The Dispiriting Everywhereness of Everything

At least the names weren't written on the ground as I walked along.

So I'm checking the copyediting of A Delicious Country, which actually has a publication season and a subtitle now, about which more in a moment. Anyhow, the copyeditor has done a wonderful job, catching my inconsistencies and fixing my spelling, capitalizing things that need capitalization and removing the occasional horrific solecism (only the horrific ones, mind you; the merely irritating solecisms he has wisely presumed to be just what I do, and if UNC Press bought it, he just shrugs and lets me dig my own grave). Anyhow: a thing of beauty.

But as I go through the typescript, I occasionally see something that even the copyeditor didn't question, because he'd have had no basis to question it. This is just about the last time I can correct such errors, so I'm open to them. One thing that caught me was my description of crossing "the Elmore Hodee bridge." Hodee? Really? I doubted that; it sounded like a mistype of "Hodge," yes? Well, I could have pawed through my notes from three years ago, but that sounded pretty awful. So I looked up "Elmer Hodge" and found something in a list of North Carolina bridges, but it was "Hodges," not "Hodge." Well, now what? Now I pulled up Google Maps, got down to street view, and looked at the god damned sign. It was the L. Elmore Hodges bridge, and it's right in the book now, but honestly: Do you not despair with me that we'll ever find another reason to leave our houses?

The copyeditor has also noted, for example, that I occasionally mention a book in text that does not show up in my bibliography, urging me to include it. Fair enough, a good point, to which i happily accede. At this point we all know of course that I do not need to go to the library to gather the information for such an inclusion; I don't even need to walk over to my bookcase and find a citation in the bibliography of one of my other sources. Not only can I find a full citation online -- I can find the entire book online, most times. For example, I mention Mark Catesby's famous Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, published in London in 1771.   And not only can I find the text of that seminal volume online: I can find the entire book, scanned page by page, in the University of North Carolina Libraries digital miscellany page.

Naturally I'm not going to be satisfied with checking the title page so that I know what year it was printed (MDCCLXXI, like I thought) and by whom (for Benjamin White, at Horace's Head, in Fleet Street, if you want to know). No, I'm going to have to go poking around among the images. The one at right Catesby calls the little owl, though you and I would likely call it a screech owl. I heard one call when I slept on someone's porch on the Intracoastal Waterway.

So this is wonderful. I mean it's terrible. I mean it's ... I mean I don't know what I mean. The world is a better place, and knowledge can advance faster, with resources like this available everywhere in the world with broadband and wifi. I passed through countless desperate little towns in North and South Carolina where, though aren't many knowledge jobs, knowledge workers will be able to take advantage of the low cost of living, move in, and do most of their

work online, then drive into Charlotte or Raleigh or Columbia or Charleston every week or so to check into a real library for resources not yet available. This is good, right? And yet. I have a shelf full of books -- I think about 150; I beg you not to ask me to count them -- that I have bought for this project, and about five instantly came to hand for reference checking, plus two more just about Catesby; one a series of researched essays about his contribution, a coffee table book filled with beautiful color prints (though not of the little owl), the other an inexpensive but thorough reprint of Catesby's entire book. So I could easily have found my information in any of those books. Is it a good thing that instead I engaged, at my desk, with a high-resolution scan of Catesby's actual work, and stumbled on the little owl? Or would it have been better to have my fingers on pages, looking through my beautiful color book or my informative monotone one, sitting in the armchair by my bookcase? I'm not asking rhetorically; I genuinely wonder. I have been able to consult dozens of rare sources for this project because of scanned books and various online resources, from UNC to the Library of Congress to Google Books to private map collections. That's great. On the other hand I have traveled to some of the world's great libraries, and looking at original books and maps, right there in front of your own face, touching them with your own fingertips, is not to be tossed aside lightly. I wrote about that experience with Lawson's own book here.

I know, I hear it too -- as I write it emerges: this is an all but unqualified good. Even Google Maps, which seems in some ways to urge us not to leave our homes, really doesn't do that unless you're the type who thinks not leaving your home sounds good. After all, I only looked up the L. Elmore Hodges bridge because I went out there and experienced it myself in the first place. A scroll along the entire route of Lawson's journey on Google Maps would be an entertaining if lazy afternoon. My walk along his route was a year of adventure and surprise. 

So I'm glad I raised the question, just to dismiss it. It can indeed sometimes feel like there's no reason to leave your house. Everything is online. But everything online is two-dimensional. I myself -- as I hope you do -- prefer the more satisfying three, to say nothing of the fourth dimension of time, through which we all move forward, online or out in the wind and rain. I hope you like these blog posts, and I hope more that when it comes out in spring you like A Delicious Country: Rediscovering the Carolinas Along the Route of John Lawson's 1700 Expedition, which by the way is its title and I told you I'd get back to that. Until spring, though, get out of the house and take a walk.

Or at least go to the library.