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.

Thinking bout pattern poetry and versus intertexti

After our brief conversation last week about pattern poetry, I have been thinking again about change ringing - the peculiar art of ringing church bells. Looking at your entry on pattern poetry (on 29/1/13), I was struck by the visual similarity in the notation of the bell-ringing instructions (called the method) and the example of versus intertexti that you give (except that former uses numbers and the latter mostly letters though numbers count the lines).

In the versus intertexti, letters are arrayed in rows on a grid (and these rows are numbered) and a passage is found or traced through these letters in order to find the hidden meaning in the text. (As an aside, I have to say that my personal fascination with this is twofold - 1. I am extremely diagrammatically challenged myself so looking at these verses makes my head spin, 2. I love the name - it is fantastic to say with all its "s"sounds, as well as "ex" and a sharp "i" at the end.)

In bell ringing or change ringing, there is a "method" which is, I understand, the name given to the notation or score directing a particular order of bell-ringing so to sound a tune. This is a chart of numbers that has a passage marked through it - different colours for different bells. All I know about change-ringing (which the Central Council of Church Bellringers calls, "The particularly British art of ringing bells full circle to a method") is from randomly seeing an image and briefly reading some information (from various websites including the one from which the image above has been taken).

I am fascinated by the idea of finding a text within a text (something that seems near impossible to me) in the case of the versus intertexti, and the articulation of a similarly unreadable (to me) text that is then activated in a particular way through the body and producing sound in the case of the change ringing.

I guess this could be said about any score - that is contains special information waiting to be discovered - but I nevertheless find it all somehow quite thrilling!