on the edge of great

What all five of my examples have in common is that they are minor elements in the text; they are not main ideas. In fact, your usual practice of reading which focuses on main ideas would dismiss them all as marginal or trivial. Another thing they have in common is that, although they are minor, they are nonetheless conspicuous, eye-catching: they are either surprising or repeated, set off from the text or too long. Close reading pays attention to elements in the text which, although marginal, are nonetheless emphatic, prominent—elements in the text which ought to be quietly subordinate to the main idea, but which textually call attention to themselves.

Most of you have been educated to ignore such elements. You have been taught to seek out and identify the main ideas, dismissing the trivial as you go. This has had to be trained into you: read to a young child sometime, you will notice she has the annoying habit of interrupting the flow of the story to draw attention to some minor thing. Close reading resembles the interruptions of that child. It is a method of undoing the training that keeps us to the straight and narrow path of main ideas. It is a way of learning not to disregard those features of the text that attract our attention, but are not principal ideas.

this guy was called bob (because yes we used to gossip about peacock drama and the community had named all the peacocks), and he lived in one little corner in a basically abandoned and overgrown thicket. specifically at the edge of it, there was a very tall and very dead tree just by the road, and bob used to sleep at the very top of it each night. during the day he'd wander near the tree, or sometimes into the thicket, but besides the resident caretaker he avoided everyone, even when we bribed him with nuts.

bob was interesting because he had three "wives" (or, more accurately, admirers). these 3 would regularly walk their chicks into his thicket just to see him, and would take up lower perches on his tree every night. i guess they were drawn in by his mysterious demeanour or something. (also he was like kind of old, I saw him ages 4 through 11 and peacocks in the wild die at like 10 or 15).

anyway, this one time a newer peacock who was unaware of the status quo came up to the tree just after sunset and started calling out to bobs wives, and I'm no peacock expert but all of the residents who saw this were convinced he was rizzing them up. none of us really agree on the content tho (some say he was being a misogynist, others say he taunted bob).

wtv it was, it caused all three of Bob's wives to fly down and just peck super violently at the newbie. and they're being super loud and flapping a bunch and scratching this guy, just generally giving him a hard time.

all of us were clicking pictures and recording videos to mark the historic moment of bob making friends. funniest bit was that one of the wives was hopping around a mandarin orange tree a few metres away, in a garden past the thicket.

after that we assume there was some sort of truce between newbie and the wives, because he often visited the thicket during the day (and got much more of Bob's attention than the wives), but at night he left the whole area alone and the wives kept up their perch.

for that particular incident, the girl who'd given him the donut (their wingman) informed the caretaker that he'd been injured in a scuffle. meanwhile, due to his proximity to bob we all named him dylan.

so yea peacocks are really entertaining (it was SO fun to narrate all this the next morning w video evidence to everyone who's missed it bc bob was one of the oldest and most famous peacocks there)