The Sign Abides

It’s three years now that I’ve held the sign.

Its message rings as true as ever.

I stand there like a fly fisherman. People swimming by the sign and me in the stream that is the sidewalk in front of the building that houses the Department of Education on Chambers Street.

I’m on my third sign. The corners get bent; the whole sign eventually starts to curl like a playing-card soldier in a vintage Disney cartoon. I’ll need another fresh one soon.

I see familiar faces on the subway with my sign in the morning on my way to Chambers Street. I was born in a rural town of 2000 people in the western part of the state; seeing familiar faces feels natural and right to me.

Some people on the train try to read the sign through the bag it’s in, one of those big translucent bags from Kinko’s.

I still like the way the sign looks. The way the letters are sized. The white space. A period rather than a question mark. A woman who worked at a weekly paper with me designed it.

The book I’m currently reading on the train, when I’m not moving the sign like a gate so people can get by,  is a novel by a young guy named Ben Lerner who lives in Brooklyn. I just finished reading his first novel a week ago. In the new one, there’s this epigraph, just before the story begins:

The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.

To come upon special thoughts like that and words put together like that are why people read. I stand in the stream every day in the hopes that the kids who can’t read well will be taught how, so they can have their own special reading experiences. Everything should be done to see that that happens.

You wonder why, in the 10 years that the kids are required by law to attend school, they don’t learn to read well. You think that maybe the schools don’t have their priorities straight. What could they be doing in 10 years that doesn’t allow for the kids to learn to read well? Well enough so they can read books on the subway. It’s a sin, isn’t, that so many of the city’s school kids can’t really read.

Runners and bicycle riders going by the sign give the most enthusiastic thumbs-up. And some drivers hold up traffic, stopping their cars and rolling down their windows to take a photo of the sign.

In the Catholic all-boys high school I went to, some of us took four years of Latin. There’s a Latin phrase, sine qua non, that means ‘without which nothing’. That’s what the ability to read well is to being a real student in school, and a real member of the culture when the school years are done. It is the indispensable ingredient that is needed to be confidently active in our society. Without it, there’s not much. Almost nothing really. Some people who can’t read well pass my sign and it takes them a long time to read it.

Some people, not just foreigners, who walk by don’t seem to be able to read it at all. I worry that the sign is humiliating them.

Here’s what I think some days when I’m standing there with the sign: The schools know what they’ve been doing hasn’t worked. They know they’ve failed to teach almost 80% of their students to read at their grade level. That’s such a failure that they must recognize that they have to make radical changes to the curriculum. They must know that to do the same thing another year is going to result in the same failure. But no one dares stand up and say that. No one wants to say it because they worry that no one in the city, no parent for sure, wants to hear what no Mets, Jets, Knicks, or Giant, or Yankee fan wants to hear, that this year is going to be a rebuilding year. No one wants to hear that. But that’s what has to be done. New ideas, new blood.

This losing can’t go on. 80% failure?

Some people smile with such fervor at the sign, I’m moved.

I didn’t write the sign’s message. It came to me one afternoon more than three years ago. With the period, not a question mark.

I think the message on the sign could change the world. That’s really all I should say when people stop on Chambers Street and ask me why I stand there every day.

Old and New Again

Fresh editions of classic books are sweet

I have four paperback copies of Ulysses in my apartment, actually maybe five (the place is a little messy), each with a different cover, and a different size slightly. That’s why I have four (or five). I’ve found each new package irresistible.

We all like buying stuff. Books are what I like to browse among and choose among. You may like to do that with wine or regional beers or music or expensive foreign fashion magazines or tennis shoes. Some people can’t resist a flea market.

The newest copy of Ulysses, this one in the picture, is designed by Peter Mendelsund. Google him, and look at his other covers. He’s got a new book out about design. It’s good looking. It’ll be in your bookstore. 

The Summer of 1975

A very memorable purchase

After teaching in Cleveland for six years right out of college, I wanted to try something else. I’d always liked books and there was a classic bookshop there that I was very taken with. You couldn’t not be. The first time I went in there, this Gertrude Stein book is what I bought. I even have a note in the front, by the date, that it was the first book I ever bought there.  I think I sensed that the place was going to be in my life somehow. But I couldn’t have guessed then that I’d eventually be a part owner of the place. I just came across the book—again—a few weeks ago when I was looking through a box for something else. I can remember the day I bought it, where it was on the shelf. I can see my hand on it, knowing that I’d be getting it, knowing that it would be a smart book. 

Postcard from 2001 drawn by Art Spiegelman. If we buy our books in bookstores, we can keep that country alive. That’s the only way.

Reading James Baldwin Again

Sadly, not many of the city’s school kids are, or can.

James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain is my train book now. I read it on the subway from 23^rd Street to Chambers Street where I hold my sign, and back again. I keep it in my Patagonia book bag, and only take it out on those morning rides. I get a few pages read a day. 

Besides reminding me what a vividly talented and necessary writer James Baldwin was at such a young age, the book gets me riled up thinking how, if it means something to me, a gray-headed 67-year-old white man sitting there on the train, it would mean a world more to a teenage black kid. I guess I mean by that, boys mostly, but girls too. But boys come to mind because the week before LeBron chose to go back to Cleveland the paper there ran an almost-week-long story about a much-loved white tavern owner close to my age who was killed by five young black men, one who worked for him, at lunch time in his place. Their mug shots show five faces that look like they never read Go Tell It on the Mountain. Worse, they don’t look like they could have read it.

Neither do the young men that I watched on CNN one night last week that are dying, and causing the dying, in Chicago, with frightening frequency. CNN showed similar scenes of such homicidal randomness going on here, too. No books were reported to have been found in the hip pockets of any of the living, or the dead.

There are no bookstores in the neighborhoods those young men come from (or came from, in the case of the dead young victims) in Cleveland or New York or Chicago. Their mean streets are not a classic movie with a cool sound track that they watch, credits too, in NYU T-shirts. You and I don’t know how mean their streets really are, no matter that I’m reading, have read for 50 years, books like Baldwin’s. Besides not having bookstores there, there aren’t enough jobs there, or fathers there whose sports pages at the kitchen table might have triggered in their sons a daily hunger for reading. Not much on those streets would find a way to get a James Baldwin book into their hands.

The only place they might find a book like that would be in their school. That’s likely the only place they might find a person who would press such a book into their hands. The only place with a librarian who would know about what kids their age would be interested in reading, someone who could make suggestions to them about all sorts of books that might speak to them, books that might light a light for them, be a companion to them, be an inspiration.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.      -James Baldwin

Most of the faces on the young men I’m talking about, the ones with the guns who shoot other men and teenagers, have an empty look; they look like they didn’t go to school for a day, let alone till they were 16, which they had to have done, by law. You’ve seen those faces.

But all of them did go to school. What happened there? Or what didn’t happen there, that left them looking that way?

Cultures require schools. It’s where the books are. No matter the neighborhood. It’s where every kid gets a desk of their own. It’s where there’s a teacher, an adult who can read well, who can show them how to read, and show them all kinds of books and magazines that they might like. It’s a place to come every day where there are bright lights in rooms with big windows. There’s a library in the school too. A school is a perfect place to give order and promise to kids from the neighborhood. And it’s the place where all their friends go.

It continually seems a sin to me that the schools don’t teach every school kid to read well enough to eventually read James Baldwin. In the 10 or 12 years that the kids go to school every day because the law and the culture say they must, they should be helped to read easily. They should be able to read any book in the school’s library by the time they’re ready to graduate. But that doesn’t happen. Not in Cleveland, not in Chicago, not here in New York City.

You have to wonder if reading is the top priority of the city’s schools. You, who are reading this, may not have considered that. You read easily and the people you know do too. But tens of thousands of kids in the city’s schools don’t read well. Kids who’ve been going to school for years. Kids with a home room, and a desk of their own. Kids who see their friends there. Kids who have teachers. Kids who go from September to June. They’ve been going every year since they were six. Most of them don’t read nearly as well as they’re supposed to.

Things can’t keep being done at school like they’re being done now. The kids from the book-less

neighborhoods are being let down by the schools where all the books are. That seems crazy to me. It’s why I hold my sign.

They should try this: They should accept once and for all, that teaching these kids to read is what they’re there for. It’s what the kids need. It’s what the culture needs. I can’t think of one other priority that could rival reading. The schools should make sure that everything that goes on, in the schools that have failed, will be to get each student to be a facile reader. Not an OK reader. A good reader. The kids lives depend on it. A James Baldwin book should be as easy for them to read when they’re 16 as it was for you and me. This is of the gravest importance.

I think, having thought on it for some time, that the lost young men who are staring at us from mug shots, wouldn’t be, if the schools had done their job. The dead would be alive.

A Great Bookstore Makes a Move

St. Mark’s Bookshop picks a new neighborhood

I love it when people don’t give up. Especially when the trends are trending against them.

St. Mark’s Bookshop, the legendary intelligent store, on 9^th Street and Third Avenue, for reasons of rent, is
moving further east to 136 East 3^rd Street, a few storefronts west of Avenue A. I walked past the space a week ago. There was no sign up yet. The door was open so carpenters could go in and out. It’s a smaller space. But that will make for a good fit in that neighborhood. You probably don’t get down there often. It’s a cool part of town. Some part of you will wish you lived there. Go there to see the store. It’ll open any day, or may have already by the time you read this.

How great for the street, a famous bookstore. My street doesn’t have one.

The Land of No Plugs or Wires

Escaping to a city park

You feel lucky to be there when you’re sitting in a park. Living here, you might miss a back yard or a porch if you grew up with one. But when you’re on a bench in the shade with a book or a magazine or a newspaper and a cup of tea or coffee, you feel like you’re on vacation in a place you wished you lived.

I have four parks within a 15-minute stroll. To grab a book or the mail, and get out of the apartment, it’s a big perk of living here. And the people you see there. TV can’t compete. And there are enough vendors or bodegas or restaurants right across the street; you can stay for hours. Go Forth.