Eliot's Little Gidding

Yesterday was J. Alfred Prufrock Day, which is the way I think of the birthday of T.S. Eliot. I love that poem so much. Whenever I feel creaky, I say, "I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled ..." And whenever I buy a peach, I say, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" and then, "In a minute there is time, for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

The spouse just heard me saying, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" He says from the other room: "Go ahead, J. Prufrock."

But lately, I have been much more enamored of Little Gidding. The passage below seems incredibly important and touching.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Reading skills and the 24-hour Day Theory

My friend K., a teacher, posted a note about her students and their difficulties reading Jane Austen. She quipped that Austen appears to be the new Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is the new Chaucer. This really tickled me, because I'm always a sucker for "X is the new Y" formulations. (Brown is the new black. 50 is the new 40. Salsa is the new ketchup. Etc, etc.) Such a succinct way of conveying change in tastes!
It also encapsulates the perceived decline in reading among young people. A book I loved called Reading Matters had a very sophisticated analysis: The idea is that standards for literacy have dramatically increased over the last 100 years or so, so perceived declines are not always actual declines. In other words, our expectations for student reading are high, and remain so.
I have a theory though. I think literacy skills may be in actual decline because of the proliferation of electronic media, especially gaming. There are more different types of media to fill up a day. Yet the 24-hour duration of a day remains stubbornly static. So the time spent on sustained reading declines. That's my theory, anyway.

A good primer on international issues

I recently finished The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, by David E. Sanger. It was an excellent introduction to today's pressing foreign policy challenges: Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea and China. I feel much more comfortable reading daily news stories about these countries now that I've read a good overview of their historical situations and contexts.
In fact, I'm a bit amused by the fact that the book has "Obama," in the title, because the book's content is mostly about how the Bush administration (and to a lesser extent, other previous administrations) handled these areas for the past eight years. There's not much about Obama at all. But it is a clever way to spin older material forward.
In fact, the next time the Visa bill comes due, I'm going to tell the spouse, "That is not a bill for shoes. That is an investment in future opportunities for the display of fashionable feet."

Another crazy dispatch from the school reading front

In fairness, I wouldn't call letting kids pick their own books "crazy." Debatable, but not crazy. But this essay I ran across does seem to deserve the word. This system, called "Accelerated Reader," assigns point values to certain books. Kids rack up enough points, and they get a treat or a prize or whatever.
But look at the howling-sick points assignments, according to the New York Times story:

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by J.K. Rowling: 44 points
• Harry Pointer and the Deathly Hallows: 34 points
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: 32 points
• My Antonia, by Willa Cather: 14 points
• Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin: 13 points
• Hamlet, by Shakespeare: 7 points

I like Harry Potter, but I have a big problem with this points system. The latter three works are much more sophisticated and thematically challenging. That they would be worth fewer points strikes me as bad and wrong, ESPECIALLY when school kids are motivated to read the Potter books anyway. What is the world coming to? The essay author, thankfully, is appalled as well.