There are more abbreviations and the grammar is much more alien to us than Shakespeare. But as with anything involving language it is just a matter of exposure and with time the rhythms and grammar begins to feel natural.
"I am increasingly convinced that the collapse of reading is one of the most profound social and cultural developments of modern times. For years surveys have shown that rates of reading have been falling precipitously since the advent of the smartphone. Now a report from the OECD finds that reading proficiency is falling around the world for the first time on record. Sarah O’Connor has written interestingly about the findings in the Financial Times..."
Another outstanding post. Enjoyed it immensely. Three disparate comments:
• I like the name change
• I think the phone isn’t the only driver for the decline in reading. I think Youtube is just as large an effect, “Videoizing” what could be written. It profoundly larger the TikTok and other social platforms; in the streaming video domain it stands on top in therms of size and growth. It has also replaced much of what's considered podcast going visual instead of aural
• What I don’t like about post applied to anything (I know it means “after” in this context) is that many people, especially amongst the educated, have a foundational belief that all things are progressing (meaning improving in context) in some manner and not reading anymore is hardly an improvement
I would agree. And apropos of the more educated and intelligent segment of the population, it can't be a coincidence that the most popular forms of history now are podcasts such as The Rest is History or The Great War/World War Two Youtube channels which all rely on an audio or video means of transferring knowledge.
Not, I would add this is necessarily a bad thing - but only if these sources are used as university lectures are, as a audial means to acquire the fundemental grounding in a topic and as a base from which to do the deeper mental work of reading a book. In reality a lot of people use it as a crutch and thus become trapped by the medium.
You and Ian Leslie are morphing into one (not a criticism. He's my favourite writer).
I like the name change! Because I'm a sad git I looked at the comments from your last post and see that I was 1 of only 3 people who prefer CC. Good to see you resisted the tyranny of the majority. RR was just a bit too broad and generic. CC is better but I don't think it matters hugely either way.
What I always want to know is how this has changed. Alan Bloom was complaining that no one read anymore in the 1960s. Were kids really reading so much more instead of playing outside and watching cartoons? I’m fully paid up to the idea that this is a problem, but the specifics don’t all seem in place. I struggle to believe that one THIRD of adults in the US read at the level of my daughter, for example.
I don't struggle with that at all. I come from an incredibly working class area in the UK and extrapolating my experiences there (and family/family friends) out to inner city and extreme rural America I could easily believe that a third of people are reading at a UK P6 level.
Depends what we mean by getting through life. Low income jobs (and while the poverty line in US is about 11%, even at 30% they will be on low incomes) don’t require much literacy to carry out. Engagement with the State can be incredibly difficult and usually involves a hefty power imbalance and deference to authority (represented by teachers, doctors etc).
For much of the more industrious part of the working class I think the advent of TV in the 60s had a very deleterious effect on the literacy of the population
But what is stranger now in the last few years is that the highly educated proportion of the population is now having vertiginous declines in reading ability.
You likely interact with people mostly from a middle class background I would assume? My mom works as a teacher in what you would call a ‘poor’ area and while all the students at the school can use a computer/smart phone very well, a substantial portion simply cannot read anything above 2nd/3rd grade comprehension.
Well, the zeitgeist was much different in the 1960s: Reading was still considered cool and intellectual; TV was still relatively new, it was pre-internet and smart phone, etc. Plus, the question would be: WHAT were these people in the 60s reading and what are the minority of readers left reading now. I think back then they read a lot more classics. Now it's much more myopic, ideological stuff that caters to a fraction-sized milieu of rich white Gen Z and Millennials that work and run publishing in New York. I am of course WAY overgeneralizing all of this. But you get my basic point.
I think there’s a big difference between what are literary publishers commissioning and what are people reading - most of the bookstores I visit have large classics sections, while the biggest contemporary books seem to be crime (for adult readers, YA and fiction in translation).
In fact, the key difference might not be that people read classics in the past, but that undergraduate level readers read ‘literature’ - my Dad had Brautigan, Hesse and Kerouac - his parents were factory workers and didn’t read fiction at all, nor did he study English Literature, but reading this stuff was part of the (counter) culture.
It’s also clear that reading skills do atrophy if not exercised - I’m aware how much longer it takes me to read a dense text compared to when I regularly did so as an Eng Lit student. When I read Chaucer a couple of years ago, it took a while to get into the rhythm of it, but once my brain adjusted it flew.
And this may sound tangential, but since the Covid lockdown, I started running for the first time in decades. Even now that l love going for a 10k run at the weekend, the first few minutes are still an act of willpower against the part of me that is going ‘this is a bit hard’. Ditto reading a book in the age of the smartphone - getting going is the hard part.
Or that was always the hard part, it’s we have vastly increased the level of possible distraction.
Also tv was very low budget and often just not that exciting back then, movies were not shown on tv (and even if they were they would have been hard to enjoy on such a small screen). I think most people probably read low brow (my relatives who were growing up then said they read lots of comic books, readers digest condensed novels, hardy boys, pulp fiction westerns, etc) but that seems healthier than reading nothing at all and just watching 5-20 second video clips nonstop
An excellent piece. I read 50 books this year, 17,000+ pages. For fun, too! The world has gone tragically mad with the abusage of smartphones. My family treat me as though I'm a true eccentric because I insist on communicating via long form email, snail mail and such, and that I try to discuss with them books and poems I've recently read whether they want to hear about them or not. We need more true communication otherwise we're lost.
I get the same reaction when I want to talk about a book or poem that they haven’t read. It’s like they tune me out or they’re completely oblivious. Very sad.
Indeed! Everything has become reduced to the bare minimum of effort. I also read broadsheet newspapers (actually made from paper), this is another of my eccentricities which they find strange. I like the fact that I'm holding something in my hands that I'm mentally engaged with which isn't my bloody smartphone.
All of this has been brewing up inside of me to the point where I have enough to write something about it!
I have always thought that newspapers ON PAPER were nicer because you can clip stuff out and keep them in a scrapbook. Maybe I’ll try to buy more of those!
That's also what I do, I clip out favourite articles! They're great to come across again after a long period of time. There are some fantastic Journalists out there who are truly worth reading and also some brilliant budding writers whom I love to come across by lucky chance while reading the newspaper. Spending a few dollars a couple of times a week keeps the printing people, the paper people, the delivery people, the newsagents etc. in a job and I believe it's a good thing. Moving everything (news, contact and such) to devices is regressive. Not all change is progress.
I still read Chaucer in my 4th hand Robinson edition, heavily annotated by former King's College London English students as well as by me. India paper too. It makes for focus and concentration if one is to understand. I find the Romaunt of the Rose tedious now, and only some of the Canterbury Tales worth re-reading but Troylus and Crysede just gets better ...read it and then Shakespeare's version of the timeless story to see how differently two geniuses of Eng Lit tackle it. There is nothing to rank them because they are not really comparable. Do BA Honours English students have to read Chaucer now ? Do they have to read bloody anything. But the loss is all theirs. The tragedy is that they will never know it.
No doubt the statistics are accurate, and smartphones have played their part, but I wonder how much impact streaming channels have had.
Firstly, there is always something to watch. Secondly, where we might once have had ‘important’ books (and films) to keep up with, we now have a seemingly bottomless well of ‘important’ TV programmes.
Is the eight-episode, seven-ish hour series absorbing the attention that would once have been given to books? That last hour before bed - crucial for the reading habit - lost in trying to keep up with police procedurals*?
Brilliant Hughes. He was such a towering figure, it is strange to find him underrated now. A funny chance that your chosen poem expresses so powerfully the anti-enlightenment mysticism that you (rightly) complain about in its political expression.
Another “great prophetic book on this subject [literacy]” is The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr. I can’t remember the subtitle, but something like, what the Internet is doing to our brains. I think it came out around 2014.
You said you’ve been reading about the Middle Ages lately so I have to recommend “the daughter of time” which was voted #1 by the crime writers guild of America in their 100 greatest crime novels of all time. I read it recently and think it truly deserved the honor.
One thing that I have noticed is a trend towards people littering their writing with an excruesence of emojis that seems to have replaced the traditional art of balance and emphasis that previously was used to portray tone and intent in written communications. Normally at the end of sentences or as part of a bullet-point list of ideas, with symbols for flags (when countries are referenced), items of food and drink or various bodily attitudes taking the place of traditional introductory sentences.
Indeed, at many more modern and fashionable companies I've noticed that the middle management layer is quite deliberately encouraged to communicate in this manner, as part of their 'communication training'.
You may be interested in my forthcoming Chaucer read-along on Substack, which will be dedicated to reading Chaucer for fun.
How accessible is it for someone who's never read anything in Middle English?
Try reading it aloud. Or, if there is a good audio book read in the original, get that. But I bet there isn't
I think if you have a well glossed edition, it’s no more difficult than Shakespeare.
There are more abbreviations and the grammar is much more alien to us than Shakespeare. But as with anything involving language it is just a matter of exposure and with time the rhythms and grammar begins to feel natural.
Already looking forward to the next one.
"I am increasingly convinced that the collapse of reading is one of the most profound social and cultural developments of modern times. For years surveys have shown that rates of reading have been falling precipitously since the advent of the smartphone. Now a report from the OECD finds that reading proficiency is falling around the world for the first time on record. Sarah O’Connor has written interestingly about the findings in the Financial Times..."
YEP. 100% right. And scary as hell.
Great article and the poem is very appealing. But I still prefer RR!!
Another outstanding post. Enjoyed it immensely. Three disparate comments:
• I like the name change
• I think the phone isn’t the only driver for the decline in reading. I think Youtube is just as large an effect, “Videoizing” what could be written. It profoundly larger the TikTok and other social platforms; in the streaming video domain it stands on top in therms of size and growth. It has also replaced much of what's considered podcast going visual instead of aural
• What I don’t like about post applied to anything (I know it means “after” in this context) is that many people, especially amongst the educated, have a foundational belief that all things are progressing (meaning improving in context) in some manner and not reading anymore is hardly an improvement
I would agree. And apropos of the more educated and intelligent segment of the population, it can't be a coincidence that the most popular forms of history now are podcasts such as The Rest is History or The Great War/World War Two Youtube channels which all rely on an audio or video means of transferring knowledge.
Not, I would add this is necessarily a bad thing - but only if these sources are used as university lectures are, as a audial means to acquire the fundemental grounding in a topic and as a base from which to do the deeper mental work of reading a book. In reality a lot of people use it as a crutch and thus become trapped by the medium.
I like your amplification and examples
You and Ian Leslie are morphing into one (not a criticism. He's my favourite writer).
I like the name change! Because I'm a sad git I looked at the comments from your last post and see that I was 1 of only 3 people who prefer CC. Good to see you resisted the tyranny of the majority. RR was just a bit too broad and generic. CC is better but I don't think it matters hugely either way.
What I always want to know is how this has changed. Alan Bloom was complaining that no one read anymore in the 1960s. Were kids really reading so much more instead of playing outside and watching cartoons? I’m fully paid up to the idea that this is a problem, but the specifics don’t all seem in place. I struggle to believe that one THIRD of adults in the US read at the level of my daughter, for example.
I don't struggle with that at all. I come from an incredibly working class area in the UK and extrapolating my experiences there (and family/family friends) out to inner city and extreme rural America I could easily believe that a third of people are reading at a UK P6 level.
Surely they struggle to get through life in a serious way
Depends what we mean by getting through life. Low income jobs (and while the poverty line in US is about 11%, even at 30% they will be on low incomes) don’t require much literacy to carry out. Engagement with the State can be incredibly difficult and usually involves a hefty power imbalance and deference to authority (represented by teachers, doctors etc).
For much of the more industrious part of the working class I think the advent of TV in the 60s had a very deleterious effect on the literacy of the population
But what is stranger now in the last few years is that the highly educated proportion of the population is now having vertiginous declines in reading ability.
You likely interact with people mostly from a middle class background I would assume? My mom works as a teacher in what you would call a ‘poor’ area and while all the students at the school can use a computer/smart phone very well, a substantial portion simply cannot read anything above 2nd/3rd grade comprehension.
oh this is sad
Well, the zeitgeist was much different in the 1960s: Reading was still considered cool and intellectual; TV was still relatively new, it was pre-internet and smart phone, etc. Plus, the question would be: WHAT were these people in the 60s reading and what are the minority of readers left reading now. I think back then they read a lot more classics. Now it's much more myopic, ideological stuff that caters to a fraction-sized milieu of rich white Gen Z and Millennials that work and run publishing in New York. I am of course WAY overgeneralizing all of this. But you get my basic point.
I think there’s a big difference between what are literary publishers commissioning and what are people reading - most of the bookstores I visit have large classics sections, while the biggest contemporary books seem to be crime (for adult readers, YA and fiction in translation).
In fact, the key difference might not be that people read classics in the past, but that undergraduate level readers read ‘literature’ - my Dad had Brautigan, Hesse and Kerouac - his parents were factory workers and didn’t read fiction at all, nor did he study English Literature, but reading this stuff was part of the (counter) culture.
It’s also clear that reading skills do atrophy if not exercised - I’m aware how much longer it takes me to read a dense text compared to when I regularly did so as an Eng Lit student. When I read Chaucer a couple of years ago, it took a while to get into the rhythm of it, but once my brain adjusted it flew.
And this may sound tangential, but since the Covid lockdown, I started running for the first time in decades. Even now that l love going for a 10k run at the weekend, the first few minutes are still an act of willpower against the part of me that is going ‘this is a bit hard’. Ditto reading a book in the age of the smartphone - getting going is the hard part.
Or that was always the hard part, it’s we have vastly increased the level of possible distraction.
Also tv was very low budget and often just not that exciting back then, movies were not shown on tv (and even if they were they would have been hard to enjoy on such a small screen). I think most people probably read low brow (my relatives who were growing up then said they read lots of comic books, readers digest condensed novels, hardy boys, pulp fiction westerns, etc) but that seems healthier than reading nothing at all and just watching 5-20 second video clips nonstop
An excellent piece. I read 50 books this year, 17,000+ pages. For fun, too! The world has gone tragically mad with the abusage of smartphones. My family treat me as though I'm a true eccentric because I insist on communicating via long form email, snail mail and such, and that I try to discuss with them books and poems I've recently read whether they want to hear about them or not. We need more true communication otherwise we're lost.
I get the same reaction when I want to talk about a book or poem that they haven’t read. It’s like they tune me out or they’re completely oblivious. Very sad.
Indeed! Everything has become reduced to the bare minimum of effort. I also read broadsheet newspapers (actually made from paper), this is another of my eccentricities which they find strange. I like the fact that I'm holding something in my hands that I'm mentally engaged with which isn't my bloody smartphone.
All of this has been brewing up inside of me to the point where I have enough to write something about it!
I'm glad I'm not alone 😁
I have always thought that newspapers ON PAPER were nicer because you can clip stuff out and keep them in a scrapbook. Maybe I’ll try to buy more of those!
That's also what I do, I clip out favourite articles! They're great to come across again after a long period of time. There are some fantastic Journalists out there who are truly worth reading and also some brilliant budding writers whom I love to come across by lucky chance while reading the newspaper. Spending a few dollars a couple of times a week keeps the printing people, the paper people, the delivery people, the newsagents etc. in a job and I believe it's a good thing. Moving everything (news, contact and such) to devices is regressive. Not all change is progress.
I still read Chaucer in my 4th hand Robinson edition, heavily annotated by former King's College London English students as well as by me. India paper too. It makes for focus and concentration if one is to understand. I find the Romaunt of the Rose tedious now, and only some of the Canterbury Tales worth re-reading but Troylus and Crysede just gets better ...read it and then Shakespeare's version of the timeless story to see how differently two geniuses of Eng Lit tackle it. There is nothing to rank them because they are not really comparable. Do BA Honours English students have to read Chaucer now ? Do they have to read bloody anything. But the loss is all theirs. The tragedy is that they will never know it.
No doubt the statistics are accurate, and smartphones have played their part, but I wonder how much impact streaming channels have had.
Firstly, there is always something to watch. Secondly, where we might once have had ‘important’ books (and films) to keep up with, we now have a seemingly bottomless well of ‘important’ TV programmes.
Is the eight-episode, seven-ish hour series absorbing the attention that would once have been given to books? That last hour before bed - crucial for the reading habit - lost in trying to keep up with police procedurals*?
* I love police procedurals.
Brilliant Hughes. He was such a towering figure, it is strange to find him underrated now. A funny chance that your chosen poem expresses so powerfully the anti-enlightenment mysticism that you (rightly) complain about in its political expression.
Oh, James.... Who taught you poetry at school? Harvest Moon by Ted Hughes is indeed a beautiful piece, but poems do not have 'paragraphs'!
Another “great prophetic book on this subject [literacy]” is The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr. I can’t remember the subtitle, but something like, what the Internet is doing to our brains. I think it came out around 2014.
You said you’ve been reading about the Middle Ages lately so I have to recommend “the daughter of time” which was voted #1 by the crime writers guild of America in their 100 greatest crime novels of all time. I read it recently and think it truly deserved the honor.
love it James :) I thought you may be interested in this :) https://theorymatters.substack.com/p/reading-as-a-warning-light
One thing that I have noticed is a trend towards people littering their writing with an excruesence of emojis that seems to have replaced the traditional art of balance and emphasis that previously was used to portray tone and intent in written communications. Normally at the end of sentences or as part of a bullet-point list of ideas, with symbols for flags (when countries are referenced), items of food and drink or various bodily attitudes taking the place of traditional introductory sentences.
Indeed, at many more modern and fashionable companies I've noticed that the middle management layer is quite deliberately encouraged to communicate in this manner, as part of their 'communication training'.