The image above is of the
original manuscript copy of T.S. Eliot's The Fire Sermon, part of his epic
work The Wasteland. On it
are marked editorial annotations, primarily those of his brilliant
collaborator Ezra Pound, no mean poet in his own right. Although the onomatopoeic
bird song at the start of the passage is left intact, the large
passage crossed out in the middle, marked "B--ll--s" by Pound, never
made it into the final edition. Neither did the words marked for
excision by Pound, the clumsy and pretentious "I have seen and see" and
the inappropriate "your" in the subsequent line. And Pound constantly
critisizes Eliot's use of wimpy qualifiers, writing after the line that
includes the word 'perhaps', "dam
per'apsey". There is no 'perhaps' in the final version. Eliot's
wife also suggests the word 'demotic' instead of 'abominable' to
describe Mr. Eugenides' French. The shorter word also fits better with
the metre of the line, and appears in the published version. So what
survives of this page is:
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd
Tereu
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea...
I can only sigh, and hope that one day I will find an editor as kind
and ruthless as Pound was to Eliot. But suppose I did? How would this
saviour of dense and ponderous prose work his or her magic on my
etherial text, never once committed to paper for the editor's surgery
(Pound was fond of editing in green crayon)?
Malcolm Gladwell, he of the brilliant Tipping
Point and expose of Olympic Sins,
wrote a New Yorker article last year called The Social
Life of Paper. In it, he argues that at present there is no
replacement for paper, because paper offers several "affordances" that
other media that capture words do not have:
- spacial flexibility: easy to move around, sort, organize
and prioritize in a tangible, physical, humanly ideosyncratic way, even
before the author/user has decided if/how to categorize it (so it can
be filed)
- tailorability: easy to annotate in multiple, personal ways,
without inexorably defacing the original, thus suiting itself to
collaborative effort
- browsability: easy to skip ahead, and back and forth to
study two or more sections or passages in parallel
Gladwell defends the apparent mess of knowledge workers' desktops,
insisting that filing of the mounds of stuff on our desktops is
inefficient, premature, and logically impossible. He damns filng
cabinets (invented by the same Dewey who invented the library indexing
system) as, at best, the final resting place for documents that are
unlikely thereafter ever to see the light of day again. These stacks of
paper are, he says, 'contextual clues to unresolved ideas'. And the
documents themselves, with earmarks, annotations, marginalia and
ungainly attachments, are not knowledge themselves but
rather support for the knowledge
that resides in people's heads, and hence any digitization that
changes the organization of this 'support material' inevitably lessens,
rather than increases its value.
'The mark of the contemporary office is not the file', writes Gladwell,
'it's the pile.' The three-dimensional, multivariate physical desktop, with all its
flexibility of arrangement, allows for 'situational awareness' that the
misnamed 'electronic desktop' simply cannot replicate.
So, herewith, a challenge to software developers. Throw away all the
preconceptions and Microsoft standards about how the computer should
organize and display information and documents. Start with, dare I
say, a clean desktop, and invent new virtual surrogates for the
physical desktop, and for the physical document, that replicate as
closely as possible their 'user experiences' and convey their
advantages: spacial flexibility, tailorability, browsability, and
capacity for situational awareness. Gladwell's right, but I don't want
to be tied to my desk, I want to carry it in my briefcase, and save
some trees in the process. And make it so instinctively obvious
that we don't need 'user training' to use it.
It's time to obsolesce Dewey, desktops and paper. Surely there are some
creative minds out there that are up to the task? My future editor
thanks you in advance, as do I.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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