The hobgoblin of little minds
by Steve Xoh

“I normally have one or two main subjects that I want to explore in each issue of this Substack, but this time I felt a bit stuck getting started because there were lots of little things I wanted to share. I started to wonder whether I could turn any of these mini-musings into a full article, but realised that would mean padding them out with things I didn’t really want to write about, and they’d end up feeling like some over-egged, corny LinkedIn “thought leader” piece. These little ideas felt more like marginalia that would happily live alongside a main article as a kind of literary side-show. If this Substack were handwritten, that’s probably what I would do, in much the same way as the doodles, notes and musings I used to fill my school books with, much to the annoyance of my teachers, who would reprimand me and tell me that wasn’t what successful students did.

Marginalia are almost as old as books themselves. They are the small doodles, notes and drawings made in the gaps and margins that offer an insight into the thoughts, opinions and imaginings of the reader or author. Some of the earliest surviving examples of marginalia are over a thousand years old. They provide a record of uncensored inner thoughts, air opinions, critiques and arguments, and capture conversations between generations of readers. These spontaneous scribbles have revealed political loyalties, religious disagreements, dark secrets and sometimes even provide an analogue version of what we might nowadays refer to as the Director’s Commentary. A famous example, attributed to the scribe of a fifteenth-century manuscript, is a note saying, “Nunc scripsi totum, pro Christo da mihi potum.” which translates as, “Now I’ve written the whole thing. For Christ’s sake give me a drink.”

My little articles might not qualify as marginalia by this definition, but for me they are tangential thoughts that I want to share in a way that is unrelated to the main article. I want them to be handwritten in the margins, giving the reader the option to engage with them if they want to and maybe even add their own notes and thoughts. But the neatness of digital platforms has all but eradicated this as a form of writing. I had a similar issue when I published my first book, for which my daughter, then aged six, created some wonderful marginalia illustrations. I was able to include these in a beautifully haphazard and messy way in the physical paperback version of the book, but soon learnt it was impossible to do this in the Kindle version, so I never published a digital alternative.

I want to experiment though, and it seems the closest I can get to marginalia on Substack is to use the callout block quote function to share these mini-musings. It’s even more difficult to work out how to do this in the podcast version, as the listener would have to physically fast-forward past them if they’re not interested in being interrupted. But I’m going to give it a go. I need to get these little pieces out of my head and into yours and, through doing so, hopefully reclaim a bit of the messy analogue joy that is all too easily lost in the digital age.