Lisa Stampnitzky's "Disciplining Terror"

Lisa Stampnitzky is Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. She earned her PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and has also held fellowships at Harvard, the University of Oxford, Ohio State University and the European University Institute.

Stampnitzky applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism", and reported the following:

My book, Disciplining Terror, explains how political violence became "terrorism," and how this transformation led to the current "war on terror." It does this by tracing the political and academic struggles through which experts made terrorism, and terrorism made experts, arguing that the expert discourse on terrorism operates at the boundary—itself increasingly contested—between science and politics, and between academic expertise and the state.

Page 99 discusses "quantification," the (often messy) process of turning social phenomena into numbers. As I note there:

A major theme in the sociological literature on quantification has been that counting and commensuration are social processes, and, as such, require work to make them happen... quantification...can be seen as a means of standardizing entities that may have an unruly presence in the world, and of making them subject not just to science but also to governance.

While this certainly does not sum up the book as a whole, it does introduce one of its major themes: the question of how the rather inchoate phenomenon of "terrorism" has been made concrete through practices of knowledge.

A core argument of the book is that "terrorism" is not a natural category, but one that has been socially and historically constructed. As with any political concept, the question of how to define "terrorism" has been contentious. Yet the problem of defining terrorism has been particularly difficult to resolve, with even terrorism experts unable to agree on such fundamentals as whether or not states can commit terrorism. Various surveys have counted hundreds of different, often contradictory, definitions in use at any given time. And quantification is but one method through which experts tried to "discipline" the fuzzy concept of terrorism. In the chapter of which page 99 is a part, I describe how researchers the RAND Corporation, a federally funded think tank in Southern California, developed the first terrorism database by clipping newspaper articles, making entries on index cards, and eventually entering these into a computer database, thus turning the new concept of "terrorism" into an object of knowledge, about which experts could then ask questions such as "Is the rate of terrorism increasing or decreasing?" The difficulty, of course, is that in order to construct such a database, humans must make judgments about whether any particular incident is, or is not, an act of terrorism, and thus, whether or not it should be included. And what makes these acts of judgment particularly fraught in this case is that to classify an event as "terrorism" is not simply to make a social or scientific judgment, but to include it in a phenomenon which has come to be popularly understood as fundamentally immoral and illegitimate.

Learn more about Disciplining Terror at the Cambridge University Press website.

Writers Read: Lisa Stampnitzky.

--Marshal Zeringue

Clare Mulley's "The Spy Who Loved"

Clare Mulley is the award-winning author of two biographies. The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (2013) is 'scrumptuously researched and expertly rendered... outstanding', according to The Daily Beast, ‘assiduously researched, passionately written and highly atmospheric’ says The Economist, and ‘compulsively readable… thrilling’ in the words of Britain's Telegraph.

Mulley's other biography, The Woman Who Saved the Children is about Eglantyne Jebb (2009), the founder of Save the Children who did not care for individual children, won the British Daily Mail Biographers’ Club prize. All royalties from this book are donated to the charity.

Mulley also contributed to The Arvon Book of Life Writing (2010). She is a regular radio contributor, speaks at leading international literary and history events, and writes and reviews for various papers and journals including The Spectator and History Today. She lives in Essex, England, with her husband and three daughters.

Mulley applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Spy Who Loved and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Spy Who Loved touches a wonderful moment in the book when special agent Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, and her one-legged lover and comrade-in-arms Andrzej Kowerski, are making a getaway from the Gestapo in Budapest, before they start to flee across Europe in the spring of 1941.

Andrzej’s pride and joy was his sandy-brown, two-door Opel Olympia, which he had kept topped up with petrol but hidden in a dirty greenhouse in the gated courtyard behind his and Christine’s flat. This was the same car that he had driven out of Poland the year before, and in which he had escaped the Hungarian internment camp. The SS had raced Opels in 1938, and the following year the convertible became a favourite of high-ranking SS officers. It is entirely possible that Andrzej’s beloved car had once belonged to a discerning Wehrmacht officer, as his sister later proudly referred to it as his ‘spoils of the war with Germany’…

Displaying what the British simply called ‘great presence of mind’, Christine had just orchestrated her and Andrzej’s release from a brutal interrogation by biting her tongue so hard it had bled profusely, enabling her to pretend to cough up blood – a symptom of tuberculosis. Rightly terrified of this highly contagious disease, the Germans had kicked them both out. But Christine still had to plead her and Andrzej’s case to the British Minister at the Embassy, where they first sought refuge, before being ‘folded up like a penknife’ and driven across the border to free Yugoslavia in the boot of the Embassy car, with Andrzej following behind in the trusty Opel.

The Opel would take them on through Europe in the spring of 1941, sometimes weeks and sometimes just days ahead of the Nazi advance. On occasion Christine would smuggle highly incriminating microfilm inside her gloves, and sometimes Andrzej employed a special panel in his wooden leg for the same purpose. Eventually the car delivered them to the safety of the British base in Cairo. Here Christine would undertake some espionage, her methods perhaps suggested by her code-name, ‘Willing’, and she was also trained to be dropped into occupied France in July 1944, ahead of the Allied liberation in the south, where her work would make her truly legendary.

There is something rather wonderful about having them captured on page 99, not by the Gestapo, the Wehrmacht, or the frustrating bureaucracy of the Allies, but in mid-flight, showing typical chutzpah as they head off to new countries and undercover missions, admittedly with ‘bruised and swollen faces’ but also with a stolen German car, a hip-flask of Hungarian brandy, and some nice new British passports.

Learn more about the book and author at Clare Mulley's website, and view a short video of the author talking about the book.

My Book, The Movie: The Spy Who Loved.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Parfit and Suzanne Chisholm's "The Lost Whale"

Michael Parfit is a British Columbia-based writer, journalist and filmmaker. With his wife, Suzanne Chisholm, he has produced and directed more than twenty stories for the National Geographic Channel.

Suzanne Chisholm has produced and filmed documentaries and has done more than a dozen pieces for the National Geographic Channel.

Parfit applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Lost Whale: The True Story of an Orca Named Luna, and reported the following:

I’m delighted with what Page 99 [inset, below left, click to enlarge] turns up.

The book is about a sweet young killer whale baby nicknamed Luna, who lost his family and started trying to make contact with people, which created both funny and sad confusion in the human species. But there are several thematic layers in the narrative, which are mostly present on this page.

When I write nonfiction, I seem inclined to hide the themes that matter to me most, and sometimes -- I often fear through lack of art -- people don't notice them and they read as if the text had only one layer. So it is wonderful that with this book the Page 99 test is almost overtly revealing of both the key plot tension and the thematic stuff that The Lost Whale is really about. That clarity probably happens because the book was written in partnership with my wife, Suzanne Chisholm, who has the clearer mind.

Do I explain the bones of the book here and make everything overt? I can’t, even if I wanted to. I don’t think truly narrative work reveals its full meaning even to the person who writes it down. You exercise control as you can, but describing real events is in some ways radically different and more slippery than writing exposition or describing events that you make up. Fictional events may indeed be shallow, if you haven't given thought to the layers, but true events that you try to describe are always shaded into depths like the sea, all the way down into regions that you can’t see and don’t understand, and the choices that make your own version of actual events are only choices, not complete facts.

So I will not try to explain the things I think are important about the book as page 99 reveals them. I won’t outline the things Suzanne and I made sure were installed between some lines and spoken clearly in others, and I won’t chart the way the final chapters and pages summon those sparks out of the blaze of the main story to illuminate something that seemed to Suzanne and me to be important. You get a glimpse on page 99, but it’s incomplete.

It took 90,000 words to make the thing whole, and an attempted description here would be like the firing of a single photographer's flash -- it might show things in stark relief that have meaning only in their shading and movement, and would thus mislead.

So I can’t explain what page 99 means. I can only say that the page indeed strikes some of those sparks -- thematically in the description of Luna's relatively gentle nudging of a canoe with people in it, and, in terms of the basic tension of the plot, in describing the confusion of a good and sincere woman named Kari Koski, who wants desperately to help the little whale but cannot figure out how.

Those stories are in this book not just because they happened, but also because they illuminate the route we have chosen to travel through the overall story of the whale people called Luna. We can only hope that this road reaches a place that has at least a bit of truth in it. Page 99 does. You’ll have to see for yourself about the rest.

Learn more about Michael Parfit and Suzanne Chisholm, and read more about The Lost Whale at the St. Martin's Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Toby Tyrrell's "On Gaia"

Toby Tyrrell is professor of Earth system science at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton (University of Southampton).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, On Gaia: A Critical Investigation of the Relationship between Life and Earth, and reported the following:

My book is an investigation of a scientific hypothesis, to see whether it is correct or not. The hypothesis that I subject to detailed scrutiny is the Gaia hypothesis, which suggests that life on Earth has helped to control the global environment, keeping it stable and comfortable for life. This is an important topic because we need a proper understanding of how Earth’s environmental system works, in order to be able to keep it habitable for us despite the massive changes we are imposing upon it, such as the 40% increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in air.

So how does my book stand up to the page 99 test? Page 99 is mid-way through an assessment of one claim put forward in support of Gaia, that the Earth is especially comfortable for life. In this chapter of the book I am in the process of showing how the data cast doubt on this claim (see also here). I have just finished showing that ice ages (the predominant climate state of the last few million years) are severely unfavourable times for life as a whole. Now I am considering whether past warm periods in Earth history were any better. The top part of page 99 shows a photograph of a Cretaceous-age fossil tree stump from Antarctica, where not even a single tree grows today. The fossil is of excellent quality and is unambiguously that of a tree stump. I like the way that this single fossil is able, by itself, to tell us that the Earth has changed over time. As it happens we now have a wealth of supporting evidence showing that forests spread much closer to the poles during past warm times on Earth, such as during the Cretaceous. Further examples, in the form of fossilised breadfruit and dinosaur bones in the high Arctic, give further evidence of past sub-tropical climates at high latitudes.

But on page 99 I am also discussing the limitations of fossil evidence, and the difficulties in working out past environments. In particular I am pointing out one such limitation: the difficulty in determining past vegetation when no fossils are left. It becomes problematic when whole ecosystems leave no trace of themselves. This is highlighted by describing how coal (with its abundant fossils) is not forming today beneath the Amazon forest.

Learn more about On Gaia at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emma Jinhua Teng's "Eurasian"

Emma Jinhua Teng is a MacVicar Faculty Fellow and the T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations and Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at MIT and the author of Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943, and reported the following:

On page 99 we meet the curious character of Patsy O’Wang/Chin Sum, a Chinese-Irish cook in a farcical play from 1895. We learn that:

As the playwright directed, "The key to this capital farce is the remarkable transformation of which Chin Sum is capable. Born of Irish father and Chinese mother and brought up in barracks in Hong Kong he has a remarkable dual nature." The transformation is effected when Chin Sum imbibes whiskey, "the drink of his father," and undergoes a metamorphosis into a "true Irishman." Strong tea, "the drink of his mother," restores Patsy's "Chinese character," which is that of a sober and industrious Chinese cook. The ideas of hybrid reversion and latent racial traits (blood will tell) are thus enacted in this farce through the bifurcated character of Patsy/Chin Sum, who reverts to parental type based on the drink he consumes.

As amusing as Patsy O’Wang may be, this selection from page 99 is not entirely representative, for this “capital farce” has only a cameo role in my book, which tells the story not of the all-too-visible fictional Eurasian characters that inhabited nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature, but rather the real-life (and largely unknown) stories of Chinese-white mixed families that made their homes in the US, China and Hong Kong during the years between 1842 and 1943. A central question of the book is how Eurasian families negotiated their social identities in an era when mixed race was generally stigmatized and monoracial classifications the norm. To this end, I examine both the range of ideas concerning racial hybridity that shaped Eurasian social experiences, and the claims set forth by individual Eurasians themselves concerning their own identities.

Yet, in other respects page 99 does reveal something of the whole. This page puts us right in Part II, "Debating Hybridity," which is the core (though perhaps not the emotional heart) of the book. The chapters of this section are dedicated to a comparison of ideas about mixed race that emerged in the US and China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with one chapter set in the US, a second in China, and a third examining the transnational flow of ideas between the two. Page 99 falls in the middle of a discussion of competing theories on "human hybridity," which I loosely group into two sets of beliefs: one focused on the purportedly detrimental effects of racial amalgamation; and the other on its possible eugenic effects (hybrid vigor). Thus page 99 relates to a central aim of my book, which is to complicate the intellectual genealogy of mixed race by demonstrating that there were diverse opinions and vibrant debates on the subject, dating back well before the landmark Loving v. Virginia case of 1967. A more nuanced understanding of historical discourses on mixedness enables us to ask: how much have we really distanced ourselves from the biological and racialist discourses of the past? After all, even as the media now embraces "mixed race icons" as emblems of a post-racial future, the very notion of "mixed" presumes the existence of "pure" races to begin with.

That the intellectual genealogy of mixed race is far from monolithic is especially evident if we move beyond Anglo-American discourses to examine those from other cultures – in this case Chinese. Readers eager to learn more about the Chinese side of things should turn to page 199.

Learn more about Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943 at the University of California Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robin Beck's "Chiefdoms, Collapse and Coalescence in the Early American South"

Robin Beck is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and assistant curator of Eastern North American Archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Chiefdoms, Collapse and Coalescence in the Early American South, and reported the following:

Each of my six chapters opens with a brief vignette that situates the reader in time and space and that presents an episode that is pivotal to--or in some way captures--the chapter that follows. As it happens, page 99 falls on the vignette that opens Chapter 3, The Stranger Indians:

May 1656

Defeat had not come often to the men of Virginia, but the weight of it settled over them now as they pushed away in their boats from the falls of the James, demoralized and shaken. Edward Hill had set out for this western frontier with his makeshift militia--more than a hundred Englishmen with their Pamunkey allies--to make a decisive show of force against the newcomers, the stranger Indians, who had appeared like apparitions out of the deep, inscrutable woods that stretched to the north, south, and west. They had met on the falls of the James, where the strangers sent their leaders forth to negotiate with Colonel Hill and his militia, who welcomed the foreigners into their camp. Later, and on the colonel’s command, his men had cut down these guests without warning or mercy, a clear lesson to the newcomers and other would-be claimants to this land that it was not for the taking. In times past such lessons, when imparted by Englishmen, were rarely challenged. But this time the strangers had imparted a devastating lesson of their own, driving the Englishmen back to their boats in a furious rage and shredding their Pamunkey Indian allies by the banks of a stream called Bloody Run. As the men of Virginia pushed toward home, the falls of the James behind them, none could have foreseen the consequences of their retreat.

When Spanish explorers first penetrated the American Southeast during the mid-1500’s, they described a precolonial, native world of river valleys thickly settled with large towns, powerful chiefs carried about on litters by their subjects, sacred temples atop high earthen mounds--and supporting it all--vast fields of maize. This was the world of the Mississippian culture, which once stretched from modern Oklahoma east to the Atlantic Ocean, from Wisconsin south to the Gulf of Mexico. Yet by the time the earliest English explorers reached the interior South just over a century later, this world was in ruins. From its ashes sprang the new world of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Catawbas, a world based not on maize and the human labor needed to farm it but on guns and commodities--namely animal hides and Indian slaves. By focusing on the native peoples of the Carolina Piedmont, those whose descendants would forge the Catawba Indian Nation, my book aims to explain both how these changes unfolded and why they unfolded in the particular way they did.

Those strangers who appeared so suddenly on Virginia’s frontier in 1656 were a group of Erie Indians expelled from the shores of Lake Erie by the Iroquois. They soon became known as the Westos, and for more than two decades their name would strike fear in native towns and villages across the Native South as they captured hundreds--if not thousands--of Indian slaves for the Virginia and Carolina markets. Their arrival would ignite the Indian slave trade and smash the Piedmont’s Mississippian chiefdoms, turning the entire region into what anthropologist Robbie Ethridge calls a shatter zone. Page 99 captures that moment in my book when before turned to after, when the world as it was turned irrevocably into something else.

Learn more about Chiefdoms, Collapse and Coalescence in the Early American South at the Cambridge University Press website.

See the July 2013 New York Times article, "Fort Tells of Spain's Early Ambitions," which reports the recent location by Robin Beck and colleagues of a 1567 Spanish fort during excavations at the Berry site, a fort and a site that play significant roles in Chiefdoms, Collapse and Coalescence in the Early American South.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson's "Enlightenment’s Frontier"

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is an assistant professor of British history at the University of Chicago.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Enlightenment's Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism, and reported the following:

In the summer of 1764, the Reverend John Walker went looking for virtue in the bogs and hills of the Hebrides. He reported to his friend Lord Kames that he had discovered a “New world” in the north, brimming with natural resources and healthy natives. Page 99 of my book Enlightenment’s Frontier recovers some of the scientific and cultural context of Walker’s voyage. A major influence on Walker was the 1703 travel account by the Gaelic geographer Martin Martin who described the inhabitants of the Hebrides as noble savages in the vein of Tacitus’ Germania. Another template for Walker’s vision was the 1732 expedition of Carl von Linné to Lapland. The botanist claimed to have discovered a providential economy in northern Sweden, populated by Sami reindeer pastoralists. By diversifying Lapland with useful plants and animals, he hoped to create a new Eden on the periphery.

These passages on page 99 capture fairly well my original design for Enlightenment’s Frontier. I was interested in exploring the environmental foundation of the Scottish Enlightenment and assumed that this was a story primarily about the use of the Highlands as a laboratory for Linnaean natural history. But like many other historians, I found a lot more than I had expected in the archives. Nested in Walker’s journey was a series of other narratives. One was the clash of rival ecologies in the Scottish Enlightenment. Walker saw in the environment a bountiful but unstable and fragile realm that had to be carefully managed by experts. In contrast, liberal improvers viewed nature as a mirror image of their markets - resilient and self-regulating. Moreover, this story of rival ecologies was connected to an even broader framework. When Walker’s quest for a Gaelic cornucopia failed at the end of the Enlightenment, northern Scotland became a crucible for Malthusian anxieties about overpopulation and resource exhaustion. In this way, the rise and fall of the Enlightenment in the Highlands sheds new light on the origins of environmentalism.

Page 99 (footnotes omitted):

health, and temperance of island life, “free from the various convulsions that ordinarily attend luxury.” This was a people molded by a nasty climate to brave adversity with industry and ascetic moderation. Martin insisted that “the ignorance of vices [was] more powerful among [them] than all the precepts of philosophy . . . among the Greeks.” These were men who knew neither sugar nor cinnamon and slept on “beds of heath” without nightcaps. Such a conflation of Greco-Roman imagery with Gaelic ethnography would have a long life among Martin’s readers and imitators.

The double vision of the Highlands owed much to Linnaeus’s travels in Lapland. As we have heard, Walker, Robertson, and Lightfoot were all committed to the Swedish botanist’s system of classification and the economic priorities embodied in his flora. Indeed, by relying on Linnaeus’s Flora Lapponica to identify useful or edible Highland plants, their accounts sometimes mixed the cultural legacies and economic prospects of Lapland and northern Scotland. Linnaeus’s book dwelled at length on the importance of native botanical knowledge to Sami subsistence. The far north accustomed them to food deemed inedible elsewhere such as unsalted fish, reindeer milk, and native wild plants. It also preserved them from the luxury of modern commerce and made them ignorant of “alcoholic beverages, tobacco, tea, coffee, sugar, silk [and] most spices.” Where another observer might have recoiled at debilitating scarcity, Linnaeus saw self-sufficiency and moderation: “The Lapp gets from his Reindeer herd almost all his needs; lives content and happy in his cold and sterile land.” This myth in turn helped sustain the moral aspect of Linnaeus’s cameralism. The Sami set a virtuous example to the rest of the nation. Only by subduing consumer appetites and denouncing luxury would his compatriots render Sweden truly independent.

Yet the centrality of Lapland to Linnaeus’s reputation never matured into a political commitment. The Swedish botanist spent only one summer in the north. Like so many other European social climbers, he took a colonial shortcut to wealth and authority. There was no compelling counterpart to the Scottish politics of population in Linnaeus’s thought because he did not think that the Sami needed special protection by the state or civil society (perhaps he would have if he had assigned them a military function). In contrast, Walker’s engagement with Highland improvement spanned the entirety of his career, from 1764 to 1803, and was driven by fertile anxieties about the economic and military fate of Scotland. The urgency and consistency of Walker’s commitment arose from the ways in which he disturbed and rearranged a mixture of Scottish commonplaces: conjectural history, the fear of Gaelic emigration, and worries about an inverse relation between commerce and martial valor. If history progressed by...

Learn more about Enlightenment's Frontier at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Wuthnow's "Small-Town America"

Robert Wuthnow grew up in a small town and currently teaches in the sociology department at Princeton University.  He is the author of many books about American religion and culture, including Red State Religion: Faith and Politics in America's Heartland .

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future, and reported the following:

Two of the book’s themes conveniently appear on page 99, which comes in a chapter about small-town residents’ feelings toward their communities. These themes emerged from lengthy qualitative interviews with more than 700 residents living in scattered communities across the country.

Many of the towns were declining. In fact, 55 percent of all non-urban US towns of fewer than 25,000 residents were smaller in 2010 than they were in 1980. In several states three-quarters were smaller. Residents of these towns were keenly aware of the decline. People no longer congregated on Main Street on Saturday evenings. The school was shuttered. Children were bused to a larger town. The playground was silent. The hardware store was gone. The corner lot where it stood was empty. Residents figured the good times were past.

But small towns are surprisingly resilient. Although the smallest ones are losing population, towns of any size are not. Most towns with at least 5,000 residents have been holding their own or growing. Many are county seats, host small manufacturing plants, or are located near interstate highways. Many are within commuting distance of larger towns and cities. They are benefiting from tele-commerce. These are the towns that two-thirds of the 30 million Americans who live in small towns call home. They are hardly disappearing.

Those of us in cities and suburbs may think about small-town life and imagine it would be dreadful. Too stifling of opportunities. Too boring for words. But that view misses the rich variety of America’s small towns. Come closer and we hear people speaking eloquently about their towns and their families and their lives. Some are here to be near an aging relative. Some are down on their luck. Some are in towns suffering from drought, a recent flood, or a factory closing. Some are recent immigrants. Some are seeking a balanced life with time for friends and family or more space and a slower place of life. They have much to tell us about the meanings of community, if we are willing to listen.

Read more about Small-Town America at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Red State Religion.

Writers Read: Robert Wuthnow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter von Ziegesar's "The Looking Glass Brother"

Peter von Ziegesar is a New York-based filmmaker and screenwriter. He has written articles, essays and reviews on film and art for many national publications, including DoubleTake, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and Art in America. His short fiction won a PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize. His work as a film and multimedia artist has received national attention, including a solo exhibition at the Hirschhorn Museum of Art in Washington, D.C. He lives in New York City.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his recent book, The Looking Glass Brother, and reported the following:

Page 99 is full of incompletion and longing. It’s a part of the memoir where I go to visit my homeless stepbrother Little Peter who’s living temporarily in a halfway house in San Raphael, California. The place seems sterile and without inspiration to me. Each night my stepbrother leaves his room and hikes up into the hills behind the halfway house and sleeps on the ground. In order to cheer him up I take him for a drive in my rental car and he steers me to the house in Sausalito where he lived to age five before my father met his mother and took them both to New York. I’m not at all sure it’s the right house, but we have a kind of wordless epiphany sitting on the front porch. Afterwards I take him back to the halfway house and leave him there. Little Peter and I share that we were both kicked out of boarding schools. We are, in fact, both failed preppies. When I leave him that afternoon, he gives me “a despairing look, like a kid being dropped off at boarding school after a nice meal at the inn with his mother and father. A look that said, ‘Why me, and why this place? And when did you stop loving me, and don’t tell me that you didn’t, because it’s obvious, or you wouldn’t be leaving me here.’ A look I’d been on the inside of many times myself.”

Later on the same page, Little Peter leaves the halfway house and starts walking and hitching across country. From Sacramento he calls me and asks for a ticket to Albuquerque, one of his regular homeless hangouts, and I readily agree. Then I get into a tussle with his mother, Olivia, who is my stepmother. She thinks he should go back to San Raphael, where he has unfinished business. This is like the good angel and the bad angel on my shoulder, and I end up refusing to buy him the bus ticket after all. The result is that he takes to the rails and winds up in jail for Thanksgiving, much to my regret. It’s a theme throughout the book that I am more willing to indulge Little Peter and accept him for what he is, while almost everyone else wants to change him. This is both my biggest strength and my biggest weakness. In fact, I find I can’t change my stepbrother. I can only stay in touch with him, give him handouts now and then and try to ease his passage when possible. Often this thin communication lifeline is what he needs, though. Just someone to talk to.

Learn more about the book and author at Peter von Ziegesar's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Looking Glass Brother.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick Colm Hogan's "How Authors’ Minds Make Stories"

Patrick Colm Hogan is a professor in the Department of English and the programs in Cognitive Science, Comparative Literature and Comparative Studies, and India Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of fifteen books, including The Mind and Its Stories and What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion, and the editor of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his recent book, How Authors' Minds Make Stories, and reported the following:

Page 99 of How Authors’ Minds Make Stories begins with a reference “alterations in women’s political authority” as represented in Jean Racine’s play, Bajazet. It continues as follows:

Racine placed Andromaque in a position of authority after the play bearing her name. He placed Agrippine in that position before the action of Britannicus. He placed Axiane and Berenice in that position outside the action of Alexandre le Grand and Berenice. In Bajazet, however, Roxane is in charge of the empire while the events are unfolding. Thus her position of authority is integral to the story’s elaboration and specification . . . . [I]t may seem that this will simply produce a mirror image of the stories in which men have the positions of authority. However, this is not a matriarchy. The society is still fundamentally patriarchal, even though an exceptional woman has managed to gain some degree of (temporary) dominance. As a result, the position of this (female) leader is more fragile, and the balance of power is more complex. In keeping with this, the female characters in Bajazet draw on both the developmental principles for female characters in earlier plays and those for male characters. The result . . . is a sort of reconfiguration in which the possible interconnections (or configurations) of principles change significantly. Put simply, the metaprinciple that segregated principles by gender has been compromised.

Readers of this site will probably not be surprised to hear that this passage both is and is not representative of the book. It is unrepresentative in that only one chapter of the book concerns Racine. Though the greatest French tragedian, Racine seems to be little read in the English-speaking world, even by professors of literature. This means that the page treats an author who is probably unfamiliar to most readers. This chapter also involves the most thorough and detailed examination of an authorial canon and the most integral use of theoretical concepts. For these reasons, the page is likely to be far more difficult to follow than most of the book, especially when taken in isolation.

On the other hand, there are many ways in which the page is characteristic. The book as a whole concerns what psychologists call simulation. Simulation is the cognitive process of imagining what a particular character will do in a particular situation. It is probably the main process we use to decide whether we want to do something in the future (e.g., ask the boss for a raise) or what we might have done better in the past (e.g., timing the request for a raise differently). The book considers what constitutes simulation and argues that literary imagination is a particularly extended and elaborated form of ordinary simulative processes.

More exactly, a literary author has a set of principles that guide his or her simulation of characters and character interactions. These often involve categories of character, such as male and female. Part of simulation involves making small changes in single properties and imagining the outcomes. For example, one might imagine a male friend asking the bouncer at a club to let one in, then re-simulate the scenario with a female friend.

In the passage just quoted, my contention is that, up to Bajazet, Racine’s literary simulations maintained a fairly strict division between the sorts of things a female character might do and those a male character might do. By making a female character the ruler in the simulation proper, he broke those constraints. In consequence, he simulated the subsequent narrative differently than he simulated similar events in earlier plays. This was a watershed that had significant consequences for the plays that followed.

Learn more about How Authors' Minds Make Stories at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue