Accumulating Literacy

May and Randolph and their literacy stories make me want to investigate, sort of drudge up my own literacy story, if I can, out of memory.

When I think of how I learned to read and write, I most often, recently, automatically think of Sesame Street. I think part of that is living with a two-year old, and being reminded of Sesame Street's influence on me. I know the doctors recommend no screen time for kids under two, but in this house, screen time is inevitable. So, I try to at least switch the tube from Calliou to Big Bird if she's even paying attention to the screen, which more than I am proud to admit, she really is.

Okay, me and Sesame Street. I loved watching Sesame Street. I was born in 1977, so I guess The Children's Television Workshop was pretty well-established at the time, and Mr. Roper was alive and kicking. I have this vague remembrance of success in watching Sesame Street and being able to answer literacy questions fast. I don't think we watched a lot of television at daycare in my earliest years, so I think there was less a competitive drive than a mastery drive going on. I can imagine that my mother would heap praise on me if I showed off mastery of the literacy tests administered by Gordon, Ernie, and company. I'm sure my mother read to me and read with me at a very early age, but I can't recall much of those moments. Maybe she taught me to read before I could remember. My father also read to me when I was very small, but I only saw him when he got his visitation weekends or summers. One of the last gifts I gave him was a copy of Going After Carpachiatto, or whatever that Tim O'Brien book is. He used to read me The Hobbit, but I remember how into the story he got and how much fun we had more than the language of the story. My dad would always use fun voices and get really dramatic, and I remember how he would explain things if he thought I might not understand them. (He continued to explain things like that to me past my twenties.) Another early bit of stuff my dad got me into was Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Martian Chronicles. He read me the first couple of books when I was maybe first or second grade, and I read them for myself later in junior high school.

As I moved into grade school, I think literacy remained a mastery drive for me. I wanted to have a sense of control over material I had to read. But there also entered the aspect of being in public to literacy. I can't point out exactly where my motivation changed from mastery to competition, but it was likely between the 1st and 3rd grades. I moved from enjoying praise from a teacher to enjoying beating out my classmates for either highest praise or highest level of mastery of literacy. I can see this now as a social aspect to my desire to attain literacy. And it wasn't limited to language, but spread to all school subjects. I think it was rooted in language, though, because the subjects were all taught in the same language, right?

Thinking of Randolph's grandfather made me think of a time when my own grandfather, my mom's dad, set sort of a literacy precedent. I remember being a kid on Christmas Eve at my grandparents' and wanting to open presents and play with my cousins. My grandpa would shush us up, gather us all around him, and read the Christmas story from the Bible. He didn't read "The Night Before Christmas." He read the King James version of the shepherds and the angels and Nazareth.

May's time in the service and his story of listening to the officers reminded me of working at the Greek restaurant I worked at for five years. There were so many levels of literacy going on in that place. The owners were both Greek immigrants: Soula, the wife, spoke English pretty well, having had to teach her three sons English while she brought them up in America; and Bill, the husband, who enjoyed reading Greek newspapers and seemed to be most at ease talking with Greek friends who came by the restaurant. I remember a time when Bill was trying to take a break from going to the casinos, and he decided to take English lessons. He hired some local teacher who came into the restaurant a lot, and I think she came in to give him some lessons after lunch shifts. I remember him sitting in the back, looking over some workbook. He looked at me and said something like, "I am trying to learn to read English. I read Greek real good, my language." I can imagine Bill feeling resistant to the schooling he was facing, something like what an illiterate adult might feel, although Bill spoke two languages fluently and was a self-made millionaire immigrant and boss of dozens of varying employees of different ages who could probably all read English better than he could. Someone interested in literacy also might be interested in the three kids of my two bosses. They all speak Greek and English. They can read and write Greek, too, I think. They must be some kind of literate in Greek, because they all served a year in the Greek army.
What got me thinking about my time working at that place, though, was thinking of how one of my coworkers was a high school dropout with a different kind of literacy than us college kids who worked there. Sometimes there was maybe some codeswitching going on with us and him, like it might take longer to tell him a story. But then again, he knew buttloads more about fixing cars than I probably ever will. Like I used to say at the restaurant, "It's all Greek to me."

http://www.madisonthecity.com/Chamber/southernliving.htm

Performing Writing, Performing Literaricity

Part Two


It was lovely to read what Beth McGregor had to say about Acting as a Writer. It's like somebody gave a name to what I do sometimes. And now that it has a name, I can call upon it as a tool in my times of need.

One time, back in the good old community college days, I had to write a short paper for an English Lit class. We had the option of either writing a biographical report or writing a fictional interview-type creative thing that included one of a list of literary figures. I chose to write a fictional account of an interview with Keats. How I wrote the thing is the interesting and apropos part. I was out with some friends at one of our older friends' apartment. I knew I had to get this thing written and turned in in maybe two days, so I had my Norton and my notebook and was planning to write it while my friends partied all around me. I never stayed at home nights in community college. After reading the Keats biographical stuff like three times, I found myself narrating out loud in a foppish, learned British accent. My friends played along, laughing and drinking and probably other things besides, and before I knew it, I had British-accent-narrated my way through the project. The final product was not that great, information wise, but it had so much style to it that it didn't matter if it were read with an accent or not. Like Beth, I had act-written my way through a literary project. (Best quote from the paper, Keats's saying "I like horses, but I can't stand surgery.")

It comes back to this idea of persona. Writing fiction gives me lots of practice in developing personae, and finding ways to understand a character that is outside myself, yet produced out of pieces of myself. For illustration I will now change the subject to music.

I was thinking about my alter-ego, my musician stage name personality, Dusty Pyramid. When I write songs, or pretty much just improvise songs for a tape recorder, which is less and less these days but still happens sometimes, I play, sing, and perform as Dusty. This acting as writing is very similar to what McGregor means. It gives me freedom to create and compose in a way that being Jordan just won't allow. Dusty doesn't have to worry about Jordan's problems or concerns, he just gets the compressed diamond of whatever I need to say onto the tape (in place of the page).
I thought about precursors, and I thought about Garth Brooks having to create Chris Gains as an outlet for the pop/R&B persona he never got the chance to use while he was becoming one of the best selling (read:pigeonholed country) recording artists of all time. I thought about how it goes beyond ego or any Freudian terminology, and it gets into what this reading means about audience and what that audience expects from a performer. Garth knew his audience wouldn't stomach a pop album that sounded like Simply Red's outtakes, but he figured out that Chris Gains wouldn't care what Garth's audience expected, Chris would just go and do his own thing.
I also thought about David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust, about Elton John, about Elton John and the whole Captain and the Kid thing which just laid it all out there in explanation for the faithful fans. I thought about the first song the Rolling Stones ever wrote, when their producer (I think) forced Mick and Keith to write an original song. What they came up with, the gem of insight and debate the philosophical connotations of which I wrestle with on a monthly basis are said all within the title: "The Singer Not The Song." According to a young Mick Jagger, "It's the singer, not the song."

Maybe eventually it is, but the song has to make folks dance, has to get kids buying records, get patrons buying libations, before the singer even gets remembered. At least that's how it was before American Idol. Davey Archuleta could never have packed Hal & Mal's. Never before the Idol. (I wouldn't recommend that Davey try to book the Hal & Mal's just yet, either, for his own safety.) But hey, contexts evolve, and we can still find artists our daughters aren't into yet. Flip that onto the creative writing front, consider ourselves fifty years old, and things get really interesting. Pan back a bit, and we're discussing composition theory.

Performing Writing, Performing Literaricity

Part One


First, let me jump into using some of the idea of performing writing and performing literacy as happened just lately in my classroom.
Friday, we were discussing one of the assigned readings, having just rejoined as a class from small groups wherein students had been discussing the reading and their reading logs. One of the readings was familiar in form and context to one of the students, and she pretty much gave an impromptu lesson on what a lab report is. I said, oh so you're familiar with the lab report? I've read some in the Writing Center, but I can't remember the last time I would have written one. Yep, she says, I have to read them all the time. I said something like would you share with the class, since it looks like you might be the biggest expert on lab reports in the class. She began by saying yes this is obviously a lab report, and I know because I have to read them all the time. After she gave a brief definition, she went through the reading, making comments at each heading and explaining how this is how people write lab reports and this here is what is usually to be found, although this piece here was a bit different and maybe because of the subject matter, but basically I'm used to reading these and know what to expect, and that's why this is here and that's there, and that's why they gave background information like this, and here's where they will usually do something like Oh exactly that's what they did here. And basically that's why I found this so boring, because it's really so predictable, but I don't find the study boring, or what they're studying; that's interesting to me, but I can understand why so many people in here wouldn't like reading this. She gave this performance so fluidly, so off-the-cuff, that at the end of her spiel, the entire class applauded.
It was not just her display of knowledge, I think, that impressed everyone (myself included). It was also her performance, the way she was so confident in explaining such a specific mode of writing. The lab report is probably a foreign type of thing to half the class (save the nursing students), but she explained it in a way that students could easily understand. And I believe that even if some of the students couldn't keep up with every little thing she was saying, they applauded anyway just based on how forceful and striking her performance was.

This is one of my most outspoken and discussion-contributing students, so I wasn't so surprised that she knew her stuff, or that she would volunteer to explain something for the class. I was a bit surprised at how impromptu and professional her performance was. Maybe she was mad because I busted her text-messaging in class and called her out on it earlier that day. Maybe that fired her up.