Reading, 'Riting, 'Rithmetic...Rest

      Those were the 3 "Rs" I learned as a child, a memorization tool for what parents and society felt was something every child should be taught and should learn while in school.  The basics, it was called, and it was a good idea but a horrible way to "learn" spelling and grammar (jump forward half a century later and you may find yourself saying that same thing about STEM*).  Look up the 3 Rs today --a mnemonic which is still around (perhaps not in Florida)-- and you'll likely find all new definitions for the words...reasoning, relationship, resilience, reality.  They are all there and more, perhaps reflecting what today's society feels is needed more than any "school" education; all of which begs the question, what's important to you, now?   For me, it may well be the last "R," that of rest.  

The foothills of Salt Lake City on April 1, 2023

     There is much to think about around this time of year, everything from paying taxes to just paying everyday bills.  Banks are finding themselves on shaky ground while stock trading firms such as Charles Schwab are not fairing much better; meanwhile grocery and utility prices continue to climb, all while many once-secure jobs such as those in tech and autos and entertainment are on the chopping block, all while employers seem to keep crying out for workers.  And then there's the weather; a strange year indeed, even if record-keepers tell us that what we're experiencing (at least here in Salt Lake) is what used to be just a "normal" winter.  It snowed again yesterday, and it will snow tomorrow, and the next day as our temps continue to remain in the mid-30s.  The bulbs we normally see pop through the ground in April are nowhere in sight; everyone I talk with is itching to get outside start churning up the oil and perhaps begin their own renewal of sorts, to plunge their hands into ground that isn't frozen, that is once their taxes are paid (the deadline in the U.S. is just a few weeks away).  Such concerns haven't escaped me since I generally notice that the readership for this blog plummets about now, which mirrors my diminished desire to pound out these posts on a regular schedule.  So while best-selling authors may turn to AI in order to meet their readership's threshold of 6 weeks before they shift to someone else, I'm providing you, dear readers, an advance warning that my timeline for writing these posts no longer feels any such pressure.  Instead I empathize more with those of you still finding the time to even read these posts (but I do thank you)...after all, who has the time to read?  I must admit that when this time of year approaches I relate to the words of Katherine May in her recent book, Enchantment (an excellent book of reflection, if you have the chance, and time): The last decade has filled so many of us with a growing sense of unreality.  We seem trapped in a grind of constant change without ever getting the chance to integrate it.  Those rolling news cycles, the chatter on social media, the way that our families have split along partisan lines: it feels as though we've undergone a halving, then a quartering, and now we are some kind of social rubble (but) I do not stop buying books.  People do not stop sending them to me.  The books become menacing, teetering on every table in the house, massing like the disenfranchised before a riot.  Stacked by my desk, they gather alarming cauls of dust...

     This pause from writing these posts may simply be a reflection of the numerous attempts governments make to take a "pulse" of the country, be it via polls or economic data.  You've heard the terms: Consumer Price Index, Gross Domestic Product, Jobs and Unemployent Report.  Izzy Frankel wrote a piece in the London Review about an effort to change the gauges the government in the UK uses to measure how folks are doing, a shift away from the stats of buying cars and homes to one of "the cost of a defined basket of goods."  It seems rather simple, and more accurate, as anyone shopping at the grocery store knows...all those things which you buy on a regular basis --from eggs to cat food, and from bread to bleach-- have shifted to a point where you're aghast at how much prices have gone up, which shifts your mood from "I'm not paying that" to one of resignation and the realization that either your are going to pay it or you're going to do without (that'll show 'em).  If it's something which you don't really need then fine; but for many this dilemma is one of whether you and your family will eat healthy, or perhaps even get to eat at all.  Things such as bleach have nearly doubled.  It's overwhelming, and scary.  Blame it on the pandemic, or freight backlogs, or a shortage of materials, or a refinery shutting down, or whatever excuse has become the excuse of the month...but that's the price (it's not going back down) and here's your bill.

      For me reading becomes my escape of sorts, a distraction to make me feel as if I'm somewhere else, and perhaps even a chance to learn something new (my default to reading nonfiction).  Anne Enright wrote a review in the London Review, one partially being on reading: Reading does, in some way, hold us together.  According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, it is connective across various neural circuits and involves large areas of the brain.  Our understanding is predictive and feels instantaneous; it can also be metacognitive, co-creative and generative...reading is an evolving skill which begins with simple decoding and ends, according to Wolf, with empathy and those ‘blessed moments’ afforded by immersion in which we attain insight, or new levels of understanding.  All that said, she jumps back to that realization of remembering things --including those books or articles she had already read (in this case books by Toni Morrison)-- differently: This year, a handsome reissue of those same early novels came through my door and I avoided them for some time.  Though I have read and taught Beloved over and again, it is three decades since I opened The Bluest Eye, Sula or Song of Solomon and I have no memory of the contents.  Worse, I cannot compass what has happened to my reading life since.  The moment of recognition in the bookshop seems to belong to a different order of existence.  I try to remember what it was like knowing nothing, how powerful that was, and it seems like a lost idyll.

      TIME had a review of the new novel by Rebecca Makkai that began: If your present self could reckon with the past, what would you try to resolve?..."Because of where I live, this idea of rewriting the self --the palimpsest of who I was and who I am, while the place stays the same-- is often on my mind," says Makkai.  And such thoughts lingered nn my mind as well, particularly when I picked up the recent book by Will Schwable which he titled: We Should Not Be Friends.  Looking back to my own past, particularly my high school days, I can't remember ever talking with anyone --not teachers ot parents or even my friends-- about what seems to divide us in today's world.  There was no mention about politics or religion, or right or left.  The President was just that, the President, whether you liked him to not...and this was during the days of the Vietnam war and the draft and friends suddenly missing; and yet somehow several of my lifelong high school friends today hold pretty much polar opposite views of the world from me, especially when it comes to issues such as Covid and climate change and politics...but our friendship is glued strong, underneath it all us finding that we share much more than that which we don't share.  Still, I do wonder where or when our paths took a different turn and at what point did our views shift so radically?  Or were such views always there and we just never talked about them; or did they appear later because of our work choices, or the military, or being influenced by the views of new friends?  Or was it because of the channels we watched and the things that we read?  In today's world we tend to realize that we are bombarded with subliminal advertising, but back then?  Heck, we had to get up and walk to the TV in order to change the channel...and there were only about 5 or so channels that made it through clearly.

      Donald MacKenzie wrote this (again in the London Review): Dozens,​ hundreds, perhaps even thousands of online ads flash before your eyes every day, so many that you probably don’t even notice most of them.  Generating the electricity to get just one ad to appear on your screen can produce a puff of carbon dioxide sufficiently large that, if it were cigarette smoke, you would be able to see it.  Showing a single digital ad to a single user involves, on average, emitting between roughly a tenth and a whole pint of carbon dioxide.  And the digital ad business puffs on quite a scale.  No one knows exactly how many ads are shown online across the world, but informed estimates collected by the researcher Mikko Kotila suggest as many as 400 billion a day.  Using your laptop or phone feels very different from taking a flight.  Whenever I fly, I am queasily aware that I’m adding significantly to my carbon footprint.  That’s harder to keep in mind when I am streaming video, transferring large files or storing my photos in the ‘cloud’ – a misleadingly ethereal metaphor for huge datacentres packed with energy-consuming computer servers.  The carbon emissions produced by information and communication technologies (ICT) are difficult to measure, but probably account for around 2 or 3 per cent of total global emissions, perhaps as much as 4 per cent.  That’s comparable to aviation’s contribution to climate change...further to and fro can be triggered by each and every individual opportunity to show you an ad.  If you are using a mobile app, the way it often works is that the opportunity will be offered first to one advertiser, and if they won’t pay for it then another advertiser, then another, and another.** If you are browsing the web, using Facebook, or searching on Google for something of commercial interest, the opportunities to show you ads are electronically auctioned in real time, with algorithms acting on behalf of various advertisers, all of whom are able to submit bids to show you an ad.  The whole process is completed in less than a second.

      This shift to digital is something even I admit to doing, all while I cling to my books.  Jumping back to Anne Enright's piece in LRB, she continued: In Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (2016), Wolf suggests ‘a rather unlikely, still too little-known region in the right hemisphere’s superior temporal gyrus’, the same bit, apparently, that glows to the newness of a literary metaphor.  This exciting factoid lies outside the range of my expertise, but I am sure Wolf is accurate to the MRIs when she says that the shift to digital has made skimming the new norm.  Scrolling and swiping have increased our ability to survey large amounts of information, but they do not engage those areas of the reading brain where we imagine and are moved by the lives of others.  We have, in neurological terms, an app for that and it is no longer being switched on.  I wonder, when I avoid the novels stacked by my chair, whether it is this involuntary act of empathy that I am resisting.  We talk a lot about distraction, but maybe I just got mean.  Reading on my phone (something which I felt I'd never do) I do find it quite easy to "cheat," a simple touch moves the page forward and I leave with a sense of "I got most of that."  A hundred pages can flash by me in no time if the book is not something I really "want" to read (and it seems that there are a number of those, the titles and reviews that sounded so promising but --as with a bad movie-- proved disappointing midway through).  And as with our metaverse of viewing choices on the television, I often find that what my library carries in books is sometimes different that what is carried on their digital app (entire courses of languages or lectures, as one example).  And still, I am that person with that urge to hold and read yet another "book."  

      Emma Smith noted that even with digital reading, there is little difference.  As she writes in her recent book, Portable Magic, e-books and e-readers "want" to be books.  They want to be books.  Amazon's first Kindle was quarto-sized, around 13 bt 20 centimeters, and Brian Cummings has noted that e-readers produce a standard ten or so words per line, 'in common with many manuscripts in Carolingian minuscule, from the tenth century CE, just like many texts from the print shop of Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1500."...Text is presented in a vertical orientation (an e-reader is portrait, rather than landscape, in format), pages are flipped from right to left to move sequentially through the text, and there is a facility to bookmark or underline particular passages.  There is even a progress gauge that serves as a numerical equivalent of the haptic pleasure of how many pages are left, and therefore how much more story there can be...Until e-books develop their own particular communicative rhetoric, design and features, they seem to be the shadow or supplement of the physical book rather than its opposite.  One such innovation might be the Amazon Kindle subscription-fee model, which pays authors royalties based not on the book as a unit but on the number of pages read by any individual reader...Another decisive shift would be the development of distinct editions for e-readers and for conventional print.  The novelist Fay Weldon suggested that future novelists should prepare two versions: a contemplative and longer one for traditional immersive reading and a shorter, plot-driven version meeting the needs of commuters reading while strap-hanging on the Tube or waiting in a sandwich queue. 

      A book has that old-school feel of that dog-eared page or the bookmark, all of it adding to that closing of it and peeking at how far along you've come.  The digital reader has much the same although with a bit more added guilt thrown in, telling you how long you've been reading time-wise, how long you should have taken to read that (many online articles now tell you at the beginning, "eight minute read" or something similar), and how many pages you have remaining.  No such guilt for Oliver Darkshire, antique book collector and devotee (and now author) of hand-held books.  As mentioned in Book Page, Darkshire commented: In the shadows of the collecting world, the habit cheerily referred to as “bibliomania” thrives in the damp and dark.  Once one is lost to the urge of buying and collecting books, there really is no way back up the slippery slope to the daylight.  It starts with a simple purchase of something nostalgic, and it ends when your body is found centuries later submerged in a tomblike ocean of first editions and literary ephemera.  I often liken being in the business of antiquarian books to running a casino or dealing in illicit substances: You may sell to customers all you like, but you never sample the merchandise.  My conscience could handle being involved in hawking books, as I could still muster some shred of denial as to the extent of my participation in organized crime, but the act of writing a book seemed like a step too far.

      I sometimes feel that when I write I get an endorphin-like jolt from that almost illicit discovery of a tidbit of information, that fact-checking, that trivial sentence or review that bumps me like a cue ball into another direction and sometimes exposes me to another world.  Reporter Dorothy Thompson found herself changing courses when she got a rare interview from a political leader, one who disliked the press, one who would give the interview only if her allotted three questions could be submitted and reviewed two days in advance, and one who was known to go into a tirade of pounding on desks if he didn't care for the end result.  Here's what Thompson wrote: I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator...In something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure I was not.  It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.  He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones.  He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure.  He is the very prototype of the Little Man.***

      Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste, The Origin of Our Discontents, expressed her view that little has changed since then, writing in TIME: ...in 2021, a year after Caste was first published, the Census Bureau made a startling announcement in alignment with an underlying premise I foreshadowed in the book: for the first time in American history, the white population showed a numerical decline—the only racial or ethnic group to do so, falling by 8.6%, from 223.6 million in 2010 to 204.3 million in 2020—as the white birth rate lagged that of the Black and Latino population and as white deaths exceeded white births.  While still in the majority, the share of the dominant caste who identify as white alone in the population of the U.S. had fallen from 63.7% in 2010 to 57.8% in 2020, “the lowest on record,” the Associated Press reported.  This was seen by some Americans as an alarming development.  A Pew Research Center study found that while the majority of respondents said they were neutral about an impending demographic shift, nearly 4 in 10 conservatives said that a declining white population was “bad” or “very bad” for the country, as did 1 in 4 white respondents overall.  Was this all true, or were we simply --once again-- being hooked on phonics?

      Remember that best-selling program, one which separated our brain's take on reading into two camps, the phonicological and the lexical,  In a review of all this, Cristine Smallwood wrote in the New York Review of Books, "Calling this a 'method' seems a bit grand.  It was more like hopes and prayers, and it worked about as well."  The "method" was termed cueing, as in if you get just a simple clue (or "cue") you can be steered in the "right" direction.  Certainly we all do an amount of cueing when we encounter new ideas.  We test what we learn against what we already know and expect of the world. 'Could it be that this election was stolen?' one might think, in the eleventh hour of scrolling.  'Is it plausible, based on everything else I know to be true, that a ring of pedophiles is operating beneath this pizza restaurant?'  But leaving aside the fact that we can take interpretations and judgements only if we are reading the words correctly --its a pizza restaurant, not a pizza rest stop-- the glory of reading at all, is to encounter the new.  To be surprised by where a sentence lands, to trip over an unexpected adjective, to be thrown out of the dullness of habit into a new and unfamiliar place.  That's the whole point -- that of all the possible words that could come next, this one does.  That of all the possible worlds, the writer --someone who is not you, who has thoughts and ways of expressing those thoughts that you never could have-- imagined this one.

      I'd like to say that that expresses me, and it is one that writers alone share...but it isn't.  No more than your conversation and input at a dinner with friends, or a clinking of beer glasses.  Perhaps the bottom line is that reading and writing really don't matter a whole lot, that those 3 r's may indeed need changing.  Josephine Quinn echoed a similar thought when she reviewed the recent book by Italian scholar, Sylvia Ferrara: There's a bigger question about whether writing, the handmaiden of imperial taxation, conscription, and surveillance, is a good thing at all...She (Ferrara) suggests that in a world without writing we'd live "suspended in a continual present."  But that isn't quite true: the power of collective memory is remarkable.  The songs and stories of past glory that the Greeks called Homer were passed down for centuries without the help of writing.  Indigenous coastal legends from Australia to the Outer Hebrides appear to describe landscapes that have not existed for thousands of centuries, and in some cases since the end of the Ice Age.  Oral history doesn't survive the onset of literacy, when the times before writing becomes myth.  But writing has been around for only six thousand years or so, and most people didn't see much of it --it wasn't omnipresent in daily life-- before the invention of the printing press and the rise of the modern state.  There is no particular reason to think it will long outlive them.

      So then there's that third "r," that of math.  The more I try to "figure" things out --such as why some of my rather intellectually brilliant friends would readily believe that the pizza restaurant may indeed be harboring nefarious people-- the more I think of Paul McCartney's words: When you were young and your heart was an open book, you used to say "live and let live."  But in this ever-changing world in which we live in makes you give in and cry.  Say live and let die.  And for me that may mean that perhaps it's time to just let things go, to cut that balloon string.  So we took different paths but well, things just turned out as they did; some things we simply weren't meant to figure out.  Give it a rest, as "they" say.  Truth is, a rest is exactly what my wife and I were thinking, a place to just get away for a bit, to unwind, a place to leave all those cares and troubles at home...maybe Africa.  Wait, where?  Well why not since way before reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic --in fact way before humans even appeared-- there were lions here in the U.S., said Hakai.  No really, lions!  As my mom used to say, something doesn't add up...

American lion fighting a saber-toothed tiger; illustration: Roman Uchytel/Science Photo Library

*STEM is basically an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, which is targeted for kindergarteners on up, said the National Stem Honor Society (yes, there really is such a group)..  Your task is to guess what the NEXT mnemonic for schooling will be by the next century.

**MacKenzie explored this electronic data-selling in greater detail in an earlier piece in LRB...the speed and numbers are so dazzling that even my eyes (and mind) blurred when trying to take it all in.

***Thompson was writing about Adolph Hitler.  The review about both "reporters who took on a world at war," and the "six press barons who enabled Hitler" appeared in the London Review and was a very different perspective of history, noting that when FDR approached Congress about supplying: ...the British people and their allies’ with weaponry ‘in sufficient volume and quickly enough so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war, which others have had to endure’, a Gallup poll showed that almost half of Americans didn’t want the bill to pass.  (Charles) Lindbergh argued that it was ‘obvious’ the British were losing the war; indeed, they were destined to lose to Germany, no matter how much assistance the Americans provided.  Roosevelt had recalled the American ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy, for saying much the same thing.  When Thompson asked Churchill how he expected to win the war, he said that he was "presently concerned only with how not to lose it.  And we shall lose it, you know, unless you come in – and with all you have."  A piece in National Geographic noted much the same thing, the losses to the German submarines almost turning the tide with the fall of England possibly just days away.  The numbers told the story: 48 U-boats sunk vs. the 749 Allied ships sunk...1146 German lives lost on those sunken U-boats vs. the 16,472 Allied lives lost on their torpedoed ships.