Entry 1 of 4:

A Literary History

As I read about literacy projects in India and the problems people face when they don't have access to the training required to become literate, I'm reminded of My Privilege.  I reckon the best of all my privileges - even above being white and male and American - is being literate.  Which honestly I take for granted.  This has been a problem in my teaching practice, I'm sure - but now is not the time to get into that.  I'll just generalize and say that teachers need to be able to relate to their students' learning needs, and it's important to remember that not everyone has access to the kind of learning environment that leads to highly effective literacy skills.  I did - big, giant Privilege right here.

I'm not braggin', or at least not meanin' to.  If you've read this far, chances are good that you also are highly literate - and therefore Highly Privileged - congratulations!  But enough about you, this is a blog....

I've always been lucky when it comes to reading.  Lucky in the first place to have highly literate parents who took the time to sit and read with my brothers and me*.  There were always books all over the house, fiction and non-, plus a steady diet of Newsweek for the adults and World for the kids.  We hit the library at least once a month, which was rarely enough that all of us would want to stock up.

I'm also lucky to have been born with some kind of natural ability to acquire information verbally.  I was able to read One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by the age of three.  Good old Dr. Seuss, he helped a lot (my favorite, On Beyond Zebra, might have something to do with an ongoing attraction to surrealism).  And I think it's worth mentioning that I spent a lot of time grooving on (pre-Elmo) Sesame Street and Electric Co. (among whatever other crap was on).

By fifth grade I was a fairly omnivorous fiction reader, getting into science fiction, mystery series aimed at adolescents of my father's generation like the Hardy Boys and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, fantasy classics like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit, and just about anything else that came within reach.  I preferred reading over just about any other pastime.  Fifth grade was also when I started playing the clarinet, which could well have had a positive effect on developing deeper literacy skills.

High school proved to be a source of further enrichment.  I started studying Spanish and participating in forensics (extemporaneous speaking, student congress, student UN, and debate).  Giving speeches under pressure was not much fun, but all of the research, oratory, and social skills required by political discourse and persuasive speaking have been invaluable.  Punk rock and protest music provided the perfect soundtrack, especially when juxtaposed against the frivolous New Wave drivel that had taken over.  The deeper we sunk into the Reagan era, the more I wanted to read about Beats and social justice and civil disobedience.  But there was still time for science fiction and Stephen King, which come to think of it aren't necessarily incompatible with antiestablishment sentiments.  In tenth grade I took a one-semester class revolving around real events as the basis for good literature, and this revelation changed the lens through which I determined what was worth reading.  Senior year's AP English forced another change by introducing the annoying and ever-problematic concept of distinguishing high art from low art.  My twelfth grade physics teacher offered me an alternative assessment, which was to read and summarize a couple Scientific American articles; reading something that far over my head pissed me off so much that I determined to continue practicing so that I could one day understand.  At the same time my girlfriend at the time was introducing me to the art of transgression: film and poetry and fiction that I would probably never have met on my own.

At Northwestern U, I majored in journalism but particularly in the first couple years studied mostly anthropology, English lit, and Spanish.  I wasn't usually interested in studying whatever I was supposed to be.  I got a work-study job at the multimillion-volume library in the massive Africana section, so when I wasn't in class or laying about I was usually reading whatever the hell I felt like.  The second half of uni was mostly journalism training, which meant tons of reading, writing, and editing.  When people talk about reading to become a better writing and writing to become a better reader, this was the type of situation they have in mind.  All of that exposure to different types of writing and to different perspectives made a lasting impression.

Let me wrap this up with a little name-dropping, a short non-exhaustive list of authors I consider to be the most influential in my world view, authors whom I continue to read and sometimes reread: Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, William Faulkner, Margaret Atwood, Douglas Adams, Kazuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami, Ernest Hemingway.

* If right now you're muttering to yourself, "Shouldn't that be 'I' instead of 'me'?", an outside observer with keen lipreading skills might start to suspect that the aforementioned highly literate, highly privileged designation was perhaps highly premature.  Save yourself the torment: fetch the Strunk & White.  Literacy, like intelligence, is nuanced and more accurately thought of as a complex and ever-changing continuum rather than a singularity.  It also depends on the observer's perspective.  For instance, some readers might find these musings interesting and worthwhile, while others more closely synced with the author's viewpoint might believe that the blog is a forum optimally designed for ranting.