Everything is Illuminated Manuscripts

V.S.

:-)

Everyone is always talking about the internet, and like Jan Brady memorably complained ("Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!") I feel I must say something. A friend of mine has dropped the article and calls the internet simply "Internet," as if it were a proper name reflecting the intimacy one has with the web. "Let's ask Internet what the weather is like in New York," or "Internet gave me directions to your house." This is funny to me, so I'm going to do the same.

But in the past few years, what could be called the puberty of Internet, in all its awkward glory, makes for a very interesting linguistic moment. What no one seems to talk about is the newly priveleged status of typing . We type to enter passwords, write e-mails, use keys and a mouse to navigate this mystical and epic interweb space. Everyone, however, is focusing on the space we access, not how we get there. I have a vested interest in buttons as an interesting icon of human-machine interaction (for a later post) but for now let's talk about typing and it's effect on language and psychology.

We've seen the efficient reduction of language into alphanumeric abbreviations, e.g. c u l8r, h@Rdc0R3, omg, ROFLMAO (side note: I don't think "Rolling on the floor laughing my ass off" was a popular idiom before Internet came along) etc. Then the collective libidinal investment in typed symbols manifested itself in the now iconic smiley face, :-), and the myriad other emoticons which followed.



The same symbols were available to scribes and printers hundreds of years ago...did they not see the simple face in a colon, hyphen and end-parethesis? They weren't stupid. They probably were just not interested in anthropomorphizing text. But medieval illuminated manuscripts say otherwise. The above illuminated capital from the Florentine Visconti Book of Hours (started by Giovannino de'Grassi and completed by Luchino Belbello da Pavia, image courtesy of Columbia.edu). The marvelous illustration takes the first capital letter, "O" as a frame for the creation of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Aside from beautifying the Biblical text of manuscripts, this art technique also proved as a source of distraction for the otherwise mind-numbing task of copying sacred text over and over and over. Much has been written on the strange monsters which appear in the margins of these texts; some say they are simply playful illustrations, others point to obscene examples as steam vents for the scribes, while still others say they reflect the haunted psychology of the Middle Ages. For now, suffice it to say they are abberations.

This monster, called a Blemmye, is a headless creatur with its face in its torso. It probably is the result of crusaders encountering warriors with faces painted on shields. He looks like a grotesque incarnation of the smiley face. Isn't he the ultimate emoticon?



Finally, I just wanted to mention a final abberation in our discourse with Internet: Spam. The poetics of Spam, which displays both the most absurd language in circulation (slogans and ads and nonsensical words) and the most calculated language (to avoid filters, to appear as language). Years ago, Spam was mostly ads for pornography, penis enlargement, dating services, etc. Then came the bogus bank inheritence claims (many of which are said to have originated in Nigeria) and real estate or stock market tips. Starting with Viagra, the sale of prescription drugs has also dominated Spam space. Ambien, Xanax, Vicodin, Percocet...that these are being hocked to the average internet user shows the national trend toward pill-popping.

But the most interesting phase is right now, with the unsettling nonsense of the fake-friend e-mail, designed to look like a reply to an e-mail you might have sent. Here are some the best ones (all real, I swear):

Re: anything miser
Re: bravado norms
Re: on heraclitus
Re: phthalate computer
an e-mail address
nullstellensatsz Rickey
Your help on a new project?
I to maricopa
colombo discover
She died saving all of us.
Re: precipice f
At before boerne
you do martel
Re: be thrall
or Sync
Re: I checkup

The content of these e-mails varies, but here's a pretty typical example:

"This one is shoe in to Double by end of week
Huge Volume spike, many people are already in the know

Imagine getting in on next HANS or FIZ
Fire Mountain Bev Company
SYm-FB VG
Extremely b ullish at 2 Cents
This is projected to go to $.70 in short alone, for long look at HANS and FIZ

Remember Snapple, this will be bigger

Get in Tuesday don't Miss it again
People are already loading up, you should too!!


cohesion because of injuries, illnesses, trades and suspensions. The Nuggets championships and we haven't been close to doing either in a lot of ways." points - since their 129-127 double-overtime win at Dallas on Wednesday night. handle when Anthony and Iverson are coming at you like that. They are hard to"

I'm not going to do a close reading of this, but what kind of language are we looking at? It's like a stock broker's stream of consciousness free-writing.

Oh brave new Internet...