Books

Thrity Umrigar’s The Weight of Heaven

Uncategorized, Winter 2015-16

by Sahar Jaafar Al-Keshwan

Frank and Ellie, Indian immigrants to America, are shattered when they lose their child to a sudden illness. They return to India, where they believe that they will find healing and consolation.  However, they have great difficulty surviving in and re-assimilating into the culture of India. In America, theysuffered discrimination, but in India they are faced with a culture shock that makes them question their own identities. Thrity Umrigar’s novel The Weight of Heaven (HarperCollins, 2009), delves into the complicated world of people who feel like immigrants in their own country.

When Frank gets a job managing a factory, he thinks that he will help improve the villagers’ lives. But he is challenged by, and eventually comes to hate, the culture of the town. The Indians around him, meanwhile, dream of America as the land of promises and opportunities. Frank knows that America is not what they imagine, but he is helpless convincing them otherwise. As a result, Frank “finds himself floundering in a country that seems increasingly foreign to him.” He feels that he has more in common with the American soldiers in Iraq, who also think that they are coming to another country to save its culture and life, but who end up with a “contempt and hatred for a culture they had come to save but was destroying them.”

Ellie also suffers from a clash with Indian culture. She volunteers as a therapist for women “trapped in a cycle of violence,” hoping that she can improve their lives. She had envisioned a bright and exotic life in India, while the truth was that the Indians suffered and struggled to earn their bread. “What could she ask these women to do?” wonders Ellie. “Go to the gym to combat depression? Take Prozac when they could barely afford wheat for their bread?” Ellie thinks that her experience in America could help the Indian villagers in her home country, but the Indians do not appreciate her purpose and dream of going to America, as it represents India’s “suitor” for them.

One reviewer, Sandip Roy, says, “Umrigar does not provide pat answers. Instead, to her great credit, she presents India, not as some passive, helpless victim, but as its own agent, smiling at its rich American suitors and manipulating them at the same time.”

The reader might consider the theme of this novel to be the cultural and psychological clash between two cultures. However, Umrigar also implies that, like Frank and Elie, Americans invade other countries under the guise of offering assistance. Indeed, this happens to Frank and Ellie, who are both victims of American colonialism. They emigrate to America to seek a better life, then return after their son dies to recover and heal, but again they fail. Their loss of their son could represent the loss of their identities, which they can find neither in America nor in India.

Umrigar also successfully shows the conflict suffered by Asian Americans when they return home. They are haunted by their culture and their memories of their home countries, but they are also haunted by their newly adopted culture in America.

 

Sahar Jaafar teaches English in Baghdad and is pursuing a Ph.D. in American Literature.

 

 

Challenging Everest

Uncategorized, Winter 2015-16

by Emma Collins

 

High above the world stand the peaks of mighty mountains, beacons for humble humans to come and prove their strength, courage, and resilience. Humans are unable to turn away from Mother Nature’s challenges, driven by some unquenchable need to conquer and claim her. But in all her wild glory, she does not go quietly into that good night of submission.

Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak at nearly six miles above sea level (29,029 feet, up there with the cruising altitude of a commercial jet) has claimed more than 250 lives. In all her cold, barren, thin-air rapture the mountain attracts thrill-seekers from across the globe every year to risk their lives for glory. While most deaths are attributed to avalanche, such as the 2015 avalanche triggered by the 7.8 Nepali earthquake that claimed 22 lives on the mountain, many more were horrific climbing accident tragedies.

Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest chronicles the events that took place on May 10 and 11, 1996, when a freak blizzard struck the mountain while climbers were attempting to reach her summit.  The movie follows Adventure Consultants, a company that offers professional guides to take climbers to the peak. The commercialization of Everest’s summit is a controversial topic that continues to draw criticism today; the bodies of climbers who perished on the ascent still line the path to the summit. Rob Hall, played by Jason Clarke, first popularized guided Everest climbs and lead a team of climbers during the 1996 events. ) For those unfamiliar with the historic disaster, the following information may spoil the movie.)

Eight people perished in the blizzard, including Hall, whose body still remains on the mountain.  Adventure Consultants lost four clients. The movie tells a story of human error, survival, and loss.  For those willing to accept historical events being glamorized for Hollywood entertainment, Kormákur offers a stressful adventure that may often leave one feeling breathless with the thin air of impossible peaks.  The cast is well chosen, although at times there are lengthy scenes of excessive emotional examination that, while offering a heart-wrenching look into the events, can feel heavy handed.  The truth behind the story offers enough emotionally charged reality.

The movie’s portrayal of Everest shows beautiful, barren landscapes contrasted with lush and untamed wilderness, a contrast that underscores the foreignness of one of Earth’s most treacherous landscapes. Scenes of home life, specifically the domesticity of the family of climber Beck Weathers (played by Josh Brolin), help to articulate the almost familiar tone in which such a monumental tragedy is told. These were not strangers beyond the reach of mortal men: they were simple people with extraordinary dreams. Kormákur offers basic medical terminology to help articulate the impossibility of the human body at 30,000 feet, but it is through the sounds of labored breathing, pained cries, and frozen, half-dead stares that the challenge Everest is made plain.

While many specifics surrounding the climbers’ deaths may never be known, it is nonetheless heartbreaking to watch as those men and women, all seeking glory for different means, perish in the face of the unthinkable. Several aspects of the story Kormákur chooses to tell almost cause fury in the watcher, as some climbers die in the face of others’ ignorance. To go into this movie looking for a Sunday evening relaxation is to be foolishly misinformed of just what the story entails.

Entertaining? Yes.

Heartbreaking? Even more so.

Everest attempts to articulate something Hall himself died trying to instill in his climbers: respect the mountain. For in an instant, she can hurl you into oblivion.

Contributing Editor Emma R. Collins of Ashby, Massachusetts, studies English and Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and hopes to become a literary editor.

 

Why Maria Edgeworth Matters

Uncategorized, Winter 2015-16

by Sean O’Rourke

Believe me, I know. A nineteenth- century novelist may not seem the sexiest subject in the world. But try this: think of Maria Edgeworth as a woman who attempted to exert her influence far beyond the boundaries that her patriarchal society had set for her, who worked in a rebellious and war-ravaged land, and whose own life was threatened by a massive uprising that would define political life in her country for the next century.

Maria Edgeworth

Maria Edgeworth

Edgeworth was a descendant of English settlers, long since integrated into Irish society,  known as the Anglo-Irish. These people were often Protestant and landholding, but they occupied a liminal space: they were neither entirely Irish, nor were they entirely English. This put her and her family in danger when the Irish rose up in 1798 and she was forced to flee her estate by oncoming rebels. She also became one of the most influential novelists of the early nineteenth century despite, or perhaps because, she was marginalized, both by her ethnicity and by her sex.

She certainly does not hold this influence today though. Writers like Dickens and Austen have stayed a part of our literary canon and continue to influence writers and readers. Edgeworth has fallen by the wayside.

Turn your mind then from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Today we’re dealing with issues like sexism, xenophobia, and racism. Look at our election process. Look at how political careers are bolstered by these qualities. Look at how we allow ourselves to be divided even from people within our own country, by race, by religion, by politics, even by gender. We’ve seen many tragic instances recently of the desolation left in the wake of denying the basic humanity of our fellow human beings. In the light of viewing our broken world, I’m made even sadder by Edgeworth’s exclusion from our literary canon.

I challenge you to go to your local library and take out Edgeworth’s Ennui and read it. Look at how people in nineteenth century Ireland were divided by religious differences, by political differences, and by racial differences. See how women were excluded then as they often are now. And then look to see how much of these problems within the novel are caused by a stubborn refusal to communicate with one another as equals. In short, Maria Edgeworth identifies a lack of conversation in her society.

You see, Maria Edgeworth, since she was an Anglo-Irish landlord, was able to have conversations with a great many people: people of her own class, English people, and Irish people, tenants, and landlords. She conversed and from that found a philosophy of equality between English subjects and Irish subjects. She was not what we would now identify as an Irish nationalist, but she believed in equality for those oppressed subjects living under the crown.

Part of the problem with oppression is that it silences people. Many Irish were not allowed the power to converse in parliamentary debates because they were Catholic, or because they were not educated enough. In addition, since the Irish parliament in Dublin dissolved itself in 1801, there was no real political power in the hands of the native Irish and with Irish landlords. Religious, and economic differences also unofficially barred them from having many conversations with the Anglo-Irish and the English, especially due to the fact that many Irish people only spoke Irish, having never been taught English. Maria Edgeworth, however, through her book, is a champion of the conversation that was so repressed in this period.

In her book, the narrator travels to Ireland and has many conversations with other Anglo-Irish lords, with his native Irish tenants, and even with a loyal Scotsman who proves to be one of his greatest allies. These conversations lead him away from the philosophy of violent repression and towards a desire to educate his tenants and improve their lives and he only learns to do those by actually talking to them as equals. 

It seems a simple, perhaps even obvious solution to many systemic societal problems until you realize how little it actually happens. We are cloistered in our neighborhoods, in our jobs, in our college campuses. Our class system may be less obvious, but that does not make it any less damaging to those who get ignored and whose voices are silenced by our lacking the knowledge that having open and honest conversation could remove this silence. We could use a bit of education by Edgeworth.

Now, I’m certainly not saying that having the odd conversation with people you don’t usually talk to is going to end all violence and produce peace and harmony amongst all religions, nationalities, and economic classes. However, I think by seeing how Edgeworth uses conversations to overcome the boundaries, that we might be better able to deal with issues such as racism, sexism, and xenophobia more adequately, more peacefully, and more compassionately.

That has been one of the great joys of reading Edgeworth and reading in general. It’s one of those old ideas that your English teachers keep telling you over and over again: that what you’re reading is still relevant today. It’s one of those things we hear over and over again, take for granted, then fail to truly consider. With Edgeworth, the power, relevance, and potential application of literature becomes quite clear. This is what makes her so interesting and so incredibly important.

Sean O’Rourke is a senior at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass. As an English major, he is a part of the Sigma Tau Delta Honor Society and aspires to teach English at the collegiate level.

Photo credit: Portrait of Maria Edgeworth. Photograph. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 14 Dec 2015. http://quest.eb.com/search/300_209998/1/300_209998/cite

 

 

Lighting a Path for Women Writers: Maria S. Cummins’s The Lamplighter

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Tom Matthews

 

“America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women” were the famous, spiteful words of Nathaniel Hawthorne in a letter to his editor, William D. Ticknor. Hawthorne was incensed at the success of Maria S. Cummins’s novel, The Lamplighter, published in 1854. “What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of The Lamplighter,” grumbled Hawthorne, “and other books neither better nor worse?”

Granted, this was the nineteenth century; Hawthorne’s question was probably circulating the minds of many competing writers. His term,  “damned mob of scribbling women,” was a clear attack on the significance and credibility of women’s writing, yes, but it may also be that Hawthorne was perplexed as to how this “mob” was achieving such success.

                                                                             Nathaniel Hawthorne / Photo. Photograph. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 15 Sep 2015.  

                                                                             Nathaniel Hawthorne / Photo. Photograph. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 15 Sep 2015.  

Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Lamplighter was a bestselling novel published by John P. Jewett. Although forgotten now, the novel was a huge success in its time, a success commonly accredited to the savvy marketing of Jewett.

Jewett began the marketing campaign with advertisements that explicitly predicted the success of the novel. ‘A GREAT BOOK COMING,’ Jewett announced, noting his company had “in press, and will publish about the First of March, a work of extraordinary power and ability, one which will rank among the very best productions of American or Foreign Genius.” It is interesting to note that Jewett says nothing about the author, giving the work an air of inherent mystery.

Ironically, Cummins’ acceptance of this anonymity was a submission to the very marginalization of women highlighted and challenged in the novel. This doesn’t mean, however, that Cummins was a hypocrite. At the time, male writers dominated the American literary world, and female writers faced much more difficulty having their work published and taken seriously. Cummins’s decision to agree to anonymous advertisement can be seen as a sacrifice in order for her work to receive fair and equal treatment. She may have felt such a sacrifice was the only way to give voice to the ideals she felt were unrepresented in American literature.

                                                                                                                                                     Maria S. Cummins / Wikipedia

                                                                                                                                                     Maria S. Cummins / Wikipedia

Cummins was unknown before The Lamplighter, and Jewett feared the novel would flop if the public knew its author was an unpublished woman. His advertisements piqued interest in the novel, as he hoped. Cummins’ anonymity did not last long, however, and she was asked to contribute to several Massachusetts newspapers. So Jewett’s strategy not only garnering interest in the novel but also (unintentionally) created a demand for Cummins’ writing.

The novel achieved bestselling status and was released in multiple editions, targeted at a wide-ranging audience. Scholar Susan Williams writes, “Soon after The Lamplighter was published in 1854, it became readily available in a variety of formats: children could enjoy a picture book with a heavily abridged plot; art lovers could admire sumptuously illustrated editions; and travelers throughout England and Europe could purchase inexpensive railroad editions.” This ensured an audience beyond that of middle-class American women.

The book’s success was more than a financial one. Cummins not only produced a quality story with The Lamplighter but also created an activity for women that was entertaining and full of value—one that women could feel satisfied engaging in. “This cult of domesticity sanctioned reading,” writes Williams,  “especially for women, as a productive way to fill one’s leisure time: to read a female Bildungsroman such as The Lamplighter was to participate in an activity that combined entertainment with the inculcation of virtue.”

Hawthorne was merely playing his part in a literary period of elitism that looked down on bestsellers. This highbrow literary elitism, although very much alive in the nineteenth century, did not affect readers’ response to The Lamplighter or their perceived literary value of the novel.

It may also be that Hawthorne felt his publisher was not as competent as Jewett and that he was losing sales. Williams points out that Hawthorne’s publisher was a competitor of Jewett and suggests, “Hawthorne may also have been diplomatically questioning the comparably poor performance of his own chosen publisher.”

With The Lamplighter, Maria S. Cummins claimed a place for women in the literary market. Furthermore, it both proved that women are more than capable of producing valuable work and paved the way for future women writers. Whether Jewett knew it or not, he was part of something significantly bigger than a successful marketing campaign.

Photo credits:

Contributing Editor, Tom Matthews, is a Senior at Clark University where he majors in English, specializing in Creative Writing and Journalism.

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Denise Levertov, Poet and Mentor

Fall 2015, Uncategorized

by Michael True

                                                                                                                                      Denise Levertoc/Photo by Michael True

                                                                                                                                      Denise Levertoc/Photo by Michael True

A major American poet of the 20th century, Denise Levertov left her mark on the rich literary history of Worcester, Mass., through her readings from the late 1960s to the 1990s, her friendships with local writers, and her 1974 poetry workshop at Assumption College. She, Robert Bly, and Stanley Kunitz helped to launch the Worcester County Poetry Association, Inc., now in its forty-fourth year. In addition to her recently published Collected Poems, she is the subject of two excellent biographies: Donna Hollenberg’s Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Revolution, and Dana Greene’s Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Life.

A special legacy is Levertov’s influence on local poets, including the late Chris Gilbert, Mary Fell, and John Hodgen, who have since received national awards. At a celebration marking the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Worcester Review, Hodgen remembered Levertov’s reading at the conclusion of the Assumption College workshop: “Denise filling La Maison Auditorium on a hot summer night, the crowd so enraptured, the room spilling over, so crowded each poem made you hungry for more, so crowded I sat out on the lawn under the window where she was reading, so filled up with poems I was writing even then.”

Sometimes regarded as a political poet because of her powerful renderings of the effects of the Vietnam war, that is a misleading classification. Poems such as “Live at War” do convey a sense of that tragic conflict and the suffering of the Vietnamese people:  “We are the humans, men who can make/ ….who do these acts,/ who convince ourselves/ it is necessary/…burned human flesh/ is burning in Vietnam as I write.” The same is true of ”The Altars in the Streets,” a response to that war based on Levertov’s time there with Muriel Rukeyser: “all the shed blood the monsoons cannot wash away/ has become a temple,/ fragile, insolent, absolute.”  As with poems by veterans such as Bruce Weigl, it speaks for the Vietnamese people struggling to sustain themselves in the crossfire. As with her love poems and religious poems, the war poems succeed through an artistry of image, sound, and argument.

During the years of her involvement in the anti-war movement, including the arrest and trial for civil disobedience of her husband, Mitchell Goodman, Levertov was occasionally overwhelmed by the effects of the war on people back home. The natural world offered her some solace, as in “Concurrence”:

each day’s terror, almost
a form of boredom—madmen
at the wheel and
stepping on the gas and
the brakes no good–
and each day one,
sometimes two, morning glories,
faultless, blue, blue sometimes
flected with magenta, each
lit from within with
the first sunlight.

Her friend and mentor, Robert Duncan, worried about how all this might threaten her poetic gift. But her admiration for the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, who faced a similar dilemma, encouraged her to face the challenge as a person and as an artist. As did other major poets such as Rukeyser and Robert Bly, Levertov provided a vivid and reflective rendering of what it felt like to live in the U.S. at that time.

Although born in England, where her first book was published, Levertov successfully appropriated a style in the American tradition of Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and the early Modernists.

Her lyrical gifts were astonishing, enabling her to convey a sense of awe, not only in the early love poems, such as “Bedtime,” but also in the religious poems, such as “Annunciation” and those set in the Pacific Northwest, such as “the mountain’s daily speech in silence.”  Her selection in The Stream and The Sapphire traces the growth of a deep religious sensibility in poems comparable to the great religious poems by John Donne, George Herbert, and 17th century metaphysical poets.

The daughter of a Hasidic Jew who became an Anglican priest and of a descendant of the Welsh mystic Angel Jones, as a young woman she considered herself a skeptic. She returned to Christianity, the religion of her youth, and was baptized a Catholic while living among the Catholic community in Seattle, where she died in 1997. It was a gradual unfolding, one might say, described attentively and movingly by biographer Dana Greene. It originated, she said, in the process of writing “Mass for the Feast of St. Thomas Didymus” and an oratorio on the disappearance and deaths of innocent clergy and laity in El Salvador in the 1980s.

The reader can trace Levertov’s assent to religious faith in “Flickering Mind” and “A Traveler,” which concludes, “I’ll chance/the pilgrim sandals.”  “Annunciation,”which first appeared in the Catholic Worker, is a powerful rendering of the Virgin Mary’s assuming a responsibility imposed upon her: “We are told of meek obedience./ The engendering Spirit/ did not enter her without consent./ God waited./ …Consent,courage unparalleled/ opened her utterly.”

Now, two decades since her death, the eloquence and power of Levertov’s work are more obvious than ever, as her work is appreciated by larger audiences of readers, critics, and scholars. And the younger poets among her Worcester audience were fortunate to have the benefit of her presence and her influence.

Michael True, Emeritus Professor, Assumption College, Worcester, Mass. He is the Co-founder of the Worcester County Poetry Association, Founding Editor, Worcester Review; and Co-founder of the Center for Nonviolent Solutions. He has taught at colleges in the U.S., India, and China. His books include An Energy Field More Intense Than War: The Nonviolent Tradition and American Literature, 1995; A Daniel Berrigan Reader, 1986; People Power: Peacemakers and Their Communities, 2007; and Prairie Song and Other Poems, 2013. True is a Featured Writer and is happy to be contacted by Journal writers seeking advice. He can be reached at mtrue@assumption.edu.                         

Getting Familiar

Summer 2015, Uncategorized

Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel, House of Leaves (2000), is an arrogant book. It asks readers to not only surrender their understanding of physical space, or even their understanding of the horror genre, but their understanding of narrative, narrators, and text (a word which here means both “the contents of the story” and “ink on a page”). There’s a lot of weird stuff going on in the book, but one always has the impression that it’s happening for a reason. To read and finish House of Leaves is to trust Danielewski to be intentional about his experimentation. 

The likely reason people endure (and even enjoy) House of Leaves is that, despite its zany methods, it delivers a very clearly-cut story.

Danielewski’s fourth novel, The Familiar, is less easy to grasp. It will be released over the course of 27 volumes, the first of which came out this May. So far, it is about a little girl named Xanther, her parents, and a kitten she finds. Easy enough. But then there’s the Mexican gang, the drug addict in Singapore, the Armenian cab driver, the cartoon character from Venice who appears for only two pages, and two mad scientists in Texas whose roles in this sprawling work are exceptionally vague as of now. One might even argue that barely anything has happened so far.

A page from House of Leaves, which illustrate Danielewski’s visual writing style.

A page from House of Leaves, which illustrate Danielewski’s visual writing style.

Despite the unwieldiness that comes at the beginning of any 27-volume series, The Familiar is still interesting for a reader who is already familiar with Danielewski’s work. His style (excluding, for now, typographical experimentation) is at its strongest here: he marshalls independent voices for each of the ten narrative perspectives, each of which would be completely distinct from all the others even without their distinct formattings. Still more impressively, each of those voices perfectly reflects each of the characters’ psychologies, which are also exceptionally thick for the beginning of such a long series. All of this:, the syntax, the characters, and the book’s governing psychology, come together to create some frightening themes which creep into focus by the volume’s end.

Still, the first part of The Familiar is fighting an uphill battle in terms of getting its readers to commit to these various storylines. Some of them are readable and hilarious (Shnork) and some of them are well-developed and so psychologically poignant that we stop caring about some of their more annoying tics (Xanther and her family), but others are very hard to follow because of their broken English (Jingjing), and still others are just not very interesting as of yet (Luther). The temptation to skip passages is hard to resist, and the only thing that kept me from doing so was my trust that Danielewski was doing something important with these sections, and that skipping them would bite me in the ass come volume fourteen.

A page from The Familiar, which also reflects danielewski's signature style.

A page from The Familiar, which also reflects danielewski’s signature style.

Danielewski’s trademark is his typographical experimentation, which more or less succeeds here. Some of the tomfoolery is understandable: each narrator has a different typeface as well as a designated color in the corner of the page. Some of the techniques from his earlier work, like placing just a few words on a page in order to encourage faster page turning, thereby increasing the sense of urgency, feel completely at home here. The purpose of some of the other components of the experimentation are still incomprehensible, though, such as the entire first forty-three pages, some of which is  very pretentious prose about death and war and such. Some narrators only use very small parts of the page for their writing, and the few full-color two-page spreads which seem to lack any context are also indecipherable as of yet. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that may become tiring.

The first volume of the familiar, subtitled “one rainy day in may,” was released this may. volume two, “into the forest,” is due out october 24, 2015.

A reader’s willingness to A) take this book out of the library; B) finish it (which, despite its size, won’t take too long, because of the formatting); and C) wait eagerly for Volume 2, says much more about the reader than it does about the book itself. It’s a question of trust–whether you expect that Danielewski will successfully pull all that is unclear into focus and whether you think that all of his whackiness does have purpose. The Familiar promises to be an incredible novel, but only a reader who believes in Danielewski (and, to a certain degree, believes in experimental literature’s ability to deliver effective stories by virtue of their jazzing around, rather than in spite of it) will ever think so. 

If this is a field that is completely unfamiliar to you, read some other experimental literature first, then read House of Leaves, then The Familiar. This recommendation carries with it the frustrating (and unoriginal) undertone that some people are not smart or experienced enough to read certain books. This is not necessarily the case. In all cases, trust is something which must be earned. You would not lend your car to a complete stranger. You would, however, lend your car to someone you have known for several years. Don’t let Mark Danielewski drive your car until you know he’s a good driver–he’s planning on borrowing it for quite some time.

Jeremy Levine is a recent graduate of Clark University, where he now works. He enjoys folk music and burritos.

Taylor Clark’s Got Nerve

Spring 2015, Uncategorized

by Warren M. Singh

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Lying on his back inside a cramped capsule on top of a missile with the destructive power of 3.5 million tons of TNT, Alan Shepard was growing impatient. Scheduled to launch on the Freedom 7 mission in 1961, he was set to become only the second American to go into space. But there was an issue: one of the flight techs didn’t like the pressure of the fuel lines and stopped the countdown. Strapped on top of 37,405 pounds of explosives, he uttered the immortal line, “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle.”

It was something out of Hollywood: a cool, snappy one-liner filled with bluster, but in Shepard’s case, it wasn’t hot air. 

 As the thousands of pounds of propellant ignited below him, buffeted by massive forces as the missile freed itself from earthly confines, his heart rate remained as low as it would have been if he was bored and making small talk at a cocktail party.

Taylor Clark wonders how he was so calm. Under massive and unimaginable physical stresses, the man was cooler than a liquid nitrogen cucumber. Surely there was something to his unflappable demeanor that set him apart, because in addition to intensive training and military experience. Shepard definitely had The Right Stuff. Clark explores fear, poise, and performance under pressure in Nerve, a literary tour of “serenity under stress and the brave new science of fear and cool.”

Clark draws on stories of unflappability from all over, from such diverse sources as a nuclear submarine officer who saved the world during the Cuban missile crisis, an emergency room surgeon at a major trauma center, and Laurence Olivier’s stage fright.  

The author admits early on that he himself is a basket stew of neuroses, and that he endured a bit of good-natured ribbing when his friends and colleagues found out that he was writing a book about fear and cool, but that just makes the journey more interesting. Instead of an exercise in academic storytelling, Clark uses lessons from the different arenas he explores to build a picture of grace under stress, what it is, what it involves, and how to get it.

The most important thing that emerges is that if you don’t think about what can go wrong, or about what you shouldn’t do (“don’t lose track of the ball, don’t fumble the catch, don’t trip”), and instead focus on what you can do and what you have direct control over (“keep your eye on the ball, keep your hands steady, take it one step at a time”), it becomes possible to harness the power of fear productively.   

It’s a bit of a confusing dichotomy, though. Aren’t fear and courage opposites? Maybe in theory, but the physical symptoms are the same. It’s no coincidence that the instinctive biological response to stress has been dubbed the “fight or flight response” ( or being the operative word). In a strict sense, nerve has connotations of both fear (bundle of nerves) and courage (to get up the nerve), and the title is aptly named with this in mind.

Nerve is a funny, entertaining, illuminating, and ultimately hopeful ride. Through stories of stress and the science of strength, Clark shows us that if we approach it in the right way, there really is nothing to fear from fear itself.

Warren Singh is a bookworm and wiseacre who sometimes goes undercover as a writer. He also occasionally pretends to be studying chemical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass. Sinecures, paeans, and disproportionately massive bribes may be proffered at probablystillsomewhatincorrect.wordpress.com

 

Doing the Right Thing

Uncategorized, Winter 2015

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by Warren Singh

Decision time, and the fate of the free world hangs in the balance: it’s 1939, and I’ve been put in charge of a new top-secret government project called The Manhattan Project, devoted to developing a game-changing weapon in competition with the Nazis. Given the circumstances, it’s a little nerve-wracking to consider the first thing that I have to do, which is choose a second-in-command to lead the team of physicists that will be the heart and soul of the endeavor.

 I’m on page 18 of The Right Decision, an immensely fun read, despite being written like a textbook (which, being published by McGraw Hill, is probably  intentional) regarding how to make decisions.

Written by a math professor named James Stein, the book draws from the fields of mathematics and economics (more specifically, decision and game theory) to address better ways of weighing and choosing options. Its chapters are divided into various broad topics: the first part of the book covers an idea central to decision theory, the ‘payoff factor’. Really, it’s a fancy way of saying, ‘what is it that you want out of this?’ Subsequent chapters deal with various ways of assessing the core idea, such as the inadmissibility option (if an option is inferior to other, similar ones, drop it like it’s on fire) or the Bayes criterion (which choice works out best on average?).

Midway, the book takes a pleasantly diverting turn, the reasons for which Stein explains at the beginning. He writes that one doesn’t learn to ride a bike solely by reading about it: you instead take a few core ideas, and then go and practice them until it clicks. Then you vary the situation and do it again. This is what he aims to do with the book, and this is where the fun is. Interspersed through the chapters are problems presented for the reader, in which Stein presents a real or hypothetical scenario and asks what you, the reader, would do. Spanning such diverse scenarios as “my best friend and his girl are having trouble and have broken up, when can I make a move for her” to “in what direction should you take your multinational corporation at this critical juncture,” these problems are immensely entertaining.

The author writes that he hopes that doing these puzzles will be just as entertaining as crosswords or Sudoku, but with the added benefit of helping us make decisions. Stein offers  28 scenarios, complete with solutions. He advises tackling one a day for a month, with the hope that at the end of it, the reader will have vastly improved decision-making skills.

Stein argues that we are the sum of our decisions, his point being that our decisions won’t always lead to good things, as the real world frequently has factors that we can’t influence, but over the long haul good decisions tend to add up better than bad ones.

It reminded me of a championship poker player, who wrote that poker is a discrete game: that is, all the odds are known. If all the odds are known by everyone at the table, then what separates champions from the merely adequate? Well, as he explains, even though the probabilities in poker are well defined, it is possible to make the correct play (there’s always a correct play, given that the probabilities are limited) and lose. A champion player is someone who can make the right play five times in a row, lose five times in a row, and the sixth time, still make the correct play.

The Right Decision doesn’t pretend to deal a winning hand, much less guarantee a good payoff. But it does teach one how to assess the odds, which is oddly liberating. In the end, there are no guarantees, and all we can do is play a beautiful game.

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Warren Singh is a bookworm and wiseacre who sometimes goes undercover as a writer. He also occasionally pretends to be studying chemical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass. Sinecures, paeans, and disproportionately massive bribes may be proffered at probablystillsomewhatincorrect.wordpress.com

If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren’t There More Happy People?

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Warren Singh

It’s 10 am, and I’m fairly sure that I’m getting strange looks. It turns out that sitting by yourself and alternating pensive looks with hysterical laughter leads to sidelong glances, even if you have a book in front of you.

The book in question is If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren’t There More Happy People? by John Lloyd John Mitchinson, published by McGraw Hill. And the contents are just as amusing as its title, if not more so.

It’s a collection of quotations on various topics by a wide variety of people, from such people as Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein, entertainment figures like Groucho Marx and Steve Martin, and even Al Capone and Miss Piggy.

Separated into sections by subjects (‘work’, ‘love’, ‘popes’, ‘potatoes’), quotes are placed in no particular ordering scheme, not alphabetically by subject, opening word, or author. Simply scanning the book leads one to believe that it’s not required, or even designed to be read in a linear fashion. For instance, I’ve been having great fun simply opening to a random page and reading whatever is there. Occasionally, this random ordering makes for a delightful incongruity: Samuel Goldwyn’s opinion that a hospital “is no place to be sick” is followed by Victor Hugo defining imagination as “intelligence with an erection.”

The book is like a party favor bag whose contents were provided by the most interesting people that you know. On one page you’ll see Joseph Heller on work: “While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it.” or Will Rogers on time: “Half our time is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.” Turn a few dozen pages back and you’ll see H.L. Mencken on stupidity: “There is no idea so stupid that you can’t get some professor to believe it.”

It’s all quite a hodgepodge, and that’s what I find so charming about it. Collecting quotes is like meeting interesting people and only hearing the most amusing or insightful things that they have to say. It’s ambrosia for my brain. Before, I’ve only dabbled in quotations recreationally, but with the addition of this book, it’s developed into a full-blown habit. Someone call the paramedics, because this volume is getting mainlined.

 

The fact that there are contradictory quotes all over doesn’t bother me; two quotes on the same page might directly cancel each other out, and I still enjoy both of them. It’s probably because I just like having my think bone tickled, and this tome is quite the thwack. I’m laughing, thinking, and then laughing some more.

If any of this sounds appealing to you, the book comes highly recommended. Its segmented quality makes it easy to read it in bits and pieces, even if you won’t necessarily want to put it down right away.

Ignorance may not be the way to bliss, but if you’re looking to get some bliss in your life, the eponymously titled book is a great place to start.

 

Randumb and Dumber

Fall 2014, Uncategorized

by Warren Singh

 

J.D. Salinger once noted that a good book was one that made you wish you were friends with the author. By that measure, I’m reading a good book, even if Nassim Nicholas Taleb is coming off as a bit of an ass. Well, a lot of an ass. But that’s okay, because, apparently, so am I.

I’m just finishing up Fooled By Randomness, a 200-something page book published by Random House that Taleb describes as a personal essay, intended to be read for fun, about “the hidden role of chance in life and in the markets,” as the subtitle has it. Taleb weaves in threads from psychology, economics, philosophy, finance, history, classic literature, probability theory, and anecdotes. In short, the book is an unconstrained story, going wherever it pleases, sprawling out around a central theme like an aerial view of London at night.

What’s the theme? Taleb writes, “I have been periodically challenged to compress all this business of randomness into a few sentences … it is: we favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.”

It’s simultaneously discomfiting and liberating to consider Taleb’s central point is that randomness is fundamental in much of our lives. Throughout the book, he expounds on the idea that we are so much less in control of what events occur than we think – we correct our past predictions in hindsight to appear more correct to ourselves, we convince ourselves that we are solely responsible for the good things that happen to us due to our actions, and we become married to our first ideas and beliefs, defending them against any and all incoming evidence to the contrary.

Taleb doesn’t argue that life’s underlying randomness is good or bad per se, he argues for its deep-running nature and indelible impact on our lives, and expounds on this idea that we cannot see it because of our inborn psychological patterns and fallacies. We are, if I may use a neologism, randumb.

Writing in a distinctive, personal voice, Taleb spins out this idea into its many facets, from financial markets to our personal lives and decisions, ultimately musing on the bad (and good) aspects of being so inextricably bound to the vagaries of chance. In the end, Fooled By Randomness is a conversation with an uncle at a family gathering, one who is unashamedly opinionated and iconoclastic, bordering on overbearing – and yet, entertaining, thought-provoking, insightful and very much worth the time.