Buy the Book
Mark Kingwell’s essay on the future of reading [“Beyond the Book,” Readings, August] reminds us that for hundreds of years books were the only tool that made us think better. That thinking is threatened by new habits of multitasking, which, as Nicholas Carr shows in his book The Shallows, change our neural pathways and make us less able to concentrate, contemplate, and reflect.
If we do not learn to think better, I fear we are doomed to accelerate toward the cliffs we can already see ahead. Bookstores, perhaps, can provide the antidote to this new problem. There we can take the time to talk about books and think together. Just as café culture changed the way new ideas and modes of thought emerged in nineteenth-century France, bookstores could be the salons of today, providing a locale for people to discuss and develop new ideas. Because it is a threat to our current intellectual laziness, this will meet resistance, but it is important. As one of my bookstore customers recently told me, “There’s a reason they burn books, you know.”
Bob Williams
Hood River, Ore.
Love in Shroom
Hamilton Morris’s article on the life and death of Steven Pollock [“Blood Spore,” Folio, July] does not present the whole picture of the man. I once dated Steve, starting in his last year at the Medical College of Wisconsin, in Milwaukee. We later moved together to San Antonio, making a brief excursion first to Colombia in search of magic mushrooms and ayahuasca. We found both.
In Milwaukee, I was a laboratory technician at the medical school, and I was assigned after we had already begun dating to help Steve with his research into dihydromorphinone ketose reductase. He loved the idea of working together, and we often conducted experiments late at night. I was always impressed with Steve’s dedication and meticulous lab work. He was so consumed by his research that he would talk about it constantly, even during lovemaking. Nothing could distract him from his efforts to improve medical science.
Linda Fugate
Red Bluff, Calif.
Scents of Place
In his “Brief History of Scent” [Miscellany, August], Beau Friedlander reports that attempts to reproduce petrichor, the smell of rain on dry earth, are “rare, and always failures.” But petrichor has been available as a natural perfume for thousands of years. Mitti, an attar of the scent of the first monsoon rain, is made from clay from a region of Uttar Pradesh, in northern India, that is molded into small figures and hydrodistilled into sandalwood oil. Because sandalwood is largely unavailable today, mitti attar is now distilled into various plasticizers such as white oil. Roman Kaiser’s attempts to re-create scents in a laboratory are interesting, but many of these smells are already available as natural aromatics.
Trygve Harris
Salalah, Oman
The Mocking Cure
I admire the depth of Christine Smallwood’s impressive research into bed-wetting therapies [“Are You Sleeping?,” Forum, August]. One treatment she neglected to mention, however, was the method my mother used: she brought me in from playing outdoors, stood me before my bed, forced my head down, and rubbed my face in the soiled sheet. I’ll bet her “cure” was not an uncommon practice back in the 1940s. And while I did later have occasional incontinence issues on the playground, I never again wet the bed. Success — except for the sad memories.
Noreen Ayres
Henryville, Pa.
Why on Earth?
Harper’s Magazine is one of the most progressive periodicals being published, yet it lingers in the dark ages when it comes to referring to the planet on which we live. In “Emptying the World’s Aquarium” [Letter from the Sea of Cortez, August], Erik Vance writes that “there is no better place on earth to look at the future of global fishing” than the Gulf of California. This is a story about what’s in the water, not in the soil, so the word “earth” is obviously incorrect. Referring to Earth as “earth” is a vestige of the Judeo-Christian legacy. You can’t have dominion over our planet or pillage it quite so easily if linguistically you put it on the same level as all the sacred words we capitalize. Please change your style. This is an egregious philosophical error in an otherwise excellent story on the decline of our Earth.
Howard Passell
Earth Systems Analysis Department, Sandia National Laboratories
Albuquerque, N.M.
