By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:48:40 +0000

SLOIP is a new word for me–maybe it is sort of akin to spandrels in a sense–my first thought, of course, being me, is, does it rhyme with anything, or is it like April?
I think Greece is probably even less of a nation of readers than the US. You hardly ever see people reading on the metro or the tram or a bus, and almost never in those inerminable bureaucratic queues that punctuate daily life here. It used to amaze me that people could sit or stand for hours doing absolutely nothing. I think the Greek school system effectively wipes out any desire to read. Kids here learn by and are tested on rote memorization, often whole paragraphs of textbook text. They too are heavily overscheduled. The public school system is so inadequate that parents have to then shell out for “frontisteria”–private after-school schools, often manned by the self-same teachers as the public schools–to teach the kids the same curriculum over again. There is next to no SLOIP. There is also a literacy problem among older adults whose education was permanently interrupted by the occupation, violence and deprivations of World War II, famine, and the Civil War of the 50s. (The first generation of living poets to have grown up without war or dictatorship has only recently coming out with their debut books.) The end of the school year is celebrated by bonfires of books.
My own for-pleasure reading dropped off drastically after Jason was born, and has never fully recovered. I used to read a couple of novels a week–now I doubt I do that in a quarter–all my reading time is taken up with more “professional” preoccupations. And, er, Dr. Seuss.
Hasn’t Harry Potter done something about the much-reported death of reading? Or just a thumb in the dam?.
I don’t know that assignments can do much in this area. True pleasure reading is escape it seems to me, though you can enjoy an assignment. I sometimes think the best way to “promote” poetry would be to ban it in the schools altogether. Imagine all those kids furtively listening to it with a thrill of the illicit on their ipods, messaging verses to friends, memorizing their favorite new couplets…

By: Ange

Ange — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:12:43 +0000

Steve, in this post you’ve combined one of my great fetishes (SLOIPS) with one of my great anxieties (post-literacy). One wonders, though, why short poems haven’t become more rather than less central to a culture so pressed for time. (Is this changing?) And how is it that the 3-minute pop song has enjoyed such popularity when the page-long poem vies for respect among the chattering classes, who still venerate the novel? (This does not seem to be changing.)
I can’t think of a more humane goal for humanities profs than to return some concept of SLOIP to the lives of their students. And by the way, it is true in my modest middle-class suburban town that we young mothers cannot find teenage babysitters because their busy-ness outweighs their need for $30-60 gigs.

Comments on: are you getting enough SLOIP?

By: Alicia (AE)

By: Ange