feelings about reading
i have been slowly figuring out how to read again and although it’s been wonderful and something i recommend, there’s an uncomfortable knot of feelings inside of me about all the things that books can’t (and maybe shouldn’t?) be
a world already gone
recently i came across the poem Please Use AI by Shawn Smucker. it starts:
Be sure to use AI when making
your next, I don’t know, meal plan,
for example. Definitely do not call
your friend who loves to cook and ask her
for her favorite recipes or tips or ways
to save time making meals,
because you will end
up talking for longer than you had hoped,
hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer
diagnosis or how lonely she’s been or even
what she’s planted in her spring
garden and then lost with the early frost.
and while i do hate ai in specific (and the rest of the poem touches on those), there is a critique in this section that goes beyond ai, and into other technologies, including the internet, social media, and even books
i read the start of that poem and it describes a world that had already come for me. if i were struggling with meal planning, it wouldn’t cross my mind to go call someone up to talk, i’d go to the internet and maybe pick up a book suggestion
i don’t think i’m the only one. and something that sits with me uncomfortably is that i don’t know if i’m ready to reach out to people like that. some of it will be my own personal issues, and some will be those big structural things that will take more than just me to break down. for example, like how lack of time to socialise (among other factors) means that we feel pressure to not “waste” it by being vulnerable and sharing the darker parts of life
safety nets
i also came across the blog post Weeds tend not to grow where they can’t take root by Ali Alkatib. it got me thinking about these technologies as safety nets, there to inexactly plug holes that maybe shouldn’t exist
don’t get me wrong, there are orders of magnitude difference between recorded media and a weird statistical simulacrum. in a perfect world, we’d still value recorded media, if only because we all have finite time on this earth and it would otherwise be impossible to have that breadth of connection with all these people across the expanse of time and space. in that same perfect world, i would be much less sure about the value of a compressed approximation that sands down the edges into sludge
but! there are gaps plugged by books that i don’t think should only be plugged by books or other recorded media. art/stories/knowledge for/about the marginalised/oppressed are necessary and yet not sufficient. it is so crucial to find support in books, but why have we built the sort of world where significant support must be found through books and not the people/society around us? this sucks!
it can’t (and shouldn’t) do everything
i’m in the uk, and they’re trying to ban parts of the internet for younger people (and in doing so require ids from the rest of us). plenty of adults have responded with “well maybe they’ll read now!”. and, well, i don’t think the existence of books really makes up for losing the good things about the internet, nor does it seriously grapple with what is terrible
even if we put that aside for a second, and only think about the role books play in learning and education, it’s still just part of many. in paulo freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed in 1967, amongst other things, he talks about the “banking model of education” (a one-way deposit of knowledge from the teacher into the empty vessel of the student), and the importance of dialogue. looking at books through this lens, i can see that books alone can only cover part of the the process. a book can only relate its information one-way. it can’t respond to your questions (although sometimes it does feel like that when you go in for a reread). there’s some follow-up that needs to be done, to do something in the world, see what happens, and react to that
when when i think about what’s missing from my learning i am privileged enough to say that it’s not access to books or basic literacy or the means to improve my literacy beyond that. it’s things like access to mentors and community who care and have the time and resources to act
who was saying it was everything though?
i don’t think many people were saying that reading was going to be a panacea. often, it’s a bit more like in You Must Read At Least One Book To Ride by Nikhil Suresh. this particular iteration is geared a bit more towards the career software engineer, but touches on other things like learning to draw, playing the piano, and video games. the idea is that most people do not have knowledge, and learning the equivalent of One Good Book on a subject can go a long way. sure, a lot of it will be in the application of the knowledge, but getting in a good chunk of knowledge can still be a useful place to start. i forget that most of the “people should read!” takes are targeted towards (or perhaps just about?) people who don’t read and weren’t considering it…
morality and care
…rather than someone like me, who felt like a moral failure for struggling with reading, despite enjoying it and wanting to do it. it’s not the only thing i struggle with in this way. for those other things, i liked KC Davis’ How to Keep House While Drowning. it’s a book that is about “care tasks”, things like keeping the house clean and doing laundry, but i think parts can be applied more widely, including to reading. care tasks are functional moves me away from abstract ideas of good and bad (which can easily cause me to spiral) and towards a more grounded, embodied sense of why i want to do this. sometimes that still sucks, especially when you throw disabilities into the mix, because now i’ve got real, concrete things that i can lose when i’m not able to do it. but it’s way better than abstracted shame, because now i’m able to do things like find a different way to get there or come to terms with the loss
and seeing reading through the lens of it being a care task helps me understand why i find it so easy to slip into a guilt/shame spiral about it. reading can be a way of caring for myself and others; so if i don’t do it i won’t be caring (which is bad™)! except, well, it’s also not caring to be berating and shaming myself for struggling. guilt and shame can be useful and prosocial feelings when used to spark change, but when it starts preventing me from doing that, it’s no longer serving its purpose
individual and systemic
that’s not to say that it was just my misinterpretation that made me consider struggle as a moral failing. there’s loads of external and societal factors i could list here, as well as many other things that i don’t even know about that nevertheless shaped my world
i think one throughline in all of the things i’ve mentioned is my struggle between individual and systemic issues and solutions. while an individual action has a limited effect, you cannot create a systemic effect without the the actions of individuals. but also individually acting is very hard without some systemic support!
that’s not a new insight to me, at least in theory. the annoying part about learning is that you can “know” something theoretically, but to really understand i have to work through many different individual examples before i’ve really integrated it. which i suppose is kinda the same thing — i can’t build an big abstract understanding until i’ve understood a bunch of little pieces of it, but how much can i say that i understand the big abstract thing until i’ve understood all the little pieces?
doing it anyway
just now, Good habits spoiled by bad motivations by Kyle Labriola popped up in my RSS feed.
These days I’m starting to believe that it’s imperative that you do not tell yourself that starting a good habit in this vein is going to change the world.
And yet, you should still do the thing. Because it’s the right thing to do.
getting back into reading has been a big thing for me and yet it’s not so big that it can do all of — gestures vaguely — that. same with a lot of other things! and like a lot of things, i think both worth doing and also keeping in mind the limitations
okie byeee