Hunting bugs

I've spent the last few evenings sitting at the computer and tormenting my good friend Michael Arnold. Michael is labouring to design and format the upcoming Oceania issue of the long-running Kiwi literary journal brief; I've been sending him lists of the typos I've discovered in the draft copy of the issue.

I've always found typo-hunting a little like spotting and slaying cockroaches. There's the initial dismay, when an unpleasant blotch is found despoiling a clean white kitchen wall or a page of carefully composed prose, followed by the satisfaction of pouncing upon and removing the intruder. As the toll of typos or insects mounts, there's a strange feeling of achievement, which is eventually tempered by the realisation that, no matter how assiduously one labours, a few pests will always inevitably survive, in cracks between walls and in the midst of fat paragraphs.

Occasionally, when I'm standing on an armchair aiming a rolled up copy of The Western Leader at a wall where a cockroach stands perfectly, unaccountably still - trying to be mistaken, perhaps, for the stain left by a finger or a fizzing beer can - I experience a surge of guilt. I think about the Jain priests of India, who supposedly cover their mouths with intricate wire meshes, so that they cannot commit the mortal sin of accidentally swallowing a fly or mosquito. I wonder whether I'm not depriving the world of something essential, by cancelling the life of another bug.

In the same way, I sometimes feel guilty about spotting and disposing of typos. Some slips in spelling are merely embarrassing, but others seem inspired. I'm not sure if typos can provide, as Freud thought they could, sudden insights into the psyche of their authors, but they can cause new ideas and images to burst through what were fairly dull sentences. Should I really ask Michael Arnold to change the startling and possibly profound phrase 'The penis is mightier than the sword' into the cliche its author intended to use?

Some of my most glorious typos have been mechanically induced. I remember sitting up late at night writing a worthy but dull leaflet for the Anti-Imperialist Coalition, sometime in the last months before the invasion of Iraq. The leaflet discussed a wave of strikes mounted by public servants in Pakistan, and discussed their repression by the government of General Musharaff. Once I'd finished the leaflet I filtered it through a spellcheck, tiredly and automatically made the recommended corrections, sent the leaflet off to the printers, and went gratefully to bed. The next day, at the protest march where the AIC's new message was being distributed to the masses, I got some curious looks from my comrades. "What's all this about a General Mascara?" someone finally asked. "Are you taking the mickey?"

The best book I read in 2011 was The Wild Places, the mountaineer and dendrophile Robert Macfarlane's account of a series of journeys to the woods, cols, skerries, marshes, and overgrown culverts which still exist in the interstices of the conurbations of modern Britain. Macfarlane celebrates Britain's tenuous wildernesses in prose eloquent and subtle enough to remind us of Updike or Joyce. Macfarlane's book is a celebration of Britain's human as well as natural history, and he loves to juxtapose words and phrases drawn from different phases in the development of the English language. Like Joyce, he has a marvellous ability to bring the complex, abstract Latinate jargon the Norman invaders brought to Britain after 1066 into dialogue with the simpler, rougher words of the older Anglo-Saxon dispensation. Like Heidegger, he delights in showing how certain words we think we know well have their origins far in the past, when they meant things and performed functions which are now unfamiliar. On my first journey through The Wild Places I often thought that I'd spotted a typo - until I checked the dictionary, and found that the likes of 'lenticles', 'wold' and 'sigil' were indeed real, if ancient, words. Like the forests it celebrated, Macfarlane's book seemed constantly to be renewing itself, by swapping a word for one of its predecessors or avatars or synonyms.

I wrote this typo-filled poem, which was included in Feeding the Gods, the book I launched last November, after marvelling at Robert Macfarlane's time-travelling sentences.

City Life

I am writing a hedge.
One word attaches itself
to another, hawthorn
to manuka, ragwort
to gorse. I am writing a walk
in the countryside.
I am writing the country,
hedge by overgrowing
hedge.

You lean over my shoulder,
grub my sentences
like hedges. You lay words
like pegs
so walls can grow.
You mark out a corridor
with your conjunctions,
add doorways, prepositions.

I snatch back the pen
and change wall to wald,
change corridor to hallway
to holloway. I walk alone
through the country.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]