TIME and Again

Rediscovering an old standby

 I’ve been getting TIME in the mail every week for a year now.  I impulsively subscribed, not having seen it much since my father read it religiously when I was a kid. It used to be in friends’ houses too. And in the doctor’s office where I’d go regularly to get an allergy shot around fifth grade. I’m enjoying it. Sometimes I slip it in my back pocket and take it with me to the new pizza joint on the corner. There’s good light there. You learn more from it than from TV news.

We think we have to be on top of all the breaking news now.  I suppose that’s natural.  But there’s also a natural  rhythm to, and reason for, a weekly magazine like TIME. I recommend it, still.

Brent Staples praised this book in the Times enough to make me buy it. I just got it. Haven’t read anything but the dust jacket. It’s the story of a black newspaper in Chicago that’s been going since 1905. It’s over 600 pages. Imagine the history. 

Teenage Wasteland

 If the kids aren’t learning how to read well in the city’s schools, it’s an empty experience for them.

Toni Morrison says it’s required reading.  She‘s saying it about Ta-Nehisi  Coates’s little 150-page book, Between the World and Me. It’s been out for some months now. It’s a letter to Coates’s 14-year-old son. You’ve heard about it. You may have read it. I’d say you should. But who I’m most interested in are the 14-year-olds in the city, school kids his son’s age. Could they read this book? Not as some over-analyzed, drawn-out homework project, a few baby pages a day. Could they just sit down with it or lie down with it, and read it, maybe in one or two sittings in their bedroom, like the letter it is? Coates wrote it for a 14-year-old.  What if the schools here asked themselves if their 8^th graders could easily read that book? Wouldn’t that be a good measure? There has to be some kind of measure. I’d say go with this one.  And if they found that most of the kids couldn’t easily read it, which is what they’d find, then shouldn’t the schools change the way they spend their students’ time?

Some of the high school kids and college kids who walk past my sign every day smile at it and me and say hi.  A few Muslim girls go by with veils over their faces. They smile big with their eyes and wave quietly.

I remember being 14. I was obsessed with the guy my 18-year-old sister was dating.  His name was William Kelly Young and he was from Boston. His parents were dead and he lived with an old sea captain. He drove a little silver-gray sports car and wore a camel-hair coat and his hair looked like a Kennedy’s. It was 1961 and that was a big thing. It was winter when he first came to visit. I was out shooting hoops in the half-shoveled driveway with a friend and he got out of his little car with his long camel-hair coat on and his good hair and clapped for the ball.  I tossed it to him. I can still see it. He swished the shot, even with his big coat on, with a real shooter’s style, from 20-some feet.  That summer when he came to stay a few days with us, he was sitting on the porch one night. I was looking at him. He was reading a paperback book. It was The Catcher in the Rye, which I’d only vaguely heard of. Oh, did that look cool to me.  A guy who could shoot hoops was reading a book in a crew-neck sweater on our porch. He was the coolest guy to me sitting there slouched in a chair reading that book that he’d brought from Boston to our little town with him. Their big love affair broke up, of course, like those good things sadly do. I think of him though. I remain a Celtics fan. And I’m a J.D. Salinger fan.

In my good city all the libraries would be open till 10:00 every night. I wonder why they aren’t open that late here.  It’d be a great thing. Just think of it, a clean well-lighted place, open every night to read books and magazines in. Kids could do homework. To people who live places where their libraries are open late, it surely surprises them that big-deal New York City’s libraries close around dinner time.

There was an article in the Times last week about two Upper West Side public schools whose boundaries may be re-arranged. That’s a concern to the parents of kids in the white, more successful school who don’t want things to change. They don’t want their kids to have to go to the school where mostly black and Hispanic kids go. Nothing about that surprised me. You know by now that’s how the world is. What did surprise me though, in this day and age, was that the school where the poor kids go doesn’t have a library.

I heard on an NPR talk show that there are more scripted TV shows on now than ever in history.  Like 400 of them. People don’t know how to see all the good ones. They binge-watch to keep up.  That seems crazy to me once you’re out of the dorm.

The rates of illiteracy in prison are as high as you’d think they’d be if you thought about it. How can that not be a pipeline? By law the kids of the city have to go to school until they’re 16. That’s 10 years. To have not learned to read in those 10 years is a big reason they’re in jail. Aren’t schools supposed to teach kids to read? If you boil it down, are schools there for any other reason?

You’ve heard how some young tennis players and young golfers go off to special schools in Florida and out West to get intense training.  Some kids from Europe and Asia come all that distance to go to these schools.  What they get is instruction from people who know how to teach, and they get plenty of time to work on their game. They get lots of reps. Lots and lots of reps. Reps are important. In everything. Peyton Manning after the Broncos good game against the Packers talked about the time they’d had in their off-week to go over things. Like at the sports academies where the kids get the instruction and all those reps, Peyton‘s coaches had the team go through their paces until they had it figured out what they needed to do to get better, to get ready for their big game.  The schools here should be like that. They should have good reading instructors, and plenty of time for their students to get all the reading reps they need to become good readers who when they’re fourteen can read books like  Between the World and Me. It would change their world.  It would make it better. It would make it safer.

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

A Rare Bird

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch 

was, still is, a special book

For two years I’ve been reassured on Sunday mornings to see The Goldfinch on the Times bestseller list. First in hardcover, then in paper. As of three weeks ago, it’s gone from the list. It was there a long time.

The book was a great reading experience for me. For many people. In a recent review of a new book a few weeks ago in the Times, the reviewer referred to The Goldfinch as ‘dazzling’. It dazzled me. I haven’t found a book that comes close to it since. It might be seven or eight more years till Tartt gives us another book. Will I be around? You start to wonder about such things.

Jersey Boys

The pols and the public schools 

of Newark compose a sad song

I’m halfway through this book. I’m not sure I’ll finish it. I liked the beginning, all about the city of Newark’s dynamic  history, and now its decline. Schools along with it. There’s a gritty stimulation in reading about cities like Newark, their streets of striving immigrants.

But the book, like life, loses its appeal when the politicians and the consultants show up. They think a lot of themselves. They think they’re all about the people. They convince people of it. They convinced well-meaning Mark Zuckerberg to give them $100 million dollars for their plan for the Newark schools. That’s what the book’s about. Of course it doesn’t work out. Of course it doesn’t.

This rich-yellow-framed magazine could trigger a kid’s interest, yours too. It’s been triggering for a long time. About the state of the physical world, it’s not new to the field.

A Reading Life

We owe it to every school kid to give them that life.

Here’s how Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Purity starts off:

                             

                            MONDAY

‘Oh pussycat, I’m so glad to hear your voice,’ the girl’s mother said on the telephone. ‘My body is betraying me again. Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal.’

‘Isn’t that everybody’s life?’ the girl, Pip, said. She’d taken to calling her mother midway through her lunch break at Renewable Solutions. It brought her some relief from the feeling that she wasn’t suited for her job, that she had a job that nobody could be suited for, or that she was a person unsuited for any kind of job; and then, after twenty minutes, she could honestly say that she needed to get back to work.

In two quick paragraphs you are with people who you hear as real. You even see them as real.  You want to be with them more. You want to read more conversations like that. You want the kind of candor that Pip has given you already about her job.

Immediately you are not alone. You are not the only one with problems in your life.

That’s why readers read.

It is a great sin to not see to it that the school children of this city acquire competent reading skills. There is no other reason as important as that to go to school.  How will they know they are not alone, if they can’t read well enough to read books? When will they sit in the quiet and be involved like you can be with a book? What kind of life will they have?

When you learned to read, it changed your life.  The nuns told us when we made our First Communion it would change our life. If it did, I didn’t notice. It was reading that changed our lives. We could read comic books and baseball cards and sports pages or library books we liked. A new world opened up.  It was great to read stuff and talk to your friends about it, or just think about it by yourself. It was even better than listening to the Everly Brothers or watching Superman.

Don’t the mayor and the school heads read?  Don’t they realize they wouldn’t have a good job of any kind if they hadn’t learned to read well? Why do they not put their foot down and say this is crazy--or sinful, as I would say--that so many kids aren’t really readers when we’ve finished with them. Doesn’t it seem crazy to them--again sinful --that kids come to them when they’re shiny and six years old, and in the 10 years minimum that they are in the city schools, they haven’t learned to read well enough in many cases to even pass the test to get in the Army? Why haven’t the teachers raised their hands and said this is crazy that what we’re doing is not producing the results it should; isn’t there a better way?

Surprisingly for someone not inclined to business imagery, spreadsheets often come to mind when I think about the schools and poor kids and their reading problems. I remember 30 years ago looking at my accountant’s computer that had a spreadsheet program.  I was trying to get money to start a weekly newspaper. We were inputting various projected ad sales numbers to see what would add up to a profit or at least a break-even number that might get an investor to throw in with us. It was fascinating to me to watch how each new number we tried would shift all the other numbers on the screen. One change changed everything.

Here’s why I think about that.  What if this was added to the education mix? What if we put into it the sentence that is on the sign I hold in front of the Dept. of Education every weekday? WHY NOT TEACH EVERY SCHOOL KID TO READ WELL. What if you put that into some imagined spreadsheet and all the other variables shifted in a way that would say to everyone: More time has to be spent on reading. If your team is missing free throws that are costing you games, then you’d make them practice shooting free throws more every day at practice. Why wouldn’t you then spend more time on reading, in all sorts of ways, including private time every day for each kid to read what he or she wanted to read, like I read baseball cards and sports pages? Why wouldn’t you have all the newest books that Barnes and Noble has in your school library? And all the magazine that kids might like? You put an article about Odell Beckham Jr. in front of them and they’ll try to read it. Eventually they’ll learn to read it.

By law the schools have them for ten years, till they’re 16. Why not make sure that in those 10 years, the kids, no matter where or who they come from, are taught to read well. What else is competing for the school’s time? And don’t say ‘tests’. Please. What else is competing? History? Math? Science? A young teacher stopped by my sign one morning and said, ‘Exactly!’ She said she taught high school biology and the kids couldn’t read the textbooks. What kind of game strategy is that? Shouldn’t they have been practicing their free throws some more?

If you want to put poverty into the spreadsheet, go ahead. If you want to put single mothers in, go

ahead. If you want to put gunshots in, that too can go in. The bottom line on the spreadsheet may give you a number you don’t want to look at. But it has to be looked at. And then action has to be taken.

If the schools decided to tackle the problem once and for all, the direction would be set. They’d know what to demand of the city and the state to get the job done. They’d know who to hire to make it happen. The great German philosopher Goethe says that if you really commit to doing something, things will come out of the woodwork, that you didn’t foresee, to assist you.

When I started this newsletter almost five years ago, I looked for a quote to put at the top of the page above everything else. I Googled, I looked through books I had on my shelves, I went to the library. Then I found this. I’d pick it again.

 'We go to college to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven't learned in high school. Once we have learned to read, the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us.'

-Robert Frost