Miles, Marcel, Marshall and Marginalia

Or, experiments in writing for the web

The Ship of Theseus is not a particularly good book. But it is a worthwhile experience.

At one level, it’s a straightforward work of fiction—a mediocre literary novel, written by the mysterious and reclusive author V.M. Strake, about a the weird journey of a man who is shanghaied onto the titular ship of Theseus.

But Straka doesn’t exist, and the story of the voyage isn’t the main—or even the most interesting—story in the book.

That one is the story about the fictional readers of this fictional book by a fictional author—readers who are trying to uncover the real identity of Straka.

That story is told in the books marginalia and in various papers and napkins and newspaper clippings left between the pages. It’s a story that unfolds out of sequence and that both is and is not connected to the plot that’s printed on the pages.

It’s a story of interpretation and a story of the interpreters and an act of interpreting all rolled together.

Fashion and literary criticism

There was a moment in the 1970s and ’80s when deconstructionism was all the rage in literary theory. Looking back, I think it was probably on its way out of fashion by the time I started at Hampden-Sydney College. But it had been a huge influence on Drs. Elizabeth Deis and Lowell Frye, my advisors-turned-colleagues-turned friends, who co-taught a freshman honors course on the Industrial Revolution.

I didn’t entirely understand what they meant the day they assigned us to read David Lodge’s Nice Work and explained that it deconstructed the Victorian novel.

It was a couple of years later, when I’d reread Dickens’ Hard Times as part of a course on the Victorian novel that I really started to understand.

Lodge’s lurid sex scenes and his lengthy descriptions of bathrooms were commentaries on the Victorian’s refusal to admit the existence of basic bodily functions. And the plot resolution—one that involves marriage offers, emigration, and financial salvation from a long-forgotten rich relative/casual acquaintance—were spoofing the escapist happy endings of Victorian literature.

The upside down

In the last few years, I’ve found myself increasingly inspired by the subversion of expectations, by pushing the boundaries of art in new directions.

It’s how you get Kind of Blue, Miles Davis’ masterpiece and arguably the greatest jazz album of all time. It’s an album that’s entirely improvised. Performers were given some very general musical themes a few hours before recording then told, “Play in the sound of these scales.”

It’s the spirit that inspired the Dada movement and the Beat poets.

A few weeks ago—back when visiting things was still something you could just, you know, go do—I visited the Marcel Duchamp exhibit at DC’s Hirshhorn. If we’re ever out of quarantine, I highly recommend it.

While there I was reminded of one of my favorite Duchamp lines, regarding his (in)famous readymades:

One simply notes that it is a bottle rack or that it was a bottle rack and has changed direction.

That an object that has changed direction can be an entirely new thing — a work of art, even — requires us to see things in juxtaposition.

A bottle rack upside down presumes an understanding of a bottle rack. It’s only by way of understanding how a bottle rack works that we can see why changing direction makes it a new thing.

Rhetoric 101

The basic forms of nonfiction writing are broadly familiar. You probably remember the 5x5 essay. It was the default expectation of high school English classes and is pushed by more than a few freshman composition instructors in colleges and universities across the United States.

• Five paragraphs of five sentences each.
• An intro paragraph that includes a thesis statement (usually either the first or last sentence of the paragraph).
• Three body paragraphs, each making one main point to support the thesis.
• A concluding paragraph that restates the thesis.

As you move through university, you learn to write in a pyramid—background setting up the problem, a review of ways other people have attacked the problem, a careful marshaling of evidence and arguments all in support of your own grand solution.

Journalists learn to invert the pyramid, putting the important stuff up front and the supporting details lower down in the story.

If we’re really lucky, there’s a teacher somewhere along the way who explains that it’s okay to break the rules.

But it’s very rare that breaking the rules means putting things out of order.

The bookness of books

I’ve a complicated history with marginalia in books.

At my high school, teachers would skim through textbooks at the end of the year, checking to see if you’d written in the book. Underline too many things and they’d charge you for a new copy. For a working class kid like me, that was no small threat.

In college, my scholarship included a small allowance for books. It wasn’t enough to cover them all, so I bought used ones whenever I could. Some had been well used. I remember an organic chemistry book in which one particularly difficult chapter was marked entirely in varying shades of highlighter.

Buying books was a bit of a gamble.

• Look for one with no markings and trust yourself to pick out what matters?
• Find one with lots of marginal notes and hope the previous owner understood the material?
• Buy books directly from friends who were smarter than I?

The information in the marginalia was in some ways even more important than the information in the text.

It’s a reminder that there are a lot of things you can do with a book.

• Loan it to a friend.
• Write in the margins.
• Stick pieces of paper in between pages.
• Read it.
• Steal it.
• Interpret it.

These are a book’s extratextual elements—the sorts of things that happen outside of the literal text of the story that lend themselves to the interpretation of the text.

On PDFs

When I first started working for the Congressional Budget Office back in 2009, I quickly developed a reputation as the guy who hates PDFs. It’s followed me pretty much ever sense.

There’s a bit of me that resents that reputation. I routinely share domain and ecosystem models as PDFs, and generally rely of a PDF when I want someone to comment on the substance of a document rather than wordsmith individual sentences.

What I dislike are PDFs as web content.

PDFs are designed for printing. There’s nothing particularly wrong with printing out a PDF. I spent a not-inconsiderable percentage of my graduate school career (and stipend!) standing at a photocopier, making copies two pages and $0.10 at a time.

The PDF is a decided improvement.

The problem with the PDF isn’t the form. It’s the way it presumes a particular way of thinking.

Writing is a product of the available technology. When you’re limited to a quill and parchment, you write down only the really important stuff. When you can buy a Bic and a Mead notebook for $0.75, you tend to doodle Batman symbols everywhere.

But everything from the quill to the Bic is linear. How could it be otherwise? Something has to be first. Something else has to be second. It’s how paper works.

The medium is the message

Ship of Theseus is a story that can only be told in a physical book.

It’s a book that has changed directions — one that makes sense only when it’s understood as a reaction to the fundamental nature of bookishness. It’s a story that both understands the ways that people can use a book and then plays with those conventions.

Marshall McLuhan famously proclaimed that “the medium is the message.” There’s a story that’s told in the literal content. But there’s another story that’s told via the medium.

A movie fundamentally compresses time, cramming days or weeks or years or even decades into a 2-hour window. Television splits stories into smaller, time-boxed segments.

The printed pages in a book communicate a literal message. The form of a book conveys a whole second message. That there’s an idea that required over 100,000 words to express. That a sentence will have some connection to the one that precedes it and to the one that follows it. That someone else read the book and decided it was worthy of publication.

That it is a conversation between the author and the reader.

That the author is in control of that conversation.

The problem of personal identity

The original ship of Theseus is a philosophy problem that dates back to (at least) Plutarch. The wooden ship is preserved by virtue of gradually replacing each part as it decays until eventually all the original parts have been replaced.

Is it the same ship?

But now suppose that you also saved all the original parts and reassembled them into a ship.

Which is the real ship of Theseus?

Problems of identity are vexing. What really makes a thing that thing? Where’s the line between a fictionalized autobiography and a hagiography? Why is David Copperfield fiction and Fire and Fury nonfiction?

Maybe there’s no one thing that counts as defining people or genres. Maybe it’s just a Wittgensteinian family resemblance — some set of overlapping traits — that makes a thing what it is.

And yet for all Wittgenstein’s clever thought experiments, we still know a chair when we see one.

On content

Those of us working in the digital space spend a lot of time talking about content. We have content strategists and content designers. We talk about content-first design.

But content itself? We know it when we see it.

I work exclusively with people who are using evidence-based research to make the world a more peaceful, prosperous, just, equitable and sustainable place.

My clients trade in ideas and evidence. Those things don’t have a specific form. They’re abstractions floating around in the ether. Creating content is about wrestling those abstractions into some concrete form, whether that be a set of words or an infographic or a video. Knowledge and evidence are usable only when we’ve shaped them through discourse or publication.

When things go well, the form effectively transmits ideas and evidence from one person to another.

Content is a vector for the transmission of information.

The digital ship of Theseus

What would the web version of Ship of Theseus look like? What are the extratextual elements—the web equivalent of writing in the margins?

I’m not sure I totally know yet. But there are a few contenders.

• It’s not linear. The phrase is generational, but “surfing the web” is (I hope!) still a thing. We get halfway through something, then get distracted by an interesting link. Before you know it, we’re experts on capybaras or we’ve documented three reliable suppliers of realistic vampire teeth.
• It’s distributed. It’s rare that we find The One Definitive Article on something. We assemble a full picture of things by reading a bunch of different sources.
• It has multiple authors. Bouncing around from source to source usually means hearing from a lot of different people.
• It’s contextless. We find stuff by way of Google. We’re not going to homepages. We look stuff up by typing in some keywords and going directly to content pages.
• It’s not just text. Even us olds go to YouTube for how-to videos.

Who knows what all that means. But it almost certainly doesn’t mean that we can just cut-and-paste from print documents to the web.