Species of sequences of spaces of pages of books

I like books. That is obvious. If you know me you're thinking "water is wet" after reading that first sentence. I strongly prefer a physical book over anything on a screen, though shorter-form papers or essays I'll download and save in a Zotero folder so that I can highlight and annotate things in it. I don't like writing in paper books.

I have been thinking about books a lot, not what's in them but what makes a book a book, the physicality, the layout, the material, the design of the thing, the way it expresses its content, its existence in physical space. I have also been thinking about words, not in a strictly linguistic sense – I'm not going to pretend I know jack shit about linguistics – but rather as shapes, forms that take up space on a page or surface. Not every book has words in it, of course, but right now I'm thinking about the ones that do...

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What the hell is a book anyway

Per the Oxford Dictionary:

"A written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers."

Per Wikipedia: "A structured presentation of recorded information, primarily verbal and graphical, through a medium."

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When I was studying design in undergrad I found myself particularly taken not just by typography – I'll define that as individually, intentionally designed glyphs – but by the practice of putting entire words on a page or a screen or a wall or a sign or wherever a word can go. This interest coalesced into something a bit more concrete when a teacher of mine handed me Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec, the beginning of which explores the concept of page-as-space, not just a repository for words:

"Before, there was nothing, or almost nothing; afterwards, there isn't much, a few signs, but which are enough for there to be a top and a bottom, a beginning and an end, a right and a left, a recto and a verso." (p.10) And then: "This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page." (p. 13) I think it's interesting that Perec uses the word "signs" as representation for what takes up a page; he doesn't really elaborate, and I'll take it to mean (maybe incorrectly but I'm trying) the shape itself of the word rather than a word pertaining to a specific meaning. His cascading set of glyphs in the first image that spell out "horizontal" – which has more weight, the definition and contextual usage of the word or the way in which it's laid out on the page?

Ulises Carrión conveyed his thoughts on what artists' books (or, as he called them, bookworks) can be in his manifesto entitled The New Art of Making Books. The very first sentence is funnily similar to the title of Species of Spaces: "A book is a sequence of spaces." Carrión was particularly interested in the concept of structure; he later says that "every word exists as an element of a structure - a phrase, a novel, a telegram", and that "space exists outside of subjectivity. If two subjects communicate in the space, then space is an element of this communication." (emphasis mine...)

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I am so deeply sorry to say it but all this does in fact have me thinking about the written internet. The New Art of Making Books was written in 1975, 18 years before the internet was available to the public, and I think it would be remiss of me to simply transfer various quotes to the present and equate them to how we use the internet in 2025. That's way too vague, anyways. All the same: page-as-space, words-as-structure, space as an element of communication; or, back to Wikipedia, "a structured presentation of recorded information, primarily verbal and graphical, through a medium." What the hell counts as a "medium", though?

I've decided to get a little obtuse with this. Is a blog or an online newsletter a book? Is a website? Is a forum? I'm thinking about how on all of these each chunk of text is placed selectively on the screen in a systemic form that contextualizes them within the greater space, whether we notice it or not. At design school we were taught, correctly, that placement conveys its own meaning, can manipulate – consider the common phenomenon of headline placement, what's next to it, how big or small it is, where it's located on a series of web pages. Think about the NYT's coverage on Palestine: how many times have you had to click through page after page on the website find a single article on the subject? It is direly obvious that tucking words away like this is a thought-out choice, that where they exist says just as much as the message they themselves actually convey.

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I realize I'm rambling. And, funnily enough, after writing that last sentence, I considered adding "but this is my space to do that." Blog as space! And, yes, mine, to an extent. I can write 

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within the text editor. I can make words bold or italic or struck through or red. I can pick a different visual theme for the blog and fuck with the layout a little. Back we go to page-as-space, back to space as its own form of communication. These words are mine: I thought of them and typed them out in Blogger's built-in post editor – this blog contains, via written text, a specific message I'm trying to convey. I also decided where to put line breaks, italics, links, images, and quotes – I choose what gets emphasized and where the reader's eye, your eye, should move to throughout this post, a message in and of itself. And you, the viewer, decide how much weight to lend to all of these things.

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In undergrad we were tasked with typesetting a predetermined text in codex format (classic pages-and-binding book), making every design decision – fonts, layout, spacing, words per page, leading, kerning, etc – ourselves. I cranked something out overnight that looked nice, but standing in front of everyone during crit the next day I had to acknowledge that at no point had there been any why behind the choices I'd made. I had treated the book not as a space or a structure but as nothing more than a repository for words, with no consideration as to who might pick it up or why. I still think about this a lot.

To circle back to my earlier paragraphs, I don't really know if a website or a blog or a forum counts as a "book." Some people don't even think that audiobooks count (they do) – it seems that "in this day and age" the definition can expand and contract at people's will. And far be it from me to say anything about this authoritatively. Maybe instead of thinking of a book as a form of space or structure I could turn it on its head – structure as book, space as book. Now I've got thoughts going all directions! It's all endless, an ouroboros...

As it stands, I'll close this out; if you've made it this far, thanks, and consider taking a look at Species of Spaces and maybe mulling over how, where, and why you write things in the format that you do. Maybe you will even learn something about yourself. Or not! I don't know!

First post

It's funny, starting a blog in July of 2025. Another one. Sorry!

This is not my first attempt – in the past five or so years there have been just about as many stabs at it – but as I've had more time to write in recent weeks I've wanted to find a way to branch out from the fiction I'm so comfortable with, push past the personal-essay grind I too easily fall into as someone with, as one friend put it, "a lot of lore". I am approaching my second year of a Master's degree, during which I've had to learn how to write like an academic at a freakish pace (my undergrad program, a design degree at an art school, had no formal classes or writing assignments at all), and think that keeping a blog that consists of more than just stories, whether true or made up, might let me explore and loosen the mental ligaments a bit.

I've decided to use Blogger as a platform rather than Substack because the latter gave me terrible performance anxiety and made me feel as if I had to hone in on one specific area of expertise which, beyond the experience of being myself, I lack. (I no longer have any remote desire to "tell my story", which has historically invited unpleasant voyeurs and forms of parasociality into my life.) The writing I did share on my old Substack blog was, to me, treacly and hastily-written, content for content's sake and little more, and I'm not very proud of it. The relative isolation of Blogspot appeals to me for now; rather than feel a push to self-promote that I myself don't like, I hope to have my own little corner of the internet where I can be a little less polished and a little less anxious while still pushing myself to write things that I'm willing to share publicly.

This Georges Perec quote, from The Gnocchi of Autumn or An Answer to a Few Questions Concerning Myself, sums up my thoughts, I think:

"How to set about avoiding, yet again, those games with mirrors within which a 'self-portrait' will be nothing more than the umpteenth reflection of a consciousness that has been well pruned, a knowledge that has been well polished, a prose made docile by the pains I have taken? A portrait of the artist of a clever monkey; can I say 'sincerely' that I'm a clown?"

I love Georges Perec. Maybe I will write about him soon. Lately, though, I have been thinking about existing as meat, and the idea of a "hedonistic reader". Whatever ends up on here, I hope you like it.