Abraham Verghese

Read this article about a doctor turned a fiction writer, Abraham Verghese.

Robert B. Zajonc

Excerpts from an obituary in this morning's newspaper.

Robert B. Zajonc, a Stanford University professor who drew on his harrowing boyhood experience as a Polish refugee fleeing the Nazis during World War II to become an expert on human behavior and a founding father in the field of modern social psychology, has died.

[...]

Born in 1923 in Poland, he and his parents fled to Warsaw from their small hometown after the Nazi invasion. In 1939, the large apartment building where they were living was bombed. The 16-year-old boy woke up in a hospital, both legs broken, to learn that he was the only survivor of the blast.

He was later rounded up by Nazi troops and sent to a labor camp, where he made bales of hay. One night in 1942, he and another youth escaped the camp and spent the next three months on the run to France - hiding during the day, walking at night. In France, he was caught by Nazis and sent to a political prison. After connecting with the French resistance, in 1943 he escaped to England where he joined the U.S. Army, working as a translator. He eventually became fluent in seven languages.

When the war ended, he worked as a translator for the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Paris. He relocated to New York in 1948 and worked as a statistician for American Express. A year later he was admitted to the University of Michigan, where he earned his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees. There he taught until 1994.

Professor Zajonc helped shape the post-World War II science of social psychology.

[...]

One of Professor Zajonc's early important studies led him to the conclusion that when someone else is present, one's performance is enhanced if engaged in a simple or well-known task. If, on the other hand, the task is difficult or unfamiliar, the presence of another person will adversely impact one's performance.

As part of that research conducted over three years, Professor Zajonc worked with cockroaches from Central America. A cockroach would run a simple maze faster if another cockroach were present. But if the maze was complex, or if the cockroach was alone, it would run the maze slower.

The writer who had played a writer

In the past dozen years we have witnessed in America at least a half dozen well publicized literary and journalistic hoaxes. A common theme runs through all of them: they are made up stories presented as real life reports, of people, often children, who are drug addicts, deviants, criminals. The stories create sensations, cause faux outrage (a seven year old street drug addict?!), their authors achieve fame, make television appearances, collect accolades and cash, before the hoax is discovered.

What interests me at the moment is that the narratives that attract so much attention and glory are not some Horatio Alger fantasies of luck and success, or uplifting sagas of friendship, bravery, of overcoming insurmountable obstacles, no Count of Monte Christo, no James Fenimore Cooper, no Huckleberry Finn even, they are invariably depressing tragedies of fall, failure, life at the bottom of the gutter. When they appear in a newspaper, their purpose is purely propagandistic: we are living in a heartless, evil capitalist society, the author suggests, and why doesn't the government do something about it! And their utterly negative view of human existence is apparently what causes their popularity, drawing readers, the discreetly charming American bourgeoise. Decadence sells among the well fed.

Not surprisingly, the fairly recent hoax of JT LeRoy attracted the avant-garde of decadence and self-congratulatory compassion, the Hollywood crowd, among them Winona Ryder, Courtney Love, Carrie Fisher, Lou Reed. The young woman who played the fake author JT LeRoy (a man) is said to have had a love affair with Italian actress Asia Argento. She has now published a book of her own, and an interesting article about it and about her travails caught my attention provoking this post. (As I stay away from inspirational literature, I haven't read the JT LeRoy books, which apparently still sell copies!) Anyway, this is the story of a writer who had played a writer. Link.

Finally, here is a list of a few recent literary hoaxes (journalistic hoaxes of this type are typically hushed, as the newspapers and television want to quickly make us forget anything that undermines their credibility.)

Murakami

Haruki Murakami was in town. I didn't join the worshipping throng, but it turns out that if I had gone to my favourite record stores the previous weekend, I might have run into him in the vinyl jazz section. Oh, well. Yesterday, a brief interview with him was published in the local paper. Excerpts:

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching. Sometimes it's not easy. You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue. You cannot do that while you are asleep. When the dream stops, it stops forever. You cannot continue to dream that same dream. But if you are a writer, you can do that. That is a great thing, to keep on dreaming while you are awake.

[...]

We are living in the future now, in a kind of science fiction - 9/11 itself was kind of unreal to me, those images of planes diving into the buildings. I felt like I stepped into the wrong world.

I have a feeling that if people like my stories, they are feeling the same way. Many people are feeling trapped. That is what I'm doing in my writing every day. I'm stepping into a dark room. There is a secret door in my mind. I step inside and I don't know what I'm going to find. Darkness. I describe what I see and I return to this world. My job is to just see and to write it down. I'm just an observer of what's happening.

Paper Wednesday

As the week drags on, the newspapers in my neck of the woods get more interesting. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are the best. Sunday, having been the edition in the not too distant past, has become unreadable, to the point where even the comics pages have now been reduced to four, down from six, down from eight pages a decade ago. The book section is now a miserly four pages. The newspapers are dying, well deserved deaths, some say, of leftist dinosaurs. In the meantime, today:

From a review of a book by Benjamin Markovits A Quiet Adjustment, a fictionalized story of the marriage of Lord Byron:

The only-you-can-save-me bad boy act has been catnip to countless generations of young ladies, and certainly Annabella (Miss Annabella Milbanke) responded to this come-on, admiring Byron's talent and intelligence, not to mention his good looks and position in society. She was confident she could prune his flaws and water his genius after they were married. Byron, for his part, was intrigued by this self-possessed young woman who declined to throw herself at him. Her refusal of his first proposal only heightened the poet's fascination for her. He was to pursue her for two more years before she accepted.

And, in the other paper today, from an article about the lead singer and songwriter Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows (not one of my faves):

“My life is like being on acid, all the time,” he says. “It’s an associative disorder, so the world doesn’t look real. And I know that it is real — people tell me it is — but that doesn’t help much.”

The worst period was pre-diagnosis, from 2003 to 2006, when he hid in his apartment, forced himself to stop writing and shuddered when physicians proposed treatments such as electro-shock therapy.

“And the problem is, you begin to get scared all the time, and then you begin to drift away. Because the world’s not real, people aren’t real, so you don’t need to be connected to anyone or anything,” he says.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

A few quotes and a link to an interview:

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

You can only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power-he’s free again.

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes are within our power . . . a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.

Waiting

Torrential rain, thunder, lightning suddenly descended on us as we drove back cross town in heavy evening traffic. Streams of water pouring down the windshield. A cloud must have broken, someone said. Left behind, she stood alone in a crowd of people, a crowd confused, uncertain if and when flights would take off. There was no one present to answer questions, to assure the stranded travelers. Chaos. Lasting an hour.

It hadn't started very encouraging, anyway. We had arrived early expecting to find the old terminal, where a flight took off once every half hour, deserted. Instead, the line snaked back and forth along the long room three and a half times before reaching a tall young man with a punk haircut guarding the gate and directing travelers to open windows, first three windows, then two, one, then four. By waiting she wouldn't make it to the gate in time, but was told at the information desk to join the queue anyway, and when her flight's check in would be closing, an announcement over the loudspeaker was to tell her to move to the head of the line. Why even wait in line? I asked the young punk rhetorically if the old regime was still running the joint. Two older men laughed. A few frustrating minutes later, the punk was called off somewhere, and I pushed her under the rope toward an open window. She was on her way.

I got off the streetcar at the stock exchange stop, near the museums and the monument of Charles de Gaulle. I walked past the stores Emporio Armani, Marc Cain, Escada, then ING Bank opposite a round Church in the center of the square where a priest was heard singing, as I walked by the fence of the Institute of the Deaf (established in 1817), finally passing The Olive Garden restaurant before turning east by the Sheraton Hotel towards the river. There was a milk bar at this square once, and a dive called the Rocking Horse where local homosexuals gathered, what has happened to them?

His directions were good. "Do you know where the Buffo Theater is?" "No!" , "The Army Museum?","No", "The Sheraton?" "Yes." "The park lies past the Sheraton and the old YMCA building behind it. The concert starts at 7, be there before 7 and we'll chat."

Nearing the park, I passed the elegant villa of the Embassy of Kuwait. The stage was situated outdoors under an open tent, and in front of it several smaller square tents with rows of rattan chairs underneath them. A tree or two blocked some views. On the small hill behind the stage, a young couple rode mountain bikes. In the sound booth three long haired guys dressed in black practiced on accoustic guitars. A group of a dozen older people took the center front row seats. It was early, just after six. He wasn't there. Nearby, in crowded open air caffes, groups of people were sitting at tables, instrument cases beside them. I paced around. Two pairs of tourists approached me, one of the men asking, "Pardon me, are you from this city?" "No, rather not," I answered awkwardly after a moment of hesitation.

At ten to seven, the musicians, dressed like California slobs, started coming one by one toward a closed tent on the side of the stage. Is this their stage getup, I thought? Times are surely changing. He showed up exactly at seven, shook hands with other organizers and the stage hands before coming to greet me. We embraced. "How is living" he asked, answering himself with another question,"Living?"

He can't stay, Michael is driving him to a birthday party. Oh, and Michael was looking forward to meeting her and talking American. Sorry, she had to leave early, Sorbonne's waiting. He and Michael have just returned from a country wedding, where moonshine was served. The country folk still make it! I could smell it on his breath, and he confessed he had to make sure to stay clear of his boss' nose. The moonshine recipe, he had learned, was based on an important historical date - 1410: 1 part yeast, 4 parts sugar, 10 parts water.

Somehow, the orchestra managed to start the concert without much delay, just a few minutes after 7. They were now wearing black suits, white shirts, 16 men and women, all strings, an orchestra without a conductor, originating, he told me, from my mother's home town over the present border.

We briefly got up and walked back to say 'hello' to Michael, and another older fellow, whom I might have known, he said, from the old days. My brother works for Sun in San Jose, the older fellow told me. Back to our seats and he soon said goodbye, wishing me a jolly good time. So far, they're hitting flat notes, I replied. So long until tomorrow to watch a gypsy ensemble. Be here at six!

He and Michael took off, and the orchestra quickly got up to speed after the first shaky piece, playing Astor Piazzola, Strauss, Offenbach, even slumming once into pop modernity with an original arrangement of Yesterday, which the audience, almost all seniors, might have been to old to dig. But who knows, people tend to age early here. I had planned to split soon, and stayed to the end. Jolly good time.

It started raining as I walked back to the streetcar stop on the Avenue. On top of a restored seven story art deco building, where the ground floor Poetry Bistro tempted my thirst, the crowned neon sign of Rolex came on.