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’…)