Through the Prism

2012-02-09T07:32:00.000-06:00

I was just looking at my page for editing posts and I can see I have at least six drafts started but not completed since last summer. A few are just titles meant to be placeholders until I could get back or notes to capture my thoughts, waiting to be fleshed out. One I've halfway written in the past month and hope to finish sometime soon. But life's been busy for me lately. Most recently--less than two weeks ago--my fiancee and I pushed up our time line and were married in my dad's ICU room (with my mom brought over from her room next door) two days before he passed. From leukemia, so not unexpected, and Mom is recovering from her issues. But the blogging's taken a bit of a back seat, as you might imagine.

Still, I had a thought after returning to work this week, spurred, as is often the case with me, by a book.

Perhaps you've seen those Claritin ads where someone's world is hazy and dim from allergies, then a film of tint is peeled back to reveal a bright, vibrant, wondrous world of life and color.

It's amazing to me just how literal that image can be sometimes, particularly in reverse. There have been times the past couple of weeks, as I've tried to move forward through grief and sadness, that I could swear something was wrong with my eyes; all the light and color literally drained away from what I was looking at and everything was dimmed before my eyes. Even when I wasn't having explicitly dark thoughts, the world became a dark place for me. It's fascinating just how powerfully tangible emotions can be as they impact our experience of reality.

Shaun Tan captures this perfectly in his book The Red Tree (also contained in Lost and Found: Three by Shaun Tan). At his website he describes the book, with sample pictures:

The Red Tree is a story without any particular narrative; a series of distinct imaginary worlds as self-contained images which invite readers to draw their own meaning in the absence of any written explanation. As a concept, the book is inspired by the impulse of children and adults alike to describe feelings using metaphor - monsters, storms, sunshine, rainbows and so on. Moving beyond cliché, I sought painted images that might further explore the expressive possibilities of this kind of shared imagination, which could be at once strange and familiar. A nameless young girl appears in every picture, a stand-in for ourselves; she passes helplessly through many dark moments, yet ultimately finds something hopeful at the end of her journey. . . .

. . . illustration is a powerful way of expressing of feeling as well as ideas, partly because it is outside of verbal language, as many emotions can be hard to articulate in words. I thought it would therefore be interesting to produce an illustrated book that is all about feelings, unframed any storyline context, in some sense going ‘directly to the source’.

What resulted after many scribbles was a series of imaginary landscapes connected only by a minimal thread of text and the silent figure of a young girl at the center of each one, with whom the reader is invited to identify. At the beginning she awakes to find blackened leaves falling from her bedroom ceiling, threatening to quietly overwhelm her. She wanders down a street, overshadowed by a huge fish that floats above her. She imagines herself trapped in a bottle washed up on a forgotten shore, or lost in a strange landscape. She's caught in a tiny boat between towering ships about to collide, then suddenly she's on stage before a mysterious audience, not knowing what to do. . . .

. . . the more I worked on this, the more I found the negative emotions - particularly feelings of loneliness and depression - were just much more interesting from both a personal and artistic point of view.

The words from the book:

The Red Tree

sometimes the day begins
with nothing to look forward to
and things go from bad to worse
darkness overcomes you
nobody understands
the world is a deaf machine
without sense or reason
sometimes you wait
and wait
and wait
and wait
and wait
and wait
and wait
but nothing ever happens
then all your troubles come at once
wonderful things are passing you by
terrible fates are inevitable
sometimes you just don't know
what you are supposed to do
or who you are meant to be
or where you are
and the day seems to end
the way it began
but suddenly there it is
right in front of you
bright and vivid
quietly waiting
just as you imagined it would be

Someone on YouTube made a video of the book:

Playing with Pictures

2012-01-13T06:52:00.004-06:00

Nothing great here, just having some very minor fun with light and color. I don't Photoshop and rarely do much of anything to my cameraphone's pictures other than Microsoft Office Picture Manager's "autocorrect" feature, so I'm sure someone with experience could come up with much better than this.

Anyway, last weekend I shared this picture of the sunset on Facebook in an attempt to capture the colors I'd just seen:

Someone responded it was great, but looked even more dramatic if you tilted your screen to darken it. So, here's the glowing fires and billowing smoke of Mordor version:

Earlier in the day, I'd taken some gloomy, winter pictures at a Flint Hills ranch, including a few of a post with a triangle:

Another angle:

Another angle:

Looking into the sun:

So here's that last one in black and white:

Darkened:

Lightened:

Enhancing the color:

Even more:

Reflecting and Expecting

2012-01-01T10:30:00.000-06:00

On 2011 and of 2012, respectively.

2011 was an eventful year for me, to say the least, although in some ways it's been a lead-in to a potentially even more eventful 2012. My blogging has decreased accordingly, as I even addressed in a September post titled Still Hanging Around: . . . it seems for a few months now I've been bouncing back and forth between really busy and tired to rather mellow, tranquil, and content. Neither state leads to very good rants or musings.

I won't go into all of it here because much of it I consider too private for this forum, but the past year has included many trips to hospitals with loved ones, moving, dealing with tight economic times at work, stresses with exes, chronic exercise injury, travel, excellent times with friends and family, new love, my 40th birthday, and an engagement announcement.

To touch on that last one a bit, a year ago I wrote a rambling, roundabout meditation on my dislike for New Year's resolutions even though I eventually arrived at a vague intent for 2011. I rather like the post: Dawn of a Brand New . . . ish . . . well . . . just another day, really. (And I'm quite fond of the two posts linked within it, although I do understand you don't have eternity to spend reading through the history of this blog.) I more implied my intent than stated it explicitly, but I indicated I wanted to create more opportunities for romance. Soon after writing the post, I created profiles for myself on two dating sites and pursued that for a good part of the year.

But a funny thing happened along the way. In the post, I wrote: Meeting someone for a date seems like such a constructed, performance-based event. Each person is on his or her best behavior, presenting a persona to make an impression. Or even when they're not, there's doubt about it since that's the expectation. I'd much rather see someone in her natural habitat being her everyday self and have her get to know me in the same way, and if a relationship organically develops then it does. But only so many people just organically enter our lives in an everyday way, and waiting can be an exercise in futility. Once I decided to stop waiting around and pursue something more intentional, an organic situation emerged. It was surprising and unexpected, has been much more of a rapidly evolving whirlwind than might seem prudent, and has been more wondrous and precious and happy than I ever thought possible.

So 2011 started with a more formal, radical resolution than is my habit. Though nothing came directly from the actions I took in pursuing what I resolved, something came about in that same realm that delightfully overshot the mark, and now 2012 looks to include a wedding, a honeymoon, a new house, and more.

I don't think any of that particularly relates to resolutions for the new year, though (although we are a week into our "wedding dress" workout regimen). No, I think 2012 looks to be eventful enough without adding the pressure of a "to do" list of things to add to my routine or feel I need to accomplish. Nevertheless, it's my nature to seek life-long learning and constant self-improvement. In keeping with that, I want to share another vague intent, this time one with much more continuity with my general operating procedure. (And for those of you who do have eternity to spend reading through the history of this blog, prepare for more links to past posts demonstrating the continuity and elaborating on my foundation for pursuing this intent.)

I don't generally use the term "Renaissance person" because I'm not sure what associations and connotations others might have for it, but I've always been drawn to the idea since it seems to fit me instinctively. In I Want to Be a Generalist (and in the intro here) I wrote about my predisposition for variety and being well-rounded, how I am interested in many different things and don't want to specialize in any. Despite the expert advice I've seen many times, I refuse to focus this blog because I want it to reflect my many, random interests, from the Tour de France to politics, religion, and social justice to nature walks and photography to children's literature to books I read to Dungeons & Dragons and much more. This blog is about me and any topic that catches my eye, which means it will be far-ranging and diverse.

We were Christmas shopping at Half-price Books and I came across one that intrigued me. It wasn't a category I normally go for and I was blindly hoping I'd run into something that would work for the person I had in mind, and I did. I not only bought him a copy of the book as a gift, I bought the second copy they had for myself. I don't have any great expectations that it will be particularly deep or well-written or will provide that perfect formula to a magically happy life that it offers, but I hope to get some good things out of it and apply them to my life. Add to my wisdom, if you will.

So that's my resolution for the New Year: read How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci and see if I can put its "Seven Da Vincian Principles" into practice in new and deeper ways. Because it was reading the descriptions of those seven principles that won me over to the book. I'm sure I'll be blogging more about them as I get to the book, but here they are, in brief:

Curiosita - An insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.

Which I've already made some reference to above and hope this blog (and my daily life, for those of you who know me) already demonstrates regularly.

Dimostrazione - A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.

I've always called myself a trial-and-error learner (including here).

Sensazione - The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.

This brings to mind my recent post Keep Your Head Up, among other thoughts.

Sfumato (literally "Going up in Smoke") - A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.

I've said many times to many people, including in this blog post, we need to Embrace Contradiction and Paradox.

Arte/Scienza - The development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination. "Whole-brain" thinking.

I remember in high school saying that my favorite subject was science, math, art, and music, and most recently blogged along these lines in: Are Knowledge and Imagination Dichotomous?

Corporalita - The cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise.

I would guess I tend to be a bit brutish for this particular definition, but I can't live happily without exercise and physical activity (see, for instance: Finally Indexing All My Born to Run Posts).

Connessione - A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems thinking.

I'm not remembering at the moment if I've specifically delved into this idea in a post, but I think it's an underlying assumption to the basic philosophy that informs much of what I say.

So maybe reading this book won't be much of a revelatory or transformative experience for me, but I'm hoping it will help me continue to grow during a year that looks to have more than its fair share of eventfulness and challenge already. Who knows, maybe I'll even like it so much I get the workbook.

External Introspection: Of Guys and Books

2011-12-31T12:45:00.001-06:00

Much of our work as librarians is practical and hands-on, but sometimes we get the chance to be philosophical. I was catching up on the blog of a favorite author a couple of weeks ago and decided I wanted to share with my colleagues a series of three posts he wrote, feeling they were relevant to our work encouraging boys to read. One of them responded with a really good question, so I've copied my original email, her question, and my response below.

The rambling original prompt to read his posts, preceded by my attempt at establishing context:

I don't know this for sure, but I'm guessing since it's something I intentionally advocate every so often that I have a bit of a reputation as one of the Guys Read librarians in our system. I think the general library landscape is more accepting of books with guy appeal than it was ten years ago. Even so, often when I read articles or see presentations or the like describing what boys like--the gross humor and etc.--my reaction is, "Yes, but . . . " Even if those are the overwhelming themes on my booklists of guy appeal books (kids; teens), even if the Top 10 "What I Like to Read" responses from the Guys Read field office I worked with last year are:

Books about war and/or weapons
Books with at least one massive sword fight
All Wimpy Kid books
World records or other weird facts
Anything having to do with Percy Jackson
Monsters and ghost stories
Books that explain how things work
Books about sports or athletes
Joke books
Cereal boxes

Even then, there still seems something slightly missing in what's conveyed about what guys like, as often as not.

Or maybe not what guys like so much as who they are.

I think I've shared things from Andrew Smith's blog before. Another group of his posts has me thinking today and I'd like to share them, because he's articulated something that gets lost in all the talk about guys liking snips and snails and puppy dog tails. He's talking teens, but there's a version of the same dynamic at play for younger guys.

The posts are in response to a question about his novel Marbury Lens. If you haven't read it, here's a bit of my review:

Jack shares this on page 53, still quite early in his book, but well after he's been kidnapped, tortured, and nearly raped, has escaped and, with the help of his best friend, accidentally killed his attacker while trying to take revenge. Things start bad, but they get much, much worse. Because Jack can't escape the shame and trauma of his experience, even after flying all the way to England and falling in love with a beautiful girl. Because England is where a stranger starts following him, then gives him a pair of glasses. When he puts the lenses on, he becomes another Jack in a dystopian wasteland of a world called Marbury. There Jack is one of three survivors looking for any signs of life other than the cannibals that dog their every step, cannibals that include a Marbury version of Connor, his best friend and the only person he's ever truly loved (before Nickie). Each time Jack goes to Marbury he loses his memory of what he is doing in England and hurts Connor and Nickie, but he can't stop going to the place. He doesn't know what's real anymore and thinks his experience might have driven him insane, but can't stop his addiction to bleak, shriveled desolation--whether in the form of Marbury, the real world, his body, or his psyche.

The posts:

nobody makes hair shirts nowadays (part one) - . . . Anyway, back to Twitter, where a friend named Rachael said (her exact tweet):

LOVED Marbury Lens! Curious if you have ever written a post about male sexuality in it, because I found that aspect intriguing.

Hmm... First off, I like to write blog posts in response to specific questions from readers. So I tweeted back and forth a few times to Rachael because I was trying to wrap my head around this concept of writing about male sexuality in The Marbury Lens.

Um. Here goes:

There is this Zen parable that I am especially fond of. I tell it over and over because it's kind of a pivot point to my life. It goes something like this:

Two fish are swimming along beside one another. One fish turns to the other and says, "So, tell me about this water stuff I keep hearing about."

That is the story.

Good, wasn't it?

Now I suppose I should explain. . . .

nobody makes hair shirts nowadays (part two) - . . . I think there are two important aspects of sexuality that are frequently mishandled, trivialized, and obfuscated (that word sounds nasty) in popular "YA" (and let me tell you how much I absolutely hate that categorical brand) literature: gender identity and sexual identity.

They are different things, and both of them put a hell of a lot of pressure on adolescent males.

I don't know so much about females. Never been one.

The gender identity aspect has to do with what it means to act like a man -- the expectational pressures placed on boys to behave in certain ways -- to "suck it up," for example. This is no small part of Jack's problem in The Marbury Lens. He doesn't tell about what happened to him, because he believes he isn't supposed to. It's just the way boys are socialized to behave. . . .

nobody makes hair shirts nowadays (part three) - . . . Let me tell you a little side note about mean comments (and another mean comment story will come up later in this post): When my first book, Ghost Medicine, came out, I received more than a few comments from people (none of whom happened to be males, but I am not going to make a generalized statement as to the significance of this) who said Boys are not introspective like this in real life. They do not look inside themselves and examine things like love and life and friendship. This stuff never happens with real boys.

I am not making this shit up. That is the truth.

The thing is, that because boys (like Jack) feel so much pressure to "suck it up," to not express unmanly feelings (as though society dictates that genderless emotions such as love, attraction, or appreciation of beauty are feminine, and that other -- equally genderless emotions -- are masculine) externally, they are, in fact entirely vastly more likely to be introspective than girls, especially when it comes to sexuality, sexual identity, and the anxiety they feel because of sexual expectations -- pressures from outside.

If you don't realize that, then I am glad I taught you something which may make your head explode.

It is my job to tell the truth.

And this really is (if there were such a thing) a recurring concept that ripples through just about every book I have ever written.

When you pile all these pressures and expectations on a reasonably bright and aware kid, like Jack, from The Marbury Lens, it is not at all unreasonable for him to conclude -- as he does -- that there must be something wrong with him, and he better not talk about it, too. . . .

I've tried to copy substantive sections of each post so you can get the gist, but there's more at the links, including some good discussion in the comments.

By the way, if you've read The Marbury Lens and want more, he just gave a brief description of the upcoming sequel in a more recent post:

Jack and Conner prepare to leave for England. They have a plan. They think it's the only reasonable way to deal with the Marbury lens. But the four boys - Jack, Conner, Ben, and Griffin - end up scattered in different places at different times. Jack is lost in a Marbury that isn't Marbury, a Glenbrook that isn't Glenbrook, pursued through every crumbling not-world by an uncaring cop trying to solve the mystery of Freddie Horvath's murder, and a deceitful kid named Quinn Cahill who believes he is the King of Marbury. Jack's universe is collapsing in on itself. He finds his friends. He finds his home. There's always just one thing, and Jack knows it. This can't be it.

A response from a colleague, with a good question:

Oooh, I have a question, Boy Librarian:

Do you think boys are socialized to say they "like" certain things, and that "liking" other things can get them into trouble?

There was a time, I remember, when I tried very hard to "like" certain bands, because they were popular. Sadly, I always prefered Cyndi Lauper to Madonna, and didn't think much of Van Halen (though we all agreed the lead guitarist was cute.) Left to my own devices, I would listen to music that was old and out-of-date, and so not cool. John Denver, the carpenters, Billy Joel, soundtracks to musicals. I even remember watching M-TV like it was a study assignment, to learn what the right band to like was.

Eventually, of course, it became far too much effort, and I just liked the music I liked.

So I'm wondering, do boys pick what they are supposed to like? If so, don't we adults continue the legacy of things-which-boys-like and things-which-girls-like by making assumptions about individual tastes based on gender? Say there is a boy who would much rather read Bridge to Terebithia than the book on Extreme Sharks that the adult is showing him. Won't he get the message that he is supposed to "like" sharks? And if he doesn't, then he's weird or he's gay or he's a wuss?

Even as a kid, I would have been offended by a "girls" display of books that was limited to ponies, princesses, and Little House on the Prairie.

(Full disclosure: I've got a "Guys Read" display up at [my library].)

Just thinkin' out loud!

My answer, which helped bring things a bit more into focus:

Do you think boys are socialized to say they "like" certain things, and that "liking" other things can get them into trouble? - Oh, absolutely! (Don't we all, in some ways?) Great question and exactly what this is all about.

The problem is that the socialization is so deep that it truly does define many boys at a subconscious level they can't grasp or fight. Others feel uneasy about certain aspects of the socialization, but the fear of being mocked or of not fitting in won't allow them to really engage their unease or actually rebel against the norms. Others try to rebel, and succeed to some extent. Others completely rebel and consciously choose to never fit in. There's a whole range of responses to this dynamic. The bulk of boys are defined by it, though, to enough of an extent that it's what we have to work with.

(And, sadly, adults are just as responsible for this socialization as peers, if not more so.)

Me for instance: Having a pacifist upbringing and great role models in my family helped me decide on some level I was never going to embrace the dominant concept of "manliness" in our society, but I was too shy and reserved to ever act out against it. Somewhere along the line I realized I preferred the company of girls (or nerds) to most boys, since I was never sure which other boys were holding me to the standard of "manliness," would judge me and mock me for not living up to it. For example, one time when I showed a peer my music interests, he mocked me and told everyone else so they would too, so I learned that music was something private that I'd keep to myself. I had many other lessons like that. At the same time as I tried to reject those values, however, they continued to define me and I found myself uninterested in the types of things we were assigned to read in school--the types of things that Guys Read-type advocates say won't work for boys--and it was not an act, I really didn't like them (and still don't, to some extent). I only became a reader because I discovered the fantasy genre; I read 2-3 books of my own choosing a week as a teen, but read almost nothing that was assigned in school (teachers always told us what we were supposed to learn from the reading during lecture and discussion anyway). I was a proud, self-proclaimed nerd who didn't want to fit in and read for fun more than anyone I knew (and got made fun of for it), yet the social conditioning I rebelled against was strong enough that I couldn't make myself like any type of book but a particular genre.

So whether they knowingly choose it or not, guys reading tastes are at least somewhat defined by this socialization, and we have to reach them where they are and appeal to who they are. Saying, "It's okay to read this 'girly' book," might work for a few, but we're not the ones enforcing these norms for them or mocking them when they don't follow them. And one of the biggest norms we have to fight is that the very act of reading itself is "unmanly," which means the first big hurdle is finding some type of reading that they'll accept as "okay for boys." Then if we can get them to consider certain types of books, most boys genuinely do like what we talk about as "boy books" because it's who they've been trained to be. There are plenty who don't fit the mold, of course--discussions like this are based on sweeping generalizations, not individualities--and that's where reference interviews and personal recommendations come in.

It's also why I don't recommend just any book with gross humor and brute appeal, because the good ones work on multiple levels. A good "boy book," in my opinion, entertains and amuses by challenging conventional mores and manners (don't talk about underpants or puke, etc.), but at the same time challenges the conventional norms of manliness and takes delight in wit and praises intelligence; it hooks guys with its base subject matter, but then works in other values and messages in subtle and fun ways. It can't be a pandering bait-and-switch or be at all preachy because guys will see through that; it has to be both stupid and smart at the same time. (As I said in my review of Ook and Gluk, no one does stupid humor as intelligently as Dav Pilkey.)

It's all about replacing the dominant message that reading isn't a "manly" thing with the idea that reading is fun for guys and that there are books that appeal to "manly" values. Once we can get guys across that barrier and into our fold as readers, they'll eventually start wanting new challenges and stimulation and will expand their interests.

And it's never as simple as just that--that's just my starting point. I may call my booklists "Guy Appeal" lists, but I tried to have a decent level of variety within them because there are many different things that appeal to guys. You'll find horror, fantasy, sci fi, humor, female protagonists, sports, nerds, mysteries, and many other things. The teen list even starts (alphabetical author listing) with a blatant lesson book about how girls are harassed for being girls (Thirteen Reasons Why). The "gross" stuff is mainly confined to the Captain Underpants Readalikes list and things like that. It's not about trying to define guys with our lists and recommendations (as much as possible, though there will always be some aspect of that), but about trying to find lists and recommendations that make sense to the ways guys define themselves.

Say there is a boy who would much rather read Bridge to Terebithia than the book on Extreme Sharks that the adult is showing him. Won't he get the message that he is supposed to "like" sharks? And if he doesn't, then he's weird or he's gay or he's a wuss? - That's why I start every reference interview not with, "You should like this," but with, "What do you like?" If he won't tell me, then my next line of questioning is, "Do you think you'd enjoy something that is . . . funny/serious/fantastical/factual/contemporary/historical/etc?" (Fill in the blanks until one lights up his eyes a bit.) Use questions to make him give you direction and guide your recommendations. And as we start narrowing in I'll even ask directly, "Do you mind if the main character is a girl?" and similar things so he defines what he's comfortable with instead of me assuming or imposing.

(The views expressed aren't based on careful academic study and don't represent all male librarians; these are just my experiences and ramblings.)

Pretty Much Says It All

2011-12-19T11:48:00.002-06:00

Jessica Hagy seems to have diagrammed the formula for a happy and meaningful life:

One of the Worst Things You Can Inflict Upon Me Is Boredom

2011-11-29T17:56:00.004-06:00

I have a confession to make: I am a Youth Services Librarian who at my core hates Summer Reading Club, Teen Read Week, National Library Week, and all of our other special events that attempt to coerce people into reading with special incentives. If you're not reading because you love reading, you're doing it for the wrong reasons, the enterprise is sullied, and chances are you won't do it again without more incentives. I don't feel it's my job to get people to read; it's my job to help people discover they enjoy reading. Extrinsic incentives detract from that purpose.

In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink transfers this general idea of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation from the library and applies it to the world of work. Just as I hope to help people realize reading is an enjoyable pursuit for the journey, he hopes to help people create workplace management dynamics that make the daily grind of employment rewarding, meaningful, and pleasant.

- Jessica Hagy, at Indexed

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and . . . Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Sawyer Effect: A weird behavioral alchemy inspired by the scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in which Tom and friends whitewash Aunt Polly's fence. This effect has two aspects. The negative: Rewards can turn play into work. The positive: Focusing on mastery can turn work into play.

- Daniel Pink, Drive

INTJ’s are very self-motivated, drawn to working autonomously, and often do their best work when simply left to their own devices to undertake a particular project or task. They do not need to be, or enjoy being, watched over closely or micro-managed. Some say that the INTJ is the most independent of all of the 16 types [of the MBTI].

- All About the INTJ Personality (e.g. me)

I have to admit my bias--as you might have guessed from my introduction--as I attempt to review Drive: I am and always have been at the extreme intrinsic end of the motivation continuum. I'm not even sure I "get" extrinsic motivation, and most of the time my reaction to someone attempting to motivate me with sticks and carrots is either resentful dismissal or outright resistance. I want nothing to do with it. So I don't find "The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us" described in this book so surprising, but instead so fundamentally commonsensical that I wonder why it's even necessary to write a book about it. It's tempting to make my review a simple one-word, "Duh!"

On the other hand, I know I'm different than many--perhaps most--people, and am grateful that Pink has made the effort to articulate these ideas in a useful way and worked to make them relevant to the world of work. Because the need for a better management style most definitely exists in way too many workplaces, schools, and lives in general. For instance, I know of an organization that recently had its managers read this book and discuss it, and still started with the discussion with the question, "How can we motivate staff?" despite Pink's inclusion of the following quote in the book: The questions so many people ask--namely, "How do I motivate people to learn? to work? to do their chores? or to take their medicine?"--are the wrong questions. They are wrong because they imply that motivation is something that gets done to people rather than something that people do. Even when wanting to learn from the book, they were so entrenched in the traditional workplace motivational models that they seemed to not quite get the point. Extrinsic, stick-and-carrot motivation is such an institutionalized habit, that even with the convincing case made by this book it will be hard for many to change.

And here's where my bias makes it hard for me to write a good review. I'd like to say Pink makes a convincing case, but I don't really know since I was already convinced before I read his book and could only nod in agreement the entire time. I enjoyed the book and hope to go back and dwell in some of the specifics for greater insight, but I'm not sure I learned enough from it for it to have been worth my time. Still, I think the message needs to spread and I must recommend it, because I think the world will be a better place if more people adopt his recommendations. More people will find that middle place in Hagy's diagram, will find more play at work the way Twain describes, if more workplaces learn the lessons in this book and shift to a model of encouraging intrinsic motivation instead of merely relying on extrinsic.

One final illustration to prove the point that the wrong motivation and context can take the fun out of absolutely anything (mildly mature content warning; nsfw):

Finally Indexing All My Born to Run Posts

2011-11-21T09:09:00.003-06:00

Christopher McDougall just wrote an excellent article for the New York Times that sums up the ideas in his excellent book Born to Run in a few pages. It even includes a short instructional video for a quick, easy drill to do daily to train your body in a healthier running form. A few quick excerpts if you're unfamiliar with the book:

The Once and Future Way to Run

We were once the greatest endurance runners on earth. We didn’t have fangs, claws, strength or speed, but the springiness of our legs and our unrivaled ability to cool our bodies by sweating rather than panting enabled humans to chase prey until it dropped from heat exhaustion. Some speculate that collaboration on such hunts led to language, then shared technology. Running arguably made us the masters of the world. . . .

Two years ago, in my book, “Born to Run,” I suggested we don’t need smarter shoes; we need smarter feet. I’d gone into Mexico’s Copper Canyon to learn from the Tarahumara Indians, who tackle 100-mile races well into their geriatric years. I was a broken-down, middle-aged, ex-runner when I arrived. Nine months later, I was transformed. After getting rid of my cushioned shoes and adopting the Tarahumaras’ whisper-soft stride, I was able to join them for a 50-mile race through the canyons. I haven’t lost a day of running to injury since. . . .

The only way to halt the running-injury epidemic, it seems, is to find a simple, foolproof method to relearn what the Tarahumara never forgot. A one best way to the one best way [to run]. . . .

Last fall, at the end of a local 10-mile trail race, I surprised myself by finishing five minutes faster than I had four years ago, when I was in much better shape. I figured the result was a fluke — until it happened again. No special prep, awful travel schedule and yet a personal best in a six-mile race.

“I don’t get it,” I told Cucuzzella this past June when we went for a run together through the Shepherd University campus in Shepherdstown. “I’m four years older. I’m pretty sure I’m heavier. I’m not doing real workouts, just whatever I feel like each day. The only difference is I’ve been 100-Upping.” . . . .

(See the video for a demonstration of the 100-Up; read the article for a description.)

Previous Posts
(In chronological order)

Was it a coincidence that the world's most enlightened people were also the world's most amazing runners? - I started listening to a book today I've been looking forward to for a long time. Not only did it not disappoint, it's so far better than expected. Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall. First a quote I like then a full introduction via The Daily Show . . .

They were so ignorant, they didn't even realize they were supposed to be burned out, overtained, and injured. Instead, they were fast. - I'm only about a third of the way done with Born to Run, but I am totally into it. My running geek is fascinated by learning more about the Leadville 100, the Adams State coach, and all kinds of other people, places, and things, I'm casually familiar with. McDougall knows how to tell a story, and he has an unending stream of them woven into this book. More than geeked, though, I'm stirred. It makes me feel everything I love about running. . . .

Trail Running Is My Favorite Form of Meditation - . . . "When I'm out on a long run," she continued, "the only thing in life that matters is finishing the run. For once, my brain isn't going blehblehbleh all the time. Everything quiets down, and the only thing going on is pure flow. It's just me and the movement and the motion. That's what I love--just being a barbarian, running through the woods." . . .

Might Have to Try Some Barefoot Running - "Everyone thinks they know how to run, but it's really as nuanced as any other activity," Eric told me. "Ask most people and they'll say, 'People just run the way they run.' That's ridiculous. Does everyone just swim the way they swim?" For every other sport, lessons are fundamental; you don't go out and start slashing away with a golf club or sliding down a mountain on skis until someone takes you through the steps and teaches you proper form. If not, inefficiency is guaranteed and injury is inevitable. . . .

Running was the superpower that made us all human--which means it's a superpower all humans possess - Lieberman began calculating temperatures, speed, and body weight. Soon, there it was before him: the solution to the Running Man mystery. To run an antelope to death, Lieberman determined, all you have to do is scare it into a gallop on a hot day. "If you keep just close enough for it to see you, it will keep sprinting away. After about ten or fifteen kilometers' worth of running, it will go into hypothermia and collapse." Translation: if you can run six miles on a summer day, then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom. We can dump heat on the run, but animals can't pant while they gallop. . . .

Born to Run Review - . . . That’s the summary, but McDougall shares his entire journey of conversion and more. He’s one heck of an entertaining storyteller, and he has woven countless tales throughout the book. In his quest to discover his own inner runner, he has been part of a convergence of U.S. ultra marathoning and the Tarahumara people of remote Mexico. Along the way he’s had more than his share of adventures into the Mexican wild lands, science, and the ultrarunning subculture, and met an amazing number of amazingly colorful people. . . .

Born to Run Visuals and Extenders - If you've been intrigued by the book, then you need to start with McDougall's site. That links to the photos of some of the people mentioned in the excerpts I've shared (like Jenn doing a handstand at the top of an 8,000 foot climb). . . .

Raramuri Diet Tips - . . . The Tarahumara diet is described in some small detail in the book, with repeated mention of two staples — pinole and chia seeds. The author relates a few stories that ascribe almost magical qualities to these simple foods, and though he is prone to hyperbole, I found myself intrigued enough to do some research and try making them on my own. . . .

I'm a Trial and Error Learner - My dad and brother are in town, and last night I took my brother hiking on some fairly rocky mountain bike trails. I wore my Vibram FiveFingers and stubbed my toes a couple of times. I knew when I hurt the middle toe and hopped around going, "Ow! Ow!" for a few seconds, but don't know when I hurt the pinky. They hurt to the touch, but seem to be OK for walking (although the soles of my feet are sore from all the rocky walking). . . .

If you don't have time to read (the rest of) Born to Run - This succinctly explains the theory that humans evolved as the world's best endurance runners and how the barefoot running style is better for you. Even has a short video demonstration. From NPR.

Natural Born Runners - A new study, it seems, would support the idea that the evolutionary advantage humans developed as predators was distance running. A Yahoo News summary:

Being Flawed Is Not a Flaw

2011-11-10T17:20:00.001-06:00

Just a thought I had in response to a conversation last night about relationship baggage and issues and after today hearing a radio personality saying, “There are no heroes; everyone is flawed,” while discussing the firing of Joe Paterno. We still must deal with the flaws and shouldn’t embrace or like them, but they don’t negate a person’s worth. It’s an immutable fact of existence that we are somewhat defined by our mistakes, finiteness, irrationality, insecurities, anxieties, apathies, and unhealthy patterns, but that doesn’t mean we’re not also valuable, lovable, estimable, and heroic.

Keep Your Head Up

2011-10-26T21:49:00.000-05:00

And take time to marvel and wonder.

I got quite a few accolades on Facebook for this picture after I shared it there.

I was very grateful for the praise, but don't know that I did much to deserve it. I was barely outside the day I took it because I was spending the day shepherding someone at the hospital. I just happened to be running a quick errand to the car in the parking garage, and when I walked out I saw this really cool sky and took a picture. It seems due to luck and happenstance more than anything.

Yet as I think about it, I didn't see anyone else stop to pull out a camera and capture it. I didn't see anyone else even seem to notice it, in fact. Everyone was busy going about their business, with their heads down and their attention elsewhere. So maybe if I'm to get credit for anything, it's for not being so absorbed by life that I can't take the time to notice my surroundings.

One thing I've noticed at the library is that kids are much more observant than their parents, and much more likely to be delighted and wonderstruck. I like to make the spaces interesting, with decorations, posters, and other things to discover all over. Adults rarely notice these kinds of things, and when they do they only see the ones at eye level. It's always the kids who point out the things hanging from the ceiling or low to the ground. I was also struck by a section in the book Moonwalking with Einstein on time and memory. Time drags when you're young and flies when you're old, in general. The theory in the book is that time is slower when you're younger because you're busy constantly discovering new things and making new memories. When you get older you've seen and done it all already, so the world is less notable and you pay less attention, thus making fewer memories because you're on autopilot and it all becomes one big blur of quickly passing time.

The picture above isn't the only one of mine that people have praised. Many seem to. I don't consider myself a photographic artist, I just like trying to capture things I enjoy looking at. But the fact that I do so seems to stand out. And it's one of the ways I make myself happy. Instead of keeping my head down and rushing through life, I do my best to pay attention to my surroundings and find things to marvel at, because that makes life more wondrous.

True or False

2011-10-15T20:31:00.000-05:00

True or False?

Because I suffer, others should also suffer.

Those who suffer less than I do are less deserving than I am.

Those who suffer less than I do are neither equal to me nor worthy of as much respect.

The existence of those who have attained what I have attained with less suffering than it took me to attain it discounts my suffering and devalues me as a person.

-----

True or False?

Because I work hard, others should also work hard.

Those who work less hard than I do are less deserving than I am.

Those who work less hard than I do are neither equal to me nor worthy of as much respect.

The existence of those who have attained what I have attained with less hard work than it took me to attain it discounts my hard work and devalues me as a person.

-----

True or False?

If someone expresses an opinion I disagree with, it is an implicit criticism of me for believing something different.

-----

False: Liberals are lazy, looking for every opportunity to live off of the hard work of others through tax-funded government handout programs.

False: Conservatives are greedy and selfish, unwilling to share or help others.

True: We demonize each other into simple, extreme caricatures bearing little resemblance to reality.

-----

True: I've always worked hard to support myself, have had minimal debt while never missing a payment, and have lived within my means without looking for or expecting handouts. I believe in encouraging hard work and don't think we should be in the business of supporting habitual freeloaders. But I believe in sharing and think we're all stronger together when we help each other out.

True: This is an excellent article that works to find a more reasoned tone and some kind of middle ground, from the liberal perspective:

Open Letter to that 53% Guy

. . . So, if you think being a liberal means that I don’t value hard work or a strong work ethic, you’re wrong. I think everyone appreciates the industry and dedication a person like you displays. I’m sure you’re a great employee, and if you have entrepreneurial ambitions, I’m sure these qualities will serve you there too. I’ll wish you the best of luck, even though a guy like you will probably need luck less than most.

I understand your pride in what you’ve accomplished, but I want to ask you something. . . .

And is this really your idea of what life should be like in the greatest country on Earth? . . .

We can have a reasonable standard for what level of work qualifies you for the American Dream, and work to build a society that realizes that dream, or we can chew each other to the bone in a nightmare of merciless competition and mutual contempt. . . .

-----

True: I want to thank author Andrew Smith for these three quotes, one from him and two from Kurt Vonnegut:

Even poor people in America believe that there is something diseased about themselves, and something holy and pure about the rich. I don't really get it. It's why so many of these ideologues who bash any economic balancing act that involves reestablishing previous tax rates on the super-rich attract so many working poor followers.
---
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
---
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

(Part one of Smith's blog post.)

I Can Never Understand Why My Friends Won't Work Out with Me

2011-10-14T10:43:00.000-05:00

Too Perfect Not to Share

2011-10-13T19:34:00.004-05:00

From Indexed

Like pirates, curious kids with library cards:
- Explore
- Take all they like
- Grow rich
If only everyone appreciated knowledge and inquisitiveness as much as this formula, it would more often be true.

And, really, I should let it go at that. With the innocent magic of learning for children. But that wouldn't be me. Because I think there are implications for adulthood, that the formula adds up to something, or should, at least, when it's properly applied. Many others have said something similar, but it was George Carlin who showed up this morning on Facebook:

(Click on the image for a larger, easier to read version.)

Topsy-Turvy Dullness

2011-10-13T18:18:00.002-05:00

Why, don't you see, if you told grown-ups I should have no peace of my life. They'd get hold of me, and they wouldn't wish silly things like you do, but real earnest things; and the scientific people would hit on some way of making things last after sunset, as likely as not; and they'd ask for a graduated income tax, and old-age pensions and manhood suffrage, and free secondary education, and dull things like that; and get them, and keep them, and the whole world would be turned topsy-turvy.

From a book first published in 1902, Five Children and It by E. Nesbit.

My review:

If you could have anything you wanted, what would it be? Quickly now, off the top of your head. You get one wish, immediately. What is it?

Okay, now that you’ve made your wish, think it through very carefully and try to imagine all the ways it might go wrong. Because your wish won’t turn out the way that you think. Wishes never do, you know. The creature granting the wish always finds a way to twist your words so they mean something a bit different than you thought, people will react to your changed state of affairs in ways you haven’t predicted, and there will be repercussions you haven’t yet imagined. So think hard about your wish. How might it go wrong?

That’s the tale in this book. Four siblings (and their baby brother) find a fairy and learn the hard way that having your wishes come true isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. The Psammead is bound to grant them one wish a day, but the wishes always end with nightfall and none of them work as hoped. Each time the children try to plan carefully, but only end up getting themselves (and others) into trouble.

While you may be familiar with this kind of story, realize that this one was written over a hundred years ago by one of the earliest authors who wrote books for children. In some ways it’s a bit old fashioned, but her witty, sometimes snarky writing certainly portrays characters that ring true regardless of place or time. So true, in fact, that part of the fun is slapping your forehead at how dumb they are with their wishes and imagining how you might do better. Could you? Try this enjoyable read and find out.

The house was deep in the country, with no other house in sight, and the children had been in London for two years, without so much as once going to the seaside even for a day by an excursion train, and so the White House seemed to them a sort of fairy palace set down in an earthly paradise. For London is like prison for children, especially if their relations are not rich.

Of course there are the shops and the theatres, and Maskelyne and Cook’s, and things, but if your people are rather poor you don’t get taken to the theatres, and you can’t buy things out of the shops; and London has none of those nice things that children may play with without hurting the things or themselves--such as trees and sand and woods and waters. And nearly everything in London is the wrong sort of shape--all straight lines and flat streets, instead of being all sorts of odd shapes, as things are in the country. Trees are all different, as you know, and I am sure some tiresome person must have told you that there are no two blades of grass exactly alike. But in streets where the blades of grass don’t grow, everything is like everything else. This is why so many children who live in towns are so extremely naughty. They do not know what is the matter with them, and no more do their fathers and mothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, tutors, governesses, and nurses; but I know. And so do you now. Children in the country are naughty sometimes, too, but that is for quite different reasons. . . .

The best part of it all was that there were no rules about not going to places and not doing things. In London almost everything is labeled “You mustn’t touch,” and though the label is invisible it’s just as bad, because you know it’s there, or if you don’t you jolly soon get told.

Still Hanging Around

2011-09-29T12:47:00.002-05:00

I know the posts have been in short supply lately. I have links and thoughts set aside for when I feel like visiting them, but it seems for a few months now I've been bouncing back and forth between really busy and tired to rather mellow, tranquil, and content. Neither state leads to very good rants or musings. I'm sure I'll be back sooner or later, but for now I want to enjoy today's beautiful weather and good mood.

Logic, Pure and Simple

2011-09-12T22:58:00.003-05:00

Kevin Drum's The Story of the Economy

Just to make sure that everyone is still clear about this, here's the current trajectory of politics and the American economy stripped down to its bare essentials:

2001-2008: Republicans run economy into ditch.

2008: Obama elected.

2009-2011: Republicans respond by doing everything possible to prevent him from fixing things.

2012: Republicans use lousy economy as campaign cudgel against Obama.

2012: Republican candidate wins presidency (maybe).

Rectifying a Dearth of Me

2011-09-09T14:34:00.004-05:00

It seems my posts have been lacking in original content and writing lately, as I haven't been making the time for it. In an attempt to rectify that a bit while still not really making time, I'll share something I've written for another context. My workplace is slowly working through our staff, doing short profiles on our intranet. I got a bit carried away answering some of the questions, since the person who writes the profiles will picked a chose and few quotes and interesting bits from the "interview" questions and the final product was much shorter than what I gave her. But since I went to all the trouble, I thought I'd share the whole thing with someone besides her. I didn't really revise or edit this for sentence structure or clarity since she'll be working it over anyway, so I'm sure it's more than a little convoluted and rough at times.

Where did you go to high school and college? What was your major?

I began school in *****, where I was born, but we moved to *****, where my parents were both from, when I was 7. We were still in ***** for my first year of high school, but Dad got a new job at ***** High School the summer after. Thinking a move was imminent and not wanting to change schools mid-year, my brother and I decided to commute with him to school. Unfortunately, we didn’t move until the following summer, so we made the 50-55 minute country drive both ways every day for a year.

I finished high school in *****, then considered some pretty serious college prospects. However, my goals for school weren’t all that clear, so I figured if I could just take general classes anywhere, I might as well do it cheaply. I decided to stay home and start school at ***** Community College, where I received a vocal music scholarship. After two years of taking things that sounded interesting, I found I’d earned an A.S. but no direction.

I took a semester off to work and decided I definitely didn’t like that, so I went back with the idea of becoming a wildlife biologist, planning to transfer to ***** State University since I’d heard they had a good program. However, during the break of my first three-hour meeting of my Chemistry II class, after spending an hour-and-a-half remembering how much I hated my Chemistry I class, I walked over to the admin building and withdrew from the class. Then I looked at the other classes I’d taken to fill out my schedule so I’d be full time, saw that one was a Shakespeare class and the other was The Oral Interpretation of Literature, and realized what I loved more than anything in the world was reading, studying, and sharing my love of books and stories.

So I finally understood I was meant to be an English major. But what to do with an English degree? I’d been intentionally avoiding the idea of becoming a teacher since both of my parents and many members of my extended family were, but I had to admit it was a pretty decent route to go. I’d been planning to transfer to ***** and they had a big teacher program, so I ended up spending the next three years there getting my Bachelor of Secondary Education in English.

However, I emerged from those years with a strong interest in learning more about religion, to find out if my liberal beliefs had the biblical and theological foundation I thought they did (since all I saw in media and popular culture made me doubt it) and how I might beneficially apply them to the world. After a trip to Princeton and considering some other options, my then-wife and I moved to *****, where I spent three years at ***** getting an academically demanding, praxis oriented, 90 hour Master of Divinity degree.

Then, nine years removed from high school—and after rejecting the idea of pursuing a Ph.D. in Social Theory/Ethics—I accepted I was going to finally have to get a real job. Before I found either a church job or a teaching job, though, I was offered the position as Librarian at ***** High School in *****. It was an intimidating thought to jump into that kind of thing with no preparation or training, but it seemed a good fit for me and expectations were very low, so I accepted. That started me in pursuit of my M.L.S. at *****. Four years later I had it and came [here].

How long have you worked [with us] and in what departments/branches?

I started [here] in August of 2002 as a Youth Services Librarian at [a branch]. I don’t remember the date, but some four-ish years later I was transferred to [a different branch] in the same position. A few years after that I decided to give the Branch Manager position at [yet another branch] a try, but quickly decided that wasn’t what I was after at the time and six months later returned to my position at [the second], where I remain to this day.

Did you participate in the Leadership Development Program? If so, how has that experience influenced you?

It has made me into a power-hungry, Machiavellian master of manipulation and devious maneuvers, attempting to take over the organization from behind the scenes as a shadow without notice, for my own personal gain.

I mean, yes, I participated in 2009. I think my biggest takeaway from the experience, as cliché as it sounds, was confidence and self-esteem, an ability to accept that others looked to me for leadership and a self-concept that began to include the thought of myself as a leader. It has allowed me to take on new roles in new ways, such as leading the Youth Services meetings, giving presentations and training sessions, and being more active as a leader both in my local units and in system-wide work.

What has been your previous work experience? How has that contributed to your growth?

My first work experience was doing chores around the house for my mom. It didn’t take me long to figure out that she was so particular and controlling about having things done one exact way, that if I got it wrong enough times she’d just take over and do it and I’d be released from the duty. As I grew older I began to realize I was much more responsive to her requests for help if she would explain what needed to be accomplished and then allow me achieve that goal in my own style and with my own methods; when she was more trusting and hands-off about her management style, I felt more respected and was more motivated to help and do quality work.

In middle school I started delivering an after-school paper route for a bit of spending money. In high school and college I joined my dad and some other teachers each summer as we painted (and sometimes shingled) houses around town. I think both of these were good lessons in being responsible and working hard to get jobs done. As a learning experience, this worked nicely in tandem with my time at McDonald’s my first two years of college, in which I regretted after the fact how lazy and irresponsible I had been, deciding I needed to grow and improve because I didn’t like being that person.

There was also a semester waiting tables at Applebee’s and one delivering pizzas for Godfather’s while in college. I think the biggest thing I remember from that was my Applebee’s manager telling me I did a good job, except I needed to “get over the quiet guy act.” “What act?” was my immediate thought to myself, but it was a good self-awareness for how I came across to others.

I was a counselor at two different camps for three of my summers in college. Those from the area may know the second of these, ***** south of town (I was there in ’94 & ’95). These were great experiences since I lived my first seven summers at a camp that my parents directed and because they gave me an opportunity to work intensely with youth while I finished up my teaching degree. I both had a lot of fun and learned a lot, particularly about my style for building a rapport with youth and engaging them.

While in seminary I worked with a youth group for two years and with an entire congregation as the pastor’s intern the third year. I also interned as a hospital chaplain. From this I especially learned about congregational dynamics and leadership, group and interpersonal relationship dynamics, and empathy.

During those years I also learned the ***** [city] landscape after growing up in ***** small towns. We rented a third floor apartment in ***** area our first year before buying a house in *****. My youth group job was with ***** Presbyterian Church up north, by ***** High School (and *****, which came later). The hospital was in ***** and the intern position was ***** Presbyterian Church in *****, and I was involved in my then-wife’s job at ***** High School in *****, especially attending lots of sporting events since she was the cheerleading sponsor. We also earned extra money as summer and after-school care for a couple of families in *****, driving them to golf and tennis lessons at ***** and other country clubs in the wealthy areas and supervising their activities. These were not only good geographical lessons, but cultural and socioeconomic ones as well.

Then I spent four years as the librarian at ***** High School in *****. First and foremost, I learned I love being a librarian from that experience. I also learned my biggest and best Readers Advisory lesson, that if I wanted the students to read I had to order what they were interested in reading, books with characters and experiences they could relate to instead of just award winners and titles off “best of” lists. Also that they trusted each other’s recommendations much more than mine, and that the best way to develop a “culture of reading” was to get them talking to each other about books. I also learned that a cluster of individualistic mavericks does not make an effective unit or promote a good organizational culture, and if they refuse to work together they’ll fail as a unit regardless of passion or commitment.

What do you consider to be your strengths? Weaknesses or foibles?

Talking about my experiences is much easier than talking about myself. Plus, everyone hates these kinds of questions and I’m no exception. Anyway, I’m just rambling a bit as I mull the subject and figure out how to approach it.

I’ve been told many times by many people that writing is one of my strengths; although often many of these same people seem annoyed by how much I write when I let myself get carried away, so they seem to like it but only in limited quantities. ;-)

I think I’d have to admit to a definite reflective, analytical intelligence as a strength; although that comes with the flip side of indecisiveness and inaction as I consider things from all angles.

I think I have a passion and excitement and genuine engagement about what I do; although I can then feel strongly about things I feel threaten it in some way, coming across as oppositional or negative at times.

When people tell me I’m a nice guy, most of them seem to really mean it, and I like to think I deserve it.

I’m sure there’s more, but I’m running out of enthusiasm for this particular question at the moment.

What are you reading now? What’s the book you’re recommending to friends these days?

I just started reading the adult nonfiction book True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-fact Society, by Farhad Manjoo and listening to the J mystery The Ring of Fire (first book of the Century Quartet), by Pierdomenico Baccalario. It’s too soon to tell yet if I’ll be recommending these.

I just finished with Okay for Now, by Gary Schmidt, which is a great young YA book by a masterful writer and one I’ll gladly recommend to anyone. Even though I read Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely a couple of years ago, I keep finding myself referring back to it and highly recommend it to everyone. And I’m still trying to get more readers for Kathleen Duey’s A Resurrection of Magic YA fantasy series while I anxiously await the third book (the first two: Skin Hunger and Sacred Scars).

Oh, and I recently loved Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, by Patton Oswalt, though know it really needs to be consumed in audio format. As a follow-up to my Leadership program experience, I learned a lot from How to Grow Up and Rule the World, by Vordak the Incomprehensible (with help from Scott Seegert). And Last Night I Sang to the Monster, by Benjamin Alire Saenz really moved me.

What do other people think is the most interesting thing about you?

Oooh, that’s a good question! I’ll have to ask some of them, because I’m curious to know.

“Anyway, from my perspective, some of the more interesting things about you are that you went to seminary school, that you remain good friends with your ex-wife, and that you're amazingly eloquent about explaining your ideas.”

“Your ability to answer inane questions.”

“You have really interesting food tastes. Very eclectic and strange combinations. And you have really diverse interests. I’d call you a Renaissance man.”

“Your obsession with the Tour de France?”

“Your analytical brain.”

Anything you want to add about your personal life and/or hobbies?

I’ve gotten away from it in recent years, but I had a lot of fun doing triathlons for a while there. I’ve been active my whole life and still enjoy vigorous physical exercise on a regular basis.

I love the Tour de France.

I still enjoy playing Dungeons & Dragons on occasion.

My favorite recording artists are Peter Gabriel and They Might Be Giants, although I love many others.

My favorite color is rainbow.

Mt. Dew is the drink of the gods.

I identify in many ways with what you find at this link (although I like to think I’m of the kinder, gentler INTJ variety).

My personal file on the G: drive is named “The Secrets of Tom Riddle.”

I haven't engaged or even read her in a long time, but I take perverse pride in the fact that the Annoyed Librarian, of all people, once held me up as a prime example of civil debate: Just out of courtesy, let's try to avoid ad hominem attacks. For the record, I may disagree with many of you, and some of you, like Degolar, I've disagreed amicably with on a number of occasions. But my disagreement with people on particular issues doesn't mean I think they're stupid. I try, though I don't always succeed, to focus on ideas and not personalities. Of course that could be because I don't have a personality. In the comments here.

Anything else you want to add?

Seriously? Are you sure you want to ask that at this point in the proceedings?

Random Picture

2011-09-08T07:21:00.000-05:00

From last night

Constant Development

2011-09-08T07:09:00.000-05:00

I'm stealing this from Paul Coelho, who stole it from here, but it's worth stealing and passing on.

Gandhi’s Top 10 Fundamentals for Changing the World

1. Change:

“You must be the change you want to see in the world.”

“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.”

2. Control:

“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”

3. Forgiveness:

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

“An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”

4. Action:

“An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.”

5. The present moment:

“I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following.”

6. Everyone is human:

“I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.”

“It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.”

7. Persist:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

8. Goodness:

“I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won’t presume to probe into the faults of others.”

“I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.”

9. Truth:

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”

“Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.”

10. Development:

“Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.”

Indexed

2011-08-29T08:16:00.004-05:00

It's an ongoing website, but after its first year it was also a book, and the ones I'm sharing are a few of my favorites from the book. There are other, even better ones that I couldn't find on the site, so I encourage you to start following and find more on your own. Here are some I liked:

Speaking of nerdy, this is the 400th index card.

Elementary!

Sometimes average is good.

Work-life balance.

Fitting in.

Depends on who you ask, of course.

Who is this Benjamin I hear so much about?

Worked into a lather, too.

Pricey.

How to Tell a Story

2011-08-20T08:01:00.001-05:00

Lately I've enjoyed reading both the books and the blog of YA author Andrew Smith, so I hope he doesn't mind what follows. Last week he wove a story through a number of his posts, with numerous points about writing mixed in. It all starts with the idea of a "Suicide Prevention Pit Bull." As a bit of an outline of shortcuts, here are links to the relevant posts in (not reverse) chronological order:

the solution den - In honor of SCBWI LA this week, I am going to offer a special conference session on writing today. I may have another one about something else all SCBWI-ey tomorrow. . . .

agent and editor tips and tricks (part one) - In regards to my Suicide Prevention Pit Bull, I received some messages from readers who mistakenly assumed the mechanism of effect is contingent upon the establishment of companionship. No. . . .

agent and editor tips and tricks (part two) - Let's see. Where was I? Oh yeah... a dog that had been genetically modified by crossbreeding among wasps and grizzly bears was chewing on my favorite left wrist. . . .

(Weekend interlude)the vice president's balls - Well. Nobody reads blogs on Saturdays, which is too bad. I think there are a lot of hungover people in Los Angeles this morning. That's what happens at writers' conferences. But not here. Not at this conference, where you get all the good shit you need. . . .

all my stuff - Well, if nobody reads blogs on Saturdays, then Sundays are dead in the water. The Andrew Smith How to Be a Writer Conference will continue tomorrow, with the conclusion of the Suicide Prevention Pit Bull story. . . . (/interlude)

a writer's conference in continuous session - For those of you who did not read agent and editor tips and tricks (part one), let me catch you up: I wanted to live, live, live. A dog was chewing on my arm. . . .

the keynote (part one) - One of those French writer guys who kept getting invited to fancy parties and alternately exiled or thrown in jails said, My job is to say what I think. Today, a lot of writers spend more time on the job saying, but do very little thinking in preparation for their blatherfests. . . .

the keynote (part two) - I am a recorder of all things regular. . . .

Are Knowledge and Imagination Dichotomous?

2011-08-19T19:04:00.000-05:00

On the wall next to my bed hangs an Einstein quote: Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Follow the link for an interesting article, by the way.) I obviously like it. But that doesn't mean I discount knowledge, because without it all we have is truthiness. I think both are important and work together. Endorsing the quote, however, implicitly endorses the idea that imagination and knowledge are at odds with each other. The memory advocates at the heart of Moonwalking with Einstein would deny that dichotomy, though, and say they are more closely linked than we normally assume:

"In our gross misunderstanding of the function of memory, we thought that memory was operated primarily by rote. In other words, you rammed it in until your head was stuffed with facts. What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus," says Buzan. "The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory." If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you'll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.

The notion that memory and creativity are two sides of the same coin sounds counterintuitive. Remembering and creativity seem like opposite, not complementary, processes. But the idea that they are one and the same is actually quite old, and was once even taken for granted. The Latin root inventio is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. And to a mind trained in the art of memory, those two ideas were closely linked. Invention was a product of inventorying. Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas? In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory. One needed a way of finding just the right piece of information at just the right moment.

That is what the art of memory was ultimately most useful for. It was not merely a tool for recording but also a tool of invention and composition. "The realization that composing depended on a well-furnished and securely available memory formed the basis of rhetorical education in antiquity," writes Mary Carruthers. Brains were as organized as modern filing cabinets, with important facts, quotations, and ideas stuffed into neat mnemonic cubbyholes, where they would never go missing, and where they could be recombined and strung together on the fly. The goal of training one's memory was to develop the capacity to leap from topic to topic and make new connections between old ideas. "As an art, memory was most importantly associated in the Middle Ages with composition, not simply with retention," argues Carruthers. "Those who practiced the crafts of memory used them--as all crafts are used--to make new things: prayers, meditations, sermons, pictures, hymns, stories, and poems."

Of the Importance of Practice

2011-08-18T19:08:00.000-05:00

Second-to-last (planned) post about the "memory book" I recently finished, Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. This one offers a bit of insight into how people become experts.

The OK Plateau, and how and why experts avoid it:

In the 1960s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner attempted to answer this question by describing the three stages that anyone goes through when acquiring a new skill. During the first phase, known as the "cognitive stage," you're intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second "associative stage," you're concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally you reach what Fitts called the "autonomous stage," when you figure that you've gotten as good as you need to get at the task and you're basically running on autopilot. During that autonomous stage, you lose conscious control over what you're doing. Most of the time that's a good thing. Your mind has one less thing to worry about. In fact, the autonomous stage seems to be one of those handy features that evolution worked out for our benefit. The less you have to focus on the repetitive tasks of everyday life, the more you can concentrate on the stuff that really matters, the stuff that you haven't seen before. And so, once we're just good enough at typing, we move it to the back of our mind's filing cabinet and stop paying it any attention. You can actually see this shift take place in fMRI scans of people learning new skills. As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the "OK plateau," the point at which you decide you're OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving. . . .

What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled "deliberative practice." Having studied the best of the best in many different fields, he has found that top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the "cognitive phase." . . .

When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend. In fact, in every domain of expertise that's been rigorously examined, from chess to violin to basketball, studies have found that the number of years one has been doing something correlates only weakly to level of performance. My dad may consider putting into a tin cup in his basement a good form of practice, but unless he's consciously challenging himself and monitoring his performance--reviewing, responding, rethinking, rejiggering--it's never going to make him appreciably better. Regular practice simply isn't enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

-----

How vast experience creates a well-spring of memories that lead to intuitive expertise:

What makes chicken sexing such a captivating subject . . . is that even the best professional sexers can't describe how they determine gender in the toughest, most ambiguous cases. Their art is inexplicable. They say that within three seconds they just "know" whether a bird is a boy or girl, but they can't say how they know. Even when carefully cross-examined by researchers, they can't give reasons why one bird is a male and another is female. What they have, they say, is intuition. In some fundamental sense, the expert chicken sexer perceives the world--at least the world of chicken privates--in a way that is completely different from you or me. . . .

This, of course, is what all experts do: They use their memories to see the world differently. Over many years, they build up a bank of experience that shapes how they perceive new information. . . .

It is said that a student of sexing must work through at least 250,000 chicks before attaining any degree of proficiency. Even if the sexer calls it "intuition," it's been shaped by years of experience. It is the vast memory bank of chick bottoms that allows him or her to recognize patterns in the vents glanced at so quickly. in most cases, the skill is not the result of conscious reasoning, but pattern recognition. It is a feat of perception and memory, not analysis. . . .

For the most part, the chess experts didn't look more moves ahead, at least not at first. They didn't even consider more possible moves. Rather, they behaved in a manner surprisingly similar to the chicken sexers: They tended to see the right moves, and they tended to see them almost right away.

It was as if the chess experts weren't thinking so much as reacting. . . . They weren't seeing the board as thirty-two pieces. They were seeing it as chunks of pieces, and systems of tension.

Grand masters literally see the board differently. Studies of their eye movements have found that they look at the edges of squares more than inexperienced players, suggesting that they're absorbing information from multiple squares at once. Their eyes also dart across greater distances, and linger for less time at any one place. They focus on fewer different spots on the board, and those spots are more likely to be relevant to figuring out the right move. . . .

Chess masters use the vast library of chess patterns that they've cached away in long-term memory to chunk the board. At the root of the chess master's skill is that he or she simply has a richer vocabulary of chunks to recognize. Which is why it is so rare for anyone to achieve world-class status in chess--or any other field--without years of experience. Even Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess prodigy of all time, had been playing intensely for nine years before he was recognized as a grand master at age fifteen.

Contrary to all the old wisdom that chess is an intellectual activity based on analysis, many of the chess master's important decisions about which moves to make happen in the immediate act of perceiving the board. Like the chicken sexer who looks at the chick and simply sees its gender or the SWAT officer who immediately notices the bomb, the chess master looks at the board and simply sees the most promising move. The process usually happens within five seconds, and you can actually see it transpiring in the brain. Using magnetoencephalography, a technique that measures the weak magnetic fields given off by a thinking brain, researchers have found that higher-rated chess players are more likely to engage the frontal and parietal cortices of the brain when they look at the board, which suggests that they are recalling information from long-term memory. Lower-ranked players are more likely to engage the medial temporal lobes, which suggests that they are encoding new information. the experts are interpreting the present board in term of their massive knowledge of past ones. The lower-ranked players see the board as something new. . . .

Expertise in "the field of shoemaking, painting, building, [or] confectionary" is the result of the same accumulation of "experiential linkings." According to Ericsson, what we call expertise is really just "vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain." In other words, a great memory isn't just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.

Memory, Like All Information, Needs Filters

2011-08-17T17:15:00.000-05:00

I didn't review it here, just had a couple of quick references, but I thought it was very interesting to run across a very similar statement in the book from yesterday's post to one in The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. The comparison is interesting because The Information includes an exploration into the development of writing and recording information as absolutely important to the way we think and how we understand the world today. It's one long progress of improving evolution. Moonwalking with Einstein, on the other hand, explores the history of books and recorded information as an erosion of memory and a detriment to our ability to think.

-----

First, a section from Moonwalking with Einstein:

One might assume that S's vacuum-cleaner memory would have made him a formidable journalist. I imagined if I could only take notes without taking notes and have at my fingertips every fact I'd ever digested, I'd be immensely better at my job. I'd be better at everything.

But professionally S was a failure. His newspaper gig didn't last long, and he was never able to hold down a steady job. He was, in Luria's estimation, "a somewhat anchorless person, living with the expectation that at any moment something particularly fine was to come his way." Ultimately, his condition made him unemployable as anything but a stage performer, a theatrical curio like the mnemonist of Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. The man with the best memory in the world simply remembered too much.

In his short story "Funes the Memorious," Jorge Luis Borges describes a fictional version of S, a man with an infallible memory who is crippled by an inability to forget. He can't distinguish between the trivial and the important. Borges's character Funes can't prioritize, can't generalize. He is "virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas." Like S, his memory was too good. Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget."

-----

Next, a section from my review of The Information:

This is a quote I found interesting from the last chapter, 15, “New News Every Day,” in reference to the idea of information overload: Having to think of information as a burden is confusing, as Charles Bennett says. "We pay to have newspapers delivered, not taken away.” But the thermodynamics of computation shows that yesterday’s newspaper takes up space that Maxwell’s demon needs for today’s work, and modern experience teaches the same. Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.

We have a greater understanding of what he means because of what has come before. Maxwell’s demon is first briefly mentioned in chapter 8, “The Informational Turn.”

Then it’s fully explained in chapter 9, “Entropy and Its Demons,” leading into: But information is physical. Maxwell’s demon makes the link. The demon performs a conversion between information and energy, one particle at a time. Szilard--who did not yet use the word information--found that, if he accounted exactly for each measurement and memory, then the conversion could be computed exactly. So he computed it. He calculated that each unit of information brings a corresponding increase in entropy--specifically, by k log 2 units. Every time the demon makes a choice between one particle and another, it costs one bit of information. The payback comes at the end of the cycle, when it has to clear its memory (Szilard did not specify this last detail in words, but in mathematics). Accounting for this properly is the only way to eliminate the paradox of perpetual motion, to bring the universe back into harmony to “restore concordance with the Second Law.”

This idea is expanded in chapter 13, “Information Is Physical”: The younger man pursued Landauer’s principle by analyzing every kind of computer he could imagine, real and abstract, from Turing machines and messenger RNA to “ballistic” computers, carrying signals via something like billiard balls. He confirmed that a great deal of computation can be done with no energy cost at all. In every case, Bennett found, heat dissipation occurs only when information is erased. Erasure is the irreversible logical operation. When the head on a Turing machine erases one square of the tape, or when an electronic computer clears a capacitor, a bit is lost, and then heat must be dissipated. In Szilard’s thought experiment, the demon does not incur an entropy cost when it observes or chooses a molecule. The payback comes at the moment of clearing the record, when the demon erases one observation to make room for the next.

Forgetting takes work.

Which leads to a thought in the Epilogue, one that particularly speaks to a librarian like myself, because in this age of information overload it takes experts who dwell in the information to filter it and make it usable; librarians, in other words, become more essential than ever: No deus ex machina waits in the wings; no man behind the curtain. We have no Maxwell’s demon to help us filter and search. “We want the Demon, you see,” wrote Stanislaw Lem, “to extract from the dance of atoms only information that is genuine, like mathematical theorems, fashion magazines, blueprints, historical chronicles, or a recipe for ion crumpets, or how to clean and iron a suit of asbestos, and poetry too, and scientific advice, and almanacs, and calendars, and secret documents, and everything that ever appeared in any newspaper in the Universe, and telephone books of the future.” As ever, it is the choice that informs us (in the original sense of that word). Selecting the genuine takes work; then forgetting takes even more work. This is the curse of omniscience: the answer to any question may arrive at the fingertips--via Google or Wikipedia or IMDb or YouTube or Epicurious or the National DNA Database or any of their natural heirs and successors--and still we wonder what we know.

-----

On a related note, another section from Moonwalking with Einstein. I've often said in response to what is assumed to be my vast knowledge of information because of my profession, "Librarians don't know everything; we know how to find everything."

Indexes were a major advance because they allowed books to be accessed in the nonlinear way we access our internal memories. They helped turn the book into something like a modern CD, where you can skip directly to the track you want, as compared to unindexed books, which, like cassette tapes, force you to troll laboriously through large swaths of material in order to find the bit you're looking for. Along with page numbers and tables of contents, the index changed what a book was, and what it could do for scholars. The historian Ivan Illich has argued that this represented an invention of such magnitude that "it seems reasonable to speak of the pre- and post-index Middle Ages." As books became easier and easier to consult, the imperative to hold their contents in memory became less and less relevant, and the very notion of what it meant to be erudite began to evolve from possessing information internally to knowing where to find information in the labyrinthine world of external memory.

To our memory-bound predecessors, the goal of training one's memory was not to become a "living book," but rather a "living concordance," a walking index of everything one had read, and all the information one had acquired. It was about more than merely possessing an internal library of facts, quotes, and ideas; it was about building an organizational scheme for accessing them.

A Few Thoughts on Memory

2011-08-16T18:54:00.001-05:00

Recently I was showing a friend a walking trail at a park I hadn't visited for at least 4-5 years, and in the middle of our walk I blurted out, "I listened to football here." I couldn't remember the exact details--probably, I believe, because it had happened multiple times and I was remembering more than one thing--but I knew without a doubt I'd had sports radio playing on my headphones while doing the same thing in the past. It was such a vivid sensation I had to share. That wasn't the first time it's happened. I make a habit of listening to audiobooks on long walks, hikes, and runs. Later, whether it's the very next time I use that same section of trail or road or months or even years later, I'll suddenly have a vivid memory of a scene or section from a book I was listening to when at that spot previously. The physical location is somehow linked to the listening experience and the activity.

Those events seem to be spontaneous triggers for specific memories. The same can happen with particular smells, songs, and other sensory associations. More often, I'll be trying to remember something and coming up blank at first, yet I'll know the memory or information is rattling around in my brain somewhere. If another person is involved, I'll ask them to keep describing the situation in different ways, until they say the one thing that clicks and suddenly I'll have access to the memory. It indeed was in there, I just had to figure out how to find it. As a librarian, I think of it as needing to find the right keyword for my search to bring up the results I want. I know the the information exists, I just have to figure out how it was classified, labeled, and stored so I can find it, and sometimes I have to try multiple searches before I can figure it out.

I'm not crazy, because that's the way memory works. And once you know that's how memory works, there are tricks you can teach yourself to make it work better. The sensory associations are key, particularly images. When I remember the football and audiobooks on my walks, I'm not remembering the words I was hearing, but the images I created in my head when I heard them. Those images are linked to the images of my physical surroundings when they played through my head, so when I revisit the places the other images come with them. The human brain's ability to recall images is much more vast than most people realize, so if you want to remember something they key is to associate it to an image.

Joshua Foer describes his experience of learning just that in Moonwalking with Einstein. While observing the event for a journalistic article, he became so intrigued by the U.S.A. Memory Championships that he decided to enter the competitive memory world and a year later won the title. He found that memory masters don't necessarily have superior intelligence or innate talent, they just practice hard using the classic mnemonic device of memory palaces--remembered or imagined physical spaces in which you mentally place images of what you want to remember, so that by "walking" through the palaces later you encounter the images and remember what they represent. As I read, I couldn't help but be reminded of Christopher McDougall's Born to Run, because the two books are written with similar structures. Like McDougall, Foer describes how went from becoming aware of an elite group who compete in an unusual task to becoming one of them. Along the way he sought out experts and learned everything he could about the topic. Interwoven with his personal experience is stories about the unusual personalities and characters he met who compete in the field, an exploration into the history of the field, and an investigation into the science of the field, the human potential and limitations. I'm pretty sure I won't be building any memory palaces of my own, but I learned a lot of interesting things and had fun doing so.

After having learned how to memorize poetry and numbers, cards and biographies, I'm convinced that remembering more is only the most obvious benefit of the many months I spent training my memory. What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice. . . .

How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say networks of our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it's about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have become estranged. That's what Ed had been trying to impart to me from the beginning: that memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

Natural Born Runners

2011-08-07T16:48:00.002-05:00

A new study, it seems, would support the idea that the evolutionary advantage humans developed as predators was distance running. A Yahoo News summary:

E. Africa grasslands influenced human evolution: study

Grasslands dominated the cradle of humanity in east Africa longer and more broadly than thought, says a study published Thursday, bolstering the idea that the rise of such landscapes shaped human evolution.

According to the so-called "savannah hypothesis", the gradual transition from dense forests into grasslands helped drive the shift toward bipedalism, increased brain size and other distinctively human traits.

First outlined in the 1920s, the theory suggests that our most ancient upright ancestors learned to walk on two feet, in part, to peer over tall grass in search of prey and predators.

Rather than simply plucking fruit from trees, they had to become shrewd hunters and move longer distances in order to survive.

The notion has been debated for more than a century, however, with some scientists saying other forces were more important in driving humans to assume their signature posture. . . .

I bring this up because it's part of the central thesis of the book Born to Run, which I blogged excessively last summer. Here's a link to the post I did pulling out the key points of the relevant argument, that humans were meant to hunt by running their prey to death.

Of Death to Taxes

2011-07-29T17:37:00.000-05:00

It almost seems pointless creating a new post with "facts" after my last one basically saying there's no such thing--at least as far as politics and this kind of thing goes--but everything I've ever shared here has been with the assumption it comes with my point of view (see the header above). So, without too much commentary, here's a whole bunch of articles and interesting information that's caught my eye recently, loosely related to the standoff about the budget and debt ceiling.

A friend posted this status update on Facebook the other day:

I know I'm shushed away and called a Pinko Commie, but I simply cannot understand why people don't like to pay taxes. Taxes are good. They pay for good things that enrich our lives and protect us from people who want to kill us. We are in debt as a nation, and we have insufficient funds in the bank of reality. Why is it bad to raise taxes? Please, give me the best reason you got.

One of the commenters asked, "Do you really believe the government can spend your money better than you can?" and I love her response:

Yes, I do believe the government can spend my money better than I can. Teachers will be able to broaden my daughter's horizon more than I can. Fire fighters, police, highway and bridge and levee builders can keep me safer than I could doing those things for myself. Our miliary protects me far better than I ever could from people who want to kill me. (If attacked I'd probably fall into a fetal position and start crying.) Our judges and legislators can figure out the law better than I ever could. The FDA and EPA keeps me healthier than I could on my own. Government sponsored arts and social and humanities projects allow me to experience things I wouldn't get to on my own. Us taxpayers pooling our funds together so my dad, who is a veteran of World War II, can afford the nine prescription medications he takes to survive and dance and get engaged at age 85 gives both of us a more satisfying life. Please don't cut medicare and social security. I don't want my dad living with me, and I certainly can't afford his meds.

One of the most direct and eloquent statements I've ever seen in favor of taxes. Of course, it's not an opinion apparently shared by many these days, as the discussion demonstrated. Some of those furthest from this position would like to see federal spending cut 40%. Here's a look at what that might mean:

The federal government is scheduled to spend about $300 billion in August. Something like $125 billion of that is debt. So if the debt ceiling doesn't get raised, the government can only spend about $175 billion. Very roughly, here's spending for the month of August in the areas Nan Hayworth says are off limits:

Social Security = $60 billion
Veterans benefits = $10 billion
Medicare/Medicaid = $70 billion
Interest payments = $20 billion
Military pay = $15 billion

Total = $175 billion

So there you have it. Nan Hayworth is right: we can fund all of these things without raising the debt ceiling. Unfortunately, that's it. There's really no other prioritizing necessary. There's not a single dollar left for any other function of government. Not defense spending, not the FBI, not foreign embassies, not the court system, not prisons, not disaster relief, not unemployment insurance, not the border patrol, not TSA or the FAA, not roadbuilding, not maintenance of any kind, not national parks, and not pensions for retired federal workers. Not anything. And aside from military personnel, every single employee of the federal government will have to be furloughed.

It gets a little more spelled out in 40 Percent Less Government Will Be Fun! Things like:

You just cut the IRS and all the accountants at Treasury, which means that the actual revenue you have to spend is $0. . . . The border control stations are entirely unmanned . . . All of our troops stationed abroad quickly run out of electricity or fuel. . . . No federal emergency assistance, or help fighting things like wildfires or floods. . . . The money your local school district was expecting at the October 1 commencement of the 2012 fiscal year does not materialize . . . and much more.

Another way to look at the benefits of taxes and some of the things that get forgotten in all the talk of cutting them is 102 Things NOT To Do If You Hate Taxes. The first few:

1. Do not use Medicare.
2. Do not use Social Security
3. Do not become a member of the US military, who are paid with tax dollars.
4. Do not ask the National Guard to help you after a disaster.
5. Do not call 911 when you get hurt.
6. Do not call the police to stop intruders in your home.
7. Do not summon the fire department to save your burning home.
8. Do not drive on any paved road, highway, and interstate or drive on any bridge.
9. Do not use public restrooms.
10. Do not send your kids to public schools.

Of those supposedly untouchable areas that shouldn't be cut, Medicare is really the only one growing unreasonably out of control because healthcare costs keep skyrocketing and we're not doing anything about it. That leads to articles like Soylent Greenbacks: David Brooks Wants People to Die for Debt Reduction.

. . . Furthermore, he argues, the reason for these soaring costs is that very old and very sick people insist on clinging on to their miserable lives, when they ought to be civic-minded enough to kick off. It's not the insurance companies, which reap huge profits by serving as useless, greed-driven middlemen. It's not the drug companies, which are making out like bandits with virtually no government regulation. It's not the whole corrupt, overpriced system of medicine for profit, which delivers the 37th best health care in the world, according to the WHO, at more than twice the cost of the best (France). No. It's all about us greedy geezers. We're the ones who are placing an untenable burden on the younger, heartier citizenry, with our selfish desire to live a little longer. . . .

Or, in another vein, Why is the Most Wasteful Government Agency Not Part of the Deficit Discussion?

. . . Of course, I’m talking about the Pentagon. Any serious battle plan to reduce the deficit must take on the Pentagon. In 2011 military spending accounted for more than 58 percent of all federal discretionary spending and even more if the interest on the federal debt that is related to military spending were added. In the last ten years we have spent more than $7.6 trillion on military and homeland security according to the National Priorities Project. . . .

Just yesterday, in fact, I was talking to someone on leave from the military. He actually requested a new, less desirable assignment with a pay cut because he was tired of his assignment being sitting around for eight hours a day. Literally, because the reason for the assignment had not materialized, so his job was just to wait around until a new purpose emerged.

Since this is a very divided, partisan issue, I guess I'll include a bit of finger pointing and claims that my facts are truer. From What if You Held a Class War and No One Showed Up?

. . . But then, for about the thousandth time, my mind wanders over the past ten years. Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they've rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us. . . .

Along with waste, one of the big complaints about taxes is supposed unfair redistribution, taking from people who work hard for it and giving to people who don't deserve it. One of the "facts" being thrown around rampantly these days is that half the nation doesn't pay any taxes. That's not quite right, as The 51 Percent Zombie Lie goes into. Half don't end up paying federal income taxes. But, in addition to federal income taxes, Americans pay excise taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, state income taxes, and various other taxes. . . . In one form or another, even poor Americans pay a fair chunk of their income in taxes. I would argue that even that most extreme example, illegal immigrants, can't avoid the majority of these taxes because of the way they're built into everyday life. A bit more of detail about that 51% number at Breaking Down the Lucky Duckies.

And there's all this outrage being generated about these so-called freeloaders, but why doesn't anyone seem to care about the fact that Amazon is able to beat the competition's prices by not having to pay state sales taxes? Don't think that's such a big deal? You should see all of the money they're pouring into efforts to make sure that doesn't change at Amazon's Scorched-Earth War Against the Rest of Us.

Truthiness Is Reality

2011-07-25T00:39:00.000-05:00

Two of the ongoing themes I like to write about in this blog are politics and the power of stories to inform our identities, beliefs, and views. A book that combines these two themes is True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo. Here's a review:

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" --George Carlin

"This isn't about what is . . . it's about what people think is. It's all imaginary anyway. That's why it's important. People only fight over imaginary things." --Neil Gaiman, American Gods

"If they think it's the truth, then they believe it, and if they believe it long enough, then it becomes the truth." --Jason Carter Eaton, The Facttracker

"Each of us thinks that on any given subject our views are essentially objective, the product of a dispassionate, realistic accounting of the world. This is naive realism, though, because we are incapable of recognizing the biases that operate upon us. . . . The bias we see in the news isn't strategic. It's real. It's real to us, at least, and that's as real as it gets. . . . We all harbor a different idea of what an objective news story should look like. . . . we all want objectivity, but we disagree about what objectivity is." --Farhad Manjoo, True Enough

Naive realism is just one of the dynamics Manjoo considers in this book as he looks at the polarization and fragmentation of opinions in modern society, opinions not just about how we should react to facts, but about the very facts themselves. It's a fascinating exploration, weaving together psychological studies and explanations, stories and examples from many realms, and major political examples. Was John Kerry a war hero or coward? Was the 9/11 world trade center attack planned by our government? Was there vote tampering in the 2004 presidential election? It all depends on who you listen to and how you interpret what they have to say. Those might seem like fringe examples, but Manjoo also considers much more everyday situations and makes a convincing case that there is no way for anyone to escape these dynamics. And that our modern media and connectedness has exacerbated them significantly.

While the title says the book is about "Learning to Live" in this kind of world, it's only in the epilogue ("Living in a World without Trust") that Manjoo really goes into what we should do about it. In this case, knowing is at least half the battle. We spend so much energy and time arguing about our convictions, convinced we're right, never realizing just all the factors at play in making us so. We would be better served if we'd all spend a bit more time carefully examining ourselves and our sources of information, uncovering the biases inherent in all of it, and being a little less strident about insistent upon our correctness.

What arises from all this, finally, is the condition Stephen Colbert diagnosed as "truthiness." Truthiness means you choose. But you're not just deciding a reality; you're also deciding to trust that reality--which means deciding to distrust the others. Whenever you choose, you're making a decision to form a particularized trust. This is the essence of the new medium. Navigating it requires forming bonds with those who are going the same way you are and rejecting those who've decided to see things differently.

Choosing means trusting some people and distrusting the rest. Choose wisely.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Word - Truthiness

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

Video Archive

If you're intrigued enough to keep reading, I think Manjoo sums up his book really nicely in this excerpt:

Investigating the rise of carelessness toward "reality" is, of course, the headlong purpose of this book. But I've been driving at a theory more pervasive than the peculiar psychology of one president, the transgressions of a single dominant political machine, or the aims of certain powerful players. The truth about truthiness, I've argued, is cognitive: when we strung up the planet in fiber-optic cable, when we dissolved the mainstream media into prickly niches, and when each of us began to create and transmit our own pictures and sounds, we eased the path through which propaganda infects the culture.

Video news releases and satellite media tours suggest the ultimate cultural expression of these forces: they show us what might become of the world--or, indeed, what has become of the world--in an age of easy lying. Today, marketers, political operatives, and others who want to convince you of the virtue of some thing or idea--whether it is a Swiffer duster, a Nokia headset, a presidential candidate, a certain education policy, or the "truth" about global warming--can go about the business of persuasion covertly, without divulging their motives or even the fact that they're engaged in persuasion. Propagandists have become experts at mining the vulnerabilities of the many-media world (for instance, the dubious ethics of bottom line-watching local news operations). They've adopted a range of methods to exploit the current conditions--some are as benign as the covert placement of products in films and TV shows, but others are more questionable, such as planting VNRs on the news, or buying up pundits, or spreading their messages anonymously and "virally" through blogs, videos, and photos on the Web.

Technically, what these operatives aim to do is capture one or many of the forces I've discussed so far: selective exposure, in which we indulge information that pleases us and cocoon ourselves among others who think as we do; selective perception, in which we interpret documentary proof according to our long-held beliefs; peripheral processing, which produces a swarm of phony experts; and the hostile media phenomenon, which pushes the news away from objectivity and toward the sort of drivel one sees on cable.

In practice, what propagandists are doing is simpler to describe: they've mastered a new way to lie.

It's Only Water in a Stranger's Tears: Or, We Do Not Take Care of One Another

2011-07-24T22:03:00.004-05:00

As much as I like what Keith Olbermann has to say, I don't much watch him. This is partly because his is too bombastic, partly because he's too combatively partisan and anti-compromise, and partly because he just reinforces my thinking instead of challenging or expanding it. But I feel I must share this because it simply so good and so much like things I've tried to articulate.

My attempt to transcribe the first half (the first half only, because I think it is this general thought/belief/stance that is most important, more so than the specifics of this particular political battle):

Face it. We do not take care of one another. Not “we” as in progressives, not “we” as in Americans, not “we” as in the West, “we” as a species. Individual people we know, we take care of them. It is human nature dating back to the caves to form small protective units: families, clans, groups, guilds. But take care of everybody? Everybody in your neighborhood, the people you love and the people you don’t know? Everybody in your country, the people who are like you and the people who have in common with you only humanity? Do you take care of them? Do we take care of them? It seems as if we are taught as young children to share, and then as soon as we let go of our parents’ hands we are taught to stop sharing, or to at least to stop prioritizing sharing, to stop sharing unconditionally, in the broadest sense, where there is no identity of family or clan or group, no hope of reward or mutual defense, no insurance against one’s future hardship. Face it. We do not take care of one another.

And that is why the social safety net that this country has stitched together piece by piece over 75 years despite the unceasing protest of the greedy and the ensconced and the divisive and the xenophobic, That is why the social safety net is this country’s greatest accomplishment and the greatest evidence that, every once in a while, American exceptionalism is based not in flag waving, but in reality. This is not to say our system of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and everything else is the best. Nor was it the first. 3,400,000 people in this country above the age of 65 still live below the poverty line, and 43,600,000 of all ages still do so. But unlike so many other nations, unlike what so many in this nation want to see and desperately strive to force, the movement in this country for more than a hundred years has always been forward, has always been just slightly bigger and better than it was yesterday towards the simple idea that those other people you see every day, the background characters, the extras in the movie that is your life, that they count too, and that the only obligation you truly have in life is to try to do something, something for them, even if you will never meet them, even if you will never know them. Something. Not everything. Something.

Every day since I started to think I’ve realized I knew a little less than I thought I did the day before about why we are all here. But over time I have come to agree with the baseball player Jackie Robinson: “A life is not important, except in the impact it has on other lives.” What other measure is there of each one of us? You will die and I will die and everybody you will see tomorrow will die and so will the children and their descendents, and we will be, at best, memories. And by what are all those who proceeded us judged? Name anybody in history—name anybody we all know or somebody only you know—by what are they judged? The answer, stripped of the bells and whistles, is not wealth nor fame not beauty nor power, but what impact did they have on the lives of others?

I think you'll find similarities between Olbermann's rant and many of the themes I blog about, but it reminds me in particular of what I was attempting to say at the end of the post Contextualizing Politics. It was buried at the bottom of the very (even for me) long post, as a bit of an appendix, so I'll reshare it here verbatim:

I'll also add an abridged version of a related post I considered writing about six months ago. Not so much about defining ourselves into opposing contextual vs. absolutist camps, but how those camps view the proper use of governmental power.

It started with this article that referenced a blogger making the case that tea partiers and hippies have the same values and share the same space on the political spectrum.

The actual blog post explains how both groups accept that human nature is innate (not socially constructed) and value independence, individualism, and self-sufficiency above all else. Being neither a hippy nor a tea partier I won't fuss about whether the comparison is accurate, but I've already said above I think we are social beings who are not independent individuals living on our own but members of cooperative societies who need to learn sharing to get along most happily.

So the thing I wanted to focus on was a view of human nature as necessarily greedy and corrupt. There's a video embedded in the middle of the post in which a tea party spokesman explains why they think government needs to be limited and small:

Now, many modern people see this belief that we have — that human nature is fundamentally flawed and selfish, and essentially unchangeable — as cynical and pessimistic. On the contrary. It is this belief that generates a society with the checks and balances against the natural human bastardliness that basically wants to tell other people what to do.

These checks and balances prevent the accumulation of too much power in the hands of too few people. And that defiance of these checks and balances by the current political class, of both parties, is the real threat that the Tea Party movement is a response to.

So people are essentially going to do the greedy thing if left unchecked, and the more power you have the more harm you can do. So far, so good. I'm absolutely on board with that. Where we veer 180 degrees is the role of government in all of this. They seem to think that governments have all the power and are thus the greatest potential for evil. I believe a democratic government of and by the people is the greatest potential for limiting individual power and evil. Left to our own natures with no social constraints or rules, we'll compete for power and some individuals will come out ahead. I like to shorthand them as "big money," "Wall Street," "corporations," or "the rich." They will greedily take from the rest of us for their own benefits as much as they possibly can unless someone has the power to stop them. The only one with enough power to do so is all of us as a collective in the form of our representative government. I know reality shows government can be as corrupt as any other power, but I still feel on principal it is the right approach to take for battling our innate selfishness. It is the approach that is based on sharing instead of individuality. It is us all coming together to look out for each other and to make sure no one has the power to oppress us.

There's more I could say about this, expanding on the ideas and my beliefs, a strong biblical basis for it, and etc., but this is the abridged version and I want to do something today besides write so I'll stop now.

(And a favorite older song as a bit of a bonus)

It's only water
In a stranger's tear
Looks are deceptive
But distinctions are clear
A foreign body
And a foreign mind
Never welcome
In the land of the blind
You may look like we do
Talk like we do
But you know how it is

You're not one of us
Not one of us
No you're not one of us
Not one of us
Not one of us
No you're not one of us

There's safety in numbers
When you learn to divide
How can we be in
If there is no outside
All shades of opinion
Feed an open mind
But your values are twisted
Let us help you unwind
You may look like we do
Talk like we do
-But you know how it is

You're not one of us
Not one of us
No you're not one of us

A Book That Needs to Be Shared

2011-07-22T17:10:00.002-05:00

I'm developing a definite liking for Amy Krouse Rosenthal's books. Many of them. I've used a couple of them in storytimes and blogged a different one previously (I Want to Be a Generalist). Here are some of the equations from her new one, This Plus That: Life's Little Equations:

1 + 1 = us

yes + no = maybe

smile + wave = hello
smile + ocean wave = beach

chalk + sitting = school
chalk + jumping = hopscotch

anything + sprinkles = better

blaming + eye rolling ≠ sincere apology
"I'm sorry" + hug = sincere apology

mumbling + toe staring ≠ polite
handshake + "how are you" = polite

practice + practice = learning
practice + practice + practice = mastering

chores ÷ everyone = family

soul + color = art
soul + words = literature
soul + sound = music
soul + movement = dance

good days + bad days = real life
once upon a time + happily ever after = pretend

Thinking About Thinking: A Tip for Success

2011-07-12T18:21:00.000-05:00

I've run across a couple of articles this week, one about childhood play and one about adult procrastination, that seem to go together:

Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills

For most of human history what children did when they played was roam in packs large or small, more or less unsupervised, and engage in freewheeling imaginative play. They were pirates and princesses, aristocrats and action heroes. Basically, says Chudacoff, they spent most of their time doing what looked like nothing much at all. . . .

Clearly the way that children spend their time has changed. Here's the issue: A growing number of psychologists believe that these changes in what children do has also changed kids' cognitive and emotional development.

It turns out that all that time spent playing make-believe actually helped children develop a critical cognitive skill called executive function. Executive function has a number of different elements, but a central one is the ability to self-regulate. Kids with good self-regulation are able to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.

We know that children's capacity for self-regulation has diminished. . . .

Self-regulation is incredibly important. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ. Children who are able to manage their feelings and pay attention are better able to learn. As executive function researcher Laura Berk explains, "Self-regulation predicts effective development in virtually every domain." . . .

One reason make-believe is such a powerful tool for building self-discipline is because during make-believe, children engage in what's called private speech: They talk to themselves about what they are going to do and how they are going to do it. . . .

And it's not just children who use private speech to control themselves. If we look at adult use of private speech, Berk says, "we're often using it to surmount obstacles, to master cognitive and social skills, and to manage our emotions."

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Why Our Monkey Brains Are Prone to Procrastination (No, It's Not Just Laziness or Lack Of Willpower): Present bias is why you’ve made the same resolution for the tenth year in a row, but this time you mean it.

Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking. . . .

Thinking about thinking, this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial – want never goes away.

Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted.

You are really bad at predicting your future mental states. In addition, you are terrible at choosing between now or later. Later is murky place where anything could go wrong. . . .

Evolutionarily it makes sense to always go for the sure bet now; your ancestors didn’t have to think about retirement or heart disease. Your brain evolved in a world where you probably wouldn’t live to meet your grandchildren. The stupid monkey part of your brain wants to gobble up candy bars and go deeply into debt. Old you, if there even is one, can deal with those things. . . .

You must be adept at thinking about thinking to defeat yourself at procrastination. You must realize there is the you who sits there now reading this, and there is a you sometime in the future who will be influenced by a different set of ideas and desires, a you in a different setting where an alternate palette of brain functions will be available for painting reality. . . .

The trick is to accept the now you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future you – a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.

This is why food plans like Nutrisystem work for many people. Now-you commits to spending a lot of money on a giant box of food which future-you will have to deal with. People who get this concept use programs like Freedom, which disables Internet access on a computer for up to eight hours, a tool allowing now-you to make it impossible for future-you to sabotage your work.

Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more will power, more drive, but because they know productivity is a game of cat and mouse versus a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty which can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push ups.

-----

The second article draws upon some of the same studies as a couple of books I've previously blogged, with similar conclusions. From Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, I quoted:

In this and many similar studies, Mischel followed the children into adulthood. He discovered the ability to delay gratification had a more profound effect than many had originally predicted. Notwithstanding the fact that the researchers had watched the kids for only a few minutes, what they learned from the experiment was enormously telling. Children who had been able to wait for that second marshmallow matured into adults who were seen as more socially competent, self-assertive, dependable, and capable of dealing with frustrations; and the scored an average of 210 points higher on their SATs than people who gulped down the one marshmallow. The predictive power was truly remarkable.

Companion studies conducted over the next decade with people of varying ages (including adults) confirmed that individuals who exercise self-control achieve better outcomes than people who don't. For example, if high schoolers are good at self-control, they experience fewer eating and drinking problems. University students with more self-control earn better grades, and married and working people have more fulfilling relationships and better careers. And as you might suspect, people who demonstrate low levels of self-control show higher levels of aggression, delinquency, health problems, and so forth.

And I concluded the quote with: The rest of the chapter explains that the self-control to delay gratification is not an inborn trait, but something that can be learned, and offers strategies for doing so.

-----

And while I didn't blog much about it, I remember reading Dan Ariely's chapter in Predictably Irrational about procrastination, which the article even quotes a bit. Here's what I wrote:

The Problem of Procrastination and Self-Control: Why We Can’t Make Ourselves Do What We Want To Do
This chapter basically makes the case for laws and regulations, forced preventative health care and savings and such. We always put things off. If we have self-imposed deadlines we put them off less. If we have externally imposed deadlines we put them off least.

-----

And the bit in the article about the evolutionary explanation for instant gratification reminds me of some of the things from The Well-Dressed Ape, like this from chapter 6:

First, let's look at my natural defenses against starving. There's a good reason that I yearn for fettuccine Alfredo and chocolate. Every cell in my body is in a near-constant state of hollering for high-calorie food. My body wants to be bigger than it is today. Therefore my cells lobby for more sugar, more fat, more food. . . .

Why fat and sugar? Why don't I crave salad? My body is lagging behind the times. For the first few million years of hominid existence, salad was everywhere. You had to kick it out of the way just to get around. By contrast, energy-rich foods were either too seasonal or too fleet-footed for convenience. . . .

When my senses register the proximity of a Chunky bar, my strongest urge is to snatch it up and get it down the hatch before, A: it gets moldy; B: it's eaten by bears, C: I'm eaten by bears. . . .

One reason cravings are so strong, and that it's so joyful to yield to them, is that they tap into the same brain chemistry that will get a human hooked on cocaine or alcohol. When the sugar from a Chunky bar hits my bloodstream, opioids of my own making flood my brain with chemical happiness. I've eaten enough Chunky bars by now to get my brain addicted to these opioids. I need no heroin, only another Chunky.

A Few Quick Thoughts on Grace

2011-07-08T08:01:00.006-05:00

One of the concepts that seems hardest for people--for many professed Christians, even--to hold onto clearly in their minds and transfer from situation to situation is the idea of grace. Much more natural and logical to many, it seems, is the idea of a theology of retribution. You get what you deserve and earn what you get. If you're a bad person you'll get punished and if you're rich in life it's because you must be good. But that's not really what Jesus and the Bible seem to say; quite the opposite, in fact. God's logic is not human logic. Instead: 1) It is impossible to be perfect, or even good enough to be truly good and unstained by sin, so instead of trying to be better than everyone else we must learn to accept that God loves us in our imperfection; and 2) The same applies to everyone else, that God loves them too, even though they also are undeserving. That message consistently runs throughout the Bible, both Old Testament and New, in lots of different ways.*

A few articles from the recent SoJo Mail got me thinking about it this morning. I was trying to articulate to someone yesterday how and why the obsession with the Casey Anthony trial has bothered me. Yes, it is indeed tragic, but so are all of the other children who die every day that no one seems to care about. What I'd love to see, I said, was all the time and energy people are putting into following this trial being instead spent locally and personally, focused on their lives and they people they encounter, seeing if they can't do something to prevent the next child death that might occur closer to them.

So I really liked this article, Loving Casey Anthony in a Culture of Vengeance:

. . . But perhaps most discouraging — chilling, even — has been the response of the people who invested so much of their time and energy in the courtroom drama and in television’s non-stop coverage of it. Presuming to know the players intimately — Casey and her family members, the defense team, the state’s lawyers (and why wouldn’t they? having admitted they’ve been glued to the trial for the last eight weeks) — these diehard observers have made their opinions known on Facebook, Twitter, and old-fashioned TV interviews: They are outraged that “there is no justice for Caylee,” the dead child.

But what many of them seem to want is vengeance. And for those who bring God into the picture, what they seem to assume is karma — that good is always rewarded and evil is always punished. . . .

For those of us who believe in this God, the hard part, of course, is to embody this kind of love — to make it evident, alive, available even (especially) to the unloveable, even to sociopaths (and maybe worse) like Casey Anthony.

The kind of vengeance people seem to want won't do anything for Caylee and won't do anything to prevent the next case like hers. Of course we can't just let the dangerous walk free to do more harm, but how does all the outrage about this case do anything positive?

Turning from crime toward economics, grace is again considered in this thought about The Lord's Prayer, What Does it Mean to ‘Forgive Us Our Debts as We Forgive Our Debtors?’

“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” – Matthew 6:12

Smack dab in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer, obscured by old translations and otherworldly assumptions, is a radical cry for Jubilee justice. In this most stripped down form of Jesus’ teaching — the bare essentials of what a disciple should bring before God in prayer — freedom from economic debt for all of God’s children plays a central role. Why is this? And what might it mean for the millions of Christians who weekly pray the Lord’s Prayer to live more deeply into this dimension of our faith? . . .

As the one who came that they (and us) may have life and have it abundantly, Jesus saw that debt was (and is) a primary mechanism of social and even spiritual control; one which must be broken if his hearers were to live into the freedom for which God had called them. He invited his followers to return to the Jubilee wisdom of the Law of Moses, practicing an economy characterized by community and forgiveness rather than competition and retribution. Evidently this vision really caught on, for the book of Acts tells us that in the early church goods were held in common so that none were indebted and all had their needs met. Calling his disciples to turn to God and one another rather than an unjust system to provide for their daily bread, Jesus got to the deepest roots of the people’s bondage and enlivened their liberation. . . .

If you're not familiar with the biblical term Jubilee, Leviticus 25 (among other places) sets it up in the Covenant between God and Israel during their founding as a nation as a time of freedom and forgiveness every 50th year. No matter what land is bought and sold, what debts are incurred, what fate leads people into slavery, every so often, God decrees, we'll wipe the slate clean and start everyone over as equals so that there can be no long-term, entrenched inequality and oppression. And Jesus taught us to include that wish for our world as part of our central prayer. Again, grace should be more important than giving people what they "deserve."

And, finally, this article considers the matter in a full shift to economic policy and politics, The Debt Ceiling Play: My ‘CliffsNotes’ Version:

Our country is in the midst of a clash between two competing moral visions. It is not, as we have known in recent history, a traditional fight between Republicans and Democrats. It is a conflict between those who believe in the common good and those who believe individual good is the only good. While a biblical worldview informs Christians that they should be wary of the rich and defend the poor, a competing ideology says that wealth is equivalent to righteousness and God’s blessing. It is a morality play in which Washington, D.C. is the stage, politicians are actors, lobbyists are directors, the “debt ceiling” is the conflict, and we are the audience who will pay the cost of the production, whether we enjoyed it or not. . . .

This play would be amusing to watch if it was just on a stage. Instead, these decisions will have real-world consequences. Should we end farm subsidy checks to millionaires in Manhattan, or baby formula rebates for new mothers? Should we end mortgage deductions for second homes, or house the homeless? Should we end a military tank program that no longer has use, or stop providing malaria bed nets for children?

The actors who are center-stage right now would have the audience believe that it is all much more complicated than that. The directors behind the scenes would like us to stay out of the way of the plot and leave it to them. But as a Christian, I can’t sit quietly by while the audience of the poor watch silently and suffer.

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*Just a couple of quick examples from one of the gospels:

But Jesus called them to him and said, ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.’ Matthew 20: 25-28

‘For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the labourers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the market-place; and he said to them, “You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.” So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” They said to him, “Because no one has hired us.” He said to them, “You also go into the vineyard.” When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the labourers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.” When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” But he replied to one of them, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” So the last will be first, and the first will be last.’ Matthew 20: 1-16

Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Matthew 25: 34-40

Anxious Introversion Has Its Advantages

2011-07-03T22:41:00.000-05:00

I have to admit, even though I do understand how I can come across to others, I get tired of being told my first reactions to things are always negative and resistant simply because I take a cautious, measured approach and fully consider things before acting. There's a very positive, important reason people like me exist and my contributions are valuable. So I get a little excited when I run across things like what follows.

Much of a recent article reminds me of an older one I blogged extensively and often find myself referring to, the one about being High-Reactive.

Consider, for instance: With slight variations, they all have reached similar conclusions: that babies differ according to inborn temperament; that 15 to 20 percent of them will react strongly to novel people or situations; and that strongly reactive babies are more likely to grow up to be anxious.

Versus this from the new one: We even find “introverts” in the animal kingdom, where 15 percent to 20 percent of many species are watchful, slow-to-warm-up types who stick to the sidelines.

And this: For the species as a whole, it is most likely an advantage to have some group members who are hypervigilant and who see everything as a threat, always ready to sound an alarm and leap into action.

Versus this: “There is no single best ... [animal] personality,” Professor Wilson concludes in his book, “Evolution for Everyone,” “but rather a diversity of personalities maintained by natural selection.”

And this from the older article against what follows and, if you follow the link, the entirety of the article: People with a high-reactive temperament — as long as it doesn’t show itself as a clinical disorder — are generally conscientious and almost obsessively well-prepared. Worriers are likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends. Someone who worries about being late will plan to get to places early. Someone anxious about giving a public lecture will work harder to prepare for it. Test-taking anxiety can lead to better studying; fear of traveling can lead to careful mapping of transit routes.

This article is from just a couple of days ago, and following are some quotes I want to highlight:

Shyness: Evolutionary Tactic?

This does us all a grave disservice, because shyness and introversion — or more precisely, the careful, sensitive temperament from which both often spring — are not just normal. They are valuable. And they may be essential to the survival of our species. . . .

We even find “introverts” in the animal kingdom, where 15 percent to 20 percent of many species are watchful, slow-to-warm-up types who stick to the sidelines (sometimes called “sitters”) while the other 80 percent are “rovers” who sally forth without paying much attention to their surroundings. Sitters and rovers favor different survival strategies, which could be summed up as the sitter’s “Look before you leap” versus the rover’s inclination to “Just do it!” Each strategy reaps different rewards.

In an illustrative experiment, David Sloan Wilson, a Binghamton evolutionary biologist, dropped metal traps into a pond of pumpkinseed sunfish. The “rover” fish couldn’t help but investigate — and were immediately caught. But the “sitter” fish stayed back, making it impossible for Professor Wilson to capture them. Had Professor Wilson’s traps posed a real threat, only the sitters would have survived. But had the sitters taken Zoloft and become more like bold rovers, the entire family of pumpkinseed sunfish would have been wiped out. “Anxiety” about the trap saved the fishes’ lives.

Next, Professor Wilson used fishing nets to catch both types of fish; when he carried them back to his lab, he noted that the rovers quickly acclimated to their new environment and started eating a full five days earlier than their sitter brethren. In this situation, the rovers were the likely survivors. “There is no single best ... [animal] personality,” Professor Wilson concludes in his book, “Evolution for Everyone,” “but rather a diversity of personalities maintained by natural selection.” . . .

Sitter children are careful and astute, and tend to learn by observing instead of by acting. They notice scary things more than other children do, but they also notice more things in general. . . .

Once they reach school age, many sitter children use such traits to great effect. Introverts, who tend to digest information thoroughly, stay on task, and work accurately, earn disproportionate numbers of National Merit Scholarship finalist positions and Phi Beta Kappa keys . . . even though their I.Q. scores are no higher than those of extroverts. Another study . . . tested 141 college students’ knowledge of 20 different subjects, from art to astronomy to statistics, and found that the introverts knew more than the extroverts about 19 subjects — presumably, the researchers concluded, because the more time people spend socializing, the less time they have for learning.

A groundbreaking study . . . found that introverts outperform extroverts when leading teams of proactive workers — the kinds of employees who take initiative and are disposed to dream up better ways of doing things. Professor Grant notes that business self-help guides often suggest that introverted leaders practice their communication skills and smile more. But, he told me, it may be extrovert leaders who need to change, to listen more and say less. . . .

And I think this is all very related to the IN of the INTJ I often blog about (linked to a search, so this will likely be at the top of what you see, with more to follow).

Talking to Kids

2011-06-25T22:45:00.000-05:00

I remember a while back a big hubbub about the Baby Einstein videos actually making kids dumber instead of smarter. Of course, it wasn't quite that simple. That was resulting, yes, because parents were parking their kids in front of the TV with the videos playing and then ignoring them. The creators of the series said doing that missed the point, that the videos only worked when parents engaged their kids about what they were seeing and used them as a prompt for interaction and conversation. The videos were good, but they were nothing without parental talk.

One of the things we like to say in libraryland is that even simple picture books generally have a broader vocabulary than everyday conversation, so reading to kids is an essential activity for exposing them to a variety of words and building a large mental dictionary. However, just as with the Baby Einstein situation, reading in isolation without interactive interpersonal language use is still limiting. According to new research:

Researchers at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, have found that mothers use more complex language and have greater interaction with children when reading a wordless book than when reading a book with text. The findings have implications for increasing language and literacy among children with developmental disabilities, they say.

"We found that when creating a story or just responding to pictures, the parent used many words and complex sentence structures while engaging with their child. That level of engagement wasn't as present when reading books with text," said Sandra Gillam, a professor of education at Utah State with expertise in early language and literacy acquisition. "These results fall in line with the generally accepted belief that less structured activities, such as playing with toys or creating things with Play-Doh, elicit more productive language interactions between parent and child. These findings in no way diminish the importance of reading printed books, but incorporating interactions with wordless books is a way to build a more solid literacy foundation in children with developmental disabilities."

Even in books with words, parents and kids can use the pictures to supplement the text, predict what might happen next, or create their own stories. Talking and reading (or watching) are neither one as effective in isolation, but work best in tandem. So while reading may be one of the best individual activities for kids (or adults), it's even better when it becomes a shared social activity.

Another recent article I enjoyed on a somewhat similar theme deals with the subject of discipline. Ultimately, I think it all goes back to the idea of not talking down to kids as though they're incapable of understanding or not worthy of full respect. Talk to kids the way you would adults or any other person and they'll learn and respond in kind. That's what I've always tried to do as an educator, librarian, and uncle, anyway, and can attest to its general effectiveness in those roles.

Some of the best parenting advice I've ever gotten was from a website for prison guards. . . .

The article, "7 things never to say to anyone, and why", listed common statements used by prison guards and police officers and explained why they make people do the exact opposite of what they're being told to do. The seven things were:

1. "Hey you! Come here!"

2. "Calm down!"

3. "I'm not going to tell you again!"

4. "Be more reasonable!"

5. "Because those are the rules!"

6. "What's your problem?"

7. "What do you want me to do about it?"

If you've ever been a child or have your own, you undoubtedly recognize those as the greatest hits of the pissed-off parent. . . .

Random Poetry

2011-06-25T09:25:00.003-05:00

Came across this while browsing the new books and like both the subject matter and the way it feels on my tongue.

Wonder Through the Pages
Karla Kuskin

So I picked out a book
on my own
from the shelf
and I started to read
on my own
to myself.
And nonsense and knowledge
came tumbling out,
whispering mysteries,
history's shout,
the wisdom of wizards,
the songs of the ages,
all wonders of wandering
wonderful pages.

Men Don’t Ask Directions

2011-06-23T13:23:00.002-05:00

A little girl, maybe 3, walked up to the desk with an armload of books, but freed one of them enough to point and say, “That . . . that boy can’t find any books about aircraft carriers.”

I looked to the side and saw said boy, maybe 5, standing silently and not reacting. “Is that what you’re looking for, aircraft carriers?” Slight nod.

I started doing a search with my computer while my deskmate engaged the girl in more conversation. “Is that boy your brother?" Nod. "Does he have a name?” . . .

Found a book in the computer, walked out to the shelves, located it, and handed it to him. He silently took it and went off to show his family.

-----

And sometimes I just don't get people. A woman just asked if we have a section for books that rhyme. She'd been at a computer, so I said no section, but there's a subject heading for rhyming and we could pull up a list in the catalog; but they wouldn't all be together, instead dispersed through the section. She said she'd rather just look herself, and is now randomly pulling books off the shelf and reading them to see if they rhyme.

New Blood

2011-06-19T23:32:00.004-05:00

I didn't realize until during the concert just how apt the name was. The New Blood concert tour for Peter Gabriel and the New Blood Orchestra. At one of only twelve U.S. destinations, Starlight Theatre in Kansas City. I was excited to see Peter Gabriel in concert after 25 years as a fan--since my teens--since he's always been my favorite and I have every one of his recordings and most of his DVDs. Even the soundtrack he did to the movie Birdy. I was a little worried going in that I'd be seeing an aging star well past his prime reliving his past glories, but instead found someone still vitally creative, still making new music and recreating his old by injecting them with new blood.

They were touring in support of his most recent album, a song exchange with a number of artists called Scratch My Back in which he remade the other artists' songs. He's expecting a return song from each of them for a follow-up album (presumably, I'll Scratch Yours). He didn't just do generic remakes, though, because he wanted a way to revision them and gather them under a unifying theme. So he gave up the electronics, guitars, and heavy drums that have been hallmarks of his music until now and instead backed his voice with an orchestra. The album was a bit melancholy, introspective, and dark, a big change from both his previous work and the original pieces.

For instance, here's Paul Simon's original version of his song Boy in the Bubble:

And here is the entirely different version by Peter Gabriel (note, only one of the New Blood videos is from the concert I saw and most if not all were made piratically; but I'm looking forward to buying the official tour DVD when it comes out in the fall):

The first half of the concert featured songs from the album and some similarly serious and sedate version's of Peter's songs. I enjoyed it, but wasn't blown away. I think the emotional highlight for me was the last song of the set, Biko. I've seen so many different videos of him ending concerts with this song, getting the audience started on the chant at the end, saying, "The rest is up to you," then slowly stepping away from the microphone and making his exit. This is an excellent example:

The audience wasn't quite as into it, weren't quite as much hard-core fans as a cohesive whole, but it still felt special to sustain this with the orchestra as he left for intermission:

So the first half of the concert was good, but not quite exciting. The second half blew me away. I asked my friend if it was just me or if they'd turned it up a notch after the intermission, and it wasn't just me. It was great orchestral music with some genius arrangements, all of his earlier work. We learned half of the orchestra traveled with him and half the players were local, having learned the pieces just for this one special event. Here are some of them, with the originals first to contrast.

An early version of Signal to Noise:

Become something almost entirely different, yet somehow the same:

This is a great early video of a younger Peter. About Carl Jung's experience losing himself around a tribal fire in Africa. The Rhythm of the Heat:

I had no idea how they would pull this one off since the last minute plus of the original is just wild tribal drums. They did and amazing job:

I was delightfully surprised to see him doing an old favorite, Intruder. While many of his songs are about noble causes and issues, this one imagines the singer as a creepy night intruder. The electronic rhythms and distortions convey the feeling well:

Without the electronics, but perhaps even creepier with an orchestra (particularly at the end):

And one that might be most familiar (of those I'm presenting; not of those performed) to my readers, Digging in the Dirt:

Again, different yet the same, and highly effective and enjoyable.

Liberal Depravity

2011-06-18T13:53:00.002-05:00

This is rather numbing overkill, but I find it amazing that there's enough to last three minutes and twenty seconds and that someone actually took the time to create it.

I'm always quick to say how I'll take a play over a musical any day, but I've seen and enjoyed my fair share, even long before my sister went into musical theater.

I generally avoid this group because they are so single-mindedly partisan and combative, but I think this one is right on.

I Like This Rule

2011-06-17T13:52:00.002-05:00

And, of course, I like "eclecticism and cross-fertilization."

That these ideas were spilling across disciplinary borders was due in large part to McCulloch, a dynamo of eclecticism and cross-fertilization. . . . [he] invited experts in these fields, as well as mathematics and electrical engineering. He instituted a Noah's Ark rule, inviting two of each species so that speakers would always have someone present who could see through their jargon.

From The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

It's In There Somewhere

2011-06-10T09:59:00.002-05:00

This is somewhat vague, enough so that I forgot to include it at first. But somewhere in this couple of sentences is a synchronicity of my biggest themes I repeat through this blog: the power and importance of story, the synthesis of the micro and macro as it pertains to politics and social justice, and how I try to live my life.

One final quote from Barry Lopez's Resistance, which I have now added at the end of my review as a conclusion:

Whether I understand the stories in every particular or not, I regard them as a kind of protection against what menaces every person--despair, conceit, failure of imagination. It is this feeling I want to give back: not thank you or every blessing on you but I wish for my life to protect your life.

There, But for the Grace of God, Go I

2011-06-09T23:11:00.000-05:00

I was talking to someone recently, a cousin, in fact, who has spent a considerable number of years living abroad on at least three other continents. One of the things he said that really struck me was that in Europe the general attitude is to look at the homeless and unfortunate and think, "If my luck had been different, that could have been me." In the U.S., however, the tendency is to look at the rich when thinking, "If my luck had been different, that could have been me." And that prominent focus of empathy determines political tendencies, whether the priority is to create a social safety net or to ensure wealth stays in the hands of those who control it.

Anyway, I know many readers won't follow links within blog posts to source material or full articles. So, at the risk of copyright issues, I feel the need to copy an entire article below. In trying to pick sections to highlight, I'm drawn to nearly every single paragraph. So instead I'll try to give a tease up front, then let you see it in context and take in the whole thing. This says it so well, the dangers we liberals see with the current conservative wishes.

You can tell the extreme cases by the hum of diesel generators at night. Instead of paying taxes for a reliable electrical grid, each wealthy family installs its own powerful generator to run the lights and air-conditioning. It’s noisy and stinks, but at least you don’t have to pay for the poor.

Our Fantasy Nation?
By Nicholas D. Kristof

With Tea Party conservatives and many Republicans balking at raising the debt ceiling, let me offer them an example of a nation that lives up to their ideals.

It has among the lowest tax burdens of any major country: fewer than 2 percent of the people pay any taxes. Government is limited, so that burdensome regulations never kill jobs.

This society embraces traditional religious values and a conservative sensibility. Nobody minds school prayer, same-sex marriage isn’t imaginable, and criminals are never coddled.

The budget priority is a strong military, the nation’s most respected institution. When generals decide on a policy for, say, Afghanistan, politicians defer to them. Citizens are deeply patriotic, and nobody burns flags.

So what is this Republican Eden, this Utopia? Why, it’s Pakistan.

Now obviously Sarah Palin and John Boehner don’t intend to turn Washington into Islamabad-on-the-Potomac. And they are right that long-term budget issues do need to be addressed. But when many Republicans insist on “starving the beast” of government, cutting taxes, regulations and social services — slashing everything but the military — well, those are steps toward Pakistan.

The United States is, of course, in no danger of actually becoming Pakistan, any more than we’re going to become Sweden at the other extreme. But as America has become more unequal, as we cut off government lifelines to the neediest Americans, as half of states plan to cut spending on higher education this year, let’s be clear about our direction — and about the turnaround that a Republican budget victory would represent.

The long trajectory of history has been for governments to take on more responsibilities, and for citizens to pay more taxes. Now we’re at a turning point, with Republicans arguing that we need to reverse course.

I spend a fair amount of time reporting in developing countries, from Congo to Colombia. They’re typically characterized by minimal taxes, high levels of inequality, free-wheeling businesses and high military expenditures. Any of that ring a bell?

In Latin American, African or Asian countries, I sometimes see shiny tanks and fighter aircraft — but schools that have trouble paying teachers. Sound familiar? And the upshot is societies that are quasi-feudal, stratified by social class, held back by a limited sense of common purpose.

Maybe that’s why the growing inequality in America pains me so. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans already have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent, based on Federal Reserve data. Yet two-thirds of the proposed Republican budget cuts would harm low- and moderate-income families, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

For a country that prides itself on social mobility, where higher education has been a traditional escalator to a better life, cutbacks in access to college are a scandal. G. Jeremiah Ryan, the president of Bergen Community College in New Jersey, tells me that when the college was set up in 1965, two-thirds of the cost of running it was supposed to be covered by state and local governments, and one-third by students. The reality today, Dr. Ryan says, is that students bear 78 percent of the cost.

In fairness to Pakistan and Congo, wealthy people in such countries manage to live surprisingly comfortably. Instead of financing education with taxes, these feudal elites send their children to elite private schools. Instead of financing a reliable police force, they hire bodyguards. Instead of supporting a modern health care system for their nation, they fly to hospitals in London.

You can tell the extreme cases by the hum of diesel generators at night. Instead of paying taxes for a reliable electrical grid, each wealthy family installs its own powerful generator to run the lights and air-conditioning. It’s noisy and stinks, but at least you don’t have to pay for the poor.

I’ve always made fun of these countries, but now I see echoes of that pattern of privatization of public services in America. Police budgets are being cut, but the wealthy take refuge in gated communities with private security guards. Their children are spared the impact of budget cuts at public schools and state universities because they attend private institutions.

Mass transit is underfinanced; after all, Mercedes-Benzes and private jets are much more practical, no? And maybe the most striking push for reversal of historical trends is the Republican plan to dismantle Medicare as a universal health care program for the elderly.

There’s even an echo of the electrical generator problem. More and more affluent homes in the suburbs are buying electrical generators to use when the power fails.

So in this season’s political debates, let’s remember that we’re arguing not only over debt ceilings and budgets, but about larger questions of our vision for our country. Do we really aspire to take a step in the direction of a low-tax laissez-faire Eden ...like Pakistan?

A Three (of Five) Star Review

2011-06-08T20:59:00.003-05:00

Resistance by Barry Lopez

I'm going to do something very unusual for me and write a review before giving a book its proper consideration. I've only read half the book at this point, the first four of the nine stories, and am debating whether I want to go on, so I thought processing my thoughts might help me come to a decision. This way I'll have them captured as either half a review (with more to follow upon completion) or a review of a half.

Here's my sticking point: Each story is meant to be by a different person telling his or her own tale--a very diverse group of globe-travelers from all walks of life, with different backgrounds and vastly different experiences--yet they monotonously share the same voice, perspective, values, and conclusions; Lopez doesn't even seem to attempt to differentiate the characters through his writing choices, so it's as though he's writing as himself just from different imagined circumstances that don't seem to have changed or impacted who he is. It's false, empty play-acting based on superficial cliches and stereotypes instead of real, multi-dimensional characters. So if I don't buy the people who are speaking to me as people, then what's the point in listening to them?

What makes it particularly frustrating is that I do appreciate what they have to say. The common theme behind the stories is that they are meant to be about "resistance." Resistance to what? From the opening story:

The human imagination, the letter speculated, was a problematic force, its use best left to experts. An imagination in the wrong hands, missing the guidance of democratic reasoning and fed the wrong ideas, an imagination with no measure of economic awareness, was a loose cannon.

Their responses are their stories of how they have come to resist. The ones I have read so far have all shared a similar pattern: each narrator was in some way scarred or traumatized and had to overcome his or her own resulting resistance to love, and only through learning to actually and fully love again were they able to move on to something creative and meaningful. It is through their personal journeys that they discovered stories that became political.

And therein lies my other quibble with Lopez's writing choices: these stories don't feel personal. Despite the countless blurbs and reviews praising the quality and beauty of his writing, it never feels confessional or intimate to me, but instead literary, remote, and analytical. I can't find a way to connect with these people, even when I can get past the sameness of their voices. And no matter how skillful, I can't consider writing beautiful or exemplary if it gets stuck being an intellectual exercise instead of communicating something that feels genuine and that draws me in.

So maybe I'll try one more story and go from there. We'll see.

UPDATE, upon completion of the book: What I really wish Lopez had done, instead of writing a collection of short stories himself, was edit a collection by different writers who could authentically be what he has attempted to create. I think that could have been much more powerful.

But, at the risk of repeating what I wrote earlier, I’ll expand a bit on my thoughts now that I’ve read the whole work. This is a fictional collection of epiphanal stories by an international diaspora of like-minded highly educated and sociologically and anthropologically literate Americans living abroad, critical of the hegemony of their country’s cultural imperialism and destructive economic values. From the initial story, which also serves as an introduction to the rest:

For the ordinary person, love is increasingly elusive, imagined as a strategy.

We believe [humans] are creatures in search of proportion in life, a pattern of grace. It is balance and beauty we believe people want, not triumph. The stories the earth’s peoples adhere to with greatest faith . . . are all well patterned. And these templates for the maintenance of vision, repeated continuously in wildly different idioms . . . these patterns from the artesian wells of artistic impulse, do not require updating. They require only repetition. Repetition, because just as murder and infidelity are within us, so, too, is forgetfulness. We forget what we want to mean.

And so we have a repetitive collection of stories from wildly different idioms, each making the same point in different ways. By coming at it from so many different cultures and perspectives, Lopez shows how vast the interconnected web of impact is that he would have us resist, economic, cultural, and environmental impoverishment on many levels. By reading more of the stories, I was able to gain a greater appreciation for the depth of what he is saying. And, I found, the stories I was able to better connect with myself came later in the book.

At the same time, my earlier criticisms hold, that there is an undermining tediousness in the repetitive singular voice of the supposedly diverse characters, characterized by a particular intellectual pretentiousness (e.g. Lebensraum was what I wanted, please forgive me, freedom from the suffocating interlock of venal desire, dire warning, Teutonic competition, extreme overreach, and sophisticated oblivion that had become, in the dim tunnels back home, everyday life).

The theme that is repeated throughout is that political resistance comes through personal wisdom; you have to figure yourself out, how to heal your wounds and make yourself healthy, before you can figure out how to do so for the world. One example, that I think might speak to some I know:

I was conscious of the emotions of love, so the necessary partings sometimes made me feel like a cracked vase, something from which the water had drained and in which the flowers had withered. It was a long while, of course, before I understood that my arduous efforts to be kind to each person, my expressions of compassion and acts of generosity, my will to accommodate were all a sort of mask. I could express love strongly, but I could not accept it, could not allow myself to be loved.

I could not, then, really claim to know love.

And another, that most spoke to me of all the stories:

In those cities I got to know some of the hospice workers and through them witnessed, once again, they physical damage caused by the humiliations of industrial manufacturing, the Western plan to create wealth.

I wished in my reveries to be like Minty, free of any need to judge, acting as a vessel of forgiveness and joy . . .

All I needed to do now was to reduce somewhat the level of suffering where I encountered it, to moderate the levels of cruelty to which so many remained inured. I still wanted such people--the indifferent--to be held accountable. I wanted someone to entreat with them and subject them to the spirit of the law. But mine was no longer the voice to do it. I had no more plans for reorganization and reconstruction. I had nothing, anymore, to sell.

And, finally, a bit of a conclusion:

Whether I understand the stories in every particular or not, I regard them as a kind of protection against what menaces every person--despair, conceit, failure of imagination. It is this feeling I want to give back: not thank you or every blessing on you but I wish for my life to protect your life.

Texting Will Be the End of Grammar

2011-06-08T17:36:00.002-05:00

Of the early days of the telegraph (mid 1800s), from The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Two motivations went hand in glove: secrecy and brevity. Short messages saved money--that was simple. So powerful was that impulse that English prose style soon seemed to be feeling the effects. Telegraphic and telegraphese described the new way of writing. Flowers of rhetoric cost too much, and some regretted it. "The telegraphic style banishes all the forms of politeness," wrote Andrew Wynter. . . .

Almost immediately, newspaper reporters began to contrive methods for transmitting more information with fewer billable words. . . .

. . . For less sensitive occasions, Vail proposed using abbreviated versions of common phrases. Instead of "give my love to," he suggested sending "gmlt." He offered a few more suggestions:

mhii - My health is improving
shf - Stocks have fallen
ymir - Your message is received
wmietg - When may I expect the goods?
wyegfef - Will you exchange gold for eastern funds?

All these systems required prearrangement between sender and recipient: the message was to be supplemented, or altered, by preexisting knowledge shared at both ends. . . .

Below Average

2011-06-07T11:30:00.002-05:00

Anatomy of a Librarian

Stolen from here

Catching Up: The News in Charts

2011-05-30T11:03:00.004-05:00

Or, Thoughts on Subjectivity

I've posted before about books like Predictably Irrational and Sway, and one of the major themes running through my posts is the relativity of reality and how large a role our finite perspectives play in determining our experience of life. Here's a bit more.

Chart 1: This shows how likely, based on one study, prisoners are to get parole based on time of day. The dotted lines? Breaks. So those who are supposed to be the most objective paragons of fair and rationale judgment are drastically swayed by fatigue and hunger on a daily basis.

Chart 2: According to at least one survey, everyone thinks they're middle class or close to it. So, if the poor don't really know they're poor, they're never going to mount much of a fight for more egalitarian public policies. And if the well-off don't know they're well off, they're going to strongly resist more egalitarian public policies. The result can be startling increases in income inequality without anyone really knowing it's happening or caring very much about it.

Chart 3: This is almost old news at this point, but agreement or disagreement with its reality is still highly relevant to current political positions. According to this data, the budget would be on its way to balanced but for three things set in motion well before the current presidential administration: tax cuts for the wealthy, the economic downturn, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Chart 4: Finally, a partisan perspective on the upcoming presidential election. There is hope of the Republican party returning to some semblance of rational reality if either they pick a reasonable candidate who wins or an extremist who loses. They will go crazy extremist if they pick a moderate who loses. And if they go with an extremist who wins, well, we'll probably get a whole bunch of new laws making it illegal to accept charity and for Muslims to commit murder.

Which Are You?

2011-05-28T12:37:00.004-05:00

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, a book by Patton Oswalt

I apologize ahead of time for not even trying to aim at Point B, or even starting from Point A. Comedy and terror and autobiography and comics and literature—they’re all the same thing.

To me.

I hereby officially nominate Patton Oswalt as the spokesperson for the Generation X nerd. And would like to perhaps hire him as my personal ambassador to the world. He’s a couple of years older than I am, but we definitely share similar formative experiences and outlooks. Except he’s funnier, more articulate, well-rounded, and culturally educated, and a better writer.

The libraries and bookstores I checked have this book in with the humor because Oswalt is a comedian, but the book is much, much more. As he says in the quote above from the book’s “Preface Foreword Intro,” it’s a random mishmash of things. Personally, I would put it with the biographies, because the autobiographical reflections are the lengthiest and densest, making up the bulk of the book in terms of both physical pages and tone. While these are funny, they are also insightful, poignant, vulnerable, and sincere. The comic bits in between made me laugh out loud often, and I’ve been sharing some with many of my friends; unfortunately, they’re for the most part too complex, nuanced, and lengthy to easily share here without context. I love the variety and randomness of the whole endeavor.

One of the not-so-comic quotes that represents me well and that I’ll be keeping handy:

I want to experience as many different tastes, sights, emotions, conflicts, and cultures as possible, so that I can expand the canvas of my memory and enrich my comedy.

As to the title, it’s from one of his central essays reflecting on his youth spent immersed in fantasy, science fiction, and comics and how it played a role in his career choices:

Every teen outcast who pursues a creative career has, at its outset, either a Zombie, Spaceship, or Wasteland work of art in them. . . .

The real-world experience we’re going to need, as writers or artists or filmmakers, will come later, when we actually have to get a real job to support whatever creative thing we’re hoping to do.

So until then, anything we create has to involve simplifying, leaving, or destroying the world we’re living in. . . .

Looking back on it now, I realize I’m a Wasteland. A lot of comedians are Wastelands--what is stand-up comedy except isolating specific parts of culture or humanity and holding them up against a stark, vast background to approach at an oblique angle and get laughs? Or, in a broader sense, pointing out hos so much of what we perceive as culture and society is disposable waste? We wander the country, seeking outposts full of cheap booze, nachos, and audiences in order to ply our trade. I’m amazed we all don’t wear sawed-off shotguns on our hips.

I should also mention that this work needs to be experienced as an audiobook with the physical book handy. While Oswalt is a surprisingly deft writer, he’s a performer first, and the book needs his performance to truly give it life. Not only does he provide the proper cadence, tone, accents, and voices when called for, he also supplements what’s on the page. Some sections have musical accompaniment and other readers. A musician performs his faux old hobo songs. Michael Stipe reads the R.E.M. lyrics in the essay constructed around them. He tells us his footnotes are footnotes before he reads them and simply adds a few bits of introduction and related thoughts that aren’t in the text.

Conversely, he also says he’s not going to attempt an audio version of the graphic novel chapter and to use the enhanced features of the CD to read the included pdf. And you need the physical book to see things like the faux note about the typeset at the end of the book and the “Also by Patton Oswalt” list of imagined books opposite the title page. I’m particularly interested in getting my hands on the three children’s books:

The Candy Van
A Ewe Named Udo Who Does Judo and Other Poems
Everyone Resents

A few other random passages:

My fresh-from-the-oven toddler’s eyes were fixed on the frame of the glass balcony door. And they must’ve thought the snow was stationary and the building was rising through the morning air into the sky.

My first coherent thought about life was that apartment houses could levitate in the snow. Decades later, when I took LSD in a tiny apartment in San Francisco, I had a realization. Most narcotics are designed to approximate the nonjudgmental, magically incorrect way we see the world before we can speak.

-----

Not only did I conceive of Ulvaak as physically ugly--eyes crookedly set, a sneering maw full of gray teeth, horribly scarred from a slime monster attack--but also obnoxious and unpleasant. Cruel jokes, quick to anger, slow to calm--he was comfortable being everything that, in life, I wished I wasn’t. Even at my politest, with my braces and cystic acne and snowman torso, no one wanted anything to do with me. So I created a fantasy character who had the strength, speed, and guts to back up every awkward remark I spent my days apologizing for. My comfort during the loneliest days of my adolescence was happy nihilism, which carried an ebony sword.

-----

The story ends--like most German children’s tales--with one animal cursing God and the horror at the heart of the universe, while another animal performs a happy, demonic murder dance under the blue moonlight.

Why Borders Is Bankrupt: A Typical Experience

2011-05-25T17:44:00.005-05:00

This morning I started listening to the audiobook of Patton Oswalt's book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. I got about a third of the way through it, enough to decide I'd take the rare action of buying a copy. I also decided I wanted it as soon as possible so I could go back and look at some of the things I was hearing before they faded in my memory. Working 12:15-9:15 and only making this decision as I prepared for work, the only way I could get a copy today was to do so over my dinner break.

I checked online and found the most easily accessible bookstore with a copy in stock was a Borders, and not the closest one, but doable with Interstate driving. The website only said "Likely in Store," but I was willing to take my chances. So when my dinner break started, I hopped in my car and off I went.

The book is by a comedian and meant to be funny, but it's also a collection of biographical essays and some are more affecting and sincere than humorous. So I wasn't sure where to look for it, with the humor, biography, or something else. I walked up to the information desk and found no one there or within sight of a 360 degree scan, so I looked up the title on the computer provided. All it did, though, was take me back to the Borders website and tell me there were three copies in stock; I still had no idea where in the store to look. After a few more seconds of waiting and scanning for an employee to show up, I started browsing the store in hopes of finding a relevant section. It wasn't in the biography and memoir section and I couldn't find the humor, so I was stumped.

I looked back at the still unattended information desk, then overheard the woman behind the checkout desk giving someone directions. I figured if she was directing someone else, she could direct me, so I walked over and asked her. She told me her computer couldn't look books up so I'd have to go to the information desk. I told her I'd tried that and there was no one there. She said she'd call someone to meet me.

As I walked over I saw there actually was someone at the desk now, but she was helping another customer. As I arrived, though, someone else came up to help me. She looked it up and led me away from all the adult books in the opposite direction, past the movies and music, hidden in the far corner by the kids books. There was the humor section and finally there was one copy of the book.

I share this because it is the exact same experience or something very like it every time I've gone to a big chain bookstore looking for an exact title. I can never find anyone to help me no matter how hard I look and can never figure out where in the store the book might be even with my professional librarian skills. It's a frustrating experience and one I avoid whenever possible, dreading when I have to go through it and entering the store resentfully expecting the worst. As far as I'm concerned, they are not in the business of customer service because they put all their efforts into atmosphere, marketing, and browseability, and none into helping people who have specific needs and questions.

Of course I know online purchasing, ebooks, and other changes have contributed to their financial failures much more than poor customer service, but I do feel it's a factor. Why should I go have a frustrating experience in the store when I have these other options available, after all? It's almost a chicken or egg quandary of which caused which. Because I can browse online in the atmosphere of my choosing, but I can't have good face-to-face, dialogue-based help without a being in a store with a real person--they de-emphasized the one part of the in-store experience that is hardest to replicate, made what could have been their biggest strength and draw into their most irritating weakness.

I don't just say this as a disinterested, venting consumer, but as someone in a related situation. Libraries are right now facing some of the worst budget issues they ever have. Many haven't even survived the last few years and others have grim futures. This has nothing to do with lack of business or success, but funding during a lengthy recession and a political climate calling for government cuts. Yet one of the big trends right now--in response to both the need to make cuts and anticipated technology impacts like ebooks--is to imitate the bookstore model. Many libraries are emphasizing space and self-service experiences while reducing staff. Some are reducing the number of staff desks or even eliminating them for a roving service model, with fewer staff available all the time to answer questions and provide expertise. I often sit on the other side of the desk helping customers just like the one I was today, in a hurry and on a mission; if I'm not there and quick to help them will they get frustrated and stop coming, resorting to other options instead?

Evolution or Revolution?

2011-05-23T20:40:00.008-05:00

The world was supposed to end a few days ago, on May 21. I know this mainly because I was invited to numerous post-Rapture events through Facebook, but it was a big deal because someone spent easily $100 million on an ad campaign, including more than 5000 billboards, telling everyone so. It's possible, even with all the ads, the message could have gotten lost in the noise, except this seems a topic Americans find interesting and timely. According to a Pew Research poll last year, 41% of Americans think it will happen in their lifetimes, within the next 40 years.

The Bible does say Christ's second coming is imminent, it's true. I think I first became aware of it when I was in middle school in the 80s. This wasn't typical for our church, but one of our Sunday school lessons was a look at how all the current events in world culture and politics matched up with the predictions in Revelation about the end times, so to expect it before we graduated high school. Then in seminary I learned that the biblical authors expected it to happen during their lifetimes 2000 years ago, that they believed it was something they would personally experience. Those same predictions were in part so obscure and veiled because they referred to the people in power at the time and couldn't be stated straight out. People have been calling for the Rapture ever since, reading their situations and contexts into the biblical references and assuming they'll be the ones to experience it.

Where does this desire for the end of the world come from and why do so many people get excited about it? About a year ago I had a post titled Eschatological Tranquility, which included: Somewhere along the line I lost my eschatological tranquility and would now rather see a grand evolution than revolution. That's really what it comes down to, this interest in the Rapture and even Heaven and the afterlife to an extent, whether people feel the world can be redeemed and made into something good and worthwhile or they feel it's rotten to its core and we need to just give up on the whole thing and look for something better.

Both veins would seem to be present in my Mennonite background. There was a strong sense from the very emergence of the denomination that the church needed to be a group apart from worldly things, that we believers should live our peaceful, loving lives as God directed in community with each other and let the world go about its unrelated business. See the Mennonite-offshoot Amish for the most radical example. But, particularly in more recent Mennonite history, the church has been actively involved in peace and social justice issues through missionary work, including many in my family. Dad lived eleven years of his childhood in Argentina as part of a missionary family, for instance, and I've said before most members of my extended family on both sides have been missionaries or teachers at one time or another. So there's always been both the sense that we shouldn't try to be like the rest of the world because it can never be what it should and the sense that we need to try to help it become something good.

One of the things I came to realize about myself in seminary was that I've picked one side of that coin. Also from the "Eschatological Tranquility" post: Part of the reason I don't know that I belong in the church is that I'm almost exclusively focused on this world and really don't care that much about "salvation" or the afterworld - I have my sense of God grounded in Christianity, but with the express goal of "Heaven on earth." Oh, wait, it's "on earth as it is in Heaven" - Lord's Prayer. Sure, I think it would be nice if the current, flawed, nature of things could be completely overthrown and replaced with people who only live in peace and happiness, but it doesn't do me any good to sit around waiting for that to happen. The temptation is to feel that's an unattainable goal, that we might as well give up on hoping the world will ever be a decent place, and hope that God will take care of what we can't accomplish--first individually in the afterlife then through the grand revolution that is the Rapture. But I'm not content to sit around doing nothing while I wait for that to happen--sitting around because I have no role in making it so--so instead I'd rather spend my time doing what's in my power to accomplish and see if I can't help slowly improve and evolve things while I'm waiting. When and if a Rapture happens doesn't really concern me because it's out of my hands, so I'll focus my attention on what is possible for me to do.

This post has actually been in my head since long before the whole recent Rapture hubbub, because it started in reaction to something an old classmate posted on Facebook a month or more ago. She took a lot of flack from more conservative Christians for an article she shared there. In her excellent blog post reflection on it, she mentioned: I was rebuked by someone I’ve known for years (and considered a friend) and promptly removed from this person’s friends list because “they don’t choose to feed their soul with people who deviate from God’s word.”

So what was this twisted, deviant article that got her in so much trouble? It was a Time cover article about a popular Christian pastor saying things that sound pretty similar to what I've been writing so far, Pastor Rob Bell: What if Hell Doesn't Exist? He suggests that, contrary to traditional Christian doctrine, it's possible that salvation is universal. One of his critics quoted in the article even accuses him of "eras[ing] the distinction between the church and the world."

One of the paragraphs says almost exactly what I did in one of my sermons after seminary on the section of Romans on the certainty we can feel regarding God's love and salvation for us and "the elect." Some have followed that logic to its conclusion to establish a doctrine of predestination and the reverse double predestination, that God has elected some for damnation in addition to salvation. I made the case we shouldn't concern ourselves about who is "in" and who is "out," but instead walk away from that passage with trust that God will take care of us and we needn't worry about it. The paragraph from the Time article:

Bell insists he is only raising the possibility that theological rigidity — and thus a faith of exclusion — is a dangerous thing. He believes in Jesus' atonement; he says he is just unclear on whether the redemption promised in Christian tradition is limited to those who meet the tests of the church. It is a case for living with mystery rather than demanding certitude.

As to the evolution vs. revolution question:

Belief in Jesus, he says, should lead human beings to work for the good of this world. What comes next has to wait. "When we get to what happens when we die, we don't have any video footage," says Bell. "So let's at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are." He is quick to note, though, that his own speculation, while unconventional, is not unprecedented. "At the center of the Christian tradition since the first church," Bell writes, "have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins and all will be reconciled to God." . . .

Things many Christian believers take for granted are more complicated than they seem. It was only when Jesus failed to return soon after the Passion and Resurrection appearances that the early church was compelled to make sense of its recollections of his teachings. . . .

For these new thinkers, heaven can mean different things. In some biblical contexts it is a synonym for God. In others it signifies life in the New Jerusalem, which, properly understood, is the reality that will result when God brings together the heavens and the earth. In yet others it seems to suggest moments of intense human communion and compassion that are, in theological terms, glimpses of the divine love that one might expect in the world to come. One thing heaven is not is an exclusive place removed from earth. This line of thinking has implications for the life of religious communities in our own time. If the earth is, in a way, to be our eternal home, then its care, and the care of all its creatures, takes on fresh urgency.

Like this pastor, I'm not ready to conclude the world is beyond redemption, to give up on it and just sit around waiting for God to make something better happen, but instead do my best to make the world a better place in the small ways I can every day, hoping to inspire others to do the same.

(Tangent: One of the things Lori mentions in her blog post is struggling with feeling like a worthy Christian even though she doesn't attend church regularly, drinks whiskey with her husband, and in other ways doesn't fit the mold of a "proper Christian." For my very unconventionally stated thoughts on whether following or not following a set of lifestyle rules makes one a Christian, look about two-thirds of the way through Thoughts on Trolling, Part III for the paragraphs surrounded by triple asterisks. Read more than just those paragraphs for helpful context.)

Jumping the Shark moment: I've written before about my socialist tendencies. I don't think its such a bad thing to agree--officially, legally, through our government--to share and make sure everyone is looked after. I think it's a good thing, in fact, and more in line with how God would have us live together. I think our goal should be to make the world a better place, hope that everyone is provided for and experiences a good quality of life. So I'm not opposed to the benefits that come from wealth and privilege, I just think it's wrong when those benefits come at the expense of others. My vision is one where we help each other climb to better heights without leaving any behind instead of using each other as stepping stones to get there then discard.

I would never call myself a Marxist, but that doesn't mean his thoughts don't have merit and lessons we can learn from. With that in mind but without further elaboration that will lengthen this post even more, I'd like to share a bit from an article titled In Praise of Marx:

The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition. For one thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China. If it did, then the result would simply be what he called "generalized scarcity," by which he means that everyone would now be deprived, not just the poor. It would mean a recycling of "the old filthy business"—or, in less tasteful translation, "the same old crap." Marxism is a theory of how well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve justice and prosperity for their people. . . .

There is a sense in which the whole of Marx's writing boils down to several embarrassing questions: Why is it that the capitalist West has accumulated more resources than human history has ever witnessed, yet appears powerless to overcome poverty, starvation, exploitation, and inequality? What are the mechanisms by which affluence for a minority seems to breed hardship and indignity for the many? Why does private wealth seem to go hand in hand with public squalor? Is it, as the good-hearted liberal reformist suggests, that we have simply not got around to mopping up these pockets of human misery, but shall do so in the fullness of time? Or is it more plausible to maintain that there is something in the nature of capitalism itself which generates deprivation and inequality, as surely as Charlie Sheen generates gossip? . . .

This is not to suggest for a moment that Marx considered capitalism as simply a Bad Thing . . . No other social system in history, he wrote, had proved so revolutionary. In a mere handful of centuries, the capitalist middle classes had erased almost every trace of their feudal foes from the face of the earth. They had piled up cultural and material treasures, invented human rights, emancipated slaves, toppled autocrats, dismantled empires, fought and died for human freedom, and laid the basis for a truly global civilization. No document lavishes such florid compliments on this mighty historical achievement as The Communist Manifesto, not even The Wall Street Journal.

That, however, was only part of the story. There are those who see modern history as an enthralling tale of progress, and those who view it as one long nightmare. Marx, with his usual perversity, thought it was both. Every advance in civilization had brought with it new possibilities of barbarism. The great slogans of the middle-class revolution—"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"—were his watchwords, too. He simply inquired why those ideas could never be put into practice without violence, poverty, and exploitation. . . .

How does this moral goal differ from liberal individualism? The difference is that to achieve true self-fulfillment, human beings for Marx must find it in and through one another. It is not just a question of each doing his or her own thing in grand isolation from others. That would not even be possible. The other must become the ground of one's own self-realization, at the same time as he or she provides the condition for one's own. At the interpersonal level, this is known as love. At the political level, it is known as socialism. Socialism for Marx would be simply whatever set of institutions would allow this reciprocity to happen to the greatest possible extent. Think of the difference between a capitalist company, in which the majority work for the benefit of the few, and a socialist cooperative, in which my own participation in the project augments the welfare of all the others, and vice versa. This is not a question of some saintly self-sacrifice. The process is built into the structure of the institution. . . .

What, though, of the fearful Day of Reckoning? Would not Marx's vision for humanity require a bloody revolution? Not necessarily. He himself thought that some nations, like Britain, Holland, and the United States, might achieve socialism peacefully. If he was a revolutionary, he was also a robust champion of reform. . . .

From the Eats Shoots and Leaves Files

2011-05-19T10:12:00.002-05:00

A comma after the first word would really help clarify the intent of this book's title and indicate which section of the library it belongs in.

Appeal Factors

2011-05-18T07:36:00.000-05:00

I prejudge and stereotype, as we all do. I take my categories and preconceived notions and apply them to new things about which I have no real knowledge. It’s unavoidable. But that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable or good. An area where I work with these factors daily is books and their appeal factors.

Awhile back, I was part of a discussion where my peers were raving about a particular book. Not just peers, but friends that often exchange recommendations with me, so I should have known enough to listen better and trust their opinions. I’m not going to claim I remember exactly what they said, but here’s what I heard: The book is about a teenage girl who’s sick or for some reason taking drugs, who travels to Paris and gets so caught up in reading a diary from the French Revolution that she imagines she’s actually there. Much of the discussion was about whether she hallucinated due to the drugs or whether she actually time traveled. But all agreed it was an excellent quality historical fiction. Here’s what I took away from what I heard: An excellent quality historical fiction about a girl, being raved about by girls, which means when I read it I’ll probably appreciate it but find it pretty dry and boring, dealing with issues I often can’t really relate to.

I didn’t get there completely in a vacuum, because that was my experience of the author’s previous book I’d read. A summary from the library catalog: In 1906, sixteen-year-old Mattie, determined to attend college and be a writer against the wishes of her father and fiance, takes a job at a summer inn where she discovers the truth about the death of a guest. Based on a true story. There was a mystery involved, but it was mostly about a girl in a dress growing up on the prairie. I was able to admire the quality of the writing, but I wasn’t moved by it and found it fairly boring. I figured this would be more of the same.

I’m now listening to disc eight of twelve of the newer book, and there hasn’t been a dress or prairie in sight. I’m finding it a wholly different reading experience. The “time travel” element hasn’t even occurred yet, even though that was central to the discussion I heard about the book. But lots of things that weren’t mentioned have. Lots of things that I find the book’s appeal factors, but that no one thought were important to mention during the discussion praising it. Yes, about half of the book takes place during a historical period, but the character’s not in a dress living a typical female period-piece life; she’s a thief, street performer, rebel, spy, and terrorist who only wears britches, hangs out in the catacombs, and blows things up. The other half takes place in the present day with the main protagonist, an overly pierced musician and genius grieving the death of her younger brother, about to get expelled from school with a major attitude problem; she’s a cool bad-ass dressed in black, and is someone many contemporary teen readers will easily identify with. Yes, it’s about a girl and it’s halfway historical, but it’s pretty far from a typical, dull, girlie, historical fiction.

Of course, my reaction is based on my preconceived notions that historical fiction books are typically dull and girlie, and I’m sure many readers don’t have this prejudice against them. Still, I have to think they’re aware of the stereotype, so why, I wonder, didn’t any of the librarians in the discussion think to mention any of these appeal factors when trying to talk it up?

The book, by the way, is Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly. And I don't imagine either character looks a thing like the ones pictured on the cover.

Connection

2011-05-02T22:38:00.003-05:00

The secret life of libraries

. . . "If someone suggested the idea of public libraries now, they'd be considered insane," says Peter Collins, library services manager in Worksop. "If you said you were going to take a little bit of money from every taxpayer, buy a whole load of books and music and games, stick them on a shelf and tell everyone, 'These are yours to borrow and all you've got to do is bring them back,' they'd be laughed out of government." . . .

The great untold truth of libraries is that people need them not because they're about study and solitude, but because they're about connection. . . .

The libraries' most powerful asset is the conversation they provide – between books and readers, between children and parents, between individuals and the collective world. Take them away and those voices turn inwards or vanish. Turns out that libraries have nothing at all to do with silence.

On Earth as It Is in Heaven

2011-04-28T22:33:00.002-05:00

This version is from Stories to Solve: Folktales from Around the World by George Shannon, although it is evidently a traditional tale. The book gives the following credit: "Heaven and Hell" is retold from Tales from Old China by Isabelle C. Chang (Random House, 1969) and Studies in Jewish and World Folklore by Haim Schwarzbaum (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1968). Regardless of the different faith traditions involved and different meanings of heaven, I think it is a valuable lesson and a philosophy worth living.

Heaven and Hell

People are always wishing. But once in China a man got his wish, which was to see the difference between heaven and hell before he died. When he visited hell, he saw tables crowded with delicious food, but everyone was hungry and angry. They had food, but were forced to sit several feet from the table and use chopsticks three feet long that made it impossible to get any food into their mouths.

When the man saw heaven, he was very surprised for it looked the same. Big tables of delicious food. People forced to sit several feet from the table and use three-foot long chopsticks that made it impossible to get any food into their mouths. It was exactly like hell, but in heaven the people were well fed and happy.

Why?

In heaven they were feeding one another.

"They Haven't Made Any Good Music Since Flood"

2011-04-26T00:01:00.001-05:00

The last time They Might Be Giants were in town, the concert (with some other stuff to lead in) was a performance of their 1990 album Flood (in its entirety, in order). Because, I'm assuming, it's still their music people know best and is what's most in demand. I've actually had people tell me they stopped listening after that album and that none of their music since was as good--even though, when pressed, they admitted they hadn't really given anything since much of a listen. I have, and don't even think Flood is my favorite TMBG album. So I'm very excited to see that they have a new album, Join Us, coming out July 19. And, according to this short video, today is TMBG awareness day.

In the last ten years the band has released multiple kids albums (that have won Grammys), done music for TV and movies, and more, but they've continued to make original music like they've always done. Here's a sampling of some of that newer music; not necessarily the best, but some of the catchier, most accessible and fun tunes in an attempt to hook you.

And, just for a bonus since it's from 1992's Apollo 18, my favorite TMBG song:

Not Quite Religious Humor

2011-04-15T17:32:00.001-05:00

A link worth following

Seasons

2011-04-13T10:08:00.002-05:00

Spring

Summer

Fall

Winter

Framed

A Philosophy

2011-04-12T14:52:00.002-05:00

"That is not what I meant. Of course you belong here, because you have offered me your friendship, and friends always belong together. But friends look out for each other's welfare, and I am concerned for yours. I wish only to protect you."

"It is I who must protect you!" she exclaimed, although she did not understand why she felt this so strongly. "You need protecting. I can look after myself."

"None of us can look after ourselves," he said after a moment. "We all have to look after each other."

From The Museum of Mary Child by Cassandra Golds

My review:

A creepy, old-fashioned tale, a mystery, a (non-romantic) love story, a magical fable. Something like that, at least. As someone who reads heavily, I find it particularly refreshing when I have trouble categorizing or describing a book, when I can say it is fairly unique and different. (Not every book has a secret pet network formed to do good called the Society of the Caged Birds of the City, after all.) Particularly when it's a good book that I enjoyed. If you want to be pleasingly intrigued, I suggest you give this one a go.

-----

In any case," she added, "as you ought to know by now, happiness is a Waste of Time. Let me hear no more about it."

-----

For this - this - was love! This closeness, this affection, this protectiveness, this respect, this cherishing, this friendship, this joy between Maria and herself was not charity but love. And this fear of losing her, and the sadness and loneliness that would come if ever she did - that too was love. Love was joy and love was pain. Love was allowing someone to matter to you. Not for their usefulness to you, or even for your usefulness to them, but for no reason, except that they were they and you were you. Love was everything, all that mattered. And yet, in a strange way, her godmother had been right. for love was a kind of folly, a losing game. The greatest of all Wastes of Time.

But then, that depended on what you thought time was for.

-----

And thus it was that Heloise discovered that there were stories apart from the ones in the Bible, stories of magic lamps, flying carpets and caves full of treasure.

But she was not surprised.

Stories were everywhere, she knew that now.

She was beginning to think that, in all the world, there were really only two things - just two. The stories you knew, and the stories you did not know.

-----

"How do stories that begin with 'Once upon a time' end?" she asked. . . .

"With and they all lived happily ever after," he said huskily.

"I don't know the end of the story," said Heloise. "Or at least, I don't know how to get to 'and they all lived happily ever after.' But you do. I know it. Please. Tell me how."

Rorschachian? - Spine Poem Exploration

2011-04-09T20:35:00.000-05:00

So it seems that spine poems are all the rage this year for National Poetry Month. Books are stacked on top of each other with the spines aligning, and the titles of the books are the poem. I haven't had time to browse the stacks looking for physical ideas, but I looked at all the titles I've rated on Goodreads and put some things together. I'm definitely no poet, but here's what my play produced:

Seek
Impossible Things
One Whole & Perfect Day
The Spectacular Now
Hidden Talents
Diamonds in the Shadow
Wild Things
The Search for Delicious
What I Call Life

How I Live Now
Godless
Invisible
Poison
Out of Order
Nothing to Lose
Nothing

Countdown
Cosmic
Rot & Ruin
You
Smile
Powerless

Wait for Me
Stuck in Neutral
If I Stay
Inexcusable
Born Confused
Waiting for Normal
The Case of the Lost Boy

When You Reach Me
The Awakening
Skin Hunger
Catching Fire
Feed
The Magic Pickle
Into the Volcano
A Step from Heaven
Kingdom Come

Last Night I Sang to the Monster
Monsters of Men
The Underneath
The Unspoken
The Unnameables
Keeper of the Night

Before I Fall
I Shall Wear Midnight
Soon I Will Be Invincible
Hero
Kick-Ass
Epic
King Dork
The Lump of Coal

This Is What I Did
Malice
Blindspot
Imaginary Enemy
Claws
Stitches
Sacred Scars
I Am the Messenger

The Search for Delicious
Tasting the Sky
The Sky Is Everywhere
Everything Bad Is Good for You
Life Is Funny
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

The Various
Gentlemen
Speak
A Tale Dark and Grimm
The Magicians
Hate List
The Foretelling

The Whole World’s Gone Crazy
Bone by Bone by Bone
Dust
Blankets
Feathers
You & You & You
Taken
Down the Rabbit Hole
Way Down Deep
The Slippery Slope

The Arrival
A Curse Dark as Gold
The End
As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth
The Big Burn
A Game of You

Teacherless Classrooms

2011-04-03T17:35:00.004-05:00

I'm curious to know if anyone would think it a good idea to have a band or orchestra room full of instruments available to students, but with no teacher. The students would still be enrolled in the music classes and a responsible non-teacher adult would hand the instruments out and supervise student behavior, but there would be no instruction. It would be assumed that if the students spent time with the instruments they would learn to play them on their own.

Is time in a gym full of equipment and directions to play productively and with a purpose a physical education class?

How about a laboratory full of substances and tools but lacking a teacher; is that a chemistry class? Say, even, the students have studied chemistry out of a book with a teacher in a different room. Would you then turn them loose in a teacherless lab expecting they'll learn what they need effectively?

I ask because there seems to be a common perception that school libraries should be a completely self-help enterprise, that as long as the resources are made available students will magically figure out how to find what they need and make good use of it. And that librarians, correspondingly, are not teachers.

(And, I know, everyone has a bad librarian horror story as supporting evidence to prove that librarians don't teach, but I'm talking about the way things should actually work--and often do--when done correctly.)

As the latest example (of many) in my experience, a local school district recently conducted a community survey about budget cuts. They are trying to figure out how to cut $10 million and came up with a list of options, then let people provide input for how to prioritize that list.

One of the options was: The district should eliminate the purchase of library books for the 2011-‐2012 school year for a general fund budget savings of approximately $107,000. This received a ranking of 2.49, which was relatively low and meant people were not in favor of implementing it.

Another option was: The district should replace librarians with library aides at the secondary schools for a savings of approximately $568,000. This received a ranking of 4.39, which means more people were in favor of this option.*

So overall people would rather keep the books and get rid of the librarians, if forced to choose. And you may be saying, "What's the point in having librarians without books?" but would you vote to provide new band instruments while eliminating band teachers or gym equipment while eliminating P.E. teachers or lab equipment while eliminating chemistry teachers? In those cases it doesn't really make sense to have one without the other, so I'm guessing the question would never even be asked. Why was this one?

As someone who's helped people use libraries** in one way or another more days than not for the last thirteen years, I'm here to tell you that people don't figure it out on their own and we have plenty to teach.

-----

*Of 20 weighted options totaling 100 points, the lowest was 0.86 and the highest 10.59

**And by "libraries" I don't just mean shelves full of books, but all the different formats and media including digital and computerized.

Applicable to More than Running, I Think

2011-04-01T21:22:00.004-05:00

I think perhaps the thing I love most about distance running is the quiet, meditative aspect. Letting my body slip into an automatic gear that takes no thought can free my mind to either wander creatively or focus clearly, and something about the endorphins or other chemicals cycling through the brain seems to facilitate thinking in a way that sitting around doesn’t.

But, while running can be a great solitary activity, it can be even better when shared. Particularly if your goal is to challenge yourself to work harder and expand your limits. Anytime you run faster than an easy pace and push yourself for an extended time, you’ll have periods when you feel good and other times when you’re hurting. It can be quite difficult to not back off your pace and slow somewhat when it gets hard. But if you’re running beside someone stride for stride or, even better, in the middle of a group, you can take breaks from concentrating on not slowing down and instead make it your goal to not lose a step on your companion(s). You can let them pull you through the rough patches, in other words, because maintaining someone else’s pace is generally much easier than fighting to maintain your own. Then after a bit you’ll feel good again, so you can return the favor when it gets hard for them. You take turns pulling each other along, offering encouragement when it’s needed and companionship when it’s not.

There are the odd times when you might actually have to slow down for each other, of course. Even worse is getting attached to a group that pulls each other down instead of up, which can happen, negatively feeding off each other to go ever slower instead of faster. But with a committed, positive group, you learn to look to each other for help when needed and it becomes automatic to reciprocate as much as possible. You all make each other better. The key is to have that understanding from the start, to get everyone in agreement that’s your goal, so when you find yourselves drifting away from it there’s nothing jarring or out of place about a reminder to maintain the proper focus. So while many of my favorite runs have been solo meditations, the best ones have always been in the company of others as part of a team.

Parasites Are Sexy

2011-03-28T17:10:00.004-05:00

Particularly ones that kill their prey.

Right?

Actually, I'm a little old-fashioned and still having trouble making the paradigm shift that would allow me to get on board with stories like All I Want for Christmas Is a Vampire. Maybe it's due to all the years I spent fighting vampires with my D&D characters, but I still tend to think of them as murderous monsters. Despite their evident sexual prowess.

(Never mind the fact that the male member needs blood flow to function properly coupled with the fact that vampires are undead creatures that lack beating hearts or flowing blood.)

As Stephen Colbert might say, the market has spoken. Popular opinion has made it clear that vampires are sexy, regardless of what I think, and I need to get over it and accept that fact.

And, if I really think about it, it should be obvious. I'm a long-time fan of Lords of Acid, after all, and back in '94 they wrote the ultimate parasite love song. Vampires are late to this party, because long before they became sexy, there were the pleasures of the crablouse.

(Before hitting play, you may want to check out the NSFW lyrics.

-----

@$#^#$&#%!!! A random thought would just happen to lead me to their website for the first time in years two weeks after they were in town on a tour . . .

Vaguely Related Thoughts about Writing

2011-03-27T10:38:00.001-05:00

A news update from The Onion: Microsoft Word Now Includes Squiggly Blue Line To Alert Writer When Word Is Too Advanced For Mainstream Audience (Although more seriously)

One of the things I say often--very often--as a librarian talking to kids and their parents is that reading is a skill. And, like any skill, the best way to improve is regular practice. Most important is not grammar drills or challenging works, but consumption of mass quantities. Generally this comes up in the context of finding enjoyable books to read and having fun with the activity so they stay motivated, but the point is that the best way to become a better reader is to read constantly. Here's an older post that expands on the thought a little.

While I don't aspire to be a writer, I bring this up because I think it applies to writing as well. Andrew Smith has just written an excellent post saying just that:

willie's houseboat, or why you should have a blog

. . . You know what else I do every day? I run. I have run (and completed) 30 marathons in my life. A marathon is 26.2 miles long, by the way.

The thing about most non-insane people who want to run a marathon is that they don't just pop out of bed one day and say, hey!!!! I'm going to go run 26.2 miles today!!!

They train up to it over time, running, working out, and contributing to their abilities every day.

That's what young (or anyone who has a goal or desire to one day actually complete something like a short story, novel, or screenplay) writers need to keep in mind:

Practice. . . .

Although apparently the decision to do so should come with a warning. One of the quotes I liked from Here Lies Arthur was:

That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.

Here's a recent blog post by a writer who greatly and humorously expands on this idea and related ones:

Beware of Writer: Ten Very Good Reasons to Get Far the Fuck Away from Us Writer Types:

. . . Please Ignore Our Forked Tongues
We are lying liars who lie. We have to be. Fiction is a lie. Non-fiction is, in its own way, a lie. When writing, deception is a skill. This, like so much of the thread that goes into our wretched quilt, trails into our real lives and ensures that the best writers make the most powerful liars. We can convince you of anything. We don’t mean to. It’s just . . .

There's more and it's funny. I know some of my regular readers have the intention of becoming writers, so I thought you should take both this and Smith's posts under advisement.

And, since I'm doing vague free-association, I thought we might revisit one of my favorite quotes from another previous post, explaining my preferred means of engaging in stories and why:

I think this is the soul of why role-playing games like D&D and EPT were so popular with young boys. They provided a trellis work for the imagination to climb upon and thrive. Unsupported, your day dreams can wither; backed up by rules, pictures, model figures and the input of others, there's no end to the amount of brain space they can consume. . . .

The power of the story, either writing or reading or listening to one, is that the imagination is tied to something that makes it go forward. . . .

D&D is, I believe, something virtually unique and unprecedented in human history. It's a story you can listen to at the same time as telling it. You can be surprised by the plot's twists and turns, but you can surprise too. It's more interactive than any other sort of narrative I can think of. If its subject matter were more serious then it would probably be considered a new art form, and it's probably surprising that nothing beyond murder mystery dinners has ever been evolved from it. This is why D&D is so addictive when it's played right. It's like the best story you've ever read combined with the charge a good storyteller feels as he plays his audience.

I think there's a basic human need to listen to stories, but also to tell them. In D&D you get that tingle you imagine when you think of the ancient storytellers, dusk falling, the camp fire burning and the first line being read. It's not like hearing "In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit," it's like saying it for the first time and to a rapt audience that is dying for your next sentence.

I have finished games feeling physically drained and actually wanted to continue to have my characters buy food at a shop or smoke a pipe in a tavern just to calm down before breaking with the game world entirely. And sometimes even that wasn't enough. The crucial difference between conventional forms of storytelling and D&D is that D&D doesn't have to finish. Ever. It's an open-ended story, and, if you're emotionally engaged with it, the temptation is just to keep going.

Musical Geography

2011-03-17T06:20:00.003-05:00

The reference (video and live):

The really cool project someone put together, one song from each of the countries named in the song:

The Alphabet of Musical Nations

The Alphabet Of Musical Nations Pt. 2

The Alphabet Of Musical Nations Pt. 3

The Alphabet Of Musical Nations Pt. 4

Gonna have to do me some listening . . .

Do As You're Told (Which Is "Be Your Own Person")

2011-03-17T05:55:00.000-05:00

A bit more on the importance of perspective. The chart that follows was shared as a link that included the phrase "class warfare." And I suppose in a way it is. How you understand it depends on which class you're siding with. The first time I saw it all I could see was hoarding by the right column, a refusal to share a bit of their excessive wealth to help people who really need it. Conservatives, however, see it as keeping hard-earned money where it belongs--with those who have earned it--rather than forcibly taking it away and turning it into handouts for those who haven't worked hard enough to deserve it--those who haven't been personally responsible. For more on this framework, see recent post Contextualizing Politics.

(Click on the image to see it full size.) Found here.

I think an article explains my understanding of statistics like this as succinctly as anything I've seen, within the current context, is: John Hallinan: The crisis is our unwillingness to make rich pay their share. I'm trying to summarize or pick out highlights to share here, but think if I do I'll end up reposting the entire thing. It's short and quick, so take a moment now to follow the link and read it.

That certainly reads to me a bit like class warfare, but coming in response to attacks from the wealthy. And the thing that's muddying the waters is that it's not being cast as a class debate, but an ideological one. It's a right vs. left, conservative vs. liberal framework that attempts to take class issues out of it. As Lakoff describes in my post linked above. And even more importantly, as also laid out in that post, it's a debate between genetic predispositions we can't control that largely seem to coincide with those political categories. It's literally in our programming to see things a certain way, and the conversation has become such that "contextualists" are more likely to find a home with the liberal way of thinking and the "absolutists" with the conservative.

To further make that point, I want to look at a book I stumbled across in our library collection. First, recall from the previous post a couple of things: "absolutists" . . . prefer a strong group unity with clear leaders, appreciate strict and forceful punishment systems, distrust human nature and outsiders, and are not distressed by inequality. And: The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. . . . And what of people who are not prosperous? They don’t have discipline, and without discipline they cannot be moral, so they deserve their poverty. The good people are hence the prosperous people. Helping others takes away their discipline, and hence makes them both unable to prosper on their own and function morally.

I didn't make note of it so only have a paraphrase from memory instead of a clear quote, but in flipping through the book I came across a sentence that said something along the lines of: Producers will always have more money than nonproducers because they are more talented, are more intelligent, or are more tenacious. In other words, the rich deserve their money because they've worked hard for it. This was in the context of liberals wanting to share their money with those undeserving nonproducers. The book:

The Conservative's Handbook: Defining the Right Position on Issues from A to Z by Phil Valentine.

I think the subtitle says it all. The dedication: To the memory and spirit of Ronald Reagan, an inspiration to all conservatives. And the table of contents:

1. America is good.

2. Belief in God is a cornerstone of our republic.

3. Character is the single most important attribute in a leader.

4. Drug legalization will cripple America.

5. Entrepreneurs are our lifeblood and deserve every penny they make.

6. Families are the basic building blocks of society.

7. Guns are good.

8. Hyphenated labels are divisive and destructive.

9. Illegal immigration is dangerous to this country.

10. Junk science is behind the global warming scare.

11. Killing through partial-birth abortion is murder.

12. Liberalism is an ideology doomed to failure.

13. Military strength deters aggression.

14. National security is the first responsibility of the federal government.

15. Oppression should not be fueled by American capitalism.

16. Political correctness is the liberal version of fascism.

17. Quotas are wrong.

18. Reagan was right.

19. Schools are best run by local people on the local level.

20. Tax rates should be flat and fair.

21. Unions have outlived their usefulness.

22. Vigilance is the price of freedom.

23. Welfare robs people of their dignity and is the poison of capitalism.

24. Xenophobia is at the root of protectionism.

25. You and you alone are ultimately responsible for your own destiny.

26. Zero tolerance is the only way to effectively deal with crime.

Heard It Here First

2011-03-14T15:03:00.002-05:00

I had a bit of a "Wow" moment reading a recent David Brooks column. Instead of the usual conservative mantra that unregulated individualism is all that matters, he said a number of things that I've been saying for years: that humans are inherently emotional, irrational, and social. He didn't go quite so far as considering policy implications of accepting these things, but it's a start.

The New Humanism

. . . This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.

This body of research suggests the French enlightenment view of human nature, which emphasized individualism and reason, was wrong. The British enlightenment, which emphasized social sentiments, was more accurate about who we are. It suggests we are not divided creatures. We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. We also thrive as we educate our emotions.

When you synthesize this research, you get different perspectives on everything from business to family to politics. You pay less attention to how people analyze the world but more to how they perceive and organize it in their minds. You pay a bit less attention to individual traits and more to the quality of relationships between people.

You get a different view of, say, human capital. Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills. Those are all important, obviously, but this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories . . .

Where's the Skirt?

2011-03-13T10:06:00.004-05:00

I think anyone who sees this image knows that the straight figured symbol indicates male and the skirt wearing one indicates female. It's accepted as universal. Even though, in my recent experience, most women don't wear dresses or skirts most of the time. It's more acceptable and common for them to do so, but the symbol represents an idea more than a reality.

I was just thinking about this the other night at a movie theater. I've been there countless times before, but hadn't really thought about how they mark their bathrooms until it hit me that the skirt was missing. While there are still things to quibble about in the way this also universalizes things about male and female gender roles and expectations, I think it is a big improvement in its focus on general biological characteristics instead of socially constructed ones like clothes.

For a much more extensive consideration of this issue, you might start here.

Plutocracy: A Political System Governed by the Wealthy People

2011-03-05T18:29:00.005-06:00

It's a story about power. It's about the loss of a countervailing power robust enough to stand up to the influence of business interests and the rich on equal terms.

From the Kevin Drum article that inspired this post's title; link to follow. This seems to be the issue of the moment for me, and I see it in everything I read and read everything I see about it. I don't know if it will be my last post on it for a while or not, but I want to tie together a bunch of that "stuff" here. Starting with a joke I posted the other day:

A unionized public employee, a tea partier, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, then looks at the tea partier and says, "Watch out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."

I think I first touched on it in this post, partially in reference to a Paul Krugman article saying:

What’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. . . . You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans.

Kevin Drum goes into it even more explicitly in his article Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin Is Really About: "How screwing unions screws the entire middle class." An excerpt:

The first is this: Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.

Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early '90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that's not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don't respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that's not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don't respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.

It doesn't take a multivariate correlation to conclude that these two things are tightly related: If politicians care almost exclusively about the concerns of the rich, it makes sense that over the past decades they've enacted policies that have ended up benefiting the rich. And if you're not rich yourself, this is a problem. First and foremost, it's an economic problem because it's siphoned vast sums of money from the pockets of most Americans into those of the ultrawealthy. At the same time, relentless concentration of wealth and power among the rich is deeply corrosive in a democracy, and this makes it a profoundly political problem as well.

I, of course, recommend reading the whole article, because he explains at length the history behind the current circumstances and how we have ended up here. Now to add a bunch of related stuff, some of it much more fun, related to the topic. First, a religious perspective from Jim Wallis:

This week, I have reminded television and radio talk show hosts that our budget didn’t get into this mess because we spent too much money on poor people! And cutting programs that help the most vulnerable (which are among the most cost-effective and least costly public spending we have) isn’t going to get us out of financial trouble, or reduce the deficit in ways that we now need. Excessive deficits are indeed a moral issue and they place crushing burdens on our children and grandchildren. But how we reduce the deficit is also a moral issue.

But, of course, I have been asked, “Okay then, what would you cut?” This debate has reminded me of the famous statement by bank robber Willie Sutton. When asked why he robbed banks, he famously replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” If we really want to reduce the deficit, we also have to go where the real money is: our massive military spending, corporate welfare subsides to big businesses, and corporate tax loopholes, as well as the long term costs of health care and Social Security, which will require important future reforms. On a television program yesterday evening, I said that I want those who now propose major cuts to critical low-income family support programs to say, out loud, that every item of Pentagon spending is more important to our well-being and security than school lunches, child health, and early education programs.

Next, The Daily Show looks at how much of this has been covered in the news. For more on that topic, I'd refer you to my previous post about Fox News:

The Daily Show - Crisis in Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer - Teachers and Wall Street
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Followed, logically of course, by a possible solution from Stephen Colbert:

Finally, if you're still with me, a couple of interesting videos from over 20 years ago. I'm not a Marxist and do see benefits to a free market economy, but think voices like this need to be part of the debate since everything has shifted so far away from them. It's long and starts slow, not even really getting into things for a good five minutes then shifting to what I think is an even better perspective around ten minutes in. Since this is related to what he says in Part II, I'll first share a bit of humor considering themes of Dr. Seuss books:

A Critique of Capitalism, Part I:

Part II:

Yet More Proof Fox Is in the Propaganda Business

2011-03-02T21:03:00.000-06:00

Humans, on the other hand, behave irrationally in spite of our big brains, perhaps because of our big brains. We cling to beliefs that should be destroyed by facts. We leap before we look. We think ourselves into bad decisions. Such loopy behavior seems to be a specialty of only the brightest species.

The most chagrining studies I've read on this subject address the indelible nature of political beliefs. As we saw in chapter 7, the brain regions that conduct critical analysis go dark when we hear something unpleasant about a new mate. Well, the brain behaves similarly with our beloved politicians. In one experiment, researchers popped Democrat and Republican subjects into an MRI machine to monitor their brains. Then they presented negative facts about presidential candidates from both parties and watched those brains writhe. While humans were quick to believe the worst about the opposing candidate, they would not accept bad news about their own man. Brains regions involved in error detection did light up, as though the brain knew it should revise its beliefs. But so did areas dedicated to avoiding the emotional agony of admitting we're wrong. And in many cases, the brains patched together alternate interpretations of the bad news, which then caused regions involved in relief and reward to sparkle. Humans do not like to change our beliefs.

The Well-Dressed Ape by Hannah Holmes

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This is already old news, but I just came across it and wanted to share anyway. Passionate viewers will ignore any retraction and go with the "evidence" they heard to support their gut feelings, so the damage is done regardless of any apologies issued. And since they do this kind of thing in more subtle ways countless times every day . . .

A Gallup Poll:

The way Fox reported it:

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This isn't about what is . . . it's about what people think is. It's all imaginary anyway. That's why it's important. People only fight over imaginary things.

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

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If they think it's the truth, then they believe it, and if they believe it long enough, then it becomes the truth.

The Facttracker, by Jason Carter Eaton

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And more on the power of belief in shaping reality here.

Joke from FB

2011-03-01T07:28:00.000-06:00

A unionized public employee, a tea partier, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, then looks at the tea partier and says, "Watch out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."

Friday Video Roundup

2011-02-25T19:51:00.002-06:00

Too many good videos shared by my friends today on Facebook, so I'll collect them all here.

First, a situation that is unfortunately typical too often of life as a librarian:

This one is just rather brilliant. Not for the gimmick or technology, but the content:

Third, Ian Anderson meets Nintendo:

And, finally, a funny commercial for an insurance company ("Just call Alpeldoorn"):

Contextualizing Politics

2011-02-23T10:02:00.002-06:00

There's a section from The Well-Dressed Ape that stands out to me as particularly insightful about politics. The idea is so much bigger than politics and I love considering all the different ways it informs interpersonal dynamics, but this post is going to be all about how contextualists and absolutists seem to fall into liberal and conservative camps. I first shared the following quote here.

Humans don't divide neatly into liberals and conservatives, they concluded. Rather, some of us are "contextualists," who tend to be empathetic and tolerant of others, who consider the context before punishing those selfish wolverines, who are suspicious of certainty when they encounter it in others, and who question authority and inequality. Others of us are "absolutists," who prefer a strong group unity with clear leaders, appreciate strict and forceful punishment systems, distrust human nature and outsiders, and are not distressed by inequality. Each of us leans one way or the other, regardless of reason, and these leanings color our behavior.

A lot has been written about how good conservatives have become at framing the issues, controlling the metaphors and vocabulary we use in our debates, having amazing across-the-board unity in their talking points, and the like, while liberals seem to accept the terms or offer a confusing muddle of "we need to listen to each other" and "it's complicated" and such.* Liberals lack a talking point or frame because we like to contextualize things, so we resist predefining situations until we can consider each one and its unique context instead of forcing it to fit our preexisting views.

I feel like I do have a simple frame that can be adapted as a talking point, though, as it seems to be my starting point for considering each issue and directs how I react. It's that we're social beings, we're all in this together, and things are better when we learn to share and play nice. If you want the one-word approach: sharing. More from Holmes:

The behavior of sharing is so fundamental to human interaction that we do it from dawn till dusk without noticing. Every group of humans that forms a culture forges rules of conduct, then conforms to them, more or less. (More when someone's watching, less when unobserved.) . . .

We can't not share, and--as much as I do fight for my individual rights and the ability to be self-determining--it seems over-insistence on individual responsibility is a denial of this fact that undermines it in unproductive and harmful ways. George Lakoff describes liberal fundamentals in a way that seems to emphasize the sharing:

Empathy — citizens caring for each other, both social and personal responsibility—acting on that care, and an ethic of excellence. From these, our freedoms and our way of life follow, as does the role of government: to protect and empower everyone equally. Protection includes safety, health, the environment, pensions and empowerment starts with education and infrastructure. No one can be free without these, and without a commitment to care and act on that care by one’s fellow citizens.

He then considers conservatives in a way that sounds suspiciously like the absolutists described by Holmes:

Conservatives believe in individual responsibility alone, not social responsibility. They don’t think government should help its citizens. That is, they don’t think citizens should help each other. The part of government they want to cut is not the military (we have 174 bases around the world), not government subsidies to corporations, not the aspect of government that fits their worldview. They want to cut the part that helps people. Why? Because that violates individual responsibility. . . .

The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. His job is to protect the family, to support the family (by winning competitions in the marketplace), and to teach his kids right from wrong by disciplining them physically when they do wrong. The use of force is necessary and required. Only then will children develop the internal discipline to become moral beings. And only with such discipline will they be able to prosper. And what of people who are not prosperous? They don’t have discipline, and without discipline they cannot be moral, so they deserve their poverty. The good people are hence the prosperous people. Helping others takes away their discipline, and hence makes them both unable to prosper on their own and function morally.

The market itself is seen in this way. The slogan, “Let the market decide” assumes the market itself is The Decider. . . .

Fathers and husbands should have control over reproduction; hence, parental and spousal notification laws and opposition to abortion. In conservative religion, God is seen as the strict father . . .

Above all, the authority of conservatism itself must be maintained. The country should be ruled by conservative values, and progressive values are seen as evil. Science should NOT have authority over the market, and so the science of global warming and evolution must be denied. Facts that are inconsistent with the authority of conservatism must be ignored or denied or explained away. . . .

Freedom is defined as being your own strict father — with individual not social responsibility, and without any government authority telling you what you can and cannot do. To defend that freedom as an individual, you will of course need a gun. . . .

To use the current issues in Wisconsin as an example, the dynamics Lakoff describes come out like this:

"Use live ammunition."

From my own Twitter account, I confronted the user, JCCentCom. He tweeted back that the demonstrators were "political enemies" and "thugs" who were "physically threatening legally elected officials." In response to such behavior, he said, "You're damned right I advocate deadly force." He later called me a "typical leftist," adding, "liberals hate police."

Only later did we realize that JCCentCom was a deputy attorney general for the state of Indiana. . . .

If someone challenges the father-figure's authority, they are a threat and need to be dealt with as aggressively as possible. The absolute authority is the most important thing and must be preserved at all costs.

The issues aren't really the issue, because the ultimate fight driving both sides is whether our approach to governing will be more contextual or absolute. Paul Krugman nails it:

What’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side. . . .

In this situation, it makes sense to call for shared sacrifice, including monetary concessions from state workers. And union leaders have signaled that they are, in fact, willing to make such concessions.

But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. . . .

Why bust the unions? . . . it’s not about the budget; it’s about the power. . . .

You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans . . .

And to go back to Lakoff's metaphor, middle- and working-class Americans who don't want to do as their government tells them are like rebellious teenagers not taking Dad's discipline to work harder and make it on their own as individuals.

Even though a majority of conservatives are Christian, it's hard to justify these policy details in light of biblical teachings. While not using the absolute vs. contextual or power dynamics as a frame, Jim Wallis captures the apparent contradictions well in considering What Would Jesus Cut?

House Republicans announced a plan yesterday to cut $43 billion in domestic spending and international aid, while increasing spending for military and defense by another $8 billion. This proposal comes just months after billions of dollars were added to the deficit with an extension of tax cuts to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. House Republicans focused in on only 12 percent of federal spending, and targeted things like education, the environment, food safety, law enforcement, infrastructure, and transportation — programs that benefit or protect most Americans. They also proposed cutting funding for programs that benefit the most vulnerable members of our society, such as nutrition programs for our poorest women and children. We don’t yet know all the cuts Republicans are targeting in their proposals, but it’s good to finally know what their priorities are. . . .

Taking the cutting knife to programs that benefit low-income people, while refusing to scrutinize the much larger blank checks we keep giving to defense contractors and corporate executives, is hypocritical and cruel. I’ll go even further and say that such a twisted moral calculus for the nation’s fiscal policy is simply not fair, and not right. It is not only bad economics, but also bad religion. The priorities we are now seeing are not consistent with Christian, Jewish, or Muslim values. And if the super-rich and their representatives in Congress persist in this fight against the poor, they will be picking a fight with all of us.

That's because it's not really about Christian, Jewish, or Muslim values, but an instinctive need to have everything defined in rigid absolutist terms that demand clear power and individual responsibility at the expense of mutuality and sharing.

If we all want to share in solving our problems, for instance, adults in Wisconsin would only have to contribute $32 each to address the state's current budget crisis that has led to so many issues:

Of course, as Wallis's article implies and the ones by Lakoff and Krugman state right out, it's not about the $32 that everyone could afford, the budget, spending, or taxes for conservatives; those are just weapons in the fight to reform the world in the image of their absolutist natures. Sharing goes against that nature and they will do anything they can to fight it. At least, that's the way it sure seems to contextual me, but then I guess I'm programmed to think that way and can't help myself . . .

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*Later in Lakoff's article: Democrats also help conservatives by what a friend has called Democratic Communication Disorder. Republican conservatives have constructed a vast and effective communication system, with think tanks, framing experts, training institutes, a system of trained speakers, vast holdings of media, and booking agents. Eighty percent of the talking heads on tv are conservatives. Talk matters because language heard over and over changes brains. If you want some background into what he means in that last sentence, I included it in the middle of a previous post.

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I'll also add an abridged version of a related post I considered writing about six months ago. Not so much about defining ourselves into opposing contextual vs. absolutist camps, but how those camps view the proper use of governmental power.

It started with this article that referenced a blogger making the case that tea partiers and hippies have the same values and share the same space on the political spectrum.

The actual blog post explains how both groups accept that human nature is innate (not socially constructed) and value independence, individualism, and self-sufficiency above all else. Being neither a hippy nor a tea partier I won't fuss about whether the comparison is accurate, but I've already said above I think we are social beings who are not independent individuals living on our own but members of cooperative societies who need to learn sharing to get along most happily.

So the thing I wanted to focus on was a view of human nature as necessarily greedy and corrupt. There's a video embedded in the middle of the post in which a tea party spokesman explains why they think government needs to be limited and small:

Now, many modern people see this belief that we have — that human nature is fundamentally flawed and selfish, and essentially unchangeable — as cynical and pessimistic. On the contrary. It is this belief that generates a society with the checks and balances against the natural human bastardliness that basically wants to tell other people what to do.

These checks and balances prevent the accumulation of too much power in the hands of too few people. And that defiance of these checks and balances by the current political class, of both parties, is the real threat that the Tea Party movement is a response to.

So people are essentially going to do the greedy thing if left unchecked, and the more power you have the more harm you can do. So far, so good. I'm absolutely on board with that. Where we veer 180 degrees is the role of government in all of this. They seem to think that governments have all the power and are thus the greatest potential for evil. I believe a democratic government of and by the people is the greatest potential for limiting individual power and evil. Left to our own natures with no social constraints or rules, we'll compete for power and some individuals will come out ahead. I like to shorthand them as "big money," "Wall Street," "corporations," or "the rich." They will greedily take from the rest of us for their own benefits as much as they possibly can unless someone has the power to stop them. The only one with enough power to do so is all of us as a collective in the form of our representative government. I know reality shows government can be as corrupt as any other power, but I still feel on principal it is the right approach to take for battling our innate selfishness. It is the approach that is based on sharing instead of individuality. It is us all coming together to look out for each other and to make sure no one has the power to oppress us.

There's more I could say about this, expanding on the ideas and my beliefs, a strong biblical basis for it, and etc., but this is the abridged version and I want to do something today besides write so I'll stop now.

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Update: I think there's more than a little connection to something I wrote a while back, Which Do You Fear More: Lazy-Selfishness or Greedy-Selfishness? . . . I see two different fears dividing people in the health care and economic debates: fear of lazy, undeserving people taking what we have earned and fear of greedy, undeserving people hoarding what we have a right to. . . .

Misanthropic Thought of the Day

2011-02-22T10:20:00.003-06:00

Perhaps there's such a big self-help book industry because so many people are self-helpless.

All Things Well-Dressed Ape

2011-02-16T23:45:00.002-06:00

The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself by Hannah Holmes

My Review

As darkness falls, I buck the human impulse to crawl under a furry hide and go to sleep. With a sheaf of journal articles and a tamed flame, I curl into a corner of the couch and compete like crazy. I'm not just writing a book here. I'm trying to write a book that's better than any other book. It takes a lot of time, this competing.

I’m one of those people who is fond of saying I could be a student forever. I already have more degrees than I can use and would happily pursue others purely out of curiosity and an interest in learning. So it’s probably not a surprise to hear that at one point in my life I was seriously considering pursuing some kind of Ph.D. The problem, I felt, was that the necessity to specialize would be too limiting. I didn’t want to focus on writing and reading just one narrow subject the rest of my life, because I’m interested in a little bit of everything. One thing I bumped into that really did intrigue me was a school that offered a “Doctorate of Interrelated Studies,” if I’ve remembered the name correctly. That was all about studying many different fields and making the connections between them.

This book is a little like that, which is what I particularly love about it and why Holmes was quite successful in competing for my attention. It’s a book written for the layperson and I imagine it could get long-winded and obvious for experts in the field(s) she covers, but I found it to be an excellent balance of information, insight, and personality. Holmes is writing a personal examination of the human animal from a biological perspective, a zoological field guide of sorts, to offer a comparison to others in the animal kingdom. So we get human biology and physiology, but learn much about the natural world along the way, as well as anthropology, sociology, psychology, and more. Topics covered by the chapters: physical description, the brain, perception, range, territoriality, diet, reproduction, behavior, communication, predators, and ecosystem impacts. On top of it all, Holmes uses herself as her primary subject for anecdotes to illustrate her points in a way that gets almost memoir-ish at times. I loved the mix of clinical, scientific terminology and folksy, personal voice. Even when I was familiar with the content she was covering, I kept reading to see which turn of phrase might delight me next. A sample bit from the introduction:

I am one of those people with a reputation for being a "natural" with children. Because I produced none of my own, my friends often make the observation with an air of puzzlement, after I've beguiled their offspring out of a sulk or into a game quieter than hurling pot lids.

The honest explanation has seemed too impolite to share: Of course I'm fluent in child. I've spent my whole life around wild animals. . . .

This is why I don’t find children baffling. They are young animals, unrefined in their instincts and impulses. If an animal is shy, I don’t gaze or grab at it, because those gestures are predatory. Instead, I avert my eyes and display something enticing. To avoid frightening the young human who has approached, it’s essential to project positive feelings. When a horse detects the stiffening of a fearful rider, the horse tenses because it has evolved to respect any indication of danger. Inversely, a fearful horse can be soothed by a rider who is at ease. And so it is with the young human: He monitors other humans for hesitations, signs of doubt, signs of danger. I try not to embody any. Thus, by exploiting an animal’s instincts, it’s possible to manipulate its behavior to suit yourself.

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Reading Journal, Epilogue

Having cranked myself through the biologist’s machinery, I see my animal self more clearly. I feel more personally the bond between me and a chimpanzee, and even between me and a fly. Our missions, after all, are identical. Every species is biologically programmed to escape predators and parasites, to gather food, to shelter from the weather, and to reproduce. Although each animal has evolved to meet these challenges in a different way, we are equals in the struggle.

In some ways my animal identity is a great comfort to me. I am still depressed by human warfare, greed, and oppression. But now it’s clear to me that these nasty acts are as much a question of biological impulse as of personal scheming. Polar bears, baboons, and wild boar can be just as nasty and for just the same reasons. Somehow, the biological underpinning of human evil makes it easier for me to stomach. Furthermore, the human’s great capacity for altruism and kindness shines even more brightly in the natural context. Our species is among the most generous and is clearly the most thoughtful.

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Previous Posts

I'm Hooked

An Intersection of Biology and Politics

Reading Journal, The Well-Dressed Ape, Chapter 1 Quotes

Reading Journal, The Well-Dressed Ape, Chapters 2-3 Quotes

Reading Journal, The Well-Dressed Ape, Chapters 4-5 Quotes

Boys & Reading?

18 Months Later: My Next Temporary Obsession

Reading Journal, The Well-Dressed Ape, Chapters 6-7 Quotes

From the "That Makes So Much Sense" Files

Reading Journal, The Well-Dressed Ape, Chapters 8-9 Quotes

Reading Journal, The Well-Dressed Ape, Chapters 10-11 Quotes

Reading Journal, The Well-Dressed Ape, Chapters 10-11 Quotes

2011-02-16T12:28:00.003-06:00

Chapter 10 – Tough as a Boiled Owl: Predators

An ever-growing population argues that while this primate may occasionally lose a battle to a predator, it’s winning the war. The repercussions of this victory aren’t fully known. One result is an unforeseen sense of loneliness. The primate is now making the conscious choice to let some of its large predators survive.
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Despite having cleansed the planet of most large predators, humans can still do a decent job of behaving like prey. That freezing response is probably built into my genes.
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My reproductive capacity is evidence of my predatory status. Those creatures who are accustomed to being eaten give birth to big families. Rabbits breed like rabbits.
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As their predators rebound, the humans are doing a most un-animally thing. In the richest cultures, where bullets are cheapest, humans are waxing nostalgic for their old tormentors.
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Our competitors are more lethal to us than our animal predators, at this point in human history. Snakes, for instance, bite half a million humans each year, killing 125,000 of us--far more than the crocodile. And this is probably a gross underestimate. . . . All these deadly snakes aren’t out to devour humans. It’s just that snake territory and human territory often overlap. Each species wants to feel safe in this territory and each perceives the other to be a menace.
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It’s the growling animals with glowing eyes who populate the dark-night terrors of a human. It’s the snakes and spiders who inspire an otherwise rational primate to leap skyward with a screech. But in reality, our most dangerous predators are hairless, scaleless, toothless, and teensy.

Living as I do in a tool-rich culture, I’ve always succeeded in fighting off the microbes who attempt to devour me. But they’ve tried. Many have tried. I’ve endured cold viruses who opened the door to their friends, welcoming bacterial invaders into my lungs. One winter I wheezed and gurgled for days before someone convinced me I had pneumonia and had best see a doctor. I’ve had simple cuts that became staging grounds for strains of bacteria capable of poisoning my blood and dropping me like a sack of wet sand. Deep in a Madagascar jungle I was ambushed by a micro-assailant who liquefied my guts and could have drained me to a husk in a few days. Each time these predators attacked, I was able to get my hands on a tool that could beat them off. I’m fortunate.
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I think of my predators as those who kill a large percentage of the humans they prey on, and my parasites as those who kill only a few, more or less by accident. The latter usually kill the young, the old, and the already sick. The classic parasite merely burdens its prey, eating it slowly enough to keep it alive.
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Two of the wildest frontiers in medical research today are “bioprospecting,” in which scientists test random plants for useful chemicals, and “zoopharmacognosy,” in which scientists save themselves a bundle of time by first taking note of which plants other animals are using.

Chapter 11 – A Bull in a China Shop: Ecosystem Impacts

We kill species proactively, before they can attack us or eat our food.
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Where humans brandished fire, ecosystems metamorphosed. Interesting questions flare up when a landscape has been so altered by humans, and so many thousands of year ago: What lived here before? And what would you consider the “natural” landscape? Is it whatever was here before humans? Or is a human-made savanna just as natural as the beaver-dammed pond? Muddying the question further is the fact that farming humans, who migrated into the territories of hunter-gatherers in the past few centuries, often banned burning, which transformed those ecosystems yet again.
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Between unintended erosion and the intentional alterations wrought by farms, roadways, shelters, public buildings, and cities, humans have now transformed between 50 percent and 83 percent of all the earth’s surface. (Estimates vary.)
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Homo sapiens has eaten dozens of its fellow animals into oblivion. We have dug up the soil and transformed the earth’s surface so thoroughly that thousands more species have failed for loss of habitat. In our ravening for tools, tools, ever more tools, we have accidentally poisoned huge swaths of land, in addition to most of the freshwater and all--all--the air.

The modern human’s impact on its environment is near total. My species has so mastered tools, and so inflated it population, that all the fun has gone out of Earth wrecking. It’s too easy. We’re capable of annihilating almost any species that bothers us. Our dominion over the land and its plants is challenged only by mountains and glaciers. We’ve even adjusted the planet’s temperature--a rare feat indeed. And oddly, none of this Earth-altering behavior dates to our modern, messy era. The human animal has been messing up the planet since we first learned to strike flint.

Reading Journal, The Well-Dressed Ape, Chapters 8-9 Quotes

2011-02-15T22:20:00.002-06:00

Chapter 8 – Busy as a Beaver: Behavior

By the end of this typical day, I will have spent less than an hour in social discourse via conversation, e-mail, and the telephone. That’s a piddling 7 percent of my waking day. . . . By the numbers, I’m not as sociable as a baboon (9 to 12 percent) or a bald eagle (12 percent), but I’m more gregarious than a solitary animal like a snake or a bear.
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Many humans feel quite out of balance unless there’s another species snuffling around the shelter.
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Recall that a leading theory on the origin of the huge human brain is that it takes a lot of neurons to keep track of all the favors we owe our allies and the favors we are owed. That same theory has been proposed for the chimp brain and the relatively large brains of crows, dolphins, wolves, and other social animals. . . . In zoo experiments, chimps have shown that they keep track of which comrades are best at solving a certain puzzle, and choose partners accordingly. They also remember which pal has groomed them or shared food with them. An animal with such a complex social life needs a lot of wattage.
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Many theorists now believe that the impulse to create art--as well as music and a sense of humor--evolved in humans because creativity showcases an individual’s intelligence to potential mates.
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To attribute these visceral doodles to great shamans seems a bit insulting to the great shamans--and to Occam’s razor, which is a rule of science stating that your theory should be no more complicated than absolutely necessary. If the simplest explanation for cave art is that boys enjoy both caves and visceral, gory images, then that’s your best theory.
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Humans aren’t the only animals to use language, but we are, by a landslide, the most articulate, babblative, communicatory, discursive, fluent, garrulous, logorrheic, prolix, verbal, verbose, vociferous, and plain old wordy.
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The brain regions that conduct critical analysis go dark when we hear something unpleasant about our new mate. Well, the brain behaves similarly with our beloved politicians.
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Unlike hunter-gatherers, farmers are tied to one spot on the land. If they run when violence threatens, they lose their livelihoods. Thus, anthropologists propose, farmers fight harder and die more. In some of these groups, violent aggression claims one in four males.
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Fascinating though it is, aggression is not the human animal’s most remarkable behavior. More interesting is how little aggression humans display, given that we like to live in groups but are territorial at the same time.
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He goes on to propose that play lays the foundation for morality in social animals like coyotes and humans, because it rewards animals for treating one another fairly.
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As most animals mature, their brains settle into the tried-and-true pathways that have proven most useful in childhood. . . . The crow is more like the human, and the chimpanzee, the dolphin, and a few other highly social, intelligent animals: We, the few, the goofy, we play for life. . . . I would venture that the human has a nearly unlimited capacity for play.
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And more than occasionally I swallow the fermented remains of fruit or grain, to enjoy the expansive and joyful effect of not worrying about everything on Earth for an hour or two.

But that last, perhaps, that “not worrying,” is not so playful. That may represent a second reason that humans crave drugs: to deliver us from the tyranny of our frightfully busy brains.
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I find the studies of subsistence cultures riveting in this regard. Those humans, from every study I've read, do not lay down their heads for eight hours of oblivion. And they would find my alarm clock and absurdity. Rather, when sleepiness catches up with a human in the middle of the day, she lies down and sleeps. Awakened in the deep of night by the snap of a twig, she puts wood on the fire and sits for an hour, grazing at the flames. Her brother might wake, too, and together they'll talk about the coming weather or the illness of their mother. As she settles back toward sleep, their cousin may rouse, step away to empty his bladder, then join the brother at the fire. And so the night passes. Humans weave in and out of sleep, punctuating the night with periods of conversation, soft song, or silent watchfulness.

This pattern, combined with the observation that the human's circadian rhythm does not neatly match the twenty-four-hour day of planet Earth, makes me wonder if the human animal didn't evolve to spend some night hours awake, keeping an eye on the world. When I sift through the numbers in a National Sleep Foundation survey, I find another intriguing clue: Three out of ten of my countrymen often find themselves wide awake in the middle of the night. And in a handful of languages, more clues: "Dead sleep" was the Middle English term for the first bout of the night; the second installment was called "morning sleep." The two terms occur in many European languages and at least on Nigerian language, according to American historian A. Roger Ekirch. And like subsistence humans, medieval European farmers also used the wakeful time in the small hours for socializing or solitary reflection. Should I wake tonight before the minute-counter approves it, I'm going to give this further thought.
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Previous post: From the "That Makes So Much Sense" Files

Chapter 9 - Chatty as a Magpie: Communication

Like all animal communication, my signals were bald attempts to bring the world into line with my desires. That theory of communication presents a bleak view of the thousands of words that flow from my face and fingers in a day. But I can't find a flaw in the argument.
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One of the clearest studies shows that 90 percent of mature females can identify an expression of sadness on an actor's face, while only 40 percent of males can. . . . (Males, on the other hand, can spot an angry face in a crowd quicker than females can. And both sexes identify angry faces quicker than they can identify the less ominous expressions.)
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All communication is a sign of failure. If everybody is pleased with the situation, then there is no need for communication.
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Try this [theory]: Vocalization caught on because yelling proved a more successful way to fight than hitting. . . . Rather than walking right up to his enemy, a vocal animal could vibrate his throat and telegraph his size through the air. This represented a tremendous savings in blood, infections, and lost limbs.
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Here's yet another theory on the origin of speech. This theory finds a foothold in my early babbling: That babbling was musical. . . .

Universally, human infants prefer to bestow their gaze on a mother who sings . . .

I was born with a version of perfect pitch, as are all humans. Most of us lose it as our brain commits itself to spoken language. . . .

So before I could walk, before I could talk, I acquired music. . . .

All humans are literate in the emotional content of music, even the music of other cultures. We all feel a physical response to music's rhythm, too. . . .

Did the hominids sing or hum or babble in rhythm before we could speak, just the way my own vocalizations progressed?
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Lying takes years of practice to perfect. But it's a worthwhile endeavor. Deception is not a subset of communication. Recall that communication is about manipulating others to your own benefit. So I propose that in the world's first conversation some animal mother called her infant toward a mound bustling with nutritious ants, and in the second, she told the mother next door that the ants were rancid.
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Occasionally an animal (besides the human) seems to make a conscious effort to mislead another. Among baboons, it's the young who seem most devious. One little devil reportedly learned to deflect his mother's wrath by standing erect, eyeing the horizon with terror, and screeching an alarm call. Another youngster specialized in false accusation of child abuse. This prodigy would watch a female baboon dig up a juicy root, then screech, "She hit me!" His mother, fooled into a protective rage, would barrel over and chase the "abuser" away from a hard-earned meal.
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The honeyguide of Africa is a nondescript bird with a knack for spotting bees' nests. Unable to breach the bee defenses herself, she instead flies in search of assistance. When the bird finds a honey badger, she issues a distinctive squawk and commences a swooping series of fluttery flights back toward the hive. . . . The honeyguides have also evolved to seek out Pygmies, who are happy to stand in for the badger.

More complex was the dialogue that developed between orcas and one family of humans in Eden, Australia, during the whaling era. Three local pods of orcas would cooperate to herd baleen whales toward Eden's harbor. Then a few orcas would sprint toward a farm owned by the Davidson family and roust the whalers by slapping their tails on the water. . . . The whalers would jump into their boats and row behind the orcas to reach the captive whales. Upon killing a whale, the Davidson crew would grant the orcas time to eat its lips and tongue. In the event that the Davidsons killed a whale without assistance from the orcas, it was then their turn to slap their oars on the water, signaling that tongue and lips were served. This interanimal agreement endured for a century.

Thoughts from a Researcher-Storyteller

2011-02-13T18:18:00.002-06:00

Or, Do You Believe You're Worthy of Love and Belonging?

A couple weeks ago I shared an article on Facebook about Facebook (and other social media) that wondered, "Is Facebook making us sad?" The basic premise is that people generally only share highlights and good times on social media, so our banal, mundane, and difficult times seem all the more so in comparison. Everyone must have a better life than me, it seems, if that's all you have to go on.

There are countless ways to make yourself feel lousy. Here's one more, according to research out of Stanford: Assume you're alone in your unhappiness. . . .

The comments for the most part supported the article's assertion, and one even included the statement, "I decide not to reveal my vulnerability on Facebook." I don't know how well I actually succeed at this, but one of the things I decided early in my blogging that I attempt to carry throughout my socializing, online or otherwise, is to allow my vulnerabilities to show. My intro statement in sharing the articles included, "Personally, I try to share my humanity not my highlights." One of the things I've noticed in the people I admire and want to be like, in the literature and blogs I like to read, in the Facebookers who I enjoy following, etc., is that they're willing to be vulnerable. I feel more connected to them because of it, and I think they are more authentic, powerful people for it.

I bring all of this up in the context of a TED talk by Brene Brown I want to share titled, The Power of Vulnerability. It's good. Very good. More than worth the twenty minutes it takes to watch. I've pulled out some quotes from the transcript (available at the site) for those who don't have time right now, but I hope if you like what's below you can get to it sometime. I even left out quotes from the conclusion in an attempt to give you some incentive to watch. The embedded video follows the quotes:

I am a storyteller. I’m a qualitative researcher. I collect stories; that’s what I do. And maybe stories are just data with a soul. . . .

When you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. When you ask people about belonging, they’ll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection. . . .

And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection. . . . The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability, this idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen. . . .

The people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they’re worthy of love and belonging. That’s it. They believe they’re worthy. . . .

So these folks had the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, it turns out, we can’t practice compassion with other people if we can’t treat ourselves kindly. And the last was they had connection, and--this was the hard part--as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection. . . .

The other thing they had in common was this. They fully embraced vulnerability. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. . . .

And I said, “Well, I have a vulnerability issue. And I know that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it’s also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love. And I think I have a problem, and I need some help.” . . .

You can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. . . .

The other thing we do is we make everything that’s uncertain certain. . . . I’m right, you’re wrong. Shut up. That’s it. Just certain. . . . There’s just blame. You know how blame is described in the research? A way to discharge pain and discomfort. . . .

Our job is to look and say, “You know what? You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.” That’s our job. . . .

Postscript: In many ways this reminds me of something Cicadas Electric said in her post Commiseration (The Mid-Winter Blues) about some of her favorite music: But these disparate individuals (from each other and from me) can speak to universal emotions (loneliness, failure, regret), and I know that I’m not quite alone, and there’s hope and even joy in that. And that’s not so depressing at all.

From the "That Makes So Much Sense" Files

2011-02-12T11:16:00.001-06:00

Using two groups of twins, from the United States and Australia, the investigators concluded that about half the difference between any two humans' ideologies results from genes. Family influence and the social environment account for the other half. This is big news to a species that considers itself autonomous and intellectual. And just as gob smacking as the numbers was the authors' analysis: Humans don't divide neatly into liberals and conservatives, they concluded. Rather, some of us are "contextualists," who tend to be empathetic and tolerant of others, who consider the context before punishing those selfish wolverines, who are suspicious of certainty when they encounter it in others, and who question authority and inequality. Others of us are "absolutists," who prefer a strong group unity with clear leaders, appreciate strict and forceful punishment systems, distrust human nature and outsiders, and are not distressed by inequality. Each of us leans one way or the other, regardless of reason, and these leanings color our behavior.

If you want to know which way I lean, all you have to do is read the header at the top of this blog. Things need context and are almost never absolute. I've preached often we should embrace contradiction and paradox, that my favorite punctuation mark is the semicolon because it allows for nuance and complicated connections, and so much more. When I rant about those I disagree with, it's often to complain that they need things unrealistically simple and black-and-white, that they can't deal with ambiguity but would rather have someone spell it all out for them so they don't have to think for themselves.

It's less overtly political, but an earlier section of the chapter had me thinking politics as well. If I'm not ranting about simplistic thinking, then I'm most likely worked up about either short-term, reactionary thinking or selfish thinking. I believe most of the bad political decisions I see are the result of at least one of those three things. I think we should always try to orient ourselves to bigger thinking, to the long-term common good, not the small, immediate, individual good. So I found all of this quite intriguing:

The behavior of sharing is so fundamental to human interaction that we do it from dawn till dusk without noticing. Every group of humans that forms a culture forges rules of conduct, then conforms to them, more or less. (More when someone's watching, less when unobserved.) . . .

Humans are particular about their partners in these efforts. I won't trade twice with someone who takes advantage of me . . .

Altruistic behavior is that which costs me effort, risk, or resources, but which doesn't benefit me. The problem is, it's hard to find an altruistic act that doesn't ultimately strengthen my hand. . . .

What if altruism isn't selfless at all, but rather a sly, long-term investment strategy? . . .

For one thing, it appears that we are hardwired to behave benevolently when we're being watched. . . .

Reputation is now strongly suspected as the engine that drives altruism: Because I am such a social animal, it's important to me that other humans trust and respect me. . . . What goes around comes around, in human groups. . . .

First of all, let's dispense with the girl-down-the-well syndrome. This is the phenomenon in which humans will donate one thousand dollars to aid one human infant, but won't donate one thousand dollars to save one hundred infants in Bangladesh. The difference is that the girl down the well has a reputation. Alas for those one hundred Bangladeshis, their faces and reputations are unknown. . . .

What exactly happens to my brain when I hand a PowerBar to a homeless human? For one thing, based on MRI experiments, my trusty dopamine receptors rev up, just as they do for great food, sex, and other life-prolonging goodies. Apparently kindness is addicting. A separate brain region simultaneously dampens my urge for instant gratification, so that I can act in favor of the long-term result. . . .

I join my dog and find that my pulse is racing. I have taken a huge social risk. I've punished a noncooperator. Theorists have argued since Darwin over why human niceness persists in spite of cheaters. . . .

Punishing is crucial to the survival of cooperation, because punishment erodes the cheater's precious social support. However, punishing also looks like a purely altruistic act: I confront the cheater, and all I get out of it is a racing heart and a peeved wolverine. No dopamine rush, even. Why, then, should I make such a sacrifice for the common good? Once again, the behavior looks biologically bankrupt at first glance. And once again on closer inspection, it appears punishing the cheaters is part of a long-term strategy wherein I trade today's stress for tomorrow's social support. When I volunteer to punish a cheater, I advertise my own high standards for trustworthiness and decency. I attract a better class of allies. My stock rises. . . .

Anyway, the sad truth about cooperative behavior seems to be that we're all wolverines inside, wolverines in bonobo clothing. If we consider only the short term, it undeniably serves me best to blow through stop signs, lie to the IRS, and ignore the little girl in the well. But in the long term, I rely on my fellow humans in so many ways that such cheating (in front of them, at least) just doesn't pay.

The Well Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself by Hannah Holmes

Update: More thoughts about these quotes here.

Reading Journal, The Well-Dressed Ape, Chapters 6-7 Quotes

2011-02-10T20:34:00.000-06:00

Chapter 6 – Hungry As a Wolf: Diet

Lest we start to take humans too seriously, processing food is not a sign of staggering genius, judging by the other animals who do it.
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Modern females on a high-protein plan like the Atkins Diet can have difficulty getting pregnant. During pregnancy, too much protein may also drive down the birth weight of a baby. Furthermore, animal liver, with its high vitamin A content, can cause birth defects or spontaneous abortion. In fact, meat is a common subject of the food aversions that human females suddenly experience in pregnancy. So it could be that foragers' meat rules serve a biological purpose: to keep females fertile.
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From the look of things in the mirror, I've struck this balance. If anything, I'm a little overprepared for a famine. But I can hardly blame my body. It's operating on the old assumption that food behaves unpredictably. . . .

First, let's look at my natural defenses against starving. There's a good reason that I yearn for fettuccine Alfredo and chocolate. Every cell in my body is in a near-constant state of hollering for high-calorie food. My body wants to be bigger than it is today. Therefore my cells lobby for more sugar, more fat, more food. . . .

Why fat and sugar? Why don't I crave salad? My body is lagging behind the times. For the first few million years of hominid existence, salad was everywhere. You had to kick it out of the way just to get around. By contrast, energy-rich foods were either too seasonal or too fleet-footed for convenience. . . .

When my senses register the proximity of a Chunky bar, my strongest urge is to snatch it up and get it down the hatch before, A: it gets moldy; B: it's eaten by bears, C: I'm eaten by bears. . . .

One reason cravings are so strong, and that it's so joyful to yield to them, is that they tap into the same brain chemistry that will get a human hooked on cocaine or alcohol. When the sugar from a Chunky bar hits my bloodstream, opioids of my own making flood my brain with chemical happiness. I've eaten enough Chunky bars by now to get my brain addicted to these opioids. I need no heroin, only another Chunky.

Chapter 7 - Loose as a Goose: Reproduction

But for a few species, often those with spectacularly needy offspring, it takes two. It's a rare lifestyle among the mammals. Only about 5 percent of all mammals form couples--and most of those agree to a contract that lasts for only one year or one brood.
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When humans confront the the question of how to mate, the overwhelming majority of cultures conclude that multiple mates are acceptable. Therefore, Homo sapiens may not qualify as a monogamous animal.
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To get closer requires a reduction of the human's normal aggressiveness. Humans, although naturally social animals, are nonetheless suspicious of strangers. Unless we're given a reason not to, most animals tend to view one another first as competition, and only later as potential friends and mates.
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Humans are unusual. For some reason, humans will cop at the drop of a hat. The female's fertility peaks for just a few days each month. But she will cop any day of the week. In fact, the millions of human pairs who practice some form of "rhythm method" of birth control will cop any day except those when the female is fertile. This is, biologically speaking, nuts. But for humans, and just a tiny number of other species, copping is distinct from reproduction.
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So it's not surprising that I, like most humans, have occasionally undertaken the act of copulation while forgetting the goal of reproduction. The behavior is educational, revealing a prospect's stamina, intelligence, and communicating ability. And it tickles the brain, the way rich food and addictive drink do. It's just, um, fun.
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Even now that I’ve moved beyond the mortifying effects of low serotonin, the chemical miasma was sufficiently thick to fuse me and my mate-for-life. We proceeded to bond. This was no piddling miracle. Most mammal males and females avoid one another until the ultimatum of reproduction drives them together. Through a narrow crack in the hostility they make contact, copulate, and split. And don’t come back, if you know what’s good for you! The sheer volume of chemicals saturating my brain as I bonded with my mate reveal the extreme measures nature must take in order to get a male and female human to stay in the same shelter for years on end.

This addling of the brain is a sack of dirty tricks, when deployed in a culture that expects a pair-bond to last a lifetime. Most of the chemical effects--the hormone fluctuation, the dopamine, the serotonin--last only a year or two. Then you’re suddenly looking across the breakfast table at a deeply flawed and aggravating . . . well, a human. How could you have not noticed that he asks you a question then leaves the room? How could it escape you that she gnaws her nails? And that’s why we have oxytocin, which can be renewed daily. As I sit muttering about unanswered questions and unwashed dishes, my mate lays his warm forepaws on my shoulders and kisses my cheek. The oxytocin, always ready to serve, glows in my brain. And we stay bonded for another day. . . .

The same is true in my own culture. The only resource I needed from my mate was companionship. It was solely my decision how much I would squelch my territoriality and self-interest in order to meet that need. To set that sentence in the past tense suggests the war is over. Never. Just this morning I issued the gentlest of growls over his letting hot water--and our shared resources--run down the drain. Just this morning he held eye contact a second longer than usual when I announced my intention to trade resources for a pedicure. The war’s never over.
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A female's preference for male body type changes at this time, too, whether she's aware of it or not. If you ask the average young Western female to pick a prospective mate from a series of young-male photos, you'll get different answers depending on the time of the month. Most days, she'll favor the softer faces, their bones smoothed by moderate testosterone. Such males are statistically stronger on cooperation and child care. But if she's fertile, chuck all that. Now she wants a rascal and a rogue, a high-rise, high-testosterone male with a cleft chin and a wandering eye. And if you specify that she's shopping for a short-term mate only, the high-test rogues rank even higher.

This is more than academic musing. A mated human female, according to surveys in my culture, is more than twice as likely to seek what biologists call an "extra-pair copulation" during the lead-up to ovulation than during the infertile weeks afterward. Other studies have found females more likely to ditch the mate to spend an evening at a singles bar when they're fertile, too. This is leading theorists to propose that the female human (and perhaps the females of other species) employs a dual strategy regarding males: She pair-bonds with a gentle, generous male who will help with the offspring, and she strives to conceive those offspring with an assortment of dominant, aggressive males.
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One piece of human anatomy argues eloquently that males have evolved to compete with one another for the female uterus. Scientists experimenting with model penises and vaginas, and various recipes for mock sperm, have found an explanation for the strange shape of the male intromittent organ: That cone on the end is ideally shaped to collect and remove fluid from the vagina before making a fresh deposit. And that fluid would be the sperm of a female's previous copulatory partner.

18 Months Later: My Next Temporary Obsession

2011-02-09T21:26:00.003-06:00

A while back I started reading The Well Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself by Hannah Holmes. I liked it so much I took my time with it and took copious notes. When I ran out of time on my checkout, I bought my own copy. Then other books came overdue and I got away from it. It's now the selection for my book club, which meets in a week, and I'm back into it full-bore.

More posts will be coming, but first a refresher on what has come before:

I'm Hooked
( . . . The honest explanation has seemed too impolite to share: Of course I'm fluent in child. I've spent my whole life around wild animals. . . . )

An Intersection of Biology and Politics
( . . . With socialized medicine and financial support for the poor, the Dutch culture ensures that the offspring of all parents get sufficient calories and sufficient protection from disease. Thus each individual comes closer to reaching his potential. . . . )

Reading Journal, The Well-Dressed Ape, Chapter 1 Quotes
(For those who remember my Born to Run Obsession, this actually came first: . . . Only a few animals enjoy membership in the distance-runners’ club. They are the horse, wolves (and domestic dogs), African hunting dogs, the hyena, the migrating wildebeest, and we Homo sapiens. . . . And when biologists compare humans to other distance runners, we travel at the front of the pack. . . . )

Reading Journal, The Well-Dressed Ape, Chapters 2-3 Quotes
( . . . And then there are some furs so fine we must turn the cheek and apply the lips. The human lips are jam-packed with sensors, and they are the only organ that can do justice to a flying squirrel. That creature simply disappears in human hands, too silken to leave any impression beyond warmth. . . . )

Reading Journal, The Well-Dressed Ape, Chapters 4-5 Quotes
( . . . In 1997, a sociologist measured the time it takes for a driver at a shopping mall to vacate a parking space. He found that a human takes seven seconds longer when another human is waiting for the space. And if the waiting human blasts his horn, the occupant will defend the temporary territory for an additional twelve seconds. . . . )

And a teaser of things to come from earlier today: Boys & Reading?
( . . . Young males learn termite fishing years later than females, because while the females are watching Mom, the males are jumping on logs and throwing leaves and biting one another's legs. . . . )

Boys & Reading?

2011-02-09T17:58:00.001-06:00

Since I like to go on about how guys can be marginalized as readers, I thought it only fair I share these two passages from a book I'm reading:

Chimps, like most animals, learn by observing, not cogitating. A mother chimpanzee fishing termites from a mound does not urge her offspring to gather around and take notes. They just do. (At least the females do. Young males learn termite fishing years later than females, because while the females are watching Mom, the males are jumping on logs and throwing leaves and biting one another's legs.)

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The clever cetaceans have also revealed some culture. Female dolphins fishing off the coast of Australia have taken to using a sponge to protect the snout as they scour the seafloor for fish. And their daughters have taken up the custom, so that more than two dozen dolphins were "sponging" as of 2005. (I'm afraid the young males seem to be skipping school.)

The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself, by Hannah Holmes.

Random Memory

2011-02-08T19:30:00.003-06:00

The previous post has me thinking about late middle to early high school. Freshman year. Football. Late in the season. Part of the getting-psyched-up-to-hit-each-other-violently routine was a call-and-response thing of some sort (foggy on the specifics; something like, "Ready?" "Let's go!"). The "captain" figure would yell something full-voice and everyone would yell back in response. Not an ongoing chant, more of a "Raaarrrggghhh" kind of thing. My turn came and, instead of the usual response, I got mostly laughter and encouragement from the coach to try again. I honestly can't remember ever trying to actually yell before that moment, and don't think I knew how.