The Naming of Cats

After much deliberation, uncertainty, hesitancy and all too much discussion of the matter, my wife has brought a cat, more properly a little kitten, into our home. She traveled some distance to select the kitten. You see, it isn’t just your ordinary cat, if you will pardon me just this once. Regardless, it is an archetypical kitten, frolicking about, snooping here and there, ears perked up, purring now and then, but always on the alert and up to no good. A regular lion on the prowl.

And now we are faced with the problem of naming it. This is not something to be taken lightly either. I can assure you it will also take a while and a good deal of uncertainty, hesitancy and all too much discussion. You want to get it quite right and yet leave a little room for cat to have its own, very private name, a name that every cat has and only the cat knows, according to the authorities in this area.




The Naming of Cats

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey--
All of them sensible everyday names.

There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter--
But all of them sensible everyday names.

But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-
Names that never belong to more than one cat.

But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover--
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

From T. S. Elliot’s Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

To view a video version of the poem from the original London production of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical Cats go here.

A Simple Little Checklist

The Louvre Museum in Paris, the most visited museum in the world, with a collection of paintings ranging across every school, the home of the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, the
Winged Victory, etc. etc, is currently exhibiting a collection of prints and drawings of lists. At the invitation of the museum, the exhibition was created by Umberto Eco who chose to work on the theme he described as The Infinity of Lists. Lists? Where is the art in Lists? My grocery list is scarcely readable. In an interview in Spiegel Online, Eco answers:

“The List is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order…How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogues, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists—the shopping list, the will, the menu—that are also cultural achievements in their own right.”

Eco, whose works include Foucault’s Pendulum and The Naming of the Rose, says his novels are full of lists. Asked why he is so interested in the subject, Eco replied, “I can’t really say. I like lists for the same reason other people like football, or pedophilia. People have their preferences.”

Eco isn’t the only one who thinks lists are important. So does Atul Gawande who wrote in the Dec 10th, 2007 New Yorker about the critical importance of the checklist in intensive care. While the use of a checklist may seem obvious to most, it isn’t commonly employed in the enormously complex intensive care units. Gawande claims that most physicians don’t believe that “something as simple as a checklist could be of much help in medical care.”

Yet, one study of patient care in I.C.U.s during a twenty four hour period observed that the average patient required 178 actions per day, ranging from drug administration to suctioning the lungs and every one posed risks and the possibility of error. No one can expect a physician under such demanding conditions to be able to remember and implement so many separate actions.

Another study identified the steps to take in order to avoid a single problem in I.C.Us., line infections. When a rather lengthy checklist of each one of the steps was created, it was observed that at least one was omitted in more than a third of the patients. And when, in another study, physicians and nurses were required to check off each step in a checklist, Gawande reports “the infection rate in Michigan’s I.C.U.s decreased by sixty percent…Michigan’s infection rates fell so low that its average I.C.U. outperformed ninety percent of I.C.U.s nationwide…[saving] more than fifteen hundred lives. The successes have been sustained for almost four years—all because of a stupid little checklist.”

A checklist may have also played a crucial role in the survival of all the passengers on Flight 1579 which landed safely in the Hudson River a few months ago. It now appears that it wasn’t only Captain Sullenberger’s piloting skills, to say nothing of a good deal of luck, that avoided a catastrophic crash in the Hudson, but also the fact that Sullenberger and his crew carefully went through a checklist before they took off of each of the steps to take if the engines failed in flight. It was only a few moments later that they were required to recall and carry out each one of the actions they had reviewed prior to take off.

As Eco notes in his interview, “At first, we think that a list is primitive and typical of very early cultures, which had no exact concept of the universe and were therefore limited to listing the characteristics they could name. But, in cultural history, the list has prevailed over and over again. It is by no means merely an expression of primitive cultures.”

Becomming a Writer

“Even on those occasions when he had no active hand in something I wrote, the choices I made, the way I approached a subject, the order in which I told what I knew, the attitude I adopted were determined by his example and his influence.”

Alec Wilkinson, My Mentor: A Young Man’s Friendship with William Maxwell.

I am currently reading, Mentors, Muses and Monsters edited by Elizabeth Benedict, a rather fascinating collection of thirty essays by writers about the people who changed their life, i.e. led them to become writers. Yet Benedict notes in her Introduction that it isn’t always a particular writer who can turn a person to a writing life.

It can also be a specific book as Michael Cunningham says in describing the life-long influence of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. It might also be a group of writers or a periodical, or indeed, an institution that can have this kind of impact on an individual. For example Jane Smiley points to her first year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Benedict also indicates that none of the thirty writers told “the archetypal story of artist and muse: the great man inspired in his great work by a moan destined to play second fiddle, or no fiddle at all.”

As I think back upon my own experience, not that I can lay claim to being a writer, that is a real writer, one whose works are read by others, I can’t think of any single person or book let me to find pleasure in living a writing life. Some books or teachers have been more influential than others and have led to a line of inquiry that guided my work for a while or motivated me to read other books they wrote.

In the early days I was greatly influenced by the kind of magazine The New Yorker was during the period when it was publishing two or three short and not-so-short short stories in each issue, as well as long, analytical essays, profiles and film reviews. And I know that Hemingway’s early novels and short stories made a lasting impression on me.

But it was probably a collection of books assigned in a course I took as an undergraduate the exerted the great influence on my life. In the days when I was a freshman at Stanford every student took a full-year course in the history of Western Civilization and then if they wanted to, could follow it with another in the Humanities devoted to literature and the arts. Those courses and the books I read for them introduced me to the world of humanistic studies and I've never recovered from the experience or found an alternative that comes close.

Again, it wasn’t any particular teacher in the course, although there were several, some as scholarly and charismatic as teachers can be sometimes, nor was it any single book or author, but rather it was the total impact of the course itself and the collection of readings that I was introduced to that made all the difference in my life.

However, the majority of the writers in Benedict’s volume wrote about the individuals who inspired them in one way or another to become writers. For example, Jonathan Safran Foer claims, “that had he not gone to Yehuda Amichai’s reading as a high school student visiting Israel, he might never have become a writer.”

Surely one of the most glowing accounts Benedict recounts in her Introduction is that of Cheryl Strayed. “I love Alice Munro, I took to saying, the way I did about any number of people I didn’t know whose writing I admired, meaning, of course, that I loved her books…But I loved her too, in a way that felt slightly ridiculous, even to me."

Capacity for Acceptance

How often have you read a book about a marriage that worked? “Worked” is the correct word because the marriage that Kay Redford Jamison unfolds in her heartbreaking memoir, Nothing Was the Same, is now a memory.

Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is the author of several extraordinarily books that are both moving and scholarly, a combination that is as uncommon as the spirit of the marriage she recalls in her memoir. Her works include An Unquiet Mind where she describes her own struggle with manic-depression, Night Falls Fast, a study of suicide, and Touched with Fire, an analysis of manic-depression and creativity. I’ve read them all and have benefited in more ways than one from each of them.

In Nothing Was The Same she looks back on her 20-year marriage to Richard Wright, a highly regarded research scholar on schizophrenia at the National Institute of Mental Health. When they met after both had been married before, Jamison says they hit it off at once. “We had many things in common—curiosity about the natural world, interested in the customs and love lives of our colleagues, and fascination with the ways the brain can veer off its tracks—and we made each other laugh…We were inclined to find pleasure in whatever it was we were doing.”

Their delight with one another lasted throughout their marriage and developed into a deep and lasting love. They meant a lot to one another. Jamison remarks that in all the years they had together, there was never a time that she was bored. Yet it wasn’t all so idyllic. “Nearly out the door on more than once occasion, certainly. But bored, never.”

She also comments that in other respects the two of them were really quite different, a difference that brought on laughter more than anything else. What better measure of love! Still, from the beginning their differences created some tension, but eventually “Our sensibilities and quirks evolved into something more shared and complex, more mingled.”

“Richard liked white Christmas lights, I like colored ones; Richard preferred lights to blink, I do not. Each year we put up strands of non-blinking colored lights for me and strands of blinking white lights for him.”

What I found most striking in their marriage was the way it was grounded in a total acceptance of one another. She writes, “…it is the capacity for understanding or accepting that is most important.” And later, “I had Richard, we had each other, and it was enough.” How rarely do I hear anything like that expressed or even sensed or observed in the ways one can usually detect such sentiments in a married couple.

After describing her relationship with Richard, she recounts the agonizing years when together they battled his lung cancer. And in the final section Jamison describes the profound loss she experienced after his death and the long process of grieving that she confronted head on.

Through it all she never succumbed to depression or verged on the threshold of a manic phase. Richard had taught her well, showed her what she needed to do to stay centered. “Richard had a way of giving back to me important things I had lost along the way.”

There is one more striking feature of their marriage that is a consistent theme in her memoir. It is the sense of calm and equilibrium that each of them seemed capable of bringing to one another. “Richard often told me that my acceptance of and love for him created a world of stillness and constancy that he had never known.” And she, in turn, told Richard that he created a “quiet” world for her.” This I believe is a miracle that comes to all too few marriages.

They had nearly twenty years together. They were colleagues, spouses, lovers and mentors for one another. However, Jamison makes it clear that what Richard could not teach her, indeed “no one could—was how to contend with the grief of losing him.”

The love you gave me wasn’t fresh and young,
It didn’t melt the sun or set the town aflame.
But it was warm and wise as any street,
Where hope and sorrow meet in bars without a name.
I only know that one day was a drink
And then the next was you and nothing was the same.

Stuart MacGregor

Moody Tales of Love

There is a grey cloud hanging over many of William Trevor’s short stories in Cheating at Canasta. The day is cloudy and misty, a melancholy mood surrounds the characters, their talk is reflective, nostalgic, and sad.

In Folie a Deux a man returns to Paris alone and, while reading in a café, muses, “The will to go on can fall away.”

Is there no gaiety in Ireland any more? Is it always so gloomy there?

There is also recognition of the truth, largely the truth of what really happened and what was really felt in a marriage or an affair, even though it was never expressed.

In A Perfect Relation Prosper says, “There was, for him in marriage, the torment of not being wanted any more.” And later “Often disagreeing, they would agree because it made things easier if that falsity seemed to be the truth.”

His language is terse and a strange rhythm of uncertainly characterizes many of the passages. From The Room, “Love makes the most of pity, or pity does of love, I don’t know which. It hardly matters.”

The Room describes in Trevorian fashion an affair between Phair whose marriage was breaking up and Katherine who seemed relatively satisfied with hers. They meet from time to time in a rented room.

They never learn much about each other and often speak elliptically leaving much unsaid or untrue. “This evening he would tell her about his day, and she would say about hers and would have to lie.”

Their affair had been an excitement for both of them. It always is, at least in the beginning. “Risk came into it in all sorts of ways; risk was part of it, the secrecy of concealment, stealth. And risk had claimed its due.”

Eventually, their affair ends. It usually does. “He expected no more of her than what she’d given him, and she would choose her moment to say that she must go. He would understand; she would not have to tell him. The best that love could do was not enough, and he would know that also.”

There are trips to Paris or Venice in several of the stories, always taken alone. Similar experiences are not unknown to me, although they are never as dark or as bleak as Trevor depicts them.

“In Folie a Deux, Wilby travels by himself to Paris. “He reads again, indulging the pleasure of being in Paris, in a brasserie where Muzak isn’t playing, at a small corner table, engrossed in a story that’s familiar yet has receded sufficiently to be blurred in places, like something good remembered.”

And in Cheating at Canasta, the story that gives the book its title, a widower returns to Harry’s Bar, a well-known restaurant in Venice, where he and his wife had many happy times. (Harry’s Bar was one of Hemingway’s haunts and it is also a bit of a legend among the celebrity crowd. I have had the good fortune of going there a couple of times and Trevor brought those experiences back to me again.)

Upstairs in the dining room Mallory overhears a young American couple arguing at the next table. To Mallory their quarreling ruins the memories of the good times he and his wife had there. But then he remembers that their life hadn’t always been quite so free of pain. He says, “Marriage was an uncalculated risk, Mallory remembered saying once. The trickiest of all undertakings.”

In reading these short stories it wasn’t long before I fell into their mood and began to speak the way his characters did. Never so dark or austere, but sometimes as indirect or cryptic and at other times contradictory or ambiguous, never saying exactly what I meant, since I was never very sure what I meant.

Week in Review

Over at the Wall Street Journal Stephen Marche writes about the evolution of the book. He says, “It’s about what the book wants to be.”

Meanwhile Sergey Brin contributes an Op-Ed defense of Google’s book digitizing program. He argues it will create the library that will last forever.

The ubiquitous Malcolm Gladwell deconstructs himself in an amusing discussion at the Guardian. "I'm interested in slightly dumb, obvious questions, right…"

At the New Yorker Here to There Department Nick Paumgarten writes about inattentional blindness: “a state of such absorption in an activity that you fail to notice really obvious stuff around you, like a guy in a gorilla suit or the state of Wisconsin.”

In a video promo of his new book, Eating Animals, Jonathan Foer answers the perennial question, What’s for dinner—broccoli or a burger?

Yahoo News reports what you have to do if you want to learn about Einstein’s love letters? The answer? Take the morning commute to Tel Aviv.

Conversational Readings offers a much-deserved word of praise for John Williams’ Stoner: “Simply put, the book is about nothing more and nothing less than a human life.”

And over at the Times of London Ben Macintyre looks closely at how the Internet might be affecting storytelling: “Narrative is not dead, merely obscured by a blizzard of byte-sized information. A story, God knows, is still the most powerful way to understand.”

Medical Reasoning

Lately I’ve been hearing one tale after another about the problems people are having with their medical care—can’t get an appointment, duplicate billing, failure to return calls, in some cases, calls that require immediate attention and finally perhaps the most frequent, incorrect or delayed diagnosis. Who has not heard such tales?

In the November 2009 New York Review of Books, Jerome Groopman, author of How Doctors Think, gives a thought-provoking account of why patients sometimes receive such poor care. He begins by describing a clinical conference he conducted for interns and residents at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

The conference focused on how doctors arrive at a diagnosis of their patient’s ills. “Some 10 to 15 percent of all patients either suffer from a delay in making the correct diagnosis or die before the correct diagnosis is made.”

At once I was struck by Groopman’s methodological approach to this problem. Unlike the usual one of discussing medical successes, Groopman begins by discussing failures. He writes, “The most instructive moments are when you are proven wrong, and realize that you believed you know more than you did, wrongly dismissing a key bit of information that contradicted your presumed diagnosis…”

Science or any empirical discipline (or individual for that matter) doesn’t move forward by pointing to its successes. If that were the case, it would scarcely ever change. Rather we learn far more from the mistakes that have made, from those cases that disprove our conjectures.

Groopman points out that the most common sources of diagnostic errors are the cognitive biases that physician’s make in trying to understand a patient’s condition. (These errors are not confined to physicians. Rather they are errors that anyone is prone to make in making a decision under conditions of uncertainty). He identifies three of the most common biases:

…anchoring where a person overvalues the first data he encounters …; availability where recent or dramatic cases quickly come to mind and color judgment about the situation at hand; and attribution where stereotypes can prejudice thinking so conclusions arise not from data but from such preconceptions.

The second notable methodological point in Groopman’s account is his emphasis on the limits of empirical generalizations in any particular case. He points out that subjects in clinical trial investigations (upon which these generalizations are based) are often highly selective as those who have multiple conditions or are taking other medications or do not fit into a narrow age range (usually too old or too young) are excluded from the study

Groopman comments, “Yet these excluded patients are the very people who heavily populate doctor’s clinics and seek their care.”

The other major sources of physician error stems from the heavy patient load they are now asked to carry. One physician “said she spends less and less time conversing with her patients. Instead she felt glued to a computer screen, checking off boxes on an electronic medical record…”

Another pointed out that “…work rounds were frequently conducted in a closed conference room with a computer rather than at the patient’s bedside.” And finally in describing the case of a seriously ill cancer patient, Groopman reports that “… no one attending to her had sat down in a chair at her [hospital] bedside and conversed at eye level, asking questions and probing her thoughts and feelings about what was being done to combat her cancer and how much more treatment she was willing to undergo.”

This may be hard to believe for anyone familiar with the days when doctors routinely came to your home if you were will or told you to come right over to his or her office if you felt poorly, or indeed, called you at the end of the day to see if you were feeling any better.

In the end Groopman makes clear that the solution to these problems will come about “…only by dogged thinking that requires the kind of time and inquiry that is absent in much of modern medical care." Dream on Dr. Groopman

Reading Philosophy in French

Ever since I read it, I’ve been mulling over an article that appeared in the Times earlier this week. Like a persistent musical tune, it won’t go away. A psychiatrist described a man in a homeless shelter who lived “a life apart, without a home, friend or regrets.”

“The staff at the homeless shelter where I worked for several years had long worried about him. He sat in the day hall, well tended and polite, reading chemistry textbooks with calm comprehension. At the moment, he was in the middle of a book written by a French philosopher in the 1930s; he was reading it in French.”

I wondered, what is there to worry about this fellow? The psychiatrist reported he had said, “My goal is equanimity. I’m not pursuing what the world calls success.” Well, good for him, I thought.

The members of the staff had described him as a man of thought but without feeling. Again I wondered how could they be sure of that, how could they know what was churning below the surface.

The article went on to describe the following incident: Before he moved into the shelter he had shared an apartment with an alcoholic. As he was leaving the apartment one morning “he passed his roommate slumped over the kitchen table. He did not pause to check on the man.” I thought that seemed perfectly reasonable; the guy was an alcoholic, was he not, and might have had similar experiences more than once.

“When he returned in the evening, his roommate was still slumped over the table. If he had not been dead earlier, he was now.”

The homeless man drew two conclusions from this experience—he was often wrong in judging other people and, because of that, he ought to distance himself them. I thought he was being needlessly hard on himself. He had every reason to believe his roommate was simply in a temporary stupor.

The psychiatrist who wrote the article drew another conclusion. She asked him for another meeting in the belief that he might achieve some sort of understanding of the incident and that he had no reason to “absent himself from the world…”

The man calmly rejected the invitation saying he wasn’t interested in getting involved with the rest of the world.

I took him at his word, that for whatever reason he has chosen to live a solitary life with his books, that the world was a messy and complicated place and he simply didn’t feel the need or the desire to enter into it.

I did not choose to look for anything deeper, to view him as a man in need of help, or that his rejection of society gave anyone cause for worry. I did not assign him to any clinical disorder or view him as disturbed. Of course, I knew virtually nothing about him or his previous history.

He had made his choice. It was not an altogether uncommon one. He isn’t the only one who feels and acts that way. There are person of renown in the arts and sciences who live such a solitary life, although they assuredly have more financial resources.

Let him be, I thought. Leave him to his books, to his chemistry and French philosophy, to his rejection of society and what in his view are it demands. He seeks only a state of calmness.

Linking Book and Reader

“The reader will find many of my friends in this book, both friends that I know and…many whom I have never met, yet know through reading, through having been taught about them and by them.” This passage is from James Schall’s The Unseriousness of Human Affairs by way of Patrick Kurp on his blog, Anecdotal Evidence.

Schall suggests the literary friends we have are both writers as well the characters they write about in their stories. But what types of friends are they? Some live with us forever, while others drift away soon after the story concludes. But did you ever hear of someone falling in love with a literary friend?

Elizabeth Hawes in her book, Camus, a Romance, says she has. “During my last college years, I had photograph of Albert Camus prominently displayed above my desk…I had fallen in love with him. Not romantic love in the only sense I had experienced in those days…but something deeper, like the bonding of two souls.”

She says Camus had an enormous impact on her life, that his insights literally changed its course. “I had never before experienced such an intimate relationship with a writer, poring over his prose and filling up with his rhythms, thinking his thoughts, trying to crawl under his skin.”

Her feelings led Hawes on a lifelong search to learn more about this very private man. Camus, a Romance is a fascinating portrait of Camus, the man and the writer. It chronicles her experiences following in his footsteps in North Africa, Paris, New York and Provence. In an effort to come to some kind of understanding of this complex man, she tracked down his friends, members of his family, and the writers that knew him

Her journey reminded me of a comparable one by the classical language teacher, Raimund Gregorious. However, Gregorious was not a writer, rather he was one of the central characters in Pascal Mercier’s masterful novel, Night Train to Lisbon. Gregorious had been teaching at the same secondary school in Berne Switzerland for decades. He was fixed in the same, daily solitary routine and had no desire to change it.

“Mundus, the most reliable and predictable person in this building and probably the whole history of the school, working here for more than thirty years, impeccable in his profession…respected and even feared in the university for his astounding knowledge of ancient languages…his head also held the Hebrew that had amazed several Old Testament scholars.”

On his way to school one day he encounters a distraught woman on a bridge who says her mother tongue is Portuguese. The woman walks with Gregorious to his class, sits there for a while, then departs. Soon thereafter Gregorious realizes his own life is drawing to a close and suddenly walks out of the classroom to the utter astonishment of his students.

“…Simply to get up and go: what courage! He just got up and went, the students keep saying. Just got up and went.” He eventually winds up in Spanish language bookstore where he chances upon an antique Portuguese book, A Goldsmith of Words by Amadeu de Prado. He buys the book and a Portuguese dictionary, begins reading, is astonished by the power and the beauty of the words and the next morning leaves Switzerland, his school, and his daily routine to take the train to Portugal on a journey to track down the life and world of Amadeu de Prado. “…he had the amazing feeling, both upsetting and liberating, that at the age of fifty-seven, he was about to take his life into his own hands for the first time.”

Like Hawes’s relationship with Camus, the one I had with the characters in Night Train to Lisbon was a strong as any I have had in reading literary fiction. I entered into the lives of Raimund Gregorious and Amadeu de Prado as if they were virtually my own. I admired them, thought about the same questions they posed on every page, and found myself just as perplexed by them as they did. And I came to know these fictional characters as well as any of the friends I have in real life, actually in some respects even better. This is the kind of encounter that can sometimes link a book with a reader and make the experience of reading literature so compelling.

Morning Line

I have this little routine that I go through each morning in reading the blogs and Web sites that interest me. The fact that I can do this still seems a bit of a miracle to me, one that I’ve never find tedious or the least bit repetitious. It’s like waking up each morning in the library.

I start with the Arts and Letters Daily that has three columns of short descriptions of new ideas, topics, issues, etc. First there is the Articles of Note, then New Books and the last Essays and Opinion pieces. In light of the brief sentence or two about each listing, I decide whether or not I want to click on the “more” link which in turn takes me to the full document itself, whereupon I can add it to my list of Unsorted Bookmarks to be read later in the day.

On Monday I always move from this tremendously rich page to The New Yorker’s Web site to find out what’s in the issue for the week. Then I move on to three sets of Blogs.

Blog 1 consists of Anecdotal Evidence by Patrick Kurp who writes with considerable insight and wisdom based on his exceptional knowledge of literary history. The Book Bench, the second is this group, is the New Yorker’s literary blog that presents a half dozen or more topics each day, and lastly the Commonplace Blog of David Meyers that presents one of the sanest and most thought provoking literary commentaries on the Web.

Blog 2 begins with Conversational Reading that has a good deal of literary news, especially about Latin American literature but far too many ads. Then I move on to the New York Times book blog, Paper Cuts, and then to the Guardian literary site that includes a good deal of news, special reports, and its own blog. Here you get the benefit of three extremely interesting Web pages that bring together a wide range of literary articles and videos.

Blog 3 consists of another three Web sites beginning with The Situationist that treats an enormous number of topics in the social sciences broadly conceived. I follow it with the Frontal Cortex written by Jonah Lehrer, the author of Proust was a Neuroscientist and How We Decide. The last of this batch is Letters from a Librarian, a site that I’ve recently discovered and has become one of my favorites, although lately its author doesn’t post comments very often. However, it is far and away the most aesthetically pleasing, as you will note at once if you visit it. It is also a extremely personal blog in which the author does what I think is so important in writing about literature, namely describing the way the experience affects them personally.

I do all this first thing in the morning and then later in the day, I return to those links I’ve saved in my Unsorted Bookmarks to read with more care. I am struck by what an extraordinary experience this is and what a wealth of information is offered up to me each day by these bloggers

None of this was possible a few years ago. Now it is and as far as I’m concerned this is a bit of a revolution in the transmission of thought and ideas and teaching.

And when I cannot get on the Web, say when I’m traveling or my server is down, I find myself terribly distressed. Something important is missing from my daily routine and I will spend the better part of the day trying to find it. Yes, it is truly an addiction and yes, I do experience withdrawal symptoms in the absence of my morning literary fix. It is like working out each day, another one of my addictions. If I unable to get to the gym or head out for a morning jog, I just don’t feel quite right the rest of the day.

Weekend Treats

Video of the Week

50 Things To Do with a Book

The Diagnostic Problem

The Novel is Not Dead After All

What Did the Dog See?

Is Nonsense of Any Value?

Reading in the News

Book a Day
How long does it take you to read a book? Can you read one in a day? Nina Sankovitch says she can and has just completed a year of reading 365 of them. She claims she read the novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog in a day. I recall it took me the better part of a week, perhaps more. I don’t know how she does it. Not only that, but she has also posted a daily review of each of the books she’s read on her blog. She says: To read a great book is a gift. A gift from the author to me, and when I pass that book on, it is the best kind of re-gift, a sharing of pleasure and joy and knowledge to the reader who receives it. Read more…

e-Textbooks
Amazon has recently given more than 200 college students its Kindle loaded with digital textbooks required in fall semester courses. Students have mixed views about the device. Some miss the ease of highlighting text and making notes in the margins. A student at Arizona State tried typing notes on the Kindle’s small keyboard but found the notes were unreadable when she went back to review them. She commented, I like the aspect of writing something down on paper and having it be so easy and just kind of writing whatever comes to my mind. Read more…

Free Newspapers
The Times reports that newspaper readership in this country continues to decline. The latest figures indicate that weekday newspaper sales are down more than 10% since last year. Much of this decrease appears to be due to rising Internet readership, the current recession, and newspaper price increases. The French with their usual élan have come up with a novel solution to this problem. They are offering young (18-24) readers) a free subscription to a newspaper of their choice. Read more…

Brain and e-Books
Is there a difference in learning and retention, to say nothing of motivation to read further between paper books and e-books? In my view these are the central questions that stand in need of investigation. Nowadays these questions are framed in terms of how the brain processes the two modes of presentation and the neural pathways that may be activated in each mode. Neuroscience investigators are far from agreeing on the matter. Read more…

End of Reading
In an interview with Tina Brown, former editor of The New Yorker, Philip Roth predicts that reading novels will virtually disappear in the next twenty-five years and that those who continue to do so will constitute a “minority cult.” He says, the book can’t compete with the screen and “the concentration and focus required to read a novel is becoming less and less prevalent, as potential readers turn instead to computers or to television.” His remarks lead me to wonder if fiction readers ever comprised more than a minority of the population.

His views on the future of reading are not new. Nine years ago in a New Yorker profile, he said: “Every year, seventy readers die and only two are replaced. That’s a very easy way to visual it. Readers means people who read serious books seriously and consistently. The evidence is everywhere that the literary era has come to an end.” Read more…

The Rising Tide of Neuroscience

In the October 13th New York Times, the Op-Ed Columnist, David Brooks writes about the latest trend in what used to be known as psychology, now more properly called social cognitive neuroscience. This field emerged a few years ago from the previous cognitive psychology revolution that overthrew the field’s previously dominant behavioral approach.

As a former psychology teacher, I wonder what has happened to the study of behavior and the role of environmental and situational factors in shaping behavior. It appears that students care less now about these factors than they do about what goes on in the brain when individuals act, think, see or feel.

Brooks describes some of the papers he heard at a recent conference of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society. He comments that most of those who attended the meeting were “so damned young, hip and attractive.” I recall Thomas Kuhn’s claim that revolutions do not occur in science and by implication almost any discipline or institution until the members of the old school pass on and are replaced by the next generation of students.

At the meeting Brooks listened to a presentation in which subjects were shown images of menacing faces. People whose parents had low social status exhibited more activation in the amygdla (the busy little part of the brain involved in fear and emotion) than people from high-status families.

In another paper evidence was presented of the brain scans of Yankee and Red Sox fans as they watched highlights of one of their games. In a control condition neither group “reacted much to an Orioles-Blue Jays Game, but when they saw their own team doing well, brain regions called the central striatum and nucleus accumbens were activated. “ And so it went.

One wonders how investigators go about choosing what part of the brain to study in response the stimuli they present. Do they also measure other area of the brain to determine whether or not they are activated? In a letter to the Times, a person inquired if brain processes are the basis of the response that is measured or whether the response itself triggers the neurological event.

In his Op-Ed piece Brooks describes a study in which the anterior cingulate cortices in American and Chinese subjects were differentially activated when they saw members of their own group endure pain suggesting these effects may form the basis of prejudice. The writer of the Times letter asks,

Is the biochemical process the basis of prejudice or is prejudice the basis for a biochemical process taking place? To simply assume that a biochemical correlate of a social activity is its explanation is bad science…

Fortunately, there are still active groups of student/investigators who are equally committed to the situational analysis of behavior. One is from law and social psychology whose views are reflected on their blog known as The Situationist that is associated with the Project on Law and Mind Science at the Harvard Law School. In a description of this approach the authors of the Situationist write:

The situation” refers to causally significant features around us and within us that we do not notice or believe are relevant in explaining human behavior. “Situationism” is an approach that is deliberately attentive to the situation. It is informed by social science—particularly social psychology, social cognition, cognitive neuroscience and related fields—and the discoveries of market actors devoted to influencing consumer behavior—marketers, public relations experts, and the like.

If you read the blog and observe the breath of the topics that it treats on an almost daily basis, it will be clear that the study of the environment and the situation is far from moribund, nor is it confined to the young, hip, or necessarily attractive.

Fictional Readers

At the Guardian Book Blog Jon Varese writes about the reading experiences of fictional characters:

When I'm reading, nothing excites me more than the discovery of a character who's reading along with me. That character becomes, instantaneously, a kind of compatriot – a kindred spirit absorbed in the world of books, inside the book in my hands. Of course the discovery is even more delicious when the book that they're reading is something that I already know and love.

He mentions his favorites—the countless books Jane Eyre had read even by the age of ten; the 18th century novels that David Copperfield had read; and “who can ever forget Emma Bovary, that hopeless romantic whose doomed fate finds its roots in her reckless and irresponsible reading?”

I too have several favorites. There are those sections in Michael Ondaajte’s The English Patient where Almsay falls in love with Katherine as she is reading a story from Herodotus.

This is the story of how I fell in love with a woman who read me a specific story from Herodotus. I heard the words she spoke across the fire, never looking up, even when she teased her husband. Perhaps she was just reading it to him. Perhaps there was no ulterior motive in the section except for themselves. It was simply a story that had jarred her in its familiarity of situation. But a path suddenly revealed itself in real life. Even though she had not conceived it as the first errant step in any way. I am sure.

Or the scene in Ian McEwan’s Saturday where Henry’s daughter Daisy is reciting Mathew Arnold's Dover Beach:

Daisy recited a poem that cast a spell on one man. Perhaps any poem would have done the trick, and thrown the switch on a sudden mood change. Still, Baxter fell for the magic, he was transfixed by it, and he was reminded how much he wanted to live.…Some nineteenth-century poet….touched off in Baxter a yearning he could barely begin to define. Page 288

Or the earlier passage where McEwan describes how Henry felt about the books that Daisy had encouraged him to read?

Henry had read the whole of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, two acknowledged masterpieces. At the cost of slowing his mental processes and many hours of his valuable time, he committed himself to the shifting intricacies of these sophisticated fairy stories. What did he grasp, after all? That adultery is understandable but wrong, that nineteenth-century women had a hard time of it, that Moscow and the Russian countryside and provincial France were once just so.

Then there is the delightful novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie. Perhaps you recall the story of the Chinese teenage boys who are sent to a remote mountainous area to be re-educated. One of them (Four Eyes) is reading Western books in secret which two of the boys (Luo and Ma) eventually steal. Luo takes one of the books, Balzac’s Ursule Mirouet, and begins reading. He finishes it quickly and shortly thereafter

…was seized with an idea: I would copy out my favourite passages from Ursule Mirouet, word for word. It was the first time in my life that I had felt any desires to copy sentences from a book. I ransacked the room for paper but all I could find was a few sheets of notepaper intended for letters to our parents. I decided I would write directly onto the inside of my sheepskin coat.

Finally, I recall Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Anna in the Tropics about a group of Cuban immigrants who work in a cigar-making factory in Florida. It was the tradition then for a person known as the lector to read books to the workers while they rolling the cigar paper. A new lector arrives and begins reading to them Anna Karenina. Anna in the Tropics is the story of the way the novel’s love affair begins to influence the life of Conchita, one of the workers in the factory.

Varese concludes his discussion of fictional readers with the question I regard as central to the act of reading:

What are the effects of reading? Not just upon fictional characters, but upon ourselves? This, to me, is one of the most fascinating reflections presented by the intersection of reader and text—testing the question whether a book can change your life, and whether that’s a good thing.

The Humanities Matter

In the latest American Scholar William Chace describes a disturbing downward trend in the number of students enrolled in English Departments, as well as other departments that study the Humanities. When I was teaching at Reed College, the English Department was always the most “popular.” There were years when Psychology ran neck and neck with English, but that was never for very long. And around the time I left the academic fray, the enrollments in the Biology Department were close to those in English.

Of course, this was at a liberal arts college where a common course in the Humanities is required of all entering students with an option to continue on in their sophomore year. But even when I left the college in the late nineties, I could see what lay ahead. When I began teaching at Reed, there were two students enrolled in the Economics Department and by the time I left, there were almost many Economic majors as there were in English. This is at a college where serious young individuals, even if a little quirky, come to study and where there are no courses in Business.

Yet Chace reports that the study of Business is now the most popular major in the nation’s colleges and universities. The figures say it all: In 1970/71 the percent of majors in English declined from 7.6 percent to 3.9 percent. In contrast, undergraduate majors in Business increased from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent. Chace writes,

In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent.

There are really two questions: What are the causes for this sharp decline in English and the Humanities? And second, what can be done to redress it?

To be sure these trends parallel the apparent decline of reading in this country, the steady demise of one independent bookstore after another, and the rising tide of mobile phones, social networks, and various modes of electronic communication. We are no longer a people of the book, but rather one of the screen.

Chace notes there are several reasons for the decline but the fundamental one “is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself.”

Pretty strong words, although they reflect those I often hear from others. I’ve not taken a course in an English Department and I have come to its subject matter through the back door so to speak. The love that I have for literature has nothing to do with critical studies or exotic theories of the text or its interpretation. Rather it is precisely for the very reasons Chace claims are missing from the current curriculum to say nothing of the great pleasure and truths that I gain from the reading experience itself.

Without a doubt, there is also the matter of the enormous cost of attending a private college where courses in English and the Humanities have always had their home. But there is still a place for instruction in these disciplines in the less costly public institutions that are primarily concerned in instruction in applied fields with direct economic payoff.

Chace suggests that to reverse the declining enrollments in the faculty must take pains to return to a more coherent curriculum and to the “rock-solid fact that [literature] can indeed amuse, delight, and educate.” He argues that courses in all the Humanistic disciplines should be taught in terms of the “intrinsic value of the works themselves, in all their range and multiplicity, as well-crafted and appealing artifacts of human wisdom.”

I concur: the courses in Humanities I was fortunate enough to take as an undergraduate continue to have an enormous impact on my life and on whatever understanding I have acquired about the world. I quote the writer, Orhan Pamuk: “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”

Weekend Briefs

Are You Counting Calories?

In Praise of the Cliché

Do Not Forget the Placebo Effect

To Think or to Blink, That is the Question

The Man Who Must Work Every Day

On the Person versus the Situation

The Humbling

Simon Axler, the actor-protagonist of Philip Roth’s new book, The Humbling, recounts a dream to his therapist in which he is unable to perform his part while on stage in a drama. The therapist responds that this type of dream is one that every patient reports at one time or another.

When I read this, I wondered if Philip Roth was beginning to feel this way about his ability to write one fine novel after another. The Humbling is his twenty-sixth novel and his publisher reports two others are on the way. I was also reminded that the dream is one I occasionally have about being unable to deliver a lecture or guide a discussion in a class I am teaching.

Axler’s therapist also reports that another common dream is one in which you find yourself driving down a steep roadway and discovering your brakes don’t work. This too is a dream I sometimes have. Again, I wondered if that’s the way Roth was feeling about growing old—he is now seventy-six. I am close behind.

In The Humbling Simon Axler is coming to the end of the line of his distinguished acting career and at the age of sixty-three is not getting any younger either. He could no longer perform on the stage at least perform convincingly. Axler says, I always had a sneaking suspicion that I have no talent whatsoever. On the opening page Roth writes,

He'd lost it. The impulse was spent. He'd never failed in the theater, everything he had done had been strong and successful, and then the terrible thing happened: he couldn't act. Going onstage became agony. Instead of the certainty that he was going to be wonderful, he knew he was going to fail. It happened three times in a row. And by the last time nobody was interested, nobody came. He couldn't get over to the audience. His talent was dead.

The novel consists of three chapters. In the first, Into Thin Air, Axler’s acting wizardry disappears “into thin air” whereupon he commits himself a psychiatric hospital where he spends a month brooding without the slightest resolution of his predicament.

In the second chapter, The Transformation, a forty-year old lesbian bursts into his life, whereupon they have an exotic and extravagant sexual romp for a little over a year. The woman, Pegeen, is the daughter of long-time friends of Axler’s who strongly disapprove of the “wacky and ill advised” affair and bring a good deal of pressure on Pegeen to bring it to an end.

In the Third Chapter, The Last Act, she does just that by abruptly leaving Axler and telling him that for her it was an experiment in heterosexuality, a terrible mistake too. (Earlier in the novel Axler had predicted this very outcome. He believed he was seeing clearly into their future, yet he could do nothing to alter the prospect.) Pegeen says, “I wanted so much to see if I could do it.” But she can’t as she succumbs to the charms of a woman she and Alxer had picked up one night at a bar to engage in a “three-way debauchery.”

The novel ends with Axler holding a shotgun to his head. It had finally occurred to him to perform one last act as if he was in the theater, only this time it would not be make believe. Roth writes,

What could be more fitting? It would constitute his return to acting, and, preposterous, disgraced, feeble little being that he was, a lesbian’s thirteen-month mistake, it would take everything in him to get the job done. To succeed one last time to make the imagined real, he would have to pretend that the attic was a theater and that he was Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev in the concluding act of The Seagull.

His body is discovered a week later by his cleaning woman. A note of eight words is found alongside him. It is the final line spoken in Chekhov’s play. “The fact is Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself.”

The Humbling is beautifully written. The dialogue between Pegeen and Axler is classic Roth--fast, smart, witty. And his depiction of Pegeen is wildly different than any of the women Roth usually writes about. Yes, she is young and Axler is old. Still their affair has none of the embarrassments and helplessness that Nathan Zuckerman experiences in his relationship with the young and exciting Jamie in Exit Ghost. Roth continues his astonishing string of masterful meditations on the “massacre” of aging and prospect of mortality.

An Education in Poker

The other day I chanced upon an article about a course on the literature of poker. I sent it to a very fine poker-player friend of mine, Shelly Brown, who works as a librarian at the Hawaii State Public Library in Honolulu. She very kindly accepted my invitation to write the following guest blog in response to the article by James McManus, adapted from his forthcoming book, “Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker”.


As a poker-playing librarian, even I am surprised James McManus is teaching a course on the literature of poker. Are there that many great books on poker? Are they enlightening, edifying, poetic or powerful? Is there even one great poker book?

McManus, who has actually written a very good poker book, "Positively Fifth Street," seems to believe that because influential, successful people such as Bill Gates, Obama, Truman and Eisenhower have cut their teeth, and sharpened their political tactics by playing the game, that we all should read literature about it.

If that is not enough to build a curriculum on, he points to the importance of poker strategy, the lexicon, the sheer risk-taking Americanness of the game. He tells us poker reflects who we are, and has helped shape our national character.

Those who follow poker a bit know McManus for both reaching the final table of the 2000 World Series of Poker (WSOP), and for being central in one of the most entertaining televised moments of the 2004 WSOP. His famous grouse, "You're disrespecting the game" toward the unconventional Elixx Powers is well-known by students of the game. The man has, so to speak, a chip on his shoulder about poker. He believes poker needs to be protected from infidels, legitimized by society, and professed to youth.

Powers, a once homeless and frequently destitute man, further mocked McManus, and with his unorthodox play, put McManus into a tailspin of "tilt" that was delightful to witness. McManus ended up calling a Powers' bluff with a ridiculous Queen high hand that gave Powers the pot and had him rolling with laughter.

Poker does not need to be prettied up and made respectable. It works in its own poetry of pleasure and pain. Those who thrive in it are rule-breaking, cut-throat geniuses. Yes, it is compelling, it is American, it is addictive, and it is merciless.

Should the literature of poker be studied? Is there a wealth of poker books our youth needs to glean lessons from? Looking at McManus' reading list it seems unlikely. Is "Streetcar Named Desire" really poker literature? Do "talking points" about famous people who play the game have anything to do with literature or poker?

If Kennedy raised Khrushchev’s bluff over the threat of a nuclear holocaust, shouldn't we study that in a course on poker and politics? Robert E. Lee used poker tactics to almost defeat the forces of the Union; let’s study poker and military strategy. If poker is the national card game, isn't that best examined within sociology or history?

McManus does in fact recommend expanding poker education, and this may be an even more suspect notion. He thinks poker may help students better understand the world from other's viewpoints. That it could be used in dispute resolution, as a tool for world peace perhaps. Do poker skills inspire one to work toward peace, love and understanding, or even fair play? Let's remember, the best poker player to inhabit the White House was Richard Nixon.

The New Yorker Festival

In May of 2000, The New Yorker magazine held a festival in New York to celebrate its 75th anniversary. Many of its well-known authors read from their work, some lectured, and others participated in panel discussions or gave interviews. The first New Yorker Festival was such a success that it has become an annual event. A few years ago, I was finally able to attend.

Think of it: the writers of a weekly magazine holding forth about their work during three full days of readings, lectures, and discussions. Outside academic society meetings, I can think of nothing else like it in this country, surely not by any other magazine or periodical. While the audience, which at times numbered in the hundreds, was largely from New York City, many individuals came from other places throughout the nation. I had traveled across the country from Oregon; one woman I met had come all the way from Honolulu.

What led me to travel so far, at some expense, to attend this Festival? More than anything, I think we came to make contact with a few of its talented contributors and to connect in some vague fashion with the community of readers and writers who recognize the unique and special value of the magazine. Many of its most notable contributors were present the year I attended. On Fiction Night, which opened the Festival, I had to choose between Anne Beattie and Richard Ford, or Michael Cunningham and Deborah Eisenberg, or Nick Hornby and Zadie Smith, or Lorrie Moore and Julian Barnes, and other pairs no less notable. The choice was impossible.

The following day was a concentrated display of brilliance. In one session John Lahr, the theatre critic of the magazine, spoke on Tennessee Williams and began by introducing Elizabeth Ashley, who has acted brilliantly many of Williams’s plays. Ashley read a passage from one with great gusto and animation. Then Lahr delivered an enthusiastic lecture for the better part of an hour on Williams' life and writing. He focused on Williams' fragmented and elusive self, the storms of depressions that dominated his life, and the sense of overwhelming loss present in all his work. Williams, he said, captured the modern spirit better than anyone else.

I moved on to one of the Festival’s highlights, a session on Literary Lawyers with Jeffrey Toobin, Louis Begley, Richard Posner, and Scott Turow. Toobin moderated the session brilliantly with wonderfully thoughtful questions. Turow responded with youthful intelligence, speaking about writing and his ongoing legal work. Posner, the scholarly judge and author who has written widely about topics ranging from literature to legal proceedings, commented with insight. Begley concluded quietly and wisely by drawing the audience back to historical novels where law plays a role--Dickens, Zola, Balzac, and even Plato. The participants agreed that these days, reality is often times more implausible than legal fiction.

David Remnick’s interview of Woody Allen was far and away the most popular event of the Festival. A huge room in the New York Public Library was used for the session. Woody ambled in and the crowd roared. He admitted he was not a scholar, saying he is just Woody. Everyone loves his modest, unassuming, and fun-loving self-deprecation. He is a natural at it and good at poking fun at much of modern life without annoying anyone. He loves to write, hates leaving his apartment, and doesn't care what people say about his work; he just needs to do it. Otherwise, he would collapse. Woody offered an interesting view of greatness: you do what you do, you do what you do best, and if others like it or think it's great, then that's fine. And if they don't, that's fine too. But you always have to do what you like to do and what you do naturally. Talent is a gift, not something you can try to attain. You can work at perfecting it, but first it has to be there.

The following day was no less impressive. At one session, Adam Gopnik interviewed Steve Martin. Once again, the session was mobbed. While Woody and Martin are wildly popular, they are funny in entirely different ways. Martin seems less personal, less instinctive. He tells more planned jokes than Woody, who just mumbles around most of the time. Martin spent some time talking about his painting collection, his progression from standup comedy routines to films, and now to writing. Along the way, there were good laughs and much good banter between him and Gopnik who is a wonderful writer in his own right. Martin noted that the most important thing in writing is clarity, as in comedy, where timing is also critical.

This year’s Festival has just concluded. Some of its highlights were:

Jhumpa Lahiri’s talk about the meaning of writing in her life.

In a discussion with Hilton Als, Tilda Swinton spoke about how difficult she finds acting.

Procrastination was the topic of James Surowiecki’s presentation.

The ever-present Malcolm Gladwell ended up talking about, yes, everything.

Dr. Atul Gawande’s lecture dealt with the critical importance of the checklist in medical practice.

Festival Weekend Links

The New Yorker Festival

A Beautiful Literary Blog

How to Change Behavior—Video of the Week

Reading the Nobel in Literature

Living By the Odds

Why Read Dickens?

Balloon Boy

AP - A homemade balloon aircraft floated away from a yard in Colorado after a 6-year-old boy was seen climbing in, setting off a frantic scramble by the military and law enforcement before the balloon slowly touched without the boy inside.

I happened to turn on the TV when the news came across that a balloon was drifting in the Colorado sky carrying a little boy in the basket. Instantly, I recalled the opening scene in Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love that I had first read as a short story in the New Yorker, followed by the novel, and later viewed as a film with Daniel Craig and Samantha Morton. Who could ever forget that opening scene?

The beginning is simple to mark. We see in sunlight under a turkey oak, partly protected from a strong, gusty wind. I was kneeling on the grass with a corkscrew in my hand, and Clarissa was passing me the bottle—a 1987 Daumas Gassac. This was the moment, this was the pinprick on the time map: I was stretching out my hand, and as the cool neck and the black foil touched my palm, we heard a man’s shout. We turned to look across the field and saw the danger. Next thing, I was running toward it…There was the shout again, and a child’s cry, enfeebled by the wind that roared in the tall trees long the hedgerows. I ran faster. And there, suddenly from different points around the field, four other men were converging the scene, running like me….What were we running toward a I don’t think any of us would ever know fully. But superficially the answer was a balloon….We were running toward a catastrophe, which itself was a kind of furnace in whose heat identities and fates would buckle into new shapes. At the base of the balloon was a basket in which there was a boy, and by the basket, clinging to a rope, was a man in need of help….

I wonder how many others had the same association? No one in the media yet, as far as I can tell or in any of the literary blogs I read. Do you recall the story? The opening incident, its outcome, the effect on the lover’s (Joe and Claire) relationship, and the subsequent ominous encounters with a man (Jed) who was also there in the field, pulling hard at the ropes to bring the balloon down. The novel and the film are as enduring as the opening scene and they have remained with me throughout the several years that have passed since I first read the excerpt in the New Yorker, then the novel, followed by viewing its film version a few years later.

In the afternoon I turned on the TV once again. At that very moment the “Breaking News” came across the screen that that the 6-year-old boy was found hiding in a cardboard box in his family's garage attic Thursday after being feared aboard a homemade helium balloon that hurtled 50 miles through the sky on live television. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Wolf Blitzer quite so happy.

Now in the morning there are concerns being expressed about the public costs of the saga (the Denver airport was closed while the balloon was cruising in the gusty winds across the Colorado sky and a large search party was formed to scour the area for the boy). And apparently the boy’s father had uttered something to the effect that “we did this for a show” so investigators will try to determine if the whole thing was a hoax, beginning by questioning the family that apparently has a history of public display (the boy’s mother and father had appeared on “Wife Swap”).

Still there is no word yet from Ian McEwan or discussion of the striking similarity to his work of fiction, or to the way in which there is often little distinction between fiction and reality. However, a few Tweeters have noticed the resemblance. “I wonder if Balloon Boy and his parents have read Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love? “Great book centered in a similar tragedy.” “Balloon Boy reminds me of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love.”

Thought and Action

I don’t know why I did it. But today I can recognize that events back then were part of a lifelong pattern in which thinking and doing have either come together or failed to come together—I think I reach a conclusion, I turn the conclusion into a decision, and then I discover that acting on the decision is something else entirely, and that doing so may proceed from the decision, but then again it may not. Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do.….I don’t mean to say that thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behavior. But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources, and is my behavior, quite independently, just as my thoughts are my thoughts, and my decisions my decisions. From The Reader by Bernard Schlink

The British Psychological Society’s Research Blog asked some of the world’s “leading” psychologists to identity the “one nagging thing they still don’t understand about themselves.” Is there only one? Anyway some of the answers were rather interesting.

Ellen Langer said she still didn’t understand why she has nightmares almost every night. Richard Wiseman said he did understand why he sometimes said or thought witty or funny “things.” Chris McManus gave the answer I liked best. “What is this thing I call beauty?”

However, David Buss gave one I’ve thought a lot about at various times.

“One nagging thing that I still don’t understand about myself is why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases. One example is my failure at affective forecasting, such as believing that I will be happy for a long time after some accomplishment (e.g. publishing a new book), when in fact the happiness dissipates more quickly than anticipated. Another is succumbing to the male sexual overperception bias, misperceiving a woman’s friendliness as sexual interest. A third is undue optimism about how quickly I can complete work projects, despite many years of experience in underestimating the time actually required. One would think that explicit knowledge of these well-documented psychological biases and years of experience with them would allow a person to cognitively override the biases. But they don’t.”

Is it possible to overcome these psychological biases? You’d think so, especially once you become aware of them. But no, this doesn’t happen very often. I think this stems from a failure to recognize the sharp distinction between thoughts and actions.

Knowing something is one thing; acting upon it is another. Everyone who smokes knows the dangers of doing so. But that doesn’t stop them from lighting up every now and then.

It isn’t uncommon for individuals undergoing psychotherapy to know a great deal about the origins of their problems and various approaches in dealing with them. In spite of this knowledge, they find it impossible to do anything to overcome their maladies.

And Jonah Lehrer on his blog The Frontal Cortex writes about the limits of self-knowledge.

My own unfixable flaw concerns "paralysis by analysis," or thinking about decisions that I know shouldn't be consciously deliberated. Although I've written about Tim Wilson's work with strawberry jam, and know a bit about the information processing powers of the unconscious, I still find myself spending far too much time in the supermarket, debating the merits of various jams. It turns out that writing a book about decision-making doesn't make you a master decider - it simply allows you to have more precise names for your mistakes.

A few years ago I did an experiment on the effects of knowledge in changing behavior. I asked would knowledge of the Bystander Effect (The frequent failure of individuals to come to the aid of a distressed person) lead individuals to avoid this failure in the future?

In one condition, I gave the participants a great deal of information about the Bystander Effect, showed them a brief film about it, and asked them to write a short essay on the topic. In spite of this knowledge, these individuals were no more likely to come to the aid of a person who dropped a large box of books or was observed having a severe asthma attack than those in the control condition who were not given any information.

A lifetime of studying psychology has convinced me, that all too often we overestimate the influence of what we know on behavior. Instead, knowledge represents only one of the many factors that influence us, especially in situations where there are strong social pressures. In these situations, we may find it very difficult to translate our knowledge into action. Until we develop more effective ways to accomplish this, we must be careful not to overestimate the extent to which a psychologically informed public will behave any differently than an uninformed one.

A Happy Marriage

I have been trying to read A Happy Marriage: A Novel by Rafael Yglesias. Naturally, I was attracted by its title. A happy marriage? What is that like I wondered? Did you ever know anyone who said they had a happy marriage, at least one, that lasted more than a dozen years? I’ve read about a few, but never in a novel.

And then the rave reviews started coming in. Susan Issacs wrote in the Times Book Review, “A tour de force, touching and harrowing at the same time.” The book flap claimed the book is “both intimate and expansive…” Another Times review said it was, a "profound deliberation on the nature of love, marriage, and the process of dying." How could I resist?

And so I started reading. The story begins with Enrique’s effort to meet his wife-to-be, Margaret. It is agonizingly slow. A friend of Enrique’s is doing all he can to prevent their meeting. And yet when they finally do, Enrique stumbles over one hurdle after another. He is indecisive, anxious, clumsy, rather adolescent actually.

They finally meet and Enrique is smitten at once. He is taken with, “Margaret’s wet blue eyes, thin body, dainty movements, the way she flings her leg over a chair: Something happened inside Enrique like a guitar string suddenly unstrung. There was a shock and a vibration in his heart, a palpable break inside the cavity of his chest.” And so it goes.

The succeeding chapters alternative between their equally slow courtship and those where Yglesias describes Margaret’s awful battle with cancer “in pitiless minutiae.” Dinitia Smith writes in the Times, “Seldom has there been in any novel such an unremitting depiction of the ravages of cancer.” It is grim and very difficult to read.

I put the novel down, placed it at the bottom of my stack of books, and mumbled something along the lines of “I can’t read this any more, the reviews not withstanding.” I wondered if something was wrong with me. How come I found so little in this novel that so many are raving about?

And then I read a review by David Meyers at The Commonplace Blog that made me feel I hadn’t gone off the deep end after all. Meyers writes: “Few books have disappointed me more than Rafael Yglesias’s novel A Happy Marriage. Its title raised my expectations to probably unreachable heights…It is touted by Scribner as an “achingly honest story about what it means for two people to spend a lifetime together—and what makes a happy marriage.” But it is none of that. It aches not; neither is it honest. And it is not about what makes a happy marriage.”

Although I have not finished the novel and am not sure if I will, I did early on find an important lesson for couples with few interests in common. Yglesias writes, “They had different tastes, and sometimes wanted different things from each other, and yet they had lived a happy life together…” Clearly there is far more to a close and long lasting marriage than shared interests.

When I read that passage in A Happy Marriage, I was reminded at once of how bewildered Woody Allen was that he and Mia Farrow remained together for as long as they did even though they had little in common.

“I could go on about our differences forever: She doesn't like the city and I adore it. She loves the country and I don't like it. She doesn't like sports at all and I love sports. She loves to eat in, early -- 5:30, 6 -- and I love to eat out, late. She likes simple, unpretentious restaurants; I like fancy places. She can't sleep with an air-conditioner on; I can only sleep with an air-conditioner on. …. She would love to take a boat down the Amazon or go up to Mount Kilimanjaro; I never want to go near those places. … She has raised nine children now with no trauma and has never owned a thermometer. I take my temperature every two hours in the course of the day."

One wonders to what extent A Happy Marriage is a novel. Every commentator points out how closely it mirrors the facts of Yglesias life—that he dropped out of high school to write a very successful first novel, had an affair with another woman, and gave everything he had to his wife while she was battling cancer. Myers remarks that the novel deals less with Margaret than with Yglesias himself. He concludes, “Margaret Joskow must have been an extraordinary woman, but from this novel the best you can do is to suppose so.”