On the Importance of Intermittence in Cognitive Processes (I owe you a meaningful post about the summer reading experiment)

 

Well, reader, I feel like I owe you something closer to insight, or fact, or revelation.  

I went on vacation!  It was nice.  I stayed at a place that looked out over a small lake.  There was a verandah with a little wicker couch facing the water.  I made a wee reading nook there.  It was the bomb.  So good.  I read most of Kevin Kwan's Lies and Weddings on that wicker. I left my phone and iPad in my room (upstairs, far away, no distractions), and I would read, sip tea, read, look out at the lake, read, adjust my position on the couch etc.. 

Planning this post, I initially thought that what I had learned was that reading with a view helps.  I tested the theory at home this morning by reading on my front porch (Jodi Picoult's House Rules, a book I picked up at the lake place when, after I had already packed my mostly finished Kwan novel, there was a delay and I needed something to read in my nook and it was in the cabin's "grab a book if you need" basket).  

At home on my porch (see photo above): yes the view helped, it was nice.  Something about bare feet and wind helps too, as I have remarked in a previous post.  I have a colleague who often slips her shoes off while reading or thinking hard, I've noticed.  Is there something to this?  Has a neurologist/ cognitive scientist ever studied feet as they relate to thought processes?  

Really though, my observation is about cognitive processes being somehow intermittent.

This last month has been a struggle with my computer and my wifi.  I learned through that struggle how much my ideal writing process is intermittent.  Technically, I can blog, or work on my other creative writing offline.  However, I realize I have a dependence on keeping silly, meaningless tabs open and flipping to them periodically.

I like writing for a bit, and then flipping to another tab and [reading a horoscope, looking at Facebook, glancing at McSweeney's or The Onion].  Productive writing happens in bursts, with short periods in which my brain needs a rest and so I look at something else passively.  It's not multitasking.  I am not productive on anything other than writing.  What I flip to in other tabs is fluff: nothing that truly engages me.  I can't watch FB videos: they suck me in too much.  Instagram likewise, I get pulled into something too long.  The news, likewise: too strong an emotional tangent.  Email--don't go there; it requires focus.  

So, I write for [I'd guess 5-10 minutes--I haven't precisely timed it, and it varies I think based on how difficult the writing task is: harder would be shorter] and then I read my horoscope. And then I come back.  It's like my brain just needs a minute.  It's resting, yes, but I think it is also still working somewhere back there.  It's still kind of on task with the writing, but needs a moment to let that work happen in the background somewhere (in the cool, shadowy, deep of head, murk of not really conscious thinking from whence truly good ideas actually come) before I press back to typing (which is sharp and shiny work somehow, and feels very frontal, piercing, hot, all eyeballs and forehead).

Reading is not exactly the same as writing. I don't feel reading as all eyeballs and sharp.  It's not as intense and front of the head and bright as writing is.  Maybe it feels like it's in the middle of my head (which tracks with what I know about parts of the brain involved in reading fiction).  HOWEVER, it is the same in that I need to come in and out of a tight focus.  I read for a while, and then I need to look at the plants and green things.  I read for a while, and then I lift my gaze and I sort of look at my surroundings, but lightly.  I am not looking around intently, not trying to see or hear or feel my surroundings.  I am just taking a moment to pause from the stimulus the book is creating and to process.  My eyes may be looking at purple coneflowers, or a lake, or someone at a nearby table eating a croissant, and I may very lightly be engaging with those things, but the depth of my engagement in those fallow moments is still with what I am reading.

I may have looked up for a few minutes, but during that looking up my brain is still working on, working out, thinking of, reflecting on, absorbing, processing, the thing I have read.  This moment might look, from the outside, like distraction, but I don't believe it actually is.  

I think intellectual process is a wavy line: one swerves in and out of tight focus on task, and needs the swerve away into a "resting" moment.  The swerve away is as important as the tight focus.  They balance each other.  I'm "on" and then "rest" and then "on and then "rest"--THAT is how the reading or writing moves forward.

As for the wind and one's toes: not sure yet how that figures in but wouldn't it be a fun surprise if it turns out there is something important there, neurologically?  Readers with fMRI facilities, can you please check into this possible connection, stat?

Commitment Issues

 It is possible for me to have more than one book on the go, especially during semester (bedtime fun book, multiple things being read for work).  It's easiest if they are very different genres and time periods so they don't start to meld in my head.

However, my current situation is unsettled, ridiculous.

I started  Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.  43 pages in, I am wondering if this is simply not the right time for this?  Too male maybe?  Or lacking interiority?  Or I just can't seem to latch on to the narrator and be interested?

I read half of Claudia Rankine's Don't Let me be Lonely yesterday, some of it while standing in front of the little free library in which I found it.  Rankine quotes Cesaire, Coetzee!  She's so good.  Why did I not know this before?  I am saving the other half.

At bedtime, not wanting Seven Moons, I tried Zadie Smith's The Fraud (Dude!  I'm sure the David Copperfield feel is intentional, but even so.  It's too Dickens/Austen and not enough ZS.  Likely I need to give it more than 4 pages to be fair, but it was not love at first page, which surprised me.  I generally love ZS).

Then (still at bedtime) I read a few pages of Ayobami Adebayo's A Spell of Good Things. 

It was promising, so why, when I got up this morning, did I start Cynthia Green's blue feet monsoon over breakfast?  It is full of references to Singapore in the 1980s (totally my jam).  Who else remembers Paya Labar airport (precursor to fabulous new Changi)?  Whoo!  I do I do.

Efforts to get this laptop to connect to home wifi for more than 90 seconds are now in the "f*ck around with DNS" stage, which is REALLY advanced for me.  Please send help.

Feet out the Window

 This afternoon, reading with a headache, I was inside in my reading chair set-up with as few lights on as possible.  It was okay.  I was relatively comfortable.  The headache did not have me in bed.  I was able to focus just fine.  I read for about an hour . . .

But honestly, I enjoyed my reading more yesterday morning when I was waiting for my teenager and parked on the far edge of a school's parking lot so I could be in the only tree's deep pool of shade.  I rolled all the windows down.  It wasn't too hot (only about 80F), and there was a light breeze.  I hiked my skirt up and took my sandals off.  I put my right foot out the car window, and my left foot on the dashboard.  I could feel the breeze on my toes.  I read happily for about 45 minutes.

On headaches: 

I get migraines.  They are not as bad as they were two years ago when I was getting 17 a month of which 3 or 4 confined me to bed for the day.  I am very glad they are not so bad, but they still slow my life right down, which is hard for me.  I'm a doer.  I'm not necessarily productive, but busy-ness is definitely my go-to coping strategy.  

To not do.  To sit.  To wait, To let things get better with time.  To just be in one spot, and feel the various discomforts, and wait them out . . . is very very hard.  

It's also good for me.  In that messed up way one can have gratitude for lousy experiences, I am grateful that migraines remind me that sometimes if you are still things do just come and you see them, experience them (e.g. the young sparrows on the windowsill, wings aflutter, still demanding their parents feed them, or e.g. my own teenagers who might share an extra word or two with me if I am sitting still on the couch).

Also, I am reminded that any day I am not in bed is a good day.  Doesn't matter what else does or doesn't happen.  Am I out of bed?  Yes?  HUGE WIN!

On the book I just finished, Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood:  

Ooo.  This is understatedly interesting.  It is a kind of secular soul searching.  Instead of gospels we get a snippet of Joan Baez ("Action is the antidote to despair") and of Hippocrates ("First, do no harm") (26).

There's a moment to which I relate profoundly in which the narrator, retreating from trying to engage with the world's problems and solve them, unsubscribes from 25+ newsletters: Threatened Species Rescue Center, Human Rights Watch, Aboriginal Legal Service, Greenpeace, Green Living Australia and more (152).

There's this gem of an observation: "I used to think there was a 'before' and 'after' most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life.  But now I know that with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after.  Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, it's still there" (210).  

This one helps me understand what sometimes feels like frustrating "stuckness" in a dear friend whose wife died suddenly of a brain aneurysm five years ago.

And finally, I hope this is true of me in this moment:

"A feeling that something is coming, waiting to be born, out of this time.  Almost physical, like before a period, or a pregnancy, or vomiting.  Something is getting ready to resolve itself" (254).

Kapoor wrap up

 I am trying to learn from Kapoor's Age of Vice.

I am trying not to be annoyed by the last 130-150 pages, and am trying to remember that this may just not have been the right time for this book for me.

I am trying not to feel like the author's self-indulgence has robbed me of time.

It's not a bad novel.  There are some lovely moments of insight.  It does a nice job of tackling a problem using multiple intersecting perspectives.

Kapoor could maybe have prioritized certain plot elements and characters, and eliminated others in order to crystallize and sharpen the whole (this is a lesson I can learn: I have a baggy, problematic, self-indulgent manuscript that needs to be turned into something better).

Kapoor and I could both do with editing more like the imagist poets did: what is the thing?  Find it, describe it, cut out all the connective tissue so that you can really see it.

Pivoting to the positive: should I read something fluffy next (Kevin Kwan's Lies and Weddings), or a Nigerian political novel (Ayobami Adebayo's A Spell of Good Things),  or an Australian novel about a woman's moral/mortal crises (Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional)?

I'm leaning towards Charlotte Wood, perhaps because it will offer a single narrator rather than the complexities offered in the Kapoor work.  Also because it offers Australia (a change of scenery given that I have just been "in" India).

Did I mention I have a lovely new laptop from work that absolutely will not get along with my wifi at home though it works fine at work or in a cafe?  If I restart everything, I get about 3 minutes of wifi use at home.  I have spent almost three weeks trying to solve this problem, with hours on the phone with various kinds of tech support.  Today's move will be asking the wifi provider for a new wifi gateway.  I have written this short post at home, and have been prompted by blogger several times that updates are "failed" because I am no longer connected to the internet . . . So, time to reboot folks.  See you on the other side.

But really the thing that feels good is LOSING time

 Re: the summer reading challenge thing, and time.

I was talking yesterday with a talented and insightful poet friend about time.  She has a great poem which I read as about how we perceive quantities of time as enough or too little.

It made me think about time's elasticity, and about something I once read about the uterus, or maybe actually it was about the vagina: pictured in textbooks as hollow, that space is not rigidly circumscribed (vagina like a hose, uterus like a melon), but is squishable, flexible, more like an uninflated balloon: there's only space in there if something makes the space, if something stretches the walls apart from each other.

What! You are thinking.  Why am I reading about the female reproductive system??

Gentle reader, sorry.  But isn't time uterine?  

It seems to be firmly circumscribed  (years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds) but really its walls collapse and touch each other, or expand apart if something stretches them?

There's a lot more to be said about time.

In terms of the summer reading, I am now deep into Deepti Kapoor's Age of Vice.  

A couple of days ago, I had my first experience in many years of taking welcome refuge in reading a novel.  I went to it to hide from other tasks, and I spent time there that felt restorative.  I lost time.  I did not count the minutes, or think about them.  I read until I felt recuperated enough to tackle other parts of my day.

Being released from the work clock, and from the clock of child care really helped.  I felt like I was in a warm honey flow of the day, not wearing a watch. 

What a relief.

The summer reading challenge is about focus, but describing it by rigid time and as an exercise in sustained concentration both also make it effortful. (Yes, sometimes effort is needed.  I am not necessarily opposed to effort.  However... ) 

My realization of the last few days in which I have been reading a lot, with pleasure, without pressure, and with a sense of imaginative dreaminess and physical restoration is that this state lets me escape time, and that feels great.  It feels like much sought ease.  It feels like luxury.

I don't want a Rolex, I want to feel like I have slipped time's noose.

Ideally, reading fiction gets me there.

Bookstores

     Perhaps you are too young to remember when bookstores were a more prevalent thing?  Barnes and Noble, Indigo, WHSmith, and Borders were all massive chain bookstores with cafes where one could buy a mediocre pressed sandwich of some kind and an overly milky espresso-style beverage.  

    Those who believed in independent bookstores thought the big chains would put the small places out of business, but ultimately Amazon put the big chains out of business and some of the hardy independent stores survived.  Thank goodness.

    The real threat is that people don't read.

    The other real threat is that we have found the pleasure of typing specific searches into computers and getting specific answers straight away.  There's a strong upside (if I want to replace my toilet tank, I don't want to browse information; I do want the most specific advice only).  The downside: you have to know what you are looking for. 

    What if you don't know what you are looking for?  What if you want to wander into a palace full of enticing options arrayed artfully, curated wittily?  

    What if you want to find a book you wouldn't have ever thought to ask for?  

    Then you need a good bookstore, one in which someone knows how to present books in manageable, interesting assortments so that you can browse pleasureably, without overwhelm.  It's an art, I think, putting good combinations of books into appealing displays.

    My home base bookstore in Baltimore (Bird in Hand in Charles Village), does a fairly good job of this.  So does Greedy Reads.

    Really superlatively good, however, is a bookstore in Harrisburg, PA called Midtown Scholar.  Midtown Scholar is huge.  It sells new and used books.  It is curated extraordinarily well.  At my recent visit, there was a large entry area ringed by "Famous Authors," and peppered with tables grouped in some predictable ways (“current bestsellers”), as well as some joyfully unpredictable ones ("for the revolution," "gothic horror and romance").  

    There's a whole room of children's books, a large wall upstairs of YA fiction.  Art, Art History, Literature, Literary Criticism, Philosophy  . . . it's a lot. It could be overwhelming.

    But it is so thoughtfully laid out: if you want to come in and buy an iced chai, a funny book about recipes based on The Hobbit, and a manga, you can do that easily in a comfortable browse, probably before your chai has even gotten drippy with condensation.

    I bought the following:

The Groff and Kwan were happy finds in a densely packed upstairs shelving area (fun for those who like a good hunt).  The others were eye candy in the artfully configured main room.  Smith in "Famous Authors," and Yuzuki in a "Featured Authors" display.

    Did I need more books?  Absolutely not.

    Did my soul need Midtown Scholar, as a balm in these trying times?  One thousand times, yes. Yes.

    Go check it out.  While you're in Harrisburg, visit the Pancake Row Houses in Shipoke.