A) 2006 – 2011
The summer of 2006 was the first best summer of my life. It marked the first time I was ever allowed to write in a book. I was, in fact, encouraged to write in books — the near dozen of them assigned in a six-week seminar on “The Quest,” from Virgil’s Aeneid to Keruoac’s On the Road, by master teacher Herr Schade. Now, I cannot remember if we rising public high school seniors were offered guidelines to writing in books, or even a rationale — I only remember feeling liberated. Maybe too liberated.
One of our odder readings was Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams.
I recall disliking it and not much else, and when I re-opened the book as a course intern in summer 2011, I was struck by some giant marginalia about chickens:
I am a chicken lover, yes, but had not realized my theoretical preoccupation with chickens in literature extended back to 2006. At least — thanks to my new discovery of being allowed to write in books — I could trace it back to that summer. (Now, if only I had thought of starting http://www.chickensinliterature.com/…)
Leafing through my catastrophically annotated texts now, I find lines consistently underlined with such vigor that words are crossed out entirely. Sometimes when I took notes excitedly enough that they were illegible, I would write them again — double (sometimes triple) marginalia. I actually have two copies of most of these books — but (I hope this gives you peace, Noel), I never plan to sell them used. Especially not the marked up copies. Not when there are chickens to be found.
B) 2011
Animals are, arguably, marginal in academia — at least, that’s what I figured in my final year of college, when I decided to write every other paper about animals. It was in my final semester when an anonymous donor dumped an entire shelf of free animal books in the library. I knew no professors studying animals (beyond the one admitting he’d never read Heidegger because his cat always climbed on top of the book when he tried — a la http://petsonacademia.tumblr.com/), and I still wonder who gave up all of those wonderful books. I took almost all of them, and gave one away as a gift: Margaret Truman’s White House Pets. I kept this picture, though:
As a rather sad case of unwanted writing.
(Excuse the unwanted piece of hair contaminating the left-behind page.)
C) 2013
I will sign off with a case of abandoned minor printing on a San Francisco sidewalk to symbolize ideas abandoned in this post: 1. a paradelle appropriated from collected 2009 spam headers in the “Spoetry” subfolder of my inbox, and 2. a discussion of a Barry McGee (famed San Francisco graffiti artist) exhibit I saw at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art — right after relocating from SF to MA — and the accompanying senses of displacement.
