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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, April 16, 2005

GOVERNMENT WORK


UD's already had what to say about Dana Gioia's thankless government work - making us worry about declining rates of reading among Americans. (Ooh look at that - UD finally figured out how to link to her own entries.) UD has already, more broadly, expressed her skepticism about claims that reading makes you a better person. (She did another link!)

No doubt as a certified English professor UD should endorse any study, any incentive, perhaps even any bullshit, that promotes Reading. Reading makes you a compassionate, socially involved human being. Reading makes you smarter. It makes you richer. It makes you glow from within. You can tell a Reader right away by her glow.

But while UD thinks some of this may be true for some people reading some forms of literature, she's pretty sure there's nothing generalizable here at all. Reading makes some people shittier than they were before - it feeds their fanaticism or whatever (Ted Kaczynski was an attentive reader of first-rate philosophy and literature). Most of what people read is trash which, if grammatically correct, may have a marginal effect on their literacy. It will not, however, make them smarter or wiser. A lot of what people read is technical writing which adds to a certain narrow knowledge but has nothing to do with morality or insight.

So for the head of the NEA to run around America scaring us about how “the decline of literary reading foreshadows serious long-term social and economic problems” is, again, a thankless task. And the task is not made easier by the sorts of opinion pieces Gioia currently has his underlings at the agency writing in the papers under his name.





UD refuses to believe that the clot of clichés that appeared in the Boston Globe recently (“Why Literature Matters: Good Books Help Make a Civil Society”) was written by the same man who wrote the brilliantly cutting attack on contemporary poetry called Can Poetry Matter? No, the Globe thing has to have been written by one of those random-paper-generator things the guys at MIT came up with, or by a staff member at the NEA.

Shall we fisk it?




The piece begins with the crowning cliché of upwardly striving American culture, a line UD encountered at a tender age in some PBS special and has met again and again and again - that John Adams thing about how he has to study “politics and war” so his sons can study “mathematics and philosophy,” so that their children can study “painting, poetry, music…”

UD suspects that most educated Americans have this quotation lurking in their heads somewhere. Not because it’s so great, but because you can never remember what subject matter goes with what generation. Did he say I’ll study French so my kids can study, um, architecture? No - it was … my grandchildren can study painting if I study, er, geography… No…

Anyway, it’s a big old thundersome cliché, and it’s the last way you want to start an editorial piece that argues for serious reading’s promotion of “independent-minded” thought. And matters get worse when whoever wrote Gioia’s piece dubs this warhorse a “bold prophecy.” Calling Jeanne Dixon!

We then get a bunch of statistics that show Americans aren’t reading anything, as a result of which we are deprived of “the joys and challenges of literature,” which is a “troubling trend.” No one who uses language this trite sees the world with the individuality and lucidity that serious literature is supposed to give you. Joys and challenges are empty words; and if you want me to believe that a trend is troubling, you should describe it with words that have not also been used to describe male pattern baldness, the Social Security crisis, and feline distemper.

The cliches keep coming -- a “growing awareness” of things “intimately related” suggests that we need to foster “innovation and creativity.” The problem is “taking its toll.” We should read Wordsworth because he cured John Stuart Mill’s “crippling depression.”

Even more than Wordsworth, though, we should read, as Americans with our own social history, Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath, this writer tells us. But these sorts of novels - linguistically unchallenging protest books - have nothing to do with the advanced literary literacy this writer seems to be worried about.



The final paragraphs of the piece are bureaucratic blahblah that no one, and UD means no one, will read as referring to anything real:

[A]ddressing the reading issue will require the leadership of politicians and the business community… Advanced literacy is a specific intellectual skill and social habit that depends on a great many educational, cultural, and economic factors.

This language truly could have been generated by computer, or by a public relations firm (maybe that’s what Gioia used) paid to produce literacy-promotion boilerplate.

Because it utterly fails to express the one undeniably valuable thing about serious literary reading - it excites, in a personal way, a sense of one’s own, and the world’s, unsuspected complexity and contradictoriness - this sort of writing accomplishes nothing.