Readings: mobile, static and inbetween

A couple of days of most engaging reading. My mobile reading (done usually when walking, exercising or during any pause of the day) is a reread of Lawrence’s The Rainbow on my phone. I love reading ebooks. I like the palm sized paragraphs, that I digest one at a time and I like the physicality of the finger sweep — almost a bit like conducting and the rhythm it establishes.

My more static reading, a large thick hard back, is curiously currently about a motorway the M25. London Orbital by Iain Sinclair.

I have a bunch of inbetween readings that are forming a dérive.

All three types of reading are inter-informed by other texts that I’ve previously or recently read that form their own questions as I read this current crop. (Imagine a bowling alley, the questions come down the lanes usually aiming at one current text) In essence the past reading is poking through the current reading and saying hey come back here a minute and consider or come here to me a minute I want to show you something.

I maintain that ebooks are giving us new ways of reading and new ways of thinking about reading. I do not agree with Jonathan Franzen’s recent drone on the topic. Indeed I think the only thing I agree with Franzen on may be birds and I wonder what the birds make of him (and us). My friend Leannej has some indications in her Birds Hate Us — An exploration of birds in a time of Avian paranoia amongst other things.

Leanne taught me to can this summer and it was the most useful thing I learned all year, the Japanese handsaw tutorials from Peter came in a very close second it must be said.

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Today I had some very fortunate experiences with very well mannered and helpful people. It reminded me how intolerable bad manners are and that people who deliberately practice them, often as a bloodsport, should not be indulged. Artists can sometimes be very bad mannered and consciously so, perhaps they imagine it gives them an edge, a certain cache. It doesn’t. One merely ends up visualizing a granny behind them, shaking her head, disgusted. It strikes me if you cannot treat people with dignity, it’s likely that you have no dignity yourself and should probably pause to figure out why.