Captcha and Release

I just had to type "doorstep City" in order to stick a link on Facebook. That sounds like the title of a poem I should write.

Though I will never prefer reading on a screen to thumbing through the care-worn pages of a book, I do love the searchability of online texts... and the ease with which I can peruse New York magazine's "Strictly Personals" from the '80s thanks to Google Books. ("Breathes There A Man—of worthy vintage who's willing to be a friend first and see where that leads?" "If you're amply shaped, let's talk." "One of New York's most eligible bachelors is tired of running and ready to be caught. Can you cure what ails me?") So the fact that I am helping digitize newspapers and novels by decoding images and typing letters makes me think I am contributing to the preservation and dissemination of knowledge even while I'm posting lolcats on my friends' pages.

Here's to you, reCAPTCHA. I'll gladly do your work for free.

(SWF seeks similarly nerdy and bibliophilic M, 18 to 23. Bad puns, writing skills, and Monty Python knowledge a plus.)

Funny as Grammar

One of my history books describes a British soldier in India as "agile as a verb."

Does this mean someone can be... steadfast as a noun? eloquent as an adjective? guiding as a preposition?

Verbose Volumes

This semester, I go from 821-page David Copperfield in Class #1 to 560-page Midnight's Children Class #2 to 682-page Jane Eyre in Class #2... and then 560-page Midnight's Children in Class #1. I must also trudge through most chapters of a 656-page history book.

If I make it through, I think I might deserve a medal.

Words, Words, Words

Fact: The bigger the book in front of you but the smaller the text, the more scholarly you feel.

I've got a 1910-page Shakespeare concordance. You can just hand me my doctorate now.


And in this concordance, printed in 1937, I espied a typographical error: "...ay, there's the rnb..."
An upside-down "u"! (Though I suppose technically it's really just an "n.")

...shut up. I think it's funny.

There Is No Frigate Like a Book

I find it strange that some people simply refuse to write in their books, as if the pages were sacred objects meant to be kept unmarked, clean of any human thought other than the writer's. I don't usually annotate novels I read outside of class, but most of my course readings and paperback textbooks have more asterisks than in a comic strip's swear words, more underlining than an emphatically written 18th-century love letter, and more scribbles in the margins than graffiti on a railroad bridge.

Having a conversation with the text, roughing it up and leaving your own imprint—that's the point, not shying away from it and demurring to question or concur.

Sometimes I select what to buy from a used bookstore simply by what a previous reader has added to the pages.
"To Mom, Love Joe, Christmas '85"
"Yes!!"
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

Top Five 19th-Century Bibliophilic Sexual Euphemisms

...That I Came Up with in the Past Half-Hour (Excepting the One About the Great White Whale—Thank You, Captain Obvious)

1. Charles your Dickens
   
2. Wuther your Heights
3. Treasure your Island
4. Mansfield your Park
5. Mill on your Floss
   

Poo-tee-weet

Thank goodness for meat lockers.

Happy birthday, Kurt.
(Did I ever tell you that I wrote you a poem? It's decent. I wish you were here.)

Wrapped Up in Books

In high school I once sat down in the aisle of our library's poetry section during a free period, opened a Sylvia Plath anthology, and read as my cheeks became steadily slick with tears.

I feel more at ease surrounded by pages than by people. The knowledge of so many who came before, the outpourings of men's souls, the covers sandwiching passion and pain and truth and lies, the words strung together like rain drops on a telephone wire. Just looking up at shelves upon shelves of sentences, of frustration and frenzy and last-minute edits and the phrase she refused to change because she felt in her bones it was the right one... it makes me so insignificant, and yet so in tune with the pulse of the world. So right.

As I was studying on my bed the other day I looked up to my bookshelf and Slaughterhouse-Five stared back at me, winking, and I couldn't resist pulling it down and flexing its paperback spine yet again. So it goes.

No Happy Couplet

If I had ever been in love, this sonnet wouldn't be so hard to write.