Friday, December 26, 2014

My Best Reading of the Year



Daniel Kahneman published Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011. This was my choice for the best nonfiction book I read this year. Among the forty books I read thirteen were nonfiction. Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2002, writes about his research in three areas of decision-making: cognitive bias, prospect theory, and happiness assessment.
            First he sets up an opposition in the ways the mind works to assess or decide something. The intuitive way works quickly, without our conscious awareness, drawing on memory. The reflective way is slower, takes conscious effort and causes bodily signs of dilated pupils, increased heart-rate, and others. Most of our decisions from moment to moment are made intuitively, some of them necessarily so, like reflex action from pain or danger, but in many cases we ought to be engaging in reflection to avoid the cognitive biases and other problems with intuitive decision-making.
            Kahneman names several categories of heuristics or rules for quick decision-making, and he enumerates their various pitfalls. Among the cognitive biases which impede good decisions are these:
The Representative Heuristic. We tend to classify according to a narrative story rather than base rates, that is the real probability that object or person A belongs in category B. An outstanding case is the Linda Problem, in which respondents go for plausibility when asked about probability (the tendency to answer a less-difficult question than the one asked is one of the drawbacks of thinking fast). Linda is single, 32, outspoken and bright. She majored in philosophy and as a student was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice. When given this information and told to rank the following scenarios in order of probability
A  Linda is a teacher is elementary school
B  Linda is a bank teller
C  Linda is an insurance salesman
D  Linda is a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement,
most respondents rank D as more likely than B, defying logic.
Tom W’s specialty is a variation of the Linda Problem.
 We tend to misconceive of the way chance works in particular ways. Given a six-sided die with 4 green and 2 red faces, rank in order of probability these sequences coming up:
A  RGRRR
B  GRGRRR
C  GRRRRR
As in the Linda Problem, most respondents will say B is more likely than A, even though there are two possibilities for a previous throw in A and thus it is more likely.
Regression to the mean tends to confirm people’s mistaken notion that punishment works better than praise; Kahneman quotes an Israeli pilot instructor who says “when I praise someone for an exceptionally good performance, he almost always does worse the next time, but when I chew out someone for a bad job, he always does better the next time.”
Insensitivity to sample size means  people are not aware that they will get results at either extreme from small samples.
The Availability Heuristic. Large classes are recalled faster than instances of less frequent classes, likely occurrences imagined more easily than unlikely ones, and associative connections between events stronger when they often occur together. But the availability heuristic results in frequent, systematic errors.
The Anchoring Heuristic. Any number mentioned in the initial request to estimate an unknown quantity or range will affect the resulting guess, however impossibly small or large the number is.
There are other sources of error aside from heuristics.
Overconfidence. Research suggests that clinical evaluations by professionals are not as reliable in predicting certain kinds of outcomes (violations of parole, recidivism, longevity of cancer patients, credit risks, the future price of a wine vintage) as formulas, that is, algorithms that equally weigh a few obvious predictors (such as Ashenfelter’s formula for wine vintage value that uses total winter rainfall, rainfall at harvest, and average temperature over the summer growing season).
WYSIATI—The intuitive mind tends to accept presented facts as all it needs (What You
 See Is All There Is), where reflection would convince us that there are some things or numbers we don’t know that would be relevant to a decision (Known Unknowns). Further reflection would suggest that there might be facts relevant to a decision that we don’t know are relevant (Unknown Unknowns).
We tend to see more order in the world than is really there. We tend to think ourselves more in control than we really are, and less subject to chance (optimistic bias) The optimistic boas lessens loss aversion—the tendency to fear losses more than we value gains. Framing works on loss aversion: more people will choose surgery if told that there is a 90% survival rate than if told that there is a 10% mortality rate. To avoid feelings of regret, people tend to continue investing in losing prospects—sunk costs.
The planning fallacy—the tendency to overestimate gains and underestimate losses—is an example of the optimistic bias.
In Prospect Theory, Kahneman found that expected utility theory, the accepted notion, did not account for the relative wealth of the person who chooses risk, but that real decision-making does. He proposes the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes. We become risk averse when there is a high probability of a large gain. We become risk seeking when there is a high probability of a large loss. We become risk seeking when there is a low probability but a chance for large gains. We become risk averse when there is a low probability for large losses.
            Rationality and Happiness—Kahneman’s research found that in remembering an experience, we rate its pleasure or pain on the peak or valley of the experience plus its ending, with no concern for duration. Moreover, the remembering self rather than the experiencing self gets the last word.
            Altogether, Kahneman’s work seems to indicate we don’t make decisions very well most of the time, and that we are not especially self-aware in any of our thinking about thinking.

           
My fiction choice is Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, written in 1969; this was a reread of a book I probably first read in the seventies or eighties. It is a book with lots of natural history—mostly botany and hemiptery, with a little of Nabokov’s expert lepidoptery. A fair amount of untranslated Russian and French is made more comprehensible because of Nabokov’s style, containing many catalogues, repetition with variation, and multilingual glosses. And like all of Nabokov, the Word is apotheosized: “Thank Log!” is a frequent expression of Van Veen, the protagonist and, as we gradually discover, the memoirist writing his own history in the third person.
            The book ends with its own blurb, and near the end is a dissertation upon time, in which Professor of Psychology Van Veen denies that the future has any part in the concept of time and which is an expression of Van’s lifelong denial of death. The book may be seen, as indeed may many novels—Austen’s romances come to mind—as a wish-fulfillment fantasy. It is an alternate-geography, alternate-history, alternate-planet story that takes place on Antiterra or Demonia. Terra, on the other hand, is a planet accessible only through the hallucinations of Van’s mentally-disturbed patients, but it is the world whose geography and history is that of our own world—the readers’ reality. Another way to look at the world map of the book, with Russia located in North America and Russian, French, and English all likely languages to be heard within any group of Americans, is that it reflects somehow the mental geography of Nabokov himself.
            Fourteen-year-old Van Veen—Ivan Dementievich Veen, whose father is most often referred to as Demon Veen—visits Ardis, the country house of his aunt Marina. There he and his cousin, twelve-year-old Ada, begin an affair that lasts for more than eighty years. The two children soon discover diaries, letters, and other documents in the attic of Ardis from which they quickly and correctly infer—both have intelligence off the IQ chart, which contributes to their mutual attraction—that Marina is in fact the mother and Demon the father of both of them. Far from deterring their affair, the discovery becomes another secret link bonding them.
            Their tryst is interrupted when Van must return to school, and it is not resumed until four years later. Another blissful summer interlude ends when Van discovers Ada has been unfaithful. He goes off to murder her two lovers, but is prevented by a silly duel in which he is injured and by the death of both of the objects of his wrath, one by his wife’s poison precipitating the fatal effects of disease, the other in an Antiterran version of a protracted Crimean War.
             Van and Ada are reunited briefly after a hiatus of five years, but when Demon Veen discovers their affair, he convinces Van to stay away from Ada so that she may have something like a normal, happy life. Ada marries, and she and Van are separated for some years. This period of reunion and separation is complicated by the presence of Ada’s younger sister Lucette, who spied on their lovemaking when they were all children, who loves Van while she also has an intimate sexual relationship with Ada, and who kills herself by leaping from an ocean liner after her last unsuccessful attempt to seduce Van.
            The lovers are again briefly reunited in their thirties in Switzerland, an idyll that ends when Ada’s husband Andrey Vinelander has an attack of “psychopathic pseudobronchitis” which may or may not have turned into tuberculosis. In any case it does not kill Andrey, who returns to Arizona, taking Ada with him, and lives on for another seventeen years. A few months after his death Ada joins Van, again in Switzerland, and they live the remainder of their long lives together: he is ninety-seven as he writes the memoir called Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, which Ada annotates as he writes.
            When I wrote that the novel is a wish-fulfillment fantasy I meant that it embodies what I regard as a particularly Nabokovian notion about true love involving the denial of convention and the embracing of the forbidden, a complication that ensures its being impossible to sustain. This notion may be seen at its most extreme in Lolita’s paean to the perverse. For Ada and Van, everyone (except perhaps Lucette) is too dim to see that their love trumps any disgust, horror, or moral opprobrium attaching to incest.

I read Hart Crane’s  Complete Poems in the 1958 Anchor Book edition introduced by Waldo Frank. Although I had read Crane before, this was my first exposure to all the poems.
            Crane’s voice is a completely unique one in American poetry. He has rigorous formal control, often with rhyme, that scarcely seems to contain the near frenzy of the lines as they range across history, juxtaposing the most disparate elements. It reminds me of a native dance fueled by peyote or other hallucinogens, where the mannered, stylized patterns of movement threaten to break apart into manic violence. But Crane’s singularity does not mean, as Frank points out in his introduction, that he was not solidly in the tradition of Whitman, whom he invokes in “Cape Hatteras.” The invocation almost turns into a conversation, with Crane as much as asking “what would you have thought of the airplane, Walt?”  This is part of The Bridge (1930) which makes up about a third of Crane’s total poetry. Although White Buildings was published first, in 1926, Frank puts The Bridge first in this book..
            “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge” describes Crane’s view of the bridge by dawn, noon,  and night, from below and presumably from the room he lived in overlooking the bridge; the “bedlamite” suicide who leaps from the bridge, and the Statue of Liberty visible from the Brooklyn side. The gull “chill from his rippling rest” is the first of a number of lines that remind me of Gerard Manley Hopkins.  In “Ave Maria” Columbus invokes the men who helped him by interceding with Queen Isabella and pronounces an exultant Te Deum for what he thinks is a successful voyage to the Orient: “I bring you back Cathay!”
             “Powhatan’s Daughter,” “Van Winkle” and other poems from the middle of The Bridge take us through real and imagined American history, all reimagined within sight of the Brooklyn Bridge. In “Cape Hatteras,” starting from Kitty Hawk, Crane juxtaposes the mechanical and industrial world with the atomic and the cosmic view, invoking Whitman, with little echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins in some lines: “Two brothers in their twinship left the dune;/Warping the gale, the Wright windwrestlers veered/Capeward, then blading the wind’s flank, banked and spun….” Somehow all this seems to lead to war, and we have both Walt’s war and Hart’s war, “from Appomattox stretched to Somme!” “The Tunnel,” the next-to-last poem, is a descent by subway into the tunnel beneath the East River, a kind of descent into the underworld with echoes of The Waste Land in overheard conversation snatches and putting another record on the gramophone; someone suggests Crane sees himself as answering The Waste Land with a poem about the promise of the New World, and in the last poem, “Atlantis,” the cables of the bridge become musical strings in a song where Atlantis is seen as some sort of continental bridge between the Old and New Worlds.
            In White Buildings Crane tries on various personae for the poet in “Chaplinesque” and “Lachrymae Christi,” updates the Faust legend in “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” eulogizes Melville in “At Melville’s Tomb,” and writes a multi-part poem about love in “Voyages.”
            In addition to some early poems Crane never reprinted and an essay, “Modern Poetry,” a section of “Uncollected Poems” contains “Eternity,” describing the aftermath of a hurricane that hit the Isle of Pines while Crane was visiting his family’s property there in 1926.
            Until the last few years, I have not spent a lot of time reading poetry in the Whitman tradition, or Whitman himself. The fact that my older son and his love are scholars of Whitman and important people in the Whitman Digital Archive has changed my attitude not only about Whitman, but about his literary heirs, of whom Crane is clearly one.
           


Sunday, December 7, 2014

Controlling the Universe



In Notes of a Native Son, which I've just finished reading, James Baldwin writes that “the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.” Only a writer could say something so outrageous as that about language. For a writer it isn’t outrageous. But a normal person would say that the root function of language has something to do with communicating with other people. Baldwin has outed writers in a big way here: we aren’t really interested in communication with other people and aren’t very good at it. We do want, along with all the villains in James Bond novels and Superman movies, to control the universe.

Friday, December 5, 2014

Making It Small

I like the things I carry to be small. First Aid kits, tool collections, and so on. I drive a small sedan, used to sail a small sailboat and fly a two-seater airplane, but I can't really claim their limitations as causes of my passion for littleness. A better excuse would be the back trouble that resulted in my two spine operations. When I carry luggage or a briefcase, I'm aware of added ounces. I even weighed the two cordless Braun electric shavers I own--neither being more than a few ounces--so I could select the lighter one for my toiletry kit.
      Take keys, for instance. For some people, a huge wad of keys attached to a belt loop with a bear chain, looking for all the world like the spiked ball of a medieval flail, is not only a tool of office but an emblem of the bearer's importance, as weighty in figurative as in literal terms. For me, a handful of keys is an annoyance that distorts my pocket and makes my trousers sag. And so I try to diminufy, littlize, attenuate, eschewing the car keys with little transmitters, cutting the plastic top from the car key to make it smaller.
      I have a drawer full of little flashlights powered by single AAA batteries or button-cell batteries or their own internal batteries rechargeable by plugging them into USB ports. But the flashlight in my pocket is only a half inch in diameter and one and half inches long--the smallest one I've ever found, but surprisingly bright. It's attached to a penknife that is not the smallest that can be found, though it's the smallest made by the Victorinox Swiss Army people, with fewer than half a dozen features.


Thursday, December 4, 2014

The Real Mexican

People can be very proprietary about their regional American brand of Mexican food. I've heard friends who were introduced to Mexican food in California or New Mexico say, when presented with a Mexican meal prepared in Tucson or Brownsville, "Well, it's good but it isn't really MEXICAN."

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Uncle Col

My wife's Uncle Col was an amused observer of the happenings around him, and when those events weren't amusing enough he would tweak them a little to provoke their essential ridiculousness. One night in Tucson we had all had dinner at Skyline Country Club's Sunday night buffet. Col came out of the restaurant into the driveway where the valet brought departing patrons their cars and found a man standing there, dressed in a suit and fairly obviously not the parking valet. But Col had a dollar in his hand and he held it out to the man, who just stared at him for a minute before saying, "What's this?" "Aren't you the valet?" asked Col, who might have been as innocently confused as he looked. The man stiffened and pulled himself up to his full height. He said, "I'm Richard Harvill, president of the university!" "Oh, oh," mumbled Col, "thought you were the valet," and his face showed no hint of a smile.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

You'll Thank Me

So here's the idea: put an ad in whatever national magazine or large regional newspaper you think might have readers likely to respond. The pitch is very simple. The ad reads, "Send me $5 and I will send you a list of all the people who responded to this ad." You might have to put a time limit on it; you might have to adjust the price. But do you see the appeal? This is a list of people who were willing to send money.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

A Place to Read

Michael Cohen, A Place to Read: Life and Books (Brisbane: Interactive Publications, 2014).

MICHAEL COHEN'S ESSAYS on the reading life are a treat to read. Relaxed, personal, wide-ranging, they contain fascinating nuggets of information and lively assessments of hundreds of books, as well as a whole life’s worth of thoughtful rumination on time, love, travel, and family, as well as what it means to be, almost existentially, a reader. – Christina Thompson, Editor, Harvard Review 

Anyone who has pounded the pavement selling The Great Books of the Western World in 54 volumes and lived to tell gets my undying respect and should get yours. Michael Cohen is a book rat, not a book snob. For him, the pleasures of the book are tactile and auditory as well as psychological and philosophical. The essays in A Place to Read take on potential plate-lunch combinations in western Kentucky, the tuxedo as male uniform, the golf course as locus of friendship and humor, and Baptist theological responses to Day of the Dead practices in Michoacán, in addition to more strictly literary subjects.
– Ann Neelon, editor of New Madrid

Michael Cohen has given us a collection of personal retrospectives that deserve a place in the finest tradition of the American essay. Each is in its own way a comment on the human situation, filtered through a personal optic that is both refined and erudite.  Amusing, highly personal, insightful, they’ll make you smile, smirk, frown, and gasp, but they’ll never bore.  I promise.
– E. A. Allen, author of the Montclaire Mysteries

Thursday, July 3, 2014

The Stars Are Going Out

OUR STAR PARTY coordinator made the sad announcement on Tuesday that this year's Twin Lakes Star Party, the twenty-fifth, will be the last. TLSP has been one of the most enjoyable events sponsored by the West Kentucky Amateur Astronomers, and it is not the first star party that has ceased to operate in recent years.

Why, my wife asked me at dinner that evening, have these star parties been disappearing? I gathered my thoughts to try to give some answers. She knows, having been head of a volunteer humane society, one of those answers. Star parties are run by volunteers, and in these sorts of organizations, the same people volunteer year in and year out. Eventually they wear out or their time is taken up by other matters.

Finally the problem is lack of new, young blood in amateur astronomy. And there are many reasons for fewer young people becoming interested, not all of them having to do with video games competing for their attention. More than half of America's population now lives in congested areas where the night sky is barely visible. I believe a wondrous dark sky full of stars and a visible Milky Way make as many converts to astronomy as our heroic efforts to show interesting sky objects to the public on planetarium nights and at other public outreach events. And telescopes themselves may be so good that, paradoxically, they become part of the problem. One of my friends got into astronomy sixty years ago by grinding his own 4-1/4-inch mirror for a telescope he then assembled. That time and effort invested him in amateur astronomy. And the time many of us have spent in pushing scopes around while star-hopping to things we wanted to see—that was time we spent learning the sky. You don’t learn the sky that way if a computer takes you to your target. My point is that lifelong amateur astronomers come from the ranks of people who find the night sky marvelous whether or not a telescope is anywhere around.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

Thurber's Thirteen Clocks

I RECENTLY REREAD James Thurber’s delightful children’s book, The Thirteen Clocks, published in 1950. The cold aggressive Duke of Coffin Castle sets impossible tasks for the suitors for the hand of his niece Saralinda, and when they fail, he whips out the sword from his cane, slits them from their guggle to their zatch, and feeds them to his geese. “Everyone has flaws,” says the Duke. “Mine is being wicked.”

Saralinda’s is the only warm hand in the castle, where there are thirteen clocks frozen at ten ‘til five since the Duke “slew time” one snowy evening. Yet everyone is aware of time here. Knowing it would take our hero, Zorn of Zorna, ninety-nine days to get to his father’s castle, get the thousand jewels the Duke demands, and get back, the Duke gives him ninety-nine hours to do it (and to start the thirteen clocks).

Saralinda is not really the Duke’s niece, but a princess he stole, and he is under a spell to keep her safe from himself and give suitors a chance at her, but when she turns twenty-one, he’ll be free to marry her, and that day is the next one after Zorn’s time expires.

Zorn is assisted by the Golux, a hapless and forgetful wizard, who suggests the jewels can come from Hagga, who weeps jewels. Of course Zorn is successful, and the Duke is left to deal with the monster, the Todal, that he has kept in his prison to prey on others.

Thurber’s book is full of wordplay, of word invention, rhyme and other sound patterns. It begs to be read aloud. And some people just don't get it. "What slish is this?" they ask in slightly different words, but echoing the Duke's reaction when his jewels turn to tears.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

You Look Like My Father, Who's in Heaven

I was sitting in the Mosaic tonight waiting for my cazuela when I noticed a couple approaching my table. They were leaving, but had veered toward me—a tallish Mexican guy, not bad-looking, and his slightly whorishly-dressed companion. The guy, who looked to be in his mid-forties, walked behind my chair and leaned over. “You look like my father, who’s in heaven,” he said. “I’m buying your dinner tonight, my friend.” And with that he pushed a fifty-dollar bill under the salsa bowl. He stuck out his hand, which I shook, but I barely had time to say “Wow, thanks” before he was gone.

Saturday, March 1, 2014

What Is Your Favorite Book?

I have trouble with the question.

The book that gave me the greatest pleasure on first reading was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and maybe that’s the one I should choose. It is also the book, along with Pride and Prejudice, The Odyssey, and Hamlet, that I’ve most often reread. Going back to a book again and again might qualify it as a favorite, though in these cases, except for the Sherlock Holmes, the rereading was for my teaching of these books. Another way to choose a favorite might be the desert island choice: if I could take only one book it would be the works of Shakespeare. If I could take two, the second one might be Don Quixote.

Okay, there are six favorites. Here are forty-four more, in no particular order. Tomorrow's list might be different.

Moby-Dick
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Six Easy Pieces
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Alice in Wonderland
Swann’s Way
Civilization and Its Discontents
Archy and Mehitabel
Richard Wilbur’s Poems
Endangered Pleasures
The World of Mr. Mulliner
The Killer Angels
How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time
Montaigne’s Essays
The Screwtape Letters
Drink to Yesterday and
A Toast to Tomorrow
Middlemarch
The Maltese Falcon
A Moveable Feast
Falling Through Space
A High Wind in Jamaica
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Treasure Island
Cry the Beloved Country
Gulliver’s Travels
Master and Commander
Ada
A Shropshire Lad
Pogo, volume 1
Poetic Meter and Poetic Form
The Moonstone
South Wind
The Importance of Being Earnest
Flannery O’Connor’s Stories
The Chronicles of Clovis
The Odes of Keats
Fathers and Sons
Catch-22
The Bookshop
The Origin of Species
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
The Oresteia
Tristram Shandy

Friday, February 7, 2014

Trendy Word

Tranche seems to be a trendy word. It means slice or portion, though why it should be preferable to those words or part, piece, chunk, hunk, bit, section, division, third, fourth... or whatever, is not clear. It comes in through finance talk, where it has been in use to signify a portion of a loan or deal, a piece of money, a section of capital. The noun turns into a verb and more commonly a participle: tranching is a process of dividing a deal into separate liens or timed disbursements, bonds into classes, and so on.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Oysters Mosca

Across the river on the Sunshine Bridge from New Orleans is Mosca's, a little roadside restaurant that can fill your car with the aroma of garlic even if you blow by at sixty. After some experiment over the years, David Earnest and Kathy and I believe we have recreated their signature menu item, a baked oyster dish simply called Oysters Mosca.  Here it is:



Oysters (a dozen per person), shucked, with half their water carefully sieved)
1-1/2 cup seasoned bread crumbs
1-1/2 sticks of butter or a combination of butter and olive oil
1 large or two medium onions coarsely chopped
1 cup mushrooms, chopped
3 cloves garlic, more if you like, minced
Parsley, chopped, if available
Juice of ½ lemon
Pepper & salt to taste
Cayenne pepper

Melt the butter and sauté onions until soft, not brown. Then add the garlic and mushrooms and sauté a few minutes more. Add bread crumbs, lemon and oyster water.  A little more moistening might be needed.  Cook for a few minutes and add salt, pepper, parsley, cayenne pepper to taste. Spread the oysters in a single layer on the bottom of a baking dish, cover with the bread crumb mixture, and bake in a 400° pre-heated oven for 10-15 minutes.

Serves 4
     The key to this dish is the amount of moisture. You may like it moist; Mosca's serves it with the oysters just done but the bread crumb mixture dry. But you can't achieve this result by cooking it longer, since that will ruin the oysters. You will have to experiment, and that's the fun. 

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Time

I have an electric toothbrush that indicates how long I should continue to brush. It pauses briefly every thirty seconds; then at the end of two minutes its motor stutters to tell me I've done enough. I do this twice a day, and this morning I realized for the first time that every two weeks I'm spending an hour brushing my teeth, or, to put it in a more depressing way, every year I spend an entire day--24 hours--doing nothing but standing in front of a sink with a toothbrush in my mouth. Maybe I should spend less time brushing. Wouldn't regaining half a day be worth two or three more hours in the dentist's chair?
     This train of thought is much too gloomy to pursue. How much time waiting for lights to turn green? Washing coffee cups? Buttoning, unbuttoning, or trying to get the damned bottom parts of the zipper engaged?