Leighton, 'Study'

For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24. This new growth reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read.

“At a time of immense cultural pessimism, the NEA is pleased to announce some important good news. Literary reading has risen in the U.S. for the first time in a quarter century,” said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. “This dramatic turnaround shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read, are working. Cultural decline is not inevitable.”

Maybe not. But any statistician will tell you to wait for the next survey, and maybe the one after that: it may be a dead cat bounce. Still, it’s way better than more decline. Pity about poetry and drama – still sinking.

The full report can be downloaded here, and in the same place you can find a six page summary of the Reading at Risk report which started the heartburn.

Ezra Pound in 1914

The teacher or lecturer is a danger. He very seldom recognises his nature or his position. The lecturer is a man who must talk for an hour.

A pleasure of aging: to reconsider books that have helped to form your attitudes. Another: not having to talk for an hour.

Ezra Pound’s The ABC of Reading (1934 – but I read it in the early 1960s) could be described as an eccentric textbook, but it’s more of a manifesto. It comprises a little generalisation about literature, a lot of examples of poetry – almost an anthology – some commentary and a reading list.

Pound thought it necessary to have a standard, to read the best that has been done in its kind. What complicates this goal for him is that no one language holds a monopoly of literary virtue. For Pound, a real understanding of poetry requires a swag of languages (Chinese, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French, Italian, Provencal and more). Cross-cultural comparison holds no terrors. To see that Greek drama is not all that good, he advises you to read Homer. Don’t bother with German – he has read it all for you, and found nothing standard-setting. The monoglot gets a look-in. Pound concedes that you can get most of it by reading ‘authorised’ translations such as Pound’s own of Seafarer, Golding’s Ovid or Gavin Douglas’s Virgil. But the strongest impression left by the book – on one seventeen year old reader, at least – is that anyone without a working knowledge of half-a-dozen languages is a dabbler.

As Pound might say: balls. But at seventeen, the book conjured up a marvellous, if deeply confusing landscape – all those exotic peaks waiting to be conquered – and the promise of initiation into the mysteries of the craft, all presented far more enticingly than the plodding textbooks with their pother about iambic pentameter. I suppose I was open to the idea of a cosmopolitan canon because of my immersion in music ?

Quite apart from its grandiose claims, the book is a bit of a mess. Some of the comments on the texts are enigmatic, most no more than jottings, all of the arguments are flat assertions and there’s a good deal of intimidating but bogus scholarship. I often felt, re-reading it, like a schoolboy lectured to by a fascinating, but slightly mad uncle.

The tone of the book is hilariously dogmatic. Read for yourself, he repeatedly urges, ignore the textbooks, shrug off received opinion, do the hard yards, get up the languages and read for yourself. Then you’ll see I’m right. This is the double-bind that made two generations of English students bite their fingernails.

Despite all this, if someone wanted to begin to read poetry seriously, there are worse books. Pound may be dogmatic, but he also cares passionately about the craft as well as the art of poetry, and almost anyone would profit from a careful reading of his examples. Today, when even first year course descriptions routinely speak of gender, race, class and identity, when the drift is towards treating creative work as ‘evidence’, this is again the stress we need.

A few of many good things.

His kinds of writers: inventors, masters, diluters, good writers without salient qualities (those ‘fortunate enough to be born when the language is in good working order’), writers of belles-lettres, the starters of crazes. (39)

His advice to seek out the earliest example of a style or an innovation, to see the colour pure before it’s mixed with others.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

There is one quality which unites all great and perdurable writers, you don’t NEED schools and colleges to keep ‘em alive.

In the spirit of which, when I am asked what should be done about Shakespeare in schools, I tend to say drop him. (It is probably time to extend the ban to universities. ) “But then they’ll never read him . . .”; as if a mountaineer scrambling around in the Grampians had never heard of Everest. Those who can read him will seek him out. Those who can’t are spared their sufferings. Does it ever occur to you that declaring someone official literature might have a downside? Who don’t you trust – Shakespeare? serious readers? What makes you bother about unserious readers?

Dr Moody concludes her page:

Since the existence of large fan communities generates money and favorable partisan coterie publicity, it is in the interest of anyone who works or becomes involved with any projects involving Austen and (lately increasingly) Burney to begin with an exaggerated respect; any sharp criticism must be presented in somewhat disguised forms.The phenomenon of the cult figure or group of texts is an important one in our era, and we need frank discussion of how different cults arise, what imagined characteristics cult figures are typically endowed with by their fans, what kinds of people become fervent fans of literary writers and their characters, and what is the effect of such cults on serious study of works of the imagination.

We could do all that. Or we could just tip-toe away. They’re making too much noise to notice.

‘Real news’? Isn’t it all just a medium of social control? Ever hear of the Web? To which there are easy answers: yes, it’s real. For example, over 200 people died in the Victorian bushfires. But don’t take it from the press: go count. No it’s not just a medium of social control unless, like John Pilger and Noam Chomsky and most arts graduates from the 1980s, you regard the entire society, including all its opposed elements, as one gigantic and malevolent System. As for the Web, I’ve yet to encounter a convincing, comprehensive news site unconnected with a newspaper. Drudge, the Huffington Report etc are parasitic on the grunt-work of trained, full-time journalists and editors.

Here’s a chunk of the New Republic piece.

These reactions fail to take into account the immediate realities and the full ramifications of the crisis threatening newspaper journalism. This is no time for Internet triumphalism: the stakes are too high. Nearly all other news media, except for online news, are also retrenching, and–particularly at the metropolitan, regional, and state levels–the online growth is not close to offsetting the decline elsewhere. Despite all the development of other media, the fact is that newspapers in recent years have continued to field the majority of reporters and to produce most of the original news stories in cities across the country. Drawing on studies conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, the project’s director, says that as of 2006 a typical metropolitan paper ran seventy stories a day, counting the national, local, and business sections (adding in the sports and style sections would bring the total closer to a hundred), whereas a half-hour of television news included only ten to twelve. And while local TV news typically emphasizes crime, fires, and traffic tie-ups, newspapers provide most of the original coverage of public affairs. Studies of newspaper and broadcast journalism have repeatedly shown that broadcast news follows the agenda set by newspapers, often repeating the same items, albeit with less depth.

Online there is certainly a great profusion of opinion, but there is little reporting, and still less of it subject to any rigorous fact-checking or editorial scrutiny. Other than news aggregators such as Google News–which link to articles from publications that still derive most of their revenue from print–the most successful news sites are oriented to specialized audiences. No online enterprise has yet generated a stream of revenue to support original reporting for the general public comparable to the revenue stream that newspapers have generated in print.

Whether the Internet will ever support general-interest journalism at a level comparable to newspapers, it would be foolish to predict.

The situation in Australia is a little better, but the decline is here, too.

? my head is far more full of ideas than it has been for a long time and part of that is in no small part down to the diminished distractability factor. With a book you engage with the book. You don’t go ‘ooooh, there’s another book over there, I’ll just go investigate that and be back to this in a bit’. It’s you and the page. The words don’t link anywhere. Don’t animate. Don’t do anything fancy. Don’t overheat and shut down at inappropriate moments (glares pointedly at laptop). But I’m struck by how much we push forwards with new technologies and leave behind technologies which are perfectly adequate, beautiful in their simplicity and may well do an even better job at helping you make mental connections.

She says, forget about what kids are getting from the screen; what are they missing on the page? In business terms, what are the opportunity costs of kids not reading books?

Which in turn makes me wonder (a) what do kids 11-19 actually read nowadays? (b) what did they read in the 1960s (or whichever period one selects) and (c) is anyone framing up the question in something like that way? It would be easy to kill any such project by pointing out that what’s read makes sense only if you consider how it’s read. But perhaps there’s a way around that.