ALTER'S "THE PLEASURES OF READING IN AN IDEOLOGICAL AGE"

I figured I would skip the introduction because I am pressed for time. But after having delved into the first chapter, I can safely say that I will go back with some interest.

Alter begins at square one with an attempt at the definition of Literature, and especially what separates it from journalism, non-fiction. Alter writes that, "Literature, then, ...is not a fixed entity but a reflection in any society of the values of the ruling class, abetted by a learned or priestly elite" (1996, pg. 25).

He goes one step further, "The poems, plays, stories, and discursive texts of a culture may variously delight or stir its members, but they are admitted to the canon chiefly because of their consonance with the distribution of power in the society, their effectiveness in reassuring or training or lulling people so that they will better perform their given social rules" (1996, pg.26), and reduces a successful novelist to a stock broker or warden, an agent and emblem of the ruling class.

Alter even mentions the works of Terry Eagleton, a neo-Marxist from England, that says he would not mind if the works of Shakespeare were as valuable as graffiti on the street. Having had to make sense of Shakespeare as an English undergrad, I now possibly understand that the real reason(not barring the Bards supernatural skills of stealing well)I had to read the Bard was because all the writers I was going to study had read Shakespeare and if I wanted to understand other than topical readings of the text I was going to have read the Bard; it was really that simple.

I have fallen in love with his certain plays (Othello, The Tempest, the comedies) because I have tried to teach them and usually just end up having students instill in themselves these big translation factories where they read Shakespeare's text and translate it into their vernacular. But then I think, how much of translation, how we create correspondences with the material that we read or are assigned to read, goes on when a person reads Literature? How much are they translating what they read to make accentuate the entertainment of what they are reading?

Alter says that Literature changes over the years because we change over the years and because it is a reflection of who we are then it follows that it is organic because we are organic. But it does contain certain qualities, "One reason for the cohesiveness of literary tradition over a stretch of almost three thousand years is its powerful impulse of self-recapitualtion" (1996, pg. 27). In addition, "Writers repeatedly work under the influence of a founding (foundling?) model...they repeatedly return to origins, seeking to emulate, extend, transpose, or outdo some founder" (1996, pg. 27).

More importantly, we read Literature because it gives us pleasure, and one of those pleasures is the "nice interplay between the verbal aesthetic form and the complex meanings conveyed" (1996, pg. 28). Myself, I would have gone with, "Literature is cool because it's complicated and shit."

ROUGH DRAFT OF WEDDING VOWS

A_____, I promise to love and cherish you, to respect your times and your ways, to know when you just want me to listen, and when you are truly seeking my humble input.

I promise to brace myself for when you are having a particularly unfortunate day. I promise to feed you pellets of chocolate and/or money champagne, Flaming Hot Cheetos and similar sundry snacks like chopped-up cucumbers and ume sisho without the sisho.

I promise to be your barometer and interpreter of temperatures (or temperaments). I promise to be your jacket when you are cold, and your heating pad for when your feet icicle. And to understand that if you are the last to get in to bed, then by universal proprietary laws you must also switch off all lights and/or lamps; I promise to extend this last promise to programming the television to turn off automatically if I like to fall asleep to its static waterfall.

A_____, I promise to rub your butt until you fall asleep, or take your glasses off after you fall asleep to a Law and Order Marathon; I promise to lay in bed and snuggle without rolling my eyes or wishing that I was at the Y with the soccer mongrels. And I promise to be your envoy for late-nite sundries at the Duane Reade like contact solution, Niagara spray starch, and Theraflu.

Not only that, I promise to wake up and make you Jamaican, Blue-Hill coffee and bagels for the rest of your life, girl, even though you don't really eat in the morning and we only have Sanka(not valid on Saturdays or Sundays). I promise not to messiah myself out to you either, so I better stop making promises and tell you somethings that I will not do.

I will not let you get away with it, because you have my back as well and don't let me succumb to my selfishself. I will not push the subject if you say I don't want to talk about it, as long as you know that I will harangue you later. I will not not hate movie and television personalities that you find unappealing, like that bitch Jessica Alba.

I will however adore, implore, eyore, and kneel-floor to make you understand that I am no more the solitary man. I am now two, or greater than or equal to two. And this is my life and I choose to bumrush this tiny, philistine island of a world with you by my side, holding my hand, helping me vanquish the heathens, the despots, the tyros, and nefarious forces that would like to do us ill.

A_____, I will not rest; I will not stray from my mission. We will not blink from our course; the terrorists of love shall know our missile-guided wrath, and we will not need a coalition of allies because our love collateral will last at least until we take our last breaths.

OSVALDO CHIQUI AND THE PARAMETERS OF A PARAMOUR'S PILFERING APPETITE

You could not take a gypsy cab from Atlantic Ave to Ocean Parkway without having an Armor-Alled, Boysenberry Black, Town Car pull up with all types of warbling feedback and chirping from inside the car where an Osvaldo asks you, para adonde joven?

No, this Osvaldo is not a gypsy cab driver even though hands-down, pretty much all the Ecuadorians from Cuenca living in around Brooklyn from 2003 to now in 2008. This is Osvaldo Chiqui and he works at Los Magos in Sunset Park; he lives around the corner from Los Magos (a modest Spanish restaurant) and enjoys the abundant commerce that traverses this part of Brooklyn, so far from the centro.

Sure there are 'Ricans and Dominicans, but mostly it's Ecuadorians from Cuenca. I'm not sure what made it so easy for Ecuadorians, especially from Cuenca, to come and immigrate to this part of NYC, but it was as if Cuencans had been born with an internal homing beacon; because, somehow or other they all lived in and around this Brooklyn quadrant. And the industry that these little Incas had decided to bumrush was none other than the taxi and limousine racket. And what a racket they held.

Uncanny, indeed. The reason I know this is because when I lived on Ocean Parkway in 2003 and personally, informally interviewed every gypsy cab driver that I had the honor of employing; I have taken a personal interest in the casting of this very personal matter, and so you must go along with me if this story is to match up or connect in any meaningful way.

Every now and then the city becomes like a repository for special visas and permisos. And you could almost intuit the nationality of the person behind the counter or on the other side of the partition based on the industry. For example, presently in Harlem, if you walked into a bodega and found an Arab behind the counter, chances are they were from Yemen. This had become more pronounced since Department of Homeland Security devoured whole departments (like Immigration and Naturalization Service) whole from within the Mastodon Justice Department.

APPLEYARD'S "BECOMING A READER" & THE STAGES OF LECTOR COGNITION IN CONTEMPORARY COLLEGIATE YAWPERS

So our professor asked us to pair our reading of Manguel's "A History of Reading" (1996) to J.A. Appleyard's "Becoming a Reader" (1990). Both books deal with Reading as a behavior with a clearly defined history and evolving future. Manguel's book offers the reader more anecdotal morsels of historic, classical, and geeky flair, while the Appleyard book mostly talks about the research of important studies and modules on Reading and Literacy.
For example, in chapter 4, Appleyard gives the reader two different scenarios of two different students to illuminate the spectrum and range that can exist between two students that while literate have varying levels of literacy. Manguel's book widely cites Greek, Roman, and even African historical anecdotes like the fact that "In the tenth century, for instance, the Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, in order not to part with his collection of 117,000 volumes when travelling, had them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order" (Manguel, 1996, pg. 193).
So then, what thread of intersection exists between both books, if any? How do these books address each other, and to what extent is that conversation garrulous or reticent? I am drawn to chapter four of Appleyard's book because I feel that a great deal of what will concern my class resides in chapter four: college and beyond: reader as interpreter. It is in this chapter that Appleyard discloses her scale or ladder of cogent interpretation. The first stage is a complete abnegation of the text, as if it were completely transparent; this is usually as far as the high school reader will get because the farthest high school schema pushes for is a duality of perception where values are either good or bad, subjective or objective, moral or immoral.
This is right before the idea of the author becomes unmoored and goes through a deconsruction sieve, "This decentering leads next to a parallel deconstructing of the idea of the author, so that the reader learns to look directly at the text itself as an object containing the full evidence about its meaning...the realization that the text is constructed not only by the writer but also by the reader and by all the codes and cultural contexts they both depend on" (Appleyard, 1990, pg. 129-130) And the majority of Appleyard's theoretical ruminations are based on William Perry's observation of Harvard undergraduates in 1970. According to Appleyard, "In Perry's view, the principal developmental task of students is to come to terms with the multiplicity of truths and values that college presents to them" (Appleyard, 1990,pg. 130). Multiplicity seems to be at the core of Manguel's book so that it seems that Manguel wrote his "A Reading..." (1996) shortly after consulting Appleyard's,"Becoming a Reader" (1990).
In Manguel's chapter, "Reading the Future" there is a directed effort at explaining the history and function of sybils and "gospel cleromancy" (1990, pg.209). Gospel cleromancy was a form of divination wherein a person would open the Bible to a passage, at random, and attempt a correspondence or "reading" between that passage and the events of people's lives. This behavior had become so predominate that in 829 the "Council of Paris had to condemn it officially."(1990, pg. 209). In other words, Manguel's text is expounded in broad, historical swaths using the "multiplicity of truths"(1990, pg. 130) approach where examples may stretch hundreds if not thousands of years of reading evolution, "By the midsixteenth century, a reader would have been able to choose from well over eight million printed books, 'more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in AD 330'"(1996, pg. 138).
There is also the idea that in the digital world, every screen is controlled by the side button or the scroll button; before the codex there existed scrolls, which were rolled up papyrus organized by subject or title. So in effect, two thousands years later, the person who reads must still "scroll" toward the knowledge contained in information halls. I guess an interesting question would be whether a codex or a hyperlink is the more advanced version of advancing from not known to known and ingested. This idea makes me excited mostly because it also relates to fiction with the work of Julio Cortazar who wrote, if I am not mistaken, the first hypertext novel, "Hopscotch" (1963).

BEING READ TO, CIGAR MAKERS, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE LECTOR

So we are still discussing Manguel's A History of Reading in my class. I have been assigned a particular question dealing with this book; the question is simple: how does Manguel describe the process of being read to? how did this evolve historically?

The first thing that I would like to discuss is Saturnino Martinez, a cigar-maker and poet that first published a newspaper for workers that made cigars. His newspaper was called La Aurora and it survived close to five years (1865-1870). In 1866 the governor of Cuba published an edict that severly penalized writers who were caught distracting the workers of tobacco shops with the reading of books. In less than five years, Saturnino had managed not only to catch the attention of the Cuban (read Spanish) government but had also managed to severly malign himself within the county as a subversive entity. Now, that is the kind of history that I like to know and that I find particularly useful to know. Especially in this country where reading is such a passive and sedentary behavior.

This behavior was eventually transferred to Key West and American cigar-makers (who were probably predominantly Cuban) were read to while they manufactured cigars. The interesting thing is that these lectors were payed by the actual cigar makers and not the administration of the cigar factories; it is almost as if the cigar makers were fully aware of the entertainment and instruction of being read to. Before that, way before that you had the Benedictine monks that decreed in Article 38 of their code that reading would be an essential part of their daily life. I skipped a swath of this chapter because it kind of drags but I will catch up on the lives of joglars, troubadors, and the like which populated the Middle Ages and were a vibrant part of society.