Happy Father's Day

Of the many lasting gifts my parents have given to me, my love of reading and literature is the most satisfying, intellectually stimulating, and even lucrative, as it led to my profession. My parents raised a reader long before it was a popular campaign with big name advocates.

My Dad was the major reader when I was very young, but both my parents shared the effort - and I'm sure the sessions of Doctor Dan or "The White Bed That Ran Away" became somewhat of an effort after the first six hundred or so repetitions!

So Happy Father's Day to my Dad. And thanks to both my parents for raising a reader.

McFiction

Years ago, when McDonald's was still a recent addition to the world of dining out, the Golden Arches signs always include the tally of how many burgers the company had sold - "over three billion sold," or five billion, six, or seven. I don't remember at what point they stopped counting.

And for all the dollars those billions of burgers sold generated for the chain, never once did I hear of McDonald's complaining that serious restaurant reviewers and critics ignored its offerings in favour of the food at other smaller restaurants  - restaurants where the chefs vied for a review in the New York Times by creating complex, layered, and unique food.

But in response to the critical acclaim and coverage Jonathan Franzen's recent book Freedom received, commercial writers Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult did indeed complain that Franzen's work received more and better attention than did any work of theirs, and that the work of white males, generally, received more attention than did theirs as well.

Jason Pinter, in The Huffington Post (Aug 10/10) interviewed the two authors about the "feud" they have with Franzen, his critics, newspaper reveiwers, and the entire literary world.

Between them, Weiner and Picoult have been on the New York Times bestseller list for months at a time. Between them, they have written over two dozen novels, have generated millions of dollars, and have millions of books in print in several countries.

So why does the literary establishment ignore them?  Picoult believes that her work is like that of Jane Austen or Shakespeare because it was popular, not literary, when written.

Because historically the books that have persevered in our culture and in our memories and our hearts were not the literary fiction of the day, but the popular fiction of the day. Think about Jane Austen. Think about Charles Dickens. Think about Shakespeare. They were popular authors. They were writing for the masses. (Huff Post)

Indeed, these authors were and are popular, but the comparison only goes so far. The quickly growing capitalist, middle class bought the fiction of Austen and Dickens, fiction that was starkly apart from the literary efforts of the aristocracy that had dominated for centuries. (Shakespeare, who wrote plays, not fiction is a different case.)

Gender lines were also quite different then; Jane Austen was told, as were other serious women writers, that no literary work by women would be published because it would never measure up. This is no longer true. Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 comes to mind - one of many examples of women writers well-regarded by the literary establishment.

Millions of readers love and buy Weiner's and Picoult's books, but from what I have read, the work of neither writer has the depth and complexity that the work of Doris Lessing has, or Austen, or Dickens, or Shakespeare, or countless others. To me, their fiction is cliched and formulaic; they work in a genre that was both expanded and refined by someone like Austen. The commercial fiction Weiner and Picoult write does neither; it takes what was done by others and repeats it endlessly with no innovation.

McDonald's doesn't complain that restaurant and food critics are not banging down the door to include it. McDonald's rakes in millions, offering its formulaic product to the millions who love it - smiling all the way to the bank. Commercial writers like Weiner and Picoult should do the same. They offer a standardized product to millions who love it and make lots of money doing so. If they want critical acclaim, they should offer the kind of fiction that commands it.

They do, though, deserve an award for generating publicity!

Raise a Reader

Tiddlywinks requires skill and teaches hand/eye coordination. Stamp collecting teaches history, geography, and classification skills, among other things. Both can be replaced by other hobbies with equal claims for offering the same knowledge and a similar skill set.

Reading is in its own category and can't so easily be replaced. Reading (writing, too) is intricately involved with critical thinking, communication, language skills, concentration, and knowledge acquisition. There isn't anything else that functions cognitively the same way that reading does.

Reading isn't replacable!

But reading - the long, slow, digesting, thinking, analyzing kind - is becoming increasingly unpopular, with more and more people admitting that a quick skim of almost anything printed is all they are able to manage. 

Many of the books that adults do read are written at a grade level for younger teens. Many newspapers in recent years have lowered the level of difficulty of the writing to try and cater to readers' diminishing skills.

Patrick Kingsley, in his article "The Art of Slow Reading" in The Guardian (Jul 15/10), writes about the problem, citing many experts who argue that the internet is responsible (and some who argue otherwise).The problem with the internet:

because...we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual titbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other.

Mark Bauerlein in The Dumbest Generation makes much the same point. He argues that while students (especially) are intelligent and can multi-task, while they have the whole world of information at their fingertips, they don't have either the background knowledge or the cognitive skills to make the connections that lead to real knowledge and real ability to negotiate with the world in many ways. What's missing? Reading ability.

A student once complained to me that the literature we were studying was too difficult and that he didn't like it! While I won't tell you exactly what I thought at the time,  I did wonder what purpose it would serve to have those as two criteria for a university literature course. Unfortunately, ease and fun are becoming two of the most important criteria. The result is exactly what Bauerlein predicts - the dumbest generation.

Bauerlein paraphrases Ronald Reagan - who said that freedom can be lost in a generation - saying that knowledge can be lost in a generation. Sometimes I wonder if it will take that long.

Tiddlywinks may be more fun and easier than reading, but what will kids do if they have to read the instructions?

Weird, Wild, Wonderful 4 - Jan 31 - Feb 6

Some new findings, some old favourites.

ThinkShop, a blog on history, politics, and literature (among other interesting and intelligent musings). This blog is very well-written by an educator who lives in Switzerland.

nthposition online magazine is hard to categorize and certainly extensive. Here are the sections, just to give an idea: Strangeness, Politics, Opinion, Places, People, Poetry, Fiction, Reviews, Artreviews, Discussion, Contributors, Links. Good writing; some eye-opening essays.

In These Times, always interesting, always pointed, always good reading:

In These Times is a newsmagazine committed to political and economic democracy and opposed to the dominance of transnational corporations and the tyranny of marketplace values over human values. In These Times is dedicated to reporting the news with the highest journalistic standards; to informing and analyzing movements for social, environmental and economic justice; and to providing an accessible forum for debate about the policies that shape our future.

Delineating Art, the blog of artist Elaine Cheung offers commentary on art and life. Many of her posts begin with a particular artist or piece and then lead out to a larger point. Thoughtful and interesting.

The CSI of Literature

The sexy new way to study literature is with CSI-style algorithms and statistics. Whether in an effort to "make it new" or an attempt to undo the quagmire of post-modernism run amok, I don't know. Quite possibly, the scientific approach just reflects cultural changes. It is becoming trendy, though, in literary studies.

Jonathan Gottschall in a Boston Globe article calls for a more scientific study of literature and his arguments are a good example of the growing trend - and a good example of why it won't work as anything more than an adjunct to the study of literature.

Gottschall’s suggestion for more science in literary studies comes from the fact that literature is, of course, material – words on a page, sounds. But that mostly ignores the intangible aspects or conflates them with the material ones.

There are several scientific theories that purport to explain human nature and the meaning of life (and now literature) in terms of biological, chemical or other processes. But, just as Gottschall’s recommended methods can’t get at the value and meaning of literature, science’s methods don’t answer the big questions about humanity. It’s like claiming to have the ultimate understanding of a Mozart piano concerto by explaining an energy wave or an ipod.

Gotschall  uses statistics to make claims about Western literature, which is fine. The problem comes in the interpretation of what the numbers actually mean.

His experiment of counting references to female beauty in the literature of many cultures shows an equal number of references throughout. This goes against the, supposed, widely held belief of literary scholars that by virtue of the number of references to female beauty in its literature, Western culture is more sexist that other cultures.

Gottschall declares that these numbers mean that any claim that Western culture is more sexist is not true and that there must be “something deeper in human nature” to account for “the intense stress on women’s beauty in Western…” and other cultures’ literature.

His numbers could just as easily be interpreted to show that sexism exists equally in all the cultures whose literature he studied. This would hardly be a new or surprising “finding.” Feminist scholars have been finding this for decades, without becoming statisticians.

Also, what exactly (and scientifically) does he mean by “something deeper in human nature”? I hear the rustling of evolutionary psychology in the shadows!

Science also tells us that Shakespeare's work was indeed written by Shakespeare. Computerized linguistic models prove the consistency of language throughout. These are results we should incorporate into our studies, but not as a main focus.

Besides, we already know that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, despite the periodic studies done because someone finds it hard to believe that anyone other than a nobleman could have created such art.

Perhaps the reasons for problems within academic departments in literary studies are more complex than Gottschall allows and are unrelated to the “need” for more science in our discipline, which is not to say that the way scholars practice literary criticism today does not have its share of problems.

Some scholars have become invested in their methods, and what were once fresh and interesting approaches have often become post-structuralist zealotry (just as previous approaches became strict and moribund).

The “consumerization” of education; focus on skills training, not on liberal education; the publish-or-perish directive; the changes in students’ attitudes - all are also part of the problem.

We can indeed make the study of literature a CSI-style endeavour; we can use algorithms and scientific analysis, which may sustain some interest for awhile in those who aren’t really interested, but the real problems are larger than anything a sexier scientific approach will solve.

Literature is messy, problematic, uncontrollable, difficult, hard to pin down, with no algorithm or scientific analysis with an answer once and for all. Many students don’t like that; it involves thinking and effort and the possibility of failure.

Many administrators, within the system and without, don’t like it because it means that there isn’t a nice tidy package – a controllable, quantifiable curriculum with a stable dollar value and predictable, interchangeable faculty.

Scientists study the material world and do so very well. Literary scholars (and other scholars in the humanities) study the intangible, the meanings, the messy and unquantifiable, and do so very well.

Burdening those who study literature with a scientific approach assumes from the outset that literature is less than what we believe it to be. It also assumes that science is more fundamental than literature to the human endeavor, and that I heartily reject.

Pride Goeth Before a Fool

Fools, foolishness, and folly are the subjects of Michael Dirda's article "These Foolish Things" in In Character.

Dirda discusses three types of fools: "Real Fools, Professional Fools, and Unsuspecting Fools."

I immediately thought of  King Arthur and his court in the story Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

During the New Year's feast at Camelot, the Green Knight bursts into the banquet hall and challenges the knights to a game: the Green Knight will stand still and allow one stroke against him from one of the knights, but in one year's time, Arthur's knight must stand still and allow him to do the same.

Although the courtiers can hardly believe what they see - a huge man and his horse all of green - Arthur agrees to the game.

 At first, one might think they are the Real (innocent) Fools of fairy tale and myth. Otherwise, wouldn't they have some inkling that things were a tad weird? If they are not Real Fools, why agree to such foolishness?

But the knights hesitate for some time before Arthur finally steps up and agrees to the terms. All the famous Knights of the Round Table sit in stunned silence - probably looking everywhere but at the Green Knight. They know this is not such a good deal.

Arthur agrees, as he must for the pride of himself and his court, and Gawain jumps in and begs to take on the task - as a loyal knight must.

 By accepting the challenge, the court shows itself to have the surfeit of pride Morgan Le Fay is testing them for in this grand ruse. A non-prideful person would weigh the odds here and decline what must mean certain death for friend and relative.

The pause and subsequent agreement because of pride show that Arthur and his court are Unsuspecting Fools:

As for Unsuspecting Fools, they are essentially everyone else in the world, starting with you and me. Everybody plays the fool sometimes; there’s no exception to the rule. More particularly, the Unsuspecting Fool is the supposedly wise figure — a sovereign, a pedantic scholar, a pillar of the establishment — who is blind to his own vanity and self-importance, ignorant of what’s really going on, puffed up with hubris. Pride goeth before a fall. In tragic vein, Oedipus and Lear are Unsuspecting Fools.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the classics in Dirda's Classics for Pleasure.

Dirda won the Pullitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 1993 and is the author also of and Bound to Please.

I would like to invite Michael Dirda to my soiree.

Inviting Writer

Lola Lemire Tostevin is a Canadian writer (in both French and English) of fiction, poetry and criticism. She taught at York University in Toronto, where she now lives.


I met Tostevin at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. She was writer in residence for one week in the hot summer of 1990. I was a graduate student doing a course in contemporary Canadian literature, and Tostevin shared her work and her thoughts, both at the university and at off-campus social events.


My most vivid memory is of Tostevin reading "Le Baisir de Juan-Les-Pins," part of her in-progress novel Frog Moon (1993).

We sat in a room next to a courtyard, with doors open, hoping for even the smallest breeze. Tostevin began to read and, after a very short time, the room was pin-drop silent, as we forgot the heat and were transfixed by the story and her quiet, but dramatic reading style.

 

Off campus, we congregated at a small backyard cottage rented by one of the other grad students. The conversation and the wine flowed in the evening heat. Tostevin shared her ideas on literature and feminism, and her advice for would be writers.

 

Tostevin was fun, talented, and generous with her time, her work, and her advice.

 

I would like to invite Lola Tostevin to my soiree.