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...