A Jane Austen Education

A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter
William Deresiewicz (2011, Penguin Books)

    Lately, I have complained of memoirs in which the authors congratulated themselves on spiritual development that was not actually on view in the books. A Jane Austen Education is not one of those: the young Billy Deresiewicz is convincingly portrayed as a complete jerk, while the authorial voice is nothing of the sort, but a wise and perceptive fellow. The page-turning suspense of this memoir is finding out how that happened; the surprise is that he can actually tell us.

    It was really all a little unlikely--that an arrogant young graduate student, studying literature at Columbia, would fall under the spell of Jane Austen. She sounded so stodgy, so old-fashioned; while, Deresiewicz says, “like so many young men, I needed to think of myself as a rebel, and modernism, with its revolutionary intensity, confirmed my self-image.” He was sarcastic, self-satisfied, and a thorough pain in the neck.

    At first, certainly, Emma lived up, or down, to his expectation of being extraordinarily ordinary: “In my other classes, D. H. Lawrence was preaching sexual revolution and Norman Mailer was cursing his way through World War II, and here I was reading about card parties.” But, as he shares the eponymous heroine’s impatience with the littleness of her small-town society, he falls under the author’s judgement of that impatience: “By creating a heroine who felt exactly as I did, and who behaved precisely as I would have in her situation, she was showing me my own ugly face.” The condescension and cruelty that fall from Emma’s lips at crucial moments deserve the humiliation that inevitably follows, and the young Deresiewicz is, in sympathy and in self-recognition, duly chastened.

    So Emma teaches him the beginning of empathy, and the importance of the trivial. From Pride and Prejudice, he discovers that making mistakes is one of the chief ways we learn anything. Being wrong, gloriously, spectacularly wrong, is both a compelling plot point and one of the chief gateways to maturity and happiness--if, like Elizabeth Bennet, you’re lucky enough to be the heroine of the book, or one of her intimates. Flighty younger sisters and indolent trophy wives (like Lady Bertram, in Mansfield Park: “as lovely, energetic and intelligent as an expensive throw pillow,”) make mistakes aplenty, and don’t get to change at all.

    He’s getting a moral education, the kind of thing that has for years been deeply out of fashion in graduate schools. It is compelling, nonetheless, especially combined with lively biographical detail about Austen’s life, and close attention to her literary techniques. Her letters, her friendships, and her brothers’ military and marital careers all make up the essential background to her particular genius; through them, Deresiewicz reveals Austen’s dedication to usefulness and good character as accurate predictors and true causes of happiness.

    He’s also learning a great deal about writing itself. In contrast to “Joyce’s syntactic labyrinths, Nabokov’s arcane vocabulary, Hemingway’s bleached-bone austerities,” Austen put “everyday words in their natural order--a language that didn’t call attention to itself in any way, just rolled along as easily as breathing.”  Austen awakened in Deresiewicz an interest in the ‘minute particulars’ of daily life, and it shows in his writing.

    Deresiewicz’s candor about the callowness of his younger days is handled well; he’s neither bragging nor complaining; he can be compassionate to himself without excusing his behavior. A Jane Austen Education is a lovely book, with the delightful side benefit that it leads to more books; in this case, biographies and volumes of Austen’s letters, and of course, the immortal novels themselves. What luxury!


 July, 2012

Be Different

Be Different: My Adventures with Asperger’s and My Advice for Fellow Aspergians, Misfits, Families, and Teachers

John Elder Robison (2011, Broadway Books)

    A couple of years ago I wrote about John Elder Robison’s memoir, Look Me in the Eye.  In his second book, Be Different, Robison has written a guide for young people with Asperger’s, and their families and teachers. A little less funny than his memoir, it’s also considerably less tragic: since being diagnosed with Asperger’s at age forty, Robison has educated himself about the condition as it’s viewed by educators and neurologists, and helped to educate them in turn.

    One thing he learned was that educators were giving Look Me in the Eye to their students with Asperger’s, and using it to start conversations about their experiences. The ways in which Robison went off the rails as a teenager, dropping out of high school and even running away to live in the woods, and the fact that he recovered to become an adult capable of work and love, must come as a tremendous relief to those kids; it’s as if they were sojourning on another planet and met someone who spoke their language.

    The other thing he discovered was that professionals in the field were routinely missing signs of distress in those young people, because their behaviour was considered so odd or extreme anyway. There’s a rather staggering account, in the introduction, of Robison seeing some documentary footage of an Aspergian kid. The boy is shown with his eyes darting side to side, “...like a lone deer in a forest filled with wolves. With a pang, I recognized his look the moment I saw it. That was me, in tenth grade, at Amherst High.” But when Robison showed this scene to a therapist whom he liked and trusted, the man responded, “They call it furtive eye movement....It doesn’t mean anything.” Oh, but it does. As this was the rare human social signal he recognized without any effort at all, Robison saw that his translation needed to go both ways.

    He speaks with credibility about how to live in the social world, as one who has learned the hard way. The manners he resisted learning from his grandparents as a child, thinking them arbitrary and illogical, have turned out to be practical tools for, if not making friends, at least being someone other people can make friends with. Autism-spectrum kids may have been told all their lives to conform to illogical social rules; now someone can tell them why. “In my antisocial days, dress didn’t matter, because I was an outcast everywhere. Now, when I join social groups, I realize it’s a lot easier to fit in if I’m dressed in a style that’s at least generally compatible with that of the other people. Also, I never go out in public in my underwear.”

    I really enjoy the dry reserve of this kind of writing, and the straightforwardness. Robison, like others of his tribe, is literal-minded to a fault. When he was little, adults used to assume that he understood what they meant, rather than what they said, and his responses consequently made him sound like a smart aleck, much to his confusion. Not that he’s serious all the time: when his brother expressed trepidation at the eyes of wild animals eight feet off the ground, Robison loses no time. “‘Those are pine demons,’ I say with a serious expression. ‘Fierce fighters.’ Nothing more needs to be said.” If his brother wants to know that the eyes belong to squirrels perched in trees, he’s going to have to go find out for himself.

     In fact, comfort in natural settings is one of the strengths of Robison’s neural difference. He feels at peace there. He is attuned to the wild from long experience running around in the woods as a boy, and from hiking wilderness trails as a man. “All that time, I was aware of possible dangers, but I never felt threatened. And my confidence was justified, because nothing ever ate me.”

    He also feels at home in the logical world of electrical engineering, which led to a career building amplifiers for rock and roll bands. His similar fascination with mechanical engineering progressed from bicycle gears to Range Rover repairs. It’s not that these subjects came naturally, exactly, but that Robison was interested enough to spend hours and hours concentrating on them to the point of mastery. One of his key pieces of advice for young geeks is to find something to focus on that people will pay them to do.

    Reading Be Different, the rest of us neurotypicals (‘nypicals’, in Robison’s handy abbreviation) are eavesdropping on advice that’s not directly meant for us, but I think that’s all right. Enjoy it for the distinctive way Robison’s mind works. Appreciate his compassion for his younger self, and the ingenuity of his approach to situations he’s not naturally good at. Read it for insight into people around you whose behavior is significantly different from what you expect; it may be that their perceptions are different, too. And in our own ways, don’t we all struggle with the question of when to conform, and when to do things our own way?
   
   
Any Good Books
June, 2012

Maphead

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks
Ken Jennings (2011, Scribner)

     You may remember Ken Jennings as the 2004 contestant who won the game show Jeopardy! 74 times in a row, a feat which permitted him to retire from computer programming and devote himself to his many and various interests. Happily for us, he’s willing to share, first with Brainiac, his book about trivia buffs, and now with an insider’s look at maps and the people who love them.

    Like most people so afflicted, his fascination started in childhood, and in a single flash: “You see that first map, and your mind is rewired, probably forever.”  Boys who get the bug trace rivers, memorize state and provincial capitals, and invent their own maps, frequently in solitude. When Jennings himself was eight, his family moved to South Korea, and he immersed himself in maps of the United States, plotting imaginary road trips over the exotic highways of Delaware.

    Maphead is about some of the ways that solitude is broken, or at least shared. The National Geographic Bee winnows middle schoolers from across the nation with a series of grueling tests and contests; the winners meet in Washington to answer questions about “Zimbabwean national parks, Dominican volcanoes, Italian car production statistics, Swazi life expectancy--nothing seems beyond their grasp.” It’s a chance for the kids to make friends with their peers and fellow geeks, people who can understand them as even their parents cannot.

    Those kids study more than they travel (though the winner earns a cruise to the Galápagos Islands, with Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, no less.) Other mapheads travel obsessively, collecting destinations: the Travelers’ Century Club, in Southern California, is restricted to people who have visited over one hundred countries. The Highpointers Club unites people trying to visit the highest points in all fifty states, whether a snowy peak, or a high spot in a cornfield. Self-described roadgeeks may drive around looking for the ghost of U.S. 99, the West Coast highway that was replaced by Interstate 5, or taking pictures of every interchange sign between Seattle and Boston on I-90.

    The recent improvement in the accuracy of the Global Positioning System made possible the sport of geocaching, which sends devotees off the beaten track in search of hidden treasures. GPS coordinates lead to, typically, a waterproof container that holds a logbook and perhaps a few trinkets for swapping. Jennings takes his six-year-old out to look in the woods across the street from their house: “A $20 billion array of sophisticated military satellites is helping me find Tupperware in the woods. Truly we are living in the future.”

    It’s a future with more computers and smart gadgets, and fewer free gas station maps, (of which a staggering eight billion were printed in the twentieth century.) But it seems likely that maps will continue their hold on the imagination. Jennings thinks he knows why: “Almost every map, whether of a shopping mall, a city, or a continent, will show us two kinds of places: places where we’ve been and places we’ve never been. The nearby and the faraway exist together in the same frame, our world undeniably connected to the new and unexpected. We can understand, at a glance, our place in the universe, our potential to go and see new things, and the way to get back home afterward.”

Malled

Malled: My unintentional career in retail
Caitlin Kelly (2011, Penguin)

Caitlin Kelly lost her job at the New York Daily News in the summer of 2006. A year later, finding freelance work rarer and more poorly paid than she’d seen in her thirty years in journalism, she applied for part-time work at a newly opening clothing store in a mall half an hour outside of New York City. She was unprepared for the physical and emotional rigors of retail, and has written Malled to complain about them.
There’s some good information here; the chapter on weathering the economic downturn, which put tens of thousands of white collar workers from other fields into competition for retail work, would have made a reasonably useful article. The retail industry employs fifteen million Americans, paying a median wage of less than nine dollars an hour, and offering five million of those people only part-time work; fifty per cent of the jobs turn over every three months. It’s a tough way to make a living, whether one is a student, the parent of young children, or a laid-off journalist, teacher, or business executive.
And Kelly could have gotten at least a few juicy blog posts out of the conditions at The North Face, where she worked. It’s one of the chain’s busiest stores, supplying an endless line of demanding, entitled customers with pricey equipment for skiing, camping, or walking around the city trying to look like they do these things. Kelly didn’t work on commission, but she took a competitive pride in meeting her weekly sales goals, and mostly felt good about the value of the products she was selling. But if the customers weren’t driving her batty with their foolish and annoying demands, corporate management was coming up with some new way to be stupid.
Again, that’s not an uninteresting subject, though it’s not clear that her parochial experience is the best example. You’d have to suspect that the natty perfection of the sales floor, with all the jackets sorted by size and facing the same way, required hours of somewhat mindless labor to maintain; and you’d readily believe that the store displays were all designed by one highly-paid person who went from place to place doing nothing else; and you wouldn’t be surprised that the behind-the-scenes spaces of the store were nowhere near as clean, spacious and well-lit as the sales floor; in fact, they’re often quite hazardous places.
It’s not much of a stretch from these realizations to the fact that, from the perspective of a giant corporation, an individual sales associate is really not important at all. The workers’ pay is the best place to save a buck, and if they get sick or injured, or simply burned out, there’s a stack of applications to choose another one from. And if their bodies are expendable, how much more so their minds and spirits, though a facade of expertise and cheerfulness is part of what’s demanded of the salespeople, no matter how long they’ve been standing on their tired, sore feet.
Caitlin Kelly, unfortunately, brings us this news with a large side helping of narcissism and entitlement. Her lack of self-awareness, irritating as it is, is unintentionally rather comic, too. Every chapter of Malled includes some chatter about her previous success in journalism (she interviewed the Queen of England!! On a yacht!!!); or the places she’s traveled, or how many languages she speaks, or how much money her family used to have.
All this is by contrast with her full-time co-workers, who are struggling to get through community college, or to buy toys and clothes for their small children. Her snootiness toward them is matched only by her rage when customers are snooty with her. (Those foreigners are the worst!! They’re such terrible racists!!!) In fact, she shares their contempt for the work she does. She is Awfully Glad she isn’t Really the Type of Person who works in such a job, not permanently at least. She’ll turn around and be just as demanding and obnoxious a customer, leaving a store in a rage because she can’t get a sales associate to sell her a (two-hundred-dollar! silk! designer!) blouse. The whole experience, given that she’s working just one or two shifts a week for most of the twenty-seven months she keeps the job, comes across as slumming.
Also unfortunately, the book is not much of an advertisement for what are supposed to be her real skills in journalism, writing, and editing ($150 an hour!!!). When she’s talking about or quoting other people, she’s making only the barest stab at descriptions or transitional explanations. When she’s talking about herself, she goes round and round in circles, patting herself on the back. A firmer editorial hand would have trimmed this material, but the result would have been a pretty skinny book.
Some of what’s wrong with Kelly’s work experience has obvious solutions, though the problems would require district management to acknowledge them, and throw a little money at them. Fix broken equipment, light the stockroom well enough to see the stock, hire enough workers for the Christmas rush, maybe even offer bonuses to the management and staff of the best-performing stores--how hard is that? But corporations are driven by a philosophy of neo-Taylorism, which holds that if any employees ever have a free moment on the job, you’ve hired too many of them; and if they are comfortable enough to stay a few years, you’re paying them too much. Rationally as well as morally, these attitudes are wrong, but I don’t see them changing any time soon.

Chances Are

Chances Are...: Adventures in Probability
Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan (2006, Viking.)

The dedication of Chances Are... gives a marvelously concise precis of what it’s about: “To Jane, who likes probability, Bob, who likes chance, and Felix, who likes risk.” What might that mean, exactly? What does it tell us about Jane, Bob, and Felix? Probability, chance, and risk are constant conditions of human life, but we haven’t always understood very much about them. Ellen and Michael Kaplan, mother and son, have written an elegant book both on what we need to know, and why we should care.

Though the ancient Romans had games of chance, it was not till the seventeenth century that Blaise Pascal set forth proofs of some fundamental issues in probability. Pascal, with his Wager and his triangle, is a relatively familiar figure; I didn’t know about Isaac Newton’s contemporary Abraham de Moivre, whom the Kaplans bring to life with superb economy. Of de Moivre’s parlous circumstances as a Huguenot refugee in England, they write, “This shabby man, ensconced at the window end of a greasy table in Slaughter’s Tavern, had, through the clever manipulation of abstract terms, discovered–or created–a way to describe how things happen the way they ‘ought’: how Chance scatters itself around the central pillar of Design in the shape of a bell.”

With economical clarity, we are introduced to the Marquis de Laplace, his student Poisson, Henri Lebesque, and Richard von Mises. And who could forget Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov, born in 1903 on a train crossing Russia: “He remained interested in everything, from metallurgy to Pushkin, from the papacy to nude skiing.” His interests included mathematical logic, algorithmic complexity, and, “with characteristic verve, he hoicked up the tottery edifice of probability and slipped new foundations underneath.” As they’ve done with all those other singular minds, the Kaplans let us stand at the door of Kolmogorov’s work and look in.

Of course, the mathematics are only part of the story. Chances Are... is equally concerned with the human element. What’s the difference between the apparently pure hand of fate at the roulette table and the swagger and bluff of poker? Which kind of game is the stock market? In any case, it helps to start with a pile of money; even in a perfectly fair game, deeper pockets win.

Insurance is another complicated game of numbers and the human factor. Lloyds of London still operates as a series of face to face encounters between the buyers and sellers of risk. As the Kaplans say, “...each time probability leaves its cozy study full of urns and dice and descends to the marketplace of human affairs, it reveals its dependence on human capabilities–on judgement and definition. As powerful a device as it is, it remains a hand tool, not a machine.”

Medical science calls for judgement, too, complicated by ethics, and by the fact that bodies, and diseases, are often more different than they are alike. Science is based on repeatable events, and statistics on aggregated events, but we get sick as individuals. Doctors are pretty poor at guessing where in a range of outcomes our case will fall, which is, of course, the only thing we really want to know. Our peculiar psychology complicates the case further: “Red sugar pills stimulate; blue ones depress–brand name placebos work better than generic. And higher dosages are usually more effective.” It’s a wonder that clinical trials give any useful information; indeed, the truly informative trial often comes only after a new treatment is released for general use.

Often, in medicine, we’d benefit from an understanding of the likelihood of false positive results, as in tests for rare conditions. Courts of law suffer under the same deficiency, because crimes are such rare acts that we don’t have a strong intuitive background. Unfortunately, we’re not usually offered a strong statistical background to compensate for that lack; judges may be suspicious of statistical reasoning because they aren’t equipped to tell good reasoning from rhetorical hokum, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be helpful.

Chances Are... combines such utility with great pleasure. It’s very clear on the math, but also on a vast swath of biography, history, and science. At heart, it’s a deeply humanist endeavor: the philosophical strands lightly flavor the whole. Like this gem: “The formal calculation of probabilities will always feel artificial to us because it slows and makes conscious our leap from perception to conclusion. It forces us to acknowledge the gulf of uncertainty and randomness that gapes below--and leaps are never easy if you look down.”

Factual certainty is elusive and contingent; if that’s the case, we are wise, and brave, to acknowledge it. Here’s to the courage for the leap.