LeVar Burton Was Not Wrong 🌈📚
May. 25th, 2025 06:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingFam, be careful with your time online.
https://greenjudy.tumblr.com/post/771760180357742592/weird-cultural-shift-detected
If reading longform, offline, makes you feel bored or anxious, be gentle and patient with yourself. Start with stories you remember well, reliable sources of well-being. But please know you will need to put some backbone into it in the long run.
I think we are going to need to rebuild our ability to think, to process experience. This will be an unsupported activity. In fact, most of the really powerful cultural forces are making it very hard for us to notice, feel, perceive, or think clearly.
I should probably reiterate that I’m not an “educator” as much as a “researcher,” and teaching isn’t really my job. Still, I do teach literature classes, and I do take teaching (somewhat) seriously. Because I’m a normal human being instead of an academic cultist, my classes are popular and generally filled with non-Humanities majors. Mostly I teach engineers, scientists, and the future venture capitalists of America (bless their hearts). I don’t think books and stories need to have any sort of “value” beyond simply enriching our human experience, but I often find myself in a position similar to that of a football coach where I have to motivate students to do work whose cost-benefit analysis may not seem straightforward.
I think the post I linked to above gets close to the heart of the matter of why it’s important to continue the study of reading at a college level. It’s not just a matter of developing empathy, critical thinking, and communication skills; it’s also about developing a practice of concentration. For me, as someone with ADHD and dyslexia, reading has always taken effort, and discipline is necessary. I think now, given that the majority of us have grown up with smartphones, everyone’s neurology has been rewired to make this sort of steady concentration more difficult than it needs to be. As someone with experience in how ADHD can absolutely fuck up your life, I can say with confidence that an inability to focus and concentrate – and the related inability to notice, perceive, and think clearly – is not healthy.
In addition, I’ve been reading various studies relating to Long Covid during the past three years, and I’m fairly certain that (a) we all have it to some degree, and (b) it has literally given us brain damage, and (c) social isolation and social media did not help. This is not our fault, and it sucks. The good news is that the damage is not irreversible.
I’m not saying that anyone needs to read, like, Finnegan’s Wake or Gravity’s Rainbow or House of Leaves or some mindfuck stupid shit like that. When I found myself having intense trouble reading back in 2021, I had to start over with idiotic early Stephen King novels. Also, pushing back against the stupidification of everything is not so much about the fetishization of dead-tree books as it is about relearning to be quiet and listen. Audiobooks are a good alternative for people on the ADHD-adjacent shades of the neurology color wheel, and they have the added benefit of being highly compatible with the process of touching grass – which is also a useful way to resist fascism by actively removing yourself from the noise machine.
My post-pandemic experiences in higher education have led me to believe that a lot of us are, in a very real way, at the point of Long Covid where being able to read a book from cover to cover has become a distinct and useful cognitive skill that can almost visibly put you a head above your peers in terms of performance. Literally: reading makes you smarter.
Anyway, I want to shout out to all the writers who are still using their own human minds to create books worth reading. I love you.
https://greenjudy.tumblr.com/post/771760180357742592/weird-cultural-shift-detected
If reading longform, offline, makes you feel bored or anxious, be gentle and patient with yourself. Start with stories you remember well, reliable sources of well-being. But please know you will need to put some backbone into it in the long run.
I think we are going to need to rebuild our ability to think, to process experience. This will be an unsupported activity. In fact, most of the really powerful cultural forces are making it very hard for us to notice, feel, perceive, or think clearly.
I should probably reiterate that I’m not an “educator” as much as a “researcher,” and teaching isn’t really my job. Still, I do teach literature classes, and I do take teaching (somewhat) seriously. Because I’m a normal human being instead of an academic cultist, my classes are popular and generally filled with non-Humanities majors. Mostly I teach engineers, scientists, and the future venture capitalists of America (bless their hearts). I don’t think books and stories need to have any sort of “value” beyond simply enriching our human experience, but I often find myself in a position similar to that of a football coach where I have to motivate students to do work whose cost-benefit analysis may not seem straightforward.
I think the post I linked to above gets close to the heart of the matter of why it’s important to continue the study of reading at a college level. It’s not just a matter of developing empathy, critical thinking, and communication skills; it’s also about developing a practice of concentration. For me, as someone with ADHD and dyslexia, reading has always taken effort, and discipline is necessary. I think now, given that the majority of us have grown up with smartphones, everyone’s neurology has been rewired to make this sort of steady concentration more difficult than it needs to be. As someone with experience in how ADHD can absolutely fuck up your life, I can say with confidence that an inability to focus and concentrate – and the related inability to notice, perceive, and think clearly – is not healthy.
In addition, I’ve been reading various studies relating to Long Covid during the past three years, and I’m fairly certain that (a) we all have it to some degree, and (b) it has literally given us brain damage, and (c) social isolation and social media did not help. This is not our fault, and it sucks. The good news is that the damage is not irreversible.
I’m not saying that anyone needs to read, like, Finnegan’s Wake or Gravity’s Rainbow or House of Leaves or some mindfuck stupid shit like that. When I found myself having intense trouble reading back in 2021, I had to start over with idiotic early Stephen King novels. Also, pushing back against the stupidification of everything is not so much about the fetishization of dead-tree books as it is about relearning to be quiet and listen. Audiobooks are a good alternative for people on the ADHD-adjacent shades of the neurology color wheel, and they have the added benefit of being highly compatible with the process of touching grass – which is also a useful way to resist fascism by actively removing yourself from the noise machine.
My post-pandemic experiences in higher education have led me to believe that a lot of us are, in a very real way, at the point of Long Covid where being able to read a book from cover to cover has become a distinct and useful cognitive skill that can almost visibly put you a head above your peers in terms of performance. Literally: reading makes you smarter.
Anyway, I want to shout out to all the writers who are still using their own human minds to create books worth reading. I love you.
