Dastardly Desserts
I almost had an interesting discussion tonight with my in-laws. Because of brownie diffusion, however, the almost-discussion didn't birth itself until I was halfway home, when I told my wife the following circumstance:
While at my in-laws' house, I overheard my mother-in-law speaking to my sister-in-law, both of whom were discussing the fact that they didn't 'have time to read' or something along those lines. My mother-in-law illustrated her argument (with a little bit of personal pride, I sensed, though I could just be overreacting) by using an example. Recently in the hospital, she had picked up a copy of some fiction book which, despite her invalid status, she couldn't really get into. "It was just something someone made up in their head!" she said, implicitly decrying the fiction she had tried to read.
Her daughter commiserated, saying she hadn't read anything in a long while, save for some nonfiction pieces that had to do with money (spending money in order to learn how to save money: Irony would insist that the first chapter be titled "You Shouldn't Have Bought This Book" with a subtitle "But You're Here Anyway, So Let's Get This Ball Rolling"). Their argument essentially revolved around the fact that there wasn't enough worth (though they phrased it differently) in books to make them worth their time.
Unable to read my copy of Cyrano de Bergerac because of this conversation, I finally trundled into the kitchen and said, admittedly with a polemic air, "You say that because you don't know how to read."
My sister-in-law seemed a little taken aback and declared that she did know how to read. I rebutted: "Oh, you know how to understand what's written down, but you don't know how to read."
"What do you mean?"
Enter the brownies; conversation stymied.
I admit a bit of smug, erudite academia-inspired snobbery being the reason for interjecting myself into the conversation, but it's the sort of thing that I have found myself worrying about more and more as the school year winds to a close. See, I have a couple days left in this school year, and I worry that the kids who have somehow survived my inept attempts at teaching still don't understand the purposes of how and why we read. In a sense, that means that I have failed one of my primary purposes as a teacher, because that is one of the things that has the greatest significance. In a country where literacy is considered at 99% of the population (yes, I know it's Wikipedia, but I'm writing a blog, not a research article, so I'm going for accessibility over reliability), I think there is a drastic decrease in people who actually know how to read. If reading is important, we should know why it is important. And the best way to practice that is to know how to do it.
Why How to Read
Strange as it may seem, I doubt many of us know the underlying purposes of reading--not only for ourselves, but for the messages we're trying to get across. It's hard to do it, to be frank. It requires effort, it requires concentration, it requires analysis. The mechanics of left-to-right, top-to-bottom, form-words-from-letters-and-sentences-from-words is not what I mean about how to read. That's teachable, that's obvious, and that's literacy.
But to push beyond that, to explore the connections of text to text, text to world, and text to self is part of the girding, underlying structure that prevents people from being able to know how to read. In short, literacy is only the (important first step) veneer that coats an entire language worth of significance lurking underneath.
There are many different theorists and philosophers out there that argue about reading, the significance of language, and even if we can do anything but defer indefinitely in a quasi-understanding feedback loop that can only pretend to pretend to mean anything. Normally, I would look them up, recite their arguments, and give full credit, but I don't really feel up to that right now. Besides, a look at the parenthetical remark next to the Wikipedia link will sum up my feelings well enough. Suffice to say that these thoughts, like most of what I write on this blog, come from others, though I think that I'm putting them into a context that is, if not unique, at least created by me and is without an additional source outside of this blog that I am aware of.
Getting Into It
I mentioned that I started discussing this with my wife. To prove a point and to change up my typically dry ramblings, here's a recreated, utterly rewritten version of our conversation, picking up approximately where we are in this blog, about halfway through our dialogue:
I: "Look, understanding why you're reading is a major part of how you read."
She: "What do you mean?"
(etc.) "It breaks down to the imagination." She gives me a dubious look from her position on the beanbag. "The power of the imagination is so indescribable, so powerful, that we are at its constant mercy. We can imagine the most horrible, gruesome fate of the world, of our son, of us, and yet, despite those late night ruminations, we awake in the morning, the sun shines, our son smiles, we are around to see those things--even though we may have lost sleep over that."
"Imagination?"
"I'm not just talking about the Spongebob Squarepants episode," I say, bouncing on a Pilate ball, "but the capacity to create possibilities."
"Like how I know that I'm going to die either from breast cancer, a bee sting, or falling off a cliff?"
I laugh and nod my head. "Right. Your imagination allows for the creation of those possible deaths--a capacity distinctly human and absolutely necessary for us to be the way that they are. Macbeth is rife with the idea of what imagination can do. It's incredible, and part of the reason that it is one of Shakespeare's masterpieces."
"I knew you'd get Shakespeare in there somehow," she says, a knowing smile smudging her lips.
"Yeah, well. Anyway, the point is that reading, regardless of whether it's informational or entertainment text, is specifically useful for transmitting ideas with as little distortion between the author and the audience. Language is already more slippery than a politician up for reelection, so the fewer voices changing the interpretation, the clearer the communication.
"Sure, you can argue against that if you'd like," I continue, not wanting to pursue that fascinating avenue just now, "but the point stands that the longer something is produced, the more lenses are viewing the final product. So if you don't read--and if you don't know how to read beyond the words on the page--you're doing yourself little good."
She shakes her red head and stares at me with her blue eyes. "But you read escapism fiction all of the time!"
"It's only partly about what you read. What really matters is the ability that I have to see and apprehend what is trying to be communicated. You can open up an encyclopedia and read a definition of love, and you'll be literate in that. Or you can open up Cyrano, Les Miserables, or some of Shakespeare's sonnets to see what it means to be in love. Reading is the intermediary step between theory and praxis--it takes us one step closer to a true experience."
"Hmm." Not convinced.
"The best writings are infused with narrative. Our lives--every time we communicate an event of the day, a funny twist of fate, an ironic instance--is boiling over with narrative structure of character, setting, and conflict. Narrative is, in a sense, what it means to be human. So it only makes sense to pursue that constantly, to see how it is done again and again, to exercise the imagination to better capture that special structure. That's how you read--you take what is on the page and let it infuse your life."
Point Given
To emphasize my point, I purposefully wrote it as a brief narrative, following certain conventions that allowed you to be 'pulled into the story'. I admit, I didn't do a very good job, but the point of it is more important (this time) than the form of it. What I am trying to illustrate here is the fact that the words themselves, without your imagination, can do little for you. Telling you that she's a redhead with blue eyes is greater detail than you had before, and the fact that I can inject those details into your brain just by words is the point I'm trying to prove.
"But, Steve," you might protest, "if you just posted a picture of her, you'd dispense with needing the details. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all."
Maybe. I could post a picture, and it would tell you what was happening the instant the photo was taken, that 1/60th of a second. The physical details of her face, expression, body position, etc. could all be apprehended instantly. That, of course, has great value. But to describe the conversation I made up (the gist of it is true, but the verbiage is 100% fiction), how could the picture assist with that? Furthermore, the importance of imagination is that it is an active thing, something that requires the effort of the reader to 'get.' Sans that effort, the passive attempt at apprehension, the letting others to imagine for us, is part of what makes us, as a whole, unable to fully understand how to read. To prove that point, we call the current trend in television 'reality' when, in reality, nothing could be farther from truth.
I almost had an interesting discussion tonight with my in-laws. Because of brownie diffusion, however, the almost-discussion didn't birth itself until I was halfway home, when I told my wife the following circumstance:
While at my in-laws' house, I overheard my mother-in-law speaking to my sister-in-law, both of whom were discussing the fact that they didn't 'have time to read' or something along those lines. My mother-in-law illustrated her argument (with a little bit of personal pride, I sensed, though I could just be overreacting) by using an example. Recently in the hospital, she had picked up a copy of some fiction book which, despite her invalid status, she couldn't really get into. "It was just something someone made up in their head!" she said, implicitly decrying the fiction she had tried to read.
Her daughter commiserated, saying she hadn't read anything in a long while, save for some nonfiction pieces that had to do with money (spending money in order to learn how to save money: Irony would insist that the first chapter be titled "You Shouldn't Have Bought This Book" with a subtitle "But You're Here Anyway, So Let's Get This Ball Rolling"). Their argument essentially revolved around the fact that there wasn't enough worth (though they phrased it differently) in books to make them worth their time.
Unable to read my copy of Cyrano de Bergerac because of this conversation, I finally trundled into the kitchen and said, admittedly with a polemic air, "You say that because you don't know how to read."
My sister-in-law seemed a little taken aback and declared that she did know how to read. I rebutted: "Oh, you know how to understand what's written down, but you don't know how to read."
"What do you mean?"
Enter the brownies; conversation stymied.
I admit a bit of smug, erudite academia-inspired snobbery being the reason for interjecting myself into the conversation, but it's the sort of thing that I have found myself worrying about more and more as the school year winds to a close. See, I have a couple days left in this school year, and I worry that the kids who have somehow survived my inept attempts at teaching still don't understand the purposes of how and why we read. In a sense, that means that I have failed one of my primary purposes as a teacher, because that is one of the things that has the greatest significance. In a country where literacy is considered at 99% of the population (yes, I know it's Wikipedia, but I'm writing a blog, not a research article, so I'm going for accessibility over reliability), I think there is a drastic decrease in people who actually know how to read. If reading is important, we should know why it is important. And the best way to practice that is to know how to do it.
Why How to Read
Strange as it may seem, I doubt many of us know the underlying purposes of reading--not only for ourselves, but for the messages we're trying to get across. It's hard to do it, to be frank. It requires effort, it requires concentration, it requires analysis. The mechanics of left-to-right, top-to-bottom, form-words-from-letters-and-sentences-from-words is not what I mean about how to read. That's teachable, that's obvious, and that's literacy.
But to push beyond that, to explore the connections of text to text, text to world, and text to self is part of the girding, underlying structure that prevents people from being able to know how to read. In short, literacy is only the (important first step) veneer that coats an entire language worth of significance lurking underneath.
There are many different theorists and philosophers out there that argue about reading, the significance of language, and even if we can do anything but defer indefinitely in a quasi-understanding feedback loop that can only pretend to pretend to mean anything. Normally, I would look them up, recite their arguments, and give full credit, but I don't really feel up to that right now. Besides, a look at the parenthetical remark next to the Wikipedia link will sum up my feelings well enough. Suffice to say that these thoughts, like most of what I write on this blog, come from others, though I think that I'm putting them into a context that is, if not unique, at least created by me and is without an additional source outside of this blog that I am aware of.
Getting Into It
I mentioned that I started discussing this with my wife. To prove a point and to change up my typically dry ramblings, here's a recreated, utterly rewritten version of our conversation, picking up approximately where we are in this blog, about halfway through our dialogue:
I: "Look, understanding why you're reading is a major part of how you read."
She: "What do you mean?"
(etc.) "It breaks down to the imagination." She gives me a dubious look from her position on the beanbag. "The power of the imagination is so indescribable, so powerful, that we are at its constant mercy. We can imagine the most horrible, gruesome fate of the world, of our son, of us, and yet, despite those late night ruminations, we awake in the morning, the sun shines, our son smiles, we are around to see those things--even though we may have lost sleep over that."
"Imagination?"
"I'm not just talking about the Spongebob Squarepants episode," I say, bouncing on a Pilate ball, "but the capacity to create possibilities."
"Like how I know that I'm going to die either from breast cancer, a bee sting, or falling off a cliff?"
I laugh and nod my head. "Right. Your imagination allows for the creation of those possible deaths--a capacity distinctly human and absolutely necessary for us to be the way that they are. Macbeth is rife with the idea of what imagination can do. It's incredible, and part of the reason that it is one of Shakespeare's masterpieces."
"I knew you'd get Shakespeare in there somehow," she says, a knowing smile smudging her lips.
"Yeah, well. Anyway, the point is that reading, regardless of whether it's informational or entertainment text, is specifically useful for transmitting ideas with as little distortion between the author and the audience. Language is already more slippery than a politician up for reelection, so the fewer voices changing the interpretation, the clearer the communication.
"Sure, you can argue against that if you'd like," I continue, not wanting to pursue that fascinating avenue just now, "but the point stands that the longer something is produced, the more lenses are viewing the final product. So if you don't read--and if you don't know how to read beyond the words on the page--you're doing yourself little good."
She shakes her red head and stares at me with her blue eyes. "But you read escapism fiction all of the time!"
"It's only partly about what you read. What really matters is the ability that I have to see and apprehend what is trying to be communicated. You can open up an encyclopedia and read a definition of love, and you'll be literate in that. Or you can open up Cyrano, Les Miserables, or some of Shakespeare's sonnets to see what it means to be in love. Reading is the intermediary step between theory and praxis--it takes us one step closer to a true experience."
"Hmm." Not convinced.
"The best writings are infused with narrative. Our lives--every time we communicate an event of the day, a funny twist of fate, an ironic instance--is boiling over with narrative structure of character, setting, and conflict. Narrative is, in a sense, what it means to be human. So it only makes sense to pursue that constantly, to see how it is done again and again, to exercise the imagination to better capture that special structure. That's how you read--you take what is on the page and let it infuse your life."
Point Given
To emphasize my point, I purposefully wrote it as a brief narrative, following certain conventions that allowed you to be 'pulled into the story'. I admit, I didn't do a very good job, but the point of it is more important (this time) than the form of it. What I am trying to illustrate here is the fact that the words themselves, without your imagination, can do little for you. Telling you that she's a redhead with blue eyes is greater detail than you had before, and the fact that I can inject those details into your brain just by words is the point I'm trying to prove.
"But, Steve," you might protest, "if you just posted a picture of her, you'd dispense with needing the details. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all."
Maybe. I could post a picture, and it would tell you what was happening the instant the photo was taken, that 1/60th of a second. The physical details of her face, expression, body position, etc. could all be apprehended instantly. That, of course, has great value. But to describe the conversation I made up (the gist of it is true, but the verbiage is 100% fiction), how could the picture assist with that? Furthermore, the importance of imagination is that it is an active thing, something that requires the effort of the reader to 'get.' Sans that effort, the passive attempt at apprehension, the letting others to imagine for us, is part of what makes us, as a whole, unable to fully understand how to read. To prove that point, we call the current trend in television 'reality' when, in reality, nothing could be farther from truth.
Comments
However, If I see the movie first then read the book, there is little work done by my imagination. I'm pretty much watching the movie over again with some extra deleted scenes.
Sometimes I try to imagine how a book would describe the scene I'm viewing on screen.
Did the author write exactly word for word what I'm seeing?
How much detail shown is described in the book?
Like the example with your "red headed, blue eyed wife". For anyone who reads this and has never seen her before, they imagined a fully detailed red head with blue eyes, plus her body type, how tall she is, what her nose looks like, etc. You as the author did all that with only "red head, blue eyes".
So really, I'm basically seeing what the director imagined when he read the book and adapted it from script to film. Thanks for doing that for me director man! I can now focus, with little effort, on how smoking hot the actress on screen is, instead of what she might look like! Or I should say, curse you for not making her as attractive as my imagination could've made her!