My friend Elaine sent me an email this morning in response to my last blog post about the decline in reading. Her effort to comment directly to the post had been eaten in cyberspace. (Does anybody know why this happens?)
In her email, she basically accused me of whining and looking for excuses to avoid writing. Guilty as charged! This week, I have spent one afternoon at the Getty with a granddaughter and another at the movies. I have even done some of the kind of house cleaning and organizing that is the classic writing avoidance activity.
So what's going on here? I'm trying to get started on the second chapter of the Book, in which I go back and look more critically and analytically at the tradition of library service to children. It means challenging some of the most cherished values and practices of our profession -- or at least putting them under the microscope for a closer look. Elaine and I did a little of this in our book on "Teens and Libraries," and it wasn't always well-received, for obvious reasons. I don't think I am being faint-hearted about confronting either Anne Carroll Moore or the old girls of ALSC, but I do recognize the need to do it as well as I can. I am daunted by the skill that is needed for this task.
Elaine tells me to doodle it or play it on the piano or whatever it takes -- just write the damn book. Yes, maam. I'll try.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Where are the readers?
We write for many reasons. I have written, for example, to prove my scholarly credentials for tenure considerations, to share my hard-earned expertise with other professionals, to communicate with friends and relatives, to entertain children, and to confront for myself the demons lurking inside young people who kill.
My father started writing a kind of memoir when he was in his seventies; it seemed to be an exercise in remembering as well as a historical record for those who came after him.
I have read many Holocaust narratives that are testimonials to horror, written to bear witness so that no one would forget what happened to the millions who died.
My son-in-law, a drama critic for the Twin Cities City Pages, writes for a living, as do many journalists and successful authors
In THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE, neurologist Alice W. Fleming writes about writer's block and its flip side, the compulsive desire to write that can keep people hunched over a keyboard for hours,unable to stop the words from spewing forth.
For most of us, however divergent our motivations may be, there is the hope that our words will reach readers. It was unnerving, therefore, to stumble during the past week on three different arguments for the decline of reading. Nicholas Carr asks in the 2008 July/August Atlantic Monthly, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google. (Sorry; I haven't learned yet how to create links.) He notes that because of the ubiquity of text on the Internet, we may actually be reading more than ever, but it's a different kind of reading that may involve a different kind of thinikng than the extended reading of longer works of prose requires. He quotes Maryanne Wolf, a developmental scientist who wrote PROUST AND THE SQUID: THE STORY AND SCIENCE OF THE READING BRAIN, who worries that we are losing our ability to interpret text and to make the mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction.
A front-page story in today's NEW YORK TIMES (7-27-08) focuses on teens' abandonment of books for the Internet. The photo accompanying the story shows a family in their living room. Mom is reading a book; Dad is reading a newspaper. The two teens sit on the sofa with their laptops. The author points out that gleaning information from Internet texts requires the kind of critical thinking that we in the library world know as information literacy skills. However, the kind of Internet reading that most teens do for pleasure apparently requires little more than a lexicon of emoticons.
The third article to cast gloom on the future of reading was review in today's LA TIMES by Davaid Futrelle of DISTRACTED: THE EROSION OF ATTENTION AND THE COMING DARK AGE by Maggie Jackson. This is another diatribe on the consequences of digital telecommunication devices -- "the beeping Blackberries that we tote to the beach instead of the giant books we used to pretend to read." The reviewer isn't crazy about the book; he finds that ironically it lacks focus. However, it is one more piece of evidence that the cognitive demands of modern life may not lend themselves to reading the kinds of books that many of us want to write.
I'm not sure what to make of all of this. I spend a lot more time reading Internet texts than I used to and still find myself capable of sinking deeply into more literary prose. Admittedly, I write these days for other educated adults -- not for media-mad young people. But sometimes I wonder: am I blogging while Rome burns?
My father started writing a kind of memoir when he was in his seventies; it seemed to be an exercise in remembering as well as a historical record for those who came after him.
I have read many Holocaust narratives that are testimonials to horror, written to bear witness so that no one would forget what happened to the millions who died.
My son-in-law, a drama critic for the Twin Cities City Pages, writes for a living, as do many journalists and successful authors
In THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE, neurologist Alice W. Fleming writes about writer's block and its flip side, the compulsive desire to write that can keep people hunched over a keyboard for hours,unable to stop the words from spewing forth.
For most of us, however divergent our motivations may be, there is the hope that our words will reach readers. It was unnerving, therefore, to stumble during the past week on three different arguments for the decline of reading. Nicholas Carr asks in the 2008 July/August Atlantic Monthly, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google. (Sorry; I haven't learned yet how to create links.) He notes that because of the ubiquity of text on the Internet, we may actually be reading more than ever, but it's a different kind of reading that may involve a different kind of thinikng than the extended reading of longer works of prose requires. He quotes Maryanne Wolf, a developmental scientist who wrote PROUST AND THE SQUID: THE STORY AND SCIENCE OF THE READING BRAIN, who worries that we are losing our ability to interpret text and to make the mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction.
A front-page story in today's NEW YORK TIMES (7-27-08) focuses on teens' abandonment of books for the Internet. The photo accompanying the story shows a family in their living room. Mom is reading a book; Dad is reading a newspaper. The two teens sit on the sofa with their laptops. The author points out that gleaning information from Internet texts requires the kind of critical thinking that we in the library world know as information literacy skills. However, the kind of Internet reading that most teens do for pleasure apparently requires little more than a lexicon of emoticons.
The third article to cast gloom on the future of reading was review in today's LA TIMES by Davaid Futrelle of DISTRACTED: THE EROSION OF ATTENTION AND THE COMING DARK AGE by Maggie Jackson. This is another diatribe on the consequences of digital telecommunication devices -- "the beeping Blackberries that we tote to the beach instead of the giant books we used to pretend to read." The reviewer isn't crazy about the book; he finds that ironically it lacks focus. However, it is one more piece of evidence that the cognitive demands of modern life may not lend themselves to reading the kinds of books that many of us want to write.
I'm not sure what to make of all of this. I spend a lot more time reading Internet texts than I used to and still find myself capable of sinking deeply into more literary prose. Admittedly, I write these days for other educated adults -- not for media-mad young people. But sometimes I wonder: am I blogging while Rome burns?
Monday, July 21, 2008
A writer's community
When I was studying for my PhD in Public Administration at USC in the early 1980s, I was part of a scholarly movement that defined itself as being in opposition to the prevailing market-oriented approach to government. Instead of running a government organization -- a library, say -- like a business, we proposed a more community-oriented approach. The particular strategy I was advocating was called coproduction, in which the organization would involve its users as coproducers of the service they were receiving. It was a bottom-up strategy in which the professionals and their clients were seen as having equal power in determining the kind of services that would be provided.
There was much discussion then of different kinds of communities. I remember in particular talk about sodalities, communities of interest. I understand that this term is most commonly associated with the Catholic Church, but we extended it to include fellowships of all kinds in which participants joined together informally because of mutual interests. I can't remember now who it was -- Barbara Bader? Jacalyn Eddy? -- who talked about the sodality created by Anne Carroll Moore and other like-minded women in the early part of the nineteenth century. They were bound together by their mutual passion for children and books and for the new institutions that were forming to bring the two together.
This has been a week in which my own sodality, a small community of writing women who care about each other as well as about children, books, and/or libraries, has been an enormous boost to my own productivity. It was a week in which my writing languished as I dealt with errands and tasks, both mundane (going to the post office) and glorious (acquiring my new digital piano and finding the right headphones after three trips to Radio Shack).
Do you know how hard it is to get back to the manuscript when you've been away for a week? You can't remember where you were or what you were thinking when you abandoned it. The learning curve seems impossibly steep. I was stuck, and even lunch with my writing friends Susan and Theresa just seemed like a pleasant distraction, not the usual stimulus to be the best kind of writer I can be. I was well and firmly stuck.
Then Theresa shared a midnight inspiration with Susan and me. She called it "meanderings" but it was a brilliant essay on yearnings and desire and what these powerful emotions have to do with the art of writing. My heart answered, "yes, exactly." As if she also knew just what I needed, my friend Elaine sent a long message (see the third comment under the previous post about historical gaps.) She triggered my thinking again about both the content of the chapter I was working on and about the whole process of writing. I spent much of yesterday back at the computer, doing some good revision and moving the Book along.
It sometimes feels so solitary. But there are friends out there, members of the sodality who are there when we need them. Thank you.
There was much discussion then of different kinds of communities. I remember in particular talk about sodalities, communities of interest. I understand that this term is most commonly associated with the Catholic Church, but we extended it to include fellowships of all kinds in which participants joined together informally because of mutual interests. I can't remember now who it was -- Barbara Bader? Jacalyn Eddy? -- who talked about the sodality created by Anne Carroll Moore and other like-minded women in the early part of the nineteenth century. They were bound together by their mutual passion for children and books and for the new institutions that were forming to bring the two together.
This has been a week in which my own sodality, a small community of writing women who care about each other as well as about children, books, and/or libraries, has been an enormous boost to my own productivity. It was a week in which my writing languished as I dealt with errands and tasks, both mundane (going to the post office) and glorious (acquiring my new digital piano and finding the right headphones after three trips to Radio Shack).
Do you know how hard it is to get back to the manuscript when you've been away for a week? You can't remember where you were or what you were thinking when you abandoned it. The learning curve seems impossibly steep. I was stuck, and even lunch with my writing friends Susan and Theresa just seemed like a pleasant distraction, not the usual stimulus to be the best kind of writer I can be. I was well and firmly stuck.
Then Theresa shared a midnight inspiration with Susan and me. She called it "meanderings" but it was a brilliant essay on yearnings and desire and what these powerful emotions have to do with the art of writing. My heart answered, "yes, exactly." As if she also knew just what I needed, my friend Elaine sent a long message (see the third comment under the previous post about historical gaps.) She triggered my thinking again about both the content of the chapter I was working on and about the whole process of writing. I spent much of yesterday back at the computer, doing some good revision and moving the Book along.
It sometimes feels so solitary. But there are friends out there, members of the sodality who are there when we need them. Thank you.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Historical gaps
I really thought I was done with Chapter 1, the history and tradition of library service to children in the U.S. I had tracked down those pesky PLA service responses and navigated through the controversy surrounding the Benton Foundation report. I had integrated Abigail Van Slyck's insights on the children's rooms in Carnegie libraries and Jacalyn Eddy's account of the influential "bookwomen" who helped to create children's book publishing and library services in the first part of this century. Enough!
Then the discussion lists started to buzz with news of a New Yorker article about Anne Carroll Moore. Is there anything more to be learned about this formidable foremother of library services to children?
What I really want to read is an article about a children's librarian serving the kids in Topeka, Kansas, in the 1920s or working in a segregated library in the South in the 1950s. Or the memoir of a new children's librarian terrorized by the indomitable ACM. I want to know what the children's librarians in Minneapolis or San Francisco thought about Stuart Little; I really don't care any more that ACM was disappointed in it. I want to know how children responded to those legendary story hours at NYPL back in the early days. I want to know what children checked out from branch libraries in Los Angeles and New Orleans at different periods in time. I know that summer reading programs have been around since about 1900. What were they like? When did themes and tangible reading incentives become part of the programs?
So much of what we know about library history is the story of great women. Where are the "little women?" Where are the children?
Then the discussion lists started to buzz with news of a New Yorker article about Anne Carroll Moore. Is there anything more to be learned about this formidable foremother of library services to children?
What I really want to read is an article about a children's librarian serving the kids in Topeka, Kansas, in the 1920s or working in a segregated library in the South in the 1950s. Or the memoir of a new children's librarian terrorized by the indomitable ACM. I want to know what the children's librarians in Minneapolis or San Francisco thought about Stuart Little; I really don't care any more that ACM was disappointed in it. I want to know how children responded to those legendary story hours at NYPL back in the early days. I want to know what children checked out from branch libraries in Los Angeles and New Orleans at different periods in time. I know that summer reading programs have been around since about 1900. What were they like? When did themes and tangible reading incentives become part of the programs?
So much of what we know about library history is the story of great women. Where are the "little women?" Where are the children?
Friday, July 11, 2008
Laying down the bones
I wish I could say that I had increased the word count on the manuscript significantly. That hasn't happened, but I've done something almost as important. I have finally laid down the bones of the book. I guess you could call it the outline. When I was a doctoral student, professors talked about creating a conceptual framework for our scholarly writing, and that's another way to think about it. But it feels to me like the skeleton, just waiting to be fleshed out.
It came in a flash, while I was emailing my friend and sometime co-author, Elaine Meyers. We had talked a lot about the shape of the book when we were both in Anaheim at the end of June so it seemed right to try it out on her. So here it is:
1. Where we came from -- the tradition of library service to children
2. The legacy reconsidered
3. The children we serve -- ways to think about childhood, from the reading child of Anne Carroll Moore et al to a notion of the child as agent with rights as well as needs.
4. Creating the library for the children we serve -- or maybe, getting it right in the library for the children we serve (using an outcome-based planning and evaluation methodology for the smaller bones)
5. Claiming the future.
Now I need to pick up the pace, since I am just now finishing chapter 1, and I'd really like to get this done before I leave for Croatia in mid-October.
It came in a flash, while I was emailing my friend and sometime co-author, Elaine Meyers. We had talked a lot about the shape of the book when we were both in Anaheim at the end of June so it seemed right to try it out on her. So here it is:
1. Where we came from -- the tradition of library service to children
2. The legacy reconsidered
3. The children we serve -- ways to think about childhood, from the reading child of Anne Carroll Moore et al to a notion of the child as agent with rights as well as needs.
4. Creating the library for the children we serve -- or maybe, getting it right in the library for the children we serve (using an outcome-based planning and evaluation methodology for the smaller bones)
5. Claiming the future.
Now I need to pick up the pace, since I am just now finishing chapter 1, and I'd really like to get this done before I leave for Croatia in mid-October.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Drudgery
So here I am in the hot weather version of my scribbling suit: baggy t shirt and baggy shorts. Bare feet. Hair up in a scraggly pony tail. And I have spent nearly two hours engaged in the worst form of informational writing drudgery: cleaning up my references.
Chapter 1 is nearly done, and it is probably the most heavily documented piece of the whole book since it deals with the history of library service to children. Much of this was already cited in the earlier edition. Dealing with those references was easy, if boring. All I had to do was print the chapter, go to the original bibliography, and type in the references (hoping that I had gotten everything right the first time), checking them off as I worked my way through. More challenging were the new bits that I had added. In many instances, I had the source at hand -- easy peasy. In too many cases, however, I didn't want to interrupt the narrative flow to look up the citation. So sprinkled through the manuscript are the dreaded words: "check cite. " Or even worse: "add more." For example, I wanted to list the new PLA Service Responses. Do I have a copy of the latest edition of the Service Responses? No. I've got my fingers crossed that they are on the Web someplace; otherwise, I'll have to request them through ILL and go back to fill this part in much, much later.
See: It's even boring to read about it.
Sorry. I'll get through this hump and have something more interesting to say next time. Maybe I'll even follow Cindy's example and wear something more attractive. (See her comment on my last post.)
Chapter 1 is nearly done, and it is probably the most heavily documented piece of the whole book since it deals with the history of library service to children. Much of this was already cited in the earlier edition. Dealing with those references was easy, if boring. All I had to do was print the chapter, go to the original bibliography, and type in the references (hoping that I had gotten everything right the first time), checking them off as I worked my way through. More challenging were the new bits that I had added. In many instances, I had the source at hand -- easy peasy. In too many cases, however, I didn't want to interrupt the narrative flow to look up the citation. So sprinkled through the manuscript are the dreaded words: "check cite. " Or even worse: "add more." For example, I wanted to list the new PLA Service Responses. Do I have a copy of the latest edition of the Service Responses? No. I've got my fingers crossed that they are on the Web someplace; otherwise, I'll have to request them through ILL and go back to fill this part in much, much later.
See: It's even boring to read about it.
Sorry. I'll get through this hump and have something more interesting to say next time. Maybe I'll even follow Cindy's example and wear something more attractive. (See her comment on my last post.)
Monday, July 7, 2008
What not to wear
I wonder how many of us writing women identified with Jo in Little Women. I just reread the book, and Jo is still my girl. Meg is too prissy; Amy, too spoiled; Meg, too good to be believed. But Jo -- strong-willed, impatient, and driven by her need to write -- now there's a heroine to admire.
I'm sure you remember where she wrote while she lived at home, tucked away in the upstairs garret, munching on apples. But how many of you remember her "scribbling suit"? "Her scribbling suit consisted of a black woolen pinafore on which she could wipe her pen at will, and a cap of the same material, adorned with a cheerful red bow, into which she bundled her hair when the decks were cleared for action. This cap was a beacon to the inquiring eyes of her family, who during these periods kept their distance, merely popping in their heads semi-occasionally to ask with interest, 'Does genius burn, Jo?' They did not always venture even to ask this question, but took an observation of the cap, and judged accordingly. If this expressive article of dress was drawn low upon the forehead, it was a sign that hard work was going on, in exciting moments it was pushed rakishlyh askew, and when despair seized the author it was plucked wholly off, and cast upon the floor. at such times the intruder silently withdrew, and not until the red bow ws seen gaily erect upon the gifted brow, did anyone dare address Jo" (Barnes and Noble Classics, p. 260).
I am so grateful that I live in a time and place in which woolen pinafores are not the norm. When I am writing in my home office, I wear leggings or sweat pants and a baggy t shirt, the same clothes I wear to the gym. My feet are bare nearly year round.
And you? What is your scribbling suit?
I'm sure you remember where she wrote while she lived at home, tucked away in the upstairs garret, munching on apples. But how many of you remember her "scribbling suit"? "Her scribbling suit consisted of a black woolen pinafore on which she could wipe her pen at will, and a cap of the same material, adorned with a cheerful red bow, into which she bundled her hair when the decks were cleared for action. This cap was a beacon to the inquiring eyes of her family, who during these periods kept their distance, merely popping in their heads semi-occasionally to ask with interest, 'Does genius burn, Jo?' They did not always venture even to ask this question, but took an observation of the cap, and judged accordingly. If this expressive article of dress was drawn low upon the forehead, it was a sign that hard work was going on, in exciting moments it was pushed rakishlyh askew, and when despair seized the author it was plucked wholly off, and cast upon the floor. at such times the intruder silently withdrew, and not until the red bow ws seen gaily erect upon the gifted brow, did anyone dare address Jo" (Barnes and Noble Classics, p. 260).
I am so grateful that I live in a time and place in which woolen pinafores are not the norm. When I am writing in my home office, I wear leggings or sweat pants and a baggy t shirt, the same clothes I wear to the gym. My feet are bare nearly year round.
And you? What is your scribbling suit?
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Inspiration or perspiration
My two children's books, "Hi, Pizza Man!" and Making Up Megaboy, were written in the incandescent heat of inspiration. Each one was a gift from the writing gods. In fact, I didn't so much WRITE Making Up Megaboy as channel the voices I heard in my mind on to the computer screen. There was little conscious thought or effort. It gives me chills to remember it.
I have tried many times since then to find the source of that inspiration. There was one summer when I cleared my calendar and tried to write every day, as my serious writer friends advise me to do. "Never mind if it doesn't go well," they say. "We all produce page after page of useless prose. Just keep at it. Revise, revise, revise. And don't be afraid to just chuck it all in the trash. Eventually the right words will come."
It didn't work for me. All that came of that summer of persistent literary effort was page after page of labored prose -- trite, banal, and definitely uninspired -- and a conviction that my earlier children's books were flukes. I certainly didn't want to bring another mediocre mid-list children's book into the world. So I stopped trying to write the great American children's novel or picture book.
I turned back to the kind of writing that my day job demanded anyway -- scholarly or professional books and articles. "Publish or perish" is not just a catchy turn of phrase. It is gospel at a major research university like UCLA where I was able to survive by publishing enough to satisfy the dreaded Committee on Academic Personnel. It became a challenge for me to find an academic writing style that had a personal voice as well as appropriate content. This kind of writing owed very little to inspiration, however, and much more to perspiration. Just sit at the computer and do it.
So here I am again, writing a professional book, hoping for the inspiration that will allow the words to soar from the page but knowing that ultimately this process owes nearly everything to perspiration and discipline.
I have tried many times since then to find the source of that inspiration. There was one summer when I cleared my calendar and tried to write every day, as my serious writer friends advise me to do. "Never mind if it doesn't go well," they say. "We all produce page after page of useless prose. Just keep at it. Revise, revise, revise. And don't be afraid to just chuck it all in the trash. Eventually the right words will come."
It didn't work for me. All that came of that summer of persistent literary effort was page after page of labored prose -- trite, banal, and definitely uninspired -- and a conviction that my earlier children's books were flukes. I certainly didn't want to bring another mediocre mid-list children's book into the world. So I stopped trying to write the great American children's novel or picture book.
I turned back to the kind of writing that my day job demanded anyway -- scholarly or professional books and articles. "Publish or perish" is not just a catchy turn of phrase. It is gospel at a major research university like UCLA where I was able to survive by publishing enough to satisfy the dreaded Committee on Academic Personnel. It became a challenge for me to find an academic writing style that had a personal voice as well as appropriate content. This kind of writing owed very little to inspiration, however, and much more to perspiration. Just sit at the computer and do it.
So here I am again, writing a professional book, hoping for the inspiration that will allow the words to soar from the page but knowing that ultimately this process owes nearly everything to perspiration and discipline.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Day 3
I have had a contract for more than a year now to revise a book that was published in 2001, CHILDREN AND LIBRARIES. I've thought about it a lot and fretted even more, but until July 1 not one word existed in the new manuscript. I have now started writing in earnest. This blog will be the place where I write and fret and think about the process.
I started with the easiest chapter, the historical overview of library service to children. This is the only chapter that I can just revise; all of the others will be brand new, written from scratch. I've had to retype the whole thing -- what on earth did I do with the original Word file? But this has been good because it combines a kind of mechanical process with reflection. I've been revising as I go along, mostly adding new information.
I'm almost at a decision point. In the earlier edition, the second chapter was a kind of assessment of the current status of library service to children. I am considering now whether to fold some of that information ino the historical overview as something like the "recent past." We'll see how that goes.
Reflections: 1. As painful as it is to get started on a big writing project (or even a little one), it is not as painful as fretting about NOT writing. 2. I don't know what I know until I've written it down.
I started with the easiest chapter, the historical overview of library service to children. This is the only chapter that I can just revise; all of the others will be brand new, written from scratch. I've had to retype the whole thing -- what on earth did I do with the original Word file? But this has been good because it combines a kind of mechanical process with reflection. I've been revising as I go along, mostly adding new information.
I'm almost at a decision point. In the earlier edition, the second chapter was a kind of assessment of the current status of library service to children. I am considering now whether to fold some of that information ino the historical overview as something like the "recent past." We'll see how that goes.
Reflections: 1. As painful as it is to get started on a big writing project (or even a little one), it is not as painful as fretting about NOT writing. 2. I don't know what I know until I've written it down.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)