It’s Not Collecting, It’s Composting: Creative Reading

“Once during an in-class writing assignment, a bright freshman asked me if ‘anal retentive’ was hyphenated or two words. I suspected she was joking, but I answered seriously, ‘The way I stuff my files, I’m tempted to say it’s one word. Of course, it’s two unless it’s being used as a compound adjective, but if you could see my filing cabinets, you’d think I’m an advocate of the single-word spelling.’”—Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Dr. Skip Eisiminger

I. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”—T.S. Eliot

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—15 July 2020—One afternoon, following a tedious class on Middle English verbs, I met a friend in Philosophy who was also headed to the Auburn library. I told him that, some day, I hoped to have the time and resources to read whatever I wanted with the sole aim of underlining and saving the passages that I “believed in.” James Dickey, my mentor at the University of South Carolina, would later call these life-affirming passages “The Juice.” As soon as I settled into my first teaching job at Clemson, 30 years before Google and Wikipedia, I began filling manila folders that I stored in vertical files, but over my first decade of four in the classroom, the file folders grew so thick and its drawer so heavy, it often took me 20 minutes or more to find “The Juice.” My “Race” folder, for example, was at least two inches thick.

After one long, unsuccessful search, I remembered that Auburn’s Dr. Current-Garcia had told a class that he summarized every scholarly article he read on one or more 3 x 5 cards. Something clicked, and I went to the English Department office to get my first pack of one hundred index cards. Figuring these would last me for the rest of the semester, I built a shallow six-inch-long box to hold “five years’ worth of collecting.” My lowball estimation was epic. Today, 40 years later, if I could place all 150,000 of my cards in one box, it would need to be 1,092” (91’) long.

I didn’t know it at the time of its conception, but my file—which most would consider a commonplace book, as distinct from a diary or journal—has a distinguished pedigree. Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Jonson, John Milton, John Locke, Edward Gibbon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wallace Stevens, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Nicholson Baker, and, of course, Sherlock Holmes all have maintained such a “book” in one form or another. However, to the best of my knowledge, I’m the only one to have kept one on 3 x 5 cards. Some have suggested I scan my cards to the computer, but I figure it would take a decade, and I’m 78 years old.

The results of my gleaning go by several names, depending on my mood. It’s my “external hard drive,” “my auxiliary brain lobe,” “my Wunderkammer,” “my eight-foot thumb drive,” “my critical mess,” or “my repository of ‘string’ too useful not to be saved.”

In a department of Elizabethan and Southern-literature specialists, I was, as Ron Moran, my department head, labelled me, “a generalist.” I was a hamster-cheeked teacher of everything from freshman English, where one class we’d be parsing an essay on gun control and the next on abortion, to interdisciplinary Humanities, which might range over the visual arts, music, and literature of the Rococo one week, followed by Neo-classical aesthetics, religious beliefs, and science the following week.

In this rich milieu, my file was my salvation as well as my self-mythologizing memoir.

Chris Benson, a former colleague, suggested that a drug-style intervention might be in order, but I have no desire to stop squirreling away my “acorns” —or even slowing down. I still have three “file stations” in our home, one on each floor, where I keep pen, paper, and scissors at the ready. Since my retirement from Clemson ten years ago, I have tutored reading at the local elementary school, helped to lead the Clemson Vets Writing Group, taught at Clemson’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, led discussions at the Clemson Emeritus College and Forum Club, and led discussions across the state on a range of topics for the SC Humanities Council. I’ve also written 437 blogs, such as this one, for Weekly Hubris, Vocabula, South Carolina Review, and other publications. All these activities have drawn heavily on the file.

II. “After a Thousand Appendectomies/Skip likes the queer thing that snaps the routine—/in the appendix, a sprouting bean.”—The Wordspinner

Once during an in-class writing assignment, a bright freshman asked me if “anal retentive” was hyphenated or two words. I suspected she was joking, but I answered seriously, “The way I stuff my files, I’m tempted to say it’s one word. Of course, it’s two unless it’s being used as a compound adjective, but if you could see my filing cabinets, you’d think I’m an advocate of the single-word spelling.”

And the stuffing continues. Most days, I gather between 20 and 25 items, but recently, after finishing Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, I filed over a hundred Schnippels, as my German wife calls them. To give readers an idea of what I collect, here’s a summary of the most interesting things I read one weekend, inked, scissored, glued onto 3 x 5 cards, and filed alphabetically by topic:

• I read in an email from a friend how for a Spike-Jones-like “orchestra,” he took the mouthpiece from a bassoon and attached it to a trombone. Voila: a “tromboon.” File: Music
• I read an on-line article in the New York Times about the “defund the police” movement and told my wife that I may have to declare myself a conservative if this gains traction. File: Justice
• I re-read a section of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate that summarized the chaos that followed the Montreal police strike in 1969. File: Justice
• In an anonymous email, I read a complaint shared by a travel agent from a customer who wanted to know why his flight from Jamaica to London was six hours longer than that of the Americans he’d met flying to Miami. File: Fools and Travel
• In Wikipedia, I learned that electrolithoautotrophs are micro-organisms that feed off the electrons in rocks. File: Eating, Animals, and Plants
• In an email from another friend, I read how he’s grown so disenchanted with on-line teaching that he’s resigned. File: Teaching
• In a poorly (on purpose) punctuated joke, I read: “I like cooking my family and my pets.” File: Grammar (Commas)
• In the car, I listened to Sen. Tim Scott (Rep., SC) on NPR as he told of “DWB: driving while black.” On one occasion in the nation’s capital, he said he was cited for “slow blinking” as he signaled a lane change. File: Race, Prejudice, and Driving
• In the Wall Street Journal, I read of the new Tesla Model Y which features “vegan leather” upholstery and a remote “fart” button.  File: Farting and Automobiles
• Finally, in the weekend “Review” section of the Wall Street Journal, I read how “to the brain, social space is physical space.” Thus, English speakers often use “spatial metaphors” to describe social connections like “close friend,” “distant cousin,” and “circle of acquaintances.” File: Space-Territory

III. “If it ain’t growin’, it’s dyin’.”—Anonymous farmer

Brian Hershberger, who writes for the Wall Street Journal, has the rather odd habit of placing every coin and bill he finds on the streets of New York, where he works, and New Jersey, where he lives, in a jar. After 20 years of making deposits, he withdrew his savings in 2020 and discovered he had $971.05. Whether it’s anecdotes or antidotes, facts or factoids, collecting is often like that—it may take a while to appreciate the “interest” that you’ve earned.

In roughly chronological order, here are some other tips for Schnipplers like me:

• “The palest ink beats the best memory.” Chinese proverb
• “Gather facts to have ideas.” Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon 
• “Make your own Bible.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Read not the Times, Read the Eternities.” Henry David Thoreau
• Keeping a commonplace book makes readers more attentive because they’re constantly panning for nuggets. Paraphrase E.W. Gurley
• “I always kept two books in my pocket, one to read, and one to write in.” Robert Louis Stevenson
• “To read without reflecting [underlining and schnippeling] is to eat without digesting.” Edmund Burke
• “Trifles make the sum of life.” Charles Dickens
• “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” Vincent Van Gogh
• “We write it down because it is too sweet to lose.” Edna Ferber
• “When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.” Anatole France
• “Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, or library.  Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for the shore.” Ray Bradbury
• “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” Linus Pauling, winner of Nobel prizes for Chemistry and Peace
• “Go through life with a plankton net.” Annie Dillard
• “Throw a wide net.” James Dickey
• “We hoard quotations like amulets. They are charms against chaos, secret mantras for dark times, strings that vibrate forever in defiance of the laws of time and space.” Louis Menand
• “Plumb the redemptive potential of the written word.” Harold Bloom
• “[Speed-reading defeats the purpose of reading] much like speed-eating a Porterhouse steak or applying the two-minute drill to sex.” Joe Queenan
• “The beginning of wisdom is to get yourself a roof.” West African proverb

To which I would add, “Then, get yourself a file cabinet.”

If, like the infamous Collyer brothers, you should find me under my books and collapsed file cabinets one day, know that I died surrounded by what I love.

“The Collyer Brothers: Down the Rabbit Hole.”

To order copies of Skip Eisiminger’s Letters to the Grandchildren (Clemson University Digital Press), click on the book cover below or contact: Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson SC 29634-0522. For Wordspinner: Mind-Boggling Games for Word Lovers, click on the book cover.