Literacy

Literacy

As an English teacher, I care about books and quite frankly I am worried about their future. With everyone religiously following reality TV shows and upholding Stephanie Meyers as great literature, I sometimes wonder what will become of the marvelous magic of the written word. While my professors have given me all sorts of upsetting articles to read on the negative influences of text messaging I have been much more alarmed by some of the things I have witnessed with my own eyes.

A couple years ago my hometown vetoed a proposal to increase property taxes by $15/year that would fund the building of a new library (Don’t even get me started about what people will pay out for sports). Then, when my younger sister was applying to colleges she got recruitment materials from UVSC touting their brand new “120 square foot library” (perhaps they’ve upgraded now that they’re a university).  Still, I think the most disconcerting thing I have come across was South Ogden’s Library/Car Wash. What is the world coming to?

car_wash_library

One thought on “Literacy

  1. I think things are going to turn out all right… as long as all the classics are still around I’ll have my work cut out for me just to catch up. Besides, with 6 or 7 billion people in the world, someone has got to start writing something really great. I mean, probably most of the great literature out there right now has been written in the last 50 years and 99 percent of it has been written in the last 150 years. Really, that’s just a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. Maybe right now were just on a lull… or maybe the really great literature has just gotten a little harder to find since we have to find it through all the rubbish.

    I have a theory too- it seems like great art comes in waves or groups of people feeding off and building off of each other. (Arnold Freiburg and Normal Rockwell, Tolkein and Lewis etc..) I think now is the generation of film. I think most movies out there are really awful, but some of them are really beautiful and well written…

    too bad most of them are filled with filth.

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