literacy - Corpus

Still reading: turning the pages for health and wellbeing in teens

5 October 2020 3 Comments

Samantha Montgomerie

This digital world has a few tricks. It’s fast, lightning quick, bringing rewards with a few quick clicks. We skim and skip, casting for the tantalising bits. And if it ain’t got us hooked real quick, we give it the flick.

And this is the world where a large number of our teens are experiencing the only reading they will commit to for pleasure.

There is much to be lost if we give up on the idea that reading deeply matters. We need to make sure our young people find the time to be still, and to ensure they are still reading. We risk a lot if we stop fostering a culture where deep reading matters.

“In the Night Kitchen”: an allegory for the patient experience?

2 September 2019 1 Comment

Emily Duncan

Did you ever hear of Mickey, how he … fell through the dark, out of his clothes past the moon and his mama and papa sleeping tight into the light of the night kitchen?”

Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen is one of those masterpieces I revisit in adulthood. Its rhythm and phrasing were tattooed on my young mind. There’s a recording of the text by the late actor James Gandolfini. Even though it was only a few years ago that I heard this, and I’m a Gandolfini fan, the petulant child in my wanted to protest, “You’re reading it all wrong!”

The appeal of In the Night Kitchen isn’t merely sentimental whimsy, but Sendak’s complicit understanding of what our parents wouldn’t admit. He encourages us to embrace the (unspoken) fear of night-time and face uncanny and surreal happenings in the dark.

Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what’s real and what’s not. They understand metaphor and symbol. If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.” Bernard Holland.

I think of the book when in hospital. Suspended in insomnia in a seventh floor isolation room, looking over the ‘night kitchen’ of Dunedin North. Like Mickey meeting the bakers, I’m alert to the labour that continues under focused beams of light while most of us sleep. There’s that that must go on. And fear. Hospital is discomforting no matter your age, so I ask: could In the Night Kitchen be read as an allegory for the patient experience?

Trivial pursuits?

26 November 2018 14 Comments

Sue Wootton

Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1889-1951

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Secondary school students in New Zealand have recently finished sitting their end of year external examinations. One of those papers was a Level 3 History exam, in which final year students were asked to respond to this quote from Julius Caesar: “Events of importance are the result of trivial causes”.

After the exam, 1300 students signed a petition asking that markers not downgrade their answers if they hadn’t understood the meaning of the word ‘trivial’. The gist of their argument was that ‘trivial’ is not a word that seventeen and eighteen-year-old English speakers in 2018 can be expected to know, and therefore, for fairness, a definition should have been included in the exam paper.

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“Poetry and Mindfulness”

19 November 2018 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

Whatever the advantages of the internet and the many technologies we use to leverage it, there is growing evidence that we are paying a price in distraction and in neurological changes that are affecting our ability to concentrate, to follow lengthy arguments – and perhaps even to empathize with each other.” – Bryan Walpert, Poetry and Mindfulness.

We citizens of the so-called developed world are living through a rapidly changing, fast-paced and information-dense time. We can trace the effects of this in our daily language. In a relatively short length of time, the digital age has appropriated certain key words, turning once qualitative terms into quantitative ones, and stretching the former meaning of words like ‘connection’ and ‘friend’ almost to breaking point. (I think also of terms once the province of human anatomy and communication, like ‘digital’, ‘fingerprint’, ‘face recognition’ and ‘voice technology’; and the emotional words ‘like’ and ‘love’.) Ostensibly we are the most connected and informed generations ever, yet loneliness, stress, cynicism, anxiety and depression seem endemic.

Curing Lesesucht (addiction to reading)

29 October 2018 3 Comments

Charlotte Simmonds

Fischel Schneersohn was born around 1885/88 in Kamianets Podolski under the Russian Empire. He studied medicine in Berlin from 1908. By 1920 he was in Kiev, working as a children’s doctor and co-editing the short-lived Hebrew literary journal Kadima. He then returned to Berlin to direct a Jewish children’s centre. He is variously recorded as having specialised in psychiatry and psychology; the non-fiction books and articles he published in both Yiddish and German certainly belong more to the field of psychology than psychiatry. But he was also interested in non-scientific literature, with many of his Yiddish novels published in the 1920s and 30s, also in German and Hebrew translation.

In the 1930s he emigrated to Mandate Palestine where he continued to practise either child psychiatry or psychology, running a clinic and afterschool programme in Tel Aviv for neurotic children. In 1952, he wrote a lengthy German report on a syndrome which could not be considered today to have any nosological validity. It was a type of Lesesucht, or reading addiction, observed among the children in his Tel Aviv clinic over 1937 to 1951.

Books as friends … and medicine

1 October 2018 3 Comments

Grace Carlyle

When I was a child I discovered three authors who have voyaged with me through life. What a debt of gratitude I owe these women who have strengthened, enriched, educated, supported and amused me for so long. I have since found other authors, some considered ‘worthier’, and deeply enjoyed them, but in difficult times I return to my old friends of childhood and reread them with undiminished delight. I don’t believe that the secret of the power is merely nostalgia. It’s something much simpler: they work. I take them like medicine. In fact I prefer them to any medicine I have ever experienced.

Where to begin? At an impressionable age I discovered Georgette Heyer and fell in love with her wit, her style, the historic settings, the sheer romanticism of her novels. Which was maybe a bit unfortunate as it took a little time to learn that the men I were reading about weren’t likely to walk into my life. What a sad day it was when I realised that. It required extensive rereading to cheer myself up, by which time the old familiar spell was working upon me all over again, albeit somewhat more realistically. But Heyer’s humour never failed to give me a lift when the going became heavy. While my reasons for returning to her kept changing, the effect remained consistent. I felt better for the reading. [Read more…] about Books as friends … and medicine