#HowWeRead
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cmolanphy.bsky.social
I spoke w/Dane Haiken for his Substack interview series #HowWeRead, focusing on how I research episodes of my @slate.com podcast #HitParadePod —from Billboard chart books to memoirs by Nile Rodgers, John Fogerty & Phil Collins. Also, my origin story a la Paul McCartney’s apocryphal “Scrambled Egg.”
HWR #11: Chris Molanphy
A pop historian in New York City
howweread.substack.com
August 27, 2025 at 6:49 AM
readingrabbit100.bsky.social
Meaning isn’t carried by words.

It’s built by the reader—
from memory,
context,
expectation.

Reading is construction,
not transfer.

#reading #meaning #textanalysis #robertdickerson #australianpainting #art #literacy #words #memory
#comprehension #mcluhan #perception #howweread
Robert Dickerson’s Girl in Blue: a solitary young girl in a blue dress stands against a sparse, muted background. Her elongated, stylised figure and distant, unfocused expression suggest quiet isolation.
April 20, 2026 at 8:43 AM
sarahbodman.bsky.social
A few pieces from our new exhibition inspired by and using processes created by @tothemadpoets.bsky.social to 'read' books differently. More info at:
www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/howweread/
You can also listen to Marian Kilpatrick reading from her ‘Carrot Shield’ at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdWV...
Marian Crawford 'reads' the Oxford English Dictionary by taking a rubbing of its covers in white chalk on black paper. Photo by Marian Kilpatrick. Marian Kilpatrick invented a 'carrot shield' to block out images of meat from recipe books of her childhood. Images of paper cut out carrots can be placed over any other materials. Photo by Marian Kilpatrick. Sarah Bodman used the shape of a pair of china figurines holding hands to 'read' a short story from 'Three Moments of an Explosion' by China Miéville. A piece of card with a cut out silhouette of their arms was used as the reading template. Photo: Marian Kilpatrick. David Dellafiora used a shower head to select text by Plato to make a poem. The image shows the original book marked where the water fell to make the reading. Photo by Marian Kilpatrick.
August 25, 2026 at 1:02 PM
readingrabbit100.bsky.social
Reading is more than decoding.

Words are recognised,
but meaning emerges
through memory,
inference,
and expectation.

The page provides symbols.

The mind builds understanding.

#reading #literacy #mcluhan #textanalysis #comprehension #howweread #mediatheory #memory #criticalreading #symbols
Charles Blackman’s The Blue Alice (1956–57 Oil on canvas, approx. 122 × 91 cm. ) presents the child heroine not as cheerful fiction, but as an emblem of reverie suspended in psychic dusk. Alice, pale and inward, drifts through a thicket of white blooms, her blue dress dissolving into a decorative yet faintly claustrophobic dreamscape. The white rabbit, alert and uncanny, punctuates the scene as both guide and omen. Blackman’s flattened space, with its lyrical distortions and symbolic density, transforms Lewis Carroll’s fantasy into something more unsettling: a vision of innocence shadowed by estrangement, where childhood wonder shades into apprehension.
April 28, 2026 at 8:06 AM