'Bird brain' should be a compliment

The misguided use of "bird brain" as a slur has finally come home to roost.

Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

Accurately measuring intelligence requires the right yardstick, except that there is no such thing. There are just too many kinds of intelligence for one yardstick to measure. Jennifer Ackerman concedes in The Genius of Birds (2016), "I would flunk these sorts of intelligence tests readily as birds might fail mine." She is speaking of the intelligence tests that various species of birds can pass with ease. Take for instance the ability of some birds to hide thousands of seeds and then remember where to find them months later or the ability of a homing pigeon to find its way home from hundreds of miles away.

Scientists might frown on my use of the word intelligence because it sounds to them like anthropomorphizing. They prefer the word cognition when talking about birds and other animals. Give Ackerman credit for being intelligent enough to use the word, however, because it is intelligence that we are talking about.

Even the word cognition has been something of a concession for science, which had long preferred thinking of every amazing thing an animal does as just instinct. By now there have been enough experiments and observations to recognize that birds, more than most animal species, can solve challenging problems. Young birds don't know their songs by instinct but must learn them over a long period of trial and error, just as a child learns to talk. Sparrows in New Zealand learned to use the sensors for a cafeteria's automatic doors so they could fly in to steal food, then fly out again.

Ackerman covers many different kinds of intelligence in birds, including the artistry of bowerbirds and the ability of mockingbirds to learn not only their own song but the songs of many other species of birds.

Some birds seem to be smarter than others, and Ackerman devotes much of her book puzzling over why. Are species that eat a variety of foods smarter than those with a more limited diet? Are birds that live in social groups smarter than loners? Are birds that migrate smarter than those that stay in one place? While discussing such questions, she describes the work of numerous authorities in the field without ever losing her audience, made up of readers of ordinary intelligence, like me, who are humbled by the genius of birds.

Keep it simple, stupid

Kathryn and Ross Petras

When we try to sound smart, whether in our speech or in our writing, that is when we are most likely to sound stupid.

That is one lesson to be learned from That Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means by Ross Petras and Kathryn Petras. This is a small dictionary, only about 150 entries, containing words we easily confuse with similar words that mean something else entirely. This happens to the best of us, and the authors offer examples of "the best of us" making these errors: Washington Post, Huffington Post, President Obama, Variety, Fox News, New York Times, Time, Forbes and even F. Scott Fitzgerald.

We may use notoriety rather than fame because those extra syllables seem to add a little class, except that the two words don't mean quite the same thing. Notoriety refers to a negative kind of fame. John Dillinger was notorious. Eliot Ness was famous.

Or we may use penultimate thinking it means something like: "the very best." The Huffington Post once described Abraham Lincoln as "the penultimate American president." Actually the word means "second from the last." I remember learning this word during the Watergate hearings. One of those involved in the crime, G. Gordon Liddy perhaps, used the word in his testimony, then had to explain its meaning for the confused Senate committee.

Many times we confuse words that look alike or sound alike. The Petras explain the difference between complementary and complimentary, flaunt and flout, flounder and founder, ingenious and ingenuous, prescribe and proscribe, stanch and staunch, tact and tack, and many others.

Often the authors admit that the battle has already been lost, some words have been misused so often that even dictionaries have given in and added new definitions. Now decimate means "to destroy or devastate," not just to destroy a tenth of something. Crescendo is a musical term meaning to gradually increase loudness or intensity. So many of us think of it as meaning climax that dictionaries now accept that meaning, to the disgust of some musicians.

Then there are those words that will always be confusing. For example, both flammable and inflammable mean the same thing. Bimonthly means both twice a month and once every two months.

The goal of language, the Petras write, is "to communicate ideas and desires in the clearest way possible." Simple words do this best. Use is almost always a better choice than utilize, method almost always better than methodology. Even if we happen to know the meaning of a more impressive word, those we are trying to communicate with may not.

The authors keep each entry short, witty and, at least for the most part, easy to understand. 

Hemingway's writing tips

In A Moveable Feast, reviewed here a couple of days ago, Ernest Hemingway makes a number of comments about the writing process, many of which have been helpful to other writers over the past half century. Here are a few of them:

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

This is the direct opposite of writer's block. It's that rare period when whatever one happens to be writing, whether a novel, an article or a letter home, really does seem to write itself. The writer cannot possibly put words down on paper or on a computer screen as quickly as they come to the mind. When this happens to me, not nearly often enough, I get frustrated because in my haste my fingers jumble the letters, creating gibberish and slowing the writing process all the more.

I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good it was until I read it over the next day.

Time gives a writer fresh eyes, a more objective perspective on the quality of the work. I'm not sure a day is really enough time, however. A week would be better. A month even better than that. Wait long enough to read what you have written and it will seem somewhat unfamiliar, almost as if it were written by someone else. You will be more likely to notice flaws, typos and unclear sentences you failed to notice when the writing was still new and you could easily confuse what you actually wrote with what you meant to write.

I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next.

This may seem the opposite of what a writer wants to do. When we know whatever it is we want to say, we want to say it. And right now. But Hemingway is right. Getting started each day can be difficult, especially if you don't know what happens next. If you can stop one day knowing what happens next, you are likely to still remember that when you begin the next day. And once you have resumed writing, your mind will be in gear and you will find it easier to continue.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Hemingway here is still talking about getting started on a new day of writing, especially when beginning something new or when one has failed to stop at the right place the day before. What he means by "one true sentence" is open to debate, and perhaps it doesn't even matter. It is just necessary to write something, anything. The narrator of the Sebastian Faulks novel Where My Heart Used to Beat says at one point, "You can always tear up the piece of paper and throw it away, but if you don't begin, then nothing comes. You have to submit." That may be what Hemingway was saying. You have to prime the pump. Then the water will flow.

I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day.

This again seems counterintuitive, but Hemingway is talking about letting the subconscious do the work for you. This takes discipline, a word Hemingway uses later, but he found the practice useful. Others might put it differently: Don't take your work home with you.

A movable book

Published in 1964 after Ernest Hemingway's death, A Moveable Feast is itself something of a movable feast. Just as Easter, a movable feast, skips around on the calendar from one year to the next, so this book doesn't stay put. The copy I purchased at Hemingway House in Key West a few years ago is called "the restored edition," supposedly put back the way Hemingway wanted it, except that Hemingway died before deciding what it should contain, or even if it was worth publishing at all.

The title, though a good one, wasn't his idea. Among the titles Hemingway had considered were The Part Nobody Knows, To Hope and Write Well (The Paris Stories), To Love and Write Well, To Write It True, How It Began and How Different It Was When You Were There. The restored edition includes 19 chapters, plus 10 other Paris "sketches," many of which had clearly been omitted previously for good reason.

In this book, even the truth is something of a movable feast. Although generally regarded as a memoir of his experiences in Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway himself called it fiction, and often it reads like his fiction. When he quotes other people, they all talk like characters in his novels.

Various people have had a hand in shaping A Moveable Feast over the years. His last wife, Mary, put the original book together, which may have been a challenge since much of it is about his first wife, Hadley. Later Hemingway's sons had input into its contents. A son (Patrick) writes the foreword for this edition, and a grandson (Sean) writes the introduction.

Hemingway may be at his best in these essays (or stories or sketches or whatever they are) when speaking about writers and writing. Best of all are his pieces on F. Scott Fitzgerald, especially one about the two of them going by train to Lyon to pick up a car and drive it back to Paris. It is a comic tale, fueled by Fitzgerald's hypochondria, his inability to hold his liquor and the fact that the car lacks a top and it rains frequently on the drive home. Elsewhere Fitzgerald is portrayed as a sadder figure because of his drinking, his difficulty in writing and Zelda's (his wife) jealousy whenever he attempts to write rather than spend time drinking with her.

Comments about Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound are also fine, as is his short piece on Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris (not the same one that exists today along the Seine). At one point Hemingway refers to Pound as a saint, interesting because the poet later moved to Italy and supported the fascists.

There is much to like in A Moveable Feast, as well as much that will make one wonder why it was ever included.

A life out of tune

Brodie Moncur, the protagonist of William Boyd's 2018 novel Love Is Blind, has perfect pitch, leading to a successful career as a piano tuner in late 19th century Europe when the piano industry is highly competitive and live musical events are a prime source of entertainment. He proves much less capable of keeping his own life in tune, especially after Lika Blum walks into it.

Brodie is hired by John Kilbarron, a gifted pianist, to tour with him and keep his pianos in perfect condition for his own needs, complicated by the fact that Kilbarron has a weak right hand that requires keys sensitive to the lightest touch. Brodie falls in love with the pianist's Russian mistress, Lika, who wants to become a great opera singer but lacks the necessary talent. Kilbarron mostly ignores her, making it possible for her and Brodie to begin a secret affair.

The bigger problem proves to be Malachi Kilbarron, John's brother, who manages the pianist's career and includes keeping an eye on Lika as one of his responsibilities. Strangely Lika seems more connected to and more fearful of Malachi than John, yet she declines to tell Brodie why. And she refuses to marry him when they finally are able to run away together.

A further complication is that Brodie develops tuberculosis, at a time when that is a death sentence.

Brodie has opportunities to retreat to a simpler life in a warm climate that would be better both for his health and his peace of mind. But, as Boyd's title reminds us, love is blind, and our young piano tuner gives up financial success, takes part in a duel and flees from country to country to escape his pursuer, all for the love of Lika.

The reader knows all this cannot possibly end happily, but it makes compulsive reading. Boyd's novels are always a pleasure.

Lost and found

As the title suggests, Lisa Jewell's 2016 novel I Found You is a missing-person novel, although more accurately it is a missing-persons novel. Several characters are missing, in one way or another, during the course of her story, including a central character who is missing his entire identity.

Alice Lake lives in a remote English seacoast village with her three children, each with a different father. Now there's a man missing from her life, an empty spot in her bed, and when she finds a man on the beach who remembers nothing about his past, she begins to imagine that he might fill it. Because he is missing a name, she calls him Frank. For all she knows, he might be a murderer, yet hope drives her to welcome him into her home.

Meanwhile, hours away, an Eastern European woman called Lilly, who has recently married a British man, becomes worried when Carl Monrose fails to come home from work. When the police use the missing man's passport to try to find him, they discover that, officially at least, he doesn't even exist.

The novel's third leg, set back in 1993, involves a family of four spending a holiday in a seacoast town. Graham, or Gray as he prefers to be called, is in his late teens and protective of his younger sister, Kirsty, especially when an older boy named Mark starts hanging around her. Gray tries to warn both her and their parents that Mark acts strange and should not be trusted. Then he fails to take his own advice, and disaster occurs.

Of course, these three threads eventually weave together, and they do so in surprising ways. There are other missing people in this story, but to say who they are would reveal too much.

This is a novel, though contrived, that one will read at a breakneck speed. If Jewell's title reveals something about the plot, it also reveals something about how it ends.

An extra clue

Readers may be a step ahead of Alan Banks and his team of investigators in the 2019 Peter Robinson novel Careless Love, but that could be because readers have an extra clue, namely the book's title. Even then Banks and company seem a bit slow in figuring out that two mysterious deaths may be connected and that they may have something to do with, well, careless love.

First the body of a lovely college student, dressed in party clothes, is found in an abandoned car, not her own, along a highway. She seems to have choked on her own vomit after an overdose of sleeping pills. But how did she get in that car? Soon after that the body of a wealthy man, also in dress clothes, is found at the bottom of a ravine, apparently from a fall. But what was he doing in that remote area and how did he get there?

Banks and the three women on his team work the cases separately, two investigators each, until a third body, another attractive college girl, is found, this one clearly a murder victim. And there is evidence tying her to the first girl. Finding a mysterious third girl may be the key to cracking the case.

Robinson's British mysteries are not noted for their suspense or surprises but rather for their steady, thorough and seemingly realistic police work. They never fail to please, however, and this one is no exception. Usually mystery readers are disappointed when they can outsmart the detectives, but somehow that isn't the case with Robinson.