Not reading much at all

...except a few recipes as this is one of the only times of the year that I do any recreational cooking and actually look at cookbooks for new things to try or try something that I remember worked well last year (and I obviously have to look at the recipe since I haven't made it for a year). So I made fruit bars, "butterscotch bark" and am about to embark on several recipes for a lunch tomorrow: a new soup, a new apple cake and maybe a cranberry-walnut loaf which is actually one of my mother's recipes. We remembered her making it and miraculously dug the recipe out of an old recipe box. It's written out in her handwriting in pencil and there's some nostalgia in reading it. How much more vivid is the experience of reading something handwritten? Or is it just the familiar hand that emotionally invests the writing and colours the reading of it?

Coincidences

I had been thinking yesterday that I wouldn’t write about DQ any more this week and that I would write about other reading I’ve been doing. But then, a strange coincidence…

My dad was an avid reader. I don’t know that much about the books he read. From the brief glimpses I got of them (they were usually library books), they seemed to be mostly political/spy thrillers. Years ago, I know he really liked John Le Carre so I assume these books he read more recently were similar. He also read other stuff. I occasionally gave him books. A couple of years ago, I remember giving him an Alistair McLeod book which he really liked – I think it had the word “Mischief” in the title. I remember that my dad asked me once if I had any poetry anthologies I could give him. Of course, I had quite a few as (see Wednesday November 30, 2005, “Claustrophobia”) publishers send them to me and I passed several anthologies over to him. We didn’t talk much about poetry but I know he particularly liked Tennyson and Browning. He also liked the Romantics – especially Keats and Shelley. I don’t know if he knew or liked any contemporary poetry.

But on to the coincidence…

Mostly my dad read newspapers and magazines. As I said recently (see Tuesday December 20, 2005, “Obituary”), I started reading the Death notices because of my mom. I got my more general interest in newspapers and magazines from my dad. I would often bring my dad newspapers and I also picked up his habit of reading the local paper whenever I went. In the summer when we are camping, I read the London Free Press and then I use it to start the campfire…

A couple of Christmases ago, I stuffed a copy of The Walrus into my dad’s stocking. He read it from cover to cover and since then has bought it sporadically off the newsstand. The Walrus appealed to him with its mix of Canadian politics and culture and its attention to design. When he finished reading an issue, he would usually pass it on to me commenting on and recommending various articles. And, yesterday, one of these issues (the May 2005 issue) of The Walrus reappeared. It was sitting on my living room couch, so I picked it up and browsed the cover. I hadn’t read this one, though I had seen it before. And, I was amazed to see that at the very bottom of the banner, there was a heading entitled “Docs and Don Quixote”. The title summarized the two review essays near the back of the magazine. I quickly skimmed both essays – I didn’t have my glasses and the room was quite dark. The first essay was called “The Life Quixotic” by Charles Foran. In it he “reviews” four books and he reveals (news to me) that “this year marks the 400th anniversary of the first installment of Don Quixote”!! In the essay, he mostly writes about the power of the novel to enchant and to send the reader on an imaginary quest. He focuses, coincidently, on the very part of DQ that I have just been reading – that intersection between Part I and Part II when so much is revealed about the construction of the text and the novel becomes much more than “just a story”. Foran uses this point to launch into a discussion of the endless potential of the novel form by asking rhetorically if “there [is] anything the novel form designed by Cervantes, can’t do”. He then posits that what we need to remember vis a vis DQ is that the novel form “can’t do reality. It can’t never not be a book”. This then allows Foran to move into a critique of the realist novel (in particular, what he calls “psychological realism”) and to celebrate the novel’s “true” definition: “always fictions, always invitations to set out on an imaginative quest”. He ends the review essay by suggesting that Jann Martel’s Life of Pi may also be one of the quixotic breed of novels – a “must read”.

Another coincidence: About a month ago, I started to write something about Life of Pi, about how I started to read it, recommended it to a friend and then regretted recommending it…but more of that later…

Folding; Or, Now as I have a taste for reading even torn papers lying in the street...

There's a sense for me in which reading DQ is like making a cake or maybe it's more like watching someone else make a cake. There's an interesting parallel too because recently I felt dissatisfied with the linearity of the blog form and I talked to someone about "folding the blog" not as in a card game but as in making a cake. Then, things that were said before or comments on earlier threads/postings could be stirred up from the past, from the bottom, from the scroll-down, from the archives and mixed-in. A kind of ongoing editorial process as a result of rereading the postings about reading and the comments on the reading about reading...

So how is DQ like this too? Well, right now, Sancho is telling DQ how he is being "read" by the village. Once Sancho recites his honest list (great madman, social climber, mad but amusing, valiant but unfortunate, well mannered but presumptuous), he lets DQ know that all this is not really noteworthy because he's just learned that DQ's story (including mentions of Sancho, Dulcinea, etc.) is "already in print under the title of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha". This is the very book that we/I have already read in Part 1! DQ surmises that the impossibility of such a book being in print when "the blood of the enemies [I] had slain was scarcely dry on [my] sword blade" means that the book must be the work of a "sage enchanter" and DQ's deeds given "to the Press by magic art". He insists on confirmation and Sancho dutifully goes off to bring back the man who told him about the book.

Once again, we're/I'm caught up in a web of enchantment engendered by reading (would D&G call it a fibre of enchantment? Would they also say that what happens next is the really crucial thing?). DQ is enchanted by his books of knight errantry and we/I are/am enchanted by the books of DQ's knight errantry. Who is our/my sage enchanter? How do we/I behave?

Starting Part II

I’m very excited so far about the first part of Part II of DQ. It’s a domestic scene so far with DQ back at home but everything’s changed irrevocably…as promised at the end of Part I. Would we/I read on otherwise? At the end of Part I as well we hear about the parchments detailing “the knight’s exploits…and the burial of this same Don Quixote, together with various epitaphs and eulogies on his life and habits” and we read samples of these sonnets and epitaphs (the ones not too worm-eaten). Is it odd to read of the characters’ deaths only halfway through the book?

In the dedication of the second part, Cervantes talks about the readers’ longing for more of Don Quixote and in the prologue he rails about the piracy and the false second part published to exploit and capitalize on the success of the first part. Did readers demand this? Or was Don Quixote, Part I, a “trend” some smart marketer hoped to use to his advantage? And originality, possession, ownership? Is this part of the discussion?

Cervantes does a version of throwing down the gauntlet in the prologue by displaying “restraint and modesty” even as he challenges the “false” author of the false second part. Is he also a Don Quixote playing out a fantasy of author-errantry? Cervantes argues that virtue will win favour, that his own second part will ring true because of its stylistic and literary similiarity to the first part. And yet so much of what we’ve/I’ve read already consists of stories cobbled together, told by other characters, written by other authors and compiled here in one place. Are these the multiplicities full of potential that D& G talk about? Should our concern then be with the too easy designation of madness assigned to Don Quixote (and Sancho, by association)? Or is there no need for concern as somehow Cervantes permits and enables readers to admire Don Quixote and I think admiration has something to do with looking and reflection…Mirar=to look, to look at, to watch. Mirador/miradora=spectator, Mirar de traves=to squint. All this makes it necessary, even essential for me to read on…

Obituary

Writing it wasn’t a necessity and I ended up letting my brother do it. But reading it was a necessity and, of course, I screwed up because I didn’t get the paper on the right day. I thought it was going in on Wednesday but it actually went in on Tuesday. When I found this out on Tuesday night, I was really freaked out that I had missed reading my own father’s obituary. I needed to read it. I went on the web and I printed it out from the Hamilton Spectator website. It had also appeared in the Guelph Mercury and the Kitchener-Waterloo Record. I also asked a friend to give me their copy of the newspaper. The next day, he delivered the obituary to my house. He’d cut it out neatly and taped it to a piece of paper. I was very grateful. But I really wanted more than that. I actually wanted to read the whole page – “Deaths”. When my friend Sylvia died in the summer, I ripped out the whole page and I read not only her obituary but everyone else’s as well. There was one guy right beside her. I can still sort of see his picture (published with the obit.) in my mind. His hair was flying around or something. I want to see the full page with my dad’s obit. in context. I want to see who else is in there with him. I guess I’ll go to the library at some point and check it out. It seems to be important. Even yesterday... I saw a bunch of newspapers in my neighbour’s blue box. He has a paper route and I guess he had some extras. I started looking through them hoping, I guess, to see Tuesday’s paper in there but all I saw was a whole stack of Thursday’s paper. The headline had the word “father” in it. I thought of reading the story but it was so cold and windy, I just walked home. I recall now that my mother was a big Obituary reader. I think it helped her to keep in touch with her community especially when she moved out of Toronto but kept reading a Toronto paper. She’d often comment on people she knew whose passing was only communicated to her through the obituaries. I’ve always read the “Deaths”. Summaries and lists and bits of a life. Sometimes a picture. I guess this is grieving…

Reading my Dad/Reading my Dad's notebook

I started to write this one before my dad died on December 12th but didn’t feel I wanted to post it until now…

On November 18th, my dad asked me to get him a notebook. He said he had some questions and he kept forgetting things so he thought he needed to start writing things down. I thought it was a good idea in part because it would give him something to do other than watch TV. Plus he always liked to write and is a very good writer.

He actually hasn’t been able to write anything in the notebook. We’ve used the notebook instead to report on our visits to him, to document his condition from day to day, to pass messages back and forth between Bruce and me, to record the phone numbers of visitors who’ve shown up while he is sleeping…Even the hospital staff started to use the notebook – mostly the Social Worker, just to let us know she’d been there…

I’ve been reading the notebook. There’s not a lot in it as his health has really deterioriated over the past two weeks. At first, when he was in the hospital, we would get him to tell us stories partly because our lives didn’t change very much from day to day and we actually didn’t have a lot of exciting news to tell him. So he rambled about his childhood to us – some stuff we had heard before but some new & some forgotten stuff. It was especially nice for “Riss” (my dad’s pet name for her) as she had never heard these stories and found them interesting.

I went through a brief identity crisis when my dad told us that my grandfather was adopted. But then the next day he told us that my grandfather was adopted by a relative and had the same surname before and after his adoption. I was surprised at how much this story affected me. I knew my grandfather had left Aberdeen as a teenager and had “gone to sea”. I didn’t know that he almost settled in Chicago. I knew he had worked on the docks but I didn’t know he’d been a stonemason or maybe I did…I started to remember things I hadn't thought about for a long time - perhaps a parallel to what my dad was experiencing. I started to write down the stories in the notebook as my dad told them but this was just before he couldn’t tell stories anymore. I only actually ended up writing down one story but it’s a good one about people who they met and adventures they had at a cottage at Boundary Bay. Part of the story was about border-crossing and the store that was half in Canada and half in the states. I thought again about how the story parallelled his precarious state of health. Reading the story in the notebook, scrawled and point-form as it is…I get a pretty vivid picture of good times…before.

More Saturday Reading

This week, I'm reading writing by my students. It's cutting into my time to do anything else though I have been able to finish Part 1 of DQ and I've just read the dedication to Part 2. I feel good that I'm inching forward. I want to think more about my reading the book within the book which is so inherent to the structure of DQ. I guess I've already talked about reading D&G this week. It was hard for me to forego reading it this morning but I am behind in my grading and my reading of student work so...

My students are writing reflective self-assessments in response to our class but also in response to an article by Edmund Hansen called "Creating Teachable Moments and Making Them Last". (I think this is the title but I don't have the article right here so I'm not sure). It's actually a great article that mostly focuses on students' lack of motivation throughout university. Hansen recommends "cognitive dissonance" as a way of stimulating and motivating students to help them achieve worthwhile learning outcomes. He also advocates for reflective writing as a way of enabling students to process the "unsettling" feelings that cognitive dissonance generates. As our course is both structurally unsettling and presents content that is often surprising to students, I use self-assessment and peer assessment through journal writing in small on-line groups as a way for them to explore their learning throughout the course.

What they write is interesting because it's often a revelation to them even as they are writing. This is partly because of the medium and because of how busy they are with other assignments and exams. It's a real-time, writing to the moment kind of experience for some of them and this is what I like to read the most -- the between-the-lines sense of discovery. Sometimes the writing becomes hyper or even garbled but the feeling is very powerful. The poorer ones tend to be written to a formula or a "try to please the teacher" template. If only they realized that what pleases me is their own honesty, excitement and even inability to fully in the moment comprehend what has happened to them over the last 3-4 months...Now that's exciting reading...

Claustrophobia 2

Rather than write a comment on the original posting (see Wednesday November 30, 2005 "Claustrophobia"), I thought I'd do a follow up as a post.

I feel like I'm repeating myself a lot. Not just in what I'm saying but in the physical paths that I'm taking these days. Hopefully, it's foundation-building like barre work and not just repetitive strain...

I was back at the City Bakery Cafe again. I went through their routine (now familiar after just one previous visit). I still don't really like the taste of the coffee or how loud the owner-guy is but it's conveniently located in relation to my destination and because of my lack of familiarity with Kitchener, at least I know where to find it when I need it...I haven't tried their bagels yet which seem to be their specialty.

It was a Wednesday and I read D&G again. I was right about their interest in werewolves and vampires so I'm kind of creeped out by what they're writing right now and hoping it will end soon. (I do have the option of skipping to another chapter – after all, they gave the reader permission to do so…but for some reason, I haven’t). While I really like the potential implied by their concept of becoming animal, it seems to be turning towards a view of "bordering" as necessarily horrific. Or what seems horrific to me. I know I can’t accept it a certain level. The book, then, becomes even more interesting and successful as a process that’s working on me and affecting me (deeply?). I keep wriggling around trying to counter their argument. I’m thinking about the beauty and intelligence of rats (we have a pet rat) and I’m thinking about having read Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto last winter…and the interesting things that she had to say about working with her dogs and reaching some kind of union with them that D&G argue is impossible with pets. D&G are completely dismissive and disparaging of relationships between humans and their pets – citing them as “sentimental Oedipal animals” (240).

I do like what they have to say about becoming-animal as outsider and as a disruptive force. I like pack and anomaly, I just don’t know if I can go any further with it. Does the resisting reader get to hang onto their wits (albeit at some cost)? Do DQ and others get to experience something important that I really never will experience?

In order to serve you better...

...we must limit the number of items in each change room to a maximum of 4 items at a time (a sign I read repeatedly as I waited for a changeroom at Urban Behavior)

What’s the relationship between reading and editing? I suppose we are always editing to some extent. Maybe that’s the secret of “power reading”…

I am currently revising an essay for publication. So much of this kind of work involves reading and puzzling together what other people have written previously about your topic. In some ways, all I really provide is my piece of the puzzle. The rest of it is often already done just waiting to be read and lifted into another context (with due credit given, of course). It’s a creative practice, a kind of mapping process and really, I guess, rhizome-like in its form and potential. I find it very draining to do this kind of work. On the other hand, you never really know where it will lead you and that can be fun!

There’s also an enormous time lag involved. The piece I’m working on now is about bees. I haven’t thought that much about bees for a while but back in 1996-1999, I thought about them a lot. Then in 2004, I wrote something new (for me) about bees trying to think about them in some new ways and in 2005-6, I’m revising that writing…so about 10 years of bees and I still feel I don’t know much about them and so I read more…

I also try to hang out with them. It’s harder to do in December but in the warm days, I sit near them and watch them hovering and interacting. Is this a kind of reading too? It's something Maurice Maeterlinck highly recommended (albeit in a weird way) in 1901 in his critique of Ludwig Buckner:

Buckner's treatise is comprehensive enough, but contains so many hazardous statements, so much long-discarded gossip and hearsay, that I suspect him of never having left his library, never having set forth himself to question his heroines, or opened one of the many hundreds of rustling, wing-lit hives which we must profane before our instinct can be attuned to their secret, before we can perceive the spirit and atmosphere, perfume and mystery, of these virgin daughters of toil.

Certainly what Maeterlinck has to say about the bees internalizes his response, his interpretation. It's a kind of reading...

Rereading/Revisiting Happier Saturday Reading...

I may not get to read much tomorrow...family matters...does this mean that reading really isn't a priority...for anyone?

Moving slowly towards the end of Part I of DQ..

“the other Mick” planted a seed in my mind with his talk of Part II of DQ (see Tuesday November 15, 2005 - “As of about eleven o’clock last night”) and I have to admit it’s made me goal-focused in a way as I realized a couple of days ago that I was getting close to the end of Part I.

But I am so tired right now and I am reminded of what Mel said about reading (see Wednesday November 23, 2005, “The Truth about Reading”). I feel myself experiencing regression (“our eyes backtrack while we read and we inevitably re-read words or phrases”). I want to read ahead but can’t somehow. Am I perhaps enchanted?

I have actually reread the section of DQ I’m on right now. It’s just after the part where Sancho Panza tries to interest DQ in the idea that he actually may have the personal power to release himself from the cage & the cart due to the fact that he is not really under an enchantment. This is in Chapter XLVIII. It’s funny because Sancho’s proof revolves around the fact that DQ has an “inclination to make big or little waters” (ie. he has to go to the bathroom). From Sancho’s perspective, if you have “normal” bodily functions, you can’t be enchanted as enchantments remove all desire, all need for these processes. This is a logical argument but it seems that DQ’s desire to be enchanted is stronger because he argues that it may be the old way of enchantment, but that in this new age of knight errantry that he is pioneering, “time may have changed the fashion from one kind [of enchantment] to another” (434). So he determinedly stays enchanted.

Is this a kind of stubbornness to which we all fall victim? (Cervantes seems to think so at least in the relation to the “enchantment” of the Catholic Church – the intertwining conversation DQ has with the canon here is revealing…and funny…) What other enchantments do we feel committed to?

I think the last one was an R, what this?