Psychonavin' to the Grand Canyon

Rerun, Reread: A Follow Up of Sorts

While I was reading D&G the other morning, I made some notes as usual and underlined and starred bits I liked or question-marked things I didn't understand. And I drew out a few things in my cartoony way...

But sometimes it just comes down to understanding what the words mean and understanding someone else's associations - where they're coming from, not where you're coming from. When D&G start out chapter 3 with 'stratification', my mind jumped to the Grand Canyon. I 'saw' the concept in geological terms. When they moved on to talk about 'double articulation', I immediately assumed it was geological and tried to understand it in those terms. Finally, yesterday (cause it was bugging me), I decided to look up 'double articulation' in the dictionary. And now I know that I'm supposed to be thinking about linguistics and the infinite use of finite elements in language. Reading about this in D&G is bound to be tricky because they won't merely describe it, they'll enact it, they'll double articulate 'double articulation' like crazy. I know them now. They won't be able to resist!

Reading in someone else’s territory

The dangers in establishing and/or breaking a routine:

Because somebody watched the D&G video on UTube and commented on that they’re having trouble reading D&G, I had the strong desire to read D&G. I also responded to the UTube person’s comment, and tried to be reassuring. I encouraged them to stick with it. I know that I will be reading this book for a very long time. I may never stop (though I didn’t tell them that).

I was also spurred on to read D&G again by the return to the place where I had photographed the book last fall. We went there the other day to escape the heat – an early evening picnic.












So, I took the book out with me the other morning and sat with a coffee and started chapter 3 which is a really good chapter (so far) about geology – stratification, double articulation, the distinction between content & expression (so far).

But, inadvertently, I sat at someone else’s table at a coffee shop I don’t usually go to in the morning. I didn’t know the routine there but the one guy who seemed to be all about calling the owner by her first name and assembling a whole group around him at this place in the morning before work was very put out. I heard him loudly comment several times that he was sorry that they couldn’t all sit at their regular table. Nobody else seemed to care. But it made me overly conscious of my own presence at times when I just wanted to sink into the D&G environment.

I stayed there self-consciously for about half-an-hour.

Reading Rebecca reading the battle for Ivanhoe

Ivanhoe can’t fight right now. He’s too ill and Rebecca’s tending to his wounds and his illness with her special physic skills (passed down through generations of Jewish women). And there’s a vibe goin’on between the two though they both know it’s a vibe that cannot be. Yikes! So, it’s bound to create future tension in the story as an experienced reader will know…For now, though, in the moment of the story, it’s interesting how a scene in which Rebecca looks out the window (carefully as the Front-de-Boeuf’s castle where she and Ivanhoe and others are being held captive is under attack) and describes the details and progress of the battle to Ivanhoe can be filled with that potential. It also implicates the reader in a more active way. An interesting approach to narration…where it’s actually more exciting to have the scene filtered through Rebecca than to read a description direct from Scott.

In a sense reading to someone else always has that potential. It’s intimate even when you read to your child or your rat or when someone reads to you on the radio like the other week when CBC reran that Al Purdy dramatization and Gordon Pinsent in the character of Al Purdy read “The Country North of Belleville” and “Wilderness Gothic” to me!* ( I did have the weird, unpleasant experience of listening to someone reading to their child from an adjacent campsite when we were away a couple of weeks ago. I found it incredibly irritating like listening to a radio with the sound turned down too low but even more irritating than that because it was a children’s story and it had that singsongyness to the reading. I went for a walk just to escape it.)


*(I love both of those Purdy poems –

from “The Country North of Belleville” :

This is the country of our defeat

and yet

during the fall plowing a man

might stop and stand in a brown valley of the furrows

and shade his eyes to watch for the same

red patch mixed with gold

that appears on the same

spot in the hills

year after year

and grow old

plowing and plowing a ten-acre field until

the convolutions run parallel with his own brain ---



From “Wilderness Gothic”:

An age of faith moving into transition,

the dinner cold and new-baked bread a failure,

deep woods shiver and water drops hang pendant,

double yolked eggs and the house creaks a little —

two shores away, a man hammering in the sky.

Perhaps he will fall.)

3 views of something potentially biological I encountered at work today

not integument

maybe moil?

or, perhaps...egregious?

Integument

integument
/integyoom nt/
• noun a tough outer protective layer, especially of an animal or plant.
— ORIGIN Latin integumentum, from integere ‘to cover’.

Does this apply to book covers which are outer protective layers but vary in their toughness? Integument refers to only a part of the relationship between the outer and the inner. Integument doesn’t reflect on the character of the inner just the toughness of the outer. And what constitutes toughness? In the case of the Seven Types of Ambiguity, the library book is hardcover with a slip cover and a plastic cover. It’s scuffed but in ‘nearly new condition’. Ivanhoe has been rebound in one of those special library leather covers that are bumpy and quite indestructible. The girl-on-the-bus’s Ivanhoe was really flash, likely lightly plastic-coated like those new paperbacks are these days…My old DQ lost its cover but this provoked comment about Daumier and DQ illustrations and I’ve kept the cover and use it as a pock-marked bookmark. Integument reminds me of Marianne Moore’s poem “The Pangolin” which I haven’t read for a while but will now:

The Pangolin

Another armored animal–scale
lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they
form the uninterrupted central
tail row! This near artichoke with head and legs and
grit-equipped gizzard,
the night miniature artist engineer is,
yes, Leonardo da Vinci’s replica–
impressive animal and toiler of whom we seldom hear.
Armor seems extra. But for him,
the closing ear-ridge–
or bare ear licking even this small
eminence and similarly safe
contracting nose and eye apertures
impenetrably closable, are not;–a true ant-eater,
not cockroach-eater, who endures
exhausting solitary trips through unfamiliar ground at night,
returning before sunrise; stepping in the moonlight,
on the moonlight peculiarly, that the outside
edges of his hands may bear the weight and save the
claws
for digging. Serpentined about
the tree, he draws
away from danger unpugnaciously,
with no sound but a harmless hiss; keeping
the fragile grace of the Thomas-
of-Leighton Buzzard Westminster Abbey wrought-iron
vine, or
rolls himself into a ball that has
power to defy all effort to unroll it; strongly intailed, neat
head for core, on neck not breaking off, with curled-in feet.
Nevertheless he has sting-proof scales; and nest
of rocks closed with earth from inside, which he can
thus darken.
Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast
each with a splendor
which man in all his vileness cannot
set aside; each with an excellence!
"Fearful yet to be feared," the armored
ant-eater met by the driver-ant does not turn back, but
engulfs what he can, the flattered sword-
edged leafpoints on the tail and artichoke set leg-and
body-plates
quivering violently when it retaliates
and swarms on him. Compact like the furled fringed frill
on the hat-brim of Gargallo’s hollow iron head of a
matador, he will drop and will
then walk away
unhurt, although if unintruded on,
he cautiously works down the tree, helped
by his tail. The giant-pangolin-
tail, graceful tool, as prop or hand or broom or ax, tipped like
an elephant’s trunk with special skin,
is not lost on this ant-and stone-swallowing uninjurable
artichoke which simpletons thought a living fable
whom the stones had nourished, whereas ants had done
so. Pangolins are not aggressive animals; between
dusk and day they have the not unchain-like machine-like
form and frictionless creep of a thing
made graceful by adversities, con-
versities. To explain grace requires
a curious hand. If that which is at all were not forever,
why would those who graced the spires
with animals and gathered there to rest, on cold luxurious
low stone seats–a monk and monk and monk–between the
thus
ingenious roof-supports, have slaved to confuse
grace with a kindly manner, time in which to pay a
debt,
the cure for sins, a graceful use
of what are yet
approved stone mullions branching out across
the perpendiculars? A sailboat
was the first machine. Pangolins, made
for moving quietly also, are models of exactness,
on four legs; on hind feet plantigrade,
with certain postures of a man. Beneath sun and moon,
man slaving
to make his life more sweet, leaves half the flowers worth
having,
needing to choose wisely how to use his strength;
a paper-maker like the wasp; a tractor of foodstuffs,
like the ant; spidering a length
of web from bluffs
above a stream; in fighting, mechanicked
like to pangolin; capsizing in
disheartenment. Bedizened or stark
naked, man, the self, the being we call human, writing-
master to this world, griffons a dark
"Like does not like like that is obnoxious"; and writes error
with four
r’s. Among animals, one has a sense of humor.
Humor saves a few steps, it saves years. Uningnorant,
modest and unemotional, and all emotion,
he has everlasting vigor,
power to grow,
though there are few creatures who can make one
breathe faster and make one erecter.
Not afraid of anything is he,
and then goes cowering forth, tread paced to meet an obstacle
at every step. Consistent with the
formula–warm blood, no gills, two pairs of hands and a few
hairs–that
is a mammal; there he sits in his own habitat,
serge-clad, strong-shod. The prey of fear, he, always
curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work
partly done,
says to the alternating blaze,
"Again the sun!
anew each day; and new and new and new,
that comes into and steadies my soul."

Marianne Moore

A small coincidence and a big one

I enacted my plan re: Seven Types of Ambiguity. After I got back from my vacation, I went to the library and checked it out again. That was about a week ago. I’ve barely opened the book and certainly haven’t started reading it again. I wonder how long it will take…

I have, though, been reading Ivanhoe. Every night and I’m moving along. Ivanhoe himself still hasn’t shown up again but I’ve just begun a new chapter that promises to reintroduce him or, at least, there’s a preamble about how Rebecca and Isaac have been sheltering him since he was wounded at the tournament. Funny that Cedric hasn’t seemed too concerned about his whereabouts…but he’s been busy.

There are two coincidences though. A small one and a big one. Again, on the bus, I watched people reading. They seem to do it mostly to shut people out. Perhaps it makes the trip faster. It just makes me feel sick when I do it but, as I’ve said before, I fear that I may be faint-hearted. Maybe I need to ‘read past the nausea’. Is that what D&G would suggest? That I’m missing something by refusing to participate in the interiority of reading on the bus? The haecceity of reading on the bus. I’m still surprised by what’s revealed through reading choices. The other day two women sitting side by side opposite me were reading. One was reading Ivanhoe (thus, the coincidence) and it was a jazzy edition and she was a very young woman – perhaps still in high school…what was the appeal of the book for her? Or maybe she had to read it for school or something…but who would teach Ivanhoe ? The other woman beside her, a middle-aged woman was reading a much older book, well-worn, perhaps from a used book store or garage sale. The cover design was distinctly 70s. This woman’s book was called How to be an assertive (not aggressive) woman in life, in love and on the job. The two women sat side by side reading, each unaware (unless they had awesome peripheral vision) of what the other was reading. The Ivanhoe woman could have told the How to be woman about Rebecca’s resistance to the Templar’s attempted rape, how she earned and commanded his respect despite her complete lack of power in a society that labelled her ‘despicable’. What could the How to be...woman tell the Ivanhoe woman? Perhaps that women need to tell their own stories…for themselves…

But to the other coincidence. And that is that I did look inside the Seven Types of Ambiguity when I got it out of the library again, just to find my place and to mark it so that when I was ready to begin again, I could just begin…I remembered that I had read up to about page 200. So I started looking at the book around page 200ish to see if I could pick up the thread. This is actually a really interesting part of reading and one that I engage in often because I read so slowly and so sporadically and read more than one book at a time. I also often lose my bookmark. So I ranged around page 200 and it seemed new to me. I think I’d read to the end of chapter 11 and maybe just started chapter 12. So now I read ahead into chapter 12 to see if I could find the exact spot where I had stopped before and I found on page 203 (far beyond where I had stopped reading before I took the book back to the library) Alex’s description of Simon (reported to the reader by Angela/Angel/Angelique) as “increasingly vehement tilting at windmills” – the premier cliché of DQ (or at least the image most people grasp and repeat when talking about DQ. And I’m back at DQ again. Will I ever stop reading that book?


O
and here are 7 words, the first ones drawn out of the bag after the new office move: egregious, integument, complexity, tuberousness, garment, gymnasium, insulation.

Psychonav 4 (3 days)

Very Random Reading Notes

I don't think I've been away from the blog for this long before.

I had a vacation and no computer.

I didn't do all of the driving.

I had the opportunity to read a lot but did and didn't.

I walked, biked, knitted, talked. I took our pet rat to the beach and let her smell the wind and the next day we took her back and let her dig around in the sand. I took quite a few pictures of clouds. Reading was down the list. But this is what I did read:

The London Free Press. Always good for starting the campfire...We used The Globe and Mail too. But I always read the Free Press:

Lots of 'human interest' stories - "Inseparable in life and death" about two London brothers who were killed in a car accident in Georgia, "Biz Wiz Kid" about an 18 year old web designer over achiever, "Parking ruling angers Richmond merchants" about a 'conflict of values' between street parking and public transit advocates, "Martial arts man's death a mystery" about a suspicious death in a small community near London "where nothing ever happens" (quote from resident). "Notice of Liquor Licence Application" for Williams Coffee Pub on Wonderland Road South, London.

I mostly check out (in detail) the Environment Canada 5 day forecast. I like the little "AccuWeather" cloud and sun and lightning bolt cartoons and can quote the "probability of precipitation" percentages on demand.

The Food Today section on June 28 had a page of strawberry salsa recipes (will I ever make one?) and one semi-interesting article called "Is 'healthy' food healthy?" which is mostly a review of a book called The End of Food by Thomas Pawlick. The article points out that supermarket produce is less nutritious than it used to be - mostly because the food is trucked in from so far away (and artificially ripened) and because the emphasis is on the look of fruit and vegetables over the flavour & food value. Buy local is the message.

I also read/looked at the July issue of Teen Vogue. Nautical styles are in. Warnings against tanning are big and I don't really remember much else. Oh, something about 70s style wedge sandles... And lots of pictures of bikinis with nobody in them.

I read The New Yorker on the beach. There was one good cartoon about a girl, her boyfriend and her dog. I enjoyed reading The New Yorker and kept thinking about how much I like reading it while I was reading it but I actually don't remember anything I read. It's interesting...one of those sensual reading experiences totally in the moment. I don't know if they'd be happy to hear this. I think you're supposed to remember what you've read in The New Yorker.

I bought Harper's but didn't get around to reading it.

I brought Ivanhoe and D&G but didn't read them either. I also brought Donna Haraway's The Companion Species Manifestowhich I've already read but wanted to read again. I didn't read that one either though I did bring it with me to the beach one day. I think I brought too many books - though a couple of my companions read two novels each over 4 days. You never know...

I think what I really focused on was the knitting and the clouds. I tried to learn to read my knitting so that I could see which row I was on. My friend A. helped me with this. She showed me how to tell a purl stitch from a knit stitch and how to count rows. I'm still hesitant but I definitely improved my knitting literacy over the last week. My cloud literacy is no better but I did see a thunderstorm come in. The water and sky changed colour so dramatically. It was astounding to see the turquoise and navy blue. We almost stayed too long poised in the wind and wondering.