We need time to grow – together

“It is a great honor and great pleasure to be able to say a few words, although, you know, the only word that actually comes to mind is: thank you. Thank you, Joe.

Our paths have crossed, mostly at conferences, over the years, and I’m reminded of the first time we met. It was 2013, my first ever Electronic Literature Organization conference in Paris. We walked. And, since then, we have walked a lot. And this is not a coincidence, the walking. I think about what we do in life as a constant walk across the fields, seeing people, seeing places, encountering all that there is to encounter without being judgmental about it.

Something that I really treasure about this collaboration is that Joe is probably the ideal mentor and ideal academic in terms of what we need right now in this society. And I’m completely convinced that if we could somehow mysteriously multiply Joe and have many more Joe’s, it is impossible, you know, because Joe is a one-and-only. But if this kind of attitude, somehow, miraculously, became more widespread, both academia and society would be much better places than they are right now, because what we need is: attentive reading, and welcoming attitudes to newcomers, and constant and ongoing intellectual curiosity, and the willingness to serve. Because service is something that we put on our CVs, right? There’s a special category. You put your publications, your research output, and then there comes this rubric called service. And of course, we put stuff there, right? Because we all do peer reviewing, you know? But, to me, Joe is someone who epitomizes what actual service is in this field. He understands this part of our academic work, which, to me right now, is probably the most crucial part. I think about our work as: networks of care. Joe, you write a lot about writing with networks, writing in networks, networked literature. The way I understand networks of care comes both from our numerous exchanges over the years and from a very particular place.

If you ever come to Portugal, pay a visit to Coimbra. There’s an amazing library at the University called the Biblioteca Joanina, which is considered one of the most beautiful libraries in the world. But, beyond the beauty, there is something even more compelling about it to me. I’ve been haunted by an image ever since I went to a conference in Porto in, I believe, 2017. I visited Coimbra, a beautiful library, amazing books, some of them 17th century books. And… there’s this colony of bats living there! And not only aren’t they chased away by the librarians, far from it, they are welcomed and well taken care of. There are two species, Tanarida teniotis and Pipistrellus pygmaeus and maybe, allegedly, there may be also Soprano pipistrel. I owe this knowledge to bioacoustic research of Professor Jorge Palmeirim from Portugal.

And what do these bats do? They actually perform a kind of pest control. I use the word “pest” because that’s what we commonly call insects like bookworms, but what I really mean is something different. This is what networks of care are for me. It means not only caring for those who you consider to be on the same page. That is easy. But in networks of care, one is able to forge collaborations with people and places and entities that feel more distant and may be even considered to some extent … well, “pest” is not the right word as I said. But you know… kind of a bookworm, right?

I’d like to close my remarks with a lengthy quote from a book. And this is an interview, which is not a coincidence. I like interviews. You can tell, based on my work at electronic book review, because I think that an interview is such an undervalued and under-recognized future format of academic creativity. The quote comes from a book that is an interview or a conversation between Jean Claude Carriare and Umberto Eco.

The title is: This Is Not the End of the Book, published in 1991. Eco actually dedicates the whole paragraph to the library in Coimbra, and what he says is absolutely right at the core of what I want to do when I think about academia as a network of care. So, quoting Umberto Eco:

I’d like to tell you a funny story. I once went to the Coimbra library in Portugal. The tables were covered with felt blankets, rather like billiard tables. I asked why. They told me that it was to protect the books from bat droppings. Why not get rid of the bats? Because they ate the worms that attacked the books. But the worm, too, must not be completely banned or eliminated. The worm’s journey through the incunabulum allows us to see how the sheets were bound together and whether some bits are newer than others, and the worm tracks sometimes form interesting patterns that add character to the ancient books. Book collecting manuals are full of instructions about protecting your books from worms. But, of course, what we do, what I would like to do, is to be able to trace those book worms’ itineraries.

For me personally, this is as vital a part of the book as the book itself. This is how I think about networks of care. And Joe is someone who consistently teaches me to read very attentively. Joe, I owe you a lot, both as a researcher and also as a creative practitioner, because I don’t come from literary studies. My primary field is media studies, and I also have creative practice in sound art. What I learned from our mutual exchanges, some of which are about music, of course — from everything we had a chance to talk about together — is that something absolutely crucial for building networks of care is: time. We need time. We need time to grow. We need time to mature. We need time to develop our ideas. We need time to be able to trace the bookworms’ itineraries across the most precious texts that humanity has seen. So, thank you, Joe.”