Tweet And Quotation Of The Day: Reading As Soulcraft Edition

From John Merrow

"I'm not saying you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I'm saying it helps." Walter Mosley NYT Book Review 8/9/15

— John Merrow (@John_Merrow) August 10, 2015

Mosley's continuation is equally eloquent:

I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I’m saying it helps. Artists, musicians, naturally empathetic children and people born to the beat of a different drum often embark on more original lives than the Company Store wants for us. They’re naturally more resistant to the forces of big business and big government.

But readers don’t have to be all that special. They have the guidance of a thousand stories to help them make their way. They are never alone. They are equipped to challenge (or ignore) the expectations laid down by standardized testing, fifth-grade bullies and parents that gaze upon the present-day world with eyes that only see the past. They can envision alternatives to economic and political systems that have no heart, art or true ­humanity.

Most readers stop here. They gather their ever-widening circle of favorite writers and read and reread their beloved books. But some are compelled to become writers. The stories they were told or read kindle an obsession that cries out to be heard. Like minor gods, they rummage in the mud looking to make characters with whom to explore their dreams, and nightmares.

Paragraphs like these also likely explain why politicians like Governor Daugaard seek to ignore literature and focus on STEM.

Quotation Of The Day: We Have A Moral Obligation To Vote Against Every Politician Who Doesn't Read Fiction Edition

From Neil Gaiman:

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'm going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we've shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

Please, read the whole lecture.

Quotation Of The Day: Reading Literature Helps One Deal With Ambiguity Edition

From this Tom Jacobs piece at Salon:

Are you uncomfortable with ambiguity? It’s a common condition, but a highly problematic one. The compulsion to quell that unease can inspire snap judgments, rigid thinking, and bad decision-making. 

Fortunately, new research suggests a simple anecdote for this affliction: Read more literary fiction.

A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic, report that people who have just read a short story have less need for what psychologists call “cognitive closure.” Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty—attitudes that allow for both sophisticated thinking and greater creativity.

Researchers offer the following reasons why fiction has this effect on readers but non-fiction does not.

“The thinking a person engages in while reading fiction does not necessarily lead him or her to a decision,” they note. This, they observe, decreases the reader’s need to come to a definitive conclusion.

“Furthermore,” they add, “while reading, the reader can stimulate the thinking styles even of people he or she might personally dislike. One can think along and even feel along with Humbert Humbert in Lolita, no matter how offensive one finds this character. This double release—of thinking through events without concerns for urgency and permanence, and thinking in ways that are different than one’s own—may produce effects of opening the mind.” 

Quotation Of The Day: Good Political Writing Begins With Writing About The Past Edition

From this Ta-Nehisi Coates post at The Atlantic:

In the interest of exercising that intellect, I would add something else: Write about something other than current politics. Do not limit yourself to fighting with people who are alive. Fight with some of the intellectual greats. Fight with historians, scientists, and academics. And then after you fight with them, have the decency to admit when they've kicked your ass. Do not use your platform to act like they didn't. Getting your ass kicked is an essential part of growing your intellectual muscle.

One should probably let reading old books kick one's gluteal area as well.

Quotation Of The Day: The End Of Everything Edition

From this Carlos Lozada column:

Nature and truth. Money and markets. Men and marriage. Faith and reason. They’ve all ended. Power ended in March, but that makes sense because leadership ended last year. History ended more than two decades ago, while the future ended just two years ago.

On the plus side, illness has ended, along with poverty, racism, war — even homework.

If you thought these things were still around, just pick up “The End of Sex,” by Donna Freitas, published last week, or Moises Naim’s “The End of Power,” which came out last month. Try David Wolman’s “The End of Money” or David Agus’s “The End of Illness.” Those came out in 2012, the same year that Hanna Rosin affirmed “The End of Men” and John Horgan imagined “The End of War.”

Saturday Morning Reads: March 9 Edition

Nathan Johnson delves into the details that South Dakota has 3rd most regressive tax structure in the nation.

According to a recent study by the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy (ITEP), South Dakota had the third-most regressive tax system in the United States as of the beginning of 2013. The bottom 20 percent of the state’s earners pay 11.6 percent of their income in taxes. The top 1 percent pay 2.1 percent.

“One could rightly say that the rate on poor people in South Dakota is 552 percent higher than the rate on those in the top 1 percent,” said Reynold Nesiba, an associate professor of economics at Augustana College. “I think most outside of the top 1 percent of the population would agree that this is grossly unfair and by no stretch of the imagination equitable.”

A self-described liberal gun guy is shilling his book. My take-away doesn't fit the general tone of the interview, so read it for yourself. My take-away:

"The people who buy most of the guns are middle-aged white men who have not finished college.. . [because] gun guys derive [self-esteem] from their guns"

The title alone makes it worth the read: The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble

Brew another cup of coffee and enjoy.

Quotation Of The Day:Andrew Bacevich May Turn Me Into A Conservative Edition

From this post at The American Conservative:

Well, I’ll admit to prejudices, so let me lay them out.

(Fans of Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman will want to stop reading here and flip to the next article. If Ronald Reagan’s your hero, sorry—you won’t like what’s coming. Ditto regarding Ron Paul. And if in search of wisdom you rely on anyone whose byline appears regularly in any publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, well, you’ve picked up the wrong magazine.)

The conservative tradition I have in mind may not satisfy purists. It doesn’t rise to the level of qualifying as anything so grandiose as a coherent philosophy. It’s more of a stew produced by combining sundry ingredients. The result, to use a word that ought warm the cockles of any conservative’s heart, is a sort of an intellectual slumgullion.

Here’s the basic recipe. As that stew’s principal ingredients, start with generous portions of John Quincy Adams and his grandson Henry. Fold in ample amounts of Randolph Bourne, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Christopher Lasch. For seasoning, throw in some Flannery O’Connor and Wendell Berry—don’t skimp. If you’re in a daring mood, add a dash of William Appleman Williams. To finish, sprinkle with Frank Capra—use a light hand: too sweet and the concoction’s ruined. Cook slowly. (Microwave not allowed.) What you get is a dish that is as nutritious as it is tasty

Niebuhr and Lasch challenge and are as relevant today as ever. A student gave me a single volume collection of Henry Adams works. His life in politics was, to put it mildly, fascinating. I admit that I don't recall reading anything by Williams or Bourne. Further, Capra is cloying, but every thinking person should read O'Connor's short stories annually.

Quotation Of The Day: Those Who Want to Lead Read

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, John Coleman notes that fewer people seem to be reading only material related to their work. He explains that reading improves leadership skills:

This is terrible for leadership, where my experience suggests those trends are even more pronounced. Business people seem to be reading less — particularly material unrelated to business. But deep, broad reading habits are often a defining characteristic of our greatest leaders and can catalyze insight, innovation, empathy, and personal effectiveness.

Note how many business titans are or have been avid readers. According to The New York Times, Steve Jobs had an "inexhaustible interest" in William Blake; Nike founder Phil Knight so reveres his library that in it you have to take off your shoes and bow; and Harman Industries founder Sidney Harman called poets "the original systems thinkers," quoting freely from Shakespeare and Tennyson. In Passion & Purpose, David Gergen notes that Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein reads dozens of books each week. And history is littered not only with great leaders who were avid readers and writers (remember, Winston Churchill won his Nobel prize in Literature, not Peace), but with business leaders who believed that deep, broad reading cultivated in them the knowledge, habits, and talents to improve their organizations.

Quotation Of The Day: Literature Matters Edition

Admiral James Stavridis, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe and Commander, U.S. European Command, discusses what he reads as part of an ongoing Atlantic series. After listing numerous news sources, he gets to fiction and poetry:

I am also a big reader of fiction, and enjoy accurate historical fiction, which affords a chance to learn history painlessly. Generally, make time to read at least one novel a week. Lately I've read The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, and The Age of Miracles, by Karen Thompson Walker, both coming-of-age novels by young American novelists. I also like the sea-going novels of Patrick O'Brian, like any Navy officer. Other authors I enjoy and read repeatedly include George MacDonald Fraser, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike, Ha Jin, Gary Shteyngart, Elmore Leonard (going strong at 85) and Ian Fleming, among many others.

I also read poetry, especially from countries I am visiting in my current job (about 80 over the past several years). For example, before a recent trip to Madrid I went back and read some of the work of Frederico Garcia Lorca. I just read a book of poetry from a decade ago by Carl Dennis called Practical Gods which impressed me. W.B. Yeats still amazes me with the freshness of his vision a century after much of his work was published.

Looking at Stavridis reading list, I would love to see a discussion between Stavridis and the Common Core advocates who want to reduce the amount of fiction and poetry that high school students read. The discussion could also include those hard-nosed business people who claim that literature has no benefit. I have the feeling the Admiral has a far different point of view.

Plains Pops: History, Reading Lists, And Poetry Edition

A History News Network poll has determined the least credible history books in print:

Readers of the History News Network have voted David Barton's The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believe About Thomas Jefferson the least credible history book in print in a week-long HNN poll. The book edged out Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States by nine votes at the end of polling -- 650 votes versus 641. Commenters criticized the book for its gross factual errors and political agenda -- in an email to HNN, Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter, professors at Grove City College and authors of Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President, wrote that "Barton misrepresents and distorts a host of Jefferson's ideas and actions, particularly his views and practices regarding religion, slavery and church-state relations." A commenter on HNN's boards noted that the book "looks like an intentional attempt to mislead and deceive in the guise of history. "

This animated characters read difficult books.

Rod Dreher discusses Wallace Stevens and asserts that one of Stevens's "gorgeous, pagan poem[s] is why the only Christianity that makes sense to me is the sacramental kind, Catholic or Orthodox."

A Reading List For Entrepreneurs

As a curmudgeon, I frequently take umbrage at the STEM uber alles crowd and the businessmen who erroneously contend that literature and history have no worth.  I also try to be a fair curmudgeon, so I want to point out these INC. posts.

Bill Murphy Jr. contends that The Great Escape is the best entrepreneurship book ever written.  He notes that a group of talented, inspired individuals did what every entrepreneur does:

First, they identified solutions to a deeply felt problem. . . .

Second, they acquired the resources they needed. . . .

Finally, they had to execute. . . .

Murphy follows up with a list of 7 other books including Moneyball and The Aeneid.

Both posts make an extremely valid point; the fault is not with the fiction or histories; the fault lies with readers who lack the imagination to read beyond the facts to garner principles.

Another Education Reform I'd Like To See

This is what school should look like:

I now want to teach a class centering on New Model Army, Hobbes's Leviathan, & Steven Johnson's Emergence. cc: @arroberts
— Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) July 13, 2012

Too often novels like New Model Army, philosophical works, and science treatises are taught in isolation.

These particular works may not work for K-12 but the principle would certainly work at the K-12 level. I incorporate a short look at the big bang theory when I teach creation myths, but it would be good to tie in some math as well.

Unfortunately, The odds of having high school classes allowing students to do in-depth study of material from several disciplines are nil.  In fact, one probably has a better chance of seeing the 1992 Dream Team as they were then play the the current USA Olympic Team in a best of seven series.

Quotation Of The Day: Guilty Pleasure Reading Edition

Gary Gutting looks at guilty pleasure reading:

Fans of popular genres implicitly recognize this when they insist that their favorite books deserve the same sort of detailed attention we give to canonical classics.  That’s why we find Library of America editions and articles in professional journals on writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and H. P. Lovejoy.  Sometimes the attention is misplaced, and the high-powered analysis is more a matter of reading into the text than extracting from it.  But the sign of a superior text of whatever genre is its ability to continue rewarding—with pleasure—those who work to uncover its riches.

Gutting may be too dismissive of Chandler whose The Big Sleep is every bit the equal of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a book beloved by English teachers across the nation.

Plains Pops: Random Reading Links List Edition

Who would have guessed the author of "The Lottery" was a "practicing amateur witch"?

Young readers no longer reading as many "classics."

NPR recommends 5 science fiction novels and sums up some critics' lists.

Finally, Graphic Novel Reporter publishes Spring 2012 Core Lists and a slide show covering over 40 graphic novels.

Reading And Food Go Together . . .

As long as one doesn't leave greasy fingerprints on the pages.

I mused about attempts to reduce the amount of literature students read here.  The practical folk behind this ludicrous alleged reform contend that fiction has little practical value.  Darya Pino STEM person who is also a foodie disagrees. She writes:

The power of language to whisk us away to other worlds, times and even into other people’s minds never ceases to astound me.

Fiction can often give me a better glimpse into a culture than even visiting, since the amount of time and exploration required to really get a sense for the mindset and lifestyle of the people who live there is substantial.

Some might argue that getting "a better glimpse into a culture" or getting a sense of others "mindset and lifestyle" still has no personal practical benefit. Pino adds one more more benefit that applies to everyone; reading fiction made her a better cook.

For instance, it’s impossible for me to read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which I’ve done several times, without craving Spanish tapas and red wine for the better part of a month (this is also why Spanish food is one of my absolute favorite cuisines). The Last Chinese Chef had me exploring obscure alleyways in Chinatown in search of the best dumplings and peking duck, and before reading it I would have said Chinese food wasn’t really my jam.

Midnight’s Children, the meta-award winning book by Salman Rushdie, forever changed the way I think and feel about Indian food. Spices and heat permeate the characters and events in Midnight’s Children, which is one of the literary tools Rushdie uses to portray his native culture. My obsession with Indian food lasted for months as I read this and other works by Rushdie, since I couldn’t stop reading him after finishing the first.

One need not read the highbrow literature Pino lists here.  Robert Parker's Spenser cooks in nearly title.

HT: LIfehacker

Plains Pops: Reading Trifecta Edition

First, from my blog reading, three interesting posts from Rod Dreher:

1. A conservative teacher discusses how poverty effects student.
2. A post based on a comment about the poverty article.
3. The humanities as a way of knowing.

Second, the first three books pulled from my to be read pile:

1. Hell is Empty (Finished)
2. Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World
3. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking will be my first Nook book.  I started but stuff got in the way, so I'm going to restart.

Thrid, a bleg for books to add to the list:

1. An overlooked classic
2. A coach's book
3. A young adult novel that's not The Hunger Games, gotta keep up with the young'uns

Quotation Of The Day: Serious Reading Edition

From this post on Tablet,

“If you consider reading simply a pastime, stop reading. Watch movies: They are less demanding on your schedule, tend to have considerably more nudity, and are generally easier to bring up in conversation. Let the faculties of your mind previously dedicated to parsing text commit themselves instead to better, more needful uses, like mastering Angry Birds. Let reading go gently into the good night and take its place alongside archery and woodcarving in the pantheon of pastimes past, previously popular and currently the domain of the few and the carefully trained.

“But if you’re serious about reading—or, for that matter, about your education—see to it attentively. Revisit Homer and read your way through human history. Don’t stop until you hit Kafka. Or, better yet, don’t stop until you see the entire vista of our culture spread before you and feel yourself every bit a part of it.

Liel Leibovitz may spend too much time reading to know Angry Birds is passe; the young'uns tell me that Fruit Ninja is the new time waster of choice. (It speaks poorly of our culture that Fruit Ninja might be passe before I finish writing this post.)He may also overstate his case, but that hyperbole may be necessary to get people's attention.  Reading the classics is an essential part of education even if pop culture wants us to think otherwise.

(HT Core Knowledge Blog)

A Conservative Gives Good Advice About Being Radical

I don't make this statement often, but David Brooks gets it perfectly right.

The paradox of reform movements is that, if you want to defy authority, you probably shouldn’t think entirely for yourself. You should attach yourself to a counter-tradition and school of thought that has been developed over the centuries and that seems true.

The old leftists had dialectical materialism and the Marxist view of history. Libertarians have Hayek and von Mises. Various spiritual movements have drawn from Transcendentalism, Stoicism, Gnosticism, Thomism, Augustine, Tolstoy, or the Catholic social teaching that inspired Dorothy Day.

These belief systems helped people envision alternate realities. They helped people explain why the things society values are not the things that should be valued. They gave movements a set of organizing principles. Joining a tradition doesn’t mean suppressing your individuality. Applying an ancient tradition to a new situation is a creative, stimulating and empowering act. Without a tradition, everything is impermanence and flux.

Most professors would like their students to be more rebellious and argumentative. But rebellion without a rigorous alternative vision is just a feeble spasm.

If I could offer advice to a young rebel, it would be to rummage the past for a body of thought that helps you understand and address the shortcomings you see. Give yourself a label. If your college hasn’t provided you with a good knowledge of countercultural viewpoints — ranging from Thoreau to Maritain — then your college has failed you and you should try to remedy that ignorance.

Effective rebellion isn’t just expressing your personal feelings. It means replacing one set of authorities and institutions with a better set of authorities and institutions. Authorities and institutions don’t repress the passions of the heart, the way some young people now suppose. They give them focus and a means to turn passion into change.

On a side note, I wonder if Brooks's insight doesn't explain why many corporate ed reformers seek to reduce reading to mere utility and emphasize STEM.  Reading people that help one successfully challenge the status quo might hurt corporations' bottom line.

Quotation Of The Day: Reading Edition

From Jennifer Eagan,

Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.

Book Soundtracks

I am old enough to remember a time when the marketing of a film's sound track sent a signal that the movie sucked had some major flaws.  Now, it's rare for a film not to market its soundtrack.

Salon reports that books now feature soundtracks.

Actually, it might be too easy. A much better sense of Emma's sensibility -- cool Britannia like Prefab Sprout, Cocteau Twins, Billy Bragg and Everything But the Girl alongside English major mainstays Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell and Joan Armatrading -- appears on author and screenwriter David Nicholls' website. Nicholls has imagined the two mix tapes Emma gives Dexter (one from 1989, the other from 2000) and created Spotify and iTunes playlists where they can be streamed or purchased.

Book soundtracks like these have become increasingly popular among authors and readers, especially as the connection between writers and their audience has become more interactive, and as the fast popularity of music-streaming services like Spotify have made it easy to share songs online. But while a song on a movie soundtrack might be there because of a licensing deal or to boost an artist on a label also owned by the studio, author playlists, when done well, can deepen a character and enhance a reader's connection.

"A big part of creating characters for me has always involved working out their tastes -- in clothes, fashion, music," said Nicholls, in an email interview. "I know what the leading characters like, what they wear, what they listen to, what they eat, and making playlists is, I suppose, a form of note-taking, a way of working without really working."

I don't see myself as a luddite, but I fear a reading future that exists of Kindles with links that allow readers to hear a song every time the title or lyrics appear on the screen.  That eventuality seems the next logical step.  Our society doesn't need more sound; it needs more time for quiet contemplation.