Month: June 2019

Weekend Reading:  Two by Penelope Lively

This was the first hot weekend of the summer, so we got a lot of reading done.  Really, there’s little else to do in the heat: I optimistically set out on a brisk walk, but returned so sweaty that I couldn’t even peel my sopping shirt off to shower.

I’ve long been a fan of Penelope Lively, and this weekend I  galloped though two of her 1980s novels, According to Mark and Judgment Day.  Lively won the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger in 1987, but I first heard of her at a rather tedious literary society meeting, where a smart, effervescent woman said that she had ordered all of Lively’s books, even the children’s books, from Blackwell’s in England.  (Blackwell’s?  England?  What?  This was before the internet.)

Lively’s According to Mark, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984, is a charming, witty novel about a biographer, Mark Lamming,  who is having midlife crisis.  Mark is writing a biography of an obscure literary figure, Gilbert Strong, whose appeal is partly that he “hasn’t been done” yet.  When Mark arrives at Strong’s house in Dorset, now a National Trust museum, to go through Strong’s letters and diaries, he is attracted to Strong’s granddaughter, Carrie, who runs a garden center on the premises.  And his infatuation seems more like a crush than love, because Carrie, though a sympathetic character, is not particularly pretty and is only semi-literate.  She has no interest in books or her grandfather.   Mark’s wife, Diana, who works in an art gallery, has an inkling  something is up, but she can’t monitor him all the time.  Mark thinks he loves Carrie, but Carrie knows it’s about his research on her grandfather.

Anyway, it’s a comedy of errors, with a road trip through France, Carrie’s discovery of the joys of reading Austen’s Emma (she loses two copies on the trip and has a hell of a time finding replacements in France), Mark’s attempted interview with Carrie’s horrible mother (an eternally bored English expatriate who wanders around Europe with various men ), and Diana’s arriving to sort everything out in the nick of time.

According to Mark is one of Lively’s best.

Lively’s Judgment Day (1980) is simultaneously lovely, entertaining, and sad, a simpler but more startling book than According to Mark.  It revolves mostly around Clare Paling, who moves with her husband, Peter, and their two children from London to the village of  Laddenham . Clare is an outsider who spends most of her time reading:  the social life in Laddenham revolves around the church, and she is an atheist.   But she admires the architecture and art, and becomes involved with researching the church history for a fete with a historical reenactment.

All the villagers have different relationships to the church:  there’s George the irritating vicar, who accidentally got into this line of work; Sydney Porter, a keen gardener with a tragic past who loves church because the words are always the same; and the horrible Bryans, who have such poor values that they desert their sad-sack son Martin so the mother can gallivant in London and the father can run off with a floozy.  Fortunately, both Sydney and Clare try to normalize the child’s  life.  And Clare’s attitude shifts to the church, if not religion.

Alas,  there is danger and violence even in an English village.  This did not end as I’d expected…. I guess I’d expected coziness!

Phyllis McGinley’s “Reflections at Dawn”

Phyllis McGinley

Phyllis McGinley won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1961, but does anyone remember?  She wrote “light verse,” the critics say.  Indeed!  Do we prefer “heavy verse”?    Her poems are are so buoyant and witty that she captures the mood and mode of suburban women’s lives.   I wish I had been of her generation so we could have shared  irreverent observations.

“Reflections at Dawn” by Phyllis McGinley

I wish I owned a Dior dress
Made to my order out of satin.
I wish I weighed a little less
And could read Latin.
Had perfect pitch or matching pearls,
A better head for street directions,
And seven daughters, all with curls
And fair complexions.
I wish I’d tan instead of burn.
But most, on all the stars that glisten,
I wish at parties I could learn
to sit and listen.

I wish I didn’t talk so much at parties.
It isn’t that I want to hear
My voice assaulting every ear,
Uprising loud and firm and clear
Above the cocktail clatter.
It’s simply, once a doorbells’ rung,
(I’ve been like this since I was young)
Some madness overtake my tongue
And I begin to chatter.

Buffet, ball, banquet, quilting bee,
Wherever conversation’s flowing,
Why must I feel it falls on me
To keep things going?
Though ladies cleverer than I
Can loll in silence, soft and idle,
Whatever topic gallops by,
I seize its bridle,
Hold forth on art, dissect the stage,
Or babble like a kindergart’ner
Of politics till I enrage
My dinner partner.

I wish I did’nt talk so much at parties.
When hotly boil the arguments,
Ah? would I had the common sense
To sit demurely on a fence
And let who will be vocal,
Instead of plunging in the fray
With my opinions on display
Till all the gentlemen edge away
To catch an early local

Oh! there is many a likely boon
That fate might flip me from her griddle.
I wish that I could sleep till noon
And play the fiddle,
Or dance a tour jete’ so light
It would not shake a single straw down.
But when I ponder how last night
I laid the law down.
More than to have the Midas touch
Or critics’ praise, however hearty,
I wish I didn’t talk so much,
I wish I didn’t talk so much,
I wish I didn’t talk so much,
When I am at a party. 

Going Too Far?

Up is down, left is right, north is south…  the world is a crazy place.

Librarians, once the keepers of the archives, are now reveling in the role of censor. Marion the librarian is back with a vengeance!

Last year the ALA (American Library Association) revoked Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from an award because literal-minded readers among them decided Pa in the Little House books was a racist.  This year they’ve revoked the name of one of their own from an award: the librarian Melvil Dewey (1851–1931), who invented the Dewey Decimal System.  The ALA has  denounced him for his “legacy of antisemitism, sexual harassment, and racism” (Book Riot).    

Here’s what I want to know:  are librarians also eradicating Dewey’s name from his own system?

We’ve come a long, long, very long way since Hollywood spawned the #MeToo movement.

DO YOU THINK ANNE OF GREEN GABLES WAS GAY?  Having read all the Anne books, I am sure she was not.

But Cori McCarthy at Tor.com writes in her article,“Fraught With Destiny: Queering L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley and Diana Barry”:

On the outside, Anne of Green Gables is an enchantingly talkative, acutely sensitive, feminist character for the ages. Anne is also a hero for those who have been maligned for being themselves. The attraction for the queer-at-heart audience only magnifies when you take a close look at one of the pivotal relationships in the story: Anne and Diana’s “friendship.” I use quotation marks here because their friendship is indeed crafted like a love story, with parallels to the inherent problems and joy within queer relationships.

Oh, dear.  I think this is a misreading of their friendship.  But perhaps one could make a case that Jo in Little Women is gay.

A Trollope Binge: The Small House at Allington

Bingeing on Anthony Trollope’s novels has its pros and cons. He was one of the most prolific Victorian writers, and he wrote some masterpieces and some duds.

Yet fans cannot get enough of him.  They are almost as keen on The Vicar of Bullhampton as The Way We Live Now.  “I love Mr. Trollope!!!” one enthusiastic fan posted.

And I tend to agree.

You won’t find a better Victorian novel than He Knew He was Right, but in my twenties, when I began to read Trollope,  only the Palliser series and the Barsetshire series were in print. I devoted a mellow summer to the six-book Barsetshire series, completely enthralled, completely uncritical; I walked around clutching  Framley Parsonage to my breast.  But to mention Trollope in an English lit class would have been to invite darts and arrows.  I had been called “a naive reader” for bringing up Mrs. Oliphant. (What were they reading, Barthes?  I do not doubt it!)

Trollope’s brilliant Barsetshire series (The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, and The Last Chronicle of Barset) was tremendously popular in the 19th century.  Earlier this month, I decided to go back to it.  I began in medias res, with Framley Parsonage, the fourth novel in the series (which can be read as a standalone, and is one of my favorites–I wrote about it here).  It was so much fun that I went right on to the fifth book, The Small House of Allington.

The Small House of Allington is a stunning novel, because Trollope really knew how to write by this point.  His interweaving of dramatic scenes within a tightly plotted book is expert. The novel  revolves around the marriage plot:  there are engagements, marrying for money, jilting, and separations without divorce.  When it was serialized in the Cornhill magazine (1862-64)  readers wrote letters begging Trollope to marry off the popular heroine Lily Dale to Johnny Eames, her lifelong swain. But it is difficult to imagine Lily marrying a man she calls a hobbledehoy, even though she has been jilted by her lover, Crosbie. 

Trollope was crazy about Lily–crazier than I am.  In Chapter 2, he praises his charming, saucy heroine and sketches her swains.

Lilian Dale, dear Lily Dale—for my reader must know that she is to be very dear, and that my story will be nothing to him if he do not love Lily Dale—Lilian Dale had discovered that Mr Crosbie was a swell. But I am bound to say that Mr Crosbie did not habitually proclaim the fact in any offensive manner; nor in becoming a swell had he become altogether a bad fellow. It was not to be expected that a man who was petted at Sebright’s should carry himself in the Allington drawing-room as would Johnny Eames, who had never been petted by any one but his mother. And this fraction of a hero of ours had other advantages to back him, over and beyond those which fashion had given him.

Such good writing! But Lily is not my favorite heroine.  I prefer Lucy Robarts in Framley Parsonage.

There are many, many characters in this novel.  I love Lily’s sister Bell, who refuses to marry her cousin Bernard because she doesn’t love him.  She is as honorable as Lily but more sensible.I fail to understand how Lily can continue to love the no-good Crosbie after he jilts her and marries someone else. And yet I am also fond of the woman he marries instead, the “horrible”  Lady Alexandrina de Courcy, who, at 30, is so desperate to marry that she gets engaged to Crosbie, even though he is jilting Lily.  Trollope caricatures Lady Alexandrina, and thinks she is an apt punishment for Crosbie, but I think her lot is much worse!

One important point:  Trollope introduces Plantagenet Palliser, who is one of the stars of the Palliser books.  “Planty Pal!” I said excitedly.

One of the best of the Barsetshire books.  And it can be read as a standalone.

What Genre Is This? Pop, Literary, & Neal Stephenson’s “Fall”

All right, I’ve done it.

I’t’s only June, and I’ve met my summer goal.  I have finished three new or newish books:  Grant Ginder’s literary beach read, Honestly, We Meant Well (which I posted on here), Charles Fishman’s  One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon (here), and Annie Ernaux’s The Years, a lyrical autobiography which was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize (here). 

Now I am delving into summer bestseller land, the kind which is sanctioned by critics.  These days, literary culture and pop culture overlap;  book review editors give more space to reviews of genre fiction. Metaphorically, the editorial bow tie has been unknotted, the authorial hair has tumbled down from the bun, and the critical high heels have been replaced by sandals.  This summer, there has been a glut of reviews of Neal Stephenson’s new science fiction novel, Fall; or Dodge in Hell.  Because so many critics have acclaimed it, I picked up a copy, and it is a thrilling read. But after 200 pages, I wonder, What is this genre?  It’s part science fiction, part literary fiction, part philosophy… . I don’t know what it is.

In the opening chapter of Fall, we meet Richard  “Dodge” Forthrast, a gaming company mogul with a philosophical bent.  After a disturbing dream about coffee, he muses on the connection between the threads of consciousness and sleep, and then on the threads of the Three Fates (Moirai) of Greek myth, who spin, measure and then snip the threads of life.   

Subconsciously, Dodge seems to be intent on death.  Before a routine surgery, he forgets to fast.  And when he realizes he has eaten, he does not think it’s important.  And so he dies on the operating table.  (A kind of suicide?) And then his friend Corvallis, nicknamed  C+, discovers that Dodge arranged for  his  brain to be preserved by some quack company.  This causes moral and technical problems for Corvallis and Dodge’s family.

And so Stephenson, like the best of literary novelists, connects Dodge’s thoughts on sleep and death with his sleep and death.  It is carefully orchestrated. And then he switches to the (third person) point-of-view of Corvallis, who unravels a dangerous hoax on the internet and in the process falls in love with Maeve, a beautiful amputee who guides boating trips in Utah. And then we jump a few years into the future, and Dodge’s niece’s  is on a road trip to a territory inhabited by right-wing religious nuts. Where it’s going from here I don’t know.  As you can imagine, the first 200 (of 892) pages have been a wild ride.   

Annie Ernaux’s “The Years”

Annie Ernaux’s exquisite book, The Years, translated from French by Alison L. Strayer, is a hybrid of memoir, autofiction, and history.  I learned about The Years when it was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.  There was a controversy about its eligibility:  it had been classified as a personal  narrative.  But Bettany Hughes, chairperson of the judges, told the Guardian it was a “much-needed riposte to the ever-narrowing trajectory of auto-fiction.”

Memoir or fiction, Ernaux’s book is breathtakingly elegiac. She begins with the sentence, “All the images will disappear,” followed by a list of abbreviated descriptions:   public lavatories built on a river, Scarlett O’Hara killing a soldier in Atlanta, photographs of people being deported to the camps, and “a house with an arbor of Virginia creeper, which was a hotel in the sixties, no. 90A, on the Zaterre in Venice.” But never fear, if lists are not your thing,  she soon segues into a chronological narrative, the  story of her life from 1940 to age 66.

This short personal narrative (240 pages) is intertwined with history, politics, and social history.  Much of the book is set at holiday dinners, as Annie navigates the years of childhood, adolescence, motherhood, middle age, and old age. At the dinners, the relatives look at photos and tell stories.  Ernaux describes the shortages  of commodities  after World War II, the national fascination with the  Tour de France and the race to the moon, the rise of Elvis Presley and rock and roll, the migrations of refugees from Algeria , and the materialism that coincides with the availability of appliances and other commodities.

We get to know Annie very well over the years.  She reads Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Gone with the Wind, hopes to become a writer, but becomes a teacher.  She sympathizes with student protests and takes to the streets with them when she is a teacher in the late ’60s. She is too busy with work and raising children to write her book, but she thinks about how she will write it.

This is a bookish book, bearing the influence of many books:   Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Gone with the Wind (Annie wants to be Scarlett O’Hara, as did my own mother), and probably many other French memoirs and novels.  I also thought of Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence series, particularly the last book, The Four-Gated City, which follows Martha Quest from age 30 in post-war London, through the upheavals of the ’60s and on to a dystopian future.

The Years won the 2018 French-American Foundation Translation Prize and the 2016 Strega European Prize.  I do think it should have won the Booker.   I look forward to reading her other books–and if you have suggestions let me know. 

The Doris Lessing Effect

Doris Lessing

Thinking back over my wide reading in the canon and pop genres, I often muse on how lucky I am to be surrounded by books. After a lifetime of buying books, I have an eclectic library that is better than many bookstores. I’ve grazed happily in ancient and modern literature: Aeschylus to Austen, Catullus to Colette, Tolstoy to Elizabeth Taylor, Dickens to Drabble. But I must admit that Doris Lessing is the writer who has influenced me most.

Her masterpiece, The Golden Notebook, opened up new worlds to women in the mid-twentieth century (and later). Anna, the heroine, is a “free woman,” a single mother, and a blocked writer who despises her own best-selling first novel. She refuses to write another “sentimental” novel and instead she writes for hours every day in four different-colored notebooks. She is brittle and unhappy because her married lover has left her:  she writes a fictional version of this.  There does not seem to be much future in love for her.  When I first read this remarkable novel, I had never visualized a future where a woman’s primary goal wasn’t marriage or motherhood. Life is difficult for Anna, but it shatters the myth that all women attain what is supposed to be the feminine dream.

Lessing was exasperated that The Golden Notebook was considered a feminist classic.  It is primarily an experimental novel about  the breakdown of personality in the fragmented post-war society. It may not be a feminist novel, but it certainly inspired feminists.

Lessing has always been a controversial writer. She was a member of the Communist party, until she (and many others) discovered what was going on in Russia.  According to the Guardian, MI5 spied on her for 20 years, “listening to her phone conversations, opening her mail and closely monitoring her movement…”And the political aspects of her work that appealed to women readers in the ’60s and ’70s seem to be lost on future generations.

And then, after her death in 2013, Lessing was attacked by several journalists and critics on the basis of her personality: in short,  as a woman, not as a writer. They sternly dubbed her “a bad mother” because she “abandoned” her two children to be raised by their father in Africa. That seems a very sexist criticism to me.  And then they turned around and criticized for having a third child who lived with her until his death. The logic of this utterly defeats me.  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

I never understand the attacks on a writer’s personality anyway. We read their work, but surely do not expect them to be perfect people.   That’s why they’re writers after all: to express ideas that might be extremely unpopular or unappealing if we had to listen to them drone on in person. But nothing they dug up on Lessing seemed terrible to me. They were determined to turn her life into a celebrity gossip column.  After all, she was a former Communist and an outspoken woman.

At Goodreads, the average star rating of The Golden Notebook is 3.8. That’s not terrible, but it’s certainly not what I’d expect. I wonder if she is less read and understood now:   only 30% of the world’s population today was alive in 1962 when The Golden Notebook was published. But then again, this is a complicated experimental novel.  It’s a lot of work to read.

Honestly, if I ever again see a headline like the following, “Doris Lessing: from champion of free love to frump with a bun” (The Spectator), I am writing a letter of protest to the editor.

What to Read on the Chaise Lounge: Mysteries, of Course!

I’m not sure if she’s wearing bug spray, but she’ll need it!

Mysteries are perfect for reading on the chaise lounge outdoors, but you can’t read  outdoors without the right equipment. Cover yourself with bug spray, wear a hat, pour a big glass of iced tea, and then choose a mystery and lounge.  If it’s humid and 90 degrees, you might enjoy John D. Macdonald’s Travis McGee mysteries, set in sultry Florida.   Then again, for an escape to California, I recommend Stuart Palmer’s The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan, a novel in the Miss Withers series (which I wrote about here).

The great thing about mysteries is that  you can pretend to be a lofty intellectual even as you race through one of Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence books. That’s how respectable the genre is!  A few years ago Julian Barnes highly praised the Penguin translations of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret series  in the TLS. I  personally find Simenon’s minimalist books interchangeable, but they are delightfully entertaining and blessedly short.

If you are a fan of witty cozies with vivid characters,  Patricia Moyes’s Inspector Henry Tibbett series has stood the test of time.   I loved Murder à la Mode, set in the 1960s at a London fashion magazine.  Moyes used to work for Vogue, so she knows fashion and magazines.   When somebody puts arsenic in the assistant editor Helen’s tea, Inspector Henry Tibbett investigates–and it helps that his niece has been interning there.

I am an aficionado of the Dutch writer Janwillem van de Wetering, a police officer and Zen Buddhist monk who turned to writing police procedurals.  In  Tumbleweed, the second in his Amsterdam Cops series, Detective-Adjutant Gripstra, a middle-aged, overweight officer who plays the drums, and Sergeant de Gier, his handsome young partner,  investigate the murder of a prostitute who practiced black magic.

Syndicate Books has reissued Margaret Millar’s classic crime fiction in omnibus editions.   My favorite is Do Evil in Return (1950), an eerie exploration of the consequences of illegal abortion.  The twist is that a young woman dies, not from an illegal abortion but because it is illegal:  she cannot find a doctor to perform one. You can read this addictive novel in Collected Millar:  Dawn of Domestic Suspense.

I was utterly engrossed by Vera Caspary’s Laura,a brilliant 1944 crime classic reissued in Women Crime Writers:  Four Suspense Novels of the 1940 (Library of America). This stunning mystery has many angles: it’s like being in a hall of mirrors. Told from three different points-of-view, this is a psychological novel about the murder of a successful advertising executive whom everybody liked.   In 1944 Laura was adapted as a popular Otto Preminger film with Gene Tierney.

You can’t go wrong with Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey series.  I especially like Have His Carcase, in which Lord Peter Wimsey, an amateur sleuth, and Harriet Vane, a mystery writer, collaborate on solving the murder of a ballroom dancer.  Harriet finds the body on the beach, but by the time the police get there it has been washed out to sea.  How do you solve a murder without a body?

What are your favorite mysteries?

Trollope’s “Framley Parsonage”

In the 21st century, Anthony Trollope is a trendy Victorian writer. Whether or not he is taught in school I cannot say, but he has a vast fan base. Some critics consider him a hack, but he has also provided them  with endless new subject matter.

I recently reread Framley Parsonage, the charming fourth novel in Trollope’s six-book Barsetshire series. It was Trollope’s breakthrough novel because of its serialization in Cornhill magazine.  Elizabeth Gaskell wrote admiringly to the publisher of the Cornhill, “I wish Mr. Trollope would go on writing Framley Parsonage forever. I don’t see why it should ever come to an end and everyone I know is always dreading the last number.”

Framley Parsonage is a sweet and mesmerizing read.  Trollope entertainingly explores the politics of the clergy and the foibles of the aristocracy. This compelling book revolves around debt, marriage, and pride and prejudice.  Though it rambles in the beginning, Trollope soon gets a grip.

The “hero” is Mark Robarts, an ambitious clergyman who, at 25, has never slaved as a curate: he has a splendid job, the prestigious Framley living, given him by his friend’s mother Lady Lufton, who has known him since boyhood. Lady Lufton loves to maneuver and manipulate: she even picked out Mark’s wife, Fanny. (Fortunately, Mark and Fanny love each other.) But we’re not surprised when Mark rebels against Lady Lufton and asserts himself, visiting a “fast set” of well-known men she disapproves of: Mr. Sowerby at Chaldicotes, a politician who is heavily in debt, and the Duke of Omnium, who is something of a roué. But Mark ends up foolishly signing one of Mr. Sowerby’s “bills”—saying he will be responsible if Mr. Sowerby can’t pay the debt—and, naturally, Mr. Sowerby cannot.

The marriage plot relieves the serious money problems faced by Mark and others. Will Mark’s sister Lucy, the smartest in the Robarts family (so much smarter than Mark) marry Lord Lufton, even though Lady Lufton disapproves? And whom will Miss Dunstable marry?

I adore Trollope’s occasional Ciceronian rhetoric.  Trollope was a lifetime fan of Cicero and even wrote a book about him.  In the following passage, you will notice a triad (a grouping of three) in the first sentence, and the second is marked by anaphora, a repetition of the same word at the beginning of successive clauses.  N.B. This passage describes Lady Lufton’s reaction to the knowledge that her son, Lord Lufton, is coming home for the winter.

It was proper, and becoming, and comfortable in the extreme. An English gentleman ought to hunt in the county where he himself owns the fields over which he rides; he ought to receive the respect and honor due to him from his own tenants; he ought to sleep under a roof of his own, and he ought also—so Lady Lufton thought—to fall in love with an embryo bride of his own mother’s choosing.

When I first began reading Trollope, very few of Trollope’s books were available. How the world is changed! You can get free copies from Project Gutenberg now. And don’t worry about reading the Barsetshire series in order:  Framley Parsonage can be read as a standalone.

Angels Walking without Electronics

An angel listens to a man’s thoughts in “Wings of Desire.”

A few days ago, I took a long walk. Something about the cool June day reminded of a time when summer didn’t become intolerably hot till July. In the late twentieth century, it seldom sizzled till July Sidewalk Sale Days, when you felt the waves of heat on the pavement as you rummaged through merchandise on tables outside stores.

I thought nothing profound on my walk. Thoughts have no narrative anyway: they are fragments, disjointed bits, occasionally bursting into ideas. In Wim Wenders’ movie Wings of Desire, written by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke, an angel (Bruno Ganz) listens to the disordered fragments of human thoughts.

Angels at the library with a human being in “Wings of Desire.”

I was slightly bored on my walk.  Suddenly I realized I had forgotten my electronic device. Without music on a Walkman, your thoughts go in a different direction.

Boredom is good for you. That’s what they say, and I believe it. In the 20th century, everything seemed slower. There was more time before e-mail and  iPhones.

Being on the internet can make you feel brittle, if you find yourself reading articles that are in no way illuminating. For instance, I wasted time today on a couple of articles about Trump and Biden insulting each other at separate stops on a trip through Iowa. Well, that’s politics. Isn’t it absurd that the presidential campaign starts so early?

Being online has some advantages. I read an excellent essay in The L.A. Review of Books, “Walking Alone: On Digital Minimalism.” Taylor Foyle muses on online addiction as he reviews a new book, Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.

Foyle observes that we are “floundering in our digitally saturated environment.” He says that Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, and the philosopher Martin Heidegger may  “seem impossibly quaint” today in their objections to TV (Merton) and the typewriter (Heidegger).

They don’t see quaint to me. We all know, however, that electronic toys are far more addictive than TV and typewriters.

Foyle muses,

That both Merton, in his Kentucky monastery, and Heidegger, in his Black Forest “hut,” spent most of their adult lives unplugged and off the grid makes me wonder what — if any — measures we could now take to escape our brave new virtual world. Our love affair — indeed, our addiction — with screens and the joy we take in pushing buttons has only deepened. The behavioral indicators of chemical dependency align quite well with our near-constant interaction with smartphones. Add to this the sophistication and economic muscle Silicon Valley spends on rewiring our neurological circuitry to make us crave more time with our devices and it now looks like our attachment is incurable.

Foyle is enthusiastic about Newport’s book.   Newport recommends not only that we detox from electronics but advises us to get back to things that make us human. Foyle writes, “To this end, Newport reflects on three core practices now crowded out by our overuse of technology: solitude, conversation, and leisure.”

It sounds good to me.  Even a walk without electronics feels different.

But some see no reason to stop. When a friend of mine found herself in a “no phone zone” at a library,  she took out her phone and took a picture.

Why do i find that sad?

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