From time to time I have written on various aspects of writing. Today I’m looking through the other end of the telescope to consider the subject of reading, for without the ability to read no one can either write or learn from the writings of others. And, as we’ll see, by “reading” I mean far more than the ability to recognize letters and spell out words.

This subject was brought to my attention about a week ago when I attended an awards banquet for an international writing contest (yes, I was there to receive two awards, one first place for best novel in the mystery/thriller/suspense/adventure category and a third place for a non-fiction book). Someone on the program prefaced the awards presentations by reading a long document that was supposed to be amusing and entertaining. Unfortunately, she could not read in any useful sense. She stumbled over words, put emphasis in wrong places, mispronounced words, failed to “get” some of the jokes, and sometimes read… each… word… in… a… sentence… spaced… out… like beads on a string as if there were no connection between them. It was painful to watch.

The person in question, who shall remain unnamed, describes herself on the website of something called the “Albuquerque Metaphysical Reading Group” as “a writer of metaphysical fiction and nonfiction”. Hmm. She actually belongs to something that identifies itself as a “reading group.” Curious.

Anyway, the experience got me thinking about the connection between writing and reading. To my mind it’s not a chicken-or-egg thing. The ability to read clearly and well is a necessary prelude to good writing. As we enter the adventure we call life, our brains are empty vessels waiting to be filled with content. Think of them as like hard drives. We can choose to fill them with whatever we want, from meaningless babblings to rap music to pornography. Or, we can fill them with ever more complex knowledge about the world and how things work. That’s what a classical education was supposed to be about, in the days before higher education turned into a kind of holding pen and party central for young adults.

And how do we fill those empty spaces in our heads with useful content? By listening to a teacher drone on about something? By comparing opinions with others whose heads are equally vacuous? Through some kind of magical osmosis in which we sit on a couch watching the Cartoon Channel? Well, no, the real answer is that if our brains are to be supplied with useful stuff it will be through reading quality pieces of writing. Anything else is just static and background noise. GIGO, as the IT folks like to say, garbage in, garbage out.

No person who has failed to master reading and acquired a deep understanding of the written language will ever be able to produce clear, analytical writing. It follows as night after day that the ability to read and understand good writing is the key to being able to write same.  If you fill your head with junk don’t expect to generate pearls of wisdom expressed in stately sentences.

And as mentioned above, reading is a lot more than just being able to recognize letters and words. As in the case of the contest chairman who read sentences as if each word was a separate bullet from a gun, it’s the connections between words that are important, the flow of the words in their total effect.  Words are only the bricks and mortar from which sentences, paragraphs, chapters and entire books are built. To stretch the metaphor, look at it from the point of view of the architect, not the guy who carries the bricks.

Reading really well, like anything else of importance, requires practice, a lot of it. There is a rule-of-thumb that to master any difficult task requires ten thousand hours of practice. This applies to such things as brain surgery, concert musicianship, baseball and, yes, reading. Then, on top of that, schedule another ten thousand hours of writing to master the craft. Excellent writing, in other words, may require a twenty thousand hour commitment.

Unfortunately, many people travel through life without ever learning these skills. The Calvin and Hobbes cartoon at left illustrates one form of so-called “writer’s block,” and in that case it may be real. The other kind of writer’s block is the more fundamental lack of proper preparation through having mastered reading and thus the art of writing. Frankly, I consider it to be bogus. When I managed a public relations agency sometimes staffers would plead “writer’s block” when their work was past its deadline. “I don’t know how to start,” they might say. I never accepted that, telling them to just begin to write and the proper beginning would come to them later. That’s what scissors and paste were for (yes, that was in the good old days before PCs and word processing).

There is a related and much-ignored art that was once taught alongside reading and writing. It’s called diction and it’s all about how words are used in speaking and writing to communicate clearly. One of the best ways I know to judge a piece of writing is to read it aloud, and I don’t mean in a monotone. Read the piece as an orator might and you can get the feel of how the words are working together. Sometimes having them pass over your tongue gives you a clearer sense of how well your sentences are crafted. In speaking as well as in writing, the “flow” of the words matters.

Reading aloud is also a good way to improve reading skills. Remember that the written word is a relatively recent arrival in history, and it’s nothing more than an often imperfect method of recording speech. Speaking, reading and writing are the great triad of human communication, evolved over a long period of time. Each is related to the other, and none can stand alone.

Final conclusion: Want to write? Learn to read.

Pat in a photo taken on Halloween night, 1978.

This is a personal note for today, which is a special day in my life. If my wife Patricia still lived, this would have been our 50th wedding anniversary. Sadly, she passed away June 21, 2011.

Our life together was rewarding and yet troubled due to  mental illness that struck her in her late 30′s. She had been very smart, hard working, cheerful and productive but after a terrible nervous breakdown and hospitalization she was never the same. For the last 30 years of our marriage she was on anti-psychotic medication and suffered several more relapses that required hospitalization, including one for more than 60 days in 2002 and another a few years later.

The Polaroid snapshot shown here shows Pat a few years before her first breakdown. It portrays the confident, charming, friendly wife I shall always remember. Sadly, there were many subsequent years during which she was a different person altogether. Not that she was bad or unfriendly, but the confidence was gone. She still had moments of humor and we had some good times, but they were few and always interspersed by troubled times of  problems. In addition to her mental illness she was addicted to alcohol and cigarettes, and sometimes had periods of paranoia during which she imagined threats from things that were not real.

I miss Pat more than I can tell, but am going forward with my own life. Last spring, after she had been gone for about a year, I wrote a poem about Pat and our lives together. I want to share it with my friends and readers, so here it is. It is very personal but I feel it is important to share Pat’s story. Please join me in remembering a kind and generous human being who brought much happiness into the world, but whose life was blighted by the dark cloud of mental illness.
Twice I Was Married
An Autobiographical Poem

Twice I was married
Yet not to different wives.
First for twenty years to Pat,
My loving wife,
Vibrant, smart and sane.

Then for thirty more
I shared my life with Pat,
The same yet different,
My troubled, childlike wife.

It was a Pat transformed,
The victim of a dark and evil thing
That crept unseen into her mind
Like poison or a spell.

Schizophrenia. It is a thief
Of souls, destroyer of lives.
For thirty years we lived beneath
The awful shadow of that thing
That stole her spirit and her pride.
In vain I hoped for better times,
In silent agony.

Sometimes strange voices spoke to her
That were not there.
Most times her medication
Held the terrible demons down,
Yet still the sickness waited,
Festering there inside her head
And gaining strength from year to year,
To twist and warp
Her thoughts.

Sometimes she didn’t want to live,
Twice ingesting pills like candy,
Later drawn by stomach pumps
In busy ER bays.
At other times hot blood had flowed
As wrist was sliced with knife,
Yet not too deep.

The years passed on,
The rhythms of our lives together
Rose and fell like gathering tides
From crest to trough.
Hope remained, and yet each crest
Was followed down and ever down
To new and deeper lows.

Paranoia is a funny thing.
There was a time when she believed
That I’d arranged her kidnapping
And hired actors to pretend
As nurses and psychiatrists.
In the psych ward that time she used
The public phone to call police,
Reporting her imprisonment.
When she told me that, she laughed,
Later, when a drug had pushed
The demons back.

Her end came suddenly, surprise
To me yet carefully planned.
At seventy years of age she’d borne
Her troubled mind for thirty some.
I left to run some errands, to a store,
And as I stepped toward the door
To leave she called to me
“I love you.”

I did not know that those would be
Her final words to me or anyone.
When I returned she’d done at last
What many times she’d tried.
On the patio, in a chair
She lay as if asleep, at peace,
A bullet through her troubled brain.

Yes I was married twice,
But not to different wives;
To two quite different versions
Of the same. One that was
Happy, bright and young,
The other sliding slowly down
Into the darkness and despair
That mental illness brings.

Those years were hard and yet
There was that one essential thing,
A common thread that tied it all
Together, linked my marriages
Into a single whole.

It was that thing that she
Expressed so well to me
In those last precious moments of her life.
It was the magic words she spoke:
“I love you,”
Her honest way of bidding me goodbye.

For some time now there’s been an assumption floating around that if you reduce your caloric intake to about 30 percent below the required daily intake you will earn yourself more years of life. I suspect a lot of people have been acting on that theory and voluntarily starving themselves in hopes of living longer. I know one such and he looks like an Auschwitz survivor.

But, sad for them, a new long-term study with monkeys has sunk that battleship. The report in the journal Nature showed  no difference in life expectancy between monkeys fed a normal diet and those fed a restricted diet. An earlier monkey study at the University of Wisconsin claimed to have found a difference, but there was a flaw in that study. Unrestricted monkeys were allowed to eat as much as they wanted, thereby becoming obese. In other words, it was a study to compare simian analogues of Twiggy and Michael Moore, and therefore bore little relationship to reality.

The whole idea got started with a study of worms, which bear even less relationship to normal humans than Michael Moore, and was followed by a mouse study. But when it comes to humans, apparently the starve-yourself-old plan just doesn’t work.

Michael Moore look-alike could have taken part in Wisconsin study.

Actually, it’s not surprising to me, and in fact I don’t know why they bother to mess around with monkeys because there has been an ongoing human experiment with billions of participants. It’s called real life, in which some people are consistently underfed thanks to poverty and food shortages while others eat like, well, Michael Moore. And the data from that experiment is pretty clear in squelching the idea of calorie restriction for life extension.

For example, the country of India is well-known for its large numbers of malnourished individuals. If the theory were correct, those people would be living long and prospering. Well, at least living long. But in fact, India has an average life expectancy of just 64.7 years, compared with 78.2 years for the United States. I don’t have a figure for the less-fortunate citizens of India, but my guess is that those who are better off are living longer and raising the average, so the actual results for those on the involuntarily calorie restricted diets could be lower, perhaps much lower.

There are many other places where food is scarce and people live on the edge, and indeed even lower life expectancies are observed there. The worst case scenario is the island of Mozambique, where the average life expectancy is just 34.2 years. The world average is 67.2 years and most of the Third World lies on the bottom half of the scale.

In case you’re wondering, the country that is the longest-lived is Japan with 82.6 years. Some other top-end data points include: France, known for its rich and hearty meals, 80.7 years; Switzerland, 82.1; Australia, 81.2. None of these places are known for widespread malnutrition and famine.

I think the real message to take away from all this is that extremes are bad, and of course that’s what we all kind of knew all along. People who are unusually thin have few physical resources to fall back on in case of illness. We know that young girls who suffer from eating disorders often die young and obese people are in danger of heart disease, diabetes and other debilitating diseases. So eat healthy food in normal amounts, maybe accompanied with a glass of wine or two and you’ll probably outlive all the starve-themselves-old crowd, not to mention the waddling obese.

I usually don’t write short posts on this blog. In fact, some may think I’m too verbose. Well, guilty I guess, although I like to examine subjects in depth and analyze the various factors involved. In this case, well, I’m merely going to post the map below, just released by the U.S. Agriculture Dept. It shows those counties reporting drought disaster. It requires no comment.

As we all know by now there is no global warming or climate change, thanks to a concerted effort by deniers to insist that we all put our fingers in our ears and recite “La, la, la I can’t hear you”. Unfortunately, they forgot to tell Mother Nature because the planet continues to show signs of warming and as far as climate change, well just turn on the Weather Channel and draw your own conclusions.

One of the most significant “canaries in the mine” that I’ve been following for some time is the extent of Arctic sea ice. The Arctic ice cap has been melting fairly steadily, and I predicted about seven or eight years ago that we would see an essentially ice free Arctic Ocean by 2015. At that time the experts were saying it wouldn’t take place until the end of the 21st century, and while I was probably setting too early a target, the trends certainly indicate that it will almost certainly happen far sooner than was thought just a few years ago.

Why is the Arctic ice important? For one thing, it provides a heat shield for the Arctic Ocean itself, preventing it from absorbing solar rays during the long period of 24-hour Midnight Sun during the months of summer. Ice and snow reflect heat back into space, while open water is dark and absorbs the rays. The more open water is exposed, the more heat is absorbed.

This matters not only because it represents de facto global warming, but also because the Arctic is an important “climate regulator” and if it’s disrupted it can create havoc, particularly in the North Atlantic. That can cause climate effects in major population centers of North America and Europe, including the possible disturbance of the Gulf Stream, the warm waters of which prevent northern Europe from being like Siberia which is at a similar latitude but has quite different climate conditions.

Right now the Arctic ice cover is at its lowest point ever for this date, as shown in the graph at left. The blue line represents this year’s ice coverage as of yesterday, August 13, 2012. The dotted line is the record low point set in 2007. Above that is the average for the previous 20-year 1979-2000 period (represented by the solid black line) and the effect of two standard deviations to that average shown by the gray band. As you can see, not only has the 2012 ice coverage extent exceeded the record low, right now it’s taking a decidedly downward turn. All in all, we’re way out of what was normal during the last two decades of the 20th century. (I’ve cropped all but the most recent data points from the graph. You can see the whole thing here.)

One of the factors that’s often overlooked in evaluating the extent of sea ice is that it is a two-dimensional view of the situation. In other words, it only shows the ice covered areas versus open water. But like most things the ice is three dimensional. In other words, in addition to its surface area the ice has the third dimension of thickness, and that dimension has been steadily decreasing. Thus, the total mass of ice is far less than it was in past years, and thus the rate of melting is able to increase because there’s less total ice to melt. To understand this, you merely need to put a block of ice out on the driveway in front of your house in July (assuming you live in the Northern Hemisphere) and watch. At first the ice will seem to melt very slowly, almost like watching grass grow. But as thawing proceeds the rate appears to speed up until toward the end it virtually disappears before your eyes.

Something like that could be taking place in the Arctic Ocean. I haven’t looked up recent figures, but a few years ago to the best of my recollection I reported that the ice had averaged about ten feet in thickness back in the 1950s, and by the early 2000′s it had been reduced to only about three feet. It’s probably even thinner today, making the ice cover even more prone to disappearing. At right is a map of the present coverage, again as of August 13. Both these graphics are from the website of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (see link above). The white area, of course, shows the extent of the ice coverage and the purple lines indicate the previous “normal” boundaries, again the average during the 1979-2000 decades.. There’s obviously a lot of open water right now that was ice-covered at this date in past year, and that water is happily absorbing those solar rays. The annual minimum coverage, by the way, usually occurs in mid-September so we have about another month of melting ahead.

You might note the little X in the right center of the ice area. That represents the North Pole. A friend of mine recently visited that remote spot on a nuclear-powered Russian ice breaking ship. I remember a few years ago reading about how a similar vessel arrived at the pole to discover an area of open water…the pole itself was ice free. Quite a disappointment for the tourists I’m sure, because one of the great thrills of taking such an expensive trip is to get out and walk around on the ice at the top of the world.

The continued loss of sea ice has already begun to be taken into account by various interested parties. For example, Russia is trying to claim as much as possible of the Arctic in anticipation of being able to drill for oil when the ice is gone. Shipping companies are salivating at the prospect of being able to sail across the top of the world between the Far East and Europe, cutting thousands of miles from the trip. Can shipping companies salivate? Well, perhaps not but they would if they could because with the high cost of fuel those ships cost a fortune to run.

Anyway, there’s the latest scoop on the Arctic ice cap. It’s like an item at an auction as the auctioneer calls for the final bids, that is, going, going (and soon) gone.