Search Mar 31, 3:58 pm 30Obamacare, The Unknown Ideal
by Paul Krugman
No, I haven’t lost my mind — or suddenly become an Ayn Rand disciple. It’s not my ideal; in a better world I’d call for single-payer, and a significant role for the government in directly providing care.
But Ross Douthat, in the course of realistically warning his fellow conservatives that Obamacare doesn’t seem to be collapsing, goes on to tell them that they’re going to have to come up with a serious alternative.
But Obamacare IS the conservative alternative, and not just because it was originally devised at the Heritage Foundation. It’s what a health-care system that does what even conservatives say they want, like making sure that people with preexisting conditions can get coverage, has to look like if it isn’t single-payer.
I don’t really think one more repetition of the logic will convince many people, but here we go again. Suppose you want preexisting conditions covered. Then you have to impose community rating — insurers must offer the same policies to people regardless of medical history. But just doing that causes a death spiral, because people wait until they’re sick to buy insurance. So you also have to have a mandate, requiring healthy people to join the risk pool. And to make buying insurance possible for people with lower incomes, you have to have subsidies.
And what you’ve just defined are the essentials of ObamaRomneyCare. It’s a three-legged stool that needs all three legs. If you want to cover preexisting conditions, you must have the mandate; if you want the mandate, you must have subsidies. If you think there’s some magic market-based solution that obviates the stuff conservatives don’t like while preserving the stuff they like, you’re deluding yourself.
What this means in practice is that any notion that Republicans will go beyond trying to sabotage the law and come up with an alternative is fantasy. Again, Obamacare is the conservative alternative, and you can’t move further right without doing no reform at all.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Sunday, March 30, 2014
About Book Readers
Books are losing the war for our attention. Here’s how they could fight back.
By Matt McFarland March 19 at 9:13 amMore Comments
The joy of reading books has become less common. (Hannibal Hanschke/EPA)
Technology has reshaped everything from how we communicate to how we find a mate or a job. Yet the experience of reading books remains largely untransformed, and the popularity of books has suffered in the face of flashier media formats that are perfected for our busy world.
The number of non-book readers has tripled since 1978. And e-books aren’t saving the day. According to the Association of American Publishers, e-book sales were flat or in decline for most of 2013.
What’s happening to books? They’ve contained a wealth of human knowledge for generations. Books such as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “The Jungle” have helped inspired movements and advanced human culture. But books struggle to compete with new forms of media that better grab our attention. Our smartphones and tablets chirp or vibrate when we receive e-mails and text messages. Notifications from social networks and apps force their way onto our devices through pop-up notifications. As books sit silently on shelves, our culture risks having great voices and ideas drowned out.
“The form that is long-form text, a couple hundred pages of words has been well-honed by humans over the course of centuries,” said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Amazon Kindle content. “There are things that you can learn in a novel or in a well-written biography that you can’t learn from a movie or learn the same way. That’s why the form has evolved the way that it has.”
Books can still open our eyes to a world of knowledge, but their reserved nature hurts them.
“Most people walk around with some kind of device or have access to some kind of device that allows them to choose how to use their time,” Grandinetti said. “In a world with that much ubiquitous choice, books need to continue to evolve to compete for someone’s time and interest.”
Our current notion of a digital book may be too close to that of a physical book. The modern struggles of books and e-books suggests we need more reinvention to retain readers. But how?
One possibility would be to integrate more multimedia into e-books, which don’t offer the same dynamic story-telling as HTML and Web sites. There aren’t e-books being published that capture the blend of prose, photos, videos and graphics that we saw in The New York Times Snow Fall project.
For masterpieces that have already been written, embracing multimedia isn’t a solution. Plato’s “Republic” or the collected works of Shakespeare can’t be sexed up with digital graphics and short videos. But Spritz could help them.
Spritz is a Boston-based start-up devoted to making reading easier and faster. Its focus is on-the-go reading. Words flash rapidly, which helps hold the attention of readers. Our eyes are naturally drawn to movement and change. Plus, because words are flashing faster than the rate most people read at, we should all be able to get more reading done.
“We’re all pressed for time because it’s an information overload,” said Spritz founder and CEO Frank Waldman, who only finds the time to read books while flying. “The reason people aren’t reading e-books is because they’re so busy reading e-mails or catching up on the news.”
He compares Spritz to the lack of distractions running on a treadmill offers vs. being outside.
“You go out on the road and you have to watch out for road conditions, weather conditions. It’s up and downhill and much harder to do,” Waldman said. “When reading on the printed page, I feel distracted by all the others things around it. I have to swipe and swipe and swipe. It’s not as easy as settling in and having words stream to brain.”
Waldman describes Spritz’s use of the optimal recognition point as the company’s secret sauce (it’s the red letter you see in the demo video above). Words are positioned on the Spritz display so that the optimal recognition point remains steady, so our eyes never have to move. Waldman points to a 2005 research paper, which said for languages that read from left to right, the optimal viewing position is between the beginning and middle of the word. The positioning of words means time isn’t wasted scanning for the optimal recognition point of the next word to be read.
In limited testing, Spritz has found comprehension isn’t negatively affected at up to 400 words per minute. For people who struggle to find time to read books, Spritz could be a game-changer. At 400 words a minute, the “Catcher in the Rye” could be read in three hours and four minutes.
So far the response to Spritz has been generally very positive. Spritz has had 20,000 people register to receive its software development kit. It doesn’t plan to release its own app. At some point, it plans to charge users a fee along the lines of WhatsApp, which chargers $0.99 a year after a year of use.
Time will tell if it can turn the tide on the rise of non-book readers.
Books are losing the war for our attention. Here’s how they could fight back.
By Matt McFarland March 19 at 9:13 amMore Comments
The joy of reading books has become less common. (Hannibal Hanschke/EPA)
Technology has reshaped everything from how we communicate to how we find a mate or a job. Yet the experience of reading books remains largely untransformed, and the popularity of books has suffered in the face of flashier media formats that are perfected for our busy world.
The number of non-book readers has tripled since 1978. And e-books aren’t saving the day. According to the Association of American Publishers, e-book sales were flat or in decline for most of 2013.
What’s happening to books? They’ve contained a wealth of human knowledge for generations. Books such as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “The Jungle” have helped inspired movements and advanced human culture. But books struggle to compete with new forms of media that better grab our attention. Our smartphones and tablets chirp or vibrate when we receive e-mails and text messages. Notifications from social networks and apps force their way onto our devices through pop-up notifications. As books sit silently on shelves, our culture risks having great voices and ideas drowned out.
“The form that is long-form text, a couple hundred pages of words has been well-honed by humans over the course of centuries,” said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Amazon Kindle content. “There are things that you can learn in a novel or in a well-written biography that you can’t learn from a movie or learn the same way. That’s why the form has evolved the way that it has.”
Books can still open our eyes to a world of knowledge, but their reserved nature hurts them.
“Most people walk around with some kind of device or have access to some kind of device that allows them to choose how to use their time,” Grandinetti said. “In a world with that much ubiquitous choice, books need to continue to evolve to compete for someone’s time and interest.”
Our current notion of a digital book may be too close to that of a physical book. The modern struggles of books and e-books suggests we need more reinvention to retain readers. But how?
One possibility would be to integrate more multimedia into e-books, which don’t offer the same dynamic story-telling as HTML and Web sites. There aren’t e-books being published that capture the blend of prose, photos, videos and graphics that we saw in The New York Times Snow Fall project.
For masterpieces that have already been written, embracing multimedia isn’t a solution. Plato’s “Republic” or the collected works of Shakespeare can’t be sexed up with digital graphics and short videos. But Spritz could help them.
Spritz is a Boston-based start-up devoted to making reading easier and faster. Its focus is on-the-go reading. Words flash rapidly, which helps hold the attention of readers. Our eyes are naturally drawn to movement and change. Plus, because words are flashing faster than the rate most people read at, we should all be able to get more reading done.
“We’re all pressed for time because it’s an information overload,” said Spritz founder and CEO Frank Waldman, who only finds the time to read books while flying. “The reason people aren’t reading e-books is because they’re so busy reading e-mails or catching up on the news.”
He compares Spritz to the lack of distractions running on a treadmill offers vs. being outside.
“You go out on the road and you have to watch out for road conditions, weather conditions. It’s up and downhill and much harder to do,” Waldman said. “When reading on the printed page, I feel distracted by all the others things around it. I have to swipe and swipe and swipe. It’s not as easy as settling in and having words stream to brain.”
Waldman describes Spritz’s use of the optimal recognition point as the company’s secret sauce (it’s the red letter you see in the demo video above). Words are positioned on the Spritz display so that the optimal recognition point remains steady, so our eyes never have to move. Waldman points to a 2005 research paper, which said for languages that read from left to right, the optimal viewing position is between the beginning and middle of the word. The positioning of words means time isn’t wasted scanning for the optimal recognition point of the next word to be read.
In limited testing, Spritz has found comprehension isn’t negatively affected at up to 400 words per minute. For people who struggle to find time to read books, Spritz could be a game-changer. At 400 words a minute, the “Catcher in the Rye” could be read in three hours and four minutes.
So far the response to Spritz has been generally very positive. Spritz has had 20,000 people register to receive its software development kit. It doesn’t plan to release its own app. At some point, it plans to charge users a fee along the lines of WhatsApp, which chargers $0.99 a year after a year of use.
Time will tell if it can turn the tide on the rise of non-book readers.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently
Huffington Post
26 March 2014
Creativity works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. Creative thinking is a stable, defining characteristic in some personalities, but it may also change based on situation and context. Inspiration and ideas often arise seemingly out of nowhere and then fail to show up when we most need them, and creative thinking requires complex cognition yet is completely distinct from the thinking process.
Neuroscience paints a complicated picture of creativity. As scientists now understand it, creativity is far more complex than the right-left brain distinction would have us think (the theory being that left brain = rational and analytical, right brain = creative and emotional). In fact, creativity is thought to involve a number of cognitive processes, neural pathways and emotions, and we still don't have the full picture of how the imaginative mind works.
And psychologically speaking, creative personality types are difficult to pin down, largely because they're complex, paradoxical and tend to avoid habit or routine. And it's not just a stereotype of the "tortured artist" -- artists really may be more complicated people. Research has suggested that creativity involves the coming together of a multitude of traits, behaviors and social influences in a single person.
"It's actually hard for creative people to know themselves because the creative self is more complex than the non-creative self," Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at New York University who has spent years researching creativity, told The Huffington Post. "The things that stand out the most are the paradoxes of the creative self ... Imaginative people have messier minds."
While there's no "typical" creative type, there are some tell-tale characteristics and behaviors of highly creative people. Here are 18 things they do differently.
They daydream.
Creative types know, despite what their third-grade teachers may have said, that daydreaming is anything but a waste of time.
According to Kaufman and psychologist Rebecca L. McMillan, who co-authored a paper titled "Ode To Positive Constructive Daydreaming," mind-wandering can aid in the process of "creative incubation." And of course, many of us know from experience that our best ideas come seemingly out of the blue when our minds are elsewhere.
Although daydreaming may seem mindless, a 2012 study suggested it could actually involve a highly engaged brain state -- daydreaming can lead to sudden connections and insights because it's related to our ability to recall information in the face of distractions. Neuroscientists have also found that daydreaming involves the same brain processes associated with imagination and creativity.
They observe everything.
The world is a creative person's oyster -- they see possibilities everywhere and are constantly taking in information that becomes fodder for creative expression. As Henry James is widely quoted, a writer is someone on whom "nothing is lost."
The writer Joan Didion kept a notebook with her at all times, and said that she wrote down observations about people and events as, ultimately, a way to better understand the complexities and contradictions of her own mind:
"However dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable 'I,'" Didion wrote in her essay On Keeping A Notebook. "We are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its marker."
They work the hours that work for them.
Many great artists have said that they do their best work either very early in the morning or late at night. Vladimir Nabokov started writing immediately after he woke up at 6 or 7 a.m., and Frank Lloyd Wright made a practice of waking up at 3 or 4 a.m. and working for several hours before heading back to bed. No matter when it is, individuals with high creative output will often figure out what time it is that their minds start firing up, and structure their days accordingly.
They take time for solitude.
"In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone," wrote the American existential psychologist Rollo May.
Artists and creatives are often stereotyped as being loners, and while this may not actually be the case, solitude can be the key to producing their best work. For Kaufman, this links back to daydreaming -- we need to give ourselves the time alone to simply allow our minds to wander.
"You need to get in touch with that inner monologue to be able to express it," he says. "It's hard to find that inner creative voice if you're ... not getting in touch with yourself and reflecting on yourself."
They turn life's obstacles around.
Many of the most iconic stories and songs of all time have been inspired by gut-wrenching pain and heartbreak -- and the silver lining of these challenges is that they may have been the catalyst to create great art. An emerging field of psychology called post-traumatic growth is suggesting that many people are able to use their hardships and early-life trauma for substantial creative growth. Specifically, researchers have found that trauma can help people to grow in the areas of interpersonal relationships, spirituality, appreciation of life, personal strength, and -- most importantly for creativity -- seeing new possibilities in life.
"A lot of people are able to use that as the fuel they need to come up with a different perspective on reality," says Kaufman. "What's happened is that their view of the world as a safe place, or as a certain type of place, has been shattered at some point in their life, causing them to go on the periphery and see things in a new, fresh light, and that's very conducive to creativity."
They seek out new experiences.
Creative people love to expose themselves to new experiences, sensations and states of mind -- and this openness is a significant predictor of creative output.
"Openness to experience is consistently the strongest predictor of creative achievement," says Kaufman. "This consists of lots of different facets, but they're all related to each other: Intellectual curiosity, thrill seeking, openness to your emotions, openness to fantasy. The thing that brings them all together is a drive for cognitive and behavioral exploration of the world, your inner world and your outer world."
They "fail up."
Resilience is practically a prerequisite for creative success, says Kaufman. Doing creative work is often described as a process of failing repeatedly until you find something that sticks, and creatives -- at least the successful ones -- learn not to take failure so personally.
"Creatives fail and the really good ones fail often," Forbes contributor Steven Kotler wrote in a piece on Einstein's creative genius.
They ask the big questions.
Creative people are insatiably curious -- they generally opt to live the examined life, and even as they get older, maintain a sense of curiosity about life. Whether through intense conversation or solitary mind-wandering, creatives look at the world around them and want to know why, and how, it is the way it is.
They people-watch.
Observant by nature and curious about the lives of others, creative types often love to people-watch -- and they may generate some of their best ideas from it.
"[Marcel] Proust spent almost his whole life people-watching, and he wrote down his observations, and it eventually came out in his books," says Kaufman. "For a lot of writers, people-watching is very important ... They're keen observers of human nature."
They take risks.
Part of doing creative work is taking risks, and many creative types thrive off of taking risks in various aspects of their lives.
"There is a deep and meaningful connection between risk taking and creativity and it's one that's often overlooked," contributor Steven Kotler wrote in Forbes. "Creativity is the act of making something from nothing. It requires making public those bets first placed by imagination. This is not a job for the timid. Time wasted, reputation tarnished, money not well spent -- these are all by-products of creativity gone awry."
They view all of life as an opportunity for self-expression.
Nietzsche believed that one's life and the world should be viewed as a work of art. Creative types may be more likely to see the world this way, and to constantly seek opportunities for self-expression in everyday life.
"Creative expression is self-expression," says Kaufman. "Creativity is nothing more than an individual expression of your needs, desires and uniqueness."
They follow their true passions.
Creative people tend to be intrinsically motivated -- meaning that they're motivated to act from some internal desire, rather than a desire for external reward or recognition. Psychologists have shown that creative people are energized by challenging activities, a sign of intrinsic motivation, and the research suggests that simply thinking of intrinsic reasons to perform an activity may be enough to boost creativity.
"Eminent creators choose and become passionately involved in challenging, risky problems that provide a powerful sense of power from the ability to use their talents," write M.A. Collins and T.M. Amabile in The Handbook of Creativity.
They get out of their own heads.
Kaufman argues that another purpose of daydreaming is to help us to get out of our own limited perspective and explore other ways of thinking, which can be an important asset to creative work.
"Daydreaming has evolved to allow us to let go of the present," says Kaufman. "The same brain network associated with daydreaming is the brain network associated with theory of mind -- I like calling it the 'imagination brain network' -- it allows you to imagine your future self, but it also allows you to imagine what someone else is thinking."
Research has also suggested that inducing "psychological distance" -- that is, taking another person's perspective or thinking about a question as if it was unreal or unfamiliar -- can boost creative thinking.
They lose track of the time.
Creative types may find that when they're writing, dancing, painting or expressing themselves in another way, they get "in the zone," or what's known as a flow state, which can help them to create at their highest level. Flow is a mental state when an individual transcends conscious thought to reach a heightened state of effortless concentration and calmness. When someone is in this state, they're practically immune to any internal or external pressures and distractions that could hinder their performance.
You get into the flow state when you're performing an activity you enjoy that you're good at, but that also challenges you -- as any good creative project does.
"[Creative people] have found the thing they love, but they've also built up the skill in it to be able to get into the flow state," says Kaufman. "The flow state requires a match between your skill set and the task or activity you're engaging in."
They surround themselves with beauty.
Creatives tend to have excellent taste, and as a result, they enjoy being surrounded by beauty.
A study recently published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts showed that musicians -- including orchestra musicians, music teachers, and soloists -- exhibit a high sensitivity and responsiveness to artistic beauty.
They connect the dots.
If there's one thing that distinguishes highly creative people from others, it's the ability to see possibilities where others don't -- or, in other words, vision. Many great artists and writers have said that creativity is simply the ability to connect the dots that others might never think to connect.
In the words of Steve Jobs:
"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things."
They constantly shake things up.
Diversity of experience, more than anything else, is critical to creativity, says Kaufman. Creatives like to shake things up, experience new things, and avoid anything that makes life more monotonous or mundane.
"Creative people have more diversity of experiences, and habit is the killer of diversity of experience," says Kaufman.
They make time for mindfulness.
Creative types understand the value of a clear and focused mind -- because their work depends on it. Many artists, entrepreneurs, writers and other creative workers, such as David Lynch, have turned to meditation as a tool for tapping into their most creative state of mind.
And science backs up the idea that mindfulness really can boost your brain power in a number of ways. A 2012 Dutch study suggested that certain meditation techniques can promote creative thinking. And mindfulness practices have been linked with improved memory and focus, better emotional well-being, reduced stress and anxiety, and improved mental clarity -- all of which can lead to better creative thought.
26 March 2014
Creativity works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. Creative thinking is a stable, defining characteristic in some personalities, but it may also change based on situation and context. Inspiration and ideas often arise seemingly out of nowhere and then fail to show up when we most need them, and creative thinking requires complex cognition yet is completely distinct from the thinking process.
Neuroscience paints a complicated picture of creativity. As scientists now understand it, creativity is far more complex than the right-left brain distinction would have us think (the theory being that left brain = rational and analytical, right brain = creative and emotional). In fact, creativity is thought to involve a number of cognitive processes, neural pathways and emotions, and we still don't have the full picture of how the imaginative mind works.
And psychologically speaking, creative personality types are difficult to pin down, largely because they're complex, paradoxical and tend to avoid habit or routine. And it's not just a stereotype of the "tortured artist" -- artists really may be more complicated people. Research has suggested that creativity involves the coming together of a multitude of traits, behaviors and social influences in a single person.
"It's actually hard for creative people to know themselves because the creative self is more complex than the non-creative self," Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at New York University who has spent years researching creativity, told The Huffington Post. "The things that stand out the most are the paradoxes of the creative self ... Imaginative people have messier minds."
While there's no "typical" creative type, there are some tell-tale characteristics and behaviors of highly creative people. Here are 18 things they do differently.
They daydream.
Creative types know, despite what their third-grade teachers may have said, that daydreaming is anything but a waste of time.
According to Kaufman and psychologist Rebecca L. McMillan, who co-authored a paper titled "Ode To Positive Constructive Daydreaming," mind-wandering can aid in the process of "creative incubation." And of course, many of us know from experience that our best ideas come seemingly out of the blue when our minds are elsewhere.
Although daydreaming may seem mindless, a 2012 study suggested it could actually involve a highly engaged brain state -- daydreaming can lead to sudden connections and insights because it's related to our ability to recall information in the face of distractions. Neuroscientists have also found that daydreaming involves the same brain processes associated with imagination and creativity.
They observe everything.
The world is a creative person's oyster -- they see possibilities everywhere and are constantly taking in information that becomes fodder for creative expression. As Henry James is widely quoted, a writer is someone on whom "nothing is lost."
The writer Joan Didion kept a notebook with her at all times, and said that she wrote down observations about people and events as, ultimately, a way to better understand the complexities and contradictions of her own mind:
"However dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable 'I,'" Didion wrote in her essay On Keeping A Notebook. "We are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its marker."
They work the hours that work for them.
Many great artists have said that they do their best work either very early in the morning or late at night. Vladimir Nabokov started writing immediately after he woke up at 6 or 7 a.m., and Frank Lloyd Wright made a practice of waking up at 3 or 4 a.m. and working for several hours before heading back to bed. No matter when it is, individuals with high creative output will often figure out what time it is that their minds start firing up, and structure their days accordingly.
They take time for solitude.
"In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone," wrote the American existential psychologist Rollo May.
Artists and creatives are often stereotyped as being loners, and while this may not actually be the case, solitude can be the key to producing their best work. For Kaufman, this links back to daydreaming -- we need to give ourselves the time alone to simply allow our minds to wander.
"You need to get in touch with that inner monologue to be able to express it," he says. "It's hard to find that inner creative voice if you're ... not getting in touch with yourself and reflecting on yourself."
They turn life's obstacles around.
Many of the most iconic stories and songs of all time have been inspired by gut-wrenching pain and heartbreak -- and the silver lining of these challenges is that they may have been the catalyst to create great art. An emerging field of psychology called post-traumatic growth is suggesting that many people are able to use their hardships and early-life trauma for substantial creative growth. Specifically, researchers have found that trauma can help people to grow in the areas of interpersonal relationships, spirituality, appreciation of life, personal strength, and -- most importantly for creativity -- seeing new possibilities in life.
"A lot of people are able to use that as the fuel they need to come up with a different perspective on reality," says Kaufman. "What's happened is that their view of the world as a safe place, or as a certain type of place, has been shattered at some point in their life, causing them to go on the periphery and see things in a new, fresh light, and that's very conducive to creativity."
They seek out new experiences.
Creative people love to expose themselves to new experiences, sensations and states of mind -- and this openness is a significant predictor of creative output.
"Openness to experience is consistently the strongest predictor of creative achievement," says Kaufman. "This consists of lots of different facets, but they're all related to each other: Intellectual curiosity, thrill seeking, openness to your emotions, openness to fantasy. The thing that brings them all together is a drive for cognitive and behavioral exploration of the world, your inner world and your outer world."
They "fail up."
Resilience is practically a prerequisite for creative success, says Kaufman. Doing creative work is often described as a process of failing repeatedly until you find something that sticks, and creatives -- at least the successful ones -- learn not to take failure so personally.
"Creatives fail and the really good ones fail often," Forbes contributor Steven Kotler wrote in a piece on Einstein's creative genius.
They ask the big questions.
Creative people are insatiably curious -- they generally opt to live the examined life, and even as they get older, maintain a sense of curiosity about life. Whether through intense conversation or solitary mind-wandering, creatives look at the world around them and want to know why, and how, it is the way it is.
They people-watch.
Observant by nature and curious about the lives of others, creative types often love to people-watch -- and they may generate some of their best ideas from it.
"[Marcel] Proust spent almost his whole life people-watching, and he wrote down his observations, and it eventually came out in his books," says Kaufman. "For a lot of writers, people-watching is very important ... They're keen observers of human nature."
They take risks.
Part of doing creative work is taking risks, and many creative types thrive off of taking risks in various aspects of their lives.
"There is a deep and meaningful connection between risk taking and creativity and it's one that's often overlooked," contributor Steven Kotler wrote in Forbes. "Creativity is the act of making something from nothing. It requires making public those bets first placed by imagination. This is not a job for the timid. Time wasted, reputation tarnished, money not well spent -- these are all by-products of creativity gone awry."
They view all of life as an opportunity for self-expression.
Nietzsche believed that one's life and the world should be viewed as a work of art. Creative types may be more likely to see the world this way, and to constantly seek opportunities for self-expression in everyday life.
"Creative expression is self-expression," says Kaufman. "Creativity is nothing more than an individual expression of your needs, desires and uniqueness."
They follow their true passions.
Creative people tend to be intrinsically motivated -- meaning that they're motivated to act from some internal desire, rather than a desire for external reward or recognition. Psychologists have shown that creative people are energized by challenging activities, a sign of intrinsic motivation, and the research suggests that simply thinking of intrinsic reasons to perform an activity may be enough to boost creativity.
"Eminent creators choose and become passionately involved in challenging, risky problems that provide a powerful sense of power from the ability to use their talents," write M.A. Collins and T.M. Amabile in The Handbook of Creativity.
They get out of their own heads.
Kaufman argues that another purpose of daydreaming is to help us to get out of our own limited perspective and explore other ways of thinking, which can be an important asset to creative work.
"Daydreaming has evolved to allow us to let go of the present," says Kaufman. "The same brain network associated with daydreaming is the brain network associated with theory of mind -- I like calling it the 'imagination brain network' -- it allows you to imagine your future self, but it also allows you to imagine what someone else is thinking."
Research has also suggested that inducing "psychological distance" -- that is, taking another person's perspective or thinking about a question as if it was unreal or unfamiliar -- can boost creative thinking.
They lose track of the time.
Creative types may find that when they're writing, dancing, painting or expressing themselves in another way, they get "in the zone," or what's known as a flow state, which can help them to create at their highest level. Flow is a mental state when an individual transcends conscious thought to reach a heightened state of effortless concentration and calmness. When someone is in this state, they're practically immune to any internal or external pressures and distractions that could hinder their performance.
You get into the flow state when you're performing an activity you enjoy that you're good at, but that also challenges you -- as any good creative project does.
"[Creative people] have found the thing they love, but they've also built up the skill in it to be able to get into the flow state," says Kaufman. "The flow state requires a match between your skill set and the task or activity you're engaging in."
They surround themselves with beauty.
Creatives tend to have excellent taste, and as a result, they enjoy being surrounded by beauty.
A study recently published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts showed that musicians -- including orchestra musicians, music teachers, and soloists -- exhibit a high sensitivity and responsiveness to artistic beauty.
They connect the dots.
If there's one thing that distinguishes highly creative people from others, it's the ability to see possibilities where others don't -- or, in other words, vision. Many great artists and writers have said that creativity is simply the ability to connect the dots that others might never think to connect.
In the words of Steve Jobs:
"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things."
They constantly shake things up.
Diversity of experience, more than anything else, is critical to creativity, says Kaufman. Creatives like to shake things up, experience new things, and avoid anything that makes life more monotonous or mundane.
"Creative people have more diversity of experiences, and habit is the killer of diversity of experience," says Kaufman.
They make time for mindfulness.
Creative types understand the value of a clear and focused mind -- because their work depends on it. Many artists, entrepreneurs, writers and other creative workers, such as David Lynch, have turned to meditation as a tool for tapping into their most creative state of mind.
And science backs up the idea that mindfulness really can boost your brain power in a number of ways. A 2012 Dutch study suggested that certain meditation techniques can promote creative thinking. And mindfulness practices have been linked with improved memory and focus, better emotional well-being, reduced stress and anxiety, and improved mental clarity -- all of which can lead to better creative thought.
Friday, March 28, 2014
The Price of Slavery
The Price of Slavery
‘The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation,’ by David Brion DavisBy BRENDA WINEAPPLEMARCH 28, 2014
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story In 1862, when Nathaniel Hawthorne headed south from New England to see the Civil War firsthand, he came upon a group of former slaves trudging northward. “They seemed a kind of creature by themselves, not altogether human,” he wrote, “but perhaps quite as good, and akin to the fauns and rustic deities of olden times.” “Whoever may be benefited by the results of this war,” he added, “it will not be the present generation of negroes.”
Open Book: The End of a Long RoadMARCH 28, 2014 Hawthorne’s stunning comparison of real men and women to half-human creatures, even if kindly intended, gets to the heart of David Brion Davis’s “The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation,” the richly textured final volume in his exceptional trilogy about slavery in the Western Hemisphere. “I have long interpreted the problem of slavery,” he writes in his introduction, “as centering on the impossibility of converting humans into the totally compliant, submissive, accepting chattel symbolized by Aristotle’s ideal of the ‘natural slave.’ ”
An ad posted by the slave trader William F. Talbott of Lexington, Ky., in 1853. Credit Hulton Archive/Getty Images Less a political historian than a moral philosopher, Davis focuses here on 19th-century trans-Atlantic abolitionism and, in particular, the intellectual and theological origins of the antislavery movement in America. Borrowing from Freud and Descartes, he suggests that slaveholders projected onto their chattels the qualities they repressed in themselves. Particularly in America, the black population represented to white people “the finitude, imperfections, sensuality, self-mockery and depravity of human nature, thereby amplifying the opposite qualities in the white race.”
As a consequence, an American dream of freedom and opportunity was inseparable from a white illusion of superiority, bolstered by the subjugation and “animalization” of black people. That is, slaves were considered domesticated savages who would, if given the chance, revert to murder and mayhem. To many whites, particularly pro-slavery Southerners, this seemed the lesson of the violent and ultimately successful Haitian Revolution, which represented, as Davis puts it, “the unleashing of pure Id.”
Continue reading the main story
But the ironies of history are boundless. Although Haiti’s slaves did win their freedom, a prolonged civil war damaged the country’s economy. Seizing this opportunity, planters elsewhere in the Caribbean and in the American South increased production, which meant they needed to acquire more slaves. In 1803, South Carolina reopened its slave trade, importing 40,000 Africans in the next four years. Yet Great Britain, having lost as many as 50,000 soldiers and seamen in Haiti, responded differently, emancipating 800,000 colonial slaves in 1834 without spilling a drop of blood.
After Haiti, many well-meaning American reformers wanted to expunge the black “Id” peacefully by recolonizing free blacks in Africa. While Davis’s use of such Freudianism may seem overbearing at times, his analysis of the underpinnings of the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, is subtle, wide-ranging and consistently judicious. Refusing to dismiss colonization out of hand, he places it within the context of the Exodus narrative of deliverance, which he then persuasively connects to American messianism. He also shows that many supporters of colonization did not consider black people to be inherently inferior. Rather, in the first decades of the 19th century, evangelical reformers argued that slavery and prejudice had so completely dehumanized the African-American that he could never escape what the New England clergyman Leonard Bacon termed “the abyss of his degradation” without being relocated to a less corrupt environment.
But, as Davis cogently observes, not only did the pompous style of many colonization speeches reinforce the “self-justificatory power of the myth of America,” the rhetoric was “so abstract and grandiose that it almost precluded serious discussion of capital investment, technological assistance, labor skills and markets.” Without money or training, how were the new colonists to establish a country, much less a prosperous one? What about the commercial networks they would endanger or the native people they would displace? As Davis makes clear, “the glaring defect in the colonizationist ideology was the refusal to recognize the vital contributions that blacks had made and would continue to make to American civilization.”
Black leaders, understandably resistant to the colonization movement, were crucial to its demise. Except for William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, initially financed by the wealthy black Philadelphian James Forten, for almost 10 years most of the white press refused to print the denunciations of colonization issued by black organizations. But the African-American newspaper Freedom’s Journal roundly criticized the American Colonization Society as perpetuating rather than eradicating slavery. And in 1829, David Walker’s radical “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World” called on nonwhites to unite, to prove “that we are men, and not brutes, as we have been represented, and by millions treated.” Smuggled into the South, the “Appeal” caused so much consternation that when Walker died of consumption in 1830, it was widely believed that he had been murdered.
Black abolitionists like James Forten, Richard Allen and Samuel Cornish demanded an integrated American society, and by the 1830s the American abolition movement had evolved into an energetic biracial entity. Davis argues that the white abolitionists, however paternalistic, were sincerely inspired by Anglo-American Christianity and by the efforts of religious women. The Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, which first met in New York in 1837, published several significant pamphlets calling for racial and gender equality without any patronizing blather, although by today’s standards their emphasis on the “elevation” of the black population might sound sanctimonious and condescending. That’s part of Davis’s larger argument: Abolitionism was not monolithic in makeup or in motivation. Black emigrationists were not the same as white colonizationists, nor was black nationalism the same as white nationalism.
Additionally, as Davis demonstrates, every movement contains nuances and paradoxes. When British reformers linked abolition to their crusade against wage slavery, Frederick Douglass replied that unlike exploited workers, chattel slaves did not even have “the privilege of saying ‘myself.’ ” Yet a correlation between these forms of bondage, as Davis points out, helps us to extend “the historically successful moral condemnation of slavery to other forms of coerced labor and exploitation,” from Nazi concentration camps to 21st-century sex trafficking.
“Moral progress seems to be historical, cultural and institutional,” Davis concludes, “not the result of a genetic improvement in human nature.” The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, as well as the South’s increasing belligerence, suggested to many abolitionists that slavery could not be ended without violence. But although the Civil War was truly catastrophic, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment could not have been predicted at its start — or, for that matter, the subsequent end of slavery in Cuba and Brazil, which resulted partly because of Anglo-American abolition. Moral progress may be historical, cultural and institutional, but it isn’t inevitable. All the more reason this superb book should be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand our complex and contradictory past.
THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY IN THE AGE OF EMANCIPATION
By David Brion Davis
422 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30
Does Reading Make You Healthier?
by Leo Robson from The New Statesman
Living life by the book: why reading isn't always good for you
Somewhere along the line, an orthodoxy hardened: cigarettes will kill you and Bon Jovi will give you a migraine, but reading – the ideal diet being Shakespeare and 19th-century novels, plus the odd modernist – will make you healthier, stronger, kinder. But is that true?
by Leo Robson Published 20 March, 2014 - 10:00
Books on Books (2003) by Jonathan Wolstenholme/Private Collection/Bridgeman Art LibraryThe Unexpected Professor: an Oxford Life in Books
John Carey
Faber & Faber, 353pp, £18.99
Reading and the Reader
Philip Davis
Oxford University Press, 147pp, £12.99
Why I Read: the Serious Pleasure of Books
Wendy Lesser
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 226pp, £17.99
The Road to Middlemarch: My Life With George Eliot
Rebecca Mead
Granta Books, 296pp, £16.99
There is a series of postcards by the Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte that applies the alarmist tone usually reserved for smoking to scenes of people reading. A sunbathing woman is going purple and the caption, set in black on white with a black border, says: “Reading causes ageing of the skin.” In other scenarios a man ignores the naked woman lying beside him (“Reading may reduce the blood flow and cause impotence”) and a mother pours huge quantities of salt into a meal (“Reading seriously harms you and others around you”). What makes the cartoons so flat and pointless, apart from Swarte’s winsome draftsmanship, is their apparent belief that the benevolence of reading is a stable fact, ripe for comic inversion, rather than a social attitude that we are free to dispute. It is the same ostensive irony that underpins George Orwell’s exercise in amateur accountancy, “Books v Cigarettes”.
Still, you can see where Swarte’s confusion came from. Reading has the best PR team in the business. Or perhaps it’s just that devoted readers have better access to the language of advocacy and celebration than chain-smokers or, say, power-ballad enthusiasts. Either way, somewhere along the line, an orthodoxy hardened: cigarettes will kill you and Bon Jovi will give you a migraine, but reading – the ideal diet being Shakespeare and 19th-century novels, plus the odd modernist – will make you healthier, stronger, kinder. With the foundation of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous in 1976, reading became the last thing you can never do too often. Even the much-made argument that works of literature – Northanger Abbey, Madame Bovary – insist on the dangers of literature redounds to literature’s benefit, and provides yet another reason for reading.
But a serious, non-circular opposition case has been made, if not against reading, then against the idea that the western canon is morally improving or good for the soul. Shakespeare, most canonical of all, became a magnet for 1980s iconoclasts, who disparaged him as an imperial stooge (post-colonial theory), a tool of national power (cultural materialism) and a product of the same social/ideological energies as such putatively non-literary texts as James I’s Counterblaste to Tobacco (new historicism). Conducted for the most part in postgraduate seminar rooms and the pages of academic texts (the collection Political Shakespeare being perhaps the best-known English example), the debate was finally settled in the public sphere, where the cultural warriors, keen to alter reputations and revise the agenda, were greeted with indifference or derision.
At the turn of the 21st century, with the debate dying off and the future uncertain, Harold Bloom, in How to Read and Why, and Frank Kermode, in Shakespeare’s Language, tried to reassert the old agenda by teaching lessons that had been standard in their youth but had faded amid the chatter.
The project has since split in two, with reading primers teaching us “how” to read and reading memoirs providing testimony as to “why”, both in positive rather than implicitly combative terms. There is no longer any need to write “in defence of” reading, or, if there is, the defence is against forces such as “distraction” and “technology” that are indifferent to reading literature, not actively ranged against it. Even those memoirs that hinge on grisly challenges – a book a day (Tolstoy and the Purple Chair) or all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics (The Whole Five Feet) – make no reference to “book addiction” or “hyper-literacy”. If a downside emerges, it does so between the lines.
In the penultimate sentence of his new book, John Carey says that reading “is freedom”, yet he provides more than enough evidence to the contrary. The Unexpected Professor is an autobiography (postwar austerity, grammar school, national service, Oxford, Oxford, Oxford) that doubles as a “selective and opinionated” history of English literature, and a glories-of-reading memoir that doubles as an anti-reading memoir. Carey notes that people like him often prefer reading things to seeing them – typically, his example comes not from his own life but from a poem by Wordsworth – and reflects: “So living your truest life in books may deaden the real world for you as well as enliven it.” But how, judging by this account, does reading enliven things?
Carey confesses to feeling guilty that as an undergraduate he could read all day, while “out in the real world” (there it is again) people were “slogging away”. But it doesn’t seem all that different from his life in the non-real world: “I secured a copy from Hammersmith Public Library . . . and slogged through all sixteen thousand lines of it. It was unspeakably boring” (Layamon’s Brut). “I slogged through it of course, because my aim was to learn, not to have fun” (Johnson’s Lives of the Poets). Even Wordsworth, who showed that reading can spoil you for experience, is read “as a kind of atonement”, in a “microscopically printed” edition that proves “not exactly an On-First-Looking-into-Chapman’s-Homer experience”. Once he had squinted his way through English literature, Carey was free to gorge on European novels, yet even that sounds like a mixed experience. Dostoevsky he found “hard going” and though there were other writers he enjoyed a good deal more – Zola, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann – he still “forced myself to make notes on the endpapers”. If there’s any enlivening going on, it’s not being enacted on life by literature but the other way around: playing cricket at other schools “made me understand better that bit in the Book of Numbers where the Israelites send out spies to size up the opposition . . .”
In What Good Are the Arts?, Carey wrote that the non-literary arts are “locked in inarticulacy”. But literature, in his version, is locked in articulacy, forever making pronouncements and cases and claims. His lifetime of reading, as recounted in this book, has given him nothing, other than the occasional ringing phrase, that he could not have found in some form of pamphlet. In Carey’s account, reading provides an opportunity to engage with writers who share your convictions and to reject the ones who don’t: Milton’s anti-royalism “put me on his side”, “what I liked most fiercely was Jonson’s exposure of rampaging luxury”, “What The Faerie Queene does is mythicise political power, attributing supernatural status to a dictatorial regime, and this makes it, at heart, crass and false”. A telling example of Carey’s picture of literature-as-logic comes when he quotes a well-known passage from George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, a reflection on “that element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency”:
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
Although this is the passage Carey uses to support his view of Eliot as “the most intelligent of English novelists”, all he says is that she “is unusual in using poetry in the service of thinking . . . The tenderness of the heartbeat and the shock of the roar would be marvellous simply as a poetic moment. But it is also part of an argument.”
It comes down to a vision of language and how it relates to ideas. Carey writes that D H Lawrence “tries to make us see that, if he could, he’d communicate in some other way, freed from the limitations of thought”. But for Philip Davis, in his treatise-like Reading and the Reader, literature allows just such freedom. According to Davis, Eliot is not putting poetry to the service of “thinking”, in Carey’s op-ed sense of the word, but doing the kind of not-quite-thinking enabled by literary language. “Try counting the thoughts in a powerful paragraph in a realist novel,” he writes, after quoting the same passage from Middlemarch: “they are no longer separate units.” Earlier in the book he asserts that, “at its deepest”, an idea possesses more than “just a statable content”.
Carey is blithely confident about the meaning of literary texts but in the past has dismissed efforts to bring aesthetic response into the realm of scientific knowledge. Davis, by contrast, surrenders to literature’s indeterminacy but believes that its impact shows up on a brain scan. He quotes the example of cognitive scientists, his collaborators at the centre for reading research that he runs at the University of Liverpool, who have demonstrated “how a dramatically compressed Shakespearean coinage such as ‘this old man godded me’ excites the brain in a way that ‘this old man deified me’ . . . does not”. Davis claims that science shows “how” a Shakespearean coinage does this – but how literature achieves the effect is exactly what resists not just scientific decoding, but verbal description. “I cannot just talk about reading,” he writes, “when that is precisely not what I shall claim to be a literary way of thinking” (as if a vet used only man-made tools).
One result of Davis’s aversion to the general is a certain overexuberance with regard to quotations. He is constantly offering “a different instance”. When he writes “I can think of a hundred examples . . .” you are justified in fearing he will list them. Shakespeare is likened to “existential physics” and “process philosophy”, and a Shakespearean allusion renders a nonsensical proposition more nonsensical still: “In the readiness of all, the words themselves seem ready when they do come.” Equally forbidding though no more instructive is the sentence that begins: “It is fashionable to talk, after Csikszentmihalyi, of being ‘in the flow’ . . .” Though Davis has none of Carey’s semi-conscious misgivings about reading, he unwittingly exposes one of its greatest dangers. Biron, attacking study at the start of Love’s Labour’s Lost, claims that “light seeking light doth light of light beguile” (in which “light” means respectively the mind, enlightenment, sight and eyes). It might be said that Davis has read too much to write a readable book about reading.
However, Davis’s idea of what literature uniquely offers to the reader is a powerful one, and is shared to some extent by Wendy Lesser, the essayist and literary editor, in her warmer but no less erudite or sophisticated Why I Read, a tribute to what she calls “the serious pleasure of books”. Just as Davis likes writing in which language is used “as a sign of approximation to point to more than itself”, so Lesser admires writers who meet our desire for order “only halfway” (Eça de Queiroz) or give us “only a small part of what is really there” (Penelope Fitzgerald). But Lesser differs from Davis and also from Carey in taking a degree of responsibility: literature is grounded in the capricious reader, not in the permanent present of the text. Carey first read War and Peace in the 1960s but if his feelings about it have changed, he doesn’t tell us, whereas Lesser explains how it overtook Anna Karenina in her affections. And the reader’s shimmying perspective – the reader as human being – is treated as a topic in its own right by the journalist Rebecca Mead in The Road to Middlemarch, in which she traces how a novel that once gratified her teenage “aspirations to maturity and learnedness” has become “a melancholy dissection of the resignations that attend middle age, the paths untrodden and the choices unmade”.
Lesser and Mead treat the reader to a more attractive vision of reading, no less valuable for being far less dutiful, no less “salutary” for accommodating the kinds of pleasures that Lesser describes as “cellulose-based”. Carey’s distinctions between learning and having fun, between life and literature, are cleanly resolved. Just as reading the classics is not slog-work, so the library is not the unreal or anti-real world. “The library had been a place for studying,” Mead writes, of her rather jollier time at Oxford, “but it had also been a place for everything else; seeing friends, watching strangers, flirting and falling in love. Life happened in the library.” Without making the connection, she promotes a similarly unhermetic vision of her engagement with literature, which is not, she writes, just “a form of escapism” but a first-hand mode of existence – as Dickens more than implied when he wrote that reading Eliot’s Adam Bede had taken its place “among the actual experiences and endurances of my life”. When you are “grasped” by a book, Mead argues, “reading . . . feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself”. And you can do it while you smoke.
Living life by the book: why reading isn't always good for you
Somewhere along the line, an orthodoxy hardened: cigarettes will kill you and Bon Jovi will give you a migraine, but reading – the ideal diet being Shakespeare and 19th-century novels, plus the odd modernist – will make you healthier, stronger, kinder. But is that true?
by Leo Robson Published 20 March, 2014 - 10:00
Books on Books (2003) by Jonathan Wolstenholme/Private Collection/Bridgeman Art LibraryThe Unexpected Professor: an Oxford Life in Books
John Carey
Faber & Faber, 353pp, £18.99
Reading and the Reader
Philip Davis
Oxford University Press, 147pp, £12.99
Why I Read: the Serious Pleasure of Books
Wendy Lesser
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 226pp, £17.99
The Road to Middlemarch: My Life With George Eliot
Rebecca Mead
Granta Books, 296pp, £16.99
There is a series of postcards by the Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte that applies the alarmist tone usually reserved for smoking to scenes of people reading. A sunbathing woman is going purple and the caption, set in black on white with a black border, says: “Reading causes ageing of the skin.” In other scenarios a man ignores the naked woman lying beside him (“Reading may reduce the blood flow and cause impotence”) and a mother pours huge quantities of salt into a meal (“Reading seriously harms you and others around you”). What makes the cartoons so flat and pointless, apart from Swarte’s winsome draftsmanship, is their apparent belief that the benevolence of reading is a stable fact, ripe for comic inversion, rather than a social attitude that we are free to dispute. It is the same ostensive irony that underpins George Orwell’s exercise in amateur accountancy, “Books v Cigarettes”.
Still, you can see where Swarte’s confusion came from. Reading has the best PR team in the business. Or perhaps it’s just that devoted readers have better access to the language of advocacy and celebration than chain-smokers or, say, power-ballad enthusiasts. Either way, somewhere along the line, an orthodoxy hardened: cigarettes will kill you and Bon Jovi will give you a migraine, but reading – the ideal diet being Shakespeare and 19th-century novels, plus the odd modernist – will make you healthier, stronger, kinder. With the foundation of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous in 1976, reading became the last thing you can never do too often. Even the much-made argument that works of literature – Northanger Abbey, Madame Bovary – insist on the dangers of literature redounds to literature’s benefit, and provides yet another reason for reading.
But a serious, non-circular opposition case has been made, if not against reading, then against the idea that the western canon is morally improving or good for the soul. Shakespeare, most canonical of all, became a magnet for 1980s iconoclasts, who disparaged him as an imperial stooge (post-colonial theory), a tool of national power (cultural materialism) and a product of the same social/ideological energies as such putatively non-literary texts as James I’s Counterblaste to Tobacco (new historicism). Conducted for the most part in postgraduate seminar rooms and the pages of academic texts (the collection Political Shakespeare being perhaps the best-known English example), the debate was finally settled in the public sphere, where the cultural warriors, keen to alter reputations and revise the agenda, were greeted with indifference or derision.
At the turn of the 21st century, with the debate dying off and the future uncertain, Harold Bloom, in How to Read and Why, and Frank Kermode, in Shakespeare’s Language, tried to reassert the old agenda by teaching lessons that had been standard in their youth but had faded amid the chatter.
The project has since split in two, with reading primers teaching us “how” to read and reading memoirs providing testimony as to “why”, both in positive rather than implicitly combative terms. There is no longer any need to write “in defence of” reading, or, if there is, the defence is against forces such as “distraction” and “technology” that are indifferent to reading literature, not actively ranged against it. Even those memoirs that hinge on grisly challenges – a book a day (Tolstoy and the Purple Chair) or all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics (The Whole Five Feet) – make no reference to “book addiction” or “hyper-literacy”. If a downside emerges, it does so between the lines.
In the penultimate sentence of his new book, John Carey says that reading “is freedom”, yet he provides more than enough evidence to the contrary. The Unexpected Professor is an autobiography (postwar austerity, grammar school, national service, Oxford, Oxford, Oxford) that doubles as a “selective and opinionated” history of English literature, and a glories-of-reading memoir that doubles as an anti-reading memoir. Carey notes that people like him often prefer reading things to seeing them – typically, his example comes not from his own life but from a poem by Wordsworth – and reflects: “So living your truest life in books may deaden the real world for you as well as enliven it.” But how, judging by this account, does reading enliven things?
Carey confesses to feeling guilty that as an undergraduate he could read all day, while “out in the real world” (there it is again) people were “slogging away”. But it doesn’t seem all that different from his life in the non-real world: “I secured a copy from Hammersmith Public Library . . . and slogged through all sixteen thousand lines of it. It was unspeakably boring” (Layamon’s Brut). “I slogged through it of course, because my aim was to learn, not to have fun” (Johnson’s Lives of the Poets). Even Wordsworth, who showed that reading can spoil you for experience, is read “as a kind of atonement”, in a “microscopically printed” edition that proves “not exactly an On-First-Looking-into-Chapman’s-Homer experience”. Once he had squinted his way through English literature, Carey was free to gorge on European novels, yet even that sounds like a mixed experience. Dostoevsky he found “hard going” and though there were other writers he enjoyed a good deal more – Zola, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann – he still “forced myself to make notes on the endpapers”. If there’s any enlivening going on, it’s not being enacted on life by literature but the other way around: playing cricket at other schools “made me understand better that bit in the Book of Numbers where the Israelites send out spies to size up the opposition . . .”
In What Good Are the Arts?, Carey wrote that the non-literary arts are “locked in inarticulacy”. But literature, in his version, is locked in articulacy, forever making pronouncements and cases and claims. His lifetime of reading, as recounted in this book, has given him nothing, other than the occasional ringing phrase, that he could not have found in some form of pamphlet. In Carey’s account, reading provides an opportunity to engage with writers who share your convictions and to reject the ones who don’t: Milton’s anti-royalism “put me on his side”, “what I liked most fiercely was Jonson’s exposure of rampaging luxury”, “What The Faerie Queene does is mythicise political power, attributing supernatural status to a dictatorial regime, and this makes it, at heart, crass and false”. A telling example of Carey’s picture of literature-as-logic comes when he quotes a well-known passage from George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, a reflection on “that element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency”:
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
Although this is the passage Carey uses to support his view of Eliot as “the most intelligent of English novelists”, all he says is that she “is unusual in using poetry in the service of thinking . . . The tenderness of the heartbeat and the shock of the roar would be marvellous simply as a poetic moment. But it is also part of an argument.”
It comes down to a vision of language and how it relates to ideas. Carey writes that D H Lawrence “tries to make us see that, if he could, he’d communicate in some other way, freed from the limitations of thought”. But for Philip Davis, in his treatise-like Reading and the Reader, literature allows just such freedom. According to Davis, Eliot is not putting poetry to the service of “thinking”, in Carey’s op-ed sense of the word, but doing the kind of not-quite-thinking enabled by literary language. “Try counting the thoughts in a powerful paragraph in a realist novel,” he writes, after quoting the same passage from Middlemarch: “they are no longer separate units.” Earlier in the book he asserts that, “at its deepest”, an idea possesses more than “just a statable content”.
Carey is blithely confident about the meaning of literary texts but in the past has dismissed efforts to bring aesthetic response into the realm of scientific knowledge. Davis, by contrast, surrenders to literature’s indeterminacy but believes that its impact shows up on a brain scan. He quotes the example of cognitive scientists, his collaborators at the centre for reading research that he runs at the University of Liverpool, who have demonstrated “how a dramatically compressed Shakespearean coinage such as ‘this old man godded me’ excites the brain in a way that ‘this old man deified me’ . . . does not”. Davis claims that science shows “how” a Shakespearean coinage does this – but how literature achieves the effect is exactly what resists not just scientific decoding, but verbal description. “I cannot just talk about reading,” he writes, “when that is precisely not what I shall claim to be a literary way of thinking” (as if a vet used only man-made tools).
One result of Davis’s aversion to the general is a certain overexuberance with regard to quotations. He is constantly offering “a different instance”. When he writes “I can think of a hundred examples . . .” you are justified in fearing he will list them. Shakespeare is likened to “existential physics” and “process philosophy”, and a Shakespearean allusion renders a nonsensical proposition more nonsensical still: “In the readiness of all, the words themselves seem ready when they do come.” Equally forbidding though no more instructive is the sentence that begins: “It is fashionable to talk, after Csikszentmihalyi, of being ‘in the flow’ . . .” Though Davis has none of Carey’s semi-conscious misgivings about reading, he unwittingly exposes one of its greatest dangers. Biron, attacking study at the start of Love’s Labour’s Lost, claims that “light seeking light doth light of light beguile” (in which “light” means respectively the mind, enlightenment, sight and eyes). It might be said that Davis has read too much to write a readable book about reading.
However, Davis’s idea of what literature uniquely offers to the reader is a powerful one, and is shared to some extent by Wendy Lesser, the essayist and literary editor, in her warmer but no less erudite or sophisticated Why I Read, a tribute to what she calls “the serious pleasure of books”. Just as Davis likes writing in which language is used “as a sign of approximation to point to more than itself”, so Lesser admires writers who meet our desire for order “only halfway” (Eça de Queiroz) or give us “only a small part of what is really there” (Penelope Fitzgerald). But Lesser differs from Davis and also from Carey in taking a degree of responsibility: literature is grounded in the capricious reader, not in the permanent present of the text. Carey first read War and Peace in the 1960s but if his feelings about it have changed, he doesn’t tell us, whereas Lesser explains how it overtook Anna Karenina in her affections. And the reader’s shimmying perspective – the reader as human being – is treated as a topic in its own right by the journalist Rebecca Mead in The Road to Middlemarch, in which she traces how a novel that once gratified her teenage “aspirations to maturity and learnedness” has become “a melancholy dissection of the resignations that attend middle age, the paths untrodden and the choices unmade”.
Lesser and Mead treat the reader to a more attractive vision of reading, no less valuable for being far less dutiful, no less “salutary” for accommodating the kinds of pleasures that Lesser describes as “cellulose-based”. Carey’s distinctions between learning and having fun, between life and literature, are cleanly resolved. Just as reading the classics is not slog-work, so the library is not the unreal or anti-real world. “The library had been a place for studying,” Mead writes, of her rather jollier time at Oxford, “but it had also been a place for everything else; seeing friends, watching strangers, flirting and falling in love. Life happened in the library.” Without making the connection, she promotes a similarly unhermetic vision of her engagement with literature, which is not, she writes, just “a form of escapism” but a first-hand mode of existence – as Dickens more than implied when he wrote that reading Eliot’s Adam Bede had taken its place “among the actual experiences and endurances of my life”. When you are “grasped” by a book, Mead argues, “reading . . . feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself”. And you can do it while you smoke.
Bookstore Illusions
by Rebecca Mead
from The New Yorker
Martin Amis, in his 1995 novel, “The Information,” delivered a memorable riff on the reading habits of transatlantic airplane travellers as divided by class. “In Coach the laptop literature was pluralistic, liberal, and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, Lebanon, World War 1, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina,” he wrote. In business class, however, “they were reading outright junk. Fat financial thrillers, chunky chillers and tublike tinglers.” But even that is better than what was being consumed in first class, filled with snoozing plutocrats, where nobody was reading anything, “except for a lone seeker who gazed, with a frown of mature skepticism, at a perfume catalogue.”
If Amis’s airplane taxonomy has been rendered obsolete by the development of the seat-back entertainment system—now travellers of all classes are watching “Skyfall,” while hoping it doesn’t—his analysis came to mind this morning, in the light of a story in the Times about the disappearance of bookstores from Manhattan. The paper reported that at last count there were a hundred and six Manhattan bookstores, down from a hundred and fifty in 2000. (If a hundred and six bookstores still sounds like more bookstores than there actually are in Manhattan, that’s because outlets like the Hudson News kiosks in Penn Station and Grand Central are included in the total.)
Every New Yorker of a couple of decades’ standing can cite her or his late, lamented local bookstore: for many years, mine was Spring Street Books, in Soho—until, in the nineties, it became a shoe store, a retail segment for which it seems there is an infinite need. In the Times, Esther Newberg, the literary agent, decried the transformation of Manhattan into “an outlet mall for rich people,” citing Fifth Avenue as her evidence. Manhattan—at least the hyper-affluent core of it—seems to have gone the way of Amis’s first-class cabin, becoming a place in which people who are too rich to read can stretch out and indulge themselves.
Thank goodness, then, for cattle class: the outer boroughs. As Emily Gould, the outer-borough novelist, tweeted this morning, “that bookstores article could just as easily be titled ‘independent bookstores thrive in Brooklyn and Jersey City.’ ” Word Bookstore, a successful independent in Greenpoint, is indeed opening a second store in Jersey City. Greenlight Bookstore, in Fort Greene—my current local—is such an exemplar of Brooklyn literary energy that entering its doors can feel like wandering into a Noah Baumbach movie, one centered around two young freelancers who meet at a reading group, their relationship sparked by an argument over whether next month’s choice should be Jonathan Lethem or Jennifer Egan.
But therein lies a problem, too. Those of us who cherish our local bookstores do so not simply because they are convenient—how great to be able to run out for milk and also pick up the new Karl Ove Knausgaard!—but also because we feel a duty to support them, because we believe in their mission. When books can be bought so cheaply online, or at one of the dwindling number of discount retailers, paying more to shop at a local bookstore feels virtuous, like buying locally sourced organic vegetables, or checking to see if a T-shirt is made in the U.S.A. It can be gratifying to the point of smugness to feel that one is being pluralistic, liberal, and humane; shopping at an independent bookstore may be one of the diminishing opportunities to experience that feeling in first-class New York City. Still, when I consider the vanished bookstores of Manhattan, I mourn not just their passing but the loss of a certain kind of book-buying innocence—a time when where one bought a book did not constitute a political statement, and reading it did not feel like participating in a requiem.
from The New Yorker
Martin Amis, in his 1995 novel, “The Information,” delivered a memorable riff on the reading habits of transatlantic airplane travellers as divided by class. “In Coach the laptop literature was pluralistic, liberal, and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, Lebanon, World War 1, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina,” he wrote. In business class, however, “they were reading outright junk. Fat financial thrillers, chunky chillers and tublike tinglers.” But even that is better than what was being consumed in first class, filled with snoozing plutocrats, where nobody was reading anything, “except for a lone seeker who gazed, with a frown of mature skepticism, at a perfume catalogue.”
If Amis’s airplane taxonomy has been rendered obsolete by the development of the seat-back entertainment system—now travellers of all classes are watching “Skyfall,” while hoping it doesn’t—his analysis came to mind this morning, in the light of a story in the Times about the disappearance of bookstores from Manhattan. The paper reported that at last count there were a hundred and six Manhattan bookstores, down from a hundred and fifty in 2000. (If a hundred and six bookstores still sounds like more bookstores than there actually are in Manhattan, that’s because outlets like the Hudson News kiosks in Penn Station and Grand Central are included in the total.)
Every New Yorker of a couple of decades’ standing can cite her or his late, lamented local bookstore: for many years, mine was Spring Street Books, in Soho—until, in the nineties, it became a shoe store, a retail segment for which it seems there is an infinite need. In the Times, Esther Newberg, the literary agent, decried the transformation of Manhattan into “an outlet mall for rich people,” citing Fifth Avenue as her evidence. Manhattan—at least the hyper-affluent core of it—seems to have gone the way of Amis’s first-class cabin, becoming a place in which people who are too rich to read can stretch out and indulge themselves.
Thank goodness, then, for cattle class: the outer boroughs. As Emily Gould, the outer-borough novelist, tweeted this morning, “that bookstores article could just as easily be titled ‘independent bookstores thrive in Brooklyn and Jersey City.’ ” Word Bookstore, a successful independent in Greenpoint, is indeed opening a second store in Jersey City. Greenlight Bookstore, in Fort Greene—my current local—is such an exemplar of Brooklyn literary energy that entering its doors can feel like wandering into a Noah Baumbach movie, one centered around two young freelancers who meet at a reading group, their relationship sparked by an argument over whether next month’s choice should be Jonathan Lethem or Jennifer Egan.
But therein lies a problem, too. Those of us who cherish our local bookstores do so not simply because they are convenient—how great to be able to run out for milk and also pick up the new Karl Ove Knausgaard!—but also because we feel a duty to support them, because we believe in their mission. When books can be bought so cheaply online, or at one of the dwindling number of discount retailers, paying more to shop at a local bookstore feels virtuous, like buying locally sourced organic vegetables, or checking to see if a T-shirt is made in the U.S.A. It can be gratifying to the point of smugness to feel that one is being pluralistic, liberal, and humane; shopping at an independent bookstore may be one of the diminishing opportunities to experience that feeling in first-class New York City. Still, when I consider the vanished bookstores of Manhattan, I mourn not just their passing but the loss of a certain kind of book-buying innocence—a time when where one bought a book did not constitute a political statement, and reading it did not feel like participating in a requiem.
Better Watch It
Best protect yourself these days. There is no such thing as an innocent cough. A pandemic could be in the offing. Stay away from creepy people. It's not worth it to hang around creepy people. Something bad could rub off on you. Avoid sociopaths. Trust me: they don't have your best interests at heart. Is there hope for the future? Best just get thru today and worry about that question at a... later date. Don't answer the phone if you don't recognize the area code. I routinely receive calls from New Hampshire and Idaho and I don't know anybody there so I don't answer. Seize the moment if you desire, but realize that it may not be your moment that you're seizing. It could be your worst enemy's moment in disguise.
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