Marks in the Margin

The Agony of Watching Roger Federer

2012-01-27T04:42:00.003-10:00

Ever since I began watching Roger Federer play tennis, I have been startled by the grace and beauty of his performance. I have seen him make shots that no one believed were possible and swing his racket with the elegance of a ballet dancer. David Foster Wallace said that watching Federer play tennis was a “religious experience:”

“The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.”

And yet, I have also been overwhelmed with anxiety that he will lose every time he steps out on the court. There are times I simply cannot watch him for fear that he will be beaten. Apparently I am not alone. A couple of years ago when Federer was about to play at Wimbledon, Calvin Tomkins wrote in the New Yorker:

“Some people are so enthralled by the way Roger Federer plays tennis that they can hardly bear to see him lose...Then I found out that others had similar reactions. “I can’t watch when he’s losing,” a friend of mine confessed the other day and then added, touchingly, “I go and clean the kitchen.”

What is going on here? What is the source of this particular anxiety? I am more than well versed in the fine art of losing, as only a Red Sox fan can know. What is this particular fear I experience each time I see Federer step out on the court, but not when the Red Sox begin playing another game?

Federer is no longer quite so young, although he is only thirty years old, five years older than his current nemeses Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. He is said by some to be past his prime. And yet he continues to play with perfection, with the same grace and elegance as he always has.

Many players, past and present, consider Federer the greatest player of all time. Have a look at this magic:

As I write, he is now playing in the Australian Open, the first of the four grand-slam tennis tournaments each year and, is about to play a semi-final match with Nadal. I am not sure I’ll be able to watch, as Nadal has beaten him too many times, especially on clay courts like they have now at Melbourne.

What is it called when you fear another person’s misfortune, especially when the other person is admired and has excelled in some way? I am not sure there is such a word or phrase that describes this feeling.

Maybe fear or anxiety isn’t the right word, dread is better: “anticipate with great apprehension.” Yes that is it.

Regardless of the correct word or phrase, all I know is that I turn away when Federer is losing. Let us simply say that I don’t like it when beauty and grace lose. Maybe everyone feels this way. A thing of beauty should last forever. We are diminished when it disappears.

When a lovely old building is torn down to be replaced by mini-mart, when an inviting bookstore goes out of business and a yoghurt bar takes its place, the neighborhood is a lesser place. It is the same when an old winding road out in the country disappears to make room for a six-lane freeway or when a beautiful grove of olive trees is cut down so that a parking garage can be built.

Similarly it is disappointing when beauty and grace on the tennis court are defeated by the grunts and groans of a slugger. You don’t want beauty and grace to be defeated. You want them to last forever.

And so in anticipation of that kind of fear or apprehension, I often turn away when Roger Federer is off his best, especially when he falls behind his opponent. Better to leave the questions of why I feel that way and what is lost to mystery, just like the mystery of Federer’s genius.

Postscript: Nadal defeated Federer a four set match in which Federer made at least 50 unforced errors.

"If there are no facts, substitute something lyrical"

2012-01-25T04:46:00.000-10:00

Memories of Chekhov is a biography of Anton Chekhov drawn from letters, diaries, essays and memories of Chekhov’s family, friends, and fellow writers. The recollections were edited and translated by Peter Sekirn who collected them from Chekhov archives in Yalta and Moscow and various American and Russian libraries. I was introduced to this new book by a New York Review Blog.

The accounts were made by people who knew Chekhov, visited him, met with him on a regular basis or lived with him. They are not secondary accounts by biographers who did not have such personal relationship or by historians who lived long after he did. In this sense it much like a film made at various times of his life. Here are a few of the accounts:

From Peter Gnedich A Russian writer, historian and playwright
Chekhov told me once, “You know, I recently visited Tolstoy in Gaspra. He was bedridden due to illness. Among other things, he spoke about me and my works. Finally, when I was about to say goodbye he took my hand and said, ‘Kiss me goodbye.’ While I bent over him and he was kissing me, he whispered in my ear in a still energetic, old man’s voice, ‘You know, I hate your plays. Shakespeare was a bad writer, and I consider your plays even worse than his.’”

From Ivan Bunin A well-known Russian Writer and Nobel Prize winner (1933)
“Do you write? Do you write a lot?” he asked me one day.
I told him, “Actually, I don’t write all that much.”
“That’s a pity,” he told me in a rather gloomy, sad voice which was not typical of him. “You should not have idle hands, you should always be working. All your life.”

From Nikolai Panov A Russian Painter who was painting Chekhov then
His maid called him from outside. He left for some time. Finally, he returned, and when we asked him why he was delayed, he reluctantly replied, “I had a medical patient waiting for me.”
I was surprised, “So late? Was it a friend?”
Chekhov replied, “Not at all. I saw her for the first time in my life. She needed a prescription for a medicine that can be poisonous. They can only dispense it from a pharmacy with a prescription.”
“You did not write it, did you?”
Anton Pavlovich did not answer anything. He sat at the fire-place, and threw in some more fire-wood. Then, after a long silence, he said quietly, “Maybe this is better for her. I looked into her eyes, and understood that she had made a decision. There is a big river not far from here, and the Stone Bridge. If she jumps, she would be in great pain before she died. With the poison, she would be better off.”
He was silent. We grew silent as well. Then, to change the subject, we began a conversation about literature.

In reading these accounts I was reminded of Janet Malcolm’s Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey that describes her wanderings about the places in Russia where Chekhov wrote and lived. She says Chekhov’s writings heighten her sense of what is important in life. All the while, she questions the enterprise of writing a biography of another person saying that it is impossible to ever truly know another person.

In a Paris Review interview, Malcolm commented, “…there is so such thing as a dispassionate observer, that every narrative is inflected by the narrator’s bias.”

And in her book on Chekhov, she wrote that biography “will always be “inescapably trivial” [as] “something lovely and precious has been defiled by the vulgar gaze of the outer world.”

She quotes Chekhov in a letter to his friend Ivan Sheheglov:

“A psychologist should not pretend to understand what he does not understand. Moreover, a psychologist should not convey the impression that he understands what no one understands. We shall not play the charlatan and we will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything.”

The Barbarian Nurseries

2012-01-23T04:42:00.000-10:00

Araceli saw her standing in the world with a new startling clarity. She lived with English-speaking strangers, high on a hill with the huge windows and the smell of solvents, and lacked the will to escape what she had become. Hector Tobar

I was born in Los Angeles, lived there throughout my youth, and left in 1954 to begin college. The town was not much more than a large pueblo then, although it grew rapidly in both numbers and prosperity during the war.

Since then, I’ve returned for brief visits, but after the early eighties I’ve never been back. Hector Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries brings me up to date on what the city is like these days. It bears only a passing resemblance to city that I knew.

Today it is a city of about four million individuals, largely composed of immigrants in which people of Hispanic or Latino origin constitute almost 50% of the population. Its population in my day was a little over one million, predominately Caucasian; today they constitute 25% of the cities’ population.

As the various ethnic groups who live there try to arrive at a common understanding of one another, more often then not, they fail. This becomes the focus of Tobar’s new novel primarily shaped around the life of Araceli Ramirez, the Mexican housekeeper of Scott and Maureen Torres-Thompson and their three children.

They live in the posh gated community of the not entirely fictional Laguna Rancho Estates. “…this house on a hill high above the ocean, on a cul-de-sac absent of pedestrians or playing children, absent of traffic, absent of the banter of vendors and policemen. It was a street of long silences.”

Scott’s millions made with a software company that folded during the stock market bust are rapidly disappearing. One by one, they cut back on the staff maintaining their estate until Araceli is the only one left.

Araceli is from Mexico City where she studied art, but economic hardship forced her to abandon her studies and come to America as so many others have. “All was well in her universe and then suddenly, and often without any discernible reason, she felt this vague but penetrating sense of impending darkness and loss.”

It arrives after a violent altercation between Scott and Maureen over the cost of a new desert garden Maureen had ordered that led them, independently, to leave home--Maureen with her baby Samantha to a spa, Scott to the home of an admiring co-worker--each expecting the other will stay to care for their two boys. Days follow in which neither one returns, leaving Araceli to wonder how much longer it will be before they do.

After four days of caring for the boys, with food running low and out of oncern for the boys, she realizes she has to do something. All she knows is that the boys’ grandfather lives somewhere in Los Angles. She takes his photo, with an address on the back, the two boys, and sets off on a search for him. They take a bus, train, and begin walking all over the distant, dangerous, unknown neighborhoods of the city. At this point, the novel begins to come alive.

They go from place to place without finding him, staying overnight at the homes of sympathetic strangers, eating strange food, worried about confrontations, all the while Araceli aware of what’s in store for her. The parents arrive back home, call the police believing the boys have been abducted, a media frenzy begins, social and racial conflict erupts, as she is accused of child abuse, endangerment or kidnapping, and hauled in and out of court, in a generalized institutional overreaction.

Eventually, she is able to communicate the facts of the matter to a sympathetic and colorful woman in Child Protective Services and a smart pro bono attorney. She is absolved of any crime, the judge berates the ambitious assistant district attorney and Araceli heads off toward an unknown destination. She has no choice as an illegal immigrant.

“…the absences and inequalities that were the core injustice of her existence. It is a big world, divided between rich and poor, just like those humorless lefties at the university said. What would I have become with a mother like Maureen…?”

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories

2012-01-20T04:47:00.000-10:00

“I stood and looked, I was always looking.” Don DeLillo

A bleak, threatening, sometimes menacing mood hangs over each of the short stories in Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmeralda. There is no joy in any of them, even in “Creation,” a romantic tale of three tourists in a remote Caribbean village who are trying to find a flight back home.

In looking at a painting, we are often invited to make up a story. Several of the characters in DeLillo’s collection do this during their daily comings and goings. Perhaps everyone does. “…we walked across the overpass. I wondered again, who these people were, the drivers and passengers, so many cars, the pressing nature of their passage, the lives inside.”

In “The Starveling” DeLillo depicts a lonely, middle-aged man who spends his time going to movies throughout the day--one in the morning, another after lunch, sometimes two, and then one more in the evening. He notices a woman in the theater who also appears to be an ardent moviegoer.

Thereafter he sees her at each of the performances he attends and begins following her. He creates a story: “…she was a person who lived within herself, remote, elusive, whatever else…lives alone, in one room, as he did.”

In “Midnight in Dostoyevsky” two students spend their time walking about the wintery northern town where their college is located. They engage in verbal battles over whatever they see. It is the core of their friendship. “Even in matters of pure physical reality, we depended on a friction between our basic faculties of sensation, his and mine…”

They begin noticing a man who seems to be walking nearby at the same time as they are. He is wearing a heavy coat. Is it a parka or an anorak? Or something else? They debate the matter, never coming to an agreement. Who is the man in the parka or the anorak? Elaborate stories are constructed. Their disagreement does not end peaceably.

There is a rhythm, a momentum to the nine stories that is hurried, as if you, or the writer, or character or someone else are on an underground subway heading somewhere rapidly.

A passage from “Human Movements in World War III” where two astronauts are circling the earth, drifting about in space observing various wars and other catastrophes:

People had hoped to be caught up in something bigger than themselves. They thought it would be a shared crisis. They would feel a sense of shared purpose, shared destiny. Like a snowstorm that blankets a large city—but lasting months, lasting years, carrying everyone along, creating fellow feeling where there was only suspicion and fear. Strangers talking to each other, meals by candlelight when the power fails. The war would ennoble everything we say and do. What was impersonal would become personal. What was solitary would be shared.

Great fun, these stories. Large truths. Colorless. Grim realities. Their mood is both hypnotic and infectious.

A Jew in the Northwest

2012-01-18T04:48:00.000-10:00

I came to see what else I might become, and like every traveler, what I’ve really discovered is who I am. William Deresiewicz

William Deresiewicz is a widely published, often controversial literary critic and author of the much talked about A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter. Before leaving the academic world he was professor of English at Yale.

Not long ago he spent a sabbatical in Portland, Oregon, “just for the hell of it, and by the time it was over, I never wanted to leave.” He says he fell in love with the place. “Everyone was so nice! They looked you in the eye! They smiled at you. They asked you how your day was going, and they really wanted to know.”

These are the first of many stereotypical characterizations of Portland and those who live there in his American Scholar (Winter 2012) essay, “A Jew in the Northwest.” He describes a typical 40ish Portlander as one with a full beard, big sweater and innocent face. I think of most of the others who bear no relationship to this person. He says the people are like the climate: mild and lacking in extremes, often with a positively bovine imperturbability. I suppose he doesn’t pay much attention to the local news or the daily weather report.

And so it goes. But his essay is fun and, as a Jew who has lived in the Northwest for all too many years, I was intrigued to read what living here means to him. It is nothing like I have ever experienced, perhaps because I arrived from entirely different world. And I trust by now that Deresiewicz has learned that there are a great many Jewish groups and individuals in the Northwest, often artists, writers and film-makers, not much different than those he knows in the East.

He begins with a discussion of Bernard Malamud and Leslie Fiedler, Jews who came to the Northwest as academic exiles. Malamud taught at what is now Oregon State University, a land grant college in Corvallis, a sleepy, rural town in the middle of farmland that Deresiewicz says must have seemed like the other side of the moon to Malamud. It still seems that way to me. A student described him as “a very unhappy man…a lonely man.” And yet he wrote three highly regarded novels while he was there.

Fiedler landed at the University of Montana in Missoula that Deresiewicz says was no Corvallis. “Montana was cowboys: wild, raunchy, libertarian.” But he felt trapped there, as his “Jewish identity remained acute, not to say aggrieved, his sense of being a misfit also.”

Deresiewicz feels he came as an immigrant. He found irresistible “the nature, and the alternative spirit, and the youthful optimism, and yes, damn it, the food…I wanted to chain myself to a parking meter, so they couldn’t take me away.”

I remember my first visit to Portland one summer when I was a graduate student. It was clear to me then and even clearer now that Portland isn’t a place where I want to live. Yet I have lived in Portland for almost 45 years and am more than ready to have them take me away.

Deresiewicz says what he misses in Portland isn’t culture--the New York museums, theater, a decent cannoli or pastrami sandwich. “It’s edge. It’s energy. It’s irony. It’s curiosity. It’s everything ethnicity and eastern speed impose on you.” I miss the sun, the blue sky, the warm days. I dread the months of rain, gray skies, the gloom that hangs over this city a fair amount of each year.

Tuesday 1/17/12: “Windy...cloudy with rain and snow. Temps nearly steady in the mid to upper 30s. Winds SSW at 20 to 30 mph.”

But Deresiewicz came to Portland to “discover a new America.” He says while New York is the city of his past, Portland—“green, self-limiting, communitarian—is the city of our future.” And yet, like Andre Aciman often says in his recent volume Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, Deresiewicz notes that while he left New York for the promise of a new life in Portland, once there, he began to miss the place he left.

Deresiewicz has lived in Portland for a fraction of the time I have. I am wondering if he too will grow tired of the endless days of rain and cloudy skies, if he will come to see that not everyone in Portland is bovine in spirit or wears thick sweaters, and that it isn’t the planner’s dream that everyone seems to think it is.

He concludes: “I understand why people used to go back to be buried in Calabria or County Cork. Put it this way: I want to live here, but I don’t want to die here.”

The Placebo Effect

2012-01-16T04:45:00.000-10:00

In any investigation of the effects of psychotherapy or a new drug, it is important to include control conditions, including at minimum a no-treatment control and at least one placebo condition.

The no-treatment condition measures change over time, while the placebo condition assesses the effect an inert substance or “phony” treatment. Individuals do get better with the passage of time and their belief that they have been given a particular treatment by a physician, who they like and in whom they have confidence.

In his article “The Power of Nothing” in the New Yorker (12/12/11), Michael Specter describes some recent experiments and current thinking on the effects of placebos. The work of Ted Kaptchuk, director of a Harvard institute dedicated to the study of placebos, constitutes a major portion of the article. Kaptchuk had previously practiced acupuncture in China

Soon after returning to this country he treated a woman for chronic bronchitis who was about to have an operation on her ovaries. A few weeks later the woman returned to his office and reported the pain in her ovaries had disappeared. Kaptchuk comments to Specter, “There was no fucking way needles or herbs did anything for that woman’s ovaries. It had to be some kind of placebo…”

Yet it is well known that a patient’s expectations can have a profound effect on the healing process and probably plays a role in any medical intervention, sometimes more so than others. And a good deal of the variability can probably be attributed to the patient, as some respond more to placebos than others, as well as the physician or therapist as some are better than others. They engender more confidence and probably have a good deal more “charisma.”

Kaptchuk considers himself one of the better ones. “I am a damn good healer. That is the difficult truth. If you needed help and you came to me, you would get better. Thousands of people have. Because, in the end, it isn’t really about the needles. It’s about the man.” Perhaps that sort of confidence is all it takes.

Specter describes several recent studies of the placebo effect. In one, “Patients [post-operative] who were told that they would receive a painkiller, whether they actually received it or not had the same experience in the trial as those who secretly received between six and eight milligrams of morphine—a significant amount.”

In a study of irritable bowel syndrome, one group received a placebo pill twice a day while those in the second received nothing. Before the study both groups were informed that placebos are inert sugar pills that are not effective. They were also informed that previous studies had demonstrated that placebos have significant healing effects. The results showed that the patients who were fully informed about placebos scored much better on standard measures of their condition than those who received nothing.

Other studies have shown that the larger the pill, the stronger the placebo effect. “Two pills are better than one, and brand name pills trump generics. Capsules are generally more effective than pills, and injections produce a more pronounced effect than either. There is even evidence to suggest that the color of medicine influences the way one responds to it…”

Taken together these studies provide fairly compelling evidence of the power of placebos.

Kaptchuk believes that even it’s all in your head, there must be some biological mechanism driving these reactions. Trying to unravel what that mechanism might be is the direction of his current research.

Kaptchuk admits, however, “I am sure I do not understand the placebo effect. I ask questions, hopefully valuable questions and we will see where the research lands.”

We Are The 1%

2012-01-13T04:42:00.000-10:00

We are the 1%, the 1% who keep reading notebooks. And here is what we believe.

The key word for the commonplace book is “annotated.” It is not just an anthology; the compiler reacts to the passages he has chosen or tells what the passages have led him to think about. A piece of prose, a poem, an aphorism can trigger the mind to consider a parallel, to dredge something from the memory, or perhaps to speculate with further range and depth on the same them. William Coe

There follows a few recent annotations of passages in my commonplace book.

On Biases
Near the end of his review of Daniel Kahneman’s widely praised Thinking, Fast and Slow Freeman Dyson asks, as Kahneman finally does, ‘What practical benefit can we derive from an understanding of our irrational mental processes?” In my mind, this is the critical point of all the research on our inferential shortcomings, our biases and illusions.

According to Dyson, Kahneman answers by saying that “he hopes to change our behavior by changing our vocabulary.” I suppose this translates into saying to yourself: Wait a moment. Am I falling prey to a bias or error in reasoning about my judgment? Is it (a tentative judgment now as I am stopping for a moment to think about it) an example of the availability bias or the confirmation bias, or some other cognitive error?

Holding back like this is not difficult to learn. Do we not admire the person who takes a while to respond to a question? Isn’t it a pleasure to see someone turning inward like that before firing off an answer?

Dyson concludes by hoping that our children and grandchildren will come to use this approach, the new vocabulary as he puts it, and will automatically correct their errors and biases when making decisions. He says we will owe a big debt to Kahneman if this “miracle” happens.

On Questioning
In a symposium on creativity, Gerald Schroeder, a physicist, claims that asking questions is the major source of creative behavior. He urges readers to take nothing on faith, keep wondering how things work, and never stop doubting.

The same point is made by Ezekiel Emanuel, Diane and Robert Levy who write that challenging conventional wisdom and “pushing the boundaries is exceedingly important to creativity—not taking what you or the world has as a given and trying to imagine it in a new way.”

I imagine that most creative thinkers use an approach not unlike that of a Socratic dialogue where research becomes a progression of questions designed to arrive at a conclusion quite different than the original one.

Some people feel very comfortable with this kind of approach. For them it becomes an endeavor to correct errors and sharpen beliefs and perhaps in the process arrive at something not recognized before.

I sense those of a more accepting frame of mind do not fall naturally into this mode of reasoning and are perhaps less likely to think of creative solutions than those of a more questioning frame of mind.

On The New Yorker
Patrick Kurp on his blog Anecdotal Evidence writes that, “The New Yorker in its most recent incarnation reflects the nation around it – self-absorbed, politically strident, smitten by celebrity, ultimately trivial. Worse, most of it is badly written.”

While I disagree with Kurp on the quality of its writing, I am aware that the character of the magazines has changed significantly from what it was, say ten or twenty years ago. Most notably it is far less devoted to the literary arts than it was in the good old days.

The days of two or three short stores are over. So too are those special issues devoted to one long essay on a major topic—Rachel Carson’s “The Silent Spring,” John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” or a those remarkable Salinger short stories. And those who have been reading the “New Yorker” forever surely miss the lengthy film reviews by Pauline Kael or the equally extensive Mavis Gallant commentaries from Paris.

To catch any of this old spirit you have to head for the magazine’s blogs, most notably the Book Bench and Culture Desk. But even here the material is short and less analytic.

Today I find myself scanning many issues, not reading much of anything, something that used to be inconceivably when it sometimes took a week or more to read everything before the next weekly gem arrived in the mail.

OCCUPY NOTEBOOKS!

Life in a Fishbowl

2012-01-11T05:31:00.000-10:00

With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of Art, I don’t see much else that can nurture human life. Muriel Barbery.

I usually enjoy film adaptations of novels. But the casting needs to fit whatever image I have of the characters and, in most respects, the story should match the one depicted in the book. Variations here and there are fine, of course, but I am generally displeased when they depart too greatly from my sense of the novel and its characters.

The best film adaptations also bring alive the characters on the page and clarify uncertainties I might have had about the story. That was certainty true of the film adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient that I must have seen three or more times, unlike the novel which I read once.

I read Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog almost three years ago; I saw the film adaption, "The Hedgehog," the other day. Barbery’s novel was widely read and appreciated in France; the film version was unknown to me, has never been shown in the multiplexes (not surprising these days), and only came to my attention during a brief showing at a nearby art house.

The novel is about a concierge, Renee, in a posh Parisian townhouse. The normally grumpy Rene is a closet intellectual with a room full of fine novels whose secret life is eventually found out by the sweet and precocious eleven year old Paloma and a newly arrived Japanese millionaire, Kakuro, both of whom befriend her and discover her reading life.

The film begins by focusing on Paloma’s adolescent complaints: Her mother is a tiresome antidepressant pill-popper, her sister is a toe-varnishing snot, and her father is a politician who barely has the time of day for any of them. Paloma compares her life to the family’s pet goldfish, locked away in a family fishbowl. She plans to take her life on her twelfth birthday, spending her days before then recording the absurdity of her life with her video camera.

Meanwhile the gruff, disheveled 54-year old Renne sweeps the floors, runs errands for the townhouse residents and generally keeps her distance from everyone but her room full of books and her cat, Leo for guess who. We are to think of her as a hedgehog, all bristly and sharp on the outside, but warm and gentle on the inside.

We learn that this is precisely the way she is with the arrival of Kakuro, who discovers very quickly her love of literature, whereupon the two begin a chaste, formal romance that transformations Renee—she has a stylish haircut, finds somewhat fashionable clothes to wear when Kakuro invites her to dinner at his apartment and for the first time she begins to smile.

Paloma finds herself drawn to these two peculiar individuals, secretly filming them and eventually spending time visiting each of them. She becomes aware of Renee’s gentle soul, her love of literature, and the quiet intelligence of Kakuro. Through her growing connection with each of them and her observations of the sources of Renee’s transformation, she realizes there is much more to life than her family fishbowl.

“With the exception of love, friendship, and the beauty of Art, I don’t see much else that can nurture human life.”

Maphead

2012-01-09T05:14:00.000-10:00

Since my earliest days, I have been fascinated by maps, the road maps I’d peruse as we were driving around California, the maps of the Paris arrondissments and Metro routes, any map in an Atlas. There was an enormous National Geographic map of the world that wallpapered one wall in the bedroom of my youth. In addition to numerous atlases, I recently acquired a Globe that looks somewhat like this.

Ken Jennings describes a real craziness about maps in his recent book Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks. In reading the book, I was hoping to find pages and pages of colorful, informative maps of places unknown, unvisited, and rich with mystery. However, there weren’t many. Instead, Jennings recounts his lifelong obsession with maps, geographical trivia, and map sub-cultures.

Apparently he has good company. “Now when I [Joseph Conrad] was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth and when I was one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there.”

Maphead consists of a dozen chapters concerning some aspect of matters geographical—the Library of Congress map collection that is the world’s largest, the world of rare map collectors, National Geographic Bee, development of spatial awareness and mapheads who invent imaginary countries.

“Islandia is a tiny kingdom at the southern tip of the Karain sub-continent, isolated from the rest of the world by the impassable Sobo Steppes and hundreds of miles of trackless ocean….Islandia through intricate and fully realized, is an entirely fictional country.”

Jennings also includes a chapter comparing the geographical knowledge of individuals in various countries. He describes a National Geographic survey of college-aged people in nine different countries, testing place-name knowledge, recent geographical changes, and map reading skills.

Do you know where Burkina Fasso is? How about its capital and the six countries that it borders?

The top scorers were Sweden, Germany and Italy where about 70% of the questions were answered correct. U.S. students averaged a “dreary” 40%--next to last (“Thank you, Mexico!”). The study was not the most rigorous but its results are similar to what investigators find in comparing American students with those in other countries in subjects like math and science.

Maphead also charts the increasing importance of GPS systems that many individuals use frequently on their cell phones and cars, as well as the extraordinary development of virtual maps by Google Earth with its rapidly growing library of aerial photographs.

“…much of the aerial imagery that Google posts, old and new, has never been seen by human eye-balls before…and sometimes there are things there at the bottom that were never know before.”

In discussing Google Earth Jennings finally gets a little bit serious in contrast to most of the other chapters that are little more than light and breezy discussions of geographical details. He suggests that unlike previous maps based on a mapmaker’s version of reality, those from Google’s virtual globe are reality. “Because its globe looks like the real place, it blurs the distinction between map and territory.”

Reed College

2012-01-05T14:11:00.000-10:00

I taught at Reed College in Portland Oregon for over 25 years. You may know something about the place—the bright and kooky students, its dedication to serious study, and reputation for graduating students who go on to receive advanced degrees.

I was always grateful to be a part of the Reed Community and think often about the important ways in which it shaped my life. It was a privileged to be there and, lo and behold, be paid to teach and do research on matters that were important to me at the time with the talented individuals who came to study there.

Last year Reed celebrated its one-hundredth birthday with a “gargantuan party, complete with dancers, drummers, jugglers, mad scientists, and a massive chorus reciting lines from the Iliad in Greek.”

The December 2011 issue of the “Reed Magazine” marked the centennial with a series of articles on student and faculty views and an alphabetically organized list of the people, traditions and ideas that have characterized Reed during its first 100 years.

A biology student said: “Reed taught me that the root of genius is passion. I was lucky to meet so many passionate geniuses at Reed.”

An economics senior commented: “This is a place where anything can happen. The Reed community is not just bounded by campus. It stretches across the globe and spans generations.”

In 1991 Steve Jobs was honored with a special award for distinguished accomplishment in science and technology. Although Jobs dropped out after one semester, he dropped back in as he put it for another year and a half to take classes, most notably in calligraphy.

In accepting the award he said that as a freshman “I was forced to go to humanities lectures it seemed like every day… And at the time I thought these were meaningless and even somewhat cruel endeavors to be put through. I can assure you that as the patina of time takes its toll, I thank God that I had these experiences here. It has helped me in everything I’ve ever done, although I wouldn’t have guessed it at the time.”

The poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1974 for his book Turtle Island, graduated from Reed in 1951 with a dual degree in anthropology and literature. Snyder was raised in the Pacific Northwest and has often returned to the College for poetry readings. "What I Have Learned" was published in his 1983 collection Axe Handles.

WHAT HAVE I LEARNED
What have I learned but
the proper use for several tools?

The moments
between hard pleasant tasks

To sit silent, drink wine,
and think my own kind
of dry crusty thoughts.

-the first Calochortus flowers
and in all the land,
it's spring.
I point them out:
the yellow petals, the golden hairs
to Gen.

Seeing in silence:
never the same twice,
but when you get it right,

you pass it on.

The Commonplace Book Tradition

2012-01-03T07:05:00.000-10:00

As the New Year begins, the commonplace book tradition is alive and well, at least as well as any tradition can be that has lived as long and through as many centuries as it has.

Nancy Kelly writes a beautiful blog on the importance of commonplacing and some of its historical antecedents on her blog, Sage Parnassus.

A friend who introduced me to the commonplace book tradition and I am sure has read every book in the New York Public Library sends me a passage from Willard Randall’s Ethan Allen: His Life and Times. (I guess this is one she hadn’t got around to yet.)

“In my youth I was much disposed to contemplation…I committed to manuscript such sentiments or arguments, as appeared most consonant to reason, lest through the debility of memory my improvement should have been less gradual. This method of scribbling I practiced for many years, from which I experienced great advantages in the progression of learning and knowledge…of grammar and language, as well as the art of reasoning…”

In a 19th Century American Literature class at St. Mary’s College in California, Professor Barry Horwitz requires his students write in their online commonplace book during each class period. They are instructed that each entry should include at least three quotations they found significant from the class readings.

He tells the students to choose passages that offer a powerful statement or one that helps to understand the text or that makes a strong impression, say one you disagree with or one that rings true to your life. As the term progresses, each student’s commonplace book is posted on the class website. An example of those from one class of twenty-eight students is shown here. Have a look--each one is distinctive, annotated thoughtfully, with attractive themes.

Periodically, “The Berkeley Daily Planet” publishes Dorothy Bryant’s annotated diary of the passages she adds to her commonplace book. Here is her latest:

“He who despairs because of the news is a coward, but he who sees hope in the human condition is mad.” Albert Camus, 1943, occupied France. Bryant comments:

“Camus wrote that sentence in his journal as he began dangerous underground work in France against the occupying Nazis. Under these conditions, his terse statement sounds like one of those dark jokes one makes in order to ease tension when engaged in activities that may bring capture, torture, and death at any moment. Today, in more “ordinary” times, this statement seems merely an echo of our passing thoughts as we scan the daily news in print or on TV. Do we ever pat ourselves on the back for maintaining this heroic balancing act? We should. Happy Holidays.

The “American Scholar” continues its practice of including a commonplace book section at the end of each issue. It does so by collecting notable quotations on a single theme in a two-page spread without comment or annotation. Fear was the theme of the Winter 2012 issue.

“Fear is the basic condition…the job that we’re here to do is to learn how to live win a way that we’re not terrified all the time.” David Foster Wallace

“I begin to believe in only one civilizing influence—the discover one of these days of a destructive agent so terrible that War shall mean annihilation and men’s fears shall force them to keep the peace. Wilkie Collins.

Here are a couple on Fear from my commonplace book:

“Is it so that everything we do is done out of fear of loneliness? ….Why else do we hold on to all these broken marriages, false friendships, boring birthday parties? What would happen if we refused all that, put an end to the skulking blackmail and stood on our own?” Pascal Mercier

“…sometimes seeing one’s fears written down, seeing them articulated, can reduce their efficacy. I don’t mean that having them before you on a piece of paper causes them to evaporate, but it can lessen their potency.” Elliot Perlman

The Year's Best

2011-12-16T04:41:00.000-10:00

This is the season when almost everyone is making a list of their favorite books of the year, in most cases a list of the ten best. The list on the Salon online magazine was a little different. They asked 50 reasonably well-known writers to name their favorite book of the past year. Their selections included two that were mentioned more than once—Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (three times) and Volt by Alan Heathcock (twice).

However, in a glaring and unforgivable omission, Salon did not ask me for my selection. In putting the question to myself, I came up with a list of the following 18 books that I that I consider my top 18 of the year. What is my favorite of the group? That is a tough one.

Paul Auster Sunset Park
Joshua Ferris The Unnamed
Natalia Ginzburg Little Virtues
Tom Rachman The Imperfectionists
Jonathan Dee The Privileges
David Vann Caribou Island

Teju Cole Open City
Patrick Leigh Fermor A Time to Keep Silence
Mary Gordon The Love of My Youth
James Salter Light Years
Alastair Reid Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner
Iris Origo War in Val d’Orcia

Andre Aciman Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere
Allegra Goodman The Cookbook Collector
Ann Patchett State of Wonder
Lily Tuck I Married You for Happiness
Michael Ondaatje The Cat’s Table
Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot

As I think back on the experience I had reading each one, there are three that brought me the greatest pleasure and insight: Open City, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere and I Married You for Happiness. Of these three, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere garnered by far the most entries in my commonplace book, always a good measure of a book’s literary value to me, but by no means the only one.

However, I found Aciman’s writing utterly compelling, as it always is, those long, wandering, here and there, back and forth, ambivalent, questioning sentences.

…the life we think of each day and the life not lived, and the life half lived, and the life we wish we’d learn to live, while we still have time, and the life we want to rewrite if only we could, and the life we know remains unwritten and may never be written at all, and the life we hope others may live far better than we have…

But I spoke these words without conviction, and would have thought I hadn’t meant them had I not grown used to the notion that speaking without conviction is how I speak the truth.

And his frequent reflections on the concept of Place, of neighborhood, of city and the memories they evoke, also ambivalent, is much like my own. So I’ll cast my vote for Andre Aciman’s Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere and look forward to hearing from Salon next year.

Marks In The Margin will be on a holiday break for the next few weeks. See you next year. Meanwhile:

On Rereading

2011-12-14T04:40:00.000-10:00

“The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does.” Patricia Spacks

I am reading On Rereading by Patricia Meyer Spacks. It is the first time I’ve read it, although I have reread the first chapter that sketches Spacks’ views on the value of rereading and the reasons that motivate her to devote a fair amount of time to rereading literary fiction.

She suggests we reread for enjoyment, a way to evoke memories, a reminder of forgotten truths, as well as a source of new ones. But we also reread, she says, to measure how we have changed or even if we have changed. “…but for most readers, rereading provides, in contrast, an experience of unexpected change.” She cites a passage from an essay on rereading by Vivian Gornick:

“When I read Colette in my twenties, I said to myself, That is exactly the way it is. Now I read her and I find myself thinking, How much smaller this all seems than it once did—cold, brilliant, limited—and silently I am saying to her, Why aren’t you making more sense of things?”

But for the most part Spacks suggests we reread fiction because we want to re-experience the pleasure we found when we first read a book, the enjoyment that can arise from an engaging story, stimulating truth or fine writing.

The bulk of her text describes the various encounters she has had rereading books. She treats the books she read as a child, her favorite Jane Austen, those she read in the 1950s, 1960s, and the 1970s, the books she read as a professional teacher and critic, those she ought to have liked, but didn’t and the ones she has read as a member of a book group.

In the final chapter, Coda, she reviews what she has learned from all the books she’s reread. She wonders what the era of electronic books will do to reading and the experience of rereading and confesses she can’t begin to imagine what that will be.

At the same time she realizes how much she has “been shaped—personality, sensitivities, convictions—by reading.” She also comes to better understand how the extent to which her values and attitudes have changed over the years.

“If Herzog has meanings that I was earlier unable to detect; if The Golden Notebook, with large pretensions, now seems relatively trivial in import; if the facts of a book’s nature can shift in such ways, value judgments, too must be less stable than they appear.”

Most of the rereading I do is simply because I’ve forgotten so much, if not all, of what the book was about, why I liked it, and why it is (usually) still on my shelf. I reread because I forget so much. And I don’t do a great deal of rereading, since I really only started reading seriously relatively late in life and have a lot catching up to do.

And then I think about those truly special books I’ve read. These are books I don’t forget. And, unlike Spacks, I know I don’t want to reread them again. I don’t want to do anything to alter the memory that I have of those days, the people in the book, their story and the great writing. None of it can ever be repeated. They were the best and I want to keep it just that way.

I’d rather not experience Gornick’s melancholy lament: “I want the reading of Colette to be the same as it once was, but it is not. Yet I am wrenched by the beauty of that which no longer feels large, and can never feel large again.”

Here is a brief video of Spacks talking about her book:

Patricia Meyer Spacks, ON REREADING from Harvard University Press on Vimeo.

Doctor to the Resistance

2011-12-12T04:39:00.000-10:00

We lived in the shadows as soldiers of the night, but our lives were not dark and martial. . . There were arrests, torture, and death for so many of our friends and comrades, and tragedy awaited all of us just around the corner. But we did not live in or with tragedy. We were exhilarated by the challenge and rightness of our cause. It was in many ways the worst of times and in just as many ways the best of times, and the best is what we remember today. Jean-Pierre Levy

Few Americans participated in the French Resistance, a movement that will always represent in my mind the epitome of moral courage. I wrote about one here. Although I imagine there were others, the only one I am aware of is Dr. Sumner Jackson. These are individuals we don’t want to forget.

Jackson’s various roles in the Resistance are described in Hal Vaughan’s Doctor to the Resistance: The Heroic True Story of an American Surgeon and His Family in Occupied Paris. Sumner Jackson graduated from the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1919 and soon thereafter joined the British Royal Medical Corp as a field surgeon during the First World War. Once America entered the war, he was enlisted by the U.S. Army Medical Corp to serve at the Red Cross Hospital in Paris. It was there that he met his wife, Toquette, a French citizen who was a nurse at the hospital then.

After the war, the couple returned to his home in Maine. But they found it difficult to adjust to life there and moved back to Paris. Jackson worked at the American Hospital in Paris, where he remained until the Germans captured him in 1944.

The Jacksons began acting as Resistance agents in 1940, soon after the Germans occupied Paris. At one point they even asked their 14 year-old son, Phillip, to gather photographic intelligence of German submarine and ship building installations around the port of Saint-Nazaire. However, most of their activities took place at the American Hospital and their home on Avenue Foch, not far from the hospital.

They used their home as a shelter for downed Allied pilots who they helped to escape back to England via the various secret routes to the Spanish coast, to hide French militants wanted by the Nazis, and to relay encrypted messages to members of the Resistance. At the hospital Jackson also treated and provided care for injured pilots, French citizens on the run from the Nazis, and members of the Resistance itself.

All the while they were trying to survive through bitter winters with scarcely any heating fuel and with limited food and medical supplies for themselves, the staff and patients at the hospital.

In 1944 the Jackson’s housemaid found anti-Nazi notes in Phillip’s clothes while doing the laundry. Soon after, the Gestapo detained the three members of the Jackson family and transported them to work camps, where most prisoners either died of beatings, starvation, or exhaustion.

Toquette was send to Ravensbruck and somehow managed to survive the war. Jackson and Philip were sent to Neuengamme. As the Americans approached the camp, the prisoners were taken to the port of Jubeck and forced into a prison ship. In an aerial attack on the German ships as they leaving the port on their way to Sweden, Jackson and Philip’s ship was bombed and quickly sunk. Jackson drowned while ministering to the injured, while Philip was able to swim back to shore.

By participating in the French Resistance Dr. Jackson, Phillip and Toquette joined with “Thousands of French patriots…who, under circumstances that none had foreseen, began to do things they never would have imagined possible. … They simply refused, at risk of their lives, to accept dishonor and degradation of human values.”

The Marriage Plot

2011-12-09T05:17:00.001-10:00

There is no happiness in love except at the end of the English novel. Jeffrey Eugenides

There are many strands running through Jeffrey Eugenides new novel, The Marriage Plot—the future of the novel, the meaning of love, and the quest for religious insight. Two others loomed large for me—the effects of reading fiction and the power of manic-depression.

The scene is 1982, the place is Brown University, the characters are three graduating seniors, Madeleine Hanna, an English major and her two suitors Leonard Bankhead, a handsome, talented student of semiotics and Mitchell Grammaticus, a prospective theology student, also talented, but struggling to compete with Leonard for Madeleine’s affection.

The novel begins with books, the books on Madeleine’s dormitory bookshelves—the Henry James, the complete Modern Library, the many 18th and 19th century novels, the moderns, too. The novel ends with a lengthy question Mitchell poses about a half-fictional, half-realistic novel. In between, we are led to wonder whether novels are actually about “real life.”

Do books change us, what good are they for, do they have any practical use or are they simply about other books? Madeleine is seriously in love with Leonard and they are both reading Roland Barthe’s book A Lover’s Discourse in the semiotics class they are taking. Eugenides writes,

“The more of A Lover’s Discourse she read, the more in love she felt. She recognized herself on every page…Here was a book addressed to lovers, a book about being in love that contained the word love in just about every sense. And oh, how she loved it.”

No matter that Barthe’s book rejects the belief that books are “about” something. “If it was “about” anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being about things.”

Eugenides’ descriptions of Leonard’s manic-depression, as bi-polar disorder was known then, are handled so well and are precise in their accuracy. Perhaps he has experienced it, known someone who has (as I have) or read the books carefully. Regardless, the violent swings, the manic highs, the depressive helplessness, its unpredictability and the terrible effects of the drug lithium that was about the only medication used at that time seem to me thoroughly true to the “disease.”

…something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.…his mind kept up its play-by-play analysis of the contest under way…You can’t get clean from depression. Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch where it hurts. It always will be there, though.

In one of Madeleine’s English classes Professor Saunders, her senior thesis adviser, declares the novel, especially those devoted to the marriage plot, had reached its highpoint with the nineteenth century novel. “As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn’t mean much anymore, and neither did the novel.”

The pleasure of reading The Marriage Plot refutes Saunders’ claim and suggests that Eugenides is quite ready to place his bets on the classic novel. “What exquisite guilt she felt wickedly enjoying narrative…Madeleine felt safe in a nineteenth-century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.”

Does Madeleine cast her lot with the troubled Leonard or the calm and reflective Mitchell or does she give up on the idea of marriage all together? You care about these people and you want to find out what she decides even in an age where marriage seems like a thing of the past, where pre-nuptial agreements and filing for separation or divorce are routine matters.

Yes, it is still possible to develop a fine novel that is sustained by the themes of love and marriage, as if anyone ever had any doubts in the first place.

The Third Place

2011-12-07T04:53:00.000-10:00

“Conversation is a crucial thing in Spanish culture. Writers, artists, poets and philosophers, intellectuals in general used to join ever day at the cafes to talk around a drink about the human and the divine and to try and arrange the problems of the world. This habit is called tertulia. German philosophers used to think first then write. Spanish philosophers use to talk, and then, if it works, to write. For the Spanish, talk is a form of thinking.”

Imagine a place where you went each day to chat with your friends, to write, or simply get away from everything and spend a quiet afternoon reading or brooding.

In his book The Great Good Place: Café’s Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars Hangouts and How They Get You Through the Day, Ray Oldenburg refers to these settings as Third Places, informal gathering places away from a person’s home and place of work. He discusses the German beer gardens, the English pubs, French cafes and the American tavern.

“In cities blessed with their own characteristic form of these Great Good Places, the stranger feels at home—nay, is at home—whereas in cities without them, even the native does not feel at home.”

He says informal gathering places are largely absent from the countless suburban communities in this country now. Oldenburg suggests that where the citizens of a country have no place to spend time outside their home or place of work, something profoundly important is missing from their life. This is the problem of place in America.

What many people in both suburbia and metropolitan areas are missing are places to gather whenever they want, as often as they want, nearby and easily accessible that are “real life alternatives to television, easy escapes from the cabin fever of marriage and family life that do not necessitate getting into an automobile.”

We often hear about how deficient American life has become, how people are distressed at the quality of their lives and how so many need to seek assistance to get their act together. Oldenburg attributes part of this general malaise to the inability to participate in the pleasures of these informal gathering places.

In contrast, the French, he says, have solved the problem of place. There are usually several coffeehouses in each of the neighborhoods of any French city. It is easy to walk there and many go to the same place at the same time each day so they can count on the regulars being there.

The Parisian café is legendary as a place for writing letters, books, or simply studying. Around the Sorbonne or any city in France near a university students gather at all hours of the day to discuss the work they are doing and the latest cultural movement. Susan Sontag wrote, “After work, or trying to write or paint, you come to a café looking for people you know. Preferably with someone, or at least with a definite rendezvous …One should go to several cafes—average: four in an evening.”

According to Oldenburg there are several fundamental characteristics of these settings.

• Everyone is considered an equal.
• Conversation is the main activity.
• The “regulars” can be counted on to be there.
• The mood is both playful and serious.
• It feels like a home away from home.

In addition, the traditional third places are fundamentally settings for friendship and companionship. The need for such settings can hardly be denied even for those who enjoy their times of solitude that are paradoxically sometimes spent in a café. A contemporary regular said, “There’s a recognition here that people come to a café to not be alone”

The Cat's Table

2011-12-05T04:43:00.000-10:00

“It is only now, years later, having been prompted by my children to describe the voyage, that it becomes an adventure, when seen through their eyes, even something significant in a life.” Michael Ondaatje

I find myself looking back more and more now as Michael Ondaatje does in his recent novel The Cat’s Table. The tale is narrated by an older version of the fictional Michael’s future self, as he recounts a critical youthful experience in his life and sees its importance in a way that was impossible at the time it occurred.

Michael, nicknamed Mynah as a youth, looks back on the twenty-one day journey from the then Ceylon to England that he took by ocean liner, the Oronsay, at the age of eleven. In an author’s note at the end of the novel, Ondaatje says The Cat’s Table is fictional and the ship, the characters in the tale and its locations is an “imagined rendering.” Why he says this is a mystery to me, when in fact, it is well-known that as a young man Ondaatje did travel by ship from Ceylon to England, did, as the novel depicts at the end, become a writer, and surely did encounter passengers on the ship that bear some resemblance to those depicted in the novel.

Knowing all this, however, in no way detracts from pleasure in reading the magical tale he unfolds during his three-week voyage through three oceans, two seas (Red and Arabian) and the Suez Canal. The “cat’s table” refers to the table where he and a group of “insignificant” adults and his two great companions, Cassius and Ramadhin, were seated at mealtimes. It is the table most distant from the one occupied by the Captain and his group of notables. Cassius is the wild one, the troublemaker, while Ramadhin is quite, serious and ill with asthma.

Ondaatje writes: “What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power…So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large and interesting with strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.” Once they realize they are virtually invisible in the midst of all the other passengers, the three boys proceed each day and night of the voyage to engage in a series of wild adventures that largely pass unnoticed. “Each day we had to do at least one thing that was forbidden.”

They discover a mural of a giant nude women deep in the ship’s hull that was painted by soldiers when the ship was used to carry troops during World War II; they visit an artificially lit garden hidden away below the lower deck; one night they tie themselves to the deck at the front of the ship during a cyclone, as the waves sweep over the bow; and each evening they hid themselves in one of lifeboats to steal a glance at the prisoner-in-chains who was being transported to England to be tried for committing a murder and only allowed out of his shipboard cell for a brief walk in the middle of the night.

As Michael grows older he moves to Canada and tries to stay in touch with the friends he made on that youthful voyage. He learns that Cassius has become a highly regarded artist and during a visit to London goes to the gallery where his paintings were showing. He sees that one depicts the dock they looked down upon when the ship paused at the Suez Canal. He learns that Ramidhin has died of his illness and takes the overnight flight to England to be with his family at the funeral.

Do certain childhood experiences echo in your life the way the journey on the Oronsay does for Michael? In all the experiences Ondaatje recounts, we realize that Michael is the observer, the outsider who even though he was just a young boy, was able to understand what the gestures and the words of those around him meant. Recalling them anew now, he arrives at an even deeper understanding of their meaning and the role they continue to play in his life.

The Cat’s Table ends with a visit Michael made to his cousin, Emily, who was also a passenger on the Oronsay’s journey to England. He wonders if the adult she became was influenced by any of the events on that journey and concludes he can never know how much it had altered her. “As far as I could tell it seemed to have been for Emily just a three-week journey...[and] how little all of it appeared to mean to her.”

The Moviegoing Scene

2011-12-02T04:56:00.000-10:00

His refuge from IBM is the cinema. In a film called L’Eclisse a woman wanders through the streets of a sunstruck, deserted city…. The woman is Monica Vitti. With her perfect legs and sensual lips and abstracted look, Monica Vitti haunts him; he falls in love with her. He has dreams in which he, of all men in the world is singled out to be her comfort and solace…J. M. Coetzee Youth

The weekend approaches. The time when I normally head out to see a film. But increasingly I am finding it impossible to bring myself to see anything playing in one of the local movie houses. Those that I do see are the exceptions and nothing like the old days when there were so many films around, I often missed a few because I couldn’t spend all day, every day, inside a movie house.

The days when you went to see every film from France and Italy are long gone. Where oh where is Ingmar Bergman these days? I conclude the Summer Doldrums have become a permanent, year-round fixture. It is not unusual for me to walk out of a film well before it is over.

A while ago things had become so bleak I decided to see Shall We Dance? a remake of the quite wonderful Japanese film of the same name. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Everyone enjoyed it. When it was over, the audience burst into applause. Such a light film. Fun yes. But applause?

I was reminded of a Sunday matinee when a young woman came down before the audience and asked for everyone's attention. She announced to the perplexed assembly that it was her mother's birthday, indeed, a very special one, and asked everyone to join in singing happy birthday to her. Without a moment's delay, everyone belted out a lusty Happy Birthday to Sandy followed by wild applause from the smiling moviegoers.

After Shall We Dance? was over, I began musing over a scene where a middle-aged woman meets the detective she has hired to snoop on her husband who she suspects is having an affair with his dancing instructor. They meet in a bar. She wants him to end the investigation. The detective wants to flirt with her. He asks her why do so many people get married? She replies at once by saying it is to bear witness to your life.

I was puzzled by her comment. How odd I thought. I recalled a remark made by one of the characters in Rachel Cusk’s novel The Lucky Ones that I happened to be reading then: “I felt a terrible despair at having failed to find another human being to corroborate my existence.”

I didn’t think that was why most people married or the reason they would give if you asked them why they did. That is not why I married my wife or why she married him as far as I know. It had nothing to do with confirming our existence. Yes, it was sometimes pleasing to tell her about my day, how I felt, and the ideas I had and equally pleasing to hear about hers. Sometimes it was even instructive. But our marriage was not dependent on our bearing witness to these accounts.

And so this is how it goes from one weekend to the next, as I ponder the meaning of the films I can mange to see in the local movie houses or the old ones I watch once again on a DVD. They engage me as much as the books I read or the theatrical performances I attend. They puzzle me, move me, sometimes clarify matters, but more often they confuse me even further, especially over questions of moral thought and action. These I never stop wrestling with. Progress is slow.

The Mind Body Problem

2011-11-30T04:41:00.000-10:00

“But I discovered early that I liked ideas much better than people and that was the end of my loneliness.” Rebecca Goldstein

Some weeks ago in my search for a novel of intellectual debate with a good story thrown in, as well, I recalled The Mind Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein that I had read many years ago, so long ago, it predated my commonplace book. Goldstein majored in philosophy at college, earned her doctorate in the discipline and subsequently returned to her alma mater to teach several philosophy courses. She wrote The Mind Body Problem during a summer vacation break.

I had just come through a very emotional time….Suddenly, I was asking the most unprofessional’ sorts of questions (I would have snickered at them as a graduate student), such as how does all this philosophy I’ve studied help me to deal with the brute contingencies of life? How does it relate to life as it’s really lived? I wanted to confront such questions in my writing, and I wanted to confront them in a way that would insert `real life’ intimately into the intellectual struggle. In short I wanted to write a philosophically motivated novel.

This is exactly what she accomplished in this novel and why I both recalled it, which isn’t always the case for one I read a long time ago, to say nothing of those I read last month. The novel begins with a question. At once you know a philosopher is a work here. “I’m often asked what it’s like to be married to a genius.”

Thereafter, Goldstein proceeds to unravel what it was like for Renee Feuer who enrolls as a graduate student in philosophy at Princeton where she meets the legendary mathematical genius, Noam Himmel, who she marries. They squabble, battle over intellectual puzzles, he treats her distainfully, she has affairs, and along the way delves deeper into the mind-body problem. Renee describes it this way: how is it possible to reconcile the “outer place of bodies and the inner private one of minds.” Sex versus cerebration as one person aptly put it.

In a recent interview Goldstein was asked, “What is love?” She answers rather elliptically but thoroughly true to life. “What is love? … we all want good things to happen to ourselves and keep the bad things at bay. You know when you love somebody you want that as much for them if not more than you do for yourself. I mean that is just the world has to go right for them or you won’t be able to bear it. … “

The novel ends with an expression of her answer. Within a few years, Noah loses his mathematical prowess. “I don’t have it anymore. I never knew what it was when I had it, and now I don’t have it anymore.” Noah breaks down with his confession. He no longer has the power to create but the desire as well and for a mathematical genius you need both.

A few years ago, Goldstein was awarded a MacArthur “genius” award. The Foundation announced: “Rebecca Goldstein is a writer whose novels and short stories dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of imaginative storytelling. … Goldstein’s writings emerge as brilliant arguments for the belief that fiction in our time may be the best vehicle for involving readers in questions of morality and existence."

You may find more of Goldstein’s numerous literary and philosophical works here.

The Spirit of the Coffee House

2011-11-28T04:42:00.000-10:00

It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt had on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. Hemingway

Over thirty years ago I bought a book titled Coffee Houses of Europe. I don't know how I managed to save it all this time, since it is a large, heavy book, filled with beautiful color photographs of some of the most famous coffee houses in Europe. Really, it’s a coffee table book and apparently it has become quite a treasure.

I’ve also had a life-long interest in the coffee house culture and the spirit that it is said to engender. No doubt that’s because most of the cities I’ve lived in have not been blessed with coffee houses or its culture. But in those that I have visited in France and Italy, I’ve felt their warmth and congeniality.

In his Introduction to the photographic plates, the Hungarian-born writer George Mikes distinguishes between the classic coffee houses of Central Europe--Vienna, Budapest, Prague—from those of Lisbon, Paris and London. He calls the latter “places,” while those in Central Europe are “a way of life…a way of looking at the world by those who do not want to look at the world at all.”

While the distinction is untrue, the classic coffee house often becomes a habitual part of a “regular’s” daily life and for some, a place where most of the day is spent. “There were coffee houses for writers, journalists and artists, and these were the most famous, because their members were…”

Mikes must have a thing against the French because he asserts, The French simply use the cafes; they don’t live there.” He claims they actually go there to have a cup of coffee or meet a friend. That is contradicted by my brief experiences at the cafes around the Sorbonne. There I have observed lively conversations between students and their professors that have surely lasted more than the hour or so of my visit.

In The Great Good Place Ray Oldenburg writes, “The coffee house, however, was fundamentally a form of human association, a gratifying one, and the need for such a society can hardly be said to have disappeared.” This has been the case from their beginning in Istanbul, where the first coffeehouses were established during the sixteenth century.

A French observer described these early coffeehouses as settings where “…news is communicated and where those interested in politics criticize the government.” Games—chess, backgammon, checkers—were also played and writers of the days read their poems and stories. This tradition spread to England and the countries of Western and Central Europe during the following century. Again their central features were sociability marked by congeniality, conversation, and social equality.

The spirit of the classic European coffeehouse has all but vanished in this country. Instead, they have been transformed into solitary, monastery-like places of keyboards and screens. Where there was once a lively conversation, now there is silence. Where there was once a group of friends and colleagues gathered around a table, now there are solitary individuals. Where there was once writing notebooks, now there are laptop computers.

Malcolm Gladwell put this as well as anyone: “I like people around me; but I don’t want to talk to them.”

Bookstore Revivals

2011-11-23T04:42:00.000-10:00

All my life, though, among my daydreams about careers that might have made me happy, has been this one: a small shop somewhere, some partner and I buying and selling used books. Sigrid Nunez The Last of Her Kind

Is there anything more pleasurable than walking into a bookshop, a small independent bookshop and roaming around the tables and bookshelves for a while? Just poking around, having a look, selecting a book to read for a while, moving on to another one.

Patrick Kurp writes about such an experience on his blog Anecdotal Evidence: “I grew up a hunter-gatherer, with the emphasis on hunter. Truly, hunting is the thing, not the gathering. Stalking the butterfly is the adventure, not the netting, pinching and pinning. Trolling the dim shelves of a book shop, alert and expectant, outweighs the pleasure of finding the three-volume Everyman’s edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy priced at $10. Ordering the same from Amazon.com is not the same. My Burton carries an addendum of happy memory, a covert connection to an autumn afternoon in Schuylerville, N.Y.”

There are still a few book lovers dedicated to preserving this type of hunting by opening and maintaining independent bookstores of their own. Perhaps you have heard that Ann Patchett and her business partner have recently opened Parnassus Books in Nashville. She professed to little interest in retail bookselling but “I also have no interest in living in a city without a bookstore.”

In describing Patchett’s new store Julie Bosman writes in the Times that “She is joining a small band of bookstore owners who have found patches of old-fashioned success in recent years, competing where Amazon cannot: by being small and sleek, with personal service, intimate author events and a carefully chosen rotation of books.”

During her summer book tour to promote her novel, State of Wonder, Patchett became more and more convinced by the crowd that showed up night after night, that not only were people still reading books, but that a small, independent bookstore was a solid business model. This did seem a little out of touch, although perhaps not for a community like Nashville where there are a fair number of universities, a sizable literary community, and the kind of start-up cash that both Patchett and her business partner are willing to make.

If a small bookstore is going to be successful today, I think it has to have a few features that set it apart from others, especially online stores and the one remaining big-box chain in this country. Sarah McNally the owner of McNally Jackson Books in New York seems to have found a few ways to do that

The store is known for its large literature collection organized by country—French, Italian, Portuguese, etc. It has a small café, lounge chairs, and the only “print-right-now” book-making machine in New York, one of 80 worldwide.

The rather enormous Book Espresso Machine (an ATM for books) can download, bind, and trim a paperback book in minutes drawing from a current collection of seven million titles. The device can also print self-published books which McNally’s machine does on the average almost 700 a month. Walk into her bookstore, hand her your masterpiece, bingo, you can put it on the shelf.

At a book fair several years ago, McNally realized “There were people greedy for books, rabid for books and I thought: This is what I want to be doing. I want to be with readers.”

The Truck

2011-11-21T04:41:00.000-10:00

“…he felt at home in Africa as food was scarce there too and everyone was also barefoot"

Nouakchott is the capital and largest city of the west African country of Mauritania. It lies on the border of the great Sahara desert. Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish writer and journalist is sitting on a stone at the edge of the Ouadane oasis, northeast of Nouakchott. He sees two glaring lights off in the distance. They appear to be moving around quite a bit. They draw closer.

I am learning about Mauritania. I am entranced by the names—Nouakchott, Ouadane, Ryszard Kapuscinski. Can you pronounced those words or know much about them? I am reading “The Truck: Hitchhiking Through Hell” Kapuscinski’s 1999 New Yorker “Letter from Mauritania.” He is describing a journey he took across the Sahara.

After a day of blistering hot heat, it suddenly becomes bitter cold. A few men sitting nearby wrap themselves in blankets. The lights draw closer. Eventually he sees that it is enormous French built truck--there are no roads; cars cannot manage the sandy, pitted, dunes of the Sahara. The driver motions Kapuscinski over, so he climbs high up into the cab.

They drive away, try to speak to one another, meanwhile Kapuscinski has no idea where they are going, although he hopes they are headed for Nouakchott. Have you ever wanted to trek across the Sahara? I doubt I could survive such an adventure. Instead, I will read Kapuscinski’s essay.

They drive on across the pitted, sandy dunes, trying desperately to avoid getting stuck. All Kapusciniski sees is the desert, dark stones scattered about. It must be like the moon. He falls into a deep sleep from which he is awakened by a sudden silence. The truck has stopped, the engine is dead, they are stuck.

He realizes he is thirsty, looks around the cab for some water, sees nothing. He begins to calculate. “Without water, you can survive in the desert for twenty-four hours; with great difficulty, for forty-eight or so. The math is simple. Under these conditions, you secrete in one day approximately ten litres of sweat, and to survive you must drink a similar amount of water.”

He gets out of the cab, looks around and sees underneath the truck bed four goatskins that are used to store water. He sighs with relief but only for a moment as he realizes they will empty quickly once the two of them begin drinking.

“The sun was climbing higher. The desert, that motionless, petrified ocean, absorbed its rays, grew hotter and began to burn. The Yoruba are said to believe that if a man’s shadow abandons him he will die.”

As the afternoon hours begin, the two of them spend the rest of the day lying underneath the truck. They drink from the second goatskin and quickly empty it. Two remain.

And once again he sees off in the distance two glaring lights that are far away but moving about wildly. The sound of a motor draws closer, he hears voices in a language he does not understand. Several dark faces, resembling the driver’s peer underneath the truck.

I read Kapuscinski’s essay in Great Adventures, a collection New Yorker travel journeys and short recollections drawn from its archives that is only available as an iPad app. They include pieces by H. L. Mencken (Spain), E. B White (Alaska), Susan Orlean (Bhutan), Peter Matthiessen (Peru), etc.

Evan Osnos’s account of a group of travelers from China taking a Grand Tour of Europe amused me the most. The tourists spend a great deal of time shopping and less touring. But in Florence the relationship is reversed. And when it came time to leave, Osnos describes a sentiment many departing travelers to this city have felt.

“The tour group enjoyed the city [Florence] so much there was a mini-mutiny when the bus prepared for departure.”

Write a Prisoner

2011-11-18T05:25:00.000-10:00

I first learned about Lorri Davis and Damien Echols on one of Piers Morgan’s CNN interview shows--why they were being interviewed, how they met, and the reason Echols had been a death-row inmate in Arkansas.

Echols had been sentenced to death as the leader of two other teenagers, both given life sentences, who were convicted of murdering three young second grade boys.

Before they met, Lorri was living in Brooklyn and working as a landscape architect. She first became aware of Echols in a documentary film about the three young boys and the three older teenagers convicted of murdering them.

After viewing the film, Lorri wrote her first letter to Echols: “I came home that night and couldn’t sleep…It breaks my heart that you are where you are and forced to endure it, so I am committed to doing whatever I can to make your life a little bit more bearable.”

So began their correspondence, writing letters to each other, sometimes several during the same day. There is no Internet in the Arkansas penitentiary. In one she wrote, “It’s great, isn’t it? Getting to know someone by writing. It’s quite wonderful and mysterious…”

Five months after they met, Lorri moved to Little Rock, and began managing the movement to arrange his release, obtaining financial support from several celebrities. They were married while he was still in prison and eventually, through a DNA analysis and unusual plea bargain, Echols, at the age of 36, was released from prison having spent half his life on death-row.

I write about Lorri and Damien because it illustrates the power and unexpected consequences of letter writing, that all but extinguished tradition of communicating with another person. Yes, Echols release is cause for celebration; so too is the love that developed between the couple. But it was the way in which their letter writing correspondence made both possible that first drew me to their story.

Writing letters to prison inmates may be one of the last contexts in which it survives. It is often the only channel for self-expression that prisoners have, especially those who are isolated from the Internet, telephone, or any other link to the world outside the prison. Writing to a prisoner may also appeal to anyone who may find themselves socially isolated, with few if any friends, and quite simply in need of someone to whom they can express themselves, particularly someone who might also benefit from the exchange.

Write a Prisoner is an organization devoted to facilitating letter-writing relationships among prisoners and their pen pals. The organization posts prisoner profiles, photos, and details about their crime. In turn, the inmates are charged a nominal fee that the organization claims is used to fund their other programs—educational materials, house and employment information for released inmates, and a scholarship fund for their children.

According the Write a Prisoner website: “Research shows that inmates who establish and maintain positive contacts outside of prison walls are less likely to return to prison. In fact, they are less likely to return to crime and substance abuse and more likely to find employment and remain productive members of society.”

If you wish to write to a prisoner, click on the link at the bottom of their home page.

Lorri and Damien now live in New York, no doubt still getting acquainted with one another and adjusting as to the hustle and bustle of life outside the walls. They are still writing to each other. But instead of writing letters, they are now sending text messages. I should have guessed.

I thank Geoffrey Gray for background information in his New York Times Magazine article (10/13/11), “My Dearest Damien.”

Hot Off the Press

2011-11-16T05:32:00.000-10:00

1. Texting has become the royal road to isolation.

2. The opened-ended, leaderless character of the Occupy movements has been the key to their success.

3. Margin Call is one of the best movies of the year and finest Wall Street movie ever made.

4. A second look at the inventive talent of Steve Jobs.

5. Do you live in one of the top ten literary cities?

6. Jane Austen has started blogging.

Print or Electronic?

2011-11-14T04:44:00.000-10:00

At Gadgetwise, a New York Times blog about technology, Jenn Wortham writes about her experience reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s latest novel, The Marriage Plot, on her Kindle. She had “adored” his previous works, couldn’t wait for his latest to be shipped, so she downloaded it to her gadget.

But reading the novel was surprisingly disappointing. Of course, she wonders if it was due to the e-reading experience or to the novel itself, a question that is impossible for any single reader to answer. Nevertheless, she decides to borrow a friend’s printed copy and attempt to see if her experience was any different.

Wortham concludes by asking her readers if they like reading certain kinds of books on their e-readers or any work of fiction or non-fiction? As of 11/12/11, 79 individuals have responded. The fact that so many have done so speaks to the significance many readers attach to the transition from print to electronic books.

Setting aside the biased sample of New York Times blog readers, more than half, 45 (57%) said they either preferred reading on the Kindle or that there wasn’t any difference between a printed or electronic version of a book. “Reading is reading. The words are what matter. You can read writing on a wall, on a can of soup, in pages, or on an electronic screen.”

In response to my query, the author of the literary blog So Many Books wrote: “I get just as much pleasure reading on my Kindle as I do in reading a print book. You know when you are into a story and all your surroundings drop away and the world could explode and you wouldn't even know it and you don't even notice you are holding a book let alone turning pages? The same thing happens on the Kindle. When I am reading a good story, the world falls away and the Kindle in my hand disappears too. There is no difference in the experience of the story.”

Still another 16 (20%) said there was a notable difference and they preferred reading on the printed page. “I simply cannot find the same emotional connection to reading something on yet another piece of soon to be obsolete tech equipment.” They offered several additional reasons: they retained more of a printed book, missed its feel or tactile sensation, found it difficult to skip around on digital readers, or they didn’t handle footnotes and page numbers well.

Only two readers expressed my major concern about e-readers. Both said it was impossible to easily make notes in the margins, although one of them wondered if that was really such a loss.

Finally, 18 individuals (23%) didn’t answer the question. They weren’t sure, preferred audio books, noted either is a trade off, or mentioned a totally unrelated subject.

Perhaps the best summary of the matter was offered in this comment: “I've had a Kindle for about 3 years and would not be without it. The advantages are: 1. It's easier to cart around than a book, so it's always with me 2. Being able to change the type size really helps with my aging eyes. 3. It's easy to hold, sometimes large books hurt my arthritic hands. 4. It can be read in bright sun. 5. You don't need bookshelves to store the books you want to keep - a real plus in small apartments. But there are disadvantages too: 1. You can't loan your books to a friend or pass them along to a charity. 2. It's very hard to skip around in the pages 3. Diagrams and illustrations don't work at all. 4. The Kindle Fire may solve the color problem, but now they don't even bother selling the art books I love. 5. Not every book I'm likely to buy is available - not by a long shot.”

While I’ve been a long-time critic of e-readers largely because of the difficulty of note taking and marking up pages, I confess I returned to my iPad recently and found reading the New Yorker app a genuine pleasure.

I made notes on a separate pad of paper or computer and, unlike printed books, was able to listen to poets reading their poems or musical groups being discussed and view a video preview of a film or a dance group that was reviewed. These were not the least bit distracting. To the contrary they enhanced the reading experience for me, although it is still not possible to highlight passages or print articles with the app.

Reading books and long essays on an e-reader is another matter.

Breaking Ranks

2011-11-11T04:41:00.000-10:00

You know you always have choices. You can go with the flow because it’s easier or you can let your convictions guide your actions if you are prepared to face the consequences.
Helene Grimaud

On January 25, 2002 fifty-two soldiers of the Israeli army published a letter in the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz explaining why they would no longer serve in occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The major reasons enunciated in their declaration included:

• We…were issued commands and directives that had nothing to do with the security of our country, and had the sole purpose of perpetuating our control over the Palestinian people

• We, who believed the commands issued to us in the territories destroy all the values we had absorbed while growing up in this country.

• We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve, and humiliate an entire people.

• We hereby declare that we shall continue serving in the Israeli Defense Forces in any mission that serves Israel’s defense.

• The missions of occupation and oppression do not serve this purpose and we shall take no part in them.

Breaking Ranks: Refusing to Serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip edited with interviews by Ronit Chacham profiles the rational of nine members of the IDF (Israel Defense Force), among the earliest of 1,100 the Israeli soldiers who have now pledged not to serve in the occupied territories.

All of the nine Refuseniks profiled in this book agree they will serve in the defense of Israel but not beyond the borders that existed before the Six-Day War of 1967 since it does not serve that purpose. Instead, it only perpetuates bombing of innocent people, destruction of their homes, humiliation, starvation and needless killing.

The nine live with an intense conflict between the values they were raised with and those displayed by the IDF in the occupied territories. Ishay Rosen-Zevi said, “What happens to a soldier, decent people, in the occupation is that power takes over, power poisons you. You can do anything. I was witness to beatings, roadblocks, curfews, going the in the middle of the night to get people. And I thought it was OK because we were all decent people…”

Most of the Refuseniks have served repeated jail terms, experienced the criticism and loss of friendship of their fellow solders, and resentment of some members of their family and, in some cases, their rabbis and teachers. In reply, they say, how can the Jews who have suffered so much violence and oppression over the centuries perpetuate the very same practices on the peoples who live in Palestine?

Rosen-Zvi comments, “In Gaza, I saw people living in shameful poverty. My heart ached for them. At the ckeckpoints, they look at your fearfully….It’s the unwillingness to see the other side that shackles our ability to comprehend terror and what motivates it….It must be stated clearly: Israeli government policies in the occupied territories are fertilizer for suicide bombings. We produce terror. Who in the right mind thinks that more destruction and humiliation will curb it?”

David Chacham-Herson puts it this way. “I am a soldier in the Israeli army, imprisoned for refusing to take part in the oppression of a people. My position arises from the feeling that you cannot be a Jew, the son of a refugee people, and oppress refugees.”

Finally, Guy Grossman expresses the subject lurking silently in background of this issue. “I see Germany right in front of me. And I hate being told that we should make the comparison. True, you can’t compare systematic Nazi genocide with our own occupation regime. But you can compare the psychology processes [italics mine] that took place there and are taking place here among our soldiers and Israeli society in general.”

Why Read Novels?

2011-11-09T04:40:00.000-10:00

It was the potential for self-recognition that made Collette’s novels so compelling.
Vivian Gornick.

In a recent interview Philip Roth, the author of more than 30 novels and no doubt a prodigious reader of countless others, said he no longer reads fiction. When asked why, he replied, “I don’t know. I wised up…” What did he mean by that enigmatic comment?

In a similar vein the novelist Nicole Krauss recently expressed her concerns about the current state of the novel. “Things seem to be changing for those of us who have staked our lives on literature. The value of the literary mind appears to be in doubt; as Nicholas Carr writes in his book about how the internet is changing our brains, there is a growing suspicion that its worth has been overinflated, that “surfing the Web is a suitable and even superior substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought.” Krauss’s full remarks can be viewed here.

I still read novels, as Krauss does, and I am sure, like countless others, she is always reading at least one or more. Why do we readers continue to read this type of literature? Is it simply because we haven’t “wised up?”

As for me, I cannot conceive of not reading a novel, it is simply a given, a necessity if you will. And while I’ve am certain I haven’t wised up, I am equally certain that will always be true.

I have written many answers to the question the interviewer asked Roth, but Michael Ondaatje recently gave an eloquent one in his magical tale, The Cat’s Table. He was describing one of the passengers on the ship that was taking the young “fictional” Michael from Sri Lanka to England.

He knew passages from all kinds of books he could recite by heart, and he sat at his desk all day wondering about them, thinking what he could say about them….Mr. Fonseka seemed to draw forth an assurance or a calming quality from the books he read…But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by.

The question “Why Do We Read Literature?” was also posed recently at the online magazine “On Fiction.” The magazine discusses the psychology of the reading experience; “Using theoretical and empirical perspectives, we endeavour to understand how fiction is created, and how readers and audience members engage in it.”

The authors describe a laboratory study of the responses of forty-one individuals when asked to read Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” They say that the poem as well as literary works that engage us put into words feelings that “we may not previously have been able consciously to recognize.”

A work of fiction or more precisely a passage or character enables us to see ourselves more clearly, to express a belief that we did not realize we held or an emotion that we were unaware of before seeing it on the page. The act of reading also sets the occasion for looking more closely at our beliefs and viewing them from another point of view. Yes we read for pleasure, both aesthetic and intellectual, but we also read for personal insight and those truths that might otherwise pass us by.

I think we often read ourselves into literature without thinking twice if it is true for others. Instead, the truth of any given passage or character becomes true for a reader because it corresponds to his or her experience or provides a language for it in a way that had not been available before. “Yes,” we say, “that is true for me. This is my story. That’s exactly the way I felt. I had not realized its truth until I saw it on the page.”

Perlmann's Silence

2011-11-07T04:47:00.000-10:00

Philipp Perlmann is attending a conference on linguistics, his academic discipline. There was a time when he was deeply engaged by the field, spoke and wrote eloquently about it. But that sense of purpose has slowly disappeared from his life, the field means little to him anymore.

Yet he is about to take the podium at an important linguistics conference to deliver the opening address. He realizes he has nothing to say, has prepared no remarks, hasn’t even thought about it.

This is the second book of Pascal Mercier’s that I have read. The first was A Night Train to Lisbon, one the finest novels I’ve ever read. Both novels are about academic linguists who speak several languages but have grown weary of their discipline and seek in one way or another to take flight from it.

But Perlmann’s Silence is perhaps twice as long, twice as heavy and already, after only 65 of 616 pages, I am growing weary of reading it. So I have set it aside for a bit. (Why are so many novels so “fat” today? Haruki Murakami’s IQ84 is close to a thousand pages and Stephen King’s 11.22.63 is over a thousand.)

I am surprised at this turn of events, couldn’t wait to get my hands on Mercier’s new novel, ordered and had it sent from England. (It won’t be available in the US until January of next year.) How can one great book be followed by one so unappealing?

The novel scarcely moves a centimeter away of Perlmann’s ruminations, worries, headaches, troubles, broodings, anxieties, ambivalences, hesitations, etc. He cannot sleep, he is out of ideas, and I am about to cast the book in the recycling bin.

Now that I think of it, I had the same experience in reading Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Solar. His earlier novel, Saturday, is also one of my favorites, as is most everything McEwan writes. Solar is said to be a comic novel. But it never seemed the least bit humorous to me.

After reading Saturday a few years ago, a novel that still percolates in my mind, I found Solar a bit of ordeal and at times also considered giving up on it. I found its central character utterly repulsive and, in spite of the fact that he was a Nobel-Prize winning physicist with a sharp and crafty mind, I could not overcome my distaste for his excesses.

In order to enjoy a novel, does its central character need to be likeable, provocative, or deserve our sympathy? As I think back upon the novels I have most enjoyed they are always peopled with individuals I admire and respect. While Henry Perowne in McEwan’s Saturday and Raimund Gregorious in Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon are certainly among them, the physicist in Solar definitely is not.

I remain hopeful that Phillip Perlmann will not continue to displease me. I will give him another chance for he has already made some noteworthy comments, albeit the same ones more than once and ever so laboriously.

The interest in methodical investigation, analysis and the development of theories, hitherto a constant, an unquestioned, self-evident element in his life and in a sense its centre of gravity—he had utterly lost that interest, and so completely that he was no longer sure he understood how it could once have been otherwise.

Running away: at first it must be wonderful; he imagined it as a quick bold rush, headlong through all feelings of obligation, out into freedom.

…he could never experience the present as it was taking place; he always woke up too late, and then there was only the substitute, the visualization, a field in which he had, out of pure desperation, become a virtuoso.

Expressions like this are the reason I keep reading novels, why I like Mercier so much and why I will return to this tome, in spite of its length and sense of weariness.

Knowing Is Not Enough

2011-11-04T04:38:00.000-10:00

To get to the point, Daniel Kahneman (winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics) makes a striking claim in writing about his new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. In spite of years of study and important research on shortcomings in human reasoning, he confesses that he still subject to them.

He is fully aware of the biases and inferential errors that we all make in evaluating the information we have in an uncertain situation and yet he continues to make such errors.

He admits he is simply unable to do anything about it.

“My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.”

In writing about his early work on predicting the future leadership ability of individual Israeli Army soldiers (New York Times October 10, 2011) he concludes:

“I thought that what was happening to us was remarkable. The statistical evidence of our failure should have shaken our confidence in our judgment of particular candidates, but it did not. We knew as a general fact that our predictions were little better than random guesses, but we continued to feel and act as if each particular prediction was valid. I was reminded of visual illusions, which remain compelling even when you know that what you see is false.”

Can knowledge or self-awareness of our judgment biases help to avoid them? Like most everyone else, Kahneman hoped that his research findings would contribute to that end. But if even he admits they haven’t, how can the rest of us do any better?

In his post about Kahneman’s book on the New Yorker Book Bench (October 25, 2011), Jonah Lehrer concludes:

“But his greatest legacy, perhaps, is also his bleakest: By categorizing our cognitive flaws, documenting not just our error, but also their embarrassing predictability, he has revealed the hollowness of a very ancient aspiration. Knowing thyself is not enough. Not even close.”

This is bleak, isn’t it? And yet, can it be true? Must it be true? I am more optimistic than Lehrer or even Kahneman. The question is clear—we need to learn how to make our knowledge of mental flaws more salient in situations where it might prove useful.

This often occurs naturally, when, for example, newly acquired information is still readily available. However, as the information is gradually forgotten with the passage of time, we need to be reminded of its relevance by a conspicuous signal or prompt to ourselves. Until we figure out how to do this more reliably, we must be careful not to overestimate the extent to which knowing about our biases influences our reasoning.

Higher Ground

2011-11-02T05:16:00.000-10:00

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.”
Rilke

Higher Ground is a movie about individuals who never stop asking questions, who wonder if they have taken the right path or if their beliefs make as much sense as they once did. How many individuals do you know who live a life of such questioning?

On the surface the film depicts the gradual erosion of a woman’s faith in the religion she was born into. We first see her as a young child, then a teenager, and then for most of the film an adult, around 40, who is born again with a full immersion in the midst of her friends and eventual husband.

Vera Farmiga directed the film and also plays the role of the adult (Corrine), while her sister is the teenager and a young look-alike is the child. Farmiga brings the film alive as she did in Up in the Air. She has deep-set eyes and an expressive face that reflects skepticism and uncertainty at every turn without uttering a word.

Little by little she begins to have doubts, her religion lets her down, doesn't answer her questions, and cannot explain the tragedies she sees and experiences. She prays, implores, almost pleads again and again for evidence, anything would do, but nothing is forthcoming.

It is all done so subtly, without the usual rancor or dispute. You see Corrine’s gradual changes in her expressions and behavior exclusively.

Beyond the story of how a woman grows in and out of religion, I also viewed the movie more generally, the way people gradually loose their faith in something that once meant a great deal to them—their profession, marriage, fundamental beliefs. There are some who simply put these doubts aside, others grow to accept them, while some act upon them.

In writing about this film, Roger Ebert comments, “…a person who suffers great misfortune is unlikely to be comforted by the assurance that God’s will has been done. (In the case of my own misfortune I prefer to think that God’s will had nothing to do with it. People who tell me it did are singularly tactless.)”

Ebert has undergone several operations to control his thyroid cancer and has recently lost his voice and lower jaw. He communicates using text-to-speech software that produces a robot-like voice that takes his written words and translates them into sound. Regardless of this debilitating condition, he continues to write with as much energy and insight as ever.

Corrine did something about her doubts and the absence of evidence. Acting on your doubts is not always easy and sometimes takes considerable courage and hard work. It is an exceptional person who alters their fundamental beliefs when the evidence for them is sparse or even contradictory.

I Married You For Happiness

2011-10-31T04:54:00.000-10:00

“There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage.”
Adam Phillips, Monogamy

The memories keep coming back, out of nowhere so it would seem, not in any particular order, simply times and places we were together. A day in Paris, a movie we saw, the first time we met.

This is the kind of experience Lily Tuck recounts in her recent novel I Married You for Happiness. Phillip is a mathematician; Nina is a painter. They met in Paris in the 60s while he was on a Fullbright and she studying to be an artist. The novel opens as Nina is preparing dinner, realizes that Phillip has not come down to join her, and goes upstairs to find he has suddenly died.

She spends the night by his side, recalling one experience after another of their forty-two years together. They arrive in short, unrelated flashbacks that are recounted in equally short fragments. It is cold, she puts on a coat he bought her in China, opens a bottle of wine, and lays down by his side.

“Spring. The weather is warm, the chestnut trees are in flower, brilliant tulips bloom in the Luxembourg Garden.”

It does not take long, however, before we learn that their marriage is less than perfect. Whose is? Phillip lectures her on mathematical theory from Fermant to Schrodinger, from the simple to the complex.

“The probability of an event occurring when there are two possible outcomes is known as a binomial probability…A chance event is not influenced by the events that have gone before it. Each [coin] toss is an independent event”

“She does not like his tone. The way he emphasizes certain words to make his point and the way he speaks to her as if she were a child.” Nina begins to realize the extent to which she has ceded her identity to Phillip’s.

And yet this collision of two different worlds is overlaid with deep love. “She can feel his arms around her. … Sweet, teasing familiar. They have a good time together. They laugh a lot. Is laughter the secret to a good marriage, she wonders? They know each other well. Just what I was thinking, she say…They nearly have the same dream once.”

Nina wonders if there were secrets he kept from her. Did Philip have a lover, someone like Lorna, a physicist he knows, would he have married Iris had she not been killed in a car crash? “She believes Philip loves her but how can she be certain of this.”

She had an affair and later an abortion that Phillip never knew about--“Lies of awful omission.”

“How long ago everything seems to her. And how unreal…She cannot imagine a life without Philip. Nor does she want to.”

Lily Tuck’s I Married You for Happiness is a beautiful prose poem of the defining moments of a marriage. It is the third memoir I have read recently written by a woman after the sudden death of her husband. The two others were Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story. Of the three, Tucks memoir is the only fictional account.

I am not sure if this is the reason why it also seems truer than the others to the experience of a long marriage, particularly a couple from two different worlds. Because it is written in fragments, it also seems true to the way memories, the real and imagined, return to us in a seemingly random fashion, like the way probability theory teaches us to expect the unexpected.

Why Keep a Commonplace Book?

2011-10-28T06:40:00.000-10:00

Make your own Bible. Select and Collect all those words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of trumpet out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.
Emerson Journals July 1836

Recently I published a short monograph on commonplace books, A Commonplace Book Primer. As regular readers of this blog are fully aware, keeping such a collection is an essential component of my reading experience.

In the Prologue I note that most of the readers I know or observe do not keep a record of the memorable passages they come upon in the books they read. The Primer is written in the belief that there is much to be gained by doing so.

There is nothing complicated about this. One need only think of it as a notebook where you record some of the ideas, questions, poems, or expressions that strike you as notable in some way.

The commonplace book concept originated in Greek and Roman antiquity for students and scholars to keep a record of the knowledge and moral wisdom of the day. It was intended as a source to draw upon in writing, speeches, education, and legal argument.

That was pretty much their sole purpose until the development of printed encyclopedias after which the practice gradually became less common and the few that were kept became a personal record of notable passages from a person’s reading history.

This remains its primary purpose today. I am often asked, “Why keep a commonplace book? After all, reading is such a great pleasure, why interrupt it by turning away from the page to spend the time recording a pithy passage?” It is not hard for me to answer.

First, I believe that keeping a commonplace book gives rise to a deeper form of reading. If you stop to think further about something you have read, then mark it in some way, and eventually add it to your commonplace book, you will inevitably read more carefully, more reflectively, and no doubt more slowly than you normally do.

Secondly, memories are fleeting and what we read is quickly forgotten. However, if we have added the quotations, poems, and fragments we wish to save to our commonplace book, they can be preserved and readily reviewed or drawn upon whenever we wish.

Finally, I have also come to believe there is genuine personal value served by keeping a commonplace book. Not only is it a fund of knowledge and source of new ideas, it can also lead to personal insight and understanding. This has been true for me each time I go back to review the entries I have made, as well as in the informal studies I have carried out on my own commonplace book.

In the Primer I review the history of commonplace books, their future in a world where electronic readers are becoming increasingly popular, and the variety of benefits the practice of keeping this kind of record can have for readers of all forms of literature.

Decriminalizing Drugs

2011-10-26T05:14:00.000-10:00

“We are not hunted or scared or looked upon as criminals. And that has made it possible to live and to breathe.” Nuno Miranda Portuguese heroin addict

Michael Specter writes in his October 17th New Yorker article, “Getting a Fix,” that almost 1%--100,000 individuals--of the population in Portugal were heroin addicts in 1999. Portugal also reported the highest rate of drug-related AIDS deaths in the European Union that year.

In response to these numbers, along with the failure of all previous efforts, largely punitive, to curtail drug use, Portugal took what Specter calls an “unlikely gamble” and passed a law that made it the first country to decriminalize drug use.

What is the best way to determine the effects of this law? Ideally we would like to have a pre-legislation measure of drug use, then one while the law is in effect, and a final period when drug use was then made illegal again. As is usually the case, it is impossible to employ this design outside the laboratory.

(An exception was the natural experiment of Prohibition in the U.S.—it began with a lengthy period when alcohol consumption was legal, then it was prohibited in 1919 by the 18th Amendment to the Constitution and 14 years later, it was repealed by the 21st Amendment.)

Absent such a design, we are left with a pre-and-post intervention measure of behavior. Again it would be best to have a comparative (control) group, say in another non-European Union country, that received no intervention to assess the effects of several alternative interpretations, usually historical trends, that might account for whatever changes occurred during the intervention.

In the end, Portugal fell back on the usual approach to measure the effects of any large scale social “experiment”—a pre-post test, no control group design.

Regardless of these methodological concerns, what were the effects of this radical Portuguese legislation? Specter provides three outcome measures:

• 37% of injecting drug users were receiving methadone to manage their addiction [in 1999]; ten years later that figure was 67%.

• The number of people convicted of drug offenses fell from 44% of the prison population in 2000 to 21% in 2005.

• The percentage of people using heroin in prison also fell sharply.

More generally Specter believes “In most respects, the law seems to have worked: serious drug use is down significantly, particularly among young people; the burden on the criminal justice system has eased; the number of people seeking treatment has grown; and the rates of drug-related deaths and cases of infectious diseases have fallen.”

But has the law really worked? Could these changes be accounted for by other concurrent events? Specter does acknowledge this possibility.

For example, he notes that the number of treatment facilities increased significantly at the same time the law was passed. Another possibility is that the observed changes were due to changes in European views about drug addiction, as well as wider knowledge of the consequences of excessive drug use. Without comparative data, it is impossible to rule out either of these alternative accounts.

There are also larger issues that go beyond the data, moral and philosophical issues of how a society should deal with drug addiction, an addiction that many claim is in fact a medical disease, more like a chronic illness.

Still, as Specter concludes, citing a clinical psychologist who works with a drug outreach group, “It is a program that reduces harm and I don’t see a better approach.”

American Resistance Heroine

2011-10-24T04:38:00.000-10:00

In the late fall of 1943 Virginia D’Albert-Lake and her husband Phillipe were contacted by a local baker in the town of Nesles, France where they were living at the time. He asked the couple if they would come to his shop to meet some strangers.

Virginia was a young American teacher who met Philippe d’Albert-Lake in 1936 while traveling in France. Philippe was from a family of substantial means with two apartments in Paris and a home in Brittany. They were married in 1937 and moved to a small cottage in Nesles, north of Paris.

The strangers the baker asked them to meet were several downed American pilots that he was hiding until he could arrange their return to England. He asked the young couple if they could help. They agreed to do what they could.

Virginia and Phillipe contacted the French Resistance to organize their return to England via the Comet escape line, a key part of the Resistance that transported downed airman through France, across the Pyrenees, into Spain and eventually back to England where they could resume their missions.

Returning military servicemen to England was a crucial part of the wartime effort since it took considerable time and money to train new airman. It is estimated that 4,000 Allied airmen were successfully returned to England by means of the Comet escape line before the D-Day landings in 1944. It is also believed that at least 12,000 individuals took part in this highly risky wartime activity.

Virginia was one of three American women who participated in the French Resistance and is thought to be the only one who has provided a first-hand account of her experiences in her diary and memoir An American Heroine in the French Resistance.

In this account she makes it clear that she did not join the Resistance out of any deep political conviction, but rather because she “was simply doing the right thing.” No matter her motivation, she “had a share” in helping to ensure the successful escape of approximately 200 downed Allied airman. Much of this work involved providing the aviators shelter and assistance in Paris, moving them to secret hideouts in apartments there, or at a hidden forest encampment south of Paris.

It was on one of these risky journeys south of Paris that the Germans captured her. At the time she was on a scouting expedition ahead of the group of airmen she was escorting to the hideaway. She spent the next eleven months in one German camp after another finally ending up at the “infamous” Ravensbruck concentration camp where she almost died.

In her memoir Virginia describes a premonition she had just before she was captured:

“Something broke inside me. I knew somehow that it was all over. There was no more reason to hope. The sun that only a few moments ago was so bright and warm, now seemed eclipsed by a grey fog….I had no choice but to stand there in the center of the dusty road, grip my [bicycle] handle bars, and wait.”

While she participated in the Resistance barely a year, the tasks she undertook were both dangerous and significant. After the war was over, she received numerous awards from the Allied governments including the United States Metal of Honor, the Order of the British Empire and the Legion of Honneur, France’s highest honor.

I imagine of equal if not more personal importance to her was the gratitude expressed by the many airmen whose life she had saved, as well as those concentration survivors who after the war testified to her “courage” and “generosity.”

Note: I am grateful to Judy Litoff for the background information she provided in the Introduction to An American Heroine in the French Resistance.

Essays on Elsewhere

2011-10-19T04:25:00.000-10:00

The Egypt I craved to return to was not the one I knew, or couldn’t wait to flee, but the one where I learned to invent being somewhere else, someone else. Andre Aciman

Andre Aciman wanders around the labyrinth of his mind like a person who can’t find his way out of the Hampton Court maze. He tries one direction, it is blocked, turns around, goes back over the same route only to come to another dead end. Meanwhile, he wishes he was on the path over the next hedge and when he finally reaches it, he yearns to be back on the one he just left.

This is the way his essays are written. You have to enjoy this way of meandering around your synapses to enjoy them. His latest collection, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, consists of eighteen partially linked essays about memory, place, exile, and identity.

Aciman says he always begins his mental meanderings by writing about place. “Some do so by writing about love, war, suffering, cruelty, power, God, or country. I write about place, or the memory of place. I write about a city called Alexandria, which I’m supposed to have loved and about other cities that remind me of a vanished world to which I allegedly wish to return. I write about exile, remembrance and the passage of time. I write—so it would seem—to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.”

In Alibis he writes about New York, where he lives, Paris, where he always dreams of being, Rome where he lived for three years with his family after leaving Alexandria which he also writes about, as well as Tuscany, which may be the one place where he doesn’t dream of being elsewhere-- Barcelona, Cambridge, a bookstore someplace or the Tuscany that he dreamed of being in while living in Egypt.

“And this is what I’ve always suspected about Tuscany. It is about many beautiful things—about small towns, magnificent vistas, and fabulous cuisine, art, culture, history—but it is ultimately about the love of books. It is a reader’s paradise. People come here because of books. Tuscany may well be for people who love life in the present—simple, elaborate, whimsical, complicated life in the present—but it is also for people who love the present when it bears the shadow of the past, who love the world provided it’s at a slight angle Bookish people.”

How I wish I had written that for it is precisely the way I feel when I am in Tuscany.

Aciman is Jewish which is to say that his parents were Jewish, the reason they had to flee Egypt. But also like myself, he is and isn’t Jewish. Neither of us wants to be anything but Jewish provided we don’t have to practice it, learn its rituals, or accept its religious tenets. At times he also wonders what it would be like to live in a place where everyone is Jewish but at other times knows it would not be easy.

Aciman cites an exchange or imagined exchange he had with a woman he was hoping to see in Paris, an exchange that is a perfect reflection of the manner in which he thinks or at least writes about the way he thinks or imagines he does. “Since you’re going to Paris, you don’t want to go to Paris. But if you were staying in New York, you’d want to be in Paris. But since you’re not staying, but going, just do me a favor. When you’re in Paris, think of yourself in New York longing for Paris, and everything will be fine.”

All the essays in this collection are written in this manner. Oddly I am one who greatly enjoys reading them, their contradictions, paradoxes, ambiguities, questions, uncertainties, backtrackings, recollections, sometimes true, sometimes false, or partially false, that become true in the writing. I think that is the way my mind works sometimes, but not all the times or the way I might like it to work, since it rarely works that way at all.

"All the Wondering Things and Times We Had"

2011-10-17T05:25:00.000-10:00

Hemingway. The almost forgotten writer. The writer who meant everything to me when I first starting reading fiction. The writer who you either cherish or deplore. The writer whose life almost everyone thinks of first instead of what he wrote. James Salter is an exception

In his essay, “The Finest Life You Ever Saw” in the October 13th New York Review of Books, Salter reviews Paul Hendrickson’s recent book, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961. Part of the book is about Hemingway’s cabin cruiser, Pilar, that he used to fish for marlin off the coast of Cuba and, as some have claimed, hunt down German submarines during World War II. It is also a carefully research personal biography of Hemingway’s life and writing in Havana between 1934 and 1961.

Salter also writes with a sense of reverence about Hemingway's style, the writing that made him great, the one that so many have tried but failed to imitate, only to appear as a parody. Hemingway’s spare writing style is easy to mimic and many have tried. There is even an annual International Imitation Hemingway competition that has been held for over thirty years.

Salter describes Hemingway’s distinctive voice by commenting “…he had his poetic gift and also the intense desire to give to the reader the full and true feeling of what happened, to make the reader feel it had happened to him. He pared things down. He left out all that could be readily understood or taken for granted and the rest he delivered with savage exactness.”

Here’s an example from the start of Hemingway’s short story In Another Country.

“In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.”

Salter writes about the thousands of letters, estimated between six or seven thousand that Hemingway wrote to his many friends, long letters and quotes from a few. I marvel at this number and think of other writers who wrote just as many letters, if not more, in their lifetime.

Voltaire is said to have written about 15,000 letters in his 83-year life, other writers were dedicated letter writers--Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, etc. I think how few letters are written today, not just by well-known writers but each of us. The loss to historians in the future who want to know about the eminent is incalculable. The loss to those of us who want to review our earlier correspondence is just as great. I speak from personal experience here.

Salter concludes his review with a statement made about Hemingway by the wife of the journalist George Seldes: “Forgive him anything, he writes like an angel.”

Democracy Now

2011-10-14T05:13:00.000-10:00

Democracy Now is an independent, daily, ultra-progressive news program that can be viewed on some cable television channels, the Web and on devices that have its app. Its reports and analyses are presented with a refreshingly liberal perspective compared to other media news programs.

If you have time this weekend, I encourage you to listen to its video interview with Stephane Hessel, the author of Indignez-vous that I’ve been writing about. I believe it will be well worth your time, both to hear and see Hessel speak about his convictions and the incredible life he has lived.

A Call to Action

2011-10-12T05:39:00.000-10:00

The motivation that underlay the Resistance was outrage. We, the veterans of the Resistance movements and fighting forces of Free France, call on the younger generations to revive and carry forward the tradition of the Resistance and its ideas. We say to you: take over, keep going, get angry! Those in positions of political responsibility, economic power and intellectual authority, in fact our whole society, must not give up or let ourselves be overwhelmed by the current international dictatorship of the financial markets, which is such a threat to peace and democracy....

It is up to us, all of us together, to ensure that our society remains one to be proud of: not this society of undocumented workers and deportations…not the society where our retirement and other gains of social security are being called into question; not this society where the media are in the hands of the rich.

The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, “I can’t do anything about it: I’ll just get by.”

These are the words of Stephane Hessel in his powerful manifesto, Indignez-Vous, that was first published late last year in France as a short, stapled pamphlet. Indignez-Vous is a French term that literally means be indignant. I think of it more as a mandate to express your outrage, especially outrage against injustice.

It can now also be read in various English versions under the title Time for Outrage. Charles Glass, the London publisher of the book, writes that it was “a publishing sensation on its first appearance, and since then has provoked a heated debate about social justice, the power of protest and how to harness our common indignation.” The Guardian reported the essay topped the Christmas best-seller list in France last year.

No wonder: what could be more timely! Stephane Hessell is a remarkable person. He is almost 94, a hero of the French Resistance, captured by the Germans and sent to concentration camps where he was tortured, and was only able to avoid being hanged at the last moment. He finally managed to escape and soon thereafter met up with the advancing American army. After the war, he participated in drafting the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Late last month Hessell spoke to students at Columbia University about his book. The Columbia Spectator reported the book’s message is widely “applicable: Hessel’s book is a call to action.” You didn’t have to look far down the street to realize his message is being clearly heard and above all practiced.

During his talk to the students Hessel urged them to find their own personal outrage and then do something about it. “You will find something, and when you find it you must commit.” It is entirely too easy to do nothing. Hessel argues this is not a time for apathy, rather this is a time for outrage. “Never give up, never be indifferent.”

I write about Hessel because of my own failures to act at various times in my life. It isn’t that I’ve been indifferent. Rather it’s that my beliefs, my convictions even when they were strong, were never followed by actions.

Yes, I made my share of contributions to the organizations I believed in. But that was easy, too easy and I was never really able to break away from the work I thought I needed to do. Individuals, like Hessel, who have more courage, more commitment to their convictions than I do, forcefully remind me that while important, outrage is not enough. It is also necessary to act.

Female Agents

2011-10-10T04:40:00.000-10:00

On the night of April 24, 1942 Lise de Baissac was parachuted behind German lines into occupied France near the town of Poiters, south of the Loire. De Baissac was an agent for England’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) established by Churchill to work with the French Resistance. Her mission was to set up a safe house for a group of British trained agents to be sent to France.

She returned to London on August 16, 1943 just before the Germans discovered her “circuit” in Poitiers. Undeterred, she returned to France in April of the following year to work with another SOE group. A leader in the British Special Forces group of World War II wrote that in risking her life every day she played an indispensible role in aiding the guerilla groups of the French Resistance who inflicted heavy losses on the German forces.

Lise de Baissac died in 2004 ago at the age of 98. Her exploits were the inspiration for the film, Female Agents (Les Femmes de l’Ombre) that I saw recently. The film is reported to have won critical praise in France for recognizing the role of women resistance fighters during the War. The film’s director said, he first thought of making the film after reading de Baissac’s obituary in The Times of London.

The plot is complex but in a word four women are parachuted into occupied France in May of 1944 on a mission to protect the details of the forthcoming Allied landing and kill a colonel in a German counter-intelligence unit who is on the verge of learning its location. The Germans have captured an English geologist who had studied the beaches of Normandy and might therefore be forced (i.e., tortured) into revealing the plans.

They join a fifth woman who is already undercover with the Resistance. There are failed night-time shootouts, regroupings, the suicide of the captured brother of the group’s leader, harrowing torture scenes, the capture and subsequent killing of four of the original group of five women, and finally the successful assassination of the German colonel by the woman playing of role of Lise de Bassac, the only surviving member of the original group.

I write about this film out of admiration for these individuals whose convictions meant enough to them to put their lives at risk. In fact, I marvel at such individuals. The fact that they were women is less important to me, although it is clear they never achieved the recognition that men did.

Lise de Baissac was one of the few to be recognized. She was awarded a Legion d’Honneur, the highest decoration in France, and the Croix de Guerre, a French military decoration. In Britain she was honored with a MBE, a member of the Order of the British Empire.

The film ends as the fictional de Baissac lights four candles in a church in remembrance of the four who didn’t survive.

The Art of Simplicity

2011-10-07T05:26:00.000-10:00

Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Apple’s 1977 “Think Different” Advertising Campaign.

Steve Jobs went to Reed College where I taught psychology throughout my academic life and was a student while I was there before he dropped out after his first semester. For a while after, he continued to hang around the department, primarily in the heavily electronic physiological lab and audited several of our classes.

And it is true, as he noted in a graduation speech he delivered at Stanford several years ago that he was troubled by the fact that it cost his parents so much to send him there. I doubt, however, that was the only reason he dropped out.

I write about Steve Jobs not only out of respect but also because he and his original team at Apple brought the computer world to me. Throughout his life he remained extremely generous to Reed. After the first computers were produced at Apple, he gave each faculty member one and he continued the practice with each succeeding version of their personal computers.

I never would have learned to use one were it not for the simplicity, for its user friendliness as it is called, of these computers. That feature is characteristic of all Apple products, They are designed to be models of simplicity.

It was simple matter to learn how to use them, something I had previously found impossible with other computer operating systems around then and still do with complicated Windows-based computers. In a way, the early Mac with its graphic interface opened up a new life for me, gave me a better and clearer way to express myself, and eventually with the development of the Web and the Internet expanded the sources of information and the ease of obtaining them regardless of where I am.

You have to remember when this was, otherwise it makes no sense given the electronic world of young people today. It was in 1984, twenty-seven years ago, that the first Macintosh computer was produced. The picture above is what it looked like and something like it sat on my desk at Reed not long after it was manufactured.

I wrote my first book on it, a book on promoting energy conservation, with a word-processor known as MacWrite. Since my handwriting is atrocious, completely unreadable even to me, I never could have written such a heavily documented book without it.

Everyone once it a while I stop to think about the larger implications of the new products that Jobs and his group at Apple have developed—the iPhone, iPod, the iPad. I’m not entirely certain they represent the positive contribution the personal computer does.

Haruki Murakami wrote about life before and after the development of the electronic revolution recently. I was reminded of what he said about this issue in thinking about the death of Steve Jobs and his enormous influence on society.

By setting the story [“Town of Cats,” published in the New Yorker] in 1984, before cell phones and e-mail and the Internet had become common, I made it impossible for my characters to use such tools. This in turn was frustrating for me. I felt their absence slowing down the speed of the novel. When I thought about it, though, not having such devices at the time—both in daily life and in the story—ceased to be an inconvenience. If you wanted to make a phone call, you just found a public telephone; if you had to look something up, you went to the library; if you wanted to contact somebody, you put a stamp on a letter and mailed it. Those were the normal ways to do those things. While writing the novel (and experiencing a kind of time slip), I had a strong feeling of what the intervening twenty-seven years had meant. Sorry to state the obvious, but maybe there’s not much connection between the convenience of people’s surroundings and the degree of happiness they feel

Serialized Commonplace Book

2011-10-05T04:47:00.000-10:00

“All educationalists taught that reading was to be carried out pen in hand, ready to note in the margin metaphors, similes, exempla, sententiae, apophthegms, proverbs, or any other transportable units of literary composition. These were then to be copied out into one or more notebooks, divided either alphabetically or by topics, and to be reused in one’s own writing.” Brian Vickers

The Berkeley Daily Planet is a free local newspaper published in Berkeley, California. It began as a daily but now publishes twice a week on Tuesday and Friday.

It has a progressive, liberal outlook (this is Berkeley, after all) and, wonder of wonders, a regular “My Commonplace Book” column written by Dorothy Bryant.

Bryant’s column consists of an excerpt from a printed book, as well as comment explaining why it captured her interest. This is rare in virtually all other commonplace books. Here is her last entry and annotation dated October 4, 2011.

Separation
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

—W. S. Merwin, b. 1927

Three lines—one homely, familiar image—the sharp point of a needle piercing my being, dragging the thread of a loved one’s absence, stitching the “color” of this loss through me and into “everything I do.”

Exactly. Using abstract, even vague terms like “absence” and “separation,” Merwin opens us to the widest possible range of loss, great or small, brief or permanent. In sixteen words, clear to any reader, he says more than hundreds of pages can tell about the loneliness, loss, and grief—of brief or long-term physical or psychic distance—or of the ultimate separation: death.

Not that we learn something new, but that we are reminded of something that, at a deeper level, we already know.

And, somehow, we are profoundly, paradoxically, comforted. He has stitched our losses into a color, a texture added to us.

That’s why we need poets.

In a way Bryant’s column is rather like the serialized novels that used to be published in English newspapers during the Victorian era. Then it was the practice of popular novelists including Dickens, Conrad and George Eliot to publish their new works of fiction in installments, usually in very affordable newspapers.

There are a few commonplace books that appear on the Web, if not on a daily, at least a weekly basis. But few are accompanied by commentary as Bryant’s is in her weekly and sometimes bi-weekly column.

Only in Berkeley.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-02T07:59:00.001-10:00

The Wall Street protests continue and are spreading. It is both gratifying and surprising. Here are some recent developments.

Protests and action meetings are occurring throughout the country in such cities as Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. For a complete list of both national and international support sites see the Occupy Together website.

There is a very active community forum on the protest movements on Facebook.

The media is paying increasing attention. The Times has published a number of articles about the Wall Street Occupiers and has shown video interviews with some of the participants on its website. An older woman said she had been there every day but one, and wanted to help “these kids do what my generation never did.”

Professor Cornell West has spoken to the group, as has Michael Moore. Noam Chomsky sent a strong message of support to the activists.

A food station has been established in the park where the protestors have gathered. Information stations, recycling and media centers, as well as a power generator have been set up. There is even a library at one end of the park with boxes of donated books. The Times reports there are also therapists on location.

The group is now publishing a, free weekly newspaper, The Occupied Wall Street Journal.

Up until recently it has relatively peaceful protest. However, last weekend there was one ugly incident in which an officer pepper sprayed a number of female protesters. The episode is currently under investigation by the police department and Manhattan district attorney.

And during the past weekend 700 demonstrators were arrested as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on the roadway, blocking traffic, while those who used the walkway were not.

The New York Police Department continues to deploy hundreds of officers on the edge of the park. To date, there is no sign they will attempt to put an end to the protest.

The movement seems to be leaderless, without structure, an end-point and or concrete goal, other than voicing discontent at the varieties of economic injustices in this country.

The development of similar protests throughout the major metropolitan centers of this country is truly remarkable. No doubt it reflects a widespread and perhaps growing support of the movement’s protest against the nation’s economic inequalities.

Day Twelve

2011-09-28T13:10:00.001-10:00

I’m back. There’s too much going on now, too much that I’d like to write about.

Hereafter, I’ll write more briefly and broaden the topics a bit.

I’ve been galvanized by Occupy Wall Street. At last we have someone speaking out on economic inequality in this country!

For years we’ve been reading about this issue, the fact that 1% of the population receives 25% of the nation’s income and holds 42% of the nation’s wealth, that these gaps are growing so that now roughly 46,200,000 people in this country live in “poverty,” defined as an annual income of $22,113 for a family of four.

Does it make any sense for one person to earn over $400,000,000 a year in salary or $300,000,000 or slightly less?

Is there any fairness in this? Is it the least bit reasonable? Does whatever rationale is invoked, let alone performance displayed, justify executive compensation of this magnitude, an annual payout, mind you. And this is only their salary, not the taxes they end up paying or the generous options and bonuses that often go with it. What kind of economic justice is this anyway?

Meanwhile, banks repossessed almost 1,000,000 homes last year and the number may be even more this year.

I quote from the website of Occupy Wall Street Now:

Our Mission
On the 17th of September, we want to see 20,000 people to flood into lower Manhattan, set up beds, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.
Like our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America. We also encourage the use of nonviolence to achieve our ends and maximize the safety of all participants.

Who is Occupy Wall Street?
Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.
The original call for this occupation was published by Adbusters in July; since then, many individuals across the country have stepped up to organize this event, such as the people of the NYC General Assembly and US Day of Rage. There'll also be similar occupations in the near future such as October2011 in Freedom Plaza, Washington D.C.

Those who believe that peaceful protests of this nature serve no purpose and accomplish even less might benefit from a closer look at history, especially recent history where far more people put far more at risk in acting upon their beliefs.

Goodbye

2011-08-31T06:47:00.002-10:00

After blogging for over three years, it’s time to say goodbye. Thank you for reading and for responding. Marks in the Margin will continue to be live should you want to consult the Archives (Topics). And you can still send me messages and questions at rkatzev@teleport.com. It’s been a great experience for me and I hope once in a while for you too.

The Book Is Dead?

2011-08-29T01:33:00.000-10:00

I go to the gym and see people reading. I go to Powell’s Bookstore and the place is jammed with readers. In last week’s New Yorker I learn about the Dickens Universe, a summer camp at the University of California in Santa Cruz where for decades Dickens’s fans, ranging from university professors to realtors, actors, and auto mechanics, young and old, ignorant and scholarly, have been spending a week each summer reading, discussing, and listening to lectures about one of his novels.

Jill Lapore, staff writer for the New Yorker and professor of American History at Harvard attended this camp this summer. She writes:

"There is very little time to sleep at Dickens camp…Reading seminars start at eight-thirty and lectures are delivered in the morning, afternoon, and evening, followed by late-night screens of film adaptations of the week’s novel. There are daily rehearsals of an original farce, written for the occasion. In addition, there are faculty seminars, graduate writing colloquiums, and teaching workshops, not to mention Victorian tea, a Victorian dance, and, presumably, summer romance for graduate students, the less Victorian the better.”

And as if I needed anything more, I read in the Times this Sunday that Ann Patchett reminds me “Americans are still reading books.”

Regardless of who she is, and the fine novels she has written, and the relatively small size of her sample, one cannot entirely discount Patchett's reassuring words as she reports “from the front” on her recent coast to coast book tour to promote her new novel, State of Wonder.

“Night after night after night I showed up in a different bookstore and people were there with their hardbacks. Sure, I signed a couple of iPad covers, Kindle covers. I’ve got no problem with that. But just because some people like their e-readers doesn’t mean we should sweep all the remaining paperbacks in a pile and strike a match. Maybe bookstores are no longer 30,000 square feet, but they are selling books.”

The evidence: " From Porter Square Books outside of Boston and River Run Bookstore in Portsmouth, N.H., to Politics and Prose in Washington and the fabulous Powell’s of Portland. From Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, to my most beloved McLean & Eakin in Petoskey, Mich., the house was packed. Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, what a bookstore that is! And the Book Stall near Chicago. (I hit them both in a single day.) Book Passage and Kepler’s and Bookshop West Portal, all in the Bay Area, and on down to the legendary Square Books in Oxford, Miss. (which, 20 years before, filled its entire window with my first novel at a time when I could not draw more than three people who were not related to me). The book, I am here to tell you, is not dead, and neither is the bookstore."

So firmly was she persuaded of the future of small, independent, locally owned bookstores, that she and her business partner have started their own. It will be called Parnassus Books and will open in Nashville, their hometown, this October. Its Mission Statement can be found here.

Is there a booklover who has not dreamed of doing something like that?

Knowing & Behaving

2011-08-26T02:32:00.000-10:00

In the August 2nd New Republic Adam Kirsch writes about several new books that discuss the experience of “ordinary Germans” during the Holocaust. The problem of the “ordinary German” as Kirsch puts it is to try to explain how “citizens from an advanced society, famous for its culture and education—could be led in the space of a few years to commit a genocide of the Jews.”

Of course, we know that this problem is not confined to citizens of Germany; it is the problem of any human being when asked by an authority under extreme pressure to attack their neighbors. And who among us believes that they would do that?

Can we learn anything from historical events like this? Is knowing about them sufficient to immunize us against strong pressures to commit violence against another human being? This is the age-old question of the effect of knowledge on behavior.

The research on this question is far from cheering. In study after study it has been demonstrated that prior knowledge or anticipating an event has very little effect on how we will behave when put in similar one. Perhaps the most relevant example of the situation Kirsch is talking about is the well-known experiments of Stanley Milgram in which individuals where asked to deliver shock to another human being in the guise of a study on the effects of punishment.

To study the effects of knowing about these studies, another experimenter gave subjects a good deal of written and verbally presented information about Milgram’s experiments. Then the subjects were asked to serve as experimenters themselves in a similar study. Of the 24 informed subjects only 1 resisted the demands of the authority to continue the experiment in spite of the clearly visible distress of the confederates who were ostensibly given shock for errors they made on a learning task. The author writes:

“For these participants, knowing that people are willing to coerce others and cause distress to obtain and scientific understanding and feeling the original Milgram study to be personally distasteful, did not preclude behaving in a manner similar to that obtained in the original Milgram study.”

The increasing public awareness of Milgram's research provides an additional test of this effect. His research has been widely written about in the media, portrayed in television plays and films, and was the subject of at least one popular song. The studies have been discussed in countless public forums and many academic disciplines. Milgram's work is as well known as any program of research in psychology.

If, as a result of this dissemination process, individuals have become more "enlightened" about unreasonable demands of authority, one might expect a diminution in the overall level of obedience in ensuing replications of his work. However, a recent analysis of these replications, which covered a 22-year period, from 1963 to 1983, found no systematic decline in obedience during this time. The overall level of obedience in the most recent studies was just as high (65% of the subjects) as it was in the earlier ones.

What can be done in the face of such evidence? It is difficult to discount it, given the various situations in both the laboratory and under natural conditions in which it has been observed. Frankly, I am not sure there’s much that can be done. In a situation of strong social pressure, even the strongest succumb.

Kirsch concludes: “A society than can only be saved by heroes is not going to be saved: there will always be far more selfish and corrupt people, than good but ineffectual ones...Someone such as Sophie School, the twenty-one year old who distributed anti-Hitler pamphlets in Munich knowing it would lead to her death, deserves everlasting praise … but she knew full well that she was not going to stop Hitler. It took the Allied armies and many millions of death to do that.”

References
Shelton, G. A. (1982). The generalization of understanding to behavior: The role of perspective in enlightenment. Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Blass, T (2000). The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority. In Thomas Blass (Ed) Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Fait Divers

2011-08-24T02:24:00.000-10:00

Teju Cole whose recent novel, Open City, I greatly admired, is now at work on a non-fiction account of Lagos, his hometown for seventeen years. He writes, “And what is there to know about a city beyond statistics, beyond population, tallest buildings, GDP, is individual human experience.”

To capture this aspect of city life Cole was drawn to what he refers to as “small news,” the sort of thing your read about in the local newspapers and crime sections, or see on the Internet. He says this type of writing is best described by a French term, fait divers, which he translates as “incidents” or “various things.” Here are two examples he mentions:

“Raol G, of Ivry, an untactful husband, came home unexpectedly and stuck his blade in his wife, who was frolicking in the arms of a friend.”

Another: “A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.”

Both of these fait divers are short, small incidents with large effects, at times ironic in tone, at other times rather humorous on first reading. Cole has begun posting these pieces on his Twitter page. He says that what all his small fates have in common is their “closed circle of the story. It needs neither elaboration nor sequel.”

He also claims you never see anything like them in the New York Times. I disagree. Although not quite as short as those he has selected, the Times routinely publishes short local tales in its daily New York news section and even shorter ones in its Metropolitan Diary column that appears each Monday in the West Coast edition. Here is one from last month:

“I was on my way to the local library near Battery Park City to return a book of short stories, and made several stops on my way … when I realized that somehow in one of the establishments, I had misplaced the book. The librarian informed me that if the book didn’t turn up, it was going to cost me $25. I complained that I wouldn’t mind so much if the stories and the writing hadn’t been so awful. I made a pest of myself with the Duane Reade [pharmacy] manager, who promised to keep an eye out for the book. Two weeks later, there at the drugstore’s service desk was the book. A young woman had returned it several days before and told the manager not to bother reading it, as none of the stories were interesting.”

I have also been collecting incidents or happenings from my daily encounters in whatever city I happen to be in; I call them Urban Tales. Here are a few examples:

The Fish Market
Annie is gone. She had not been there all week. I assumed she was on vacation. But she was not there the following week either. They told me she was working at another store on the other side of town now. I couldn't believe it. We spoke often, called each other by our first name. We exchanged stories. The weather, the bus trip over, where the ahi tuna came from this week. She was my friend. I felt I let her down if I didn't buy something each time I went in. She never told me she was leaving.

Happy Birthday
I like going to Sunday matinees, especially when it is cold and rainy and as dark as it usually is outside around here. As I was going to my seat on such a recent Sunday afternoon, a young woman came down before the audience and asked for everyone's attention. She announced to the puzzled assembly that it was her mother's birthday, indeed, a very special one, and asked it we would all join together to sing happy birthday to her. Without a moment's delay everyone took up her request and sang a lusty Happy Birthday to her mom, Sandy.

Next Door
I used to live high up in the hills above Portland before moving to the neighborhood below. One day, in the market up there, a man approached and greeted me as if we were old friends. I stopped, stared at him for much too long, looking puzzled and uncertain. Eventually I confessed I had no idea who he was. He didn't pause a moment to tell me he was X, my next-door neighbor. We had been neighbors for three years up there in the hills above the city.

I am indebted to Macy Halford on the Book Bench for introducing me to Teju Cole’s Fait Divers.

The Cellist of Sarajevo

2011-08-22T01:45:00.000-10:00

At times we scarcely notice significant historical events when they occur. They fail to catch our attention, in one ear out the other as they say. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovia (between April 1992 and December 1994) and the siege of Sarajevo was a case in point for me.

Yes, I was dimly aware of the war, must have read about it in the paper, knew that NATO intervention finally brought the war to an end. But in the midst of all the other news of those days and the work I was doing, the reality of human experience simply flew right by me.

Sometimes a work of fiction can recapture what that was like and in particular what it was like for the people who struggled day after day during those years to stay alive as the shelling and sniper fire continued. Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo accomplished this for me. Instead of focusing on the political and military picture, his novel recounts the experiences of three unconnected individuals.

The fourth character, the cellist of Sarajevo, is based on the real-life musician, Verdran Smailovic, who had been the cellist of the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra before the war began. Perhaps you remember the day early in the war when a mortar shell killed twenty-two citizens of Sarajevo as they stood in line to buy bread. Smailovic witnessed their deaths and to commemorate each individual he vowed to play (Albinoni’s Adagio) in the square where they died for twenty-two consecutive days.

While this is all we learn about the cellist, Galloway’s novel unfolds the tale of three individuals who at various times come to hear him perform.

“Some days he had an audience. Other days there was so much shelling that no one in their right mind would linger in the street. It didn’t appear to make any difference to him. He always played exactly the same way.”

Arrow is a sniper who is given the task of protecting the cellist. She is far and away the most interesting character in the novel and her skills as a sniper are legendary. Dragan is a man who spends hours traveling to an old brewery to get water for his family and ungrateful neighbor. Kenan is a baker trying to cross a dangerous intersection to get to his job.

But we really learn nothing about the cellist, his motivation, and thoughts as he plays during those twenty-two straight days. Nor do we learn much about what his music brought to the people of Sarajevo? Did it bring them any sense of hope, hope that the war would end, that the city would be rebuilt, and some degree of normalcy would return?

Indeed, with the exception of Arrow, the characters seemed to me almost lifeless. Maybe that’s what war does to many of those who have to live through it. They simply give up on living.

The real drama, the real emotion of The Cellist of Sarajevo comes from Galloway’s depiction of the city, the destruction, the damage and those who didn’t make it across the intersection or were killed during a mortar attack.

It was reported that nearly 10,000 people were killed or unaccounted for, including over 1,500 children during the siege while an additional 56,000 people were wounded; half were children. Electricity was rarely available, food and water were scarce, the only thing that was plentiful was fear and the daily shelling from the hills surrounding the city. In the afterword Galloway says an average of 329 shells hit the city each day, with a one day high of 3,777. Is it any wonder there was an abundance of fear?

“Dragan knows he won’t ever be able to forget what has happened here. If the war ends, if life goes back to some semblance of how it once was, and he survives, he won’t be able to explain how any of it was possible. An explanation implies a logic, but there’s no logic to Sarajevo now.”

A Science of Literature?

2011-08-17T03:52:00.000-10:00

I’ve been reading the first issue of the new journal, The Scientific Study of Literature. Is a science of literature possible?

Occasionally we read about a study that claims to be a scientific investigation of literature. For instance there are increasing accounts of the evolutionary origins of stories and story telling, others on what is happening to various areas of the brain as we read a book, and still others that describe computerized research on a large body of textual materials, say an author’s work or a particular historical period.

However, the first issue of the new journal departs from these approaches in emphasizing the experience of reader and the interaction of the reader with the text, rather than the interpretation of texts, the method that currently tends to dominate literary scholarship.

Research on literary processing is carried out in the laboratory with a group of individuals as they read specially designed reading materials. Only rarely are published sections of works of fiction or non-fiction examined, either in the lab or under natural (non-laboratory) conditions.

In discussing the current state of the field Dixon and Bortolussi distinguish between cognitive processing and that focused on emotion and affective reactions. “Personal resonance” is a term that investigators in this area use to contrast a literary text from an expository one. In a representative study it was reported that while both types of text prompted an equal number of recollections, those elicited by a literary text were more personal, evoking scenes in which the reader was involved.

Surely that is one of the reasons for the great appeal of reading works of literature and why individuals become so absorbed in the experience. It reminds us of a similar experience or elicits an association with some personal meaning, sometimes having nothing to do with what is meant in the text.

In his article, “The Individual in the Scientific Study of Literature,” Raymond Gibbs writes: “Yet I am continually struck by an overwhelming sense that reading is so deeply personal, and the content and workings of my mind so individual, that it would be near impossible to describe my literary experiences in any way as something shared with others.”

And then, he poses the central question for this field: How is it possible to use a reader’s unique response to literature as the basis for general scientific principles?

In any study of a group of individuals, a large percentage will vary from the general statistical trend. Gibbs reminds us of the countless ways these individuals differ: gender, age, occupation, education, social status, language, culture, geographic origin, religion, political beliefs, ethnicity, personality, physiological differences, etc. Can a general theory of literary responding be derived when confronted with these differences and the complex ways they interact with one other?

My own view, one expressed occasionally in previous posts, is that other than recognizing this fact, such generalizations are impossible. And that is why I find the entire field rather anomalous and more closely allied with case studies, clinical research, and single subject designs.

Long ago Virginia Woolf said all this much better in her essay, “How Should One Read a Book?” “In the first place, I want to emphasize the not of interrogation at the end of my title. Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to you. The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions…. After all what laws can be laid down about books?”

Testing the Waters

2011-08-15T02:28:00.000-10:00

Blind Lunch
One day when I was walking around Florence I chanced upon a store-front window, looked in and saw a man and a woman having lunch together. That was all—one table, two chairs, two people eating lunch. By the door was a sign directing the reader to a website where I subsequently read the following message (translated from the Italian):

Sharing a private moment with a stranger, it means giving up the surprise, let go and let himself be invaded. Blind Lunch takes place within a window, the only boundary that separates the public from the private sector, which faces directly onto the street. The space is transformed into a cozy and intimate with a central dining table, a meeting point where two people unknown to each other, eat a meal together.

Fancy that, I thought. Wouldn’t it be amusing, perhaps even interesting, to give it a try? I sent an email (in English) to the indicated address expressing my interest and never heard a word in reply.

Experimenting Society
A note from the Web a while ago: Today Vermont is set to make history by becoming the first state in the nation to offer universal, single-payer healthcare when Gov. Peter Shumlin signs its healthcare reform bill into law. The Vermont plan, called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, will attempt to stem rising medical care prices and provide universal coverage... Dr. Deb Richter, president of Vermont Health Care for All … moved from Buffalo, New York, to Vermont in 1999 to advocate for a universal, single-payer healthcare system in the state. Gov. Shumlin calls her the “backbone” of the grassroots effort that helped persuade the Democratic-led state legislature to pass the bill this spring.

Here is an example of an experimenting society at its best. First try something new on a small scale. Then evaluate the results. If the outcome is positive, continue with the program. If it isn’t, try something different. This approach is easy to do when applied to limited number of people. Making changes, as well as mistakes is less risky in small groups or organizations. I have found that to be the case whenever I have observed the origin of significant social changes. The smaller the country, state or academic setting, the easier it is to experiment with change and then in light of its effects, decide whether or not to apply it on a larger scale.

Study Thyself
Reading a book isn’t quite as simple as it used to be. Now a reader is given a choice, print version, Kindle, iPad1 or iPad2, Nook, or mobile phone. It is rather like going to the market to get some cereal where you find yourself confronted with one long shelf above another of a countless number of choices. In the Times last week Nick Bilton describes the way he went about deciding how to read a book. He writes,

“This might not sound so extraordinary, but I didn’t just read a book in print, on an e-reader or even a mobile phone. Instead I read a book on dozens of devices….I wanted to answer a question I often hear: which e-reader or tablet is the best for reading books?”

The book he selected was The Alienist by Caleb Carr and he read sections of it on eleven (11) different devices plus “a crumply old print paperback.” The gadgets included the Kindle, the Google Nexus S Android phone, the iPhone, a Samsung Galaxy Tablet, the iPads (1 & 2), the Nook and laptop computer. For each device he describes its desirable and undesirable features.

A single person trying various approaches by themselves (self-experiments) or with one other individual (single subject research) often leads to important discoveries in science. Examples include Herman Ebbinghaus on memory, Freud on the unconscious, and Albert Hoffman on psychedelic drugs. While Bilton was far from doing scientific research he was going about the decision on how best to read a book by doing a little “experiment” on himself.

While he says reading the paperback version of the novel was frustrating because he couldn’t easily look up things as he could on his iPhone, in the end, he concluded to my immense pleasure, “But if money is tight, go for print. My used paperback cost only $4.” Not only that but he could mark it up any old way he liked.

On Facebook

2011-08-12T04:47:00.000-10:00

And why had he never had a friend as Jorge O’Kelly had been for Prado--A friend with whom he could have talked about things like loyalty and love, and about death?
Pascal Mercier Night Train to Lisbon

I don’t understand Facebook or Twitter or really texting either. It’s not that I’m opposed to them. Rather, I simply don’t get their appeal. Of course, many explanations have been proposed and I’ve not found anything too objectionable in these accounts. But what I don’t understand is the purpose, the goal, the raison d’etre of communicating this way.

It is said that their goal is connection, to connect with one friends make new ones, find out what’s going on with them. What a strange way to make contact with another person, sometimes hundreds of persons, many of whom you’ve never met or spoken with, or have the slightest idea who they are.

In her essay Generation Why? in the New York Review of Books (November 2010) Zadie Smith also asks,

Why? Why Facebook? Why this format? Why do it like that? Why not do it another way? The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the “Why” of Facebook. He uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the site helps everyone connect with people and share information with the people they want to stay connected with….”

Doesn’t anyone wonder about the nature of that connection, its quality, durability, the degree to which it is a genuine connection? Currently there are said to be over 750 million active users, half of whom log on to Facebook on any given day. The average user is said to have 130 friends, although a “friend” of mine has over 850 friends, and two members of my family have well over 800. What does it mean to have over 800 friends anyway? Is this some kind of a contest to see how many friends we can accumulate?

How can anyone have that many friends? Why are we not discussing the value of this kind of friendship?

I pose these questions not because I was raised during the letter-writing era, followed by the telephone and now e-mailing or that I’m simply an old grouch. I find some of these new communication techniques and the Internet itself a bit of a miracle.

Do Facebook members think much about the quality their connections? As far as I can tell the exchanges that occur on its website seem silly, rather superficial and scarcely the stuff of what we mean, or used to mean, by a friendship.

“Yes.” “Haha, that’s very funny.” “What a beautiful couple.” “Great photos.” “We're hard core: waited 2 hrs for screen door brunch. After a super grueling aerial class this morning I was so hungry! But the summer veggie hash was so worth the wait!” “New Job, new puppy, new car, new desk, new computer, new year since birth--same old guy.” There are an enormous number of Likes and X is now friends with Y and lots of Yeses.

Isn’t this slightly ridiculous?

In response I suppose devoted Facebookers could always quote Charles Lamb who in a letter to Coleridge wrote about his how he felt about his long suffering sister: “’Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.”

Eventually Smith closed her account at Facebook and writes: “The last defense of every Facebook addict is: but it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do that, too,… If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.”

Future of Bookmarks

2011-08-10T04:58:00.000-10:00

With the ascendancy of the e-book, what will become those odd-little bookmarks that to mark the page we last read in paper books? I don’t know if you feel the same, but I’m very particular about the bookmarks I use. They have to be just the right size. I don’t like small ones like the business cards or bus tickets that some readers use; they tend to fall out of books or get lost somewhere, so they are really quite useless. I don’t much care for paper clips that crease the pages of the books I am reading or those printed on flimsy paper that tear or bend easily.

The bookmarks at the legendary Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, used to be like that. I never liked them at all and always recycled them whenever I was given one. But Mr. Powell must have taken my displeasure to heart for a few years ago he stiffened up his bookmarks so that they now remain in the books I buy there, rather than on the stack of papers in my recycling box.

One of my favorite bookmarks was given out by a small, independent bookstore in Portland that I had been going to for almost 40 years. Sadly, the bookstore is no longer in business which isn’t surprising given the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The store had an almost perfect bookmark, one that remained the same during all the years I went there. They kept doling them out from an inventory that must have numbered in the millions and I still have enough for a lifetime of reading.

Every now and then I read a book that is a treasure. Some of these are reference books, like the dictionary or encyclopedia. Others are books of paintings or photographs. These books clearly require one of the cherished bookmarks that I’ve collected over the years in my travels. These usually turn out to be made of thin leather with a calligraphed message or distinctive symbol printed on the front side. Or the book might already include one those colorful ribbon strips that sometimes accompany those really fine and important books, as well as all my red Michelin guides of hotels and restaurants in Italy and France.

These narrow cloth or silk ribbons that are bound into the book at the top of the spine are said to be the eighteenth and nineteenth century precursors of the modern bookmark. It is a mystery why they aren’t included in every book. Wonder of wonders, the Paris Review now includes a bookmark with each issue. Such a simple idea--promote the periodical, aid those who take their time reading the material, point the way to the publisher’s website where the reader can search the archive, listen to poems, and by golly also subscribe. Then again, maybe it is not such a good idea, since if it is widely adopted it will likely be the end of bookmark craftsman, as well as the pleasure of collecting distinctive bookmarks.

I keep my most valued bookmarks in a very special box upon my desk. The box is about the size of an egg carton, opens with a hinged lid, and has always sat upon my desk ever since I received it. It has more than enough room to house all my favorite bookmarks. The lid is appropriately calligraphed with passages about writing: “Writing is nothing more than a guided dream (Jorge Luis Borges). If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it (Toni Morrison). True ease in writing comes from art not chance (Proust).”

Bookmarks have not escaped the wonders of the electronic age either. A 21st century reader can now purchase a digital bookmark with a built-in dictionary, the ever-popular Selco Bookmark Dictionary II. It is said to hold 130,000 words with “definitions thoroughly revised and updated.” They can be had at Amazon for a little over $35. Whoever heard of paying for a bookmark?

The "keypad" of this gadget is no thicker than your ordinary bookmark. However, it is attached at the top to a modest-size LCD screen that not only displays the meaning of words, but also the date and time of day for readers who can’t live without this information. As if that is not enough, it also incorporates a calculator, for readers trying to solve Fermant’s Last Theorem. I have been rendered speechless by the thing. The screen sits up upon the top of the keypad, like Humpty-Dumpty on his wall. I have a feeling it won’t be long before my jazzy new Selco Bookmark Dictionary II will experience a similar fate.

If you prefer to make your own, see this clever suggestion. And for readers ready to upgrade to a four-star deluxe bookmark, I can report that Tiffany’s new bamboo leaf/scarab bookmark in sterling silver is available at the time of this writing. I saw it advertised in the Times a while ago and was duly informed it is designed for bookmark lovers who want to add a touch of glamour to their favorite coffee table book. Each one is carefully embossed with bamboo stalks and a tiny copper and gold beetle. At $120, it would make a perfect gift for all your bookish friends. You don’t live near a Tiffany store? No problem: just go to their online store to order this gem. Better do so before they run out; I am sure the supply is limited.

Briefs

2011-08-08T04:12:00.000-10:00

My reading notebook, otherwise known as my commonplace book, consists of two sections now—Briefs and Passages. Passages are the notable thoughts and ideas I collect from the books and periodicals I read. Briefs are provocative comments, a word or phrase, a quotation from a random collection of almost anything I read—a newspaper, blog, journal, essay, etc. The Briefs for each year are usually just a few pages while the Passages can be anywhere from 50 to 60 pages. To give you an idea of the kinds of things I collect in the Briefs, here are those I saved last year.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it. William Faulkner

I have so much to say about the importance of memory…the role of memory in love. One way in which we love people is by remembering them, maybe even after they’ve forgotten things about themselves. I find the idea of bearing witness very beautiful. The idea that to love someone is to bear witness to his or her life comes up a lot in the book [Man Walks Into a Room]. I find the idea of bearing witness very beautiful. Nicole Krauss

But great books force people to engage in the human conversation. They teach empathy and they teach compassion. They remind us of all the words there are beyond whatever. In a large sense, this is what Man Walks into a Room is about. It's about a man who becomes disengaged, and who—after a lot of loneliness and pain—relearns the difficult beauty of engagement. If I could reduce what matters to me most right now to a single word, it would be simply that: engagement. Nicole Krauss

“… you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness. Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge.” William Cory

Miracles can happen in the writing process. More often than in life, unfortunately. David Grossman

…that we have these ideals which are extraordinarily powerful, and extraordinarily high and our inability to execute them is tragic…. Osker Eustis

The world’s most urgent environmental need, he has come to believe, is not for some miraculous seeming scientific breakthrough but for a vast, unprecedented transformation of human behavior. David Owen

I have one opinion—one should evaluate things—which is strongly held. I’m never unhappy with the results. I haven’t yet seen a result I didn’t like. Esther Duflo

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor but on a more complex scale….The writer’s real world and the writer’s fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. David Mitchell

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” Writing instructs and that doesn’t necessarily make it dictatorial, elitist, self-righteous or school-marmish. A good writer writes with authority. He has something to give us – pleasure, insight, information – something he convinces us is worth having. He may do so by arguing, explaining, seducing or amusing. An exchange takes place: He convinces us to listen and we give our attentiveness, which is respectful but neither naïve nor credulous. If he tries too hard – if he tailgates like an overheated driver – the contract is broken and we close the book. If we are writers and don't uphold our end of the bargain, we're soon out of readers. Patrick Kurp

It is tempting to think of public resistance to particularly egregious Supreme Court decisions. Suppose, for example, that there had been a popular uprising against Bush v. Gore in 2000—that the recount of votes in Florida had gone forward despite the Court’s decision and that Al Gore had won and become president. The United States would not have invaded Iraq. Lax financial regulation would not have brought us close to an economic meltdown. John Roberts and Samuel Alito would not be on the Supreme Court. The fantasy has its appeal. But the price would have been high: the loss of fealty to the one institution that holds this vast, disparate country together: law….”The Democrats as well as the Republicans followed the decision. They did so peacefully.” It was, he said, “the most remarkable…feature of the case.” Anthony Lewis

Varieties of Hunger

2011-08-05T02:38:00.000-10:00

In an interview about her novel The Cookbook Collector, Allegra Goodman was asked why she chose the title. She replied:

This is a book about hunger and about acquisition; it’s a book about people deciding how to live. The cookbook motif raises interesting questions: Is it better to follow a formula or recipe as you live your life? Or improvise as you go along?

By “hunger” I think Goodman is also referring to a strong desire, a longing both for ideas and love, for success and riches.

How sad he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end.

Emily, the older of two contrasting sisters and CEO of Veritech, a software firm in Silicon Valley, longs for Jonathan, the founder of ISIS, a software firm in Cambridge.

He needed Emily to believe in him so that he could believe in himself.

Jess(amine, Emily’s younger sister, a graduate student in philosophy at Berkeley longs for wisdom, literature and eventually George, a Microsoft millionaire, bookstore owner and rare book collector.

…he was constantly disappointed. Dissatisfied. He was always looking for the next thing. He had the mind of a researcher, restlessly turning corners, seeking out new questions.

Both sisters “hunger” for the truth about their mother who died when they were very young.

Information wasn’t always such a gift; it was also a loss, the end of possibility.

Meanwhile, George yearns for Jess.

…he never stopped desiring the one he couldn’t find…The one he couldn’t find became the one he couldn’t have.

Orion, the software programmer for ISIS, yearns for Sorel, an independent soul, who also works at ISIS.

…he grew more solitary, even as he hungered for companionship.

In a word, every person depicted in this intellectual rich novel hungers after one thing or another—fulfillment, knowledge, achievement and love.

I prefer the chase; I like pursuit better than so-called fulfillment. Everybody does.

Is all of this longing worth the chase? Goodman concludes with this question:

What profit is it to own so many things, to stroll in gardens and enjoy previous jewels, to each such food and drink such wine? In the end, what good is it to collect such riches? Every wall will crumble. The beautiful will wither and decay.

Aesthetic Experience

2011-08-03T05:02:00.004-10:00

“I hardly think there can be a place in the world where life is more delicious for its own simple sake.” Nathaniel Hawthorne

I am often asked why I keep returning to Florence. In her novel The Cookbook Collector Allegra Goodman answers for me.

"You forget that some aesthetic experiences satisfy…There is such a thing as excellence, and I do know it when I see it, and when I find it I am fulfilled. I want to keep on hunting endlessly. If I’m restless, that’s not because I want to be or because I can’t help it. I am not chronically dissatisfied; I’ve been disappointed. There’s a difference. When I discover something beautiful and right and rare, I’m happy. I’m content."

That is precisely the way I feel about Florence. For me there can never be another place like it. I am content there. Totally. That’s the way it has always been. I feel no need for anything more and am forever grateful for having found it and been given the chance to be there so often.

Some people want to travel, they want to go up the Amazon, explore the Great Barrier Reef, see the cheery blossoms in Japan. I am not one of them. When you find perfection and beauty, when you find a place that feels like home, your querencia, isn’t that sufficient?

Why do we call something beautiful? Why do we say Florence is a beautiful place? What is it that we mean when we say something is beautiful?

David Hume wrote: “Beauty is not a quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”

Hume has got it just right, as usual. And in The Maytrees Annie Dillard writes:

“In her last years Lou puzzled over beauty…She never knew what to make of it. Certainly nothing in Darwin, in chemical evolution, in optics or psychology or even cognitive anthropology gave it a show."

And so I continue to “puzzle over” beauty until I return to Florence where it is on “show” everywhere.

The Cookbook Collector

2011-07-27T13:00:00.004-10:00

I’ve finally found a book I can read. It has been a long slog to get to The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman. What is it about this book makes it one I can read?

There are the people—they are intelligent, amusing, thoughtful, different, lovable, confused, conflicted and I’m drawn to them. I recognize them.

There is the situation—a bookstore in Berkeley, a software company in Cambridge, a software company in Palo Alto, all very interesting, at varying times, a part of my life.

There are the issues, the questions—to marry or not, to reveal or keep silent, to buy or to sell, the ambiguities of life and work, all well known to me now.

It is all there, written beautifully, it is smart, clever, serious and wise all combined in by a master of literary creation. Goodman has done her research, she knows what she is writing about, and there is much that is worth collecting.

Holiday

2011-06-30T21:11:00.002-10:00

Marks in the Margin will join most Europeans and be on a holiday break (vacanze estive) for the rest of the summer. I hope you enjoy your summer and have a chance to read a good book or two.

Car-Free Florence

2011-06-28T19:59:00.006-10:00

Three days ago on the streets outside the apartment I am renting in Florence there were no longer any cars whizzing by. Indeed, barriers manned by the Carabinieri were set in place that prohibited cars, taxis, trucks, buses, scooters, and motorcycles from entering the area. It was strangely weird and so very quiet and it remains so. Something seems missing, as if everyone has fled the city.

At first I thought it was temporary to block off the traffic during Festiva, Florence’s celebration of its patron saint. Eventually it became clear that was part of Florence’s rapidly expanding plan to increase the number of pedestrian friendly or car-free zones.

People were milling about, amiably chatting with one another on what otherwise would have been an area packed with noisy vehicles moving slowly, bumper to bumper between the many cars parked along each side of the street as those of us who were walking sought a safe place on the narrow sidewalks that are common throughout this city.

In a recent issue of the New Yorker Nicholas Leman writes about several new books that discuss the shifting trends in living in cities or suburbs. Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, interested me most. According to Glaeser the key factor that makes a city successful is proximity, the way it brings people into contact, “enabling them to interact in rich, unexpected, productive ways.”

“In a big city, people can choose peers who share their interests, just as Monet and Cezanne found each other in nineteenth century Paris, or Belushi and Aykroyd found each other in twentieth-century Chicago.”

Florence is also one of the cities that epitomize Glaeser’s view of proximity. Its effects are precisely what I see happening on the streets outside my apartment now. When I’m here I often think of the extraordinarily creative period of the Renaissance in Florence. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Gaileo, Brunneleschi, Machiavelli, the Medicis--all working together, sometimes across the street from one another or down the block at bit.

Elsewhere I have written about Hillel Schocken and Malcolm Gladwell’s views of the experience of living in large metropolitan areas. Gladwell cites the work of Jane Jacobs:

“The miracle of Hudson Street, according to Jacobs, was created by the particular configuration of the streets and buildings of the neighborhood. Jacobs argued that when a neighborhood is oriented toward the street, when sidewalks are used for socializing and play and commerce, the users of that street are transformed by the resulting stimulation: they form relationships and casual contacts they would never have otherwise. Sparely populated suburbs may look appealing, she said, but without an active sidewalk life, without the frequent serendipitous interactions of many different people, "there is no public acquaintanceship, no foundation of public trust, no cross-connections with the necessary people."

When I first read that many years ago I was naturally struck by the lively public socializing that I have always observed in the neighborhoods here Florence. I doubt that the rarity of such encounters in America is because Italians are more outgoing than we are.

Rather I think it has more to do with almost haphazard way their cities have evolved over the centuries and the resulting relationship of the buildings to the street. The frequent socializing of the Italians occurs because their cities naturally invite fortuitous meetings between individuals as they stroll along the sidewalks or visit the piazza in their neighborhood.

“Now in Florence, when the air is red with the summer sunset and the campaniles begin to sound vespers and the day's work is done, everyone collects in the piazzas. The steps of Santa Maria del Fiore swarm with men of every rank and every class; artisans, merchants, teachers, arts, doctors, technicians, poets, scholars. A thousand minds, a thousand arguments; a lively intermingling of questions, problems, news of the latest happening, jokes; an inexhaustible play of language and thought, a vibrant curiosity;…all these spring into being, and then are spent. And this is the pleasure of the Florentine public.” Richard Goodwin

And Schocken, in his book, Intimate Anonymity, defines a city as: "a fixed place where people can form relations with others at various levels of intimacy, while remaining entirely anonymous." He concludes by noting: "The future of urbanism lies in the understanding that the city is a human event, not a sculpture." I am sure this is one of the secrets in the design of all good cities and the neighborhoods within them. It is surely one of the secrets of Florence.

Note: For a continuing discussion and superb photos of car-free cities throughout the world, including the most famous one in Italy, see the journal Car-Free Cities.

What is Social Psychology?

2011-06-26T21:00:00.003-10:00

For years I taught and did research in experimental social psychology. In my day, the field emphasized the situational determinants of behavior, perhaps best exemplified by the studies of Stanley Milgram on obedience and disobedience to authority and Philip Zimbardo on behavior within simulated prisons.

There has been a marked change in the field since than, one that focuses less on the situation and more on the way a person views it. An example: It isn’t so much what you say, but what is heard.

I continue to believe the field is important as long as one is ever mindful of the extraordinary variability of behavior and the limits this places on its theories. How widely does the generalization apply--under all conditions and if not, which ones? Does it hold for me and how does this vary over the course of my lifetime?

Timothy Wilson, the author of Strangers to Ourselves, (“the most influential book I’ve ever read,” Malcolm Gladwell) and one of the most highly regarded social psychologists, recently gave an overview of the discipline on the Edge. As Wilson sees it, there are six very general ideas that guide the field today.

• It is not the objective environment that influences people but how they interpret it and the story they construct to account for why they acted the way they did.

• Recognizing the importance of unconscious processes on thought and behavior after a long period in which the field had ignored it.

• Individuals are often unaware of the true causes of their behavior. When they try to explain why they did what they did, they usually fall back on ad hoc theories or make one up.

• Individuals are poor predictors of how they will respond to future events. We usually overestimate the degree to which they will make us feel better or worse.

• One of the most effective ways to change dysfunctional behavior is to “edit” the stories individuals use to explain their behavior or “redirect” them in a more adaptive direction.

By way of illustration Wilson describes an intervention with students who were having a difficult time during their first year in college. The grades of students whose stories focused on their own failings improved “dramatically” when it was suggested their problems were normal for first year students, that it was the academic situation, rather than their own abilities that was responsible for their poor grades.

• Experimental tests of programs that address social problems can be fruitfully applied in determining if they work. Wilson cites two examples of an often-observed outcome of programs designed to reduce anti-social behavior.

When D.A.R.E., an anti-drug program that kids went through when they were in school, was tested with appropriate control groups, the findings revealed it not only didn’t work but it actually increased alcohol and smoking. Similarly a Scared Straight program designed to scare at-risk kids from a life of crime, increased the likelihood they would commit them.

In all such examples the results are formulated on the basis of a large sample of individuals. With evidence of this sort, one must ask is the effect a strong or weak one? What percent of the sample conforms to the general trend and is there any way to account for these differences? How confident can one be that any particular individual in the sample acted in accordance with the main outcome?

For me, the difficulties in answering these questions, difficulties that are inherent in the statistical methods used to analyze the results, are at the core of my disenchantment with social psychology and why it I am no longer very active in the field.

Fragments from Florence

2011-06-23T21:00:00.003-10:00

It is the city itself—the city understood as a self; as a whole, a miraculously developed design. It is the city as what Italians call an insieme, an all-of-it-together. R.W.B. Lewis

Every June 24th Florence puts on a colorful celebration for its patron saint San Giovanni Battista. During the day, there are parades, concerts, a rowing competition along the Arno, much good cheer, and in the evening a fireworks show launched from the Piazza Michelangelo, a hillside square with a panoramic view of the city below.

The finals in a sport that is a combination of ruby, wrestling, and soccer also takes place in the afternoon at another square. It is said to be a rather bloody battle that has been cancelled in the past because of the violence among its spectators. While the match is scheduled this year, I have no desire to join the throng in attendance at this gladiator-like event.

The ease of walking everywhere is one of the delights of being in Florence. I walk to the market, to the bookstores, to the magazine stand and the trattorias that I go back to each year. This is what a city should be like, a place where everything is close by, it is not difficult to get by without a car, and as you saunter about the city, you are presented with one surprise after another.

Tomorrow the celebration continues with an event known as White Night in Nottarno in the Oltrarno (the other side of the Arno) when the shops, restaurants, and bars stay open well past midnight. Every piazza in the area will hold concerts and live performances. There will be street art demonstrations, late night dinners, jazz, Latino and rock concerts. Clearly there is far too much to do. What a place this is!

And yet at times I am taken aback when I read about the wartime experience of people who were living in Florence then. Now the streets are crowded, the people are smiling and there is gaiety everywhere. Then the streets were empty with threats of bombing and that knock on the door. The Jews were in hiding if they had not already been rounded up, everyone was hungry and had much to fear, there were worries about what the retreating Germans would do to their city and only hopes that the Allies would arrive soon.

“A grim long winter lies before us, at the end of which none of us can tell whether our homes will still be standing, or our children safe; and we must meet it with what we can muster of patience, courage, and hope” Iris Origo

The Parco Delle Cascine is an enormous park on the western edge of Florence that stretches along the Arno for miles. Over the years I have gone there often, first as a runner, then as a walker, and now as a picnicker. I marvel at how few people are usually there. Perhaps it is because the park is so vast and so heavily treed that the people are simply hidden in between the bushes and shrubs and down the long pathways that traverse the park from one end to the other.

The Number 7 bus takes travels up into the hills above city to the little town of Fiesole that was first a Roman and later Etruscan village and where I have dinner one night. On the bus trip back I sit down next to three young women who immediately try to engage me in conversation. I see at once that they are a little tipsy. So we have a lively conversation although they do not speak English and I do not speak Polish, their native language, or Italian which is what they are speaking or trying to speak to me.

Still we have a jolly time for a while, until another women approaches us and says with a note of exasperation that she can’t stand listening to us any longer. So she begins translating what everyone is saying, although I thought we were doing just fine before she comes to our “rescue.”

The three Polish women are heading for a pizza restaurant a little below Fiesole and they invite me to join them there. I had just eaten enough lasagna for all four of us, so regrettably I decline. Who knows what might have happened on that lovely evening up in the hills above the city of Florence had I accepted their invitation. In retrospect, I am glad that I had eaten a substantial dinner.

Journey to a Tuscan Villa

2011-06-21T18:08:00.008-10:00

I’d like to invite you on a tour of an Italian retreat for writers, Santa Maddalena, located in the heart of Tuscany about a half-hour from Florence. It was the home of the writer Gregor Von Rezzori and his wife. When he died, she established the Santa Maddalena Foundation that offers visiting fellowships to four writers each year, as well supporting the Writers Festival described in my last two posts.

You don’t have to fly all night to Italy for this tour that will also include visits with some of well-known writers who have worked there. To see the beauty of this place, hear what it means to these writers, and be introduced to Rezzori’s wife, Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori, you need only watch two engaging videos included without additional charge on this no-cost, no-frills journey. How can you resist?

The Santa Maddalena utopia has been described this way: The land, located above a wooded ravine, has been transformed into a series of garden rooms….And an olive grove and pathway that link the house to the tower where many of the writers stay. Flower covered walls and groves of oak and chestnut trees mark the way to this former signal tower from the 15th century. Below, hidden by a screen of bamboo and trees is the pool and terrace.…There also is a vegetable garden with sun-ripen tomatoes in typical Italian style.

Recent fellows have included, Colm Tolbin, Michael Cunningham, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith (twice). Bruce Chatwin wrote of his visit: “The Tower is the place where I have always worked, clear headedly and well, in winter and in summer, by day or night - And the places you work well are the places you love most.”

Jens Christian Grondahl, a Danish writer, said, “Places reflect the people who have lived in them, and Santa Maddalena resonates and shimmers with the echoes and reflections of lives spent loving beautiful things."

The tour begins here:

And continues here:

Buon Viaggio

Why Write?

2011-06-19T19:48:00.005-10:00

Zadie Smith was the featured speaker (Lectio Magistralis) at the Writers Festival (Festival degli Scrittori) I attended in Florence the other day. It was an odd presentation as we were given a pamphlet of her talk upon arriving that I was halfway through as she began reading it, word-by-word.

Meanwhile, the Italian version of her remarks was simultaneously shown on the screen behind the podium. I had expected at least a bit of spontaneity from Zadie Smith during this important lecture. There was none.

The title of her talk was Why Write? (Perche Scrivere?) and what I found most striking about it was the emphasis she placed on social factors in answering the question. She set the background by describing the bleak situation that confronts writers today, arguing that it is almost ridiculous to write a novel any more

There are few readers and it takes years to write one, let alone finding a publisher. If that hurdle is passed, you struggle to preserve its copyright, suffer through all the criticism it receives and the abusive remarks of bloggers. At the same time she suggests this has always been true for the writers of any era.

…Keats suffered the barbs of a few critics but never had to contend with half the internet calling him an asshole; Emily Bronte struggled to find an audience, but she wasn’t competing with a global audiovisual entertainment industry, cinema, television, online gaming, iPods, iPads, and tricked-out phones loaded with a lifetime’s worth of two-minute distractions.

Do writers consider all this misery as they put pen to pad of paper or pound away at the keyboard? I had imagined they rarely did, that they wrote because it was second nature to them or with only themselves in mind.

Why write then? If the act is so attendant with misery? Pope’s answer will be familiar to writers of all times and all ages. Because he couldn’t help it, any more than he could help his hump or his height.

But then she returns to the social factors in considering the question. She says that Pope also wrote to secure the approval of his peers and the opinions of his fellow writers. More so than the opinion of readers, and certainly more so than that of critics, whom he denigrates in the traditional way…

She cites Gregor von Rezzori to illustrate way writers are ever mindful of their readers. “It [the value of writing] has created a reality—and people are touched by it. I have this feeling. Do you? I saw this thing. Can I make you see it? I had this thought. Can you understand it? I am in this elation to death. Are you? I am wondering whether writing is possible. Are you?”

(Rezzori was an Austrian writer who married an Italian woman and together they settled in Tuscany. To honor Rezzori after he died, she established a foundation that supports a retreat for writers at their Tuscan villa, four of whom are offered resident fellowships each year (in 2009 Smith was one of them). As part of Florence Writers Festival, the foundation presents the Gregor von Rezzori Prize for the best work of foreign fiction translated in Italian.)

Smith continued that we write for other reasons too—because we are concerned with the “beauty in words and their right arrangement,” to engage in a dialogue with the wider world, “to counter that overwhelming sense of one’s own pointless,” and finally to see if we can, “that we do still have abilities, ideas and means of communication that are our own…”

But her emphasis on the social context of the writing enterprise did surprise me. It is not an answer I would have given to the question Why Write? and I wonder how many real writers would attach such weight to it. Do Philip Roth or Ian McEwan think for a moment about their readers? Did Virginia Woolf or Jane Austen?

Writers will always write, regardless of the views or number of their readers--like Zadie Smith who still writes, even though she has her critics and must experience all the modern distractions she mentioned that compete with her best efforts.

However, Smith has not published a novel in six years. Her last book was a set of literary essays and recently she has become the monthly book reviewer for Harper’s Magazine. Has she given up on “the act that is so attendant with misery”?

Writing to Connect

2011-06-16T21:31:00.004-10:00

I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely. Nicole Krauss

When I write something, I’m not really writing for anyone but myself. I’m not trying to impress, persuade, or communicate with someone. Rather I’m writing to see if I can and can do it reasonably well. At least that is what I thought until I read an essay by Jhumpa Lahiri which was soon thereafter reinforced in a lecture I heard Zadie Smith deliver.

In her essay New Yorker (June 13th-20th) essay Lahari says when she began to write it was to connect with another person. “When I began to make friends, writing was the vehicle. So that in the beginning, writing, like reading, was less a solitary pursuit than an attempt to connect with others. I did not write alone but with another student in my class at school.”

This statement brought me to a halt. I had just written about the preoccupation young people have today connecting via the various digital technologies available to them. I was worried that they no longer knew how to be alone and spend time with themselves. Lahiri’s statement implies that perhaps writers in all their solitude are simply doing the same thing—trying in their way to connect with other people.

This seemed to me a bit of an insight. Perhaps I’m not writing for myself, at least not exclusively. Rather I may be writing just as much for my readers, however few there are, in the manner I can connect with them best. And how much different is that than connecting with someone online or on your cellphone?

It has been said that we search for company in literature. Is that any different than searching for company online? Imagine a person who reads all day in the company of their fictional friends. Is this person doing anything different than a young kid texting all day or sending messages to their e-mail buddies?

Of course, these questions are difficult to answer. But Lahiri’s simple statement in her essay did bring them into focus.

In How to Read and Why Harold Bloom comments that the search for friendship is one of the reasons we read. “Because you can know, intimately only a very few people, and perhaps you never know them at all. After reading The Magic Mountain you know Hans Castorp thoroughly, and he is greatly worth knowing.”

Of course, we read for other reasons too and we surely write for an equal number of reasons. But perhaps one of them is the search for friendship. I may error in thinking that we might be motivated to write in order to communicate with our peers, our friends, and other largely anonymous readers. Perhaps this expands the notion of “connecting” too broadly so that it covers too much of what we do, thereby rendering it untestable.

I have written a fair amount on writing and until recently did not view as a social activity. But I’ve been led to reconsider that view in light of the stream of questions Lahiri’s essay led me to and, by a strange co-incidence, a lecture I heard Zadie Smith give the other day in Florence. To be continued.

Virtual Identity

2011-06-14T20:13:00.004-10:00

We live in an age when private life is being destroyed.
Milan Kundera

Have you ever wanted to live in a monastery, a secular one where contemplation, rather than prayer is the order of the day? I think you have to be a peace with solitude in order to ever consider that kind of life. Of course, you don’t have to move into a remote monastery to live like that. It is enough to live alone and try your best to bracket the ordinary distractions that seem to have overtaken contemporary life.

Yesterday I went to an exhibition in Florence that was a multi-media reflection on the theme of Virtual Identity. It dealt with the emerging way we define our self, both personally and collectively in the new digital culture, where we are constantly available and interacting with smart phones, social networks, computers, etc. “In today’s communication society, one seems to exist only if traceable online and in the constant flow of information”

The exhibition echoed a theme that many have written about, concerned not so much with the nature of the “communication society” but rather it’s cost, what is lost, what we are not doing as a result of our constant need to connect. And what is lost is the experience of solitude, of being alone, and having time for reflection and mind wandering, if you will.

When asked by an interviewer “Do you need a lot of solitude to write?” James Salter replied: “Complete solitude. Although I’ve made notes for things and even written synopses sitting in trains or on park benches, for the complete composition of things I need absolute solitude, preferably an empty house.” I believe almost every writer would reply similarly.

Recently I read A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Fermor was a British author, scholar and soldier and a highly regarded travel writer. He died last week and was eulogized with much admiration. In A Time to Keep Silence he describes his life in a French monastery and how he responded at various stages to monastic silence and isolation.

“If my first days in the Abbey had been a period of depression, the unwinding process, after I had left, was ten times worse. The Abbey was at first a graveyard: the outer world seemed afterwards, by contrast, an inferno of noise and vulgarity.”

He reports that after a painful period of adjustment he found that it was not long before he achieved a degree of peace and clarity of spirit that he had never known before.

He writes about the “staggering difference between life in the abbey and the world outside.” Indeed, I suspect most people today view monastic life as alien to their values and seem almost joyless. And I think this true for most forms of solitude that are often depicted as a lonely, boring type of existence.

In an essay, “One Hundred Fears of Solitude” published in Granta last year, Hal Crowther notes that the various digital communication techniques have destroyed the experience of silence, of autonomy, of privacy.

When his class was over one day“Two hundred students all pulled out their cellphones, called someone and said, “Where are you?” People want to connect.”

And later Crowther cites what a woman with a master’s degree told a reporter: “I lost my cellphone once. “I felt like my world had just ended. I had a breakdown on campus.”

In Exit Ghost Philip Roth writes, What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say—so much so pressing that it couldn’t wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. Inside the cars, the drivers were on the phone…For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too. To eradicate the experience of separation must inevitable have a dramatic effect.

At dinner one night a few years ago at an outdoor café in Fiesole, a town in the hills above Florence, I observed a couple sitting silently together at their table. (Since then, I’ve seen this scene repeated over and over again.) Each one was holding their cell phone. I never saw them speaking to one another. Instead, they spent the entire time talking to someone on their phone. And when they were done speaking, they continued to fiddle with their gadget. I suspected they were searching for their e-mail messages or poking around the Web. I thought they were a couple on the verge of a meltdown.

E-Reader Update

2011-06-12T22:14:00.003-10:00

I finally succumbed the other day and bought an e-reader—the iPad 2. It is my fourth (previously 1 Kindle and 2 iPads, each returned) attempt to come to terms with one of these gadgets.

The catalyst this time was the end of the $5 fee the New Yorker’s publisher was charging print subscribers to read the app version of the magazine. Subscribers are now able to download each issue of the magazine without any additional cost.

And since I was about to set foot in Italy once again, where the magazine is hard to find and if you do, it will always be two or three weeks old, probably older than the one you read before leaving. Now I can read it over here the morning it appears on the newsstands in New York. Since the new New Yorker has become much more politically and internationally focused than its former literary, cultural self, the articles don’t seem as dated as they might be when read weeks later.

To date I have enjoyed reading the magazine’s app. But I have not enjoyed being unable to highlight, copy, or save a passage of the text. I have tried and tried again to do this and have been uniformly unsuccessful. There is nothing on the Web that indicates it is possible. In response to my inquiry, the magazine sent the following reply:

Dear Subscriber:
At this time, highlighting and copying/ pasting is not a features in the app.
Sincerely,
Sherry

How disappointing! I am scarcely consoled by Sherry’s optimistic phrase, “At this time.” Maybe if enough readers voice their concern, as I have, the magazine will come around on this matter too.

Henceforth, when I read an issue on the iPad, I’ll have to have my laptop or a notepad on hand in order to copy anything and make occasional notes, both of which are part and parcel of the way I read the print edition or anything for that matter. And since the pages are not numbered, it is quite time consuming to try to find a passage sometime after finishing a piece.

I am currently getting used to the gadget. There are some books I will try to read and test what it is like to view films. There are several cinema apps (free) that look promising. And I’m embarrassed to admit that I have been playing a game, Words with Friends, with my wife. It’s a variation of Scrabble that she is a whiz at and when I manage to beat her, I am hoping that will be the end of my iPad game-playing-days. It is one heck of a time-waster.

In short, I see the iPad’s current limitations and some of its advantages for someone who primarily likes to read and watch films. Anything on the screen is bright and clear, like the quality of any Apple product, and to me that is a real advantage over the dull screen of the Kindle. There are an overwhelming number of tempting apps and those I prefer don’t cost a Euro.

This is a sort of status report. I’m not using the thing much. It remains to be seen whether I’ll ever get used to it or simply pass it on to someone else.

Banking in Italy

2011-06-09T21:47:00.004-10:00

This is a door to an Italian bank, like the one I went to yesterday. Doors like this must be passed through to enter banks throughout this country. It isn’t the way you enter a US Bank, but here in Italy you just can’t walk into a bank at your pleasure.

Once you master the system in Italy, and it does take a bit of figuring out, you enter one door at a time, one person at a time, no more. First you have to press the enter (Entrata) button and if you don’t look like a threat to society, however they look these days and however that is determined, the door slides open and you walk into a small, narrow double-door chamber. So that’s the first door

You are now in an inner corridor, about the size of a small closet. Somehow you are inspected, although again you never know how, and if you pass muster, another door slides open and there you are, inside the bank. Eureka! You have made it. As you wipe the sweat off your brow, you finally can proceed to the counter.

I should note the procedure is reversed when you leave the bank. So you see it isn’t easy to transact your business at the bank or rob one for that matter.

In spite of these strict entry and exist requirements, much like getting in and out of an Ivy League college these days, banks are still robbed in Italy. According to a 2007 report in the Guardian, over 3000 bank robberies occurred in Italy the previous year, slightly more than half of those in all of Europe. And you know how many countries there are in Europe, don’t you?

You think you have a safe job working at an Italian bank? Wrong. According to the Guardian once again “bank clerks now face a one in 10 chance of being held up every year.”

“One Ferrara bank clerk, Stefano Bellettati, told La Repubblica that after being robbed nine times in 11 years, one heist stood out. "Four robbers with wigs and masks came in speaking English, French and Spanish among themselves to avoid identification and fled on bicycles."

One might wonder how they ever made it through those high-security, double-door entry closets. Perhaps they don’t have such systems outside of the major metropolitan areas. I am in the dark about this, although I suspect there are bank branches in neighborhoods outside the city center and small towns that may not have such tight security systems. I don’t doubt they cost a fair amount to procure and install.

I suppose this shouldn’t be surprising: People will find a way to do what they want regardless of how hard it is or the potential risk to them. Even trying to transact your business at your friendly Italian bank.

Sojourn in Tuscany

2011-06-04T10:03:00.003-10:00

Marks in the Margin is going on Summer break as I’m off to Italy for a while. Postings, if any will be intermittent. In the meantime, you are welcome to browse the archives.

Vi auguro buona lettura molto durante l'estate.

Certified Copy

2011-06-02T05:09:00.002-10:00

What is the difference between an original work of art and a copy? Can one put the same value on them? If not, why not? Does the distinction even matter? These are the questions initially raised in the movie Certified Copy and, on one interpretation the central theme of the film.

The film was written and directed by the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami. A woman, Juliette Binoche attends a lecture on copies of original works by an art historian, William Shimell. At the end of his presentation she goes to the podium to ask him a question, they converse for a while, and then she invites him to visit a nearby village in Tuscany with her.

Who could ask for more—an interesting question, two handsome actors, wandering through a Tuscan village? As they drive through the countryside, they continue to talk. The talk seems strange. It isn’t the sort of conversation you have with a stranger. You wonder if they might actually know one another after all, as she begins to flirt with him and then argue a bit. The owner of the café assumes they are married.

What is going on? What does Kiarostami mean by all this lofty discussion and incongruous talk?

You begin to interpret their conversation differently. You return to the original question. Are they re-enacting their marriage, creating a copy of the real thing? Is there a difference between the two?

You think perhaps they are married after all; perhaps they no longer live together. What fun to catch on or to think you catch on. You have that “I get it” feeling. Do you have to have a marriage like this to get it? Or is it obvious to everyone? It wasn’t to every moviegoer I spoke to about the film. And some of the reviewers were equally puzzled too.

Roger Ebert who I always count on for insight about the cinema confesses he isn’t sure what was going on. He writes, “Perhaps Kiarostami’s intention is to demonstrate how the reality is whatever the artist chooses, and that he can transfer from original art to copy in midstream. Or perhaps that’s not possible. Perhaps I have no idea what he’s demonstrating.”

And he concludes: “Is a skillful copy of the Mona Lisa less valuable than the original painting? What if the original had been lost? Would we treasure a copy? Such questions are raised by Certified Copy and not answered. Is raising them the point? Does Kiarostami know the answer? Does he care? At least we are engaged, and he does it well. Is that enough?….This is the best I can do with Certified Copy. Perhaps it was wrong of me to try.”

Come on, Roger--the re-enactment of their marriage is indistinguishable from their actual marriage. She wants to go somewhere; he doesn’t. She wants to have a meal; he isn’t hungry. She stops to have a conversation with some villagers; he walks on. Was their marriage any different? She wants him back; he is content in their separation. The roles they are playing in the story are duplicates of how they had always acted. The pas de deux of their marriage is their marriage.

As far as I’m concerned this is cinema at its best. It is also fiction at its best—an amusing story against a background of provocative questions, peopled by brainy individuals, wandering about the villages and countryside of Tuscany.

Just Being There

2011-05-31T07:28:00.005-10:00

Each June, as the winter continues for what seems forever, I make plans to visit Italy. In the beginning, it was the single event that kept me going through the winter. Now I wonder if it will be the last time. It is also a chance to recharge the muse after finishing a project and I begin floundering around for the next one.

I do not speak Italian and have little appreciation of its artistic treasures. I have no business or research to undertake. It is enough to simply be there. It is also a stroke of good fortune that I can fly away to Florence, where I spend most of my days simply wandering from place to place, listening to the people, astonished by their energy and the beauty that surrounds them. Then there is the warmth, the warmth each day, all day and throughout the night.

It is reassuring to walk into a place to find the same individuals you recall from previous years--the strong and beautiful woman at the laundry; the quiet one at the kiosk, who retrieves the morning papers for me; those who serve me coffee or tea at the bars. There is something comforting about the people who are familiar in this far off place.

As part of warming up for this month long retreat, I’ve been reading Alastair Reid’s Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner.

Reid was a poet, staff writer at the New Yorker for several years and translator of many works of South American poets. Among other places, he lived in a remote Spanish village during part of each year. Here he took up residence among the villagers who had kept the modern world at bay.

Communication in the village depended on word of mouth and, as Reid writes in Notes from a Spanish Village “are at the mercy of memory. In the store, Dona Anna tells me that Don Anselmo wishes to see me, though she cannot remember when she got the message.”

There are two, no doubt more, ways to travel—to observe a place and to live among its people. I prefer the later. Upon returning to the unnamed village each year, Reid said he “looked forward keenly to picking up the long, unfinished conversations, the view from the inside.”

From his very first visit to Spain he realized it was going to matter a great deal to him and become a part of his life. “I found it recognizable at once, in the way that something one has been looking for subconsciously is recognizable.”

He bought a small home on a hill above the village, shopped in its few stores, helped the neighbors when needed, and lived a simple life, a life that was possible then in such a village where the climate was warm and where the people took pride in being self-sufficient. He had no car indeed, there were few cars in the village, although the bus did trek up the hill a couple of times a day.

He returned each year, in part, to confirm the village, even though as he says, it doesn’t care. But he wonders if “perhaps we come back to confirm ourselves?”

“From my first visit on, simply being in Spain has always occasioned in me a kind of joy, a physical tingle, which comes from a whole crop of elements: its light, its landscape, its language, and most of all its human rhythm, a manner of being that graces the place. It comes, however not from any such abstract awareness but from intense particularities: bare village café’s loud with argument and dominoes, or else sleepy and empty except for flies; sudden memorable conversations with strangers; the way Spaniards have of imposing human time, so that meals and meetings last as long as they need to.”

As I approach my return to Florence, I share many of Reid’s sentiments. It is warm there, the light is sparkling, as are its people, and while I am a foreigner who doesn’t speak the language, I do not feel like one. There are even times when I am recognized on the street or in a café and that, of course, always surprises and delights me both.

As he prepares to leave once again, always a difficult experience, Reid comments, “…the urgencies I have created for myself elsewhere seem trivial by now, and the timelessness I have grown into is something too rich to leave cursorily.”

Yes, always.

Particularities of Individuals

2011-05-29T07:07:00.006-10:00

I continue to read experiments from the various branches of psychology. And they continue to mystify me. Who do they apply to? What is one to make of these generalizations derived from incomprehensible statistical analyses? When examined closely, the differences between conditions or individuals are due to multiple factors and relatively small, albeit statistically significant. What kind of game is this statistical analysis anyway?

When I find myself pondering these questions, I often turn to the work or Robert Coles. Coles is one of those rare individuals who combine a deep appreciation and knowledge of literature with his work as a physician, social researcher, and child psychiatrist. A recipient of one of the first MacArthur genius awards, he is the author of over eighty books and is Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at the Harvard Medical School.

For years Coles has taught a legendary course on the relationships between literature and the practice of medicine. He attributes his life-long interest in this topic to the work of the poet and doctor William Carlos Williams who became a close friend while he was a medical resident. In an interview Coles said, “I became so impressed with the dual life he lived as a physician and as a writer/social observer of sorts that I thought maybe I’d give it a try myself.”

In Times of Surrender Coles writes about his friendship with Williams and how it led him to realize the inherent affinity between medicine and literature—their common interest in the concreteness of particular human experience. Williams had written

“The abstract, categorical mind can be wonderful…But we‘ve got to keep a close check on all that....The doctor treating a patient out there on the front line falls back on himself…and he has to come to terms with not only a disease but a particular person: this patient, not patienthood, not lungs, in general, or kidneys or hearts in general, but one guy, one gal, one kid who has some trouble and is handling it in a way that may be different than anyone else’s way!”

And in his own work, Coles has emphasized he uniqueness of each individual; that variation is ever-present in the work he does. He put it this way, “I’m constantly impressed with mystery, and maybe even feel that there are certain things that cannot be understood or clarified through generalizations, that resolve themselves into matter of individuality, and again, are part of the mystery of the world that one celebrates as a writer, rather than tries to solve and undo as a social scientist.”

This is why he and other physicians have turned to literature and to writing about the lives of particular individuals, whether in a work of fiction as in Chekhov, Walker Percy and recently Rivka Galachen or non-fiction, as exemplified in the recent articles and books of Jerome Groopman and Autul Gawande, both of whom I have written about in this blog.

Doctors often write well because they never loose sight of specific patients and the way they express their illness. In his essays, Groopman has reminded us how our current medical beliefs are subject to qualification and often refutation. This is often the case with comparative research studies (clinical trials), whose findings may be relevant to some patients but not to others. These studies usually fail to pinpoint those to whom it applies and those to whom it doesn’t.

In reading literature we get to know a person as an individual, not an example of a personality dimension or character type. Quite often we get to know them better than the so-called real people we know or read about in research reports. In Reading Chekhov, Janet Malcolm wrote, “We never see people in life as clearly as we see the people in novels, stories, and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other.”

And we don’t have to worry if their lives follow a common pattern or theoretical prediction. Their life is its own truth--unique and non-replicable.

When Prophecy Fails

2011-05-26T04:19:00.004-10:00

How do you react when a prediction you have made is not confirmed? Do you discount the evidence, look instead for supporting data, or revise your belief while you seek further support?

The recent Doomsday predictions of Harold Camping and his followers reminded me of the classic study of these questions, When Prophecy Fails, by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter. Their work, published in 1956, examined what happened after the world didn’t end in a great flood according to the prediction of a cult of believers.

The cult developed following the purported message a housewife, Dorothy Martin, claimed to have received that the world would end in a great flood on December 21, 1954. Acting on this message, a sizeable number of believers quit their jobs, left college and in some cases their spouses and gave away their possessions to prepare for their departure on a flying saucer which would come to rescue them.

It was an elaborate Doomsday prediction and equally elaborate plan to escape it. What happened to the members of the cult when the world didn’t end on that Winter Solstice in 1954? Did they reject their belief or did they strengthen their commitment to it?

Virtually all of them failed to acknowledge the fallacy of their prediction or the message from another planet. Instead, Dorothy Martin claimed she had received another message that the “God of Earth” has spared the planet and the end of the world had been called off because her followers had “spread so much light.” As a result, members of the cult swung into action and tried more vigorously to spread its message by recruiting new followers.

Reaffirmation of belief in the face of contradictory information has been labeled confirmation bias, although Festinger and his colleagues viewed it within the framework of their theory of cognitive dissonance. On this account, it is unsettling to have one’s belief disconfirmed especially when it is firmly held and concrete actions have been taken that are consistent with it.

Individuals can take a variety of steps to reduce their dissonance—look elsewhere for supporting evidence, seek social support for their beliefs, strengthen their attitudes toward the basic idea, or discount the negative evidence. Recruiting others to join their cause was the most vigorous action the group took as they developed a campaign to spread its message to as wide a population as possible.

How did the believers of the recent Doomsday prediction react when confronted with their mistaken belief? Did they give it up or begin a vigorous recruiting campaign as the followers of Dorothy Martin did? Or did they attempt to justify their belief by claiming it was a further test of God to persevere in their faith?

It is really too early to know much about how these believers will respond in the long run. Most were naturally disappointed. However, apparently a few have admitted their error. Some had given away or sold their possessions, while others had drained their savings accounts.

Meanwhile, Harold Camping, the group’s leader, has been relatively silent. And the group has not been subject to the intensive, “participant observation” study that Festinger and his colleagues had carried out.

But if their dissonance theory is correct, one can anticipate a strengthening of commitment to their prediction in some form and increasing efforts to recruit others to their group. If none of this occurs, it will be just as interesting to see how proponents of dissonance theory respond to the disconfirming evidence.

Rendezvous in Rome

2011-05-22T11:07:00.005-10:00

They met in Rome through a mutual friend. They were both in their sixties now, Adam, a musician, was there while his daughter was taking a master violin class, Miranda, an epidemiologist for a conference and solo vacation. They had been former lovers, first loves who were certain to be married until their relationship was shattered when Adam betrayed Miranda. Later we learn Miranda acted similarly.

“We thought that we would be each others one true love. We believed in that idea: the one true love. Now it is impossible that we should believe that, living as we have lived, having loved each other.”

This is the tale of Mary Gordon’s The Love of Our Youth. Do you ever wonder about a long lost love(s)? What are they doing now, where do they live, are they married and tolerably content? Do they wonder about you? It is unlikely you will have the type of encounter Adam and Miranda do or, if by chance you do, that it will be in such a historic place.

Adam and Miranda make the most of their time in Rome as they agree to meet each day to walk for a while in a different place. More often than not it is along the tree-lined paths of the Villa Borghese gardens, to a church or monument of the sort that can be found on practically every corner of Rome. Occasionally they linger over a meal in a café.

Adam had lived in Rome, he had family there and he wanted to show Miranda the places that meant most to him. As they stroll along, they slowly reveal themselves to one another and the persons they have become in the nearly a half-century since they last saw one another. “Are we fated to always be the people we were? Always making the same mistakes?”

Their lives, its rhythms, had grown radically apart. The things that had absorbed them once, no longer did. Yet they still play the question-asking game. “She enjoys this kind of play with him. It was who they were, people who played in this way. She doesn’t have people now who play in this way with her.”

Yes, they ask about each others life, families, and the work they do. But they explore more the real difference between them—the central concern of their lives. Adam is devoted to music; Miranda to political engagement and social change as expressed in her medical research in “undeveloped” countries. Their dialogue on these two lives pervades the novel.

“…she hears him playing a Bach partita, one of the preludes of Debussy, and she realizes that she had moved herself away from his music, thinking it irrelevant to the suffering of the world Now and newly she sees it as essential, an alternative to chaos, a sign of the goodness that is the counterpoint of the dread conditions she is living in.”

In reading Gordon’s novel I became the observer, following behind them as they recount their past, their uncertainties, and the way they are still bound to each other.

They circle around this truth, although Miranda does her best to deny it. The sharpness of her protest when Adam expresses “regret for the life we didn’t have together” awakens a regret sometimes felt at the passing of old loves, old selves, old hopes.

“It is time to go she says. They walk out to the road. Stand here, Adam, just stand here. It will be easier for me to remember if I can remember other things. You against this pale sky, the red, or is it purple of these leaves. And the silly palms, and the yellow of the plane trees. And the building, and the heads of all those poets, or whoever they are that made someone think they deserved to be remembered. By the likes of us."

A Writing Life

2011-05-19T11:06:00.005-10:00

Recently a friend sent me an essay she wrote about the importance writing has meant to her throughout her life. It is a profound and moving testament. The essay, Reflections on the Writing Life, was an address she delivered on the 72nd anniversary of Kristallnacht and dedicated to Hannah Senesh, a Hungarian Jew, who was murdered by the Nazi’s in 1944 at the age of 23. She begins by quoting Senesh:

“I feel I could not possibly live without writing, even if only for myself, in my diary….A thought that is not put on paper is as if it had never been born. I can only truly grasp a thought when I’ve expressed it in writing.”

I often feel that way. It is one of the reasons I write these posts. I have an idea and I start trying to put it to words and I find the idea isn’t really much of an idea after all. Had I not tried to write about it, it might have lingered in my mind as some kind of a gem. Writing clarifies. Writing corrects. Writing discovers.

In her essay my friend compares writing to music. She hears a rhythm of words in her ear that “chime in my head as I write them down.” I know that feeling. I hear a sentence or a phrase that almost demands to be written.

Sometimes it is only a word and I type it and the rest of the paragraph and every now and then a page will follow almost automatically. It is quick and when I’m done, little in the way of editing seems to be required. That is unlike the usual case when each word or so requires a herculean effort.

Similarly, my friend says: “I listen for harmonies, point-counterpoint, cadences and fluency in the word-music I want to make as I weave word –patterns on the page.”

She reviews the course of her writing life, beginning as a child when she wrote poems, impressions, and the letters to the members of her family. “Letters are our charms against the ache of absence and separation, and the fear of loss.”

Although I have never met her or spoken to her, I have had the good fortune, perhaps even the richest of fortunes, to be one of her correspondents.

She wrote in her journal as if it was another person. It became “my listener, my confidant—a second person, a “you,” my old companero.”

Later in life she turned to academic writing as she pursued her career in sociology while at the same time writing short stories and then sometime later a trilogy of novels. In writing she discovered that one has an inner life and in reading and re-reading our writings, “we come to know ourselves more deeply.”

To write and then put it in the hands of a reader in the various ways there are to do that now is to make it permanent. In her essay, my friend expresses this much better. “To read another’s writing is to keep its light in the world.” If a book or letter is never read, it is as if it is hidden away in a box until it discarded and eventually turns to dust.

You will appreciate the spirit of her essay and why I wanted to write about it by reading its conclusion:

“Let us, People of the Book, go on reading and writing, let us continue the conversation between the generations, let us be keepers of the flame, let us keep their lights in this world as we go on kindling our own beside them.”

The essay was written by Audrey Borenstein, co-founder of the Life Writing Connection (with Olivia Dresher), author of One Journal’s Life: A Meditation on Journal-Keeping, Redeeming the Sin, and other works of short fiction, poetry, and criticism, including The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies, and Evanesce.

Spring Break

2011-04-05T11:02:00.004-10:00

Marks in the Margin will be on Spring Break for an indefinite period. Thank you for reading and responding. You are welcome to write to me at rkatzev@teleport.com. And please feel free to browse the list of Topics archived on each page of the blog.

Open City

2011-04-03T05:07:00.006-10:00

Julius is his name. He is from Nigeria and has lived in the United States since 1992. His father, a German, died when Julius was young and he is estranged from his Nigerian mother. He has done well in this country, graduating from medical school and is about to complete his psychiatric residency. He is also widely cultured, devoted to classical music, photography, and literature. And he is the central character in Teju Cole's remarkable debut novel Open City.

Julius is also a wanderer, an observer who takes off on long walks in New York City to ease the stresses of his working day and recent, painful breakup with his girl friend. “And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.” He often wanders deep into the canyons through Columbus Circle, all the way down to Wall Street and Battery Park continuing up the West Side Highway.

He is an acute observer of everything he sees and everyone with whom he speaks and he records his observations with a clarity that soon become the reflections of a therapist, a philosopher interspersed with memories of his boyhood in Nigeria. He notes it “is unimaginable how many small stories people all over this city carried around with them.” The same can be said of Julius.

He encounters an enormous range of people—immigrants, a Liberian who he visits in a detention center where he has been for two years, a graduate student he befriends at Internet café during a visit to Brussels, the doctor he meets on the flight there, and he makes several visits to a dying former professor whose conversations echo the literary class he once took from him. And in these meetings he mulls over art, literature, music and photography, the partisanship and violence of contemporary life, and a countless number of books.

Cole's novel reads like a meditation, a diary without a plot, an autobiography without a beginning or end. “The days went by slowly, and my sense of being entirely alone in the city intensified. Most days I stayed indoors, reading, but I read without pleasure. On the occasions when I went out, I wandered aimlessly in the parks and in the museum district. The stones paving the streets were sodden, liquid underfoot, and the sky, dirty for days, was redolent with moisture.”

Always the observer, the listener, Julius is generally aloof, not one to get involved in the melodrama of the city. Even when he is mugged one night he describes the experience as an impartial observer rather than the victim of a brutal attack.

“I fell to the ground. I don’t recall if I cried out, or if opening my mouth I was unable to make a sound. They began to kick me all over—shins, back, arms—a quick preplanned choreography..The initial awareness of pain was gone, but now came the anticipation of how much it would hurt later, how bad tomorrow would be for both my body and my mind. My mind had gone blank except for this lone thought…We find it convenient to describe time as a material, we “waste” time, we “take” our time. As I lay there time because material in a strange new way: fragmented, torn into incoherent tufts, and at the same time spreading, like something spilled like a stain.”

Throughout Julius poses questions that he cannot answer and he reflects on ordinary matters. On happiness: “I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherry wood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard.”

And the seasons: “In recent years I have noticed how much the light affects my abilities to be sociable. In winter I retreat. In the long and sunny days following in March, April, and May, I am much more likely to see out the company of others, more likely to feel myself alert to sights and sounds, to colors, patterns, moving bodies, smells other than the ones in my office or at the apartment. The cold months make me feel dull, and spring feels like a gentle sharpening of the senses.”

Toward the end of his journeys about the streets of Manhattan Julius goes to a symphony at Carnegie Hall. Watching Simon Rattle conduct Mahler’s 9th, he recalls other conductors who have led an orchestra in Mahler’s vast score and he falls into a mood connected to each name, “one of balance, extreme, sentimental, pained, consoling.”

“I found myself thinking of Mahler’s last years as I sat on the uptown-bound N train last night. All the darkness that surrounded him, the various reminders of frailty and morality, were lit brightly from some unknown source, but even that light was shadowed. I thought of how clouds sometimes race across the sunlit canyons formed by the steep sides of skyscrapers, so that the start divisions of dark and light are shot through with the passing light and dark. Mahler’s final works…were all first performed posthumously; all are vast, strongly illuminated, and lively works, surrounded by the tragedy that was unfolding in his life.”

These are but a few of his ruminations in this beautiful, intellectually rich and provocative novel. They led me to think about many old and new issues and in the strange way that sometimes happens in reading certain works of fiction, I often found myself in an extended conversation with Cole. Perhaps you will too if you read Open City and fall under its spell as I did.

Notes from the Web

2011-03-31T13:03:00.005-10:00

Ulysses
The Summer 2012 Olympics will take place in London. In a competition to select a piece of verse designed to inspire the athletes and serve as a motto for the event, the last lines Tennyson’s Ulysses were chosen.

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

The passage is a ringing call to action, exploration, and persistence. It also has a very personal meaning for me, as it is the passage that my grandmother stitched in a beautiful needlepoint tapestry that has always hung above the fireplace of my home.

Books That Make a Reader
Philip Roth recently spoke before The Center for Fiction about the books that turned his life toward literature. The books were four novels by Thomas Wolfe. He said:

In 1949, when I was sixteen, I stumbled on Thomas Wolfe, who died at thirty-eight in 1938, and who made numerous adolescents aside from me devotees of literature for life. In Wolfe, everything was heroically outside, whether it was the voracious appetite for experience of Eugene Gant, the hero of his first two novels, or of George Webber, the hero of his last two. The hero’s loneliness, his egocentrism, his sprawling consciousness gave rise to a tone of elegiac lyricism that was endlessly sustained by the raw yearning for an epic existence—for an epic American existence. And, in those postwar years, what imaginative young reader didn’t yearn for that?

Theater Chez Schmidt
My Last Play was written and is performed by Ed Schmidt in what The New Yorker calls “his perfectly nice Carroll Gardens flat for an audience of fourteen.” He has been performing his work this way since 2002, when he first started inviting viewers to his home. In My Last Play Schmidt discusses his life “on the margins of the American theatre” and when he concludes he does something quite remarkable. He invites the members of the audience to take one of the theater books from his library of 2,000 volumes.

As Hilton Als says in describing this uncommon form of theater-going, “His iconoclasm must be lonely. Which, of course, the source of any comedy worth its thorns.”

Virginia Woolf
Monday, March 28th was the 70th Anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s death. I’ll never forget the letter, the love letter really, that she wrote to her husband, Leonard, before she left to take her life in the nearby River Ouse.

Dearest,

I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another one of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V.

Write a Sentence

2011-03-29T07:02:00.006-10:00

“I feel I could not possibly live without writing, even if only for myself, in my diary…A thought that is not put on paper is as if it had never been born. I can only truly grasp a thought when I’ve expressed it in writing.” Hannah Senesh

Writing takes me away from myself. This happens when I have something to say. I write and time flashes by. Sometimes I look at the clock and cannot believe what time it is. Writing is liberating, a state of mind that is mindless.

"From things that have happened . . . and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason." Hemingway

It’s not so much the tale of her husband’s death (Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker 12/13/10), but rather the way she has written about it. The full interiorization of her experiences, the rhythm, the short rolling sentences. The frequent use of the first person, present tense. It rings in my ears. I start writing that way.

“Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one tamped with your personality.” Robert Darton

Unexpected ideas and experiences I had forgotten about emerge when writing. Sometimes I become a different person when writing and the words just seem to appear on the page. I think this must be someone else.

“I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn’t matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones. And because I accepted that what I’d once believed was possible was in fact impossible, and because I knew I would never show a word of it to anyone, I wrote a sentence.” Nicole Krauss

I don’t know what voice is. But I get into this mood while writing and it stays with me until the end. Usually it is in the third person, present or past tense. It is a kind of ironic, jesting voice that I sometimes find in the works of Coetzee.

“I don't mean style... I mean voice: something that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head." Philip Roth

Is it just a playful way of writing, poking fun at myths, styles, ideas, simply by affirming them in a way that makes them seem silly, ridiculous, etc. An example is Coetzee’s novel Youth. One technique he uses a lot is a string of questions, three or four one right after the other. Each question poses a different alternative, usually an opposite with the final one an absurd combination of the earlier ones and it is usually very funny.

“I have written nothing whatsoever for three years and I do not see any immediate likelihood of my writing. The writing of poetry takes time and I never have any time."
T. S. Eliot

Writing is an antidote to insanity.

“It’s hard to tell somebody what you mean to say. And that’s an idea that I’m obsessed with. It’s why I write. It’s why everybody writes. Because it’s hard to say what you want to say.” Jonathan Foer.

I have my best ideas away from my desk.

“How do your books come into being? Where do they start?”
“I have little pieces of writing that sit around collecting dust, or whatever they’re collecting. They are drawn to other bits of narrative like iron filings.” Louise Erdrich

For me the pleasure comes in composing a thoughtful, sensible, clear page or so. In a way, the fun comes in meeting the challenge to put something worthwhile together. And knowing you can do it once in a while.

“A writer’s personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner.” Zadie Smith

The muse arrives in the writing, not before.

“We write to taste life twice.” Anais Nin

Indignez-vous!

2011-03-27T14:03:00.005-10:00

The other night I went to cafe here in Honolulu that I had been hoping to visit before leaving. I entered, was politely seated, handed the menu, and decided what I wanted.

Off in the corner a man sat at a table, alone, like I was. He was reading something intently. It looked like a periodical or magazine of some sort. But he was also reading with a pen in hand, writing on the pages from time to time, and underlining sentences.

I don’t see that often. In fact, I don’t see it anywhere these days except at the university. I wondered what he was reading, if he was a teacher or a scholar who lived here. The entire experience was refreshing.

As I was leaving the restaurant, I went over to ask him what he was reading. He showed me an issue of The Nation and pointed to an essay, Indignez-Vous, by Stephane Hessel, a writer-philosopher whose book of the same name recently was at the top of the best seller list in France

At once I set out to find the issue with Hessel’s essay. In his introduction to the piece Charles Glass writes about the 93 year old Hessel who is of German Jewish ancestry and whose family moved to France in 1924. While serving in the French army in 1940, he was captured, sent to a POW camp, eventually escaped and joined de Gaulle’s band of Free French resistants. The Gestapo captured him while serving in one of the resistance networks, sent him the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps from which he escaped once again. After the war he was a key figure in drafting the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Glass attributes the popularity of Hessel’s slim but forceful Indignez-vous! to the “public’s need for a voice to articulate popular resentment of ruling-class ruthlessness, police brutality, stark income disparities, banking and political corruption, and victimization of the poor and immigrants.” Will the book have any readership in this country? It is highly unlikely, although one might fervently wish so.

In the essay Hessel expresses his outrage at any betrayal of the Universal Declaration. He asks his readers in France to remember the history of their nation and reaffirm its highest achievements. “It is up to us, all of us together, to ensure that our society remains one to be proud of: not this society of undocumented workers and deportations…not the society were our retirement and other gains of social security are being called into question; not this society where the media are in the hands of the rich.”

He says all of these social rights were at the core of the Resistance’s program but now they are under attack. “The motivation that underlay the Resistance was outrage. We, the Veterans of the Resistance movements and fighting forces of Free France, call on the younger generations to revive and carry forward the tradition of the Resistance and its ideas. We say to you: take over, keep going, get angry.”

Hessel clearly believes that historical progress is made by successive challenges to injustices and that each individual is responsible for contributing to this task. The great challenges he feels most outraged against are the immense gap between the very poor and the very rich, “which never ceases to expand” and the gradual eroding of human rights and “the state of the planet.”

He also feels passionately that “The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, “I can’t do anything about it: I’ll jut get by.” And throughout it seems that he is primarily addressing the young. “To the young, I say: look around you, you will find things that make you justifiably angry—the treatment of immigrants, illegal aliens and Roma. You will see concrete situations that provoke you to act as a real citizen. Seek and you shall find!”

The spirit of the French resistance lives on and Hessel’s reminder is a powerful manifesto of outrage against the many injustices that remain in contemporary society today. “To you who will create the twenty-first century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts,

TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE”

I don’t think I’ve ever read a more compelling call to action. How fortunate that I went to the cafe that night, that a person was reading Hessel’s essay and that I didn’t succumb to my normal hesitancy to ask someone what they are reading.

Organizing a Commonplace Book

2011-03-24T16:30:00.004-10:00

A reader of the blog I wrote on Monday commented that Locke’s indexing method isn’t as complicated as I made it appear. This reader is a librarian so perhaps that should make sense, although she does go on to say, “The complicated part is consistent taxonomy so that every time a certain topic occurs you call it the same thing. You'd think this would be easy but it's not.” Her comment led me to look more closely at just how Locke did it.

The matter looms large for those who are concerned with how to organize their commonplace book. I imagine most readers simply list in turn the passages from the books and other materials they read. That’s how I do it in Word .doc with the author and title of the piece followed by the passages I want to record.

At the end of the year I add the collection to those of the previous years. So over time the passages I’ve chosen becomes a rather large, unstructured, unindexed “monster.” Others may have separate notebook for each topic and in the ideal world a carefully indexed list of passages organized by topics. That is more or less the way Locke did it.

At the outset he laid out an index keyed to each letter of the alphabet as shown in the photo on the left side of this page. Each of these boxes was, in turn, divided into five separate boxes corresponding to one of the five vowels. When he read something he wanted to add to his commonplace book, he added it to one of the lettered boxes based on the topic he chose for it (never a simple matter), for example “L” for a passage on letter writing. Then he placed it in the smaller box corresponding to the first vowel of the topic, for example “E” in letter writing.

Locke did not begin with a pre-determined set of topics; instead he created them during the course of his readings. They included a broad array of themes, each in turn, followed by the passage and a comment of his own. The exact method he used in doing this is unknown to me at this time. Did he create a set of pages for each letter, giving rise to a lengthy notebook-like document? Perhaps he explains this in his book, A Little Common Place Book, that I’ve yet to read in full.

While I do not select the topic for each saved passage, from time to time I go back to the yearly collection and attempt to do that after I’ve read the material. This is a very labor intensive, time consuming task. Imagine doing this for a yearly collection of 100 pages.

Because of my interest in the role of questions posed in literary works, I recently went back to look more closely at them in the second volume (2005 thru 2010) of my commonplace book. To extract questions from this electronic record, I simply entered a question mark in the Word Find box and recorded the question found.

I selected about three quarters of them for a total of 227 questions from 151 separate works of literature. Some books like Night Train to Lisbon had a great many questions, others like Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road had only one, as did John Williams’ Stoner and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. In most cases I selected questions that had a general application and avoided those that did not raise a larger issue. Those not selected were either trivial, uninteresting, or framed rhetorically without seeking information or an answer.

Then I classified each one of the questions in terms of the general topic, issue, or subject that it raised. The first round of this procedure identified 48 separate categories. Since there was considerable overlap between them, they were combined and reduced in number to 17 general themes. For example, questions initially classified as relating to marriage, friendship, romance, and relationships were combined into the general topic of Relationships. Those concerning memory, thinking, language, and neuroscience, were grouped together as Cognitive, while Life represented a combination of Fate, Luck, Work, and Future.

The ten most frequent categories with the number of times they occurred are shown below.

Category Frequency

Relationships 38
Literature 31
Life 25
Cognitive 22
Writing 19
Self 18
Age 14
Truth 9
Morality 8

The following categories were also recorded: Emotions (6), Success (6), Place (4), Judaism (4), Beauty (2), and Time (1).

I doubt if Locke ever attempted to analyze the meaning of his classifications or how they related to his life. But he did annotate them which I have never done while reading, but only sometime later in a separate essay. I have always felt that doing all this while reading really becomes a distraction and too time consuming. It also interrupts the flow of the reading experience. For me it is better to do it well after I have finished the book.

So on balance, I still find Locke’s procedure too complicated, too time-consuming to do while reading and not much less so afterwards either. But I do think the results are instructive, if you are willing to make the effort.

Chronicles of Pain

2011-03-22T14:32:00.005-10:00

Why do some people do so well with intractable pain problems while others fall apart with ordinary ones? Nicole Krauss Great House

A few years ago during a period when I had the flu or worse, I sneezed too hard. At that moment I felt a piercing pain in my back. It was subsequently given the name of a spinal compression fracture. While the pain from that memorable sneeze has all but vanished, without going into the details, it has produced a milder form of pain in my leg.

When I talk to my doctor about this, he invariably asks me to rate the level of pain on a scale from one to ten. I find it impossible to do this. Is a six different from a seven and what does a seven mean anyway? Trying to describe to another person what it is that you feel when you hurt somewhere “…is like dancing about architecture.” [From the film Playing By Heart]

In The Pain Chronicles Melanie Thernstrom tries to create a vocabulary for understanding the experience of pain. She writes about her own chronic neck pain, the various pain clinics she has visited, and treatments she has tried to alleviate it. She also recounts in considerable detail the history of various conceptions of pain, the evolution of the disease model, and recent developments in neuroscientific fields.

At least ten percent of the population in the United States suffers from chronic pain. The rest of us live a relatively pain free life. She calls this the normal state; the second state occurs after a debilitating, pain-inducing event whose effects can last for months or many years. She writes, “When you’re in that second state, you hold on to expectations of that first life….But people have to let themselves die and lose their old expectations.” Oh, that it were so simple.

After reading Therstrom’s book and her exceptional review of the history and current research on chronic pain, I confess to no greater understanding of it. And it never seemed to me that Thernstrom did either. Yes, we are better informed about alternative accounts, but I am still at a loss to confidently put a number on the pain rating scale and, of course, do much of anything about the normal aches and pains that come my way now.

The book is organized as a collage or patchwork quilt with five separate parts—pain as metaphor, history, disease, narrative, and perception—each with a set of micro essays, almost blog-like on various related topics. And through all of this she interweaves accounts of her own chronic pain.

Thernstrom expresses skepticism about most current pain management techniques and suggests that any improvement from them is probably a placebo effect. She notes that the practitioner’s force of personality may be responsible for any derived benefits, rather than the treatment procedure itself. Therapists who appeared to be most effective “…all possessed some kind of personal power; they knew how to evoke belief, and their patients actually followed their suggestions.”

The mystery of resilience is a matter of so many factors—genetics, temperament, luck, will, neurotransmitters, etc—that it is impossible to predict who will fall apart and who will master the condition of chronic pain. As Therstrom puts it in her epigraph: Dolor dictat (Pain Dictates).

Poetry Lab

2011-03-20T16:37:00.005-10:00

Cabinet is a stylish quarterly magazine of art and culture that describes itself as playful, intellectually curious, hybrid, visually engaging, and thoroughly unconventional. It was named the “Best New Magazine” of 2000 by the American Library Association and “Best Art and Culture Magazine” for 2001 and 2003 by the New York Press. Have a look at the current issue here.

In 2009 the magazine inaugurated a Poetry Lab, a series of occasional evening programs in New York dedicated to a poet by what it calls unorthodox means. “Poetry Lab is dedicated to discovering what more and what else can be done with a poem.” Earlier this month the event was devoted to William Carlos Williams, who practiced medicine and wrote poetry throughout his life. In his autobiography, Williams wrote, “As a writer I have been a physician, and as a physician a writer.”

Why do so many doctors write so well? The list is a long and distinguished one: Maugham, Chekhov, Walker Percy and more recently, Robert Coles, Oliver Sacks, Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande. When Williams was asked this question, he replied:

“When they ask me, as of late they frequently do, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.”

Last Friday Cabinet’s Poetry Lab dealt with “textual-appropriation” which is another way of saying, drawing on material from a commonplace book in writing poems, fragments, essays, etc. In its announcement Cabinet wrote, “In the process we shape selves, build arguments, and navigate the cosmos of the readable world.”

The event last Friday was a celebration of the re-publication of A Little Common Place Book that is attributed to John Locke. The panel members consisted of historians and critics who have written about the cutting and pasting that constitutes the practice of textual-appropriation.

The introduction to A Little Common Place Book was written D. Graham Burnett, an editor of Cabinet. Because of the centrality of commonplace books for Marks in the Margin, I would like to quote a long passage from it.

“Reading is perhaps best understood as a peculiar form of writing, and vice versa. Renaissance thinkers took this paradox seriously, giving it concrete form in their "commonplace books," manuscript journals of passages copied from assorted texts and organized under various headings. The origins of the practice lay in the preparatory methods of classical oratory and medieval sermon composition, but commonplacing achieved the status of a true art among humanists like Erasmus and Montaigne, who used these notebooks to maintain command over an ever-expanding body of published texts, while culling material for their own correspondence, essays and literary compositions.”

The book reproduces Locke’s 1797 book which before its current publication existed in only one copy at the Princeton University Library. Anyone interested in purchasing a copy can do so at Proteotypes. I have not seen it listed yet at the online bookstore sites.

The publisher indicates the volume also has blank pages where you can record your own “thoughts or those met in your reading.”

They also say that Locke’s essay will instruct you on how to index those you record. I am familiar with Locke’s procedure and I confess its complexities baffle me.