Arrowsmith (Pulitzer Winning Novel)

Medicine. Scientific Research. Public Health. Bubonic Plague. Commercialism. Salesmanship. Success. Men of Measured Merriment. Politics. 

Arrowsmith, written by Sinclair Lewis, won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. It was made into a film in 1931. I found the novel a nice change of pace from some of the previous Pulitzer winners that focused on domestic drama.

Briefly, Lewis describes Martin Arrowsmith’s journey into the world of medicine. The story opens with a young Martin working for a doctor. The storyline continues with Martin going to medical school, taking various jobs, becoming a minor hero, and fighting to do what he loves. Lewis shows how various people in Martin’s life support or undermine his love of research. Lewis also shows the politics and social aspects of medicine.

While Arrowsmith is set in an earlier time, a modern audience can easily relate to it. The novel speaks to the idea of doing something we love and to having a calling. In some ways the novel is a love story. Lewis shows Martin’s love for research, his love for various women and his admiration and fondness for various men. My guess is that many modern medical novelists were inspired by this story.

Forward the Foundation (SF Book)

The Loss of Loved Ones. Despair. Hope for the Future. A Plan. Subtle Manipulation.

Years ago when I overenthusiastically described a book to a friend, she sarcastically quipped, “You know it isn’t real; it’s pretend.” So, I have to confess that part of my mind thinks of Forward the Foundation as the biography of Hari Sheldon. The book makes me sentimental. It was written at the end of Isaac Asimov’s life and published after his death. While the novel ends with the triumph of a life’s work, it contains many stories of loss. The novel is another example of good storytelling, with little unexpected twists tucked in to make it interesting.

Briefly, Forward the Foundation fills in the period of Hari Sheldon’s life between Prelude to Foundation and Foundation. Asimov describes the origins of The Sheldon Plan, First Foundation, and Second Foundation. He describes the decay of Trantor over the decades as well as the aging of Sheldon and many of the other major characters. One bright spot is the birth of Sheldon’s granddaughter Wanda, the daughter of Sheldon and Dors’ foster-son, Raych. While the original Foundation Series novels refer to Sheldon in terms of some larger than life character, Asimov shows how other individuals made major contributions that made The Sheldon Plan possible.

Besides being entertaining, Asimov’s Foundation Series made me think. — I started reading the series almost a year ago. — I look at politics differently, losing my last bit of naiveté. The novels made me more aware of cause and effect on a large scale. Forward the Foundation also makes references to making subtle changes in order to bring about a major outcome. This reminds me so much of the recent attempts to stabilize the world economy. All in all, I’m glad I read the whole series.

End Note: Asimov wrote a Robot Series that has some overlap with the Foundation Series. Also, there are  a number of Foundation novels not written by Asimov.

The Dog Who Knew Too Much (Mystery Book)

A Shady Ex-husband. A Wilderness Camp. A Missing Boy. A Gold Mine. Corrupt Officials.  

The Dog Who Knew Too Much, the fourth book in the Chet and Bernie Mystery series by Spencer Quinn, was well worth waiting for. (The book was at our library almost two months before I was able to check it out. One day I almost tackled someone who got a hold of the book before I reached the New Book shelf.) Like the previous books, it is intriguing, warm, and fun; it is a solid mystery. I love this series because it is fresh and interesting. Because the story is told from the point of view of Chet (the dog), we are given details that we might not normally pay attention to: scents, the flow of air, small body gestures, critters, faint sounds, and, of course, food. The Dog Who Knew Too Much can easily be understood without reading the previous books but rewards fans. We not only catch up with Chet and Bernie, but renew our acquaintance with Bernie’s girlfriend Suzie —who is kickass in this book—Iggy and Mr. Parsons.

Briefly, Bernie is approached by Anya, who wants Bernie to pose as her boyfriend when she goes to Parents’ Day at the wilderness camp her son is attending. She is afraid of her ex-husband and wants a bodyguard. When Bernie and Anya arrive, they discover that her son, Devin, is missing, never making it back from an overnight trip with his group. The story becomes even more complicated when Bernie is implicated in a murder. What happened to Devin? Who is the real murderer or was there even a murder? Can Chet once again rescue his best friend?

I don’t remember laughing out loud while reading the previous books, but I did with this one. It is humorous without being too cute. Bernie is the type of person I would want on my side. I wish I had someone as loyal to me as Chet is to Bernie. The book is easy and quick to read, while still being intelligent. Part of me was slightly (a teeny, teeny bit) disappointed with the book, but I have felt that way with almost every sequel I have read this year. I still am talking up this book to everyone who will listen to me.

Focus (Quote)

Even though I am no longer taking classes in or practicing Liuhebafa—an internal martial art— I am still finding inspiration in reading Liuhebafa Five Character Secrets by Paul Dillon. Here is a wonderful quote on focus. I especially like the imagery: feeling unfocused, imagine a tiger.

Creative Imagination (Intent) moves like a fearsome tiger.

A tiger on a hunt is single pointed, totally focused on its prey. When it moves it is awesome in its ferocity and power often bringing down animals that are larger and more powerful like a water buffalo or an elephant.

Just so, you must use this example of focused intensity when you are establishing your intention or goal. You must have the strength of purpose to stick to achieve this goal. Do not think that something is too big or too difficult to accomplish. Through experience you will see how holding onto your dream and steadily working at it can bring the most fantastic results.

Fifth Tai Chi Class of the Season

Did you ever go through one of those periods where you were feeling blah, absolutely blah? Space aliens could land and proclaim that you were their long lost queen, and you would just roll your eyes and say, “Whatever.”  I managed to eat, shower, and get to class without much incident. Before class started, I went into the Ladies Room and noticed that my ponytail was unsalvageable: a bad, bad hair day. While we initially did the Tai Chi form, Bob played a CD that he had recorded which describes what Tai Chi is and its benefits. It mildly irritated me; I couldn’t focus on the form and listen to it at the same time. I did like the section where he said that Tai Chi improves the ability to visualize.

As in previous weeks, for the rest of the class we focused on different things as we did the form. An old one, that we first focused on when we originally learned the form, was imagining that our heads were suspended from above, almost like a puppet. Conversely, we focused on sinking our weight; perhaps the most important concept in Tai Chi. This is what helps generate power. We next focused on all the big and little circles our bodies made as we moved through the different postures, working to make the circles smooth and complete. This was one of my favorite exercises of the day. We moved on to focusing on whether we were pivoting on the balls or heels of our feet and how that affected the energy in our bodies. Lastly, we paid attention to how expanded or contracted our hands were—the closeness of our fingers—in different parts of the form. I never thought about that before, and I think I might have had some of my hand positions reversed from how they were supposed to be.

We are not perky, eager students every day. We do the best we can, and forgive ourselves for not being what we wish we were. It is part of committing to a practice. Focusing and refocusing, despite any negativity, is how we grow. This is true of Tai Chi, Yoga, meditation, and, I would imagine, a lot of other practices. Sometimes it helps to admit it.

New Year’s Resolutions (Quote)

I found this quote in Words that Matter which is taken from Oprah Magazine.

Instead of waking up New Year’s morning and saying, “I’m going to do X now,” then berating yourself a month later when that resolution didn’t work, remember: You’re doing nothing less than rewiring your brain. Approach change as if you’re learning a new language or new instrument. Obviously, you’re not going to be fluent or play symphonies instantly; you’ll need constant focus and practice.

Rebecca Skloot

Of Jung, Spock, and Revolution

Experiential and Participatory, those are some of the words that describe how we have changed in the last 40+ years, continuing on with some of my thoughts from my last blog entry, Stand On Zanzibar. We are no longer satisfied to passively watch an entertainer. We are less concerned about finding the right teacher or guru.

In the world of entertainment we want to have an active role. At the very least we want to choose when we watch a television program or vote for the winner of a reality TV series. Many of us want and expect our entertainment to come from multiple platforms. We want more than a book or a TV program; we want a larger experience. [Last night I finished Victory of Eagles by Naomi Novik, and one of my first thoughts was “I wonder which dragon I am" and made a mental note to see if there was a personality quiz on-line.] We twitter, blog, Facebook, YouTube. If we can’t be discovered by a talent scout, we put our art out on the internet and let the “public decide.” We write fan fiction, create avatars, roleplay our favorite characters. It used to be only a bunch of nerds wearing Mr. Spock ears; now a larger percent of us want to be immersed in our entertainment.

The authority figure role has also diminished over the last 40 years. Instead of a staff of paid encyclopedia writers, people from all over share their knowledge on sites like Wikipedia. We ask questions in internet groups. We share recipes and helpful hints on websites. We are more likely to actively seek out the answers ourselves from multiple sources, rather than looking to one expert and, we are more likely to want to make the final decision ourselves.

I am reading Jung on Active Imagination by Joan Chodorow. Carl Jung drew mandalas almost every morning in 1918 through 1919. Finally one day he realized: “One could not go beyond the center. The Center is goal and everything is directed toward that center,…the self is the principle and archetype of orientation and meaning.” This profound idea helped change psychology. But the point is that Jung actively participated in the process. He needed to experience hundreds of mandalas to reach his conclusion. He was an unusual man. Now, more and more people want to interact with life experientially, whether directly or virtually, to find their wisdom.

I hear friends and family lamenting about how few people attend Sunday services. Many churches are filled with old congregates. Part of the situation is that traditional churches are working on the old model. Younger people want an experiential religion. They are less likely to want someone with impressive credentials standing in front of them. Yet, I also hear of churches bucking the trend and creating new experiences for their members, some taking full advantage of social media.

Part of the revolution of the last forty years is where we put ourselves. We are no longer playing follow the leader. We are putting ourselves in the center of our world and then creating the picture of our lives by reaching out to the larger world around us. The idea is not so different from Jung and his mandalas.

The Graveyard Book

Last night I finished reading the 2009 Hugo Winning Novel, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. The story is about a boy whose family is murdered when he is a baby and who is brought up by the dead and not so dead inhabitants of a graveyard. It isn’t something I would normally have chosen to read, but it did leave me thinking, as most books do. And, I found two quotes that fit in with the theme of this blog.

On Mastery:

There were some lessons that Bod had mastered. He had eaten a bellyful of unripe apples, sour and white-pipped, from the tree some years before, and had regretted it for days, his guts cramping and painful while Mrs. Owens lectured him on what not to eat. Now he always waited until the apples were ripe before eating them, and never ate more than two or three a night.

If only the rest of us could be so bright, particularly those of us who sit in odd positions and end up in a lot of pain, only to sit that way the next day.

Inspiration:

You’re alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential.

Making the Abstract Concrete

I always feel a bit better when I find other people who think like I do about learning. I have been reading Movement for Actors, edited by Nicole Potter. One of the essays is by Alan S. Questel who describes the work of Feldenkrais.

To make the abstract concrete is a kind of learning that is not prevalent in our culture. Most of our learning is informational—facts and ideas that we take in through books, lectures, and other media, where we listen to someone else tell us what we should know and understand.

Real learning, the kind we experienced as children, comes from our ability to make distinctions and create new relationships to the world we live in. Through this kind of learning, we can develop a sense of self based on an internal criteria and inner authority.

The Dip

Seth Godin’s book The Dip reminds me a lot of George Leonard’s book Mastery. Both of them talk about the non-glamorous middle period after the excitement of the beginning wears off where many, if not most, people quit. Here is Godin’s description of The Dip:

At the beginning, when you first start something, it’s fun.…it’s interesting, and you get plenty of good feedback from the people around you. Over the next few days and weeks, the rapid learning you experience keeps you going. Whatever your new thing is, it’s easy to stay engaged in it. And then the Dip happens. The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery…The Dip is the combination of bureaucracy and busywork….The Dip is the difference between the easy “beginner” technique and the more useful “expert” approach…The Dip is the long stretch between beginner’s luck and real accomplishment.

Change Begins Within

Change begins from within and then extends outwards. Something from outside can stimulate it but until it happens inside of us, it’s not ours.


Tian Dayton, The Soul’s Companion

Mine

Lately I have been going through one of those phases again where I wonder how can I know so much and yet my life appear to be so screwed up. I like this quote in The Principles of Effortless Power by Peter Ralston:

A lot of people want to learn something, and simply study from someone who tells them to do this and that, and that’s legitimate….In my case, I wanted to make the art mine. And in order to be mine, I had to have the ability. I had to discover and understand it. It didn’t do me any good if someone said something and I believed it; only if I understood it, only when it was my experience and my ability, was it useful.

Icicle

These past few weeks I have been struggling with the idea of head knowledge verses applied knowledge. Some ideas make so much sense when I read them or think about them, but when I need to apply them to a problem in my life, I don’t feel very smart.

A tangible way to illustrate this is to talk about my experience trying to make a beaded icicle. I knew that I needed to gradually increase the circumference of the icicle, create some sort of spiral effect, and have variegation. After my first attempt, I also discovered that I needed to make my object stiff. Even thought the finished icicle is fairly abstract and freeform, I needed four attempts to come up with something that “worked.”

I am beginning to believe that much of life is an artistic endeavor. My parents were so hell bent on “getting it right the first time.” In truth, most of life is just stringing one bead at a time, with a few basic principles in mind, and seeing how our efforts turn out, knowing that we can try something a little--or a lot--different the next time.

Substitutes for Self-confidence

In The Ordeal of Change, Eric Hoffer talks about how to overcome that awkwardness that most of us feel when we begin something new.

Faith, enthusiasm, and passionate intensity in general are substitutes for the self-confidence born of experience and the possession of skills.

I sometimes imagine opening up my arms wide and just flinging myself with mindless abandon.

Trying Again

I think most new Tai Chi students would benefit from this quote from Linda Myoki Lehrhaupt from T’ai Chi as a Path of Wisdom:

…t’ai chi has nothing to do with perfecting technique. It has nothing to do with mastering oneself, if by that we mean controlling our feelings or thoughts. It is, rather, the practice of the student who, frustrated and angry at not getting “it,” starts to walk out the door but then returns to her training place and vows to try once more. Being able to say “I’ll try again” is one of the deepest expressions of faith in oneself.

Persistence

I like this quote from the The Heartmath Solution:

Don’t fall into the trap of feeling as if things will never get better or telling yourself, “I’ve tried, but it’s just not working.” That period between making an effort to change and actually registering the results is when most people stumble, lapsing back into old behaviors.

Poetry Challenge

I was an English major, belonged to an off-campus poetry group, and wrote a poem nightly for the first few years after graduation. I am not sure when I stopped. All I know is that I have written only a handful of poems in recent years.

This month I have been participating in a poetry challenge. Each day the moderator gives us our topic or form, and we are to create a poem and post it.

My first surprise was how much emotion I had bottled up. I wrote my first poem and cried. Since then I have had many mornings of releasing long pent up feelings.

My Tai Chi friend Elizabeth regularly participates in poetry slams, unfortunately I only see her briefly when her class ends and Liuhebafa begins. For the first two weeks of the month I couldn’t connect with her to tell her about the challenge. As I waved my hand weakly in her direction, I told a number of other women about the challenge. What surprised me was how interested they were. I hadn’t expected that at all.

Poetry feels so new to me. I supposed it is another example of “Beginner’s Mind.” One of the many things I am enjoying is how my attention has been changing. I pay more attention to small sensory experiences. I notice a squirrel, the details of a cup, the juxtaposition of objects in the lawn. I have been reading novels by Christopher Fowler lately and am amazed how small details draw me into his stories. The same technique is true for poetry writing.

I think we all need something like the poetry challenge. Too often we feel impotent in our lives. The latest news story is the Swine Flu Pandemic. We can feel totally powerless. “Wash your hands.” Yea, right. I literally had someone sneeze in my face earlier this winter. But when I wrote my first Sestina this morning, I felt powerful. Maybe I only felt that way for an hour, but I felt it. I am sure my immune system, my emotions, and my fight or flight reflex felt that too. I will miss the challenge once the month ends.

Knowing

I have been feeling more than a tad uncertain lately. I found this quote from Ernest Holmes in The Voice Celestial:

I want to know and know that I know.

Eternalities

I normally don’t consider myself a wordsmith, but every so often a word will give me pause. Today I was reading an affirmation by Ernest Homes in The Science of Mind “…the Good, the Enduring, and the True are Eternalities in my experience.” Try saying that phrase a few times fast. Every time I tripped over the word “Eternalities.” I wasn’t the only one who had problems. Microsoft Word flagged it as a misspelling, but would let me look up Eternality: “Something that lasts for all time without beginning or end.” The pop up window even gave me some clues as to how to pronounce it.

The word “Eternalities” is like a neglected child in a large extended family. It has five syllables in a world of short words. It describes a very, very long period of time in an era of short attention spans. It describes something very spiritual in an era of consumerism, though the era may be ending. Yet, “Eternalities” seems to be invaluable to anyone who wants to think of the Divine. It is like the kid with insomnia who wakes up the family when he smells the gas leak. He finally gets a little respect.

Now all I need to do is use it three times in conversation and the word will be mine forever—or so the theory goes.

Knowing What I Don't Know

One of my favorite experiences is the feeling of knowing what I don’t know. I can almost see and feel a space opening up in what formerly felt like pure chaos. A question or an intention appears. In Liuhebafa, I don’t know the transition between “the crouching tiger listens to the wind” and “feint to the east but attack to the west.” I am unsure about the weight changes in “rein in the horse.”

A lot of learning needs to take place before I can begin to know what I don’t know. In the beginning, the form is just a roiling blur, just so much chaos. When I am practicing at home, I begin to be able to put together a few movements, many of which are wrong. I still am not sure where to focus my attention when I get back to class on Saturday. But finally in the beginning movements of the form, I am able to know where to focus my attention. I am able to fill in the gaps of my ignorance.

In Tai Chi, I am also struggling to identify what I don’t know. Here, I am primarily my own teacher since I am not officially taking a class this fall. I find myself sleepwalking through the form when I practice at home. I know that I need to focus on sinking my weight, but haven’t I been telling myself this for a long time? But then there is that delicious moment when I again know what I don’t know. I don’t know what it feels like in my upper legs when I sink my weight when I do “cloud hands.” Now, I can begin to experiment with that.

This feeling of knowing what I don't know goes beyond Tai Chi and Liuhebafa. Usually, whenever I learn anything new, I begin with reading everything I can get my hands on. I plunge into the murky lake of ideas. Usually I find this great fun. Once in awhile this stage lasts too long. I also like the feeling of having a direction or three or a whole spider web of directions. I like a rhythm between chaos and direction.

I like people who know what they don’t know. I feel more confident in their abilities when I know they are searching in a particular direction. I like to know that they are asking for advice or seeking out information. I mistrust people who think they themselves have all the answers.