[Music]
[Applause]
when I was an 8 year old boy I used to
drive my family crazy whenever we would
go out in my dad’s blue Chevy station
wagon I would be glued to the window
watching and watching and looking and
finally I would see what I had been on
the lookout for all the while and I
would shout stop the car stop the car
and my four brothers and sisters would
say no my parents would sigh okay okay
and they would pull over and I’d say
thanks thanks dad and he’d say Michael
oh but be quick and what I had seen was
a pond a pond
a pond often full of green smelly stinky
algae and I would take my Skippy peanut
butter jar that I had washed out oh so
carefully before the days of dishwashers
and I would run to the pond and kind of
wade in and scoop up all the muck and I
would bring this back and my brothers
and sisters would say really Michael
really you smell your PF Flyers are full
of muck and I would say yeah but I got
it I got it I had begged my parents to
give me a microscope for Christmas and I
knew that when I got home when I put
that drop of water on the slide it would
be teeming with life I spent many days
and many nights building my slide
library looking at pond and pond and
pond in the winter in the summer in the
spring and I was upset
I drove my brothers and sisters crazy
because I was driven I was driven by
wonder we know that wonder is super
important in the sciences the great
astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says
I wonder every day for wonder is the
window that takes us from where we are
to where we want to be many years later
I had a very different kind of wonder
moment I was sitting in a class where we
were reading 17th and 18th century
British poetry yeah and I put up my hand
and I said to the prof but how did this
stuff get published what was it like for
the people who read it how did they buy
it what was going on and he said Michael
come and see and he took me into his
office and he said to me what do you
know I said what do you mean I don’t
know anything and he said excellent
that’s a great place to begin and I saw
that he had a shelf of 17th and 18th
century leather-bound books and he
started to pull them off the shelves and
he said hey look at this this is an
anti-piracy device it’s like a hologram
on a credit card so that they can’t copy
the book only this was made in 1670 and
then he picked up another book and he
said oh look at this and raking light
you
see the printer was doing this on the
cheap he was cheating on the paper
this is third-rate stuff can you see oh
this one he said oho
they’re cheating the other way said the
guy wrote the book too short and so now
the printer is putting lines of blank
LEDs between all the different lines of
prose to make the book too long so they
can sell it for more money and I learned
that day that authors do not write books
authors produce manuscripts that
communities of makers turn into books I
learned that day that every book was a
communal object made by paper makers and
type founders by compositors who were
setting the type by the Pressman who
were pulling by the children who were
folding the sheets and the men and women
who were sewing them together and
putting them in boards that day in that
boring class my professor told me that
if you know how to read the whole book
every book is alive with the judgments
of its makers and to read the whole book
is to learn how to discern the human
presences in every historical text
I left that profs office that day
knowing that I and probably you had been
cheated cheated because I have been
handed the texts of history in boring
textbooks in anthologies stripped out of
all their
and historical particularity they no
longer had a local habitation and a name
it’s like saying we expect you to know
about wheat but we’re only gonna give
you Wonder Bread
it’s like inviting people to a banquet
and when you get there all the food is
white that bland diet that problem that
I had been fed in all these books was
kind of boring because the strangeness
of history the specificity of a local
time and the decisions of communities of
makers was completely gone and I felt
really cheated because a book every book
is an expressive object and you know
this we judge books by their covers all
the time and rightly so you should judge
a book by its cover
don’t judge a book by its movie but
definitely judge it by its cover so if
you go into the airport and you walk
into the airport bookstore and and you
see a certain kind of book on the rack
and there’s a picture on the cover of
that book and oh he’s some kind of
brawny man he has no shirt on right and
he’s embracing this woman and she’s kind
of falling out of her ballgown and the
plantation is burning in the background
right you know what that book is not
that we would read such books certainly
not but you know that’s a Harlequin
romance right yeah and it’s telling you
I am a Harlequin romance you should buy
me now and you look at a different kind
of book and it’s got those ring
these foiled letters on it and maybe
like an f-16 phantom jet or an ak-47 or
maybe even a grenade and you look at
that and you say oh I’ll get that for my
dad it’s a Tom Clancy novel
yeah well books are expressive forms
they tell us all the time about what
they are and who they’re for they tell
us about a price point and a readership
and whether they’re are meant to endure
or not that’s true on our own time and
that was true way back in history during
the 1850s in America books were gaudy
book covers were bright red and green
they had gold stamping all over them
they were full of Garland’s and flowers
and then the civil war broke out and the
mood of the nation changed brothers and
fathers were dying no publisher would
produce a book with gold and flowers and
bright colors this is a book published
in the Civil War
it’s somber it reflects the mood of a
nation that is getting the dispatches
from Fredericksburg and Antietam that
sees the casualty list from the Battle
of Bull Run and can never ever imagine
their own happiness again this book has
nothing to do with the Civil War it’s
the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne
but it has everything to do with the
moment in which it was made
it has everything to do with the sombre
sensibility of a nation
at war with itself a book is a kind of
the wormhole it lets us travel in time
a portal into the past that passed
another country that we can go visit
deeply and come home again to see our
own world with new eyes I teach a course
called the history of the book from
Archimedes to the iPad it’s mostly for
first-year students and it meets
entirely in Special Collections and we
look at stuff and we try to learn how to
read the whole book in all its gorgeous
pluriform a tea and the students are
pretty cool around the seminar table
they’re like okay yeah oh yeah I read
about that for the seminar mm-hmm right
yeah okay prof I got that but then when
I pick up my computer bag and I leave
the classroom they’re out in the
courtyard
mom-mom King Lear 1608 we were looking
at King Lear Shakespeare it’s a little
pamphlet it’s a little pamphlet and the
printer oak something-or-other didn’t
buy enough paper and so the dude was
editing Shakespeare to make it shorter
so he could fit it all in it mom we’ve
got it I thought Shakespeare
it’s one thing to tell your students you
need to be alive to the contingencies of
human history Wow it’s another thing to
show your students how fragile
Shakespeare is yeah there is in our
digital world hunger for the object for
haptic knowledge to hold it in your own
hands to turn the pages to hold the book
up to the light and to see the watermark
to smell the history not to fetishize
but to travel to another country to be
filled with Wonder to come home with new
eyes to be given the courage to
understand there is a hunger for the
object you go into the New York Public
Library and you give them your address
and proof of where you live and you can
look at all the old stuff you go down
the street into the Metropolitan Museum
of Art and you start to pick up the
vases and try to sleep in the louis
quatorze bed they put you in jail but
with books you can do this you can live
in the history of them so that you can
understand your own time I think we need
to ask ourselves in this our digital age
what is education for we have made our
students slaves to duty we have made our
children prisoners of diligence and
instead we should be giving them love we
should be giving them the wonder the
window that takes them from where they
are
to where they want to go what is our
model of Education today it’s a kind of
a broadcast model want one want want
want want want want want why and we
should be giving our students an
experiential model to curate
opportunities for wonder not everyone
will work but some of them will and when
you can get that student that child that
boy that girl wonder happens and the
thirst to know begins in many ways I’m
still that boy in my father’s blue Chevy
wagon driving my brothers and sisters
crazy stop the car stop the car I say
only now I say it to my students I beg
them slow down slow down for wonder if
you look closely and slowly the book is
teeming with life
go ahead dive in
you
[Applause]
when I was an 8 year old boy I used to
drive my family crazy whenever we would
go out in my dad’s blue Chevy station
wagon I would be glued to the window
watching and watching and looking and
finally I would see what I had been on
the lookout for all the while and I
would shout stop the car stop the car
and my four brothers and sisters would
say no my parents would sigh okay okay
and they would pull over and I’d say
thanks thanks dad and he’d say Michael
oh but be quick and what I had seen was
a pond a pond
a pond often full of green smelly stinky
algae and I would take my Skippy peanut
butter jar that I had washed out oh so
carefully before the days of dishwashers
and I would run to the pond and kind of
wade in and scoop up all the muck and I
would bring this back and my brothers
and sisters would say really Michael
really you smell your PF Flyers are full
of muck and I would say yeah but I got
it I got it I had begged my parents to
give me a microscope for Christmas and I
knew that when I got home when I put
that drop of water on the slide it would
be teeming with life I spent many days
and many nights building my slide
library looking at pond and pond and
pond in the winter in the summer in the
spring and I was upset
I drove my brothers and sisters crazy
because I was driven I was driven by
wonder we know that wonder is super
important in the sciences the great
astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says
I wonder every day for wonder is the
window that takes us from where we are
to where we want to be many years later
I had a very different kind of wonder
moment I was sitting in a class where we
were reading 17th and 18th century
British poetry yeah and I put up my hand
and I said to the prof but how did this
stuff get published what was it like for
the people who read it how did they buy
it what was going on and he said Michael
come and see and he took me into his
office and he said to me what do you
know I said what do you mean I don’t
know anything and he said excellent
that’s a great place to begin and I saw
that he had a shelf of 17th and 18th
century leather-bound books and he
started to pull them off the shelves and
he said hey look at this this is an
anti-piracy device it’s like a hologram
on a credit card so that they can’t copy
the book only this was made in 1670 and
then he picked up another book and he
said oh look at this and raking light
you
see the printer was doing this on the
cheap he was cheating on the paper
this is third-rate stuff can you see oh
this one he said oho
they’re cheating the other way said the
guy wrote the book too short and so now
the printer is putting lines of blank
LEDs between all the different lines of
prose to make the book too long so they
can sell it for more money and I learned
that day that authors do not write books
authors produce manuscripts that
communities of makers turn into books I
learned that day that every book was a
communal object made by paper makers and
type founders by compositors who were
setting the type by the Pressman who
were pulling by the children who were
folding the sheets and the men and women
who were sewing them together and
putting them in boards that day in that
boring class my professor told me that
if you know how to read the whole book
every book is alive with the judgments
of its makers and to read the whole book
is to learn how to discern the human
presences in every historical text
I left that profs office that day
knowing that I and probably you had been
cheated cheated because I have been
handed the texts of history in boring
textbooks in anthologies stripped out of
all their
and historical particularity they no
longer had a local habitation and a name
it’s like saying we expect you to know
about wheat but we’re only gonna give
you Wonder Bread
it’s like inviting people to a banquet
and when you get there all the food is
white that bland diet that problem that
I had been fed in all these books was
kind of boring because the strangeness
of history the specificity of a local
time and the decisions of communities of
makers was completely gone and I felt
really cheated because a book every book
is an expressive object and you know
this we judge books by their covers all
the time and rightly so you should judge
a book by its cover
don’t judge a book by its movie but
definitely judge it by its cover so if
you go into the airport and you walk
into the airport bookstore and and you
see a certain kind of book on the rack
and there’s a picture on the cover of
that book and oh he’s some kind of
brawny man he has no shirt on right and
he’s embracing this woman and she’s kind
of falling out of her ballgown and the
plantation is burning in the background
right you know what that book is not
that we would read such books certainly
not but you know that’s a Harlequin
romance right yeah and it’s telling you
I am a Harlequin romance you should buy
me now and you look at a different kind
of book and it’s got those ring
these foiled letters on it and maybe
like an f-16 phantom jet or an ak-47 or
maybe even a grenade and you look at
that and you say oh I’ll get that for my
dad it’s a Tom Clancy novel
yeah well books are expressive forms
they tell us all the time about what
they are and who they’re for they tell
us about a price point and a readership
and whether they’re are meant to endure
or not that’s true on our own time and
that was true way back in history during
the 1850s in America books were gaudy
book covers were bright red and green
they had gold stamping all over them
they were full of Garland’s and flowers
and then the civil war broke out and the
mood of the nation changed brothers and
fathers were dying no publisher would
produce a book with gold and flowers and
bright colors this is a book published
in the Civil War
it’s somber it reflects the mood of a
nation that is getting the dispatches
from Fredericksburg and Antietam that
sees the casualty list from the Battle
of Bull Run and can never ever imagine
their own happiness again this book has
nothing to do with the Civil War it’s
the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne
but it has everything to do with the
moment in which it was made
it has everything to do with the sombre
sensibility of a nation
at war with itself a book is a kind of
the wormhole it lets us travel in time
a portal into the past that passed
another country that we can go visit
deeply and come home again to see our
own world with new eyes I teach a course
called the history of the book from
Archimedes to the iPad it’s mostly for
first-year students and it meets
entirely in Special Collections and we
look at stuff and we try to learn how to
read the whole book in all its gorgeous
pluriform a tea and the students are
pretty cool around the seminar table
they’re like okay yeah oh yeah I read
about that for the seminar mm-hmm right
yeah okay prof I got that but then when
I pick up my computer bag and I leave
the classroom they’re out in the
courtyard
mom-mom King Lear 1608 we were looking
at King Lear Shakespeare it’s a little
pamphlet it’s a little pamphlet and the
printer oak something-or-other didn’t
buy enough paper and so the dude was
editing Shakespeare to make it shorter
so he could fit it all in it mom we’ve
got it I thought Shakespeare
it’s one thing to tell your students you
need to be alive to the contingencies of
human history Wow it’s another thing to
show your students how fragile
Shakespeare is yeah there is in our
digital world hunger for the object for
haptic knowledge to hold it in your own
hands to turn the pages to hold the book
up to the light and to see the watermark
to smell the history not to fetishize
but to travel to another country to be
filled with Wonder to come home with new
eyes to be given the courage to
understand there is a hunger for the
object you go into the New York Public
Library and you give them your address
and proof of where you live and you can
look at all the old stuff you go down
the street into the Metropolitan Museum
of Art and you start to pick up the
vases and try to sleep in the louis
quatorze bed they put you in jail but
with books you can do this you can live
in the history of them so that you can
understand your own time I think we need
to ask ourselves in this our digital age
what is education for we have made our
students slaves to duty we have made our
children prisoners of diligence and
instead we should be giving them love we
should be giving them the wonder the
window that takes them from where they
are
to where they want to go what is our
model of Education today it’s a kind of
a broadcast model want one want want
want want want want want why and we
should be giving our students an
experiential model to curate
opportunities for wonder not everyone
will work but some of them will and when
you can get that student that child that
boy that girl wonder happens and the
thirst to know begins in many ways I’m
still that boy in my father’s blue Chevy
wagon driving my brothers and sisters
crazy stop the car stop the car I say
only now I say it to my students I beg
them slow down slow down for wonder if
you look closely and slowly the book is
teeming with life
go ahead dive in
you
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