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.
