Tuesday March 14, 2023; 1:25 PM EDT
- Some of my impressions about literacy today, with a few examples:#
- There is so much desire across the society to speak, to hear, and to be heard, both in and outside the arts. Eg., long-running open mic scenes, multitudes of online lit mags, the brilliant and powerful tags I see on so many train cars as they pass.#
- Many institutions seem open to our speech but really aren’t. Many politicians are indifferent to the voices of others. Leaders in other fields too. Eg. Relentless gerrymandering, social media software that operates like a deep water fishing net rather than as a tool for community building and exchange.#
- People are keenly aware that they move through their days in a society that is set up so as to ignore their speech and their creative expression. Grim hearts to the left of me, grim hearts to the right of me . . .#
- Nevertheless, people make their enclaves and practice their favorite forms of creativity. It’s the “urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world” that Whitman keenly observed. Depending on where a person lives, conditions for this may or may not be favorable. It can be very lonely in this neighborhood or that little town.#
- While many institutions and powerful people like our silence, when they can get it, they’re also perfectly comfortable speaking for us if we let them. That’s all about power.#
- That kind of power play ignores one truth about thoughtful and creative expression. The words a particular person chooses have a magical trait: they are that person’s best judgment about meaning and experience. As such, they cannot be replaced.#
- Even creative people of presumably good will back away from the complexity of our society. Eg., for decades Saturday Night Live ignored or tiptoed around the topic of race a huge portion of the time.#
- Even a brilliant editor of a decently funded magazine cannot fill its pages with works that reliably represent the range and complexity of the society. There will be absences and silences. There will be people who appear there like a ventriloquist’s dummy: the mouth moves but the words are someone else’s words. A special issue with a guest editor will only go so far.#
- The hunger to speak, to hear, to read, endures. I worked at a public university. We published a history of racism and segregation in our little city. At the book launch, the Fire Marshall would have been appalled by the overfilled auditorium. Dozens of people came there who had never stepped foot on the public campus they paid for with their taxes because as far as they knew the institution had not previously been interested in them. We sold 164 copies of the book that night. The line at the signing table was well over an hour long. People stayed in the seats afterwards, paging through, combing the index, showing their friends pictures and paragraphs about people they knew, scraps of their own history they had never seen treated with respect in print. So much hunger for lives to be acknowledged and meaningful words to be preserved, to be considered in solitude, to be shared in community, to be supported by meaningful institutions. And still so many silences and wounds, so much giving up on that part of our shared humanity. #
- English major programs are often still designed to reproduce English professors rather than to help create on behalf of the society a richer assembly of readers, writers, editors, performers, and publishers who can evolve in each other’s presence like the ingredients of a stew. These programs are often still designed to help people take on an academic voice when there are so many other voices — unpredictable, challenging, arty, civic, activist voices — that young people would recognize as exciting to them and valuable to their community. Like the rest of us, young people usually know they are living in a society that welcomes their silence, their narrowly construed job-seeking, and their narrow well-behaved conformity.#