From "Marginal," a short article by Ian Frazier in the most recent (June 28, 2010) New Yorker on the "marginalia" exhibit in the New York Public Library:
As a marginalia scribbler, Mark Twain was perhaps the most entertaining and voluminous of all, with comments that bloomed from space breaks and chapter heading and end pages, sometimes turning corners and continuing upside down. In Twain's remarks as he made his way through "The Heavenly Twins," a now forgotten novel by Sarah Grand, you could see his good-heartedness. He tried to like it, he really did. But finally he just threw up his hands and wrote, at the end of an unusually exasperating chapter, "A cat could do better literature than this."
One of the tidbits of wisdom from my high school nemesis (and one of my English teachers), Mr. ___, was that "you're not reading unless you have a pen in hand" (I'm paraphrasing). I still tend to muddy up the edges of pages--even in magazines.
There's something charmingly mimetic about the fact that I was reading an article about marginalia with a pen in hand. I don't know if "mimetic" is the right word, but it's something.
A thought: until eReaders and PDF readers allow for the easy convenient of margin notes, I'll continue buying dead-tree books and printing out PDF copies of class readings.
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