The Street Sweeper

…to produce a written account of the destruction of European Jewry down to the last detail and to bury it in the hope that it would survive…This was what kept them going—the need to tell what would otherwise have been unimaginable. Elliot Perlman

I usually find a character or situation that mirrors to some degree my life in the novels that mean most to me. That is one of the reasons I found Elliot Perlman’s latest novel, The Street Sweeper, such an engrossing work of fiction.

I can only touch on one or two of the several themes coursing in and out of this novel—the nature of history, memory, and racism in America, the Holocaust, friendship, and the importance of communication. And chance. Chance is what brings the two main characters together and is the source of each of these themes.

A chance encounter between two individuals is not a totally random event. Rather it is the intersection of their separate, fully determined paths that is fortuitous. Had the chance encounter not occurred, their lives would have taken entirely different paths. And Lamont Williams and Adam Zignelik would have never met on the pages of The Street Sweeper.

Lamont Williams is an African-American ex-con, having been imprisoned for a robbery he never committed but in which by chance he became involved. Lamont has a probationary “Building Services” job at a New York Hospital and while making his rounds one day fortuitously befriends, Henryk Mandelbrot, a Holocaust survivor. It is Henryk who tells Lamont everything he experienced while he was in Auschwitz. He wants him to remember all of it.

“Tell everyone what happened here. Tell everyone what happened here.” This sentence is repeated over and over again throughout this sprawling narrative.

Adam Zignelik is a Jewish about-to-be ex-history professor at Columbia as a result of his meager publication record. As he is searching for a new direction to his career, he learns about a professor in Illinois, Henry Border, who interviewed Holocaust survivors in displaced person camps and, like Mandelbrot, conveyed detailed accounts of the horrors they experienced.

This discovery takes Adam on a series of weekend commutes to Chicago where he begins listening to the recordings made by Border. Meanwhile, Lamont begins listening to Mandelbort’s accounts of his unbearable Sonderkommando “job” in Auschwitz.

“I had no choice if I was to keep living. None of us had a choice. It was live in this hell, a world like no human being had every known before, or not live at all.”

And later Lamont asks Mandelbrot: “You wanted to survive to get the story out.” He replies: “Yes, for what other reasons was there to live.”

After Mandelbrot has unfolded his tale of survival to Lamont, one that is perhaps the most painful “fictional” account of Auschwitz I have ever read, and Adam has grasped the equally unbearable tales revealed in Border’s recordings, their paths ultimately intersect.

This occurs as a result of Adam’s role in the overturning of an injustice done to Lamont while working at the hospital. In this way, the novel weaves together the parallel situations of blacks in America and the Jews throughout Europe during the Holocaust.

The first sentence of The Street Sweeper is: “Memory is a willful dog. It won’t be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule all its own that you can never know.”

The theme is repeated on the last pages of the novel: “What is memory? It is the storage, the retention and the recall of the constituents, gross and nuanced of information. How is it called upon? A certain protein in the brain, an enzyme, acts upon one neuron after another in rapid sequence as if to light them up…each neuron holds some pixel, some datum and if even one is lost, the sequence is interrupted. Then you have started to forget.”

Perlman does not want us to forget these events, they need to be passed on from one generation to another in all the ways this is possible.

The last sentence of this thoroughly absorbing novel, one that I have only been able to mention of a fraction of, is: “Tell everyone what happened here.”

Leonardo Live

Last weekend, I flew to London to see the once-in-a-lifetime National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci exhibition. I was invited by the irrepressible Tim Marlow and the charming Mariella Frostrup, both well known to British art critics. I found it impossible to refuse their extraordinary invitation.

They escorted me around the gallery, spoke eloquently and enthusiastically about each of the Leonardo paintings and introduced me to several knowledgeable art historians who in one way or another participated in the creation of this exhibition.

As a novice in the world of art appreciation, I was blown over by all that I learned--the history of each painting, Leonardo’s life in Florence and Milan, his patrons and students, and the difficult business of restoring his works, as well as authenticating them.

The truth must be told. I did not fly to London last weekend. I do not know Marlow or Frostrup. And it has been over 30 years since I last stepped foot in the National Gallery.

But I did attend and indeed relish going to the theater to view a live video broadcast of the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition that has been presented as a one-time only showing in cinemas across the United Kingdom and in several cities in this country.

However, everything I said about the on-screen presentation is true. For me, sitting quietly in the theater, being informed by these learned scholars and listening to the breezy English television hosts, Marlow and Frostrup, describe in detail each painting was a student’s delight.

I imagine anyone with knowledge of Leonardo’s paintings might have plenty of reasons to discourse on the weaknesses of the presentation. That was definitely true of Roberta Smith’s critique in the Times.

She notes that “Leonardo Live” was perhaps the first instance of the digital format applied to an art exhibition. However, “Thankful as I am to have an inkling of what the Leonardo show was like, I can’t say that it is entirely a promising debut.”

Smith finds fault with the notion that viewing a painting on film “is as good as, if not better than seeing it in the flesh, even in the context of a crowded exhibition, is bizarre.” Her claim must be taken seriously. Yet, for me the experience was far more revealing than it would have been in person. I might note the background music, keyed to each painting, didn’t hurt either.

I was also far more engaged in the works than I usually am at museum exhibition. The commentaries of the hosts and various scholars were largely responsible, as were the detailed close-ups and background historical scenes made possible by the video presentation. I was able to see the gradual evolution of the restored paintings explained by the hosts and the experts they were interviewing.

I suspect that variations on how one experiences such a presentation are largely a function of their prior knowledge of art history. Since my background in this area is practically nil, I found the movie much more immediate and enlightening than I surely would have had by viewing the paintings in-person.

Here is a short preview of the exhibition.

The Courage to Care II

What compelled them to disregard danger and torture—even death—and choose humanity? What moved them to put their lives in jeopardy for the sake of saving one Jewish child, one Jewish mother?

Always there is the question of why, why did the rescuers act the way they did, and why were there so few. As they recounted their experiences, the majority struggled to understand what they did given the enormous risks they were taking. Here is how some of them answered:

Odette Myers (France)
The rescuers usually say, “It was nothing. Why all the fuss? It was the natural thing.”
She speculates that because the rescuers were not so formally educated, they had to do their own thinking and that led them to respond quickly without deliberating about ethical principles.

Max Rothschild (Netherlands)
“…why did I do it? And I don’t let anybody step on anybody else’s toes. I have no philosophy. I don’t belong to a church. But when I see injustice done, I do something about it.”

Herman Graebe (Poland)
“I cannot explain exactly why or how I did these things, but I believe that my mother’s influence on me when I was a child has a lot to do with it….She said, take people as they come, not by profession, not by religion, but by what they are as persons.”

Johtje Vos (Netherlands)
“We were hiding 36 people, 32 Jews, and four others who also were being sought by the Gestapo. We had made a tunnel underground from our house to a nature reservation and when we got a warning or had an inkling that the village was surrounded, they all went in there.…we did it because we believed it was the right thing to do.”

Marion Pritchard (Netherlands)
“It did not occur to me to do anything other than what I did…I think you have a responsibility to yourself to behave decently. We all have memories of times we should have done something and didn’t. And it gets in the way the rest of your life.”

Gaby Cohen (France)
“I do not have a scientific answer for why those who helped did it. I have asked myself that question over and over. For those of us who were young Jewish people at the time, it is not difficult to give an answer as to why we took the risks. We young Jews felt that it was our duty to help the helpless, to help those who were even in more danger than we were. But for the Catholic and Protestant families who took risks to help our children, it is not so easy for me to answer why. …What we know is that many people did it, they helped, even though we cannot say why.”

John Weidner (France)
“I only knew what I had to do, what my conscience and ethics compelled me to do. And I can tell you that I found a lot of people in all kinds of places---small people, of low social position; big people of high social condition; educated and uneducated—who were ready to help because they had pity and love and compassion in their hearts, and who thought, “It is my duty to help the Jews.”

These are the straightforward answers of a small sample of rescuers. While their behavior was of large significance, the reasons they offer for doing so seem nothing out of the ordinary. Of course, they were far more than that.

In an essay at the conclusion of The Courage to Care, Elie Wiesel poses the reverse question, Why were there so few rescuers? He asks what happened to those well-educated liberals and humanists who write eloquently about injustice and the many Nazi collaborators? “Why did they choose to remain insensitive to the plight, the tragedy, the murder of Jewish men and women and children?”

He has no answer. The question is disturbing and difficult and there are no accounts in this volume that give any hints as to what motivated their behavior. A companion volume of the non-rescuers and collaborators would be instructive.

The Courage to Care I

In those times there was a darkness everywhere…all the gates of compassion seemed to have been closed. The killer killed and the Jews died and the outside world adopted an attitude of either complicity or of indifference. Only a few had the courage to care.
Elie Wiesel

Imagine for a moment you are living in Nazi occupied Paris. One night an old friend comes knocking at your door. She is nervous, pale and rather emaciated. She is wearing a yellow star on her coat. Your husband is asleep, as are your three young children.

The person whispers in a pleading voice: “Can you hide me and my two boys for a few days? The Nazis are about to roundup of all the Jews in Paris.”

What do you do? Do you really have any idea? Can you imagine the risks involved, to you, and everyone in your family, that if you are caught, each of you will probably be shot or taken away to be tortured and then, if you survive the beatings, shipped off to Auschwitz in a cattle car, where your fate will be unspeakable?

The Courage to Care, edited by Carol Rittner & Sondra Meyers, recounts the experience of individuals throughout Europe who, in spite of these risks, did rescue and protect Jewish individuals in Europe during World War II. They did this by hiding, feeding, and helping them to move to a safer place that in many instances meant another country.

Each of the rescuers describes, in their own words their experience in aiding these Jewish men, women and children. All told, it is currently estimated that over 23,000 individuals can be identified as rescuers. They came from countries throughout Europe, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, France, Bulgaria, Poland, and even Germany.

It is impossible to estimate the number of Jews who were saved during the Holocaust; we know how many were not. The Courage to Care documents the story of 20 of these individuals. Portions of the book are included in the award winning film, A Courage to Care that I often showed in my social psychology class when we were discussing bystander intervention in crisis situations.

Odette Myers and her mother were saved by the Catholic concierge of the apartment building in Paris where they lived. She awoke them in the early morning of July 1942 when she heard the Nazis were beginning to round up over 13,000 stateless Jews. She hid them in a broom closet in her apartment and convinced the Gestapo agents the family had gone to their country home. After the Germans left, her husband, a member of the resistance, walked with them to the Metro where another member of the resistance took them to a hiding place in the country.

The experience of John Weidner of France was one of the most detailed of the accounts and, in several respects, representative of the majority of the others. While he wanted to help Jewish individuals in the Netherlands where he was originally from, he admitted that initially he had no idea what to do.

However, he lived close to the French-Swiss border and was familiar with several routes between the two countries. Eventually with the help of others, including his family and friends, he established a network, known as the Dutch-Paris network, that brought Jews from the Netherlands to Belgium then through France, and on to Geneva.

He described how difficult this was—it was extremely perilous to help Jews, he had to find safe places along the route, and ways to feed them, arrange for false papers and find money to pay for their papers and food. Above all he had to trust the people who were part of his group, as well as the Jews, who if caught and tortured, might reveal the names and addresses that would put all of them in danger.

One of his agents was eventually arrested and wasn’t able to hold up under the torture, resulting in the capture of nearly 300 members of his group who were deported to Nazi concentration camps. Forty, including his sister, never came back.

He concludes that the most important thing he learned was “…that you can have all kinds of theories but if you do not have love in action, those theories and creeds do not mean anything at all.”

On Letter Writing

If we stop writing letters, who will keep our history or dare venture upon a biography?
Roger Angell

Before me sits a three page, typed letter plus an essay the writer included in her mailing. I have never met this person and it is unlikely I ever will, as she lives on the other side of the country in a remote New England village and is no longer doing any traveling. I am about to write a reply, quite similar in kind and no doubt will include one or two recent pieces I’ve written.

We have been sending letters back and forth like this for over five years. We discuss the books we are reading and mention a few notable passages from them. We discuss our writings and recent reflections on all matter of things. Rarely do we talk much about ourselves, although inevitably that intrudes. The letters are pretty serious stuff.

In her latest letter, she discusses Proust’s views on the suffering involved in writing a novel, a new book she is writing, and what Sholem Aleichem said about wisdom. “Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.” etc.

I “met” the letter writer while conducting a survey of individuals who keep a commonplace book. Her returned questionnaire was the most stimulating and detailed of any in the sample. There were many issues I wanted to know more about and I was led to write her a letter in reply.

We have maintained our correspondence ever since. She does not use e-mail, believes it leads to much mischief and our friendship is not of the sort that calls forth a telephone call on occasion. Besides, she is dedicated to preserving the fine and lost art of letter writing, a practice she often refers to as “one of the good old ways.”

I learn a great deal from her musings. Not long ago I sent her a book I had written. Because her eyesight is gradually failing, she asked her husband to read a few pages to her each evening. After finishing the volume, she wrote to me:

Your book, [her husband] says, ought to be read by every thinking person on the planet. I enthusiastically agree…Since completing the reading of A Literary Collage, one of us still asks the other, “Do you miss reading Katzev’s book?” Invariably the answer is a wistful Yes.

This amazed me. Never before have I heard anything like it. I have few readers anyway, but this! This was surely the most remarkable.

I miss the days when there was a personal letter or two in my mailbox every day. Don’t you feel the same? In the belief that it would be nice to get a letter in the mailbox once in a while, the literary website, “The Rumpus” recently announced a subscription ($5 a month) which will send a “author-penned letter a week, delivered to mailboxes rather than inboxes.”

The founder of the notion said: “I got this urge to get back to sending paper letters and I also knew a lot of authors who I knew would be really excited about it.” As of last month the following letter-writers have agreed to participate—Dave Eggers, Stephen Elliott, Nick Flynn, Margaret Cho, Tao Lin and Jonathan Ames.

Ever since I heard about the project I have been betwixt and between about taking out a subscription. It isn’t the $5. Rather, it just seems a bit phony. I don’t know any of these writers and of course they don’t know me, so there’s little common ground between us.

For now I’ve concluded I am not that desperate for a letter in the mailbox. Besides, I have the pleasure of waiting for the next gem from my letter-writing friend in the East.

Simone Weil

I can, therefore I am. From the moment that I act, I make myself exist…What I am is defined by what I can do. Simone Weil

The life of Simone Weil has always been a test to me, a test to translate my beliefs into action, one that I have rarely met. During these times when people everywhere are putting their life on the line, I wanted reread Francine Du Plessix Gray’s Simone Weil, one of the Penguin Lives series of short biographies.

I was reminded what a complex person she was, how gifted she was, her struggles to understand the poor and make life easier for them and her various efforts to come to grips with philosophical and spiritual issues. And in each of these endeavors to put whatever conclusions she was led to into practice.

Simone Weil was born into a prosperous, educated family of secular Jews in Paris. Both she and her brother Andre were childhood prodigies. Simone finished first in the entrance examination for the elite Ecole Normale Superieure, graduating to become a professor of philosophy and a teacher in a series of French towns.

She moved from school to school primarily because the school administrators objected to her participation in labor protests. She lived with a family in each town and, in spite of her life-long battle with migraines, began living as consistently as she knew how with her beliefs.

In each of the homes where she lived, she spent her evenings teaching the children of the family that hosted her and helping them with their homework.

At every chance, she also taught classes to the workers in the factories in the towns she inhabited.

At various times, she took a leave of absence from her teaching position to work as a laborer in a factory. In one year it was at an electrical parts manufacturer, then later, in two different automobile factories.

She believed that labor work is the truest road to self-knowledge and understanding the plight of the working class, whose suffering became perhaps the central theme of her life and, as Gray notes, “her strong tendency to cultivate her own.” Later she writes:

“But she was convinced that hard physical work was essential for an intellectual, lest the mind become all too taken with itself, all too removed from the concrete realities of everyday life, the burdens that rest upon the overwhelming majority of the earth’s population.”

With every farm family with whom she lived, Weil helped them during the harvest season, milking the cows in the early morning, peeling the vegetables, and cleaning up the barns.

In 1936 she fought in the Spanish Civil War as part of anti-fascist militia group from France. It was there that she badly burned herself and left Spain to recuperate in Assisi Italy where she claims she had the first of several subsequent mystical experiences that led to a difficult and ambivalent relationship with Catholicism.

During World War II, she joined the French Resistance until she and her parents were able to flee France for the United States. Not long after, she eventually returned to London where she joined the Free French group. While in London, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanitarium.

However, as always, even when she was a child, she refused to eat scarcely anything in the belief that it was wrong to eat more than then the overwhelming majority of the earth’s population, as well as her countrymen who struggled to survive in occupied France.

Weil’s condition quickly deteriorated and she died in 1943 at the age of 34. The coroner reports said, “the deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat…”

Philosopher, teacher, writer, laborer, activist, religious eclectic, a rich and paradoxical life, always questioning, worrying about the poor and their suffering and above all trying to do something about it, even if meant suffering herself, and in the end tragic.

In writing about Weil, T. S. Eliot characterized her as a “…mind of occasional flashes of inspiration…personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.”

Moneyball

The word “sabermetrics” refers to the application of statistical analysis to predict and compare the performance of individual baseball players. It is the acronym of the Society for American Baseball Research. Even though I am a lifetime baseball fan and a Founding Father of the exclusive Red Sox Nation, I had never heard of the term before I saw “Moneyball,” the film based on Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.

Lewis claims that baseball is unfair in the sense that money rules, that teams with the most economic clout attract the “best” players since they can offer them outrageous salaries. In contrast, the teams that are least successful have with far less financial resources to pay their players. For better or worse, talent seems to flow in the direction of cash.

But what is talent? That is the question sabermetrics addresses. According to Lewis and those voiced by the characters in the film, predictions of player success made by baseball scouts and other insiders are flawed because they are based on subjective views of factors that have little relationship to empirical measures of player performance.

The film recounts the tale of the Oakland Athletics beginning in 2001 when they almost beat the Yankee’s in the American League playoff series. In the following year, the Athletics spent $42 million on player salaries while the Yankees had a $125 million payroll. The Athletics began that season without the three best players on their 2001 team by loosing their first 11games.

At this point the Athletics general manager, Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, realizes he and his scouts are not asking the right questions. In a timely meeting with a recent Yale graduate in economics, Peter Brand, played by the perfectly cast nerdy-looking Jonah Hill, he is introduced to the sabermetric approach to building a successful baseball team.

Brand persuades him that slugging and on-base percentage measures are far more effective than conventional offensive measures of batting average, runs batted in and stolen bases. Sabermetrics also analyzes performance measures with a rigorous set of equations unlike the more intuitive, “clinical” methods usually employed by baseball insiders and scouts. In addition, players scoring well on the basis of a sabermetrics assessment are much cheaper to sign than those selected by traditional methods.

Once Beane began hiring players on the basis of this statistical analysis, the Athletics began to win games. Although they didn’t win the World Series in 2002, loosing in the playoff series after finishing first place in the American League Western Division, they did win 20 straight games, a League record of successive wins that stands to this day.

Aside from the intelligence and power of the film, the issue it tackles has widespread implications. What is the most effective method of predicting behavior? The standard view holds that personal experience, clinical judgment, sometimes called instinct or intuition combined in some unorganized fashion and subject to all the biases and errors that combinatory methods often make, is the most effective.

In contrast, the statistical approach, empirical or evidence-based approach, combined on a fixed quantitative basis, is the most effective. Assumptions are built into the statistical models, yes, but they are adhered to consistently and can be changed in the light of further evidence.

The relative merits of these differing approaches have been compared in many fields—medicine, psychotherapy, correctional practices, and baseball to name but a few. The debate has gone on for years in spite of the fact that research has reliably shown that statistical decision making out performs clinical judgment. It isn’t perfect, but it clearly reduces the risk of error. Yet, because it challenges many long-standing practices, it is often strongly resisted.

“Moneyball” shows us how useful statistical methods applied to the prediction of baseball player success allowed the Oakland Athletics to achieve winning seasons despite the burden of severely limited player budgets. In fact, for years, the Athletics ranked first among all major league teams is dollars spent per games won. Can’t beat the facts, can you?

On Book Reviewing

If you can’t say something nice, skip the nonsense about not saying anything and pursue a career in book reviews. Frank Santo

A person has written a review of the book I’m currently reading. His review is published is the august New York Times Sunday Book Review. He considers the book simple-minded, amateurish, silly, repetitious, and, as a novel, “deadly frivolous.” Meanwhile, I am enjoying it tremendously.

Am I going to stop reading it? Do I feel the least bit regretful about purchasing the book, a not-inexpensive hardbound version of over 600 pages? After reading the review, is the book any less appealing? In answer to all three questions, a clear No.

I ask myself what then is the purpose of a book review. Is it important for the reviewer to speak ill of a book that isn’t liked, praise it if it is liked, or quite simply try to describe what the book is about so a potential reader can determine if it is one they wish to read?

The book is The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman. Why did I buy it? I greatly enjoyed Perlman’s previous novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity. In fact I thought it was of the best books I have read recently. I have also enjoyed some of his short stories. I am always hungry for a novel that means something to me and so I had good reasons for believing Perlman’s new novel would be one of those. It is.

I write about some of the books I’m reading and it is rare that I finish a book that I don’t like. In reviewing those I finish, I am always looking for what it has done right, for what keeps me reading it, and why I felt I wanted to write about it. I avoid writing about books I didn’t like, for a know full well that those that bore me to death will inevitably move others to relish.

Recently Phillip Roth commented that he doesn’t read fiction these days, saying he has “wised up.” While I seriously doubt that’s true and that Roth, as is his manner, is having fun with the interviewer, I do know more and more commentators are expressing doubts about the value of reading and writing fiction any more.

In his essay, “Why Write Novels at All” in the Times a few weeks ago, Garth Hallberg points to Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot as offering a widely voiced answer. In describing the heroine’s pleasure in reading Barthes’s Lover’s Discourse. Eugenides writes:

“It wasn’t only this writing that seemed beautiful…What made Madeleine sit up in bed was something closer to the reason she read books in the first place….Here was a sign that she wasn’t alone.”

How often we have heard that before--we read novels and perhaps, also writers write them, because they makes us feel less lonely. Is that why you read fiction?

Does reading in fact reduce loneliness? I know of no evidence that it does. While I cherish a fine novel and while it often moves me greatly, it has absolutely no effect on whatever sense of loneliness I may be feeling at the time.

What I am seeking in reading fiction and what I hope writers are trying to impart to readers is a deeper understanding of contemporary issues, those truths that only fiction seems able to provide, and a humane description of the thoughts and emotions of other people as they meet the dilemmas that confront them.

This is a rich order, one that only the finest novels achieve. And I confess that The Street Sweeper comes close to meeting, in spite of its complexity and lengthy digressions, and the comments of a displeased Times reviewer.

Wislawa Szymborska

In 1996 Wislawa Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before then, I had never heard of her. Not long after, I started reading her poems. They were so unlike most contemporary poetry in one key respect—I could understand them.

They were also smart, uncomplicated and perceptive. Her poems created larger meanings out of simple things—a chair, a tree, and what she called the “daily bustle.” Szymborska died last week at the age of 88.

She dreaded the increasing popularity that followed the Nobel award, preferring instead to live and write in solitude. In 2002 she said:

“Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.”

She continued: “For the last few years my favourite phrase has been I don’t know. I’ve reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don’t know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.”

In October of 2010 I posted one of her poems. The poem, like so many others that she has written, lingers. In memory of Szymborska, here is the poem that I discovered at the end of Julie Orringer’s remarkable novel The Invisible Bridge—an epic tale of three brothers trying to survive during the Holocaust in Hungary.

It is a long novel that drew me in from the fist sentence and would not let me out for a full 600 pages. The following passage occurs in the novel:

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

And here is Szymborska’s poem that appeared in her collection, View With a Grain of Sand:

Any Case

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

A Life of Learning

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.
Keith Thomas The Fifth British Academy Lecture November 20, 2001.

Sometimes I read about a person or situation that cuts through the endless distractions of life and reminds me what a life of learning can be. This was my reaction in reading an interview with George Steiner that appeared at the English Language version of PressEurop as last year drew to a close.

Steiner is an always-thoughtful writer whose knowledge of history, literature and the arts reflects a lifetime of scholarship and serious reflection. He has been described by A.S. Byant as a “…Renaissance man…a European metaphysician with an instinct for the driving ideas of our time.”

Here is what he spoke about during the interview:

• Close to 80 million, that’s 80,000,000 human beings were killed between 1914 and 1945 in Europe through “wars, deportations, concentration camps, famines and bombardments.” He confesses he is amazed that Europe continues to exist.

• His life has been inspired by a rabbi who said, “Truth is always in exile.”

• Steiner finds contemporary science increasingly inaccessible to most individuals. I even find much of the science of psychology, the one I studied and taught for most of my life, is completely inaccessible to me now.

• He has struggled all his life to understand the sources of creative thinking and has written a book, Grammars of Creation, to try to understand it. “But at the end of my life, I still don’t.” I suspect it will always remain a mystery.

• He asks the reader to imagine a world where neuro-chemistry, could explain Mozart. He says it is conceivable and finds it frightening.

• He worries a great deal about the fate of modern refugees. In a recent speech to members of the German government, he concluded, “Ladies and Gentleman, all the stars are now turning yellow.”

• He also worries about the new world of technology as he calls it, and believes it has significantly changed the experience of reading literature.

• Times of silence have also been seriously affected. “Silence has become a huge luxury. People are living in a constant din…Young people are afraid of silence. What will become of serious and difficult reading? Is it possible to read Plato while wearing a Walkman?” Does anyone read Plato these days?

• He finds contemporary literature in serious disrepair. “Literature has chosen the domain of small scale personal relationships, and no longer deals with great metaphysical themes.” When was the last time you read a philosophical novel?

• The study of Jewish intellectual history and passion for art in the broadest sense has been the central themes of his life. “I want to stay close to the Shoah, in a place where I can speak my four languages. They are my escape, my greatest joy and pleasure.”

Revisiting Writing

To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason.

That was the first blog post of Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and often-jailed dissident. He wrote that sentence as he was first learning to type and had little experience of writing.

I am thoroughly in agreement with Weiwei. Writing is all about expressing yourself. When I read something or when an idea comes to mind, the first thing I want to do is write something about it. Writing clarifies and completes the notion in a way that speaking doesn’t. It is also a catalyst for other ideas and making contact with the snippets that are hidden away in the folders of my laptop..

“Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one tamped with your personality.” Robert Darton

I find my voice in writing, not speaking. It is all in the fingers, not the vocal chords. How strange. I don’t know what it is called. But I get into this mood while writing and it stays with me until the end. Usually it is when I write in the third person, present or past tense. This separates the words from myself and, thereby, makes them less personal. It is a kind of ironic, jesting, voice that I sometimes find in the works of Coetzee.

There are times when I am reading a novel or story when I fall into its mood and its words and the way they are put together so that I begin to think and write like the people in the story. I mimic them in both spirit and tone. I think about my life from their perspective and take on their ways of expressing it.

This happened to me while reading Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed and I did nothing to push it away. The same happened recently in reading some of the stories in Don DeLillo’s recent The Angel Esmeralda.

It is how the characters in a film sometimes affect me. I come out of the theater and I am one of them. It is a strange experience and while it never lasts long after a film, it tends to last quite a bit longer while reading a book, especially a lengthy one.

Is this how we are influenced by the arts? Do their effects linger even when we aren’t aware of them? Perhaps we become the people in the book or the film in ways that are subtle and beyond our comprehension.

Ideas I didn’t know I had within me emerge when I’m writing. They arrive in the writing, not before. The words simply appear on the page. Afterwards, I think, that cannot be me. Hemingway described the experience. "The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it."

For me it all boils down to composing a sensible, worthwhile page or so once in a while. The pleasure is being able to do that. It is like working out; writing gives me a setting to work out my mind.

I used to think that I write primarily for myself, to try to compose something clearly and well thought out, even smart. I thought I didn’t have any readers in mind, as few as there are, but only to meet whatever standard I set for myself.

But now I wonder. Maybe I’m writing to converse, to make contact with another person even though the person is never there or replies. Nicole Krauss wrote, "I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely."

Maybe that’s what I’m doing too, nowhere near as well as Krauss, but still because the world is a pretty lonely place.

Winter

The weather made her feel as if there was no point to life: whether you worked hard didn’t matter, whether you found someone to love didn’t matter, because even if you worked hard and found someone to love, a day like this would come, when a strange damp coolness seeped in through the windowpanes and seeped in through you, make you see that everything was meaningless. Brian Morton The Dylanist

Winter, the bane of my life. The dreaded season. A time to escape, to go underground. And yet for Adam Gopnik it is a season to love, one of serenity and of all things “warmth.” In his new book, Winter: Five Windows on the Season, he writes about this season in an imaginative way.

“My subject is the new feelings winter has provoked in men and women of those modern times: fear, joy exhilaration, magnetic appeal and mysterious attraction. Since to be modern is to let imagination and invention do a lot of the work once done by tradition and ritual.”

The book was originally presented in a series of informal evening talks with a group of Gopnik’s friends and then as the more formal Massey Lecture Series, a Canadian Broadcasting Company radio forum to address important contemporary issues or as a reviewer put it, “a Stanley Cup final for the mind.”

The published version of Gopnik’s broadcasts consists of five chapters, each devoted to a different aspect of winter

• Romantic Winter--musical, literary, and artistic depictions

• Radical Winter--places of extreme winter, the polar expeditions (North and South)

• Recuperative Winter--the winter holidays, Christmas, the carols, Dickens

• Recreational Winter--winter sports, hockey (The Montreal Canadians and ice-skating

• Remembering Winter—personal recollections of snowstorms, school closings, and days by the fire with a good book

“Joy,” “appeal,” “attraction.” I am thinking to myself how can anyone feel like this about winter. My feelings are precisely the opposite. But I was raised in Los Angeles, where winter can be as warm as summer. That may be one possible reason for our differences.

What struck me most about Winter was how happy Gopnik says he is then. “Gray skies and December lights are my idea of secret joy.”“…a season long seen as a sign of nature’s withdrawal from grace, has become for us a time of human warmth.”

And “by us” Gopnik refers to those who live and have been raised, as he was, in Canada (Montreal) and to his family that, like most families are drawn together inside their homes when the weather outside is bitterly cold and icy.

Gopnik writes: "I love winter, I love snow, I love blizzards. I love the way it transforms an ordinary scene." How fortunate, I think to myself as I sit at my desk shivering.

I am done in by the winter. It virtually immobilizes me. I see men and women outside walking without a cap, bald men, men who have shaved their head. How can they do that? Do they eat more, have different genes, or are they simply braver? My ambition is to delete winter from my life.

After I read the book, I thought why not do the same for summer, the season I love, the joy of my life, a time to embrace not flee. How writers and artists depict summer, the place to be (Italy), the sports (baseball), the holidays (fireworks), swimming at Zuma Beach. Summer—Five Windows on the Season. Look for it soon at your favorite bookstore.

The Agony of Watching Roger Federer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"If there are no facts, substitute something lyrical"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Barbarian Nurseries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Jew in the Northwest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Placebo Effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Are The 1%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OCCUPY NOTEBOOKS!

Life in a Fishbowl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maphead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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