At the Food Pantry: Boy and books

Posted on Thursday, June 10, 2010 by nosleepingdog

There was a gangly boy, perhaps 14 years old, looking through the “Free Books for Kids” at the Food Pantry as I walked over. “Hi, finding anything you like?” I asked. “Well…” he said, ”do you have any comic books? like Spiderman vs. …” “No, the place where I get most of the books doesn’t have any comics, I’m sorry.” He picked up a thick hardback. “This is Harry Potter in Spanish?” “Yes, pretty good way to learn a language once you have some basics.” He made a polite noise and put the book back, but kept looking, telling me that he was moving to North Dakota this summer. That could be real soon, I thought, since tomorrow was the last day of school. “Whoa, that’s going to be a big change from Oregon. Have you ever been there?” “Oh, yeah, a bunch of times, we kinda go back and forth.”

He was a serious young man, with a good smile and a clear gaze. The other two people who’d gotten out of the small car were an older youth, brother I figured—same reddish-blond hair and very fair skin, and a woman who was being “head of household” over at the Food Pantry dock. She looked old enough to be their mom, barely, but then lately everyone seems too young to me.

I rummaged among the books for teens, looking for something he might like. I got few bookseekers his age, mostly my customers were under twelve. At a certain age reading tastes become more individualized, much harder to satisfy from my small stock of secondhand books and library discards. Here, among the chapter books, a fat paperback with a boy hero and “wizard” in the title. And an S.E. Hinton book, Tex, about a boy on his own on a ranch with his siblings after his mother dies and his father leaves to find work. I remembered a line, “I just went on spreading mustard on the baloney and eating it. We were out of bread.” On the cover were a motorcycle, which featured largely in the story, and a rawboned young man wearing a sheepskin jacket and a battered cowboy hat. I put it on the table near him, and looked for more. The (fictional) journal of a boy in the Union Army. One or two more.

The boy bound for North Dakota was still working through the books behind me, arranged in the open back of the car. “What’s this?” he asked, holding out an old grey hardback, a book club edition of Collected Stories of Mowgli. I’d just added it today. “It’s about a boy who’s raised by wolves,” I said, watching his face for signs of recognition. Nothing. “In India,” I added, “and he goes on living in the jungle with the animals. The stories are about his adventures and what he learns from them.” One of my favorite books as a child, I thought to myself, I really should be able to say something more about it. But he was interested. “How much is it?” he asked diffidently. “Oh, it’s free, they’re all free.” His face lightened, and his hand took a firmer hold upon the book. He looked at a few others without choosing any, then turned to the table. The book with “wizard” in the title made the cut, and another. “I’m getting some books for friends,” he said. “Good, that’s good.”

After a bit I ventured to say that he had a long drive ahead of him. “Yeah, three days,” with an air of remembering just how long those days were. “I have some other books to read too, though. Ice Fire and Dark Fire, it’s a series. There’s these two people, they live in a house with a bunch of dragons made out of clay. And a boy comes to live with them, they’re not his family, but he comes to live with them and the clay dragons start speaking to him, they’re not just clay…” Inner voices, not yet silenced, I thought, nodding as he spoke. His head turned quickly, he’d heard his name called though I hadn’t heard. “I’ve got to go now, thanks.” A lot of my interchanges with kids ended this way. “Sure, you’re welcome.”

He made several trips back to the small car with boxes of food, half-gallons of milk, and his brother groaned in a comic fashion under the weight of a large bag of dog kibble. Oh good, they’ve got a dog, hope the dog gets to go, but I won’t ask. Finally they were done, all three coming smiling back to the car; the mother gave me a friendly look, the grey-haired woman with the second-hand books who’d been talking to her son. He veered my way and said, with his open face, “Thanks for the books.” “You’re welcome, I hope you all have a good journey. And good luck in North Dakota.” They smiled and waved and off they went.

Reading and the brain, and “brain scans”

Posted on Monday, December 14, 2009 by nosleepingdog

There’s a new book out about what happens in our brains when we read, which may appeal to people interested in accessible accounts of neuroscience, as well as to those of us who are watching the shift from paper to electronic reading.

Reading in the brain : the science and evolution of a human invention
Stanislas Dehaene. (New York : Viking, 2009)
ISBN: 9780670021109 – Description: xi, 388 p. : ill., map ; 24 cm.

I put a reserve on it at the library and am waiting for it to arrive. In the meantime, I found that the author has put all the color figures online along with short chapter summaries. The imbalance on the webpage between text, and the diagrams and brain maps, makes the book look more forbiddingly technical than it is, I hope. Unfortunately the book on Amazon doesn’t have the LookInside feature, so we can’t look at more of the text. Reviews have been mostly positive (links to several, on author’s page; Barnes and Noble review) though one was critical of the book’s accessibility for us “interested lay readers”:

Unfortunately, he needs to lay a lot of groundwork. This makes the first 100 pages of the book an excruciating slog. While it picks up after the first two chapters, the book still sometimes slips back into detailed explanations of neurophysiology. Dehaene is first and foremost an academic, and he seems to want to make his work defensible to his peers even as he tries to explain it to laymen. This is especially problematic in his diagrams. Rather than helping to clarify points, his visual presentations are almost always overly technical, presenting formulas and pictures of the brain that are difficult to decipher. Part of the problem is that images are all black-and-white. While he offers up full color versions on the book’s website, that’s only useful to readers who are also regularly consulting their computers. …The result is a work that requires focus to read, but rewards the effort.

It is disappointing that, according to this reviewer, the images in the book are not in color like those on the web. This reminds me of a book I looked at recently on the various branches of our early human-ish ancestors, in which maps to locate the various hominid species were poorly done or not there at all. Publishers try to cut corners and end up crippling the book. But I hope that won’t be the case here, and even if parts of it are over my head I look forward to the exploration.

I’m expecting a stimulating mix of actual established neuroscience, conclusions based on new research still open to interpretation, and informed speculation. After discussing how, he believes, reading (including our writing systems) developed in response to our neurological structures—“over time, scribes developed increasingly efficient notations that fitted the organization of our brains”, Dehaene applies the same theory to other areas of human culture: “Mathematics, art, and religion may also be construed as constrained devices, adjusted to our primate brains by millennia of cultural evolution.”

Cautions about fMRI (brain scan) studies: What a fish can tell us

I don’t know how much of Reading in the Brain relies on fMRI data, but many of the popularized “this-is-how-your-brain-works” revelations do rely heavily on brain scans, including fMRI, and we’re seeing some push-back from other scientists. A study at Dartmouth (reported by Wired, and Science News) found that a salmon’s brain had “a beautiful, red-hot area of activity that lit up during emotional scenes [photos put before the salmon’s eyes]”. Wow! Unfortunately for all but the spiritualists among us, the fish in question was dead. Apparently the neural activity that showed up was random, and more rigorous statistical analysis of the data revealed this. While many popularizers, especially in the general media, give the impression that brain scan interpretation is cut and dried, the truth is quite the opposite.

Less dramatic studies have also called attention to flawed statistical methods in fMRI studies. Some such methods, in fact, practically guarantee that researchers will seem to find exactly what they’re looking for in the tangle of fMRI data. Other new research raises questions about one of the most basic assumptions of fMRI — that blood flow is a sign of increased neural activity. At least in some situations, the link between blood flow and nerve action appears to be absent. Still other papers point out insufficient attention to insidious pitfalls in interpreting the complex enigmatic relationship between an active brain region and an emotion or task. (Science News)

Michael Shermer, founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine and columnist for Scientific American, gives an excellent presentation of how fMRI works and why “bright spots” in the brain don’t necessarily tell us much of anything. His article (pdf) , “Five Ways Brain Scans Mislead Us”, is as technical as it needs to be but won’t give you a headache. A more technical but still readable article by Edward Vul et al., “Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition” examines one major source of errors in brain scan analyses. [There’s a short summary here at mindhacks.com, if you want to skip the technical details, and an interview with Edward Vul at scientificamerican.com.]

So while the area known as “social cognitive neuroscience” is fascinating, and we all love quick and easy explanations, remember that much of what you read in this area is, like the lottery, best used “for entertainment purposes only”.

Home Ground: Words of our native land

Posted on Thursday, September 17, 2009 by nosleepingdog

Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez. Trinity University Press, San Antonio Texas, 2006.

One of the language byways I find fascinating is that of terms for landforms; they’re often based on metaphors (oxbow bend in a river, neck of land), some have ancient linguistic roots, others reflect the cultural history of an area with words from the language of indigenous people or early explorers. Those who share my interest will love this book, but it also has appeal for those who enjoy American regional writing or history, or are interested in how the landforms we see come into being.

Home Ground’s entries are in alphabetical order but it’s far richer than a dictionary. Entries are signed by their authors, who are mostly American writers with particular regional roots––novelists, poets, nature writers, scientists. From them we hear not just the definition and history of the term but also more diverse notes: political (the drowning of Celilo Falls in the Columbia River, by a dam, comes up in the entry for dalles), ecological, personal, and literary (quotations from hundreds of writers including Thoreau, Jack London, T.S. Eliot, Joel Chandler Harris, Pablo Neruda, Louis L’Amour, Joyce Carol Oates).

There are no fewer than three indexes: one for authors so quoted, one for terms (with cross-references), and one for specific place names mentioned: the San Andreas Fault, Satans Slab, South Dakota. And there are short biographies of the writers who produced the entries. With all this, you can browse the book or look for something specific like every mention of the Mississippi River, all the terms relating to ice, or mentions of Herman Melville.

If you have ever wondered what the difference is between a hill and a mountain, or among the words canyon/cleft/coulee/gorge/gully/ravine, you can find out right here. Terms run the gamut of languages––ronde, tseghiizi (Navajo), névé, krummholz, cuesta, gumbo (probably from a Central Bantu dialect), nunatuk, eddy (possbily Norse), erg (Arabic) and so on (although etymology is not always included). And they vary from the words of Western science (imbricated rock) to those of other observers (coyote well, paternoster lake).

And now, a few sample entries:

tule land

Tule land is a term recorded as early as 1856, just after gold rush. It usually refers to the flats of bulrushes and other reeds along the rivers of the West Coast. In the muddy shallows along the Sacramento, for example, as the river takes its time joining the San Joaquin and approaching the San Pablo and San Francisco Bays, there are vast thickets of reeds, home to waterfowl and fur-bearing animals. Tule lands are especially common at the junctures of rivers, where the slightest breeze will set the rushes whispering and rasping over the mud and standing water. The Wintu Indians called tule land “the storehouse of instant tools” because the rushes could be used to make so many things: mats, clothes, baskets, lodges, boats, and cradles, sandals, brooms, fish traps, and talismanic images. ROBERT MORGAN

nivation hollow

In A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail,
Bill Bryson wrote: “I never met a hiker with a good word to say about
the trail in Pennsylvania. It is, as someone told a National Geographic reporter in 1987, the place ‘where boots go to die.’…Mile upon mile of ragged, oddly angled slabs of stone strewn about in wobbly piles…These require constant attentiveness if you are not to twist an ankle or sprawl on your face––not a pleasant experience with fifty pounds of momentum on your back.” Such a hiker on the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania might just as well have been complaining about nivation hollows. A bowl-shaped depression in the ground, a nivation hollow begins to take shape when ice forms over a shallow rock basin beneath a snow bank. The ice freezes and thaws over time. During the warm period, melted snow seeps into the bottom of the hollow. During the cooler period, the seep water freezes. The rock breaks up, weathers, and erodes. Meltwater carries away the finer rock particles and the hollow becomes larger and deeper. MARY SWANDER

fil du courant

A Cajun French term meaning “thread of the current,” fil du courant is used to describe the optimal navigation course within a bayou or river. The fil is often visible as a glassy-smooth pathway through the otherwise ripping water. Louisiana shrimpers follow the fil du courant to avoid underwater obstructions and to secure sufficient depth for skim nets that extend winglike from either side of the vessel. MIKE TIDWELL

fall line

Fall line is a phrase both metaphoric and literal. In broader terms, it means the zone where the Piedmont foothills level out into the coastal plain, where sandy soil derived from marine deposits replaces rocky rolling land. On some southeastern rivers, such as in the Carolinas and Virginia, the Fall Line is a specific place where shoals and rapids once stopped navigation from the coast because ships couldn’t pass through. Cities such as Richmond, Fayetteville, and Columbia sprang up at the head of navigation, and mills and factories were built to take advantage of the water power at the falls and rapids. The abrupt change of elevation caused industry and commerce, courts and seats of government, to take root in those areas. ROBERT MORGAN

Line drawings, by Molly O’Halloran, illustrate some of the terms, such as this one for “Quaking Bog” which shows how peat, sphagnum, geologic forms, plants and water all combine to form this floating vegetative structure that will seem solid until stepped on. [The scan is much reduced, and for some reason tinted beige, unlike the original.]

More free books for kids: Portland, Oregon

Posted on Friday, March 13, 2009 by nosleepingdog

Last month I blogged about giving away books to kids at our local food pantry. It’s been an effective way to encourage reading in kids of all ages, and provide parents and grandparents with books they can read with the children. All kids should have books of their very own. I wrote the post hoping to encourage others to get involved in getting books and children together.

As a former Portlander, I am pleased to report that there’s a group in that city dedicated to gathering books and giving them to disadvantaged kids. It’s called The Children’s Book Bank and they are currently concentrating on children under 6, when early habits are formed. They’re doing some creative stuff: one way they gather books is by inviting those who want to help, to have a book drive through their own organization, which could range from Boy Scouts to church to a business or hiking group. They also muster volunteers to help clean and mend books and bundle them up. If you live near Portland, visit their site and think about how you could help.

This offers one model for those who’d like to form an organization for the purpose, as well as for one-time group efforts to gather books and then donate them to some existing organization. I guarantee your community has organizations that would welcome clean usable children’s books. These would include Head Start programs, shelters (ones for women and children, or for homeless families, or for kids on the street), social agency waiting rooms, daycare facilities run by non-profits, Ronald MacDonald Houses, maybe the local Boys and Girls Club. If it’s a place that serves disadvantaged kids or families, they can probably find a good use for your kids’ outgrown books or books your group can gather in a book drive.

And, if you want to do something on your own, like I’ve been doing–showing up each week at the food pantry for 3 hours with a carful of books and two folding tables, I can attest to it being easy, well-received, and very rewarding. I’ve also gotten to read some great kids’ books as I sit by my tables!

Here is a figure from The Children’s Book Bank site:

“Two thirds of low-income families own no books for their children.”

Let’s all do something to change this, now!