Left-handers are not the only 10 per cent minority to be branded 'sinister'
by the more fearful and manipulative elements in European culture ...
spatial re-articulation of most standard routines and artifacts (including
texts and some kinds of images) must be quite taxing and frustrating and
even angering ... I think of the corresponding experience of people who
have to constantly re-orient to a 'heteronormative' culture-made world. And
there are quite a number of other similarities in the discussion, from the
nature/nurture origin, to the normal variation vs. traumatic etiology, to
the dichotomy vs. cline of degree, to the single-category vs. multiple
different forms co-classed together (think also here of ADD or
schizophrenia), to the issue of what is pathological by nature vs.
pathologized by culture, ...
All those peculiar characteristics with regard to writing and handling
books are of course the normal orientation for, say, Chinese written in the
traditional way (top to bottom and then in columns that flow from right to
left). Printed books have the spine at the right side, open left to right,
begin on the left leaf, and end with just the back cover at the left of the
last page. Magazines from Taiwan, too, and comic books. A lot of Japanese
is printed this way as well. I usually pick the books up the wrong way and
have to turn them over, feeling confused and stupid. But I could well
imagine, if immersed in this culture long enough, and without constant
reminders from our own, that one day I would just 'switch' ... perhaps at a
higher price today than my brain would have paid to do it when I was six.
JAY.
PS. Did those classic experiments with the up-down inverting glasses, in
which people also suddenly 'switched' after a time, include a case with
right-left reversal rather than vertical inversion? it may be that
right-left is wired a little deeper ... or comes to be so.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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