CONTENTS

1. CONTENTS AS Creative Writing Resource Pack Aim:to apply creative writing skills within a variety of writing genres. [Recommended website for further research: The Electric Typewriter]  Articles/editorials  Blog entries  Writing a pitch  Reviews  Online encyclopedia  Travel writing

2. CreativeWritingConcepts&Ideas

3. Articles/editorials • In Defence of Pretentiousness (Dan Fox) - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/09/in-defence-of-pretentiousness • On Keeping a Notebook (Joan Didion) - https://penusa.org/sites/default/files/didion.pdf • Roger Federer as Religious Experience (David Foster Wallace) - http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html • Stewart Lee: I was writing like I was trying to get myself sacked (Stewart Lee) - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/31/stewart-lee-content-provider-book-extract • Naked Face: Can you read people’s thoughts just by looking at them? (Malcolm Gladwell) - http://gladwell.com/the-naked-face/ • Teenagers and social networking – it might actually be good for them (Clive Thompson) - https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/oct/05/teens-social-networking-good-for-them • A Canadian with $1,000 a year can live very comfortably and enjoyably in Paris (Ernest Hemingway) - https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/a-canadian-with-1000-a-year-can-live-very-comfortably-and-enjoyably-in-paris/ • The Hippies (Hunter S. Thompson) - https://distrito47.wordpress.com/2014/02/03/the-hippies-by-hunter-s-thompson/ • Money: The real truth about money (Gregg Easterbrook) - http://content.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1015883,00.html

4. In defence of pretentiousnessby Dan FoxTuesday 9 February 2016https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/09/in-defence-of-pretentiousness In an age that worships the ‘authentic’, it has become a slur for all seasons – the easy way to tear down the poseurs and announce you’re not one of them. But without it, life would be very dull indeed. Pretentiousness happens over there. In the way he writes. In her music taste. In the way they dress. And who hasn’t before described a person, place or thing as pretentious? Right-thinking folk curl up and die if accused of it. Always pejorative, the word “pretentious” is easy shorthand for dismissing novels, plays and movies. It’s used to slag off music, bitch about what a person is wearing or rubbish the decor in a hotel.Scan the culture page in a major newspaper and likely as not you’ll find the word lurking in a film review or opinion piece supporting cuts to arts funding. It is ammunition for apoplectic one-star Yelp.com restaurant reviews and is a character trait strenuously denied in online dating profiles. You can smell it in the air when complaints are made about something being too “arty”, and hear the suck of inevitability as it gloms onto the word “elitist”. Actor Hugh Grant tells listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Film Programme in 2012 why the films of Jean-Luc Godard are “pretentious nonsense”. Marisa Gerber, reporting on the proper way to pronounce the names of Hispanic neighbourhoods in Los Angeles, discovers that “no one can seem to agree if using the Spanish pronunciation is respectful – or pretentious” (LA Times, 7 May 2013). Theo Hobson declares atheism to be “an ideology that’s pretentious and muddled”. The Italian politician Maurizio Gasparri causes outrage as he tweets that the English are “pretentious pricks” when Italy beat England in the 2014 World Cup. Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Anthony Doerr tells Michelle Dean that he “grew up where to call yourself a writer would be pretentious” Journalist Ruth Dudley Edwards informs her readers that her “prevailing thoughts about the writer Salman Rushdie” are that he is “self-important, pretentious, attention-seeking and ungrateful” (Daily Mail, 19 June 2007). On BBC 5 Live in 2009, Richard Bacon gets to grips with a question that has vexed humanity for centuries: “Is wine over-rated and pretentious?” The pretentious flaws of others affirm your own intellectual or aesthetic expertise. Simultaneously, their fakery highlights the contours of your down-to-earth character and virtuous ordinariness. It is your plain speaking that makes you trustworthy. That person’s pretentious use of words hides the fact that they do not have anything of substance to say. It is axiomatic that pretentiousness makes no one look good. But pretension is measured using prejudiced metrics. The baselines against which authenticity and pretentiousness are calibrated vary wildly. Antipretension critics conscript words such as “logic”, “reason”, and “the facts”, to make their assessments look objective. The accuser of pretension – naturally thinking themselves to be the real deal, in possession of an educated and discerning mind – believes that somewhere else in the world there is a genuine article that the pretentious thing or person aspires to be, but is falling short of or exaggerating it. Pretentiousness is always someone else’s crime. It’s never a felony in the first person. You might cop to the odd personality flaw; the occasional pirouette of self-deprecation is nothing if not good manners. Most likely one of those imperfections nobody minds owning up to, something that looks charming in the right circumstances. Being absent-minded. A bad dancer. Partial to a large gin after work. But being pretentious? That’s premier-league obnoxious, the team-mate of arrogance, condescension, careerism and pomposity. Pretension brunches with fraudulence and snobbery, and shops for baubles with the pseudo and the vacuous. Undoubtedly you’re the sort to take an interest in the world around you. Think about what gets you out of the house at weekends. Is it dirt-biking or brewing craft ales? Maybe bird-spotting, kickboxing, visiting medieval churches, or attending cosplay conventions dressed as Harry Potter. Perhaps it’s art appreciation, bread baking, five-a-side football, astronomy, philately, writing erotic fan-fiction, playing soldiers from the comfort of your couch in Call of Duty, metal-detecting, larping, running, playing darts, keeping goldfish, reading up on Middle East politics, cabinet making, restoring old hi-fi equipment, learning Russian, amateur dramatics, pickling vegetables, cultivating cacti, knitting, learning the clarinet, free climbing, standup comedy, philosophy evening classes, caravanning, consulting the tarot, fly-fishing, yoga, DJing, making ceramic Toby jugs, designing your own clothes, photographing vintage American diners for your Instagram feed, following college athletics, floristry, collecting true-crime books, racing 1970s muscle cars, or watching old silent films. Whatever it is you do, I’ll bet you’d never think it pretentious. That’s because you do it, and pretension never self-identifies.

5. This accuser rarely itemises both what is being aspired to, and just why it is that the subject in question fails to make the grade. When a person decides that a restaurant is pretentious, the “authentic” restaurant to which it’s being compared and the values that provide The One True Restaurant with its bona fides are seldom revealed. The tendency is to understand it as the cousin of affectation, one of the dark arts of charlatanry. To be pretentious is to be deceitful, untrustworthy. If a book on pretentiousness is deemed pretentious, no example of a plain-speaking, salt-of-the-earth study of the topic will be given. There is no need. Pretension just is. Pretension sets the amateur against the professional in a game rigged by tradition, qualifications and institutional approval. Puncture the word “pretentious” and out scuttles a bestiary of class anxieties; fears about getting above your station, and policing those suspected of trying to migrate from their social background. The word is bent to fit emotional attitudes towards economic and social inequality, and used as shorthand in arguments over authenticity, elitism and populism. In the arts, pretentiousness is the brand of witchcraft used by scheming cultural mandarins to keep the great unwashed at bay. It’s a way of saying that contemporary art is a “con” and that subtitled films are “difficult” – that they do not appeal to everyone and therefore must be aimed at the sorts of people who think they are better than everyone else. Arguing about rules, regulations and right or wrong ways of doing things is one way of talking about the amateur and the professional; social categories that make pretentiousness an even knottier issue. The professional is licensed – by training, title, money, time spent – to work in a particular field. They can avoid the charge of pretension because they work in an official capacity. The amateur, on the other hand, might only do a certain thing at weekends or in the evenings, often for free and out of enthusiasm. The amateur doesn’t have the right credentials, so trying to do what the professional does might open them to accusations of being pretentious, of stepping above their station. Pretension is a question of optics: the pessimist sees pretension as a sham. The optimist views it as innocent, tragicomic, an excess of effort. Saying that a person is pretentious can be a way of calling out the trappings and absurdities of power. It’s a way of undermining the authority that they have positioned themselves with. It is also a way of warning them not to get above themselves. Used as an insult, it’s an informal tool of class surveillance, a stick with which to beat someone for putting on airs and graces. Where the word “pretentious” differs from “pretending” is that it carries with it the sting of class betrayal, especially in the UK, where class is a neurosis as much as a set of social conditions. If being authentic is considered a virtue – what we should strive to be in society – then being pretentious is considered a cover-up, a face-palm to your background. The horror that class migration evokes in people is almost tribal, as if it is a disavowal of your family and friends. To suggest a person is pretentious is to say they’re behaving in ways they’re not qualified for through experience or economic status. Pretension is tied up with class, which is not just a question of money and how you spend it. Class is about how your identity is constructed in relationship to the world around you, and the resources used in order to do that. To accuse someone of pretentiousness, of trying to stand out, affirms the fact that you fit in with everyone else. Because pretension is measured against the baseline “norm” of the accuser, there is an assumption that pretension always involves scrabbling up the class ladder. Pretension is taken to be synonymous with snobbery. But claims to ordinariness and salt-of-the-earth virtue are themselves pretentious. The assumption that dropping your aitches, asserting a love of cheap lager over a fine wine, or processed cheese over parmesan, will make you seem unspoiled or somehow more gritty, is classic downwardly mobile play-acting. Anti-intellectualism is a snobbery just like anti-pretension; the anti-intellectual is often anxious not to be marked as part of an educated elite, the kind of person that they suspect uses ideas and language to maintain a position of power. To live in major cities in the west is to be surrounded by claims to authenticity. We’re encouraged to look for the real deal, and not get seduced by the ersatz bloom of pretension. Authenticity is a form of authority; a legitimacy of speech, dress, action. It promises a ticket to the truth. Shops, restaurants, real estate, and a range of leisure activities all promise the bona fide, the genuine, the real McCoy. Being authentic is a virtue and buying into it is a demonstration of financial shrewdness. In 2015, a billboard advertising hair styling products in Shoreditch, east London, declared that “Pretence is an Offence”. It’s a ham-fisted appeal to a non-existent link between youth and creative authenticity, ignoring the fact that many large cities are theatres of pretension. Buildings imitate architecture from past eras or other parts of the world. Shops and restaurants strive to evoke emotional atmospheres based on historical periods – from back when life was honest and true – to promise an experience in excess of the goods on offer.

6. Marketing lures consumers – particularly urban, middle-class ones – with games of linguistic pretence. The “home-made”, the “natural”, the “organic”, and the “farm-raised” play on fantasies of our own ecological responsibility in the food we buy, or nostalgia for meals just like your mum probably never made. The natural and organic possess a kind of earthy authenticity, or do the job of stand-ins for other cultures. (In a New York branch of Whole Foods I once saw white asparagus described on the store label as “preferred by Europeans”, as if to suggest that buying it would confer both nutritional value and an appreciation for some misty notion of European sophistication.) Pretension is a name game. Look at the sizing terms used by Starbucks - grande, venti, trenta– designed to make you think of Milanese coffee bars rather than the grim airport terminal in the Midwest that you’re stuck in. Think of the exotic and romantic evocations named by perfumes and aftershaves – Oriental Lace, Euphoria, La Nuit de l’Homme, Midnight Poison, Possession – or the cod-Latin names that businesses and healthcare providers give themselves for ersatz gravitas. Verizon, Protiviti, Diageo, Novartis, Celera, Hospira, Aetna; these are names designed to make you think of venerable institutions whose company headquarters have neoclassical facades and wood-panelled offices filled with leather-bound encyclopaedias, not bland glass-and-steel buildings in out-of-town business parks. Car names provide deliciously absurd examples. Ford Aspire, Citroën Picasso, Lincoln Navigator, Honda Element, Austin Allegro, Oldsmobile Starfire, Toyota Highlander, Jeep Renegade, Buick Wildcat, Ferrari Testarossa, Porsche Cayenne, VW Scirocco, Dodge Charger, Chevrolet Cavalier, Plymouth Fury Golden Commando, Vauxhall Tigra, Kia Picanto, Renault Captor, Mitsubishi Shogun. The names are patently ridiculous. Will you become a feudal Japanese general as you do the school run behind the wheel of a Shogun? That’s for you and your grip on reality to decide, but these pretences speak of the powerful lure of lifestyle, of chasing proximity to happiness or prestige (though not in the case of the workaday Shogun). The original meaning of the word “prestige” was an illusion or conjuring trick, from the Latin praestigium – a delusion. The delusion is in ever-deferred promises of personal betterment through acquisition. It’s there in advertising campaigns that use the radicalism of a previous era in order to market the products of today – the absorption of transgression and dissidence into just more categories of consumer values. “Because you’re special.” “Because you’re worth it.” Aspiration is the sense of dislocation between our present state and what we hope will make life easier, more tolerable. To close this gap, we play roles that might help us feel we are living a more ideal life. We might close that gap with a hobby, the way we present ourselves on social media, a way of dressing, or in the food we eat. Pretentiousness defines a degree of dislocation between our circumstances and the image we are trying to project. Tattoos and a Crass band T-shirt no longer, as they once did, mark you out as a person committed to the principles of a radical lifestyle – living in a squat, becoming vegan, rejecting the comforts of convention in order to pursue an alternative vision of society. The westerner who knows the difference between soba and ramen noodles is not necessarily an adventurous traveller, conversant in the cuisine of east Asia. This knowledge can instead be an ostentatious display of tolerance for cultural difference. That Korean bibimbap or “proper” British fish and chips – preferably ordered in a mockney accent – may taste good but it doesn’t make you a better human being. Style has always been a question of survival in cities. It is a way of navigating other people and carving your own corner. There is pleasure to be had in playing with it. But there is a serious cognitive dissonance between the effort we put into controlling our image and, at the same time, claiming allegiance to transparency and authenticity. “Cultural omnivores” are what sociologists call those members of the middle classes who can access, participate in, know and feel confident about using a wide range of cultural references – from the popular to the esoteric, from the local to the international. Step out in a vintage Run DMC T-shirt, have lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant, check out an exhibition of Brazilian modernist art, and end the day at a bar styled after a 1920s speakeasy. A genuinely pluralist outlook on life might motivate these interests. But it also speaks loudly to privilege; the privileges of education, travel and leisure time that money allows. In 2014, the New York-based collective K-Hole – a group of artists operating in the register of a trend forecasting group – published Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom. Youth Mode argued that we live in an era of “mass indie”, the assimilation of once alternative and independent forms of youth culture into the mainstream, and that personal expression through fashion or music taste no longer carries the subcultural weight it once did.

7. One solution to this problem, K-Hole suggested, might be called “normcore”, a strategy of assimilation into different communities rather than demonstrating individual self-expression. Fitting in would be the new standing out. Normcore was misinterpreted at the time as a mandate to dress boringly, to wear Gap cargo shorts or nondescript sportswear, but what K-Hole was driving at was an idea of adaptability, of dressing the part depending on the context. Class, lifestyle and the judgment of pretension are clearly chained to questions of taste. If what’s pretentious for one person is innovative or enthralling for another, is debating pretentiousness simply just another way of talking about taste? Only up to a point. If the word “pretentious” is used to define a person or thing operating outside the legitimate borders of their class or qualifications, then that’s an operation of socially conditioned taste. This dress or that movie is in “bad taste” because it’s failing to use the right class codes properly. Concepts of taste are too broad to fully explain why pretence triggers such strong cultural allergies. A more specific answer might be found in the adjective “sophisticated”, which often gets paired with “taste” to describe a refined sensibility or liking for complexity. “The class politics of sophistication are inseparable from its sexual politics,” wrote Joseph Litvak in Strange Gourmets, in 1997. Litvak points out how a glance at the dictionary is all it takes to recall that “sophistication” in fact means “perversion”. For though sophistication might nowadays be defined most readily as “worldliness”, as the opposite of “naivety”, its older meaning, as well as its normative meaning, deriving from the rhetorical aberration known as sophistry, is “corruption” or “adulteration”. In medieval Latin, the verb sophisticare was used in relation to the dishonest tampering of goods, especially food. At the start of the 18th century, the use of “sophisticated” shifted to mean something deprived of a primitive or natural state. “Unsophisticated” meant something genuine, but shifted to mean a person who was ingenuous or inexperienced. In the 19th century, the idea of something being altered also became associated with wisdom or refinement. Pretentiousness shares with sophistication a lingering sense of “unnaturalness”; something faked, pretending, tampered with. Litvak presses the idea that sophistication is linked to perversion in the sexual sense, and therefore carries with it a latent homophobic charge. The association of sophistication with a form of urbane and knowing behaviour gets reinforced “every time advertising and journalism, loathing as they do the pretentious and the trendy, derisively dangle before their audience the perennially unpopular figure of the snooty (ie gay) salesman in the upscale boutique.” Pretension implies affectation. People are not acting like themselves, rather, their lying urbanity is trampling all over your plain-speaking truth. Being pretentious is rarely harmful to anyone. Accusing others of it is. You can use the word “pretentious” as a weapon with which to bludgeon other people’s creative efforts, but in shutting them down the accusation will shatter in your hand and out will bleed your own insecurities, prejudices and unquestioned assumptions. And that is why pretentiousness matters. It is a false note of objective judgment, and when it rings we can hear what society values in culture, hear how we perceive our individual selves. What we are reluctant to admit is that culture would have no colour without pretension. It would be a lifeless shade of Gap store beige. The doors to imagination would be kept locked tight in fear of finding behind them something that violates the consensus over what is an acceptable creative act, what is an acceptable bar to drink at, what is an acceptable pair of shoes to wear to work. Pretension can be found in all walks of life, and it’s not just wars of values and tastes that are waged with it. It conditions the arts, undoubtedly, but also politics, religion and sport. (Anyone who has enjoyed listening to veteran football commentator Ray Hudson can attest to the imaginative flair of pretentious sports reporting. “It’s a Bernini sculpture of a goal, that rivals the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, a magisterial hit by an artist!” was how Hudson once described a match-winning goal scored by Ronaldinho for Barcelona.) Pretension gets sticky with a mess of unpleasant traits; narcissism, lying, ostentation, presumption, snobbery, selfish individualism. These are not synonyms for each other. The pretentious are also those who brave being different, whether that’s making a stand against creative consensus or running the gauntlet of catching the last bus home on a Saturday night dressed differently to everyone else. Pretentiousness matters because of what it reveals about how your identity relates to everyone else’s. And hard though it may be to accept, being pretentious is a part of what we do every day. Pretentiousness keeps life interesting. Without the permissions it gives – the licence to try new experiences, to experiment with ideas, to see if you want to live your life another way – people from all kinds of backgrounds will not be exposed to difference, to new ideas or the histories of their chosen field. A rich culture sustained by people who devote their lives to it, often with little reward or recognition, is a pretentious one.

8. So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day's events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best. What is this business about "shopping, typing piece, dinner with E, depressed"? Shopping for what? Typing what piece? Who is E? Was this "E" depressed, or was I depressed? Who cares? In fact I have abandoned altogether that kind of pointless entry; instead I tell what some would call lies. "That's simply not true," the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event. "The party was not for you, the spider was not a black widow, it wasn't that way at all." Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters. The cracked crab that I recall having for lunch the day my father came home from Detroit in 1945 must certainly be embroidery, worked into the day's pattern to lend verisimilitude; I was ten years old and would not now remember the cracked crab. The day's events did not turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt. Or that is what it was to me. Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow. How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write - on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, "That's my old football number"); impressions of Bettina Aptheker and Benjamin Sonnenberg and Teddy ("Mr. Acapulco") Stauffer; careful aperçus about tennis bums and failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether It was snowing outside. I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hat-check, counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect that the line "That's' my old football number" touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probably "The Eighty-Yard Run." Nor is my concern with a woman in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper in a Wilmington bar. My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point. On Keeping a Notebook (Joan Didion) –https://penusa.org/sites/default/files/didion.pdfThat woman Estelle,'" the note reads, "'is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today.' Dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper, hotel bar, Wilmington RR, 9:45 a.m. August Monday morning." Since the note is in my notebook, it presumably has some meaning to me. I study it for a long while. At first I have only the most general notion of what I was doing on an August Monday morning in the bar of the hotel across from the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Wilmington, Delaware (waiting for a train? missing one? 1960? 1961? why Wilmington?), but I do remember being there. The woman in the dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper had come down from her room for a beer, and the bartender had heard before the reason why George Sharp and she were separated today. "Sure," he said, and went on mopping the floor. "You told me." At the other end of the bar is a girl. She is talking, pointedly, not to the man beside her but to a cat lying in the triangle of sunlight cast through the open door. She is wearing a plaid silk dress from Peck & Peck, and the hem is coming down. Here is what it is: the girl has been on the Eastern Shore, and now she is going back to the city, leaving the man beside her, and all she can see ahead are the viscous summer sidewalks and the 3 a.m. long-distance calls that will make her lie awake and then sleep drugged through all the steaming mornings left in August (1960? 1961?). Because she must go directly from the train to lunch in New York, she wishes that she had a safety pin for the hem of the plaid silk dress, and she also wishes that she could forget about the hem and the lunch and stay in the cool bar that smells of disinfectant and malt and make friends with the woman in the crepe-de-Chine wrapper. She is afflicted by a little self-pity, and she wants to compare Estelles. That is what that was all about.Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts. She returned the tablet to me a few years ago; the first entry is an account of a woman who believed herself to be freezing to death in the Arctic night, only to find, when day broke, that she had stumbled onto the Sahara Desert, where she would die of the heat before lunch. I have no idea what turn of a five-year-old's mind could have prompted so insistently "ironic" and exotic a story, but it does reveal a certain predilection for the extreme which has dogged me into adult life; perhaps if I were analytically inclined I would find it a truer story than any I might have told about Donald Johnson's birthday party or the day my cousin Brenda put Kitty Litter in the aquarium.

9. It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing. ("You're the least important person in the room and don't forget it," Jessica Mitford's governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.) Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other people's trout. And so we do. But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable "I." We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker. And sometimes even the maker has difficulty with the meaning. There does not seem to be, for example, any point in my knowing for the rest of my life that, during 1964, 720 tons of soot fell on every square mile of New York City, yet there it is in my notebook, labeled "FACT". Nor do I really need to remember that Ambrose Bierce liked to spell Leland Stanford's name "£eland $tanford" or that "smart women almost always wear black in Cuba," a fashion hint without much potential for practical application. And does not the relevance of these notes seem marginal at best?:In the basement museum of the Inyo County Courthouse in Independence, California, sign pinned to a mandarin coat: "This MANDARIN COAT was often worn by Mrs. Minnie S. Brooks when giving lectures on her TEAPOT COLLECTION." Redhead getting out of car in front of Beverly Wilshire Hotel, chinchilla stole, Vuitton bags with tags reading: MRS LOU FOX HOTEL SAHARA VEGAS Well, perhaps not entirely marginal. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Minnie S. Brooks and her MANDARIN COAT pull me back into my own childhood, for although I never knew Mrs. Brooks and did not visit Inyo County until I was thirty, I grew up in just such a world, in houses cluttered with Indian relics and bits of gold ore and ambergris and the souvenirs my Aunt Mercy Farnsworth brought back from the Orient. It is a long way from that world to Mrs. Lou Fox's world, where we all live now, and is it not just as well to remember that? Might not Mrs. Minnie S. Brooks help me to remember what I am? Might not Mrs. Lou Fox help me to remember what I am not? But sometimes the point is harder to discern. What exactly did I have in mind when I noted down that it cost the father of someone I know $650 a month to light the place on the Hudson in which he lived before the Crash? What use was I planning to make of this line by Jimmy Hoffa: "I may have my faults, but being wrong ain't one of them"? And although I think it interesting to know where the girls who travel with the Syndicate have their hair done when they find themselves on the West Coast, will I ever make suitable use of it? Might I not be better off just passing it on to John O'Hara? What is a recipe for sauerkraut doing in my notebook? What kind of magpie keeps this notebook? "He was born the night the Titanic went down." That seems a nice enough line, and I even recall who said it, but is it not really a better line in life than it could ever be in fiction? But of course that is exactly it: not that I should ever use the line, but that I should remember the woman who said it and the afternoon I heard it. We were on her terrace by the sea, and we were finishing the wine left from lunch, trying to get what sun there was, a California winter sun. The woman whose husband was born the night the Titanic went down wanted to rent her house, wanted to go back to her children in Paris. I remember wishing that I could afford the house, which cost $1,000 a month. "Someday you will," she said lazily. "Someday it all comes." There in the sun on her terrace it seemed easy to believe in someday, but later I had a low-grade afternoon hangover and ran over a black snake on the way to the supermarket and was flooded with inexplicable fear when I heard the checkout clerk explaining to the man ahead of me why she was finally divorcing her husband. "He left me no choice," she said over and over as she the punched the register. "He has a little seven-month-old baby by her, he left me no choice." I would like to believe that my dread then was for the human condition, but of course it was for me, because I wanted a baby and did not then have one and because I wanted to own the house that cost $1,000 a month to rent and because I had a hangover. It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.

10. It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you. "So what's new in the whiskey business?" What could that possibly mean to you? To me it means a blonde in a Pucci bathing suit sitting with a couple of fat men by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Another man approaches, and they all regard one another in silence for a while. "So what's new in the whiskey business?" one of the fat men finally says by way of welcome, and the blonde stands up, arches one foot and dips it in the pool looking all the while at the cabana where Baby Pignatari is talking on the telephone. That is all there is to that, except that several years later I saw the blonde coming out of Saks Fifth Avenue in New York with her California complexion and a voluminous mink coat. In the harsh wind that day she looked old and irrevocably tired to me, and even the skins in the mink coat were not worked the way they were doing them that year, not the way she would have wanted them done, and there is the point of the story. For a while after that I did not like to look in the mirror, and my eyes would skim the newspapers and pick out only the deaths, the cancer victims, the premature coronaries, the suicides, and I stopped riding the Lexington Avenue IRT because I noticed for the first time that all the strangers I had seen for years - the man with the seeing-eye dog, the spinster who read the classified pages every day, the fat girl who always got off with me at Grand Central - looked older than they once had. It all comes back. Even that recipe for sauerkraut: even that brings it back. I was on Fire Island when I first made that sauerkraut, and it was raining, and we drank a lot of bourbon and ate the sauerkraut and went to bed at ten, and I listened to the rain and the Atlantic and felt safe. I made the sauerkraut again last night and it did not make me feel any safer, but that is, as they say, another story. (1966), in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969, London: Andre Deutch.

11. Blog entries • Joy (Zadie Smith) - http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/38624810934/joy-by-zadie-smith#_=_ • The Likely Cause Of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think (Johann Hari) - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html • The Space Between The Lines Is Your Life (Elizabeth Koch) - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-space-between-the-lines-is-your-life • No, You Need A History Lesson: The Confederate Flag Is A Symbol of Hate - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/benjamin-okeefe/no-you-need-a-history-les_b_7625040.html • ‘As a teen with big teeth and NHS specs, Janet Street Parter only got cards from her mum. 50 years on she stillo thinks: Valentine’s Day? It’s just for smug CREEPS! - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2278358/Janet-Street-Porter-Valentines-Day-Its-just-smug-CREEPS.html • World’s 50 most powerful blogs - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs

12. ‘JOY’ BY ZADIE SMITH It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience. And if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. It’s not at all obvious to me how we should make an accommodation between joy and the rest of our everyday lives. Perhaps the first thing to say is that I experience at least a little pleasure every day. I wonder if this is more than the usual amount? It was the same even in childhood when most people are miserable. I don’t think this is because so many wonderful things happen to me but rather that the small things go a long way. I seem to get more than the ordinary satisfaction out of food, for example—any old food. An egg sandwich from one of these grimy food vans on Washington Square has the genuine power to turn my day around. Whatever is put in front of me, foodwise, will usually get a five-star review. You’d think that people would like to cook for, or eat with, me—in fact I’m told it’s boring. Where there is no discernment there can be no awareness of expertise or gratitude for special effort. “Don’t say that was delicious,” my husband warns, “you say everything’s delicious.” “But it was delicious.” It drives him crazy. All day long I can look forward to a popsicle. The persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calmed for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth. And though it’s true that when the flavor is finished the anxiety returns, we do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that is so readily available, especially here in America. A pineapple popsicle. Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle. My other source of daily pleasure is—but I wish I had a better way of putting it—”other people’s faces.” A red-headed girl, with a marvelous large nose she probably hates, and green eyes and that sun-shy complexion composed more of freckles than skin. Or a heavyset grown man, smoking a cigarette in the rain, with a soggy mustache, above which, a surprise—the keen eyes, snub nose, and cherub mouth of his own eight-year-old self. Upon leaving the library at the end of the day I will walk a little more quickly to the apartment to tell my husband about an angular, cat-eyed teenager, in skinny jeans and stacked-heel boots, a perfectly ordinary gray sweatshirt, last night’s makeup, and a silky Pocahontas wig slightly askew over his own Afro. He was sashaying down the street, plaits flying, using the whole of Broadway as his personal catwalk. “Miss Thang, but off duty.” I add this for clarity, but my husband nods a little impatiently; there was no need for the addition. My husband is also a professional gawker. http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/38624810934/joy-by-zadie-smith#_=_ The advice one finds in ladies’ magazines is usually to be feared, but there is something in that old chestnut: “shared interests.” It does help. I like to hear about the Chinese girl he saw in the hall, carrying a large medical textbook, so beautiful she looked like an illustration. Or the tall Kenyan in the elevator whose elongated physical elegance reduced every other nearby body to the shrunken, gnarly status of a troll. Usually I will not have seen these people—my husband works on the eighth floor of the library, I work on the fifth—but simply hearing them described can be almost as much a pleasure as encountering them myself. More pleasurable still is when we recreate the walks or gestures or voices of these strangers, or whole conversations—between two people in the queue for the ATM, or two students on a bench near the fountain. And then there are all the many things that the dog does and says, entirely anthropomorphized and usually offensive, which express the universe of things we ourselves cannot do or say, to each other or to other people. “You’re being the dog,” our child said recently, surprising us. She is almost three and all our private languages are losing their privacy and becoming known to her. Of course, we knew she would eventually become fully conscious, and that before this happened we would have to give up arguing, smoking, eating meat, using the Internet, talking about other people’s faces, and voicing the dog, but now the time has come, she is fully aware, and we find ourselves unable to change. “Stop being the dog,” she said, “it’s very silly,” and for the first time in eight years we looked at the dog and were ashamed. Occasionally the child, too, is a pleasure, though mostly she is a joy, which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all, but rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize as joy, and now must find some way to live with daily. This is a new problem. Until quite recently I had known joy only five times in my life, perhaps six, and each time tried to forget it soon after it happened, out of the fear that the memory of it would dement and destroy everything else. Let’s call it six. Three of those times I was in love, but only once was the love viable, or likely to bring me any pleasure in the long run. Twice I was on drugs—of quite different kinds. Once I was in water, once on a train, once sitting on a high wall, once on a high hill, once in a nightclub, and once in a hospital bed. It is hard to arrive at generalities in the face of such a small and varied collection of data. The uncertain item is the nightclub, and because it was essentially a communal experience I feel I can open the question out to the floor. I am addressing this to my fellow Britons in particular. Fellow Britons! Those of you, that is, who were fortunate enough to take the first generation of the amphetamine ecstasy and yet experience none of the adverse, occasionally lethal reactions we now know others suffered—yes, for you people I have a question. Was that joy?

13. I am especially interested to hear from anyone who happened to be in the Fabric club, near the old Smithfield meat market, on a night sometime in the year 1999 (I’m sorry I can’t be more specific) when the DJ mixed “Can I Kick It?” and then “Smells Like Teen Spirit” into the deep house track he had been seeming to play exclusively for the previous four hours. I myself was wandering out of the cavernous unisex (!) toilets wishing I could find my friend Sarah, or if not her, my friend Warren, or if not him, anyone who would take pity on a girl who had taken and was about to come up on ecstasy who had lost everyone and everything, including her handbag. I stumbled back into the fray. Most of the men were topless, and most of the women, like me, wore strange aprons, fashionable at the time, that covered just the front of one’s torso, and only remained decent by means of a few weak-looking strings tied in dainty bows behind. I pushed through this crowd of sweaty bare backs, despairing, wondering where in a super club one might bed down for the night (the stairs? the fire exit?). But everything I tried to look at quickly shattered and arranged itself in a series of patterned fragments, as if I were living in a kaleidoscope. Where was I trying to get to anyway? There was no longer any “bar” or “chill-out zone”—there was only dance floor. All was dance floor. Everybody danced. I stood still, oppressed on all sides by dancing, quite sure I was about to go out of my mind. Then suddenly I could hear Q-Tip—blessed Q-Tip!—not a synthesizer, not a vocoder, but Q-Tip, with his human voice, rapping over a human beat. And the top of my skull opened to let human Q-Tip in, and a rail-thin man with enormous eyes reached across a sea of bodies for my hand. He kept asking me the same thing over and over: You feeling it? I was. My ridiculous heels were killing me, I was terrified I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delight that “Can I Kick It?” should happen to be playing at this precise moment in the history of the world, and was now morphing into “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I took the man’s hand. The top of my head flew away. We danced and danced. We gave ourselves up to joy. Years later, while listening to a song called “Weak Become Heroes” by the British artist The Streets I found this experience almost perfectly recreated in rhyme, and realized that just as most American children alive in 1969 saw the moon landings, nearly every Briton between sixteen and thirty in the 1990s met some version of the skinny pill head I came across that night in Fabric. The name The Streets gives him is “European Bob.” I suspect he is an archetypal figure of my generation. The character “Super Hans” in the British TV comedy Peep Show is another example of the breed, though it might be more accurate to say Super Hans is European Bob in “old” age (forty). I don’t remember the name of my particular pill head, but will call him “Smiley.” He was one of these strangers you met exclusively on dance floors, or else on a beach in Ibiza. They tended to have inexplicable nicknames, no home or family you could ever identify, a limitless capacity for drug-taking, and a universal feeling of goodwill toward all men and women, no matter their color, creed, or state of inebriation. Their most endearing quality was their generosity. For the length of one night Smiley would do anything at all for you. Find you a cab, walk miles through the early morning streets looking for food, hold your hair as you threw up, and listen to you complain at great length about your parents and friends—agreeing with all your grievances—though every soul involved in these disputes was completely unknown to him. Contrary to your initial suspicions Smiley did not want to sleep with you, rob you, or con you in any way. It was simply intensely important to him that you had a good time, tonight, with him. “How you feeling?” was Smiley’s perennial question. “You feeling it yet? I’m feeling it. You feeling it yet?” And that you should feel it seemed almost more important to him than that he should. Was that joy? Probably not. But it mimicked joy’s conditions pretty well. It included, in minor form, the great struggle that tends to precede joy, and the feeling—once one is “in” joy—that the experiencing subject has somehow “entered” the emotion, and disappeared. I “have” pleasure, it is a feeling I want to experience and own. A beach holiday is a pleasure. A new dress is a pleasure. But on that dance floor I was joy, or some small piece of joy, with all these other hundreds of people who were also a part of joy. The Smileys, in their way, must have recognized the vital difference; it would explain their great concern with other people’s experience. For as long as that high lasted, they seemed to pass beyond their own egos. And it might really have been joy if the next morning didn’t always arrive. I don’t just mean the deathly headache, the blurred vision, and the stomach cramps. What really destroyed the possibility that this had been joy was the replaying in one’s mind of the actual events of the previous night, and the brutal recognition that every moment of sublimity—every conversation that had seemed to touch upon the meaning of life, every tune that had appeared a masterwork—had no substance whatsoever now, here, in the harsh light of the morning. The final indignity came when you dragged yourself finally from your bed and went into the living room. There, on your mother’s sofa—in the place of that jester spirit-animal savior person you thought you’d met last night—someone had left a crushingly boring skinny pill head, already smoking a joint, who wanted to borrow twenty quid for a cab. It wasn’t all a waste of time though. At the neural level, such experiences gave you a clue about what joy not-under-the-influence would feel like. Helped you learn to recognize joy, when it arrived. I suppose a neuroscientist could explain in very clear terms why the moment after giving birth can feel ecstatic, or swimming in a Welsh mountain lake with somebody dear to you. Perhaps the same synapses that ecstasy falsely twanged are twanged authentically by fresh water, certain epidurals, and oxytocin. And if, while sitting on a high hill in the South of France, someone who has access to a phone comes dashing up the slope to inform you that two years of tension, tedious study, and academic anxiety have not been in vain—perhaps again these same synapses or whatever they are do their happy dance.

14. We certainly don’t need to be neuroscientists to know that wild romantic crushes—especially if they are fraught with danger—do something ecstatic to our brains, though like the pills that share the name, horror and disappointment are usually not far behind. When my wild crush came, we wandered around a museum for so long it closed without us noticing; stuck in the grounds we climbed a high wall and, finding it higher on its other side, considered our options: broken ankles or a long night sleeping on a stone lion. In the end a passerby helped us down, and things turned prosaic and, after a few months, fizzled out. What looked like love had just been teen spirit. But what a wonderful thing, to sit on a high wall, dizzy with joy, and think nothing of breaking your ankles. Real love came much later. It lay at the end of a long and arduous road, and up to the very last moment I had been convinced it wouldn’t happen. I was so surprised by its arrival, so unprepared, that on the day it arrived I had already arranged for us to visit the Holocaust museum at Auschwitz. You were holding my feet on the train to the bus that would take us there. We were heading toward all that makes life intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile. That was joy. But it’s no good thinking about or discussing it. It has no place next to the furious argument about who cleaned the house or picked up the child. It is irrelevant when sitting peacefully, watching an old movie, or doing an impression of two old ladies in a shop, or as I eat a popsicle while you scowl at me, or when working on different floors of the library. It doesn’t fit with the everyday. The thing no one ever tells you about joy is that it has very little real pleasure in it. And yet if it hadn’t happened at all, at least once, how would we live? A final thought: sometimes joy multiplies itself dangerously. Children are the infamous example. Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you? Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than your total annihilation? It should be noted that an equally dangerous joy, for many people, is the dog or the cat, relationships with animals being in some sense intensified by guaranteed finitude. You hope to leave this world before your child. You are quite certain your dog will leave before you do. Joy is such a human madness. The writer Julian Barnes, considering mourning, once said, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.” In fact, it was a friend of his who wrote the line in a letter of condolence, and Julian told it to my husband, who told it to me. For months afterward these words stuck with both of us, so clear and so brutal. It hurts just as much as it is worth. What an arrangement. Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal? Surely if we were sane and reasonable we would every time choose a pleasure over a joy, as animals themselves sensibly do. The end of a pleasure brings no great harm to anyone, after all, and can always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth.

15. The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think By Johann Hari It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned — and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong — and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it. If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves. I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs. I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind — what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can’t stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me. If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: “Drugs. Duh.” It’s not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That’s what addiction means. One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments — ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself. It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned — and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong — and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it. If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves. I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs. I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind — what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can’t stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me. If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: “Drugs. Duh.” It’s not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That’s what addiction means. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html

16. Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you. It’s your cage. After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days — if anything can hook you, it’s that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can’t recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is — again — striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.) When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don’t seem to make sense — unless you take account of this new approach. Here’s one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right — it’s the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them — then it’s obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit. But here’s the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected. One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments — ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself. The advert explains: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.” But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then? In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling. The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did. At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was — at the same time as the Rat Park experiment — a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was “as common as chewing gum” among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended. But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers — according to the same study — simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn’t want the drug any more.

17. This has huge implications for the one-hundred-year-old war on drugs. This massive war — which, as I saw, kills people from the malls of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool — is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people’s brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren’t the driver of addiction — if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction — then this makes no sense. Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction. For example, I went to a prison in Arizona — ‘Tent City’ — where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages (‘The Hole’) for weeks and weeks on end to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human recreation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. And when those prisoners get out, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record — guaranteeing they with be cut off even more. I watched this playing out in the human stories I met across the world. There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts to reconnect with the world — and so leave behind their addictions. This isn’t theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them — to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs. One example I learned about was a group of addicts who were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other’s care. The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. I’ll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country’s top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass — and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal’s example. If you still believe — as I used to — that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander’s theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different. This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It’s how we get our satisfaction. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find — the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about ‘addiction’ altogether, and instead call it ‘bonding.’ A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else. So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection. When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I still couldn’t shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me — you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction, and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers’ Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of everyone present, who knew I was there to observe) and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table. But still, surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in quite precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre’s book The Cult of Pharmacology. Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug inside it called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism — cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed. But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That’s not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that’s still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger picture.

18. This isn’t only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster’s — “only connect.” But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the Internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live — constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us. The writer George Monbiot has called this “the age of loneliness.” We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connections than ever before. Bruce Alexander — the creator of Rat Park — told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery — how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation that is sinking on us like a thick fog. But this new evidence isn’t just a challenge to us politically. It doesn’t just force us to change our minds. It forces us to change our hearts. Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like Intervention — tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won’t stop should be shunned. It’s the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But in fact, I learned, that will only deepen their addiction — and you may lose them altogether. I came home determined to tie the addicts in my life closer to me than ever — to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can’t. When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow, we should have been singing love songs to them all along. The full story of Johann Hari’s journey — told through the stories of the people he met — can be read in Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, published by Bloomsbury. The book has been praised by everyone from Elton John to Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein. You can buy it at all good bookstores and read more at www.chasingthescream.com.

19. Writing a pitch • Dragon’s Den pitch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzH3MuxGVls • The Apprentice – Brett’s unique pitching technique - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv0aSM15qzQ • How To Write a Sales Pitch That Sells (Heather Allard) - https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/openforum/articles/how-to-write-a-sales-pitch-that-sells/ • Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone at MacWorld 2007 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4 • Elon Musk debuts the Tesla Powerwall - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKORsrlN-2k

20. Reviews • Empire ‘Arrival’ Film Review (Dan Jolin) - http://www.empireonline.com/movies/arrival-2/review/ • Pitchfork ‘Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp To Butterfly’ Album Review (Craig Jenkins) - http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20390-to-pimp-a-butterfly/ • Guardian ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2’ Film Review (Peter Bradshaw) - https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/apr/24/guardians-of-the-galaxy-vol-2-film-review-chris-pratt-baby-groot-vin-diesel • London Review of Books ‘Zadie Smith – White Teeth’ (Daniel Soar) - https://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n18/daniel-soar/willesden-fast-forward • NME Albums of the Year 2016 (Larry Bartleet) - http://www.nme.com/list/nme-best-albums-2016-1869261 • America After The Fall – upheaval in the home of the brave (Adrian Searle) - https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/feb/21/america-after-the-fall-review-us-art-wall-street-crash-grant-wood • In Memoriam: AA Gill’s Most Scathing Restaurant Reviews (Tim Forster and Brenna Houck) - https://www.eater.com/2016/12/12/13920880/aa-gill-best-restaurant-reviews-in-memoriam

21. Empire Film Review‘Arrival’ (Dan Jolin)★★★★★ http://www.empireonline.com/movies/arrival-2/review/ Planet Earth is thrown into chaos when 12 mysterious, extra-terrestrial craft appear around the world. Their inhabitants want to talk, so it’s up to linguistics professor Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams) to try to decipher their mind-bending language before global panic turns into inter-species war. If you need a deeply thoughtful and impressive new take on a familiar old genre (and in this era of identikit sequels, we clearly do), then Denis Villeneuve is your man. The French-Canadian director gave the drug-war thriller a violent shake-up with last year’s morally murky Sicario, and before that he turned the kidnap drama on its head with Prisoners. Now we get his take on alien visitation. Arrival is Villeneuve’s The Day The Earth Stood Still or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and somehow he makes it true to the tropes while also feeling like something new. It helps that Villeneuve and his creative team have made their extra-solar visitors as truly ‘alien’ as possible, and thereby ensure this first-contact narrative is inventively, fiendishly and (you’d imagine) realistically problematic. The alien craft, or “shells”, are immense, lens-shaped, black-rocky obelisks which levitate noiselessly several metres above the Earth’s surface, never actually touching terra firma. Every 18 hours a hatch opens in the shell’s lower tip, admitting a delegation of Homo sapiens into the gravity-bending interior. The human visitors, carrying an achingly symbolic canary in a cage, arrive at a rectangular audience chamber in which they’re separated from a sea of ominous white mist by a transparent wall. And from the swirling space-fog they emerge: the eerie, graceful “heptapods”, resembling a hybrid of squid, spider, whale and mangrove. The tips of their gnarled, finger-like limbs, it transpires, peel open into starfish-like appendages which ejaculate ink that flows into lazily floating, coffee-mug-stain symbols. This is the aliens’ language. It’s way beyond “klaatubaradanikto” — or even Close Encounters’ five-note salutation. They have something to say, and the race to figure out what it is gives the film both its tight structure and pulsing momentum. Without a single planetary leader to be taken to on our divided world, the heptapods have suspended themselves over a dozen points around its surface. But why 12, exactly? And why those specific locations? The mysteries layer up, though despite all the heavy portent, Eric Heisserer’s script isn’t without levity — at one point physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) correlates that all the arrival sites are in places where Sheena Easton had a hit in 1980. Perhaps they’re just inter-galactic fans of 9 To 5’s perky pop stylings. While the Chinese and Russians get stroppy and sabre-rattley, the Americans put linguist Dr Louise Banks on the case. Like all good movie eggheads, she’s both intensely brainy and able to distil her science down into digestible soundbites for the sceptical military-types, represented by Forest Whitaker’s weary Colonel and Michael Stuhlbarg’s CIA prick. She also comes with some outsize emotional baggage, connected with the death of a loved one. But before you roll your eyes over the cliché of the grieving hero, be reassured this particular emotional thread is ingeniously connected with the macro-trauma playing out around her. Also, in finding an actress to sell it convincingly, Villeneuve could have done no better than Adams, who negotiates and balances Louise’s frustrations with the army wonks, her bewilderment/awe at meeting E.T.s, and her personal tribulations with subtlety and absorbing naturalism. On the exterior, Louise is the calm, albeit shaky, eye of this interplanetary storm. On the interior rages a silent storm of her own, a fugue of memory fragments that comes to twist and bend like a psychic cyclone as she begins to decode the visitors’ inky vernacular. Adams is the film’s quiet, luminous heart, and Villeneuve spends more time focusing on her face than he does the aliens or their mysterious vessels; we’re not even allowed to see the first shell properly until Louise herself witnesses it, and quite right, too. Arrival is a beautifully polished puzzle box of a story whose emotional and cerebral heft should enable it to withstand nit-picky scrutiny. And like all the best sci-fi, it has something pertinent to say about today’s world; particularly about the importance of communication, and how we need to transcend cultural divides and misconceptions if we’re to survive as a species. An ideal that shouldn’t need any translation. The Earth may be standing still again, but Arrival is a fresh take on the cosmic- encounter movie that grips you with the strength of its ideas and the quality of its execution, then burrows deep thanks to its resonant themes and emotional richness.

22. Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly The music, meanwhile, follows a long line of genre-busting freakouts (The Roots’ Phrenology, Common’s Electric Circus, Q-Tip’s Kamaal the Abstract, André 3000’s The Love Below) in kicking at the confines of rap music presentation. There’s half a jazz band present at all times; pianist Robert Glasper, producer/sax player Terrace Martin and bass wizard Thundercat give Butterfly a loose, fluid undertow every bit as tempestuous and unpredictable as the army of flows at Kendrick’s disposal. The rapper’s branching out, too, exploding into spastic slam poetry on "For Free?", switching from shouty gymnastics to drunken sobs on "u" and even effecting the lilt of a caring mother on "You Ain’tGotta Lie (Momma Said)". It turns out Kendrick’s new direction was every direction at once. Despite all this, he’s still toying with a narrative on the sly: Just beneath the surface lies a messianic yarn about avoiding the wiles of a sultry girl named Lucy who’s secretly a physical manifestation of the devil. Kendrick refuses to dole out blame without accepting any, however, and on the chaotic free jazz excursion "u" he turns a mirror on himself, screaming "Loving you is complicated!" and suggesting his fame hasn’t helped his loved ones back home. Kendrick’s criticisms, as they did on good kid, come with powerful, self-imposed challenges. As Bilal quips on the chorus to "Institutionalized": "Shit don’t change until you get up and wash your ass, nigga.“ Kendrick’s principle of personal responsibility has treaded dangerously close to respectability politics lately, especially after a prickly remark about the Mike Brown shooting in a recent Billboardinterview that seemed to pin the death on the victim, but To Pimp a Butterfly avoids that trap. (Mostly.) "Complexion (A Zulu Love)" is a tender note of appreciation for women of all skin tones with help from North Carolina rapper Rapsody (whose slickly referential guest verse contains a nod to "Good and Bad Hair"). This is an album about tiny quality of life improvements to be made in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It might not be the message we want in a year where systemic police and judicial inequality have cost many the ultimate price, but that doesn’t bankrupt it of value. To Pimp a Butterfly pivots on the polarizing lead single, "i". Upon release last autumn, the sunny soul pep talk came off lightweight and glib. When it appears deep in the back end of Butterfly, though, "i" plays less like the jingle we heard last year and more like the beating heart of the matter. To push the point, the album opts for a live-sounding mix that ditches out midway through, giving way to a speech from the rapper himself. In tone, the speech is not unlike the legendary 1968 concert where James Brown waved off security and personally held off a Boston audience’s fury after news broke that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. "How many niggas we done lost, bro?" Kendrick shouts over the crowd. "It shouldn’t be shit for us to come out here and appreciate the little bit of life we got left." Underneath the tragedy and adversity, To Pimp a Butterfly is a celebration of the audacity to wake up each morning to try to be better, knowing it could all end in a second, for no reason at all. by Craig Jenkins The dense and complex follow-up to good kid, m.A.A.d city is wry, theatrical, chaotic, ironic, and mournful, often all at once. Kendrick Lamar’s major-label albums play out like Spike Lee films in miniature. In both artists’ worlds, the stakes are unbearably high, the characters’ motives are unclear, and morality is knotty, but there is a central force you can feel steering every moment. The "Good and Bad Hair" musical routine from Lee’s 1988 feature School Daze depicted black women grappling with colorism and exclusionary standards of American beauty. Mookie’s climactic window smash in 1989’s Do the Right Thing plunged its characters into fiery bedlam, quietly prophesying the coming L.A. riots in the process. In these moments, you could feel the director speaking to you directly through his characters and their trajectories. Lamar’s records, while crowded with conflicting ideas and arguing voices, have a similar sense of a guiding hand at work. Lamar’s new album, To Pimp a Butterfly, doesn’t explicitly bill itself as a movie like good kid, m.A.A.d citydid, but the network of interlocking dramas explored here feels filmic nonetheless, and a variety of characters appear across the album’s expanse. The opener, "Wesley’s Theory", turns the downfall of action-star-turned-convicted-tax-dodger Wesley Snipes into a kind of Faustian parable. Snoop drops by on "Institutionalized"; Dre himself phones in on "Wesley". The mood is wry, theatrical, chaotic, ironic, and mournful, often all at once: On "For Free? (Interlude)" an impatient woman ticks off a laundry list of material demands before Kendrick snaps back that "This dick ain’t free!" and thunders through a history of black oppression, spoken-word style, as if to say, "This money you crave, it’s blood money." The album is dotted with surreal grace notes, like a parable: God appears in the guise of a homeless man in "How Much a Dollar Cost", and closer "Mortal Man" ends on a lengthy, unnerving fever-dream interview with the ghost of 2Pac.

23. Online encyclopedia • Encyclopedia Britannica - https://www.britannica.com/ • Encyclopedia.com - http://www.encyclopedia.com/ • Oxford Reference World Encyclopedia - http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199546091.001.0001/acref-9780199546091 • Wikipedia on Online Encyclopedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_encyclopedia • List of online encyclopedias - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_encyclopedias

24. Travel Writing • Why Would You Walk? (Bill Bryson) - http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/brysons-america-why-would-you-walk-1079183.html • Mark Twain – The Innocents Abroad - http://www.searchengine.org.uk/ebooks/66/19.pdf • The Old Patagonian Express extract (Paul Theroux) – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/artsandculture/5095027/The-Old-Patagonian-Express-an-extract-from-the-Paul-Theroux-travel-book.html • Tourist Traps Worth A Visit (Peter Jon Lindberg) – http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/tourist-traps-worth-a-visit# • The Road to Shangri-La (Patrick Symmes) – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3669971/The-road-to-Shangri-La.html • Trapped (Aron Ralston) - https://www.outsideonline.com/1927626/trapped

25. Bryson's America: Why would you walk? And the thing is, this man looked really fit. I'm sure he jogs extravagant distances and plays squash and does all kinds of exuberantly healthful things, but I am just as sure that he drives to each of these undertakings. It's crazy. An acquaintance of ours was complaining the other day about the difficulty of finding a place to park outside the local gymnasium. She goes there several times a week to walk on a treadmill. The gymnasium is, at most, a six-minute walk from her front door. I asked why she didn't walk to the gym and do six minutes less on the treadmill. She looked at me as if I were tragically simple-minded and said, "But I have a programme for the treadmill. It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty." It had not occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard. According to a concerned and faintly horrified recent editorial in the Boston Globe, the United States spends less than 1 per cent of its $25bn- a-year roads budget on facilities for pedestrians. Actually, I'm surprised it's that much. Go to almost any suburb developed in the last 30 years - and there are thousands to choose from - and you will not find a pavement anywhere. Often you won't find a single pedestrian crossing. I am not exaggerating. I had this brought home to me last summer when we were driving across Maine and stopped for coffee in one of those endless zones of shopping malls, motels, petrol stations and fast-food places that sprout everywhere in America these days. I noticed there was a bookshop across the street, so I decided to skip coffee and pop over. I needed a particular book and anyway I figured that this would give my wife a chance to spend some important private quality time with four restive, overheated children. Although the bookshop was no more than 50ft or 60ft away, I discovered that there was no way to get there on foot. There was a traffic crossing for cars, but no provision for pedestrians and no way to cross without dodging through three lanes of swiftly turning traffic. I had to get in the car and drive across. At the time it seemed ridiculous and exasperating, but afterwards I realised that I was probably the only person ever even to have entertained the notion of negotiating that intersection on foot. The fact is, Americans not only don't walk anywhere, they won't walk anywhere, and woe to anyone who tries to make them, as a town here in New Hampshire called Laconia discovered to its cost. A few years ago Laconia spent $5m on pedestrianising its town centre, to make it a pleasant shopping environment. Aesthetically it was a triumph - urban planners came from all over to coo and take photos - but commercially it was a disaster. Forced to walk one whole block from a car park, shoppers abandoned downtown Laconia for suburban malls. In 1994 Laconia dug up its pretty brick paving, took away the benches and tubs of geraniums and decorative trees, and put the street back to the way it had been in the first place. Now people can park right in front of the shops again and downtown Laconia thrives anew. And if that isn't sad, I don't know what is. `Notes from a Big Country' by Bill Bryson Bill Bryson // Monday 8 March 1999 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/brysons-america-why-would-you-walk-1079183.html I'LL TELL you this, but you'll have to promise that it will go no further. Not long after we moved here we had the people next door round for dinner and - I swear this is true - they drove. I was astounded (I recall asking them jokingly if they used a light aircraft to get to the supermarket, which simply drew blank looks and the mental scratching of my name from all future invitation lists), but I have since come to realise that there was nothing especially odd in their driving less than a couple of hundred feet to visit us. Nobody walks anywhere in America nowadays. A researcher at the University of California at Berkeley recently made a study of the nation's walking habits and concluded that 85 per cent of people in the United States are "essentially" sedentary; 35 per cent of the population are "totally" sedentary. The average American walks less than 75 miles a year - about 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. I'm no stranger to sloth myself, but that's appallingly little. One of the things we wanted when we moved to America was to live in a town within walking distance of shops. Hanover, where we settled, is a small, typical New England college town, pleasant, sedate and compact. It has a broad green, an old-fashioned main street, nice college buildings with big lawns, and leafy residential streets. It is, in short, an agreeable, easy place to stroll. Nearly everyone in town is within a level five-minute walk of the shops, and yet as far as I can tell virtually no one walks. I walk to town nearly every day when I am at home. I go to the post office or library or the local bookshop, and sometimes, if I am feeling particularly debonair, I stop at RoseyJekesCafi for a cappuccino. All this is a big part of my life and I wouldn't dream of doing it other than on foot. People have got used to this curious and eccentric behaviour now, but several times in the early days, passing neighbours would slow beside the kerb and ask if I wanted a lift. "But I'm going your way," they would insist when I politely declined. "Really, it's no bother." "Honestly, I enjoy walking." Well, if you're absolutely sure", they would say, and depart reluctantly, as if they felt they were leaving the scene of an accident. People have become so habituated to using the car for everything that it would never occur to them to unfurl their legs and see what they can do. Sometimes it's almost ludicrous. The other day I was in a little nearby town called Etna waiting to bring home one of my children from a piano lesson when a car stopped outside the local post office and a man about my age popped out and dashed inside (and left the motor running - something else that exercises me inordinately). He was inside for about three or four minutes, then came out, got in the car and drove exactly 16 feet to the general store next door, and popped in, engine still running.

26. The Old Patagonian Express: an extract from the Paul Theroux travel book An extract from the famous Paul Theroux travel book about the travel writer's train journey from the east coast of the USA down to South America. By Paul Theroux // 02 Apr 2009 One of us on that sliding subway train was clearly not heading for work. You would have known it immediately by the size of his bag. And you can always tell a fugitive by his vagrant expression of smugness; he seems to have a secret in his mouth – he looks as if he is about to blow a bubble. But why be coy? I had woken in my old bedroom, in the house where I had spent the best part of my life. The snow lay deep around the house, and there were frozen footprints across the yard to the garbage can. A blizzard had just visited, another was expected to blow in soon. I had dressed and tied my shoes with more than usual care, and left the stubble on my upper lip for a moustache I planned to grow. Slapping my pockets to make sure my ballpoint and passport were safe, I went downstairs, past my mother's hiccuping cuckoo clock, and then to Wellington Circle to catch the train. It was a morning of paralysing frost, the perfect day to leave for South America. For some, this was the train to Sullivan Square, or Milk Street, or at the very most Orient Heights; for me, it was the train to Patagonia. Two men using a foreign language spoke in low voices; there were others with lunch-boxes and valises and briefcases, and one lady with the sort of wrinkled department store bag that indicated she was going to return or exchange an unwanted item (the original bag lending veracity to the awkward operation). The freezing weather had altered the faces in the multi-racial car: the whites cheeks looked rubbed with pink chalk, the Chinese were bloodless, the blacks ashen or yellow-grey. At dawn it had been 12F, by mid-morning it was 9F, and the temperature was still dropping. The cold wind gusted through the car as the doors opened at Haymarket, and it had the effect of silencing the muttering foreigners. They looked Mediterranean; they winced at the draught. Most of the people sat compactly, with their elbows against their sides and their hands in their laps, squinting and conserving their warmth. They had affairs to attend to in town – work, shopping, banking, the embarrassing moment at the refund desk. Two had hefty textbooks in their laps, and a spine turned towards me read A General Introduction to Sociology. A man solemnly scanned the headlines in the Globe, another thumb-flicked the papers in his briefcase. A lady told her little girl to stop kicking and sit still. • Now they were getting out at the windy platforms – after four stations the car was half-full. They would return that evening, having spent the day speaking of the weather. But they were dressed for it, office clothes under eskimo coats, gloves, mittens, woolly hats; resignation was on their faces and, already, a suggestion of fatigue. Not a trace of excitement; all this was usual and ordinary; the train was their daily chore. • No one looked out of the window. They had seen the harbour, and Bunker Hill, and the billboards before. Nor did they look at each other. Their gazes stopped a few inches from their eyes. Though they paid no attention to them, the signs above their heads spoke to these people. These folks were local, they mattered, the advertising men knew who they were addressing. NEED FEDERAL INCOME TAX FORMS? Beneath it a youth in a pea jacket grinned at his newspaper and swallowed. CASH YOUR CHECKS ALL OVER MASSACHUSETTS. A lady with that yellow-grey Hottentot colour hugged her shopping bag. BE A SCHOOL VOLUNTEER IN THE BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS. Not a bad idea for the sick-of-it-all briefcase examiner in the Russian hat. MORTGAGE MONEY? WE HAVE PLENTY. No one glanced up. ROOFS AND GUTTES. GET A COLLEGE DEGREE IN YOUR SPARE TIME. A restaurant. A radio station. A plea to stop smoking. • The signs did not speak to me. These were local matters, but I was leaving this morning. And when you are leaving, the promises in advertisements are ineffectual. Money, school, house, radio: I was putting them behind me and in the duration of this short trip from Wellington Circle to State Street, the words of the ads had become merely an imploring jabber, like the nonsense of an unknown language. I could shrug; I was being pulled away from home. Apart from the cold, and the blinding light on the fallen snow, there was nothing of great significance in my going, nothing momentous except the fact that as we drew into South Station I was now a mile nearer to Patagonia. • Extracted from "The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas" (Penguin). Used with permission. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/artsandculture/5095027/The-Old-Patagonian-Express-an-extract-from-the-Paul-Theroux-travel-book.html Paul Theroux's book, first published in 1979, is regarded as a classic of modern travel writing