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Electronic Deep Reading

fawnI read an interview with Will Self this morning in the Guardian. Is the fate of our literary culture sealed? He regrets the passing of “deep reading,” reading in which the reader is fully immersed in the text. The opposite of deep reading is shallow reading, the kind of reading I do when surfing the web, an idle activity. I catch the gist of a piece and flick to the next item, trying to pick out what is interesting to me and move on. This style of reading is the kind I do in the stacks in a library or wandering in a bookstore. Read just enough to decide if I want to check out or buy the book. Then I take it home and read it. If it is good, I read it as deeply as it deserves or resonates with my interests. Reading is a continuum that runs from shallow to deep. I imagine it is the same for most readers.

Do I read electronic texts deeply? Of course. While surfing, when a report or essay strikes me as important to me, I often become immersed and read it as deeply as I read paper books. When I read a book that arrests me on my Kindle, I am lost to world. (Ask my wife.)

I experience many differences between the electronic reading experience and reading a paper book, but they are most similar, I should say identical, when I am most absorbed. Mr. Self writes about forgetting all “the workaday contingencies of their identity” while reading deeply. Among those contingencies is the media itself: desktop display, phone, dedicated reader, paperback, custom leather binding, they all are forgotten when deeply reading paper or an electronic display. Or at least I forget them, and I don’t think I am unique.

Publishing is certainly changing, but I very much doubt that reading itself is changing. Electronic reading is superficially different from paper reading and those superficial differences are challenging because they force readers to change habits they have developed since they were children: the way to hold a book and the how it feels in their hands, turning the pages, using a finger for a temporary bookmark, judging where they are by the thickness of pages already read. These are all parts of the reading experience that are not reproduced in electronic reading, but they have nothing to do with deep reading.

Until readers get beyond these and many other habits, they may have difficulty achieving deep reading electronically. As a software engineer, I have transitioned into electronic reading over at least two decades, so I am not a useful example, but I notice among my friends, the acclimation period is measured in weeks and months, not decades. Also, I observe that better readers, usually the ones who claim to be most attached to paper books, are the quickest studies at electronic reading after they start.

It’s fun to declare that the world is going to hell on a flat screen display and eInk, but I doubt that deep reading is on its way out.

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Five Reasons to Retire

I’ve been retired for a year and a half now and I have learned five reasons to retire.

1. You need more excitement.

When you are working, when there is an emergency, you call someone to fix it. When you are retired, you try to fix it yourself. Need I say more?

2. You need more to do.

While I was working, I thought I worked independently, but I was deluded. I always had a portfolio, the stuff my boss and I decided that I should do. If the portfolio got too large, or too small, between the two of us, we would work out the priorities and shove some stuff off the dock. Retirement is different. There is no business. You have no portfolio. There is no dock to shove stuff off. The days and weeks go by and list of things to be done piles up like dust in a Martian valley. Nothing is ever crossed off.

3. You need more exercise.

When you work, you are on a schedule. You go to the gym before or after work on schedule. When you retire, you don’t exercise on schedule; you fix the lawn mower, catch the dog, patch the roof, and charge the car battery. Instead of gently relieving the work’s built-up tension with smooth motions on the elliptical machine, you beat your brains and throw your back out lifting a 700-pound riding lawn mower and developing an awareness of muscles you never wanted to have and you may have to have removed by an out-of-network surgeon.

4. You need more stress.

At work, when a former employee threatens to bring an assault rifle to the office and an executive sales manager threatens mass layoffs if the product doesn’t ship next week, what do you do? With thirty years experience, you calmly try whatever worked the last time. After three decades, there’s always a last time. At worst, you can hide in the supply closet. But retirement is a new world. There’s never a time before. You have to think this stuff up and you have no idea if it will work. And your gray beard and scraggy eye brows shout that youthful ignorance is not an excuse for this geezer.

5. You need to restart your education.

As you age, neural connections grow in your brain and new capacities develop. In your twenties and thirties, you have a wealth of facts at your fingertips: where you parked, where you left your keys, the names of your children, where you work, what you are doing at this moment. It comes so easily. From nursery school to graduate school, you have learned to acquire and use these ready facts to navigate through life. The day you retire, all of these ready facts head for outer space. With your facts mutely peering down from the interstellar chill, you have sixty years or so of education to replace with a navigation system that does not depend on knowing, for example, that Perry Mason is in reruns or that your area code changed in 1972. A retired person can live a normal life with the aid of a tablet computer chained to his wrist and instructions for using Wikipedia tattooed on his forearm, but it takes more fortitude than I can muster without a nap.

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Dictionaries

I was yelled at in the fourth grade for spending too much time at the back of the room reading the copy of Webster’s 2nd Edition that was strapped to a bookstand in a corner.

I use a lot of dictionaries. On my laptop, I use the OED and Merriam-Webster Unabridged online editions, which I subscribe to. I also have dated copies of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate and the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary installed on my laptop hard disk in case I am disconnected from the Internet.

In my workroom, I have a treasured copy of the Merriam-Webster Unabridged 2nd Edition, the flyspeck print two volume of the OED, and several other old dictionaries, including one my father got when he was in high school in the 1930s.

This is overkill. Aside from my early predilection for dictionaries, in college I received advice from two obscure but great writers: Herrlee Creel and Edwin McClellan. Creel, whom I have blogged about before, was a historian of early China. McClellan translated and wrote about 20th Century Japanese novels. Both, in their time, were noted for their clear and elegant style. Both told me that they used a dictionary constantly. Both had copies of Webster’s Unabridged, 3rd Edition, next to their desks. Both said that writers who use thesauri are illiterate. They both emanated a whiff of arrogant martinet, but I still think they gave good advice.

I do know that poking around in a dictionary, especially the OED with its historic quotations and etymologies, consistently leads me to the exact word I am looking for. My online dictionaries have thesauri and lists of synonyms and antonyms and I have an old copy of Roget, but nothing works better for me than reading definitions and quotations.

Webster’s 2nd Edition was the last prescriptive dictionary published by Merriam-Webster. If I had to take a side, I would declare myself a descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist. Generally, I think it is most important to know how language is used. Prescriptivists expect a dictionary to be a rulebook for language usage and want to be told what a word should mean, not what people mean when they use it. For example, a prescriptivist expects to be told that “hopefully” is an adverb that must never modify an entire sentence, as in “Hopefully, George will not anger Hephzibah.” A descriptivist will note that “hopefully” is often used in that manner, although some speakers avoid it.

When the 3rd edition came out, the prescriptivists declared both the ruin of the English language and the end of civilization. Nero Wolfe burned the 3rd edition in his fireplace and high school English teachers wept in despair. For a while, condemning the 3rd edition was the rage among folks who hadn’t looked in a dictionary since the last time they read Homer. Nevertheless, serious writers and students of the language rejoiced. After its initial spike in popularity from the histrionics, the 3rd edition has continued to be a standard reference.

Why do I keep a copy of the 2nd edition around? Because its pages are a door to a lost world. The authors and editors of 2nd edition were sure of their place in the world as the arbiters of crisp distinctions between correct and incorrect. Reading it, you catch a glimpse of a world where platonic ideal words hold all true knowledge. A wonderful world, but it never did exist and never will exist, but fascinates me nonetheless.