A Bookstore Like No Other

"Who says the traditional bookshop is dead? In this age of chain superstores and online selling, it often seems that the days of the old-style independent dealer are numbered. But one American bookseller, at least, refuses to believe that." The Independent (London), September 6, 1998

I went to Powell’s bookstore on the weekend and was floored by the number of people there. Yes, it was a rainy afternoon in Portland, Oregon. Perfectly normal day. And it was the day before Valentine’s Day but I can’t imagine that many booklovers were giving their lover a book. And they don’t sell candy at Powell’s. What they sell is an incredible number of new and used books.

There was not a free table in the room where you can get coffee and read for a while. Elsewhere the aisles were filled with serious looking people searching intently for their next acquisition. Many devoted readers were sitting on the floor, pouring over the books they had pulled from the shelf.

Upstairs a large group had gathered for a poetry reading. There were long lines at the two checkout stands, one upstairs on the main floor, the other downstairs on the lower level. It just felt really good to be there on that a dreary Saturday afternoon. And whenever I walk into Powell’s when it is as jammed as it was that day, I break out in a big smile.

Let me tell you a little about Powell’s that many claim is the world’s largest bookstore. I remember when it opened in a run-down warehouse and sold only used books, mostly beat--up paperbacks. Then one day they started to sell new books. After that, the store seem to take off. It now occupies a full block at that same location in a part of town that has become rather gentrified of late.

But still the store has that same dusty-musty warehouse feeling and is but one of several other branches—a couple of stores at the airport, a technical bookstore a down the street a ways, one in the suburbs, and two on the other side of town, one of which specializes in books for home and garden. It also has a widely visited Web site that I am sure is a major source of its revenue. And it has become a must-visit for the increasing number of travelers who come to Portland. No doubt many come primarily to stock up on books at Powell’s.

Powell’s has nine rooms on four floors of one city block. It seems immense. Each room is known by a different color—go to the green and blue rooms for literature, reference, and poetry, the gold room for mysteries and science fiction, the orange room for cooking, crafts, and gardening, the red room for young readers, games and sciences, the purple room for social sciences, history and ethnic studies, the red room for religion, travel and foreign language, and the pearl room for art, drama, music and dance.

During a period when one bookstore after another is closing and when it is reported that two bookstores close every week in England, even Powell’s has been affected by the current economic crisis. Sales have declined somewhat perhaps most notably in online store purchases and plans to expand the store by adding yet a new floor, have been abandoned. I confess, you’d never imagine that was possible after visiting last Saturday afternoon and no doubt the day after either.

It is easy to get lost in Powell’s and I have a hunch more than one booklover has ended up spending the night there after the store had closed. Indeed, as it says on the stores brochure, The City of Books, “Once you visit you won’t want to leave.”

To those of you who fear for the future of the book, take heart, and come to Powell’s any weekend afternoon. Your fears will vanish the moment you walk in the door.

Presidential Commonplace Books

On President’s Day this year, I was led to wonder about the commonplace book activity of any past or present U.S. Presidents. We know a little about the reading habits of Presidents—Obama was recently seen with a copy of Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World and on another occasion clutching a copy of Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland, while Clinton was known as a voracious reader.

But do Presidents keep a record of some of the notable passages they come across in the books or periodicals they read? Perhaps they might wish to invoke them in a meeting, speech, or future writing. To my knowledge Thomas Jefferson was the only President who kept a commonplace book. In fact, as a youth, he kept two, the first devoted to matters of government and politics, the second, the earlier of the two, to literature and poetry

In addition to collecting passages, Jefferson also did a good deal of annotating at the time he wrote the passage in his commonplace book. The practice of annotating is rarely engaged in by those who keep a commonplace book and is even less likely to occur at the time the entries are made. On her commonplace book page, Lucia Knoles cites the following Jeffersonian procedure:

"He would synopsize and capture the key points of his readings and add his own reflections, recording them in a journal which he called his 'commonplace book.' One of his biographers quoted Jefferson as saying 'I was in the habit of abridging and commonplacing what I read meriting it, and of sometimes mixing my own reflections on the subject.' His tutor, James Maury, commended the practice as a means 'to reflect, and remark on, and digest what you read.”

Jefferson’s commonplace book on government also anticipates many of the ideas he later expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

“Stanyan says that the first kinds of Greece were elected by the free consent of the people.” “All men are, by nature, equal and free: No one has the right to any authority over another without his consent: All lawful government is founded on the consent of those, who are subject to it.”

It also includes passages that deal with policy issues we confront today. For example, here is a representative passage on gun control from Cesare, Marquis of Beccaria:

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes ... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

The descendents of Thomas Jefferson withheld publication of his literary commonplace book until 1928. According to Douglas Wilson, who edited a 1988 edition of the work, Jefferson maintained it from the age of about fifteen to thirty and because it is the most personal of the two, provides a rare glimpse of Jefferson’s formative years and the considerable influence of literature in the development of his personality.

The collection includes about four hundred passages that Jefferson copied by hand. Many of the entries were written by Jefferson in their original Latin, Greek, or French, and appear to be selected because of their philosophical and moral content. Wilson indicates that 339 of the entries are poetry, and 35 of the 45 authors quoted are poets. Homer, Horace, Pope, Milton, Shakespeare and Euripides are among the most frequently cited.

In noting some of the similarities between Jefferson’s and Milton’s commonplace books, Ruth Mohl suggests both men selected passages not only for their literary merit but also as “sources of inspiration and practical wisdom.” Later she concludes that like Milton’s, Jefferson’s literary commonplace book is alive with:

"Themes of courage, self-reliance, freedom, equality, the necessity of wisdom combined with strength, and faith in God…along with those on the brevity of life, death and the fatal beauty of women. In them the personality of Jefferson is strikingly revealed—as if in his own words he was recording his philosophy of life.”

May-December Romance

Lost in Translation is far and away my favorite May-December romance written for the screen. None of the countless others come close. There is no lust in Lost in Translation. There is none of the awkwardness that usually characterizes most depictions of a couple like this. She is young, about twenty; he is almost three decades older in his fifties. In spite of this difference, they find themselves at loose ends and similar mind at the swanking Park Hyatt in Tokyo. They never talk about their age difference, although early on she says he must be going through a “mid-life crisis.” I thought it was the only false moment in the film.

The fact that these two people, at opposite ends of their lives are drawn to one another is the heart of the film. They banter, they jest, or simply gaze at one another. There is never any hint that he can’t keep up with her or that he is uncomfortable playing around with her friends. He is as young as they are. Sofia Coppola, the film’s author and director, put it this way: “But I think that, you know, that early 20s kind of 'what am I going to do with my life?' crisis I felt was similar to the guy having a mid-life crisis. I just related to his character and allowed them to both be kind of going through similar things, but from other ends of the spectrum.”

Yet I didn’t think it was necessarily a younger woman older man crisis. It is a crisis that any two individuals can have at any time in their lives. The connection between Bob and Charlotte is startling. I kept wondering what could they ever do? What kind of a relationship could they possible have? I wanted them to have a future. And yet I knew that was impossible. At the end Bob says he doesn’t want to leave. Charlotte replies, well don’t. We’ll start a jazz band. Age is so irrelevant. And yet it colors everything. She is newly married and unhappily so. He has been married 25 years and finds it is growing tedious. The emotional torpor of their separate lives is the springboard of their relationship.

I often find myself puzzled why the characters depicted in contemporary films act the way they do. They may be indecisive or ambivalent or violent or they may feel strongly about another person. But it isn’t clear why. And so they are less compelling than they might be. None of this is the case for Lost in Translation. I knew why Charlotte and Bob were there, why they were at loose ends. I understood them and thought about them for days. One night they entered my dreams.

Charlotte is luminous, totally unadorned. There is nothing racy or pretentious about her. She is quiet, inquisitive, reflective. He learns she was a philosophy major at Yale and so there is a reason for her doubts and curiosity. There is also a sweetness about her, a sweet and melancholy wistfulness. She is thoroughly irresistible. She speaks softly. She is quiet. While she doesn’t say much, when she does, it is smart, clear, and to the point. She seems years older than her age. The rhythm and tone of her words is lovely.

Bob is detached, bemused, and full of hilarious wit and innocuous nonsense. She approaches him in the bar and asks him what he’s up to. He says he is planning a prison break and asks if she is in or out. When she tells him she studied philosophy, he tells her there must be a “good buck in that racket.”

What is it that he sees in her? Is it her youth? The good times they have together? The escape from his sleeplessness and boredom? Or a trifling fling far away from home? The depth of their apparent feeling argues against those possibilities. Yet, I wonder if they would have been drawn to one another had they not been geographically removed from their spouses.

The ending is wrenching. They depart from the Park Hyatt rather clumsily. On the drive to the airport Bob sees Charlotte walking down a crowded street. He tells the driver to stop and races after her. They embrace and with tears in her eyes and maybe his too, they finally kiss for a heartbreaking moment. He whispers something to her. And then, as they must, they go their separate ways.

On Writing Well

A few years ago I enrolled in a workshop on writing memoirs and essays. It taught me a lot about what I should try to be doing when I try to write just about anything, including a memoir or essay. And what I learned really wasn’t much different than what I knew about writing peer-reviewed articles for research journals. The course was described this way:

Personal narrative shares with fiction writing the obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, and deliver a bit of wisdom. But whereas a fictional "I" can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator, in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does the memoir/essayist pull from oneself the truth-speaker who alone can tell the story that needs to be told? Personal memoir becomes literature when it is shaped, shaped by a form. Ask what is the form that surrounds this memoir?

I took a great deal of notes at the workshop. Some deserve to be remembered, as well as communicated, and so I will pass along a few of the ideas I took note of during the two-week session.


A personal memoir should attempt to understand an experience that you have had, to know what it means. The understanding or your attempt to understand it becomes the form.

Try to achieve a wisdom beyond yourself, ask what is the organizing principle of the essay? It need only to apply to yourself; don't worry about it's generality.

For example, the instructor’s essay on letter writing tried to use her own experience to explain why people don't write letters any more.

In reading essays, consider the following questions:

1 Can you see the larger picture?
2 What is understood?
3 What is the essay about?
4 How to make some sense of what has happened to you?

A personal essay needs also to be going somewhere, to be in motion, to answer a question, to solve a problem, to provide some insight, to make some sense of your experience.

A mood piece must have a revelation to be an example of a personal essay. Revelation develops from a cumulative building of incident after incident until clarity or insight is apparent or the revelation emerges.

The writer should be different at the end of the essay than they were at the beginning. They are different because of the revelation. If you write about your migraines, understanding what they are and what brings them on should deepened.

The charge is to inquire more deeply or to try. To work through, in a step-by-step fashion, a self-inspection, to introspect about the situation(s) you are describing.

Page after page of feelings is not a journey. Simply exposing yourself is not literature. You need to be going somewhere and be a different person when you get there than you were when you started, even if you don't fully understand the situation.

The workshop was taught by Vivian Gornick whose work, The Situation and the Story: The Art of the Personal Narrative, expands upon many of workshop themes. If you find a few of the workshop notes at all instructive, I encourage you to read her volume on the difficult art of writing about personal experience.

On Writing in Books

In Library Looking Glass, David Cecil wonders if writing in books is a bad practice. This is an issue about which many readers have firm convictions. Cecil admits it is certainly the wrong thing to do if a book is a “precious object, elegantly bound and on fine expensive paper.” But when it comes to the regular books we read, there is much to be said for it. Cecil says, “It helps to make a book seem more one’s own; and, unless what is written insults its author, it is a compliment to him. It treats him as a living man, with whom one wants, as it were, to converse.”

It is startling to read how similar Cecil’s routine is to mine: “In particular when anything in the text has especially struck me, I have noted on the end-paper the number of the page where this has occurred. Sometimes my note simply indicated admiration; but more often admiration of a special and personal kind. The passage referred to was beautiful or comical or well-written in ways that had a peculiar appeal to my own taste, or it stated a view which I found especially illuminating; or it stimulated in me a fruitful train of thought.”

However, I take two additional steps that Cecil apparently didn’t. When I have finished the book or however much I want to read, I copy each of the passages I have marked in a Word document. Following that, I insert them following those I have already collected in my Commonplace Book for the year. And at year’s end, I add the year’s collection to those I have been saving since 1988. In part, I do all this because the computer makes it so easy, maybe too easy. When Cecil started writing in his books, the computer was a distant dream, if that. Would he be saving his passages in electronic form today? My hunch is he would.

Of course, Cecil is talking about his own books, not those he obtained in the library. I am sure he would agree that making marks in a library book is inexcusable. But even worse is “defacing” your own books in a way that apparently Toby Lichtig does with abandon:

“…in my library anything goes: doodles, numbers, addresses, lists, recipes and the ensuing food stains.”…the marks and scrawls help me to recall the text—and crucially, the person I was when red it: how I was feeling, where I was sitting, whom I was with.”

Stephanie Hollmichel, the blogger at “So Many Books,” and a diligent keeper of a commonplace book, employs a much more civilized approach, indeed, although she marks her notable passages, it is one that doesn’t leave any marks in the book and is far more selective than the my procedure. Here is how she described her routine to me:

“When I read I keep a tin of page nibs by my side … and stick them on the pages at passages that particularly catch my attention. When I am done with the book I go back through it looking at all the passages I marked and take out the page nibs that mark passages that no longer seem all that interesting. Then I let the book sit for a day or two and go back and look at the still marked passages and make a final decision about which ones really speak to me and copy those out into my commonplace book.”

I don’t think any of these readers are going to get too excited about the iPad or any of the other e-book readers either. None of them make marking or collecting their favorite passages very straightforward. Indeed, Lichig remarks “…I intend to carry on reading as I always have: with an object I can physically alter; something I can damage with impunity. Ever-primed for action, my pen hovers restlessly just above the page.”

Mine does too, but I am certainly not going to scrawl anything across the page or leave coffee stains on it either.

Who Knows Best?

Jerome Groopman’s essay, “Health Care: Who Knows “Best”?” in the February 11th New York Review of Books isn’t going to help pass the moribund legislation before Congress. Groopman argues that there are serious problems in relying on studies of comparative effectiveness to improve the quality of care--one of the central components of both the House and Senate bills.

Obama often says, Let’s study and figure out what works and what doesn’t. And let’s encourage doctors and patients to get what works. Let’s discourage what doesn’t.

According to Groopman, it’s not quite that simple. The findings of comparative effectiveness research are always open to further testing and ultimate refutation or qualification. What is true today is often false tomorrow.

Groopman cites several examples: “Best practices” research once demonstrated that blood sugar levels should be tightly controlled in critically patients in intensive care. Later research showed that this practice was not only shown to be wrong but resulted in a high likelihood of death when compared with measures allowing a more flexible treatment and higher blood sugar.”

He points to another failure in treating hip and knee replacement by orthopedic surgeons. In this case, conforming to or deviating from the “best practice” procedures based on comparative research had no effect on the rate of complications from the operation or the outcome of the treated individuals.

Groopman claims physicians are growing increasingly dubious of efforts to standardize clinical practice based on comparative effectiveness studies.

“…clinical trials yield averages that often do not reflect the real world of individual patients, particularly those with multiple medical conditions. Nor do current findings on best practices take into account changes in an illness as it evolves over time. Tight control of blood sugar made help some diabetics, but not others.”

As our knowledge of the disease process grows, the care and treatment of patients has become overwhelming complex. So it is not surprising that the clinical application of the best practices model is fraught with difficulties. As Groopman points out, the findings fail to distinguish between those patients where it works and those where it doesn’t.

To add to this complexity, Groopman develops further the role of cognitive biases in medical decision making and the pitfalls of human reasoning in situations where an easily made error can end a person’s life. He takes special note of the following potential sources of error

• Overconfidence Bias—over estimating the importance of his own work and analytical skills

• Confirmation Bias—the tendency to ignore and discount contradictory evidence

• Focusing Illusion—basing a decision on a single patient change that is mistakenly employed in predicting the effects on the overall condition.

Groopman’s essay calls into question one of the basic tenants of Obama’s health care proposal. He concludes: “The care of patients is complex and choices about treatments involve difficult tradeoffs. That the uncertainties can be erased by mandates from experts is a misconceived panacea, a focusing illusion.”

This does not imply comparative effectiveness research should be disregard. To the contrary, it means there is much more that has to be taken into account in medical decision making-- the history and state of the individual patient, the boundary conditions of the research findings, the experience of the physician in dealing with the patient’s problem and the numerous value judgments that both the physician and the patient will want to consider.

Omnibus

The Game is finally over I am thinking what is the big deal after all? I am told that even the commercials this year were “horrible” and, to some, “offensive.” The Game is one of the most important days of the year, the main event until the one next year. It is surely the most widely watched television program in this country (an estimated 106 million viewers this year, about a third of the total US population) and perhaps the world, too. I suppose I should have simply relaxed, stopped grousing, and enjoyed the day for a change.

I remember when the first Super Bowl was played. It was late January in 1967 on my son’s first birthday and so before the game was the moved further and further into the year, I was always able to remember his age. We were living in a university town up the coast from Los Angeles and had invited a big crowd to our home to watch the thing, as it was blacked out L.A where the game was held that year. Several rows of folding chairs were set up before the television set and, along with an estimated sixty million other viewers, we watched the Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs—are they still in business?

I tend to think of television events like this in terms of what they could be or what they once were. And so I recall what we used to do each Sunday afternoon in the early days of television. Then it was those remarkable programs of the Omnibus Television series. Week after week Omnibus brought drama, dance, music, science, art, history and opera to our living room for two incredible hours. The program was hosted by the always learned and witty British journalist Alistair Cooke and was shown on one of the major networks, that’s CBS, NBC, and ABC, mind you, from 1952 to 1961.

I recall the first program was a live performance, as were most of its programs, of Henry VIII. It also included a reading by William Saroyan of his short story, “The Bad Men,” and an analysis of the human digestive system. On subsequent programs Orson Wells stared in an adaptation of King Lear, Peter Ustinov performed as Samuel Johnson, William Faulkner took us on a tour of Oxford, Mississippi and James Agee wrote a five-part docudrama of the life of Abraham Lincoln with a script written by Carl Sandburg and music by Aaron Copeland. Can you believe that all of this was actually on Sunday afternoon television?

Wait, that is not all. I’ll never forget remarkable musical series that began with Leopold Stokowski and Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” that was eventually taken over by Leonard Bernstein who “single-handedly enlarged the possibilities of music analysis and performance on television.” He taught me much of what I “know” about music and he did that with his unique style of passion and excitement.

Surely that was the Golden Age of Television. Whatever happened to the spirit of enlightenment that made those programs possible? The show appeared in the early days of black and white television. Is there not an even greater audience for such programming in the new millennium?

Today I vainly search for something to watch on TV, surfing the channels, trying to find something to view for a while. The array of choices is mind-boggling--quiz shows, wrestling matches, shouting matches, sitcoms, cop shows, soap operas, crime and more crime investigations. And oh, yes, professional football games. It is hopeless.

“Fifty seven channels and nothin’s on.” Add two hundred, the result is the same. No doubt I expect too much. Omnibus was free. Cable TV had not been imagined. But would I pay for a channel to see Omnibus again? The answer should be clear and I wouldn’t mind paying a goodly sum. I can’t imagine I am the only one either.

Man's Search for Meaning

According to a survey reported in the Times a while ago, Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning is among the “ten most influential books in the United States.” I read the book a few months ago for the first time and it has taken me a while to say a few words about it. Given its account of the horrors of life in the Nazi concentration camps, I guess that is perfectly understandable.

Frankl describes the impossibly hard struggle to survive under one of the most brutal conditions man has ever devised, the moment to moment struggle for warmth, food, safety, clothes, shoes and indeed for existence, including his own.

We stumbled on in the darkness over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor’s arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk.

…only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves.

Out of this experience or perhaps because of it, Frankl developed his theory of Logotherapy built around its core assumption that finding a meaning to one’s life is man’s primary motivational force. Logotherapy deviates from psychoanalysis in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts. In my notes, I wrote, “Is this what most people think? Is the search for meaning our primary concern, the dominant motivation of our life?”

According to Frankl there are three places where man can find meaning in their life—the work they do or create, the love they experience with someone else, and their response to suffering. He argues that without suffering human life cannot be complete. Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.

A person’s character is revealed in their response to the inevitable suffering they experience. Here he turns to his experiences in the camp for support. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.

Throughout his account I kept thinking, well, he was one of the lucky ones. The odds of survival in the camp were about 1 in 28. Did those who didn’t survive think their life had meaning as they were being forcibly marched to the gas chambers?

(Whenever I think of the Holocaust, I think of the millions who perished and I wonder what would the world be like today if they had not been killed, if the Holocaust had never occurred? The question takes on meaning for me as I think about the remarkable achievements of some of those who did survive.)

I have thought a lot about Frankl’s theory of suffering and the significance he attaches to the experience. Man’s Search for Meaning has left an enduring mark on my life. It seems to have left its mark on most everyone who reads it. The other night I took to the book to a restaurant to read while I was having dinner. And once the waitress saw me reading the book, she actually sat down next to me and proceeded to tell me how much the book meant to her and how it had changed her life.

Her experience is not uncommon. In an Afterward in the edition I read, William Winslade writes:

…the darkness of despair threatened to overwhelm a young Israeli soldier who had lost both his legs in the Yom Kippur War. He was drowning in depressing and contemplating suicide. One day a friend noticed that his outlook had changed to hopeful serenity. The soldier attributed his transformation to reading Man’s Search for Meaning. When he was told about the soldier, Frankl wondered whether “there may be such a thing as autobibliotherapy—healing through reading.

The Amazing Word Wide Web

“No pleasure has any savor for me without communication. Not even a merry thought comes to my mind without my being vexed at having produced it alone without anyone to offer it to.” Montaigne

Fanfare for the Common Violist

Recalling Eric Rohmer

He Was a Town’s Person

Who Stole our Reading Time?

"People should go where they are not supposed to go, say what they are not supposed to say, and stay when they are told to leave." Howard Zinn

What’s The Best British Novel Since the War?

Obedience to Authority

It is not often that a psychological experiment is discussed in work of fiction. Stanley Milgram’s well-known experiment on obedience and disobedience is an exception. You may recall that in the guise of a study on the effect of punishment on learning, subjects were “ordered” by the experimenter to give increasingly more severe shocks for errors made by the learner in another room who cried out in pain as the shocks became more painful. (Of course, the learner never received shocks and the cries of pain were bogus, although the teacher believed shock was being delivered to the learner.) Milgram reported that sixty-five percent of the subjects in this basic procedure obeyed the experimenter and went to the very end of the thirty-point shock level generator.

Milgram's classic experiments stunned me, as they have virtually everyone who reads or hears about them. They revealed the enormous power of the social situation in controlling behavior and the extent to which an individual can be induced to harm another person. In his recent discussion of two recent novels that describe these studies, Edward Champion says, “Ordinary people have relatively few resources to resist being sucked into an activity which normal circumstances would see them shrinking from in disgust.” Moreover, they did this in a compelling laboratory situation of deep personal consequence to the participants. Finally, as they have for so many others, their relevance to the Holocaust moved me deeply. The force of these experiments has similarly affected countless students and scholars in a variety of disciplines to this day.

Champion describes two recent novels, Chip Kidd’s The Learners, and Will Lavender’s Obedience, that have concerned themselves with Milgram’s experiments. I have just started reading a third, Rebecca Goldstein’s tour-de-force, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Early in the novel, the brilliant game theorist, The Goddess of Game Theory, Lucinda Mandelbaum attends a seminar in which the long-winded speaker claims the subjects (teachers) in Milgram’s experiments fail to display the slightest degree of moral reasoning. Madelbaum takes issue with this interpretation arguing that the experiment is an instance of what is called an escalation game in game theory.

“Once a participant takes the first step, he’s already paid a certain price—he’s inflicted discomfort, and he’s feeling bad about it—but if he stops he’ll get nothing for his pain…So once he’s made his first bid, and the experimenter escalates by telling him he has to give an even stronger shock at the next mistake or he will not have completed the experiment like a good subject, he’s more than likely to escalate by complying.”

Lucinda claims that once you view the study this way, the results are completely predictable. She then proposes a test: run the experiment without requiring the subject to incrementally increase the intensity of the shock. She predicts not a single subject will deliver the highest level on the shock generator.

In fact, her interpretation does not predict the experimental results observed by Milgram and others who have replicated the study. In particular, it does not account for the fact that thirty-five percent of the subjects do not follow the experimenter’s order, who say they cannot go on any longer, and withdraw from the experiment. They are known as the disobedient subjects, the resistors, if you will.

In addition, Lucinda’s prediction is incorrect. Milgram did conduct the experiment she proposes and found that when subjects were allowed to choose the shock intensity level, there was one subject who continued to the highest level (30th shock level) and another went to the 25th level, well beyond the point at which the learner had stopped responding altogether, which should have led any normal person to wonder if he was even alive.

Milgram concludes his discussion of the study this way: “Insofar as the experiments tell us something about human nature, the revelation on how men act toward others when they are on their own is here. Whatever leads to shocking the victim at the highest level cannot be explained by autonomously generated aggression but needs to be explained by the transformation of behavior that comes about through obedience to orders.”

I suspect Rebecca Goldstein was not aware of this study—Number 11 in a series of variations Milgram carried out on his basic design. Is a factual refutation of an explanation presented in a work of fiction relevant? In order to answer this question you might want to look at the context in which it is introduced. Everything Goldstein had earlier presented about game theory, the nature of a zero-sum game, and escalation games is factually correct. To maintain consistency with this framework then, it seems reasonable to me to continue in that vein and either propose another untested empirical explanation or let the story go forward in light of the falsification of Lucinda’s proposal

Making Sense of What Happened

At the end of her interview in the latest issue of the Paris Review, Mary Karr says, “We remember the bleakness. That’s mostly what we remember.” Isn’t that the truth, isn’t that the sad truth? And isn’t it just as sad to observe that most readers seem to be interested in those memoirs that tell the bleakest, most harrowing, most traumatic tales?

Mary Karr may be largely responsible for the autobiographical frenzy that has taken hold in this country since the late nineties. Her three memoirs, The Liars Club, Cherry, and most recently Lit have been wildly popular and have made their author a literary celebrity. She speaks in jaunty, colorful, and utterly blunt, fashion. In a way, she sounds a little like Holden Caulfield.

“By the time I wrote The Liar’s Club, it was off my fucking chest.” “Being a famous writer was a little like being a famous cocktail waitress—nobody dressed in diamonds.” “But reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.”

She also exaggerates a great deal. “Books offer what TV and film often skip over—the internal and historical truths.” (Apologies to Bergman, Rohmer, Truffaut, Resnais, Godard, Antonini, Fellini, etc.) “When I went to California at seventeen, I wrote back to my sister saying, these people are boring because the weather’s so good they never had to develop an inner life.” (Apologies to T.C. Boyle, Alice Walker, Ray Bradbury, Amy Tan, Michael Chabon, Joan Didion, Dave Eggers, Robert Hass, Anne Lamont, Alice Sebold, Tobias Wolff, etc.)

In contrast, throughout the interview Karr also makes some smart observations about literature and the craft of writing. Like almost all writers she says it is critically important to rewrite ruthlessly and that most present day poetry is obscure, incomprehensible and has “ceased to perform its primary function which is to move the reader.”

When asked what she considered the biggest problems with memoirs today, she replied that they were not reflective enough. Here she is in agreement with the many critics of contemporary memoirs, writers like Vivian Gornick and Cristina Nehring who argue that all too many memoirists fail to extrapolative general insights about their personal experiences from their confessional accounts.

For example, in her May 2003 article in Harpers, Nehring comments about Montaigne’s personal essays: “He could examine his own reading and loving and cheating and hesitating, and deduce brave insights about the reading, loving, cheating, and hesitating of others.” She argues forcefully that autobiography at its best is a “series of engagements with issues, not simply self-absorption.”

In The Situation and the Story, Gornick puts it this way: the objective of memoir writing “to use my own response to a circumstance or event—as a means of making some larger sense of things.” And later in expressing the importance of what she calls developing an organizing principle, Gornick suggests:

“A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to life from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”

Whether or not Karr’s three memoirs meet this standard of truth will have to be decided by reading them. I confess that I have yet to do so, although I do strongly agree with Nehring and Gornick on the standard of merit to apply in judging a memoir. This may account for why I rarely read a memoir and why I rarely finish those that I do begin.

In This World But Not Of It

I can’t let too much time pass before commenting on the death of J. D. Salinger. I first read Catcher in the Rye when I was in high school. Holden Caulfield spoke to me and for me and he spoke the way I did then or wanted to.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and why my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me and all the David Copperfied kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

He said things I didn’t know I wanted to stay and didn’t know how to either. He said it clearly and brilliantly. I haven’t read too many other books that I remember in this way. Before I read Catcher in the Rye, I didn’t really know what “phony” meant but afterwards I saw it everywhere and now I had a word for it. And I still see it everywhere. As Charles McGrath put it in his brilliant obituary in the Times, Catcher in the Rye, struck a nerve in conveying a “sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world…”

And then I began reading Salinger’s short stores in the New Yorker—A Perfect Day for Bananafish, For Esme with Love and Squalor, Franny, and then Zooey, and Seymour. And there were more too. We couldn’t wait for the next one and it was the first thing we looked for in each new issue. I began saving those issues and for many years stashed them away in a separate box. Someone must have thrown them out one day, for they are gone now, another priceless treasure out the door.

And then, as is widely known, Salinger retreated from the public glare to a remote town in New Hampshire and stopped publishing altogether, although he was often out and about and active in the community He said, “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” Here he speaks for me once again.

A great many writers have written eloquently of what Salinger meant to them. A. M. Homes said, “I feel as though my father has died.” David Eggers commented, “His is still my favorite dialogue, the dialogue that rings truest, that’s at once very naturalistic and musical; it’s really remarkable how difficult it is to do what he does between quotation marks.”

Lillian Ross says, “His writing was his and his alone, and his way of life was only what he chose to follow. …The trouble with all of us, he believed, is that when we were young we never knew anybody who could or would tell us any of the penalties of making it in the world on the usual terms: “I don’t mean just the pretty obvious penalties, I mean the ones that are just about unnoticeable and that do really lasting damage, the kind the world doesn’t even think of as damage.”

Finally, in a glowing tribute Adam Gopnik writes, “And so his death throws us back from the myth to the magical world of his writing as it really is, with its matchless comedy, its ear for American speech, its contagious ardor and incomparable charm. Salinger’s voice—which illuminated and enlivened these pages for two decades—remade American writing in the fifties and sixties in a way that no one had since Hemingway.”

It is said that Salinger continue to write throughout the years he lived in New Hampshire which has apparently been preserved in many notebooks and there is some speculation that a couple of novels have been locked away in a local bank vault. Perhaps we will one day come to see some of these posthumous works. Regardless, they will do nothing to diminish the remarkable experience of reading Catcher in the Rye and those nine short stories

“God, how I still love private readers,” he wrote. “It’s what we all used to be.”

Salinger said, “…he was in this world but not of it.” In commenting on Janet Malcolm’s essay on Salinger in the New York Review of Books, McGrath concludes, “That the Glasses (and by implication, their creator) were not at home in the world was the whole point, which said as much about the world as about the kind of people who failed to get along there.”

Summertime

To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?”

Pascal Mercier Night Train to Lisbon

In reading the latest books by the Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, I sense how much fun he is having writing them. And because he writes so well and so originally, it is just as much fun to be reading the tale he unfolds. Both are true for his latest novel, Summertime.

In this novel, like his two previous fictional memoirs, Boyhood and Youth, Coetzee creates a third person narrator and employees the first person, present tense. In this way, he distances himself from himself in a way that creates a very amusing effect

In Summertime J. M Coetzee fictionalizes one John Coetzee, who we learn is dead, through a series of interviews with a researcher who conducts interviews himself with persons who knew John at one period in his life. At times this becomes utterly hilarious

When he meets with a old school friend who he recalls was not very bright but is now a very successful business man, John muses: “What does this suggest about the works of the world? What it seems most obviously to suggest is that the path that leads through Latin and algebra is not the path to success. But it may suggest something much more: that understanding things is a waste of time.”

This is clearly not J. M. Coetzee speaking. And once you know about Coetzee’s life, you realize his tale is entirely fictional. J. M. Coetzee is not dead, he is not single, or childless, and he is not a totally unlovable person. Is Coetzee here telling us how foolish it is to connect a writer’s life with his works of fiction? In Summertime he writes, “It would be very, very naïve to conclude that because the theme was present in his writing it had to be present in his life.”

Among John’s friends interviewed by the researcher is a former lover, Julia, who reports he was “not fully human, like a glass ball, sexually autistic.” “Here we have a man who, in the most intimate of human relations, cannot connect, or can connect only briefly, intermittently. Yet how does he make his living? He makes his living writing reports, expert reports, on intimate human experience. Because that is what novels are about—isn’t it?—intimate experience….Doesn’t that strike you as odd.?”

His cousin Margo reports he was cold and berates him as a “failed runaway, failed car mechanic too, for whose failure she is at this moment having to suffer” as they are forced to spend a bitterly cold night in John’s truck which has broken down in the middle of the desert. To Adriana, a Brazilian dance teacher, he is a “wooden man,” “disembodied,” who could not dance to save his life. “How can you be a great writer, if you are just an ordinary little man??

An academic colleague says, “Something was always being held back.” Another describes him as “…the kind of man who is convinced that supreme felicity will be his if only he can acquire a French mistress who will recite Ronsard to him and play Couperin on the clavecin while simultaneously inducting into the mysteries of love, French style.” And, “He was just a man, a man of his time, talented, maybe even gifted, but frankly, not a giant.”

What is Coetzee saying in these depictions? Is he confessing his own doubts about himself, his own isolation, sense of dislocation and social awkwardness, disguised as the views of former friends? Or is he suggesting you can never correctly view one’s personality through the eyes of others? What do others know of us? Don’t they usually get it wrong?

Coetzee writes, “Who can say what goes on in people’s inner life?” Can the person himself even understand what is going on in his or her own inner life? And if not, why not make up a tale about it, why not fictionalize it, and perhaps have a little fun in the process? Isn’t this what storytellers do?

“He believed our life stories are ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world.”

Reading in the News

Fiction Therapy
In the Guardian a writer pays tribute to Saul Bellow’s Herzog for helping him to read his way out of depression. He says “…the novel made it possible for him to “momentarily forget my own problems and lose myself completely in the richly detailed and beautifully rendered world of the novel. I cannot describe the feeling of calm-amid-the chaos that this generated…”

Re-Reading Books
Stefanie Hollmichel on her blog So Many Books describes the pleasures of re-reading old books. An essay by William Hazlitt put her in the mood pick up her favorite books once again. She says, “When you know what to expect you can sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. Unlike reading a new book you don’t have to figure out what is going on, who the characters are and what relationships they have. You know this so don’t have to puzzle it out. You are free to attend to other elements of the story.”

Renting Books
On The Huffington Post David Colbert wonders if we might begin to see the return of book rental programs as the cost of purchasing new books becomes increasingly expensive. “There'd be nothing new about it. In the 1930s, before the modern era of paperbacks, the U.S. had maybe fifty thousand rental libraries of one kind or another. Many bookstores also rented books, as did general stores. Drugstores were another common outlet.”

Book Memories
Over the years I have read so many books and confess that I have forgotten all too many of them. And then once in a while a passage or a scene or indeed the story itself drifts into my mind in a way that completely baffles me. In the Guardian Evan Maloney wonders “…why do I remember scenes from some books so well, as if they were real-life experiences rather than sequences of symbols on a page, and why do I finish other books and forget them entirely?”

Getting Kids to Read
Are you worried that kids don’t read anymore? Kathy Ceceri at Wired reports that she has the solution--comic books. “It seems like a parent’s dream: a comic book based on classic plays and books. This dream has become a reality with the new book Masterpiece Comics. Masterpiece Comics… a mixture of classic comics like Blonde and Little Lulu and classic literature like Macbeth and Crime and Punishment.”

Make a List
In his recent book, The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande suggests that the systematic application of the simple checklist “…can help us manage the extreme complexity of the modern world…Failure results not so much from ignorance (not knowing enough about what works) as from ineptitude (not properly applying what we know works).” Strange as it may seem, he demonstrates how often doctors makes mistakes that are easily avoided by working through the essential tasks on a checklist.

The Apple Tablet

I am not immune from all the hoopla and media frenzy about the latest Apple product. And as I am sure you know by now, the new Apple Tablet, now known as the iPad has been duly announced and will be available for sale at the end of March.

Questions concerning the nature of reading on the iPad loom large in my thinking. Some have now been answered. It is known that the screen will be 9.7 in, midway between the 3.5 in screen of the iPhone and the 15 in MacBook Pro but larger than the 6 inch Kindle screen and the same as the larger Kindle DX.

However, the lighting on the color iPad screen will be bright and sharp unlike the dull gray of the Kindle. And like the iPhone, the screen is said to be very responsive to scrolling, tapping and flipping into a horizontal view.

Aside from everything else it can do (see Apple.com) what will reading a book, magazine or newspaper be like on the iPad? This is the central question I have about the device.

We know now that there will be an iBookstore where you can purchase books for the iPad from five publishers that have signed up to date-- Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan. And I am sure it won’t be long until other publishers sign on too.

We are told that the publishers will be able to charge $12.99 to $14.99 for most general fiction and nonfiction books, which is more than most, but not all, Kindle books, although a good deal less than the printed book.

As David Pogue noted in his initial impression of the iPad: "The iPad as an e-book reader is a no-brainer. It’s just infinitely better-looking and more responsive than the Kindle, not to mention it has color and doesn’t require external illumination."

Will you be able to highlight or mark passages? And will it be possible to save them so they can be subsequently downloaded to your computer? All of this is possible with the Kindle, but as I earlier noted, the procedure is cumbersome and time consuming, requiring several less-than-simple steps. And the same questions apply to making notes on the pages of the materials to-be-read on the iPad.

Apple has several accessories for the iPad that appeal to me. One is a cover that both protects the screen and opens in a way that makes it “feel” like you are opening a book and holding each side with your hands.

And by flipping the screen in a horizontal position, the iPad creates two separate pages on the screen in the same way you view side-by-side pages of a printed book. Very cool and very unlike the Kindle.

But what books are you able to download from the iBookstore and will they also be downloadable to a Mac computer or iPhone? That is also of critical importance to me. However, to date almost all the books I want to read are not available in an e-book format.

I am also intrigued by the IPad dock that places the screen at a slightly tilted vertical angle, like a laptop screen, while at the same time making it possible to charge the device once its connected to an electrical outlet or your computer.

I am been cautioned that this marvelous new gadget is just another toy, that I should stick with the old-fashioned book and not fall sway to the latest digital fad. And I will probably take this advice.

Nonetheless, we still have a great deal to learn about the new Apple Tablet especially from the first-hand reviews of those who have an opportunity to actually test it, which apparently no one outside of Apple have been able to do yet, and we learn more about the books sold at the iBookstore and what limits will be placed on the devices that can download them.

Solitary or Social Readers

Recently a local book club leader wrote to explain why she devotes herself so energetically to the group:

…what I love best about the book club meetings, other than talking about books with other people, are hearing peoples' takes on the stories we read. We all lead such different lives, and come from such different backgrounds, (and are at different stages in our lives), that the book usually has different meanings for each of us. It's interesting to hear how many different ways a story can be interpreted, and I usually come away with a better appreciation for what I've read... anyway those are the moments I look forward to, (other than meeting fellow book lovers! What's not to like about that?!

In the Times recently, Motoko Rich takes a slightly contrary view arguing that reading in the era of online book groups, Oprah clubs, Shelfari, and the countless informal book groups that are everywhere these days, has now become “a relentlessly social pursuit.” She notes: “Publishers, meanwhile are fashioning social networking sites where they hope to attract readers who want to comment on books and one another.”

I know individuals who belong to three or four different book groups at the same time and each and every one of them meets somewhere to have a meal before or during their “meeting.” Are they there for the meal, the friendly chit-chat, to flirt or to have a serious discussion about the book they may or may not have read before hand?

But there is a different class of reader as Rich points out who feel “that their relationship with a book, its characters and the author is too intimate to share.” These readers can engage in all the benefits cited by the leader of the local book group for why she likes her group. They too can reflect on the book’s meanings, its relationship with the works or other authors, and read the opinions of those who have reviewed the book and who might have a different take on it or who view the story in a usual way. And all of this can be experienced without the gossip or the meal at the current restaurant of the year.

Rich also concludes that these two (public and private) readers are not mutually exclusive, that readers who prefer to read privately are not necessarily adverse to discussing it publicly, although my hunch is that a group of more than one of two such individuals would be sufficient for them. And perhaps if the club was structured more around the type of reading groups that we usually called seminars or conferences in college or the Book Salons as in Europe during the 19th Century, they might be more likely to become more social readers.

I used to teach at a college where in order to graduate students were required to write a Senior Thesis and then engage in its defense with a group of faculty members. At the time of their defense the students almost always brought trays of food, (baked goods, sandwiches, trays of vegetables and fruits, etc.) and abundant beverages. Did they think all this food would increase the likelihood they would pass?

It was always difficult for me to carry on a coherent discussion munching a chocolate croissant and so I found myself in an awkward position, not knowing what to do with these offerings, since I was never hungry and didn’t much care to snack anyway.

I guess that is why I have always been one of those readers who prefer to carry out the pursuit of reading and what I say about it in a largely, although not exclusively, private fashion. Nonetheless, I remain quite interested in the question of whether the solitary reading experience in some way significantly different than reading without the expectation of discussing it with others

Let's Just Talk About Fear

In Pascal Mercier’s novel Night Train to Lisbon the Portuguese physician Amedeau Prado inquires: Is it so that everything we do is done out of fear of loneliness? ….Why else do we hold on to all these broken marriages, false friendships, boring birthday parties? What would happen if we refused all that, put an end to the skulking blackmail and stood on our own?

The theme is echoed in the recent film A Single Man based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel of the same name. In the film George, unmarried and gay, still grieves over the death of his lover eight years ago. In a lecture to in his literature class, he departs from his prepared remarks on Adous Huxley to speak forcefully on the extent to which fear is used to govern the populace:

Let’s just talk about fear. Fear, after all, is our real enemy. Fear is taking over our world. Fear is being used as a tool of manipulation in our society.

It’s how politicians peddle policy and how Madison Avenue sells us things that we don’t need. Think about it. Fear that we’re going to be attacked, fear that there are communists lurking around every corner, fear that some little Caribbean country that doesn’t believe in our way of life poses a threat to us.

Fear that black culture may take over the world. Fear of Elvis Presleyʼs hips. Well, maybe that one is a real fear. Fear that our bad breath might ruin our friendships... Fear of growing old and being alone.

Fear that we’re useless and that no one cares what we have to say.

It is clear the students are not getting his message, not its relevance or its subtext. George realizes he has lost them, closes his Huxley book, and wishes the class a good weekend.

Much of what we do in life is often enacted to avoid something else. Do we not work to avoid impoverishment? How often do we marry to avoid loneliness? Do we read or write to avoid boredom? And what about the neurotic fears and phobias that so many people have today--agoraphobia, claustrophobia, fear of elevators, fear of flying, and fear of social embarrassment that gives rises to extreme cases of social anxiety and shyness?

What are the fears of writers? Fear of running out of ideas, of writer’s block, of a poorly received book, of their inevitable limitations? In a recent Paris Review interview Mary Karr is asked: “What are you afraid of?” She responds: “Failure. I keep Beckett’s motto above my desk: Fail better.” In his Nobel speech, Orhan Pamuk proclaimed, “I write to avoid being forgotten.”

In a way that is also one of the reasons I write, to leave something permanent after I am gone, to have a book in the library or on the bookshelf of my children. In this way, I won’t be quite so quickly forgotten.

Behind any artist's urge to create is an egotistical impulse -- a desire to be remembered, to see one's works immortalized. Writers attempt to defy death by achieving eternal life on the page and in the imaginations of readers. Such hopes are ultimately illusory: obviously, a page or a book or a computer file may outlast their creators, but nothing has the stamina to outlast time. Yet few writers are either willing or courageous enough to confront the fact that literary immortality is essentially impossible.

(From a review of Paul Auster’s Invisible by Vincent Rossmeier at Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon.)

Conversations With My Gardener

I write to tell you about a beautiful film I saw on the weekend. In most cases reading or viewing something beautiful is not something I feel like keeping private. Conversations with My Gardener is a French film about a Parisian artist who hires a gardener to bring back to life the overgrown garden at his family’s rundown manor in the country.

The beauty of this film is not only in its visual images, but also in its depiction of the friendship, devotion, and philosophies of the two men. To see the film is close to being in France, in the countryside during the summer: flowers, and vegetables, a dog running after a motorbike, charming people speaking amusingly in French, a language as beautiful than the scenery.

There is a good deal of talk between the painter and the gardener who turn out to be old childhood school friends. Each has gone their own way, one to the Parisian art and café world, the other to a blue-collar life on railroad work crews

Their friendship is renewed and deepens as the seasons pass. They exchange views about the profound and the trivial—paintings, lovers, marriage music, careers, fishing and illness. It is wonderful to watch these two men speaking and jesting with one another for a couple of hours on the screen.

The gardener tells the painter that the important things are those you keep in your heart. He tells him to always carry a knife and a piece of string—advice that turns out to be helpful in a future scene. The painter takes the gardener to the Louvre and tells him about light and dark and what he is thinking while he paints.

A reviewer comments: There’s a great sense of place. We luxuriate in the verdant peace of Rhone-Alpes’ picturesque Villefranche-sur-Saone, and the eternal city of Paris, through the cobbled streets, the sidewalk cafes and the Arc de Triomphe…There are many images of conversation that are memorable, but none more so than that of the two men fishing, deliberating on matters of life and death. Philosophical, mischievous and melancholy, this is a beautiful film that draws us to the two characters, their lives and hearts.

If you enjoy this sort of thing, try to view the film if it comes your way. Here is a clip of what you will see.

Wordplay

Some people enjoy saying things they don’t quite mean. I am one of them. On a really stormy day, I will often look outside and say something like, “What a beautiful day it is.” I am not lying or trying to mislead anyone. Rather, saying the opposite of what I really mean or what is obviously untrue is how I sometimes like to talk. It is a form of irony, an exaggerated form of irony, and speaking that way often has more than one meaning. It is also a very tricky matter.

I might say something like I really enjoy Thai food, when it fact I don’t like it at all. And if you are the recipient of this statement, you are suppose to pick up on it and know that I am really telling you how much I dislike Thai food. As you can see, this can sometimes be misinterpreted.

But when you know someone who catches on at once, and this is usually a person who knows you very well, she might reply in kind. She will say something like “Yes, let’s go to this new Thai restaurant,” when in fact, she doesn’t mean that at all and you are fully aware she doesn’t. What she means is that going to a Thai restaurant is out of the question, that, of course we will go to our favorite French bistro.

Apparently, this way of communicating is rather common for those who speak Farsi. In an interview in the Times a few years ago, the Iranian novelist, Dalia Sofer, described the elusiveness and indirect way of speaking in Farsi.

There’s this whole idea of taarof—you say something you don’t mean, and the other person is supposed to pick up on it. For example, if I am visiting you, I may say, “It is getting late; I must go, and you say, “No, please stay,” and I am supposed to know that you really want me to go. People have to pick up on codes.

By no means is this restricted to those who speak Farsi. The American writer Amy Bloom is a master of this writing technique. (Maybe she speaks this way too.) In her latest collection of short stories, Where the God of Loves Hangs Out, the couple depicted in the first quartet of stories often speaks that way to one another.

Clare and William, who are having an affair, are about to have dinner. William has the gout so must eat mild foods. Clare goes out to the kitchen to make something for the two of them.

She “…gathers up everything that wasn’t eaten at lunch and every promising plastic container, including a little olive tapenade and a lot of pineapple cottage cheese, and lays it all on the coffee table in front of William with a couple of forks and two napkins.”

“You do go all out,” he says.

“I don’t know how Isabel [William’s wife] caters to you the way she does. If Charles [Clare’s husband] were as much of a baby as you, I’d get a nurse and check into a hotel.”

“I’m sure you would.”

And later, they are sitting together on a sofa where, because of his gout, William has to spend much of each day.

“A lot of activity here,” Clare says.

“Oh, yes quite a ruckus, “William says.

Here is one more:

“All right,” William said. “Let’s have it. You’re shipwrecked on a desert island. Who do you want to be with—me or Nelson Slater?” [a young kid in the neighborhood]

“Oh my God,” Clare says. “Nelson. Of course.”

“Good choice. He did a great job with the firewood.”

All this can be very amusing, of course, both for Clare and William and for the reader, at least a reader who takes a liking to this way of communicating.

It can also be equally amusing if you like to speak that way to someone once in a while. Knowing someone who also enjoys bantering with you in this way and who can easily catch on to your way of speaking is simply one of the great joys in life. It lends an edge to communicating, a little mystery too and it can often lead to sparkling conversations and crazy ideas that are sometimes not quite so crazy after all.

Why Do I Write II

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.

Graham Greene

It is widely believed that writing about traumatic and emotional events can reduce the distress they give rise to. Indeed, the authors of the passages quoted in my Commonplace Book often mentioned its therapeutic benefits in explaining why they wrote.

In Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, James Pennebaker marshals an impressive array evidence to show that writing about emotional experiences can have the same positive effects on physical and mental heath as discussing them with a trained therapist.

In an early study, for example, Pennebaker reports that the spouses of individuals who committed suicide reported having fewer health problems when they spoke to others about this traumatic event than those who did not. Indeed spouses who did not talk about their partner’s death experienced higher levels of anxiety, depression and insomnia. According to Pennebaker, suppressing the expression of upsetting events is harmful and over a period of time becomes a serious health risk. In contrast, facing them squarely by talking and writing about them has the opposite effect.

How does writing accomplish this? In trying to answer this question Pennebaker reflects on his own experiences: In writing about upsetting events, for example, I often came to a new understanding of the emotional events themselves. Problems that had seemed overwhelming became more circumscribed and manageable after I saw them on paper. In some way, writing about my haunting experiences helped to resolve them.

A good many writers expressed themselves similarly:

One writes to keep going, to keep oneself from going mad...to live through the next day or two. Harold Bloom

If one was fairly content, why in the name of God would one want to go through the discipline and scariness of sitting down to write 90,000 words...Writing makes you lonely because you have to exile yourself. But deeper than that is an inborn native loneliness, a spiritual void that words, for some reason, help fill. Edna O’Brien

My own reasons for writing, for setting down the story, are to a large extent selfish. With each story--and by story I mean anything I write--I am trying simply to work something out for myself. You, the reader, play a part here: this is a private matter, as I write about the things that disturb me, the things that won't let me alone, the things that are eating slowly into my brain at 3 in the morning, the things that unbalance my world. Roxana Robinson

I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy. Orhan Pamuk

One thing I know for sure is that if I did not write these characters, these stories, I would be much less happy and probably much less normal. Writing allows me to explore situations that are impossible for me to explore in my life. And yet they are very active parts in me. Emotionally I am an extreme person and writing makes it possible for me to go on. David Grossman

I would write to forget, to get rid of sad moments. Once they were written down, they were gone. Jean Rhys

To take issue with these writers, as well as Pennebaker, I believe we are probably deluding ourselves by thinking we can put our emotional problems behind us by simply writing about them. Long ago we learned to be skeptical of the claims of the "insight" theories of psychotherapy. Awareness is not sufficient to cure. Similarly, the evidence on writing therapy suggests considerable caution about accepting its various claims of success.

Well before I ever heard of "writing therapy" I wrote in my journal. I know that I am much more likely to write there when things are not going well. But I also know that no matter how much I write or how much truth there is in what I write, I do not thereby put the problems behind me. I may feel a little better after I compose the passages, but only for the moment.

Yes, eventually the problems disappear. However, I realize that this occurs for reasons that have very little, if anything, to do with the fact that I may have written about them one day.

Why Do I Write? I

I often ask myself why do I spend so much time writing. I used to write articles for peer-reviewed psychological journals. I wrote letters in the days when writing letters was about the only way to communicate with anyone.

Now I spend a fair amount of time each day writing e-mails. I also used to write in my journal and I still do a little of that, although now it’s in a Word document on my computer labeled Flash Notes. And I write on my blog once in a while, as well as an essay or two now and then.

Why do I spend so much time doing this? Few people read my professional publications and even fewer read the books, essays, or the blog that I am writing this piece for. So what’s the point, anyway? What is the purpose of all this writing? Why not play chess, instead?

Writing was one of the most frequent themes of the passages I collected in my Commonplace Book. A while ago I pulled together all the passages on each of the most common themes and when I reviewed those on Writing, I noticed that the individuals who wrote the passages I collected gave three major reasons for why they devoted their life to writing.

Several said they wrote to answer a question they had or to better understand some issue. I know I try to do that too. I have a question or an idea that I’d like to write about but I scarcely know where to begin. So, rather that wait for the muse to do her work, I simply start writing about it and sometimes, to my amazement, I end up with a page or two that begins to clarify matters for me.

One writes not because one knows the answer but because one wants to explore the question. J.M. Coetzee

I write to understand as much as to be understood. Elle Wiesel

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want, and what I fear. Joan Didion

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

That was why one wrote, wasn’t it? To find out why. Jens Christian Grondahl

Andin his eloquent Nobel Prize Lecture where he gave on my count at least twenty different reasons why he writes, Orhan Pamuk said: Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone.

The second major reason the writers gave was that they simply needed to do so, that it was a natural thing for them to do, they didn’t really have much choice in the matter. It is as if these writers write almost reflexively, in the same way they need to breathe.

At times, this basic need is quite familiar to me. I don’t write to make a living or to make known some particular insight or point of view. Rather I write because there’s no other way to express myself and I very much want to do that.

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself, I’ve learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled “file and forget,” and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare? Why should I be dedicated and set aside--yes if not to tell at least a few people about it? There seems to be no escape. Ralph Ellison

The inexhaustible urge toward self-expression makes it nearly a sure thing that there will always be writers around as long as there is us. David Remnick

In his Nobel remarks, Pamuk also cited this reason. It was the first one he gave in answering the question about why he wrote: I write because I have an innate need to write.