In a Close Reading Booth

to say something broadly flat out

“Shakespeare’s sonnets are hard to think about. They are hard to think about individually and they are hard to think about collectively.”

—Stephen Booth, start of Chapter 1, “The Critical Dilemma,” An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Yale UP, 1969

Poetics are cared about. Stephen Booth cared about them.

Sick as a parrot, how poetic language operates on and in audiences, gadflies at this point, no air apparent atop, if you believe some of the reports, in the sense that markets care about stability.

It’s hard to say broadly something flat out, in public, using the tongue, the grid, the rollbacks. You know, frankly, this is a huge issue, if marine life’s suffering. We do see an awareness, but business happens in the short-term.

Some people really enjoy playing bridge. And then the question is, what is the goal of that?

Close reading has never gone completely out of style. Can’t we just make up another name under this umbrella? Some of the people who should have known are just beginning to give their accounts, part owners of the thing. A mean business.

“I felt like lots of smoke.” I think I need to touch on this vacuum. I don’t want to be too hyperbolic or blind-eye on all of this debating, suing—the sheer numbers becoming the fabric of the place.

You live with ugly furniture so long that concentric circles are going to explode. We’ve seen this before.

It’s crazy how influential it is, widening by the hour.

But Booth’s approach is microscopic reading hung up on meaning, which is no more than habit in the uncertainty caused, the myriad currents, the hearing of the diplomatic staff.

Cicadas Cuba has, Japan has, and ideational patterns at play involve third countries. It’s a complicated situation. Could cicadas really do something like this? Some are large and loud enough in some parts of the world, seeming to come from many directions while sitting in the tent.

Water on the tongue is talkative, but you have to be close enough. That’s hard to believe, inside a home. As it happens, I listen to the sound.

If the people who had these difficulties could have been accused enough, if enough of them had been singing up in these trees, I’d be prepared to believe it.

Every nation’s cicadas are absolutely the most devastating. You remember them definitely. They come out, background to foreground, consistently.

Music, sound, and punishment can be weaponized to enforce rules. (Barry Manilow, the theme from Friends—but we won’t get into that, heart and soul.)

Normality starts with law. Here’s an example:

On our side like the tokened pestilence

Where death is sure.

Spain responded by dismissing water evaporating from a plate. It might have no place to work.

An explicit poem is a momentary flash, and then it’s over, like a pun, a flavor, or a retort.

Ora Retort? I used to date a woman by that name. About getting together she would say, “When were you thinking?” but never add “of getting together,” and soon the entire question was only “When?”

The middle of the ocean may as well be shore as offshore, all or nothing being there. Hundreds of enthusiasts watching, they’ll file for administration in August, “when we will cut off our chains.” When will we?

But first, the dramatic turn of events. It has to be today, there’s no other day, its sound, its sense, its potential senses, their homonyms, their cognates, their synonyms, and the antonyms of those.

The same kinds of “substantive nonsense and non-importing patterns” have been warned. Europeans, awarded new powers that pop up in slang, jokes, songs, and nursery rhymes, wait nervously to see what happens next.

Explosions of disobedience take control, those dense networks of patterns to sort of demonstrate “the principal source of the greatness we find in Shakespeare’s work.”

To all intents, I suppose we’ll have found out, taken on extra duties: the so-called silent majority will have been at play here. Today has come as a real shock. The report includes priming—when, after hearing a word, we recognize words related to it, expectation being the depth of the processing of our engagement with a statement.

(Shallow processing explains whether a brother be allowed to marry his widow’s sister.)

There it’s a question of motion for an asteroid to comment on. We can fit an orbit around the sun.

Can we assume, what, ejected material? It’s going to take a “that’s weird” first, then more of a “that’s neat,” before we can. There’s a set of rules in place, but to decide how this new one’s going to be named—here there are no rules. All we now know is a little bit more than we knew before.

Just think of the things that you read, hear, or say every day that, despite not adhering, you understand perfectly, as the Kennedy motorcade made its way toward Dallas.

A security check is carried out under lock and key. More transparency is still a long way from close. As a black box language goes in, comprehension comes out, for all the wrong reasons, and relieved of command with no impact on current operations.

All have a no-touching rule. A judge announces sentences that simply teach a lesson. Many welcome them. Many complain, seriously and equally. More recently, dynamical cognitive linguists began to use physics and calculus to get inside, explaining shifting in terms of interacting.

For the first time in over two years, dynamicists on and off the pitch emphasize that language happens in time, like cricket or any other game. So the message is, forget cricket, football is the future. Is this a defining moment? Still a long way to go, history tells us. Booth too. Tough stance.

In the jargon, it’s called “cat primes dog quickly.” Expectations slow, more arbitrary connections for the breakaway authorities make themselves felt, but on the argument of force, there’s no relationship between animal words and office words.

If I put you on postcards, stickers, and more—you with a series of animals followed by desks—will you feel an imposition of direct rule?

Self-style has failed to determine its own future in about two seconds. Following a desk with a cat won’t help you sink in as strongly as a trouble-maker (ever since the first Christians came here). Martin Luther played a key role in that book. He was a Methodist. I’m not going to stand here and wait. (I know I do a lot with hymns, but I got that from my grandmother, who memorized poems.)

And then there was the transition, and then a problem. I have to say this: certain sentences are especially good, and everybody would bear their own sense if—if there were buttresses because of one sentence.

Has anything changed?

“The child rushed through the doorway fell” got into a syntactical dead end, the circle of concern, the garden path, so to speak. No, no, that can’t do. There’s something the matter. Overtly.

Where are the works of the mothers?

Until you said, wait a minute, what role did Christianity play in all this? I saw more than I could hear. But you never hear all you hear, and that’s the end. The one who’s cutting the path doesn’t know that it’s crooked behind.

Are there enough voices to straighten the posters? Then more will come, which isn’t what God wanted. The whole enterprise needs a little encouragement. I will do it myself. Why should others shut up? Nobody ordains a woman. You just have to brush aside the thoughts in men.

Similar ambiguities in Shakespeare’s sonnets not only tolerate but celebrate uncertainty. They don’t notice themselves doing it. “They stay so that say so” is a component of poetic richness. Full stop.

Things like that I think are just your foot on my foot, momentary confusions. “I grant, sweet foot, thy lovely argument, deserves the travail of a worthier pen”: just so, take it off. The forced telling we started by, me telling you to force what they’re wondering—it’s good, at the end of each day. Can you help make it? You have to live up to that, the language that will make others do it: two states of mind at least have to experience glamorized images of the latest news and postulate something wrong.

And happening!

Shifts occur when parts are switched unexpectedly. Shakespeare’s “He childed as I fathered,” his “hearts that spanieled me at heels,” notice something odd, make sense of it, and put on more unusual activity. His motive remains unclear. A bomb attack has killed one policeman.

Who is behind this spirited bidding, and barriers are high? In real time, in a hurry, we manage a deluge of information, never treating sounds, words, phrases, sentences, and meanings as language. Who has choked on language?

When it comes to small and medium enterprises that rely on the multi-level interactions that characterize Shakespeare’s verse, our brains are fluently bombarded. And rather than being wounded or killed, or feeling “overload,” or asking too many questions, this complexity, this mess, we are really cool about. An even heavier flow of blood can actually chill the activity across the board.

But what is ironic, a smoother circuit than a hexagon.

Here’s an idea. Fictive motion, when we describe things that can’t move, like “the road runs through the desert,” “The valley was bumpy and uneven.” Government is playing a role, I’d like to add. This effect disappears when the road is “in” the desert. So it’s everywhere, however nascent, in a courier or a career, a male or a female, even though I disagree with those gender norms.

According to Booth, the greatest tragedy occurs in the audience, giving us several chances to switch our moral allegiance, to step out and realize we can, or to realize we can and step out. Either way, entrepreneurship, authorship, craftsmanship, oneupmanship, it’s a tough journey, however available and trending.

So why don’t we?

Shakespeare doesn’t want us to, that’s why.

To begin with, our responses never seem quite appropriate. Our tone of small talk can’t be removed. Our syntax isn’t maddeningly contorted, our pace isn’t tortuous, and there aren’t enough adjectives and nouns coming to us to satisfy his lust for the walk-me-through-it he always had time for.

But we, despite being players and welcoming “an effectively miraculous experience,” not mouthing “the inherent limitation of the human mind,” Booth argues strenuously, don’t.