The Waste Land: now shiny

Making it new, again

In which we discuss the pros and cons of recent developments, in the light of several different considerations

On the one hand it is “the future of books:” a Hogwart’s Land we could even recently only have dreamed of. In the first Harry Potter movie, those moving newspaper pictures looked like magic, even to a population of seasoned cinema-goers. Now they’re just another., slightly more fun, manifestation of our phones – or of what’s being called – what’s being called in the halls of Faber, my dear! – an “enhanced e-book.”

“April is the cruelest month?” There’s an app for that.

“What are the roots that clutch?” Well, one of them is a gnarled hand that claws us back into the past – our recent, parental past, not the deep one, but it reaches, through its wasteness , what Faber poetry supremo Paul Keegan calls its “strangeness,” into something primeval. Well,  our new Forest Primeval is bring spruced up. Faber has just launched The Waste Land app – an application, that is, for the Tablet Computer That Must (Not) Be Named.

I’m very sorry to have missed last night’s official launch. I missed it twice, in fact: I’d have missed it anyway, because I teach on Tuesday  nights; and, even had I got the night free to go to it, I’d have missed it because I’ve been laid up all week with a gastric flu virus. So I didn’t get to see it in action, but the link above is to a video interview from the Guardian which gives some indication of the look and feel of the thing and what’s in it. I’ll go on that.

First, it looks very civilised. The front looks like a nicely-designed (though not of the current Faber stable), slightly retro, recognisably poetry, book – that is, to someone like me it looks instantly covetable. Click it open and you see the first page of ‘The Burial of the Dead’, familiar and yet – as Keegan says – perennially strange. News that stays news indeed.

Unfortunately, the next thing you get – at last in the video – is Fiona Shaw reading the first few lines in a “conversational,” acty, slightly tetchy tone…

But fortunately, Paul K says you only have to call up the elements of the app if you want them. So in my Hogwarts Land needn’t include that.

The third thing is the audio recordings: Ted Hughes, for one, and – bizarrely – Viggo Mortensen. And, not just the old familiar one of Eliot himself sonorously intoning the grandly odd lines, 25 years after they were written, but also a newly-discovered  recording of a far more youthful Eliot, reading them only a decade after they were written, in 1933. (Now this is news. New recording of The Waste Land discovered! Were we told this at the time?)

There are notes (though you’d have thought we’d have learned our lesson on that score, since Eliot himself went so far as to apologise for  his original notes, before he died; but maybe this explains them). The Waste Land is strange now partly because of its messiness. (We could say the same of Paul Keegan’s hair, but we’d be saying it in a nice way.) (And did I say thank you for permission to translate Prufrock into Pirate? Arrr, thannnk yoouuuu…)

You can have this cross-referential magic, but for a price (we never imagined the future being so expensive, did we? Even in Harry Potter the wands appear to be only sort of wand-priced). Instead of small paper boards with leaves for some nominal sum, there is a pleasing object, clean and pristine, with a shiny surface to look through like a crystal ball, into… into…

That’ll be £400+, please.

And yes, yes, of course I covet it. I said – it’s like a talking book, with a previously unknown recording of TS Eliot reading The Waste Land! The type looks lovely. Even Fiona and Viggo offer a chance to hear the police in different voices (and to thank God they didn’t get Sting involved). Of course I want one. But my three (increasingly archaic) Macs aside, it ‘ impossible not to feel alarmed about the way we are with increasing speed whizzing into a world where everything – the news, literature,  messages from your family, your notes to yourself, your own snapshots – is manipulated by a branded product. We’re drowning in product placement and somehow we’re finding it cosy. Even the Daily Mail website (I know; I have to read it for work) has a banner with iPads on it, advertising its own app. The iPad is seemingly being pushed, presumably gratis, by every publisher of any kind of content whatsoever, everywhere.

It’s the Emerald City of Oz, and Steve Jobs is the Great Oz himself, standing increasingly skeletally on that huge stage, in front of that huge screen, everything impossibly shiny while he looks frail and all too human – but embiggened (to coin a phrase) by his zeal, his mania for the illusion he is creating with our money – the wondrous world he’s bringing us to – and by the giant screen behind him.

No Waste Land this. It’s the shiniest place you ever saw, as long as you keep the glasses on.

Well, it’s a conundrum, and a big one. The Waste Land app is clearly a well-made and gorgeous thing. And it contains resources in it that anyone with half a brain would want access to. And it might be a way of helping to make poetry aural again. But to what extent do we want, or even need, our private reading experiences to be augmented, enhanced, mediated? If Socrates was right when he called the invention of writing “an aid not to memory but to reminiscence,” then where are we now? Are we changing our brains? Are we changing our art after the fact? Do we require celebrity guides? This is one, and serious, question.

The next question is about the new culture of access, where “access” requires not just a computer but a whole series of expensive landfill-destined objects, each oddly incompatible with the rest, to wrestle down a snakepit of squirming content. Is this new recording of Eliot going to be available anywhere to those of us who can’t, or won’t,  afford an iPad? (TS Eliot couldn’t afford an iPad.)

I’ve been saying for ages that the current hyper-commercialisation of publishing and bookselling may well create a new underground literary culture resembling samizdat – and I’m not saying this is a bad, thing, mind you. But as pretty as this app is, and as great as it is that Faber is so forward-looking, meeting the future head-on (as it did in its early Modernist heyday), it shows the reflection of that underground in its pretty screen.

Digital publishing may not be the “saving” of bookselling – though indeed it may, who knows, and there are certainly cheaper e-reading platforms than the iPad – but it and its talking friends certainly look for now like the future – the present – of it.

He said Marie
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

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