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 Dickens by Alfred Bryan, courtesy of The Morgan Library website The Morgan Library, one of best places to spend an afternoon in New York, is having a Charles Dickens exhibition with things on display like the manuscript for A Christmas Carol, original illustrations for his books, and personal letters.
This kind of show always thrills me. Seeing rough drafts with all their cross-outs and marginalia, reading personal correspondence between Dickens and his illustrator (for Jenny Wren, the dressmaker of dolls in Our Mutual Friend: “A weird sharpness not without beauty, is the thing I want”). Among all this paper, written in his own hand, DICKENS becomes Dickens – a hardworking writer, serious and skilled, slogging it out.
I love hearing about how great writers write so I was excited when I came across a letter Dickens wrote to a young German novelist, Sophie Verena, who dedicated her first novel to him. She must have asked him the usual questions, because here’s what Dickens said to her:
“In reply to your second question whether I dictate, I answer with a smile that I can as soon imagine a painter dictating his pictures. No. I write every word of my books with my own hand, and do not write them very quickly either. I write with great care and pains (being passionately fond of my art, and thinking it worth my trouble), and persevere, and work hard.”
I will remember these words the next time I hear about a writer pumping out 5,000 words a day and it makes me want to die a little.
Dickens has good advice for Sophie about maintaining a work/life balance, a quandary as elusive during the first industrial revolution as it is today:
“You must remember that in all your literary aspiration, and whether thinking or writing, it is indispensably necessary to relieve that wear and tear of the mind by some other exertion that may be wholesomely set against it. Habitually, I have always had, besides great bodily exercise, some mental pursuit of a light kind with which to vary my labors as an Author. And I have found the result so salutary, that I strongly commend it to the fair friend in whom I am deeply interested.”
In other words, work out regularly and pursue a hobby. I’m sure everyone’s mother would agree.
Isn’t it weird when you read stuff about daily life 150 years ago (or a thousand years ago) and it’s just like today? Somehow I expect the passage of time to affect the human condition, but it doesn’t. Our combustion engines and wireless connections and social mores don’t change our basic needs and drives. I bet if I could sit down and chat with a 10th century Viking, we’d have a surprising amount in common.
If I could stand the smell.
 credit: Ben Walsh, Business Insider
You don’t have to be a Trekkie to appreciate the Vulcan patriotism displayed by president and COO Bradley Abelow at his congressional subcommittee hearing for the MF Global debacle. Live long and prosper, indeed!
Like many people, I was thrilled to see this picture in the NY Times today because nothing gets me going like SECRET MESSAGES. My vote for best character in A Tale of Two Cities? Madame Defarge and her knitting needles, of course. And how about those Native American marine Code Talkers we learned about from watching the preview for that Nicholas Cage movie? Makes me want run out and buy Rosetta Stone Navajo for the whole family!
Because meaning within meaning is what’s really fun and interesting. In Cast Off, the book I’m writing now, the two main characters learn a unique language that’s tonal with very few morphemes. In other words (pun intended), the way the words are pitched are more important than the vowels and consonants they contain. This means my characters can speak two languages at once. They can say, “Please pass the salt” in Dutch but pitch the words in such a way that at the same time they’re also saying, “That woman in the corner over there is plotting to assassinate us!” How handy is that?
***Just want to follow up on my Magic Powers post. My husband, who likes keeping a low profile so I’ll refer to him by his scrambled letter name, iNck, says I have a fourth power: the ability to fall asleep in seconds almost anywhere. It’s true, I conked out at a Rolling Stones concert and have snoozed through countless NY Rangers games, but I maintain that this ability is a skill, not a power. It’s too commonplace to be magic. My friends Andy S. and Jordy S. (no relation) can do it, and so can every parent with a child under five. So, sorry iNck, my magic power tally stands at three.
 Abracadabra! It’s true. I don’t care what Richard Dawkins says about the only real magic being the kind we witness in the universe, I know my powers are magical and I have proof they exist.
My magic powers are special abilities that I possess for which is there is no scientific explanation. I have identified three of them, but I’m not ruling out more.
Skeptical? Check this out:
My first magic power is being able to parallel park flawlessly every time. Anyone who knows me knows this is an impossibility. I’m a terrible driver. Partly because I get distracted (it’s so boring!) and partly because I’ve got no depth perception. When I cook I have to ask other people if the pot is big enough. I can’t figure out how to fit more than 2 flashlights in a milk crate. Put it this way: if I were to take an IQ test for spatial ability, I’d get a 10. And yet…when it’s time to parallel park, I slip right in like a hand in a glove or a pig in a blanket or a stacking chair on top of another identical stacking chair.
Magic.
My second magic power is being able to tell exactly how long to set the microwave every time. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s because I’ve owned the same microwave for 11 years and I just know it really well. Well, you’re wrong because my powers work on microwaves I’ve never used before. Never even seen before. What else, other than magic, could account for that? Answer me that, why don’t you!
My third, and so far final but I’m leaving the door open for others to emerge, power isn’t really mine. It’s an object that I own that’s imbued with magical properties. Like the Green Lantern’s ring. Or that stick Moses turned into a snake (so cool). My personal talisman is a pair of earrings my sister gave me when I was 11. Even though they’re tiny, they cannot be lost. I’m telling you, I’ve owned these earrings for more than thirty years and I wear them 4 or 5 days a week. They’ve gone missing for hours, even days at a time, but I always find them. In fact, I’m wearing them now. My magical earrings.
My magic powers give me tremendous pleasure and satisfaction. When I dig around my jewelry box and one of the earrings isn’t there, my heart rate doesn’t speed a millisecond because I know it’s just a matter of time – and not a lot of time – before the earring turns up. When I eyeball a parking spot fit for a Mini Cooper from the driver’s seat of my SUV, I let out a triumphant “Ha HA!” and glide in. And when a friend asks me to load the popcorn into her microwave, I punch in 2-0-0-START, spin around and murmur, “But you’ll want to take it out 10 seconds early.”
I just hope that going public won’t make the juju wear off.
And look – it has a lovely new cover! Also, Escape made the Texas Bluebonnet Award Master List for 2012-2013. I’m really excited about my visit to the Ethical Culture School on December 12th to talk with the 4th graders about Ethiopian adventures.
 Just finished THE MAGIC OF REALITY: How We Know What’s Really True by Richard Dawkins. I loved it. It’s got the easiest and best explanation of evolution that I’ve come across, which is great because I find that when it comes to profound concepts I need multiple explanations, the simpler the better.
My favorite part of the book, though, was in the first chapter where Dawkins offers three definitions of magic. There’s supernatural magic, the kind we find in myths and fairy tales that usually requires a broomstick or a wand or maybe some ground up unicorn horn. Then there’s stage magic, which is the variety practiced by Houdini, Penn and Teller, and their cohorts. And finally there’s what Dawkins calls “poetic magic.” This is the good stuff. It’s the magic we feel when we witness an eclipse or a double rainbow, hold our newborns for the first time, fall in love, gaze with disbelief at a cherry blossom tree in May, each bloom crystalized in ice.
As the title says, the magic of reality.
I needed to do a lot of research on human evolution for CAST OFF, my novel in progress. Some of the characters in the book are homo floresiensis, the human ancestors whose remains were discovered in Indonesia in 2004. Homo floresiensis are nicknamed Hobbits because fully grown they were only about three feet tall. They lived on the island Flores along with komodo dragons, pygmy elephants and giant rats. Also, they were alive 13,000 years ago. Historically and evolutionarily speaking, that’s yesterday.
Let that sink in for a minute. You know those cave paintings in France? Homo sapiens made them about 17,000 years ago. Neanderthals? They died out about 25,000 years ago. 13,000 years ago people who looked just like you and me were wearing clothes, hunting and making art, burying their dead and using fire, molding ceramics and building structures out of wood. And people who looked kind of like you and me but also kind of like chimpanzees were doing some of those things, too.
Until either a volcanic eruption or marauding homo sapiens wiped them out. Or both. We don’t know for sure.
I spent time with William Jungers in the cafeteria at the Museum of Natural History talking about the Hobbits. Bill is a paleoanthropologist and chairs the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University. He hosted a symposium about homo floresiensis at Stony Brook. He’s been to Indonesia and examined their remains.
Here’s a picture of Bill with a model of what the Hobbits may have looked like:
I asked him, “So if you’ve got homo sapiens on one end of the spectrum and chimps and bonobos on the other end, where do homo floresiensis fall?” He said that homo floresiensis barely made it into the “homo” bucket but that they were far more like us than like apes.
Whoa. I’ve read a lot about apes, and I’ve been to Indonesia and hung out with wild orangutans, and I have to tell you, apes are a lot like us. They’ve got a wide emotional range, they communicate, they make war, commit murder, nurture orphaned babies, problem solve, make tools, use tools, play for no reason other than sheer enjoyment, empathize, act selflessly, act selfishly, get bored…see what I mean?
So what does it mean to be barely in the same category as us and yet far more like us than like apes?
Here’s where Dawkins helps. He describes evolution like a stack of postcards three miles high. The first postcard has a picture of you, the second postcard has a picture of your father, the third your grandfather, the fourth your great-grandfather all the way back through millions of ancestors until you get to the very first postcard, which was taken 185 million generations ago (you’ll need to pretend photography was invented back then), and depicts something that looks like…a fish.
It’s incomprehensible to think that we descend from fish, but it’s easy to believe that we share a heritage with our father, our grandfather or even our great-great-great-etc. grandfather, who, even though he was a caveman was still a homo sapien and if you gave him a shave and decent suit he’d fit right in on line at the movies or as a member of the House of Representatives.
If I remember that each generation changes just a teeny bit from the one that preceded it, I can wrap my head around the idea that those tiny differences add up so that at some point long ago, our ancestors looked very different from us.
What interests me, though, isn’t how different our ancestors were from us but how similar they were. What did we humans inherit from that fish-like creature? Or from the one that looked a lot like a lizard but wasn’t a lizard, or from the ape that wasn’t quite an ape, or from the human ancestor that we shared with homo floresiensis, some of whose descendants became Hobbits while others became…us?
 Versailles used to really stink. Of course it’s all a matter of perspective and taste. What I think is hilarious, you find appalling. What you think is gross, I think is fascinating. And isn’t it great that the world is full of different opinions, otherwise it’d be a really boring place to live?
Except I’m usually the outlier.
Here’s an example. A bunch of years ago, I took a writing class at The New School. Every week we’d bring in something we’d written, read it aloud and receive constructive criticism from our peers and the teacher. At the time I was working on a collection of moderately subversive nursery rhymes and I was really pleased with this one (it’s better if you read it aloud):
Extra Help
Today I thee my thpeech teacher, her name ith Thally Beth
Which ith really not the betht name when you teach kidth who can’t thay “eth.”
But I don’t feel too bad, you thee
‘Cauthe my friend Laura’th got it worthe than me.
She thees Mithter Elzedall – and she can’t thay her “L-th” at all!
And then there’th David from our clath
He’th really good at doing math
But even when he trieth and trieth
He thimply cannot thay hith “Y-th.”
Not the short oneth or the long
He really hateth our morning thong:
“Young laddy, young lathie, prey how do you do?
Hey howdy! Yo ho! To you, you, you and you!”
Yeth it’th hard for Laura, David and me
But at leatht we’re not like Henry and Lee.
They’re five like uth, but they can’t read yet
Tho they thee Mithuth Rothkovidyet.
She thitth with them and writeth down wordth
Like pop and top and bearth and birdth.
Tho far they read jutht pup and cup
But Mithuth Rothkovidyet thayth she won’t give up!
To learn to talk and thing and read
Our parentth get uth the help we need.
And they thay if we work really hard
They’ll let uth play out in the yard!
Cricket.
No one would look at me. After a long, awkward pause the teacher said, “I just don’t understand. Why would you make fun of small children?”
I tried to explain that I wasn’t making fun of kids, I was making fun of parents who treat every minor imperfection like a life-threatening disease requiring the intervention of highly paid specialists.
The class didn’t buy it. I tried to do some damage control by reading a totally banal limerick about a family with too many strollers. I’m not sure it worked.
But this has been the story of my life. In junior high while the other kids were grooving on Bruce Springsteen and The Who, I was studying opera (“Yeah, I really like Led Zeppelin,” I would say, trying to pass as cool. “He’s a total fox”).
It’s still true today. I spent a year researching my latest novel. It’s set in the 17th century in Amsterdam, in Indonesia and on a Dutch East India Company ship. I must have learned at least 10 bajillion facts. But here are a few that stick with me:
- The term sailors used for cannibalism – the kind where they had to eat each other out of desperation, not the kind practiced as a ritual – is “custom of the sea.”
- Since Versailles had no bathrooms, people would simply relieve themselves in the corridors (I’d kill to know the etiquette around this. Did one wait for a private moment? Ask one’s companion to turn his or her back? Squat and keep chatting?). In 1715 Louis the XIV decreed that the excrement had to be removed once a week. Before that it was catch as catch can. So to speak.
- When you amputate someone’s arm, you’ll find that arteries are like spaghetti and veins are like capellini. Also, until the 17th century, surgeons cauterized the stump, but sometime in that century they started using a flap technique.
The questions I always ask are: What was it really like? What’s the stuff nobody wants to talk about? What’s underneath the surface?
Who’s with me?
 I’ve been thinking a lot about Stanely Milgram, the social psychologist who ran the (in)famous experiments in the early 1960s that looked at people’s willingness to commit acts of cruelty in the name of obedience.
Milgram was trying to figure out why so many Germans stood by or participated in Nazi acts of atrocity. He brought in 100 subjects, all men, and told them they were participating in an experiment that would demonstrate that people learned more quickly when they were punished. Each man was assigned the role of teacher, and he asked a student, whom he could hear but not see, a series of questions. If the student got the question right, the teacher moved onto the next question. If the student got the question wrong, the teacher pulled a lever on an impressive looking machine that zapped the student with an electric shock. Each new wrong answer elicited a stronger shock, all the way up to 450 volts. The subjects screamed and pleaded for release, but the teachers were instructed by men in white lab coats to keep going. (The students were actors and perfectly safe, but the teachers didn’t know that.)
You can watch a video about the Milgram experiments here. For comic relief, note Milgram’s facial hair.
Before the experiments were conducted, everyone involved expected most or all of the teachers to pull out. No normal, moral adult would torture a fellow human being just because some official looking guy told him to, right? In fact, it turned out that only 1.3% of the teachers refused to participate.
The Milgram experiments suggest to me that we humans have an innate—and strong—desire to obey people whom we believe are superior to us. That part of what it means to be human is to want to do what we’re told.
We see this instinct in our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, who share 98% of our DNA. If you’re a lowly male chimp and you try to mate with a female in your troupe, or you’re a bonobo and you don’t wait to eat until your alpha females have eaten (bonobos are matriarchal), you’re in for a beating.
I think about this instinct to obey and then I think about the values I try to instill I my kids, and the values they learn at school: be kind, share, be honest, be inclusive, be respectful of others and their different points of view, follow the rules. These values aren’t going to help them recognize when a person in charge is wrong and they’re not going to help them actually stand up and do something about it. They—we—need stronger weapons like determination, self control, and self knowledge. Because it’s not just peer pressure we’re up against, it’s our very nature.
 You see the stats everywhere: ebook sales are exploding, ereaders are flying off the (virtual) shelves. Everybody’s smartphone has an ereader app. Or two. But not for kids. Not yet.
It’s driving me crazy, but I can’t find the article I read a couple of months ago that broke down ebook sales for kids by age. Suffice it say, among kids in the GRANDPA HATES THE BIRD demographic, in the 6-10 year old range, sales are zero. I’m paraphrasing here, but you get the idea.
Why don’t young kids read ebooks? Ereaders are expensive; ereaders are fragile, and ereaders are still kinda suckish.
In my opinion, the last reason is the most important one. All the kids I know who have ereaders or parents willing to lend them one start out super excited and then run back to paper once they’re faced with the realities of gray screens, unwieldy devices and generic design.
So why did I do it? Why publish stories for kids that they can’t or won’t read?
Because it’s only a matter of time before they can and will. Ereaders will get cheaper (a basic Kindle is currently $79); ereaders will get hardier, and ereaders will get better. And when they do, Bird will be waiting.
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