Author Archives: Peter Kerry Powers

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About Peter Kerry Powers

Director, Center for Public Humanities Professor of English Messiah University

The Reading Evangelist

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The Washington Post reported yesterday that the Library of Congress, in conjunction with the Children’s book Council, has appointed Jon Scieszka as its first National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Scieszka is the author of a number of very enjoyable children’s books, most notably The Stinky Cheeseman. My son liked it just for the title. We don’t remember a great deal about the content. I also like Scieszka’s emphasis on getting boys to read through his website, guyread.com, the gendered status of reading being another general concern of mine

I’m intrigued by two aspects of this announcement. First, Librarian of Congress James Billington suggested in his remarks about the appointment that “We think it’s very important to have an evangelist for reading.” In the official news release from the LOC, Billington goes on to say

“Jon Scieszka will be an articulate emissary, promoting reading and literature among young people, which are important for the health and creativity of our democratic society.”

Robin Adelson, executive director at Children’s Book Council, added,

“Jon Scieszka’s platform will spotlight the diversity and breadth of children’s literature available today and in so doing present a solution to what can be done to change the state of reading in this country.”

The metaphors are mixed, but all of them are fascinating. If we need a reading evangelist, it must be the case that the country as a whole is among the unwashed and unregenerate, that the gospel of reading comes to us from afar. We have seen and heard, but not understood. Reading, in fact, can save us. Reading is also in need of an emissary to help the non-reader understand it’s excellencies. Billington has something of a misplaced metaphor since I would assume that everyone agrees that young people are important for the health and creativity of our democratic society. I’m not sure, though, that everyone agrees that reading and literature are important for the health and creativity of our democratic society.

Will reading and literature, reading in general and reading literature in particular, heal us of all our woes? My being lurches to say “Amen” and raise my hands in testimony to the gospel of literary reading; this is, after all, the great rationale for the study of literature since at least Matthew Arnold. Whether it’s really true or not is another question. Human cultures have existed quite well without written literature, and fascist societies exhibited widespread literacy. But I do think it’s an intriguing question as to whether broad-based democracies can exist without effective levels of literacy. Something that doesn’t leave us at the mercy of the soundbite. In societies that have had print, reading and writing have been primarily associated with the ruling classes. The development of democracy, the widespread availability of print media, and rising levels of literacy have tended to go hand in hand, even if the connections are accidental rather than essential. (Widespread literacy didn’t prevent fascism, for instance, though I’ve seen some interesting discussions on the primary role of radio—an oral/aural new media of the day—in the rise of Nazism).

Still, Billington and Adelson draw on a rhetoric that seems pretty common to me in recent responses to the “reading crisis.” Reading will make us better. Though what better means is sometimes left to the vagueness of terms like “health” and “creativity.” Interestingly, reading hasn’t always enjoyed this healthy reputation. There’s a long tradition in literature of suspicion of the health effects provoked by reading. The first great Western novel, Don Quixote, is primarily about how excessive reading deranges the mind. Women who read too much are repeatedly driven to adultery and suicide. Men who read too much become soft and effeminate or lazy and irresponsible. Or demonically possessed. Or murderous. Authors’ revenge on their imperious audience, perhaps?

Now, however, reading is right up there with health club memberships and anti-smoking campaigns. If things get much worse, I suspect we will have Senate inquiries with testimony from Madonna and Angelina Jolie on the deleterious effects of non-reading.

The other issue that interests me about this new program is that it is sponsored by Cheerios. I could go on about the fact that, if a public entity like the Library of Congress is truly convinced that reading will save us, shouldn’t we devote public funds to the effort and not leave it in the hands of General Mills. At least it’s not being sponsored by Lucky Charms, I guess.

But that’s another subject, my real interest here is that the named culprits for our so-called reading crisis are manifold: television, the internet, poor parenting, poor teaching, etcetera. One culprit regularly left out is….corporate America. Or, contemporary global capitalism more generally. I don’t think I want to go the orthodox Marxist route and suggest that an ignorant and unreading labor force serves the purposes of international corporations. (Though, hey, it is convenient, isn’t it?)

I’m more interested in the ways in which the shape of our economy has simply changed the time available for reading. The average work week has ballooned to 47 hours per worker, lower than the industrial workers of the nineteenth century but significantly higher than three decades ago when the NEA first started getting worried about the state of reading. In addition, the average American is now spending nearly an hour a day commuting to and from work. Finally, this figure now includes 60 per cent of women, who have always made up the highest percentage of readers. Only 19% of women were in the paid labor force in 1900.

Thus, even though the average work week in 1900 was longer at 50+ hours (lower, however, for educated white collar workers), the average family is now spending a great deal more time in the work place with relatively less time for anything—political and civic participation, reading, much less necessary housework like washing dishes and clothes, fixing the gutters and mowing the lawn.

I’m surprised, frankly, that we don’t have a crisis in lawn care. Though, to be honest, we do have a crisis in lawn care at my house, and I’m not sure it has anything to do with the work week.

The shape of contemporary corporate capitalism is driven by the need for efficiencies and documentable productivity. This is true even of life in higher education—which used to be a fairly sleepy affair designed to give marginally paid professors the time to read and think. No longer. Public universities gauge productivity by how many pages you publish in which prestigious journals. Or how many student units you are able to teach per course hour. No wonder we have so many studies on Madonna and American Idol. Easier to watch TV. Reading Don Quixote, much less the latest novel, just to read doesn’t fit the system.

If someone could prove that reading Don Quixote would improve the corporate bottom line, I’m sure we’d all be given afternoon breaks and required to read. Corporations already sponsor gyms and health club memberships to keep down the costs of health insurance. If reading is so good for us, let’s ask that businesses provide us all with reading rooms and give us new forty-five minute breaks each day to catch up on our reading.

Now there’s an idea whose time has come. I think I’ll preach its gospel.

Final Thought.

Wild Man

I love this picture of Jon Scieszka, but does this look like the picture of a man you’d trust your children with in the stacks of a library?

Fresh Start

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I suppose I should just start by saying that I’ve never blogged before, and really only got started reading blogs recently. I spent an hour trying to figure out what template to use, and am still not quite sure I’m happy. I’m not sure what to anticipate about readers of this blog, or whether I would be distressed if the only people who read it are family who feel obligated or students curious about their prof. Nevertheless, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to think of “what looked best.” After getting the page up, I read somewhere that choosing generic terms like “Read” or “Write” for a title and domain name is also a bad idea. So I’m off to a poor start.

Still, I guess what I’m interested in is the peculiar shape of those everyday things people do without thinking, like reading and writing. In Michel de Certeau’s phrase, The Practice of Everyday Life. So if the title is banal, perhaps at least I’ll figure out some mildly interesting things to say about these banal topics.In part my new interest in blogging springs from being a teacher and trying to think about how my students communicate, the media through which they read and write, and how that media affects the way they read and write.

All of this is, I realize, old hat to experts in the field of electronic communication. But I guess one thing that’s intrigued me about the world of blogs is how things like expertise count and do not count. Do degrees and essays published and lectures given and promotions received–all the typical means of accruing status and clout in the traditional worlds of academe and even print more generally–do these things really count for much in a world of blogs? I guess it would be naïve to say that they don’t count at all, but my general sense is that people don’t read an academic’s blog because she is an intellectual. When an academic accrues some status on the web (how “status” is determined on the web is an intriguing side interest) I think it’s because she reads and writes well, does it in some kind of imaginative and effective way. The triumph, again, of rhetoric, if in a very different shape and form. This I’m interested in exploring.Thus the title of this blog: “Read, Write, Now.” I’m interested in what’s happening with reading first, and then secondarily how that’s related to writing. I got interested in the topic first with the general explosion of interest in the so-called “reading crisis.” I say so-called not to indicate a cynical disregard for the concerns being raised by the NEA and so many others. Indeed, I really do think that something critical is going on with reading, and I’m not so convinced as digital utopians that what’s happening is all to the good. I’ve snuck a look at my daughter’s Facebook page and those of a number of my students. If this is reading, it’s not hard to imagine why reading comprehension shrinks apace, as does the tolerance for a text even so long as the one I’m now writing. I wonder about the possibilities of democracy in a culture where educated persons have difficulty giving sustained attention to a document as long as the Declaration of Independence (a text I used to require as a short assignment). Still, the nature of what’s happening and its consequences are unclear to me and I want to figure that out and reflect on some of those issues over the course of the next year or so. Additionally, one of the things that fascinates me most is the way reading is imagined in the present. Not so much what reading is, but how the idea and image of reading is functioning in our current cultural climate. Finally, I admit it, “Read” is broad and vague and all-encompassing enough to let me join the millions of others who write about books they like or don’t like.

“Write” probably follows naturally from read. Until very recently I’ve considered myself a writer first—a self-definition I’ve discarded in favor of “Reader”, if for no other reason to poke fun at my students who claim they really love to write but hate to read. Let’s give readers the prestige for once. I’m interested in the interaction of reading and writing. How what we’re reading shapes what we write, and perhaps just as importantly, how the way we write affects the way we read. I finished an MFA at the University of Montana, and I’m still convinced these many years later that it did more for me as a reader than my later graduate studies at Duke.

“Now” may be least important—or too hopelessly vague as a topic–but I guess I’m primarily interested in the shape of reading and writing in the present. How are we different from previous generations, and should we care? Given that the title puns on an imperative—Read right now—I hope, too, that the “now” reflects my own sense of urgency, my sense that reading is important and not to be taken for granted.“Now” also means I can talk about whatever the heck I want, just in case I get bored with reading and writing. Or in case you do.