Beltane                                                                                 Early Growth Moon

Sort of like attending my own funeral.   All day today notes have come in from docent classmates responding to my resignation from the program which I sent out in a private newsletter we have just for our class.  Mini-eulogies.  It’s interesting because it is often this kind of stuff that we don’t feel liberated to say until a relationship has been severed, either by death or by saying a permanent good-bye.  Would probably be good if we could learn to say these things more often.  Thanks to all of you who’ve written.

The revision process has legs now, new material being written, older material rewritten.  I’m back in the fictive dream of Missing, inhabiting the two worlds and living with their characters, their flora and fauna.  It’s a homecoming of sorts.  Though I’ve been into for a month or so in terms of writing, I’ve been at it for longer with reading material from beta readers, re-reading the text myself and plotting a strategy for this third revision.

Put another 5 verses of Book I into English today, making better and more notes about items for the commentary.  I really want this commentary to synch with Perseus, but I also want it to live on smartphones and tablet computers.  I want it to be the commentary for this media age.

Greg and I talked last Friday about how this kind of reading necessarily becomes close reading, a sort of reading often promoted, but less often executed.   You might call it slow reading.

Speed reading has its place, I guess, and I certainly tried to put it to use, having taken the Evelyn Woods program when I started college in 1965.  This program preaches adapting your speed to the kind of reading you’re doing.  So, say Time magazine or Sports Illustrated (of equal depth most of the time) might take your quickest scan, finger moving down the center of the page with some speed.  Philosophy on the other hand would go much more slowly, say 150 words a minute.  The idea preached by speed readers is that the quicker you go the more your mind concentrates on reading alone, not wandering away.  Maybe.

What I do know is that if you want to learn, slowing down to the pace translation forces, often word by word, looking up the word, its grammatical forms, figuring out how they fit together before the sense of the sentence begins to emerge, then you read slowly.  Letting the mind wander when it will, tracking words down through paths already in the mind, making connections, asking questions, probing the text.  This is how you make a work your own.

So, I’m for slow food, slow travel, slow reading, slow thinking.