The Clock

I received an interesting gift from a fellow bibliophile this past Christmas. The box was labeled “A Novel Way to Tell Time,” and inside was a device called Author Clock. The Author Clock is a small screen (a bit smaller than my iPhone 15) surrounded by a wooden frame. There is one brass button on the side of the box, which serves as a scrolling dial. After one goes through the usual set up routine for devices these days – syncing to the computer, downloading something, etc. – the Author Clock, basically a library of quotes from novels, appears on the screen. Each quote references the real time where you are, set to the minute, hour, or day.

The initial response of everyone in my house was mesmerization. (Is that a word? It should be.) Each one of the four members of my household became locked on the device, holding it in a hand and staring, unmoving, reading each quote, then waiting for the next one to arise. Funny, but you don’t immediately realize this device is a clock in the traditional sense. When my son came home from college and saw it, he immediately became mesmerized. After staring for fifteen minutes, his head snapped up and he looked around like he didn’t know where he was. His way of asking how long he had been looking at the thing – what time is it – made us all giggle. It took him a second to realize we were laughing because he was holding a clock in his hand.

After you stare at it for a bit, patterns emerge. As would be expected, a majority of the quotes come from mystery/thriller/police procedural-type books. This makes sense. If one plans to commit a crime, time can be important. If one plans to tell someone about a crime that was committed – victim, police officer, detective, perpetrator, lawyer, judge, etc. – the time will likely be mentioned. Some of the quotes are boring, along the lines of, “What time is it,” Jennifer said. “It is fifteen minutes past three,” Bill replied. Or something like, “At 6:28 on Monday, I drove to work.”. A few of the quotes are intriguing, prompting one to thoughts such as “hmmm, I wonder what that book is about.” It is very exciting to see a quote from a book one has read. My daughter set up the Author Clock for me, hence she was the first person in my household to look at it. By coincidence, the first quote that came up was from a book she had read not too long before. She got very excited and ended up mesmerized for forty-five minutes. (I couldn’t decide if this was good or bad. On the one hand, she was reading quotes from books. On other hand, they were on yet another screen.)

Other patterns emerge. The Author Clock is marketed as, “A teleportation device powered by literature from every corner of the Earth.”. In reality, the majority of the quotes are from modern American pop fiction with a few classics sprinkled in, if the term “classic,” indicates something written before a few years ago and that has some level of intellectual something to it - not Shakespeare or Dante, more like Agatha Christie and James Joyce. (A notable and amusing exception to this pattern is the quote used to inform the user the Author Clock needs to be charged, which comes from Don Quixote. “Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up completely out of his mind.”) My initial thought about this pattern was that literary fiction must not focus much on time. Then I realized that was idiotic, and the more reasonable explanation lies in the source of the quotes.

If one visits the Author Clock website and reads the options listed along the top of the home page, the third option from the left explains. It is titled “Submit a Quote.” Its purpose is exactly what you think it would be. Anyone is invited to submit a quote to the company. Every time the quote library is updated, one person who submitted a quote will receive a free Author Clock. In other words, actual readers of books (and, I suspect, writers hoping to see their work on the screen) do the homework. The website also bills the Author Clock as a passion project. “Author Clock was an idea we simply couldn’t shake, so we had to build it.” No word on where the idea came from, although I do have a guess based on a recent excursion. I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York City with T., the friend who gave me the Author Clock. T. is my bibliophilic kindred spirit. I have other friends who love books and/or love to read books. I have exactly one friend who reverences books the way I do, who devotes so many of her waking moments to buying, reading, and talking about books. We met volunteering together for a used book sale, which surprises no one who knows us. She is the only one of my friends for whom I would use the O word (obsessive) to describe her relationship with books, although not exclusively obsessive. For me, obsession begins and ends with books. I like other art forms and other objects, but books are it for me. In addition to books, T. is also obsessed with films and clocks.

Books and films feel contradictory, odd bedfellows as far as art forms go. Reading a book and viewing a film are such different methods of consumption, and you can’t really do both a lot. We all know someone who seems like they have read every book or seen every film, but we don’t know anyone who seems to have done both. T. comes the closest of anyone I know. I like films, in a very limited sense, but I can’t say I devote many of my waking moments to them. I am too busy reading. But T. is obsessed with books, and films, and clocks.

I cannot explain the clock thing. I understand being really into physical objects. I love index cards, notebooks, and gel pens, not just for their utilitarian purposes but also as objects to admire. But I don’t love them enough to donate many of my waking moments to them. T. loves clocks, not as functional objects per se, but as things to look at. I don’t know if it is an aesthetic attraction or if it has something to do with the functional apparatus or the underlying theory of time and what that represents. But she is obsessed with them. And they were the reason she invited me to MOMA. If you follow the NYC art scene, you know where this is going. The exhibit I went to see at MOMA represents the marriage between my friend’s two obsessions that are not books. If someone had sat down and decided he wanted to make an art exhibit which would thrill T., this is what he would have created. The he in question is the artist Christian Marclay, and the exhibit is The Clock.

The Clock is a 24-hour long montage of thousands of film (and some television) clips of representations of time – clocks, of course, wall clocks, pocket watches, digital clocks, outdoor clocks, car radio clocks, as well as other references to time, generally in the form of dialogue. Each clip is synchronized to the actual time such that the time represented on screen matches the real time in the place you are sitting while viewing The Clock. So yes, The Clock is a clock. Unlike the Author Clock, the clips contained in The Clock don’t huddle together in one time period or genre. After an hour or so of viewing, some patterns emerge – Big Ben is the star of the show, British, Japanese, and French films apparently spotlight time quite a bit, and yes, Sherlock Holmes and James Bond pop up to represent the detectives and spies of the world who, surely, value time for all of its countdowns to bomb explosions and pinpointing of times of death. But the piece is wide-ranging in terms of genre, time period, and nationality. I was there for about three hours and I saw American film classics such as The Godfather and Once Upon a Time in the West, not to mention, of course, High Noon at noon. There were also plenty of American pop films represented – Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, Johnny Depp in a film I couldn’t identify, Denzel Washington in that movie where he is in a car with the timer for something set to explode in eight minutes, etc. – although this was limited by The Clock’s release date in 2010. There were also many foreign films – the three countries previously mentioned, as well as Italian, Chinese, German, Korean, Indian – and many of the clips were from the pre-color era, including a clip from that wonderful episode of The Twilight Zone about the library and the bespectacled reading man.

The Clock has some interesting quirks as well. Only six copies exist and the exhibit can only be viewed at a museum or art gallery. Only a certain number of people can view it at one time. Those people must be sitting on neutral-colored, rectangular, very comfortable, evenly spaced, precisely lined up sofas. The Author Clock includes no such specifications. Once you get the device set up, you can sit on whatever you want while you look at it, or stand up or lay down or balance on your head or soak in the bathtub or whatever. The Author Clock is also less complex than The Clock. Marclay’s clock is not a one clip per minute telling of time. There were often multiple clips for one moment in time. And, I was fascinated when I realized that the clips sometimes interact with each other to create a sense of the flow of time. At the end of one clip, a man begins to remove a pocket watch from his pocket. In the next clip, a different man continues to remove a pocket watch from his pocket. One woman opens a door and another woman walks through a door into a totally different film. Minutes after a clip of a countdown is shown, after intervening clips have played, the culmination of the countdown appears. This is quite different from the Author Clock, which displays the quote at the beginning of the minute or hour, displays the quote until the minute or hour has elapsed, then flips to the next quote. Neither the Author Clock itself nor the editing, or lack thereof, bear any resemblance to the art piece, save for the idea behind it.

T. also has an Author Clock, so we each know the other one is familiar with it. When we walked out of The Clock, I looked at her and said, “The Author Clock is just a rip-off of that.”. To which she replied, “Well, yeah.”. (She kindly refrained from saying “duh.”) If you look at Marclay’s other works, he is obviously into, amongst many other things, thematically editing film clips. For example, a previous piece called Telephones is seven minutes and thirty-five second worth of film clips of actors and actresses using telephones. This is his thing. The creators of the Author Clock are an engineer, a product designer, and an editor. (As an irrelevant but interesting, at least to me, aside, the editor’s bio claims that the book under her arm in her website photo is “probably a fantasy novel,” implying she often reads fantasy novels. If you think about it for a second, fantasy novels are not anchored to “real” time because they don’t take place in the “real” world. Hmmm…) The idea is billed as something “we simply couldn’t shake,” and maybe that is true. But the idea itself is The Clock applied to books, for sale.

In fairness to the Author Clock, it is not a direct rip off and it does put a somewhat clever spin on Marclay’s idea. (Although, under the category of things that make you go hmmm, MOMA sells the Author Clock in its shop.) Bibliophiles aren’t cinephiles, so it does appeal to a different audience. And while I don’t care for the fact that readers do the work and the three creators get the money (the Author Clock has apparently sold well), I am ecstatic that there are more than two people who care enough about the written word to purchase an item called Author Clock. But still, something about the Author Clock leaves me a tad discomfited. I think my unease may stem from a general discomfort with the fusion of books and technology/social media. When Christian Marclay conceived of and then made his video, he (and his assistants) had to watch DVDs and scrub through video footage to edit the clips together into the finished 24-hour long piece. This process took three years. That feels substantial, like a marriage of intellect, creative expression, and elbow grease. The Author Clock was born on Kickstarter and the creators ask the public to submit clips. Perhaps that explains why Marclay’s video sells for $600,000 and you have to be an art institution to buy it, while the Author Clock is available online (and at the MOMA shop) to anyone with nothing better to do with $200.

Do I like my Author Clock? I would never have bought it for myself, but it was lovely to receive as a gift. Even though the novelty has worn off, I do still sometimes get drawn in. What grabs me is the anticipation, the wondering what quote will be next. Mostly, I like it because it makes me happy to think that there are people other than me who value books enough to make and sell devices which display quotes from books. At least one person had to read each of those thousands of books, and I like that too. I more than liked The Clock, even though I walked in thinking I would not, mostly due to aforementioned lack of spending temporal capital on films. T., who has seen all but five minutes of The Clock over the course of separate viewings, said it was up to me to decide when to leave. I thought I would last fifteen minutes. We sat down shortly after 10:30 AM. I didn’t even notice time passing until the clip from High Noon played. I found myself looking around, in confusion, thinking, “Wait, it’s noon?”. I was still engrossed at 1:30 when we decided to leave, mostly because I was starving. It was not because I was tired of watching The Clock. I wasn’t mesmerized either. I was engaged, challenged, stimulated, and had not even noticed I spent three hours looking at something that wasn’t the page of a book.