The Book of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt Smith

Emotions are funny things…some flit through us at the speed of light, barely registering on our face or consciousness, while others linger, hovering over us, coloring our perceptions of each new day. Descartes thought here were six basic emotions: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness, but most of us can name several more of which we have intimate knowledge.

There are emotions that we experience only once or twice in a lifetime and yet someone somewhere has probably identified and named that particular feeling. It is reassuring and something joyous, I think, to discover that some strong emotion is shared. Tiffany Watt Smith does not attempt a comprehensive catalog, but she makes the excellent point that we need more words for our feelings rather than trying to narrow the breadth and width of human experience into discrete and limited categories. It is a marvelous, revelatory read.

Watt Smith worked in theatre before beginning an academic career. Somehow that seems entirely appropriate to emotion-spotting. An actor with a range of experiences may need some prompting on how they should feel about a certain scene, and the words help to give them context. Or perhaps actors are teaching us as audience an emotion we instinctively recognize but have never been able to put into words.

The book is filled with a sense of good humor. Even in definitions of those feelings we would be happy to do without, like disappointment and despair, Watt Smith does not leave us feeling bereft. She always puts in a little upswing at the end which shows us the way out, or makes us smile in relief and pleasure that we are not in that space now.

I particularly liked her discussion of compassion in which she recognizes that

”For Tibetan Buddhists, the wish to free a person from suffering is ideally experienced in equanimity, with a quiet confidence. For many of us, however, compassion is considerably more anxious territory…requiring a person to discover very vulnerable parts of themselves…Only the wisest can bend themselves to another’s pain without being rendered numb and helpless themselves: the “compassion fatigue” we hear about in the caring professions today.”

Her discussion of contempt puts me in mind of Donald Trump, as do many things these days. Contempt is a performative emotion in that it turns a spectator into a participant, inviting a conversation. One can watch a spectacle, but once one acts or speaks in contempt, one is provoking a response.

Disgust is a prime candidate for a “universal” emotion as it is instantaneous and involuntary, though Watt Smith points out that often “something out of place” is often the culprit to feelings of involuntary disgust: a hair in one’s soup, soup on one’s beard or clothing, or simply a disagreeable smell where we don’t expect to find it.

There is a word which has no equivalent in English, though I have seen the emotion described in a novel by a woman of Bangladeshi descent, called maya-lage. Watt Smith calls it fago in this book, which is a type of love and pity felt for those in need, mixed with sadness, sorrow, and compassion. It is the feeling one gets contemplating the fate of those who experience an earthquake, or other natural disaster.

I can’t recommend this book more highly for all of us, but especially for those in the creative professions. It is filled with irresistible descriptions of feelings we may have experienced but for which we had no words, and may inspire attempts to capture those emotions as they cross the mind-body divide. The author goes around the world seeking words that express a human state. It is completely absorbing. One doesn’t have to read the entries in order—one is encouraged to skip around.

You will not want to miss emotions for which definitions appear in a country we just visit—that a nationality has created a word for a sensation may mean it is a characteristic feeling in a certain culture, like han, a feeling of sadness and hope at the same time…a yearning for things to be different (Korea), or torschlusspanik, a German word for the agitated, fretful feeling that time is running out, or “gate-closing panic.” I am quite sure the Chinese must have similar expression somewhere, knowing what I do about their culture. I must also mention the extraordinary capture of characteristic feeling in the term greng jai, “the feeling of being reluctant to accept another’s offer of help because of the bother it would cause them.” Greng jai is a Thai phrase.

Buy this one. Watt Smith is a delightful companion, and many of the words you will want to find again. Below, Tiffany Watt Smith gives a short TED-like talk on her work.

Tiffany Watt Smith @ 5x15 from 5x15 on Vimeo.

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Coyote America by Dan Flores

Dan Flores has done something fascinating in this book, rehabilitating the image of a persecuted carnivore lowest on our opinion roster of animals, including cockroaches and rats. He makes the case that coyotes should be America’s national avatar, displacing the bison or buffalo. Extremely clever, adaptable, and pioneering, the coyote was designated a principal deity by American Indians--North America’s oldest deity, responsible for creating all of North America.

Flores tells us that coyotes live within a couple miles of us at all times now…even those of us in major metropolitan areas. Coyotes are cosmopolitan, and have been living in urban areas since the time of Columbus at least. They are perceptive, wily fellow-travelers with us.

”Suffice it to say here that as we humans head off into an uncertain and probably dangerous future of our own making, it might be wise to keep an eye on [coyotes]. I, for one, am going to be very interested in how coyotes cope with the twenty-first century and what insights we might draw about our own circumstances from a coyote history that so often seems to mirror ours.”

Coyotes are predators, feeding mainly on small mammals, birds, or fruits. They are sociable, hunting in packs. Contrary to the notion that coyotes were responsible for cattle kills, they were nearly always scavengers of large animals as befit their position in the ranking of predators in the larger ecosystem. Very nearly killed off as pests since the end of the nineteenth century, they have none-the-less persevered.

Flores suggests we look to the Indian coyote stories, of which there is a rich seam, to understand human nature: “who better to illustrate that than self-centered, gluttonous, carnal Coyote?”As we began to understand our own animal natures, the study of other social animals leaves “little doubt that…canines also understand equality and inequity…and experience both a rudimentary form of empathy and some basic theory of mind…an essential sense of what in human terms we would call 'right and wrong.'”

Employees of the Wildlife Services’ Predator Research Center, whose greatest advocate is the American sheep industry, is responsible for killing by aerial shooting roughly 35,000 coyotes from the air annually. Even they readily admit that coyotes have personality: “They’re individuals. Like people, some get into trouble.” Sheep farmers claim to lose some percentage of lambs to coyote packs every year. The federal government spends an equal amount of money (the cost of the lambs) to kill or sterilize coyote. Hmmm...a good use of federal tax dollars?

This book is a wildlife biologist’s dream. Readable, eloquent, well-argued, it looks at coyote history from many angles and leads even those of us with reason to dislike the disruptive canines to a grudging admiration and wonder. Of course, sport hunters probably don’t read peer-reviewed ecological articles, but Flores points out that ecosystems tend to develop some balances in response to threats and flourishing in their environment. Trying to kill coyotes takes natural balances out of the equation.

Flores ends with examples of coyote in art, and reminds us again how the animal is portrayed as a caricature of human nature, for example Wile E’s comic overconfidence (remind you of anyone?), unswerving obsession with a goal, and unfailing faith in technology. (Even that swath of red-gold hair has something of the coyote about it.) But I don’t want to carry the metaphor too far. After all, coyote in modern day parlance means a person who sneaks illegal aliens into the U.S. from Mexico.

NPR's David Greene interviewed Dan Flores about this book on coyotes.

Dan Flores is a historian, A.B. Hammond Professor Emeritus at University of Montana-Missoula, who has written several books about the American West and the animals who reside there. This year he also published a book called American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, perhaps in conjunction with the movement by Sean Gerrity, president of American Prairie Reserve, committed to wildlife conservation and hoping to create the largest wildlife complex ever assembled in the continental United States. "When complete, the reserve will comprise some 3.5 million contiguous acres (more than 5,000 square miles) of native grassland in northeastern Montana, with a goal of restoring the wildlife abundance the landscape once contained." [National Geographic bio].

Here is Dan Flores addressing the 32nd National Cowboy Poetry gathering about the history of America's Serengeti, and here is Sean Gerrity at an Aspen Institute gathering to elicit donations for his project.


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The Trespasser (Dublin Murder Squad #6) by Tana French

This novel in the Tana French series about Irish murder detective Antoinette Conway is universally loved and considered among her best in a long line of terrific mystery novels. Why? There is little action in this novel. It is a novel of psychologies and pathologies.

The writing brings us deeply into the internal politics of a murder squad and expresses the difficulty of a woman operating in a rough environment hung with grisly soul-destroying murders. The male camaraderie inside the squad means that little concession is made for women with different histories, priorities, manners, and habits. Other women detectives Antoinette had known didn’t want to fight the scum-stain perps outside and their own colleagues inside. Antoinette is in the middle of making that very decision for herself during the period of the novel.

Antoinette is driven and bright, but she also has a chip on her shoulder that may lead her to attribute motives to colleagues inappropriately. Certainly she has been hazed by older detectives, so she has some cause for paranoia, but not everyone wants her to fail. In this novel she is chosen along with Stephen, a man everyone likes, to handle a case that looks straightforward…and turns out anything but.

French does the thought processes and conversation and hidden meanings so well that even from this distance we feel the cut of the sly put-downs and deflections, and the terror of facing very experienced actors in the interview rooms. The older male detectives in this novel reveal that they could care less why a suspect might commit a crime, and are just happy to put someone down for the crime if it increases their solve-rate, whether or not it makes perfect sense.

Antoinette pursues the psychological in all her interviews. Cops conducting interviews must mask their feelings and intentions and the suspect must survive insinuation or barrage on their most closely held secrets. It is hurtful on both sides. One can only be steeped in slime for so long before it feels like it covers everything.

It’s French’s language that is so entrancing: her fresh insults and filthy descriptions of perps and coworkers stun us into laughter, making the old story of murder feel new. She also leads us astray several times, mentioning red herrings that we hang onto long past the time we should have jettisoned them.

Antoinette is able to twist us around her finger because we trust her vision. She can be cruel, dismissive, and suspicious but she goes after bad guys like a rottweiler. We'd want her on our side, but we wouldn't want her suspecting us of doing wrong. Readers convince themselves she is the honest and upstanding cop, unwilling to close ranks with male colleagues she doesn’t trust even as we begin to wonder if she isn’t being unreasonable. How can one person have so much going on inside? French almost loses our sympathy for Antoinette with her anger and admissions of her self-deceptions.

In this case, a young woman Aislinn has a makeover into a slim, slick magazine image of herself and ends up dead. The case has the appearance of an off-the-shelf “domestic.” Antoinette and Stephen initially feel disrespected when they are specifically chosen for the assignment, but their wide-open instincts turn up pieces that do not fit in a point-and-solve case.

One piece of the story that left me feeling unsure was the thread that involved Antoinette’s father. A big piece of Antoinette’s identity involves her dark (what used to be called swarthy) skin, presumably from her father’s side, and the notion of Antoinette as fatherless child who struggled with belonging.

Her father appears in this novel, but I got little notion of him as non-Irish descent. We are treated to his clothes, but get cursory treatment of him as a person. French clearly left this thread for another day, but why introduce him at all? And why doesn’t the mere sight of him inspire a quenchless curiosity in Antoinette? He clearly wants to make contact, though in a queer and underhanded way. Is he a spook? Will French take Antoinette on a wider world tour in future novels and expand her reach into international intrigue? Is he the trespasser of the title?

I listened to the Penguin Audio production of this book, read by Hilda Fay. The Irish accents are the beauty of the listening experience, and I wouldn't have wanted to miss them. The fresh insults Antoinette thinks up to describe a person she disdains can be particularly toothsome in Irish brogue. And Fay does Breslin's greasy speaking style to perfection. Highly recommended.

Here is an October 3, 2016 review of French's work published in the New Yorker by Laura Miller, books and culture columnist for the online magazine Slate. Below is an interview with Tana French after her win for the Ireland's AM Crime Fiction Book of the Year for her outstanding novel of crime and social commentary Broken Harbor.

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The Peripheral by William Gibson

William Gibson’s storytelling skill is such that we read/listen to him string adjectives, verbs, and nouns together in the places we expect to find them, only to discover 30-40 minutes later that we have no earthly idea what it is he is talking about. Ah, but what does it matter? He is slick, cool, forward-thinking. Surely it will all become clear.

I like several things about the world that contains Flynn and her brother Burton. Composting toilets are no longer unusual, and virtual reality is commonly used. Coffee and Red Bull are in big demand but only two vegetables (jalapeno & green onion) were mentioned amidst cronuts, pork or chicken nubbins, blinis with caviar & sour cream, sardine panini, shrimp bowls, breakfast burritos, and an unreasonable amount of sushi. You can see where my head was.

Anyway, there’s lots of technology, but the really big thing is that two time periods can coexist: before and after the “jackpot." “That really was a vile period, Flynn’s day,” one character from the other side comments, and another tells us the jackpot had already begun while Flynn was living pretty rough, close by her veteran brother and his shot-up best buddy, Connor. Humans can travel between these two time periods, and can effectively change singular outcomes, though not the jackpot. The jackpot, we are told, is multi-causal and devastating to life on earth.

It is only a little curious (but still cool) that Gibson barely even refers to sex. It’s as though women got what they wanted—to be recognized for their minds and their skills rather than their bodies. Some attention is paid to clothing, haircuts, and attractive features, but Flynn is strangely reticent to be seen in a sweatshirt and panties by a face on a screen, even one some great distance in the future. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask the screen to hide it’s eyes. But the language and thought processes of men and women are oddly similar among everyone except Lowbeer, who has a mind I recognize as feminine.

It was delightful to discover she also has a male body, coincidently still alive in Flynn’s time.

I really liked what Gibson did with his worlds. He seems to have taken Naomi Klein’s nonfiction book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate to heart and imagined what comes before, during, and after climate change. His later world is filled with people for whom the concept altruism draws surprised comment. Newgate prison in London has been rebuilt because “the klepts thought it a wise and necessary thing.” One thing I didn't like as well was that he gave his chief villain in the post-jackpot world a Middle Eastern name. One could look at that as divine justice, but for me it was a little too reminiscent of those old films where the bad guy looked Russian and had a German accent. Maybe a little too obvious in a book without much of that.

China has a presence in both worlds, though not too heavily underscored. It was kind of cool, the post-jackpot imaginings...though sans vegetables…Connor, the shot-up veteran who was wheelchair bound, had a chance to bound around in new and different peripherals who accepted his personality and life force. And the very end shows the maturity of Gibson’s vision.

Despite liking the sentiments Gibson shares in this big story, I probably am not going to reach for another scifi novel very soon. I read this as a challenge to myself to get out of my comfort zone and see the world(s). However much I finally enjoyed it, it still feels a little too much like play when we have a lot of work to do if we’re to change outcomes slightly during our own jackpot.


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The Bangkok Asset (Sonchai Jitpleeheep #6) by John Burdett

It is difficult to know if Burdett is so far out of touch he is creating a science fiction world or if he is so in touch that we are the ones inhabiting a present we know little of. He repeats often during this book that the West has so destabilized itself with the corruption of our spirituality and morals, and its support of divisive financial and corporate policy that all is left is for it to collapse into a state of oligarchy, state control, and slavery. The natural outcome of this disintegration are the trans-human creatures he introduces to us in this book: creatures bred to control humans.

All the things we liked about the Burdett series are still there but they are wrapped in this new black packaging. Burdett is funny and insightful. I loved his new character, Krom, a smart, capable lesbian with a full-body tattoo and a fierce libido. Burdett has a point when it comes to trans-humans: eventually we are probably all going to be installing little technological aids into our bodies to prevent problems or enhance features…he just jumped the gun a little with his physically perfect though psychologically stunted spawn.

Our beloved Sonchai is struggling with his history. He wants to know who his father is, and for some strange reason his mother has been withholding. In this episode she finally shows him pictures which helps only a little: it was all too long ago and old men often do not resemble their younger selves.

There is a mystery here, but the old police procedural format seems to have gone out the window. This is far more a psychological thriller with super-elements. It is interesting that Burdett chose to call his freaks trans-humans considering we are just going through trans-talk in the States at the moment. One of his Chinese characters, offered a choice of straight, gay, or trans bars, chose trannies as his far-and-away favorite. Perhaps it is the notion of infinitely adaptable human experience? Are we infinitely adaptable?

Speaking of Chinese, there is a strong suggestion of Chinese influence deep in Thai government business, and throughout Southeast Asia, which probably has an element of truth. It would be difficult to imagine they wouldn’t have a great deal of influence, given China’s size, wealth, population, needs, and proximity.

“War is always a balance between wanting to win and needing to survive.”

The book takes a dog-leg into Cambodia to visit the jungle site of Vietnam-era LSD experiments that sort of fit with the search for Jitpleecheep’s search for his father, but it is so dark and weird that it seemed Burdett wanted to add this to the historical record regardless of whether or not it fit perfectly. Is it true? Again, there may be elements of truth, though it is infuriating America’s secret spy agency would have this kind of reach in a country with which we had no diplomatic relations for at least four years in the 1960’s. Maybe it is folklore kept alive by people Burdett meets in Bangkok—it must be very strange at times in Bangkok with all those old operators hanging around.

Burdett also reminds us of three U.S. citizens who self-immolated in front of government buildings to protest the Vietnam War. I’d never heard of this. Alice Herz, Roger LaPorte, Norman Morrison. November 1965. How effectively they were erased.

One reviewer said the book was open-ended, suggesting a further installment in this vein. Perhaps that is true, though I felt Burdett was just offering questions for us all to consider. Who wouldn’t want enhancements of one sort or another? It depends. It depends on what we give up in the process, and what kind of society we eventually want. He has a couple of zinger quotes that seem appropriate to present-day America:

“Haven’t you noticed how childish the West has become? Just when it most needs men and women of mature judgment it seems there aren’t any. Such a society is vulnerable to the most radical manipulation…what do dissatisfied children do? They complain, they cry—but it never occurs to them to rebel effectively…Infantilism and slavery go hand in hand…”

I am only marginally sad to lose Sonchai Jitpleecheep to Burdett’s changing fictional world. It seems Burdett is giving us something new, filled with the insights of a lifetime. Thought-provoking.

A word on the audio: Actor Stephen Hogan does an excellent job with the material but he has a way of dropping his voice to indicate a character's thought or the narrator speaking. The change in register is so great that unless one is wearing headphones, one has to adjust the volume constantly, otherwise the other characters' voices are much too loud. This is only a problem in a car or on a stereo system. A suggestion to Recorded Books then, is that Hogan can drop his voice, but not to such a great extent. The difference in loudness is the problem.



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The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life by John le Carré

Audio CD Pub September 8th 2016 by Penguin Original Title The Pigeon Tunnel: A Life of Writing ISBN13: 9780241977545

These stories are pure enjoyment. David Cornwell makes up for all those years he refused interviews, answering questions we never got to ask. If he doesn’t quite “bare all,” within are things we may have felt strongly about at the time, but now excite us just for the pleasure of hearing a different voice tell us indeed, we may have been right all along.

The written word is fine, but I am going to urge readers to consider the audio of this memoir which is read by the author himself. His accents and inflection make for riotous listening in parts: his plummy enunciation explain moments of real learning, like when he was sent to Paris as a sixteen-year-old to pick up a debt for his father, or his learning the ways of Hollywood.

Society’s view of spies changes with the times, and David Cornwell acknowledges this, and along with us is horrified at the waste and destruction many of those pointed in the direction of the interests of state have wrought through arrogance and incompetence.

What is most appealing about le Carré’s writing is that David Cornwell has never stopped being the man that attracted MI-5 and-6 when he was recruited early on in his career. He is capable of enormous leaps of understanding—and judgment, when it comes to it. A few of his books will remain in the stacks, long-lasting as literature, because he managed to capture something we acknowledge as real, if dark and depressing and somehow enormously sad.

This le Carré autobiography is arguably even more engrossing than his novels because he applies his writing talent and unparalleled observation and pacing skills, but he shares the sources of his inspiration, highlighting for us where his characters diverge from their real-life counterparts. Real people in real crises are almost always more interesting than their fictional counterparts, aren’t they? Best of all, we get cameos of famed leaders and crooks, winners, losers, and those who tried.

The most affecting bits he saved for the end, where he talks about his “confected” childhood memories, including a mother, all angles instead of curves, whom he met at the age of twenty-one and who talked nonstop about Ronnie (his father), but supplanting the “he” with “you.”

A family of storytellers, then, and it all manifest in a man torn between the truth and it’s opposite. Cornwell could tell a scam from a mile away, which is why he never went public with the “tell-all” offered to him by Nicholas Elliott, best friend and colleague of Kim Philby, one of the most infamous double agents in British Intelligence history. But hearing Cornwell take on the voice of Elliott as he ostensibly spilled the secrets regarding the still-classified debriefing with Philby in Beirut is something you do not want to miss, even if you aren’t aware of the significance of that confession.

A couple of meetings with Yasser Arafat stand out, as does his unrehearsed seventy-five minute live interview with French television personality and host Bernard Pivot. Cornell speaks so glowingly of what a phenomenon Pivot was on television that I will forever regret not knowing enough French to understand Pivot's wit and sense of style.

This book gives enormous pleasure, whatever your preferred method of consumption. The revelations may seem out of date to some, but it is actually one of those memoirs that never go out of date. Classic, I think they call it.

Below, an excerpt from the audio, read by le Carré:




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Hope for a Cool Pillow by Margaret Overton

Many end-of-life discussions have been popular these past couple years, but this one is a little different. It comes at the discussion from a different angle, and it is an angle I have not seen well-articulated, certainly not by a doctor.

For one thing, it is intensely personal, especially in the beginning. Overton claims to be an introvert, but she does an awful a lot of reaching out in this book. I laughed aloud at one joke she told on herself:

At her nursery school, they often played musical chairs, “which I loathed and which may have scarred me for life. I still worry about adequate seating. Usually some poor kid who was not paying attention got stuck without a chair. Then he stood awkwardly and felt blazingly stupid while everyone else sat comfortably and looked smug. It was a terrible game.”

It is hard not to like this woman flinching yet at a child’s game. But, in a way, this book is about paying attention so you can lie as comfortably as possible on your own deathbed.

As a doctor, Overton has the viewpoint, motives, and reaction to incentives of a doctor. But here she is talking about the health care system and why it doesn’t seem to work for everyone (according to statistics, we might say anyone) in this country. I have never personally seen a doctor question in detail the incentives of the system, but Overton does here. She is very thought-provoking, particularly because she doesn’t give us easy answers. She acknowledges the questions, and asks us to do the same.

”The last six months of life accounted for roughly twenty-five percent of our Medicare spending….We try really hard to revive the people least likely to benefit….doctors often operate to fix something that will not save a dying patient, and in doing so avoid the difficult conversation with patients and caregivers about their prognosis and what they want.”

So, it is not so different from Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, except that she gives a little responsibility to doctors, many of whom are not trained nor equipped for this conversation.

If a person with good health insurance and a terminal disease is in the hospital, is there any reason to limit treatment? She suggests that a for-profit private system of healthcare may not give us the kind of incentives, treatments, and quality of life (or quality of death) we desire.

”I find the concept of for-profit hospitals appalling. There’s an inherent misalignment of motives in the “business” of medicine. Physicians have a moral and financial incentive to provide excessive care to people who can pay for it as long as they have a heartbeat.”

She interleaves her narrative about taking a three-part post-graduate course at Harvard on hospital administration with the declining health of her father and her mother, and with experiences she is having in the hospital. Mostly she wants to share her grief, her expertise, her thinking, and her care. She seems the best kind of friend to talk with about end-of-life issues.

Her father had urged on her the need for preparation, and attention to these matters. He managed very well, until his cancer diagnosis. After many treatments meant to extend his life rather than cure his cancer, things got grimmer. He decided he’d had enough, and his preparation meant his family did not have a hard time of it.

Overton’s mother was a different story, and many of you will recognize the more lingering death of a dementia patient. However, even this wasn’t as painful as some of us experience, due to that planning again. The real problem comes when someone has no family to help, as is the case with many patients Overton sees in the hospital at the last stages of their lives, treated callously by an ever-changing roster of medical care personnel, and unable to make clear decisions.

I find it fruitful to hear the experiences of a doctor, and note she says “Personally, I don’t want to live into my nineties.” Her recommendation is that we do not wait on thinking about these things because life is fragile, and you don’t want to be one of the 45% of patients without advanced directives. Your life, in that case, would no longer be your own.

Totally inappropriately, I am adding a note that Overton introduced me to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is something I thought I'd invented, frankly. It is the notion that incompetent folks may be too incompetent to know how incompetent they are. It is a very useful construct, particularly in these times.


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