Shuffling the Pages: A Video Post

In the video I've posted here, I show the act of shuffling the pages of Composition No. 1 in order to randomize the page order, as per Saporta's instructions. Though we only filmed the shuffling of pages one time, I actually did so four times in order to really mix them up. It was interesting that, just as Uglow suggested in his introduction, I had highly emotional reactions to this act. I put it off for a long time despite feeling like I should practice the act before filming it (I did not shuffle the pages once until the day I filmed this) because it did not seem appropriate to do so until it was time to begin the book. I felt as if shuffling was a part of reading. I also considered (though not seriously) how I might know what pages they had originally come in and whether knowing this might have significance. I thought this despite the fact that I knew that the randomness was part of the experience. All in all, I felt incredibly uneasy about performing these simple instructions, even at the command of the author.

My feelings while performing the simple act of shuffling the pages is an example of how emotionally and ethically invested we are in book-space ideas of what literature ought to be. Even a radical like me feels tradition bound, as if there's something naturally "right" about the way it's always been done. Read left to right, top to bottom, front to back. This is the way it's supposed to be. But who says? Who started that, and why were they right? Who is Aristotle but a long-dead Greek?