Claustrophobia

...Or, I’m getting the sense that D&G are into vampires, horror and the supernatural which could be a problem for me because I believe I may be faint-hearted.

Because of my work, publishers send me free copies of books from time to time. Sometimes what they send me makes perfect sense – new editions of books I’ve already used before, but sometimes the choices seem fairly random. I often read the random books anyway. I see it as an opportunity --a book that has literally fallen into my hands out of a box full of styrofoam peanuts.

I read Edith Warton’s The Age of Innocence because of this. I really liked this book a lot. It was like a glass vase – delicate and cleverly engineered. I liked its density and intensity. I’d like to think about how she accomplished that. I’d read it again…It was so still and close in one way and so dynamic in another. I think about it whenever I take off gloves or receive flowers.

I also got Bram Stoker’s Dracula from a publisher. I thought I would like it because I’d just read The Monk, The Castle of Otranto, and Frankenstein and I was on a bit of a gothic kick. But Dracula deeply disturbed me. It gave me nightmares. I was clawing for air, swimming up towards the greeny sunlight…claustrophobic. I actually gave the book away to MP because I felt I could not even keep it in my house. My friend J. laughed at me! But it would take a lot for me to ever crack the cover of that one again…I don’t even want to write about it anymore…

No Wake

Saturday:
It isn’t a windy day just overcast and there is snow on the ground. Riding the bike in this. My cold ears but satisfied core. I sat inside today. It was too wet to sit at a picnic table and too cold. The boat was tied up. There was no wake.

We had been talking here (on the blog) before about picking where we left off in a book and our capacity for re entering the story…

A Thousand Plateaus surprised me today. I’ve gotten so used to having time to read it only on Saturday mornings that I forgot that I’d had time to read it early one morning (a Wednesday) in Kitchener at the bakery/coffee shop near my brother’s house.

When I opened the book today, I saw yellow post-its I’d stuck in there and stars and underlining and for a moment I couldn’t remember having made those marks. I hadn’t marked up the book very much before.

At the bakery/coffee shop near my brother’s house, they have an unusual system of service – reading a café becomes another way of reading: how to behave, knowing the rules, what language to use, where is the cream?, where are the lids?, who or how you pay?. At the City Bakery there are a lot of signs and a path to follow. Walk in the door, turn right for coffee (self-serve), fridge straight ahead for milk and cream (self-serve), don’t know about the sugar because I don’t use it, another turn (to the left this time) for baked goods (so far no interaction with people) that are well labelled with names and prices and then an old-fashioned bus fare box in which you deposit payment – preferably exact change but the sign said “we make change”. There was a staff but they were baking in full view behind the baked goods, in white smocks and hats (perhaps another sign so that there would be no confusion about their role as bakers).

All this reading before I sat down to read. When I read, I read about the history of ideas, the perpetual life of ideas. I had trouble understanding one thing – I put a question mark beside it. It was about D&G’s distinction between natural history and evolution. …something about internal vs. external conditions and relationships vs. production. I’ll keep workin’ on it!

After about half an hour of relatively uninterrupted reading – other people around me mostly reading newspapers and quietly talking, even a woman and two small children eating preschool bagels -- a couple of loud talking women sat down two tables away from me. I found it hard to concentrate…but it was time to go anyway.

Is one half hour adequate time to read?

There was a couple talking in the other coffee shop on Saturday too. It was almost like they were on their first date. Or maybe they’d known each other a long time ago and had lost track. There were mini bios and loud, almost forced laughter…I read for about 45 minutes there mostly able to concentrate.

Can you re enter the “zone” of the book and depart it so quickly? People often tell me they stay up “all night” reading a good book. I never do that. These days I often fall asleep reading DQ. I dream about him. I remember reading the bulk of J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey in a boat while my friends were fishing but that was some time ago…

Is there ever adequate reading time?

Reading while Driving

You fixed my hair...while we stood under the DQ sign at Union Station

While you worked, I read about the crunched up pieces of Oreo cookies they mix into some of their DQ ice cream concoctions. Not being much for ice cream, I was not tantalized and mostly didn’t read the description. I actually turned away from the picture of the brown one with darker brown bits…

I wanted to think more about my experience of reading DQ - not the frothy frozen confection/brazier burger/oreo bit DQ – but the one who is currently (in my reading experience) caged in a cart by “demons” (really all of his well-wishers from the inn) and being carried back to his village to be “cured” of his madness. And all this because he read a few too many books…

How much am I subject to this same kind of madness?

When I was a teenager I remember being accused of this madness by my cousin’s stepfather who was a chores guy. He spent all of his spare time doing odd jobs around the house and yard. I liked to read – mostly twentieth century American fiction at the time – and he was very offended by my propensity to “sit around” and read while there was “work to be done”. Awkwardly, I couldn’t explain to him that reading was work too…not that that really occurred to me at the time…that my teenage reading was important work for me. I just looked like a lazy slob to him…with no future…a kind of madness for someone like him who measured worth in different ways. He liked my boyfriend though. My boyfriend knew how to do things and didn’t particularly like to read. Now that I think about it, I don’t really remember him ever reading anything…

Can you read this?

The Truth about Reading;Or, Coincidences Abound

This week, my student, Mel, taught our class a lesson about Power Reading so I asked her if I could publish it here. She said okay. Here it is! She had included a few little drawings but so far I haven't been able to upload those (I'll keep trying). Power reading is something I really haven't thought about that much but will now. How about you? Activity #2 (Slides 12 & 13) is fun to try...Check out Mel's discussion questions on Slide 16. I've already posted this week about reading environment (see "Saturday Reading"). Where do you like to read? Where do you read most efficiently? Is efficiency an issue for you as a reader?

Slide 1
The Truth About Reading

Slide 2
An in class exercise in which we measure our current reading speed

Slide 3
The Reading Process
We are taught to read out loud by sounding out the words
As our confidence and vocabulary increase, we learn to “silent read”
The speed at which we read continues to increase until 5th or 6th grade
From 7th grade on, we focus on interpreting and understanding what we read and our reading speed remains the same

Slide 4
Factors that Decrease Reading Speed
1. Subvocalization
2. Pauses in eye movement
3. Short distance travelled by the eye
4. Regression

Slide 5
Subvocalization
SUBVOCALIZATION: the act of speaking the words you read out loud in your head
The average person speaks at 150 words per minute
Because of subvocalization, people are rarely able to read much faster than 150-200 words per minute

Slide 6
Example:
Read the following words to yourself as they appear on the screen:

CAR
APPLE
MOON
FLOWER

Slide 7
Showed pictures of the car, apple, moon, flower to prove that we don’t subvocalize when we look at pictures.


Slide 8
Eye Pauses
Our eyes are not in constant motion across the page
They move in blocks pausing between movements to take in the words

Slide 9
Distance of Eye Movement
Our eyes move across the page in small movements taking in one word at a time slowing our reading speed
In order to read faster, we must train our eyes to take in more words at one time

Slide 10
Regression
REGRESSION: our eyes backtrack while we read and we inevitably re-read words or phrases

Slide 11
The average student re-reads words or phrases 20 times per page, which drastically slows down ones reading speed

Slide 12
Activity #2:
Do you subvocalize?
As a group, try to say the rhyme “Mary had a little lamb” out loud (repeat it twice) while you read the following short paragraph
For those who forget the rhyme it is as follows:
“Mary had a little lamb who’s fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go.”

Slide 13
“Frank turned his right ear towards the doors, the better to hear. There came the chink of a bottle being put down upon some hard surface, and then the dull scraping noise of a heavy chair being dragged across the floor. Frank caught a glimpse of a small man, his back to the door, pushing the chair into place.”
-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, pg. 12.

Slide 14
Tips for Reading Faster
1. Try to force your eyes to move quickly across the page by using a guide (your finger or a pen)
- this increases speed
- it also reduces subvocalization
2. Avoid regression by pushing your eyes forward no matter what

Slide 15
Try to take in multiple words at a time when reading by working on your peripheral vision
- there are various practice exercises on the internet which help you to use your peripheral vision, including:

http://www.ababasoft.com/wider_eye_span/index.html

Slide 16
Discussion Questions
1. What is your ideal environment for reading?
2. How does this relate (positively or negatively) to any of the limiting factors of reading speed?
3. Do you find your reading speed varies with the type of reading you are doing? If so, what type of material slows you down and what type of material can you read quickly?

Slide 17
References
Mikhailov, Serge. Speed Reading is not Magic. http://ababasoft.com/wider_eye_span/index.html, 2005
Paulsen, Dennis. Power Reading for Student-Athletes. Power Reading Inc., 2004
Suggestions for Improving Reading Speed. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, http://www.ucc.vt.edu/stdysk/stdyhlp.html.

Red Leather Disco Pants and Ken Follett’s Whiteout: a recent GO Bus encounter

What do you find when you read over someone’s shoulder or as I tried to do, across the aisle of the GO Bus? For me it’s usually self-help, religion or steamy romance. Don’t people read cowboy novels anymore? I tried to memorize a line from page 328 of someone’s book on the #10 Beeline Express that had the chapter heading “London Bridge” but I can’t quite pull it out right now. Something about the “same swarthy man”…I also didn’t get much of the Ken Follett novel on the GO Bus. He kept turning the book away from me and towards the woman beside him and the one standing in the aisle, the woman with the red leather disco pants kept blocking my view – jostled by the motion of the bus – like the wind and the weather behind it?

Here’s the synopsis from www.ken-follett.com if you’re interested:
The story ...
A missing canister of a deadly virus. A lab technician bleeding from the eyes. Toni Gallo, the security director of a Scottish medical research firm, knows she has problems, but she has no idea of the nightmare to come.
As a Christmas Eve blizzard whips out of the north, several people converge on a remote family house. Stanley Oxenford, the research company’s director, has everything riding on the drug he is developing to fight the virus – but he isn’t the only one: His grown children, who have come to spend Christmas, have their eyes on the money it will bring.
Toni Gallo, forced to resign from the police department in disgrace, is betting her career on keeping the drug safe; a local television reporter, determined to move up, has sniffed the story, even if he has to bend the facts to tell it; and a violent trio of thugs is on its way to steal it for a client already waiting – though what the client really has in mind is something that will shock them all.
As the storm worsens, the emotional sparks – jealousies, distrust, sexual attraction, rivalries – crackle; desperate secrets are revealed; hidden traitors and unexpected heroes emerge ...

Saturday reading

I’ve set up a kind of semi-weekly Saturday morning ritual this fall – riding my bike down to the Bayfront. Part of that ritual is getting a coffee and reading. I read outside as much as possible. It’s pretty windy down there. Between words or phrases or sentences, I watch tour buses empty out folks in brightly coloured clothing who billow past me to get onto the Harbour Tour boat. Now that it’s November, that’s pretty much stopped but I’m still there reading.

I’ve been reading books about animals. I finished Steve Baker’s The Postmodern Animal down at the Bayfront and now I’m reading Gilles Deleuse and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. It’s not particularly a book about animals though there’s a chapter or two that point in that direction…but I was guided to it by someone who felt my reading of a poem by Mary Leapor with its grinning Pards, Tygers and Wolves was suggestive of D&G’s “becoming-animal”.

Despite not being an animal book, I like this book so far. It’s fun! It starts by giving the reader permission to read the book in any order they like except to read the conclusion last. I started with Chapter 10 “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…” but then I decided to read the introduction and then flit around from there. I’d assumed that I’d go back to Chapter 10 after the intro. but the intro. opened up other possibilities and I wasn't sure anymore. I actually found it difficult to decide where to go next. But I liked flipping through the text and throwing chunks of pages backand forth.

This book is really proving to be quite great (and funny too). I have to give the translator, Brian Massumi, credit as there are lots of puns which I assume have to be reconstructed or reconstituted in English or maybe they’re even funnier in French. I think there should be more pictures in the book. As I read I find I’m drawing a lot of diagrams and concept maps. The book is complex – conceptualized as and promoting a rhizome-world-view so I draw things out to understand them better. The rhizome itself seems very kinesthetic and visual to me. I’ve had a lot of “hands on” interactions with irises…and that’s how it seems to me…

The book might also benefit from having a different shape…maybe wider and shorter or longer and narrower or very deep and hollow – something you could reach into and pull text out of like those brainstorming balls for business execs. where you reach in and pull out a word to trigger a storm or stream of thought or a million dollars or something that exudes success. (I used to have one of those brainstorming balls and I found it interfered with my brainstorming. Eventually I got rid of the ball but kept the words in an old Crown Royal faux velvet drawstring bag…I’ll keep going on D&G tho’…)

How do you read a newspaper?

…or more accurately, how do I do it? And do I always do it the same way or does it depend on which paper I’m reading? I read The Hamilton Spectator at lunch yesterday. I’ve always liked reading the newspaper partly because you never know what’s in there, what might catch your eye, what you might read. It’s mildly adventurous. I’m interested as much in what I don’t read as in what I do read. I like the role that headlines play and photos and what draws you in and gets you to read something you might not normally read. I read newspapers in a totally unsystematic way and word for word, I doubt if I read even 1/100th of what’s there…

How did I experience Thursday November 17th 2005 through The Hamilton Spectator? There were four articles on the front page. Two were stories I’d already heard about on the radio so I didn’t read them: Human bird flu in China & Pearson airport landing fees (I figured the airport story would have a Hamilton angle on how Toronto’s misfortune could be Hamilton’s gain and sure enough on the back page the continuation of the A1 story was subtitled “Opportunities for Hamilton” which I didn’t read either). The story on the Lego vs. Megablocks courtcase didn’t really interest me and the “top” story “Test of Nerves: Meet-the-teacher night” made me laugh a little…I read a bit of it because I’m teaching an education course right now so I feel it’s my duty to keep up on news related to education...The article had bullet points & side bars to make it easy to read so I guess I skimmed it…

I didn’t read the article on deamalgamation on page A3 or the article called “Autistic kids love haven in school” (despite my earlier statement about keeping up on education issues). I skipped all the ads.

I did read an article called “Students’ lives upset by tornado fallout” which was about how a program for learning disabled adults is being moved to another school because the school that got hit by the tornado last week is closed and those kids have to be moved into the school where the learning disabled adults are now…Anyway the story was really about how difficult change is for learning disabled adults and how people think it’s disrespectful to create unnecessary stress in their lives. I read the story in part because it had a nice photo (a family portrait of parents with their learning disabled daughter) and because one of my students had just done a teaching session in class on advocacy for disabled adults. I was compelled to read the story!

I glanced at the story on the facing page which mostly consisted of maps and info. about local Santa Claus parades. The Hamilton parade route is really close to my house so it’s gtk when it is so I can understand why there’s sudden chaos on my street.

I read an article on the next page called “Hit by tornado trauma”. This story picked up on the lives of several people whose homes were damaged by the tornado & how they are not sleeping well because we’ve had very high winds ever since…

Probably the most memorable and interesting piece of info. came out of this article. According to the “warning preparedness meteorologist” who was quoted, November is a transition month between summer & winter. It's also known as the high-wind month and mariners call the November winds "The Witches of November" because of the howling sound the November winds make when they blow through the rigging on ships...

I skipped the next bunch of articles and then read one on A12 called “Mom shames aimless daughter” partly because it had a photo of a mom & daughter holding a hand printed sign that said “I don’t do my homework and I act up in school so my parents are preparing me for my future…will work for food”. So I was reading the photo and figured I should read the article. It was about a mom who made her daughter hold this sign while standing on a street corner (in Oklahoma City) as punishment. Public response was mixed. Someone called the Children’s Aid on the mom and accused her of psychological abuse…Apparently the girl has been well behaved since the event.

I was too tired to read the article on the facing page called “Not enough sleep for 3 million”…I guffawed at the “Drug could help drop spare tire pounds quickly” but didn’t read it. I did read the article on the same page (A14) called “Hey, it’s Shirtless Guy!” and it made me laugh out loud and disturb my coworkers. It was a campus-life type story about a guy who doesn’t wear a shirt at his university. He colours his nipples for various occasions and wears wrap-around sunglasses. He also has a chin beard. Some profs. ask him to put on a shirt in class (which he does). Apparently there is a club devoted to him at the school – the “Club Dedicated to the Fellow Without a Shirt” and he’s a school celebrity…I guess can argue that this article is also work-related for me and that’s why I read it (??).

I didn’t read the business page but I did think that Stelco’s court-appointed monitor, Alex Morrison, looked a little like a young Conrad Black…

I read one of the editorials – “The Net stays in good hands” about the World Symposium on the Information Society & I read a couple of the letters to the editor – usually one of my favourite parts of the paper and with the Spec sometimes I even know the people who’ve written the letters!! But not today…and they weren’t great letters and that was it. I flipped through the sports & the entertainment sections and read a little about the romance between Cathy Jones and Tom Wilson – for no reason except that I see Tom Wilson walking down Locke Street all the time. I also looked at the review for Man of La Mancha which is playing at some theatre in Burlington and I thought that that was an interesting real-life coincidence and pulls DQ back into the picture (I like that)!!

How do you read a newspaper?

The OED word of the day is "information fatigue"

Here's the link:
http://www.oed.com/cgi/display/wotd

...more later

But I'd like to hear more of your ideas about coincidences in stories...

Otto asked a good question a couple of days ago:

How can the resonance of coincidence carry any uncanniness if the story is fiction?

oops, I published this too soon and didn't get to finish!

back along Herlan Ave
??? street
Victoria Street
Park Ave
Queen Street
Charles Street
King Street
Hwy 8
Hwy 401
Hwy 6 South
the road that runs through Morriston
Victoria Road S.
Maddaugh Rd.
Centre Road
some sidestreet in Carlisle
Wildberry Drive (monster home lane -just for a laugh)
Elderberry Drive (the houses are over the top)
Carlisle Road
Hwy 6
York Road
Olympic Road
Cootes Drive
and then I parked and took a bus...

The signs I read on my drive today

I haven't had much of a chance to read as I have been driving today. I read some street signs. Let's see if I can remember them:

Locke Street
Main Street
Hwy. 403 East (Toronto)
Hwy. 6 North (Guelph)
Hwy. 401 West (London)
Hwy. 8 (Kitchener)
Ottawa Street
Charles Street
Victoria Street
Strange Street
Herlan Ave.
Strange Street
Victoria Street
?? street (had to take a detour because of construction)
Breithaupt Street
Weber Street
Victoria Street
Wellington Road 32
Speedvale Ave
Woolwich Street
Wellington Street
back the other way on Wellington Street
Eramosa Road
Delhi Street
back the other way on Delhi
Spring Street
Havelock Street
Derry Street
King Street
Spring Street
Delhi Street
Speedvale Ave.
Wellington Road 32
Hwy 7
Victoria Street
Weber Street
Breithaupt Street
?? street
Victoria Street
?? street
Herlan Ave.

As of about eleven o'clock last night

I was on page 395 of Don Quixote. I think maybe that’s about halfway but it looks like (without checking) that it’s not quite. I’ve been very hard on this book. I bang it around a lot. The cover is now the bookmark. I used to recommend to my students that they throw their novels across the room and half jokingly speculated that where a book lay after it was thrown might have some significance…Where things lie with DQ now does have some significance…as he has just become active again after sitting quietly in the wings for some pages now. I liked how we were given a glimpse of him on page 386:

And there stood Don Quixote, listening and speechless, pondering on these extraordinary events and attributing them all to the chimeras of knight errantry.

No wonder I feel so much like him as I too have been sitting quietly and listening and watching in wonder since we got back to the inn for the second time.

One thing I wonder about is the role of coincidence in a story.

In a short section of the book between the battle with the wineskins and the trick the innkeeper’s daughter & Maritornes play on Don Quixote, there are many coincidences linking apparently random visitors to the inn together. These are labelled “more strange events,” “yet more adventures,” “other strange events”. Why is DQ set apart and explained away so often -- “telling them who he was, and that they need pay no attention to him, for he was out of his mind” when all or almost all of the characters seem subject to the same wonder that he is…

How do you respond to coincidences in stories?

On not beginning from the beginning

I was watching the wind yesterday. We’ve had a lot of it. I read that a tornado touched down near my house last Wednesday but I haven’t really seen where it happened except in the Hamilton Spectator…

I asked someone for help in reading the sky. He said the fast clouds only told you that these are high winds. Knowing the wind direction is important but what he said was really important was what is behind the wind. I read that remark and saw the wind as a kind of veil. Is it keeping things from me? But I think he really meant that the weather that follows the moving clouds is what matters because it’s an indicator of what’s next and in that, the present moment matters less than the future… Gotta keep movin’.

I’m resisting writing an introduction. I prefer to take on a role – that of a wandering reader, une lectrice érrante. I recognize that reading shapes much of my experience and I want to understand that better. I’m willing to admit that, like Don Quixote, I’ve lost my wits to reading and I read the world from a skewed perspective. I’ve wondered if others find that too…

I have not made a reading list. I know that I often read with purpose because I have to find something out from a book but I also read very indiscriminately and I’m open to suggestions. I’m not starting any new books today or embarking on a new way of reading. My habit for many years is to read more than one book at a time and I often find myself attached to reading a particular book in a particular location or place.

I’m reading three books right now. Two of them I’m very committed to but at the same time I don’t want to read them quickly. I like them and I want to stay in their presence, under their spells for a while longer yet…

une lectrice errante

I think there's an accent on the first "e" of "errante" but...just to throw out the term...to define the purpose...or not...but y'all are welcome to begin the conversation...don't wait for me!

My Year of Reading begins Monday Nov.14th 2005