shhh, peaceful

My brain, poor flawed organ that it is, lacks the skill for close reading. Whenever I read a book, my eyes tend to skim the words erratically, focusing and drifting at random—often, without my realizing it, they’ll leap over whole paragraphs impatiently searching for something that will catch their attention. It’s a good way to read quickly, but a terrible way to read well. Like many children of the Internet age, I have a hard time appreciating (or even noticing) those subtle moments in fiction that bring more watchful readers so much pleasure; if a story’s going to grab me, it usually has to have major pyrotechnics. Maybe not explosions and a car, but something loud and flashy and showy.

of course I’m embarrassed by this! I’ve lost count by now of how many times my cheeks have flushed with shame when I read, say, a review of a novel by a more discerning reader who’s picked up on some fine-grained distinction or pitch-perfect detail or—worst of all—subtle shade of emotion or tension that my dull eyes had hopscotched over without even noticing. I’m not proud of my inability to read carefully. But these are facts. Best to admit them.

So that’s why I liked Donald Antrim’s story “The Real Manhattan,” published in last November’s New Yorker, so much. It may well have contained subtle moments of genius that I totally missed, but that doesn’t matter, because the overall story blares at you like a foghorn—the way Antrim orchestrates his frenzied portrayal of madness is so deft that it’s impossible not to appreciate it.

Now, the tricky bit is, it’s impossible to really excerpt a few paragraphs to show why the story’s so good—Jim’s horrifying relapse into his manic-depressive hell unfolds not quickly, but over a long expanse of pages. The art is in the build-up, not in any one sentence or scene. But, setting that aside, I wanted to highlight this one paragraph, which is mostly irrelevant to the main plot and themes, but did pull off a (none-too-subtle) effect that I enjoyed a great deal:

…Kate was marching around the apartment in her red platform heels, shoving items into her purse and looking in the usual places for her keys. She had to flee before Jim walked in. She could phone him from the street and tell him that she’d meet him at the restaurant. Going from Elliot to Jim to Elliot and Jim and Susan without a break was bullshit. But, seriously, where was she going to go? It was too cold out to sit on a bench. The bar next door to the restaurant was bleak and depressing, an old men’s dive, and the bar inside the restaurant would be a mob scene of people pushing for tables. She could stand idly flipping through magazines at the newsstand across Broadway, but that would mean accommodating the line of men squeezing past her to look at porn at the rear of the store. She slammed the apartment door behind her and started down the five flights of stairs. Too often in winter she failed to leave the apartment before sunset. It worked hell on her mood.

I’d guess that pretty much anyone who’s lived in a city apartment with a significant other can relate to this. At some point, you feel trapped in your cramped space, and you have to leave NOW—but where are you going to go? So you consider your old haunts, benches or coffee shop or dive bars that have served you well in other capacities but are now all totally inadequate for the moment. You need a private refuge, not a lively local neighborhood. And, because you know these places so well, you know exactly how they’ll fail you: “accommodating the line of men squeezing past her to look at porn at the rear of the store.” I get like this when I have to leave my apartment to work and don’t know where to go. That café will be too crowded and that one doesn’t have enough electric outlets and oy, that one plays the music too loud… Suddenly a city can feel very claustrophobic. I’ve just never seen a writer capture this so elegantly.

(Photo: “Toy Claustrophobia,” Erik Charlton)

So I’ve been reading Consider the Lobster, and you know what I like about David Foster Wallace? It’s not that he’s terrifyingly brilliant and erudite, in the way that someone like Thomas Pynchon or Zadie Smith is—like oh my god what the FUCK else might they have tucked away in those marvelously intricate brains of theirs? No, it’s actually the exact opposite with DFW. Reading his essays, it’s as if the only gifts he ever possessed were a genuine (and I mean genuine) childlike curiosity and incredible patience. Nothing superhuman. Just those two tools, things even your average chimpanzee has at his disposal. And his essays seem to prove that that’s actually all you need to write things that then come out terrifyingly brilliant and erudite. You just ask questions and keep asking questions and—here’s the trick—you don’t get bored but you keep asking questions and take your time wondering and eventually you’ll see your subject in a bright new light.

Now, there’s at least one counter-possibility: Maybe DFW’s writing is just sneaky, and, in reality, you actually do need superhuman powers to write the things DFW writes, and it just so happens that DFW is very skilled at hiding his superhuman powers, making them seem as if they were nothing more than a willingness to ask lots of questions, sort of like when you drink Sunny D and it sure seems as if it’s just oranges and water, and mmm, delicious, but then you look closely and it turns out it also contains lots of other complex and carefully calibrated chemicals with names like sodium hexametaphosphate—it’s entirely possible DFW is like that. And I know this analogy isn’t quite perfect because Sunny D is gross and doesn’t hide its own artificiality all that well, but maybe you see what I mean.

What strikes me about DFW’s footnotes is basically the obvious thing to strike anyone about DFW’s footnotes—they’re evidence of a inquisitiveness that keeps excitedly circling back to microtopics and says, “HEY! What if we look at it this way, or what about this way…” Even after a sentence has been thought through and written and then contemplated some more and scratched out and rewritten and finally crafted just perfectly there’s still yet another way of considering it. There’s always another way. So, footnote that shit.

One place you see this relentlessness at work is in his questions to the reader at the end of his Gourmet piece, “Consider the Lobster,” where he’s very earnestly beseeching his readers to introspect for a moment and ask themselves if they really feel OK with boiling to death a living, breathing crustacean (viz., the lobster) which very probably feels pain, and if they are OK with that, to ask themselves if it’s because they’ve really thought through the philosophical questions involved and constructed for themselves an internally coherent moral framework or if they’re just cobbling together thin and selfish justifications so that they can get on with the business of dunking lobster meat in butter, and, what’s more, DFW asks, if the Gourmet readers would prefer he shut up because they’re just trying to paw through a food magazine in peace, and not attend a seminar on animal rights, then they ought to ask what process in their brain allows them to feel OK about dismissing or ignoring these questions… Like that, he keeps calmly, persistently interrogating.

And why not? Curiosity and patience were, after all, the means by which many a great bit of writing was made—not through pyrotechnics or obscure allusions or verbal feats of daring or intricately crafted plots. Shakespeare may have never blotted a line, and Mozart may have composed whole universes between his greasy ears, but the rest of us poor sinners have had to do things the old-fashioned way, by plodding through and calmly second-guessing ourselves at every turn. And so I like very much that here’s a difficult writer, which DFW sometimes can be, and here’s someone who’s considered a formally inventive writer and a forbiddingly literate writer, who actually just came armed with two simple qualities, curiosity and patience, with which he poked and prodded his way to something very astonishing, indeed.

Excuse me, but I’m on a Wikipedia bender lately. I just can’t stop clicking. So here we go: The Bone Wars? This was a real thing? Oh yes. Yes it was. In the latter third of the 19th century, we learn, a pair of rival American paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othaniel Charles Marsh “used underhanded methods to out-compete each other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and destruction of bones.”

This wasn’t as gruesome as it sounds: The rivalry did spur a race to excavate, which in turn led to the discovery of 142 new species of dinosaur, including childhood favs like Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and Allosaurus. A word of appreciation, by the way, for Allosaurus: The dinosaur books I gobbled up as a kid were usually divided into three eras: the Triassic (lame chicken-sized dinosaurs), Jurassic (now these were terrible lizards…) and finally the glorious Cretaceous (oh hell yes). The Allosaurus was a late Jurassic beast, usually shown scarfing down chunks of Brontosaurus meat, and he signified a child’s very first encounter with the truly massive, peerless carnivores of yore—dominating the imagination for a brief while until you flipped a few pages and stumbled across the Cretaceous-era Tyrannosaurus Rex, king of all predators. (I understand now they have Spinosaurus and other gigantic brutes that put T. Rex to shame—well, T. Rex is still top lizard in my book.)

Anyway, back to our dueling paleontologists:

On one occasion, the two scientists had gone on a fossil-collecting expedition to Cope’s marl pits in New Jersey, where William Parker Foulke had discovered the holotype specimen of Hadrosaurus foulkii, described by the paleontologist Joseph Leidy; this was one of the first American dinosaur finds, and the pits were still rich with fossils.

Though the two parted amicably, Marsh secretly bribed the pit operators to divert the fossils they were discovering to him, instead of Cope. The two began attacking each other in papers and publications, and their personal relations soured. Marsh humiliated Cope by pointing out his reconstruction of the plesiosaur Elasmosaurus was flawed, with the head placed where the tail should have been. … Cope tried to cover up his mistake by purchasing every copy he could find of the journal it was published in.

In the end, Marsh won the Bone Wars, digging up and naming 80 new species of dinosaur, versus Cope’s piteous 56. But paleontology itself was the real loser—not only was the profession’s good name blighted for decades by their tomfoolery, but “the reported use of dynamite and sabotage by employees of both men destroyed or buried hundreds of potentially critical fossil remains.” Oh dear.

Even worse, the two miscreants would often hastily slap all sorts of bones together in their race to unveil new species, and they often assembled incorrect skeletons that sowed confusion for decades. Marsh, it turns out, was the wiseguy who fit a human skull on a looming sauropod’s torso and named his creation Brontosaurus (it later had to be rechristened Apatosaurus, once it was given its correct head—the real tragedy is that the new name was clumsier and not quite so fearsome: “Apatosaurus” means “deceptive lizard”; right, uh-huh, like there’s anything deceptive about that dude.)

In a chat with The Philosopher’s Magazine, David Chalmers lays out his theory of the “extended mind,” arguing that our cognitive systems are more than just what’s crammed inside that gray matter in our skulls. The mind should be thought of as a larger, extended system that can encompass even gadgets like the iPhone:

“The key idea is that when bits of the environment are hooked up to your cognitive system in the right way, they are, in effect, part of the mind, part of the cognitive system. So, say I’m rearranging Scrabble tiles on a rack. This is very close to being analogous to the situation when I’m doing an anagram in my head. In one case the representations are out in the world, in the other case they’re in here. We say doing an anagram on a rack ought be regarded as a cognitive process, a process of the mind, even though it’s out there in the world.”

This is where the iPhone comes in, as a more contemporary example of how the extended mind works.

“A whole lot of my cognitive activities and my brain functions have now been uploaded into my iPhone. It stores a whole lot of my beliefs, phone numbers, addresses, whatever. It acts as my memory for these things. It’s always there when I need it.”

Chalmers even claims it holds some of his desires.

“I have a list of all of my favorite dishes at the restaurant we go to all the time in Canberra. I say, OK, what are we going to order? Well, I’ll pull up the iPhone—these are the dishes we like here. It’s the repository of my desires, my plans. There’s a calendar, there’s an iPhone calculator, and so on. It’s even got a little decision maker that comes up, yes or no.”

Okay, I think I buy it. (Scrabble racks!) The original paper that Chalmers and Andy Clark wrote on the subject invented an Alzheimer’s patient named Otto who jots things down in his notebook so that he won’t forget them. When you or I need to conjure up an address or name, we just summon it from some musty alcove in our memory. When Otto needs a fact, he flips through his spiral notebook. We consider memory part of the mind, so why can’t we say that Otto’s notebook is part of his mind? What’s the difference? It’s a short hop to declaring that an iPhone can be part of one’s extended mind, too.

Maybe all this just means that “mind” is an unduly foggy term. Let’s all thank the relevant deities I’m not a philosopher and don’t have to tear hair over this. It is odd, though, how memory works in the Internet age. When I’m writing about energy issues, let’s say, then instead of learning all the nitty-gritty details about how utility decoupling works or what the latest data on snowfall in Greenland says, I never bother memorizing the details. Instead, I’ll just get a feel for the main concepts and remember where on the Internet I can find more information in a pinch.

Now, sure, I do the same thing with books or notes, but I rely on this method much more often now—and, of course, the Internet’s always available, making the need to memorize stuff even less acute. My head’s filled with fewer actual facts and more search terms or heuristics. Everyone does it. Emily Gould recently wrote a great post about Mind Google, which works like this: Rather than reaching instinctively for your iPhone to settle some trivia dispute with your friends (who did the voice of Liz in Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties again?), you just rack your futile brain about it and then, later, when you’re in the bathroom gazing at the tiles and thinking about something else entirely, the answer magically slaps you in the face. (“Jennifer Love Hewitt—of freaking course!”)

So some facts are still up in the old noggin. I mean, it’s not like you can just do without facts altogether. It’s just more efficient to outsource a larger chunk of stuff to that great hivemind on the Web. Probably a net plus. Though I wonder if someone like (oh, say) Thomas Pynchon could’ve written Gravity’s Rainbow if instead of cramming all that stuff about rocket science and German ballads and Plato and god knows what else in his skull, he was always saying to himself, “Eh, I don’t need to remember this, I’ll just look it up on Wikipedia later…”

One more thing about the extended mind. It ought to include other people, too. Shouldn’t it? I know I have a bunch of stories and anecdotes I can’t tell—or at least tell well—without some of the other participants around to help me fill in the details and color. In effect, I have to recreate the memory with someone else. I read somewhere once a devastating article about how older widows essentially lose a large chunk of their memory after their partner dies, because there are many events that could only recollect “together,” with their spouse. No, wait, maybe this was in a novel? Or a This American Life podcast? Oy, my brain’s a barren wasteland—off to wheedle the answer out of the Internet.

Here’s a good Monday diversion: Wikipedia’s master list of color names. Learn your cobalts and ceruleans and cyans. Some of the terms on this list are fairly obscure: Would you ever, in a million years, have guessed what color “Razzmatazz” is? (It’s a sort of magenta.) But some of the names are hilariously perfect—”old rose” denotes the hue of aging, sickly rose petals. And some of the terms made me realize how easily I could distinguish shades I hadn’t even realized were distinguishable until I saw the names for them: I could picture right away the difference between “Islamic green” (think Saudi flag) and “shamrock green.”

More clicking around… There’s also a complete list of every single crayon color that Crayola has seen fit to christen over the years. Some of the names have been changed, sometimes mysteriously so. In 1990, “maize” (a childhood favorite of mine, handy for drawing golden retrievers and buried sea-treasure) was replaced by the weedier name “dandelion.” The color itself changed slightly, too: Appropriately, dandelion looks more like the drab patches of yellow you’d see on an abandoned lot while maize evokes sunny Ukrainian wheat fields. Why’d they get rid of it?

Some of the Crayola color names are quite frivolous and totally inapt: I have no use for “laser lemon” or “Fuzzy Wuzzy brown” or even “radical red” (which, perhaps to protect kids from creeping Bolshevism, actually denotes a watery hue that’s more pinkish than Pinko). But some of the Crayola names should be added to the original master list of English color names—”Granny Smith green” is an amazing term, instantly visualized, and as best I can tell has no analogue on the grown-ups’ list of colors.

A few clicks later, we learn that Hungarian is the only known language to have two “basic” words for red, “piros” and “vörös.” Now, it’s not so unusual for a language to have a different set of basic color terms than English does: For instance, both “blue” and “azure” are basic color terms in Russian, while only “blue” is a basic color term in English (in the sense that native English speakers consider azure a type of blue, which is not the case with, say, green). What makes the Hungarian case odd is that red is the most basic color—it’s the third color languages acquire a word for, after black and white. Also, there’s this queer business:

* Expressions where “red” typically translates to “piros”: a red road sign, the red line of Budapest Metro, a holiday shown in red in the calendar, ruddy complexion, the red nose of a clown, some red flowers (those of a neutral nature, e.g. tulips), red peppers and paprika, red card suits (hearts and diamonds), red traffic lights, red stripes on a flag, etc.

* Expressions where “red” typically translates to “vörös”: red army, red wine, red carpet (for receiving important guests), red hair or beard, red lion (the mythical animal), the Red Cross, the novel The Red and the Black, the Red Sea, redshift, red giant, red blood cells, red oak, some red flowers (those with passionate connotations, e.g. roses), red fox, names of ferric and other red minerals, red copper, rust, red phosphorus, the color of blushing with anger or shame, etc.

You know, those lists made sense for a few short moments, and then I was lost again.