Lord Valentine

Barbara Frederickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has written a book, Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, in which she argues that our ideas about love need to be overhauled. Love is neither a long-lasting, continually present emotion, nor a deep-rooted blood-tie of kinship. Rather, It’s a "micro-moment of positivity resonance" that you can share with anyone you happen to come into connect with in the course of your day.

Part of Fredrickson's motive in advancing this unorthodox theory (according the article in the Atlantic where I heard about the book)  is to remind lonely,  love-starved people that the absence of a “significant other” in their lives doesn’t mean they’re incapable of loving or are leading a loveless existence. She writes:  "Thinking of love purely as romance or commitment that you share with one special person—as it appears most on earth do—surely limits the health and happiness you derive" from love.

The point is well-taken—and it has often been made before. But Frederickson veers into error when she suggests that the myriads of single people who are looking for a partner are in the grip of a "worldwide collapse of imagination.” 

The fact is that Frederickson’s definition of love—as a momentary thrill that we feel in spite of ourselves, which she and other biologists can no doubt write a chemical equation to describe—is severely limiting itself. The most profound and satisfying thrill of love is, perhaps, a low murmur of heartbreaking affection for that special someone with whom we have shared many years of living. (Some would go further and take the argument into the theological realm. But we’ll leave that train of thought for another time.)

I suspect that individuals who have experienced the long-standing affection of a soul-mate are better able to tap into those micro-moments of love that are all around us than those who lack a shared inner world. We love our spouse or significant other more than the clerk at Walgreens, not only because we know them far better and are tirelessly attracted and engaged by what we know, but also because we get far more in return. The ricochets of ongoing experience are the source of endless interest and more than occasional delight. 

For myself, I love the snow on the trees, the music on the stereo, the article in the morning paper about tofu, and a hundred other things just now. I love waving to the postal worker I see almost every day who returns my wave with an appreciative smile before returning to her plodding path around the block. But I love my wife Hilary a whole lot more.

This is not to say that Frederkson’s researches are unimportant. She presents us with an entirely new meaning for the phrase “love triangle”—it involves mirror neurons, oxytocin, and vagal tone. And she offers compelling proof that love is connected to the heart—via the vagus nerve. Her research also lends credence to the power of Buddhist and Jewish teachings of loving kindness to strengthen vagal tone, thus helping people to become more loving, whatever their condition in life might be.

Her advice to single folk--to seek out little moments of connection--is probably sound, though I’m not sure how she feels about flirting.

And when she describes love as "a single act, performed by two brains," she touches upon a realization as old as the troubadours, though it’s also possible to love something that doesn’t have a brain—a pear, say, or a mountain. Or a poem.

In one of his lyrics Bertrand de Ventadorn writes:

Of course it’s no wonder I sing

better than any other troubadour:

my heart draws me more toward love,

and I am better made for his command.

Heart body knowledge sense

strength and energy—I have set all on love,

The rein draws me straight toward love,

and I cannot turn toward anything else.

A man is really dead when he does not feel

some sweet taste of love in his heart;

and what is it worth to live without worth,

except to irritate everybody?

May the Lord God never hate me so

that I live another day, or even less than a day,

after I am guilty of being such a pest,

and I no longer have the will to love.

Italian Folk: Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino

I might describe the music of Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, who performed last night at the Cedar Cultural Center, as mesmerizing, but it seems odd to use a word derived from the practices of an eighteenth-century Austrian physician when referring to a South Italian band singing songs from a tradition dating back to ancient times, often in a Greek-tinted dialect. Then again, that adjective—mesmerizing—has largely lost its historical associations with the early days of therapeutic magnetism, and CGS makes no bones about the power of its music to ease the worries of daily living and elevate listeners to a loftier realm. 

I’d give them a testimonial any time.

The rhythm of the music last night was driven by large tambourines, and much of it held to the same medium up-tempo beat, though there were a few ballads in the mix, and the beat also rose to levels of genuine fury from time to time. The structure seldom varied from a tonic-dominant-tonic toggle, and the tunes, such as they were, resembled plangent cries and cackling, staccato shouts held within a narrow range of intervals. Some of the songs had a dark, rich-textured, almost drone-like harmony that reminded me of some a capella songs Alan Lomax collected in 1954 in Calabria, just around the instep from the band's home region of Salento (Rounder Records:11661-1803-2).

Nothing in the show even faintly resembled pop.

The CGS “sound” would soon become monotonous, however, were it not for the energy and explosive insistence with which it’s delivered and the virtuosity, both vocal and instrumental, of the musicians. Bagpipes, recorders, guitar and bouzouki, accordion, fiddle, several sizes of tambourines, and on one occasion, even a bag of stones tossed in the air again and again to establish a rhythm, with dust rising into the spotlights (from the mountain paths of Salento, perhaps?) 

It was easy to see, and to feel, that the musicians were grooving on the intensity of the fields of sound within which they moved. And it would not be too far-fetched to imagine that as the pulse of the music reached a pitch of intensity, we were being carried back beyond the boot of Italy, across the Adriatic to the origins of the Western musical tradition. 

On a slightly more intellectual note, it occurs to me that when done well, there is something fascinating about a musical style that doesn’t develop much, but draws its interest from tiny variations in short, edgy phrases happily repeated over and over again. (I think Stravinsky would agree.)

And then, from time to time, a dancer with dark, flowing hair, wearing a red dress (Silvia Perrone) would appear and prance about on the stage waving a black shawl. Her demeanor seemed less frantic, less hyper-charged, than the music she was dancing to, but it was pleasing nevertheless. This, we were told, was the tarantella, a dance with roots extending back for centuries.

There is some confusion about the name, however. Scholars tell us it derives from the city of Taranto, yet there is also a long-standing tradition that the dance developed as a cure for the bite of a local wolf spider or tarantula (also named after the city). The belief dates back to the sixteenth century that the spider’s bite was poisonous, causing a hysterical condition that would lead to death unless the victim performed a frenzied tarantella to exorcize the poison.

Vocalist Maria Mazzotta, a diminutive figure out of a fairy tale, had a high-pitched penetrating sound, like the buzz of a power saw in the garage next door—if such a sound can also be agitated and sweet and haunting. Giancarlo Paglialunga  delivered a booming shout from the right hand side of the stage while at the same time pounding away on his tamburrieddhu. Emanuele Licci offered up a lighter, more flexible lyric voice and when he wasn’t singing, he often took off spontaneously, dancing nimbly across the stage while strumming his bouzouki. Giulio Bianco’s Pan-like recorder trills were sometimes lost in the mix, but his bagpipe solos, delivered from center stage, were a treat.

Those hoping for a “O Sole Mio”-style café accordion from  Massimiliano Morabito left the hall disappointed, I’m sure. He kept to a heavy rhythmic pulse in which  individual notes were seldom discernible.

The band’s leader, Mauro Durante, did the talking, explaining the origins of the group (it was founded in 1975 by his father) and also offered up some extraordinary fiddling. His ten-minute solo on the tambourine exhibited a remarkable range of rhythms, colors, and pitches.

Not so long ago, Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino was performing in front of a hundred thousand people at the itinerant La Notte della Taranta festival in  Salento. Tuesday night it put on a spirited show in front of a hundred curious and enthusiastic Minnesotans, many of whom, by the time it was over, were dancing in the dark behind the delta of folding chairs clustered in front of the stage.

Many thanks to Cedar, and to Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino! And thanks, I guess, to the tarantula, too.

Unhappy with Happiness?

 There are those who conduct the polls, and those who tell us what the polls mean. Then there are people like me, who read such reports online and notice that the explanations being offered don’t match the statistics being presented.

A recent case in point: an article appeared in the Atlantic with the title, “There’s More to Life Than Happiness.” It begins with a discussion of Victor Frankl’s influential book, Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he contends that those who feel their life has meaning, and therefore “have something to live for,” fare better and deal with adversity more successfully than those who don’t. (For what it's worth, I read that book 40 years ago. I liked it.)

Frankl suggests that Americans don’t think much amount meaning nowadays, placing an emphasis, rather, on “being happy.”

"To the European," he’s quoted as saying, "it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'"

At this point the author of the article, Emily Esfahani Smith, shifts gears a little, referring to a recent Gallup poll that suggests 6 out of 10 Americans are happy. Two sentences further on, she notes a recent finding of the Center for Disease Control that 4 out of 10 Americans “have not discovered a satisfying life purpose.”

Here’s where the trouble begins. It would be reasonable to presume that those 60 percent who are happy have found meaning, and the 40 percent who are glum are drifting aimlessly through life. But that’s not what the evidence reports. It comes from two separate studies, one of which dealt with happiness, and the other with meaning.

There is no good reason to present these findings in the same paragraph. Perhaps recognizing that she has failed to “connect the dots,” Smith immediately moves on to yet further assertions with less specific data behind them: “Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research.”

Here is a real story…but it isn’t the one she’s reporting. It’s Todd Kashdan’s story. You can follow the link to explore his studies showing that those who pursue happiness more assiduously have less success finding it. 

But even here there’s a fly in the ointment. Listen to this sentence: “People putting the greatest emphasis on being happy reported 50 percent less frequent positive emotions, 35 percent less satisfaction about their life, and 75 percent more depressive symptoms than people that had their priorities elsewhere.”

That may be true, but perhaps it should have been phrased the other way around: People who have less frequent positive emotions, less satisfaction about their life, and more depressive symptoms, are more likely to place an emphasis on being happy than those who are already experiencing a high level of well-being.

In other words, people who are happy don’t think much about it. Those who are fighting an unending battle with anxiety or depression, perhaps due to childhood trauma or physiological issues, must work harder to “find” happiness any way they can.

Kashdan agrees with Frankl that Americans think too much about happiness:

The United States is obsessed with happiness … There are cultural pressures to be happy. Go on amazon.com and look at how many books have happiness in the title.

So I did. I also keyed in a few other categories for comparison. Here are the results, in thousands:

Happiness        29

Baseball           32

Meaning          34

Gardening      54

Sex                 142

Philosophy     376

Music             749

Religion         928

Art               1,898  

 Doesn’t look too obsessive to me. And we ought to be open to the possibility that most of the books that deal with happiness are saying the same things these researcher are – Give it a Rest.

Meanwhile, back in the original story, Smith is pushing her argument further, citing evidence that there is a strong correlation between those things that give meaning to life, such as responsibility and commitment, and genuine unhappiness. Thus the often-cited relationship between childrearing and unhappiness. The upshot of it all, according to Smith, is that “the amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.”

This strikes me as hogwash, pure and simple. It seems to me that happiness, meaning, social responsibility, and commitment are like peas in a pod. It's worth noting that Frankl doesn’t shy away from using the word “happiness,” but puts it in context. Smith quotes him as saying: “… happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.” He doesn’t deny that it exists; he doesn’t suggest it's unimportant. He merely says that it’s futile to pursue it directly.

I suspect it is only by making use of the shallowest definition of happiness that researchers have been able to differentiate it from meaning, satisfaction, and even bliss. It may be that the standard research definition of happiness basically correlates with thrill-seeking. But that’s not what happiness is.

In the end, studies like the ones I’m reviewing here are muddled and the conclusions wrongheaded and misleading, What’s worse, they give happiness a bad name. 

Why should we care? Because one of the enduring misconceptions of modern life, in America or anywhere else, is that if we’re happy, we must be doing something wrong. It is from this soil that guilt and neuroses arise. It would be far better to start celebrating Gaudium essendi, the joy of existing, and go on to note that we’re more likely to feel it as we become more deeply engaged in life.  

 

“Happy is the man who’s found his work.”

Tim Parks - Editorial Gripes

In two recent articles in the New York Review of Books, “Learning to Speak American” and "In Praise of the Language Police,” Tim Parks, eminent translator of books from Italian into English,  raises all sorts of interesting issues about editing,  translation, and regional differences in word usage. One example among many: he notes that the individual editing his forthcoming book about trains suggests he change the word “carriage” to “coach”—ninety-eight times!

A reader responds that in the U.S. a coach is something pulled by a horse; the appropriate word substitution would be “car.” And so it goes.  

In some cases the editor appears to be right. There’s no harm in swapping kilometers for miles. Failure to do so would interrupt the flow of Parks’s book time and again, as the reader pauses to consider, Now let me see, 14 kilometers times .61 would be …

My favorite among Parks’s quibbles is this.

“ Does the position of “also” really need to be moved in front of the verb ‘to be’ in sentences like ‘Trains also were useful during the 1908 earthquake in Catania,’ when to me it looked much better after it?”

I have edited more than a few books myself—not on the vaunted plane across which Parks moves, perhaps—and am repeatedly amazed to come upon the “also” before the verb. Nobody talks like that; I’m wondering how that usage came to be considered mandatory in written prose.

Though Parks doesn’t mention it, I number the excessive use of “as well” among my own pet peeves. It sometimes seems that a sentence has been awkwardly rearranged for no other reason but to facilitate the inclusion of that unctuous expression. Perhaps we should come down off our high horses and give in to an occasional “too”?

But that’s a long-standing quibble. My recent gripe is against the excessive use of “multiple,” when it would have been easier and better to say “many.”  I visited that theater multiple times!?  Bad. Bad. Bad.

The readers' comments to these two pieces are a seminar in themselves, bringing out nuances of language and reading tastes that Parks himself hardly considers or doesn’t seem to know about. 

For example, many readers are agreed that one of the pleasures in reading books from foreign countries derives from the oddity of the regional expressions involved. Why remove them?  

Others suggest that such culture-translation is the price the foreign author pays to tap into the lucrative American market.

 Here is one of the more comprehensive reader comments:

Personally, as a writer, I despise editors and accuse them variously of:
1. having no true feeling for prose or the importance of an author's voice,

2. merely substituting their preferences for mine (mine are doubtless better informed and result in superior writing),

3. being corporate flunkies willing to obey any order from above to keep their jobs or further their careers, and

4. being envious, wannabe writers.

As an editor, however, I despise writers because:
1. they think some higher talent or mission excuses them from studying grammar and usage, 

2. they fail to recognize my ability to spot difficulties they have overlooked, because they fail to recognize that while they know what they have in mind, readers don't, 

3. they view themselves as artists but think of me as a low-level technician serving corporate interests, and

4. they are envious of anyone who has a real job and a regular paycheck.

The list is funny and touches on some good points, though I have no sympathy for the animosity involved—perhaps it’s being delivered tongue in cheek. Parks, I think, would agree. Well along in his first essay, he writes, “On sending in my observations on the proofs, my commissioning editor turns out to be more than ready to negotiate.” Well, that’s how it ought to be. 

By the way, Parks’s translation of Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is among my all-time favorite books, and I also enjoyed his early memoir An Italian Education. On the other hand,  A Season in Verona, in which he joins his twin loves of soccer and regional slang, is perhaps too much of a good thing?

The Well-Digger’s Daughter – A Perfect Film

Among those films that are shown once or twice at the Twin Cities Film Festival and return for a week or two in the fall, The Well Digger’s Daughter deserves a special note. Set on the eve of World War I and shot amid the glorious countryside of the Alpille Mountains, just east of Arles, France, it tells the story of a simple well-digger, his assistant, and his five daughters.

It’s fun to see Daniel Auteuil reprise the role that introduced him to the world many years ago, of the wily carnation farmer in Jean de Florette. In The Well-Digger’s Daughter Auteuil plays a no less crusty, but simpler and more honorable character, and the film itself is a simpler production, too, devoid of knavery or revenge. But the characters are sketched with such sincerity and nuance that we’re entranced by, if not riveted to, what’s taking place on the screen.

 Astrid Berges-Frisbey, who plays the well-digger’s eldest daughter, deserves a special note. Her ability to project a moody, saintly intensity without saying much adds immeasurably to the strength of the plot.

The film is a fairy tale of sorts, on the order of Drew Barrymore’s Ever After, though there’s nothing magical about the plot. Then again, there is something a bit magical about the Provençal countryside. 

The film opens with a shot of a poppy field; I believe it’s a field Hilary and I hiked out to on May 1, 1978, just past the Abbaye de Montjamour but before you reach Daudet’s windmill. I looked at that field many times as we showed our slides to friends later—I’d recognize the outline of those hills anywhere.

As it happens, we watched The Well-Digger’s Daughter within the cozy confines of my “office,” streaming it from Netflix. I was drinking a glass of Côtes du Rhône at the time. The previous day I’d dug an old Time-Life book, The Cooking of Provincial France by M.F.K. Fischer, out of the basement in a fit of nostalgia. We were hosting a friend’s 60th birthday party and Hilary had the idea of reviving an old favorite, Tarte a la Tomate. 

Glancing at the text alongside the recipe, I read:

Soup is mainly for supper, for both young and old, in provincial France: in fact, soup is supper. Country people simply eat a big bowl of it, often made with potatoes or bread, and go to bed.

There’s something quaint about these old cookbooks. (This one came out in 1968.) The world has changed. Then again, what often appeals to us is the world before it changed On the other hand, nowadays we can sit at home, drinking wine and watching films on demand about country folk a century and half a world away, eating soup, digging wells, attending air shows where the planes have open cockpits, getting pregnant, and sundry other stuff.   

The tart turned out well, by the way. Well, how could it not, with half a pound of Gruyere cheese on top?

     

Les Mis

We caught a matinee of  Les Misérables (the musical version) today. I had a feeling I wouldn’t like it, but it seemed like a good opportunity to familiarize myself with a slice of popular culture. Besides, the wind chill outside was -7.

I’m a big opera fan, so I have no trouble watching people sing. Having seen fifty or a hundred operas, I can say with some degree of authority that the folks in Les Misérables don’t sing very well. It’s a different style, you say. That’s for sure.

Nor do absurd and convoluted plots trouble me much. (Have you ever seen Rigoletto, or better yet, Simon Boccanegra?) In fact, there are several very good film versions of Les Misérables out there already. The Liam Neeson version (1998) which also stars Geoffrey Rush, Clare Danes, and Uma Thurman, is underrated. And the Claude Lelouch version (1995), with WWII “flashbacks” and Jean-Paul Belmondo in the starring role, is also quite good. In the 1935 version, Charles Laughton set a standard of sorts in the role of Inspector Javert, and the black-and-white format of that film lent added good-and-evil punch to the production. Due to that film, the gleaming candlesticks that Jean Valjean “forgot” have been etched into my visual databank forever. (Or was it only that I saw the film on a black-and-white TV?)

Without further hemming and hawing, let me report to anyone who’s on the fence regarding this film that it passed the time well enough. I enjoyed it. I even teared up on several occasions. And it’s always nice to revisit Paris from time to time, even if it’s from the seat of a darkened theater.

There were a few aspects of the film that I didn’t like. I find mad-cap, stylized depictions of abuse, thievery, brutality, and  prostitution unpleasant to watch—the zany energy in the costumes and behavior runs counter to the misery being depicted, and also to the film’s message of love and forgiveness. As a result, I hated every scene in which Helena Bonham Carter and Sasha Baron Cohen appears. I also had trouble getting excited about the music itself, which struck me as light-weight, sing-songy pop (if not downright schlock), for the most part.

On the other hand, the entire cast did a marvelous job of breathing sincerity and emotion into even the most ho-hum tunes. Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe engage in a solid cat-and-mouse game throughout the film, and they both acquit themselves well enough in the singing department. Crowe’s performance has been described as “strained,” but I didn’t think so. I took it to be a reflection of the moral perturbations he was feeling in spite of himself. If we’d learned a little more about his early life (at the expense of all the pickpocket foolishness, perhaps) it would have added even further to the drama.

Meanwhile, Anne Hathaway could not have done a better job of rendering the heartbreak of Fantine.

Yet as I watched the film, I caught myself time and again thinking about other films. The Count of Monte Cristo (2002) was really quite good. And what about Richard Lester’s Three Musketeers (1973)? Jessica Lange’s fine performance in Cousin Bette even flashed through my mind a few times, don’t ask me why.

I also found myself wondering whether it would be a good idea to make a spicy Provencal stew out of the stub of a pork roast that was thawing in the refrigerator, or to coat the pork chunks with cayenne, cumin, and paprika and broil them in the oven to make pincho moruno.

When the lights came up on Les Mis, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. This was largely because the nobility and self-sacrifice of Jean Valjean is a moving sight to see.

We stopped at Lunds on the way home to pick up some leeks for the stew. We put Gounod’s Faust on the stereo while we were cooking, and we felt we were seeing Les Misérables all over again…but this time the music was in French, and it was much better.  

Pike Island Wildlife

One good place to catch some sun when the day heats up in mid-January—Pike Island.

We headed north down the trail from the parking lot at Fort Snelling State Park at eleven, following the bluff under the historic fort for a hundred yards before veering toward the Mississippi. A red-tailed hawk was moving through the woods ahead of us. After pausing for a minute on a grassy, sunny hilltop, we walked down through an inch of packed snow to the frozen pebbles on the beach.

The hum of traffic crossing the Mendota Bridge was incessant—so much so that we hardly heard it except when an arriving 767 added to the roar. No, it was peaceful on the river. We wandered desultorily, examining chunks of sandstone as if they contained the secrets of Devonian life and scouring the wooded bank above us from time to time in case a forest creature might show its head.

The river, perhaps fifty yards across, is half-frozen; out near the middle you can see it gurgling past. There are very few tracks out there. No human has ventured out recently. We watched an eagle soar across, and at one point along the way I noticed a glass Christmas tree ornament sitting on the ice near shore. I have no idea how that got there.

We eventually returned to the woods and followed a sunny path east toward the Mississippi’s confluence with the Minnesota River. No humans had come this way since the recent dusting of snow but there were other tracks all over the place—squirrel, deer, crow, coyote, and those tiny mousy tracks, not much bigger than grains of rice, that could be any number of little rodent species.

At one point we came upon some very fresh coyote scat. As we approached the confluence we noticed a flock of flickers that had decided to stay the winter. When a pileated woodpecker landed in the tree nearby it brought our woodpecker species count up to five.

It was sunnier of the south side of the island. Condos of every vintage hugged the edge of the bluffs across the river. One part of the trail was dusted with wind-blown feathers though neither of us spotted a kill-site anywhere nearby. White-breasted nuthatches were beeping, and a kingfisher was chattering in a distant slough, well out of sight.

 Then we came upon the biggest crow prints I’d ever seen. Turns out they belonged to a couple of turkeys we spotted foraging in the woods.

We’d built up an appetite during our four-mile perambulation—though we weren’t walking very fast. 

On the way home we stopped at the recently-opened Mill Valley Kitchen in St. Louis Park. The food was pretty good…but I felt like I was sitting in my aunt’s suburban condo. 

I kept looking over at a painting of a Northern California coastal landscape that was hanging on the wall—all smooth orange slopes with clumps of miniature oak trees—and hatching plans to return once again to the Pacific.