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Podcast: Your Gut Instinct is Bad For Your Relationships

While caring for his wife as she struggled with a severe nervous breakdown, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky put the cognitive strategies he’d long been teaching others to work on his strained relationship. After seeing the incredible impact it had on his marriage as a whole, he decided to write a book to share these relationship-changing communication strategies.

Join us as Dr. Tsipursky explains why going with your “gut” can actually backfire and shares 12 practical mental habits you can begin using today for excellent communication.

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Guest information for ‘Gleb Tsipursky- Instinct Relationship’ Podcast Episode

Gleb Tsipursky, PhD, is a cognitive neuroscientist and behavioral economist on a mission to protect people from relationship disasters caused by the mental blind spots known as cognitive biases through the use of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)-informed strategies. His expertise comes from over fifteen years in academia researching cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics, including seven as a professor at Ohio State University, where he published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in academic journals such as Behavior and Social Issues and Journal of Social and Political Psychology. It also stems from his background of over twenty years of consulting, coaching, speaking, and training on improving relationships in business settings as CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. A civic activist, Tsipursky leads Intentional Insights, a nonprofit organization popularizing the research on solving cognitive biases, and has extensive expertise on translating the research to a broad audience. His cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Newsweek, The Conversation, CNBC, CBS News, NPR, and more. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut, The Truth Seeker’s Handbook, and Pro Truth. He lives in Columbus, OH; and to avoid disaster in his personal life, makes sure to spend ample time with his wife.

About The Psych Central Podcast Host

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author. To learn more about Gabe, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

Computer Generated Transcript for ‘Gleb Tsipursky- Instinct Relationship’ Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Psych Central Podcast, where guest experts in the field of psychology and mental health share thought-provoking information using plain, everyday language. Here’s your host, Gabe Howard.

Gabe Howard: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of The Psych Central Podcast. Calling into the show today, we have Dr. Gleb Tsipursky. Dr. Tispursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. He is the author of The Blindspots Between Us, and he’s a returning guest. Dr. Tsipursky, welcome to the show.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Thanks so much for having me on again, Gabe. It’s a pleasure.

Gabe Howard: Well, I’m very excited to have you on, because today we’re going to be talking about how our mental blind spots can damage our relationships and how to defeat these blind spots to save our relationships. I think this is something a lot of people can really relate to because we all very much care about our relationships.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: We do, but we think too little about the kind of mental blind spots that devastate our relationships. I mean, there’s a reason about 40% of marriages in the US end in divorces. And there is a reason that so many friendships break apart due to misunderstandings and conflicts that don’t need to happen. And when I see people doing that, running into these sorts of problems, they are just suffering in needless, unnecessary way. And that really harms them, and that really kind of breaks my heart. So that’s why I wrote this book.

Gabe Howard: We think about the term cognitive bias and there’s just so many psychological terms that basically say the way that your body feels is lying to you. That just because something makes you feel good doesn’t make it good. And just because something feels bad doesn’t make it bad. And I know that you’ve done excellent work in helping business leaders understand that. And this book is sort of an extension of that work in helping people understand that just because your friend or lover or spouse makes you feel bad doesn’t make it bad. Is that what you’re trying to tie together here?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: I am, and this work actually emerged from where my wife, about five years ago, had a nervous breakdown, major nervous breakdown, where she was in a pretty terrible spot. So like you said, I’ve been doing consulting, coaching, training for business leaders for over 20 years now. And I’m a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics. I’ve taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Ohio State as a professor for fifteen years. Now, at that point when my wife had a nervous breakdown, that was pretty terrible. So she was just crying for no reason, anxious for no reason. No reason that she was aware of. And that was really bad. She couldn’t work, she couldn’t do anything. I had to become her caretaker. And that was a really big strain on a relationship. I knew about these strategies, which I was already teaching to business leaders, and I started applying them toward our relationship. And we started to work through some of these strains in our relationship using the strategies. And so seeing the kind of impact that they had on our marriage and where they pretty much saved our marriage, definitely would not have been able to cope without these strategies. I decided that it would be a good time to write a book for a broader audience about personal relationships, romantic life, friendship, community, civic engagement, all of those sorts of relationships that are really damaged by the blind spots we have between us as human beings that can really be saved if we just are more aware of these blind spots and know about the research based tactics to address these blind spots.

Gabe Howard: As I’m sitting here listening to you, I completely agree with you, I know your educational background. I know the research that you’ve put into it. I’ve read your books and I believe you, Dr. Tsipursky. But there’s this large part of me that’s like, wait a minute, we’re supposed to trust our heart and trust our gut, especially in romantic relationships, love at first sight. I mean, every romantic comedy is based on this butterflies in the stomach. So the logical part of me is like Dr. Tsipursky, spot on. But the I want to fall in love in this magical way part of me is like, don’t bring science into this. And I imagine you get this a lot, right, because love isn’t supposed to boil down to science. What do you say to that?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Well, I say it’s just like exactly the kind of love we feel for a box of dozen donuts. You know, when we see them, when we see that box of dozen donuts, we just have this desire in our heart and our gut. We feel it’s the right thing to do to just gorge on those donuts. They look delicious and it’s yummy. And wouldn’t it be lovely to eat all those donuts, right? Well, I mean, what would happen to you after that?

Gabe Howard: Right.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: That would not be a good consequence for you. You know that. You know that, you know, five minutes after you finished gorging yourself on those donuts or eating a whole tub of ice cream or whatever your poison is, that you would be regretting it. And that is the kind of experience that we have where our body, our heart, our mind, or our feelings, whatever it comes from, those sensations, they lie to us. They deceive us about what’s good for us. And that all comes from how our emotions are wired. They’re not actually wired for the modern environment. That’s the sucky thing. They’re wired for the savannah environment. When we lived in small tribes of hunter-gatherers, fifteen people to 150 people. So in that environment, when we came across a source of sugar, honey, apples, bananas, it was very important for us to eat as much of it as possible. And that’s what our emotions were for. We are the descendants of those who were successfully able to gorge themselves on all the sugar that they came across, all the honey. And therefore, they survived and those who didn’t, didn’t. That’s an inborn instinct in us. That’s a genetic instinct. Now, in the current modern environment, it leads us in very bad directions because we have way too much sugar in our environment for our own good.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: So if we eat too much of it, we get fat. That’s bad for us. There’s a reason there’s an obesity epidemic here in the US and actually around the world in countries that adopt the US diet. And so this is why you want to understand that your feelings are going to be lying to you around food, around what kind of food you want to eat. In the same way, your feelings, the current research is showing very clearly, that your feelings are going to be lying to you about other people because our feelings are adapted to the tribal environment, when we lived in those small tribes. They are a great fit if you happen to live in a small tribe in the African savannah. But for all of you who are not listening to this podcast in a small little cave in the African savannah, they’re going to be a terrible fit for you. It’s really going to cause you to make really wrong, terrible decisions for your long term good. Because these natural, primitive, savage feelings are not what you want to be using for modern, current environment.

Gabe Howard: There’s a phrase and you reference it as well. Marketers say you can’t go wrong telling people what they want to hear, and that’s a great marketing concept to sell, you know, cereal. But it’s not such a great concept if you’re trying to encourage people to fall in love, get married or make decisions. Because if you buy a cereal that you don’t like, eh, you’re out four bucks, right. You’re out, you know, five bucks, big deal. You never eat the cereal again. But if you wreck a relationship that is good or you enter into a relationship that’s bad, this has real long term consequences.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Right now, in the current environment where we don’t realize that go with your heart and follow your gut on the romantic relationships is horrible advice that will devastate your relationships, no matter how uncomfortable you feel about me saying that. People like Tony Robbins, I mean, he says be primal, be savage. You know, follow your intuition. That’s an essential message for people like Tony Robbins or Dr. Oz or whatever. All those other people who are on those stages and who millions of people listen to. It’s very comfortable to hear that message because you want to follow your gut. You feel good about it. Just like it feels comfortable, it feels delightful to eat those dozen donuts. It feels delightful, feels comfortable to go with your gut and follow your intuitions in your relationships, because that is what feels good. It doesn’t feel comfortable at all, you really have to go outside of your comfort zone to do the difficult thing and step back from your intuitions and from your feelings and say, hey, I might be wrong about this. This might not be the right move. I might not want to enter into this relationship or I might want to stop this relationship. That’s actually not good for me. But people don’t want to hear that. These people who tell you this advice, they actually are leading you in very bad directions, very harmful, very dangerous directions. Research shows clearly that they’re wrong.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: And if you don’t want to screw up your relationships and you’re not going to be part of the 40% whose marriages end up in divorce and whose other sorts of relationships are devastated. So this is something that you need to realize that you are going to be really shooting yourself in the foot if you follow the advice of to be primal, to be savage. Even though it feels very uncomfortable to hear what I’m saying right now. Of course, it goes against your intuitions. It doesn’t feel comfortable and it will never feel comfortable. Just like there are lots of unscrupulous food companies that sell you a box of dozen donuts when they really should be selling you a box of two donuts. I mean, that’s the healthy thing in the modern environment. We know that. That’s what doctors advise us, but it’s very hard to stop it when we have a box of dozen donuts. Well, why then do companies sell us a box of dozen donuts? Because they make a lot more money doing this then when they sell you one donut or two donuts. So the relationship gurus, they make a whole lot more money than people who tell you to actually do the right but uncomfortable thing. The simple, counterintuitive, effective strategies that help you address your relationships by defeating these mental blind spots and helping you save your relationships.

Gabe Howard: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Sponsor Message: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.com. Secure, convenient, and affordable online counseling. Our counselors are licensed, accredited professionals. Anything you share is confidential. Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist whenever you feel it’s needed. A month of online therapy often costs less than a single traditional face to face session. Go to BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral and experience seven days of free therapy to see if online counseling is right for you. BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral.

Gabe Howard: And we’re back discussing how our mental blind spots can damage our relationships with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky. One of the things I like about your book is that you talk about the illusion of transparency and you have a story that sort of surrounds it to bring this to the forefront so that people can understand it. Can you talk about the illusion of transparency and can you share the story that’s in your book?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Happy to. So the story was of two casual acquaintances of mine. They went out on a date together. George and Mary, when they went on the date, George, he thought it was wonderful. Mary was so understanding, so interested, listened to him so well. And George told Mary all about himself. He felt that Mary really understood him, unlike so many of the women that he dated. So as they parted for the night, they agreed to schedule another date soon. Well, the next day, George texted Mary, but Mary didn’t text back. So, George waited for a day and sent Mary a Facebook message. But she didn’t respond to him. Even though George noticed that she saw the Facebook message. He sent her an e-mail then. But Mary maintained radio silence. Eventually, he gave up trying to contact her. He was really disappointed, and he thought that, just like all of these other women, how can he be so wrong about her? So why didn’t Mary write back or respond back? Well, she had a different experience than George on the date. Mary was polite and shy and she felt really overwhelmed from the start of a date with George being so extroverted and energetic, telling her all about himself, his parents, job, friends, not asking her anything about herself.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: And she thought, you know, why would I date someone who overwhelms me like that? Doesn’t really care about what I think? She politely listened to George, not wanting to hurt his feelings. And she told George, she would go out with him again, but she had absolutely no intention of doing so. I learned about this, the really different viewpoints of Mary and George, because I knew both of them as casual acquaintances. George, after the date, started complaining to people around him, including me, about Mary’s refusal to respond to the messages. That he thought at least went very well. And George felt that he was genuinely sharing and Mary did wonderful listing so he was confused and upset. I privately then went to Mary, asked Mary about, hey, what’s up? What happened? And she told me her side of the story. She told me that she sent a lot of nonverbal signals of her lack of interest in what he was saying to her. But George really failed to catch the signals. Mary perceived him as oversharing and herself as behaving very politely until she could leave. Now, that’s the story. That’s the nature of the story. You might feel that it’s problematic for Mary to avoid responding to George’s texts.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: But you have to realize that there are tons of Marys out there who behave this way due to a combination of shyness, politeness, and conflict avoidance. That’s the kind of people they are. They’re kind of anxious about conflict. But at the same time, there are so many Georges, they are very extroverted, they’re very energetic. And as a result, they don’t read nonverbal signals from others very well at all. In this case, both George and Mary fell into the illusion of transparency. This is one of the most common mental blind spots or cognitive biases. The illusion of transparency describes our tendency to greatly overestimate the extent to which others understand our mental patterns, what we feel and what we think. It’s one of the many biases that cause us to feel, think, and talk past each other. And so this is the big problem for us, the illusion of transparency, because if you feel that, like George felt, that Mary understands him and Mary feels like I’m sending these very clear signals, why does this guy keep being a jerk and not responding to them? That is something super dangerous for relationships, harms a great deal of relationships when we misunderstand the extent to which other people get us.

Gabe Howard: One of the things that I want to focus in on is that she said that she was sending non verbals. On one hand, I am guilty of missing the nonverbal. So I’m going to tend to take Georgia’s side in this, which is that she didn’t speak up. She didn’t say anything, and instead she hinted. And it sounds like what you’re saying is that she felt in her gut that her nonverbals, her hinting, were enough and that Georgia’s lack of responding made him rude.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Mm-hmm.

Gabe Howard: But probably from George’s side, as you said, George’s like, she said nothing. I carried on. And now she’s blaming me. So now we’ve got both of those sides. Now, they’re not going to work out as a romantic couple.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Clearly.

Gabe Howard: we get it. It’s a bummer. But let’s pretend for a moment that you are much more invested, Dr. Tsipursky, in George and Mary than you actually are. And you’re like, oh, my God, if they can just get over this one tiny little hump, they will just be a beautiful couple forever. And I know you’re not a therapist, but if you could sit George and Mary down and say, listen, you two are actually a perfect couple. But you’ve let this primitive nonsense get in the way. How would you help them get over this hump so they could see that, actually, they do have quite a bit in common?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Well, I would think that one of the things they need to work on is let’s say they have, share a lot of interests and they have very similar values. They have a lot of differences in their communication styles. That will be a big challenge. First of all, working on the illusion of transparency, they need to be much more humble about the idea that the other person understands them, about their ability to send signals correctly. The essence of the illusion of transparency is that when we think we’re sending a signal, a message to other people, we think the other person gets it 100%. That’s just how it feels because we feel OK, we’re sending this message. Therefore, the other people understand it because we are sending it.

Gabe Howard: Right.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: We are way too confident about our own ability to be good communicators. And that is the underlying essence of the illusion of transparency. Everyone, all of us, and especially George and Mary, need to develop a great deal more humility about their ability to send the signals, whether verbal or nonverbal and have those signals be received appropriately. So that’s kind of one thing to work on. The other things to work on would be the differences in communication styles where Mary is clearly shy., conflict-avoidant. So she’s very unlikely to speak up just because of that personality. It will take her a great deal of emotional labor to speak up in these areas. So perhaps that she can, instead of speaking up, because specifically verbalizing things is pretty difficult for many people. She can have a nonverbal signal that’s much more clear, you know, raising her hand in some way to indicate that, you know, hey, I’m getting overwhelmed. We need to pause or something like that. So some way that you can clearly indicate that she needs a break and that the conversation perhaps is not leading to where she wants it to lead and that George needs to stop talking. And George needs to, by contrast, to be much more aware and clearly reading Mary’s signals of interest and not interest. Because, you know, George is a raconteur. He likes telling stories. He likes sharing about himself. He likes sharing about everything. And he just kind of does overwhelm people. Knowing him as a casual acquaintance, he’s kind of the life of the party. But life is not always a party.

Gabe Howard: So, you know, like I can absolutely relate to George, you know, it’s not an accident that I’m a speaker, a podcaster, or a writer. All of these things involve being the center of attention and sharing and talking. So I really can relate to George. And that’s kind of why I brought it up, because I have a lot of Marys in my life.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Mm-hmm.

Gabe Howard: And I was completely unaware that I was overwhelming people because I just assumed that people would tell me to stop or something. I just didn’t know. So when I became older and more understanding and more socially adept, I realized that, oh, wow, people think that I’m ignoring their wishes. And that’s kind of why I want to touch on it. And obviously, I can only speak from my personal experience as being a George. But I’m sure that there’s a lot of Marys out there, that really think that they’ve been put upon or ignored by the Georges. Now that Mary understands that George did not realize he was doing it. It’s really sad when you think that somebody is ignoring your wishes.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Yeah.

Gabe Howard: And as you said, her gut was telling her that George was ignoring her rather than what was actually happening, which was George misunderstood. One of the things you talk about in your book is developing mental fitness. And we want to overcome the dangerous judgment errors of cognitive bias because they’re wrecking our relationships. What is mental fitness?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Mental fitness is the same thing as physical fitness. So we talked a little bit earlier about our ability to restrain ourselves from eating that dozen donuts, because then otherwise you’re really in trouble at this point in the world. You needed to develop a good approach to a healthy diet in order to address this. So you had to have physical fitness. Part of physical fitness is having a good diet. And it takes so much effort to have a good diet in this modern world because it doesn’t pay our capitalist society, all of these companies, for you to have a good diet, It pays them much better for you to eat all the sugar and processed food, which is exactly what caused you to have bad diet, obesity, various diabetes, heart disease, all those sorts of problems. The society is set against you. The capitalist marketplace is set against your having a healthy diet overall, and you have to work really hard to have a good diet. So that’s the part of physical fitness. Another part of physical fitness is, of course, is working out. Not sitting on your couch and watching Netflix all day, no matter how much Netflix might want you to do that.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: That is not a good way of having exercise, which is another important part of physical fitness. You need to put on your sweats and go to the gym. And, you know, right now, maybe in the coronavirus, get some form exercise machine and exercise at home. That is hard to do. Think about how hard it is to have physical fitness, to do the healthy diet and healthy exercises. It’s just as hard and just as important to have mental fitness. Now, in this current modern world where we’re spending more time at home because of the coronavirus, working more with our mind than with our body, it’s even more important to have mental fitness. Meaning working out your mind, not being primitive, not being savage, but figuring out what are the dangerous judgment errors? What are the cognitive biases, the mental blind spots to which you as an individual are most prone to? And you need to work on addressing them. That is what mental fitness is about. You need to figure out where you’re screwing up in your relationships because of these mental blind spots and the kind of effective mental habits that can help you address this.

Gabe Howard: All right, Dr. Tsipursky, you’ve convinced me. What are some helpful suggestions to get us there?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: So the mental habits, there are 12 mental habits that I describe in the book. So first, identify and make a plan to address all of these dangerous judgment errors. Two, be able to delay all of your decision making in your relationships, because it’s very tempting for us to immediately respond to an e-mail from someone with whom we’re in a relationship that caused us to be triggered. Instead, it might be much better for us to take some time and actually think about that response. Mindfulness meditation is actually very helpful for us to build up focus and focus is what’s necessary for us to delay our responses and to manage our response effectively. Then probabilistic thinking. It’s very tempting for us in relationships to think in black and white terms, good or bad, you know, something nice or not nice. Instead, we need to think much more in shades of gray and evaluate various scenarios and probabilities. Five, make predictions about the future. If you aren’t able to make predictions about the future, about what or how the other person will respond to things you do in the relationship, then you will not have a very good mental model of that person. And of course, that will hurt your relationship. So you can calibrate yourself and improve your ability to understand the other person by making predictions of how they will behave. Next, consider alternative explanations and options. It’s very tempting for us to blame the other person, have negative feelings, thoughts about the other person, just like Mary had negative thoughts about George’s behavior and George had negative thoughts about Mary’s behavior.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: None of them thought about the alternative explanations and options. You know, Mary didn’t think that George might have been misunderstanding her, missing the signals, instead of ignoring the signals. And the same thing with George about Mary. Consider your past experiences. There’s a reason a lot of people tend to get into the same kinds of bad relationships in the future as they did in the past. They don’t analyze the mistakes they made in the past and they don’t correct them. Consider a long term future when repeating scenarios. A lot of people get into a relationship just because of lust. They have this kind of desire for a dozen donuts and they don’t think about the long term consequences of getting into the relationship and the kind of situation, if this will be a series of repeating scenarios. Is this the kind of relationships that they want to have? Consider other people’s perspectives. That’s number nine. That’s very hard for us to do. It’s very easy to miss. We just think about ourselves and what we want to do and we don’t think about other people and what their aspirations are. Next, use an outside view to get an external perspective. Talk to other people, other people in your life who are trusted and objective advisors. George shouldn’t just talk to people who will say, yeah, you’re absolutely right, Mary is a jerk and vice versa. You should think about other people who would be trusted and objective, who will tell you, hey, you know, George, maybe you talk a little bit too much about yourself and here’s how Mary might be thinking about this.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Then set a policy to guide your future self and your organization if you’re doing this as part of a business, as part of an organization. So what kind of policy do you want? If you’re George, what kind of policy do you want to have toward your dates? Maybe you want to make sure to not simply talk all this time about yourself, but make sure to early on in the date and throughout the date to ask the other person about themselves and have all of these habits, mental habits that will help you have a much more effective relationship. And finally make a pre-commitment. So that was the internal policy, this is the external policy. You want to make a commitment to achieve a goal that you want. So a common pre-commitment is let’s say you want to lose weight. You can tell your friends, people, and your romantic partners, whatever, that you want to lose weight and ask them to help you avoid eating the dozen donuts. So that they can tell you, hey, you know, maybe you shouldn’t be ordering two desserts when you’re out at a restaurant. One will do. So that pre-commitment will help your friends help you. So those 12 mental habits, those are the specific mental habits you can develop to develop mental fitness. Just like you develop certain habits to have good diet and good exercise, you need to have these 12 habits to develop good mental fitness to work out your mind.

Gabe Howard: Dr. Tsipursky, first, I really appreciate having you here. Where can our listeners find you and where can they find your book?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: The Blindspots Between Us is available in bookstores everywhere. It’s published by a great traditional publisher called New Harbinger, one of the best psychology publishers out there. You can find out more about my work at DisasterAvoidanceExperts.com, DisasterAvoidanceExperts.com, where I help people address cognitive biases, these mental blind spots in professional settings, in their relationships and other areas. Also, you might especially want to check out DisasterAvoidanceExperts.com/subscribe for an eight video based module course on how to make the wisest decisions in your relationships and other life areas. And finally, I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. Happy to answer questions. Dr. Gleb Tsipursky on LinkedIn. G L E B T S I P U R S K Y.

Gabe Howard: Thank you, Dr. Tispursky. And listen up, everybody. Here’s what we need from you. If you like the show, please rate, subscribe, and review. Use your words and tell people why you like it. Share us on social media and once again, in the little description, don’t just tell people that you listen to the show. Tell them why you listen to this show. Remember, we have our own Facebook group at PsychCentral.com/FBShow. That will take you right there. And you can get one week of free, convenient, affordable, private online counseling anytime, anywhere, simply by visiting BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral. And we will see everybody next week.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to The Psych Central Podcast. Want your audience to be wowed at your next event? Feature an appearance and LIVE RECORDING of the Psych Central Podcast right from your stage! For more details, or to book an event, please email us at [email protected]. Previous episodes can be found at PsychCentral.com/Show or on your favorite podcast player. Psych Central is the internet’s oldest and largest independent mental health website run by mental health professionals. Overseen by Dr. John Grohol, Psych Central offers trusted resources and quizzes to help answer your questions about mental health, personality, psychotherapy, and more. Please visit us today at PsychCentral.com. To learn more about our host, Gabe Howard, please visit his website at gabehoward.com. Thank you for listening and please share with your friends, family, and followers.

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ashley-unicorn · 4 years ago

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Podcast: Your Gut Instinct is Bad For Your Relationships

Join us as Dr. Tsipursky explains why going with your “gut” can actually backfire and shares 12 practical mental habits you can begin using today for excellent communication.

We want to hear from you — Please fill out our listener survey by clicking the graphic above!

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Computer Generated Transcript for ‘Gleb Tsipursky- Instinct Relationship’ Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Thanks so much for having me on again, Gabe. It’s a pleasure.

Gabe Howard: Right.

Gabe Howard: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Clearly.

Gabe Howard: Right.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Yeah.

Gabe Howard: All right, Dr. Tsipursky, you’ve convinced me. What are some helpful suggestions to get us there?

Gabe Howard: Dr. Tsipursky, first, I really appreciate having you here. Where can our listeners find you and where can they find your book?

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brentrogers · 4 years ago

Text

Podcast: Your Gut Instinct is Bad For Your Relationships

Join us as Dr. Tsipursky explains why going with your “gut” can actually backfire and shares 12 practical mental habits you can begin using today for excellent communication.

We want to hear from you — Please fill out our listener survey by clicking the graphic above!

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW

Guest information for ‘Gleb Tsipursky- Instinct Relationship’ Podcast Episode

About The Psych Central Podcast Host

Computer Generated Transcript for ‘Gleb Tsipursky- Instinct Relationship’ Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Thanks so much for having me on again, Gabe. It’s a pleasure.

Gabe Howard: Right.

Gabe Howard: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Clearly.

Gabe Howard: Right.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Yeah.

Gabe Howard: All right, Dr. Tsipursky, you’ve convinced me. What are some helpful suggestions to get us there?

Gabe Howard: Dr. Tsipursky, first, I really appreciate having you here. Where can our listeners find you and where can they find your book?

Podcast: Your Gut Instinct is Bad For Your Relationships syndicated from

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dinafbrownil · 5 years ago

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Despite Quick Fixes, Kaiser Permanente Mental Health Care Still Lags

Editor’s note: Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

OAKLAND, Calif. — After years of state sanctions and fines, Kaiser Permanente claims it has gone a long way toward improving its mental health care. The national managed-care giant — California’s largest insurer with 9 million members — touts more than 1,200 therapist hires since 2016, improved patient access to appointments and an expanded training program for mental health professionals. Regulators at California’s Department of Managed Health Care report that Kaiser is meeting the benchmarks laid out in a 2017 settlement agreement that resulted from two years of negotiations.

But interviews with dozens of Kaiser Permanente therapists, patients and industry experts paint a more troubling picture of superficial gains that look good on paper but do not translate into more effective and accessible care. Many Kaiser patients still struggle to access ongoing treatment, often waiting two months between therapy sessions.

Kaiser therapists say that the HMO has figured out how to game the system set up by California regulators to measure progress without meaningfully improving care. They describe a model that relies on perfunctory intake interviews, conducted by phone from call centers, to show improved response times for patients seeking an initial appointment, but then fails to follow through with timely or regular follow-up care.

“The initial intake isn’t starting treatment. It just means the patient has to explain their experience multiple times,” said Kirstin Quinn Siegel, a licensed marriage and family therapist at Kaiser’s Richmond clinic. “It’s not a way to improve mental health services. It’s a way to improve their numbers.”

Such allegations are central to a five-day walkout planned this week involving thousands of Kaiser’s mental health professionals, who hit picket lines Monday demanding more time for administrative tasks, higher wages and shorter wait times for patient appointments.

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Of particular concern, according to multiple therapists, is a telehealth program called Connect 2 Care. Patients who call in with a mental health issue are offered an appointment, sometimes that same day, for an intake assessment conducted by phone with a therapist.

The intake calls, which last about 30 minutes, count toward meeting the state’s “timely access” regulation, which requires patients be given an initial urgent appointment within 48 hours and a non-urgent appointment within 10 days. A standard intake interview typically lasts at least an hour and is done in person by a therapist who will provide ongoing treatment, according to the American Psychological Association. Such visits generally include a full medical history, a mental status evaluation, an initial diagnosis and the creation of a treatment plan.

In contrast, Kaiser has opened large call centers in Livermore and San Leandro, lined with cubicles where Connect 2 Care therapists provide initial intakes by phone. But patients speak with the Connect 2 Care therapist only once. To book a follow-up appointment, they often wait four to eight weeks to see a therapist in person who will provide ongoing care. When they finally get in to see someone, said Siegel and others, the patient tells his story again, and the new therapist has to do another assessment. Many patients report waiting months between each subsequent appointment.

Kaiser officials, when touting improvements in their mental health care, note the system met the state’s timely access metric more than 90% of the time in 2019. But therapists say programs like Connect 2 Care are more about savvy record-keeping than good medicine.

Michael Torres, a child psychologist in the San Leandro clinic, said when it comes to ongoing therapy, little has changed in the 17 years he’s worked at Kaiser. His schedule is so packed that he is able to see his patients only every four to six weeks, even when a child is experiencing major depression and should be seen weekly. “It’s heartbreaking,” he said. “It only exacerbates conditions, prolongs symptoms, and professionally it’s just unethical.”

Torres also has a private practice, where he says some of his Kaiser patients choose to see him more frequently by paying out-of-pocket. “You then skew those getting better services to those who can afford it,” he added.

Kenneth Rogers, a Kaiser psychologist in the Sacramento area, said his options are either to see his patients once every two months or to squeeze them in after hours. “Whatever you’re working on, it’s not fresh in eight weeks. For most patients, you want to be regularly following up,” he said.

“I tell people if they have serious mental health issues, don’t go with Kaiser,” said Augie Feder, a therapist who left Kaiser last year and has a private practice in Berkeley.

While complaints about inadequate mental health care remain frustratingly commonplace throughout America’s health care system, Kaiser, headquartered in Oakland, has come under particular scrutiny from California regulators in recent years, in part because its therapists have been aggressive in documenting concerns.

In 2013, the state Department of Managed Health Care found Kaiser was systematically shortchanging patients seeking mental health treatment in violation of the state’s parity law, and levied a $4 million fine. In 2015, regulators again cited Kaiser, finding some patients were waiting months to see a psychiatrist or therapist. In 2017, the state cited Kaiser a third time for persistent problems. This time, the parties reached a settlement requiring Kaiser to hire an outside consultant for three years to improve access and oversight.

Since then, the National Union of Healthcare Workers, which represents 3,600 Kaiser mental health therapists in California — spanning psychologists, marriage and family therapists, social workers and psychiatric nurses — has continued to confront Kaiser for what the union says are ongoing lapses.

“Kaiser is trying to teach to the test,” said Fred Seavey, research director for the union. Still lacking enough therapists to meet patient demand, he said, Kaiser — despite $79.7 billion of operating revenue in 2018 — uses an “austerity model” in which the system rations care by front-loading resources toward initial appointments at the expense of ongoing care.

A survey by NUHW of 759 Kaiser therapists in April found that 71% said wait times for appointments at their clinics had gotten worse in the past two years; just 4% said individual weekly appointments are available for patients who need them. The union has collected more than 1,300 stories from patients who say they have been unable to access adequate mental health care.

In a September letter to the American Psychological Association, Kaiser accused the union of “an ongoing public pressure campaign … to try and pressure Kaiser Permanente management to agree to their financial demands.”

“We‘re doing as much as anyone to get ahead of this national issue,” said Dr. Don Mordecai, a psychiatrist and Kaiser Permanente’s national leader for mental health and wellness. “We’re certainly aware that we have some challenges.” Rates of depression, anxiety, suicide and addiction have soared across the country in recent years, and it has been difficult to meet the demand, he said.

Adding to the problem, Mordecai said, is a shortage of mental health workers that slows hiring. Kaiser has grown its mental health workforce in California by 30% since 2015, but membership has grown 23% over the same period, leaving the ratio of patients per therapist little changed. The Connect 2 Care program gives patients rapid access to a mental health professional, he said, and surveys show patient satisfaction is high.

Kaiser has launched an initiative to train 140 therapists each year and allocated $10 million to expand its postgraduate training program. Kaiser also has contracted with outside providers, including Beacon Health Options and Magellan Health, to improve access to care.

Mordecai said part of the problem is the mindset that all patients with depression or anxiety should be in extended individual therapy. “That is dated,” he said. “We’re not going to have enough providers to do that.” Instead, he argued, many patients with moderate mental health concerns should be treated in a primary care setting.

In contrast to the union survey, Kaiser spokesman Vincent Staupe said a review of return therapy visits found that patients are being seen according to therapists’ documented recommendations more than 84% of the time.

But several Kaiser therapists said the electronic records system that helps generate that statistic is misleading.

“If you say that to any clinician in any Kaiser clinic their jaw will just drop, because it’s just not true,” said Siegel at Kaiser’s Richmond clinic. “There is almost no clinician that is seeing their patients as often as they would recommend.”

When therapists enter the date of a patient’s next appointment into the default template for the electronic health records system, for example, it’s listed under “recommended treatment options,” when the date is really based on appointment availability, said Siegel.

“The language looks like the therapist is recommending that the patient come back in four, six or eight weeks, which is almost never what a clinician would recommend,” Siegel said.

Siegel said therapists in Richmond and elsewhere are inserting their own language that specifies the frequency of appointments the therapist believes is clinically appropriate (usually weekly or biweekly) before writing the date of the “next available return appointment.”

Asked about the concern, Marc Brown, a Kaiser spokesman, said, “We have numerous templates within the behavioral health record, and they are evolving constantly to make them more useful.” He reiterated that the recommendations are determined and entered into the record “solely by clinicians.”

Patients contacted by KHN described the frustrating hurdles of trying to get help through Kaiser: calls to therapists to no avail; hours spent on hold; months of treatment delayed.

Matthew Wasserman said he was “excited to join Kaiser” when he signed up for coverage in January 2019. “I heard the health care was great, but the one thing everyone told me was that the mental health was really bad,” said Wasserman, 36, who lives in Los Angeles.

Wasserman, who suffers from anxiety, knew that joining Kaiser meant giving up weekly appointments with his longtime therapist. He called Kaiser a week after his coverage started to find a new one. Following an initial appointment, he was told the next available follow-up wasn’t for three to four months. Instead, someone from Beacon Health would be in touch.

Wasserman waited more than a week, but no one called. He started contacting therapists on Beacon’s online directory. Out of the 30 to 40 he called, five called back. Three had no openings. The other two had time midday, but he couldn’t miss work.

So, he called Beacon and waited nearly two hours on hold. Two weeks later, he got an email listing three additional providers. None returned his calls.

“I have anxiety, so to find time at work to call and go through all my health care information over and over, it was really hard,” Wasserman said.

It was only after he filed an official grievance that Kaiser found a therapist who could see him on an ongoing basis — nearly four months after his initial request.

For other patients, the consequences have been more extreme.

In June 2017, Kevin Dickens of Alameda was depressed, anxious and suicidal. “My wife would come home and find me curled in a ball in the corner,” said Dickens, 42. His primary care doctor prescribed Prozac, but Kaiser said it had no available therapy appointments.

Instead, he was sent a list of 20 contracted providers to call. “It took me two weeks to go through the entire list, getting denied by every single doctor,” he said. He called Kaiser and was sent another 20 names, but again was unable to get an appointment.

Dickens called a third time and was scheduled with a psychiatrist who had an opening three weeks later, nearly nine weeks after his initial request. He went to the appointment, but three days later attempted suicide and was hospitalized.

After his release, Kaiser connected him with a therapist who could see him every six weeks. “I felt I needed every two weeks,” he said. “But there was nothing I could do.”

The American Psychological Association would not comment on Kaiser Permanente’s model. But Lynn Bufka, a senior director at the organization, said every study she has seen on the effectiveness of therapy is based on appointments occurring at least once a week. “So it really does raise the question of whether psychotherapy can be effective if you’re only seeing someone every four or six weeks,” Bufka said.

Shelley Rouillard, director of the California Department of Managed Health Care, said her department has not yet looked at whether patients are able to access follow-up appointments and will have more information on how they are faring after a future survey. Still, she said, Kaiser has made improvements since 2017 and so far has met the benchmarks set up in the settlement agreement. She would not share specifics, saying the details are not public.

“That doesn’t mean patients aren’t having trouble getting services,” Rouillard said. “That’s happening throughout the health care system.”

Access to affordable outpatient therapy indeed remains a national problem. A recent report from Milliman, a health care consulting company, found Americans were dramatically more likely to resort to out-of-network providers for mental health care than for other conditions because of inadequate provider networks.

But given Kaiser’s market dominance in California and its reputation as a signature model for integrated care, the system’s critics say the continued shortfalls in mental health care are both damaging and unacceptable.

“What I want to ask Kaiser executives is, would you send your loved one to our clinic? Would you want your family member with severe depression or debilitating anxiety or some other mental health condition to be seen once every six or eight weeks?” Siegel said. “I don’t think they would. I think they would want their loved one to get more treatment than we are able to provide.”

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/despite-quick-fixes-kaiser-permanente-mental-health-care-still-lags/

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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years ago

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THE FACT THAT ALL THESE LANGUAGES ARE TURING-EQUIVALENT MEANS THAT, STRICTLY SPEAKING, YOU CAN NO LONGER CLAIM TO HAVE INVENTED A NEW LANGUAGE, BUT WHAT IF HE WANTED TO HAVE A DISPROPORTIONATELY LOW PROBABILITY OF THE FORMER WILL SEEM TO HAVE FELT THE SAME BEFORE THEY STARTED TO BE ABLE TO DUPLICATE IT IN LESS THAN THREE WEEKS

You'd have to be product companies, in the summer of 2005, had eight startups in it. At least $1000 a month. The pointy-haired boss from responsibility: if he chooses something that is really just a bunch of twenty year olds could get rich from a startup is the percentage chance it's Google. A startup now can be just a pair of 22 year old guys. It was like being told to use dry water. I find that to have good ideas I need to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like Oh, I can't draw. A Lisp macro can be anything from an abbreviation to a compiler for a new search engine in 1998, or turning down a billion dollar acquisition offer. A function type. Of course the habits of mind. Really? Code size is important, because the only employees are a couple 25 year old founders who can live on practically nothing. Y Combinator we still only have four people, so we try to standardize everything.

When you assemble ideas at random and see what you came up with. If I had a choice of a spending the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I liked that much. In fact, I know it from my own experience as a reader. If you ever end up running a company, but this is the best way to get rich, why doesn't everyone want to do this? Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. Many people remember it as the happiest time of their lives. This is actually a rational response to their situation. Corollary: be careful what you measure. People who aren't smart at least try to act that way.1 When it was first developed, Lisp embodied nine new ideas: Conditionals.

Now the only threshold is courage. But there are two founders with the same qualifications who are both equally committed to the business, that's easy. If startups are mobile, the best opportunities are where things suck more than in corporate IT departments. When Robert got kicked out of grad school for writing the Internet worm of 1988, I envied him enormously for finding a way out without the stigma of failure. I read about people who liked what they did so much that I only did it out of necessity, there must be a lot of people use this technique without being consciously aware of it, and most of those weren't truly smart, so our third test was largely a fashion, driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century. If you work hard at being a bond trader for ten years, thinking that you'll quit and write novels when you have absolutely no desire to work on things you do. It seems safe to say now that open source has prevented that. In order to get tenure in any field you must not arrive at conclusions that members of tenure committees can disagree with. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same.

The problem with this car, as with American cars is bad design. You don't have to be a novelist, are you really out of your way to make yourself work on hard problems is to work on boring stuff. And since all the hackers use. When I have to read all these books if I remember so little from them? College is where faking stops working. Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this. You have more leverage negotiating with VCs than you realize. Which for founders will result in the perfect combination: funding rounds that close fast, with high valuations. Henry Ford. The only reason to hire someone is to do something differently.2 The worthwhile departments, in my opinion, are math, the hard sciences, engineering, history especially economic and social history, and I answered twenty, I could see them thinking that we didn't count for much. Rtm and Trevor and I do because we always have, and Jessica does too, mostly, because she's gotten into sync with us.

It's hard to create wealth by making a commodity. And it did not seem to be any syntax for it. I think, is worry about the opinion of the rest of the time success means getting bought, why not think of that idea, just that I don't want four years of my life to be consumed by random schleps. How about if I give you a couple reasons why a safe career might not be what your parents really want for you. Nor is there anything wrong with that. In fact, I'd guess 70% of the idea is much older than Henry Ford. Earlier this year I wrote something that seemed suitable for a magazine, so I had to do it.

Being friends with someone for even a couple days in some of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up.3 How can Larry and Sergey seem to have been headed down the wrong path. In the times when they weren't, philosophy was hopelessly intermingled with religion. Look at what a hard time doing that. They've tried hard to make money selling programming languages, as Erann Gat has pointed out, what industry best practice. Because anything that brings an advantage will give your competitors an advantage over you if they do it? It would be great if a startup could give us something of the old Moore's Law back, by writing software for smaller companies, because their software is probably going to be developing it for people like you. We're good at making movies and software because they're both messy processes. Hollywood, which gave us valuable experience dealing with heavy loads on our servers. For example, newspaper editors assigned stories to reporters, then edited what they wrote. Go out of your element? So although not knowing how to program that magically enables business people to understand them.

But if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to write one I'd be very curious to see it, but that's not the way to do really big things seems to be visibility. I probably read two or three founders, you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if they show the slightest sign of wasting your time, you'll be a grad-school dropout, and you have a new idea you can just sit down and consciously come up with an idea for a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and even then was afflicted by the structural problems I've described above. If you're talking to someone from corp dev, is the group within companies that buys other companies. And nearly all the rest, including me, remember it as a tautology. At some firms it's over 50%. The field is a lot more than what software you use. This seems to be allowed, that's what. So the most successful companies we've funded were started by undergrads.

The median age worldwide is about 27, so probably a third of your company. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. This is reassuring to investors, because they know that some of the other, it seems an axiom that if you need money, you can start to count on it. If someone with a PhD in computer science can't understand this thermostat, it must be satisfying expectations I didn't know I had. And it can last for months. While you're at it, with dramatic results. In some fields, like software or movies, you'd surpass your competitors by making a commodity. If you want to stay happy, you have to carry your weight. Startups are still very rare. That's nonsense. Now we needed to raise more.

Notes

We care about. Which in turn forces Digg to respond gracefully to such changes, because she liked the iPhone too, of course, Feynman and Diogenes were from adjacent traditions, but one way, without becoming a Texas oilman was not just the raw gaps and anomalies.

Charismatic candidates will tend to get into a few months later. I've said into something that would appeal to investors, even though it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. None at all is a constant multiple of usage, so it's conceivable that a skilled vine-dresser was worth 8,000 sestertii, for the same reason parents don't tell the craziest lies about me.

Or a phone, IM, email, Web, games, but he turned them down because investors already owned more than the time and Bob nominally had a day job is one of the most successful startups, because you can talk about humans being meant or designed to express algorithms, and that modern corporate executives would work better, but the problems all fall into in the US. 4%, Macintosh 18. I think this made us seem naive, or an electric power grid than without, real income, or can be said to have fun in this article are translated into Common Lisp seems to have had a killed portraiture as a motive, and have not stopped to say what was happening in them.

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spamzineglasgow · 6 years ago

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SPAM Digest #2 (Oct 2018)

A quick list of the editors’ current favourite critical essays, post-internet think pieces, and literature reviews that have influenced the way we think about contemporary poetics, technology and storytelling.

‘How to Write About a Vanishing World’, by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker

Like many others, I’ve spent a week in a state of grief about the recent IPCC report. I’m all over The Guardian like a traumatised fungus, trying to find nourishment in the form of answers, devouring data I don’t understand. I sense the dyspeptic effects of all those figures. Thank goodness for Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014), who draws us back to the role of narrative in making sense of our vanishing world. Provocatively she opens with the familiar trope of the ‘stormy night’ and tells of ‘an American herpetologist named Marty Crump’ who, after a neighbourly tip, discovers the emergence of golden toads not far from her home in northwest Costa Rica. This is in the late eighties. These strange and beautiful creatures are part of the biospheric treasure trove whose loss Kolbert then documents across the intervening decades, up to the present. By the turn of the century, she suggests, biology had become a practice of living elegia: ‘A biologist could now choose a species to study and watch it disappear, all within the course of a few field seasons’.

Her article collects numerous other stories of scientists losing their subject — from Arctic ice to Great Barrier corals — until extinction becomes the presiding litany of our times. She notes how researchers find themselves paralysed, unsure of intended outcomes when faced with such scales of ecological loss. Even as scientific projects to assist vulnerable ecosystems gather in nuance and strength, there’s a sense that we’re already fighting a losing game. Science becomes a question of narrative transmission, as much as active intervention; by doing research, you’re sending some sort of message of hope. As Kolbert puts it, ‘Hope and its doleful twin, Hopelessness, might be thought of as the co-muses of the modern eco-narrative’, inspiring nature writers and scientists alike. The central question is ‘how we relate to that loss’: is it a question of elegy and mourning, or sparking a call to arms? Even those writers who urge us to act, who celebrate the potentials of direct intervention, admit that none of this will happen fast enough to make a lasting difference. Ending on the phrase ‘Lalalalalala, can’t hear you!’, Kolbert sardonically evokes that familiar, Trumpian stage of climate denial which has been rearing its all-too-human, deluded head of late. But what persists is the value of keeping on — ‘Narrating the disaster becomes a way to try to avert it’ (and here I am reminded of Maurice Blanchot’s writing of the disaster as a polysemous, irreducible event) — writing, as Kolbert does in this piece, our stories in the face of defeat. An earnest act in the face of inevitable cynicism, a careful digestion of failure. Maybe ecological writing just needs to be more metamodern.

M.S.

‘Your favorite Twitter bots are about die, thanks to upcoming rule changes’, By Oscar Schwartz, Quartz

Twitter bots fans, you might want to take a seat: there could be some terrible news out there. According to Oscar Schwartz and his article on Quartz, many of our favourite sources of coded linguistic beauty might disappear in the coming months due to what he calls ‘a company-wide attempt to eradicate malicious bots from the platform.’ A couple months ago, Twitter announced that they would start requiring bot developers to undergo a thorough vetting process in order to gain access to Twitter’s programming interface (where the essence of a Twitter bot lies) - an amount of bureaucratic load that prolific bot artists have told Schwartz would simply be too much work to keep up with.

Regardless of the bleak prediction, the think piece reads less like a eulogy for Twitter bots, and more like a defense of them. Schwartz provides us here with a real goldmine for Twitter bots to follow - from Jia Zhang’s @censusAmericans, which composes little biographies of nameless Americans by compiling information provided to the open census database, to Allison Parrish's @the_ephemerides, which couples images of distant planets from NASA’s archive with computer-generated poetry. In a statement to Schwartz, Parrish (a poet, computer-programmer, and educator as well as a Twitter-botter) states that ‘asking permission to make a bot is like asking someone permission to do graffiti on a wall (...) It undermines everything that is interesting about bot-making.” - a point that is not only rhetorically effective, but possibly a very productive way of conceptualising Twitter-bots as an art form.

‘For these bot-makers, letting their creations die off on Twitter is an act of protest. It’s not so much directed at the new developer rules, but at the platform’s broader ideology. “For me it’s becoming clear that Twitter is driven by a kind of metrics mindset that is antithetical to quality communication,” Parrish says. “These recent changes have nothing to do with limiting violent or racist language on the platform and are all about making it more financially viable.”

[Darius] Kazemi [another prominent bot artist] agrees, adding that to continue making creative bots on Twitter is making a bargain with the devil. “We’re being asked to trade in our creative freedom for exposure to a large audience,” he says. “But I am beginning to suspect that once we all leave Twitter, they will realize that we represent a lot of what made Twitter good, and that maybe the platform needs fun bot makers more than we need Twitter.”’

D.B.

‘Erasing the signs of labour under the signs of happiness: “joy” and “fidelity” as bromides in literary translation’, by Sophie Collins, The Poetry Society

Some of our most significant intellectual epiphanies occur in lecture theatres, often in resistance to the lecture in question. Maybe this is a form of vicarious translation. In her piece, Collins begins with an anecdote about a lecture she was looking forward to leaving her cold. The speaker’s takeaway slogan, the ‘joy of translation’, rang hollow as a company ‘mission statement’. Against this platitude from the corporate happiness factory, Collins explores the affective entanglements of reading translation through various types of negativity, the disciplinary disparities around its process, intentions and attendant critical debates. Drawing upon her own experience in translating literature from the Dutch, Collins explores the value of acknowledging struggle in translation — from ‘uncertainty and self-consciousness’ to ‘breakdown and frustration’. She makes room for the translator’s own vexed identity to be critically recognised in the process, and thus asks for analytic frameworks which keep in mind the theories around hybridity posited by thinkers such as Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhaba and Julia Kristeva.

Working through the negative space of translation, Collins goes on to deconstruct the concept of ‘joy’ itself, upon whose insistence various arms of society’s ideological apparatus are able to keep us in stasis and check: ‘Given that the desire for happiness can cover signs of its negation, a revolutionary politics has to work hard to stay proximate to unhappiness’. Joy becomes less a personal experience than ‘something more like obedience to a collective cause’. Translation might allow us to notice relationality and difference between cultures; but as a creative act in itself, translation also provides a discursive technology for intervention in structures of power. Often denigrated as secondary or indeed ‘women’s work’, translation occupies a precarious position in the ‘creative hierarchy’, and this is reinforced by vacuous proclamations about its joy. Whose joy are we reveering here anyway? What we need, Collins argues, is a more complex set of theories around translation, which bring into play its disruptive, ‘negative’ aspects. Her productive alternative to ‘fidelity’ or ‘faithfulness’ as the goal or logic for translation is that of ‘intimacy’: a translation process that ‘exhibits a heightened contextualisation of its source text for the reader’; one that bears with it the often fraught emotional truths around the act of moving between texts, times, cultural tones and affective states. Emotional truths whose discernment opens a space for seriously ‘affirm[ing] the possibility of change’:

As a proposed ideal for translations, ‘intimacy’ brings with it its own questions, problematics and risks. Ultimately, however, my application of the term is intended to shift the translation relationship from a place of universality, heteronormacy, authority and centralised power, towards a particularised space whose aesthetics are determined by the two or more people involved, in this way amplifying and promoting creativity and deviant aesthetics in translations between national languages.

M.S.

‘On Translating Human Acts’ by Han Kang - By Deborah Smith in Asymptote

Han Kang plays language with the kind of near-unbearable intensity which Jacqueline du Pré applied to the cello, exploring its sensory possibilities through a continual detailing of the minutely physical—a bead of sweat trickling down the nape of a neck, the rasp of even the softest fabric against skin—which builds to such a pitch that even the slightest physical contact, no matter how intentionally tender or gently performed, is felt as violence, as violation.

As someone who works in the field, I'm always eager to read the translator's note before commencing my reading of the work. Translators' introductions, beyond outlining the context of any novel, tend to reveal the hyper-specific difficulties they faced when attempting to replicate linguistic nuances of the source language into the target language. In this case, one example given was the 'brick-thick Gwangju dialect', as Korean dialects are distinguished by grammatical differences rather than individual words. Looking to avoid 'translationese', Smith identifies that her primary concern was the effect the text had over the reader, rather than specific syntactic structures, aiming for 'a non specific colloquialism that would carry the warmth Han intended'.

Already intrigued by Smith's introduction, and after having finished Human Acts, I continued my research of Smith, coming across much of the criticism she received by many academics for her translations of both The Vegetarian (she had been studying Korean for only three years before commencing this work) and Human Acts. In this essay, Smith takes us on a journey through the complexities and challenges she faced as a translator. One that really stuck out to me was the necessity to find as many possible synonyms for the verb 'to erase'. This word continued to resurface in the original often as a straight repetition. As Smith notes, Korean is 'far more tolerant' of this than English. I had once encountered a similar issue myself when translating a memoir based in one Rio de Janeiro's jails. The prisoners in that text frequently used the word 'parada', a local slang that can mean 'thing', 'business', 'occurrence', but is context specific. The heavy repetition of any of these options in English didn't read well, making the text clunky and awkward. Only through methodically finding specific synonyms to match with each context was I able to resolve this.

Out of all the nuances and subtleties Smith had to work through, none can be more thought-provoking than the title itself, 'Human Acts'. As Smith notes, a literal translation of the Korean would have resulted in the slightly awkward title 'The boy is coming', leaving her with the tricky task of finding a captivating title that retained the neutrality of the original. Read the full article to hear about which elements Smith had to keep in mind when deciding how to translate Kang's 'restrained Korean'.

M.P.

#SPAM Digest

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ntrending · 6 years ago

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How to decode the secret language of birds

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/how-to-decode-the-secret-language-of-birds/

How to decode the secret language of birds

A little bird once told me…well, a lot. That twittering song isn’t just the sound of relaxation, a sign of spring, or nature’s alarm clock. It’s a language that can convey valuable information to the trained ear—even when that ear belongs to a human.

With each real-world chirp, cheep, and melody, the bird is sending a potent message. It might be a male’s love poem, designed to woo a comely female, or a show of strength, warning other birds to back off. Often, that seemingly-carefree song serves as an alarm call indicating that a predator is on the prowl—or a human is lumbering down the trail ahead.

For millennia, wild critters have been listening in to these messages. And for good reason. When a robin sees a predator like a coyote, for example, it will sound the alarm—short low- and high-pitched shrieks—and other prey like squirrels will heed that warning.

But rodents aren’t the only mammals to interpret a conversation between birds. For centuries, Native Americans have relied on so-called “bird language” to learn the whereabouts of people and other animals that would otherwise remain invisible to the human eye.

“A lot of indigenous people have been using bird language to know where mega-predators are,” says Pinar Ateş Sinopoulos-Lloyd, co-founder of Queer Nature, who leads courses on bird language. “They are able to decipher how birds communicate and warn each other in the forest.”

Learning bird language isn’t just a strategy once used to survive. According to Heather Durham, a bird language expert at Wilderness Awareness School, it’s also a tool to establish a more intimate and enriching connection with nature.

“To notice and understand these sorts of dramas unfolding all around us at all times makes the world a far more interesting place,” she wrote in an email.

There’s no Rosetta Stone for bird language, but anyone with finely-tuned ears, keen observation skills, and plenty of patience can learn to translate songs into information.

Here’s a beginner’s guide to learning the avian alphabet.

Pick a perch

Start by finding a comfortable place outside—it could be in your backyard, a nearby park, or even in your home by a window. Ideally, you’ll want to settle down in a diverse habitat that’s far from human disturbance, explained Jon Young in the seminal bird-language book What the Robin Knows.

“A spot with a good field of view and a meeting of habitats will yield a higher diversity of birds and animals to observe,” he wrote.

Once you find the right place, stick to it. The more time you spend in one location, the more familiar you’ll become with its inhabitants—which means you won’t have to start from scratch each time you go on a listening trip.

When you arrive at your perch, Durham says, sit still for at least 20 minutes. This gives the animals time to get used to your presence. To get started, she wrote, “Go out, sit down, and pay attention.”

Find common birds with a lot to say

Now that you’re settled, look for common songbirds that forage or nest on the ground. They’re more likely to detect predators on the forest floor and, as a result, have much more to say, according to Young.

Young also recommends that you choose species that stick to the same, small territory year-round. That way, you’ll get to know birds in each season, noting how their behavior and calls change. (Males of many species, for example, exhibit a wider repertoire of calls in spring.)

Of course, not everyone is well-versed in the birds that fit all of these criteria. So Young listed a few birds that make great teaching subjects.

American robins

Juncos

Song sparrows

Catbirds

Cardinals

Red-winged blackbirds

Become familiar with baseline calls

Once you narrow your focus to a species or two—such as a familiar robin or charismatic red cardinal—start paying attention to baseline vocalizations.

According to Young, these sounds fall into broad categories such as “song,” “companion calling,” and “aggression.” Though they won’t tell you much about threats, they’ll help you establish a baseline of birdcall for your area of observation. Eventually, this makes it much easier to detect alarm calls.

Distinguishing song is simple: Listen for rhythmic melodies, like those of the American robin. These are especially easy to pick out in the early morning during spring, when males are performing for prospective mates.

“You can get a clue as to whether a bird has found a mate by how much he’s singing,” says Kenn Kaufman, field editor at Audubon magazine and longtime birder. If you have trouble identifying any particular song, check out a digital bird guide like Audubon’s Guide to North American Birds. These typically feature songs as well as descriptions.

Deciphering companion calls, which mated pairs use to communicate, requires a bit more patience. First, you need to find a couple; Young suggests looking for song sparrows or cardinals. Then listen to how they talk to each other in a series of soft chirps. According to Wilderness Awareness School, you can think of companion calling as akin to murmuring to your spouse over a dinner table.

Similarly, to identify calls of aggression, you can look for a particular behavior, often a territorial display. During breeding season (which happens in spring for most species), keep your eyes peeled for a stand-off: Two male birds, poised at either side of the lawn, flapping their feathers and squawking as if to say, “Back off, this is my land.” They often compete like this because more territory means more resources, such as nesting sites and food.

Learning baseline calls will give you a glimpse into the world of songbirds and all its drama: who’s looking for love, who’s angry with whom, and who’s in a relationship. Once you do, it will be much easier to detect when something is amiss.

When birds detect a threat, be it a crash-diving kite or a slithering serpent, they sound the alarm. As naturalists are learning, Durham says, each warning call may encode specific information about the threat—down to the species of predator.

In her own backyard, she’s noticed that sparrows and towhees sound a different alarm for the “lazy well-fed cat who couldn’t be bothered to stalk anything” than for the “lean, scrappy feral cat who subsisted mainly on birds,” she says.

“The former would elicit a general announcement of lackadaisical chirps akin to ‘Just saying, that lazy cat’s around again,’” she says. “Whereas the latter was more like a shrieking ‘Fly for your lives!’”

Alarm calls require observation and patience to learn, but Young offers a few tips that quicken the process.

Pick up a field guide to figure out which predators lurk near your perch. Keep an eye out for these falcons, snakes, foxes, and other beasts. If you find one stalking prey, then watch it and listen to how birds respond.

You can also listen for specific sounds that most alarm calls share. “Often, they’re more harsh, unpleasant, or arresting than everyday bird calls,” Kaufman says. For example, listen to the alarm of an American robin. According to the Wilderness Awareness School, the noise itself can sound similar to companion calls, but far more agitated.

Not sure how to discern an agitated bird call from a calm one? We don’t blame you. You can also try running a simple experiment: Once you’re settled into your spot—and the birds have resumed their normal chatter—have a friend walk towards you from a few hundred yards away. As the human approaches, listen and take note of how the birds respond. You can also observe how birds react to other mammals, such as feral cats.

If all else fails—or if you want to get a headstart—check out this library of bird voices. Built to accompany Young’s book, the digital collection contains vocalizations of more than 15 common species, including Northern cardinals and American goldfinches.

Even with an audio archive, learning bird language requires patience. Each species is slightly different, Kaufman says, and learning their varied calls takes time. But it will be well worth your effort.

“We are often … a jarring, unaware presence in the world beyond the front door,” Young wrote. “If we’re in bird language mode, however, we’re moving with a whole different frame of mind and venturing into another realm of awareness and intention and curiosity.”

Durham would agree. For her, interpreting bird language “allows me to visibly and audibly measure and adjust my impact on the natural world,” she says. “If I’m distracted and not tuned in, all wildlife around me is going to be long gone before I even step foot into the forest.”

Written By Benji Jones

#DIY

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originaldetectivesheep · 7 years ago

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Year in Review - Books I Read In 2017

Last year I only read about a hundred of other people's works, so I was able to note everything. This year....was not like that. By more committed Gutenberg-grinding, I increased that number by a factor of three. These are the highlights, excerpted notes on stuff that I found particularly good, or relevant, or interesting.

Robert Wallace - The Tycoon of Crime Another Phantom adventure, though this one holds back the appearance of the great detective a little and actually sets up a few tricks that aren't immediately obvious. Most are, though, and this is not a great mystery, but it's a competent enough pulp, well-flavored with brutality and gore that's almost heartrending in the modern day -- because it's a callback to the trenches of the Western Front, where bad-luck wounds, dismemberment, and poison gas were just everyday facts of life. That look in passing into the world of the men who wrote this stuff and were looking for it in their reading is the main attraction of this nowadays, but if you're looking to read a Phantom story, this is probably the pick of the litter.

Edgar Rice Burroughs - Apache Devil There are a few pulled punches in this, but not a lot, and in addition to a gripping narrative this story also packs a lot of good craft and a more united plot than it seems at first glance. It's interesting from the modern perspective to see Burroughs so sympathetic to the Apache in the context of his vigorous racism against "savages" from other places; some of this may be closer exposure to Native American culture and thus the greater willingness to credit them as human beings, and some of it may be him pitching to his audience, where American natives were crushed, nearly extinct, and eulogizable, while black people were making the Great Migration out of the south and creating economic anxiety. Either way, this is a pretty good book and not as garbage in its politics as Burroughs frequently is.

Abraham Merritt - Seven Steps To Satan Merritt's Eastern lore is well-worked into this tale, and more importantly he does a good job of keeping the reader on their toes, guessing what of this Satan's tricks are magic and what are just that, tricks. The intersection of magic, illusion, manipulation, and hypnotism is a neat contrast to the usual suspicions of occultism, and the effect is really neat in keeping this Indiana Jones adventure full of darkness and mystery. Harry is a little too obvious a plot jackknife, but you have to get to a resolution somehow, and he doesn't stick out too much in this world of super-minds and super-drugs. Merritt has better stuff, but this is pretty good even so.

Stella Benson - This Is The End I had a limited selection of Benson's stuff, but this is definitely the choice of the batch. As smart and observant as ever, and with nearly as flawless and perfect a flow of language and an eye for metaphor as in Living Alone, she also turns all of this around into a punishing, apocalyptic hammer of emotional weight and import at the turn and through on to the devastating finish. I'd been reading up on the Somme and Verdun campaigns, which would have been the backdrop offstage for this, so this may have hit me harder than others, but it's hard to see how that ending, and Benson's poetry woven in around her prose, could fail to have the same effect regardless of circumstances.

Walter S. Cramp - Psyche For real, I nearly miscopied this author's name as "Crap" when writing this out. This one is BAD, folks. You can introduce your characters with a physical description if you like, though it does get kind of fan-ficcy, but do not attach a goddamn alignment readout to it. The descriptions suck, the deliberate archaisms in dialogue suck -- do not write 'thou' unless you are going to use 'you' elsewhere to show correct tu/vous formulations in older English -- the staging and plotting sucks, and Cra(m)p can't be bothered to keep a consistent tense. This is an awful book and should have been pulped a hundred years ago rather than continuing to waste people's time and electrons down to the present.

J. A. Buck - Sargasso of Lost Safaris Everything you need to know about this insistently self-footbulleting series can be found from the episode here, where in the middle of a taut thriller about bad whites and educated natives double-crossing each other, the protagonists fight the world's worst-described dinosaur for pagecount. No explanation, they just needed another 500 words between two chapters and so they roll on the random monster table and get a fucking Baryonix or whatever. The 'girl Tarzan' trope is at the outer edges of reality, and Tarzan did a lot of Lost World garbage too, but too much of this is too true to life to fuck itself over by throwing in dinosaurs like it aint a thing. Fuck this stupid shit.

Wilhelm Walloth - Empress Octavia "Death was to stalk over it like a Phoenician dyer, when he crushes purple snails upon a white woollen cloak till the dark juices trickle down investing the snowy vesture with a crimson splendor." When you write this sentence, stop. Just stop. I have bad habits like this too, but nothing, even a translation from German, is a justification for throwing out a sentence like that, especially in a second paragraph. Stop. No. Beyond this, this is yet another Ben-Hur wannabe that is in love with its research and can't decide what fucking tense it's in. If you are interested in Rome, read Gibbon or Tacitus, or Suetonius or Caesar himself; if you want literature, stay the FUCK away from the Bibliotheca Romana. The plot takes directions that only a German can and would go in, in its period, but this boldness alone is not enough to excuse the poor composition and overall aimlessness.

Stephen Crane - Maggie: A Girl of the Streets I'm sure this was revolutionary when it came out, but at this distance, it feels like parody or melodrama - a lot of which is coming from the dialect, which is even more intolerable in the present than it was when this was written. This isn't even hard dialect, and there's no need for it to be consistently phonetic rather than, like, just describing people's accents. You look at "The Playboy of the Western World" and what that doesn't do with forcing pronunciations, and then you look back at this, and you see rapidly which one does a better job of conveying the lifestyles of the deprived and limited. I know this is supposed to be heartbreaking, but it's completely outclassed and replaced, for modern audiences, by The Jungle, which more people need to re-read and actually understand as a labor story rather than a USDA tract. Anything, literally anything, else you can get out of Stephen Crane is going to be better than this.

John Peter Drummond - Tigress of Twanbi Seriously, this story would be greatly improved by getting the Tarzan shit out of it. If it was Hurree Das, picaresque Indian doctor versus Julebba the Arab Amazon with their countervailing motivations and the local allies who ended up in the crossfire of her domination war in the African bush and his attempts to stop it or at least get out with a whole skin, this tale would be significantly improved in addition to completely unidentifiable for the white audience it had to be sold to at the time of publication. So it goes. Drummond's side characters are significantly better than his leads or his plots, and should have held out for a trade to Stan Weinbaum or P.P. Sheehan for a case of beer plus a player to be named later rather than having to submit to this dreck.

Robert Eustace - The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings Playing like a series of Eustace's Madame Sara stories -- there's definitely something to peel the onion on there, where every villain is a mysterious older Latin woman -- the plot here moves by the usual bumps of caper and medical/forensic detection, with seldom an attachment from one episode to the next. The individual stories are entertaining, but this is a collection, not a novel, and going from front to back is like binging a TV series in novella form. The individual tricks range from lame and overdone to Holmesian superclass, but this would be so much better if there was an actual whole narrative rather than this point to point.

Augusta Groner - The Pocket Diary Found In The Snow If I had gotten to this before Three Pretenders, I definitely would have thrown in a shoutout callback to Joe Mueller somewhere; Groner's Austrian detective is a more modern Holmes in a Vienna at the end of its rope, and in addition to the neat characters and relatable scene dressing, the mystery here is pretty good and the inevitable howdoneit epilogue is actually interesting rather than tiresome, which is always a potential stumbling block in this sort of caper. Most of Groner's work that I have is pretty short, but at least I'll have the possibility of re-reading her in the original German later.

Anonymous for The Wizard - Six-Gun Gorilla It's easy to see why nobody, so far, has come forward to claim this clunky Western with a hilarious concept played absolutely straight. This is a Madonna's-doctor's-dog exercise in crank-turnery written in Scotland by Brits who have never been to the high desert, for an audience that needs to be told that bandits aren't particularly interested in mining. As a craft exercise, there's some merit to it: anyone can write a gorilla-revenge story in Africa, or a Western manhunt, but when an editor comes to you and says "so there's this gorilla and he's a badass gunfighter, write a story to fit these illustrations and make it not suck", that's when you really have to stretch your creative muscles. There are signs that this was a house name product or a collab rather than one author, and more insistent signs that it was a joke played on the readership to see how long they'd put up with it. It's almost magic realist in its combination of brutality and absurdity -- who the hell knows what British schoolboys thought of it in 1939.

Robert W. Chambers - The Slayer of Souls Probably not the inspiration for that song that was on like every compilation in Rock Hard and Metal Hammer in summer 2005, this Chambers joint is either pitched perfectly for the Trumpist present -- did you know that Muslims, socialists, Chinese people, unionists, and anarchists are all actually the same, and all actually parts of a gigantic Satanist conspiracy? oh wow such deep state many alex jones -- or an incoherent stew of staunch J. Edgar Hoover fanboyism that can't keep its own geography straight, which is actually kind of the same thing so never mind. This is exactly the sort of story that George Orwell was so hot about in "Boys' Weeklies": good, craft-wise, and definitely gripping, but utterly complicit in a way and to a degree that almost becomes self-parody. If you can stop laughing at it, it's got the good action and aggressively-expansive world-setting of good rano-esque anime; if you can't, Chambers has better short stories and have you heard of this guy called Abraham Merrit?

Stendahl - The Red and the Black It is maybe over-egging it a little to call this a 'perfect' novel, but it is closer to that perfection than it is to any other reasonable descriptor. The society of the Bourbon restoration may be lost to us, but the characters stand the test of time, and Stendahl moves them in time with the plot -- the way that their actions are only tenuously liked to their outcomes is a triumph of realism -- with the hand of a master. I like Stendahl's Italian stuff too, but France in his own time is his best course, and this is his best work.

Sylvanus Cobb - Ben Hamed What's really striking about this sword and sandal mellerdrammer is how relatively non-racist it is, and how easily it accepts Muslims as real people and mostly normal. There's a bunch of orientalism, sure, but while the Giant Negro sidekick occasionally comes off servile, he's also smart, experienced, and independent, and takes, for his characterization, an appropriately central role in shepherding the star-crossed lovers to the end of their tale. This could easily get a banging Arab-directed film adaptation today with very few changes -- and that's not just about how good it is as entertainment, but also about how far Cobb was ahead of the curve in 1863.

Talbot Mundy - C. I. D. Another inter-war Indian thriller, this excellent spy novel pits a wide range of the native-state establishment -- corrupt priests, a venal rajah, the incompetent British Resident, a motley gang of profiteers -- against the genius and initiative of Mundy's great hope for India, the always effective, never moral Chullunder Gose. As expected, the top agent of the Confidential Investigations Division masterfully controls the whole chessboard, pitting the various enemy forces against each other and subverting each in turn before throwing in his reserves -- Hawkes, back in a smaller role as British India yields to British-Indian cooperation, and the obligatory American, a pre-MSF doctor who starts the book looking for a Chekhov's tiger hunt. Thing is, this is fiction, and so it's Mundy who's really keeping all these balls in the air and weaving the skein of the story into an incredibly awesome whole. If you have problems with Kipling and Haggard, start getting into Mundy from here. A neat thing that will not go unnoticed by other pulp deep-divers is the shots-fired bit introducing the Resident's library, which is noted to feature the works of Edgar Wallace. Whether to make a point in the story -- "every colonial section chief, no matter how actually bad, secretly thinks of himself as Sanders", which I've used in my own stuff -- or to start beef -- "people read Wallace and think he knows about the colonies, but he has actually just been to the track and his apartment and needs to stfu before idiots making policy off his 'exceptionally stupid member of the Navy League circa 1910' worldview hurt somebody" -- this is definitely a callout, and definitely intentional.

Gordon MacReagh - The Witch-Casting I'm reading these Kingi Bwana stories in order, and it is getting suspiciously clear that as long as he put in a bit of African-kicking at the start, he was free to get as smart and real as he liked later in the story -- and the amount of kicking was something that there were subtle efforts to reduce. This one starts off with Kaffa getting the brunt of it, but almost immediately turns around on that point as King and a larger collection of nonwhite friends-as-much-as-trusties do a witch-hunt unlike any witch-hunt you'd expect from '30s pulp, with a similarly sharp turn on African traditional religion that's nearly as out of place. MacReagh cannot completely escape his own prejudices or the expectations of his time, but this one gets as close to the event horizon as any of his stuff.

Titus Petronius Arbiter - The Satyricon The modern age has ground a lot of the obscenity off this one, which for many years was mostly famous, infamous and/or banned for its central plots of man-on-man sex; in 2017, it takes more than boyfucking to shock people. This is probably for the better; with the false atmosphere of licentiousness cut out of it, this is as it was at the beginning, a spicy story of Roman idiots having hilarious misadventures that, by subtle exaggeration, hold the follies and fads of their time up to ridicule. It is longer than it needs to be, and some of the jokes are poorly preserved, and this translation is contaminated by unnecessary footnotes and inclusion bodies of later forgers' porn that's been stapled in over the centuries, but it's still a good, true look at Rome as it actually was at the height of the empire, without the hagiography of a historian or the religio-political axe-grinding of the Christians. Probably worth the struggle.

Willa Cather - April Twilights I was collecting Cather from her papers at the University of Nebraska, and had to read this in the process of reformatting it; poetry does not well survive HTML->ASCII transitions. The deep and dark and bleak is strong here; through the classical allusions, the callbacks to Provencal troubadours, across the American landscape, the same refrain runs: "I am old and decrepit and not emotionally capable of loving other people". So, relatable. The widespread criticism of Cather, that she can't get herself out of traditional modes even when this is to her disadvantage, is held up by her poetry as well; there's more than a few places here where you've got to frown at a bodgingly conventional rhyme or metaphor that someone more open to modernity would almost have had to have done better. But there are, even still parts where that traditionalism works well, and is effective; it's worth reading out for those, even at all that.

H.P. Lovecraft and others - Twenty-Nine Collaborative Stories Most of what we now recognize as the Cthulhu Mythos -- and definitely any kind of idea of Lovecraft's stuff as a coherent whole or linked world-system -- comes out of these stories as much as his own. On his own, Lovecraft moved to the beat of his own drum and followed his ideas where they went; here, he helps friends and fans plug their fanfic into what becomes a shared universe. The stories are not all great; Hazel Heal put up some classics here but also some stinkers, and most of Robert Barlow's contributions, especially as they range into sci-fi, are kind of eh. Zealia Bishop, though, does yeoman service as Lovecraft's official trans-Mississippian correspondent, and Adolphe de Castro's top-class works settle Lovecraftian mysticism in real foreign lands. It's worth getting through these: there's good stuff in here, and you also get the sense and feel of how Lovecraft actively built his 'school' -- and ensured that he was the one to influence the direction of weird fiction for years to come.

William Hope Hodgson - The House on the Borderland A true classic, this is potentially the very most black metal horror novel ever written. The brutality of the swine creatures, the remote devastation of the time-blasted cosmos, the liminality of dreams and reality; Teitanblood and Xasthur and Inquisition hope and fail to convey this sense of unholy immensity, of uncaring timeless evil. Hodgson hits some heights in his shorter stories, but here, he hits it absolutely out of the park. Completely essential.

Suetonius - The Life of Claudius Claudius comes off in this one like I've observed German colonial rule as remembered in most places other than Africa: "not worse than necessary". Suetonius doesn't miss the caprices of a guy who almost certainly was on the spectrum, and had other distinguishing impairments, but also faithfully records a lot of good works and good ideas, with less wastage and idiocy than the likes of his surrounding emperors. The translator's appendix, as expected, freaks out about the results of Claudius' expedition to Britain, and continues to vainly expect the Roman people to want to get rid of effective and oppressive imperial rule to get back to the ineffective oppression of the senatorial republic. How someone who translates Latin can be ignorant of "senatores boni viri, senatus mala bestia" and what that actually means in the context of government is beyond me.

Julius Caesar - De Bello Civili This is in three parts, double-text, and when I can understand what places are being talked about (still not 100%, even after all of this, on where the heck in Italy Brundusium is), it flows well and is as clear in its language as anything else of Caesar's. Even the structure is well-laid: in book 1, Caesar starts the war, and wins a big victory in Spain; in book 2, one of his generals gets disastered in Africa; and in book 3, the epic conclusion and final battles. Though this is still ultimately a public relations exercise, Caesar doesn't step back from his own disasters, and gives full credit to his foes: this does tend to make him look better when he beats them up, and it is curious how nothing is ever directly his fault, and how most reverses go to troops losing their head and acting without orders, which would be out of character for his faithful super-army if it didn't keep happening. As always, Caesar leans on logistics; his focus on the relative supply situations in Spain and in Thessaly is the key to success, and a dead giveaway that this was written or at least dictated by the commander himself, and not by some biographer who wouldn't've had that experience in keeping an army fed and watered in the field.

Katherine Mansfield - Something Childish and Other Stories What's really cool in this collection of earlier Mansfield is that you get to see her evolve through the War: she's already mature, and really good, in the New Zealand and Continental tales that precede it, but after the title story (dated to 1914, with a collapse-out at the end that is a KILLER allegory for that August, even if unintended), you really start to see how the nervous stress of total war wears on a population engaged, how the greater position of women in society transforms her and her work, and leads her on towards self-discovery. The later and more experimental stories are, in general, slightly better, but this is all good material -- and there's a hell of a sting in the tail at the end.

Henry W. Herbert - The Roman Traitor In his introduction Herbert mentions a friend who encouraged him to finish this book, without which it would never have been released. This friend should be dug up and beaten soundly with rocks, because this rehash of the Catilline conspiracy is utterly unnecessary as a novel or as antiquarianism, and Herbert is an awful, awful writer whose torture of language and narrative structure would shame a Nero. The day you write the phrase "bad conclave" is the day your editor should throw you through a door. This isn't the worst book in the Bib. Romanica, but it may be the very most badly written. Just read the actual history from Sallust and forget this stupid garbage.

Gustave Flaubert - Salammbo This takes a while to really get its feet under it and show where it's going, but once it does, look out. Flaubert masterfully captures the brutality of warfare and the color of the ancient world, and his language is superbly translated; you put this next to the staid English garbage in the rest of the Bib. Romanica and you wonder why most of them even bothered. The turn at the end hits like a ton of bricks, especially if you like me don't know anything about Carthaginian history and don't know what's coming -- but it's also the only possible ending for this captivating chronicle of horror, misery and nightmare. Just excellent.

Willa Cather - My Antonia A deeply drawn narrative of love, growth, and the midwestern plains, this book is more enhanced than anything else by Cather's commitment to its place and time: childhood is always a lost world forever, but the place that Jim and Antonia grow up through is thoroughly lost a hundred years and more on, but it survives in these pages down to the dirt on the floors and the chaff under the characters' collars. After the narrator goes to Omaha, the tale weakens a little, and the end, for modern audiences, is probably a little under-tuned, but this is Cather's flagship novel for a reason, and definitely rewards the time spent reading it.

Margaret Atwood - Negotiating With the Dead This is another lecture series like the Forster above, but coming from different source, moving in different ways, and much more about Atwood herself and the roots of her writing in the Canadian landscape and literary scene that shaped her. There is a lot about writing as a living thing in this book, and very little about it as a process: it's kind of a synthesis-antithesis-conclusion out of Forster and Bickham, more perceptive than either and leaving Welty, poor soul so far from the modern perspective, in the absolute dust. It may be a question of eras, or just one of sympathies -- an adequately intelligent writer of speculative fiction is going to necessarily fall in with Atwood's ideas about doing something meaningful that also keeps the lights on -- but this book, out of all of the four in this mini-course, hit the most home and told me the most about what I do that I didn't already know. It doesn't have the coherent, lecturized feel of the Forster, but at times there are just the most amazing insights, and the craziest images out of that crazy time that was the middle 20th century, and with how good it was I'm fairly ashamed to not have read any other Atwood before it, which makes me just an awful person. At least I'm in a damn library and probably can fix that now.

Willa Cather - The Bohemian Girl A novella that should probably better and more widely reputed than it is, this one is mostly a meditation on love, maturity, and switching horses in midstream, but Cather, like no one else, manages to defend both the dour, hard prairie homestead and the need to escape from it. This is her "zwey seele wohnen, ach, in meinen Brust", and it's kind of a thing all through her fiction, but in here it's especially well developed, with a coda that unlike a lot of her other ones actually works.

Talbot Mundy - The Marriage of Meldrum Strange Sales figures or editorial comment must have highlighted the "big team" problems in the last book, because this one cuts it down to the essentials: Ommony and Gose and Ramsden for muscle and some minor characters. The plot is a good and twisty romance, keeping everything real, and it is just magic to watch Ommony work calm while Gose spits science like a Bollywood comedian, yin and yang combining to catch everyone in every trap. A rare gem after several misfires.

Talbot Mundy - Old Ugly-Face One of Mundy's real best, this is an epic navigation of the human heart, against the majestic Himalayas....played by psychics battling to ensure the succession of the Dalai Lama. Mundy gon Mundy, but the love triangle here is perfect and the environments are astounding -- a must read.

D. W. O'Brien - Blitzkrieg in the Past There's a chapter in this one called "Tank Versus Dinosaur", and that's about the shape of it. You could also say "Sergeant Rock goes to Pellucidar" and not miss by much; a M3 Grant and crew ends up in a fantasy cavemen-and-dinosaurs past and has some adventures while talking '40s smack, and then romps their way home. What's cool about it for authors is how O'Brien writes around his dinosaur: there is no description at all of the beast or its species or attributes. It is big, and makes angry noises, because the author could not be assed to take the time out to do research while writing this story. And yet it works, unless you're reading really close; let this be a lesson for anyone who can't finish their research up exactly correct on deadline.

Talbot Mundy - The Ivory Trail A lot of this raw, brutal epic of survival in the east-African backcountry is probably from life; Mundy tried this life and failed at it before he became a writer, and the asides and incidental scenes can only be from bitter experience. Others might expect a purer adventure -- you'd get one from MacReagh on these materials -- but Mundy has the essential truth of colonialism: there are no secrets, mere survival is hideously tough, and everyone else in the game is more brutal and better equipped. Conrad might have had the literary chops and adventurousness to end this differently, but even he who fared into the Heart of Darkness didn't have the stomach to write a middle passage like Mundy does here with his heroes in German prison.

Talbot Mundy - Guns of the Gods This Yasmini adventure makes itself a prequel, of her youth and how she got into the position of wealth and information mastery that sets up her later career. The plot is tight if less convoluted than some that I've been reading lately, and the incidents woven through the intrigue and the treasure hunt are fantastic. On a deeper level, the real judgment and sensitivity in the negotiation of east and west by Tess and Yasmini makes up for the stray Americans happening into the heart of the tale, and in a real way this is Mundy's most openly and solidly anti-Raj, pro-Home Rule adventure yet. For both an excellent story and what's probably a local maximum in wokeness, this comes highly recommended.

Thorne Smith - Rain In The Doorway A kind of Alice in Jazz Age NYC, this is a ridiculous madcap adventure that loses little in the passage of time and not much at all in the way it winds back down to reality. Smart and stupid and sexy in all the best ways, this kind of hilarity is pretty much Smith's best stock in trade, and this particular book is one of the better examples.

Thorne Smith - Turnabout The least hair of maturity creeps into Smith's writing here, as one of his interminable boozing Lost Generation miscouples actually gets in a family way as well as into an inexplicable supernatural adventure. The very very familiar central trick is well executed, and Tim's advancing pregnancy provides a nice frame to hang the rest of the events off of. The end is a little pat with the reinsertion of the Dutch uncle, but you live and deal. This is one of Smith's better, and a good occasion to round out the end of the string.

Wilkie Collins - Armadale Collins makes up for his bad start with this absolute beast of a romance, bound up with mysticism rather than being an encyclopedia, but still turned out with real and vital if slightly implausible people. The consistent mystery of the vision unites the book, but the way that the various Armadales react to that vision, its interpretations, and each other, is solid and real. It is an immense read that demanded like six hours of flight time, but it is definitely rewarding, and worth the bother of pounding through the huge narrative.

Wilkie Collins - No Name There is a tangled tale and a half in this one, a desperate adventure of roguery in the name of revenge that keeps getting tangled up with coincidence as much as fate or intent. The links may be a little creaky, but this is a huge, smart, intensely twisting drama with a lead for the ages in Magdalen, and an adversary worthy of her steel in Lecomt. The end is a little formula and takes a little long to wind down, but this is an artifact of the time and the expected conventions, and it inhibits the power of this novel but little. Good good stuff.

Talbot Mundy - The Thrilling Adventures of Dick Anthony of Arran "For a few days Cairo swallowed Dick." NO. Shut it. Shut up. Be mature. Tuned to a compositional level somewhere between Sexton Blake and Lovecraft's middle-school works, this is not good or well-written Mundy, and there are research holes in it that might have been stabbed through with a claymore. In places, his later quality pokes through, but in the main this is a stolid imitation of part Kipling, part John Buchan by a writer who does not have enough name weight to force publishers to his way of thinking rather than the reverse. This leftover should have stayed left over and buried.

These were excerpted from the full writeups of the complete chronological list below, which accounts for frequent hanging references. The pure volume of this list indicates why I didn't copy the whole of the writeup blocks into this entry.

Robert Barr - The Sword Maker E. Rice Burroughs - Land of Terror E. Rice Burroughs - Tarzan and the Leopard Men L. Winifred Faraday (tr) - Tain bo Cuailnge Robert Barr - The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont Richard Rhodes - The Making of the Atomic Bomb Robert Wallace - Death Flight Richard Rhodes - Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb Richard Rhodes - Twilight of the Bombs Robert Wallace - Empire of Terror Robert Wallace - Fangs of Murder Robert Wallace - The Sinister Dr. Wong Mary Cagle - Let's Speak English! Robert Wallace - The Tycoon of Crime Stella Benson - Kwan-yin William H. Ainsworth - The Spectre Bride Robert Eustace - The Face of the Abbot Robert Eustace - The Blood-Red Cross Robert Eustace - Madam Sara Robert Eustace - Followed Robert Eustace - The Secret of Emu Plain Arthur Conan Doyle - The Uncharted Coast Edgar Rice Burroughs - Apache Devil Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan the Invincible William W. Astor - The Last of the Tenth Legion Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan the Magnificent Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Bandit of Hell's Bend Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Cave Girl Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Deputy Sheriff of Comanche County Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Efficiency Expert Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Girl From Farris' Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Girl From Hollywood Stella Benson - Living Alone Stella Benson - The Desert Islander Victor Appleton - Tom Swift and his Giant Telescope Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Lad and the Lion Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Man-Eater Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Moon Men Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Outlaw of Torn Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Rider Edgar Rice Burroughs - The War Chief Abraham Merritt - Burn, Witch, Burn! Abraham Merritt - Creep, Shadow! Abraham Merritt - Seven Steps To Satan Abraham Merritt - The Dwellers in the Mirage Abraham Merritt - The Face in the Abyss Abraham Merritt - The Last Poet and the Robots Edward Spencer Beesly - Catiline, Clodius, and Tiberius Malcolm Jameson - Collected Stories Fantasy Magazine - The Challenge From Beyond The Strand - As Far As They Had Got J. M. Synge - The Playboy of the Western World Abdullah/Brand/Means/Sheehan - The Ten-Foot Chain Stella Benson - This Is The End Stella Benson - Twenty Emily Beesly - Stories From the History of Rome Hugh Allingham - Captain Cuellar's Adventures in Connaught and Ulster, A.D. 1588 James DeMille - The Martyr of the Catacombs Sallust - Bellum Catalinae Edmond Rostand - Cyrano de Bergerac "Captain Adam Seaborn" - Symzonia, A Voyage of Discovery R.E.H. Dyer - Raiders of the Sarhad Walter S. Cramp - Psyche H.P. Lovecraft - From Beyond Robert F. Pennell - Ancient Rome Garrett Putnam Serviss - Edison's Conquest of Mars Irving Batcheller - Charge It Irving Batcheller - Vergillius Duffield Osborne - The Lion's Brood Dale Carnegie - How to Win Friends and Influence People J. A. Buck - The Slave Brand of Sleman bin Ali J. A. Buck - Killers' Kraal J. A. Buck - Sargasso of Lost Safaris J. A. Buck - Sword of Gimshai Wilhelm Walloth - Empress Octavia Stephen Crane - The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky Stephen Crane - The Blue Hotel Stephen Crane - The Open Boat Stephen Crane - Maggie: A Girl of the Streets Stephen Crane - The Monster and More Stendahl - Armance Victor Appleton II - Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung Victor Appleton II - Tom Swift and the Visitor From Planet X Robert Curtis - Edgar Wallace Each Way John Peter Drummond - Bride of the Serpent God John Peter Drummond - The Nirvana of the Seven Voodoos John Peter Drummond - Tigress of Twanbi Robert Eustace - The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings Augusta Groner - The Pocket Diary Found In The Snow Augusta Groner - The Case of the Registered Letter Augusta Groner - The Case of the Lamp That Went Out Augusta Groner - The Case of the Golden Bullet Augusta Groner - The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study Anonymous for The Wizard - Six-Gun Gorilla Walter Horatio Pater - Marius the Epicurean John Russel Russell - Adventures in the Moon and Other Worlds Answers Magazine - Sexton Blake J. U. Giesy with Junius B. Smith - The Occult Detector J. U. Giesy with Junius B. Smith - The Significance of the High "D" J. U. Giesy with Junius B. Smith - The House of Invisible Bondage Stendahl - The Abbess of Castro and Others John Aylscough - Faustula John Aylscough - Mariquita Robert W. Chambers - The Maker of Moons and Other Stories Robert W. Chambers - The Slayer of Souls Edith Nesbit - My School Days Edith Nesbit - Re-collected (self re-collection) Edith Nesbit - The Magic World Edith Nesbit - Wet Magic Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Planet of Doubt Stanley G. Weinbaum - Smothered Seas Stanley G. Weinbaum - Graph Stanley G. Weinbaum - Flight on Titan Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Red Peri Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Black Flame Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Dark Other Stanley G. Weinbaum - The New Adam Gordon MacReagh - re-collected shorter stories (self re-collection) Stendahl - The Charterhouse of Parma Stendahl - The Red and the Black Sylvanus Cobb - Atholbane Sylvanus Cobb - Ben Hamed Sylvanus Cobb - Ivan the Serf Sylvanus Cobb - Bianca Sylvanus Cobb - Orion the Gold-Beater Sylvanus Cobb - The Gunmaker of Moscow Sylvanus Cobb - The Knight of Leon Sylvanus Cobb - The Smuggler's Ward Talbot Mundy - Black Light Talbot Mundy - Burberton and Ali Beg Talbot Mundy - C. I. D. Talbot Mundy - Caesar Dies Talbot Mundy - For the Salt Which He Had Eaten Talbot Mundy - From Hell, Hull, and Halifax Talbot Mundy - Full Moon J. U. Giesy - Palos of the Dog Star Pack J. U. Giesy with Junius B. Smith - The Wistaria Scarf J. U. Giesy with Junius B. Smith - The Purple Light Gordon MacReagh - The Slave Runner Gordon MacReagh - The Ebony Juju Gordon MacReagh - The Lost End of Nowhere Gordon MacReagh - Quill Gold Gordon MacReagh - Unprofitable Ivory Gordon MacReagh - The Witch-Casting Gordon MacReagh - Strangers of the Amulet Gordon MacReagh - The Ivory Killers Gordon MacReagh - Black Drums Talking Walter Moers - The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear Gordon MacReagh - Wardens of the Big Game Gordon MacReagh - Raiders of Abyssinia Gordon MacReagh - A Man to Kill Gordon MacReagh - Slaves For Ethiopia Gordon MacReagh - Strong As Gorillas Gordon MacReagh - Blood and Steel Gordon MacReagh - White Waters and Black Cardinal Newman - Callista J. U. Giesy with Junius B. Smith - The Master Mind Titus Petronius Arbiter - The Satyricon Talbot Mundy - Her Reputation Giancarlo Livraghi - The Power of Stupidity Willa Cather - April Twilights H.P. Lovecraft and others - Twenty-Nine Collaborative Stories J. U. Giesy with Junius B. Smith - Rubies of Doom Abraham Merritt - The Moon Pool Abraham Merritt - The Metal Monster Abraham Merritt - The Ship of Ishtar John G. Lockhart - Valerius William Hope Hodgson - Carnacki, Supernatural Detective and Others William Hope Hodgson - Carnacki the Ghost Finder William Hope Hodgson - The House on the Borderland Suetonius - The Life of Julius Caesar Suetonius - The Life of Augustus Caesar Suetonius - The Life of Tiberius Caesar Suetonius - The Life of Caligula Suetonius - The Life of Claudius Suetonius - The Life of Nero Suetonius - The Life of Galba Suetonius - The Life of Otho Suetonius - The Life of Vitellus Suetonius - The Life of Vespasian Suetonius - The Life of Titus Suetonius - The Life of Domitian The Lock and Key Library - Classic Mystery and Detective Stories - Old Time English Hume Nisbet - The Demon Spell b/w The Vampire Maid Hume Nisbet - The Land of the Hibiscus Blossom Hume Nisbet - The Swampers E. Hoffman Price - The Girl From Samarcand Flavius Philostratus - The Life of Apollonius H. P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness H. P. Lovecraft - Selected Essays including Supernatural Horror in Literature H. P. Lovecraft - The Case of Charles Dexter Ward H. P. Lovecraft - The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Others H. P. Lovecraft - The Dream Cycle H. P. Lovecraft - The Dunwich Horror H. P. Lovecraft - The Shadow Out of Time H. P. Lovecraft - The Shadow Over Innsmouth H. P. Lovecraft - The Whisperer in Darkness H. P. Lovecraft - His Earliest Writings H. P. Lovecraft - Poems and Fragments (self re-collection) H. P. Lovecraft - The Cthulhu Mythos (self re-collection) H. P. Lovecraft - Tales of Monstrosity (self re-collection) H. P. Lovecraft - Tales of the Crypt (self re-collection) H. P. Lovecraft - Tales of Paganism (self re-collection) Edward Bulwer-Lytton - The Last Days of Pompeii Gavin Menzies - 1421: The Year China Discovered America Ernst Eckstein - Quintus Claudius Julius Caesar - The African Wars Julius Caesar - The Alexandrine War Julius Caesar - De Bello Civili Julius Caesar - The Hispanic War Talbot Mundy - Cock o' the North Julius Caesar - The Gallic Wars Katherine Mansfield - Bliss and Other Stories Katherine Mansfield - In A German Pension Katherine Mansfield - Something Childish and Other Stories Katherine Mansfield - The Garden Party and Other Stories John W. Graham - Nearea Andy Adams - A Texas Matchmaker Andy Adams - Cattle Brands Andy Adams - Reed Anthony, Cowman Andy Adams - The Log of a Cowboy Andy Adams - Wells Brothers Charles Kingsley - Hypatia Francis Stevens - Claimed! Francis Stevens - Nightmare! Francis Stevens - Serapion Francis Stevens - The Heads of Cerberus Francis Stevens - The Rest of the Stories (self re-collection) Talbot Mundy - Hira Singh Henry W. Herbert - The Roman Traitor Robert Howard - Tales of Breckenridge Elkins Robert Howard - Tales of El Borak Robert Howard - Tales of the West Robert Howard - Swords of the Red Brotherhood Robert Howard - The Black Stranger Robert Howard - The Pike Bearfield Stories Robert Howard - The Exploits of Buckner Jeopardy Grimes Robert Howard - Weird Poetry (self re-collection) Robert Howard - Collected Juvenilia Robert Howard - The Spicy Adventures of Wild Bill Clanton (self re-collection) Robert Howard - Tales of the Weird West (self re-collection) Robert Howard - The Treasure of Shaibar Khan Robert Howard - Red Blades of Black Cathay Robert Howard - The Isle of Pirates' Doom Robert Howard - Dig Me No Grave Robert Howard - The Garden of Fear Robert Howard - The God in the Bowl Virgil - The Aneid Gustave Flaubert - Herodias Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary Talbot Mundy - Hookum Hai Gustave Flaubert - Salammbo Willa Cather - Alexander's Bridge Willa Cather - My Antonia Eudora Welty - On Writing E.M. Forster - Aspects of the Novel Jack M. Bickham - The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them) Margaret Atwood - Negotiating With the Dead Arthur Conan Doyle - Fairies Photographed Arthur Conan Doyle - Great Britain and the Next War Willa Cather - My Autobiography, by S. S. McClure Willa Cather - O Pioneers! Willa Cather - One of Ours Willa Cather - The Song of the Lark Heinrich Brode - Tippu Tib Willa Cather - The Troll Garden Willa Cather - Youth and the Bright Medusa Willa Cather - The Bohemian Girl Willa Cather - The Affair at Grover Station Willa Cather - The Count of Crow's Nest Willa Cather - The Shortest Stories (self re-collection) Willa Cather - Tales ABC (self re-collection) Willa Cather - Tales DEF (self re-collection) Willa Cather - Tales G-K-O (self re-collection) Willa Cather - Tales PRST (self re-collection) Willa Cather - Stories W (self re-collection) Henryk Sienkiewicz - Quo Vadis Charles Darwin - The Voyage of the Beagle Sinclair Lewis - Babbitt Talbot Mundy - Jimgrim and Allah's Peace Talbot Mundy - East and West Talbot Mundy - The Iblis at Ludd Talbot Mundy - The Seventeen Thieves of El-Khalil Talbot Mundy - The Lion of Petra Talbot Mundy - The Woman Ayisha Talbot Mundy - The Last Trooper Talbot Mundy - The King in Check Talbot Mundy - A Secret Society Talbot Mundy - Moses and Mrs. Aintree Talbot Mundy - The Mystery of Khufu's Tomb Talbot Mundy - Jungle Jest Talbot Mundy - The Nine Unknown Talbot Mundy - The Marriage of Meldrum Strange Talbot Mundy - The Hundred Days Talbot Mundy - OM: The Secret of Ahbor Valley Talbot Mundy - The Devil's Guard Talbot Mundy - Jimgrim, King of the World Talbot Mundy - Machassan Ah Talbot Mundy - Oakes Respects An Adversary Talbot Mundy - Old Ugly-Face Talbot Mundy - Payable to Bearer Talbot Mundy - Poems and Dicta Talbot Mundy - Rung Ho! Talbot Mundy - Selected Stories Gordon MacReagh - Projection From Epsilon Leroy Yerxa - Back from the Crypt (self re-collection) Garrett P. Serviss - A Columbus of Space Garrett P. Serviss - The Moon Metal Garrett P. Serviss - The Second Deluge Garrett P. Serviss - The Sky Pirate Sinclair Lewis - Arrowsmith Robert Buchanan - Camlan and the Shadow of the Sword Robert Buchanan - God and the Man Henry R. Schoolcraft - To the Sources of the Mississippi River D. W. O'Brien - Squadron of the Damned D. W. O'Brien - Blitzkrieg in the Past D. W. O'Brien - The Floating Robot D. W. O'Brien - Gone In 20 Kilobytes (self re-collection) D. W. O'Brien - Lost in Space (self re-collection) D. W. O'Brien - Ghosts of War (self re-collection) William Ware - Aurelian William Ware - Zenobia J. S. Fletcher - The Stories (self re-collection) J. S. Fletcher - Perris of the Cherry-Trees J. S. Fletcher - The Middle Temple Murder J. S. Fletcher - The Paradise Mystery J. S. Fletcher - The Safety Pin Francis H. Atkins - The Short Stories (self re-collection) M. P. Shiel - In Short (self re-collection) Francis H. Atkins - A Studio Mystery Francis H. Atkins - The Black Opal Talbot Mundy - The Eye of Zeitoon Talbot Mundy - The Ivory Trail Talbot Mundy - The Man From Poonch Talbot Mundy - The Middle Way Talbot Mundy - The Red Flame of Erinpura Talbot Mundy - The Thunder Dragon Gate Talbot Mundy - Tros of Samothrace Talbot Mundy - Queen Cleopatra Talbot Mundy - Purple Pirate Talbot Mundy - A Soldier and a Gentleman Talbot Mundy - Winds of the World Talbot Mundy - King of the Khyber Rifles Talbot Mundy - Guns of the Gods Talbot Mundy - Caves of Terror Thorne Smith - Biltmore Oswald: The Diary of a Hapless Recruit Thorne Smith - Biltmore Oswald: Very Much At Sea Thorne Smith - Birthday Present Thorne Smith - Did She Fall? Thorne Smith - Dream's End Thorne Smith - Haunts and By-Paths Thorne Smith - Rain In The Doorway Thorne Smith - Skin and Bones Thorne Smith - The Bishop's Jaegers Thorne Smith - The Glorious Pool Thorne Smith - The Night Life of the Gods Thorne Smith - The Stray Lamb Thorne Smith - The Jovial Ghosts: The Misadventures of Topper Thorne Smith - Topper Takes A Trip Thorne Smith - Turnabout Thorne Smith - Yonder's Henry Wilkie Collins - Antonina Wilkie Collins - Armadale Wilkie Collins - I Say No Wilkie Collins - Miss or Mrs Wilkie Collins - My Lady's Money Wilkie Collins - No Name Wilkie Collins - The Haunted Hotel Wilkie Collins - The Law and the Lady Leroy Yerxa - Death Rides At Night D. W. O'Brien - Flight From Farisha Gordon MacReagh - Out of Africa (self re-collection) Peter Cheyney - Quick Draws (self re-collection) Talbot Mundy - The Thrilling Adventures of Dick Anthony of Arran D. W. O'Brien - The Last Analysis M. P. Shiel - Children of the Wind Edgar Wallace - 1925: The Story of a Fatal Peace M. P. Shiel - Prince Zaleski Edgar Wallace - A Case For Angel, Esquire M. P. Shiel - Shapes in the Fire Edgar Wallace - A Deed of Gift M. P. Shiel - The Evil That Men Do Edgar Wallace - A Debt Discharged M. P. Shiel - The Last Miracle Edgar Wallace - A Dream M. P. Shiel - The Lord of the Sea Edgar Wallace - A Raid on a Gambling Hell

#meta #criticism #a novel a day keeps any semblance of a life away

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amitavab · 8 years ago

Text

Solzhenitsyn, Literary Giant Who Defied Soviets, Dies at 89

By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN

Corrections Appended

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of the 20th century, died late on Sunday at the age of 89 in Moscow.

His son Yermolai said the cause was a heart ailment.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn outlived by nearly 17 years the Soviet state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekhov.

Over the next five decades, Mr. Solzhenitsyn's fame spread throughout the world as he drew upon his experiences of totalitarian duress to write evocative novels like "The First Circle" and "The Cancer Ward" and historical works like "The Gulag Archipelago."

"Gulag" was a monumental account of the Soviet labor camp system, a chain of prisons that by Mr. Solzhenitsyn's calculation some 60 million people had entered during the 20th century. The book led to his expulsion from his native land. George F. Kennan, the American diplomat, described it as "the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was heir to a morally focused and often prophetic Russian literary tradition, and he looked the part. With his stern visage, lofty brow and full, Old Testament beard, he recalled Tolstoy while suggesting a modern-day Jeremiah, denouncing the evils of the Kremlin and later the mores of the West. He returned to Russia and deplored what he considered its spiritual decline, but in the last years of his life he embraced President Vladimir V. Putin as a restorer of Russia's greatness.

In almost half a century, more than 30 million of his books have been sold worldwide and translated into some 40 languages. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn owed his initial success to Khrushchev's decision to allow "Ivan Denisovich" to be published in a popular journal. Khrushchev believed its publication would advance the liberal line he had promoted since his secret speech in 1956 on the crimes of Stalin.

But soon after the story appeared, Khrushchev was replaced by hard-liners, and they campaigned to silence its author. They stopped publication of his new works, denounced him as a traitor and confiscated his manuscripts.

A Giant and a Victim

Their iron grip could not contain Mr. Solzhenitsyn's reach. By then his works were appearing outside the Soviet Union, in many languages, and he was being compared not only to Russia's literary giants but also to Stalin's literary victims, writers like Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak.

At home, the Kremlin stepped up its campaign by expelling Mr. Solzhenitsyn from the Writer's Union. He fought back. He succeeded in having microfilms of his banned manuscripts smuggled out of the Soviet Union. He addressed petitions to government organs, wrote open letters, rallied support among friends and artists, and corresponded with people abroad. They turned his struggles into one of the most celebrated cases of the cold war period.

Hundreds of well-known intellectuals signed petitions against his silencing; the names of left-leaning figures like Jean-Paul Sartre carried particular weight with Moscow. Other supporters included Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, W. H. Auden, Gunther Grass, Heinrich Boll, Yukio Mishima, Carlos Fuentes and, from the United States, Arthur Miller, John Updike, Truman Capote and Kurt Vonnegut. All joined a call for an international cultural boycott of the Soviet Union.

That position was confirmed when he was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in the face of Moscow's protests. The Nobel jurists cited him for "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn dared not travel to Stockholm to accept the prize for fear that the Soviet authorities would prevent him from returning. But his acceptance address was circulated widely. He recalled a time when "in the midst of exhausting prison camp relocations, marching in a column of prisoners in the gloom of bitterly cold evenings, with strings of camp lights glimmering through the darkness, we would often feel rising in our breast what we would have wanted to shout out to the whole world — if only the whole world could have heard us."

He wrote that while an ordinary man was obliged "not to participate in lies," artists had greater responsibilities. "It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!"

By this time, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had completed his own massive attempt at truthfulness, "The Gulag Archipelago." In more than 300,000 words, he told the history of the Gulag prison camps, whose operations and rationale and even existence were subjects long considered taboo.

Publishers in Paris and New York had secretly received the manuscript on microfilm. But wanting the book to appear first in the Soviet Union, Mr. Solzhenitsyn asked them to put off publishing it. Then, in September 1973, he changed his mind. He had learned that the Soviet spy agency, the KGB, had unearthed a buried copy of the book after interrogating his typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, and that she had hung herself soon afterward.

He went on the offensive. With his approval, the book was speedily published in Paris, in Russian, just after Christmas. The Soviet government counterattacked with a spate of articles, including one in Pravda, the state-run newspaper, headlined "The Path of a Traitor." He and his family were followed, and he received death threats.

On Feb. 12, 1974, he was arrested. The next day, he was told that he was being deprived of his citizenship and deported. On his arrest, he had been careful to take with him a threadbare cap and a shabby sheepskin coat that he had saved from his years in exile. He wore them both as he was marched onto an Aeroflot flight to Frankfurt.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was welcomed by the German novelist Heinrich Böll. Six weeks after his expulsion, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was joined by his wife, Natalia Svetlova, and their three sons. She had played a critical role in organizing his notes and transmitting his manuscripts. After a short stay in Switzerland, the family moved to the United States, settling in the hamlet of Cavendish, Vt.

There he kept mostly to himself for some 18 years, protected from sightseers by neighbors, who posted a sign saying, "No Directions to the Solzhenitsyns." He kept writing and thinking a great deal about Russia and hardly at all about his new environment, so certain was he that he would return to his homeland one day.

His rare public appearances could turn into hectoring jeremiads. Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country of his sanctuary spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were cowardly. Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its "hasty" capitulation in Vietnam. And he criticized the country's music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.

Many in the West did not know what to make of the man. He was perceived as a great writer and hero who had defied the Russian authorities. Yet he seemed willing to lash out at everyone else as well — democrats, secularists, capitalists, liberals and consumers.

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who has written extensively about the Soviet Union and visited Mr. Solzhenitsyn, wrote in 2001: "In terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of the 20th century. Who else compares? Orwell? Koestler? And yet when his name comes up now, it is more often than not as a freak, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a crank, a has been."

In the 1970s, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned President Gerald R. Ford to avoid seeing Mr. Solzhenitsyn. "Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer, but his political views are an embarrassment even to his fellow dissidents," Mr. Kissinger wrote in a memo. "Not only would a meeting with the president offend the Soviets, but it would raise some controversy about Solzhenitsyn's views of the United States and its allies." Mr. Ford followed the advice.

The writer Susan Sontag recalled a conversation about Mr. Solzhenitsyn between her and Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet who had followed Mr. Solzhenitsyn into forced exile and who would also become a Nobel laureate. "We were laughing and agreeing about how we thought Solzhenitsyn's views on the United States, his criticism of the press, and all the rest were deeply wrong, and on and on," she said. "And then Joseph said: 'But you know, Susan, everything Solzhenitsyn says about the Soviet Union is true. Really, all those numbers — 60 million victims — it's all true.' "

Ivan Denisovich

In the autumn of 1961, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a 43-year-old high school teacher of physics and astronomy in Ryazan, a city some 70 miles south of Moscow. He had been there since 1956, when his sentence of perpetual exile in a dusty region of Kazakhstan was suspended. Aside from his teaching duties, he was writing and rewriting stories he had conceived while confined in prisons and labor camps since 1944.

One story, a short novel, was "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," an account of a single day in an icy prison camp written in the voice of an inmate named Ivan Denisovich Shukov, a bricklayer. With little sentimentality, he recounts the trials and sufferings of "zeks," as the prisoners were known, peasants who were willing to risk punishment and pain as they seek seemingly small advantages like a few more minutes before a fire. He also reveals their survival skills, their loyalty to their work brigade and their pride.

The day ends with the prisoner in his bunk. "Shukov felt pleased with his life as he went to sleep," Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote. Shukov was pleased because, among other things, he had not been put in an isolation cell, and his brigade had avoided a work assignment in a place unprotected from the bitter wind, and he had swiped some extra gruel, and had been able to buy a bit of tobacco from another prisoner.

"The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one," Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote, adding: "Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three days were for leap years."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn typed the story single spaced, using both sides to save paper. He sent one copy to Lev Kopelev, an intellectual with whom he had shared a cell 16 years earlier. Mr. Kopelev, who later became a well known dissident, realized that under Khrushchev's policies of liberalization, it might be possible to have the story published by Novy Mir, or The New World, the most prestigious of the Soviet Union's so-called thick literary and cultural journals. Mr. Kopelev and his colleagues steered the manuscript around lower editors who might have blocked its publication and took it to Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor and a Politburo member who backed Khrushchev.

On reading the manuscript, Mr. Tvardovsky summoned Mr. Solzhenitsyn from Ryazan. "You have written a marvelous thing," he told him. "You have described only one day, and yet everything there is to say about prison has been said." He likened the story to Tolstoy's moral tales. Other editors compared it to Dostoyevski's "House of the Dead," which the author had based on his own experience of incarceration in czarist times. Mr. Tvardovsky offered Mr. Solzhenitsyn a contract worth more than twice his teacher's annual salary, but he cautioned that he was not certain he could publish the story.

Mr. Tvardovsky was eventually able to get Khrushchev himself to read "One Day in the Life." Khrushchev was impressed, and by mid-October 1962, the presidium of the Politburo took up the question of whether to allow it to be published. The presidium ultimately agreed, and in his biography "Solzhenitsyn" (Norton, 1985), Michael Scammell wrote that Khrushchev defended the decision and was reported to have declared: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil."

The novel appeared in Novy Mir in early 1962. The critic Kornei Chukovsky pronounced the work "a literary miracle." Grigori Baklanov, a respected novelist and writer about World War II, declared that the story was one of those rare creations after which "it is impossible to go on writing as one did before."

Novy Mir ordered extra printings, and every copy was sold. A book edition and an inexpensive newspaper version also vanished from the shelves.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was not the first to write about the camps. As early as 1951, Gustav Herling, a Pole, had published "A World Apart," about the three years he spent in a labor camp on the White Sea. Some Soviet writers had typed accounts of their own experiences, and these pages and their carbon copies were passed from reader to reader in a clandestine, self-publishing effort called zamizdat. Given the millions who had been forced into the gulag, few families could have been unaware of the camp experiences of relatives or friends. But few had had access to these accounts. "One Day in the Life" changed that.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, said on Monday that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was "a man with a unique life story whose name will endure throughout the history of Russia."

"Severe trials befell Solzhenitsyn, as they did millions of other people in this country," Mr. Gorbachev said in an interview with the Interfax news agency. "He was among the first to speak out about the brutality of Stalin's regime and about the people who experienced it, but were not crushed."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn's books "changed the minds of millions of people, making them rethink their past and present," Mr. Gorbachev said.

Born With the Russian Revolution

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in the Caucasus spa town of Kislovodsk on Dec. 11, 1918, a year after the Russian Revolution began. His father, Isaaki, had been a Russian artillery officer on the German front and married to Taissa Shcherback by the brigade priest. Shortly after he was demobilized and six months before his son's birth, he was killed in a hunting accident. The young widow took the child to Rostov-on-Don, where she reared him while working as a typist and stenographer. By Mr. Solzhenitsyn's account, he and his mother lived in a dilapidated hut. Still, her class origins — she was the daughter of a Ukrainian land owner — were considered suspect, as was her knowledge of English and French. Mr. Solzhenitsyn remembered her burying his father's three war medals because they could indicate reactionary beliefs.

He was religious. When he was a child, older boys once ripped a cross from his neck. Nonetheless, at 12, though the Communists repudiated religion, he joined the Young Pioneers and later became a member of Komsomol, the Communist youth organization.

He was a good student with an aptitude for mathematics, though from adolescence he imagined becoming a writer. In 1941, a few days before Germany attacked Russia to expand World War II into Soviet territory, he graduated from Rostov University with a degree in physics and math. A year earlier, he had married Natalia Reshetovskaya, a chemist. When hostilities began, he joined the army and was assigned to look after horses and wagons before being transferred to artillery school. He spent three years in combat as a commander of a reconnaissance battery.

In February 1945, as the war in Europe drew to a close, he was arrested on the East Prussian front by agents of Smersh, the Soviet spy agency. The evidence against him was found in a letter to a school friend in which he referred to Stalin — disrespectfully, the authorities said — as "the man with the mustache." Though he was a loyal Communist, he was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. It was his entry into the vast network of punitive institutions that he would later name the Gulag Archipelago, after the Russian acronym for the Main Administration of Camps.

His penal journey began with stays in two prisons in Moscow. Then he was transferred to a camp nearby, where he moved timbers, and then to another, called New Jerusalem, where he dug clay. From there he was taken to a camp called Kaluga Gate, where he suffered a moral and spiritual breakdown after equivocating in his response to a warden's demand that he report on fellow inmates. Though he never provided information, he referred to his nine months there as the low point in his life.

After brief stays in several other institutions, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was moved to Special Prison No. 16 on the outskirts of Moscow on July 9, 1947. This was a so-called sharashka, an institution for inmates who were highly trained scientists and whose forced labor involved advanced scientific research. He was put there because of his gift for mathematics, which he credited with saving his life. "Probably I would not have survived eight years of the camps if as a mathematician I had not been assigned for three years to a sharashka." His experiences at No. 16 provided the basis for his novel "The First Circle," which was not published outside the Soviet Union until 1968. While incarcerated at the research institute, he formed close friendships with Mr. Kopelev and another inmate, Dmitry Panin, and later modeled the leading characters of "The First Circle" on them.

Granted relative freedom within the institute, the three would meet each night to carry on intellectual discussions and debate. During the day, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was assigned to work on an electronic voice-recognition project with applications toward coding messages. In his spare time, he began to write for himself: poems, sketches and outlines of books.

He also tended toward outspokenness, and it soon undid him. After scorning the scientific work of the colonel who headed the institute, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was banished to a desolate penal camp in Kazakhstan called Ekibastuz. It would become the inspiration for "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."

At Ekibastuz, any writing would be seized as contraband. So he devised a method that enabled him to retain even long sections of prose. After seeing Lithuanian Catholic prisoners fashion rosaries out of beads made from chewed bread, he asked them to make a similar chain for him, but with more beads. In his hands, each bead came to represent a passage that he would repeat to himself until he could say it without hesitation. Only then would he move on to the next bead. He later wrote that by the end of his prison term, he had committed to memory 12,000 lines in this way.

'Perpetual Exile'

On Feb. 9, 1953, his term in the camps officially ended. On March 6, he was sent farther east, arriving in Kok-Terek, a desert settlement, in time to hear the announcement of Stalin's death broadcast over loudspeakers in the village square. It was here that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was ordered to spend his term of "perpetual exile."

He taught in a local school and secretly wrote poems, plays and sketches with no hope of having them published. He also began corresponding with his former wife, who during his incarceration had divorced him. He was bothered by stomach pains, and when he was able to visit a regional clinic, doctors found a large cancerous tumor.

His life as a restricted pariah struggling with the disease would lead to his novel "The Cancer Ward," which also first appeared outside the Soviet Union, in 1969. He finally managed to get to a cancer clinic in the city of Tashkent and later described his desperation there in a short story, "The Right Hand."

"I was like the sick people all around me, and yet I was different," he wrote. "I had fewer rights than they had and was forced to be more silent. People came to visit them, and their one concern, their one aim in life, was to get well again. But if I recovered, it would be almost pointless: I was 35 years of age, and yet in that spring I had no one I could call my own in the whole world. I did not even own a passport, and if I were to recover, I should have to leave this green, abundant land and go back to my desert, where I had been exiled 'in perpetuity. ' There I was under open surveillance, reported on every fortnight, and for a long time the local police had not even allowed me, a dying man, to go away for treatment."

After acquiring medical treatment and resorting to folk remedies, Mr. Solzhenitsyn did recover. In April 1956, a letter arrived informing him that his period of internal exile had been lifted and that he was free to move. In December, he spent the holidays with his former wife, and in February 1957, the two remarried. He then joined her in Ryazan, where Natalia Reshetovskaya headed the chemistry department of an agricultural college. Meanwhile, a rehabilitation tribunal invalidated his original sentence and found that he had remained "a Soviet patriot." He resumed teaching and writing, both new material as well as old, reworking some of the lines he had once stored away as he fingered his beads.

Twenty-two months elapsed between the publication of "Ivan Denisovich" and the fall of Khrushchev. Early in that period, the journal Novy Mir was able to follow up its initial success with Mr. Solzhenitsyn by publishing three more short novels by him in 1963. These would be the last of his works to be legally distributed in his homeland until the Soviet Union began to collapse in 1989.

When Leonid I. Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as party leader in October 1964, it was apparent that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was being silenced. In May 1967, in an open letter to the Congress of the Soviet Writers Union, he urged that delegates "demand and ensure the abolition of all censorship, open or hidden."

He told them that manuscripts of "The First Circle" and "The Cancer Ward" had been confiscated, that for three years he and his work had been libeled through an orchestrated media campaign, and that he had been prevented from even giving public readings. "Thus," he wrote, "my work has been finally smothered, gagged, and slandered."

He added, "No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death."

The letter touched off a battle within the writers union and in broader intellectual and political circles, pitting Mr. Solzhenitsyn's defenders against those allied with the party's hard-line leadership. Two years later, on Nov. 4, 1969, the tiny Ryazan branch of the U.S.S.R. Writers Union voted five to one to expel Mr. Solzhenitsyn. The decision ignited further furor at home. In the West, it intensified a wave of anti-Soviet sentiment that had been generated in 1968 when Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the liberal reforms of the Prague spring.

The conflict grew 11 months later with the announcement that Mr. Solzhenitsyn had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Soviet press responded with accusations that the award had been engineered by "reactionary circles for anti-Soviet purposes." One newspaper belittled the author as "a run of the mill writer"; another said it was "a sacrilege" to mention his name with the "creators of Russian and Soviet classics."

But there were also Russians willing to defend Mr. Solzhenitsyn. The eminent cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich wrote to the editors of Pravda, Izvestia, and other leading newspapers praising the writer. Mr. Rostropovich, who had taken some risk in inviting Mr. Solzhenitsyn to live at his dacha near Moscow for several years, suffered official disfavor after his letter was published abroad.

Even greater risks were taken by the inmates of the Potma Labor camp. They smuggled out congratulations to Mr. Solzhenitsyn, expressing admiration for his "courageous creative work, upholding the sense of human dignity and exposing the trampling of the human soul and the destruction of human values."

Private Turmoil

At the time, Mr. Solzhenitsyn's private life was in turmoil. As news of the prize was announced, his marriage was dissolving. Two years earlier he had met Natalia Svetlova, a mathematician who was involved in typing and circulating samizdat literature, and they became drawn to each other. As Mr. Solzhenitsyn explained, "She simply joined me in my struggle and we went side by side." He asked his wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, for a divorce. But she refused, and continued to do so for several years. At one point, shortly after he had won the prize, she attempted suicide, and he had to rush her to a hospital, where she was revived.

In the meantime, Natalia Svetlova gave birth to Yermolai and Ignat, Mr. Solzhenitsyn's two oldest sons. Finally, in March 1973, Natalia Reshetovskaya consented to a divorce. Soon afterward, Mr. Solzhenitsyn and Natalia Svetlova were married in an Orthodox church near Moscow.

His skirmishes with the state only intensified. While the authorities kept him from publishing, he kept writing and speaking out, eliciting threats by mail and phone. He slept with a pitchfork beside his bed. Finally, government agents who had tried to isolate and intimidate him arrested him, took him to the airport and deported him. Mr. Solzhenitsyn believed his stay in the United States would be temporary. "In a strange way, I not only hope, I am inwardly convinced that I shall go back," he told the BBC. "I live with that conviction. I mean my physical return, not just my books. And that contradicts all rationality."

With that goal, he lived like a recluse in rural Vermont, paying little attention to his surroundings as he kept writing about Russia, in Russian, with Russian readers in mind.

"He wrote, ate, and slept and that was about all," Mr. Remnick wrote in 1994 after visiting the Solzhenitsyn family in Cavendish. "For him to accept a telephone call was an event; he rarely left his 50 acres." In contrast to the rest of his family, he never became an American citizen.

His children — a third son, Stepan, had been born six months before Mr. Solzhenitsyn was deported — went to local schools, but they began their day with prayers in Russian for Russia's liberation, and their mother gave them Russian lessons. She also designed the pages and set the type for the 20 volumes of her husband's work that were being produced in Russian by the YMCA Press in Paris. And she administered a fund to help political prisoners and their families. Mr. Solzhenitsyn had donated to the fund all royalties from "The Gulag Archipelago," by far his best-selling book.

As for the author, he would head each morning for the writing house, a wing the Solzhenitsyns had added to the property. There he devoted himself to a gigantic work of historical fiction that eventually ran to more than 5,000 pages in four volumes. The work, called "The Red Wheel," focused on the revolutionary chaos that had spawned Bolshevism and set the stage for modern Russian history. It has been compared, at least in its sweep and intentions, with Tolstoy's "War and Peace."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn started work on the first volume, "August 1914," in 1969, though he said he had begun thinking about the project before World War II, when he was a student in Rostov. "August 1914" was spirited out of the Soviet Union and published in Paris before Mr. Solzhenitsyn's expulsion.

He believed that his account, which challenged Soviet dogma about the founding period, was as iconoclastic as his earlier writings about the gulag.

In the United States, "August 1914" reached No. 2 on best-seller lists, but the subsequent volumes, "November 1916," "March 1917," and "April 1917," all completed in Cavendish, have not been widely bought or read.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was displeased by the Russian reaction to "The Red Wheel," which he spoke of as the centerpiece of his creative life. He expressed the hope that it would gain importance with time.

Aloof in America

In Mr. Solzhenitsyn's 18 years in Vermont, he never warmed to Americans beyond his Cavendish neighbors. On the eve of his return to Russia in 1994, he acknowledged he had been aloof. "Instead of secluding myself here and writing 'The Red Wheel,' I suppose I could have spent time making myself likable to the West," he told Mr. Remnick. "The only problem is that I would have had to drop my way of life and my work."

But even when he stepped outside Cavendish, as he did when he addressed the Harvard graduates in 1978, his condemnations of American politics, press freedoms and social mores struck many as insensitive, haughty and snobbish.

There were those who described him as reactionary, as an unreconstructed Slavophile, a Russian nationalist, undemocratic and authoritarian. Olga Carlisle, a writer who had helped spirit the manuscript of "The Gulag Archipelago" out of Moscow but who was no longer speaking to Mr. Solzhenitsyn, wrote in Newsweek that the Harvard speech had been intended for a Russian audience, not an American one.

"His own convictions are deeply rooted in the Russian spirit, which is untempered by the civilizing influences of a democratic tradition," Ms. Carlisle said. And Czeslaw Milosz, generally admiring of his fellow Nobel laureate, wrote, "Like the Russian masses, he, we may assume, has strong authoritarian tendencies."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia on May 27, 1994, first landing in the Siberian northeast, in Magadan, the former heart of the Gulag. On arrival, he bent down to touch the soil in memory of the victims.

He flew on to Vladivostok, where he and his family began a two-month journey by private railroad car across Russia, to see what his post-Communist country now looked like. The BBC was on hand to film the entire passage and pay for it.

On the first of 17 stops, his judgment was already clear. His homeland, he said, was "tortured, stunned, altered beyond recognition." As he traveled on, encountering hearty crowds, signing books and meeting dignitaries as well as ordinary people, his gloom deepened. And after settling into a new home on the edge of Moscow, he began to voice his pessimism, deploring the crime, corruption, collapsing services, faltering democracy and what he felt to be the spiritual decline of Russia.

In Vermont, he had never warmed to Mr. Gorbachev and his reform policies of perestroika. He thought they were the last-ditch tactics of a leader defending a system that Mr. Solzhenitsyn had long known to be doomed.

For a while he was impressed by Boris N. Yeltsin, Russia's first freely elected leader, but then turned against him. Mr. Yeltsin, he said, had failed to defend the interests of ethnic Russians, who had become vulnerable foreign minorities in the newly independent countries that had so suddenly been sheared off from the Soviet Union. Later, he criticized the advent of Vladimir V. Putin as antidemocratic.

Russians initially greeted Mr. Solzhenitsyn with high hopes. On the eve of his return, a poll in St. Petersburg showed him to be the favorite choice for president. But he soon made it clear that he had no wish to take on a political role in influencing Russian society, and his reception soon turned tepid.

Few Russians were reading "The Red Wheel." The books were said to be too long for young readers.

Michael Specter, then The New York Times correspondent in Moscow, observed, "Leading intellectuals here consider his oratory hollow, his time past and his mission unclear."

Nationalists, who had once hoped for his blessing, were alienated by his rejection. Democratic reformers, who wanted his backing, were offended by his aloofness and criticism of them. Old Communists reviled him as they always had.

In October 1994, Mr. Solzhenitsyn addressed Russia's Parliament. His complaints and condemnations had not abated. "This is not a democracy, but an oligarchy," he declared. "Rule by the few." He spoke for an hour, and when he finished, there was only a smattering of applause.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn started appearing on television twice a week as the host of a 15-minute show called "A Meeting With Solzhenitsyn." Most times he veered into condemnatory monologues that left his less outspoken guests with little to do but look on. Alessandra Stanley, writing about the program for The Times, said Mr. Solzhenitsyn came across "as a combination of Charlie Rose and Moses." After receiving poor ratings, the program was canceled a year after it was started.

As the century turned, Mr. Solzhenitsyn continued to write. In a 2001 book, he confronted the relationship of Russians and Jews, a subject that some critics had long contended he had ignored or belittled in his fiction. A few accused him of anti-Semitism. Irving Howe, the literary critic, did not go that far but maintained that in "August 1914," Mr. Solzhenitsyn was dismissive of Jewish concerns and gave insufficient weight to pogroms and other persecution of the Jews. Others noted that none of the prisoners in "Ivan Denisovich" were definitively identified as a Jew, and the one whose Jewish identity was subtly hinted at was the one who had the most privileges and was protected from the greatest rigors.

Mr. Remnick defended Mr. Solzhenitsyn, saying he "in fact, is not anti-Semitic; his books are not anti-Semitic, and he is not, in his personal relations, anti-Jewish; Natalia's mother is Jewish, and not a few of his friends are, too."

In the final years of his life, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had spoken approvingly of a "restoration" of Russia under Mr. Putin, and was criticized in some quarters as increasingly nationalist.

In an interview last year with Der Spiegel, Mr. Solzhenitsyn said that Russians' view of the West as a "knight of democracy" had been shattered by the NATO bombing of Serbia, an event he called "a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals." He dismissed Western democracy-building efforts, telling the Times of London in 2005 that democracy "is not worth a brass farthing if it is installed by bayonet."

In 2007, he accepted a State Prize from then-President Putin — after refusing, on principle, similar prizes from Gorbachev and from Yeltsin. Mr. Putin, he said in the Der Spiegel interview, "inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people. And he started to do what was possible — a slow and gradual restoration."

Anne Barnard contributed reporting from Moscow, and Ellen Barry from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 7, 2008 An obituary on Monday about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer, misstated the title of his first novel and the year it appeared in Novy Mir, a Russian literary journal. The novel is "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," not "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," and Novy Mir published it in 1962, not 1963.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 7, 2008 The obituary also misspelled the given name and surname of a Russian writer who, like Mr. Solzhenitsyn, had been persecuted under the Soviet system. He was Osip Mandelstam, not Iosip Mandleshtam.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 7, 2008 And a subheading and a passage in the obituary also referred incorrectly to 1918, the year of Mr. Solzhenitsyn's birth. That was one year after the Russian Revolution, a series of events that led to the official formation of the Soviet Union in December 1922. Mr. Solzhenitsyn was not "Born With the Soviet Union" or born "a year after the Soviet Union arose from revolution."

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