O Brave New World...

Day 30: What nonfiction that you have read recently would you review/recommend?

I don't read a ton of nonfiction -- I used to; I used to read lots of marxist theory and commentary... Marx, Engels, a little Lenin though his prose is boring as shit, Luxemburg, Mandel, Norman Geras, Michael Löwy, etc. But now I tend to read biographies and memoirs and occasional pop sociology like Barbara Ehrenreich, as far as nonfiction. The last few things I read were biographies -- Steve Jobs (which I would only recommend if you want to stoke your fires further about what an asshole he was), Melissa Gilbert (kind of funny, but much less so and much less political than I was hoping for. She didn't get it ghost-written, that's for sure. It would have been better written), and... I think there was someone else... but I am coming up blank. I re-read Will in the World not too long ago. I highly recommend THAT, if you like Shakespeare. It's like a social history of a possible life he could have had, with interesting use of primary sources, and with the use of the plays themselves as primary sources. I really liked it.

Day 31: Why is the idea of "class" so nebulous in the United States -- as opposed to, say, Britain.

American exceptionalism, marxist style. Ugh. This is the worst inheritance of the American ethos. From DeTocqueville on, analysts have noted that Americans believe their own Big Lie, that anyone can rise in status if they work hard enough, and that individualism is not only good, but the best way to be. I think the best analysis of this I've ever read is Mike Davis' Prisoners of the American Dream. I highly recommend that too. And for the British end of the question, E. P. Thompson's brilliant Making of the English Working Class.

Day 32: Who is a teacher you recall fondly -- from middle school? (also, other blog topics, from high school, from college, from grad school)

For middle school, I guess it has to be Ms. Noznick. Pauline Noznick. I'm Facebook friended to her now (she writes a lot about this year's snowy Chicago winter, and posts pictures from the Botanical Gardens). All of which makes it seem like I must have been her teacher's pet and so on. Not so. I drove her fucking crazy and annoyed the shit out of her, and she pissed me off. For some reason she told us about how her great-grandfather (or grandfather?) had fought with the Czarist Whites in the 1920s Russian Civil War. That infuriated me, for a start. I mean, there's no reason for her to talk about this in 1978 except that I must have said something about the Russian Revolution (which it is certainly likely I would have done.) And we used to tussle all the time in class -- she was my Homeroom teacher and my Social Studies teacher, for 7th and 8th grade.

In 7th grade we did European history -- or at least, we did the French Revolution, as I recall, so maybe the great political ideas? Because 8th grade was American History, for sure. But I know we did topical units, like the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Socialism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism (together! In one unit: Marx, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union!) There was this guy who worked for our school district, or was a consultant or something, who would dress up as various historical figures and visit schools and do a spiel in the theater or auditorium. I know he did a Civil War soldier and something else. And he did a Russian Commissar. He came to Nichols to present as a Russian Commissar, and did a speech in a heavy fake Russian accent on the topic "Freedom FROM versus Freedom TO". In 1978 or 1977, as the Cold War raged on. And I sat in the audience, getting angrier and angrier, with Ms. Noznick needling her laser stare down the row at me, warning me to sit tight. But I couldn't. As soon as he asked for questions, I shot up out of my seat and started denouncing his prejudices and bullshit. My whole row was laughing at the entertainment I provided with my politics. Ms. Noznick was mortified. Another time, I corrected her pronunciation of "bourgeois" in class. Her response was those little white patches that can appear, bracketing your nose, and a clipped "... I am the ADULT and YOU are the child..."

At least she taught about this stuff, though. I can't imagine anyone teaching anything like "The Five Main Points in Marxist Theory" now. I mean, they were simplistic and intended to be damning, like "Point #3 -- Violence is the way, THE ONLY WAY, to create social change." Or "Point #5: Economics is the force that moves history." I wrote essays on both of those, and it was thrilling to get to do so -- to write polemics at age 12. I appreciate her for that, and for being a rigorous teacher. She obviously recalled me fondly for my brain if nothing else, but she was also very pleased to find out I'd become a middle school Social Studies (and Language Arts, ugh) teacher.

Day 33: What's your current favorite sci-fi/sitcom/any genre TV show and why? What's so appealing about it?

I just finished watching Caprica with johnbcannon. That was enjoyable, as a prequel to Battlestar Galactica. I never got into Buffy, but I very, very much liked Firefly and the movie, Serenity. I was sad Firefly was cancelled. I even enjoyed Star Trek: Enterprise, but I guess I'd enjoy anything in that imaginary universe... Oh! ANY GENRE! I just read the sci-fi part and stopped there... I don't watch current TV on TV, because I don't have any cable. But on Netflix... I really liked the first season of Orange is the New Black -- it, like, gets an A+ on the Bechdel Test. Amazing ensemble acting with mostly women. It is so not exploitative of women-in-prison genres, but also somehow manages not to be a gross white-lady-capitalizes-on-her-prison-experience vehicle, even though it easily could be that. The other women are whole people. And I've never gotten to see so many different women of color with different aspects. One way the show manages this is by giving us parts of flashbacks for EVERYONE's back story. I haven't quite finished re-watching the first season, with my mother, and I should, soon, before the second season starts.

Day 34: What technology that exists now could you not really imagine as a child?

Hm. I don't think I had the slightest inkling of personal computers and the changes they would wreak. I couldn't have imagined email and not handwriting letters. I guess I could have imagined phones with images and small handheld portable phones -- they showed things like that on sci-fi TV shows. I don't know, though. I don't think I was much of a futurist as a kid. I didn't try to imagine what would exist in the future, except for flying cars and space travel.

Day 35: Pro baseball, or pro football?

Pro football -- and even then, really only a few teams interest me, and mostly the Green Bay Packers. But baseball... I just find it yawningly boring. People get very lyrical about baseball, but I cannot.

Day 36: What are the books from your childhood that stay with you?

This is a HUGE topic, depending on how you take it. It would be shorter if I thought of it in terms of picture books, not young adult fiction. I'll try to compromise. Picture books: I Have a Turtle, which was one of those cheap cardboard-backed books you could get in check-out lines. Something like that. It wasn't a Golden Book, though. Smaller format. I learned to read from that. I loved a quiet picture book called The Big Red Barn. And the Frances books -- with Frances the badger? By Russell and Lillian Hoban. I liked those. I loved anything written and/or illustrated by Robert McCloskey, from Make Way for Ducklings to Blueberries for Sal and One Morning in Maine... I always felt a kinship to those books when my family would hit the road for our August car vacation which usually ended up on the East Coast, with Boston and Maine places we went almost every summer. Good Night Moon was an entrancing, calming, soporific book, as it has been for generations at this point. I admired but was not a fan of Harold and the Purple Crayon and Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. My great-aunt was an editor at Scholastic, and she sent us a LOT of books, when we were little. She sent a great collection of poems, many by Robert Louis Stevenson, and I remember liking them. Oh, yeah, and The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, which I had to look up just now -- I had no idea it was written in 1939. That story was awesome.

Day 37: How do you feel about aging?

Gah. My stepmother always answers this question the same way: "It's better than the alternative." Ha. Yeah. Well, that's true. It is not much fun, though, and seeing what lies ahead of me as I hang out with my mother? Not fun at all. A lack of dexterity, losing control of my hands and small motor skills? UGH. Poor(er) vision and possible diabetic retinopathy, e.g. BLINDNESS? God, even worse. Aphasia? Boo. Worse than that, there's obviously a genetic predilection in at least part of my mother's family for dementia. Fuck me. I don't like aging.

Day 38: Do you think it's possible to maintain your privacy in this networked age?

I can't get worked up about this. Maybe I should, but it just seems like the NSA could, if it wanted to, get whatever info it wanted. Maybe I also don't really feel all that private? I mean, I guess I'd rather not have my employer know various things about me. But, if you know my name and Google it, you will see a pretty comprehensive record of my adult life, and I can't really care.

Day 39: Why cats?

BECAUSE. Cats are fantastic. I don't get people who say cats are aloof. I've never had a cat that was aloof... towards ME. Towards other people, maybe. Cats are the right size to have in your house. Cats are warm and soothing and a tactile pleasure to touch. Cats don't slobber. Cats don't need to go on walks -- they are perfectly happy to flip a switch in their brain and race around your apartment like a crazed whirlwind. Cats instinctively come sit on or by you if you are feeling sick or blue. Cats (my cats anyway) are basically quiet except for interrogatory meows in a variety of pleasing registers. Cats offer a positive role model for the pleasures of laziness. Cats have interesting personalities and you can see at least some rudimentary thought processes if you stare in their eyes.

What skill would you like to pick up or improve in the next few years?

Wait -- first, I am in Lake Geneva, for my pretty much annual visit. I have been being extraordinarily more lazy than usual, even, partly due to the sweltering heat and humidity -- though it was just grey and cool when I got here, so that wasn't my excuse then.

It is green and lush and beautiful here, as I always find it. I want to do silly tourist things like take a trip on the Walworth II, the mail boat, with my father and stepmother, and go to a fish fry on Friday night, and take a ride on the last electric train in the state, in East Troy (and incidentally go to an AWESOME fake old ice cream shoppe in East Troy, which scooped up all these pharmacies-going-out-of-business fixtures and set them up wonderfully... the décor, which includes Red Scare admonitions, is equalled by the very excellent ice cream creations, like the chocolate peanut butter shake, mmm.)

My father drove me past the "old Quinn farm" where his great-grandfather, Micheal Quinn [sic], who was born in 1825 and emigrated to the US in 1853, married a widow and obtained an excellent farm. The woman -- Polly Enos Quinn -- had twelve kids, all of whom made it to adulthood, five from her first husband and seven with Micheal Quinn. And her great-great grandfather fought in both the American Revolution (Captain Abel Dinsmore) and Shay's Rebellion. Yeah, being in LG is a lot about history and genealogy for me. I am helping my dad with the photographs and some small amount of research assistance for the (self-published) collection he is going to put out of his local history columns from the Lake Geneva Regional News. They're cute, except for their terrible titles.

Here, the 1873 Geneva Township Plat, a detail showing the two Quinn Farms, one bought by William and Rose Quinn, and one, as I say, married into by Micheal Quinn, formerly belonging to Polly Enos Quinn.





Anyway, I have to leave to go check whether the door the body shop found for my poor, battered Mazda Protegé is the right kind... I stupidly, STUPIDLY, scraped it along a tree... a small tree, even... in Columbia, MO, reversing down a dreadful driveway. Everything in the door is functional, except a slightly dragging electric window... and the repair estimate is $872, UGH. If this door doesn't fit, I think I might cancel the bodywork. I mean, fuck it. I can suck up the ugliness and endless embarrassment, right?

And after that, I have to go pick up my mother at the Kenosha Metra station; she's coming up to stay for tonight and Thursday night, and then I'll drive her over to see my uncle in Milwaukee. It is such a pleasure for me that my mom and dad get along.

Oh. What skill? I would like to ACTUALLY MAKE SOME PROGRESS LEARNING HINDI. I have made some, in fact, though a lot of it is just things I've spent time learning in the past settling into my brain. I'd like to devote some time in the rest of this summer (and those weeks are dwindling, sigh) to working on it, though, and then NOT JUST PUT IT AWAY once school starts. I'm working my way through Rupert Snell's Beginning Hindi book right now, much more carefully, and it's helpful. Partly the quality and size of the print is so terrible (small! blurry!) that I am just rewriting absolutely everything that is in Devanagari, and leaving out the transliterations. That's better for me, though I am still slow at sounding it out, god.

Day 14: What did you expect to be doing at this age, when you were young? How does it compare with the actuality?

But first: what the fuck is wrong with Facebook? Everything is taking a bazillion years to do, look at individual pages (including my own), load more wall items, upload a photo... ugh.

Okay. I remember doing this same topic last year, somewhere sandwiched in among the not quite 365 entries that high schooler had come up with. As I recall -- and as true, in any case -- I did not think about being a teacher, as a kid. I thought about being a writer, a translator of French, an archaeologist, and possibly a professor of history. I don't think I considered much else. I would have liked to consider artist, but I never felt like I had enough originality and creativity to do that. And I made progress towards some of those intended goals during college and afterwards -- I majored in French; I took the intro to archaeology course and then got frightened off by the final lecture in which grad students took turns telling us there were no jobs at all and if we were LUCKY we'd be doomed to running ahead of a backhoe or bulldozer that was putting in a highway or a Walmart. I got an MA (and am ABD, sigh) in history. I worked as a translator for a revolutionary left newsmagazine in Paris. But somehow, I have ended up a teacher anyway.

The weird thing is, I can see how it started to coalesce, this decision, bit by bit, wavelet by wavelet, until it was a tide I couldn't resist. In grad school, a housemate gave up his potential PhD in Art History and Archaeology (which we'd spent tons of time talking about; I can still geek out on archaeology for any length of time you care to mention) in order to Get a Job. He entered a credential program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and we shifted our hours of late night conversations to teaching and education reform (actual reform, not the disgusting NCLB, which did not exist yet, anyway). I remember we spent time going around on the Ebonics issue, which I defended hotly, while wishing its champions had chosen a less foolish name. A false analogy with phonics did not help the cause.

Then, when I ran out of department support (in hindsight, probably not something I needed to really worry about: I could have cobbled together jobs that paid the same amount without TAing) I went back to my mom's in Chicago to finish the research and writing (Jesus fuck, I've just realized I can use Ancestry.com to look at the 1930 and 1940 census for Clarks, Louisiana, the epicenter of my research, oh, MAN, I am going to do that) I got a job tutoring at the high school I'd gone to -- Evanston Township High School. It was a great job. Only half-time, so not enough to live on. But twenty hours a week working with high schoolers one-on-one or in very, very small groups, on all kinds of subjects: different areas of history, English, French or Spanish... I enjoyed it immensely. And then something started happening all the time. I would create some tools to help me tutor kids on, say, The Odyssey -- the Robert Fitzgerald classic edition with the Matisse-like line sketch illustrations. Like, I found sixteen or eighteen passages that were absolutely golden from all over the book, and did a close reading with the kids ... for instance, the lines from the suitors' feast in Ithaka when Odysseus and his retainers bust in and kill them all, which include the first use of the unimaginably common phrase "bite the dust". And newish teachers, or some not new at all, would come ask if they could use my materials. My curriculum. This kept happening, and I started to feel like cutting out the middle-man. Why not become a teacher? At the same time, my sister had decided to become and elementary school teacher in Oakland, and she walked into a job, on just an emergency credential. That looked good to me, living back at home with my mother as an adult, and chafing to be earning an actual income.

I was sort of on the interview circuit for history positions, even though I hadn't started writing my diss, and I had a few interviews. At one (Doane College in Nebraska) they told me with supposed regret that they thought they were too white for me. True. At the other -- Traverse City, Michigan, a community college with UNBELIEVABLE funding sources, since it's such a tourist town -- they obviously had an inside candidate, but still flew me up to interview. That would have been a strange and interesting job. Distance learning via video to students in the U. P. Anyway, I wasn't too keen on teaching a class here and a class there, the modern adjunct migratory labor of the "freeway flyer". Ugh. And I felt like teaching public school was a more democratic option anyway, one of the few public services left in this country, and free and open to all children. Like being a public librarian, as my mother was. Also not an inconsiderable factor: teaching public school comes with a union, and union activism.

I intended to be a HIGH SCHOOL teacher, of course. But the first subbing position I got as a teacher on a sub credential in Oakland was for a middle school position, and they hired me in six weeks as a permanent employee on an emergency credential, and that was that. It's been middle school ever since. I still think longingly of high school, though. And peer through deeply rose-tinted lenses back at being a college instructor. The freedom! The joy of saying whatever you want in your lectures (yeah, yeah, as long as it is historically supported and relevant to the course description)! The ease of lecture format, compared to the entertainment factor and multiple methods we have to use in teaching middle school! I mean, my lectures were cutting edge, and visual, and audio... for 1996. For every lecture, I had a set of detailed, primary source mostly full-color, or black and white photographs, or political cartoons visuals that were printed on transparencies and projected to enormous size behind me at the podium. And I talked around and about those images, as well as bringing in audio clips or, once, singing myself. I even made a collective database project for social history through genealogy, as a project that showed exactly the demographic trends we'd been talking about, after students had first collected on paper and then entered into Filemaker Pro, four generations of their family, with demographic questions as well as the standard genealogical questions. Damn, that was fun.

Day 8: What behaviors do you think will kill a relationship?

I don't really know. In two of my serious relationships, I did the breaking up, and in those cases, there were a lot of different things... in the second of them, I felt undervalued, misused, emotionally abused, and ... I don't know, it was so bad that the list could go on a depressingly long time. In two of my serious relationships, the other person did the ending and honestly, I don't know what killed the relationship for them. I thought it was alive and well. Or maybe not that. I felt that MY emotions had not changed. Obviously, theirs had.

If I imagine a relationship and think about what would kill it, I guess I think that imbalance of feelings would be heading in the deathly direction. Maybe cheating (see below), but I am not sure about that.

Day 9: Do you believe in "once a cheater, always a cheater"?

Of people I know who have had affairs, one was absolutely serially unfaithful in one (fifteen year, about) relationship, and hasn't had any extracurricular activity at all in the second (almost thirty-five year) relationship. The other people I've known who have cheated (slept with someone else in what was understood to be a monogamous relationship) -- including me -- have only done it once, and it didn't end the primary relationship, though it caused conflict and unhappiness for a time. So I guess I don't think 'once a cheater, always a cheater'. Out here, in the Bay Area, or on the younger generation of the Left, or however you want to describe this, there are other ways to arrange things that would make cheating a non-issue. I'm not really too interested in those ways right now.

Day 6: How is your life now different from what you expected as a child? How is it similar?

I guess it depends at which point(s) I look at my expectations. When I was little I could not really imagine an adult future at all. I think I've written here before that one of the clearer memories I have of such a projection was when I was five or so and imagined a future female commune. But that didn't include what kind of work I would do, or anything. At later ages, I imagined being a writer or an archaeologist or a professor of history or a French translator. I never really imagined being a teacher, especially a middle school teacher. I think if I'd imagined it at all as an outcome I would have thought of myself as a high school teacher, and that thought still recurs to me. Hey, I've got another fourteen years (not including this one) in the classroom, so maybe I'll graduate to high school and view that as a second career. I never imagined having a progressive disease -- who does? So diabetes was not in my future projection. To be honest, as a kid, I never fantasized about marriage or even about having kids myself. I sort of assumed I would, but didn't think about it much. At various points I imagined living permanently outside of the United States, but I didn't know then how important being near family would be to me. I think I would not be shocked as a five year old to see myself as a 46 year old, all told.

Day 3: What's worse, the fact that kids these days wear baggy pants, or that they won't get off my damn lawn?

This topic is hard for me. First, I am a terrible literalist. I like the way springheel_jack approached it, but I think that being a middle school teacher just gets in the way of that. I literally see baggy pants (well, not in the English sense... just the American and possibly Canadian sense?) all day long. I used to be around screaming teenagers on their homeward commute after school, on the bus, before I had a car. That experience very much lent itself to the 'please get off my damn lawn,' feeling, though I live in an apartment. Normally, though... youth fashion doesn't bother me at all, though I find it hard to view it as aesthetically PLEASING to me. I can't get excited about 500 gym shoes with marginal differences, or track suits and athletic team jerseys as couture. But it doesn't BOTHER me. It's not that I'd rather see kids wearing something else, exactly. (This is a bit sad to admit, but I sort of like how my niece looks in her hella boring Oakland school uniform -- khaki pants or a khaki skirt, a white shirt of some sort, and/or a navy shirt, I guess? She wears clothes well, though, so probably anything would look good on her.)

The off the lawn thing... well... sometimes. God, sometimes after a tiring day at work, yes, I feel crotchety as hell. But not today, thankfully. I am having a good time, for the most part, right now, teaching how to write an argumentative essay (responding to a piece of literature, in this case, the adaptation of "A Christmas Carol" as a play with 31 parts! Almost every kid in my class had lines! Only from their seats; we didn't memorize the script and act it out. Still). I was schooled to within an inch of my life on the organization of a five paragraph essay in high school, and I am happily forcing that method on my hapless students. But I think it works well, rigid cage that it is. Once you learn the rigid cage, though, you can fly free, yet stay on topic.

I. Introductory paragraph with thesis statement
II. Body Paragraph 1
Topic Sentence
generalization introducing evidence
detail (e.g., at this point, quote from source)
explanation (aka, analysis, commentary)
transition
g
d
e
tr
g
d
e
tr
Concluding Sentence
III. Body Paragraph 2, see above
IV. Body Paragraph 3, see above
V. Concluding paragraph

All the hard upfront work is done on a three by three rectangular grid, a G-D-E sheet, and then if necessary they add some transitions and maybe a Topic sentence with transitional language and a concluding sentence, and voila. It's kind of instant mix, add water, but as I say, if they learn it well enough, then they can evade it and write better than it.

But I've certainly gotten off topic right now! Ha. Anyway, it's somewhat fun to teach this in a writer's workshoppy kind of way, with kids scribbling furiously on those forms and then checking with me and getting immediate feedback. I don't get as much time as I'd like to interact with kids one-on-one, and they are like thirsty plants drinking up the focused attention.

Day 1: Have reading and writing changed (in utility, in purpose, in percentage of literacy, in any way) since the advent of video?

There ended up being 75 topics, and maybe I'll come up with more, and I'll leave that post stuck at the top there, in case anyone ELSE wants to come up with more topics, but meanwhile, I thought what I might do is write a couple of these entries a week, not forcing myself to write every day. My mother SAYS she might join me and do one entry a week, to sort of ease her way into blogging. I hope she does. redlibrarian39, I'm talking to YOU. Even my older niece has gotten into the blogging act, but she's using Blogger, with a friend of hers in NYC. They're silly and funny, the pair of them, and also very good at writing.

On today's topic -- honestly, I feel like I shot my bolt on this when I made my class write on the topic basically as a punishment when they couldn't settle down one day last year (and by last year I mean, during the 2011-2012 school year). If I could find the handwritten two pages I did then, I'd scan them and put them in here. I don't want to rewrite the whole thing from memory. What I write below is not what I wrote that day, though it may share some elements.

Anecdotally, as a teacher, I feel that the worth of learning to read complicated or deep material has suffered since the popularization of TV, movies, and videos in general. Even when I was a kid, our culture was still not entirely video-saturated -- our crappy black and white TV got only, what, between six and nine channels, and stopped broadcasting at midnight, going to crackly snow. And movies were an occasional treat, at a movie theater, for $3.25. $2.25, matinee. Probably my generation watched fewer movies, in fact, than children in the fifties, for who (at least according to Stephen King) it seems to have been a weekly thing. In any case, before I digress further -- reading was the imaginative escape I sought, at any rate. I know that there was already (in fact, that there doubtless always was) a large proportion of kids who thought reading was boring, most likely because they weren't great at it. That's the thing. I didn't really understand until I took credentialing classes in teaching reading that it was such a hard skill to acquire. If you understand anything less than 95% of the words in a selection you are reading, the frustration level is so high that you won't understand enough of the text to continue it. Thus, the smaller reading vocabulary you have, the crappier things (generally -- the "lower interest" texts) you'll have available to read at your reading level. But if you challenge yourself too much, the frustration pushes you down.

More than that -- because I think that that problem must have existed since literacy has existed -- with all of the diversions and distractions and substitutions for text offered by audio-visual narratives, I think that people in the past generation or so have not developed the skill of picturing what they either read, or hear, in their head. I ask students what they picture when I am reading aloud, and most of them have a hard time, unless there is a movie version of the text, and they've seen it. For me, I always had such a clear picture in my mind from fiction that I was almost universally disappointed by the look imposed on characters if a film WAS made from whatever the book was. My niece is like that. My students are mostly not like that -- at least the ones in the English/Language Arts Support class are not like that.

It is a little hard to tell whether the students who don't have a Support class have that mental picturing skill to a higher degree... from their weekly reading logs, it is clear that some of them read challenging and complex texts (one kid is seriously working his way through a number of 19th century classics, from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson through Melville's Moby Dick) and that they do imagine scenes... they write specifically about what they can picture in part of the daily log. But for many of them, they read and reread the Wimpy Kid books, or the Junie B. Jones books, both of which are elementary school level texts...

Science fiction has had a lot to say, predictively, about whether reading will cease to be something that the majority of people can do. Maybe I am more affected by reading sci fi than by looking at actual data? The two authors whose predictions I remember most immediately are Neal Stephenson and John Varley. For Stephenson, most non-elite people in his corporatized future (in one book, Snow Crash the only political states are the balkanized corporations and private companies which own and run each aspect of society) only "read" what he calls mediaglyphs, which are some set of symbols you can use to operate various machines -- like the icons on your desktop -- "open", "close", "turn on", "turn off", "go forward" etc. For Varley, he doesn't get as specific about what remnants of literacy there might be, except that in his 8 Worlds novel* that is focused on a journalist and the world of news coverage Steel Beach there are (actually, also in The Golden Globe, another of the 8 Worlds novels) there are carefully "leveled" versions of any text, from fully written, through something with a limited vocabulary, to simply audio and visual, which he assumes is the version the vast majority access. Written -- electronically, on pads much like today's tablets -- newspapers are quaint dinosaurs entirely subsidized by the State. Varley (although he seems himself to be a libertarian) does HAVE a State, unlike Stephenson's mini-entities. Varley's State is, however, run by a Central Computer that is functionally self-aware and smarter than humans are capable of being.

Okay, I digressed again. Nevertheless, I think my point is, overall... that maybe literacy for the majority IS something that is going to be transformed by our culture's increasing use of video for every purpose. You know, unless we reach a capitalist and ecological crisis that has us starkly facing "socialism or barbarism" and ending up with barbarism. In that case, I guess reading words written by hand on some facsimile of paper will again become a crucial skill. OR NOT (that latter option would be the conclusion drawn by one of my mother's favorite post-Apocalyptic novels -- yes, she loves that whole genre -- Earth Abides.