“Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human” by Richard Wrangham

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
Richard Wrangham
Basic Books
2009
320 pp.
9780465013623
When we think about what makes us human, we usually think about our upright stance, our large brains, and our ability to use tools and language. Those aspects of humanity are easy to see and leave durable traces, such as million-year-old stone hand axes from Africa and ten thousand year old cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia. Yet it may be something more humble and difficult to spot that really set us on the evolutionary path to where we are now. According to anthropologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham, cooking is likely the one thing above all others that made us human.

It is possible to envision how it got started. Modern primates are known to throw rocks around, perhaps in conflict or play, and perhaps one of our tree-dwelling ancestors noticed that crashing certain types of rocks together would send off sparks that could catch grass on fire. Tending such a fire would certainly have been within the capability of our distant ancestors, as it is for primates today. Some can even start a fire if given matches. Fire would have been an excellent deterrent against predators, and would have made living on the ground and out of the trees safer. This would have been important during times of climate change when forest was replaced with savannah. It was probably not long before someone noticed that food dropped in the fire for a while tasted better, was easier to eat, and felt more satisfying. The rest is evolutionary history.

These days there a lot of theories going around about what humans are supposed to eat. Two of the most popular (and extreme) are the raw food movement and the (supposedly) paleolithic diet. Wrangham easily demolishes the former by pointing out that cooked food is far more digestible than raw food, and that our digestive systems are clearly adapted to easily digestible food. Compared to other primates, our teeth are small, our jaws are weak, and our intestines are small. We are simply not physically capable of chewing and digesting wild raw foods as other primates do. The proof of this comes from studies of raw food enthusiasts, which show that about half of the women stop menstruating, even on a diet much richer than you would actually find in the wild. No species can survive with half of its females infertile.

The other diet fad Wrangham addresses is the “paleolithic” diet, which emphasizes meat, meat, and more meat, and avoids carbs as much as possible. People on this sort of diet (as on the raw food diet) find that they are always hungry. This is something the native peoples of North America could have told them about. They call it “rabbit hunger” and scientists call it “ketosis.” A diet heavy in lean meat causes protein poisoning that damages the kidneys and liver, causes intense hunger, and eventually leads to death, as many early explorers discovered the hard way. In fact we know that the maximum safe level of protein intake is half of all calories, so at least half our diet must consist of carbohydrates and fat. Fat, whether animal or vegetable, is a rare commodity in the tropics where we evolved, so that means our ancestors ate at least half of their diet as carbohydrates. So much for that theory.

Although cooking can seem like a chore to some of us, it actually liberated us from the much more onerous chore of chewing and digesting raw food. Primates spend a good deal of their day just chewing tough raw foods like leaves and wild fruits (which are not as soft and plump as agricultural fruits). Furthermore, because their food was so low in digestible calories, they had to eat almost constantly throughout the day. Chimpanzees only get about 20 minutes off between meals, which doesn’t leave much time for doing anything constructive. Our ancestors, on the other hand, could get far more calories from cooked food, and so had hours of free time to go gather choice foods, such as carbohydrate-rich roots, honey, and of course, animals. All that travelling, hunting, digging, and carrying would have encouraged our bipedal stance and our ability to walk and run with our hands free. (See more on that here.) The more rich cooked food we ate, the less energy was devoted to chewing and digestion and the more could be devoted to our growing brains. And so, here we are.

I posted before about the downside of all this: due to the size difference between males and females, a male can force a female to cook for him in exchange for occasional meat and, more importantly, protection from other males who would take the cooked food by force. Wrangham calls it a protection racket, which sounds about right. This is the system that prevails in every culture ever studied, past or present, rich or poor, pastoral or agricultural, “primitive” or “civilized,” patriarchal or (otherwise) egalitarian. It may be dressed up with romance and marriage rituals, but the cooking compact is at its foundation an unequal bargain. What really impresses me is that women still know it. Our sense of equal worth has not been blunted by two million years of involuntary servitude. Anthropologists have recorded the complaints of women from diverse cultures saying exactly the same thing: “Here I am, slaving over the fire/stove while my husband sits around doing nothing.” The ability to cook has done wonderful things for our species, but perhaps it is the utterly unquenchable desire for equality and freedom that is the best human characteristic.

Catching Fire: The double-edged chef’s knife

In Victorian England, the aesthetic writer John Ruskin argued that household labor was divided harmoniously and that women were superior to men. He credited women with greater organizational skills than men and explained that women were therefore better at managing households. But to philosopher John Stuart Mill, it was obvious that women were treated unfairly. Ruskin’s gallantry, he said, was “an empty compliment … since there is no other situation in life in which it is the established order, and considered quite natural and suitable, that the better should obey the worse. If this piece of talk is good for anything, it is only as an admission by men, of the corrupting influence of power.”

Mill’s accusation that Victorian British men used power to their own advantage might be applied equally well to all nonindustrial societies. The women living on Vanatinai had as much control over their lives as in any society. They were not regarded as inferior to men, and in the public realm they were not subject to male authority. But even when they were tired and men were relaxing, they still had to cook. [Anthropologist] Maria Lepowsky does not report what would have happened if a woman had refused to cook, but among hunter-gatherers who are similarly egalitarian, husbands are liable to beat wives if the evening meal is merely late or poorly cooked. When there is a conflict, most women have no choice: they have to cook, because cultural rules, ultimately enforced by men for their own benefit, demand it

The idea that cooking led to our pair-bonds suggests a worldwide irony. Cooking brought huge nutritional benefits. But for women, the adoptions of cooking has also led to a major increase in their vulnerability to male authority. Men were the greater beneficiaries. Cooking freed women’s time and fed their children, but it also trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture. Cooking created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority. It is not a pretty picture.

—Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

This is one of the most depressing chapters I’ve read in a while. Up until this point I was enjoying the idea that cooking made us human, that it shaped our bodies and brains to be what they are today. But the idea that cooking also made us patriarchal is decidedly uncomfortable, especially since I am on the receiving end of that patriarchy. I am fortunate to live in a time and place where I don’t need a husband to guard my food (or books!) from marauders, but men still do make most of the decisions in the world, and let’s just say that there is some room for improvement there. I can only hope that we will continue to evolve in the direction of equality so that we can all enjoy being human.

Catching Fire: Men, Women, and Cooking

This may explain why I’m not keen on either marriage or cooking:

Relying on cooked food creates opportunities for cooperation, but just as important, it exposes cooks to being exploited. Cooking takes time, so lone cooks cannot easily guard their wares from determined thieves such as hungry males without their own food. Pair-bonds solve the problem. Having a husband ensures that a woman’s gathered foods will not be taken by others; having a wife ensures the man will have an evening meal. According to this idea, cooking created a simple marriage system; or perhaps it solidified a preexisting version of married life that could have been prompted by hunting or sexual competition. Either way, the result was a primitive protection racket in which husbands used their bonds with other men in the community to protect their wives from being robbed, and women returned the favour by preparing their husbands’ meals. The many beneficial aspects of the household, such as provisioning by males, increases in labor efficiency, and creating of a social network for child-rearing, were additions consequent to solving the more basic problem: females needed male protection, specifically because of cooking. A male used his social power both to ensure that a female did not lose her food, and to guarantee his own meal by assigning to work of cooking to the female.

—Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

A while back I read a book that argued that our bodies our designed to run. This book argues that our bodies are designed to eat cooked food. Both theories seem to be correct, but it’s the cooking that would have made the running possible. Cooking dramatically increases the energy we can get from food, and this allowed our early ancestors to downsize their jaws and intestines in favour of growing bigger brains. It also cuts down on chewing time (our primate cousins spend much of the day just chewing raw food) which frees up time for chasing animals across the veldt. Of course one must cook on the ground, and it may be fire that encouraged us to leave the trees in the first place by making it safe to live on the ground full-time. From there it was just an evolutionary hop, skip, and jump to standing, walking, and running.

The trade-off for the technological miracle of cooking seems to be the subjugation of half of the species. Women are responsible for daily household cooking in nearly every culture ever studied, past and present, even though there is no biological reason for it. The division of labour in this case seems to be, as Wrangham so aptly puts it, a protection racket. “Cook for me and there won’t be any trouble.” Apparently it was an offer our foremothers could not refuse, and to this day women in every society are burdened with the vast majority of the cooking and other household work. What is amazing is that after nearly 2 million years of evolution, in every culture from the Kalahari to downtown Tokyo, women still know it’s a raw deal. Perhaps it’s time to renegotiate?

“The Whole Five Feet” by Christopher Beha

The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else
Christopher R. Beha
Grove Press
2009-05-06
256 pp.
9780802118844

The only reason I read this book is because I was assured that it actually took the great books seriously, unlike some other tome-conquering tales I’ve read. The author initially intended to write a comedy—“a feckless, somewhat lost young man who shuts himself away from the modern world … the young man might learn a few easy lessons, and we could all share some laughs along the way." However real life intruded—birth, death, and serious illness—to remind him that neither life nor books are to be taken lightly.

The lost young man part was more or less right. Not clear on what to do next, he moved back home to his parents’ luxurious New York apartment and decided to spend a year doing nothing other than read the Harvard Classics, a five-foot long set of books intended by its editor, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, “to provide the literary materials from which a careful and persistent reader might gain a fair view of the progress of man observing, recording, inventing, and imagining from the earliest historical times to the close of the nineteenth century.” You may notice right away that gorging on 22,000 pages of serious text in one year does not sound very “careful.” There were works, particularly in the poetry volumes, that Beha would have liked to linger over, but in the end he realized that he had the rest of his life to get better acquainted with the books and poems that spoke to him.

I was hardly done with some of these books when I knew that I would never return to them, whereas other will probably remain touchstones throughout my life. But again, it was the books themselves that taught me this. Before I read these two superficially similar books, I couldn’t have known that Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ would mean little to me while Pascal’s Pensées would mean so much. Many of my favourite works in the Classics, such as Dana’s Two Years before the Mast or Haskell’s letter from Gettysburg, had been entirely unfamiliar to me when I started. While reading these books, I needed to judge their worth for myself. But first I needed that outdated body—the clerisy, the intellectual elite—to tell me which books to read.

There is a definite sense of passing and loss in this book, and a desire to reclaim something for the future.

I wanted to establish a connection with those who came before me… I wanted to believe that for all the things lost, there might be abundant recompense somewhere.

Beha had personal reasons to read the Harvard Classics. His grandmother had had a set, and he was intrigued as to what a devoutly Catholic wife and mother with an 8th grade education would want with the great books. He also wondered how much of what she had absorbed from those books had filtered down through to family into himself. But of course reading the classics made them his own. He relates what he read to his own experiences of loss (including loss of faith) and illness, but he also feels the loss of the literary culture that the Harvard Classics (and the Great Books of the Western World) tried to popularize. He knows he cannot re-enter that culture without becoming an anachronism in his own time, but still he feels that we have lost something valuable and beautiful.

His poems, Wordsworth tells us, “were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.” He warns that readers who are used to the “gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers” may find his work strange or awkward: “they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title.”

It would surprise most readers now to hear Wordsworth’s description of his own language after reading about “that blessed mood, / In which the burthen of the mystery, / In which the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world, / Is lightened.” It’s not just the relative elegance of his supposed “awkwardness” that is so striking, but the complexity of this “language of conversation.”

One could be charitable and say that colloquial language evolves over time, and what seems conversational in one era is destined to sound strange more than a century later. But this won’t quite do. Wordsworth’s conversational language isn’t just different from ours; it’s richer and more beautiful. Simply put, something has been lost. When I came to this conclusion, I thought back to my grandfather. It seemed to me that our decline in self-expression rested somewhere in the fact that he had grown up memorizing lines from Longfellow whereas I had grown up memorizing lines from Caddyshack.

But what has been lost can be regained. Our predecessors were not born reciting poetry, they learned it by reading, which we can also do. We may lack the tweedy taskmasters of the past, but the task has never been easier. Culture has never been more accessible, even to elites, as it is now. Libraries and the Internet have made just about every significant work of art or thought available for little effort and expense. You can do the Grand Tour from your living room and read the classics for price of a library card. You can watch Shakespeare’s plays and listen to symphonies on YouTube. We don’t need a Harvard Classics any more, we only need people to remind us why we should keep reading (and watching and listening to and looking at) the classics.

In many ways, this is how I feel about having finished the Classics: I shall go on in the same way. Nothing in my life is going to change in any visible fashion. But these books have helped me to find meaning in events—illness and loss as well as moments of great joy—that didn’t make any sense to me. At the same time, life helped me make sense of these books. And so it will continue to go, for although I have read through the whole five feet, I’ll never be finished with them.

Polyglot: Wrestling with Words

Kató Lomb describes some of the difficulties of being a simultaneous translator:

When a speaker recites intricately polished, long sentences from his script and we have to improvise, then a wrestling match between speaker and interpreter ensues. All we can do is wrestle in the Greco-Roman style while the speaker does so in a "catch-as-catch-can" way. In this struggle, we are always defeated.

… Anyway, only the speaker is allowed to stop. (“A profound mind, searching for the most suitable form to express his thoughts!”) If it is the interpreter who falls silent, then the sudden silence will awake even the delegates peacefully  napping in their headphones. (“There are amateurs sitting in the booths; they don’t know the terms.”)

—Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages [Download PDF]

Polyglot: Some things need no translation

I had been sitting alone and bored for hours when a pretty, smiling little Mongolian woman stepped inside my compartment. Unfortunately, it soon  turned out that she didn’t speak a word in any other language apart from her
mother tongue. My knowledge of Mongolian was restricted to only bayartai (goodbye), which I didn’t consider suitable to start a conversation.

So we looked sadly at each other for a while. Then my companion took out some provisions from her wicker basket and offered me some. The delicious cookies established my good opinion of Mongolian cuisine more eloquently
than any speech. She must have surmised as I turned the pastry in my hand—it resembled our cottage-cheese turnover—that I was racking my brains about how to make it. And that was when the pantomime began. Until the train reached  its  destination,  we  exchanged  recipes  for  hours, without exchanging—or being able to exchange—a word. I seem to have correctly “translated” the cooking techniques expressing slicing, breading, thickening, folding, filling, stirring, kneading, cutting, and tenderizing because the meals I learned from this Mongolian woman have since become frequent dishes of my cooking repertoire. And I sometimes imagine with a pleasant feeling that somewhere in Ulanbator a  bunch  of  Mongolian  children  might  be  devouring  their plates of fried chicken to my health.

—Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages [Download PDF]

This reminds me of when my great-aunt came to visit. She didn’t understand any English but greatly enjoyed watching Wok with Yan every day. I never did ask if she prepared any Chinese stir-fries after she returned home…

Polyglot: Travelling in America

Author’s note: I interrupt myself here to give some practical advice to those preparing to go to America. On the train, in the hotel lounge, or at the breakfast table, those sitting next to you will ask you the same questions. First question: “Where are you from?” Second: “What do you do?” Third: “What do you drive?” When I was a novice traveler, I admitted that I usually took the bus. People were so astonished that I changed my answer. I now say, “I don’t think you know the make—it’s an Ikarus.” “Is it a big car?” they would ask. “Is it bigger than a Chevrolet?” “Much bigger!” I would reply with a quick flip of the wrist. [Ikarus is a Hungarian bus manufacturer.]

—Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages [Download PDF]

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: Books are Experience

Books are experience, the words of authors proving the solace of love, the fulfillment of family, the torment of war, and the wisdom of memory. Joy and tears, pleasure and pain: everything came to me while I read in my purple chair. I had never sat so still, and yet experienced so much.

—Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

Polyglot: The Forbearance of Books

A book can be pocketed and discarded, scrawled and torn into pages, lost and bought again. It can be dragged out from a suitcase, opened in front of you when having a snack, revived at the moment of waking, and skimmed through once again before falling asleep. It needs no notice by phone if you can’t attend the appointment fixed in the timetable. It won’t get mad if awakened from its slumber during your sleepless nights. Its message can be swallowed whole or chewed into tiny pieces. Its content lures you for intellectual adventures and it satisfies your spirit of adventure. You can get bored of it—but it won’t ever get bored of you.

—Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages [Download PDF]

Polyglot: Knowledge is Boring

I wonder about those who learn a language for practical reasons rather than for itself. It is boring to know. The only thing of interest is learning.

…An exciting game, a coquettish hide-and-seek, a magnificent flirt with the spirit of humanity. Never do we read so fluently and with such keen eyes as in a hardly known, new language. We grow young by it, we become children, babbling babies and we seem to start a new life. This is the elixir of my life.

…Sometimes I think of it with a certain joy that I can even learn Chinese at my ancient age and that I can recall the bygone pleasure of childhood when I first uttered in the superstitious, old language “mother,” and I fall asleep with this word: “milk.”

—Dezső Kosztolányi from the story "I read in Portuguese" in Our Strong Fortress, Language, quoted in Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages [Download PDF]

Polyglot: Read!

Whenever I am asked how I was able to succeed in many languages in a relatively short period of time, I always make a bow in spirit to the source of all knowledge: books. My advice to learners can thus be expressed in one word: read!

—Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages [Download PDF]

Polyglot: Why it’s better to learn languages from books

I see another difficulty in practicing a language with others. An uninteresting partner is uninteresting in a foreign language as well.

I have written about how much I suffered in Japan because everyone wanted to practice their English with me and I couldn’t attain with the greatest effort to get answers in Japanese to my questions asked in Japanese. In the end, someone took pity on me and recommended a certain Mr. Matsumoto, who understood my sorrow and showed willingness to converse with me in Japanese in the afternoons.

Mr. Matsumoto proved to be a Buddhist monk. He was indeed ready to talk in Japanese, but unfortunately his only topic was Buddhism; specifically, that 11 of its 12 branches held completely false views. Only the branch that he followed was the true one. While he was explaining to me what the sole correct interpretation of the Lotus Sutra was for the third hour, I slipped away.

—Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages [Download PDF]

Through the wonders of Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia, I just discovered Kató Lomb (1909-2003), a Hungarian translator and interpreter who worked in 16 (sixteen) languages. Though her training was in chemistry, the Depression forced her to seek alternative employment, and she decided to try teaching English. (80 years later that is still a viable alternative for unemployed graduates!) Then came Russian (which was handy when the Soviets took over Hungary), French, and so on, and so forth. Each time she had some immediate incentive to learn a language (usually economic), and so she racked up language after language. She denied having any particular gift for languages, and in fact did poorly in language classes as a child. What she did have was motivation, and a method that made learning interesting. Her key to learning was to seek out texts that were interesting enough to stick with through the rough patches. She did most of her learning by reading novels. Wanting to know what happened in the end was a great spur to keep slogging through unknown words. Though she did make some use of grammars and dictionaries, and even formal classes, the bulk of her learning came from reading books. It’s the only way she was able to learn so many languages so quickly and so fluently. She felt that traditional teaching methods that focus on grammar, vocabulary lists, and boring exercises were ineffective and slow. It’s hard to argue with that given her results!

Though I am only part way through Polyglot, I definitely recommend it to anyone interested in languages. As if to illustrate her point, she also tells some very funny stories, so it is quite an entertaining read as well. Bonne lecture!

Chess Bitch: J. Polgar

When I found out that the J in J. Polgar stood for Judit, I was so excited. I didn’t even know she was a woman, just that she smashed her opponents like mashed potatoes. After that, I put her games up on my bedroom wall.

—Linda Nangwale from Zambia, in Jennifer Shahade, Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport

“Crazy Busy” by Edward D. Hallowell

CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD
Edward M. Hallowell
Ballantine Books
2006-03-28
256 pp.
9780345482433

I “read” this book in audio format some time ago and, ironically, have not had the time time post about it until now. As a result I have forgotten many of the details, but I recently got the print version out of the library to remind myself of the salient points, and I’d like to post them here since I’m certain I’m not the only crazy busy person around here.

First of all I should say that, since I don’t work or have kids, I am not busy in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, I have the same feeling of not having enough time (or energy) to do everything I want to do that everyone else seems to have these days. I think this just proves the absurdity of the default human approach to choice and abundance: we want it all, and we especially want the hottest, newest, coolest thing.

I blogged about this before; my main problem is the internet. I can quite pleasantly fritter away hours following Twitter links and trying to put a dent in Google Reader (how kind of them to stop counting unread posts after 1,000), but that doesn’t get me any closer to the goals I have when I’m not in front of the screen and clicking the mouse to get my next morsel of cyberkibble. Neurologists have studied the pleasure we get from acquiring new information and unlike other cravings, our desire for data is never sated but in fact increases with success. The stomach can fill, thirst can be quenched, sleep can refresh, but our brains can’t get enough. Under natural circumstances it would be what biologists call an adaptive trait, something that helped our ancestors survive and got us to this point, but in the information age it has become a bit of a liability, like being a diabetic in a candy store.

I got Crazy Busy in hopes that it would give me the wisdom to manage my brain’s appetite in a more sensible way. It’s a very enjoyable book, and the author has made up all sorts of humorous names for the different pressures of modern life—gemmelsmerch (ubiquitous distractions);  gigaguilt (guilt over missing or losing track of electronic communications); screensucking (the online equivalent of thumb sucking); doomdarts (suddenly remembered obligations that haunt you).

The overall goal of the book is to help people to do what matters most to them, and the first step is to acknowledge one’s limits, starting with death. As a culture we are rather averse to contemplating our own deaths, but a little actuarial knowledge goes a long way to putting one’s use of time into perspective. The book even contains a table of how many minutes you likely have left, depending on your age. Once it is established that we do not have time for everything, we can move on to Hallowell’s ten principles for dealing with overload:

1. Do what matters most to you. In a word, prioritize.
2. Create a positive emotional environment wherever you are. You’ll think and cope better and more creatively.
3. Find your rhythm. Put as much of your life on automatic pilot as possible, saving your brain for more important tasks.
4. Invest your time wisely so as to get maximum return. This entails considering what you really get out of every activity.
5. Don’t waste time screensucking. Except for reading this blog. ;)
6. Identify and control the sources of gemmelsmerch (distraction). This consists mainly in creating rules to abate and contain unimportant and unscheduled demands on your time.
7. Delegate. Be “effectively interdependent,” not independent.
8. Slow down. Don’t be in such a rush. A few more seconds at a stop light are not going to kill you, but stressing about it might.
9. Don’t multitask ineffectively. In fact there is no such thing as effective multitasking; multitasking is terribly inefficient.
10. Play. What this really means is to be as absorbed in what you are doing as children are when they play.

If you think that’s complicated, there are a number of other lists and a great deal more advice in this book on how to deal with the various issues that lead to a state of “crazybusy.” That’s just a symptom of how complex our lives are now, and that each problem does need to be taken in turn and dealt with. Not dealing with these problems is not really an option any more. But as the author states, we should not try to achieve a state of total control over every second of our lives. Not only is it impossible, it would be a terrible way to live. Instead we should just exert enough control so that we can spend most of our time on the most important things. As for which techniques to use, I think the best rules are the ones you use. It’s better just to get started and build skills as you go along.

One skill I’ve been using lately, inspired partly by this book and partly by this article at Datamation, is to make more use of electronic filters. It’s not good enough to say no to something I’m not interested in; that takes time and brain cycles. It’s much better to arrange it so I never see these things in the first place. That means unsubscribing from newsletters that never get read anyway, setting my email to shunt coupons off to another folder that I can consult when I go shopping, and setting Tweetdeck to filter out FourSquare announcements (yet another reason to love Tweetdeck!). The idea is to let technology do the filtering for me. I’ve also engaged in massive Twitter downsizing (apologies to those I’ve unfollowed or never followed), which has noticeably improved my peace of mind and productivity (hence this post). It’s a baby step, but that is exactly what is needed to deal with distractions that come a few kilobytes at a time.

What are your tricks for dealing with information overload and multimedia mayhem? How do you keep your brain on track and your priorities top-of-mind? Are you really surfing the web or flailing helplessly in the rip tide of distraction?

CrazyBusy: The Blob

By blather and its sibling clutter, I refer to the colossal, growing mess of words, images, numbers, noises, and physical object that roll over us every day like the Blob from the 1950s horror movie. This stuff oozes out of televisions, radios, magazines, billboards, books, mail, and other printed material and congeals in the piles we put it all into, along with the other junk modern life upchucks like mountains of used tires. The piles tumble down around our work and living spaces and ominously remain, waiting for the signal to organize and unite into one gigantic Megablob the size of earth, protruding like a horrific tumor so big that it will set the world off its orbit.

—Edward M. Hallowell, CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Handling Your Fast-Paced Life

I just started listening to this book and had to post this amusing snippet. Lest you think the book is out of date in referring to piles of print, it also addresses the fire hose of information spewing out of our computer screens. I confess I’ve been drowning in information, or as Clay Shirky would put it, experiencing filter failure, for some time. This is challenging time for information addicts, especially those of us grew up with a scarcity of information. Young people have little idea of how hard us old-timers used to have to work to get information. Now I’m like a Depression survivor who saves every piece of tin foil and scrap of fabric. Saving things may be good for the environment, but trying to save, or at least catch and read, every interesting bit of information is a great way to drive oneself crazy. I’m hoping this book will help me embrace information abundance in a healthier way.

“Eccentrics” by Dr. David Weeks and Jamie James

Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness
Dr. David Weeks and Jamie James 
Villard
1995
277 pp.
9780394565651

I think most of us bookworms know what it’s like to be thought of as a little bit eccentric. Non-readers simply can’t understand the joy we get from immersing ourselves in the imaginative worlds that books create. The joy is so great that we go on indulging our intellectual whims regardless of the jokes and criticisms. The same is true of people further along the eccentricity continuum, who are the subject of this book. In Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness, the authors report the results of the first major scientific study of eccentrics. The lead investigator, Dr. David Weeks, began in a rather eccentric way. In order to find subjects, he posted index cards on bulletin boards that said “Eccentric? If you feel that you might be, contact Dr. David Weeks at…” He figured that an eccentric would be exactly the sort of person to respond to that kind of ad, in indeed they did, in droves. In the end nearly 800 people were selected for the study, and from the response the investigators estimated that about one in ten thousand people are “classic, full-time eccentrics.”

So, what is an eccentric? According to this study, an eccentric is:

• nonconforming;
• creative;
• strongly motivated by curiosity;
• idealistic: he wants to make the world a better place and the people in it happier
• happily obsessed with one or more hobbyhorses (usually five or six)
• aware from early childhood that he is different;
• intelligent;
• opinionated and outspoken, convinced that he is right and that the rest of the world is out of step;
• noncompetitive, not in need of reassurance or reinforcement from society;
• unusual in his eating habits and living arrangements;
• not particularly interested in the opinions or company of other people, except in order to persuade them to his—the correct—point of view;
• possessed of a mischievous sense of humor;
• single;
• usually the eldest or an only child; and
• a bad speller.

The first five items on the list were the most defining characteristics of the eccentrics in the study. The other factors were common but not universal. The last item should perhaps be explained: it’s not that eccentrics don’t know how to spell, it’s just that they sometimes think they have a better way to spell things. Given how crazy the English language is (most of the subjects were British or American) they may have a point!

The most likeable eccentrics are the creatives—the painters, sculptors, writers, etc. I suppose society almost expects artists to be eccentric, so these people are not so threatening to our sense of order. A little more difficult are the eccentric scientists, mostly inventors, who often seek after seemingly impossible goals, such as perpetual motion machines. It would be easy to write off their activities as pointless tinkering except that many important scientific and technical discoveries have been made by people we would consider eccentric. For example, Isaac Newton spent more time on alchemy than on physics or mathematics, and he attributed his Principia to esoteric knowledge revealed by God to ancient mystical philosophers. Somehow those eccentricities have been conveniently cleansed from the history of science in order to preserve the myth that science is a purely rational pursuit. Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Perhaps science has to start with magic as well.

The most difficult eccentrics to handle are the ones involved in alternative theories of reality—arcane spiritualism, wild speculations about the origins of civilization (e.g. Atlantis), and conspiracy theorists. Some of these proselytizers are clearly charlatans, but others genuinely believe what they propose, even when it flies in the face of incontrovertible facts. These eccentrics are hard to understand, and I guess as long as they don’t cause any trouble we must let them be. Mental health is not a question here; eccentrics are demonstrably healthy mentally, and even tend to have less mental illness in their families than non-eccentrics. This study looked at various psychological indicators and found that while healthy, eccentrics are definitely different and have specific personality traits (listed above) that distinguish them from non-eccentrics. What this means is that eccentricity is not an act, but it comes from within, and usually starts in childhood. The people in the study could remember feeling different as a child, and often had bitter feelings about being forced to conform. Few had anything good to say about their upbringing. Being repressed as children often made them rebel and become even more eccentric in adulthood. Conversely, the children of eccentrics (when they have children, which isn’t often) tend to rebel by becoming overly conformist. That always seems to be the way with strong childhood influences, doesn’t it?

Women eccentrics are difficult to study. They are almost absent from the historical record, partly due to bias in reporting, partly because many were shut up in mental institutions or kept at home. In recent decades women are more free to be eccentric, but judging eccentricity in women is still subject to bias. What might be considered normal behaviour in a man might be considered out of the ordinary for a woman. These judgements are changeable, just as what was eccentric for a woman to do in the past (e.g. wear pants) is now perfectly normal.  Therefore it is difficult to judge eccentricity in women objectively, even with psychological tests, which can themselves be gender-biased. Nevertheless, it does seem that eccentric women react to societal strictures by becoming even more eccentric, just as all eccentrics do in response to strict parenting. It is also common for eccentric women to wait until the children have left home to begin expressing themselves, often divorcing their husbands in the process. Interestingly, there were more women than men in the survey (500 versus 300, approximately), but I wonder how many more women there are just waiting for their opportunity to pursue their own eccentric projects?

The final chapter of the book was about the general health and happiness of eccentrics. The former is easier to measure; eccentrics are healthier than average, and tend to go to the doctor far less often than non-eccentrics. More difficult to measure is happiness, but the authors report that the eccentrics in the study not only seem happier than most people, they radiate joy. It appears that their creative and investigative pursuits are deeply fulfilling, and this is surely good for health. Also good for their health is their lack of concern for what other people think. Eccentrics seem to be free from the need to impress others and free from the fear of failure (partly because they don’t accept the notion of failure). The book speculates that eccentrics may have lower levels of stress hormones and higher levels of growth hormone (a sign of well-being), but there are no medical tests to confirm this. As with all scientific investigation, eccentric or not, more study is needed.

This book certainly made me think about my own eccentricities. When I look at the list of characteristics of an eccentric, I can check off every item except the last—I must admit I do enjoy spelling words correctly. I still don’t know if I qualify as an eccentric, though, because I keep most of it to myself. I don’t “look” eccentric, and in fact I consciously groom myself to look ordinary. The older I get the more I like to fly under the radar—I call it urban camouflage. Part of it has to do with where I live—ordinary, middle-class, leafy suburbia. When I’ve travelled to big cities I’ve been excited by the diversity of self-expression there, but there even the craziest outfits are taken in stride; here they would stop traffic. Part of it has to do with my illness; I don’t have the energy to answer a lot of questions. But mostly I’m just self-conscious, which likely excludes me from the ranks of eccentrics. I wish I wasn’t self-conscious, and this book has certainly gotten me thinking about how to get over it. On the other hand, perhaps the study is wrong. Most eccentrics live alone, and many are quite reclusive. Perhaps they are more self-conscious than they let on, and simply appear not to care what others think while in reality they have just learned to avoid society in order to make both it and themselves more comfortable. If they hide their eccentricities with walls, can it not be said that I hide mine with ordinary clothes? That said, I do not consider myself to be as eccentric as the people in the study. I am not trying to solve the energy crisis, nor do I create sculptures out of found materials or walk everywhere backwards. I just want to read my books and learn about everything. Is that so eccentric?

Here lies Lord Berners,
One of the learners.
His great love of learning
May earn him a burning.
But praise to the Lord,
He never was bored!

—Epitaph of Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners (1883–1950), composed by himself (from Eccentrics)

Eccentrics: Impossible is Nothing

Yet “impossible” is not a word in the eccentric lexicon. Yvonne X (that is her name) builds perpetual-motion machines in her workshop in Westfield, New Jersey….

She led me out to the workshop and proudly pointed at her machine, which looked like something out of a low-budget 1950’s science-fiction film. Gleaming stainless-steel cylinders were mounted on a frame along the brick wall. Tubes sprouted from the tops and bottoms, joined together by candelabra-shaped connectors. In the far corner more tubes dripped from the ceiling like plastic spaghetti. In the center was a highly polished silver disk, about the size of a football, mounted on a tripod and suspended by wires….

She squeezed the trigger mounted on the machine to activate it. The pipes made a fizzing sound, the liquids changed color, and the tubes began vibrating violently. A deep rumble issued sickeningly from the cylinders, and a gasket blew off like bullet, splattering test tubes. Then the silver disk, spinning with a gentle hum, began to ascend, faster and faster, until it finally crashed right through the workshop ceiling. There was a moment of calm. Yvonne X and I gaped at each other.

Then, as Milton said, all hell broke loose. Behind us a beaker exploded, then another. Sparks came showering out of melting wires. The room was filled with acrid smells of raw electricity and singed eyebrows (mine). The sprinkler system came on a sprayed the room with warm water. Yvonne turned and hightailed it out of the room, with me treading on her heels and feeling very much like a character in a particularly violent Warner Brothers cartoon. The fire department was soon on the scene. As firemen hosed down the scene of the disaster, Yvonne X was already brainstorming. She told me she was certain she knew what was wrong with the design, and vowed to start over.

That indomitable spirit of hopefulness is almost universal among eccentrics….

—Dr. David Weeds and Jamie James, Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness

“Party of One” by Anneli Rufus

Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto
Anneli Rufus
Da Capo Press
2003
320 pp.
9781569245132

This book is for all the non-social-butterflies out there. If you are reading this blog, you are probably one of them. Bookish types are the quintessential loners, though as Anneli Rufus (or anneli rufus) points out, loners defy description almost by definition. Rufus defines loners as people who simply like being alone, and a side effect of spending time alone following our own internal promptings is that we tend to develop very individual personalities and habits. Unlike most people we have no desire to fit in with the crowd and so we quite naturally veer off in our own directions, that is, in all directions.

The book celebrates many of the lonerish manifestations—artists, writers, heroes, adventurers, geeks—and does a good job of defending the loner by showing how much society benefits from all the creative projects we give birth to in our secret lairs. Rufus also spends some time taking down the most negative and unjustified loner stereotypes, the serial killer and the crazy person. She points out that while the media robotically portray every psychopath as a loner, it turns out that most of them had plenty of friends and family, at least before they got caught. There is a hardly a loner in the bunch. A few kept visitors away for the obvious reason that they had something (bodies, bombs, etc.) to hide. Some desperately craved human companionship but ended up alone because of an offensive personality. Social rejection prompts them to kill, not some inborn misanthropy that supposedly led them to shun society in the first place. Real loners don’t much care whether people accept us, so we don’t kill them when they don’t. It seems logical, but criminologists persist in profiling suspects as loners and so the friendly, smiling psychopaths get away.

The mentally ill are another class of what Rufus calls “pseudoloners.” Very often, like most people, they crave friendship and love but their distorted personalities turn people off and they end up alone against their will. The unfortunate consequence is that people tend to see solitude as a symptom of mental illness and this causes no end of trouble for the happy loner, especially for children. No parent wants their child to end up a maladjusted freak, or worse, and so they fling their little daydreamers into group activities, not realizing they may be torturing their own children and perhaps even stunting their internal growth. Rufus speaks from experience here, and relates how her mother kept trying to make her play with other children, basically at random. Research on how hard-wired our personalities are shows how futile this sort of remediation is. Making a loner social is as possible as making gay straight. You can make people miserable, but you can’t make them something they’re not.

My least favourite chapter was on religion. The basic premise is that religion, being inherently collective, is not of any interest to a true loner. This is then followed by some garden-variety Christianity-bashing (Crusades, check; Inquisition, check; witch-burning, check), as well as a freak-show tour of the ancient desert ascetics and medieval anchorites. Apparently bias against Christianity trumps the defense of loners because these spiritual seekers are portrayed as crazy people living completely useless lives. A few pages on and hermits of other traditions are treated with great respect. It’s an all too typical double-standard and shows a lack of research because there is a great tradition in Christianity of appreciating solitude and valuing solitary seekers. Rufus does bring up Thomas Merton, America’s famous hermit-monk, but then questions his loner cred by pointing to his fame and wide circle of correspondents. It seems the only good hermit is a non-Christian hermit.

I think the strongest part of the book is the emphasis on the creativity of the loner. Using time alone constructively is what separates the true loner from the outcast and the mentally ill. The arts and popular culture are dominated by the products of loners. We entertain the masses, even if we do not wish to be with them at the time. Loners are also responsible for a great deal of our scientific and technical achievements. It cannot be otherwise—creativity and invention come from within and cannot happen if there is distraction from without, therefore solitude is required. It’s an affirming realization, and one that I wish all young loners in today’s hyper-connected world could hear to counter all the voices telling them to join the crowd and stop being “anti-social.” It’s possible that nonloners will never be able to understand loners, but at least loners can come to understand themselves and let themselves be who they are.

Romance of the Garden

This is how I most like to garden—as a matchmaker who introduces a modest flower to a shy spot of land and watches them hit it off so well that I am irrelevant.

—Carol Graham Chudley and Dorothy Field, Between Gardens: Observations on Gardening, Friendship and Disability

I love this metaphor of the garden as a love affair between plants and the land. In this book, an exchange of letters between two gardeners, the authors both describe how they learned to let plants decide where they want to grow. They tried the horticultural equivalent of arranged marriages but found more success, and less stress, by welcoming volunteers, scattering seeds broadly, and letting the plants decide where they want to grow. Reading about the trials and errors of these two experienced gardeners makes me feel better about the weedy tangle that I call my garden. I’ve already learned some of their lessons. One winter I lost a lovely patch of Spanish lavender to cold and snow but rather than replace it I chose to plant more of the lavender varieties that had survived. This approach is really the only option given my marginal energy levels. There are times when I just can’t get into the garden for days or even weeks at a time, so if a plant can’t make it on its own, it isn’t going to make it in my garden!

“Script and Scribble” by Kitty Burns Florey

Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting
Kitty Burns Florey
Melville House
2008-11-01
225 pp.
9781933633671

I’ve been wanting to read Script and Scribble since reading Stefanie’s review of the book at So Many Books. Although I was very interested in handwriting in my teen years and developed my own distinct script, the quality of my handwriting has deteriorated in proportion to my use of the computer for communication. I do still write in a journal by hand, but in that case illegibility is a virtue in that it shields my innermost thoughts from prying eyes (and sometimes even my own!). I have been dissatisfied with the state of my handwriting for some time, and so I was glad to hear of a book dealing with the issue.

Lest I give the impression that the book is some dry instruction manual, let me say that Script and Scribble is so much fun that I devoured it in a day and a half. Its unabashed curmudgeonliness is delivered with such abundant wit that even a die-hard keyboarding purist would enjoy it. The book traipses through the history of handwriting from antiquity to the latest pedagogical trends, with a sprinkling of anecdotes from the author’s own graphological joys and sorrows.

I must admit I did skip the chapter on “graphology” (handwriting analysis), a subject so ludicrous it doesn’t even merit the effort of mockery. Otherwise the book was thoroughly entertaining. I was (temporarily) wooed by the graceful beauty of the florid (to us) Spencerian script, which was

…based on natural forms. To Spencer, the stones washed smooth by the lake became the ovals that are the foundation of his letters; arching tree branches and smooth-flowing streams led him to his graceful connecting lines. Remembering the joys of nature—the wild flowers, the smooth pebbles, the beams of sunlight, the flight of birds across a sky traced with wispy clouds—he mingled round and angular, light and dark, trailing vines and curling stems, slender upstrokes and shaded downstrokes, swooping capitals and judicious flourishes.

But I soon came to my senses when I considered the practicality of such handwriting in my life. It’s difficult to write (though by no means the most difficult hand available), and for those not used to it, difficult to read, which makes it a poor medium for communication. When I glanced back over the examples of past writing and calligraphy styles, I came to the same conclusion as the author does in the last chapter: Renaissance Italic stands out as the most legible, beautiful, and practical hand we have come up with yet. Indeed there is a movement (which has its epicentre in Oregon) to teach children (and adults) a single, semi-cursive Italic-based writing hand to replace both “ball and stick” printing and the loopy Palmer-esque cursive that is sprung on children just as they are getting the hang of printing.

We can only hope this is the beginning of the end of Puritanical (literally—Puritans disliked calligraphy) domination of handwriting. I wonder if the pointed arches of Italic reminded the Puritans too much of “Papist” cathedrals? In any case, the roundhand (a.k.a. copperplate) writing they invented replaced the earthiness of a broad nib with the ethereal swooping of a pointed pen, and it obviously caught on among a growing literate population. I don’t imagine they would have approved of the excessive flourishes their style of writing gave rise to, but without it we might not have the humble ballpoint pen, which might have been more to their liking.

While the author does not hold any illusions about the status of handwriting in this digital age (i.e. it’s on life-support, with the family divided on whether to pull the plug), she does point out that there are areas where handwriting is still essential. Our competence may still be judged through hand-written job applications, notes of love, thanks, or condolence are only acceptable when written by hand, and in the case of medical records and prescriptions, good handwriting can save lives. There is also the fact that a full quarter of the children in the USA do not have access to a computer at home, and so handwriting is still an essential skill for students. If this is the case, then a quick, simple, good-looking Italic-based writing style might fulfill all of these needs, as well as solve more mundane problems like deciphering the shopping list or post-it note.

Alas, the book the Florey recommends for learning the new cursive Italic, Write Now, is out of print [Edit: is now available here], but there are plenty of websites and even YouTube videos showing how it’s done. But for me the most exciting thing about rethinking handwriting is the opportunity to come up with one’s own style. Technology may have handwriting on the ropes, but it also makes the entire history of handwriting available to us. We can take what we like from history and adapt it to our needs. Perhaps in the end technology will help us improve our handwriting and make it more open, accessible, streamlined, and customized—like technology itself.

A true source of human happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life and elevating them by art.

–William Morris

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Postscript: One of the many amusing sidenotes in the book includes this gem from the writers’ guidelines for Verbatim magazine:

Under no circumstances will a handwritten MS be read. Instead, it will be roundly ridiculed, unless it is written using the Palmer method, in which case it will be stared at in amazement.