Newsletter from Jay Wilcox, December 2018: On Being Incurious

Good morning/afternoon/evening! And Happy New Year!

As a teacher, I see a lot of people who expect to become good at reading and writing but never pick up a book--many even claim to hate reading/writing. How can you become good at something you hate? This always feels like a strange, transactional approach to knowledge. Pay enough money, get gud at skill.

I don't mean to poke fun. I'm just poking fun.

Much of our discourse seems increasingly and disturbingly transactional. Consider standardized testing. If a school does "well," we give them more money--and if they do poorly, we take their money. These transactions, I feel, contribute to a major competence gap between our society and others. What if we took a cue from Finland and didn't even send our kids to school until they were seven? Seems to be working fine over there.

My rant comes back to this: if someone isn't the kind of person who is open to reading, their test scores will likely reflect that, no matter how many boring test-prep reading passages they slog through. 

Now let me back up for a second and admit that reading totally sucks. That's right, I said it! But what I'm referring to here is the physical act of moving one's eyes back and forth over text. That sucks hard, and not enough creative writers acknowledge this. You gotta write clearly and without self-indulgence. If I am insufficiently unboring, throw my work away.

This being said, if we can admit that reading is physically and mentally taxing, we can also admit that some things actually make damn good reading. There's awesome stuff out there! Even if only one in a million books grips you, that's still enough for an afternoon.

Sure, not all tomes deserve finishing, but all deserve starting--which begs the question of whether it is worse to be dumb or incurious. It's hard to find good books, but it's easy to want to find good books.

Humbly a Ravenclaw,

Jay

P.S. - Oh yeah, still writing a novel. #MusicForParasites