Change of Perspective

Things I'm Thankful For

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:04:00 +0000

Instead of the Sunday Summary, here’s a list of some of the things I’m thankful for as this Thanksgiving weekend winds down:

family and friends, even though they’re scattered all over the country
the Internet, which, in addition to enabling us to learn anything we want to know, also allows us to keep in touch with family and friends, even though they’re scattered all over the country
thick, warm wool socks, which I wear all winter long
the election of Barack Obama
the abundance on my Thanksgiving table and in my refrigerator
glucosamine and chondroitin, which--at least so far--are keeping my 60-year-old joints working painlessly
libraries
the next generation, which is turning out very nicely, if I do say so myself
the approaching end of George W. Bush’s Presidency
music
human resilience, especially in children
flowers
audiobooks for listening to while exercising
the handiwork of my massage therapist and personal trainer (see above reference to glucosamine and chondroitin)
fuzzy warm pajamas and fleece-lined slippers
Excedrin
Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center
the fact that Sarah Palin is not going to be the next Vice-President of the United States
hot cocoa
the aroma of turkey soup simmering in the kitchen

6 Reasons Why Writing Your Life Story Matters « Dan Curtis

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:07:00 +0000

6 Reasons Why Writing Your Life Story Matters « Dan Curtis ~ Professional Personal Historian:

Professional personal historian Dan Curtis has created a list of 6 compelling reasons why people should write their life stories. Which one are you hiding behind?

Happy Thanksgiving!

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:00:00 +0000

Here in the United States we're celebrating Thanksgiving today. We've taken a proprietary hold on this holiday, incorporating it into our national myth and folklore, by portraying it as a unique event involving Pilgrims and Indians that commemorates the founding of the country.

In reality, though, harvest celebrations are as old as agriculture itself. Throughout time cultures have offered thanks to their deities for the fruits of autumn. The cornucopia, or horn of plenty, has become the ubiquitous symbol of these celebrations. Although now we most often see the cornucopia portrayed as a woven basket holding produce, the original cornucopia, as the word's Latin root tells us, included an animal's--probably a bull's or a ram's--horn.
One autumn an Asian man participated in a life story writing workshop I was presenting. He is now an American citizen, and his children were born here in the U. S., but he wanted to write about his childhood experiences so his children would know about their Asian heritage. When he read his narration of how the residents of the village presented offerings of rice to the gods and visited relatives on a day in autumn, the other workshop participants commented that this sounded a lot like our American Thanksgiving.

It would have been more accurate to say that our Thanksgiving sounds a lot like the ancient Asian tradition of giving thanks. We don't have a monopoly on autumnal thanksgiving, even if we do spell it with a capital letter and get a paid day off from work. Sharing life stories with people from another culture can broaden our perspective on our place in the world and in history.

Sunday Summary

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:56:00 +0000

Sleep makes room for memories

Sleep not only refreshes the body, it may also push the reset button on the brain, helping the brain stay flexible and ready to learn, new research shows.

Whether it is slow-wave sleep or rapid eye movement (REM), sleep changes the biochemistry of the brain, and the change is necessary to continue learning new things, suggests research presented November 18 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Memory loss: Special report

This page collects a series of articles from this fall in the Los Angeles Times about memory loss (e.g., Early Warning Signs of Alzhiemer's Disease, Tips for Preventing Memory Loss).

Art as Visual Research: 12 Examples of Kinetic Illusions in Op Art

Scientists did not invent the vast majority of visual illusions. Rather, they are the work of visual artists, who have used their insights into the workings of the visual system to create visual illusions in their pieces of art. We have previously pointed out in our essays that, long before visual science existed as a formal discipline, artists had devised techniques to “trick” the brain into thinking that a flat canvas was three-dimensional, or that a series of brushstrokes in a still life was in fact a bowl of luscious fruit. Thus the visual arts have sometimes preceded the visual sciences in the discovery of fundamental vision principles, through the application of methodical—although perhaps more intuitive—research techniques. In this sense, art, illusions and visual science have always been implicitly linked.

Related Posts:

We See What We Expect to See
We See What We Expect to See (Part 2)
Perception Deception

Video: Natalie Goldberg on "Old Friend from Far Away"

Related Post:

Book Review: Old Friend from Far Away

Book Review: Writing a Woman's Life

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 15:51:00 +0000

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman's Life (1988)
W.W. Norton & Company, 144 pages, $14.95 hardcover
ISBN 0-393-02601-9

Highly recommended

In the "Introduction," feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun explains the topic of her book:

There are four ways to write a woman's life: the woman herself may tell it, in what she chooses to call an autobiography; she may tell it in what she chooses to call fiction; a biographer, woman or man, may write the woman's life in what is called a biography; or the woman may write her own life in advance of living it, unconsciously, and without recognizing or naming the process. (p. 12)

Heilbrun says that she will focus on three of these methods, omitting fiction.

Men have always had narrative stories, such as the quest motif and the warrior exemplar, on which to base their lives and within which to tell their life stories. But, Heilbrun argues, such stories of action and accomplishment have been denied to women; the behavior praised by these stories has always been branded "unwomanly":

above all other prohibitions, what has been forbidden to women is anger, together with the open admission of the desire for power and control over one's life (which inevitably means accepting some degree of power and control over other lives). (p. 13)
* * * * *
Because this has been declared unwomanly, and because many women would prefer (or think they would prefer) a world without evident power or control, women have been deprived of the narratives, or the texts, plots, or examples, by which they might assume power over—take control of—their own lives. (p. 17)
* * * * *
Well into the twentieth century, it continued to be impossible for women to admit into their autobiographical narratives the claim of achievement, the admission of ambition, the recognition that accomplishment was neither luck nor the result of the efforts or generosity of others. (p. 24)
* * * * *
The concept of biography itself has changed profoundly in the last two decades, biographies of women especially so. But while biographers of men have been challenged on the "objectivity" of their interpretation, biographers of women have had not only to choose one interpretation over another but, far more difficult, actually to reinvent the lives their subjects led, discovering from what evidence they could find the processes and decisions, the choices and unique pain, that lay beyond the life stories of these women. The choices and pain of the women who did not make a man the center of their lives seemed unique, because there were no models of the lives they wanted to live, no exemplars, no stories. These choices, this pain, those stories, and how they may be more systematically faced…are what I want to examine in this book. (p. 31)

In subsequent chapters Heilbrun offers George Sand, Willa Cather, and particularly Dorothy L. Sayers as examples of women who tried to mold their lives into patterns other than those traditionally allowed to them. However:

Only in the last third of the twentieth century have women broken through to a realization of the narratives that have been controlling their lives. Women poets of one generation—those born between 1923 and 1932—can now be seen to have transformed the autobiographies of women's lives, to have expressed, and suffered for expressing, what women had not earlier been allowed to say. (p. 60)

These poets, all American, are Denise Levertov, Jane Cooper, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath.

Finally, Heilbrun argues for what she calls "reinventing marriage," for a new kind of marriage in which husband and wife both recognize and nurture the other's strengths. "Marriage is the most persistent of myths imprisoning women, and misleading those who write of women's lives" (p. 77), she says. As an example of this new kind of marriage she cites the relationship between Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

One of the more interesting aspects of Writing a Woman's Life is Heilbrun's explanation, in chapter six, of why she chose to use a pseudonym in the 1960s when, as a young college professor, she started publishing detective novels: "I believe now that I must have wanted, with extraordinary fervor, to create a space for myself" (p. 113). "But I also sought another identity, another role. I sought to create an individual whose destiny offered more possibility than I could comfortably imagine for myself" (p. 114).

My problem with any type of literary criticism based on a particular ideology is that it often ends up reducing complex issues to dismissively simple statements, such as this declaration by Heilbrun: "Marriage, in short, is a bargain, like buying a house or entering a profession" (p. 92). Nonetheless, in general, Writing a Woman's Life offers a compelling view of cultural and social conventions that are currently undergoing change.

National Day of Listening

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:16:00 +0000

National Day of Listening:

This holiday season, StoryCorps is asking everyone across the nation to take an hour on Friday, November 28, 2008, the day after Thanksgiving, to record and preserve a Do-It-Yourself interview with a loved one. It can be a grandparent, sibling, friend, or a familiar face from the neighborhood.

All you have to do is visit nationaldayoflistening.org and download your free Do-It-Yourself Instruction Guide, complete with simple step-by-step instructions for recording and preserving interviews at home, watch our new DIY video, and find the person's story who you want to hear.

'American Widow Project': The Healing Power of Stories

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:16:00 +0000

'American Widow Project' Born From Grief : NPR:

Taryn Davis was just 21 years old when her husband was killed in Iraq. As a young widow, she felt bereft and very alone. She channeled her grief into the American Widow Project. It began as a documentary and transformed into a national support group for other widows.

This morning National Public Radio (NPR) aired a story about the American Widow Project, started by two young wives whose husbands were killed in Iraq. The project turned in to a documentary and now is a Web site that provides a place for military widows to tell their stories. As the Web page indicates, one person's story is often just what another grieved person needs to hear.

Feminism, post-election

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 18:56:00 +0000

Feminism, post-election - Los Angeles Times:

For a second-wave feminist like myself, this election year has been a roller-coaster ride: exciting, and sick-making, and yet again exciting. We have seen an eminently qualified woman contend for a presidential nomination and fail, at least in part because she was demonized as a dragon lady; then we have seen a shamefully unqualified woman handed a vice presidential nomination, at least in part because she was a walking advertisement for Mrs. America. Taken together, such unforeseen events have been remarkable, especially insofar as they remind us of where we are, as a culture, in the centuries-long struggle to normalize equality for women.

In this piece in the Los Angeles Times feminist and writer Vivian Gornick laments that "The second wave of American feminism is now in a period of quietude, even of setback." She looks at the treatment of both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin during the recent election as "evidence that high-level sexism persists in the United States."

Along the way Gornick traces the history of the modern women's movement, which began with the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" in 1792. Gornick says that about every 50 years since that time the women's movement has raised its head, always with the same underlying message: "The conviction that men by nature take their brains seriously, and women by nature do not, is based not on an inborn reality but on a cultural belief that has served our deepest insecurities."

Sunday Summary

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 16:09:00 +0000

A Boy's Life

This long article in The Atlantic treats the difficult subject of transgender children: children, some as young as 3 or 4, who want to be the gender opposite from their physiology. Should parents treat their young children as members of the other gender, or should they seek treatment to help their children adjust to the gender that matches their biological sex? The existence of such transgender children raises the age-old questions of nature vs. nurture: Are transgender children born that way or made that way? Is gender a biological given or a social construction?

Writer Hanna Rosin has done extensive research into this complex topic and does a good job of presenting both sides of the issue. Her presentation of the stories of several children, and their parents, who have experienced transgenderism gives her article an air of poignant reality.

Think You're Multitasking? Think Again

Don't believe the multitasking hype, scientists say. New research shows that we humans aren't as good as we think we are at doing several things at once. But it also highlights a human skill that gave us an evolutionary edge.

Multitasking Teens May Be Muddling Their Brains

Doing several things at once can feel so productive. But scientists say switching rapidly between tasks can actually slow us down.

Even though modern technology allows people to perform more tasks at the same time, juggling tasks can make our brains lose connections to important information. Which means, in the end, it takes longer because we have to remind our brains what we were working on.

The Ties That Bind

In this New York Times blog Allison Arieff considers what kind of legacy our dependence on technology will leave for our children.

First Person Plural

In this article in The Atlantic Paul Bloom looks at the definition of happy:
Many researchers now believe, to varying degrees, that each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another. This theory might explain certain puzzles of everyday life, such as why addictions and compulsions are so hard to shake off, and why we insist on spending so much of our lives in worlds—like TV shows and novels and virtual-reality experiences—that don’t actually exist. And it provides a useful framework for thinking about the increasingly popular position that people would be better off if governments and businesses helped them inhibit certain gut feelings and emotional reactions.

Book Review: The Midnight Disease

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:50:00 +0000

Flaherty, Alice W. The Midnight Disease (2004) Houghton Mifflin, 307 pages, $24.00 hardcover ISBN 0-618-23065-3

Trained as a scientist, neurologist Alice W. Flaherty always enjoyed writing. But after the birth and death of premature twin boys, she had a mental breakdown that made her write nearly constantly, a condition known as hypergraphia. She took medication and was hospitalized for her mental state; the medication curbed her compulsion to write but also took away most of her emotion and passion about life. Her purpose in this book, subtitled The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain, is to examine hypergraphia, writer's block, and creativity as brain states. In looking for scientific explanations of these states she discusses the functions of different areas of the brain and the role each area plays in creativity or blocked creativity.

Most writers have experienced writer’s block at some time and know that almost everything written about overcoming writer’s block consists of exhortations and exercises to help squelch their inner critic. Yet experienced writers who have been successful in their writing before often know that an inner critic is not what’s keeping them from producing. These writers may find some new insight from Flaherty’s discussion of block as a state associated with both anxiety and depression:

Writer's block that is linked to anxiety is often also tied to procrastination--the process that leads you to suddenly clean out your basement the week before a writing deadline. Procrastination of a different sort can accompany depression. For at the most fundamental (or simplistic) level, there are perhaps only two types of writer's black, high energy and low energy. Unlike low-energy block, high-energy block may worsen as your deadline approaches; it makes you sweat, makes you sit down only to jump up again. [. . .] In low-energy block, the desire that makes you sit down to write is a dull sense of guilt. Instead of ideas, you have only sterile ruminations on how things used to be when you could write, when the world had color. (p. 135)

Although scientists are still discovering how the brain works, Flaherty does have some suggestions for summoning the muse and avoiding writer’s block. "Three ingrained cycles are important for both mood and creativity: sleep, the seasons, and hormonal cycles" (p. 125). Many people, she says, sleep later than usual on weekends, then wake up on Monday with something like jet lag. "The treatment, studies have shown, is to keep the time one rises as constant as possible. The time one goes to sleep is less important" (p. 126). About the relationship between fatigue and writer’s block she says:

A short (less than fifteen-minute) nap during such a lag may be much more effective than coffee. The length of your nap, however, is important. Naps longer than fifteen minutes usually allow you to transition into dream sleep (rapid eye movement or REM-stage sleep), and you will wake up much groggier than if you had remained in nondream sleep. [. . .] sleep deprivation itself seems to decrease creativity, rather than increasing it. (p. 129)

It’s hard not to appreciate advice from a writer who declares, "I don't write to forget what happened; I write to remember. There are worse things in life than painful desire; one of them is to have no desire" (p. 205).

Psychologist James Pennebaker Counts, and Analyzes, Words

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:46:00 +0000

Scientist at Work - James W. Pennebaker - Psychologist James Pennebaker Counts, and Analyzes, Words - Biography - NYTimes.com:

James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas, is a pioneer in studying the relationship between language and health. In his early experiments he found that writing about traumatic experiences can strengthen people's immune systems. More recently, he has turned to analyzing every word someone says or writes to see what word choice may indicate about people.

He found, for example, that Osama bin Laden’s use of first-person pronouns (I, me, my, mine) remained fairly constant over several years. By contrast, his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, used such words more and more often.

“This dramatic increase suggests greater insecurity, feelings of threat, and perhaps a shift in his relationship with bin Laden,” Dr. Pennebaker wrote in his report , which was published in The Content Analysis Reader (Sage Publications, July 2008).

To count and analyze the kinds of words someone uses, Pennebaker has developed a software program.

To test-drive the program, Dr. Pennebaker, a pioneer in the field of therapeutic writing, asked a group of people recovering from serious illness or other trauma to engage in a series of writing exercises. The word tallies showed that those whose health was improving tended to decrease their use of first-person pronouns through the course of the study.

Health improvements were also seen among people whose use of causal words — because, cause, effect — increased. Simply ruminating about an experience without trying to understand the causes is less likely to lead to psychological growth, he explained; the subjects who used causal words “were changing the way they were thinking about things.”

Pennebaker has also found that men tend to use more articles (a, an, and the) than women and that women tend to use more pronouns (he, she, they) than men. "The difference, he says, may suggest that men are more prone to concrete thinking and women are more likely to see things from other perspectives."

Book Review: Old Friend from Far Away

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:48:00 +0000

Goldberg, Natalie. Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir

New York: Free Press, 2007
ISBN 978-1-4165-3502-7

Highly Recommended

In Writing Down the Bones Natalie Goldberg produced what has become a classic manual for writers eager to stir up their creativity. In Old Friend from Far Away she focuses her advice on memoir writing. The old friend of the title is, of course, you--all the yous, all the selves you’ve ever been or only dreamed of being. And the far away place is the past--50 or 80 years ago, or five minutes ago.

In the introduction Goldberg discusses why memoir has become so popular in America over the last 25 years: “Think of the word: memoir. . . . It is the study of memory, structured on the meandering way we remember. Essentially it is an examination of the zigzag nature of how our mind works” (p. xviii). We have turned to the memoir form with such gusto because “We have an intuition that it can save us. Writing is the act of reaching across the abyss of isolation to share and reflect. . . . Often without realizing it, we are on a quest, a search for meaning. What does our time on this earth add up to?” (p. xix).

Most other books for memoir writers aim to stir up memories in a fairly straightforward, traditional way, with prompts about things such as your early childhood memories, your favorite relatives, your best vacation. But Goldberg is much more unconventional. She warns that we cannot approach writing memoir head-on; we must approach it sideways: “because life is not linear, you want to approach writing memoir sideways, using the deepest kind of thinking to sort through the layers: you want reflection to discover what the real connections are” (p. xxi).

It’s difficult to describe exactly what Goldberg means my approaching a topic sideways. It’s better to let her show you. Here’s a section from the entry “Place,” chosen at random from Old Friend from Far Away:

Write about a place you haven’t lived. Go, ten minutes.

Make a lost of thirty things pertaining to place; i.e., boulevard, street corner, gulley canyon, arroyo.
Write another ten minutes including ten words from your list but with this topic: the place I am most afraid to go.

Notice the different levels you can write about place. One is concrete: Colorado Springs, Colorado, Memphis, Tennessee. . . . The other is inner: I have not been in a peaceful place for a long time. I have been in a thoughtful place. I feel lost; I can’t find a place for myself. (p. 201)

Goldberg’s sideways approach to memoir writing forces us to probe beneath the surface of experience to find its kernel of meaning. “Memoir is taking personal experience and turning it inside out. We surrender our most precious understanding, so others can feel what we felt and be enlarged. This means when we write we give up ourselves” (p. 147).

Most of Goldberg’s writing exercises instruct us to set a timer and write for ten minutes. Why ten minutes?

Ten minutes is a convenient starting point. It’s a sprint. Feel free to ease into longer runs. But don’t abandon that ten-minute hard-core pressurized feeling that you have to get it all down on two or three pages. There is something wildly exhilarating about that: gun to the head, writing for life and death in ten minutes. (p. 98)

She seems to be advocating here a kind of writing sometimes called free writing or automatic writing--a keep-the-pen-moving-across-the-page act of writing that does not stop to edit or judge but keeps going to see what will emerge onto the page. The idea behind this kind of writing is that whatever thoughts, feelings, or visions are just below the surface of consciousness will take advantage of this uncensored opportunity to jump out and present themselves. And these thoughts are usually the ones that most need our attention right now.

Finally, why write memoir? Goldberg says we write about our life

to remember all of it. The good and the bad. To trust your experience, to have a confidence that your moments and the moments of others on this earth mattered, not to be forgotten. . . . It is a great thing you are doing whatever it is you are remembering. You are saying that life--and its passing--have true value. (p. 265)

And for whom do we write? For “our better, worse, encumbered, forfeited, imprisoned, beloved selves” (p. 299).

The Long Run - Writing Memoir, McCain Found a Narrative for Life

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:42:00 +0000

The Long Run - Writing Memoir, McCain Found a Narrative for Life - Series - NYTimes.com:

Let me say right up front that this post is not an endorsement of John McCain in next month's election.

Regardless of one's politics, this article in the New York Times features many of the most salient aspects of memoir, life writing, life narrative, and the power of stories. The article covers the writing and the effects of McCain's 1999 memoir Faith of My Fathers, written with McCain's speechwriter Mark Salter:

Mr. Salter, taking a little literary license, assembled from Mr. McCain’s recollections a neat narrative that he had never before articulated. It became a best seller, a television movie and the first of five successful McCain-Salter volumes. And on the eve of Mr. McCain’s 2000 Republican primary run, its story line reshaped his political identity. In interviews and speeches, Mr. McCain has increasingly described his life in the book’s language and themes. . . .

We do not just create our life stories; in reality, those stories often, in turn, shape who we are or who we become:

Politics was imitating art, said Stephen Wayne, a political scientist at Georgetown who has studied Mr. McCain’s career and memoir. “It is almost as if McCain had described himself as a literary character,” Professor Wayne said, “and then he tried to be that person in real life.”

Some friends say it is only natural that Mr. McCain would begin to sound like his autobiography. “If I have some thoughts in my mind and I take the time to write them down,” said Orson Swindle, a close friend from prison camp, “I find that I will be inclined to say them exactly that way over and over, too.”

And this process can be interpreted either positively or negatively:

Robert Timberg, a marine wounded in Vietnam who became Mr. McCain’s biographer and admired his memoir, said the John McCain he knew 15 years ago would never have suggested that he was more patriotic than a rival the way the senator has in attacking his Democratic opponent, Senator Barack Obama.

“Political campaigns have a way of distorting reality and turning political candidates into caricatures of themselves,” Mr. Timberg said, adding, “In some ways that has happened to him, and in some ways he may have contributed to that.”

The article also treats the relationship between literature and life:

The John McCain of “Faith of My Fathers,” for example, bears more than a little resemblance to the fictional Robert Jordan of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” the Hemingway hero Mr. McCain later celebrated in another book with Mr. Salter, “Worth the Fighting For,” which was named for a line of Jordan’s dying thoughts. He was “a man who would risk his life but never his honor,” Mr. McCain wrote with Mr. Salter, a model of “how a great man should style himself.”

Finally:

Mr. McCain owes much to the book, said Mr. Weaver, who guided the senator’s 2000 campaign. “It made his persona much grander, much more cause-oriented,” Mr. Weaver recalled. “The book played a major role in creating the brand that has served McCain so well.”

We all are our stories. The stories about ourselves that we tell ourselves and others become who we are.

Sunday Summary

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:28:00 +0000

I'm working on a research proposal for school right now. As exhilarating as it is to be getting near working on my dissertation, this phase is very time-consuming. Consequently, I'm resorting to a list of a couple of tabs I've left open in my browser for far too long in hopes of being able to write a separate post about each one.

Pandemic Influenza Storybook

In a brilliant application of the power of stories, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has put together a collection of stories from people who lived through the world-wide influenza epidemics of 1918 and 1957:
The 1918 influenza pandemic killed more than 50 million people worldwide including an estimated 675,000 people in the United States, and it is one of the touchstones for today’s public health preparedness initiatives. To put it in perspective, that’s more people than all those who died (both military personnel and civilians) during World War I (1914–1918). T The 1957 Influenza Pandemic caused at least 70,000 U.S. deaths and 1–2 million deaths worldwide. Improvements in scientific technology made it possible to more quickly identify that pandemic when compared with the 1918 event. These first-person and family accounts contained herein provide an intimate, personal view of the 1918 and 1957 pandemics that goes beyond the staggering statistics associated with those events and, therefore, can help planners re-energize their efforts and fight preparedness fatigue and apathy.

Interview with Historian Howard Zinn

"Author of A People's History of the United States shares his thoughts on revisionist historians, the upcoming election and more"

Howard Zinn was an activist professor at my alma mater, Boston University, in the 1960s. His book A People's History presents a different perspective on American history than the one usually taught in school.
It is unlikely that 20 years ago, when Howard Zinn's magnum opus A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to the Present was published, that anyone thought it would sell close to two million copies and spawn an entirely new historiography. Today, though not quite a household name, spry octogenarian Zinn is a much in-demand lecturer, criss-crossing the country, speaking to crowded halls and auditoriums and continuing his life-long commitment to social justice activism.

"That One"?

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:05:00 +0000

Did you hear John McCain call Barack Obama "that one" last night?

It's not quite as bad as "you people," but it's close.

America's top meditation retreats - USATODAY.com

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:09:00 +0000

America's top meditation retreats - USATODAY.com:

Here's a different perspective on travel articles, from USA Today:

Meditation has been found to lower cholesterol, ease pain, speed healing, curb insomnia and boost the immune system. It can also help slay the demons of depression, anxiety and the kinds of compulsions that send you back three times to check the stove. By practicing meditation, you'll feel more energized, gain self-knowledge and achieve a healthier state of mind.

What Are You Reading for Banned Books Week?

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:55:00 +0000

ALA | Banned Books Week:

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read is observed during the last week of September each year. Observed since 1982, this annual ALA event reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted. This year, 2008, marks BBW's 27th anniversary (September 27 through October 4).

Check out the American Library Association's Banned Books Week Website for information about the most frequently challenged books and about how you can fight censorship in your community.

October: National Breast Cancer Awareness Month

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:17:00 +0000

National Breast Cancer Awareness Month increasing early breast cancer detection awareness:

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Check out this site for all kinds of information about breast cancer and how you can help in the fight against this disease.

Between Us Girls: Sarah Palin - The New Face of Feminism?

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:44:00 +0000

Between Us Girls: Sarah Palin - The New Face of Feminism?:

The girls over at Between Us Girls give us a summary of the meaning of feminism and reach a conclusion that's important for all women to consider this election year:

Make no mistake, Sarah Palin is not the new face of feminism. She is simply a woman whose ambition surpasses her abilities and whose presence on the national political scene threatens to set the feminist movement back a hundred years. Ladies, we can do better than this - don't doubt it. While we all want to see a woman in the White House, we want the right woman. At first glance, Sarah Palin seemed like the answer to many a woman's dreams, but she is nothing more than a shiny penny. The glimmering, mirror-like surface attracts our attention, but upon closer inspection we find that what lies below the surface is far less valuable than we might have anticipated or hoped.

My daughter recently made a similar point on her blog.

It's important to keep in mind that not all women are feminists and that feminists advocate equal rights for women. Don't let anyone tell you that electing Sarah Palin as Vice-President of the United States, and thus putting her a heartbeat away from the U. S. Presidency, is a step forward for women. With her vindictiveness and arrogance, she could plunge women back into the nineteenth century. Women deserve better. The United States deserves better.

Napping for Creativity

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 22:49:00 +0000

Prototype - We’ll Fill This Space, but First a Nap - NYTimes.com:

Creativity, in general, involves the ability to see associations or relationships between disparate objects, items, or concepts. In the mysterious process of creativity, the brain forges new neural pathways between previously unrelated things. Research now suggests that sleep may aid in the creative process, just as it improves performance, learning, and memory: "While traditional stories about sleep and creativity emphasize vivid dreams hastily transcribed upon waking, recent research highlights the importance of letting ideas marinate and percolate."

"Letting ideas marinate and percolate" refers to the characteristic step in creativity known as incubation. Traditional advice to sleep on a problem refers to allowing time for the incubation of ideas. One deterrent to creativity, paradoxically, can be thinking about something too much. Once you stop thinking about it and move on to something else, the solution or answer may come to you in one of those "Aha!" moments. New research, discussed in this article, suggests that sleep may aid in the incubation of creative ideas.

To allow employees to nurture the creative process, several companies--including Google, Cisco Systems, and Procter & Gamble--are installing Energy Pods, "leather recliners with egglike hoods that block noise and light, for employees to take naps at work."

Apparently the creative minds that thought up the notion of the Power Nap had the right idea after all.

Chicago scientist John Cacioppo suggests that loneliness is a threat to your health

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 21:06:00 +0000

Chicago scientist John Cacioppo suggests that loneliness is a threat to your health - The Boston Globe:

In an age when social contact is defined by how many thousands of "friends" an individual has on Facebook, Americans are lonely people and getting lonelier all the time, according to John Cacioppo. Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, is co-author, with William Patrick, of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection.

Loneliness isn't just a matter of being alone:

Indeed, the lonely don't spend any more time by themselves than the rest of us do. Real loneliness is a feeling that some essential connection is lacking, and while social circumstances matter, it's also partly genetic.

Loneliness can cause people to settle for relationships that other people would not settle for. It can also diminish people's self-control, including their ability to stick with a task, and cause them to substitute pets and computers for human contact. Loneliness can also have physical effects. For example, Cacioppo says, lonely middle-age and older adults are less likely to exercise than are their peers with more satisfying human relationships.

The interviewer asks Cacioppo if older people are especially lonely. While it may be true that older adults' number of close contacts declines as their peers begin to die, those who manage to maintain close relationships with at least a few friends and family members generally become happier.

Asked if loneliness is a peculiarly American problem, Cacioppo replies:

Americans have more friends than Europeans on average. But what defines a friend is different in America than in Europe. In Europe, first of all, there's less mobility. There's a level of stability that we just don't know in America. But that same stability is connection, and those are threads of connection that I think lead to a definition of friends that is more high-quality.

In friendship, as in many other aspects of life, it's quality rather than quantity that counts.

Birth of the Modern Op-Ed Page

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:29:00 +0000

Now here is an interesting fact that I did not know:

It was on this day in 1970 that the first modern op-ed page appeared in The New York Times. People sometimes think that "op-ed" stands for "opinion-editorial," but it actually stands for "opposite the editorial page." Op-eds began in the 1920s, but they were forums for newspapers' columnists, not for outside writers. The modern op-ed was created by New York Times journalist John Bertram Oakes. Oakes received a commentary letter that he thought was excellent, but it was too long to print as a letter to the editor, and it couldn't be published in the op-ed page since it wasn't by a columnist. So he got the idea for an op-ed page that would include outside opinions. Oakes spent 10 years trying to convince publishers that is was good idea. Finally the Times editors agreed, and published the first version, and it's become the model for op-ed pages worldwide.

(From The Writer's Almanac, a publication of American Public Media)

While I did know that "op-ed" means "opposite the editorial page," I had no idea that this was such a modern phenomenon. I don't seem to remember a time when the op-ed pages didn't exist.

How about you?

Celebrity Worship: Good for Your Health?

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:05:00 +0000

Celebrity Worship: Good for Your Health? - TIME:

Using Palinmania as a hook, this article in Time reports on studies by Shira Gabriel, a psychologist at the University of Buffalo, that examine how celebrity worship may affect an admirer's self-esteem. Gabriel found that writing a five-minute essay about their favorite celebrity greatly increased the self-esteem of students who had initially scored low on a standard self-esteem test.

"Because people form bonds in their mind with their favorite celebrities, they are able to assimilate the celebrity's characteristics in themselves and feel better about themselves when they think about that celebrity," says Gabriel. "And that is something these individuals can't do in real relationships because of their fear of rejection keeps them from getting close to people."

But, Gabriel warns, although a little celebrity worship can be beneficial, a lot can become harmful, as cases of obsessed fans and stalkers prove. Admiration of celebrities can become addictive and can prevent people from forming satisfying relationships with real people. And extreme celebrity worship can result in drastically lowered self-esteen in admirers who realize that they can never actually enter the world of the one they admire. This realization often reinforces the admirer's own feelings of inadequacy and isolation.

Book Review: A Writer's Space

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:14:00 +0000

Maisel, Eric. A Writer's Space.

Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2008
ISBN 1-59869-460-X

Recommended

In this little (5.5 in. wide by 6.25 in. tall) book Maisel, a therapist and creativity coach, uses the metaphor of space “to communicate how you can get a grip on your writing life and transform yourself from an occasional writer to a regular writer” (p. 3). All your writing space needs, he says, is “a chair, a table, silence, and a little awe” (p. 5).

Maisel divides his discussion into nine sections:

physical space
home space
mind space
emotional space
reflective space
imagined space
public space
existential space
epilogue: creative space: a writing fable

This book is not about the craft or the mechanics of writing (e.g., punctuation, sentence structure). In fact, the weakest section is “imagined space,” where Maisel touches briefly on such issues of composition (probably in an effort to fill out the book’s contents a bit). No, this book is about the mind-set necessary to become a committed, productive writer.

One of the most useful parts of this book is chapter 14, “creative mindfulness,” in which Maisel distinguishes between traditional mindfulness--”the nonjudgmental observation and acknowledgment of our thoughts” (p. 81)--and creative mindfulness, the purpose of which is “to master mindfulness . . . and to employ that mastery in the service of deep thought, rich action, and wide-awake living” (p. 83). He identifies six principles of creative mindfulness:

Fearlessly observe your own thoughts.
Detach from the thoughts you are thinking.
Appraise your thoughts.
Restate your intentions based on your appraisal.
Free your neurons, empty your mind, and ready yourself for creating.
Explode into your work.

These six steps can help you bring creative mindful intention to your work, which will, in turn, make you a better and more productive writer.

Another particularly useful section of the book is chapter 16, “the weight of individuality,” in which Maisel briefly--perhaps a bit TOO briefly--addresses the common theme of the association between artistic creativity and mental instability:

Nature is not stupid. Nature makes the calculation that, for an individual to truly be individual, it had better invest him with enough power, passion, energy, and appetite to manifest that individuality. . . . It should also be clear how this extra energy and fuller appetite lead to conditions such as addiction, mania, and insatiability. (p. 99)

Fortunately, Maisel follows this chapter with another on “quick centering,” a method you can use “to center and quiet your mind and your emotions by taking ten-second pauses” (p. 103).

You’ll have to get your grammar help elsewhere. But for information on how to be in the world as a writer, check out this little book.

©2008 by Mary Daniels Brown

Please pass the Hydrox!

noreply@blogger.com (Mary) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:03:00 +0000

Last Friday, while visiting a friend in Connecticut, I walked into a grocery store and there they were: stacks of boxes of Hydrox cookies!

Even as a child I preferred Hydrox to the cloyingly sweet Oreo. The Hydrox chocolate wafers were not very sweet, and biting into a Hydrox produced a subtle but distinct contrast between the not-very-sweet cookies and the sweeter (but not nearly so overwhelmingly sweet as Oreo) creme filling. Oreos, and other products like them, have contributed to Americans' desire for overwhelming sweetness in everything: cookies, cereals, fruit drinks, even toothpaste and over-the-counter medications.

But for the more discerning palate, Hydrox cookies are back, at least for a little while. Kellogg Company has reissued them for a limited run in honor of their 100th anniversary.

Hydrox cookies were introduced as the first creme-filled chocolate sandwich cookie in 1908 by Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company, which later became Sunshine Biscuit Company. Looking for a name that went well with sunshine, the company combined the beginnings of hydrogen and oxygen, the components of water with its connotations of purity and cleanliness. In 1996 Keebler purchased Sunshine Biscuit Company and renamed the cookies Hydrox Ddroxies. In 1999 Keebler reformulated the cookies and called them must Droxies. In 2003 the company stopped making the cookies but, in response to public demand, has brought back Hydrox for a limited time in honor of its 100th anniversary.

Find out more at hydroxcookies.com

And in the meantime, get to your local grocery store. When they're gone, they're gone for good.