The benefits of reading literary fiction

As an avid reader, I often take for granted the importance of reading and think, naively, that others do as well. Then I come across statistics such as these (from the Statistic Brain Research Institute):

• 46 percent of U.S. adults can’t understand the labels on their prescriptions;

• 50 percent of U.S. adults are unable to read an eighth-grade-level book;

• 33 percent of U.S. high school graduates will never read a book after high school;

• 42 percent of college students will never read a book after they graduate.

My disappointment deepens when I read of studies showing that a person’s ability to be empathetic increases through reading.

Is this connected to the increasingly vitrolic and mean comments we read online? Do these voices showing hatred, seeing the world in black-and-white terms and failing to allow for the complexity of other human beings reflect the dearth of reading?

In her article “Reading as a Form of Therapy” (newyorker.com), Ceridwen Dovey refers to a study in 2013 in Science that found that “reading literary fiction (rather than popular fiction or literary nonfiction) improved participants’ results on tests that measured social perception and empathy, which are crucial to ‘theory of mind’: the ability to guess with accuracy what another human being might be thinking or feeling, a skill humans only start to develop around the age of 4.”

But what is literary fiction? Some would say it’s elitist, snobbish, hard to understand, an arbitrary label. Wikipedia defines it as “works that offer deliberate social commentary, political criticism, or focus on the individual to explore some part of the human condition.” I would add that it generally presents characters that are complex, not one-dimensional or predictable.

Dovey refers to Keith Oatley, a novelist and emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, who has for many years run a research group interested in the psychology of fiction. He says: “We have started to show how identification with fictional characters occurs, how literary art can improve social abilities, how it can move us emotionally, and can prompt changes of selfhood.”

Dovey writes about her experience with a bibliotherapist named Ella Berthoud, who asked her about her reading habits. After several sessions, conducted via email, Berthoud recommended a list of books for Dovey to read.

She worked her way through the books over the next couple of years and gained some insights. “In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks,” Dovey writes. “Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself.”

Dovey calls bibliotherapy a “broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect.” She traces the first use of the term to a 1916 article in The Atlantic Monthly, “A Literary Clinic.” The author refers to an early bibliotherapist who says: “You must read more novels. Not pleasant stories that make you forget yourself. They must be searching, drastic, stinging, relentless novels.”

Bibliotherapy is not a panacea, and not every reader is necessarily empathetic. Yet regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than nonreaders.

 

Jeanette Winterson has written that fiction and poetry heal "the rupture reality makes on the imagination." It's worth a try.

Brian Wilson, troubled genius

Love and Mercy, the new bio pic about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, is a searing portrait of a musical genius who suffered from an abusive father, mental illness and an abusive psychotherapist.

 

 

The film, directed by Bill Pohlad, takes an interesting and effective approach, using two actors to portray Wilson. Paul Dano plays the young Wilson, of the 1960s, while John Cusack plays Wilson in the 1980s, after he came under the care and guardianship of Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). The film’s narrative moves back and forth between the younger and older Wilson, which helps with the pacing of the story, a key element when showing a character’s inner life as much as their outer.

After a panic attack, Wilson withdraws from touring with the popular Beach Boys—made up of his brothers Dennis and Carl, their cousin Mike Love and their friend Al Jardine—and decides to devote his energy to making “the greatest album ever made.”

The film is most alive when showing the making of Pet Sounds, which indeed came to be seen as one of the greatest albums ever made. Wilson’s genius, his detailed attention to combining the sounds of various instruments—many not used in a pop song recording—and the harmonies of the Beach Boys, is on display. We learn of the competition they felt with the Beatles after the release of Revolver, and the Beatles, inspired by Pet Sounds, later produced Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which many consider the greatest album ever made.

While under the care of Dr. Landy, Wilson meets Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), who sells him a Cadillac. They begin dating, but are rarely alone, since Landy and his assistants accompany Wilson wherever he goes. While the controlling, abusive Landy character seems outlandish at times, he was apparently every bit as bad or worse.

Dano and Cusack are excellent in their portrayals, with Dano carrying more of the screen time, while Cusack’s role is more subtle.

The film effectively shows the growing torment Wilson experiences as he hears voices in his head and experiences anxiety. But some of these scenes go on too long and drag, hindering the film’s pacing.

Love and Mercy (the title comes from a 1988 song by Wilson) is a powerful exploration of one man’s descent into mental illness and his emergence into a measure of health. It’s an enjoyable depiction of the creation of a great piece of music. And it shows the power of love and mercy to rescue a person from those wanting to control him.

And for those who love The Beach Boys’ music, there’s plenty of that as well.

The cost of gun violence

We in the United States live in a gun culture. This is, we live amid a plethora of guns and people with guns—so much so that it had become unsurprising when we hear about someone being shot, either by intent, by accident or self-inflicted.

But what is the cost of such gun violence? Interestingly, while the U.S. government has assessed the economic toll of various problems, such as motor vehicle crashes, air pollution, heart disease and domestic violence, it has not collected data on the costs of gun violence. Why not?

According to “What Does Gun Violence Really Cost?” (Mother Jones, May/June) by Mark Follman, Julia Lurie, Jaeah Lee and Ted Miller, “the National Rifle Association and other influential gun rights advocates have long pressured political leaders to shut down research related to firearms.”

 

 

An April 7 editorial in the Annals of Internal Medicine called this “suppression of science.” It noted that “polictical forces had effectively banned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific agencies from funding research on gun-related injury and death.” This suppression worked, since no relevant studies have been published since 2005.

Not to be deterred by such influence, Mother Jones set to work investigating this question in 2012. The article goes into detail about what these writers learned. For example, in the last decade, more than 750,000 Americans were injured by gunshots, and more than 320,000 were killed. Each year, more than 11,000 people are murdered with a firearm, and more than 20,000 others commit suicide using one. In addition, “hundreds of children die annually in gun homicides, and each week seems to bring news of another toddler accidently shooting himself or a sibling with an unsecured gun,” write the authors. And while “violent crime overall has declined steadily in recent years, rates of gun injury and death are climbing (up 11 and 4 percent since 2011), and mass shootings have been on the rise.”

As the editorial by a team of doctors in Annals of Internal Medicine said: “It does not matter whether we believe that guns kill people or that people kill people with guns—the result is the same: a public health crisis.”

The writers in Mother Jones have not accumulated a lot of data, they also tell a half dozen stories of specific individuals affected by gun violence and the approximate costs to them and to society (i.e., taxpayers). Such stories help bring the statistics home, make them real.

To help get a hold of the economic toll of gun violence, Mother Jones turned to Ted Miller at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, an independent nonprofit that studies public health, education and safety issues.

Miller looks at two categories of costs: direct and indirect. “Every time a bullet hits somebody, expenses can include emergency services, police investigations and long-term medical and mental-health care, as well as court and prison costs.” These are direct costs, and about 87 percent of them fall on taxpayers.

Indirect costs include “lost income, losses to employers and impact on quality of life, which Miller bases on amounts that juries award for pain and suffering to victims of wrongful injury and death.”

Mother Jones crunched data from 2012 and found that “the annual cost of gun violence in America exceeds $229 billion.” Direct costs account for $8.6 billion, which means “the average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we pay for 32 of them every single day.”

Our gun culture, which places a high value on owning guns, is expensive.

Art and poverty

Many people see art, whether it’s literature or painting or film or theater, as a useless activity or product for the benefit of an elite group of people, not for the poor.

If people don’t have adequate food or shelter, what good is art, no matter what the medium?

Gregory Wolfe, publisher and editor of Image, a journal that focuses on art, faith and mystery, spoke about art and poverty in January at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. An adaptation of his talk appears in the latest issue of Image (No. 84).

 

The Potato Eaters by Vincent Van Gogh

 

This is a topic that many people concerned about justice issues, including many Mennonites, have trouble with. Many respond like the disciples, particularly Judas, responded to the woman who anointed Jesus with an expensive perfume (John 12:1-8; Mark 14:3-9). What a waste! The money spent on that could have been used to feed the poor.

But Jesus blesses her action. Wolfe comments: “The anointing is wholly gratuitous, which also happens to be one of the fundamental characteristics of art.”

Over the centuries, Wolfe points out, the poor have shown their desire for beauty. In the Catholic tradition, for example, look at the great cathedrals as well as household shrines and murals.

Art comes in many forms and serves many purposes. Folk art has a long tradition and often comes out of poor communities. Pop art, however, has become mostly a commodity that makes millions for various corporations.

Many concerned about justice fear art may be a distraction. However, says Wolfe, “beauty, whether manmade or natural, evokes in us the desire to protect what is both precious and vulnerable.”

I volunteer for Circles of Hope, which seeks to help people move out of poverty. The people I’ve come to know show that they aren’t solely concerned about money. They want to live, to enjoy life with their families and friends. And they are quite creative in finding ways to get by on little.

Kansas governor Sam Brownback signed a bill last month preventing Kansas families receiving government assistance from using those funds to visit swimming pools, see movies, go gambling or get tattoos. As the Washington Post writes: “There’s nothing fun about being on welfare, and a new Kansas bill aims to keep it that way.”

These legislators seem to have no clue how poor people live or the struggles they face to survive.

In an earlier issue, Image ran an interview with Roberta Ahmanson, who has worked to serve the homeless through a nonprofit called Village of Hope. She notes that the founder “intuitively understood that the places you bring people to speak to them about their own value.” Village of Hope, she says, “is probably the only homeless shelter in the world that has stained-glass windows and an 18-foot vase and Albert Paley gates.”

Art reflects beauty. It also reflects the artist’s own poverty. An artist creates a “nothing” that does nothing. But while it “does not in itself alleviate the suffering that poverty entails, … it remains one of the most compelling means by which we can be turned from distraction and denial and enabled to dwell for a time among those we would pass by.”

While poverty isolates people, art brings us together.

We all need bread and roses, food and art. Beauty enriches our lives and makes us want to enrich others’ lives as well.

Scientists judge climate change reporting

Reports keep coming out about climate change. For example, despite the record snowfalls in the eastern United States, December 2014 through February were the hottest winter (or summer in the Southern Hemisphere) ever recorded, since such records began being kept in 1880. Yet some articles play down such findings.

Now a group of climate scientists is reviewing articles and trying to counter some of the misinformation being published. Calling themselves Climate Feedback, the group includes scientists, oceanographers and atmospheric physicists.

The group is making use of a browser plugin from the nonprofit Hypothes.is to annotate climate journalism on the Web, writes Laura Dattaro in “How Climate Scientists Are Annotating Climate Reporting” at cjr.org, the website of Columbia Journalism Review.

“Readers with the plugin, or with a link created through it,” writes Dattaro, “can read an article while simultaneously reading comments and citations from a cadre of experts. Click on the headline, and you’ll see an overall rating, based on the article’s accuracy, fairness, and adherence to evidence.”

Climate Feedback lists about 25 scientists who contribute criticism, and more can apply as long as they’re actively publishing climate research.

Dattaro gives a couple of examples of articles the group has critiqued. The first one was an article by Steve Koonin, a theoretical physicist and former BP scientist who now heads NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, which was published in the Wall Street Journal’s Saturday Essay section last December.

“Koonin argued that it’s too early to shape climate global policy because the specifics of the science are not settled,” writes Dattaro. Climate Feedback uses a rating system much like that for rating movies: four points (rather than stars) is the top grade. Six scientists gave this article a rating of a half point, which places it between “poor” and “very poor.”

Another Wall Street Journal column got a similar review. Danish author and analyst Bjorn Lomborg, has been accused of having links to the Koch Brothers, who are notorious for funding misinformation around climate science, writes Dattaro. Lomborg claimed “climate-change alarmists” are ignoring a wealth of climate data that “are actually encouraging,” to the detriment of us all, according to the review.

A major spokesperson for Climate Feedback is Emmanuel Vincent, a climate scientist at the University of California, Merced’s Center for Climate Communication. He says he wants to see a more scientific point of view on what is said about climate change. “Climate change has been taken a little bit outside of the realm of science,” he says.

Many magazines employ fact-checkers (though fewer than used to), but Vincent says that’s not how he sees his group. According to Kattaro, he says “the ultimate goal isn’t to fact-check but to foster more scientific thinking in journalists and ultimately build more communication between the two parties.” The group often makes responses on articles in the comments section of the magazines where the articles appear.

New York Times climate reporter Justin Gillis says: “We’ve seen some pretty serious misrepresentation of climate science in certain news outlets. I would hope those outlets would take the comments seriously.”

Editors still make the call about what gets published. Vincent’s hope is that journalists and scientists will be more critical in their work and will “listen to each other (while also informing the reader),” writes Dattaro.

Unfortunately, too many readers aren’t interested in facts, only ideology.

The anxiety of aging

Noah Baumbach’s new film, While We’re Young, is his most mature (no pun intended) and funny film to date. Each of his films (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg and Frances Ha) combine funny dialogue with the painful drama of relationships.

 

While We’re Young opens with a middle-age couple, Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts), watching over their friends’ baby, trying to calm it by telling fairy tales they can’t remember. Soon we’re awash in dialogue that pokes satirical fun at people’s anxieties and obsessions with parenting, career and where their lives are heading. Serious subjects, but Baumbach handles them with such a light touch that we find ourselves laughing at these characters before we realize how much we may resemble them.

After two miscarriages, Josh and Cornelia have given up having children, and they feel alienated from many of their friends, who are first-time parents. Josh is a documentary filmmaker who has 100 hours of footage recording an old professor lecturing in his home on the meaning of power, though the old man interrupts the filming with calls to his wife or trips to the bathroom. Cornelia is a producer, and her father is a well-known filmmaker. He and Josh don’t get along.

After a lecture Josh gives at a college in New York City, where they live, he meets a young couple, Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried). Jamie gushes about Josh’s film work and about Cornelia’s father. The two couples go out to eat, and Josh and Cornelia are struck by how carefree the young couple is. Josh especially is attracted to Jamie’s in-the-moment approach to life. Soon they’re spending more and more time with this young couple and ignoring their older friends.

Jamie, who is a budding filmmaker, pitches a film idea to Josh and soon lures him into helping him with it. The film appears to be based on a serendipitous meeting with one of Josh’s high school classmates. Josh, meanwhile, can’t procure funding for his film, while Jamie gets support for his.

Later, Josh discovers that the subject of Jamie’s film is actually Darby’s classmate, and the whole thing was staged. When Josh confronts Jamie about it, Jamie admits it was fabricated but says it’s still a good story. The satirical jabs at filmmaking is one more layer to the story.

While We’re Young performs a delicate balance between satire and drama. In today’s world, where irony reigns, it’s difficult to portray the emotions of a relationship or the anxieties of aging, as when Josh has a bike accident, then learns from the doctor that he has arthritis in his knee. Josh and Cornelia’s relationship is the emotional center of the film, and these two actors carry it off well, again combining laugh-out-loud humor with pathos.

Baumbach’s milieu is usually New York, and his characters are frustrated intellectuals whose skill at relationships is limited. Many of us who watch the film may not fit that profile, yet we will connect with the humanity of the characters and the anxieties they face.

While We’re Young is rated R for language.

Religion and the Bible on TV

Every year around Easter, we find old Jesus films on TV, from The Greatest Story Ever Told to  Jesus of Nazareth to The Gospel According to St. Matthew.

Increasingly, shows with religious themes are showing up on TV. In March, CNN is in the midst of a six-part series called “Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery,” in which biblical stories are described by scholars and re-enacted.

The Weather Channel showed “Top 10: Bible Weather,” in which 10 calamities from the Bible are paired with equivalent phenomena from our time, with re-enactments standing alongside news footage.

The UP network broadcast “Noah’s Ark,” and PBS’s series Nova rebroadcast the 2008 documentary “The Bible’s Buried Secrets.”

Later, the Smithsonian Channel showed “Siege of Masada,” a one-hour special about the Masada legend, followed by “Killing Jesus” on the National Geographic Channel.

Beginning April 5, NBC will show “A.D. The Bible Continues,” produced by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, whose miniseries “The Bible” was so popular on the History Channel last year.

Why so many shows with religious themes? The main reason is that they’re popular.

But are they helpful? And do they offer a reliable portrait of biblical stories and themes?

That will depend on the show and on viewers’ needs and desires.

 

One new series on USA that’s received a lot of attention is “Dig,” which premiered March 5. It promotes itself as being “based on reality and true.” We’ve heard that before.

Kimberly Winston writes for Religion News Service that the show “moves quickly between multiple story lines and locations, bouncing off prophesies and spinning conspiracies around the Second Coming of Christ, the Book of Revelation and the restoration of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, where much of the series is filmed.”

It includes a high priest’s magical breastplate, a spotless red heifer and a doomsday Christian group living in a bunker, with plenty of action and suspense. The many plot lines can leave viewers feeling confused, and some of the characters are far from complex.

Its references to the Essenes, the 12 gemstones on the high priest’s breastplate and the red heifer may lead some viewers to look up such information from the Bible, but I doubt it.

Instead, viewers who stick with it may enjoy the suspense, the settings—Jerusalem, Norway, New Mexico—or the esoteric nature of the story.

With the plethora of offerings on TV these days, including many fine ones, why not have some using religious themes and retelling biblical stories?

I also notice that other dramas—realistic ones, not just fantastical ones like “Supernatural” or “Grimm”—often include characters who are religious. And they aren’t always stereotyped as naive or fanatical.

What TV shows have you found particularly good in how they portray religion or Christians?

A related point is that if religion relates to all of life, then shows that portray life authentically and with a certain moral compassion (without being moralizing) should qualify as well.