• Tag Archives reading
  • Colma, California City of the Dead

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    Waxing Gibbous Corn Moon    moonrise 1816  moonset  0130

    Finished Alive in Necropolis. A fascinating book, part ghost story, part coming of age story, part police procedural set in Colma, California.  Colma, California is not just anywhere; it is where San Francisco chose to bury its dead.  There are way more dead people in Colma’s 17 cemeteries, 1.5 million, than citizens, 1, 280.   This one I read almost straight through.  It kept what John Gardner calls the fictive dream alive.

    Feels good to have read the last two nights rather than watch TV.  I might let it become a habit.  I love fiction, write fiction.  That’s not to say I don’t pick up non-fiction, in fact, I do.  Quite a bit.  Some folks I know rarely read fiction.  I rarely read non-fiction books through in the same way I do novels.  I tend to treat them as resources, reading them more in the manner of college reading.  I seek the big ideas, the general arc of the argument.  Sometimes, I’ll finish them, but rarely.

    Kate is home, the night is pleasant.  The kids are healthy, the grandkids, too.  And the dogs.  The gardens productive and the flowers are beautiful.  A good now.


  • Does Google Make Us Stupid?

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                      First Quarter of the Flower Moon

    “When life gives you lemmings, jump over the cliff.”  A quote from an unusually cynical book I’m reading right now.

    Am also reading an article from the Atlantic which asks the question, “Does Google Make Us Stupid?”  The author says that he and other his literary friends now find it difficult to read a whole book, to sustain a long and complex thought process, to do anything more than speed read blogs.  They attach this tendency to the Web and their constant web presence, searching, reading, researching, writing. 

    It makes for an arresting article title.  I wanted to read it.  The argument doesn’t track for me, however.  Unless it’s my age (compared to theirs), their experience does not match mine.  I don’t find reading a book a challenge.  I do notice that I have a shorter attention span at times, something I correlate more to the span between commercials on TV programs;  but, when I need the focus for a subtle or complicated book, it is there.

    When I write a novel, it comes in daily chunks, not one long, intricate thread.  It must get there, of course, but it happens in discrete, manageable bites.  Reading complex material is the same process for me.  I read it at a pace that makes it accessible to me.  

    When I started college, I took the Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics Program.  I remember two things.  One, if you want to read fast, take an index card and follow it as you move it down the page, taking in lines whole, from the center, rather than left to right.  Two, no matter how fast you read, the material determines the pace you can read.  Where 1,000 words a minute might be possible for fiction, when reading philosophy 150 words a minute is fast.  This squares with my own experience and factors into the topic, too.     


  • Minneapolis and St. Paul and Seattle, the Northern Sunrise for Literacy

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              Waning Gibbous Cold Moon

    Allison found this good news about reading, at least here in the Twin Cities.  The twilight’s pall hangs over the rest of the land, but not in these places according to Jack Miller.

    Residents of Minneapolis and Seattle are the most bookish and well-read, according to results from a new survey released today of the most literate American cities. 

    The survey focused on 69 U.S. cities with populations of 250,000 or above. Jack Miller of Central Connecticut State University chose six key indicators to rank literacy. These included newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources.

    Overall, the top 10 most literate (and wired) cities included:

    1—Minneapolis, Minn.
    2—Seattle, Wash.
    3—St. Paul, Minn.
    4—Denver, Colo.
    5—Washington, D.C.
    6—St. Louis, Mo
    .
    7—San Francisco, Calif.
    8—Atlanta, Ga.
    9—Pittsburgh, Pa.
    10—Boston, Mass.

    Minneapolis, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Denver and Washington, D.C., have made the top 10 every year since 2003, when the survey first launched.


  • Will Reading Continue to Dwindle?

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    A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
      – Friedrich Nietzsche

    The Twilight of the Books offers evidence of a decline in reading.  Here are a few excerpts to prove their point:

    “In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you didn’t read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the rise.

    In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.””

    The rest of the article provides further evidence to support these contentions.  One hypothesis is that reading will return to its pre-modern era state as an activity of a specialized reading class.  Back in the 19th century that class had some caché, this article suggests that may not be the case in the future; reading will be arcane.  Fine by me, but bad for a democracy relying on an educated electorate.

    Something the article touches on only obliquely is the degree to which we may return to an image intensive culture, much like the middle ages where architecture, painting and other image creating crafts were primary teachers of the illiterate.  The article does talk about a second orality, a return to the type of communication common among pre-literate cultures where memorization and story counted for a great deal.  A potential downside of this return is diminishment of critical analysis since writing allows for side by side comparison of two ideas where in an oral culture only one notion at a time can hold sway, making critical thought difficult.

    There are, however, contradictory trends not covered in the article.  The explosion of blogs, in the tens of millions, certainly represents a degree of literacy and creative writing not explained in the dismal statistics.  It also doesn’t cover the unusual merging of image and words in manga and graphic novels, nor does it expand on the second orality which in this case will have a cultural context supportive of critical analysis and, therefore, presumably available for transmission in more oral friendly forms like you tube, tv news, podcasts.   Still, a provocative look at tomorrow. 

    Wouldn’t you know, just when I get down to serious writing…