A Work of Fiction
I have been spending a lot of time in the library. It's probably one of my favorite places in the world. If I go downtown, there are 8 floors of heaven. Including one just for A/V materials. Reasonably, I could go in, with nothing but my citizenship in the good city of Chicago, and come out with the Criterion Collection DVD of The Last Temptation of Christ, the cd soundtrack for the Buena Vista Social Club, a vinyl copy of the Stone's Exile on Main Street, and copy of Phillip Roth's new novel. Can you do that in Barnes and Noble? Not to mention all the other amenities of a billion-dollar, city-funded resource. So that's really fun for a vacation every now and then. But usually, I hang out in my local branch. Sort of the Jim's Pub to downtown's Taj Mahal. But it has it's finer points. The least of these being that it is a block from my house.
Now a library sounds like a depressing place to be. I know. But Nicole has gone to see her mother while we are sorting some things out. This whole thing with the delayed menstrual cycle has put quite a scare on us both.
Anyway, the library is not depressing. Granted there are a lot of seemly characters that hang out there. Primarily because it is a free place to go. Out of the cold. But I go there to write. And read. And post this blog. It's not good for man to be alone in his apartment. Plus, its easy to get tired to death of depicting the plight of human nature in my work, if I am not spending any substantial time 'being' in human nature. I have to give props to Thomas Mann for that one.
So today, as I am sitting in the corner of the Sulzer branch, out of the way, I hear a ruckus. A class of 10th graders from the Chicago Public School system. They are taking a field trip. A tour of the library. My library. And they are not quiet. Now, I could give you several incriminating anecdotes that show how inadequate the education of this band of 16 year olds actually is. But that would be the perception of one person, right? I will give you one example of an actual overheard portion of the tour. You tell me.
TEACHER: Now over here is where the fiction section is housed. A fiction book is a story that isn't real. It isn't true. Like The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. That is fiction. They are arranged in these rows here. Alphabetical. By the author's last name. Can anyone give me an example of another fiction?
I wanted to stop them right then and there. I wanted to raise my hand and say, "OOOHHHH, I KNOW! I KNOW! The Fox News Channel!" Oh to be 16 again and to know then what I know now. Seriously though, politics aside, am I to believe that a kid in the 10th grade, in the city of Chicago, does not know what the word fiction means? Shouldn't this tour have taken place like...10 years ago. My daughter was writing fiction by the time she was 8.
So if the killings in Minnesota spurred me to admonish you to aggressively love your children, this should encourage you to take your kids to the library every once and a while. Read them books. Fiction and otherwise. Teach them to read. Don't wait for the educators of the world to spoon-feed them their knowledge. And while this is no slight on American teachers (who I am sure are very intelligent and work very hard at what they do), at no time should your child's education be sloughed off as the sole responsibility of the state school system.
Now a library sounds like a depressing place to be. I know. But Nicole has gone to see her mother while we are sorting some things out. This whole thing with the delayed menstrual cycle has put quite a scare on us both.
Anyway, the library is not depressing. Granted there are a lot of seemly characters that hang out there. Primarily because it is a free place to go. Out of the cold. But I go there to write. And read. And post this blog. It's not good for man to be alone in his apartment. Plus, its easy to get tired to death of depicting the plight of human nature in my work, if I am not spending any substantial time 'being' in human nature. I have to give props to Thomas Mann for that one.
So today, as I am sitting in the corner of the Sulzer branch, out of the way, I hear a ruckus. A class of 10th graders from the Chicago Public School system. They are taking a field trip. A tour of the library. My library. And they are not quiet. Now, I could give you several incriminating anecdotes that show how inadequate the education of this band of 16 year olds actually is. But that would be the perception of one person, right? I will give you one example of an actual overheard portion of the tour. You tell me.
TEACHER: Now over here is where the fiction section is housed. A fiction book is a story that isn't real. It isn't true. Like The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. That is fiction. They are arranged in these rows here. Alphabetical. By the author's last name. Can anyone give me an example of another fiction?
I wanted to stop them right then and there. I wanted to raise my hand and say, "OOOHHHH, I KNOW! I KNOW! The Fox News Channel!" Oh to be 16 again and to know then what I know now. Seriously though, politics aside, am I to believe that a kid in the 10th grade, in the city of Chicago, does not know what the word fiction means? Shouldn't this tour have taken place like...10 years ago. My daughter was writing fiction by the time she was 8.
So if the killings in Minnesota spurred me to admonish you to aggressively love your children, this should encourage you to take your kids to the library every once and a while. Read them books. Fiction and otherwise. Teach them to read. Don't wait for the educators of the world to spoon-feed them their knowledge. And while this is no slight on American teachers (who I am sure are very intelligent and work very hard at what they do), at no time should your child's education be sloughed off as the sole responsibility of the state school system.
posted by The Passenger at 9:04 AM
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