From time to time I would like to post some of the blogs and articles that I've enjoyed during the week. Here are a few for this week:
On Chekhov:
http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2009/02/if-we-want-to-know-what-other-people.html#links
People Reading:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/bookspotting/
Power of the Situation
http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/
Subtle Influence
http://nudges.wordpress.com/
Tennis & Age
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/02/tennis_and_time.php
Visiting Tolstoy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/feb/09/tolstoy-visit-homestead-1905
The Film Revolutionary Road
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081230/REVIEWS/812309997/1023
Weekend Treats
http://www.ted.com/talks
2.14.2009
2.13.2009
First of All
Kenneth O. Hanson was a Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland Oregon where I taught for many years. I didn’t know him well but I was aware of his dedication to teaching and his students throughout the thirty-two years he was at the College.
I also knew that each summer he traveled to Greece which he apparently discovered in 1963 and where he moved to permanently after retiring from the faculty. I was relatively unfamiliar with his poetry, but there is one poem that he wrote that is among my favorites. I have framed one of the few linocut impressions made of it and it always hangs on the wall in the room where I have my desk.
The poem, First of All, conveys much of what I have tried to describe elsewhere in my search for a place. In both Hanson’s and my case, place refers to a geographical and community setting where one feels at home. Hanson found his home in Greece.
Others have found find it in the writing they do as Jhumpa Lahiri has: "I never felt that I had any claim to any place in the world. But, but in my writing, I've found my home, really, in a very basic sense — in a way that I never had one growing up."
Or in books and walking in the woods, as Patrick Kurp, author of the blog Anecdotal Evidence, has: “Most days, I can feel at home in two places -- among books, in a library or shop, and walking in woods and fields. In these settings I know equilibrium, which should not be confused with anything so grand as happiness, contentment or security.”
Or in the very search for a place itself as Zadie Smith suggests: “Our endless and impossible journey towards home is in fact our home.”
In First of All Hanson describes what he is looking for in this search and what it is like in the place where he found his home. The poem is shown as it does in impression that I have framed.
First of All Kenneth O. Hanson
First of all it is necessary
to find yourself a country
--which is not easy.
It takes much looking
after which you must be lucky.
There must be rocks and water
and a sky that is willing
to take itself for granted
without being overbearing.
There should be fresh fish
in the harbor, fresh bread
in the local stores.
The people should know
how to suffer without
being unhappy, and how to be happy
without feeling guilty. The men
should be named Dimitrios
Costa, John or Evangelos
The newspapers should always
lie, which gives you something
to think about. There should be
great gods in the background
and on all the mountaintops.
There should be lesser gods
in the fields, and nymphs
about all the cool fountains
The past should be always
somewhere in the distance
not taken to seriously
but there always giving perspective.
The present should consist of the seven
days of the week forever.
The music should be broken-hearted
without being self-indulgent.
It should be difficult to sing.
Even the birds in the trees should
work for a dangerous living.
When it rains there should be
no doubt about it. The people
should be hard to govern
and not know how to queue up.
They should come from the villages
and go out to sea, and go back
to the villages. There should be
no word in their language
for self-pity. They should
be farmers and sailors, with only
a few poets. The olive trees
and the orange trees and the cypress
will change your life, the rocks
and the lies and the gods
and the strict music. If you go there
you should be prepared to leave
at a moment’s notice, knowing
after all you have been somewhere.
I also knew that each summer he traveled to Greece which he apparently discovered in 1963 and where he moved to permanently after retiring from the faculty. I was relatively unfamiliar with his poetry, but there is one poem that he wrote that is among my favorites. I have framed one of the few linocut impressions made of it and it always hangs on the wall in the room where I have my desk.
The poem, First of All, conveys much of what I have tried to describe elsewhere in my search for a place. In both Hanson’s and my case, place refers to a geographical and community setting where one feels at home. Hanson found his home in Greece.
Others have found find it in the writing they do as Jhumpa Lahiri has: "I never felt that I had any claim to any place in the world. But, but in my writing, I've found my home, really, in a very basic sense — in a way that I never had one growing up."
Or in books and walking in the woods, as Patrick Kurp, author of the blog Anecdotal Evidence, has: “Most days, I can feel at home in two places -- among books, in a library or shop, and walking in woods and fields. In these settings I know equilibrium, which should not be confused with anything so grand as happiness, contentment or security.”
Or in the very search for a place itself as Zadie Smith suggests: “Our endless and impossible journey towards home is in fact our home.”
In First of All Hanson describes what he is looking for in this search and what it is like in the place where he found his home. The poem is shown as it does in impression that I have framed.
First of All Kenneth O. Hanson
First of all it is necessary
to find yourself a country
--which is not easy.
It takes much looking
after which you must be lucky.
There must be rocks and water
and a sky that is willing
to take itself for granted
without being overbearing.
There should be fresh fish
in the harbor, fresh bread
in the local stores.
The people should know
how to suffer without
being unhappy, and how to be happy
without feeling guilty. The men
should be named Dimitrios
Costa, John or Evangelos
The newspapers should always
lie, which gives you something
to think about. There should be
great gods in the background
and on all the mountaintops.
There should be lesser gods
in the fields, and nymphs
about all the cool fountains
The past should be always
somewhere in the distance
not taken to seriously
but there always giving perspective.
The present should consist of the seven
days of the week forever.
The music should be broken-hearted
without being self-indulgent.
It should be difficult to sing.
Even the birds in the trees should
work for a dangerous living.
When it rains there should be
no doubt about it. The people
should be hard to govern
and not know how to queue up.
They should come from the villages
and go out to sea, and go back
to the villages. There should be
no word in their language
for self-pity. They should
be farmers and sailors, with only
a few poets. The olive trees
and the orange trees and the cypress
will change your life, the rocks
and the lies and the gods
and the strict music. If you go there
you should be prepared to leave
at a moment’s notice, knowing
after all you have been somewhere.
2.12.2009
Kindle2
A friend writes me from time to time about her beloved Kindle. Of course it didn’t take long for her to order the “new and improved” version, the Kindle2. Today she informs me that it is now possible to receive The New Yorker wirelessly on the new Kindle. At $2.99 a month, that’s a bargain compared to the weekly newsstand price. And the fact that is sent early each Monday allows a reader on a remote island in the Pacific to receive it eons before it is seen on the newsstand and several eons before a subscriber receives it in the mail.
I have resisted the Kindle ever since it appeared. There is, of course, my long history of reading the printed page with the covers of the book held between my hands. However, I imagine in time one could get used to the new routine, leaving open the question of how long that would take.
I had always assumed it was impossible to place marks in the margin or its Kindle equivalent next to the noteworthy passages a reader might want to record. This was the central concern I had about every ebook. And I had also assumed it was impossible to save the passages so marked and then eventually transfer them to a Word document on a computer so that they might subsequently added to the reader’s commonplace book.
I have now been duly informed I was wrong on both counts. It appears that it is not only possible but rather than the cumbersome process I imagined it to be, it is, in fact, unbelievably simple. At least, that is what my friend says and that is what is confirmed in the Kindle2 manual.
In response to my doubts, my friend writes: “Why is it cumbersome? It is better now because the manual says you can save starting from a single word and go from page to page (rather than having to start at the beginning of a line and start the highlighting over again on the next page). But it was never difficult—you just clicked to highlight a passage and then clicked when you reached the end of the passage. You just hook it up to the computer and copy the file. A lot easier than typing everything all over again.”
Well, it is true I spend a good deal of time typing the passages I mark in a book or periodical. I have rationalized this by saying it gives me a chance to review the passages and give them further thought. Of course, I could do that anyway, without having to spend all that time typing the passages on the keyboard.
And the Amazon website makes this quite clear: “By using the QWERTY keyboard, you can add annotations to text, just like you might write in the margins of a book. And because it is digital, you can edit, delete, and export your notes.” And that’s not all.
“Using the new 5-way controller, you can highlight and clip key passages and bookmark pages for future use. You'll never need to bookmark your last place in the book, because Kindle remembers for you and always opens to the last page you read.”
This is all pretty amazing. Can it be this simple? Does it really work so easily in practice? Can I ever get used to it? Understand that I am no longer a young, electronic wizard.
A couple of other features appeal to me. I understand there is a built-in dictionary. What a good idea. How often have you come across an unfamiliar word that you want learn its meaning? And how often has this happened while you are lying in bed with the dictionary on a bookshelf two floors below? At least, you thought it was there but come to think of it, you can’t be sure now. The word remains a mystery, unless you make note of it in some way and then remember to check the dictionary when you eventually find it somewhere downstairs.
Again, from the Kindle2 website: “The New Oxford American Dictionary with over 250,000 entries and definitions, so you can seamlessly look up the definitions of words without interrupting your reading. Come across a word you don't know? Simply move the cursor to it and the definition will automatically display at the bottom of the screen. Never fear a sesquipedalian word again--simply look it up and keep reading.” Another miracle of sorts.
Finally, the gadget offers wireless access to Wikipedia, a feature that is less interesting to me but I imagine can be useful in a pinch. Amazon informs me that: “With Kindle in hand, looking up people, places, events, and more has never been easier. It gives whole new meaning to the phrase walking encyclopedia.” Can you believe that?
To be sure, I do often have a question about someone or some book or some issue and more often then not Wikipedia gives me a provisional answer. Usually I go to the computer to get the information. Now I need never get up out of bed or leave my poolside lounge chair with “latest generation” of Amazon’s new super-thin, wireless, “reading device.”
In the old days we used to read books. Now we read, if we read, “reading devices.” What could possibly be next?
I have resisted the Kindle ever since it appeared. There is, of course, my long history of reading the printed page with the covers of the book held between my hands. However, I imagine in time one could get used to the new routine, leaving open the question of how long that would take.
I had always assumed it was impossible to place marks in the margin or its Kindle equivalent next to the noteworthy passages a reader might want to record. This was the central concern I had about every ebook. And I had also assumed it was impossible to save the passages so marked and then eventually transfer them to a Word document on a computer so that they might subsequently added to the reader’s commonplace book.
I have now been duly informed I was wrong on both counts. It appears that it is not only possible but rather than the cumbersome process I imagined it to be, it is, in fact, unbelievably simple. At least, that is what my friend says and that is what is confirmed in the Kindle2 manual.
In response to my doubts, my friend writes: “Why is it cumbersome? It is better now because the manual says you can save starting from a single word and go from page to page (rather than having to start at the beginning of a line and start the highlighting over again on the next page). But it was never difficult—you just clicked to highlight a passage and then clicked when you reached the end of the passage. You just hook it up to the computer and copy the file. A lot easier than typing everything all over again.”
Well, it is true I spend a good deal of time typing the passages I mark in a book or periodical. I have rationalized this by saying it gives me a chance to review the passages and give them further thought. Of course, I could do that anyway, without having to spend all that time typing the passages on the keyboard.
And the Amazon website makes this quite clear: “By using the QWERTY keyboard, you can add annotations to text, just like you might write in the margins of a book. And because it is digital, you can edit, delete, and export your notes.” And that’s not all.
“Using the new 5-way controller, you can highlight and clip key passages and bookmark pages for future use. You'll never need to bookmark your last place in the book, because Kindle remembers for you and always opens to the last page you read.”
This is all pretty amazing. Can it be this simple? Does it really work so easily in practice? Can I ever get used to it? Understand that I am no longer a young, electronic wizard.
A couple of other features appeal to me. I understand there is a built-in dictionary. What a good idea. How often have you come across an unfamiliar word that you want learn its meaning? And how often has this happened while you are lying in bed with the dictionary on a bookshelf two floors below? At least, you thought it was there but come to think of it, you can’t be sure now. The word remains a mystery, unless you make note of it in some way and then remember to check the dictionary when you eventually find it somewhere downstairs.
Again, from the Kindle2 website: “The New Oxford American Dictionary with over 250,000 entries and definitions, so you can seamlessly look up the definitions of words without interrupting your reading. Come across a word you don't know? Simply move the cursor to it and the definition will automatically display at the bottom of the screen. Never fear a sesquipedalian word again--simply look it up and keep reading.” Another miracle of sorts.
Finally, the gadget offers wireless access to Wikipedia, a feature that is less interesting to me but I imagine can be useful in a pinch. Amazon informs me that: “With Kindle in hand, looking up people, places, events, and more has never been easier. It gives whole new meaning to the phrase walking encyclopedia.” Can you believe that?
To be sure, I do often have a question about someone or some book or some issue and more often then not Wikipedia gives me a provisional answer. Usually I go to the computer to get the information. Now I need never get up out of bed or leave my poolside lounge chair with “latest generation” of Amazon’s new super-thin, wireless, “reading device.”
In the old days we used to read books. Now we read, if we read, “reading devices.” What could possibly be next?
2.11.2009
Effects of Literature
I return to the topic of reading. In my earlier post on How to Read a Book, I briefly mentioned Harold Bloom’s similarly titled How to Read and Why that is primarily composed of Bloom’s suggestions on how to benefit from reading some of the classic works of literature.
In the first chapter, Bloom claims that we read because the experience has a number of important and highly desirable effects on the individual reader. I think it is important to examine carefully these claims.
He suggests, for example, that reading imaginative literature alleviates loneliness. Elsewhere Toni Morrison expressed a similar view: “I was lonely for the company of those people in the book.” Does reading literature have this effect? I am dubious as I know of no direct evidence for this kind of influence.
In my case, enjoying the company of my literary friends is not the same as lessening my isolation or in any permanent fashion decreasing the loneliness that I sometimes feel. Yes, I learn that there are other individuals who sometimes think and feel the way I do.
While this is somewhat reassuring, still I know that it is a fictional world that provides this confirmation and it won’t be long before I will have to come to terms if not with loneliness, per se, the relatively solitary world in which I now live.
In several places Bloom suggests reading “is the search for a difficult pleasure” and that it is “the most healing of pleasures.” However, further on, a certain inconsistency creeps into this claim when he admits “You cannot directly improve anyone else's life by reading better or more deeply.”
To be sure, reading is a great pleasure, one of the finest. But is that experience therapeutic which I take what Bloom means by “healing?” Here there is some supporting evidence, although it consists of only a small number of studies that leave much to be desired in terms of methodology.
Reading poetry is claimed to be therapeutic by some investigators. Others have employed self-help manuals to alter a wide-variety of undesirable behaviors with findings that are at best mixed.
There are also a small number of laboratory studies on the effects of reading literature. But these studies employ artificially created reading materials that are specifically tailored for use in the laboratory and they seem quite unlike the ordinary reading experiences that Bloom, as well as most everyone else would like to know more about.
Finally there are a few quasi-experimental field studies that document the positive effects of reading well-known works of literature. If interested, I invite the reader to read a review (the last essay) of this issue that I wrote a while ago.
Bloom does not ignore the underlying quest for knowledge, “not just of ourselves and others, but of the ways things are.” And later he writes, “We read Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dickens, Proust, and all their peers because they more than enlarge life.”
But ultimately Bloom believes “We read to strengthen the self and to learn its authentic interests.” Absent any systematic research, at least that I am unaware of on these claims, each of us must ask if and to what extent that holds for us.
In my case, I know that literature has reaffirmed the interests that I have and the life it has led me to. And to that extent, it has certainly reinforced the confidence I have in this pursuit. Would I be saying this if I were unable to read literature? The question is tantalizing but impossible to answer.
Throughout this post, as well as others, I have asked for evidence relevant to the issue at hand. Is this question reasonable? Fair? Does it make sense to seek evidence for claims about how literature shapes an individual?
By training and background I am prone to ask questions like this. In time, empirical studies of these matters will develop. I know it exists in other areas of literary analysis that are not directly relevant to this one. The questions may be premature at this time but perhaps this will not be the case for long.
In the first chapter, Bloom claims that we read because the experience has a number of important and highly desirable effects on the individual reader. I think it is important to examine carefully these claims.
He suggests, for example, that reading imaginative literature alleviates loneliness. Elsewhere Toni Morrison expressed a similar view: “I was lonely for the company of those people in the book.” Does reading literature have this effect? I am dubious as I know of no direct evidence for this kind of influence.
In my case, enjoying the company of my literary friends is not the same as lessening my isolation or in any permanent fashion decreasing the loneliness that I sometimes feel. Yes, I learn that there are other individuals who sometimes think and feel the way I do.
While this is somewhat reassuring, still I know that it is a fictional world that provides this confirmation and it won’t be long before I will have to come to terms if not with loneliness, per se, the relatively solitary world in which I now live.
In several places Bloom suggests reading “is the search for a difficult pleasure” and that it is “the most healing of pleasures.” However, further on, a certain inconsistency creeps into this claim when he admits “You cannot directly improve anyone else's life by reading better or more deeply.”
To be sure, reading is a great pleasure, one of the finest. But is that experience therapeutic which I take what Bloom means by “healing?” Here there is some supporting evidence, although it consists of only a small number of studies that leave much to be desired in terms of methodology.
Reading poetry is claimed to be therapeutic by some investigators. Others have employed self-help manuals to alter a wide-variety of undesirable behaviors with findings that are at best mixed.
There are also a small number of laboratory studies on the effects of reading literature. But these studies employ artificially created reading materials that are specifically tailored for use in the laboratory and they seem quite unlike the ordinary reading experiences that Bloom, as well as most everyone else would like to know more about.
Finally there are a few quasi-experimental field studies that document the positive effects of reading well-known works of literature. If interested, I invite the reader to read a review (the last essay) of this issue that I wrote a while ago.
Bloom does not ignore the underlying quest for knowledge, “not just of ourselves and others, but of the ways things are.” And later he writes, “We read Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dickens, Proust, and all their peers because they more than enlarge life.”
But ultimately Bloom believes “We read to strengthen the self and to learn its authentic interests.” Absent any systematic research, at least that I am unaware of on these claims, each of us must ask if and to what extent that holds for us.
In my case, I know that literature has reaffirmed the interests that I have and the life it has led me to. And to that extent, it has certainly reinforced the confidence I have in this pursuit. Would I be saying this if I were unable to read literature? The question is tantalizing but impossible to answer.
Throughout this post, as well as others, I have asked for evidence relevant to the issue at hand. Is this question reasonable? Fair? Does it make sense to seek evidence for claims about how literature shapes an individual?
By training and background I am prone to ask questions like this. In time, empirical studies of these matters will develop. I know it exists in other areas of literary analysis that are not directly relevant to this one. The questions may be premature at this time but perhaps this will not be the case for long.
2.10.2009
A Literary Education
In an essay in the June 16th, 2008 New Criterion Joseph Epstein discusses his literary education and why it drew him to the literary life he now leads. To a large extent this is reflected in the very fine essays he writes, as well as the fictional forays he makes from time to time.
Throughout this piece Epstein tries to identify what he learned from his literary education. In turn, while my literary education has been much briefer, I was led to ask the same question as I read his piece. Over the years, I have been continually surprised by what I have discovered.
In the most general sense, I now realize there are as many truths to be found in literature as in the psychological science I have been studying for most of my life. Indeed, in many respects literary truths tell me more about life, especially my life, than the more formal generalizations of psychology.
Literary truths hold for the individual. They make no claims on anyone beyond the reader who chances upon them in the books or essays they read. The truths of any single reader are usually quite different than the truths of any other reader. That is the wonderful thing about literature and the reason why it is such a gold mine of truths.
In writing about the work of social scientists Epstein expresses a somewhat similar view: “Scientists and social scientists claim to operate by induction, but there are grounds for thinking that they do not, not really; that instead they are testing hopefully, hunches, which they call hypotheses. But novelists and poets, if they are true to their craft, are not out to prove anything.”
And later: “One of the most important functions of literature in the current day is to cultivate a healthy distrust of the ideas thrown up by journalism and social science.”
This leaves open the question how and in what ways literature gives rise to this skepticism. For it was something I learned very early on in my own studies of social science, particularly from its methodology and mode of analysis.
Epstein reminds readers of Freud’s well-known claim that most of what he knew he learned from poets. I’ve always wondered exactly what Freud meant by this. To be sure his conjectures based on the Sophocles Oedipus Trilogy made him famous. But while he was clearly well read in the classics, my sense is that he learned far more from his patients than the writers whose work he admired.
In speaking of the truths to be found in literature Epstein writes that “James [Henry] felt that there were truths above the level of ideas, truths of the instincts, of the heart, of the soul, and these were truths that James, once he had attained to his literary mastery, attempted to plumb in his novels and stories.”
At the outset of his study of literature is Epstein hoped that the “thoughts of imaginary characters, the dramatization of large themes through carefully constructed plots, the portrayals of how the world works, really works---these were among the things that literature, carefully attended to, might one day help me to learn.” Epstein admits that a literary education is largely a private affair and that our real teachers are the books we happen to read.
He concludes: “So from the study of literature we learn that life is sad, comic, heroic, vicious, dignified, ridiculous, and endlessly amusing…” Not every writer can so readily translate his education into the life he leads, but Epstein is clearly one who has.
Can this be learned in other ways? In the end, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t to be obtained in psychology. Many writers, perhaps not surprisingly, say it can only be learned through the study of literature. Here are the views of four who I admire.
Eliot Perlman: Fiction, at least some fiction, can also confront us with truths we might otherwise never have encountered. It can provide us with insights we would never have gained elsewhere.
Salman Rushdie: Its [literature] cultural importance derives…from its success in telling us things about ourselves that we hear from no other quarter.
Richard Ford: He liked novels because they dealt with the incommensurables in life, with the things that couldn’t be expressed another way.
John Updike: We look to fiction for images of reality—real life rendered as vicarious experience, with a circumstantial intimacy that more factual, explanatory accounts cannot quite supply.
John Updike
Throughout this piece Epstein tries to identify what he learned from his literary education. In turn, while my literary education has been much briefer, I was led to ask the same question as I read his piece. Over the years, I have been continually surprised by what I have discovered.
In the most general sense, I now realize there are as many truths to be found in literature as in the psychological science I have been studying for most of my life. Indeed, in many respects literary truths tell me more about life, especially my life, than the more formal generalizations of psychology.
Literary truths hold for the individual. They make no claims on anyone beyond the reader who chances upon them in the books or essays they read. The truths of any single reader are usually quite different than the truths of any other reader. That is the wonderful thing about literature and the reason why it is such a gold mine of truths.
In writing about the work of social scientists Epstein expresses a somewhat similar view: “Scientists and social scientists claim to operate by induction, but there are grounds for thinking that they do not, not really; that instead they are testing hopefully, hunches, which they call hypotheses. But novelists and poets, if they are true to their craft, are not out to prove anything.”
And later: “One of the most important functions of literature in the current day is to cultivate a healthy distrust of the ideas thrown up by journalism and social science.”
This leaves open the question how and in what ways literature gives rise to this skepticism. For it was something I learned very early on in my own studies of social science, particularly from its methodology and mode of analysis.
Epstein reminds readers of Freud’s well-known claim that most of what he knew he learned from poets. I’ve always wondered exactly what Freud meant by this. To be sure his conjectures based on the Sophocles Oedipus Trilogy made him famous. But while he was clearly well read in the classics, my sense is that he learned far more from his patients than the writers whose work he admired.
In speaking of the truths to be found in literature Epstein writes that “James [Henry] felt that there were truths above the level of ideas, truths of the instincts, of the heart, of the soul, and these were truths that James, once he had attained to his literary mastery, attempted to plumb in his novels and stories.”
At the outset of his study of literature is Epstein hoped that the “thoughts of imaginary characters, the dramatization of large themes through carefully constructed plots, the portrayals of how the world works, really works---these were among the things that literature, carefully attended to, might one day help me to learn.” Epstein admits that a literary education is largely a private affair and that our real teachers are the books we happen to read.
He concludes: “So from the study of literature we learn that life is sad, comic, heroic, vicious, dignified, ridiculous, and endlessly amusing…” Not every writer can so readily translate his education into the life he leads, but Epstein is clearly one who has.
Can this be learned in other ways? In the end, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t to be obtained in psychology. Many writers, perhaps not surprisingly, say it can only be learned through the study of literature. Here are the views of four who I admire.
Eliot Perlman: Fiction, at least some fiction, can also confront us with truths we might otherwise never have encountered. It can provide us with insights we would never have gained elsewhere.
Salman Rushdie: Its [literature] cultural importance derives…from its success in telling us things about ourselves that we hear from no other quarter.
Richard Ford: He liked novels because they dealt with the incommensurables in life, with the things that couldn’t be expressed another way.
John Updike: We look to fiction for images of reality—real life rendered as vicarious experience, with a circumstantial intimacy that more factual, explanatory accounts cannot quite supply.
John Updike
2.09.2009
How To Read a Book
I read a book in a rather unusual way, at least when compared to most readers that I know and they are a dwindling number, indeed. Over the years, I have changed the routine a little and explored its implications in a recently published book, In the Country of Books. I’d like to tell you about it.
My comments will not be of the sort written by Harold Bloom, who I greatly admire, in his memorable volume How to Read a Book and Why, especially his remarks in the first chapter prior to his review and analysis of some well known works of literature. Instead, I want to describe the practice I employ in reading any printed matter, fiction, non-fiction, essay, or article.
When I come across a passage that seems memorable in some respect, I put a little mark in the margin or enclose the passage in parentheses. Then I write down on the end page of the document its page number. I do this for every one of the passages I have marked in this way.
When I have completed reading the material, I type each passage in a Word document on my computer, listed under the name of the author, title of the work and it source if it is from a periodical. These passages develop cumulatively over the year in, for example, the Passages I am starting to collect for 2009.
At the end of the year, I review the collection, correct any errors, and make a printed copy. Following this, I add the yearly collection to the growing hard copy volume and now electronic version that I have been compiling for many years.
From time to time I review the passages in particular books and cite them in something I am writing or, as in years past, my lectures to students. I also annotate some when I want to explore the ideas or issues they have led me to.
As a case in point, I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers: The Story of Success. I marked a goodly number of passages in this book, with additional notes to myself like “Look closely at this claim.” Most of the passages I marked in this volume were factual (or presumed factual) statements that Gladwell made about the individuals and conditions that gave rise to their extraordinary achievements.
Many were helpful to me in organizing a discussion with other readers of Outliers.
And when I write something about a book that I only dimly recall, the passages that I recorded help me to remember its contents and details about the theme I want to consider.
Doing all this has changed the nature of my reading experiences. More often than not reading tends to be a fairly passive process. We move rapidly from sentence to sentence, rarely stopping to mull over any single one. Marking those that seem notable for one reason or another slows reading down. It transforms it from a page turning exercise into an occasion to think further about the material. Rarely do we stop to think twice about a passage, or make note of it so that we can react to it sometime later. In my view, this is the real advantage of collecting notable passages. It deepens the reading experience, turns it into an engagement with issues, and a true educational experience.
Students often report that one of the greatest hurdles they face in getting started on their writing assignments is finding ideas to write about. Compiling a collection of topics and themes while they are reading might be valuable tool in overcoming this problem. A notebook in which they collect notable passages from the materials they read could easily be drawn upon for writing assignments and might also serve as a catalyst in developing ideas of their own. At least, this is the way it has worked for me.
My comments will not be of the sort written by Harold Bloom, who I greatly admire, in his memorable volume How to Read a Book and Why, especially his remarks in the first chapter prior to his review and analysis of some well known works of literature. Instead, I want to describe the practice I employ in reading any printed matter, fiction, non-fiction, essay, or article.
When I come across a passage that seems memorable in some respect, I put a little mark in the margin or enclose the passage in parentheses. Then I write down on the end page of the document its page number. I do this for every one of the passages I have marked in this way.
When I have completed reading the material, I type each passage in a Word document on my computer, listed under the name of the author, title of the work and it source if it is from a periodical. These passages develop cumulatively over the year in, for example, the Passages I am starting to collect for 2009.
At the end of the year, I review the collection, correct any errors, and make a printed copy. Following this, I add the yearly collection to the growing hard copy volume and now electronic version that I have been compiling for many years.
From time to time I review the passages in particular books and cite them in something I am writing or, as in years past, my lectures to students. I also annotate some when I want to explore the ideas or issues they have led me to.
As a case in point, I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers: The Story of Success. I marked a goodly number of passages in this book, with additional notes to myself like “Look closely at this claim.” Most of the passages I marked in this volume were factual (or presumed factual) statements that Gladwell made about the individuals and conditions that gave rise to their extraordinary achievements.
Many were helpful to me in organizing a discussion with other readers of Outliers.
And when I write something about a book that I only dimly recall, the passages that I recorded help me to remember its contents and details about the theme I want to consider.
Doing all this has changed the nature of my reading experiences. More often than not reading tends to be a fairly passive process. We move rapidly from sentence to sentence, rarely stopping to mull over any single one. Marking those that seem notable for one reason or another slows reading down. It transforms it from a page turning exercise into an occasion to think further about the material. Rarely do we stop to think twice about a passage, or make note of it so that we can react to it sometime later. In my view, this is the real advantage of collecting notable passages. It deepens the reading experience, turns it into an engagement with issues, and a true educational experience.
Students often report that one of the greatest hurdles they face in getting started on their writing assignments is finding ideas to write about. Compiling a collection of topics and themes while they are reading might be valuable tool in overcoming this problem. A notebook in which they collect notable passages from the materials they read could easily be drawn upon for writing assignments and might also serve as a catalyst in developing ideas of their own. At least, this is the way it has worked for me.
2.06.2009
Outliers
I have admired the articles and books that Malcolm Gladwell has published ever since he began writing for the New Yorker. At first, I was deeply impressed by the way he wrote. He is a story-teller, a good one and is able to bring alive the abstract findings of large and important areas of social science. His essays in the New Yorker are entertaining, instructive, and more often than not, concern issues of consequence.
But as the years went by, I began to worry about their appeal. I began to ask What are the special responsibilities of a science writer, one whose work is widely read and much admired? Is it enough that he popularizes the science, in most cases, findings from social psychology that he writes about? Or does the popularity of his work also call for a more critical approach to the material?
As a social scientist with a good deal of applied research experience, I thought Gladwell often simplified issues that were far more complicated than he acknowledged. I worried about the studies that he didn’t talk about and the qualifications they would place upon his claims. I was troubled by his tendency to over-generalize, as I knew his claims did not apply as widely as he implied. And then most of his essays and books consist of a series of anecdotes or case studies with little in the way of analysis. A writer doesn’t create a very deep understanding of human behavior from a cascade of entertaining anecdotes.
This has been true of his previous books, The Tipping Point and Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, as well as most recent work, Outliers: The Story of Success that at this time ranks Number 1 on the New York Times List of non-fiction best sellers where it is likely to remain their for the rest of the year.
In Outliers Gladwell proposes the five-factor theory of success. He never gives an explicit definition of success. But in a very general way, it is clear what he means by the examples of extraordinary achievement he discusses--Bill Gates, Robert Oppenheimer, The Beatles, etc. According to Gladwell, the factors responsible for success these and other extremely success individuals are Talent, Hard Work, Opportunities, Timing and Luck.
Neither factor alone is sufficient to guarantee success. Nor is success necessarily preceded by any single one. But Gladwell wants us to appreciate the powerful role that past experiences, family background, and cultural traditions play in determining success. At the same time, he wishes to counter the tendency in our society to overestimate the role of ambition, determination, and personality traits in accounting for these cases.
At a later point, I will discuss in detail this very entertaining book. Here I would simply like to point out that Gladwell commits one of the major inferential errors that I mentioned in blogging yesterday about Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think, namely the Confirmation Bias.
In every case of exceptional achievement that he treats, Gladwell cites exclusively evidence in support of his views. Nowhere does he mention instances that might raise doubt about his views or evidence that would limit their generality. Rather, he selects cases (almost always anecdotes) that conform to his claims. In this respect I find Outliers and almost everything else Gladwell has written quite misleading.
To mention briefly one example: In writing about the considerable advantage young Canadian hockey players have when they are born early in the year (they gain additional experience playing and practicing due the January 1st eligibility cutoff date for age-class hockey teams), he does not acknowledge that six of the thirty-three the players on the championship team he discusses were born in the later half of the year and, thus, are exceptions to the general claim he makes. How can their excellence in hockey be understood and would such an explanation provide an alternative account for the relationship Gladwell reports?
Recently someone asked me if in light of my concerns, I thought Outliers was worth reading. I really had to pause before answering. Yes, I said, it is surely worth it to Gladwell to write these kinds of books. And they are certainly very amusing and very well written. But unless a person approaches his works with a more critical eye, I would hesitate to recommend them.
But as the years went by, I began to worry about their appeal. I began to ask What are the special responsibilities of a science writer, one whose work is widely read and much admired? Is it enough that he popularizes the science, in most cases, findings from social psychology that he writes about? Or does the popularity of his work also call for a more critical approach to the material?
As a social scientist with a good deal of applied research experience, I thought Gladwell often simplified issues that were far more complicated than he acknowledged. I worried about the studies that he didn’t talk about and the qualifications they would place upon his claims. I was troubled by his tendency to over-generalize, as I knew his claims did not apply as widely as he implied. And then most of his essays and books consist of a series of anecdotes or case studies with little in the way of analysis. A writer doesn’t create a very deep understanding of human behavior from a cascade of entertaining anecdotes.
This has been true of his previous books, The Tipping Point and Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, as well as most recent work, Outliers: The Story of Success that at this time ranks Number 1 on the New York Times List of non-fiction best sellers where it is likely to remain their for the rest of the year.
In Outliers Gladwell proposes the five-factor theory of success. He never gives an explicit definition of success. But in a very general way, it is clear what he means by the examples of extraordinary achievement he discusses--Bill Gates, Robert Oppenheimer, The Beatles, etc. According to Gladwell, the factors responsible for success these and other extremely success individuals are Talent, Hard Work, Opportunities, Timing and Luck.
Neither factor alone is sufficient to guarantee success. Nor is success necessarily preceded by any single one. But Gladwell wants us to appreciate the powerful role that past experiences, family background, and cultural traditions play in determining success. At the same time, he wishes to counter the tendency in our society to overestimate the role of ambition, determination, and personality traits in accounting for these cases.
At a later point, I will discuss in detail this very entertaining book. Here I would simply like to point out that Gladwell commits one of the major inferential errors that I mentioned in blogging yesterday about Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think, namely the Confirmation Bias.
In every case of exceptional achievement that he treats, Gladwell cites exclusively evidence in support of his views. Nowhere does he mention instances that might raise doubt about his views or evidence that would limit their generality. Rather, he selects cases (almost always anecdotes) that conform to his claims. In this respect I find Outliers and almost everything else Gladwell has written quite misleading.
To mention briefly one example: In writing about the considerable advantage young Canadian hockey players have when they are born early in the year (they gain additional experience playing and practicing due the January 1st eligibility cutoff date for age-class hockey teams), he does not acknowledge that six of the thirty-three the players on the championship team he discusses were born in the later half of the year and, thus, are exceptions to the general claim he makes. How can their excellence in hockey be understood and would such an explanation provide an alternative account for the relationship Gladwell reports?
Recently someone asked me if in light of my concerns, I thought Outliers was worth reading. I really had to pause before answering. Yes, I said, it is surely worth it to Gladwell to write these kinds of books. And they are certainly very amusing and very well written. But unless a person approaches his works with a more critical eye, I would hesitate to recommend them.
2.05.2009
Decision Making Errors
I was reminded of Jerome Groopman’s recent book, How Doctors Think, in blogging about medically trained writers yesterday. Groopman writes about the biases and errors that intrude on the decision making process of physicians. They occur far more often than is normally believed, sometimes with devastating consequences.
When I read the book, I was impressed by Groopman’s knowledge of recent cognitive research on heuristics and biases. His account is up-to date in all respects.
Some of the errors that physicians make can and do often occur to anyone. Groopman’s goal is to insure that when physicians shift from theoretical studies to practical applications, they are more mindful of the biases and uncertainty inherent in diagnosing patient illnesses.
He believes that overconfidence is one of the most common errors that physicians make, largely as result of their past diagnostic experiences. He writes: “You have to be prepared in your mind for the atypical and not so quickly reassure yourself, and your patient, that everything is okay.”
And later: “I learned from this to always hold back, to make sure that even when I think I have the answer, to generate a short list of alternatives. That simple strategy is one of the safeguards against cognitive errors.”
Taking issue with Malcolm Gladwell’s claims his wildly popular Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Groopman cautions about making snap diagnostic judgments based on intuition.
He writes: “Much has been made of the power of intuition, and certainly initial impressions formed in a flash can be correct. But…intuition has its perils. Cogent medical judgments meld first impressions—gestalt—with deliberate analysis.”
In addition to Overconfidence some of the common inferential errors that Groopman discusses include the following:
Representative Error: Your decision is too strongly influenced by a prototype “so you fail to consider possibilities that contradict the prototype and thus attribute the symptoms to the wrong cause.”
Confirmation Bias: Your decision is based on attending to supporting evidence exclusively, ignoring or “minimizing data that contradict it.
Commission Error: “This is the tendency toward action rather than inaction.”
Availability Bias: Reaching a decision on the basis of a recent, vivid or easily recalled situation that is unrepresentative of case under consideration.
Groopman suggests that “most misguided care results from a cascade of cognitive errors.” He urges physicians to avoid premature closure, indeed, to be ever mindful of alternative accounts and keep inquiring “What else could it be?”
Everyone could benefit from such advice. It bears repeating: “Be ever mindful of alternative accounts and keep inquiring.”
When I read the book, I was impressed by Groopman’s knowledge of recent cognitive research on heuristics and biases. His account is up-to date in all respects.
Some of the errors that physicians make can and do often occur to anyone. Groopman’s goal is to insure that when physicians shift from theoretical studies to practical applications, they are more mindful of the biases and uncertainty inherent in diagnosing patient illnesses.
He believes that overconfidence is one of the most common errors that physicians make, largely as result of their past diagnostic experiences. He writes: “You have to be prepared in your mind for the atypical and not so quickly reassure yourself, and your patient, that everything is okay.”
And later: “I learned from this to always hold back, to make sure that even when I think I have the answer, to generate a short list of alternatives. That simple strategy is one of the safeguards against cognitive errors.”
Taking issue with Malcolm Gladwell’s claims his wildly popular Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Groopman cautions about making snap diagnostic judgments based on intuition.
He writes: “Much has been made of the power of intuition, and certainly initial impressions formed in a flash can be correct. But…intuition has its perils. Cogent medical judgments meld first impressions—gestalt—with deliberate analysis.”
In addition to Overconfidence some of the common inferential errors that Groopman discusses include the following:
Representative Error: Your decision is too strongly influenced by a prototype “so you fail to consider possibilities that contradict the prototype and thus attribute the symptoms to the wrong cause.”
Confirmation Bias: Your decision is based on attending to supporting evidence exclusively, ignoring or “minimizing data that contradict it.
Commission Error: “This is the tendency toward action rather than inaction.”
Availability Bias: Reaching a decision on the basis of a recent, vivid or easily recalled situation that is unrepresentative of case under consideration.
Groopman suggests that “most misguided care results from a cascade of cognitive errors.” He urges physicians to avoid premature closure, indeed, to be ever mindful of alternative accounts and keep inquiring “What else could it be?”
Everyone could benefit from such advice. It bears repeating: “Be ever mindful of alternative accounts and keep inquiring.”
2.04.2009
Doctors as Writers
I am often surprised to learn that a writer whose work I admire had been trained as a physician. I think of Somerset Maugham, Anton Chekhov, and Walker Percy. I’ll never forget reading Percy’s Moviegoer and then enjoying it just a much a few years ago when I read it again.
There are also more contemporary novelists like Ethan Canin, Rivka Galachen and Daniel Mason all of whom studied in medical school. Similarly, several well-known non-fiction writers such as Robert Coles, Oliver Sachs, and Theodore Dalrymple were trained as doctors.
Among my favorite New Yorker short story writers was Auturo Vivante whose romantic stories of Italian life entranced me in my earlier New Yorker days. One day I wrote him a letter to that effect and he even had the courtesy to reply.
And if you had the good fortune of reading Annals of Medicine who can ever forget the epidemiological “mysteries” that Berton Rouche wove? Although Rouche never formally studied medicine, you’d never know it from reading his memorable accounts.
And now the New Yorker has two eminent doctors—Dr. Jerome Groopman and Dr. Atul Gawande--on their staff who write brilliant essays about their medical experiences and recent advances in their science. Groopman recently wrote a deservedly popular and important book about medical decision-making titled How Doctors Think that I very much enjoyed and Gawade has also written two volumes that I’ve not yet read—Complications and Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance.
Why do so many doctors write so well? When asked a similar question, William Carlos Williams, who practiced medicine and wrote poetry throughout his life, replied:
"When they ask me, as of late they frequently do, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing."
When I think about this question I realize both medicine and literature are concerned with the individual, not generalizations that apply across a large number. Both disciplines focus on the individual in intimate detail—suffering, illness, personal crisis, birth and dying.
Kathryn Montgomery, a professor of literature, is quoted in a May 15th article in the Times as saying: “Doctors are storytellers. They spend all day long listening to stories and telling stories.”
Perhaps that is why there are so few, if any clinical psychologists who write novels. While they listen all day to stories, it is rare for them to tell one in return.
In a letter written in 1899 to a fellow physician in Moscow, Chekhov wrote: “I have no doubt that my involvement in medical science has had a strong influence on my literary activities; it significantly enlarged the scope of my observations and enriched me with knowledge whose true worth to a writer can be evaluated only by somebody who is himself a doctor…”
Finally, Theodore Dalrymple recently passed along the following advice to a group of resident doctors:
“I had only three pieces of advice to give: firstly, that they should continue in the hospital for a few more years, because human nature was concentrated and distilled there as if for the express purpose of training writers; secondly, that on no account should they consort with academics of the humanities departments of any university, for to do so was the primrose path to stylistic perdition; and finally, that they should read a great deal.”
“Read a great deal.” Good advice for anyone, regardless of the “primrose path” they have taken.
There are also more contemporary novelists like Ethan Canin, Rivka Galachen and Daniel Mason all of whom studied in medical school. Similarly, several well-known non-fiction writers such as Robert Coles, Oliver Sachs, and Theodore Dalrymple were trained as doctors.
Among my favorite New Yorker short story writers was Auturo Vivante whose romantic stories of Italian life entranced me in my earlier New Yorker days. One day I wrote him a letter to that effect and he even had the courtesy to reply.
And if you had the good fortune of reading Annals of Medicine who can ever forget the epidemiological “mysteries” that Berton Rouche wove? Although Rouche never formally studied medicine, you’d never know it from reading his memorable accounts.
And now the New Yorker has two eminent doctors—Dr. Jerome Groopman and Dr. Atul Gawande--on their staff who write brilliant essays about their medical experiences and recent advances in their science. Groopman recently wrote a deservedly popular and important book about medical decision-making titled How Doctors Think that I very much enjoyed and Gawade has also written two volumes that I’ve not yet read—Complications and Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance.
Why do so many doctors write so well? When asked a similar question, William Carlos Williams, who practiced medicine and wrote poetry throughout his life, replied:
"When they ask me, as of late they frequently do, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing."
When I think about this question I realize both medicine and literature are concerned with the individual, not generalizations that apply across a large number. Both disciplines focus on the individual in intimate detail—suffering, illness, personal crisis, birth and dying.
Kathryn Montgomery, a professor of literature, is quoted in a May 15th article in the Times as saying: “Doctors are storytellers. They spend all day long listening to stories and telling stories.”
Perhaps that is why there are so few, if any clinical psychologists who write novels. While they listen all day to stories, it is rare for them to tell one in return.
In a letter written in 1899 to a fellow physician in Moscow, Chekhov wrote: “I have no doubt that my involvement in medical science has had a strong influence on my literary activities; it significantly enlarged the scope of my observations and enriched me with knowledge whose true worth to a writer can be evaluated only by somebody who is himself a doctor…”
Finally, Theodore Dalrymple recently passed along the following advice to a group of resident doctors:
“I had only three pieces of advice to give: firstly, that they should continue in the hospital for a few more years, because human nature was concentrated and distilled there as if for the express purpose of training writers; secondly, that on no account should they consort with academics of the humanities departments of any university, for to do so was the primrose path to stylistic perdition; and finally, that they should read a great deal.”
“Read a great deal.” Good advice for anyone, regardless of the “primrose path” they have taken.
2.03.2009
On Traveling
If I have trouble finding a book that captures my interest, it is usually because it doesn’t make contact with some aspect of my life—where I am, how I feel, a recent experience or whatever it is that I’m searching for. If I am in the mood to read something French or Russian I know exactly where to look. If I am at loose ends, I want a book that echoes and perhaps reflects on that experience.
But after reading Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon last year, I’ve been having trouble finding much pleasure in any particular book. Mercier’s novel is an intellectual tour de force and I am always on the lookout for one of those, regardless of anything else.
However, I was recently and unexpectedly entertained by a very long short story, The Lover, by Damon Galgut in the latest Paris Review. The story is about a young man, whose name we never learn, who is at loose ends in South Africa. The tale depicts his wanderings from one place to another and then several more for the better part of what must have easily been a year. And since I am always wandering from one place to another, whether it be for somewhere to live or an idea to investigate, I found myself enjoying the story even though it seemed excessively repetitious.
In this tale the central character simply decides: “one morning to leave and gets on a bus that same night. He has it in mind to travel around for two weeks and then go back.”
His travels last far more than that. Galgut writes:
What is he looking for? He himself doesn’t know.
His life is unfocused and directionless, he has not made a home for himself.
…he thinks that he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much.
Eventually he meets up with some other people and ambivalently decides to join them on their own unfocused wanderings. At certain times he leaves them. But soon thereafter he races after trying to join them once again.
He is continually uneasy, no matter where he is and who he is with, always uncertain about the idea and the value of traveling. After several months of what was to be a two-week excursion, he eventually returns to his home in South Africa, where he is soon overcome with a deep sense of apathy and once again at drift.
The story ends on what a philosophical note when the hero begins to question himself about the very nature of experience itself. Galgut describes his thoughts this way:
A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it is made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.
…soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.
Is the purpose of any trip primarily to collect memories? Does a trip even have to have a purpose? The experience itself is so fleeting. It starts and then it is over and what is left other than the memories that in time will fade or are transformed and then totally forgotten. Is it worth it? Of course, there are all those photos, but that isn’t why you went all that distance or incurred all those costs.
As far back as 1670, Pascal wrote in the Pensees: The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
I remember Pascal’s words every time I consider traveling far from home and then, as I begin to imagine how much I’ll enjoy being there, I promptly ignore his wise consul and begin to make my plans. How much more sensible it would have been to have taken his advice more seriously and simply stayed at home to travel there on Goggle Earth.
But after reading Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon last year, I’ve been having trouble finding much pleasure in any particular book. Mercier’s novel is an intellectual tour de force and I am always on the lookout for one of those, regardless of anything else.
However, I was recently and unexpectedly entertained by a very long short story, The Lover, by Damon Galgut in the latest Paris Review. The story is about a young man, whose name we never learn, who is at loose ends in South Africa. The tale depicts his wanderings from one place to another and then several more for the better part of what must have easily been a year. And since I am always wandering from one place to another, whether it be for somewhere to live or an idea to investigate, I found myself enjoying the story even though it seemed excessively repetitious.
In this tale the central character simply decides: “one morning to leave and gets on a bus that same night. He has it in mind to travel around for two weeks and then go back.”
His travels last far more than that. Galgut writes:
What is he looking for? He himself doesn’t know.
His life is unfocused and directionless, he has not made a home for himself.
…he thinks that he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much.
Eventually he meets up with some other people and ambivalently decides to join them on their own unfocused wanderings. At certain times he leaves them. But soon thereafter he races after trying to join them once again.
He is continually uneasy, no matter where he is and who he is with, always uncertain about the idea and the value of traveling. After several months of what was to be a two-week excursion, he eventually returns to his home in South Africa, where he is soon overcome with a deep sense of apathy and once again at drift.
The story ends on what a philosophical note when the hero begins to question himself about the very nature of experience itself. Galgut describes his thoughts this way:
A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it is made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.
…soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.
Is the purpose of any trip primarily to collect memories? Does a trip even have to have a purpose? The experience itself is so fleeting. It starts and then it is over and what is left other than the memories that in time will fade or are transformed and then totally forgotten. Is it worth it? Of course, there are all those photos, but that isn’t why you went all that distance or incurred all those costs.
As far back as 1670, Pascal wrote in the Pensees: The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
I remember Pascal’s words every time I consider traveling far from home and then, as I begin to imagine how much I’ll enjoy being there, I promptly ignore his wise consul and begin to make my plans. How much more sensible it would have been to have taken his advice more seriously and simply stayed at home to travel there on Goggle Earth.
2.02.2009
Groundhog Day
February 2nd is the birthday of James Joyce. It is also the day I was born seventy two years ago. Joyce turns 127 today. He has a few years and far, far more talent on me. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man he wrote:
“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.”
And in the Oxford Book of Ages, the following passages were cited on the page for 72 years.
One virtue he had in perfection, which was prudence, too often the only one that is left us at seventy-two. Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
Nothing is more incumbent on the old, than to know when they shall get out of the way, and relinquish to younger successors the honours they can no longer earn, and the duties they can no longer perform. Thomas Jefferson. Letter to John Vaughan
Dear Miss Martineau,
I am seventy-two years of age, at which period there comes over one a shameful love of ease and repose, common to dogs, horses, clergymen and even to Edinburgh Reviewers. Then an idea comes across me sometimes that I am entitled to five or six years of quiet before I die.
Sydney Smith Dec 11, 1842
It is also Groundhog Day today. This is a good day to have been born. At least, I have a way to remember it. It appears that Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow early this morning indicating that an already harsh winter will last for yet another six weeks.
Over the years, I have collected a great many thoughts about Aging, one of the most frequent themes in my Commonplace Book. Here are a few:
The purpose of living is to get old enough to have something to say. But by that time, your voice doesn’t work and your hands won’t obey you so it’s tough as hell to find a way to say it all. M.F.K. Fisher
December’s come again, and the winter birds fly overhead. And I keep getting older.
Haruki Murakami
You’re only ripe for a moment. Life made more sense in the Middle Ages, when no one lasted past forty. Brian Morton Starting Out in the Evening
What is it that puts me outside? It is age. The wound of age. Philip Roth The Human Stain
“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.”
And in the Oxford Book of Ages, the following passages were cited on the page for 72 years.
One virtue he had in perfection, which was prudence, too often the only one that is left us at seventy-two. Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
Nothing is more incumbent on the old, than to know when they shall get out of the way, and relinquish to younger successors the honours they can no longer earn, and the duties they can no longer perform. Thomas Jefferson. Letter to John Vaughan
Dear Miss Martineau,
I am seventy-two years of age, at which period there comes over one a shameful love of ease and repose, common to dogs, horses, clergymen and even to Edinburgh Reviewers. Then an idea comes across me sometimes that I am entitled to five or six years of quiet before I die.
Sydney Smith Dec 11, 1842
It is also Groundhog Day today. This is a good day to have been born. At least, I have a way to remember it. It appears that Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow early this morning indicating that an already harsh winter will last for yet another six weeks.
Over the years, I have collected a great many thoughts about Aging, one of the most frequent themes in my Commonplace Book. Here are a few:
The purpose of living is to get old enough to have something to say. But by that time, your voice doesn’t work and your hands won’t obey you so it’s tough as hell to find a way to say it all. M.F.K. Fisher
December’s come again, and the winter birds fly overhead. And I keep getting older.
Haruki Murakami
You’re only ripe for a moment. Life made more sense in the Middle Ages, when no one lasted past forty. Brian Morton Starting Out in the Evening
What is it that puts me outside? It is age. The wound of age. Philip Roth The Human Stain
1.31.2009
On a French Train
On a different continent and among different people, Theodore Dalrymple writes about a commingling of cultures much like the one I described in an earlier blog about Honolulu. Dalrymple is in France on a train heading for the airport on his way out of Paris.
“There was nothing distinctly French about the passengers, not ethnically, culturally, or linguistically. There was a Babel of tongues, but not much French among it. There were Indians, Chinese, East Europeans, black Africans and North Africans; I did, with effort, spot a couple of French speakers at the other end of the car.”
And like the way I sometimes feel among the multi-ethnic people of Honolulu, he felt a bit uneasy. Not so much because he wasn’t sure where he was, although “If anyone had been placed on such a train without a previous clue as to where it was, he would not have the faintest idea what continent, let alone what country, he was in.”
Rather his unease stemmed from the guilt he felt over feeling uneasy in the first place. But why? He knows that he is also a foreigner…that “I was also myself the son and grandson of refugees. Should I not have rejoiced at this sign of the increasing openness of the world, of crumbling barriers, instead of finding it deeply unattractive…?”
Rejoice? I am not yet there. It is hard enough to make sense of where I am and whom I am amongst. I know there are places in this city where I feel more comfortable, more “among my own.” And when I realize that, I find myself just as unsettled. Why in that part of town and not where I am? For me understanding has to come before rejoicing
Dalrymple concludes: “Of course, time and common experience would eventually meld them into some semblance of people with a shared mentality. If not they, then their children would have enough in common to become French; and by then the French, perhaps, would have become just a little like all of them.”
So I will probably have to leave it to my children, and to theirs, to rejoice. I know they already have and little by little they are showing me the way.
“There was nothing distinctly French about the passengers, not ethnically, culturally, or linguistically. There was a Babel of tongues, but not much French among it. There were Indians, Chinese, East Europeans, black Africans and North Africans; I did, with effort, spot a couple of French speakers at the other end of the car.”
And like the way I sometimes feel among the multi-ethnic people of Honolulu, he felt a bit uneasy. Not so much because he wasn’t sure where he was, although “If anyone had been placed on such a train without a previous clue as to where it was, he would not have the faintest idea what continent, let alone what country, he was in.”
Rather his unease stemmed from the guilt he felt over feeling uneasy in the first place. But why? He knows that he is also a foreigner…that “I was also myself the son and grandson of refugees. Should I not have rejoiced at this sign of the increasing openness of the world, of crumbling barriers, instead of finding it deeply unattractive…?”
Rejoice? I am not yet there. It is hard enough to make sense of where I am and whom I am amongst. I know there are places in this city where I feel more comfortable, more “among my own.” And when I realize that, I find myself just as unsettled. Why in that part of town and not where I am? For me understanding has to come before rejoicing
Dalrymple concludes: “Of course, time and common experience would eventually meld them into some semblance of people with a shared mentality. If not they, then their children would have enough in common to become French; and by then the French, perhaps, would have become just a little like all of them.”
So I will probably have to leave it to my children, and to theirs, to rejoice. I know they already have and little by little they are showing me the way.
1.30.2009
Health System
The January 26th issue of The New Yorker published a provocative essay on the US health care system by Atul Gawande. He begins by noting: “In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty.” Those currently abound in our own country.
He argues that it is essential to respond to the US health care crisis by building on the current system and attempts to support this view with examples (selectively) from other countries that have a universal health care system.
For example he reports that in Great Britain: “The N.H.S. was a pragmatic outgrowth of circumstances peculiar to Britain immediately after the Second World War….As a matter of wartime necessity, the government began a national Emergency Medical Service to supplement the local services. By 1945, when the National Health Service was proposed, it had become evident that a national system of health coverage was not only necessary but also largely already in place—with nationally run hospitals, salaried doctors, and free care for everyone.”
And in France: “With an almost impossible range of crises on its hands—food shortages, destroyed power plants, a quarter of the population living as refugees—the de Gaulle government had neither the time nor the capacity create an entirely new health-care system. So it built on what it had, expanding the existing payroll-tax-funded, private insurance system to cover all wage earners, their families, and retirees. The self-employed were added in the nineteen sixties. And the remainder of uninsured residents were finally included in 2000.”
Gawande claims that in each case the response to the crisis that existed in these countries gave rise to a health care system based upon the existing one, a process he calls “path dependence” following social scientists who have used that term to describe similarly designed system-wide social changes. The new system was not created de novo or based on a totally new design that replaced the existing system, but rather each countries “own history, however, imperfect, unusual, and untidy.”
In the United States it is estimated that the cost of health care is twice as much as other “developed” nations that have a universal health care system. The US also ranks well below these countries on various measures that assess the overall health of its citizens. More than 40 million American are said to have no health insurance, including a sizable number who are denied insurance by for-profit private insurance providers.
These conditions are crises enough to mandate change. But unlike Great Britain, we do not face a wartime emergency or like France, a post-war breakdown of society. While we face major economic problems, we do have adequate time to consider a fundamental change in the US health care system, one that would take the best of our current system and combine it with features that make it universal and more cost effective. We do not have to ignore what is currently in place, but we do not have to retain all of it either.
On my view that would involve a universal health care system based on Medicare, our current hospital and physician services, research facilities and pharmacies. It would also eliminate for-profit insurance providers that are no longer necessary under this type of universal health care program. In short, such a program would build upon our current system while, at the same time, centralizing its administration, expanding its coverage, and reducing its costs.
While this is far from the major topic of Marks in the Margin, it is one that interests me enormously. I can’t help but think it is one that most everyone is confronted with today and the fact that it is the subject of a thoughtful analysis in The New Yorker led me to write a few words about it. Some additional passages from Gawande’s essay are posted below.
Today, Securite Sociale provides payroll-tax financed insurance to all French residents, primarily through a hundred and forty-four independent, not-for-profit, local insurance funds. The French health-care system has among the highest public-satisfaction levels of any major Western country, and compared with Americans, the French have a higher life expectancy, lower infant mortality, more physicians and lower costs.
…at some alchemical point, they [the stories] combine with opportunity and leadership to produce change.
On the left, then, single-payer enthusiasts argue that the only coherent solution is to end private health insurance and replace it with a national insurance program. And on the right, the free marketers argue that the only coherent solution is to end public insurance and employer-controlled health benefits so that we can all buy our own coverage and put market forces to work.
The country has this one chance, the idealist maintains, to sweep away our inhumane, wasteful patchwork system and replace it with something new and more rational. So we should prepare for a bold overhaul, just as every other Western democracy has. True reform requires transformation at a stroke. But is this really the way it has occurred in other countries? The answer is no.
…other countries came to universalize health care under entirely different circumstances.
Every industrialized nation in the world except the United States has a national system that guarantees affordable health care for all its citizens.
Employers who wanted to compete for workers [during World War II] could, however, offer commercial health insurance. That spurred our distinctive reliance on private insurance obtained through one’s place of employment…that we’ve struggled with for six decades.
Some people regard the path-dependence of our policies as evidence of weak leadership; we have, they charge allowed our choices to be constrained by history and by vested interests.
So accepting the path-dependence of our health-care system—recognizing that we had better build on what we’ve got—doesn’t mean that we have to curtail our ambitions.
It should leave no one uncovered…It should no longer be an economic catastrophe for employers. And it should hold doctors, nurses, hospitals, drug and device companies, and insurers collectively responsible for make care better, safer, and less costly.
He argues that it is essential to respond to the US health care crisis by building on the current system and attempts to support this view with examples (selectively) from other countries that have a universal health care system.
For example he reports that in Great Britain: “The N.H.S. was a pragmatic outgrowth of circumstances peculiar to Britain immediately after the Second World War….As a matter of wartime necessity, the government began a national Emergency Medical Service to supplement the local services. By 1945, when the National Health Service was proposed, it had become evident that a national system of health coverage was not only necessary but also largely already in place—with nationally run hospitals, salaried doctors, and free care for everyone.”
And in France: “With an almost impossible range of crises on its hands—food shortages, destroyed power plants, a quarter of the population living as refugees—the de Gaulle government had neither the time nor the capacity create an entirely new health-care system. So it built on what it had, expanding the existing payroll-tax-funded, private insurance system to cover all wage earners, their families, and retirees. The self-employed were added in the nineteen sixties. And the remainder of uninsured residents were finally included in 2000.”
Gawande claims that in each case the response to the crisis that existed in these countries gave rise to a health care system based upon the existing one, a process he calls “path dependence” following social scientists who have used that term to describe similarly designed system-wide social changes. The new system was not created de novo or based on a totally new design that replaced the existing system, but rather each countries “own history, however, imperfect, unusual, and untidy.”
In the United States it is estimated that the cost of health care is twice as much as other “developed” nations that have a universal health care system. The US also ranks well below these countries on various measures that assess the overall health of its citizens. More than 40 million American are said to have no health insurance, including a sizable number who are denied insurance by for-profit private insurance providers.
These conditions are crises enough to mandate change. But unlike Great Britain, we do not face a wartime emergency or like France, a post-war breakdown of society. While we face major economic problems, we do have adequate time to consider a fundamental change in the US health care system, one that would take the best of our current system and combine it with features that make it universal and more cost effective. We do not have to ignore what is currently in place, but we do not have to retain all of it either.
On my view that would involve a universal health care system based on Medicare, our current hospital and physician services, research facilities and pharmacies. It would also eliminate for-profit insurance providers that are no longer necessary under this type of universal health care program. In short, such a program would build upon our current system while, at the same time, centralizing its administration, expanding its coverage, and reducing its costs.
While this is far from the major topic of Marks in the Margin, it is one that interests me enormously. I can’t help but think it is one that most everyone is confronted with today and the fact that it is the subject of a thoughtful analysis in The New Yorker led me to write a few words about it. Some additional passages from Gawande’s essay are posted below.
Today, Securite Sociale provides payroll-tax financed insurance to all French residents, primarily through a hundred and forty-four independent, not-for-profit, local insurance funds. The French health-care system has among the highest public-satisfaction levels of any major Western country, and compared with Americans, the French have a higher life expectancy, lower infant mortality, more physicians and lower costs.
…at some alchemical point, they [the stories] combine with opportunity and leadership to produce change.
On the left, then, single-payer enthusiasts argue that the only coherent solution is to end private health insurance and replace it with a national insurance program. And on the right, the free marketers argue that the only coherent solution is to end public insurance and employer-controlled health benefits so that we can all buy our own coverage and put market forces to work.
The country has this one chance, the idealist maintains, to sweep away our inhumane, wasteful patchwork system and replace it with something new and more rational. So we should prepare for a bold overhaul, just as every other Western democracy has. True reform requires transformation at a stroke. But is this really the way it has occurred in other countries? The answer is no.
…other countries came to universalize health care under entirely different circumstances.
Every industrialized nation in the world except the United States has a national system that guarantees affordable health care for all its citizens.
Employers who wanted to compete for workers [during World War II] could, however, offer commercial health insurance. That spurred our distinctive reliance on private insurance obtained through one’s place of employment…that we’ve struggled with for six decades.
Some people regard the path-dependence of our policies as evidence of weak leadership; we have, they charge allowed our choices to be constrained by history and by vested interests.
So accepting the path-dependence of our health-care system—recognizing that we had better build on what we’ve got—doesn’t mean that we have to curtail our ambitions.
It should leave no one uncovered…It should no longer be an economic catastrophe for employers. And it should hold doctors, nurses, hospitals, drug and device companies, and insurers collectively responsible for make care better, safer, and less costly.
1.29.2009
John Updike
I have read most of the short stores that John Updike has published in The New Yorker. And they are by and large wonderful. For years, I have been trying to track down one of them in order to read again. It must have been published in The New Yorker, as I don’t think I’ve ever read any of his stories in another periodical or in one of his several collections.
In this story, as I recall it, a young man sees a beautiful woman on a bus. Or is it on a subway? I think he is also on the bus or subway with the woman standing or maybe sitting some distance away. Or does he see her from the street or platform as the bus/subway is passing by? I can’t be sure now. Understand that it was a long time ago that I read the story. Or think I read it.
The young man goes in search of the woman after she leaves the bus/subway. Of course, he cannot find her. But still she lingers in his mind and we begin to learn more about her as Updike in his special way describes what it will or, more exactly, it would have been like, once they met.
Did I actually read such a story? Maybe I dreamed it or elaborated it from a similar one by Updike. And was it even by Updike? That has always been my unconfirmed belief. It could not have been Roth. Or Salinger. I have never been able to locate the story again. One night I spent a couple of hours at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon trying to find it in the many volumes of Updike short stores that this remarkable bookstore has in its Updike collection.
I scanned through the titles and contents of each of the stories I thought might be the one. But I could not find it. Perhaps I went through the volumes too quickly. Or perhaps it wasn’t Updike or anyone else who wrote this story. Rather, it is simply one I had concocted.
For I have often had that experience--one where I see a lovely woman off in the distance and I have imagined the good times we would have together. Usually I see her on a bus, stopped at an intersection while I am standing on the street. Usually, it is in Paris. Soon the bus moves on. Never once has she gotten off the bus. So I’ve never been presented with the chance to follow after her, not that I ever would. I am sure that is most fortunate.
Is this a common experience? Have you ever seen a person off in the distance who you would like to befriend? Or have you had such a dream? And if you have read this Updike story, by all means let me know.
In commenting on the closing of The Twenty Third Avenue Books in Portland, I made note of the following comment by Richard Powers:
“There’s a scene in Plowing where one of the people in Seattle goes into an enormous used bookstore, looking for a book that had moved him as a child and that he had been looking for since the age of nine. It’s a story about a boy whose drawings somehow come alive, and he’s never been able to find this book again. What the writer knows is that the profession that he’s entered into, and the life that he’s taken on, is exactly the desire to recreate this story that he’s never been able to find again.”
So I should get with it and write the story that I am unable to find. It won’t be anywhere near as elegant as Updike’s. That is impossible. But at least my search will be over.
In this story, as I recall it, a young man sees a beautiful woman on a bus. Or is it on a subway? I think he is also on the bus or subway with the woman standing or maybe sitting some distance away. Or does he see her from the street or platform as the bus/subway is passing by? I can’t be sure now. Understand that it was a long time ago that I read the story. Or think I read it.
The young man goes in search of the woman after she leaves the bus/subway. Of course, he cannot find her. But still she lingers in his mind and we begin to learn more about her as Updike in his special way describes what it will or, more exactly, it would have been like, once they met.
Did I actually read such a story? Maybe I dreamed it or elaborated it from a similar one by Updike. And was it even by Updike? That has always been my unconfirmed belief. It could not have been Roth. Or Salinger. I have never been able to locate the story again. One night I spent a couple of hours at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon trying to find it in the many volumes of Updike short stores that this remarkable bookstore has in its Updike collection.
I scanned through the titles and contents of each of the stories I thought might be the one. But I could not find it. Perhaps I went through the volumes too quickly. Or perhaps it wasn’t Updike or anyone else who wrote this story. Rather, it is simply one I had concocted.
For I have often had that experience--one where I see a lovely woman off in the distance and I have imagined the good times we would have together. Usually I see her on a bus, stopped at an intersection while I am standing on the street. Usually, it is in Paris. Soon the bus moves on. Never once has she gotten off the bus. So I’ve never been presented with the chance to follow after her, not that I ever would. I am sure that is most fortunate.
Is this a common experience? Have you ever seen a person off in the distance who you would like to befriend? Or have you had such a dream? And if you have read this Updike story, by all means let me know.
In commenting on the closing of The Twenty Third Avenue Books in Portland, I made note of the following comment by Richard Powers:
“There’s a scene in Plowing where one of the people in Seattle goes into an enormous used bookstore, looking for a book that had moved him as a child and that he had been looking for since the age of nine. It’s a story about a boy whose drawings somehow come alive, and he’s never been able to find this book again. What the writer knows is that the profession that he’s entered into, and the life that he’s taken on, is exactly the desire to recreate this story that he’s never been able to find again.”
So I should get with it and write the story that I am unable to find. It won’t be anywhere near as elegant as Updike’s. That is impossible. But at least my search will be over.
1.28.2009
An Education
I live in Honolulu now, having finally come to this distant island after living in Portland, Oregon for most of my adult life. There seems to be very little literary life here, as few authors make the trip across the ocean on their book tour or to give a talk at a lecture series. Barnes & Noble and Borders have a few stores in the area but as far as I can tell only one independent bookstore has managed to survive. I have been told there are a few local writers, but they are not well known to me, which is truly of no importance.
However, I recently learned that of three writers whose work I have read in The New Yorker magazine and on its blog, The Book Bench, spent their youth in Hawaii—Allegra Goodman, Ligaya Mishan, and Tara Bray Smith. We must also add Barack Obama who may very well be the most widely read author in the US and perhaps the world right now.
When I first came here, I worried that literature would disappear from my life, that I would run out of books to read or ideas to investigate. No, that has not happened in spite of all the warm sunny days and sandy beaches. To the contrary, I am learning what a remarkable place Hawaii is and ever so slowly coming to understand what it means to live in such a racially diverse community, one that is so widely different from anything I have known before.
In writing about how Obama’s Hawaiian experience might shape his presidency, as well as her own experiences growing up here, Allegra Goodman notes that she was also a student in the same school, Punahou, that Obama attended. She also says that her fifth grade teacher, Mrs Hefty, was the one Obama named as his favorite teacher “for her ability to make every single child feel special,” which to Goodman means “singular.”
She writes: “Mrs. Hefty’s students were Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, Korean, Tongan, white, and more often that that, hapa, a combination of many races and traditions. On the surface, our classroom looked like a melting pot. A girl with honey blond hair, café-au-lait skin, and green eyes might say proudly, “I’m part Hawaiian, part Portuguese, part Chinese, and part Irish.”
And then echoing a feeling I often experience here she writes: “What did it mean to live in Hawaii—especially for those of us who had no native Hawaiian ancestry? Were we immigrants? Invaders? Americans?” At times I do feel a bit out of place here until I realize, no one is really out of place here even though we all have to struggle to find just what that place is.
Later Goodman comments “To envision a world where racial identity is more fluid, where men and women are more mobile, and where segregation is a thing of the past is not to envision a post-racial world. Obama knows this, as anyone who has lived in Hawaii must.”
At the same time, she appreciates the considerable benefits that living in a community as complex and diverse as Honolulu can be to a leader in the contemporary world. As we have come to know him, it is clear that everything Obama has done and said reflects the experiences he had here.
Similarly, in interviewing Tara Bray Smith, Ligaya Misha asks how Obama’s Hawaiian experiences might influence the country during the course of his presidency. Smith replies:
“Obama embodies America at its best: a country where the concepts of native and foreigner, “pure” and “mixed,” black and white, hapa and hundred per cent are so complex that the claim of belonging because of blood quantum or family tree must be set against the argument that what defines an American is not the place of the circumstances of his birth but his allegiance to his country’s laws and ideas. Hawaii, by virtue of its exceptionally diverse population, is a place where these questions are explicit.”
What a refreshing change this will be if these questions are widely asked throughout this country. They are questions that I, for one, had not imagined giving much thought to once I moved here. Now they are unavoidable.
However, I recently learned that of three writers whose work I have read in The New Yorker magazine and on its blog, The Book Bench, spent their youth in Hawaii—Allegra Goodman, Ligaya Mishan, and Tara Bray Smith. We must also add Barack Obama who may very well be the most widely read author in the US and perhaps the world right now.
When I first came here, I worried that literature would disappear from my life, that I would run out of books to read or ideas to investigate. No, that has not happened in spite of all the warm sunny days and sandy beaches. To the contrary, I am learning what a remarkable place Hawaii is and ever so slowly coming to understand what it means to live in such a racially diverse community, one that is so widely different from anything I have known before.
In writing about how Obama’s Hawaiian experience might shape his presidency, as well as her own experiences growing up here, Allegra Goodman notes that she was also a student in the same school, Punahou, that Obama attended. She also says that her fifth grade teacher, Mrs Hefty, was the one Obama named as his favorite teacher “for her ability to make every single child feel special,” which to Goodman means “singular.”
She writes: “Mrs. Hefty’s students were Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, Korean, Tongan, white, and more often that that, hapa, a combination of many races and traditions. On the surface, our classroom looked like a melting pot. A girl with honey blond hair, café-au-lait skin, and green eyes might say proudly, “I’m part Hawaiian, part Portuguese, part Chinese, and part Irish.”
And then echoing a feeling I often experience here she writes: “What did it mean to live in Hawaii—especially for those of us who had no native Hawaiian ancestry? Were we immigrants? Invaders? Americans?” At times I do feel a bit out of place here until I realize, no one is really out of place here even though we all have to struggle to find just what that place is.
Later Goodman comments “To envision a world where racial identity is more fluid, where men and women are more mobile, and where segregation is a thing of the past is not to envision a post-racial world. Obama knows this, as anyone who has lived in Hawaii must.”
At the same time, she appreciates the considerable benefits that living in a community as complex and diverse as Honolulu can be to a leader in the contemporary world. As we have come to know him, it is clear that everything Obama has done and said reflects the experiences he had here.
Similarly, in interviewing Tara Bray Smith, Ligaya Misha asks how Obama’s Hawaiian experiences might influence the country during the course of his presidency. Smith replies:
“Obama embodies America at its best: a country where the concepts of native and foreigner, “pure” and “mixed,” black and white, hapa and hundred per cent are so complex that the claim of belonging because of blood quantum or family tree must be set against the argument that what defines an American is not the place of the circumstances of his birth but his allegiance to his country’s laws and ideas. Hawaii, by virtue of its exceptionally diverse population, is a place where these questions are explicit.”
What a refreshing change this will be if these questions are widely asked throughout this country. They are questions that I, for one, had not imagined giving much thought to once I moved here. Now they are unavoidable.
1.27.2009
The Last Lecture
Imagine you were a college or university teacher. What would talk about in your last lecture, especially one that you were going to give because you had been diagnosed with an incurable disease and had but a few months to live? Would you try to summarize the research you have done or the future of your discipline or perhaps what you have learned by studying it for most of your life?
This opportunity, sad to say, was recently given to Randy Pausch, a professor of computer sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Pausch had been informed he had a terminal pancreatic cancer that subsequent treatments failed to arrest. With three to six months of life left, Pausch delivered his widely known last lecture that can be viewed on the Web or read in a slightly expanded version in The Last Lecture.
What I remember most about this book is the dreams that Pausch says he had as a child. As he enumerated them, I tried to recall the dreams I had as a young person. I could not recall a single one, that is, a childhood dream to attain a lifelong goal once I became an adult. All my dreams then were focused on the immediate tasks before me—get the assignment done, do the reading, write the paper.
Paush had many dreams and enthusiastically encouraged his listeners never to give up on their own. As a youth, he had dreamed of being in zero gravity, playing in the National Football League, writing a World Book Encyclopedia article, meeting and being Captain Kirk—a character in the Star Trek series, being "one of the guys who won the big stuffed animals in the amusement park", and becoming a Disney Imagineer, in particular, to work on their cyberspace/new media projects.
In the first part of his lecture Pausch described how he was able to achieve in most respects each of those dreams—while he never played in the National Football League, Pausch participated in a practice session with the Pittsburgh Steelers after they had learned it was one of his childhood goals. In the second half of the lecture he explained with a set of lessons how his viewers or readers could set about reaching their childhood dreams, as well.
Given all the hype that I had heard about Pausch’s lecture, I had high expectations for it. I confess, however, that while I was impressed with Pausch’s gusto, his lecture didn’t meet the hopes I had for it. Perhaps that was because I scarcely had any dreams as a child and the relatively simplicity of his “enabling” lessons.
Regardless, I did make note of a few passages and they are noted below. The passages that I did make note of in his volume are listed below.
What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?
We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.
…if you dispense your own wisdom, others often dismiss it; if you offer wisdom from a third party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable.
Have something to bring to the table, because that will make you more welcome.
I sometimes think I got more from pursuing that dream, and not accomplishing it, then I did from many of the ones I did accomplish.
You’ve got to get the fundamentals down, because otherwise the fancy stuff is not going to work.
…stay positive.
A friend of ours suggested that Jai [his wife] keep a daily journal, and Jai says it helps. She writes in there the things that get on her nerves about me. “Randy didn’t put his plate in the dishwasher tonight,” she wrote one night. “He just left it there on the table, and went to his computer.” She knew I was preoccupied, heading to the Internet to research possible medical treatments. Still, the dish on the table bothered her. I can’t blame her. So she wrote about it, felt better, and again we didn’t have to get into an argument.
Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think.
Luck is indeed where preparation meets opportunity.
This opportunity, sad to say, was recently given to Randy Pausch, a professor of computer sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Pausch had been informed he had a terminal pancreatic cancer that subsequent treatments failed to arrest. With three to six months of life left, Pausch delivered his widely known last lecture that can be viewed on the Web or read in a slightly expanded version in The Last Lecture.
What I remember most about this book is the dreams that Pausch says he had as a child. As he enumerated them, I tried to recall the dreams I had as a young person. I could not recall a single one, that is, a childhood dream to attain a lifelong goal once I became an adult. All my dreams then were focused on the immediate tasks before me—get the assignment done, do the reading, write the paper.
Paush had many dreams and enthusiastically encouraged his listeners never to give up on their own. As a youth, he had dreamed of being in zero gravity, playing in the National Football League, writing a World Book Encyclopedia article, meeting and being Captain Kirk—a character in the Star Trek series, being "one of the guys who won the big stuffed animals in the amusement park", and becoming a Disney Imagineer, in particular, to work on their cyberspace/new media projects.
In the first part of his lecture Pausch described how he was able to achieve in most respects each of those dreams—while he never played in the National Football League, Pausch participated in a practice session with the Pittsburgh Steelers after they had learned it was one of his childhood goals. In the second half of the lecture he explained with a set of lessons how his viewers or readers could set about reaching their childhood dreams, as well.
Given all the hype that I had heard about Pausch’s lecture, I had high expectations for it. I confess, however, that while I was impressed with Pausch’s gusto, his lecture didn’t meet the hopes I had for it. Perhaps that was because I scarcely had any dreams as a child and the relatively simplicity of his “enabling” lessons.
Regardless, I did make note of a few passages and they are noted below. The passages that I did make note of in his volume are listed below.
What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?
We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.
…if you dispense your own wisdom, others often dismiss it; if you offer wisdom from a third party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable.
Have something to bring to the table, because that will make you more welcome.
I sometimes think I got more from pursuing that dream, and not accomplishing it, then I did from many of the ones I did accomplish.
You’ve got to get the fundamentals down, because otherwise the fancy stuff is not going to work.
…stay positive.
A friend of ours suggested that Jai [his wife] keep a daily journal, and Jai says it helps. She writes in there the things that get on her nerves about me. “Randy didn’t put his plate in the dishwasher tonight,” she wrote one night. “He just left it there on the table, and went to his computer.” She knew I was preoccupied, heading to the Internet to research possible medical treatments. Still, the dish on the table bothered her. I can’t blame her. So she wrote about it, felt better, and again we didn’t have to get into an argument.
Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think.
Luck is indeed where preparation meets opportunity.
1.26.2009
Solitude
In thinking about Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, I was brought back again to some reflections on solitude that I had written some time ago. There I described my own encounters with solitude that, even as a relatively young man, were fairly frequent.
In contrast, William Dersiewicz writes that today solitude is virtually unknown among the youth of this country. He says “we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration and it is also taking away our ability to be alone.”
He describes the case of one “teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That’s 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes…So on average, she’s never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she’s never alone.”
He asks his students about the role of solitude in their life and is rather taken aback by their answer. “One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of being alone so unsettling that she’ll sit with a friend even when she has a paper to write. Another said, why would anyone want to be alone?”
Dersiewicz attributes the “terror” of being alone to the Internet. He says [The Internet] has allowed isolated people to communicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another…But as the Internet’s dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing.”
First it was the telephone and then the television and now e-mailing and texting and the constant stream of whatever it is that people are staring at on their cell phones. Rarely do I see a young person walking about without their eyes focused on their cell phone or talking to someone with the thing. What is it that they are talking about? How can they have so much to say to one another?
At dinner one night at an outdoor café in Italy, I observed a couple sitting silently together at their table. Each one was peering at their cell phone. I never once saw them speaking to one another. Instead, they spent the entire time I was there talking to someone on their mobile. And when they were finished speaking, they continued to fiddle with it, no doubt searching for the latest text message or poking around the Web. I thought they were surely a couple on the verge of a meltdown.
In Exit Ghost Philip Roth writes:
“Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. Inside the cars, the drivers were on the phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone. For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time, I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking to a telephone preferable to walking about under no one’s surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the streets through one’s animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire. For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too. To eradicate the experience of separation must inevitably have a dramatic effect.”
What is lost when people no longer experience that “separation” and our desire, even ability, to be alone for any length of time? Deresiewicz responds that “First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self…Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading.” And else where he says they have also lost the ability to be still and to appreciate the experience of idleness.
Solitude as Deresiewicz admits isn’t easy and clearly isn’t for everyone. Yes, “the silent apartment” is ever present. But that rarely seems to bother me. I feel much like the librarian in Martha Cooley’s The Archivist who confesses: “But once again I’d tasted solitude as an alternative to the life I was leading, and the possibility of its permanence scared and attracted me.”
Below are additional comments on solitude that I collected from Deresiewicz’s essay:
The great contemporary terror is anonymity.
So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration and it is also taking away our ability to be alone.
Man may be a social animal, but solitude has traditionally been a societal value. In particular, the act of being alone has been understood as an essential dimension of religious experience...You cannot hear God when people are chattering at you.
Solitude becomes, more than ever, the arena of heroic self discovery…
…our great fear is not submersion by the mass, but isolation from the herd.
Now it is impossible to be alone.
My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And, of course, they have no time at all for solitude…have never heard of it, can’t imagine why it would be worth having
…our use of technology—seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others.
The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less we are able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.
Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence.
…solitude enables us to secure the integrity of the self, as well as to explore it.
We are not merely social beings. We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood.
But no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral can arise without solitude.
The last thing to say about solitude is that it isn’t very polite.
Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone.
In contrast, William Dersiewicz writes that today solitude is virtually unknown among the youth of this country. He says “we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration and it is also taking away our ability to be alone.”
He describes the case of one “teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That’s 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes…So on average, she’s never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she’s never alone.”
He asks his students about the role of solitude in their life and is rather taken aback by their answer. “One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of being alone so unsettling that she’ll sit with a friend even when she has a paper to write. Another said, why would anyone want to be alone?”
Dersiewicz attributes the “terror” of being alone to the Internet. He says [The Internet] has allowed isolated people to communicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another…But as the Internet’s dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing.”
First it was the telephone and then the television and now e-mailing and texting and the constant stream of whatever it is that people are staring at on their cell phones. Rarely do I see a young person walking about without their eyes focused on their cell phone or talking to someone with the thing. What is it that they are talking about? How can they have so much to say to one another?
At dinner one night at an outdoor café in Italy, I observed a couple sitting silently together at their table. Each one was peering at their cell phone. I never once saw them speaking to one another. Instead, they spent the entire time I was there talking to someone on their mobile. And when they were finished speaking, they continued to fiddle with it, no doubt searching for the latest text message or poking around the Web. I thought they were surely a couple on the verge of a meltdown.
In Exit Ghost Philip Roth writes:
“Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. Inside the cars, the drivers were on the phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone. For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time, I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking to a telephone preferable to walking about under no one’s surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the streets through one’s animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire. For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too. To eradicate the experience of separation must inevitably have a dramatic effect.”
What is lost when people no longer experience that “separation” and our desire, even ability, to be alone for any length of time? Deresiewicz responds that “First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self…Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading.” And else where he says they have also lost the ability to be still and to appreciate the experience of idleness.
Solitude as Deresiewicz admits isn’t easy and clearly isn’t for everyone. Yes, “the silent apartment” is ever present. But that rarely seems to bother me. I feel much like the librarian in Martha Cooley’s The Archivist who confesses: “But once again I’d tasted solitude as an alternative to the life I was leading, and the possibility of its permanence scared and attracted me.”
Below are additional comments on solitude that I collected from Deresiewicz’s essay:
The great contemporary terror is anonymity.
So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration and it is also taking away our ability to be alone.
Man may be a social animal, but solitude has traditionally been a societal value. In particular, the act of being alone has been understood as an essential dimension of religious experience...You cannot hear God when people are chattering at you.
Solitude becomes, more than ever, the arena of heroic self discovery…
…our great fear is not submersion by the mass, but isolation from the herd.
Now it is impossible to be alone.
My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And, of course, they have no time at all for solitude…have never heard of it, can’t imagine why it would be worth having
…our use of technology—seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others.
The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less we are able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.
Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence.
…solitude enables us to secure the integrity of the self, as well as to explore it.
We are not merely social beings. We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood.
But no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral can arise without solitude.
The last thing to say about solitude is that it isn’t very polite.
Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone.
1.24.2009
Out Stealing Horses
Trond Sander, a sixty-seven-year-old Norwegian, is the central figure in Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses. We know he has recently lost his wife and sister who both died within one month. “After they were gone,” he says, “I lost interest in talking to anyone.” In response, he moves to a remote spot in the Norwegian forest where he lives in an old run-down cabin isolated from any neighbors.
We know nothing about his professional life but in the course of the novel we come to learn a great deal about his youth, also spent in a rural setting, as memories of the past sweep over him with loss and regret.
For years Trond had wanted to live in solitude. He says “All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this.” And later, once he has settled into to his cabin, he comments: “…When everything around me suddenly turned silent, I realized how much I had missed it. Soon I thought of nothing else….”
Never does he seem lonely. For many who have lived in solitude for any length of time, there is a clear distinction between loneliness and solitude. Penolope Lively wrote “Solitude is enjoyed only by those who are not alone; the lonely feel differently about it.” And by way of explaining the difference, May Sarton suggests: "Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”
And then, Trond has his dog and his radio (but no TV or telephone) that plays the BBC all day which he says “make living alone much easier.” And then he remarks “Those last words sound a bit self-pitying, and disloyal to my life here. I do not need to defend it or explain it to anyone.”
What would it be like to live out your life in solitude? This is an experience that is becoming increasing common, as living an independent life becomes a matter of choice and the aging population grows in number. According to recent statistics, at least one in every nine adults in the US lives alone. And for persons 75 years old and over, the proportion living alone is 52 percent for women and 21 percent for men
Trond admits: “…that in the middle of a train of thought we start talking out loud, that the difference between talking and no talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversation we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one from the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line.”
For the aged, it is likely that they also begin to ruminate about death. Trond wonders: “If you were dead, you were dead, but in the fraction of a second just before; whether you realized then it was the end, and what that felt like.” And later “I could die at any minute, that’s the way it is, but this is something I have known the last three years, and not given a damn and still do not.”
But much of the novel describes the way his youth presses in upon him. At times, it annoys and disturbs him. At other times he is taken by a delight in recalling the people, especially his father, with whom he spent so much of his youth.
In the end, Trond comes to terms with the unsettling memories of his youth and concludes “When someone says the past is a foreign country, that they do things differently there, then I have probably felt that way for most of my life because I have been obliged to, but I am not anymore.”
Below are additional passages that I collected from this very satisfying novel:
I can see the shape of the wind on the water.
…I have never gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate.
I believe we shape our lives ourselves, at any rate I have shaped mine, for what it’s worth, and I take complete responsibility.
My plan for this place is quite simple. It is to be my final home.
People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings.
I’m surprised at how unfilled my shopping baskets have become, how few things I need now I am alone. I suffer a sudden onset of meaningless melancholy and feel the eyes of the check-out lady on my forehead as I search for the money to pay, the widower is what she sees, they do not understand anything, and it is just as well.
…I am no longer surprised when I realize that mature men are well below my own age.
…a man of barely forty, as my father was when I saw him for the last time, when I was fifteen, and he vanished from my life forever. To me he will never be older.
I can see he misses his father, quite simply and straightforwardly, and I would wish it was as easy as that, that you could just miss your father, and that was all there was to it.
…I do not know whether I really want to know about them. They take up too much room. It has become hard to concentrate…
…I really wanted to be alone. To solve my problems alone, one at a time with clear thinking.
I have seen so many things and been part of so much in my life although I will not go into details now, for I have been lucky too.
Tell me. How are you really? She says, as if there were two versions of my life.
We know nothing about his professional life but in the course of the novel we come to learn a great deal about his youth, also spent in a rural setting, as memories of the past sweep over him with loss and regret.
For years Trond had wanted to live in solitude. He says “All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this.” And later, once he has settled into to his cabin, he comments: “…When everything around me suddenly turned silent, I realized how much I had missed it. Soon I thought of nothing else….”
Never does he seem lonely. For many who have lived in solitude for any length of time, there is a clear distinction between loneliness and solitude. Penolope Lively wrote “Solitude is enjoyed only by those who are not alone; the lonely feel differently about it.” And by way of explaining the difference, May Sarton suggests: "Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”
And then, Trond has his dog and his radio (but no TV or telephone) that plays the BBC all day which he says “make living alone much easier.” And then he remarks “Those last words sound a bit self-pitying, and disloyal to my life here. I do not need to defend it or explain it to anyone.”
What would it be like to live out your life in solitude? This is an experience that is becoming increasing common, as living an independent life becomes a matter of choice and the aging population grows in number. According to recent statistics, at least one in every nine adults in the US lives alone. And for persons 75 years old and over, the proportion living alone is 52 percent for women and 21 percent for men
Trond admits: “…that in the middle of a train of thought we start talking out loud, that the difference between talking and no talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversation we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one from the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line.”
For the aged, it is likely that they also begin to ruminate about death. Trond wonders: “If you were dead, you were dead, but in the fraction of a second just before; whether you realized then it was the end, and what that felt like.” And later “I could die at any minute, that’s the way it is, but this is something I have known the last three years, and not given a damn and still do not.”
But much of the novel describes the way his youth presses in upon him. At times, it annoys and disturbs him. At other times he is taken by a delight in recalling the people, especially his father, with whom he spent so much of his youth.
In the end, Trond comes to terms with the unsettling memories of his youth and concludes “When someone says the past is a foreign country, that they do things differently there, then I have probably felt that way for most of my life because I have been obliged to, but I am not anymore.”
Below are additional passages that I collected from this very satisfying novel:
I can see the shape of the wind on the water.
…I have never gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate.
I believe we shape our lives ourselves, at any rate I have shaped mine, for what it’s worth, and I take complete responsibility.
My plan for this place is quite simple. It is to be my final home.
People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings.
I’m surprised at how unfilled my shopping baskets have become, how few things I need now I am alone. I suffer a sudden onset of meaningless melancholy and feel the eyes of the check-out lady on my forehead as I search for the money to pay, the widower is what she sees, they do not understand anything, and it is just as well.
…I am no longer surprised when I realize that mature men are well below my own age.
…a man of barely forty, as my father was when I saw him for the last time, when I was fifteen, and he vanished from my life forever. To me he will never be older.
I can see he misses his father, quite simply and straightforwardly, and I would wish it was as easy as that, that you could just miss your father, and that was all there was to it.
…I do not know whether I really want to know about them. They take up too much room. It has become hard to concentrate…
…I really wanted to be alone. To solve my problems alone, one at a time with clear thinking.
I have seen so many things and been part of so much in my life although I will not go into details now, for I have been lucky too.
Tell me. How are you really? She says, as if there were two versions of my life.
1.23.2009
Praise Song for the Day
I have been reading some of the critics who have been up in arms about the poem Elizabeth Alexander read at the inauguration. One critic referred to it as “Histories worst inaugural poem.” Another characterized it as “awful” and earlier had fled the TV before having “to hear the prose banalities of Elizabeth Alexander.”
My first reaction on reading such remarks was one of surprise for I had applauded the poem following its presentation. And then, in my naive way, I had wondered what makes a good poem and more exactly what distinguishes a fine poem from an inferior one? Is there an objective way to answer that question, one that is widely, if not universally accepted by students of poetry?
Nowhere could I find quite why the critics had found Praise Song for the Day so lamentable. Nowhere could I find what exactly about the poem the critics found so objectionable. They simply didn’t like it and worse.
So much of the poetry that is published today is simply incomprehensible to me. I try to make sense of it, read it over several times, and, still, the majority of newly published poems are beyond my understanding. But I did understand Alexander’s poem and it did move me.
Have the critics forgotten about the reader? Does a poem exist independently of the reaction of the reader? Does not a reader’s enjoyment and appreciation of a work of poetry count for something?
And so today I read with some amusement a report on the Guardian website that the poem has been an extraordinarily popular publication. According to the Guardian’s report, the poem:
"…has not been received with universal acclaim, with the Los Angeles Times calling it “less than praiseworthy” and The New Republic describing it as “bureaucratic.” But
Alexander’s publisher Graywolf Press is rushing out an $8 paperback of the poem on 6 February nonetheless, with a 100,000 first print run. With over two weeks to go before publication, the book is already the bestselling poetry book on Amazon.com; Alexander’s new-found celebrity has also sent another of her titles, the 2005 Pulitzer prize finalist American Sublime, into the third spot."
Three cheers for readers. Even if the poem is not among the world’s finest, isn’t it of some consequence that a great many readers are taking pleasure in it and indeed that they are actually reading a work of poetry?
I am of the same mind as Ann Patchett who recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
“I’m all for reading bad books because I consider them to be a gateway drug. People who read back books now may or may not read better books in the future. People who read nothing now will read nothing in the future.”
If Alexander’s poetry encourages individuals (many of whom might rarely if ever read any poetry), to read more poetry and turns their interest to a broader range of poetry works perhaps we should think twice about criticizing so severely Praise Song for the Day.
My first reaction on reading such remarks was one of surprise for I had applauded the poem following its presentation. And then, in my naive way, I had wondered what makes a good poem and more exactly what distinguishes a fine poem from an inferior one? Is there an objective way to answer that question, one that is widely, if not universally accepted by students of poetry?
Nowhere could I find quite why the critics had found Praise Song for the Day so lamentable. Nowhere could I find what exactly about the poem the critics found so objectionable. They simply didn’t like it and worse.
So much of the poetry that is published today is simply incomprehensible to me. I try to make sense of it, read it over several times, and, still, the majority of newly published poems are beyond my understanding. But I did understand Alexander’s poem and it did move me.
Have the critics forgotten about the reader? Does a poem exist independently of the reaction of the reader? Does not a reader’s enjoyment and appreciation of a work of poetry count for something?
And so today I read with some amusement a report on the Guardian website that the poem has been an extraordinarily popular publication. According to the Guardian’s report, the poem:
"…has not been received with universal acclaim, with the Los Angeles Times calling it “less than praiseworthy” and The New Republic describing it as “bureaucratic.” But
Alexander’s publisher Graywolf Press is rushing out an $8 paperback of the poem on 6 February nonetheless, with a 100,000 first print run. With over two weeks to go before publication, the book is already the bestselling poetry book on Amazon.com; Alexander’s new-found celebrity has also sent another of her titles, the 2005 Pulitzer prize finalist American Sublime, into the third spot."
Three cheers for readers. Even if the poem is not among the world’s finest, isn’t it of some consequence that a great many readers are taking pleasure in it and indeed that they are actually reading a work of poetry?
I am of the same mind as Ann Patchett who recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
“I’m all for reading bad books because I consider them to be a gateway drug. People who read back books now may or may not read better books in the future. People who read nothing now will read nothing in the future.”
If Alexander’s poetry encourages individuals (many of whom might rarely if ever read any poetry), to read more poetry and turns their interest to a broader range of poetry works perhaps we should think twice about criticizing so severely Praise Song for the Day.
1.22.2009
Personal Identity
On my understanding, a philosophical novel is quite simply a work of fiction that treats the kinds of questions normally posed by philosophers, e.g. moral, existential, metaphysical, etc. It is a novel of ideas and questions that generate ideas worthy of consideration. Such a novel is the heart of the reading experience for me.
Is it any wonder then why I liked Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon so much? Ideas and problems abound within this tale, one with a very limited narrative and a great many questions, most of them unanswered. One of the central issues of Night Train to Lisbon concerns how one comes to know another person, including oneself. Within philosophy this is sometimes known as the problem of personal identity and in psychology as the nature of self-perception or self-knowledge.
Consider these questions that are either raised by the Portuguese physician Amadeau Prado or the Swiss linguist, Raimund Gregorious, who goes in search of the individuals who are the central players in Prado’s fictional, masterpiece A Goldsmith of Words:
How can you tell whether to take a feeling seriously or treat it as a carefree mood?
The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth?
In such stories, is there really a difference between true and false?
What do we know of somebody if we know nothing of the images passed to him by his imagination?
To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?
What difficult questions. Who has not wondered about them at one time or another? How complicated and unknowable we are. How then can we ever expect to know another person? Mercier writes: We are in the dark about so many of our wishes and thoughts, and others sometimes know more about them than we do. And, as if to take issue with current empirical research on person perception, he proclaims: Inside a person it is much more complicated than our schematic, ridiculous explanations wanted to have us believe.
In a similar vein, Mercier by way of Prado wonders a great deal about the problem of identity. Who are we anyway? Are we the same person today that we were 40 years ago? If so, what is it that constitutes our core or does that concept mean anything at all? Prado inquires:
When was somebody himself? When he was as always? As he saw himself? Or as he was when the white hot lava of thoughts and feelings buried all lies, masks, and self-deceptions?
Is there a mystery under the surfaces of human action? Or are human beings utterly what their obvious acts indicate?
Does it make any sense to say that a person has a central self, a distinctive identity that lies hidden behind most of the actions that constitute daily life? I sometimes find myself in the presence of another person who for entirely unknown reasons calls forth expressions that somehow seem far more myself than is usually the case. How does that happen? Who is the me that appears in such situations and how does it differ from my other self or selves? Nothing that I have been able to detect in the other person seems responsible. But what I am on those rare occasions is instantaneous and continuous and thoroughly exhilarating. It seems entirely natural and I have no idea what to make of it.
Consider the following passages recorded from Mercier’s novel which also touch on these two questions:
Is there a mystery under the surfaces of human action? Or are human beings utterly what their obvious acts indicate?
We humans: what do we know of one another?
…our outside form doesn’t appear to others as to our own eyes.
Was it possible that the best way to make sure of yourself was to know and understand someone else?
How can you tell whether to take a feeling seriously or treat it as a carefree mood?
The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth?
…that the body is less corrupt than the mind. The mind is a charming area of self-deception, woven of beautiful, soothing words that give us the illusion that we have an unerring familiarity with ourselves.
Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living.
But when [do] we set out to understand somebody’s inside? Is that a trip that ever ends?
Inside a person it was much more complicated than our schematic, ridiculous explanations wanted to have us believe.
When was somebody himself? When he was as always? As he saw himself? Or as he was when the white hot lava of thoughts and feelings buried all lies, masks, and self-deceptions?
Is it any wonder then why I liked Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon so much? Ideas and problems abound within this tale, one with a very limited narrative and a great many questions, most of them unanswered. One of the central issues of Night Train to Lisbon concerns how one comes to know another person, including oneself. Within philosophy this is sometimes known as the problem of personal identity and in psychology as the nature of self-perception or self-knowledge.
Consider these questions that are either raised by the Portuguese physician Amadeau Prado or the Swiss linguist, Raimund Gregorious, who goes in search of the individuals who are the central players in Prado’s fictional, masterpiece A Goldsmith of Words:
How can you tell whether to take a feeling seriously or treat it as a carefree mood?
The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth?
In such stories, is there really a difference between true and false?
What do we know of somebody if we know nothing of the images passed to him by his imagination?
To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?
What difficult questions. Who has not wondered about them at one time or another? How complicated and unknowable we are. How then can we ever expect to know another person? Mercier writes: We are in the dark about so many of our wishes and thoughts, and others sometimes know more about them than we do. And, as if to take issue with current empirical research on person perception, he proclaims: Inside a person it is much more complicated than our schematic, ridiculous explanations wanted to have us believe.
In a similar vein, Mercier by way of Prado wonders a great deal about the problem of identity. Who are we anyway? Are we the same person today that we were 40 years ago? If so, what is it that constitutes our core or does that concept mean anything at all? Prado inquires:
When was somebody himself? When he was as always? As he saw himself? Or as he was when the white hot lava of thoughts and feelings buried all lies, masks, and self-deceptions?
Is there a mystery under the surfaces of human action? Or are human beings utterly what their obvious acts indicate?
Does it make any sense to say that a person has a central self, a distinctive identity that lies hidden behind most of the actions that constitute daily life? I sometimes find myself in the presence of another person who for entirely unknown reasons calls forth expressions that somehow seem far more myself than is usually the case. How does that happen? Who is the me that appears in such situations and how does it differ from my other self or selves? Nothing that I have been able to detect in the other person seems responsible. But what I am on those rare occasions is instantaneous and continuous and thoroughly exhilarating. It seems entirely natural and I have no idea what to make of it.
Consider the following passages recorded from Mercier’s novel which also touch on these two questions:
Is there a mystery under the surfaces of human action? Or are human beings utterly what their obvious acts indicate?
We humans: what do we know of one another?
…our outside form doesn’t appear to others as to our own eyes.
Was it possible that the best way to make sure of yourself was to know and understand someone else?
How can you tell whether to take a feeling seriously or treat it as a carefree mood?
The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth?
…that the body is less corrupt than the mind. The mind is a charming area of self-deception, woven of beautiful, soothing words that give us the illusion that we have an unerring familiarity with ourselves.
Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living.
But when [do] we set out to understand somebody’s inside? Is that a trip that ever ends?
Inside a person it was much more complicated than our schematic, ridiculous explanations wanted to have us believe.
When was somebody himself? When he was as always? As he saw himself? Or as he was when the white hot lava of thoughts and feelings buried all lies, masks, and self-deceptions?
1.21.2009
Bookstore Closing
Yesterday I learned that one of my favorite bookstores has closed. On the website where I learned of the closing, the author wrote:
“For me, to lose just one such institution is like grieving the pending loss of our future. What will become of us in a world without the tactile experiences of a book? Without the kinship of the neighborhood bookstore?”
Naturally, I am aware that independent bookstores throughout the country are closing. But this one hit home. The bookstore, Twenty-Third Avenue Books, was located in Portland, Oregon, my former hometown, the place where I had lived for most of my adult life. Even though I no longer live there, I keenly share the sadness of the writer who informed me that, even if I did, I would no longer have the “the kinship of that neighborhood bookstore.”
I had been going there for years as I lived just a couple of blocks away and while its inventory was never very large, they always had a truly exceptional contemporary fiction collection. They also had my favorite bookmark and fortunately I still have a goodly number--like the one at the top of the post.
When I read the news, I found it hard to believe, although I guess I shouldn’t have been the least bit surprised given the state of the bookstore world these days and how empty it felt during my last visits. Other bookstores in towns where I have lived have also gone out of business recently—Cody’s in Berkeley, Stacy’s in San Francisco, Duttons in Los Angeles. Following its recent closure, Kepler’s in Palo Alto, where I practically lived as an undergraduate has been given a reprieve by community donors in Silicon Valley and may be able to weather the bookstore-closing-storm.
In response to a Paris Review (#164 Winter 2002-2003) question about his favorite bookstore, Richard Powers said:
“You go into that bookstore hungering for a world and a coloration and a register in sounds and senses, and you run your finger along the shelf and wonder, Is this it? Is this it? And you find something that’s close, or something that surprises you in its divergence from what you needed. But finally you can’t find the book that you want to read, and that’s when you start writing.”
And then later:
“There’s a scene in Plowing where one of the people in Seattle goes into an enormous used bookstore, looking for a book that had moved him as a child and that he had been looking for since the age of nine. It’s a story about a boy whose drawings somehow come alive, and he’s never been able to find this book again. What the writer knows is that the profession that he’s entered into, and the life that he’s taken on, is exactly the desire to recreate this story that he’s never been able to find again.”
There is--but now only used to be--a poem by Jane Smiley on the wall at the of Twenty Third Avenue Books that sums up precisely what is so special about a bookstore and why the closing of this one is distressing.
The Worth of a Bookstore
“Leaving any bookstore is hard, especially on a day in
August, when the street outside burns and glares, and
the books inside are cool and crisp to the touch;
especially on a day in January, when the wind is blowing,
the ice is treacherous, and the books inside seem to
gather together in colorful warmth. It’s hard to leave
a bookstore any day of the year, though, because a
bookstore is one of the few places where all the
cantankerous, conflicting, alluring voices of the world
co-exist in peace and order, and the avid reader is
as free as a person can possibly be, because she is
free to choose among them.”
And the heroine of Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Last of Her Kind describes a dream that is one I also harbor from time to time.
“All my life, though, among my daydreams about careers that might have made me happy, has been this one: a small shop somewhere, some partner and I buying and selling used books.”
What booklover has not had such a daydream?
1.20.2009
Inaugural Poem
What better way to celebrate this day and the power of words than to read the poem Elizabeth Alexander wrote and recited at the Inauguration of Barack Obama.
Praise Song for the Day
Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."
We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."
We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.
Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."
Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.
In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.
Praise Song for the Day
Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."
We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."
We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.
Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."
Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.
In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.
1.19.2009
Follow-Ups
New York Times
Yahoo News reports that several rescue measures are underway to meet head-on the financial crisis that the New York Times is currently facing. This includes an investment of several million dollars that the “billionaire Carlos Slim Helu” is said to be considering. In addition, the Times is said to be planning to raise a good deal of additional capital by selling its newly constructed 52 story Manhattan headquarters.
Finally, the great and legendary Red Sox Nation may be pleased to learn that the Times is also selling its stake in the Boston Red Sox. Now there is an investment that is worthy of consideration.
Taken together, the proceeds from these actions should be more than enough to guarantee the continuation of the Times as we have known it for years, including the treasured, by this reader, print edition.
On Reading
Ann Patchett in the January 16th Wall Street Journal writes that she is not surprised by the recent NEA report that reading appears to be on the rise. In Nashville, where she lives and serves on the Library Board, the director of the libraries reports that their survey confirms the NEA findings and indicates that their patrons “say the main reason they’re coming to the library is for books! We have to get the word out. It isn’t over. People still want to read!”
Patchett writes: “I have long refused to participate in the last rites of what is both my passion and my profession. I meet too many people who stay up half the night racing towards a final chapter. We are a hardy bunch, we readers. The rumor is we’ll play around with a Kindle or an I-Book for awhile but eventually give up on the whole endeavor…I am more of the Charlton Heston school: you’ll get my paperback of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” away from me when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.”
Patchett is also a firm believer in “the fact that it isn’t so much what you read, it’s that you read. Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we’ve never met, living lives we couldn’t possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character’s skin….I’m all for reading bad books because I consider them a gateway drug. People who read bad books now may or may not read better books in the future. People who read nothing now will read nothing in the future.”
I know of no more eloquent statement of the value of reading literature, nor of the variety of positive effects it can have. She concludes: “Why are more people reading? Because they are either discovering or remembering just how good it can be.”
Yahoo News reports that several rescue measures are underway to meet head-on the financial crisis that the New York Times is currently facing. This includes an investment of several million dollars that the “billionaire Carlos Slim Helu” is said to be considering. In addition, the Times is said to be planning to raise a good deal of additional capital by selling its newly constructed 52 story Manhattan headquarters.
Finally, the great and legendary Red Sox Nation may be pleased to learn that the Times is also selling its stake in the Boston Red Sox. Now there is an investment that is worthy of consideration.
Taken together, the proceeds from these actions should be more than enough to guarantee the continuation of the Times as we have known it for years, including the treasured, by this reader, print edition.
On Reading
Ann Patchett in the January 16th Wall Street Journal writes that she is not surprised by the recent NEA report that reading appears to be on the rise. In Nashville, where she lives and serves on the Library Board, the director of the libraries reports that their survey confirms the NEA findings and indicates that their patrons “say the main reason they’re coming to the library is for books! We have to get the word out. It isn’t over. People still want to read!”
Patchett writes: “I have long refused to participate in the last rites of what is both my passion and my profession. I meet too many people who stay up half the night racing towards a final chapter. We are a hardy bunch, we readers. The rumor is we’ll play around with a Kindle or an I-Book for awhile but eventually give up on the whole endeavor…I am more of the Charlton Heston school: you’ll get my paperback of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” away from me when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.”
Patchett is also a firm believer in “the fact that it isn’t so much what you read, it’s that you read. Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we’ve never met, living lives we couldn’t possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character’s skin….I’m all for reading bad books because I consider them a gateway drug. People who read bad books now may or may not read better books in the future. People who read nothing now will read nothing in the future.”
I know of no more eloquent statement of the value of reading literature, nor of the variety of positive effects it can have. She concludes: “Why are more people reading? Because they are either discovering or remembering just how good it can be.”
1.18.2009
The Influence of Place
I write about place again. Are we shaped by the places where we have lived? Can the cities and countries where we have spent some time influence the sort of person we become? These questions loom large in my thinking about the role of place in our life.
In the Opinion section of The New York Times this morning six writers ask how Barack Obama has been influenced by the places in which he has lived—Indonesia, Honolulu, Chicago and Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Universities.
The editors write: “We are shaped by the places we have lived. And Barack Obama has lived in a lot of different places. His memoir “Dreams from My Father” recounts formative years spent in Indonesia, Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York City, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago. How might these places have helped to mold the man who will be the next president of the United States? What might he have taken away from, say, Jakarta in 1967? Or Columbia University? Six writers who lived where Mr. Obama lived—when he lived there—reflect on those questions.”
Endy Bayuni writes that “Anyone going to a public school in Jakarta would have had early exposure to a vast array of cultures.” By “growing up respecting cultural and religious differences probably helped pare him for his return to the United States, a society still divided by race.”
Lois-Ann Yamanaka writes that he was similarly affected by the years in spent in Honolulu where the cultures are both diverse and stratified. Margot Miffin suggests that the years he spent at Occidental College taught him the key values the college promoted—critical thought and social justice.
At Columbia where he completed his undergraduate degree, Kevin Baker suggests Obama read everything he could get his hands on and that being in New York “taught Barack Obama how indomitable people can be, even in a city that has been written off…It was a poorer town then, a harder one, but still a place of vaulting ambition, of indelible beauty. We thought we could do anything. We felt such pride to be there.”
John Matteson writes that the major lessons Obama learned at Harvard Law were “the finitude of one’s own powers; the twin, paradoxical necessities of self-reliance and interdependence; and the humanity that comes when one finds oneself a long way from perfection, and then finds new ways of striving….He appears to have learned that he, to a degree quite rare, possessed the confidence, the serenity and the supreme resilience to accomplish goals to which he may have feared he was not equal.”
Finally, Aleksandar Hemon his days in Chicago surely taught Obama the “gruff solidarity of survival [that] is an essential part of living in Chicago….What Mr. Obama should have learned living in Chicago is that it takes far more than gut feeling and bulling, far more than fuzzy-warm nationalism and fantasies of greatness, to run a country as vast and complicated as Chicago is a city.”
Indeed, each of these authors conclude more generally that place exerts its influence in terms of what a person learns from the most salient features where he or she has lived. Perhaps what makes Barack Obama’s experiences so distinctive is that he has lived in an extremely wide variety of places, places where he has been exposed to situations that have given him the opportunity to learn a rare combination of extraordinarily valuable lessons. He has clearly learned them well.
In the Opinion section of The New York Times this morning six writers ask how Barack Obama has been influenced by the places in which he has lived—Indonesia, Honolulu, Chicago and Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Universities.
The editors write: “We are shaped by the places we have lived. And Barack Obama has lived in a lot of different places. His memoir “Dreams from My Father” recounts formative years spent in Indonesia, Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York City, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago. How might these places have helped to mold the man who will be the next president of the United States? What might he have taken away from, say, Jakarta in 1967? Or Columbia University? Six writers who lived where Mr. Obama lived—when he lived there—reflect on those questions.”
Endy Bayuni writes that “Anyone going to a public school in Jakarta would have had early exposure to a vast array of cultures.” By “growing up respecting cultural and religious differences probably helped pare him for his return to the United States, a society still divided by race.”
Lois-Ann Yamanaka writes that he was similarly affected by the years in spent in Honolulu where the cultures are both diverse and stratified. Margot Miffin suggests that the years he spent at Occidental College taught him the key values the college promoted—critical thought and social justice.
At Columbia where he completed his undergraduate degree, Kevin Baker suggests Obama read everything he could get his hands on and that being in New York “taught Barack Obama how indomitable people can be, even in a city that has been written off…It was a poorer town then, a harder one, but still a place of vaulting ambition, of indelible beauty. We thought we could do anything. We felt such pride to be there.”
John Matteson writes that the major lessons Obama learned at Harvard Law were “the finitude of one’s own powers; the twin, paradoxical necessities of self-reliance and interdependence; and the humanity that comes when one finds oneself a long way from perfection, and then finds new ways of striving….He appears to have learned that he, to a degree quite rare, possessed the confidence, the serenity and the supreme resilience to accomplish goals to which he may have feared he was not equal.”
Finally, Aleksandar Hemon his days in Chicago surely taught Obama the “gruff solidarity of survival [that] is an essential part of living in Chicago….What Mr. Obama should have learned living in Chicago is that it takes far more than gut feeling and bulling, far more than fuzzy-warm nationalism and fantasies of greatness, to run a country as vast and complicated as Chicago is a city.”
Indeed, each of these authors conclude more generally that place exerts its influence in terms of what a person learns from the most salient features where he or she has lived. Perhaps what makes Barack Obama’s experiences so distinctive is that he has lived in an extremely wide variety of places, places where he has been exposed to situations that have given him the opportunity to learn a rare combination of extraordinarily valuable lessons. He has clearly learned them well.
1.17.2009
The New York Times
In the latest issue of the Atlantic Michael Hirschorn predicts that The New York Times will soon stop publishing the print edition of the newspaper, retaining instead the far more popular digital edition. He suggests this could occur as early as sometime this year.
According to Hirschorn the Times is deeply in debt and while it has several assets it could sell, such as the Boston Globe, this is not exactly the best of times to put a newspaper or much of anything of value up for sale. Given its bleak financial condition, gradually diminishing print circulation, and escalating use of its website, Hirschorn says “at some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition and with it the Times as we know it, will no longer exist.”
As a long time reader of the Times, I find this inconceivable. It will mean the end of one of the main events of my day, every day, in fact, even when I’m traveling and often spend a good deal of time searching for a copy of the latest edition.
As Hirschorn puts it, the end of the print edition of the Times “will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives.”
It will also mean the end of the only way I really know how to read the newspaper. I don’t know about you, but I find it virtually impossible to read with any kind of care the Times website or the newly arrived digital version of the paper. That is true for almost any lengthy digital article, book, or periodical.
I am remote from the generation of the screen, far from knowing how to peer at the screen for anything but a headline or few short paragraphs. If I find something of any length on the Web, I end up printing a copy to read. That would be impossible to do each day with the Times as the number of articles I read from start to finish isn’t getting any less.
In my experience reading is a matter of marking up the text, make notes in the margin, underlining, shifting around from paragraph to paragraph, sometimes returning to an article several pages back and from time to time cutting something out of the paper. It is a matter of holding the text in my hands, staring at the photos, occasionally peering at the ads, and taking notes on my yellow pad of paper. It is also a matter of taking a break from the computer.
Reading this way on the screen is simply not possible. Yes, I can scan the headlines, read short pieces, and get the basics. But the Times is a quite a bit more than the basics. And while I know my Times is not everyone’s Times and while I am aware of the particular style and slant of the paper, it is nevertheless one that is quite congenial to me.
I along with a great many others from my generation will miss the daily arrival of the Times. So I remain ever hopeful that Hirschorn’s prediction is in the management’s view simply not an option.
According to Hirschorn the Times is deeply in debt and while it has several assets it could sell, such as the Boston Globe, this is not exactly the best of times to put a newspaper or much of anything of value up for sale. Given its bleak financial condition, gradually diminishing print circulation, and escalating use of its website, Hirschorn says “at some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition and with it the Times as we know it, will no longer exist.”
As a long time reader of the Times, I find this inconceivable. It will mean the end of one of the main events of my day, every day, in fact, even when I’m traveling and often spend a good deal of time searching for a copy of the latest edition.
As Hirschorn puts it, the end of the print edition of the Times “will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives.”
It will also mean the end of the only way I really know how to read the newspaper. I don’t know about you, but I find it virtually impossible to read with any kind of care the Times website or the newly arrived digital version of the paper. That is true for almost any lengthy digital article, book, or periodical.
I am remote from the generation of the screen, far from knowing how to peer at the screen for anything but a headline or few short paragraphs. If I find something of any length on the Web, I end up printing a copy to read. That would be impossible to do each day with the Times as the number of articles I read from start to finish isn’t getting any less.
In my experience reading is a matter of marking up the text, make notes in the margin, underlining, shifting around from paragraph to paragraph, sometimes returning to an article several pages back and from time to time cutting something out of the paper. It is a matter of holding the text in my hands, staring at the photos, occasionally peering at the ads, and taking notes on my yellow pad of paper. It is also a matter of taking a break from the computer.
Reading this way on the screen is simply not possible. Yes, I can scan the headlines, read short pieces, and get the basics. But the Times is a quite a bit more than the basics. And while I know my Times is not everyone’s Times and while I am aware of the particular style and slant of the paper, it is nevertheless one that is quite congenial to me.
I along with a great many others from my generation will miss the daily arrival of the Times. So I remain ever hopeful that Hirschorn’s prediction is in the management’s view simply not an option.
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