What on earth can I possibly say?

 

I’ve been writing this blog since 2007, and odds are I’ll keep going for the foreseeable future. Why do I do it? 

 

The truth is, Books in Northport does not have a huge readership. None of its posts has ever “gone viral.” Occasionally (and the occasions are rare) someone struck by a certain thought or story of mine here will share a post with a friend or put a link on Facebook, but my readers are more generally content to enjoy for themselves, quietly. Even comments to any particular post are uncommon.

 

And when I look at my stats (which no, I am not going to share publicly, thank you very much), I see that 2017 was the high-water readership mark for this blog. (Six years ago. Should that make me sad?) The statistics give only numbers and a jagged line climbing to a sharp peak before falling again – no indication why more people were reading me in that year than any other. 

What did I write about in 2017? I did a lot of book reviews that year. There were adventures in the Southwest. (But I still do book reviews and recount adventures, when I have any to recount.) There was the launch of Sarah Shoemaker’s novel, Mr. Rochester, a lot of my personal musings (examples here and here), topics literary, historical, social and political pleas (here's an example of that kind of thing), and small personal and local observations here and there, as snippets of my small-town bookselling life dog-paddled furiously to survive in a stormy sea of national chaos. Because that's how I remember 2017 -- as a plunge into national chaos.

Did readers find my questions similar to ones they were asking themselves that year, or were they seeking refuge from disturbing questions in books and in someone else’s life?

 

Because maybe, I’m thinking, it wasn’t my writing or subject matter that caused the spike at all but simply a new kind of chaos that drove more people that year to online forums in general. And now, maybe we have gradually become accustomed to chaos and have given up any attempt either to escape fully or to understand. Maybe recipes and dogs and word puzzles and jigsaw puzzles on Facebook are more tranquilizing, and therefore more appealing, than anything I could possibly write. Whatever!

Numerous suggestions for increasing website audience can be found online, if marketing is your aim or popularity (numbers) your goal. I had a professional group “reach out” to me a few years back, offering to provide more exciting “content” to my blog than I had come up with myself. Unlike the Queen, I was amused, because while my bookstore often appears on this site, as do books, I’m not writing advertising copy. Most simply put, this is my life I'm sharing – certain aspects of it, anyway: books read, travels enjoyed, adventures undertaken, thoughts entertained, questions that plague me, as well as (to steal from Carl Jung) memories, dreams, reflections -- regardless of how many or how few friends or strangers may be interested.

 

Poet Fleda Brown, on her blog, "The Wobbly Bicycle," writes that she has not been writing poems lately but a diary instead, which she approaches as a literary project, in hopes that it will eventually be published. Another writer whose work I admire told me at one point that he felt I had found my “form” in blog posts, and more than one friend (both writers and nonwriters) suggests now and again that Books in Northport could be turned into a book. Is it motivation I lack or energy or something else? Others have done it, so the idea itself is not absurd. -- But a bound volume of my originally digital words without accompanying images (related or unrelated, today's being the latter) and embedded links? It would be, I’m thinking, more hole than cloth.

 

There’s no Big Question here today. No plan for the future. No sudden epiphany. Idle speculation, merely, after four housebound days of clouds and rain and wind and a few snow flurries and a dead car battery, so, as always, take it or leave it. 

If It Quacks Like a Duck, Who Is It?

Jingle-decorated safety pin from Romania

You know, I’m sure, the old saw that starts out, “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...” Well, I want to tell you that that would not be your local philosopher-bookseller! You’d know that, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you be able to tell the difference after over nine years of Books in Northport? If you’re a friend and/or a customer or even if we’ve never met but you follow Books in Northport from afar, don’t you recognize my voice in these lines? And if a strange voice were to break in and take over Books in Northport, wouldn’t you know something was wrong? Wouldn’t your suspicions be aroused?

What the -- ?! Why on earth do I pose these silly rhetorical questions? If curious, please read on.

Insisting on holiday cheer

As a general rule, I am not one for compulsively checking blog stats. While now and then a post getting more than the usual daily attention can boost my spirits, seeing low numbers on things written from my heart can be discouraging, so why give myself the grief? Instead, for the most part, I just say what I have to say, post a link on Facebook, and the pay is the same (zilch!), whether no one reads or hundreds do. Once in a while, though, I get curious. I was curious the other day, and what I found on the stats report was, as Lewis Carroll had Alice say, “curiouser and curiouser,” to say the least. While stats for individual posts were unsurprising – pretty much as usual – total number of blog views had spiked. The spike was sharp and not explainable by a large number of views of any particular post or posts. What was going on?

A look at ‘traffic sources’ did nothing to dispel the mystery, largest numbers of visitors coming from Google or Facebook, as is usually the case. ‘Audience,’ however, showed a different story. There on the world map, with shades of green showing where viewers are located when they visit, the darkest green covered the area of the former USSR. The rest of the world paled in comparison. 

I shared the surprising result with David, who asked why Russians would be reading my blog. Well, I don’t think they are. Ten times as many Russians as Americans? Why would Russians feel a sudden hunger for a northern Michigan bookseller’s take on Hermann Hesse or scenes of our village in winter? I doubt there is anything in my content or CV fascinating to these new “viewers,” but in light of current events their presence is alarming, even if, as seems likely, "they" are machines rather than people.

Think about it. Blogger is a big deal world-wide. As the anniversary of Tienanmen Square approached, the Chinese government blocked Blogger, making it inaccessible to Internet users in China unless they were able to cobble together a circuitous alternate route to the blogs, and the same was true of Google and Tumblr.

(Do a search and read about it if you don’t believe me, but bear in mind that searches are tailored to individual searchers, and your results would not necessarily match mine. In that way, creators of algorithms need to take their share of the blame for Americans reading only news sources with views matching those they already had.)

Moreover, with the new Google Plus service (which I do not use), blogs can be automatically connected to Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, Tumblr, WordPress, Gmail, DO Note, Weebly and other sites and services. And now, think of all the bloggers who update using their mobile phones. “We’re all connected” means, among other more positive things, that we are all that much more vulnerable.

For over nine years, I have loved writing Books in Northport and connecting with people around the world -- those who actually connect, that is, not hostile, anonymous individuals, groups, or worms that only hover and stalk, with no interest in what I write, not even anything personal against me as a person or bookseller. Now I wonder how long I and other blogger friends will be able to maintain this precious outlet that has been for so long, for us and our readers, literary as well as social. I don’t know what might happen or when anything at all might come down on us.

“The personal is political.” Do you resist that idea? I’ll tell you, I’m really feeling it today.

Repressive governments are not interested in our fates as individuals, but they are very interested in restricting, in the most general, sweeping sense, our freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, and the free exchange of ideas. It’s unlikely that darkness and silence will fall on us tomorrow – more likely we will be overwhelmed, day by day, by blinding metaphorical searchlights and fake news and enemies masquerading as friends.

If another voice breaks in here one day, though – or if your access is mysteriously denied – I'm telling you now, ahead of time, not to take it lying down. In fact, start now to do what you can. Think about it. What can you do? Now do it!

Flowers for freedom!

Dickens--Zing! Kahneman--Zing!! Winter--Zing!!!

1. Where the Dickens Did We Get That Phrase?

“Cute as the dickens” describes my dog Sarah pretty well. But why do we say that?

“What the dickens--?” (my mother's phrase) is obviously a way of asking “What the devil?” without mentioning the devil, but again—why?

These questions never occurred to me until this year’s big Charles Dickens birthday started a tsunami of smart-aleck headlines. Bruce found one of them and brought it to the bookstore to use for a display. (SORRY--no pictures today--technical difficulties!)

So how did this popular author’s name come to be substituted for one so very, very unpopular? If you already know the answer, go to the head of the glass. (Steve, that will probably be you.) It had nothing to do with Charles and something (I hesitate to say “everything,” because who knows?) to do with Shakespeare. And, knowing him, don't you suppose he borrowed it from somewhere else? Be that as it may, February 7 was the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens.

2. I Was of Two Minds

This is embarrassing, but if Daniel Kahneman can confess errors in his thinking, who am I to sweep mine under the rug? The morning after my most recent post, I looked back at it and saw with a shock that I had introduced egregious errors into the story of business failure rates. I correctly reported Kahneman’s 35% success statistic, but then in my commentary somehow converted that to a 35% failure rate, effectively cutting the statistical failures in half! It was as if, at the same time I was passing on figures showing that two-thirds of new businesses fail in the first five years, I couldn’t quite believe it and softened the bad news, reinterpreting and misinterpreting, unconsciously, the very clear data, making it look as if only a third (which seemed like a lot to me) failed in that period. Having introduced one error, I went on to compound it in another sentence. It’s fixed now. I think I’ve eliminated the errors. But please check me.

Okay, bad enough, but that isn’t the whole story. Yesterday I got an e-mail from my sister, asking for clarification in the post previous to the one I’d found errors in, and—sure enough!—I’d done something similar there. In my discussion of regression to the mean, I had both golfers doing better on the second day! It should have been only the golfer who did poorly the first day who did better the second, the one who did well the first day doing less well the second day. Again, I think my unconscious mind did not want to accept the statistical truth and was rejecting regression to the mean! Unconsciously I was perfectly willing to see improvement in the one golfer’s game but was not willing to see deterioration in the score of the other. I wanted to think he was “better” than that, not merely lucky on the first day.

When I found my mistakes on business failure rates, my first inclination was to berate myself for making errors in simple math (percentages and subtraction). I should never try to breeze through numbers, I told myself, and should always proof-read such material several times over. Numbers are my nemesis! Then my sister pointed out the other error, and it was like a lightning bolt. My problem wasn’t math! My problem was that the statistical evidence is so counter-intuitive that even when I believed it and wanted to tell others about it, I didn’t want to accept it fully myself!  No wonder these errors are so persistent!

Kahneman says of himself that while he is very aware of certain common errors in statistical thinking, it will never be “natural” to him to see the correct version first, that he will always have to be vigilant and correct his original thinking. So I sigh, make my corrections, and tell myself that I’m in good company....

3. Winter, Having Neglected Us Recently, Makes Another Appearance

At least, that’s what the forecast says. Already temperatures have dropped. Will we really get three days of snow? And what then? Cold and snow make winter more expensive (heat, plow) and more hazardous (slippery roads and sidewalks), but in the bigger picture we need the cold and snow cover. Without snow’s mulching effect, the ground would freeze too far down. Without cold, trees would bud out too early.

To every thing, there is a season, and snow and cold serve purposes both of nature and man here Up North. It's snowing and blowing like the dickens up here today!

Apology: If you need to contact me in the next few days, try phone instead of e-mail. Yes, more of those pesky technical difficulties to be addressed....

Christianity and Cruelty

Yes, that’s a contentious headline for today’s post, but what I have to say may surprise anyone looking for an indictment of religion, this or any other. Read on. Agree or disagree? Let me know.

This is Black History Month. If I ever read the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, it was a long time ago, so that’s the book I chose to begin in this first week of February. It is not pleasant reading: Douglass tells stories of life under slavery that rival the horrors of 20^th-century concentration camps. It’s hard to say what the “worst” of these horrors might have been, but the author singles out religious slave-owners as the cruelest:

In August, 1832, my master attended as Methodist camp-meeting held in the Bay-side, Talbot county [Maryland], and there experienced religion. I indulged a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did not do this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane. I was disappointed in both these respects. It neither made him to be humane to his slaves, nor to emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before. Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty.  – Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

When young Frederick’s ownership passes out of the family following several owners’ deaths, and when after that he is released from bondage to a cruel “breaker” of slaves, he eventually comes to “the best master I ever had, till I became my own master,” a certain Mr. Freeland.

Another advantage I gained in my new master was, he made no pretensions to, or profession of, religion; and this, in my opinion, was truly a great advantage. I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most appalling barbarity – a sanctifier for the most hateful frauds – and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholding find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me.

This apparent indictment of religion comes from the first-hand experience of one born into slavery, who knew various masters, and who did not escape to freedom until his 21^st year. 

Is religion then to be cited as a cause of cruelty, a logical rationale for slavery, just as many indict it as a cause of war? I have written about religion and war on another occasion, so anyone who knows me or has read this blog will not be surprised by my position, which is that while certain teachings may, under the guise of religion, help rationalize slavery or war, religion itself, Christianity or any other, does not provide the initial idea or impulse. If it did, how to explain the Abolitionist movement in the North, predominantly inspired by religion, “professing that slaveholding was incompatible with Christian piety”?

How to explain the deep faith felt by Frederick Douglass himself?

In order to make my case, I must briefly leave the slave narrative and even the issue of slavery in American history and turn to a field of current research that will at first seem far removed from my main subject. The research field is that of reasoning and statistics and how our intuitions lead us into hasty conclusions we are persuaded to abandon only rarely and reluctantly. The book laying out this story (less dramatic from one point of view but relevant to every single living human being) is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011).

Let’s start with Kahneman’s statement that our minds prefer causal explanations to statistically more accurate explanations. In a golf tournament, for example, a player who does well on Day 1 will generally not do as well on Day 2, whereas a player who performed badly on Day 1 will generally improve on Day 2. Statistically, this is explained by a law called “regression to the mean,” a law of demonstrated predictive value that runs so counter to our intuitions that we invariably prefer to “explain” the deterioration or improvement with causal stories. During one Winter Olympics, Kahneman writes,

I was startled to hear the sportscaster’s comments while athletes were preparing for their second jump: “Norway had a great first jump; he will be tense, hoping to protect his lead and will probably do worse” or “Sweden had a bad first jump and he knows he has nothing to lose and will be relaxed, which should help him to do better.” The commentator had obviously detected regression to the mean and had invented a causal story for which there was no evidence.

The less evidence we have for a prediction, Kahneman instructs us, the more we need to realize the bias of our expectation that the future will replicate the past, and the more we need to moderate predictions by allowing for regression to the mean.

The business of predicting sports outcomes seems very far, I realize, from any story about religion and cruelty, so I need another piece from the statistician’s bag of tricks, namely that the more extreme a case, the greater likelihood of regression to the mean. Kahneman makes up a news story, “Depressed children treated with an energy drink improve significantly over a three-month period” and says the claim it makes is perfectly true. Because depressed children constitute an extreme group, there is every likelihood that they will show improvement three months later, and this would be the case no matter what they did during those three months. It is only our human preference for causal stories that makes us want to attribute improvement to the energy drink. This is the reason that a control group is necessary to establish a causal link.

Returning to the original question about cruel slave-owners professing Christianity, I am certainly not going to try to explain them out of history, but I want to contrast them, one extreme group, with another extreme group, the Quaker Abolitionists in the North. If we look at a group comprising all professing American Christians during the 1830s, both the Quaker Abolitionists and the cruel slave-owners can be seen as extremes on opposite ends of a Christian continuum of reaction. Obviously, then, Christian principles and beliefs alone cannot be said to cause both a defense of the cruelest practices of slavery and a spirited and dedicated attack on the same institution (and neither would the cool-headed, rational statistician be surprised to find the most behavior change at the two extremes).

But this is unsatisfying, isn’t it? Statistics, while demonstrable, give us no explanation at all and leave us with nothing whatsoever to conclude about the relation of religious belief to behavior. This is where I want to put forward my own theory--untestable but not incongruent with either the experience of Douglass or the research of Kahneman—that it was the cognitive dissonance created by the conjunction of Christianity and slavery that drove one group of slave-owners to outrageous cruelty while simultaneously driving religious Quakers to take up the Abolitionist cause.

The term ‘cognitive dissonance’ does not appear in Kahneman’s book, but he does discuss cognitive ‘ease’ and ‘strain.’

Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

The reflective mind, in an attempt to resolve a contradiction or eliminate dissonance, will always reach first for a familiar bias. Slaveholders and Quakers began with different biases and thus naturally reached different conclusions, just as those who initially believe religion’s effects are beneficial will reach different conclusions from those who initially believe religion’s effects are harmful. Is religion, then, neutral? What do you think?

The institution of slavery was decidedly not neutral. Douglass describes his yearning for knowledge and freedom, his feeling of being “broken in body, soul, and spirit,” and then finding within himself the strength again to resist.

The battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free. The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for whatever else might follow, even death itself. He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery. I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection....

Both the slave and the slave-owner lived slavery’s contradiction in the mind, but the slave lived it also in his body. Little wonder that daily experiencing of such a contradiction would drive many masters to cruelty, alcoholism, or both; less wonder that the hunger for freedom could never be eradicated in the slave.

Douglass remarks that while some think there could be no fellow feeling among slaves, he found his fellow slaves “noble souls.”

We were linked and interlinked with each other. I loved them with a love stronger than any thing I have experienced since. ... I believe we would have died for each other.

Common experience, recognition of one another as human beings, and their shared desire for freedom for knowledge and freedom bound them to each other.

-- Here I must leave off for today. I am less than halfway through Douglass’s and Kahneman’s books, and my whole tying together of the two is probably premature, but I cannot help trying to bring together these two very different books I am presently reading, going from one to the other with a fascinated mind....