Reading (in)ability, word counts, Edgar Allan Poe

Wednesday 9/16/26

As I mentioned, I read quite a few testimonials by teachers from kindergarten through college. You see where things are headed in terms of thinking, reading, learning, and how dire the situation is, with not only no help forthcoming, but things becoming worse and worse. These teachers have no chance.

The manner in which most children are raised precludes any schooling from making a difference at all in helping to educate them. The majority aren't read to and hardly any children read voluntarily. They don't read at all. This used to be as reliable a group of readers--or maybe I should say book lovers--as there was. Kids loved books. They loved stories. They wanted to hear them at night. They insisted on hearing them. They asked to be read more stories. "Read another."

That demographic is now virtually gone. You can't overstate what this means to the world when even kids don't want stories. That's on the parents. Kids are still kids. They come out into the world the same way. But the parents fail them. They stick a screen in the hands. There's your real parent. Mr. Screen. Sure, Mr. Screen doesn't feed the kid and put clothes on its back, but Mr. Screen and everything that Mr. Screen represents is doing a large part of the rearing, and almost all of it at the mental and learning levels.

That kid is going to be an adult who is as thick as a redwood. Who has no interest in ideas, art, anything of substance. Who never reads, never thinks, can't think. Has no curiosity. No depth. Won't ever have any passions. They won't even know how to be interested in anything. They'll just be there. Eventually they'll produce and raise kids in their image. They'll make the world worse, and then they'll die, with that just there-ness being the sum of their lives, which becomes no longer here, and something equivalent to might as well not have showed.

This morning I was reading an account from a high school honors English teacher who teaches in a school in which eighty percent of the students read at grade level. In today's illiterate world, this is a high number. We're talking--relatively speaking, anyway--a good school. These are the better students in 2026's America.

Her account was about the pace of her classes and the resulting complaints of parents. You also can't underestimate the negative effect of complaining parents. They are always on the side of their kid, no matter how in the wrong the kid may be. They shirk any responsibility both in terms of their parenting and in whatever their kid has done or failed to do. It's never their fault, and it's never the kid's fault. Little Joey could set the school on fire and it would be the school's fault for building something so flammable. Little Sally doesn't do any of her homework all year, then it's the teacher's fault for assigning any homework at all.

It's like parents are trolling the world. Kind of similar to those four boobs we saw the other day taunting the residents of Halifax with their Lake America sweatshirts. This teacher was saying that four days were allotted in her honors class to cover Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 short story, "The Tell-Tale Heart." Do you know how long "The Tell-Tale Heart" is? It's 2000 words long. I'll give you a comparative idea of some word counts. The entry preceding this one in this journal about the two stories I was working on is 1800 words long. The "On immaculate innings" sports entry is 1500 words. The "Suck my clog" entry with Uncle Skeeter is 2700 words. "9/11, Donald Trump, and publishing" is 1800 words. "Double Deflection" is 3500 words. Grateful Dead/"Dark Star" book listening notes and thoughts V is 1000 words.

The teacher said that they give no other homework than the reading for the class. This honors class, in a school where eighty percent of the students read at grade level, putting this school far beyond most schools in this country--these are the "smart" kids in a "good" area--couldn't handle the 2000 word story in four days. Rather, it took the class two weeks. Which the parents then complained about, saying "only" two weeks for their children to read a 2000 word story.

Do you understand how clueless you have to be, how oblivious you need to be to anything that reading entails, like you've never once done it in your life, to make that complaint? You had people making this complaint en masse. It was a group complaint. Do you understand how bad this is? Do you understand the picture this presents of our utter illiteracy? How dire the future for the world is? How dire it is right now for the world? And by future, I don't mean next century. I'm talking about the future of my own lifetime. I'm talking five years. Ten years. By the year 2040.

In tenth grade, I was in just a regular English class in a public high school in Connecticut. Wasn't honors or anything like that. Just gen pop public high school English. You were assigned a book, a story, a play, you read the book, story, play, there were papers to be written about those works, and that was it. Wasn't a big deal. It was school. This was English class. You read and wrote. To be expected.

Macbeth (20,000 words) got assigned. You did the reading. You came to class. The play was discussed. You were called on. We were all expected to do this. It hardly merited talking about. It certainly didn't merit talking about in some, "Can you believe what we're being made to do in English class?" sense. That would have been like signing up to play hockey and then being surprised that when you got to the rink hockey was played.

Another text we read that year was Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (7000 words), which I reread last night. Its language is far more rococo than that of "The Tell-Tale Heart." As I read this for the latest time, I thought that there is virtually no one in America who could read this story now. And it's not like Poe was doing crazy and wild things with language. It's the vocabulary and that sentences have multiple clauses. You're not getting many five-word subject-verb sentences without a comma.

It isn't text speak. We write and think in a kind of preempted autofill. Like whatever we say has already been said before it's actually said. If you were to take your phone and respond to anyone who texted you with the AI-generated response that appears as soon as someone else's text comes in, people wouldn't think, "Whoa! That doesn't sound like Amanda!" Chances are, if you're like most people, no one would know the difference. You might as well not be there.

Poe initiates a sentence; that sentence has a word (or two, three, four) that people don't know at the point where it breaks off into a restrictive clause--that part in the middle of the sentence bracketed by commas--which then is meant to "knit up" with the portion of that sentence that is resumed at the restrictive clause's conclusion. That is, you're meant to carry the meaning and momentum of that opening part of the sentence forward across the space of the nonrestrictive clause and be back on your merry reading way.

And people cannot do this. If you can't do this, you can't read. You are essentially illiterate. This is fundamental writing. It's not "advanced." If you read a children's book, you'll see sentences of the same design. This is made worse with Poe by people knowing so few words, let alone knowing the words that are characteristic of Poe's vocabulary. Nor can they glean the meaning of those words from context, because they don't have those thinking and deductive skills either.

People can't understand non-autofill type language, period. They don't have any words of their own. They don't have their own way of speaking. They don't have anything to say. They wouldn't be able to say it anyway. Everything comes from without. When people want to talk, they don't think, "What do I think and how should I say it?" there on their insides. No. They cast their eyes at the junk pile of post-human, post-language, post-thinking, post-reading, post-individuality society. That's the pile of the ready-made phrases sitting there in the middle of the only street that anyone can or does go down.

At the end of the day, hill to die on, I'm here for it, GOAT, literally, it's peak, it's a banger, it slaps, it's a vibe, change my mind, hot take, checks notes, no notes, etc.

There's no relationship between those words and phrases--which are all anyone uses to "communicate"--and actual meaning. People aren't assessing meaning; they're assessing fit. They have a round hole. They look for a round peg to stick in the hole. They're just shapes. They're not carriers of specific sense.

And virtually no one in our society can talk without these shapes from the main street word and phrase pile. People who make their living talking--people who make a fortune talking--have nothing to say and no way to say it. They do the same thing. And then, the moronic masses recognize that the same pegs are being used as the pegs they use, and because of that, and only because of that, they "like" that person, follow them, pay money for their product or service, on account that it's like them and similar to what they do and all they can do. They find this comforting. It's as if they're paying themselves, or this idea of what they could be if they went down another road, or what they are, really, in effect.

They get nothing from these people. The people they are this "huge" fan of. They derive no enjoyment. No edification. That's not why they support and celebrate that person. "Consume" that person's media. They would categorically reject and want nothing to do with anyone who might give them anything of substance. They wouldn't want the podcaster, for instance, with anything to say who said it well, said it brilliantly, said it wittily. They want the person who talks and thinks--which is to say, doesn't think at all and uses the recycled phraseology--just like they do.

And it seems like I'm the only person in this world who is able to understand this very simple, very obvious thing, for which there are scant exceptions. Because hardly anyone can tell what anything is now. A purple horse with wings could cross the street in front of them on an early morning with no one else around, and they won't even see it no matter that it's right where they're looking and there's nothing else to see.

The other thing with something like "The Fall of the House of Usher" is that there are so many words in the story that fit the bill of being unfamiliar words, that a person feels like they're being hit again and again and again. Another shot to the body, a blow to the jaw, a hit upside the head. It takes a toll fast. The would-be reader feels punch-drunk. They're frustrated. They are feeling down about themselves, too. Inadequate. They're used to being lied to by people they also lie to. You're great, I'm great, blah blah blah.

They think, "No way, I'm done." And they return to that which is stupid. The TikTok video, a Taylor Swift song, a Stephen A. Smith contrived diatribe of just barking at the air, his words meaning nothing. It's the empty barking. The volume. Those ready-made phrases. "At the end of the day, Patrick Mahomes is GOATED."

There isn't much depth to "The Tell-Tale Heart." It isn't a well-rounded story. There aren't all these levels of meaning. It's really quite inchoate. Reads like a fragment. A burst. Poe was often just trying to be edgy and shock. He routinely repeated himself. Was formulaic. Poe's stories make better conversational subjects than they do reading experiences. Lovecraft is somewhat similar in that regard. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," there isn't that much you should be able to miss as you go through it.

That is, it doesn't have these subtle details that if you fail to note any of them you're going to be confused. Nah. You can read it fast, read it only half concentrating, and get "the gist," which is all a high school student is often trying to do anyway, going back however far you want to go back. I wasn't like this. I wanted to read the work, understand the work, know the work.

But of course there were kids in my tenth grade class who just wanted to do the bare minimum so that they'd have a clue what the text was about and could muster an answer when they were called on in class and wouldn't have to say that they didn't do the reading at all. Nor could one hop on the non-existent internet for help. You needed a dictionary to look up a word.

As I said yesterday, reading and thinking are closely related. If you can't read, if you can't process the aspects of your own life, the problems you face, the aims you have, the things you might do and how to do them, as though you were reading something on the pages of your own mind, so to speak, you are unlikely to be able to think, and you almost certainly won't be able to think well or think through things well.

You won't have awareness. You won't have the mental muscles to lift that which needs lifting. Instead, you will drift through life oblivious, at the mercy of that which is around you, which now includes people and forces which want to enslave you in ways you're not able to see or understand, make you a beast of burden in service to their greed, ego, power-mongering.

Want some word count stats? Regarding those two stories I said yesterday that I was working on: "Fitty" is currently 5000 words and "Dead Thomas" is 6000. Regarding other stories I've recently mentioned in these pages: "Hero of Mine" is 1200 words, "What the Mouse Knew" is 1600 words. The piece about school-related horror films I'm about to finish now stands presently at 3500 words.

This entry, which I wrote in a few minutes here on this early Wednesday morning--it's 4:48 right now--is 400 words longer than Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." Takes ten minutes to read by the official counter. And it's not like whatever is behind that official counter is programmed to think everyone reads with ease. Ten minutes is a little shy of two trips up and down the Bunker Hill Monument. You see how brief this is?