Some remarks have been made here about the politics of choice concerning human knowledge. It must be made clear that this subject is tricky. What to view and what to see in order to take into consideration human knowledge is a considerable issue. To help, I could be evasive and claim that dogs don’t write books, therefore, I need not bother asking what books I should read by “Rover.”

“What is the latest book of poetry written by Rover?”

“Her output has been very little.”

“Anything, then?”

“No, nothing.”

“What about by Coco?”

I can conclude then that it’s human stuff I have to deal with to know things from a particular point of view. But things are even more complicated because of the issue of commodities. Books are a commodity these days, therefore, to judge human knowledge today also involves certain economic considerations. Poor Henry out there has written a book explaining all of nature, but the agents and the book publishers want nothing to do with him. That’s what I mean. Henry’s also written a novel whose characters are so sweat and sublime that his book puts Cervantes and Pynchon to shame. Unfortunately, he lost the file due to electrical storm and his backups are all crazy-looking, like the symbols of machine language. Henry gives up and ends up reading books on famous grill jockeys.

The point is we have to choose what’s illuminating and what isn’t. “Isn’t” may make the list of your neighbor. You congretate in the backyard over drinks and fight about who contributed more and contributed right. A gunbattle follows. Aliens zoom down and wonder at the two books sprinkled with blood. They conclude that there was really nothing here and zoom off to other happy hunting grounds.

Some people have it easy. The books (or magazines) have been chosen for them, as in the “Great Books” or the “Classics” of the New York Times big sellers lists. Tradition. I enter the library and there’s a huge book on a table. I don’t know who put it there but I sit and open and read. Maybe I don’t like what I see there; maybe I do. Maybe someone’s slipped in a postcard with weird symbols on it. By the way, there’s a painting on the wall. Next door to it is a photograph of the very same subject.

Here we always go back to the notion of modern spaces to fix a context for a potential canon of work. It’s as Neha identifies herself: “I’m a lit major.” It’s as Susan Gibb identifies herself: “A student of the word.”

In reviewing the reading series in development here, I think I can come to a few major conclusions: I’m considering reading in two senses:

1. Reading as everyday (existential) activity: reading the self, environment, and landscape
2. Reading as cultural act and agency–multiform(al)/function(al) literacy

Literacy is applicable to both, but I would argue that literacy in its presence sense is more in line with the professions, scholarship, and specialization (I heard it used just the other day in this context). Likewise, both areas can involve degrees of skill and value. In English studies close reading is valued over the glance or surface read and thus the skill of close reading is emphasized in the classroom and developing the skill is supposedly addressed in the teaching pedagogy. But the term “close reading” can be ambiguous, in that people assume multiple meanings in its use, especially when we talk about education policy and schooling. Surely to deconstruct a text involves close reading, as would any other critical or philosophical aesthetic applied to texts. There are indeed different ways of reading William Carlos Williams’ poem To Daphne and Virginia

The smell of the heat is boxwood

when rousing us
a movement of the air

stirs our thoughts

that had no life in them
to a life, a life in which

two women agonize:

to live and to breathe is no less.

and Dean Young’s I Am But a Traveler in This Land & Know Little of Its Ways

Is Everything a field of energy caused
by human projection? From the crib bars
hang the teething tools. Above the finger-drummed
desk, a bit lip. The cyclone fence of buts

surrounds the soccer field of what if.

–But, of course, this is well known, even though the poems may not be. Yet, I’m nagged by the second of the two main ideas. Is one way of reading better than another? What does best justice to the poem or to the photograph at least for the reader who wants to read: the biographical approach, which informs a reading of Williams’ Asphodel, that Greeny Flower by looking for the connection between real life and the poem; the new critical approach which takes the poem as a self-contained work; the post-structuralist, which, as a set of approaches, focuses on the ambiguities and complexities of meaning, identity, and construct; the reader-response, which places the reader at the heart of the process? It may be that these are pointless questions. If someone wants to compare Williams’ life to the things he writes about, I’d say, go for it (who is Daphne?). Likewise, if one wants to read the philosophy of Derrida or Jacques Lacan or explore the notions underpinning colonialist writings, that’s excellent too. Or what about studying the patterns of things and get into the philosophy of recursionism, a la Escher?

All of this is taking me off track though, it would seem, because anyone can seek out the approaches and use them to understand some part of the stone to whatever degree this may be possible. Is it fine to bring forth the story then of the three readers: the poet, who observes the stone; the geologist, who tells us its parts, and the capitalist, who will figure its market value. Three readers, three stones. But is there one “essential” stone around which all three congregate with gloves on?

At my son’s recent eye test at the doctor the nurse held up a chart and asked, “What is this?’

“It’s a glove,” he said.

What do you think he was looking at?