b l o g o s

in flight

It figures. As soon as I find myself flying around with a baby in tow, the airlines stop offering pre-boarding to people traveling with small children. I asked the person taking tickets today if I could go on, and she greeted me with a curt "not yet" and an explanation of the new policy, and then asked me to step aside while the gold medallion people swept through. Turns out they got held up at the valet stand though because the lady didn't give them pink valet tags. I'd like to think I had something to do with that, heh.

I don't just say this out of some sort of parental entitlement--I actually don't mind standing in line, and N is quite a patient little passenger--but with a baby so young I really do need the extra time to get settled into the seat before the person sitting on the aisle seat next to us boards. I'm usually trying to get her situated to nurse so that the takeoff doesn't hurt her ears (or the ears of the people around us), and to do that discreetly requires strategic positioning of lots of blankets. I also have to make sure that all the necessaries--N's favorite book, favorite teething toy, etc.,--are within reach, and so it helps to have the seat next to me empty while I get organized.

So this new "policy" pretty much sucks. But what's even more outrageous is that this also means anyone who needs extra time or assistance is stuck boarding in their assigned zones, including the BLIND GUY on my flight. I am not making this up.

All this said, N is a really great flyer and has developed an odd obsession with tray tables.

sartre's crabs

This morning at breakfast I read the most delightful piece in this month's Harpers--a short excerpt of a conversation between Jean-Paul Sartre and John Gerassi, a scholar who interviewed him in 1971. The excerpt details Sartre's post-mescaline visions of crabs. They followed him everywhere, "just three or four of them." (The crabs, it turns out, were lobsters, but having not heard this anecdote before, imagine my delight when the interviewer knowingly responds to Sartre's reference to his near-nervous breakdown with, "you mean the crabs?" And Sartre, interestingly, chooses to refer to them throughout as crabs.)

These crabs kept Sartre company at movies, on walks--always when he "was going someplace." He consulted a psychotherapist, some fellow named Jacques Lacan, who suggested that the crabs were his way of coping with loneliness. It's odd, then, that they were never around when Sartre was writing, for there is nothing more solitary, more grippingly lonely (often) than writing. Simone de Beauvoir (jeez--this guy and his no-name associates) considered crabs a sign of his depression. 

The crab's mode of life seems rather relevant. Crabs are not sing-songy bluebirds, or sweet furry creatures. They are hard-shelled, pincered bottom-dwellers that scurry on the ocean floor, eating algae, worms, bacteria, what have you. With creaturely life in mind, the standout line of the interview is this: "Despite their mocking, my crabs never said that my books would not be on the shelf, or that if they were, so what?"

Sartre's crabs kept him grounded and real. From time to time, we could all use a few crabs.

everyday reading: rapt

I have taken to liking this new--or maybe not so new--genre of trade books I referred to last night at dinner as "pop neurology." It's kind of like pop psychology, but with more attention to neurons and chemicals. This week I read a book called Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher.

The book itself has multiple commitments. At times Gallagher sounds like an English major, quoting from Poe, Emerson, and Milton. At others, she sounds like a philosopher, hewing closely (very) to the writings of William James. At still others, she sounds like cross between a buddhist monk and the master on Karate Kid. And often she sounds like the researcher she is--or used to be (does one every really stop being a researcher?). At any rate, Gallagher does a nice job synthesizing other studies related to attention and the mind, many of which (like the nuns doing puzzles) you will have heard or read about.

But more than that, while the book is a trade book, it manages to maintain its integrity in a way that trade scienc-y books seem to me to struggle to do, lapsing into hyperbole that often begins with the title. But this book, like the title, is elegant and even spare. The length of chapters even seem to take into account what Gallagher has learned about human attention these days. Which is a lot. This book is valuable because it encourages its readers to slow down and focus. There's a touch of technophobia lurking in some chapters, but by and large Gallagher gives people good tips to manage our networked lives. The best part though is that the book isn't simply about developing a machine-like focus, but it urges an almost magical approach to attention, one that combines attention with appreciation, advocates for an eastern way of giving one's self over to the moment, combined with a western way of choosing--very deliberately--what those moments will be, or what will get our attention. The word "rapt" works well to capture that part of the book's mission.

Toward the beginning of the book, Gallagher uses the parlance of bottom-up vs. top-down attention, where bottom-up is the chaotic kind of attention that I often practice during a day at the office, letting an email or a drop-in structure what I'm doing or derail what I'd planned to do. Top-down attention is more commanding in that it refuses to be sidetracked. It struck me while reading that this book would be particularly useful for graduate students who are trying to structure their lives and days around large, looming writing projects and smaller, yet still important duties. And I recommend it confidently because it is both demanding and forgiving, which is what we might all aspire to be as researchers, writers, teachers, and advisors.

everyday reading: The Invention of Air

I am starting a new and occasional series called "everyday reading," which for me means trade books that I read before bed. I recently finished Steven Johnson's The Invention of Air, having checked it out from the public library. It is a wide-ranging book centered on Joseph Priestley, the eighteenth century scientist, preacher, and rhetorical theorist (okay I added that last part, but he was!) whose quarters next to a brewpub led to his discovery of oxygen.

Now, I happen to have more than a passing interest in Priestley, having just finished an article co-authored with Cory Holding about Priestley's material rhetoric (and also Gilbert Austin's), and so I approach this book with more than just passing interest. In the course of researching for that article, I read many of Priestley's letters (which Johnson deals with in some depth) and especially focused on his treatises on electricity and his scientific reports of his invention and subsequent refinement of the process of carbonating water. Many of the stories Johnson tells were therefore already familiar to me. But that didn't make them any less interesting. The overall point of this book has to do with the virtues of pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake. Priestley certainly wasn't in science for the money, otherwise he would have tried to patent his carbonated water process instead of blabbing excitedly about it to everybody such that someone called Schweppes (the one whose name is still on your soda water bottles) ended up securing the rights. Nor was Priestley exclusively a scientist. Johnson makes a big deal about eighteenth-century intellectual culture, its coffeehouses overflowing with (very) public intellectionsls, and its scientific societies.

The book is also curious and even a little tortured (I think) because it has to fulfill that trade function and tell a story that relates Priestley to America's founding fathers. It's not hard to do--Priestley was, after all, good friends with Benjamin Franklin, and the two traded notes on their electricity experiments for some years. But that story falls a little flat next to the story that Johnson so obviously wants to--and ultimately does--tell: the story about a lively, connected intellect, and about the kinds of ecologies that fosters such intellect. These ecologies are human (his friends from the societies), spatial (coffeehouses, laboratories, and pubs), and very obviously material and animal (lilting mint sprigs and scorched cabbage heads, suffocating mice and the occasional unfortunate cat). And Johnson's love for storytelling shows on every page.