Happy Birthday to Us!

Today marks the 9th anniversary of OnFiction! 

Just wanted to take a moment to thank all of you readers for supporting us all these years. We've managed almost 650 posts so far and hopefully you have enjoyed reading them just as much as we've enjoyed writing them. A huge thanks as well to all of our contributors!

Looking forward and moving forward...

(Painting: 'Miss Auras, The Red Book' by Sir John Lavery)

The Arts and Empathy

Last night I participated in a wonderful symposium on the relation between the arts and empathy, organized by Roots of Empathy and hosted at the Bata Shoe Museum. The panel consisted of Cameron Bailey (Artistic Director, Toronto International Film Festival) and Martha Durbin (Chair, Board of Trustees for the Royal Ontario Museum), along with myself. Dr. Ellen Winner (Boston College) was also an intended participant via Skype, but unfortunately the technology did not cooperate. Mary Ito (CBC, Roots of Empathy) did a wonderful job as moderator, guiding us through a discussion of how various forms of the arts might possibly help to foster empathy with others, particularly those who are different from ourselves and often members of vulnerable populations. So many interesting ideas got bandied about, but a few broad ideas stood out to me:

1. How might different forms of art, such as theatre, film, historical artifacts, and even non-representational/non-figurative abstract visual art potentially provoke and challenge people to take on the experiences of others who live quite different lives from our own?

2. Does art attract empathic people? Does it foster empathy in people who come to art? Or could both things be true simultaneously?

3. Why do some instances of art succeed in encouraging the audience to empathize with someone quite different from him or herself, whereas other instances of art might fail to do so?

4. How might art affect children differently from adults, with respect to the promotion or engagement of empathy?

This night was also a reminder to me of the absolutely fantastic work that Roots of Empathy does throughout the world. For those who don't know, Roots of Empathy is a program in which young schoolchildren, often those living in under-served neighbourhoods, are guided through a series of lessons centred around visits by a parent and her baby. I had the very good fortune of witnessing the program in action and I have to say it's absolutely amazing. You can read more about my take in a previous post. Please consider supporting this wonderful organization in any way you can. For those interested in making a financial contribution, it is possible to do so here.

A huge thank you to the organizers for allowing me to a part of this, Mary for her deft moderating skills, and Cameron and Martha for fostering such an interesting and entertaining discussion.

Ibsen and the Provisional

In Henrik Ibsen and the birth of modernism, Toril Moi proposes that Ibsen was the most important playwright since Shakespeare, and that his work was critical to the coming of modernism in the West. Last month, I was pleased to give a talk at the Centre for Ibsen Studies at the University of Oslo. I wanted to explore with the people there a theme of Søren Kierkegaard's Concluding unscientific postscript and the seeming opposite, Ibsen's plays about science.

On the theme of science, Ibsen had written Ghosts, about the discovery of syphilis in a family. Following the shock provoked by that play, in 1882 he wrote An enemy of the people, about the discovery by Dr Stockmann that, in the town baths which were central to the economy of the town where he lived, the water was contaminated.

Dr Stockmann thinks at first that his discovery will benefit the town. But the town's mayor, his brother, thinks otherwise, and the local people come to think of Dr Stockmann as their enemy.

A huge concern of Ibsen's time was the spate of five cholera epidemics that swept through Europe in the nineteenth century, killing hundreds of thousands of people. In the 1850s, cholera was discovered to be spread by contaminated water, but it took years for the discovery to be accepted. It was, however, this discovery that enabled the inference that infectious diseases are spread by germs. Cholera and its implications caused great public consternation, and were discussed in newspapers much as AIDS was discussed in the 1980s, and cancer is discussed today.

A source for An enemy of the people came from a friendship with the poet, Alfred Meissner, which Ibsen had formed in the 1870s when he was living in Munich. H.G. Kohler recounts how Meissner told Ibsen that his father, Dr Eduard Meissner, had worked in Teplitz, in Bohemia. In the middle of the summer of 1832, he had diagnosed a case of cholera. The mayor of the town tried to get him to change his diagnosis, but he refused. A mob besieged his house, smashed his windows, and demanded that he leave the town. In a two-faced way, the town's mayor professed friendship with Dr Meissner, but endorsed the crowd's demands, so Dr Meissner and his family were forced to leave the town.

This conflict is replayed in An enemy of the people, with Dr Stockmann's diagnosis of contaminated water in the town's public baths. He becomes increasingly assertive, and is rejected by everyone in the town except his wife and children. The climax comes at the end when Dr Stockmann proclaims: "the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone." 

Science is based on evidence and is provisional. At the same time one can meet scientists who believe they are absolutely right, who confront every attempt to ask questions, or to offer suggestions, with vehemence.

Søren Kierkegaard proposes the idea of indirect communication in a passage of some eight pages in Part Two of Concluding unscientific postscript. His idea is that indirect communication is a mode in which a person communicates with someone else not to persuade, not to try to get the other person to think as the person wants, not to coerce, but to enable the other to think and feel what she or she wants to think and feel. Kierkegaard links it to inwardness, which is fundamental to modernism in literature.

One implication of the idea of indirect communication is that as audience members and readers of artistic fiction we are not instructed, not persuaded what to think and feel. Instead, we are invited to think and feel for ourselves in the circumstances of a play, short story, novel, or film. And rather than being unscientific, as Kierkegaard may seem to imply from the title of his book, the idea is also at the centre of science because although a scientist offers evidence, and suggests inferences from it, science is provisional. The scientist does not stand alone. Changes of interpretation can be suggested by other people when new evidence is discovered, when new inferences are offered.

Ibsen, H. (1882). Ghosts, and A public enemy. (usual translataion An enemy of the people) In P. Watts (Trans.), Ibsen, Ghosts and other plays (pp. 101-219). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Kierkegaard, S. (1846). Concluding unscientific postscript (D. F. Swenson & W. Lowrie, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (Currrenl work published 1968).

Kohler, H. G. (1990). Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People and Eduard Meissner's expulsion from Teplitz. British Medical Journal, 300, 1123-1126.

Moi, T. (2006). Henrik Ibsen and the birth of modernism: Art, theater, philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Are shrubs the hipster scented candle? Shrubs and Fermentation, part 2 of 2

As I should perhaps have explained in my prior essay struggling through the social justice implications of sugars and flavorings, shrubs are intense extractions of aromatic compounds from plant matter, contributing a much wider and more idiosyncratic flavoring of beverages. They are often extracted by the combination of fruits, herbs, and spices with sugar and cider vinegar, the active bacterial cultures of which continue to ferment the sugars and fruits, creating novel but recognizable flavors—often from produce that might otherwise have spoiled, such as softening fruits.

Given contemporary interest in mixology, shrubs represent a rediscovery of longstanding folk foodways, such as making switchel (highlighted in the haying scene featured in my childhood copy of the Little House on the Prairie cookbook, for example). They are often also used to perform claims about the tastes of place, taking advantage of locally characteristic flavors and preserving them in relatively storable — and marketable — ways.

Shrubs are also an excellent example of what are often characterized as hipster approaches to consumption and production, emphasizing artisanal craft and unique and intense experience, particularly in the mundane materiality of everyday life. As part of a recent project exploring the uses of edible signal species of climate change, I have been learning about shrubs, and experiencing their intensity has led me to pose this question about whether they represent something like a hipster version of scented candles, a question I think is interesting beyond the superficial similarity of enjoyable aroma.

As a person who has always avoided artificial scents because of unpleasant effects such as headache and respiratory tract pain, I have often been dubious about the appeal of cinnamon-scented stores, smelly candles and fruity personal care items, and air fresheners in general. (And research on the effects of phthalates and other substances used in these scented products reinforces my concern and suggests that people with heightened chemical sensitivities to such substances may well be providing coal-mine canary services to the broader populace.) However, the half hour I spent sniffing at my first shrub once it had brewed (when I had rescued impulse-buy strawberries and some leftover parsley) gave me a sudden appreciation for the sensory pleasure that scented candles must provide for others less punished by them!

Recognizing the joy and beauty of this sensory enjoyment — whether it's a more protected and less acute one, or a more sensation seeking version — makes me also recognize some of the social dynamics caught up in the celebration of the invitation to inhabit a particular place through the senses, or the deriding of poor taste around someone else's scent preferences. As with the precious approach to many food and "lifestyle" choice, things like scent can be used not only for enjoyment, but to perform that enjoyment in ways that signal class positioning as well as empathy for other (as with sugar boycotts). Implications for the ways we craft narratives of of the senses may include more attention to the way we invite others to share or explore our experiences of sensory delight, without dismissiveness or judgment and with attention to the embedding of privilege in foodie preciousness. (A wonderful film treatment of taste this evokes is The Taste of Others!)

Obama and truth in fiction

In The New York Review of Books recently a conversation was published between US President Barack Obama and novelist Marilynne Robinson. At the beginning of the second part of this conversation, published on 19 November 2015, p. 6, Obama is quoted as saying:

… the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.

Obama points here to two issues, I think.

The first is that fiction is an invitation to empathy with others. Were he not so busy, I imagine Obama would be delighted to read of recent findings in the psychology of fiction (see e.g. Mar & al. 2006; Kidd & Castano, 2013).

The second is the issue of truth. Certain people—for reasons of their own I suppose—think that fiction is merely made up, that it is lies. But Obama is right. Recent empirical findings have confirmed it: there is truth in fiction—truth of other people—otherwise the findings I quoted in the previous paragraph could not have occurred. Is there more to be said about this kind of truth? Obama says it’s about a “world [that] is complicated and full of grays.” No doubt that’s right, too, but can we go further? Truth in science involves correspondences between mental models of scientists and aspects of the physical and biological world. These worlds oblige by remaining more-or-less stable. But there are other kinds of truth, and for these we must turn to fiction (Oatley, 1999). Each person we know is her or his own world, and each of us is another such world. So among us humans not only are there many worlds to make models of, but these worlds don’t remain stable. They change as we develop, they change with circumstance, and they change with the relationships people enter. And where might we learn about such matters? By living, of course, but also as Barack Obama said, from novels.

Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342, 377-380.

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 694-712.

Oatley, K. (1999). Why fiction may be twice as true as fact: Fiction as cognitive and emotional simulation. Review of General Psychology, 3, 101-117.

Obama, B., & Robinson, M. (2015). President Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A conversation in Iowa. The New York Review of Books, 62, 6-8.

Image: Obama and Robinson say “Goodbye” after their conversation, NYRB, 62, p. 6.

Re-appreciating Place

Last week, I had the opportunity to take part in a long-term learning project that has been named after various geographic regions where it takes place – in the case I participated in in northern Georgia, it is the Piedmont Project. In northern Arizona, it’s the Ponderosa Project, and I hear that there are many additional regional variants.  

These projects exist to engage faculty in the places in which they teach, and through that engagement, to support them in taking on sustainability themes in their courses—whether that be through explicit learning for sustainability and “education for sustainable development” (something the U.N. has just completed a decade of promoting), or rather more lightly through taking on a sustainability-themed example in a language class, for example, translating an explanation of campus recycling or energy conservation efforts. We returned repeatedly to the power of places for reminding people both of the most common tropes of sustainability work—the material processes of our everyday lives and their effects—and also, and perhaps more importantly, for engaging people in the wonder that inspires sustainability work, that makes people reflect on what should be sustained for all people to thrive in the long term.

I was prompted to share my experience because as a geographer, I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about and exploring place. But like any canon one learns, there can be a tendency with things once learned to seem like something everyone has learned. So no matter how much impact it had when I was first encountering the power of really noticing place, and paying attention to its qualities, and what being in place FELT like, it has still been remarkably easy to set it aside and not focus on what it offers in terms of entry points to experiential learning. 

Noticing place has its weirdnesses, too: in this amazing, clearly very place-inspired meeting spot, all of the bathrooms were graced with air freshener whose location in Georgia seemed to invite considerable analysis: I challenge anyone to describe the smell of TimeMist Clean Cotton—and to tell us where that places them.

Feeding Movements

The past several weeks in Minneapolis have been tumultuous if hopeful. Protests have gathered since the November 15 police killing of Jamar Clark, and these have revealed both the volatile persistence of white supremacy (via the subsequent terrorism and shooting of peaceful protestors) and also, via sustained caring work of thousands of people to support the various needs of those involved, the steady persistence of communities determined to dismantle racism and its institutions.

As an identifiably white woman involved in food movement work (where white women form a corps of allies—although with a longstanding and often problematic and privileged history of unsuccessfully trying to make things better), I am cautious about the ways I seek to discharge my own feelings of frustration and dismay over the injustices being protested. I vocally appreciate the many efforts that have been made to push back against policies intentionally designed to exploit and injure—like redlining and other "black rules" that keeps people of color from homeownership and other loans that make middle class stability possible—and I am also vocal in revising the stories that blame the failures of extending middle class participation equitably on those from whom it has been withheld. Now in the midst of the North American holiday season, my brother has been jokingly sharing helpful how-to lists about avoiding politics and rancor at family meals, recognizing the number of times I have helped clear the end of the dinner table lingering by taking my male relatives up on their baiting rants about black fatherhood responsibility or unemployment patterns or the current complaint about political correctness. I find the conservative-talk-show-fueled handbook of explanations about social issues irresistibly compelling in part because it opens conversational doors my aunts and colleagues, for example, are more likely to ignore. And once opened, there are so many stories of dispossession resisted, of calories withheld and recreated anyways, of food knowledge suppressed but sewn in seeds into hems, and persisting to nourish people in their long, long fight to even be recognized as having food knowledge, as deserving land and love and repair, and as our relatives, our neighbors, people to whom we have responsibilities of basic human decency, even if we cannot understand the abstract ways we are implicated in their traumatic histories of enslavement and discrimination, and the ways finance and property and educational systems continue to benefit us at their expense.

So given eighteen days when this conversation is brought out into the streets, where white people walk tentatively down the sidewalk to say they are neighbors and want to be supportive but that they do not understand what is at stake and how we have gotten to this point of conflict, I found myself needing to be there, not because I felt like I could help so much as because I felt so overwhelmed with helplessness and disempowering rage otherwise. Being there, the Black Lives Matters leaders gave a focus to my emotion; I could find tasks needing doing, and orientation to keep on in the face of this offered while working alongside people who have to live with this rage and systemic disempowerment.

Maybe I was a little bit helpful for some of those white folks who were wanting to enter a conversation and needed someone with the time to talk them through some history, or for the various crews where I was able to help keep people fed or warm or sustained in some other way, including the nerdy crew of mostly outsiders who launched into the project of catching ourselves up on the history of the community centered around this police station (built symbolically on the site of a former community center). But more than anything, what I was able to do there was to learn viscerally how movements feed themselves, both practically and intangibly, using their overwhelming emotion as the fuel that sustains movement logistics, and practically giving many the chance to learn what’s happening and why and how, and how to be fundamentally human, through the chance to feed each other—to give and receive food, and in talking over its practicalities, to reproduce a community, find out what it needs, and find out how one is a part of it.

After asking hundreds of protesters dancing in the streets and listening to the speeches of American Indian Movement and Black Lives Matter speakers and singers after a march on City Hall whether they had a pocket tool that might open some of the many cans of food donated, I tied this can opener above to the kitchen tent during the first week of the protest. And I’m sure it was bulldozed at the end (somewhere around 36:00 here...); but after being sent on mission to find it in the nearby neighborhood grocery store (the one amidst the 37 fast food restaurants and one ascendant sit-down, youth-employing, amazing community-anchoring café and the similarly inspiring West Broadway Farmers Market), I kept the other one in my pocket because I know I’ll continue to need it.

Phenological Anxiety and Abeyance

Last year at this time, I watched the leaves flame out with peculiar detachment: for the first time, I was leaving my temperate deciduous autumn during the brief interval between leaf fall and snow fall, dissociating the exhilarating experience of gorgeous foliage transformation from the anxious anticipation of winter. This year, I am attempting to channel that dissociation to mitigate the seemingly unavoidable resignation that comes with the end of warm season foliage.

Psychologically, part of what was interesting about trading in my usual excruciatingly cold winter for a cool southern hemisphere summer in Dunedin was that it did not feel quite like summer—it was much more like coasting in a pleasant autumn/spring holding pattern, the kind of seasonal dawn/dusk people in places like Florida and California must experience, complete with a full panoply of broadleaf evergreens whose home range just doesn’t extend quite this far. This in-between season is quite a contrast with the ominous gloaming of both the second half of autumn and the first half of spring in Minnesota, both of which twinkle with the starry brightness of long clear nights and the occasional crystalline sunny days of a winter too cold to snow but also stretch out with snow cover that one knows will last almost half of the year before the leaves flesh out again. Even if it might be t-shirt and swimming weather (like it is today!) while the leaves are crunchy on the beach in Minneapolis, one knows that the lake could freeze within the week, and this leads to a certain pinchedness that contrasts the relaxed abandon elicited by extended warmth in summer.

In a Dunedin kind of summer, any warm morning is almost certain to be followed by a stiff breeze off the cold ocean separating you from Antarctica, sucked in by the lifting warming of interior Otago. The short half-life of warmth prompts somewhat more structured adventure: one is motivated to get out into the promise of warmth but without the illusion of extended heat or the punishment of overheating. This is consistent with spring/fall activities of my prior experience, times when I have found it easiest to plan around the possibility of being outside, getting some sunshine and warmth in whatever time of day best allows it, and then retreating inside to get work done with the rest of the time—a rhythm that feels well balanced and measured, overextended into neither lassitude nor action.

The summer/winter rhythm, in contrast, often feels like one of allowing catch-up relaxation time contrasted with the holing up of cold months recognized to not be much good for fun. Everyday winter sports like biking or snowshoeing or skiing (even as a commute) are process-intensive enough with their bundling and equipment to feel laborious. And the cold is punishing enough to elicit a constant low-level vigilance. Even on days nice enough to lounge around outside if dressed warmly enough, for example, I’ve had police stop to make sure I wasn’t dead when trying to soak up some sun sitting against a tree in the park. Constant reminders of how not to be killed by the weather require a fair amount of the “hygge” coziness that has become a trendy aspiration of cold winter sojourns.

So as I watch orange, red, and yellow leaves stream off the trees today in the uncertain mid-autumn sunny warmth, I am compelled by ways to build up my measure of phenological equanimity in the face of oncoming winter. Phenology is the study of the signs of seasonal progression, and it was an unusual gift last year to be able to watch these signs without bracing for the onrush of seasonal symptoms one expects next (ice! snow! dryness crinkly with static, dark mornings, afternoons, and long nights and slippery roads). This year, I find myself poking at the edges of this anticipation in a more exploratory way, wondering how to build mitigation by other means than escape.

I remind myself that I already organize my daily commute around sun gathering, and that I own a reasonable trunkful of warm winter clothes. The walking and bike commute may soon be more difficult, but I have just discovered a bus route that stops within two blocks of my home and office. I am looking for some better sources of humidity, and spaces to be active and at ease without a lot of extra clothing this winter. If I could build into my schedule regular sessions working in community greenhouses, pleasant spaces, and sunny places to write, can those feel as ordinary, well-balanced, and un-emergency as staying out of the high sun in summer or keeping the garden weeded?

Two Sharp Shakes

On Indigenous Peoples Day, being back on laundry feels mundane—but I am going to celebrate efforts to decolonize places by understanding the stories we use to shape those places, in the hopes that such efforts can help us shape them more equitably. 

Partly because of health problems, and arguably also because of class positioning and the effects that has on people's tolerance for disgust and their enthusiasm for demonstrating cleanliness, my mother taught me how to do laundry when I was quite young. And after twenty years living with my mate, one of the things I still often find myself trying to demonstrate persuasively is two sharp shakes of each laundered item as it goes from the basket onto the line or into the dryer. 

I have never liked ironing. (See also: learning to do laundry before being very good at controlling steaming metal appliances, or small ladder required to reach into washing machine, requiring climbing up and then down to the dryer for each piece of clothes...) Given my rather strong aversion, I've always thought of the two sharp shakes mainly as a way to prevent wrinkles. As I've tried to justify it in my demonstrations—and as I've learned more about the dynamics of laundering—I've realized it's not just about wrinkles (although the pre-emptive smoothing of the collar and placket and pockets does save me a lot of ironing). It also shakes off lint from the wash, pollen from the yard, and the various bits of leaf and insects that may be resting on the clothes. 

The pollen pieces (along with molds) aren't something I'd ever thought of before quite recently—and hence the justification felt quite ad hoc, even if it was legitimate. It made me notice, however, that I was adopting reasons that contributed to my feeling of doing laundry right. Noticing the distance between my ability to explain why and this definitive sense that two sharp shakes seemed to both serve some functions and also set the appropriate pacing for laundry hanging made me also notice than when I was too rushed to take the time for each garments' shakes (it turns out I shake them both before hanging and after), the need to shake them out lingers with the clothing, and I'll find myself wondering if it's legit to shake them in the bedroom, or if I need to shake any potential loitering spiders out on the porch, or out the window.

This is clearly a trivial case. However, it strikes me as a good example of the functions that lurk in practices, waiting to be explored. Exploration may provide insights into what makes these practices meaningful—not necessarily why they are persuasive or optimal, but perhaps why they have been made to feel right, perhaps through only dimly remembered instructions or modeled behaviors (it would not have been till years after my formative laundry learning that I regularly hung laundry outside with my mother and grandmother). And it reminds us that the way that we shape spaces to provide these instructions, often outside of explicit language, seems worth regularly exploring and reinvesting in.

A New Appreciation of What Pies Are For

I paid closer attention to the shape of my produce over the course of this last growing season. Partly because I’ve been working with a number of projects that are starting to figure out what it might be meaningful to measure in gardens, I’ve started thinking about how much food I collect, and what state it’s in. I had never really thought to account for how much of the food I produced was eaten by woodchucks or slugs – because I wasn’t eating it, I was just thinking of it not existing, effectively. But prompted by the wonderful Food Dignity project, I started to think differently about the produce that dried up on the stems because I hadn’t come to pick it (the dried beans and raspberries were delicious, and a handful would have been a pint fresh!), or the strawberries that would have been more edible if I had better air circulation, or the zucchinis I might have had if I could figure out how to distract the woodchuck.

None of this is to say that I feel like I must account for – and possess – all the production possible, but it also made me feel somewhat more successful, and to notice, furthermore, the different stages along the life cycle of a plant where it might be useful, something that had previously been tacit knowledge. For example, I live in a climate where fava beans don’t thrive, but they do well enough – and I can eat the greens if I don’t get enough beans. The purslane and sorrel that grow in my beds no matter what I do are likewise delicious, and reliable even when the rabbits eat whatever was more intentionally planted.

This attention to the stages and close relations of the produce I intended has also spilled over to the produce I find myself sorting as I prepare for winter. Sorting through a ten pound box of blueberries for freezing, for example, I found myself eating ones that might be too mushy to hold up well in my Individual Quick Freeze process – and also sorting out all the ones that seemed questionably ripe; it seemed like those might justify the high amounts of sugar called for in blueberry pie. And all of a sudden I gained a new appreciation of the function of pies!

Pies’ main function may be to deal with questionable fruit! This seems obvious enough in retrospect—although I’m not sure I’ve ever categorized pie as a holding tank for not-freezer-worthy fruit. And this categorization of such a basic staple has made me wonder what other functional food categories I’ve been overlooking at this time of needing to figure out how to squeeze more holding space out of my larder.

Hello, shrubs…

Films and Facts

I recently reviewed for PsycCRITIQUES The imitation game (Oatley, 2014). It’s a film about the life of Alan Turing, founder of modern computing and artificial intelligence, and important contributor to cognitive science. The film is a good one, and it’s been well received. Many people will not have heard of Turing or the contribution he made during World War II at the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (click here) to breaking German codes, and hence to defeating the Nazis and probably shortening the War, perhaps by as much as two years. It’s good that the film tells audiences something about this. But Turing is someone I happened to know about. I did not enjoy the film as much as many of my friends did because for me the misinformation in the film was irritating. Why, I think to myself, does the film industry use the caption “based on a true story,” as if this somehow implies that a film with this designation is better than one drawn from a novel, or short story, or written by a scriptwriter?  Documentaries have a dedication to truth, but why in movies are there no genres that correspond to history or biography in which filmed events are anchored in known facts and evidence?

In the New York Times Sunday Review section, of 15 February this year, Jeff Zacks, who has done very interesting research on events in movies (Zacks, 2013) wrote a piece for the column Gray Matter in which he discussed how people remember incidents and issues from historical films that aren’t true, and which don’t appear in histories or biographies. These incidents and issues are inserted by film-makers because they think that they make for a better story. In the New York Times piece Zacks cites, but does not give references for, two studies that relate to this issue. The references are below. In a study by Butler et al. (2009), students read a text on a piece of history and watched a film clip on the same subject. In a test, one week later, they better remembered events that were seen in the clip and had also read about, than those who recalled information from the text without having seen a film clip about it. When, however, the film’s information contradicted information from the text, subjects often recalled the false information from the film. Umanath et al. (2012) repeated the experiment but asked the students to monitor the films for inaccuracies. Even when they had done this, tests of recall often showed they had remembered not the correct information from the text but the misinformation from the movie. 

In his New York Times article, Zacks writes that what is going on here is that we are better at remembering events than at remembering the source of events, and that this usually makes sense as it’s the events themselves that are likely to be the most important. The trouble with inaccurate information in movies is that we may remember it, and believe it to be true, even when we don’t remember that the film was only “based on a true story.” Umanath et al. did however find one technique that helped. If the misinformation was identified at the time it was seen in the film then its influence was substantially reduced. 

So, if you haven’t seen The imitation game, and think you might go, here are some of its inaccuracies, so that you can recognize them at the time. Turing was eccentric but did not have a stammer. He did not suffer official opposition of the kind depicted in the film. He did not invent and build the machine to decode the Nazi Enigma code all by himself; he had important collaborators, who included Gordon Welshman (who does not appear in the film). The woman to whom Turing becomes engaged, Joan Clarke, did not apply to join Bletchley Park and be mistaken as a typist. She won a double first in mathematics at Cambridge and was recruited by Welshman. And so on. And so on. You can read more about the inaccuracies in an article by Caryl (2015) in the New York Review of Books.

In the Wikipedia article on The imitation game the following appears, in relation to the film’s inaccuracies.

In a January 2015 interview with The Huffington Post in response to general complaints about the level of historical accuracy in the film, its screenwriter Moore said: "When you use the language of 'fact checking' to talk about a film, I think you're sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies'. That's not what water lilies look like, that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That's the goal of the piece.

Yesterday evening Graham Moore won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for his work on this film. Good for him. All the same, it sounds from his Huffington Post quote that if he were painting Monet’s “Water Lilies,” he might replace some of the lilies with orchids because they are more valuable.

Butler, A. C., Zaromb, F. M., Lyle, K. B., & Roediger, H. L. (2009). Using popular films to enhance classroom learning: The good, the bad, and the interesting. Psychological Science, 20, 1161-1168.

Caryl, C. (2015, February 5). Saving Alan Turing from his friends. New York Review of Books, 42 (2), 19-21. 

Oatley, K. (2014) Coded messages. Review of The Imitation Game (2014) dir. Morten Tyldum, PsycCRITIQUES, 59 (52), pp. [np]

Umanath, S., Butler, A. C., & Marsh, E. (2012). Positive and negative effects of monitoring popular films for historical inaccuracies. Applied Cognitive Science, 26, 556-567. 

Zacks, J. M. (2013). Constructing event representations during film comprehension. In A. P. Shimamura (Ed.), Psychocinematics: Exploring cognition at the movies. New York: Oxford University Press.

Zacks, J. M. (2015, February 15). Why movie "facts" prevail. New York Times, p. SR 12. 

The Pleasures of Rereading and Where They Come From

Why do people reread novels? Why do they listen over and over to pieces of music they’ve already heard? A worn and dog-eared copy of a repair manual, or a recipe book, or a dictionary, or a dense philosophical text makes sense, but somehow that of a novel less so. Young children will listen to the same favorite story read to them many times in a row, and request the same story at the next opportunity, while a stack of other books stands unread nearby. Why would humans waste their time rereading an account of fictional lives in fictional worlds? Why would they bother listening to music that they know so well they can whistle it?

Two of my favorite thinkers have discussed these phenomena, and I was surprised to find on closer inspection that their arguments are interestingly similar. C. S. Lewis, early twentieth century author of the Chronicles of Narnia series and Christian apologist, said that it is very difficult to know whether a story is affecting another reader’s “deeper imagination or only exciting his emotions”. One way to test which the other reader experiences is to learn whether she “often rereads the same story”. Rereading is a sign of interest and attention to something other than the plot and its sequences of suspense, climax, suspense, climax: “Knowing that the ‘surprise’ is coming we can now fully relish the fact that this path through the shrubbery doesn’t look as if it were suddenly going to bring us out on the edge of the cliff….It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia” (Lewis, p. 16).

But why should attending to the “surprisingness” (p. 16) be any more valuable than attending to each surprise-event as it occurs in the story? Lewis enlarges the perimeter of the concept, though, and says that it’s not just surprisingness that we value – it’s theme. Themes likes “giantness,” “otherness,” “the desolation of space,” “home-coming,” “reunion with a beloved”, among others, attract us deeply. “All that happens [in a story] may be delightful: but can any such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted?” (p. 18) Rereading is an iterative attempt to find ourselves enveloped within the theme, almost in spite of the plot. Lewis then proposes that that tension between these two story elements is precisely that which makes story and real life so much alike: “We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never embodied” (p. 18). We want to experience something larger and more comprehensive, more coherent than the ostensibly stochastic plot events as they are unfolding.  So we go back again and again to the events to attend the birth and development of theme and to feel ourselves a part of it.

In a chapter entitled “Musical Parsing and Musical Affect,” the generative and cognitive linguist Ray Jackendoff (1992) argues against the idea that affect in music is largely determined by the music’s novelty for the listener. He notes, “musical affect is produced not just by hearing (and predicting) the musical surface of a piece, but by the activity of deriving in real time all the details of abstract musical structure. The musical structure has intrinsic points of instability or tension, which require resolution and therefore result in affect” (p. 153).  Jackendoff posits a “musical parser” that is “informationally encapsulated from musical memory” and that continues to parse independent of the listener’s conscious knowledge of, in Jackendoff’s example, a “deceptive cadence” that is about to be heard. Despite the fact that the listener is likely not unduly surprised by the cadence, having heard it before, nevertheless the listener can still experience genuine emotions elicited by the piece because of this encapsulation. Jackendoff argues that if we think in terms of the listener’s “conscious expectations” or if we take the view that there is a free exchange between the cognitive faculty that “constructs abstract structures that analyze the musical surface” (p. 155) and musical memory, then neither fresh affect nor heightened affect can occur. In his view, affect originates in part through in the structure of the musical phrase itself and in the parser’s ongoing identification of the “most salient structure” (p. 154) to be pursued in light of the instability inherent in every “analysis of the musical surface”. And this, independent of conscious memory.

Now, one must be careful not to approach the two views reductively. These thinkers occupy different temporal cohorts, different fields of inquiry, and different areas of creative media. Nevertheless, both are analysts of an artistic pursuit that they understand deeply. Lewis wrote dozens of novels and stories, and Jackendoff has worked closely with the composer and music theorist Fred Lerdahl in developing their theory of musical reception and production, based on the Chomskyan paradigm of generative linguistics. I am struck by the similarities in Lewis’ and Jackendoff’s views of how affect, and not uncommonly extraordinary affect, can arise in spite of great familiarity with a piece, whether of fiction or music. Lewis’ plot events would seem to align with Jackendoff’s musical phrases, as they both have accepted ways of building and resolving, and accepted deviances thereon. Both elements are numerous and temporally intertwined. Both have accepted discrete boundaries at which points the soul or parser detects and discards implausible assessments of the elements.

More interesting, though, is both thinkers’ strong insistence on the lack of communication or articulation between the theme/memory entities and the plot experiencer/musical parser. If Lewis had been a cognitive psychologist, he might have said that the plot components are processed in a massively parallel fashion and the theme is fashioned in a heavily constructivist sort of way from the results of that processing. Jackendoff, as an author of children’s fantasy fiction, might have asked can a series of musical phrase analyses “quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted” (Lewis, p. 18). Indeed, this informational encapsulation would seem to be a crucial part of the pleasure-in-rereading conundrum. What we want in reading a cherished, dog-eared book with which we are in some sense in love, is to get back to the way we felt when we were entertaining that book’s big ideas at the most abstract levels of analysis that the soul/ parser can experience. We don’t need to remember what exactly we were thinking or feeling during each analysis. We need, at most, the desire to set the parser to work again, “trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive” (Lewis, p. 18).

Jackendoff, R. (1992). Languages of the mind: Essays on mental representation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Lewis, C. S., (1966). Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. Edited with preface by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

By Dr. Rebecca Wells-Jopling.

Narrating place practices

Or, Things I really like about Aotearoa New Zealand

Now, those of you who know me are going to try to say that this is just me soap-boxing for energy efficiency. But those of you who know my family may recall that my mother has spent the majority of my lifetime lobbying for nice clotheslines. (I am happy to report, before I continue with the story of this particular clothesline, that my mother now has a very smart fold-out clothesline with a lovely view of its own.*) While it is true that this clothesline, the technology upon which I am currently drying my laundry and airing my bedding, has perhaps the best view of any clothesline I have ever seen,** what got me thinking about practices in place, or specifically place-based practices, was the way that the clothesline was introduced to me.

When we first set up house earlier this month for our writing and research sojourn here in Dunedin, our host warily explained, with fond gestures toward the line, that although they do have a clothes dryer, they don’t really use it. When we replied that we, also, had a clothes dryer but preferred to dry out clothes outside (although this sometimes means contending with frozen clothes in the winter), she seemed visibly relieved, and truncated what was clearly meant to be the foundation for a polite but thorough suggestion about the different ways of doing things here (i.e. more efficiently, with more reliance on a wee bit of effort, and less concession to convenience)—an explanation evidently set up against the expectation that we would be unfamiliar with how to do things in the sensible and orderly way.

If this was just a one-off thing, I might not have thought about it from a narrative perspective. But I have been met repeatedly with surprise that am able to carry out everyday skills with basic competence. Clearly, narratives attached to Americans, and perhaps also to academics, suggest we live high-consumption, low-skill lives, perhaps because we are not expected to be good with the physical world. (Our all-day writing also prompts some comments about real work.) But being able to balk these narratives opens up the possibility of being able to view much more explicitly some of the dangerous costs of delegitimazing certain kinds of practices we label as work.

In addition to the most crucial dynamic of being responsible for the work we rely on, rather than putting this labor into the hands of people we are not willing to pay well to do work we don’t want to have to think about, being able to engage with a range of everyday technologies in different places provides access to a realm of meaning making that is easily habituated into invisibility in our home environments. Without romanticizing (tasks such as clotheswashing ARE much easier when mechanized, and this is part of the promise of geographic and gender equity modernity has not delivered), I recognize that when I am able to wash and dry and mend my clothes, or procure and prepare food in different kinds of ways with different tools, I must tell myself more thorough stories about what I am doing, and how, and why. And having gained access to this story layer behind the veil of automaticity, I can take home this relationship with the practices that get me through my day, and my more richly experienced stories of them.

* And the beehives are moving down the generations to me and my brother, in part as a concession to their yellow-spotting interference with laundry hanging.

** You are here looking across Andersons Bay and the Musselburgh Rise toward the downtown and suburbs of Dunedin

Every body's Embodied Experience

You cannot make or have experience for somebody else. You can, however, pay good attention to somebody else's experience, or interpret or discover the meaning of experience together, and in the process you might learn more about your own experience and what it means to be in a body. As narrators sharing words about the psychology of fiction and narrative in virtual space, it is easy to interact without paying adequate attention to embodied experience--and as such disembodied habit becomes reinforced, sharing the experience of ourselves in bodies can be challenging. As we interact with each others' narrative personae in this disembodied space, it also becomes easier to generalize from our own experiences--and to unintentionally discount others' experiences by assuming they should follow the patterns of our own. Because food is what I am often writing about, I get to cheat in some ways: writing about eating invokes bodily experience. But especially because food is the focus of my work, I sometimes want non-food methods for getting people to pay attention to their inward experience and to think and feel from inside their bodies. Toward this end, I have spent a significant part of the past year studying the teaching of yoga, and particularly teaching yoga in a way that makes it accessible to everyone. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the intensive workshop I have just completed has confirmed my suspicions about the radical potential of increasing access to embodied experience.