... was the original name of this blog and the subject of the first post on it, so I'm always delighted to find something bloggable that can take the "marginalia" tag.
I love this one, from the biography "John Adams" (pp. 763-764)(commission earned):
Unlike [Thomas] Jefferson, who seldom ever marked a book, and then only faintly in pencil, [John] Adams, pen in hand, loved to add his comments in the margins. It was part of the joy of reading for him, to have something to say himself, to talk back to, agree or take issue with, Rousseau, Condorcet, Turgot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, or Joseph Priestley.
Ah, John Adams was a proto-blogger!
“There is no doubt that people are in the long run what the government make out of them...,” Adams read in Rousseau. “The government ought to be what the people make it,” he wrote in response.
At times his marginal observations nearly equaled what was printed on the page, as in Mary Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution, which Adams read at least twice and with delight, since he disagreed with nearly everything she said. To her claim that government must be simple, for example, he answered, “The clock would be simple if you destroyed all the wheels . . . but it would not tell the time of day.”...
To the pronouncements of the French philosophes in particular, he would respond with an indignant “Nonsense” or “Fool! Fool!” But he could also scratch in an approving “Good” or “Very Good” or an emphatic “Excellent!”
Excellent!
ADDED: When I published this post, I clicked on the "marginalia" tag and I experienced a second bloggerly delight. I found a post with snails — about medieval marginalia showing people fighting snails. Example:
And I'd just written a post that had prominent snail content — "After the rain, he went out in search of snails. He talked to them; they did not creep away from him. He held them in his hand..." So, I made a "snails" tag and added it retrospectively. Click and look at the snail content from the past 2 decades.
That says something about me and my marginalia project, but what do you think? Are people what the government makes out of us or is the government what we the people make it? You know, Rousseau and Adams don't disagree. Adams is talking about what ought to be. Rousseau is saying what he thinks really happens.
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32 comments:
The yellow highlighter had not been invented yet.
Adams was brilliant. Apparently arrogant and disliked. But brilliant.
The Bollinger Collected Coleridge volume 12 Marginalia is a half dozen volumes itself.
Bollingen
This book was my introduction to David McCullough. I never expected such a readable history book, one that it wasn’t hard to just move from page to page.
I was most interested with the story of his son that I learned from the book. John Quincy Adams traveled with his dad to Europe and then without him while the father was in France. It is crazy to think of someone being that I dependent as a young teen.
“…But he could also scratch in an … emphatic “Excellent!”
So not only a protoblogger, but a forerunner of Bill and Ted, too
I hate to deface a book, especially with my foolish scribblings. Over the decades since high school, I recorded my marginalia in wire-bound notebooks. I would start with an outline page containing the title, author, and a very brief description of the work, followed by my notes headed with the chapter, page, and sometimes the paragraph.
Starting about 1990 I began using a digital voice recorder rather than a notebook. A few years ago I was moving a large desk with a drawer packed with old notebooks. Over a lunch break, I perused one of those notebooks, one I filled with scribbles relating to Simon Scharma's bicentennial history of the French Revolution, Citizens. I was mightily chagrined by the banalities and nonsense. Consequently, I'm in no mood to review my digital audio musings, either.
“There is no doubt that people are in the long run what the government make out of them...,” Adams read in Rousseau. “The government ought to be what the people make it,” he wrote in response."
The difference is: how much control government exercises.
That reminds me, I was reading the Education of Henry Adams and forgot about it for some reason...
One of the additional pleasures of paper books. You can do the notes thing with Kindle too but it's just not the same. My dear mother, who was a librarian, loved to put flowers and leafs in waxed paper and flatten them inside the pages of a nice stout publication. The worst are the oafs and vandals who (over) use "HiLighter" marking pens. That slime leaches through the pages over time and sticks them together. The hot pink or glitzy yellow pens have all the subtlety of a neon fast food logo.
Kings believed they should make the people whatever they wanted. After all they owned them along with all lands in their Realm .
Those ignorant colonials like Adams actually believed in owning their own lands that they had fought once to the death to take from savages using their guts and guns. Why not do it again to a German tyrant made into an English King that was planning their replacement to increase his friends power and wealth with his lands in North America.
COMMON SENSE prevailed, we fought and Cornwallis’ Army surrendered.But after Napoleonic Wars,the British turned their military around and came back to claim it was theirs for sure, and lost again.
Finally after Sherman and Grant had won our war that came close to split the States, the British withdrew their huge Army they had lurking in Canada to gobble up the USA once more.
Adams was right .
Mad Magazine
"Marginals
edit
Aragonés has a featured section in every issue called "A Mad Look At...", typically featuring 4–5 pages of speechless gag strips that are all related to a single subject, such as "Gambling," "UFOs" or "Pizza." Aragonés became famous for his wordless "drawn-out dramas" or "marginals" which were inserted into the margins and between panels of the magazine. The drawings are both horizontal and vertical, and occasionally extend around corners. Prior to Aragonés's arrival at Mad, the magazine had sometimes filled its margins with text jokes under the catch-all heading "Marginal Thinking." Aragonés convinced Feldstein to use his cartoons by creating a dummy sample issue with his Marginals drawn along the edges. The staff of Mad enjoyed his marginals, but did not expect him to be able to maintain the steady stream of small cartoons needed for each issue.[11] Aragonés has provided marginals for every issue of Mad since 1963 except one (his contributions to that issue were lost by the Post Office). Associate Editor Jerry DeFuccio said, "Writing the 'Marginal Thinking' marginals had always been a pain in the butt. Sergio made the pain go away."[12]"
There's a special niche in Hell for people who scribble marginalia in library books.
one my BIGGEST joys of re-rereading books (like The Lord of The Rings), is seeing my underlines, and re-reading my margin notes.
Two years ago, i lost (left) my Fellowship of the Ring at the local scenic overlook (which is was great place to read books.. IF you don't leave them on the bench).
Finding a replacement 1960's paperback (with the cool cover artwork) wasn't easy; but it was easier than remembering all the notes. My copy of The Two Towers fell apart back in the '90's, but it was easy back thing to get a replacement, and i still had the original, so i could transpose (?) the notes..
Anyway, rereading margin notes is fun! when i used to buy my books at the used bookstore, they'd often have OTHER PEOPLE'S margin notes, which made them even better.
ps. My original Lord of The Rings was my sister's..
I stole them from her when she foolishly left them at the house when she went off to college..
There's a moral there, somewhere
The blogger in me would follow the thread from marginalia to genitalia and conclude that notable ideas would have been scrawled in the snow. That was then, but with climate change, the modern blogger would obviously have to improvise with a fountain pen filled with an inorganic solution in order to limit their carbon footprint and other anthropogenic forcings.
At our national beginning, we had (to somewhat over-simplify) three models for leadership: Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. Washington, however, was unique, and to attempt to create a new Washington could have led us into Bonapartism. And Washington himself rejected that. So the choice was between two versions of republicanism, Adams and Jefferson. We tried Adams, but he wasn't (how shall I say it?) "political" enough. So we got Jefferson. All of our leaders since then have been descendants of Jefferson--in many cases illegitimate descendants -- but descendants nevertheless.
If you think this analysis is worth thinking about, then ask which Presidential candidate is in which tradition. Or in the Bonapartism tradition the nation rejected way back then?
A librarian whose name was Eulalia
Scribbled comments in books, inter alia.
Even though this'll
Be grounds for dismissal
She persisted with her marginalia.
The only time (outside textbooks) that I ever engaged, or indulged, in marginalia was in The Name of the Rose in high school. I have no idea why I did that.
‘All great change in America begins at the dinner table.’ – Ronald Reagan
I rarely write marginalia. Once in a while I'll underline, circle, or put a ! next to a typo, misuse of a word or concept, or simple factual mistake--especially in library books. I doubt that I or anyone else will re-read my personal copies, even if they escape the landfill or bonfire after I'm gone.
I'm a huge fan of marginalia. Since I read mostly history, and re-read volumes after several years, I began to use different colored pencils, with a note on the flyleaf indicating the date and color. It's kind of interesting to see how my opinions and certainty have changed over the years.
In a Murder She Wrote episode, a young writer, trying to engage Jessica Fletcher's interest, describes his plot. Jessica exclaims, "But that's the Brothers Karamazov!" The writer replies, "It is?" I thought, "It is?" and immediately pull my copy out to see if I had actually read it, or if it was just there to impress my guests. I open it up to find persipacious marginalia in my handwriting throughout. I do miss my brain and glad to discover evidence that I once had one.
I’m all for note taking when reading. But don’t write in the book. Write in a separate notebook. I think it’s a form of vandalism when people underline, highlight, or notate in the margins.
That said, the relationship of the people to the federal government is too complicated. Both Rousseau and Adams favor the aphorism. Fuck aphorisms.
In my teaching days, I would occasionally see some of my students' books and marvel at how they'd managed to highlight in yellow something approaching 90% of the text. It made me want to recommend to publishers that they produce their texts on yellow paper, so as to spare the students the bother of highlighting. I could have made a fortune with that idea.
I also hate to deface books (even my own), but I have sometimes inserted sticky notes on pages that I want to refer back to.
I've read McCullough's John Adams, Chernow's Hamilton and Grant, and Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin. All were great reads, and left me more impressed with their subjects than before, especially Grant, whose presidency Chernow convinced me was not only unjustly maligned, but in fact great. Like Trump, Grant also had to put up with a lot of backstabbers and opportunists, but managed to accomplish a lot.
Hugo Black used to mark up books that he hated. He would underline and circle all the stupid shit in a book.
When he died, the priest who was giving the eulogy was in Black's library, and he found one of his marked up books. And he thought Black agreed with all the stuff he was marking up. So in his eulogy, he was going on and on about how Black loved the "living Constitution" and "substantive" due process and all this stuff he absolutely hated.
And so while the priest is giving his eulogy, and getting his jurisprudence 100% wrong, all the other Supreme Court Justices are looking at each other during the funeral, going "what the heck?" and trying not to laugh out loud.
I want to thank Althouse for one thing: the men in shorts rule.
It clarified my life. I've raised my boys with it. Now they are adults and, while they may disagree and I don't know what they wear when I'm not around, are at least aware of that the standard exists.
This blog has been around a long time. Thanks.
The most famous marginalia would have to be Fermat's last theorem. He added that he had a proof but no room in the margin for it. It took mathematicians more than 350 years to come up with a valid proof.
You should have seen my copy of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." Gawd I hated that book, but he seems to have won, the sophists are now in charge, and the empiricists are in retreat. I do thank him for clarifying the thinking of the sophists though, or rather the thinking process, which is more a process of rationalizing feelings.
@NotWhoIUsedtoBe
Glad to be of service... for so long and just by continuing to do the same thing.
Duke Dan said...
This book was my introduction to David McCullough... (Mine, too)I was most interested with the story of his son that I learned from the book. John Quincy Adams traveled with his dad to Europe and then without him while the father was in France. It is crazy to think of someone being that I dependent as a young teen.
JQ's long career in the public sphere is probably worth an in-depth look for modern audiences. I know he was part of the movie Amistad, but surely most Americans have barely heard of him.
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