My post about YA and getting kids to read generated quite a bit of discussion, and not a little bit of outrage, if clueless pasty-faced Anglophones frothing at the mouth on twitter are to go by. Well, that and people who are generally angry that I had the temerity to malign YA (and assorted other genres, but it’s the YA defenders that are the most riled up). It’s very zergling-defending-the-overmind. I hope I never come to intimately associate my identity with a genre of texts I consume (or even individual works). That’s a horrible thing to do to yourself. Here’s one that tickled me:
Ah, me and my hate of reading fiction. Excuse me, I’m going to change this blog’s name to “Requires Only Yuri.” Lesbian manga. Forever. No more books! Give me a moment to delete all the book reviews.
It also confirms rather that some people have this bizarre idea that reading fiction in particular is some exalted, exalting fetish, like going to church. Really, I wish I had the intellectual vigor to absorb more non-fiction, but I’d guess to some the height of intellectual curiosity is picking up a copy of The Hunger Games.
But enough about the easy targets. Let’s go over again where I come from:
In comparison with the public expenditure of other countries, (especially developing countries): China 13%, Indonesia 8.1%, Malaysia 20%, Mexico, 24.3%, Philippines 17%, United Kingdom and France 11%, the Thai GDP and national budget allocate considerable funds to education. By 2006 it represented 27% of the national budget. Although education is mainly financed by the national budget, important local funds, particularly in urban areas, are being released to support education. In the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority, up to 28.1% of the education budget has been provided by local financing. Loans and technical assistance for education are also received from Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, and the OECF.
There’s a lot to criticize about public education in Thailand, but as you can see, funding isn’t exactly one of them. I know, I know, the US is a third-world shithole, but I can’t quite come to grip with the idea of an education system so appalling it has trouble teaching its students their native–and often only–language. Students here do have trouble with English, but you know, that’s a second language. The idea that some US schools are supported by advertisements is pretty fucking unreal. Totally alien, even. How does that even work! I’ve never seen a single ad at schools in my life, and certainly not themed Coca-Cola days. That’s dystopian stuff, that is.
I make fun of the US a lot, but I still maintain a faint conception that a first-world country surely can’t be so desperate. That’s why I have a lot of trouble wrapping my mind around all the poverty, the terrible healthcare, and all the rest (so many school shootings! What hideous crime rates!). The sheer dissonance between how the US presents itself and its actual reality cannot be stressed enough. If I told a Thai friend today that many people in the US live hands-to-mouth, have to put up with debilitating illness/injuries due to a lack of healthcare, they won’t believe me. That’s not even getting started on the misogynistic regime.
Apart from that, I did quite make an ass of myself by not thinking of several perspectives: of living in a white world (and therefore having to get white literature aka the western canon, which is end to end dead white people), of students with learning disabilities, and immigrants (though having said that, there were immigrants in the discussion and they were talked over by people who weren’t). For that, my apologies.
I still don’t think “get them to read YA no matter how shitty” is the magical panacea or even that it’ll solve any problem at an appreciable level, but hey.
So, appropriately, Hayibo: Africans shocked by uncivilized antics of European savages.
“The brochures promise sea and sun, but they’re still incredibly backward in Spain,” she recalled. “Basically they all live in mud huts called haciendas, and they sleep for two hours in the middle of the day. In Europe they call it a ‘siesta’. In Ghana we call it ‘being fucking lazy’.”
But, she added, this kind of “depressing inertia” was to be expected in a country with more debt than most of Africa combined.
I love it, it’s the best thing.
Check out the comments for this Bangkok Post item. This is why I think white liberals really need to start collecting their expat cousins from all of Asia. The white man has a burden, folks, and it’s the reining in of other whites.
This is old but for anyone who missed it, Arthur B of Ferretbrain talked about Conan at great length. It’s worth the length, promise! He also talked about Hitler.
If you attack Hitler, you’re attacking me, and every other fan who, tortured during the hellish ordeal of mockery and ostracisation which the sensitive, intelligent geek boy endures going through school, turned to the haven of SF for escape. [...] Boys of a geeky persuasion need role models like Hitler more than ever, because they are growing up in a world where there is no White History Month to encourage them to take pride in their ethnicity, where feminism has completely sidelined and creep-shamed the Men’s Rights movement, and where nobody will ever throw them a Straight Pride parade to honour their sexuality.
<3
Fozmeadows had a run-in with Professor Mansplainer.
Guy: Honestly, I think you ideology is hurting you.
Guy: I am a perfectly reasonable person.
Me: What, feminism?
Guy: Have a perfectly reasonable conversation with you.
Guy: Not feminism.
Guy: YOUR ideology.
Guy: The bastard chimera of a misused ideology that you have crafted for yourself.
Mansplainers all seem to talk the same, too. See one and you’ve seen ‘em all.
Let’s Read Some Cory Fucking Doctorow. This is an amazing thing, and I say that as someone who used to like Doctorow.
That part of San Francisco is one of the weird bits — you go in through the Hilton’s front entrance and it’s all touristy stuff like the cablecar turnaround and family restaurants. Go through to the other side and you’re in the ‘Loin, where every tracked out transvestite hooker, hardcase pimp, hissing drug dealer and cracked up homeless person in town was concentrated.
shut up shut up shut up fuck you FUCK YOU NOT ANOTHER WORD OUT OF YOU DOCTOROW
Right? There’s a “tranny hooker” trotted out later in the same book.
This is subtly, but importantly, different. Marcus is the narrator and the only interpreter of this world we have: it’s his story, and what he says goes. More than that, he’s quite obviously the author’s Gary Stu: the smartest, bravest, sexiest, best-liked guy in every room he enters, and self-evidently incapable of error. Doctorow is walking a very thin line between having a character be a habitual dick to women, and having the text actively hate women, and you know what? I’m not going to give him the benefit of the doubt in ambiguous cases, because fuck Cory.
Much better than I can articulate.
This “first page” at Dear Author is what, I imagine, functional illiteracy is like.
“Sarah I really don’t want to be here?” Said Karly.
Karly tapped Sarah’s shoulder when she ignored her.
“Why are you ignoring me?” Said Karly.
[...]
So if she kicked some pedophiles ass, or slapped some abuser here an there that was fine by her.
[...]
She remembered unsheathing her steel Katana blade from her back and readying the blade for revenge. Calm washed over her; the comforted feeling she got right before she dealt deaths.
I’m so sorry, Americans.
Liz (@hawkwing_lb)
/ April 21, 2012Thanks for the Conan link. That was well worth reading.
Unfortunately, while the Dear Author example is bad, compared to some of the things I have seen in a writing workshop or fanfic website or two, it’s not actually functionally illiterate. Most of the sentences have some sort of point, and while the grammar and punctuation is bad, you can still get some idea of what the write meant to convey.
(Unlike say, this. Or this.)
I’m from Ireland, and while our adult illiteracy rate isn’t quite at the US’s level, a four year survey in the 1990s found that something like 1 in 4 adults had difficulty with even the simplest reading tasks – like figuring out how much medication to take from instructions printed on the label. (25%, compared to the USA’s 40%. And we only spend between 5-8% of GDP on education, on average.) I’m not sure how well our figures take into account the roughly 6% of the native population for whom English is a second language or a mother tongue *alongside* Irish, though.
(Our non-English-language education is really crap. I mean *really* crap. One of my great regrets about the Irish education system is the fact that I’m literate for basic tasks – the most marginal qualification of literacy – in three languages besides English – but one of those I had fourteen years of instruction in, and the other two, six and two, respectively. You’d think I could be reading *actual literature* in the former pair, but I read short academic articles only with difficulty. But I apologise: this is off-topic.)
acrackedmoon
/ April 22, 2012Fanfic websites I can get, but… writing workshops? There are people who bring stuff worse than this? Ghastly.
Re: non-English language ed, ours isn’t that great either (or English-language ed period). I really really wish ours was better with English, it’d dissolve so many of the barriers and give us so many tools to fight against imperialism/western hegemony.
Liz (@hawkwing_lb)
/ April 22, 2012@acrackedmoon:
If you want to keep any faith in the human species, never read slush, then. (TNH at Making Light has a great post from 2004 about types of slush. Scroll down to the context of rejection if you’re interested.)
But yes. There are people who bring stuff as bad or worse to writing workshops. At least, going by the online ones like Critters or the OWW of which I was once a member in my not-that-long-ago youf. Sometimes they even CAPITALISE any WORDS that are IMPORTANT.
Better foreign language education would (maybe start to) help with many things the world over. (But much as I find my native English useful, I can’t seperate my feelings about it from the knowledge that there exists an entire historic literature in Irish which I will never be able to access with equal fluency (thanks, history!) – which is to say I understand why English is a necessary tool today, but I rather wish it wasn’t *quite* so prominent as it managed to become. But then, as part of the western hegemony/anglophone imperialist world, my regret is functionally pointless, really, isn’t it.)
Emil Söderman
/ April 22, 2012I think that to some degree non-fiction and fiction require separate skills (vocabulary and well, familiarity with the subject in the case of the former, and grammar/structure in the case of the latter) they’re not neccessarily the same thing. (as pointed out there’s a significant group of people, mostly men, who read but only non-fiction)
devilintheflesh
/ April 22, 2012Yeah, YA can be a little over-rated. But ‘A Tree grows in Brooklyn’ is sort of YA. Sort of, in that it’s so brilliant and yet anyone can read it.
devilintheflesh
/ April 22, 2012Sorry, didn’t quite read your whole post, just the first paragraph about YA.
I read the rest. I’m still not sure what you’re talking about, so I’ll just follow you and comment more adequately on your next post.
Next Friday
/ April 22, 2012I liked Arthur B’s piece.
Actually, that’s how The Iron Dream should have been written in the first place. A few critical essays, recollections from friends, a few ‘rediscovered’ interviews, and a short story, thirty pages maximum. More meta, less drivel.
Nonny Morgan
/ April 22, 2012I thought you had an interesting point, actually. In the US, reading is treated as sort of a holy cow. It’s not really questioned why reading is better than, say, stories through visual or interactive media; it’s assumed that it is. You see the same sorta thing with comic books and graphic novels; somehow, they don’t count as real reading.
I’ll admit to having basically repeating the same thing — “At least they’re reading”. I appreciate seeing another perspective to something that I’ve basically accepted all my life. Thanks :)
acrackedmoon
/ April 22, 2012Yeah, my original point was something like “it’s just as possible to consume texts mindlessly as it is to consume anything else” which I’m pretty sure is the absolute truth.
Nonny Morgan
/ April 22, 2012It most certainly is!
When I was a teenager, I participated in our library’s summer reading challenge. I’m not sure if they have those over your way, but they’re basically this — kids sign up, and if they read a minimum number of books, they get prizes. There were additional prizes if you set higher goals, and if you were the person to read the most books over the summer.
I read quite literally 150 books that one summer. But, I wasn’t really reading them in any actual sense. I was skimming, basically, and it was quite mindless. I was reading for the sake of reading, not for the story. I realized that, hey, that’s not really such a great thing, and backed off doing that, but there were a lot of people encouraging, well, quantity over quality.
mastadge
/ April 23, 2012It also leads to a bizarre form of guilt, wherein people will lament, “I wish I read (more)” when in fact they have no particular desire to read (fiction or books, at least) but feel vaguely guilty that they’re not participating in the sort of Improving Intellectual Activity that they’ve been told they should enjoy but, for whatever reason, don’t. They see it as some sort of failure of discipline that they haven’t made the time to read the same nonsense bestseller all the “readers” are talking about.
Every time I hear pundits using the concepts of literacy and reading more or less interchangeably, I wish I could discuss with them the notion that while achieving a 100% literacy may be a noble goal, having 100% of the population reading novels is a very silly one.
Seth Gordon
/ April 23, 2012Speaking as a Yank: in this country, on the level of sentiment (e.g., polls asking people which professions they respect the most), people love teachers, but on the level of actually allocating tax money, primary education is screwed.
A significant part of this, I think, is Baumol’s cost disease: the productivity-per-unit-labor of other jobs has grown steadily over the last 75 years or so (e.g., it takes a lot fewer worker-hours to build a car than it used to), while teaching is as labor-intensive as always (even more so, since now there is more concern about things like reducing class sizes and giving extra services for children with learning disabilities). Which means that teachers’ salaries, compared with the salaries of other professions requiring similar skill levels, have suffered a slow leak.
(And I think this has also led to a vicious cycle: good potential teachers leave the field or never enter it, leaving room for lots of mediocre-to-lousy people to come in, leading to tongue-clucking about how our kids aren’t learning anything and it’s all the teachers’ fault, making it easy to justify their lousy salaries, also leading administrators to solve the problem by imposing paint-by-numbers curricula from above, making the job even less attractive to teachers who have the gift of actually perceiving what their students need, and so on and so on.)
Remedying this situation would require, among other things, drastically raising teachers’ salaries, which would require… GASP!… raising taxes.
And of course there is plain old sexism: even before taking the Baumol effect into account, salaries for teachers have reflected the expectation that the person who does it for a living is not actually depending on that money to support a family.
Next Friday
/ April 23, 2012There’s a vicious circle with taxes as well. Since about half of the budget comes from local taxes (with federal contribution probably covering the cost of paper clips), then raising taxes would hit the neighborhoods that need help the most.
ǝuuǝıɹpɐ (@adrienneleigh)
/ April 23, 2012Hey, wanting to clarify my point from the last thread. I am totally not saying that YA Will Save Humanity, or anything! Here’s what i was trying to get at (from my admittedly White, middle-class and privileged perspective). The following things are true:
1. There is a LOT of functional illiteracy in the US. (Estimates go up to like 27% of the population, in at least some areas, being functionally illiterate.) There’s a lot of systemic reasons for this, including shitty schools, lack of attention to and support for education, etc.
2. Illiteracy is heavily correlated with poverty, in this country.
3. It’s often difficult to get kids and/or teenagers to understand why they should give a shit about something they don’t already give a shit about.
Given that, all i was saying is that i’d rather kids learn to enjoy reading, and stories — even if they are (at least at first) “consuming texts mindlessly” — than get all the joy of reading crushed out of them by our stupid broken one-size-fits-all education system. (I’m at least in some position to speak to this — despite having ALWAYS loved reading, i hated Shakespeare for YEARS because the first thing i encountered by him was in school, and it was Romeo & Juliet. (My opinion from about page fifteen of the play was that these two idiots could not POSSIBLY die SOON ENOUGH OMG. Twenty-plus years later, that’s still my opinion of that play.))
I would totally rather that people of all ages read GOOD books (fiction and nonfiction!), but if we can get them STARTED by reading bad books, i’m willing to start there, because the demonstrable consequences of illiteracy are FUCKING HIGH over here. Then, hopefully, we encourage them to engage with texts, good or bad, by asking questions and interrogating the fail-y bits. Thing is, someone has to care enough to (a) give kids books they WILL enjoy, and then (b) help them graduate to “hard” or “good” or whatever-you-want-to-call-them books rather than just all-Twilight-all-the-time. And that caring is in sadly short fucking supply in this country. :(
(I would also like to point out that it would be awful to insist that people have to read good books ALL the time! I do love me some fluffy-ass fiction, sometimes.)
acrackedmoon
/ April 23, 2012It’s just that I don’t think consuming fluffy fun books is any more intellectually stimulating than playing WoW or whatnot, but people make this act of reading fiction into some weird fetish, automatically sacrosanct and superior above all other forms of entertainment. When, in fact, mindless reading is like mindless any-other-thing. There’s no difference between reading fluffy manga and reading the latest YA flavor-of-the-week. You turn your critical faculties off and go, and you come out retaining very little of what you read because it doesn’t have much substance or because it simply isn’t very good.
the twisted spinster
/ April 23, 2012It occurs to me that the fetishizing* of reading we do here in the USA is probably a larger cause of the reading-avoidance problem than we want to admit. Americans, for all their talk of individuality and freedom and all of that are very group and peer-oriented, and groups have things they are supposed to do and things they aren’t. Also, this dovetails with a general anti-intellectual sentiment that is one of our oldest flaws. If you aren’t in a group that’s supposed to be “brainy” then you aren’t supposed to do brainy group things. In general, “braininess” is also considered unmasculine, and this country is still a frontier country psychologically if not in fact, and men are supposed to be “masculine.” Hence the idea that Real Men don’t read novels — they’re permitted to read non-fiction as long as the subjects are “masculine” subjects like machines or war. Science fiction was considered permissible to men as long as it stuck to fancy gadgets, war in space, sexy alien women, etc. Once it started getting into real intellectual areas like… just about anything, really — many male readers started circling the wagons complaining that the wimmen were ruining their scifi with all this “girl stuff” like questions about culture and thinking about aliens as if they could be people, etc.
Getting back to the group thing: groups are formed in school. You soon find out whether you’re a Jock, or a Nerd, or your part of the group of guys obsessed with cars, or if you’re a girl you’re supposed to be into fashion, or being popular, or else you can be a loner (actually a group) or a misfit (goths/etc.). Some of these groups are allowed to read books but are often restricted in what they are allowed to read by their peers. For example, nerds can read scifi and fantasy but they’d better not read romance. Fashion girls can read romance but they’ll get mocked if a Heinlein falls out of their bag. Goths read poetry, but only poets like Edgar Allen Poe. Jocks don’t read. Car guys read manuals. Etc. Reading or not reading becomes a mark of your in-group status and “improving your mind” is secondary if considered at all.
the twisted spinster
/ April 23, 2012Ah, forgot to add that *Firefox does not think “fetishizing” is a word but Free Online Dictionary says it is.
Captain Falcon (@psychoxnino)
/ April 24, 2012I think the reason why YA is popular among adults is because the readership is looking for the same thing they usually find in popular entertainment, just in book form. The fact that even this form of reading is considered an intellectual activity is probably an indicator of a broader problem of literacy in the U.S. Reading is “fetishized” because it isn’t a thing that people commonly do, even those who have the time and resources to do it.
Among minorities and immigrants, literacy is definitely an issue, I’d say. I learned English for practical reasons, and I took up reading as a hobby for that same purpose. My parents encouraged me for those reasons, and my brother got stuck in an after school tutoring class after earning a C in English in the fifth grade. I didn’t read YA, but a friend of mine, also first generation immigrant, is a Twilight fanboy (yes, I know). After finishing up with Meyer’s atrocities, he bought a Nook (for the novelty), went on to Hunger Games and made an attempt at Chuck Palahniuk (“I don’t know, it’s kind of gross, I don’t get it, it actually sounds like something YOU would like.”). Does it actually help his literacy? A little, and not so much in reading or comprehension as in speaking with correct use of phrases. I know people who tend to misuse or mispronounce certain words, like pronouncing the ‘b’ in “debt,” or saying “resume” like a verb when they mean the noun, confusing “compliment” and “complement.” That sort of thing. Because YA is very basic in the writing, because it uses English as it is spoken rather than as it is usually written, it can help some people with basic reading comprehension as well as communication.
And as much as I like to bust my friends’ collective balls over their third grade level English reading skills, some of them happen to be fluent in more languages than me, so uh yeah.
That isn’t, of course, what YA’s intended purpose is. I think YA’s intended purpose is to entertain at the level of your average TV sitcom. When people try the “at least it gets them to read” argument with me, my natural inclination is to sneer and say something biting. But it actually depends on the person who’s talking. I know a teacher who works with kids, mostly non-white, mostly low-income, and I’m told that public educators have to work against a number of factors including a lack of support or interest from the students’ families, community crime and gang violence, lack of funding and supplies, to name just a few. So if some kid likes to stay inside and read Hunger Games and not get into any trouble, it’s a win, and there’s no damage there. It’s a low bar to reach for, but that’s where we are at, realistically.
Being honest here, I did get started with trash fiction too. The crime fiction/suspense/thriller paperbacks that they sell next to the car magazines at the drug store, that’s where I went after I got done with children’s lit. That stuff is probably worse than YA, if you can imagine that.
Tim Vermeulen (@CormansInferno)
/ April 24, 2012whats the teacher name on fanboy & cum cum
Amazingly, this is one of the few times someone was being accidentally filthy on the internet. They misspelled the name of the cartoon series “Fanboy & Chum Chum.”
sam dean rapekink
I see the Supernatural fandom has taken notice of the blog.
Caleb Dunaway (@OneGreatTurtle)
/ April 24, 2012(On reflection, I think this is more of a response to the previous YA post, not this one, but you’re getting it here anyway)
I just finished my MSLS (with a specialty in youth services) and I have pretty much the same qualms with YA / children’s lit, though I don’t think the category as a whole is completely without worth. Genre YA is by and large the worst fork of it, especially for anything relating to gender / minority issues; contemporary / realistic YA has a relatively higher record of getting it right and having better overall literary quality to boot. Which, as someone who reads and enjoys genre, is depressing. I think some of the defensiveness that people get with regards to critiquing YA fiction is born by lumping all of YA together under the same banner–it goes without saying that Judy Blume is a much different author than, say, Stephenie Meyer, but when someone like Martin Amis or Self-Important Newspaper Editorial Authors lob a grenade into the field everyone has to defend everything, which causes a lot of confusion as everyone starts cherry-picking titles to back up their arguments, leaving the field looking very strange indeed.
I’m also with you on the notion that reading books is not automatically superior to playing video games / watching TV/movies / etc. I grew up doing all three and continue to do all three to varying extents, so I really don’t care if someone doesn’t read as much as I do. What bothers me most is the complete lack of narrative comprehension and analysis people demonstrate; our education system isn’t equipping people to critically engage with narratives (in books, movies, TV, games, etc.), and I’d much rather we have critical engagement over “my preferred way to kill time is superior to your preferred way to kill time” advocacy / arguments. It does no one any service to regulate any genre or media to the cultural gutter, where few will ever care about what toxic cultural ideals fester and brood there (SEE: SF/F until somewhat recently probably, video games), because we can just ignore them and feign moral superiority.
I also worry, with all the adult interest in YA, that adults are driving that market, rather than actual YA. Which is quite the large problem for books not targeted at adults.
saajanpatel
/ May 1, 2012Nalo Hopkinson wrote a YA book:
http://melaniesrandomthoughts-melanie.blogspot.com/2012/04/review-chaos-by-nalo-hopkinson.html?spref=tw