I referred to the 24 hr classroom in this post, but I think this notion of “learning time” needs further explaining because I don’t want to imply that I want people to be “in school” for 24 hrs. Far from it. Thus the title of this post gets archived under the “on reading” series.

The explanation is relevant to “schooling” and time. In an older essay, I put out some ideas on computer conferencing as an aid in “extending” the classroom beyond its traditional scope, playing with the idea that the square classroom limits rather than enhances intellectual pursuit. I find it absurd that we expect students to learn what can be learned about a subject in 15 weeks, four to six hours per week, especially when the “ethic” of learning is really about the grade and the credit, which amounts to equating a grade with a commodity. Most of the students in my classes–not all, mind you, and not always to an absolute degree–really only want to get through the course with a B or better and then move on to the next credit, regardless of the subject. Students do the best they can to “get” the grade they want not to “learn” the material which is the best way perhaps of making the grade. In graduate school I never worried about a grade because I was so involved in showing my teachers that I knew what I was talking about.

In all of this, I blame no one, and maybe I’m being presumptuous. But I talk to too many teachers who lament “how” their students navigate higher education, and I lament it myself. Blame isn’t the point. Typically, we’re thrilled with the “personhood” of students–that is, as people they’re just as interesting, smart, and likeable as any I’ve known.

First, I read the environment and the history students bring with them. Did anyone like school as a child? Maybe the early grades, when recently everything is colors, playtime, and nice posters (note that I’ve followed my daughter’s education fairly closely and know pretty well what’s going on now in her high school. It was never this way for me, posters, play, and fun: I always hated school and would never want to be “young” again). For the yunguns, though, “school” will “happen.”

Attitudes aside, the very presence of “school” in one’s history is an incredible influence on basic human experience of the world. Not to beat this to death, but I remember driving home from a college course just after graduating high school and having this realization: “It’s 10 AM, September, and I’m driving home. What the hell am I supposed to be doing with myself?” (I had been trained that from 8 to 3 I should be in school, the prime destination of youth in our culture.)

More importantly, early school experience “shapes” how we think about a “learning space” in general, “learning space” defined as a “place” where one is supposed to learn, and any place “beyond” or “outside” that “room” or “hall” is preferrable, typically taking the shape of “summer” time when no “teacher” could force me to work on vocabulary. “Summertime” however always came with reminders that “school” was just around the corner.

In this context, what I’d like to see is “school” blurred away as a shaper of human experience with more of a trend toward intensified learning. Practically speaking, this can be incorporated into college because college is and has been still a “matter of choice.” Compulsory education calls for a rigidity to its structure which forms a burden on learning. The more colleges act “compulsory,” the more they will take on the shape of secondary education, impeding education, in the sense that Blake judged hindrances–as in

I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

As I build my reading list, I’m thinking about the effect of ancillary texts; how do I create a list that will lead to the building of another list by the reader. We come away from “school” with a body of knowledge and attitudes. But does this body suggest a hypertextual tree of life? Do we leave high school ready to add to what we know, to seek out “more” or to change it? Or do we leave relieved, ready for something different, wanting to forget the past? An excellent read should be like an excellent fajita, an “experience” you want to pursue and refashion and consider on your own. Personally, one of the interesting things about my memory is the smell of roasting chiles (chee-less: the pronounciation has a lot to do with the smell and the taste in my memory). Some readers think that there may be some knowledge out there that they need to “get,” some fruit that they have yet to experience, that will help them understanding things better. It may be that, as Plato would say, it’s the pursuit of one thing to the next, a building on the first “discrete/non-discrete” element due to the second that adds a little color to the fruit.

You read a poem. Then a second. The first unfolds a little more. The first adds to the second. Then comes the third and the first and second are dashed against the rocks.

Some remarks have been made here about the politics of choice concerning human knowledge. It must be made clear that this subject is tricky. What to view and what to see in order to take into consideration human knowledge is a considerable issue. To help, I could be evasive and claim that dogs don’t write books, therefore, I need not bother asking what books I should read by “Rover.”

“What is the latest book of poetry written by Rover?”

“Her output has been very little.”

“Anything, then?”

“No, nothing.”

“What about by Coco?”

I can conclude then that it’s human stuff I have to deal with to know things from a particular point of view. But things are even more complicated because of the issue of commodities. Books are a commodity these days, therefore, to judge human knowledge today also involves certain economic considerations. Poor Henry out there has written a book explaining all of nature, but the agents and the book publishers want nothing to do with him. That’s what I mean. Henry’s also written a novel whose characters are so sweat and sublime that his book puts Cervantes and Pynchon to shame. Unfortunately, he lost the file due to electrical storm and his backups are all crazy-looking, like the symbols of machine language. Henry gives up and ends up reading books on famous grill jockeys.

The point is we have to choose what’s illuminating and what isn’t. “Isn’t” may make the list of your neighbor. You congretate in the backyard over drinks and fight about who contributed more and contributed right. A gunbattle follows. Aliens zoom down and wonder at the two books sprinkled with blood. They conclude that there was really nothing here and zoom off to other happy hunting grounds.

Some people have it easy. The books (or magazines) have been chosen for them, as in the “Great Books” or the “Classics” of the New York Times big sellers lists. Tradition. I enter the library and there’s a huge book on a table. I don’t know who put it there but I sit and open and read. Maybe I don’t like what I see there; maybe I do. Maybe someone’s slipped in a postcard with weird symbols on it. By the way, there’s a painting on the wall. Next door to it is a photograph of the very same subject.

Here we always go back to the notion of modern spaces to fix a context for a potential canon of work. It’s as Neha identifies herself: “I’m a lit major.” It’s as Susan Gibb identifies herself: “A student of the word.”

In reviewing the reading series in development here, I think I can come to a few major conclusions: I’m considering reading in two senses:

1. Reading as everyday (existential) activity: reading the self, environment, and landscape
2. Reading as cultural act and agency–multiform(al)/function(al) literacy

Literacy is applicable to both, but I would argue that literacy in its presence sense is more in line with the professions, scholarship, and specialization (I heard it used just the other day in this context). Likewise, both areas can involve degrees of skill and value. In English studies close reading is valued over the glance or surface read and thus the skill of close reading is emphasized in the classroom and developing the skill is supposedly addressed in the teaching pedagogy. But the term “close reading” can be ambiguous, in that people assume multiple meanings in its use, especially when we talk about education policy and schooling. Surely to deconstruct a text involves close reading, as would any other critical or philosophical aesthetic applied to texts. There are indeed different ways of reading William Carlos Williams’ poem To Daphne and Virginia

The smell of the heat is boxwood

when rousing us
a movement of the air

stirs our thoughts

that had no life in them
to a life, a life in which

two women agonize:

to live and to breathe is no less.

and Dean Young’s I Am But a Traveler in This Land & Know Little of Its Ways

Is Everything a field of energy caused
by human projection? From the crib bars
hang the teething tools. Above the finger-drummed
desk, a bit lip. The cyclone fence of buts

surrounds the soccer field of what if.

–But, of course, this is well known, even though the poems may not be. Yet, I’m nagged by the second of the two main ideas. Is one way of reading better than another? What does best justice to the poem or to the photograph at least for the reader who wants to read: the biographical approach, which informs a reading of Williams’ Asphodel, that Greeny Flower by looking for the connection between real life and the poem; the new critical approach which takes the poem as a self-contained work; the post-structuralist, which, as a set of approaches, focuses on the ambiguities and complexities of meaning, identity, and construct; the reader-response, which places the reader at the heart of the process? It may be that these are pointless questions. If someone wants to compare Williams’ life to the things he writes about, I’d say, go for it (who is Daphne?). Likewise, if one wants to read the philosophy of Derrida or Jacques Lacan or explore the notions underpinning colonialist writings, that’s excellent too. Or what about studying the patterns of things and get into the philosophy of recursionism, a la Escher?

All of this is taking me off track though, it would seem, because anyone can seek out the approaches and use them to understand some part of the stone to whatever degree this may be possible. Is it fine to bring forth the story then of the three readers: the poet, who observes the stone; the geologist, who tells us its parts, and the capitalist, who will figure its market value. Three readers, three stones. But is there one “essential” stone around which all three congregate with gloves on?

At my son’s recent eye test at the doctor the nurse held up a chart and asked, “What is this?’

“It’s a glove,” he said.

What do you think he was looking at?

Everyone needs money to live. Saying that reading often involves quality depends on who you ask.

Certainly the cashier at McDonalds makes less money than the doctor. But it could be true that the fry cook at the local diner enjoys his job more than the surgeon, who has a secret fear of the color of entrails.

But all of this should be taken as a given. Beauty may is in the eye of the beholder, as is quality. And certaining the notion of “skilled” reading depends on time, place, context, and country. The guy who’s just lost his job probably could give a rat’s ass about whether Dante is high art. Yet, if you ask the professor, the answer could be that even though there are many people out there seeking survival pay, Dante is still a great poet. Surely the college freshman’s attitude about Dante shouldn’t be taken all that seriously, given that typically they don’t know enough to be sincere about the subject (as in any other case like this), just as I can’t really be sincere in my judgement of black holes as being either a corny idea or flabergastingly exact and cool. (How can I claim to deny evolution if I am just not familiar enough with it to say yay or nay?) I am not a fan of the Beetles, but I know enough about music to know that the Beetles’ output is pretty darned amazing, and that their music over time is consistently competent. What range, what nuance, and talk about play with the landscape, and they did it over and over again. But I wouldn’t purchase a single bit of it.

Judgement in many cases has simply to do with agnosis. If you haven’t read Dr. Suess how can you judge the work? How many people decry the violence of video games yet wouldn’t know a console from a shoebottom. Some people claim that science can’t explain everything thus we need religion to fill in the holes. Right. So many mysteries and the size of the universe is proof of something.

In English studies (or for the English major, just to keep things in sponsorship), one of the most valuable forms of reading is called “close” reading. It’s the primary goal of foundational studies of literature and from that point all other things are derived. First you learn to study the text’s nuances, understand its literal meaning, it’s details, vocabulary, structure, then you move on to bigger and better things (wink, wink). You read a poem first for what’s on the page or waving through the air, then you move to figures of speech, implied meaning, form, influence, and the weird things that happen when you manually play the record in reverse (Abner, Abner, Abner or some such thing if you remember the old ELO trick). You take the surveys, a few major authors, then enter graduate school and hit the critics and the multiverse and experience what you don’t have time for in the basic undergrad curriculum. Check out the courses at major universities for what’s currently being taught for Ph.D. How about Piers Plowman in the original? How about a whole bunch of southwestern or Chicano/a fiction and history? Why not? How about a whole bunch of Chinese literature? It’s not just about the literature, depending on what that means; it’s also about the culture? This makes the question of Dante in Italian or English a little more profound. And what about Kafka? It was Borges who consulted the Oracle and walked away with a new kind of grin. Good luck knowing your multiplying selves.

We can talk about the art of reading without ever picking up a poem. I found this list from the Army’s website just to make a point about “reading” and the idea of “reading for.” Why would it be suggested that leaders read Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization?