The Dish

Inspired by Dostoevsky’s observation, “Try not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute,” psychologist Daniel Wegner designed experiments to test how well people can suppress their own thoughts. The answer: poorly. Subjects forbidden to think about a subject not only thought of it more often; they continued to think about it for days on end. In tribute to Wegner, who died earlier this month, Maria Konnikova reprints a 2012 essay on his findings:

The more effort we expend on keeping something from our mind, the more likely we are to be reminded of it—because at some level, we have to keep reminding ourselves not to think about it. As long as not thinking is in the back of our minds, we will be prompted to think of precisely the thing we shouldn’t be thinking about. Wegner calls this an ironic monitoring process: each time we think about a distracter topic to put off the topic we’d like to avoid (something we do consciously), our minds unconsciously search for the unwanted thought so that they can pounce on it if it makes so much as a peep. And if we are tired or stressed or distracted—or even if our mind goes silent for a moment—the unwanted thought will take the opportunity to assert itself.

It’s especially bad in social situations, when we try to avoid making mistakes that would carry some sort of social cost, such as trying not to swear or make sexual references or touch on an otherwise sensitive area of conversation. People who are asked to keep something private are more likely to mention it or allude to it in some way in a conversation. People who are asked not to think of anything sexual are more likely to slip up—and even show greater levels of physical arousal. People with eating disorders are more likely to mention food. People who have some sort of social prejudice—racism, sexism, homophobia—are more likely to say something biased when they are trying to be on their best behavior—especially if they are stressed or otherwise mentally engaged at the time.

Update from a reader:

When I was a child, a friend of my dad’s told me, “If you see a white horse, make a wish – and it’ll come true … unless you think of a red fox.”

Not very, argues Jonathan Povilovis. From his lengthy critique, which questions its status as “The Great American Novel”:

Jay Gatsby disowned his family and made millions illegally, which for many is just cause to hold up self-righteous noses and applaud the fact that his funeral was under-attended—the bastard deserved it. But even if you’re happy to think that the ‘20’s were corrupt no matter how you look at them, so who cares how Gatsby got rich; or even if you’re left-leaning enough to see that Tom Buchanan did even less to earn his fortune than Gatsby did his, tossing the legalities aside, there’s still something unsettling about this whole narrative. What scares the hell out of me is not that I still want to cheer for Jay Gatsby even though he’s done some bad things—I don’t care that I don’t care that he’s simply done bad things. I care that he did them all for a person. He wanted to be with Daisy, the woman he loved.

What this means is that Gatsby is a man with very serious desire. He not only broke laws but also went to (literally) absurd lengths to lie, to falsely present himself to Daisy (and everyone else) in order to gain her love. But unfortunate for him and critical for us is that the way that Gatsby went about trying to [get] Daisy’s love excludes the possibility that he could earn it, because earning love takes more than just serious desire: it also takes some serious integrity. In other words, real love requires that you submit to a pretty high standard set of ethical rules, including a level of honesty and vulnerability between you and your lover, often requiring you to relinquish some of those more selfish desires; but this is not the kind of love that appears center stage in Fitzgerald’s novel.

Update from a reader:

The faulty logic in Povilovis’ essay is quite stunning. Where would we be without the lessons of the flawed character?

Would that line of reasoning not discount the importance of virtually every 20th century protagonist worth a damn (along with Shakespeare’s and so on, back through the Greeks and Romans).  Aren’t the flaws the entire point?  Isn’t it the sad bittersweet irony what makes the novel achingly “great,” and elevates the tragic mythology to a deeper level of metaphor that can speak on many levels – as a sweeping symbol of our flawed “great” country to the day-to-day struggles we each face in that quest for our own version of greatest above our personal baggage and the weight of our choices.

While Jay Gatsby was not in fact “great” in the most meaningful sense, there is a deeper meaning in his aspirations and yearning for that illusive mantel, as there is for Nick Adams and Lady Brett and Don Corleone and Tony Soprano and Walter White and Macbeth. Povilovis’ complaint seems to miss the point of literature entirely.

Another adds, “I’d rather have Atticus Finch as a father, but when I read a book, maybe I want to peer into the heart of darkness.” Another reader:

I don’t think Povilovis is suggesting The Great Gatsby isn’t a great novel; I think he’s saying Gatsby is a disturbing hero because of the great effort he makes to reinvent himself for this woman he loves, which is all founded on a lie.

But that tale of reinvention is why Gatsby endures.  Here is a man who (spoiler alert) cuts most of his ties with home, assumes a new identity and breaks the law, all to grab the money and power to make himself acceptable to Daisy.   And all his success, which American Gospel says should bring him contentment, fails him.  It doesn’t win him Daisy (Fitzgerald doesn’t seem fully convinced Daisy is actually worth it) and it can’t get him respect or acceptance in the class he’s muscled his way into.  As H.L. Mencken wrote of Rudolph Valentino, a year after Gatsby was published, he had achieved “a colossal and preposterous nothing.”

In some ways, Fitzgerald wrote a shorter and more lyrical version of the novels Theodore Dreiser had been sledgehammering out for years, about the seduction of material wealth and how the burning American desire for more can masks a rootless and more troubling anomie. But Dreiser, great and brave as he was, didn’t have the sympathy for his characters that Fitzgerald did.  Dreiser could outline the facts of the tragedy; Fitzgerald could break your heart.

Gatsby, by all rights, shouldn’t be borne back to the past; he should have carved out a new life and new identity for himself, made a tidy living, and found respectability.  That’s an American ideal: You can move away from your roots and start anew.  But like so many of us, he can’t pull himself away from the dreams of his past, and in the end, his enviable wealth fails him.

Gatsby’s story is one of destructive desire.  That is the story of many American dreams, and that’s what makes Gatsby great.

Meanwhile, Colin Marshall relays Gertrude Stein’s letter to Fitzgerald about the novel, which includes these comments:

I like the melody of your dedication and it shows that you have a background of beauty and tenderness and that is a comfort. The next good thing is that you write naturally in sentences and that too is a comfort. You write naturally in sentences and one can read all of them and that among other things is a comfort. You are creating the contemporary world much as Thackeray did his in Pendennis and Vanity Fair and this isn’t a bad compliment. You make a modern world and a modern orgy strangely enough it was never done until you did it in This Side of Paradise. My belief in This Side of Paradise was alright. This is as good a book and different and older and that is what one does, one does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

Recent Dish on Fitzgerald and his novel here, here, and here. And go here for the recent debate over The Godfather as a great American novel.

Alec MacGillis is unsure that Detroit has them:

We’ve heard so much about all the vacant buildings in Detroit and the budding return of deal-seeking hipsters that there’s an assumption that the city is just waiting to be discovered by a wave of new residents of the sort that are flooding into Brooklyn and Washington but also, in smaller numbers, parts of Baltimore, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. What this misses is one of Detroit’s cruel ironies: while it has many, many vacant buildings available for a song, it lacks the sort of housing stock on which urban renaissances are born.

The “urban renewal” wave of the 1950s and ’60s was more disastrous in Detroit than anywhere else—to make room for a web of new expressways (built partly to speed travel among the big auto plants on the periphery), the city knocked down not only a major African-American neighborhood (thus contributing to the racial tensions that spawned the 1967 riots) but also a swath of buildings on the southwest corner of downtown, exactly the sort of warehouses and small factories that have been reborn as loft apartments and condos in other cities. There are also precious few of the brownstones and other rowhouses that are so popular with gentrifiers in other cities. As Jane Jacobs explained years ago, cities thrive on density, but Detroit, for the reasons described above, was always more spread out than other big cities. What is mostly left for housing, with the exception of rejuvenating pockets like the Midtown area around Wayne State and the Detroit Institute of Art, are some breathtakingly handsome Art Deco towers downtown in various stages of vacancy, and a sea of single family homes scattered across the vast expanse, offering less than ideal raw material for the sort of bikes-and-coffee-shop comeback we’ve seen in other cities.

Yglesias notes another handicap Detroit suffers – a lack of major universities:

The overall higher education sector in the United States takes a lot of criticism these days, but in part precisely because of the things that make it seem kind of bloated and inefficient it’s a very valuable urban amenity. Universities both create little neighborhood-level retail clusters around them, and along with medical facilities become the twin pillars of a regional knowledge-based economy. Of course cities can thrive without necessarily playing host to a prestigious private university or a public university flagship campus (San Antonio, for example) but for lots of older cities hit hard by the macroeconomic trends of the 1970s and 1980s the existence of major universities has provided a foundation for rebuilding.