Cuttings: October 2014

The Marshmallow Test review – if you can resist, you will go far - review of Walter Mischel The Marshmallow Test: Understanding Self-Control and How to Master It, by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. “Walter Mischel's study into impulse control began in the 1960s…. He tested pre-school kids on their self-control. It was simple: they could have one marshmallow immediately, or wait, alone in a room, for a given number of minutes, ring a bell and the researcher would give them two. The results were astonishing to the team: good impulse control turned out to be a predictor of success in disparate areas, from academic results to health in later life…. [Mischel's concern in this book] is with the lived experience of impulse control, the moment of failure, the moment of success, what can be learned and what unlearned…. Children who can be persuaded to think of marshmallows as puffs of cloud are more likely to overcome their temptation than children encouraged to think of the squidge and the sweetness…. Children who were able to imagine the marshmallow with a frame around it, as an image rather than the thing itself, found it easier to defer gratification, too. Children who distracted themselves performed better. Hot and cool perception interlace with abstraction and diversion to create the person who, down the line, when you've seen their Sats scores and healthy internal organs, you'd call more ‘rounded’.”

We need a bold scandalous feminism – article by Jacqueline Rose in The Guardian. “It is time to return to what feminism has to tell us. It is time to make the case for what women have to say about the perils of our modern world. But the case cannot be made along the lines that have become most familiar. We cannot make it only by asserting women's right to equality or by arguing that women are qualified to enter the courts of judgment and the corridors of power. Those claims are important but they tend to be made – loudly, as they must be – to the detriment of another type of understanding, less obvious but no less vital, that makes its way into the darker spaces of the world, ripping the cover from the illusions through which the most deadly forms of power sustain and congratulate themselves. This we might call the knowledge of women. In its best forms, it is what allows women to struggle for freedom without being co-opted by false pretension or by the brute exertion of power for its own sake.”

The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris by Colin Jones – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “In this compelling Cheshire cat of a book, Colin Jones charts the moment in the mid-18th century when Paris learned to smile. Until that point, the court, tucked away at Versailles, had insisted that everyone kept a straight face. This was partly because France's most privileged mouths had been spoiled by too much sugar, and no one wanted their black stumps flashed to infinity in the Hall of Mirrors. But it was also because smiling in general risked making you look either plebeian or insane. To understand why you have to go to the roots. Sourire, a smile, comes from sous-rire, a little laugh, and laughing was something that definitely belonged to the lower orders. Just like a yawn or a fart, a side-splitting guffaw breached the boundary between the body and the rest of the world. This inside-outsideness was fine if you were of a Rabelaisian turn of mind, but disturbing if you weren't. For in the bellylaugh's uninhibited rumble, it was possible to hear the stirrings of serious social and political dissent. No wonder the toffs at Versailles kept their mouths clamped shut, refusing to mobilise their features beyond the occasional sneer.”

The Truth about Evil – article by John Gray in The Guardian. “Whatever their position on the political spectrum, almost all of those who govern us hold to some version of the melioristic liberalism that is the west’s default creed, which teaches that human civilisation is advancing – however falteringly – to a point at which the worst forms of human destructiveness can be left behind. According to this view, evil, if any such thing exists, is not an inbuilt human flaw, but a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently improved. Paradoxically, this belief in the evanescence of evil is what underlies the hysterical invocation of evil that has lately become so prominent. There are many bad and lamentable forces in the world today, but it is those that undermine the belief in human improvement that are demonised as “evil”…. It’s in the Middle East… that the prevailing liberal worldview has proved most consistently misguided. At bottom, it may be western leaders’ inability to think outside this melioristic creed that accounts for their failure to learn from experience….”

How Texts Teach What Readers Learn, by Margaret Meek. “Understanding authorship, audience, illustration and iconic interpretation are part of the ontogenesis of ‘literary competences’. To learn to read a book, as distinct from simply recognizing the words on the page, a young reader has to become both the teller (picking up the author’s view and voice) and the told (the recipient of the story, the interpreter). This symbolic interaction is learned early. It is rarely, if ever, taught, except in so far as an adult stands in for the author by giving the text a ‘voice’ when reading to the child. Wendy and Stephen [the dedicatees of Rosie’s Walk by Pat Hutchins, the book under discussion] are replaced by other nameless children, in this case thousands of them, whose interpretations of the words and pictures may be as numerous, but are scarcely ever inquired into or understood for what they are.” (p 10) [See also discussion here.]

Humans, 150,000 years ago, wouldn’t figure on a list of the five most interesting species on Earth – interview with Jared Diamond by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. “Diamond has enjoyed huge success with several “big books” – most famously, 1997’s Guns, Germs and Steel – which ask the most sweeping questions it is possible to ask about human history. For instance: why did one species of primate, unremarkable until 70,000 years ago, come to develop language, art, music, nation states and space travel? Why do some civilisations prosper, while others collapse? Why did westerners conquer the Americas, Africa and Australia, instead of the other way round? Diamond, who describes himself as a biogeographer, answers them in translucent prose that has the effect of making the world seem to click into place, each fact assuming its place in an elegant arc of pan-historical reasoning. Our interview itself provides an example: one white man arriving to interview another, in English, on the imposing main campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a landscape bearing little trace of the Native Americans who once thrived here. Why? Because 8,000 years ago – to borrow from Guns, Germs and Steel – the geography of Europe and the Middle East made it easier to farm crops and animals there than elsewhere.”

Jacques Tati’s Playtime: Life-Affirming Comedy – article by Jonathan Romney in The Guardian. “In its quiet way, Playtime expresses a satiric outrage at the antiseptic nature of modern life, but its take on urban alienation is nothing if not joyous. Tati celebrates human character (and French character in particular) as indomitably resistant to imposed order, especially if that order smacks of transatlantic-style bureaucracy…. The sprawling cast fills the screen, especially in the increasingly manic second hour, which features the chaotic opening night of the pretentious Royal Garden restaurant. Hulot is present there, but often disappears into the throng, Where’s Wally?-style. Tati had already wearied of the character, and constantly subverts his audience’s desire to see him at centre stage. Playtime teems with confounding Hulot lookalikes, equipped with his trademark hat, pipe and raincoat. Tati also hides himself in the action, camouflaged; in one shot, he plays a policeman directing traffic in jerky semaphore, but stays in the background, just a living part of the overall scenery. The film’s mesmerising strangeness rises partly from a tension between the delicacy, even discretion, of the gags and the vastness of the conception. This is minimalist humour mounted on a maximalist scale. The timing disconcerts: jokes are barely signalled, and are often over before we’ve quite registered them. The most audacious sight gag, the spontaneous shattering of a glass door, is done with scant ceremony, and the joke then becomes the doorman’s attempts to carry on as if the door were intact. Other routines don’t gel as gags in the usual sense; two adjacent flats are shot to look like a single space, so that neighbours appear to inhabit the same room. But Tati works this set-up less for laughs than for an unsettling detached oddness.”