A Modest Proposal

Hendrick Hertzberg proposes this counter-proposal to the NRA's suggestion of armed guards in every school:

Here’s a better idea. Let’s put a police officer in every gun shop—there are slightly more than fifty thousand—in the United States. That would be half as expensive, and much, much more to the point.

Inside My Reading Mind

The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts is a reader’s autobiography and a lament for the lost importance of literature.  I’m not sure I’ve read all 14 chapters, but I love chapter six so much, I wish I had written it.  Called “The Shadow Life of Reading,” Birkerts reflects on the relationship between our mind in a book and our mind away from the book, a relationship that intrigues me, puzzles me, amazes me, and moves me.

I just recently finished Room by Emma Donoghue, a novel that describes the life of a young woman imprisoned in a 11 x 11 windowless room by an abductor.  The story is told through the voice of her five year old son Jack.  Jack was born in captivity and has never been outside the room.  The reader could focus on the hideousness of the crime that brought and keeps Jack and his mother in the room, but it is written in such a way that the reader can also focus on how the two perceive the world through their restrictive lenses.  I never managed to really imagine myself in their shoes, but I did get so immersed in what it was like for them; it was as if I had entered another world.  And at times, when I wasn’t reading the book, something would happen to suddenly thrust me back into the world of Jack and his mother.

Birkerts says,

When we read, we create and then occupy a hitherto nonexistent interior locale.  Regardless of what happens on the page, the simple fact that we have cleared room for these peculiar figments we now preside over gives us a feeling of freedom and control.  No less exalting is the sensation of inner and outer worlds coinciding, going on simultaneously, or very nearly so.

Birkerts doesn’t completely describe these two worlds as they exist for me.  Maybe no one can.  But he acknowledges it and attempts to describe it with words.  For me, this is reassuring and exciting.  My intuition tells me that the better I can describe this sensation of living in a book, the deeper I will experience it.  Birkerts goes on to explain that this world exists not only as I read but after I put the book down, hence his title “The Shadow Life of Books.”  He says, once he has opened the gate into that “ulterior realm,” he has entered a “place I will at least partially inhabit as I go about my daily tasks.”  Later he says, “Now I have occupied the book and the book has begun to occupy me…I carry the work everywhere…for the duration of my reading—and maybe less vividly after—I will shift between two centers of awareness…I find the back-and-forth movement—an abstract sort of friction—invigorating.”

Reading Room, I found myself returning to the room while dealing with outer world of daily life.  This visit to the inner world of a book is somewhat like visiting a new country where I can enjoy the experience all the while knowing that a part of me is outside it.  There is too much about this place that I don’t understand.  But I treasure the shadow life of both my travels to new lands and travels to new books.

It’s not surprising that some novels create a more memorable shadow than others.  Some novels may be hard to put down as I rush on to find out what will happen next.  But when I put the book down to enter again the outer world, the shadow is faint, and when I get to the end of the book, when I finally find out what happened, there is no shadow left at all.  There have been a few times in my life that I was so taken over by the world in the book that I had to read it again.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out why some books leave such a big shadow and some don’t.  Does a vivid shadow mean the book had value beyond entertainment?  I somehow think it does, but I’m not sure why.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo left a big shadow for me.  But I can’t figure out its value beyond entertainment.  Maybe it is like a vivid dream.  I may not know where it came from, but something in my psyche thinks I need this story.  Right now, I want to read novels that leave a strong and vivid shadow.  That’s how I’ll continue to study this phenomenon.

From "Amazing Peace" by Maya Angelou

...
It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.

On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
All the earth's tribes loosen their voices
To celebrate the promise of Peace.

We, Angels and Mortal's, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.

Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.

Read more: http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Maya-Angelous-Amazing-Peace/2#ixzz2G59QXq8R

How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown?

160.

What It's All About

Here's an interesting explanation about the gun issue from Alec Wilkinson in the New Yorker:

I don’t think there is any mystery to understanding the passionate feelings people have for guns. Nobody really believes it’s about maintaining a militia. It’s about having possession of a tool that makes a person feel powerful nearly to the point of exaltation. What argument can meet this, I am not sure, especially since the topic isn’t openly discussed. To people who support owning guns, the issue is treated as a right and a matter of democracy, not a complicated subject also involving elements of personal mental health. I am not saying that people who love guns inordinately are unstable; I am saying that a gun is the most powerful device there is to accessorize the ego.

Love and Acceptance

I've been hearing about Far from the Tree, a book by Andrew Solomon about parents who have children who don't fit with mainstream expectation (deaf, Down's, gay, transgender...) with minimal interest.  However, today Andrew Sullivan's blog contains an excerpt which makes me want to pick up the book and have a look.

[B]efore I started on the book, I hadn’t drawn the distinction—which has become important to me since—which is between love and acceptance. You know, I feel as though when I was in the process of coming out of the closet it was upsetting for my parents, especially for my mother, and they weren’t very accepting of it. And I experienced that as their not being very loving. And actually, what I recognized writing the book, is that parents of children who have some kind of difference almost always have to struggle with it, and often manage to come through, and it’s their love that motivates them to come to terms with the strangeness or difference or whatever it is that’s extraordinary in their children. And having looked at all these other families I was able to say: Okay, my family didn’t throw me out, they didn’t want nothing to do with me, they weren’t actively rejecting. It just took them a while to get used to it.

Looking for Answers from the NRA

Juan Cole posts ten ways the NRA speech was stupid.  Here's number three:

Urged creation of 100,000-strong new Federal bureaucracy of armed school guards, which implies big tax increase. Thanks, Wayne! (And did not mention that Columbine had an armed guard or that Virginia Tech has its own police department.)

New Ideas

The Atlantic proclaims there are "10 Ideas that Changed the World in 2012."  I find this one especially interesting:  "Trial and Error Experiments Could Improve Public Policy."  Briefly,

 "Businesses conduct hundreds of thousands of randomized trials each year. Pharmaceutical companies conduct thousands more. But government? Hardly any. Government agencies conduct only a smattering of controlled experiments to test policies in the justice system, education, welfare and so on. Why doesn't government want to learn?" 

Guns Represent Opportunities

Adam Gopnik writes "The Simple Truth about Gun Control."

...the central insight of the modern study of criminal violence is that all crime—even the horrific violent crimes of assault and rape—is at some level opportunistic. Building a low annoying wall against them is almost as effective as building a high impenetrable one....What the New York Police Department found out, through empirical experience and better organization, was that making crime even a little bit harder made it much, much rarer. This is undeniably true of property crime, and common sense and evidence tells you that this is also true even of crimes committed by crazy people (to use the plain English the subject deserves). Those who hold themselves together enough to be capable of killing anyone are subject to the same rules of opportunity as sane people. Even madmen need opportunities to display their madness, and behave in different ways depending on the possibilities at hand. 

Guns and Hubris

Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses another issue involved with gun ownership:  self-control.  He writes about Jovan Belcher, the football player who killed his girlfriend and himself.  Two months before the shooting Belcher had said to a friend that he would shoot her if she didn't leave him alone.  Coates says

It would seem to me that part of responsible gun ownership would not simply involve a knowledge of guns, but a knowledge of oneself. It's not enough to keep your piece on safety and under lock, if you are not employing such protections for yourself. If I have ceded control over my anger to my significant other, and have had thoughts of shooting her, perhaps I should not have guns in my house. 

Research on Guns

I've been doing gun research in response to the lasted mass shootings, and I'm attaching some links to articles I found helpful.

Here Jeffry Toobin explains the evolution of second amendment interpretation:

In this article, you are reminded that your mutual funds may contain companies that manufacture guns.

In this different approach, Weigel proposes regulating bullets because "ammo has a shelf life," and "guns are forever.

Who owns guns?  CNN says "a decreasing number of american gun owners own two-thirds of the nation's guns and as many as one-third of the guns on the planet."

Te-Nehsi Coates reminds us that gun ownership should include self knowledge and self control here and here.

Here are suggestions for change from This Week.

Next--
Write letters.
What about mental health?
What about gun safety?

Just How Goofy?

Am I crazy?  The passage below makes me feel hopeful:


"The goofiness you must get yourself into to get where you have to go, the extent of the mistakes you are required to make! If they told you beforehand about all the mistakes, you'd say no, I can't do it, you'll have to get somebody else, I'm too smart to make all those mistakes. And they would tell you, we have faith, don't worry, and you would say no, no way, you need a much bigger schmuck than me, but they repeat they have faith that you are the one, that you will evolve into a colossal schmuck more conscientiously than you can possibly begin to imagine, you will mistakes on a scale you can't even dream of now - because there is no other way to reach the end."  (Philip Roth from Sabbath's Theater)