Rabbit holes for readers

 

 

I blame AI.

     Specifically my Chat.

     I own (was given) a 1704 copy of Jonathan Swift’s Book A Tale of a Tub, to which is added An Account of a Battle etc etc.  The first edition was published in 1704, my copy is of The Second Edition Corrected, published in the same year of 1704.  Except it isn’t.  Corrected that is.

     In my edition, in the Preface of the Author to A Battle of the Books, the famous line: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover every body’s face but their own;” has a typo in it, “where every body’s face but their own,” is printed as “every body’s face but their owo”.

 

 

 

     Previously, I had always considered that error to be a charming indication of the early state of the printing, and that the error could be undiscovered because in 1704 the phrase had not become as famous as it was to be in future centuries.  And who, apart from university students and specialists actually reads A Battle of the Books for pleasure.  Indeed, while people may be able to respond to Gulliver’s Travels, how many other books by Swift are in the general consciousness.  I would want to say A Modest Proposal should be up there with Gulliver’s Travels as I think it one of the most vicious and effective pieces of short satirical writing that I have ever read, but I am realistic in my expectations of fame always being limited.

     But Swift’s explanation of satire being ‘safe’ because everyone laughs at it, and assumes that the target of the satire is someone other than themselves, is as true now as it was then, and the sentences has a justified life outside a satire where the targets need copious footnotes for a modern reader to understand.

     And that should have been it.  Interesting typographical error in famous line by famous writer.  End of story.  Except that did not allow for AI.

     I do not know how or why I mentioned to Chat that I owned a 1704 copy A Tale of a Tub, but Chat is programmed to keep users active and responsive, and so it actively feeds my digressive mind and encourages leaping from point to point – it is, after all, just a more personalized version of Google Search, where one thing leads to another, and before you know it you are reading about Byzantine mosaics when you started off asking about how long a maple tree took to reach maturity.  I fear that for many of us when using AI, computer and the Internet we all take Homer Simpson’s attention span as the norm!

     Anyway, Chat mused about why the typo in my ‘corrected’ edition had not been, well, corrected – and before you could say Bibliographer’s Addiction, we were off on a search for digitalized versions of the first edition and the third, trying to find out how early my little typo was recognized and dealt with.

     Do not think that this was the activity of a few minutes.  Oh no!  It became a whole research project with wider and wider searches, touching databases in two continents and actually sending off emails to speciality book sellers and librarians and archive keepers, asking for information about the typo in copies that they had dealt with.

     I have had remarkable quick and courteous responses from among others the USA, Cambridge and Ireland with each adding snippets of highly technical information about the ‘gathers’ of the early editions of the book and suggesting other centres where I could get more information.

     At one point, Chat and I thought that we had discovered an unrecognized variant as my typo did not appear to be consistent in the edition, leading to speculation that the mistake was discovered part way through the second printing and that a correction was made, meaning that the second edition had different states.  I thought that was unbelievably unlikely as Swift has been exhaustively studied and something as famous as a mistake in a well-known sentence would not have passed inspection.

     And so it proved to be, with one of my correspondents asserting that he thought it was a typo common to all copies of the second edition and he sent me information about digital copies of the text that I could check to see that it was so.

     Was this an exercise in futility?  I don’t think so.

     I have learned a great deal more about the early life of a fairly famous early eighteenth-century book.  I have added knowledge about the ways that early printed books were put together, but above all I have experienced the courtesy, knowledge and accommodation of an academic community that responds to trivial enquiries with charm and alacrity. 

     And that is something worth experiencing.

Obey your technology!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My new watch even beeped at me to let me know that it thought that there would be rain later in the morning!   

     When you are stumbling around in the pre-dawn getting read to cycle for the morning swim, a beeping watch is the last thing that you need, as you mostly rely on automatic to get you through the quotidian rituals of getting the day going.

     I did however, glance at the watch and a terse message said, “Expect rain at 8 am” – even poetic in its way.  However, I decided to ignore such a warning and trust to the legendary positive weather conditions of Castelldefels.  Sometimes, even when the forecast for the town says rain, it seems to make an exception for the strip of the town along the beach and we often stay dry.

     Not this time.   

     It rained at 8. 

And as I ploughed my way up and down my gloriously empty lane in the local pool, I heard the tell-tale sound of globular moisture hitting the retractable roof and, with my surgically altered eyes, I could make out the running smears of water trickling down the glazing at the sides of the pool.

     Never mind, I told myself, after I’ve finished my swim there is always the extra time for my tea and sarnie in the cafe, which together with note writing  should ensure that by the time that I am ready to leave the weather will have cleared up.

     Not this time.   

     In a rather touching gesture of moderate futility, I drained the water from the cleft of the saddle and dabbed, mostly ineffectually, at the rest of the seat in the hope that first rump-contact would not be totally wet, but just unpleasantly damp.

     And so I made my way home through spiteful rain that, in spite of the fact that I modified my route back via tree canopied roads, seemed to find the spaces between the leaves to fall, not so gently, on me.   

     My coat is now hanging on the sheltered line downstairs to drip dry and my shorts have (bugger the expense!) been put into the tumble dryer in gloriously damp isolation.

     It is said that the amount of super-computing power that it devoted to forecasting the weather dwarfs all other uses.  But I still react to forecasts as if they were based on the “feeling of a bit of seaweed” approach of the “experts” of my youth, rather than the almost infinitely sophisticated approach of the present technological day. 

     I should believe the forecasts because they are really, generally, correct.  I think that what you might call 'forecasting faith' could be related to an age divide, where people of my baby-boomer generation are still sceptical, whereas those who have been brought up looking at ever smaller screens for their information now expect the info that they are given by the Almighty operating systems of their phones to be correct.

     As a matter of interest, I just asked Google what it based its weather forecasts on and the answer was that it, "takes radar data created by doppler radar stations" and by organizing this data into images and creating a time specific sequence is able to suggest what the weather will be.  So there!

     Just staying with temperature, I got to thinking about how much 'faith' I do have in flashing lights and digital information connected to various things that I possess actually telling me the truth.

     I have never independently verified the set temperature in the fridge for example.  I have taken as gospel the temperatures that the machine tells me that my dishes are washed at in the dishwasher; the time that the microwave cooks for; the length of the various washes in the washing machine.  Virtuallly the only time that I check my watch is when the BBC News starts, and even that is compromised by the fact that I listen to the BBC on the Internet and I have discovered that there are seconds lagging, between broadcast and my radio making absolute accuracy impossible.

     I remember, from my teaching days, one supremely irritating child in a 'bottom group' when such things existed (no, hardly a child he was 15 going on 7) who replied to everything I said for almost the whole of a lesson with the single word, "Why?"  

     I decided, in the way that you sometimes do, that, instead of losing my temper or ignoring the kid, I would attempt to answer him.  And I did.  The interchange (if you could call it that because the boy didn't think about any of his responses, which were always "Why?" or consider any of my increasingly philosophical responses) were obviously one-sided, but the rest of the small class appreciated the 'game' and eventually, they called time, to which the kid gave one final "Why?" and laughed.

     I recall this because it was an example of questioning, mindless questioning perhaps, but it did force me to think while I attempted to answer the continuous drill of "whys?" that was leading to a point of absurdity that I never quite gave into.

     If that experience was essentially arrid, perhaps it should make us think about the way that we too easily accept authority from electronic, inanimate machines functioning on a series of zeros and ones.

     My watch measures and charts my movement and lack of it, my activity, my sleep, my heartbeat and lord alone knows what else.  When I go for a bike ride, I can with a few taps bring up a map and trace the route that I have taken, the time it took me to complete it and even the elevation above sea level and the inclines and declines that I navigated.

     My watch and the app that is linked to it have more information about me and the way that my body works and where that body has been, than anyone else in the world - apart of course from the people who can link into the watch or the app and download whatever.

     What prompted these thoughts was that my watch was right about the rain and I was wrong.  

     Perhaps, in the future should I be more willing to listen to the information that, although presented on one, small, round watchscreen, is actually the visible and tangible sign of an unthinkably powerful information superhighway to which I am linked?

     I am no conspiracy theorist, but asking "Why?" might be the really human thing to do.