July 24

     During this week's teaching workshop, throughout all our discussion of teaching writing, I couldn't help feeling--in some ways--that we are making much ado about nothing. Not that writing is nothing, or that illiteracy doesn't exist, but that all our heuristics, and theory, and pedagogy will come to nothing at all if students don't read. My belief, as a writer and avid reader myself, is that reading is the foundation of writing. All the rest of it, spelling, vocabulary, sentence structure, even the practice writing situations, work only in conjunction with what the student has learned from reading-- a lot of reading.
      Of course, I'm writing this just as the NEA has released those depressing statistics that spell out, quite clearly, that American adults are not reading. If the adults aren't reading, I fear children won't be far behind.
      We didn't really address reading in any meaningful way in the workshop, partly because of that unnatural split in the academy between English literature and English composition. Each side has planted a flag on its own territory, and the students are left to sort out the sense of it as best they can. How can Faulkner's writing--with his bizarre, woozy, yet dead-on awareness of audience and point of view-- not be addressed in a complete study of composition? How can a English literature class neglect to examine even one of Woolf's weirdly beautiful sentences to see how it affected those souls who struggled through the years between the wars?
       Students who read--and writing teachers who read--quickly come to the understanding that there are few, if any, hard and fast rules in the writing of English. It is as functional, and sometimes as lovely--if in the right hands--as clay. They learn how to manipulate  ideas and, if they're truly clever, audiences with words, punctuation, and structure whose sole purpose of existence is in the service of delivering ideas to an audience.
      Well, enough.
      Currently, I am reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, an absolutely compelling novel from the point of view of a 15-year-old boy with autism. He is brilliant (knows all the prime numbers to 7,057), fears the color yellow, and has been accused of killing a neighbor's dog. He hasn't, of course, but decides that he will find the murderer.
      There is nothing cute or sympathetic in this book. Haddon allows the character to present himself, and as an autistic child, Christopher does not seem to be capable of self-pity or cutsiness. Instead, he is entirely and oddly admirable as he is. A Spock of a child, he sees a shadow world the rest of us miss altogether, when he dissects common parlance (and how illogical it is) and examines personal idiosyncracies, not just in himself but in others who are less aware of themselves than he is of himself.
       Brilliant without yet falling into the clever trap (I'm only on page 50), it's one of the stand-out books that I've read this year.