Month: April 2014

In a review of Lydia Davis’s new story collection Can’t and Won’t, Christine Smallwood observes that the famously concise writer “makes the impossible look easy”:

Like Proust, whom she has translated, Davis writes the act of writing itself. I don’t just mean that her narrators tend to be teachers or authors, though that’s true; I mean that her stories are filled with moments of crisis about how to carry on, or what word to put down next, and fears that it could all mean nothing in the end. She’s a theorist of the arbitrary. The fact that she makes it look so easy—so arbitrary, even—is part of the fun.

Chloe Schama declares Davis “the perfect writer for the Twitter era”:

Davis does not just turn dada doodads into text with grammatical coherence. She produces stories that are inevitably compared to poetry, not only because of their concision and appearance on the page, but because of their obvious care of construction. “A fire does not need to be called warm or red,” she writes in one of the stories, “Revise: 1,” included in her new collection; “Remove many more adjectives.” I haven’t counted the adjectives in Can’t and Won’t, but I’m certain the total would be paltry. Most of the stories in Can’t and Won’t are just a page or two; the longest—“The Seals,” a poignant reflection on the loss of an older sister and a father—is just over 20 pages, and it feels like a marathon.

Davis is perhaps the sparest contemporary fiction writer we have—breathtakingly bold in the limits she imposes on herself.

Not only are there no extra adjectives, there are very few adverbs, no extra clauses, no scene-setting, no tiresome realist blather detailing the subway route from Bushwick to Broome Street. There is no roughage in her writing—there is nowhere to hide. There are only the words—stark and striking, an experiment in just how little it takes to make a story. Her work can sometimes read like a test of discipline or the brilliant product of a dare: You thought I couldn’t do it, didn’t you? I broke your heart in one paragraph or less.

Erica Wagner close-reads the new book, praising it as “an open invitation to look as closely as we can at both literature and the world.” But Scott Esposito gives the collection a lukewarm review:

[T]he stories in Can’t and Won’t studiously distance themselves from the very sort of tough existential questions that Davis has made such an art of approaching in her own way. Rather than veering toward the dying man’s breath, they veer off in the direction of light humor—what Can’t and Won’t feels most like is a very precisely honed book of jokes. Of course, an effective sense of humor has always been one of Davis’ most potent weapons, and I would not want to see her work deprived of it, but here it leaves precious little room for the other emotions that tend to mix so profoundly in her fiction.

In a recent interview, Davis explained how she got interested in writing at such brevity:

I can date that pretty precisely to the fall of 1973. So I was 26 years old and I had just been reading the short stories or the prose poems of Russell Edson. And for some reason, I was sparked by those. I thought, “These are fun to read, and provocative and interesting, and I’d like to try this.” So I set myself the challenge of writing two very short stories every day just to see what would happen.

A few readers complement this post with some classic writings:

I’m heavily invested in the notion that idleness, laziness, and procrastination are vital to the full flowering of human life. (If they aren’t, I’m fucked.) I’m reminded of this passage from Emerson’s Experience:

We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that ‘tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born. It is said, all martyrdoms looked mean when they were suffered. Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.

Another:

I saw your post on idleness and I wanted to share what I think is the best piece ever on the virtues of idleness – Chesterton’s essay on lying in bed. The gist of it:

The tone now commonly taken toward the practice of lying in bed is hypocritical and unhealthy. Of all the marks of modernity that seem to mean a kind of decadence, there is none more menacing and dangerous than the exultation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the expense of very great and primary ones, at the expense of eternal ties and tragic human morality. If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics. …

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle. A man’s minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. …

For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic caution to be added. … The caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all.

As someone who struggles with discipline and time management, I find it refreshing to be told that this is not a moral failing.

A reader writes, “I figured I’d chime in on the ADHD thread, since there’s still apparently one voice missing: someone who was diagnosed as a child”:

That’d be me. At the age of six, in my second marking period in first grade, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Though my memory is hazy of that time, what I recall is being inattentive in class and extremely disruptive. I remember one time being at a hospital for something unrelated, and they put me in a straitjacket to calm me down.

I can’t emphasize enough how hyper I acted as a child, and how quickly that changed when I began to take Ritalin.

Quarterly report cards in my school district would give you a checkmark for everything you weren’t doing well in (ability to work with others, self-control, etc.), and after one full marking period with the help of Ritalin, I went from having every box checked to only two. I will never forget the pride I felt then.

My adolescence, life, and identity were very much entwined with ADHD. But my academic and social life settled down significantly when I started taking meds. I was a very good student, usually in the advanced classes. The pills gave me the ability to focus on the school work, and I know I could not have calmed down without them. Everything else, from Little League to karate, was easier with the pill. Days I forgot it were long and tedious.

As I began dating my now-wife, we talked about going off the drug. Those conversations were driven by my primary care doctor suggesting it (fearing the effects of 20 years of daily amphetamine intake at a level of anywhere from 10 milligrams to 54 milligrams!), as well as my wife getting her master’s degree in education, where she gained academic insight into ADHD. (She was shocked, for example, that I was merely prescribed medication but never forced to have therapy or visit a psychologist, something she claimed is mandatory for people diagnosed nowadays, though your thread seems to imply otherwise).

While my energy level initially fell, I have found that coffee does a pretty good job of compensating for the lack of stimulant in me. I now realize the pill also was the deciding factor in my day-to-day life. On days I felt sick in the morning, I could take the pill and feel better. I could eat shit food that should have knocked me out and brought down my energy (so many carbs!), but the pill overruled it. Since then, I have a much better diet, and when I get sick, I actually need to take a day off to rest before I feel better. These things are new to me in my life as of my mid-20s.

The ADHD is still certainly there. Little things still manifest. When I write a song with my band, I’ll write most of the song, but eventually I trail off. It’s mentally finished for me before I actually finish. I’ve noticed this my entire life. Still, being off the pill, I’m more even-mannered than ever before. Though the ADHD seems to act up a little late at night, I’m mostly pretty-even throughout the day. Being well-fed certainly helps, and I can definitely concentrate best right after some food or caffeine. But maybe that’s the same for everyone, not just those of us with ADHD.

I’m very happy being off the pill now, for sure, and this thread has been a great read.

Update from a reader:

I’m the college student with ADD who wrote in a few years ago about using pot to even out the effects of my ADD medication. You put my email in The Cannabis Closet, which was great, but also eternally mortifying because I used the word “coeds” for some Adderall-induced reason. Yikes.

Anyway, I thought I’d chime in to help flesh out the topic. I was diagnosed in the 5th grade, after my exasperated neurologist dad was complaining to a coworker about all the troubles I’d been having in school. His coworker happened to be another neurologist specializing in ADHD and one of the leading researchers on the disorder in the country, and she told him that my behavior matched almost exactly. That’s when I started getting to visit my dad at work during the week, taking a battery of tests.

The most memorable test involved a box with one large button and an LED screen that flashed numbers. The doctor would give me a series of instructions about when to push the button (always on a 9, when the same number happened twice in a row, when a 5 came after a 6, things like that) and then leave me to do the test on a table full of puzzles, toys and games. My dad still likes telling the story about driving me home after the first one and I could describe every toy in detail but couldn’t remember the rules of the test.

After trying these tests under a bunch of different medications, I was only then officially diagnosed with ADD without hyperactivity, and began seeing a psychiatrist once a month to help me not only manage my medication, but also to teach me the tools to adapt to my disorder, to figure out how to take something that can be debilitating and turn it into a benefit. Without those developed skills, I’m not sure I would’ve even graduated high school, much less college. I’ve been on and off my medication since then depending on my life circumstances. My experience, however, gives me two takeaways:

1) My experience with medication was largely positive, but only in the long run. I went through several medications as I grew up, and found types and amounts that worked for me through a close working relationship with my psychiatrist. There were periods where I felt like a hollowed-out zombie, where I didn’t eat or sleep, where I got into fights at school all because of the meds. The idea that kids now are just being given prescriptions without any accompanying therapy is shocking. Medication is an an effective tool, but only when used correctly.

2) I’m currently unable to get any medication at all. My psychiatrist retired, and it’s been impossible to find another psychiatrist who is willing to prescribe me Adderall. Doctors are so worried about people who don’t have ADD using it or selling it that I come across as exhibiting drug-seeking behavior. All I need is someone who can give me the prescription I need, occasionally consulting and checking in to see if any adjustments have to be made. I’m fine for now, my current job doesn’t require that I be medicated, but I want to go back to school, and even the application process feels impossible without meds. I’m not sure what I’ll do. Drug dealers don’t take my insurance.

The issue is so complicated. There are too many drugs floating around, but not enough of them are getting to the people who need them.

Seth Masket reviews many studies on the question:

Your allies may be quick to abandon you during a scandal if you’re expendable (think John Edwards), but if you’re, say, the president, they may be more likely to rally to your side. Scandals may also be more damaging for black candidates (PDF) than for white ones.

Additionally, scandals may be more likely to emerge when the opposition party has a lower opinion of the incumbent and when it’s a slow news week (PDF). Voters think worse of scandals involving financial problems than they do of sex scandals, especially when abuse of power is involved. They are also quicker to forgive (or forget) sex scandals than financial ones (PDF).

The studies all seem to confirm the idea that scandals are serious and do exact a price from politician’s careers. Yet a lot of this research remains plagued by selection bias. That is, scandals may be more likely to emerge among the better candidates or more powerful officeholders. This isn’t because better politicians are more likely to cheat on their spouses (although that would be interesting!), but because no one’s going to bother to research and dig up scandals against a politician whose career isn’t going anywhere.

Reason checks in on the growing 3D printing industry:

The latest breakthrough:

For the first time ever, scientists have 3D printed a cancer tumor in order to study how to kill it.

Growing cancer cells in a laboratory is nothing new—it’s often how new drugs are tested before they hit clinical trials. But those cultures are grown on petri dishes, where they’re unable to become actual “tumors” and are instead simply sheets of 2D cells. That means that a drug might work on cancer cells in a lab, but once it’s tested on an actual tumor, the three dimensional structure of it can throw in some added kinks that makes it ineffective. Wei Sun of Drexel University saw that the 3D printing of living cells has improved enough to make printing of actual tumors a viable possibility.

In other 3D printing news, Staples is hoping to bring the technology to the general public:

The office supply retailer began offering 3D printing services in two stores on Thursday, one in New York and another in Los Angeles. Anyone can walk in and have Staples crank out a tchotchke—or 1,000 of them—while reveling in the glory of the 3D printing revolution without spending thousands on an actual printer. If the pilot takes off, Staples (SPLS) says it will expand 3D printing services to more stores.