manoush zomorodi

Reading Round-Up: August 2018

/ Christine Pennylegion

Happy almost-September! I usually wait until after the end of the month to do these round-up posts, but since I just started my latest book last night, I know I’m not going to finish it before we’re into September. And while I guess September technically isn’t the fall, and it certainly shows no signs of cooling down where we live, it still always feels like a new beginning to me — that’s what all those years of school will do to you, I guess. And so I bid a cheerful adieu to summer with a look at my last summer books:

  1. Present Shock (Douglas Rushkoff)
  2. The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football (John J. Miller)
  3. The Quiet American (Graham Greene)
  4. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self (Manoush Zomorodi)
  5. Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh)
  6. Every Bitter Thing is Sweet (Sara Hagerty)
  7. Golden Age and Other Stories (Naomi Novik)
  8. Open Mic Night in Moscow: And Other Stories from My Search for Black Markets, Soviet Architecture, and Emotionally Unavailable Russian Men (Audrey Murray)
  9. Uprooted (Naomi Novik)
  10. The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane (Lisa See)
  11. Seabiscuit: An American Legend (Laura Hillenbrand)
  12. The Wife (Meg Wolitzer)

This was probably my most balanced month in a while in terms of fiction and non-fiction reads: if not in number of books, then probably in terms of rough page count. I think I would like to fall into a pattern of where I’m reading at something like a 1:2 ratio of non-fiction to fiction. I get itchy when I read too much of the one or the other in a row — alternating a little more deliberately gives me a constant, rotating mental palate-cleanse which I find refreshing.

Bored and Brilliant and Uprooted have already been touched-on in their own posts.

I’m afraid I don’t have much to say about Douglas Rushkoff’s Present Shock — I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but at this point its contents seem to have slipped completely out of my head. Except one thing, which is when he points out how weird it is to have Facebook flatten all of the relationships we have gathered over the years into an eternal present where we’re interacting with current coworkers and friends from grade school and everything in between. Yes; that is weird. But that’s all I remember. Sorry, Mr. Rushkoff. Maybe I can’t remember this book because I am suffering from a case of present shock.

The Big Scrum was a fun read. I care very little for sports in terms of sitting down and watching them, but I love sports writing and I love a good sports story. This is a fascinating account of how football came to occupy the place it does in American culture, and taught me basically everything I know about Teddy Roosevelt (not hard to do when you’re starting from zero!).

And speaking of sports writing, man oh man: Seabiscuit. It’s no surprise to me that Seabiscuit was a best-seller; it was easily the most engrossing thing I read this month. Laura Hillenbrand is an impeccable historian and a fantastic storyteller — at one point I found myself actually getting breathless as I read the account of one of Seabiscuit’s races. And sure, that race happened eighty years ago, but Hillenbrand made it come alive. The best part is that because the story takes place in the 1930s, you can find newsreel footage of at least some of the events covered in the book. Here is Seabiscuit’s 1938 match race against his half-uncle, War Admiral, which is widely hailed as one of the best horse races of all time:

Last month I read Sara Hagerty’s Unseen, which is her second book; this month I read her first book second, Every Bitter Thing is Sweet. The title is an allusion to Proverbs 27:7, “One who is full loathes honey, but to one who is hungry everything bitter is sweet.” This book is more of a memoir than Unseen, going into a lot of detail about things that were only referenced in the second book: the deep struggles in the early years of her marriage, the pain of a decade-plus of infertility, the trauma lurking behind her children’s adoptions. These are all bitter things — but, she writes, can be sweet to us when we let them feed our hunger for God.

The last non-fiction I tackled this month was Audrey Murray’s Open Mic Night in Moscow, which slots nicely into one of my favourite genres: amusing travelogues. The book follows Murray as she travels through the former Soviet states over the course of about a year. It’s surprisingly vulnerable at times, and sneakily educational — but most of all it’s very, very funny.

As far as fiction goes, this month was a pretty good mix of serious and silly. I very much enjoyed The Quiet American, and it will go back into my pile one day; I have a feeling it’s one of those books that gets better with subsequent readings. Decline and Fall will doubtless be another one to revisit in a year or two; it’s satirical and preposterous and thoroughly enjoyable. And if I read it enough I may finally be able to keep Evelyn Waugh and Edith Wharton straight in my mind. Those E.W.s are confusing.

I’m a huge fan of Naomi Novik’s nine-volume Temeraire series, which is probably easiest to explain thus: the Napoleonic wars, but with dragon-based aerial support. Golden Age and Other Stories is a collection of short stories set in the same world, each one inspired by a piece of fan art (pictures included, of course!). That’s a neat way for an author to interact with her fandom — I’d love to see more of that kind of collaboration.

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane was the first selection of a new book club I’ve been invited to join. Except then it was un-selected in favour of something else, but since I already had a copy from the library I read it anyway. This novel is set (mostly) in China from the late 1980s through the present day and touches on a lot of themes: education, international adoption, the interaction between Chinese and Western culture, the relationship between majority and minority ethnicities in China, and woven throughout, a whole lot of the history and production of pu’er tea. It’s tremendously sad — I cried a bit — but the ending is perfect. And I now have another Lisa See book waiting for me on my to-read pile.

Last but not least was Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife, which I (and everybody else, judging by the library holds list) read because it’s been recently made into a movie. I guessed half of the surprise ending when I was about halfway through, but didn’t see the other part coming at all. It’s a quick, engaging read with lots of stuff to chew on.

Boredom as discipline (a follow-up)

/ Christine Pennylegion / 1 Comment

Last week I wrote a post about Manoush Zomorodi’s book, Bored and Brilliant and the value of letting our minds wander in as undistracted an environment as we can regularly manage. (Again: it’s a great book and you should read it.) Since that post was closing in on two thousand words I thought I had better stop writing and publish it, but I hadn’t actually yet run out of things it prompted me to think about. So, here are some further things I’ve been gnawing on.

This book actually meshes well — strange as this may seem — with something I read last month, Sara Hagerty’s Unseen: The Gift of Being Hidden in a World that Loves to be Noticed. Since I read Unseen I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to live a “hidden” life, especially in regard to Biblical language around being “hidden in God” or “hidden in Christ”. What does it mean to be hidden in God? How do we cultivate that private, inner life? I’ve been mulling this over with some of my friends (hi, Heather) via email. Hagerty’s whole thing is taking those moments of our days where our instincts are to distract ourselves, or bury our emotions, or vent to friends, and instead use them as prompts to turn toward God in prayer — particularly when we are angry, hurt, etc., but really (ideally) all of the time. It’s like being a tree — we see the trunk and the limbs above the ground, but in reality the great strength of the tree is in the root system, hidden from view. The inner life of relationship with God, hidden from others, is our root system, and it’s what our flourishing depends on.

How does that mesh with what Zomorodi is talking about it? I have no idea if she is religious or not, but that’s beside the point perhaps. What stands out to me in this context is not something from the book, but an anecdote she related in her interview on the Team Human podcast. Zomorodi takes her show on the road to college campuses, and one of the exercises she has students do is to take a piece of paper and write something down on it — just a thought, not necessarily anything weighty. But then their instruction is to tear the piece of paper up and never tell her, or anyone else, what was written on it. And she’s found that students are aghast, they find it really difficult to do, because we are so primed by our natural drive for connection with others and by the techno-social forces driving our world right now, that it seems completely bizarre to have a thought and not immediately share it. Zomorodi is concerned about privacy in the sense that we often think of — stopping websites from tracking our data, etc. — but also in terms of privacy of thought, being not only able but willing to keep things to ourselves, even to take pleasure in that. Is that a skill that is disappearing? It seems to me that maybe it is.

So here’s the intersection of hiddenness and boredom/stillness and the delight of not saying it all: the secret place of prayer. Our days are filled with all these little cracks of time — waiting in line, pausing between activities, settling down before bed, taking a tea break — and we so easily reach for things to fill them: to books, to our phones, to the internet perhaps above all. (Quick, internet! Amuse me!) Zomorodi reminds us that those cracks are where, if we surrender to “doing nothing”, our brains find their most creative space. Hagerty reminds us that those moments are where, if we surrender to “doing nothing”, our hearts find their rest in God. If we never allow ourselves to be bored, to be un-distracted, to be still — we lose not only those chances at productive creativity, but we lose those chances to reorient our souls, to go to the hidden places with the Lord. We lose our roots.

I have been trying to leave myself more cracks in my day… with varying levels of success. It seems to depend a lot on how well I’ve been sleeping, actually. If I’m overtired, all I want is the self-soothing ritual of a blog post (or a dozen) to read or a game of scrabble against the computer. But I am trying — to learn to do this, to discipline my mind, to learn to want to do this more than I want other things.

I feel like this post isn’t quite fully formed — well, my thoughts on this are still not quite fully formed. But I wanted to put it out there anyway, and invite you to mull with me. What does it mean to cultivate a hidden life? To hide yourself in God? What do you do with your cracks?

Let’s get bored

/ Christine Pennylegion / 4 Comments

Manoush Zomorodi hosts WYNC’s Note to Self podcast. In 2015, Zomorodi hosted a six-day challenge for her listeners in realigning their relationship with their smartphones. Why, she wondered, are our phones so hard to put down? How much do we actually use them, compared to how much we think we use them? And what are we missing out on? The challene series was widely successful, with over 20,000 initial participants, and now it’s a book:

This is a brilliant (ba-dum tssh) read in which Zomorodi makes a strong case for the value of boredom, of deliberately leaving (or making) spaces in our days for daydreaming, spacing out, and sitting around with no distractions or mental agenda. Far from wasted time, these moments are actually critical for our own creativity, ability to plan, and mental health. We shouldn’t be avoiding boredom; we should be embracing it.

But why is it so hard to let ourselves be bored? After hitting a creative wall at work, Zomorodi began examinging her life in order to figure out what was happening:

My mind felt tired. Worn-out. Why? Yes, I was juggling motherhood, marriage, and career in one of the most hectic cities in the world. But it was more than that. In order to analyze what was going on with me, I began by observing my own behaviour. What I found was, frankly, exhausting. As soon as I took a moment to reflect, I realized there wasn’t a single waking moment in my life that I didn’t find a way to fill — and my main accomplice was my phone.

I had long ago traded my own flip phone for a smartphone, and now it seemed I spent every spare minute on it. Whether waiting for the subway, in line for coffee, or at my son’s preschool for pickup, I was engaged in some kind of information call-and-response. I checked the weather, updated Twitter, responded to e-mails. When I flopped into bed at the end of an exhausting day, instead of turning out the lights, I chose to fire up Two Dots — a game that I couldn’t stop playing despite myself. I wasn’t using my smartphone to connect. I was using it to escape. […] My brain was always occupied, but my mind wasn’t doing anything with all the information coming in.

[…] I saw a connection between a lack of stimulation — boredom — and a flourishing of creativity and drive. It was so clear to me because the cycle of technological innovation sped up at exactly the same time my life did, too. Between the time my son was born and could walk, we saw mobile technology change the way people called a taxi, ordered food, found a date. Suddenly, very basic society actions that had remained unchanged for decades were upended. And then, when the next operating system came out six months later, unpended again. My life wasn’t just pre-children and post-children . . . it was simultaneously pre-mobile phone, post-mobile phone. Both children and smartphones shifted me to the core.

In light of all this, I asked myself, “Can my lack of ideas have to do with never being bored?” (3-4)

As it turns out, research suggests that the answer to that question is an overwhelming Yes. When we allow our minds to wander, we activate something called the default mode, “the mental place where we solve problems and generate our best ideas, and engage in what’s known as ‘autobiographical planning,’ which is how we make sense of our world and our lives and set future goals. The default mode is als involved in how we try to understand and empathize with other people, and make moral judgments” (5). When we’re spacing out, there’s an awful lot going on underneath the surface; it’s not wasted time, but rather the opposite. In fact, fMRIs show that when a person is daydreaming, their brains are active at about 80-90% of the level they would be when deliberately thinking through a complex problem. Under the surface, our brains are working hard — which is why our best ideas so often come when we’re taking a walk, washing dishes, or having a shower.

Zomorodi is not anti-technology and this is not an anti-technology book. It’s not about not using our smartphones, but about using them purposefully instead of mindlessly, about placing them back in service to us as tools rather than over us as taskmasters. To that end, she suggests seven exercises to be completed over the course of a week.. Here are the seven culminating challenges and some “upgrades” for those who want a bit more (she suggests reading Bored and Brilliant straight through before attempting them, in order to better understand the purpose of each challenge):

  1. Observe yourself: download a time-and-usage tracking app to your phone (I’ve linked to those at the end of this post). Don’t change your behaviour on day one, but think about how you would like to use / relate to your phone.
  2. Put your phone totally away while engaging in motion (no using it on your commute or while you’re out walking). Challenge upgrade: try instead to notice five things around you that you’ve never noticed before.
  3. Have a photo-free day: don’t take any pictures with your phone. Challenge upgrade: today when you look at pictures on social media, only look at them: no likes, no comments, no shares or retweets.
  4. Delete that app: the one that you find yourself constantly opening without even thinking about it, be it social media, a game, the news, whatever. Challenge upgrade: don’t just delete the app, delete your whole account.
  5. Take a fakecation: block out some time for yourself, set an auto-reply on your email, let your phone go to voicemail, and totally disconnect from tech for that time. Challenge upgrade: don’t just take a hiatus from email and the phone, but download an app that will send auto-replies to incoming texts as well.
  6. Observe something else: go to a public place (the mall, the library, a cafe, etc.) and simply sit and observe. Try to find something you would never have seen/noticed if your face was stuck in a screen. Challenge upgrade: Instead of just noticing, write down what you are observing, in as much detail as possible.
  7. The Bored and Brilliant challenge: Identify an area of life where you need to do some real thinking. Set aside thirty minutes. Put a pot of water on the stove and watch it until it boils, then immediately sit down with a pen and paper and put your mind to the problem you’ve identified: unlock its solution through the deliberate cultivation of the boredom that leads to creative thinking.

I have not completed the challenges yet — most of the time I think I have a pretty good handle on how I’m using my phone. But one thing that really challenged me was in Chapter Five, “App Addled”: the phenomenon of self-interruption. We’re all aware of how easy it is to be interrupted by others: by incoming emails, by app notifications, by incoming text messages. But most of the time, it’s not other people who are interrupting us — it’s us interrupting ourselves:

But you can’t blame your coworkers or your children or your Gchat buddy for everything. Guess who is the person who actually interrupts you the most? Yourself. [Gloria] Mark’s lab has a term for this — the “pattern of self-interruption.”

“From an observer’s perspective, you’re watching a person [and] they’re typing in a Word document. And then, for no apparent reason, they suddenly stop what they’re doing and they shift and look at e-mail or check Facebook. These kinds of self-interruptions happen almost as frequently as people are interrupted from external sources,” Mark said. “So we find that when external interruptions are pretty high in any particular hour, then even if the level of external interruptions wanes [in the next hour], then people self-interrupt.”

In other words, if you’ve had a hectic morning dealing with lots of e-mail and people stopping by your desk, you are more likely to start interrupting yourself. Interruptions are self-perpetuating. (90)

I do this all the time. I’ll be writing a post, or writing an email, then all of a sudden I’m looking at my blog reader or checking my virtual store in my favourite game, or taking a look at my library holds list, or looking something up on wikipedia… and generally for no real reason. This self-interrupting also plays into something Zomorodi discusses in an earlier chapter: reading comprehension:

His journalistic interest piqued, Mike [Rosenwald] began investigating why he and his friends were struggling with something that, until recently, had come naturally. He went, of course, straight to the Internet to see what was coming between him and the page. (When in Rome . . . ) What he discovered was a radical break in reading methodology post-Internet. Before the Web, reading was primarily a linear activity. “You looked at a magazine, a menu, a book. Whatever,” he said. “You pretty much read it uninterrupted, and that’s the way we’ve read since writing on caves.”

Then along came the Internet with hyperlines, scrolling screens, and an impossible-to-finish flow of information, which necessitated nonlinear reading. The problem, Mike found, wasn’t that our brains have adapted to this second form of reading. Rather, it has supplanted the first. In an article he wrote for The Washington Post, he did his own in-house (and meta) experiment on the thoroughness of reading online. Only 30 percent of the people reading his story about having trouble reading got to the last line of his story. (46)

For a few years now, I’ve tried to make it a discipline to read as linearly as I can when I’m reading online, something that’s hard to do — all those delicious hyperlinks begging to be read as well! What I try to do is to open any links I want to read in new tabs, and to read them after I’ve finished with the thing I started with, rather than jumping around. It’s hard. But I think it’s worth trying. To that end I’ve decided that, going forward, instead of hyperlinking within the main body of my posts here, I’ll stick them all at the end. I’ve also started to go through old entries and reformat them this way (although that’s a side project that will take a little while to finish). I can’t control how people read my posts, of course, but I can maybe help foster some good habits — in myself as well.

I appreciate the thoroughness of the research in Bored and Brilliant (as well as its excellent index). Manoush Zomorodi has written a very timely and useful book, one which I recommend wholeheartedly to anyone who wants to take back some control over their digital experience and creative lives.

Explore More: Manoush Zomorodi | Note to Self podcast | “Bored and Brilliant” TED Talk | “Bored and Brilliant” podcast challenge series (6 episodes) | Default mode (wikipedia) | “Moment” app (iphone) | “SPACE” app (android) | “Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say” (Mike Rosenwald, Washington Post) |