Reading – Page 2 – Essays & Articles

Going Postal

Posted on 2009-01-21 by Gene Wilburn

It was a bonanza day at the mailbox today. Two different shipments arrived — one from Amazon.ca and one from AbeBooks, my preferred online seller of used books.

The Amazon shipment included more Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett (now Sir Terry Pratchett), including the very funny Going Postal. My set of trade paperbacks is now complete, until TP publishes another. His latest novel, Nation, is one of his rare non-Discworld works. In my re-reading of Discworld, in the sequence in which they were published, I’ve reached Maskerade.

There’s no single thing that attracts me to Pratchett’s fantasy series — sometimes called ‘comedic fantasy’, which is accurate as far as it goes. It’s zany, similar in spirit if not in style, to Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. It’s often funny in the way Joss Whedon scripts are funny — quick lines and understatements and unexpected juxtapositions.

Pratchett is also amusing, as well as thought provoking, as a social satirist. His thinly disguised sendups of the Gulf War, Christmas, opera, rock music, Shakespearean drama, and Hollywood, among other things, are all part of the fun.

He’s an interesting stylist too. His plot structures resemble a spiral more than anything else, and they’re not always easy to follow. He includes no chapter breaks — the books seemingly ramble about — but they always circle back toward the centre.

I find a great deal of wisdom in his novels. It pops up in the Night Watch books, the witch novels, the novels in which Death is the main character, and especially in the Tiffany Aching stories.

The reason I’ve collected all his novels is that I want to read and re-read them for years, the way I do with David Eddings’s Belgariad and Mallorean series, and the eternally delightful mysteries of Agatha Christie. When I need ‘comfort’ reading, these are the books I reach for.

The DVD of Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog is something I’ve bought on faith. I’m not even certain what it is, but it’s by Joss Whedon and it’s had enthusiastic reviews. As I mentioned in my blog entry Things Joss Whedony, I’m addicted to the man’s creative productions.

The book Writing Creative Nonfiction is a followup to a posting on the newly-launched Creative NonFiction Writing Forums. It sounded interesting and instructive, and it wasn’t very expensive, so I simply indulged.

Le Petit Larousse Illustré, 1982 ed., is a used book I sought out after a conversation in Starbucks with a man who was reading Nietzsche in French translation. I posted on this on the Creative NonFiction Writing Forums:

While sitting in Starbucks this morning [January 18, 2009], working on my current blog entry and browsing some of my favourite forums, I was joined across the table by an older gentleman (about my age) I’ve seen in Starbucks previously.

As I finished up my work and was putting away my netbook, I happened to look at the book he was reading. It was a book by Nietzsche, in French (I didn’t quite catch the title). My curiosity overcame me and I asked him why he was reading Nietzsche in a French translation. His simple answer: he liked reading French.

I asked him how he’d got so good at reading French (he was clearly not a native French speaker). I don’t know what I expected — that he’d been assigned to the French Embassy at some time in his career, that he had a bohemian period in Paris, that he’d been a member of the Foreign Legion.

No, he just liked reading French. He told me he’d taken French in school but had forgotten most of it, but one day he picked up a book in French and decided to read it. At first, he said, he had to use a dictionary for almost every other word. But now he scarcely uses a dictionary at all.

The breakthrough, he told me, came when he got rid of his French-English dictionary and started using Le Petit Larousse, a French-only dictionary. He said the French definitions were very clear, and that the dictionary also provided synonyms and antonyms.

Interesting. My ability to read French was never particularly good, but it even that has atrophied through disuse. Worse, I even live in a bilingual English-French country (though I rarely encounter French other than on my cereal boxes).

It’s making me think perhaps I should get a Le Petit Larousse if I can find a used one, and try some Camus again. I always loved Camus as a stylist.

I sincerely admire people who do things like read French simply because they like it, and elect to read their Nietzsche in French. Kudos!

I once owned a version of this fine dictionary when I was studying French at university, and the conversation brought back memories of my enjoyment of it. It may be an undertaking like yet another started and failed diet, but I truly want to try to re-learn how to read French. I’ve always liked French, though I have a tin ear for learning languages. I’m going to try, or put another way, je l’essai (which I’m certain is terrible French).

Besides, it’s a beautiful book.

Snowfall & Certainty

Posted on 2009-01-07 by Gene Wilburn

Once again I had a good overnight sleep, but I didn’t feel very spry this morning. All the sneezing and coughing has tired me. I thought of staying in, but two days inside without any fresh air and exercise is more than I like. I miss my routine when I’m unable to get out. I miss my Starbucks cuppa too.

So this morning I stuffed myself with nostrums and palliatives — two Dristans and a glug of Benylin cough syrup — and headed into the falling snow. It was a slushy, stick-to-everything kind of snow. Pretty to look at and not bad for walking, but difficult for photography.

I took my Panasonic LX3 with a UV filter on to protect the lens, and carried the camera in my coat pocket. I tried, when possible, to find a protected overhang before hauling out the camera to take a shot, but sometimes I had to shoot in the open to get the image I wanted. I returned the camera to my pocket as soon as possible after the shot, and it appears to have weathered the storm.

I felt sorry for drivers today. The snowfall started last night and continued into this morning’s rush hour. The roads are slushy and at times visibility is low.

I followed my usual route to the harbour, passing behind the local library to the Credit River, then down river, under the bridges to the pier. The trumpeter swans are back and they, along with the mute swans, swam towards me hoping for a handout. “Spare bread for out-of-work wildfowl?” The ducks were in on it too. I could see a few pigeons giving me the eye.

Not many moms and nannies around today to toss bread their way while their toddlers giggle and thrill to the ensuing dash. I didn’t see any other pedestrians. Some people use common sense in weather like this and stay indoors.

At Starbucks I keyed in most of this blog, then did a little email and surfing. I had along Sibyl, my new Acer Aspire One netbook. I’ve had it about three weeks now and have come to love it. You can see from the following photo how compact it is in relation to a Starbucks cup and a standard-size ball pen.

It took me awhile to adjust to the keyboard, but it’s actually improved my typing, which had become sloppy. I’m a touch typist, having learned to type in high school on manual upright Royals, Underwoods, and Smith Coronas with blank keytops and a large keyboard layout chart on the far classroom wall. You learned to make precise keystrokes on those machines, and over the years my technique had lost some precision. It’s needed again when I type on Sibyl.

The library had some holds that I picked up on the way home, the most interesting of which is the book On Being Certain: Believing You’re Right Even When You’re Not by Robert Burton.

In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton shows that feeling certain—feeling that we know something— is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. An increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. In other words, the feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen. [Description on Amazon.com]

I first heard about this book on the excellent Brain Science podcast where podcaster Dr. Ginger Campbell reviewed the book in one episode then interviewed Robert Burton in the next. Worthwhile listening. I suspect On Being Certain will be a good read, and a consideration for my permanent book collection.

On Reading In Cold Blood

Posted on 2008-07-28 by Gene Wilburn

When I visited the library last Friday to pick up a novel, I had in mind genre fiction such as sci-fi or mystery. Or the closely aligned forensic detective fiction. I’d just finished reading Cormack McCarthy’s The Road, which was bleak, spare, and powerful and Asimov and Silverberg’s collaboration Nightfall, a novelized version of Isaac Asimov’s classic short story that I found interesting but that contained some rather bad writing and a weak plot.

I noticed a prominent display called Raves & Faves that contained multiple copies of some readers’ favourites. Intrigued, I browsed the shelf and was surprised at the mix of material, newer and older. Among the offerings was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. As I looked at it, I decided I was finally ready to read it. I’ve been reading and watching darker things lately, like the often gory novels involving forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan, by Kathy Reichs, Season Six of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and Season One of Dexter. Not to mention a couple of decades of murder and crime fiction.

But of course In Cold Blood is not fiction, though it employs fictional techniques. It details the 1959 slaying of Herbert Clutter, a wealthy farmer from Holcomb, Kansas; his wife, and two children. The killers, Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith, were arrested not long after the murders, and Capote ultimately spent six years working on the book. It is considered the originator of the non-fiction novel and the forerunner of the New Journalism movement.¹

I’ve felt antipathy for this work since it was first released in 1965. At the time I was an undergraduate at Arizona State University, young, callow, naive. I was appalled by the subject matter and thought it disgusting that it should become a best seller. Worse, Capote became a frequent guest on late-night talk shows and I disliked him instantly. Flamboyantly homosexual and acerbic, he seemed full of venom and despite. Worse, he seemed so full of himself — not simply egoistic, but egomaniacal. I resolved that although I held what seemed a minority opinion about the work, I would never read In Cold Blood.

Of course that was foolish. To judge a person’s literary work by the person’s personality and a shallow understanding of the subject matter is downright irrational, not to mention immature. Mea culpa. Thank goodness we grow up.

As soon as I started reading In Cold Blood I was scarcely able to put it down. It is really well written, although a bit dated in style. Capote brings the stark Kansas landscape to life, and gets you into the head of the townspeople, the victims, and the two parole violators who committed the murders. Employing the techniques of fiction, Capote gives the work a story arc, a fleshing out of character, and a dark ambiguity that withholds judgement, although it is obvious from the writing that Capote abhorred capital punishment. Both of the accused were eventually hanged.

When I finished the work, I looked up some criticism to see what had been said about it. Undoubtedly Capote, along with Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, changed journalism with their creative nonfiction styles. It’s been pointed out that they’re not the first to employ novelistic techniques in nonfiction, but they certainly moulded it and popularized it.

One part of the story I didn’t know is that when Capote went to Kansas to research the story, he brought along Harper Lee, soon to become famous for To Kill a Mockingbird, as a kind of research assistant. They had been friends since childhood. It was Harper Lee, evidently, who broke down barriers to communication with the locals who were highly suspicious of Capote himself.

Something that nagged me throughout the reading, though, was that I had no way of knowing if Capote was always accurate in the things he wrote. Evidently he never took notes while interviewing people, bragging on TV that he had a superb memory that allowed him to remember 95% of what people told him. There are no footnotes in the work, or end notes. Some of the locals depicted in the work have gone on record to say that they’d been misquoted, misrepresented, or that certain scenes, like the book’s finale in the graveyard, never actually took place.

Nonetheless, the book rings true. There may be discrepancies and a little fictionalizing, but I could imagine the final scene taking place, even if it didn’t. It was in character. I think creative journalism has tightened up since Capote’s time with more attention to accuracy and more focus on citations but for the first of its kind, the work is remarkable.

I’m glad I read In Cold Blood, and I’m embarrassed that it’s taken me so long to do so. I not only enjoyed the writing, I learned from it. Whatever else Capote was, he was a superb writer.

¹ Wikipedia. “In Cold Blood“

Distraction vs Concentration

Posted on 2008-07-22 by Gene Wilburn

When is the last time you memorized a poem or a speech? Even something modest like Lewis Carrol’s “Jabberwocky” or e.e. cummings’ “Buffalo Bill”? If you’re like me, it’s been a long, long time. The last time I was required to memorize something for school was in the seventh grade, when each student in the class had to memorize and recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. As an undergraduate at university I would sometimes memorize poems simply because it was fun.

That was a different age. I wonder what a modern student would think if you were to suggest they memorize a poem. I suspect you’d just get one of those funny looks that says more eloquently than words how out of touch you are. Why memorize anything when you can look it up on Google in seconds?

Forget memorization then. When was the last time you read a long, important novel, say like Joyce’s Ulysses? If recently, good for you! Or how about a lengthy essay on a subject of interest. These are things I used to do but find I can’t do anymore. Memorization, lengthy reading of serious material — I find it too difficult to concentrate on anything for that long. I thought it was old age creeping up on me until I read the Atlantic essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. When he described what was happening to him, I felt I’d met a kinsman:

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

After referring to some anecdotes about others who have confessed to similar states, including a blogger who admitted he had quit reading books altogether, Carr then cites Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Wolf says “We are how we read.” Worried about the style of reading promoted by the Net, she says that when we read online we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. (see Carr above for additional material on Wolf)

This theme was highlighted again a couple of days ago in a Times Online article by Bryan Appleyard, “Stoooopid …. why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks:
The digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate”, that begins with a caution from David Meyer.

David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995 his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves.

The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

The article then lists a chorus of writers who are articulating concerns and fears about what is happening to our brains and our culture through widespread chronic distraction.

Some of this is likely hyperbole or outright fear mongering. Whenever a topic like this starts to become a swell, my skepticism kicks in. Nonetheless, there’s something in this I feel inside myself and that I don’t dismiss outright. I’m particularly concerned when neuroscientists can demonstrate the effects of distraction in the brain. Using a cell phone while driving, they’ve observed in lab tests, is on a par with driving impaired with alcohol.

Fortunately it’s not all doom and gloom. The brain is malleable. Just as it can be conditioned to be distracted, it can be trained to pay attention. We can be taught how to focus and concentrate. We can even learn to ignore the ring of a cell phone.

I don’t know about reading Ulysses, but I think I’m going to go off and memorize a short poem, or a favourite song lyric.

The Zonules of Zinn

Posted on 2008-04-01 by Gene Wilburn

I’ve taken the title of this posting from a new book that arrived from Amazon.ca today: Beyond the Zonules of Zinn: a Fantastic Journey through Your Brain, by David Bainbridge.¹ I learned about this book from the extensive coverage given to it by one of my favourite podcasts: The Brain Science Podcast, hosted by Dr. Ginger Campbell. Brain science? Yes, for Marion and me brain science and research has become our latest study — in a lay person’s sense of the word.

Our interest in brain study has been increasing gradually over the past few years. Of course we, like most people, have been fascinated by the brain as long as we can remember. But after her Mom’s stroke and eventual death due to heart problems, we became interested in knowing how much of her former self could be recovered, as well as wondering what, exactly, happens during a stroke.

Later, after my heart attack, I felt I was losing my ability to think clearly and systematically about anything and that my memory was slipping. I was fumbling on everyday words too often for my liking. Part of this was compounded by clinical depression and the meds I was taking to ameliorate the condition. Around this time we both began to hear about new studies and findings about neuroplasticity — the ability of the brain to recover some lost functions and to continue functioning well into late old age.

As I rehabbed from an angioplasty/stent procedure, then a second procedure when I developed more arterial blockage, I became very interested in the keys to a healthy recovery and to overall health and wellness. Not surprisingly, all the things I learned about that contribute to heart health also contribute to brain health: a good diet with a lower-overall glycemic index, regular cardiovascular exercise, and good mental habits for dealing with stress and keeping the mind active.

As I began feeling better, I began reading more and with joy, in the way I did in my younger life when I was interested in nearly everything. A career in computing curtailed that enthusiasm for years because so much energy was required in learning and keeping up with technologies and methodologies. Marion had evolved along a similar path and we both once again began to study art, literature, philosophy and science. Being retired is a great boon to self study.

A healthy brain, so I kept reading, needed to be worked and challenged constantly — whether by learning a new language, taking a course, or even solving challenging puzzles such as non-trivial sudoku and crossword puzzles. I took to both, having never been a puzzle person before (as opposed to being puzzling, at which I excel). As a result of this continuous challenge to my brain, I could feel my mental functions improving. I was remembering things better, word loss was becoming no worse than what would be expected for someone in his early 60’s, and my appetite for learning had returned.

We watched Norman Doidge speak about brain plasticity in a couple of television interviews so we tracked down a library copy of his popular work The Brain That Changes Itself. It was so remarkable we’ve since bought our own copy.

About that time I was browsing the courses that were on sale from The Teaching Company. Marion and I like their courses very much and have purchased courses on history, art, linguistics, and philosophy. I wanted to buy a science course, but nothing quite as abstruse as particle physics or an overview of mathematics. I spied Understanding the Brain, taught by Dr. Jeannette Norden. It was either that or their course on Genetics and DNA. I bought the brain course and now, 36 half-hour lectures later, we’re awed by what we’ve learned from the course and we now have enough foundation knowledge to move on to further study. In our opinion, this course is excellent for people like us who are relatively new to neuroscience. Dr. Norden is a fine lecturer and the course material progressed in a logical and orderly manner.

Our studies have led us to V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain, Daniel Amen’s Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, Jeff Hawkins’s On Intelligence, and now the Zonules of Zinn.

We both feel recharged. Brain study, for us, has been one of the most powerful areas we’ve ever explored. It gives us a scientific perspective on where we’ve come from, in an evolutionary sense, and how we are what we are. So much has been learned about the brain in the past twenty years and so much more discovery lies in the future. Like all fields of science, some of what we think we know will likely be discarded as our knowledge increases, and there will be whole new areas of investigation not yet guessed at.

Brain study has been the most powerful intellectual stimulant we’ve encountered in years. We think that brain research and Genetic/DNA research are at the forefront of our current understanding of what we are as evolved life forms on this incredibly diverse and improbable planet. As lay persons looking at science from the outside, we’re delighted so many wonderful, thoughtful scientists and researchers have taken the trouble to write for, and speak to, the non science-trained community.

When things slow down a bit, which could be some time down the road, you can guess what our next course purchase will be. Genetics/DNA, of course.

¹ The Zonules of Zinn, for those interested, is one of the areas of brain study with an exotic name. It refers to a ring of fibrous strands that attach from the muscles that ring the lens of the eye. They function in pulling the lens flatter so we can see distant objects more clearly, and relaxing so we can see nearby objects. The eye is a direct outgrowth of the brain. As neuroscientists tell us, it’s the only part of our brain that is visible from the outside.

Ice Formations

Posted on 2007-12-07 by Gene Wilburn

Ice Formations

Sometimes photography is about equipment. Other times it’s about the seasons. Once in awhile it’s about art. Today it was about friends.

This morning Richard picked me up at my place and drove us to Starbucks where we met Marty and Dan. We had a great chat over coffee and munchies, then we took a casual stroll around Saddington Park, over to Ben Machree Park and back on the Waterfront Trail beside Lake Ontario.

We took casual shots of ice, geese, ducks, and each other. Plenty of jokes, lots of laughs, and a shared camaraderie as we skidded over icy sidewalks, chatted about our gear, and agreed that Flickr was immensely fun and rewarding.

The day was mild, around the freezing mark, with a trace of snow in the air. Compared to earlier in the week it felt balmy. It was a bit of a surprise how warm and comfy Starbucks felt when we returned there for a warmup java after our walk.

We all parted ways at that point. I walked to the library and picked up one of my holds. I thought about staying there and doing some writing in my journal, but I was a little tired so I walked the rest of the way home. I fell asleep in the afternoon and slept one of those delicious naps you hate to wake up from because you feel so toasty and relaxed under the covers.

Then up to an empty house. Marion is visiting her sisters overnight and Trev and Kirsten went into Toronto overnight. We’ll meet up again tomorrow in Burlington for a family pre-Christmas dinner.

I played the lazy bachelor and made myself a can of Campbell’s Bean with Bacon soup for dinner which I ate while solving easy sudoku puzzles. I had to rub out my answers on three of them and start over before getting them right. I only learned how to do them last week and still make lots of mistakes. I’ll move on to harder ones after another week or so of practice on the easy ones.

Tonight I’ll continue reading book three of the Thursday Next novels: Well of Lost Plots, by Jasper Fforde. It’s a delightfully witty series with off-the-wall humour reminiscent of both Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams.