Sunday 24 May 2015

Johnny Can't Read




"Teachers today frequently find that students who can't read a page of history are becoming experts in code"

Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media" pp.229

Everyone gets really hot about literacy rates. Ask people why and the same answer is thrown up again and again: Attention span! Yes yes, apparently it is all a question of working memory. (Engle 2002, Bosse and Valdois 2009 etc. etc.). It is an idea which has entered the public consciousness. Why don't we read? Smartphones! Google! This is also an idea which has been picked up during our present cognitive turn in education.

The question which this debate stands to leave aside is: what if attention spans are poor because the task is boring?

"Johnny can't read because reading, as customarily taught, is too superficial and consumerlike an activity...The problem is not that Johnny can't read but that, in an age of depth involvement, Johnny can't visualize distant goals"


- ibid. my emphasis

The Inattentive Reader - Henri Matisse
At this point it is traditional to haul out somebody who frequently reads five Victorian novels in an afternoon to make everybody feel bad. In this way the social norm is asserted and we can go back to skimming the abstracts of those papers we are sure somebody read. (Sure they did: ten of them in fact). 

We need to get rid of the idea of reading-as-engrossment. Reading is in fact an extremely precarious activity. When reading, we linger permanently on the edge of distraction. This is a fact reinforced by a painting called "The Inattentive Reader" by Henri Matisse which one of my teachers, in their wisdom, hung in the English Department common room at UCL's Foster Court.

In fact, the truth is that reading was always pretty superficial as an activity. In Pride and Prejudice, set at the heyday of the novel, Elizabeth Bennett sits on the edge of a conversation reading a novel with half an ear on the conversation. Eventually she drops the book and wanders over to join the party. Bingley's sister, when she tries to impress Darcy by declaring "How much sooner one tires of anything than a book!" is regarded with major side-eye as a fake-ass bitch. To Austen, reading is just a diversion: Mr Bennett uses it to escape from his wife, the girls to escape from tedium. A trip to a theme park of imagination it ain't. 

This is not an isolated event. Tolstoy's Levin in Anna Karenina is described as reading vaguely whilst his housekeeper gossips happily at him. It doesn't seem to bother either of them. My point is that reading is a gleefully, openly consumerist activity which when done well involves no real engrossment at all.

Sorry what was that about attention spans? I wasn't listening.
It is not that we are too superficial to read but rather not superficial enough. "Johnny", as McLuhan argues, is living in an age of "depth involvement". He is not distracted too easily but rather he demands too absolute an engrossment. The "Call of Duty" series demands a level of concentration that Austen would simply not have comprehended. To expect a book to be able to provide this is bonkers, and yet this is what those who are all-in on reading-as-engrossment peddle.

Reading-as-engrossment carries with it a set of cultural assumptions that are culturally assimilated at university and earlier: Reading is study. Reading is hard. Reading is concentrating. Reading is work.

Yet if students are interested in anything it is a kind of digital cataclysm, the onrushing clash of colour and sound provided by an IMAX, and XBOX and many other things with an "X" in them. It is this which has perfected "engrossment" and "depth involvement". It is hard work to play these games, and it requires concentration. These provide the impression, according to McLuhan, of emergence from the gaping maw of "superficiality" and "consumerism" in search for authenticity; this occurs even as we plunge deeper into the belly of the whale itself. Simply put, the students feel as if reading is not hard enough to be important, because that is what we have taught them.

It may be a tragic consequence of the quest for "realness" that just this depth involvement could prove to be consumerism perfected. 

Perhaps then what we need as teachers is to make a virtue of our weakness: superficiality and artifice, the very "fakeness" of reading, its precarious status as a diversion and a pastime may well be, as the advertisers like to say, its Unique Selling Point. 

It is not shameful to spend an hour on a single page. There is nothing wrong with "glancing" or "skimming" or "flicking-through". Why are we always supposed to be mining the smithy of our souls? Why does boredom have to reflect badly on us? What if poetry could be recaptured as Byronic "hours of idleness" rather than a sort of grimly determined ploughing for poetic features? What if we stopped talking about "getting into a book" and instead thought about literacy as something which returns us to, rather than keeps us from, the party?

(To be continued)

Monday 18 May 2015

A Sonnet to Thor

My student is writing a sonnet about Thor. Mine was about Batman, but it was only meant as an example. However, he took to the idea. Specifically he took to the idea and defected to the dread banner of Marvel like a LITTLE JUDAS.

But I forgive him that.

There is a bit of an error with the scanning in the second quatrain but it is eminently fixable.

I lost my example sonnet "On Batman" because I was shutting down the computer too quickly. I don't care because it wasn't very good and now scholars can debate over it like Coleridge's never completed first draft of "Kubla Khan". I do not mourn it!

No really, though, the Thor sonnet is pretty great.

It makes me think as well that the idea of "trendy" versus "traditional" teaching is a crock of shit. I mean, here is a kid from inner London who has written a Shakespearian sonnet about a thousands-of-years old Norse God because he watched a film written by the bloke who did "Buffy".

I cannot, as they say, even.

Bleat as some will about cultural capital and heritage, Thor is an authentic honest to pagan-god mega story and Marvel's myth game is tight. And a sonnet is something real. What I like about poetic forms is they have the imperious certainty of Mathematics. You don't get something that's a "bit sonnety", it either is or it isn't. Petrarchan? Naw I did a Spenserian.

But as for the topic? Choose on old chap, plenty more creepily Wagnerian power players to pick from. Do Parsifal next! Or Hawkeye, sure, Hawkeye is good too. It makes no difference to me.