Curious

To some, marginalia is heresy. Every time I touch my pencil to a margin I hear Patrick Altick retching, although the well-hidden and oft-rebuffed historian within me vehemently disagrees with the beau idéal.

How many times have you been annoyed by the marginalia left by some idiot–huge and redoubled exclamation points, uncomplimentary expressions (”absurd,” “oh, come now,” “for God’s sake!!!!”), and long, scrawled explanations of what seems perfectly clear in the printed text? The critical points may be well taken, but the margin is no place to utter them. Pencilings of this sort–including compulsive underlining, a sophomoric affliction if there ever was one–are bad enough; even worse is marking with ink.

Nevertheless, I desecrate.* I ravage. How else will I successfully plunder when the time comes to borrow those words from the page and richly recall the plans I had for them? I will also confess to girlish daydreams of someday stumbling upon the scribbled marginalia of a beloved author, thinker, or critic in a book carelessly discarded at one of the millions of thrift stores that plead for exploration. How ridiculous my delight would be to discover his or her delight or displeasure in the passage at hand.

For me, marginalia also claims fanciful significance, a most embarrassing admission. Plagued by an indulgent imagination, my conscious mind organizes thoughts and discoveries in both “files” and “footnotes.” “Files,” inexplicably named so in elementary school, consist of discoveries I don’t yet know what to make of, things my gut tells me I should find significant and relevant even as I don’t. “Footnotes” represent nomadic facts/truths which prove equally germane to a dozen topics. “Files” and “footnotes” are responsible for the precious notional marginalia inspiring me to defend the actual joy.

In defending marginalia, I am finding it the perfect stuff for the link-happy redemption I seek after the cruel unraveling of my most recent list attempt. So without further consternation, I will form a list of marginalia “filed” and “footnoted” over the past four days:

• Do you judge a book by its cover? Find one more reason to do so at Penguin’s blog post on the Book Designs of the Year. But consider yourself warned, Pynchon fans argue that you ought do otherwise.
• Google Books continues to dream big about “little-seen” books, even while research warns that online reading may not be a suitable replacement for the printed word. Be that as it may, John Yemma, editor of The Christian Science Monitor, suggests that the printed word has truly become a luxury once more.
• But what about the auditory? Thanks to my mother’s insistence on reading us literature aloud from her armchair, I hold a special place in my heart for audio books. Audio renditions of literature can both surprise, as Maud Newton found when sifting through the British Library Archives, and delight, as I rediscovered upon hearing John Lithgow’s reading of “Taste,” a short story by children’s author Roald Dahl.
• Sunday P. humored me by suggesting we watch one of my favorite movies (for the 9th time), The Winslow Boy (1999), a beautiful David Mamet film adaptation of the late Sir Terence Rattigan’s stage-play. The movie’s message inspired me to hunt up David Mamet’s political, coming-out essay: “Why I am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead’ Liberal,” published in March at the Village Voice, and wonder at his bold, refreshing political transformation.
• In the New York Times, Stanley Fish publishes a bizarre and dubiously relevant list of the “10 Best American Movies,” only two of which follow the golden 1950s.
• Many are quibbling over the artistic and social function of video games. Last year Steven Poole argued against a simple classification of gaming as “play.” This year John Lanchester turns the London Review of Books into a launching point for the discussion of video games’ artistic merits. Jane McGonigal, spokeswoman for the Institute For The Future, encourages museums to adopt an opportunistic view of the gaming industry as museums seek to reaffirm their relevance and innovative spirit in the 21st century.
• Weisberg finishes his list of Bushisms with a humorous “Top 25,” highlighting the importance of syntax and precision.

*Out of respect for Altick, I marked the above passage from The Art of Literary Research with a hurriedly-fashioned, sticky note bookmark.