Too Many Words

On Monday I met up with a couple of friends for coffee, a welcome oasis of grown-up conversation in a season that has been mostly packed with mom tasks and work tasks. My friend Jenny and I were talking about writing in books: she never does it, while I do it a lot. How else would I remember my favorite quotes? Or those sudden flashes of insight? (Of course I only write in my own books. If you lend me a book I will do my recording in a little notebook of my own.) Jenny and I agree on a lot of things, but as I was explaining the joys of returning to the copy of Paradise Lost that I bought when I was eighteen, knowing that the black ink is from intro to Western lit and the green ink is from my survey course on 17th- and 18th-century lit and the blue ink is from the upper-level Milton class -- well, Jenny looked at me as if I were telling her she ought to get an eyelid tattoo.

But the delights of this habit of mine were reinforced a few days later, when I was skimming through my copy of Motor Speech Disorders (a frequent companion these days) and came across this note from 2007 in the margin: "some of us have deficits there!" It was in reference to a sentence I would have overlooked otherwise: "Linguistic planning requires...the ability to discard from active processing utterances that have already been formulated and executed."

A quirk of mine is that I love public speaking: I get a huge charge out of it. But after I give a talk, I always hear it playing back in my head again and again. Was that phrasing all right? Should I have cracked that joke in another spot? Lecturing twice a week means that I have my own words running through my head all the time-- practicing beforehand, and the involuntary replay afterward. I'm not very good at discarding from active processing, and the effect is that I'm tired of the sound of my own voice.

So this is just a quick post to say hi. Teaching this class is taking more time and mental energy than I would have imagined. I think it's a good sign that I'm feeling worried about the lecture I'll give ten days from now instead of the lecture I'll give Monday. I'm being summoned to read Pippi Longstocking right now. I don't think there are notes in its margin yet. Do you take notes in your books? And do your own words ever keep playing in your head? I could use a mute button.

Comments

[Tracy]

a mute button will be useful, especially if you teach this course again (and again - we hope, right?). K says that the first time you teach a course is the roughest, and it gets better after that.

I like writing in certain books but not others, while Nina is upset at the idea of writing in a book (and HAS to, in her pre-AP English class where she is learning to annotate) - amazing how different people prefer different styles.

[Bearing]

I don't replay my own words in my head afterwards so much, but I rehearse them incessantly. Not just for public speaking, either -- if I anticipate making a routine phone call in a few hours, say to do something like change the dates of our theater tickets (to give an example from last week), I will find myself repeatedly going over what I will say to the person on the other end of the line. Talk about a waste of brain cells! "Hello, I'm a subscriber and I need to change one of the performance dates. Oh, thank you so much.". Over and over. I think it's a manifestation of social anxiety.

But I also go over and over things I wish I had said in arguments, or I imagine arguments that I might have with people some day and practice for them.

So, yeah, I could use a mute button. I get sick of listening to myself pretend to talk.

[rachel]

I figured out this is why I need to read gripping novels so much more when I'm teaching/engaging in public - only getting sucked into a real vacuum of a book turns off the replay button.

[Bearing]

Something for you on the subject of writing in books:
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/marginalia/