Last night I just wanted to read some entertaining junk, so I tried Complicated Shadows: The Life and Music of Elvis Costello by Graeme Thomson, which I bought used at Amaranth Books in Evanston. For the most part it bored me (I went back to the brick-o'-Neal for a while), but the one who came before me must have been fascinated. I noticed the first few pages had been carpet-bombed in pencil--underlines and parentheses everywhere. Then I flipped around and found that EVERY FUCKING PAGE had been marked up, so much that it got difficult for me to concentrate. Example: Page 105, which I did not read to. I think I quit around page 10. You'll probably have to click on the pic and look at the large version to make all the marks out.
I'm a cheap fiend who buys a lot of used books, so I'm used to reading around college students' dutiful highlighting and margin notes, because those usually serve to emphasize a manageable number of quotes, facts, and/or ideas. But this person started marking stuff--"OK, I want to come back to this, and this, and this, and this"--until he/she ended up deciding to try and remember the whole damn thing. These aren't just the random marks of someone following the words with a pencil--notice how the underlines and parentheses always seem to cleanly mark a coherent fragment, or just one word.
I bet this dutiful Elvis tracker managed to win free tickets for tomorrow's Ravinia performance. I just now remembered to order a lawn ticket. More on that Monday. Or maybe this person brought the book to Amaranth completely embarrased by his/her obsessive actions, forgot the whole affair, went home and put on King of America and let the memory fizzle out.
