Category Archives for On Reading and Literature

Should Today’s Children Still be Reading Little Red Riding Hood?

Thoughts on traditional folk tales in a modern world

Last week, I brought Richard Scarry’s Animal Nursery Tales over to my sister’s house to read to my three (soon to be four) year old nephew. I’d found the book at an estate sale a few months ago. It had all the classic children’s stories — Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears to name a few — but with Scarry’s classic and enchanting style of illustration. What a find!

The front and back cover serve as a sort of pictorial table of contents. Owen and I looked through the pictures together and we settled on our first story, Little Red Riding Hood. “Have you heard this story before?” I looked at him and then over at his mother, who was playing with Owen’s baby brother on the other sofa. She shook her head. Wow, I thought. What a first. Imagine never having heard Little Red Riding Hood before. I couldn’t.

And so we began the story. He was very engaged. I thought to myself, reading through the first few pages, this flows so well. Lots of repetition and interesting visuals — no wonder it’s a classic. I did my best Wolf voice as he asks Little Red Riding Hood, “Where are you going, little miss?” upon meeting her in the forest. I made big eyes at Owen and he was hooked, wondering what the big bad wolf was going to do next. I read how the wolf hurried over to Grandmother’s house, getting there before Little Red Riding Hood.

I did my best Grandmother voice as she calls out, “Who is there?” when the wolf knocks at the door before switching quickly to a strange wolf-pretending-to-be-a-little-girl voice as he replies, “It is I, Little Red Riding Hood.” Checking to make sure Owen was following, I asked him, “But is it really Little Red Riding Hood?” “No!” He was actually paying attention and following along! I’d had trouble lately finding books that sustained his interest. This was great!

And then we got to…

“Just pull the latch string and come in, my dear!” said Grandmother.

The wolf came in.

He leaped at Grandmother and swallowed her whole!

I had forgotten this part was here. I looked over at Owen. He seemed okay… We continued the story. But I was on high alert now and realizing with each new page, This is actually a terrifying story. Grandmother has been eaten. Now the wolf is impersonating Grandmother. Poor Little Red Riding Hood has unknowingly come right up to the wolf. She doesn’t know it’s the wolf, but we do, and the build up of ‘What big ears you have’ and ‘What big eyes you have’ leading up to the climax of ‘What big teeth you have’ is very, very scary. The story wraps up with the wolf chasing Little Red Riding Hood out of the house and then a woodcutter cutting open the wolf to rescue Grandmother from his stomach. Grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood live and are not physically harmed, but one can imagine that they (and perhaps even a young reader!) are emotionally traumatized.

We’d gotten to the end of the story. I was a little worried about Owen and ready to call it a day, but he wanted another story. Maybe that wasn’t so bad after all? We looked through the front and back cover again. I suggested The Three Little Pigs. Owen looked at me cautiously. “Is there a wolf in it?” he asked. “Yes…” “Is the wolf bad?” “Yes…” “Then I don’t want to read that one.” I winced. Poor little guy.

So we read The Gingerbread Man. In this story, a gingerbread man comes to life and runs away. He outruns everyone in the town and they’re all chasing him. When he gets to a river and realizes he can’t get across, a fox offers him a ride across on the fox’s back. The gingerbread man accepts. Partway across the river, the fox tells the gingerbread man that the water is getting higher and he had better climb up onto his head. So the gingerbread man does. Then, the fox says the water is getting even higher and the gingerbread man should climb up onto the fox’s nose. So he does. And then the fox eats the gingerbread man and the story ends. “That’s it?” Owen asked. Yes, Owen, that’s it. Both feeling a little flat at that point, we put the book to rest.

Later that night and all through the next day, I wondered about what I had read. Those were the stories of my childhood, told to me a million times over in different books and TV shows. I turned out fine. Everybody has read them. We’re all fine. Maybe we’re too soft now is all. They’re stories.

But that didn’t feel satisfying and so I thought some more.

I came to what I thought was a helpful question, What is the purpose of children’s stories?

Surely, children’s stories are meant to entertain. But then, they’re also often instructive.

And what we’ve wanted stories to teach children has changed over time. Little Red Riding Hood is thought to have originated in the 17th century. According to Hannah Newton, author of The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580–1720, in 17th century England, almost one-third of young people died before they were 15 years old. And ‘Rather than shielding their offspring from these foreboding facts, parents encouraged their children to think about their own mortality.’ (source) Indeed, in tale after tale, death or the possibility of death makes a recurring appearance. Little Red Riding Hood is an instructive tale that warns about threats to one’s own mortality. Do not talk to strangers — or you may die. Beware of wolves — or you may die. Similarly, with The Gingerbread Man. Do not unthinkingly place your trust in strangers, even if they appear to be trying to help you — or you may die. Death was a significant and real threat, so many of these stories provided instruction as to how to avoid death.

Thankfully, in most parts of the world, death in childhood is much less of a threat. And so it makes sense that newer stories don’t provide this flavor of instruction. Simple survival is no longer the primary concern for most parents.

We can refer to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for clues on what instead may be a new focus. According to Maslow, once physiological needs (food, water, warmth, rest) and safety needs (security and safety) — together what I am calling simple survival — are met, then the next needs are ‘Love and Belonging’ (intimate relationships, friends, family, connection) and after that ‘Esteem’ (respect, self-esteem, confidence). When I think of modern children’s stories, they absolutely seem to be focused on these next two categories of needs. Modern stories do not tend to instruct children on how to physically survive, but instead instruct on how to form and maintain relationships and how to develop a sense of self-worth.

Think of the recent Disney movie, Encanto. Mirabel, the only one in her family who has not been given a magical gift, struggles to feel like she fits in with her family. As she tries to help the family, initially it seems like she’s making things worse and so she questions her own abilities and worth. By the end of the story, by being herself and by being honest and open with her family, she is able to save the family and realize her own place in the family as well as develop feelings of self-worth and confidence.

Think of the classic Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, which provided instruction on how to handle emotions such as anger, and also on how to process complicated but realistic threats to a child such as divorce or the death of a loved one.

These are the problems of today’s children, and we have updated our stories to reflect that.

Naturally, some of the older children’s tales now feel a little out of place.

And so while my initial response to reading Little Red Riding Hood was Well, I read that as a kid. We’re too soft now, my thoughts have evolved. I now think that just because it’s a story that’s familiar doesn’t mean that it will have more value to a child. A good story for a child has some combination of entertainment and instruction. Little Red Riding Hood no longer instructs, but it absolutely still entertains, provided that any fear the child feels does not overshadow any entertainment value he may receive. And this last part depends on the child and their age and maturity level.

Was Little Red Riding Hood a good story for Owen? Eh…I don’t think it did a terrible amount of harm, but he probably wasn’t quite ready for it. I told him a story that had a lesson he didn’t really need and that was probably equally scary as it was entertaining. There are lots of stories out there that provide lessons that are more useful to him that he would find just as entertaining (and less scary). I’ll probably stick with those for now.

The Appeal of the Plotless

From Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

The other night, I came across the film ‘Berlin: Symphony of a Great City.’ It’s a black and white silent film from 1927. We see shots of the city and its people all from one day, starting from early morning and ending late into the evening. The film shows men and women from all walks of life, each going about his or her day, their paths crossing and diverging as we follow men and women from all social classes. In busy roads, we see horses pulling carts delivering goods and others pulling men and women in coaches. A man runs after and manages to get onto a crowded trolley. Those on bicycles and those very wealthy chauffeured within automobiles are amongst the crowd. Pedestrians weaving their way perilously through the traffic complete the picture. 

Throughout the film, which includes depictions of train stations, neighborhoods, factories, mess halls, expensive restaurants and hotels, theaters, the rich and the poor, engaged in both labor and leisure, there is no narrator or narration. The only words that appear on screen is the announcement of the movement into a new Act. (Akt I, Akt II, Akt III…) We follow no individuals in particular. We have both the birds eye view and that of the fly on the wall. 

There is no arc. There is no story. There is no plot. 

Instead, we see life. The film captures, quite beautifully, Berlin and its people on a day in 1927.

There are limitations to plot. Real life doesn’t follow a narrative arc. We take events and make them fit along storylines, along plots. But these are curated. We hear one side of the story, see one part of the picture. Your life, my life — life in general doesn’t follow a narrative arc. Events happen and people and places and objects exist and then don’t exist. 

I have always enjoyed the plotless. I sometimes find myself enjoying the first few chapters of novels where the character, place, and setting are developed — and then losing interest as the story, and plot, develop. I think I could read a treasury of beginnings. I enjoy the feeling of being dropped into a setting, persona, place, and time and imagining, So this is what it might be like to be you.

There are novels out there for people like me. A favorite is Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively. The central character, Claudia, is on her deathbed and envisions,

 ‘A history of the world…And in the process, my own.’ Of its nature, ‘I shall omit the narrative. What I shall do is flesh it out; give it life and colour, add the screams and the rhetoric…The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence. Everything happens at once.’

 And so, Moon Tiger is told forwards and backwards in time, and from multiple perspectives. Sometimes we witness an event as Claudia and other times as her daughter, as her sister-in-law. There is no central narrative arc, but we do uncover as the story progresses, Claudia, piece by piece in what is a compelling and engaging telling.

Another novel I admire is The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. It has a unique shape. The frame of the story is a self-standing short novel, called Free Women. But sections of this story are separated by the contents of four notebooks, written by the central character of Free Women, Anna. In one notebook, she is Anna the author. In another, Anna writes about her time with the Communist Party and politics. In another, Anna tells the story of fictional characters whose experiences closely parallel her own. And one is like a diary. Then, there is a final notebook (the golden notebook) which is Anna’s attempt to bring the four other notebooks together. The Golden Notebook is fascinating. The various notebooks overlap and don’t overlap and together create a picture of a very complicated woman and mind. Lessing has written on the format of the book,

 ‘Another idea was that if the book were shaped in the right way it would make its own comment about the conventional novel…To put the short novel Free Women as a summary and condensation of all that mass material, was to say something about the conventional novel, another way of describing the dissatisfaction of a writer when something is finished: “How little I have managed to say of the truth, how little I have caught of all that complexity; how can this small neat thing be true when what I experienced was so rough and apparently formless and unshaped.” But my major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.’

And here I move away from fiction, where plot, story, and action are expected to non-fiction that appeals to me in its plotlessness. 

The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin is a work thirteen years in the making that was left unfinished when Benjamin died. It was to be a description of and criticism of nineteenth century society in Paris, told through a focus on the new indoor glass-roofed shopping arcades that were beginning to be popular at the time. Benjamin intended it to be a collage-like work. He drew from an incredible volume and breadth of primary sources. Although there is speculation as to how far the unfinished Arcades Project differs structurally from how Benjamin imagined the finished work, the unfinished work has become a significant piece in its own right. The Arcades Project is divided into 36 categories, such as ‘Mirrors’, ‘Prostitution’, ‘Idleness’, and ‘The Flaneur.’ Each section then has material directly quoted from primary sources, contributing towards the category as well as the overall purpose of the work. Of its effect, Thomas Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin write in the forward, ‘These proliferating passages, extracted from their original context like collectibles, were eventually set up to communicate among themselves, often in a rather subterranean manner. The organized masses of historical objects — the particular items of Benjamin’s displays (drafts and excerpts) — together give rise to “a world of secret affinities.”’ In this way, the arrangement and curation of material conspire to allow the reader to draw her own connections and create her own meaning, encouraged and guided by the raw material, but not strictly directed as she would otherwise be through a traditional narration. 

A work similar in its collage-ness is The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. Holbrook Jackson, in his introduction to the 1932 edition, states it best:

‘The Anatomy looks like a crude assembly of quotations and it is indeed a vast mobilization of the notions and expressions of others, yet it is not they but the rifler who is revealed on every page, it is he, not they, who peeps from behind every quotation. The reason is clear. He is an artist in literary mosaic, using the shreds and patches he has torn from the work of others to make a picture emphatically his own. Books are his raw material. Other artists fashion images out of clay, contrive fabrics and forms of stone, symphonies of words, sounds, or pigments. Burton makes a cosmos out of quotations. He raids the writings of the past, which he often finds neglected or in ruins, and reassembles them in a structure of his own, much as the ruins of Rome were pillaged by the builders of the Renaissance and worked into the temples and palaces of a new civilization.’

A more recent attempt to curate and present thematically can be found in Lapham’s Quarterly, which organizes primary sources into a topic for each issue — topics ranging from ‘Migration’ to ‘Music’ to ‘Death.’ 

In the works I’ve mentioned so far, I think I can summarize their appeal to me in that they seem more honest and true to reality in the choices their creators made not to fit their contents into a more traditional narrative arc. With the nonfiction (and here Berlin: Symphony of a Great City seems to fit), raw material is presented, arranged yes in a certain way, and definitely curated — but not explained. The reader or viewer has the joy and liberty of making her own connections and meaning. The reader is allowed to connect the dots in her own way and there are infinite possibilities when the creator has not already defined one path. In not prescribing meaning, the works seem more — honest.

In the same light, the novels, in their abandonment of the traditional narrative arc, also seem more honest. There was more to these stories — and more to life — than can fit within a neat storyline. The authors, in not being constrained by plot and by having to move their characters along in space and time from a point a to a point b, are free to give us something more, something that to me felt truer. And that to me is the appeal of the plotless — authenticity, truth, and I also probably enjoy the streak of independence, the deviation from the norm.

In Search of Short Stories: A Navigation Guide (sort of)

Finding books you like can take hard work, huge emphasis here on the you. Because chances are, what you like isn’t necessarily the same as what your mother likes or what your friend likes or what a New York Times critic likes or even what the judges of the Man Booker prize like. My point being, our tastes are all our own. The secret to enjoying reading is to know what you like – and then how to find it.

Thankfully, for books, there are some great tools out there to help us. There’s the popular Goodreads as well as the popular-among-librarian-types LibraryThing. Both websites have in their databases pretty much every in-print book out there (barring the very obscure and very old) along with a synopsis, user ratings, and user reviews. The sites will suggest similar titles to a book. They’re excellent resources. With a bit of work, you can more or less comb through the plethora of books out there, cherry-picking the ones that might appeal to you, based on real data.

safariIt is a different story unfortunately for shorter works – short stories and creative nonfiction articles specifically (hereon, for simplicity’s sake, both are referred to as ‘short stories’). I have yet to find a resource out there that makes it easy – or forget easy, possible, to comb through the content out there to find pieces that will speak to you.

In my mind, here is the current landscape: In order to obtain an overview of current short stories, one would have to manually check a multitude of websites, magazines, and lit journals. To catch even a sampling of what exists would mean regularly checking dozens of websites on a regular basis.

Like with books, there are various ‘gold standards’ one can refer to that do some of the curation work for you, that select from the sludge piles the ‘best of the best’ – lists of award winning short stories, anthologies of ‘the best’ short stories of 2017, noteworthy magazines, etc. But as with books, I buy very much into the theory that tastes differ and tastes matter. So – how then to find what we like?

The current landscape of the short story world to me is books pre-Goodreads, music pre-Spotify, and recipes pre-Pinterest. It is a cumbersome, manual business to sift through and find what one likes.

An ideal scenario would be the existence of some sort of platform that allowed users to rate and review short stories, tag them according to subject matter, mood, or other descriptive terms (ex: funny, historical, grief), keep track of what they’ve read and liked, and receive suggestions for new pieces they might like based on past activity. Sadly, I have yet to find such a tool.

So while I wait, I’m still finding short stories that speak to me and am still very grateful for the content and authors out there. I just have to work a little harder to find them. Here’s my current approach.

The Work I do to Find Short Stories

My Tool of Choice: Surprisingly, Twitter. Why Twitter? Most magazines, online literary journals, and authors themselves will promote new content on Twitter. By following these various accounts, you can quickly build up a constantly updated feed of new short work to consider – your pool. (Medium, WordPress, and others are also options – but I’ve found publications/authors are more likely to have Twitter accounts than accounts on other platforms.)

Cast a Wide Net: At time of writing, I currently follow 1,186 accounts. Is this too many? Quite possibly to almost definitely. However, whenever I come across a writer, magazine, or website that I think I *might* be interested in, I follow them. My theory is: cast a wide net and then from that, filter. I’d prefer to be able to consider and then rule out something rather than not consider it at all (and potentially miss something good).

Go Down Those Rabbit Holes: How do you find the right accounts/writers/magazines to follow? First, start with following a couple of accounts of names you know (look for a favorite magazine or author). From there you have a few options.
– Twitter is great at suggesting new and similar accounts to follow. Sometimes these suggestions are terrible, and sometimes they’re good.
– Look at the feed of an account you’re following. Who are they retweeting? Whose tweets are they liking? Which Twitter accounts do they follow? Could these be possible accounts you might be interested in? Has anyone added the account you’re following to a List of accounts? If so, could other accounts on this List also be interesting?
– Whenever you come across an author, magazine, or website whether on Twitter, elsewhere online, or offline, check to see if there are related Twitter accounts you can follow.

Sort and Categorize: Now that you have all these accounts that you follow, make it easier on yourself and categorize them into your own Lists on Twitter. Are there natural groupings that occur – possible distinctions could be by account type: ‘Writers’ versus ‘Lit Magazines/Sites’ or by work type, ‘Short Story’ versus ‘Creative Nonfiction.’ You may pull out a few you love especially and create a ‘Favorites’ List.

Read: Read through your feed and Lists. Look for tweets that are linking you to possible new material. Follow a link. Browse through the piece. If you enjoy it, ‘like’ the tweet. This will also bookmark it for you under your likes.

Weed Regularly: This is the part I could be better at. In addition to looking for accounts and pieces to love, be on the constant lookout for accounts that just aren’t working for you. After a couple of irrelevant or disappointing tweets, consider unfollowing an account.

Repeat: Keep adding new accounts, keep updating your lists, keep finding new material you like, review your likes every now and again for clues as to which accounts you’re liking again and again (and which you can then bump up to a ‘favorites’ List), weed out/remove accounts that don’t match your tastes.

This process saves me the work of one-by-one checking a very long list of websites. Again, it’s definitely not perfect, not by a long shot. A few notable downsides: I’m only considering online free material, and material not backed somehow by an active twitter account is significantly handicapped. I also don’t use this method exclusively. In addition, I subscribe to the mailing lists and newsletters of sites that I know I love.

Still looking for a better way – so if someone has ideas – or wants to invent something (an app of Goodreads quality or higher?!), I’m all ears.

As a side note, here are a few great sites out there that I’ve stumbled across as well as a few pieces I really enjoyed in 2017.

Sites I frequent:
Hippocampus Magazine – “an exclusively online publication set out to entertain, educate and engage writers and readers of creative nonfiction. Each issue features memoir excerpts, personal essays, reviews, interviews and craft articles”
Catapult – “produces an award-winning daily online magazine of narrative nonfiction and fiction”
Guernica – “a magazine of global arts and politics”
Narrative Magazine – “A renowned modern library of fiction, poetry, essays, and visual art by celebrated and emerging artists, provided free to readers.”
The Rumpus – “features interviews, book reviews, essays, comics, and critiques of creative culture as well as original fiction and poetry”
Dear Damsels – Dear Damsels is an online platform championing young female voices – a place where women can come together online, to read and write about the things that matter to them

A few great pieces:
“Ice” – River Teeth Journal
“Woven” – Catapult
“Zhiyu/Jerry” – The Rumpus
“I Knew She Was Beautiful” – The New Yorker

What I’ve Discovered in 2017 (the bookish version)

I’m a list-maker. I love lists, and I make lots of them. As a kid, I think I once tried to inventory everything that was in my parents’ home (down to the number of pencils and spoons). This project, unsurprisingly, was never finished. And so here is a different list.

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It is not a Best Books of 2017 list. I don’t read nearly enough newly published books to even attempt such a list. In fact, I have trouble making ‘best-of’ lists in general. Don’t they imply that you’ve somehow read/experienced/tasted/watched the gamut? I have not. And so this list is less ambitious. Out of all of the things I have come across and experienced this year, this list details what I have been most happy to discover.

EDIT: My initial list of things discovered was far too long. This is the abridged book/reading-related version.

What I’ve Discovered in 2017 (the bookish version)

1. You don’t have to finish the books you start

I used to have some pretty heavy guilt if there were books sitting on my shelves that I either hadn’t gotten to yet or hadn’t finished. This was most severe if the book was a classic, a recommendation from a friend, or ‘supposed to be really good’ by any other standard. But reading without enjoyment seems to me to defeat the entire purpose of reading (save of course what we have to trudge through during school and study). Reading without enjoyment also prevents you from getting to other books you’ll enjoy more. There are millions and millions of books out there – far more than you can ever hope to get to within your lifetime. Why waste your time on books that for whatever reason just aren’t interesting to you? Since embracing the idea that not finishing books is indeed okay, I have read far far more this year than I have in previous years – frankly because every (well, most) pages were enjoyable – and when they stopped being enjoyable, I just put the book down. See my previous post for more elaboration on the reasons why it doesn’t always make sense to finish the books that we start.

This habit of starting and stopping and abandoning books also works best when the books are free – as in, borrowed from a library, which brings me to my next point.

2. I love libraries

It’s not that I didn’t like libraries before – I just don’t think I’d ever been exposed to them in the right way and/or given them a true chance. I have fond (as well as tormented) memories of studying in the library while in university and I loved the Black Diamond Royal Library while I was living in Copenhagen. But I loved those libraries in the same way I like a nice bookstore or a cozy coffeeshop – as a space to sit.

This year though, thoughtlessly, I fell into libraries. It started with wanting a place to sit and read and work that was quieter than the coffeeshop I’d been frequenting – and where I didn’t feel guilty about staying past finishing my latte. And then I found so much more than a nice place to sit, namely:

A Few Reasons Why I Love Libraries

ONE: The obvious (but perhaps overlooked, at least by me) fact that you have access to basically any book you could want, for free. I’m lucky to live in a city with a well-funded and large library system. We can get from within our library system (or request via Interlibrary Loan) more or less any book title. For free. In my particular library system, this means I can check out 100 books at a time, with 3 week loan periods and the possibility to renew up to 6 months (provided nobody else is waiting on my copy). Sometimes, I just don’t understand why libraries aren’t a bigger threat to booksellers. That said, before 2017, I hardly went to the library. The biggest difference though is that before, I read much much less. I also ‘tried out’ books less. Today, I usually check out 6-7 books a week. I will browse through all of these, decide not to read 4-5 of them, actually read 2 from front to cover, – and then check out 6 more books the next week. If we assume that each book costs a (conservatively low) $15, that equates to a whopping $4,680 yearly book habit had I been buying instead of borrowing books.

TWO: Libraries are the last (truly) public indoor spaces. In many communities, libraries are the only indoor public spaces where you can spend as much time as you want and where there isn’t an expectation for you to purchase anything or spend any money. Coffee shops, bars, and shopping malls are all great places to meet up with friends, socialize, or just sit – but there is always the expectation of the purchase. And there is always the sense of outstaying one’s welcome should no purchase be made. In this sense, libraries are glaringly unique.

THREE: Libraries are putting on amazing events and programs. I was surprised by how many events my local library holds. From story time for kids to free yoga to knitting clubs to homework help sessions to family craft nights to writing workshops and local history lectures, they host such an impressive slew of free events on a daily basis. In this way, they’re becoming places not only to read but also to learn, to interact with others, to create and to make.

FOUR: They have the potential to be even more. Libraries in general are moving away from their traditional function – of being a building that houses books – and towards being a collaborative community space that facilitates learning. And learning can take place in many shapes and forms – from the reading of books to the usage of databases to the participation in classes to the joining of groups to meeting others with like-minded interests. The Aspen Institute’s 2014 Report, Rising to the Challenge: Re-Envisioning Public Libraries states it beautifully. On page 5, I found this quick and perfect summary that captures the role public libraries can play in today’s changing world and economy:

What People and Communities Need to Flourish in the Knowledge Economy

 

LIFELONG ACCESS to an ever-increasing and ever-changing body of knowledge and tools to ensure that their skills remain relevant to the current economy as it continues to evolve

THE CAPACITY AND DISPOSITION TO LEARN IN SMALL, QUICK DOSES rather than wade through
mounds of links and piles of data that provide too much information and too little knowledge

THE ABILITY TO USE, UNDERSTAND AND PROCESS INFORMATION IN MANY DIFFERENT FORMS including text, data, audio and video and to evaluate the quality of information from different sources and understand its relevance.

PLACES TO GATHER, collaborate and contribute to knowledge development

ACCESS TO CONVERSATIONS AMONG CREATIVE PEOPLE in their areas of interest so that they
can innovate and develop or maintain a competitive advantage in the knowledge economy

People and communities need PUBLIC LIBRARIES.

3. I can store, organize, search, and remember – what I’ve read

For the full, lengthy original post, click here. This year, Zotero has been my godsend. In short, it’s a research tool traditionally primarily used by students and researchers to keep track of journal articles and other documents read as part of academic research. I use it as a tool to keep track of what I read. When I come across things I read that I want to remember, I categorize, tag, and store these quotations and snippets of text within Zotero. I add notes and there’s a logical structure within which my excerpts are sorted so that I can find them later. Now, a year into using Zotero, I have thousands of quotations and excerpts all catalogued and searchable of all the things that I’ve read, loved, and wanted to remember. I can search – say using the tag – ‘creativity’ and find 20 different excerpts I’ve come across in the past year. I absolutely love this system.

4. Text Mining of literature is a very cool thing

My two favorite things are probably books and data. So, needless to say, it was a very good day when I learned about text mining and its application in analyzing literature, done through institutions such as the Stanford Literary Lab. The general idea behind text mining is that there are so many books that have been published and that are still being published that it’s impossible to expect to be able to read them all. How then can anyone expect to gain a comprehensive overview of ‘literature’ considering that a single person can only hope to read a slim portion of ‘literature’? Further, today through various efforts including Project Gutenberg, much of the literary classics (that are no longer covered by copyright) are digitized and freely available. This presents a new opportunity to analyze these texts using traditional data methods. The text can be ‘tokenized’ into measurable units, either words or short word-pairings so that they are then readable as data and able to be studied through programs like R & Python.

Examples of possible analyses include looking at word frequencies or lengths of sentences within a novel. Or to ask, are there more words with positive connotations during certain portions of a novel? Or, do male and female characters use different types of words? The Stanford Literary Lab has done some fascinating work. One of its pamphlets looked at the ‘Emotions of London‘ as expressed in literature. Place names were identified throughout a broad corpus (data set) of novels and the adjectives used to describe those place names were coded as positive or negative in emotion. The result of the project was a fascinating map of London color coded to display the breadth of emotion associated with each area as expressed in literature.

The possibilities for analysis, I think, are endless. Novels to some degree are a record of the feelings and thoughts of the time in which they were written. You could search within thousands of novels for the changing depiction of marriage, fidelity, and infidelity. You could analyze changing thoughts about death and the afterlife. You could look at conversations between servant and master, mother and child. Basically any analysis that has been done through close examination and careful scrutiny of a few texts can now be attempted through digital analysis of a large swath of texts. In a very nerdy sort of way, I find that all really exciting.

Bullet in the Brain, David Hume, & What Makes Us Curious

Certain facts, certain books, certain entire fields of study leave us unfazed, unstimulated, and generally uninterested. And yet, sometimes something – anything – a mere phrase, can arrest the attention and set the mind reeling.

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There is a short story by Tobias Wolff called “Bullet in the Brain” about a man named Anders, a book critic, who is shot in the head during a bank robbery gone wrong. As the bullet enters his brain, it fires off all sorts of synapses and moments of his life flash before him. Despite everything that he has experienced in his life, what he remembers, rather than his marriage, the birth of a child, and his achievements – is playing baseball and a phrase one of the kids said:

“Short stop,” the boy says, “Short’s the best position they is.”

Anders was struck by this phrase. He was “strangely roused, elated, by those two final words, their pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance, repeating them to himself.”

The story ends with Anders in his final moments replaying the words, “They is, they is, they is.“

I love this short story and I love thinking about how some things can capture our attention in ways that sometimes feel mysterious. Certain things just appeal to us and we’re left wondering why.

I recently came across this statement about curiosity and the ideas that interest us.

Not every fact elicits our curiosity, but occasionally one will become sufficiently important, “if the idea strikes us with such force, and concerns us so nearly, as to give uneasiness in its instability and inconstancy.” (Quote attributed to David Hume, found in Curiosity by Alberto Manguel)

While the statement leaves unanswered why certain facts might ‘strike us with such force,’ I am interested in the second part of the phrasing: as to give us uneasiness in its instability and inconstancy. Interesting facts are interesting to us partly because they contain some instability or inconstancy so as to cause us uneasiness.

This feels true. I think we can be most interested in things we don’t fully understand – as children we are drawn to the possibility of magic and fairy tales. As adults, what we don’t fully understand can be religion, other human beings and psychology, outer space and mankind’s place in the universe, natural disasters, modern evils – ISIS, terrorism. We understand enough to know that there is so much more that we don’t understand. And what we are able to understand feels tenuous next to all that we do not know. The idea doesn’t feel complete, but yet it feels important – and so we are curious. There is a yearning to complete the idea and to complete the understanding.

We can be interested in and drawn to the ideas that do not fully fit into our previous conceptions of how things are or how they should be – whether in our contemplations on new scientific theory or on the unexpected music of they is, they is, they is.

Stephen King and Noel Carroll on Why We Like Horror Stories

So I know I’m late in the game, but I just saw the movie, ‘It’ on Sunday. To be fair, I saw about two-thirds of it. The remaining third, my hands or my hair or my sweater were at least partially covering my eyes. In general, I’m not good with horror movies. I don’t have the stomach – or the nerves for them. As far as horror movies go, I liked the new ‘It.’ And it got me thinking, what is it about this movie and horror movies in general that appeal to us? They can kind of be a stressful experience. Parts of some horror movies can even make for an unpleasant experience.

I came across a book a few months past called Stephen King and Philosophy by Jacob M. Held. In its introduction, Held (with the help of philosopher Noel Carroll as well as Stephen King himself) presents a theory or two,

 

From Stephen King and Philosophy

Noel Carroll notes that “the attraction of supernatural horror is that it provokes a sense of awe which confirms a deep-seated human conviction about the world, viz., that it contains vast unknown forces.”…Carroll calls this attraction a paradox of the heart insofar as we are attracted to that which horrifies us. We are attracted to wonder, the sublime, the awesome, something before which we tremble in the recognition that we may be destroyed by or lost in it. It is terrifying in that it inspires terror, as do the deepest and most profound mysteries of the universe, for they rightfully put us in our place as insignificant, cosmically speaking.

Stephen King refers to horror as a “dance of dreams.” Horror, he claims, awakens the child in us and, he notes, children are bent. Children think around corners. Horror invigorates our imagination, requiring us to think around the corners of life. In this way horror helps us to reenvision what matters most. King notes, “If the horror story is our rehearsal for death, then its strict moralities make it also a reaffirmation of life and good will and simple imagination. Horror is conservative, and some things matter enough that they ought to be conserved. Horror challenges our norms, pushes them to the limits, and often times breaks them to smithereens, only to have them come back restructured, reconfigured, and reinforced. “So the norm emerges stronger than before; it has been, so to say, tested; its superiority to the abnormal vindicated.”

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Three Things : City Design for Humans, Book Fights, & Oh So Many Questions – November 6th

From reimagining urban planning to book fights to a book that only gives questions and no answers, here are three things keeping me interested:3

  • Book Fight!: A funny and witty podcast filled with book talk, author talk, and lots of good banter
  • Jan Gehl & The Human Scale: A documentary & TED Talk that challenge us to consider how our cities can better cater to the human scale
  • Gold Fools by Gilbert Sorrentino: Is this really a book written in nothing but questions?

1) Book Fight! Podcast

This podcast is actually one of the regular highlights of my week. Mike Ingram and Tom McAllister are smart, not always so tasteful, but always very funny.

There’s an iTunes review that says “Listening to Tom and Mike feels like eavesdropping on the most interesting conversation at a party,” and it’s certainly true. They cover the gamut, from highbrow classics to popular, trending literature to the obscure and weird. They’re self-deprecating, witty, and there’s such a great rapport between them that it’s hard to stop listening.

Recent podcasts cover Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Patrician Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, and (among the more obscure of the bunch) “Uggs for Gaza” by Gordon Haber. Along with the book talk, other literary or not so literary themes discussed (that change with the season) include millennials and how they’re portrayed by the media and the affairs and romances of authors.

And as well as being entertaining, it is important to also point out that the conversations are thought-provoking, deep, and ask and attempt to answer interesting and challenging questions. Highly recommended for lovers of reading, writing, or books that are looking for something both intellectually stimulating but also light-hearted and entertaining.

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2. Jan Gehl & The Human Scale

There’s both a TED Talk and a documentary linked to here which explore Danish architect Jan Gehl’s ideas on urban planning, most specifically the human scale. According to Gehl, older cities (those which were built largely before the 1960s) were composed of two elements: the street (built back then primarily for walking) and the square (built as an area of public space and for the human eye). These older cities were built with the needs of the human body in mind: the speed at which a person would walk, the distances that would need to be covered on foot, what they would smell and hear and see.

Human ScaleWith the 1960s came intense population growth from agrarian communities into the cities as well as the rise of the automobile. These two factors together contributed towards rapid city construction that was heavily catered towards the needs of the automobile. Newer cities were designed to be navigated within at vehicle speeds of 60km/hr, rather than pedestrian speeds of 5km/hr. Distances between home and work and shopping became greater. In addition to the distances alone becoming prohibitive to walking, the stretches between destinations became barren of activity and life. In stark contrast to the vibrant squares, plazas, and public spaces of older European cities were born the empty in-between spaces of suburban America.

The impact of this shift in the design of cities has been enormous. Gehl mentions that the three main factors essential towards good human health are: Fresh Air, Exercise, and Meeting other people.

Newer cities make it much more challenging for people to achieve these three factors. Gehl’s research has shown that the way public spaces are designed significantly impact public behavior. What happens when a neighborhood meeting corner or public space disappears? People meet less. And what happens when streets are pedestrianized and more public spaces are created? People fill those spaces.

When cities are out of touch with the human-scale, they are not serving the needs of its people. People are less able to fully interact with the city. Cars and traffic can stifle or suffocate a city. People aren’t able to walk, to discover. With less walking and public areas come less spontaneous human interaction. People are more isolated and alone and are meeting others less often.

Gehl asks, how is it that despite the fact that humans have maintained the same size, proportions, and basic needs over the past hundreds of years –  in the past fifty, our cities have ballooned to seemingly meet creatures the size of – dinosaurs? Fascinating food for thought.


3. Gold Fools by Gilbert Sorrentino

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How is it possible than an entire book is composed of nothing but interrogative sentences? Would it even have a plot? Would it make sense? Might it, maybe, even be captivating? Might somehow the questions invite you to participate with the book and the reading experience in a way is entirely new and novel?

Yes, this is a book that is written entirely in questions. It’s a Western adventure novel and it somehow manages to get away without a single declarative sentence. I am a sucker for books that challenge conventions. And I am just so pleased that something like this exists, and I revel in the fact that it is actually, a very readable and enjoyable book. It has a plot and character development and all the familiar trappings, but somehow Sorrentino was genius enough to first dream up the idea of a book of nothing but questions – and then execute it. And it’s pretty good.

Link to Gold Fools goodreads page.

Alan Watts on How Our Anxieties Are Born Out of Our Desire for Security

My first introduction to Alan Watts was through the plethora of inspirational videos based on his writing that are out there on YouTube. Back when I was quitting my job, it seemed like every other person I told sent a Alan Watts link my way. And there are a lot of them out there. Spiritual Mind, the YouTube channel I was directed to most, seems to put out a new one almost every day. The videos, as a side note, are pretty good. They’re simple, but persuasive messages of encouragement to live according to one’s own standards, ambitions, and dreams. To do what you want with your one life.

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Watts, (1915 – 1973), a British philosopher, was well known for having been able to convey and interpret ancient Eastern teachings in ways that are understandable to and palatable by Western society. His writing addressed complex ideas, explained simply. He tackled, among other subjects, human consciousness, happiness, human identity, religion, contemplation, and anxiety – topics that are timeless and still as relevant as ever today.

In 1951, Watts published The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message For An Age of Anxiety.  A few years prior, in 1947, W.H. Auden had declared the period an “Age of Anxiety” with his epic poem of the same title. In the first pages of his book, Watts writes,

“[S]cience and industry have so increased both the tempo and violence of living…There is, then, the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years so many long-established traditions have broken down – traditions of family and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time.”

But set aside some of the specific phrasing and Watts could easily be describing our time. In fact, I would venture to guess that every generation perhaps before and certainly since Watts has also thought themselves very anxious, having of course to deal with exceptional never before seen challenges affecting their particular times. And so it goes forever and ever, each generation feeling that they face new challenges and so are – of course, unavoidably, painfully anxious. We are anxious and anxious about being anxious.

A lot of books and articles addressing anxiety do so by identifying causes of anxiety. A quick google search led me to material explaining how our current anxiety is a result of social media and the comparisons it encourages, the election of Donald Trump, drug use, economic recessions, more people living further away from relatives, as well as a general decrease in ‘opportunities to make real connections with others.’

Watts, however, takes a different approach.

He too identifies causes of anxiety – but inner causes of anxiety. Watts identifies patterns of thinking and mental constructions that are widespread today that, almost regardless of the state of the world or individual circumstances, create anxiety. Naturally, it also follows then that awareness of and identification of these patterns can help to ease anxiety – regardless of the state of the world or of our individual circumstances.

There’s a lot of great material in the book – and there’s a reason that, together in volume, it amounts to a book rather than an article – and in paraphrasing, much is of course lost.

But the meat of Watt’s point – evident too in his title – is that a desire for security contributes to anxiety. Of course, it’s natural to want to feel secure. We want to have money in the bank to protect ourselves for emergencies, we do go and take out various insurance policies on our home, our car, our life, we do solicit advice and conduct research before making big decisions, we do look after our health, we do invest, we do strive for high paying jobs. All of these and many other actions help to provide structure and stability in our lives and are good and proper things to do and strive for.

The challenge comes though in the fact that – really, there is no such thing as real stability and security. And that, despite whatever preventative, precautionary measures we can undertake or stress about taking, we are always left with insecurity. You never know what can happen, and to a certain extent it is impossible to anticipate everything. We have to become comfortable with insecurity.

Insecurity is a part of being alive, of being. To protest against this insecurity is to struggle against – everything – life. And being in the state of struggling and anxiety makes us feel more insecure, and so on. Watts states it as such,

“It must be obvious, from the start, that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I,” but it is just the feeling of being an isolated ‘I’ which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want.

To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath.”

And similarly,

“For most of us this conflict is ever gnawing within us because our lives are one long effort to resist the unknown, the real present in which we live, which is the unknown in the midst of coming into being. Living thus, we never really learn to live with it. At every moment we are cautious, hesitant, and on the defensive. And all to no avail, for life thrusts us into the unknown willy-nilly, and resistance is as futile and exasperating as trying to swim against a roaring torrent.”

An answer – or a way we can respond to the inclination to feel insecure – is to be better at being present. Feelings of insecurity are born out of a fixation on the possibilities of the future and also on comparisons to the past. Therefore, a clearer focus on each individual moment will make it impossible to be as insecure. You cannot truly be present in an activity AND be anxious about some insecurity. If you are present in an activity – that’s it. If there’s anxiety there too, then you’re not really being present.

“The art of living in this ‘predicament’ is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past and the known on the other. It consists in being completely sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.”

And at this, we are notoriously bad.

“For the animal to be happy it is enough that this moment be enjoyable. But man is hardly satisfied with this at all. He is much more concerned to have enjoyable memories and expectations – especially the latter. With these assured, he can put up with an extremely miserable present. Without this assurance, he can be extremely miserable in the midst of immediate physical pleasure.”

And suffer greatly for it.

“After all, the future is quite meaningless and unimportant unless, sooner or later, it is going to become the present. Thus to plan for a future which is not going to become present is hardly more absurd than to plan for a future which, when it comes to me, will find me ‘absent,’ looking fixedly over its shoulder instead of into its face.”

I have to reiterate – the above doesn’t do the book justice and any meaningful gains can only be taken by reading the book itself. Or, for some ‘samplings’ of Watts, the YouTube channel Spiritual Mind is still a great starting place.

Other similar books I’ve enjoyed recently: The Tao of Pooh, A New Earth

How I Remember What I Read: Creating a Personal Database of All Things Interesting

I have trouble sometimes remembering what I read. This failing applies to nonfiction, fiction, books, and articles alike. It frustrates me endlessly. I like reading. Part of the reason I like reading is that in spite of the fact that you might be enjoying yourself, reading feels like a productive activity and one that has some educational value. I enjoy the thought that I’m learning, becoming wiser. But, what then, when you don’t remember what you read? Suddenly, what felt like productivity seems like waste.
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I comfort myself with the possibility that perhaps, even through my inability to recall particular details and facts, maybe the meaning and the meat of what I’ve read is still there somewhere waiting to be tapped into or is influencing me in small, subtle ways. But, maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s just all, gone.

And so, motivated by the fear that I’m not necessarily retaining what I read, I’ve been looking for a system and for tools to help.I’ve tried a few things, from meticulously jotting down into notebooks excerpts and quotations to using applications like OneNote or Evernote, perhaps combined with bookmarking tools like Pocket. But all were lacking in one way or another. Now, after significant trial and error, I feel like I’ve got something that works. It’s not perfect (and I’m making little adjustments and improvements as I go) – but, it’s pretty good.

 

Why have a system?

What was wrong – what was missing – with the paper and pencil or Evernote solutions that I’d tried previously? Well, to get to that, I’ll illustrate exactly what I want in an ideal system:

I want to be able to record. I want to be able to keep in one place all the interesting things I find – whether it’s a couple of key sentences in an article on fitness, a paragraph or two from a brilliant essay in an online magazine, or a sentence here and there (as well as my own comments) from a book I’ve read.

I want to be able to organize. I’d like to have some sort of folder/categorizing/tagging system. That way I can keep my notes together and organized by subject or area of interest. And I’d like to have the ability to keep this pretty detailed.

And I’d like to be able to search. A year from now, I want to be able to search, by tag, within my notes, within original text, for phrases like “Memory” or “Montaigne” or “The Civil War” and see everything I’ve ever found interesting about or including that language. I want to be rid of the moments when I think maybe I read something kind of about something in a particular book, only to never locate it.

I want to use this to find things as I recall them or to find things after I’ve forgotten them. A quick skim through such a catalogue may help me rediscover thoughts or interests I had a few months ago but had since abandoned. I want to keep a careful, curated breadcrumb trail of all my interests.

In short, I need a system that allows me to record, organize, and search.

For me, what has ended up working has been the research tool Zotero.


Why Zotero, and how do I use it?

In terms of the basics of what Zotero is, I’ll let them speak for themselves. The below was pulled from their About page,

Zotero is a free, open-source research tool that helps you collect, organize, and analyze research and share it in a variety of ways. Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software — the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references — and the best aspects of modern software and web applications, such as the ability to organize, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero interacts seamlessly with online resources: when it senses you are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, it can automatically extract and save complete bibliographic references. Zotero effortlessly transmits information to and from other web services and applications, and it runs both as a web service and offline on your personal devices.

To get a sense of what the landscape of the tool looks like while in usage, below is a screenshot of my working version of Zotero. As you can see, it looks very different from your traditional bookmarking and note-taking tools. This, for me is perhaps one of its biggest advantages. It’s designed to be a research tool, and thus the focus is on organizing and sorting your information rather than on writing or on developing ‘read-later’ lists. With this in mind, it’s incredibly powerful. Should you so desire, you could sort, tag, categorize, and annotate all your favorite quotes from all your favorite books and then search within, sort, and rearrange these quotes according to different themes or topics. You can do so quickly and without disrupting the underlying data. Every document you add is saved as an item, which you can then add notes to and tags to and store within folders.

 

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Figure 1

To provide a bit more detail, here is how I use it:

1) While reading online, if I come across something I want to store and remember, I save it with the Zotero bookmarklet and it automatically saves a copy of whatever I was viewing. In addition, any text is auto-indexed and made searchable. When saving the material, Zotero also automatically adds in any available metadata (things like Author, Website Name, Article Title, Date Published). When I next go into Zotero, a new entry will have automatically have been added and the metadata populated.

 

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Figure 2, Zotero Bookmarklet; source: zotero.org

2) With my items now in Zotero, I can sort and arrange them within a folder structure of my choosing. Zotero also allows for the same item to be stored within multiple folders – for those cases where mutual exclusivity just isn’t possible and I can’t decide if something should fall under ‘Philosophy’ or ‘Psychology.’

3) For each item in Zotero (remember, an item is a document – a book, magazine article, etc.), anything that I find myself wanting to highlight or remember, I add as a note. Notes are attached to specific items, and you create notes as you need them. For some articles, I have one to two notes. For a book, I may have over 100. To keep things organized, I’ll assign each note a number so that each note/highlight stays in sequential order, just like how it appears in the text. (If numbers aren’t used, Zotero by default sorts alphabetically.)

As an example, see Figure 3 below. The middle pane currently shows all the notes (lines prefaced by a yellow sticky note) that are attached to the item Life’s Stories, the name of an article that appeared in The Atlantic. The rightmost pane shows the details of the particular note that is currently highlighted. As I read an article, if there are particular excerpts that I find interesting or want to remember, I will copy it over as a note. By making something a note, I give myself a higher chance of finding it again in the future. It also now appears in my reading pane. Another way of thinking of it is your notes are all the quotes you would want to write down.

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Figure 3

4) On a note level as well as an item level, I assign tags according to topic or theme so as it make it easier for me to locate the note or item later. Tags work across folder structures and allow for an even more specific level of detail. Many tags can be assigned to a single note or item.

As an example, I’ll refer again to the note that appears above in Figure 3. The text of the note reads:

It can be hard to share a story when it amounts to: “This happened, and it was terrible. The end.” In research McLean did, in which she asked people who’d had near-death experiences to tell their stories to others. “The people who told these unresolved stories had really negative responses,” she says. If there wasn’t some kind of uplifting redemptive end to the story (beyond just the fact that they survived), “The listeners did not like that.”

I assigned to this note the tags ‘trauma,’ ‘resilience,’ and ‘personal narratives.‘ Although these words themselves don’t appear in the excerpt, they do describe concepts the excerpt touches on. In addition, these tags are topics I have some interest in and could imagine myself wanting to search for in the future. By adding these tags, I increase my chances of finding this note when I’m looking for it. There is certainly an art and some subjectivity in determining what words to use for tags and how many tags to assign to a note. I always try to imagine the different angles from which I might want to discover the text again in the future and then design my tags to fit that.

5) Once I have a few items in my Zotero database, I can perform advanced searches, utilizing any or all of the features mentioned above – full text searching through the original document, within particular folders, through the notes I’ve added, or through tags.


A note on physical books and other non-digitized material,

Zotero can automatically locate book metadata (author, predefined tags, publisher, call number, etc.) given an ISBN number. But, the rest of the process is of course rather manual. Typically my method now is that as I read, I highlight and add notes in the margins of the physical book. Then, every few chapters or so, I go back in and type up each highlight as a note attached to the book entry in Zotero. Each note is assigned tags that I think are relevant. I have to admit that this is a time consuming process and for books that you’re reading purely for entertainment value with less care for what you remember/get out of it, this type of process probably doesn’t make sense. However, for books where you are reading as much (or even more) for information as for entertainment, where you want to remember what you read, I find the act of going back and typing up the sentences and paragraphs that were most salient to me incredibly valuable in helping to cement, digest, and thus retain what I’ve read. And then, once done, you have the important parts of the book digitized, categorized, and more accessible to you in the future.

 


The Result?

In the end, I have a carefully organized, easily searchable, personal database of anything and everything that I’ve ever read and found interesting. I can look up a topic or keyword and find documents I had forgotten about. Through my tagging system, I can make connections between different things I’ve read, where it may not have been evident before that it was possible for connections to be made. Through a cursory skim, I am inspired over and over again. And I actually have a chance at finding that particular quote that was in that one book about that one thing, should my memory fail me.

Zotero is free and open source, so I encourage you to give it a try and see if it works for you. https://www.zotero.org/ (In case it wasn’t obvious, this isn’t sponsored by Zotero/I have no affiliation with them. I just like their software.)

*And if you’re really into data, you can export your Zotero data in a variety of formats to have a different sort of personal database to play with.

 

 

 

The Forgotten Ballad to Unrequited Love: The Original Little Mermaid

“Far out in the ocean the water is as blue as the petals of the loveliest cornflower, and as clear as the purest glass. But it is very deep too. It goes down deeper than any anchor rope will go, and many, many steeples would have to be stacked one on top of another to reach from the bottom to the surface of the sea. It is down there that the sea folk live.”

Or so the story of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” begins.

I had always known that the Disney version of “The Little Mermaid” was vastly different from the original. I had heard that the original was sad, heartbreaking, horrible. I had assumed it was some sort of twisted tale from the dark ages, unfit in its darkness for the children of today.

But oh, I was so surprised then, when I eventually did find my way to the original story. Yes, it’s sad – or has its sad elements. But it’s also so very beautiful.

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Now, the 1989 Disney adaptation of “The Little Mermaid” is great. It’s enchanting and funny and lovely– but the thing is, it seems very much to be its own story, and a different story from the story Hans Christian Andersen told. And we can’t forget that before the 1989 film, in fact before Disney was a company, before Walt Disney the man was even born, before his parents in fact were born, the story of “The Little Mermaid” had enchanted thousands of people (millions perhaps?) in its own right. First published in 1837, it has stood the test of time. Or at least, it seems to have, until we realize that “The Little Mermaid” story most of us know isn’t at all the one of Hans Christian Andersen.

Shall we start with how the real story ends? In Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”, the little mermaid doesn’t get to marry her Prince. In fact, she dies, completely heartbroken. Sad and tragic? Yes. Beautiful? Just wait.

 

[The Real Story]

She doesn’t get the Prince. And yes, it is sad, but it has to be so. Because, as I’d like to explain, “The Little Mermaid” is a ballad for unrequited love, for the persistent, brave, foolhardy love that continues quietly even as it is unappreciated, unrecognized, and unseen.

And in this story and for the sake of her love, the little mermaid gives up so much. In addition to losing her voice and to forsaking her family and home, she endures great pain. Her transformation of tail to legs comes with tortuous agony, as if a sharp sword slashed through her. And although she is graceful and beautiful and lovely, each step she takes on human legs feels as if she is treading of a bed of knives that pierce her skin as she walks.

Bertall_ill_La_Petite_SirèneCoupled with the physical pain is the emotional. The Prince, foolish man, longs for the girl that saved him, for the voice and the song of the girl that saved him. Of course, we all know the Prince’s dream girl is in fact the little mermaid, but she cannot tell him. And so she suffers, as the Prince continues to see her only as an innocent child. His heart, he tells her, is saved for the girl that saved him. It is this girl and not the little mermaid that he desperately wants to find, to marry. But still the little mermaid hopes. The Prince spends time with her and cares for her and even speaks of the possibility of marrying her. Her hope must grow so large.

In the end, the Prince marries another, a girl he thinks is the girl that saved him, but of course, isn’t. And the little mermaid is given the opportunity to win back her life with her family, to return to life as a mermaid, if she can kill the Prince as he sleeps. But, she loves him, and so she can’t.

Instead as part of the bargain she made with the sea witch, she dies, turning into sea foam.

 

But here, Andersen is able to deliver the ultimate judgment. Instead of simply perishing as sea foam as other mermaids do (we are told earlier that, unlike humans, mermaids do not have afterlives), the little mermaid becomes a daughter of the air. In exchange for her goodness, for her suffering, and her loyalty, she is given the chance to win immortality, to win an immortal soul.

 

“You, poor little mermaid, have tried with your whole heart… Your suffering and your loyalty have raised you up into the realm of airy spirits, and now in the course of three hundred years you may earn by your good deeds a soul that will never die.”

 

So you see? It’s sad, but it’s so much more complicated than that. She loves with an intensity and a passion that is unreturned and unappreciated, but that has worth in its own right, for what it is. And this love is ultimately recognized. In the story, recognition comes from the spiritual realm. But for those of us who are less spiritual, this redemption comes also a metaphor for simple truth. Goodness, although not recognized, is still goodness and evil, though it may go unnoticed, is still evil. Andersen gave the little mermaid spiritual redemption but he also gave her ultimate recognition for what she is and for what she has done.

And although fantastical, perhaps it’s closer to truth than the Disney version. In real life, much of love is unreturned. Real life and real love can be difficult, heartbreaking even. I am reminded of David Whyte’s description of heartbreak in his book Consolations,

 

Heartbreak is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control…

Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colors and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life. Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in a love relationship, in a life’s work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self.

 

And so, instead of only celebrating the successful kind of love that ends in marriage, perhaps we should also honor the more difficult types of love too. Perhaps we should honor the nobleness, the purity of the unrequited love in each other.

Leonard Cohen once said, we usually don’t deserve the love we expect. And I would add, neither do we receive the type of love we deserve. Instead, we love others with the type of love we deserve, hoping for something in return.

 

Little-Mermaid-Proteus-1887

 

 

For further reading (and viewing): Enjoy the full text of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”. For film adaptations more true to the original text, see if you can find copies of Rusalochka (Russian), Anderusen Dōwa Ningyo Hime (Japanese), and The Little Mermaid by The Reader’s Digest.  More on David Whyte’s Consolations.