This title will be available soon. Where the rituals of academic life are concerned, there are few exercises as rudimentary, at once essential and banal, as taking notes. A student goes to class and reflexively pulls out a spiral-bound notebook, scribbling furiously to keep pace with the lecture. A scholar produces copious marginalia in an essay or book: in this sense, his or her library is not so much a collection of volumes on a shelf as an archive of palimpsests. Field notes are the preferred literary genre of anthropologists, linguists, and sociologists venturing beyond the walls of the ivory tower; ...