Of course, i think you make the same decisions that Mitch Mcconnell did, because the next election is always a chance that youre going to end up being in the minority party. Now, the only hope i have, and thats actually driven by my experience with students here, the change is going to have to be generational. The change is going to have to come from people who havent been typically getting involved in the political process and changing things. Its going to have to come from a new set of leaders who havent been used by the other side in certain ways, that havent been abused by the other side in certain ways. So that they dont feel that, you know, sort of sting that theyre going to do it to them, you know, because its been done in the past to their side. So im hopeful because i teach these tremendous students semester in and semester out, and i see the potential for leadership. But the key is getting these young people involved in politics rather than involved in Investment Banking or law school or something different, to tell them that their involvement in politics is worth doing, that they can change the world, because its going to have to be them who ends up doing it. For more information on booktvs recent visit to nashville and the many other destinations on our cities tour, go to cspan. Org citiestour. When i tune into it on the weekends, usually its authors sharing their new releases. Watching the nonfiction authors on booktv is the best television for serious readers. On cspan they can have a longer conversation and delve into their subjects. Booktv weekends, they bring you author after author after author that spotlight the work of fascinating people. I love booktv and im a cspan fan. [inaudible conversations] good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to barnes noble on the Upper West Side. Tonight i have the distinct pleasure of introducing author david denby. Mr. Denby is the author of great books, an acclaimed account of returning to college and reading the western classics during the curriculum wars. Hes a staff writer and former film critic for the new yorker, and his reviews and essays have appeared in the new republic, the atlantic and new york magazine, among others. He brings us today his new book, lit up one reporter, three schools, 24 books that can change lives. Can todays teenagers be turned on to serious reading . What kinds of teachers can do it and what books . One of those schools is the Beacon School, and were fundraising for them tonight. Mention the Beacon School book fair at the register, and a portion of your purchase will be donated. Dave eggers writes in this nuanced and vivid account of great books taught in three very different schools, denby has proven what teachers have always known, that taught with passion and commitment literature old and new can inspire any and every student. This is a necessary bulwark against kneejerk cynicism about the decline of reading among young people. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming author david denby. [applause] thanks so much. Welcome, all. Glad to see you on a friday night. I set out five years ago to answer a particular question which seemed to me also an enormous question, and that is what in the world could turn 15yearolds on to reading seriously, serious literature, serious magazines, serious anything when so much of their time is absorbed in this . And in screens in general. I chose 15 because it seemed the right time in their teenage lives when their brains were still malleable, their characters and identities were still up in the air, when they were making choices, do they want to go to college, do they want to go into the military, what kind of jobs do they want to get, what kind of work do they want to do, what their sexual identities might be. And i wondered how much are they reading, reading seriously . The book business, as you may have heard, is doing okay, and thank god for this house, may it long survive. As well as all the independents stores in which we manage to survive as writers and readers. As well as online. But the statistical evidence from Pure Research and from Common Sense Media and observation would suggest they werent reading many books. Were in the middle of an enormous transformation in the way we consume print, and perhaps in the way that we relate to one another. Its so pervasive, perhaps so enveloping that we cant even grab hold of it. I mean, my own magazine, the new yorker, has been going through convulsions for the last 15 years or so. The new yorker as a hard copy, as you know, is a kind of artifice. Its very carefully written, its very much fussed over, its to some degree sometimes to a maddening degree. In the editing phase, its laid out very carefully, designed very carefully, and suddenly, you know, were in the middle of this storm of journalism coming from every single angle. Communication of words coming from every single angle. Sherry turk el, speaking of kids in particular, has done a lot of work on how we relate to technology, and she was protech very much. She thought the internet was an extension of our spirituality. Shes jumped the fence in the last two books, alone together and recent book reclaiming conversation. She did a lot of research. Shes a professor at mit, psychology and sociology. Shes done a lot of work with teenagers and discovered, to her dismay, that increasingly they are avoiding facetoface confrontation. They want their relationships to be mediated by text, by cell phone including romantic relationships. Not Just Relationships between teachers and students, but ordinary friendships and even romantic friendships. And she sees that as an enormous damage to the self. That when you engage in confrontation with another person, that is when you grow. That is when you come to terms with who you are and who that person is, and theres all that fantastic recognition of the others, selfrecognition, everything that hagel talked about. It happens in facetoface encounter. I feel the same way about reading, and sherry is and i have actually done a kind of dog and pony show together where she talks about the potential loss of self through cell phone interaction, smartphone interaction, and i talk about how, how much you grow as a person when you read seriously. Ive been a moviegoer my whole life, and i adore movies. Particularly soothing and important to me because i have very bad adhd, and when i go to the movies, i particularly like, i like sitting fairly close and perhaps lose the frame altogether so that im surrounded and sensuously bombarded by the image. And its a great sensory stimulant, movies. And even to the point of the arousal of one sense gets the others aroused. And i remember in 1972 when i saw the god father for the first time at a screening how i felt when i came out onto the street. Part of the reason i felt that way when i came out onto the street is that i was sitting at the screening next to faye dunaway. [laughter] so that was a sensory arousal too. But i have always felt after being pleasure my wiped out by a movie that i had to restore myself in some way. And the way i restore myself apart from just reflection or writing about it, you know, in a practical way restoring yourself, is reading and reading and reading and immersing myself in literature. And im sure i dont have to argue here the necessity producing the next generation of great readers. Were talking about the centrality of literacy to our civilization, to citizenship. I think it would not be extravagant to say youre seeing right now the loss of real understanding of character, of person, of rhetoric in the kind of political campaigns that were seeing in which so many voters seem unable to have perceived what anyone would perceive if they had simply read huckleberry finn. And noticed the duke and the king and other conmen who huck has to deal with. In any case, what civilization are we going to have, what kind of literature are we going to have, how are we going to develop threedimensional people . Those are the large issues. The best way to create readers, of course, is to start reading to them when theyre infants, six weeks, eight weeks, first time the baby smiles, put her in your arms, turn pages. You all know this. Theyre not going to remember, of course, anything that they read, but they may have an affective memory of being held and associate that with the pleasure of reading itself. This is one of the big differences which you also know between upper middle class kids and poor kids. They dont often get that kind of treatment. They dont there isnt time. A single mother may have to get food on the table for three and four people. They may not read much themselves. Those conversations, those immersions in the world, what objects are in the world, what forces are playing around the house as the kids get older and you can have conversation with them, thats if you spend some time with working class kids or poor kids as i did in the course of writing this book, you see that the lack of that habit of what id have to call e vidty, a kind of nonstop curiosity to take in everything around you avidity. I dont, i refuse to believe, however, that the game is over at 6. If i did believe that, i obviously would not have written this. I wanted to see what kind of interventions could be made in the normal way of teaching. And so at 15. High School Teachers are temporarily in the position of authority to dictate certain books to the kids which they think will do them some good or change them or get them excited about literature itself. I didnt want to write a handbook, a teaching handbook. Im to not equipped to do that. I dont have the interest to do it. Im not an education researcher. Im a reporter and critic. And i, im sick of the, in education writing, the utter reliance on enumerating everything; statistics, scores, the kind of metric fallacy by which we dont allow ourselves to know anything about education until its been established sawtistically. Statistically. The latest folly in this kind of metric obsession, i mean, youve seen the kind of semicollapse of no child left behind and race to the top which tied School Assessment to how kids scored on tests to the point at which the schools were being denuded of their normal interests in creating threedimensional human beings and were engaged in test prep all the time. But the latest folly is something called grit, and theres a book coming out by Angela Duckworth from the university of pennsylvania that is getting a lot of attention. And what it does is set up a kind of numerical rubrics by which a character can be measured in children. And the rubrics are such things as perseverance, which makes perfect sense, but zest, positiveness. My guess is that mel brooks displayed a great deal of zest, but woody allen and larry david none whatsoever. [laughter] i mean, i find all of this absurd. First of all, you have to find a way of measuring it, of grading it and of teaching it. Now, also i would say, you know, just all of education should be about developing character. And certainly, reading literature is about developing character. But, in other words, what were trying to do is to find some numeric that will alert us to what the deficiencies are in our children just as the reading and math tests in no child left behind alerted us to what the deficiencies were in their education in those areas but without telling us how to overcome the deficiency. Its a desperation that continues throughout american education, i think, because we dont want to face, we cannot face, we will not face the real problem which is poverty. That is the real problem. Anyway, i was sick of the, what i would call the pornography of educational failure so often tied to this e pneumonia rahtive fallacy. And i wanted to see something that worked, what kind of literary education worked. So i had done Something Like this before, the book that was mentioned in the kind introduction. Great books in which i went back to columbia and read the western classics, required courses at columbia which lasts through two long classes, and it was at the time of the curriculum debate 25 years ago. Should children who descended of latin or african descent be asked to read western classics, you know . The dead white males. You remember that. And i went back through columbia and sat in on the classes and Read Everything and listened to the can kids and wrote it up as a kind of middleaged adventure. So i had a model for what i would do. I would sit in class, i would keep my mouth shut which is not easy and listen and read. Read everything, listen to everything that was said, take notes and then try to shape it into a narrative of the year. Now, i was having all these thoughts in a kind of desultory way, and a guy came up to me on the street on the Upper West Side. It sounds like a joke, a guy comes up to you and tells you about a school. His name is samuel abrams, and he was an exteacher at Beacon School at 61st street behind lincoln center, and he told me about the school which he described as an interesting place. It was a Progressive School but not a soft, feelgood, slack kind of place. Everybody worked hard, they believed in writing and speaking more than testing. The teachers had great freedom to write their own curriculums, to choose their own books with agreement from the principal and that way they were able to attract intellectuallydistinguished teachers and give them free rein. Physically, it was miserable, the school. It was never intended to be a school. An old building, it was cramped, it was crowded, everybody was on top of everyone else. You couldnt get off a jump shot in the vim for more than 10 feet without scraping the ceiling which all proof to sam and to me also as i later observed that you dont need a good Physical Plant in order to have a good school. What you need is teachers, students, computers and a library. It had a good library. They have now left. Theyre now down at 44th street in a much, much larger place, and i even feel kind of nostalgia for the kind of closedin, tight soul fullness, everyone on top of everyone else at the old place. Anyway, i settled into a class taught by a single teacher named sean leon and stayed there for the entire year. I think i went to every actual class of english 10e. And sean leon has an irish mother, American Navy father. He grew up in louisiana near new orleans. He is a lapsed catholic which i mention only because it was an element in the way he taught the class which was that he was in a state of some distress himself about his own life. And he allowed himself the students to see that and made it an element in the way that they read the books. The reading list was unusual. No shakespeare, no mark twain, no toni morrison, although kids read these books in other classes at beacon. They read stories by faulkner and hemingway, dystopian novels by orwell and huxley, hessa and vonnegut, dos toy jeff skys daunting notes from underground, a short narrative that he wrote at the gunning of his great period, 1860, crime and punishment and the other famous books came after it. And some of these books were hard and disturbing, and the kids were flattered by the difficulty, i think, of the assignments. They were i didnt notice anyone buckling under, lets put it that way. And mr. Leon ghei them an enormous gave them an enormous amount of support, and he had all sorts of interesting ways of organizing the classroom. But one of the things he did was to use the issues raised by the text and bring them into the kids lives. I dont mean that it devolved into confessional, sunday afternoon in the Church Basement or around the campfire at summer camp. It was much more rigorous than that. But there would be a degree of personal involvement and confession and discussion, and then it would go back to the text. It always came back to literature. But it had the effect of pulling out of the kids questions that he wanted them to answer which was what do you live for . What does matter in your life . What are your relations to your parents and your friends, to each other . How much time are you spending on screens, and he even forced them into a 48hour digital fast which most of them failed as i would have, in which they were not allowed to go on screens for two days. And i discovered as we went over the results in class and the kids wrote me a lot of letters about what had happened to them. You know, only three out of 32 students, big class, actually filled the down time by reading books. And a lot of them were seriously upset without their daily contact through the internet or with constant music or with the Television Set constantly on or something electronic constantly on. They were seriously upset. They were not just unplugged, they were unstrung, a lot of them. And these were good students. These were good kids. So he turned that into a kind of challenging lesson. He did all the english teacher stuff, and we did, you know, elaborate structural discussions of books and metaphor and symbol and so on, and he did a lot of syntax and grammar which i love hearing them talk about it. And i try to have, play with it and have fun with it and taking my cue from mr. Leon, show how sin tactical issues and grammatical issues all play into questions of character, how youre presenting yourself in prose is, in a way, the way youre shaping your soul. Some of this interesting classroom ways of teaching literature was, well, they read from sylvia plath tormented poems, and the kids wrote their own versions anonymously and read them. I dont know who wrote what, but it allowed them to vent in extraordinary ways. When we got to the dostoyevsky text, the hero of the notes from underground is the selfhating, perverse intellectual who screws himself at every possible turn and yet feels superior to the world by means of perceptiveness and insight into what other people live for. And the kids found him fascinating because they had their own problems in fitting in, wondering where theyre going to fit into society. I mean, they have the most negative notions of what grownup society is going to do to them, one are for the incredible success of the hunger games, right . In which theyre all placed in violent opposition with each other for the pleasure of grownups. Thats the text for this period. Anyway, when they got to serious text, they saw what was the kind of narcissism embedded in that degree of pride, but they also saw a certain glory in it which i think is what dostoyevsky intended. And he had them take the role of the underground man one student at a time, and and someone else take the role of interlocutor questioning this guys way