Sun, 19 Nov 2006

inner
2004. A friend of mine from college asked if I wanted some part-time work writing short online study guides for short stories, and while I wasn’t really that interested, I figured I could try a few and see how it went, so I agreed. Once a week I would be assigned a story, a pdf copy emailed to me, and by the end of the week I would email back a two thousand word summary of the characters, settings and plot developments of the story, along with notes on symbolism and contemporary relevence. I discovered that such summaries intentionally have a small flaw, a character added who was not in the original work, or an event which did not take place, so that students who felt they could cut and paste these summaries in place of actual work would be given failing grades by instructors who were professionally aware of this “tell”. I enjoyed adding this detail, trying not to make it too garish but at the same time hoping to add some sort of amusement to readers who had actually read the work and saw the inclusion as a kind of knowing wink which the student who did not read the work would never notice. Months passed, and soon I was given other kinds of documents to summarize, from novels to legal statements to financial reports, and each of these was also given a tell, so that the function of the summary changed if you had access to the original work. Some documents had multiple tells, some which went in entirely different directions than the actual work, and some which even stood in direct opposition to legitimate statements. In time, I not only wrote these summaries, but replacement works, similar in general nature but different in telling detail, such as institutional copies of popular novels with potentially offensive material removed, or copies for children’s libraries with difficult material changed to simpler terms. I discovered that copies of novels available at public libraries were slightly different from copies available at bookstores, which were both different from copies directly available from the publisher, or the author. I discovered that the law studied and practiced by students was different in slight ways from law publically practiced, and each court was likewise off in miniscule ways, which were rarely noticed, and if noticed not disclosed, as such knowledge was only an advantage so long as it remained secret. Finally I discovered that there is no exact copy of any text anywhere, that each seeming copy is different from all others, each of which is similar only in this shared difference, and it is a collective apathy and embarassment that prevents people from recognizing that when they seem to talk about one thing, they are in fact talking about two different things, and this unseen but everpresent disconnect is the reason why we are the way we are today.
(03:25.11.19.2006) [/scrytch] #