Replies to Bridget 2 - Versus intertexti and change ringing

The score / diagram for the change ringing is really interesting.  There are the rows of numbers where the order of the numbers changes and then the coloured lines too which trace the pattern of the numbers.  It seems this duplication must be to emphasise the shape of the method as a whole?  I suppose it would be quite hard to recognise the pattern in the spread of numbers on their own, you'd have to read every line instead of 'seeing' it.    Perhaps that's a little like what we apparently learn to do with words - to recognise them for their overall shape rather than having to spell each one out individually to ourselves.

 I just found this image in a book I’m reading (Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith) which uses a similar system to the method notation.  It’s a page from Derek Beaulieu’s Flatland (2007) in which he traces the path of each letter as it occurs on each page of Edwin A. Abbot’s Flatland written in 1884.  This takes the idea of ‘seeing’ as opposed to ‘reading’ a text to an extreme. It scrubs out all the possible meaning and sound qualities of the letter arrangements to become purely graphic (although somehow it does look like a graphic representation of sound – different frequencies turned on their side). 

In the last reading group where we discussed an extract from The Gutenberg Galaxy, the conversation turned to ideas of speed reading - a technique McLuhan touches on as an extreme example of the ‘alphabetic dissociation of the senses’ that is one of the book’s central concerns.

“[In the new institutes for speed reading] they are taught how to use the eye on the page so as to avoid all verbalization and all incipient movements of the throat which accompany our cinematic chase from left to right, in order to create the mental sound movie which we call reading.”

A number of the group hadn’t read the text beforehand and so were attempting to get ‘up to speed’ during the discussion - Laura described a technique she’d learned which involves running your finger down the middle of a page and reading those words that it touched, somehow either trusting your peripheral vision to take in the rest or just joining the gaps mentally.  I wasn’t really able to make it work for me – perhaps it requires a lot of practice – but it also made me realise the extent to which I do read aloud to myself, in my head, when I read a text.  I’m not a quick reader at all.  I also thought it slightly ironic that a method which McLuhan’s described as totally visual, was in fact being taught through tactile methods – running a finger over the text.  And that reminded me of how when learning to write at school we were taught to put our left index fingers down on the paper at the end of a word to establish the gap we needed to make before writing the next.  Words were things that needed to be physically separated.  If we made mistakes we would lick our fingers and rub the pencil letters until we got a smudgy mess - there was a lot of touching of words going on.  I think alphabetic writing has a tactility all of its own which McLuhan and Rotman fail to explore again and again – I seem to keep coming back to that.