Spending my life reading

 1. At some point between my 11th and 13th years on this planet, a global equator of sorts was passed: globally, the population that was literate passed the 50 percent point. This was one of the great events of the 1960s, although at the time it was not celebrated with jubilees and fireworks. Rather it was simply a plodding little point on a graph.

Still, this was the Enlightenment in action. Even as, in the sixties, what literacy meant – what distinguished the oral from the textual – became a much more philosophically ambiguous matter, the certainties of the classroom locked into place writing systems and reading for boys and girls. The latter is especially noteworthy. I am taking this statistic from Unesco, which made retrospective estimates of literacy in this narrow sense going back to the 1820s, when 20 percent of the world was literate. As we know from studies made of literacy by various French historians like Roger Chartier, literacy was not the doublehanded writing and reading instrument we assume it be back in the day: for instance, in France, teaching girls to read was not complemented with teaching them to write: just as one can have piano practice and learn to read a score without necessarily learning to write a score.

My son has learned in his history class in middle school that there was something called the industrial “revolution”, but his textbooks don’t mention the equally important media revolution. The two are bound together – I take it as a world historical event that on November 29, 1814, the Times of London installed a Koenig press, which attached steam power to to the old manually driven iron printing press, with the result that it could print 1,100 one sided sheets per hour. If ever we want to celebrate a Modernization day, November 29th would be a good pick. It was the steam driven printing press that drove literacy.

2. Which is my queer introduction to praising Simon During’s recent Face Book post, which gave us a variation from the old “what books would you take to be marooned with on an island” motif.

“So, in response to the 100 best novels nonsense we are doing a “ten novels I’d like to reread one more time in the last year of my life” list.”

I am not so much a lister, but I am a reader. And I am fascinated by reading media – and by media tout court. To me, this joining of reading and mortality flashes a light on the context of reading within a species that is now largely trained, from a young age, to see lines and curves and dots and translate them into words and sentences and paragraphs. And for some who spends a lot of time, in fact the majority of the working day, looking at these lines and curves and dots (formerly on paper, and now of this background lit … thing we call a screen), mortality is not measured out with coffee spoons, but with this eye-to-shapes activity, which is enfolded in the other ongoing activity: breathing, heartbeat, blinking, and as we get older whatever ache is chasing another in hands, feet, arms, neck, head, et fucking cetera.

The list, restored to mortal time, takes on an urgency which in some ways disguises the real question here, the question that all literacy invites us to take up: how do we spend our life times? Spend, here, should take on a lot of weight. Etymologically, from the old Germanic forspendan, use up, and from the Latin, expendare, pay out – to consume. An existential consumption, the consumer consuming itself. Use, here, plunges us back to the Hobbesian root of utilitarianism: a war against the elements, a war in which the self becomes a kind of front, autogenerates, a biology primed for picking up signs on the way to eating, excreting, copulating, reproducing, and dying. In the parenthesis of the latter, in that final year – which of course is very hard to predict, in contrast to the familiar movie/tv scenario in our heads where the doctor announces the bad news (cancer, usually) of the one year left – we have books. Novels, for Simon D. We are out of the classroom for good, here – that sponsor of our first reading and for many people, surprisingly many people, the only context in which reading the “great books” happens.

3. The recourse to the Enlightenment program of literacy, which all the 19th century European savants (and their pendant correspondents in North America) noticed, was a kind of scriptural anxiety. For the steam engine driven press had the potential to print anything, against the readers pence. From porn to shockers. The question was, and the question still is, how to fit this reading life (or listening or viewing life, given the audio-visual technology) with the hard fact that the users all die. I find this a terrifying as well as fascinating topic: reading accumulates to what end?

Not that I have an answer