Twenty-eight years ago someone named Jim received a copy of Umberto Eco's Six Walks in the Fictional Woods for one of his birthdays; first edition, third printing. At some point later, sponsored by the Arcadia Fund with contributions from the Internet Archive, station09.cebu digitized this copy of the book using a Sony Alpha-A6300 and uploaded it to archive.org on October 8th 2020, upload completing and the digitized copy being fully accessible, gifted to everyone 25 years 10 months and 14 days after being gifted to Jim. Most other details are speculative. How old Jim was when he received the birthday book, somebody out there possibly knows but is non-deducible from the bookplate inscription alone; the path the book took after leaving Jim's collection and when, whether Jim even read the book and enjoyed the creative adventure that really is part of that book.
Tuesday August 16th of last year I'm listening to the podcast Homestuck Made This World where they briefly invoke something Umberto Eco says in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, that text is a lazy machine that requires the reader to do much of its work for it. I had already looked into Six Walks in the Fictional Woods after having watched Kyle Kallgren's video essay on Umberto Eco a couple of months before, June 8th the day it had come out- as I recall, I caught as much of it as I could as it premiered on my lunch break, but the premiere extended a little past when it was time to go back to work so I had to pause and finish the last few minutes of it afterward. At work that day, I had begun the audiobook of Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman and read by J. Paul Boehmer and Coleen Marlo; and had listened to the entirety of U2's Achtung Baby!, an album which came out three years, one week, and one day before the day Jim received a published volume of Umberto Eco lectures, an album which came out two days before I was born. After work, I watched the first episode of Ms. Marvel, finished off a viewing of Kung Fu Panda 2 I had begun a couple of days before, and watched the third episode of each of FLCL, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
I watched the behind-the-scenes documentary of the making of The Last Jedi today, The Director and the Jedi, and a shot of their location shooting in Ireland reminded me briefly of Barry Levinson's 1992 magnum opus Toys, which I'm only bringing up because, flipping through my notes, I would watch that film that Saturday?
I'd looked into Six Walks in the Fictional Woods around that time, and for some reason it had dropped off my radar until today even though it still had relevance to the very ongoing project for which I watched The Director and the Jedi today (it's, both the very project, which is ongoing, and, a project which is very ongoing.) I'd recently been trying to remember the conversation that Cameron and Michael had had where they'd invoked the sieve-like nature of text, the fact that narrative can't get infinitely detailed so thus will always be at least partially ambiguous; I remembered a specific detail about the conversation yesterday, the idea you never see Gandalf out shopping even though he must, and that afforded me enough grist to ask about it on the Homestuck Made This World discord server, where I could receive a reply pointing me accurately toward the specific episode. Took less than ten minutes. Listening through the episode this morning, finding the philosophical apparatus they used (Eco!), tracking down the citation at lunch. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. It was then that I remembered I'd been looking into the book in the first place.
Also, at lunch on the computer-- browsing twitter a little bit, Robert Evans @IwriteOK who hosts one of the podcasts on my regular listen-to-at-work rotation, is the citational provenance for this part-- Austin Kleon, he of the Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work! books that were lent to me unsolicited by one of my artist-friends-who-happens-to-also-be-one-of-my-professors at college and which I so dug, had tweeted about the quasi-nightmarish vague dystopia of the implications of one of Google's newest features.
Kleon writes that one of the most interesting parts of old photographs is the tiny imperfections in them, the ephemera that clogs up the backgrounds and pins the photographs down to specific places and times and things we wouldn't question to question. He writes that that's why he keeps the detailed records he does of the small mundane things, the crap and crud and junk, the TV watched and the meetings attended: it's because of my own, similar records that I've kept daily for eight years now that I can tell you the specifics about the day I was introduced to Six Walks in the Fictional Woods.
Imperfect your memories - Austin Kleon
And that brings it back full circle I think- the seeming imperfections, like the handwritten birthday dedication kept at the front page of a book from a stranger, that tells you that this particular volume, and thus perhaps every volume, has a story, and those stories fit together in a chain of other stories that it's impossible to explicate every meaning of, that we could try to smooth away the seeming imperfections but that would erase the humanity of our memories.
I don't know. As the very ongoing project continues, I become more aware that I'm not the best at wrapping things up in a bow.
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