The texture of eyes past

Posted on | February 23, 2005 | 22 Comments

My desk is a mess of eraser bits. When I read, I draw a vertical line at the outside margin of passages I’d like to quote or keep for re-reading and general documentation. It has to be pencil. I have a small fit if I can’t find a pencil in the house. On such occasions rather than a biro I instead use small ripped up pieces of paper (Post-It notes are a last resort because they lose stickiness after one use, and they are hard to reassemble in the perfect square of purchase).

I get a little disappointed when someone else doesn’t rub out their own note-taking. It’s as though their use of the text is so instrumental or explicit that it can afford to remain exposed for the next person’s judgement. There is some variance between the vertical underliner and the horizontal allusionist. My hypothesis is that the horizontal underliner is more often an undergraduate, autodidact or school student. The more abstract vertical line has the confidence and selectivity of a dedicated reader: postgraduate degrees and above.

As a tiny politics of presumed benevolence I usually rub out a past reader’s lines as well as my own. There’s something about the author-reader relationship I want to preserve for others, as well as a lingering desire to believe in the fantasy that a message has been issued just for me. With a pristine page I can entertain myself by imagining a different time, a different location, a different life than the ones that surround me as I sit down to read. Yet I’m uneasy about this decision. I can’t help but be affected by the evidence that another person has been seized by this same set of words. Whether or not our selections match – I always consider why they have highlighted something I haven’t, and feel a sense of conviction when I highlight something they overlook – I like the feeling that I’m part of a community of readers that have, and will, come.

The current chapter I’m studying has a real riot going on. There’s the curious person using pencil to write the letter “J” after his or her favourite point. Another reader is more evidently strategic, marking a potential “quote” with heavy double underlines as a counter-tactic. Black Pen takes things up a notch by insisting on horizontal lines and an accompanying “NB” (duh!). Not sentences, but clauses are held captive, in apparent synchronicity with Black Pen’s comprehension. Green Marker intervenes with a dignified cross on rare if pivotal sentences. But loudest by far is dreaded Highlighter. These yellow blocs seem close to insatiable, yet even they appear qualified to leave out the author’s “in short”s, “and”s, and references.

Perhaps this explains why I use pencil. Every now and then I’m in a hurry, the book’s overdue and the deadline’s long passed. That’s when I don’t quite have the time to carefully conceal my unique selection of notes. As I drop the book down the library chute, a surreptitious pleasure lies in the prospect that the next borrower can choose to get to know me a little and, after a brief and intimate encounter, decide whether I’m worth keeping or rubbing away.

Category: Reading

Comments

22 Responses to “The texture of eyes past”

  1. Mark Bahnisch
    February 23rd, 2005 @ 4:20 pm

    I’m the complete opposite, Mel – I find what previous readers have underlined fascinating :)

  2. Glen
    February 23rd, 2005 @ 5:43 pm

    What about connections to other authors or concepts, written in the white-space? I am a page-corner folder as well. I try to buy all the books I read, mainly cause I am shit at taking notes and I am a rememberer. I either remember it, remember where it came from, or I remember that I should be remembering something. Of course, this is dangerous, as I don’t remember what I have forgotten, but I normally have a good memory, at least, I can’t ever remember not having a good memory…

  3. Christian McCrea
    February 23rd, 2005 @ 6:01 pm

    Falling in love is finding a Bookhenge. Walking into a library, you find a mess of books inbetween shelves, an untidy set of vortices, usually in small circles. Sometimes they are standing in the middle, sometimes they leave it there for the staff to fall in love with.

    Why mayan archeology next to Foucault… what are they studying?

  4. David Brake
    February 23rd, 2005 @ 7:30 pm

    I can’t believe you own up to writing in library books! You can never erase the marks completely and over time such markings make the book increasingly diffficult to OCR. I like to scan passages that are important and put them into Endnote – people who mark books make this very difficult. It also makes it hard for students to think for themselves about a book when they see certain passages or chapters have already been underlined – they naturally concentrate on those chapters and skip the others. Please stop…

  5. Mark Bahnisch
    February 23rd, 2005 @ 8:41 pm

    Personally I go for the masses of yellow postit notes thing…

  6. mc gregg
    February 23rd, 2005 @ 9:19 pm

    Oh no! I may have just placed myself on some secret international librarian register! Imagine that. My nerd life would be over. But worse – I’ve lost a potential friend who uses verbs like OCR. Huh? There must be a much bigger IT budget at LSE than UQ! In my own defence, I was trying to say that I’m really *good* compared to other naughty people, who make even old skool photocopying near impossible. I really agree that it’s about letting students think for themselves. And that’s kinda the point: when we read something new, surely we’re all students ?

  7. casualised worker bee
    February 24th, 2005 @ 10:00 am

    oi greggy – mark away. some of us love reading other people comments and focus points. as for hindering students, they still have to think through the marked passage don’t they. what sort of paranoia about intellectual capital is chris on about! and don’t give me the students have to think for themselves bit. bah. So every time you see notes someone else has made you don’t read the rest or question their markings? scared they might do something with those passages we couldn’t huh? comments add to the reading-machine. the text doesn’t stop because we want a nice, clean and pretty page. let it go, fuck it up. why be some self-appointed guardian. i hereby decree the column marker’s revolution underway.

    as for librarians, nazis in disguise i reckon – turn your phone off, don’t write in the books, stop talking, that book’s not worth stocking blah blah. but those sexy one’s with glasses, black hair and stern look mmmmmm.now that would make me stop, a librarian with a whip hehe.

    lots of love

    the buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

  8. mc gregg
    February 24th, 2005 @ 10:07 am

    Is it possible that the masochist female librarian and attendant male gardener hold a similar place in our culture’s imagination?

  9. Mark Bahnisch
    February 24th, 2005 @ 10:25 am

    Yes!

    My flatmate’s b/f is a male librarian, she’s an ex-librarian (as is my sister) and none of them fit the type.

    Librarians also do wonderful blog. There are thousands of librarian blogs. Here’s a sample:

    http://www.livejournal.com/users/bookmobile/

    And librarians are in the forefront of the fight against the American Patriot Act.

    And some of the UQ Librarians used to play in a very good folk band in Brisvegas, Spot the Dog.

  10. Mark Bahnisch
    February 24th, 2005 @ 10:33 am

    …and librarians are unbeatable at pub trivia…

  11. Mel
    February 24th, 2005 @ 11:38 am

    What about my personal favourite, The Asterisk!

    I also like it when someone has written something so moronic in the margin that someone else has been moved to add “no it’s not” or just “?????”

    As I am an academic retard, such things give me the rare feeling of understanding something better than someone else.

  12. Mel
    February 24th, 2005 @ 11:43 am

    Also – I was having a conversation with Gemma last night about how we read books when a deadline is looming. She makes strategic decisions about which books are most important to get through in that time. I skim through the table of contents and the introduction to get a basic idea of what a larger number of books are saying, then select what look like the most relevant chapters. It’s rare and luxurious for me actually to read a book from cover to cover. I go back to the same books over years and find new insights all the time, even though technically I’ve ‘read’ the book.

    Oh also, I read the book once quickly without writing anything, then comes the in-depth note-taking phase. Only if I have a photocopy (which I am dismayed to find is now ‘old school’) will I actually underline or highlight anything.

  13. Mark Bahnisch
    February 24th, 2005 @ 1:30 pm

    “What about my personal favourite, The Asterisk!”

    And don’t forget the triple asterisk, which a friend of mine claims she couldn’t have written her PhD without…

  14. Glen
    February 24th, 2005 @ 11:39 pm

    “My nerd life would be over.”

    Even without books or PhDs I think most academics would still be nerds :P

    Although it is mildy disconcerting when reading a page full of underlined/highlighted/asterisky text and you find yourself more interested in something that has not been permanently exclaimed.

  15. Mark Bahnisch
    February 25th, 2005 @ 2:16 am

    Depends how you define nerds, Glen… Sociologists dress well at least… We were the prototypical metrosexuals (and obsessed with typologies)…

  16. Rowan
    February 25th, 2005 @ 12:13 pm

    Let me assure you, photocopying is not ‘old school’. I once worked as a photocopy attendant in a large public library. Talk about an ethographic researcher’s paradise! After many months working there I slowly discovered that there is a whole pathology of photocopying that is yet to be explained (in fact it exists in draft form under the title of ‘The Practice and Pathology of Photocopying’ and is presently gathering dust in my filing cabinet; one day I’ll get around to publishing it). There were a small group of regulars who we gave nicknames to, including the ‘flag man’ (he only photocopied pictures of flags), the ‘aeroplane man’ (he only photocopied aeroplanes, but was so fastidious about copy quality that he would flit between copiers because, being an obsessive, he had figured out which ones would reproduce marks in certain parts of the page), and then there was Octavio, the Brazilian homeless guy who would scatter all passers-by with his smell and spent every day researching education theory (go figure!). If there is such a thing as a reprographic avant-garde, it is there in that copy centre.

  17. Mark Bahnisch
    February 25th, 2005 @ 3:30 pm

    Hey Mel – I think you got yr inaugural spam comment (Sealy mattresses)! Beware the latest trend – the spam trackback…

  18. mc gregg
    February 25th, 2005 @ 9:38 pm

    Thanks Mark, it certainly isn’t the first – I wish! They’re being total bastards this week. I gave up on trackback about a month ago.

    I get nervous about spam as intimate as mattress ads. What do they think I’ve been up to lately??!

  19. Glen
    February 27th, 2005 @ 11:41 am

    “I get nervous about spam as intimate as mattress ads. What do they think I’ve been up to lately??!”

    hmmm, then I am in trouble: v1agra, g.badar and his wonderful cheap software, teens in MY area, that international prize/award, r0lex like emmminem wears, and “Pliant and dissolvable lozenges for serious someone.”

    It is weird to think of spam as intimate, don’t you think? Maybe you are in the market for a new mattress;). Spam would have to be the antithesis of intimacy.

  20. Mark Bahnisch
    February 28th, 2005 @ 2:40 pm

    Mel, I keep getting spam offering me a PhD without having to write a thesis :) Tempting!

  21. Mark Bahnisch
    February 28th, 2005 @ 10:44 pm

    Latest spam – is this targetted to peeps finishing phds with looming deadlines?

    “When you hide your anxious feelings for months or years, you perpetuate your anxiety by assuming it’s your fault. Anxiety is not your fault. There is nothing inherently wrong with who you are. You are a good, valuable, uniquely special person. You simply suffer from anxiety.”

    or do I need some paranoia spam?

  22. Laura
    March 6th, 2005 @ 12:21 am

    As an undergrad I got reasonably familiar with the handwriting of many of the faculty in my department. A cheap bibliographic thrill for me is happening on abusive marginalia they’ve added to the books of Hated Rivals. My favourite — a man who is lovely and kind and generous in person — is always writing ‘CRAP!’ down the side of postcolonial stuff about Shakespeare.

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