Fungible Convictions

My latest post is up at the Identity Theory editors blog, about the mental gamble it is to re-read a favorite book:

But re-reading other texts, even ones that provided the same feeling of accomplishment, can be a totally different, even crushing, experience.

I once tried to re-read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, the book that first got me to love literature. And I couldn’t get through the first chapter. I could hardly believe it. I thought the writing was awful, the characters flat, the premise almost silly.

And it hurt.

“The Risks of Re-Reading”–Identity Theory Editors’ Blog

The chain owner of the long-lifed Out-of-Town News has decided not to renew his $5000/month lease, says the Boston Globe.

The owner, now a chain vendor, has notified Cambridge officials that it does not plan to renew its lease Jan. 31, saying the public appetite for printed news has all but vanished.

While I’m mostly the heartless sort—one who believes in the law of supply and demand at least at the local level—this will all but eliminate access to foreign newspapers and magazines in Cambridge for those who don’t have internet. But that’s kind of the point: who passes through Harvard Square every day, reads a foreign language, and doesn’t have an internet connection? Cambridge and neighboring Somerville have working-class immigrant communities, but they’re not who I’ve seen browsing the two cramped aisles at Out-of-Town News.

Don’t misunderstand, this is a big loss to Harvard Square. But demand for information, like water, has its way of finding and exploiting cracks, changing the landscape in the process.

Added: A Harvard grad friend of mine says, “How will I tell people where to meet me in Harvard Square?”

A private school librarian writes in Sunday’s Washington Post that kids aren’t reading and that, in turn, the professional purpose of English teachers and librarians is disappearing. First a snippet, and then a critique of this argument that shows up once a year in every general interest publication:

Typically, many people in my line of work no longer have the title of librarian. They are called media and information specialists, or sometimes librarian technologists. The buzzword in the trade is “information literacy,” a misnomer, because what it is really about is mastering computer skills, not promoting a love of reading and books. These days, librarians measure the quality of returns in data-mining stints. We teach students how to maximize a database search, about successful retrieval rates. What usually gets lost in the scramble is a careful reading of the material.

[. . .]

Conventional wisdom has it that teenagers don’t read because they’re too busy. Only after high school, sometime midway through college, do young adults reconnect with their childhood love of reading and make books their partners for life. I don’t think so anymore. The 2004 Reading at Risk report by the National Endowment for the Arts concluded that literary reading was in serious decline on all fronts, especially among the youngest adults, ages 18 to 24, whose rate of decrease was 55 percent greater than that of the total adult population.

1. Despite its popularity as a starting point in the reading crisis discussion, the NEA study is deeply flawed (not to mention self-serving). Its scope is a mere twenty years, from 1982 to 2002, with a third survey in 1992. It doesn’t allow for comparison of other decades affected by technological change. It takes as a given that literary reading declined in each of the intervening years—forcefully implying, without evidence, that the trend from 2002 onward will be down, as was the trend from the Renaissance to 1982.

2. The study and literary apologists like the librarian above assume that literary activity is synonymous with reading literature, which is b.s. The health of the literary life is measured not just in books read but in conversations had and letters and articles read about books, in events attended, in one’s own writing. I don’t doubt that fewer people are reading Dickens and Austen. But more people are discussing Dickens and Austen than ever before, and literature is healthier for it.

3. No one is in a position to speculate what kids fifty years ago thought about the books they read, or whether kids fifty years ago who read as kids went on to read as adults, or vice versa. We don’t have the data. There is no golden age of reading to cite. And there’s certainly no evidence that a society that reads Big Books is a saner or less violent or more just society. (Heck, Thomas Jefferson’s vaunted literacy didn’t keep him from turning the presidential campaign of 1800 into the filthiest in American history.)

4. Librarians have traditionally been information managers. And information used to be more exclusive, a lot less manageable when there were just books and musty rooms. I couldn’t tell you when librarianship became conflated with literacy education—perhaps with the creation of the public library system. But it’s not the primary job of librarians or English teachers to get young people interested in reading literature. (That’s the job of writers and other readers!) Librarians do have an advocacy role, but they can’t be expected to advocate to teenagers on behalf of an entire medium. And English teachers are responsible for the development of students’ capacity to appreciate and use the English language—a task that necessarily involves great literature. The job description is “teach the language, broadly and deeply, to our kids, because broad, deep knowledge of language results in a better person.” The job description is not “convince our kids to read literature.”

Anyway, that’s enough for now. What do you all think? Am I off my rocker?

Harvard Book Store had a reading tonight in support of the new paperback Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, an anthology of essays by youngish authors setting out to prove that literary writing is still fun to make and exciting to read.

The publishing of Bookmark Now took on a marketable urgency after the National Endowment for the Arts’ petit squab report on Americans’ declining reading habits. Magazines and blogs made much hay of all this when the report came out last year, and as Bookmark Now attests, it is still duly carted out any time someone needs to vent about books not being read.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the NEA report, though. While I can’t question that time spent reading has declined (as has time for every other activity, given the entertainment options we now enjoy), if the NEA’s intention was to motivate people to read more literature, the report effects the opposite.

Bookmark Now’s editor, Kevin Smokler, said he cobbled his anthology together to remind people that reading literature is relevant and, in many respects, a uniquely enjoyable experience . Good! The NEA’s survey, on the other hand, looked for connections between reading literature and going to concerts, visiting museums, volunteering, etc. In other words, the NEA equated reading literature with being a cultured person. That line of thought works great to sell liberal arts programs. But don’t try to sell it to the American market at large. It’s elitism. And if there’s one thing the average American can’t stand, it’s being told they’re below average.

—Andrew