Death of the Sentence

Is the sentence dead? Can Johnny learn to spell? Or is it "too" spell? Sigh.

I can still write sentences. Subject. Verb. Whoops, maybe it's not as easy as I thought.

The New York Times is trying to scare us. The problem is, they don't go far enough. According to the Times, kids can't write sentences well any more, in part because they don't write them often; instead they write text messages and grammatically disgusting items in their MySpace profile and their IM conversations. Be that as it may, the problem isn't just teens. I know many adults who are God awful writers. What's worse, many of them don't realize it because they don't know what it means to read either.

Sure, they can tumble over the collections of consonants and vowels and grunt or utter seemingly coherent thoughts, and they can recite the words that appear on the screen before them. Just don't ask them what it means.

According to this article, in Mississippi only 15 percent of eighth graders can write proficiently. Fifteen percent! For the innumerate among you, that means 85 percent of 14 or 15 year old kids in Mississippi can't write. Methinks there be a literacy problem in this country. For tis not only Mississippi where there be problems.

I don't buy the Times' whitewashing of the statistics. For example:

While 33 percent of eighth graders writing with proficiency may not sound like a lot, it is the best performance by eighth graders on any subject matter tested in the national assessment program in the last three years. Smaller percentages of eighth-grade students have performed at the proficiency level in reading, math, science, civics or history tests. Only 17 percent of eighth graders managed a proficient score on the nationwide history exam in 2006, for example.

Bullshit. Thirty-three percent is terrible. No ifs ands or buts about it. If it's better than three years ago, that's good, but the performance is still terrible. How can we allow any of these kids to run for elected office thirty-forty years from now? Are we going to become a society that is more split between educated and uneducated than we already are? That's just asking for trouble.

Certainly, a couple comments on the cusp of diatribe from yours truly are not going to spur a shift in national education. Neither will a few million donated by Bill Gates, though it's a better option than my blather on this itty bitty blog. But I can't help wondering why this isn't a larger issue in the presidential campaigns.

I'm curious, could this be a national security issue? If our soldiers can't read their orders proficiently enough, might they do something improper? To be honest, I have much more faith in our forces than that. I've met a few active soldiers over the past few years, and not one of them has struck me as an aw-shucks idiot or wide-eyed fool. I don't know what it's like in the trenches, but in airports and on sidewalks, they say the right things. I'm proud of them. We all should be.

But I'm still concerned about the kids over here. Harry Potter is done. Can our kids read anything else? And how many of the kids actually read those books and how many waited for the next movie? When peace returns, will our soldiers be able to understand their union rules?

I'm off on a rant here, but my point is this: How can we be a great country if a large number of our kids can't read? I'm not stupid, but I can't find an answer to that.

From the Novelist Picket Lines

No, I’m not walking around in circles with a placard in my hands while the cats stare at me and wonder why I haven’t tossed any toy mice their way recently. Instead I’m laughing my out-of-shape butt off as I read a wonderful story from the Onion.

The story is about a Novelists’ strike and how it has affected absolutely no one. Some of the quotes are brilliant.

Hey, if you can’t laugh, then you shouldn’t write.

Attack on the Memoir?

There was a story the other day in the New York Times about a British writer who was not allowed to come into the United States, where he was going to attend an opening party for his new book, Dandy in the Underworld, which is a memoir.

I've not heard of this guy, Sebastian Horsely, before, though I'm not much for memoirs, which seem to have pushed the novel further into the background of the literary world. His work is about his experiences as a drug abuser and frequent user of prostitutes. He chronicles his trips to the Philippines, where a photographer took pictures of him being hung from a cross. (Buy the book, just in time for Easter! Good God, what has this world come to?) Presumably, that's where the image I found online and borrowed for this post came from.

Memoirs and memoirists have had some trouble the past couple of years -- especially in recent weeks -- and I couldn't help but wonder whether, in a way, this decision by the United States is a way to challenge whether Horsely really was telling the truth. What Horsely has that "Margaret Jones" didn't have was indisputable truth that he'd done these things -- at least the mock crucifiction. Jones's tale, while reportedly poignant and stunning, is not her personal experience. Ergo, not memoir. Thank you, try again.

Personally, I have no trouble with fiction. I love reading it and writing it. I believe most readers who say they prefer nonfiction because they want to read about what is real are simply lazy. They literally have not exercised their imagination. Shame on them. A good story -- especially fiction -- should feel real to a reader, otherwise there is no believability and ultimately the work will wither and die on the vine.

I'd like to believe that Margaret Jones, whose real name is Margaret Seltzer, could simply have converted the story to fiction. As the New York Times blog post suggests, that's not always easy. But at least it's honest.

As for Mr. Horsely, well, if I read the article correctly it said that he was trying to get into the United States without a visa -- which, reportedly, is still possible for British folks, as long as they haven't been convicted of a crime involving moral terpitude. Perhaps I'm reading it wrong. I'd have expected his publisher or agent to have checked into securing a visa, but the article is silent on that point.

I doubt I'll be reading about the book about the dandy. I can't relate to drug abuse and using prostitutes, and I don't care to live vicariously through him. I imagine he'll be in the United States eventually to sell another book. Or perhaps the next we hear of him, he'll be admitting that he made stuff up for his book. As he told the Time Out London, "It's better to be quotable than honest."

Ad Astra, Sir Arthur, Don't Forget to Write

Arthur C. Clarke, the author of numerous science and science fiction dreams and books, died this week. While he's best known for writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Stanley Kubrick made into one of the all-time greatest films, Clarke was a prolific writer (author of nearly 100 books) and a great thinker. Though his idea was considered by his attorney too crazy to be worth patenting, he is credited as the first to imagine telecommunications satellites.

His idea was proposed in a scientific paper he wrote in 1945 (Sputnik launched in 1957), which showed the feasibility of satellites that stayed in geostationary orbit around the earth. That now well-trafficked area of space has since been officially designated the Clarke Orbit. According to Clarke's New York Times obituary:

[That paper was] "the most important thing I ever wrote." In a wry piece entitled, A Short Pre-History of Comsats, Or: How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time, he claimed that a lawyer had dissuaded him from applying for a patent. The lawyer, he said, thought the notion of relaying signals from space was too far-fetched to be taken seriously.

But Clarke wrote much that his millions of readers took very seriously. My personal favorite book of his is Childhood's End. Like 2001, which came later, this work included a benevolent yet removed presence that watches over -- even mentors -- humanity. They step in and stop warfare among nations, but their real goal is to prepare them for the next, awkward step in their evolution.

I never met or interviewed Clarke, who lived for the past half century in Sri Lanka, but he contributed a video commentary to Space Day in 2001, which I covered. The event, held at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, was special for me, in part because I love space but also because I had the chance to meet and interview John Glenn, the first American to orbit the planet and a former U.S. senator from Ohio. Clarke said to the crowd of mostly school children that among them might be sitting the first person to set foot on Mars.

That comment came back to me after watching a statement (available on YouTube video) that Clarke gave upon the announcement of the Google Lunar X Prize. The announcement of the $30 million competition, challenging a privately funded team to send robot up to the moon, came last September. As he did on Space Day 2001, Clarke offered a taped statement and spoke about things like the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik, which occurred in October.

"I was always sure that humanity would reach the moon," he said, "but I didn't really believe I would live to see it. And I'm sure I didn't believe I'd live to see it end. ... We need to go to the moon for the right reasons. We need to find the models for markets of profitable operations that would inspire entrepreneurs and business leaders as well as our scientists and engineers. That's the only way to ensure permanence."

He went on to say that he hoped to one day enjoy one of the nongovernmental suborbital flights that he believed would be actively taking passengers before this decade is over. That sounds like a tall order, (assuming he means, as most people erroneously do, that the decade ends when 2010 begins; it ends when 2010 ends), but Clarke was not one to shrink from his dreams.

Peter Diamandis, who chairs the X Prize Foundation, offered his thoughts after the death of his friend, Sir Arthur. He wrote,

"Arthur once said, there are three phases to a great idea: 'The first phase is when people tell you it’s a crazy idea, it will never work; the second phase is when people say, it might work, but it’s not worth doing; and the third phase is when people say, I told you that was a great idea all along!' We at the X PRIZE Foundation know that feeling ... and Arthur was one of my great supporters to pursue the original Ansari X PRIZE, and the many prizes that followed. Thank you Arthur for encouraging our crazy ideas!"

Thank you, indeed, Sir Arthur, for dreaming big and encouraging others to dream too. Like you did, I hope one day to venture off this wonderful home planet. I can't think of a better way to truly learn the most about humanity and appreciate what we have here on earth than to view it from a distance and return to the cradle of life to share what has been learned.