runs brown 29

[Terrance]

> > I don't think VN said that.
> 
> "Incidentally, I use the word READER very loosely. Curiously enough, one
> cannot READ a book: one can only reread it. 

Not the same as all reading is rereading. Or all reading is writing. 

Writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the
thousand and one things—childhood, certainties, cities,
doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves—that go on
slipping, like sand, through our fingers. I have tried to
learn the lesson of the midget drummer. And one more, which
I got from that other immense work, Dog Years: When you’ve
done it once, start all over and do it better.”

   --Salman Rushdie, Introduction to “Gunter Grass On Writing
      And Politics 1967-1983”


Rushdie is alluding to the first, second, and third drafts
  of The Tin Drum, which Grass fed to the furnace. 

Extrapolating from Rushdie’s comments and the story of Grass
  in the furnace room writing and rewriting, we might consider
  what I like to call Thomas Mann’s Problem,  he asks
  that we read his books twice.