a city reader

2012-01-16T07:09:00.000-08:00

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.

2012-01-16T07:05:00.000-08:00

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.

2012-01-16T07:02:00.000-08:00

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.

2012-01-16T06:56:00.000-08:00

Esquire, the Spanish edition. Things you find in newsstands and magazine stores here.

2011-12-20T07:31:00.000-08:00

And They Call This Book Country?

New York City has a rich, alluring literary tradition, but way too many of its kids don’t know how to read.

This issue makes it two years since I started a cityReader. I’ve decided to re-run the first issue. It best describes why I’m doing what I’m doing. Here it is:

Before you move here, you have this image of New York City as a bookish place. The photograph of the famous writers gathered at the Gotham Book Mart. The New Yorker. Random House. Esquire. The Strand. Susan Sontag. The Reading Room at the big library. Simon & Schuster. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Columbia. NYU. Tom Wolfe. The New School. Woody Allen. The New York Times Book Review. Vintage paperbacks. John Cheever. The New York Review of Books. J.D. Salinger. The Paris Review. The Algonquin. The Partisan Review. Delmore Schwartz. You even see it call itself Book Country in ads for some kind of book fest. It would be your kind of place, you believe.

Then, about the time you’re moving here a dozen years ago, you see a photo on the front page of the Times as you’re skimming the headlines before you sit down to read the the whole paper, and you think, oh, that must be a picture from some place like Harlan County, Kentucky about some hardscrabble issue, one of those features the Times does now and then about some place remote from New York and its refinement (see above). But when you’re in your seat on the couch and you look closer you’re shocked to see that it’s not Kentucky at all but a picture of one of the ball fields in New York City where the public high school teams play their games. There are other pictures inside of other sorry-looking fields. You’re not so naïve to think the public school fields would be like a suburban school’s fields, but you can’t believe that they’re that bad and you feel like a fool for being so unaware and you get angry at New York for not being a good person if that’s how it’s let its playing fields for its kids go. You hope your friends don’t see the article.

You move to Manhattan as planned and the condition of playing fields doesn’t come up much. Anyone you knew from college who lived here has moved to the suburbs, for reasons like playing fields for their kids. You do read, maybe prompted by that article, that some mogul(s) is fixing up some of the fields. That makes you feel better. You wanted more outrage from the citizenry maybe, but at least some progress is being made. What you really wish is that the Mayor would declare eminent domain and seize all sorts of parking lots and raze under-used buildings and put in rich, green, playing fields throughout the city. He could even take too-exclusive and over-blown Gramercy Park up the street from where you live and turn it into a hockey rink. You very much wish for spaces for kids here. You’re surprised no one else brings it up ever.

But that’s not really about the New York bookishness that drew you here. That’s only a first instance of how you are disabused of some of your New York illusions. Those nasty playing fields would be as nothing compared to what really starts bugging you, and what bugs you still about the city. But maybe those playing fields will come in handy as a metaphor. You’ve come to see too many of the public schools in this bookish city as just as hardscrabble and under-watered and un-tended-to as those awful-looking fields. You aren’t talking about the physical plants of the schools, though they usually look pretty uninviting. No, you are talking about the reading life of the kids in so many of those big schools.

In the neighborhood you live in now, you can stand, on a holiday, when traffic is light, in the center of the intersection in front of your apartment building, and you can see five bodegas of varying quality, two of them selling flowers. Three dry cleaners, one with washers and dryers. A newsstand with a busy lottery machine, an internet café. There’s an off-brand grocery store, a couple nail salons, two liquor stores, a CVS, a Starbucks, a Dunkin’ Donuts, two good bagel places, one pizza place (you refuse to count the one that sells a-shot-and-a-slice). Maybe a dozen restaurants, and almost that many popular bars. It’s a great neighborhood, with, hey, that exclusive park-with-a key just a short block away. It has all you wanted when you moved here. Except it doesn’t have a bookstore. The newsstand will sell you fashion magazines from Milan, muscle magazines, college hoops mags. But there’s no bookstore in sight. You can walk to Union Square to the vibrant, four-floored Barnes & Noble and you do that. And Strand is not far beyond that. But you wanted your neighborhood to have its own bookstore, a small one like where one of the bodegas is. Didn’t they say this town was Book Country?

You know you have no real reason to complain about what your immediate neighborhood lacks when you compare it to the parts of the city where those ball fields are. There aren’t really any bookstores out there. You think of that promo that said New York is Book Country. Just parts of it, they must have meant.

There’s another metaphor you use when you’re having a pint with friends and you steer the conversation your way and you start going on about kids and reading and the poor results poor kids get in reading tests. You say that in a small island culture where everyone lives near the shore, swimming is the most important skill that to needs be taught to kids so they survive, so they don’t drown. They don’t teach soccer or traditional dance steps until every child knows how to swim. When you see that your friends accept that as obvious, you bring up New York City’s schools. You say that in order to survive in this culture you have to know how to read, more than you need to know how to sing or shoot hoops or play volleyball or know who dug the Erie Canal. You have to know how to read before anything else. In order to survive really. In order not to drown.

The Mayor, in his treasure chest campaign, so touted the success he claims he’s achieved in the schools since he took them over, you thought he was maybe going to buy an aircraft carrier and fly onto it and claim the learning war was over. You get mad thinking that he would have been cheered.

Don’t they see, kids are drowning still. A third of them can’t read well enough to pass their swimming test. And you know that many of the kids who pass are really only dog-paddling. Why does the Mayor who fastidiously saw to it that 100% of the bars complied with his no-smoking edict, why does he not demand that 100% of the city’s kids know how to read? In Cleveland, where you came from 12 years ago, there’s a plaque on the front of the big library that says: Kids Who Read Succeed. Hell, maybe Cleveland is Book Country.

You wonder if anyone really cares. It isn’t talked about much. The Times and other publications talk about numbers and unions and rubber rooms. You can’t even name the Times’ education editor. Do they have one? You wonder why mothers of kids in the schools don’t take to the street with pots and pans and march down to Chambers Street to demand that their kids be taught to read. They know what it means for their kids not to know how to read, if only from seeing the neighborhoods filled with the bodies of kids who’ve drowned.

If the Mayor can up-end centuries of tradition and outlaw tobacco from public houses, why can’t he buck Albany and the Board of Regents and turn the city’s schools into reading academies where kids will immerse themselves in books and magazines, and the state syllabus be damned. It isn’t longer hours at school the kids need, it is focused hours. It is reading time. Time to make up for what they lacked in their earliest years. The city has them for 12 years. You think about that sometimes when you remember that that’s how long ago you came here. That’s a long time.

So you decide to start ‘a cityReader’. You’re not sure what you’ll do with it. But you’re tired of talking about it. Tired of your own metaphors. You want to go around and see what the deal is…why in 12 years the schools aren’t teaching the kids to read well enough to succeed.

2011-12-20T07:23:00.000-08:00

The Voice of America
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

When you read Walt Whitman you wish he’d been the one chosen when some cities were all reading the same book. Remember that? We need to be reading him. He wouldn’t be wearing a Fox or an MSNBC T shirt if he were here. Not a hat that said Brooks or Krugman on it either. He transcended that kind of smallness. He was big. So big you feel small when you read him. Where did he get his expansiveness? Where did he get his confidence? Where did he get his love?

I’m reading him on the subway in the morning now. It’s quite a scene to raise your eyes from the book’s pages and see the American faces on their way to work.

2011-12-20T07:19:00.000-08:00

The Best Book I Read in 2011
The Art of Fielding

If I’d kept a log of the books I read during the year, I might recall a title I liked more than The Art of Fielding. But I didn’t, so this is the book that comes to mind as my best book of the year. It’s a novel and I’m not that big on novels any more, and I wouldn’t have read it maybe if the woman who works at the bookstore I go to hadn’t sensed it was the right book for me that day. Isn’t that reason enough to go to a real store? Make that a resolution.

Two other books come to mind. Hemingway’s Boat. A biography of his post-Paris years. And then there’s a small paperback book called you are here by a Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. He has lots of books out. This is the first one of his for me. I think it changed me, though nobody’s noticed, or commented at all.

2011-12-20T07:16:00.001-08:00

Morning subway station. Man with his Kindle.

2011-11-13T18:09:00.000-08:00

The New School

An idea that came to the cityReader when he was thinking about St. Mark’s Bookshop staying alive.

St. Mark’s Bookshop got a new life. Another chance. A rent deal was worked out. Did you know that? So all those fiercely smart books that they always have there get to stay on their shelves. It’s almost like the end of Fahrenheit 451, in this day when bookstores are closing, when books are being squeezed into little gizmos not much bigger than the Sgt. Preston ore detector I ordered from Shredded Wheat when I was a kid. In this day when we genuflect at Steve Jobs’ grave for including a futuristic voice app on the new iPhone that you can talk to like something we’d have been grossed out by in ominous futuristic movies years ago. It’d have been something we’d Occupy… over, wouldn’t it? Now we’re gushing about it. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t the idea weird? Talking to a non-person and asking her if our social calendar is full on Wednesday at 6:00? Isn’t it weird that we think that’s cool while bookstores are closing.

So it’s good that a real bookstore is staying open. And it’s good that the smart people who work there will still have jobs. Some of them have already been let go of course the past few months as austerity had to rule in these times of Amazon and iPads. And Nooks. Maybe we’ll turn back some day. A CD collector friend who goes to flea markets and record fairs says the every CD that comes out now also comes out in vinyl. He says Letterman (I don’t stay up that late anymore) holds up the big vinyl album now, not the little CD anymore, when some singer or group comes on. That’s cool. Maybe after books die, they’ll come back to life again. I love the stuff of books. I think the biography of Jobs with the photo and the white dust jacket is better looking than any of his products. That doesn’t mean that I don’t get some kind of stimulation from my iPhone, but not like I do from a cool-looking, cool-feeling book.

Anyway, St. Mark’s’ difficulties made me think of good bookstores and the very bright staffs they have. You know them. They seem like they all went to Oberlin. And that they’ve read Thomas Pynchon and you haven’t. Because they have a look that says that. That look that makes you not ask for a bag even if it’s raining out. That look that makes you want to say when you’re buying the Patti Smith book as a Christmas gift that you read it a year ago. You zip up your coat lest they see the dukes-up leprechaun on your Notre Dame T shirt. You love ‘em being there though. It makes the store seem a step up from the street. They make you bring your A game.

So here’s what I’m thinking. These bright Pynchon-reading bookstore sales clerks love to be around books. They’ll work for cheap and live in parts of Brooklyn that look like car impound lots so they can live in New York City and be around books. There must be thousands of such types all around the country who’d love to live in New York City and be around books. If they could find such jobs they’d leave Portland in a New York minute. But with bookstores closing here and scaling back where would all those book types work? Who needs thousands of English majors from Skidmore and Middlebury and Spelman and Kenyon and Wisconsin and Georgetown?

You know who? I know who. The New York City schools. First graders need ‘em. Twelfth graders need ‘em. The schools here need thousands of English majors. They need their bookishness. They need their style or self-styled lack of it. They need truckloads of ‘em. They’d come by the truckloads too, if…

If the schools decided they needed to change themselves into places where language and literature were honored above all else. If the schools decided that they could no longer ignore the obvious: poor kids aren’t learning how to read or write in the city’s schools. It just wasn’t working. Almost not working at all. It wasn’t working anywhere, actually. Not in Louisville. Not in Green Bay. Not in Houston, Dallas, or Galveston. Not in Portland.

But only New York could attract the bright young reading and writing types that would love to live here and spend their days with books and lined paper. They’d love to read aloud to kids. They’d love to learn about new young adult novels. They’d rather do that than stand behind cash registers . And they’d make more money. It’d get their parents off their ass, too.

You couldn’t find a better match. This would be better than Teach for America. This would be a book nerd’s wet dream. With summers off and long holidays to go to Burning Man and the World Cup. They’d enliven the faculty room. No more talk about ‘The Good Wife’ and Groupon dominating lunch time. There’d be talk of Bushwick concerts and Alexander McQueen. There’d be 'Playbills' from The Book of Mormon. Energy. Happiness. A job. An English major with a job with books. You could almost cry, couldn’t you?

Now, they won’t have had all the education courses. Maybe none, if you’re lucky. You want them to have had courses in Beckett. You want them to remember Shel Silverstein poems from when they were kids. You don’t care what they wear. I don’t know what you’d have to tell them. Tell ‘em to read when the kids do. Tell them to make sure every kid has a book they like, all the time. Show ‘em where the school library is. They’ll want the library to be a good one. Tell them you’ll take care of noise in the halls. And that you’ll make sure parents know that these teachers weren’t hired to be disciplinarians. Tell them this has to work. For the kids and for them. This is a dream match-up. Life-long readers and would-be’s. It has to work. And it will work, if no one gets scared, and reverts to the old ways. To The Old School.

The Old School is where it is now. It can’t stay there. I see it in the faces of the people who pass me with my sign. They all know. They’re not going to Occupy Wall Street about it. Neither am I. But they know it has to change. When they read about this old man’s New School idea, they’ll wish they’d had such a place when they were young. So do I. So do you. Let’s make these new schools for the kids.

2011-11-13T18:02:00.000-08:00

50 Years Later, It’s Me and Ishmael Again

I’m reading Moby Dick

In the middle of reading the new novel , The Art of Fielding, I felt compelled to go get a copy of Moby Dick. You’ll see why when you read The Art of Fielding.

I had never finished Moby Dick. I wrote a poem once about not finishing it one high school summer because I kept being drawn to the basketball hoop in my driveway that I could see from my bedroom window. I hated summer reading lists anyway.

Now I’m a hundred pages into it, and it’s all you’ve heard. If you read it in high school, you haven’t read it yet. Go get the paperback and read it now. Ishmael’s voice is quite a voice.

2011-11-13T17:56:00.000-08:00

Ground Ball to Short…

The Art of Fielding makes all the plays

Why would a 500-page first-novel about a baseball team at a small college in Wisconsin get over-the-top rave reviews? Why would one of my daughters who’s no big sports fan have read it, saying she hated to have her train from Brooklyn get to its Manhattan stop when she was in the last chapters? Why did my West Village bookseller almost hand it to me? Why did a guy I didn’t know in that store two weeks later when I was looking for my next book point out the The Art of Fielding to me? I don’t know why it’s all that to them.

But the team in the Midwest is nicknamed the Harpooners and the college has a statue of Herman Melville on the grounds. And they’ve got a shortstop named Henry that you’ll remember the rest of your life.

2011-11-13T17:52:00.000-08:00

One of the great windows at Three Lives bookstore in the West Village.

2011-10-10T18:23:00.000-07:00

What If You Couldn’t Read Well?

11 ways to see to it that our city’s school kids can.

'Like any other part of yoga, only practice will increase your aptitude.’ I read that sentence in a magazine last week. It didn’t surprise me. You either. Of course that would be the case. In every thing we try, even spiritual, graceful yoga, we don’t get good at it without practice.

When you watch a TV football game and the holder on a field goal takes the long-snapped ball and turns the laces away from the kicker’s on-rushing foot while straightening the ball and angling it just so, you wonder how he can do that in such pressure-filled, tight time and space. If he got injured, could just any guy off the bench come out and do it? No, he could not. The any-guy wouldn’t have practiced it enough. Wouldn’t have taken enough reps to do it well, if at all.

Reps are what I believe many of our city school kids don’t get enough of when it comes to reading. Without reps they have no shot of reading well. Here are some things I’d do about that:

1.) I’d look at the syllabus and see if enough time was available for kids to get the reading reps they needed. If there wasn’t enough time, I’d alter the syllabus. Or ignore it. School is the only quiet time most of the poor readers have to get up to snuff. Everything has to take second place to their getting to read well. Everything. All chancellors, principals, teachers must believe that. Because school is where it has to happen. Only place.

2.) The kids’ home environment could no longer be used as an excuse for the kids not learning to read well. Factor in the kids’ upbringing, and go from there. Maybe even more reps are needed for some kids. If so, then those reps must be gotten. There’s no option. For a kid not to learn to read well is not acceptable. It’s hard for me to accept that the old excuse of the kids’ home environment is still being trotted out. It’s a messy world we all live in. It always has been. When it comes to poor kids and their environment and their reading abilities, we luckily have a place to make a difference for them. It’s a classroom where the child has to come every school day. It should make a difference. If a fat guy had to go to Canyon Ranch every day for 10 years, that’d be a gift to him that would make a difference. School is that gift for kids who need to have a sturdy environment to come to every day to learn to read well. It must be made as pleasant and purposeful as the Canyon Ranch is made for the big guy.

3.) For homework, I’d have the kids read 10 pages from the book they’re reading. A book they chose. One they like. Or it could be Sports Illustrated or People magazine. Anything that lets them know that heat rises off a page. That’s the key to liking to read. Feeling that heat. They might think it only comes off a screen or through headphones. Throw a reader a good mag while they’re watching TV, they’ll go to the mag every time.

4.) Kids must see teachers reading. While the kids are reading, the teachers can not be grading papers. They should have a book and be reading it. If the kids aren’t seeing reading at home, how great it is that they can come to a place every day with a desk of their own and something to read they like, and a teacher who likes to read, too. Teachers shouldn’t try to ingratiate themselves by talking about TV very much, if at all. Teachers who don’t read shouldn’t be teachers.

5.) The school should have a good library. If I were a teacher I’d demand it. If I were a parent I would demand it. The librarian would have to be a real reader who would enthuse, not too much though, about the things she has. Kids should want to go to the library. If I were a teacher, I’d suggest to the parents that they take their kids at least once a week to the neighborhood library. (Of course, in all of this, I’m talking about poor kids and poor parents. They’re the ones who the system everywhere is failing.)

6.) If I were a teacher, I’d demand that the school be kept orderly and quiet. If reading was the emphasis of the school day, keeping the halls quiet would be done for that good reason, an understandable one, rather than be quiet because I said so. Big noise can not be tolerated. It ruins everything. (It drives me nuts when people talk in movies or libraries. I got punched in my neighborhood library here for telling a hyper-talkative drug addict to please be quiet. It mostly bent my glasses.)

7.) There should be magazines in the room for the kids to read when they’ve finished other work. There’s heat in the right magazine.

8.) I’d try to find a philanthropy that would underwrite a subscription for each kid to get a magazine of their choice. Sent to their home. It’s nice to get a magazine in the mail. New York publishes so many magazines, someone ought to be able to get them involved in this.

9.) I’d think of the schools as reading academies. What’s a ‘school’ anyway? All of us at one time or another during our school years thought why couldn’t we just go to the big library downtown every day and let our interests take us where they will. That might have been logistically unrealistic, but each school could be an academy of reading. Filled with good books and the time to read them. No more underlining adverbs. Or weekly vocabulary tests. I was good at all that stuff. Because I was a reader. That’s the only way. The rest is time-filler, time-killer.

10.) I’d do this all until each kid who wasn’t disabled in some way could read well. It might take a year for some. It might take 10 for some others. But they wouldn’t leave my system until they could read well. Not haltingly. Well.

11.) At their high school graduation you should be able to toss any book on the New York Times Best Seller list to any kid up on the stage and say read page 201. They should be able to read it as well as you or I. That would make it a commencement. In New York City.

2011-10-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

A Great Writer’s Great Eye

Eudora Welty’s camera told some stories

I could look at photo books for hours. And I do. I’m a guy who’ll sit on the floor or on a windowsill in a bookstore till my butt hurts staring at pages of photographs. That’s how I came upon Eudora Welty’s book a few years ago. I didn’t even know she took pictures.

Her shots are of common Southern themes. Poor farmers. Black people. But there’s something special about them. You can tell she was trying to find out something. Not just show something. She gets you to linger with her while she tries to figure out how people are. She likely stared at the faces and scenes she captured later on when they’d become pictures. They’re worth staring at.

2011-10-10T18:13:00.000-07:00

de Kooning Early And Often

If you join MoMA you can get in ahead of the crowd

I joined MoMA recently for 75 bucks. For a whole year. That’s less than 10 pints of Guinness when you figure in tips. You not only get to go anytime you want, you get to enter an hour earlier than non-members to see de Kooning. I’ve often wondered if there aren’t some people who go every day to MoMA. I’ll bet there are. Or who go to some particular museum every day like some people go to the gym every day, or out to their same spot for a Guinness every night .

The biography of de Kooning is 100% rewarding. You learn everything about modern art. All the characters. Great New York stuff too. The physical book, by Knopf, is a masterpiece of design itself. With your membership you can get it at a discount. You should join.

2011-10-10T18:10:00.000-07:00

Six times a year it comes out. With very good writers and a good look.

2011-09-14T02:37:00.000-07:00

‘Stick To Your Guns!’ the guy said to me

The message really matters to some people, so I stand tall with it.

I can tell by some of the comments people make when they see my sign that they feel like I do. I can also see it in their eyes. I can also now see it in the faces of some of the people who pass me on their way into work at the Dept. of Ed. building I stand in front of with the sign. At first none of those people going in the building knew how to react to me. They didn’t know me. They still don’t really, though I’ve given a few of them a copy of this newsletter. I may have looked like an opponent of some kind. Somebody trashing the work they do. Now they smile more; give me a look that says they agree with the sign.

I liked it when the guy blurted out as he walked by, ‘Stick To Your Guns!’. He was an older guy. That’s an old-guy expression. It was good to hear. Like it was coming from my late-father who I sometimes conjure to reinforce my determination. You wonder as you stand there sometimes what you’re doing, what you hope to accomplish. What can one guy do. Frequently when there’s a lull in the stream of people walking by, I turn the sign toward me and read it. The simplicity of it comforts me and charges me up. I turn it back toward the street, and make sure to stand tall. I know how to stand tall, because I’m imitating someone who stood tall in my eyes.

Sit with me on my couch in 1972 in Lakewood, Ohio. I lived there because I moved to Cleveland after college three years earlier to teach in an inner-city Catholic grade school. I needed a teaching job as a deferment from the draft which would have sent me to Vietnam where I didn’t want to go, especially since when I graduated in 1969 in South Bend, Indiana, I was married with a week-old daughter. So I jumped at the teaching opportunity. A lot of guys jumped at teaching jobs then. Anyway I’m on my couch. I can see myself sitting there looking at the college alumni magazine in front of a big window on the second-floor half of a double house we were renting.

There’s a small article up front in the magazine with a picture of a student. There’s something about the guy I’m drawn to. The way he’s standing, I guess. The way he looks. The solitariness of him. He looks like a guy with a sincere purpose. So I fold the magazine back, probably light a cigarette, and read about this guy. His name is Al. He is a student. He’s quiet-looking. Like maybe he’s a swimmer. Thinning blonde hair. White t shirt. White levis, as we called them then. He’s holding a large juice can in front of his chest. The article says he holds this can every day in front of both dining halls during the lunch and dinner hour. There may have been a sign on the can; I can’t recall. But what he’s got the can for is to collect money for Bangladesh, which at the time was going through political and environmental disasters. It was famous then like Haiti or Sudan are now. This guy Al was moved to find a can and use it to help people who 40 years ago seemed much further away than they seem now.

You wouldn’t think that effort of his would seem so important to me. The ‘60s had just ended. Bolder gestures had been made over all sorts of issues of war and peace and poverty. Students had danced, and worn war paint and flowers in their hair, and burned draft cards and hung images of national leaders. Music was involved, drugs were too. Cops got involved. Tear gas sometimes. After all that, what was it about Al that grabbed me as being so radical?

Probably the simplicity of it. The persistence of it. The obviousness of it. The Quaker look of it on a Catholic campus. The way he stood there. By himself. Who knows why we’re drawn to things? All I know is that for 40 years Al has seemed like the way to be. Like Pat Tillman might seem the way to a younger generation.

So I’m there with my sign last week and a guy maybe in his 50s, a white guy in a tie, slows down and says something like, Ain’t that the truth! I look at him and smile. Al probably would have been more stoic. But I smile, and the guy starts telling me he was once in prison, and he was amazed how many of the other prisoners came to him to have him write letters for them. Oh my, I thought, there’s one more example of how not teaching people to read affects their lives. Think about that. Guys in jail came to this guy to have him write letters for them. Not term papers. Not letters to their lawyer. But just plain letters home. By law a young person has to stay in school until they’re 16. So, these guys in jail had been in school from kindergarten or first grade through 10th grade, at least; and could not write well enough to write a letter home. Of course, this is not news, prisoners asking someone else to pen a letter for them. We’ve seen it in movies, and it’s a good scene usually. But I think it’s a scenario that a college professor teaching elementary education prospects could put up on the blackboard at the beginning of the semester and it could be analyzed the whole marking period. How could someone go to public school for 10 years and not know how to read well enough to be able to write well enough to write a basic letter?

If the topic were discussed long enough, some student might say, I wonder if the fact that these men couldn’t read well contributed to the life that landed them in jail. Eureka moment! There you are. That is of course a contributing factor. Imagine being an adult without the skill to write a letter home. That means no emailing either. That means no participating in the common world. How can schools not see that to pass these students on before they can read as well as they should at that grade level is doing a terrible disservice to the kids and their neighborhood and the family they might start some day.

The sign doesn’t say all that. But it implies it. And sometimes people who have to squint and stare a long time to read it, sometimes they’ll say, That’s right, or they’ll just smile sadly as they walk on by.

2011-09-14T02:33:00.000-07:00

Message In A Bottle

A woman’s distant family problems wash ashore

Of course I’m excited about this book. Martha Southgate and I worked together 25 years ago on a weekly paper I started in Cleveland. She was interested so much in writing and the arts, she was destined to move here. She’s been here quite a while now. This is her fourth novel. The first three got good praise. The first one won the Coretta Scott King award.

This one’s got Cleveland in it, and it’s got Woods Hole in it, a world away from Lake Erie’s shores. It’s about a woman from a black family with classic books on the shelves. It’s about alcohol and the distance it imposes. it’s about other ways we distance ourselves, too. It’s about the reasons. We read books to see what the reasons might be for how we are. Here’s a graceful, fearless attempt to show us some reasons.

2011-09-14T02:23:00.000-07:00

Less Cool By Degrees

A mixed-race young man’s personal culture wars

Thomas Chatterton Williams grew up in the white part of town. In New Jersey. You understand how he is drawn to the black culture he sees in the hip-hop images on the TV in the black barbershop he is driven to every couple weeks. You’re stirred along with him when he finds that new, proud part of his life to identify with. You recognize why he wants to. Part of you wants to too. That’s part of why you’re reading the book.

But he’s not all that. And it doesn’t accommodate all of him. He’s his parents’ kid. Intellectual aspirations are as much a part of him as his basketball and his music. Just hearing that, you can tell it’s a good story. And it’s told well. Williams is lean and truthful. Just like he looks.
Adults and high-school kids will like it. Nothing not to like.

2011-09-14T02:22:00.001-07:00

This beautiful six-times-a-year magazine talks about the best photographs in New York’s galleries and museums. Its site is photographmag.com. But get the hard copy.

2011-08-02T08:11:00.000-07:00

Soul on Ice

The Water Guy’s poem and other things that came my way on the court house steps.

The idea came to me in the night. The sign idea. I’d get a sign made. I’d put a line on it about kids and reading and I’d take it downtown in front of the Tweed Court House where the Department of Education does its business. I’d been there before to a few of their evening public meetings. So I knew the lay of the land. Sidewalk and big steps. I’d go to Kinko’s and get a sign made. I was ready to get out of my apartment with this obsession I had about the schools not teaching poor kids to read.

And so, there I was one morning at 8:00 on Chambers Street, three or four steps up the big rung of stairs in front of the building, holding my sign up, aiming it out toward the passers-by, most of them on their way to work in other buildings. The Dept. of Ed workers I thought I’d see passing me on their way up the stairs, didn’t come that way. They go in side doors underneath the steps. That was not how I imagined it. But I eventually learned to pick them out of the crowd coming in either direction from their subway stations and I made sure they could see my sign.

I wasn’t there to be a jerk, shoving my sign in people’s faces. I just wanted it to be seen. I wanted the people to read the words and think about them. ‘Why Not Teach Every School Kid To Read Well.’ I felt good holding the sign with that message.

No one knew who I was. Some didn’t even know the building was the Dept. of Ed’s. It doesn’t say so. For all they knew I could have been working for some charter school or Hooked-on-Phonics. Or maybe I was running for office. Or maybe I was a nut. But most of the people walking by learned to trust that I was well-intentioned, and as the days went on they’d smile at me. One said she’d missed me the day before. Some folks would nod at me and my sign and say, Right On. Others would say, Amen. A couple older women said emphatically, Absolutely. One guy said his wife teaches science in the city schools. He said she said that when they have to write something, it’s illiterate. How could it nor be if they can’t read well, I thought. You can only learn to write by reading. So I knew I was right to come there with my sign. I was finding out things. People wanted kids to read well. They were telling me. One guy, a young guy, said there ought to be a thousand people there with you with signs.

I hadn’t thought about a thousand people being there. I had imagined a march some day. I had imagined Spike Lee standing there with me. Caroline Kennedy maybe. Justin Tuck. Melo. Sapphire. They could stand by me with my one sign or I’d get others made at Kinko’s for them. I’d do whatever it took to get the message out strongly. I have a feeling something good is going to come of it.

Here’s one thing that’s come already. A couple weeks ago passing below me on the sidewalk was a young black guy pushing a cart of some kind, a big heavy-looking cart , with Styrofoam tubs on it filled with ice and many bottles of water. He was gonna’ sell them to tourists I assumed. Brooklyn Bridge is nearby. Lots of things. Compared to the rest of us on the block, he looked like a farmer tilling rocky soil on a hot day. And he stopped his plow and got my attention. He wondered if I’d read something he wrote. I said sure. He said he’d stop by again and give it to me. A week went by before he got it to me. Here it is.

READ A BOOK

THE ONLY THING THAT’S WRECKIN MY PATIENCE
IS NO EDUCATION
YOU SAY F THAT
2 OF YOUR FRIENDS ARE TUCKED FLAT
15 YEARS OLD WHAT WAS THEIR LEGACY
JUNK FOOD JUNK MOODS AND TREACHERY
THE STREETS IS A MOUTH READY TO EAT YOUR SOUL
AND YOU INSIST ON CHASING INVISIBLE GOALS
I ADMIT THE SYSTEM ONLY TEACH YOU LIES
NOT ONE WORD ABOUT HOW THE AFRICANS DIED
BUT IT TEACH HOW TO READ SO READ A BOOK
AND LEARN HOW TO DEFEND AGAINST THE CROOK
DON’T READ AND YOU WILL ALWAYS FALL SHORT
JUST BLOODY MEAT IN AN ALLIGATOR COURT
BAGGY PANTS AND HAIR IN BRAIDS
20 SOLDIERS AND NO GRENADE
THESE PEOPLE AIN’T SCARED OF YOU
BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO
BUT READ A BOOK AND SHOW THEM POWER
TELL THEM THEIR HISTORY AND OURS
THEY DON’T CARE HOW LOUD YOUR MUSIC IS
OR WHO THE HOTTEST RAPPER IN SHOW BIZ IS
THEY LOVE THE RAPPERS THEY JUST TALKIN SLICK
SHOWIN YOU HOW TO KILL OUR KIDS
WITH CRACK AND GACKS THAT DON’T CARE ABOUT INFANTS
GOING TO WAR OVER TOPICS THAT’S SENSELESS
READ A BOOK SEE WHAT’S INSIDE
AND YOU WILL KNOW THE WAR IN IRAQ IS GENOCIDE
MUSLIM AGAINST MUSLIM LIKE AFRICAN AGAINST AFRICAN
YOU’LL FIND OUT THAT SNEAKERS AND JEWELRY AIN’T HAPPENIN
YOU’LL STOP MAKIN BABIES BECAUSE THE DESIRE IS THERE
AND OUR WOMEN WILL STOP SEEKING A WHITEWASHED LOVE AFFAIR
DON’T END UP WITH A BULLET IN YOUR NECK
BECAUSE OF A SECT THAT AIN’T RESPECT
DON’T GO TO JAIL BECAUSE YOU ARE HUNGRY
READ A BOOK AND EARN SOME MONEY
USE THE MATHEMATICAL EQUATIONS TO RUN YOUR LIFE
BIOLOGY SO YOU CAN KNOW YOUR WIFE
HISTORY SO IT CAN STOP REPEATING
CHEMISTRY SO YOU CAN KNOW WHAT YOU’RE EATING
ENGLISH SO YOU CAN REWRITE THE CONSTITUTION
AND PHYSICS SO YOU CAN STOP THE POLLUTION
OF NATURE, THE BODY, THE WATER, AND THE MIND
READ A BOOK BECAUSE IT’S NATION TIME…

-MUKI

2011-08-02T08:07:00.001-07:00

The Art of Sending Postcards

Making an old thing new again

I’ve got two young granddaughters in Wyoming. A couple months ago it hit me that I should send them a postcard every week or two. So I’ve been doing that. What a wonderful connective thing it is to do. For the sender anyway. I have no idea how big a deal it is for them. They’d rather get stickers, I’m sure. But it’s fun to pick out the cards. It gets you to museum stores. And that’s a good thing. You get to swim around all the great stuff there. And then to leave with a bag so thin, it could be 1965 and you’ve got the new Beatles 45. It’s all cool.

Back home on the couch, a photo book beneath you for a lap desk, you think what you want to say. 15-20 words are all you’ve got room for. The pen moves nicely in the little space. It makes a mark. It’s your mark.

2011-08-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

These times still demand the Times

Read it with your English muffin in the morning

I haven’t signed-up for the online edition of the Times. I buy it every morning around 6:00. I like to go out to get it. It looks great in a stack under a light outside the magazine store a block up the street. I get a cup of coffee while I’m out, and an orange and a banana to go with my peanut butter-slathered English muffin. I love getting back to my apartment, putting my fixins on a plate, and then taking it to the couch with the paper. It’s quiet. The computer is still dark in the other room. No TV, no radio. Just the Times and me. By lamplight.

Knowing I don’t have unlimited access to the online edition makes me read the paper version more thoroughly. I spend over an hour with it. I probably save time that way though. If I had online access still, I’d waste who knows how much time during the day. This way is better. I recommend it. On all levels.

2011-08-02T07:58:00.000-07:00

If I were suddenly limited to getting three periodicals mailed to me, this would be one of them.

2011-06-27T06:05:00.000-07:00

School Is Out for Summer

Another year of failing to teach the kids to read has come and gone.

Here are some recent things that keep me thinking about this obsession of mine with the poor kids in the public schools in this city and how they’re being sinfully short-changed when it comes to reading, how they’re being allowed to graduate from local high schools without really knowing how to read. Every day I notice something that makes me think about this.

Usually I see an article in the paper or hear something on public radio, or something I see on the street brings it to mind. What I see in the paper or hear on the radio is almost never about reading, of course; it’s usually about teachers or charter schools or budgets or buildings. But that lack of media attention to my obsession grabs me too.

Last week I went out of town, and thought about it even there. I’m obsessed, like I said; so it goes wherever I go.

And where I went to was New Canaan, Connecticut for a college roommate’s kid’s high school graduation. That’s a world-and-a-half away from the schools and kids I’m usually thinking about. It’s a movie-set of Range Rovers and skis in the garage. Leafy, rolling streets and million dollar homes. A wooden train station where commuters leave for Manhattan. I looked at the high school yearbook supplement in my friend’s living room. It told where the 300-and-some seniors would be going to college next year. Exeter’s seniors couldn’t be going to better schools. And this was a public school list I was looking at.

Here some numbers came out this month from the State Education Department that showed that only 21% of the city’s high school graduates were prepared to do college-level work. 21%. Hell, major league pitchers hit that well. That’s beneath unacceptable. That’s a sin is what it is. And it’s the poor kids who bring the average down. Black and Hispanic kids. They’re the ones who are getting left behind, getting lost. I’m sure you’ve noticed. You’ve noticed it for years. Then why is the discussion always about almost everything but them and how they can’t read well enough to go to even the CUNY colleges without taking remedial courses? Why is the discussion dominated by worries about teachers and charters and buildings? Why isn’t it dominated by talk of why another year has passed and another class of kids has not learned to read well enough to make something stimulating of their lives? Isn’t that what the teachers and the charters and the buildings are there for?

The kids in New Canaan can probably ski and they likely have an iPad at home. They’ve been to Beaver Creek and St. Croix. And the mailbox at the end of the driveway groans with glossy catalogs six days a week. In some essential way this stems from the adults in their house or in some ancestral house having learned how to read well. You can’t get there any other way. And by reading I don’t necessarily mean that the whole town now, or all the great-grandparents then, read the best literature. That’s just one kind of reading. Law books require a great reading facility too. So do medical books, and books on economics. The Times, the Wall Street Journal. That’s reading too. It comes with the territory, and a territory like New Canaan doesn’t come without it.

This morning I grabbed a collection of Hemingway’s short stories off the beyond-cluttered table in front of my couch and started reading ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ for maybe the 20th time in my life. I’ve read it more than I’ve read any other piece of writing. The first paragraph of course sets the scene, and as I read it, I thought how wonderful it was to be able to read, and how sad it was that some people in this city would not be able to read it and enjoy it. Here’s the first paragraph:

It was late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man
who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the
electric light. In the daytime the street was dusty, but at
night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit
late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he
felt the difference. The two waiters inside the cafe knew that
the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good
client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave
without paying, so they kept watch on him.

I don’t show that to imply that if only the kids could read that they’d be on their way. They wouldn’t care a bit for it maybe. But there are wonderfully-written things for their age that they could be enjoying. Think how empty and restless your life would be if you couldn’t read well. Don’t we owe it to all our kids to give them a chance to be more than empty, more than restless.

I turned 64 in June. I have four grandchildren, a fifth due to show up next month. Their mothers, two of my daughters, and their fathers read to them three or four books a day. Every day. (Which is more than reading-obsessed me did when my three kids were little. I’ll excuse myself, by saying I was very young.) One granddaughter who lives way out west was two a few weeks ago. I sent books. An iPhone photo of her and her presents showed that others sent her books too. That’s great. Even if she never reads that Hemingway story, she’s likely to grow up to be a good reader.

The poorer-than-my-grandchildren city public school kids almost surely don’t have the number of books my granddaughter has. And you hear that used as an excuse for why the schools can’t seem to get their reading scores up to par. Are they saying these kids are destined by fate to not be capable readers? Can that be? The schools are making excuses? In 10 or 12 years they can’t teach a kid to read? Well then I’m glad they don’t run AA or Weight Watchers or camps for overweight kids. It’s very cynical to run a system in which only 21% of the graduates are college-ready and then to be resistant to any kind of structural change to that system. Come on. If Derek Jeter were hitting .210, he’d be on the bench.

I’m surprised New York City isn’t outraged. But it isn’t. In the casual listening I do to local radio, there’s more talk about how we’re falling behind other nation’s schools in science. Huh? I say to myself,You think those kids who can barely read have a chance to be scientists? You think the schools should teach those kids more science, not more reading?

21%. That’s a crazy, sad number. You wouldn’t think New York City would accept that of itself, would you.

2011-06-27T05:58:00.000-07:00

Let Kids Read About Their Heroes

Summer’s a good time to get them magazines

Maybe it’s Jose Reyes. Maybe it’s Wayne Rooney. Or the US women’s soccer team. Maybe it’s Lady Gaga. Whoever it is, there’s sure to be magazines that obsess about them. Buy some for your kids. They’ll love them. They’ll read every page. They’ll find it fun. They’ll like the way magazines speak to them, to their interest, their fantasy, their identity.

And it will improve their reading. Summer is notoriously the time when kids lose whatever momentum they built-up in reading. Magazines will keep them swimming in the right direction.
Magazine subscriptions are cheap. Buck an issue. Order some. It’s great when they come in the mail. For a kid especially.

It’ll take them away from the TV for an hour here and there.

2011-06-27T05:54:00.000-07:00

I Went Down to the Sacred Store

St. Mark’s Bookshop makes some changes

I read in New York Press that St. Mark’s Bookshop has been forced by the economy and New Yorkers’ new reading habits to make do without part-time workers, and has had to cut back some of the regular staff’s hours.
Nothing shocks me anymore about the deteriorating state of real books and the places that sell real books. But this news about St. Mark’s surprised me. I figured it was such a unique store in such a huge town that it would always have enough customers for the intellectually challenging stock on its shelves and the edgy graphics books on its table. The East Village, St. Mark’s Place, NYU, and Cooper Union are all right there, or close.
It’s one of those stores that changes you. You walk in and you’re different than you were seconds ago on the street. It has its own created attitude. It’s like going to the Film Forum. Which itself may be getting hurt by Netflix. This online world has its casualties.
Go to bookstores. Don’t buy books on line. Use that for shoes. And go to the Film Forum too.

2011-06-27T05:48:00.001-07:00

On one of the many tables at Strand.

2011-05-16T07:40:00.000-07:00

Well, I Finally Read Sapphire’s Push

I saw the movie first. Both got me bothered again about what needs to be done in school.

I don’t use Netflix like you’re supposed to. I don’t have a box or whatever it’s called that you can play DVDs on. So I can’t watch them on the television set in the other room. For a while I was watching them on my laptop. I’d put it right in my lap and watch it like I was reading a magazine. I liked that. But then the tray on my computer stopped working , so all I can catch now on my lap are the ‘instantly watchable’ offerings. That’s where I found ‘Precious’ a few days ago.

I was certainly aware of it since before it came out in the theaters. One of my daughters had read Push, the book it’s based on, and raved about it. Everybody raved about it. And it seemed to everybody I knew that it would be a book and a movie I’d rush to. But you know how that can go. Sometimes you resist the obvious. Sometimes you just have to wait till the time is right.

Well, it was right the other day. I stared at the movie unblinkingly, as they say. When it was over, I went out and got Push. And read it. Here’s what it made me think about:

Good as the movie was, and as faithful to the book as a movie can be, the book was way better. The book is in the first person. You’re not just looking at Precious and thinking all sorts of things about her looks and her acting and how she might feel about being cast as an ugly fat girl (a typical distancing kind of discussion with yourself that keeps movies from being as close to the bone as a book), you’re seeing her and her world through her eyes. You’re hearing what she thinks about being fat and ugly. You're hearing her tell what it feels like to be raped by her father. It’s all complicated and heinous in a way that’s harsher and more revealing than the movie action. And the book is amazingly written in the illiterate, slowly improving, way that Precious wrote and spoke then. It’s a real reading experience, unenhanced by mood-altering music, unencumbered by pronouncements to yourself that this better win an Oscar.

It made me think, of course, about reading, in the Harlem where it takes place. The TV is always going in the apartment she shares with her mother. In the book, she calls her mother’s shows, her ‘stories’. That’s what they’re called in those apartments. Stories. Not book stories like we think of them. No, the soap operas are called stories. You’ve probably seen the movie. The mother, by law, had to have gone to school till she was 16. It doesn’t seem it, does it? You could put her up on the blackboard the first day of a teacher training class and spend the whole semester discussing her. Maybe they should do that in education courses in college; maybe they should dissect Precious’s mother for weeks, and see if they can come up with a way of re-tooling the curriculum in urban public schools that would allow (make sure) that students who spend 10 or 12 years in the system come out with the most essential tool required to live an engaged life in society; the ability to read well. Look what the lack of that ability did to her life, and to her daughter’s life. It was only when Precious began to learn her ABCs, at 16, in an alternative school, that her life began to be her life.

I’d recommend you read Push. I see that Sapphire, who wrote Push, has a book coming out this summer, called The Kid. It’s about Precious’s son, who we only know of as a little baby, fathered by Precious’s father. It’s rough stuff. Poverty and few jobs and racism can breed such normlessness. That’s nothing new. But it’s not going to get any better unless the city, and other cities, determine to do the one thing that for sure will improve it all, and the one thing that the law gives them some control over for at least 10 years, and that’s to teach every kid they have in school to read well enough to live a decent life.

Let’s not get all Woody Guthrie about teachers unions and class size and who should be fired first if staffs are trimmed. If we made a commitment to teach reading above all else until it sunk in, no excuses allowed, sociological or psychological, things would take care of themselves. It has to sink in. Whatever it takes. Exposure to books and magazines that the kids find interesting must be part of every day, every class actually. Time for the kids to swim around in that material is a must.

Let’s use swimming for a minute. It works as a metaphor for all this. Indulge me.

Urban kids can’t swim as well, generally speaking, as suburban kids. They don’t have as many nice summer public pools or health club pools or summer cottages or trips to the shore. Or parents who can swim. Just like reading where the city kids don’t have as many bookstores or nice libraries or shelves at home stocked with books. Or parents who can read as well as suburban parents. Again, I’m speaking generally.

So, let’s say in gym class one semester, swimming is on the agenda in a NYC public school. I don’t even know if any city schools have pools. But let’s imagine it. Because that’s all I’m doing; imagining it. But I’ll bet the first classes are as disorderly and disheartening for all involved as an early reading class might be. Kids would be hesitant, kids would be loud, kids would screw around. Some would find it wonderfully refreshing. Others would mask their insecurity and fear over not knowing how, by being dismissive of it, calling it dumb. Refusing to even try. You can imagine it. You can also relate. We’ve all reacted to some new challenge that way.

The only thing that will make it better is for those kids to go in the pool a lot. They’re way behind the suburban kids. Will they ever catch up? Maybe. If they get a chance to get in the pool a lot. Everyday if necessary. It can’t be done without a lot of ‘reps’. But with those reps, it can be done.

The schools have the kids in class for at least 10 years. That’s more than enough time for enough reps in reading. They have to make sure the kids get those reps. That’s all that’s certain to work. In anything really. Cooking. Dancing. Swimming. Crossword puzzles. There is no substitute for reps.

A personal rep experience. I started being drawn to British soccer on television last year. I’m a passionate sport fan. But like most guys my age, I didn’t know much about soccer beyond Pele' and a few other names. Because we don’t know much about it, we dismiss it as some cricket-like thing that less robust countries play. I was the lone guy among my friends who decided to investigate it. At first I didn’t know the rules, how the standings were kept, what various tournaments were, who was good and who wasn’t. But there were visuals about it, and the wonderful crowd-chanting, that kept me coming back to watch a little bit of it every week. And what do you know, the more time I spent with it, the more reps I got, the more I started to figure it out. My friends who don’t watch hardly any of it, still dismiss it. They never got the reps. So they just don’t know. Sound familiar?

It sounds too familiar, if you ask me.

2011-05-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

A Great Idea For A Book

Successful folks remember a kid’s book that mattered to them

Whenever I think of my own early books I recall two of them that mattered: a picture book about Abe Lincoln that had one of those gold stickers on it that meant it won an award. In my memory I’m reading it (maybe just looking at it) in bed by myself. I can still feel it in my hands.

The illustrations seem rich to me still. Then I remember one Easter my grandmother gave me a non-illustrated book, my first one. It was a biography of Lou Gehrig. I didn’t even know who he was. I was a little kid. I don’t recall it having a dust jacket. It was orange. I wonder how they pick a book’s hard cover color. That orange seemed odd to me. There were no other orange books in our house.

I can remember climbing up on the back of my father’s reading chair to look at the books on the shelf in the den when no one was around. I had pajamas with feet on them still. My mother would have gasped if she saw me. I recall all the rows of covers looking irresistible to me.

2011-05-16T07:26:00.000-07:00

What ‘Teach for America’ Has Taught Us

Its founder shares 20 years worth of lessons.

I saw Wendy Kopp on C-Span a few weeks ago. She was impressively practical and realistic when talking about Teach for America, which she started in 1990. And if she was proud of what she’d done, her nostrils didn’t flare about it. I liked her.

It’s one of those programs you wished you’d been involved with, like the Peace Corps was for my generation. You go teach in a low-income part of the country for two years, right after college. A lot of the teachers stay on. Those who don’t , take the experience they got, which they likely would not have gotten, if such a program didn’t exist, and it informs their lives. It’s a plus, all around.

In the book, Kopp shares what she’s found out about schools, kids, communities. What works, what doesn’t, what ought to be done. It’s more than theory. She’s been at it 20+ years already.

She lives here. I had a hunch she’d get the nod when Cathleen Black stepped aside. Maybe she still will.

2011-05-16T07:23:00.000-07:00

Western Hospitality. Little napkin that comes with your coffee, which they let you drink in the library in Jackson, Wyoming.

2011-04-10T18:26:00.000-07:00

A Draft Dodger’s School Bag

Cathleen Black’s getting canned got me rereading a ’60s classic.

In 1968 James Herndon wrote a book called The Way It Spozed To Be about his first year teaching a segregated junior high school class near San Francisco. Up until then, teaching junior high was mostly a woman’s position. But in the late ‘60s young men started scrambling for those jobs. You could get a deferment from going to Vietnam if you could find a teaching opening. In 1969, I was one of those young men looking for such a job. I had just graduated from college. I had a wife and a month-old daughter, and I found an inner-city school in Cleveland that needed a sixth-grade teacher. James Herndon’s little book became as much a must-read for me then as Soul On Ice.

Here’s an excerpt from it. You’ll see why I picked it out to show it to you:

Well, I told myself, for one thing, 7H was in no shape to learn or do anything. The heart of their problem as a class was the simple skill of reading. There were four kids who couldn't read their own names, three or four who couldn't read anything else, and the rest of the class who could read a little but were always shaky about it. They were unsure if they would be able to avoid derision at any given moment, and so tried to assert their superiority over each other in the very area of their common incompetence. Any time we tried to work on beginning word recognition, letters, sounds, the majority sounded off about "that baby stuff," and as a result the nonreaders had to bound off about it too; they couldn't admit not knowing how to read and so they couldn't ever begin to learn, because in order to learn they'd have to begin, right there in class, with simplicities, easily identified by all as "learning to read," and open themselves up to scorn. Nothing doing. On the other hand, everything we were supposed to be doing in class presupposed that everybody could read.

That was written in 1968. In my first year in Cleveland in 1969, I found the same situation. A half-a-dozen years ago in a New York City parochial high school made up of mostly inner-city boys, I found virtually the same situation, still. I tried to do something about it both times. So did Herndon. We both tried to let kids read on their own in class, privately. Stuff they liked. So they could catch up. So they could find joy in reading. Have a better life. Principals didn’t like us doing that. The kids aren’t learning that way, they’d say.

Now here we are in 2011. In the city, Cathleen Black, the Chancellor for three months, was let go. She wasn’t a fit apparently. Her popularity rating was so low you couldn’t even call it popularity. Her pictures in the paper made her look like Nick Nolte. She lost her cool a couple times in front of protesting parents. Reports I’ve read in the daily papers imply she wasn’t expediting things on Chambers Street. I saw her once on TV talking to a kid in a classroom and she wasn’t very good at it. I saw her at two board meetings and she looked unsure of herself.

So I should be glad she’s gone, you’d think. But I’m not. I championed her when she was chosen to take over, as much as one takes over here when the Mayor is in charge and he appointed you. I think maybe he saw in her what I still see. And I don’t mean her, Cathy Black, necessarily. I mean someone from the outside. Someone who is demanding and restless and impatient with the way things are. That’s how I saw her anyway. I might be wrong. She could be a flake. I don’t know her. I never worked with her. But her obvious uneasiness at the job may have been the appropriate response to it. There was a saying back in the days of Herndon that went something like, madness is the only right response to these insane times.

That might be over-dramatic of me. But I just said it so I must believe it. I do think it’s insane the way the officials in charge of the schools here in sophisticated New York City, a place that is the print media capital of the world, are uncaring about the woeful state of reading among their poor kids. It isn’t like they haven’t seen the test results year after year in the papers and on TV. If they watch the local news, they must have seen poor people hovering around crime scenes or fire scenes who sound like they haven’t been to school at all, not for a day. When by law they were in school in New York City for at least 10 years. How could it seem like they hadn’t been to school at all? Doesn’t that dent the consciousness of Manhattan and Chambers Street?

I’m thinking, against all reports to the contrary I realize, that maybe a Cathleen Black, after more than three months would have said, this is insane. We can’t continue to run things like this. She looked like she could get mad enough to say that. And maybe she’d go Awww! if they complained. That’s what I think maybe could have happened.

I have to pin my hopes on something beyond the standard fare. The standard fare isn’t getting it done. And I don’t think the charter school movement is the answer either. That’s not much beyond the way it’s been done all along here. More than that needs to be done. Something, and this too goes back to 1968, something radical has to be done.

I’d craft a new curriculum for schools in poor districts. Yes, I’m talking mostly about black neighborhoods, but there are other poor kids too that need to learn to read. Kids who need an immersion in reading day after day, class after class, for as long as it takes for them to read well. Odd that should seem radical, isn’t it. But it is, compared to the way it’s being done now. Someone has to take charge of these schools and see to it that no one this city can’t read well. That’s one thing that can be controlled. We may not be able to control the environment the kids come from or the environment they return to at day’s end. But we have control over the kids for at least 10 years in a place where there are desks and lockers and cafeteria seats for everyone. There are teachers and books and computers. The job has to get done.

Cathleen Black did get things done in her other career. I’m sure adjustments were made on the fly. If they didn’t work, other things were tried. The marketplace let her know what worked. Readers determined things. Then readers in her office did what needed to be done. It’s 2011. You have to know how to read. Could anything be more obvious, more basic to functioning in the culture?

Let’s not relax and act smugly that we knew it all along now that Black is gone, and we’re back to having things in the hands of someone with experience. All those people with experience have been running things for years. Since 1968, and before.

Come on.

2011-04-10T18:23:00.001-07:00

You’ll Be Smarter For It

Twice a month it arrives almost intimidatingly

Take this issue for example. Here are some of the topics. They’re more than reviews: Mahatma Gandhi biography. The letters of Saul Bellow. The implications of the royal wedding. Egypt. Charles Baxter’s new book of short stories. Mexican cooking. William Shawn’s twins. Google and its digital library ambitions. Zadie Smith on Orson Welles. Wall Street. Chinese art. The rivalry between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth. Ronald Dworkin. ‘When London was the Capital of America.’ Russia’s gulag. Hungary. Crime novelist James Ellroy. Our economic recovery. A murder trial in Queens.

These are all written by experts. They’re longer than you’re used to. You won’t read them all. I don’t anyway. When you finish a review, you feel you’ve done something. You have done something; it’s not TV.

2011-04-10T18:11:00.000-07:00

To Me, The Year’s Most Important Book

It’s now in paperback. Grab one.

I’ve hyped this here before. I’ll let names you might know better have a say:

‘Reality Hunger is more than thought-provoking, it’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in a long time.’---Jonathan Safran Foer

‘I’ve just finished reading Reality Hunger and I’m lit up by it—astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed…it really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume,’---Jonathan Lethem

‘Raw and gorgeous…It’s about time someone said something this honest in print.’---Susan Salter Reynolds, LA Times

‘Might be the most intense, thought-accelerating book of the last ten years.’---Chuck Klosterman

2011-04-10T18:09:00.000-07:00

Every home should get it. Kids will love it. You’ll wonder (like me) why you lived without it. $15 for 12 issues.

2011-03-15T05:25:00.000-07:00

I’m Going Crazy Over Reading

The city’s failure to teach its students to read well is beyond madness.

Let me start with this. It’s the opening of J.D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters:

One night some twenty years ago, during a siege of mumps, in our enormous family, my younger sister, Franny, was moved, crib and all, into the ostensibly germ-free room I shared with my eldest brother, Seymour. I was fifteen, Seymour was seventeen. Along about two in the morning, the new roommate’s crying wakened me. I lay in a still, neutral position for a few minutes, listening to the racket, till I heard, or felt, Seymour stir in the bed next to mine. In those days we kept a flashlight on the night table between us, for emergencies that, as far as I remember, never arose. Seymour turned it on and got out of bed. ‘The bottle’s on the stove, Mother said,’ I told him. ‘I gave it to her a little while ago,’ Seymour said. ‘She isn’t hungry.’ He went over in the dark to the bookcase and beamed the flashlight slowly back and forth along the stacks. I sat up in bed. ‘What are you going to do?’ I said. ‘I thought maybe I’d read something to her,’ Seymour said, and took down a book. ‘She’s ten months old, for God’s sake,’ I said. ‘I know,’ Seymour said. ‘They have ears. They can hear.’

The story Seymour read to Franny that night, by flashlight, was a favorite of his, a Taoist tale. To this day, Franny swears that she remembers Seymour reading it to her.

I copied that out because I wanted you to hear it. Because it’s beautiful. Because I believe in the ‘craziness’ of it. And because it feels to me like it matters today. Of course it does.

I’ve become as crazy as Seymour about reading. Everything I see in the paper or hear on the radio about schools and kids, I see through the prism of reading. When I read a couple weeks ago that an overwhelming amount of New York City’s public school grads need major remedial work when they go into the city university system, all I could think was, of course that’s true. If they can’t read easily, they couldn’t possibly be ready for college-level studying. It makes me cynical. Cynical that it wasn’t a page one, above the fold, story. What could be more important? What could be more telling about how cities and schools work, than showing the natural outgrowth of our grade schools and high schools not teaching their kids to read well? In 12 years. The papers and radio (and TV probably, too; I don’t watch local TV news.) gave more space to discussions about which teachers will get laid-off in budget cutbacks. Everyone wants to be Woody Guthrie and sing a song about injustice. Well, it’s a way bigger injustice to let kids graduate, those who haven’t dropped out already, without knowing how to read. We’d rather crucify the parents that let their competent teen-age daughter try to sail around the world, than crucify the system that sends its charges out into the choppy waters of society without knowing how to read. Talk about drowning. There are kids drowning all the time in our city, because they don’t know how to read. It’s irresponsible. It’s sinful.

On WNYC, the local NPR station, they’ve had a segment recently where they ask listeners to try to answer the questions the grade school kids are asked on the big all-important science test. I’ve heard a couple installments of it. Part way through each segment I turn my radio to sports talk. I do that to keep from getting mad. Of course the kids can’t answer those questions. The adults hardly can. But the adults weren’t just in science class, like the kids were. The kids couldn’t possibly answer them, because they couldn’t possibly read them well enough to answer them. But that isn’t said. It isn’t said that the kids who need remedial work in college with 12 years of school under their belt, couldn’t answer them. It’s crazy. Even the brilliant, thoughtful hosts on the show, don’t get it. Where’s Seymour when you need him? He knew that the bottle was not what Franny needed in the dark that night, but some other kind of nourishment.

All of the city is outraged now at Mubarak and Gadhafi and the governor of Wisconsin. Of course, who wouldn’t be. But we weren’t outraged even as late as a month ago. Until the citizens took to the streets. What will it take to get us outraged about the schools and their failure to teach poor kids to read? Mothers here are going to have to take to the streets. Will you march with them if they do?

Look how angry we got at No Child Left Behind. Look how we screamed about the Patriot Act. Why don’t we get as riled about the fact that our kids get passed from grade to grade, in smugly enlightened New York City, without knowing how to really read? Why did we worry more about the Patriot Act than we do about the fact that most of our kids can’t read well enough to go into those libraries? Would we all rather be armchair Woody Guthries than Seymour?

Am I crazy to think that if the kids learned to read, a whole lot would change? Colleges would really be colleges and not just places where so many kids are at an 8th grade level, if that. Police and firefighters tests would not be accused of being racially biased, when really they’re only unfair because some of those taking the tests can’t read well enough to answer enough of the questions correctly. Schools could teach challenging content. Teachers could be more enthused about their classes. Imagine what it’s like to teach literature or history to kids who read grades below the level it says on the door. What does class size or school size or teachers salary matter if the kids aren’t being taught read? What do charter schools matter if they aren’t primarily focused on teaching kids to read? From everything you hear, it seems the charters are just better, if they are that, at teaching kids to do well on the big tests. Or they’re better at knowing how to get kids into colleges that have slots available for city high school graduates, even if those colleges know major remedial work will be required. What does that mean? Is that education?

The picture I attached to this is of kids entering the school board meeting in Brooklyn. You’ve heard about those meetings. The parents hissed and booed the Chancellor. It was all about school closings and using space in some schools for charter schools. The signs the kids are carrying say, Bolder Faster Change. I don’t know what they meant by it. They probably meant, make the schools work for us now. Yeah, let’s do that. Let’s think about what would be the essential ingredient that would do that. Can crazy me be the only one who believes reading is the answer?

Franny swears that she remembers Seymour reading it to her.

2011-03-15T05:19:00.000-07:00

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL---STILL

The perfection of pocket-size paperbacks

They ruled once. They were all you could get, after the hardcovers. You’d see them on racks mostly. Like you now see city postcards outside magazine stores. You couldn’t really spin the racks. Most of them were leaning to one side or another, and one rack would sometimes bump into one next to it as you slowly turned it.

You’d see the racks in stores, and airports, in hotel lobby gift shops. They held Peyton Place, The Carpetbaggers, The Catcher in the Rye. In grade school I bought Catcher off a rack in my small-town cigar store. The cover had a boy on it with a red cap on backwards. Adding that picture to the title, I figured it was a baseball book.

You can still get them. Though they don’t dominate anymore. I love ‘em. Sometimes, about to run out the door to meet someone who will keep me waiting, or heading to a subway, I’ll grab one, slip it in my back pocket. I feel young again then. Back in Time. When Vonnegut was still alive, and Cat’s Cradle might be the book on my hip.

2011-03-15T05:15:00.000-07:00

The Classic Opinionated Movie Book

It’s heavy like the big dictionary it is

It’s one of those they call ‘the perfect bathroom book’. You can turn to any page and maybe find some entry that’ll matter to you; if not, just turn to another page. I just did it this second , and ‘Peter Falk’ was there. There are 1500 entries. I just tried it again and there was ‘William Hurt’.

It’s not just dry biographical notes either. Or italicized filmographies. David Thomson, who taught at Dartmouth, is opinionated and will challenge you, maybe make you mad. He’s got his own tastes. You’ve got yours. Oh, he’s smart. It’s fun to disagree with him.

It’s almost 1000 pages. Get it for yourself . We’re movie crazy, aren’t we? Soon, the way they’re talking, they’ll be more movies than you can look at, on the computer. This book would be a good companion for all that.

2011-03-15T05:11:00.001-07:00

A small photo book I saw in a frame shop in Wyoming. I wrote down the title and ordered it when I got home. It’s a story about the photographer’s brother. The other day I noticed that Viggo Mortensen edited it.

2011-02-13T18:41:00.000-08:00

The Chancellor Needs A Mantra

The failing way the schools are run now demands a new approach from her. She has to look within herself.

This is the 15th issue of this newsletter. I didn’t know how often it would come out when I started. It seems to have settled into a once-a-month schedule. I say I’m going to do it more frequently, but 30 days seem to go by before I get another one out.

But I think about kids and reading almost every day. I have for a long time. That’s why I started doing this. It’s hard not to think about kids and reading, especially living here. You see a lot of kids. I’m a big walker, and not going to a job anymore, I have time to roam around the town. I pass by schools and see kids trudging into school in the morning, bounding out in the afternoon. I see them giggle and squeal, grab each other. I see older kids with older faces. Some paired-off with a love interest. None of them give an inch of ground when you’re trying to pass through them on the sidewalk. I kind of get a kick out of that. It’s a delicious pain sometimes to be reminded you’re an old guy in their eyes. Your cool-color running shoes, and Patagonia fleece don’t impress them.

The schools here look grim. (I’m just talking about the outside now. I haven’t been inside them. ) They’re just stone. They’re right up to the sidewalk. So I don’t see them like I’d see the schools when I lived in Ohio, from a car on my way to work. There you’d see the whole school set back from the street. Grass in the front. The bright windows on three or four floors lit like an Advent calendar. Here you don’t get that distance to take it all in.

I read about kids and reading most days. I go to web sites, or old books from when I was a teacher years ago. I go to the big Barnes & Noble near me on Union Square and look through the children’s section, and the books for teachers and parents. I don’t know why that stuff interests me so much, but it does. I think a lot about my four young grandchildren, some near, some far, and when I’m walking west from my apartment I make a point to go by Books of Wonder on 18th Street to see what new kids books are in the window. I go in often. When you’re a grandparent you do those things.

You’d think from I what I’ve said, that I’d be reading every word on schools I see in the Times. I don’t though. It ‘s almost always uninspiring (I say’almost’ because there must have been something I’ve read that’s been inspiring, even I can’t recall that happening). What they write it seems is always about the politics of it, or the physical plant closings of it. Or the test scores. If they try to be more ‘human’ about it, they focus on a chess team in a poor section of town. That kind of thing. I can’t tell you how many articles about chess teams I’ve seen over the years.

What they don’t seem to write about is reading. Other than when it’s to point out the poor test scores. And even then, they seem to worry more about math scores. Everyone seems to worry so much today about math scores. Science. As if America isn’t the place where Google and Facebook and iPhones and all that stuff was invented. They don’t worry about reading like they ought to. Maybe they don’t know what to say about it. Maybe it doesn’t require as much equipment as math and science do, and newspapers, founded for a male readership, are more comfortable talking about hardware, and numbers. Maybe poetry and short stories are thought of as stuff for girls. If you go by the test scores for the city’s boys, you’d think they think that too.

If you go to the school board meetings, they don’t talk about reading there either. School closings and charter schools seem to be the topics of the moment. The big solutions. Charter schools and closing failing schools. I wonder if the Cleveland Cavaliers moved to a new arena, got out of their failing one, if their record would improve. How much has new Citi Field helped the Mets? I think it’s a ludicrous distraction from the more radical issue of teaching the kids to read, above everything else.

I had real hopes for Cathleen Black. Joel Klein was such a loser at every board meeting I attended (on his Blackberry virtually the whole two hours) that I thought this hot-shot publishing woman would be not only easily better than Klein, but may have some magic. I could care less that she had no education degree. But she has looked like her own kind of loser so far. She needs to stop the press tours to schools, and instead sit down in a quiet place and find a mantra that says reading. She should meditate on that twice a day. And then she has to marshal her self-assurance and her forceful management skills and make the schools run as beautifully as her magazines were run. Making sure that all the graduates could easily read every word in the magazines she fashioned.

She’s clueless now. Aimless. The poor thing (I know that’s sexist but that’s how I felt about her at the meetings). She’s without a map. They’re all without a map. They grab some au courant idea like charter schools and get stuck on it. The parents holler from the gallery and she, probably a very confident leader (or at least projecting confidence) in her publishing life, sits up on the stage at the big long table, averting her eyes, almost rolling them. She made the much-talked-about ‘Aww’ comment out of pained frustration. She had nothing of substance to say to their pleas. What could she say, these changes are going to work wonders for your kids? No. Because they’re not. She knows it. Everybody must know it.

If you’ve read the issues of this newsletter when Mary Leonhardt has written the main essay (If you haven’t, you should. Look at acityreader.blogspot.com), you’ll be convinced, I believe, that if the kids were given time enough and freedom enough to read what interests them, in school, they could become avid readers and succeed at all their subjects. What could be more wonderful than that. Or simpler. Hard to believe that sounds radical. How could it not be true though. Think about it. Every subject needs an ability to read and a competent, agile mind that comes from reading. It’s the simplest solution. Why don’t they see it. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

If I had any nerve, beyond writing about it, I’d get mothers to march down to Chambers Street carrying signs, saying teach our kids to read, let my people read. Something’s got to happen here. The schools are wasting the kids’ time, wasting the kids’ lives. They have them for twelve years. They have to get the job done. The kids have to bound out of school each day, having been stimulated by reading. Imagine what that would be like. The size of the school wouldn’t matter. Charter or not wouldn’t matter. The Chancellor wouldn’t look clueless anymore. She has to make that happen. The kids I wade through on the sidewalk are too cool to be shortchanged.

2011-02-13T18:37:00.000-08:00

Where All The World Is Shiny

For cheap thrills, dip into your local magazine store

It’s a beauty of living in this city, and of living on the second floor like I do, that magazine stores are easy to get to. Even with the almost-give-away cheap prices for subscriptions today, it’s always worth your time to browse the shiny walls of a place filled from the ceiling to your feet with irresistible mags. Why wait till you’re at the airport or the train station and too hurried to enjoy it.

You’ll find periodicals you didn’t know existed. You might grab a photo mag or a British political paper, and get excited in that special way only page-turning can do. The internet doesn’t come close.

Take your kid with you. The porn is in the back or non-existent. They’ll want you to get them a magazine. If they really like it, you can subscribe to it.

I resist cheap home delivery offers from the Times, so I can walk a block in early morning to get mine at the store. All those covers.

2011-02-13T18:21:00.000-08:00

TRACK THIS PAPER DOWN

The Brooklyn Rail: It is the road to ride

I’ve been reading this for about a year. It comes out 10 times a years. It’s thick. On good paper. It feels like the Voice once did. Feels even better than that. It’s writing is stimulating. It’s more like The New York Review of Book in its style and topics.

Politics, cultural stuff, some fiction. The art is smart and all in black-and-white. The ads are too. And they’re not the usual garish tabloid ads. They’re for galleries and books. You feel while you’re reading it that you’re in the New York you wanted it to be when you moved here.

I subscribe to it but you can find it for free in some bookstores. They have a cool website (brooklynrail.org). But I’d look for a hard copy. Its texture is a big part of reading it. And it’s worth reading.

2011-02-13T18:14:00.000-08:00

One of the rich pages in Unexpected: 30 Years of Patagonia Catalog Photography.

2011-01-11T09:50:00.000-08:00

Last Week I Friended

Walt Whitman

He’s always been there when I needed him

In this new month of the new year, I needed inspiration. What was there to say about kids and reading right now? The new Chancellor had just begun. I’d given her my suggestions in the last issue. So I went to Whit (that’s what my co-worker and I called him in the bookstore I ran more than 30 years ago in Cleveland) to shake up my mind. He can do that. Like no one else. I could write down pages of passages. But here’s just one; one that seems to fit this place, this topic:

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.

I think so too. We must be great. We must make sure all our people can read.
I decided to re-run my first essay. The one that says best what this project of mine is all about:

And They Call This Book Country?

New York City has a rich, alluring literary tradition, but way too many of its kids don’t know how to read.

Before you move here, you have this image of New York City as a bookish place. The photograph of the famous writers gathered at the Gotham Book Mart. The New Yorker. Random House. Esquire. The Strand. Susan Sontag. The Reading Room at the big library. Simon and Schuster. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Columbia. NYU. Tom Wolfe. The New School. Woody Allen. The New York Times Book Review. Vintage paperbacks. The New York Review of Books. J.D. Salinger. The Paris Review. The Algonquin. The Partisan Review. Delmore Schwartz. You even see it call itself Book Country in ads for some kind of book fest. It would be your kind of place, you believe.
Then, about the time you’re moving here a dozen years ago, you see a photo on the front page of the Times as you’re skimming the headlines before you sit down to read the the whole paper, and you think, oh, that must be a picture from some place like Harlan County, Kentucky about some hardscrabble issue, one of those features the Times does now and then about some place remote from New York and its refinement (see above).

But when you’re in your seat on the couch and you look closer you’re shocked to see that it’s not Kentucky at all but a picture of one of the ball fields in New York City where the public high school teams play their games. There are other pictures inside of other sorry-looking fields. You’re not so naïve to think the public school fields would be like a suburban school’s fields, but you can’t believe that they’re that bad and you feel like a fool for being so unaware and you get angry at New York for not being a good person if that’s how it’s let its playing fields for its kids go. You hope your friends don’t see the article.

You move to Manhattan as planned and the condition of playing fields doesn’t come up much. Anyone you knew from college who lived here has moved to the suburbs, for reasons like playing fields for their kids. You do read, maybe prompted by that article, that some mogul(s) is fixing up some of the fields. That makes you feel better. You wanted more outrage from the citizenry maybe, but at least some progress is being made. What you really wish is that the Mayor would declare eminent domain and seize all sorts of parking lots and raze under-used buildings and put in rich, green, playing fields throughout the city. He could even take too-exclusive and over-blown Gramercy Park up the street from where you live and turn it into a hockey rink. You very much wish for spaces for kids here. You’re surprised no one else brings it up ever.

But that’s not really about the New York bookishness that drew you here. That’s only a first instance of how you are disabused of some of your New York illusions. Those nasty playing fields would be as nothing compared to what really starts bugging you, and what bugs you still about the city. But maybe those playing fields will come in handy as a metaphor. You’ve come to see too many of the public schools in this bookish city as just as hardscrabble and under-watered and un-tended-to as those awful-looking fields. You aren’t talking about the physical plants of the schools, though they usually looked pretty uninviting. No, you are talking about the reading life of the kids in so many of those big schools.

In the neighborhood you live in now, you could stand, on a holiday, when traffic is light, in the center of the intersection in front of your apartment building, and you see five bodegas of varying quality, two of them selling flowers. Three dry cleaners, one with washers and dryers. A newsstand with a busy lottery machine, an internet café. There’s an off-brand grocery store, a couple nail salons, two liquor stores, a CVS, a Starbucks, a Dunkin’ Donuts, two good bagel places, one pizza place (you refuse to count the one that sells a-shot-and-a-slice). Maybe a dozen restaurants, and almost that many popular bars. It’s a great neighborhood, with, hey, that exclusive park-with-a key just a short block away. It has all you wanted when you moved here. Except it doesn’t have a bookstore. The newsstand will sell you fashion magazines from Milan, muscle magazines, college hoops mags. But there’s no bookstore in sight. You can walk to Union Square to the vibrant, four-floored Barnes & Noble and you do that. And Strand is not far beyond that. But you wanted your neighborhood to have its own bookstore, a small one like where one of the bodegas is. Didn’t they say this town was Book Country?

You know you have no real reason to complain about what your immediate neighborhood lacks when you compare it to the parts of the city where those ballfields are. There aren’t really any bookstores out there. You think of that promo that said New York is Book Country. Just parts of it, they must have meant.

There’s another metaphor you use when you’re having a pint with friends and you steer the conversation your way and you start going on about kids and reading and the poor results poor kids get in reading tests. You say that in a small island culture where everyone lives near the shore, swimming is the most important skill that to needs be taught to kids so they survive, so they don’t drown. They don’t teach soccer or traditional dance steps until every child knows how to swim. When you see that your friends accept that as obvious, you bring up New York City’s schools. You say that in order to survive in this culture you have to know how to read, more than you need to know how to sing or shoot hoops or play volleyball or know who dug the Erie Canal. You have to know how to read before anything else. In order to survive really. In order not to drown.

The Mayor (our Mayor who shouldn’t be our Mayor again), in his treasure chest campaign, so touted the success he claims he’s achieved in the schools since he took them over, you thought he was maybe going to buy an aircraft carrier and fly onto it and claim the learning war was over. You get mad thinking that he would have been cheered.

Don’t they see, kids are drowning still. A third of them can’t read well enough to pass their swimming test. And you know that many of the kids who pass are really only dog-paddling. Why would the Mayor who fastidiously saw to it that 100% of the bars complied with his no-smoking edict, why does he not demand that 100% of the city’s kids know how to read? In Cleveland, where you came from 12 years ago, there’s a plaque on the front of the big library that says: Kids Who Read Succeed. Hell, maybe Cleveland is Book Country.

You wonder if anyone really cares. It isn’t talked about much. The Times and other publications talk about numbers and unions and rubber rooms. You can’t even name the Times’ education editor. Do they have one? You wonder why mothers of kids in the schools don’t take to the street with pots and pans and march down to Chambers Street to demand that their kids be taught to read. They know what it means for their kids not to know how to read, if only from seeing the neighborhoods filled with the bodies of kids who’ve drowned.

If the Mayor could up-end centuries of tradition and outlaw tobacco from public houses, why can’t he buck Albany and the Board of Regents and turn the city’s schools into reading academies where kids would immerse themselves in books and magazines, and the state syllabus be damned. It isn’t longer hours at school the kids need, it is focused hours. It is reading time. Time to make up for what they lacked in their earliest years. The city has them for 12 years. You think about that sometimes when you remember that that’s how long ago you came here. That’s a long time.

So you decide to start ‘a cityReader’. You’re not sure what you’ll do with it. But you’re tired of talking about it. Tired of your own metaphors. You want to go around and see what the deal is…why in 12 years the schools aren’t teaching the kids to read well enough to succeed.

2011-01-11T09:48:00.000-08:00

Me Got an iPhone!

Did it change my (the) world?

My laptop screen broke. I was going away before Christmas. I had to have something to check my email on. I’m a little bit obsessed that way. I’ve got buddies and kids I like/need to hear from. So that was the tipping point. I bought a shiny, smooth little iPhone. Not giddily. I’m too old for that. I’ve had it a month. I’ve bought not one app. No free ones even. I don’t play games. It’s a phone and an email-box for me. And a snazzy alarm clock. I like it.
But I’m not going to read [ital]The New York Times[ital] on it. I’m just not. I don’t care if the [ital]Times[ital] has formatted itself to fit the phone. I like my walk in the morning darkness to get the paper. I like the way it looks under lamplight when I bring it back in the apartment with my cup of coffee in a paper cup. It’s a stunningly-designed vehicle that is bracing to hold. It gets as broken-in as pajamas as you read through it. I recommend going back to it, if you’ve left it.

2011-01-11T09:45:00.000-08:00

I Thought It Was Going To Be A Kids Book

It turned-out to be a graphic novel, and definitely not for kids

You see art-student types reading graphic novels on the subway. You wonder why they spent ten bucks on something they can go through so quickly. Even though you read ‘Maus’ years ago and would spend way more than ten bucks on it. Shelves of them are expanding in bookstores. I went into Forbidden Planet recently and was amazed by the number of them, and the variety of topics. And the great graphics of them.
This one will mean something to you if you’re real reader. It’s warm, and wistful, and dark at the same time. I was stunned by its plot. I gave five of them as Christmas gifts. Look for it.

2011-01-11T09:41:00.000-08:00

The magazine I get most excited by when it shows up in my mailbox. I don’t ski, or climb mountains, or kayak, but the writing and the photos take me away. Get it. Magazine subscriptions are cheap.

2010-11-15T07:47:00.000-08:00

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

Will the Mayor’s fashionable new choice for Schools Chancellor, Cathleen Black, put reading back in style?

I didn’t like Joel Klein. I saw him at school board meetings. He was less than just a suit. He sat there playing with his Blackberry. The whole time. Looking up occasionally, dyspeptically. You wished for C-Span cameras, to catch him at it. If he was a big-deal lawyer in his former life, you wondered how. He was dismissive of parents and activists who tried to hold his attention in their paltry two-minute chance at the microphone. He acted (‘acted’ is almost too strong a word for what he did) tired, disinterested. I wanted to stand up and point out his glaring, insufferable lack of interest. But I’m sure everyone in the audience had already noticed.

Most of the audience were minorities. Parents of kids whose education, whose future, he controlled. You’d think he could rise to the occasion once a month to seem empathetic, show some interest. Nope. If the city’s media ever commented on his pathological lack of charisma, I never saw it. He was too close to the idealized paradigm of what New York holds dear: high SATs, Ivy League, kids in private schools, knew the Clintons, worked in Washington. Now he’s going off to work with Rupert Murdoch. In the reign of what-party Bloomberg, that’s no real surprise. It’s no bigger a move than changing your August vacation plans from Martha’s Vineyard to Nantucket. I’m glad he’s going.

I’m not sure what he accomplished. Are you? If there were some changes made, other cities made them too. Likely before New York did. No Smoking and bike paths and mayoral control of the schools weren’t invented here.

Now the Mayor wants Cathleen Black to take over. I’m not surprised by the choice. She stylish. The Mayor likes all that. She’s sorta’ Democrat, sorta’ Republican. Kids in boarding schools. Rich enough to own homes on the Vineyard and Nantucket. That’s right in Michael Bloomberg’s wheelhouse.

She has no experience in education. The predictable critics are grousing about that. As if all the former chancellors with doctorates in education had done jack for the poor kids here, or anywhere else. I like the choice. She’s full of life. She looks, and certainly is, able. That to me is most important. An able person can succeed in just about anything. She’s 66, so she’s seen a lot. She has kids of her own. She’s hired many young people at all her magazines. She appears, especially after dull-lawyer Klein, to have charisma. And her professional success has been in publishing, so she must respect the written word. If you’d rather have some PhD who’s still reading John Dewey at bedtime, you maybe haven’t noticed that we’re in crisis here.

Way too many kids who have gone through the public schools in this country’s most sophisticated city don’t know how to read to save their lives. They are being shortchanged year after year. Don’t show me statistics like Klein showed us statistics. The schools have sucked for a long time. And he left them sucking still.

Maybe Cathleen Black will make them better. She’s not a lawyer or an ambitious professional bureaucrat, used to sober briefs and boring documents. Her life has been spent turning blank pages into artful rectangles of style and order and stimulation. Just what schools should be. Does that sound crazy? That someone from a fashion mag world might have just the right aesthetic sense to make something out of the disorder of our public schools? Doesn’t sound crazy to me. Her eye for detail, her years of experience in putting out great products month after month, year after year, in a hotly competitive market should not be discounted. Between the glossy photo pages, she’s showcased writers and issues worthy of Leonard Lopate’s NPR show.

I welcome her enthusiastically. I hope she gets the OK.

Here’s what I’d tell her. Be radical. You’ve got just one shot at this. Don’t try to please the media or the boyish Secretary of Education. Don’t cater to the folks leading the charter school juggernaut. Or the unions. We’re in crisis.

This might be a guide: You know how Henry Ford paid his workers enough so that they’d be able to buy the cars they built. Well, maybe you could use that same notion, and set as your goal, making sure that the kids who reach high school in the city’s public schools can read well enough to read the magazines that you put out all those years at Hearst. That would be wonderful , wouldn’t it? I don’t mean from a marketing standpoint. You don’t have to worry about that anymore. But wouldn’t it be great to have the kids reading at a level where they could pick up any of those magazines and read through them like your two kids I’m sure can? That could be your curriculum guide. What better measure of your success?

Use that. Whatever measuring stick the system is using now must be a strange one. Do they think the kids have achieved it? Whatever it is. They can’t believe it. But they haven’t come up with anything that even remotely gets the job done.

And don’t do this: Don’t talk, like President Obama does, about every kid going to college. Nonsense. That’s like telling every fat kid they’re going to run the Boston Marathon. Let’s teach them to read first. Read well. If they can do that, college will take care of itself.

I’ve used this imagined scenario before. I’ve used it many time actually to explain my frustration with the failure of the schools here to do what, to me, seems doable. OK, imagine your oldest child is home from boarding school over the summer. He or she hasn’t got a summer job. The retired guy down the street who knows your son or daughter well, knowing that they aren’t working, asks if maybe they’d like to make some spending money. He suggests maybe they’d like to help his six-year-old granddaughter, who’s spending the summer with him, learn to read. Your kid thinks about and, not knowing how to say no to the old guy, says, Sure, I’d do that. And then asks the neighbor, How long do I get to accomplish the goal? He says, 12 years. Your kid wants to slap his forehead and laugh, and say, Who couldn’t do that? Well, apparently the New York City school system can’t. In 12 years, they can’t seem to teach most of the kids to read. Really read, well enough to read your magazines.

I hope you get the job. And that you do it as well as you’ve done your work in the shiny magazine world. The kids here deserve to shine. All of ‘em.

2010-11-15T07:44:00.001-08:00

Bob Dylan Through Good Ears

Greil Marcus’s 40 years of listening

I took this book on a trip with me a few weeks ago. I’d finished the novel I’d been reading just before I went. This was all I had to get me through. As it turned out, it was all I needed. We’ve all read Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone. But I’d forgotten how good he writes. Forty years of stuff is here. Great stuff. Personal and subjective enough to feel honest. And true. You can’t ask for more. Demanding too. He might have a love affair with Dylan’s genius. But he’s tough and dismissive when he thinks Dylan’s standards are lowered.

You can hear the music. You can recall the era. You promise yourself you’ll listen to every Dylan CD you have in chronological order when you get home. You’ll watch ‘No Direction Home’ again.

You find yourself thinking of driving your car in 1965, smoking another cigarette, hoping the radio will play the long version of ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’

2010-11-15T07:38:00.000-08:00

A Self-Portrait in Letters

Saul Bellow reveals himself in 70 years of correspondence.

Here’s the quote I have on my Facebook page: ‘If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.’ It the first line in my favorite book, Saul Bellow’s novel, Herzog. He’s my favorite writer. His is the brightest mind. Viking just published his letters. 558 pages of them. I just bought the book. I wish I had a long train trip ahead of me.

Here’s what Philip Roth says on the dust jacket: ‘It comes as no surprise that the great novelist was a great correspondent as well. I hungrily read the book through in three nights. As though I’d stumbled upon a lost Bellow masterpiece only recently unearthed.’

If you haven’t read Saul Bellow, you almost haven’t lived.

2010-11-15T07:29:00.000-08:00

The bookcase nearest my bed.

2010-10-11T05:30:00.000-07:00

Waiting for Superwoman?

Stop waiting. She’s already here. For years, teacher, author, ‘a cityReader’ contributor, Mary Leonhardt, has been making the case for the ultimate importance of reading. Here she is again.

Three years ago the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) published a follow-up study, titled To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence, to their 2004 study titled Reading at Risk. According to NEA Chairman, Dana Gioia: “new NEA study is the first to bring together reliable, nationally representative data, including everything the federal government knows about reading. This study shows the startling declines, in how much and how well Americans read, that are adversely affecting this country's culture, economy, and civic life as well as our children's educational achievement."

Among their more depressing findings: Reading scores for 12 graders “fell significantly” from 1992 to 2005. Out of 31 industrial nations, our 15 year olds rank only fifteenth, behind such countries as Poland and Korea.

How can this be? Between 2004 and 2007 money was poured into education. States were busy perfecting their assessment tests. The charter school movement flourished. Parents were made an important part of most school achievement plans. And yet . . . and yet . . .

Reading scores, according to the NEA's research, continued to plummet.

I don't think there is any mystery here. From my vantage point, in high school English classrooms across the country, from 1971 until 2008, I watched it happen.

What did I see? I saw a larger and larger number of student who, simply, rarely read. In the 1970s we worried about television pulling kids away from books. But few houses had more than one television then, and no one had cable, or DVD players, or iPods, or video games, or cell phones, or netbooks, or iPads. A paperback was still the easiest portable entertainment to carry around.

I remember, growing up in the 1950's, trading comic books and Nancy Drew books. That was our entertainment. Television was very new, and the one or two channels we could get rarely had anything on we were interested in. But a new Nancy Drew book? I would have sold my little sisters for one.

Fast forward to today. According to ‘USA Today’, in an article in their September 21, 2006 issue, the average American home now has more television sets than people. When you add in all of the other digital entertainment available to kids, is it any surprise that reading scores are plummeting?

This isn't a little matter. The NEA study documents how low reading scores have a global effect in our country―not just on reading scores, but on total educational achievement as well as participation in civic and professional life.

Is there any way to turn this around? Should we just throw up our hands? I don't think we need to, but I believe there needs to be a sea change in how we think about reading.

First of all, reading isn't just another skill kids need to be taught, along with science and math and history and health―a skill that kids learn by being taught phonics and then carefully, and tediously, pulled through reading material that the school has approved.

That's how it's been done for over a hundred years, but it didn't use to matter much, because so many children use to have rich, independent reading lives of their own. But today, that is becoming rarer and rarer. Another finding of the NEA report was that, on average, young people ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching television, but only seven minutes doing reading for pleasure

The education establishment needs to understand that until kids are turned into enthusiastic, avid readers, any educational gains will be minimal. Kids used to come to school as avid readers; now they don't. Schools need to pick up the slack, and take responsibility for turning kids into avid readers.

How can schools do this? This is the elementary school I would love to see.

The school entrance way wouldn't just have posters and announcements and signs pointing the way to the office. There would be bookcases loaded with reading material children can easily love: picture books, series books, comics, magazines―whatever children in that school love to read. Some comfortable chairs scattered around would be a nice touch as well.

Once in the main office, a visitor would see more kid-friendly reading material―on the tables, on the counters, wherever a child can reach. The school secretary would have a paperback or magazine on her desk, for reading when she has a spare minute. The principal should have plenty of reading material in his office, both for him and for any visitors to pick up.

There would be reading material scattered through the hallways―on tables, in little bookcases. Wherever there is room.

The classrooms would, of course, be loaded with reading material, as would the nurse's office, the cafeteria, the guidance office, and especially the school buses.

This is all too expensive, you say? And you couldn't possibly keep track of all these books and magazines. Wouldn't kids just walk off with them?

More expensive books could be in the school library―hardcover books, research material, expensive new fiction. The reading material scattered around the school could be bought on eBay or coaxed from parents, or funded with donations. Or perhaps the school could do with fewer computers or televisions. Imagine all of the Harry Potter books you could buy for the price of one computer.

Once the school has a rich collection of reading material everywhere, teachers should be told that at least three hours out of every school day need to be given to the children for silent reading of books of their own choice. And teachers, and the rest of the school staff, also need to be told that students must see them reading―nor for the whole three hours, perhaps, but for a good part of the school day.

I'm guessing that the response of most teachers would be twofold: one, that children would never sit still that long to just read and, two, that they have much too much other material they have to cover.

I have found with children that, if everyone else is reading, they will usually at least look quietly at reading material, if the material is interesting enough. Teachers should be told to use whatever material works. Comic books, joke books, ‘Sports Illustrated for Kids’, ‘Captain Underpants’ books . . . whatever it takes. And the reading time could initially be broken into half hour segments. As the kids become more interested in reading, and start finding books they enjoy, teachers will be surprised to find them begging for more quiet reading time.

Between quiet reading times, teachers can teach other subjects. But the exciting part of this is that a teacher will find, if she has lots of historical fiction around, and children's books about science and nature, that kids will pick these up during their free reading time, and eventually have a much more in-depth understanding of many disciplines. There is no better teacher than a book.

For this to work, however, educators have to give up a number of cherished beliefs. One is that kids shouldn't read “trashy” books. For my money, that is equivalent to saying that someone should die of thirst if they have to drink tap water rather than Poland Springs. Get kids reading first; you can introduce them to more complex literature later.

The other deeply ingrained belief in our culture is that just sitting around reading is somehow a waste of time. Kids should go to school to study and work hard. How can spending three hours a day reading ‘Goosebump’ books be a worthwhile use of time?

And maybe that points up the worst problem of all. We give lip service to the value of being a good reader, but are uneasy about having children who want to spend an entire afternoon curled up in their room with their collection of ‘Road and Track’ magazines. We're happier if they are playing soccer, or answering comprehension questions on boring, assigned school reading. Teachers think they need to be up in the front of the room all the time, teaching. What will their principal think if they are spending hours a day just presiding over students reading? Shouldn't they have the kids . . . memorizing vocabulary . . .or outlining chapters . . . anything other than just hunkered down over a Harry Potter book?

No. No more than good soccer coaches should have their players spend most of their time watching soccer videos or listening to lectures about how to play soccer. Good players need to play. Good readers need to read. Practice isn't everything, but it's close. And practicing an activity you love almost guarantees you will become pretty good at it.

You want reading scores to go up? Make sure our young people are spending two or three hours a day reading material they love. Then you can start talking about charter schools, and uniforms, and new math programs, and merit pay for teachers, and all of the other reform-of-the-day proposals.

First we have to get serious about reading.

2010-10-11T05:24:00.000-07:00

‘a cityreader’ Turns One

Our desire to get the schools here to teach kids to read well is stronger than when we started

This ‘acityReader’ you’re looking at is #12. That makes it a year since we started. Each issue and the accompanying blog (acityreader.blogspot.com)have been solely devoted to discussing the city’s school kids and reading. It’s the newsletter’s belief that there is no excuse for the school system here to oversee its children for 12 years, and at the end of those 12 years, not to have all the graduates reading at a high level. Many kids, unable to read, just drop out before the 12 years are finished. It’s a sorry situation, that, like pigeons, and gum on the sidewalk, is accepted as a normal urban tradition. ‘acityReader’ can’t accept that. We’ll keep highlighting the failure.

2010-10-11T05:19:00.000-07:00

Her Kindle Looked Unforgiving From Where I Sat

Above the clouds she had nothing nice to hold on to

Ten days ago I’m on a plane from Salt Lake City. I’m on the aisle. The flight is smooth enough that I can read without tensing every time we shimmy through clouds, or worse, shimmy when we’re in clear blue sky. What’s that about? Anyway, I’m reading the biography of John Cheever in a beautiful Vintage paperback. I look at the cover from time to time. I look at the top of the book with my finger marking my place to see how far I am. Across the aisle and back one, a woman is reading a Kindle. She’s reading one of those Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books. I looked down at it when I was coming back from the lavatory. I’m thinking, then and now, what’s the beauty in that? No wonderful cover like I’ve got. No texture. No tactile way to measure progress. No bending of the book to show you’ve been there. It was like wearing plastic Levis.

2010-10-11T05:10:00.000-07:00

I didn’t buy Exley because of its cover. But when I got it home and looked at it, I was wowed. Here’s a novel that has at its center a favorite book of the main character’s father. A real book. A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley. You may have read it. You should. The main character goes in search of the author. Look how the cover designer, Jamie Keenan, gives personality to the book. A wonderful book, by the way.

2010-09-06T18:48:00.000-07:00

THE MAYOR WOULD BE A GOOD FIT IN WASHINGTON

In teaching kids to read, his 42% winning percentage
is the same as DC’s last-place baseball team.

Wanna’ talk sports? I could talk it day and night. I really wanted to use the Pittsburgh Pirates as an example of woeful failure. But the Mayor was in the news recently talking about Washington, so instead I used the Nationals. I could also have used the Knicks.

42%. That’s how many kids read up to snuff in the latest test. 42% is all. And don’t think you could toss the book you’re currently reading to that 42% and have them breeze through a paragraph. I’ll bet you couldn’t take a stage full of graduates from a public high school here and be confident that even they could read your book. How can that be? How can the Mayor, leader of a system that took these kids into its care, under its tutelage as they say, when they were potential-filled six-year-olds … how could he not hang his head in shame when the tests show how much he’s let them down. Imagine the future for the other 58%. College, hell. Prison is a better bet. I haven’t seen him hang his head. Have you? Tell me, if you do.

OK, so maybe these kids come from book-less homes. Maybe from father-less homes where there’s not even a sports page lying around that might entice a kid to read about A-Rod, or LeBron, or Venus Williams. So maybe these six-year-olds come in with a reading deficit on day one. So? The schools aren’t expected to be magic kingdoms where that deficit will be made up in one semester. But the schools have them for 12 years. 12 years. That’s a very long time. Wouldn’t you think in 12 years they could make things right? Think about it. 12 years.

An even more chilling figure is this one I read recently: Only 28% of young black men graduate from high school on time. That’s right. I read it twice. 28%. I’m sure if they’d been taught to read, the number would be reversed. 82%. That’s what I think. God, if you can’t read, school must be horrible. Like gym class for an overweight kid.

The new school year just started. If 42% of kids in grades three through eight read that poorly (and it gets worse in the higher grades), imagine what the school year is going to be like. Have you read anything hopeful that will correct that? I haven’t. Charter schools? You think that’ll do it? Closing failing schools? Will that be the answer? The Pirates have the nicest, coziest new stadium in baseball. What did that do for their record?

The system is wrong. The culture of the schools is wrong. People send me articles they think I should read about this or that group or individual who’s trying to do some sideline project to help kids read. I dismiss it. I look like an ingrate, I’m sure. But to me the problem is so vast, so systemic, the only solution is to radically change the way schools operate. If the system isn’t changed, failure will continue. Maybe even get worse. Especially as TV becomes the default go-to way to pass time. It is for adults. Why wouldn’t it be for their kids.

The only way, and I mean the only way, is for the Mayor to really take control of things and turn every public school into a reading academy. Grades 1 through 12. Every day, every week, every semester. For 12 years. Books will be read, magazines, comic books, sports pages. Kids will be given time to read in school. Books they want to read. Huge amounts of time. Whatever it takes, so that when the graduating class is up on stage, you could take whatever book you might have with you and toss it to any one of them, and they could read it like your kid could, like you could have when you were 18. Don’t we owe that to them? Don’t we owe that to us?

Here’s a sports metaphor. When kids graduate, they should be able to dribble between their legs reading-wise. The way it is now, they can barely make a lay-up. But at graduation, everybody goes all dressed up to the auditorium and gets emotional about making it through high school and teachers get thanked and parents and grandparents get all choked up over the accomplishment — not aware that most of the kids going on to college are in no way ready for it. That’s a ruse. That’s a sin. Like I have, you’ve read about the huge percentage who have to do remedial work to make it through freshman year. So many don’t finish. Another ruse. Another sin.

So the answer has to be reading academies. That’s what the kids need. They have to make up ground. In reading. Math, don’t worry about it. Science, that either. It’s reading they have to excel at. The rest will follow.

Another sports reference. A term that’s always used. Reps. You read all the time, or see it on ESPN … a guy has to get in a lot of reps to get better. A young quarterback like Mark Sanchez, let’s say, has to get in a lot of reps to get comfortable at the position. You used to read how Larry Bird took 500 hundred jump shots every day. How Herschel Walker did something like 1000 sit-ups a day. All good athletes do reps. Well, for kids who need to feel comfortable with reading, reps are the answer. They have to read a lot. Just as the poor shooter has to take hundreds of shots every day, and the overweight kid has to run laps and do hundreds of sit-ups, so will the poor readers have to read, read, read.

The poor shooter may not have a hoop in his driveway, so the gym or playground is where he’d have to go to get his reps in. The gym is not always available to him, the playground either. But the poor reader has an advantage; he’s in school 10 months a year. For 12 years. What he needs is all right there. Books. Quiet. Plenty of time. Teachers. It’s the ideal place to get better at reading. Who cares if there aren’t any books at home. Or newspapers. Let the stupid TV be on day and night. There’s plenty of time in school to get the job done. It has to happen there. To hell with the current syllabus, to hell with the way it’s always been done, to hell with tenure concerns. These kids have to learn to read.

Once they’ve learned to read, reading will be fun. They can grab a Sports Illustrated or a Glamour magazine. They can read the Voice. Rolling Stone. People. They can roam around Barnes and Noble. Check books out of the library. Talk to their friends about what they’re reading. Go to college. Art school. Fashion school. Life will be more fun.

Mr. Mayor, they need you to help. Be their manager, with a new game plan. They want to stop losing.

Caption: HE WANTED TO BE THE MANAGER. You’d think he would have kicked the water cooler or have thrown bats by now over his team’s poor performance.

2010-09-06T18:41:00.000-07:00

DO YOUR KIDS HAVE GAME?

Sports magazines are irresistible reading portals, especially for boys.

I was bored in grade school (later schools, too) and I’d often fake sickness to stay home. My mother, anxious that I not be bored, would go down to Main Street in our small town in rural Western New York, to Engels Cigar Store, and come back with two or three sports magazines for me. She’d put one of those pillows-with-arms behind me in my bed and bring me ginger ale and lemon sherbet and ask if I needed anything else. I needed nothing else. I had all I wanted. I could read about Willie Mays and Jim Brown and Bob Cousy. I could find out about Notre Dame’s new quarterback. I was happy (happiest maybe) there in the lamplight.

Bring some of those magazines home to your kid. Get one for a neighborhood kid. If you buy them for yourself, don’t throw them out. Some boy would love them. Believe me.

Caption: SEASON’S GREETINGS. Each sport has more than a handful of fact-filled, photo-filled, pre-season magazines.

2010-09-06T18:36:00.000-07:00

IF JONATHAN FRANZEN LIVES TO BE 100…

When Ernest Hemingway was in his 20s, he could already make claims to being the boss.

Two weeks ago at Strand, there were stacks of classic Hemingway titles with wonderful covers I’d never seen. They were from England. Priced unbelievably at $4.95. I had to get one. I’ll get more later, even if I already have them all with other covers. This collection came out when he was 29. To re-read him, after all the other writers you’ve read in the meantime, is to be jolted again, like hearing early Springsteen. ‘In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows…It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.’

Caption: THE FAMILY OF MAN. These are stories about men in tough situations, alone, or with other guys.

2010-09-06T18:30:00.000-07:00

New York Mag. When it comes in the mail, it brightens the evening. It’s shinier and better designed than anything on TV. It’s a new stadium with a Jumbotron. You surely get it, don’t you?

2010-08-09T18:59:00.000-07:00

Feeling an urge to do more than jaw about kids and reading.
Feeling an urge to get dirty.

I NEED TO BE SEAN PENN

Here’s an image that came to me this morning, when I was without one, to get this started: When you read about major leaguers who come from the Dominican Republic, they invariably, in their poverty, first played with a baseball made of socks and rubber bands. Something like that. It’s so out of our realm, I can’t even accurately recall what fragments of stuff went into the balls. You almost don’t believe it. A ball? They couldn’t find even a rubber ball somewhere? Couldn’t steal a hardball somewhere? We’ve got so many balls, we can’t imagine it. You read the same thing about Latin American soccer players. No real soccer balls as kids. Paper bags and twine instead. Again, can’t be true, we half-think. Who, we wonder, not in Africa, can be that poor? Hell, we spend three bucks and more here on a little ice cream cone. A pint of Guinness is now seven.

But it is true. And that may be what it’s like for some of the city’s poorest kids where books are concerned. Maybe you’re thinking, oh no, you’ve seen some segment on local news where grateful black kids are given books by a corporate Santa or a Target store in some feel good clip, just before they go to the national news, just before the weather man makes a joke to the female anchor who’s tamping down an upright stack of papers and smiling like he’s funny. We all feel good in our New York City then, knowing that our poor kids are being looked after, that they have nice new books, and that everybody’s smiling. Did you see the faces on those kids! No problems. I’ll take another Guinness. With tip, eight bucks.

But that’s bullshit. The world is not what they tell you it’s like at 6:29. Look at the earlier segment where they showed some Brooklyn neighborhood where somebody’s been shot, where there’s been a big fire from an ashtray or an overloaded outlet or where the landlord is not fixing the busted water pipes. Look at those faces on the women out on the sidewalk, with the long-cigarette packs and the pink lighters in their hands and slippers on their feet and there’s the yellow police tape in front of their apartment building. Those kids in there don’t have books. There’s no Barnes and Noble up the street. And what do you make your own books out of? Twine and old T shirts and rubber bands? Do you think those mothers on the sidewalk in front of those buildings with cop cars red lights swirling, with firemen breaking through the walls, read to their kids? Goodnight Moon. Goodnight who?

This Bloombergian city that pats itself on the back so often you’d think it would need a chiropractor on the premises full-time must like to watch the 6:29 sign-off part of the news better than the earlier part. How else explain why it can’t get its will together to teach the kids to read even when they have them in school for 12 years . It’s staggering that the schools don’t determine to make up for the burnt-out, book-less beginnings that so many kids start out life in. Come on. Of course it’s going to take special effort. It’s going to take thinking outside the box, outside the syllabus. It can’t go on like it’s gone on. You’ve seen the test scores. They can’t suck enough, as Imus would say. No matter the spin the mayor’s Chancellor puts on them. Unless they’re 100%, they are signs of failure. As Bill Parcells always says about a team’s record: You are what your record says you are.

So here we are in the city that has so much. It’s dynamic. No doubt. I was in Dublin a couple years ago and took scores of photos of store fronts and pubs-with-Guinness and great-looking civic buildings and parks, and people. When I got back here, I told somebody, after being wowed again by this place I’d moved to, that I could have taken as many of those great Dublin-type pictures on one block right here; there’s that much good stuff here. We’re lucky to live where we do. But we’ve got kids in this same city who in the game of reading are playing with balls made of rags.

That’s why Sean Penn comes into this. The other night at 10:00 I turned my TV on just to see what might be on Anderson Cooper who I think is great whenever I catch him. He had Sean Penn on about Haiti where Penn had been for six straight months. He was now back in California, for good or just for a while, I don’t know. But he came right through the TV screen; he was so defiantly strong and unsmilingly fearless in what he said about scenes he‘d seen or things he’d come to know while he worked to provide shelter and water and food in Haiti. Was it 100% objectively true like Margaret Warner might tell it on Jim Lehrer? Who knows. But it was his truth, told unsparingly. No soft soap. He’ll blow his cigarette smoke right in your face. He makes a newsletter like this seem feckless. He makes a blog like mine seem wimpy. com.

If it’s going to take more from Bloomberg and Klein, according to me, and I say it every issue, then it’s going to take more from me and my ‘cityReader’, too. I don’t know what that’ll be, but it’s got to go toward the Sean Penn way. It can’t just be talk. It can’t be like watching high-minded TV shows. It can’t be NPR listening. It has to be more. Something where you roll your sleeves up like Sean Penn did in Haiti.

How’s this for not rolling your sleeves up like Sean Penn did: I joined Facebook last week. Here’s why though. I ‘d been told by well-meaning folks, you need to put your project on Facebook. So I finally did. But here’s really why I did, in a kind of a Sean Penn-seeking way. I sometimes have C-Span book shows on in the background on weekends while I’m reading the paper or magazines, or sneaking a cigarette. A couple weeks ago there was a guy on who wrote a book about Facebook. He said there was a young man in Colombia, who late one night posted (I’m not even sure yet if that’s what it’s called) to his 100 friends a note about how frustrated he was, continually hearing in the media about FARC, a radical group down there. When he woke up, he had like 1500 comments already. Some weeks later 1,000,000 people marched on Bogota as a result of his late night quiet rant. Man, I thought, what if I could do that about kids and reading in New York. And so that’s why I’m on Facebook. Hoping to spread the word. Knowing that I really want to be more Sean Penn about it though.

The only thing I’ve done ‘radical’ about any of this is to get 1000 stickers that say ‘acityReader’ on them with the blog’s address. You’re not supposed to put them up, even in the East Village, and a few have already been scraped off lampposts by the department of whoever does such things, so I’ve still got most of the 1000 in my apartment. But I mean to put them all up.

caption: SEAN PENN PLAYING AN ACTIVIST. He’s one in his real life, too. His six months in Haiti were more than a cameo.

2010-08-09T18:48:00.000-07:00

Doesn’t It Seem Like A Title For Today?

But it was 40 years ago that The Greening of America was all the talk

I was telling a friend a couple weeks ago that there are some books that gave words to what I was feeling at different times in my life. The Greening of America was certainly one of those. And not just for me; it spoke to the whole generation in 1970. I even saw my conservative father reading the excerpts from it in the evening paper.

I tried to get a copy last week. Out of print. Ouch. I was shocked. It was like Slaughterhouse-Five. I found a good used copy online. Even the quality paperbacks were pocket-size then. You actually carried them in your hip pocket. Vonnegut, Heller, Pirsig. To hold it now is to recall that time. I haven’t read it again. I’ve dipped into it. It’s a little intense. There was a war going on.

caption: EVOKING AN ERA. Looking at the cover art now, it’s as iconic as a T shirt.

2010-08-09T18:42:00.000-07:00

Ginsberg Shoots His Buddies

Beat Memories collects his photographs of his closest friends.

I’m going to Washington next week to see The National Gallery of Art’s show of 80 photographs that Allen Ginsberg took, mostly from 1953-1963, of Kerouac and Cassady and Corso and Burroughs and others who made up the Beats. I’ve looked at most of these photos more than a hundred times in an earlier book, snapshot poetics. I can’t recommend the book enough. It’s in paperback. You should own it.

This new one, Beat Memories is all that and more. It’s put out to accompany the exhibition. There are all the photos I’ve stared at before, and then some. Additionally, there’s an enlightening essay by Sarah Greenough. There’s also an interview with Ginsberg from 1991. You should own this book, too. The exhibit lasts through September 6. You could go. Take the Bolt Bus.

caption: ‘THE POIGNANCY OF A PHOTOGRAPH comes from looking back at a fleeting moment in a floating world’—Allen Ginsberg

2010-08-09T18:33:00.000-07:00

Harvey Pekar wrote a few things, music and book reviews, for a weekly paper,
The Edition, I ran in Cleveland in the 80s and 90s. He was wonderfully,
bewilderingly challenging. R.I.P.

2010-07-06T19:03:00.000-07:00

THE TWO-MINUTE WARNING

and other tell-tale signs that make you yawn at the school board meeting (now called, less democratically, the Panel for Educational Policy)

The most recent meeting was in late June in Manhattan (they rotate each month among the boroughs) at Murry Bergtraum High School on Pearl Street right by the Brooklyn Bridge. I went.

You think you’re at the wrong place when you get there 45 minutes early, even if you’ve witnessed the scene before at other school board meetings. There’s this huddle of cops outside the door and you wonder again if there’s been some problem or if the meeting’s been cancelled because Obama or some other big pol is in town and is being feted there. There are that many uniforms. Certainly more than you’d expect (I wouldn’t expect any) for a school board meeting, where if tradition holds, maybe 50 earnest citizens will show up. Most of them women.

It’s too early really to go in, and I roam around Pearl Street to kill time, wishing there were a bookstore I could duck into. I’m always wishing that. But even in a tonier neighborhood like Tribeca there isn’t one, even with the perfect demographics there. So there wouldn’t be one here. And I make do with a CVS; I go in and look around. I buy a Zone bar. And head back to the school.

Inside there’s a desk immediately up the entranceway’s polished stairs and the guard sitting there makes me feel a little self-conscious (passing by all those cops out front can do that to you) as I eat the last half of my Zone bar and look at signs on the wall. The biggest shows slash marks through a hat and a cell phone. I wouldn’t want to go to school there. I’m not going to say it feels like a prison. I wouldn’t know what that’s like. It’s very clean. But it doesn’t feel like the school I went to or my kids went to. It feels more like the very clean factory my father ran. I expect to see a sign that says ‘hard hat area’.

The guard asks if I’m there to make a comment later at the meeting and when I say no, they point me to the left and I go right where they say to go. I notice a photocopied sign taped to the wall along my way that says Men’s Restroom, near which I figure there’ll be a water fountain where I can rinse my mouth of that dusty sweet taste (no matter which flavor you get) a Zone bar leaves you with. I head the way the arrow on the sign says. And the guard from the table hollers at me, like I’m sneaking backstage. I tell him I’m going to the restroom and he gets OK with that.

The auditorium slated for the 6 to 8pm meeting is dimly lit like a bus terminal. No skylights. Low wattage. Security guards around. There’s a plainclothes cop (you can tell) sitting across the aisle from me. There aren’t many people there. A scattering of mostly African-American women. Up on the stage there is a long table with wings that will accommodate the panel. Each seat has a name plate in front of it, but the table is so far back on the stage that you can’t read the names. The only sign you can read clearly is an electronic one right up at the front of the stage with red LED numbers like a 24-second NBA clock. This one is set at 2:00...two minutes.

In the aisle right near me and in the other aisle at the long end of my row are microphones set up with signs taped to them saying: “Each Speaker Will Be Allowed Up To 2 Minutes.” You wonder why it’s set to two minutes. You’ve been to a dozen of these meetings, and it isn’t like a big time-consuming dialogue is going to take place. Most of the questions are addressed to Chancellor Klein and he’s no more apt to get into a discussion with the speakers than a wooden Indian would be. The questioners are tolerated, at best, at these things. They’d be better off calling C-Span or Boomer Esiason. They’d get more respect.

Once the panel gets seated, you’re disappointed that the microphones in front of them don’t send the sound out your way loudly or clearly. You’d be mad if you took your kid to see ‘Annie’ and the sound was that bad. And the table is so far back that you’ve got to look pretty closely to see whose mouth is moving. It’s not impressive. Nor is the fact that at any time you can look up and see as many as a quarter of them fiddling with their Blackberries. One young member walks in more than an hour late, slides his suit coat off, puts it on the back of the chair, takes his seat, reaches down into the coat pocket and pulls out his Blackberry and starts checking out his messages. He hasn’t been there a minute. No one’s going to say anything to him; the Chancellor’s on his Blackberry more than anyone.

Nothing much goes on. There is a screen above the stage that hypes some national numbers that show the fourth graders in the city have out-performed the rest of the state in reading, which is a good thing. But you think to yourself sitting there that this is New York Fucking City, the home of Random House and The New Yorker and a hundred other literate things I could list. So we beat Buffalo and my old hometown in rural western New York, and we beat Corning. That’s like saying Antwerp beat the other Belgian towns in diamond cutting.

The rest of the meeting is about budgets and the like. It’s boring, especially since you can’t hear what they’re saying very clearly.

It’s really all a yawn and everyone in the room is bored by it, panel included, except for the citizens who’ve written out what they’re going to say, and have timed it to two minutes, because they know about the two minute warning, but after adjusting the mike and clearing their throat and overcoming their jitters, it lasts a little longer than two minutes. But no matter, the bell goes off exactly when their time’s up and they have to stop.

It’s boring because there’s nothing radical going on. Most NYC public school kids cannot read well enough when they graduate (if they even do) to read To Kill a Mockingbird for pleasure, and up on stage more than a dozen adults are considering nothing radical to change that. Charter schools are as radical as they’ll go. Smaller schools are high right now on their priority list. Closing poor-performing schools is championed, as if the building’s structure caused poor reading performance.

You sit there and can feel the sluggishness. It’s like being in church, where no one gives evidence of being filled with the spirit. You want to stand up and say…hey, how come the kids aren’t taught to read proficiently? Here it is another school year over. Another year of failure. Because all the kids can’t read well. They’ve been in the city schools since early fall. They’ve been doing that drill for some years, in some cases for 12 years. And still most of the students can’t read well.

You wish someone on the board could explain that failure. Is it just a part of city life to them that most of the poor kids can’t read? Is it just something we have to accept? Like pigeons and rats? You wish some board member would speak clearly into his or her mike, and take two minutes to say: This is nuts. We’re not doing our job.

Caption: Don’t Take Up Our Time. Speakers are not really listened to.

2010-07-06T19:01:00.000-07:00

At Least The Libraries Will Stay Open

But here in long-hours New York City, it should be more

According to a mailing from the New York Public Library, over 130,000 New Yorkers sent notes to the city to get budget officials to reconsider the talked-about $37 million cut that would have darkened the libraries up to three days a week. These petitions must have helped. Now the libraries will stay open five days a week. That’s a relief. But still, even symbolically that’s not enough. This is Book Country, the home office of the publishing industry. You’d think library hours here would never be compromised. This is a city where you can eat late, drink till 4 in the morning. That’s radical, compared to Cleveland, let’s say. Why don’t we do something radical about library hours. Why not keep them open late. Open ‘em early. The kids are the future, pols always say. They say a lot they don’t do. We shouldn’t let them just talk about kids and the future and not hold them to it.

Caption: Kids want adults to be strong advocates for them. Let’s give them more hours.

2010-07-06T18:58:00.000-07:00

Ann Beattie Was Like
Joni Mitchell To Us In The 70s

So I went to hear her read last month in Brooklyn

She still looked like the old dust jacket photos, even if it’s impossibly 35 years since we fell in love with her face. She has a new book out, a novella, Walks with Men. That’s what brought her to Brooklyn for a reading.

Not many people were there. I commented to my friend who went with me that it was hard to believe so few people showed up, so few late baby boomers who lived their lives in some ways according to the manners of her books. Like they lived their lives according to Dylan or Joni.

I read the novella. I’ve gone back to her older stories. Don’t miss reading them in your life.

The reading was at Book Court on Court Street in Cobble Hill. A perfect bookstore. Go some day, some night.

Caption: We Lived Accordingly. Her books were cautionary tales, and how-to manuals, at the same time.

2010-07-06T18:54:00.000-07:00

I got this CD for sending a donation (I think it was
$65) to WNYC. I usually don’t ask them to send me
something. This time I did, because I remembered
one of my kids likes Jakob Dylan. I listen to parts of
Brian Lehrer’s and Leonard Lopate’s show every
day. I should have sent them hundreds of dollars.
These guys should each make hundreds of dollars
every hour they’re on. They’re better at what they
do than people in the city who do make that kind of
money. Send money to their station. wnyc.org.
And listen to them.

2010-05-24T19:21:00.000-07:00

Ray Bradbury, a living legend, has a novel take on what schools should do about reading. Mary Leonhardt thinks about it and responds.

P.S. 451

In the latest ‘Paris Review’, there’s a lengthy interview with Ray Bradbury, my first favorite writer, whose book, Something Wicked This Way Comes, was the first I may have bought off one of those paperback book racks. I was a freshman in high school. I’d never heard of Ray Bradbury. I was only into sports stuff then. But the book seized my attention for some reason. It was a turning point in my life. I stopped spending every free moment bouncing balls and started looking for ways to be by myself with books that seized me.

In the interview Bradbury says:
‘Our education system has gone to hell…Young children must be taught how to read and write…We must not let them go into fourth and fifth grade not knowing how to read. So we must put out books with educational pictures, or use comics to teach them how to read.
We should forget about teaching children mathematics. They’re not going to use it ever in their lives. Give them simple arithmetic—one plus one is two, and how to divide, and how to subtract. Those are simple things that can be taught quickly. But no mathematics because they are never going to use it, never in their lives, unless they are going to be scientists, and then they can simply learn it later…If you are bright you will learn how to educate yourself with mathematics if you need it. But the average child never will. So it must be reading and writing.’

I underlined that when I read it. I agree with it, of course. I wondered what Mary Leonhardt thought of it. She has contributed to ‘acityReader’ twice so far. Actually her books on kids and reading seized me like Bradbury’s book did. Here’s what she thinks:

 I wasn’t a big Bradbury fan but one of his books, Dandelion Wine, I really loved: the image of the little boy up in the tower in the morning, turning on the lights all over town, the boy wearing the wondrous first-of-the-summer sneakers, the golden dandelion wine. It was a book about happiness, and a happiness dependent on a child’s imaginings.

There are so many reasons why the best educational gift we can give children is a love of reading. One not usually thought of is the way books help children pretend—and imagine a life quite different from their own. I remember my daughter and her friends playing “Narnia” by pretending to be all of the different characters in the series. Children who can imagine being a unicorn or a wicked witch can later, in their lives, imagine being a doctor, or going on a safari. They can imagine a life much richer than the one fate seems to be dealing them.

But I think Bradbury got the math part a little wrong. Math is important. My son points out that people who play the lottery are math-challenged. They have no understanding of probability. People who spend themselves deep into debt often don’t understand, along the way, exactly how all of these little charges on their charge card are going to become a mountain of debt that overwhelms them.

But Bradbury was completely right about teaching reading being much more important—because one of the many other gifts that a habit of avid reading bestows is, very often, the ability to learn math easily and quickly. Yes: Avid readers are usually pretty good at math as well.

I first realized this when I was teaching high school English and writing books about how to get kids reading. One thing I did then was to study SAT scores of avid readers. I found what I was looking for—the verbal scores of avid readers were always very high, while the SAT scores of good students who did little independent reading were pretty mediocre. There were the kids everyone called “poor testers”, but I knew they just weren’t avid readers.

But then something else jumped out at me. The kids with very high verbal scores almost all had high math scores as well. Not scores as high as their verbal scores, but very respectable scores—usually in the 600 range, which was a very high score then. But it didn’t work the other way. Kids with very high math scores did not necessarily have high verbal scores. Their verbal scores were just as likely to be in the low 500’s or 400’s.

So a high verbal score seemed to guarantee a high math score, but a high math score did not guarantee a high verbal score.

I’ve thought about this a lot. My guess is that avid reading—which is necessary for the high verbal scores—develops the ability to process information in a sophisticated way. Think of children reading a Harry Potter book. Not only do they have to understand a world with customs and rules completely different from their own, they have to understand characters whose identity even shifts around. Who is good? Who is evil? Who is out to get Harry?

And the incredible wealth of details and descriptions in those books! Some of my high school students used to reread all of the books currently in the series before a new one was due. They wanted to make sure they remembered everything perfectly.

Now multiply this by hundreds of books, the number that avid readers read in their childhood. They have stretched their minds hundreds of times by following multiple plots and characters, by understanding the major themes in life—that things aren’t always what they seem, that people grow through adversity, that bravery and goodness are their own reward.

The kind of elastic mind that grows through avid reading can figure out math problems and chemistry equations, and the causes of World War II. It’s a mind that doesn’t just retain information; it’s a mind that sees subtleties, that understands different perspectives, that can grasp the whole, rather than just the part, of a problem.

I used to be surprised when my avid fantasy readers seem to gravitate towards a love of history. Weren’t they opposite? Then I realized that most great fantasy writers—J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Jordan, J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman—create complex political worlds with different factions shifting for power and control. Just like history!

Historical fiction is also wonderful background, allowing children to understand different cultures and times. Romances explore relationships. Stories of families can help illuminate a child’s own family.

Here is how I would run an elementary school—how I would “teach” reading:

After children acquire a basic ability to read simple books—with luck by second grade—I would fill their classrooms, the library, the halls, the cafeteria, all of the offices—with reading material they could easily love. Comics. Magazines. Easy reader books. Lots of popular children’s fiction. Mysteries. Fantasy. Anything I could find that children would read.

Then for at least three or four hours every day, I would have quiet reading time in the classrooms. Let the children choose what they want to read. Don’t give them tests. Don’t make them answer comprehension questions and do worksheets. No: have rugs, beanbag chairs, comfortable sofas—and let the children read.

While the children are reading the teacher can also read, but she can also use this quiet time to give individual help to children, with writing, with math, with whatever children are having trouble understanding. But most of the teaching will be done by the books: books that children love will teach them much more sophisticated reading and writing skills than a million worksheets and vocabulary drills.

You think children won’t sit still for this? For years I taught tenth graders who hated reading, who were scoring the lowest on all kinds of achievement tests. I just sat them down in my book-filled classroom and said, “Read.” And, after awhile, they did. By the end of the semester they were pleading for more “just reading” days. When the bell rang for lunch, many would be still hunched over their books, reluctant to leave those enthralling worlds. Years later now I run into these kids occasionally, and always ask them if they are still reading. The answer is usually yes. And they are usually doing well in a career.

So if you want children to do well in math—and science and history and foreign languages and technology and everything else—my advice is simple: make sure they have plenty of good books to read, and time to read them.

Caption: Listening in on a conversation with Ray Bradbury. ‘The Paris Review’ interviews with writers are the last word.

2010-05-24T19:19:00.000-07:00

Books, Interrupted

Budget cuts could shut some libraries, reduce hours for sure

Here’s what the New York Public Library flier says: 18 million visits to the system’s branches each year. 50 million books and other materials. 39,000 programs and classes. 600,000 visits to children’s programs. 34,000 attended job classes. Thousands of books loaned to nursing homes, senior centers, schools, and prisons.

Here’s what’s at stake, according to the flier, if budget cuts happen:10 branches closed. Others open only 4 days. 736 staff positions eliminated.

You might not be a library-goer. You’re missing out if you’re not. There are way more interesting, and worthwhile things in them than there were in the Virgin record stores. They’re more stimulating than Whole Foods. Better than anything on TV. Books, newspapers, magazines, chairs, tables, lights, community bulletin boards, wifi. Now, all that’s there for you 6 days a week. You don’t want less. Go to NYPL.org and see how you can help. And go to your branch, if you don’t normally. Check out what’s been there all along for you.

Caption: Go to the site. It’s as important as keeping schools open.

2010-05-24T19:13:00.000-07:00

A Store of One’s Own

Why not be somebody at your local bookshop

Did you know you used to be able to borrow books in bookstores? They had lending libraries in the store and you could rent a book, for not much. Hemingway used to do that at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, an English language bookshop in Paris during that famous time of Gertrude Stein and Hemingway and James Joyce. Beach got known for publishing Ulysses in 1922 when big publishers, and even big countries, like ours, wouldn’t touch it. Ex-pat writers would pick up their mail there, cash a check. Sounds great, doesn’t it.

Well, you could have a bookstore here where they know your name. Just pick an independent bookshop near you or one somewhere in town that you really like, and start going in there often. Order books from them. Email an order to them. Call them. You live in New York, like Hemingway lived in Paris. Order books like he did. Hell, be like Hem. Fish the Amazon, don’t
order books from it.

Caption: An American in Paris. Sylvia Beach fashioned the store and life (I think) she wanted.

2010-05-24T19:07:00.000-07:00

I stayed up all night on a train from Florida to South Bend,
reading this on my way back to school from spring break,
maybe 1967. This is a newer edition.
It’s as good as the cover might lead you to believe.

2010-05-03T18:46:00.000-07:00

It’s a totally interesting book, enviably well-written. But how many New York City public high school kids could read it?

BARACK OBAMA IN JUST UNDER 600 PAGES

If you were in the same room, even in the same house, with me, I’d have interrupted whatever you were doing and read out loud to you a score of passages from David Remnick’s The Bridge. Obama is the most important guy in the world. He’s young, and unique among people in power for being cool and coordinated. He’s from Hawaii, and he’s half-black and half-white, and he’s under siege by idiots. And what could you be doing that was more interesting than hearing about this guy. That’s what I would think as I went Yo, and said, “Listen to this!”

Here’s one about Michelle when she was at Princeton:
One of Michelle’s freshman-year roommates at Pyne Hall, a girl named Catherine Donnelly, from New Orleans, moved out midway through the year. Donnelly’s mother was so upset at the notion of her daughter rooming with a black girl that she telephoned influential alumni and hectored the university administration to get Catherine another room.

Just before I read that, ‘Conde Nast Traveler’ magazine arrived with a picture of Michelle on the cover, in the White House, in a beautiful sleeveless, rose-colored dress, wearing pearls and pointed low-heeled shoes. And that great face. And I thought, screw you Mrs. Donnelly, look where Michelle Robinson is now.

There are all sorts of things about Obama’s mother and father and grandparents, and his days in Hawaii and Indonesia. His high school is a big factor in his growth. So is coming here to New York to go to Columbia (which he did in junior year; he started at Occidental College in California). Harvard is huge. Chicago even more huge. Remnick evokes each of these stops along the way with a great writer’s great details. It all moves like a wonderful magazine article that you don’t want to end. Even as you approach the 586th page, you want to stay in it.

One of the reasons is that Obama is always moving. He’s going somewhere. Ambitious. Destined. Genetically endowed to stand out. Graceful. Curious. Brotherless. Neither all-black nor all-white, he keeps looking to define himself. He glides. You go along with him. He’s irresistible even on the page. You’re taken with him, like everyone is. Even the Black pols in Chicago, who’d been at it long before he showed up — all J.Crew-looking with his Harvard law degree — have to respect his intelligence and his drive. He won’t be denied. You know as you read it that he’s in the White House now. And you see why, all along the way. His eye is never not on the prize. You don’t resent him for it. You just watch the glide. You roll with it. You want to be him. You turn the book in your hands and look at the cover; more than once. You’re inspired by the story.

Yo, listen to this, I’d say again. I’d like to be a teacher and say it to Black students in the city schools. Listen to this:
As a young man, Obama searched for clues to his own identity by very purposefully reading his way through DuBois, Hughes, Wright, Baldwin, Ellison, and Malcolm X. He has also mentioned texts by Douglass, Marcus Garvey, Martin Delany, and a range of novelists—in particular, Toni Morrison. In fact, reading as a way of becoming is a feature of African-American autobiography, as it is of so many outsider-memoirists of any ethnicity. In memoirs of all kinds, a young person in search of a way to rise above his circumstances or out of his confusion invariably goes to the bookshelf. Malcolm X, for one, provides an extended account of his self-education. He reads histories by Will Durant and H.G. Wells, which gave him a glimpse into ‘black people’s history before they came to this country’; he reads Carter G. Woodson’s ‘The Negro in Our History’, which ‘opened my eyes about black empires before the black slave was brought to the United States and the early Negro struggles for freedom.’ In ‘Soul on Ice’, Eldridge Cleaver recounts his reading of Rousseau, Paine, Voltaire, Lenin, Bakunin…as a means of detailing his own radical catechism. Young autobiographers also read other memoirs to learn the form. Claude Brown told an audience in New York in 1990 that he carefully studied the structures of Douglass’s slave narratives and Richard Wright’s ‘Black Boy’ before writing ‘Manchild in the Promised Land’, his memoir of growing up in Harlem in the nineteen-forties and fifties. Even Sammy Davis, Jr., in his Harlem-to-Hollywood autobiography, ‘Yes I Can’, is eager to tell the reader that, while he was on ‘latrine duty’ in the Army, he became an obsessive reader of Wilde, Rostand, Poe, Dickens, and Twain; and that helped him endure the racism of his fellow soldiers.

One of the principal aspects of the book that makes it bright is the brightness of all the people in it. From Obama’s mother and father to the staff he picked for the White House. Books flow through them. Education is the way they made it. They are all aspirants. It makes them percolate. It makes the book move.

You wish young people would read it. You wish it would be assigned. Seniors in high school, let’s say, would undertake it for a month. Get someone to donate fresh copies for all the seniors in the system. Younger students would see the big kids reading it and want to do the same. I can recall when I was a freshman in high school, seeing one of the upperclassmen, a cool guy in my eyes, walking out of a classroom carrying a copy of James Joyce’s [ital]A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man[ital]. It looked so mature, so collegiate, that I couldn’t wait to grow older and read it.

But could it work in the city school system? Could enough of the kids read at a level to understand it, get the magic from it? Maybe have their lives changed by it? Like Cleaver’s life was changed by reading. Like Malcolm’s. Like Barack Obama’s life was changed.

Here’s something the schools could use as a guide. A better one I think than working toward passing the Regents exams. What if the seniors, like I imagined, were in fact going to be given that month in the last semester to read The Bridge. Meaningfully read it. That might give direction to the curriculum-makers. They’d know they would have to prepare kids all along the way, from pre-school on really, to be able to read a book like this one when they were seniors,. Wouldn’t that direct them? Wouldn’t that be some real prize to eye? I think so.

The way it is now, they couldn’t do it — if they even hung around till senior year. Pathetic isn’t it? Isn’t it? After 12 years, going to school most of the year, each of those years, they couldn’t do it. Haven’t the principals noticed? Haven’t they said this is crazy that we haven’t sent these kids off with an ability to read well.

One more Yo from me:

It is from Obama’s famous speech at the Democratic Convention in Boston in 2004. As he was winding down, he went into a Tom Joad-like list of purpose. First thing on his list, and you can imagine, may even remember, how he sounded saying it: If there’s child on the South Side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child.

Barack Obama would wish, for all sorts of reasons, that that child could read David Remnick’s book.

We should wish that too, and work to see that it happens. It’s a bridge that needs crossing.

Caption: What a shame. The city school kids here can’t get out of books what Obama got out of them.

2010-05-03T18:44:00.000-07:00

Taking the Show to Brooklyn

A meeting about charter schools draws a crowd

I went to Brooklyn last month to take in a monthly school board meeting. (They move the meetings among the boroughs.) They call the board here the Panel for Educational Policy. Don’t let the name fool you, like they want it to. Spanky and Alfalfa dressed as G-men would fit right in at their long table. You should go to one of these meetings.

The night’s issue was charter schools and it drew a fervent crowd of supporters. Mothers and their young kids were there in force. Dressed up in same-color T-shirts and same-color baseball caps, carrying signs, they could have been at a union rally or all sitting together at the Little League World Series. They were almost exclusively African-American. This was their cause. These schools. They’re true believers. I’m not. Unless they turn them into reading academies, they’ll not change things much for the kids. And I thought it was a kind of racism to have cute little black girls with their hair done just right come up to the microphones and be cute little black girls with their hair done just right. That’s an old bit. The Panel loved it.

Caption: One of the many signs in the auditorium pleading for charter schools.

2010-05-03T18:34:00.000-07:00

What Makes a Perfect Book

The Bridge is the perfect model

Not to beat a cliché, but you know it when you see it: perfection. A just-poured pint of Guinness. A perfectly-flat-brimmed red baseball cap on a Black kid’s head. Long Converse sneakers at the bottom of a long pair of faded Levis. The book about Obama by David Remnick is like that. The photo on the front is by Martin Schoeller, who did the Andre Agassi book cover, and who’s done all sorts of famous portraits. That draws you, like a hot magazine cover does. That photo with the typeface and the way it’s put together by Chip Kidd makes you pick it up. And when you do, its heft and feel make you want to own it, read it. You open it and the weight of the paper and the binding leave the book lying flat like the big book at church, like the big dictionary at the library. It’s by Knopf. Nothing finer.

Caption: It looks at you from the window; you look back.

2010-05-03T18:27:00.000-07:00

There’s no magazine that combines
wonderful writing with wonderful photos like this one.

2010-04-06T20:01:00.000-07:00

A sometimes teacher takes a reading on his former students...and himself

THE GRADUATE PAGES BACK TO 1969

I was between editing jobs 10 years ago, when I shook hands with a guy in a bar in the East Village and said I’d love to give it a try, to teach mostly minority junior and senior boys English at a lower-rung Catholic high school. The guy, 25 years younger than I, was head of the English department and we’d met in that bar to feel each other out. He was in a hurry to find a teacher. I’d seen an ad for the position on some do-good web site just the day before. It was late September and the teacher who’d started the year had--already--not worked out. He’d had real problems with discipline. But I was not worried or anxious about that, I said, over beers. I couldn’t wait to get started.

I had taught before. 30 years earlier. In 1969 I was fresh from college where I’d been married just before my senior year (a not that unusual occurrence back then; the Vietnam war intensified experiences and hurried along decisions, in a kind of ‘tomorrow is promised to no one’ way. My wife couldn’t come to my graduation; she was back in our off-campus apartment, in bedroom slippers, with our week-old daughter). And I then certainly didn’t want to go to Southeast Asia as a soldier. I didn’t even want to get in the National Guard. The only way I could figure to get out of being called to the regular army was to teach school.

Teaching was something I’d never really considered before then. As much as I liked books, and kids, and as much as I wasn’t cut out for the business world that my father had been a big success in, teaching seemed to me then like a Hush-Puppies, lunch-in-a-brown-paper-bag world, with no appeal to me.

But as graduation neared, I changed my mind. Teaching, beyond the certain deferment status it would give me, began to seem like the movie I wanted to be in. I had lined-up a job as a fifth-grade English teacher in an inner-city Catholic school in Cleveland where my wife was from. (I was from a rural western New York State small town that offered no prospects for teaching jobs; offered no prospects, period, other than an eventual job running my father’s [and grandfather’s before him] business, something I definitely didn’t plan on doing.) I was eager to teach in a gritty, urban school. It was just the thing for those times. And I already had all the gear. I had a corduroy sport coat, long hair, and a tan VW bug.

I loved the setting, the students (all Black), the fellow teachers. I read all the books about free schools, and devoured books and magazine articles about various radical approaches to teaching. I played basketball with the 8th graders in the gym after school. Many afternoons I’d go out for beers when classes ended with the other white male teacher; he was also there for a deferment.

I stayed in teaching for six years. While I had, during that first year, been called for an army physical and been given a medical deferment for bronchial asthma, which I really didn’t have (letters from my small-town doctor, making more of my chronic hay fever than was justified, must have allowed the military doctor to excuse me, a lucky white boy, from consideration), I decided to stick with teaching for the six years that I had planned to ‘use’ the profession to keep me out of the war. And, not to take too much credit for altruism, I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. Besides, I thought I was pretty good in the classroom. Even if I didn’t remedy what became shockingly, sadly, frustratingly apparent to me: Most of the kids in the school had a very difficult time with reading.

But let’s come back to my second attempt at teaching, at that boys school here. And let’s call it my second chance. Because in the intervening 30 years, I’d felt a little uneasy with how I had, in the naïve, idealistic way of those times, maybe not done all I could to actually teach those kids to read. I had, like many, if not most, young teachers back then, in inner-city schools, done everything but wear a dashiki, to ingratiate myself to the Black students. I wanted them to love me. I needed to be one with them. My white guilt over-rode my obligation. I was trying to learn from them.

So when I began my second chance as a teacher, I wanted to make amends. I was determined to take pains to teach the young men I’d meet in my classes the beauty of reading.

I festooned my classroom with cool-looking-to-me dust jackets of books I thought they’d like. I filled plastic milk crates with all kinds of magazines I’d scavenged from twined, about-to-be-recycled bundles outside apartment buildings all over town. Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, Vibe, XXL, Time, Architectural Digest, People, Slam, Entertainment Weekly. Even Vogue. Anything to let them see that heat rose off a page. That they weren’t limited to TV and headphones. That reading was better than just sitting and staring, or, as too often happens in school, putting their head down on the desk and sleeping.

Out of my own pocket I went up to Strand and bought multiple copies of paperback books I thought we’d like. Drown by Junot Diaz, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. I read out loud to them. I gave them free time to read on their own. The magazine crates were kept neat and were replenished frequently, and they could read them whenever they had time. I gave them lots of time. Sometimes, when they’d all have a book or magazine in front of them, the room was quiet in that great stimulating way. My eyes watered a few times.

I caught shit from the authorities, of course, when one of them would walk by and notice the silence. They’d poke their head in to see what was going on. They didn’t like what they saw. They didn’t see the value in the kids reading magazines and books of their choosing. They were shocked, I know, to see me reading too. They wanted worksheets and vocabulary drills. They wanted what they were used to.

The kids were terrible readers. All those years of worksheets and underlining adverbs and answering questions at the end of the story in big, heavy anthologies, hadn’t helped, as far as I could see. The kids could not read easily; some hardly at all. And yet the school was going to see to it that almost all of them got into some college. That seemed crazy to me. The standards and the state tests and the college admissions departments had to be kidding. These kids could barely read. And the kids knew it. They didn’t want to read out loud. They didn’t want to write either. How could they write well, if they couldn’t read? How could they do anything in school really, other than a few of them who could draw in art class, without knowing how to read?

What must it be like in the public schools? I wondered. It had to be even worse. I grew cynical. I still am. I don’t trust any of the numbers in the paper. I don’t trust the tests they take. I don’t trust the authorities. Once I told the seniors that if a group of freshmen from Harvard came to town and they were paired off with you guys for the weekend, you’d find that you could beat them at just about any sport. You‘d be stronger than they are. Your teeth would be straighter. You could sing better. Be funnier. Know how to get around the city better. Find drugs for them. Finds girls. The only thing they could do better than you is read.

I don’t know if that made a dent. I don’t know if anything I did that year did. I know I left with a big impression. The kids, 30 years later, couldn’t really read any better than Mattie Townes or Howard Smith or Julio Taylor or Leon Anderson or Janice Troulierre or Jerry Watts or Loretta Hight or Joseph Pollard or the other kids in the 5th grade at St. Agnes School on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio in those wide-eyed, hopeful years when young men in Volkswagens thought they could change the world.

Photo Caption: My attempt. Some of the magazines I brought to class. I hope it worked.

2010-04-06T19:56:00.000-07:00

A World Within A World

Andre Kertesz’s 63 photos of people lost in reading

When I get a book, I put my name in it, and the year I got it, and the season. In this one, it says ‘B. Gunlocke Fall ‘75’. It doesn’t seem possible I’ve had it that long. But it does look that old. It’s a paperback, only 70-some pages. On good paper. The price then was $3.95. The cover’s a little cracked and yellowed, like a book you’d see outside Strand on one of the their bargain-shelves-on-wheels, for $1.00. If you see it there, get it. Or order it. Any bookstore will do that for you.

I’ll bet I’ve looked at it a hundred times. I must have bought 10 copies over the years and given them away. If you like photography, you know Kertesz. For years he lived on Washington Square. You’ve likely seen his photos looking down on the park in winter, with footprints patterning the snow. If you like reading, you’ll stare at the pages of this little book.

Photo Caption: Kertesz must have been a devout reader himself. Each example is like a holy card.

2010-04-06T19:51:00.000-07:00

Nose In It:

Here’s Kerouac from his introduction in 1959 to Robert Frank’s The Americans: ‘What a poem this is…Whether ‘tis milk of humankind-ness, of human-kindness, Shakespeare meant, makes no difference when you look at these pictures. Better than a show.’ The book changed photography forever. In Photography After Frank, a book of essays, mostly from the Times, by Philip Gefter, the altered landscape is surveyed. Avedon, Freidlander, Eggleston, Arbus, Goldin, and the rest. I just read it for the third time. It’s thrilling in its style, as are the vivid photo examples of what’s come since.

Here’s a funnyfunny book. A very smart book, a novel that I’m too old to be reading, by most measures. It’s about early careers and new marriage and new kids. The reviews I read were so excited about it though, I couldn’t resist. I’m only a few chapters into it, but I’ve already read some of them out loud to a friend. I laughed so hard I had put it down a few times to catch my breath, wipe my eyes. It’s The Ask by Sam Lipsyte. I’m tellin’ ya.

2010-04-06T19:37:00.000-07:00

East Village. On 9th Street.

2010-03-08T20:28:00.000-08:00

AN OPEN LETTER TO
PRESIDENT OBAMA

Dear President Obama,

I know that you are worried about education: Different tests? More charter schools? Curriculum change? Uniforms? What will work?

After teaching for 37 years, in public, private, and parochial schools across the country, I can tell you. Really. Here it is. One sentence: Turn kids into avid readers.

Too simple? Put avid readers next to students who work hard but only read what they have to, if that. You’ll find the avid readers read better, write better, follow lectures more easily, concentrate more deeply, have larger frames of reference that make learning history and science easier, and are even more likely to excel in math.

A habit of avid reading develops intelligence. Avid readers understand what they read in more complex, nuanced ways. They actually listen more astutely than mediocre or poor readers, because of the way they’ve learned to process language. They become more interested in various fields of study. They just know more.

Avid reading changes everything.

How can schools develop avid readers? I’ve done it for years, using rules I developed after reading I Robot by Isaac Asimov. I used his concept of priority. The first rule is absolute. The second rule is absolute unless it interferes with the first rule; the first rule always has priority. The third rule is absolute unless it interferes with the first or second rule, and so on.

Rule I: Children must learn to love reading.

Find whatever books, whatever comics, whatever magazines will lure them into a literate world. A boy loves dogs: scour libraries and bookstores for dog books. A teenage girl is falling apart because of family troubles: find books about girls in similar circumstances, books that illuminate her world. A teenage boy is rebellious and hates school: he might like the Robert Parker Spenser books. Sports lovers? Hard to beat Sports Illustrated.

What breaks this rule is forcing a child or teenager to read a book he doesn’t like.

Rule 2: Children must form a habit of reading.

But remember, in helping children form this habit, you don’t want to make reading an unpleasant chore. It’s very easy for schools to have children be enthusiastic about quiet reading time. The teacher just needs to have plenty of high interest reading material available, and then say vaguely, “Oh, let’s see. We could do those math worksheets, or maybe read for a bit.” After awhile, the students will be begging for quiet reading time.

Rule 3: Children should develop analytic reading skills.

But again, only if this doesn’t interfere with Rule 1 and Rule 2. But once children are enjoying reading, and developing a habit of reading, a teacher can begin to ask them questions that will stretch their minds a bit. Which is the best fantasy series? The most evil villain? And what is evil, anyway? When children are all reading different books, the discussions can be wide-ranging and fascinating.

Rule 4: Children should learn to appreciate some of the great literature of the world.

If you have students who love reading, have a habit of reading, and can intelligently discuss their reading, then, and only then, you can introduce them to some of the wonderful classics in our language. But be prepared to back off if you see they are not yet able to love these books. What’s the point of teaching teenagers to hate Charles Dickens?

None of these rules is followed now; in fact, because of testing mandates and entrenched curriculum and fearful teachers and clueless administrators, these rules are twisted and jumped and spat upon on a daily basis. Make the whole class read the same, boring book! Hand out those prepared, tedious questions! What? You mean some of the students won’t, or can’t, read Ethan Frome? Bad students!

And then, sometime on a Friday night, go visit a mall filled with teenagers. Do you see them hanging around the bookstore, trying to sneak in a little reading time for free?

No, of course you don’t. The whole of our education problem can be seen in those bookstore aisles empty of young people.

We are raising a nation of kids who don’t like to read, and don’t read very much. Until that changes, no other educational reform will matter very much.

Sincerely,

Mary Leonhardt

Photo Caption: President Obama, we've read that your mother showered you with books.

2010-03-08T20:26:00.000-08:00

American Idol. (He was mine for sure.)

Willie Mays. The name alone still moves me.

Once in the college years, someone from school, a guy I hardly hung with, ran into someone in another city who knew me. After my name came up, to certify I was indeed the guy in question, the classmate said, “You mean the guy who wears black Converse and likes Willie Mays?” Oh, did I like Willie Mays. Countless nights were spent in boarding school and college, with me, the lone Mays guy, arguing with the smug, deluded, true believers in Mickey Mantle, whom I didn’t mind, but come on! The contrarian in me certainly understands the impulse to say Mantle, or Roberto Clemente, were better. But they weren’t. In my lifetime, only Michael Jordan was in his league. I’ve often told the oldest of my three daughters: If I’d known I wasn’t going to have a son, I’d have named you Willie.

Photo Caption: I’d know that smile, that ear, that thumb, anywhere.

2010-03-08T20:24:00.000-08:00

Nose In It:

Looking at the stack of four books, you think of two things quickly. One, how much cooler they look than the Kindle version could possibly look. Two, what a motley mix it is. The books have nothing in common. They could be gifts waiting to be wrapped for three different graduates, and a parent. Two are new. Food Rules by Michael Pollan. Get it. If you change one thing in your diet, it’s worth the eleven bucks. It’s a nice little book to hold, too. Then there’s Roger Rosenblatt’s Making Toast. I’d buy it for you. And you’d be thankful, even if it’s about the sudden death of his 38-year-old daughter. It’s the most human book. Go to it.

Two oldies. Joseph Mitchell’s legendary Up in the Old Hotel. I read a few selections again. Maybe I’ve read them too often, like I’ve looked at Cartier-Bresson’s photos too many times. They didn’t do it for me this time. Unlike Don DeLillo’s Underworld which I’m reading for the second time. Better than whatever movie won the Oscar.

2010-03-08T20:22:00.000-08:00

A must-read. 20 times a year.

2010-02-07T20:29:00.000-08:00

In these economic doldrums, Manhattan’s libraries are busier by double digits. But the city is cutting back their hours.

ARE THE CITY'S LIBRARIES TOO BIG TO FAIL?

Even in my sports-obsessed childhood and adolescence, I’d peel off from my buddies occasionally and go into the library by myself. This was small-town stuff in rural western New York. You knew the librarian, because you knew her husband who coached one of the teams in Little League. And your parents knew the librarian because they’d grown up with her. She wore glasses on a chain, and she was always nice to you — a kindred spirit you could tell, smiling with her over-bite … as she sat at her desk with books around her, stamping a customer’s card with one of those rubber date-stamps, before she slid the card snuggly into that tight back-page pouch and closed the book and handed it back, taking her glasses off her nose as she did.

I don’t know what I went in there for, really. Why did I leave my best friends to go in? Probably for nothing specific. It wasn’t for Gulliver or Daniel Boone — though it may have been for Davy Crockett, a huge obsession some time in grade school. Hardy Boys, maybe. Sports books, too. But I didn’t really need the white-framed Whipple Free Library for those. My parents were well-off and could buy me all kinds of books. I was mostly going in there to roam around. In the quiet. Among all those different-colored rectangles. To see what I might see. To find what might jump off the shelves at me.

The other night, the late architect and brilliant raconteur Philip Johnson was profiled on an obscure cable channel; they followed him walking around his grounds in New Canaan, going in and out of the half-dozen structures he’d designed on his 40 acres there. In one small building he walked into, there were books lining shelves on all the walls. Nothing else. No streamlined clocks or Rothko prints. He smiled with his bald head and big black glasses and said something about how books were the most beautiful things. They are, of course — everybody’s current iPad-gasping aside.

Libraries are filled with beauty. Bookstores, too. If you’re one of those people, like me, who sees it that way, you probably spend more time in museum bookshops than you do looking at the art on the gallery walls. You’d rather look at paintings and photographs in a big book by lamplight on your couch than slide along the exhibition walls, not knowing when to speed up or slow down, finding yourself going in the wrong direction too much of the time. You’re a book person, after all. Most comfortable with a rectangle in your hands, your eyes (heart?) all alive when you’re reading.

A book person, you may have gotten a letter last week from the New York Public Library that began like this:

Dear Friend, If you need proof that our City is hurting, step into your local library. With visits to our branches up to 18 million—an increase of 11 percent—in the past year alone, we have never been more in demand. …In the current economy, however, our financial resources are strained. Careful control of spending continues at the Library, allowing us to maintain a minimum of 6 day service and offer extended hours at many locations. But we’ve had to rely on a leaner staff and reduce our budget for the acquisition of new books and other materials by 25 percent in our branches and 35 percent in our research centers, all at a time when people need us most...

The letter goes on to ask you to become a Friend of the New York Public Library. The levels of suggested giving range from $25 to $1500. We should do it. Go to nypl.org and get the address. Maybe you can do it all online. Here’s why: About the same time the letter came, the NYPL email newsletter arrived, announcing that the city’s budget cuts were causing the library system to have to reduce hours at many of the branches. Still 6 days, but shorter hours. The Queens system has already announced cuts in their hours. Brooklyn hasn’t yet. My neighborhood branch will open two hours later three mornings a week and will close an hour earlier some other days.

I could complain about my branch. The noise of people ravenously riffling through DVDs. The library worker shelving books too loudly, the noise of it unnoticed by her because of the music-sizzling headphones in her ears. The sleeping homeless types and methadone addicts, dominating the periodical area, the day’s tabloids strewn in front of them. The cell phones ringing, answered in a loud manner. The lack of anyone seriously overseeing it all. The anger that wells up inside some days at all the distractions. The lack of comfortable seats.

But it is still beautiful to me, with its variety of books on shelves and in carts, waiting to be put back in place. And its wonderful, generous free-ness; you can actually take stacks of books home to look at. What a wonder. Let’s hear it for Ben Franklin. And let’s hear it for the mothers and the nannies who wheel in little kids to go upstairs where a spacious and wonderfully-stocked children’s department awaits, staffed by bright young women who never seem to run out of energy or patience. They must have dreamed that they’d one day be working in a vibrant library with little kids in New York City. Let’s hope they aren’t among the cuts.

A lot is asked of the libraries, especially in this big city where most of the patrons are strangers. And now they’re not going to be open as many hours as these people need them to be.

I increasingly lie awake in bed in the dark, shocked from sleep by some bump in the night. It’s a sign of age for sure and of a genetic endowment from a long-dead mother who felt the bumps too. And among the many things I think about, when I don’t just get up and start my day at 3:00 in the morning, is my recurrent plan, for this project — to every day get on the train and go to a different library in the city. Take my laptop and a marble-covered notebook and head out to other parts of Manhattan and the Bronx and Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island, beyond the reach of most Barnes and Nobles — where libraries are centerpieces of the neighborhoods, where community fliers fill bulletin boards and countertops like they do in the back of old churches. Where immigrants learn to make their way in this new and confusing place. I don’t know why I haven’t undertaken that. Maybe it’s laziness. Maybe it’s all the competing stuff of little consequence that gets in the way. Maybe in the light of day the city still seems new and confusing to me. And so I stay close to home, deluding myself that the two blocks to the local library are my small-town Main Street and that when I go into my branch, the lady with glasses on a chain will be there smiling at me.

There was an item in the paper a couple of weeks ago that said kids, when they weren’t in school, were on the internet and on their phones texting and in front of the TV just about all the time. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, and I’m not moved to go on Google to find them, but it was an unbelievable amount of time spent with some gizmo or other. And I’m sure adults aren’t far behind. Things are changing fast. The iPad is the latest thing. I’ll admit I even felt stranded a month ago when I was in the center of town wondering where the closest Kinko’s might be, realizing that if I’d had an iPhone or a Blackberry, I could find one.

Books are endangered. Skyline Books on 18th Street just closed. Biography Books has lost its place on Bleecker Street. The aforementioned iPad and its relatives are primed to take over. Maybe it’s an age thing, but I mourn. Another bump in the night. I worry that kids won’t have the private book experiences we book lovers have had.

One hopeful sign, in the midst of all this flux, is the new library branch by Grand Central. It’s bright and has big windows like a new store, and there are good chairs to sit in and read, and there’s a Teen Center where kids can come and get good books and hang out. Here’s another idea I had in the dark. Maybe the city could open more new libraries like that around town. Places with a welcoming, modern feel. Maybe any new real estate development that looks for government funding or tax breaks could be required to put one of these facilities on the ground floor of their projects. The neighborhoods could use all the books they can get. Maybe the city could also give tax breaks to bookstores. This city has long been the center of book publishing. And those traditions should be cherished and saved and helped along, like Broadway shows, and Wall Street firms, and sports teams have been.

There has to be money for books. The kid that put down his bat and ball and went inside his hometown library and never really left says so.

Photo caption:
A RAY OF HOPE FOR BOOKS IN THE CITY. Maybe we could get more small libraries like the new Grand Central branch.

2010-02-07T20:26:00.000-08:00

Now That’s a Book!

The Catcher has it all.

I tried this just now. I opened The Catcher in the Rye randomly to 10 different places and read the first sentence my eyes fell upon. Not one wasn’t interesting. It didn’t surprise me. If it surprises you, you haven’t read it in a while, or maybe you’ve never read it. There’s nothing like it. A female friend in Cleveland said she’s read it 20 times. When I was in 8th grade in 1961, my older sister had a boyfriend visit from Boston. He was quickly the older brother I’d never had, and always wanted. He was funny, drove a little sports car, kinda looked like Paul McCartney. He could hit a jump shot even with a camel hair coat on, in loafers, on our icy driveway. His parents were dead and he lived with an old New England sea captain. His name was Billy Young. One night on our porch, I saw him reading Catcher.

Photo caption:
Our Book: Likely the most significant book to my generation.

2010-02-07T20:24:00.000-08:00

Nose In It:

A train trip to the Midwest made for great reading time. Trains, which surprisingly don’t have wifi, give you back your sanity. Just you and a book (and the little pillow they toss to you). In my case, Flannery, A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch. I bought it at Penn Books, downstairs at the station, just before departure. Perfect choice for me. When I got back, someone bought me the new Don DeLillo novel, Point Omega. The Times didn’t like it much. I did. I don’t care about plots. But this lean story drew me in. The writing is precise and clear. The right details are everything. He’s not Don DeLillo for nothing.

Nor is Dylan Dylan for nothing. I read his Chronicles (volume one) when it came out in 2004. Something made me pick him up again last week. I read it all again. It’s even better than you think it would be, even if you think it’d be better than almost any writer out there. The way he puts words together, the intelligence, the recall. Unrivaled. I felt lucky to be reading him.

2010-02-07T20:19:00.000-08:00

Skyline Books window before it went dark.

2010-01-11T18:44:00.000-08:00

Kindles and Nooks show me nothing.
When they add more features, they’ll be even worse.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

I’ve been in the Union Square Barnes & Noble 20 times since they moved the tables of new and noteworthy paperbacks and cleared the big wall of books to make room for the ‘Nook’ counter and display area, and it still looks incongruous to me. Gone is the variety of colors and designs on the books that used to be there. Instead, the new space is clean and spare and bright, like a made-up-airline counter in an old sit-com. That’s how they want it to look, I guess. Modern and sleek.

This is all coming fast. On Christmas Day, Amazon sold more e-books than regular books. That’s big, no matter how you explain it. And that’s with sales of the Nooks and Kindles still in the pre-baby-step stage. I’ve seen maybe four people, at most, reading one. Wait till they become the big deal to have. Most people won’t want a big ol’ book anymore. They just won’t. Not even a beautiful book of black-and-white photographs of Paris. No more than they want the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ album on a 331/3 record in a cardboard sleeve, a format they would never have thought they could do without. Remember (some of you) how you’d prop the sleeve up, or hold it and stare at it like a concert poster, while the record was playing?

I don’t want this change to happen. I don’t want books to go away. I’m sitting here in the dark of very early morning in a blue knit cap like Kurt Vonnegut had on for the dust jacket photo of Breakfast of Champions. I’ve got books in wonderful piles everywhere you look, like you’d think a guy wearing a blue knit cap indoors might have. Books are art to me. If I won the lottery, I’d buy all the beautiful books of black-and-white photographs of Paris.

I find nothing appealing about the Nooks and the Kindles. I was standing next to a guy who was reading one on the subway. It looked like a Magic Slate. It was gray all over. And they’re talking like it’s a beautiful thing. I don’t get it. It might be revolutionary, but it’s nothing design-wise. (I don’t think Apple computers are that big a deal design-wise either, if you want to know the truth. They’re rectangles with an Apple logo on the front. ) Look at the covers of the books on your shelf. Some of those are beautiful. Hold on to them.

Here’s part of a paragraph from a book I’m reading about book thieves, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. This is the author talking, not one of the thieves:
…my daughter returned from camp last summer with her copy of 'Motherless Brooklyn' in a state approaching ruin. She told me she’d dropped it into a creek, but couldn’t bear to leave it behind, even after she’d finished it. This book’s body is inextricably linked to the experience of reading it. I hope she holds on to it, because as long as she does, its wavy, expanded pages will remind her of that hot day she read it with her feet in the water — and of the fourteen-year-old she was at the time. A book is much more than a delivery vehicle for its contents…

Here are two things I overheard people say; people, I think, who can’t resist new gadgets and are looking for a reason to get an e-book reader:
‘Now when I go on vacation I can take 10 books with me. I won’t have to lug all those books.’ (Please, I wanted to say, don’t bullshit yourself. How many books are you really going to read while on vacation?)
‘Now when you finish a book on the subway, you can start another one right away.’ (Please.)

But here’s the part of the transformation that’s most troubling. Especially in an age of incessant computers and Blackberries. Books are the quiet things. They stand silent. When you’re with one, it’s just the two of you. But with e-book readers it won’t be that way. Already you can get The New York Times on them, and magazines, and as many books as you want. I’m betting that eventually you’ll get a lot more. ESPN.com. Google, of course. Anything you want. Some company will give you all that, and the rest of them will have to follow. Netflix. Photo capabilities. You know that will happen.

And then it’s not just the two of you anymore. All the ruckus that’s on the other gizmos will be on the little book machines. Reading will never be the same. Come across a long descriptive section in the book you’re reading, or notice that the next chapter is 20 pages long, and your restless nature will have you pushing some button to take you to a magazine or ESPN or Yahoo or a news bulletin with a list of the just-announced nominees for the Oscars. Complete with pictures or clips from the nominated movies. Who’s going to go back to that 20-page chapter with no pictures? Not young people for sure.

Here’s a very-young-people story. I’m out West over the holidays seeing two of my kids, and two of my granddaughters who are very young. We go, for tradition’s sake, to Mass early on Christmas Eve, then we go out to dinner at a nice little place close by. The youngest child, 6 months old, will be no problem, but the older one will be squirmy at best. Early on in the restaurant, my son-in-law, no computer geek at all, slides his iPhone to his not-quite-three-year-old daughter to give her something to do, while we have a drink and decide on dinner. I’m across the table from her and down a couple of seats, but I observe her finding an app familiar to her on the shiny machine in front of her, and soon she’s sliding photos along, like adults do on their iPhones, and soon after that, with her thumb and forefinger, like adults do, she’s enlarging the photos, without squealing over the wonder of it all. It might have been Christmas Eve, but it was an epiphany to me. So, this was the future. No, actually it was already the present.

Now, my granddaughter may have a hundred books. No bedtime, no nap, ever happens without a book or three being read to her. There’s usually a book in bed with her. So, she’ll be all right. She won’t be limited, no matter what new buttons and machines might come her way, to sliding photos with her fingers.

But what about city kids, poor kids, who don’t have a hundred books, who don’t get stories read to them before they go to sleep? What’s going to happen to them in this new world? They could wind up further behind. They could be like crippled kids when their friends get bicycles. The distance will grow. They must be taught to read. They must be given books and time to read them. If it takes all of the 12 years they’re in school to get to be easy readers, so be it; that necessary skill has to be learned. It’s the only way to close the distance. Sure, I want my granddaughter to be in the front of the pack. But I don’t want her lapping anyone. If the schools have the will, they can see that everyone reads well. Reading isn’t a skill that only a few people can learn to do, like standing at the plate facing a 90-mile-an-hour fastball. It’s something that can be taught to everyone. There can be no equivocating about it.

And there can be no grandstanding. Let’s not have some computer company donate 1000 e-book readers to some school in Brooklyn with T-shirts that say ‘I’m an e-Z reader’ for a photo-op. Let’s use the 12 years to actually teach them to read. If someone handed you an assignment to teach a kid to read and told you you had 12 years to do it, you’d be dumb-founded. 12 years! Who couldn’t do that in 12 years? My point exactly.

Photo caption:
TAKE A BOOK ALONG FOR THE JOURNEY, AMERICANS. The world doesn’t need more plastic . Leave the gadgets behind.

2010-01-11T18:41:00.000-08:00

Following Crazy Heart

You find what you’re looking for

It’s mid-afternoon and you’ve just come out the side door of the Angelika and you’re glad that’s the sidewalk you’re on. You’ve just seen ‘Crazy Heart’ and you don’t want to be a block over, walking north toward home through the endless cheesiness of Broadway. What you want is a beer in a bar with country music playing, but you’ve just come back from Wyoming and you know that bar isn’t in this town. So you walk toward the corner and you dip down into Mercer Street Books where the lights and the squeeze of books on tables and shelves makes you rub your hands together like you would have in that country bar if it were here. And you know you’ll find something. Half-an-hour later you do. A 25-year-old used biography of James Agee. Five dollars and fifty cents. Your own crazy heart is satisfied for now. You walk home, with your new book, avoiding Broadway the whole way.

Photo caption:
James Agee: A Bad Blake of his own.

2010-01-11T18:38:00.000-08:00

Nose In It:

The book you’re reading at home that you take with you on a trip doesn’t always travel well. It can. It can ease the transition, keep you connected to home, act as an emotional buffer, be a security blanket. Or it can lose its appeal in the bright sun of vacation. The National Book Award winning-novel, Colum McCann’s Let The Great World Spin is an example of the latter. It didn’t have enough of whatever I needed to hold me while I was away. Don DeLillo’s and Joseph O’Neill’s ‘9/11’novels (that’s what McCann’s is, in its way) held me brilliantly in ways this one didn’t.

I’m reading Nick Hornby’s first book, Fever Pitch, a memoir of being a soccer fan. It’s wonderfully written, if a bit uncomfortable; his obsession is a little too intense for me.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much is a true story. Also about obsession; about rare books and what some people do to acquire them. Weirdly fascinating.

2010-01-11T18:35:00.000-08:00

Found upstairs at Strand.

2009-12-08T04:58:00.000-08:00

After all the books and articles I've read about city schools and failure and what are we going to do about them...

THIS SEEMS LIKE THE ANSWER

Books you need jump off shelves to you. That’s how I wound up with four books by Mary Leonhardt. Why I needed them I didn’t know at the time the first one jumped. My kids were beyond the age where they needed my help in reading, if they ever did. They were in college or had already graduated. I was no longer a teacher. But something had me hanging around the education books in a store somewhere, and there was Parents Who Love Reading, Kids Who Don’t. It had a boring, all-type cover and I hadn’t heard of it or Mary. But I bought it, magically, like those things happen … devoured it, like those books make you … and it became a fast friend to me, a companion like Walt Whitman’s books had once become a friend to me. In her writing I found the truth. That’s what we all look for when we cross a bookstore threshold.

When I was planning this blog, this newsletter, I took a bus to Massachusetts to meet her. She lives in Concord, retired from teaching. The first thing she said to me after hello was that she had to read to me the opening sentences of a paperback book she was reading. She was just who I hoped she would be.

A week ago she e-mailed me answers to questions I had sent her.

It appears that all cities have trouble teaching so many of their kids to read well, even though the 12 years they have them seem way more than enough time. Do you have any insight into why it's such a difficult thing to do? Or is it not so difficult and is there just something the public schools are missing?

This is what most educators don’t understand:

In reading, as in life, practice is everything. Excellent readers are kids who, somewhere along the line, fell in love with books and so spend a great deal of time reading. Schools don’t make falling in love with books a priority. Or even a goal!

Schools think kids become excellent readers by answering comprehension questions and memorizing vocabulary. Not only are they wrong about this (just ask an excellent, avid reader if he spends a lot of time filling out worksheets or memorizing vocabulary), but this belief necessitates that everyone read the same book—so the teachers can make up questions on it.

The result is that kids hate reading because they are forced to read stories and books they don’t like and then answer questions they think are stupid.

Poor kids usually don't have books at home, maybe weren't read to enough. Can school make up for that? Again, 12 years seems plenty of time to do that. Why doesn't it get done?

Sure. All educators have to do is flood every school with interesting reading material (books, comics, magazines, newspapers) and then let the kids spend at least an hour or two a day just reading. No worksheets. No memorizing vocabulary. No required reading—just free choice. And everyone needs to be reading during this time—the principal, teachers, secretaries, the nurse, coaches—everyone!

If this were done in elementary and junior high, high school kids could then be assigned more challenging titles and have fun discussing them. But our high schools are now filled with students who read poorly and see reading as only a boring chore to avoid at all costs.

If you were chosen the Schools Chancellor, what would you do the first hour in office to change things?

Oh, what a tempting question! How about this: an edict mandating that school districts spend as much on librarians and reading material for the kids as they spend on administrators and their staff.

I see great-looking young adult books in the bookstores. They look edgy. Do school libraries get those? Do they get them while they're fresh?

I have really liked almost every school librarian I’ve ever met. They are often the only adult in the school who really values reading.

That said, school libraries are very underfunded, and the money they do get is being directed to computers and other technology. New young adult fiction is usually at the bottom of the funding list.

The other point is that often the books that really turn kids into readers are series, like Goosebumps or Vampire Academy; or category fiction, like mysteries or science fiction. These are really low status books, and librarians are often afraid to order them.

The title of one of your books is ‘How to Teach a Love of Reading Without Getting Fired’. What's the deal? How could there be resistance to teaching a love of reading? How did you have to be careful when you weren't being careful?

Would you believe schools are still teaching Ethan Frome? And Great Expectations? From about sixth grade through high school, teachers are presented with a curriculum that requires them to teach books that most kids will hate.

I coach teachers on ways to avoid a poisonous, required curriculum, to get their students reading books they can love, and not get fired in the process. The critical element is that students need to be given the ability to choose most or all of their reading.

TVs, computers, cell phones, all that. Good or bad for reading?

TV: bad. Computers are better; at least they are reading a bit, and often writing, too. All of the texting that goes on with cell phones is probably good IF they are also avidly reading, since then they will acquire good grammatical structures they can use when they want to.

What reluctance did even English teachers evidence when you'd talk to them about your way of doing things?

English teachers tend to teach the way they were taught, with a required curriculum that mandates the teaching of certain books. The difficulty they have getting their whole class to read these books pales before the difficulty they envision managing a class where students can choose most of their reading.

And anyway, they have already read the books they are assigning. They have folders full of discussion questions, and tests, and vocabulary exercises on these books. Why on earth would they want to open their curriculum to books that kids choose—that maybe the teacher hasn’t read. How can she give them a test on it?

The fact that most students read little of these required books, or any other books with a required book hanging over their heads, simply doesn’t impact them. I think the reason is because most teachers don’t understand how important avid reading is for developing reading skills. So it doesn’t matter too much if students are not reading.

Are schools arranged correctly for reading?

No. Most schools are pretty sterile places. I would love to see schools with magazines in the cafeteria, comics in the nurse’s office, overflowing bookshelves lining the halls. I want to see piles of Soccer World and Sports Illustrated for Kids in the gym. I want the school buses to be awash with interesting reading material.

Why aren't kids breezing through books and reading assignments after 12 years?

This is really the heart of the issue. Kids don’t breeze through reading assignments because they don’t read well enough to do so. But since reading is a hidden skill—unlike, say, playing soccer—few people realize how poorly many children read. And they read poorly because they read so little.

Follow a child of any age throughout a school day, and see how much time this child spends in sustained, concentrated reading. Everything else in a school day is considered more important than just having a child sit and read for a block of time. Kids listen to lectures, discuss issues, answer questions, fill out worksheets, write essays . . . but just sit and read? No time for that. It’s so sad

2009-12-08T04:53:00.000-08:00

We Learned More from a Three-Minute Record…

Bruce and Stephen King, the same week in the Times?

Well, Bruce wasn’t writing in the Times like Stephen King was, but he sure got writerly attention from David Brooks on the Op-Ed page. Brooks went on about his own ‘second’ education, the emotional education he got from listening to Bruce’s music. OK, so maybe the fervor of this recent reaction was prompted by his young daughter’s Springsteen fervor; you get like that when you’re a parent. But his message was one the readers of the city’s other dailies already knew: There’s more to school than studying.

Which brings me to the Book Review, where usually A students write about books written by other A students. Or professors write about books by other professors. But on November 29, there was Stephen King writing the cover review of a biography of Raymond Carver. Two guys who probably cut a class or two.

You can’t write a book review better than Stephen King wrote this. The A students could consult Fowler or Roget or re-read all their Edmund Wilson and not get close to it. They’ve had plenty of shots in that very Book Review and have not done what Stephen King did.
If you missed it, ‘you could look it up’, as another non-A student once said.

Photo caption: RAYMOND CARVER. For many, the face of the American short story.

2009-12-06T20:59:00.001-08:00

Nose In It:

A new enthusiasm bites you and you race out and buy some books about it. Nothing like a new interest for over-loading on new purchases. They say that’s why golf is the perfect hobby. There’s no end to the books and magazines about it. To an avid reader, an impractical book buyer, a new pursuit gives you a determined reason to go to a new shelf in the store.

Lately, and at first sheepishly, I find myself looking at books about soccer. (Why do I, right now, want to say, I know, like Craig Ferguson says it?), I say sheepishly (rolling my eyes and grinning, again like Ferguson) because my friends don’t (worse, won’t) do soccer. So, I’m alone among my pals when it comes to subjects like the World Cup and MLS and the Tottenham Spurs. They don’t even want to hear me wonder aloud why the British press says Chelsea were beaten, or Liverpool have lost three straight. It’s like cricket to them. It can’t be, but that’s how they act about it. (They’ll watch UConn and Tennessee girls’ basketball. But not Premier League soccer. Huh?)

So they didn’t run out and buy The Beckham Experiment like I did. I read it before I’d even seen him play. Then last month I watched him two weeks in a row. He was way better than I’d been led to believe, and easily the most interesting player on the field (best too maybe, even at his age).

Then there’s Soccernomics, a Freakonomics about British soccer. A fun way to learn inside stuff about the game. A better way, and a better-written way though, is How Soccer Explains the World. If Thomas Friedman were young and interesting, this is what he might write.

I read these two books over Thanksgiving, north of Boston. The friend I stayed with had no TV, so I walked two blocks to an Irish bar to watch the Notre Dame game and a couple of other football games. Among the college football-filled screens was, surprisingly, one with a British soccer game.

2009-12-06T20:54:00.000-08:00

Wallace Shawn, warm inside
Three Lives & Company.

2009-11-21T22:20:00.000-08:00

And They Call This Book Country?

New York City has a rich, alluring literary tradition, but way too many of its kids don’t know how to read.

Before you move here, you have this image of New York City as a bookish place. The photograph of the famous writers gathered at the Gotham Book Mart. The New Yorker. Random House. Esquire. The Strand. Susan Sontag. The Reading Room at the big library. Simon & Schuster. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Columbia. NYU. Tom Wolfe. The New School. Woody Allen. The New York Times Book Review. Vintage paperbacks. John Cheever. The New York Review of Books. J.D. Salinger. The Paris Review. The Algonquin. The Partisan Review. Delmore Schwartz. You even see it call itself Book Country in ads for some kind of book fest. It would be your kind of place, you believe.

Then, about the time you’re moving here a dozen years ago, you see a photo on the front page of the Times as you’re skimming the headlines before you sit down to read the the whole paper, and you think, oh, that must be a picture from some place like Harlan County, Kentucky about some hardscrabble issue, one of those features the Times does now and then about some place remote from New York and its refinement (see above). But when you’re in your seat on the couch and you look closer you’re shocked to see that it’s not Kentucky at all but a picture of one of the ball fields in New York City where the public high school teams play their games. There are other pictures inside of other sorry-looking fields. You’re not so naïve to think the public school fields would be like a suburban school’s fields, but you can’t believe that they’re that bad and you feel like a fool for being so unaware and you get angry at New York for not being a good person if that’s how it’s let its playing fields for its kids go. You hope your friends don’t see the article.

You move to Manhattan as planned and the condition of playing fields doesn’t come up much. Anyone you knew from college who lived here has moved to the suburbs, for reasons like playing fields for their kids. You do read, maybe prompted by that article, that some mogul(s) is fixing up some of the fields. That makes you feel better. You wanted more outrage from the citizenry maybe, but at least some progress is being made. What you really wish is that the Mayor would declare eminent domain and seize all sorts of parking lots and raze under-used buildings and put in rich, green, playing fields throughout the city. He could even take too-exclusive and over-blown Gramercy Park up the street from where you live and turn it into a hockey rink. You very much wish for spaces for kids here. You’re surprised no one else brings it up ever.

But that’s not really about the New York bookishness that drew you here. That’s only a first instance of how you are disabused of some of your New York illusions. Those nasty playing fields would be as nothing compared to what really starts bugging you, and what bugs you still about the city. But maybe those playing fields will come in handy as a metaphor. You’ve come to see too many of the public schools in this bookish city as just as hardscrabble and under-watered and un-tended-to as those awful-looking fields. You aren’t talking about the physical plants of the schools, though they usually look pretty uninviting. No, you are talking about the reading life of the kids in so many of those big schools.

In the neighborhood you live in now, you can stand, on a holiday, when traffic is light, in the center of the intersection in front of your apartment building, and you can see five bodegas of varying quality, two of them selling flowers. Three dry cleaners, one with washers and dryers. A newsstand with a busy lottery machine, an internet café. There’s an off-brand grocery store, a couple nail salons, two liquor stores, a CVS, a Starbucks, a Dunkin’ Donuts, two good bagel places, one pizza place (you refuse to count the one that sells a-shot-and-a-slice). Maybe a dozen restaurants, and almost that many popular bars. It’s a great neighborhood, with, hey, that exclusive park-with-a key just a short block away. It has all you wanted when you moved here. Except it doesn’t have a bookstore. The newsstand will sell you fashion magazines from Milan, muscle magazines, college hoops mags. But there’s no bookstore in sight. You can walk to Union Square to the vibrant, four-floored Barnes & Noble and you do that. And Strand is not far beyond that. But you wanted your neighborhood to have its own bookstore, a small one like where one of the bodegas is. Didn’t they say this town was Book Country?

You know you have no real reason to complain about what your immediate neighborhood lacks when you compare it to the parts of the city where those ball fields are. There aren’t really any bookstores out there. You think of that promo that said New York is Book Country. Just parts of it, they must have meant.

There’s another metaphor you use when you’re having a pint with friends and you steer the conversation your way and you start going on about kids and reading and the poor results poor kids get in reading tests. You say that in a small island culture where everyone lives near the shore, swimming is the most important skill that to needs be taught to kids so they survive, so they don’t drown. They don’t teach soccer or traditional dance steps until every child knows how to swim. When you see that your friends accept that as obvious, you bring up New York City’s schools. You say that in order to survive in this culture you have to know how to read, more than you need to know how to sing or shoot hoops or play volleyball or know who dug the Erie Canal. You have to know how to read before anything else. In order to survive really. In order not to drown.

The Mayor (our Mayor who shouldn’t be our Mayor again), in his treasure chest campaign, so touted the success he claims he’s achieved in the schools since he took them over, you thought he was maybe going to buy an aircraft carrier and fly onto it and claim the learning war was over. You get mad thinking that he would have been cheered.

Don’t they see, kids are drowning still. A third of them can’t read well enough to pass their swimming test. And you know that many of the kids who pass are really only dog-paddling. Why does the Mayor who fastidiously saw to it that 100% of the bars complied with his no-smoking edict, why does he not demand that 100% of the city’s kids know how to read? In Cleveland, where you came from 12 years ago, there’s a plaque on the front of the big library that says: Kids Who Read Succeed. Hell, maybe Cleveland is Book Country.

You wonder if anyone really cares. It isn’t talked about much. The Times and other publications talk about numbers and unions and rubber rooms. You can’t even name the Times’ education editor. Do they have one? You wonder why mothers of kids in the schools don’t take to the street with pots and pans and march down to Chambers Street to demand that their kids be taught to read. They know what it means for their kids not to know how to read, if only from seeing the neighborhoods filled with the bodies of kids who’ve drowned.

If the Mayor can up-end centuries of tradition and outlaw tobacco from public houses, why can’t he buck Albany and the Board of Regents and turn the city’s schools into reading academies where kids will immerse themselves in books and magazines, and the state syllabus be damned. It isn’t longer hours at school the kids need, it is focused hours. It is reading time. Time to make up for what they lacked in their earliest years. The city has them for 12 years. You think about that sometimes when you remember that that’s how long ago you came here. That’s a long time.

So you decide to start ‘a cityReader’. You’re not sure what you’ll do with it. But you’re tired of talking about it. Tired of your own metaphors. You want to go around and see what the deal is…why in 12 years the schools aren’t teaching the kids to read well enough to succeed.

‘a cityReader’ will be a blog and a sheet to be passed around. Maybe every couple of weeks.

Bill Gunlocke

2009-11-21T20:11:00.000-08:00

What’s next, knocking down McSorley’s for a Pinkberry?

The end of the classic newsstand is cause for lament (is it too late for outrage?)

You probably weren’t around for the razing of the old Penn Station (I was; I just wasn’t around here), but you’ve probably read about it. You’ve seen the pictures of the place, the way the light came in. You’ve wondered what they were thinking, to get rid of that great building and to replace it with what we have now.

What’s going on now with the newsstands is—to me—just as confusing, just as ludicrous. The great chocked-with-addictive-stuff, lumpy newsstands with their newspapers and cigarettes and candy bars and lotta-skin mags are being replaced with what looks like some things made by the people who made new phone booths when people made new phone booths. Silver steel and glass. Cold-looking. Texture-less. Airport-like.

This either matters to you, or it doesn’t. But to those who love street things and and love the old-pool-hall textures of those newsstands with their jumble of rectangles, all orderly in their way, it’s a loss equal to old Penn Station.

Photo caption: OLDSTANDS Not fastidious enough for the Mayor?

2009-11-21T20:05:00.000-08:00

Nose In It:
Insomnia has me up in the middle of the night reading Frank O’Connor, Collected Stories. I’ve thought this before, so it’s not just a current enthusiasm: If I could take only one book, I’d take this one. Each story is its own little world, inside the already-little world of Ireland. His stories sent me to his memoir, My Father’s Son. An even littler world.

This re-reading of O’Connor may have been prompted by Ulysses and Us, a fresh new look at Joyce and 1904 Dublin. It was exciting to read, way more than I would have thought.

Orhan Pamuk’s novel is supposed to be next on my list. I don’t know though. Might be more romance than I can take. Loved Snow and Istanbul.

While not sleeping, I also read for the fifth or sixth time, The Catcher in the Rye. I first bought it off the small-town cigar store paperback rack when I was in grade school, thinking it was about baseball. (The popular cover then was an illustration of Holden with his red hunting cap on backwards.) Salinger created this wonderful voice, and you can see why young readers adopt Holden as a companion. He had a line that made me think about the recent election here: ‘In New York, boy, money really talks—I’m not kidding.’

2009-11-19T09:49:00.000-08:00

Young Ernest, still young,
in St. Mark’s Bookshop window.