Close Reading

Skip Reading Close Reading

Skip Reading, I've learned, is actually what scholars do with one anothers academic papers.  No one ever really close reads those things.  Skip Reading can be done if one has some command of the subject.  For example, I imagine when Einstein worked in the patent office, he could just glance at a patent application and know if it was a new thing, and a workable thing. 

I skip read poems by the ton, or did.  In the library, I'd find a step stool to sit on, and just go through book after book, magazine after magazine.  Poets churn out poems by the millions everyday.  And publishers follow suit.  And it's all too much, sadly.  Everyone finds themselves skip reading.  Which fosters skip writers, but that's another thing...

But making a patent application, making an invention, has to work, bear up under close scrutiny, close reading.  One can't worry about it being dismissed at a glance, as not being original, as not being workable.  If one thinks it works, it works, and one proceeds until persuaded otherwise.

Close Reading, I've learned, is a term Students of Philosophy use for a category.  Brbk....search/philosophy/close reading

quote

Watch "Philosophy 101 - Close Reading - Joel B. Hunter" on YouTube
https://youtu.be/vskv-4BuHMI

unquote

Actually what I had in mind is a theory of philosophy that the proponents present in such a fashion that is HAS to be close read.  Puzzling by design.  Maybe I made that up.  Brbk...search/figuritive/philosophy/close read...and, that search didn't work, and I didn't bookmark, dogear, note, what I just recently read about these philosophers with the presentation of their philosophy requiring close reading!  No matter, I've brought my thoughts along to James Joyce and his obsessive note taking.  Brbk...search/James Joyce/note taking...

And that search didn't turn up what I'd recently read, that he always had at hand note paper, and wrote notes in tiny handwriting he read back with a magnifying glass, as he was near blind.

Glosses, annotations, notes.  I go on and on about captions.  Motifs have captions, the playground of antiquarians, archaeologists.  History presents a set of motifs, and scholars caption them.  Not just scholars, everyone.  And not just History, Nature too.  Puzzling by design!

Anyway, note taking, annotation, captioning, glossing, have their extreme, and I happened on a good example, a web site that hot links just about every word of  James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.  Words highlighted in bold open windows about that word, or passage-a bit like Joyce looking at one his notes with a magnifying glass!

Joyce, I suspect, was a bit off, in a genius way verging on unintlligible madness.  One day, while being an activity assistant for alz patients, a hopeless task, as they have the skills of like one year olds, I presented a blank paper and crayon to a fellow who had once been a lawyer, and he wrote what was like a parody of what was once his craft-notes, notes that made no sense at all, like one of those unique languages sometimes savants make up.  I still have the page somewhere, a souviner.  Oh, I'm no better off, blogged many pages, a gloss on one song lyric...

"I will find a souvenir
Just to say the world was here."

-Nena, 99 Red Balloons

:)

DavidDavid