The Dish

Remembering What We Read

by Jessie Roberts

Nicholas Carr points out the advantages of reading the physical page:

The differences between page and screen go beyond the simple tactile pleasures of good paper stock. To the human mind, a sequence of pages bound together into a physical object is very different from a flat screen that displays only a single “page” of information at a time. The physical presence of the printed pages, and the ability to flip back and forth through them, turns out to be important to the mind’s ability to navigate written works, particularly lengthy and complicated ones. We quickly develop a mental map of the contents of a printed text, as if its argument or story were a voyage unfolding through space. If you’ve ever picked up a book that you read long ago and discovered that your hands were able to locate a particular passage quickly, you’ve experienced this phenomenon. When we hold a physical publication in our hands, we also hold its contents in our mind.

The spatial memories seem to translate into more immersive reading and stronger comprehension. A recent experiment conducted with young readers in Norway found that, with both expository and narrative works, people who read from a printed page understand a text better than those who read the same material on a screen. The findings are consistent with a series of other studies on the process of reading. “We know from empirical and theoretical research that having a good spatial mental representation of the physical layout of the text supports reading comprehension,” wrote the Norwegian researchers. They suggested that the ability of print readers to “see as well as tactilely feel the spatial extension and physical dimensions” of an entire text likely played a role in their superior comprehension.

Previous Dish on reading and e-reading here, here, and here.

How Not To Write About The Balkans

by Jessie Roberts

In the spirit of Granta‘s “How to Write about Africa,” Balkanist presents “How to Write about the Balkans”:

Make sure to place yourself, the Western journalist, at the very center of the story. Include anecdotes about being strapped into the seat of some godforsaken regional airline as it makes a bumpy landing on a narrow strip of runway. Detail the sheer terror you feel in the company of your wild-eyed driver, who careens recklessly around the blind curves of deadly mountain roads. Admit that you find yourself uneasily calculating the age of every local male you meet, nervously wondering if he ever carried a weapon in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, or Kosovo.

In contrast, the locals will appear fearless and serene, perfectly satisfied in their poverty. At this point, you should describe the smiling peasants offering plastic cups filled with raspberries on the roadside, or the women in headscarves dutifully carrying heavy buckets of sir up the hill to sell at the market. You might describe hospitable villagers who ply you with homemade rakija (“a type of brandy made from distilled fruit”, you’ll explain), or in the cities, enthusiastic university students who, despite the astronomical unemployment rate, enter “secret, smoky clubs” and dance ‘til dawn in a city you might deem “the new Berlin”.

Next, you should mention that this “friendly” and “vibrant” atmosphere makes it difficult to imagine that so much “barbarity” or “bloodshed” was visited upon the region so recently.

(Photo by Flickr user tagacayak)

Novel Isolation

by Jessie Roberts

Diane Mehta describes “reader’s block,” or the inability to read the work of others while she was writing her own book:

It’s difficult to read while immersed in writing a novel. If you’re stuck to your book as purposefully as you’re supposed to be stuck to it, it makes no sense to commit yourself to someone else’s book. It’s distracting. You have your own characters to consider. (At least, that’s what we tell ourselves, glumly.) I became sure of this when I tried Philip Roth and found he just turned my writing into bitterness and dense frenzy, which I liked, but which I quickly realized would harm my sentences. His, so calculated, would strong-arm mine and I would be the loser, with flaccid sentences that tried to be hard. Roth stayed on the shelf.

In Defense Of Poor Grammar

by Jessie Roberts

A self-described “recovering grammar snob” explains why she overcame her rigor:

[T]here are two schools of thought when it comes to how we should use language. One is “prescriptive” and it’s backed by grammar snobs and the kind of people who froth at the mouth over the decline of “the King’s English”. The other is “descriptive” and it’s more about accepting that how people use language is how language works. A prescriptivist believes in the idea of standard English and sees mistakes everywhere. A descriptivist sees many englishes, and none of them are standard. …

The way people speak and write is based on a lot of factors. Geography, for one.

The various communities you belong to are also a big influence. Most of us belong to several communities and speak a little differently in the context of each one, whether that community is found at work, on a sports team, in a particular ethnic group, or in a religious community. We’re all fluent in more than one english, for example the language of our peer group and the language of our parents’ generation.

And then there are the two factors that have possibly the biggest impact on how we use language: education and socioeconomic status. When you judge people for what you consider to be poor grammar, you’re judging them for not being as good as you at something that might be a challenge because they didn’t have the advantages or experience you did. Maybe they haven’t had the luxury of worrying about their grammar. Maybe their use of language is right in line with their community. Maybe you’re just being a pedantic, prescriptivist jerk.

(Photo by Flickr user dullhunk)

The Sloppiness Of Studying The Self

by Matt Sitman

In a lengthy critique of psychologist Barbara Fredricksen’s Positivity – including news that a recent study found serious problems with the math underlying her work – Will Wilkinson hones in on a perennial problem with happiness research:

[M]ost work in the psychological and social sciences suffers from a lack of conceptual rigor. It’s a bit sloppy around the edges, and in the middle, too. For example, “happiness research” is a booming field, but the titans of the subdiscipline disagree sharply about what happiness actually is. No experiment or regression will settle it. It’s a philosophical question. Nevertheless, they work like the dickens to measure it, whatever it is—life satisfaction, “flourishing,” pleasure minus pain—and to correlate it to other, more easily quantified things with as much statistical rigor as deemed necessary to appear authoritative. It’s as if the precision of the statistical analysis is supposed somehow to compensate for, or help us forget, the imprecision of thought at the foundation of the enterprise.

It’s interesting that Fredrickson in Positivity avoids the term “happiness,” because she feels “it’s murky and overused.” One may say the same of “positivity.” There is definitely murk. According to Fredrickson, the constituents of positivity are joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love. But why these emotions? Why not others? As an inventory of positivity, this seems arbitrary.

Tania Lombrozo responds by defending the messiness of psychological research:

There’s a natural back and forth: we think about things a particular way, which motivates experiments, which in turn provide data, which leads us to refine and revise the way we conceptualize phenomena and theoretical entities. This dance between theory and experimentation is common to all science.

In the case of psychology, it is a particularly young field. It’s early days for the empirical study of many core psychological phenomena, including happiness.

So I agree with Wilkinson that psychological theorizing is often imprecise, and I share a craving for conceptual rigor. But some conceptual sloppiness may simply be a sign of immaturity, of psychology’s adolescent state. It’s an unavoidable step in achieving scientific progress, not the mark of a failed or floundering science.

Previous Dish on Fredrickson’s work here and here.

Beauty In Physics

by Jessie Roberts

Particle physicist Ben Still collaborated with artist Lyndall Phelps on Covariance, the installation for the Superposition project seen above:

The pair were introduced by the Institute [of Physics] and given the brief of creating a physics installation for public display. Rather than focusing on one particular area of physics, they decided instead to look at the machines that make the science happen — particle physics detectors.

“These [are] massive machines used to see the smallest bits of nature,” Still tells Wired.co.uk. The installation aims to show the way in which the detectors build up a picture of how these tiny particles interact with each other on a larger scale, as well as reflecting the way the electronic data collected by the detectors is then used to create plots on computers. …

“I showed [Phelps] some of the plots I was making for an analysis I was developing and again she was quite struck by how we took data from this massive machine and made these colourful plots to try and extract information,” [says Still]. The colour running through the installation, says Still represents “the way in which the data is presented finally”.

Here’s a close-up of the work, which consists of 28,000 glass beads arranged into 20 different designs:

Covariance is on display in the former ice wells of London’s Canal Museum through October 20th.

(Photos by Richard Davies, whose most recent photography and book project is Wooden Churches)

Visiting Your Favorite Film

by Brendan James

Troy Patterson studies what keeps us coming back to amusement parks, after “a record-setting year for the business”:

Projection is what the amusement park is all about—the projection of eager ideas of innocent fun, of nostalgia for things that haven’t even happened yet, of vomit on the X2 at Magic Mountain. The latest and last word in amusement-park projection concerns our disappearance into virtual reality by way of film—meaning, for one thing, the continued trend toward attractions such as Transformers: The Ride 3D at Universal Studios.

Enthusiasts are already anticipating what 2014 will bring, naturally enough, ardent anticipation being among the defining qualities of the amusement-park experience: In Florida, Hogwarts wannabes will thrill to the expansion of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. In Italy, Cinecitta World will open on the grounds of the venerable movie studio, a development that has some cineastes up in arms but is okay with me so long as they include an Anita Ekberg water slide.

There is a difference in kind between the straightforward pop-entertainment experiences pioneered by Disneyland and those exemplified by Transformers: The Ride (the purpose of which is “blurring the line between fiction and reality”). If we may take a brief ride of the Jean Baudrillard Reverse Bungee, we may theorize that while the old Disneyland model of escapism involves a flight from adult reality into its infantile simulacrum, the new line-blurring Transformers-style escapism represents the next generation of the ethos of Walt Disney Worldand EPCOT Center, with their designs on reshaping reality.

PEDs And Writing

by Jessie Roberts

In light of recent controversies over performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) in sports, Brian Michael Murphy considers the role of drugs in literature:

All of my writing heroes used PEDs. I still respect them; I would still shake their hands; I would never boo them as they took the podium to read, just returned from a stint in rehab or a drunk tank. I’m thinking of Allen Ginsburg’s acid. Baudelaire’s absinthe. Alice Walker’s magic mushrooms. Graham Greene’s Benzedrine. Legend has it that Gabriel García Márquez smoked up to 10 packs of cigarettes a day while holed up in his writing room for a year and a half like José Arcadio Buendía with his astrolabe and crucible. I once read that Balzac drank 50 cups of coffee daily and died of heart failure; another account said his personal record was 200 cups in a day, and that he died of a perforated ulcer.

I don’t use PEDs myself, aside from a demitasse of espresso here and there. Perhaps the impurity in me is not the caffeine, however. Perhaps it’s that very desire to be the best writer, to outshine my peers and gather accolades from people I don’t know, the willingness to sacrifice my time, energy, and relationships in order to accomplish it. Real life–a game of racquetball with my best friend, sharing a meal with my wife and daughter, teaching–tempers this impure ambition and keeps me connected to reality.

(Image: Portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto, or The Absinthe Drinker, by Picasso, via Wikipedia)

When Dinosaur Rockers Go Extinct

by Brendan James

E.J. Dickson worries that Springsteen’s music, unappreciated by millennials, won’t survive longer after his death:

[H]ere’s the thing about Bruce’s fan base: It may be huge, and it may be rabidly loyal, but it is old. Like, Peter, Paul and Mary fan old, to the point where David Brooks, in a recent New York Times editorial, referred to American Springsteen fans as “hitting their AARP years, or deep into them” (in Europe, where Springsteen’s fans are arguably even more fervent than their U.S. counterparts, the crowds tend to skew much younger). …

That feeling of restlessness and exhilaration that Bruce speaks to in his songs will be around forever. But Bruce won’t be. Dude is pushing 65. He can’t go smashing his balls into cameramen forever. And if this trend continues – if his music is listened to by progressively fewer and fewer members of younger generations – his fans won’t be around for much longer, either. He won’t reach the level of Zeppelin or Dylan or Kurt Cobain or Neil Young, artists who are still popular among those born decades after the pinnacle of their popularity. In 20 years, he will be a dinosaur, a Glenn Miller, duly respected in record books and Rolling Stone but virtually ignored by people born from 1995 onward. He will be known as the guy who sucked because he was old, or the guy who was old because he sucked.

I’ll make a tentative prediction that Springsteen’s quieter albums like Nebraska and Tom Joad will resurface in the future generations with every obligatory 10-year folk revival. Those records drop the gaudy, heartland grandeur that turns off younger listeners with no interest in cars or crumbling textile mills.

Previous Dish on the Boss here, here, here and here.

This Is Your Brain On Buzzfeed

by Matt Sitman

In a brilliant, depressing examination of lists and listicles, Mark O’Connell finds their deeper meaning:

In an interview with The Paris Review twenty years ago, Don DeLillo mentioned that “lists are a form of cultural hysteria.” From the vantage point of today, you wonder how much anyone—even someone as routinely prescient as DeLillo—could possibly have identified list-based hysteria in 1993. DeLillo’s statement also hints at something crucial about the list as a form: the tension between its gesturing toward order and its acknowledgement of order’s impossibility. The list—or, more specifically, the listicle—extends a promise of the definitive while necessarily revealing that no such promise could ever be fulfilled. It arises out of a desire to impose order on a life, a culture, a society, a difficult matter, a vast and teeming panorama of cat adorability and nineties nostalgia. Umberto Eco put it dramatically: “The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order.”

His take on why they’re the epitome of a culture actively arrayed against our attention spans:

In an essay about Internet addiction in The Dublin Review last year, the Irish novelist and short-story writer Kevin Barry wrote about how the rapid depletion of his powers of attention affected the way he composes a piece of writing: “Lately, I note, most of the essays and stories I write tend to be broken up into very short, numbered sections, because I can no longer replicate on the page the impression or sensation of consecutive, concentrated thought, because I don’t really do that anymore.” Of course, essayists have been using the list as a way to structure thought for a long time. (Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp,’” to point to a famous example, takes the form of a list of fifty-eight numbered fragments.) But the list is a way of writing that anticipates, and addresses itself to, a certain capriciousness in the reader. By not only allowing partial and fleeting engagement but by actively encouraging it, the list becomes the form which accommodates itself most smoothly to the way a lot of us read now, a lot of the time. It’s the house style of a distracted culture.