Marcus' World

Blogging as Catharsis

Today I read a fascinating memoir by the poet Frederick Seidel in the November issue of Harper's, in which the poet declaims on his love of motorcycles.  I still have absolutely no desire to own--or even to ride--a motorcycle, but I now have a better appreciation of the motivations of someone who does.

Here's the sentence that struck me most: "I had to explain this mortifying event to myself and to the world."  Seidel is referring to a terrible accident he had while riding a motorcycle in Vermont.  But this sentence explains the urge--inexplicable to those who do not have it--for any writer (and other artists) to publicly grapple with difficult personal experiences.

Certainly I have done that this year, as part of my process for coping with and healing from the divorce.  I  could have written in a diary, or perhaps just emailed with close family and friends (I used email a lot too).  But I was compelled to be public even though I didn't have to.

Why?  For the most part it was simply the compulsion to share, as Seidel expresses so well.  Growing up, pre-Web, I gravitated early and strongly to the personal essay as the most elemental form of writing.  I devour novels and am moved by poems, but nothing strikes a chord for me as much as a life laid bare on the page or screen.

I tried not to blog everything that came to mind, saving up my insights for when they seemed substantial.  And I decided to stop writing about the divorce altogether on the day it was official.  There is no doubt in my mind that I would be less whole today if I hadn't done this. Blogging was my catharsis.

An unanticipated, but gratifying, effect of the public aspect of my writing is that it helped others.  (This benefit seems obvious in retrospect, but I wasn't thinking about it at the time.)  One day a college friend, who is now a church minister, wrote to say that my posts were proving helpful as he counseled couples who are having difficulties in his church.  He appreciated my candor, which brought tears to his eyes.  And he felt that since I could be so honest about what I was going through, I had a good chance of coming out a stronger person on the other side.

I hope so, and I know so.  And the truth  is that I would not trade a minute of my time with Helen, because it made me who I am today.   For as Jack Gilbert asks, "How can they say the marriage failed?"

Dr. Jerome Groopman's Caution on Evidence Based Medicine

Last weekend I picked up the New York Review of Books, and was pleased to discover that Dr. Jerome Groopman offers a contrarian take on evidence-based medicine.

EBM guides health professionals to use the best evidence and not to rely on intuition and what they've always done before.  This makes great sense.  But the problem is that the "evidence" often comes in the form of consensus papers and guidelines that are necessarily generic, and often not applicable to the needs of real-life patients.  This is especially true if the patients a doctor encounters are not demographically similar to the patients in clinical trials; Groopman speaks of "cherry-picking" study patients in such a way that the trials are easy to administer.

None of this means EBM is awful, just that it's not an unalloyed good.  Librarians often teach about how to search EBM resources, and about the importance of critical thinking in general.  We should ensure that students and practitioners critically think about the benefits and costs of EBM as well.

Richard Rodriguez on the Twilight of the American Newspaper

This month's Harper's includes a great essay by Richard Rodriguez about the declining state of American newspapers, especially the San Francisco Chronicle.  (A very brief excerpt is online, and the complete text is available to subscribers.)  He goes beyond a predictable lament about how the Internet has ruined the news, to a more focused and poignant critique about how the decline of metropolitan newspapers speaks to a decline in a city's sense of itself.  We've already lost the Rocky Mountain News, and the San Francisco Chronicle came close to folding earlier this year.

Perhaps national newspapers will develop local niches throughout the country, a possibility that Rodriguez notes.  (Lately the Times has started marketing itself as vital to the Bay Area, I've noticed in various coffee shops and on Muni platforms.)  We may not return to a time when obituaries were a true remembrance of a town's people--Rodriguez is particularly saddened that obituaries today are almost all paid for--and when a columnist like Herb Caen could "set the conversation for San Francisco."

Other ways to bring people together now exist, such as Facebook, Twitter, MeetUp, and the like.  But Rodriquez seems right that our larger "sense of place" is lost.  But how much does this matter?  He quotes a fellow journalist's observation that the news conversation is now global; an article from the Washington Post here,  a blog post from the Huff Post there, and so forth.  So perhaps we've sacrificed some localism for globalism, and we'll just have to get used to it.

There may also come a day when print fades away, except for high-end national newspapers (and maybe even for those).   There are intrinsic qualities to print news--the texture, the sidebars, the funnies.  But these are dispensable as long as there is good reporting that allows readers to make intelligent decisions.  We shouldn't fetishize print just because it's familiar, but should be spending time figuring out how to fund online news gathering.  Ads haven't worked on  the Web, so we need another solution.

Some solutions--much easier said than done--are more direct government funding and/or greater foundation support.  In these regards Michael Massing, Paul Starr, and Robert McChesney all have ideas worth exploring.  Rodriquez is right that journalistic localism is on the wane, but I think we have larger challenges to contend with. 

Satisficers and Maximizers Redux

This week I came across a blog post about how to avoid satisificing, which reminded me of a post I wrote about satisficers and maximizers more than 3 years ago.  

The newer post, by Matthew E. May, describes the dangers of satisficing--settling for a "good enough" solution when better solutions are possible--in the workplace.  I agree with him; too many workplace decisions are marred by complacency or inertia, which can be negative aspects of satisficing.  Maximizers are always seeking more information in order to reach a better decision.

In the workplace, then, I now support maximizing.   But in "life"--the personal relationships and connections we cultivate on our own time--I am still a satisficer.  From my blog post:

"Satisficing is a nice way of life, all things considered.  (That sentence itself is the work of a satisficer!)  It's a recognition that the costs of obtaining superior information are greater than the costs of making a mistake and trying something else. "

At the time I was thinking of a work setting, but with some poetic license this now works for the personal realm.  "Personal satisficing" is giving the people you care about the benefit of the doubt,  through recognizing and accepting that to some extent they'll never measure up to your expectations.   This isn't easy, but we all should try.

Obviously you shouldn't satisfice so much that you "settle" for relationships that don't make you happy.  But if you always try to maximize your relationships--given how fragile and foible-heavy we all are--you could wind up isolated.  As long as we satisface it might be possible to make a perfect product, but try as we might we'll never have perfect people.

The Public Option

It's nice to see that the public option has new life in  ongoing debates over health insurance reform.

I'm no wonk, but it seems obvious to me that the private insurance companies could use a dose of healthy competition from a government-run health run.  If government bureaucracy is so inefficient, then what does Aetna and Blue Cross have to fear?  If so people will run screaming from the public option plans.

Or maybe the truth is that the government plan will be efficient, driving costs down and thus helping consumers.  That sounds good to me, and it's the real reason private insurers are scared.

My concern with the potential Senate bill is that it would let states opt out; the public option would be strongest if it were nationwide.  But maybe for now we have to settle for a partial public option on the way to complete reform.  This is one of those times that calls for the phrase: "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

So I'll settle for the good.  And for those of you who want an excellent--and delightfully partisan--defense of the public option, check out this video by Robert Reich.

Fixing California

Tonight I attended a panel discussion about efforts to reform California's government and constitution, sponsored by the San Francisco Young Democrats.  Organizations represented included the Courage Campaign, CA Forward, Repair California, and the New America Foundation.

California is one of very few states to require a 2/3 majority to pass its state budget, which means that budgets are always late and often turn on the quirky whims of individual legislators.  CA Forward wants to use the state’s voter initiative process to make the budget process more rational, by proposing a series of reasonable reforms for the ballot next year.  These include budgets passed by a simple majority, and pay-as-you-go rules to prevent ballooning deficits.

These ideas make sense, but they don't address the fundamental problem: California's voter initiative process (which gave us the 2/3 rule as well as property tax caps that have starved public services) is out of control.  There should be some voter initiative option, but the California Constitution is a balderdash of hundreds of contradictory amendments approved over time.  At the panel tonight, participants pointed out that the state Constitution is 8 times as long as the US Constitution.  And the ease of the initiative process gives legislators of both parties an incentive to be recalcitrant.  They know they can just take their case to the voters, almost at will.  And special interest groups can as well, which is why we have so many half-baked measures on the books.

So I am drawn to the efforts of the Courage Campaign Repair California to fundamentally reform the state constitution.  If the voters approve this via initiatives (!), California would host a televised, multi-month Constitutional convention in 2011.  (The New America Foundation is advising Repair California about the logistics of holding such a convention.)  Regular citizens would mingle with policy experts to produce a rational and workable document that allows the state to raise enough money and to govern itself again (the 2/3 rule must go, and voter initiatives must become harder to mount.)  This would be the first substantial change to the California Constitution since 1879. 

And hey--Hendrik Hertzberg likes the idea, so it must have merit.

I have mixed feelings about California.  I don't subscribe to the idea of a "California dream," but I know that with 38,000,000 people the Golden State is a vital part of our union.  And I'll always miss New York City, but the Bay Area is beautiful.

But whatever I think of life here, I'll be in California for a long time.  So it's nice to think that I may someday live in a state that works.

President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

While some of the criticism of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize is reasonable,  I support the decision.

After 8 years of President Bush's relentless rejection of the rest of the world and its interests, "changing the tone" toward one of engagement in less than a year is an accomplishment worth rewarding.  This President went to Egypt, while the last President had a shoe thrown at him in Iraq.  And this President wants to reduce the scourge of nuclear weapons, which are not peacemakers except in a scenario of "mutually assured destruction." 

Obama is prosecuting two wars, but that's a consequence of the world he inherited rather than the one we wish to see.  If we really awarded the peace prize based on enduring accomplishments, perhaps nobody would deserve it.

Obama's inheritance stems in large measure from President Bush.  The prize was indeed a rebuke of Bush's policies, but those deserved rebuking.   I admire the grand chutzpah of awarding the prize to Obama so early in his term, and hope the Nobel Committee remains firm in its resolve.  Sure, Morgan Tsvangirai or Iranian freedom fighters would also have been great choices.  But this doesn't mean Obama was a bad one.

A Rejoinder to the Blog Backlash

Pardon the crudity, but I can't help posting the photo below.  I was at Wishbone earlier today, innocently looking for a greeting card, and came across this journal along the way.  Inside there is a note about how it is a "very private" publication.

Among the criticisms of blogs are that they are vessels for meaningless public narcissism. Clearly anyone who would buy this particular journal feels this way.

There is copious chaff among the wheat of the blogosphere. But I've felt for years now that a thoughtful, introspective blog post is just as powerful as a well-developed personal essay.  What is the difference?

One of my favorite books is The Art of the Personal Essay.  Edited by Phillip Lopate, the book was published in 1995--well before anyone knew the word "blog"--and contains essays going all the way back to ancient days.  (Looking for a shot of Plutarch or Kenko?  Lopate's got 'em.)  And Michel de Montaigne deservedly gets his own section, as he is the most famous personal essayist who ever lived. 

de Montaigne died in 1592.  The desire for a public accounting of personal business existed well before the Web, whatever the owners of this pen-and-paper journal might believe.  Blogs make the impulse to share easier to achieve, but they didn't create it.

The obvious difference between a blog post and a published essay is that blogs are unvetted by anyone except their authors.  Essays must pass both publisher and editorial scruiny.  This means the bar for what counts as a "good" blog should be high.  And who's to say what counts as good?  That's another problem.

All of these are legitimate questions about blogs, which are still a very new form of writing.  But accusing blog platforms of inventing the desire to over-share is spurious.   At least it's funny too; I got two "likes" when I posted the photo to Facebook.

I'm more sensitive than most, I recognize, because I've now written this blog for close to five years.  Some posts are much better than others and most are decent but not great.   The best posts I've written been very personal, and this candor has helped others. 

Would the writing have been any different if it was printed on paper rather than etched on a screen?  I hope not.  The writing is what counts, in print or online.

 

Huck Finn, Tutoring, and Censorship

Yesterday I finished Huck Finn, which I last read in 10th grade.  This time I read the authentic text, based on the chance discovery of 663 missing pages of the manuscript in 1991.

The tale of young Huck and runaway slave Jim traveling along the Mississippi River is one of the most famous in world literature.   It is also one of the most controversial novels in American history, facing repeated threats of censorship because everyone--even the mostly lovable Huck--aggressively uses the "n" word.

I knew about the history of Huck Finn, and have always felt that censorship has no place in America.  That said, I was startled at the frequency at which the slur appears.  And saddened by the fact that, whenever Huck starts thinking kind thoughts about Jim, he forces himself to think that Jim will always be a lesser person than he is.  

Of course, Jim is incredibly kind and quite intelligent--almost saintly. This read I wondered if a more accurate charge that could be leveled against Mark Twain, instead of "racist," is of unrealistic fantasist.  Jim would still be a very good man if Twain had made him more complex.

In the middle of my reading back to school tutoring resumed.  Almost all of the students at the tutoring center are in minority groups, and my tutee Charles is African-American.  So I wondered about the propriety of bringing along Huck Finn, but decided that leaving it at work was tantamount to giving in to censorship.

Then I got to the tutoring center.  A (white) woman walked over and said she had been reprimanded for bringing Huck Finn last year, because it was a "banned book."  When I was a kid, one of my mom's friends (an African-American teacher) had a button that said, "I love banned books."  At the time I thought he must have been kinky, but eventually figured out that he was against censorship.

Me too.  But I'm for respecting boundaries and the rules of places not my home--I'm a guest of the tutoring center, which is in an African-American church.  (And after all, I wouldn't bring Mein Kampf to the Holocaust Museum even though everyone has a right to read it.) Besides that, Charles is only 10...too young to understand that Twain is making a passionate plea against racism and the horror of slavery.

But the "banned books" argument pissed me off.  I didn't know what to do; as with everything interesting in life, there were competing valid claims at stake. Standing up for the right to read was up against the inadvisability of making a scene.  And defending the power and vitality of art is less persuasive when you're dealing with children who haven't developed all their critical capabilities, but are old enough to be hurt.  (Not that Charles noticed any of my angst; he was busy being grumpy about having to do his homework.)

So, at first I flipped the book over but kept it on the table.  That way it was harder to discern but still not out of sight.  Then I put it under my chair.  But that made me feel like a pushover and so put Huck back on the table, right side up and without apology.  This annoyed my fellow (white) tutor Lisa, who was firmly in the let's not make a scene camp.  So finally I put the book under my chair again, while giving her a tepid lecture against censorship.  By now it was 7:45, and I reasoned that tutoring would be over at 8:00 anyway.

As a librarian, I should have been tougher.  But as a tutor of a 10 year old child,  I acted reasonably.  And as a lover of literature, I thank Twain for writing a powerfully provocative novel that can cause such angst 124 years after publication. 

Tutoring Begins Anew

Tonight was the first night of my new year at the after-school tutoring program at Back on Track.  My tutee Charles is now 10 and in fifth grade--and he is very proud of this, pointing out on several occasions that he is no longer in 4th grade.

Back on Track is a free one-on-one tutoring program.  Charles is one of four children in his family who come to the tutoring center; his parents are younger than I am, and don't make much money.  I try not to think about the challenges facing him now and in the future, focusing instead on his multiplication tables and on Connect Four.

At Northwestern--maybe even earlier--I worried that all volunteering is a band-aid that doesn't come close to addressing the underlying causes of poverty and inequality.  This was certainly on my mind in New York, when I volunteered for a similar tutoring program. 

I still worry about this.  But I've decided that the world would be even harsher than it already is if nobody stopped to volunteer.   That keeps me going, even if the long-term impact of my efforts will be small.