Scribbling in Books

I am reading. I come across a sentence or a phrase that stops me in my tracks. I read it again. Something about it hits me—a question, conjecture, a bit of truth, sometimes a truth about myself. I put a parenthesis around it and note the page number on the inside back cover of the book. And when I finish the book, I copy all the saved passages into a Word document and add them to my Commonplace Book.

The passage is part of the story. But that isn’t why I mark it. I do that because it is relevant to me that may or may not have any relevance to the tale. Another reader might also mark the passage but for entirely different reasons. Or not mark it at all. Instead she marks other passages that I quickly pass by.

Recently I bumped into Fluther, a question and answer website with a social twist. Twitter recently purchased the company that runs it. I must have found it by doing a search for underlining or highlighting passages since it was the subject of the question that appeared on my screen: Do you underline passages in books when you are reading them?

To date fifty-three individuals have described the way they do or do not write in the books they are reading. One person answered, As I read a book, I often underline or highlight passages that I find interesting, things that I can relate to, or words that are really insightful. When I re-read some books, I often reconnect with these passages instantly, but sometimes I find them odd, and wonder what state of mind or stage in life I was at when I first underlined them.

Another person confessed, I’ve always felt that it was wrong to write in books. I know lots of people do it, and many great authors and thinkers have done it, but I just can’t bring myself to write in my books, whether textbooks, novels, or non-fiction, I just can’t do it.

One reported she often bought an extra copy of a book that she had marked up, if it was one she really liked. However, no one said they took the extra step of saving their highlighted passages in electronic form, as I do.

I often ask myself why have I been saving the passages that I mark in books. Is it simply a mindless habit? Yes, I return to them now and then. However, rarely if ever do I return to a single passage and write about it. Nor do I organize a set of passages from various books that deal with a single theme. It would be good to that.

And whenever I return to the collection of passages in my Commonplace Book and open it to a randomly selected page, I am amazed at how provocative many of them are and it is almost a crime to leave them there without some kind of additional commentary or review.

Sometimes saving these passages helps me to remember the book and think once again about its story and themes. So in this way, saving them becomes a memory aid. There’s no other way I could possibly remember the books I read or the ideas in them, without saving them electronically and then printing the collection at the end of each year.

Recently Patrick Kurp wrote on his blog, Anecdotal Evidence: For years I’ve kept notebooks in which I transcribe notable passages from my reading. These commonplace books used to be almost random, organized only by chronology, but they grew unwieldy because I never found time to devise useful indexes. They were diverting to browse but almost worthless if I sought a specific passage or topic.

The fact that saving the passages electronically permits such a search is one of the major reasons I spend the extra time copying them. It is a highly effectively way to create the kind of index that Kurp seeks. He also experiences the same thing I do when I return to read some of the passages I’ve been saving all these years. It is sometimes rather startling.

At some point I started dedicating discrete notebooks to large subjects – Trees, Birds, I’ve leafed through it the last several days, marveling at the amount of insight and first-rate writing devoted to the subject, the central event in our history, the one we’re still contesting. For a sobering insight, compare the mass of words inspired by the Vietnam War. Michael Herr? Tim O’Brien

Rabbit Hole

Can you imagine a more shattering experience than the death of your child? When you lose a child, you become a different person. There is no going back to the way you were before. It is a wound that no one ever recovers from. This is the subject of Rabbit Hole a film currently showing in the theaters.

Before it became a move, it was a Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway play. It was also the subject of the 2007 French Film, Apres Lui. And before then it was treated in the highly praised Ian McEwan novel, The Child in Time. Like the couple in Rabbit Hole, the couple in McEwan’s novel, whose child disappears one day, grow apart following their loss.

Mc Ewan writes, The loss had driven them to the extremes of their personalities. Now there was no mutual consolation, no touching, no love. Their old intimacy, their habitual assumption that they were on the same side, was dead. They remained huddled over their separate losses, and unspoken resentments began to grow.

It is the way the couples diverge in response to the loss of their child, the kind of loss that makes normal life impossible, that captured my greatest sympathies in the film. Normally, you would expect them to come together. But in both fictional accounts, they don’t.

Six months ago Danny, the four-year old son of Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aron Eckhart) in Rabbit Hole, was killed by a car as he was rushing into the street to retrieve his ball. Becca is trying to forget Danny, to erase all vestiges of his life, while Howie continues to grieve.

He does not want to get rid of Danny’s clothes or toys or postings on the refrigerator door as Becca does. He continues to attend a support group; Becca stays home. The disagreements, sometimes violent, continue to escalate. There is no coming together, no shared grief, only further and further drifting apart.

How can one understand this? Is there some reason why both McEwan and David Linday-Abaire, the author of the theatrical Rabbit Hole, chose to depict the loss of a child this way? Yes, it is almost impossible to ever recover from such an event. But why in this divergent fashion? Does it reflect a fundamental difference in their personalities, a difference that existed well before their marriage?

It is easier to understand the connection sought in both Apres Lui and Rabbit Hole when the women begin to stalk the person who was responsible, albeit both accidental, for the death of their son. In Apres Lui, the divorced Camille (Catherine Deneuve), searches for her son’s friend who was driving the car when he was killed in an accident. She hires him to work in her bookshop, cooks meals for him, and arranges to pay for his college tuition.

In Rabbit Hole, Becca follows the school bus that brings her teenage son’s friend home from school each day. Eventually they begin meeting at a park bench. One day he brings her a graphic novel that he had made. Together they try to recover from an experience from which there is no recovery. When Howie learns of their meetings, he becomes enraged which serves only to increase the distance between them,

People react differently to the same event, to a story they are reading or to a tragedy they experience. Sometimes a tragedy as devastating as the death of your child can create a gap that can never be closed. While the marriages did not collapse in Rabbit Hole or The Child in Time, we know they will never be the same.

Stoner: Revisited

“The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print -- the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly." John Williams

Until a few years ago I had never heard of the novel Stoner or its author, John Williams. My introduction to the novel occurred while reading a blog where it was given the kind of praise normally reserved for a masterpiece. It was also said to be a tragic tale of a college professor of literature.

Within minutes I left to buy a copy of the novel and not long after had one of the highpoints of my reading days. Early last year I wrote a short review of it and began to read whatever else I could find about the book and its author. Every now and then I chance upon another person’s discovery of the novel and how they were as overwhelmed by it as everyone else is.

I am led to wonder why we don’t hear more about Stoner? I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who has read it or seen more than a handful of commentators write about. C. P. Snow’s explanation is that “…we live in a peculiarly silly age and it doesn’t fit the triviality of the day.” Earlier he said, “Very few novels in English, or literary productions of any kind, have come anywhere near its level for human wisdom or as a work of art.”

I read about Snow’s appraisal in a recent essay, A Sadness Unto the Bone: John William’s Stoner, by Mel Livatino in the Summer 2010 issue of the Sewanee Review. Livatino feels much the same way as Snow. He has read the novel four times and says that knowing the plot and being so familiar with its pages has not diminished their power. Isn’t that what is said about a classic work of literature? Still he confesses he isn’t sure if he “can endure Stoner’s sorrow again.”

Livatino considers the novel “remarkable” in four ways.

1. Unlike most contemporary novels, Stoner unfolds the life story of an individual from birth to death.

2. “The narrative “runs counter to modernism’s dictum to show, not tell.”

3. The novel reads like a work of poetry, it is deeply moving and “pitch perfect.”

4. He also believes few writers today express the depth of understanding and sympathy of the characters they write about as Williams does in Stoner.

There is something else about Stoner that led me to feel similarly moved. It has nothing to do with its structure or how it was written or the fact that Stoner’s life in the university bore a certain similarity to my own. Rather it was the way in which literature transformed his life, gave him a new life and identity, one that as Livatino notes changed his life from “dumbness to consciousness.”

“His teaching excels not because he is brilliant of creative, or flashing—none of which he is, as the novel shows—but because he is witness to such a consciousness and is dedicated to the literature that has brought it into being and because he demands much of his students.”

"People Need Bookstores"

One night before I moved from Portland, Oregon, I went over the Powell’s, the well-known bookstore just a few blocks from my home. It was the first time I had been there in a long while. I went upstairs to the book holding room. I had ordered a book from their warehouse the day before and here it was the very next day and then came downstairs, where a reading was about to begin, and eventually down another flight to the new book section on the 1st floor. It felt really good to be there, so close to where my home was, even though the night was cold and wet.

The next morning I thought it might be hard to live in a place where Powell’s wasn’t just a couple of blocks down the way. And then I wondered if a bookstore, if Powell’s, could keep a person, keep me, in a town that I found so cold and oppressive most of the year. For me, and so many others, a bookstore, especially one like Powell’s is really the heart of a community.

And yet each day we learn of another bookstore closing. Even the large chain bookstores are beginning to close now. Borders will be shutting down over 200 stores across the country, including its largest store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Barnes and Noble is also closing some of their largest stores, including the “megastore” near Lincoln Center in Manhattan. One by one both the large and the small stores are giving up the game. It is not unlike losing one long-time friend after another.

But every once in a while we hear about a really fine bookstore that is still there and may even be doing well. Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, the bookstore owned by the writer Louise Erdrich is an example. In an interview in the latest Paris Review (#195) Erdrich talks about her store as well as bookstores in general. I don’t think I have read anything more compelling than her description of what a bookstore means to a community and to its readers.

She says that while the store is a business, it is far more about the people who work there and the people who come to find books. “But walking into a small bookstore, you immediately feel the presence of the mind that has chosen the books on the shelves. You communicate intellectually with the buyer. Then if you’re lucky, you meet another great reader in person…”

It is silly of me to try to convey Erdrich’s high praise of bookstores. Better that I let her speak for herself.

“People need bookstores and need other readers. We need the intimate communication with others who love books. We don’t really think we do because of the ease that the Internet has introduced, but we still need the physical world more than we know. Little bookstores are community services, not profitable business enterprises. Books are just too inexpensive online and there are too many of them, so a physical bookstore has to offer something different. Perhaps little bookstores will attain nonprofit status. Maybe one fine day the government will subsidize them, so they can thrive as nonprofit entities. Some very clever bookstore, probably not us, is going to manage to do that and become the paradigm of the rest.”

Will we ever see the day that the government, state or federal, subsidizes little bookstores? For the cost of subsidizing General Motors, the government could easily keep alive every small bookstore in this country and open a sizable number of new ones along the way.

In the interview Erdrich also had some very sensible things to say about the future of books. “As for the book as an object, it’s like bread. It is such a perfectly evolved piece of technology that it will be hard to top….the paperback—so low-low tech and high-tech at the same time—it is also a great piece of technology.”

Unlike an electronic book, it can be given to someone else, you can write in it, you can even put it on your bookshelf. “I also like that you can throw books across the room, as people have done with mine….The whole absence of touching and feeling a book would be a loss…”

At the same time, she knows that there are many readers who just want the text so that electronic versions are best viewed as another method of publication. She does not object to them. She says, “I don’t feel the sense of alarm and threat that some other writers seem to feel about e-books.”

I am with her from A to Z on books, bookstores, and the future of reading. And she has said it all so vigorously and so eloquently.

"The Line That Separates Art from Life"

The appeal of Paul Auster’s new novel, Sunset Park, steadily grew on me. I came to know the characters better, the past that brought them to their present situations, and what their future course, if any, is likely to be. And along the way, I came to like each of them more and more.

In a word, I really became immersed in the novel and by the end I didn’t want our friendships to end. Isn’t one of the things every reader is looking for in a novel? One of the characters says: He has never been able to put his finger on the line that separates art from life. That is true of most of the novels that engage me.

We first meet Miles Heller, the central character, who is working perfunctorily “trashing out” foreclosed houses in Florida, getting rid of all the things left behind when the residents are evicted. They always leave their house littered with trash.

“In a collapsing world of economic ruin and relentless, every expanding hardship, trashing out is one of the few thriving businesses in the area…In the beginning, he was stunned by the disarray and the filth, the neglect.”

Miles has come to the end of the line. He has no plans, no ideas, no real hope that his days will improve. Other than trashing out homes he spends his days doing next to nothing—reading, thinking walking, watching films, following the news.

He is haunted by the memory of his stepbrother’s death. It occurred while they were walking together on a country road and arguing about some trivial matter. But their argument got out of hand, leading Miles to shove his angry brother into the road, right in the path of an oncoming car.

“He doesn’t know if Bobby’s death was an accident or if he was secretly trying to kill him. The entire story of his life hinges upon what happened that day…he still can’t be certain if he is guilty of a crime or not.”

Miles flees New York and the home of his father and stepmother, never letting them know where he is or making any contact over the course of the next seven years. Eventually, he is jolted out of his grief by meeting and then falling in love with Pilar whom he first sees in a park reading The Great Gatsby. Pilar is smart, rather a precocious intellectual so it seems. But she is also “underage,” only sixteen.

And while they share an ardent devotion to one another, to avoid arrest for having an affair with an underage minor, Miles eventually returns to New York and takes up residence in an abandoned house with three other people.

We meet each of them, in turn—Bing, his close friend, who runs the Hospital for Broken Things where he repairs broken typewriters, rotary phones, fountain pens, cherished objects from the past. We meet Alice who is working on her Ph.D. dissertation and Ellen who is an artist of sorts who suffers history of mental illness. Each of these lost souls captured my sympathy too.

Finally, after several false starts and many imagined reunions, (“…that played out in your head so many times over the years were bound to be richer, fuller, and more emotionally satisfying than the real thing”) he makes contact with his actress stepmother and book publisher father, Morris Heller.

Morris has been scrambling to publish worthwhile books to avoid bankruptcy at Heller Books. Yet, he knows that even if he fails, he will be able to write his memoir with the title, “Forty Years in the Desert: Publishing Literature in a Country Where People Hate Books.”

Even though Miles is warmly reconciled with his parents, Sunset Park ends somberly as he flees New York once again. As he is driving across the Brooklyn Bridge looking at the huge buildings on the other side of the East River, he, like so many others who have viewed this skyline recently, thinks about the,

“…missing buildings, the collapsed and burning building that no longer exist…and he wonders if it is worth hoping for a future when there is no future, and for now he will stop hoping for anything and live only for now, this moment, this passing moment, the now that is here and then not here, the now that is gone forever.”

The Limits of Research

Jonah Lehrer’s dazzling essay, The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method, has been the most frequently e-mailed article from the New Yorker since it was published last month. This pleases me a lot. For Lehrer describes one of the most serious problems associated with research in the social sciences, especially research in psychology and, as he points out, the natural sciences as well.

In a nutshell the problem is the difficulty of replicating experimental findings. A derivative problem is the frequently observed decline in the overall effect of any particular variable(s) with repeated testing. Replication is the heart of scientific research. That is the purpose of making the findings public—so that investigators in other labs can see if they can observe the same outcome. He writes,

“Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their rests. The test of replicability, as it is know, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community reinforces itself.”

Lehrer cites many examples of the failure to replicate. He notes how often the therapeutic power of a drug wanes on repeated testing and then eventually disappears or turns out on analysis to be largely a function of the placebo effect. He discusses at some length the difficulty of replicating the phenomenon of verbal overshadowing—how the act of describing memories seems or seemed at one time, to interfere with recall.

And he cites the well-known failure to replicate the early studies by Joseph Rhine on extrasensory perception (ESP) that turned out to be a statistical fluke. It was Rhine who first coined the term “the decline effect.”

It has even been observed in a series of studies where the same genetic strains of mice were shipped to three different labs on the same day from the same supplier and raised under identical conditions, including the way they were handled. The investigator who reported the widely different results from each lab concluded that a lot of scientific data are nothing but noise. “The end result is a scientific accident that can take years to unravel.”

What accounts for the fact that so many research studies cannot be replicated? Several factors are at work. Proper control conditions may have been omitted from the original experiments, the samples may not have been randomly selected or consist of a highly uniform, unrepresentative group of individuals, usually college sophomores. Or the results may have occurred because of experimenter biases that inevitably led to evidence supporting the hypothesis. Few experimenters really design studies to disprove, rather than confirm their hypothesis. This is a point Karl Popper emphasized many years ago.

Then there is the publication biases characteristic of most scientific journals. Researchers who do not report positive outcomes cannot get their findings published. According to one study, ninety-seven percent of psychology studies proved their hypothesis. We know this can’t be the case. As one investigator (Richard Palmer, a biologist) noted, “Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed.” And he continued:

“We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori believes often repeated.”

Lehrer has written a powerful, persuasive essay on the limits of scientific research. It is the kind of essay I wish I had written, as I have been aware of this for years based on a lifetime of reading research in psychology, as well as my own studies. I have been guilty of looking for data that confirms my hypothesis, interpreting outcomes in a way that will insure their publication, and no doubt biasing (conservatively) the design of my studies without really trying to test (falsify) them.

But I didn’t write the essay and no doubt could never have done so with the skill and breadth that Lehrer has. I commend him for his piece, as well as the New Yorker for publishing it and thereby making possible its wide dissemination.

The Future of Reading

As I look ahead to the future of reading, I do not share the pessimistic concerns voiced by so many commentators. If anything, I see just as many readers as there ever were, they are reading more, in more ways, and for longer periods of time than ever. They are reading on the Internet, with increasing frequency on their e-readers, and yes, they are still reading printed books.

I go to Powell’s Bookstore in Portland and it is jammed. People walk around with a basket full of books to buy, others are reading while sitting on the floor in the row after row of bookshelves that fill this five-story bookstore. Darin Sennett, director of strategic projects at Powell’s says he sees no evidence that books are dying.

“People do love bookstores and they’re an important part of our culture. Print books are not dead. People will continue to want them and love them. But their desires and the way they want to read are evolving. I can see print and e-books living nicely together.”

I see no decline in the quality or depth of writing in the books and documents I read. To be sure, my choices are highly selective. But I have more than enough to read, in fact, I am inundated with materials that I have always been drawn to. I am not concerned about students who are said to read less and less and no longer write critically or reflectively. My experience has demonstrated that students vary widely on both dimensions in about the same proportion as always.

Instead what I see is an increasing concern about the quality of student education and the nature of their reading habits. And I read about more and more innovative programs to promote the literary arts among the young. To be sure students, as well as the rest of us, are tempted by an increasing number of distractions on the Internet. But there is good reason to believe that, if anything, they may actually keep us more alert, keep our minds more active and more engaged with the text, whether it be on the screen or on the page.

However, I do have one concern and it has nothing to do with purported decline in reading and it is really nothing new either. Instead my concern is how we read. For me reading is a slow process and one that is always performed with a pen in hand as it was during the eras when commonplace books flourished. Like readers then, I write in the margins of the books I read, I underline text, I make notes on the inside covers. And then I copy all of this into my commonplace book to be read again and again and sometimes drawn upon in something I write.

I rarely see a person reading with a pen or pencil and I ask myself what are they getting out of this experience. Do they stop to mull over a sentence or a paragraph, do they go back and read a related passage in the book? What kind of a record will they have of the encounter? What will they remember? Of course, they will remember very little or nothing at all. But if they collected some of their thoughts and memorable passages in some kind of a record, their memories will be preserved so they can be reviewed and considered again and again.

It is a matter of how engaged a person is with what they are reading. When you are skimming pages, or reading rather casually, literature cannot possibly have much influence. But when you are reading reflectively, writing things in the book or on a separate pad of paper, reading can become an experience that will stick with you, will become something you’ll be more likely to bring to your life.

I am on the same wavelength as Ann Patchett whose words deserve to be repeated: “I have long refused to participate in the last rites of what is both my passion and my profession. I meet too many people who stay up half the night racing towards a final chapter. We are a hardy bunch, we readers.”

I don’t think there is anyone who is immune from the pleasures of a book that speaks to them, no one who can ignore a startling bit of truth or a beautiful expression.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Again Ann Patchett hit the nail on the head: “Why are more people reading? Because they are either discovering or remembering just how good it can be.”

Hiatus

Marks in the Margin will be taking a break for an indefinite period while I hole up in a grass shack on a remote island in the middle of the ocean to work on some long-delayed projects. Postings during this pause will be intermittent, if that. I'll still be reading, catching up on a long list of books that go back several decades, and training for the next season. Meanwhile, I wish each of you Happy Holidays and many thanks for reading and responding.

What's Next?

Last Tuesday, November 9th, The New York Times published a special anniversary issue of its regular Tuesday edition of Science Times. They asked “top researchers” in ten sciences to predict the future direction of their field and what the most important discoveries are likely to be during the next ten years.

The researcher’s disciplines ranged from genomics to mathematics to earth science. Here is a very brief list of ten disciplines and the predictions of the researchers:

Space Science: Learning more about asteroids

Game Science: Developing games for the study of women’s rights, climate change and medical innovation

Climate Change: Testing the accuracy of current climate change models

Engineering: Growing integration of biological processes in engineering real systems

Biotechnology: Refining methods for producing stem cells that will be “cheap, fast, and relatively easy.”

Conservation Biology: Increasing knowledge of marine biodiversity

Ocean Science: Exploration of the oceans (70% of the planet) with particular emphasis of the “mysterious” yet major worldwide effects of the Indian Ocean

Genomics: Reading new types of genomes and completing DNA sequencing (ordering) of an individual’s (or any organism’s) genome at a single time

Neuroscience: Determination of the physical organization of a memory within the brain

Mathematics: Discovery of scientific results that are correct and predictive but are without explanation. “We may be able to do science without insight, and we may have to learn to live without it.” [Personal note: My favorite prediction and one with particular relevance to psychology.]

There are several features of this list that concern me. I am struck by the overlap of disciplines. There are two pointing to improved understanding of climate change, two focusing on developments in the biological sciences, and two related to the marine sciences. Indeed, the majority of disciplines are drawn from the natural sciences.

Secondly, the social sciences are completely ignored. Not a single researcher in economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. is interviewed. Are these not sciences? Do they not seek general laws about the subject matter of their inquires? Are there no more discoveries to be made in these fields? Or is it simply that anyone with a head on their shoulders already knows the results of their studies?

Perhaps the editors at the Times do not consider these fields as sciences. Or perhaps they believe we now have a complete understanding of human behavior and are easily able to predict and control it. No, I am sure they do not hold these views. What then can account for their failure to interview a few representative investigators from these areas?

I am aware that they are not unified sciences and that there are frequent disagreements among investigators in these disciplines. For example, Rom Harre, researcher, teacher, and writer in the philosophy of science, and later in social psychology has written about his field, one that was mine for many years:

“It has been about 30 years since the first rumblings of discontent with the state of academic psychology began to be heard…Methods that have long been shown to be ineffective or worse are still used on a routine basis by hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. Conceptual muddles long exposed to view are evidence in almost every issue of standard psychology journals.”

Geoffrey Loftus, a leading cognitive psychologist has also spoken of his concerns about the field. “But I have developed a certain angst over the intervening 30 something years, a constant nagging sensation that our field spends a lot of time spinning its wheels without really making much progress.”

I suspect the same can also be said of the other social sciences. Still that doesn’t make them any less scientific in objectives and methods. Rather it reflects their developing state and the extraordinarily complex subject matter they have carved out to investigate. As others have said, the social sciences are the most difficult of all the sciences.

Finally, I might note that there are also wide areas of uncertainty and theoretical disagreements within the natural sciences. So in this respect they are no different than the social sciences, indeed probably any field of inquiry especially one that in comparison with the natural sciences is in an early stage of development.

Radio: Then and Now

In an essay in the November 11th New York Review of Books, Bill McKibben reminds us how extraordinary radio is today and the way it has been transformed by the digital age. Yet it is rarely discussed and not much is written about it. I grew up with the radio and I have grown old with the radio so I appreciate how right he is.

Television was still several years away when I was a child and so my early experience with the media was exclusively an auditory one. As a result it was also an imaginative one. There was nothing to look at, no images before me, and so what traveled through my ears took me to my own places, my own mental maps. I had an RCA flip top radio that turned on and off by lifting a horizontal lid covering the dial, at that time exclusively AM. Somewhere on the box Nipper, the legendary RCA dog, was peering into a large speaker searching for his master’s voice.

I listened, if you can believe it, to Stuart Hamblin who sang country music and ran for president on the Prohibition Party ticket, Arthur Godfrey who had a morning variety show, the Lone Ranger, Dick Tracy, Hopalong Cassidy, etc. And on Sunday nights, instead of peering at 60 Minutes on the tube, we sat around a huge radio cabinet listening to the comedians of the day--Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly, Edgar Bergen, Abbott and Costello, Fred Allen, etc. These are people you may never have heard of but they were wildly popular during what some have called golden age of radio.

I still listen to the radio and I do so far more often than I watch television. McKibben cites some intriguing statistics on radio listening today. He notes that in terms of frequency of listeners, Rush Limbaugh is number one with 14.25 million listeners, that’s 14.25 million listeners, during an average week. But surprisingly Public Radio is not far behind.

“National Public Radio’s flagship news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, featuring news and commentary alongside in-depth reports and stories that can stretch over twenty minutes—are the second- and third-most-popular radio programs in the country, each drawing about 13 million unique listeners in the course of the week.”

In my view Terry Gross’s Fresh Air is far and away the number one program on NPR. I listen to her relentlessly perceptive and intelligent interviews when I workout and the moments pass by in a flash. I’ve never heard or seen an interviewer draw out a person better or get to the central issue faster than Gross and she’s been conducting the show for nearly thirty-five years. McKibben reports Fresh Air is syndicated to more that 450 stations and can claim of average of nearly 4.5 million listeners each week.

Every time I listen to National Public Radio I am struck by the range and originality of its programming. I often wonder why that kind of programming can no longer be brought to television? There was a time when it was on Omnibus during a nine-year period beginning in 1952. I must have seen almost all the hour-long shows that aired on network television each Sunday afternoon. They featured theater and opera performances, literary readings, interviews with celebrities, scientists and artists and some legendary concerts accompanied by lectures from Leonard Bernstein.

Once in a while, programs like these can be found on the Web. Why not TV? Yes occasionally there are comparable programs on cable TV but unlike those early television programs or those on Public Radio they are not given away for free.

Perhaps the most remarkable event that has come to radio during our time is the development of podcasting and radio Apps. Countless programs can now be listened to on iPods or other comparable devices. And the equally numerous programs that can be streamed to a radio station App have rewritten the rules of radio listening. I can listen to Fresh Air on WXYY, classical music on one of several stations, as well as programs that range from Ira Glass’ unusual This American Life to Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! news hour on the Pacifica Network.

As McKibben says, “…this is the perfect moment to be a young radiohead.” I might add, there’s nothing wrong with being an old one too. Sue Schardt, executive director of the Association of Independents in Radio said it well, “It’s a transformative and exciting moment, a huge revolution.”

The Weekend

In The Weekend by Berhard Schlink, the author of the highly praised The Reader, a group of former compatriots gather together at a run-down countryside mansion to welcome the release from prison of their former leader, Jorg, a pardoned German political terrorist. Little happens during the weekend other than talk, many questions, recollections, and a good deal of food and drink. But the tension among these people is powerful and the arguments among them raise issues that cannot be easily dismissed today.

The group consists of Jorg and his sister and those she invited for the weekend--a lawyer, a journalist a cleric, an aspiring novelist, a dental technician and various spouses and children. Other than one younger guest, who urges a return to “the struggle” and bemoans the betrayal of the revolution by the others, most have made their compromises, rejoined society, and found their way to being good citizens.

It rains a lot, some pair off, others go for walks around the extensive grounds. But mostly they gather round the table to argue about the legitimacy of their violent revolutionary past and its many victims.

The book recalls the 1970s militant campaigns of the left-wing Baader-Meinhof gang and in its later stages the Red Army faction. One is also reminded of similar groups in Italy and Japan that formed after World War II. An argument can be made that the individuals who joined these groups felt they had to make up for the conformity and lack of resistance of their parents to the fascist states in which they lived. As Jorg explains it,

“Our parents conformed and shirked resistance—we couldn’t repeat that. We couldn’t simply watch children being burned by napalm in Vietnam, starving in Africa, being broken in institutions in Germany.”

Otherwise he says very little. In a way, he seems a broken man, trying to adjust to life outside the prison and the demands it now places upon him. He needs a job and in the end accepts an offer to work in the dental technician’s office. Whatever happened to the fight against oppression? Perhaps it simply became tedious, as implied by the remark of one of the guests.

“When I started my studies, all that counted was existentialism, at the end of my studies everyone was keen on analytic philosophy, and twenty years ago Kant and Hegel came back. The problems of existentialism hadn’t been solved, nor had those of analytic philosophy. People were simply fed up with them.”

Still the fact that it may no longer be fashionable to speak of existentialism or analytic philosophy or oppression, for that matter, doesn’t mean the questions they posed have been answered.

Jorg’s estranged son also appears mid-way in the novel, disguised as an architectural historian who challenges his father to account for breaking up his family and the brutality of his terrorists actions. Jorg replies, “I know I have been wrong and made mistakes. I just want the respect due to someone who has given everything for a larger cause and a good one.”

His son then asks him, “What mistakes?” Jorg responds, “The victims. A struggle that doesn’t lead to success doesn’t justify victims.” The conversation continues—pass the rolls, is there any more coffee? And yet throughout there is the lingering, more general question: If you cannot win the struggle, should you not take it up?

Some critics have said The Weekend is a “bad novel,” that it is boring and ponderous or that “the characters are dead on the page.” I found it otherwise. The novel is not meant as a character study or mystery, or one with a good deal of action. Rather, it is one of moral reflection, especially for Germans who cannot easily forget their heritage or walk away from it.

The Weekend ends as if nothing momentous had gone on. “As easily as the friends had formed themselves into a whole, they would also fall apart again.” And one by one each of them drives away down the muddy road to their home.

Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

How are innovations developed? Do they spring forth in the mind of a single individual? Or are they crafted over time in a dialogue with others? Is there some recurring pattern that can account for their formation? These are the types of questions Steven Johnson considers in his densely packed, heavily researched book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History Innovation.

In this book Johnson undertakes an analysis of 300 of the most influential innovations in areas ranging from the discovery of air conditioning, evolution, vacuum tubes, vacuum cleaners, the Internet and the World Wide Web.

It is an intellectual tour-de-force that is continually fascinating. Johnson argues that certain environments breed innovations effortlessly. Listing the major themes of this factually rich volume is, I think, the clearest way to illustrate his findings.

• Good ideas rarely spring de novo in the mind of a single person. It’s very, very rare to find cases where somebody on their own, working alone, in a moment of sudden clarity has a great breakthrough that changes the world.

• Innovations are built out of a collection of existing ideas and they are limited to those ideas that happen to be around at any given time. Ideas are works of bricolage; they are built out of that detritus [of old ideas]…in reality they’ve been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage.

• Innovations are often generated in open networks of ideas, individuals or settings that meld together seamlessly. …[a creative] space…sees information spillover as a feature, not a flaw. It is designed to leak. In this sense it shares some core values with the liquid networks of dense cities.

• Good ideas often come from hunches that develop over a longer period of time. …the idea (Darwin’s theory of natural selection) didn’t arrive in a flash; it drifted into his consciousness over time, in waves… The Web came into being as an archetypal slow hunch: from a child’s exploration of a hundred year old encyclopedia, to a freelancer’s idle side project designed to help him keep track of his colleagues, to a deliberate attempt to build a new information platform that could connect computers across the planet.

• Good ideas often occur by chance, say during a dream or while on a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll. (A similar phenomenon occurs with long showers or soaks in a tub…)

• Innovations are often crafted from a tool or idea originally developed for a specific application but is then transformed or “gets hijacked” for a completely new one. Gutenberg’s printing press was a classic combinatorial innovation…Each of the key elements that made it such a transformative machine—the moveable type, the ink, the paper, and the press itself—had been developed separately well before Gutenberg printed his first bible.

• Good ideas often develop after a long series of false starts and errors. Being wrong forces you to explore…When we’re wrong, we have to challenge our assumptions, adopt new strategies.

• Finally good ideas are often formed in environments that encourage and promote exchanges between fields and methods of analysis.….[hotbeds of innovation] where different kinds of thoughts could productively collide and recombine.

In reviewing the 300 innovations (Each one is briefly described in the Appendix) that he studied, Johnson concludes that by far the majority developed in open environments, where there were no barriers (copyright protections), no economic incentives (market forces), and where ideas flowed freely in unregulated channels of communication.

For those eager to create the next big thing, Johnson concludes with this bit of advice: Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent.

(He also penned some not-so-subtle advice that is clearly aimed my way: New ideas do not thrive on archipelagoes.)

Charter Schools: A Reconsideration

In reviewing the film Waiting for Superman, I gave the impression that charter schools are uniformly superior to pubic schools on standard measures of educational achievement. That is the claim propagated in the film, one that is flatly contradicted by Diane Ravitch in a ringing critique in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.

Ravitch argues that the writer and director Davis Guggenheim failed to acknowledge evidence that “only one in five” charter schools are able to outperform comparable public schools. “Why propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter schools are the answer to our educational woes…when there are twice as many failing charters as there are successful ones?”

She claims that Guggenheim simply ignored the wide variation in the effectiveness of charter schools, the fact that some are run by “incompetent leaders” or [for profit] corporations, that others have been accused of “unsavory real estate deals,” or whose directors are paid fees that range from $300,000-$400,00 a year.

In support of her claims she cites a major study of half the country’s 5,000 charter schools that revealed only 17% achieved superior outcomes on math tests compared to a matched sample of public schools, while 37 percent were worse, and the remaining 46% were no different.

Ravitch says the film gives the impression that charter schools work so well because they hire truly excellent teachers. She counters with a study indicating “teacher quality accounts for about 7.5-10 percent of student test score gains.” While teachers may be essential to the success of any school, other factors like curriculum, student background, as well as family income and support of student schoolwork are more important. According to research cited by Ravitch, “…about 60 percent of achievement is explained by nonschool factors.”

I view Ravitch’s critique as a corrective to the depiction of charter schools in Waiting for Superman. The film is clearly designed to persuade viewers of their superiority. However, it does so by ignoring evidence that raises doubts about their effectiveness.

This is a common strategy in most persuasive campaigns. Yet there is much evidence that demonstrates presenting both sides of an argument is more effective. This approach not only enhances the credibility of the source, but also the strength of the message.

What is common to the effective charter and public schools that can account for their successes? To answer this question Ravitch points to the very excellent public education systems in Finland, Japan, and Singapore, widely recognized to be “high-performing” systems. She asserts they have “….succeeded not by privatizing their schools or closing those with low scores, but by strengthening the education profession. They also have less poverty than we do.”

These school systems often have a national curriculum that not only includes the basic skills of reading and math but also incorporates programs in the humanities, sciences, foreign languages, history, etc. They also have strong teacher training programs. Perhaps they can do all this so successfully because they are small countries with a fairly homogeneous population. Nevertheless, they represent an instructive model for those dedicated to designing more effective public education programs in this country.

I admit I have not read the reports cited by Ravitch. Rather my intent has been to report her views and thereby suggest a reconsideration of Waiting for Superman. In addition, I have not read the extensive literature comparing the effectiveness of charter and public educational programs. My account is based on secondary sources and the view of my informant who has read those studies and tells me that Ravitch’s claims are essentially correct.

Balancing Upon a Pinpoint

What do we know about the Holocaust experience? The question is constantly before me. It is one of those momentary “It could have been me” thoughts and it is a painful one. In Julie Orringer’s novel, The Invisible Bridge, I began once again to grasp its horror and enormity and tragedy.

The novel is largely set in Hungary although it begins with a few years of education and romance in Paris. Andras, a young Hungarian Jew, is forbidden to enter architecture school but is able to obtain a permit to study in France. His brother, Tibor, similarly obtains a permit to study medicine in Italy. Andras is the center of the tale; he falls madly in love with Klara, an older woman, also a Hungarian Jew who fled Hungary to avoid prosecution for killing a man in self-defense.

As the Nazis take control of much of Europe and the war approaches, both Andras and Tibor are forced to return to Budapest where they are conscripted into the state labor service (Munkaszolgalat) that by 1938 consisted solely of Jewish Hungarians. They labored under horrific conditions in support of the Hungarian Army during bitterly cold winters, with little to eat, little to keep warm, constantly beaten and threatened as one by one the weaker men die or are shot.

No sooner are they released than they are called back once again to another Munkaszolgalat under even harsher conditions. Released to their homes, taken away, released, taken away—countless times, too many times. I thought a little editorial pruning might have been a good idea.

Little is known about the plight of the Hungarian Jews or the forced labor camps during World War II, as they have received less notice than the Nazi death camps. The Invisible Bridge made me realize that in Hungary death in these camps was usually prolonged by starvation, illness, and painful injuries. It is known that Hungarian Jews avoided deportation until 1944 when more than half the Hungarian-Jewish population was transported to death camps elsewhere.

“One and a half million Jewish men and women and children: How was anyone to understand a number like that?”

As I read more and more of this novel, I became greatly interested in its origins. We get a hint of that in the last chapter, The Epilogue, where Orringer gives us a short fictional account and in Szymborska’s poem, Any Case, that concludes her novel. We learn more directly from Orringer that the idea for The Invisible Bridge came in a surprising revelation from her grandfather as they were discussing a trip she was going to take to Paris.

Her grandfather mentioned that he had lived in Paris when he was a young man, that he had a scholarship to study architecture and, as a Hungarian Jew, had lost his student visa when he was conscripted into a forced labor company and had to return to Hungary. “I knew he had been in labor camps during the war, but I knew nothing about what had happened to him there or how he’d managed to survive.” And then she started to ask him questions whereupon an incredible, heartbreaking series of stories emerged that gave her the foundation for her novel.

I was also overwhelmed by the amount of research Orringer undertook in writing this novel. In a detailed Acknowledgement section she describes the support of the US Holocaust Museum, a Holocaust museum in Paris and two in Budapest, numerous newspaper archives, and guidance from many individuals about architectural and geographical questions, matters of translation and details of twentieth century politics and history.

The list of these acknowledgements and sources of support is a very long, densely packed one. The novel did not simply spring forth from the accounts of her grandfather upon which she built her fictional narrative. A reader often fails to appreciate the amount of research that is required to craft a work of literature like this.

The Invisible Bridge ends with a brief, rather subdued sense of hope when those who survived come together in this country. And yet as Orringer writes, “…one of the central truths of his [Andras] life: that in any moment of happiness there was a reminder of bitterness or tragedy.” And later, “…no period of mourning would ever be long enough.”

Any Case

October is National Poetry Month (in England--Patrick Kurp calls it the true Poetry Month) and as it draws to a close, I will post my annual poem by the Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska called Any Case, also sometimes titled Could Have.

I discovered the poem at the end of Julie Orringer’s remarkable novel The Invisible Bridge, an epic tale of three brothers trying to survive during the Holocaust in Hungary. It is a long novel that drew me in from the first sentence and would not let me out for a full 600 pages. The following passage occurs in the novel:

…the excruciating smallness, the pinpoint upon which every life is balanced. The scale might be tipped by the tiniest of things: the lice that carried typhus, the few thimblefuls of water that remained in a canteen, the dust of breadcrumbs in a pocket.

Any Case
It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Closer. Farther away.
It happened, but not to you.
You survived because you were first.
You survived because you were last.
Because alone. Because the others.
Because on the left. Because on the right.
Because it was raining. Because it was sunny.
Because a shadow fell.
Luckily there was a forest.
Luckily there were no trees.
Luckily a rail, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A frame, a turn, an inch, a second.
Luckily a straw was floating on the water.
Thanks to, thus, in spite of, and yet.
What would have happened if a hand, a leg,
One step, a hair away?
So you are here? Straight from that moment still suspended?
The net's mesh was tight, but you? through the mesh?
I can't stop wondering at it, can't be silent enough.
Listen,
How quickly your heart is beating in me.

Wislawa Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Grazyna Drabik and Sharon Olds.

Preserving E-Mails

Do you save your e-mails? If so, how do you organize them? Do you keep them permanently? On what basis do you decide which messages to save?

I don’t save my e-mails other than those I need for short-term purposes and then they go to the trash. From out of the thousands I’ve received by now, those that I want to save I copy as a Word document or enter in a previous document that deals with its subject. On the other hand, a friend of mine saves almost all of her e-mails. She says she is a bit of a neurotic about this matter.

“I delete almost nothing except for junk mail and group emails that don't really apply to me …I have a lot of folders/subfolders…I have a "library school" folder with folders in it for individual classes I took. I have a general work folder for my department, and one for the whole company. If there is something involving a lot of correspondence, I set it up its own folder. I have a "friends" folder but I separated out my Pratt [her library school] friends and jewelry-making friends …an "orders" folder since I buy a lot of stuff online and at some point, I decided to make a subfolder for book orders …”

The preservation of electronic mail extends well beyond personal practices. It is a matter of considerable concern to historians and biographers of all disciplines who hitherto have had a rich source of written materials to draw upon in their research. Are we loosing too much information of this sort by communicating on the Internet rather than in written letters?

It is generally assumed that written letters have a degree of permanence that is quite different than messages sent over the Internet. In a review of M. F. K. Fischer’s A Life in Letters, Betty Fussell comments: “Had she lived in another decade, many of her letters might have been lost forever, flashed on screen to be read and discarded in a matter of minutes. A Life in Letters reminds one of what is lost in the magic of electronic mail: permanence.”

Robert Crease, a physicist, makes a similar point in discussing the future work of science historians faced with the fact that e-mail, rather than written letters, has become the normal method scientists use to communicate with each other. He cites the famous 1941 meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Nils Bohr in Nazi occupied Denmark to discuss the development of the atomic bomb. There are several accounts of this meeting, not all of them in agreement, but according to Crease, recently discovered draft letters that Bohr had written about their meeting serve as a “corrective to Heisenberg’s version, showing it to be deceitful and self-serving.”

The same is true for literary correspondents. In Literary Letters, Lost in Cyberspace (New York Times 9/4/05) Rachel Donadio says publishers who routinely correspond with writers have not developed a systematic way to preserve their e-mails. She notes the New Yorker routinely purges their e-mails and reports that Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at the magazine, admits that she doesn’t always save the messages from the many writers she corresponds with.

“Unfortunately, since I haven’t discovered any convenient way to electronically archive e-mail correspondence, I don’t usually save it, and it gets erased from our server after a few months.” Donadio also reports that Blake Bailey, who has written biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever, worries, “It often occurs to me that e-mail may render a certain kind of literary biography all but obsolete.”

While methods of electronic communication may be useful for rapid communication among scientists and cultural historians, it remains uncertain whether they will be preserved at all and how this might affect historians in the future. I am aware there are various proposals to promote the preservation of electronic documents, but I have no knowledge of their present state.

I do know, however, that e-mail messages can also be every bit as tangible and as permanent as a written letter. They can be saved in computer folders, zip drives, an external hard drive or printed so that they are physically indistinguishable from a traditional letter. It is a simple matter to print and then file hard copies of e-mail messages so that you can, in fact, have a paper trail of your correspondence while at the same time benefiting from the advantages of rapid electronic communication.

In short, e-mail messages do not simply disappear after they have been sent. And there is nothing about e-mail messages per se that prevents them from being every bit as useful to future historians and interested readers as traditional letters. Had Virginia Woolf been able to send her voluminous correspondence over the Internet, there is no inherent reason she could not have filed away her hand-written drafts or printed copies of her messages so that they could drawn upon for the multiple volumes that have been published to date.

The example of Zadie Smith, a writer of considerable contemporary renown, is instructive. She says she has preserved 12,000 e-mail messages that she has exchanged with her literary friends. “The great majority of it is correspondence with other writers, my editor, my copy editor, etc. Some of them are amazing e-mails from writers whose hem I fear to kiss, etc.” Donadio reports Salman Rushdie is one of several other writers who save their e-mails. “Yes, I have saved my e-mails, written and received since the mid-90’s when I started using computers regularly…”

So it is not only possible, it is easy, and it is being done. The matter of preserving electronic communications may not be quite as serious as some envisage.

Thanks to Stefanie Hollmichel of So Many Books for stimulating me to consider this issue.

"Failure Factories"

Early in the documentary film Waiting for Superman, knowing that it is going to be yet another ringing indictment of public school education in this country, we see David Guggenheim, the director and co-writer, driving past three run-down public schools in Los Angeles on his way to drop off his three children at an expensive private school.

We think, why isn’t he sending his kids to public schools and where he can get personally involved in improving them? Is he simply going to tell the all too familiar tale of the failures of public education in this country, as if there’s nothing any of us, nothing he can do about their deplorable state?

In his defense, he is making this film, one in a series he has made about education in America, in the hope that it will galvanize other individuals to band together to move the public school system out of its deep rut. He does this by illustrating successes that are possible within that system at publically funded charter schools in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C. and Redwood City, California.

To set the stage, Guggenheim lays out the well-known statistics of the performance of children who are educated in the public schools of urban centers of this country. Charts are shown of decades of extremely low reading and math scores. More charts are shown of how American children compare with those in other countries. On some measures, they rank lowest, on others, near the bottom. The only one where the students in this country rank highest in on their personal confidence that they rank number one!

We are also shown the powerful role the teacher’s union plays in working to maintain their current contracts with school systems in this country. Teacher tenure is virtually guaranteed after two years of teaching. In contrast to other professions, it is virtually impossible to dismiss a teacher. We are shown a roomful of New York City teachers who have been charged with incompetence or misconduct but are still on the payroll. Some are sleeping, others working crossword puzzles, some reading, all the while they are being paid their regular salary.

Interweaved with all this is the story of five children and their parents who are struggling to educate their children and enroll them in a charter school. Because these schools can only accept a limited number of students, they must enter a lottery to see if they are selected. The film concludes with suspenseful, nerve-wracking lottery drawings to see who among these dedicated kids will be chosen.

More importantly though we are shown the very considerable successes achieved by some charter schools, in particular The Harlem Success Academy and the KIPP programs, now in several cities throughout the country,

The schools are characterized by highly qualified, highly motivated teachers who assume that every one of their students is capable of performing well. The data support this assumption. The teachers are generally well paid, concentrate from day one on preparing students for college, and give considerable personal tutoring when a student would benefit from it. The students in several of the schools located in poor urban neighborhoods often do better academically than those in the well-off suburban school districts.

While not all charter schools can report such positive outcomes, we are led to think education in this country would be significantly improved by increasing support for them.

When you enter the theater showing Waiting for Superman, you can take a short handout from a box affixed to a poster about the film. The handout tells you what you can do to “make a difference in education today.” What a good idea!

• See the film and get everyone you know to see it. OK, go see it.

• You can pledge to see it at www.WaitingForSuperman.com and receive a $5 credit from www.DonorsChoose.org towards a classroom project.

• By visiting www.DonorsChoose.org, you can donate to a public school class of your choice—pencils for poetry writing, microscope slides, etc.

• Volunteer to mentor a student --- www.mentoring.org

• Go to www.WaitingForSuperman.com to find other activities and resources that will help improve education in this country.

Coffee House Culture

The other day Starbucks announced it will now offer its customers a digital network providing free e-books, movies, and access to some sites you normally pay for such as The Wall Street Journal, as well as other gratis sites including The New York Times, USA Today, Apple's iTunes, etc. Of course, they are only accessible as long as you remain at Starbucks--presumably paying for drinks, pastries, sandwiches, etc. Starbucks also gets a share of anything sold on its in-store network.

So at Starbucks coffee houses you’ll be peering at your iPhone, listening to your iPod or reading on your computer. This is not Paris after all where you can buy a cup of coffee and stay at your favorite table all day working away on your masterpiece or coming up with the next big thing with your friends.

Whatever happened to those days of the coffee house culture? Do you remember them? Sitting around for hours dreaming up new ideas, talking about the latest new book, or new discovery in the lab? According to Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From, a great many came during those coffee house conversations.

Johnson believes good ideas don't come from a lone genius working alone in a laboratory or at his desk. Instead, they frequently come from interactions between your colleagues and intellectual friends. He points to the coffee houses of Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. "People would hang out in this intellectual hub and have these free-floating conversations about all these different interests and passions.”

He claims Benjamin Franklin’s Club of Honest Whigs that used to meet at the London Coffeehouse when he was in England would hash over ideas that were instrumental in Franklin’s thinking. Johnson writes, "There should be a plaque to commemorate that coffeehouse. It was really a tremendously generative space.”

In Where Good Ideas Come From he describe these coffee houses as 'liquid networks” where people from entirely different perspectives gather together to thrash out whatever was on their minds. He cites several examples:

• Eighteenth century English coffeehouse where everything from the science of electricity, to the insurance industry, to democracy itself was discussed

• Freud’s salon “where physicians, philosophers, and scientists gathered to help shape the emerging field of psychoanalysis”

• Those legendary Paris cafes where writers, poets, artists and architects laid the foundations of contemporary culture

• The Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s where Johnson claims “a ragtag assemblage of amateur hobbyists, teenagers, digital entrepreneurs, and academic scientists managed to spark the personal computer revolution…”

The coffee house model of innovation has a certain romantic appeal to it. And yet I can’t help but be skeptical of the claims Johnson attaches to it. On the surface, of course, one imagines these were and continue to be settings for lively intellectual exchange. However, we have no independent record of what in fact was said during these exchanges. Nor does Johnson cite any evidence made by participants of the role they played in formulating their ideas.

I am not suggesting they aren’t sources of innovation. But what came first—the idea or the conversation? And if the idea came first, how was it further developed at the coffee house? Or if the conversation came first, what is the evidence for this claim?

A network can support a person’s ideas, can be a setting where they can be expressed, and where perhaps they are refined in the process. And they can motivate someone to continue their line of thinking or their research program. But do we have a record of any of this?

Perhaps I’m being pedantic. But those are the kinds of questions I always ask, especially given the importance Johnson attributes to the coffee house model of creativity. While it has enormous appeal and while the experience of being with your friends in those settings is often stimulating, I wonder if any of the innovations Johnson discusses in his book, were, in fact, “born” there. To be sure, they may have been discussed and perhaps clarified, but that is a different matter than origination.

To Think or Not to Think

Like Malcolm Gladwell in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Jonah Lehrer on his blog The Frontal Cortex recently made a strong case for the value of unconscious thought. His argument was based on evidence derived from one experiment, in a European laboratory, under conditions of unknown generality. This kind of “cherry picking,” which Gladwell also employs, doesn’t do much for the fine art of science writing

Lehrer draws on a recent experiment by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis who asked three groups of subjects, a mix of experts and novices, to predict the outcome of soccer matches. The first group was asked to predict the outcome after thinking about it for two minutes. The second group was asked to make a decision immediately without thinking about it at all. The third group was asked to decide after being distracted by an unrelated memory task for two minutes.

The results indicated that experts, regardless of the group they were in, were very poor at predicting the outcome of the matches. So were the groups that thought about the matter for two minutes and those asked to make the decision immediately. In contrast, subjects who were distracted by the memory task for two minutes were “significantly” better than the other two groups. Lehrer concludes from this study that the practical implications are to “trust your gut.”

He then says the question is “what is the unconscious up to. What information is it processing during those two minutes of distraction?” I disagree. The question that seems most important to me is how representative of the decision-making process is this study, one that asked individuals to predict the outcome of soccer matches? How widely does it apply? Under what conditions doesn’t it hold? And let's not forget that the study was conducted under highly-reactive laboratory conditions with unknown relevance to natural situations.

We know that at times we benefit by trusting our gut reactions but at other times we don’t. Is there any way we can know when to trust them and when not to? A recent study by McMackin and Slovic sought to identify these conditions by comparing two decision-making tasks--one designed to favor an intuitive approach, the other a reasoned one.

On the intuitively biased task college students were asked to predict how a group of “experts” would rate the effectiveness of a set of consumer advertisements. The so-called expert ratings were obtained from group of psychology and marketing undergraduate students.

On the reasoned biased task, the students were asked to answer five questions requiring numerical estimates of matters of fact. For example, they were asked to estimate the area of the United States or the length of the Amazon River.

Two conditions of decision-making were compared with one another on each of these tasks—a group that was asked to decide immediately and a delayed responding group that was asked to respond after thinking about their reasons for a few minutes and then writing them down on a form provided by the experimenter.

The results indicated the immediately responding group was more accurate on the advertisement task than the group asked to think about their decision for a bit. In contrast, the immediately responding group (gut reactors) performed less accurately than the thinking group (also asked to provide reasons for their answers) on the more difficult task requiring numerical judgments.

Here then is one situation in which the characteristics of the task can critically affect the accuracy of a decision. Under some conditions, it may be more effective to respond without doing much thinking. In other conditions, a more deliberative, reasoned approach may be more effective.

I think it is essential not to ignore such limiting conditions when discussing the results of any scientific finding. All too often, we emphasize the outcome of a single study, without recognizing other studies that contradict, call it into question or suggest an alternative interpretation.

I fear this is one of the reasons we find ourselves so confused about the research we read or hear about in the popular media. No sooner do we learn that drinking wine is bad for our health, then the very next day we learn that it has no effect on our health and may, in fact, be essential for a long life, the very fountain of youth.

The Experience of Beauty

From time to time during the day and mainly after dinner each night, I go for a walk along the canal near my home. You can do that every night of the year on the island where I live now. How great is that!

The canal brings water down from the mountains that bisect this island and where it rains a good part of each day. This makes it possible for people to survive here and nourish an abundant tropical life.

Saunter would be a better way to describe how I proceed on these evening strolls. Perhaps meander would even be more accurate. And I simply let my mind wander, never sure what thought will arrive next. Sometimes I get my best ideas, such as they are, during these times.

But there is something else about these promenades that brings me back to the canal time and time again. It is the outrigger canoes, each one with six paddlers that glide up and down the waterway first on their way out to sea and then on their return to the point where they embarked.

There is a beauty in these canoes that I find irresistible. When I see them approaching, I stop to gaze at them until they pass by. Sometimes there is one canoe, sometimes a group of them racing down and back along the canal.

I am struck by how quiet they are. In fact, they glide through the water in total silence. Occasionally you’ll hear the “rudder man” in the back give a command, but otherwise they move smoothly, swiftly and quietly by. No noisy engines, broken mufflers, loud horns or motorcycle roars.

After the sun sets, night falls fast here in these islands as close as they are to the equator. As I walk along the canal then, the outriggers sometimes come upon me rather suddenly, as it is too dark to see or hear them approaching from a far.

They have always reflected in the very truest way the spirit of this place and the native people who live here. They are a perfect fit, an adaptation to the conditions that prevail on this remote island, a form of transport that doesn’t muck up the environment or deplete its precious resources.

It has been said, “The experience of "beauty" often involves the interpretation of some entity as being in balance and harmony with nature which may lead to feelings of attraction and emotional well being.” Yes, there is a harmony about the outrigger canoes—a harmony between man, motion, and water, a perfect blending of form and function.

Thomas Aquinas put it this way: “Beauty must include three qualities: integrity, or completeness--since things that lack something are thereby ugly; right proportion or harmony; and brightness—we call things bright in colour beautiful.”

I find it interesting that a prayer is occasionally spoken before the canoe is launched no matter how long or short the voyage. The prayer needn't be long or distinctively Hawaiian, nor does it have to be religious in nature. A prayer helps focus the crew mentally and spiritually and expresses a note of gratitude to nature for the gift of the tree from which the canoe used to be made (modern hulls are commonly made now from reinforced plastic) and the water through which it travels.

I think of the poems of W.S. Merwin, the current U.S Poet Laureate, who lives in relative seclusion on a former pineapple plantation built on the distant slopes of Haleakala on the nearby island of Maui. When asked how someone living on the edge of the United States in a far corner of Maui could reach such literary heights, Merwin replied, "You live your life."

In his poem, The Shadow of Sirius, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, Merwin wrote,

Where the roaring torrent
raced at one time
to carve farther down
those high walls in the stone
for the silence that I hear now
day and night on its way to the sea.