Initial Musings and Explanations

Testing, testing!  (I'm pretty sure that's how you're supposed to start every new blog, right?  Just trying to use my prior knowledge (also, boom!  New vocabulary term.).)

So, a few words about the title of my blog and the url I came up with...

The articles and book chapters that I've been reading about the definition of literacy/literacies and how they affect all aspects of our collective lives are really blowing my literary mind.  I think that I've always been conditioned to think of "literacy" as the ability to read well, and I've never struggled in that area.  I learned to read when I was four years old, and I was an insatiable reader from then on out.  In addition, I always ascribed to the idea of a "cannon" of what is "good" to read and what is shameful to read.  For example, I LOVED V.C. Andrews when I was in middle school (Flowers in the Attic, anyone?  Disgusting and fascinating.).  However, when I got older, I felt like I couldn't let myself read anything that wasn't sectioned off in the "Literature" shelves in the bookstore.  I refused to read Harry Potter until I was 25 years old, and then I found that I loved that series of books more than most of the novels I was assigned to read in grad school for literature.

All that is to say that I'm really intrigued by looking at literacy and literacies in a different light; rather than looking at literacy as the practice of making sure a 9th grader can read The Epic of Gilgamesh, and instead, focusing on incorporating students' already burgeoning literary lives, I think that academic and social revolutions can begin in the classroom and carry over into the community.

And I'm excited to look at and utilize this new-to-me information about literacy with different eyes, not new ones.  I mean, after all, my eyes/experiences bring something unique to the table that I don't just want to let go of.

As far as the Notorious B.I.G. lyrics go, I feel like that's pretty self-explanatory.  I mean, isn't that why people crave communicating with others, pursuing oral and written conversations?  Sometimes others' words do hypnotize us; they capture how we're feeling or they sound so beautiful that we want to savor them.  Or they persuade us that Biggie's flashy ways are great.  (That was probably an over-academization of those rap lyrics, but isn't that what blogs are for?)

Also, for anyone interested in rap and hip-hop (as I am), a really great book to check out is Dirty South: Outkast, Lil Wayne, Soulja Boy, and the Southern Rappers Who Reinvented Hip-Hop.  There's an interesting section on Houston rappers and DJs, and I feel that if you're interested in the genre, it might be good background reading material for understanding some of the rap/hip-hop scene in this area.  (This also relates to the Susan Weinstein article on the pleasures of rap as a literate practice--I think knowing about a region's hip-hop history could be useful in connecting with some students' at home literary practices.)

So, hopefully those ramblings show a bit of my current (early) understanding of literacy and literacy practices, and I hope to get a bit more coherent (and arguably more interesting) in the near future.

--Holland