Utilitarian reading (AI) considers words as symbols referring only to other symbols like them. Words are therefore interchangeable, fungible—place holders for each other. AI obligingly sorts the symbols so as to condense and summarize them. By contrast, close reading offers not an answer but a presence. Words are not fungible tokens but embodiments of a speaker’s voice. In utilitarian reading we SEE the words. In close reading we HEAR them, and behind those spoken words someone speaking t...| Slant Books
My bedside dresser is a disaster. Don’t take my word for it. That’s a photo of it you see here. Too many books piled in every direction, about to fall over. My wife Peggy counts them from time to time, calling out the growing number so that I can’t fail to hear it. She refuses to straighten the piles herself, much as she’d like to. She wants me to do it myself.| Slant Books