DISCOURSE, n. I can’t quit twitter. It’s owned by a fascist ghoul and increasingly more broken every day, but my bookish community still lives there, it’s a reliable way to get the word out about a new book, sometimes passionate fans will coalesce around a single tweet to make a four-year-old epistolary sci-fi novella rocket to the top of the bestseller list, and I’m too lazy to make graphics or videos every time I want to express some half-formed thought that isn’t yet a newsletter, so I’ll never be good at Instagram or TikTok.
One of twitter’s less appealing qualities is that sometimes our amorphous, incomprehensible network gets into a big fight that spirals off into the ether. Sometimes people call this “discourse,” which is a word that used to mean “the process or faculty of reasoning” or “the thread of an argument” (I’m quoting the OED), but in the context of twitter, means something much more like the definition the OED offers for its ancestor, Latin “discursus”: action of running off in different directions, dispersal, action of running about, bustling activity.
Anyway, on… May 4, maybe? I got online and everybody was mad about Moby-Dick, which is, at least, less traumatic than some of the things we get (justifiably) mad about. The origin turned out to be a tweet by someone named Jason Anger (yes, really):
I would 100% prefer my kid to be able to read and understand Moby Dick, but hate it and read rarely, than to love reading Diary of a Wimpy kid and its like frequently. A love of reading is nice, but it's not the goal of literacy instruction.
Anger clarified (I use this verb loosely) in a subsequent thread that he was talking about how US education fails to teach literacy through phonics, a method that would be taught in the first few years of school and has no overlap with the age when students might be asked to read Moby-Dick, unless you have a really precocious and whale-obsessed seven year old. In fairness to Anger, phonics is a demonstrably effective method of teaching literacy, and literacy is a necessary but not sufficient approach to Melville’s whaling epic.
And then he said the funniest part:
What is the purpose of literacy instruction? I’d argue that it’s to produce adults who can read well enough to understand the day to day written communications necessary for productive and satisfied adults. 2/
In order to do so, they should be able to read and understand various texts, including newspapers or other sources of news, insurance and tax documents, work-related communications, etc. 3/
Reading—and hating—Moby-Dick is necessary because it will help you email your boss. Got it.
Wait, what?
This is the part in the movie where somebody says “ENHANCE” to their computer and we zoom in on the text of Moby-Dick. As a sample selected purely from laziness, here are three sentences that I wrote about previously:
As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with “Requiem eternam” (eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the mass itself, and any other funeral music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him Requin.
First and foremost, in this newsletter about words, it is my duty to reiterate you that Ishmael is either mistaken or lying. French “Requin” has nothing to do with Latin “Requiem.” This is one of countless times over the course of Moby-Dick that Ishmael will provide false information as if it is true. But it sounds cool as hell.
Let us return to the point: can reading this passage, and an enormously long novel composed of similarly wonderful and ponderous passages, riddled with uncertainty, help us understand “insurance and tax documents, work-related communications”?
lol
US tax documents might rival Melville’s sentences in complexity, and I do often have to read them multiple times to understand what is required of me, but they use language in a wildly different way. They are not meant to conjure any sensation or emotion in the reader. Ambiguity is their ruin. That’s why they’re so goddamn exhausting. I went hunting for the tax form within fastest reach, which for me was a 1099-MISC, used for miscellaneous income, including royalties and—appropriately for our whaling friends—fishing boat proceeds. It comes with fine-print instructions at the bottom, essentially a list of definitions. Here is what the IRS wants you to know about “fishing boat proceeds”:
Box 5. Shows the amount paid to you as a fishing boat crew member by the operator, who considers you to be self-employed. Self-employed individuals must report this amount on Schedule C (Form 1040). See Pub. 334.
It’s not going to win prizes for prosody, but you can’t deny it’s precise. Schedule C (Form 1040). It is dull. It is exacting. If you don’t follow the instructions right, you could go to jail for a long time.
The US Internal Revenue Service would never lie to you about the origin of the French word for shark, no matter how beautiful that lie was. Beauty is not a concern here at all. Also, imagine the crew members of the Pequod filing their taxes and grumbling about how Ahab considers them self-employed.
I’m being glib, sort of. In sincerity, I’m genuinely not sure the skill of reading (lingering over, thinking about, imagining, remembering, interpreting) Moby-Dick has much to do with the skill of reading (understanding in order to complete) tax forms. Phonics is foundational for both, I guess.
The discourse, naturally, ran off in all directions from its origin point that conflated literacy (undeniably useful) with reading fiction in the service of “understand[ing] day to day written communications” and becoming “productive.” Moby-Dick is perhaps the funniest possible choice for this perspective on why we read and teach works of literary fiction. If you have not read it or are not familiar, I wholeheartedly recommend this masterpiece of a tweet by EEMAR/@catchaspark_ to give you the idea:
i love ishmael "merman hellville" fakename. love a narrator who opens his book like "hi. i hate working. do you ever get depressed? i'm in a great mood right now and it is NOT a manic state. anyway, i've googled 10,000 whale facts. fact one: the whale is a horse and he loves me"
That this December 2019 tweet is still circulating and has, as of May 2023, nearly 23,000 “Likes” suggests more fondness for Melville’s book than Jason Anger might have expected when he chose it as representative of hated required reading—that is nevertheless necessary for productive adulthood, like a gross nutrient concoction you must consume for your health. Yes, it tastes horrible, but once you choke it down, you can get back to the real point of life: productivity.
I don’t think your boss would appreciate an enormously long, yet still incomplete and uncertain, emailed list of types of whales, not even if you’re employed as a cetologist. Probably especially not then. But feel free to call out sick from work by telling them you have a damp, drizzly November of the soul and you’re about to step into the street and methodically knock people’s hats off. I would like to know how that goes.
What am I doing here? Arguing against the reading or teaching of books like Moby-Dick? Fuck no. But I resent the notion that we must thump the tome of Moby-Dick against the skulls of high school students until they major in business and never read again.
Jason Anger’s first tweet implies that education is—must be—suffering. That the point of school is to force hated books on students and that, conversely, there is nothing to be gained from beloved books. In this view, hard work and enjoyment are mutually exclusive. Because a book like Moby-Dick is not a pleasure to read (according to Anger), therefore we must do it because it’s… useful?
I think a lot of people, reasonable people, people who aren’t the discourse-originating Twitter Main Character of the day, believe something like this. Years of having to justify the presence of the humanities to people who only care about making cuts have forced us into this contortion of pretending that Ishmael’s 10,000 Whale Facts will make you good at work emails.
It won’t.
That’s not why we read literature. That’s not why we teach literature to young people. Literature isn’t useful. Not in the narrow sense meant by people who want to cut education and replace it with job training. We’re never going to convince them, so let’s stop trying. No more arguing on their terms. Down with usefulness.
Life isn’t only about being good at your job.
Education is for shaping people, as citizens, as humans, as individuals, and about showing off what’s in the world, who we are, how we got here, how things work. Ideally we’d come out with our curiosity and compassion intact, wanting to care for each other and this planet we all have to share, and yeah, of course, having developed literacy and the many other skills we need to live, to the extent of our differing abilities. Often we don’t. I can’t fix that in this newsletter I write for free while my kid’s napping, though I wish I could.
I’m not here to tell the lie that every book you read in school will bring you joy, or even that it should. Learning is not fun fun fun all the time; that’s marketing garbage. A lot of learning is drudgery. Some stuff you won’t like or be good at. Some stuff you just have to memorize. Sometimes practice—long, repeated hours of practice—is the only way to master a skill. There’s no getting around it.
Sometimes the book your teacher picks will bore you, maybe because you’re a bored kid, or your teacher sucks at their job, or because some books are boring. Sometimes the book your teacher picks will make you angry, or sad, or you’ll just hate it and think it’s useless. Sometimes you’ll be right! Nobody can design a system that is proof against any of that. The best we can do is that sometimes students get to pick their own reading and sometimes we all read the same book together. Maybe it’s a book chosen because lots of people in the past read it and discussed it and held it up as important, or beautiful, or monstrous and horrifying. Maybe it’s a book chosen because people in the past or the present have marginalized and erased books like it—and their authors. (We should read more of those.) Moby-Dick, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, any book at all. Some of us will hate it and some of us won’t, and we will talk to each other, pick it apart, the text and what’s in it and who wrote it and what it says about the world and how it works, its strengths and its flaws, and this different experience we all have of what happens between the book and our brain, and that, to me, is a huge part of what it means to be human.
Will it make you a better cog in the machine of capitalism? The idea makes me want knock your hat right off your head and take to the fucking sea.
Let’s move on from assigned reading to free choice. Here are two small-r romance novels I loved.
Forever Your Rogue (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Erin Langston. When I see five or six romance readers posting rapturous praise about the same book, they rarely lead me wrong. This is a gorgeously written historical. It’s got love letters, beautiful prose, utterly heartwrenching scenes of familial love, and a realistic take on how hard it would be to dash out the door to do a Grand Romantic Gesture with two small children (impossible). Cora, a widow, wasn’t named the testamentary guardian of her own children in her terrible husband’s will, so now she might lose them to her terrible husband’s equally terrible relatives unless she can convince the court otherwise. Nate, a dissolute rake, owes Cora a favor and agrees to pose as her betrothed to persuade her terrible relatives to leave her alone. This desperate scheme is pure romance novel. It doesn’t work at all with regard to the relatives, but it works marvelously on Nate. He falls in love with Cora and her two children, reforms himself to be worthy of them, and then engages in a little paperwork theft and fraud to get his new-found family out of trouble. Cora is worth all the crimes in the world, by the way. It’s so meaningful to me to see a character who has kids get treated as someone who can still be the protagonist of their own story, whose personhood is not consumed by their children. Plus, she’s uptight as hell, which is very relatable. Also remarkable: an author’s note about the foundational legal research that inspired the story, with a bibliography of primary sources, which was impressive and fascinating and heartbreaking all at once. Content guidance from the author.
Tanked (m/f, both cis and het?, contemporary) by Mia Hopkins. I haven’t read very many contemporaries that deal with the pandemic—as far as I can remember, just this one and Jodie Slaughter’s To Be Alone With You, discussed here—but it makes sense that Mia Hopkins would do it and do it right. So much of this series, set in East Los Angeles, is about how people survive and thrive in this specific Latinx community, and while the focus is on joy, Hopkins doesn’t elide the hardships. The presentation of the pandemic feels very real. Angel and Deanna both remake their lives over the course of the book, finding themselves and each other and new ways to be with their families, and it’s really wonderful and wholesome. And yes, I am deliberately using the word “wholesome” about a book that includes a lot of beautifully written kinky sex, because this book’s outlook on love—caring for yourself and others, making the world a little bit better however you can—deserves exactly that description. Content guidance: My memory isn’t good enough at the moment to make a complete list, just wanted to note that there is past physical abuse by family members and intimate partners.
I was a guest on the podcast Kingdom of Thirst last week, where I had a great time chatting with the host, Abigail Kelly, about my novel The Scandalous Letters of V and J, which comes out on Tuesday. It’s horny and queer and magic and absolutely useless (thanks).
I will be back in your inbox at the beginning of June!
