CATHERINE GUDIS, BUYWAYS: BILLBOARDS, AUTOMOBILES,
AND THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE (New York: Routledge, 2004). With 50 pages of notes, Buyways is a welcome--seemingly comprehensive--synthesis of multiple, disparate, and oftentimes hard to find sources, and it should serve as an indispensable source book for those working with related subjects in the future. At the same time, Gudis's argument could benefit from a more sophisticated theoretical framework. This is a historical project, to be sure, but one senses that Gudis too often tries to fit the history of billboarding and its billboards under one rubric, treating it as a more or less single commercial project rather than a diverse array of communication or speech acts. Gudis is at her most compelling when she allows time to work through critical evaluation, and more "close readings" of individual billboards would have elicited more in the way of cultural significance and highlighted the multiplicity of strategies at work within the medium. Surely, billboards painted to look like the landscape surrounding them ( Ce n'est pas un billboard ) and the complicated logistics of "showroom" billboards involving living people could benefit from a variety of approaches. A special and larger case in point concerns how Gudis configures billboard literacy and how to understand the process of driving through, and reading, a textual and/or commercial landscape. Gudis begins Buyways by noting the textual collage and palimpsests created by almost manic bill posting on walls and trees, but by Chapter 4 ("The Aesthetics of Speed and the Powers of 'Picturization'") she argues that billboards sought the more efficient image rather than "clever verbal devices" to "consolidate the message" and thus attempted, as much as possible, to eliminate words. "Pictures, not text," she writes, "were best remembered." This opens up an interesting discussion of the relationship between billboards and modern art, but the focus on image allows Gudis to short the textual landscape in her writing--even though that landscape was, and would continue to be imagined by the larger culture as, one largely made up of words and oftentimes very memorable words at that. From the "Book Boards," which were "'free-form' billboards in the shape of an open book" erected in the 1920s, to Paramount Studio's 1932 boards which had four "pages" that were actually turned by attendants, advertisers never seemed too far away from the bibliographic in their ideas. This sense is confirmed elsewhere, as when, for example, Gudis quotes an advertiser who explains, "Every panel is like an open book held up before the reader's eye, and the book is always open to your page. . .It has no cover on it." At other times, the medium is described as one which could "talk the vernacular. . .the language of the common people" and was thus valuable for teaching people "a knowledge of letters." One also thinks of the successful Burma-Shave billboard campaign that, for nearly forty years, featured poems and no images, as well as another similarly poetic pitch that I happened upon in the General Outdoor Advertising Company's archives at the Indiana Historical Society. (See the graphic accompanying this review.) Punctuated by line drawings that attempted to illustrate the poem in between its words, this hybrid of text and image reads: Look both ways when crossing streets-- Walk S-l-o-w-l-y use your head! No matter if you're in a rush For jam and taystee bread! P.S. It'll wait--it stays fresh! The poem's subject matter of slowness, caution, and waiting, along with its attempts to slow the reading experience by interspersing images and breaking the word "slowly" into its component parts, seems worth a second look for the ways in which it's not so clearly "unblinking" after all. Such closer considerations would not only help us to better understand this one textual landscape, but to more clearly come to grips with how the new media and especially the Web--the "virtual highway" that Gudis describes as "the ultimate in billboard aesthetics"--affect our reading and sense of literacy as well. In "Reading as Poaching" from The Practice of Everyday Life , Michel de Certeau writes that "readers are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across field they did not write. . .Indeed, reading has no place." This note of "placelessness" is the same note that Gudis sounds throughout her book. De Certeau's reader and the decentralized American market don't readily go hand in hand, however, and would seem to offer a challenging and fruitful opportunity for further study. Despite this bump in the road, though, Buyways is a smooth ride and a very welcome spotlight on one of our more neglected media. Mike Chasar has written about Burma-Shave's billboard poetry as well as the effect of billboards on the work of William Carlos Williams. His recent reviews and essays appear in TIRWeb 6.3, Rain Taxi, and Word for/ Word. _____________
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