Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

James Nestor (2021, Riverhead Books)

 

          In Breath, James Nestor has found the ultimate subject for immersive reporting. Every one of us breathes every day, yet most of us know almost nothing about it. Actually, we know less than some ancient civilizations did: "Seven books of the Chinese Tao dating back to around 400 BCE focused entirely on breathing, how it could kill us or heal us, depending on how we used it." Today our doctors have all kinds of equipment, of course, and could readily study our respiration rates and the composition of our blood gases, but they almost never do. What are they missing, and why does it matter?

        In the past two centuries, some people have rediscovered and tried to reintroduce what the Taoists (and the Hindus, and the Buddhists) knew. "Many early pioneers in this discipline weren't scientists. They were tinkerers, a kind of rogue group I call 'pulmonauts,' who stumbled on the powers of breathing because nothing else could help them." Their work has consequently had trouble getting a lasting foothold in the culture of medicine. The chance to hear about these odd ducks is a strength, and a delight, of this book.

        Carl Stough, for example, started his career as a choral conductor. He went on to teach opera singers, paraplegics, and people with emphysema better ways of breathing. Under his training, the 1968 U.S. men's track team had one of the great Olympic competitions in history, setting five world records in Mexico City. He broke new ground in every field he tried, but he didn't train anybody to carry on his work. "Stough broke all the rules; he expanded lungs and extended life spans. And yet, most people today have never heard of him."

        Anders Olsson is a Swedish man who has become obsessed with better ways of breathing. He joined Nestor in a mildly insane experiment: they had themselves studied at intervals while they underwent ten days of breathing only through their mouths. The experience of nasal obstruction was as gruesome as you'd imagine: "My snoring has increased 4,820 percent from ten days ago." Fortunately, switching to nasal breathing for the next ten days relieved their headaches, sleep apnea, and other ills relatively quickly.

        Olsson joined Nestor in this project because his own research suggests that overbreathing is a widespread problem, that we actually need more carbon dioxide in our blood to make the best use of the oxygen we take in. Breathing more slowly, and spending more time between inhalations, seems to improve the functions of the nervous system, the heart, and the lungs, and reduce overall stress on the body. Some psychologists are extending that insight into treatment for anxiety disorders as well, having patients inhale extra carbon dioxide to stave off panic attacks. Maybe that's why we can sometimes get a calming effect from a brisk walk.

          Nestor also found that our breathing is also compromised by the changes in facial structure that came along with processed food over the past three centuries. It's not just genetics, it's functional. Of course, he's dogged about the question. "There had to be procedures, manipulations, or exercises that could reverse the past few centuries of damage from soft and mushy industrialized food. There had to be something that could help me with my own obstructed airways, and the wheezing, respiratory problems, and congestion I'd often experienced."

           There is: more exercise for the jaw. He actually added bone mass to his lower face by biting on a retainer and chewing gum. "The chew-airway connection, like so much else breath-related, was old news. As I dug through a century of scientific papers on the subject over several months, I felt like I was trapped in a respiratory research spin cycle. Different scientists, different decades; the same conclusions, the same collective amnesia."

            Since we breathe all day, every day, this book will make you self-conscious. How fast am I breathing right now? Can I walk faster without panting? How can I keep my mouth closed at night, comfortably? (I'm trying out a sleep mask as a chin sling; it's pretty comfortable, and I'm sleeping better.) Because this book is selling so well, I have hopes that this knowledge will be taken up in formal medicine. It probably won't, though, because it comes from outside the walls, which kicks up medicine's own immune response. Nevertheless, better breathing might make us healthier. It's up to us to be curious, and willing to try simple things. 

 

 

Any Good Books, May 1, 2021 

published by email

 

Rock Breaks Scissors:

Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody

William Poundstone (2014; Little, Brown and Company)

       We hear a lot these days about algorithms behind the scenes of our digital lives: the minute we shop or browse for news online, Big Data draws a bead on us. Research shows that it would take a great deal of effort not to be predictable in this way; in fact, we probably couldn't achieve it if we tried.  This is not just true of my taste in L.L. Bean sweaters - and what I might be willing to pay for them - but all the way down to the smallest atoms of choice, like a friendly game of Rock, Paper, Scissors over a bar tab. (Not always so friendly: did you know that there are international tournaments of RPS?)

 

      There's actually a game one step more primitive than that, in which two players make individual choices, such as heads or tails on a penny they hold, and award the win to either matching coins, for one player, or non-matching coins for the other. Any binary will do: odds and evens, or yeses and noes. When playing against a machine, the ideal would be to play a random sequence of guesses, and avoid falling into predictable patterns. 

 

      Practically nobody can do this; our vision of randomness turns out to be guessable by the most primitive machines. Back in the fifties, a couple of the masterminds at Bell Labs built such machines; Claude Shannon's had sixteen bits of memory, fewer than you have in your fingers and toes. "A stream of brilliant and egotistical scientists, engineers, and mathematicians passed through Bell Labs in the 1950's. Shannons' outguessing machine was the sword in the stone. Anyone with pretensions to being smart could hardly leave without matching his genius against it. Few could resist the challenge, and few left without sacrificing a bit of ego." Shannon himself, naturally, had the only consistent winning record. 

 

      Poundstone's book looks into research on the prediction problems we encounter in everyday life: multiple choice tests, March Madness brackets, or tennis serves; and some that are rare but consequential: picking unguessable passwords, or offering the right price on a house. His advice won't make you unbeatable, but these are cases where moving the odds a little bit is at least pleasing, and possibly profitable. 

 

      Some of the advice amounts to: be humble. You're human, so your intuition about what randomness looks like is probably terrible. Your intuitions about football betting, in a point-spread tournament, are probably so bad that you'd win just as often betting the opposite of your preferred card, because if your contrarian Evil Twin wins, there are probably no other bets like that to split the pot with. 

 

       The stock market is the classic case of needing to outwit other humans as ill-informed as you are. Poundstone's long term investment strategy, based on a ten-year trailing average of price-to-earnings ratios, is the polar opposite of day trading. It's austere in the extreme, but he's probably right. 

 

      Even if you have no skin in such games, Rock Breaks Scissors is an invigorating book. The writing is clean and clear, and Poundstone follows the questions he raises to a reasonable depth. And his goal is salutary: "To understand the misperception of randomness is to gain power, not over fate but over ourselves. Fortuna keeps spinning her wheel, and no one gets out of the game."

Any Good Books, April 1, 2021 by email.

A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile

A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile

James Alan McPherson (2000, Touchstone)

       The essays of James Alan McPherson (1943-2016) that are collected here were written near the end of his distinguished career as a fiction writer, essayist, and teacher. They offer glimpses of his life as a student, a father, and an observer of American culture and history. His range is impressive, not to say intimidating: he's also capable of reckoning with what ancient Rome, Shakespeare, and modern Japan might have to say to us.

      The exile of the subtitle refers to the fact that, beginning in 1981, he made his home in Iowa City, where he taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; that's a long way from his childhood: "I lived in a lower-class black community in Savannah, Georgia, attended segregated public schools, and knew no white people socially. I can't remember thinking of this last fact as a disadvantage, but I do know that early on I was being conditioned to believe that I was not supposed to know any white people on social terms." As fate would have it, he became a reader, and then a student at Morris Brown College in Atlanta. At Harvard Law School, he studied fiction writing on the side, and followed up with an MFA from the Iowa workshop, having already been published by the Atlantic Monthly.

      Iowa may be one of the whitest places there is; what McPherson liked about it was that it was self-consciously a place with customs and rituals, a sense of the Done Thing. He went so far as to pose as a sports fan, in concert with the prevailing ethos. "...I was sure to find all the butchers watching a game on television. They had already assumed that I was an athlete because all the black males they noticed were athletes. I did not disappoint them." But of course, there's much more going on with him than that. It's just that you can't get close enough to people to figure out their real stories without making some gesture of community.

       McPherson's own community included Ralph Ellison, whom he appreciates here both as a hero and as a friend, in an essay responding to the publication of Ellison's Juneteenth. Ellison, McPherson says, brought to the modernist project a blues sensibility, capable of mingling the inescapable strife of daily life with a streak of humor, and of personal style. After all, among the ancient Greeks, "life was tragic, full of agon. But to them it was also comic. And the two dramatic categories were linked."

       They're linked in Huckleberry Finn, certainly. In an essay occasioned by the restoration of some passages of the book that had been cut, McPherson observes that Mark Twain "was writing about the possibility of friendships across racial lines, at a time when such emotional connections were considered radical. He was writing about the struggles of the human heart confined to the structure of white supremacy...yet Twain, like Stephen Crane after him, still wrestled with the possibilities of heroic action within the confines of a corrupt uncaring culture."

       Such matters are in McPherson's purview as well, particularly when he reads Othello in the shadow of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, which were recent history at the time. The outlines of our life today were clear to him already: "Prosperity has been polarized, with great wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The institution of the nation-state is rapidly being replaced by global corporate ties under invisible managements. The middle class is frightened. The poor no longer exist as human beings. Europe is becoming one federated nation, while the demographics of the United States are changing relentlessly. Information is everywhere, but there is less and less of it with any substance."

      That's the world we still live in, and we can't say nobody saw it coming.

 

Emailed as  Any Good Books, March 1, 2021

Still in Love

 

Still in Love: a novel

Michael Downing (Counterpoint, 2019)

      Mark Sternum has it made, teaching creative writing at Hellman College. He has tenure, and teaches only two classes per semester. He's conscientious, though, going so far as to complete the assignment for each class, submitting it to be marked up by the Professor, his teaching partner. The Professor is a hard case, and a bit of a pedant. "When would the Professor want to discuss ideas for stories? Never. When would it be useful to disclose the autobiographical basis of a story? Never. How much time will we spend brainstorming and writing in class? None. 'I will never be interested in anything except every word you write.'"

      Mark, on the other hand, is there to mother the students. It's his mailbox that is full of submitted work on Monday mornings, and whose office hours are a parade of students who need to discuss syntactical confusion, ideas for stories, and the feedback they've received from the Professor. He devises the assignments, does all the copying, and keeps track of the lucky twelve who are admitted to the class. On the whole, this arrangement satisfies Mark. He knows it isn't fashionable to admit how much he loves teaching, but he's exceedingly lucky to be at Hellman, where he can still enjoy it wholeheartedly.

      Mark's romantic partner, Paul, is away in Italy for the spring semester of 2017. We met Paul previously in the delightful Perfect Agreement; they are still in the same awkward–or perfect–arrangement by which Mark keeps a too-small house in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and Paul keeps a too-small apartment overlooking the Cambridge Common. Hellman lies conveniently between the two, so Mark can retreat back and forth; his Saab mechanic is in Ipswich, but the Chinese food is better in Cambridge.

      Still in Love hits the notes of traditional academic comedy, such as the tension between the tenured faculty, who get offices, and the contingent, who barely get desks. Will they vote to form a union? There's department politics: "[The department chair] had a damnably good memory and a thick file on everyone in the department to back her up when necessary. She had reluctantly agreed to be chair when she was first asked to take the five-year appointment. That was ten years ago." The other English faculty appear in quick sketches: "He was built like a broomstick, and he had long cultivated an image in the department as a misanthrope, which was his attempt to take credit for being disliked." Or sometimes little mysteries: "It's always hard to tell if he's sneaky or senile. Take your pick."

      What I liked best about the book, though, is the course itself. We are in the position of the auditing students, who seat themselves on the deep window ledges around the classroom, while the enrolled students sit around the table. Some of the students need to go back to first principles, like what conjunctions are, and how to tell phrases from clauses. As for how to combine them, regard this little beauty: "When the dependent clause comes first, you need a comma. You need no comma when the independent clause comes first."

      I know my way around prose, but writing fiction is an art so far beyond my knowledge as to appear magical. Downing is simultaneously describing effects and practicing them, especially in the assignments Mark completes. Seemingly impossible technical requirements - words of one syllable, a 125-word sentence - make the writers think hard about every word, and what it contributes to the reader's understanding. They may even, like Mark, come to love limitations, which give form and structure to the work. The Professor's dogmatism is as lovable as it is prickly: "Don't withhold facts to create mystery. That's manipulation, and readers will sense it. The real mysteries of life are not withheld facts. The real mysteries are simple and persistent questions. Why doesn't she love me? How could he say that?"

     Just so, Downing has strewn the novel with mysteries to leave us with. Do Mark and Paul ever get to live together, and should they? Whither Hellman, the adjuncts' union, writing, teaching itself? Why read fiction? I'm a little closer to grasping that one.

 

Any Good Books,

February, 2021

Emailed 2/1/21

 

The Best Cook in the World

 

The Best Cook in the World: Tales from my Momma's Southern Table

Rick Bragg (Vintage, 2018)

Cookbooks, I'm told, vary along a spectrum from the dry, scientific, just-the-facts style to the ridiculously discursive, which lay an elaborate scene for each dish, including its provenance and what the weather was like when the writer first ate it. In The Best Cook in the World, Rick Bragg is surely setting the farthest boundary of the discursive style. Since I'm not really looking for a cookbook to cook out of, that suits me just fine.

In the first place, Bragg is not at all a cook, himself. He took a mind to interview his mother when she was in her late seventies about how she did what she did in the kitchen, in hopes of preserving some knowledge that might be going the way of the old growth forest. "She does not own a mixer or a blender. There is a forty-year-old lopsided sifter for her flour, and a hand-cranked can opener. She mixes with a bent fork and a big spoon, smelted, I believe during the Spanish-American War." The recipes in the books come in teaspoons and cups and such, for our convenience, but "[s]he cooks in dabs, and smidgens, and tads, and a measurement she mysteriously refers to as 'you know, hon, just some.'" And how long does it need to cook? Well, I'm sorry, but Margaret Bundrum Bragg doesn't know you, and she doesn't know how hot your oven runs. You'll know when it's done, if you're paying attention like you should.

In the second place, this is real country food. In the northeastern corner of Alabama, where Bragg's people come from, nobody needed to be told to eat locally, or 'farm-to-table'–that's just what food was. "The country people, the working people, subsisted mostly on beans, greens, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, pork, and sometimes chicken, when one could be spared or perhaps stolen." And all this with plenty of butter; if not butter, bacon grease; and if not bacon grease, lard. You can only eat food this rich in fat if you have also chopped the wood for the stove to cook it on, or been out hauling logs or digging wells all day.

The family stories Bragg tells go back a hundred years, to when his great-grandfather James J. Bundrum went off to Georgia after (probably) killing another man in a drunken fight. He was a mean, violent old cuss, but he could cook like an angel, so in 1924 his son, Charlie, went and found him in the Georgia hills, and brought him back to teach Charlie's new wife how to cook. The sixteen-year-old bride, Ava, was just as hard-headed as the old man, and "it would be a fat lie to claim that her tutelage began with anything remotely akin to enthusiasm on her part." As iron sharpens iron, though, these two stubborn people eventually came to an understanding. He taught her biscuits and cornbread, and planting and foraging, and how to select the chicken whose day it is to die. "Spare the young when you can, and let them grow into fat hens or good roosters. It might be as tough as a two-by-twelve, but would be good for broth, or dumplings, or stew. And if you have to eat a chicken your kids have named, wait till they are visiting relatives, and blame the foxes."

That last is a level of sneakiness, not to say larceny, that runs in the family, because people have to eat. Where did that stoat come from, or those two pigs feet? (They come in fours.) And why was that cow trying to cross a railway trestle when it came to grief? These are mysterious matters, but in time they became the stuff of stories as delicious as the food they describe. Even the worst year, 1934, when Charlie was serving time for bootlegging, led to wonderful suppers consisting entirely of sweet potato pie or cobbler - cobbled together, indeed, by the best cook in the world. Bragg's own mother wasn't yet born in those days, but she would later work her magic keeping three sons alive on government commodities, and on what Bragg called in another book, "the table scraps of nothing."

Should you ever wish to wax elegiac about hillbillies, I'd suggest this or Bragg's earlier memoirs as a good place to begin. He treats these prideful, stubborn people both honestly and lovingly. Sometimes they drink, sometimes they cuss, sometimes they sing Hank Williams tunes over the stove, and you'll wish you were there to hear them, and to sit down over simple food, cooked well.

 

Any Good Books, by email

January 1, 2021