Cursive script. I recently gave the daughter of a friend, twenty-two, a bottle of wine in return for helping me on a small project. I hand-scripted a thank-you note along with it, but her face went blank when she opened it. I asked what was wrong and she said, “I can’t read…squiggles.” Chalk up another win for digital technologies.
I have beautiful handwriting, but it’s a lot of work, and I have to be in the right mood to deploy this handwriting, and its content has to merit a personal touch—thank-you notes or birthday cards. My handwriting is beautiful because, starting in my thirties, I worked hard at fixing it. An insouciant Vancouver school system had left me and my cohorts with a scrawl like Adrian Mole circa age twelve and one-eighth. You could practically see the pimples in every stroke.
Fun fact: I’m left-handed, which has always made cursive script a challenge. Oddly, when I need to write anything larger than six inches high, such as on a chalkboard, I become a right-handed person—the letters suddenly turn into objects and they want to be navigated by a different part of my brain.
I’m also not a good typer. I’m a three-and-a-half-fingered typer, using mostly index fingers with a dash of thumbs on the space bar. I’m also pig lazy. Typing may be less work than handwriting, but even so, if I want to put out words, I only ever want to type them once.
In 1998 I was in a Brussels hotel and my laptop died. To meet a deadline I used the hotel’s business centre. I sat down to work and…it was like I’d had a stroke: none of the Benelux keyboard keys were in their correct spot. I gave up after three sentences. It was worse than difficult; it was impossible, infinitely more difficult than back when I taught myself to type (badly) in my late teens. My brain couldn’t do it.
Four years ago I noticed I was making far more mistakes than usual while typing on my Mac laptop—clumsy, embarrassing errors—and I was worried: Is this how it starts? I felt like I was back in the Brussels business centre, but this time my stroke was occurring in slow motion and bore the dark undercurrents of mental decay. Worrying about this decay became my silent mania, until finally, it dawned on me that I had started hardcore using an iPhone around the same time my “condition” began. While I’m a three-and-a-half-fingered typer on a keyboard, I’m also a three-and-a-half-fingered typer on a mobile phone, except my thumbs are doing what my fingers usually do. Added bonus? Autocorrect. So, deep inside the box of tangled electrical cords that is my brain, that little neuron cluster that had orchestrated my keypad strokes for twenty-five years suddenly had to reconfigure itself to accept a similar yet inverted reality—and it didn’t like doing so one bit.
Science tells us that all humans grow ten thousand new brain cells a day, but if we don’t activate them by learning new things, they’re reabsorbed back into our bodies—which is slightly creepy, but if you don’t try to retain them, then you probably don’t deserve them. It took my typing cortex four years to grow new cells and to renegotiate the neural and ergonomic issues of getting used to swapping thumbs and fingers between devices—four years.
The good news is that I asked around and learned that most people in my life were quietly experiencing a similar secret panic over escalating typing uselessness—I am not alone. But I can see that our species’ entire relationship with words, and their mode of construction, is clearly undergoing a massive rewiring. I bridge an era straddling handwriting and heavy smartphone usage. Young people like my friend’s daughter, with her emoticons and rampant acronyms, are blessed in having no cursive script to unlearn—with the bonus of having no sense of something having been lost. That’s a kind of freedom, and I’m jealous. Part of accepting the future is acknowledging that some things must be forgotten, and it’s always an insult because it’s always the things you love. We lost handwriting and got Comic Sans in return. That’s a very bad deal.
Bit Rot
A friend of mine works as an archivist at a large university that collects rare documents of all sorts. She tells me that a major issue with collecting documents that were created after about 1990 is that the really desirable “papers” don’t physically exist—or rather, they do exist, but they’re lying comatose inside a 1995-ish laptop. Not only that, but the structured electrons that constitute any given file inside that 1995 laptop are drifting away as electrons apparently do. Depending on a laptop’s architecture, its drive will erase itself at a half-life rate of about fifteen years. This has many implications.
For the archivist, it means that the paper they once collected—novel manuscripts, notepads, UN speeches and what have you—no longer exists, or never came into existence. The paper material that arrives for archiving now is more incidental: thank-you notes, ticket stubs, dinner table seating plans and cocktail napkin sketches. Manuscripts for novels now exist almost entirely electronically, and there’s apparently not that much interest in a printout of a book in its early stages, or even in the final drafts where a back and forth with an editor is evident. Archivists want the first draft only, and they want it written by hand, the thinking being that with handwriting you have a true neurological record of a book’s pregnancy and birth. This is a bit fetishistic and not too likely to happen. The need for the authorial gesture in the face of high tech is not unlike the New York art world of the early 1960s, where the abstract expressionists (with their near-religious obsession with dribbles and strokes being a manifestation of the subconscious) were in the winter of their vanguard, while the newly emerging pop artists, with their technological unsentimental rejection of brush strokes and the “paintiness” of paint, were next in line to steal the crown.
At universities, younger people tell me that older archivists just want to retire and flee the building, leaving the digital archiving issue for the youngsters to deal with. The youngsters can’t wait to rise to the challenge, but as of yet, there’s no widely accepted protocol on how to acquire and permanently store files from the early digital era. Of course, the Golden Fleece for the young archivists is a writer’s old laptop, dozing away at the back of the hall cupboard. Its files may be disintegrating, but this is where the archivist can take the true measure of a writer or politician—or pretty much anyone, you included.
Getting past the issue of cables, adaptors and plugs (“Honey, where did I put the 1997 DPX GM9/PC-KNW changer adapter?”) and assuming that the laptops have been kept in a quiet, temperature-controlled environment, the archivist of the near future might be able to graze on the mind of a novelist or statesman or artist with a level of voyeurism unprecedented in the realm of research. It’s all there: not just book drafts or worthy letters to PEN, but everyday correspondence, shopping history, browsing history, email history, porn history, gaming history—materials that one can only describe as, logarithmically, too much information.
So how does one take what is historically valuable without straying into the laptop’s scarier neighbourhoods? As it stands, the only protocol is to have the archivist and the laptop donor sit at a table together and go through the files one by one (assuming the files are still legible), and say yay or nay, keep or delete—with the archivist there to ensure that the file creator doesn’t go in and delete those bits that make him or her look bad. Question: Does posterity really need that flame email sent to Adobe at 1:30 a.m. in 2007, complaining about their relentless update emails? No. No it does not.
Not only is this one-by-one process slow, but intrinsic to it is a distrust between the creators of the documents and those whose goal is to preserve legacy. It’s easy to imagine Winston Smith of 1984 sitting, waiting for the clock to strike thirteen while an archivist asks why an archive donor treasonously cancelled their subscription to Martha Stewart Living in 1998.
Here’s a question: Do I, or anyone else, want to look at four hundred different versions of a book from first draft to final manuscript? Maybe, but probably not—that’s for academics in the year 2525. What about sealing documents for one hundred years? Unsurprisingly, embarrassment and shame lasts far beyond the grave, and this is a donation path taken far less
than one might think.
Here’s the most important question: What would I really like to see? Well, here’s a thought: many writers email themselves a copy of their novels at the end of every day, using the cloud as a backup mechanism. Imagine if one were able to take all of those daily backups and then place them into a sort of stop-motion animation. One could see how an author constructs their work, by looking at words per day, words cut and pasted, paragraphs deleted, items shuffled about, typos, notes to self, and then, when the editing process begins, one could watch how a novel is hacked and pruned and reshaped—an organic process displayed in a dynamic organic mode. This would be a fascinating new way of appreciating a book’s creation—a visual language to describe a verbal process. And while this is just a fanciful idea, it does point out a chasm that now exists between the old manuscript and the new, and gives a taste of a visit to the archives of tomorrow.
Bartholomew Is Right There at the Dawn of Language
A long time ago a bunch of people were sitting on a log, looking at a fire and wishing they had language so that they could talk to each other. Grunting was becoming a bore, and besides, they had fire now—they deserved language. They’d arrived.
Of course, they didn’t think of it that way—they only had these feelings that went undescribed because there were no words for them. But within this tribe there was this one alpha guy in particular who saw himself as the creative one. He pointed to himself and said, “Vlakk.” He picked up a stick, held it up, stared at it, scrunched his eyes and then pronounced it glink. And everyone there repeated, “glink,” and thenceforth sticks became known as glinks and Vlakk was now Vlakk.
Vlakk then pointed at the fire and again made up a noise—unk—and from then on, fire was called unk. And so on. In one night Vlakk was able to come up with sound effects for dozens of nouns and verbs—gazelles and smallpox and thorns and mate-beating—and because it was just one intelligence making up all these new words, the newly evolving language had a sense of cohesiveness to it—it sounded true to itself the way Italian or Japanese does.
However, Vlakk’s language-creation process made one tribe member, whom he’d named Glog, furious. In his head Glog was thinking, This is crazy! You can’t just go around making up words arbitrarily, based on sound effects! But of course Glog didn’t have language, so there was no way for him to articulate his anger at the vim with which Vlakk was cooking up new words. And it’s not as if Glog had some other, better way of naming things; he was just one of nature’s born bitchers and moaners. A hater.
Vlakk and Glog and their tribe had many children, most of whom died very young of hideous causes, because it was the distant past and, in general, people didn’t last too long. But many descendants of Vlakk survived to generate new sound effects that went on to become words.
And, of course, Glog’s descendants carried his gene for finickiness. As the new language grew and grew, they continued to protest the arbitrary, harum-scarum way in which Vlakk’s descendants gave words to things like “dung beetles” or “ritualized impalement on sharp satay-like bamboo skewers beside anthills.” As the language evolved over thousands of years, everyone forgot that words had begun as arbitrary sound effects. Words were now simply words, long divorced from their grunting heritage.
As culture became more complex, so did language. Grammar was invented, as was the future tense. And gender, and verb conjugation, and all the things that make learning a new language a chore.
Finally, language entered our modern times. If Glog the Finicky had been king, his far-distant grandchild Bartholomew would have been his successor. Distant as they were in time, their neo-cortexes were of the same size: Bartholomew was Glog with a good haircut and a stylish suit.
Bartholomew was, unsurprisingly, obsessed with new additions to the language. He was particularly incensed by the things that caused language to change or evolve. He worked as a copy checker for a large business magazine and spent his lunch hours and weekends writing acid-tipped hate mail to other magazines that incorporated any noun or verb that had entered the language since the dawn of digital culture. “Can’t you see how you’re diluting the language? Corrupting it! Tell me, what is JPEG? What a sick and diseased and laughable word it is—it’s not even a word! It’s a sound effect, a glottal sideshow freak. It’s a bastard word—a bearded lady of a word.”
People at the magazine thought Bartholomew a lovable kook, but they were very careful never to offend him because, while he wasn’t the sort of person to anonymously mail you a dead sparrow inside a cardboard box as some form of demented condemnation, there lingered the feeling that he had more subtle, untraceable means of punishing a perceived offender, like maybe he was keeping dossiers on all of them. The secretaries in the office would make fun of his cologne—they called it “KGB.” And one year during the office Christmas party, staff got drunk and snooped through Bartholomew’s cubicle, but they found nothing.
Fortunately there was Karen from HR, who was able to bring a ray of light into Bartholomew’s grumpy world. Karen was the office free spirit. She had a Bettie Page hairdo, a nose ring and black knee socks she had bought in Osaka. Each morning she dropped off files at his desk and, with effort, was usually able to coax a smile out of Bartholomew. She saw him as a challenge to her womanly charms: she knew Bartholomew was straight because she would see him loitering in front of the straight porn section at the newsstand three blocks over from the office.
At first Karen tried to come on sexy, but she pulled back because sexy freaked him out. This was going to be one tough fish to reel in. So ultimately she decided to conquer Bartholomew by email. Short. Sweet. Perky. Saucy. Unfortunately, this decision was made right at the tipping point in human history when handheld devices started enslaving the human psyche. Bartholomew was quickly distressed by the collapse of language into a chimp-like bafflegab of emoticons, emojis, acronyms and abbreviations. Oftentimes his co-workers’ text messages exceeded his powers of cryptography. He took to keeping his office door shut. He grew a beard and, as people began to forget he was there, he went all Howard Hughes-y. But he was bunkering himself.
Bartholomew had also been raised in the Glog family tradition, which was to believe that every moment of life heralded the beginning of the end. Language was becoming a scrapyard of slashes, diacritical marks and pointless combinations of characters. Suffice it to say that, for Bartholomew, the supremacy of smartphones heralded the beginning of the end of language, a tradition that had begun around the campfire so many years before.
One morning Karen was on the subway going to work and realized, however improbably, that she was starting to actually fall in love with Bartholomew. Knowing it wasn’t maybe the smartest thing to do, she sent Bartholomew a very lusty text message:
W|-|3|| I g37 70 7|-|3 0ffi(3 2d4y, 137’5 m4k3 p455i0||473 10v3
0v3r70p y0ur 14rg3 (0113(7i0|| 0f 1i||3d y3110w 13g41 p4d5.
S|-|4rp3|| u p3||(i1, Big B0y
Bartholomew read this and thought, Good lord, language has devolved into a series of strung-together vanity licence plates! I can’t be a part of this! I can’t! So when Karen showed up, Bartholomew didn’t give her his daily smile. Karen was crushed. She sent a proper email in perfect English that said:
Dear Bartholomew,
Earlier today while I was riding the subway to work I emailed you a whimsical message. I think it overstepped the boundaries of “what is correct” but it was meant in jest and I hope you won’t think lesser of me for it.
Karen
The thing is, Bartholomew ignored this email because he was crazy, and the thing about crazy people is that they really are crazy. Sometimes you can get quite far with them and you start telling other people, “So-and-so’s not the least bit crazy.” And then So-and-so suddenly starts to exhibit their crazy behaviour, at which point you think, Whoa! and pull back. People were right: this guy is really nuts.
Karen’s boss, Lydia, saw Karen moping in the lunchroom and said, “Honey, sometim
es I think it’s almost more polite to be crazy 24/7, because at least you don’t get people falling in love with you and making a mess of things.”
“But I love him.”
“Of course you do, sweetie. Pass me the Splenda.”
As Karen left the lunchroom, Lydia said to her co-workers, “People always seem to fall in love during that magical time before one person sees the other person display their signature crazy behaviour. Poor Karen.”
But Karen’s heart mended from her break with Bartholomew, and within two years she was engaged to a guy who made sculptures out of cardboard boxes that he took to the Burning Man festival in the California desert.
And life went on.
Bartholomew grew older and buggier. People stopped using land-line telephones altogether. Everyone on Earth used smartphones, even starving people in starving countries. Phones basically cost nothing to make and were as common as, well, the packs of Splenda used in the office lunchroom. All the languages on Earth collapsed and contracted, and Bartholomew’s endgame scenario was coming true: language was dying. People began to speak the way they texted, and before Bartholomew turned fifty, language was right back to the log and the roaring fire. Bartholomew wondered why he even came to work. Nobody paid any attention to what he did, but, as the Glog family motto goes, “Somebody has to maintain standards.”
Then one day Karen walked past Bartholomew’s office with her by now teenage daughter. His door was open and he was able to hear the two women speak. They both sounded like the Tasmanian Devil character from Bugs Bunny cartoons. Then they turned around and spoke to Bartholomew: “Booga-booga-ooga-oog?”
Bit Rot Page 26
