David Kermani, John Ashbery: A Comprehensive Bibliography

Garland, 1976.

The printed bibliography, liked the printed catalogue and the open shop, is a casualty of the Internet. In theory bibliographies should flower on the Web, since it allows for instant updating, color reproductions of covers and links to the periodicals or appearances, but I know of few cases where there is any treatment worthy of excitement. Someone, after all, still has to do all the work, and without even a printed volume to recognize the achievement, why bother?

This volume covers the first 20 years of Ashbery’s work by his good friend and lover. Documenting the 35 years that followed would be an immense task, but Kermani’s energy seems to have gone into the Ashbery Resource Center, an online database where you can search for every poem with the mention of the word “dream” in it, assemble a list of the poet’s influences, etc. It’s undoubtedly a marvelous resource, but it’s not a bibliography.

This was Allan’s working reference copy, and thus not for sale. It’s ex-library, but most of the defacement is limited to the front endpaper. There are only two copies of any sort online, one a copy signed by Ashbery and Kermani for $295, the other a fine copy for $50. A scarce book. Apparently people still need printed bibliographies.

Comments

[Joe Marchione]

Interesting stuff! I have a theory about why the web is not conducive to the flourishing of truly quality bibliographies (the very word "bibliography," as it is used on the net, increasingly refers to a glorified book list). It is, I believe, the very vastness of database search capabilities and virtual storage space where the trouble begins....

Before I fell into the chasm that is used bookselling, I was a chef. And one of my tours of duty was a short year as sous chef at a country club. It seemed, at first, a dream job. Compared to real world restaurants, there was virtually no worry about food costs. The daily, weekly and monthly grind of inventory control and waste worries was, compared to for-profit operations, non-existent. If members wanted something, you got it for them, no questions asked. Very early on, I realized I was not happy there. It took me awhile to figure out why. The lack of constraints removed an important motivating force in my ability to create. It became, at least for me, the proverbial 'tennis without a net.'

I hear you. "Objection! Relevance?" Patience, your honor. Relevance *should* become apparent in a moment.

A bibliography is a collection of facts about books-that-have-something-in-common. The careful bibliographer approaches the subject with some idea of where they are going, a broad outline of books and how they will be ordered. As they accumulate facts, they begin to find the occasional book that does not fit into that broad outline. The more deeply they delve, the more that original broad outline smudges. I suspect that nearly every first time bibliographer faces this ever growing pile of facts and curses the day they took on the project, not to mention the evil booksellers who enabled them (Hi, John B ;-)

Some give up here but those who pass through this slough of despond (Or was it the foothills of confusion? pick your literary reference... just avoid the "Mountains of Ignorance") are then able to focus on the work and impose their unified vision on the subject. It may not be 'right.' And I guarantee you that time will prove some 'facts' wrong. Certain unified visions are definitely better than others. But still, a completed bibliography is a starting point, a place where the author/editor says "Hey! Start Here!"

Think of the web as the accumulated facts. Google and their ilk barf a collection of facts on to your screen and wash their collective hands of the affair (no doubt so they can pat themselves on the back and binge on more facts). And before you can say "Marshall McLuhan," the consumer of this data hits save, slaps their hands together and proclaims "DONE!"

Done? Excuse me. You haven't even started yet. A bibliographer lives with those facts, picks an angle and presents those facts in a manner that corresponds to that chosen angle. The consumer of the completed bibliography may not agree with the 'angle' but at least has something to work from. A human point of view. That aforementioned 'unified vision' comes from an intelligent entity that recognizes the need for said vision, can handle the outliers (forget Colin Wilson's "The Outsider"... the book for this century should be entitled "The Outlier."). Like or not, a unified vision takes work. The ability to recognize problems and how/if they can fit in to your vision.

So how does the web work against the creation of bibliographies? In my opinion the constant message we get from the search engine mediums is "Facts are good." Facts suspect? No worries. The 'wisdom of the crowd' will fix that in no time. The bibliographer, a fact collector par excellence, should thrive in this setting. And yet s/he doesn't. There are always more facts to be gathered. Without the physical object of a book as target/deadline, s/he puts off the finished product. Worse, the unified vision gets put off as well, worrying that some inconvenient fact lurking just around the corner will require a complete restructuring of the vision. So s/he settles. Presents the facts. Look, you can sort them alphabetically, by year, by number of words in the sentence. The 'dream' search mentioned in the original post, a fine thing because you remember a moving poem where he used the word dream. Except in real life, the word you remembered as 'dream' wasn't. And your reader wants more than a list of facts. They want your expertise, your experience, your opinions about the mistakes and outliers. And yes, they want to disagree with you when necessary.

That restaurant thing above? Think of the vast virtual storage space and search/sort capabilities as tennis without the net. Sometimes, constraints are good.