The struggle for form
Sep. 3rd, 2004 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbThis is a purely personal story. Don't bother reading it if you aren't interested in my research or writing process. I started using a computer about twelve or thirteen years ago, a year or so after graduating. Until then, all the research work I had done had been handwritten or typed. I found the procedure of typing actually more painful than handwriting (although, being able to touch-type, it was faster) because of the much greater inflexibility of a typed manuscript as compared to a handwritten one. It was slower than typing, but much easier to correct and redraft; and as most of my work consisted in reworking, rethinking, redrafting, typing became agony to me. The promise it held of a faster and smoother draft, simply never fulfilled itself. The last article I typed took me six months and five drafts.
Then I was handed down an already aged Amstrad with a very elementary (by today's standards) word processing package. To me, it was a revelation: it cut down my working time by a factor of ten. I came to it with the advantage of being able to touch type, and therefore to write fast; but the flexibility and speed with which it allowed me to work was such that even if I had been typing with a single finger, the advantage would have been considerable. From the moment I first worked with an electronic keyboard and screen, I promised myself that I would never look at a typewriter in the face again; and I have kept my promise.
This, however, implied a problem. I had already done a considerable amount of research work, let alone comics stories and poetry. In theory, I should have copied out all the manuscripts, typing them on to floppies (hands up anyone who remembers when computer memory was so poor that everything had to be saved on floppies!); in practice, it would have been a monstrous amount of work and I could not quite bring myself to do it.
The next important stage in my work was the time when I found my own voice as a researcher. I can practically show you the page and point where it happened - where, in a sense, I emancipated myself from idol-worshipping Dumezil (though never from the spiritual paternity the great man can claim over me).
Cut to the present. My computer life (so to speak) has been a series of hand-me-downs, with the technology to match; for most of the time, I was about five years behind everyone else. Not that I minded much, because I regarded my computer (as I still to some extent do) as an extension of a typewriter, and, later, of a library. I was perfectly happy with cheap and primitive word processing packages, because the only thing I really wanted to do was to go to the British Library and analyze ancient texts. It was a big enough matter when I first was able to store my files on a hard drive instead of multiple floppies; an even bigger one when I first started to regularly use Windows (1998). I first got on the Internet in 2001, first listened to a CD on my computer about the same time, first used a graphics package a year later. (Videogames were another matter; I had had some tastes of them on friends' PCs as early as the early nineties. But I never really got into them, probably because I never could afford a playstation.)
At the same time, however, another process was taking place: computers - I mean new computers, with all the bells and whistles - were becoming cheaper. Cheaper in absolute terms - today, a complete system will set you back maybe a thousand pounds, when I can remember very well a time when it cost at least 25% more - and even cheaper when considering inflation. For the first time, I have been able to buy components instead of begging friends and family for their or their businesses' no-longer-needed trash. The stuff I mean, of course, is still out-of-date, bought from the excellent British store Morgan's, which sells the leftovers from makers' stock at low prices, but at least new and unused. And I have finally got myself a scanner; and one with Omnipage on it.
Here comes the climax of the story. I made a bitter discovery. The first item I scanned and copied - a paper on the Crusades typed long ago for college - was good enough, though I found it better to chop off two pages of closing waffle that had callow student written all over it. But the next item, on which I am working now, was honestly dreadful. For a start, it was full of assumptions I would not now make. It referred back not only to Dumezil's work but even to lesser post-Dumezilian items as though they were Holy Writ, which every reader was bound to know, understand, and accept; and it did so in a sort of shorthand, referring to head concepts as if the whole process of thought and investigation behind them was simply present in them. Also, it was all too evident that I felt the agonizing pressure of working on a typewriter: I had cut every possible corner, including the capital sin of not including even summaries of my primary texts. Finally, the thought behind the work was in some ways schematic, taking a text and superimposing a frame of previously formulated interpretations. Actually, these two failings were connected: the same pressure to cut corners and produce something, anything, led both to sloppy writing and to sloppy, schematic thinking. I had yet to learn that things have to be done correctly and to the end, without skimping any corners. (Curiously, I learned more or less the same lesson as an artist: do all the work through, don't skimp, and for no reason say "this will do".)
The trouble is that this study represents lots of work: work done badly, but done, and which I really do not want to start over again. It is full of good, useful ideas and material that I do not want to throw away; and I need to use it as the framework for a large study on Taliesin and related legends, which I am working on. But the form is so dreadful that I will probably have to rewrite most of it, even once I have scanned, copied, and corrected it all. It was simply done wrong; and when something is done wrong, there is no point in trying to mend it. It must be done over again.Well, this IS a diary, you know!
Then I was handed down an already aged Amstrad with a very elementary (by today's standards) word processing package. To me, it was a revelation: it cut down my working time by a factor of ten. I came to it with the advantage of being able to touch type, and therefore to write fast; but the flexibility and speed with which it allowed me to work was such that even if I had been typing with a single finger, the advantage would have been considerable. From the moment I first worked with an electronic keyboard and screen, I promised myself that I would never look at a typewriter in the face again; and I have kept my promise.
This, however, implied a problem. I had already done a considerable amount of research work, let alone comics stories and poetry. In theory, I should have copied out all the manuscripts, typing them on to floppies (hands up anyone who remembers when computer memory was so poor that everything had to be saved on floppies!); in practice, it would have been a monstrous amount of work and I could not quite bring myself to do it.
The next important stage in my work was the time when I found my own voice as a researcher. I can practically show you the page and point where it happened - where, in a sense, I emancipated myself from idol-worshipping Dumezil (though never from the spiritual paternity the great man can claim over me).
Cut to the present. My computer life (so to speak) has been a series of hand-me-downs, with the technology to match; for most of the time, I was about five years behind everyone else. Not that I minded much, because I regarded my computer (as I still to some extent do) as an extension of a typewriter, and, later, of a library. I was perfectly happy with cheap and primitive word processing packages, because the only thing I really wanted to do was to go to the British Library and analyze ancient texts. It was a big enough matter when I first was able to store my files on a hard drive instead of multiple floppies; an even bigger one when I first started to regularly use Windows (1998). I first got on the Internet in 2001, first listened to a CD on my computer about the same time, first used a graphics package a year later. (Videogames were another matter; I had had some tastes of them on friends' PCs as early as the early nineties. But I never really got into them, probably because I never could afford a playstation.)
At the same time, however, another process was taking place: computers - I mean new computers, with all the bells and whistles - were becoming cheaper. Cheaper in absolute terms - today, a complete system will set you back maybe a thousand pounds, when I can remember very well a time when it cost at least 25% more - and even cheaper when considering inflation. For the first time, I have been able to buy components instead of begging friends and family for their or their businesses' no-longer-needed trash. The stuff I mean, of course, is still out-of-date, bought from the excellent British store Morgan's, which sells the leftovers from makers' stock at low prices, but at least new and unused. And I have finally got myself a scanner; and one with Omnipage on it.
Here comes the climax of the story. I made a bitter discovery. The first item I scanned and copied - a paper on the Crusades typed long ago for college - was good enough, though I found it better to chop off two pages of closing waffle that had callow student written all over it. But the next item, on which I am working now, was honestly dreadful. For a start, it was full of assumptions I would not now make. It referred back not only to Dumezil's work but even to lesser post-Dumezilian items as though they were Holy Writ, which every reader was bound to know, understand, and accept; and it did so in a sort of shorthand, referring to head concepts as if the whole process of thought and investigation behind them was simply present in them. Also, it was all too evident that I felt the agonizing pressure of working on a typewriter: I had cut every possible corner, including the capital sin of not including even summaries of my primary texts. Finally, the thought behind the work was in some ways schematic, taking a text and superimposing a frame of previously formulated interpretations. Actually, these two failings were connected: the same pressure to cut corners and produce something, anything, led both to sloppy writing and to sloppy, schematic thinking. I had yet to learn that things have to be done correctly and to the end, without skimping any corners. (Curiously, I learned more or less the same lesson as an artist: do all the work through, don't skimp, and for no reason say "this will do".)
The trouble is that this study represents lots of work: work done badly, but done, and which I really do not want to start over again. It is full of good, useful ideas and material that I do not want to throw away; and I need to use it as the framework for a large study on Taliesin and related legends, which I am working on. But the form is so dreadful that I will probably have to rewrite most of it, even once I have scanned, copied, and corrected it all. It was simply done wrong; and when something is done wrong, there is no point in trying to mend it. It must be done over again.Well, this IS a diary, you know!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 12:20 pm (UTC)Elaborate? Kinda difficult. It is, as I said, a large study - book-sized. I understand Taliesin as an avatar of the Celtic supreme god Lug (not the only one - Lug was a god rather fond of becoming incarnate. Decades ago, for instance, the great Arthurian scholar Roger Sherman Loomis rightly identified him with Lancelot). I also believe that his character may be traced in a number of stories which are ostensibly not about him at all, and that comparison can bring out the meaning of what might be called his theology, with increasing precision. This is not exactly the right space to give an account of my views and methods. If you go further up my LJ, you will find one sample of a study of mine, this one about Virgil; and if you have the nerve, you can Google me and find the gigantic (500,000 words) book I wrote about the British Dark Age (407-597), in which, I would say, all my views and methods can be studied if one has the patience.