"Our Love for Literature Dwindles in the Internet Age"

From Pace University's student newspaper, an article chock-a-block with frightening comments on the state of college students and literature:

Freshman Michael Pascale doesn't think literature is dead, but he would be one of the few. On his bookshelf lies Dante's Inferno and Mario Puzo's Omertaby, The Sicilian and The Godfather.

"I love to read," Pascale said. "It's good to stimulate the mind using comprehension skills." His friends chuckled snidely under their hands as he said this.

Pascale lamented over how most college students his age don't share his point of view on reading. "People find other means of entertainment instead of using their imaginations," he said. "If there were more books that interest kids our age - books on hip hop and drugs, you know, the stuff you see on TV - If they put that stuff into books, a lot more people would be reading."
And here comes the money quote...wait for it...

Pascale's friend, freshman Jeven Chiera, chooses to read Cosmopolitan over books, deeming the latter to be too difficult to concentrate on, especially with her busy schedule.

"I always wanted to read The DaVinci Code though," Chiera said.
(Thanks to The Literary Saloon for the link.)

Latest Acquisitions

I finally satisfied my book-buying urges with a recent binge at Half-Price Books in Corpus Christi, Texas, my favorite bookstore in the whole wide world. I think Corpus must be where literary types go to die and then leave behind their fabulous book collections, because Half-Price in Corpus has the best selection (and prices) of any used store I know.

Anyway, thanks to my friend, J/M, and my sister-in-law for financing the shopping trip with birthday gift cards. Y'all must know that the way to this girl's heart is through her bookshelves.

But enough of the preliminaries--on to the haul! Here's what I ended up with:

Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
For Kings and Planets by Ethan Canin
The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett
The Ha-Ha by Dave King
Littlejohn by Howard Owen
Matches by Alan Kaufman
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
Headlong by Michael Frayn
Big If by Mark Costello
Cherry by Mary Karr
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Pitch Dark by Renata Adler
The Plumed Serpent by D. H. Lawrence
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Little Children by Tom Perrotta
Postcards by Annie Proulx
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
Pamela by Samuel Richardson
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Old School by Tobias Wolff
Mating by Norman Rush
Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom
Finding a Form: Essays by William H. Gass

Hooray! So many good books...it warms my heart.

"With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar"

"The word 'scrotum' does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. "
Cue the controversy:

"The Newbery award winning book this year — The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron who is also a librarian — contains the word scrotum, not once, but a few times. Apparently this is a problem for some librarians and parents who have been challenging and/or removing the book from school library shelves..."
Author Susan Patron has issued a response:

"In writing The Higher Power of Lucky, I was interested in creating authentic characters who would ring true for readers. I wanted readers to trust that I respect them and would not talk down to them. Like the child-version of myself, Lucky eavesdrops on adult conversations; she is searching for a form of spirituality, a higher power.

I was shocked and horrified to read that some school librarians, teachers, and media specialists are choosing not to include the 2007 Newbery Medal winner in their collections because they fear parental objections to the word scrotum, or because they are uncomfortable with the word themselves. If I were a parent of a middle-grade child, I would want to make decisions about my child's reading myself—I'd be appalled that my school librarian had decided to take on the role of censor and deny my child access to a major award-winning book. And if I were a 10-year-old and learned that adults were worried that the current Newbery book was not appropriate for me, I'd figure out a way to get my mitts on it anyway, its allure intensified by the exciting forbidden-ness—by the unexpressed but obvious fear on the part of these adults..."

"Untouchable" authors--should we teach them?

From "Teachers defy list of untouchable authors" and "Teachers fight back over classics"...

Much controversy in Britain (and the blogosphere) as some middle school teachers object to teaching works by classic authors like George Eliot and Charles Dickens, claiming that those authors "are too difficult for many pupils aged 11 to 14 and could put them off great writers for life."

Apparently, Britain's Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, roiled the English teachers of the commonwealth by requesting that the new curriculum include a list of suggested authors:

Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Blake, Charlotte Bronte, Robert Burns, Geoffrey Chaucer, Kate Chopin, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Thomas Gray, Thomas Hardy, John Keats, John Masefield, Alexander Pope, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare (sonnets), Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, Alfred Lord Tennyson, HG Wells, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Wordsworth and William Wordsworth
But the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, apparently deeming the list too difficult, planned to bin it. In defense of the suggested authors, Johnson contended that

"There are certain untouchable elements of the secondary curriculum that all teenagers should learn for a classic, well-rounded British education....For example, it's vital that teachers instil a love of literature in young people and engage them with the best-loved writers from our history."
The National Association for the Teaching of English disagreed with Johnson's statement, maintaining that "teaching texts of such linguistic complexity is completely counter-productive." And in a particularly sophisticated counter-argument, the NATE deemed Johnson "a bird brain."

Says NATE policy director, Ian McNeilly,

"The guy's a bird brain. If he wants to make an informed decision he can give me a ring. His decision is completely uninformed."
While I can see both sides of this issue, I tend to agree with Johnson, primarily because of my personal experience in this area, I taught a 7th and 8th grade literature class using a curriculum I'd designed around "classic" authors, such as Swift, Twain, Stephen Crane, etc. To my great surprise, the work that students enjoyed the most was the most difficult one in the batch, Gulliver's Travels. In fact, they enjoyed it so much that we ended up reading three parts of it, instead of just "A Voyage to Lilliput," the one section that I'd planned on reading. (The students actually requested that we read more!)

However, it's not hard to imagine students feeling utterly stymied by The Canterbury Tales or Middlemarch. It seems like careful text selection would prove the real key to making classic authors accessible--and hopefully enjoyable!--to students.

"Lichtenstein: creator or copycat?"

Thought-provoking article in The Boston Globe about Roy Lichtenstein's appropriation of comic book art.

I, much like the article's author,

"never thought Lichtenstein's work was a direct copy of scenes from comic books. I assumed that he stylized certain scenes suggested by the comic vernacular of the 1950s and 1960s."
But this guy (high school art teacher David Barsalou) knew otherwise:

He has found and catalogued almost every comic book panel later blown up and sold for megabucks by 1960s Op Art icon Roy Lichtenstein. So far, Barsalou has about 140....
"He tried to make it seem as though he was making major compositional changes in his work, but he wasn't," says Barsalou, who teaches at the High School of Commerce in Springfield. "The critics are of one mind that he made major changes, but if you look at the work, he copied them almost verbatim. Only a few were original."
Case in point:

Which of course brings up all kinds of thorny copyright issues--copyright issues that the original comic book authors truly have a vested interest in.

Barsalou correctly points that musicians who "sample" other artists' music have to pay them royalties. Does the Lichtenstein estate owe compensation to the creators of the original work?
Yikes...interesting food for thought there. Any comments from the lawyers and lawyers-in-training in the house?

DailyLit: Read Books By Email

Too busy for books? Read them by email.

If you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don't find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read. This works incredibly well not just on your computer but also on a Treo, Blackberry, Sidekick or whatever the PDA of your choice.
In the words of Dr. Seuss: Try it, you might like it! (Oops -- it would appear that the actual quote from Green Eggs and Ham is "You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may.")
--from DailyLit.com

Neat concept, and it's completely free. (Extra nice feature: no registration is required.) I just signed up for The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. So I suppose I'll soon see if this idea works as well in practice as it does in theory. I tend not to read electronic versions of books, but this direct-to-your-inbox approach might be just the thing to suck me into electronic texts.

For My Friends Currently Enduring Law School (And Those Who Have Already Survived)

A quote for you--

Law school, like starting a band, writing a novel, or having sex with a dolphin, is something that you should do only because you cannot imagine a life in which you have not done so.
(From Paul Ford's "Lawyering," easily one of the funniest articles I've read in a month of Sundays.)

Whittling Down The Classics

Wow, what disturbing news from the Guardian's book blog:

Cut classics: Why not cut the padding out of old warhorses such as The Mill on the Floss and Vanity Fair?
The news that Weidenfeld & Nicolson are producing slimline versions of classics has most people apoplectic but actually I don't feel as appalled as everyone else seems to be.
According to those who are anti this idea, the whole point about these works of genius - Mill on the Floss, David Copperfield and Wives and Daughters are also to get the W & N cut-off-at-the-knees treatment - is their ambling byways, baffling dead-ends and sudden jumps of pace and tone. It is this glorious "complexity" - some might call it "muddle" - that makes a classic, classic.
I don't agree...
I plan on responding to this whole concept (or should I say "half concept"?) later, but for now I am going to huddle in the corner and sob unreservedly.