Believe it or not, I know the literature, and still think you and it go too
far. Remember that poetry ms were read from rather than read because even
most of the high nobility were illiterate. That being the case, its
appearance on the page was rather less important.

As to whether or not we read emails aloud, the point behind the point I was
making was that we read what's written for voice and ear differently.

Mark


At 12:01 AM 2/1/2003 +0000, you wrote:
>Mark:
>
><snip>
>I think rather too much is made of this. We're only talking about a change
>in conventions when the material became less expensive to produce. [MW]
><snip>
>
>Are we? You make it sound all very simple and unfussworthy. But even
>conventions aren't either value neutral or without wider effects.
>
>The point about, say, moving from continuous script towards word separation
>(7th C Ireland <> 10th C Europe) first through interpuncts then through
>spaces, which seems a pleasant place to start, is that you can parse a text
>much more quickly. That means they're easier to copy and to perform. You
>don't have to subvocalise first (praelectio) then read aloud for sense
>(narratio). Word separation and silent, private reading seem to develop
>together (Cf Paul Saenger). (To some degree one can probably push this
>forward into printing, privacy and the self. Pushing it the other way one
>arrives at the point implied by cris cheek a few weeks ago: orality
>foregrounds the performer, not the author. But all of that is by the by.)
>And from this juncture, one might say, visual emptiness becomes 'active'.
>Words become units on a substrate, print avant la Letraset: 'the use of
>printing moved the word away from its original association with sound and
>treated it more _as a thing in space_', as Ong puts it (the _emphasis_ is
>mine). And visual lineation continues that process.
>
>David Howard's useful comment suggested that what the words and the lines
>did to the silence (and vice versa) was as worth considering as what the
>words did for themselves and what the lines did to the words. (Here is
>Takehisa Kosugi on _music_ and silence: 'We Japanese believe music is both
>silence and sound and the surroundings of the music, the time and space. To
>enjoy silence is very important...') It also invited the inference that the
>blank page _represented_ silence. And it was the issue of *representation*
>that interested me.
>
>Reading silently (that is, independent of any deliberate sounding of the
>text) has a periodicity in the number and type of to and fro eye movements
>and pauses: the sequence of saccades and fixations. Fluency requires an
>ordered rhythm and that rhythm (unsurprisingly) is influenced by the text.
>
>Reading a lineated text, odd things happen, it seems to me: a matter of eye
>saccades but also of foveal and parafoveal vision (respectively, the areas
>of attention and attentiveness, I suppose). Quite aside from any aural cues
>or impressions, one teeters, at each line end, upon some sort of threshold.
>Each becomes an independent fragment left from some larger erasure, as in
>Spicer's *Thing Language*, an obvious example, with its empty space (how do
>you _speak_ that empty space?) followed by:
>
>    This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
>    Tougher than anything.
>    No one listens to poetry. The ocean
>    Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
>    Or crash of water. It means
>    Nothing.
>    [...]
>    It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
>    One listens to poetry
>
>Or there's William Watson's (awful) C16th sonnet 31 *My Love is Past* in
>which he adds to the constraints of rhyme and metre the same Latin tag
>('Amare est insanire') as an acrostic _and_ a telestich, then squeezes the
>result into the shape of 'a pasquine piller': an extreme example of greater
>interest in the edge.
>
><snip>
>The continuous verse lines in ms tradition rarely lead to confusion about
>where one line ends and the next begins--conventions of meter and rhyme took
>care of that.[MW]
><snip>
>
>Not confusion (a functionalist interpretation) but perhaps a greater latency
>in how the text is perceived. And isn't that the point? Speed, attention,
>type of attention. The _process_ of reading, constru(ct)ing the aural text,
>would be somewhat different. And visual lineation, potentially, makes rhyme
>and then metre less necessary and other things more possible. Hence, say,
>Tim Atkins' highly erased *25 Sonnets*, from one inattentive hearing
>
><snip>
>We don't read aloud in our carrels unless we want to get kicked out of the
>library. But when you're in your own space don't you ever find yourself
>called upon to read aloud? Or better, don't you read aloud to whoever shares
>your intimate space[...]?[MW]
><snip>
>
>Of course. But we are not, I assume, sounding out each other's emails from
>the screen. If Augustine passed us reading a newspaper, in our own space
>shared with whomever, he wouldn't marvel at our 'silence', as he did with
>Bishop Ambrose. So aren't you making too much of *reading aloud*? It's a
>choice, not a necessity and not a two stage process in the sense outlined
>above.
>
>CW