Waiting Games

Waiting is frustrating, demoralizing, agonizing, aggravating, annoying, time consuming, and incredibly expensive. Federal Express

Most of us spend a fair amount of our daily life waiting—waiting for the bus, waiting for the letter in the mail, waiting in line at the market, waiting in a traffic jam, waiting for luggage at the baggage carousel, waiting on the phone to talk to someone, anyone other that an automated voice.

Several months ago Alex Stone wrote an article about this topic in the Times, “Why Waiting is Torture” (8/18/12). Sometimes it does feel a little like torture, doesn’t it? He begins by describing a problem at the Houston airport, one that I am sure is true at most airports, namely, waiting for your bag at the baggage claim area.

It takes forever for the bags to begin rolling out onto the carousel, finally they arrive everyone finds their luggage fairly soon—except you. You begin to wonder if it has been lost once again. Eventually, there it is, all by its lonely self, you grab it, and utter a profanity or two.

In Houston, passengers were lodging a sizable number of complaints at this seemingly endless waiting period. The airport executives added baggage handlers. While the wait time decreased, the complaints didn’t. What to do? They solved the problem in a clever way.

They moved the arrival gates further away from the main terminal and routed the bags to the most distant carousel. As a result, arriving passengers had to walk several minutes longer to get to the baggage claim area. This didn’t seem to be much of a problem. The complaints dropped to “near zero.”

The effect of the increasing walk time points to a more general principle: If you can occupy wait time with some other activity, people won’t grumble so much about long waiting periods. This principle builds on the widely reported fact that perceived wait time is generally overestimated from actual wait time, Stone says by about 36%.

This has led some buildings to place a mirror or bulletin board next to elevator doors. Similarly, call centers play music, often loud, aversive music, during the lengthy period while you wait for “representative.”

Consider other applications of this principle: Delivery services often provide consumers with a tracking number so they can follow the progress of their purchase on its usually circuitous route to you. At more and more multiple roadway intersections, an automated sign is posted indicating the remaining number of seconds before the signal changes.

In tall buildings, the wait time for the arrival of one of several elevators is similarly indicated by a central panel showing the number of the floor the elevators are on and their progress or lack thereof toward your floor. Wouldn’t it be nice if a comparable technique could be employed at bus stops, where the wait time for the next bus going your way seems to be an eternity or while you wait to check out at the supermarket, for a taxi, or delivery of your mail?

All these little distractions sometimes help to pass the time, not much to be sure, but they usually lead to fewer complaints. There are many other situations that stand in need of natural distractions or activities to minimize the overestimation of actual wait time. Doing so would also increase the overall satisfaction of consumers who wait and wait in one queue after another for periods that sometimes border on the intolerable.

Stone concludes, “Americans spend roughly 37 billion hours each year waiting in line. The dominant cost of waiting is an emotional one: stress, boredom, the nagging sensation that one’s life is slipping away….when all else fails, bring a book.”

The Life of Objects

…if I had not cherished my girlish dreams, of love and romance, if I had not read and, what is worse, believed all those novels, if I had stayed in Ballycarra…

Susanna Moore’s The Lives of Objects brought me back to the terror, the destruction, and misery of World War II. It begins in 1938 with seventeen year old Beatrice living with her mother and father, local shopkeepers, who show little regard for her or for the novels she reads. She wishes only to leave Ballycara, a small village in west Ireland.

To relieve her boredom, she teaches herself how to make lace and earn a little money. Out of nowhere, a European countess sweeps into her shop one day, is taken by her fine lacework, and invites her to Germany to work for her friends, a wealthy couple, Felix and Dorothea Metzenburg.

But this is no fairy tale. Germany invades westward toward Belgium, Holland and France, then eastward to Poland and Russia. War overtakes the Metzenbergs (Felix is no longer “in” with Hitler) and they leave Berlin for their vast country estate.

There Beatrice must put aside her lacework and begin burying the Metzenburg’s treasure in the surrounding gardens—porcelains, ivories, ornate furniture, paintings, silver and gold, jewels, small and large sculptures, canned goods, etc. Later, one by one these objects are used to barter for food or stolen by thieves and then, toward the end of the war, by invading Russian troops.

The palace is bombed, ruins are everywhere, there is talk of concentration camps, the Metzenburgs, their servants and Beatrice take shelter in one of the smaller homes on their estate. Villagers begin to disappear, so do friends, on a visit to Berlin to sell some paintings, Dorothea finds her home destroyed, her attorney cheats her out of a sizable amount of money, the dealer she had hoped to sell some artwork cannot be found.

The marauding Russians take over her country estate, Felix is arrested and taken to one of the camps, there is filth, disarray, and destruction everywhere, illness and starvation must be endured, Beatrice is brutalized, there is no heat and it is the coldest winter ever recorded.

Enough. You get the picture. While The Life of Objects is said to be a novel, it reads more like a memoir, a historical account of what life was like in Nazi Germany. And while I’ve read many such accounts, Moore’s treatment seems like no other.

Eventually the Germans surrender, but the Russians remain at the estate, the servants either die or leave and Dorothea and Beatrice set out for Berlin where they settle in the American sector. They had survived, but they were not the same.

…we had been left with the inexhaustible presence of evil. That people including myself, could so easily resume their old ways and habits seemed a repudiation of all that had been lost.

Innovation: Together or Alone

It is 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.
Steven Johnson

It seems that the determinants of success and creative achievement have become a matter of political debate. We have one presidential candidate who attributes it to individual initiative and one who says, “we succeed because we do things together," one who champions “Big Capital” and one who supports government and corporate collaboration.

In last Sunday’s Times (9/23/12) Steven Johnson, the author of Where Good Ideas Come From, writes about this issue by taking up the question of who created the Internet. In discussing this case, Johnson returns to his claim that, like so many other technologies,

“the Internet was created by—and continues to shaped by—centralized groups of scientists and programmers and hobbyists. (and more than a few entrepreneurs) freely sharing the fruits of their intellectual labor…”

I wrote about Johnson’s views here in discussing the culture of the coffee house and here in discussing Where Good Ideas Come From. I imagine he returns to these themes in his latest book, Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age.

In his Times article he claims that we live in a society that credits the development of the most important new products to corporations or government agencies. Johnson takes issue with this view:

“…the institutions responsible for the technology itself were neither governments nor private start-ups. They were much closer to the loose, collaborative organizations of academic research. They were networks of peers.”

They are not motivated by economic incentives, copyright protections, or centralized control of their work. Rather, they are primarily interested in sharing their ideas, and in collaborating with others in developing them further.

Johnson is concerned with “products” as he calls them, to a large extent, technological products. But surely there are other forms of creative achievement. What role do peer networks play in the arts, in writing a great novel or composing a memorable piece of music?

I doubt Tolstoy or Proust sat around with their buddies working on their novels or that Beethoven went down to the coffee house to try out his new compositions with his friends. Their “products” were creations of talented individuals, working alone, long hours, collaborating only with their thoughts and imagination.

Works of art are every bit an innovation as the technologies Johnson discusses. They constitute, at least, one important exception to his view. No doubt there are others that call into question the necessity of collaborative peer networks for creative achievements.

Evolutionary Psychology

…our minds have a stubborn fondness for simple-sounding explanations that may be false. David Barash

Anthony Gottlieb has written (New Yorker 9/17/12) an important critique of the increasing application of evolutionary accounts of human behavior. He writes:

Today’s biologists tend to be cautious about labeling any trait as an evolutionary adaptation—that is, one that is spread through a population because it provided a reproductive advantage. It’s a concept that is easily abused …

While his discussion of evolutionary psychology is wide ranging, I want only to summarize the methodological limitations that in his view, as well as mine, characterize the field. It doesn’t matter what your conclusions are if they are based on a limited, error-prone method.

And there are several methodological weaknesses in most current evolutionary studies of human thought and action.

1. Disentangling the separate effects of culture and biology (e.g. reproductive advantage) is perhaps the greatest difficulty faced by evolutionary psychologists. In the absence of hard evidence, say rigorous, well-controlled randomized experiments, this is a problem for most attempts to explain behavior.

2. Research in this area is of limited value when it is based almost entirely on self reports that are extremely unreliable and subject to a number of biases inherent in the laboratory study of human behavior

3. The vast majority of evolutionary psychology studies are carried out with college sophomores, taking a psychology course, where experimental participation is a course requirement.

4. These studies are also conducted almost entirely with students in Western, industrialized nations largely in the United States.

Establishing very general, universal principles of evolutionary psychology is the goal of this discipline. At the same time, the field seems to have little concern for human variation, for the enormous differences there are between individuals. American college sophomores are hardly the basis for developing such a science.

It is well known they are quite different in several respects (styles of reasoning, individual versus group perspective, etc.) from comparable groups in non-Western cultures. To formulate a set of very general principles is going to require a cross cultural program of research in which a fair number of influential variables are examined in well-controlled, multivariate designs.

While many of these limitations are understood and often acknowledged, they are often forgotten or ignored. The same is true for discussions of other areas of psychology, economics, and sociology. It is unfortunate they are so easily set aside.

iDyssey

Here is a portion of Stefano De Luigi’s contemporary version of Homer’s Odysseus. The link below appeared today on the New Yorker’s online blog. I believe a more complete version will be in the current issue (10/1/12) issue.

I was rather captivated by the video and wanted to pass it along right away. It is very much worth a few minutes to watch and listen.

Link

The New Yorker comments,

This past spring, the photographer Stefano De Luigi set out to retrace the Mediterranean voyage of Homer’s Odysseus, armed with only an iPhone to document his travels. In Turkey, Greece, Tunisia, and Italy, De Luigi took Hipstamatic photos, recorded noises from streets and seas, filmed cities and ships, and asked people he met along the way to read excerpts from the Odyssey in their mother tongue.

“The epic has its roots in an oral tradition, transmitted by itinerant poets, singers, and storytellers,” De Luigi writes. “In contemporary society, the digital revolution has drastically changed the transmission of knowledge and information.

Roberto Calasso

If we continue down this part of my library, it could last for hours, because every book here has a story.

Roberto Calasso has devoted his entire life to books—reading, editing, translating, publishing, organizing, and simply being in their presence. He is director of a prestigious Italian publishing house and author of many books, including the international best seller, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

In an interview in the latest issue of the Paris Review, he is described as, “a writer on esoteric topics, a book collector, a translator of Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, and an editor who oversees the publication of some ninety books a year, in every domain from the scientific to the poetic…”

Calasso’s father was an attorney, a learned legal scholar and most of the books is his library were Latin texts on the theory of law, published between the 16th and 17th century. Calasso recalls how he felt when he was there. “Just to be around them, with their obscure titles and authors, was far more useful to me than reading so many other books later on.”

As they are sitting in his study in Milan, the interviewer asks Calasso to describe it. (What a good question, I thought.) He replies it is like being in paradise. It requires a big table, upon which the books and papers and dictionaries are set in separate piles. Each wall has a different them, one Greece and Rome, another on India, where he has studied Vedic sacrifice.

He is then asked how he organizes his library or to be more exact, his libraries, containing about twenty thousand volumes located in three separate locations in Milan. He replies that to answer the question properly would require an autobiography.

“For me there are several criteria—practical, aesthetic, capricious. The essential thing is to obey what Aby Warburg [founder of the Warburg Library in London] called “the law of the good neighbor.”

Calasso is said to “stand for a lost ideal.” One hopes that there will always be individuals who cherish their books as much as he does, who quite simply want to be around them and enjoy their sensory dimensions. The books I read on a screen have none of that appeal. And I miss that a great deal

One also hopes that there will always be libraries that house books on their shelves, not in the basement or underneath the football stadium. Where are the books in the emerging digital libraries? What will we lose when there are gone?

Here is what will be lost, a collection of some of the most inviting libraries in all the places where they still remain.

Winter Journal

“He was running out of time. Everyone was, it was the general condition.”
Ian McEwan

Paul Auster is 65 and devotes a large portion of his recent memoir, Winter Journal, to the matter of growing old. I am a few years older, so I have been devoting an even larger portion of my time to the subject.

Several years before I read Auster’s memoir, I wrote,

“The business of growing old crept up on me slowly. It was not something I had thought about or planned for. There was no course on it in college. And then one day there it was, staring me straight in the face--grey beard, cold, dark hands, brittle bones, wrinkles here and there, and more, of course. … you have no idea how ferocious it will be…

Auster begins Winter Journal similarly,

“You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.”

This is the way it is once you realize you’re growing old, there’s no escaping it, and Auster struggles and grumbles about it, as we all do. Winter Journal also meanders around other portions of his life—his mother, lovers, 21 different homes he’s lived in, illnesses, favorite foods, scars from many injuries, and a couple of traffic accidents.

And he has written his memoir in the second person “you” as if to distance him from himself and, to my way of thinking, from his readers too. It does seem a bit contrived.

He writes about a near-death experience somewhat more personally, “…you had learned that death was not something to be feared anymore, that when the moment comes for a person to die, his being shifts into another zone of consciousness, and he is able to accept it. Or so you thought.”

A few years ago I had a similar experience in Florence. At breakfast one morning I drank too much of the strong coffee they in Italy and experienced what is known as a vasovagal reaction, a mild form of fainting. I desperately wanted to lie down and sleep for a bit.

Luckily I happened to be passing by the Palazzo Strozzi, a center of cultural events in Florence. A smart Florentine designed the Palazzo with large stone benches on three of its four sides. They were originally intended as a shady resting place for servants and the motley assortment of characters the palace attracted long ago.

I laid down on one and immediately fell into one of the most peaceful moments of my life. I thought I was coming to the end and it did feel good and I was not at all fearful or worried about a single thing. Alas, I eventually recovered and moseyed off to join my wife for a lovely al fresco luncheon.

I wish I had kinder words for Winter Journal. But it rambles all over the place, with few meaningful insights. Nevertheless, I know that many readers enjoy confessional musings of this sort. For them, the book might be a pleasure

At the end Auster wonders, as we all do once we reach his age, how many days are left. Quite frankly, every day that I wake up, I feel it’s a bit of a miracle.

I am reminded of a film, My Life Without Me, that I saw several years ago. In the film, Ann played by the ever-lovely Sarah Polley, learns she is going to die. She is married and has two young children. She makes a list of things she wants to do before she dies. And does each one, in turn.

If you learned you were going to die, what would be on your list?

After the Season

"People were always saying something had completely changed them, some experience or book or man, but if you knew how they had been before, nothing much really had changed…in truth the most you could expect was to change perhaps one thing and even that would eventually go back to what it had been.” James Salter

In “After the Season,” the first short story in Bernhard Schlink’s new collection, Summer Lies, a middle man and woman meet after the summer crowd has left a village somewhere out on Cape Cod. He walked by a popular restaurant one night, saw the woman sitting alone, reading a book, hesitated for a moment until she looked up and smiled at him.

“Then he took his courage in both hands, walked over to her table, and asked if he might join her.”

No doubt you can see where this is going. Susan is wealthy, has inherited from her former husband a large home and a smaller cottage not far from the restaurant, a condominium in Manhattan, and one in Los Angeles. Richard plays the flute in a New York orchestra, earning a paltry salary that requires him to live in a tacky apartment in a noisy, sometimes threatening, run-down New York neighborhood.

“He didn’t like rich people. He despised inherited wealth and considered earned riches to be ill-gotten.”

Nevertheless, they begin to see each other, then live together, fall in love, and start to plan their future. They spend many hours walking along the beach, cooking, and in bed. Schlink writes that she saw something in him that he was not aware of and he found it impossible to resist the “gift of it to him.”

No doubt he was also taken in by the allure of living like the rich in her New York condo and the end of his financial worries.

Eventually Susan must fly to Los Angeles to work for a while organizing her foundation and his vacation has come to an end. They part at the airport and Richard flies back to New York to resume his work with the orchestra.

After living so luxuriously, it was difficult to get used to his neighborhood. The kids were sitting out on the front steps of their houses, smoking, drinking, and blasting tunes from their boom box. He wasn’t entirely sure he was safe.

However over the years, the neighborhood began to change. He started to meet doctors, lawyers and bankers and could take his visitors out to a decent restaurant. His building wasn’t torn down or renovated to bring it up to date. But that was fine because he liked it the way it was.

“He liked the noises [in the adjacent apartments]. They gave him the feeling that he was living in the real world, not just a rich enclave.”

He had his life there, the second oboist who he met for dinner once a week, the old man who lived on the top floor who came down to play chess with him, and Maria, the kid down the street who wanted to learn how to play the flute.

When he arrived back in front of his building, Richard sat down on its steps, listened to the children playing hide-and-seek, greeted his neighbors who welcomed him back, and waved to his Spanish teacher who was walking by.

“This was his world: the street, the neat houses and the shabby ones, the Italian restaurant on the corner…the foot shops, the newsstand and the fitness center…He hadn’t just got used to this world. He loved it.”

He had forgotten he would have to give up all of this for the new one Susan offered. He would have to decide which one to choose fairly soon. He went up stairs, switched off the light, and went to bed.

I was completely absorbed by “After the Season,” by its reminder of what we so easily forget, and the importance of remembering it once in a while.

Sweet Tooth

The first rule of espionage is trust no one.

Sweet Tooth is the title of Ian McEwan’s latest novel. I was fortunate to obtain a copy of the European edition, long before (November 13th) the US edition will be published. Reading it is such great fun. And it doesn’t take a genius to detect that McEwan had a lot of fun in writing it.

The outline of the story can be told; anything more would spoil it for any future reader. It is a thriller, a spy thriller, layer upon layer of deception, uncertainty, and ambiguity.

McEwan unfolds the tale in a post 60s cold war climate in the voice of Serena Frome, the daughter of an Anglican bishop and his wife, living in a quiet town on the Dorset coast. She enrolls at Cambridge, graduates with a degree in mathematics, although she spends most of her time reading literature, a voracious reader to be sure.

She has several affairs along the way, most notably with a history professor, a former MI5 operative. Their days in his summer cottage are idylls of picnics, walks in the woods and culinary masterpieces. He and only he knows his days are numbered and he decides to groom her for the MI5. (There are two intelligence services in England. MI6 deals with foreign intelligence, while MI5 with domestic security.)

In time, he disappears and she applies for a job with the MI5, is accepted, and assigned to work on project code named Sweet Tooth. The task of this group is to recruit writers (“We don’t tell them what to think. We enable them to do their work.”). She is given the task of trying to enlist Tom Haley, a young writer of short fiction and academic essays.

She reads Haley’s fanciful, bizarre stories that McEwan has sprinkled throughout the novel. It is here where you know he is really having fun.

"I count those hours with his fiction as among the happiest in my time at Five. All my needs beyond the sexual met and merged: I was reading, I was doing it for a higher purpose that gave me professional pride, and I was soon to meet the author. Did I have doubts or moral qualms about the project? Not at that stage. I was pleased to have been chosen."

The MI5 senior staff agrees that he is worth supporting, whereupon he is given a generous yearly stipend to write whatever he wants, free of his academic responsibilities. They are hopeful he will write the kind of novel that will be sufficiently anti-communistic to justify the expense.

In due course, she falls in love with Haley who reciprocates the sentiment and they have some jolly times together. It is beyond here that I must stop. The tale gets complex, with much duplicity, concealment, and treachery, all the while terribly amusing.

But Sweet Tooth is really much more than a thrilling spy story. In many respects it is a novel about the experience of reading literature. Tom Haley comments, “I like life as I knew it recreated on the page….[but] it wasn’t possible to recreate life on the page without tricks.”

It is also about the blurry line between fiction and reality, moral reasoning about espionage, and what many readers hope to gain from fiction. Serena says, “And I suppose in my mindless way, I was looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favorite old shoes.”

The last chapter is priceless, McEwan at his best. Reading Sweet Tooth is something to look forward to and, in time, no doubt to be seen on the screen at your local multiplex.


Footnote: In an interview, McEwan reports that in researching the novel, he went online and applied to join the MI5. He was then given a set of complex, technical questions that he struggled to answer (all online) and “within a tenth of a second” after they were submitted, he was informed he had been refused.

The Auschwitz Volunteer

There is always a difference between saying you will do something and actually doing it. A long time before, many years before, I had worked on myself to be able to fuse the two. Witold Pilecki

On September 19, 1940 in Warsaw, Poland a man walked into a Nazi roundup of Polish citizens. He knew exactly what he was doing. What he was doing was volunteering to be shipped to Auschwitz along with the others rounded up that day.

His name was Witold Pilecki and he is the only known individual to volunteer to be taken to Auschwitz. I was rather stunned when I first read about him; everyone is. In light of all that we know about Auschwitz and the other Nazi concentration camps, his act is no doubt one of the most courageous anyone has ever performed.

At the time Pilecki was a member of the Polish Underground in Nazi occupied Poland that had been split in half with the Russians occupying the eastern section and Germans the west.

In The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery, Pilecki describes what he and other prisoners went through at the camp. His report was written after he managed to escape and after many decades in which the Communist government in Poland censored the report.

It has finally been translated into English. The translator comments that he has tried to maintain the unrevised and unpolished character of his writing. The publisher notes: “As a result this report of his Auschwitz mission has a rare immediacy and particularly personal voice—it reads as if Pilecki were sitting in the room with us telling his story.”

At the outset Pilecki writes: “The game which I was now playing in Auschwitz was dangerous. This sentence does not really convey the reality; in fact I had gone far beyond what people in the real world would consider dangerous."

His mission had three objectives:

• To distribute food and build morale for the prisoners, along with news from outside

• To send out reports about what was going on in the camp

• To organize an armed uprising to take over the camp with the support of Polish or Allied arms and troops

Pilecki succeeded in sending out information about the conditions in the camp and in building morale among the prisoners, but in spite of what was well known after a few years, neither the Polish Underground, nor Allied forces did anything to intervene in what had become a death and torture camp.

Starvation, shootings, disease, prolonged exposure to the cold and heat, cutting with sharp instruments, overwork, gassing, phenol injections, all of these brutal atrocities were used by the Germans, first on the Polish prisoners, then on the Russians captured during the German invasion of Soviet Russia and finally on the Jews.

Pilecki writes that he had “bade farewell to everything I had hitherto known on this earth and entered something seemingly no longer of it” He reports that the Soviet prisoners were the first victims of the gassing by Zyklon B and that they were so tightly packed in the crematoria “that even in death they could not fall over.” And of the murdered Jews: “Over a thousand a day from the new transports were gassed. The corpses were burnt in the new crematoria.”

After being in Auschwitz a little over two and a half years, Pilecki, along with another prisoner escaped from the camp through an ingenious and difficult route through the camp bakery. Eventually he returned to Warsaw, participated in the Warsaw Uprising, but in 1947 was arrested by the Polish Communist secret police and executed as an “imperialist spy” the following year.

In the Forward to the book, Rabbi Michael Schudrick of Poland wrote: “May the life of Witold Pilecki inspire us all to do one more good deed, of any kind, each and every day of our lives.”

La Rafle (The Roundup)

In thinking of the lives never allowed to blossom, of those children deprived of a future, those destinies cut short, we must raise still further the demands we make of our own lives. By refusing indifference, neglect, and complacency, we shall make ourselves stronger together. Francois Hollande

The French film La Rafle begins with the roundup of 13,000 Jewish men, women and children at 4 AM on the morning of July 16, 1942 in Nazi occupied Paris, by members of the collaborating French police.

They were taken to a transit camp at Drancy in the suburbs of Paris or a huge bicycle track (Velodrome d’Hiver) where they remained for several days without food and water. Of these 13,000 individuals only 100 are believed to have survived.

The German directive to the French police read: “The teams charged with the arrests will have to proceed with the most possible speed, without useless words and without comment. Furthermore, at the moment of the arrest, the well-foundedness or ill-foundedness of this arrest is not to be discussed.”

Originally the Germans had ordered the arrest of 25,000 French Jews. The fact that only half that number were rounded up reflects the courage of those French citizens who hid at least 10,000 of their Jewish friends and neighbors.

Nevertheless, the police arrested 3,118 men, 5,919 women, and 4,115 children. Eventually these 13,152 Jewish citizens of France were taken by train (cattle cars) with their families to a transit camp closer to Germany. Then they were transferred to Auschwitz in Poland, this time separated from their families, with men in one set of cars, women in another, and children in the third,

The horrors of life in Auschwitz, the brutality of the German guards and subsequent gassing of the Jews in the crematorium are too grim to be recounted here. The film focuses on the treatment of the sick and emaciated Jews, and the terror of the children as they are separated from their mother and father. It also centers on one child who somehow managed to escape from the camp, wend his way back to Paris, only to learn that everyone in his family has been killed.

The child, Joseph Weisman, now 80, believes it is time for the French to speak out on the fate of these wartime Jews. For the most part, the police and leaders of France have resisted a public acknowledgment of these events. Most of the records of the raids were destroyed after the war and only recently have the surviving records of one police station been discovered.

Wiseman says, “When I speak about it, it suffocates me, chokes me. It’s important to tell this story to the youth of today. It is they who will write the story of tomorrow.”

The appearance of La Rafle coincides with the 70th Anniversary of the mass arrests. While not the first public acknowledgment of the government’s role in the roundup, last month there were a series of public commemorations, including museum exhibitions and an address by President Francois Hollande.

The director of the film Rose Bosch, wrote: “La Rafle is a truthful account of events that took place on that morning in July 1942. Having experienced so many horrible things around the world when I was a journalist, I was angered by the fact that children were always on the front line. I was going to tell this story from the children’s point of view, the point of view of a group of real life children who experienced all this in Paris in 1942.”

On A Summer Day

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. Henry James

A summer morning is every bit as beautiful to me, the clear light, freshness in the air, the sun reflecting off the nearby buildings. I head out and it is already approaching 90. This is going to be a perfect summer day.

How do others view summer mornings and afternoons? To find out I did a targeted search of the word “summer” in my commonplace book, a collection of passages from practically every book I’ve read since 1988.

Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms
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.

Christopher Wilkins The Measure of Love
I felt like someone feels who spends a bright summer’s afternoon in a dark, smoky cinema, engrossed in some tenebrous gothic drama, only to emerge blinking into a world where it is still broad daylight and where there are shops and children and safety and laughter and people getting on with their lives.

Ann Patchett Bel Canto
In Paris, Simon Thibault had loved his wife, though not always faithfully or with a great deal of attention. They had been married for twenty-five years. There had been two children, a summer month spent every year at the sea with friends, various jobs, various family dogs, large family Christmases that included many elderly relatives.

Colm Toibin The Master
…he could not stop asking himself what he wished for now, and answering that he wanted only more of this—calm days, a beautiful small house and this soft summer light.

Anita Brookner A Friend from England
One always expects the summer to last for much longer than it does: one forgets the very sensation of being cold.

Andre Aciman Out of Egypt
Summers were long in Venice, she said, and there was nothing she liked more some days than to take the vaporetto and ride around the city, or head directly for the Lido and spend a morning on the beach by herself. She loved the sea. I loved it too, I said, reminding her that it was she who taught me how to swim.

Ian McEwan The Child in Time
I don’t remember a hotter summer than this in seventy-four years. It’s hot. In fact, I’d say it was too hot. Stephen said that was better than too wet and his father agreed. …Give me the heat anytime.

Elizabeth Hawes Camus, a Romance
In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.

Natalia Ginzburg The Little Virtues
There are only two seasons in the Abruzzi: summer and winter. The spring is snowy and windy like the winter, and the autumn is hot and clear like the summer.

Alastair Reid Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner
I do not own a watch and pass the summer without ever knowing the time.

Andre Aciman Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere
…warm, intimate feeling that settles around noon on typically clear Roman summer days.

Richard Goodwin The American Condition
Now at Florence, when the air is red with the summer sunset and the campaniles begin to sound vespers and the day’s work is done, everyone collects in the piazzas. The steps of Santa Maria del Fiore swarm with men of every rank and every class; artisans, merchants, teachers, artists, doctors technicians, poets, scholars. …And this is the pleasure of the Florentine public.

Olah Olafsson Restoration
…summer arrived with the most glorious weather imaginable: hot, sunny days and warm nights.

Rules for Writing

All I can say is that I was looking for a certain density of thought. A living voice. A text that would surprise me and take me through a mental adventure. Phillip Lopate

There was an article in the Times last month (7/26/12) on how to write. I thought, I can always use a few hints. The article was written by Colson Whitehead, a writer who I had been led to believe is highly regarded.

Since he is an expert on these matters, I read the article with considerable care, only to discover he was dispensing the same advice I must have read at least a dozen times before. You know, the usual: write what you know; revise, revise revise; “what isn’t said is as important as what is said;” and so on. And then I came to the last “rule,” as Mr.Whitehead calls them, number 11, in fact, where I was informed, “There are no rules.”

A great burst of laughter could be heard for miles around. Oh, but, Colin, what about those ten other rules you so kindly “shared” with the rest of us?

Anyway, I thought the last so-called rule was a blessing. Because I write poorly, spell like a six year old, and no doubt violate every rule established by grammarians and the authorities at the New Yorker.

I do that intentionally or maybe, naturally or more likely because I don’t know how to write, as I try not to write, but to be heard, by someone as if we were sitting together in a room, having a conversation, only I am doing that or trying to do that on the page. Like now.

On two occasions I did take a writing workshop to overcome my glaring deficiencies. Both were really excuses to spend some time in Europe, although both were taught by an esteemed writer who I was certain would come to my assistance.

One year the workshop was taught, if you can call it that, by Philip Lopate, the well-known essayist and editor of the invaluable Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. And Lopate did pass along a number of good suggestions, not rules.

• Build suspense; establish a tension

• Pose a problem

• Be fully honest

• Create a character, turn yourself into one, observe yourself from a distance, use your quirks and contradictions

• Reflect on your life, don’t simply spell it out. Even if you don’t understand it, it is important for an author to try to come to some understanding of the autobiographical facts that are presented ad nauseum in most memoirs.

• An analytic perspective is equally important.

• To think on the page is to engage the reader.

Lopate’s suggestions were refreshing, different, tips that go well beyond Whitehead’s oft-repeated rules. Practicing them is another matter. I still have a long way to go. Obviously.

The Magic of Words

The writer discovers first for himself by moving words around, bringing out surprising new meanings in them through arranging them in never-before-seen combinations. And if he hits upon the perfect combination, a light goes off, and the world will seem a brighter place to him and his readers. Joseph Epstein

Country Names
I am sometimes entranced by a word, by the way it sounds and how it looks on the page. “Burkina Faso.” Yes it is really two words but it describes a single entity. Do you know where it is?

How about its capital? Talk about a word. Ouagadougou. Just how do you pronounce that one? Pop the word in Google’s Translator under the “Detect Language” menu and listen to its smooth sound. Pretty exotic. Yes? And it was correctly identified as French in origin, reflecting Burkina Faso’s colonial heritage.

Wordplay
I must have been down and out a few years ago when I went to see Wordplay, a documentary about the world of crossword puzzlers and the legendary Times crossword puzzle editor, Will Shortz. Or just plain fed up with the rubbish playing in the local cinemas.

From the first glimpse of the ever-smiling Will, I too began to smile as he introduced me to a world where there was much to feel good about. The world is primarily the people who construct and play crosswords with such remarkable skill. What a small world, but what talent, what knowledge and what unassuming humor about their gift. Nothing but “Ah, shucks, there’s not much I can do about it.” or “I don’t know how I do it, I just can.”

A refreshing movie, a delightful one for a change, nothing to ponder the moral implications or the madness that surrounds us. How reassuring that not everyone has lost their marbles. Maybe we will get through this after all.

Other’s Words
In The Words of Others, Gary Morson explores the history, the variety, and the multiple uses of quotations. It’s not a book of quotations, as in a unannotated commonplace book, but rather an analysis of the role of quotations in literature, anthologies, and contemporary culture. Through the magic of Kindle’s Highlights, I made note of a number of passages--quotations by authors of some renown, including famous last words and ideas and questions about quotations that Morson discusses in his book.

A wise man once said that ‘no man is ever an island,’ and truer words were never spoken.

Was Adam the only one able to speak without quoting?

As the Talmud testifies, commentary invites ever more commentary. A single gnomic line can come to resonate with centuries of subsequent wisdom.

Anatole France frankly advised, “When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it”). Yes, indeed, but do more. Copy many well-said things. Piece them together. Assimilate them. Make the process of reading them a way to form the mind and shape the soul.

Sometimes phrases we have read or heard become so thoroughly assimilated into our way of speaking or thinking that we no longer recognize them as anything but our own.

Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful. Dorothy Parker

Erasmus saw his amazingly popular anthology as fulfilling the most important purposes of literature, guiding the use of language and conveying valuable lessons. Quotations distilled, and reading them instilled, wisdom.

It could be said of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other men’s flowers, providing of my own only the string that ties them together. Montaigne

"How Time Flies"

“Time is memory. Simple as that. Without memory, there can be no time. No before and after, no sooner or later, no now and then. After all, how do we detect what we call the passage of time except by perceiving change? But without memory, all change would be imperceptible. We see the leaves in the forest are turning brown and we think, “autumn already. How time flies.” But that is because we remember how the forest looks in summer. The forest alone, denied our memories could not bear witness to the passage of time.” Christopher Wilkins

When I have something to say, writing takes me away from the clock. I write, its OK, and time flashes by. Sometimes I look at the clock and cannot believe what time it is.

Does time perception vary as a function of motivation? When we feeling good about what we’re doing, does time pass more quickly than when we are in a negative mood?

Einstein observed that the experience of time is largely subjective and most research on time perception attributes this to the effects of positive and negative affective states. But what is the underlying mechanism of this relationship?

In three experiments Philip Gable and Bryon Poole have tried to get a handle the matter. According to their hypothesis, positive affective states vary in motivational intensity with some low in approach motivation (e.g. satisfaction) and others high (e.g. exciting). Similarly, negative avoidance states vary from boring to painful.

In their third and most informative experiment, they tried to separate the approach-avoidance dimension from intensity of arousal. Does high positive motivation shorten the perception of time relative to high-negative states, independent of approach or avoidance?

129 introductory psychology students (97 female, 32 male) participated in the study. They were asked to view high-positive arousal photographs and high-negative arousal pictures. For each picture they were asked to judge whether it was displayed for a short or a long period, with higher proportions indicating a slower perception of time.

The results revealed that high positive motivation shortens time perception relative to high negative motivation. The perception of time was largely determined by positive motivation, rather than either positive (approach) or negative (avoidance) arousal.

So when I’m writing and it is going well, I don’t think a bit about time or what time it is. On the other hand, when it isn’t going well and I am staring at a blank page or deleting one sentence after another and feeling really displeased, I am keenly aware of time and how long it is taking to accomplish something. However, in neither case am I especially aroused.

Of course, the experiments reported by Gale and Poole were conducted in the laboratory, with one method and with college students who participated because they were taking a course (psychology) where participation was a course requirement.

Would the findings occur outside the lab, under different conditions, with a different set of subjects? These are questions that are always important to answer about highly reactive laboratory experiments that are also subject to experimenter biases and a variety of subject hypotheses about what the experimenter expects and their desire not to look foolish.

On A Lazy, Dazy Day in August

Anything can happen on a summer afternoon
On a lazy dazy golden hazy summer afternoon
Lily Tuck

And the sun finally shines upon the Northwest, the days are warm, and the Web is having a summer rally.

A poet reminds us of the long forgotten craft of sending postcards.

While the Spice Girls at the Olympic closing ceremony amused me more than I care to admit, I was far more impressed by word of what the Olympics used to be and could be now without any difficulty.

A psychotherapist suggests that writing and reading poetry can have therapeutic value.

I learned from more than I need to know about England during the last two exhausting weeks, including the fact that people still like to read over there and gather together in groups to talk about its practical value.

Earlier this summer I read about a very special perfect moment experienced by a musician while talking to someone who sounds a lot like someone I know.

New Websites sprout like the dandelions in the grass around here, including one that is so rich in intellectual fare that it has entered the exclusive realm of my Firefox bookmarks.

Expanded Memory

In preliterate cultures, the great sagas and epics were necessarily communal creations committed to tribal memory and chanted under priestly supervision over generations. With the invention of the alphabet, authors no longer depended on communal memory but stored their work on stone, papyrus, or paper. Jason Epstein

More and more now I find myself turning to the Web when I can’t remember something. I don’t remember a person's name or the title of the book she wrote. But the Web remembers and then I remember too.

Sometimes what I am searching for drifts in on its own, usually when I am unprepared or doing something other than trying to recall it. And sometimes this occurs several days after memory failed me, when I’ve totally forgotten what it was that I was even trying to recall.

But I am impatient and have no interest in these “mind pops” and so more and more often I rely upon the Web. I suppose we’ve always depended on other resources to refresh our memories. Nevertheless I always, yes always, feel bad about this. Is my brain turning to mush? Is the dread disease finally consuming me?

So it was with considerable relief that I read Daniel Wegner’s article in the Times last Sunday (8/5/12) suggesting there’s nothing really wrong with checking the Web, that it isn’t a sign of mental deterioration. What good news; I won’t forget that.

He says we all have limited memories, “no one remembers everything.” We ask a friend about something we’ve forgotten. My friend knows everything about the subject I’ve forgotten. My wife asks me where she left her glasses. Since she asks me so often, I always keep track of where her glasses are.

The other night we were watching an old movie and I could not for the life of me remember the name of the actress. I asked her, if she did. She thought for a while and then said, “Emma something.” Immediately I replied, “Emma Thompson.” There we have it: communal memory on the couch.

Each time we draw upon the Web or another person, we only expand our memory. It isn’t that we are becoming overly dependent on these sources or becoming more forgetful. Rather it is an adaptive response to our limited memory capacity.

Wegner refers to this process as “transactive memory.” In introducing the idea he describes it as a “way to understand the group mind….each of us in a couple or group remembers some things personally—and then we can remember much more by knowing who else might know what we don’t. In this way we become part of a transactive memory system.”

Isn’t this an example of our increasingly specialized society? We don’t live in a preliterate society referred to by Epstein, where stories were communicated verbally and where it was necessary to rely upon communal memory and our own ability to remember what was spoken, if we were ever to remember anything.

We have all become a great cybermind. As long as we are connected to our machines through talk and keystrokes, we can all be part of the biggest, smartest mind ever. It is only we are trapped for a moment without our Internet link that we return to our own little personal minds, tumbling back to earth from our flotation devices in the crowd.

His essay was like a cathartic therapy session. A feeling of reassurance swept over me, my fear of relying on Goggle or someone else disappeared, and I no longer have to berate myself or feel bad after all about being part of the “great cybermind.”

No Pain, No Gain

Here is how Malcolm Gladwell defines “slack” in his latest New Yorker (7/30/12) essay: Slack--the gap between what is possible, under conditions of absolute effort, and actual performance--is unavoidable. We all want to try our hardest, every time. But we can’t.”

As an example he compares his experience as a high school runner with that of the early nineteen-eighties distance runner Alberto Salazar. Gladwell gave up competitive running when his fear of what it takes to be among the best grew too overwhelming.

By contrast, Salazar who not only faced the same fear, but almost died from all-out running on two occasions concluded just the opposite.

In his memoir l4 Minutes Salazar writes that he felt “exhilarated” even after doctors thought he was dead after collapsing at the end of the 1978 Falmouth Road Race, “one of the premier road races in the world,” as his temperature reached 107 and was rising.

“My thrill ran deeper; I had learned something from death. I had learned, through the agency of my lifelong prayer, that I wasn’t afraid of death. I realized that this made me different from the people walking by me in the street. More important…it made me different from other runners.”

Gladwell claims that between 17 and 24 Salazar ran on average 105 miles a week (that’s 15 miles every day, through winter storms and blistering hot and humid summers), missing just eleven days of running in that seven-year period. I imagine he wasn’t just running, but running hard during each one of those miles.

Did it take its toll? Yes, according to Gladwell, who claims most “elite distance runners can maintain their form into their early thirties. Salazar stopped competitive racing in his mid-twenties.”

Was that because he pushed himself beyond his limits? While it is surely associated with the way he ran, the only way he could run and win, it is impossible to know if that was the reason he reached his peak comparatively early.

Consider an alternative: Most great distance runners run gracefully, without any apparent effort, almost naturally, like a cheetah racing across the African savannah. In contrast, Salazar “shuffled like an old man,” struggling with everything he had to keep running at full speed.

While Salazar obviously had enormous desire and great talent, it was always accompanied by pain. “The pain of running is like the pain of drowning,” he said. “A kind of weariness sets in and you lose the will to fight. What I could do is simply push myself through that exhaustion.”

Is that kind of pain necessary to be a champion runner? Is it necessary to be superior in any sport or human endeavor? Clearly not. I have no answer to how necessary it is for an elite distance runner.

But I do know that most long-distance runners have said they reach a point during a marathon where they believe they can’t go on any longer, but if they do, they will usually push through that state, get their “second wind” and resume running as before.

Salazar believes his acceptance of pain can be attributed to his father’s deep faith in Catholicism and the demands he placed on Salazar to keep going no matter how painful or exhausted he was. “A Salazar never quits.”

Tin House

Tin House is a literary magazine published every quarter in Portland, Oregon. In the summer issue there were several short stories and poems, two long essays, five book reviews, one culinary memoir and the usual Tin House crossword puzzle. Quite a brainy feast.

The first short story, “The Right Way to End a Story,” was written by Holly Goddard Jones, a writer I’ve never heard of before but after reading her story, I knew I wanted to read everything she’d written.

Juliet had been tending a fantasy about the famous photographer who would be lodging with her at the college’s guest house. She knew that he was older than she – twenty years at least – but that was perhaps a good thing at this point in her life, as recently separated as she was, as recently thirty as she was. An older man, an artist, a jet-setter in (she imagined) khaki trousers and a vest: she’d seen his self-portrait on the Internet and felt very kindly toward him.

Juliet writes good sentences, but her stuff’s just too domestic for most men to care about. Men don’t care about these relationship stories she does. And you know who edits the journals that are worth a shit? Men.

A few pages further on is a short story, “Dolly,” by Alice Munro of all people, perhaps the short story writer of the century. It is about an older couple coming to grips with mortality and emotions that are immune to age.

There had been some discussion of death. Our deaths. Jackson being eighty-three years old and myself seventy-one at the time, we had naturally made plans for our funerals (none) and for the burials (immediate) in a plot already purchased. We had decided against cremation, which was popular with our friends. It was just the actual dying that had been left out or up to chance.

…no lies, after all, are as strong as the lies we tell ourselves.

Then there are several fine book reviews, including a long essay, “The Merritt Parkway Novel,” by Gerald Howard in which he reviews Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road and Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm, each of which takes place in the suburban Connecticut countryside, not far from the Merritt Parkway.

Paul Charles Griffin writes about buying a used Raymond Chandler novel on Amazon when he needs to decide whether to order a copy rated “Like New” or “Very Good” or “Acceptable”. On principle, he never buys one given an “Acceptable” rating but when the seller claimed that his satisfaction “was his top priority,” he succumbed.

Pleased to have someone even remotely concerned with my happiness, I went with the “Acceptable” rating and waited for the mailman to arrive.

And then he writes about Chandler’s Lady in the Lake, and quite delightfully about reading the yellow highlights and marginal notes in the used copy. They are clever and he thinks they were written by a young Indian, Sanjay.

It was as if I were reading the book with him, as if we were discussing it together in a book club…my excursion into the mind of Sanjay K reminded me of what reading is all about, looking to another person’s soul, hearing his thoughts, feeling his feeling and seeing the world through his eyes…This is why reading has always been the most important thing to me. It allows me a reprieve from my private universe, allows me to be somebody else for an hour.

I could go on for a while longer about other book reviews, essays, and the culinary memoir, as well as the solution to the Tin Hat crossword. But I will leave it to you to track down a copy if you’re interested. I do believe it will be worth whatever it costs, new, used (very good, or acceptable).

Marvis Gallant Journals

For years I was an avid reader of Mavis Gallant’s "Letters from Paris" that appeared in the New Yorker. They were my introduction to Europe and to the city that for a while became my first and final destination each time I went there.

Throughout the 60 years Gallant lived in Europe she kept a daily journal. They are her accounts of the many changes in Europeans and their cultures after World War 2. The war ended in 1945. My first trip to Europe was nine years later. Rubble was still on the streets of London and almost every city in Germany city I visited. People had scarcely any money and in Madrid, where she lived for a while, Franco was still in power.

A friend of Gallant’s, Frances Kierman, is currently editing the vast, mostly handwritten entries for what will be the first of several volumes of her daily journal entries. Gallant is about to turn 90, has been quite ill recently and is doing her best in working with Kierman to recall some of the incidents she wrote about.

Jhumpa Lahiri recently met Gallant to conduct an interview for Granta magazine. After their meeting, Lahiri wrote, "I had never met a writer who has inspired me so greatly, and towards whom I felt such enormous debt."

Several excerpts from her journals were recently published in the July 9th & 16th double issue of the New Yorker. They are drawn from four months 1952 when she was struggling to survive as a writer in Madrid.


I live on bread wine, and mortadella. Europe for me is govered by the price of mortadella.

When I think of my life before I came here, it is like someone else’s life, something I am being told. I can’t write anyone. At the moment I haven’t the postage, but even if I had, what to say?

Sunshine and little to eat (potatoes and potatoes). To the Prado, that small container overflowing with good things. Back to Goya. I go back and back and still he is haunting and terrifying.

No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not exist except in my mind I have a feeling of sadness, looking around for them, as if the half-empty café were a place I had once come to with friends who had all moved away.

Today from the balcony I see a blind man tapping his way long the buildings across the street. He reaches a street crossing; everyone watches, silent, and lets him walk full on into the side of a building. When he has recovered (for a moment he was like a butterfy beating its wings in a box) the spectators just walk away.

I hang on the end of hunger. We are all as pale as paper. I can’t wear my blouses because they are dirty and I haven’t soap for them and for me and it has to be me.

Today I have no money and no food.

Told Frederick [a friend] I no longer believe in the novel. He said, “Write it whether you believe in it or not.” It is like watching a plant die.

Chambrun [her agent] has send four hundred dollars and says he will send the rest later. The first thing I bought was good white bread.

What to Believe?

“You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time.” Abraham Lincoln*

The rapid fall of Jonah Lehrer reflects a problem with all secondary accounts of scientific findings—on the Web, in the press, in books, conversations, etc. You can’t always believe them.

Lehrer was forced to resign from his position as a blogger for the New Yorker when it was discovered he had fabricated several passages from a purported interview with Bob Dylan and had reused material previously published on his blog at Wired magazine. Having read those blogs, I was quite puzzled to see them once again on the New Yorker’s digital pages.

Since then his latest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, has been withdrawn by its publisher, and Wired magazine, where he had blogged before coming to the New Yorker is reviewing all of his previous posts. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is asking bookstores to returned their unsold copies for a full refund and the same offer has been made to readers who purchased a print copy of the book.

From a star in the blogosphere, Lehrer has almost overnight been ostracized to a writers no-man’s land, to be shunned as if he carried around some dread virus. One wonders what will become of him.

Absent the original report in a peer-reviewed (ideally) journal, it is hard, no, impossible to determine the reliability of the kind of secondary accounts Lehrer published. They could be subject to any number of reporting biases, errors, outright deception, or simple fudging.

Apparently this was true in several and perhaps others yet discovered in the blogs and books of Jonah Lehrer, whose popularity was not unlike that of Malcolm Gladwell. And it may also be true of the several blogs I have written about Lehrer’s posts and books that are even further away from the original sources than Lehrer’s.

I first started reading Lehrer on his blog, the Frontal Cortex. I liked the way he attempted to integrate scientific findings with ordinary experiences. Eventually, his blogs became more neuroscience and less psychological and, in turn, I didn’t follow him as often as I used to, as I’ve never been particularly enamored of neuroscience and its presumption of “at last we know.”

I knew all the evidence he cited from experimental studies was a secondary account, but I had no reason to believe he fabricated anything or distorted the findings one way or another. Therein lies the problem of a reporter, like myself, or a reader. How can you trust such accounts when you don’t have the original research upon which it is based or even know how to interpret it if you did?

When I was a social psychologist, I uniformly went to the original studies I talked about in class or cited in my research. I read them as carefully as I could, tried to interpret the increasingly complex statistical analyses, and checked to see that the investigator’s conclusions didn’t go beyond the data. I can assure you this was never easy. And how often have you read lately about researchers who have fudged on their data or even in some cases actually made it up?

Apparently Lehrer did fudge and did distort and did also invent what he claimed to be true. Should I remove the several blogs where I have cited his work? No, I’ll leave them up for a while and suggest you read them, as well as all other secondary accounts of the research I discuss with considerable caution.

* Note: The Abraham Lincoln quotation was drawn from Jonah Lehrer’s blog, "Deception" written in November, 2006.

Mr. Keatley's Commonplace Book

Most commonplace books, and there aren’t many of those, are private collections of notable passages that readers have collected over the years. Very few have been published and those that have are primarily the collections of well-known individuals—Thomas Jefferson, John Milton, W. H. Auden, Alex Guinness, etc. However, I suspect a relatively modest number have been published privately, probably less today than in previous centuries. Who can ever know these things?

From the earliest days of the commonplace book tradition, copying noteworthy passages by hand, usually into one or more notebooks, has been the preferred method of transcription. The introduction of the typewriter and computer and more recently the several methods of electronic recording have made inroads on this practice.

A considerable number of “commonplace books” and quotation lists are now appearing on the Web. I discuss a few here. While these electronic analogues of their printed forerunners have probably not changed the character of commonplace books, they have surely broadened the audience for what had become a largely private activity.

One of the most usual of those that I’ve read about lately is On Opening Mr. Keatley’s Commonplace Book by Brendan Bruce. I am completely in the dark about the identity, real or fictional, of Mr. Keatley or Brendan Bruce. But here it is, his commonplace book, formatted as a photographic portfolio on a Website, known as "blub" for some reason.

You can also sample a few of its pages and buy a paper or Kindle version from the ubiquitous Amazon.com. Regardless, on each page is a list of the passages that Mr. Keatley or Mr. Bruce deemed worthy of collecting from what is apparently a rather vast and wide ranging set of books.

No reason is given why the passages were selected, nor are they annotated or organized by theme, which I guess is true of most commonplace books. Nevertheless, here is a sampling from the 15 pages available on the Web. Might this kind of thing be the Christmas gift of 2012 for a fair number of commonplacers?

An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia. Thomas Babington Macaulay

Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth. Joseph Joubert

Judge and be prepared to be judged. Ayn Rand

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries. Joseph Addison

Those who air at great deeds must also suffer greatly. Plutarch

Destiny: n. A tyrant’s authority for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure. Anatole France

Bring your desires down to your present means. Increase them only when your increased means permit. Aristotle

I have never learned anything from any man who agreed with me. Dudley Field Malone

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. Dick the Butcher, King Henry VI Part II

Surprise happens so often that it’s surprising that we’re surprised by it. Paul Wolfowitz

Money is like the sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. W. Somerset Maugham

What I want is men who will support me when I am in the wrong. William, Lord Melbourne

Reports are not self-executive. Florence Nighingale.

"Moral Life of Downtown"

Earl Shorris was an essayist and social critic who began one of the first programs to bring literature to the poor and uneducated. Shorris died a few weeks ago and for anyone interested in the possibility of changing lives through literature, this represents a great loss.

While he was interviewing inmates for a book he was writing on poverty, he routinely asked them why poor people became poor. In response, one woman answered because they never learned “the moral life of downtown.” When Shorris asked her what she meant, she replied, “plays, museums, concerts, lectures, you know.”

Shorris concluded from these words that what they lacked wasn’t money, but education, education in the humanities. As a result he began developing the Clemente Course in the Humanities designed for economically and educationally disadvantaged individuals that was offered without cost. The participants studied four subjects: literature, art history, moral philosophy, and American History.

I was drawn to Shorris’ course, like others I’ve written about here, because of my interest in the effects of reading literature. The curriculum of most of these programs is based on Shorris’ course and almost all are intended to reach the poor, unemployed, low wage workers, addicts, the homeless and prisoners. Can you imagine groups that might be more resistant and as unlikely to benefit from such a course as these?

How successful is the course in achieving this goal? Gathering evidence to answer this question is not easy. It is often difficult to track down participants, many of whom lead chaotic lives with no permanent address or phone number. Shorris reports a preliminary evaluation in the Appendix to his first book, New American Blues: A Journey through Poverty to Democracy.

Only half (55%) of the students were able to complete the course the first time he offered it, leaving a sample of seventeen individuals for the pre- and post-course assessment. The findings indicated there were modest gains in the student’s self-esteem and use of cognitive strategies.

But most of the change scores were not significant, and absent comparative data from a group of individuals who were not able to participate in the course or were enrolled in an alternative program, it is difficult to know what to make of these findings.

The Clemente Course is currently being taught in over twenty cities in this country, as well as several foreign countries. Anecdotal evidence from students who have taken these courses and others like it, has been uniformly positive.

A student who spoke at the Spring 2006 graduation ceremony of a similar course (Humanity in Perspective) I evaluated for the Oregon Council of Humanities gave this account.

My classmates and I answered an invitation to come and learn. Twice a week for 2 semesters we gathered together to discuss some of history’s great minds and ideas. We read and discussed the Greek Philosophers and dramatists…the foundations of Democracy in America…the Transcendentalists and contemporary writers…issues of slavery, prejudice, women’s right, civil rights, human rights.

We wrote papers and formulated thesis arguments. These things alone would constitute an interesting educational experience. But this is not all we learned. We learned that these were not just texts to be read, but ideas to live by. We learned about the power of words to harm or to help. We learned how to listen, and how and when to speak up. We learned that our ideas and our opinions are important. We learned that each of us can make a difference in our lives, in our community, in the world. We learned these things not only from these texts and from our teachers, but from each other.

Others commented:

During this class, our minds were freed. That is something that will always be with us, and, trust me, it can never be taken away.

The course was the only positive in this whole bad prison experience.

The class is what people need to want to learn and be better people. I know I am because of it.

Reports like these make it clear how much the thousands of students who have taken courses based on Shorris’ conception owe to him.

Serendipitious Discovery

Early in my freshman year at Stanford I began working at the Library. In those days the great collection of books in the stacks wasn’t open to the students. At the circulation desk I would receive the student request card, try to recall from the book’s call number what level it was on, head into the stacks, down the stairs, through the long and dark aisles, until I came to the right shelf, run my hand along the spine of the books, glancing from time to time at the titles, wishing I could stop to read one or two, scanning the Dewey Decimal numbers, collect the book if it was there, head back down the aisle, up the stairs and pass the book on to the staff to be checked out after stealing a glance at its introductory pages.

That sounds pretty tedious, but it wasn’t. I liked wandering around the shelves, always intrigued by the books that were stored there, the new topics and areas of study that I didn’t know existed, stopping every now and then to grab a book to bring upstairs to read until I had to head down again to fetch one. Eventually I became eligible for one of study the tables located on each floor of the stacks. There I could keep my textbooks and other volumes that I had checked out from the library and do my class work in a setting that is about as favorable as they come.

I spent most of my days and many nights at that table in the stacks of the Library. It was utterly peaceful there, no one else was around and I could come and go as I pleased. Since I was in the throes of academic discovery, it was the best of all possible places.

Every once in a while, I’d take a little “study break” to wander up and down the aisles, checking the titles of the books that caught my eye. This kind of exploration will no longer be possible in the new bookless library. There will no discovery of that unknown book that you subsequently found indispensable. Thomas Benton has recently described the importance of such moments in the process of doing research.

I remember one time I was writing about Edgar Allan Poe and phrenology when I found a box of ephemera—not catalogued in any detail—that included a pamphlet for a book by an early psychologist who analyzed Poe on the basis of daguerreotypes of the poet. I quickly found the book in another area of the same library, and discovered a sequence of pages that purported to show that Poe was suffering from a disorder that affected only one hemisphere of his brain and that revealed itself in the asymmetry of his face…that accidental discovery—the centerpiece of a subsequent article—would never have been made but for the serendipity and convenience of the stacks.

How often I recall a similar experience in my own research. I would go in search of a particular bound volume of a journal. Accidentally I’d pick out the wrong one and beginning scanning the pages, only to discover another article, perhaps even more important than the one I was searching for and that, in turn, led me on a path of further inquiry that would never had occurred if I was searching for the article online. Who has not had the pleasure of discovering such an article by thumbing through the journals of their discipline?

To be sure searching online can be a rich source of information and unexpected sources do appear sometimes. But the search is a targeted one, a narrow one. You are looking for a particular document and you find it or something close. As a friend wrote to me in describing her own online experiences: “There is no room in that equation for the serendipitous discovery. When all goes well, you find what you are looking for. But sometimes what you need to find is what you are not looking for.”

On Friendships

All friends are friends in a different way. James Salter

I have been mulling over three films I’ve seen recently, thinking about what I might say about each one. Then a couple of days ago, I suddenly realized they have a common theme, namely the various forms of friendship. (This sometimes happens when I’ve been mulling over something for a while and not getting anywhere.)

The Intouchables
The Intouchables depicts the unlikely friendship between Philippe, a wealthy French tetraplegic (all four limbs are paralyzed) and Driss, a young Senegalese offender who is hired to be his live-in caretaker. From an awkward adjustment to his life in Philippe’s Parisian townhouse and Philippe’s needs, a delightful bond develops between these two individuals from vastly different cultures.



Monsieur Lazhar
Bashir Lazhar, an Algerian immigrant with a painful past and uncertain status in Montreal, learns of a teacher who committed suicide in a nearby school. He presents himself to the school’s principal, describes his teaching background and is hired as a replacement. At first the students resent his presence, miss their former teacher, but as times passes a reciprocal love and respect develops between the students and Lazhar, as well as been Lazhar and other members of the faculty.



Take This Waltz
Margot and Daniel meet by chance on a flight back to Toronto. Although devotedly married, she finds herself attracted to him. Surprisingly Daniel lives across the street from Margot and her husband Lou. Margot and Daniel do little to avoid the mutual infatuation that develops between them. The ambivalence of their romantic attraction becomes the slow waltz that sometimes characterizes a friendship.