FOOD FOOD THOUGHT: MULTITASKING IS THE OPPOSITE OF MINDFUL PRESENCE

Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (New York: Norton, 2014) ("Most of us assume . . . that automation is benign, that it raises us to higher callings but doesn't otherwise alter the way we behave or think. That's a fallacy. It's an expression of what scholars of automation have come to call the 'substitution myth.' A labor-saving device doesn't just provide a substitute for some isolated component of a job It alters the character of the entire task, including the roles, attitudes, and skills of the people who take part in it. As Raja Parasuraman explained in a 2000 journal article, 'Automation does not simply supplant human activity but rather changes it, often in ways unintended and unanticipated by the designers." Automation remakes both work and the worker." Id. at 67. "'Paying attention to the computer and to the patient requires multitasking,' observes [Beth] Lown, and multitasking 'is the opposite of mindful presence.'" Id. at 103. Also see Daniel Menaker, "Our Tools, Ourselves," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/9/2014.).

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: IS AMERICA BEYOND REPAIR?

Bob Herbert, Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America (New York: Doubleday, 2014) ("The twenty-first century has not been kind to the middle class in America. The economic nightmare that descended . . . was part of an epic change in the lives of individuals and families across the country. Millions of hardworking men and women who had believed they were solidly anchored economically found themselves cast into a financial abyss, struggling with joblessness, home foreclosures, and personal bankruptcy. Some were astonished to find themselves turning to food banks and homeless shelters. The hard times would eventually spread like a blight across the country, wiping out saving, crushing home values and upending carefully nurtured career plans. For much of the population, the very notion of economic security evaporated." "[] The years that had been unkind to the middle class were positively brutal to the working class and the poor. The United States was no longer a place of widely shared prosperity and limitless optimism. It was a country that had lost it way." Id. at 1-2. Also see Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, "Country at a Crossroads," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/9/2014.). 

A HISTORICAL NOTE TO REMEMBER AS AMERICA'S POLITICAL CENTER CEASES TO HOLD

John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (New York: Basic Books, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "In Massacre, renowned historian John Merriman recounts the sixty-four days that changed the face of European politics forever. He introduces a cast of inimitable characters--from les petroleuses) women accused of being incendiaries) to the painter Gustave Courbet--whose ideas of justice and equality helped fuel a revolution. Incredibly progressive, the Commune initiated a number of significant social reforms, including the recognition of women's unions, calling for compulsory primary education, and schools for girls. Their utopia, however, was brought to a chaotic and bloody end on May 22 [1871], when 130,000 government troops from Versailles poured through an unguarded opening in the western wall and executed captured Connunards en masses as mush of Paris burned." Also, see Adam Gopnik, "Fires in Paris: Why Do People Still Fight About the Paris Commune?," The New Yorker, 12 22 & 29, 2014.).

John Merriman, Police Stories: Building the French State, 1815-1851 (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2006).

POETRY AND SUFFERING

Stig Dagerman, A Burnt Child: A Novel, introduction by Per Olov Enquist, translated from the Swedish by Benjamin Mier-Cruz (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 2013) ("The worst thing about hitting animals is that you can never ask them for forgiveness. And you can never get forgiveness. Though, in the end, forgiveness is the only thing you need." Id. at 105.).

Stig Dagerman, German Autumn, foreword by Mark Kurlansky, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton Macpherson (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 2011) (This is a collection of writings about the aftermath of the Second World War in Germany. From "The Art of Sinking": "Sink a little! Try to sink a little! When it comes to the art of sinking then there are worse and better artists. In Germany there are bad practitioners who keep themselves alive only by the thought that since they have so little to live for they have even less to die for. But there are surprisingly many who are willing to accept anything merely to survive." Id. at 43, 43. From the essay "Literature and Suffering": "What is the distance between literature and suffering? Does it depend on the nature of the suffering, on its closeness or on its strength? Is the distance less between poetry and the suffering caused by the reflection of the fire than the distance between poetry and the suffering arising from the fire itself? There are examples to hand that show there is more or less immediate connection between poetry and remote or closed suffering. Perhaps we can say that simply to suffer with others is a form of poetry, which feels a powerful longing for words. Immediate open suffering distinguishes itself from the indirect kind by, among other things, not longing for words, at least not at the moment it occurs. Open suffering is shy, restrained, taciturn." Id. at 111, 111.).

Stig Dagerman, Island of the Doomed, preface by Alice McDermott, translated from the Swedish by Steven Hartman (Boston: A Verba Mundi Book/David R. Godine, 2013) ("But above all it's through your severe eye slits, captain, that we can see you're proud of being an empty suit of armour; an empty suit of armour can't be afraid, for instance, it can wander through any forest you like without being worried, without being afraid that a snake might wriggle up through the heather and wrap itself around its leg. You think it's an advantage, an enormous advantage not to be able to feel afraid, and in your emptiness you are laughing away at all the many people who are terrified at the prospect of dying of hunger, dying of thirst, dying of loneliness, dying of paralysis, dying of wounds, but if you pause and think about it then maybe it's not as much of an advantage as you think. Your lack of fear isn't in fact due to your store of courage, but rather to your inability to feel anything at all, to your not being able to feel anything because you haven't had anything to feel with for for the last four hundred years, and your memories of the time when the armour was bristling with life just fill you with ridicule and sterile defiance." " That's why it's right to say to you what someone once said to somebody else: I say unto you the man who fears not life shall not love life, the man who does not harbor fear, neither shall he harbor courage, the man who fears not death shall not be enabled to die with dignity, the man who fears not himself, neither shall he love another. But let's not talk about that, captain, you can't be opened up with words, you can only be opened up with a tin opener or a five-inch nail, and when you have  been opened up, people will only wonder why they bothered." Id. at 249-250.).

Stig Dagerman, Sleet, foreword by Mark Kurlansky, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton Macpherson (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 2011) (From "The Stockholm Car": "When you're the child of a small family farmer, your back grows crooked already at an early age from you trying to bear as much on it as the grown-ups. It's only fitting that we bear their burdens, seeing as we already wear their outgrown clothes and speak their castoff words. Our haunches burn from the strain of trying to keep pace with their long strides. It's not easy walking in these grown-up shoes, no sir. But it's what we've got to do, 'cause being children is a choice we've never really had." Id. at 119, 119.).

A SERIOUS MAN?

Howard Jacobson, J: A Novel (London & New York: Hogarth, 2014) ("A life was owned by the person who lived it, he believed. What happened didn't always happen because you wanted it to, but what you made of it was your responsibility. Help there was little and gods there were none. We are the authors of our own consequences, if not always of our own actions." "The credo of a serious man. You could be too serious, he didn't doubt that. But his birthright was his birthright. No one can make me, he thought, feeling the spray on his cheeks." Id. at 342. "'You have an unfortunate tendency to overwrite, her supervisor said when he had read the whole report. 'May I suggest you read fewer novels.'" Id. at 17. "'It's a great intellectual privilege to work in a library,' she reminded him. 'The Argentinian writer Borges was a librarian. The English poet Philip Larkin was a librarian.' Kevern hadn't heard of either of them. 'All human life is here,' she went on. 'The best of it and the worst of it, mainly the worst. Books do that, they bring out the bad in readers if there's bad already in them.' 'And if there isn't?' She smiled at him and stroked her pigtail. 'Then they bring out the good. As in me, I hope. I've been able to read a lot here." Id. at 211-212.).

WHAT STORIES WILL THE NEW YEAR BRING?

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (New York: Viking, 2013) ("What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story." "Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art. and then a way of traveling from here to there, What is it like to be the old man silenced by a stroke, the young man facing the executioner, the woman walking across the border, the child on the roller coaster, the person you've only read about, or the one next to you in bed?" "We tell ourselves stories in order to live, or to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live; tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown, stories of justification, of accursedness, of luck and star-crossed love, or versions clad in the cynicism that is at times a very elegant garment. Sometimes the story collapses, and it demands that we recognize we've been lost, or terrible, or ridiculous, or just stuck; sometimes change arrives like an ambulance or a supply drop. Not a few stories are sinking ships, and may of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us." Id. at 3-4. I fear I am out of stories. No new stories, and tired of my old ones.).

WHAT WILL THE NEW YEAR BRING? REALISTIC PERSPECTIVE! BOOKS WORTH REREADING!

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road To the Deep North: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2014) ("[H]e had beside their bed, as he always did, no matter where he was, a book, having returned to the habit or reading in his middle age. A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched . . ." Id. at 22. "Darky Gardiner did not have many beliefs. He did not believe he was unique or that he had some sort of destiny. In this own heart he felt all such ideas were a complete nonsense, and that death could find him at any moment, as it was note finding so many others. Life wasn't about ideas. Life was a bit about luck. Mostly though, it was a stacked deck. Life was only about getting the next footstep right." Id. at 169-170. "In the end all that was left was the heat and the clouds of rain, and insects and birds and animals and vegetation that neither knew note cared. Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a could, bamboo to be bamboo." Id. at 227. Also see Michael Gorra, "Bridge to Nowhere," New York Times Book Review, Sunday, 8/31/2014.).