The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Grading Etiquette

    Joseph Williams’s “The Phenomenology of Error” isn’t about grading so much as it is about finding error. It’s by now a history piece, but should be revisited. The idea is that readers, graders, teachers are predisposed to look for certain things they can and do call errors and to ignore or miss other issues that might be and are called errors by others. There appears to be no universal scorecard, no biblical rubric. The etiquette of golf is more rigorous and precise than the rules of writing and reading. And with regard to the etiquette of reading, marking, and scoring papers, as Beckett said, you’ve only to listen to any conversation for five minutes to note inherent chaos.

    That’s not to say there have not been efforts to tidy up the mess. Picked at random, the University of Maryland’s grading guidelines seem reasonable. But note the general rubric for an “A” paper:  “It not only fulfills the assignment but does so in a fresh and mature way. The paper is exciting to read; it accommodates itself well to its intended audience.” The intended audience of course is no doubt an adjunct instructor sitting over a laptop, drinking coffee at the boisterous Bipartisan Cafe. But how can a paper be “exciting to read”? Excitement is something that registers in the reader’s mind, and what excites one reader may put another into a coma. But perhaps the mystery is solved by the semicolon; for if a paper does “accommodate itself well to its intended audience,” it may, by definition, be exciting? But even if we resolve what is or is not exciting, how are we to determine if something is “fresh and mature”? Isn’t this oxymoronic? Fresh suggests something the reader has never seen before, yet mature suggests it’s nevertheless something the reader recognizes. Perhaps there is some sense to that. But fresh and mature excitement, wrapping snugly around its audience, is not the only requisite of the “A” paper at the U of M: the paper must also reference “citations [that] are used effectively where appropriate and are formatted correctly.” Ah, formatting! But what is incorrect formatting? Incorrect formatting is like the microphone that descends like an unsightly strap slipping from the shoulder of the top of the screen, distracting the audience from the verisimilitude and pretension strutting across the stage. But let’s move on. Also in the “A” paper, we find “paragraphs that are fully developed,” like firm, ripe tomatoes. Now that’s exciting. Yet the “A” paper requires that the prose be only “occasionally memorable.” And note that this disallows the reader justifying a failing mark because he can not remember the paper, yet his remembering it might be because he’s seen it before.

    We may also learn from the “F” paper rubric at the U of M. The “F” paper “is off the assignment. The thesis is unclear; the paper moves confusedly in several directions. It may even fall seriously short of minimum length requirements.” But wait, doesn’t this sound fresh and exciting, if not mature? Were we in a math class, seriously might be defined as, perhaps, 60% of minimum – just a guess. Whatever serious is, “there is virtually no evidence, or the attribution of evidence is problematic or has been neglected.” Now that sounds serious, but perhaps the audience is the same as that for television news shows? Yeah, but “the organization seems to a significant degree haphazard or arbitrary.” That’s bad, like the front page of today’s newspaper. And not only that, but “some sentences are incomprehensible.” Imagine, but do they mean incomprehensible, or inconceivable?

    Moral of the story? Etiquette is prescription where nature is found wanting.

  • Now is the Science of our Discontent: E. O. Wilson and the Sacrifice of Science

    Why do humans sacrifice for one another, sometimes even giving their lives so that others may go on living? We are an exceptionally selfish species, if measured by our propensity to hoard, to covet power and control, to manipulate and coerce. Scientists appear to be part of the species. Nature published last August a new paper by E. O. Wilson, with Marin Nowak and Corina Tarnita, all of Harvard (Wilson, now 81), but we wonder what’s become of the peer review process when after publication 137 scientists see fit to call Wilson a heretic, signing a letter chastising Nature for publishing his argument. Of course there’s disagreement – no disagreement, no argument; no argument, no need to publish results. One would think the scientist would be the first to understand this. So what’s going on here?

    Borrowing from the medical peer review scandal, about which we posted last October: In the Atlantic’s “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science,” David H. Freedman (November, 2010) said, “Though scientists and science journalists are constantly talking up the value of the peer-review process, researchers admit among themselves that biased, erroneous, and even blatantly fraudulent studies easily slip through it.” The motive appears to be funding. If you are a scholar at work on research on kin selection, it’s possible that Wilson’s breakaway article renders your work null and void. Yet most disturbing is the suggestion that many of the scientists signing the letter of discontent have not even read Wilson’s paper, or, if they have, have not studied the mathematics addendum, or if they have, have not understood the math. A Boston Globe interview (April 17, 2011) with Wilson, interestingly titled “Where does good come from?,” discusses the letter of discontent and his revised theory. According to the Globe, Richard Dawkins said, “It’s almost universally regarded as a disgrace that Nature published it.” That’s not a rebuttal; it’s an insult. Wired Science’s Brandon Keim summarized the support that does exist as well as opposing viewpoints: See “E. O. Wilson Proposes New Theory of Social Evolution.”

    The crux of the matter was usefully stated by Robert B. Laughlin in A Different Universe (2005): “The pig-headed response of the science establishment to the emergent principles potentially present in life is, of course, a glaring symptom of its addiction to reductionist beliefs – happily abetted by the pharmaceutical industry, which greatly appreciates having minutiae relevant to its business worked out at taxpayer expense” (173). Laughlin defines emergence this way: “Emergence means complex organizational structure growing out of simple rules. Emergence means stable inevitability in the way certain things are. Emergence means unpredictability, in the sense of small events causing great and qualitative changes in larger ones. Emergence means the fundamental impossibility of control. Emergence is a law of nature to which humans are subservient” (200-201). Further, Laughlin explains, perhaps, both the medical research scandal and the dissing by so many scientists of Wilson’s paper: “A measurement that cannot be done accurately, or that cannot be reproduced even if it is accurate, can never be divorced from politics and must therefore generate mythologies” (215). What Laughlin is talking about is science that shifts in focus from explaining things based on “the behavior of parts to the behavior of the collective” (208). And that is precisely the direction taken by Wilson’s new paper.

    The threat of Wilson’s change in focus is to the dominance of the individual, the single gene as well as the single person. When humans come together, the resulting behavior of the group is something different from the behavior of each individual within the group. The same may be true of genes. This is what Dawkins can’t tolerate, for the focus changes from competition, which his work is bound to, to cooperation, which is probably an emergent phenomenon. If we are to have the truth, it appears that someone in the scientific community is going to have to make a sacrifice. Perhaps E. O. Wilson already has.

  • David Brooks and The Plaque of Alienation; or, the Consciousness Bubble

    Are we making progress? And is the progress good? Have humans improved over time? Are we better than our ancestors? What makes us human, and whatever that is, have we been improving upon it? The universe may be expanding; our consciousness is not. Something seems to be blocking our arteries: the plaque of alienation. Yet there are some who are apparently awakening to a new dawn, a new and improved consciousness, and there’s a consciousness revolution afoot, as David Brooks tells it in his January 17, 2011 New Yorker article, under the Annals of Psychology section: “Social Animal: How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life.” Not since the 1960s have we seen such an upswell in the commercialization of consciousness.

    “We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness,” Brooks tells us. The revolutionaries in this assault on our personal dark ages include “geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others” who “have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind.” Such a list of armed trick-or-treaters makes us want to light out for the territory. But wait, for “far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows.” But how are we suddenly under water? If we’re to have a revolution in consciousness, shouldn’t we be able to talk about it without using metaphors? But there’s more: “They [the revolutionaries] are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has the least to say.” Whose culture? Has Brooks never read Langston Hughes nor heard of the Harlem Renaissance? For Langston talked precisely about “those things.” Has Brooks never read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Thoreau’s Walden? But there’s even more: “Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.” Mathew Arnold’s “Sea of Faith,” in Brooks’s view, is now bone dry; and apparently Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth is suddenly irrelevant (in spite of our underwater status), as must be Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul, not to mention the work of Mary Midgley. And Brooks must have missed the film Examined Life, with Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, and Martha Nussbaum. Neither has Brooks seemed to have ever visited the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Theology and philosophy are not atrophying; that’s one of the few immutable laws the brain seems to labor under. It’s what makes consciousness worthwhile, for, as Dostoevsky’s underground man says, “Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.”

    And where Brooks’s tightly-written scenario takes us is to a happiness moral, much cliched, but no doubt true: we’ve been looking in all the wrong places. “Joining a group that meets just once a month produces the same increase in happiness as doubling your income,” Brooks says, siting recent research. The problem, Brooks says, is that “Many Americans generally have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant cultural bias. They live in a society that prizes the development of career skills but is inarticulate when it comes to the things that matter most.” Agreed. But why must Brooks have the imprimatur of science to get to the moral? And is it really a revolution of consciousness that he’s describing, or a simple increase in awareness that comes with maturity and experience? Jung said, “…if we maintain that mental phenomena arise from the activity of glands, we are sure of the thanks and respect of our contemporaries, whereas if we explain the break-up of the atom in the sun as an emanation of the creative Weltgeist, we shall be looked down upon as intellectual freaks. And yet both views are equally logical, equally metaphysical, equally arbitrary and equally symbolic. From the standpoint of epistemology it is just as admissible to derive animals from the human species, as man from animal species.” Jung is explaining how the scientific method came to dominate explanations of life: “…everything that could not be seen with the eyes or touched with the hands was held in doubt; such things were even laughed at because of their supposed affinity with metaphysics.” The science Brooks has come to rely on is what Jung called “psychology without the soul,” for the soul is now inadmissible evidence in the court of science. Jung explained that “It is the popular way of thinking, and therefore it is decent, reasonable, scientific and normal. Mind must be thought to be an epiphenomenon of matter. The same conclusion is reached even if we say not ‘mind’ but ‘psyche’, and in place of matter speak of brain, hormones, instincts or drives. To grant the substantiality of the soul or psyche is repugnant to the spirit of the age, for to do so would be heresy.”

    No doubt Brooks could have made his argument citing the poets instead of the scientists. And no doubt Arnold’s Sea of Faith is indeed today as dry as bone dust. Brooks cites the scientists because poetic currency has been devalued. What is easily missed is that the scientists also trade in a currency, as Jung explains: “We delude ourselves with the thought that we know much more about matter than about a ‘metaphysical’ mind, and so we overestimate physical causation and believe that it alone affords us a true explanation of life. But matter is just as inscrutable as mind…It is only our doubts as to the omnipotence of matter which could lead us to examine in a critical way this verdict of science upon the human psyche.” And it is this doubt which sticks to the arteries of our psyche and alienates us from the fun the scientists today seem to be having. We fear yet another bubble.

  • Sea Monsters in A. C. Grayling’s Secular Bible; or, Humanity’s Greatest Endeavor

    The receding shorelines of the Sea of Faith betrayed not a spiritual drought but a thirst for knowledge when Matthew Arnold stood on the cliffs of Dover and declared his desperate love for his girl amid humanity’s confusing mission, for the beautiful sea, the moon coming to pieces on its surface, the calm English evening wanting amour, was full of sea monsters. It’s an easy poem to parody, Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Anthony Hecht certainly thought so, when, about a hundred years later, he refashioned it “The Dover Bitch,” thinking of the lot of Arnold’s girl, who, lured by the promise of a weekend tryst at the beach, is forced to listen to Arnold’s God’s not in his heaven, all’s wrong with the world speech. Not much has changed since Arnold’s moonlit vision of sadness. The Sea, though not yet empty, is still losing water to the thirsty scientists, whose promises, in turn, of certitude, progress, or peace, seem as empty as Arnold’s unfurling religious girdle.

    If there is no spirit, then nothing is spiritual. The brain is simply a piece of meat, as Jonah Lehrer keeps repeating, and the universe is merely a long fly ball of exploding rock off the bat of a big bang Louisville Slugger. But the nature of the slugger remains unknown, and there’s reason to view with skepticism Dawkins’s and his disciples’ descents. The latest to echo Arnold’s theme appears to be A. C. Grayling, who has written a secular bible, in which he creates a collage from the world canon. Here’s a sample, from Grayling’s “Genesis”: “Thus nature by unseen bodies and forces works; thus the elements and seeds of nature lie far beneath the ordinary gaze of eyes, Needing instead the mind’s gaze, to penetrate and understand” (p. 5). But doesn’t this carry a whiff of dualism, from which the spirit was born? And does he mean “the ordinary gaze of eyes,” or the gaze of ordinary eyes? For just as the Church argues that we need the clergy to explain what we in our ordinary (not to mention fallen) state can’t understand, Grayling posits the scientist as the new high priest who will explain what we in our ordinary intelligence have no way of seeing or understanding: “It is nothing less than science, mankind’s greatest endeavour, greatest achievements, and greatest promise” (p. 11). In any case, Grayling’s secular bible hardly seems an improvement over the sacred Bible. Grayling suggests that his purpose is to get us to think independently, but that’s not as clear as that he wants us to think like him. Anyway, it would seem that much of the writing of the world canon writers he references (Dryden and Milton, for example) would never had been written were it not for the Bible. There are other seeming contradictions in Grayling’s purported purpose.

    Grayling comments, in an interview with Matthew Adams, in The New Humanist, “If the sum total of positivity, in some way, outweighed the negativity, in that little moment in one corner of the universe, which was otherwise just a bland, neutral state, then the whole history of the universe is made good by it. But if the negativity outweighed the positivity, then the whole history of the universe is tainted by it. And for that reason, we have a universal responsibility to promote the good.” This sounds strangely religious, and thus contradictory, for it’s religious sentiment Grayling wants to eradicate. It also sounds like some sort of cosmic baseball game. And what is the mind that he refers to? Would that be Lehrer’s piece of meat? Grayling seems to continue the mind-body split, which is what gives rise to ideas of the spirit to begin with. And what is the universe, and why should we feel responsible to its indifference? And does the universe have a history? These seem metaphors and anthropomorphisms, inaccurate and irrelevant. It’s simply not clear why our promoting the good would make any difference in or to the universe. To better understand the universe, we could read again Garrett Lisi’s “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything,” except that the physics is surely beyond the ability of ordinary eyes. And we are again reminded of Robert B. Laughlin’s A Different Universe, which opens and ends on a theme suggested by Sir Arthur Eddington: “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” Grayling, in his introduction, which he calls an Epistle, reaches back to the ancient Greeks when he says that “…every action and pursuit, aims at some good….” But it’s not so easy knowing what’s good. What we value is simply what we want, and what we want is not always what’s good for us. In the end, Grayling’s purpose seems naïve, and worse, for he seems to trap much of the independent thinking in the world canon in a cage with a single purpose, and that can’t be good.

    Is the universe free? “They’ll never ever reach the moon,” Leonard Cohen sang, “at least not the one we’re after.” Just so, the physicists attempt to explain the universe in a language most of us will never understand. But then what language are we to use to understand the moon we are after, or the ocean in which we wish to live? The neuroscientists exploring the brain are like the physicists exploring the universe. As Vonnegut illustrated in his short novel Cat’s Cradle, no cat, lots of string. There’s nothing more difficult than creating something from nothing. Science is not, as Grayling would have us believe, “mankind’s greatest endeavour.” Humanity’s greatest endeavor, to return to Mathew Arnold, is love.

  • A Sentence Pilloried in the Stocks

    We followed, the other day, over at Literary Rejections on Display, a thread that led us to a sentence being pilloried by an on-line coterie of critics: “Don and Katy watched hypnotically Gino place more coffees out at another table with supreme balance.” Perhaps it wasn’t the sentence that offended readers as much as its author flinging hash around an apparently voluntary critic’s negative review of her work (we are in Anon waters here). In any case, we found the offending sentence interesting. Well, so did the critics; there’s a lot to be learned from the bad and the small – what would we do without writing samples we can stone to death? Just so, Geoffrey Pullum trudges on in his battle against the Goliath Elements of Style, for many of the prescribed rules turn out to be balderdashes.

    So what did we find interesting in the offending sentence? We like the way the sentence illustrates Gino’s awkwardness, an awkward sentence for an awkward scene. But Gino is not awkward; he has “supreme balance.” What enthralls the watcher is the potential fall. It is an awkward sentence, but that awkwardness is the waiter’s balancing act. And if it’s not hypnotic, what then attracted all the attention? But “supreme” seems wrong; acrobatic might better serve the sentence’s purpose. But what is its purpose?

    When we ascend or descend a flight of stairs, we don’t want to trip and fall, and carpenters understand that stair tre­ad depth and uniformity, riser height, and nose projection codes ensure our voyage up or down the stairs goes smoothly. No one notices the perfect stairway. But literature is not a flight of stairs; literature is a crooked house with cobbled stairs, its floors often tilted and confusing. Not that this was the offending writer’s intention, but conversations with an author almost always prove spurious. We make of the sentence what we will.

  • Where the Palace of Wisdom is Loaded with Vice

    John Lancaster’s review of The Road of Excess, Marcus Boon’s book on writing under the influence, appeared in the January 6, 2003 New Yorker, and the review provides an effective, short introduction into drug use in writing as well as the journalistic impulse to too easily categorize, stereotype, and generalize. Associating addictions with occupations simply creates a stereotype. It’s probably true to say that alcoholism travels promiscuously in sales, but this doesn’t mean that alcohol is notably absent from other occupations, nor that all who work in sales are alcoholics, so what does the adage gain us in understanding either addiction or sales? Addictions transcend occupations; we find them everywhere. We may be living in the Age of Drugs, since we also live in the Age of Anxiety. Lancaster points out that most of the drugs we associate with addictions are late 19th or 20th century inventions. But while drugs addict, not all addictions are to drugs. Boon’s title comes from William Blake’s “The Proverbs of Hell,” found in Blake’s long poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The complete line is “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” But Blake wasn’t talking about drugs. He was talking about contraries. When Salvador Dali was asked if he painted while on drugs, as if that might explain surrealism, he responded, no; and asked in reply, “Why should I take the drug; I am the drug.”

    Lancaster attempts to level the hyperbole, claiming that beyond the classic cases frequently referenced, attempts to associate drugs with writing usually miss the train we’re actually on. Then, he adds a final paragraph, which unfortunately drags jazz and drugs into his discussion, to support his anti-climactic claim that drug use has, after all, influenced the arts, particularly popular music. “The story of dope-fiend writers is interesting, but the history of dope-fiend jazz musicians is the history of jazz,” Lancaster says. Dope is not the history of jazz, any more than alcohol is the history of any occupation. Drugs have seeped into all socio-economic demographics of our society. Should we say that steroid use is the history of baseball? In the end, the average writer is no different from the average carpenter, who rises early and starts pounding nails, not beers, while the writer is pounding keys. Of interest with regard to Lancaster’s review are the letters found in the January 27 New Yorker “Mail,” Sue Mingus emphatically insisting that her husband, the famous jazz bassist Charles Mingus, listed by Lancaster as an addict, “was not a heroin addict,” and she eloquently argues that Lancaster “perpetuates myths and clichés and reveals little of the nature of creativity.” Another reader wrote to deflate Lancaster’s reference that listening to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue approximates the heroin experience. The reader claimed that the Kind of Blue album came after Miles’s addictions, seemingly a question of fact; but, in any case, the year we saw Mark McQuire and Jose Canseco hit back to back homers in the King Dome – did that approximate for the fan what it’s like to be on steroids?

    As pervasive then as drug use, are the associations we make about its use, and so we were not surprised to hear JazzWax weighing in on jazz and popular music drug use in yesterday’s Sunday Wax Bits. Keith Richards’s recent memoir, Life, provides a fresh example of the JazzWax point that popular music’s business plan has always promoted the glamorization of drugs. But Lancaster also pointed out that writing that is about drugs is usually best when it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and is wrapped in humor. We’re not sure we can take Richards’s entire memoir seriously, for it’s a memoir meant to sell a life, and if the story of popular music is about something other than popular music, it’s about an addiction not to drugs, but to money, which reveals itself in exploitation and adulteration, a watering down of goods and needs to wants and consumptions.

  • Targeting the Philistines: The Diversion of Literature and Disease of Criticism

    How Literature Works: 50 Key Concepts arrived, but is somewhat disappointing. By John Sutherland, retired from University College London, the book is a commercial cut and paste job. But that’s OK; it’s actually a bit of fun, its structure designed as if for on-line consumption, a mosaic approach combining linear language with magazine layout. The only thing missing might be JPEG photo inserts or cartoon drawings. It is pedantic while attempting to appeal to the anti-pedantic in its use of sarcasm, but the rib-poking, jargoned-filled references might create a confusing tone. We are unsure what the author’s attitude toward his subject is, but picture a historic, bronze statue in an old city park. None of the current locals can name or explain the statue. The statue is covered with graffiti equally obscure. And there’s Sutherland, standing on a soapbox like a street corner preacher, explaining to passersby how bronze statues are made. No one is listening, but that’s of no importance, because the age of statues has ended.

    Written using a desktop publishing platform, the page layouts contain text boxes, multiple font sizes and styles, and copious but short references but no consistent citation method. A timeline across the bottom of the first pages of each chapter is interesting. There is a glossary, which is useful, but, as it turns out, it’s a glossary to a glossary, for that’s what the book is, a glossary, each chapter devoted to a single literary concept, though most are arguably little more than literary terms that are each reduced to a single, pithy takeaway statement called in the text “the condensed idea.” There are two Jeopardy-like quizzes, with answers following the glossary, textbook style.

    The book is not about how literature works, but about how literary criticism works. The note-like introduction offers an apology. Eliot and Lawrence help support the deferential claim that criticism should be left to those who create literature. “What would one not give for Shakespeare’s view on his own drama?,” Sutherland asks. This is silly, for if we want to know Shakespeare’s view on his own drama, all we need do is read Shakespeare’s drama. It’s a Uriah Heepian humility Sutherland invokes, but the attitude explains why critics like Harold Bloom and James Wood might be more effective. Wood’s recent book, How Fiction Works, is literature compared to Sutherland’s book, and there’s irony in the comparable titles, Sutherland apparently cribbing an idea from Wood. But the ideas are not new, and the critics are passing them back and forth wrapped in different packaging.

    A comparison between Sutherland and Wood illustrates two very different approaches. For example, Sutherland uses Robinson Crusoe’s “two shoes that were not fellows” to explain what he calls “Solidity of Specification” (the title of chapter 29, and by which he means, simply put, attention to detail; but he gets the term, he tells us, from Henry James, and comments that it’s the only time James uses the term in all of his writing – yes, because Henry James wasn’t in the business of writing text books, of creating terms that would find a home in the Canon of the Glossary). But Wood has already referenced the same two shoes Crusoe finds on the beach. But Wood does so indirectly, by quoting at length J. M. Coetzee’s discussion of the Defoe Crusoe shoe passage in Elizabeth Costello, a work of fiction. Wood’s book is deeper, for he immerses the reader in the discussion, while what we get in Sutherland is primarily definitions, terms, pithy sayings, stand alone quotes. One senses a complex love for literature from Wood and Bloom, even as the expression of that love exposes them to the occasional purple pathos, while Sutherland, who values Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as the best poem ever, may like the idea of literature more than literature itself. Literature can be a diversion or a disease; the criticism will follow suit.

    At the end of Sutherland, we have to listen to yet another eulogy for the book. All is not well in the literary world. The philistines are crowding at the gate, and there’s a multitude of them. There is too much to read, most of it inferior work. Paper is disappearing; the book in your hands is as dead as a doornail. Perhaps the philistines are the target market for How Literature Works, but literature is not dead, while talking about it appears also to be a pastime still alive and kicking.

    How Literature Works: 50 Key Concepts, by John Sutherland, Oxford University Press, 205 pages, $14.95, paperback.

  • Double Consommé; or, the Doo-wop of the Tweet

    What was the first human’s first utterance? Did it fill 140 characters? “The fall is into language,” Norman O. Brown said, but we picture a slip on a banana peel followed by Joyce’s 102-character utterance:

    “The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy” (Finnegans Wake).

    So the tweets re-circle, and the Twitter Big Bang is well on its way to 300 sextillion tweets. What does 300 sextillion look like when not doing “duty for the holos”? 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. But multiply that number times 140 to get a closer look at the Twitter universe. Who can read it all, each tweet a star?

    Two converging posts sent us tweet gazing this morning, Mozart in the background, one (over at the Books I Read blog) drawing our attention to Alain de Botton’s recent tweeting experiment, a kind of History of the Western World in 7 Tweets, the other an essay in yesterday’s Times suggesting we might use the 140 character limit of the tweet in college composition classes.

    The tweet is to writing what the Doo-wop three-minute song is to music. But we like Doo-wop, and we enjoy the well-worded tweet. As interesting as Joyce’s vocalized fall is, we think the first human’s first words were probably more like “doo-wop,” and the fall may indeed have been into banana cream and not language. This is the way T. S. Eliot’s world ends, not with a bang but a tweet.

  • Plato was a Neuroscientist, too; or, Plato’s Purple Haze

    A new Oliver Sacks book is out, The Mind’s Eye. We are kicked in the eye with metaphor, philosophy, and dichotomy, and we have not even opened the book yet: metaphor because Sacks is talking about the brain, for the mind, as Jonah Lehrer put it, “is really just a piece of meat” (Buckminster Fuller defined the mind as the capability to leverage ideas from single case experiences – see Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth); philosophy and dichotomy because to speak of the mind as an idea distinct from the brain is to cross into Plato territory (a very large country of philosopher states).

    We came across Sacks’s new book in the April Harper’s Magazine, in a review by Israel Rosenfield, “Oliver Sacks and the plasticity of perception.” The brain is on the move again.

    We ordered The Mind’s Eye; meantime, what does Rosenfield have to say about it? Rosenfield makes this claim: “There is a simple fact about evolution that, although rarely mentioned, is very revealing: plants don’t have brains.” (Of course, why mention the obvious, a claim about which there is no disagreement?) Yet here’s his explanation for why plants don’t have brains: “Plants don’t have brains because they don’t need them; they don’t move from place to place.” In grade school we called this moving from place to place “locomotion.” The classic example is the amoeba, but do amoebas have brains? We understand that plants don’t have the same locomotion that animals do, but we question Rosenfield’s claim that plants don’t move from place to place, because plants do move from place to place. They travel underground and in the wind, float down rivers and out to sea, appear in the most unlikely places, out of cracks in the hot summer asphalt. In fact, as Michael Pollan has suggested (The Botany of Desire, 2002), plants manipulate animals: we taxi them around, ferry them, fly them to the moon. Plants may not have brains, or locomotion, but they do get around.

    Rosenfield says that brains “create something that is not there; and in doing so they help us to make sense of our environments.” To illustrate, he uses the phenomenon of color. According to Rosenfield, there is no color outside of the brain: “There are no colors in nature,” he says. (Tell that to Van Gogh, whose paintings reveal the brush of a butterfly and the heart of a hummingbird.) Nature, without a brain to perceive it, is like Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”: “If we were aware of our ‘real’ visual worlds,” Rosenfield says, “we would see constantly changing images of dirty gray, making it difficult for us to recognize forms.” But Zoe, our cat, has no problem recognizing forms. Then again, she does act like she’s on Purple Haze most of the time. In any case, the mention of separate realities brings to mind Plato as well as Purple Haze. Any mention of forms brings us back to Plato. We might also work in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Reality. Is there something outside the brain? Is there something inside the brain? What does it look like when the brain is asleep, or astroke?

    But it’s a sunny morning in Portland, the first in some time, the sky a solid blue, fronting the promise of a solid gold weekend. Both our brain and mind seem to agree that we should get out and into this sun. Zoe’s already out there, chasing the forms around the Salsa Garden. Ah, Bartleby; Ah, locomotion!

  • And then went down to the book: Gloria Steinem’s The Beach Book

    Gloria Steinem’s The Beach Book (1963) is dedicated “To Ocean Beach Pier that was and to Paradise Island.” But Steinem wrote little of the book, an example the first piece of Chapter One, “The Suntan”: “How to Get One.” Most of the rest of the book is a collection of writing by others, pieces related, often distantly, to the beach. The book is a book-beachcomber’s collection of writing (and illustrations) about the beach, to be read when on the beach, or when contemplating the loss of a beach.

    Steinem’s book assumes a beach culture of a leisure class, beach bums, those with time and ennui enough to carry their bag with lotion, beach towel, books and magazines, go-to-the-beach paraphernalia, and parasol, to set-up in the sand up from the water, people with time to kill until the ocean comes for them. Don’t go near the water alert: beach bums, not surf bums – there are no surfers in the book, alas. Though there is a black and white photo of President John F. Kennedy, from the Los Angeles Times News Bureau, on the beach in Santa Monica, surrounded by fans, soaking wet in swim trunks. But he doesn’t look like any kind of bum; he looks like a surfer, or an LA County Lifeguard.

    The introduction to Steinem’s book, improbably, as he tells us, is written by John Kenneth Galbraith, who explains in some detail that he does not like the beach. In fact, the few times he’s been to the beach have been when he was ensconced in the “main attraction…an excellent hotel set well back from the sand.” Nevertheless, Galbraith appreciates “what makes the beach in our society…A beach is not a place but a state of mind.” Indeed, until the ocean intrudes – from The Beach Book book-comber collection:

    “And the waters increased, and the waters prevailed” (“Noah and the Flood,” Genesis).

    “It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown to windward. It destroyed at once the organized life of the ship by its scattering effect” (from Typhoon, by Joseph Conrad).

    “The night had brought little relief from the heat, and at dawn a hot gust of wind blows across the colorless sea” (from “The Seventh Seal,” by Ingmar Bergman).

    “They came ashore on Omaha Beach, the slogging, unglamorous men that no one envied” (from The Longest Day, by Cornelius Ryan).

    “To keep from feeling guilty about spending so much time on a tan, it is advisable to read or think something while you lie there” (from The Beach Book, “The Suntan: How to Get One,” by Gloria Steinem).

    “As soon as the crust was cool enough to retain water, it began to rain. The deluge is faintly described in Genesis, but instead of forty days and forty nights, it rained for more nearly forty centuries. It rained without letup and with the force of a tropical downpour. It rained until the clouds had dumped something like three hundred million cubic miles of water upon the bare rocks. (“The Birth of the Ocean,” from Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Seven Seas).

    “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? / I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. / I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think they will sing to me” (from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T. S. Eliot).

    Steinem does not use Ezra Pound in her book for the beach. But if she had, she might have drawn from both the first Canto and the older “The Seafarer.” In the first Canto we are already in the middle of something: “And then went down to the ship, / Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and / We set up mast and sail on that swart ship…Thus with stretched sail, we went over the sea till day’s end. / Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean, / came we then to the bounds of deepest water….”

    “Canto I” follows the older “The Seafarer,” who tells his own story, first person, of life at sea: “May I, for my own self, song’s truth reckon, / Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days / Hardship endured oft. / Bitter breast-cares have I abided, / Known on my keel many a care’s hold, / And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent / Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head / While she tossed close to cliffs.” He “shall have his sorrow for sea-fare.”

  • A Portrait of the Retiring Reader

    At El Camino College in the late 1960s I met an old man and an old woman in a literature class. I fell into talking with them outside class one day, waiting for the professor to arrive. The old man said he was recently retired from a life of work that had permitted him little time to read. They asked me what the young people were reading – outside of the class-assigned reading. They were looking for recommendations. I described the Beats, Ginsberg and Kerouac, and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, my interests at the time. The old man said he didn’t want to read something that might leave a bad taste in his mouth. Our literature class came to an end and I never saw the two old students again. 

    I’ve now spent a life working and reading but still have a newborn’s appetite, but at the bookstore last week I picked up a used copy of Naked Lunch and quickly put it back down. I’m still the same reader I was as a young man at El Camino, but now, like the old man in my literature class, I don’t want to read something that’s going to give me heartburn. 

    The many articles on retirement I’ve recently noticed are of course due to the coming of age of the Baby Boomers. If you were born after WWII but before Vietnam, welcome to the fold. Most of the retirement articles, usefully, focus on money: how much will you need, how long can you wait, what else can you do. But the question that interests me the most is how will you spend your time: Winnebago Weeks on Route 66; Lunch on the Beach at Laguna; Golf at Bandon Dunes; Flying Lessons Over the Mojave…Yes, yes, but after this, what then? 

    For many of us, retirement will seem like popping out of the water after a long, slow commute to the top of a busy, crowded sea. After 30 years of working 9 to 5, we’ll find ourselves floating on the surface, surrounded by acres of open water under a baby-blue sky. What will we do with all this space and time? 

    One activity for which some of us may be out of shape is reading…Yes, yes, but read what? I think of the old man and old woman in my El Camino literature class. I too now prefer books that will not leave a bad taste in the mouth. But what does that mean? We want to read books that will uplift, inspire, and encourage the imagination, books written with mystery, style, and deference, books that will float us on the open sea of retirement. Nothing sappy, mind you, nor condescending – we are, after all, adults. Here are a few books personally annotated – an eclectic selection of suggestions for beginning retirees, dedicated to the old man and old woman I met back at El Camino: 

    Walden (1854), by Henry David Thoreau. Reading is economical. If Huck Finn is the beginning of American literature, Walden should have been the beginning of American economy. Here you will learn to live deliberately, and, if necessary, alone, but not quite alone, for you will have the woods and the pond and neighbors. 

    My Garden (Book) (1999), by Jamaica Kincaid. This backyard Walden helped inspire my own backyard Salsa Garden, where we plant everything we need to make our summer salsa. 

    Silence (1961), by John Cage. Cage’s writing is less annoying than his music, until you completely let go and find yourself laughing and enjoying the indeterminacies and exactitudes. 

    Siddhartha (1922), by Herman Hesse. If you missed the serene trip in the sixties, you can read it in your 60’s. 

    Memoirs (1974), by Pablo Neruda. The beloved Chilean poet’s memory is full of stories about life and a love for life. Neruda’s great strength was his patience and will to explore that love in a way that others might feel and see and taste and touch and hear. 

    The City and the Mountains (1901), by Eca de Queiros. In 2008, New Directions published a new edition, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. The story is an exercise in compare and contrast between city and rural living. The many delightful but absurd technological inventions the city-dwellers value foreshadow our own time. 

    The Square (1955); Moderato Cantabile (1958); 10:30 on a Summer Night (1960); The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas (1962) by Marguerite Duras. Mysterious, short novels, though not exactly mysteries, with fine dialog, setting, and characterization. 

    My Antonia (1918), by Willa Cather. The look of recognition in another that lasts a lifetime of separation. A truly beautiful book. 

    The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw (1989), by Patrick McManus. I first heard McManus as bedtime stories my wife read aloud to our son, the day ending for all of us in laughter. Now, I think there are few images as beautiful as an older person laughing, which is what you’ll be doing when you read this book. 

    Rose, Where did you get that red? Teaching Great Poetry to Children (1973), by Kenneth Koch. From Koch’s experience teaching great poetry to children in New York City, examples of great poems with the children’s poems following, one illuminating the other. We can understand a great poem, get the ideas behind great poems, volunteer to teach poetry in our local grade school, and have some fun with great and small, old and young. 

    A good reader is someone who can recommend a book to a friend and get it right. I might not have been such a good reader back at El Camino, and I’m still working on becoming a better reader. We read to remain in the world, and to enjoy our stay. We may have retired from a job, an occupation, a role – we hope never to retire from the pleasurable occupation of reading.