Matthew Sitman

Your Characters Shouldn’t Be Lonely

by Matt Sitman

That’s Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk’s writing advice. He advocates avoiding “thought” verbs in your prose, such as “Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others you love to use”:

One of the most-common mistakes that beginning writers make is leaving their characters alone. Writing, you may be alone. Reading, your audience may be alone. But your character should spend very, very little time alone. Because a solitary character starts thinking or worrying or wondering.

For example: Waiting for the bus, Mark started to worry about how long the trip would take..”

A better break-down might be: “The schedule said the bus would come by at noon, but Mark’s watch said it was already 11:57. You could see all the way down the road, as far as the Mall, and not see a bus. No doubt, the driver was parked at the turn-around, the far end of the line, taking a nap. The driver was kicked back, asleep, and Mark was going to be late. Or worse, the driver was drinking, and he’d pull up drunk and charge Mark seventy-five cents for death in a fiery traffic accident…”

A character alone must lapse into fantasy or memory, but even then you can’t use “thought” verbs or any of their abstract relatives.

Oh, and you can just forget about using the verbs forget and remember.

Sound Sleep, Sound Mind

by Matt Sitman

Russell Foster, who researches the neuroscience of sleep, explores its importance for mental health:

In an interview, Foster discusses his early experiments into the connection between sleep and sanity:

[P]eople have been talking about people with really disrupted sleep with mental illness since the 1880s. So it’s a well-described phenomenon, but largely ignored. When people did start thinking about it in the 1970s, for example, they assumed that the abnormal sleep was a result of the antipsychotics that were being introduced at the time, but of course ignoring the fact that for the previous 100 years people had been talking about poor sleep without any antipsychotics. And then the other argument was that it is not the antipsychotics — it’s because of the socialized relations.

This really intrigued me, so we used this tiny little wristwatch device to measure the rest activity cycle of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia.

These patterns were absolutely smashed — these are the worst rest activity patterns I’ve seen, whether from a mouse or a human. This was really profound and I thought: “Hang on.” I worked really closely with my colleague, Katharina Wulff, and Katharina had the really good idea to compare unemployed individuals and look at their sleep-rest patterns as a parallel to work on those patients with schizophrenia. And actually, the unemployed don’t have particularly abnormal sleep patterns at all; their statistics are not very different from the working population, so clearly lack of a job was not causing this. Also, we had enough data to suggest that these abnormal sleep patterns were occurring irrespective of the antipsychotic medication.

Assimilating Through The Airwaves

by Matt Sitman

Titi Nguyen, whose family moved from Vietnam to the United States when she was a child, pens a love letter to The Wonder Years, the television show that helped her feel more at home in a strange new land:

The Wonder Years rooted me into my new country’s emotional and ancestral landscape. For better or worse, the show’s historical depictions added to my fuzzy understanding of my own family’s story. Beginning with the pilot, the show became an immediate necessity for me. In the end of that first episode, the Arnolds learn that the Coopers’ nineteen-year-old son, Brian, has died in Vietnam, and Kevin finds a grieving Winnie in Harper’s Woods. There and then they share their first kiss. That the Coopers’ tragedy occurred in my home country at the hands of the Vietnamese surprised me. How, after only thirty minutes on screen, could I possibly feel more empathy for these made-up characters than I had for the real lives of the people of my home country?

The Reasons We Don’t Read

by Matt Sitman

It rarely comes down to finances, as Kaya Genç realized when she revisited George Orwell’s essay, “Books v. Cigarettes,” written after he had heard that factory workers found books too expensive:

[Orwell] calculated his expenditure on books over a period of 15 years. He took note of them (“bought,” “given to me or bought with book tokens,” “review copies and complimentary copies,” “borrowed and not returned,” “temporarily on loan”) and learned that over this course of time he had purchased a total of 442 titles. Since he had roughly the same amount of books stored in another place he doubled the figure for a final calculation. “[I]t seems that I possess altogether nearly 900 books, at a cost of £165 15s,” he wrote.

To fully estimate his reading expenses he added to the sum the cost of newspapers and periodicals. Orwell typically read two daily papers, an evening paper, two Sunday papers, a weekly magazine, and “one or two” monthly magazines. He added these and the cost of his library subscriptions. In the end he concluded that his “total reading expenses over the past fifteen years have been in the neighbourhood of £25 a year.”

In contrast, he had spent £40 a year on cigarettes. His reading habit was cheaper than his smoking one. The workers had had little reason to complain about the cost of books, he decided. If they were not reading literature it was probably because they found books boring — not because they couldn’t afford them.

She updates Orwell’s self-inventory for the age of tablet reading and Starbucks:

My e-reading expenditures … cost me around $385 — less than my coffee expenditures for the same period, which were in the neighborhood of $1,800. My e-reading habit thus costs only a fifth of my drinking one (maybe a little more when I’m not working on a novel). For every dollar I spent on the likes of Tolstoy I spent four on coffee beans.

(Photo by Fabrizio Salvetti)

The Right Book At The Right Time

by Matt Sitman

R.R. Reno meditates on the way certain books become “existentially arresting” for us because of “the time and place when they happen to fall into our hands”:

I read Herman Hesse and J.D. Salinger at a teenager. Like many others I thrilled to their intimations of philosophy. But they did not become touchstones, perhaps because I quickly grew out of the superficial angst and feelings of alienation that I was told should characterize the life of a serious teenager. Instead, my first important book was The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann.

I read it while living as a climbing bum in Yosemite Valley in the late 1970s. The title was of the sort to attract a climber’s attention. And the book’s many pages promised hours of diversion. What I got instead was a modicum of self-knowledge. Hans Castorp, the main character, goes to visit a relative at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Switzerland, and ends up staying indefinitely. Situated literally above everyday concerns about career, family, and class, his life is pleasantly suspended. Such is the mountain’s magic. Yet, as Mann develops the story over hundreds of pages, the mountain turns out to work a black magic of self-deception and false innocence. The novel did not diminish Yosemite’s seductions, but it allowed me for the first time to see the darkness in my dreams.

His concluding thoughts:

I started The Magic Mountain imagining myself in control. I planned to use the book to entertain myself during the evening hours at the campsite. But soon enough Mann’s novel bewitched me, and I was a patient operated upon by a master surgeon, which is what St. Augustine’s sense of enjoyment brings about. It’s this vulnerability to influence, an anesthesia to the self and its purposes—that we need to cultivate if books are to be important for us.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, RIP

by Matt Sitman

Last week, the prominent political theorist, Christian ethicist, and public intellectual passed away at the age of 72. Elshtain was perhaps best known for making the ethical case for American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9-11, outlined in her book Just War Against Terror. The NYT obituary describes her impact this way:

In the weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Dr. Elshtain was among a handful of scholars and religious leaders, including Franklin Graham and Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, invited to meet with President George W. Bush to discuss the response he was considering. Dr. Elshtain had expertise in one particular area of interest to the president, her husband recalled: she had written extensively on the fourth-century Christian bishop later known as St. Augustine and his doctrine of the Just War. That doctrine held that while Christians could not justify killing to protect themselves, they could engage in war to protect the lives of others. The notion became central to the Bush administration’s justification of the war in Iraq as in large part a humanitarian project to free the Iraqi people from a tyrant.

Despite her arguments on behalf of war, many remembrances are emphasizing the difficulty in applying labels to her thinking. Carl Scott summarizes her this way:

[S]he was something of a difference feminist, something of an Augustinian, something of a Jane Addams-ite battler for social justice, something of a communitarian, and something of a foreign-policy neo-conservative.

Her most lasting legacy might be that, unlike many academic political theorists, she sought to engage religious thought in her work, long before it was trendy:

“Her joint appointment in political science and the divinity school at [the University of] Chicago was truly unusual,” said Erik Owens, a professor at Boston College who worked with Elshtain when she was his dissertation adviser. “Religion was not taken seriously enough as a proper subject of study by political scientists through most of her career, and political science was equally suspect in most divinity schools. She helped to bring these two disciplinary guilds into conversation with one another. This may be one of her greatest legacies as a professional academic.”

Biographically, her concern for ordinary people, and the weak and disabled among us, came from her own experiences – especially with illness, as Robbie George, who served with her on President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, points out:

She was a daughter of the west—born and bred in Colorado. She did not enter the world with a silver spoon in her mouth, nor was she given a gilt-edged education. She was among the last cohort of Americans to be struck by polio. She limped throughout her life, but never complained of her affliction or let it slow her down.

Marc Livecche, a former student of Elshtain’s, recalls her refusal “to change anything she thought or to attempt to change anything you thought simply in order to reach an agreeable reconciliation”:

Believing instead that falsehood is the opposite of dialogue, and that real disagreement is a hard won victory accessible only through an honest meeting of minds, she gave it to you straight and demonstrated the refreshing value of frankness-with-charity and invective-against-twaddle. This led to her belief that what the world most needed from Christians was, in Camus’ terms, “Christians who remain Christians.” For Elshtain this meant that Christians have to speak out loudly and clearly, in witness to their normative grounding, against evil in the world, never leaving the world in doubt that we stand against those bloodstained regimes that put the innocent to torture. She bore none of the utopian sentimentalism that believed we could end evil in history but neither did she give in to cynicism by refusing to believe we might end some evils and diminish others.

In addition to her work on just war theory noted above, Elshtain wrote on women and public life, St. Augustine and politics, the moral dimension of democratic life, and more. One of her last major projects was her 2005-2006 Gifford Lectures, which resulted in her book Sovereignty: God, State, and Self. From its final pages:

One of my persistent worries about our own time is that we may be squandering a good bit of rich heritage through processes of organized ‘forgetting,’ a climate of opinion that encourages presentism rather than a historical perspective that reminds us that we are always boats moving against the current, ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past,’ in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s memorable words from The Great Gatsby. This historic recognition should not occasion resentment or dour heaviness; rather, it should instill gratitude. As this book drew to a close, I realized that it was no culminating magnum opus — few books are — but, rather, a contribution to the shared memory of our time and place. And that is enough.

For more, especially if interested in her work in political theory, read Russell Arben Fox’s richly detailed thoughts on Elshtain here. For a critical take on her writings, on torture in particular, see Corey Robin here.

Fighting Over The First Americans

by Matt Sitman

Michael Lemonick profiles the work of archaeology professor James Adovasio, whose excavations of the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in western Pennsylvania helped upend our ideas about the peopling of North America:

A young archaeologist at the University of Pittsburgh, he intended to use Meadowcroft to train students. But what he found here helped demolish his colleagues’ long-held ideas about the timing of humans’ first steps in the New World. Since the nineteen-thirties, the conventional wisdom had held that humans crossed over into North America from Siberia around thirteen thousand years ago, then spread over the next five hundred years through North and South America—wiping out mammoths, mastodons, and other large mammals as they went. This hypothesis became known as the “blitzkrieg model” of species extinction.

But Adovasio, now a professor at Mercyhurst University, in Erie, Pennsylvania, discovered evidence that humans had camped at Meadowcroft, under a protective rock overhang, sixteen thousand years ago—a few thousand years before the Siberian crossing.

Adovasio at least partly blames old-fashioned prejudices for the persistence of the theory he rejects:

In part, he attributes the longstanding acceptance of this implausible story to the fact that, until relatively recently, most archaeologists were men. “I mean, who but a male would think that the ancestors of modern Native Americans sprinted to South America and killed everything in their path?”

If the first immigrants did arrive much earlier, the ice-free corridor through the glaciers wouldn’t have been available. But there’s an alternate route: they could have travelled down the coast in boats. “The colonization of Australia occurred even earlier,” Adovasio said. “It’s, in my opinion, simple racism that we never recognized before that the earliest populations in the Americas were capable of building boats.”

A Tough Pill For Theocons To Swallow

by Matthew Sitman

Damon Linker points to the “most decisive weakness” in theocon Robbie George’s brief against same-sex marriage – and notes that, really, George’s arguments are more about contraception than gay unions:

Permitting gay marriage will not lead Americans to stop thinking of marriage as a conjugal union. Quite the reverse: Gay marriage has come to be widely accepted because our society stopped thinking of marriage as a conjugal union decades ago.

Between five and six decades ago, to be precise. That’s when the birth control pill — first made available to consumers for the treatment of menstrual disorders in 1957 and approved by the FDA for contraceptive use three years later — began to transform sexual relationships, and hence marriage, in the United States. Once pregnancy was decoupled from intercourse, pre-marital sex became far more common, which removed one powerful incentive to marry young (or marry at all). It likewise became far more common for newlyweds to give themselves an extended childless honeymoon (with some couples choosing never to have kids).

In all of these ways, and many more, the widespread availability of contraception transformed marriage from a conjugal union into a relationship based to a considerable degree on the emotional and sexual fulfillment of its members — with childrearing often, though not always, a part of the equation. And it is because same-sex couples are obviously just as capable as heterosexual couples of forming relationships based on emotional and sexual fulfillment that gay marriage has come to be accepted so widely and so quickly in our culture.

Daniel McCarthy elaborates:

There is, of course, a good reason why even Robert George and Charles Cooper don’t argue that heterosexuals who cannot bear children may be denied access to the institution of marriage: because marriage is not only about children, and in fact the West has a long history of balancing priorities between marriage-as-about-children (proles) and marriage-as-about-love-between-two-people (fides)—until now, specifically a man and a woman. Carle Zimmerman’s Family and Civilization, oft-cited here, sketches that history. Although the relative weights of proles and fides have shifted over time, both have been definitive components of the ideal until now.

One weakness of the traditionalist argument has been its failure to adhere strictly enough to proles. But the failure to give fides its due has perhaps contributed at least as much to the rout. Can anything other than marriage, if homosexuals are to be excluded from that, accommodate fides? Would any alternative be acceptable to others who cannot bear their own children—“domestic partnerships” for the aged? The question answers itself.

A Poem For Sunday

by Matthew Sitman

Here’s our third and final poem from Robert Bly, “His Nest”:

It’s all right if this suffering goes on for years.
It’s all right if the hawk never finds his own nest.
It’s all right if we never receive the love we want.

It’s all right if we listen to the sitar for hours.
It doesn’t matter how softly the musician plays.
Sooner or later the melody will say it all.

It doesn’t matter if we regret our crimes or not.
The mice will carry our defeats into Asia,
And the Tuva throat-singers will tell the whole story.

It’s all right if we can’t remain cheerful all day.
The task we have accepted is to go down
To renew our friendship with the ruined things.

It’s all right if people think we are idiots.
It’s all right if we lie face down on the earth.
It’s all right if we open the coffin and climb in.

It’s not our fault that things have gone wrong.
Let’s agree that it was Saturn and the other old men
Who have arranged this series of defeats for us.

The Fate Of The Rock Star

by Matthew Sitman

In the midst of a lovely celebration of her music-filled life, Elizabeth Wurtzel ponders it:

I wonder if there will ever be another rock star. Probably not. Axl Rose was the last one in the sense of having a drug problem, dating a centerfold, showing up onstage at Madison Square Garden two hours and 15 minutes late to an audience that continued to sit and wait. No one would sit and wait anymore. Too exhausted.

And the whole point is to post that it happened on Facebook, not to have the experience. Kurt Cobain was an anti-rock star. That was good too. Eminem: maybe. Jay-Z is a businessman—it’s not that he isn’t talented, but he is a professional, the kingpin of an entertainment conglomerate. The opposite of a rock star is a professional. He is the platform and the content. And really, ideally you are the platform, even if that makes you inanimate: People now form lines around the corner not to buy a new album but because a new iPhone is out. Then they use it to send text messages mostly, or to do something they could have done two devices ago, but in any case the wait begins at 4:45 a.m. Which is to say that the party is over. Or maybe standing there as the dark of night becomes the light of day and the Apple Store opens for business is the fun part. Steve Jobs was weirdly both a rock star and a professional, so it figures he would check out before this got any worse.