Literacy Today

Literacy=the ability to read and write.
I suppose you can add all of the qualities you'd like. What should be read? I say anything, anywhere. What I find intriguing may bore the pants off someone else. I tend to read alot of novels on the, shall we say "dark side". My mother and I cannot read the same books. She wants happy, happy stuff. I like happy stuff, but I guess I prefer literature that provokes my thought processes, opens up new worlds to me. I think my mother would faint if she read one page of Danielewski's House of Leaves or anything by Raymond Federman. She has read Lolita and she considered it a dirty book. She couldn't understand where Nabokov was coming from or his statement on democracy. She's reading from a different frame of reference than I am. We are both literate. I, trying to encourage reading, bought my son The Basketball Diaries. He loves basketball. He sure enough read it front to back, handed it back to me and asked, "Have you read this?" I took the book and read it. It was radically honest and about drug addiction. I was not sorry I gave it to him to read, but he seemed relieved that I did not know what I had given him to read. We discussed the book further after I had read it. He had not been psychologically damaged. I cannot define what you or anyone would consider literate. Again read and write.
Many letters have been found in garages and attics stuffed away from a time when women did not delve in the public literary sphere. The letters are gems of great historic values. They are literature. So if you can read a creative work and write a letter, well maybe that means you are literate. Apply it to e-mail or the internet if you like, but if reading and writing are involved, so is literacy. Speaking of which it is Joni Mitchell, not Joanie Mitchell. The mean one can be such a ditz. Over and Out.