{"id":2393,"date":"2020-02-09T18:19:30","date_gmt":"2020-02-09T23:19:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/?p=2393"},"modified":"2021-10-10T11:06:44","modified_gmt":"2021-10-10T15:06:44","slug":"the-art-of-the-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/the-art-of-the-book\/","title":{"rendered":"When a Book Gets Caught Up in the Story. The Art of the Book in the Digital Age"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When I was in college, David Foster Wallace (DFW as he was affectionately referred to) was a literary powerhouse. He was the author that all of the literature fanatics loved to read (or at least said that they loved to read). He wrote books like the thousand-page tour-de-force Infinite Jest that were too long and complicated for science geeks like me. DFW gave exactly one talk about his philosophy on life, addressing the graduating class of Kenyan College in 2005. The talk was titled This is Water<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After he died, that speech became a holy relic to the worshippers of DFW. But how do you take that speech and make it into something more, both as a homage to DFW and a way of preserving and extending the insights of the author? You create a book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I loved the speech and was curious about how it could be transformed into a book. The speech is only 25 minutes long, so it needed to be something special. When I was in college, there was a room in the library for special books called The Art of the Book<\/a>. It displayed books for their craft and construction, not just their content. The book This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life<\/a> reminds me of the books in that room. It is a beautiful little volume with DFW’s speech split up over pages, complementing the cadence to the author’s writing.(1)<\/sup><\/a>I enjoy reading the book<\/a> while listening to the audio<\/a> at the same time and follow along for a multi-sensory experience.<\/span><\/span>