On Reading in Slow Motion PDF

On Reading in Slow Motion In the introduction to "On Reading as a Writer," we told you about two of our mantras for reading: (1) In order to learn how to write, you have to learn how to read as a writer. (2) There's only one way to learn how to read well and that's by rereading. We have a third ma...

On Reading in Slow Motion In the introduction to "On Reading as a Writer," we told you about two of our mantras for reading: (1) In order to learn how to write, you have to learn how to read as a writer. (2) There's only one way to learn how to read well and that's by rereading. We have a third mantra we repeat to our students: Read in slow motion. When students are learning to read as writers, it's more valuable for them to read and reread a brief selection with great care than it is for them to race through a much longer text. Reading in slow motion means looking up unfamiliar terms, names, historical events, and images. We encourage our students to track down some of the author's sources and to read those sources as writers, which means exploring the connections the author has made to or between those sources. We do this because we want our students to see that whatever they're reading is connected to a much larger network of meaning. We believe so strongly in the value of reading in slow motion that we routinely offer classes where we spend the entire semester reading, discussing, and writing about one short book --- a book that engages with a complicated subject in innovative ways. We have one rule in these classes: no reading ahead. Students are invited, encouraged, and at times even required to reread what we've already read and discussed, but when they finish the five or seven or ten pages assigned for the next class, they must stop at the designated point. We have this rule for two reasons, both equally important. First, as we have mentioned often in this book, there's only one way to learn how to read well and that is to reread. As you reread, you inevitably notice passages you skipped over the first time; you can see patterns of thought and organization; you can pick up on repeated terms, phrases, and ideas; you can see connections unfold in time; you become aware of nuances, deflections, missteps, and gems hidden in plain sight. The words on the page or on the screen don't change, but your relationship to them does once you become more and more familiar with how the writer chooses to put those words together. Reading in slow motion forces you to engage with writing that isn't meant to be skimmed, writing that can't be reduced to a bulleted list, a meme, or a series of snappy slides, writing that gives you access to a mind at work on a problem that warrants your time and attention. The second reason we ask students not to read ahead is that this allows us to spend a semester considering what could or might come next in the piece we're reading. By staying together --- by staying on the same page, as it were --- we get to see in each class session that what happens next in any given piece of writing is the result of a choice on the writer's part. That choice may be conscious or unconscious; it may appear to be mandated by reason or convention; it might come off as inspired or irrational. But in every single instance, asking "What's next, do you think?" focuses attention on the fact that whatever comes next is never inevitable. As writers, we can always choose our own paths. Always. Recently, we spent a semester reading Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby, which is a book-length, essayistic meditation on the author's mother's decline into dementia. It is also a reflection on the power of stories, on mortality, and on incompleteness. Or, in Solnit's own words, "Pared back to its bare bones, this book is a history of an emergency and the stories that kept me company." Along the way, Solnit considers fairy tales, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the water library in Iceland, Marquis de Sade, Frankenstein, Che Guevara, Georgia O'Keeffe, The Snow Queen, Patti Smith, and a host of other stories, writers, and artists as she mourns the unfinished business she has with her mother. As we moved along with the waves of Solnit's prose, we had students write an interpretive footnote (described at length on pp. 76--82), so they could dig down into one of Solnit's primary sources. Then, as the weeks passed, we followed Solnit through her discussions of mazes, labyrinths, and prisons, we had students revise their interpretive footnotes with new information. Further on the trek, which leads to Iceland and confrontations with global warming, we had our students write an interpretive connection. And then, as the ending of the book approached, we assigned them the task of writing an interpretive thread. What is an "interpretive thread"? Another one of our invented genres! Here's the key paragraph from our assignment: For this final writing experience, we'd like you to work with three different passages from The Faraway Nearby and two original sources (these can be sources Solnit references or points to or sources you want to bring into the conversation). You can draw on your previous writings if you choose or you can strike off in an entirely new direction. What you write about is up to you, as long as it's question-driven. So, don't feel like you're charged (or burdened!) with making a grand statement about Solnit. Imagine your audience is your peers and that you are sharing with them one train of thought that reading Solnit for the past two months has caused you to follow. The "thread," in other words, is the end result of engaging in the sustained activity of making connections. There are an infinite number of paths through Solnit's book. We want to see which path each student took. As always, we provided the students with a model response we'd composed for them to work from. In this instance, we wrote about the book's title that is said to come from a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe (Solnit herself says this in the book), but we'd discovered, in our research, that it wasn't actually the title O'Keeffe herself had given the painting in question. This led us to various biographies, a conversation with an art historian, and, eventually, a clear understanding of when the title of the painting was changed (after O'Keeffe's death), but not why or who instituted the change. We came face to face with Solnit's observation that "\[e\]ssayists too face the temptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea." Solnit bids all of us to resist this urge, even as she acknowledges having been compelled by editors to tie things up nicely at the end. Rather than present you with our thread, though, we'd like for you to read Nishtha Trivedi's response to this assignment. making the strange familiar, making the familiar strange "To make the familiar strange and the strange familiar," sounds like a sentence Solnit would write or even a sentence that you'd think sums up Solnit's efforts of juxtaposing various stories and events together to shift the readers to new perspectives. I searched for this sentence on Google, wondering where it could take me and was navigated to Dustin Wax's website "Introduction to Anthropology." Wax writes that the task of the anthropologist is "to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar," in reference to Horace Miner's paper on "Body Ritual among the Nacirema," published in the journal American Anthropologist. Having ventured this far, I decided to let this click carry me to another faraway website, to find Miner's observations of the Nacirema, "a North American group living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumara of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. Little is known of their origin, although tradition states that they came from the east." Immediately I pictured a remote tribe on some faraway island somewhere. Miner described the Nacirema as a people obsessed with bodies and rituals of the body, and I read along, just as unattached as I'd been when I started reading the first part of the story of the Inuit that Solnit had described. In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and below the medicine men in prestige, are specialists whose designation is best translated as "holy-mouth-men." The Nacirema have an almost pathological horror of and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them. Miner says this society also has prestigious healers who specialize in other parts of the body. "The medicine men have an imposing temple, or latipso, in every community of any size." Miner also describes rituals that women undergo in order to be accepted in this society. "Special women's rites are performed only four times during each lunar month, but what they lack in frequency is made up in barbarity. As part of this ceremony, women bake their heads in small ovens for about an hour.... The theoretically interesting point is that what seems to be a preponderantly masochistic people have developed sadistic specialists." There's a lot more of this, every act and body ritual compounding in bizarreness, making the reader wonder how such a backward, barbarian, and ritualistic society could still exist. Most of all, this research comes off as a story of a faraway land a long time ago, too strange to have anything to do with you. Until you look a little closer and realize Nacirema is "American" spelled backward, latipso is "(h)ospital" spelled backward, and the like. Those medicine men are but modern-day doctors, the holy-mouth-men are dentists, and women putting their heads in the oven is but stark imagery of hair being treated at the salon. As the Smithsonian Magazine article on this paper says, the line between weirdness and normalcy depends entirely on your point of view. Clearly what Miner was trying to do with this paper was to demonstrate how we heighten the perceived weirdness of other cultures when we talk of them in such a clinical observing manner, completely devoid of empathy. This paper detailed everyday activities of Americans, and yet in all its strangely worded descriptions I'm sure it was impossible for any of us to resonate with the people he described --- ourselves. In The Faraway Nearby, Solnit takes so many ideas that seem universal to us: the concept of day and night, that of a family, of illness and death, and flips them around, while exploring landscapes such as the Arctic, and centuries-old stories, and bringing them right into our mirrors. Her own description of doctors doesn't stray too far from Miner's medicine men --- she describes her hospital as "a version of Abu Ghraib run by angels," which fits surprisingly well with Miner's description of "sadistic specialists." All of a sudden, images of terror and violence and the "greater good" have been brought into my home; doctors are angelic soldiers on a mission to treat and cure, no matter what. There's something strange about a routine hospital visit now, and something familiar about soldiers following orders in a faraway land. The most breathtaking of these descriptions was central to \[Solnit's\] second "Ice" chapter, where within a story of Inuit leader Ataguttaaluk resorting to eating her dead children and husband in order to survive, Solnit claims, "I am myself a cannibal in a roundabout way.... We consume each other in a thousand ways, some of them joys, some of them crimes and nightmares." What do you do when you're confronted so viscerally: when you've been reading a story about something that happened once upon a time long, long ago, and suddenly you're pulled into the middle of it, and told that you too are something you've never imagined you could be? Well you think, you reflect, you imagine. Solnit has always said empathy begins as an act of imagination, and now you can imagine connecting with a cannibal, and suddenly her suffering and courage touches your heart in ways your brain cannot capture --- because there's no memory or factual information involved: you can't remember being a cannibal in its literal sense, and yet, you can imagine how you've used people, hurt people, survived on the sorrow or the kindness of others, and this empathy can change who you decide you're going to become. In these unique juxtapositions, there is startling clarity because you are forced to confront something you never engaged with, only to find that it resembles home, and forced to question that which you hold as truth, only to realize you could quite easily poke holes through it...... This is just the first half of Nishtha's response. Next, she focuses on the word juxtaposition, which leads her to a consideration of Meret Oppenheim's surrealist work, Object, a fur-lined cup and saucer, another example of the familiar made strange. Then she considers Yoko Ono's White Chess Set and the burden of femininity. She's clearly learned from Solnit how to read like a writer; Nishtha is using her writing to take her to thinkers and to ideas that are new to her. Indeed, at the close of her piece, she finds herself thinking Object "is shockingly beautiful, and its playful refusal to fit into any genre, convention, rules, or interpretation is the true genius of the artist." All of this work is made possible by slow reading: it allows a detail to become a world all its own and the reader to dwell in and on the particular choices the writer has made to get the words on the page to do justice to the complexity of the issues under consideration. Practice Session One, Part One: Interpretive Footnote and Habits of the Creative Mind Habits: reflecting, orienting, questioning Activities: note-taking, researching, writing Select a word, a passage, a citation, a reference, a concept, a fact, or a detail from any of the essays you've read up to this point in Habits of the Creative Mind and research it. Then compose an "interpretive footnote" that illuminates both what you've selected to research and what our use of that material reveals about the project of Habits, our habits of mind, or anything else about the enterprise for generating new thoughts that you deem important. Your footnote should assume a readership composed of other readers of the essays in Habits of the Creative Mind. To complete this assignment successfully, you will have to do research that drills down past the first link in a web search, past the Wikipedia entries, past what any of your peers or your professor could find with ease and without thinking. You need to read or look at or watch or listen to what your first research foray has taken you to and then you will need to keep going till you've come across material that has helped you to think something new, see something new, understand something new, ask something new, or feel something new. You'll know you're on the right track when you've written something that enriches your peers' and your professor's understanding of a question, problem, issue, or idea that is connected in some way to the larger project of Habits of the Creative Mind. Practice Session One, Part Two: Interpretive Connection and Habits of the Creative Mind Habits: reflecting, questioning, connecting Activities: note-taking, researching, writing We mention the "interpretive connection" in passing in our essay on "Slow Reading." If you've been working with our book for a while, you can probably predict what goes into making an interpretive connection: you draw together two terms or ideas or passages by means of the research you've done on each item. You can find an example of an interpretive connection at the opening of Nishtha's essay. Nishtha begins by drilling down on the phrase "to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange," which leads her to the field of anthropology, which leads her to Miner's essay on the Nacirema. She then connects Miner's observations to Solnit's discussion of her own experience in the hospital, using Miner to illuminate the significance of Solnit's jarring description of the hospital as "a version of Abu Ghraib run by angels." In both instances, the writers are making the familiar strange. If you've read a handful of the essays in Habits with care, you are in a position to move from drilling down on terms, phrases, or passages in isolation to the imaginative work of making connections between terms, phrases, or passages in context. Starting with what you discovered completing the first part of this practice session, your goal now is to follow one of the paths created by your interpretive footnote back to the source text (in this instance, it's Habits) and make a connection that illuminates another part of the text. Say, for example, you researched "creativity" for Part One of this practice session and that led you to an interview with Lynda Barry (an artist, teacher, and writer we greatly admire), where she discusses humanity's collective amnesia about the importance of play. For your interpretive footnote, you zeroed in on the moment Barry says, "There's total amnesia of the experience of deep play. When you're an adult watching a kid playing with a little toy, you just think that kid's doing that and there's nothing else to it. But from the kid's perspective that toy is playing with them. It's interactive." Now, you'd be in a position to take Barry's idea back to Habits and see if it works for writing: Can writing be interactive? What would it take to get to the place where you could experience writing as playing with you while you are playing with it? Spend an hour following paths out from your interpretive footnote back to a different spot in Habits. What do you discover? Make as many possible connections as you can during this time. When you're finished, identify the connection that seems most promising to you and/or the connection you'd be most excited to explore further and write an explanation of your choice. You can then proceed to writing the connection in full or proceed to Part Three, depending on your teacher's instructions. Practice Session One, Part Three: Interpretive Thread and Habits of the Creative Mind Habits: reflecting, connecting, playing Activities: note-taking, researching, writing If you've made it this far, it means you've worked with enough of Habits to be in a position to string together multiple interpretive connections to create a thread that you see running through the book. We know it's awkward using our own book as the original source for this exercise, but it's the only thing we can be certain we all have in common! These practice sessions will work with any extended piece of thoughtful prose. We've shared an example of this in "On Reading in Slow Motion" because time and time again we've seen this project serve as a breakthrough moment for our students: the freedom to make connections balanced with the responsibility to be faithful to the meaning of the source text invites our students to give up trying to guess what the teacher wants and focus instead on using their writing to help them to think thoughts that are new to them. We like this formula for the interpretive thread --- three passages from the main text and two passages from original sources turned up during the research process --- because it gives everyone a lot of room to move around in. And it emphasizes movement from within the text to outside the text and back again at a different point. For this assignment, we never give a word count or page limit. You should take as much space as you need to get something to happen. Practice Session Two, Part One: Interpretive Footnote and the Declaration of Independence Habits: reflecting, exploring, questioning Activities: note-taking, reading, researching The Declaration of Independence is the document that led to the founding of the United States of America. The document is composed of 1,337 words, excluding the names of the fifty-six signers. The document has a few words that you might not have used in conversation (e.g., unalienable, usurpations, invariably) but, for the most part, contemporary English speakers can understand the gist of this historic document --- the colonists are declaring their independence from the British colonizers. A creative mind, however, is never satisfied with getting the gist of things. The Declaration of Independence wasn't about forming a union anywhere at any time; it was written in 1776, in response to a specific history that the writers had with England, with the king, and with Enlightenment ideas about sovereignty, nature, and human rights. For this practice session, we want you to take the approach we've outlined in "On Reading in Slow Motion" and apply it to the Declaration of Independence. Choose a word or a phrase or a reference that seems important to you, one you feel you don't adequately understand. When you've made your choice, we'd like you to set about doing the research necessary to generate an interpretive footnote that does justice to the complex issues raised by the term, phrase, or reference you've selected. You may want to consult the Oxford English Dictionary to find the late eighteenth-century meaning of the term or phrase you selected. To complete this assignment successfully, you will have to do research that drills down past the first link in a web search, past the Wikipedia entries, past what any of your peers or your professor could find with ease. You need to read or look at or watch or listen to what your first research foray has taken you to and then you will need to keep going until you've come across material that has helped you to think something new, see something new, understand something new, ask something new, or feel something new. You'll know you're on the right track when you've written something that enriches your peers' and your professor's understanding of a question, problem, issue, or idea that is connected in some way to the larger project of founding the United States. Practice Session Two, Part Two: Danielle Allen's Interpretation of the Declaration of Independence Habits: reflecting, connecting, exploring Activities: analyzing, comparing Danielle Allen has written extensively about the Declaration of Independence in her book Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. When Allen was teaching a night class in Chicago about the Declaration, she approached it as a course in slow reading: she and her students worked through the document word by word over a semester. The result was transformative for both the students and their teacher. Allen rediscovered that the Declaration made powerful arguments for equality as well as liberty, and discovered for the first time that its 1,337 words could be made accessible to general readers, not just experts. Through your library or your teacher, get ahold of a copy of Allen's Our Declaration and see what she has to say about the passage that contains the word, phrase, or reference that you researched and wrote about in the first part of Practice Session Two: Interpretive Footnote and the Declaration of Independence. Compare your interpretive footnote to Allen's interpretation. What does Allen say that enriches your understanding of the passage you've written about? What might your interpretive footnote contribute to Allen's understanding of the passage? Compose an interpretive connection where you consider the relationship between your way of reading the Declaration and Allen's. Hold off judging which is better or which one is right: your project is to interpret the difference in reading practices.