Entering Clothed Area

The importance of reading and writing

These days, there’s a lot of chatter around the fact that we’re descending into the chaos of a post-literate society. Phooey, I say. Rose Horowitch’s latest article in The Atlantic, “The End of Reading is Here,” may be irresistible clickbait to the bony fingers of the aged and erudite, but I say we’re barely out of the pre-literate phase of humanity.

We’re still trying to get the basics right.

Let’s admit it: reading doesn’t come easily. Even after working out the mechanics for 6,000 years, people like me have yet to fully comprehend the meaning of even the most rudimentary sentences. The sign above was a welcome sight when I finally saw it. That’s because I hadn’t seen its counterpart when I brought my children to a delightfully uncrowded beach on the Jersey Shore some years ago. Had I seen “Entering Nude Area” on the way in, I might have saved all of us some embarrassment. But I did not. Or if I did, I didn’t comprehend it, being the pre-literate that I am. Especially when thoroughly distracted.

(To be fair, the phrase “Entering Clothed Area” was clear as a bell. Kudos to the writer of that beauty. Gorgeous syntax. So pure, so honest — almost Hemingwayesque — I had to stop and take a photo.)

Horowitch has it all wrong. We read. The better part of our days are spent in the act of reading, and not in the luxurious sense, cuddled up with a book in some english major’s fantasy, but with urgency and exhaustion: we spend hours hunching over devices of every variety for work, we squint to decipher the small print on important documents or pill bottles or train schedules, we blearily attempt to comprehend columns and columns of bad news, and in New Jersey, we instantaneously ingest whole paragraphs of information on road signs in the hopes of making the right turn out of 75 possible wrong ones.

All of us read a lot, we read fast, and we’re expected to digest all of it accurately. And we all know how impossible it is to do any of those things well (says the person who regularly shows up to parties on the wrong day). To say we are post literate implies that we do all of that and have – at some point – read a book? Ha! And where would we even get one of those? At a bookstore? As if.

Somehow, in this post-literate age, there are still plenty of authors raking it in. Sure, Horowitch takes pot shots at Partypooper, Dog Man, and Onyx Storm, imagining a world where she might compare modern young adult and mass market fiction to good old Louis Pasternak, whoever the hell that is. I’d like to see that guy write a decent romantasy without using emojis. Good luck! Could it be that the oh-so literate publishing industry is only interested in cashing in on whatever people will buy, even as the returns diminish? Or are they truly interested in taking chances on new authors with literary ideas? I’m not sure the big five would recognize a Pasternak if he didn’t have comps with Colleen Hoover.

But if reading doesn’t come easily, writing is like an outward bound adventure inside the terrifying crevices of your own mind. I’ve been cracking away at writing for a long time and I have deep respect for anyone who writes anything. It’s a lonely place to be and few people understand the challenges.

For one thing, you constantly want to eat chips, and that’s a massive stumbling block – especially at 4pm every day. And there are constant distractions: air temperature, a sore toe, remembering things you forgot to put on your calendar, remembering people to chat with, funny memes, and the age-old difficulty of typing — especially with chip crumbs on your fingers.

When I’m writing for work, the goal is clear communication, hopefully with a little panache. When I’m writing for myself, the goal is to get the sh*t off my computer and in front of someone else. And those two things prove to be impossibly hard.

But for some writers, when it works it works. As evidenced by this stellar example of a piece of writing that does it all:

For the fellas out there, this anonymous genius is taking on an age-old conundrum: how to write a well-worded sign in the ladies room that doesn’t yield the wrong results. It’s harder than it looks! Ladies, notice the humor and grace, the clarity of the message, the respect! It puts other bathroom signs to shame (which usually read: “Don’t flush anything down the toilet,” which is clearly not the point of using a bathroom).

When I saw this sign at a roadside cafe on the way home from North Carolina, I felt sure we were on our way to not just literacy, but perhaps a new form of communication that incorporates delightful graphic design and helpful information systems. I hadn’t read Horowitch’s article yet (or heard her interviewed on 11 different podcasts or seen snippets of those interviews all over social media for days), but I thought to myself, “At last, we’ve finally achieved greatness as a species who cares about elevating basic communication.” I stood in awe of this masterwork, wondering what delights would follow.

And then I promptly peed in the garbage can.

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Thanks for reading, and helping me get this sh*t off my computer! It means the world. Let me know what it means to you! xox