Wednesday, August 25, 2004
The rule and the exception
I've always been fascinated when I pick up an old book and someone has underlined passages in it. Once in 7th grade English, a guy named Mark handed me a copy of That Was Then, This Is Now. There were passages underlined in blue ballpoint pen, a concept that was new to me; for one thing, that was the first year we were allowed to use pens in class, and I was mildly obsessed with them. Also, writing in a book with a pen was something I never would have been allowed to do at home. But mainly, I just assumed that anything that was underlined was The Good Stuff. You know: sex, drugs, motorcycles. That kind of thing. It was 1978, and I watched Soap (when my mother wasn't home to make me turn it off) and SNL (after my mother had gone to sleep, with the sound turned down so low I had to sit four inches from the TV, just in case she woke up and wandered in to make sure I wasn't watching SNL). I knew what The Good Stuff was, and this was definitely not it. What the owner of the book (Mark's older brother, as I recall) had underlined was just nonsense; a phrase here, a sentence there. A couple of words. I have a feeling it had been assigned reading and he was supposed to have been reading it in class, so he underlined something every once in a while to make it look like he was doing the assignment. I can still picture the cover: it's that mid-70s paperback edition with the watercolorish only-slightly-psychedelic picture of Cathy on the front, with M&M ("Baby Freak") tripping out in the background.
After that, I quit thinking that anything underlined was automatically The Good Stuff. Unless... the underliner used a straightedge to underline. Seriously, there are people out there who have a ruler or some similar item handy when they're reading books. And when they want to underline something, they park the ruler under the words and make a perfectly straight line, almost always with a fine-point pen, under them. I find it even more interesting that I usually find this in marriage manuals and self-help books, suggesting that there's a certain kind of perfectionism found in readers of marriage manuals and self-help books that might lead them to need help from such books.
Am I overgeneralizing? Judge for yourself. Here are some straight-as-an-arrow underlined passages from Mental Health Through Will-Training, by one Abraham A. Low (that's the author; I have no idea who the underliner might have been).
I'll tell you this much: I don't think I would have wanted to be this person's wife. Or co-worker. Or daughter, son, sister, brother, or next-door neighbor.
Not too long ago I was in a used book store and found a bunch of old issues of Holiday magazine. I picked one up because the cover was wonderful: a photo of New York, in that crisp and stunning black and white that I'm not sure cameras are capable of producing anymore.
Its previous owner was obviously mentally ill. Not the kind of mental illness that can be overcome by cultivating the Will, either. Nearly every photo of any person was defaced, the eyes scratched out with a pen. Racial epithets of all kinds captioned each one. The margins were filled with the kind of insane rambling that shows up in movies about serial killers when the FBI agents meet with the profiler and they quit exchanging dark quips and start looking serious and panicked. Oh, and then there were the swastikas.
There was a lot of underlining in that magazine. I don't want to know what any of it meant, and I wasn't about to try to figure it out. But here's the scary part: there were about 20 years' worth of magazines in that stack, from the 40s through the 60s, and every one of them was covered in the same kind of stuff. Especially the ones that covered the Kennedys.
Hmmm, maybe Lee Harvey Oswald's undiscovered stash of ephemera ended up at Oracle Junction. Hey, stranger things have happened.
I've always been fascinated when I pick up an old book and someone has underlined passages in it. Once in 7th grade English, a guy named Mark handed me a copy of That Was Then, This Is Now. There were passages underlined in blue ballpoint pen, a concept that was new to me; for one thing, that was the first year we were allowed to use pens in class, and I was mildly obsessed with them. Also, writing in a book with a pen was something I never would have been allowed to do at home. But mainly, I just assumed that anything that was underlined was The Good Stuff. You know: sex, drugs, motorcycles. That kind of thing. It was 1978, and I watched Soap (when my mother wasn't home to make me turn it off) and SNL (after my mother had gone to sleep, with the sound turned down so low I had to sit four inches from the TV, just in case she woke up and wandered in to make sure I wasn't watching SNL). I knew what The Good Stuff was, and this was definitely not it. What the owner of the book (Mark's older brother, as I recall) had underlined was just nonsense; a phrase here, a sentence there. A couple of words. I have a feeling it had been assigned reading and he was supposed to have been reading it in class, so he underlined something every once in a while to make it look like he was doing the assignment. I can still picture the cover: it's that mid-70s paperback edition with the watercolorish only-slightly-psychedelic picture of Cathy on the front, with M&M ("Baby Freak") tripping out in the background.
After that, I quit thinking that anything underlined was automatically The Good Stuff. Unless... the underliner used a straightedge to underline. Seriously, there are people out there who have a ruler or some similar item handy when they're reading books. And when they want to underline something, they park the ruler under the words and make a perfectly straight line, almost always with a fine-point pen, under them. I find it even more interesting that I usually find this in marriage manuals and self-help books, suggesting that there's a certain kind of perfectionism found in readers of marriage manuals and self-help books that might lead them to need help from such books.
Am I overgeneralizing? Judge for yourself. Here are some straight-as-an-arrow underlined passages from Mental Health Through Will-Training, by one Abraham A. Low (that's the author; I have no idea who the underliner might have been).
You may conclude, therefore, that Frank's offer was a polite gesture rather than a genuine eagerness to be of help. But in group life an insincere gesture of generosity and fellowship is far more valuable than an outspoken expression of enmity and a brutal assertion of one's sovereignty.
If the nervous patient is to rid himself of his disturbing symptoms he will have to cultivate the Will to bear discomfort.
I'll tell you this much: I don't think I would have wanted to be this person's wife. Or co-worker. Or daughter, son, sister, brother, or next-door neighbor.
Not too long ago I was in a used book store and found a bunch of old issues of Holiday magazine. I picked one up because the cover was wonderful: a photo of New York, in that crisp and stunning black and white that I'm not sure cameras are capable of producing anymore.
Its previous owner was obviously mentally ill. Not the kind of mental illness that can be overcome by cultivating the Will, either. Nearly every photo of any person was defaced, the eyes scratched out with a pen. Racial epithets of all kinds captioned each one. The margins were filled with the kind of insane rambling that shows up in movies about serial killers when the FBI agents meet with the profiler and they quit exchanging dark quips and start looking serious and panicked. Oh, and then there were the swastikas.
There was a lot of underlining in that magazine. I don't want to know what any of it meant, and I wasn't about to try to figure it out. But here's the scary part: there were about 20 years' worth of magazines in that stack, from the 40s through the 60s, and every one of them was covered in the same kind of stuff. Especially the ones that covered the Kennedys.
Hmmm, maybe Lee Harvey Oswald's undiscovered stash of ephemera ended up at Oracle Junction. Hey, stranger things have happened.
permalink posted by The Vintage Reader @ 8:16 PM 
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