What to Believe?

“You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time.” Abraham Lincoln*

The rapid fall of Jonah Lehrer reflects a problem with all secondary accounts of scientific findings—on the Web, in the press, in books, conversations, etc. You can’t always believe them.

Lehrer was forced to resign from his position as a blogger for the New Yorker when it was discovered he had fabricated several passages from a purported interview with Bob Dylan and had reused material previously published on his blog at Wired magazine. Having read those blogs, I was quite puzzled to see them once again on the New Yorker’s digital pages.

Since then his latest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, has been withdrawn by its publisher, and Wired magazine, where he had blogged before coming to the New Yorker is reviewing all of his previous posts. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is asking bookstores to returned their unsold copies for a full refund and the same offer has been made to readers who purchased a print copy of the book.

From a star in the blogosphere, Lehrer has almost overnight been ostracized to a writers no-man’s land, to be shunned as if he carried around some dread virus. One wonders what will become of him.

Absent the original report in a peer-reviewed (ideally) journal, it is hard, no, impossible to determine the reliability of the kind of secondary accounts Lehrer published. They could be subject to any number of reporting biases, errors, outright deception, or simple fudging.

Apparently this was true in several and perhaps others yet discovered in the blogs and books of Jonah Lehrer, whose popularity was not unlike that of Malcolm Gladwell. And it may also be true of the several blogs I have written about Lehrer’s posts and books that are even further away from the original sources than Lehrer’s.

I first started reading Lehrer on his blog, the Frontal Cortex. I liked the way he attempted to integrate scientific findings with ordinary experiences. Eventually, his blogs became more neuroscience and less psychological and, in turn, I didn’t follow him as often as I used to, as I’ve never been particularly enamored of neuroscience and its presumption of “at last we know.”

I knew all the evidence he cited from experimental studies was a secondary account, but I had no reason to believe he fabricated anything or distorted the findings one way or another. Therein lies the problem of a reporter, like myself, or a reader. How can you trust such accounts when you don’t have the original research upon which it is based or even know how to interpret it if you did?

When I was a social psychologist, I uniformly went to the original studies I talked about in class or cited in my research. I read them as carefully as I could, tried to interpret the increasingly complex statistical analyses, and checked to see that the investigator’s conclusions didn’t go beyond the data. I can assure you this was never easy. And how often have you read lately about researchers who have fudged on their data or even in some cases actually made it up?

Apparently Lehrer did fudge and did distort and did also invent what he claimed to be true. Should I remove the several blogs where I have cited his work? No, I’ll leave them up for a while and suggest you read them, as well as all other secondary accounts of the research I discuss with considerable caution.

* Note: The Abraham Lincoln quotation was drawn from Jonah Lehrer’s blog, "Deception" written in November, 2006.

Mr. Keatley's Commonplace Book

Most commonplace books, and there aren’t many of those, are private collections of notable passages that readers have collected over the years. Very few have been published and those that have are primarily the collections of well-known individuals—Thomas Jefferson, John Milton, W. H. Auden, Alex Guinness, etc. However, I suspect a relatively modest number have been published privately, probably less today than in previous centuries. Who can ever know these things?

From the earliest days of the commonplace book tradition, copying noteworthy passages by hand, usually into one or more notebooks, has been the preferred method of transcription. The introduction of the typewriter and computer and more recently the several methods of electronic recording have made inroads on this practice.

A considerable number of “commonplace books” and quotation lists are now appearing on the Web. I discuss a few here. While these electronic analogues of their printed forerunners have probably not changed the character of commonplace books, they have surely broadened the audience for what had become a largely private activity.

One of the most usual of those that I’ve read about lately is On Opening Mr. Keatley’s Commonplace Book by Brendan Bruce. I am completely in the dark about the identity, real or fictional, of Mr. Keatley or Brendan Bruce. But here it is, his commonplace book, formatted as a photographic portfolio on a Website, known as "blub" for some reason.

You can also sample a few of its pages and buy a paper or Kindle version from the ubiquitous Amazon.com. Regardless, on each page is a list of the passages that Mr. Keatley or Mr. Bruce deemed worthy of collecting from what is apparently a rather vast and wide ranging set of books.

No reason is given why the passages were selected, nor are they annotated or organized by theme, which I guess is true of most commonplace books. Nevertheless, here is a sampling from the 15 pages available on the Web. Might this kind of thing be the Christmas gift of 2012 for a fair number of commonplacers?

An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia. Thomas Babington Macaulay

Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth. Joseph Joubert

Judge and be prepared to be judged. Ayn Rand

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries. Joseph Addison

Those who air at great deeds must also suffer greatly. Plutarch

Destiny: n. A tyrant’s authority for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure. Anatole France

Bring your desires down to your present means. Increase them only when your increased means permit. Aristotle

I have never learned anything from any man who agreed with me. Dudley Field Malone

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. Dick the Butcher, King Henry VI Part II

Surprise happens so often that it’s surprising that we’re surprised by it. Paul Wolfowitz

Money is like the sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. W. Somerset Maugham

What I want is men who will support me when I am in the wrong. William, Lord Melbourne

Reports are not self-executive. Florence Nighingale.

"Moral Life of Downtown"

Earl Shorris was an essayist and social critic who began one of the first programs to bring literature to the poor and uneducated. Shorris died a few weeks ago and for anyone interested in the possibility of changing lives through literature, this represents a great loss.

While he was interviewing inmates for a book he was writing on poverty, he routinely asked them why poor people became poor. In response, one woman answered because they never learned “the moral life of downtown.” When Shorris asked her what she meant, she replied, “plays, museums, concerts, lectures, you know.”

Shorris concluded from these words that what they lacked wasn’t money, but education, education in the humanities. As a result he began developing the Clemente Course in the Humanities designed for economically and educationally disadvantaged individuals that was offered without cost. The participants studied four subjects: literature, art history, moral philosophy, and American History.

I was drawn to Shorris’ course, like others I’ve written about here, because of my interest in the effects of reading literature. The curriculum of most of these programs is based on Shorris’ course and almost all are intended to reach the poor, unemployed, low wage workers, addicts, the homeless and prisoners. Can you imagine groups that might be more resistant and as unlikely to benefit from such a course as these?

How successful is the course in achieving this goal? Gathering evidence to answer this question is not easy. It is often difficult to track down participants, many of whom lead chaotic lives with no permanent address or phone number. Shorris reports a preliminary evaluation in the Appendix to his first book, New American Blues: A Journey through Poverty to Democracy.

Only half (55%) of the students were able to complete the course the first time he offered it, leaving a sample of seventeen individuals for the pre- and post-course assessment. The findings indicated there were modest gains in the student’s self-esteem and use of cognitive strategies.

But most of the change scores were not significant, and absent comparative data from a group of individuals who were not able to participate in the course or were enrolled in an alternative program, it is difficult to know what to make of these findings.

The Clemente Course is currently being taught in over twenty cities in this country, as well as several foreign countries. Anecdotal evidence from students who have taken these courses and others like it, has been uniformly positive.

A student who spoke at the Spring 2006 graduation ceremony of a similar course (Humanity in Perspective) I evaluated for the Oregon Council of Humanities gave this account.

My classmates and I answered an invitation to come and learn. Twice a week for 2 semesters we gathered together to discuss some of history’s great minds and ideas. We read and discussed the Greek Philosophers and dramatists…the foundations of Democracy in America…the Transcendentalists and contemporary writers…issues of slavery, prejudice, women’s right, civil rights, human rights.

We wrote papers and formulated thesis arguments. These things alone would constitute an interesting educational experience. But this is not all we learned. We learned that these were not just texts to be read, but ideas to live by. We learned about the power of words to harm or to help. We learned how to listen, and how and when to speak up. We learned that our ideas and our opinions are important. We learned that each of us can make a difference in our lives, in our community, in the world. We learned these things not only from these texts and from our teachers, but from each other.

Others commented:

During this class, our minds were freed. That is something that will always be with us, and, trust me, it can never be taken away.

The course was the only positive in this whole bad prison experience.

The class is what people need to want to learn and be better people. I know I am because of it.

Reports like these make it clear how much the thousands of students who have taken courses based on Shorris’ conception owe to him.

Serendipitious Discovery

Early in my freshman year at Stanford I began working at the Library. In those days the great collection of books in the stacks wasn’t open to the students. At the circulation desk I would receive the student request card, try to recall from the book’s call number what level it was on, head into the stacks, down the stairs, through the long and dark aisles, until I came to the right shelf, run my hand along the spine of the books, glancing from time to time at the titles, wishing I could stop to read one or two, scanning the Dewey Decimal numbers, collect the book if it was there, head back down the aisle, up the stairs and pass the book on to the staff to be checked out after stealing a glance at its introductory pages.

That sounds pretty tedious, but it wasn’t. I liked wandering around the shelves, always intrigued by the books that were stored there, the new topics and areas of study that I didn’t know existed, stopping every now and then to grab a book to bring upstairs to read until I had to head down again to fetch one. Eventually I became eligible for one of study the tables located on each floor of the stacks. There I could keep my textbooks and other volumes that I had checked out from the library and do my class work in a setting that is about as favorable as they come.

I spent most of my days and many nights at that table in the stacks of the Library. It was utterly peaceful there, no one else was around and I could come and go as I pleased. Since I was in the throes of academic discovery, it was the best of all possible places.

Every once in a while, I’d take a little “study break” to wander up and down the aisles, checking the titles of the books that caught my eye. This kind of exploration will no longer be possible in the new bookless library. There will no discovery of that unknown book that you subsequently found indispensable. Thomas Benton has recently described the importance of such moments in the process of doing research.

I remember one time I was writing about Edgar Allan Poe and phrenology when I found a box of ephemera—not catalogued in any detail—that included a pamphlet for a book by an early psychologist who analyzed Poe on the basis of daguerreotypes of the poet. I quickly found the book in another area of the same library, and discovered a sequence of pages that purported to show that Poe was suffering from a disorder that affected only one hemisphere of his brain and that revealed itself in the asymmetry of his face…that accidental discovery—the centerpiece of a subsequent article—would never have been made but for the serendipity and convenience of the stacks.

How often I recall a similar experience in my own research. I would go in search of a particular bound volume of a journal. Accidentally I’d pick out the wrong one and beginning scanning the pages, only to discover another article, perhaps even more important than the one I was searching for and that, in turn, led me on a path of further inquiry that would never had occurred if I was searching for the article online. Who has not had the pleasure of discovering such an article by thumbing through the journals of their discipline?

To be sure searching online can be a rich source of information and unexpected sources do appear sometimes. But the search is a targeted one, a narrow one. You are looking for a particular document and you find it or something close. As a friend wrote to me in describing her own online experiences: “There is no room in that equation for the serendipitous discovery. When all goes well, you find what you are looking for. But sometimes what you need to find is what you are not looking for.”

On Friendships

All friends are friends in a different way. James Salter

I have been mulling over three films I’ve seen recently, thinking about what I might say about each one. Then a couple of days ago, I suddenly realized they have a common theme, namely the various forms of friendship. (This sometimes happens when I’ve been mulling over something for a while and not getting anywhere.)

The Intouchables
The Intouchables depicts the unlikely friendship between Philippe, a wealthy French tetraplegic (all four limbs are paralyzed) and Driss, a young Senegalese offender who is hired to be his live-in caretaker. From an awkward adjustment to his life in Philippe’s Parisian townhouse and Philippe’s needs, a delightful bond develops between these two individuals from vastly different cultures.



Monsieur Lazhar
Bashir Lazhar, an Algerian immigrant with a painful past and uncertain status in Montreal, learns of a teacher who committed suicide in a nearby school. He presents himself to the school’s principal, describes his teaching background and is hired as a replacement. At first the students resent his presence, miss their former teacher, but as times passes a reciprocal love and respect develops between the students and Lazhar, as well as been Lazhar and other members of the faculty.



Take This Waltz
Margot and Daniel meet by chance on a flight back to Toronto. Although devotedly married, she finds herself attracted to him. Surprisingly Daniel lives across the street from Margot and her husband Lou. Margot and Daniel do little to avoid the mutual infatuation that develops between them. The ambivalence of their romantic attraction becomes the slow waltz that sometimes characterizes a friendship.

Leviathan

Even the strongest were weak…even the bravest lacked courage; even the wisest were ignorant. Paul Auster

Paul Auster’s Leviathan recounts a long and complicated story with a good deal of action and almost as much talk. It begins with a man being killed in a bomb blast. We learn from the narrator Peter Aaron that it was his long time friend Benjamin Sachs. Was it an accident or a suicide?

Both Sachs and Aaron are writers. They met on a snowy night in New York after their joint appearance at a reading was cancelled and became great friends afterward. Aaron knows what happened and wants to write the story before the FBI tracks him down.

Sachs is a troubled man. He writes, he spends days wandering around the city, and escapes to his cabin in Vermont from time to time. While he is deeply in love with his wife, Fanny, he disappears one day, is never found, and is presumed to be dead.

In fact, while walking out in the woods in Vermont, he meets a man who threatens him with a gun. Sachs ends up killing the man and runs off with a bag full of one hundred dollar bills he finds in the guy’s truck. Sachs becomes a wanted man. After driving across the country for days, he ends up in Berkeley.

He calls a friend in New York, explains where he is and why. She pledges secrecy and gives him the number of a friend of hers. He calls, she is willing to have him stay for awhile, eventually they fall in love (nothing like proximity) but he can’t remain there forever.

The story moves on, it has a nice momentum, several mysteries remain unsolved, and so I keep reading. It gets more complicated, there are multiple identities, other romances, and I have only given you a partial account, saying nothing at all about the narrator, Peter Aaron and his life. You have to like this sort of novel to stay with it.

Earlier we learned that Sachs had been in prison for his strong opposition to the Vietnam War. He decides to start down this path once again, learns how to build bombs, purchases the materials to assemble them, and works his way back and forth across the country blowing up replicas of the Statue of Liberty in those scattered communities where they stand.

It is never made entirely clear why Sachs is doing this other than his general anti-establishment views. But we know he is a man of action, not words. “You’re confusing thoughts and deeds. There’s a world of difference between doing something and just thinking about it.”

An accident happens, one of his bombs goes off prematurely, and Sachs is killed. It appears to be an accident. Maybe yes, maybe no. Finally the FBI finds Peter Aaron. However, it’s too late, he has already finished his manuscript and his novel can be published.

Is Auster trying to tell us something? Perhaps he wishes to remind us that life is nothing but a random chain of coincidences. That each event is in one or another connected with every other one. Or that freedom can be dangerous. More likely he simply wants to tell a good story.

Some critics view Auster as a pre-modernist, others as a modernist, still others as thoroughly post-modern. Others have found one fault after another with the way Auster writes. And then there are some critics who claim the narratives in Auster’s novels are all pretty much the same. Let them have their say. In no way did their views interfere with my enjoyment of Leviathan.

The Places in Murakami's Novels

The New York Times has published a combo photo-audio-passage page about the places in Tokyo that Murakami writes about in his novels. The one above is the Metropolitan Expressway 3. His new novel, IQ84, opens on this expressway as taxi is caught in a traffic jam. Murakami writes:

The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast. Janacek’s ‘Sinfonietta’ -- probably not the ideal music to hear in a taxi caught in traffic. The middle-aged driver didn’t seem to be listening very closely, either. With his mouth clamped shut, he stared straight ahead at the endless line of cars stretching out on the elevated expressway, like a veteran fisherman standing in the bow of his boat, reading the ominous confluence of two currents. Aomame settled into the broad back seat, closed her eyes, and listened to the music.”

Go here to see a similar combination for:

Jingu Stadium and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Jingu-Gaien—a favorite Murakami running route from the running book
Denny’s and After Dark
Hotel Okura and IQ84
Kanagawa Prefecture and Gene Pitney’s Town Without Pity
Kinokuniya Books and his running book
Prada Store and IQ84
Aoyama Itchome—a subway station—and Hard-Boiled Wonderland & The End of the World
Nakamuraya Café and IQ84

What Time Is It?

“What is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.” St. Augustine

How often do you wonder what time it is? Time rules much our life. Time to go to bed, time to get up, time to get to work, time to have dinner, time to call it a day. And most of the time we really have a pretty fair idea what time it is.

Unless we are suffering from jet lag, we generally know when to eat and when to sleep. And that is what I am experiencing now, having returned from Italy to the West Coast. The flight took a fair amount of a day. The adjustment is going to take a fair amount of a week or two.

It is said that you need one day to recover for every time zone you travel through. That means nine days for me. Based on previous experience, I think that’s about right. I begin to wonder if the trip is worth it after all.

I find the west-east trip (Portland to Florence) doesn't cause much of a problem, hardly any, in fact. That’s odd given the reports of most other travelers. Perhaps it’s the pleasure of being back in Florence that does the trick. There is light, there is sun, the sky is blue. My clocks click in to Florentine time almost immediately.

On the other hand the return trip, east to west (Florence to Portland) really does me in. I’ve no idea why there is this difference. It’s still the same crossing of 9 different time zones. It isn’t that it may be grey, perhaps rainy, cloudy most of the day. Even when it’s sunny, as it can be in July and August, I experience a prolonged period of jet lag.

I don’t think age has much to do with it. It has always been uncomfortable. I just have to follow the routine, jet lag or not, and then eventually it will disappear. What it has to do with is the way we tell time. We tell time by our internal clock and we tell time by our psychological clock.

Our bodily rhythms, circadian rhythms and some say, our genetically determined temporal blueprint, govern our internal clock. Our daily routine and social schedule and obligations govern our psychological clock. These two types of clocks run fairly automatically and we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them.

But now these two time-controlling systems are radically askew to put it mildly, “fucked up” as Katherine Schulz wrote in her review of Till Roenneberg’s Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired.

When it’s time to get up here in Portland, it’s early afternoon in Florence. Who wants to have breakfast then? When it’s time to go to bed in Portland, it’s early morning in Florence. Who can sleep then? No one. It is miserable.

For me sleeping through the so-called night is the worst part of jet lag. The other commonly attributed symptoms—headaches, disorientation, memory loss, depression, digestive problems, irritability—never bother me. Fatigue and sleep deprivation do.

By the end of the day, I am so utterly exhausted that I usually fall asleep at once. But after sleeping for perhaps an hour or two, I’m up the rest of the night. By morning, I’m a wreck. I want to work; my body wants to sleep. After lunch, I try to nap, but then it’s early evening in Florence, and I haven’t the slight ability to nap then.

And it goes on like this for days. Eventually the disjointed craziness disappears, and I forget about all this discomfort by the time the next summer rolls around and Italy beckons once again.

On a Summer Weekend

Beethoven Flashmob




Click on: The Happiest Man in American

Archeology of The Present

For her next project, Maria took a temporary job as a chambermaid in a large midtown hotel. The point was to gather information about the guests, but not in any intrusive or compromising way. She intentionally avoided them in fact, restricting herself to what could be learned from the objects scattered about their rooms. …It was an archeology of the present, so to speak, an attempt to reconstitute the essence of something from only the barest fragments: …Paul Auster Leviathan

Their names were Carla and Roberto. I learned this from the welcome sign in the kitchen. I also knew that Moretti is their family name. That was the name on the Post-Its that I found in one of the drawers. Professor Roberto Moretti. Maybe Professor Carla Moretti too.*

A few years ago I stayed in their apartment in Florence and came to know them in this rather indirect fashion. Each day I learned something more and each time I looked at something that I thought I had seen before, I realized it was something new. One day I noticed there were psychiatric journals in the upstairs family room. Maybe Professor Moretti was a psychiatrist. Or maybe Carla was and they shared an office together.

I was not surprised that Roberto and maybe Carla were professors. The number of books in their apartment was enormous. In practically every room, there were floor to ceiling bookcases full of learned texts in music, art, philosophy, literature and several major reference sets and collections of fine editions. In the music room, there was also a grand piano. Perhaps that was Carla’s. Or maybe they both played the piano. That was more likely from the looks of things around there.

Most of the books, however, were literary masterpieces--all the classic novels, many contemporary ones from every nation, all beautifully bound in Italian editions. I looked about this place and asked: Have they really read all of this stuff? I also bemoaned the fact that I did not know Italian. Ces’t la vie.

“…it was fascinating to see the different ways people arranged themselves, and how much you could infer about their lives from a few objects.” Peter Stamm Seven Years

What can one learn about a person from the place they live in, by looking at the objects they have put on their shelves and in their drawers, as well as the photographs and paintings that they put up on the walls? They are the traces of their life that they have left in their home, traces that reveal a great deal about anyone in any place or time. The traces are real, they are brought into their homes and put somewhere by someone. They are not secondary accounts, or someone’s recollections, or something you might be told if you asked about them.

This place clearly belonged to a learned family. I had no idea how old they were, but that was not important. I knew they had a family, or at least two children, whose beautifully framed photographs were hung on the walls of their bedroom.

Their daughter was shown at various stages of her life, from a young child, through adolescence and as mature women. She was in a reflective mood in one photograph. Her dark eyes were framed by equally dark shoulder length hair. Her wide forehead and full lips told me that she would not be easily swayed.

Nearby were three photos of what must surely was her brother. He was also shown at various stages of his life. In the most recent he had a full head of curly hair, was wearing glasses and appeared to be a most studious fellow just like everyone else in this family.

There was also a picture of a nicely dressed young man and woman, caught in an informal embrace. They were smiling and I thought was surely Carla and Roberto around the time they were married. What a handsome couple they were! They reminded me a bit of how my wife and I looked when we were setting out together.

Their apartment is in the university section of the Florence, although I thought they did not teach there. If they did, surely they would be living in the apartment. I sensed that there was more that was hidden from me.

Why didn’t they live there? Their apartment was furnished so beautifully, with a fully equipped kitchen, two bedrooms and ample space for entertaining. Perhaps they fell on hard times and had to move to more modest quarters. But then again, perhaps they simply needed a place that had more bookshelves.

* To protect their privacy, I have used fictitious names.

A Free Bench

We spend our life trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench.
Beckett, Texts for Nothing

The days drift by. The Florentine mood is peaceful. Being here is almost hypnotic, slightly soporific. At noon each day I take my bag lunch and sit out on a bench, more accurately a ledge attached to some of the classic Renaissance buildings.

The Palazzo Ruccelai, shown above, was designed by the architect Leon Battista Alberti and built between 1446 and 1451. On either side of the two main doorways are long stone benches that run the length of the building. They served then, and still do, as resting places for the weary and occasional picnicker.

I stare at the people passing by and wonder about their life, where they are from, what they do during the day, and how they like it. The variation between them is enormous-the wealthy out shopping with their overflowing bags, the over-dressed, the simply dressed, the undressed. I think she could lose some weight, she is wearing too much makeup, how wonderfully thin she is, why doesn’t she look over this way, what does she see in him.

At breakfast several years ago I drank too much of the strong coffee they make around here and experienced what is known as a vasovagal reaction, a mild form of fainting. I desperately wanted to lie down and sleep for a bit. Frankly, I thought it might be the end.

Luckily I happened to be passing by the Palazzo Strozzi, a center of cultural events in Florence. The Palazzo is furnished on three of its sides with a large stone benches originally intended as a shady resting place for servants and the motley assortment of characters the palace attracted long ago. The bench now gives everybody a welcome opportunity to rest for a moment and let their latest vasovagal reaction fade away.

One day I penned a little poem about the bench I try to visit when I’m in Portland.

Across the street from my home and down about half a block
a bench has been thoughtfully placed beside the building.
I go there around teatime when the rains have passed
to sip my diet Snapple and linger in the sun.

I watch the cars go by and stare a little too long at the pretty girls
from the art school around the corner. It is my bench or so I like to think.
Sometimes another neighbor or passing stranger will come to sit beside me
and we may strike up a conversation which I do not mind at all.

But I do mind when the clouds are overhead and the rain is pouring down
upon the bench across the street from my home and down about half a block.
For then my bench and I must take our drinks indoors which is, I regret to say
most of the time around here.

Studying Psychotherapy

From time to time one of my former students comes to see me when he or she is in Portland. It is one of the great pleasures of my life, especially when they go on to achieve the kind of success that the person who came to see me a few weeks ago day has.

Professor Jeffrey Berman was one of the first students who studied with me at Reed. I guided him on his senior thesis and Jeffrey was able to publish the results. Since then he has conduced a large number of influential studies on the effects of psychotherapy.

A great many therapists resist the experimental scrutiny of their practice. Nevertheless, Jeffrey forges on. He always has a new study to tell me about and no doubt it is a controversial one, in spite of its methodological rigor. In most cases, his research takes issue with one of the many current myths about psychotherapy.

Much of his research involves comparing the outcomes of different types of therapy, say behavioral, cognitive, humanistic, psychoanalytic, or “undifferentiated” counseling, etc. In the study we discussed in detail he compared the therapeutic effects of trained (professional) and untrained (paraprofessional) therapists.

Training programs are almost naturally assumed to be necessary for clinical success, that a trained therapist is bound to be more effective than an untrained one. Most of the prior research confirmed this assumption. However, Jeffrey found they were based on inappropriate comparisons and statistical analyses.

To avoid those problems he carried out a more selective comparison with stiffer methodological requirements. Unlike the previous studies he found that professional (trained) and paraprofessional (untrained) therapists were generally equal in client outcome effectiveness.

Further, there were no outcome differences for patient problems or for type of treatment or, finally, for treatments carried out individually or in groups. In a word, on these measures, trained therapists were no more effective than those who were untrained.

Of course, these findings are no better than the previous studies upon which they were based. And while they were chosen with great care, they were not original studies carried out by Jeffrey, research that is extremely difficult to conduct now. So in the end he had to fall back on a second order comparison, known as meta-analysis that has become the standard method of summarizing research findings but to some commentators has its own inherent limitations.

Nevertheless, his findings both surprised and pleased me; one more myth about psychotherapy falls by the wayside to empirical analysis. Of course, I was also pleased to hear about his research and how provocative it continues to be.

Recently, he has been returning to Reed each year, ostensibly for his annual class reunion. But I know it also reflects how much his years at Reed, his many friends, the great spirit of the place means to him. It is an ailment for which there is no cure, one that affects most graduates of this very special college.

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

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

In 1994 I read Howard Zinn’s You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train. I know this from the passages I collected in my commonplace book 18 years ago.

I am quite distant from my copy of the book now and recall very little other than Zinn’s impassioned plea for equal justice in this country and the power of speaking out when it is denied. Since then, I have seen his films, read about him, and admired his life-long protests to insure genuine equality in this society.

Howard Zinn died early in 2010. I remember him on this July 4th and reassert the values we presumably celebrate today by citing some of the passages I recorded from You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train.

It is easy to mistake silence for acceptance.

I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.

The chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made—you read a book [Johnny Got His Gun, Born on the Fourth of July], you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way.

The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.

Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their bulbs, their guns, to stop you.

From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country—not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.

…to relinquish the safety of silence.

I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other.

Going around the country, I was impressed again and again by how favorably people reacted to what, undoubtedly, is a radical view of society—antiwar, anti-military, critical of the legal system, advocating a drastic redistribution of the wealth, supportive of protest even to the point of civil disobedience.

We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people can transform the world.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act…

Americans in Florence

I don’t have the gift of entering into paintings as I do when reading a book. It isn’t that they leave me without a thought or two and some kind of vague appreciation of their colors and style.

But beyond that, I am at a loss for words and words are the only way I think and imagine, at least insofar as I am aware of. I feel very much like Edgar Logan in Jennie Erdal’s The Missing Shade of Blue.

At that point the language to interpret a painting was simply not available to me. …My eyes were innocent like those of a child, though to me they were simply crude and ignorant.

In spite of this, last week I went to see the exhibition, Americans in Florence, at the Palazzo Strozzi and hoped I could learn a little something about the many American painters who enjoyed their days here, as much as I do, and were suitably inspired to express their pleasure in the way they know best.

The exhibition featured the work of John Singer Sargent. Like many Americans who travel to Florence, they made a first stop in a local hotel. Here is how Sargent depicted one such room.

William Merrit Chase, less well known among the American Impressionists, usually preferred to stay in one of the many villas just outside the centro. Chase painted this picture of the Villa Silli before he bought it a few years later.

Many of Sargent’s paintings were portraits of the writers and artists who visited Florence. The British writer Vernon Lee (pseudonym of Violet Paget) known for her novels, essays, and travelogues, was among them.

Willard Metcalf, also not as widely known as Sargent, was among the several artists who painted the Tuscan countryside. Here is one he painted of Fiesole, located up in the hills above Florence. It is one of my favorite places to visit while I’m here.

Sargent’s painting of Henry James is often reproduced; perhaps you’ve seen it before. One reviewer wrote of this painting, His eyes, watery green, yet secret and profound will look at you, will touch and catch you intimately.

These are only a sampling of the exhibition’s paintings. It runs until July 15th, so there’s plenty of time to head over for a first-hand viewing. If you can’t make it, there’s an app of the exhibition available at the iBooks store.

E-books Don't Smell

“The smell of a freshly printed book is the best smell in the world.”
Karl Lagerfeld

My iPad doesn’t smell and of course the e-books I read on the Kindle app don’t either. However my printed books do, a pleasure derived from my very first days of reading and one that I miss with those I read on an e-reader.

Printed books don’t smell the same either, a feature that broadens their pleasure. Age, paper, binding and cover contribute to these differences. It has been described this way:

The ink and chemicals used in the production of a book reacts with heat, moisture and light, causing the organic materials to break down. This is especially true for books with high acidity, like those made during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The books deep in the library stacks at the university where I went as an undergraduate smelled old, some a bit musty. The air circulation down there in those days was poor, it was hot, and dark. You had to switch a light on to find what you were looking for on the shelves.

That smell was quite different from those Bantam paperbacks I recall reading as a kid. Whenever I come across one of those paperbacks today, they still smell the very same way.

“When I open them,
most of the books have the smell
of an earlier time leaking out between the pages -
a special odor of the knowledge
and emotions that for ages
have been calmly resting between the covers.
Breathing it in,
I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.”
- Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

Strangely, after all of these years, I’ve not forgotten the peculiar blend of paper, leather, and dust that I inhaled each time I stepped foot in the little neighborhood library of my hometown.

It is hard to describe odors in general and even harder to describe the various smells of books. We don’t have words for the wide range of odors that come our way even though the sense of smell is one of our most primitive.

Yet, it has been estimated that humans can distinguish thousands of different odors—aromas, fragrances, and scents. Though we can make such distinctions, we can attach a name to only fraction. However we can conjure up countless associations to the distinctive smell of books—the book we read on a park bench in Flore ce, or the one we read on the floor at Powell’s, another deep in the stacks of what is now known as the Green Library, etc.

If you miss the smell of e-books as much as I do, you will be pleased to learn that through the wonders of technology, our problems have finally been solved. Thanks to Smell of Books, you can now chose to give your e-books a distinctive smell with their “revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer.”

But wait there is more. You can now choose between five, no less, distinctive aromas—classic musty, crunch bacon, eau de cat, new book, and finally their five star aroma, sense of scent of sensibility.


You can also relax secure in the knowledge that “Smell of Books™ is compatible with a wide range of e-readers and 100% DRM-compatible. Whether you read your e-books on a Kindle or an iPhone using Stanza, Smell of Books™ will bring back that real book smell you miss so much.”

Nora

“The amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.”
Nora Ephron

The death of Nora Ephron shocked me. How could someone so alive leave us? Yes, I felt it as a personal loss. For a brief moment in my life she was my friend. I recall our time together clearly. Permit me to recount it.

My first job was in a bookstore. The store was called Martindale’s after dear old Mr. Martindale, who along with his store in West Los Angeles is long gone. I must have been in Junior High at the time and so could not have been more than fourteen. Nora was slightly younger.

It wasn’t “your ordinary first job.” To this day I can remember the smell of the new books and the distinctive scent they created in that relatively small space. Even then I somehow knew the books, or thought I did, knew their titles, and authors. I could tell people what they were about and, without much of effort, get them to buy the book, and then one or two others along the way. I have utterly no idea how I was able to do any of that, especially at that time in my life.

It was the young girl who worked along with me that made that summer so unforgettable. Her name was Nora, the clever, sprightly Nora, well known for her literary and cinematic wit. I fell madly in love with her that summer at Martindale’s. Those who know her may be aware she is slightly cross-eyed. What young man could resist that?

But Nora could talk. She was clever, funny and bright. She was the first person I could ever really talk to. There have only been one or two others, many years later. As I recall it now, Nora and I spent the entire time bantering and jesting with one another. It is a mystery how we managed to get anything done or sell any books, or remember to give the proper change to those well-healed customers.

I am sure she has no recollection of me or our “brief encounter” at Martindale’s bookstore or probably even working there. But every time I hear about her or see one of her films, I remember the summer of my very first job. Books, magazines, paperbacks, and the beautiful cross-eyed girl who talked with me.

I never thought much about it at the time; after all, I was scarcely a teenager. All I knew was that I was crazy about Nora, but that was about it. I went back to school after that summer and only many years later, when Nora became well known, did I recall out time together and only recently have I begun to appreciate its significance.

This is how I will always remember her. Not for her films or books, although they were no different than she was. But our time together at Martindale's, when we were just kids.

On a Morning Walk

The area around Florence is still my favorite: there is something special about the Tuscan light. Barack Obama, Corriere della Sera 7/8/10

Each morning I go on a long walk along the Arno. It is then that I find the light at its best. I walk across the river on one bridge and back across another. All told there are six bridges across the Arno in Florence.

At the Ponte Alle Grazie: Originally built in 1227, the Ponte Alle Grazie is the oldest of the bridges crossing the Arno and the longest. In 1944, it was, destroyed by the Nazis in retreat from the advancing Allied army. It was rebuilt in 1953.











A shady park along the River, a welcome spot on the hot sunny days. I go there to read on a bench in the afternoon.













Constructed in 1345 on the narrowest point of the river, the legendary Ponte Vecchio is the only bridge to have survived the invasion of German troops in 1944—said to be on orders from Hitler. Today there are shops along each side occupied by jewelers, art dealers and souvenir sellers.














The buildings along the banks of the Arno from the Ponte Vecchio. The range of bright colors on the buildings in Italy are unique of my experience and they are at their best in the bright morning light.

























A treat in a café at the end of the walk.

The Right Question

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

Some people are questioners and others are not. To my knowledge the source of these differences has not been investigated. Leon Neyfakb writes about one teachers examination of this issue in his Boston Globe article, “Are We Asking the Right Questions?” I might title it “Are We Asking Questions At All?”

His article begins by describing a teenage classroom situation where the students have been reading Camus’ The Plague. The teacher asks them to generate as many questions about the novel as possible. Not to worry about answers, but simply the questions. Dan Rothstein, co-founder of the Right Question Institute in Cambridge is observing all this in the back of the classroom

Rothstein believes current the current educational curriculum has neglected to teach young children how to ask good questions. He says, “learning how to ask questions should be considered as critical as learning how to read, write, and do basic math.”

His Institute has a Blog, programs in education, health care, training programs in voter engagement and something the Institute refers to as Microdemocracy which it describes as “individuals using essential democratic skills to participate in decisions make in their ordinary encounters with public institutions.” One assumes that learning how to ask good questions is an essential part of all these programs.

Rothstein and his colleague Luz Santana have recently published their manifesto-of-sorts, Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions. It makes two simple arguments:

All students should and can learn to formulate their own questions
All educators can easily teach the skill as part of their regular practice

What is a right question? It is hard to tell from either Neyfakb’s article or the material on the Institute’s website. It is suggested that choosing the right question involves a trade-off between clarity and depth. But what distinguishes a right from a wrong trade-off?

In response to an invitation to write the Institute should we wish to know more, I wrote to seek clarification of what, in fact, a “right question” is. The Institute gives itself that name. Surely it means something. Is it simply a good question? Why not then, The Good Question Institute? I’ve never had a reply.

While asking questions is critically important, one never knows what the right one is until you obtain an answer. For example, if your question solves an important problem, moves the issue forward, leads to further questions that bring you closer to a solution, etc. then it is the right one for that time.

Whether you can change an unquestioning person into a questioning one remains on open question. Starting with teenagers is surely worth the effort, but I think individuals at any age could benefit from such instruction.

It is asking questions, showing curiosity, and inquiring genuinely that is important to me and to Rothstein. He has put his conviction into action. I praise him for that.

A Florentine Tradition

In contrast to the Dickensian grime, smoke, and smog, to all the noise and confusion that characterized the modern city, there was the peaceful sunlit Florence of the Renaissance—a simpler, purer, more harmonious “magic city” of art and music, learning and piety, strength and beauty. Walter Kaiser

I went out for a long afternoon walk on my first day in Florence. In no time at all the sound of trumpets and rolling drums greeted me. The rhythmic beat came from a group of Florentines dressed in the traditional Renaissance costume of their neighborhood. In turn, they were followed by groups of men from other neighborhoods dressed in their distinctive costumes.



The parade went on for a good half hour as the marchers moved slowly down the crowded street from one end of town to the other. The ancient tradition lives on. This is the way it has always been in Florence.



The main event takes place in piazza in front of Santa Croce Cathedral, where the large, rectangular area has been heavily sanded and ringed with bleachers. It is there that the legendary Calcio Strorico takes place, as it has in various piazzas of Florence for over five centuries.




It is a brutal event involving soccer, rugby, and fierce fighting between the teams from each of the neighborhoods. A commentator put it this way: “Equal parts show and sport, the festivities surrounding this ruthless competition incorporate Renaissance folk traditions and garb.”

Tradition aside, it became so brutal recently that it was banned last year. They will try again this year.

Summer Sojourn

Marks in the Margin is going on a summer break for a while. Postings, if any, will be intermittent.

In the meantime, you are welcome to browse the archives. Know that your comments are always appreciated

As usual at this time of the year I wish you much good reading.

A Graduation Letter

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. Anatole France

In a interview in the Times (5/27/12), the president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, was asked, Is there any book you wish all incoming freshmen at Harvard would read? She said it would be Kathryn Schultz’s recent book, Being Wrong, suggesting it “advocates doubt as a skill and praises error as the foundation of wisdom.”

I thought for a long time about this question. Would book would I recommend to incoming students to any college? It was a good question, even though the interviewer limits it to one.

This fall my grandson will be entering the freshman class at Penn. Along with a letter, I am giving him Ann Patchett’s What Now? It’s not because I think all freshmen at Penn or any other college should read it, but that the questions it poses are relevant to anyone at any time in their life.

However, in a way, What Now? is not unlike Schultz’s Being Wrong. Both stress the importance of remaining skeptical, being open to alternatives, and contrary information, whether in the form of factual evidence or personal experience. It is also a short book and like so many other freshmen these days, he doesn’t read a great deal outside of class.

He is a very fine soccer player who the Penn soccer coach invited him to enroll at Penn. And so in my letter I began by quoting legendary soccer star Romario who said recently, “The tendency of everyone is to evolve.”

I put side-by-side two photos one of me, when I graduated from high school in 1954 and one of him. I asked him to look at me now and wrote: Do I bear any resemblance to that graduating senior in 1954? I said, think how you look now. Imagine what you’ll look like or be thinking about in fifty years or so.

I wrote about how change rules our life, change in appearance, change in ideas, change in what you regard as important. We evolve as a result of the colossal number of events and experiences we have in our life, to say nothing of the aging process itself. I admitted I have no idea how I was able to do the things I did even twenty, thirty of more years ago or if any of it actually happened, let alone to me.

I told him what it was like when I entered college what a momentous experience is was for me, how it that changed my life forever. I hoped that he would be similarly affected by his days ahead at Penn. Wistfully I wrote, “I envy you so much now. How I wish I could do it all over again. You will have to do it for me.”

Like every graduation speaker, I passed along a word of advice by urging him to make the most of his days at Penn. “You’ll never have a chance to repeat them. Take them where it leads you, even if it is far from where you begin.”

I said there was much wisdom in Patchett’s suggestion, “Identify your heart’s truest desire and don’t change that for anything.”

And I concluded by writing, “Know, however, that your “truest desire” today many not be the one you’ll have tomorrow. So whatever your plans are, be open to changing them. That’s what I did and, for that, I remain forever grateful.”

The Girl Who Fell From The Sky

What they were about to do defied all knowledge, all common sense, and yet she felt only a great rush of excitement.

Anne-Marie Walters was one of the thirty-nine women agents of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) who were sent into occupied France during World War II. These agents worked with various groups of the French Resistance providing intelligence, sabotaging German facilities and trains and assisting downed Allied airmen to return to England.

Their work was fraught with danger. Twelve of the 39 were captured and murdered by the Germans, one died of meningitis, while the remainder survived the war. Anne-Marie was one and wrote about her experiences in Moondrop to Gascony. Her friendship with the mother of the British writer, Simon Mawer led to his interest in the women who served in the SOE. Walters is the subject of Mawer’s The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (published in the US as Trapeze).

Part fiction, part fact, Mawrer’s novel is an account of what it was like to serve as an agent in Nazi occupied France. The activities of the men and women of the Resistance is both inspiring social history and one that never ceases to command my respect knowing that these individuals worked day and night, usually alone, under the constant threat of capture and its terrifying consequences.

The novel begins by introducing Marian Sutro whose mother was French and father English; Marian speaks both languages fluently. As a result, she comes to the attention of an SOE recruiter, is sent to Scotland for training where she learns espionage, surveillance, wireless operation, and how to survive behind enemy lines. The training is grueling.

Always assume the worst, one of the instructors warned them: a pessimist makes the best agent.

She is parachuted into France, becomes Alice for a while, and begins work with the resistance. Eventually she is asked to go to Nazi infested Paris where there is no safety. Her task is to deliver an important letter to a French atomic scientist, once her teen-age infatuation.

The letter is from a professor in England. To read the letter, he is given a key. Alice tells him he can open up a minuscule compartment and take out a microdot. A microscope is required to read the embedded letter. Clever! It is persuasive, describing the work of German scientists to develop an atomic bomb.

Alice arranges his escape to England, finds herself unable to join him on the pick-up plane, manages to elude her followers, and returns to the relative safety of the countryside.

Does she return to England to join her former lover, remain in France to carry on with her resistance work, or fall prey to Nazi captors? These questions will not be answered here. Mawer’s account is captivating, fast paced, full of surprise, ingenuity, and suspense.

Once in a while I read such a thriller. I read The Girl Who Fell From The Sky because it is a story about the French Resistance, one of those events where I ask myself once again how I would behave if I were placed in a similar situation. Would I be able to display such courage? It is as simple and unknowable as that.

What are you going to decide? Because you’ve got to make a choice. That’s one of positive thing that this war has brought: we have to choose.

The Missing Shade of Blue

Suppose there that a person…to have become perfectly well acquainted with colours of all kind, excepting one particular shade of blue…Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, be placed before him…Now I ask, whether it is possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, though it had never been conveyed to him by his senses.
David Hume

We are in Edinburgh. Edgar Logan, a young man from Paris, arrives to translate the essays of David Hume. “…most of my life has been spent in books, reading other people’s stories, living vicariously through characters that don’t exist.”

Early on he meets the, bitter, physically crumbling, soon-to-be-dismissed-philosophy professor, Harry Sanderson and his enigmatic wife, Carrie. “Up until then I lacked the talent for friendship. Later I would sometimes wonder what it was about the Sandersons that made the difference, what it was the sucked me in…”

This is how Jennie Erdal begins her novel, The Missing Shade of Blue. It engrossed me from the first page. Several threads are interlaced throughout her tale.

On David Hume: Hume had not set out with the intention of being an unbeliever. Rather he had followed the arguments for religion and them wanting. He was a man primarily interested in explaining our place in the world so that we might live better lives; and the art of living well, he soon discovered did not sit happily with clinging on to illusions.

On philosophy: The unexamined life is much despised. According to Socrates, it is not worth living. But actually, the examined life can get you into all sorts of trouble.

On painting: At that point the language to interpret a painting was simply not available to me. Later Carrie would tell me this was an advantage. My eyes were innocent like those of a child, though to me they were simply crude and ignorant.

On vicarious experience: Nearly all of my experience of life—the highs and lows, the hopes and disappointments, the chaotic entanglements—everything that matters in fact—all of this has been mediated through the written word. With the result that novels have given me the sense—the illusion perhaps—of a connection with others, with the texture of real lives.

On marriage: My close reading of fiction had taught me that nearly all marriages occupied strange territory. But it was more vivid and startling to see it with you own eyes.

On happiness: …happiness often reveals itself as counterpoint. It is edged about with things that are opposite to it.

On novels: …a good novel was like a small miracle…fiction allowed us to live lives of other than our own….And every so often, I said, something emerged from a novel that could only be called truth—there was no other name for it. Which has a paradoxical ring to it, since of course, fiction is made up, full of lies.

These are but a fraction of the passages I noted in The Missing Shade of Blue. Is there a story along with Erdal’s philosophical ruminations? Yes, but on my reading, it plays a minor role. There is the tragic deterioration of a once fine philosopher and an emerging relationship between the Edgar, the translator and Carrie, the painter.

A Philosophical Adventure is the subtitle of The Missing Shade of Blue. That it is, the kind of book I am forever searching for. I found it one of those “small miracles.” For a philosopher, it will be a fictional treat. For a translator or painter, it is an endless debate. For any reader, it is a rich dialogue on Hume, happiness, friendship, language, and should you be the least bit interested, fly-fishing.

On My Mind

Page Turner
The New Yorker has come alive again. Not on the printed page, although at times there is a really fine short story or literary commentary, but on the Web in the form of a new blog called Page-Turner. It first appeared on May 15th, after the magazine’s former book blog, the Book Bench, had been languishing in the doldrums for months.

In introducing Page-Turner Sasha Weiss writes: “Walking the halls of The New Yorker, one hears conversations about books trailing out of office doors…Page-Turner is an elaboration of this ongoing conversation.”

Recently Salman Rushdie wrote on censorship, Giles Harvey on the Death of a Salesman, Richard Brody on Susan Sontag’s writings about cinema, the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, interviews with the writers, Lorie Moore and Maile Maloy about their short stories, along with the daily list of Book News and the weekly posting by some of the staff on what they are currently reading.

Page-Turner has also inaugurated a series where writers are asked what book they have revisited most often. What a good question. Maile Melody who wrote the first response, said it is Salinger’s Nine Stories. What is yours?

A Better Person
At the gym I was listening to my first audiobook. It was read and written by Ann Patchett. And it is about her marriages and views on marriage, in general. Naturally, I was not aware she had quite so many lovers and more than one marriage.

She described a situation where she was talking to a friend about her disastrous first marriage and another person she loved deeply. She was pondering his frequent marriage proposals; they had been together for eleven years, no less.

Her friend asked her a a question you don’t often hear, a really good question, I thought. So did Ann Patchett. Her friend asked her does your new love make you a better person.

I stopped the tape there. I had to remember that question. It is a good one to think about it. I realized the question not only applies to your husband or your wife but to any person you know, any friend. Does the person make you a better one? And vice versa?

Hyperlinks
The other day I was reading the New Yorker on my iPad when I came across an advertisement for a book. I was informed that if I clicked on a link at the bottom of the ad, I could read an excerpt. I thought, how clever, perhaps the first time I had seen a hyperlink in an advertisement, at least in the digital version of the magazine.

I clicked on the link, skimmed a page praising the book, read several pages from the first chapter, and found the material not uninteresting. I was then informed I could click on another link to see a video of the author talking about the book. Fancy that, I thought.

Yet another link took me to a group of online bookstores where I could buy the printed version of the book. Finally, one more link took me to a comparable group of bookstores where I could purchase the e-book version. That was it. No more links. No more clicking. Back to the magazine, I went.

How remarkable all this was. Then I wondered if all of this could be done with a paper version of a book or magazine for that matter. Yes, I think I read about it somewhere. Then I wondered if any of this mattered. Did I learn a little about the book? Yes. Did I buy the book? No.

Besides, I don’t much care for hyperlinks in any text, paper or electronic. They do little else but distract me. My preference is clearly on the side of a footnote or set of references at the end, where I can be distracted when I want.

Engagement With The Text

The debate over the relative merits of reading electronic and printed books continues. It is not an idle one, as several issues are involved—comparative learning, retention, pleasure, cost, convenience, etc. Most commentators acknowledge a certain degree of uncertainty about the mater.

Not Tim Parks, who last year claimed that reading on the screen is superior to reading on paper. After describing the well-known benefits of e-books—purchase text instantly, pay less, save trees, and carry around countless volumes, etc.—Parks moves beyond these features to the nature of the reading experience itself.

“The e-book… would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, ... It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.”

Who is Parks referring to? I am not sure he is speaking for anyone but himself. Can he present supporting argument and evidence for claiming a reader is more engaged with an e-book than its printed counterpart?

As for myself, no matter how often I read an e-book, I always feel something is missing. What is missing is the print-book’s ease of writing notes, marking passages, as well as all the physical features of the printed book itself that I have grown used to and quite frankly mean a lot to me.

Taken together the experience of reading a printed book brings me closer to the text, heightens my reading experiences, and deepens it if you will. I can turn back and forth between pages, not a feature that is easily carried out on an e-book, think further about the passages I mark, make further notes and I can do this any time I go back to the book on my shelf, which I do a lot and never do in an e-book

I realize some of these behaviors can be performed on an e-book but for me doing that barely approximates carrying them out on the printed page. No doubt I’m “old school,” too fixed in my ways to change a life long pattern reading. On the other hand, I am aware that many far younger readers, including students reading academic texts, find e-books an undesirable alternative to those clunky, heavy, extravagant printed texts.

A fellow blogger replied to comments about Parks’ article by suggesting a serious engagement with the text can happen with any format, not just an e-book. And then she added: “I think most readers don’t really care as long as they have a good book to read.” I reply, “But it does to me.”

While research on this topic is in its early stages, what little we know suggests that there are major differences in the reading experience as a function of its format—print, online, e-reader, audiotape. Measures of retention, reader satisfaction, and neural processing, etc. seem to vary with each of these modes of presentation.

At the very least, anyone asserting one format is superior to any other should acknowledge the potential relevance of these findings, even if they do not influence their preferences. In an interview on this topic, Anne Mangen, an investigator at the National Center for Reading Research & Education in Norway, hit the nail on the head:

“I would say that the current shift from paper to screen represents a vast literary shift, the implications of which—short-term and, in particular, long-term—we are not yet aware of.”