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Anybody catch Tim Parks’ New York Review of Books blog post, A Weapon for Readers? The weapon in question? A pen! For writing in your books. It is clear where Parks stands on marginalia. He advocates reading not with a pen nearby or on the table next to you or in your bag, but reading with a pen in your hand.

But how is this a weapon? Parks thinks we have too much respect for the written word and too little awareness of what words are doing. We are too passive, too accepting. We let novelists get away with too much. Reading with a pen in hand makes one more alert and a more active reader.

He has tested this on his students. None of them marked up their books. He told them they had to. Not only did they have to mark up the text, but they had to make three or four comments on every page, at least one critical and if it’s aggressive, even better. A question mark should be placed next to anything you find suspect, underline anything you appreciate, and freely write things like “splendid” or “bullshit” in the margins too.

“A pen is not a magic wand,” he admits, but he found that this experiment with his students helped them improve their reading. Of course writing in library books is not encouraged, that’s just rude. But your own books? I get the feeling Parks wants them to look well read by the time you get to the end — folded pages, writing all over the place, a cracked spine.

Parks is rather aggressive with his pen as weapon idea:

There is something predatory, cruel even, about a pen suspended over a text. Like a hawk over a field, it is on the lookout for something vulnerable. Then it is a pleasure to swoop and skewer the victim with the nib’s sharp point. The mere fact of holding the hand poised for action changes our attitude to the text.

It makes is seem like reading is an adversarial relationship between author, book, and reader. I don’t approach reading like that. For me reading is like dating. Sometimes I am looking for love. Sometimes I just want a one night stand. Sometimes we don’t even make it to first base and other times it is an out of the park home run. Now and then I just want to flirt. And then there are the deep and serious encounters when you plumb the depth of your being. I could go on, but you get the idea. Even with a pen in my hand it never transforms into a weapon. I’m just taking notes so I can gossip about all the details with my friends later.

I thought it kind of interesting that Parks’s post showed up so soon after the digital is killing marginalia article. I suppose this is now a subtopic of the print versus digital debate. I wonder how long it will drag on before it there is nothing left to say and everything becomes repetitive? Actually, I think it might already be on it’s last gasp. But like a mortally wounded character in a Shakespeare tragedy, it will likely have some very long speeches before the curtain falls on it.

No offense to any librarians out there, but I prefer to own books, not borrow them. I realize there’s a financial downside to my predilection, but what can I say? It feels good to support the industry, the book stores, the publishers, the authors themselves. If I can manage it, I don’t mind spending the money on books.

For starters, I like having them around, living in my rooms. Books make great furniture and, in a way, furnaces: they warm homes.

Secondly, I usually read with a pen in my hand. I underline passages, write comments, exclamation points, stars, notes and complaints. It is the dying art of marginalia, a direct reader-response. I can’t do that with library books, and Post-It Notes simply do not satisfy.

I’ve been on nice reading streak lately — have picked out some good ones. I just finished THE MARTIAN by Andy Weir. Fabulously entertaining, and a celebration of science and the intelligence of man. A geek-hero who survives through his attitude, his determination, and his brilliant mind.

Before that, I read THE ROUND HOUSE by Louise Erdrich. I loved it, every word. What a great writer. Seamless sentences, never a crack showing, and such human insight. A writer with soul. But I’ve got a problem and you can probably guess it: I borrowed the book from my local library and it’s past due.

I’ve been reluctant to return it, to drop it into the slot and hear the dull thunk as it hits the bin. Gone, gone, gone. My book no more.

One first-world problem is that I’ve been rereading, almost daily, the book’s perfect last paragraph. Over and over I return to it, stunned and speechless. That penultimate sentence, especially. What a beautiful evocation of lost innocence, the crossing over into something harder, more brutal and cold, adulthood and loss, “when we all realized we were old.”

I really didn’t want to let the book go, and maybe I’ll buy a copy for myself one day. In the meantime, I’ll type out that last paragraph here, so I’ll have it safely tucked away in the white, high-ceilinged halls of cyberspace. I don’t think there’s any spoilers revealed, it’s not that kind of book. A 13-year-old boy and his parents return home after a long drive.

Quick aside: I don’t play a musical instrument, but I love music. One of the things I’ve always envied about musicians is that they can play all these great songs, have those enduring melodies and fat riffs run through the fingers as they channel greatness.

That’s how I feel typing this passage from Louise Erdrich. Like I’m playing the guitar part from “And Your Bird Can Sing.”

How I wish that I could write as simply, as beautifully.

- - - - -

IN ALL THOSE miles, in all those hours, in all that air rushing by and sky coming at us, blending into the next horizon, then the one after that, in all that time there was nothing to be said. I cannot remember speaking and I cannot remember my mother or my father speaking. I knew that they knew everything. The sentence was to endure. Nobody shed tears and there was no anger. My mother or my father drove, gripping the wheel with neutral concentration. I don’t remember that they even looked at me or I at them after the shock of that first moment when we all realized we were old. I do remember, though, the familiar side of the roadside cafe just before we would cross the reservation line. On every one of my childhood trips that place was always a stop for ice cream, coffee and a newspaper, pie. It was always what my father called the last leg of the journey. But we did not stop this time. We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.

The wonderful Lokesh, who sends me article links sometimes and who I wish had a blog (hint, hint), sent me a link to a a fun article in the New York Times Magazine, What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text. Perhaps you have seen it? It is about marginalia and observes that there seems to be a lot of buzz about the topic of late.

I think part of the buzz stems from the worry about the disappearance of marginalia with e-books. Sure, you can highlight and make notes on your own e-books, but you will never, ever buy an e-book and discover someone else’s marginalia in it.

Sam Anderson, the author of the article, is an avowed marginaliaist (yes, I made that up!). He is so enthusiastic that I found myself, someone who had the command, “never write in a book!” drilled into her head since she knew what a book was, wanting to pick up a pencil and start scribbling in the margin.

But lest you think the article is simply sounding the alarm on the disappearance of marginalia, it is much more than that. Anderson sees marginalia as a bridge between the private and the social reading life. He had an epiphany about what social reading in the future could look like, a future in which you could see all the marginal notes of your friends from, say, Infinite Jest, appear in your copy of the book where you could not only comment on the text of the book, but on the marginal commentary as well. Sounds cool, doesn’t it?

And then I thought, wait a minute! Kindle has a feature that lets you publish your notes and also lets you see the notes of other people who have read the book. You can’t limit it to only the notes of your friends, but maybe it will get there eventually. Anderson does mention this feature and he adds an interesting wishful twist: the possibility of subscribing to your favorite critic’s marginalia or to have the marginalia of past authors like Blake, Coleridge, Emerson, etc, appear in the book you are reading (assuming those authors had read and annotated said book of course). How nifty would that be?

I hadn’t been to Kindle’s marginalia site in awhile so I popped over to discover that they now have a feature where you can follow the notes of other people. If you have a Kindle and you make your notes public, let me know so I can follow you! I have some public notes anyone can see for my Kindle. I am rather disappointed to discover that books I didn’t download from Amazon don’t appear here. I had some good notes for Turn of the Screw and they are nowhere to be found. So the system isn’t perfect, but it is something that could prove to be interesting.

David Markson reading (or talking)

The Strand is pretty much out of any Markson-owned books now, the hunt is officially over. Not too long ago I was told by a worker at The Strand that he is fairly positive that I own more than double the amount of Markson-owned books of any other Markson Treasure Hunter. I have around 250 or so of his books. And here, once a day, I plan to share some of his marginalia.

as of 1/1/1900

Did you know that President Thomas Jefferson, novelist Mark Twain, and evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin all wrote in the margins? According to the New York Times, marginalia was denounced in the 20th century as a form of graffiti. These days, scholars love marked up books.

The article offers these observations from University of Toronto professor Heather Jackson: “Books with markings are increasingly seen these days as more valuable, not just for a celebrity connection but also for what they reveal about the community of people associated with a work…examining marginalia reveals a pattern of emotional reactions among everyday readers that might otherwise be missed, even by literary professionals.”

The Caxton Club and the Newberry Library will host a symposium in March to debate this subject; Jackson will be speaking there as well. The event will spotlight on a new essay collection entitled Other People’s Books: Association Copies and the Stories They Tell. This title contains 52 essays and 112 illustrations.

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