full fathom five

Reviews

I have just added a page with links to reviews and interviews of Full Fathom Five the book.  It also appears on the right hand sidebar.

Eat the Document

James Wood, in the March 3 issue of the New Yorker, reviewed two novels about radical anti-war groups of the late sixties/early seventies: Peter Carey's His Illegal Self and Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions. Because I have a stake in the subject, having made formative choices of my adulthood (my life-partner, career-path, lifestyle, politics, etc.) based on opposition to the Vietnam War, I ordered both books from my local library's interlibrary loan.   

    Meanwhile, I read a related novel, Dana Spiotta's 2006 Eat the Document, that Wood also mentioned in his review with the rare encomniums of "brittle elegance" and "spectacular."  It certainly deserves the praise. (And by the way, there are surprisingly few books on this era; it takes objective, clear-eyed reporting, at a distance of a few decades, to accurately render this tumultuous period, and frankly, many of its would-be authors were too stoned at the time to remember much).   

    Dana Spiotta, by contrast, was only a child during this period, so she approaches it as a historian.  She also uses an alternative culture closer to her own generation, the nineties, to contrast and thus characterize the earlier dissidents, intercutting chapters between the two eras.  Nineties disaffected adolescents gather in "infoshops" to organize what they call "tests," events such as Reclaim-the-Parking-Lot that showcase reactions of the public, thus reinforcing who's in on the joke, irony, or sarcasm, and - most important to the organizers - who's out.  Unlike their forebears, who were suspicious of technology and the media, these "testers" fearlessly use both as tools to ridicule the dominant culture.  They sit in the safety of their parents' suburban houses behind their computers and hack their way into corporate websites to subvert products with alternative ad-campaigns, whereas their forebears followed their alienation physically into anti-war protests, sit-ins, and back-to-the-land communes. 

    Intercutting these two eras throughout the book is a brilliant device, and Spiotta clarifies their differences by embodying the most radical fringes of both in her characters.  Mary and Bobby have gone into hiding after their 1972 bombings of Dow Chemical executives' ostensibly unoccupied vacation-homes goes awry and kills an innocent housekeeper.  This pair is contrasted with Josh, who so effectively subverts corporate websites that he's hired by his chief nemesis, a huge pharmaceutical company, to create a gated-community fashioned on a wired version of utopia that is really a subtle system of consumer control.  Josh is taken in by the irony of the outcome and the technological challenge of getting there.  He thrives, as Mary and Bobby, forced by their underground existence to jettison each other and their entire past and to minimize their engagement with the present, shrivel before our eyes. 

     Spiotta is so gifted it's literally scary.  The feeling of foreboding gathers as Mary spots her face on a wanted poster in yet another bar and flees in the middle of the night, hitching to another small town in another state where she dyes her hair a new color and changes her name.  Mary is in a prison of her own vigilance, and we inadvertently root for her -despite the heinous act she committed - because she's a perpetual underdog.  Her greatness of heart, which is apparent in her empathy for other trapped people, is the source of her undoing, what made her give her all to stop the Vietnam War.  And so we are conflicted as we read, turning pages to find a way out of our own moral ambiguity.          

Any Bitter Thing

I've had a killer-cold that's gone on for three weeks(!), so I've had a large block of time to sit by the fire and read.  I was fortunate to have Any Bitter Thing, Maine author Monica Wood's latest novel, on hand.  Although I buy all Monica's books and admire her writing and sensibility, I hadn't read this latest one even though it's been out long enough to be reissued in paperback.  A discerning reader in my book group had told me that the book turns religious at the end.  So, being agnostic, I was disappointed and never picked it up.

Boy, was I wrong!  Without giving too much away, the novel is about a Catholic priest wrongly accused of sexual abuse of his niece, whom he adopted in infancy.  In the end, the niece, now grown and having turned her back on God and the Catholic Church because of the false accusation, goes to church for the first time in twenty years.  This is the only possible reason I can see for my friend's judgment of the ending as being religious.  But the niece doesn't have any particular revelation or otherwise strong experience being back in church.  So I can't see how this could signal a religious message of any kind. 

It made me re-realize how different our interpretations of literature are, based on what we bring to the reading.  If we bring a beef with the Catholic Church in particular, I guess I could see siding with the main character's anger at her Catholic faith, and later feeling betrayed when that character goes to church in the end.  But I, who was fixated on writing techniques that were so seamlessly done that they were hard to pick out - such as the author's mixing of first-person and omniscient points of view and shifting from present to reminiscent narration - just let religious details go by without noticing, because I'm not really interested.  So each of us sees the same novel completely differently.  It failed for my friend, and succeeded for me. 

Another thing that impressed me about this novel is how the characters live on in one's mind after you put the book down.  I still picture them moving around, in exactly the way I think about people I know.  I picture them going to the ice-box, making a fire in the stove, spooning oatmeal cookie batter onto a baking sheet.   My guess on why they are so real, when other characters quickly fade from my mind, is that Monica makes them complex.  They are conflicted, usually poised between vying choices, beliefs, or characteristics, so they are interesting and charged with human energy, life.  Like all of us, so I see them as friends and miss them when the book is over.

This is a beautiful, deeply human book.  I hope you'll pick it up.      

Coming of Age

Two new coming-of-age stories I've enjoyed recently are Marisha Pessl's debut novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and British novelist David Mitchell's Black Swan Green.  Both written from the close-in, first-person viewpoint of adolescent narrators who - by definition - care intensely about fitting in, they each cover just one pivotal school year, and end with final scenes showcasing a former "loser" in the narrator's world achieving the status of seer.  The ability of the narrator to recognize this and more, signals her/his profound change.  Both endings subtly mix familiar marks of our own adolescence with idiosyncratic tics that make the narrators seem like they're actually striking out into today's world.  They walk off the last page with your faith that they'll triumph, whatever they do.  They have now become friends, iconic young people like David Copperfield and Jane Eyre who will stick in your mind forever.   

    Another resemblance these novels have are the quirky voices of their narrators.  In Pessl's novel, in particular, it is almost as if the writer sets herself the challenge of irritating the reader yet holding her/his interest in spite of it.  Pessl characterizes her protagonist as a needy prodigy by giving her the habit of citing almost every idea she has.  So, in telling us about someone she thinks is consigning himself to a living hell, (Inferno, Dante, 1300) follows.  Many of the citations are made up, I guess to suggest that - like many adolescents - she's desperate.  Even if they are of her own making, she constantly needs to prop herself up with authority-figures.      

    The only way Pessl held me through the first few chapters in this paradoxically arrogant teenager's head, was to strategically place the memory of finding a teacher's corpse on the second page, firing our curiosity.  So you're then pulled through the book by the need to know why and how this teacher died while impatiently hacking your way through citations, trying to damp down your annoyance.  "Yeah, we get it! You're wicked smaht; so what?" I kept thinking as I glazed over another citation.  It's the same irritation that Virginia Woolf puts us through with her countless parenthetical interruptions, making us have to go back and reread the beginning of the sentence to connect it to its end.   

    Mitchell's narrator puts up equivalent barriers, except his are because of a disability, not intellectual arrogance, so we tend to be more forgiving.  His thirteen year-old protagonist has a speech impediment, and his whole mission in life is to hide it from his peers so that he won't be the butt of bullying.  He personifies the force that cuts off his throat on all words beginning with "S" and "N" by the name "Hangman."  So he'll tell us something, with Hangman threatening him in almost every sentence, so that he has to find his way around the menacing trigger-words.   

    Both narrators, mercifully, suspend these quirks in key places: Pessyl when there's external action, and Mitchell in description.  So they don't interrupt what the authors either hold dear or have to nail just right.  Pessyl's examples would require whole scenes, but Mitchell's are short enough to give you a sample.  His description of coming into a summer garden: "Roses brewed the air."  An autumn vista: "A field in the distance was burnt flapjack brown. The field after that was the color paintbrush water goes."  And on the week before a new school-year starts: "These last days of freedom rattle like a nearly empty box of Tic-tacs."   

    First-person novels tend to promote voice, and with such authentic adolescent voices as these, it would be tempting for the authors to rest on their laurels, having their teenagers come to some small inner convictions over the course of the story.  But they've worked hard to polish and combine other elements, which give their novels a wider range of appeal.  Pessl has constructed an intricate, compelling plot, and Mitchell, as you see above, makes imagery that reveals his narrator's gentle, aesthetic nature amidst the coarse, cruel world of adolescent bravado.                           

Mindfulness

I'm reading social psychologist Ellen Langer's Mindfulness, a cross between a self-help- and research-book about learning how to spend less time "on automatic" and more time alert to the present moment.  She starts the book out on the roots of mindlessness, such as seeing things in categories, going through rituals or rote-behavior, jumping to conclusions because of familiar contexts, etc., all of which most of us know all-too-well.  So I found myself sort of nodding off in the beginning of the book, and having trouble picking it up again.  I kept thinking, "oh geez, this again!" and then skimming over the details.  Until I got to the category of not being open to new information, which Langer demonstrated by putting two "the"s together in the same sentence.  In the next sentence she tells us she did it, and I'm snapped awake by realizing that I didn't even notice.  This illustrates her research-finding that we prefer to see things in old, familiar forms rather than take in new information.  So we'll read nonsense sentences or sentences with skipped or duplicated words as normal, filling in the missing elements without even realizing we're doing it.  This is when I "woke up" and started really paying attention to the book.

    And this morning, watching the Australian Open men's tennis final on TV, I found Langer's lessons about unmindfulness, things I thought I already knew, flooding back to me as I became aware of my own feelings of letdown as I watched the match.  Longtime number one-in-the-world Roger Federer was up a set and a break over the new dark horse Fernando Gonzalez, whom I was rooting for.  I realized that I was disappointed and bored because I was anticipating what usually happens: Federer up a set and a break is indomitable.  I was doing several things to ruin the match for myself, among them limiting the future by seeing Federer as "unbeatable," seeing the resources of each player as limited and subject to entropy (the inevitable breaking down so that I anticipated the level of play as all downhill from here), and watching the match just for its outcome, ignoring its process. 

    I chose the most obvious of these and began to try watching Federer's process, so I could perhaps figure out how he wins all the time.  I decided I'd start with his footwork, since this is what coaches look for when they're scouting for the next tennis prodigy: a young player's footwork.  This necessitated taking my eye off the ball and the scoreboard to watch Federer's feet throughout each point.  This was damn hard, and I harked back to trying to sneak past my dog Cody the other day, and how dogs are so drawn to a moving target that it's hard to avoid their peripheral vision.  I recalled how I'd glibly differentiated myself from Cody in this way, but now found myself fighting a strong instinct to follow that little yellow ball.  (You've all seen how the audience turns its head in unison back and forth as the ball flies over the net.)   

    Keeping my gaze to Roger's feet meant shifting my attention from the outcome of each point.  But after a few points, a pattern emerged that had as much fascination as the ball and score.  I saw that the most vigorous part of Federer's preparation is not when he's getting ready to hit the ball, but the split-second after he hits the ball.  He strikes the ball, then - while everyone, including his opponent - watches the flight of the ball, Federer takes a series of quick split-steps (sideways bounces) to the quadrant of the court where the ball is most likely to come back (a simple matter of calculating angles and odds).  In this way he collapses time (in Langer's terms), making the future of his next strike of the ball almost the tail-end of the last strike. 

     When I learned tennis, way back about fifty years ago, the most I could do with coaches' perennial warning to "prepare early," was to try to get my racket back closer and closer to the time I saw the ball come off the strings of the opponent.  (I thought the game was about stroking the ball, not footwork!)  It was very hard to do this, and in my decades of playing the game, I'm still not able to alter my stroke more than a few points a set.  That's because the natural tendency is to watch the ball coming towards you, and then swing at it all in one continuous motion.  Training yourself to see the ball early off the strings of your opponent and draw your racket back as you do, breaks this naturally fluid movement in two.   

      But that's just racket preparation.  Roger Federer, of course, has it all: early racket preparation and - duh! - footwork.  His eager bounces sideways on the balls of his feet immediately upon striking the ball are - in Langer's schema - because his future (the next ball that will come at him) dictates his present (getting into position).  He strikes the ball, then his anticipated next strike moves him across the court. 

    Watching things this way makes the result of his first strike almost incidental.  Time after time, I found myself watching his feet and wondering where the ball was, disappointed when Roger stood still for an instant waiting for the ball, in perfect position, and the ball ended up smacking the net off his opponent's racket.  For the first time (after watching Federer play for years!), I got an inkling of how it must be to be Federer, the disappointment he feels when the ball doesn't come back.  Now, at last, I can hear what coaches of the past meant when they said that at net you have to want the ball to come back.  If you don't, if you're afraid of it, or just standing there flatfooted hoping your opponent will make a mistake, you might as well go back to the baseline because you'll never be any good up there.  Roger's wanting the ball to come back, no matter where he is on the court, reverses the normal context of the play.  (And this is why he's a champion).  I had come to the match with the assumption that either player welcomes the errors of his opponent.  Watching Roger's footwork instead of the ball turned that assumption on its head.  This is what Langer calls changing the context.

    At the awards ceremony, Roger again changed the context.  Instead of abiding by the ritual that has opponents keeping to their chairs on either side of the umpire's box while the trophies are brought out, Federer gets up, goes over to Fernando Gonzalez, and leans down to him, putting his face on Fernando's level, asking him questions then cocking an ear to really listen to his answers.  Fernando looks slightly taken aback, giving cursory answers, then smiles, looking wistfully after Federer as he's whisked away by tournament officials.  In a few minutes, they're on the podium together, and Fernando's talking up a storm to Roger, both men clearly relaxed and happy.  It's wonderful to see, and even though Fernando, when given the microphone, says "This is the hardest thing I've had to do in the two weeks of this tournament," he goes on to give a relaxed and authentic thanks to audience, sponsors, tournament officials, and to Roger, "a wonderful person." 

    It was a great match, both on and off the court, and Langer gave me the tools to see its greatness, something I would have missed if not for her.  It's one of the first times I've wanted to write a fan-letter.  But first, I guess I really should finish the book!    

             

A Fence-jumping Writer

I've just discovered an incredible novelist: Colm Toibin, author of The Master, a book I'd never heard of and didn't mean to read.  I'm under a deadline for the next two months, and I'm not even letting myself read my next book-group selection, judging that I don't have time for any but deadline- and work-related reading.  But my husband just finished The Master, and recommended it.   

   So I made the mistake of picking it up while I was waiting for him to come out of a store or something, and the book was the only readable thing in the car at the time.  And once I picked it up, I was gone.   

   But for the life of me, I can't fathom why.  Toibin, apparently an Irish writer, and one I've never heard of, has written a masterpiece, bringing the great Henry James to life on the page.  And he breaks some major "rules" of creative writing that I've taught for the last twenty years, leaving me more grateful than ever that I've moved into a different field (ESL) than one that seemed less teachable the longer I taught it.  Writing is doing, so beyond being a prod to make students do, a teacher has little conceptual knowledge to pass on to students.   

   The first conceptual "rule" Toibin breaks is opening his novel inside a character's head.  And we're not only inside Henry James's head, we're not even getting his take on the "real" world.  He's dreaming.  So it's as if Toibin is challenging himself to counter every strategy to hook readers in his opening: there's only one character onstage; there's no action; and we're inside someone's dream.  There are no senses at work, nothing to imaginatively involve the reader, and the reader has, as yet, no stake in the character and thus no reason to be interested in his dream.   

    And yet, I was hooked.  I went back and read over the short paragraph, and I think now what drew me in was this very imaginative spareness, the lacks that I just cited. The author sets up a literary desert, and the few sense-perceptibles he sprinkles in soak into our parched imaginations, triggering strong empathy.  Henry James is like all of us in the lonely hour before dawn: woken by the effort of trying to hold on to the fleeting images of dead loved-ones in a dream, aware of creaking neck muscles that signal aging and mortality.  Toibin thus makes one of our greatest writers human and accessible, someone readers can immediately identify with.   

    Toibin then proceeds to tell us about characters and events via straight exposition, rather than showing via scene.  As in his opening, he suggests scenes, but does it sparsely.  Like his master Henry James, he does rooms particularly vividly.  But most of the novel is pure exposition about Henry's thoughts, jumping the fence that writing texts set up against anything but action and external description to characterize.   

   It reminds me of years ago when I was going through a creative writing program, and how we students would puzzle over student stories criticised by the intructors being simultaneously accepted for publication in literary journals.  We quickly learned that if there was any body of conceptual knowledge in this field that might shorten the journey to publication, it was regularly challenged by many writers. 

    This novel is more than just meeting a challenge, though.  There is something calmingly familiar about the work, as if in it's pages, the reader finds herself finally home.  Perhaps it's Toibin's genius at describing rooms, particularly homey, cosy rooms against rainy, gray English winters.  Perhaps it's the way these rooms ameliorate James's exile from his native New England.  Or perhaps because it's written so close in to James's consciousness that we feel, throughout the novel, that we're in the presence of a comfortable companion, if not a friend.   

    This book makes me want to take up Henry James, something I haven't done in decades.  I also look forward to reading more Toibin novels, and I'd love to hear from anyone who knows anything about this guy.  Some of his titles are: The South; The Heather Blazing; The Story of the Night; and The Blackwater Lightship.                   

Two Illuminating reads

Two of the four books I read on our sailing vacation were in that rare category of delivering truths so hard to face, that they're not entertaining, but redeem themselves by illuminating a situation that resounds in your mind for days after, then hardens into lifelong knowledge.  Which is a longwinded way of saying that I found these books of utmost importance.   

   The first, The Places in Between, is an unembellished account of Scotch author Rory McStewart's 2002 walk across Afghanistan.  All the way across, from Herat to Kaboul, McStewart had to wangle letters of endorsement from the most powerful warlords in each region.  Only by having these letters on his person, was McStewart able to survive confrontations by gangs of armed and desperately poor, hungry vagabonds haunting the snowy mountains and dry plains.  The letters meant that he was under the protection of these warlords, and this was the way he also found hospitality.   

   This dependence on physical power was played out in every aspect of Afghan society: every detail of relating to others, even down to where you sit in a room, depends on your power and status.  The most powerful man always sits furthest from the door, with the less powerful arrayed around him in a definite pecking-order.  There are no women in the rooms of this book; the genders are strictly segregated. 

So what I came out of the book feeling, was despair for our western values of negotiation, individual freedom, and the rule of law ever taking root in Afghanistan.  But our foreign policy in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East, assumes that this region understands democracy, wants it, and - with enough aid - will eventually get it.  After reading this book, I have little hope of that.   

   The second book argues that this divide is caused more by religion than power.  Faith is the culprit in Sam Harris's provocative The End of Faith.  This is a hard book to read because Harris beats the reader over the head with his premise that religion is the most divisive force in our history as well as in current events, and that our survival depends on our overcoming the current taboo against questioning each other's faith.  Harris says that we live a perpetual choice between conversation and violence, and we've got to choose the former if we wish to survive.  We have got to overcome our polite silence around faith-based statements and beliefs, and put religion back into public discourse.   

   

    Harris rightly says that we have given a pass to religion, letting it thrive without subjecting it to the same laws of evidence and rational analysis that we subject every other kind of belief to.  For instance, if we have an intolerable headache, we believe the cure lies in current medical practices, not techniques of The Middle Agest.  We wouldn't let a doctor drill holes in our head to "exorcise demons;" we'd go to the most up-to-date clinic or hospital.  Religion is the only field in which we rely on ancient texts and practices to fuel our beliefs and behavior.  And, Harris says, these texts tell us to commit atrocities that have kept us at war for our entire history.   

    Harris is extremely persuasive, and unfortunately, terrorists make his case stronger every day.  They are acting on parts of the Koran that Harris relentlessly catalogues to show that reliance on these ancient texts - and he includes the bible in this analysis - is killing us.  And abetting that lethal work is our polite tolerance, our refusal to shine the light of reason on religious beliefs.  "What is worst in us (outright delusion) has been elevated beyond the reach of criticism, while what is best (reason and intellectual honesty) must remain hidden, for fear of giving offense," says Harris.   

    I found Harris's case very hard to counter, but I would have liked to see a final chapter on possible situations and scripts for how we can begin to talk about matters of faith diplomatically enough to keep people in the same room with us.  I agree with him that it's dangerous to accept our current silence around religious beliefs, but how to start talking about them is the kicker.  My recent book group's slide away from faith into politics the other day when we tried discussing this book, proved that the practical implementation of Harris's message, even among friends, is hard to pull off.  But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.               

       

Good summer reads

People seem to like light fare for summer reading, I guess stemming from lightweight paperbacks one can pack in beach-bags.  Two light-reads I've found that are the perfect blend of engagement and learning something by book's end, are Anonymous Lawyer by law-blogger Jeremy Blachman, and Marley and Me by John Grogan.  The first is a new twist on the epistolary novel, done all in e-mail and blog-entries, held together by a supercilious and very unreliable narrator.  What keeps us reading is Blachman's humor plus our feeling of moral superiority to this money-grubbing, status-obsessed narrator, who will do anything to top the ladder in his big-law firm.  It's high-farce, something I don't normally find relevant enough to my own life to sustain my interest, but the epistolary structure that manages to tell more about the first-person narrator than he thinks he's telling via different internet media is clever and engaging, and Blachman makes this highly inventive form look effortless.   

    Marley & Me is also high-farce, but anchored enough in the daily stuff of relationship to be deeply engaging.  Another draw is intense and ongoing conflict, given the fact that two naive city-dwellers with demanding, fulltime jobs take on an over-sized, high-energy Labrador-retriever puppy, hooking us into rooting for this couple to work out the enormous problems that this dog brings to their household.  And we don't want them to have to give the dog up, because it's clear that no one else would take him; this is Marley's only chance at life.   

   This ups our stake in this dog, and I found myself bent over the page saying "Come on, Marley, get it!"  But Marley's like past retrievers I've had, who ask to go out, only to come trotting around to the side door where they scratch or jump up to peer in the window, slavering to come in.  You let them in, and they immediately trot back to the first door, panting to go out to start the round again.  Only Marley's worse.  He's not only dumb, but has all kinds of behavioral tics like thunderstorm terror and fear of being alone, that do tons of real estate damage and can never be eradicated.  At one point, Grogan, at his wit's end, researches dog experts and learns that the kindest thing he could do to a freak-of-nature like Marley, is to have him euthanized.   

    This doesn't sound good, but is truly a case of bad grapes in the hands of a good writer being turned to champagne.  Grogan had me about falling off the deck with laughter, and my husband kept asking when I'd be finished so he could read it.  We whipped through that book in about three days.  Now it's with our daughter, and I doubt my friend who lent it to me will see it anytime soon, as I've promised it to several more people. 

    And a third book that I always think of as a summer read, is The Summer Guest, by Justin Cronin.  This is a novel set in a fishing camp up in what sounds like the Moosehead Lake region of Maine.  The setting is glorious, and the characters well-developed and memorable.  These two elements are so strong that the plot seems almost an afterthought.  But it's intriguing and plausible, and you're left with the feeling of having visited a community that you wish you could go back to and live in, very much like the small Maine towns novelist Richard Russo sets us down in.  I'm taking my book-group there for the last precious days of summer, when I assign them this book at our upcoming meeting.   

   

Positive Psychology

I've been reading the second book in my self-study of Positive Psychology, a new field that started in 1998.  I first read Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis, a history of psychology's and philosophy's findings on the good life, that I reviewed here not long ago.  Now I'm reading Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness, which is a practical guide to building more positive emotion into our lives.   

   

Positive psychology is a major shift from psychology's lifelong focus on mental illness and disorder to the traits that make people thrive and the experiences that make life worth living. The positive psychologists are building a classification system of emotional strengths and sanities that, in the same way psychiatry classified the disorders and insanities, allow researchers and practitioners to agree when a strength is present.   

   

Seligman's book makes a persuasive case for putting more happiness into our lives.  One study featured a group of 180 nuns who lived roughly the same cloistered lives, with the same diet, reproductive and marital histories, the same access to medical care, etc.  Researchers read their novitiate essays, written in 1932 before the nuns took their final vows.  They rated the amount of positive feeling expressed in each essay, shaped by words like happy, joyful, grateful, thankful, etc. (Examples of these essays are presented, so readers can judge for themselves the difference in these young writers' stances towards life.) The researchers found that 90 percent of the most cheerful quarter of the group was alive at age 85 versus only 34 percent of the least cheerful quarter.  And 54 percent of the most cheerful quarter was alive at 94, as opposed to 11 percent of the least cheerful.   

   

Longevity is just one outcome affected by attitude; Seligman reports similar findings of career and relationship success, health benefits, creativity and problem-solving ability, and feelings of well-being tied to a positive stance towards life. He then outlines practical exercises we can use to increase our happiness "set-point," which is a characteristic mood-range that we seem to inherit.  A particularly potent exercise is building optimism by recognizing and then arguing down pessimistic thoughts.  (Pessimism is an easy habit to acquire because negative thoughts and the tendency to inflate danger once had the evolutionary reward of keeping us safe from predators.)   

   

Seligman first shows us how to differentiate pessimism from optimism.  The pessimist generalizes bad events throughout time and space; the optimist limits bad events to specific time and circumstance.  So the trick is to recognize this pattern, then rationally dispute the pessimistic stance.  (This method of disputation by marshalling evidence distinguishes positive psychology from Norman Vincent Peale's positive thinking, which is more a kind of boosterism or repetition of positive phrases.  The logical argument method advocated by positive psychology appeals to more scientific and sceptical minds).   

   

Here's an example that I found myself trying as I read.  We've had almost steady rain here in the Northeast for two solid months.  I've generalized this rain into our future by seeing it as a sign of global warming, and I've assumed defeat in the battle against global warming ever since Bush's rejection of the Kyoto treaty.  I thus see the rains as the start of a downward trajectory that will eventually threaten all life on the planet.  This is the most pessimistic view of the rains one could possibly have, and makes them much more depressing than they are.   

   

What are they?  Perhaps a symptom of global warming, perhaps not.  Whichever they are, they're limited to the specific times they come. They don't extend indefinitely into future or past, as I unconsciously assumed whenever I saw them.  As soon as I disputed this (aided by the fact that I'm an ignoramous in science, and thus don't carry around a working knowledge of global warming, much less that we're beyond the point of no return), I felt that I'd broken through a logjam.  I was flooded with ideas of how my husband and I can decrease the carbon "footprint" we leave on the planet.  I realized that although I complain plenty about non-Kyoto Bush and people in SUV's and pickups, I've never even investigated the ride-share network we have in our area;  I thought of some more energy-hogging appliances (our iron, electric grill, etc.) that we can get rid of, and I realized how much I leave computer, printer, and lights on when I'm not using them.  I felt energized and eager to learn more about taking our own environmental responsibility (instead of helplessly carping at Bush) for the first time in years.   

   

This new empowerment is exactly what Seligman describes as an outcome of "learned optimism."  It's just one example of how practical this book is, how it can make you feel more active, effective, and eager in the very act of reading.  This convinces me that the positive psychologists are onto something.   

   

One caveat I have is that the personal anecdotes Seligman uses about his family, professional recognition, and past work (on "learned helplessness"), weaken the book by making the author look a bit smug.  But I decided to take this as clumsy writing rather than character; then it doesn't taint the whole enterprise and you can simply read past it for the ideas and methods, which are substantive and inspiring.   

           

Happiness Research

I have a rule against buying books (my dream is to rid our house of all but a collection of good reference books that fit only our existing shelves), but I've broken it for Jonathan Haidt's "The Happiness Hypothesis."  Thanks to Cowtown Pattie's (http://www.texastrifles.blogspot.com/) wonderful book-service link she posted the other day, it's coming in the mail.  In hardback, no less!

That's how good it is, this primer, just out from Basic Books, on happiness.  In only about 247 pages, "positive psychologist" Haidt gives us the latest research on how to be happy, showing experiments testing ancient ideas on the subject, and then translating all this psychology and philosophy into concrete, daily exercises we can do to increase our happiness.  Positive psychology is a new field that emerged in the mid-nineties, shifting the traditional focus of psychology from disorders and disease to health and happiness.  Starting with ancient ideas such as the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do to you, Haidt shows us recent experiments that reveal the power of reciprocity in our ethics and behavior.   

This power runs throughout all cultures and eras; Haidt shows that our species is hard-wired to exchange benefits and costs.  He reminds us of how salespeople and fundraisers of all sorts will give away something free up front, to activate our tit-for-tat reflex, and unless we consciously know the power of reciprocity, we'll fall right in line, feeling obligated to buy products that we don't want or give money to causes we don't support.  He cites the Hari Krishna group in airports in the sixties giving away flowers to passersby; most of those people who took flowers then felt obligated to dig into their pockets for money.

After convincing us that reciprocity is a powerful force, Haidt shows us some daily kindnesses we can practice that use this instinct to enhance our sense of well-being.  The daily practices - small things like singling out someone you're grateful to and thanking them - are ways Haidt says we can "tame the elephant."  Haidt likens the human self to a rider on an elephant.  The rider is our conscious mind, the part of us that uses language to assess our situation and plan how to enhance it, and the elephant our unconscious - the vast part of us beneath our awareness, that reacts without thinking.  This part is wild, untamed, and far beyond the control of the relatively new, underdeveloped conscious mind.  While the tools of consciousness - like language - are a relatively recent development in human evolution, the "elephant" has had thousands more years to maximize efficiency.  This is why, says Haidt, that a computer will beat a human in chess games or math calculations or organizing data any day, but the most sophisticated computer in the world could never mimic the ability of a six year-old child to follow a path through the woods.  Our logical, thinking mind is thus way behind our gut reactions, and those have been hard-wired through thousands of years to keep us safe from predators.  And what Haidt says has kept us safest as a species, is negative attitudes - of always anticipating danger.     

But in these modern times, when we are relatively safe from natural predators, this negative attitude no longer serves us.  However, knowing that and changing our behavior are two different things.  Haidt discusses our frequent resolutions to change, but says that even our most powerful epiphanies fade after a few weeks.  That's because our "elephant" is much more powerful than our conscious mind.  Our "rider" is too tiny, too undeveloped at this stage of our evolution, to control the elephant.  But we can, through daily practice, tame the elephant, retrain it.  The three most effective ways to do this, Haidt says, are meditation, cognitive psychology (and the daily tasks of kindliness, such as showing gratitude are of this category), and anti-depressants. 

I hope this quick account piques your interest.  The only caveat I have is that this book is dense, packed with information, and so for those of you who share my ignorance of brain physiology and science in general, it's a slow read.  But believe me, it's worth it for its practical value.  I already have broken some habitual thought-patterns that weren't serving me well - just by becoming aware of them via this book.