Slice Acceleration

In our neighbourhood there is a practice of leaving books and household articles at curbside, free for the picking. Some have turned this recycling practice into an art.

The other day, I stumbled upon a pile of books which amounted to an ingenious gag.

On top was a Signet paperback with bold colours and offering to guide the reader to Dynamic Speed Reading.

Under the speed inducing paperback was a hardcover edition of Carl Honoré In Praise of Slow with its yield sign shaped layout on the cover.

There is a quotation from Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature on the cover of the Honoré book that reads "Try reading this book one chapter a day — its is worth allowing its subversive message to sink in so it has a chance of changing your life." Now I am not a radical believer that reading, slow or otherwise, can change your life (I am of the school that discourse (writing or talking) about what is read can, maybe, along with other actions, change the world). In any event, I found in my daily reading a passage in e.e. cumminngs that is intriguing for its word-slicing speed and its injunction not to hurry, intriguing because of its echo with the book stack gag — it requires some combination of both stopping to pay attention and some acceleration to browse quickly over the offerings to pull out the gems.

is always beau

tiful and
that nobod
y beauti

ful ev
er hur

ries

The paradox being if the eye doesn't hurry over the breaks no meaning emerges.

And so for day 1356
30.08.2010

Printing Out and Slowing Down

Marie-Laure Ryan on reading Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce.

During my first pass through Twelve Blue I was so preoccupied with restoring a semblance of order in its informational chaos that I hardly took the time to slow down and properly savor a passage. The twelve lines on the left of each screen kept urging me to make use of my freedom to click, to move on and find out what lay beyond the screen. When I encountered passages that tempted me to take a deep breath and inhale the flavor of language. I cheated the electronic medium by printing them out. This allowed me to postpone their rereading and to move on in my elusive quest for narrative coherence. (Without printouts, and without a map of the network, who knows if I would ever get another look at a given screen?)

from Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media

And so for day 975
14.08.2009

The Further Adventures of e

Lola Lemire Tostevin in an essay on Canadian poet bp Nichol ("Is This Where the Poem Begins?" collected in Subject to Criticism: Essays) suggests that "[w]hat bp Nichol wrote of Marshall McLuhan could easily apply to his own writing:"

There is a lightness of touch to McLuhan's writing, an airiness, that has often been mistaken for a lack of depth. But the wonderful thing in reading McLuhan is precisely that he was using language to take off, using it to soar free of an artificial notion of what constitutes profound thinking, utilizing instead the mind's ability to leap, to follow fictional highways to real destinations ...

Odd, when I find myself reading the twists and turns of the oeuvre of bp Nichol I am more inclined to plunk myself down and mine the text rather than soar (i.e. use the text as a springboard). Recall my being caught up in cogitating about the spacing "no is e" culled from "Coda: Mid-Initial Sequence" from The Martyrology: Book III reprinted in As Elected. I plod along sensitive to the sense making machinery. Later in that particular sequence one comes across the following line:

i (n) am e

The poetic subject "names" and negates. And the non-soaring reader is attentive to the echo with the earlier line "no is e". On offer is the negation of an "h".

11 years since i first conceived myself a writer
took up the task to earn the name
& now i see
i (n) am e

Now it is possible to also read, slowly, a different parsing "in am e". I see the enemy. And 'e is us. Or not entirely since the slow reader can resist easy identification with the shifter "i". I guess I am a sore reader prone to scratching...

And so for day 672
15.10.2008