Poet Laureate Billy Collins ’63 is cheerfully contrarian regarding the “chicken-little, alarmist, attention-getting proclamation” of the demise of reading.
“I live in New York and people do nothing else but read, at least the people I know,” he says. “The usual case that’s made is that television kills readership, but it turns out in other surveys that there is another group of people who watch a lot of TV but who do a lot reading, too. To them, it’s all information. One medium doesn’t preclude the other for a lot of people.”
Collins is more than comfortable with the technology of the information explosion of recent decades, including the Internet. Indeed, the site Billy Collins Action Poetry (http://www.bcactionpoet.org) features a selection of his poems animated by a variety of artists.
As for the much-lamented lack of literacy encouraged by e-mail, you can blame Collins for at least part of it.
“I have no respect for e-mail,” he says. “When I e-mail, I don’t capitalize and so on. The medium itself encourages one to ignore the usual syntactical and grammatical etiquette. It’s based on efficiency, and lowercase lettering and no punctuation at least gives the illusion you’re being speedy about it.”
For Collins, the future of the book is a long one.
“I’m not too worried,” he says. “The novel has been dying since the ’60s. We’ve heard about the death of history, the death of irony after 9/11, and so on, and most of these things don’t ever die. I don’t think the book will ever die—or not soon anyway. Everything we say about it is true: its portability, the fact that you can reread it, stick it in pocket, write notes in margin. Some of these things may be done electronically, but it doesn’t have the same feel.”
He is similarly unimpressed by the prediction that losing reading skills puts us in danger of losing syntax itself.
“It’s time we got rid of syntax, anyway,” he says. “The hell with it.”
Edward Jones ’72, Pultizer Prize-winning author of The Known World, is more pessimistic about the state of reading in America.
“People in America haven’t been readers for a long time,” he says, “and when they do read, they read diet books and books written by people who have never written books—people like models. There are lots of books being published, but a lot of them won’t be around in 100 years.”
Jones is no cultural snob. His own reading life began at the age of 7 or 8 with comic books, starting in the 1950s with D.C. Comics and, in the 1960s, with Marvel Comics, whose heroes he found “more human.” He was introduced to Dickens at Holy Cross in a 19th- century literature course taught by Maurice Géracht.
Jones calls himself a traditionalist in writing, disliking the love of abbreviation that, for example, turns your into ur. And he feels that students today seem less able to handle a demanding reading schedule.
“Ten years ago I returned to Holy Cross and talked to a professor who used to teach a course that required students to read a book a week,” he recalls. “I asked if he still taught the course, and he said the students can’t handle it. Have their brains shrunk? No, but I wonder if they’re not tasked enough. You’re told to read this in a week, and you make time.”
Timothy Austin, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college, is skeptical about the death of reading.
“My Ph.D. is in lingustics, so when I hear these assertions, my linguistic brain kicks in,” he says. “You can trace back centuries people who said language is going to the dogs, and that certain syntactic connections are being lost because we don’t study Latin or Greek. Century after century we’ve heard lamentations over the death of something or other due to something dropping out of the educational world. I think there will always be people who will raise red flags, but there’s not a lot of evidence. Language changes incredibly slowly, and not very much in response to external pressures. Particularly the syntax is very resistant to rapid change. I’m not worried about losses to language.”
The Joy of Reading, continued>>>
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17 Suggestions - Faculty, students and administrators offer their recommendations for a summer of reading
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