A SONG FOR READING

I’ve been thinking of two lines from books I love that have stayed with me for over three decades. The first is from James Joyce’s Ulysses:

There will never be another Bloom.

This is Molly Bloom talking about her idiosyncratic husband Leopold in the novel’s final ecstatic sections. A line that seems to sum up the novel’s vision of how utterly stupendously unique and irreplaceable we all are.

And then there’s that line from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon:

Nothing worse than a black man with keys.

Referring to Macon Dead’s obsession with his properties. Macon and his keys, symptomatic of the limits of capitalism as a liberation strategy for the African diaspora.

Over these last decades these aperçus have echoed in me, and helped me, and just thinking about them brings me back to those halcyon college days when I first read the novels and was undone by them.

The wild part?

Neither of these lines appear in the books. Or anything even close.

And it wasn’t until last year that I realized the fact — even though I’ve read Song of Solomon twice and Ulysses once since my college days. Why didn’t I notice sooner? Probably so caught up in the joy of reading these masterworks that the absence of my favorite lines sailed right over my head.

The realization brought me up short, had me scanning older editions thinking that maybe they’d been cut for some reason, but no fucking dice: these lines had never existed in any editions of the books.

I knew my memory had gaps (thanks, childhood trauma) but still — I almost never misquote books and it was a strange thing to misremember, much less invent, especially so forcefully. These lines felt real to me, deeply emotionally real — and also external to me. I was convinced that someone had delivered me these lines — if not Joyce or Morrison, then who?

For once my Rutgers diaries had the answer. See: I had read these books in class, with professors who had rocked my world, whose love of the material and brilliance had transformed my vision of what literature was. (Professor Abena Busia, I never thanked you enough.)

These were my professor’s lines, their utterances, which in my own liminal state of learning-becoming, in my own furor lectoris, I folded into the novels. And carried with me, confusing my professor’s insights and passions for the books themselves, because in the place within where these books resided, these two were, indeed, one.

2

At the beginning of the year the National Assessment of Educational Progress released its latest grim results — a continued decline in reading ability among US students.

The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills, according to NAEP, was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent.

Wasn’t just young people either. Adults showed a similar reading decline.

Every time these reports are released and reveal the precarious state of reading I always redouble my efforts to push reading and to remind others to do the same. Reading is in decline, and it’s up to us who love books to hold the line, to slow the lexic erosion. Hold out long enough for the page on this dystopic era to turn.

Some people don’t believe the page will ever turn — for some the age of the book is over, never to return — that may be, but I’m too much the Mets fan and too deep the child of the African diaspora to abandon hope.

So I stay pushing books, trying to convert reluctant / resistant / non-readers to the reading life. This past year, however, I’ve tweaked my approach because of the whole Ulysses – Song of Solomon confusion I just talked about. Before, I used to try to find the perfect book for the perfect reader, was all about immaculate curation, about Kwisatz Haderaching the whole thing. And sure, if I find the perfect book all the better, but lately I’m trying to remind myself that what really matters is not to offer up perfect books or worthy books, but to offer books that I’m truly enthusiastic about.

What I’m discovering is that our enthusiasm for a book will do more to inspire reading than the book itself.

It brings me back to advice my mentor Samuel R. Delany gave me in regard to teaching, and which the whole Ulysses / Song of Solomon weirdness confirms.

Your students may forget your name and even the class they took but they will never forget your enthusiasm for the material.

The way I never forgot Professor Abena Busia’s enthusiasm for Song of Solomon.

Whether we’re teachers or reading missionaries, our enthusiasm is everything. Our enthusiasm is the fulcrum that can move the world — or at least inspire someone to sit down, open a book, and read.

And in that reading they might discover, like Milkman discovered in Song of Solomon, like I discovered at Rugers, that if you surrender to the air, to the words, to the song, you could fly.