School shooters, teachers, and do-gooders

Malcolm Gladwell on school shooters
As a high-school teacher, this article's conclusion terrified me. "The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts."
I don't know if he is right. God I hope not.

The podcast The Hidden Brain looks at education
Again, as a high-school teacher, I was intrigued and inspired by this podcast. More than one of the segments covered research that basically said that positive attitudes, and sharing those positive thoughts with the students, significantly improved performance. So I made myself a resolution: I am going to send a positive personal note to every student by the end of semester. On Friday, I sent six notes home. I hope I can keep the resolution going.

Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help 
The author of this book, Larissa MacFarquhar, had published a few of these chapters in The New Yorker, and they were fascinating. One was about people who donate a kidney to strangers. Another was about a couple who adopted 22 kids, many of them special needs. As I read the articles in the magazine, I wondered why I wasn't as selfless as these saints. However, as I read the book, it became clear that radical altruism is not an unalloyed good. MacFarquhar notes that, in one culture, the word "gift" can also mean poison, and that gifts often are a form of dominance, in that the receiver then "owes" something to the giver. She also notes that, even in our culture, codependence, has become an issue. So in the end, MacFarquhar claims that radical altruism isn't something we would all want to emulate.

Her conclusion lays out the complexity of the book: "If everyone thought like a do-gooder, the world would not be our world any longer, and the new world that would take its place would be so utterly different as to be nearly unimaginable. People talk about changing the world, but that's not usually what they mean. They mean securing enough help so there is less avoidable suffering and people can get on with living decent lives; they don't mean a world in which helping is the only life there is.
If there were no do-gooders, on the other hand, the world would be similar to ours, but worse. Without their showing what a person can do for strangers if he sets himself to do it, fewer would try. It may be true that not everyone should be a do-gooder. But it is also true that these strange, hopeful, tough, idealistic, demanding, life-threatening, and relentless people, by their extravagant example, help keep those life-sustaining qualities alive."

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Chuck Klosterman interviews Jonathan Franzen

In the new GQ, Klosterman, one of my favorite writers, interviews Franzen, author of two recent, insanely well-received books that I haven't read yet. It might be time.


"There are at least four ways an author can become semi-important: He (or she) can have massive commercial success. He can be adored and elevated by critics. He can craft "social epics" that contextualize modernity and force op-ed writers to reevaluate What This All Means. He can even become a celebrity in and of himself, which means that whatever he chooses to write becomes meaningful solely because he is the person who wrote it. There are many, many writers who fulfill one or more of these criteria. However, only Jonathan Franzen hits for the cycle. Only Franzen does all four, and he does them all to the highest possible degree. This is why Franzen is the most important living fiction writer in America, and—if viewed from a distance—perhaps the only important one. He's the most complete."

Read the rest of the article here.
Franzen's most recent book is Freedom: A Novel.
Klosterman's most recent book is Eating the Dinosaur

To Fool The Eye

A book cover? No, a painting. Read about the artist here.

Local Author Writing About Politics for the NYT

"If I were one of the big corporate donors who bankrolled the Republican tide that carried into office more than 50 new Republicans in the House, I would be wary of what you just bought.

For no matter your view of President Obama, he effectively saved capitalism. And for that, he paid a terrible political price."

This was written by Spokane-grown Timothy Egan, winner of the National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl and most recently the author of The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America.

He writes a blog for the New York Times, and the above is from an excerpt from his post titled "How Obama Saved Capitalism and Lost the Midterms" I recommend it.

Steve Martin's Boring Autobiography

I am in the middle of reading Steve Martin's autobiography, Born Standing Up, and I am having a hard time getting through the darn thing. I think I've figured out why. It is not very well written.

Yes, I know, I'm an English teacher, so I will be accused of being nitpicky about books. Yep. Sure am. I expect published writing to be good, and this wasn't.

Yes, it has its moments of humor: "I was in awe of the red-bearded Mike, who seemed so confident in the divided world of Aspen, where locals with a sense of entitlement were pitted against developers with a sense of condominiums."
and
"I was excited to learn that we were now living in the Age of Aquarius, an age when, at least astrologically, the world would be taken over by macrame."

Aside from the one-liners, it also has a wonderful description that captures what made his standup so great. The following comes about 3/4 of the way through the book, about the time it actually gets interesting for a while. He describes how he came up with his absurd comedic style:

"In a college psychology class, I had read a treatise on comedy explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it. ... What bothered me about this formula was the nature of the laugh it inspired, a vocal acknowledgement that a joke had been told, like automatic applause at the end of a song. ...

"These notions stayed with me for months, until they formed an idea that revolutionized my comedic direction: What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told when to laugh.

"To test my ideas, at my next appearance at the Ice House, I went onstage and began: 'I'd like to open up with sort of a 'funny comedy bit.' This has really been a big one for me ... it's the one that put me where I am today. I'm sure most of you will recognize the title when I mention it; it's the Nose on Microphone routine [pause for imagined applause]. And it's always funny, no matter how many times you see it.' "I leaned in and placed my nose on the mike for a few long seconds. Then I stopped and took several bows, saying, 'Thank you very much.' 'That's it?' they thought. Yes, that was it. The laugh came not then, but only after they realized I had already moved on to the next bit.

"Now that I had assigned myself to an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing: This is funny, you just haven't gotten it yet. If I wasn't offering punch lines, I'd never be standing there with egg on my face. It was essential that I never show doubt about what I was doing. ... Eventually, I thought, the laughs would be playing catch-up to what I was doing. Everything would be either delivered in passing, or the opposite, an elaborate presentation that climaxed in pointlessness. Another rule was to make the audience believe that I thought I was fantastic, that my confidence could not be shattered. They had to believe that I didn't care if they laughed at all, and that this act was going on with or without them. ... "My goal was to make the audience laugh but leave them unable to describe what it was that had made them laugh."

Most importantly, he mentions my hometown: "Bill had put me on the road, opening the show for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and I am grateful to them because they really didn't need me. We went everywhere. Atlanta, Spokane, Madison, Little Rock, Tallahassee, you name it, I was there."


However, the writing through the first 3/4 of the book is soporific at times. For instance, in some stretches, so many of his sentences are loose (that is, they basically begin subject-predicate then add stuff to the end) that it lulls the reader (me) into a daze. To wit, here are the beginnings of consecutive sentences on the last page I read, page 59:

"The show consisted of..."

"I appeared in..."

"Fortunately, I ended up with..."

"The opening night was attended by..."

"The play was followed by...

later, on page 94-95, he adds dead "to be" verbs to the loose sentences to create Valium in print:

"The Trumbo house was..."

"The walls in the living room were..."

"I had never seen..."

"In the entry was..."

"In the dining room was..."

"There was..."

"These artists are..."

"Gropper's art depicted..."

Along with the weak syntax, Martin's editor failed to excise too many cliches. People are "rail thin," albums "break ground," surprised people are "saucer-eyed," clotheshorses are"dressed to kill," neophytes get "taken under the wing" of others, and sketchy comedy acts are "hit and miss"

If cliches aren't the problem, then maybe it's the redundancies that often result from a pileup of adjectives and adverbs:
"His sheepdog, an ecstatic, ball-chasing mop named Winston, dove repeatedly into the deep snowy banks to retrieve our enthusiastically thrown snowballs. Winston didn't seem to mind that they would vanish white on white, and he earnestly pursued the impossible, digging, digging, digging."
OR
"My mind was a blank. Blanker than blank. I was a tabula rasa. I put paper in the typewriter and impotently stared at it." Is the word "impotently" necessary there?

When Martin finds that his diction and syntax aren't injecting enough life into his writing, he moves too quickly to the exaggerated simile, such as:
"I bounded down the massive steps, waving the onionskin envelope aloft for Phil to see, as though it were the lost map of the Incas."
OR
"I lived in suburbia at a time when a one-hour drive to Los Angeles in my first great car...seemed like a trip across the continent in a Conestoga wagon."

I probably could have forgiven the lapses in writing if he was actually opening up and telling something deep, something real. But many times he simply elides the most important parts of the story. For instance, when describing a difficult breakup with a woman he truly loved, this is all we get: "painfully for me, we drifted apart." Is that it?

OK, so maybe he didn't want to get personal, but even when describing his career, when he gets a chance to tell us what really makes him tick, he gives us a rhetorical question instead of an answer: "Even though the idea of doing comedy had sounded risky when I compared it to the safety of doing trick after trick, I wanted, needed, to be called a comedian. I discovered it was not magic I was interested in but performing in general. Why?....My answer to the question is simple: Who wouldn't want to be in show business?" Is that it?

So, in the end, though it had some laughs, Born Standing Up was a pretty weak effort. Martin kept the story fairly surface level, so I think he ended up trying to punch it up with some middle school tricks. I would have liked to have seen what an attentive, demanding editor could have evoked from Martin.

Reading Really IS Fundamental

A recent article in The New Yorker, "Twilight of the Books" by Caleb Crain, added yet another lamentation concerning the decline of reading in western culture, and America in particular.

Even though I am an English teacher, I get tired of these jeremiads by the chicken littles who say the cultural sky is falling. The statistics (and the above article cites many--too many) seem to be irrefutable: people aren't reading as much as they used to read. But the question I always ask myself is, "Why does that matter?" We know that IQs have been rising pretty much all through the 20th century--the proof has been given the name the Flynn Effect (as outlined eloquently in a recent Malcolm Gladwell article).

So people are getting smarter, right? Well, as Gladwell points out, we have become more abstract in our thinking, and the IQ tests examine this type of abstract thinking. So we may not be getting smarter, we may just be getting better at abstract thinking. But as our culture becomes less literate, the Flynn Effect might reverse as we become less able to recognize patterns. This pattern recognition is what has led us to the IQ gains and to our modern, abstract way of thinking--a way of thinking that seems to be, more and more, the only way of thinking that allows for personal success.

Thus, abstract (modern) thinking seems to derive from literacy, so, to answer my question posed earlier, literacy is very important for the habits of mind it creates--the ability to reason. The Crain article cites a great example of the difference between literate and illiterate thinking:

It’s difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently[....] But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.” Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn’t. Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had grouped the three tools together, discarding the log, replied, “Whoever told you that must have been crazy,” and another suggested, “Probably he’s got a lot of firewood.” One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and declared, “Now, clearly the child doesn’t belong in this group,” only to have a peasant answer: "Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them."

Literacy allows people another way of seeing--the ability to be metacognitive, to think about thinking. This ability is not necessarily a better one, not necessarily a smarter one, but it certainly is an increasingly useful one in our modern world.

More importantly for our society, a literate mindset seems to be the only one that would allow for the debate a democracy requires. As a researcher concluded after synthesizing existing research on the "oral mind-set":

Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

It seems that just the widespread ability to read might have been the catalyst that dragged us hominids out of the dark ages. It now seems that the declining ability to read might be what is plunging us back into them.

Read the entire article here.

Thomas Jefferson is Rolling in his Grave

My friend Rob and I have been in a kind of long distance argument with some people over our disdain for popular entertainment. Rob and I have ridiculed such popular entertainments as Transformers, 300 and Dancing With the Stars. I don't have anything against any of these in particular (though 300 might be the stupidest movie I have ever seen), but I do hold a grudge against what passes for art in our society.

I have been accused of being elitist, and I don't necessarily disagree with that appellation. I believe that some art is better than others, the same way that I believe that some baseball players are better than others and that some food is better than others. It's funny, if I said steak is better than Kraft Mac N Chee, I'm not an elitist. If I say A-Rod is a better player than Yuniesky Betancourt, I'm not an elitist. But if I say Children of Men is better than 300, suddenly I'm an elitist. That's not to say that Mac, Yuni and 300 are not worthy of anybody liking them. That IS to say, though, that just because somebody likes something doesn't mean it's good.

I like America's Funniest Home Videos. I would watch it three hours a day if I could, no kidding. But it's not "good". It's entertaining, but it's not "good".

To say that something is good requires the frontal lobe, the thinking part. To say that I like something requires the brain stem, the reptilian brain, the feeling part. So I can't argue, and I won't argue, if people say they like something. However, I can argue, and will argue, if someone argues that something is good just because they like it.

And what America likes is getting, on the whole, stupider and stupider. We are not exercising the frontal lobe, the thinking part of our brain. To wit:

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

"I just get sleepy when I read," said Richard Bustos of Dallas, a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify. Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool.

Read the entire article here.

One bad sentence, one good review

From a review of a new biography of Aimee Semple McPherson comes one of the worst sentences I've read in a long time. I know that the author of the review, John Updike, is a master prose stylist, one of the greatest American authors alive, but this sentence is confusing and terrible, and made worse because it sounds like it's trying so hard to impress.

Nor, herself a feminist symbol, though not a member of any feminist organization, did she neglect the cause of gender equality.

This sentence could be reworded ten different ways, each time making it clearer and less showy. To wit: "Though she was a feminist symbol who attended to the cause of gender equality, she did not belong to any feminist organization."

Other than this ugly sentence, the review is interesting, making the book, and the subject of the book, sound fascinating.

In 1927, she established a temple commissary that, as the Depression settled in, emerged as “one of the region’s most effective and inclusive welfare institutions.” According to Epstein:

When the schools stopped feeding children free lunches, Aimee took over the program. When city welfare agencies staggered under the load of beggars, the women of Angelus Temple sewed quilts and baked loaves of bread by the thousands. When bread lines stretched for city blocks . . . Angelus Temple was the only place anyone could get a meal, clothing, and blankets, no questions asked.

She brushed aside the distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor, and that between legal and illegal residents. One Mexican, the actor Anthony Quinn, who as a teen-ager acted as a translator for her, told an interviewer, “During the Depression . . . the one human being that never asked you what your nationality was, what you believed in and so forth, was Aimee Semple McPherson. All you had to do was pick up the phone and say, ‘I’m hungry,’ and within an hour there’d be a food basket there for you. . . . She literally kept most of that Mexican community . . . alive.” In an era when anti-black racism was freely expressed, not least loudly by fundamentalist white Protestants, she persistently tried to make “interracial revival a reality at Angelus Temple,” bringing a series of black leaders to its pulpit and welcoming into the congregation poor Southern blacks who had recently immigrated to a Los Angeles of increasing racial tensions. The same week of the Detroit race riots, in June of 1943, McPherson publicly converted the notorious black former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson on the Temple stage, and embraced him “as he raised his hand in worship.”

Read the entire article here.

Simplify

Every year when I teach Walden, I begin asking myself some deep questions: Am I doing what I want to do with my life? Am I living deliberately or robotically? Am I spending my life pursuing "stuff," forgetting the truly valuable things in life?

Thoreau was a crank, a jerk, a hypocrite, but that does not change the fact that almost everything he said was true. When many think of Thoreau and Walden, they think he suggested we all drop out of society and go live in the woods as a hermit. The fact is, Thoreau was not a hermit--he walked to town almost every day. Rather, he decided to simplify his life, so he could determine truly what his life should be--that is, once you strip away all the unnecessaries of life, you will, by definition, be left with only what is necessary.

And, what is necessary for you must, of course, be different that what is necessary for me. Thus, Walden was simply a call for every one of us to simplify our life, determine what our goals are, and advance confidently in their direction.

Perhaps my favorite quotation from Walden is this:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Every year I learn something from reading Walden. Reading it also puts me on the lookout for modern day Thoreaus, like this guy.

Down a rambling residential road on the outskirts of Sebastopol, the dream house sits like a testament to discriminating taste.

This dream house is the love child of artist-builder Jay Shafer, who lovingly hand-crafted it. The stainless-steel kitchen, gleaming next to the natural wood interior, is outfitted with customized storage and built-ins. From his bed, Shafer can gaze into the Northern California sky through a cathedral window. In his immaculate office space, a laptop sits alongside rows of architectural books and magazines -- many featuring his house on the cover. And from the old-fashioned front porch, he can look out on a breathtaking setting: an apple orchard in full bloom.

But in an era when bigger is taken as a synonym for better, calling Shafer's home a dream house might strike some as an oxymoron. Why? The entire house, including sleeping loft, measures only 96 square feet -- smaller than many people's bathrooms. But Jay Shafer's dream isn't of a lifestyle writ large but of one carefully created and then writ tiny.

Read the entire article (and see pictures of the house) here.

The Lucifer Effect

Philip Zimbardo might be best known to schlubs like me as the guy who narrates the psychology television series we find on the community college/public access channels. You know the guy: he looks like Satan. And I know most of us have stopped just for a moment, as we were flipping through channels, and ended up watching the whole program.

He is most well known in psychology circles, however, for the Stanford Prison Experiment, which showed that normal groups of people can quickly devolve into Lord of the Flies type cruelty.

After testifying in defense of one of the soldiers implicated in the Abu Ghraib debacle, he has published a new book called The Lucifer Effect, outlining the comparisons between the S.P.E. and A.G.

This interview whetted my appetite to read the book.