The Love of the Word

     This morning I stumbled upon some notes I had written a couple of years ago, for a seminar held by my colleagues in our Western Civilization Program, on the subject of writing.  They broach many of the topics we've batted around, or battered around, here on Mere Comments, so I thought I'd send them up Little Round Top and see what would happen:

Thoughts about writing:

1. Let’s be clear about the forest: a vast cultural breakdown in eloquence, clarity, and deliberative wisdom; all could fit under the general category of taste, so long as that term is not taken to mean mere subjective preferences; rather a sense of fitness, balance, and beauty.

2. An analogy: music.  Suppose that the only music a people ever hear is the music they themselves produce, uneducated except by their own ears and their own hearts.  We know how fine much of that music is: how many classical composers, from Brahms to Chopin to Rachmaninoff to Copland, have built upon the rhythms and harmonies of folk music.  Now imagine a world in which “music” is slipshod, canned, mass-marketed, not bawdy but sleazy, not expressing the deepest longings of a culture but ensuring that no truly local culture will ever rise again.  Imagine that what you have “heard” as music are the grunted quarter-rhymes of gangsta rap, or the slurred melismas of the latest diva whose voice seems to have been made for half-dozing customers in a brothel.  Imagine that that is “music” to your ears.  Now try to listen for five minutes to Mozart – and he is, for all his complexity, easy for the layman to approach.  You will find yourself restless; you will not know what is going on, nor why you should care.  You would have been better off had you never heard any music in your life.  You are in a far worse condition than is the rustic.

3. This is the case with our culture and writing.  We are inundated with the vapid, the silly, the slipshod, the awkward, the tasteless.  Our students do not read newspapers, and that may be, on the whole, a good thing; but for twelve years they have read textbooks, and they read magazines or look at their pictures, and they paddle about the internet.  They are not rustic in the matter of writing.  Imagine how easy our job would be, if only that were the case!  Imagine someone from the outback of Ohio two hundred years ago, whose only books in his cabin were the King James Bible and The Compleat Angler, or the Sermons of Jeremy Taylor, or Parson Weems’ Life of Washington.  Even the sillier stuff in those days verged on eloquence and wisdom, and in any case there was not much of it directly available.  Such a man’s writing would perhaps be rustic – would lack polish, would fall into the sentimentalities of the day, would sometimes wobble in the grammar – but it would be real writing.  A peek into the diaries of the men who fought in the Civil War is enough to prove it.  Our students – I should say almost everyone alive in America right now – are not bad writers because they are rustic.  They are bad writers because their ears have been corrupted.

4. What to do about this?  I have become persuaded that in such a case the patient cannot be given the cure before he is made aware of the disease: before he is at least introduced to its manifold forms, its pustules and eruptions, its clogs and tics.  We need to be honest with ourselves here.  We all live in the vicinity of the dump, and none of us is free of its influence.  We learn to write by imitation, and that is the problem. Our students – and our colleagues, and alas we ourselves too often – have been imitating what is nearest to hand.  Perhaps it might be instructive to compare, say, the front page of the Podunk Post from 1890, probably homespun, but also direct and intelligent, with the front page of our beloved Providence Journal.  At all events we cannot pretend either that the problem is simply their own.  I have just read an old essay by Frank Kermode on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and it almost made me weep, not simply for what he said, though that was fine enough, but for the decline in my own profession.  Though there may be few enough journals now that might publish such an essay, there are even fewer of us professors who possess the learning, the quiet wisdom, the taste, to have written it in the first place.  When I read such prose, I don’t feel like a pygmy standing on the back of a giant; only like a pygmy.  But it is at least something to be made aware of the fact.

5. Then we need to immerse them in good writing.  How can they write fine prose, when they have hardly ever seen it?  Novels here don’t count; the art of fiction is too distant from the art of the essay for most people to bridge the gap. 

6. More than that, we ought to introduce them to a love of good writing.  I don’t pretend to know how to do this, but I do know that the burden rests upon our shoulders, in this program.  It’s well and good to argue that everybody in the college bears responsibility for it.  True enough, but if we wait for everybody to lift the burden, we may as well just agree to let it rot on the ground.  So at the very least we ought to resuscitate the old DWC colloquia devoted to our studies, our writing; we ought to have a lecture series; we ought to encourage or even require students to attend some of these.  Consider that many of them will spend four years here and never find themselves in the company of people who have devoted their lives to the study, or the love, of what is well thought and well expressed. 

Your thoughts, ladies and gentlemen?

Comments

[labrialumn]

Do you not find that the grammar-checker in Word dislikes well-crafted prose? Or that university English guidelines likewise assault the language, such that what you desire is forbidden?

What can I say but take your children out of school, and teach them at home from what Charlotte Mason called "real books"

[Will]

How I wish you did know how to do this. I actually regret testing out of the English Composition requirement from my undergraduate years. Now all I have are a few pointers on the five paragraph essay.

[Jim H.]

This is one of the best arguments for homeschooling. Charlotte Mason called mindless books "twaddle." Take a good look around your neighbor's home and chances are (no matter how well educated they are), it will be buried in twaddle. Homeschoolers are big believers in reading "living books" and it's no surprise that colleges are beginning to take notice by admitting more homeschoolers every year.

[Daniel Propson]

"Then we need to immerse them in good writing. How can they write fine prose, when they have hardly ever seen it?"

When I read this, I immediately thought, "How simple! They need only say what happened, as accurately as they can."

A previous post by David Mills came to mind. He mentioned an author who "has something to say and said it as clearly as he could, and so has unconsciously achieved style."

The full post: http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2007/12/the-reasons-for.html#trackback

Still, I agree that when we drink in the style (or lack thereof) of the modern writing world, it becomes more difficult to write eloquently. Accuracy is no longer the point. 19th century writers struggled for the right word; 21st century writers take the first word they come upon. If they are English majors, they try to be clever; but they are hardly concerned over whether what they write is true. (If it isn't true, at least it's "truthy.")

An author seeking to write the truth will often write beautifully despite himself, for the search for truth takes the author beyond his own limitations. This kind of writing has become rare, but it can be learned easily enough by anyone who wants to learn.

[Ethan C.]

Forgive my pessimism, but from my experience grading papers for college freshman writing classes, I think college is too late. It takes a tremendous amount of motivation for a student to break the bad habits of a half-decade. Perhaps if there were quite stringent requirements for graduation, not just in English Literature but in all the humanities, with a real possibility of a student being denied a diploma for lack of proficiency, we could muster a bit more improvement. Alas, the financial drawbacks to such a scheme should be apparent to anyone versed in the business of higher education nowadays.

One would think that if anyone were prepared to be counter-cultural in this matter, it would be universities. But their rebellion against popular sentiments has been, shall we say, of a rather different nature. This sort of corrective program would be an impossibility, given the easy charges of "elitism" and "cultural imperialism" that could be laid against it. If there is any hope for improvement in the higher realm, it will be only in our smaller and more marginal colleges, where the ideal of a rounded education has not yet been virtually extinguished.

The real hope is in the home schooling, classical schooling, and charter schooling movements within the grass roots. High standards can't start in college. They have to be part of a child's education from the beginning. Per usual, the solution will have to begin with individual families bound together in like-minded groups, then trickle upward into the established institutions. Fortunately, I believe there is a real possibility of such a Burkean revolution occurring.

[Nick Milne]

I had hoped to concoct a list of ten recommendations, but my time here is limited and I'm not entirely sure that I could come up with ten useful ideas anyway (for I am a product of the system here being condemned, after all).

Still, this is a matter that has occupied my thoughts somewhat more than usual of late, mostly owing to the recent appointment of a family friend to the dubious-sounding post of "literacy commissioner" on the local school board. The position carries real authority; that is, she can force the public schools in the county to adopt programs she recommends. So far she has recommended nothing, of course, but as she has only been so invested for a matter of weeks I don't exactly blame her.

In recent weeks, what is more, I spent a good deal of time marking the well-intentioned essays of first-year English students at a reasonably respectable university. Now, I say "first-year English students," but this is misleading; they are first-year students, in an introductory English class, but many of them have no clear conception of what faculty they will eventually adopt, as of yet.

Some observations based on this:

The students do not seem to read, and I mean this is in a number of ways. First, they do not tend to read books that they have not been assigned. I circulated a short survey at the beginning of the year asking them to list some favourite films and books so I would know what sort of allusions I could safely make or which analaogies would be most fruitful. I was not especially surprised to note that the books that figured most heavily on their lists of "favourites" were either those which I remember being heavily favoured in the high school curriculum (books like Brave New World, 1984, Lord of the Flies, etc.) or books that pretty everyone had read (The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, and so on; I am not putting these two literary phenomena on the same level, though). The few students who provided different touchstones in this field tended to skew "progressive" and "edgy," and I suspect they were trying to impress me. Stuff by the likes of Herman Hesse, Eve Ensler, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland, etc.

The second sense in which they do not read is a quite literal one. Even when they are assigned a text, there is a tendency for them only to "skim" it rather than really grappling with the thing on its own terms. What they want out of a text, insofar as they want anything at all, is the ability to answer with convincing BS if called upon in lecture, quotes that can mined for the simplistic essay topics they have been assigned, and a very bare sense of the general "story" being told so that they can claim plausibly to know what's going on if ever they happen to be talking about the text in mixed company. They don't want reading to change their lives, unless it is to make them more fashionable somehow. The great and enraging lie of the thing is that there is everywhere a rush towards literature (and art in general, it must be admitted) that "challenges preconceptions" and "questions beliefs," but the people who are experiencing this material were raised in and with the ideals these works are proposing. Works proposing "sexual liberation" and the questioning of authority are painted as transgressive, but they transgress nothing! They are the norm, now, not the still small voice of one crying in the wilderness*.

A truly challenging, belief-questioning work for the modern student would probably be written by someone like Joseph Pieper or C.S. Lewis. Good luck getting them into the curriculum, though, let alone ensuring that they are read.

Anyway, to solve these problems requires greater intellection than I possess. One thing that I've been thinking, though, is that the early emphasis on critical analysis of literature could be a prime factor in the disdain that soon grows towards reading. I believe it was Dr. Esolen himself who mentioned (a few weeks back) the folly of asking young students to do things beyond their competence, such as describing the causes of the Great Depression (or some such; if it wasn't you, sir, I beg your pardon), and writing essays about books in the lower grades is similarly dangerous. It would, I think, be better to first help students hone the tools necessary to read literature appreciatively rather than analytically. That is, we should start them on books they are likely to enjoy, and offer them increasingly elaborate ways in which to enjoy them. And naturally, as with any regiment of exercise (for the brain and the soul may both be strengthened as muscles may be), each "set" should become increasingly more intense.

At higher levels, then, it would be a quite different matter to begin teaching students how to analyze why it is that they enjoy what they are reading, or why what they are reading can be enjoyed. They will have had the time to grow into what needs to be done rather than having it foisted upon them whether they like it or not. I think E.F. Schumacher's principle of the Adequatio fits into this somewhere, too, but I am pressed for time, as I said, and I don't have his stuff in front of me to consult.

Still, it's a big and tragic question. We're all tired of reading crap, naturally, and some of us are also tired of being more or less forced to write it if we want to be taken seriously by the retarded (I use the word not unthinkingly) institutions that mandate it. A magazine like Touchstone is a good start; or, anyway, it is better, at least, than Tiger Beat ;-)

A final thought: essays are the clearest indication of the problem among students, and it is essays other than those they have written themselves that are most lacking in the typical curriculum. There's a certain kind of book that I enjoy very much, and purchase whenever I find a new iteration of it in a used bookstore, but which is rarely published these days and even more rarely read. I speak, that is, of the essay collection. Not necessarily a collection of offerings from a single author, for those are common enough, but rather of the kind that used to serve almost as a textbook for writing classes in more thoughtful times. I have one here from the 1940's that includes selections from thinkers as varied as Emerson, and Chesterton, and J.B. Priestley, and A.A. Milne. The book's content is unified in nothing but its excellence; it is simply a collection of essays on every topic under the sun, well-written and well-presented. This needs to come back, perhaps.

* - Biblical allusion is also entirely - entirely! - lost on the average student. I once saw a friend of mine, who is in many respects quite clever, dismiss "all that Old Testament stuff" in favour of "his philosophy," which he described literally by saying, "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." Startled utterings of the words "Ecclesiastes" and "Isaiah" did not impress him.

[Nick Milne]

Off-Topic: Ethan (this is the first comment thread I've seen you in for a while, so I'm cornering you here), did you get my e-mail? I hope I sent it to the right address.

[james]

Dr. Esolen,
Could I bother you for the source of the Kermode essay on Winter's Tale? A google search came up with an introduction to the Signet edition of the play, but not much else. Thank you.

[Bill R]

I grew up among the rustics of rural Wyoming in the 1960s. I had a high school English teacher (Miss Ellington, God bless her) who was decidedly of the old school. You would fail her class unless you could write a simple declarative sentence, a coherent paragraph, and a workman-like essay. She introduced me to Strunk & White, and taught me to ignore "style" and just write clearly. I fear that there aren't many Miss Ellingtons around in high schools these days, though our local school is blessed to have my daughter teaching freshman English. But she seems like the Little Dutch Boy (or Girl) with her finger in the dyke. There is little support in the schools, or among the parents and students for her efforts (except, ironically, among immigrant Asian parents for their children). I'm not entirely sure of what can be done, but we do need Heroes--parents and teachers who will save one child at a time, unplugging television sets, video games, and the like, and pushing good books into their hands. But pessimism still intrudes: check out this recent column by Albert Mohler, "The Twilight of the Books."

[Ethan C.]

Nick, you do indeed have my address correct. I've also replied to you on your blog. Thank you for your email.

[Beth]

I too am pressed for time just now, having to put together the final bits of syllabi for freshman comp, Brit lit, and advanced grammar courses to begin next week . . . But I give Tony's concerns a hearty amen, and want to make a few comments, albeit in a rather associative manner. (I would write shorter if I had more time, as a number of famous writers have said.)

One of our grads is going to teach a course for us this semester while working on her MA at a nearby state university. As we discussed the syllabus and writing assignments yesterday, she abruptly stopped and said something like, "I just want to thank you and the rest of the faculty here for teaching us how to write clearly and accurately. I'm so sick of reading the horrible stuff that passes for communication in English journals and books, and having it demanded of me to write esoterically with lots of jargon . . . I'm glad I know that's not a good way to write." I am often horrified at the writing by my colleagues in our journals -- these people are teaching our young folk to *write*?????

So that's a problem which I see no hope of resolving absent a total revolution in higher education. Meanwhile, if you want your children to go to college, seriously consider some (not just any, but some) of the small private colleges which still care about a decent education. These are becoming fewer by the year, alas, but some of us still try.

As someone said above, college is (almost, anyway) too late to address the problem, except for a few highly motivated students. People need to learn to love good writing from the nursery. I too advocate home education for this reason, for those who live where the school system is not going to help them. But wherever your children go to school, make sure that you read to them and offer them books that are truly excellent and, yes, just let them enjoy these, talking about them in greater and greater depth as the children show interest and become ready. I think there's a good article on forming the moral imagination through literature in the TS archives, if I remember correctly.

Someone above said that good writing is as simple as "saying what happened, clearly." (It was a qualified statement, I know.) It would be -- if my students could observe what happened and had any idea of how to describe it. They are so caught up in the perceptions of their culture and the lingo of it that they don't actually "see" anything -- they "see" that "mom is always there for me" or "it was a really awesome trip" or whatever; they *think* in cliches and therefore *see* in cliches, and so of course *write* in cliches. (The church has its own set of these, of course, which make me cringe even more than the more generic ones.)

If they can't see, if they can't think, they can't write. And it's true that they don't read, as someone else pointed out -- that even when they read, they don't read. They tell me they "get the gist of it" and that's sufficient. Well, sometimes it is, but not always (and they often actually *don't* get the gist of it; they miss it by miles), and if they aren't reading anything that requires reflection, they aren't thinking. If everything I read can be skimmed to "get the gist of it" then I'm not reading anything that challenges my views, which means I'm not thinking. But this is where many, probably most, of my students are (yes, even a great many of the home educated ones, I'm sorry to say).

Then a fair number of my colleagues in other disciplines get annoyed that the students "can't write," by which they mean they can't put commas where they go, but they let the most wretched thinking and articulation go by unchallenged -- well, it's close enough, they seem to think, or I know what he means -- either because they don't see it themselves or they don't want to take the time to insist on excellence or they don't have any confidence in their ability to do so (that's the English department's job!).

Well, I have accumulated student emails about textbooks as I've written this, so I will stop ranting. I will, however, end with a request for prayer for those of us trying to capture students (at any level) for the love of language, to convince them of the vital importance of using it clearly, accurately, and even perhaps eloquently for the sake of truth . . . We need wisdom and patience!

[James Kabala]

Ethan is probably right that you need to give good books to your children long before college. I haven't read as many of the "great books" for adults as I ought to have done, and while I hope to read as many of them as I can in the four or five decades that (God willing) I have left to go, it's probably too late for them to affect my writing style. I did, however, read (and often re-read) all the classics for children when my age was in single digits, and my writing style (not that I make any great boasts for it) and worldview are probably influenced in ways I don't even realize by Carroll, Graham, Lewis (in the Narnia books), and the rest. Then, when they hit ten or so, time to bring in Twain, Dickens, Austen, and eventually Shakespeare (all of whom I have read, but not to the extent I should), and their style will improve even more. The Bible (in a good translation), of course, should be a constant throughout their lives.

[Daniel Propson]

'They are so caught up in the perceptions of their culture and the lingo of it that they don't actually "see" anything.'

You're exactly right, Beth. Or at least it seems that way, to us who teach them. But some of them, at least, are faking. They DO see something; they just don't have a way to describe it. They don't have a way to describe it because they haven't realized that THAT'S WHAT WORDS DO.

Tony entitled this post "The Love of the Word." Our children need to know the love of words, a love that can only be taught through example. Once you know what it's like to say something clearly, fully, eloquently, you never forget it.

[thomas]

At the Maude's Tavern school that I dream about, we address this by spending more time on less, i.e. other than mathematics and laboratory, limiting the high school curriculum to:

• Revised Standard Bible
• Twelve Dramas; Shakespeare
• Dante's Comedy; Anthony Esolen
• Gregorian Missal; Solesmes songbook
• Songs, Sonnets & Verses; Christina Rossetti
• Federalist Papers; Hamilton, Madison & Jay
• The Compendium of the Catholic Catechism
• Essays: Moral and Political; David Hume
• Complete Works; Flannery O'Connor
• Adoremus Hymnal; Ignatius Press
• Confessions; Saint Augustine
• The New Jerusalem Bible

[Beth]

So true, Mr. Propson!

Thomas -- great selections all, but it's especially lovely to see Christian Rossetti on your list! My students absolutely fell in love with her work when I taught Victorian literature a couple of years ago.

[Nick]

I'm getting this strange vibe that Stuart is going to materialize any moment but I think the assertion made is far too broad. Language teachers have complained about their students’ lack of reading since the beginning of time. This is nothing essentially new to our age. As Stuart has also pointed out, and I agree with, just because we see poor literature today doesn't mean that it didn't exist yesterday. That fellow in Ohio was probably reading some pretty atrocious sermons that were floating around or his form of the penny-dreadful. Good literature gets remembered. Bad literature gets forgotten. It’s one of the ways the "democracy of the dead" votes.

Therefore, I think it is better that we frame the question in terms of how we deal with a problem that has existed for some time (even back in the mythical golden ages) and will likely be there until Jesus corrects it at the end of time.

Students face a number of challenges in our current environment. The fact that they don’t read as many books as past generations shouldn’t be too surprising. Mass media doesn’t consist of books anymore. Movies, TV, and video games now are mass media. A student from my generation is more likely to recognize the source of, “blue wizard is about to die,” than he is to recognize the source of, “eat, drink, for tomorrow we die.”

Now there is much to be said about the loss of our Christian heritage. But, should we really be surprised? Jesus didn’t say, “and you guys will come to posses the earth in your own day and everyone will have a common Christian culture,” instead he warned that Christians would be few and would exist in constant struggle with the dominant culture.

As to the idea of “local culture” I find the idea odd. Localities have been growing wider and wider for centuries. Roads destroyed many local cultures. Then the printing press continued to destroy more. Now the Internet is finishing up the job. We should remember that books themselves by preserving the culture of their authors have destroyed the culture of others no matter how classic and well written the text.

That being said, after having to suffer through the opening stages of an “Introduction to Children’s Literature” class this month I would like to drive a stake through Kohlberg’s analysis of developmental morality and all the other psychobabble that gets tacked onto literature classes these days.

[Clifford Simon]

>>Accuracy is no longer the point. 19th century writers struggled for the right word; 21st century writers take the first word they come upon.<< - Daniel Propson

Snoopy is on top his doghouse, with a typewriter. He is pacing and deeply thinking.

"It."
"It was."
"It was a dark and stormy night."

Good writers search intensely for just the right words!

:-)

[windmilltilter]

Thomas,
Why Christina Rossetti?

Not that I have any beef with Rossetti...she's a fine poet, but I was curious as to the rationale.

I would think you could get more mileage out of Hopkins or Dickinson.

[dilys]

Pretty much in agreement with everyone above, and armed with a probably unrealistic "counsel of perfection." Good writing is not least about the ear, and students who only skim don't have an ear.

Reading aloud from works such as Thomas lists, and even brief memorization of classic verse, at any age, would take us a long way [not to mention the iterative effect of real weekly liturgy, including the older Prayer Books or Missals]. In addition, once one has an ear, it is much more difficult to write content that is meretricious twaddle.

In 1968, teaching freshman comp at the University of Tennessee, I met a rural student, wearing overalls long before they were radical student chic. He was embarrassed by Chaucer's ruder pieces, and his expository essays were pure King James Bible cadence. I repent in remembering him, my callow educationist ideas can only have corrupted his expression. And I wonder who and what he is now, and how long ago such students went extinct.

[Thomas]

Beth & Windmilltilter,
While Hopkins or Dickinson are more popular in English departments, I think the time will come that Rossetti will get the sort of regard that Jane Austen has come to have. Be that as it may, my own taste finds her poetry much more substantial than that of Hopkins or Dickinson. Further, her poetry fits better with the tight circumscription of the Maude's Tavern curriculum.
By the way, there's no existing book of her poetry called "Songs, Sonnets & Verses" which is rather my label for Sing-Song/Pageant/Verses.

[Thomas]

As Dilys remarks, memorization and recitation are important. They won't receive proper emphasis within an educational system that's unwilling or unable to make serious value judgments.

[Bill R]

One passage from Tony's post kept coming back to me during lunch:

"Now imagine a world in which “music” is slipshod, canned, mass-marketed, not bawdy but sleazy, not expressing the deepest longings of a culture but ensuring that no truly local culture will ever rise again. Imagine that what you have “heard” as music are the grunted quarter-rhymes of gangsta rap, or the slurred melismas of the latest diva whose voice seems to have been made for half-dozing customers in a brothel. Imagine that that is “music” to your ears. Now try to listen for five minutes to Mozart – and he is, for all his complexity, easy for the layman to approach. You will find yourself restless; you will not know what is going on, nor why you should care. You would have been better off had you never heard any music in your life. You are in a far worse condition than is the rustic."

This describes the state of the church today (or at least much of the evangelical church). Not (yet) gangsta rap, perhaps, but slurred malismas--no doubt. It's all of a piece. We won't offer God our best, for we assert (rather petulantly?) that he ought to like us the way we are: somewhat lazy, easily bored, and unwilling to do better. "Just as I am, Lord, just as I am." If this worked at all, it only worked when people were still a bit disciplined. With discipline, like reading books, becoming a rather arcane hobby, perhaps we should just stay home in our skivvies and watch Joel Osteen on the tube. ("Pass the communion popcorn, honey.")

[Tony Esolen]

Nick,

I couldn't agree with you more, about the deadly effect of assigning phony "analysis" papers to students who still are learning to read. The harm is tremendous: books that should be gateways to wonder are reduced to dreary assignments inviting slovenliness, cheating, inattention, and resentment. Meanwhile it never occurs to the homework-loaders that childhood is the perfect time for REREADING, two, three, ten times! So maybe the question to ask our students is not what they have read, which can obscure the matter, but what they have re-read, for pleasure. Then hear the crickets chirping.

Thomas,

Thanks for putting me on that list! But the New Jerusalem Bible? Surely you mean the Old Jerusalem Bible! The New has been Newtered. Tolkien would blanch to see it.

Nick again, and Stuart, preemptively -- :)

I know that cultures produce a lot of sentimental stuff that is soon forgotten. But I've read such books, too -- and there's a difference. One of these days I'll have to write about it. Put it this way: if you had an ugly house in the old days, it was probably because you were poor and couldn't afford better. But it was an honest kind of ugly, and it was probably clean. It wasn't an ugly that was the product of years of study and deliberate uglification. Our bad reading is not like that, just as our ugly new houses are not like the old homestead that Cy slapped together out Dakota way. I've argued before that the best of a truly popular culture is really excellent, and the ordinary stuff is at least not horrible. Nobody is going to mistake an Italian folk song on a mandolin for Rossini, but then again, nobody is going to mistake it for Britney Spears, either. What we have is not only worse than not-great, or not-so-good, or standard-folk-stuff; it's not even the same kind of thing. We don't have any popular culture at all. A lot of work goes into the production of your local newspaper, much more than fifty years ago. It takes a lot of work to make something that stupid...

[James Kabala]

Nick does make some valid points. If our imagination goes back two hundred additional years to the English Midlands in 1600 and finds the ancestor of that Ohio farmer, he probably couldn't read at all. The age of mass literacy in the West may turn out to be just a blip in human history.

[Tony Esolen]

James (other James, not James K or James A),

The Kermode essay is in fact in the Signet edition of the Winter's Tale.

Folks,

Might we be able to craft a definition of literacy -- maybe that is the wrong word to use -- that is not the same thing as knowing how to decipher letters? That is, a definition that would include the bard Caedmon, who turned Scripture into song though he couldn't read any, and exclude, well, you know ...

[Bill R]

"Might we be able to craft a definition of literacy -- maybe that is the wrong word to use -- that is not the same thing as knowing how to decipher letters?"

Hmmm...perhaps listening to something other than rock on your Ipod? I've actually been able to listen to a couple of dozen good books (mostly longer novels) in the two hours per day I'm consigned to the L.A. freeways Mondays through Fridays. I have a highly literate lawyer friend who claims this is not the same thing as reading the work. Well, perhaps, but it sure beats not "reading" it at all, and virtually anything on the car radio. This way, even the subliterate can absorb much of the Western canon.

[Thomas]

Tony,
You're welcome, and also thanks for your twelve online lectures (forget where I downloaded them) on the Comedy..they're helpful for semiliterate tutors such as myself. Regarding the Jerusalem Bible, we mainly use it as something different from our standard RSV (leaving original languages for college); however, to be honest it's the wonderful title that I can't resist. While "New" there intends "revised", perhaps not for the better, I take it instead as reference to the Holy City, New Jerusalem (hattip back to Rossetti's Verses) and so a reasonable title for a Bible (unlike "New American" which sounds like the title for a Mormon translation or some such modern provinciality).

[Thomas]

literacy: the ability to say what needs to be said with coherence to the literate expression of others.

[Gina]

The Midlands farmer ca. 1600 likely had a wealth of shared poetry, prayers and songs at his mental disposal. "Literacy" means different things in different ages.

[Nick Milne]

Tony,

Spot on. I know that my own young years were spent rereading things constantly; not in any sense because I was mindful of Lewis' proposition that one has not really read a book until one has read it twice, but rather because there was, as you say, a real sense of wonder to the thing that I liked to tap into. To this day, in fact, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game is something to which I return when I'm feeling in the mood for some of that "old-school" delight, albeit tinged with pathos and savagery. I first read it in the fifth grade, and then six or seven times thereafter.

Which is hardly impressive, I suppose; it is only Ender's Game, after all. There were friends for whom multiple, self-instigated readings of The Lord of the Rings, however, were matters of no peculiarity or moment whatsoever. It was simply what one did.

Inasmuch as I try to avoid having "an area" or "an interest" when it comes to the ridiculous theorizing that my colleagues so enjoy, I have to admit to having a particular fascination with the effects created in literature by the order in which information is received. Non-linear narratives, "spoilers," extra-textual information about the text's fictional world (Albus Dumbledore's extra-textual homosexuality in the Harry Potter series, for example; or extraneous references to the strange land of Zembla in Nabokov's Pale Fire), and the like, all interest me terribly.

To this end, and with what you were saying in mind, I would be very intrigued to see what would happen if students were directed to read the same book twice in a row and then comment on the experience. It would have to be a book that contains revelations or "surprises," or at least has an ending that could not simply be intuited in advance. Reading through the early chapters knowing where it's all leading does peculiar things to how the reader understands the text and the sort of things he notices.

Of course, finding a group of students willing to read a book just once is hard enough. Perhaps I ought not to push my luck.

Now, with regard to your second question, concerning the formulation of a "new literacy," of sorts, my efforts to do so have met with failure. I can say, though, that fruitful directions to take with it include considerations of sensibility, comprehension, and even virtue. If we are to speak plainly and usefully about the different value of different types of art, we must somehow return a moral dimension to the production of and engagement with that art. To paraphrase a recent New Criterion article, when once we put Tupac Shakur and John Milton on an equal playing field, where we might just as legitimately engage the one as the other, the result will be that no one will read Milton. Your new literacy should likely either not allow for this, or allow for it only with censure.

Incidentally, I will just note here, for the sake of clarity, that I and the poster "Nick" are not the same person. If such clarification is even necessary, of course.

[labrialumn]

Nick,
Skimming is -taught- these days. I haven't got it down very well, though. Various things I was once taught were cheating, including using Cliff Notes, are taught, and taught to be taught to students to future teachers.

Most colleges appear to have moved from higher education to grammar schools, and a grammar of the subjects that is heavily weakened with Political Correctness in the place of any sort of sensible philosophy.

Professors only grade correct regurgitations of the assigned materials. They can't even recognize the same ideas and data when put in ones own words. They lack the concept of digesting and making something ones' own. They themselves are only "concrete operational" to use their jargon.

A Burkean revolution? I fear it is more likely we will die like flies in the camps.

I'm embarrassed that I write poorly. I know I do. No revisions, just flow of consciousness. Little knowledge of grammar as a left-brained discipline. :-(

Nick, how amazingly relativistic of you. I am reminded of a wonderful essay "Robbed of Their Heritage" which belongs here, methinks.

Thomas, modern 'education' makes value judgments all the time! You aren't green enough! You are a homophobe! You are a patriarchal white European male! And other such eternal condemnations.

The New King James has nice language, apart from its unfortunate choice of textual sources. The RSV already has unfaith assumptions in some of the translations. The ESV is clunky where it diverges from the RSV. The translators might be able to parse Hebrew and Greek, but they haven't immersed their minds in living books.

Thomas, that leads to very pedestrian, 3rd grade level English, with no allusions, no style, no 'ear' for language.

[Bobby Winters]

>>An author seeking to write the truth will often write beautifully despite himself, for the search for truth takes the author beyond his own limitations. <<

This. Listen to what this man, Daniel Propson, has said. .

I'd also like to chime in with those who point out the value of having listened to reading aloud. What ever merits I might have as a writer are due to 1) writing the truth, 2) the King James Bible, and 3) having listened to my wife read out loud to our children.

[Bill R]

"...having listened to my wife read out loud to our children."

I read the Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings out loud over several years to my children at bedtime. When I finally finished reading the latter to my youngest child, he jumped from bed and ran to his mother, sobbing, "It's over! It's over!"

God willing, I may get the chance to do this again with grandkids someday.

[Beth]

Thomas and Windmilltilter,

I'm not sure I'd consider Christina Rossetti more "substantial" than Hopkins, except perhaps as we have so much more of her work on so many more topics. Hopkins has saved my life (both literally and figuratively) more than once through the powerful honesty of his struggle with despair while clinging to God despite it -- a message that people who struggle with depression need to hear over and over in ways that ring true. So I am personally invested in his work in a way I am not always, which no doubt affects my judgment, especially when making comparisons. :)

I have always loved Rossetti and thought her much better than my (secular) colleagues generally seem to, but I didn't realize just how rich her work is until I got the complete works and read them all over a period of a few days in preparation for my Victorian lit class. It was one of the deepest spiritual experiences of reading literature (aside from the Word) that I have ever had -- not in the emotional sense as much as in the sense of being challenged and changed. I am perhaps a little worried about her getting any further recognition in the academy, though, as I've seen some pretty pathetic attempts to claim her for radical 20th century feminism . . .

I appreciate Dickinson, but can't quite put her in the same class with Hopkins and Rossetti -- that may be just personal preference with style, but both Hopkins and Rossetti more explicitly expound the Scriptures (without being predictable or glib), and I find that at this time in my life, anyway, this is what I need most. I like their imagery better than Dickinson's as well, but again this may just be personal preference.

All three are certainly great craftsmen and write honestly as well as eloquently about this journey we are on. I don't find a lot of that today, though there are a few.

[Andy]

I am a symptom of our current cultural decay: a cartoonist. My recently published graphic novel, "Fox Bunny Funny", contains no words at all. Googling the title today, I came upon a Publishers' Weekly forum about comics and education; a school librarian was extolling my book over "oatmeal" literature like Moby Dick.

I think I needed to read Mr. Esolen's latest essay as a corrective to my initial jubilation upon reading that forum. I now appreciate the more depressing side of the message.

[Judy Warner]

I have gotten the chance with my step-grandchildren, but not being my own children they do not have the same love of language that my daughter was born with. When she was learning to talk and heard a new word that she liked, she would repeat it and say lovingly, "That's a good word to say." The grandkids like a good story, and have listened eagerly to Narnia books, Little House books, and Thornton Burgess stories. But they don't seem to have any feeling for the language itself. I wonder if this is something inborn, or if it's because they have had too much TV and other popular culture pouring into their ears.

[DGP]

As I read Prof. Esolen's stirring appeal, I recall with shame my own writing efforts from years gone by. I daren't say more.

[Tony Esolen]

Andy,

A cartoonist? Aw, you shouldn't have opened that door. I admit here to a guilty pleasure. I am a tremendous fan of

Al Capp (Li'l Abner)
Chuck Jones (Bugs Bunny et alia)
Charles Schulz (Peanuts)
Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes)

-- giving honorable mentions to Tex Avery (Tom and Jerry, etc.), Friz Freleng (Pink Panther etc.), and Robert McKimson (also Bugs Bunny, but not as crazy as Chuck Jones). My wife even bought me a movie about Chuck Jones for Christmas, "Chuck Amuck" -- punning on "Duck Amuck," one of the Daffy cartoons.

Yes, I know that Matt Groening is a master satirist -- and probably an underrated animator. Nick Park (Wallace and Gromit) is a genius, too. But nothing can match the genial hundred-angled humor, literary and folksy and musical and visual all at once, of Chuck Jones.

Favorites?

Bugs Bunny: "Run for your lives, little children, for she is an evil witch, and means to eat you for her supper!"
Hans Butterball: "Ach!"
Gretel Butterball: "Und Himmel!"

Elmer-Siegfried: "Oh Bwoonhiwda, you'we so wovewy!"
Bugs-Brunhilda: "Yes I know it, ain't it somethin," -- or something like that --

Foghorn Leghorn, to Eggbert: "You say you've nevah played BASEball before? Thar's somethin' Ah say thar's somethin' a little bit eeew about a boy who's nevah played BASEball!"

Genius --

[Fr. Bill]

I've wandered in here just before bedtime, which may account for the weirdness of this notion ...

Is it possible that learning to listen to extended orally-spoken prose (or fictional narrative, perhsps) contributes to one's primitive abilities to read and, later, to write with facility?

I ask because some of my earliest boyhood memories are of my parents reading out loud to me and my brother. They read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn out loud to us. Also Grimm's Fairy tales, and probably a lot more I don't recall. I also remember devouring the local library, binging on various genres (sci-fi, horror, adventures, murder mysteries) or authors (Heinlein, Clark, Asimov, Twain, Poe were boyhood favorites I'd hork down). It helped, I suppose, not to have television (we lived in the deserts of Southern California).

Again, I ask this because we read to our children, all of Lewis' fiction, ninety-percent of Tolkien, and many of my boyhood favorites. I read Tolkien at least four times out loud over the years. And, I notice that my children read a lot on their own. Watching them in junior high and high school reminded me of my youth as they'd ingest texts.

Finally, I ask because in my pastoral ministry I have ALWAYS refused to give my parishioners Biblical texts to follow along with for the lections appointed for the worship service. Instead, I have INSISTED that they listen to the reader. What they report is that listening to a text being read is -- at first -- difficult for them. They report that it took them weeks to successfully listen and understand what they were listening to.

Does anyone have any idea whether there is any connection between listening to read texts, reading texts, and (finally) writing coherent text?

[Bill R]

Pepe Le Pew! Don't forget ze Frenchman! Er, ze Frenchskunk. Um....oh, zis stinks....

[Ethan C.]

Andy, I too confess a great appreciation for your medium, and I consider it a legitimate venue for good art. But there's a tendency nowadays to confuse the realms of "sequential art" (the highfalutin term for comics) and literature. The school librarian is committing a serious category mistake which redounds to the detriment of both art forms.

Let me add, for those who might suspect me of some leveling tendency, that I do think that there's an artistic hierarchy in which literature is above comic art. But being lower on the totem pole doesn't make some art forms worthless, nor does it mean that they don't each have certain unique strengths that the higher forms may lack.

Treating only the narrative arts: I'd say poetry is superior to prose, fiction is superior to non-fiction, short fiction is superior to long fiction (a controversial position, I'll bet, but I'm willing to defend it), then graphic art including comics would be next. After that would come drama and movies, then television, and on down the list to pen and paper RPGs, and video games (which only barely fit into the narrative category, usually deriving most of their artistic merit from other qualities).

It doesn't bother me to see young people who are extremely fluent in some of these lesser forms. However, the untutored mind gravitates toward the lower forms at the expense of the higher, especially when it is not exposed to any great works within the higher arts. The expansion of new forms of artistic media in the last century has made it easier for a person to be truly literate in certain arts while remaining wholly unaware that he is missing out on the others. The curing of this ignorance seems to be the main task of literary higher education nowadays.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>What they report is that listening to a text being read is -- at first -- difficult for them. <<<

I can see why. Most people stink at reading aloud in public. That they seldom practice before doing so doesn't help (advice to Lectors at an Orthodox site: "Read the text before you read the text"). Another is the problem of recitation; what intonation, cadence, volume, etc. do you use? Merely "reading' the passage is something of a dramatic performance requiring not only rehearsal but also a lot of individual decisions by the reader.

This is one reason, I believe, that the early Church preferred to chant the readings--as is still done in the Eastern Churches and some Western monastic settings. Chant effectively depersonalizes the reading--it removes from the reader all of those persnickety decisions and instead constrains him to the melody and cadence of the chant. As such, he is now free to present the reading free of his own personal interpretation, while the people are free to concentrate on the text, and not on the reader as master thespian.

To chant well is a challenge, but, surprisingly, not one which requires musical ability beyond the bare capacity to carry a tune. The main issue is breaking the text up into phrases that match the rhythms of the chant. It is, in fact, so easy that a child can do it--as my daughters proved by reading at Liturgy for the bishop at Church Camp when they were, respectively, 11 and 9 years old. At my old parish, it was customary to have the teenagers serve at one Liturgy per month, including the readings, and even self-conscious boys whose voices were in mid-change, and whose normal speech is a self-conscious mumble delivered while looking at their feet, manage a credible job. The key, however, is being totally familiar with the text before you being--which in itself is beneficial to the reader and the congregation alike.

So used have I become to chanted reading that, when I find myself in a situation that the reading is merely being read, I find it very hard to follow the text--almost always because the reader is focusing too much on the performance aspect of reading and simply is making a botch of it. It would be far better to return to chanting (though the very thought horrifies some Roman Catholic priests--once, when a Byzantine Catholic priest was invited to deliver the Gospel at a Roman Mass, he chanted it as he would at home, after which the pastor hurried to the lectern to inform people that this was "normal" in the Eastern Churches, and not in any way heretical), not only because it IS the Tradition in both the East and West (the rubrics of the Missae Romanum assume it is being sung throughout) but because singing is a mnemonic device--you can more easily remember something if you sing it than if you say it. I, for my part, have been so seduced by this that, asked to recite something as simple as the Nicene Creed, find myself in some difficulty until I mentally sing my way through it in my head.

Latin Catholics who are exposed to chanted readings invariably like them--especially those called upon to read, as was the case with one Latin priest who visited us during Lent and was asked to read the Gospel. The first time, he merely read it--to noticeable fidgeting in the congregation. The second time, he was told just to do it Latin straight chant, and he did just fine. Eventually, he was chanting in the Ruthenian fashion, without that deer in the headlights look he had that first night. Eventually, he got bi-ritual faculties and is now the regular celebrant at our mission in Montgomery County.

[Judy Warner]

This chanting is a direct descendant of Torah readings. One of the things boys learn (and girls too, nowadays) in preparation for the bar mitzvah is how to use the little marks above the letters to chant their Torah reading.

Anglican chant is beautiful but it is not used as much as I would like. We had one priest who taught us to chant the introit and a few other parts of the Mass, but most priests prefer to read straight. At the church my daughter attends at college, she is cantor for the psalms -- chants the first half of the verse and the congregation chants the second half. It is wonderful and seems to bring out the holiness of the words.

[Beth]

I'm betting that in Father Bill's church the reading is *excellent.* [I have heard him read and know his philosophy. :)] But we are a culture of sound bites and images; we have not been trained to truly listen to anything of substance for more than a few moments. I see this in play in the classroom all the time.

There are also, however, people for whom this is difficult just because of their learning style -- I can't concentrate on oral lectures/sermons without taking notes because I am such a strong verbal learner; I need to *see* words, it seems, to grasp them well. But I don't like being given outlines or even following along in the Word -- I want to take my own notes so that I am concentrating on listening to and processing the words effectively. I wish my students knew how to do this!

Father Bill -- I can't point you to any research, but it's a commonplace in my discipline that reading aloud to children is the beginning of literacy. We learn to love language best by first hearing it. I think it also helps to *not* insist that children learn to read before they are cognitively ready -- all my children are avid readers who love language, but they learned to read anywhere from age 3 to age 8. One learning disability expert has said that she would be out of a job if we'd stop trying to force little boys to read before they are ready -- often not until 7 or 8. If reading is hard because you are dyslexic, for example, how will you learn to appreciate language *as* language? My children who learned "late" loved being read to and when they were ready to read for themselves were eager for it.

[Bill R]

It may be surprising, but I strongly agree with Stuart about chanting. I didn't always see that, but I think Stuart has well described the reasons why chanting works for the church. GL directed me toward the Lutheran Liturgical Brotherhood, which has a prayer book for Protestants, complete with the entire Psalter set to chant (the Brotherhood's website has all of the Psalms downloadable in digital audio format). There seems to be a movement afoot for more litigurical Protestants to return to the incorporation of chanting into the liturgy.

[Fr. Bill]

Bill R: have a link to the Lutheran Liturgical Brotherhood?

Stuart: What you said about chant is true, but off-topic with respect to my question. Granting your exposition of the value of chant, to receive communication delivered in such a medium would still require the listener to acquire some skill in parsing the sounds that reach his ear. It was this last point about which I was speculating.

We routinely chant the Psalm and a canticle, to Anglican chant. Sometimes we chant as a group, sometimes the cantor chants line after line, while the congregation chants an antiphon in response to each line. We chant the Sursum Corda antiphonally, I chant the proper preface, we chant the Sanctus et Benedictus together. You're right, that chant is actually so simple that children can pick it up within a couple of repetitions.

Beth: thank you! Yes, those who read in our worship are prepared. I supply them with the text well beforehand, and they are careful to practice. Their ministry is always fruitful among us.

Here's another tip: get your children to reading out loud to you. It can effect amazing improvement in diction and overall skills in speaking or reading. I saw this vividly during some months when I was driving my eldest daughter to a jazz piano instructor who lived a hour's drive from our home. I gave her a battered copy of Chesterton's Orthodoxy and asked her to read it out loud during the drive.

I thought to expose her to Chesterton that way, and it worked. She rarely got more than a paragraph read before she stopped to inquire about this or that point which was escaping her. But, initially, she was stopping at almost every sentence to restart. The gushing-garden-hose style of vocal reading common in youth renders Chesterton into mush. So, she had to parse the sentence and then render its syntax, its emphases, its Chestertonian qualities through inflection, pacing, and similar elementary vocal cues. At first she was very clumsy; later she was quite proficient.

[Bill R]

"Bill R: have a link to the Lutheran Liturgical Brotherhood?" - Fr. Bill

http://www.llpb.us/

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Stuart: What you said about chant is true, but off-topic with respect to my question. Granting your exposition of the value of chant, to receive communication delivered in such a medium would still require the listener to acquire some skill in parsing the sounds that reach his ear. It was this last point about which I was speculating.<<<

I find that the parsing is easier with chant, in that the words fall with a particular cadence and rhythm which apparently command attention better than the spoken word. Undoubtedly the listener has to make some effort to understand, but this is facilitated by the reader's clear enunciation while chanting. The most important aspect of listening, however, is paying attention, and it is my experience that people will pay attention much more closely to something chanted than to something recited.

>>>We routinely chant the Psalm and a canticle, to Anglican chant. Sometimes we chant as a group, sometimes the cantor chants line after line, while the congregation chants an antiphon in response to each line. We chant the Sursum Corda antiphonally, I chant the proper preface, we chant the Sanctus et Benedictus together. You're right, that chant is actually so simple that children can pick it up within a couple of repetitions.<<<

In the Byzantine rite, most if not all the Liturgy is chanted, there being a variety of ways in which this applied. In the Antiphons, for instance, there are several variations--either the lector/cantor alternates with the choir, or with the congregation, or the congregation divides and chants each verse, or verse and refrain alternately. In the Ruthenian Church, antiphonal chanting of the Psalms is normal for Vespers, while in Orthros, it is usual for the cantor to chant the opening Psalms solo. The Kontakion, Troparion are normally chanted congregationally, while the Prokimenon and Alleluia are done responsorally. Most other parts of the Liturgy are chanted congregationally or take the form of a chanted dialogue between the celebrant and the people. The readings are chanted, the Epistle by the cantor, the Gospel by the deacon or priest.

In the Byzantine rite, there is a cycle of eight different chant tones called the Oktoekoes (eight tones, how novel!), which are employed on a weekly cycle beginning the second Sunday after Pentecost. Each major feast also has its own set of festal tones, while in Lent additional tones are found in the Triodion. it sounds more complex than it really is. It took me about a year to learn all the Ruthenian tones, but I have already picked up most of the Melkite tones in something under six months. Once you understand the system, you can anticipate how the music works.

[smh]

Tony:

I have a hard time imagining a "fix" apart from a regression, so fear the situation in which minds have been damaged to the point where that becomes impossible, that is, to the point where they can only be delivered by death and started over in heaven.

Good writing is the product of labor based upon the awakening and growth of the mind in love of beauty, order, and truth. One gives this to children who have the gift to receive it in the way our parents gave it to us, by reading it to us in an environment where there is a mysterious--a real but unremarked--connection between the virtues of the writing and the family life by which we are surrounded. Once it has awakened a love and a hunger of the fundamental things in us--once we have heard the horns of Elfland--we desire more of this, and seek it out, eventually reaching a stage at which, as adults, we are willing to acknowledge that perfecting the gift, in writing now for others, involves real labor, in which we are then, more cognizant than ever of its value, willing to engage. We have given our children (with you this includes your students) as much as we have been able of what we ourselves received.

You know what a privilege and thrill it is to awaken a mind. It is very much like that of begetting new life, and what keeps dedicated teachers slogging through piles of evidence of their failure to beget in students who are far past the age where the awakening normally occurs: the monochronos hedone of breaking light.

I think I could pass this on to those who were not as fortunate as we, but not without taking them back in some way to the first loves we both knew as small children. What I fear is that too many have been ruined--that they are unable mentally, spiritually, and physically to become once again as little children, a requirement for seeing more kingdoms than one.

Steve

[labrialumn]

Andy,
Graphic novels are not without literary potential. Perhaps you can use your gift to do something quite remarkable.

I grant that there is something about having to use the imagination from the written or spoken word that having pictures takes away from, as we see with TV. Graphic novels fall somewhere in the middle, I suspect.

Yet, while not fully exploited, there is material even in such things as Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, or Read or Die: The TV, that could be expanded upon and reach far beyond what most people think of as "cartoons"

I think you have to be read to well to be able to read aloud well. I was read to, and so when I read, I still have the vocal cadences when reading. I do ok reading aloud.

We still chant the collect and a few other parts of the liturgy in the LCMS.

[tonyo]

Flying home from a business trip last night, I noticed a well-dressed, middle-aged, woman across the aisle reading a account of Britney Spears in People Magazine.
Nuff said.

[James A. Altena]

Dear Tony,

Why a "guilty" pleasure? Not only is it quite innocent, but (as you rightly note with Chuck Jones, to which one could easily add Watterson, Larson, and others) often involves sheer genius. The comics are far and away the most worthwhile part of any newspaper (and the lack thereof another reeason why the NYT is only fit for birdcage liner), and the major reason for subscribing to one.

I'll add another BB favorite:

"What an ignoramerus! What a maroon!"

[smh]

Parenthetically, what brought the "fear of irreparable damage" to my mind was an article I read last week (I forget where) about how the minds of modern children, responsive from early childhood to the world of "interactivity," are "different" than ours--meaning those of people who are at present older than about thirty. Clearly the authors were very reluctant to say that there is something wrong with these children, but they were finally forced to say that numerous studies on the rising incidence of Attention Deficit Disorder and socialization problems with such children point to a problem which many informed parents are beginning to address by not allowing their children to interact with the family computer until they are seven or older.

The article had no surprises, for in my job I see these poor kids in action all the time, and it is a mantra of younger colleagues that they are different than we were, so deserve different treatment. The kind of indulgence they recommend simply reinforces my impression that "different" means "damaged," and I am not willing to accept their reasoning that this is how the world is now--implying that henceforward all children will be screen-zombies, so we might as well baptize the phenomenon. The reasoning is the same as that of parents who think that since teenagers are going to have sex anyway, they might as well be provided with birth-control.

[Nick]

James,

My jaw just hit the floor. I didn't expect you at all to defend cartoons and agreed with Ethan's (implicit) defense against what we both apparently thought would be your response. I shouldn't have been surprised, we do share a host of tastes it seems minus rock music. And science fiction. Oh to the day when we convert you to the wonders of both! :)

[James A. Altena]

Nick,

Hope you didn't fracture your jaw! :-)

Cartoons (of which I have bulging foldres full, some going back 20 years or more) have absolutely nothing in common with rock music. The first, as a medium of humor, are quite often a wonderful vehicle for stating truth. Please don't get me started again on the second.... :-)

Converting me on science fiction might not be inmpossible. But I'm afraid reading it will have to get in line behind all the classic novels and theological treatises I haven't read, so that may be a few lifetimes away. Unless, of course, one of your science fiction novels manages to suspend time or provide me additional lifetimes in cryogenic suspense to read that genre as well. :-)

P.S. Quoth the Roadrunner: "MEEP! MEEP!"

Yours faithfully, Wiley E. Coyote

[This post was brought to you by Acme Products....]

P.P.S. Since I loathe all sports (unless one counts chess as a sport), Tony Esolen doubtless considers there to be something positvely "eeew" about me....

[austin]

There is one addition to any curriculum that would help immediately: a poem every day. Assign poems and have the students bring in favorite poems. Then they'll begin to notice the power of words.

We do this at home. My children are all good writers and go to normal schools. Parents should read a poem a day too.