Reading is Life
I've been catching up on some reading. Thanks to Annie ("Getting tired of fighting the good fight") at Maud Newton's I saw these fascinating paragraphs (from the LA Times) about the "life of Delta librarian Ronnie Wise":
People just don’t realize the stress of a Mississippi librarian’s life, he says. People don’t understand what it takes to keep those front doors open — or what’s at stake if you don’t. Reading, Wise believes, is life. Illiteracy, therefore, is death. He witnesses its stranglehold every day. Shopping at the grocery store, standing in line at the bank or post office, he’s constantly accosted by strangers trying to conceal their secret behind the same lie. "Excuse me," they say. "Forgot my glasses — could you tell me what this says?"
People call him a librarian, and he surely looks like a librarian, with his sedentary frame, thick eyeglasses, fastidiously trimmed hair and goatee. But, deep down, he feels like something else, something more. He feels like the Sisyphus of Mississippi. He feels like a superhero in one of his beloved comic books, even though he fights the forces of darkness with little more than night classes and meager grants, and he loses more than he wins; 30 years of that would make even Spiderman cranky.
One Response
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Leave a Reply
To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.
I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Wednesday, 8 November 2006 at 03.52
Permalink
I lived in Mississippi for a time, although not in the Delta country. I did visit there a few times, however.
I don't recall a noticeable illiteracy problem there, although I don't doubt there was some then and that some persists today. I think it would've been easy to find a bunch of marginal readers, including plenty whose reading was confined to strictly brief, utilitarian things such as street signs and advertisements.
Interestingly, there was a band of little all-black agricultural communities across the state north of the coastal region. These tiny towns had a culture of their own. I visited a couple. The locals spoke a rich dialect that caused this city-raised yankee to have to pause and interpret what was being said, sometimes even having to ask a speaker to repeat. The dialect was a combination of different pronunciations, very pronounced drawl, syllables being added to words and, often, emphasis on a different part of a word or sentence than what I was accustomed to.
You get on to it, but feel really funny so obviously having to work to understand the lingo of a fellow citizen of your own country.