Posted on 01/23/2008 7:30:42 PM PST by forkinsocket
In her recent biography of Condoleezza Rice, Elisabeth Bumiller tells us that Condi, a former professor and provost at Stanford University, has a curious relationship to books — curious at least for an academic. As she was growing up, Rice relates, her parents piled books up on her nightstand and the result was a distaste for reading. “She stopped reading for pleasure, and does not to this day,” Bumiller writes.
This was the strangest fact of many curious nuggets that can be gleaned from Bumiller’s work. And it left me wondering about modernity’s relationship with books. Many of the most impressive characters I know from history are book fanatics. I think of Seneca and Montaigne, both of whom developed a decided preference for books over people, seeing in them not a retreat from the world as much as a means of opening the doors to new worlds and a better class of interlocutors. As time passes, I develop more sympathy for their approach.
But the rise of mass literacy and a popular print media clearly constitute one of the markers for the modern age. In fact, for the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant it was the decisive fact which marked a break with the past and the prospect of the development of a human potential that had long been locked away. “Das lesende Publikum,” “the reading public” was this decisive new audience. And “publicity”—mass education through reading—was in his mind the critical path to the development of a new society. This unfolded in the nineteenth century into a middle class for which voracious reading was seen as a tool for social advancement—the so-called Bildungsbürgertum of Germany, the rise and transformation of universities, the birth of countless newspapers, magazines and publishing houses.
So where do we stand two hundred years after this dawn? Ursula Le Guin charts the territory in an article entitled “Staying Awake” in the current issue of Harper’s.
Some people lament the disappearance of the spotted owl from our forests; others sport bumper stickers boasting that they eat fried spotted owls. It appears that books, too, are a threatened species, and reactions to the news are similarly various. In 2004 a National Endowment for the Arts survey revealed that 43 percent of Americans polled hadn’t read a book all year, and last November, in its report “To Read or Not to Read,” the NEA lamented the decline of reading, warning that non-readers do less well in the job market and are less useful citizens in general. This moved Motoko Rich of the New York Times to write a Sunday feature in which she inquired of various bookish people why anyone should read at all. The Associated Press ran their own poll and announced last August that 27 percent of their respondents had spent the year bookless, a better figure than the NEA’s, but the tone of the AP piece was remarkable for its complacency. Quoting a project manager for a telecommunications company in Dallas who said, “I just get sleepy when I read,” the AP correspondent, Alan Fram, commented, “a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify.”
So Condoleezza Rice, it seems, is in good company. But Condi has it just right when she says that she does not read for pleasure:
For most of human history, most people could not read at all. Literacy was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless; it was power itself. Pleasure was not an issue. The ability to maintain and understand commercial records, the ability to communicate across distance and in code, the ability to keep the word of God to yourself and transmit it only at your own will and in your own time—these are formidable means of control over others and aggrandizement of self. Every literate society began with literacy as a constitutive prerogative of the (male) ruling class.
It’s a simple fact that in many respects, educational standards have fallen in the Western world. What was expected of high school students around the turn of the century is daunting.
I see a high point of reading in the United States from around 1850 to about 1950—call it the century of the book—the high point from which the doomsayers see us declining. As the public school came to be considered fundamental to democracy, and as libraries went public and flourished, reading was assumed to be something we shared in common. Teaching from first grade up centered on “English,” not only because immigrants wanted their children fluent in it but because literature—fiction, scientific works, history, poetry—was a major form of social currency.
To look at schoolbooks from 1890 or 1910 can be scary; the level of literacy and general cultural knowledge expected of a ten-year-old is rather awesome. Such texts, and lists of the novels kids were expected to read in high school up to the 1960s, lead one to believe that Americans really wanted and expected their children not only to be able to read but to do it, and not to fall asleep doing it.
Theater goers in New York who have seen the brilliant new performance of Frank Wedekind’s “Spring Awakening” know this was also the case for Middle Europe, where the spirit of adolescents was often brutally crushed under the weight of rote learning in fields of no obvious practical utility.
But the challenge of this century is a different one. It is a pendulum which has perhaps swung too far in the direction of triviality and popular appeasement. The market drives the media, to some extent, and the keepers of high culture seem to fade into the background. And, as Le Guin argues, technology offers up a great diversity of paths to transmitting information and plot lines. Reading requires an active imagination; it takes an effort.
If people make time to read, it’s because it’s part of their jobs, or other media aren’t readily available, or they aren’t much interested in them—or because they enjoy reading. Lamenting over percentage counts induces a moralizing tone: It is bad that we don’t read; we should read more; we must read more. Concentrating on the drowsy fellow in Dallas, perhaps we forget our own people, the hedonists who read because they want to. Were such people ever in the majority?. . .
Television has steadily lowered its standards of what is entertaining until most programs are either brain-numbing or actively nasty. Hollywood remakes remakes and tries to gross out, with an occasional breakthrough that reminds us what a movie can be when undertaken as art. And the Internet offers everything to everybody: but perhaps because of that all-inclusiveness there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from Web-surfing. You can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or a book on your computer, but these artifacts are made accessible by the Web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps blogging is an effort to bring creativity to networking, and perhaps blogs will develop aesthetic form, but they certainly haven’t done it yet.
What, blogging has developed no aesthetic form?! Le Guin needs to spend more time surfing the internet. But I’m with her on the rest of it. And indeed, the greatest gift of the internet comes in the fact that masses of accumulated learning can be stored on line and made immediately accessible, with tools to understand the details one doesn’t know. It seems to me that Google Books and comparable resources offered up by dozens of academic libraries around the world may be the most important advance that the internet has offered in the last two or three years. For instance, I recently went searching for one of my favorite Meister Eckehart sermons on the web and found among other sources a fourteenth century manuscript fully imaged and accessible from a cloister library in Switzerland. You could almost feel the crackling, buckling parchment on which it was written. It gave me a bit of a workout reading the Gothic fraktur, but being able to absorb an original illuminated manuscript in the comfort of your own study is quite something. What was the great Library of Alexandria compared to this?
Le Guin also offers us the conventional complaint against the publishing industry and its standards.
To me, then, one of the most despicable things about corporate publishers and chain booksellers is their assumption that books are inherently worthless. If a title that was supposed to sell a lot doesn’t “perform” within a few weeks, it gets its covers torn off—it is trashed. The corporate mentality recognizes no success that is not immediate. This week’s blockbuster must eclipse last week’s, as if there weren’t room for more than one book at a time. Hence the crass stupidity of most publishers (and, again, chain booksellers) in handling backlists. . .
To get big quick money, the publisher must risk a multimillion-dollar advance on a hot author who’s supposed to provide this week’s bestseller. These millions—often a dead loss—come out of funds that used to go to pay normal advances to reliable midlist authors and the royalties on older books that kept selling. Many midlist authors have been dropped, many reliably selling books remaindered, in order to feed Moloch. Is that any way to run a business?
Better of course that they should feed Moloch with midlist authors than with children. But the other point lurking here and made quite brilliantly by Arthur Schopenhauer some 150 years ago goes to the industry’s obsession with always shoveling something brand new under our noses, something with a hint of scandal, but the product of an abysmally poor or thoroughly conventional mind. The past offers better writers, better ideas, more helpful friends. But it does not offer the sort of material that can be sold profitably in airport bookshops and in drugstores. Or will it?
Le Guin in any event comes back to this inevitable point: the distinction between true literature and the trivial, and its relevance to the world of commerce.
So why don’t the corporations drop the literary publishing houses, or at least the literary departments of the publishers they bought, with amused contempt, as unprofitable? Why don’t they let them go back to muddling along making just enough, in a good year, to pay binders and editors, modest advances and crummy royalties, while plowing most profits back into taking chances on new writers? Since kids coming up through the schools are seldom taught to read for pleasure and anyhow are distracted by electrons, the relative number of book-readers is unlikely to see any kind of useful increase and may well shrink further. What’s in this dismal scene for you, Mr. Corporate Executive? Why don’t you just get out of it, dump the ungrateful little pikers, and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?
Is it because you think if you own publishing you can control what’s printed, what’s written, what’s read? Well, lotsa luck, sir. It’s a common delusion of tyrants. Writers and readers, even as they suffer from it, regard it with amused contempt.
Reading, I firmly believe, is a source of relief from tyrants. Both for individuals and societies.
i used to read fiction but, after high school it just didn’t hold my attention anymore. non-fiction is all i read anymore.
If you find the info I would love to see it. I can’t in my wildest imagination think any black American would stand by and watch another group of people be made to enter by a seperate door. I don’t doubt you I am just stunned!
Reading, I firmly believe, is a source of relief from tyrants. Both for individuals and societies.
These sentences pose an interesting thought. I still like to read for fun. I just started De Tocqueville's Democracy in America the other day. It's a pretty new translation, and I think it's going to be very good.
If I ever lose my sight I am in trouble, I don’t like audiobooks. I am a visual person and audio books lose me. I can’t seem to pay attention and grasp the material. I need to read it myself.
I heard about Jews having to use the backdoor, too, but I thought it was a wild rumor. That can’t be true, can it? I’d be horrified that Jews would submit themselves to that. I certainly wouldn’t. I won’t even wear Islaamic hijab when in Muslim countries, let alone be pushed to the backdoor. Hope this isn’t true.
Last week, a line was crossed. A terrible line was crossed at Annapolis. With the world looking on, the President of the United States sponsored Judeophobia. Jew-hatred was okay, understandable even.Under the auspices of a global "peace" conference, the White House sanctioned Jew-hatred. The Jew is contemptible, inferior, ignorant, politically and socially disenfranchised: separate entrance ways, service entrances for the Jews, refusal to touch or shake hands with a Jew, refusal of audience members to wear the translation earphones when Ehud Olmert spoke...
Ms. Rice Visited Israel, Not Birmingham, Alabama (IMRA January 17, 2008 Lenny Ben-David)
Ms. Rice Visited Israel, Not Birmingham, Alabama Two months ago in Annapolis Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice compared the plight of Palestinians to the experience of African-Americans some 40 years ago in the segregated South. "I know what it is like to hear that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian," she said. "I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness."
I agree. Reading is much better.
When I read fiction, it is mostly classics including works from the 20th century that are regarded as classics.
I’ve posted some links in this thread. It was ugly to draw the same comparisons to Israel that Jimmuh Carter also has (he called it “apartheid” whereas his Saudi masters REALLY practice Apartheid supressing all religions other than Islam and have a 21st century policy of REFUSING Jews entry into to country, this may have changed but it was put in place THIS century).
actually, the bookworm is an endangered species. we are headed to a new dark ages. we have advanced as far as we are going to, and this is as good as it gets.
I should start a ping list just for screen name twins. :D
Books I just bought yesterday:
Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
Norman Cohn's Europe's Inner Demons.
& Lila Abu-Lughod's Veiled Sentiments: Honor & Poetry in a Bedouin Society.
Sorry, I feel asleep reading this. Let’s see...Oh, yeah. Many of us who love to read haven’t read a book in years because we can read the internet, not as this author suggests, but real books on the internet as if they were from dead trees. For example, I’m into screenplays now and have read one a day for the past month or so. I’d do the same with paper versions, but they’re unwieldy and I’d have to drive to the library. So I contend that there are two different kinds of literate people: those who can read but don’t enjoy it and those who truly enjoy it. The internet has not changed either of them.
Ditto here. I've got bookcases full of 'em. I just hope I live long enough to read them all.
Condi Rice could have been a concert pianist if she so chose, but she decided on a different path. Gifted, would be the word to describe the Sectary of State.
see my post 34 forgive the formatting.
The high point of literacy in America was reached at the BEGINNING of the age of the Government School. The Government School was introduced to America for the purpose of REDUCING the level of literacy in America. The Government Schools are a resounding success. They are accomplishing what they were designed to do: create an illiterate, ignorant, fornicating Mass American, who would be amenable to being herded into factories and to the battlefield.
My eyes glaze over anytime I hear any politician, no matter how “conservative,” promising to “fix” the Government Schools. They ARE NOT BROKEN. They are functioning PERFECTLY. They are accomplishing PRECISELY what they have been DESIGNED to accomplish.
What was the Library of Alexandria compared to the Internet? Exclusive. It was also vulnerable to a despotic attack by Islamic tyrants.
With the world of knowledge at your fingertips, people turn to their vices rather than seek to better themselves. Instant gratification. Don't earn the money to buy some leisure; just download that song/new movie. Don't woo a girl, just spam out "hi theres" to young women on a social network and if their rejections seem too much, just discretely get some porn. When that gets old watch some reruns and laugh at some jokes. Who can concentrate on reading Asimov's books on science when you can read his books on ROBOTS instead? Why learn the laws of science when you can learn the laws of ROBOTS?
That's quite an assortment. I'll have to remember to ask you next week how they were.
I lost interest in Condi during her speech in 2004(?) at the Repub Convention, in which she described how her grandfather switched religions in order to get a scholarship to college—and that’s why her family have been “devout whatevers ever since.” What kind of cynicism is that?
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