All the time in the world

I just finished Lynne Truss' 2008 American version of Eats, Shoots & Leaves.  I've always been a bit picky with grammar, selectively so, most of the time, but picky nonetheless.  Misuse of 'there', 'their' and 'they're' drives me up a wall.  I want to rip my hair out upon reading mixed up 'your' and 'you're's (I'm actually not sure how to punctuate that).  I really can't stand people with mix and match colloquialisms and phrases a la the bartender in Boondock Saints- "People in glass houses sink ships".

On the whole I was kind of proud of myself after reading it.  My grammar isn't half-bad, despite living in the age of the e-mail and text message. There was one section in her book that I found really poignant, though.  Transcribed here from Chapter 6- "Merely Conventional Signs" is the passage I found most interesting, not because it was espousing some particular nuance of grammar being lost to T9, but because as a bit of a grammar nut and a bibliophile it struck a chord.

Having grown up as readers of the printed word (and possibly even scribblers in margins), we may take for granted the processes involved in the traditional activity of reading- so let us remind ourselves.  The printed word is presented to us in a linear way, with syntax supreme in conveying the sense of the words in their order.  We read privately, mentally listening to the writer's voice and translating the writer's thoughts.  The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.  Picking up the book in the first place entails an active pursuit of understanding.  Holding the book, we are aware of posterity and continuity.  knowing that the printed word is always edited, typeset and proof-read before it reaches us, we appreciate it's literary authority.  Having paid money for it (often), we have a sense of investment and pride of ownership, not to mention a feeling of general virtue.

All these conditions for reading are overturned by the new technologies.  Information is presented to us in a non-linear way, through an exponential series of lateral associations.  The internet is a public "space" which you visit, and even inhabit; its product is inherently impersonal and disembodied.  Scrolling documents is the opposite of reading: your eyes remains static, while the material flows past.  Despite all the opportunities to "interact", we all read material from the internet (or CD-roms or whatever) entirely passively because all the interesting associative thinking has already been done on our behalf.  Electronic media are intrinsically ephemeral, are open to perpetual revision, and work quite strenuously against any sort of historical perception.  The opposite of edited, the material on the internet is unmediated, except by the technology itself.  And having no price, it has questionable value.  Finally, you can't write comments in the margin of your screen to be discovered by another reader fifty years down the line.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves, p. 153-54

It strikes me now, the irony of writing my own commentary on a quote such as that on a blog, or on the internet at all for that matter. 

The Internet: the ultimate unmediated medium in which anyone can write anything about anything regulated by nothing.  

I used to hate it when people would write in books.  Maybe it was something that was drilled into me as a child. I remember carefully covering Elementary School books with brown paper bags at the beginning of every school year; the threats of the teachers of fines for books returned with doodles in the margins.  Even into High School books were sacred- despite how much I might have loathed the subject.  Around 11th grade things changed a little, I'd doodle inside the front cover, draw boxes around headings out of boredom; but write notes in a literary book? Never.  

My World Lit. teacher in 12th grade gave us The Norton Anthology: World Masterpieces- Expanded Edition In One Volume as our text. At over 3000 pages it was a massive tome; not something your average high schooler wanted to carry around.  My teacher's suggestion?  Take an X-acto knife and have at it; cut it up into pieces.  

Parts I, II, III, and IV were given the most unkindest cut of all.  Parts V and VI, were spared the knife, left to live out their days still connected to part VI.  As much as it was done for convenience, I think quite a bit of the decision to slice apart the book was rebellion as only an All-honors, A-student can do it.  "Fine, you assigned me this book. I'm gonna cut it apart! How do you like it now?!"  (Just fine I'd imagine- as he was the one suggesting we cut it apart in the first place, mostly to decrease the frequency of 'I forgot my book cause it's to heavy' excuses.)

I regret cutting it into so many pieces now though.  Two would have sufficed, dividing it at the end of part II; but hindsight is 20/20.  Despite creating Frankenstein's monster out of my World Lit book- and excepting my name on the front page- I never wrote in it.  

College changed that though.  Maybe it was the fact that I owned all of my books now (although that seems to go against my desire to possess books as objects of reverence), maybe it was convenience.  Really, I think it was a combination of a single professor and the discovery of non-fiction I actually enjoyed.  I wasn't stuck reading about how economics played a role in the election of blahbity-blah, or how statistics work (Oh, math, how I loathe thee.)  I was reading about Zen Buddhism in Japan and writing papers on the architecture of tea houses.  I was reading about the history of world architecture and the Vietnam war.  This stuff was cool and I finally had something to say about it.  

I also had a professor that took the mystique out of books.  He asked what the hell books were for if you didn't write notes in them, underline the important stuff and generally interact with them.  It was his opinion that books weren't just for reading, but engaging, thinking about, understanding; making mental connections and taking note of them; doing all that interesting 'associative thinking' Lynne Truss talks about.  

After that professor, I can remember my own excitement in college taking books out of the library only to discover inscriptions on the title page from A.D. White, the first president of the university, or just the enjoyment I'd get from reading other peoples' insights scribbled in margins, or manifest in an underline, or a box around a quote (even if that enjoyment often came from disagreeing with the penciled-in observations).  They gave the book more a life, a history, a place in a larger picture.

I guess this is my way of writing in the margins, maybe not for someone else to discover 50 years down the line, but maybe to lead someone to the library tomorrow to take out a book that might otherwise languish, unread, on the shelves, and maybe, just maybe, make a connection to an idea, a history, or another person, writing in the margins.