Marcus' World

The Lifespan of a Fact

Several years ago I took a class in travel writing.  We read classic pieces by Patrick Leigh Fermor and VS Naipaul.  We also constructed our own narratives, ideally after absorbing the lessons in craft contained in the readings.  Our instructor was Ben Downing, an expert in the life of Leigh Fermor. 

As I wrote up my own travels I wanted to get every last detail correct.  If I'd had a cappucino in Buenos Aires, I couldn't very well tell the reader it had been a latte.  If it took three buses to get from point A to point B in Recife, Brazil, it was a violation to only report two.  This was lying. And liars are bad.

The trouble was that, in the pursuit of pristine accuracy, I was losing sight of the larger truth of these trips and what they had meant in my life.  The forest for the trees.  I recall Ben's sage advice not to obsess about the facts that were mere data points more than the lynchpins of the story.  He was not claiming that we should lie with abandon, but making the more subtle point that there are facts and then there is truth.

Fast forward to the recent publication of the book The Lifespan of a Fact.  There's a great excerpt in the current Harper's, and last night a Facebook friend pointed me to an interview about the book that ran this weekend on To the Best of Our Knowledge. 

Nutshell version:  For **seven years**, author John D'Agata and fact checker Jim Fingal corresponded about the numerous specific factual claims in an article D'Agata had written about the suicide of a teenager in Las Vegas.  Fingal sought support for claims about the number of strip clubs in town, or where people hailed from.  D'Agata groused back that taking some liberties in the pursuit of the larger story was fully justified.  Back and forth they went, round and round again.  After lo those seven years, D'Agata's article finally appeared in The Believer.

Although he can be pompous in defense of his artistic choices, I am with D'Agata.  If forced to choose between literal and metaphorical truth, I'll take the latter. 

Not that D'Agata always takes the high road.  He says there are 34 strip clubs in Las Vegas, but Fingal can only verify 31.  When pressed, D'Agata admits he claimed 34 because it works better in the "rhythm" of the sentence.  Lame?  Yes.  But if the larger point is that Vegas is a temple of the flesh, it works with either number.  Although D'Agata should have kept his rhythms in check, this is a disinction without a difference.

One more example, less cut-and-dried.  D'Agata claimed that one of his sources was from Mississippi, but Fingal figured out she had lived in Vegas for many years.  So doesn't that make Vegas her home?  Depends on how you look at it.  When people ask me where my home is, sometimes I say California (where I live) and sometimes Ohio (where I grew up).  There aren't always shared facts that we can all agree on.  

Here is that sentence as it ran in The Believer, which happens to be the first sentence: "One summer, when sixteen-year-old Levi Presley jumped from the observation deck of the 1,149-foot-high tower of the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas, the local city council was considering a bill that would temporarily ban lap dancing in the city’s strip clubs, archaeologists unearthed shards of the world’s oldest bottle of Tabasco brand sauce from beneath a parking lot, and a woman from Mississippi beat a chicken named Ginger in a thirty-five-minute-long game of tic-tac-toe." 

Looks like D'Agata won this scuffle, since the Mississippi roots are intact.  Had Fingal prevailed we would probably read "a woman....beat a chicken named Ginger..."   In either case, we have a vivid scene set. And if this woman somehow became a person from Arkansas not much would be lost even though it isn't true.

But if Levi Pressley had jumped from the Bellagio and not the Stratosphere, we'd have a big problem on our hands.  There are facts and there are FACTS.  But our language has no way to make this distinction, so any deviation from the literal truth is suspect. 

Maybe the solution, as the Facebook discussion indicated last night, is to post a clear disclaimer when authors are taking liberties.  Readers who are troubled can look elsewhere, those who are not can read on.

Farhad Manjoo, Richard Russo, and the Future of Reading

I love bookstores, especially the independent variety.  Any trip to downtown Berkeley doesn't feel right without popping into Pegasus Books, where I look forward to the calendar sale every new year.  Last summer Pi Wen and I enjoyed a getaway weekend in SF, complete with brunch in Potrero Hill. Before brunch we both popped into Christopher's Books, and both left with print matter.  Just this month a used bookstore opened in our neighborhood, complete with its glorious musty book smell. It reminded me of Bookman's Alley, the indie shop I frequented in college (when I wasn't visiting Great Expectations or the Booknook Parnassus, two other indies in town.)

All that said, these days I love the ability to download books to my iPad within a few seconds.  A few weeks ago I attended a couple talks at Cal, both of which led to book recommendations.  With no trouble at all those books were wirelessly beamed to me, and they will be my companions on next month's flight to Malaysia.  Last weekend I downloaded Jeffrey Eugenides's latest novel The Marriage Plot, for next month's book club.  At 10 PM on a Saturday night, this was by far an easier and less expensive option for obtaining the book than driving over to Pegasus.

A few weeks ago, to widespread derision, Amazon held a one-day promotion. Customers could go into a physical store, use a price check app to see if an item they were interested in cost less on Amazon, and then get a 5% discount for purchasing that item online.  In effect, Amazon used all the physical store's ongoing liabilities--the need to pay rent, pay their employees, keep the lights on, and pay taxes--against them.  Horribly crappy, and everyone thinks so.

But...the Amazon promotion explicitly excluded books.  Sure, you could go to Best Buy and find out how much cheaper a flatscreen TV was at Amazon, and then get that discount.  But you couldn't go to Pegasus Books and do the same thing.

Nonetheless, novelist Richard Russo penned a widely discussed attack on Amazon's promotion as the next step in the company's assault on independent bookstores.  Russo makes many strong points about the role of physical bookstores aside from selling wares--fostering community, supporting emerging artists.  I linked to his piece on Facebook, as I've long been outraged at the fact that Amazon gets away with charging no sales taxes.  Economies of scale are one thing, but as the Occupiers have reminded us everyone should play by the same rules.  Russo worries about a dystopian future in which everyone shops at Amazon and the independent bookstore disappears.

Enter Farhad Manjoo, who published a sharp-elbowed and much derided rebuttal to Russo.   Manjoo makes three central points. First, that it's more expensive to shop at the indie store than Amazon (no way to dispute that).  Second, that this reduced cost has led people to purchase more books, which seems logical but is not certain based on the evidence he provides (he cites statistics, but those are from Amazon and would need further unpacking.)  Third, and most importantly, that the saved dollars from shopping at Amazon can be redirected toward cultural activities.  Manjoo: "With the money you saved by buying books at Amazon, you could have gone to see a few productions at your local theater company, visited your city’s museum, purchased some locally crafted furniture, or spent more money at your farmers’ market. Each of these is a cultural experience that’s created in your community." 

The backlash against Farhad was predicatable and vitriolic, confirming my belief that hysterical opposition to someone means that person is on to something.  Most of the commeners seem to think that he doesn't like to read, ignoring the fact that he's a widely read technology columnist who published a book three years ago.  Actually, his central thesis is that Amazon--for all of its hardball tactics--makes reading more accessible than the independent bookstore. 

There is no doubt that Amazon should have to charge and collect sales tax.  Even so, Amazon would be cheaper than its competitors.  Arguments against the big A boil down to the fact that shopping there is penny wise and pound foolish...we lose community, we lose contact, we lose connection.  True.  But I've noticed that the people who make this point all have discretionary income. What about the mother on a fixed income who wants a book for her baby?  Amazon, or Walmart, are much better options for her than my beloved Pegasus.  There's a strong strain of elitism in all this protestation.

Not that I personally object to elitism; I am pretty hoity toity myself.  But let's be honest.  People like me are willing to pay the premiums to keep a place like Pegasus afloat.  The independent bookstore serves the upper-middle and upper classes.

If all independent bookstores disappear from God's green earth I will be very sad.  But I won't read any less.  And I'll use my saved money to fund local reading societies or other means of encouraging new writers.  Reading is the thing, and words are a treasure.  Bookstores are a means to that end, but not the end itself.  As we cruise along through the digital age, we shouldn't lose sight of that fact.

 

 

Happy Birthday Beverly Cleary

Thanks to Pamela Paul I know that Beverly Cleary turned 95 years old today.  She was born in 1916, the same year as my grandmother.  Which makes me happy--growing up, Cleary was my grandmother of the written word.  I liked Judy Blume too, but Cleary was my favorite children's novelist.

Like anyone else I enjoyed reading about Ramona, Beezus, and Henry Huggins.  But my favorite Cleary novel is Dear Mr. Henshaw, which won the Newbery Medal for best children's book of 1984.

I was seven then, the same age as main character Leigh Botts.  Leigh is sad and confused by his parent's divorce; I was too, as my folks had divorced the year before.  In this troubled state Leigh begins a correspondence with well-known children's author Boyd Henshaw, first as a class assignment and eventually because he wants to. Through his correspondence with Mr. Henshaw we learn about Leigh's feelings and anxieties.  Most poignantly, Leigh must come to terms with the fact that his father is not as reliable as he should be although he means well.  This is exactly what I was struggling with at the time. 

Kids at that age have a hard time understanding that their parents are fallible.  As a kid I knew what Leigh was going through; when I re-read the book 20 years later I realized that there were some things Leigh was just too young to understand. 

Leigh is a sensitive boy, better on the page than in spoken speech.  To this day I best express myself in writing, so there's a little bit of Leigh Botts in me yet.

Happy birthday Beverly Cleary.

Amy Chua, Memoir, and Parenting

We've long known that you can't judge a book by its cover. Now we must state that you shouldn't judge it by a sensational but out-of-context excerpt either.

Ever since the WSJ ran the excerpt from Amy Chua's new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother a few weeks ago, the blogosphere has been abuzz.  Is she serious? Is she nuts? etc. etc.  The paper reported that almost 6,000 comments came in to WSJ.com (it's probably more now), a new record.  The excerpt depicted a very grim mother who never gave her a children a moment's rest from music practice, and never thought they were good enough.   Well, sort of...even in the excerpt you can feel that Chua is poking fun at herself, and not writing a how-to manual but a memoir.

Chua must have said this a thousand times by now--"this is a memoir, not a how-to manual."  She said it many times the other night in Berkeley, where I was part of the packed house for her interview/reading at the Hillside Club. If people choose to read the book in full, as I have, they will see this is true. 

If the book were a how-to manual, then why would Chua have had such a tough time raising her second daughter Lulu?  Lulu wanted to be her own person from the get-go--not the stereotypical "Chinese" daughter--and she's gotten her wish; no more grueling violin lessons, tennis it is.  And if Chua were so callous and cruel toward her daughters, why would she forever be leaving sweet notes on their pillows and in their lunchboxes? In what I thought was one of the most touching passages, Chua acknowledges that she has a hard time being verbally loving, and so she uses these notes as a proxy.

I'm not saying Chua is a perfect parent, and neither would she.  But that's not the point of the book.  Here we have an individual person's story, warts and all.  And that's all we have.

But, of course, the world doesn't work that way.  Once a piece of writing--or any piece of art--is packaged and framed, its reception is no longer in control of the artist.  (This is what Roland Barthes and George Lakoff were talking about.)  And so we have Asian-Americans furious that Chua has reinforced some of the most persistent stereotypes; we have non Asian-Americans worried that they are coddling their own children too much; and we have general cultural anxiety that we are losing educational ground to China.  This last is the most absurd--Chua is an American, born in Illinois to immigrant parents.  If we're going to continue discussing Chua's writing in these terms, we should at least acknowledge that we're not talking about the book she's actually written.

---

All of this hub-bub has made me think back to my own childhood.  Looking back, I had a great deal of autonomy for such a little pip-squeak.  As long as my homework was finished it didn't matter when I did it (and thus, I often did it on the school bus the morning before it was due.) I could read whatever books I wanted, no matter how adult the themes.  I could pursue my own interests without clearing them with my parents, a freedom that extended to college and my frequent change of major.  My folks treated me as a little adult to the greatest extent possible, and I am very grateful for it.

On the other hand, the "Western" idea that "it's OK as long as you do your best" did seep a little too deeply into my bones.  In tenth grade I studied geometry with a teacher whose honest-to-god name was Ms. Elvira Moscovici.  I'd struggled when some basic geometric concepts were introduced in seventh grade (by Mr. Elwood Combs), so when tenth grade rolled around I convinced myself I just couldn't do it.  And so the year rolled on--I ended up with a B and not an A, which was an unusual event. 

At the end of the year I sat on the couch and looked back on what I had missed on tests throughout the year.  I was trying to learn.  In that frame of mind, I could tell instantly what the right answer should have been.  It was obvious once I'd set my mind to it, and stopped psyching myself out.

If there is any wisdom in Chua's advice, it is to push your kids past the point where they would want to go naturally.  Success in anything requires a combination of talent and persistence--and talent is usually easier to come by. You don't need to go as far as Chua, precipitating a full-throated rebellion once your child reaches 13.  So yes, balance is the key.  But that means that Chua's ways have some merit too.

Nonobject, an Experiment in Design Fiction

Last night I had the pleasure of visiting Kepler's Books, the legendary independent bookstore in Menlo Park whose closure in 2005 prompted community activism to re-open the doors. 

The occasion was the launch party for Nonobject, a new book by Branko Lukic and Barry Katz. Both are extremely talented designers; Lukic owns his own firm and Katz is a professor at Stanford and the California College of the Arts.  Their new book--which also includes a version designed for the iPad--is an extended examination of the "nonobject," the space between users and everyday objects like silverware and doorknobs. 

Part of their mission is to cause us to examine our interactions with these objects, which we use so often that they become invisible.  What goes on in that space between us and our possessions?  If we changed something--for example, made all of our silverware at 90 degree angles so that we had to stab at our food--how would this affect social interactions? 

Their book gives birth to a new genre, which the authors call "design fiction."  The idea is to be unconstrained and to let the imagination roam freely; Lukic spoke of becoming childlike again.  Therefore, Lukic conceives of all sorts of fantastical ideas that Katz contextualizes.  Examples: a spoon that won't let you keep eating if you are eating too quickly. Or a phone that you can use to reach out and touch someone...literally. 

Much of it seems ridiculous, and at some point practical concerns--who would buy these things? who would manufacture them?--would have to take precedence.  But for now we're in a playspace of the mind, liberated from all the constraints that comprise adulthood and so-called "real life."  For that reason alone this is a noteworthy effort.

Wallace Stegner's Close Observation

In my literary zodiac, this is the Year of Wallace Stegner.  After finishing Crossing to Safety a few months ago, I am now immersed in The Spectator Bird.  All of this is warm up for a re-read of Angle of Repose, which I last read in college.  Or maybe soon after college--at Northwestern I recall a woman laughing uproriously as she read reading Angle in the lunchroom, which strikes me as funnier than the book itself.

I'm 20% of the way through Spectator Bird, which concerns the life of retired literary agent Joe Allston and his wife Ruth.  Joe is grumpy and Ruth is forbearing, in a bit of gender stereotyping that one can forgive because Stegner's other observations are so precise.  Their Bay Area abode (part of the fun of reading Stegner now is that I know where he is talking about!) offers the setting for Joe's brooding and Ruth's good works.

The action really begins when Joe reads his diary from a trip he and Ruth took to Denmark many years before.  This is after receiving a postcard from someone he'd met on that long ago trip.  At first Joe wants to hide the postcard, for no good reason (or at least none that's yet been revealed).  But he tells Ruth about it and soon enough he's reading the diary aloud. 

Every so often Joe pauses to see how Ruth is receiving the recital.  I love these moments.  Here is one: "Again I looked across at Ruth.  She made a rueful, sympathetic smile, and her eyes were shiny. She obviously wanted to pat me and kiss me better...Often I submit to her sympathy. I depend on it, in fact. But right then I chose to be flippant."  And thus, in exacting detail, Stegner describes an exchange that must have taken 5 seconds in real time.

But in our conversations with loved ones every single second and every single gesture count.  Stegner appears to have known this better than most of us.  Swashbuckling novels or whodunits are fun to read, and generally read quickly.  But his "quiet writing" is ultimately more powerful because you have to slow down, savor, and think about your own interactions with people you care about. 

And with a little work those interactions can improve.  The humanities are facing dire attack, but they still have a lot to teach us.

 

Wallace Stegner's "Crossing to Safety"

This August I slowly but surely re-read Wallace Stegner's 1987 novel Crossing to Safety.   Stegner is brilliant in capturing the subtle nuances of conversation--the feints and gestures that we all make, either to seize control of the situation, to move things along peacefully, or to retreat if it's reached an uncomfortable crossroads.  This makes for rich reading, but things don't exactly zip along. 

The novel tells the story of the lifelong friendship of two couples:  Sid and Charity Lang, and Larry and Sally Morgan.  Sid and Larry are professors striving to earn tenure in the midst of the Depression; Sally and Charity are their faculty wives.  Today this arrangement feels very antiquated, but it is appropriate for the time.

Sid and Charity come from great northeast wealth; Larry and Sally struggled to gain a foothold in the hardscrabble west.  (This is a bit cliched, but reflects Stegner's role as the chronicler of the American west.) They all meet up in Madison, Wisconsin, home of the state university and an east-west crossroads.

Larry and Sally struggle with health problems; Sally comes down with polio.  Sid and Charity struggle with the fact that Sid never matches her expectations in professional accomplishment.  This is the harder struggle. Larry grows to resent Charity's dominance of Sid's life, but knows that Sid would have things no other way.

Stegner recounts the story from Larry's perspective and biases.  I wish he had told the story from many angles, so that Charity doesn't come off so uncharitably.  Larry's western crustiness grated on me after a while, but that just means Stegner portrayed him with depth. 

Larry loves Sid as a true friend, and that love is less complicated than his relationship to Sally; and definitely simpler than Sid's bond with Charity.  Stegner reminds us that we need true friends just as much as we need lovers.

Another Look at The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down remains one of my favorite books; as I noted last week, I decided to read it again after 11 years.  Yesterday--after many moments of "I just can't put this book down!"--I finished it again.

The first read was as a senior in college, as an independent study project.  Yesterday I pulled the resulting paper from the archives.  The book concerns the struggle between Hmong parents and her American doctors about how best to care for their daugher Lia, who had a severe form of epilepsy.  The parents didn't give her all medicines as prescribed, both because they couldn't fully understand the directions and because they thought the medicine was making her more sick; her doctors raged against  their "non-compliance" while never stopping to understand the very sophisticated (and profoundly different) Hmong understanding of the spiritual components of illness.

In my college paper, I'm harder on the doctors than the Hmong parents Foua Yang and Nao Kao Lee.  Neil Ernst and Peggy Philp, Lia's pediatricians, are extremely dedicated and humble.  Yet, I still think it is true that (as I wrote then), "Neil and Peggy accepted one aspect of the colonial viewpoint: we are right and they are wrong."

In contrast, I argued that the Hmong were more reasonable--they wanted Western medicine mixed with neeb (Hmong healing spirit.)  How ecumenical and open!  Yes, to some extent--but the only reason Lia's parents wanted Western medicine is because they were now living in the US and they had no choice.  (They were here as part of a forced migration to America, where many Hmong expected a hero's welcome after fighting for us during the Vietnam War.)  In Laos, Foua and Nao Kao would not have consulted Western doctors at all.

So, this time around I had to conclude that the Hmong were just as attached to their culture as the doctors were to the mystique of biomedicine. Indeed, Fadiman goes to great length to explain how the Hmong have always fiercely resisted assimilation to any larger culture.   In college it was easy to be pro-Hmong, anti-West...but, really, that's just another simplistic binary distinction.  

In 1999, apparently, I was familiar with the semiotic concept of syntagmatic analysis.  My paper argues that syntagmatic analysis can save us all--this theory focuses on the word-by-word connections that make up good sentences.  These words relationships become syntagms.  Taking the idealistic plunge that is the glory of youth, I write, "The value of every word in a sentence is a wonderful metaphor for the value of every culture in the world.  The fact that a good sentence suffers once a single word is removed is analogous to the harm caused whenever a viewpoint is silenced."  (This earned an "interesting observation" note from my instructor, in the margin.)   I conclude,  far too optimistically perhaps, "Although it is easier to fix these words than it is to cease cultural competition, Fadiman's account remains us that this is always possible." Hmm....I don't know anymore.  I guess it's still possible to "cease cultural competition," but this time around I have to say that Fadiman's point is that this is not very likely.

Re-reading as an Adult

This week I began to re-read Anne Fadiman's amazing 1997 book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.  It is one of the few books I truly love, one that merits all the exclamation points you can muster. (!!!)  Fadiman tells a sad and oh-so-human tale, based on a true story, of the clash between Hmong immigrant parents and Western-educated doctors in Merced, California.  Their young daughter Lia has epilepsy, which to the Hmong is what happens when the spirit catches you and you fall down.  To the doctors it is a biochemical reaction to misfiring neurons.  Who is right?  Everyone.

But this post isn't really about the book, as much as I want you to read it.  It's about re-reading favored texts as an adult--how it seems harder to focus than the first time, but how some things strike more deeply.

I first read Spirit as a senior in college, as part of an independent study in English.  I wrote one of the few papers I actually kept about it, which I plan to re-read as soon as I'm finished with the book.  In my memory banks the reading was truly immersive and seamless, although I suppose I faced interruptions and didn't read all 300 pages in one sitting.

These days I am having a harder focusing, despite recent efforts to curtail my iPhone usage on the morning commute. I simply notice my mind wandering, thinking about what lies ahead at work or even weekend plans.  Nicholas Carr is surely right that our always-on gadgets are both a blessing and a curse, with negative effects on our ability to focus. But, perhaps the harder time focusing while reading is simply because we have more to keep track of as we get older.   Maybe it has always been so, and we're romanticizing an age of pristine reading that never really existed.

I'm not sure.  I do know that Fadiman's attention to Hmong culture and history, as well as to the Hmong involvement in the Vietnam war on the side of the US, greatly impresses me this time around.  She alternates the personal story of Lia Lee with these context-setting, big picture overviews.  In the intervening years I mostly recalled the personal story, which is the most vivid. But maybe I now have a greater capacity to appreciate history as I'm getting older.  And the numerous nuances of interactions between different cultures are also resonating more deeply this time around, 11 years of life after the first read.

So: I'm having a harder time focusing  this time around, but Fadiman's work is resonating more complexly too. Not a bad trade-off, all in all.

The Wisdom of Augie March

For what seems like forever I've been reading Saul Bellow's 1953 novel (and National Book Award winner) The Adventures of Augie March.  It's not that it wasn't enjoyable; very far from it.  In grand bildungsroman style, Bellow offers a lively account of Augie March's childhood and young adulthood in Great Depression Chicago, with a long and crucial detour down to Mexico.  But it's also dense (find the plot on Wikipedia), and at certain junctures I preferred the quick comforts of tweets and news stories. Nicholas Carr might be on to something about how the Web is turning our brains to jelly; I'll find out when I listen to him Wednesday at the Commonwealth Club.

Yesterday I finally finished Augie. Augie's main concern--in gloriously overwrought youthful fashion--is about finding his purpose in life.   As Augie learns, there's always a tension between fashioning a better life and accepting the limitations of our core nature.

Towards the end of the novel, a father figure named Mr. Mintouchian tells Augie, "You must take your chance on what you are....You will not invent better than God or nature or turn yourself into the man who lacks no gift or development."  Augie is relieved; finally he can be himself--in all his irrational glory--rather than clambering incessantly toward what he "should" be.

Then again, we really should push ourselves to rise above our natural limitations.  There's the rub; how can we simultaneously accept our core natures, without merely becoming lazy and not even trying to improve anything about ourselves?  I'm not sure, and I'll probably never know.  But now, whenever I become frustrated with parts of myself that seem intractably funky, I'll thank Saul Bellow for artfully declaring that one of the best things we can do is embrace who we already are.