Category Archives: Reading

Modern life, Reading

The Death of Newspapers

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Kevin Siers Cartoon Caption

My hometown paper, The Charlotte Observer, has fired Kevin Siers, its Pulitzer-Prize winning political cartoonist. Like many other papers, the Observer has been whittling itself away the past few years. They lost their palatial office building, quit printing a Saturday edition, and have bled off numerous positions over the last decade: business editor, book editor, social editor, and so on.

I didn’t agree with many of the Observer’s or Siers’ positions, but they were well presented and challenging. They used to host a limerick competition for St. Patrick’s Day and picked one of my limericks for publication. Kevin Siers picked my submission for his “Write that Caption” cartoon competition four times, and always awarded me with his original black-and-white drawing — except the last one, when he surprised me with the colorized version used for publication. (See above) It’s a cherished memento that now hangs framed in my office.

People tell me, “Just read the news online.” No. Trying to read online is not the same experience. Pop-up ads disrupt you. Worse, autoplay videos try to lure you away from the article, and videos aren’t as thought-provoking or enjoyable. Reading is an active and cooperative activity between reader and writer, while watching a video is passive and one-sided. Watching a video is like inserting electrodes into your brain and submissively absorbing the input.

Progress? This isn’t it.

Reading

Reading for life

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John Irving
John Irving, Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries

It’s a distressing trend: Only a minority of adults reads for pleasure. COVID (while ruining everything else) has only made things worse. Seeking escape, folks drift toward the brain-numbing distractions of booze, video games, and binge-watching TV.

That’s dire news for writers and publishers. What to do?

There’s a great article I want to recommend about the reading crisis in the latest Vox titled How to fall back in love with reading. Step one on the road to reading recovery is to remind yourself WHY you should read instead of blotting out your consciousness with passive entertainment. The Vox piece reminds us that reading is associated with longer, healthier lives. Reading also enhances social skills.

Of course, there’s a deep cultural bias at work, which associates recreational reading with social ineptness and sissiness. That couldn’t be further from the truth. As President Harry S. Truman once put it, “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” Think of Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and John Kennedy, all energetic, life-long lovers of the written word.

As for the stereotype of readers as puny, we have the vital examples of Ernest Hemingway and Yukio Mishima, just to name a couple. Author John Irving, pictured above, was a wrestler in college, so pugnacious that in his younger days, he’d take a seat at a bar with a book and a beer and wait for someone to pick on him. A few did, to their dismay.

Reading

Quote of the day

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Library
My den.

“When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world.”

Niccolò Machiavelli

Literature, Reading, Writing

Words – just words

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Words just words

One of my coping mechanisms when stuck on a manuscript is to read outstanding posts on writing I’ve saved over the years. This morning, I revisited this advice from K.M. Weiland:

One of the best rules of thumb for showing instead of telling is to never name an emotion. Love, hate, happiness, sadness, frustration, grief—they all might be easily recognizable emotions. They might even all be emotions that will immediately get a point across to a reader. But by themselves the words lack the ability to make a reader feel what we are trying to convey.

This insight shook the mental cobwebs that had been holding me back. Weiland’s right — the most stirring and uplifting prose succeeds obliquely, rousing the reader to silent awe or trembling fear. A few examples:

“Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.” – Wendell Berry

“The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.” — Flannery O’Connor

“I sat up straight and as I did so something inside my head moved like the weights on a doll’s eyes and it hit me inside in back of my eyeballs. My legs felt warm and wet and my shoes were wet and warm inside. I knew that I was hit and leaned over and put my hand on my knee. My knee wasn’t there.” — Ernest Hemingway

Not only do these examples evoke intense reactions, they do so indirectly. As Weiland advises, the best writing shows rather than tells. Emily Dickinson was on the same track when she proposed that we tell the truth, but tell it slant.

I believe these passages soar for us because they appeal to more than just our logical selves. The neocortex, that is, the rational brain, processes language, but it connects to other parts of the brain as well. The limbic system interprets facts as emotions, and triggers the reptilian brain, which in turn shoots reactions to the body. So if you read Stephen King alone at midnight, you start peeking outside the window and maybe sweat a little. That’s the three parts working together. And we love it.

Good writing, then, achieves unity of mind and body, a sorely needed experience in an age that fractures and alienates.

Beowulf, Reading

Quote of the day

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“Finish reading an especially difficult book, and its cover functions more like a trophy awarded for intellectual labor. Carry a book around in public, and its cover can betray you to other people who will make assumptions about you. It feels risky to be so exposed, but at times such assumptions are welcome, as when a book cover, flashed across a crowded subway car, operates like a secret handshake.”

Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth

History, Nature, Reading

Hurricanes, History, and Writing

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spaghetti graph

Hurricane Florence has left us dazed, confused, and waterlogged. As bad as it was, the shifting forecasts and endless revisions of the storm’s projected path only made it worse. Florence was supposed to march through North Carolina and douse Raleigh, instead, it hit Wilmington and slowly churned its way through South Carolina, spinning off tornados and flooding low-lying areas. Here in Charlotte, trees are down and many roads and yards are under water. Now comes the clean up. Yuck.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Back in the heady days of the Enlightenment, learned individuals imagined they could predict and control both man and nature through science. French scholar Pierre-Simon de Laplace assured fellow scientists they could one day predict the exact movements of tides and storms — in fact, he went so far as to claim that the movement of every atom could be calculated.

Now we have both private industry and government departments armed with Cray supercomputers that can guzzle meteorological data from all over the world, digest it faster than Laplace ever dreamed, and spit out detailed predictions.

Problem is, those details are often wrong — just as we’ve just seen with Hurricane Florence.

A long, long time ago, I worked in the insurance industry as an analyst and project manager. Pretty handy with a computer, a long-time weather buff, and an instructor of statistics, I served on the North Carolina Rate Bureau’s Property Committee a number of years, where I studied long-range weather forecasts. Our mandate was to recommend and justify future rate proposals based on expected weather patterns. To make a long story short, I learned quickly that despite all our efforts, we were only guessing at future trends.

More famous experts have performed as badly, even worse. Barbara Tuchman’s “The March of Folly” chronicles the greatest miscalculations in history, including America’s conduct of the Vietnam War. Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, was a whiz kid with a degree from Harvard Business School. Here’s how Tuchman summarizes McNamara’s mindset:

“Precise and positive, with slicked-down hair and rimless glasses, McNamara was a specialist of management through ‘statistical control’ … his genius for statistics left little respect for human variables and no room for the unpredictable.” (p. 285)

The military establishment Secretary McNamara guided was all too receptive. The commander of the US forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, the years of escalation and certain victory, was William C. Westmoreland. Though later denounced as the “most disastrous American general since Custer,” Westmoreland was not ill-prepared for the job. He’d graduated West Point with the highest rank possible, first captain, and was America’s youngest major general ever. And he’d studied statistics at — Harvard Business School. In fact, his reliance on “kill statistics” overstated American success in Vietnam, setting up both the American military and public for a nasty confrontation with reality.

If US leaders had listened to historians rather than statisticians, and recognized that Vietnam’s ancient animosity against China precluded Communist Chinese control of an independent Vietnam, they could have avoided a tragedy. Instead, they relied on the dehumanizing scientism of B.F. Skinner to “stress” the Vietnamese into acting “rationally.” Despite the odds, first against the French, and then the Americans, the Vietnamese prevailed.

Sadly, those who would reduce people to a logical, globalized, and disconnected existence aren’t going to let a few tragic failures stop them. But no matter what they say or do, numbers alone cannot define humanity or nature. Humans stubbornly refuse to surrender purpose, identity, and emotional fulfillment. And we are not without weapons. Literature is a wild, throaty howl of defiance to those who would reduce us to formulas or pawns in their ideological schemes. And that’s a fact we can be sure of.

Language, Modern life, Reading

My Name is Joe Bob, and I’m an English Major

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Reader

Well. Seems Joe Bob Briggs is torn these days. While repeatedly swearing his life long love for literature, he now claims it has no real-world value:

And eventually, if you study the data, which is what the Modern Language Association does, you have to reach the conclusion that studying English is good for…nothing. …

I’m racking my brain. I’m trying to come up with justifications. I’m trying to figure out some way this translates into “Yes, you are now prepared for life.” But alas, these modern students who thumb their noses at English are correct. It’s good for nothing. It has no practical value whatsoever.

Wait — NO practical value? C’mon, Joe!

Briggs laments that many of today’s college students aren’t even considering majoring in English, and are instead flocking to more “practical” courses of study. No doubt a degree in accounting or math is more marketable these days. But to dismiss the study of literature as having no value is wrong, wrong, wrong.

We could argue that learning how to interpret complex texts has significant value in a technological world. We could talk about the crucial role of reading in improving one’s social intelligence, making one more adept at working with others, or how reading helps one form a robust and informed worldview to make sense of one’s place in the world. Or how fiction in general, and science fiction in particular, opens one to spiritual insights that can make you a happier, and therefore more productive person.

But if you insist on focusing only on hard science, we’ve got you covered. Scientists have solid evidence on the link between reading and general problem solving skills. The act of reading itself builds “white matter” in the brain that boosts its ability to recognize patterns and imagine new scenarios. The importance of reading in nurturing general intelligence is beyond dispute:

But in today’s world, fluid intelligence and reading generally go hand in hand. In fact, the increased emphasis on critical reading and writing skills in schools may partly explain why students perform, on average, about 20 points higher on IQ tests than in the early 20th century. The so-called Flynn effect is named after James Flynn, a New Zealand professor who has devoted much of his career to studying the worldwide phenomena of increasing IQ scores.

Knowing technical details is important, but developing the ability to use technical knowledge in new and creative ways is critical.

Reading, Writing

Storytelling: It’s about Going Primal

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We’ve talked about the paleo diet and lifestyle before, but here’s a great post on the vital role paleo plays in the stories we enjoy reading. The post, by author E J Randolph, appears at Jami Gold’s blog, one of the best writing resources on the web. Check it out:

The evolutionary imperative at the level of our genes is to “eat, survive, and procreate.” Our brains evolved to solve the obstacles to these goals, and the same basic brain functioning operates today in every sphere of our lives—including writing. … For a story to ensnare our attention though, we need a big problem to solve. We are interested in how others solve problems in different situations. We may need that knowledge. It is imperative we remember or are told which berries are poisonous, which plants are edible, where the best places to hunt are.

We are riveted by big problems. The bigger the problem, the better the story.

Absolutely! As James Bell counsels, every effective story has to be about death. It doesn’t have to be about physical death; a protag can grab and hold our attention if he’s confronting other forms of death, such as professional death, or the death of a relationship. (Of course, since making a living and personal relationships are vital to one’s survival, those struggles indirectly involve physical death.)

Our goal is to craft a story that enchants readers with beauty and emotion. Evocative details that trigger the senses as well as believable, interesting characters are important, but most important is a realistic threat the protag must face. Pull those elements together, and you’ve created a story that slush pile editors and readers will love.

Modern life, Reading

How Reading Rewires Your Brain

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Reading

There is no doubt in my mind that modern society traps its subjects in an unhealthy and unsuitable environment. That stark realization motivates many of my stories (see here and here, for example). The most disturbing symptom of how toxic our culture has become is the increasingly acerbic mutual distrust evident in current politics. Little wonder so many feel depressed, powerless, and alienated.

Rather than utilizing technology to better our lives, we let it rule us. Distracted by smart phones, buffeted by inescapable sensory overload, and hobbling our discourse in 140-character outbursts at each other, we’re incapable of understanding our own inner selves, much less that of others.

Fortunately, the tonic for the condition we find ourselves in is close at hand — if only we would use it, as this eye-opening piece in big think proclaims:

Research shows that reading not only helps with fluid intelligence, but with reading comprehension and emotional intelligence as well. You make smarter decisions about yourself and those around you.

All of these benefits require actually reading, which leads to the formation of a philosophy rather than the regurgitation of an agenda, so prevalent in reposts and online trolling. Recognizing the intentions of another human also plays a role in constructing an ideology. Novels are especially well-suited for this task. A 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology found overlap in brain regions used to comprehend stories and networks dedicated to interactions with others.

The beauty of it all is that when you read, you gain more than just the knowledge contained in the text. The very act of reading builds “white matter” in the brain, thereby boosting the brain’s interconnectivity and ability to function more efficiently.

In the United States — yes, the United States — 1 out of 4 children grow up without learning to read. That’s intolerable. Want to do your part to make the world a better and happier place? Read, and do what you can to help others read.

And if you really get ambitious, and have the nerve to try it, write something beautiful.