28. July 2008 by Gene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Reading | 2 Comments »

22. July 2008 by Gene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Anderson. “Neurology Study: Brain Too Slow For Cell Phone Use While Driving”, Ergonomics Today.

Mark Bauerlein. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). Tarcher, 2008.

Maggie Jackson. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Prometheus, 2008.

Sharon O’Brien. “Improve Your Concentration with Brain Fitness Activities”, About.com: Senior Living.

Posted in Health & Wellness, Reading, Technology | 8 Comments »

1. April 2008 by Gene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Learning, Reading | 9 Comments »

7. December 2007 by starbuckguy.

Ice Formations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Games & Puzzles, Reading, Photography | 1 Comment »