The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything : Monkey See : NPR

You know that list of 1,000 books you must read before you die? It's not true. You will be permitted to die even if you don't read them. So, sad to say, delaying reading them is no guarantee of a longer life. But there may be other reasons to put them off.

The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything : Monkey See : NPR

Goodreads readers and A Gift for the Sultan

I was happy to see that 871 people participated in the drawing I set up in Goodreads for five copies of A Gift for the Sultan (paperback edition).

I've just let the five winners know that the book will be on its way to them next week, and I also want to thank the other 866 people who put the book on their wishlist. I hope that many of them do read the book (even though they didn't win a free copy). To encourage you all, I've also made it available in a Kindle e-book edition at a price that probably suits your budget.

If you haven't yet discovered Goodreads, check it out. You'll meet lots of other interested and interesting readers.

Review agenda

I just got my 1st Kindle — a gift from my beloved accomplice, an anticipatory reward for getting my novel published. And for starters (I'm still learning to use the thing) I've loaded it with Jonathan Franzen, Freedom and Marcy Dermansky, Bad Marie, which I intend to read and remark upon here. But first I have to get through the pile of other, old-fashioned printed books I'm committed to review. So here then is the rough schedule of what to expect in coming weeks, in order of schedule (I'm not a speed reader, and I like to take time to write these things, so I'm not promising any deadlines):

1. Euclides Da Cunha, Backlands : the Canudos Campaign, trad. Elizabeth Lowe (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).  I've finished reading this big (476 pp.), complex and immensely famous work of Brazilian history, anthropology and geography (not to mention phrenology, a theme for da Cunha), but I'm not yet ready to give you my thoughts on it because I first want to finish another immensely famous and important book, 
2. Mario Vargas Llosa, La guerra del fin del mundo (Madrid Spain: Punto de Lectura, 2008). English translation by Helen R. Lane, The War of the End of the World. This is a big (921 pp.), ambitious novel based on these same events, the resistance to the death of thousands of extremely poor, backlands fanatics to the then-new Brazilian republic and its army, 1895-97. I plan to post the review of this book on the Spanish-language blog, but for Literature & Society I want to reflect on these two books together, what they tell us about Brazil and what they can teach us from these two very different approachs (da Cunha's and Vargas Llosa's) to telling a similar story. Maybe next week I'll have this thought through to share with you.
3. Karen Kerschen, Violeta Parra: By the Whim of the Wind (Albuquerque: ABQ Press, 2010).  For a  change of pace, though not of continent. I'm eager to read this bio of Chile's famous composer, performer and artist (and part of a family of famous artists) whose most famous song, "Gracias a la vida",  became a kind of theme for those of us defending Chile in its long, dark night of Pinochetism. Probably in about 2 weeks (no promises, though — things happen, and I'm going to be very busy promoting my own new novel, so it could take longer).

Then I can turn to other works, like the two books I just downloaded onto the Kindle and Tony Judt's big Post-War. I may learn to love the Kindle, but even if I don't — real printed books are still more comfortable — it's awfully handy for somebody like me living in Spain who wants to acquire books from the States quickly and cheaply.

My one complaint so far: The Amazon library I log onto is very weak on books in languages other than English. I'll go back to the instruction book (loaded onto the Kindle) to find out how I can download books from other suppliers, such as Spanish publishers.

Defining this blog

You've probably noted changes in the "About me" box to the right. My aim is to make my intentions clear to you and also to me; it's so easy to get distracted these days by whatever fascinating new thing comes up on the 'net that it takes effort to maintain focus.

One major editorial shift is that I'm no longer committing myself to that weekly essay on Spain. I didn't sense any great demand for it from my readers (though Dirk, as usual, made intelligent comments), so I'll shift my reflections on Spain to the other, Spanish-language blog, Lecturas y lectores. It was mainly for myself, as a way to try to understand some of the puzzling phenomena in the country where I now live. I'll leave a note here whenever something on the Spanish blog may be of interest to readers here, such as reviews of fiction.

Another thing. Somehow I've got onto a list of potential reviewers of new books, and publicists keep sending me proposals to interview authors on all kinds of things. Naturally the publicists have never actually looked at this blog to see what I do cover, so I get everything from astrology to diet to reconciliations of science with God to searches for undersea treasure. Not what I do. If you want me to critique serious fiction or something related to the topics I've listed in "About me," please do write. Otherwise don't be surprised to receive no answer. I've got other things to do.

Recent reading: On reading

Here's a fascinating book by a French brain scientist who is elegantly articulate in English. The language is important, because he uses the peculiarities of English spelling, and the consequent difficulties of inexperienced readers to interpret it, to demonstrate how many different areas of the brain must be activated to interpret something as simple as the sentence you have just read.

Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the brain : the science and evolution of a human invention. (Viking, 2009)

When we begin to read a page of text, we don't take in the whole page or even a whole line, but visualize clearly only a very small section at a time, moving our eyes in rapid saccades. Reading requires rapid and successive interpretations of small sets of visual marks (in alphabetic writing, no more than 5-7 letters per saccade) by neurons from several regions of the brain, interrogating the symbols until the most likely hypothesis of their meaning is established. The very first operation in each saccade is to recognize the symbols as letters (rather than corporate logos, or numbers, or something else) and attribute possible sounds to them. If the symbols invariably represent a single sound (as in Italian or German), it is quickly recognized by the phonics neurons. If they may represent several possible sounds (e.g., the letters "ough" in English), other neurons from other parts of the brain must apply grammatical rules while others evaluate context (the symbols seen in previous saccades) to narrow the possible interpetations.

Recognition of symbols as letters (or phonemes or characters in nonalphabetic systems) occurs in all humans, regardless of culture or writing system, in approximately the same section of the left brain hemisphere (Dehaene calls it the "letter box"), but requires activation of other brain sections to interpret them. Recognition of simplified symbols, or "proto letters", evolved millions of years before the invention of writing, inspired by common forms seen in nature: L, Y, T etc. Even apes recognize such symbols. What humans have been able to do that apes cannot is to learn to give different interpretations to the symbols, that is, to invent writing.

"…over time, scribes developed increasingly efficient notations that fitted the organization of our brains. In brief, our cortex did not specifically evolve for writing. Rather, writing evolved to fit the cortex." Thus all writing systems in all cultures, even Chinese or the many Indian scripts, share common features: combinations of symbols of no more than 4 strokes, arranged in straight, regular lines. All (even Chinese) include some signal of sound. Those writing systems that correspond most closely to spoken sounds (e.g., Finnish, Italian, German) are the quickest for children to learn, English is the most difficult of the European languages and reading Chinese takes much longer. Phonics teaching is far superior to "whole word" approach for enabling the learner to read unfamiliar words.

There is much more to this book, including diagrams of brains and brain activity, a capsule history of the probable history of writing (how the first symbols were invented and how they evolved), anecdotes from the history of reading-brain research, an impassioned discussion of pedagogy, and chapters on dyslexia and mirror writing. It's a very complex subject, but Dehaene is a graceful writer and makes it about as clear as it can be for us non-neuroscientists.

For more on this author, see Overview - Experimental Cognitive Psychology - Stanislas Dehaene - Collège de France

Cataclysms of Consciousness

Daniel del Solar has forwarded a letter from self-described "Podunk university English teacher" Luciana Bohne, who complains that a junior said to her, without embarrassment, "I don't read." Prof. Bohne warns that "Without minds or hearts, [such students] are instrumentalized to buy whatever deadens their clamoring and frightened senses--official lies, immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt educations."

Prof. Bohne, what you are experiencing is a mere ripple of the Third Cataclysm of Consciousness -- the third major degradation of thinking and imagination since humans first started flaking stones for tools. We are entering what will be remembered (if anybody still remembers how to remember) as the Post-literate Age.

The First Cataclysm began around 1000 B.C. with the invention of writing -- at first, thought to be no more than a handy way for the king's minions to keep track of who owed taxes and where the grain was stored. The terrible effects of this invention have been exhaustively explored by Julian Jaynes (1977), The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company. They included the loss of memory (people relied on marks on clay tablets instead of their own memories of the songs of their people) and, far more disturbing, the loss of the voice of God.

The practice of reading, Jaynes argued, creates neural connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, so that auditory right-brain impressions are no longer independent of left-brain analysis. In Homer, whose songs were elaborated in an oral culture long before literacy was introduced, the heroes literally [sic] hear the voices of their gods; later Greeks, infected by literacy, no longer could. I'm not doing Jaynes' brilliant book justice, but that's the main idea. For more, see his many fans' website.

Beyond Jaynes, we can see that the First Cataclysm is still continuing. Whenever literacy is introduced into a previously oral culture, the young lose their awe of the ancient traditions and their respect for their elders, and they also lose -- even when they try very hard -- the ability to improvise long heroic songs fluently. Well, Walter Ong can tell you a lot more about that problem. Cf. Ong, Walter J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York, Routledge.

The Second Cataclysm is also still going on. This was the popularization of printing, which had its most immediate deleterious effects in Europe. Benedict Anderson makes a convincing case that the proliferation of cheaply printed books, pamphlets, sermons and so on in the vernacular languages spelled the end of Latin as a universal language among the tiny, international learned elite, and gave a huge boost to nationalist sentiment. From there it's been downhill all the way to Slobodan Milosevic and the unfortunate Zoran Djindjic, not to mention Israelis and Palestinians, or Timorese and Indonesians, or any of countless other bloody conflicts. Cf. Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities. London, Verso.

Of course, in the wake of each cataclysm, new generations were born not knowing the value of a single universal language, or the even greater glories of oral culture. And there grew a class of people who actually enjoyed reading and thought they were superior because they knew how to do it. Even today, there are little groups of people trying to return to oral cultures, and larger societies struggling to preserve the ancient languages -- Sanskrit, old Greek, classical Latin, Icelandic.

And no doubt there will be many like us, the old timers, who cling to our print-literacy culture even after it has fallen completely into disuse. The new generations will have no trouble communicating with one another without reading print, but still, we Old Timers fear that they will be missing something. And we will be right.

Just as you and I have lost forever the voices of our gods and the enchantment of bowing a one-stringed fiddle and improvising heroic verses for days on end. So, the loss is inevitable. All we can do, like the bards of oral societies and the chanting monks of early literacy, is to cling to our traditions as long as we can.