One more (cryptic) note

Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.

Many thanks to Aunt M-mv. You're more than awesome; you're family.

Blogging hiatus

Folks, as a wise hobbit once said (in the moving pictures, anyway):

I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. I need a holiday.

We'll be checking email daily but will not likely post again until August 8 or so. Write to us or bookmark us, and we'll see you in about ten days.

Hey, and if you've been enjoying your "Mental multivitamin" and a purchase that can be made at Amazon.com is in your future, please make your purchase via one of the many Amazon links on this site (including this one!). We appreciate your business.

Many thanks, readers, thinkers, autodidacts, and visitors.

We'll see you in August.

"And woe to the innocent bystanders."

M.B. wrote the following in response to one of our older entries, "Parenting as performance art" (2.20.2004):

Now, I'm not sure it's the only reason parents do this, but I don't think this type of behavior is limited to mothers. I've been a captive audience for plenty a blowhard on his cellphone, loudly namedropping his way through a conversation. Or upon being introduced to someone at a cocktail party, the first words out of her mouth were "Hi, I'm an attorney." Good girl, I bet your Mommy's so proud! Now will you please go to the potty?

It's the Ego! Everyone's got one; we just have different colleagues. And woe to the innocent bystanders.

Heh, heh, heh.

Thanks for the chuckle this morning, M.B.

Pigeons

Two pigeons visit the ledge of my bedroom every morning. I think they do it to torment our cat, a so-called "inside cat." He wouldn't know what to do with live prey even if the window didn't separate him from his quarry. But that doesn't stop him from affecting a threatening brow and swishing his tail in a "not-another-step-or-I'll-get-you" manner.

Stupid cat.

Pigeons, on the other hand, are apparently rather bright.

From an article at Scientific American:

Some types of pigeons are well known for their ability to find their way home. New findings indicate that the animals can learn to follow man-made routes, making their trips less mentally taxing.

...

The authors note that “homing pigeons appear to have a remarkable ability to shift from one home strategy to another,” so the results may not hold true for birds on all their travels, especially those longer than 200 kilometers. But they posit that the birds might prefer following freeways--instead of using their innate compassess--because they make navigating easier and allow the animals to dedicate more brainpower to other jobs, such as keeping an eye out for predators.

How not to buy happiness

From Volume 133, Issue 2 of Daedalus: J. of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (MIT Press):

An enduring paradox in the literature on human happiness is that although the rich are significantly happier than the poor within any country at any moment, average happiness levels change very little as people’s incomes rise in tandem over time.1 Richard Easterlin and others have interpreted these observations to mean that happiness depends on relative rather than absolute income.2

In this essay I offer a slightly different interpretation of the evidence–namely, that gains in happiness that might have been expected to result from growth in absolute income have not materialized because of the ways in which people in affluent societies have generally spent their incomes.

In effect, I wish to propose two different answers to the question “Does money buy happiness?” Considerable evidence suggests that if we use an increase in our incomes, as many of us do, simply to buy bigger houses and more expensive cars, then we do not end up any happier than before. But if we use an increase in our incomes to buy more of certain inconspicuous goods–such as freedom from a long commute or a stressful job–then the evidence paints a very different picture. The less we spend on conspicuous consumption goods, the better we can afford to alleviate congestion; and the more time we can devote to family and friends, to exercise, sleep, travel, and other restorative activities. On the best available evidence, reallocating our time and money in these and similar ways would result in healthier, longer– and happier–lives.

From later in the piece:

Many important rewards in life–access to the best schools, to the most desirable mates, and even, in times of famine, to the food needed for survival– depend critically on how the choices we make compare to the choices made by others. In most cases, the person who stays at the office two hours longer each day to be able to afford a house in a better school district has no conscious intention to make it more difficult for others to achieve the same goal. Yet that is an inescapable consequence of his action. The best response available to others may be to work longer hours as well, thereby to preserve their current positions. Yet the ineluctable mathematical logic of musical chairs assures that only 10 percent of all children can occupy top-decile school seats, no matter how many hours their parents work.

"Hating America"

From Bruce Bawer's essay in The Hudson Review:

Living in Europe, I gradually came to appreciate American virtues I’d always taken for granted, or even disdained—among them a lack of self-seriousness, a grasp of irony and self-deprecating humor, a friendly informality with strangers, an unashamed curiosity, an openness to new experience, an innate optimism, a willingness to think for oneself and speak one’s mind and question the accepted way of doing things. (One reason why Europeans view Americans as ignorant is that when we don’t know something, we’re more likely to admit it freely and ask questions.) While Americans, I saw, cherished liberty, Europeans tended to take it for granted or dismiss it as a naive or cynical, and somehow vaguely embarrassing, American fiction. I found myself toting up words that begin with i: individuality, imagination, initiative, inventiveness, independence of mind. Americans, it seemed to me, were more likely to think for themselves and trust their own judgments, and less easily cowed by authorities or bossed around by “experts”; they believed in their own ability to make things better. No wonder so many smart, ambitious young Europeans look for inspiration to the United States, which has a dynamism their own countries lack, and which communicates the idea that life can be an adventure and that there’s important, exciting work to be done. Reagan-style “morning in America” clichés may make some of us wince, but they reflect something genuine and valuable in the American air. Europeans may or may not have more of a “sense of history” than Americans do (in fact, in a recent study comparing students’ historical knowledge, the results were pretty much a draw), but America has something else that matters—a belief in the future.

Welcome home, D.W.!

Your virtual friends at "Mental multivitamin" hope you and your family had a wonderful adventure.

About us

Welcome!
For those of you who are new to this enterprise, welcome! Among other things, we at "Mental multivitamin" (M-mv) believe that fogged memory and slowed wit are not the inevitable consequences of , say, becoming a parent and/or growing old(er). Exercise your brain — read, play River Crossing, solve the New York Times crossword puzzle, learn Latin.

And take "Mental multivitamin," of course.

The recommended daily allowance
M-mv often includes "The recommended daily allowance," which features descriptions, quotes, and synopses from books (and occasionally films, cds, software, and artwork) that can have the same effect on gray matter as juicing can have on the rest of a getting-older-and-wiser body. If a title tantalizes you, dear reader, thinker, autodidact, click on the link.

On the nightstand
Once a month, we also cobble together "On the nightstand (under the pillow, in the knapsack, etc.)," a snapshot of the books that have recently become a part of the geography of our imaginations. You can find those entries at the links below. Our next installment of this feature will run in August.

Previous "On the nightstand" entries:
7.19.2004
6.12.2004
5.19.2004
4.22.2004
3.12.2004
2.15.2004
1.26.2004
12.31.2003

Write to us
We appreciate your comments, questions, and recommendations, so direct your (civilized) remarks and inquiries to the folks at "Mental multivitamin" by clicking here.

Shameless self-promotion
Finally, if a purchase that can be made at Amazon.com is in your future, please use one of the links here at "Mental multivitamin" (like this one!). No, we're not in this for the money, but it certainly is helpful.

Many thanks, readers, thinkers, autodidacts, and visitors.

In which R.T., an M-mv fave, responds to...

our recent entry, "The mommy wars continue, apparently."

The incomparable R.T. writes:

One of the things I have always found puzzling about this whole topic is why there isn't an equal philosophical, practical and (sadly) nasty debate going on among men; i.e., Daddy Wars.

Obviously, many men compete at different levels. Who makes the most money, has the more prestigious or intellectual job, or works the hardest, or drives the best golf ball, or whatever. It isn't for lack of a competitive urge. I also believe that many fathers care very much for their children, want the best outcome for them, and are engaged in their lives and their upbringing. Yet for some reason, I haven't seen the same dialogue or angst over their own roles as dads. At least not in a public forum.

If it's not a lack of a competitive urge and it's not a lack of caring, then what is it?

Can you envision the same kind of questions being argued, debated and mourned over in groups of men? Who has their child in daycare and why? Who doesn't? Who has reorganized their work schedule so they can spend time with their child when he or she comes home from school? Who hasn't? Who takes on a job with travel and laments the loss of being with their children when they take their first steps or climb their first tree or go on their first date? Who regrets the early years of their child's life passing so quickly and is now trying to make up for it by turning down job promotions so they can spend more time with their kids? Who frets about lack of quality childcare when he and his spouse must both work outside the home Who worries that Susie may not be socializing postively for lack of time with her? Conversely, who is sad or guilt-ridden and looking for answers when he can't provide enough money for their child to go to that tony high school or to attend Harvard or to ditch the job and stay home to homeschool their children?

Are men thinking about these things? And if so, don't they have need for support among other men? Aren't they looking for validation somewere for the choices they have made and how it is or may effect their children? If not, why?

Do men EVER talk about these things? Do they beat themselves up over their choices? Or are they more resilient somehow? I don't imagine it is because they all just don't care. Somehow I get the feeling that men approach their roles as fathers as something that just DOES co-exist naturally with their working/worldly selves, and however they piece it together will be because they have to or were compelled to, not because they made some choice of arbitrary free-will. No second-guessing then.

Am I wrong?

And if I am not wrong about men, then why is it women do this? Why are they the ones who feel solely responsibile for juggling the schedules and needs and impact of child-rearing with their own careers or personal lives? Why aren't men joining in the national debate on what is best for the children versus what is best for the adult or, hopefully, what works best for both and for the ultimate healthy outcome of a child?

I don't know. But I like to think that conditions for ALL children in the world will improve greatly once our civilization evolves to the next level where men, too, are asking themselves and discussing with others these same questions. The co-joining with other men and women about what works best for children in families might help bring about a more peaceful and democratic approach to finding what is best for each child, allow women to realize it isn't all "on us," and at the same time soften the competitive edge that has overcome the Mommy Wars and wedged women into one "camp" or the other.

In the meantime, I, too, will sit out the Mommy Wars. I find nothing productive in assailing someone else's choices or life, and that is pretty much the level to which this "debate" has sunk. But there sure are times I like to think about, refigure, analyze and project about the choices I have made for my own children. A forum where that is done without that competitive element of one-up-manship would be more to my liking.

I say, turn this one over to the men for a while and see where it leads. Could be interesting, if nothing else.

__________________________

One thought about why men don't fret this stuff: Their paychecks are usually bigger, which somehow translates into "their paychecks are more important," which segues into "their work is harder" and, consequently, they don't have the time or inclination to worry about how the children are raised. I'm not saying it's right, only that this is how I see it play out... over and over.

I'm also convinced that women are "hard-wired" to feel the issues of childcare and parenting differently (e.g., more intensely, more competitively, more everything) than men do. This is simplistic and vague, I know. But the clock is merciless.

Quoting R.T.:

I find nothing productive in assailing someone else's choices or life, and that is pretty much the level to which this "debate" has sunk. But there sure are times I like to think about, re-figure, analyze and project about the choices I have made for my own children. A forum where that is done without that competitive element of one-up-manship would be more to my liking.

She's right. Frankly, there are ridiculous claims on all sides of the mommy wars, and the professionalization of mothering is, let's be honest, disgusting. Power-parenting and parenting as a performance art make me want to flee for Antartica... or vomit. Or both.

The mommy wars continue, apparently

From "Fresh ink spurts over stay-at-home quandary" (Toronto Star):

In March, the American writer Caitlin Flanagan lit a match under the mothers-who-work issue with a long — 16-page — essay in The Atlantic magazine. Flanagan is a more than fine writer. And she has views. This coupling propelled her piece to command the magazine's cover. In colours of fuchsia and mustard, the cover art featured a young mother in a frilled peter pan collar tucking her infant into his/her crib. It was the skilfully written cover headline that was more arresting. "Dispatches from The Nanny Wars: How Serfdom Saved The Women's Movement."

It's hard to imagine a title catchier than that.

Ayup. And many bloggers and writers worried that piece to bits in March and April. We touched on it briefly here.

Reports Rachel Donadio in the New York Observer:

Tapping into the turgid well of upper-middle-class women’s guilt, [Flanagan's article] drew "an extraordinary number of letters," according to Julia Rothwax, a spokeswoman for The Atlantic. It set off a debate among women writers who still proudly wear the "feminist" mantle: Ellen Willis and Lynne Sharon Schwartz, among others, raged against Ms. Flanagan in The Atlantic’s letters column, while book groups, bloggers and dinner-party conversations from Scarsdale to Santa Monica have busily dissected in the piece.

And now folks are dissecting Flanagan's recent turn in the New Yorker, "To hell with all that."

Back to the Toronto Star piece:

Now we see Flanagan's mother, standing on a stepladder, washing down the wallpaper, which bears a Dutch motif. "In one clear moment, staring at a little windmill or a tiny Dutch girl, she realized that it was no longer possible for her to go on living that particular life," writes Flanagan. Mother went to work, handing her daughter a key on a string and leaving a line-up of precooked casseroles. Flanagan was 12. She felt abandoned and, at least to my ear, bitter. Her mother, by contrast, "cheered up. The sulks that had so often descended upon her lifted miraculously."

It's a reasonable assertion that Flanagan's sudden transformation into a latch-key kid framed her early motherhood determination not to "abandon" her own babies. In Flanagan's thinking, working mothers would find themselves parenting "wan and neurotic kids," whereas stay-at-home moms would have "emotionally hardy, confident kids." It didn't turn out that way. "What a bust," Flanagan writes of her own, albeit unscientific, observations. "There was no difference at all that I could divine."

It's almost quaint to hear Flanagan consider that a woman with "an education and a desire to take part in the business world...may not be uniquely suited to the simple routines of child care." The next step is for Flanagan to consider that education has nothing to do with it.

So there.

As a woman who wears dark sunglasses to the park on a cloudy day to foil the social x-rays who will blather to anyone about their little Jasons and Megans, I consider myself disconnected from the mommy wars — real or imagined — being waged in print and in any forum in which mothers meet. As for the "serfdom" of nannies, well, I can empathize. I mean, try living on a writer's meager earnings.

But I'll toss this out there after reading Flanagan and others:

Choosing this life didn't involve a great deal — heck, any — angst for me or for my family. Like Flanagan, I stayed home with my oldest until he was ready for school. Why? Because, quite honestly, becoming pregnant with him was no accident: I was (am) in a happy marriage, we wanted a child, and I wanted to raise him or her. It was that simple. No grueling debates about so-called "gender issues" or the division of household labor. Nope. My paycheck was smaller, and my skill set lent itself to a variety of creative work options that would enable me to continue writing and editing. But, to be perfectly clear, being a mother was the work on which I wanted to focus. Not with the "ridiculous and more than a little crazy" professionalism so many working-women-turned-stay-at-home-(for now, anyway)-mothers(mis)apply to parenting. (See our entry "'Hold on to a fast-fading formality'" and Anna Quindlen's essay "Flown Away, Left Behind" (January 12).) But with as much humor and candor as the inexperienced but earnest novice will approach any task.

We made out just fine.

And then he headed off to school.

Within two weeks of each school year, our son's first few teachers would invariably remark that they could tell he had not been a — their term, folks — "daycare baby." How? He's just so friendly and polite. He's just so bright. He's just so... you know... enjoyable. Oh, okay. Whatever you say. I'm thinking that his affability may have been as much nature as nurture, but my best guess is that his teachers would not have been interested in debating that with me.

Our son did well.

And I returned to a "regular" (i.e., traditional and, therefore, "real") job.

In time, though, we became a family of four, of five. And at the "Now-we-are-nearly-four" stage in our family's development, I re-evaluated just how much of my paycheck I'd have left after paying child number one's private school tuition and afterschool care fees and child number two's daycare bill, to say nothing of commuting and drycleaning costs, lunches, wardrobe, etc. Egads. Not much there, is there? Besides, I said to my husband one night, we don't want child number two to be a — their term, folks — "daycare baby," do we?

No, of course not.

So I stayed home.

Again.

And about a year after leaving that last "real" job, we learned that we would soon be a family of five.

And so it goes.

With a Master's degree and (now) more than two decades of writing and editing credits and successes to my byline and/or name, I guess I just never considered that my career was over when I decided to raise my own children 24/7. (Even washing the dirty sheets when they're sick, Caitlin. Even that.) In fact, in many ways, my career became more satisfying when I opted out of a traditional work schedule — if not financially then certainly emotionally because, for me, it's always been more about the byline than the size of the check. I work my projects in the interstices that motherhood offers. (Yes, they're there, if only one doesn't fritter them away on People magazine and the like.)

Our family's choices define our lifestyle, but they do not define me. "Mother of three" is never the first fact I reveal about myself. It may be the role I love, perhaps above all other roles, but it's not the one that generates the sorts of conversations I most enjoy.

Anyway.

The mommy wars. Who will win?

Hey, I don't care. As long as it's not one of the women at the park. Or one of those in the sub-genre of mommy bloggers, "Mommies who whine and make myriad grammatical errors while doing it."

Bleah.

___________________________________
Related M-mv entries:

More on mommy myths and wars (6.9.2004)

What motherhood does to and for you (3.31.2004)

For those of you following "The Mommy Myth"(s) (3.4.2004)

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming... (2.25.2004)

Parenting as performance art (2.20.2004)

Speaking of mommy myths... (2.12.2004)

"Shattering 'The Mommy Myth'" (2.10.2004)

Man, I love mind-stretching stuff like this.

Don't you?

From "The Myth of the Beginning of Time" (Scientific American):

Was the big bang really the beginning of time? Or did the universe exist before then? Such a question seemed almost blasphemous only a decade ago. Most cosmologists insisted that it simply made no sense--that to contemplate a time before the big bang was like asking for directions to a place north of the North Pole. But developments in theoretical physics, especially the rise of string theory, have changed their perspective. The pre-bang universe has become the latest frontier of cosmology.

The new willingness to consider what might have happened before the bang is the latest swing of an intellectual pendulum that has rocked back and forth for millennia. In one form or another, the issue of the ultimate beginning has engaged philosophers and theologians in nearly every culture. It is entwined with a grand set of concerns, one famously encapsulated in an 1897 painting by Paul Gauguin: D'ou venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous? "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" The piece depicts the cycle of birth, life and death--origin, identity and destiny for each individual--and these personal concerns connect directly to cosmic ones. We can trace our lineage back through the generations, back through our animal ancestors, to early forms of life and protolife, to the elements synthesized in the primordial universe, to the amorphous energy deposited in space before that. Does our family tree extend forever backward? Or do its roots terminate? Is the cosmos as impermanent as we are?

Is motherhood a universal bond?

We've recommended Brain, Child before. Here's another thought-provoking essay from folks who know that not all mothers grab People when they want to relax.

From Jennifer Niesslein's piece, "Is motherhood a universal bond?":

In Franzen's essay, Shirley Brice Heath describes some avid readers as likely to have been "social isolates" as children--that is, kids who felt different from the world around them and immersed themselves in books. Heath tells Franzen, "The important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Although they aren't present, they become your community."

...

Three mothers walk into a bar. One is a well-paid executive who lives in L.A. with her three kids, husband, and nanny. Another, who works as a cashier at a video store, is unmarried with one teenaged child. The third raises her twin toddlers and cares for her dying great-aunt. So the bartender tries to think of something to say to the three of them, something about motherhood that they could all could relate to, but all she can think of are broad emotions like Love and Fear. The three smile politely at each other and at the bartender, then sip their drinks in silence. The bartender cleans some glassware and thinks about what to pack in her kids' lunches. They're all tremendously relieved when the priest and the rabbi walk in.

A.W.A.D.

A.Word.A.Day was in a list of links in our original template's sidebar. I've never gotten around to recreating the list or the sidebar. Ah, well. Read? Build a sidebar? Yeah. I'm thinking you know which will win. In any event, bookmark, A.W.A.D.

Today's word: charley horse.

Project Vote Smart

If you haven't explored this site, bookmark it, and spend some there... soon.

Lies and the lying liars who tell them

Have you seen this article at the Econonmist?

From "Making windows in men's souls":

The problem with both polygraphy and voice analysis is that they rely on second-hand signs of lying which a good actor can suppress. Furthermore, someone who is telling the truth might exhibit just these signals, because the very act of being questioned by the authorities is stressful. Instead, current research is looking directly at the source of lies, the brain itself.

"I am always ready to learn...

but I do not always like being taught."

— Winston Churchill

Can you say, "Autodidacticism"?

"It was a dark and stormy night."

Have you seen this story?

From: "Writers vie to be worst they can be":

A California man claimed top honors Monday at the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest celebrating bad writing, likening the end of a love affair to "Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail."

...

The competition pays mocking homage to the Victorian author whose 1830 novel "Paul Clifford" opened with this all-too-familiar phrase: "It was a dark and stormy night."

Heh, heh, heh.

Steve Almond

In "Book wars" (11.30.2003), we quoted a bit from Steve Almond. From that entry:

In a guest column at MobyLives, Steve Almond (who notes that he has not read Middlemarch) muses that Bloom should forget his rage and "excoriat[e] the true opponents of creative enlightenment. A short list would include: the deification of consumerism, the decline in funding for public education, the economic inequality that has become the hallmark of late-model capitalism. This culture discourages creativity, and deep thought, because such actions are not profitable. The horrible fact that people turn to Stephen King rather than Saul Bellow is, in other words, symptomalogy."

"[L]urking beneath [Harold Bloom's] petulant elitism is an egalitarian impulse," Almond asserts. "He knows that young people are turning away from the great books that might save them. But he fails to concern himself with why." Almond does, though. "[I]t's NOT because Americans are dumb or lazy, but because they fear the chaos of their feelings. Our masters of commerce are quite happy with this arrangement. They want us in this state of terror, as it makes us more likely to obey their constant buy messages. The unexamined life, it might be said, offers an extraordinary profit margin." [Emphasis added.]

Almond concludes, "We [writers] will achieve a greater measure of relevance not by tearing one another down, or making literature exclusive, but by working to promote our common goal, which is to get people reading, thinking, and feeling again." [Emphasis added.]

Last week, the Boston Globe profiled Almond.

"It's wonderful when people like your stuff," Almond says. "But who you really are is at home with this keyboard having a chance to get to the deepest part of whatever your weird, mixed-up feelings are about life. I could keep milking the candy thing. But my job now is to find what I'm obsessive about. Otherwise it's like trying to put fake chocolate in something. It never works."

Check out Candyfreak.

Is math a sport?

Last week, the first contingent of U.S. Olympians arrived in Athens. The five men and one woman, survivors of a merciless selection process, stood ready to test themselves against the strongest competitors in the world.

Sunday, they go home.

Their competition, the International Mathematical Olympiad, is already over. The math Olympiad may not attract a worldwide broadcast audience or demand traffic-jamming last-minute infrastructure fixes like the Olympic Games per se. But it's a contest as rigorous and rarefied as anything you'll see on NBC this August. Could mathletes someday compete alongside track stars and basketball players under the aegis of the five rings?

Read the complete article here.

To the moon

Another link of interest.

Thirty-five years ago

"That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."

— Neil Armstrong

'Giant leap' opens world of possibility

Apollo Anniversary: Moon Landing "Inspired World"

Apollo 11 Anniversary: A Look Back in Pictures

The Apollo Program: Apollo 11

The History Place: Apollo 11

Feel smart again.

We've recommended this before, but so many still fall prey to those inane quizzes ("What sort of [insert inanity] am I?") that we thought, "Hey! Time for a reminder."

Visit the Quiz/Fact Library at mental_floss. No, they won't give you a pretty picture to paste into your online journal, but they will jumpstart your brain.

Go for it.

On the nightstand (under the pillow, in the knapsack, etc.)

Ayup. Another month gone. Another heap o' books read. We tossed the joint over the weekend, checking on nightstands, under pillows (and beds), in knapsacks, under chairs, on the library table, and in the, erm, bathroom. Here are a few of the books that have recently become a part of the geography of our imaginations.

Wagner's Ring: Turning the Sky Round (M. Owen Lee)
Wagner's Ring: A Listener's Companion and Concordance (J.K. Holman)
The Wagner Operas (Ernest Newman)
The World Theatre of Wagner (Charles Osborne)
Yes. The Ring of the Nibelung. Not familiar? Start here. Then borrow this. You'll be hooked.

The Original Olympics (Stewart Ross)
DK Eyewitness Guides: Olympics
Only twenty-five days until the opening ceremony.

The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories (Hans Christian Andersen)
After watching one of my favorite movies, we had to haul out the original stories. Wonderful, wonderful stuff — the book and the movie.

Socrates Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy (Christopher Phillips)
Not bad.

Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper (Bryan Magee)
Much better.

"B" Is for Betsy (Carolyn Haywood)
The Lighthouse Family: The Storm (Cynthia Rylant)
The Unicorn's Secret: #1 Moonsilver and #2 The Silver Thread (Kathleen Duey)
Many of the stories the two youngest share with each other still feature girls in braids, magical beasts, and/or animals with dialogue, but that's all right with us.

Thirsty (M.T. Anderson)
The City of Ember (Jeanne DuPrau)
Two recent teen book club selections. No, not the best literature, concurs Master M-mv. But not awful, either. (An aside: young M-mv suggests Anderson's Feed over Thirsty.)

I, Robot (Isaac Asimov)
Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
A Separate Peace (John Knowles)
Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
As You Like It (Shakespeare)
The Autobiography of Ben Franklin
Family book club selections from now until late August.

Post Captain (Patrick O'Brian)
A Sea of Words, Third Edition: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O'Brian (Dean King)
Yes, Mr. M-mv is still "at sea."

Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls (Rachel Simmons)
Just started.

From the "light summer reading" (also known as the "afternoon well spent") category:

The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
Yes, I am aware that everyone else read this sometime ago, but I tend to avoid the books everyone else is reading. This was not my usual fare but a pleasant way to pass an afternoon at the park.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon)
Another well-spent afternoon. One of my favorite passages:

And Siobhan says people go on holidays to see new things and relax, but it wouldn't make me relaxed and you can see new things by looking at earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of the solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness intersect at right angles. And I think that there are so many things in just one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly.

Rape: A Love Story (Joyce Carol Oates)
Like Beasts and Zombie, Rape is a slim, not-a-wasted-word novel that explores a difficult, disturbing subject. Oates never disappoints.

Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)
Fans of The Handmaid's Tale will love this. I know I did.

As always, there are many, many more, but I am just about out of time. Let me leave you with this bit from an old favorite of mine (yes, a few of us discovered How to Read a Book years, decades before someone told us we should read it):

The mind can atrophy, like the muscles, if it is not used. Atrophy of the mental musceles is the penalty we pay for not taking mental exercise. And this is a terrible penalty, for there is evidence that atrophy of the mind is a mortal disease.

_________________________________
Previous "On the nightstand" entries:
6.12.2004
5.19.2004
4.22.2004
3.12.2004
2.15.2004
1.26.2004
12.31.2003

The recommended daily allowance

No doubt you are right, my best of friends, there would be far less suffering amongst mankind, if men -- and God knows why they are so fashioned -- did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity.

"Everywhere, we learn only from...

those whom we love."

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Disco died that night.

'fess up. Who celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Disco Demolition Night yesterday? We watched "Disco Demolition 25th Anniversary: The Real Story" on WTTW to celebrate, well, actually, to see Garry Meier. It was damned good to hear his voice again. Someone get him back on the air. Please.

Anyway, about the Demolition... for the out-of-towners, here are some links to catch you up.

From the Sun-Times, "For the record":

Just a simple promotion that no one thought would work. And it goes down in Chicago lore, fondly with cult status for some, disgraceful for others. Monday marks the 25th anniversary... Disco died that night, with Dahl and Veeck held responsible. Sox fans' rough and unruly reputation was solidified. And the two people most responsible for that night, Dahl and Veeck, had career paths that went flying in opposite directions. "Steve Dahl went to six-figure contracts and simulcasts," Veeck said. "I went to Florida to hang drywall and wait for the phone to ring. When I say no one took my calls, I mean no one. I did get a couple calls [for marketing jobs] from soccer teams; apparently they like riots."

...

"You know what my dad said to me that night after the game?" Veeck said. "He said, 'Sometimes, these things just work too well.'"

Ayup.

And from the Trib (registration required but quick, free, and painless), "25 years later, disco debacle recalled fondly":

So much is forgotten over the span of 25 years that it's easy to revise history.

There's been a lot of revisionist history when it comes to recalling that fateful muggy night of July 12, 1979, in old Comiskey Park.

It was Disco Demolition Night at the ballpark--a promotion hosted by WLUP-FM 97.9 and its emerging radio personalities Steve Dahl and Garry Meier. Between games of the double-header, they blew up a large box of disco records.

If you're from Chicago, you know the story: Things got out of hand, with many of the 50,000 attending the White Sox game storming the field and forcing the Sox to forfeit the second game to the Detroit Tigers. At the time and for many years after, it was considered one of Chicago's biggest black eyes.

More about "reading at risk"

More of the discussion we began on 7.9.2004...

We found the following article at The Rage Diaries, which, as regular M-mv readers know, is one of our favorite web-stops.

From "New on the endangered species list: the bookworm":

But perhaps the most profound shift behind the dying breed of bookworms is that Americans have less time - and a shrinking tolerance for solitude. "There are so many ways not to feel alone, where the one way used to be moving into a novel's imaginative space," says Kathleen Fitzpatrick, an associate professor at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.

As the wired, and wireless, world grows, the dominant culture is increasingly one of immediacy. "Why pick up Tolkien when you can spend three hours watching 'Lord of the Rings?' " asks Matthew Felling of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a research group in Washington. "Modern media is making us a Cliffs Notes nation."

In essential ways, experts say, reading simply feels less important. Early America saw literacy as a means to salvation: You learned to read in order to read the Bible, and that impetus was strong enough that New England joined Scotland as one of the first hubs of universal literacy. A few generations ago, "the whole idea of literacy was something parents thought to be terribly important because not everyone was literate," says Douglas Raybeck, an anthropologist at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. "Now literacy is taken for granted."

That shift has been so profound, he continues, that technology now "meets people halfway," demanding less and less literacy as chores once completed through written correspondence can be done at the sound of a voice or the click of a mouse.

Plagiarism

From "Fending Off a Plagiarist":

However I have not given up on the profession. Even though I have new evidence of plagiarism's power -- how people will take great risks to cheat and others will avoid the hard work of keeping them from cheating -- I am renewed in my campaign against it.

Certainly, I have learned that researchers must hold on to their primary sources. I've written this article in part as a cautionary tale to fellow scholars. Send copies of your primary sources to archives if you desire, but keep the originals yourself.

Early in our M-mv career, we opined on the evils of plagiarism. From that entry:

It's funny (and I don't mean, "funny, ha-ha funny") to me that most thinkers and readers can readily identify plagiarism when the words or ideas of one traditionally published writer are appropriated by another.

But when it comes to the Web, many of the same readers and thinkers have adopted an "oh-it's-just-borrowing" mentality that makes e-writers, website developers, photographers, artists, graphic designers, and others who make all or part of their living along the information superhighway shudder. An entire article is reprinted without permission there. Images are copied from here and used over there. Unique design elements of a new business' corporate identity program are diminished when cribbed by another business. Photographs for sale in an Web image gallery are copied and pasted into personal websites.

Read the complete entry here.

And our 11.3.2003 RDA may interest others who share our violent aversion to those who would steal another's words, thoughts, and research to claim as their own.

Chicago Historical Society

Admission is free on Mondays. This is one of the best deals in town.

Dark matter

From "Dark Matter and Dark Energy: One in the Same?":

Dark matter and dark energy are two of the most vexing problems in science today. Together they dominate the universe, comprising some 96 percent of all mass and energy.

But nobody knows what either is. It's tempting to consider them products of the same unknown phenomenon, something theorist Robert Scherrer suggests. The professor of physics at Vanderbilt University says "k-essence" is behind it all.

And from "Moon to Provide a Stepping Stone to Mars and Beyond":

Thirty-five years after the world watched three Americans leave Earth on a mission to be the first to land on the moon, the United States is plotting a return to the lunar landscape. But while the destination is the same, the motives have changed.

Then the goal was to prove to a divided world simply that it could be done and done best by a free society. Now the driving motivation is to demonstrate the technologies and hone the skills needed to venture beyond Earth’s own backyard.

About books

I hope Mrs. Multivitamin and other bibliophiles out there will tackle these questions, too. I love talking about books!

I'd be delighted, Mrs. Buried Treasure.

Readers, thinkers, and autodidacts, here is a complete survey, including a poll we've created in honor of Buried Treasure. Our responses are italicized.

What is your favorite type of bookstore?
A. A large, well-lit chain store with a cafe and a large selection of books
B. A dark, dusty, used bookstore full of mysterious and vaguely organized books
C. A local independent bookstore that features books by local authors and a self-serve coffee station for customers
D. All of them! If they sell books, I'm there.

What excites you most?
A. Awaiting a new book by a favorite author
B. Discovering of a classic you've been wanting to read
C. Receiving a free book from a friend in the mail

Which do you prefer?
A. Fiction
B. Non-fiction
C. A mix of both

What is your favorite of these forms?
A. Novel
B. Short story
C. Poetry

What is your fiction preference?
A. Contemporary fiction
B. Classic novels
C. Genre (mystery, espionage, etc.)
D. An eclectic combination

Does the design and condition of the book matter?
A. Yes, I love a well designed book and keep mine in mint condition.
B. No, the words are what matter.
C. Yes and no. I appreciate good design and treat my books with respect, but I am not obsessive about it.

On average how many books do you read a month?
A. One or two
B. Four or five
C. Ten or more

Do you prefer to own or borrow?
A. There is a particular joy in owning a book. I have a large personal library.
B. Why spend money when you can read it for free? I use the public library.
C. Different tools for different job. I own and borrow.

Where do you get (the majority) of your book news?
A. Newspapers
B. Magazines
C. Television
D. Blogs
E. Friends, acquaintances, and other fellow readers
F. Booksellers
G. A combination of the sources above and others, including excellent catalogues

Are books a professional obsession?
A. Yes, I work or have worked in the field (writer, reviewer, publisher, teacher, librarian, bookseller, etc.).
B. No, I do it for fun.
C. I write the occasional review but have a regular job outside of books.

What is your favorite type of bookstore?
	A large, well-lit chain store with a cafe and a large selection of books
	A dark, dusty, used bookstore full of mysterious and vaguely organized books
	A local independent bookstore that features books by local authors and a self-serve coffee station for customers
	All of them! If they sell books, I'm there.
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Chevalier Noir for the Mind

For Chevalier Noir for the Mind items 1 through 20, click here; items 21 through 25, click here.

26. Inter-Library Loan
27. A yellow legal pad and twenty newly sharpened pencils
28. The back-to-school aisle
29. Amazon.com's search engine
30. The Deborah Rowe Radio Show

To be continued...

"Good humor...

makes all things tolerable."

— Henry Ward Beecher

The soundtrack of our lives

The second in an occasional feature.

"Not again!" My oldest slumps into his seat in our city-tough minivan. "Argh!"

"Yes, again. Hey, and hello to you, too. And you're welcome for the ride. And...."

"Hi, Mom." He pecks me on the head and settles back. "Thank you for picking me up." Turning to his sisters in the back seat, "Girls, do we have to listen to this again?" He's pleading. He's weak. They know it.

"Yes!" they squeal in unison. "Yes! Yes! Yes! We love this stuff!"

And they do. And it's my fault. And the kid knows it. I'll bake him brownies for dessert to make it up to him.

The intersection of grammar geek and philosopher chic

So, one of our April RDAs was the delightful Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.

We followed up on it in May, linking Paul Robinson's essay "The Philosophy of Punctuation," which Lynne Truss references in Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

You know, we've sold more copies of this pithy book of grammar geekiness than it would be polite to mention.

On the other hand, we sold only one copy of Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America since recommending it back in January. (An aside: That RDA served as a starting block for our "An opinion cannot hurt you" musings, which follow the recommendation.) That's too bad. The Metaphysical Club can't be swallowed in one sitting, that's true, and Eats, Shoots and Leaves can be consumed over a lingering lunch. But since when did length and ease govern the tastes of readers, thinkers, and autodidacts?

Anyway, here's the intersection to which today's entry title refers: Menand reviews the Truss book for the New Yorker. Of course, fans of the bestselling guide to commas, full stops, and other punctuation have dismissed Menand's criticisms with sentiments along the very line Truss seeks to define her audience:

When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to "get a life" by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.

But we can't possibly be the only "sticklers" to see the irony in this?

Look, read Menand's review not for his critique of the grammatical gaffes Truss commits but for his musings on "writing voice." For example, consider this:

One of the most mysterious of writing’s immaterial properties is what people call “voice.” Editors sometimes refer to it, in a phrase that underscores the paradox at the heart of the idea, as “the voice on the page.” Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may avoid cliché, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity the “voice.” There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one. Grammatical correctness doesn’t insure it. Calculated incorrectness doesn’t, either. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks of the first-person singular—any of these can enliven prose without giving it a voice. You can set the stage as elaborately as you like, but either the phantom appears or it doesn’t.

When it does appear, the subject is often irrelevant. “I do not care for movies very much and I rarely see them,” W. H. Auden wrote to the editors of The Nation in 1944. “Further, I am suspicious of criticism as the literary genre which, more than any other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight, intellectuals without love. I am all the more surprised, therefore, to find myself not only reading Mr. Agee before I read anyone else in The Nation but also consciously looking forward all week to reading him again.” A lot of the movies that James Agee reviewed between 1942 and 1948, when he was The Nation’s film critic, were negligible then and are forgotten now. But you can still read his columns with pleasure. They continue to pass the ultimate test of good writing: it is more painful to stop reading them than it is to keep going. When you get to the end of Agee’s sentences, you wish, like Auden, that there were more sentences.

You see, those who criticized Menand for criticizing Truss missed the gifts of his review altogether.

Reading at risk

Just a reminder: Registration to read the New York Times online is required but quick, free, and painless:

From "Fewer Noses Stuck in Books in America, Survey Finds":

The study, with its stark depiction of how Americans now entertain, inform and educate themselves, does seem likely to fuel debate over issues like the teaching and encouragement of reading in schools, the financing of literacy programs and the prevalence in American life of television and the other electronic media that have been increasingly stealing time from readers for a couple of generations at least. It also raises questions about the role of literature in the contemporary world.

The survey also makes a striking correlation between readers of literature and those who are socially engaged, noting that readers are far more likely than nonreaders to do volunteer and charity work and go to art museums, performing arts events and ballgames. "Whatever good things the new electronic media bring, they also seem to be creating a decline in cultural and civic participation," Mr. Gioia said. "Of literary readers, 43 percent perform charity work; only 17 percent of nonreaders do. That's not a subtle difference."

Still, in a world where information is more readily available than ever, where people know more than they ever have, and where visual acuity is becoming ever more crucially utilitarian, it is worth asking: What, if anything, does literature's diminished importance to Americans represent? The study has already produced conflicting reactions.

This, of course, contradicts the Statistical Abstract on which we reported back in February.

Reported USA Today on February 12:

When it comes to leisure time, Americans still would rather curl up with a good book than go online and surf the Web. Soccer is more popular than softball these days, but bowling still beats golf. And U.S. families spend some $660 per year on their TVs, stereos and video games.

So says the Census Bureau's annual compilation of facts and figures telling America about itself, from crops to crime, pollution to paychecks. The new Statistical Abstract of the United States, being released Thursday, runs more than 1,000 pages and offers an estimated 800,000 or 900,000 numbers.

As it turns out, we at M-mv were right about the Statistical Abstract. We wrote, in part:

This, of course, is a bunch of happy horse, erm, poop. Or, rather, it is a misreading, as in, the respondents may like the idea of preferring to curl up with a book, but in practice they actually surf... or zonk out in front of the great American campfire for the latest episode of one or another "reality" show.

...

I posit that more than half of the respondents who checked the box that says that they "prefer reading to surfing" did so in a (desperate) bid to appear more intelligent... if only to themselves.

Self delusions are the saddest variety of lie.

Read the complete entry here.

The recommended daily allowance

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.

Because, if you stop to think of it, the three Rules of Robotics are the essential guiding principles of a good many of the world's ethical systems. Of course, every human being is supposed to have the instinct of self-preservation. That's Rule Three to a robot. Also every "good" human being, with a social conscience and a sense of responsibility, is supposed to defer to proper authority; to listen to his doctor, his boss, his government, his fellow man; to obey laws, to follow rules, to conform to custom — even when they interfere with his comfort or safety. That's Rule Two to a robot. Also, every "good" human being is supposed to love others as himself, protect his fellow man, risk his life to save another. That's Rule One to a robot. To put is simply — if Byerley follows all the Rules of Robotics, he may be a robot, and may simply be a very good man.

For the record, we loathe movie-tie-in editions and were shocked when an Amazon.com search on the ISBN number for our edition, which sports an illustrated cover, yielded an edition with a photograph of an "and-I-mean-business" Will Smith on the cover. Oh, well. In any event, if you missed this gem in your youth or if you have studiously avoided science fiction, spend an evening with fast-paced and deceptively simple stories that I, Robot comprises.

Oh, and we at M-mv are the sort who most certainly read the book before seeing the movie. We're betting that you already figured that out, though.

"When the brain falls in love"

NPR's Madeleine Brand speaks with German neuroscientist Dr. Andreas Bartels about how the human brain changes when someone is in love.

"The hopeless attempt to stay forever young"

From "The Perpetual Adolescent" by M-mv favorite Joseph Epstein:

The greatest sins, Santayana thought, are those that set out to strangle human nature. This is of course what is being done in cultivating perpetual adolescence, while putting off maturity for as long as possible. Maturity provides a more articulated sense of the ebb and flow, the ups and downs, of life, a more subtly reticulated graph of human possibility. Above all, it values a clear and fit conception of reality. Maturity is ever cognizant that the clock is running, life is finite, and among the greatest mistakes is to believe otherwise. Maturity doesn't exclude playfulness or high humor. Far from it. The mature understand that the bitterest joke of all is that the quickest way to grow old lies in the hopeless attempt to stay forever young.

Chicago stories

An Art Institute of Chicago print of Seurat's "La Grande Jatte" dominates one wall of our living room; Martorell's "Saint George Killing the Dragon" and Hopper's "Nighthawks" each earned its own wall, too. I sometimes imagine these paintings eyeing each other with the same unease that, say, our volumes of Jane Austen must eye the volumes of Margaret Atwood. "What are you doing here?" one will hiss to the other.

Yes. The product of an overcaffeinated brain. I know.

The print has been a prominent feature of the geography of our imaginations for so long that I think we secretly suspected that there was nothing more to know of its mysteries. And then we visited the Art Institute's latest special exhibit — "Seurat and the Making of 'La Grande Jatte'" — and realized how wrong we were.

So much more to learn and to see. Which reminds me...

I wrote the following after we visited the Rembrandt exhibit in May. My aching back has prompted me to repeat this passage for any of the reading, thinking, learning parents in our midst:

If you are a parent or teacher who plans to introduce children to remarkable works of art or amazing scientific discoveries or key historical concepts via museum exhibits, take the time to see said exhibits from their perspective. In the case of "Rembrandt's Journey," this meant crouching to the height of my two youngest and learning that the small etchings lost all of their magnificent detail from the distance between a child's eyes and the spot high on the Institute wall and that the reflection from overhead lighting on the glass covering the etchings reduced Rembrandt's brilliance (pun intended) to framed patches of light if the budding art historian was the height of the average third-grader or shorter.

Something to think about.

So, yes, Mr. M-mv toted one child, while Mrs. M-mv toted the other. Our backs ache, a given. But our children actually saw (and enjoyed) the exhibit. Worth the price of a back rub and a tube of Bengay, no question.

For more of our thoughts on children and museums, see "(Behind the scenes) at the museum."

For more about the exhibit, read "Seurat exhibit a revelation of a masterpiece." (Registration to read the Trib online is required but free, quick, and painless.)

And for more of our Chicago stories, check out the links below.

From the (e)mailbag

Behind-the-Scenes Event

Printers Row Book Fair

*heavy sigh*

More on Garry Meier

Action! An Adventure in Moviemaking

"Say it isn't so, Roe."

The zoo

Urban flight

We still miss Garry Meier.

Reading, thinking, learning

C-O Sole

A Midsummer Night's Dream

ABT's Swan Lake at the Civic Opera House

Spoon River Anthology

Shakespeare redux

(Behind the scenes) at the museum

If you're in the area...

Today is Casimir Pulaski Day!

"Show me another city so glad to be alive!"

Chicago's first citizen: Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable

Black History Month

We miss Garry Meier.

More Chicago stuff (if you non-residents can Bear it)

The recommended daily allowance (Sinatra on Chicago)

"My Kind of Town, Chicago Is"

Ford Free Tuesdays

A son goes to war

Registration is required to read the Chicago Tribune online, but it's fast, painless, and free. Do it now, and then read the excellent and thought-provoking series of articles "A son goes to war."

"Ring around the Planet"

Cassini's first images of Saturn from orbit. Amazing.

The recommended daily allowance

A short story that will stay with you a long time: "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" by Brian Aldiss. "Super-Toys" was the inspiration for AI, Artificial Intelligence.

Why or why not?

Yesterday we featured some Sydney J. Harris quotations. This one caught A.L.'s imagination:

Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, "Why not?" and the other, "Why bother?"

A.L. wrote:

LOL! Ain't it the truth. Sometimes I listen to the one voice, and sometimes the other. Actually, the "Why not?" voice has been winning out lately... a bike ride down 125 miles of the coast of Oregon is in the works right now. Do you hear these two voices? How do they convince you of their positions so you ignore the one and listen to the other?

Yes, yes, A.L., I hear both voices; however, it is less that they compete, trying to persuade me to their sides, and more that I simply silence one or the other, as in, "Shhh! I'm listening to 'Why not?' just now," or, "Hush! 'Why bother?' is telling me something."

Recent items on my "Why not?" list
Developing and maintaining the "Mental multivitamin" project

Believe it or not, deciding to blog was not a light decision for me.

Buying a swimsuit

No, I haven't worn it anywhere yet, but it's been a mild summer so far.

Allowing my photo to be published with an article I sold earlier this month

I loathe the idea that readership, in part, is determined by how an author looks, but for this particular piece, the editor's request seemed reasonable, so, there you go.

Recent items on my "Why bother?" list
Asserting my convictions about faith and religion and the chasm that exists between those two concepts

It's not as if anyone actually hears. For the record, though, I have great faith and no religion.

Reading the fourth and fifth books in the Harry Potter series

Surely, it must be clear to anyone who writes and/or celebrates excellence in writing that the faltering series has slipped from promising to eh to positively dreadful. I'd press Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy on readers, instead.

Responding to every attack from those who cry, "Snob!"

A gentle reminder: "Delight in excellence is easily confused with snobbery by the ignorant." (Joseph Epstein)

Thanks for making me think this afternoon, A.L., and, as always, thanks for visiting M-mv. You've been with us since we started, I think. Did you know that yesterday was our eight-month anniversary?