Thank you very much to everyone online in person and so well.
The last session of our group at Palooza 2023 and we're going to have Professor Jason Scott-Warren from the faculty of Cambridge,
who is going to lead our Q&A and provide some mind-boggling closing remarks.
And so, yes, over to you. And it's for all of the speakers from both days.
Yeah, if we think maybe the concluding remarks, then we'll open up to more Q&A, because I think we really want to hear from
everyone in the room and out there about what questions remain for them.
So I'm going to just try to keep this relatively brief. I'm going to kind of scribble down a few thoughts.
But um yeah, such an amazingly rich couple of days, that it's really hard to summarise and to conclude.
I think one thing that was really lovely about this symposium was the way that we kind of went back in time, in the
structure of some of these panels, that we kind of began with surviving copies and that tour of the surviving copies,
and then we went back through the kind of responses to Agrippa since 1992 and then this afternoon,
we wound back in the Kitchen and we wound back in all that very immediate early excitement
around the hacking and the publication and the hacking of Agrippa.
So that kind of backwards motion worked really well, I think.
And I think the other really nice thing about it was the kind of element of transmission that we've had in the conference.
So this kind of Anglo-American kind of this kind of extraordinary kind of connection that we had, over Zoom,
which has been handled so brilliantly by the a/v team here.
I'm concerned that we're in a kind of moment where that sort of yearning to be post post-COVID
is kind of leading us to a slightly strange kind of recoil from digital forms of engagement from kind of,
you know, getting together with people over Zoom, we're all a bit fixated on
"We need to be in the room, we need to be present, we need to be in person".
And actually it's really nice, I think, to have some kind of vindication of the process of kind of meeting digitally in this way,
even though it has forced us to be confined to the afternoons, which was kind of an unusual thing. 24/var/folders/13/38nlpvfx13z26th1dk3nx1nc0000gp/T/com.microsoft.Outlook/21AFE58A-4CCE-465F-B2E2-B4EE5F056852/Re- OEDs.eml
So I'm really unqualified to sum up and Justine's bowled me a real googly here because I'm really an early modernist,
I spend my whole time in the 16th and 17th centuries and so having to think about anything from 1992 is really terrifying.
And I've had an early modern poem in my mind, through this conference, which I want to I going to actually read, and I'm like 'no don't read an early modern poem!', but I'm actually
I'm going to read it because then it will be a self-destructive poem.
You won't be able to see it on screen, it's just going to fade on the air, it's an immediately self-destructive poem.
And it's a poem from Robert Herrick's Hesperides, which is a collection of 1200 short, mostly short poems that he published in 1648.
And in this poem he imagines the death of his book. And you have to know a little bit of classical background, inevitably, because it's from the 17th century.
So you have to know that Absirtus was the brother of Medea and that Medea killed her brother and tore him
into pieces when she was being pursued by her father, to stop him from catching her.
This is a story which is retailed by Ovid in the Tristia.
And Herrick picks this up to imagine encountering his dismembered book; so: To His Book.
If hap it must that I must see the lie, Absirtus-like
all torn confusedly, With solemn tears and with much grief of heart, I'll recollect thee weeping part by part,
and having washed thee, close thee in a chest, With spice; that done, I'll leave thee to thy rest.
Herrick's fantasy in this poem puts him in the position of a grieving father forced to gather his son's lifeless limbs on a journey of sorrow.
That's from the Ovid. Having spent all these years collecting the poems in his book together,
Herrick then imagines re-collecting the scattered fragments and recapitulating all that earlier labour in a kind of tragic mode.
So the book becomes a body. It becomes a body which can be gathered up and embalmed and entombed like a human body.
In a way, it's a kind of reliquary; there's a kind of excess of presence at this point; the book,
when it's torn up, when it's destroyed, turns into a person, it turns into a child.
It kind of, it's never more alive than when it's dead in a way, perhaps.
And Herrick's act of curation keeps on reminding me in a slightly ghastly way, perhaps,
of what we're doing here in kind of bringing this text together, putting Agrippa back together again,
in it's strange hybrid form and then taking it apart and bringing it back to life,
even as we acknowledge that it's a scattered body dispersed around the world, which can then be pulled together through a video link.
So I'm looking back on Agrippa, I'm looking at it with the eyes of an early modernist and I'm starting to get hooked on Agrippa, I'm starting to get the Agrippa bug,
which is really good because, you know, it's kind of late in the day, but I mean, we all have to get the bug, I think.
And I'm getting it, and I think I might be getting it because I'm wondering whether Agrippa ultimately takes sides in some way.
So because it coincides with the the arrival in the early nineties of the Internet as a kind of public phenomenon,
something that people are aware of, we think of it as forward-looking.
We think of it as this crossroads of the old and the new, we kind of fixate on the diskette,
we fixate on the hopes for simultaneous broadcast, all those exciting technological things we were talking about earlier on today.
In a way, there's a kind of teleological narrative, all this kind of leads to us.
So so that's kind of, I think, in a way that becomes the excitement of Agrippa,
But a part of me is wondering whether, I don't know, it's kind of biased the other way.
So there's a kind of plea in Agrippa on behalf of the distressed, the textured and the archaeological.
Agrippa the poem, rather I think,
really surprised me, I went back to Agrippa the poem and it gives you this moment when Gibson is complaining about his grandfather,
who was quote prone to modern materials, covering with a charmless concrete slab the sweet,
uneven brick that knew the iron shoes of Yankee horses, so kind of you know
the horrific concrete over the brick as a kind of betrayal of the past.
It gives us the fledgling writer on the railway station platform above Indian-head pennies undisturbed since the dawn of man,
the writer slipping in imagination from Main Street into the depths of, quote, fossil time, limestone centuries.
So there's this kind of yearning, this kind of pull back into the past.
And and I wonder whether there's also there somehow a kind of rebellion against digital technology, a kind of nostalgic rearguard action.
The poem, after all, is not just about the failures of memory,
it clearly is about the failures of memory, but it seems like it might also be about the process of retrieval.
How do you go about kind of pulling out the details from a photograph and
including the incredibly successful retrieval of the origins of Gibson's writing career,
from his engagement with copies of certain magazines in the all night bus stations, so we actually do get back to the past.
We do hit a moment of real kind of contact there.
There is the fact that the content of the disk, this kind of diskette, that the content of
the disk should be an autobiographical poem; that's kind of feels like a scandal.
You know, you get to the digital component, and what's hiding on that component? not just a poem, but an autobiographical poem.
And how shocking is that? How retro could you get? There's the fact that it uses this slow motion unfolding of the scrolling
poem up the screen to create the kind of shared reading experience in a darkened room.
So, in those kind of darkened rooms, maybe across the networked world,
Lauren was talking earlier, quoting the press release on the Global Fireside Chat, on the new form of tribal storytelling.
So we're trying to revive a kind of old mode of storytelling here. And then there's the fact that the text,
the diskette, plays with encryption techniques that are the preserve of the state and the military and the banking sector,
supposedly, according to the way they were kind of pitched to their audience.
But it uses them to sort of seal and to nullify a poem.
So it's kind of like, take these kind of, you know, big, scary kind of features of modernity and use them to wipe out an autobiographical poem.
So there's something kind of really interesting, I don't know, something funny going on there.
And and yeah, I just wonder if there's a kind of slight, you know, all of these kind of layers in the book and then, kind of, you know,
the kind of, there is the diskette, it's a kind of an anticlimax, but it's also the ghost in the machine, it's also the soul of the book.
So there's a really interesting set of paradoxes there I think.
When he launched Agrippa in December 1992, Kevin Begos anticipated that it would present a curatorial challenge,
So how were libraries going to be able to deal with this book that would change irrevocably as it was read.
So how do you catalogue this book? because as soon as you catalogue it, it's changed, he says.
He also anticipated that the reading of the book would become a real problem.
So he says 20 years into the future, getting hold of a computer that will be able to play the disk will be more expensive than
buying a copy of Agrippa; it's really funny the way that Begos kind of forsees the whole history of Agrippa as he describes,
as he talks about it. And it's this kind of challenge that Justine has been exploring in her PhD
so this challenge for curators of working out which distressings are part of the artefact
And which are not; the challenge of working out how to slow down the kinds of degradation
that the book intends to suffer, and the kinds of degradation that the book doesn't foresee,
so the kinds of, you know, warpings and twistings and breakages that it doesn't foresee,
librarians have to manage the book's self-destructive tendencies.
And Justine's been doing this by creating a new copy census which is a method that was pioneered,
I think, in relation to old books, in relation to the Shakespeare First Folio and Copernicus's De Revolutionibus,
so these kind of books where going around libraries, around the world,
and pulling them together kind of made sense and allowed you to to learn new things about the book.
and this is kind of, I mean, applying this to a book from 1992 is quite novel and interesting.
and as you saw yesterday, when we were treated to this copy census in visual form, in a way what it's doing is bringing to light,
that improvisatory and experimental,
quality of Agrippa, and spontaneity in the copies as they were produced, making them, in the end, something far from mechanistic.
And I think what's really interesting about the project as Justine is pursuing it is that it's not just about copies of the book,
it's also about the different institutional framings of the book,
so what happens to Agrippa when it passes into these new collections, into libraries, into art galleries, into different kinds of hands?
And we saw yesterday the very many different ways in which the book is being kind of treated, in which the kind of gatekeeping around the book is happening.
so you've got this kind of real sense of: who's allowed to see it, how are they allowed, what conditions are they allowed to see it under,
and perhaps, what's happening to the book in response to its readers?
How is the book kind of changing in the hands of its readers?
Which was really interesting.
It's not just about the physical form of the book, but also about how valuations of the object are changing as it enters new locales.
And all of that is feeding into a broader exploration, which I think we've seen really beautifully in this symposium as well,
this question in textual studies, in bibliographical studies about what exactly this thing we call a book is.
So Matt's lecture last night or the panel we just had today, this kind of huge
and slightly kind of strange or estranging question about what exactly is a book,
what do we mean by this thing, this ongoing process of rediscovery of something we thought that we knew.
So I think that once we've had some more kind of questions and discussion about
about the things that we've been learning across the course of the symposium,
then we'll really want to thank everyone who has made possible this latest variation,
this latest mutation in the project of coming to grips with the book.