So what had happened was, my daily reading sort of tailed off. Distractions and all that. Then my writing dropped off...

So what had happened was, my daily reading sort of tailed off. Distractions and all that. Then my writing dropped off. And then, the web hit me with three great ideas hit me right in a row. The web provides energy for reading, the reading transforms into energy for writing. Suddenly, here we are, posting the links again. The web is good. Mandy Brown, Umyazu: Nor do we read when we slip through the stream or flick through the feed. Reading is an awakening of attention, not a deadening of it. We read to come alive to ourselves, not to forget who we are or what we are doing, or what is being done to us without our consent. We read to encounter the world, to connect what we know to what we do not know yet, knowing all the while that such understanding is always temporary, lovely precisely because it is transient. The suspension of disbelief that a reader brings to a text is an openness to becoming someone new, to shedding old selves and wriggling into new ones. It is an invitation to…