On The Road

Thoughts with a bag full of books and a Balance bar on my bus ride to Boston

On Friday morning I had an aisle seat on a Bolt bus to Boston. I get excited over bus rides. Train rides too. There you are with no restless options. You’ve got that one seat. You have to be quiet. You can’t kill time with a phone call from a buddy. You can’t turn on ESPN radio. You can’t run to the corner for another cup of coffee and a big cookie. You’re right there with just your backpack under your seat stuffed tightly with all you hope you’ll need. It feels good. It’s thrilling to me to be going somewhere on a Friday.

I had four books with me. Not because I was going to read four books in three days (I’d maybe read one short one), but because I wanted these four with me. There was an Alice Munro short story in one I wanted to read. Two others I was deciding between. The other I had just finished and might want to refer to in this newsletter. Anyway, I felt, with some obvious delusion, like a student, with my blue watch cap on, there among the much younger college-age kids.

Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat.

I looked out the window while we went up Amsterdam Avenue. When we got to 110th and turned right to get to a highway, I hauled up my backpack and took out a book I bought the day before, Kurt Vonnegut, The Last Interview. It was actually six interviews. It’d be perfect for the ride. Especially for a getting-old guy who suddenly felt like a student again. I’d read Vonnegut religiously (who hadn’t?)back in my college days and the ones soon after. The books were pocket-size and you could actually stuff one into the back pocket of your bell-bottom jeans.

The girl sitting next to me was shy and quiet. Tall and appropriately pale, her grandmother probably told her she could be a model. (‘You’re as pretty as those girls.’). She at first mostly looked out the window, and checked her phone for messages. Then she dug a paperback book out of her big purse on her lap. It was Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. I said to her, ‘That’s a good one.’ She smiled faintly. That and other things, like the girl across the aisle who was internally tapping her foot the whole way, restless to just get there, no book, no magazine, one too-loud phone call, made me think about kids and reading.

On the #6 train I take at 7:30 every weekday morning to go downtown to hold my sign (‘WHY NOT TEACH EVERY SCHOOL KID TO READ WELL.’) in front of the Department of Education building I frequently notice an Asian mother with her three young girls of varying grade-school ages. Each of the girls is reading a book. Books like my three daughters used to read, like you read, or your kids read. The kids aren’t nerds. They’ve each got corduroy jeans on and fleeces and lively socks and tennis shoes. They read through all the local stops. The mother doesn’t read on the train. She sits with her arms folded, no lively socks for her, a school bag or two on her lap. She doesn’t bug the kids. They’re reading.

I smile to myself. Not because I’m some book nerd; I’m not. I can waste time with sports talk radio and beers in front of big screens in taverns with the best of them. I wear a patch to keep from smoking. I smile because it looks beautiful to me. Three young kids making their ride (their life) more interesting. (The kids next to them the other day were sharing a Snickers at 7:30. No books in their hands. Or in their world, maybe.) I’ve been tempted to ask the mother if I could talk with her someday about her kids and their book habits. But I haven’t; probably won’t. It fascinates me though.

So fascinates me that I’ve more than once, over lunch with the young woman, born in Taiwan, who designs each issue of this newsletter, asked her about the difference in schooling she went through. What makes Asian kids do stuff our kids don’t do? You’ve seen it. You know what I mean. You’ve certainly read about it. You’ve read that 75% of the kids at prestigious Stuyvesant High are Asian. I’m not saying that the rest of the kids, the non-Asian kids, aren’t cool (maybe too cool?). They’re creative and spontaneous and we’re a lucky country that grows such dynamism. But those three young girls on the train seem more focused. The rest of their day will probably go pretty well. Maybe very well. To be focused is a wonderful thing. We all know life is better when we are. That’s the joy of a bus ride, with a good book. That focus.

At Strand bookstore last week, with all this in mind, I bought a paperback copy of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. You’ve heard about it. The mean Asian mother forcing her kids to practice piano and violin ridiculously long hours. No sleepovers. No parties. It got ridiculed on talk shows. I’m now guessing mostly by people who hadn’t really read it. I read it in a day. I’m not going to review it here. I’ll just suggest you ought to read it. It’s an eye-opening answer to the questions I want to ask the mother on the train and the ones I ask my designer friend from Taiwan. It’s wonderfully-written. You almost can’t write better than Amy Chua does. It’s funny, tough-on-herself revelatory. You could spend a semester discussing it. Get the book and engage with her.

I finished the Vonnegut interviews by the time we passed Providence. It was easy reading. Nostalgic. His answers to the interviewers’ questions were funny and cynical and truthful in a ‘60s kind of way. At one point he talks about a sign he made. It said, ‘DEAR FUTURE GENERATIONS: PLEASE ACCEPT OUR APOLOGIES.’

You start to worry about that as you get old, especially when you have five young grandchildren. You want to not feel you’re leaving the place you enjoyed the hell out of worse than when you got here. You don’t know what to do about all the things our generation did poorly when we thought we’d do it all so right, so much better than those not-to-be-trusted people over 30 had done. You hope your reading sign will bring some attention to what you feel is a basic solution to a dire condition. Many poor kids in the city can’t really read. We’ve come to accept it somehow that urban minority kids not reading well is an on-going apparently unsolvable problem. That it’s part of the city’s landscape. Like pigeons.

Annie’s Un-Vanity Fair Photos
Annie Leibovitz shoots some timeless beauty

She’s not on assignment for anyone but herself in this book with the breathtaking dust-jacket close-up of Niagara Falls. She started the Pilgrimage (the book’s title) there, and then headed out. To Walden Pond, Amherst, Massachusetts, Yosemite, Georgia O’Keefe’s New Mexico, Virginia Woolf’s England, among other places with great interiors and exteriors to shoot with her big and small cameras.

One thing Leibovitz does in her best books is write about her feeling and her process. Readers like to learn about how people do their work. She satisfies that way. And her photographs are so rich, they’re like paintings. This a real book, with intelligence and determination and heft. Full of celebration, if not celebrity. It’s a thing of beauty.

Be There or Be Square
Libraries have the coolest stuff

It used to be(didn’t it?) that teenagers would hang out at the library on school nights to sit next to their friends and do their homework and laugh too loud. Sometimes boys and girls together. They’d work on term papers. Do they still have those? They’d work on History projects. They’d chew gum and try to look cool. The lights were brighter there than at home. There were no family members there. There were magazines if you got bored. It was more fun than TV.

I don’t sense they do that anymore. There are all sorts of good books they’d like. Not just classics either. Good young adult novels with great covers. How are they going to run across those if they don’t go to the library at night.? They’re at home’texting’ instead. When all the valuable texts are in the library.

Newsstands here have magazines you’ve never heard of. Some are like pictures at an exhibition.

It’s Sink or Swim
Learning to read well is necessary to survive in our culture. Too many of our kids are drowning.

I have no dog to take out when I get up in the morning. So if I wake up real early before I can go to the corner for my paper and my coffee, I’ll read a book. This morning was like that. I wonderfully have two books going. I read a bit from both. One, a new novel; the other, a paperback biography of Walt Whitman. I live in the back of the building. There’s no noise at all.

It hits me some mornings how perfect it is to sit on the corner of the couch with a good lamp lighting up the pages. I can’t imagine a better place to be then. It hit me this morning how restless I would be if I couldn’t read well enough to be enjoying such times. I’d have to have the TV or radio going. I’d have to be checking my computer. I’d maybe try to go back to sleep. I thought, as I often do, about poor kids here and how they aren’t likely to ever feel what I feel then. I got mad at the schools again. The old swimming image came to mind. It frequently does when I think about the sinfulness of not teaching kids to read well.

Here’s why I think of swimming. I’ve written about it before. It works for me. What if we all lived right by the sea. What if fishing were the only means of survival, and everyone had to go out in boats and bring in a catch to feed themselves and their village. Certainly soon after kids learned to walk, they’d all be dipped in the water and taught to swim. They’d have to be. Water is where they’d have to spend their days. To not know how to swim would make them vulnerable to drowning. It would make them not equipped to go out on the boats in all sorts of weather to earn a livelihood. They’d be without the means.

They’d have to be strong swimmers. To survive. It would be the responsibility of the elders to teach them to swim well. The whole society would depend on that ability being passed down to the children. No one would question its necessity. No child would not be taught to swim well.

Let’s use that swimming image as a metaphor for reading in our culture. Are our kids all being taught to swim well? Are all our kids coming out of our training lessons knowing how to swim well enough to survive in any weather? In the 10 or 12 years that they have to go to the public pool for 6 or 7 hours a day, do they learn to swim easily, easily enough so we don’t have to worry about them drowning? Can they swim strongly, confidently? Or do they thrash and cough and choke trying to get to the end of the pool? Or can some of them do no more than a dead-man’s float? Or dog paddle?

Suburban kids who have their own pools or cottages or trips to Florida or the Jersey Shore can swim with ease. So can many city kids from the middle class. But the poor kids. How about them? Don’t they need to survive too?

Can you see the parallel? Can you see that if we don’t teach those poor kids to read well, they can’t really survive? How will they eat? How will they mix with the kids who can read? How will they help their village? How will they find some quiet, deep comfort in their early mornings when they’re awakened by things that go bump in the night like I am?

________________________________

For some months I’ve stood with my sign on Chambers Street. I’m there for an hour in the morning. I see many now-familiar faces every day. Some people smile, give a nod, say Right On, or Ain’t That The Truth. Some ask what I’m all about. One girl, a student on her way to Stuyvesant High, early on asked me that. One day she handed me a poem she’d written for school. It’s about my sign:

Why not
teach
every
school kid
to read
well.

The stark sign challenges passersby with the question that is not, well,
a question – at least not
to him, the sign-bearer: a fervent, active reader,
and a retired teacher.
The font on the sign is large, each word basic enough for a kid,
at least a literate kid, the kind of kid every

kid should be, to read. Every
word is typed in bold on the imposing rectangular sign, well-
reinforced, like each of the ideas and claims the man, kid-
like in his dogged determination, makes. Not
unfazed by the questions or attacks from people who read
the message skeptically, he seizes every opportunity to advocate his position and teach.

Standing outside an official building each morning, he acknowledges the teachers
who work inside. Every
professional in the building knows who he is; everyone reads
the same nine words (six lines) before she continues her trek to the office. Well
she knows them, as well as any poem she memorized in childhood. Not
unreasonable; the innocent lines insert themselves in one’s brain, like images of kids

without the power to read. Kids,
generally poorer kids, without the possibility of escaping from apathetic teachers,
struggling parents, or unforgiving neighborhoods with a good book… not
surprising that this man, after a life devoted to every
aspect of proper English, reading it, teaching it, learning it, and writing it well
would take up the cause. Reading

the newsletters he’s published, printed, and handed out himself, reading
the story of his interesting life, the stories of the sad lives of the kids
impacted by the well-
tried and often-failing educational system, reading these teachings
and anecdotes of this ex-Midwesterner, I am angry because every
day he stands there, sending out his message, is another day the people with power will not

change the status quo. They teach not,
and don’t let those who can, teach, instead causing kids harm by cutting every
teacher’s incentive to teach well. They hope for successful kids but overlook the key: reading.

How To Make a Tent

Issue #1 of a magazine for the Occupy Movement

I can’t claim participation in Occupy Wall Street. The closest I got to being part of it was to walk through the camp for maybe an hour on a sunshine afternoon in search of photos to take. I didn’t talk with anyone. I turned my head sideways once to read some of the titles in the library that they’d set up. That’s the most I exerted myself.

I grabbed this new magazine the other day in the lobby of The School of Visual Arts which is near me and which probably has students who sat-in at the Occupy park, and others who didn’t. This magazine is strongly-written and feels radical. It’s hard to find. Look at occupytheory.org.

The Early Favorite

The Street Sweeper is my first best book of this new year

I’m only 100 pages into this novel, but I can tell, could tell by page 5 actually, that it’s got me and is worth telling you about. I danced around but never bought Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity while knowing from reviews and the look of the book that I should. We’ve all got books like that that we let get by us. This new one I jumped on right away.

His style is very easy and makes you calmly turn the page to see where it all might be going. His exact observations of the everyday stuff of New York City life are worth the cover price themselves. But the story, which intertwines the Civil Rights movement with a felon and a father and son and the Holocaust, is like nothing you’ve read about all that before. High praise.