My Year of Reading

Wrapping and Unwrapping

2006-11-13T09:20:00.000-05:00

On the subject of my current reading:

I am very close to finishing Roxana. She is being, to some degree, unwrapped now, undone by her incredible past, unable to fashion a future. It's a kind of tragedy or, at the very least, a judgement...which is often to my mind a greater tragedy than a straight-up kill-everybody-at-the-end tragedy.

I am obviously not listening to Defoe's judgement at some level for I am fashioning a future through two new blogs: la lectrice errante and (slightly more than) 50 walks. You're invited! I'm not sure if I should design new personalities for these two blogs. It's a possibility or perhaps even an opportunity...What would D&G think?

Other reading: Choice books picked up in Halifax and at the Hamilton Small Press Book fair. The favorite, I think, is What I would Buy if I had Money by Dan B. It's photocopies of grocery store ads (mostly) with some Future Shop ads thrown in occasionally. It is a pure expression of desire, a desiring. I don't think it's widely available. In fact, when I bought it for 4 bucks, the woman in the gallery where I bought it said that it wasn't a book that they normally carried. It was probably just dropped off by the guy/author, snuck onto the shelf. Who gets the 4 bucks then?? Applicant by Jesse Reklaw is disturbing/interesting and widely available (check it out) but not as disturbing as the book I bought last year at the book fair which was called All the Guns I've Ever Had which I thought was fiction. After I talked to the author, though, I realized it was non-fiction...still it is a very visually pleasing book...

And, finally, the most recent book I've purchased: The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. It was a necessity because the library copy kept getting recalled (ha ha). I like the chapter "The Parts of a Book". I suspect this will become very important to me as I wander...

Just a note

2006-10-31T12:00:00.000-05:00

It was just a note from the Interlibrary Loan department that The Philosopher's Dog is three days late...with a threat...

If the above materials are not returned within 3 working days, you will be banned from use of RACER until the materials in question are returned. This ban will be lifted only upon receipt of the overdue materials by the Interlending department.

YOU WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL OVERDUE CHARGES.

If you have already returned this item please disregard this message.

I took it back. I need my access to ILL more than I need to read The Philosopher's Dog. I never got past page 38. I think it was the hockey players from Minnesota who killed it. When I couldn't recommend it to them, it died for me too...

I did read a wonderful book the other day though. I actually bought it I liked it so much. I'll dig it up at home and read it to you tomorrow...

P.S. My Year of Reading is almost finished and I'm thinking about my blogging future plans which I will formally announce (with links) soon...certainly before November 14th.

Time to Read

2006-10-24T12:18:00.000-04:00

I’m on page 38 of The Philosopher’s Dog by Raimond Gaita. It’s an engaging read inasmuch as it’s a series of animal ‘stories’ or maybe, more accurately, animal ‘true-crime’ punctuated by thoughtful bits where Gaita reflects, questions, turns over assumptions he’s made about the animals he comes into contact with and asks not only why he makes assumptions but what’s been internalized by the culture in general. He also asks the reader to think about these questions.

I’m wondering how he does it. I’ve already referred to the introduction and his suggested method for reading the ‘philosophical bits’. I think the title contributes because we know that the focus will be on the relationship between a philosopher and his dog and that philosophers tend to be ‘thinky’ people. We expect the book to be philosophical. Gaita also asks a lot of questions in the book (at least up to page 38) and he begins to answer the questions…for himself. For example, in one paragraph on page 36 there are four questions related to the issue of animal euthanasia as Gaita faces a decision about it:

Was I wrong to intend to kill Tosca that way?
Should I extend to all animals the kind of compassion I would extend to Gypsy, respectful of their dignity in a way that is not consistent with "putting them out of their misery"?
Am I wrong even to ask that question?
Should the answer not be obvious now?

There’s always a lingering sense that these questions are relevant for us too. It’s tonal and moral. It puts the pressure on. Gaita, it seems, wants to engage in a dialogue with us but he can’t hear what we say in response. It’s productive in the sense that we may discuss his questions with others. But that hasn’t happened to me yet.

I’ve been travelling over the last few days. I went to the hotel pool/hot tub/gym area. I brought The Philosopher’s Dog with me. I met a group of hockey players from Minnesota at the pool and several of them asked me what I was reading. I could tell that they were put-off the title but that they were okay with the idea that the book was about dogs & animal stories. They asked me if the book “was any good”. I said “it’s okay”. I didn’t feel that I could give it an enthusiastic and unequivocal endorsement.

Now, that it’s been said, I’m feeling at one level that I don’t want to finish the book. I wonder if that’s to do with laziness and not wanting to bother to answer Gaita's questions…or feeling pressured…or just that it’s true, that the book is just “okay”.

New Wanderings/New Book

2006-10-10T14:24:00.000-04:00

I'm very excited as I just happened upon a book description that caught my eye and I ordered the book through InterLibrary Loan. Lo and behold, if it doesn't arrive today from the Vancouver Public Library (shocking to me that such a little paperback isn't anywhere closer...). It's called The Philosopher's Dog by Raimond Gaita. Another Australian author. (I hope I can finish this one!) In the introduction, he promises a clash of philosophy and storytelling. He's very warm and encouraging...

My advice to the reader who finds some of the philosophical sections difficult is to read on, though slowly, and to return to the difficult sectons when she has finished the book, remembering that all philosophy benefits from, and most philosophy requires, more than one reading.

This reminds me of the old Talking Heads lyric (though I think Gaita meant no harm):

Oh the boys
want to talk
Like to to talk about those problems
And the girls
say they're concerned
And they are
concerned with these decisions

And it's all
Hard Logic
To follow and the
Girls get lost
And the boys
say they're concerned
But they are
concerned with these decisions

(I don't quite remember the lyrics this way but...this is what's on the TH website).

But read on! Don't be deterred by my slow reading, my distractions, my meanderings...

P.S. photo - as seen in the parking lot of Home Depot, Ancaster early Sunday morning, Oct 1. Driver looked nothing like DQ but did cast the evil eye at me as I photographed her car...

Roxana

2006-09-29T08:55:00.000-04:00

There’s an accounting in this book that reflects a lot about Defoe’s background as a fact-gatherer. I’d illustrate it with charts and accounts. (I think he did this already in A Journal of the Plague Year). It’s not what we’d expect in a novel. It’s not apparently a page-turner strategy, yet it is… I’m turning the pages. I find it absurdly fascinating. At times the story seems to stand still and only tension is created. I can feel the wear-marks on the floor from all the pacing that the character must do in going over the same ground seemingly endlessly. It creates tension in the reader too. There’s a sense of ‘stop talking and just get on with it’. This is especially true in the conversations between Roxana (who hasn’t yet been named so) and her maid Amy around the issue of whether and when R. will end up sleeping with the gentleman (her former landlord) who has been so generous to her since her husband left her, she had to farm her kids out to relatives and fell into abject poverty. Whether she sleeps with him or not in some ways seems the least of her worries but I understand why she worries and why Amy worries along with her and why the talking takes so long. Roxana’s also acutely aware of what we’d call ‘the slippery slope’. She knows she’s on the edge of it. When things seem to be working out, she knows that her debts will be called in. There will be a day of reckoning. It’s religious of course and we might analyze it from that perspective or from a perspective in which we recognize Roxana’s compromised position as a woman in her time and place but what Defoe really recognizes and (more importantly) gets down on paper is Roxana’s intelligence and self-awareness. As readers we really get a sense of how she lives in her own body and in her own world. But in a book supremely about manipulation, is she also working on us? What does she want from us? I’m thinking about that…

Stimulating the Palate

2006-09-22T16:36:00.000-04:00

Jackpot (wow)
Bacteria (I feel negative about this one)
alongside (is that all one word or alloneword?)
trundle (buggy)
embryonic (I've heard a couple of birth stories recently so, yes, this, but this whole year of reading can be described using this word too)

Ration (ways in which we stand in our own way:( )
Kinship ( I read three chapters of Georgio Agamben's The Open today and suggest that his question "But what becomes of the animality of man in posthistory?" is apt here)
chase (verb or noun?)
caster (please check spelling or OED - wow, it's a variant spelling of 'castor' which is a wheel on a chair or table or a container with small holes in the top of it - like a salt shaker or a sugar shaker, thus, 'castor/caster sugar')
willpower (some have a hard time with the 'castor/caster sugar')

incubator (all of the babies I know born recently have been big and healthy - no need for this - but my ideas are, on the other, in need of one right now... perhaps)
greediness (wanting too much)
water (wow - I think I can brainstorm on that one quite considerably)
tetralogy (4?- 'who does that?' and 'why not'?)
bigot (remember: the open)

macinnongati

2006-09-14T08:20:00.000-04:00

or an 'undeviating heart'.

I got up in the night last night panicked by the number of things I have to navigate for the next six weeks. It's a ridiculous state really - not sleeping when you have a lot to do because you really need the sleep in order to do the doing (or something like that). 'Macinnongati' may be what gets me through. I am reading quite fiendishly in preparation for some of these tasks and I'm tasking as I read. One of the things I have to do is prepare an index. It's disturbing me. I am not a methodical person and it seems that this is a task that requires that kind of habit. It's not my way. I'm reading a chapter in the Chicago Manual of Style about how to write an index. It's skilled work. I'm afraid to begin. 'Macinnongati'. I know I want to reach the destination beyond the index. I know it's important to embrace the indexing practice as part of the journey. My heart sinks. I keep moving.

Taking a detour

2006-09-13T14:17:00.000-04:00

Well, since I haven't had a chance to get back to the library to get Seven Types out again...I grabbed Roxana by Daniel Defoe out of a box and started reading it right after I reached the glorious conclusion of Ivanhoe. What does this mean? Perhaps I prefer fiction at hand. I don't want to have to go looking for it. Perhaps I like novels that have the name of the main character in the title. Come to think of it, I do. I like King Lear and Hamlet and Tom Jones and Moll Flanders and Tristram Shandy and David Copperfield and Ulysses...and DQ... I'll let you know what happens.

And a footnote

2006-09-07T10:52:00.000-04:00

A few pages after 'the twist, the surprise', there's a footnote in my edition that comments on an apparent critical controversy around Scott's insertion of 'the twist, the surprise'. If I had time, I'd read more about this...it would be interesting. It would be especially interesting to find out when these critical comments were made. Literary fashions change and maybe critics aren’t always honourable in how they understand the times in which the book was actually engendered and written. The footnote briefly suggests that readers (whoever that refers to) found the turn of events contrived and far-fetched. Personally, I loved it. I thought it was classic gothic and very comical (to my mind - these are two things that naturally go together). It also functioned narratively as a way of bringing all of the characters together effectively to share some information and revelations and as a transition to the next episode – the battle for Rebecca – which turned out to be an incredibly short section – I would write a footnote on that – though I loved Brian de Bois Guilbert’s final moments – very interesting character altogether. He’s driven by passion and this makes him human despite being a bad guy. Yet his ‘unbalance’ is not madness in the stereotypical sense. He doesn't loll around with his head in his hands talking nonsense - though he does become uncontrollable. Indeed, in the end, his madness manifests itself through the body. Scott talks about his face a lot…and it is the last part of him that we see – Malvoisin has to see his face and read it. It’s one of those extreme close-up pov to zoom out to crane shot scenes. But too short.

A Twist, A Surprise

2006-09-06T11:40:00.000-04:00

And just when I thought Ivanhoe was winding down, Scott throws in a twist, a surprise. Now I've stopped thinking about what I'm going to read next (I know, I've pledged to read Seven Types of Ambiguity but I have to go back and get it out of the library and who knows what book might jump out in front of me before then or is that just an avoidance strategy?). I'm completely in/with Ivanhoe. How could this have happened? What effect will it have on the ultimate clash of foes which we knew was coming? Clearly, no matter how much experience you have as a reader, it's not good to become complacent about the book you're reading. Maybe if I read faster and more intensely, it would be easier but I leave books to sit for so long. I have about 20 library books in my office. Now I have to move offices (again) and I'm wondering if I should just take the books back to the library or if I should pack them? Or if I should read them. Or if I will read them...

My destiny calls, and I go

2006-08-31T09:16:00.000-04:00

I was thinking again about Seven Types of Ambiguity. The book is now somewhere in the library system, not in my hands. I think the trigger was a conversation I had about Bratz (the dolls that usurped Barbie) and whether they ominously model a glam-hooker look for little girls. I guess I was reminded of Seven Types because of this. I began to think about whether Angie herself is an ambiguity or just a stereotype. The story, as far as I got in it, took a little twist in her chapter. She’s got a medical problem now that complicates things. Because of the non-chronological time sequence in the book, we’ve already seen the partial results of this even though we had no explanation for it at the time we read about it. This certainly created an ambiguity or potential for ambiguity. As it is with all anti-social acts, we, on the outside, are wondering why what happened in the story happened, ‘what was that person thinking?’ It’s interesting. I’ve resolved to continue reading the book, squeeze it in right after I finish Ivanhoe which I think will be soon. It’s a book at its page-turner stage. Everyone is in position. It's the climax. We're sitting poised at the top of the roller coaster. The Black Knight and Locksley have revealed their true identities. Ivanhoe has left the priory – earlier than ordered to by the Black Knight, though he can barely bear his corselet. Rebecca is just hours away from execution. Brian de Bois-Guilbert has been manipulated by Malvoisin away from defending Rebecca or fleeing and towards appearing in the lists. But his resolve is still shaky. As is mine. Yet, I’m swept forward by the to-do list, the inevitability of things happening that involve me (I must appear whether I like it or not, whether I can bear my corselet or not).

Oh, and I listened to the Broadway soundtrack of Man of La Mancha. I’m surprised at how much of it I know (down to all of the lyrics for “The Impossible Dream” – something I must have sucked up in my childhood without knowing it - I've never seen the play or film). Here’s part of the chorus from “I, Don Quixote”:

My destiny calls, and I go!
And the wild winds of fortune
Shall carry me onward ... To wither so ever they blow ...
Wither so ever they blow ...

Wither so ever they blow...

Takin’ the Fall (and lovin’ it?)

2006-08-24T08:45:00.000-04:00

I’m in the middle of the trial scene in Ivanhoe where they’re trying to get Rebecca to take the fall. It happens to all of us. She has beauty and truth on her side. Will they carry enough clout to save her? I also read my horoscope and some D& G.

Horoscope: Don’t censor yourself as you test the boundaries.

D & G are talking about Monsters. They see monsters as filled with potential. I think I’ve mentioned this before. They cast their net widely (or maybe wildly) in this chapter (chapter 3). It’s wonderful. I love when they get on a wordy roll and then say on page 47 “We’re a little lost now.”

Last night in my dream, there were a lot of gift exchanges. I visited a lot of different houses, climbed stairs and stood on front porches. Some of you had cameo roles. One of my gifts, near the end of the dream was an animal. After all, I love animals. This animal was a half monkey, half bird. The ‘package’ was a dog and the ‘bunkey’ had to be birthed out of the dog. Both the birth and the animal were wild and monstrous. I was filled with fear. I wanted to doubt the sincerity of the gift. I read its potential as a test or a cruel joke. But it wasn’t all about me, was it? I managed to turn my attention to the animal and I remember thinking about what it might need from me. The dream ended unresolved. Was this dream a test of my boundaries?

Repeat horoscope: Don’t censor yourself as you test the boundaries.

The dream was so disturbing and fascinating I’m not sure that I should even be remembering it much less writing it down but…

Repeat horoscope: Don’t censor yourself as you test the boundaries.

My friend N. was so surprised recently by the mix of inaccuracy and precision of her horoscope that she told me about it over the phone and then emailed it to me. We’re not even close to being the same sign. She thought hers was funny. I didn’t find mine funny at all. It seemed more like a safety rope or a hand rail and I’ve been gripping it all week as I gingerly negotiate. I’m just wondering if I should read the new horoscope that comes out today and covers the next week.

Ambiguities

2006-08-15T13:06:00.000-04:00

I still haven’t been able to make a commitment to Seven Types of Ambiguity even after all these weeks of having it out of the library (twice) and after I made a video about it. The second time I had it out of the library I only read three pages. I took it back on Saturday. I don’t know whether to get it out again and determinedly finish it or what. I’m still reading Ivanhoe although I did have to renew the book again…but I know I’ll finish it. I don’t understand why I feel particularly differently about the two books. Maybe I just can’t read two novels at the same time. Maybe once I finish Ivanhoe, the way will be clear to read Seven Types. Hard to say as I did read a whole children’s novel yesterday (called The Rational Brutes) without difficulty but that was work related…

Last time I was at the library, I picked up the new translation of DQ. Dare I even consider reading it? Actually I have flipped through it and read the bio. of Edith Grossman, the translator…I was looking for illustrations but no such luck. There’s a pretty scary-looking cover photo of a helmet…more apropos of one of Shakespeare’s tragedies or something…

Reading the Updo 2

2006-08-11T07:56:00.000-04:00

Last time I was stepmother-of-the-bride and that warranted a certain kind of updo. This time I was 'just a friend'-of-the-bride and more completely casual altogether...but I still needed some kind of updo. And two updos in an 8-month period? Does this signal a change in me? Can I be read differently or do I read myself differently. Do I enable the updo in ways that I was unable to before? Am I addicted to the do? Two possibilities come to mind: that D&G are responsible in some way for the change (I give them a lot of credit - ATP is the best self-help book I've ever read) or it may be that I am 'becoming' middle-aged (which also gestures to D&G).

About thirty years ago, I went to the opera with my mother. She was in her middle age then. She liked sweater sets and pencil skirts. Fairly recently, she told me that she almost died when I showed up that day for the opera wearing demin overalls and sandles. I thought it was all about the music. I thought I was just there to sit and listen. I had no idea that it was quite a bit about promenading at intermission...

Preparing for a wedding is to some extent a matter of prereading or predicting what will be suitable. I wore orange to a winter wedding. Almost all of the other women wore navy or black. No one seemed to mind my 'look' but I did stick out visually. I can see it now in the photos! This time, to a summer wedding, I wore a blue and black dress. I had nice jewellery. I seemed to fit right in. I can't completely figure it out.

But up with the updo. I'm ready.

Veil 2

2006-08-09T09:03:00.000-04:00

Looking one way and then the other

2006-08-04T09:54:00.000-04:00

What happens when you have too much to read? I try to be systematic but I find that there’s also something productive or creative or even funny in being up to your eyeballs in books and papers knowing that you’ll never read them all even as you know that you have to read them all, you have to get a grip on the ‘field’ and the papers are flying around the room and keeping them straight is important and not important at the same time and you’re looking one way and then the other – especially when you’re writing three things at the same time and editing something else.

What happens when you have too much too read and you read it and then you have to integrate it into something you’re making? Does it stay sorted in your head in a way that makes it possible for you to find it, to navigate through it and does it look similar in your brain to how it looks in your office: piles of papers spread out over three desks and a bookshelf full of bookmarked library books plus the stuff on the computer that you’ve never printed because it’s 400 pages despite being only available on line? And reading off the computer screen is so not happening…

Yet no panic rises. It feels right. Is this psychonavigation? Is this the knowing that the route will be found and successfully negotiated without extreme danger? Although I did have a nightmare (unrelated to reading) last night…

Reading the fruit

2006-08-01T08:45:00.000-04:00

Ivanhoe is turning out to be a bit of a page turner. If only I weren’t so tired when I start to read it…usually late at night after all the possible things that could be done in that day are done. Sometimes I can only manage to turn the page once or twice. And then I fall asleep and wake or drop the book. Right now Prior Aymer & Isaac are prisoners and negotiating their freedoms in a way that reveals both the best and worst of their characters. Well-dialogued! Scott manages to keep quite a few balls in the air at the same time…so, lots of adventure and Ivanhoe has completely disappeared again (from the pages of the book). I have a strong sense that we don’t really need him. But maybe that’s the trick so that he can later appear and do something remarkable. Maybe he’s the one to catch all of the balls that are up now and resolve all of the plots. Now there’s a hero. I feel like I need someone like that in my life right now. Life right now is turning out to be a bit of a page turner.

And this includes the garbage. The talk of the town these days is maggots. Everybody’s talking about maggots. This is because it’s very hot and they just started green bin recycling here and we’re up close and contending with maggots directly and it’s just not nice. Even over lunch the other day, somebody asked me for advice on dealing with their maggots. Then there was an article in View Magazine about them called, “Maggots, they’re not that Bad” with tips and all. I’d already figured out that you had to line the bin with something like a paper bag in order to keep it cleaner and that you had to keep the bin outside and hose it out every week. So I felt gratified to read that this was indeed a sensible approach. I didn’t know about freezing stuff before you put it out or using vinegar and other cleaning products etc. My main contact with maggots prior to this experience is having them in fruit that we grow in the garden. We had, up until this past winter, a dwarf sour cherry tree in our front garden. People would always come by when the tree was fruiting and ask if they could pick or try a cherry and I would tell them that they were sour cherries but that they could try them. I’d warn them that some of the cherries had maggots in them. I appreciated that these people asked. Sometimes, I’d be in the house and I’d see people stopping to pick the cherries. Usually they’d have some kind of discussion among themselves about whether these were really cherries and whether they were good to eat. For those people I’d always say under my breath, ”yes, help yourself, a maggot guaranteed in every one” because they really were not the greatest cherries. The tree was not in good condition and had to be taken down this past winter. We haven’t replanted yet. We still have a mulberry tree in the front. It’s interesting that no one touches that tree though the fruit is much better than the cherries were. It seems, from questions I get asked, that most people don’t even know what the tree is or that the fruit is highly edible. I guess it’s a matter of knowing how to read the trees and read the fruit. I still see shrubs with tantalizing-looking berries and wonder if they’re edible…

I just read an article about maggot art. I really don't know what to say about this except that as I've been reading a lot about early legistation against animal cruelty, I have no doubt that I'd have to advocate for the maggots on this one.

Psychonavin' to the Grand Canyon

2006-07-28T12:15:00.000-04:00

Rerun, Reread: A Follow Up of Sorts

2006-07-26T20:04:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-20T08:56:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-19T09:39:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-14T15:28:00.000-04:00

not integument

maybe moil?

or, perhaps...egregious?

Integument

2006-07-13T16:00:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-12T14:18:00.000-04:00

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)

2006-07-05T09:16:00.000-04:00

Very Random Reading Notes

2006-07-04T10:44:00.000-04:00

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.

15 Words

2006-06-23T08:32:00.000-04:00

I'm almost to page 200 of the Seven Types of Ambiguity. I went to the bookstore yesterday to buy the book but then didn't and when I was reading it last night, I decided I didn't like it that much. I'm in the third section/part/ambiguity. Empson says that this ambiguity "may profitably be divided into those which, once understood, remain an intelligible unit in the mind, those in which the pleasure belongs to the act of working out and understanding...and those in which the ambiguity works best if it is never discovered". Angela, in part 3, is telling her story but also trying to work out what happened with Simon. I think the reason that I don't like it as much is that it is really straight narrative (backstory) and I found part one more compelling in the way the story was told. I'm also not completely buying the "representation of the prostitute" in this book. It's a great plot device but...Maybe I'm being negative because I'm considering not finishing the book now - the fates are on the doorstep...the book is due back at the library...I didn't decide to buy it...Maybe I'll take it back to the library and check out again in a few days...

I've also been thinking about the two words from the brainstorming bag that I've left lying on my desk: Lair & Sigmoid. I have to move out of my office again soon...so they'll have to go back in the bag for the move. I may never find them again. Here are fifteen more words I may never find again. I'll see what I can do with them over the next week:

penguin
token
unicorn
moil
drop
corpse
bulkiness
attract
whisker
insistence
eyelash
bearded
spur
diagram
ice cream

Just typing them released some thoughts and associations (animals, facial hair, what D&G say about Willard, how I ate some ice cream recently and it wasn't so bad but wasn't that great and 'moil', what a word!) but I have to go driving now...

Psychonav 3 (3 days)

2006-06-20T08:43:00.000-04:00

I totally screwed up the navigation on Saturday. I was going to Oakville. I even had a map! But I refused to use it except for the fine details at the end –the street and house number and I was stymied several times in my attempt to navigate and manoeuvre through the suburbs. I had to backtrack finally and use the QEW which I wanted to avoid. I blame the suburbs. That’s easy! No, I blame myself because I was too rushed and felt nothing as I was driving. It was all in my head and not in my heart. I was too logical and I forgot to calculate Bronte Creek. I assumed that because it was the suburbs that it would be all logic. I was ok with the reason (a bridal shower) for having to go to what ended up being the northern outer edges of Oakville closish to Milton. I was kind of curious as I always am about families and bridal/baby shower rituals. I learned a new one this weekend – that during the gift opening, you present a gift to the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first (the bride-to-be should be so lucky!) giver. “It’s a tradition!” shouted the maid-of-honour/hostess. I have a sense that you could make traditions up on the spot and justify them with that phrase. But the route to marriage and the future with someone else is also subject to psychonavigation. The bride-to-be on Saturday was lovely and assured and held all the babies of her best friends with confidence. At the last shower I attended (in April), the bride-to-be and the rest of us played a game in which we were blindfolded, spun and then had to stick a flower on a larger-than-lifesize drawing of the groom. We had to try to press the flower against the paper close to his heart. A senior with a deft touch won the game. I won something too (a pedicure kit) for having a special mark on the bottom of my chair.

Why am I so determined these days to avoid the QEW and the 401 and those other superhighways? I think it has to do, in part, with pacing and concentration. It’s also aesthetic. I like driving down Concession 6 W in Flamborough because it’s kind of a narrow road and the trees arch over it. I like Gore Road too (except for the speed limit which is 60 km.). A few weeks ago it was all lilac-lined and I could drive by smell. There’s the roundabout on Townline Road and the black bridge. I stopped by the side of the road on Sunday to top up the oil (the car was making a clicking/ticking sound) and I was completely alone for about 10 minutes. The big wind – prelude to a coming thunderstorm – blew the high grasses all around me. It was hot. The grasses were five and six feet tall. They were in full bloom. A Fortinos bag in my trunk billowed away out of my reach as I fumbled for the funnel, the rag, the red bottle. I could feel there and then that I was on the right track.

On Friday morning, I took the GO bus to Toronto and let go of the driving. The navigation belonged to someone else. I read over some notes I’d made from an article I’d read which I intended to refer to in my conference paper that afternoon. I felt pressured and tired and I didn’t pay much attention to what how and where we were driving. The only thing I really noticed was that though it was just after 7am, we were moving all the time. And this turned out to be (apparently) the driver’s preoccupation. It seemed that it didn’t matter where we went, what route we took, what mattered was that we were moving. We all have our reasons for moving. At one point, I looked up and saw an unfamiliar building and briefly wondered about it. At one point, I looked up and saw Pearson Airport and wondered, why are we here? It was a very strange route to take but we kept moving and then we were going south on the 427 and then were on the Gardiner/Lakeshore, the Lakeshore, York Street backtracking to Bay and arriving at Union Station at 8am. We had ranged all over the GTA and made it to our destination in less than an hour during morning rush hour. While we were on the 427, I counted the number of World Cup flags flying from cars moving in the opposite direction. There were an incredibly small number – only 21 out of thousands of cars. Actually, only 20, because one was an Oilers’ flag. I wondered about this. I wondered also why so many people were supporting Switzerland until I realized that they were England fans who fly the St. George’s Cross (not sure why –always thought that was the Welsh flag) – definitely this is the most popular flag next to Italy and Portugal on the 427 at 7:40 am. I can’t read all of the flags though…just don’t know what they are.

Getting Past Father’s Day

2006-06-19T12:42:00.000-04:00

Of course, I’ve been dreading Father’s Day for the past month or more…ever since the signs appeared in stores, I guess…the day after Mother’s Day. My Dad was never one to fully embrace the tribute day…he didn’t really care about holidays and celebrations that much and told me last year not to buy him a birthday present but that might have been because he could feel that he was dying (and wouldn’t need anything like a new shirt or an Artie Shaw CD with Kitty Kallen singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” – which is what they played on Jazz FM while I was driving to Waterloo yesterday – should have known…1946…Artie Shaw…my dad’s fav.) though the rest of us didn’t know it at the time…

Of course, I totally felt like a suck even worrying about Father’s Day. There are lots of people around me without fathers who blithely breeze by the day without a flicker, or maybe there is a flicker and I just don’t know about it at the time…after all, I didn’t exactly go around telling everybody how I felt either…maybe I’ll ask them now that it’s over and done with till next year…when, I assume, I’ll feel differently.

Fatherhood looms large in Seven Types of Ambiguity. I am proud to say I read up to page 106 this weekend. I still doubt that I’ll finish it by June 24 but I’ve been thinking about buying the book as I really would like to finish it now. I don’t know how I did all that reading actually. I was away all day Friday and it was a very busy weekend. I’m well into Part Two, the second ambiguity, I guess, which William Empson in his Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) says “occurs when two ideas which are connected only by being both relevant in the context, can be given in one word simultaneously”. I don’t know what the word is yet. I haven’t even thought about it.

Part 2 is a first-person narrative by Joe, who is Sam’s father. So far, Sam & Joe haven’t interacted much (though Sam is reading Winnie the Pooh when he and Joe have their conversation) but Joe talks a lot about how he is defined as a father by the people around him especially under the circumstances (I’ll keep it cryptic so I don’t spoil things for anyone who’s also reading or wants to read the book). Joe also seems intent on escaping from his own history and his own father’s legacy even as he seems to be playing-out the same drama as his father played (on page 104, even his eyebrows are conspiring to be like his father’s). At least that’s what I think…Joe’s being drawn into something dangerous now by Sid who also has a father issue…Hey, maybe the word is ‘father’.

The ambiguities which Empson saw as “stages of advancing logical disorder” are playing-out. I like the way Perlman can tell stories even through this increasing disorder which is, I guess, realism, in a sense. The only things that have really bugged me about the book so far are that Simon’s dog is named Empson which is dumb and that the female characters consist (so far) of a hooker with a heart-of gold, a dressed-for-success object of desire and an out-of-touch working-class mom. Reading Seven Types of Ambiguity is also interfering with my reading of Ivanhoe which is stopped at a very exciting moment…De Bracy is issuing his ultimatum to Rowena. She cracks and emotes and we see De Bracy waver – so we can see him as a conflicted character…will he play it safe and go for the straightforwardly evil path…or will he embrace complexity in a complex world? And where the hell is Ivanhoe…the book’s named after him and all he’s done so far is fight and faint!

Two or more Types of Ambiguity

2006-06-14T15:36:00.000-04:00

I've had Eliot Perlman's Seven Types of Ambiguity out of the library for 4 1/2 weeks now and I'm only on page 47. It's a 623 page book so I'm going to have to get going if I'm going to finish it by the due date (June 24). It's unlikely. So, will it be just another book that I haven't finished reading because it has to go back to the library? And what's the significance of that? Does not finishing = not liking or valuing or enjoying? Probably not, in my case just because it takes me so long to read or maybe because I get distracted and read other stuff in the middle of the reading of the 623 page novel or maybe it's just too big and I can't carry it around with me so it ends up sitting in my office for a week just because I can't fit it in my bag to take home with me and read 'at my leisure'. I like the Perlman book. It's interesting and a bit of a page turner at the part that I'm at right now with a climactic kidnapping etc. yet I don't feel desparate to move ahead. I know what's happening in the book right now so I can just leave it and then say...ok, what's next. I really like the second person narration in Part 1 which is the only part I've read (I'm about 2 pages away from Part 2). It's second person so it's really bizarre and circular in a weird way. You can also get confused and think that the narrator (a shrink) is talking to you (the reader) so that's compelling and interesting. I don't mind percolating this book. I feel absolutely no sense of identification with the characters, I don't think. I'm not with them so maybe that's why I can't move forward very committedly. I don't think it matters. I'm just worried that I may only get to page 63 or 72 or optimistically, 88 by June 24 and not really have read the book. How much of a novel do you have to read to have read it? I dread buying the book mostly because I have so many books already that just sit there, mostly finished but unreread. I'm not much of a collector of books (except I like photo books).

26 Hours in North York

2006-06-12T11:10:00.000-04:00

Psychonav 2

2006-06-08T15:26:00.000-04:00

I wanted to know more. I got Gene Ammarell’s Bugis Navigation out of the library. I’m always surprised when books like these are so readily available. I checked and within ten minutes had the book in my hand. It’s a kind of magic. As is navigation.

Navigation requires macinnongati or an 'undeviating heart'

The navigator’s meditation = ‘arrival ensured, then depart’

prior to departure one surrenders one’s material and spiritual self to a higher power (the Bugis are Muslim)

the process of the meditation is samananita ‘making it as if it has already been seen’ or visualizing the entire journey:

things and people you expect to meet
places you know which you imagine might be similar

If the trip cannot be visualized, if no mental image appears, it is postponed (usually only for a few hours but can be for one or two days).

Danger can be anticipated with mata ati (‘the liver’s eye’ or what we’d call ‘the mind’s eye’)

Self-empowerment in the face of the unknown and feared.

I’m trying to think about how much I do this already, if at all. I know that I have a very hard time letting someone know when I will arrive and that I am often late arriving because I feel guilty and pressured and say a time that then turns out to be completely ridiculous.

Psychonavigation

2006-06-06T14:52:00.000-04:00

I’ve been away. Not far, but certainly ‘out of normal range’. And I’ve been wandering without a map again…in a rental car. Reading the signs and wondering. The rental car was a much smaller car than I’m used to driving so I read the space differently and parked all wonky the first few times but then revelled in parallel parking which is so much easier with a small car. I did it enthusiastically…all the time. I didn’t realize that the car had a CD player until after I’d left home, after I’d picked up the car so I hurriedly burned 2 CDs in my office before I left town. As I did a lot of driving, I listened to these 2 CDs repeatedly over the four days I was away. I’m still humming those tunes and singing those songs and seeing the ballet and the play in my head. Does intense musical repetition create a kind of muscle memory in the brain and the mouth and the heart and the hands? I listened to Anita O’Day everyday and a sweet and simple California-sound jazz song “I Want to Sing a Song” became my theme song:

Sometimes when I get blue
I want to sing a song
So I do

And sometimes when I feel gay
Another song I sing
That’s my way

There are those who fret over things that have passed
I forget

If I’m found without friends
A song is what my heart recommends

And if I’m lost in a crowd
I want to sing a song

Long and loud

Loud and long to show that I love someone too

I want to sing a song
Just for you

I want to sing a song
Just for you

I was out for the evening one of the evenings I was away and at the end of it, I gave a ride to a couple of guys who were going my way and on the way back we talked for the ½ hour drive about driving without a map. One of the guys told me that this was called psychonavigation and that the Bugis of Indonesia (fishers and traders) have perfected this skill. What I was really interested in was how they read their environment and in reading up on this later, I found that they not only read wind, weather, clouds, all the stuff you’d guess but they read the phosphorescence on the water and the lightning on the horizon. They memorize algorithms that predict tide activities, know the stars, bless the voyage with coins and an egg in the centre of a basket of uncooked rice and “Captains will also engage in "meditative visualization" of their journey, literally willing their ships (through the power of their thought) the ability to reach their destination.”

Is this what I do? Is this ‘ranging’ like a dog, like I do, banking on memories and feelings to get me (in this case) from North York to Waterloo without a map and without resorting to the 401? And why, why do I do it? I swear, this time, I revisited/passed childhood-haunts-I'd-forgotten-about almost instinctively - "Oh, yes, it's there I think", I thought and it was there. Where do I think I’m going? For what am I fishing?

Choosing Kitchener over Guelph

2006-06-05T18:38:00.000-04:00

The Loneliness of George Bush, 2006

2006-05-29T14:46:00.000-04:00

Although at a certain level, I think the ‘Bushisms’ calendar is really petty and mean, I have to say that the Monday 29 May (Memorial Day) quotation was noteworthy:

Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment.

January 14, 2001

Five years later, it seems that he hasn’t been able to sort this out…

Photo Caption: The Loneliness of George Bush, 2006

Reading has taken that professional turn that it sometimes does. I’m scrambling to finish a paper and I’m reading some wonderful, wondrous texts of animal husbandry. I’m reading fast and highlighting often. I know more than I used to know about many things. A few examples:

the character of a Ploughman
the good effects of Industry
how highland workers are ‘like the swallows’
a proposed tax to punish farmers who fail to supply an adequate number of cottages for labourers
farmers as fathers
picturesque vs. positive beauty

I’ve also read an excerpt from Gilles Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon and it’s helpful for me to think about his idea of the ‘head without a face’ which seems to encapsulate the situation of the domesticated farm animal (or at least that’s what I’m going to say). It also reminds me of the vegetarian mantra – “I don’t eat anything with a face”. Can the ‘head without a face’ be the meat-eaters justification? This is not Deleuze’s perspective. He’s interested in the intimacy of the head-meat relationship as it’s represented in Bacon’s work and the movement of head-to-meat in several paintings. He talks about the de-localizing force of meat, the meat of the mouth, the scream and the mouth as the hole through which the entire body escapes…

A Cloud I Made (perhaps) and a Sign

2006-05-24T09:24:00.000-04:00

The OED word of the day is 'isohel'

2006-05-19T09:30:00.000-04:00

Noun: (Meteorology) a line on a map connecting points having the same duration of sunshine. A line of equal or constant solar radiation on a graph, plot, or map; an isopleth of solar radiation.

I use my umbrella everyday this spring
it's very very green
these lines are hard to draw
why map such connections
when somebody's home in the kitchen making clouds?

Making a Cloud
Materials
1 empty 2-liter plastic bottle (with cap, labels removed)
water
matches
Procedure
1. Place a very small volume of water into the 2-L bottle.
2. Cap the bottle tightly and shake the bottle to accelerate the evaporation of some of the water inside.
3. Compress the air inside the bottle by squeezing the sizes.
4. Release the pressure on the sides of the bottle and observe any cloud formation inside.
5. Open the cap of the bottle.
6. Light a match, extinguish the match, and attempt to draw some of the smoke into the open end of the bottle.
7. Cap the bottle tightly and compress the air inside by squeezing the sides.
8. Release the pressure on the sides of the bottle and observe any cloud formation.

For D&G
desire is an intransitive life force
under pressure to become
a desire-for-something

they seek to free desire from this pressure-to-become
in the concept of 'becoming'.

Sprawl Convoy

2006-05-17T17:43:00.000-04:00

Or, More Saturday Reading

I know I shouldn't do it while I'm driving.
But I was perplexed and coasting very slowly
trying to read the scene in front of me.

Mildly disturbing to know that he was going exactly where I was going.

the behemoth of the anti-farm.

Page Turners

2006-05-15T12:25:00.000-04:00

Several things:

My friend/next door office neighbour left Friday for a 2-month hiatus from work. She was feted and wined and dined all week by friends here. She came into my office at the end of the day on Friday and said, "Here: you can look after this while I'm gone" and she gave me her desk calendar entitled George W. Bushisms: The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg (not sure if that's a fake author's name or not - I didn't really know that calendars had authors but...the author's name seems apt). She gave me the box for the calendar too and said I should put the old pages into the box to reuse as scrap paper.

So for Friday May 12:
"One of my hardest parts of my job is to console the family members who have lost their life."
Saturday & Sunday May 13/14:
"So thank you for reminding me about the importance of being a good mom and a great volunteer as well."
Monday May 15:
"The best way to find these terrorists who hide in holes is to get people coming forth to describe the location of the hole, is to give clues and data."

(My only comment is that I'm really glad that no one is going around writing down everything I say.)

I don't know if I actually like this calendar. But it's a page turner...It's a ripper...

As is Ivanhoe. No wonder that guy spoke so highly of it...Indeed, it may be better than the Bible (at least in the sense that it's fast-paced and fairly predictable - I mean, I know who the Disinherited Knight really is, don't you?). I'm certainly getting through the book quickly. (And it's a good thing too since I just got my hold from the library. It's called Seven Types of Ambiguity by Eliot Perlman and it's a thicky - much larger than I expected it to be in these spare, ironic times - or maybe spare, ironic was so five-years ago - not sure). For now, though, Ivanhoe has everything: there are beautiful women (Rowena, Rebecca, Alicia - one to be crowned Queen of Love and Beauty), dangerous and mysterious knights, a 'pretender' to the throne, ethnic tensions (Norman, Saxon, Jewish), money, sport and horses. Not to mention, disguise. I wasn't particularly scared when Gurth had his 'nocturnal adventures' and "found himself in a deep lane, running between two banks overgrown with hazel and holly, while here and there a dwarf oak flung its arms altogether across the path". I knew he'd get captured by robbers. I knew the trees wouldn't talk. I hoped that he'd get to keep some of his money because he'd talked about 'buying his freedom' at the end of the previous chapter and I'm all for that. And he did despite the 'profession' of the robbers. I like how each chapter is a little nugget. By the end of the robbery chapter, Gurth, back with the Disinherited Knight, "laid himself across the opening of the tent, so that no one could enter without awakening him". On the facing page, it's already morning and the tournament is about to begin again.

No rest for the reader...

Reading D and G page 37

2006-05-12T12:06:00.000-04:00

Double-Double, Triple-Triple and the 4x4

2006-05-12T09:44:00.000-04:00

I moved to a new office space recently. I’m out of my ‘unit’ where there was a mini-fridge and a microwave and a kettle and even a toaster (which I admit, I never used – though I like toast very much, it is, for me, an intimate food you eat when you’re half-asleep and half-dressed: it just doesn’t strike me as office fare). So, equipped only with a little kettle, I’ve started drinking my coffee black. I never really put much into it before (just a blush of cream, no sugar) but now it’s just black. And this, apparently, is very unusual. I already knew this with regard to the ‘blush of cream’ which I often find hard to describe to the drive-thru box. Once I got a coffee that was half a cup of cream & half coffee because I asked for ‘half a cream’. The ‘a’ was lost in the noise of traffic and the traffic of the drive-thru work-space. But even in person I’ve had trouble with it – some Tim Hortons workers can’t seem to bypass the ‘cream machine’ which does not seem to have a ‘half a cream’ setting. Others do just fine and I get my perfect coffee. Perplexed, I have to ask though: could anyone really drink a cup that’s half filled with cream and half coffee?

I got the partial answer to this perplexing question when I was in Waterloo last week. Those trips fill me with some sense of dread. It’s not the drive which is tame exhilaration at a number of levels. It’s not seeing my mother - I look forward to that quite tenderly. It’s the town itself. My poor senses are little acclimatized to the affluent suburbs. I don’t know where I am there. I go to the mall sometimes. I see people driving Jaguars and shopping at Zellers. I go to the park skirted by monster-home-courts curved to follow the river. I go to a restaurant or more accurately, I go to a chain that serves food. Last week, I went to Williams Coffee Pub intending to read D&G. Instead I eavesdropped on a job interview, a business meeting, wrote a proposal and worked to avoid the pointed stares of an affluent middle-aged-looking-to-have-an-affair-man. I did talk to the woman working at the counter. She struck me as old-school Waterloo and when I asked for my ‘half a cream’, she openly expressed her own perplexity. “How am I going to do that”? , she said looking at the cream machine. She experimented giving me a small cream from the cream machine in a large coffee mug. She placed the coffee cup between us on the counter and we examined it together. “How’s that?” I was pleased. It looked just right. And then she asked me if I always drink it that way. She said, “I couldn’t do that. I have to put lots of cream and sugar in. I don’t really like coffee very much”.

Why didn’t I read D&G that day? Indeed, when given the rare opportunity to read, why do I ever choose not to read? Is it that I don’t really like reading very much, that I always have to put lots of cream and sugar in? I don’t think so. I think it’s more to do with intimacy – maybe reading like eating toast is something you do half-asleep and half-dressed. Yet I am a public reader and I watched people read The Outsider by Albert Camus, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, In the Twilight of Western Thought by Herman Dooyeweerd, I Hate You, Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality by Jerold J. Kriesman and Hal Straus on various buses and in restaurants this week. I am one of those restaurant readers (reading on the bus makes me feel nauseous). It just needs to look and feel and taste right - like the coffee. And the temperature matters too. Definitely not lukewarm.

Liar/Lair Lair/Liar

2006-05-11T15:59:00.000-04:00

I pulled ‘lair’ from my brainstorming bag a while back but mistakenly typed it as ‘liar’ and then quickly corrected it. The two are obviously related in terms of deceptiveness and hiding truths. I guess lies constitute appropriate hiding places too. But are there good lairs and good liars or even necessary lairs/liars? What lies do I hide in my lair? Or when does lair become liar? When does ones identity become that of ‘the liar’? What’s the tipping point?

Obviously this is a big part of DQ where we simultaneously know and don’t know who the author is, where there is a false version of the story which DQ himself feels he must work against – it hovers over him like (dare I say) a b a d o m e n. So he goes to Barcelona instead of Saragossa just because the false version has him go to Saragossa and he doesn’t want to do what the false storyteller claims he does. The story has gotten ahead him of somehow yet he still feels he can alter the course of events ‘after the fact’ because ‘the fact’ is a fabrication, a lie. And he does. Yet it is in Barcelona that he is undone. Do we cheer for the underdog then? Do we wish that DQ had gone to Saragossa as the story said? And is the person who can confidently say that Cervantes is the author of DQ the one who has not read it? (or ‘redit’? – does it mean ‘reward’?)

They asked him whither he meant to direct his steps. He replied, to Saragossa, to take part in the harness jousts which were held in that city every year. Don Juan told him that the new history described how Don Quixote, let him be who he might, took part there in a tilting at the ring, utterly devoid of invention, poor in mottoes, very poor in costume, though rich in sillinesses.
"For that very reason," said Don Quixote, "I will not set foot in Saragossa; and by that means I shall expose to the world the lie of this new history writer, and people will see that I am not the Don Quixote he speaks of."
"You will do quite right," said Don Jeronimo; "and there are other jousts at Barcelona in which Senor Don Quixote may display his prowess."

Was it better for him (and for you and for me) to be laughed at in Saragossa than to go to Barcelona and be tricked and defeated and have the story wind down to its end?

These are clearly some of the questions that Borges picks up on in his “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. The question of authorship that Cervantes throws into disarray is at the centre of all of this. Should Borges really be trying to tie things down? Or is that what he's really discussing in the story? How many authors of the Quixote are there wandering with us through the spring rains with the lilacs shining/unable to disguise their show and their scent? How many quotations from an author constitute authorship here on the blog? Can I cobble together a construction of Borges and Cervantes and Scott (where everyone, it seems, is ‘in disguise’) and the copyright holder of the Brainstorming Ball and the OED and blithely identify this text as one of my own making? Are we wandering readers ever wandering alone? D&G might say that we’re not wandering at all that we are just part of a rhizomic-pack-in-process, an assemblage, a multiplicitity of readers and words and real men and men-of-our-dreams.

CODA

All the sad young men/sitting in the bars/knowing neon lights/missing all the stars.

Camouflage or 'Vestis Virum Redit'

2006-05-08T13:21:00.000-04:00

I started taking a Latin workshop today - sort of a refresher. I feel out of my depth already as I look at the texts we're reading and see only bits of things I can kind of understand. As someone else said today, it's not so much the vocabulary it's the grammar - putting it all together. It's not even at the stage where we're 'keeping things whole'. I'm questioning my motivation but I'll go along for the ride...

I can remember a few aphorisms from Latin and the one I'm thinking of now is 'vestis virum redit' (clothes make the man). Hold that thought while I digress…

I had a productive weekend with D&G not in the sense that I read a lot or that I read on Saturday. I got as far as Pam's in Jackson Square - a very good reading location for me. I got the book out onto the table beside my coffee cup and then my friend ML came along and I talked to him. He was supposed to be shopping at the market and I was supposed to be reading but we did talk briefly about D&G and I said that I was feeling very good about them recently. They are helping me out and getting more and more intertwined with things like yoga and dance and reflective writing. I like the chapter I’m reading now called “1914: One or several wolves?” They talk about multiplicities, masses, packs, assemblages: “Keep everything in sight at the same time,” they encourage. The writing is exciting, energetic, full of potential. My wounded identity draws nearer. I’m listening.

I photographed some boys-I-just-met last week. This is one of the ways that they chose to be photographed:

Are they hiding or revealing?

In Ivanhoe, all of the characters seem to be defined by their clothes and there are detailed descriptions of what they are wearing as they gather for that initial dinner at Cedric the Saxon's place. Rowena has just entered the room...

I also went (this past weekend after I shot the photo of the boys) to see an art exhibition by Amy Creighton called “Camouflage”. AM (another person with the same initials as mine) asked me if I noticed that all of the models in the photos had their faces averted from the camera and we decided after consulting briefly with the artist that the shots constituted a kind of anti-portraiture where the viewer loses the privilege of staring into the face of the portrayed. Is this a rebellion, an attempt to frustrate habit? Or simply what the review of the show says - that we gather material from the media and construct our identity from that. For various reasons, the portraits remind me of my visits to the dermatologist. They have a completely different character to them. There's medicalized content, the desire to change but not the loneliness and longing of that real wait in the closed-door room before the doctor comes in. I can't avert my face. Is not showing your face a form of revelation or is it a form of self-betrayal? And what does it mean to show your face?

Sigmoid; Or, Thrown for a bit of a curve

2006-05-02T09:09:00.000-04:00

The first few pages of Ivanhoe have been excruciating. I can’t stand the preamble. I want to get to the amble and after a few pages I do, and now I’m wandering with Gurth and Wamba. Do they in anyway resemble DQ & Sancho? Well, yes, on first impression! Is this the real truth of all stories? Is everything a coincidence?

Yesterday, I was looking for a poem about sheep. This is in connection with some work I’m doing on a conference paper about breeding. I spent almost the entire day in my office reading book excerpts from from a fantastic e-resource called “Eighteenth Century Collections Online”. One of the books I read was a ‘necrology’ – something I hadn’t encountered before:

(ne•crol•o•gy (nə-krŏl'ə-jē, nĕ-)
n., pl. -gies.
1. A list of people who have died, especially in the recent past or during a specific period.
2. An obituary.
nec'ro•log'ic (nĕk'rə-lŏj'ĭk) or nec'ro•log'i•cal adj.
ne•crol'o•gist n.)

What it actually consisted of was a series of fairly lengthy biographies of ‘neglected’ personages who had died in 1797-8. The guy I wanted to read about was duly praised by the anonymous biographer:

Would to heaven that many of those immortal heroes, on whose memory we lavish such high flown eulogiums, had possessed half the virtues, and been degraded by as few vices, as this breeder of cattle!

In my search for sheep poems, I also turned to my shelf full of those anthologies that publishers have sent me. I pulled out one of the Longman volumes because they’re separated into historical periods and I wanted to narrow my search to early-modern poetry. The book is floppy with very thin paper and cover (I guess to make it more light weight and sensual). Inadvertently, the book flipped itself open to the lengthy excerpt from Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote. But what was even more interesting to me is that the book which is set up for teaching and learning prints the early-modern text but then follows-up with a ‘resonance’ text to “provide additional context for key works through source readings or responses from a different century or culture." The ‘resonance’ for DQ is Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote’” -- a story that I’ve read before but totally forgot about! It’s a short text and I HIGHLY recommend that you read it now so that I can, with peace of mind talk about it more!!!

Another Omen/Reading the Signs

2006-04-28T09:36:00.000-04:00

Or; ‘the injustice of outwardness’

Neither Cervantes (if I can speak for him) or I suggest living lives by omens. I imagine it’s a very slow way to proceed. Like a paragraph full of links, living by omens offers too many possibilities, distracts you from the narrative (which, I concede, can be a good thing), requires too much constant attentiveness. Plus you don’t really ever know how good you are at reading the signs. I’d be perpetually anxious that I was missing something…

Clearly at the end of DQ, Sancho is trying to propel DQ forward and be encouraging. Though he doesn’t know the true identity of the Knight of the White Moon, Sancho’s pretty happy to be going home and prevented by DQ’s defeat from engaging in knight errantry for one year:

At the entrance of the village, so says Cide Hamete, Don Quixote saw two boys quarrelling on the village threshing-floor one of whom said to the other, "Take it easy, Periquillo; thou shalt never see it again as long as thou livest."
Don Quixote heard this, and said he to Sancho, "Dost thou not mark, friend, what that boy said, 'Thou shalt never see it again as long as thou livest'?"
"Well," said Sancho, "what does it matter if the boy said so?"
"What!" said Don Quixote, "dost thou not see that, applied to the object of my desires, the words mean that I am never to see Dulcinea more?"
Sancho was about to answer, when his attention was diverted by seeing a hare come flying across the plain pursued by several greyhounds and sportsmen. In its terror it ran to take shelter and hide itself under Dapple. Sancho caught it alive and presented it to Don Quixote, who was saying, "Malum signum, malum signum! a hare flies, greyhounds chase it, Dulcinea appears not."
"Your worship's a strange man," said Sancho; "let's take it for granted that this hare is Dulcinea, and these greyhounds chasing it the malignant enchanters who turned her into a country wench; she flies, and I catch her and put her into your worship's hands, and you hold her in your arms and cherish her; what bad sign is that, or what ill omen is there to be found here?"

But there is an ‘ill-wind’ to contend with. As I’m reading Chapter 73, I know that there is only one more chapter, a very short chapter. I know that I’m about to finish the book. I’m grappling for a strategy. I know I’m not going to like the way that it ends just as I don’t like the way that The Female Quixote ends or the way Pepita’s DQ ballet ends. I start Chapter 74. I don’t even like the title: OF HOW DON QUIXOTE FELL SICK, AND OF THE WILL HE MADE, AND HOW HE DIED. I’m reading gingerly. And then right in the middle of the chapter, somebody on the outside starts talking to me (about photography or cars or the chimney or taxes). And I am distracted. And I resume and finish and put the book down and immediately pick up Ivanhoe which I’d positioned conveniently at my elbow. I want and don’t want to move on:

Such was the end of the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha, whose village Cide Hamete would not indicate precisely, in order to leave all the towns and villages of La Mancha to contend among themselves for the right to adopt him and claim him as a son, as the seven cities of Greece contended for Homer.

Oh Don Quixote (and I selectively quote here and conveniently omit the tirade against “the false and foolish tales of the books of chivalry, which, thanks to that of my true Don Quixote, are even now tottering, and doubtless doomed to fall for ever”):

For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; it was his to act, mine to write; we two together make but one…

Morning and Afternoon Light

2006-04-27T15:21:00.000-04:00

Spring is here, I hear.

I too fly by night

2006-04-26T08:58:00.000-04:00

I had to get a magnifying glass to read the notes on the back of the Anita O’Day CD because "THIS IS A FACIMILE OF THE ORIGINAL LP BACK COVER". I know very little about Anita O’Day except that we fell in love with her in the 70s when we were kids and we saw Bert Stern’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day and we’ve never forgotten her. I read the back cover, not really expecting to learn anything in particular but just because I like the way these cats (a guy called Dom Cerulli, in this case) wrote about jazz on the back of album covers in 1961. So her singing “mellows and matures”, she “makes it sound all so simple”, she’s “a different Anita who has gone beyond those other Anitas” with an “uncanny sense of time”. She’s “complex and daring”…going further and further out on that limb of harmonic improvisation”. And she sings beautiful songs like “The Ballad of All the Sad Young Men”.

drinking up the night/trying not to drown…while a grimy moon/watches from above/all the sad young men/play at making love/misbegotten moon/shines for sad young men/let your gentle light/ guide them home again/all the sad young men

with “supple lyrical sense”. There’s a “bright twist”. She scats “at bright tempo” giving another song its “appropriately funky treatment” and “fitting herself to the brass section….playing rather than singing her vocal”.

I suspect it’s a kind of aspiration of mine: playing rather than singing my vocal. I too fly by night.

Aphorism

2006-04-25T08:04:00.000-04:00

Or; Reading the signs, redux, redux

(The first sign, I remember, underlined the absurdity of witticisms on roadside signs - driving as I was towards my father's death. They changed that sign every week and it really began to annoy me although one week the sign's message was about the similarity between 'silent' and 'listen'. I hope I haven't forgotten that one.)

(The second sign, I remember, was more emotional - wanting a sign that things weren't falling apart, that absurdity of death-too-young needing an explanation.)

And then these signs, also close to home (pix courtesy of CKRZ FM - Six Nations Radio):

Reading Recommended Reading

2006-04-24T09:54:00.000-04:00

My friend Cees sent me a speech by Joanna Chapman, 'a very courageous woman' who has been wrestling with local authorities for quite some time on matters of principle. The interesting thing about the speech is that Chapman advocates for a consensual, non-adversarial political process and contrasts her experiences with two local councils - one of them being the one with which she is currently (and adversarily) engaged. She doesn't think that this is the way things should be. She also recommends that we support and transform our local media making them sources that we want to read and not merely eschew in favour of the news from away.

Cees described the situation as connected to my preoccupation with dreaming/nightmares and he projected my interior life onto our bigger community life in which 'our city council full of their developer-induced dreams create nightmares for all of us'. And I've talked to a few people this past week about the Caledonia blockade in these terms (though the authority in question is not Hamilton City Council) where the struggle is largely about land use and the ethics of urban sprawl.

But I think there are some other questions behind Cees's recommended reading and those are why am I so self-absorbed, seemingly (on the blog) unaware or uncontemplative about what is going on just outside my door? What happens when I read this speech transcript by a 'courageous woman' and measure my response? Why am I writing about my nightmares, the prescription of D&G and my attraction to/reluctance to engage experientially with the nightmare? My identification is with the wanderer, DQ, who is (very close to the end of the book) being partly wound down and concluded and partly lamented and celebrated and revived. Is wandering a flight response? Cervantes has his hands behind his back now with his fingers tightly crossed. As do I.

And we continue...

Waking up to D and G

2006-04-17T16:30:00.000-04:00

I feel like I’ve been losing track of D&G lately. I think this is because I haven’t had that much time to read. I’d relegated them to a routine – it was the Saturday morning readings but then that started not to work out so well as my Saturday got taken over/overtaken. I can ride my bike again but I don’t have ‘permission’ to do it yet.

I had a nightmare on Sunday morning. It was one of those awful situations where you are awake and asleep simultaneously and the dream is disturbing (this one played to my claustrophobic tendencies) and even though you can think of it as a dream and know that you are awake, you can’t quite wake up. I actually hit myself to wake up and then ran outside. It wasn’t cold enough outside to have the desired effect of jolting me but after I ran around for few minutes, I woke up fully.

I hate when this happens. It’s interesting that it happened this week because I had just heard a radio show about sleep and dream therapy which was very interesting and enticing. It reminded me of D&G and the kind of therapeutic practice their work suggests. I was really interested in some of the techniques talked about on the radio – even thinking I might try writing out my dreams as a way of becoming more proscriptive with them but the waking nightmare experience reminded me that this would be a very risky move for me. A day later, I’m not thinking about experiments in dreaming, I’m turning to D&G.

D&G require a certain commitment that other reading doesn’t necessarily require. For example, the chapters are long. The material gets you into an interesting way of thinking that’s pretty removed from everyday life. It takes time to move in and out of that way of thinking. Very little of my life is actually contemplative or conducive to contemplation. I can’t find space for contemplation. My patterns are too suburban or too urban hick. Where are my contemplative environments? Do they enable reading? Does the reading occur prior to the contemplative act? Do I need two spaces – one for reading and then one for thinking about the reading? Or is it three spaces – reading, thinking about the reading, thinking about the thinking about the reading?

In Chapter 2, D&G warn against being reductive and this is something that I really like about them. I just need the space to think, the floor to lie on, the cool tiles of contemplation.

Reading to the Rat; Or, Interception:

2006-04-14T16:00:00.000-04:00

ORIGIN Latin intercipere ‘catch between’

Misspelled as interseption in my brainstorming bag

I’m caught between finishing DQ and not finishing DQ. DQ and Sancho have left the Duke and Duchess’s place and are (despite the skinny few pages left in the book) having an accelerated series of fabulous adventures – one right after another. Last night I read Chapter LXII “The Adventure of the Enchanted Head; with other childish matters which cannot be omitted”. I love enchanted heads in novels and I thought immediately about the evil floating helmet in The Castle of Otranto (a favourite book of mine):

The first thing that struck Manfred’s eyes was a group of his servants endeavouring to raise something that appeared to him a mountain of sable plumes. He gazed without believing his sight. “What are ye doing?” cried Manfred, wrathfully. “Where is my son?”

A volley of voices replied, “Oh! my lord! the prince! the prince! the helmet! the helmet!”

Shocked with these lamentable sounds, and dreading he knew not what, he advanced hastily—but, what a sight for a father’s eyes!—he beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, a hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers.

I’m thinking about what novel I will read next. I’m thinking about reading Ivanhoe by Walter Scott. I have no real reason for reading it, it just occurred to me that I could read it. I saw a new Dover edition (cheap) at the bookstore. Maybe its cheap availability is what made me think about it. Or maybe it’s nostalgia. My brother and I used to watch the Ivanhoe TV show when we were kids and I can still remember part of the theme song and how the tiled floor felt against my stomach (I often lay on the floor – that tile is a very visceral part of my early years, I think).

Or, I could read the other book that I haven't got yet. I put a hold on a novel at the public library quite a while ago but I haven’t heard anything. Holds are weird in that way. It can take months to get stuff. The way the book interrupts your life and your consciousness is sometimes very interesting and surprising. I’m kind of eager to read this book even though I can’t remember the title or author. It was recommended by my friend Mike who has often been right before.

When it takes a long time to get a book, it’s usually because it’s popular. Once you get it you know that there are no renewals. You have to get on with the reading even if you're not ready or you don't think you have the time. I remember when we got Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn, we read it out loud - one chapter every night because we knew that everyone wouldn’t get a chance to read it in the three-week loan period. It just wouldn’t happen. It was a nice experience to read the book aloud. It was just at the time when we first got our rat, Gwendolyn. It seemed to us that she liked the reading too – or, at least, she was attentive and quiet while we were reading. When the book was finished and the normal evening routine (of everyone just silently going their separate ways) resumed, she actually seemed more agitated and ran around her cage a lot more. This could all be projection of course because rats are more active at night generally but we liked to think that she liked hearing Airborn being read – rats are very social creatures after all…

P.S. I think that I have to read Ivanhoe now because I found this quote when I was searching the online version of the book - testing the waters so to speak. It really made my day to read that Sir Walter Scott is ranked second to God on the best authors list:

I love this book more then any book I've read (besides the bible). Sir Walter Scott is the wisest book writer that I've ever known(besides God). The plot was awsome. I never thought that the BK (Black Knight) was Richard the BK (Big King). I really liked Wamba, I even wrote an essay about Wamba called "Not only a Jester: A Wamba Story. Every body thought he was just a stupid Jester and they didnt know that behind the jokes there was a brave and wise hero. If someone made a play about Ivanhoe that would be cool. This is the Greatest book ever.

My cynicism lifts: the brainstorming bag is working

2006-04-10T14:00:00.000-04:00

I have swept all of the words aside except Lair. It may be a place where I can stash my Swag.

Here's what I've pulled out today:
piggyback, handkerchief, concubine, clamor, coin, sigmoid, milkweed, triable, polarization, question, albatross, erosiveness, pizza, lashing, crowbar

Nothing's happened yet - should I try some new words?

2006-04-07T08:09:00.000-04:00

So... today

intermediary, decease, shaker, faze, demise (is this a theme?), science, cyclopedia, removal, tankful, respectability, pare, capability, abdicate, photoelectric, lair.

P.S. I looked up "eruct" on the OED dictionary site: "Sorry, there are no results for that search". So, a spelling mistake in my brainstorming bag? That could promote some 'productive' brainstorming...

P.S. 2 The word that kept jumping out at me all day (I kept the words lined up on my desk yesterday) was - "swag": It made me partly think about something that hangs or sways and about 'money stuff', stolen goods...but mostly it was just the word itself, the way it sounds...

Brainstorming Ball

2006-04-06T11:08:00.000-04:00

I found my 'brainstorming bag' (was a brainstorming ball) in the basement last night. I'd referred to it in an earlier post. There are hundreds of words in the bag -- many more than I had remembered, probably thousands! I'll just pull out a few, read them and see what happens (let me know what comes to mind for you too!) :)

Swag, Imprompriety, Hoodwink, Rationalization, Vermicide, Beverage, Tract, Bandana, Tumble, Season, Shim, Eruct, Plunger, Air-Borne, Glamor.

I'll have to think about this reading...plus I don't know what some of these words mean...(eruct?)...more to come...

Reading my skin

2006-04-04T09:28:00.000-04:00

I met my new dermatologist yesterday. He came in swinging his canister of liquid nitrogen as dermatologists do. He gave me the once-over as dermatologists do. As a regular, I should be used to it by now. But I find it very disconcerting. Maybe it’s just that he’s my new dermatologist (my old one moved to Stoney Creek). He’s talking to me but the whole time he’s sweeping my skin with his eyes. He has special close-up vision. He can spot a freckle gone wrong in an instant. He knows what’s he’s looking for and he knows that I am someone who may give him cause to pause in his reading, to make him stop and reread me. It’s not necessarily complexity he’s finding, it’s anomaly. But it’s intimate. He’s reading and rereading me, my skin. Since we had never met before, he asked me the usual questions about where I grew up (to determine my potential past sun damage), what I do for a living now (my current and potential sun damage), and what I like to do for a good time (just kidding – he wanted to know if I liked outdoor sports like golf (don’t know) & tennis (yes)). He doesn’t really want to get to know me, he just wants enough information to allow him to process and proceed. This is what dermatologists do. All the time he’s talking and I’m talking back, he’s reading me, holding my hand and sweeping his eyes up my arm, across my shoulders and down my other arm. He looks at my face but not the way that anybody else looks at my face. He’s talking in an ordinary way but he’s mentally divided my face up into vertical sections and he’s scanning each section. His head and eyes move vertically. He stops at the bridge of my nose where I had the surgery two years ago and spends a little more time there. He touches the bridge of my nose, smoothes the skin across and he moves his head closer. He checks out my neck, a persistent problem– seems to be under control now. He spritzes my hand with the liquid nitrogen. I’d read it as a small wart but he says not…I’m looking at it right now. It’s red and it looks like a super giant wart. I know it will blister and peel off in a couple of days and smooth out…like my neck…pictured here from a few months ago.

I fell asleep reading DQ last night

2006-03-29T08:19:00.000-05:00

It would be nice if this were a prelude to dreaming. I often dream travel dreams – both good and bad, both outdoors and indoors, both gothic horror and trampoline dreams…and more. DQ is kind of dreamy right now. DQ and Sancho are in two different places and Cervantes moves us back and forth between the two of them. As we leave one or another of them, we are always told that there is someone there, a steward, writing…so that when we drift away from Sancho and back to DQ, we will not have missed anything. And time shifts too. It’s two steps forward and two steps back (hopefully with some hip lifts, shimmies and turns thrown in). Is this how memory works? Or psychiatry? Who is my scribe? Who is writing when I’m away so that I know what happened to me when I come back?

Because I’ve been so much with death recently (I was at a wake this past Saturday night too), I can only think of myself as swirling, a little dizzy, turned around. I swear that sometimes I can feel the world turning in my body. None of the people I know who have died in the past year knew each other. But I feel forced to connect them, squeeze them together, just as a way of coping or as a way of creating a pattern that has the potential for disturbance. Maybe I shouldn’t try to do this…

Perhaps we should never have eaten the parabola cookie. It’s a shape and a line and an explanation.

Reading the 'To Do' List

2006-03-27T13:55:00.000-05:00

I have been driven by the ‘To Do’ list lately. It’s unusual for me to even write these kinds of things down. Others tell me that they feel satisfied when they cross things off their list, that the list brings them pleasure – I feel pressure. Sometimes it’s clearer to me when I see things written down, when I see the list lying on the table before me…but what about the things that you don’t write down on the ‘To Do’ list but that you really need to do more than any of the things on the ‘To Do’ list.

Smell
Walk
Touch
Smile
Read
Ride

And when do you know if it’s enough, if it’s time to cross it off the list? The ‘To Do’ list is so purposeful and quantifiable. Is it at all in keeping with my wandering?

The verbs on my current ‘To Do’ list are:

Redo
Report
Reassess
Mark
Revise
Reassess
Write
Give Feedback x 7
Pay
Write
Call
Write
Call
Submit
Edit
Call
Copy edit

Don Quixote is under siege by the Duke and Duchess…
He’s been accosted and pinched by mysterious intruders.
He’s been worried about his chastity and he’s tested.
Sancho is the victim of an elaborate ruse which is now extended to include his wife and daughter who is cooking eggs and rashers of bacon for a ‘hot’ page.
Theresa Panza is preparing a package of fat acorns for the Duchess.
I feel a sense of injustice. I find it hard to laugh at DQ and Sancho. They fill me with too much wonder. And with them I wander and we fail to focus on the 'To Do' list.

Reading a Corner (Walking); Or, Reading the Signs (redux)

2006-03-22T08:08:00.000-05:00

I love to walk and watch and read. It's not a new phenomenon. Lots of people learn to read this way. Tombstones and advertisements.

I can provide one example -- of the 18th century British labouring class poet, novelist, playwright, Ann Cromartie Yearsley.

As [Hannah] More claims, other than a translation of Virgil's Georgics, Yearsley had no substantial exposure to classical writing but what she "had taken from little ordinary prints which hung in a shop window" (Yearsley 1787, xii).

This could be a false claim. Labouring-class writers were often promoted as 'natural geniuses', their histories rewritten by patrons who preferred the notion that genius sprung out of the natural world and that if cultivated by the proper patron/gardener, it might bear fruit. I'm not sure where Yearsley was supposed to have picked up Virgil's Georgics though...

Disclaimer

2006-03-20T08:39:00.000-05:00

"It is stated, they say, in the true original of this history, that when Cide Hamete came to write this chapter, his interpreter did not translate it as he wrote it—that is, as a kind of complaint the Moor made against himself for having taken in hand a story so dry and of so little variety as this of Don Quixote, for he found himself forced to speak perpetually of him and Sancho, without venturing to indulge in digressions and episodes more serious and more interesting. He said, too, that to go on, mind, hand, pen always restricted to writing upon one single subject, and speaking through the mouths of a few characters, was intolerable drudgery, the result of which was never equal to the author's labour, and that to avoid this he had in the First Part availed himself of the device of novels, like "The Ill-advised Curiosity," and "The Captive Captain," which stand, as it were, apart from the story; the others are given there being incidents which occurred to Don Quixote himself and could not be omitted. He also thought, he says, that many, engrossed by the interest attaching to the exploits of Don Quixote, would take none in the novels, and pass them over hastily or impatiently without noticing the elegance and art of their composition, which would be very manifest were they published by themselves and not as mere adjuncts to the crazes of Don Quixote or the simplicities of Sancho. Therefore in this Second Part he thought it best not to insert novels, either separate or interwoven, but only episodes, something like them, arising out of the circumstances the facts present; and even these sparingly, and with no more words than suffice to make them plain; and as he confines and restricts himself to the narrow limits of the narrative, though he has ability; capacity, and brains enough to deal with the whole universe, he requests that his labours may not be despised, and that credit be given him, not alone for what he writes, but for what he has refrained from writing".

From CHAPTER XLIV:
"HOW SANCHO PANZA WAS CONDUCTED TO HIS GOVERNMENT, AND OF THE STRANGE ADVENTURE THAT BEFELL DON QUIXOTE IN THE CASTLE"

Eating the Parabola Cookie

2006-03-16T09:35:00.000-05:00

The parabola (from the Greek: παραβολή) is a conic section generated by the intersection of a right circular conical surface and a plane parallel to a generating straight line of that surface.

A parabola can also be defined as a locus of points which are equidistant from a given point (the focus) and a given line (the directrix).

A particular case arises when the plane is tangent to the conical surface. In that case the intersection is a degenerate parabola consisting of a straight line.

ORIGIN Latin, from Greek parabole ‘placing side by side’.

Sources: OED & Wikipedia. Photo and emphasis are mine (things I'm thinking about...potential roles/shapes to try-on, routes to take, directions to follow/avoid). One of my students made the cookie.

another piece of the puzzle

2006-03-14T09:27:00.000-05:00

Cleaning my basement (see Tuesday February 28, 2005, “Dust”) means fundamentally that I'm reading my basement as most of the pack-ratting I do involves papers, writing, books, files, postcards and weird little scraps of paper often with the name of a book-never-read written on them. One thing I found the other night was a “diary” I kept of sunrises. These were recorded during the same period of time I discussed yesterday – sometime during the seven years that I commuted between Hamilton and Toronto. The entries are dated but there’s no day-of-the-week or year so I can’t say exactly when they were written. The sunrises were recorded on the GO bus. While I drove the evening shift, I took the bus when I was on day shift. I’d get the 5:20 am bus. I had a portable cassette player/AM-FM radio and I listened to music and watched the beginning of the day. (I remember I became strangely attached to some morning show on a rock station. I forget who the celebrity hosts were but they revelled in bathroom humour and, for some reason, I enjoyed it or maybe it was the music they played…) I never slept on the bus in the morning but I almost always slept on the way back – waking just at the curve in the road around Cootes Paradise.

Here are some excerpts of what I saw:

Nov 7
Red & navy clouds
Navy clouds rise up into the blue
Red spreads into peach

Nov 13
Best seat in the house!
This Mortal Coil
Mild sunrise pale pink
Lighter shade of navy
All with a wash of grey

Nov 19
I saw both sunrise & set today
The back wheel of a quickly peddled bicycle silhouetted against the orange setting sun
Soles occidere
Sunrise singles bar

Nov 22
“all my senses rebel”
a hole in the sky with the sun leaking through

Nov 27
Yesterday the driver let us off at Adelaide and University rather than at King and University. Everyone was really confused by this.

Nov 28
Spectacular sunup – Flamboyant.

Nov 30
Muted purples, oranges, greys. Dull spectacle. The days are getting so much shorter right now that I’m arriving too early to even see the sunrise!

Dec 7
Mauve (clouds) and peach (sky). Nearly translucent.

I want the sunrises to return.

Reading without a Map

2006-03-13T10:28:00.000-05:00

I could say that I’m travelling without a map but that would be a cliché…except it’s true on my new Saturday morning drives to Waterloo. And I am actively resisting reading a map.

What does familiarity with a particular route bring to the traveller?

Efficiency:

I remember driving to Hamilton from evening shifts in midtown Toronto. It was always around 1:30 am. Route One was the Southern Route. I’d drop my co-worker at King & Jameson and then land on the Gardiner. (We usually worked 8 consecutive evenings and this took some stamina). Route Two was the Northern Route – up to the 401 West, to the 403 and then south to meet the QE in Oakville.

The routes offered variety. If I was working with the King & Jameson co-worker, the southern route was inevitable.

The route to work was fixed. I don’t know why. There was never any northern route to work. It was always QE, Gardiner, Jarvis, Mt. Pleasant, Eglinton. I remember my little Honda Civic labouring at the corner of Front and Jarvis, catching its breath before we got into the city driving.

I’m trying to remember more of what I experienced in the driving then. I always turned the music up loud. What did I listen to? I knew the road well enough that I knew exactly where and when to change lanes on the QE. I often drove at the speed limit and kept to the right. I was coming home from work but there were a lot of people driving drunk and driving out of some just-prior exuberance. There were angry drivers too and I tried to lie low, stay under their radar.

Is this too much preamble? I haven’t got to the place where I wanted to start writing. I am wandering again. There’s been another death and lots to think about…

What else does familiarity with a particular route bring to the traveller?

Haecceity:

I used to drive to Guelph every Sunday. I had developed my route without a map. It came out of my childhood and out of knowing people along the route – in Morriston and Carlisle and Flamborough. I’d change sometimes out of whim, necessity, weather. I’d range like a dog and sniff out a new section of the place that was me and the route moving together. In the last days of my driving to Guelph, I was the route.

I’m lost now. I drive to North Waterloo without a map. I know how to get there efficiently but I don’t want to take that route. I’m ranging now trying to find my place in this route. I’ve found some bridges (one one-laner!), a butterfly conservatory and an airport. I’ve figured out some of it but every once in a while, I hit a T-junction or a one-way system and I’m lost. And I range and weave and turn the music up loud (mostly jazz radio or Handel or Bach) and follow the river. I always hope that I don’t end up in a subdivision too soon though this is inevitable as I get closer to North Waterloo…it’s just the nature of the place.

Saturday Reading revived (and revised)

2006-03-10T13:51:00.000-05:00

I forgot to mention that I got back to Saturday reading again last Saturday. I snuck out for about half an hour and went for a coffee on my way to Waterloo. I was reading my own work. The reading was really editing. I'm reading my own writing and finding (at this point in the process) little errors, the ones that you say you don't really care about but that really bug you if they get into print. I don't like this kind of reading and rereading.

I also, earlier in the week -- I think it was on a Thursday night, got back into reading D&G. Otto has been really inspiring in this respect. I had fun with D&G when I first started reading them but then started not having so much fun. Reading them on Thursday was fun again. It was nice to be back in their universe and do some mental stretches with them. And draw some more cartoons...(see Monday February 6, 2006, "Two Cartoons;Or, reading D&G just before Xmas with the Carpenters running interference").

I'm finished with my editing (for the moment-until the next reader finds more mistakes ) so maybe I'll bring D&G with me this Saturday. One thing I did do that last time I read them was look to see how much I've read in the chapter I'm on. I've read about 30 pages of it but it's a long chapter...Another book that's going take me a long time to read...I also thought the post-its I've stuck in the book and the other notes I've made in the book are very graphically appealing. Writing on and in books I'm reading is pleasurable and not always a curse as I might have suggested in an earlier comment.

Turned-down corners

2006-03-07T08:11:00.000-05:00

Sometimes when I’m reading DQ, I don’t want to stop. I want to keep moving through the story but there’s a passage that warrants rereading. I don’t like to mark-up pleasure-books. I’m not studying DQ, I’m just reading it. I don’t want to read it with a pen-in-hand. So I turn down the corners of pages that I want to return to. The corners are like memories – they’re there but I don’t have to retreive them...Or maybe I do...

Sometimes I do go back to them and sometimes I have to search the page and really wonder why the corner is turned down – did I do it in the wrong direction and really want the next page, did the book fairies coyly, or with more malicious intent, change the configuration of the turned-down corners in my book or is there something really significant that I'm forgetting or something in the moment of reading that can't be retreived?

Reading a Poetry Reading and reading a review

2006-03-06T09:30:00.000-05:00

I went to a poetry reading at the library the other night. It was kind of serendipitous. I felt like going and I didn’t have to sell the idea to anyone else. There wasn’t anyone else. The headliner poet was Patrick Lane. He’s a famous Canadian poet. I haven’t read any of his poems. His celebrity has percolated into my consciousness enough that I know the name of his wife (another famous Canadian poet whose poems I’ve never read) and I know that he is a recovering alcoholic (don’t ask me why I know this – he did mention a friendship with Al Purdy whose work I have read & loved, so that may be why I know this fact about PL or maybe it was on the poetry news or something…).

I liked the poetry reading and I liked the poems that PL read. They were very narrative and prosy so they were easy on the ear, easy to follow. He even generated quite a bit of suspense when he read the one (it may not have actually been a poem) about his dad getting killed at work by a disgruntled former employee.

The poem I liked the best was the first one he read, “The War”. It was partly about the Holocaust but also about the irony of murder – how it’s bad when we’re the victim but somehow justified when we’re the perpetrator or at least that’s how I read it. It was the image of fly-catching that really nailed the poem for me. I liked the way PL read this part, how he made it complicated just like the way a fly flies, how he moved his hand when he read it. I liked the rhythm of his reading – he paced the language, phrased it so that the word “click” clicked just at the right moment.

Of course, I would (with my fascination with all things animal) zero-in on the fly wondering as I always do, if the fly would speak and, if so, if it would speak out of its own subjectivity or if it would speak with some kind of anthropomorphized voice – cartoonish or simulated real… PL, I think, let us hear the fly speak for itself. We heard its last “word,” its sound as the speaker’s friend taught the speaker how to catch the fly in mid flight and dash it to the ground and kill it. Before he killed it, he held his hand up to the speaker’s ear to let him hear the caught-alive fly speak. The episode was repeated twice in the poem. It had to matter.

The day after the poetry reading, I went on the internet to see if the text of the poem was printed anywhere. I wanted to read it. There were other things in the poem that interested me. PL’s sense of place was very powerful and he listed a lot of endangered species and, of course, being a war story, there was a lot of allusion to memory, re-membering and nostalgia (stuff I’m preoccupied with right now). I wondered too if he could be called a nature poet and thought, vaguely, that I might try to find out.

I didn’t find the poem but I found a review of the book (Go Leaving Strange) in which the poem appears and a reference to the poem with a quotation from the very section I was interested in.

The heat/ and a single fly he caught in the middle of the telling, his one hand/ holding what was left of the bread and his other, the left one, coming/ behind the fly and then sweeping slowly, catching the fly as it rose/ backwards as flies do when they first lift from what they rest on, bread/ the crumbs fallen on the slick surface of the table, a lick of wet butter./ He held his fist to my ear so I could hear the buzzing/ then flung the fly to the floor, the single sharp click of its body/ breaking there. And the story going on, the fly an interruption…

But the reviewer,(for The Danforth Review) Shane Neilson, read this poem completely differently than I did! He described the “fly episode” as a “paragraph of digression”, a “monster-size digression” and “irredeemably prosy”. I saw it as central to the poem (really nailing the message that we really don’t learn from our pasts despite the stories we tell, that, in fact, our pasts interrupt the ongoing story, the one we want to, ironically, get on with). Neilson saw the fly episode as something that should be edited out of the poem along with a lot of other stuff (which is funny as PL said at the poetry reading that he doesn’t edit his work, that most of it is published in first draft because he types slowly and figures he edits in his head). Maybe Neilson needs to see PL and hear him read it - the way he moved his hand, paced the language, phrased it so that the word “click” clicked just at the right moment.

I learned other stuff from reading the review of Lane’s book – that Lane is thought of as a superb poet who hasn’t changed much over the years and that Neilson sees this as a major failing. He champions the poet who “upon acquiring a style, first exhaust[s] and then relinquish[es] it in favour of seeking out another”. This assumes that we read the complete works of a poet and follow them along their poetic path rather than just read selected greatest hits etc. I read a lot of some poets but for the most part tend to flit through anthologies dipping deeper into the work of poets who tantalize me with a work I like. And I liked “The War” so I’ll dig deeper…and keep digging at the questions of DQ's ongoing and unfolding story and our own reasons for moving.

Veil (Resized)

2006-03-03T08:15:00.000-05:00

Otto's comment (placed here because we can't figure out how to get photos into the comment box):

the veil (curtain on the clothesline) image reminded me formally of this blank screen. the presence of the objects surrounding the blank rectangles in the
centre of the picture is heightened; the curtain is meant to let light through, and the screen is meant is to reflect light. but both speak of framing
the natural world.

Quixotic?

2006-03-02T08:32:00.000-05:00

I met a group of really nice young women yesterday at the local Jane Austen Fellowship. I decided in the end to talk about quixotism and I asked them a lot of questions (see below). They felt, frankly, that they were to some degree, quixotic. They asserted that they were balanced and not mad in their quixotism. They also talked compellingly about the comfort and sense of escape that reading brings them.

How well do we read romance/reality?

I asked them to quickly and parodically create the elements of a romantic comedy. And then I asked them some more questions:

Was it easy to do this?
Is it a form of self-mockery?
Do any of us “go too far” with our attraction to this sub-genre?
Do any of us live life as if it were a romantic comedy?
Are we Quixotic?

Do we know how JA felt about romance?
Do we know how the reader feels about romance?

Is there a connection?
Sense of identification?
Are we partly engaged, partly “above it all”?
Do the foibles of Austen’s characters allow us to indulge in fantasies we know are not true but are comforting in some way?
Have you ever been attacked for what you read/view because others view you as too quixotic?

Can how we relate to /identify with romance effect our own reading?

Why did Austen need to defend the novel (her famous defense in Ch. V of Northanger Abbey)?
Would Austen concur with our definitions of Romantic Comedy?
What would she do with these definitions?
What did she do with them?

Is Austen a snob when she privileges characters according to their ability to read perceptively?
Or is it an accurate way to judge character?
Do we do this?

How well do Northanger Abbey characters read?
What about Persuasion?

What about us?
How well do we read romance?

How do we balance the tension between fictional romance and real romance?
How do we live within our real romances if we privilege fictional romances?
Do we need a little fiction in our real romances?
Or, is this a recipe for disappointment?
Does Austen offer any practical tips?

(They felt that Austen was very helpful, that she creates intelligent heroines who model intelligent attitudes about romance. Most of them felt that they wanted to be like Elizabeth Bennet. Others preferred to model themselves after Elinor Dashwood, Anne Elliot and Fanny Price. They valued patience in romance - something Don Quixote could relate to, I think!).

Dust

2006-02-28T08:25:00.000-05:00

Being hypersensitive to all things DQ (despite my distaste for ice cream – I actually use “the other DQ” as a landmark and find myself looking at the DQ buildings I would have totally ignored previously) alerts me to the fact that once you start to focus on something, it pops up everywhere. Does that mean that there is no such thing as coincidence? That coincidence is manufactured by a mind that has already created it and is actually seeking it?

Today it’s dust. I see dust everywhere. This is because we’re having an area of our basement excavated. The work started yesterday. We thought we were prepared. Rooms were cleared. Boxes packed. Garbage put out. But we weren’t prepared for the dust. Or, we were only prepared for a portion of the dust that we actually got and now, I see dust everywhere. It’s on my keyboard, my coffee cup, the conference table, the windowsill – all places far away geographically from the work site. Is it a mental thing? Am I just attuned to dust? Did I bring the dust with me, in my pockets, in my hair, on my shoes? I’m checking my shoes now and the bottoms don’t look very dusty but there does seem to be a thin film on the uppers…I’m brushing it off now…

In my reading of DQ, I’m into a longish chunk devoted to DQ & Sancho’s visit with the Duke and Duchess who have recently read the first book of DQ & Sancho’s adventures – The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha. As they know “of Don Quixote’s extravagances”, they decide to “fall in with his whimsies, to agree with him in all he said, and to treat him like a knight errant”. But they go further and actually manufacture and stage adventures which entangle both DQ and Sancho in (mostly) funny ways. The D&D understand the triggers, the cues that DQ and Sancho need to engage them in their own fantasies. Much is made, for example, of Sancho’s island governorship (which he covets) and of the transformation of Dulcinea del Toboso. So, DQ and Sancho live in a constructed series of adventures here at the D&D’s place, even as this constructed adventure is part of their “real” adventures embedded in Part II. Do the D&D just want to have some fun or do they want to ensure that DQ and Sancho make their mark on the D&D’s turf so that the D&D can become part of the second part of the story? I’m not through the adventure yet but it’s very curious…

Another page just peeled off the back of my disintegrating copy of DQ. One side is “Penguin Classics: Recent and Forthcoming Volumes” and includes The Psalms, A Nietzsche Reader and Cicero’s Letters to Atticus. The other is an ad for Two Spanish Picaresque Novels – Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler. The description makes them both sound like good reads: with “ingenious ruses”, the outwitting of masters, and “scatological adventure”.

A Greeting from the last paragraph of Part II Chapter XXXV

2006-02-27T08:04:00.000-05:00

And now bright smiling dawn came on apace; the flowers of the field, revived, raised up their heads, and the crystal waters of the brooks, murmuring over the grey and white pebbles, hastened to pay their tribute to the expectant rivers; the glad earth, the unclouded sky, the fresh breeze, the clear light, each and all showed that the day that came treading on the skirts of morning would be calm and bright.

Otto on D and G

2006-02-21T08:02:00.000-05:00

I actually haven't been reading D&G much lately. But Otto has so I'll just link us to Otto's Plaid Column post from Thursday February 16, 2006! I have made some further notes on my notes/drawings (see Monday February 6, 2006 "Two Cartoons") of my readings from D&G, chapter 10.

The whole practice of "Saturday Reading" (see Monday November 21, 2005 and several subsequent postings) has dissolved...I need a moment to reassess this and find a new small space for reading D&G (was Steve Baker before D&G - not sure who it'll be next - although, now that I think of it, I have Giorgio Agamben's The Open on deck and "the other Mick" has recommended a few things...).

Keeping Things Whole

2006-02-20T07:57:00.000-05:00

A difficult few days...but I've learned over the years, to prepare for this. I know where to go. I try to make it easy for myself... I keep Mark Strand's Selected Poems on an open shelf reserved only for "working books". Most of my novels, art books, poetry books etc. are boxed. But I know that sometimes, from time to time, I need to read Strand. He's a literary soulmate. A lot of people I know don't like his work at all but it works for me...I've always really, really liked him. Strand always makes me laugh and cry. "Keeping Things Whole" is one of his best known poems and one I read this weekend. It really helps me to pull myself together.

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

- Mark Strand

I also grabbed Ray K. Metzker's Landscapes (one of the best books of photography I have ever seen) and flipped through it. It's partly what every photo monograph is - a collection of best shots- but it's also a cohesive experience. You can't really just flip through it - it's not a casual, detached experience: you're drawn in. We bought it by mistake thinking it was a different book of Metzker's photos but when I opened it for the first time and started to look at it, to read it, I couldn't put it down. I loved it. As I moved in and through the photos, I thought of Strand's poem "Keeping Things Whole". I still don't know why. But in an uncanny coincidence, facing one of plates about 80 pages into the book, Metzker had reproduced that very poem as illustration. And I'm feeling better already...just writing about it!

Wordhoard

2006-02-17T07:44:00.000-05:00

Just as I was wondering whether I’m hoarding DQ, I found this news (pasted below) on the OED website. It interested me yet it was kind of repugnant at the same time. My geekiness extends into different areas, I guess. I don’t really care about the size of my vocabulary. I should try reading the dictionary though. It can actually be kind of interesting as I recall especially if there are pictures. I do like the word “wordhoard”. I tried looking it up in the OED but got “Sorry, there were no results for your search”. I thought that was pretty funny. I guess it’s not a real word despite being used in an article posted on the OED website.

In the following extract from Words, Words, Words, language expert David Crystal shows how to estimate the size of your vocabulary...
As adults, our passive vocabulary is usually a third larger than our active vocabulary. We understand far more words than we routinely use.
How can we find out what our active and passive levels are? Most people are intrigued by the question, and would like to know how large their wordhoard is. One method of calculation is given below.

i. Take a dictionary, any dictionary...
Take a medium-sized dictionary - one between 1,500 and 2,000 pages. Aim for a sample of pages which is 2 per cent of the whole. If the dictionary is 1,500 pages, that means a sample of thirty pages; 2,000 pages will give you forty. Ensure the sample is exactly 2 per cent, to make the final calculation easy (see below).

ii. Spread the sample
Break the sample down into a series of selections from different parts of the dictionary - say (for a thirty-page sample), six choices of five pages each, or ten choices of three pages. It isn't sensible to take all pages from a single part. If you chose letter U, for instance, you would find yourself flooded with words beginning with un-. But do make sure you include some prefixes. A representative sample would look like this: words beginning with CA-, EX-, JA-, OB-, PL-, SC-, TO-, and UN-.

iii. Check the words
Begin with the first full page in each case - in other words, if you are looking for EX- and you find a few EX- words at the bottom of the page, ignore them and start at the top of the next page.
Go through all the words on each page of your sample. Divide your page margins into two columns. (Alternatively, you can write the headwords out on a separate sheet of paper.) If you think you know a word, but would not use it yourself, put a light pencil tick in the left-hand column. If you think you would, in addition, actively use the word, put a tick in the right-hand column. This is the difference between your passive and active vocabulary. You may need to look at the definition or examples given next to the word before you can decide. Ignore the number of meanings the word has: if you know or use the word in any of its meanings, that will do.
In a more sophisticated version, you can have three columns under each of these headings. For passive vocabulary, you can ask yourself: 'Do I know the word well, vaguely, or not at all?' For active vocabulary, you can ask: 'Do I use the word often, occasionally, or not at all?' If you are uncertain, use the final column.
Make sure you don't miss any words out. Some dictionaries cluster (or 'nest') words together in bold face within an entry, just showing their endings, as in nation, ~al, ~ize. Don't ignore these. They are different words. Also include any phrases or idioms, such as call up and call the tune. Ignore alternative spellings: an example like Caesarean/Cesarean counts as just one word.

iv. Add up the ticks
Add up the ticks in each column, and jot the totals down at the bottom of each page. Then add up all the page totals. Multiply by 50 (if your sample was 2 per cent of the whole). The result will be, more or less, the size of your personal vocabulary.
The procedure, of course, doesn't allow for people who happen to know a large number of non-standard words, such as dialect words, which won't be in this kind of dictionary. And if you are, say, a scientist, it will underestimate your specialist vocabulary too. But the figure it gives will be an approximation of your everyday wordhoard. And it will be larger than you think (my emphasis)

I wonder what that proves? (my emphasis)

Yesterday

2006-02-16T08:31:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, someone asked me how much longer I was going to be reading DQ. I thought it was an odd question. I have about 300 more pages left to read. I’m not rushing. I like to wander in the episodes (and the book is very episodic) and I spend quite a bit of time thinking about Don Quixote and Sancho after I read an episode. I don’t have a plan. Maybe I’m a slow reader. Maybe I’m a hoarder. Some people seem to judge a book’s quality by how fast they read it. “It’s a page-turner”. DQ is a page turner. I just don’t turn the pages very quickly! That might be why my copy of the book is getting so messed up.

Loose Covers

2006-02-13T08:13:00.000-05:00

Just a bit contrived (but I am really reading these books right now)...This book was a gift (people rarely give me books). It's proving to be useful for the upcoming/impending Austen talk (and of course gives me permission to read more of/reread Austen's juvenilia -- Love and Freindship is brilliantly satirical and Jack and Alice is a real hoot!)

This one is for a class I'm teaching this week on "designing explanations".

The cover attracted me. I thought it was about a prof. who breakdances for his class. It's actually quite ok, very smooth easy read on pedagogical excellence based on a study done by Ken Bain.

Was "not a coincidence" but now I'm not sure...

2006-02-10T12:28:00.000-05:00

I’ll start with “a voice”

Daumier tried to capture Don Quixote as a character who had escaped Cervantes and the prison bars of lines of print on pages of a book. And it seems to be true, DQ has escaped the world of “retreat” and has entered the “real” world as an icon of some kind, known by everybody from scholar to man-in-the-street. This escape from the author and even the story the author placed him in is quite fascinating. Sherlock Holmes has done it, so has the monster of Frankenstein, and Dracula, probably Ebenezer Scrooge. They no longer have to have anything to the book that gave them birth, but they can if they want to. They are comfortable in both the “real” world and the splendid world of “retreat”.

…and continue with “Otto”

I love the notion of the "creature" being free of the creator - free to be accessed by anyone who sees themself in him or her.

…and then it’s over to me…

I’d already titled this entry “not a coincidence” and I was starting to write it in my head while on my way to work this morning.

But there is a coincidence, something I probably looked at a long time ago but didn’t remember – especially as both the back and front covers of my Penguin Classic DQ fell off several months ago so I don’t see the real cover as the cover anymore – I just see what I have left which is really just the title page and the text. The papers are all curling up at the bottom right corner and I’ve now torn a couple of pages…but I believe this is a Daumier painting on the cover that I’ve kept and sometimes use as a bookmark:

So now to the part that is not a coincidence or is no longer a coincidence:

A couple of months ago, the local Jane Austen Fellowship group asked me if I would give a talk on Austen at one of their upcoming meetings. I agreed but put them off a bit. Now the date is fast approaching. I vaguely said I’d talk about either the juvenilia or the influence of earlier authors on Austen but I’ve decided now that I’ll incorporate DQ.

I have a somewhat uncomfortable relationship to Jane Austen’s work. I used to teach a course on Austen which I enjoyed but I am definitely not a Janeite. My students were either appalled by this or didn’t care. They were amused by my attachment to Austen’s juvenilia – one of the Janeites suggested that it was a sign of my immaturity. So be it. The juvenilia makes me laugh and it’s clever. I’ll report on my journey to integrate Austen and DQ (it’s fairly obvious in Northanger Abbey that Austen is borrowing from either DQ or Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote which is an eighteenth-century rewriting of DQ – and a very funny book too!).

Like a skipping record, I am repeating myself - but is there any harmony in that repeated moment?

2006-02-09T08:07:00.000-05:00

or exquisite dissonance...?

After commenting twice on my own posting, and reading those comments (see Tuesday February 7, 2006 "Reading Dore's DQ/a voice...coincidences redux"),I begin to wonder ...Should I create or admit that I have already begun to create connections to DQ deliberately...that it's not just all coincidence?

Some of it is. And I have to admit that I'm enjoying the moment of discovery, the moment of the coincidence. I smile or laugh. And it mostly has come through reading: a note scribbled on a draft program that I happen to see, something received in the mail, a magazine found on a couch, a comment here on the blog...from a voice.

I would include all of the links but I think the last paragraph looks better without them...

Reading Dore's DQ/a voice...coincidences redux

2006-02-07T08:21:00.000-05:00

Here's the frontispiece from Gustav Dore's illustrated DQ. I think it's called "Don Quixote in his Library"

Not too many thoughts yet but always the thought that illustrations and text generate a potential. And...the frontispiece is a gateway and sets a tone. You have to pass through it or flip past it to enter the text. I like the author/illustrator (for example, Dr. Seuss). It's a comfortable fit. But comparisons are interesting. I like the completely different takes of John Tenniel and Arthur Rackham on Alice in Wonderland. Maybe with children's books you grow up through Tenniel and into Rackham who has much more appeal for disaffected youth. I've seen the Petipa/Gorsky/Minkus Don Quixote ballet which I could read as an illustrated text but the ballet really just focuses on one episode. Dore's project seems much more comprehensive and ambitious.

Two Cartoons;Or, reading D&G just before Xmas with the Carpenters running interference

2006-02-06T08:12:00.000-05:00

In fact, the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.

Each multiplicity is defined by a borderline functioning as Anomolous

Functions of the Anomolous:
1. borders each multiplicity
2. determines stability
3. precondition for the alliance necessary to becoming
4. carries the transformations of becoming or crossing of multiplicities always farther down the line of flight

They speak of dangers...on a continuum from poodles to Ahab-like self-destruction

…and The Folding

2006-02-03T15:58:00.000-05:00

It is, in part, the folding that I love about DQ. The folding brings you back to coincidences again…(see Thursday December 22, 2005, “Folding; Or, Now as I have a taste for reading even torn papers lying in the street” and other varied postings on coincidences). Now the narrator has revealed that Cide Hamete, “the chronicler of this great history” has revealed that Master Peter, the puppeteer, is really Gines de Pasamonte, one of the galley slaves DQ freed in his earlier adventure (in Part I). (Wow, it’s tiring just recounting all that). In Part II, Gines tricks them again and goes his merry way. It’s just a brief reappearance. It’s interesting to me mostly because of his ape (he travels with a prophesying ape) and because of his puppets. I really didn’t pay much attention to Master Peter himself and in this way, I suppose, he conned me too (“he made apes of them all” is how the text puts it). But I’m wondering now about the ape. In the story, the ape is represented as highly intelligent but then revealed as merely having the ability to mimic intelligent behaviour. The ape has run away – fled to the inn roof. What does his running away mean, how do I read it? Do I fold in what I’ve already seen in DQ with the lions in Part II, Chapter XVII, do I include my own reading and response to the tiger in Life of Pi? (See Thursday January 19, 2006, “DQ Update”). Or is the ape folded in from some other fiction or reality outside of my reality or experience…perhaps while Cervantes was mowing Borges’ lawn (see Wednesday February 01, 2006 “comment from ‘a voice’”)?

The Scramble

2006-02-01T16:15:00.000-05:00

I forgot about “scramble competition”.
It’s another new term.
I like the free-for-all implied by it.
It appeals to my apparent need for chaos.
It’s dynamic and risky.
It’s a breakdance move.
It’s a midway ride.
It may be dangerous... especially for a reader.
A reader tends to like to sit back and watch, and be there for the long haul, for the story.
There’s pleasure in that.
That strategy (sit back and watch) could be an advantage if tenacity and being there are the keys that access the resources.
But the reader may not know or care about the competition.
The story is a siren.
Readers often don’t want to know where they are going (they hope though) and often don’t have practical skills in controlling where they are going (except to stop reading).
Are readers too polite?
Should they know what the competitive stakes may be before they go into the story?
In the scramble, can the reader be easily colonized, tricked out of the limited resources that caused the scramble in the first place?

Predictably

2006-01-31T08:14:00.000-05:00

Predictably, I haven’t got very far with The Forgotten Pollinators and it’s due back tomorrow!!!!

I was enjoying it because it’s a natural history/environmental text that recognizes the weaknesses of its designated genre and tries to address those weaknesses (except in the title – a big oversight, in my opinion). Nabhan and Buchmann are clear about their activist stance – they study plant pollination and see that the destruction of habitat, introduction of “alien species,” new parasites etc. are having a negative impact on species survival. They know how to “prove” this, describe this and write about this within their own academic and scientific communities but they want to have a greater impact on general readers. They reach out formally by structuring the book as a series of “rememberings”. So the facts are told through stories told by Gary & Steve who talk about their work experientially. This is much more palatable for a general reader who can "learn the science" through the stories of Gary & Steve’s individual and collective field work over the years. We also hear stories of the bees, bats, ants etc. who are the “heroes” of the tales. Nabhan and Buchman include drawings by Paul Mirocha (drawings are often a part of natural history texts) but probably my favourite part of the book is the glossary just because it has some great new terms in it. I have a hard time remembering terminology. But here are some of the new terms I’m learning:

Adaptive radiation
Anemophily
Bombiculture
Cascading extinctions
Defaunation
Facultative mutualism
Floral reward
lek
Linked extinctions
Melittophily
Nectar corridor
Outcrossing
Reciprocal coevolution
Seed shadow
Traplining
Tripped flower
Yellow rain

I hope they'll be useful...or I could just drop them randomly into conversations along the way...

Wandering /NO RENEWALS

2006-01-25T07:59:00.000-05:00

I ordered a book from interlibrary loan recently. I wanted to check a reference that I'd found on the internet for this academic paper I'm finishing (today, I hope). I thought I'd use my typical research reading method which is to read the index, find the specific topic I’m interested in (bees), locate the quotation, check it, reference it properly and send the book back… but lo and behold, in true errant fashion, DQesque, (you might say), I looked up the first reference to bees in the index and the book drew me in (it’s interesting) and I am wandering in it and now wondering if I can possibly read the whole thing by the time that I have to return it to the library – NO RENEWALS is stamped on the hot pink order paper taped to the front cover.

Wandering and NO RENEWALS represent such cross purposes. And it really does take me quite some time to read a book…

DQ Update

2006-01-19T11:57:00.000-05:00

I’ve had a bit of a reading spurt and miraculously have read about 40 pages of DQ recently. It is in part because the adventures are coming fast and furious and the reading is compelling. Of this 40 pages my favourite part is Chapter XVII which includes Sancho filling DQ’s helmet with curds and then allowing DQ to don the helmet and have the curds run down his face and beard. DQ believes that his skull is softening or his brain is melting or that he is inexplicably sweating and then gets really mad when he realizes that he has curds in his helmet. Sancho, of course, claims that the Devil did it. Next, a cart decorated with the King’s colours appears. DQ and company are told that the cart contains a gift of lions which the carters are delivering to the king. DQ demands that the lions be released so that he can challenge them. Unable to dissuade him, everyone runs away and the lion-keeper-carter opens the first cage. The lion stretches, yawns, turns around and basically ignores DQ who then demands that the lion-keeper agitate the lion and “force” him to come out and fight. The lion-keeper then says:

Be content, Sir Knight, with the day’s work, which is all that could be desired so far as valour goes. Do not seek to tempt Fortune a second time.

Is this a lesson in learning to “let things lie”? It also brings to mind the beautiful indifference of animals to human desires and reminds me that my favourite part in Life of Pi (not a book that I loved by any means) is when the tiger runs away (I won’t recount the whole episode because I don’t want to ruin it for anyone’s who almost there in the book or planning to read the book or even see the film they’re making of it).

Reading the Up Do

2006-01-17T07:47:00.000-05:00

As a young girl, to my eyes, the beehive hairdo was the epitome of feminine beauty. I always wanted one but never had one...I began 2006 with the updo and french manicure (no pic of hands available at this time). Adjectives used to describe the updo by various wondering friends and family: loopy, medusa, fabulous, artistic, not bad now that I've gotten used to it (not really an adjective but descriptive in its own way). There was a happy occasion attached to the updo. I successfully danced all night in heels. My only regret (and I've had a few) is that the ballroom was strangely empty and there was no one there to dance with me when Frank Sinatra sang "My Way" and I wasn't drunk like the guy who wore his girlfriend's fake fur wrap half the night so I couldn't get up and dance by myself with an invisible partner.

Reading with your Ears

2006-01-16T08:30:00.000-05:00

My mom doesn’t see very well anymore. She’s always enjoyed reading and has tried some of the large print books from the library and the talking books to see if that helps. But she seems to also have trouble concentrating, putting together the story as she reads/listens. She says that she forgets what she’s read/heard and has to start over again. I can totally understand how this happens because I often take long breaks in my reading of particular books. When I return to them, I have to bang myself on the head to remember what exactly was going on the last time I read that book. The process is accelerated with my mom. Over Christmas, we all (including my mom) found the process kind of comical. She was listening to a book on tape called Scarlet Feather by Maeve Binchy, an author I know she really likes. But she would often lose her concentration and even fall asleep while she was listening. Because our house is small, when she listens to her tapes we usually end up listening too as regardless of what we’re doing, we can hear the audio. That means that we also get invested in or involved in the story. With the Maeve Binchy book though, we had to keep starting the tape over again because my mom couldn’t remember what she’d already listened to. With this particular book we ended up listening to the beginning of it three times. We’d get a little more into it but that was only because we let the tape run longer even if my mom had fallen asleep. So each time we listened to the beginning of the book, we’d get a little bit further along in the story but not much. It’s a really interesting, incremental way to read. I found by the third time, I just tuned out of the beginning of the story (which I’d already listened to twice) and perked up my ears only when the new part of the story began. Ultimately, we didn’t get very far with the story because after the third try, my mom suddenly said that she didn’t like the tape and that it wasn’t as good as the book had been. I was surprised because I hadn’t realized that she had already read the book. The tape is unabridged and literally just someone reading the book so it isn’t actually any different than the book so it must be something in the experience of reading to herself that brought her more pleasure. Or just the fact that she used to be able to concentrate and be independent in her reading. Recently, we tried another book on CD called The Horse Whisperer by Nicolas Evans. This is a book I know my mom hasn’t read. I’d seen the movie (not a great movie) but had never read the book (it’s a good story). As the story was much more engaging than the Maeve Binchy, we ended up listening to a lot more of it and I found that we kind of pushed my mom to continue on with it rather than repeat and replay parts she didn’t remember. But at one point, I had to do a basic plot summary for her and realized that she was getting almost nothing from listening to the story. We were the ones who were reading. I've recently wondered if this is the end of my mom’s reading life and I wonder more generally how a habitual reader learns to makes sense of things without reading.

Reading the Signs

2006-01-12T09:12:00.000-05:00

In grief I think we look for signs and assign meaning to things which may or may not be meaningful. It seems harmless and it helps. At Don’s memorial yesterday, the CD the family had chosen to play would not play at first. Don’s cousin Paul just had to continue with his service until someone from the funeral home let us know that they had got the CD to work. Later, many people commented that Don had intervened and prevented the CD from playing. “He didn’t want us to listen to that song,” several people asserted. Someone even said that he didn’t want us to listen to that song at first but then relented. This would have to be the case because the chosen song was so funereal, appropriate and by James Taylor an artist we all know Don liked:

Just shower the people you love with love
Show them the way that you feel
Things are gonna work out fine if you only will

Later, as we were driving back to Hamilton, we all noticed how beautiful the weather was – mild, pastel sky and sun…and we read it as a sign and as a lovely gift that Don had sent us…it doesn’t matter whether this is true or not.

This is something I’m learning from DQ currently - as the knight errant – The Knight of the Mirrors - has turned out to be a fraud/a friend wounded by DQ and now failed in his quest to trick DQ into returning home. And DQ has continued to wander convinced that the face of his friend revealed when DQ lifted his visor at the end of their “battle” was put there by an enchantment and that he has really successfully vanquished an enemy. And I guess there's some truth in that...

Reluctant to post this one…Reading death/Is death reading me?

2006-01-10T08:09:00.000-05:00

But I’m reading the obituaries again (despite Sean’s comment - see Tuesday December 20, 2005, “Obituary”, The Guelph Mercury calls their death section “Obituaries”). It’s so different this time…only a month after my dad’s death. I received the phone call on Monday. My old, dear friend Don died suddenly of a heart attack last Friday. I was in shock for at least an hour – flitting around my office, picking up pieces of paper randomly, reading a little, putting them down, checking my email incessantly as if some words, something I could read, some news would come to make it all make sense. I also had to be practical and write a couple of people who would want to know, would be, like me, like me, shocked and reading…

One of the practical things that I did was look for Don’s death notice on line. I’d already been given the “what to do next” info. on the phone but, as with my dad, I needed to see the announcement of his death in black and white and read it. What did I learn? Nothing about the cause of death or the events leading up to it, just the word “suddenly” and Don’s age (which I already knew – though “in his 58th year” is not the way I would have said it…as if he were stretching towards May 14th – his next birthday, not quite reaching it). I read the names of his family members some who I know, some who I don’t know…reading that they will plant a tree in Don’s memory made me feel much better and much worse as he and I spent a lot of time walking in the woods and cross country skiing so long ago now...I was worried about the funeral home so it did reassure me to see in black and white that it’s not the same one we used for my dad.

I didn’t want to have to go back there again so soon.

Part II is even better than Part I

2006-01-06T13:14:00.000-05:00

...what ever that means… but my eyes grow wider and my laugh louder as I eagerly (now) flip the pages. I am not often this kind of reader anymore.

First, Sancho asserts his intelligence, understands that he is not merely a hapless sidekick but an actor with the power to propel the story. He meets DQ’s needs (as a squire should) by creating a Dulcinea from a random, passing peasant girl knowing that once DQ makes his love declaration, they can literally and literarily move on. And I can read on…

And then they meet the cartful of actors – Death, the Angel etc. and resist the impulse to read them as anything but what they are and again the adventure continues…(how is this or is it at all like Pokemon or a video game?).

And now, DQ has met another knight errant and Sancho another squire and knights & squires have just separated for their respective conversations…and it's wonderous to imagine that there are other errantes out there...

Abridged and edited (but true) excerpts from various emails received & read in the last 2 days

2006-01-05T14:50:00.000-05:00

Hi I am in your class on Mondays at 2:30 but i was just wondering if it
was possible for me to switch into your class on tuesdays at 11:30 if
possible. I have a class conflict and it has been really hard for me
to compromise my schedule. Just let me know as soon as possible. Thanks so
much for you time.

I am registered in your class but have not been assigned a section. I was told to contact the instructor of the course to find out how to get sectioned. I was wondering how I would go about getting sectioned into the Tuesday class? Thank you for you help.

Take Care and have a good week !

Is the Monday section ok? I have to switch a lab section for another class first but I don't think it should be a problem to get done by next Monday.

I'm very sorry I missed class yesterday, but my plane didn't arrive until 4:00.

I really want to register in your class, but the system indicates
the seat was full. I am just wondering is it possible for me to register for
this course in another way or is there anyways for me to get in this class.

I have successfully added the class. However, I am not sectioned. I have a 4th year seminar on fridays during the friday timeslot, and the monday time from 230-530 would be the optimal time slot, as i have another class during the tuesday period as well. Should i come and see you in your office to arrange get sectioned? Or should i just come to the first class on monday and see you then?

I just registered for your class today and I was wondering if you
could tell me my section.

Reading Garry Winogrand

2006-01-03T08:00:00.000-05:00

For the last year or maybe two, I’ve kept a couple of Garry Winogrand books beside my bed and I often “read” them. He’s one of my fav. photographers so I thought in a time when I’m not getting much textual reading done, perhaps a look at some of the musings I’ve made about Winogrand in another journal I started last year might get me (and y’alls) thinking about other kinds of reading.

In part it has to do with the light and the observation of light and the rendering and translation of light into black and white photography. I'm trying to make some notes about a photographer I like & learn, I hope, something about why & how I like these photographs. I sense that they are influential (I am also a photographer) & I know that this photographer (the American photographer, Garry Winogrand who died in 1986ish) is lauded by others but in reading about his work, no one has really satisfied me in their explanations of why & how I like his work.

One thing I know about Winogrand that I like and I think is medium-specific (to photography) & culturally specific (to the increasing affluence of the 1960s, the indulgence, the consumerism) is that Winogrand took a lot of photos (and I'm not kidding). Even his friends joked about it so much that he apparently started to describe events in terms of how many rolls of film he had shot. So that when someone asked him about a social event he attended (where he might be working or not), he'd succinctly say, "32 rolls" to describe the event. I think many people who photograph more casually would use "affordability" as one of the reasons why they don't take as many photos as Winogrand. So is Winogrand indulgent or excessive as a character and is this something that I like about him?

[A question that occus to me at this point is: how has digital photography changed this mindset that taking a lot of photos is weird or indulgent or too expensive? I 'm also thinking of people I know who videotaped their kids incessantly and must have hundreds of hours of basketball game, swimming & ballet lesson footage stored away somewhere...what opportunities does that offer them? or are they just documenters and not artists...]

But I think that Winogrand took a lot of photographs because he was looking for something in the event and he knew that unless he photographed a lot he had no chance of finding it or getting close to it because it only existed in the moment, in the essence of the event. It's very difficult to understand what's happening to you when you're doing something but the camera can help (in some ways though it takes you out of the event in other ways). If you look at Winogrand's contact sheets and then at the one shot that got published, that he or someone else picked out as the essential photo of that event, maybe then you can get a better sense of what his working methodology was. I've heard some comments about just how bad some of his photos are when you look at the contact sheets but this not a smart observation as far as I'm concerned because it doesn't take into account the process & the 'being in the eventness' of the process and the learning through mistakes etc. Not every photo has to be good in order for it to be "good" (for the process).

But I haven't got back to talking about the light.

(Don't let me forget to talk about superstition...because Winogrand was highly superstitious and this fits with the magical power of photography - photography as perservative, creator of talismans etc.)

I like some of the things John Szarkowski has to say about Winogrand -- particularly about his inability to focus.

In his earlier work, Szarkowski seems to think that it (the issue of focus) has to do with an essential indecisiveness at points where the formal issues (light & line for example) seem to interfere with the subject. W's photos are "sharp" but unfocussed simultaneously. That really shakes things up!

In analyzing W's later work, Szarkowski can't explain the lack of focus because it's "real". Despite his skill as a photographer, Winogrand produced a lot of unsharp negs (and, no, he was only in his fifties when he died so it's not an old age issue) in the last years of his life.

As you know (or may know), I am interested in 'focus' as a problem/challenge and that I think the issue lies way beyond the boundaries of photography. Lately, I've been photographing movement & purposely out of focus. I primarily use a manual camera & I shoot in available light a lot. I'm also thinking about focus in terms of being predominately right brained and how much it's okay to be myself as a right brained thinker...and not focus???

Beyond the photographic, there's also the in-the-moment humour in his work. Photography, generally, is good for this. I really can't get into my "theories" of humour in photography right now but, briefly, because photography captures a moment, there a decontextualizing that can generate humour. You sometimes really don't know what's going on because only part of the "story" is present. So I've got a couple of photos here by Garry Winogrand. The Bronx Zoo one is one of my absolute favorites. You can make up a story about what's going on here but, ultimately, I find that regardless of any logical explanation for the picture, the humour of the photo overpowers it. For me, it's just a great photo! The other photo has something to say about spectacle and photography itself and there's a long history of photographs of photographers taking photographs -- so the Apollo 11 one is funny too but is fundamentally about photography & looking...as is the Zoo photo really if you take follow a particular storyline and interpret the box as a way of creating a "hide", a neutral viewing place where the observed isn't thrown off by the observer because he/she can see them. So the observer has advantage and power over the observed (theory of the gaze). In Winogrand's photo though, there is the observer of the photograph whose gaze disarms the observer in the photo and exposes their "ruse" & renders it absurd. But what about the other couple in the photo with their identical jackets? Are they "hiding" too?

Poor Attention Span

2006-01-01T15:59:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year!!

The skies have been morosely overcast all week – even and consistent grey blocks -- hardly pathetic fallacy as I am behaving quite unevenly and inconsistently…

I find it incredibly difficult to concentrate on any one thing when I’m at home which may be why I often prefer to go out to do my reading (See for example Monday November 21, 2005 "Saturday Reading", Friday December 2, 2005 "Rereading/Revisiting Happier Saturday Reading", Thursday December 8, 2005 "Claustrophobia 2"). At home there are constant interruptions, distractions and an enormous number of unfinished tasks staring me in the face – especially if there’s a whole week to contemplate them…plus it always snows at least once at this time of year…

My reading has been distracted, interrupted and mostly unfinished. I seem to flit around, picking up papers, books and magazines and reading them sometimes with purpose and sometimes without. For example, two days ago, I was looking for something on a shelf and ended up crouched on the floor reading the McMaster Centre for Dance Performance Newsletter “profiles” page. Then, I needed to sort out my plans for next week so I had to go and find Ami and Aldo’s embossed purple, silver & white wedding invitation. I had read it quickly when we got it a couple of months ago but I hadn’t paid attention to the times and address. I had noted the strange insertion of a middle name for Ami (she is now Ami Elizabeth – perhaps after Elizabeth Bennet – as Ami is a big P&P fan). I’ve known her for over twenty years now and one of her ongoing laments was that her parents didn’t give her a middle name…so, I guess, at a time when she is changing her surname anyway, it made sense to totally “get the name right” (although the choice of Elizabeth surprises me a little). A part of the invitation I hadn’t read before was the “poem” to the left of the hardcore times & addresses information. It seems pretty standard and appears uncredited. Here it is:

For hearing my thoughts
Understanding my dreams
And being my best friend…
For loving me without end…
I do.

Beyond reading newsletters and wedding invitations, I’ve also been trying to read an article all week connected to the academic paper I’m revising (See Tuesday December 6, 2005 “In order to serve you better..."). It’s a very clearly written and mostly interesting article partly about bees, partly about Amazons but mostly about shifts in perceptions about women and gender roles in eighteenth-century Britain (“On Queen Bees and Being Queens” by Dror Wahrman). It’s a good comprehensive contextual article for me. It reassures me in some ways by confirming and solidifying what I’ve already found out about bees but it’s different enough from what I’m doing that I feel that what I’m writing is actually worth writing (a common affliction of writers, I think).

Another bit of reading I’ve done this week is connected to the “Summons to Juror” I received in the mail on Friday. This is the fourth time I’ve been summoned in the last fifteen years (please tell me if this seems like a lot of times for a process that is random selection!!). I read the enclosed flyer called “Some Commonly Asked Questions about Jury Duty” several times mostly out of disbelief…

P.S. Just so you know…DQ and Sancho are just entering El Toboso as DQ prepares himself to address Dulcinea. D& G have stopped talking about vampires for now and are looking at the brighter side (in my opinion) of the outsider, the anomalous…

Not reading much at all

2005-12-29T05:46:00.000-05:00

...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

2005-12-24T11:43:00.000-05:00

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...

2005-12-22T13:44:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-21T13:21:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-20T16:00:00.000-05:00

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

2005-12-15T08:18:00.000-05:00

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.

Claustrophobia 2

2005-12-08T07:40:00.000-05:00

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...

2005-12-06T07:38:00.000-05:00

...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...