The Social Network

Fictional accounts of a living person(s) are risky. The risk lies in getting it wrong to the detriment and distress of a fair number of individuals even though the work is justified as fictional. This is why I am registering a dissenting voice amidst the widespread praise of The Social Network, the film made of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires.

Zuckerberg concurs: "The reason why we didn't participate is because it was very clear that it was fiction from the beginning. We talked to [Mezrich] about that and he basically told us, ‘what I'm most interested in is telling the most interesting story.’ We want to make sure that we never participate in something like that, so then someone can take something that's really fictional and say, 'We talked to Mark Zuckerberg for this.' So, I think it's clear that it's fiction. All the book reviews of that book from people who know it say that it's fiction. The movie is based on the book.”

To begin, the film made Zuckerberg into a creep, a totally inept human being, a rude and insensitive person. I thought that was unfair and unnecessary. It is also untrue. Zuckerberg in person, as I’ve viewed him in several videos, is nothing like the Zuckerberg depicted in the film. To be sure, like everyone else, he has his excesses. And he may be a bit nerdy, but these days that isn’t rare and he surely doesn’t lack all the civilities ascribed to him in the film.

And then The Social Network concentrated almost exclusively on disputes among the Facebook founders and the three Harvard students who also were thinking along similar lines rather than on Zuckerberg, his background, skills at computer programming, and the several other individuals who supported him in creating Facebook.

It also completely ignored the issue that continues to puzzle me as to why social networking has such appeal. At least the film failed to explain the Facebook phenomenon in a way that makes sense to me, although it seems to have done so for others.

No doubt this is a topic best explored with other methods and in other forums. Yes, I am a member but entirely out of curiosity. Surely that is not the reason 500,000,000 other individuals have signed up or why a goodly number of them spend a fair amount of time each day on the site.

No idea is totally original. As Steven Johnson often remarks in his new book Where Good Ideas Come From, most innovations are cobbled together from other elements. Bricolage (“construction or creation from a diverse range of available things”) is a word Johnson often uses to describe this process.

It was his smarts, some luck, the people who worked with him and the social networking Websites that preceded his that gave Zuckerberg what he need to “cobble together” Facebook. A movie could be crafted or at least include some of this background. It would be one with less distortion and exaggeration and no doubt wouldn’t make much money for Columbia Pictures

I was also bothered by the Winklevoss brothers dispute, the way they went about grousing about Zuckerberg, and then their eventual lawsuit. They simply lost the race, like they lost the Henley Regatta. They didn't have what it takes to develop the software or pull together the resources, and above all the gumption to put Facebook on the map. According to Dustin Moscovistz, one of the co-founders of Facebook, “the Winlevosses had no part in the work we did to create the site…”

And contrary to their claim they were not the first to think about a facebook-like concept. There were similar Websites that preceded Facebook (founded 2004), including My Space (founded 2003) and Friendster (founded 2002), as well as Zuckerberg’s previous work in creating Facemash and Course Match at Harvard.

Zuckerberg's apparent betrayal of his once-close friend and roommate, Eduardo Saverin did bother and then confuse me, although I certainly don’t know the truth of this matter. I do know that Saverin is listed as a co-founder and that while the percentage of shares he owns has been reduced, the same is true of Zuckerberg’s with the investments of venture capitalists or “angel investors” as they were described in the film. Saverin also has settled his lawsuit against Facebook for an undisclosed amount.

While the film may be well made, with a zesty dialogue and colorful cast, it makes the founding of Facebook more of an undergraduate caper than a fascinating yet baffling innovation with, in this viewer’s opinion, an unknown future and a puzzling appeal.

Letters to Fictional Friends

Have you ever wanted to write a letter to one of your fictional friends? For example, one to Emma Bovary to give here some badly needed advice? Or to Nathan Zuckerman telling him to cool it? Or how about one to Michael Beard to tell him what a bastard he is? How often I’ve thought about writing to one of the characters in a book I’m reading.

Letters with Character is a blog where readers can post letters directed to their favorite or not-so-favorite characters. Readers are invited to submit letters (LettersWithCharacter@gmail.com) that are “funny, sad, digressive, trenchant, or trivial.” The site apparently receives far too many submissions to publish them all. The only requirement is that a real person write the letter to an unreal person in work of fiction.

Here are a few that have been recently accepted.

To Jay Gatsby in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Hey Gatsby,
How's it going? What're you up to Saturday night? Wait, let me guess: A party. Again. With the same goddamn bores. Can I make a suggestion? Cancel the band. Turn off your lights. Lock your doors, for once. (Jesus, seriously. It's just not safe having people waltz in and out willy-nilly.) Instead, come over to my place. We'll watch a movie and kick back with a few beers. Have you seen (500) Days of Summer? What about Forgetting Sarah Marshall? Maybe we'll stay away from High Fidelity, but you've already seen that a thousand times, I know. Anyway, email me back or just drop on by. You're always welcome.
Your other neighbor,
Brian Kim

To David Kepesh in Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal

Dear David Kepesh,
Spare me.
Thanks,
Lawrence Levi

Of course you can still write to one of your literary friends without submitting it to Letters with Character.

Here’s one I recently drafted to Raimund Gregorious the central character in Pascal Mercier’s still memorable, still re-readable Night Train to Lisbon.

Dear Mundus:
I understand they are going to make a movie of your life? Should I be impressed? Are you pleased? Do you know who will play your role? Perhaps it will be someone like Robert Redford? He’s about your age now.

Imagine a life of a language professor and linguistic scholar thoroughly fixed in his ways and pillar of his school in Switzerland who takes off on the spur of the moment one day for Lisbon after discovering a remarkable book by the Portuguese writer Amadeu de Prado. I have no idea how a movie can be made of this sojourn let alone the tale of the philosophical treatise that led you to abandon your settled days in Basel.

You wondered if the best way to make sure of yourself was to know and understand someone else? Did you find that to be the case as you learned more and more about Prado? Did his life and his relationships as they were unfolded to you in A Goldsmith of Words and the encounters they led you to give you a better understanding of yourself?

In reading your recent letters I’ve noticed you mostly ask questions. I don’t recall you ever answered them. I confess I found that “conversational style” rather fascinating. Where did you learn to write that way? Do you also converse in the same fashion?

In my experience, most people never ask questions. The person who does becomes an instant friend. I think we have in this linguistic style something very revealing about human behavior. But for the life of me I don’t quite know what it is yet. Do you?

Thanks for staying in touch. I look forward to your next set of questions.
Yours,
Marks in the Margin

Lost in Translation

In the Times earlier this month Michael Cunningham makes the bold claim that “all literature is a product of translation.” It is far more than simply translating a work from one language to another with all the imperfections and variations that involves. His argument goes like this.

First, the writer makes an effort to translate his ideas or images to the page. There is always a discrepancy between the two. Cunningham claims most writers never write the book they had hoped to write. “It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work.”

Next is the language translator who makes an effort to capture the writers meaning in another language that may yield only a vague approximation of his intent, subtle ironies, nuances, and sometimes humor that may be the most difficult of all to accurately convey in another language.

Finally, on Cunningham’s account, there is the reader’s translation of the writer’s words. What does the writer mean by saying this? What does the story mean, after all? Do I have even the vaguest idea?

No two readers are going to answer these questions in the same way. Cunningham suggests in a rather elaborate fashion that each reader translates the text into his or her “private imaginary lexicon, according to his or her interests and needs and levels of comprehension.”

Emerson said it better: “You have seen a skillful man reading Plutarch. Well, that author is a thousand things to a thousand persons. Take that book into your own two hands and read your eyes out. You will never find there what the other finds.”

However, I think there is another step in translating a work of literature and that may the longest and the most subject to change. It is the way the story gets recalled and retold again and again as time goes by. You look for a review of the book, you tell your friend about it, you try to write a blog about it and at each step along the way the story is given another translation.

Cunningham concludes: “Here, then, is the full process of translation. At one point we have a writer in a room, struggling to approximate the impossible vision that hovers over his head. He finishes it, with misgivings. Some time later we have a translator struggling to approximate the vision, not to mention the particulars of language and voice, of the text that lies before him. He does the best he can, but is never satisfied. And then, finally we have the reader. The reader is the least tortured of the trio, but the reader too may very well feel that he is missing something in the book, that through sheer ineptitude he is failing to be a proper vessel for the book’s overarching vision.”

I found Cunningham’s notion refreshing and provocative. It has elicited some comment in letters to the Times. One person made reference to a remark Robert Frost made about poetry: “When you translate poetry, poetry is what gets lost in translation.”

Try translating that into Italian. I did and here’s how one translator did it: "Quando si traduce la poesia, la poesia è ciò che si perde nella traduzione." Is that what Frost meant?

A Brainy Feast

Recently I’ve developed ambivalent feelings about the New Yorker Magazine. However, last weekend it staged a literary and cultural tour-de-force that was difficult not to appreciate. It was the eleventh year of the New Yorker Festival that this year brought together a really brilliant group of writers, artists, performers, critics, etc. for a three-day intellectual extravaganza.

The Festival customarily begins on Friday night with paired discussions among writers, including this year such luminaries as Orhan Pamuk, Lorrie Moore, Mary Karr, Zadie Smith, Joyce Carol Oates, E. L. Doctorow, Annie Proulx, etc. Taken together it was an impressive group of contemporary writers.

Earlier that evening there was also a special opening night screening of The Social Network that you surely must know is about the inception and development of Facebook.

Saturday consisted of individual lectures (Atul Gawande, How to Live When You Have to Die; Paul Goldberger, Why Architecture Matters), panel discussions (Natural Disasters, The Case for Gay Marriage), conversations (Paul Krugman talking with Larissa MacFarquhar; Yo-Yo Ma talking with Alex Ross) etc.

Sunday was more of the same with a mix of talks (Malcolm Gladwell who was all over the place), panels (Your Brain on the Internet), an afternoon of poetry readings, walking tours about New York, including the legendary Festival tradition and all time favorite with Calvin Trillin leading a small group on a culinary saunter through lower Manhattan that always concludes with a dim-sum feast!

One year I tried to get a couple of tickets to Trillin’s feast. I duly waited until moment the tickets officially went on sale and then I called at the strike of the gong. It could not have been more than five to ten seconds later when I placed my order and was duly informed the event was already sold out.

These are only a sampling of this year’s events. However, you can read about all of them on the Festival Blog that provides a brief summary of each session along with short video introductions to some of the presentations. If you scroll through the list of offerings you’ll see what a goldmine it is. You could easily spend an entire weekend mining its riches.

Even better, if you happen to have a little extra cash and some spare time, you can watch a complete video of a fair number of the presentations. The individual videos are priced at $4.95 and access to all of them is $59.95. I’ve bought a few of them (Gawande, Gladwell, the Krugman discussion, and Lorrie Moore’s.

I’ve started watching Gawande’s lecture and it is meticulous and moving to be sure. It is also an hour and a half (including about 20 minutes of really fine questions from a very literate audience) and I wanted to stop about mid-way through so I could spend time mulling it over before watching any further.

Perhaps this introduction will tempt you to take advantage of the video presentations of this year’s three-day “celebration of ideas and the arts.” They will only be available until the end of the month.

Since the first New Yorker Festival in 2000 to celebrate the magazines’ 75th Anniversary, they have been holding these gatherings on an annual basis about this time of year. In comparison with recent years, I thought this year’s program was especially cerebral, more focused on the literary arts and social issues and less on celebrities and the media.

Very Much Tomorrow

This is not a post about book, film or notable essay. Rather it is a story that appeals to me. The story, as it was told in a Times article last month, is about an ancient Italian hill town that has developed a project that is strikingly different than anything in its past or that you might expect it to do.

The town is Tocco Da Casuria, a “quintessential Italian town of 2,700 people” in the central part of Italy. I’ve been to such towns, lingered there for hours, returned time and time again. There isn’t much going on in these hill towns. The streets are quiet. It is hot when I am there. I go to a small café or “bar” to get a cold drink and there are two or three elderly men there watching a soccer game on the TV. I sit down and watch the game. It is hard to leave.

Tocco has undertaken a project that has started to take hold in other comparable Italian villages. And it is a major achievement for a little town like Tocco, one, however, that is not being emulated in large urban centers where Italian planning and regulation requirements pose too many barriers at the present time.

What Tocco has done has become totally energy self-sufficient. Not only that, but the little village is making money from its electricity production by selling it to other communities in Italy. Last year the excess production of renewable energy earned the town 170,000 Euros ($200,000). The surplus funds permitted it to renovate its schools, “tripled the budget for street cleaners” and ended local taxes and fees for community services like garbage removal.

Tocco has achieved this degree of energy sufficiency has been by building four wind turbines and roof-top solar panels in private residences, the sports center complex, and some of its ancient buildings. According to the Times article “Tocco was motivated to become an early adapter because Italy already had among the highest electricity rates in Europe, and nearly three times the average in the United States, and it could not cope with the wild fluctuations in fossil fuel prices and supply that prevailed in the last decade.”

These are representative of the conditions that exist in every town and city in industrial countries. When combined with the falling price of renewable energy and government incentives to Italian communities that are able to produce surplus energy, the development of such projects has become a no brainer.

The Tocco Da Casuria story captured my imagination. Here is the typical Italian hill town that has preserved its old ways and at the same time is on the forefront of energy technology. Old men at the café sitting outside in the sun, their wives on their way to the market, and all the while wind turbines are blowing in the wind high among the hillside olive trees and new roof-top solar panels are soaking up the energy to light its walkways and power its few offices and shops.

As the Times article points out “Tocco is very much tomorrow.” It is also a small town where change seems to come more readily than in larger urban centers, one that apparently has been implemented with comparable savings in more than 800 Italian communities not unlike Tocco.

There is also another story to tell about Tocco Da Casuria, one not discussed in the Times article. It is the story of how these changes came to pass, the people who were responsible for initiating and implementing the projects. The situation that led the town to consider adopting sustainable energy projects is well known but not the process whereby they became a reality. It is worth the trip there to find out. Arrivedici.

The New Yorker App

Dedicated readers of the New Yorker who are both pragmatic and digitally proficient have been waiting for the New Yorker’s iPad App ever since the hefty gadget flew into the Apple Store. Earlier this week they learned that the App had gone public and could now be downloaded to the iPad. But once they took a look how to obtain the first issue, a loud groan could be heard throughout the land.

While the entire magazine, ads, cartoons, What’s Going On, articles, essays, the works are there, something is still missing. And what is missing is free access.

To read each weekly issue the moment it hits the newsstands in New York will cost you $5.00. So if you are a subscriber, you not only will be paying the weekly cost of the print edition, but an additional $5.00 per issue for the electronic version.

Imagine the furor. The following comments were made in response to the magazine’s online announcement of the App.

I am astonished that Conde Nast believes I should pay for my subscription twice. That's dumb.

Is Condé Nast seriously expecting that I and other subscribers will rather pay $4.99 than simply bringing along the actual magazine? I'd be happy to pay for the app or an additional subscription fee, but not at this price.

I love The New Yorker and I love my Ipad but sadly at five bucks a pop, never the two shall meet! A very long time subscriber

Like others, I'd like to see free access for subscribers. I live overseas. It takes 2-3 weeks beyond the normal delivery time for me to receive each issue. And now I'm moving to Afghanistan. I'd love to see an iPad subscription option that would allow me to get the issues on-time. You can even charge the same amount and pocket the international postage fees!

What is one to do? For non-subscribers, it’s not a bad deal, as the newsstand price of each issue is $5.99. It’s not a great deal either even with the modest discount for readers who belong to the Borders or Barnes & Noble membership program.

For current subscribers it does present a dilemma. They will have to decide how important it is to pay the additional $5 per issue. Is the magazine worth it today? I don’t think so, although I might have responded differently in the days before the electronic age.

As the subscriber who is moving to Afghanistan indicated, it is simply a matter of how long can you wait. Waiting two or three weeks for an overseas resident might make it worthwhile to pay for the instantly arrive iPad issue and almost as worthwhile for subscribers on the West Coast where it doesn’t arrive until Friday or Saturday. And for those who live on an island in the middle of the ocean, as I do now, where the magazine eventually drifts in with the prevailing trade winds, it might be a good deal. But first I have to buy an iPad and I’ve been mulling that over for months now and will probably continue to do so for many more.

Ideally the New Yorker could offer readers an option to subscribe to the App instead of the print copy and Conde Nast says, they hope to be able to have this option “before too long.” But knowing Conde Nast and the nature of their business, I wouldn’t bet my penny collection on that happening.

While the App may be aesthetically pleasing and a complete version of the print edition that can be read almost immediately after it is published, consider what cannot be done with it. You cannot easily underline (highlight) passages. You cannot make notes in the margins. You cannot cut out funny cartoons or articles worth saving. For a reader who likes to do all these things, the App is a bare approximation of the original and scarcely worth an additional $5 per issue.

And in the final analysis it’s all a matter of how patient you are. As Saint Augustine said when faced with this dilemma, “Patience is the companion of wisdom.”

Go and Study

A mocker asked the great and gentle rabbi Hillel to summarize the Torah while standing on one foot, to which Hillel replied: “That’s easy. What you wouldn’t have done to you, don’t do to others. As for the rest, go and study.”
Rebecca Goldstein The Mind Body Problem

A friend recently wrote to me about the ambivalence he feels toward being in graduate school now. In reply I had all too casually said that he was there “…to lay the foundation for a life of learning.” Given his current dilemma, I realize now that was rather thoughtless, although he said it had “deeply moved” him.

Graduate student uncertainty about the path they have started down is much more common than it was in my day. When I entered graduate school, there were very considerable demands for university and college professors in all disciplines. This is clearly no longer the case. And for various other reasons the university as I came to know it is no longer quite so attractive to young students or, for that matter, to their professors either.

My friend confesses he is more “moved by pressing goals.” These are far removed from the academic fray. “……there are aspects of the business that intrigue me: the fast pace, the money making, sharp dressing… Mostly the pace. Scholarly research is too slow-paced. And then, after it’s published, who’ll read it? It takes too long to become an established researcher, widely quoted and respected. And teaching and university bureaucracy are so problematic. Knowing all of these shortcomings, present in every industry, will not help me to excel within this “industry.”

I understand his predicament and deeply sympathetic with it. What can I say? We approached this kind of choice point at different times and at different angles. I know my counsel is unrealistic and yet I can’t imagine suggesting he give up on the academic world so soon after beginning his graduate studies.

Our exchange reminded me of a recent remembrance by Roger Scruton of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s memorable lecture The Idea of a University that he refers to as "…surely the most serene and beautiful vindication that we have of the old ideal of the scholarly life."

Later Scruton continues, … It was not simply a repository of knowledge. It was a place where work and leisure occurred side by side, shaping each other, and each playing its part in producing the well-formed and graceful personality.

Yes, that’s the way I always thought of life in the academy. I still do even though I am no longer formally a part of it.

Is there a place today for a life of learning? I know it is an increasingly narrow one. But still its appeal remains as strong for me today as it was the first day I became a freshman in college. I quote Keith Thomas in his Fifth British Academy Lecture, November 20, 2001.

Finally, the life of learning still has an exemplary morality to offer. Where else, save in other forms of academic inquiry, can we find the same scrupulous concern for truth, the same requirement that all propositions which are not self-evidently true should be documented, the same conviction that getting things right is more important than a quick fix, the same acceptance of the complexity of things and the same refusal to contemplate any dumbing down? And where else is hard-won knowledge freely imparted, without hope of financial recompense? So long as these qualities remain in evidence, those who follow the life of learning have no reason to be ashamed of their calling.

500 Million Members

Facebook: You can’t avoid it. Zuckerberg here, Zuckerberg there, the IPO (Will he or won’t he?), the movie, the profile in the New Yorker, the book (The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich) and no doubt another book or two in the works.

What is it all about? I am on Facebook. I don’t know why. No one ever seeks my friendship. I rarely seek the friendship of anyone or say very little about myself. Most of it is fabricated anyway. I even have my face there. That is a mistake. No wonder no one wants to be my friend

Once I tried to befriend a person, if that is what you call it I found on the site. I did so only because she had written to me about a book I wrote: “Your book was an inspiration.”

I never received a reply. That seemed odd. She is no longer a public presence there. Already we have had our first argument.

Why would anyone want to talk, if that is what you call it, on this site? How can you make these exchanges so public? The discourse is moronic anyway. Why not sent an e-mail, write a letter, or make a telephone call? If you’re not good for more than a word or two, text the person.

Zuckerberg is reported to be a strange one in the New Yorker (9/20/10) profile by Jose Vargas. “…a wary and private person…. mixture of shy and cocky… he can come off as flip and condescending … backstabbing, conniving, and insensitive.” Yes, perhaps a bit disdainful, autocratic, secretive, but extraordinarily successful. Is that what it takes?

Zuckerberg’s story is a familiar one, especially if you have read Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s account of the reasons some individuals become enormously successful in their field. According to Vargas, like so many digital wizards, Zuckerberg was a computer prodigy as a kid, played computer games, and early on began to tinker with coding. When he was about eleven, his parents hired a computer tutor and not long after Zuckerberg began taking evening computer courses at a nearby college.

Soon after he became a freshman at Harvard, he built a CourseMatch, a program that enabled students to decide which classes to take and another, Facemash, that Vargas characterizes as a kind of “sexual-playoff system” that was promptly shutdown by the administration.

And then as Vargas describes it, “Afterward , three upperclassmen …approached Zuckerberg for assistance with a site that they had been working on, called Harvard Connection.” Apparently Zuckerberg worked with them a while “but he soon abandoned their project in order to build his own site, which he eventually labeled Facebook.” The site, originally a social network for Harvard students, soon thereafter expanded to other colleges, became an instant hit, whereupon Zukerberg dropped out of Harvard (as Gates did and as Jobs did from Reed) to run it. The rest is well known.

I am less interested in Zuckerberg the person or the current controversies over Facebook’s privacy policies than I am in the conditions that led him to formulate the Facebook concept, create its software, and then apply it with such success to the Web. In Outliers Gladwell formulates a five-factor theory of success: talent, hard work, opportunity, timing and luck.

Obviously Zukerberg had a great deal of natural savvy about computers and knack for coding. Equally clear, he spent hours and hours, perhaps Gladwell’s magical 10,000 hours, developing his computer software skills. He parents gave him every opportunity, hired a tutor and provided a first-rate education.

As for timing, one really never can be sure when an idea will take hold but by the time Facebook was launched, the Web had become a very fertile ground for match making and, as a friend put it to me recently, "mischief-making." And then luck is such a vague term. Of course, Zuckerberg was lucky. No one becomes an extraordinarily successful person without a good deal of luck. So that factor, along with timing, is of little value in predicting success and even less useful in fostering it.

Still there is the lingering unknown of whether or not the idea and execution of Facebook was based (“stolen”) upon the work of the upperclassmen who had approached Zuckerberg for assistance with their own highly similar site. Two of the three are appealing for more than the previous sixty-five million dollar settlement with Facebook and the case is currently under review.

However, the settlement was a financial one that leaves unanswered the question of who was really responsible for the Facebook concept. I suppose one can never really know these things anyway and in the words of a young German writer I cited in an earlier post on where ideas come from, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,”

Can't Remember What's in Books

The effect of the reading experience was the central issue that drew me to the field of literature. Reading a book is like any other experience. You are a different person afterwards than you were before. But in what way? And to what degree? Further, what is the cumulative impact of reading book after book, essay after essay, year after year?

During all the time I was teaching and doing research in psychology, I never encountered anyone or any systematic program of research in the discipline that was investigating these questions. This surprised me and continues to do so. Given all the reading of literary fiction and non-fiction we do, one has to wonder if and how we are influenced by it.

These questions were considered by James Collins in his essay, The Plot Escapes Me, in the Times Book Review last Sunday (9/19/10). Collins says he finds it impossible to remember much of anything about the books he’s read. And then he wonders what is the point of reading after all, if you can’t remember what’s in them?

Yes, he answers, we read for pleasure and sometimes to learn something new. But then he confesses, “When we read a serious book, we want to learn something, we want it to change us, and it hardly seems for that to happen if its fugitive content passes through us like light through glass.”

Surely, he speculates, reading a book must have affected his “brain” in terms of the ways he thinks and “…they must have left deposits of information…that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it. Mustn’t they have?”

To find out he calls Professor Maryanne Wolf, the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,” to see if she might shed some light on his puzzlement. She was the right person to call, especially if he wanted to find out what current neurological thinking is on these matters. If he had called me, he might have written an entirely different essay, one that would never have appeared in the Times Book Review.

Wolf gives him the answer he wants, the one he more or less answered himself the way he framed the questions. Wolf claims, Collins is a different person for having read all the books he tells her about.

“There is a difference between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”

All this is very encouraging of course both to Collins and all the rest of us dedicated readers. Yet, it still seems rather fanciful to me. Let us just say that all the books I’ve read by Ian McEwan changed my brain in some way. And let us also agree that a neurophysiologist can measure all the ups and down of my neurons while I was reading them, that they are most active in the left ventral occipito-temporal cortex. But knowing all that still leaves me in the dark about how these brain processes get translated into my beliefs and actions. Doesn’t it?

The same questions hold for all the Philip Roth books I’ve read or that single masterpiece Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier. Yes, my brain was hoping all over the place when I read those books and I suppose it was changed in some fashion by those experiences. But after saying that, I remain stranded at the choice point, having no clear idea how my now-changed-brain influences the decision I make, the attitude I hold, or the course of action I take.

Yes, hearing Wolf’s views and even reading her highly regarded book might make some degree of intuitive sense. But in terms of really getting a handle on the concrete effects of reading literature, I remain as baffled as ever.

Quite frankly, in my mind Wolf’s account isn’t any more enlightening than the one Lorrie Moore, a writer not a neuroscientist, mind you, made several years ago: "Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort--good food or junk food--and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells."

On Literary Journals

I’ve been traveling lately without a permanent address and so I’ve not been receiving any mail. All that ended a few days ago when a big packet of literature was delivered overnight from home base. Many thanks to the gang at home. It was like Christmas

Inside the packet I found the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, Paris Review, American Scholar and Lapham’s Quarterly. I haven’t received a gift like this since the time I found an electric train under the Christmas tree.

It isn’t necessary to talk about politics, the recession, environmental disasters or the latest war, although trustworthy commentary on these topics is not precluded, and you don’t have to have a Style Issue, a Food Issue, a Media Issue or a Shopping Issue to attract readers of poetry, fiction, interviews, and essays as the Paris Review has time and time again done since its founding fifty-seven years ago.

The latest issue is an example: there’s a superb short story, Virgin, by April Ayers Lawson—“Do you really think people change, or just seem to change?” two contemporary author interviews, Norman Rush—“It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live….As I write a novel, I’m aware that I’m struggling against the “obligation” to solace.” and Michel Houellebecq—“I wake up during the night around one A.M. I write half-awake in a semi-conscious state. Progressively, as I drink coffee, I become more conscious. And I write until I’m sick of it.”

The same quality holds for the consistently outstanding New York Review of Books with its usual range of critical reviews and analyses of the arts and sciences broadly speaking. The latest issue has an unsettling essay by Michael Tomasky on the cloture rule and filibustering in the Senate. He writes:

“…obstructionism is empirically worse today than ever, or at least since 1917, when the current “cloture” system was first adopted.” “But typically filibusters have put off for decades actions the nation should have taken years before—civil rights, notably, including anti-lynching laws.” “The truth is that no institution of American government is more responsible for our inability to address pressing national problems than the Senate, and no institution is in greater need of reform.”

Tomasky concludes his review with several current reform proposals. They include Rewriting the cloture rule, Rule 22, itself. In addition the Senate, unlike the House, does not declare itself a new body upon reconvening every odd-year in January; if it adopted the House procedure, it would be able to change its rules by a simple majority, rather than a two-thirds vote.

The current issue also includes another unsettling review by Arnold Relman concerning the recently passed Health Care Legislation. According to his analysis the complex bill will not control the costs of medical care in this country, rather it will only increase, not lessen federal budget problems.

He says the reason for this is the legislation’s “failure to change our current dependence on private, for-profit insurance plans…By mandating and subsidizing the purchase of private insurance for almost all those not eligible for …Medicare or Medicaid the legislation has created a virtual monopoly for the private insurance industry.”

There is much more--(Krugman & Wells on the economic slump, a review of Franzen’s Freedom, the Warburg Library, etc.) I’ve not said a word about the very fine issue of The American Scholar, with an amusing short story, By Appointment Only, by Louis Begley or the Fall issue of Lapham’s Quarterly devoted to The City, both of which were also in my packet of mail.

My point has been to give a few examples of the riches to be found in the so-called “little magazines” and periodicals that are published in this country. In a letter to readers of the latest issue of the Paris Review its new editor, Lorin Stein, wonders if a printed literary journal can still survive in the age of the Internet. The quality of those I recently received makes it clear to me that their future is guaranteed. There will always be individuals who will want to read good, intelligent writing. Perhaps not many, but there were never very many anyway. Yet, they have made all the difference.

Motherhood is Hell

“If everyone would read this book, the propagation of the human race would virtually cease…”

In last week’s Times Magazine (9/12/10) Lisa Belkin asks, “Is child-rearing the new self-actualization?” Her question stems from a recent article by the evolutionary psychologist David Kendrick that redefined Abraham Maslow’s original theory of self-actualization in terms of “attracting a mate and ultimately, parenting children.”

Rachel Cusk, the well known and much admired by this reader English writer, would surely object, and do so strongly, to this dubious claim. Cusk is the mother of two children and has recently written about her experience of motherhood in A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother.

The book is a bold expression, a powerful one that angered many readers for its brutally honest account of motherhood. The nearly unanimous outcry after it was published confused Cusk for, as she commented, “I was only being honest.”

Cusk is not the first writer to write critically about the experience of motherhood. But she may be the first to describe its adversities with such vitality and intensity--a domestic struggle, confinement, sleeplessness, confusion, guilt mixed with love, servitude mixed with compassion, a prison, boot-camp, never ending torment.

‘Motherhood, for me, was a sort of compound fenced off from the rest of the world. I was forever plotting my escape from it, when I found myself pregnant again when Albertine was six months old, I greeted my old cell with the cheerless acceptance of a convict intercepted at large.”

In A Life’s Work, Cusk has tried to convey what she thought and felt about the experience of having a child. Although she might now regret publishing the book, she must have hoped that other people would identify with her account and know that they were not the only ones to react the way she did.

For Cusk caring for her child was “isolating, frequently boring, relentless, demanding and exhausting. It erodes your self-esteem and your membership in the adult world.”

Throughout the book she draws upon works of literary fiction to corroborate her experiences. She cites Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth and asks what a woman is if she is not a mother or a wife either.

“The baby is the symbol not just of Lily’s exclusion from the human life-cycle, nor of the vulnerability, the helplessness that marks her life and her life’s end: it is also the vision of her squandered femininity…”

And in a separate chapter on Madame Bovary, she reflects on how confusing it is for a mother to make sense of being “supremely powerful and powerless at the same time.”

Her relationship with her husband comes under pressure. “…after a child is born the lives of its mother and father diverge, so that where before they were living in a state of some equality, now they exist in a sort of feudal relation with each other.” Clearly news about the how closely fathers are now involved in child rearing had yet to arrive in the British Isles.

And yet they were in this “crime” together. “When evening comes, I prepare the bottle. Her father is to give it to her, for we are advised that this treachery is best committed not by the traitor herself but by a hired assassin.”

I have always found much to admire in the works of Rachel Cusk. And while I will never be a mother, I heard clearly what she was saying in this book. At one point she speaks of “…the death of freedom, its untimely murder by the state of parenthood…” Note: parenthood, not motherhood.

And later “…the hardship of parenthood is so unrelievedly shock….At its worst moments parenthood does indeed resemble hell, in the sense that its torments are never ending.”

OK, you get the picture. While very few parents are likely to admit they experience anything close to this degree of hardship in raising their children, I think there is enough truth in Cusk’s account will be familiar to anyone who has ever been a parent.

"Hunger to capture another life, to understand another life."

In 1978 John Updike gave a lengthy interview in response to the questions of two professors of English while he was attending a writers conference in Croatia. He discussed his writing process (semi-fixed, every day but Sunday, a good deal of rewriting), favorite writers ((Thurber, Proust, Calvino, Nabokov) and the excessive focus of American fiction on infidelity and the breakdown of marriage (Madam Bovary and Anna Karenina are also novels of adultery and marital estrangement).

When asked about the many predictions that the era of the novel is over, Updike responded with the bold claim that the novel is the “ultimate vessel for truth telling and artistic expression.” Bold, yes, but also a view that was responsible for the turn I took from psychology to literature.

Psychologists seek to establish very general laws of human thought and action. However, I never understood how evidence derived by averaging the scores of a group of individuals could serve as the foundation for a science of individual behavior. Laws based on such aggregate data tell us very little about specific individuals and serve only to obscure crucial features of human variability and uniqueness. Literature points the spotlight on them.

Further, the many exceptions to those general laws severely limits their generality. Thus, it is impossible to say with much confidence that they hold for a particular individual at a particular time and place. I have come to believe that psychology will always have to be content with this sort of limitation. Laws based on aggregate data hold for some people, some of the time, but one never can be sure on any given occasion if they apply to a particular individual in the situation at hand.

This conclusion is not unlike one often voiced in judicial proceedings, where the legal standing of psychological research is also called into question. It took me a while to understand why courts were so hesitant to admit social science evidence, let alone take it seriously in adjudicating cases. Yet legal cases are decided on an individual basis and so, even when the weight of evidence clearly supports the relevant social science generalization, the courts still require "proof" that it applies in the case being decided.

When judges ask psychologists to link the general principle to the specific case, it is difficult, if not impossible for them to do so with certainty. But that is what the law requires. Psychologists can provide relevant case knowledge and guidance, but the information they present is rarely, if ever, decisive in judicial decision-making.

In his essay Medicine and Literature, Robert Coles puts the matter eloquently. "I am constantly impressed with mystery, and maybe even feel that there are certain things than cannot be understood or clarified through generalizations, that resolve themselves into matters of individuality, and again, are part of the mystery of the world that one celebrates as a writer, rather than tries to solve and undo as a social scientist…..As physicians we also know, or ought to know, that each person is different, each patient reacts in his or her special way to any illness, and indeed to life itself. A sense of complexity of human affairs, a respect for human particularity, ...these are the stuff of the humanities at their best …"

During all the time I was primarily engaged in psychology, I never stopped reading literature, mostly contemporary fiction. I did not have the time to read widely, but the literature I did read always told me things about myself and others that I never heard expressed in psychology. With rare exceptions, I rarely saw individuals in psychology as clearly or as deeply as I did in the novels and short stores I read.

Literary truths hold for particular individuals and situations. They make no claims beyond that. They do not require testing or verification or large sample statistical analysis. Their veracity cannot be doubted, they are without exception true for the individual or situation at that time and place, and as Coles suggests, they are bound to be different for each person and situation.

This is what I take Updike means when he speaks of the novel as the “ultimate vessel” for truth telling. Writers may not be overly concerned with expressing literary truths but it is a natural consequence of the work they do. Nor is the excellence of their work judged in terms of the literary truths on its pages.

Instead, what Updike does in his stories is “examine the details, the texture of time, the texture of a little experience in such a way as to make it yield all-new meaning, like turning a sock inside out or something.”

"A Variety of Impersonations"

For all the seeming self-exposure of the novels, he was a great defender of his solitude, not because he particularly liked it but because swarming emotional anarchy and self-exposure were possible for him only in isolation.

I think of Proust and the several years he rarely left his cork-lined apartment working on his masterpiece. I think of Salinger secluded at his home in the forested hillside of New Hampshire, Salinger who after the enormous success of Catcher in the Rye, rarely broke his silence. After To Kill A Mockingbird was published, Harper Lee did much the same, refusing interviews and public appearances. The creative life is usually solitary and it is in that solitude that a writer finds his story. Perhaps it also creates a strong desire to be heard. Every writer says much the same. Martha Gelhorn put it well, “I always live alone to work, cannot do it otherwise except as total immersion.”

In a way brothers probably know each other better than they ever know anyone else.

One summer my brother and I met at a cafe in the beautiful town of Lucca in Tuscany. The warm afternoon was drawing to a close. The buildings surrounding the piazza glowed in that late afternoon Tuscan light. And he started to tell me about what he saw. He saw things I did not even notice until he pointed them out. It was like that with each building. The object; its meaning; historical importance and why it was placed there and not somewhere else. It was dazzling. He did know a great deal. But above all he wanted to tell me about it. I had never heard him so spontaneously outgoing to me or interested in what he was talking about. It turned out to be our last day together. We never had a better one.

…what matters isn’t what made you do it but what it is you do.

I listen to people tell me what they intend to do and what their attitudes and beliefs are or I read the same things in their writings and I say to myself this is really of no importance. What is important is how they translate their beliefs and attitudes into behavior, what they do when push comes to shove in real time. Many years of experience and a fair amount of research have taught me that the finest of intentions often fall by the wayside under conditions of even the most minimal pressure.

There is no you, Maria, any more than there’s a me. There is only this way that we have established over the months of performing together, and what it is congruent with isn’t “ourselves” but past performances—we’re has-beens at heart, routinely trotting out the old, old, act….It’s all impersonation—in the absence of a self, one impersonates selves, and after a while impersonates best the self that best gets one through.

Does it make any sense to speak of a self, an identity that is the same today as it was 30 or 40 years ago, a self that lies hidden behind most of the actions that constitute our daily life? Or are we, as the author of the passage above suggests, little else but performances of who we imagine our self to be or might wish to be?

On this account the notion of a self as a distinctive identity is a myth. Instead we are impersonators like actors on the stage with a range of parts we perform to meet the demands of the situation or the image that we think others have of us.

I have been searching unsuccessfully for my self for years. Instead, what I find are the various behaviors I enact over time, a set of behaviors that has remained consistent for most of my life now. If this is what is meant by “self,” then I admit the search has been successful after all.

The quoted passages above are from Philip Roth’s novel, The Counterlife. The novel depicts the various lives two brothers lived or might have lived--one is never quite sure. It is an imaginative, forceful, confrontational novel that is Roth at his best.

I might note that Roth, an intensely private man, also lives in virtual solitude at his home in Connecticut. He works from early morning until the end of the day, every day, in his studio back in the trees away from the house. He says he cannot do otherwise, that he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he couldn’t write every day.

My responses reflect the way I read a novel or most any book for that matter. I read a passage, come to a halt for one reason or another, place a mark in the margin, and then continue mulling it over for a while. From time to time I return to the passage and others from a really excellent book after I have entered all the marked passages in my Commonplace Book. And every so often these passages serve as the basis for something I write.

Notes on Reading

At Barnes and Noble last night I was given an extended demonstration of what it’s like to read The New Yorker on their e-reader, The Nook. The magazine arrives so late in the week at my home that I usually head out to buy a second copy on the newsstand the day after it hits the streets in New York. To avoid this unnecessary extravagance, I have wondered what it would be like to read the magazine moments after its publication on an e-reader at a fraction of the cost of the printed version(s).

And what I learned is that electronic version of The New Yorker is nothing like the edition that has been coming my way in the mail for ages. In the version of the magazine I read or tried to read on The Nook there are no ads, no little sidebars, no color photos, a fraction of the cartoons and unless you’re reading the both the print and the electronic version simultaneously, you have no idea what else is missing and that includes some of the articles, essays and reviews. Frankly, I thought the e-reader version of the magazine was a fraud.

While weekly edition The New Yorker is also available on the Web, much of the print version is also missing and a good many of the essays are blocked and can only be read by subscribers to the electronic edition of the magazine which is sent each week to subscribers via e-mail. I confess I’ve tried to read this digital version and I found it to be impossible.

I’ve also been worrying a great deal lately about what is happening to practice of reading on these devices. It is claimed that you can “read” countless books and periodicals with them, a large number for free. But what does that mean, what is meant by “reading” anyway? Is it simply from moving from one sentence to another, page after page with a flip of a thumb? Is that all that is meant by reading?

For me reading has always meant much more. It is reading carefully and slowly and sometimes deeply. It is marking passages, making notes, flipping back and forth between pages, and when you’re all done keeping a record of the best of what you’ve read in a notebook or as it’s usually referred to a commonplace book. Doing all of this with an e-reader is not anything I’ve ever observed anyone doing. Nor have I heard anyone tell me this is the way they read with the Nook, Kindle, or iPad. Of course this might be said of most readers of printed books too.

Recently a few blogs have made mention of the commonplace book tradition. Amanda at Desert Book Chick discusses the history of how she uses her commonplace book and over at Kittling: Books, Cathy does much the same in her post There's Nothing Common About Commonplace books. I was amused to read some of the comments to these postings.

I’ve been considering something of the sort for quite some time (didn’t know that there is actually a name for it) but I have this problem with the fact that I need to have it someplace close in order to use it, otherwise I don’t feel like getting up to retrieve anything while I’m immersed in a book. But I do actually need one because at the moment, my thoughts are scattered on post-its everywhere and that really won’t do.

Wow – i have never heard of these – what a simply WONDERFUL idea!!!

I have never heard about commonplace books either. I kept a diary when I was quite young, though, and looking back at that stage, I think it helped me finding a writing voice.

I wish I had kept something like that years ago - it would be wonderful to look at now to see how (or if) I've grown.

And then there is the matter of the future of the printed book, a future that many predict with be short. I realize printed books are expensive to produce and publishers lose a good deal of money on most of them. On possible solution to this problem was recently suggested by William Gibson.

My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they’re able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home. Book making machines exist and they’re remarkably sophisticated. You’d eliminate the waste and you’d get your book -– and it would be a real book. You might even have the option of buying a deluxe edition. You could have it printed with an extra nice binding, low acid paper.

How cool is that? How would it work? You’d come into the bookstore, go to the shelf where the traditional book has always been located, read a short summary of it on a few pages within a slim pamphlet-like volume or do the same on the bookstore’s Web page, decide if you want to read the book, and if so, head over to the machine to print the complete volume on non-toxic, recycled paper with a soft cover. Or something like that.

The Art of Translation

“…the only rule in translation is that there are no rules.” Barbara Harshav

Readers of this blog may remember how much I admired Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier. Mercier, the pen name of Peter Beiri, is also the author of Lea a novel that I have been very eager to read. However, it has not yet been translated into English. To find out if the translation rights were still available, I wrote to Professor Barbara Harshav who did the English translation of Night Train to Lisbon. She replied that the rights had been purchased and another person is currently doing the English Language translation.

This was followed by a lively exchange on the art and process of translation. Reading a work of literature in translation, as I often do, is not something we ordinarily think about. And yet, once you realize there are many different styles and approaches to translating, you begin to wonder how true the translation is to the original.

In addition to German, Professor Harshav has translated a number of French, Yiddish and Hebrew publications. She is currently teaching a course on translation in the Comparative Literature Department at Yale and serves as President of the American Literary Translators Association. With her permission I have minimally edited and framed as an interview her responses to the questions I posed to her.

Q How does a reader know when a translation is good or bad? This is a reader, like myself, who does not know the translator, who cannot read the original and knows nothing about what distinguishes a good from a bad translation.
You raise the fundamental question about judging translation. In some ways, you are really buying a pig in a poke because there are no objective standards of quality. Signs of a bad translation would include strange locutions or phrases that are just slightly off. For example, would you write "completely new" or "brand new"? Minor details, but they can give the game away.

Another indication is that something just doesn't make sense, which means that the translator probably hasn't understood the original. More subtly, the rhythm of the English can be off, but it takes a fairly rare sensibility to language to discern that. However, that still leaves the issue of whether the translation is really conveying the original. And I doubt whether there's any way to know that.

As for whether you'd know if you were reading a less than perfect translation -- you wouldn't. In some ways, translation is one of the blindest items we buy (a pig in a poke -- translate that!). For example, if I get sick, I go to the doctor and if I don't get better, I try to find another doctor. The same with an auto mechanic. But we have no way of knowing if a translator has conveyed what's in the original.

Q Have you ever considered a translation a “better” book than the original?
I have had several authors tell me that. That raises a lot of issues about the nature of the process of translation as opposed to the process of writing itself. Aside from the major obvious difference, I suspect that translating a work is a more conscious process. I know that, when I've spoken with authors about their work, we have both been surprised that I often I know it better than they do, pick up connections they weren't aware of.

Translating, as I understand it, is a creative process. I have to live in a work, walk around in it, feel its dimensions, get into it. And to shift the metaphor, I have to feel that every single word is right. So, initially, I work on the leaves, then I get to the trees and from there to the forest.

So it's a tedious, self-conscious process that has to flow easily in the end. I argue that the translator has to be extremely humble and disappear into the text, so that the author says "that's what I wrote" and the reader doesn't know it's a translation.

Q What are the highlights for you of the process of translating a work of literature?
The greatest experiences I've had have been working very closely with authors. Knowing Peter Bieri was a great advantage, especially since, when I got into the novel, I recalled that he and I shared a love of detective fiction, which is an important part of the novel. Moreover, working together was absolute, sheer joy, based on mutual admiration and shared values.

So, to answer your question, yes, I think I got into what he meant. But that's been my experience with all my favorite works. I have to inhabit the work, walk around in it, see out of it. Indeed, as I work, I create images in my mind and translate from them. I hope you saw the scenes in Night Train. In the end, ironically, I know the work better than the author. Another experience with Peter was that, for a good part of it, I read the English aloud while he compared it with the German. Both of us were bowled over by that and found all sorts of connections neither of us knew were there.

Q I also wonder if it is important to have some personal experience with the place, theme, or the work’s central character(s) when translating a novel. Like you, Gregorious was a linguist, devoted to language and knowledgeable in several. Many of your translations are works in Hebrew. Was that helped by your very considerable experience living in Israel?
That is one of the fundamental problems of translation. Translation is not simply a matter of two dictionaries. Don't be surprised: I know many translators of repute, as it were, who claim that that's the essence of translation. The whole translating endeavor, as I see it, is understanding and conveying cultural differences; and that means not just knowing one, but two, cultures intimately to be able to find equivalents.

I think that one of the main attributes for a good translator (aside from humility) is the ability to play with language and not be afraid to push the boundaries of your own language. Walter Benjamin claims that one of the tasks of the translator is to stretch his own language.

And, finally, yes, I do consider translating an art. One of my basic principles is that sentences should dance on the page -- and that applies to literature, history, economics, philosophy and anything else I happen to be translating.

A Melancholy Egotism

Silence in October is the first novel Jens Christian Grondahl published in this country. It is a dreary tale of long, dense paragraphs. Nevertheless, its themes sometimes echo in my mind. I read it in two periods, separated by at least a month or two. It is the kind of book that easily lends itself to such a reading; in fact, it isn’t easy to take all that melancholy questioning without a break.

The questions Grondahl ponders are important, that is, they interest me and there are a great many of them, none of which are ever answered. The unexpected departure of the narrator’s (whose name we never learn) wife from their marriage of seventeen years is the central event around which everything else in the novel develops. And what develops is the narrator’s ruminations about the meaning of this event for his life, his marriage, his work (art historian), and the several other relationships that have come his way. That’s all but that’s a lot.

There is little story and not much action in the novel. Instead, reading Silence in October must be like what a psychotherapist of the non-directive persuasion must go through day after day listening to his patients unfold the perturbations of their emotional and mental life. The narrator does not know why his wife, Astrid, leaves or where she goes or if she will ever return. The only evidence he has are the charges she makes to their credit card which track her hotels and meals in Portugal where they had once gone together during better times.

We learn about their Marriage, although only from his perspective: “She was at once the woman I had wanted to leave and the woman I had gone to, and I was the man who had seen her alternatively as my salvation and my warden, as an unexpected, liberating lightness in my life and a burden, that chained me to the eternally grinding treadmill of days.”

We learn about the Silence that had come between them: “It became unnecessary to talk so much. After all, it was enough that we were there.” “Perhaps it didn’t matter, my being unable to think of anything to say to her. Words had never been what bound us together.” “…it occurred to me how much in life remains unspoken, in shadow.”

The narrator speaks often of the Repetition of their days together, how tedious they became, how exhausting and trivial they were. And while he spent all those years with Astrid, he realized that he never really Knew her: “I knew her as I had seen her in the thousands of days and nights we had spent together, but what of herself, as she was to herself.” “I thought about how close one can be and yet know nothing.”

And finally the narrator reflects on Solitude, the solitude when he and Astrid were together and the different kind of solitude after she leaves: “I was content in my solitude, completely absorbed in my book.” “…now I could finally be myself, far from other’s words and eyes, all their irrelevant stories and fruitless plans.”

Like the repetition in his life, these are the central themes the narrator mulls over and over throughout Silence in October. He circles around them, worries and raises questions about them from page one to page two hundred and ninety six tightly compacted, slowly paced pages. His musings are the stuff of a self-absorbed egotist who, in spite of all his introspective analysis, really doesn’t know himself, let alone anyone else.

Other than a few excursions to New York where he gathers information for his book on American painters, he never wanders far from these deliberations. He walks upon the beach with them, sits at his desk with them, confides them to no one, not even the woman he has an affair with in New York. You get the picture.

Where do the truths lie in this obsessive self-analysis? None is asserted in the novel. Perhaps, they reside only in the act of consideration itself. Yet it is only from a single perspective from which little in the way of self-knowledge can ever be expected.

E-Reading: More or Less?

I workout each day at the gym. More and more often now I see people who bring their Kindle with them and read with the thing while they are exercising. Some are simultaneously reading their e-book, listening to tunes on their iPod, and from time to time glancing up to watch the Food Channel on one of the overhead TVs. All of this makes life bearable, I suppose.

The other day, the person on the machine next to me was tinkering with their iPad. First it was YouTube, then the Times, then Pandora (ear phones in her ears) until I lost interest and picked up the pace a bit.

But not everyone has succumbed to the lure of these devices; there are still a few who I see reading a printed book as I snoop to find its title. Today I stopped to take a good look at one such reader only to discover it was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I should have known.

As for me, after listening to NPR for a while on my iPhone, I generally switch to the local rock station App and belt out a few tunes while I’m getting my heart beat up on the treadmill. Watching the TV depresses me unless they are showing a Red Sox game or Roger Federer playing tennis.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on how these new devices are changing reading habits. Confirming other reports I’ve heard, the article claims recent surveys indicate that people are reading more. At least that’s what the readers say they are doing

In one study 40% of digital readers reported they now read more than they did with printed books and in another study 55% of recent purchasers of Sony’s e-reader claimed they would be reading more books in the future.

The Journal article claims these findings contrast with the recent National Endowment of the Arts study reporting sharp declines in reading frequency especially among the young. However, this was a much larger, random sample investigation of individuals throughout the country. But like the more recent studies of e-book readers all of evidence in based on the self-reports of individual readers.

Are these findings believable? Can we be confident in what people report when they are interviewed by another person or fill out a questionnaire? There is good reason to believe that those who respond to these surveys overestimate the frequency of positive or highly valued behaviors such as, yes, reading.

Since the subjects are fully aware that reading is important, they are hesitant to say they aren’t doing much of it anymore. They are also aware they are in a study and pretty much know its hypothesis, so they are reluctant to say anything that might contradict it.

In turn, the experimenter may subtly frame the questions in such a way as to confirm the hypothesis or if the survey is taken in the presence of the subject, lead them to respond in a certain way. These influences are known as experimenter errors and biases, factors that must always be ruled out of any study in which they are plausible alternative accounts of the findings.

So are readers reading more on their new devices? In my mind it is still an open question. I also don’t know if they are reading as carefully, or as deeply, if you will, as they might have been doing before they began reading e-books. On the other hand, I think it is clear that e-readers are purchasing more books and, of course, downloading a great many free ones. But my hunch is they are by no means reading each and every one of them, at least from start to finish.

Reading Downtime

“I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can’t do anything anyway.” Toni Morrison

Let’s talk about reading. You read a great deal—you must read fast. I read less--I read slowly. But we both keep reading, one thing after another, day after day, month after month, books, articles, essays, papers, the Web, etc.

Isn’t this a little bit crazy? I wonder if it can be compared to eating, constant eating, one meal after another, never a pause to digest or savor. When it comes to books, isn’t it also a bit unfaithful? We read a book we cherish, we admire the author and the way the books was written, we love the story.

And yet no sooner have we finished, then we move on to the next book, the next story and writer that we love. We have become bookizers, after womanizers. Wouldn’t it be better if we stopped reading for a while, took a walk, or went to the beach to mull it all over?

Yes we write about it, blog about it but all the while we are writing about it, we are already into the next book, one after another, like spending the night with one mistress and the next night with another.

Is this what reading is about?

I thought about all this recently after finishing a long and melancholy reading of Silence in October by Jens Christian Grondahl. No sooner had I finished than I started to read Per Petterson’s latest novel, I Curse the River of Time.

I had to stop. Both Scandinavian novels are dark and gray and the days are damp, so full of turmoil and unsettling memories. I needed some sun, perhaps an Italian novel, perhaps simply a vacation from reading for a while.

Have you ever had this experience? The metaphor of digesting a rich meal is not inappropriate. You have a fine meal one night and the next morning you don’t feel like eating a thing for a week.

The other day I finished Nicole Krauss’s second novel, The History of Love. Quite frankly, all I wanted to do was come up for air. I like the way she writes so much. Maybe I like it too much. Maybe I like Nicole Krauss too much. Her first novel is Man Walks into Room. I will probably read it for the second time too.

Can one read too much, too much without a pause for reflection and review? Isn’t it like doing anything too much? After a strenuous workout, physical or otherwise, isn’t is it a good idea to rest for a while? Perhaps the Greeks were right: Everything in moderation.

Physiology professor Loren Frank put it this way in the Times yesterday, “Almost certainly downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long term memories.” He said that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

And yet some of us read two or three books at a time. How can we possibly read a really fine work of literature deeply and immerse ourselves in it when we are also reading two or three others at the same time?

I am not suggesting we read less, only that we slow down a bit. It is like the slow food movement. Take a break, a seventh inning stretch, read your book more slowly. Ruminate about the book you just finished, what does it all mean, is it important or not, review your notes if you took them, talk to your roommate about it, your cat if necessary, give it a second thought

OK. That’s enough on reading. Next time, we’ll talk about trigonometry.

Dear Colleague

“To be a writer is to have hope, and to a writer, no matter how old, hope is belief in one more work yet to be written, another book that is somehow the capstone or distillation of all that has been written before.”

This is how Yi-Fu Tuan begins the Introduction to Dear Colleague: Common and Uncommon Observations. In a way, isn’t it the hope of every person, writer or not, a hope to set off on one more path, another life, another place, one last adventure?

In Tuan’s case, as it was mine recently, he had just finished his autobiography and was searching for another work that would bring together his lifetime of observations and experiences. This is what he has done in Dear Colleague, an unusual book, something between a personal journal, set of fragments, and letter writing collection.

The volume has a rather curious origin. Remarking that “real” conversations at a research university are rare, Tuan began writing his reflections as short letters sent biweekly to his friends and colleagues. The letters were brief, most them short one or two paragraphs in length. In a way, they were not unlike present-day blogs.

In Dear Colleague Tuan has assembled a fair number of them under twenty topical headings. The topics have been arranged to follow a path that “leads from nature and human nature, through society and culture, geography (Tuan’s professional discipline at the University of Wisconsin), history, morality, and religion, to stages of life and a sense of ending.”

In the section Home, Rootedness & Place Tuan wrote, “I am reluctant to admit that mere physical environment can affect my mood. Samuel Johnson (1709-84) was likewise reluctant. “Change of place” should make much difference, for the true source of happiness or misery lies in ourselves, he opined. But then he remembered who said, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” It was Satan—the fallen but still defiant archangel in Milton’s Paradise Lost.”

One more from the section on Nature, “A human being can go blind, lose a limb or two, or a third of the brain, and yet in time adjust so well that these losses are barely missed. The same would seem to apply to external nature. Suppose for reasons of pollution and urban glare we can no longer see the stars. W.H. Auden, for one, honestly admits that he would learn to look at an empty sky and appreciate its “total dark sublime,” though this might take him a while."

Reading an unrelated set of fragments on a set of diverse topics may not be to everyone’s liking. But Tuan invites the reader to browse as you would in a bookstore. There’s nothing about his observations that command they be read in order. They can be dipped in and out of, skipping from comment to comment, independent of topic or order. He suggests his book might be enjoyed at the airport as you wait to board your flight. Given the conditions of most air travel these days, most travelers should be able to finish the book in one sitting.

Tuan also maintains an easy-to-read blog with his current and past “letters, “as well as links to his various publications. He concludes his Introduction by asking what reward is there in reading a book like Dear Colleague?

“Well,” he says, “they will get to know one person and his world better. It doesn’t sound like much, yet I think the effort worthwhile—as worthwhile as getting to know stock options, baseball, or a cat.”

Literary Memories

We forget so much. I forget so much of the books I read. I read every word, I think about the story and the ideas and then if I ask myself about a book I read five, eight or ten years, I can scarcely recall a thing. Where have my memories gone? I am continually intrigued by the question. Do I retain anything from my reading?

I asked myself that question again after reading Nicole Krauss’s novel The History of Love. I first read the novel in 2005 and again this year. I duly made notes and cited passages in my commonplace book after both readings. But in contrast to the first, I wrote something about the novel this year. Does that make a difference? I must remember to ask myself about Krauss’s novel five years from now.

I saved 21 passages the first time I read the book, compared to 30 when I read it this year. What does that mean? Am I reading more carefully? Has this business of collecting passages gotten the better of me? Or am I becoming more and more like Leo Gursky? Probably all three.

Eight of the passages I saved this year were also saved when I read the book initially. They were:

Put a fool in front of the window and you’ll get a Spinoza

…to live in an undescribed world was too lonely

…the insoluble contradiction of being animals cursed with self-reflection, and moral beings cursed with animal instincts.

We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.

I live alone now, which doesn’t bother me. Or maybe just a little.

You also asked what I do…Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I’m not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.

He was no longer in the business of making friendships.

…the whose sense of time and history in the book is very loose.

These overlapping selections please me a bit. They reflect a certain consistency in my behavior, my identity, if you will, something I am never sure is the same from one day to the next. It may also reflect the difficulty, indeed the near impossibility of changing behavior. William Salter expressed this well:

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.

I read a lot, probably too much. Book after book each year, articles and essays, the newspaper, literary journals, and more. How can one remember all of that? Surely long term memory has its limits. Thinks get jumbled up, sent to ever more remote synapses.

When I come across a passage I copied the first time around, I might be able to recognize it as something familiar. But recognition is not recall or retrieval. Still something must be left from the books we read—somewhere—a certain residue, perhaps organized in some fashion unique to each reader or just as likely randomly scattered about the great storehouse. No doubt they are also mixed up and combined in ways completely unknown to each of us--inaccessible, unavailable, irretrievable memories.

In his American Scholar essay, Reading in the Digital Age, Sven Birkerts has also grappled with this question. He puts it this way, “You can shine the interrogation lamp in my face and ask me to describe Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus and I will fail miserably, even though I have listed it as one of the novels I most admire. But I know that traces of its intelligence are in me, that I can, depending on the prompt, call up scenes from that novel in bright, unexpected flashes: it has not vanished completely."