Be a Regular

Having a favorite bookstore is a reason to live here.

An advantage of living in a city like this is that you can walk to a bookstore. Some have closed in the last few years. St. Mark’s Bookshop just closed for good.  But you can still get to one on foot.

I’ll sometimes order sneakers online. Or Christmas toys for my five grandchildren.  But books, no. The neighborhood stores are too integral to a community to bypass. If you live in a borough that’s without one,  find one near where you work. It makes for a better life. It’s civilization at its best.

I’m surprised everybody doesn’t get this every week. Not that I never have gripes with it.

Where The Wild Things Are

Reading deals with real-life scary 

things that TV doesn’t.

I don’t watch any TV series except when sometimes I’ll see an old 'Seinfeld.' Frequently I can go all day and night without turning on the television.  This might be why:

I met a friend maybe 12 years ago for a lunch at a place on Third Avenue that had just opened, Blue 9 Burger.  It was supposed to be a big deal, burgers like you get in California. We sat by the window in front. We were going to the movies almost next door within the hour. It was Memorial Day. We talked about the girls going by on the sidewalk, sports, our kids. We were both divorced.  About halfway through our burgers, a young Latino guy came in and walked past our table with a noticeable intensity. You sensed he was honked-off about something.  Enough that I kept looking at him as he headed toward where you ordered your food. He didn’t stop there. He went to the right, into the kitchen, and soon you could hear pots and pans banging off the floor and off the wall. He must have been called in to work on his day off and he was pissed. It made our hearts pound. It was scary. We couldn’t eat. We couldn’t hear what was being said, but you could hear angry intensity in the voices. You can get scared over things like that. Squealing tires can scare you. A guy running through traffic in midday to get away from something can scare you, make your heart go. 

TV doesn’t give you that. Pots and pans banging? Intense voices? Disgruntled employee without a gun? That’s more the stuff of comedy on TV. You need a gun pushed between someone’s eyebrows to scare you on TV, or piano wire around someone’s neck, and even that doesn’t really scare you, not like the noises in the kitchen scared my buddy and me sitting in the window in a new burger place on a sunny day.  So what’s the point of TV, I thought, and its crime shows and its ’gritty’ shows, if it can’t capture real-life fear? It seemed a waste of time. What could you be learning? You need books for that.

What then about kids and adults who can’t read well enough to turn the TV off and read something that’s more real, scary even? Imagine if you were stuck with no alternative to TV. Life would be different if you had no escape from the tube. You’d be restless. You’d eat more junk. TV makes you hungry for junk food. You couldn’t even sit with a game on and look at the newspaper or a magazine. If you couldn’t read well, you wouldn’t buy a paper or get a magazine in the mail. You’d have to just sit there staring at timeouts and commercials, or talk on the phone, or text all night, or play a game on your phone, or listen to tunes. Nothing deeply quiet like reading to go to. Nothing orderly in front of you like comfortably-layered lines of type on a white background.

You couldn’t live that way, without things to read around you.  You’d want more.

Most of the graduates of the city’s schools won’t live with books and magazines and newspapers around them. They don’t read at a high enough level to be able to be to read well enough to read a book. Too many kids here graduate without the ability to read well.  What are they going to do with their lives? Watch TV all the time? Netflix? Play phone games?

I did see a TV program last week.  It was on that channel that shows City Council meetings and the Mayor’s press conferences. The one I saw showed the Mayor at a school in Queens that had higher than normal graduation rates. The Chancellor was there and the school’s principal, and some students and some other adults. The Mayor talked about hopeful changes he’s made to the system.  Reading was mentioned.  But not emphasized above everything else.  It almost never is. The Times doesn’t emphasize reading like you’d think it would when it’s writing about the schools.  The biggest failure of the schools is not teaching every school kid to read well.  How can that not be the topic on the table every day at the Department of Education? TheTimes should have a reading writer. They have food writers galore. They have a ‘Frugal Travel’ writer. Aren’t the kids and their future, which I believe and so do you, will be determined by how well they learn to read, worthy of as much space as one-day’s TV listings a week? The TV listings get a whole page every day.  

What else is there but reading really? I almost don’t remember one thing I learned in school.  Whatever state capitals I remember came from staring at a paper placemat at a Howard Johnson’s. Reading on your own is what brings about learning during the school years. In sports pages and magazines, library books, ‘MAD' magazine, backs of baseball cards, even catalogs.

Here’s a poem by Jane Shore. I’ve liked her work when I’ve come across it over the last 20 years. I just bought three used books o f her poems.

The Sound of Sense

Through the heat register I can hear

my daughter reading in the room below,

eating breakfast in her usual chair

at the kitchen table, two white pages

of her open book throwing the blinding

pan of sunlight back at her downcast face.

I hear her chirping up and down the scale

but I can’t decipher a single word

as Emma learns to read. She’s in first grade

and has to read a new book every day,

a weight she carries between school

and home in her backpack, in a Ziploc

baggie, with her lunch—a nibbled sandwich

squashed into an aluminum foil ball

she’s crumpled hard as a chunk of pyrite.

She unzips the baggie and out falls

“The Farm,” eight pages long, more pamphlet

than book. Not much happens in the plot.

A farm, a barn, a boy, a cow that moos a lot.

The words are hard, but Emma sounds them out

one at a time, the O’s both long and short—

Cheerios bobbing in a lake of milk

in which her spoon trails like a drunken oar.

This morning her father, coaching her,

clears his throat, knocking his cup against what?

--I hear it clatter but can’t make it out.

“Hurry up,” he shouts “or you’ll miss the bus!”

I hear his imperative clearly enough,

but in the raised volume of her reply

the words are lost, garbled, caught in the throat

of the register’s winding ducts and vents.

In an hour or so, when the sunlight moves on,

a film will glaze the soured milk, like frost,

where the sodden O’s float, life preservers.

Now, over muffled clinks of silverware,

clattered plates, running water, morning din,

the sound of sense resumes its little dance.

I hear my daughter turn the title page,

then silence, then a spurt of words, false start,

hesitation, a spondee of some sort,

then an iamb, then an anapest, then

a pause, another iamb—that’s The End.

Then the scrape of wood on tile as Emma

pushes her chair away and clomps upstairs

to change from her pajamas into clothes.

Outside The Box

A more vivid look at the big world than TV gives you.

Anthony Bourdain takes you places. Even if sometimes you aren’t packed  to go. You walk in the room where your TV is and turn on CNN to see some real news on the weekend and there you are in Peru again while Bourdain oohs and aahs over some exotic  local dish at a big table.  It almost works.  (His now-classic book Kitchen Confidential worked very well.)

What really works well if you want to go places is Outside magazine.  I’ve hyped it to you before.  The writing is top-notch. The photography is worth the price of a subscription.  Mountains. Rivers. Lakes that look like they’ve been photo-shopped, they look so other-worldly. Snowboarders, hikers, missionaries. There’s a lot in each issue. Good ads too. Right in your lap. 

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