Literacy (social and otherwise)

Reading through essays by William Gass and John Updike this morning I discovered that both had dedicated their books to Robert Silvers. Who is Robert B. Silvers? The editor of New York Review Books, born in 1929, called an "obsessive perfectionist," with a New York Public Library lecture series named after him. Yes, he's a big deal, and I feel like I should apologize for not knowing it. Perhaps this is pushing me towards a tipping point of some kind.

As I made cinnamon rolls yesterday I listened to The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. I've heard a lot about him (sorry Robert Silvers!) and thought I might as well check it out. I admit the thing I remember most was the concept of "stickiness" (what makes something memorable and worth reflecting on) and the fact that I probably should have been more attentive to the "power of context" as I scrubbed out our storage room. I love the idea of a maven, an "information specialist" who shares knowledge for the love of people and for the love of the item (Gladwell uses the example of those who actually use the phone number listed on the back of boxes of soap. Those are people who really know soap!) Wesley may be a coupon maven for grocery stores and oil changes. Perhaps I am an essay maven. The goal of the book is to inspire people to create positive social epidemics. With the creators of Sesame Street, I dream of a literacy epidemic. How do you encourage people to read? How do you initate the desire to read? How is there so much we don't know? (Again, a nod to Robert Silvers...) I dream of story times and libraries and book groups as I always have, but as a writing teacher of college students, I'm really starting to think about this. Sometimes I wonder if my students know how to read directions. That's frustrated days. On normal days, I just want people to understand the joy that comes from learning and exploring language. According to William Gass, "the reader's freedom is a holy thing"; can such divine liberty be achieved without literacy? Also from Gass in On Finding a Form:
“I believe the artist’s fundamental loyalty must be to form, and his energy employed in the activity of making….a maker whose aim is to make something supremely worthwhile, to make something inherently valuable in itself” (Gass 35).

“In any event, and after many years of scribble and erasure, I came finally to the belief that sentences were containers of consciousness, that they were directly thought itself, which is one thing that goes on in consciousness, but they were other things as well, in more devious, indirect ways. Insofar as the words referred, they involved…our perceptions; thus a good sentence had to see and hear and smell and touch or taste whatever it was supposed to see and hear and smell and touch or taste; that acuity and accuracy of sensation was, in those sentences that invoked it, essential” (Gass 39).

So, my question is--how do individuals promote literacy? Is reading enough? Or does the term "literacy" imply meaning-making and literature? I don't think that everyone should memorize "The Wasteland" or resent Stephenie Meyer for her sentences that must be read fast rather than savored...but isn't there a balance somewhere?

If there are any literacy plans and/or ideas out there, please share.