Close-reading a common email, like repeating a familiar word too many times, is a way of rendering the familiar "uncanny." On the other hand, close-reading an unfamiliar email can have the opposite effect of making it more familiar. Both instances cause the formation of a new "structure," but while the former partially replaces an older, more familiar one with something less well-known, the latter is the beginning of a new perception, replacing nothing, or at least a structure that was very shallow. So a close reading of something familiar should tend to be more unsettling than the alternative. Or maybe the rendering familiar of something strange, if taken to an extreme, can be just as destabilizing. Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.
A logbook to be kept while {fermenting in Taiwan} {journeying in China} {researching, studying, traveling, and eating herring in Amsterdam.}
This musing is apropos: so banish the thought that you don't know what you are talking about. Or understand the phenomenon to echo the process itself: forced to contemplate one's own thinking, you no longer take for granted that thinking is immediately--naturally--decipherable.
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