To Read or Not to Read

The National Endowment for the Arts has released a report on American reading habits,To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence. An excerpt:

The story the data tell is simple, consistent, and alarming. Although there has been measurable progress in recent years in reading ability at the elementary school level, all progress appears to halt as children enter their teenage years. There is a general decline in reading among teenage and adult Americans. Most alarming, both reading ability and the habit of regular reading have greatly declined among college graduates. These negative trends have more than literary importance. As this report makes clear, the declines have demonstrable social, economic, cultural, and civic implications.

How does one summarize this disturbing story? As Americans, especially younger Americans, read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they have lower levels of academic achievement. (The shameful fact that nearly one-third of American teenagers drop out of school is deeply connected to declining literacy and reading comprehension.) With lower levels of reading and writing ability, people do less well in the job market. Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement. Significantly worse reading skills are found among prisoners than in the general adult population. And deficient readers are less likely to become active in civic and cultural life, most notably in volunteerism and voting.

NEA Announces New Reading Study (NEA press release)
To Read or Not to Read (.pdf download)

A visit to the Kolb-Proust Archive

I had the great privilege to see some items from the Kolb-Proust Archive at the University of Illinois today. Philip Kolb (1907-1992), professor of French at the university, edited Proust's correspondence and in so doing assembled an extraordinary archive for the university library. Caroline Szylowicz, the Kolb-Proust librarian, put together a sampling of materials for my visit — a tremendously generous gesture, as I'm just a dedicated reader, not a Proust scholar. Arrayed on a massive library table were letters to and from Proust, early editions of Du côté de chez Swann, an unbound limited edition of À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, and manuscript excerpts revealing Proust's capacity for endless revision by accretion, with galley passages and handwritten scraps pasted onto poster-sized sheets.

One highlight: a letter from Marcel, aged eight, to his grandfather, signed "Marcel Proust." Another: a lithograph of Jacques-Émile Blanche's portrait of Proust, accompanying the unbound pages of À l'ombre. Another: a letter from Proust to his former chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli. Parts of this letter surface in the narrator's letter to Albertine in The Fugitive. Another: a letter from Proust biographer George Painter to Philip Kolb, which I found by chance when I opened a copy of Du côté de chez Swann to read the last paragraph.

And one more: a letter from Jacques Rivière, editor of La Nouvelle Revue Française, dated October 12, 1922. Suffering from pneumonia, coughing constantly, Proust was communicating with his housekeeper Céleste Albaret at this time by writing notes on stray pieces of paper. He wrote several such notes on this letter, in a labored script that makes a poignant contrast to Rivière's elegant letterhead and confidently slanting signature. I copied one of Proust's notes:

faut-il être à jeun pour
prendre l'aspirine

William C. Carter's biography Marcel Proust gives a good translation: "Should aspirin be taken on an empty stomach?" Proust died on November 18, 1922.

Related post
Philip Kolb on Proust

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Two great bookstores

The Seminary Co-op Bookstore and 57th Street Books in Hyde Park, Chicago, are two great bookstores. They do not offer coffee. They do not offer tea. Nor do they offer Burt's Bees lip balm, or Lindt chocolate, or the other notions and sundries that have infiltrated both chain and independent bookstores. The Sem Co-op is the best scholarly bookstore in the country, a spacious, well-lit basement labyrinth of bookshelves. 57th Street Books is its trade-oriented sibling. Both stores (along with a third store at the Newberry Library) are member-owned; buying three shares of stock ($30) makes you a member and gets you a 10% discount on all purchases. Another benefit: the Sem Co-op will order (and ship) virtually any book in print.

It's always inspiring and humbling to visit the Co-op. It can also be expensive: I spent $125 on Proust-related reading — and could have spent twice as much.

The Seminary Co-op Bookstores

Graffiti

On the 57th Street side of 57th Street Books, Hyde Park, Chicago:



(Can someone explain the joke?)

Overheard

In Hyde Park, Chicago, yesterday:

"I've dealt with cadavers before."

All "overheard" posts (Pinboard)

(Thanks, Elaine!)

Proust and the Muse of history

Here she is:

the Muse, whom we should fail to recognize for as long as possible if we want to preserve the freshness of our impressions and some creative power, but whom precisely those of us who have avoided her shall meet in the evening of our lives in the nave of some old village church, at a moment when all of a sudden they feel less touched by the eternal beauty expressed in the carvings on the altar than by the diverse fates which they have suffered, as they moved into a distinguished private collection or a chapel, then into a museum, or by the feeling that we are treading on an almost sentient flagstone, composed of the last remains of Arnauld or Pascal, or quite simply by deciphering the names of the daughters of the nobleman or the commoner inscribed on the copper plate of a wooden prie-dieu, imagining perchance the fresh young faces of these village maidens, the Muse who has assumed everything rejected by the higher Muses of philosophy and art, everything unfounded in truth, everything which is merely contingent but which also reveals other laws: the Muse of history!

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 640

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Proust on the human ostrich

Reader, do you know such ostriches?

Gilberte belonged, or at least had belonged during those years, to the most frequently encountered species of human ostrich, those who bury their heads in the hope, not of not being seen, which they believe to be implausible, but of not seeing themselves being seen, which seems important enough to them and allows them to leave the rest to chance.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 551

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Joshua Foer on memory

Joshua Foer has a piece in National Geographic on people with unusual memory deficits and surpluses:

AJ remembers when she first realized that her memory was not the same as everyone else's. She was in the seventh grade, studying for finals. "I was not happy because I hated school," she says. Her mother was helping her with her homework, but her mind had wandered elsewhere. "I started thinking about the year before, when I was in sixth grade and how I loved sixth grade. But then I started realizing that I was remembering the exact date, exactly what I was doing a year ago that day." At first she didn't think much of it. But a few weeks later, playing with a friend, she remembered that they had also spent the day together exactly one year earlier.

"Each year has a certain feeling, and then each time of year has a certain feeling. The spring of 1981 feels completely different from the winter of 1981," she says. Dates for AJ are like the petite madeleine cake that sent Marcel Proust's mind hurtling back in time in Remembrance of Things Past. Their mere mention starts her reminiscing involuntarily. "You know when you smell something, it brings you back? I'm like ten levels deeper and more intense than that."

When I first glanced at this piece, I thought, Oh, Proust Was a Neuroscientist. But that book, on my to-read list, is by Jonah Lehrer.

Remember This (National Geographic, via Boing Boing)

Related reading
Proust: involuntary memory, foolish things

Talk to the face

An editorial in a college newspaper recently suggested that college faculty join Facebook as a way to show their desire "to connect with" students. The editors gamely suggest academic benefits: chances to create assignments that focus on what students are "already interested in" and chances to find "examples" (of what?) that students will recognize.

I'm always interested in showing the relevance of the works I teach, but it's a professor's responsibility to enlarge a student's understanding of reality, not to appeal to and thereby affirm the present limits of that understanding. And the idea of a grown-ass man or woman wandering about in the teenaged and young-adult voyeurdrome of Facebook is at best slightly absurd; at worst, deeply creepy. Anecdotal evidence suggests to me that many students agree. A much better way for faculty and students to "connect" is to talk, face to face, not as pseudo-friends but as members of a community devoted to teaching and learning.

Related reading
How to talk to a professor

Quicksilver plug-ins

For Mac users: Lifehacker has a very helpful post today on ten useful Quicksilver plug-ins. I've been using Quicksilver for most of 2007, and six of these plug-ins were new to me. (I wish I'd known about Shelf months ago: it's already made my Mac life better.)

For non-Mac users: Quicksilver is a free program that launches programs, opens files and folders, and simplifies countless elements of working on a computer. To my mind, Quicksilver alone might be reason enough to switch to a Mac.

Top 10 Quicksilver Plug-ins (Lifehacker)
What is Quicksilver? (Blacktree, Inc.)