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Category Archives: Reading
Fate of Visions
Marcel Proust in “The Princesse de Guermantes Receives”, Third Chapter of The Past Recaptured, translated by Frederick A. Blossom, on the fragility of memories and the affordances offered by nebulous recall If I still possessed a copy of […], I … Continue reading
Finger Pieces
There is a recent entry in Berneval that slyly substitutes the word “finders” for “fingers”. finders lightly running down a spine It can appear to be a simple error or the work of the unconscious on the resources of language. … Continue reading
Reading the Index Finding Treasure
In these days of full text searching, the reading of indices is no longer an habitual activity. It is not however difficult to appreciate the indices prepared with the care and preserved in tomes such as The Book of Knowldge: … Continue reading
Micro-Pangs
The one side of the layout is a micro-narrative. On the other side is a brief sartorial description and a note about what the spotted person is reading. At times the micro-narraitve offers a pastiche of what the spotted person … Continue reading
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Productive Renewal
Jan Lars Jensen. Nervous System or Losing My Mind in Literature “A Can Opener for Our Times” Serious people read non-fiction, after all. But non-fiction books can accommodate readers who drop in and out of their breadth. A person can … Continue reading
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Situated Reading of Situations
Susan Stewart. On Longing [T]he distance between the situation of reading and the situation of the depiction is bridged by description, the use of a field of familiar signs […] Thus, whenever we speak of the context of reading, we … Continue reading
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Page Turning
As Appendix B to More Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Rupert Hart-Davis there is “A Reminiscence of 1898 by Wilfred Hugh Chesson” in which Wilde comments on the impact of page size on the experience of reading. “I do … Continue reading
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Readers, Intergenerational
A photograph by Sidney Weaver adorns the back dust jacket of 1968 Citadel publication of Secrets of the British Museum by Peter Fryer (originally published as Private Case — Public Scandal 1966) It is a touching photograph which given the … Continue reading
Approaches
A fictional account of reading James At the Metropolitan Museum sunlight had cleared the apartment towers and was gracing the upper steps by the museum entrance. In the 1970s I’d sat on those steps with Pimm. We’d discovered early on … Continue reading
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Deployments
From Humanism and Democratic Criticism by Edward Said: That deployment of an alternative identity is what we do when we read and when we connect parts of the text to other parts and when we go on to expand the … Continue reading
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