Thoughts and Feelings

As usual, my hands had gone into their Raynaud’s syndrome spasm in the cold and were white to the second joints of the fingers.

Wallace Stegner Spectator Bird

Are our thoughts about future events closely associated with the feelings we have once we experience them? A personal illustration: Like Joe Ashton in Stegner’s Spectator Bird, I have what is known as Raynaud’s Syndrome. It is a condition that is strictly associated with cold weather in an almost one to one relationship. You don’t see one of those too often.

When the weather is cold, my hands turn black and blue and then sometimes white and red. My feet probably do so, as well, but I don’t see them and I don’t need to type with them. The episodes come and go throughout a cold day. It is very colorful but it can be somewhat painful too. While there is a name for the phenomenon, there is very little known about it and almost no cure. The only certain way to overcome Raynaud’s is to get on the plane and fly to the tropics as fast as you can.

After being in Hawaii last year, my wife and I decided to return to Oregon. However, I had forgotten about what the winter is really like there, how cold, wet and dreary it usually is. After living there for forty years, I can say all this, read about what the winter weather is like, but I cannot feel it. I cannot recapture the reality of what it is like for me to live under those conditions while I’m in the tropics

When we moved to Honolulu, I told myself over and over not to forget the winter. I wrote about it all to often. And yet, I returned to Portland. Once the winter began, I was truly miserable, at least in the way I feel miserable when it is cold, regardless of how warm it is inside.

There is the word, the thought and there is the feeling--the gap is enormous and that is the problem. My thoughts about the winter were totally dissociated from the way I felt when it was cold. Why is this the case?

It is not an error in predicting future emotional responses, what is now called affective forecasting. I knew what it would be like, but I could not feel it as a sensory event.

It is not a failure of memory. I recall the winter, all the winters I have spent in Portland and the increasing difficulty I have in dealing with them. Why, then, did I not bring that to bear on the decision to return? Alas, memories are not feelings.

Nor is it matter of language. I have many words to describe the effects of the weather on my body and mind. They are common words. It isn’t like trying to describe an unusual pain or emotional experience. Rather I can tell you exactly what happens to my hands, and the sense of being cold all the time, and the troubles I have going out. Yes, these are little woes, but they do have their way with me.

There is also nothing new about this. Long ago in his Treatise of Human Nature Hume pointed out that ideas are but “faint images” of our “sensation, passions and emotions.”

In a recent study of the relationship between various thoughts (anger, anxiety, depression, etc) and their corresponding affective state, La Pointe and Harrell confirm Hume’s conjecture in the language of their discipline. They report “…very few significant relationships were found between specific cognitions and affective states.”

But what they or anyone else as far as I can tell, don’t report is how to overcome this discrepancy, how to bring one’s thoughts or memories into a closer relationship with their feelings. The problem is similar to the relationship between thoughts and actions. In both cases, the discrepancies are often quite large, poorly understood, and difficult to narrow.

Handwriting versus Typing

The recent publication of Writing Letters with Pen & Ink by Edward St. Paige reminds me how important writing by hand still is for some people. It is also important to many individuals who collect passages from the books they read.

In a survey I conducted of individuals who keep a commonplace book several commented at some length on why they prefer to write by hand, rather than typing, the passages they want to save. Reading the text is one thing. Recalling it is another. But in between these two activities is the process of transcribing.

What is copying? First it is attending once again to the text. Perhaps it is also thinking about it further; it occupies your mind once again. In The Body’s Recollection of Being, David Michael Levin compared transcribing to the hand copying of religious texts by medieval monks, an activity that required “the most intense meditative concentration, poise and steadiness of hand.” Later he spoke of it as a “way of carving words (and their meaning) into flesh, into body.”

In a subsequent exchange about her survey responses, Olivia Dresher, publisher of Impassio Press and director of the Life Writing Connection went further to suggest that transcribing the quotes by hand is superior to typing them on a typewriter which, in turn, is superior to typing them on a computer keyboard. She claimed:

“...handwritten quotes linger more in my consciousness because I actually wrote [sometimes very slowly] them with my hands into a notebook. And they feel more permanent (even if that’s an illusion), more connected to me, less fleeting.”

For Levin and Dresher, writing the passages by hand is an experience that is almost “sacred,” a feature of commonplacing that brings the meaning of the words into their consciousness in a far deeper way than when they are typed. The experience becomes a very physical one for them, one that is not unlike incorporating something into your body, as one does in eating food.

As Audrey Borenstein, the author of Redeeming the Sin: Social Science and Literature noted in quoting the Talmud: “A fitting quotation is like bread to the famished.”

Further Dresher went on to argue that while typing passages on a typewriter enables you to see them on a piece of paper, it doesn’t have the same effect as writing them by hand. And that typing them on a computer keyboard, where they appear on the screen, places the text at an even further distance from the person than either of the two other methods of transcribing.

The distinction these readers make between the several methods of transcribing the passages in their commonplace book is instructive. So too are their claims for their short and long term effects on the transcriber. Does it matter how you record the passages? The hypothesis these readers propose is testable. It would be easy to design an experiment to compare the relative effects of the different methods of transcription.

Consider a recall test or some other measure of permanence. Would quotes that had been handwritten be recalled with greater accuracy than those that had been typed on a typewriter or computer keyboard? That is but one of several questions that might be explored in such an experiment.

Talking to Yourself

I spend a good part of the day talking to myself--silently, of course. I ask myself questions, try to answer them, and mull over one thing or another. Doesn’t everybody do this?

Some of my best ideas emerge during these conversations. At the end of each day, I head out for a walk along a canal near my place and let my thoughts wander--my day, what I might do next, whatever pops into my mind. I usually find this an especially productive time.

On his blog Just Seven Things, Si Conroy writes about the way talking to yourself can be a very intelligent thing to do:

“By talking to yourself … your conscious brain gives a clear set of instructions to your other-than-conscious brain. You ask yourself the question and often answer it very quickly yourself because the totality of your resources (conscious and unconscious) are now engaged to a common endeavor (and in most cases, you knew the answer to the problem: it just needed unlocking by you being clear with yourself).”

In his latest novel, Summertime, J. M. Coetzee carries on a lengthy interview with himself, disguised in the form of interviews conducted with various people in his life who are asked about the experiences they had with a J.M. Coetzee and the kind of person Mr. Coetzee revealed himself to be at that time.

On his blog The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer does something similar in an interview he conducted with himself about his book How We Decide. And the question Do You Talk to Yourself? was also posed on Jezebel last year. The post was written by Anna North who confesses she talks to herself all day, almost every day.

Because an injury to her wrists prevents her from typing very well, she must use voice-recognition software in order to “write.” She quotes a psychologist, Randy Engle, who claims most people talk to themselves and, moreover, in some situations it’s a good thing to do:

"When we are reading something that is quite complex, it helps to verbalize it aloud, because hearing it, and hearing the language, gives us another cue for remembering those exact words. Listening to our internal auditory memory has been found to be quite helpful to understand a particularly complex sentence."

In a promotion video for his new book, A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation, the author, Daniel Menaker, shows how much fun talking to yourself can be. Other than the books I write about, I don’t usually go out of my way to promote a book or place an ad on my blog about it. This case will be the exception. I think you’ll understand why once to view the video.

Of course, you have to be careful when you talk to yourself, especially when you do so in the presence of other people. People found mumbling something to themselves as they wander down a crowed street are usually thought to be a little bit crazy and are likely to be thrown into the loony bin.

From time to time I see a woman at Starbucks who talks and talks by herself. Not just to herself but outwardly to others, although no one else is there. When I first overhead her, it never dawned on me it was a monologue. It sounded just like a normal conversation. Eventually I must have realized I never heard someone reply. So I glanced over, only to discover there wasn’t anyone there. Still, she never seemed to stop—fully articulate sentences, pauses, continuing in a rather animated fashion. Every time I see her, it is the same. I can never quite make out what she is saying, although I am sure it makes perfect sense to her.

Year in Ideas

Every year for the past nine The Times Magazine has published an issue devoted to the best ideas of the year. I have read them all and confess, I cannot recall a single idea among the many that have been discussed. This isn’t due to any defect in my memory. Rather, it is a result of the very strange concept the Magazine has of an “Idea.” The 2009 issue begins with the following statement:

“…we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009—the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity …the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations…ideas from science and art, politics and policy, technology and engineering, zombie studies…”

Thus, the Times views ideas as anything from notions, to bits of ingenuity, to innovations and well, yes, ideas. What is common to each of these “noteworthy notions” is that they are new in the sense of not existing before, or they are original, or are, for the first time, useful.

Consider the following examples, drawn somewhat randomly from the latest collection of the year’s best ideas:

• Fake car noise—designed for the silent hybrid cars.

• Giving names to cows--found to increase milk production

• Glow in the dark dogs—created with genes taken from a sea anemone that emits red fluorescence

• Hour glass shaped surfboards—found to increase maneuverability

• Lithium in water supply—study found reduced suicides in Korea

• Printable batteries—printed with a complex compound instead of ink

• Stiletto shoes shaped like a lobster-claw, ankle high—“the world needs fantasy” said the designer

Are these ideas in the best sense of the term? Can’t we do a little better? Isn’t an idea something like a belief or abstract concept or a theory, model or hypothesis that has some generality? While the Times notable notions are primarily derived from current research, they are largely technical devices or “innovations” designed for a particular practical application.

We don’t see any concepts like Capitalism or Evolution or the General Theory of Relativity among the best ideas of 2009 and I don’t recall anything like them either in any of the previous issues. To be sure, concepts of that character are rarely formulated on an annual basis

Rather than a long list of notable notions that are always arranged alphabetically from A to Z, perhaps the Times might have a more interesting Year In Ideas issue if it concentrated on the one or two of the most provocative Ideas of the year. Were there not developments in the natural, biological or behavioral sciences during 2009 that were in this sense notable? Why not draw their Ideas from the many award programs such as the Nobels, MacArthur Genius Awards, Goldman Environmental Prizes, Lasker Medical Awards, etc. that recognize distinguished achievement in their respective fields? I’m sure I’d remember some of those.

That Saturday Feeling

I like going to the cleaners and the coffee shop on Saturday morning.
Condeleezza Rice

When I was younger, I recall a distinctive feeling that used to sweep over me each Saturday. Every now and then it comes to me again. How to describe it?

The week is over, so are classes for a while. The homework can wait. The day is wide open. And it was usually sunny where I grew up. Saturday is different and what is clearly different about it is the prospect of not having anything I must do. It is a free day. That which must be done can be put on hold for a day.

Saturday

Today is Saturday
a day to relax
and lie in the sun
a day to drink lemonade
when all the works done
a day to eat strawberries

Barbara Stahly

And so the Saturday feeling is a blank space, an open range of possibilities and unknowns. It is like being at a traffic circle that takes off in half a dozen different directions. Which one to take? Around and around I go.

In remembering that elusive feeling, I am, of course, also reminded of Ian McEwan’s novel, Saturday, a novel that engrossed me for days. In Saturday McEwan charts a Saturday in the life of a reflective, London neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne. Henry rises early, glances out the open window of his townhouse and sees a plane off in the distance falling in flames as it approaches Heathrow. The mood is set. It looks like Henry’s Saturday is going to be an ominous one.

And yet I think Perowne also felt that special Saturday feeling as he started to ponder the day ahead and how he might spend it. He didn’t have to rush off to the hospital, worry about his next operation, give a lecture or attend an endless series of meetings. He could do pretty much whatever he wanted—play squash with a good friend, take a drive in his silver Mercedes, plan what to cook for a family gathering that evening, or simply ruminate about his discipline, his family, and the troublesome times in which he lives.

And Henry ruminates a great deal:

For the past two hours he’s been in a dream of absorption that has dissolved all sense of time, and all awareness of the other parts of his life. Even his awareness of his own existence has vanished. He’s been delivered into a pure present, free of the weight of the past the past or any anxieties about the future. In retrospect, though never at the time, it feels like profound happiness. …. This state of mind brings a contentment he never finds with any passive form of entertainment. Books, cinema, even music can’t bring him to this... He feels calm, and spacious, fully qualified to exist.

Yes, to a certain extent that is the way I feel on Saturday now—momentarily free of the past, a sense of calm about the day ahead. And when Saturday is over, I am likely to measure myself a little bit by how I chose fill up the space that loomed before me as the day began.

Cities Without Cars

It snowed heavily on the drive back to Portland from the Bay Area. The weather gurus didn’t know this was coming, no one was prepared, trucks and buses did not chain-up, the roads were not sanded. And then the disaster began.

Traffic came to a halt. No one moved for hours. Long lines of stranded drivers stretched down I5 mile and after mile and then some more. Trucks and buses couldn’t get up the icy hills, cars ran out of gas, it was a monumental traffic jam, better thought of as solitary confinement on the Interstate.

A man jumped out of his car and ran into the woods to do what he could no longer avoid (I am thinking, how are others handling this?); a woman vomited out her car window; drivers pushed their cars onto the siding and walked off to nowhere.

It was then that I thought of Venice and the hill towns of Italy. Venice--the city without cars, the carfree city, the city that never heard of an Interstate or being imprisoned on a roadway, the city that is surprisingly quiet without the roar of motorcycles or four-barrel-carburetors.

In his recent book, Carfree Cities, J. H. Crawford offers a potential solution to the many urban problems caused by the automobile. He argues, without much dispute, that a carfree city saves energy, preserves the environment, and improves the quality of our lives. Crawford expresses his approach this way:

"Imagine life in a city free from the noise, stench, and danger of cars, trucks, and buses. Imagine that all basic needs, from groceries to child care, lie within a five-minute walk of every doorstep. Imagine that no commute takes more than 35 minutes from door to door, and that service is provided by a fast, cheap, safe, comfortable public transport system… the car is a technology that has run wild, and that the time has come to reclaim city streets for human activities."

He describes cities throughout the world that have established carfree neighborhoods or carfree zones and includes what I regard as striking photographs of these places and the life that goes within them. You can glimpse this at the Carfree Times Web site and subscribe to its periodic publication distributed over the Internet. If you review the latest issues, you will notice the many inviting images of carless piazzas in Venice and other carfree cities throughout the world.

I realize it is impossible these days to live without a car or at least without access to one once in a while. Our communities have been designed for automobiles and so they have become a necessity. What then are the practical applications of the carfree concept for contemporary urban communities? Crawford proposes a carfree city planned to maximize the quality of life and provides a fair number of suggestions for implementing the carfree concept in both new and existing cities. I have lived in carfree cities and been in others where carfree zones have been established on certain days and whenever I am in these places I have seen the way they have returned the city and its streets to the people.

Of course, these ideas are not going to help me much in driving into Portland on a snowy winter day, but they will bring the city alive once I manage to get there. And perhaps one day, I won’t have to drive or fly to the Bay Area for the holidays. Instead, I will get on a hi-speed train that will whiz me there in a few hours, whereupon I will proceed into a community where I will have no need for a car of my own. This is not a dream in the cities depicted in Carfree Cites, so I have no reason to believe it isn’t a realistic possibility elsewhere.

Loyality to Self or Person We Love

Ann Packer’s first novel, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier presents a timeless moral dilemma. Carrie Bell, a recent college graduate in Madison, Wisconsin finds that her love for the man she is engaged to marry is “untangling.”

“A slow draining away of my feelings for him, a trickle I hardly noticed at first until the level was so low it was all I could notice, until what remained was dark and murky and it seemed that in no time at all I’d be bone-dry.”

To try to awaken her feelings, her fiancé, Mike Mayer, tries to impress her by jumping into a lake from a pier. Tragically, he breaks his neck and is paralyzed for the rest of his life.

What does Carrie owe Mike? What obligations does an individual have to the person they love or once loved when love is precisely what they need? Should she stay in Madison or strike out on her own? She struggles with this question for months. (She has a difficult time making up her mind about everything and that’s why I found the novel very slow going at times.) Finally, Carrie leaves Madison without saying a word to any of her friends or Mike who remains paralyzed in the hospital.

"What I had discovered was that I couldn’t give up my life for Mike—that’s how I saw it at the time, that’s the choice I thought I had to make.”

She goes to New York, falls in love again, succumbs to the joys and temptations of being there and finally enrolls in the Parson School of Design to pursue the talent she has for designing and sewing dresses.

Then one day her lifelong female friend from Madison calls to ask her to return to help her through a crisis. Again she vacillates—on and on--but after doing that for far too many pages, she decides to remain in New York.

Eventually, she realizes she has made a mistake, and returns to Madison for a while. However, once she gets back, her friend will no longer speak to her. She resolves to stay until she does, meanwhile spending most of her time with her paralyzed former boy friend, lover and fiancé.

It takes weeks and then months—and again, many pages--before her friend forgives her but by then she has given up on New York, her lover there, and the new path she had begun to carve out for herself.

How disappointing, I thought at first. How much I wanted her to remain in New York and create that new life for herself. But she couldn’t. Loyalty, responsibility and devotion to friends and family came to take hold of her. History exerts a powerful constraint on the future.

And so the novel presents that ever present issue, one that is never resolved without regret one way or another. The mystery of how the moral question is resolved maintained my interest in the novel. What are we to do when we are faced with this kind of a dilemma? Do we abandon our lover who is no longer the person he once was? Or do we abandon our self, what we know we must do when a person we love stands in need? By the time the book is over, Ms. Packer has provided an answer. Is it the one you would have made?

Up In the Air

Ryan Bingham returns to his solitary apartment in the film version of Up in the Air. The small one bedroom unit is painted white, it is stark white, empty, feels unlived in and desolate. Well, it really isn’t lived in much. There is scarcely any furniture or food in the pantry. Yet it is his home away from home. His real home is 30,000 feet in a business class seat on American Airlines. He travels around the country informing people they have lost their jobs.

Ryan seems content to spend a few days a year in his bleak apartment somewhere down a long corridor of what might just as well be a Holiday Inn in Timbuktu. He isn’t married, doesn’t want to be, has no children, no desire to have any, not even a regular girlfriend anymore. He lectures to groups of business people on how to lighten up their commitments, how to unpack the backpacks of their life, as he puts it.

His friends are behind the ticket counter at American Airlines, their business-class hostesses and those who greet him when he arrives at the Hilton Hotel in St. Louis, Wichita or wherever he happens to be for the night. They are his hello, Ryan, friends.

Until he meets a charmer, Alex Goran, who has the same type of job in the sky as he does. They flirt, they become lovers, they seem to enjoy being together whenever they can, they spend an almost “dreamy” weekend at his younger sister’s wedding. Ryan and Alex are unerringly on the same wave-length.

But then Ryan begins to miss her, wishes she was around more often, and share more of his life with her. The silent apartment that lies wait begins to feel a bit oppressive. Is this a problem? As far as I could tell, it isn’t.

His forlorn state reminded me of Doris Grumbach’s reflections on the fifty days of solitude she spent in her home on the coast of Maine:

At first I found I missed another voice, not so much a voice responsive to my unexpressed thoughts as an independent one speaking its own words….There was a reward for this deprivation. The absence of other voices compelled me to listen more intently to the inner one. I became aware that the interior voice, so often before stifled or stilled entirely by what I thought others wanted to hear, or what I considered to be socially acceptable, grew gratifyingly louder, more insistent.

They spoke loudly to Ryan too. In the midst of his standard unpack-your-backpack speech one day, he stops abruptly, leaves the podium, and rushes out to fly to Alex’s hometown. He knocks on her door, she comes down the stairs, opens it up, whereupon he glimpses a bunch of kids running up and down the stairs.

Here the film let me down. They let Ryan down far more. Alex was not the person she seemed to be. I search unsuccessfully for clues that she wasn’t.

She never mentioned she was married, never gave him an inkling she was, he thought she was being honest. I guess in a sense she was. She says she thought he knew. And then she admits he was her escape. Simply his escape? She never conveys anything that led me or Ryan to sense that is what he meant to her.

Would it have mattered if he knew? Would their relationship have been any different? Would he have wanted her to play a larger part in his life even if he knew she was married and had children?

Ryan goes back to work, his job is preserved as the firm has given up on an Internet firing project, and he returns to his home in the sky and the friends who cross his path on his journey from one dreary, forlorn town to the

Decade Reflections

It was about the time I turned 40 in 1977 that I began to wonder if I would live to see the turn of the century. Ten years later, I realized I was now older than my father, who died when he was 49. I was certain then that I would never see New Years Eve at the end of the century.

Well, I did, whereupon I sallied forth into the 21st century. I thought surely I wouldn’t live through its first decade. Wrong again, as I am now trekking along into the first full week of January 2010. Surely this can’t go on forever.

This is the time for reflections on the past decade. Everyone seems to have something to say about it. What can be said about the last decade? On what basis do we judge it? Regrettably its most salient features were two wars, both unnecessary, both grounded in lies, both extremely costly, economic policies that almost brought the country to its knees, and the marginalization of the arts and sciences that will take years to recoup.

Why not instead reflect on distinguished works of literature or the cinema? So many fine authors died during the past year. They include those I have read and have admired—Saul Bellow, John Updike, Susan Sontag, David Foster Wallace, Simon Gray, Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, W.G. Sebald and William Styron. There were many others too, but these are the ones whose books have moved me more than once.

Will there be others to fill the great gap they have left? Will there be another group of writers in the next decade who will write as well as they did? It is hard for me to imagine who they might be. I can think of a few—Coetzee, Roth, McEwan, Ondaatje but my hunch, no, more my hope is that each of them will still be pounding the keyboard on New Year’s Eve 2019.

Perhaps here I can simply point to the books that meant the most to me during the past decade. At the end of each year, I make a list of the books and periodicals I have read and organize them into Fiction, Non-Fiction, Essays and Short Stories. I went through the lists for each of the past ten years and selected one work of fiction, although there were at least two or three others that I might have selected. The choice was impossible but here are those that I rank among the most memorable novels of the first decade of the 21st century.

2000 Ann Patchett Bel Canto
2001 J.M. Coetzee Youth
2002 Azar Nafisi Reading Lolita in Tehran
2003 John Williams Stoner
2004 Ian McEwan Saturday
2005 Eliott Perlman Seven Types of Ambiguity
2006 Rachel Cusk Arlington Park
2007 Philip Roth Exit Ghost
2008 Pascal Mercier Night Train to Lisbon
2009 Michael Ondaatje Anil’s Ghost

It was a good decade for literature, would you not agree? It is tragic that the same cannot be said for the more public and influential worlds of commerce and affairs of state.

We'll Always Have Books

During the holidays, I received a Kindle. I opened the box with great anticipation, read the directions, and started to “play” with it for a while. I couldn’t wait to return it the very next day.

I found the screen very dull, grayish. No doubt, the bright screen of the Mac, as well as the much brighter and more readable printed page has spoiled me.

Going back and forth between pages in a printed book, say between page 10 and page 40, which have been noted for some reason, is difficult with the Kindle.

I missed the physicality of the book, the attractive cover, the typeset that that was employed, its particular odor, and sheer presence on my shelf.

The screen is much smaller than a printed page and, as a result. there’s much more “turning” of e-book pages, if you will. This takes a little bit of time, while the blank screen gathers in the next page.

Saving passages, essential to my reading routine, is a cumbersome procedure that involves several steps. First you need to scroll to the start of the passage, which requires knowing how to scroll. Then you press a button whereupon you scroll to the “Add Highlight” selection. Once that’s figured out, you are told to scroll to the end of the passage you want to save. Press the scroll button again. You’ll see on the Kindle page that the complete passage appears in a box. The box is automatically added to your “Clippings” file.

To move your clippings (saved passages) to your computer you need to connect both the Kindle and the computer with a dual usb cord. The clippings file shows up on your computer screen in a Kindle box; then simply drag the clippings file to your computer to edit it, if you wish, or add the saved passages to those you are saving from other books you have read, say in your commonplace book, as I do. Whew! I need a nap.

I also write notes on the pages of a printed book or on the inside cover if the book calls forth an idea that I’d like to think about. There’s a way to do that on the Kindle that is somewhat similar and just as complex as the highlighting-transfer-to-computer procedure, which also requires using that itty bitty keyboard that I found takes as much time as making a long distance call to a friend in Ouagadougou, Burkina Fasso.

Give me a good old book and a pen any old time. Reading on the Kindle is clearly not for me. Frankly, I have no idea why it is or might be for anyone else. The paper book is quite simply the state of the art now and my hunch is it will be that way for the foreseeable future and beyond.

In my case, pretty much the same holds for reading any lengthy piece I find on the Web or the digital version of a newspaper or periodical. I wonder how many Kindles will be returned this year and once the initial novelty of the thing wears off, I wonder how many others will continue reading with the device. Of course, Amazon is silent on these matters.

I see a lot of people reading these days, far more than the statistics would lead you to believe, and while I don’t get around too much and they may not be reading Proust, never once have I encountered another person reading with an e-book.

Hibernating

Dear Readers,

Marks in the Margin will be hibernating during the forthcoming holiday season. Our regular broadcast schedule will resume at the first of the year.

Other commentaries can be found at The Essayist.

Richard Katzev
rkatzev@teleport.com

Thanksgiving Menu

Appetizer: Teaching Literature in Prison

Soup: Books about Books

Salad: The Power of Social Networks

Main Course: History of Memoirs

Desert: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Coffee/Tea: Billy Collins Poetry

The Food Issue

After a lifetime dedication to the weekly New Yorker, I find myself reading less and less of each issue now. The magazine is no longer the literary periodical it used to be. It was literature that first drew me to the magazine and why I always looked forward to it so much. As a young high school student, it became my Literature 101.

The magazine introduced me to the cultural life of this country, at least as reflected in the goings on in New York. I became aware of the people who were profiled in the magazine, the heroes of high culture, the books they wrote and films they made or appeared in. I was taken away to worlds I never knew existed by the two or three short stories that were published then in each issue and by those remarkable letters from foreign cities. What better introduction to Paris than those memorable Letters from Paris by Janet Flanner?

Indeed, the arrival of The New Yorker used to be one of the main events of my week. It bothered me when it wasn’t delivered on time, and if it didn’t arrive the next day, I would usually go out to buy a copy at the newsstand. Of course, it usually drifted in the day after but I'd didn’t want to run the risk that it might not, or, as happened now and then, it was delivered by mistake to someone else.

With the exception of the recently introduced double issues, the magazine has been published every week for the past seventy-eighteen years. Frankly, I find this rather astonishing. Putting together a magazine of this quality week after week for as many years as this (with no reason to believe it will be any different in the years ahead) seems something of a miracle to me.

And yet, while the quality of the magazine has been maintained, the subject matter has changed significantly. Today there is far less literature with a significant shift toward more domestic and international political issues, as well as pop-cultural and media themes.

Non-fiction articles now make up the bulk of the magazine. Consider for example the newly arrived Special Issues. There is the Money issue, the Fashion issue, the Cartoon issue and last week’s Food Issue, one that was a disappointment to me.

There was no discussion about hunger in America and elsewhere throughout the world. Not a peep about obesity or eating disorders (bulimia and anorexia), nothing about the increasing price of food, recent discussion of vegetarianism or the animal rights movement, and nary a word about corporate farming, food shortages, the impact of droughts on food production, etc. Are these not food related topics?

Instead, the issue treated the reader to articles on something called spit pie, breaking news from the rising wine culture in China, a job description of a Michelin inspection, and the challenges of preparing a Thanksgiving meal abroad and, oh, yes, the secrets of how to create really tasty new food flavors. Really now, is this The New Yorker we used to love?

In truth, there is also a special Fiction Issue early in the year. Finally an issue with more than a single short story. Those in the Fiction Issue are largely by new, relatively unknown authors. Indeed, the stories that do appear in The New Yorker now are much more varied that used to be the case, with a goodly number set in foreign lands and translated from their native languages. This trend is refreshing to readers growing weary of all those domestic conflicts of East Coast couples.

So I keep reading The New Yorker, scanning the pieces more than I ever used to, still heading off to the bookstore to get each weekly issue. I no longer have a mail subscription since the delivery was so unreliable. Sometimes an issue didn’t arrive until a week after it was published in New Yorker. By then I had already read much of it on the Web or, if I wanted to, in its digital edition that as far as I can tell is identical to the printed version. With all these changes, William Shawn must be dying yet another death in his grave.

Collecting Ideas

Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading…Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things. Robert Darnton

Currently my Commonplace Book consists of well over 300 pages of various extracts copied from the books and periodicals that I have read and then collected in a yearly Word document in what has become a rather huge spiral bound notebook.

In thinking back to the origins of my Commonplace Book, I am not at all sure why I began marking passages and then saving them in the first place. The passages must have stood out for one reason or another and I may have wanted to make a record of them in order to reread them sometime in the future.

I think I also had dreams of doing some writing. I know I admired a great many writers and often wondered how they were able to write so well. In my naïve way, I must have imagined that if I studied their works carefully and copied portions of them often enough, I might one day be able to write like they did.

I know there was something in the literature I was reading that was not only different but was also somehow more truthful, more discerning about what mattered in my life than what I was reading in psychology. I don’t recall collecting passages in the academic books and journals I was reading.

Yes, I took notes but those were for my lectures and classroom presentations and were never added to my Commonplace Book or preserved in special notebooks. I may have placed them in a file for the next time I taught the class but not because I found them memorable or otherwise worth saving because they were especially significant.

Lately, I have begun to think of my Commonplace Book as a form of collecting; in my case, collecting ideas as well as clever or provocative expressions that stand apart from ordinary discourse and are, for that reason, worth preserving. In some cases they serve as a standard against which to judge my own attempts to write with some degree of clarity.

Collecting ideas also has a number of distinct advantages compared to collecting most other objects—they cost next to nothing, they are easy to find, do not clutter up your closet, and don’t require periodic repair or maintenance.

A reader of Patrick Kurp’s blog, Anecdotal Evidence also suggests the same view. In a comment on a recent post, he asks, “Could we argue that this is what writing is? Collecting? I would.”

Kurp replies, “The art is in the arrangement. Guy Davenport says “…I am grateful for the unintentional education of having been taught how to find things (all that I have ever done, I think, with texts and pictures)…”

He concludes, “There’s no arguing that a blog is a mutated form of collecting, rooted in the charming custom of keeping a commonplace book and the near-universal human urge to find, collect and share.”

Weekend Questions

Are you running out of bookshelf space?

Do old writers simply fade away?

What do the French do when a bookstore closes?

Why do people gush over Proust?

What happened to the books in the library?

What can we learn from Sophocles?

The Convert

A few months ago Margie Boule, a widely read columnist for the Oregonian, the local newspaper in the town where I now find myself, says she would have “despised” someone who read with an e-book. Margie Boule is a reader, she loves books, and reports that she would have also called herself a “book murder, a destroyer of bookstores or something more colorful,” if she ever read an e-book.

But now in her column in the November 19th Oregonian she is reading “more books on a Kindle than on paper.” Do I sense a revolution in the works? Hitherto, she was comforted by her books, she “loves the feel of the pages, and the soft whoosh when one is turned. I love the smell of an old book. I love the crispness of the paper in a new book.” And yet…

She now reports a long list of advantages of the e-book. “The Kindle is light; it fits in my purse easily. If I come across a character I can’t remember, I can search the book and recall who the character is. If a friend recommends a book, I can buy it…and be reading the title page within a minute…And if I like the book, I can purchase another e-copy and have it sent to my daughter’s Kindle, as a gift.”

Moreover, a book from the Kindle store costs less than the hardback or even the paperback at the bookstores. And she claims there are many classic books at the Kindle store that are apparently free—Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Jack London, etc. That was news to me.

Booklover that she is, she also reports that she is still buying printed books, mostly biographies, cookbooks, decorating books, photography books. These are usually books with pictures or photos that she says, in agreement with other commentators, appear “gray and grainy on the Kindle.” She also misses the cartoons, and the charts and the book jackets, all of which are either absent or poorly reproduced on the Kindle. (I would also miss the ads that I understand are largely omitted from periodicals, like the New Yorker, as well as newspapers, like the New York Times.

And then there is the occasional social encounter with another person who wants to know if that’s a Kindle she is reading. She takes pleasure in demonstrating how it works and most assuredly the ensuing conversation too.

And yet…back to basics, Boule misses those times she used to spend browsing through small independent bookstores and terribly guilty at depriving them, at least those that have survived, of the income which must have been a rather sizeable sum, from the purchases she made in the good old days.

And in an e-mail exchange we had, Boule reported that she wasn’t sure if you could copy (highlight) passages and then download to them to your computer. That’s a deal breaker for me; I’ve heard some claim they could do this, even though it is cumbersome. But she did tell me something I didn’t realize--that she could e-mail long documents to a Kindle “which has its own e-mail address so that I can read them when I’m on the run.” I imagine this would really be useful to people on go but of little value to those who have trouble finding anywhere to go these days.

From a booklover who despised someone reading an e-book to one doing that very same thing is quite a turnaround. While I surely don’t feel anything close to despising an e-book reader, I haven’t felt especially compelled to give it a try. But Boule’s column today does give me pause. While I remain on the fence, I confess her column was extremely persuasive.

After reporting these details to my lunchtime companion, I was firmly cautioned not to buy the thing just yet on the grounds that Christmas is just around the corner and “I never have anything left to give you, since you always run off and buy things yourself.”

Imagine Chekhov as Your Doctor

Lapham’s Quarterly is a rather unique and to my mind a much needed periodical in that each issue is devoted to a single theme. It is usually explored by means of excerpts from a variety of contemporary and historical articles, books, essays, etc. The issue begins with an introductory essay and analysis by the editor Lewis Lapham. The Fall Quarterly issue was devoted to Medicine.

It includes selections from Virginia Woof’s essay On Being Ill, Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Atul Gawande’s recent essay in The New Yorker, The Cost Conundrum that President Obama apparently discussed at some length with his aides. Others include works by Ken Kesey, John Barth, Sinclair Lewis, Oliver Sacks and many more. It is a very rich collection.

In his Introduction (“Preamble,”) Lapham cites the following figures that are representative of comparable data we’ve heard so much about lately:

Medical error ranks as the country’s eighth leading cause of death, more deadly than breast cancer or highway accidents.

Americans in 2007 paid $7,421 per capita for healthcare as opposed to $2,840 paid by the Finns and $3,328 by the Swedes, but life expectancy in the United States is not as long as it is in thirty other countries…

The money allocated to healthcare in most other developed countries (in Canada and France as well as in Germany and Japan) provides medical insurance for entire citizenry…in America 46 million citizens (15% of the population) are uninsured.


To continue my posts on the relationship between Medicine and Literature, here are some of the most noteworthy passages I recorded in this of issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.

It is the duty of a doctor to prolong life. It is not his duty to prolong the act of dying.
Lord Thomas Horder

The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art. W. Russell Brain

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel. Gustave Flaubert

Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today. Confucius

It strikes me as absurd and rather obscene, this whole cosmetic and medical industry based on lust for youth, age fear, death terror. Who the hell wants to live forever? Most of us, apparently; but it’s idiotic. After all, there is such a thing as life saturation: the point when everything is pure effort and total repetition. Truman Capote.

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Sylvia Plath

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. Isaac Asimov

Imagine having Chekhov, who was a doctor, for your doctor. Imagine having William Carlos Williams, who was a poet, or Walker Percy, who’s a novelist, for your doctor. Anatole Broyard

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

I find an irresistible desire to make jokes. When you’re lying in the hospital with a catheter and IV in your arm, you have two choices, self-pity or irony. Anatole Broyard

Gnawing on My Kindle

There is a graphic in Steven Pinker’s review of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent collection of essays, What the Dog Saw, that says it all. Pinker’s review appeared in The Times Book Review of November 15th; the graphic is by Christoph Niemann. It is the clearest and the cleverest critique of Gladwell’s works I’ve ever seen.












On my reading, Gladwell’s essays and books are characterized by a maddening logic of beginning with a particular incident, an anecdote, usually a colorful one, and building step by step with succeeding series of equally amusing anecdotes a major priniciple of behavior.

From a thin slice of the pie, in combination with others in turn, he arrives at a conclusion that he claims to have wide generality. Oh, that it was so simple. Pinker, the author of The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works, agrees. While acknowledging that some of the essays Gladwell has written are “masterpieces in the art of the essay,” he asserts that most include misleading definitions, faulty statistical reasoning, and only a limited understanding of research findings in psychology.

“The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus — for example, that “we” believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that “risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable.” As a generic statement, this is true but trite: of course many things can go wrong in a complex system, and of course people sometimes trade off safety for cost and convenience …. But as a more substantive claim that accident investigations are meaningless “rituals of reassurance” with no effect on safety, or that people have a “fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater”… it is demonstrably false.”

Pinker concludes by exclaiming that Gladwell's endless stream of cherry-picked anecdotes “had me gnawing on my Kindle.” Perfect.

While I don’t have a Kindle to gnaw on, I have read almost everything Gladwell has written, including his three books (The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, as well as almost all of his New Yorker essays). There is no doubt he is an amusing and extraordinary curious essayist with a rare talent for identifying fascinating, often ignored questions. I like his stuff a great deal.

However, his reasoning about these issues is another matter. I have blogged about his works here before, perhaps more often than any other writer. But nothing I have said or, indeed that Pinker has said, can quite match the critical perceptiveness of Christoph Niemann’s three-part graphic that accompanied Pinker’s review.

The Naming of Cats

After much deliberation, uncertainty, hesitancy and all too much discussion of the matter, my wife has brought a cat, more properly a little kitten, into our home. She traveled some distance to select the kitten. You see, it isn’t just your ordinary cat, if you will pardon me just this once. Regardless, it is an archetypical kitten, frolicking about, snooping here and there, ears perked up, purring now and then, but always on the alert and up to no good. A regular lion on the prowl.

And now we are faced with the problem of naming it. This is not something to be taken lightly either. I can assure you it will also take a while and a good deal of uncertainty, hesitancy and all too much discussion. You want to get it quite right and yet leave a little room for cat to have its own, very private name, a name that every cat has and only the cat knows, according to the authorities in this area.




The Naming of Cats

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey--
All of them sensible everyday names.

There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter--
But all of them sensible everyday names.

But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-
Names that never belong to more than one cat.

But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover--
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

From T. S. Elliot’s Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

To view a video version of the poem from the original London production of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical Cats go here.

A Simple Little Checklist

The Louvre Museum in Paris, the most visited museum in the world, with a collection of paintings ranging across every school, the home of the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, the
Winged Victory, etc. etc, is currently exhibiting a collection of prints and drawings of lists. At the invitation of the museum, the exhibition was created by Umberto Eco who chose to work on the theme he described as The Infinity of Lists. Lists? Where is the art in Lists? My grocery list is scarcely readable. In an interview in Spiegel Online, Eco answers:

“The List is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order…How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogues, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists—the shopping list, the will, the menu—that are also cultural achievements in their own right.”

Eco, whose works include Foucault’s Pendulum and The Naming of the Rose, says his novels are full of lists. Asked why he is so interested in the subject, Eco replied, “I can’t really say. I like lists for the same reason other people like football, or pedophilia. People have their preferences.”

Eco isn’t the only one who thinks lists are important. So does Atul Gawande who wrote in the Dec 10th, 2007 New Yorker about the critical importance of the checklist in intensive care. While the use of a checklist may seem obvious to most, it isn’t commonly employed in the enormously complex intensive care units. Gawande claims that most physicians don’t believe that “something as simple as a checklist could be of much help in medical care.”

Yet, one study of patient care in I.C.U.s during a twenty four hour period observed that the average patient required 178 actions per day, ranging from drug administration to suctioning the lungs and every one posed risks and the possibility of error. No one can expect a physician under such demanding conditions to be able to remember and implement so many separate actions.

Another study identified the steps to take in order to avoid a single problem in I.C.Us., line infections. When a rather lengthy checklist of each one of the steps was created, it was observed that at least one was omitted in more than a third of the patients. And when, in another study, physicians and nurses were required to check off each step in a checklist, Gawande reports “the infection rate in Michigan’s I.C.U.s decreased by sixty percent…Michigan’s infection rates fell so low that its average I.C.U. outperformed ninety percent of I.C.U.s nationwide…[saving] more than fifteen hundred lives. The successes have been sustained for almost four years—all because of a stupid little checklist.”

A checklist may have also played a crucial role in the survival of all the passengers on Flight 1579 which landed safely in the Hudson River a few months ago. It now appears that it wasn’t only Captain Sullenberger’s piloting skills, to say nothing of a good deal of luck, that avoided a catastrophic crash in the Hudson, but also the fact that Sullenberger and his crew carefully went through a checklist before they took off of each of the steps to take if the engines failed in flight. It was only a few moments later that they were required to recall and carry out each one of the actions they had reviewed prior to take off.

As Eco notes in his interview, “At first, we think that a list is primitive and typical of very early cultures, which had no exact concept of the universe and were therefore limited to listing the characteristics they could name. But, in cultural history, the list has prevailed over and over again. It is by no means merely an expression of primitive cultures.”

Becomming a Writer

“Even on those occasions when he had no active hand in something I wrote, the choices I made, the way I approached a subject, the order in which I told what I knew, the attitude I adopted were determined by his example and his influence.”

Alec Wilkinson, My Mentor: A Young Man’s Friendship with William Maxwell.

I am currently reading, Mentors, Muses and Monsters edited by Elizabeth Benedict, a rather fascinating collection of thirty essays by writers about the people who changed their life, i.e. led them to become writers. Yet Benedict notes in her Introduction that it isn’t always a particular writer who can turn a person to a writing life.

It can also be a specific book as Michael Cunningham says in describing the life-long influence of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. It might also be a group of writers or a periodical, or indeed, an institution that can have this kind of impact on an individual. For example Jane Smiley points to her first year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Benedict also indicates that none of the thirty writers told “the archetypal story of artist and muse: the great man inspired in his great work by a moan destined to play second fiddle, or no fiddle at all.”

As I think back upon my own experience, not that I can lay claim to being a writer, that is a real writer, one whose works are read by others, I can’t think of any single person or book let me to find pleasure in living a writing life. Some books or teachers have been more influential than others and have led to a line of inquiry that guided my work for a while or motivated me to read other books they wrote.

In the early days I was greatly influenced by the kind of magazine The New Yorker was during the period when it was publishing two or three short and not-so-short short stories in each issue, as well as long, analytical essays, profiles and film reviews. And I know that Hemingway’s early novels and short stories made a lasting impression on me.

But it was probably a collection of books assigned in a course I took as an undergraduate the exerted the great influence on my life. In the days when I was a freshman at Stanford every student took a full-year course in the history of Western Civilization and then if they wanted to, could follow it with another in the Humanities devoted to literature and the arts. Those courses and the books I read for them introduced me to the world of humanistic studies and I've never recovered from the experience or found an alternative that comes close.

Again, it wasn’t any particular teacher in the course, although there were several, some as scholarly and charismatic as teachers can be sometimes, nor was it any single book or author, but rather it was the total impact of the course itself and the collection of readings that I was introduced to that made all the difference in my life.

However, the majority of the writers in Benedict’s volume wrote about the individuals who inspired them in one way or another to become writers. For example, Jonathan Safran Foer claims, “that had he not gone to Yehuda Amichai’s reading as a high school student visiting Israel, he might never have become a writer.”

Surely one of the most glowing accounts Benedict recounts in her Introduction is that of Cheryl Strayed. “I love Alice Munro, I took to saying, the way I did about any number of people I didn’t know whose writing I admired, meaning, of course, that I loved her books…But I loved her too, in a way that felt slightly ridiculous, even to me."

Capacity for Acceptance

How often have you read a book about a marriage that worked? “Worked” is the correct word because the marriage that Kay Redford Jamison unfolds in her heartbreaking memoir, Nothing Was the Same, is now a memory.

Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is the author of several extraordinarily books that are both moving and scholarly, a combination that is as uncommon as the spirit of the marriage she recalls in her memoir. Her works include An Unquiet Mind where she describes her own struggle with manic-depression, Night Falls Fast, a study of suicide, and Touched with Fire, an analysis of manic-depression and creativity. I’ve read them all and have benefited in more ways than one from each of them.

In Nothing Was The Same she looks back on her 20-year marriage to Richard Wright, a highly regarded research scholar on schizophrenia at the National Institute of Mental Health. When they met after both had been married before, Jamison says they hit it off at once. “We had many things in common—curiosity about the natural world, interested in the customs and love lives of our colleagues, and fascination with the ways the brain can veer off its tracks—and we made each other laugh…We were inclined to find pleasure in whatever it was we were doing.”

Their delight with one another lasted throughout their marriage and developed into a deep and lasting love. They meant a lot to one another. Jamison remarks that in all the years they had together, there was never a time that she was bored. Yet it wasn’t all so idyllic. “Nearly out the door on more than once occasion, certainly. But bored, never.”

She also comments that in other respects the two of them were really quite different, a difference that brought on laughter more than anything else. What better measure of love! Still, from the beginning their differences created some tension, but eventually “Our sensibilities and quirks evolved into something more shared and complex, more mingled.”

“Richard liked white Christmas lights, I like colored ones; Richard preferred lights to blink, I do not. Each year we put up strands of non-blinking colored lights for me and strands of blinking white lights for him.”

What I found most striking in their marriage was the way it was grounded in a total acceptance of one another. She writes, “…it is the capacity for understanding or accepting that is most important.” And later, “I had Richard, we had each other, and it was enough.” How rarely do I hear anything like that expressed or even sensed or observed in the ways one can usually detect such sentiments in a married couple.

After describing her relationship with Richard, she recounts the agonizing years when together they battled his lung cancer. And in the final section Jamison describes the profound loss she experienced after his death and the long process of grieving that she confronted head on.

Through it all she never succumbed to depression or verged on the threshold of a manic phase. Richard had taught her well, showed her what she needed to do to stay centered. “Richard had a way of giving back to me important things I had lost along the way.”

There is one more striking feature of their marriage that is a consistent theme in her memoir. It is the sense of calm and equilibrium that each of them seemed capable of bringing to one another. “Richard often told me that my acceptance of and love for him created a world of stillness and constancy that he had never known.” And she, in turn, told Richard that he created a “quiet” world for her.” This I believe is a miracle that comes to all too few marriages.

They had nearly twenty years together. They were colleagues, spouses, lovers and mentors for one another. However, Jamison makes it clear that what Richard could not teach her, indeed “no one could—was how to contend with the grief of losing him.”

The love you gave me wasn’t fresh and young,
It didn’t melt the sun or set the town aflame.
But it was warm and wise as any street,
Where hope and sorrow meet in bars without a name.
I only know that one day was a drink
And then the next was you and nothing was the same.

Stuart MacGregor

Moody Tales of Love

There is a grey cloud hanging over many of William Trevor’s short stories in Cheating at Canasta. The day is cloudy and misty, a melancholy mood surrounds the characters, their talk is reflective, nostalgic, and sad.

In Folie a Deux a man returns to Paris alone and, while reading in a café, muses, “The will to go on can fall away.”

Is there no gaiety in Ireland any more? Is it always so gloomy there?

There is also recognition of the truth, largely the truth of what really happened and what was really felt in a marriage or an affair, even though it was never expressed.

In A Perfect Relation Prosper says, “There was, for him in marriage, the torment of not being wanted any more.” And later “Often disagreeing, they would agree because it made things easier if that falsity seemed to be the truth.”

His language is terse and a strange rhythm of uncertainly characterizes many of the passages. From The Room, “Love makes the most of pity, or pity does of love, I don’t know which. It hardly matters.”

The Room describes in Trevorian fashion an affair between Phair whose marriage was breaking up and Katherine who seemed relatively satisfied with hers. They meet from time to time in a rented room.

They never learn much about each other and often speak elliptically leaving much unsaid or untrue. “This evening he would tell her about his day, and she would say about hers and would have to lie.”

Their affair had been an excitement for both of them. It always is, at least in the beginning. “Risk came into it in all sorts of ways; risk was part of it, the secrecy of concealment, stealth. And risk had claimed its due.”

Eventually, their affair ends. It usually does. “He expected no more of her than what she’d given him, and she would choose her moment to say that she must go. He would understand; she would not have to tell him. The best that love could do was not enough, and he would know that also.”

There are trips to Paris or Venice in several of the stories, always taken alone. Similar experiences are not unknown to me, although they are never as dark or as bleak as Trevor depicts them.

“In Folie a Deux, Wilby travels by himself to Paris. “He reads again, indulging the pleasure of being in Paris, in a brasserie where Muzak isn’t playing, at a small corner table, engrossed in a story that’s familiar yet has receded sufficiently to be blurred in places, like something good remembered.”

And in Cheating at Canasta, the story that gives the book its title, a widower returns to Harry’s Bar, a well-known restaurant in Venice, where he and his wife had many happy times. (Harry’s Bar was one of Hemingway’s haunts and it is also a bit of a legend among the celebrity crowd. I have had the good fortune of going there a couple of times and Trevor brought those experiences back to me again.)

Upstairs in the dining room Mallory overhears a young American couple arguing at the next table. To Mallory their quarreling ruins the memories of the good times he and his wife had there. But then he remembers that their life hadn’t always been quite so free of pain. He says, “Marriage was an uncalculated risk, Mallory remembered saying once. The trickiest of all undertakings.”

In reading these short stories it wasn’t long before I fell into their mood and began to speak the way his characters did. Never so dark or austere, but sometimes as indirect or cryptic and at other times contradictory or ambiguous, never saying exactly what I meant, since I was never very sure what I meant.

Week in Review

Over at the Wall Street Journal Stephen Marche writes about the evolution of the book. He says, “It’s about what the book wants to be.”

Meanwhile Sergey Brin contributes an Op-Ed defense of Google’s book digitizing program. He argues it will create the library that will last forever.

The ubiquitous Malcolm Gladwell deconstructs himself in an amusing discussion at the Guardian. "I'm interested in slightly dumb, obvious questions, right…"

At the New Yorker Here to There Department Nick Paumgarten writes about inattentional blindness: “a state of such absorption in an activity that you fail to notice really obvious stuff around you, like a guy in a gorilla suit or the state of Wisconsin.”

In a video promo of his new book, Eating Animals, Jonathan Foer answers the perennial question, What’s for dinner—broccoli or a burger?

Yahoo News reports what you have to do if you want to learn about Einstein’s love letters? The answer? Take the morning commute to Tel Aviv.

Conversational Readings offers a much-deserved word of praise for John Williams’ Stoner: “Simply put, the book is about nothing more and nothing less than a human life.”

And over at the Times of London Ben Macintyre looks closely at how the Internet might be affecting storytelling: “Narrative is not dead, merely obscured by a blizzard of byte-sized information. A story, God knows, is still the most powerful way to understand.”

Medical Reasoning

Lately I’ve been hearing one tale after another about the problems people are having with their medical care—can’t get an appointment, duplicate billing, failure to return calls, in some cases, calls that require immediate attention and finally perhaps the most frequent, incorrect or delayed diagnosis. Who has not heard such tales?

In the November 2009 New York Review of Books, Jerome Groopman, author of How Doctors Think, gives a thought-provoking account of why patients sometimes receive such poor care. He begins by describing a clinical conference he conducted for interns and residents at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

The conference focused on how doctors arrive at a diagnosis of their patient’s ills. “Some 10 to 15 percent of all patients either suffer from a delay in making the correct diagnosis or die before the correct diagnosis is made.”

At once I was struck by Groopman’s methodological approach to this problem. Unlike the usual one of discussing medical successes, Groopman begins by discussing failures. He writes, “The most instructive moments are when you are proven wrong, and realize that you believed you know more than you did, wrongly dismissing a key bit of information that contradicted your presumed diagnosis…”

Science or any empirical discipline (or individual for that matter) doesn’t move forward by pointing to its successes. If that were the case, it would scarcely ever change. Rather we learn far more from the mistakes that have made, from those cases that disprove our conjectures.

Groopman points out that the most common sources of diagnostic errors are the cognitive biases that physician’s make in trying to understand a patient’s condition. (These errors are not confined to physicians. Rather they are errors that anyone is prone to make in making a decision under conditions of uncertainty). He identifies three of the most common biases:

…anchoring where a person overvalues the first data he encounters …; availability where recent or dramatic cases quickly come to mind and color judgment about the situation at hand; and attribution where stereotypes can prejudice thinking so conclusions arise not from data but from such preconceptions.

The second notable methodological point in Groopman’s account is his emphasis on the limits of empirical generalizations in any particular case. He points out that subjects in clinical trial investigations (upon which these generalizations are based) are often highly selective as those who have multiple conditions or are taking other medications or do not fit into a narrow age range (usually too old or too young) are excluded from the study

Groopman comments, “Yet these excluded patients are the very people who heavily populate doctor’s clinics and seek their care.”

The other major sources of physician error stems from the heavy patient load they are now asked to carry. One physician “said she spends less and less time conversing with her patients. Instead she felt glued to a computer screen, checking off boxes on an electronic medical record…”

Another pointed out that “…work rounds were frequently conducted in a closed conference room with a computer rather than at the patient’s bedside.” And finally in describing the case of a seriously ill cancer patient, Groopman reports that “… no one attending to her had sat down in a chair at her [hospital] bedside and conversed at eye level, asking questions and probing her thoughts and feelings about what was being done to combat her cancer and how much more treatment she was willing to undergo.”

This may be hard to believe for anyone familiar with the days when doctors routinely came to your home if you were will or told you to come right over to his or her office if you felt poorly, or indeed, called you at the end of the day to see if you were feeling any better.

In the end Groopman makes clear that the solution to these problems will come about “…only by dogged thinking that requires the kind of time and inquiry that is absent in much of modern medical care." Dream on Dr. Groopman