Reading this book (as well as other dense and difficult texts recently) brings about a pleasure of puzzling out meaning. I get a similar feeling from some poetry.
Here are some phrases I really love not simply because of their arcaneness but also because I can tell: they are trying to convey something. As I describe in my reading of Elyot Grant's "30 Puzzle Design Lessons[..]", it comes not from the Eureka or the Fiero but both together... I'll have to rewrite this when I have a more precise way to actually convey what that is again.
Anyway, I'm really enjoying reading these sentences pockmarked with long parenthesized interruptions which I must go back and reread in order to remember where we were, and this one in particular is puzzling to me at this moment:
I've had many such moments with this book (six pages in!) and I think I've been having this feeling significantly more because of this 'Close reading' forum of the self-- it's a good excuse to note down things that make sense to me, or things that don't make sense to me but I assume they do, and write down what they mean in different language-- in my own language. I find that it's useful to practice this 'translation' in an explicit way even if the real translation that I care about most is only the first half: the translation from external to internal.
The rest is just practice. It's means and ends reversed. It's a game. Written close analysis is a game which enables deep thought...
Here are some phrases I really love not simply because of their arcaneness but also because I can tell: they are trying to convey something. As I describe in my reading of Elyot Grant's "30 Puzzle Design Lessons[..]", it comes not from the Eureka or the Fiero but both together... I'll have to rewrite this when I have a more precise way to actually convey what that is again.
Anyway, I'm really enjoying reading these sentences pockmarked with long parenthesized interruptions which I must go back and reread in order to remember where we were, and this one in particular is puzzling to me at this moment:
Quote from: p6[..] this book's turn to ugly feelings to reanimate aesthetics is simply the flip side of its privileging of the aesthetic domain as the ideal site to examine the politically ambiguous work of negative emotions.
I've had many such moments with this book (six pages in!) and I think I've been having this feeling significantly more because of this 'Close reading' forum of the self-- it's a good excuse to note down things that make sense to me, or things that don't make sense to me but I assume they do, and write down what they mean in different language-- in my own language. I find that it's useful to practice this 'translation' in an explicit way even if the real translation that I care about most is only the first half: the translation from external to internal.
The rest is just practice. It's means and ends reversed. It's a game. Written close analysis is a game which enables deep thought...