Matthew Battles - "Tree"

Matthew Battles discusses Tree.

At the Co-op

RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested, but not required)

About the book: Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Tree explores the forms, uses, and alliances of this living object's entanglement with humanity, from antiquity to the present. Trees tower over us and yet fade into background. Their lifespan outstrips ours, and yet their wisdom remains inscrutable, treasured up in the heartwood. They serve us in many ways-as keel, lodgepole, and execution site-and yet to become human, we had to come down from their limbs. In this book Matthew Battles follows the tree's branches across art, poetry, and landscape, marking the edges of imagination with wildness and shadow.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

About the author: Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. As associate director at metaLAB, his research explores the dark abundance of objects in libraries, museums, and landscapes; technology's impact on our experience of art, culture, and the natural world; and the conditions of culture and experience in the context of deep time. This work takes varied form in writing, video, and multimedia installation. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology appears such venues as The American Scholar, The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, and The New York Times. In addition to Tree, his other books include Library: An Unquiet History and Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word (Norton) and, with Jeffrey Schnapp, The Library Beyond the Book (Harvard).