Lanham DN

 "What's Next for Text?" by Richard A. Lanham

Even though books aren’t dying, sticking    to print is the outdated way.

Writers who decide not to compete in this new market place but to dedicate their text to fixed print only have become clerks of a historical mode… unmistakably antiquarian…(17).

 

Lanham explains what he aims to do throughout the rest of his piece. I thought this was a nice acknowledgment that Bernhardt seems to ignore: advocating for a more visual space while sticking with unbroken text. Although Bernhardt does include an example, he doesn’t necessarily practice what he preaches.	I want to look at some examples of text in its new digital environment…If we are going to keep on discussing, in print, what’s next for text in the digital space, we should at least try to look at what is happening…(18).
I couldn’t help but think about McCloud when I was reading this section. Does this challenge his idea that we don’t relate to detailed images (or, in this case, a real person explaining the text)? Should it have been a cartoon?	We notice, too, that Professor Minsky is wearing a sport shirt. He talks with a certain accent. His whole manner, informal and arm-waving, contrasts with the formal fixity of the text (19).
How a text can change when accompanied by an image. McCloud again.	Our responses to the speaking lecturer…feed back onto the whole text, not just that page. The text, without changing, has undergone a subtle metamorphosis (20).
I was wondering-if it three-dimensional letter space was where we have been as well as where we are going- what happened in between? Interesting	But vision for two-eyed Homo sapiens is a stereo, a three-dimensional spatial event, and three-dimensional space was outlawed by the flat, consecutive text created by the Greek alphabet (26).
Introducing the idea of oscillation. I like the thought of this as a reenactment of what we do we when see.	When computer graphic techniques constitute a virtual three-dimensional world of two-dimensional print, when they oscillate between two-dimensional and three-dimensional images of a letter, they are…re-enacting the act of seeing. They are making us see how we see, and doing this around a core of letters (27).
Again this makes me think of McCloud. He said that words were the absolute abstractions. The word “eye” does not at all resemble what we think of when we see the word.	…the relationship of a word and the thing it represents (27).
McCloud talked about space and time in his TED talk.	[Text] is also being put back into time (28).
This makes me think of Elbow’s both/and thing. Isn’t Lanham saying that the oscillation between the two is the best because it represents the way our imagination actually works?	Prose is sequential; image is instantaneous. Our imagination is asked to combine two kinds of perception, two ways to understand the world, words and things, or at last put them into very rapid oscillation (31).
Recalls our Porter discussion about how texts are not static but fluid and changing.	Stuff doesn’t change. Our attitudes toward it change all the time (34).