marginal

The other morning I was reading this thing that appeared in my NPR Books feed (don’t you subscribe to National Public Radio book talk? what are you? not a nerd?): Chat While Reading: The Future of Books? It’s about this site, called BookGlutton.com, where you are able to discuss books as you read them. Provided you’re reading the digital public-domain copies on the site. I checked it out, sort of. I didn’t sign up for the site, but I clicked through a book to get an idea of how it worked. So, there’s the book, and on the left is a chat window (which is only enabled if you’re signed up and logged in, so I don’t know how lively it is), and you can click on any passage in the book and on the right, any notes that have been written by others will appear. I don’t know if this feature is also only viewable if you’re signed up and logged in; if it is, then I suppose there would be notes there, and if it’s not, then people sure aren’t communicating much. Also I wonder if you have to keep going back to click through the passages you’ve noted to see if anyone else has written anything or if the site notifies you somehow. I suppose I can’t talk about this site much one way or the other without signing up, but I don’t really feel like signing up for it — I have enough accounts on enough websites to keep track of as it is. But the main reason is that nobody wants to read my margin notes, as they are random and generally unhelpful. Also sometimes snarky.

Allow me to share:

In the Aeneid:

I mean, I suppose we can argue that Virgil is generally not cool, but I don’t really feel like arguing about it. Let’s not fight.

In The Sound and the Fury:

Right? I know.

In Gulliver’s Travels:

Allow me to explain. I read this for a class. (Of course I did. As amusing as he may sometimes be, does anybody sit around reading Jonathan Swift just because? If you do, that’s cool, I guess, but you may be the only person in the world who does. Just saying.) The professor spent an inordinate amount of time explaining the bit about Gulliver’s teacher (Master Bates — get it? GET IT?!? MASTER BATES!! Oh, Jonathan Swift, you CARD!) and how he died after Gulliver married. We could talk about how Master Bates probably only faked his death after Gulliver married, but you know, let’s not.

In Macbeth:

I don’t have anything to say about this.

In Mansfield Park:

Um. Sorry. Spoiler alert? But do you honestly think Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram could have interesting (let alone good) sex? Really?

In the Gregory Corso poem “Marriage”:

Should I get married? Should I be good? Or…

There are more, certainly, but I got tired of looking for them. Yes, sometimes I write in books. Not nearly as much as I used to, but even so, I know that some people think of writing in books as a form of literary abuse, but I like to think of it as, um, not literary abuse. I find margin notes amusing, actually, because when I reread books, which I do sometimes, and I find a note I wrote a long time ago, it often reminds me of something. Though sometimes I just wonder what the hell I was going on about. Like how on one page of The Sound and the Fury, it just says “Solipsistic” and nothing else. It could’ve been a comment on Jason Compson, or it could’ve just been that I thought of that word for something else and wanted to write it down and didn’t have any other paper handy. Knowing myself, either scenario is equally likely.

But it’s weird finding other people’s notes in books. I remember when I was 12 or so, and my grandmother bought a house. The people who moved out left boxes of books in the basement, and I remember going through them and picking out things to read. One of the books was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and aside from the fact that I was too young for Tom Robbins when I was 12, the book was full of underlining and notes, usually in the sex scenes. I kept wondering why the person had underlined those passages and left other passages unmarked, before I just decided, in all my 12-year-old wisdom, that whoever had done all that underlining must just like sex a lot. ¹

I’m not sure what the takeaway lesson is here today, if in fact there is a lesson at all (probably not). But maybe it’s that if you underline only sex scenes in a book, someday some kid is going to find it and think you’re a weirdo. Or something. Do you even write in books?

_______________________________________________________
^{1. Thanks to the Human Growth and Reproduction classes I took in elementary school, which included the special time when one of the teachers asked a roomful of confused and slightly terrified 8-year-old girls if any of us masturbated, and the general reaction was “I’m supposed to do what to my what?” (we also learned that nipples weren’t just for breastfeeding, and perhaps this is proof that I went to some kind of crazy hippie school), I’d already been educated about sex. Somewhat. So reading the sex scenes in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues didn’t particularly faze me (except it wasn’t like in those books we had in class where the cuddly blushing naked people would hug and then hide under the covers), except I remember thinking it was weird that someone went to the trouble of underlining everything, especially since this person (I mean, at this point I’m just assuming it was the same person) had already dog-eared the pages.}