The Mind Club

The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why it Matters

Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray (Viking, 2016)

    'The problem of other minds' is one of the age-old philosophical conundrums. Renee Descartes was pretty sure that he had a mind, and you do, or you wouldn’t be here now, but what about dogs, or fish, or fruit flies? What about computers like Watson, the Jeopardy champion? In The Mind Club, Dan Wagner and Kurt Gray bring psychological research to bear on the philosophical question of just what it means to have a mind.

     The premise of the book is that we have two different senses for the concept, whose relationship is complex. On the one hand, there’s an interior state of experience, having to do with sensations, emotions, and 'what it’s like' to be you. Experience is not directly accessible to others, but we can imagine it much more readily in a dog than in a fruit fly. We can even picture it more easily in dead people than we can in robots.

    On the other hand, the exterior aspects of mind are termed agency. By this, Wegner and Gray mean the ability to set goals and make things happen in the world, whether scratching our noses or erecting skyscrapers. Fully functioning people have both, of course, but the edge cases are instructive. Small children are high in experience and low in agency, which gives rise to the moral imperative not to harm them. If parents (and the village) do their job, children grow up to have agency, as well, acquiring the moral imperative not to harm others.

    Such complementarity seems to be baked in to these concepts, which often appear as two sides of a coin. "Thinking doers are active minds with moral responsibility that do actions, minds like corporations and God. Vulnerable feelers are passive minds with moral rights that have actions done to them, minds like puppies, medical patients, and babies. This division of doer and feeler should feel intuitive because it is as ancient as human thought."

     Indeed, Aristotle divided the moral world along the same lines, naming the active party the agent, and the victim or recipient of an action the patient. "Linking mind perception to morality not only explains the enduring hilarity of kids injuring unsuspecting adults but also allows you to predict your moral outrage about almost any infraction. Tough man (high agency) punches kitten (high experience)? Immoral. Kitten (low agency) scratches tough man (low experience)? Not immoral."

     The implications of this framework run throughout the book, as they do throughout family life, our systems of charitable giving, and the justice system. "When someone is cast as a victimized moral patient–a vulnerable feeler–it is difficult to simultaneously see him or her as an agent responsible for wrongdoing. This explains why defendants on trial often testify to the suffering or abuse they experienced in their lives, such as in the case of Lorena Bobbitt."

      The Mind Club is dense with research: each chapter cites fifty or more articles or books; but the writing is witty, and moves right along. In the end, it crosses from psychology back to philosophy: "We are forever a point of view: even if we lose our memories, meditate away our desires, and quiet our constant quest for mental control, we are still a source of perception. But recognizing this fact provides the secret to transcending ourselves as much as we possibly can. By understanding that we perceive the world instead of understanding it directly, we can realize not only that the self is fragile and that free will is an illusion but also that other minds can be both more and less than they appear."

Any Good Books,

January 2020

Power Concedes Nothing

Power Concedes Nothing: The Unfinished Fight for Social Justice in America

Connie Rice (Scribner, 2012)

    Connie Rice had a path of high achievement set before her from infancy. Her parents met at Howard College, where her mother trained as a teacher. Her father had an exemplary Air Force career, which exposed Connie and her two younger brothers to a great variety of human environments, while shielding them from most of the racial hardships that other Black kids faced in the sixties. What could have been disruptive was embraced as adventurous: "On top of [her mother's] relentless academic tasks, she dunked us in whatever the new local culture offered–ballet, piano lessons, new food, painting, crafts, ceramics, horseback riding, archery, bowling, swim teams, drama, skiing, county fairs, high tea, or square dancing." That sounds manic, verging on comic, but it led to the kind of confidence that permitted Connie twice to walk into a new school and become class president.

    Within the Black American Princess bubble, there were also experiences that foretold what she'd use all that preparation for. Reading Anne Frank's diary, as a ten-year-old; navigating between terrible schools (Anacostia, San Antonio) and great ones (London, Shaker Heights); winning the debate championship of Texas; and spending one high school summer watching the Watergate hearings. "Every day, after scouring the newspapers for behind-the-scenes analysis, I stood at the ironing board, glued to the television. At first the Judiciary Committee's hearings, a cross between a constitutional show trial and a suspense-filled soap opera, were riveting enough."

    When, in due course, the immortal Barbara Jordan rose to be recognized, Connie Rice had a new heroine. "When she cross-examined a witness, challenged her colleagues on the committee, or parried with lawyers, I felt I was watching Elizabeth I incarnated as a black congresswoman from Texas." Jordan's full-throated defense of the Constitution, and her indictment of Richard Nixon's corruption, struck a chord in Rice that would propel her to law school and the work of social justice.

    But first, at her mother's urging, Radcliffe College. (Rice was one of the last people to be admitted to Harvard by accident, as the colleges proceeded toward their merger.) She studied Government, made some good friends, and took up martial arts. Her Tae Kwon Do was so strong that she took three years off to pursue it, medaling at the national championships, before going on to NYU.

     In her second summer there, she interned with the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund on death penalty cases. Here was an education! And one that seemed more significant than third-year classes, though she did enough to finish school. "Death row had ripped off law school's Socratic mask and shown me the sordid underbelly of our warped bar of justice." Rice moved on to a clerkship in Federal court, and even a year or so in a major law firm, just to show she could do it, before winding up in Los Angeles in the west-coast branch of the LDF.

     That's where the real story in this memoir begins, as Rice brings all this experience to bear on the violent culture of the gang-ridden streets, the violent culture of the Los Angeles Police Department, and the stultifying intransigence of government bureaucracy. Sometimes the work is on an individual level, as when she is enlisted to help a fugitive surrender without getting shot by the police on his way in. Other times, she makes herself heard with lawsuits, including one that resulted in the LA school district building 140 new schools, making up a deficit of thirty years without new construction.

     On whatever scale, the work is legal, it's political, and it's always personal. Her mission is to look out for the people deemed too poor for decent education, too down-and-out for police protection, too insignificant for elected officials to notice them. "I've learned that suing cops earns their respect but helping them to change earns their trust. I've learned to make adversaries into allies and, when necessary, to sue my friends and even my own board members, because it doesn't matter who holds it–power concedes nothing without a demand."

Any Good Books, December, 2019

The Destiny Thief

Any Good Books, November, 2019

The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life

Richard Russo (2018, Vintage)

    Richard Russo came late to writing fiction. In his twenties, he studied for a Ph.D. in American literature, and was on his way to becoming a teacher. But before he acquired that degree, he also pursued a Master of Fine Arts in fiction. He wasn't good at it yet, but he had some idea of what he needed to learn. So, as the academic career got off the ground–endless sections of freshman composition at Penn State–he returned to his first novel, of which his teacher had liked only the portion set in his home town in upstate New York. "They weren't exactly good, those forty pages, but they were mine, which was more than could be said for the other two hundred." 

     Bad news, he thought, since he'd spent his twenties getting as far from Gloversville as he could manage. That said, however, if he was doomed to be from Gloversville (where his grandfather had actually been a glove cutter), why not see what could be made of it? "I needed not only to claim as my own the very place I'd been fleeing for so long but also to lose myself there, to give my full attention to the kind of people whose lives were, at least to me, both important and essential."

 

    In the meantime, he had learned some of the skills of writing fiction, which he has gone on to teach. I was especially interested in the essay "What Frogs Think: A Defense of Omniscience." When he commended to his students the practice of telling the story from the omniscient point of view, they tended to resist. Maybe it means they haven't read enough literature; novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries favored the godlike point of view. Maybe they're just too young: "As we mature we see patterns, and those can resolve themselves into worlds. We want to tell readers how those worlds (as well as the real one they're based on) work. At twenty-five or thirty, not many writers are anxious to assume so much responsibility." Certainly, I have read stories from this century that would have been greatly improved if the writer had seen fit to explain a little more.

 

     Russo relishes the mastery of Charles Dickens. His essay on The Pickwick Papers shows how a youthful Dickens overran the bounds of the sketches he'd been commissioned to write. "By the time we're not quite halfway through the book, both we and Dickens are suddenly aware that he's writing a novel; he's begun to plant narrative seeds that will bear fruit in later chapters, to defer dramatic payoffs and in so doing increase their power." Dickens has already begun to intermingle the pathos of the world he sees around him with an irresistible comedic streak. No wonder he's still being read. 

    Dickens was writing for money, of course, and under the deadline pressures of serial publication. Russo has much to say about craft and art, and how they may (or may not) survive in the world of commerce. Creative writing programs proliferate, but it seems unlikely that the audience for fiction is actually growing. "Popular culture tells us that those who fail didn't want success badly enough, as if hunger and faith were the best predictors of it. In reality, hunger and faith, absent talent, or at least a certain facility, is more often a prescription for heartbreak." 

    Howbeit, we must attend to our craft, if art is to have a chance; there are no guarantees. "That art should be so elusive is deeply mysterious. In many respects it seems so straightforward. What art demands of us has remained constant down through the centuries–that we slow down, observe, contemplate, court quiet, practice stillness, live as if we have all the time in the world, knowing full well that we don't."

Semicolon

Any Good Books, October, 2019

Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

Cecelia Watson (Ecco, 2019)

        It's characteristic of the thoroughness of Cecelia Watson's research that the she knows both the date of the semicolon's invention (1494) and the name of the inventor, a Venetian publisher; the type designer was Bolognese. The humanists of the Renaissance were busy inventing marks, most of which quickly faded out of use; the semicolon survived because of its utility as a way to mark a pause, longer than the one marked by a comma, and shorter than that of a colon. In other words, its use was purely a matter of prosody, the music of language.

        From the middle of the eighteenth century through the nineteenth century, grammarians contended to publish the most thorough explications of English grammar, and the most 'scientific'. The competition was fierce; one dauntless scholar published “The Grammar of English Grammars, which contained 1,192 pages filled with tiny print surveying a selection of 548 English grammar books that had been published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up until the 1852 printing of his own book.” Some authors based their grammatical theories on Latin and Greek; others attempted logical induction directly from English. They all had much the same difficulty: “how could it be possible to give useful rules for punctuation, while at the same time acknowledging that those rules couldn't describe every valid approach to punctuating a text?” 

       But it was ever thus: ambiguity creeps in through the cracks. Watson has a couple of chapters about legal situations where the rules were asked to carry more weight than they really could bear. “Any remaining hope that the law could somehow escape the challenges posed by punctuation went out the window when a semicolon set about wreaking havoc up and down the Northeast Corridor in a dramatic Massachusetts court case that caused six years of controversy in courtrooms, in legislative debates, and in the streets.” Six years! 

 

       She has another couple of chapters about the stylistic uses of the semicolon. Herman Melville wrote in the nineteenth century, the semicolon's golden age. “No,” says Watson, “it's not really that Melville uses the semicolon to stretch out the distance between a capital letter and a period; instead, the semicolons are in the service of carrying you slowly, gently, pleasurably away from whatever it was you thought you were reading about–the process of beheading the whale, or how to assess winds, or cannibalism.”

       In the hands of the modern essayist Rebecca Solnit, on the other hand, “A semicolon is sometimes not a pause, but the opposite: an instrument of quickness, a little springboard that launches you rapidly from thought to thought.” These observations return the semicolon to the realm of music. The punctuation may, incidentally, accord with The Chicago Manual of Style, but it was chosen for its rhythm. 

 

       Watson is not opposed to rules, exactly, but she is opposed to idolatry about them. For one thing, as we've seen, they had to be invented. For another, they can make no claim to completeness, because the language is always flourishing in new ways. As language changes, we imagine that it decays, because the rules of our youth pass out of fashion; in reality, though, “[t]here was no time when everyone spoke flawless English and people punctuated 'properly.'” 

 

      She's also opposed to the pernicious snobbery by which those of us who happened to grow up speaking the dominant dialect ascribe some kind of moral virtue to following the rules. “Rules can be an easy, lazy way to put the onus on someone else: if you make a grammar mistake while trying to convey something heartfelt, I can just point out that you've used a comma splice and I'm excused from confronting what you were saying, since you didn't say it properly.” Don't be that person. Communicating is better than standing on privilege, any day.

At the Strangers' Gate

At the Strangers' Gate: Arrivals in New York

Adam Gopnik (2017, Vintage Books)

     In 1980, Adam Gopnik and his soon-to-be-wife, Martha, left Montreal for the brighter lights of New York. They were just kids when they arrived, twenty and eighteen, and they moved into an absurd apartment, a nine-by-eleven basement studio on East Eighty-seventh Street. “We were so enraptured with the idea of our escaping and intertwining that everything unappealing about the place was transposed into the key of irresistible.” 

   

     That is to say, it was an optimistic time. Martha was studying film-making at Columbia, and Adam was starting art-history graduate school, though his ambitions also including writing for magazines and composing for Broadway. Everything seemed possible. “If your faith is in life's poetry, as ours was, a tiny room inadequate by any human standard and designed to make life borderline impossible looks appealing. The less possible it becomes, the more beautiful the illusion looks.”

     Gopnik says (and, being his age, I agree) “Forty years is the natural gestation time of nostalgia, the interval it takes for a past period to become a lost time, and, sometimes, a golden age.” We don't really feel that way about the eighties, especially in New York, where the brassiness of the gold rush has left an unpleasant stain, to this day, on our economic lives. “Today the young live less absurd lives, but have more chastened ambitions. Adequacy seems, bitterly, enough.”

     Forty years ago, sweetly, fake-Scandinavian ice cream was new. “The apartments got smaller and the ice cream got fattier. Eating premium ice cream in a tiny space with roaches was almost the same as living in a reasonable amount of room.” By the same token, lunchtime talks about the pictures at the Museum of Modern Art for fifty dollars a time seemed like a fair start in the working world. “In the eighties, fluidity of opportunity made up for absurdity of occupation. You did a silly job, but having jobs was not in itself silly–one led to a better one.” 

     In Gopnik's case, that meant becoming the fashion copyeditor at Gentlemen's Quarterly, though he was singularly unqualified on nearly all counts. Martha had all the fashion sense in the family, and all the eye for detail. What Adam had was a way with words. “...I pounded out, with ever-increasing confidence, rules and diktats and nonnegotiable dogmas on grooming.” Really, what was there to say? “Perhaps the truth is that fashion can only be diktats, and our respect for fashion is our secret respect for the necessity of an arbitrary principle in life.”

     With a newly full-time salary, the Gopniks made a giant leap upward, into SoHo. Against all odds, they found a fifteen hundred square foot loft space in the middle of an urban village where the work of art making occurred behind every historic cast-iron facade. (The upstairs neighbor worked in straw, dead fish having proved impractical.) As an art historian and critic, Gopnik was at the center of the known world, though I freely confess that I have to take his word for the value and meaning of the various works on offer. 

     Job led on to job, editing fiction for GQ and then for Knopf, and eventually writing at The New Yorker, all before the age of twenty-seven; it would seem magical if you didn't know about all the work behind it. In the case of The New Yorker, the work was to walk around, to look and listen. He cultivated the legendary Joseph Mitchell, who put him onto what he calls the secret of good writing: “a wild exactitude.” Gopnik says, “Flat descriptive sentences describing an absurdly vivid character, simple inventories of impossible objects–that was the end! Good stories were strange stories told straight.” 

     It's likely that this book will mean more to you if you ever saw New York in the eighties, but if not, don't let that stop you. Gopnik's wild exactitude is always worth the price of admission.

Email edition September 1, 2019

The Whole Five Feet

The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else

Christopher R. Beha (Grove Press, 2009)

     When he set out to read the Harvard Classics in 2007, Christopher Beha was at something of a loose end. He had broken up with his girlfriend, left his editorial job, and moved back into his parents' apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. He had a degree from Princeton, and a Masters in creative writing, but his novel wasn't selling, and the publishing career looked like an all-too-comfortable dead end. Fortunately, his parents could afford to shelter his retreat from independence, and, when his aunt's terminal cancer caused her to move in as well, he was there to help. It was to be a tough year for his own health as well, and his reading project became a lifeline.

     The Harvard Classics set is not often spoken of these days. When it is, it's as the epitome of the Dead White Men canon; a curiosity rather than a living document. But it was once as much a part of the middle class home as the piano in the parlor, and for a similar reason: people aspired to partake of Culture, in an un-ironic way that we can scarcely now conceive. In 1909, Charles William Eliot, after some forty years as president of Harvard, was invited by the publisher P. F. Collier & Son to compile the collection, following on a remark he had sometimes made that "a five-foot shelf would hold books enough to give in the course of years a good substitute for a liberal education." He proposed omitting Shakespeare and the Bible, on the grounds that people already owned them; in the end, they made the cut. Dickens and Thackeray had to wait for the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, a twenty-volume successor to the fifty-one-volume Five-Foot Shelf.

     Beha initially conceived of reading the whole 22,000 pages in one year as the sort of literary stunt that had seen such successes as cooking all of Julia Child, or swallowing the Oxford English Dictionary: a sort of indoor Appalachian Trail. "The book I intended to write was essentially a comedy, about a feckless, somewhat lost young man who shuts himself away from the modern world and its cultural white noise–from life as it's lived in his own time and place–in order to immerse himself in classic literature." It became something much more than that when he learned how the Shelf had shaped his late grandmother's life. In his youth, he had often seen the books in her house at Sag Harbor, but he'd never gotten much beyond Eliot's introduction. "I realized that a woman I had never thought of as especially literary had likely gained from these books a greater grasp on the history of literary culture than her grandson now had."

     A front-to-back reading was almost certainly not what Eliot had in mind; the last two volumes contain lectures and reading guides that outline possible paths through the volumes. One could read philosophy, religion, drama, or poetry in a connected way. One might concentrate on Greece (Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles) or France (Racine, Descartes, Rousseau) or the United States (Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson.) The randomness of taking the volumes as they came was compelling in its own right, though. Beha keeps being moved by the conversation the authors are already having with one another: "I was still reading to some degree to acquire knowledge, and I was certainly still reading for pleasure. But I was also reading to be a part in a great chain of readers: Aurelius read Plato, then Aurelius died. Milton read Aurelius, then Milton died. And here I sat up in bed reading Milton, fighting off the time when sleep would overtake me. Such is everything."

     And here am I reading Christopher Beha (who went on to publish novels, and edit for Harper's;) and you are reading me. There's no telling how far back it goes, or how far forward. Much as we enjoy the doing of it, isn't it lovely to step back and look at reading that way?

Garlic and Sapphires

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise

Ruth Reichl (Penguin Books, 2006)

     Sometimes, you're the last to know about your own life. In 1993, while she was the restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, Ruth Reichl got a call from the New York Times trying to lure her back East. The Times already knew her work, and they knew she'd say yes. The department secretary knew. Her journalist husband arranged with his employer for a spot in their New York bureau. She grudgingly agreed to a day of interviews; still thinking she wasn't interested, she was free to say what she really thought, which made them want her all the more. And really–she'd have been nuts to say no.

     As soon as she said yes, she had a new problem: her fame preceded her. Her picture was posted at the waiters's stations in all the best places, with bonuses for spotting her. This could be delightful: "And then fireworks began shooting across the table: black truffles and white ones, foie gras, lobster, turbot, venison. The play of flavors was a symphony, as if we were the only people in the restaurant and fifty chefs were cooking just to please us. Each dish was rushed to the table the instant it was ready; each was served at the peak of perfection." But since that's not an experience most people can ever have, it's not the experience she was trying to review.

     The solution was wigs, or rather, personas. An old friend of her late mother sent her to the right consignment shop, and got her a makeup artist. Ruth became Molly, a wealthy nonentity from the Midwest, someone who could blend in to the point where the service at Le Cirque was actively bad. This was an interesting sociological study: Can a dull, poor person get a decent table? At what apparent age does a woman disappear? Or, on the other end of the power scale, why do the editors of the Times like to be seen with her?

      Even more, as she tried on different looks, Reichl found herself engaged by the psychological implications. When she wore her mother's jewelry and clothing, she understood her perhaps better than ever before. "I felt my mother's joy as I swept up the stairs, breathing in the affluent air. By the time I arrived at the top I was seeing it all as she would, thrilling to the chains rippling seductively across the windows and the deep, private underwater feel of the room."

     Plenty of things about the New York of twenty-five years ago seem both familiar and strange: smoking sections in restaurants! Pay phones! The Trump Tower as merely a gaudy temple of excess! The era of classic French restaurants was bumbling to a close, and Reichl sought out ethnic enclaves that seemed bold and new (at least for the Times.) But the gulf between the rich and the poor already yawned like the Grand Canyon, with the same blindness on the part of the wealthy that we see today.

      Reichl's predecessor as critic was somehow still glowering around the office, giving evidence that the job had a limited life span. She was missing too many dinners with her young son. And, by 1998, she had started to run out of faces. A few of her later personas were the worst kind of customers: the peevish, the demanding, or the snobbish, occasionally to the horror of her friends who went out with her. 

      Once again, blessedly, the powers that be had a better plan for her than she had for herself. Offered the editorship of Gourmet, she had the good sense to say yes. Time being what it is, you probably can't go back to these restaurants, and you probably wouldn't want to. But the recipes Reichl includes may count as compensation, and the writing itself is delicious.

Any Good Books, July 2019

Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music

Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music

Glenn Kurtz (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

      As a young boy in the early seventies, Glenn Kurtz was accounted a guitar prodigy by the staff and students of his local suburban guitar school. He could play anything, it seemed, from folk tunes like "The Jolly Roving Tar" to the classical 'Segovia repertoire', with side excursions, as the decade went on, into rock and jazz. He was a musical true believer, spending his afternoons in ecstasies of Beethoven and Bach. Practicing is the story of what happened to Kurtz's dreams as he came to maturity.

      Disregarding his parents' skepticism about a career in music, Kurtz accepted admission to the New England Conservatory, which catapulted him into a whole different league. NEC is centered on Jordan Hall, a performance space surrounded by rehearsal spaces. "In every room deeply committed musicians were aspiring to concert careers. The whole structure vibrated with intensely focused ambition and the insidious undertone of competition that came with it. Every hour of the day we were immersed in one another's practicing, each contributing our part to the din." The students study music history and theory, conducting and composition, but what they are really there to do is practice, and practice some more.

      Each student, naturally, has a teacher. Kurtz's teacher took him back to the very beginning, because his technique had too much tension in it, and he had trouble getting a clean tone out of the guitar. That was going to be a severe obstacle to being the next Segovia, but so be it–he would start again. The Conservatory being what it was, he was soon schooled in another reality: "Even if I could play the melody by Brahms as beautifully as the pianist next door, Brahms didn't write for the guitar. I had thought I was a musician. Now, for the first time, I realized that I was just a guitarist. Nothing had changed. I still had to practice. But suddenly these études felt like a kind of exile." 

 

      The guitarists had one notable advantage in the conservatory environment: they were very popular in the gig office. Kurtz could make a modest side living playing in the background at parties and weddings–if he didn't mind playing in the background. But he coveted the concert stage, which is dominated by other instruments. Plenty of pianists since Liszt had made a concert career of the piano, and plenty of violinists since Paganini, but classical guitarists generally need some kind of day job.

     Kurtz made a sojourn in Europe after graduation, but the story was the same. "Nothing prevented me from earning a living as a classical guitarist–I could teach, I could play at cafés and weddings, perform the occasional concert. But this was not the life I had striven for. Time splintered. Exercises became agony; preparing for competitions seemed futile." So, in a fog, he came home and got a menial job in publishing. Going on to graduate school in literature, he left the guitar untouched.

     Kurtz wrote this book because he picked up his guitar again in his mid-thirties with a new attitude, and a new understanding of what it is to practice. "I'm trying not to repeat myself. My first time through, I practiced badly, chasing an ideal that ruined music for me, turning what I had loved the most into torture. Now I'm pursuing not an ideal but the reality of my own experience." 

 

      It's complicated: he'll never get back some of the speed and ease he had in his twenty-one-year-old hands. But he can play every day; he can be kinder to himself, and more in the moment. Nothing is wasted, really, neither the time he gave to the guitar in his youth, nor the years when he had to put it down and face the rest of life. From now on, it's one day at a time.

Any Good Books, June 2019 Emailed.

Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen

Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen

Mary Norris (W.W. Norton, 2019)

      When I reviewed Mary Norris's Between You and Me, a memoir about her life on The New Yorker's copy desk, I hoped we'd hear from her again. In Greek to Me, she's back with the story of the obsession that occupied her non-working life. She studied both modern and classical Greek; she traveled all over the Greek world (the book would have benefited from a map); and she immersed herself in Greek myth and drama. She was fortunate to work for The New Yorker, which had a policy of supporting educational opportunities for its employees. Her boss there, Ed Stringham, loved Greece; he helped her plan her first journeys, and loaded her down with books to encourage her new enthusiasm.

     One of Norris's first delights was the Greek alphabet itself. She sprinkles it through the book as a challenge to the reader, but of course, we already know a good deal of it, from the 𝜶 and 𝜷 of the word 'alphabet', to the 𝝍 of 'psychology' and the 𝜒 of 'charisma'. And, of course, there's the noble 𝜴. "Oh! Omega has energy has energy in it, it has breath and inspiration...Nobody seriously translates 'I am the Alpha and the Omega,' the words of the Almighty from the Book of Revelation, as 'I am A through Z.' The Greek alphabet is infinite."

     I love the connections Norris finds between antiquity and the present day. The conversational putty that fills American English ("like, totally, so, you know, OK, really, actually, honestly,...") has its counterpart in the particles of ancient Greek. "I was amazed, in reading Plato's Apology of Socrates, how much nuance these syllables give to Socrates' speech–they act like nudges, winks, facial expressions. You can almost see Socrates poking his listener as you hear his confidential 'don't you know,' a folksy expression from a sage older generation." The casual nature of the smallest words poses a translation problem, as the literal English tends to weigh more than the Greek original. But then, in writing, we have punctuation for some of the purposes for which they only had words. Translation is always, always an imperfect art.

     That's why people sometimes perform ancient Greek plays in the original language. Norris joined the Barnard Columbia Greek Drama Group in the chorus of the Electra of Euripedes, walking around New York City in a fog of memorized Greek texts. The following year, she was promoted to the lead in The Trojan Women, as Hecuba, Queen of the defeated Troy. Her husband and son have been killed, and her home is burning. "The play is an exercise in comparative and superlative: Hecuba starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder and sadder until she is the saddest woman who ever lived." She wrote to Katharine Hepburn to ask for advice about the pacing of all that sadness, which is totally ludicrous, except it's exactly what Mary Norris would do. She misses no opportunity.

     Norris had time to do all this because she was single. There was nobody to mind if she got caught up in study and forgot to eat dinner or collect the mail. As a woman traveling alone in Greece, she attracted the attention of every man with a pulse, which could be awkward, especially given the imperfect state of her spoken Greek. Even more, however, her love of Greece had a liberating effect.

     Her Catholic girlhood had offered Norris a very limited menu of ways to be a woman, either a mother or a nun. "Other women and girls may favor a different goddess. Many opt for Artemis, the huntress; someone who longs for children might identify with Demeter; great beauties are chosen by Aphrodite. Hera is not popular; in her Roman guise as Juno she is statuesque and confident, but what a bitch. For me, it had to be Athena. Whereas the Virgin Mary is a model of humility and servitude, Athena is the template for a liberated woman." Mary Norris has taken full advantage of that template, and the result is glorious.

Any Good Books, May 2019 email edition.

Dreyer's English

Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

Benjamin Dreyer (Random House, 2019)

     One day I'm going to write a review consisting solely of large chunks from the book, because the writing is just so damned sprightly. I don't think this is that day, but it wouldn't be a bad one to choose. Benjamin Dreyer, in his capacity as the Copy Chief at Random House, has made the world a better place by cleaning up the prose of innumerable writers. He knows a good sentence from a bad one, and he has written a beautiful, witty book about how to tell the difference. 
 

    "A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection."

    The book is mostly a catalog of misdirections Dreyer has known. He hastens to say that it's not actually comprehensive; you still need The Chicago Manual of Style "whose edicts I don't always agree with but whose definitive bossiness is, in its way, comforting," and Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, in addition to a few good dictionaries. 
 

    But what a catalog! Under "Notes on Proper Nouns", under "Colombia", this: "South American country. Two o's. Columbia, with a u, is, among other things, a New York university, a recording company, a Hollywood movie studio, the District also known as Washington, the Gem of the Ocean, and the female representation of the United States." 'Among other things?' Seriously? Nice. 
 

    You will find at least a few things you didn't know in that chapter, as you might in "Notes on Easily Misspelled Words" and "The Confusables." Some of you, though, spoiling for an argument, will turn directly to "Peeves and Crotchets." "The thing is, everyone's peeves and crotchets are different. People who couldn't care less about 'could care less' will, faced with the use of 'impact' as a verb, geschrei the house down, and that mob that sees fifty shades of red, scarlet, and carmine over the relatively newfangled use of 'begs the question' to mean 'raises the question' may well pass by a 'comprised of' without so much as batting an eye." 
 

    Some entries ("Based off of") get "No. Just no." Some get "I don't think that's asking a lot." Others get "Move on already," or, at greater length: "As to people who object to supermarket express-lane signs reading '10 items or less'? On the one hand, I hear you. On the other hand, get a hobby. Maybe flower arranging, or decoupage." Good writers avoid some expressions because they're wrong, and others because people will come running to tell them that they're wrong. 
 

    That same mob of peevers and pedants are the indirect subject of the chapter on "Rules and Nonrules," such as 'Never End a Sentence with a Preposition,' and 'Contractions Aren't Allowed in Formal Writing.' "Why are they nonrules? So far as I'm concerned, because they're largely unhelpful, pointlessly constricting, feckless, and useless. Also because they're generally of dubious origin: devised out of thin air, then passed on till they've gained respectable solidarity and, ultimately, have ossified." All good reasons. 
 

    No matter how many books on usage you already have, you want this one. It's funny; it's timely; it's authoritative, but in a way that keeps the conversation going. Dreyer again, by way of conclusion: "There's no rule without an exception (well, mostly), there's no thought without an afterthought (at least for me), there's always something you meant to say but forgot to say. There's no last word, only the next word." And thank Goodness for it. 

Published by email,

Any Good Books, April 2019

Counting Backwards

Counting Backwards: A Doctor's Notes on Anesthesia

Henry Jay Przybylo, M.D. (W.W. Norton, 2018)

     Anesthesia is a mystery, even to its practitioners. Dr. Przybylo (who goes by Dr. Jay around the hospital) has administered anesthesia over thirty thousand times over his career, and he doesn't exactly know how the gas he uses does what it does. "Despite decades of research, its mechanism of action remains a mystery. I must have faith in my anesthesia gas." He has faith, as well, in his experience; and in his preparation, which is invariably meticulous. A mistake he made in his first year of practice, when he picked up the wrong syringe, led him to work out a standard approach to setting up his operating area. "The basic needs must be within an arm's reach and not concealed in clutter. The anticipated is one step away; the potential, another step beyond."

     From this cockpit, Dr. Jay manages the drugs, both gaseous and intravenous, that render the patient insensible and pain free, to make surgery possible. He has drugs to dispel anxiety, prevent the formation of memory, stop pain, and prevent movement. At the same time, he has to keep tabs on the vital signs of the patient: he doesn't want to suppress the heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing of the patient too much. Depending on what the surgeon is doing, the body may respond with lulls or surges, and the maintenance of stability may require anticipation–verging on art–from the anesthesiologist.

     Because Dr. Jay specializes in the care of children, he has need of a few other arts. While an adult may understand that she needs a shot to begin the process of anesthesia, a child will probably see that as unacceptable. "Since every step taken toward a procedure room increases the anxiety of my patient, my goal is to shorten or disguise the time from that first step until my anesthesia coma is induced. Distraction is a major tool, and maintaining an ability to distract keeps me young, or at least requires that I stay current and informed."

     Indeed, he seems to be a lifelong learner on many fronts. He studies what the other people in the operating theater are doing, learning the rhythms and habits of the surgeons he works with. He understands cardiology, cancer, and diseases of the lungs. He has learned more and more about preventing post-operative pain, and has improved the way he speaks to people he isn't sure can understand him.

    Dr. Jay has a deft touch with the history of his field, from recreational ether to sonar-assisted lidocaine shots. He's also very good with simple explanations of how things work, and what kinds of things can go wrong. But what really makes me recommend Counting Backwards are the lessons that all of us could use. Setting up his space the same way every time, for example, is critically important to working as efficiently as possible; at the same time, it's an exercise in mindfulness, a way of preparing himself from the inside out.

   Thus prepared, he makes the machinery an extension of himself, and, seemingly, vice versa. But he doesn't fall into the machinery completely. No matter how long the procedure goes on, he prefers to stand up and watch over the drapes, rather than sitting down. "Far too often, when the readings waver, all eyes home in on the monitor screen. I've resorted to placing a towel over the screen to stop residents from watching it instead of the patient." As long as the patient is a human being, the doctors have to be, too.

Any Good Books published by email,

March 1, 2019

Why Religion? A Personal Story

Why Religion? A Personal Story

Elaine Pagels (2018, HarperCollins)

       When fifteen-year-old Elaine Hiesey went to hear Billy Graham preaching at San Francisco's Cow Palace, she was transported by his promises, to a degree that horrified her sedate suburban parents. Her father was at odds with religion, her mother a nominal Methodist, but she took up with a crowd of Bible-thumping Jesus enthusiasts near her home in Palo Alto. Fortunately, by my lights, she also had a crowd of arts-minded friends from the local community theater. When one of them, a gifted artist, was killed in a car accident, her Christian friends declared that he was going to hell, because he was Jewish. "That made no sense. Wasn't Jesus Jewish? When that didn't seem to matter, I realized that what they had said had nothing to do with what had drawn me to that church, and to the faith we'd claimed to share." 

 

        Though she left that church, she retained a sense that religion had answers to questions that she had never been encouraged to think about in her childhood home. She wasn't encouraged to think about them at Stanford, where she studied history; the study of religion wasn't even available there. But since the question wouldn't leave her alone, she pursued graduate study at Harvard's Divinity School. They put her off for a year, on the grounds that women take up space in graduate school better used by men; nevertheless, she persisted. 

 

       Harvard happened to be one of two places in the U.S. that had copies of the ancient books that had been discovered at Nag Hammadi, in Egypt, twenty-five years earlier. With names like the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the 'gnostic' gospels purported to record the lost teachings of Jesus. The second-century bishop Irenaeus considered them heretical. By the fourth century, they had been translated from Greek into Coptic; they were hidden from the proscriptions of the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius, and only returned to light in the 1940's. These discoveries have been the basis of Elaine Pagels's professional life, which has included teaching, and the writing of both scholarly and popular books.

      Why Religion also recalls her personal life: her marriage to the distinguished physicist Heinz Pagels; the illness and death of their six-year-old child, Mark, of pulmonary hypertension; their adoption of two more children; and her husband's shocking death in a hiking accident. "No longer married, suddenly I was widowed. From Latin, the name means 'emptied.' Far worse; it felt like being torn in half, ripped apart from the single functioning organism that had been our family, our lives." She describes the numbness of the ensuing months, as she figured out how to keep her family going, and tried to understand how rage might coexist with grief. It was a propitious time to study the book of Job, and the development of early Christian conceptions of Satan. 

 

     So, really, why religion? Heinz Pagels actually asked her this at the beginning of their courtship. "After an intense discussion, contentious and hilarious, we came to see that each of us was hoping to understand something fundamental." Today, she is not a believer, nor an unbeliever - her understanding comes from a time before creeds gave those words meaning. She sees religion both in a larger context, as part of the knotted net that binds all humans to each other and with the world; and as a personal, interior experience, all but incommunicable; in that sense, she is a gnostic. "Even now, writing about what's so deeply personal, I'm aware that anything I say can speak to you only as it resonates through what you have experienced yourself; yet even within those limits, we may experience mutual recognition."

     I hope that's not heresy, because it feels like salvation.

Email edition February 1 2019

Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing

Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing: Encounters with the Mysteries and Meanings of Language
Daniel Tammet (2017, Little Brown Spark)

       Most of us could see, given the right squint, the roundness of three or the pointiness of K, or even the dog shape of the word 'dog', facing to the left; that's the kindergarten level of synesthesia. Daniel Tammet's native synesthesia is somewhere around Ph.D. level by comparison. In addition to instant calculation of squares, cubes, and calendars, "...I kept a list of words according to their shape and texture: words as round as a three (gobble, cupboard, cabbage); pointy as a four (jacket, wife, quick); shimmering as a five (kingdom, shoemaker, surrounded)." And imagine the thrill of 'lollipop', with its embedded '1011', a nice round multiple of three!

       This savant-wizardry came along with epilepsy and Asperger's syndrome. The mental landscape of Tammet's childhood was so full of sensation that he had a very poor grasp of spoken language--it just didn't register with him. Mercifully, his high school German teacher invited him for a weekly conversation, throwing him a lifeline that gave him a better grasp of ordinary social intercourse. Still, he says, "I learned my mother tongue self-consciously, quite often confusedly, as if my mother were a foreigner to me, and her sole language my second."

       The first essay in this collection reprises parts of Tammet's 2007 memoir, Born on a Blue Day, which was a world-wide best seller. But what would he do for an encore? Was that book a singularity, as some English-language reviewers suggested, or did he have more to say? Well, one thing that happens when your memoir succeeds is that people begin to write to you as though they know you; one such correspondent was a young Frenchman whom Tammet would fall in love with and go on to marry; they now live in Paris. He also summoned the nerve to send off his book to Les Murray, an Australian poet whose poetic language stems from a strain of autistic-savant creativity that Tammet found profoundly resonant. Tammet went on to become his French translator.

       Translation turns out to be a part of his natural vocation. Because of the way his mind works, Tammet is conversant in something like ten languages, including Icelandic and Esperanto. Iceland, it turns out, has authorities charged with making official judgments about what children can be named; he gives us an essay on what 'purely Icelandic' means, and how that changes through time. He goes to meet Esperanto speakers, who live in the paradox that they have to sell their universalist vision in their other native tongue. 
 
      His experience of being treated as a linguistic curiosity (not to say freak show) gives him a sympathetic bond with the Esperantists, as well as those who devote their passion to reviving or preserving the native tongues of Mexico or the Isle of Man, perhaps the ultimate quixotic pursuit. "Fifty years ago, many new words needed coining to match modern island life: the elders of the recordings had never ridden in a car or airplane, owned a computer, or gone to university."

      Tammet has other wonderfully informative conversations with deaf people who joined the Deaf community by learning ASL as adults; people who make the Bible the first written book in obscure languages; and socio-linguists who record and study phone conversations. He also makes a larger point about translation's relationship to literature, which came to him while reading Anna Karenina in English. "Something had worked itself in my head. All literature, I finally realized with a jolt, amounted to an act of translation: a condensing, a sifting, a realignment of the author's thought-world into words." Yes, he can do this. Yes, he's a writer. And his thought-world is a fascinating place.

January, 2019