I’ve always have enjoyed reading J.R’s writing when her writings were short pieces and not the longer sort of piece that is a book, and I was curious about the way that it would be when it would be a book. I knew that I would like it, because I like her writing, and after all her book would be her writing too. Just like her online writing and productions are examples of her writing, and I like them as well. I was curious of course about the way it might be different. Because I knew that it would be a thing, a different thing, for her, and maybe also thus for me. I read her book when it was being written and talked with her about it. This is was a special way to read a book. When you know the author and can do this, I think it is a very special thing and I am grateful for it. After it was done being written and was out for the general public reading, I read it again, and this was interesting in how it wasn’t quite the same. Of course the difference partly is a matter of orientation. But some would say that and then just get on with changing channels. I like to hover on such things because it says so much to me about what reading is, and thereby writing too. I think that it is very apropos in this case because J.R.’s book, and her writing in general, is very much about reading. It is a writing that is reading. And reading is very much a matter of orientation, and that is what the writing reveals, an orientation. And I am delighted by the prospects of reading anew by changing the circumstances of my reading.
J.R. Carpenter’s book, Words the Dog Knows is obliquely about how a reader becomes a writer. Or rather, it is about how a reader is revealed as a writer; or, how reading in its own way is a form of writing and writing in its own way is a form of reading; and how they lead to one another, which could be said to be a question that the world of the book is addressing, albeit obliquely, because although reading is referenced, writing - as in being a writer, that is, as in the character being a writer - is not.
Reading starts in this world as a silent solitude. Even where it should count - in school - it still brackets the character/reader (Simone). The peculiarity of her reading, is the peculiarity of her being, which does stand apart, reading everything, and doing it even then, right away as a way of also writing it. She is not marginalized by this. She is empowered by it. That is a significant difference.
She reads books and the environment outside. Then as she is moving, growing up and leaving where she comes from, she writes more and more the reading of both outside and inside environments.
When she is being more a writer than a reader and showing that she is a writer, you can tell because the reading changes in the way that it describes, and how it makes connections. It is less a story in that moment, and more a picture and a reckoning.
The procedure is mediated, predicated, by dogs, by one in particular. Writing is the reading that will come out, it must to show itself, reveal its reading, make its reading, be the reading and the telling and the picture and the reckoning. Then it is no longer silent and in solitude. The dog and its silent but evident recognition of a growing lexicon is an important reference and association to/with this process. Because it too has something inside that must come out, both symbolic and factual. And because it, the dog, occasions relationships. You can learn a lot from dogs, by way of dogs, because of dogs.
“I am I because my little dog knows me,” J.R. quotes Gertrude Stein. Yes, first the dog, then other people. But also the city. Specifically, Montreal.
All of this is great for me. I love Gertrude Stein. I love J.R.’s writing reading. I think dogs are quite intriguing. And I love Montreal.
It is noted that Montreal has a legacy. The character has read the city in a book before she moves to there and reads it living there. She does not compare the two, rather, she refers them to each other, makes references and associations. Who is the narrator? She is, Simone, the reader writer. She reads things first in books, or by way of stories that she hears from other people, then she reads them living them, ‘in person’ as it were (a city is like a person too - Montreal and Rome, for example), and then she reads them writing them. She does not compare - she refers, references, makes associations. This is better for to expand the greater reading, rather than exclude and narrow it.
I like the way it makes me be aware of living something reading it and how that is a writing that is making it all be connected to a lot of other things, which both expands the greater reading (book) and brings things together to make wondrous sense; but not as predetermined unfolding already as it has been written - rather as magic miracle the force of reckoning (the energetic intensity of making an account of something not to be underestimated). That way everything makes sense, but it’s serendipity, delightful, surprising, (i.e. that it does) because it is contingent upon so many things that just happen to fall into place - as if they were meant to - where it is critical to emphasize the “as if.” Since you don’t know, it is thus delightful to discover it, the trace of possibly maybe. And anyway it doesn’t matter if it was meant to be. The wonder and beauty is in the happenstance - and the ontological thrill is the prospect that the world you read you write is reading writing you as well. It is a relationship.
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