NANDINI NAYAR
 May05 Enid
Blyton II
Apr05 Enid
Blyton I
PENI GRIFFIN
Mar05 Last
Column
Feb05 What's
In Your Notebook?
Jan05 Read
A Little Louder
Nov/Dec04 Creativity
IV
Oct04 Creativity
III
Sep04 Creativity
II
Aug04 Creativity
Jun/Jul04 Social
Angst and All That
May04 Reading
In Public
Apr04 Elephant
In The Living-Room
Mar04 Literary
Synchronicity
Feb04 The
Most Important Thing in the World
Jan04
Year-End Wrap-Ups
Dec03 Editors...
They Ain't Want You Want, They're What You Need
Nov03 The
Secret Formula for Originality - Revealed!
Oct03 An
Incoherent Message Concerning Narrative Structure; or 'Reality. What a
concept.'
Sep03 Preaching
to the Choir
Aug03 FanFic
on ACHUKACHAT, the website discussion board...
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Preaching to the Choir
by Peni Griffin
When I arrived at the library during my mid-August visit, I could tell
something was up - an unusual number of cops, a couple of out-of-place
vehicles, all the entrance doors wide open - but nobody stopped me to say
a bomb threat was in progress, so I went on in. At the return desk I unslung
my backpack as usual, but before I could offload a uniform came up, asked
me to join a line of people beyond the circulation desk, and vanished.
Only when I reached the line was I informed, by a beaming circulation clerk,
that Laura Bush was in the building. Five seconds later she came around
the corner from the escalators, a lavender figure inside a loose bubble
of black outfits, waved at us peons, and was gone.
Now, I admit that it's easy for me to miss a news story. Still, a visit
from the First Librarian to our astonishing Enchilada of a library should
have been unavoidably big news. Everyone should have been talking about
it. There should have been banners (we do banners well here) and bookfairs
and busloads of schoolchildren and a quickie parade featuring the marching
band of Fox Tech High School, which is across the street from the library
and periodically practices down Main Street anyway. There should have
been a reception and book signing in the Southwest Craft Center, across
the street in the other direction, and readings and a poetry slam and
protesters and pickpockets and free burritos.
Instead, as was reported below the fold in the next day's Express
News, she slipped in, spent five minutes reading Click, Clack,
Moo: Cows That Type to "a gaggle of uniformed second graders from
St. Anthony's Catholic School," handed out some cards depicting the
First Pets, went to a luncheon "of local businesspeople and philanthropists" at
the Marriott Riverwalk, and vanished from our beautiful, historic,
apathetic streets.
You call that a reading promotion? I sure don't!
St. Anthony's Catholic School doesn't need encouragement to read. That's
The Good School. St. Anthony's older kids don't even get parking tickets.
They're the elite; and if they don't act like the elite, they don't get
to go to St. Anthony's. No functional illiterates; no stoners; no trenchcoat
mafia.
And second graders! People are always pitching reading to second graders;
but when they get old enough to do real in-depth reading and have their
own disposable income, when the manufacturers of skateboards and beer
and computers and make-up and movies and clothing and designer hallucinogens
flock around treating them like the stars of the market economy, the
literacy community drops them like cherry bombs down a toilet and takes
no responsibility for the mess.
Fox Tech High School, now, with its day care center, its game little
marching band dodging traffic on Main, its pierced Hispanic students
doing last-minute homework on the city buses in the morning, its burglar
bars - Fox Tech could use five minutes of a smiling woman in lavender
demonstrating that she thinks they're worth the trouble to wave at. They
deserve to be courted to join the reading public - them, and their babies
in the day care center, if you really can't stand not to have cute little
kids in the photo op.
I'm not even picking on Laura Bush here. The First Librarian is only
doing "reading promotion" as it is done in this country at this time;
with neither imagination nor passion, ignoring the lessons of the consumer
society. Literacy posters are nice; but when do you ever see one outside
of a library? If you want to spread the word, you hire a billboard with
a catchy slogan. (My modest suggestion? "Defy Authority. READ!") Reading
Rainbow is a good show, but it contributes to the labeling of reading
as a baby activity. If you want to be cool, you nab the teens - and the
writers of YA literature are doing their best to make it easy for you,
writing the most compelling, thought-provoking literature of the day.
We've got to stop being snobs about who we approach and how. We've
got to stop acting as though reading is what makes us better than the
kids at Fox Tech. We've got to kill the idea that reading is hard. We've
got to live the reality that reading is as relevant to the gangbangers
smoking and drinking on the corner as to the businesspeople and philanthropists
smoking and drinking on the patio of the Marriott Riverwalk.
If we don't, we deserve what we get - a literature industry that is
controlled by a smaller and smaller set of publishers and booksellers,
to the point of monopoly; a society that regards literature as a snob
commodity; and schools full of children and teens who assume that they
aren't good enough, smart enough, or geeky enough to read.
It's past time we got off our butts and did this right, people.
SEPTEMBER 2003 © Peni Griffin
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