A Day in the Life of a Blog

I've always felt sort of nourished by the New Yorker, finishing an issue feeling ...enlightened, learning something about a subject that was written by a master of his craft.... Anonymous

The best thing about the New Yorker today is their online blogs,

I regard them as the new New Yorker, as the old New Yorker is long gone, a fading memory of the golden era of the literary arts.

Every weekday there are several posts, not one as is the common practice. In fact, there is a group of New Yorker bloggers, whose blogs are listed in the top headline of the blog page. The link I use is their Cultural Desk that is their centralized hub for commentaries on literature, music, film and art.

On Thursday, September 27th, a fairly representative day in the life of this blog, I counted
eight separate postings, as follows.

The New York Art Book Fair

Writing Negative Reviews on Amazon

Contemporary Films

The Songs of Iris Dement

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

The Daily Book News

Prime Minister Netanyahu Caption Contest

Classical Musician and Orchestral Rapper, Chilly Gonzales

This is quite a rich and varied collection and they represent but a small portion of what also is available on the magazine’s Website. You can check the weekly issue to learn the table of contents and which of the articles are not blocked. The fact that the new New Yorker doesn’t make them all available is a bit annoying, largely a matter, I imagine, of Conde-Nast’s corporate interests and we all know what they are.

However, if you are a subscriber, you can also sign in to read them all. The magazine now has a number of digital editions, iPad, iPhone and some but not all Android tablets, free to subscribers, but not to non-subscribers.

Who needs a print edition of the magazine anymore? If you are interested in politics, celebrities, entertainment, food, fashion, etc, then it remains your cup of tea.

P.S. The next day there was another set of eight posts about: the Moby Dick Read, The New York Film Festival, a rehearsal for a new play, the Pale King Archive, long forgotten food recipes, a humorous post on punctuation marks, Japanese photo books at the New York Art Book Fair, and the regular book news.

And just yesterday, that was a long and amusing post about Haruki Murakami and his readers, the Harukists, who were disappointed that he didn’t win the Nobel Prize.

Portraits of The Portrait of a Lady

It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself. Ezra Pound

Is it reasonable to write about a book I’ve never read? I’ve read a fair amount about the book, but not the thing itself. However, I have read a reverential review by Anthony Lane of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady in the New Yorker last month.

Lane writes about how much the book meant to him and reviews a recent book by Michael Gorra about James’s novel titled, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece. Once in a while I dip into a James novel, but I’ve found his formal style and ponderous loquaciousness of little appeal.

And while I don’t usually get much out of the movie reviews Lane writes for the New Yorker, his treatment of Portrait and enthusiasm about it was different. I say to myself, if I can’t write a classic novel or expect to enjoy it, the least I can do is read about it.

At this point then, what I have is second order accounts of the novel—Lane’s, Gorra’s as viewed by Lane, along with some timely quotations from James, Lane and Gorra. Lane begins his account the way James began Portrait.

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

This is hardly the view of anyone I have ever met, although it is one that I still continue to practice. Not the traditional English way with scones, jams and other treats. Simply a cup of tea wherever I am and if it’s in the tropics, no doubt iced tea, and if it’s in Portland, hot tea most days in that town in the far north of this land. In the best of all possible worlds, it would be good to share that time with someone else, but that is largely a dream these days.

Lane quotes a passage early in the novel, “She had been looking all round her again,--at the lawn, the great trees, the reedy, silvery Thames, the beautiful old house; and, while engaged in this survey, she had also narrowly scrutinized her companions; a comprehensiveness of observation easily conceivable on the part of a young woman who was evidently both intelligent and excited…”I have never seen anything so beautiful as this,” she declared.

Whereupon Lane remarks, “I have never read anything as beautiful as that.” He says the beauty of this passage isn’t the scene James describes but rather the excitement and quickness of Isabel Archer’s response.

Lane acknowledges, as any reader does who rereads a novel they first read when they were young, that his appreciation of The Portrait of a Lady bears little relationship to how he finds it today.

He turns to Gorra’s book about the novel and commends him for approaching James by treating, in depth, only one of his works. He reminds us there are many books about a single book, including Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, etc.

Lane asks if you love a book so much, should you “leave rough traces of that love, or should scholarship smooth them over?” Reading Lane’s essay leaves little doubt in my mind where he stands. Or, for that matter, Jeffrey Eugenides, author of widely praised The Marriage Plot, who called James’s novel, “the best marriage plot novel ever….It’s much darker than anything Austen did, and it leads straight to the moral ambiguities and complexities of the modern novel.”

Failure to Rescue

Scientists have given a new name to the deaths that occur in surgery after something goes wrong—whether it is an infection or some bizarre twist of the stomach. They call them a “failure to rescue.” More than anything, this is what distinguished the great from the mediocre. They didn’t fail less. They rescued more. Atul Gawande

Suppose you are faced with surgery and need to choose between two different hospitals. Both have the same death rate following surgery. But they differ in terms of surgical complications. The first has fewer complications, while the second has more, but is better at rescuing patients from them.

Which hospital would you choose? Normally you’d prefer the first, hoping at all cost to avoid any complication. That’s what Atul Gawande, an eminent surgeon and staff writer at the New Yorker, said he would have chosen during his talk at the New Yorker Festival last weekend.

But he admitted he was wrong. You would have been better off having surgery in the second hospital. He said this was crazy and counter intuitive. He pointed out, however, that problems during surgery depend on many unknown and complex circumstances—chance, how poor the patients are, their health, etc., that you really want the hospital that has a better record of rescuing patients from any unforeseen difficulty.

In his lecture, Gawande cited some of the medical studies supporting this idea and explored their implications. He pointed to the British Petroleum oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago. According to the official investigation, there were many signs that the drill pipe was having problems, but the companies involved did nothing about them before the night of the explosions and the crew testing the well the day after did not take immediate action once they recognized how serious the situation had become.

When something goes wrong or a mistake is made, more often than not, we tend to ignore it or diminish its importance and hope it won’t happen again. Less often do we acknowledge the problem and then plan carefully what to do if and when it happens again. The BP crew did not have such a plan ready to employ once they were aware something was wrong.

The hospitals that had a better rescue rate did have in place a well-prepared set of scenarios about what to do once something went wrong. The surgical teams had practiced it, talked about it, and each member of the team knew what to do in the event of an emergency.

Gawande also mentioned the widely discussed case of the US Airways flight that crashed in the icy waters of the Hudson River a few years ago. While most everyone praised the skill of the Pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, even he acknowledged that had little to do with avoiding any casualties. That depended far more on his crew, the plane’s attendants, the proximity of the ferryboats that rushed over to the plane, and above all the well-rehearsed plan they had for responding to emergency situations.

Gawande’s discussion of this issue suggests a general strategy for anyone who wants to deal effectively with unforeseen errors, accidents, and mistakes: Have a plan, practice it, and prepare for as many possible difficulties as possible.

He spoke about this topic in his recent Commencement address to the graduating students at Williams College, concluding:

So you will take risks, and you will have failures. But it’s what happens afterward that is defining. A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it—will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?—because the difference between triumph and defeat, you’ll find, isn’t about willingness to take risks. It’s about mastery of rescue.

Digital Ping-Pong

Several years ago, I read about an air force pilot who deliberately crashed his jet into a remote area of the Rockies. I don’t usually pay much attention to things like that, but for some reason the mystery of this one took hold of me. I was moved to write a poem-of-sorts about it to my wife. A few days later I sent it to her in an email.

Enigma
It is all over.
Such a disappointment.
They located the plane.
Confirmed it was the pilot.
Soon the bombs will be uncovered
I had been so hoping
It would remain a mystery

Where did the plane go?
What was up with the pilot?
How were the bombs to be used?
What fun to speculate.
Chapter one through six.
A best seller.
Blockbuster film.
Italy each summer.

After I sent her the poem-of-sorts, it didn’t take her long to reply in kind. Her reply itself was unexpected, especially its speed. Her volley was sparkling.

Enigma
No more mystery?
I disagree.
Why did he do it?
What terrible thing ate at his soul?
Why did he wheel away?
Only to land
In the silent snow
Buried in ice
Fragments scattered

Did he long for the quiet?
Turn off the engine
Give up the struggle
Had he dickered with dying
Had he thought it all through
Was it just an impulse
Or nothing
And everything
A mechanical failure of the soul
Or only a mechanical failure
No more mystery?
Ha!
Now even more.
Paris in the Fall

I was overwhelmed by her reply. Our exchange was a breathtaking moment in the history of the Internet, to say nothing of our marriage.

Share-It Square

Something is wrong with too many places in America today. Mark Lakeman

Where are the public squares in this country like the piazzas in Italy where people gather to chat with their friends or anyone else who happens by? I recall a suburban square, one like countless others in this country, that was recently built on the main street in a town outside of San Francisco. I have driven by that square many times and not once have I seen anyone there or even anyone approaching the place.

I admire the square, the trees and benches that have been abundantly distributed throughout. I hope that it will eventually become a popular gathering place. But in all honesty, I have no reason to believe it will, as long as you have strap yourself in your three-ton utility vehicle every time you want to go there.

Think of the even more numerous intersections in this country where only automobiles gather to wait for the signal to change. What is an Italian piazza anyway but an intersection where cross streets come together? What might be done to create a more public setting in the lonely intersections of this country?

I first read about how to reinvent the intersection in an interview with Steven Johnson discussing his new book, Future Perfect, in which he discusses once again the importance of peer networks in developing new ideas. He describes a fellow in Portland, Oregon who realized that “throughout human history, cross streets have been places where civic culture happens.”

So he got together with people in his neighborhood to start sprucing up the intersection, now known as Share-It Square after the intersection streets, SE 9th and Sherrett Streets. They built a small lending library, a food stand, 24 hour solar powered tea station, a bulletin board and placed paintings here and there. The idea caught on. Soon there was another one in Portland known as Sunnyside Piazza and then several others, at last count over 20.

After Share-It Square had been developed, the organizers surveyed their individuals in the immediate area and found that an overwhelming majority felt that crime had decreased, traffic had slowed, and communication between neighbors had improved ((85% on each of these measures).

The Sunnyside Piazza intersection is said to attract people throughout the day. Neighbors say they intentionally detour through the intersection to and from the nearby streets, perhaps to visit the kiosk, run into friends, or simply participate in whatever is going on there.

What did it take to change a neighborhood intersection into a public square? One person, who apparently realized on a trip to Italy that cross streets have historically been places where people gather. Initially, the civic officials in Portland resisted his idea, but eventually relented, then neighbors joined together to transform the intersection, and once Share-It-Square became so successful, the concept spread rapidly, as these things do these days.

Imagine what might happen if this idea spread throughout a number of the many empty intersections in this country. Instead of being a boring old cross streets where only cars drive through, they became neighborhood-gathering places. Perhaps, a few might become what they are in Florence and almost any other city in Italy.

“Now at Florence, when the air is red with the summer sunset and the campaniles begin to sound vespers and the day’s work is done, everyone collects in the piazzas. The steps of Santa Maria del Fiore swarm with men of every rank and every class; artisans, merchants, teachers, artists, doctors technicians, poets, scholars. A thousand minds, a thousand arguments; a lively intermingling of questions, problems, news of the latest happening, jokes; an inexhaustible play of language and thought, a vibrant curiosity; the changeable temper of a thousand spirits by whom every object of discussion is broken into an infinity of sense and significations—all of these spring into being, and then are spent. And this is the pleasure of the Florentine public.” Richard Goodwin The American Condition

Questions in Fiction

“She communicates largely by asking questions, not personal questions about his life or past history but questions about his opinions on topics ranging from the weather to the state of the world.”
Paul Auster

What is the role of asking questions in fiction, a question that I regard as rather important in itself. Recently I carried out an informal study to look more closely at the role of questions in the passages I recorded from works of fiction in my commonplace book.

To extract questions from electronic digital record of the second volume of my commonplace book, I simply entered a question mark in the Word Find box and recorded the question found. This is one of the simplest ways a commonplace book can become a research tool.

I selected about three quarters of the questions (227) from 151 separate works of literature. Some like Night Train to Lisbon had a great many questions, others like Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road had only one, as did John Williams’ Stoner and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. In most cases I selected questions that had a general application and avoided those that did not raise a larger issue. Those not selected were trivial, uninteresting, or framed rhetorically without seeking information or an answer.

Then I classified each one of the questions in terms of the general topic, issue, or subject that it raised. The first round of this procedure identified 48 categories. Since there was considerable overlap between them, they were combined and reduced in number to 17.

For example, questions initially classified as relating to marriage, friendship, romance, and relationships were combined into the general topic of Relationships. Those concerning memory, thinking, language, and neuroscience, were grouped together as Cognitive, while Life represented a combination of Fate, Luck, Work, and Future

The ten most frequent categories, rank ordered in terms of frequency, along with a few examples are shown below:

Relationships
Someone to thank you once in a while and tell you you’d done well—everyone needed that, didn’t they? Rachel Cusk Arlington Park
Literature
Life
Cognitive
Writing
Identity
The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which comes closer to the truth? Pascal Mercier Night Train to Lisbon
Change
But how do you stop doing something when you are completely unaware that you are doing it? Geoff Dyer Jeff in Venice
Age
Truth
Morality
Had they stopped playing by the rules because they got nothing following them? Bernhard Schlink The Weekend

It would be interesting to compare novelists on this dimension. Do some employ questioning more than others and if so, what might be responsible for their practice? Do they come from a particular tradition or are they, like Peter Bieri, the pen name of Pascal Mercier involved in a discipline, philosophy, where questioning is a common practice?

Regardless, it reflects a style of writing that is one of probing and wrestling with ideas. Questioning is not a critical feature of the novels I like most. I may enjoy that style of writing and tend to think that way myself, but it probably plays little if any role in my reading preferences.

However, when questions are posed in a work of fiction, I become more engaged with the text and begin to make all the associations that come with my experience and what I know or want to know about the topic. In a way, I join with the author who, with his questions, invites me to think further about the issues he posses and participate with him exploring the story further.

“I learned because I asked questions. It’s the soul that asks, the heart that demands.”
Doreen Carvajal The River of Forgetting

Waiting Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Life of Objects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innovation: Together or Alone

It is very, very rare to find cases where somebody on their own, working alone, in a moment of sudden clarity has a great breakthrough that changes the world.
Steven Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolutionary Psychology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

iDyssey

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

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

Link

The New Yorker comments,

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

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

Roberto Calasso

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winter Journal

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

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

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

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

Auster begins Winter Journal similarly,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sweet Tooth

The first rule of espionage is trust no one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

The Auschwitz Volunteer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His mission had three objectives:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

La Rafle (The Roundup)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On A Summer Day

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

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

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

Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rules for Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Build suspense; establish a tension

• Pose a problem

• Be fully honest

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

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

• An analytic perspective is equally important.

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

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

The Magic of Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was Adam the only one able to speak without quoting?

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How Time Flies"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On A Lazy, Dazy Day in August

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expanded Memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Pain, No Gain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tin House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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