What is slow reads?

Passages

• When I was 16 . . . I went to a jazz-and-poetry concert in Leeds. I can’t remember now how we swung it. Our boarding school, 13 miles from the city streets, set amongst the wind-swept fields around Wetherby, was of liberal persuasion. But the Head, a muscular Quaker committed to bracing rambles across the moors, preferably in driving horizontal rain, believed jazz to be decadent and sybaritic.

  From Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

• Both Black Friday and the opening day of deer season involve competition for a limited supply of the most desirable trophies, and the successful competitors are almost invariably those who plot out their strategy well in advance and arrive at their location at least an hour before daylight. But I think the comparison ends there.

  from Via Negativa.

• It turns out that if you blow on the slit in the back of a cicada shell, you can produce a high-piched whistle. Remember, you read it here first! Does it sound like a cicada? Of course not. It sounds like a very small appliance of unclear function. I saw an ad that said Hunters Wanted, & realized I was still wearing a blaze-orange vest. The sun had set hours ago, following an obscure schedule of its own devising.

  From Via Negativa

• To read Tranströmer—the best times are at night, in silence, and alone—is to surrender to the far-fetched. It is to climb out of bed and listen to what the house is saying, and to how the wind outside responds. Each of his readers reads him as a personal secret. For this reason it is strange to see this master of solitude being celebrated in the streets or showing up as a trending topic on Twitter and a best-seller on Amazon. He usually dwells in quieter precincts.

  Teju Cole, from The New Yorker's book blog

• I imagine they were trying, lazily, to include me in their conversation, or, more likely–given that my answers would result in their returning to a quieter Russian murmur–merely supplementing the boredom of their own familiar conversation with some foreign material. Still, given the flickering darkness of the room, my heat-dazed state, and the spit of their rough accents, the experience was one of a surreal purgatory. I am definitely going back next week.

  From autobiology.

• The flip book in my dream must have been three hundred pages, and on each page my friend had sketched the same scene, with the variation occurring only in the grass, that stippled breeze, that breath from God—that is, from my friend who’d done the sketches, or from me who’d dreamed of my friend having done the sketches. Notebooks record God.

  From wmc is now here.