READING AND PACING

While I am thinking about what texts to take for a walk, I read a review of Mike Parr's performance "Underneath the Bitumen the Artist" in The Monthly Magazine. 73-year-old Parr had himself buried for three days in a container under a busy road in Hobart and the one book he took was Robert Hughes' "The Fatal Shore", a loaded choice that initially irritates the reviewer. Parr responds with a description of his days in the container. About the book he says only "Sometimes The Fatal Shore induces a kind of paroxysm and I begin reading aloud with increasingly violent vehemence."

Also just before I start, I read that Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian refugee detained on Manus island, has written a book, "No Friend But the Mountains". I try to buy it but it sold out. I would have taken it for a walk, with the knot in my stomach from imagining the suffering of these people detained indefinitely. I haven't been back long enough to know how to help but I do not want to look away.

(the text) produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else. I am not necessarily captivated by the text of pleasure; it can be an act that is slight, complex, tenuous, almost scatterbrained; a sudden movement of the head like a bird who understands nothing of what we hear, who hears what we do not understand.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

What does it mean to interrupt the text (and to be interrupted by it)? To cross a street, to notice changes in breathing, rhythm, speed, or mood, or hunger?
Will we read aloud, passing the book between us? Repeating certain lines and perhaps stopping to discuss them?

June, who came to walk with me