By Pamela Paul
nytimes

With no small amount of trepidation, I lay open here the first page of my diary — high-­schoolish stabs at intellectualism, fleeting girlish obsessions, deliberately obscure annotations and all. After many failed adolescent attempts at keeping a journal, the summer after my junior year in high school, I finally found a format I could adhere to: Never mind describing the back-and-lack-of-forths of unrequited crushes and falling-outs with friends. I decided to list the books I read instead.

And I’ve stuck with this Book of Books, or Bob, as I’ve come to call it, ever since. Were my house to burst suddenly into flames, I would bypass the laptop and photo albums and even, God forgive me, my children’s artwork in order to rescue Bob, the record of every book I’ve read or didn’t finish reading since the summer of 1988.

The impetus for starting my book of books had less to do with recording my life than with documenting what my embarrassingly faulty memory failed to hold on to. I often can’t remember if I’ve read a book or not, nor do I remember the barest substance of those I have. A former beau once demanded to know the hero’s name in “Of Human Bondage” six months after I’d read it. “His object of desire’s name was Mildred,” I answered miserably. Though I’d spent more than 600 pages and nearly a month with the character, I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name. (It’s Philip, if you must know.)

Bob may not reveal the identities of individual characters — all that sort of thing is still lost — but it does show how one book led to another or prompted a total shift in genre. It records whether I’ve read an author before, and if so, when. Why had I left him, and what drew me back? Over the years, it’s become in certain ways even more of a personal record than a diary might be, not about what happened but about how what happened made me think, drove my interests, shaped my ideas.

It’s also become an itinerary of where I’ve been and where I really was while I was there. During my 20s, when I lived abroad and traveled frequently, I would annotate Bob with my location at the time, recording the serendipity of reading a particular book in a particular place. I remember how, lying in a dormitory in Mauriac, an unspectacular hamlet in central France where I was staying on an American Field Service program, I read the subject of the first entry, inspired by Baryshnikov’s performance in “Metamorphosis” on Broadway: “The Trial” (fittingly, an unfinished work).

Location often dictated content. When I backpacked through western China in the early 1990s, I picked up whatever discards I could get from passing travelers — Donna Tartt’s “Secret History”; a middling Tom Sharpe satire; “Ethan Frome.” I remember reading “Moby-Dick” during a lonely holiday on Ko Phi Phi, while most vacationers more reasonably nursed hangovers with potboilers and romance. And reading “A Distant Mirror” in northern France, where I could visit the nearby Château de Coucy.

I admitted to Bob when I read self-help or reread old favorites or tossed aside “Interview With the Vampire” after one chapter, mystified by its raging popularity. Bob knew that I was perennially behind on pop-cultural phenomena, that I read “A Civil Action” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities” years after the cocktail-party chatter faded. That I never finished “Paradise Lost” for freshman English. With 24 years of data, Bob reveals as much about my literary foibles, passing curiosities and guilty pleasures as any other diary.

For these reasons, I don’t generally share Bob with others. Whether it stems from envy or disappointment or genuine outrage, other people’s reactions to Bob are almost universally negative. “You’re tallying up books like the ticking off of accomplishments,” one ex-boyfriend accused me, as if I’d admitted to quantifying parental love or indexing my inner beauty. “Hurry, go note it in Bob,” he’d gibe every time I closed a book.

“What does this tell you if you don’t remember anything about the book?” another asked, suggesting an expanded Bob with a page of my impressions of each book in its stead. (That lasted one book; the relationship didn’t last much longer.) “You’re not seriously going to allow books on tape, are you?” demanded a third.

Quite a few people just can’t get past the numbers. I didn’t even think to enumerate my entries until I was somewhere in the 300s, at which point I went back and counted. But I will admit to satisfaction in the growing tally, if also an element of danger: Have I read as many books this March as I did last? What’s my yearly average? What of the long books that slow me down: “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” “The Power Broker,” “The Pickwick Papers”? There’s also the inexorable decline over time, my rate dropping in response to accumulated responsibilities, children to care for, piled-up magazines competing for my attention.

Bob is otherwise showing his age. At some point, I spilled coffee on him; the gray cover is mottled, and one corner is woody and bare. Truly hopeless, I occasionally forget to enter a book I’ve just read. But I always eventually go back, ever faithful, and note the missing volumes.

Shortly after we met, my husband met Bob and came up with his own variation, the Blob (Big List of Books), which he enters into his computer. An upgrade, I ­decided.

If a child is dosed with psychotropic drugs throughout the process of growing up,  what does that mean for their sense of agency? For their ability to achieve mastery over their emotions and behavior? Who would they be if not for their pill?

— Casey Schwartz
thedailybeast

By Eric Liu
theatlantic

In a recent episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones, a treacherous courtier tells the queen regent he knows the true identity of the young king’s father. “Information is power,” he hisses. Immediately, she orders her guards to seize him, shutter his business, and kill him — and then, just as quickly, she makes a show of casually changing her mind. As her men release the shaken courtier she retorts, “Power is power.”

American politics is not a game of thrones. But it is an arena for the exercise and pursuit of power. Indeed, our constitutional democratic market republic is far more complex, with far more permutations of potency than any king’s court ever had. To understand civic life and history in the United States is to understand power, public and private, in its fullest possible expression.

Why, then, doesn’t anyone teach it like that?

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who has devoted her post-Supreme Court career to reviving civics, points out that the point of free, compulsory public schooling was to make citizens. But over recent decades, the quality and availability of civic education in our schools has been in serious decline.

This is partly because the left has pushed schools away from an Americanizing mission, while the right has made any interesting substantive debate about American history or society subject to toxic controversy (see the Arizona law banning ethnic studies). These and other forces — like the push to promote STEM subjects — have left civics neglected, underfunded, and decidedly unsexy.

The results are distressing, if not surprising. Nearly two-thirds of our students today are below proficiency in national tests of civic knowledge. Less than a third of eighth graders can identify the purpose of the Declaration of Independence.

A few encouraging innovations have arisen in response. O’Connor has launched iCivics.org, an online platform that uses video games to teach civics to over a million middle schoolers. Participant Media’s TakePart.com will debut a series next week called 60-Second Civics, explaining things like the Electoral College with lively animated videos tuned to Gen Y sensibilities. Rock the Vote has created a pop-infused “Democracy Class” program for high school students.

But in most classrooms where civics is still being taught today, something central is missing. Students get facts and explanations of process. Sometimes they get a real encounter with an issue like poverty or sustainability. What they almost never get is this: a systematic understanding of how to get what they want.

I propose to revive civics by making it squarely about the thing people are too often afraid to talk about in schools: power, and the ways it is won and wielded in a democracy.

Imagine a curriculum that taught students how to be powerful — not only to feel empowered but to be fluent in the language of power and facile in its exercise.

It would teach them that civic power — the capacity to effect desired outcomes in common life – can derive from ideas, wealth, status, charisma, collective voice, and control of violence. It would show how power throughout our country’s history has been exercised and justified, for good and for ill.

A power civics curriculum would focus on a host of hard skills often ignored in procedural or fact-centered civics lessons:

• How to see the underlying power dynamics beneath every public controversy.
• How to read the power map of any community.
• How to organize and mobilize people to achieve an objective.
• How to force certain issues into public discussion.
• How to challenge entrenched interests.
• How to apply pressure on elected officials.

These kinds of how-to’s would make historical set-pieces like the Ratification or the Missouri Compromise suddenly much more vivid. They would illuminate contemporary fights over health care. They could be used to shed light on the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street or the antecedents of both.

This approach — a pedagogy of the self-governing — would best be learned and taught by doing. A power civics curriculum should be hands-on and project-based, giving students the chance to move people and catalyze action.

There do exist excellent experiential civics curricula where students create community projects and advocate for policy. The Civic Action Project developed by the Constitutional Rights Foundation is one promising example. But “lab” approaches like these are the exception today, not the rule. Every classroom should be teaching youth the strategies and laws of civic power.

Does all this seem unseemly? Perhaps one reason why so few civics courses go this route is that the whole topic feels so Machiavellian–which is to say European, medieval, calculating. It’s too Game of Thrones.

But pick up any book by, say, Robert Caro — whether about Robert Moses and the making of modern New York or young Lyndon Johnson and the path he took from Texas Hill Country to the White House. Take a look at why your city council chose one development proposal over another. Ask why Congress can’t bring itself to disfavor its donors. You will quickly recognize what you weren’t ever taught as a kid: There is a secret curriculum that explains how stuff actually gets done in America. In a democracy, that knowledge should be democratized.

Could power civics be abused to create amoral tacticians who use their skills for evil? Sure. Such a risk, though, is inherent in the revelation of any knowledge, from microbiology to law. This just underscores the need for ethical context — for the why that comes with the how — and some civiccharacter education.

In the end, teaching civics while avoiding the topic of power is like teaching physics while avoiding thermodynamics. It’s a bland pretense, demotivating to teacher and pupil alike.

All young people want to understand how to be more powerful and effective, individually and in groups. Give them that understanding — teach them power — and they will be highly motivated to keep learning. They will be curious about the origins of today’s social and economic arrangements. They will develop an eye for ways to reform those arrangements. They will cultivate an appreciation for what is exceptional about the system we’ve inherited. They will feel more responsible for combating rot and sclerosis in that system.

They will, in short, become a generation of great citizens. That would be powerful. And it just might save the republic.

I have already thought about it before, where does fascism begin. It does not begin with the first bombs that are thrown, it does not begin with the terror one can write about, in every newspaper. It begins in the relationships between people. Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman.

— Ingeborg Bachmann, in a 1973 interview
(via tumblr)

We buy our books to give shape to our thinking, but it never occurs to us that the manner in which we make our purchases may have a more lasting influence on our character than the contents of the book.

— Michael Sacasas, “Technology in America“

If yonder raindrop should its heart disclose,
Behold therein a hundred seas displayed.
In every atom, if thou gaze aright,
Thousands of reasoning beings are contained.
The gnat in limbs doth match the elephant.
In name is yonder drop as Nile’s broad flood.
In every grain a thousand harvests dwell.
The world within a grain of millet’s heart.
The universe in the mosquito’s wing contained.
Within that point in space the heavens roll.
Upon one little spot within the heart
Resteth the Lord and Master of the worlds.
Therein two worlds commingled may be seen . . .

— The Sage Mahmoud Shabistari,
in the Fourteenth Century
(The Secret Garden)

This miniscule world of the sand grains is also the world of inconceivably minute beings, which swim through the liquid film around a grain of sand as fish would swim through the ocean covering the sphere of the earth. Among this fauna and flora of the capillary water are single-celled animals and plants, water mites, shrimplike crustacea, insects, and the larvae of infinitely small worms — all living, dying, swimming, feeding, breathing, reproducing in a world so small that our human senses cannot grasp its scale, a world in which the microdroplet of water separating one grain of sand from another is like a vast, dark sea.

— Marine Biologist Rachel Carson,
Twentieth Century
(The Edge of the Sea)

Lodged in the slime they say: ‘Once we were grim

And sullen in the sweet air above, that took
A further gladness from the play of sun;
Inside us, we bore acedia’s dismal smoke.

We have this black mire now to be sullen in.’
This canticle they gargle from the craw,
Unable to speak whole words.

 — The Inferno of Dante
tr. Robert Pinsky

To laypersons (and to many sociologists in their unguarded moments) it seems absurd to think about age as anything but chronological fact and as something every individual simply is. Like race and gender, for most people, most of the time, age is unproblematic. When asked “How old are you?” we offer the number of years since our birth. When someone directs us to act our age, we know what age is (the number of years since our birth), usually know what is being demanded of us, and often are prepared to account for our “misbehavior.” We assume that as people get older they will fulfill different roles in a predictable sequence. When the sequence or timing is altered, we linguistically mark the discrepancy (teenage mothers, nontraditional students), and we want an explanation, an account, for being “off time.”

As with race and gender, the apparently objective and factual nature of age make it ideal for sociological inquiry. Sociologists now understand race as a social construction rather than a biological “fact.” Race is defined by and constituted within social groups (How much “blood” makes one black or Native American?), and it is accomplished by individuals (What does it mean to “pass” as one race and not another?). Moreover, a sociological understanding of race has led us to appreciate more fully the relations of power and the pervasive normative ideas that create and sustain the supposedly biological “fact” of race.

Similarly, sociologists understand gender as a social construction and individual accomplishment. Gender is defined and constituted within social groups (What does masculinity entail for a heterosexual steelworker? a gay bank manager?), and it is accomplished by individuals in interaction (How does a woman in a male-dominated job “act” feminine?). Further, normative cultural ideas traditionally have equated gender with women. We view the dominant group, in this case men, as if its members had no gender.

There is much to suggest that age, like race and gender, is anything but natural and involves much more than the number of years since one’s birth. “Act your age. You’re a big kid now,” we say to children to encourage independence (or obedience). “Act your age. Stop being so childish,” we say to other adults when we think they are being irresponsible. “Act your age; you’re not as young as you used to be,” we say to an old person pursuing “youthful” activities. The sanctioned ages vary, but the command “Act!” remains the same. When we say “act your age” we press for behavior that conforms to norms. However, the saying also expresses a commonsense understanding that age is not natural or fixed, and it implies that age requires work, i.e. physical or mental effort. As such, the saying encapsulates a fundamentally sociological view of age and provides us with the useful metaphor of performance. Age is an act.

As readers too — look! — brought to a standstill before the page — how wide, now, we must open our eyes.

The eyes, the lips, of the reader move, then, and as they move, the music of the work begins; those moving lips sustain it; but, for this great novel, it is as if the eyes were lighting here, then there, upon the surface of a series of tapestries, observing in each place the signs: symbols like the figures of the lion and the lady, the little dog, the silver moons, sung above an oval island.

– William H. Gass,
Introduction to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
by Rainer Maria Rilke

And if one day all we do and suffer done
should seem suddenly trivial and strange,
as though it were no longer clear
why we should have kicked off our childhood shoes
for such things — would not this length
of yellowed lace, this densely woven swatch
of linen flowers, be enough to hold us here?
See: this much was accomplished.

A life, perhaps, was made too little of, who knows?
a happiness in hand let slip; yet despite this,
for each loss there appeared in its place
this spun-out thing, not lighter than life,
and yet perfect, and so beautiful that all our so-be-its
are no longer premature, smiled at, and held in abeyance.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

No. Rilke is not Malte. Yet Malte is Rilke. Just as matter and mind, for Spinoza, were essential but separate aspects of one natural whole, so Malte is an aspect of Rilke — Rilke see with one “I”. And Malte, when he describes the remaining interior wall of a demolished house (to choose a celebrated example), is penetrating more fully into things than Rilke or Rodin or any one of us would, if we were merely walking by on some Parisian sidewalk, because this vision, like so many others, is an observation taken home, and taken to heart, and held warmly there until it rises like bread. Anyone can stand still and take notes. Quite a different eye or recording hand constructs one thing out of its response to another. It is the artful act of composition that creates the emotional knowledge which such passages contain — the metaphors of misery and shame and decay which arise like imagined odors from the wall. Thus Rilke comes into possession of this knowledge in the same moment Malte does; but he does so (and consequently suffers a stroke of synesthesia, smelling the ugliness he has just seen) because he is imagining Malte; and Malte, to be Malte, must make these discoveries; must run in horror from this wall which he feels exposes his soul to every passerby like a flung-open coat. One probably cannot say it too often: writing is, among other things, an activity which discovers its object; which surprises itself with the meanings it runs into, and passes sometimes with apologies, or recognizes with a start like an old friend encountered in a strange place.

— William H. Gass,
Introduction to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
by Rainer Maria Rilke

The leaves are falling, falling from far away,
as though a distant garden died above us;
they fall, fall with denial in their wave.

And through the night the hard earth falls
farther than the stars in solitude.

We all are falling. Here, this hand falls.
And see — there goes another. It’s in us all.

And yet there’s One who’s gently holding hands
let this falling fall and never land.

— Railer Maria Rilke, “Autumn”