The Girls of Summer

I’m using my daughters to make a point. That’s them in the picture, thirty years or more ago.

A divorced father, I lived close to my three kids and saw them a lot. Overnights, dinners, movies, pick ‘em up from school, watch their games. All that stuff. But I looked forward eagerly to the week-long getaways with them from where we lived in Cleveland to South Florida to see my older sister and her kids over spring breaks, and in summers to drive to my younger sister’s big summer home on a lake in Northern Michigan. That’s where this begins. On Crooked Lake.

You almost couldn’t tell my kids apart from my sister’s kids or the other kids in my sister’s big extended married-into family up there. They dressed like them. Swam like them. Read the same Judy Blume and V.C Andrews. Listened to the same tunes. Same TV shows. Same movies. Same things to hold their hair back.

What they didn’t do like their cousins or the other kids there was water ski. Oh, they could get up eventually. And go around once or twice. But the other kids could hold on with one hand and adjust their bathing suit with the other. They could wave and signal their mother or father to speed up or go around the loop again. They could jump the wake and crouch down way out there almost hole-high with the boat and zoom across the water grinning the whole time. My kids couldn’t do that. They couldn’t drop a ski either. They certainly couldn’t go from the dock on one ski.

No matter that we went for a week or so every summer. The kids up there were there for the whole summer from places like Cincinnati and Detroit and Chicago. They skied every day. My kids couldn’t do what they did on skis. And as they got older and started to like boys, they didn’t even bother to try to get better or even ski anymore. They were too far behind. They’d sit on the dock looking at Seventeen or a book and get a suntan instead. Or float on rafts on their stomach to get their back and back of their legs brown.

They probably figured why even try to do something they couldn’t get really good at. They may have envied their cousins’ easy ability. They may have wished, for that daily hour when the boat was in constant use taking one kid after another for self-assured ski adventures, that they were back home in Cleveland, hanging with their friends who couldn’t ski well either.

If they had had a summer-long place on Crooked Lake they’d have been able to ride like the wind on skis. But as their life was, they couldn’t. They didn’t get to do it enough. They didn’t get enough practice at it. They didn’t get enough reps at it to be good.

I could relate. In the small town I grew up in in Western New York, some kids’ families had cottages on little nearby Loon Lake, or on another lake around there. My family didn’t. The kids that had a cottage could water ski like the Crooked Lake crowd. I couldn’t. I could shoot hoops and play baseball with the best of them, but I never learned to ski. I avoided the lake therefore, only going when I got older to drink beer and smoke cigarettes and feed the jukebox at Musty’s, a wobbly, wonderful lakeside dive.

You know where I’m going with this. I’m going to equate my kids and my not becoming easy skiers to some of the city’s school kids not being able to read well. As I’ve said many times in this blog/newsletter: the kids aren’t going to be able to read easily until they get enough reps. And because they don’t get enough reps, they’re going to pull back from it. Go away from it. Feel bad about it. Get mad at it. Say screw it. They’ll want to go back to Cleveland and hang with their friends who can’t do it well either.

For my kids and waterskiing, there was no way to catch up. An annual week of doing it, couldn’t get it done. There was simply no way to do it so infrequently and get good at it. There was no place to do it when they weren’t at the lake. No place to practice. It’s not that way for kids who aren’t good readers. They have schools. They have schools where they have to go almost 200 days a year. By law they have to go. At least till they’re 16. They can’t blow it off. They can’t avoid it. It’s like going to Crooked Lake 200 days a year. With a desk of their own and a teacher.

With all that time, ten or twelve years of time, nearly 200 days in each of those years, how come many aren’t learning to read well? If a kid went to the lake and went skiing that much and didn’t learn to ski competently, you’d think something was crazy. You’d think it couldn’t be true. You’d say the boat must not have enough oomph, the skis didn’t fit them, or the lake was too rough. Or that they were not really going ten or twelve years. Or they weren’t going every day of those 200. You wouldn’t accept that at the end of all that time, the kids who’d been going to the lake from when they were six until they were 18 couldn’t ski easily. You’d say that’s nuts.

I say it’s nuts.

Every time I stop to write about it, the number of years and the number of days, and the poor results, confound me. Does the syllabus speak to the needs the kids have? Do the state’s curriculum requirements speak to the needs the kids have? Does anyone in a board meeting or a teachers’ workshop say, Hey, this isn’t working? Is what’s on the agenda for the poor-reading kids in the new school year different from last year? Is teaching every school kid to read well the paramount goal? Are the kids getting all the reps they need?

That my three daughters aren’t easy waterskiers is not important to their lives anymore. The lack of that skill doesn’t hamper them. It doesn’t prevent them from living interesting lives. If they couldn’t read well, it would make a world of difference. They’re lucky girls.

Free Thinker in China

Ai Weiwei finds trouble in creative ways

If it were the late ‘60s, when I was in college, you’d carry this book around in your hip pocket. You’d read everything the guy wrote. There’d be posters. T-shirts. More students would get cameras. They’d go see the movie ‘Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry’ at IFC over and over. They’d name kids after him.

You should not miss the movie. It’s 100% good.

I’ve become a little obsessed with him. I’m going to order an expensive book of his photographs. He took 10, 000 shots when he lived here for 10 years as a student. He loves New York. You see that in the film.

In a world where politicians and Lance Armstrong are bullshit, you’ll love this guy.

What The Smart Kids Are Up To

A magazine that’ll quicken your pace

In a time when most magazines are telling you how certain they are that the sky is falling, Fast Company[ might have an article about two recent college grads who just developed a geometry of graphite tubes that will carry water to the thirsty villages of Africa for pennies a day. There’s an article in the newest issue about a company that plans to make biofuels from Brazilian sugarcane.

Get it for yourself. It’s a monthly. It probably doesn’t cost more than a dollar an issue in the mail. Send your kid one. Anybody in junior high or beyond will like it. It’s an energetic magazine. It makes you realize how exciting it can be to be working on the world’s big and small needs.

I noticed in a store the other day that it’s in paperback now. It’s very good.

A Year On The Street

Standing with my sign every morning was an engaging education.

Here are four quotes I used in an article I wrote in 1996 for a magazine I edited in Cleveland. I came upon them yesterday when I was rearranging things that were sliding off a shelf in my wonderful-to-me, book-strewn apartment :

I can think of no more important endeavor than reading. To be a little dramatic, it’s saved my life in many ways. I’ve been pursuing it now for a long time. Heavily I’d say for the past ten years. I began very late…If I had one wish for my children, it would be that they become readers.
-Harvey Keitel in Esquire

No matter how high the quality of programming, an excess of passive reception stunts a child’s oral development and prepares him or her to be frustrated by the seemingly arbitrary rules of standard English…Frustration turns to resentment: kids drop out of school and, in the worst case, join violent gangs of ‘post-illiterates.’
-Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker

To me, nothing can be more important than giving children books. It’s better to be giving children books than drug treatment to them when they’re 15 years old. Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn’t have to put them in prisons? If people don’t read, you have the kind of culture, and I use the word very loosely, that we have now. I think television turned out to be exactly as bad as the most irritating and pedantic intellectuals of the ‘50s said it was going to be.
-Fran Lebowitz in The New York Times

People who don’t read are brutes
-Playwright Eugene Ionesco

They of course still apply today. More maybe. They’re the types of observations that eventually got me to start this newsletter/blog two and a half years ago, and got me to go to Kinko’s and get my sign made. And got me to go downtown and stand with it in front of the Department of Education for an hour in the morning. Most mornings anyway. I’ve been there a year now. Here’s what I’ve seen:

Things change. Kids who passed me on their way to a sixth-grade (it was its first year) charter school grew remarkably. Little kids weren’t little anymore by year’s end. The parents or grandparents who walked with some of them the first months, backed off, and the kids came by themselves or in small groups. Some did nothing but holler and squeal and irritate adults on the sidewalk. You hoped they were somehow going to learn to read well. They need to. Some knew it. I could tell by the way even the noisiest respected what the sign said. They could tell the sign loved them, even as they some days nearly bumped me off the sidewalk.

Jobs, addresses, and relationships change too. Some people who used to walk by almost every day don’t anymore.

Attitudes change. Some people who wouldn’t look at my sign for weeks began to accept what it must mean; now many of them smile or say good morning every time they go by.

Some people, quiet, reader-types, who may have never given a thumbs up to anything, give a thumbs up to the sign. A few cars honk their horns and roll down their windows so I can see their faces and their thumbs up. Some honk every time they pass. My eyes water a little bit over the reaction some days. I’ll think maybe some kid or parent will be encouraged or inspired by the sign’s message. Even if the school system won’t be.

I give a copy of the newsletter to some of the passers-by. I keep a few of them in a canvas brief case I set across the sidewalk. I don’t give everybody one. I don’t want to impose. Many people have too much in their hands. Coffee, a purse, the morning paper, iPhones. A few have a cigarette going.

Quite a few people have taken a picture of the sign. Some say they’ll put it on Facebook. I like it when they say that. Despite my standing in public with the sign, I’m not at all a natural at promotion. I’m really not, to a fault probably. But I don’t want to look like I’m running for something or selling myself. I’m 65 now. I’ve seen way too many self-promoters. I think the sign will be its own agent. I really believe that. The idea for it came in a kind of inspiration. The words formed themselves. I didn’t question it. I went to get the sign made immediately, very uncharacteristically for me who can often deliberate over something till it loses its steam (case in point: I’ve been single for 35 years).

I will give the sign all the time it needs. I will stand there with it another year. I like standing there. I like seeing what I see. Maybe some day I’ll start taking photos of what I see with the small camera that’s always in my pocket. I see great faces.

Sometimes a face stops and talks to me about the sign. At first they wondered what the deal was. What was I about. I always look down and refer to the sign. Then I say some variation on the same theme. I say that in the ten or twelve years that the schools have the kids, they should make sure the kids learn how to read well. I say that the excuses of background are tired. I say the schools exist in every neighborhood and each kid has a desk and each room has teacher. I say that if their early upbringing may have not allowed for enough reading reps to make for an ideal preparation for school work, the kids must be given a chance in school to get all the reps they need. I say that the curriculum must be fashioned to give priority to that need for reps. Ten or twelve years of that should get the job done. It has to. If it takes Saturdays and Sundays and summertime too. Whatever it takes to get in the reps.

What I don’t say, but what I believe to the core of me, is that the teachers have to be readers too. Go out and get English majors to teach kids about books and reading. People who love books. Love is what you need. Love is what they missed when they missed being read to when they were small. I saw it in their faces this past year when they walked by my sign.

A Store We Need, Needs Us

Help Save St. Mark’s Bookshop

My first issue, the most important place for me to put a small stack of my newsletters was in the vestibule of St. Mark’s Bookshop. To me, that small space was the home office of intellectual free papers and announcements for plays and art happenings that defined an intelligent city. When I crossed the threshold from there into the store, I was where I felt I belonged, the kind of store I had imagined myself in when I was younger and living elsewhere. A place where you might see Susan Sontag looking around, which I in fact did a couple times.

Now it’s fighting for its life. But it’s not dead. You can keep it alive by shopping there. Google it. Sign petitions. But go there. There’s no place like it. Let’s keep that sentence in the present tense.

Once The Best Friend You Had

The Village Voice doesn’t talk like it used to. That’s too bad for all of us.

It would have once been the leader in the fight against NYU’s expansion in the Village. Its writers would have been who you wanted to read on the subject. You felt stimulated and radical reading it. You felt you had a companion when it came out every week. No matter your age. It was the Voice you listened to.

Nothing has come along and really bested it. But it’s not a big deal anymore. It doesn’t have the income or the pages it used to. Craigslist took away its all-important classified ad base. Mobile phones took away what we thought was our timeless hunger for real pages to read from.

You probably don’t read it much anymore. I don’t either really. But when I’m stopping somewhere for a beer in an afternoon window or a slice somewhere, I’ll grab one. You should too.