Interacting with Texts: Text of a Public Lecture
My question in this lecture: What do you do with a novel, or a play, or a movie,
or a story, or a poem—when you see one? That is, how do you
interact with texts?
1 Retellling (=summary=synopsis):
Mike Rose says: I couldn't
imagine a more crucial skill than summarizing; we can't manage information,
make crisp connections, or rebut arguments without it. The great syntheses and
refutations are built on it.
To summarize, I close
the book—repeat, close the book and--straight from my head to the keyboard--retell
what I’ve just heard. Points to
remember:
·
Focus on important aspects, not
trivia—separate wheat from chaff
·
Don’t say too much
· Don’t say too little
Let’s practice this for a second, looking at one thing you
have already read: Ben Carson, Do it
Better, pp. 45-53.
.
2. Interpretation=moral of story=point author
is trying to make.
Whether we realize it or not, we don’t tell stories to just
enjoy ourselves. We tell them to make a
point, to instruct, to enlighten, to champion a cause of some sort. Let’s illustrate this through a few examples:
·
3 Little Piggies
·
What is the moral, the point, that
Dr. Carson is making?
·
Sometimes it takes a tremendous
amount of reading skill to get the point.
In other words, sometimes the point is lost on almost ALL readers: Joke:
(now look at your text, p. 233-234)
3. Connecting to your own life
Whether you realize it or not, everything we read forever
changes us, if ever so slightly. It
changes our way of looking at the world, and it sometimes even changes the way
we react to it. That is why people write,
because they want to transform us.
If they are decent, they try to transform us because they think
this transformation is good for us.
If they are selfish, they try to transform us because they think this
transformation is good for them.
·
Let me give you one personal
example. The Car Mechanic’s Joke.
·
Now, can you connect Dr. Carson’s
essay to your own life? Did it change
your ideas about books? Would you have your kids watch less TV as a result of reading
his essay? Would you, or would you not,
seriously take Carson’s mother’s approach to rearing children? Does it his story help you boost your own
self-confidence (that is, help you feel that if Carson can do it, maybe you can too?)
4. Critical Thinking
But all this is chickenfeed, practically, compared to the most
important level of interacting with texts.
Whatever we see, or hear, or feel, or smell, or touch we must screen,
filter, safeguard against, analyze. Let’s
use a few examples:
First example: Commercials. They belong to the category of propaganda, of
language that is being used to take advantage of us, to swindle us, to cheat
us, to make us lose our critical faculties.
They appeal to the monkey part of our brain, not to the human part.
The underlying assumption of every commercial is that we are
dumb, that we can be swayed in whichever direction. Well, commercials work, which shows that, in
some ways at least, they are right and that we’re pretty stupid. And this is the first step to wisdom: Knowing that indeed
we’re not all that smart. Once we
know that our brains are imperfect, we can take precautions.
Tom Paine, the most courageous and idealistic founding
father, said: My
Mind is My Church. So, one
critical stance: avoid commercials. That is what I do. I know they are brain poison, so I avoid them
like the plague! For instance,
I listen to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (FM 89.9)—the only commercial-free
radio in Michigan I know of, and not to National Public Radio--which,
despite the name, has commercials galore. I
haven't had a TV set for the past 30 years. I protect the only church I have,
the best part of me, the only part of me that a chimpanzee doesn’t have.
Another tactic: THINK. What is important to you in a car? Environmental friendliness, reliability, durability, MPG, safety, cost. FORD studiously avoids talking about all that. Why: because their cars are not environmentally friendly, not reliable, not durable, not safe, use too much gasoline, and are too costly. Fix Or Repair Daily. Found On the Road Dead. These are not jokes! Ford assumes that we are too stupid to tell junk from quality, that we’re too smugly self-confident to seek independent expert advice. They wholeheartedly agree with Bertrand Russell that "there is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority." Prove them wrong! Think!
Second Example: The Punch & Judy Show (contemporary politics):
An election is no more than a
gratuitous Punch and Judy show, offered by the rulers to distract the attention
of the ruled--Aldous Huxley
If Huxley is right—your task:
Do not let them distract you.
Fact, 1% of Americans own half of America.
Fact: They like it
that way.
Fact: They want 60%
of America, if they can get it, then 70%, 80%, 90%, 99% . . ..
Fact: They own the
media.
Fact: Every item in
the news is meant to distract us from this unchristian, un-Buddhist, indecent state of affairs. They never tell us we could turn Detroit into
a paradise! They make us forget that it’s
a crime to have people sleep under a bridge in -10ºC; that it’s a crime to have
millions of hungry children in America and hundreds of millions the world over.
Fact: it’s always been like that: Tom Jefferson (1807): I really look
with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading
newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what
has been passing in the world in their time.
What can critical readers do?
a. Unplug, unsubscribe, disconnect. You’d be better off going to college, reading
books, fishing, standing on your head, smoking even (I mean this--if forced to
read the New York Times every day or smoke of pack of cigarettes every
day, I'd reluctantly smoke--better poison my lungs than my brain), than having anything to do with the media. But this is a tall order. If you don’t have what it takes to disconnect, the
second best remedy is
CRITICAL THINKING:
Let’s look at one such example: poor Howard Dean:
Fact: He doesn’t take money from BB
Fact: He wants to
shift income distribution: They get only
47%, we get 53%, while Bush wants: They
get 93%, we get 7%. So, the people who
control the media decided to play it safe.
They don’t want us to get another 3%.
Moreover, they make billions in Iraq, and Dean dares talking about stopping the
war? He wants to kill the golden goose
simply because every day a few POOR American kids get injured and killed over
there? What’s this nonsense of saying
that the lives of poor people count more than the profits of rich people? What are we, Christians? Buddhists? Are we crazy enough to believe that “those
who live by the sword shall perish by the sword?”
Do we really believe
that rich, greedy people cannot go to heaven? Do
we agree with Christ that you can either worship the almighty dollar or
the almighty God, but not both (these are
paraphrases of Jesus of Nazareth).
So the man Dean is dangerous. He cares about ordinary people like
us!!! They’ve got to get rid of
him. They tell themselves: The American people are not critical
thinkers, so we’ll hoodwink them, we’ll whisper nonsense in their ears, and
they will bray that nonsense as if it’s the gospel. We can’t of course talk about the issues, because
every imbecile could then see that Dean is better for us than Kerry and Bush. So what do the media barons do?
They make an issue of Dean’s wife, who is sane enough not to join the campaign trail--and dean slides!
They make an issue of a good-natured, exuberant “war cry”—as
if that has anything to do with anything—and Dean is dead in the waters!
And lo and behold, Dean is losing the race, and now we’ll face a farcical choice, between a man who voted for the fraudulent massacre in Iraq and a man who voted for the fraudulent massacre in Iraq, between a man who voted to transfer money from ordinary and future Americans to his billionaire backers (and who insulted our intelligence to boot by miscalling this transfer "tax cuts") and a man who voted to transfer money from ordinary and future Americans to his billionaire backers. And they call this a choice? And who cares if Tom Paine, Ben Franklin, and Martin Luther King are turning in their grave?
History, H.G. Wells said, is a race
between education and catastrophe.
He might have been right, and now we’re getting close to the wire. Educate yourself, not as if your life
depends on it, but because your life does depend on it. Educate your friends. Read books, not newspapers.
Talk to wise people.
Take a good critical thinking class. Filter everything. Chuck your TV. And, for Christ’s sake,
Think!