QUESTIONS FOR QUESTIONS

Last night I gave a brief, informal presentation about my work to a small group of people, and I wrote the paragraph below (imagining myself saying it) in order to get started. I didn’t use it as part of the “presentation,” but here it is:

The question that I ask myself, as a maker of books, is, what does it mean, today, to be a maker of books? What can it mean to a make books? From this flows a multitude of related questions that are provisionally answered in each piece: What is a book? Why are books important? Why should this text be a book? How is this book like other books? How is it different? How is it made? Why is it made that way? How is it read? Why is it read that way? Does it expand the tradition/history/genre? Or does it ossify? Does it make connections outside of itself? Outside of the tradition/history/genre? What is it doing, how does it function, really? How many more questions can I get this book to ask?