Dalsis_About Slowness

Travis Dalsis

Eastern Michigan University

Dr. Douglas Baker

5 January 2012

A Response to “About Slowness”

Whenever I bring home leftovers from a restaurant and I don’t feel like eating them the next day, I given the meal to my three dogs.  They gulp the food down in an instant.  They don’t stop to taste the sweetness of the pasta sauce, apply the meaty texture of the ravioli to the palate of their mouth, or feel the satisfaction of a crisp buttered bread roll crunch under their teeth.  They swallow it all whole—most of the time.  Newkirk’s introduction to his text, “About Slowness,” reveals a cognitive pattern akin to the fine-dining experience.  In the opening section, I immediately felt that much of my reading was somewhat in between a fine dining experience and a dog swallowing leftovers whole.  It challenged me to consider what Newkirk calls auditorizing a text.  In a disconnected, individualistic culture we often forget that an authorship and readership consists of an invisible, intangible relationship.  The author prepares a bountiful meal and invites the reader to partake.  The role of the author is to engage the reader in a mental dining experience that resonates deep in the heart of an individual much like people who experience the warm-fuzzy moments when they sit down at their favorite restaurant booth and enjoy a meal together.

What does it mean to read slowly?  Newkirk debunks preconceived notions immediately when he states that it’s not about speed.  It’s not about “word-to-word struggle” (2) either.  Slowness in reading consists of processing the information—“follow a train of thought, mentally construct characters, follow the unfolding of an idea, hear a text, attend to language, question, visualize scenes” (2).  In essence, Newkirk defines slow reading as paying attention to the decisions an author makes in a literary work; reading and rereading a text with a new engagement each time; it is also likened to the ebb and flow of a tide where there is moments of fast-paced reading and slow, deep reflecting moments, as well as moments where a reader completely pauses to savor the text (thoughts and emotions evoked during the reading).

“Reading taught me to be attentive” (5).  Paying attention to minute details of a text, constructing meaning through reading and rereading, and excavating the ideas the author lays before a reader is what Newkirk values as a slow reader.  He sends the message to his audience that one can brush pass a text quickly and miss the savory details that makes reading rich.  Newkirk’s thesis claims that paying attention is a difficult practice to undertake, but there is relevance to paying attention to texts.   

1.                      Slow down and pay attention to words.  The author uses words intentionally and if we callously graze over them without savoring their intentionality, we’ll miss meaning.

Overall, Newkirk provides interested metaphors for reading that helps teachers understand the complexity that students are working through when they are reading a text for the first, second, or even third time.  Disciplining oneself to read slowly and pay attention is a skill that all need work to increase.  U.S. culture is inundated with information from many mediums and it’s difficult to stop and carefully read/process all that is presented.  Newkirk makes this implicit reality explicit in his work and thus challenges readers to slow down.