From a piece I just wrote for the New Haven Independent, which took my advice and began (as of today) a monthly column by our city’s librarians:
In researching my biography of the author Judy Blume, I have had occasion to go through thousands of newspaper articles from the 1970s through the present, using the keywords “Judy Blume.” Especially in the ’70s and ’80s, large numbers of the articles I have found were written by the town librarian, who in many towns was given a regular spot in the local newspaper, perhaps once a month, to announce new library acquisitions. Sometimes they were just bullet-pointed lists, but sometimes the librarians added annotations smart, cheeky, snarky, or enthusiastic.
These columns provide a fascinating snapshot into the reading habits of the not-too-distant past; they are also a reminder of how much our literary culture unites us. Librarians were pushing Judy Blume to children, and John Updike and Philip Roth to adults, in West Virginia as in New York City. (They were also trying to ban Judy Blume in northern states as well as in deep Dixie.) And they are a fun trip down memory lane, for those who remember The Peter Principle, the picture books of Richard Scarry, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and the ubiquity of Sidney Sheldon and Jackie Collins, before James Patterson and Malcolm Gladwell dethroned them as the go-to airplane reads.
The librarian’s column seemed worth reviving, and I am so heartened that at my urging the Independent has heeded my call. A regular librarian’s column gives a proper perch to an important civic leader (or what today we might call an “influencer”), somebody who sees what books are being made and can suggest which ones might be worth reading. And if we disagree — well, we know where to find the librarian to quarrel.
Write on (with a pen)
As longtime superfans know (hello, you six!), I loved penmanship and am rather saddened by the disappearing practice of writing by hand. Perhaps no policy decision, at any level, irks me as much as summer camps’ practice of inviting parents to send emails to a camp portal, then printing out the emails and giving them to the campers as “mail.” (My eldest daughter’s beloved summer camp does this.) I sounded the alarm early, back in 2016, when in a New Yorker piece I had my say about handwriting.
So I was chuffed to see that The Economist had jumped aboard the bandwagon I helped construct. What’s more, there is a ray of hope! From The Economist this week:
A line of research shows the benefits of an “innovation” that predates computers: handwriting. Studies have found that writing on paper can improve everything from recalling a random series of words to imparting a better conceptual grasp of complicated ideas.
For learning material by rote, from the shapes of letters to the quirks of English spelling, the benefits of using a pen or pencil lie in how the motor and sensory memory of putting words on paper reinforces that material. The arrangement of squiggles on a page feeds into visual memory: people might remember a word they wrote down in French class as being at the bottom-left on a page, par exemple.
One of the best-demonstrated advantages of writing by hand seems to be in superior note-taking. In a study from 2014 by Pam Mueller and Danny Oppenheimer, students typing wrote down almost twice as many words and more passages verbatim from lectures, suggesting they were not understanding so much as rapidly copying the material.
Handwriting—which takes longer for nearly all university-level students—forces note-takers to synthesise ideas into their own words. This aids conceptual understanding at the moment of writing. But those taking notes by hand also perform better on tests when students are later able to study from their notes. The effect even persisted when the students who typed were explicitly instructed to rephrase the material in their own words. The instruction was “completely ineffective” at reducing verbatim note-taking, the researchers note: they did not understand the material so much as parrot it.
Many studies have confirmed handwriting’s benefits, and policymakers have taken note. Though America’s “Common Core” curriculum from 2010 does not require handwriting instruction past first grade (roughly age six), about half the states since then have mandated more teaching of it, thanks to campaigning by researchers and handwriting supporters. In Sweden there is a push for more handwriting and printed books and fewer devices. England’s national curriculum already prescribes teaching the rudiments of cursive by age seven.
Did you catch that? “Though America’s “Common Core” curriculum from 2010 does not require handwriting instruction past first grade (roughly age six), about half the states since then have mandated more teaching of it, thanks to campaigning by researchers and handwriting supporters.” I am not sure if Connecticut is among such states, but I sincerely hope so.
Here’s the catch: my last 10 years of college students hadn’t really learned cursive. So are there enough young teachers in the guild to teach handwriting? Time will tell.
Update on being named Oppenheimer
I feel I owe you an update from the front lines of being named “Oppenheimer.” (For those of you who didn’t see it, I expounded on what the movie had done to me in this Wall Street Journal piece.)
First, I clearly spooked a TSA guy at the airport. He looked at my ID and clearly didn’t believe that I could have that last name. Then—if I read his double-take correctly—he moved from disbelief into suspicion: if I indeed was an Oppenheimer, was it wise to let me on an airplane? Wasn’t a guy named Oppenheimer just a wee bit more likely to be concealing a bomb? Maybe there should be a pat-down? But, unsure of how to proceed, he eventually just waved me on to the metal detector. And, I am sure, prayed for his job.
Second, the other Mark Oppenheimer, the South African barrister who shares my name and occasionally gets my email, and with whom I have struck up an intercontinental friendship, thought it would be fun to invite me on his podcast to talk about the movie Oppenheimer (actually, the full Barbenheimer). Then he doubled down (tripled down?) and invited my brother, the author and critic Daniel Oppenheimer, to join the podcast as well. So it was Oppenheimer and Oppenheimer and Oppenheimer on Oppenheimer. If you have an hour to kill, here you are:
Middle age is a massacre
Close observers of the above video will notice my slightly wounded eye, still swollen and a bit closed many months after my surgery for a detached retina. Was it Philip Roth who said, “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre”? Well, Jiminy Cricket, middle age is a massacre! With my two knee surgeries now years in the past, the past twelve months have yielded a detached retina and, as of this past month, trochanteric bursitis, which basically means, “Your thigh and leg and right buttock will hurt SO MUCH that for a week you will have to work up the courage to slide into the driver’s seat in your car, and you won’t sleep more than an hour at a stretch, but then the pain will quickly dissipate, your body will return to normal, and you will wonder if you just spent a week atoning for some terrible sin and now you can walk again.”
My experience of aches and pains always brings with it a slight twinge of shame. I am from a family of long-lived people, some of whom seem never to have any health issues. My grandfather lived to almost 96, and for the last 20 years of his life he subsisted on a diet of corned beef and Hires root beer. Also, they all look really young, and some of them stay weirdly limber and flexible (if you saw my great-aunt Anne move, you’d swear she could still do a somersault well into her eighties, though I never issued her the challenge; she probably would have taken me up on it, and executed the somersault with her one nightly cigarette dangling from her lower lip the whole time). So I wonder what I have done to get trochanteric bursitis at the mere age of 49? It feels like I am to blame. I know that makes no sense to feel that way, but there it is.
Classified ad from the 1980s
In my research, I found this charming old ad for a used bookstore clerk:
Four bucks an hour! Five bucks after the first month! Apply at the store, “around the corner from Blockbuster’s Video.”
Count me in.
Happy holiday, for those who observe
Welcome to the wettest Sukkot on record, at least here in Connecticut. You know whom you can observe it with? “Rabbi” Peter Oliveira, the messianic Jew who is the pastor of First Congregational Church in Litchfield, Conn., the church that Lyman Beecher served hundreds of years ago. He is a Christian, but claims Jewish ancestry, and has incorporated Jewish rituals into his ministry. In fact, he runs a dual operation: on Sunday he preaches as pastor of First Congregational, but on Saturdays he preaches as “Rabbi Peter” of Mishkahn Nachamu, a messianic “Jewish” church. I got this email from him earlier this week:
Due to weather conditions, Shabbat service 10:45am tomorrow must be held at our regular location…
PLEASE PASS THIS INFO TO YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY WHO MIGHT BE COMING!
The rain should stop midday, so our afternoon and evening activities may still be held for those already situated on the Sukkot Grounds!
Cultural appropriation? Well, yes. But I have been to his services, where Christians, draped in Jewish prayer shawls, whip out shofars and blow with great passion. There is no doubting their sincerity, even if it’s not entirely clear to me what they are being sincere about. And I kind of want to drive up to see what kind of sukkah he has built.
What I’m reading
For research purposes, I am deep into John O’Hara’s 1949 novel A Rage to Live. It is a sexy page-turner about well-heeled WWI-era Protestants in lust. It’s like early Updike, for a guy who never really thrilled to Updike. Have any of you read it? Any O’Hara fans out there? Once upon a time, he was yooge, as the former president would say. Drop me a line with O’Hara thoughts (or whatever) at mark.oppenheimer@aju.edu.
What I’m listening to
Hopefully, comes this weekend, the bands at this festival, described without a whiff of irony: