Push

I read Push in a few hours, and I don't say that to brag. After four books on lit theory, a novel was a breeze. But it was a cold, shitty breeze that make me feel a lot of yuckiness inside. I know that's what everyone will touch on in their posts, how hard it was to read the story of a girl sexually abused by both parents, mother of two kids by her own father before high school, suffering from extreme confusion, depression, poverty, illiteracy, and HIV. Heavy. I know why we read it, what we were supposed to do--gauge our emotional reactions a la Rosenblatt. At the same time we could look at Precious' experiences with reading and writing. I did a little searching on Sapphire and the book, here's an interview. I thought this statement about purpose was interesting: "There's a blues song 'What's Been Done In the Dark Has to Come to the Light' and I think that's something that stays on my mind. I always want to bring out what's been hidden or marginalized. In Precious she is more misunderstood than invisible, we hear about her everyday. Every time Newt Gingrich opens his mouth it's about a welfare mother. I wanted to shed additional light. I wanted to show something behind the statistic. So yeah, I'm on a mission."

These things sparked me -- Precious' descriptions of feelings and people and places are child-like, very low-level from a professional standpoint, and yet they are more wisely phrased and profound than established professional writers, at least in provoking an emotional reaction:

"Can't he see I am a girl for flowers and thin straw legs and a place in the picture."

"There eyez is like far away spaceships."

"I'm alive inside. A bird is my heart."

"...I am sick of the walking dicks of Harlem."

"So my mother--one eye, no man, two children and the Bible."

"Sometime I wish I was not alive. But I don't know how to die. Ain' no plug to pull out. 'N no matter how bad I feel my heart don't stop beating and my eyes open in the morning."

Other strong themes I picked up on were the power of narratives (especially in the support group scene where Precious learns there are others like her, who have suffered like her), the bullshittiness of bureaucracy (the tests and reports and welfare trouble), and Precious' metamorphosis, best described by her list of what's important to her on pg. 109. Precious walks through Harlem and describes the filth and desperation of the ghetto, her hatred for crackheads and the ironic injustice of being considered one of their lot. Most of all I felt the worst seeing her struggle through the horrible confusion of the sexual abuse at such a young age, by her father. That was the worst. Luckily the love and acceptance she finds in friends and herself leads me to believe that she turned out ok after the last page was turned.

"Ms. Rain say one of the criticizsm of The Color Purple is it have fairy tale ending. I would say, well shit like that can be true. Life can work out for the best sometimes. Ms. Rain love Color Purple too but say realism has its virtues too. Izm, smizm! Sometimes I wanna tell Ms Rain shut up with all the IZM stuff. But she my teacher so I don't tell her shut up. I don't know what "realism" mean but I do know what REALITY is and it's a mutherfucker, lemme tell you."

de gustibus non disputandum

“A specific reader and a specific text at a specific time and place: change any of these, and there occurs a different circuit, a different event—a different poem.” (14)

The central importance of this factor of the reader’s focus on attention is assumed in Coleridge’s famous statement about poetry: “the reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasure activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself.” Buy the ticket, take the ride, in other words. (Thanks Doc) 28)

“The reader responds to the verbal stimuli derived from the text, but at the same time he must draw selectively on the resources of his own fund of experience and sensibility to provide and organize the substance of his response. Out of this the new experience, the literary work, is formed (43)

“The writings of a Hitler might arouse powerful emotions of hate in a reader, but this would still be an efferent reading, which might, for example, lead him to rush out and engage in mob action.” (45)

“We are not vicarious or substitute Juliets…we are living in the world of the work which we have created under guidance of the text and are entering into new potentialities of our own natures.” (68)

“In our schools, the emphasis in the teaching of reading is almost entirely on the efferent stance. Comprehension in reading tests is assumed mainly to be of this type. It is not possible here to detail the methods of the teaching of literature in school and college that tend often to develop an efferent attitude, even toward the literary work of art." (79)

“We must recognize that the reader brings to or adds to the nonverbal or socio-physical setting his whole past experience of life and literature.” (81)

“Impressionist critics were charge with forgetting the poem itself as they pursued the adventures of their souls among masterpieces” (102)…"given the fact that a poem is re-created each time it is read, can we validly speak of anything as being the poem itself?" (104)

“Probably no work of art can suffice as interpretation of another work.” (136)

“The solution, as I see it, lies in rejecting the preoccupation with some illusory unspecifiable absolute or correct reading or ideal reader. Let us look at the reality of the literary enterprise, or “literature” as a certain kind of activity of human beings in our culture…we need to stress the basic affinity of all readers of literary works of art. The general reader needs to honor his own relationship with the text.” (140)

“The solution, as I saw it, is the education of a reading public that would appreciate aesthetic values and accord the serious artist freedom and support." (142)

In light of some illusory unspecifiable absolute or ideal reading, all readings are failures. The emphasis should be rather on a creative transaction, a coming-together of a human being (with all that implies of past experience and present preoccupations) and a text (with all that implies of potentialities for participation)."(144)

“Literary judgments—on, say, “Byzantium” or “Middlemarch”—are actually judgments on the potentialities of those texts to enable readers to evoke an aesthetic transaction.” (153)

“Another consideration: the reader undertakes to see the work as a whole, yet in actual literary transactions it may sometimes be some minor part that had intensely personal reverberations. A poem may live in the memory through only one phrase that suddenly embodies for us the ‘joy’ and the ‘juice of life.’” (160)

Hopefully by ending on this note, the method of this particular post becomes clear. I’m also ending with this last quote in hopes that it will generate a bulletin board of sorts—what pieces of text, phrases of books, lines in movies, have sparked you? For me, one of the strongest was from "The Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugenides: We knew the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."

growling flowers

"these so-called avant-garde artists seem to be rediscovering the basic alphabet of aesthetics; though their works are often very minor indeed, they may be performing a function by educating a public largely wedded to the purely efferent attitudes to begin the slow development of aesthetic attention to an awareness of their own responses." (Rosenblatt, 82)

tell me do you feel it?

As I started to read Rosenblatt's The RTP, I was initially worried, as I wasn't getting into it as much as her other work. But I think that's between the first two chapters are essentially fluently rewritten ways to describe the interdependent triad of reader, text, and poem of meaning making. Chapter 3 was where I started to become more involved, particularly with her analysis of efferent and aesthetic reading. Beginning with one of my new favorite ideas of "burning through" a reading, living through it, she delineates the kinds of approach we take to reading between reading to remember or apply (more typically found in scientific reading) and the pure art, affective stance, like Keats writes about in "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again." In addition to the combined stance needed to read and make sense by use of referents or imagination, "different aesthetic transactions with the same text may also produce different or levels of experience, depending on the nature, state of mind, or past experience of the reader." So, not only can someone not read a poem for you, you can't read it the same way twice. This makes me wonder if the question of what classics are universal even matters.

Efferent-dominant reading is what we're teaching kids to do. Read for details, read to answer the questions right. There's no way to test on affect, on aesthetic, as it's particular to each person. I felt a pang of guilt, remembering my first year of teaching at HSA, first year with my own room, with no real supervison as it was a charter school, copying out worksheets from suggested workbooks that invited the kids to classify poem tones by their titles. Extracting democratic messages from decontextualized political speeches. No wonder my kids got great TAKS scores. But now I'm not so proud of it. Luckily they had enough experience and enough academic confidence to read for pleasure as well. But what if we could get kids to feel like this:

only slightly more intelligently.

Thought on the transformative power of the narrative--I've read the Bible, been to Sunday school and church all through my youth, and have taken classes in religion, yet what leads me to know/believe that there is a heaven is a story about a young man who was killed in a hunting accident, and as he bled to death, he looked around him and said, "it's so beautiful," before dying. This story might have left me somewhat nonplussed had I seen in a movie or novel, except that this was a truth story, and happened to my great uncle. Experience and culture does make a difference.

Adolesense Pt 2

Rosenblatt's description of adolescent upheaval includes some insight to confusing aspect of sex. She claims there's an inadequate amount of preparation in the discourse of the bedroom, and avoid or misrepresent sexual matters, leaving young people to draw their own conclusions while being bombarded by sexual messages in the media and from other unreliable sources.

This book was discussed on Mike and Juliet's Morning Show today. Ms. Levkoff managed to say "vulva," "masturbation," "erection," and "wet dream" in the first five minutes. I tried to watch, as it directly relates to the topic of conversations--what you can and can't talk about and why. But when Mike offered up that he remembered having a wet dream, I had to change channels. I can talk about sex probably more than the next person, but I was trying to eat.

Ellen DeGeneres also discussed the difficulty of explaining sex to kids as she had a guest to her show read a passage of her rereleased book, "My Point (and I Do Have One)." The passage was a funny dialogue between a young child and a parent, who attempts to explain the youngster's query by metaphors of an egg, a mama bear and papa bear, growing a baby in their stomach, Daddy's special sauce, and ended on a mutual liking for hamburgers. The guest reader, by the way, was a woman who claimed in her survey (the whole audience was surveyed about their sexual lives in order to examine America's lacking sex life and need for frank, open conversations) that she had sex everyday. She looked healthy, relaxed, happy. Her husband was a piledriver. No, that's his job. Seriously.

Adolesense

I've found that if I stop to post on every interesting chunk of Rosenblatt I will have no time for any other classes. Nevertheless,

In the 3rd and 4th chapters, she begins to address concerns as an English educator--schools are too often failing to provide contexts for students to experience a vital personal reaction to art in the form of text. Schools make a frame with no picture--students regurgitate what they think the teacher thinks of a story, and fail to give a real response. Things don't change because teachers uphold certain expectations (as do parents and everyone raised in traditional mainstream public schools) of what school should do and look like: writing traditional essays and answering multiple choice questions about who the main character was. Teachers have to value true literature experiences themselves, liberate pupils from self-defeating practices, give them freedom to wrestle with ideas and emotions, and not place so much value on a particular form of response.

"The study of literature should give the student the form of emotional release that all art offers and, at the same time, without strain or pressure, should help him gain ever more complex satisfactions from literature." (71)

"A poem or a novel should provide fresh insight. Readers, therefore, must be helped to develop flexibility of mind, a freedom from rigid emotional habits, if they are to enter the aesthetic experiences the artist has made possible." (98)

Rosenblatt does a decent job of capturing the upheaval of the adolescent mind--changing body images and obsessive self-consciousness, a desire to reflect what's "normal (and here I suggest more attention to media awareness in our curriculum is needed)," struggling to find independence and emancipation from familial structures. They need links to their experiences to be present in the books they read. They need to be emotionally and intellectually ready to reevaluate assumptions and cultural suggestions, and to adjust accordingly. This is how readers live in the world.

Easy to see why fundies are so scared.

I return to my question about whether or not some books may be universally accessible. I feel like Rosenblatt's saying yes. But not without a lot of trickiness.

the no-title post

"Sensuous details will acquire significance as they lead him to glimpse the emotional undercurrents that flow so swiftly beneath the surface of everyday life."

Rosenblatt's Ch. 2, "The Literary Experience," posits that the reader makes the text into something more than words on a page, that the individual experience to the poem or story gives it meaning, and that it's our task as teachers to foster fruitful interactions. I was thinking about this in regards to our conversation about classics--are there books that everyone should read, texts that hold universal meaning. The IRD had a defined list of classics (and even "near-classics"), texts which they had determined were irreplaceable and held potential to develop values and a larger social perspective for emergent readers, for every grade level, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It even attempted to include marginalized voices and multicultural texts, so good for them, not bad for a corporate organization. It stressed the value of absorption, getting lost in a book, the way I did in second grade when I didn't hear the bell ring while reading in the library and consequently being late for class. Did the books I read make me examine my views on humanity? I dunno. Maybe subconsciously, yes.

"There are many experiences that we all have in common--birth, growth, love, death. We can communicate because of a common core of experience, even though there may be infinite personal variations." So maybe it's not that bad to suggest there are a few really great books that can speak to a lot of people. I'm not going to say everyone, but a lot.

Then I got to thinking about why we respond to the pieces we respond to, that tenuous hold that certain authors or themes or stories have on us, and why. My favorite books--Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (really anything by Hunter S. Thompson), The Virgin Suicides (really anything by Jeffrey Eugenides), Still Life with Woodpecker (really anything by Tom Robbins), Jazz (really anything by Toni Morrison), The Shining (anything by Stephen King). You get the picture. Clearly these authors' styles and the subject matter strike some kind of chord with me that when I read them, I have an intense emotional response. Their words and phrasing, their rythym, the broken conventions and violated textual norms all speak to me, as do the plots and settings and subject matter of these stories. That said, I assume these works were out of my emotional range when I was 8, or even 12, and I wouldn't have appreciated them the way I do now. When I was young, I was a big fan of Nancy Drew and other stories that I see now as more or less moral homilies that Rosenblatt warns about. Well, not really warns, but she draws attention to the difference between reading as pure art and reading in order to extrapolate social implications, and I imagine most pleasure reading necessarily falls somewhere in between, hopefully closer to the aesthetic side.

In regards to classroom practice, I was also disappointed when we'd take a trip to the library, and my students would either not show any enthusiasm or any clue about how to find a book they'd like. Some assumed no books held any kind of enjoyment for them. Some would check out the same books every time, usually about (for the boys, anyway) drugs, low riders, or rappers. Seriously. Those were self-selected books, and I didn't want to dissuade them from picking out their own books, but I constantly tried to develop an inquisitive mind--find something you don't much about and learn. Of course, part of the problem with no real grasp on the search process, part was a pervasive belief that books were boring, although some did find themselves following a particular series or author and got real pleasure from it. I liked Rosenblatt's quote on 39 about the escape value of literature--"anything that offers refreshment and a lessening of tension may have its value in helpng us to resume our practical lives with renewed vigor..." (I don't want to rewrite the whole paragraph, but it's a good one. For the troubled kiddos that I taught, the escape principle was definitely valid, as was the opportunity to sympathize/learn from other peoples in conflict--as I look back on the more successful lessons I had, the ones that spoke to and broke through to my kids, they were stories like The Diary of Anne Frank, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, To Kill a Mockingbird, poems about love and family and heartbreak. They were texts that had within them a theme or emotion that the kids could relate to in some way as a basis for discussion. "Knowledge of literary forms is empty without an accompanying humanity."

No one can read a poem for us.

So this post is kind of scatter-brained, I realize, but I'm wondering at this point:
What stories do you feel strongly about, that you would encourage students to read, and why?
What kind of schema or game plan should we set up for "responsible reading," or should we send them out into the story on their own and let them make what they will of it?
What kind of questions and discussions will extend their meaning-making (keeping in mind the role of imaginative writing in response to text)?

One last thought--I liked how Rosenblatt suggests that the experience of reading produces some ultimately undefineable results and emotions, that there is something almost magical about the event that is different for every person. Also that to really get something from reading, the reader has to be imaginative and searching--how can we develop that creativity in our kids (especially when we hold them to such rigid standards and classroom structures)?