Who reads Karl Marx these days?

A famous musician, who recently ended a relationship with one of the richest men in the world, was photographed reading a copy of the Communist Manifesto. A few hours later, following a flurry of media commentary, she announced that this was all a joke.

paparazzi followed me 2 a shoot so I tried 2 think what I could do that would yield the most onion-ish possible headline and it worked haha pic.twitter.com/9w8pPwIFAq

— Grimes 🪐 (@Grimezsz) October 3, 2021

I have no idea (and don't particularly care) whether it was always intended as a joke, or whether she improvised this explanation retrospectively in order to distance herself from some of the other possible interpretations of her action. What does interest me is the range of stories that people tell themselves about reading and literacy, based on her perceived actions.

Some stories are based on what we know about the musician and her relationship history. So perhaps this should be interpreted as a pointed message to her former partner and his extreme wealth.

Some people appear to believe that those who read the Communist Manifesto are necessarily committed to the redistribution of wealth and/or the overthrow of the capitalist system. So if she was reading the book properly, she must be planning (or at least considering) to redistribute any money she receives from her former partner. Or perhaps to throw herself into a struggle for a fairer society.

However, some people read socialist literature with exactly the opposite motivation - to understand and defuse potential threats to the capitalist system, and to refute socialist arguments. Geoff Shullenberger has drawn our attention to the perhaps surprising familiarity of right-wing figures (such as Andrew Breitbart and Peter Thiel) with the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) and with French postmodernism (Derrida, Foucault).

Or perhaps you don't need a pre-existing political motive to read Marx, simply a curiosity about the history of ideas, and a desire to be aware of one of the most important texts of its time.

Even if I take this photo at face value… someone thinks that it’s wrong to be literate? https://t.co/ycgarEAcZw

— Esther Schindler (@estherschindler) October 3, 2021

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Geoff Shullenberger, Theorycels in Trumpworld (Outsider Theory, 5 January 2021)

Bad Books

Why do bad books exist?

I suspect a lot of business books are full of fluff because the authors don't have enough experience or insight to actually fill a book

— Jason Yip (@jchyip) December 13, 2016

@jchyip Don't just blame the authors. The publishers act as if most of the readers are intellectually lazy. And they are often proved right.

— Richard Veryard (@richardveryard) December 14, 2016

A major publisher sent @statmodeling a stats textbook. What happened next will amuse you. https://t.co/kyyCQcKNvC pic.twitter.com/71tghkzhg3

— Ivan Oransky (@ivanoransky) December 8, 2016

Purpose of Reading 3

If you search for the "Purpose of Books" you will find dozens of websites repeating (with small variations) a quotation from Christopher Morley stating that the real purpose of books is to trap (or perhaps to inspire) the mind into doing its own thinking. I have also found some other quotes by Morley on books and reading. However, I have been unable to find the original source for the "purpose of books" quote.

Trap or inspire? Is one version of the quote incorrect, or did Morley himself produce two different versions of his aphorism? I rather like the uncertainty of having two alternative versions, because it makes me wonder about the curious equation "trap=inspire". Reminds me of the famous cat that might be either dead (trapped) or alive (inspired).

But there is still something perverse about the apparently endless repetition of Morley's once-meaningful quote, ripped from its context and pinned to the internet by countless Bouvards and Pécuchets. If the purpose of reading is to entrap and enchant the mind, surely the effect of this quotation is the exact opposite - to allow the dull mind to escape the effort of thinking.

Some writers of the past have been completely reduced to the fragmented rubble of quotations (I guess the greatest of these being Heraclitus). But much of Morley's work is still available to the modern reader, thanks to Project Gutenberg and Quotidiana. See for example his essay On Visiting Bookshops (1920). I was about to give you a quote from it, but I stopped myself in time. You'll just have to read the whole thing yourself.

The Purpose of Reading 2

Following my post on The Purpose of Reading, I got a comment from someone called Drum advertising a small (and no doubt worthy) booklet on "How to ENJOY READING ALOUD to young children". (His capital letters, not mine.)

When my children were younger, one of the most important factors in my own enjoyment (not that that mattered much in the scheme of things) was the choice of book. Some of the books they wanted to hear were absolutely dismal to read: heavy and badly-written prose with no natural rhythm or style. I don't want to name and shame here, but if you think Builders and Postmen you'll be on the right lines. Whereas some books were an absolute delight to read. I particularly liked Dr Seuss (especially the fish having hysterics in anapestic tetrameters), and when they were older they got some Just-So-Stories as well ("the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees").

But I still want to quibble with the way this "Bad-Dads-Don't-Read" agenda is being presented, because it is confusing about the true purpose of bedtime reading. If the purpose of (bedtime) reading is defined solely in terms of the educational benefit to children, this is not sufficient reason why it has to be the father who does the reading.

Let’s compare with cooking tea. It may well be a good thing for fathers to cook tea for their children sometimes; but this is not just because children need to eat, as there are many other ways of achieving this purpose. (Give them some money and send them round the lane for some chips. Or a kebab with salad, if you’re worried about nutrition.)

According to the research, more mothers than fathers read bedtime stories. I expect that more mothers than fathers cook tea and wash clothes too. We may agree that children need bedtime stories, but perhaps not quite as much or as urgently as they need food and clean clothes.

Many parents provide for the physical and mental and emotional needs of their children by earning money, which is used to purchase goods and services for their children, including take-away food and child-care. If the children need bedtime stories, there are plenty of pre-recorded tapes available. But I think it is sad if parents cannot at least sometimes manage to provide for the needs of their children more directly – by actually cooking the food and helping with the homework themselves. The reason for this is not instrumental (just because the children need to eat, or the children need to learn stuff) but deeply embedded in the nature of parenthood.

My sons possess some tapes of Stephen Fry reading the Harry Potter books. (These used to belong to my late grandmother, whose eyesight had failed. Reading to elderly relatives raises some of the same issues as reading to children.) Fry has a plummy voice, and can do a better range of accents than I can, but I still thought it was better if I read the books to my sons. (I regret that I was not able to read them to my grandmother as well.) Sometimes I even tried to make up some stories myself. (They weren’t very good, but that wasn’t the point.)

Cooking for your children, reading or making up bedtime stories, these are what some philosophers call “focal practices”: that means they have value in themselves, and are not just done as a means to some other end. But we must choose our own focal practices, rather than merely conform to external pressure. If a father chooses to spend the time with his children building castles, or singing songs about elephants, rather than reading stories about elephants and castles, isn’t that just as good?

The advocates of reading-to-children imply that there is something special about parents reading to children. And there is: but then lots of other things are special too.

And here’s a final note for fathers (and mothers). If you didn’t read to your children when they were young, make sure you read to your grandchildren. Or get them to read to you.

The Purpose of Reading?

Perhaps one purpose of reading is to think about what you read.

Dads 'don't read bedtime stories' according to a headline on the BBC News website, citing some research which suggested that "less than half of fathers regularly read bedtime stories to their children" [BBC News 10 April 2008].

Just humour me while I unpack how I read this story.

Firstly I felt guilty. I used to read to my children when they were younger, but nowadays they mostly read to themselves. So am I one of the "more than half" that don't "regularly" read bedtime stories? That's terrible.

Then I worked out the punctuation. The inverted commas indicate that the BBC is quoting from "research". (This could mean anything from casual survey to serious academic study.) Phew, at least it's not the BBC that's criticizing me, merely a bunch of "researchers".

Then I worked out the implied context. Thinking about it, I started to doubt whether many fathers read regularly to their grown-up children. So when it says "fathers" it presumably means "fathers of young children". Without this qualification, the statement seems pretty implausible. Maybe it's not me that they're talking about after all?

Finally I read the footnotes. There weren't any footnotes on the BBC website, so I went to the National Year of Reading website. Eventually I found a press release (9 April 2008) with a footnote to a YouGov survey.

"Note to editors. The National Year of Reading research was conducted by YouGov, who surveyed 2,207 parents of children aged 0-16 in March 2008. Parents of children aged older than ten were asked to respond about when they were younger."

The unnamed hack who copied this press release onto the BBC website either failed to read this footnote, or failed to appreciate its importance. So much for reading then. I wonder what (if anything) his or her parents used to read at bedtime.

Literacy

It was a sad day, in my view, when politicians decided reading and writing were not good enough for our children, and started to pour huge amounts of money into something called "literacy" instead.

We now discover that (at least in the UK) this money has been almost completely wasted. Levels of "literacy" are scarcely better than fifty years ago, and the putative rise in "standards" are an illusion based on faulty methodology. This according to independent researchers at the University of Cambridge.

Source: Primary Review via BBC News November 2nd 2007.

There are several possible reactions to this story, depending on your party affiliation.

• Denial. "There are lots of other studies that demonstrate just how important and valuable these literacy initiatives have been."

• Escalation. "We obviously haven't done enough. We need more money, more initiatives, more targets, more effective initiatives."

• Relief. "Given the vast increase in television and other distractions, we should be happy that literacy levels haven't deteriorated over the past fifty years."
  

Given the vast amounts of money that governments are capable of wasting on other useless or counter-productive initiatives, or bailing out reckless financiers, a mere five hundred million pounds hardly seems worth bothering about. What does that amount to anyway - one cheap paperback per child?

Update: further commentary from Mary Bousted of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, English 'losing out' to literacy (BBC News, 9th April 2009)


See also Michael Rosen, Who Owns Literacy? (Feb 2012)

Reading versus TV

In an article on MSN Encarta, Martha Brockenbough asks What Effect Reading Has On Our Minds, quoting from an article What Reading Does for the Mind (pdf) by Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich.

In some cases, the effects of reading can be directly compared with the effects of television. For example, when asked a simple yet significant general knowledge question - "are there more Jews or Moslems in the world" - 70% of US college students got the answer wrong.

"Cunningham found that the more TV participants watched, the more likely they were to get that question wrong. But the more they read, the more likely they were to get the answers right. General intellectual ability didn't matter here--the amount of reading vs. television consumption did."

What does this tell us about the social purpose of television?

In a post on Common Knowledge, Scott Adams asks another simple yet significant question - "how many people died in the second world war" - and receives some staggeringly incorrect answers.

Scott suggests a general knowledge test before allowing people to vote. Presumably it would be those who know too much (because they read too much) who should be disqualified.

[Update] In a lecture at the LSE in June 2003, American economist of education Alan Krueger describes the gulf between (middle-class) readers and (lower-class) TV viewers as the 'Harry Potter divide'. [Source: Guardian, July 2003]. Middle-class children spend the summer reading J.K Rowling, while their parents covet her success and try to write something magical themselves [Guardian May 2006].

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