The School of Life

This is for You: We All Need Words on Dedications and Acknowledgements.

When I was five, I lied.

I told friends at my primary school that an author had dedicated a book to me. In print. And everything.

This white lie got me in a bit of hot water. “Bring it in and show us then”, they said. “OK.”

Except the book didn’t exist. One fib led to another and I decided to write my own dedication in a way that (I thought) looked like type: For Molly Mackey.

(I wrote it in pencil, because I wasn’t old enough to write in pen.)

The book was Terry Jones’s Fairy Tales, which included a story called ‘Brave Molly’, so it made sense to me that it would be dedicated to a real life Molly. I wrote it on the inside page, hoping my friends wouldn’t get to the actual dedication: these stories were written for Sally Jones in the summer of 1978.

I still have the book. And you can see my hand-written ‘dedication’, along with the very faint ‘for’, rubbed out after my super sleuth friends quickly discovered the truth:

It’s a laughable forgery. I think I knew it at the time, but I really, really wanted to have a book dedicated to me. I thought it was the Best. Thing. Ever. That someone could write a book and say, “here, this is for you” blew my mind.

 It still does. The first thing I do when I pick up a book – any book – is look at the dedication in the front and the thanks at the back. If I’m in a bookshop, browsing the three-for-two mounds, I don’t read the blurbs. I head straight for the names, the little bit where the author writes in their own voice.

Sometimes they tell you how they’re connected to that name on the first page (for Kate, my mother). Mostly I have to settle for the bare bones. For… but then my brain goes into overdrive (“must be his partner/wife/sister/mum/best friend”). I swiftly make up my own stories about how the name in print is connected to the name on the front cover.

Sometimes authors give you a little more, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous Once again to Zelda. In Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love, the dedication reads: for my grandparents, who taught me the opposite of disappearing, next to their four photos, as well as and for Jonathan, my life. You don’t have to be a Nobel prizewinner to know that’s Jonathan Safran Foer. Ahhh. Lovely! Two authors! Together! In love!

All the time I search for scraps of information. Something, anything, about the author. Why? I don’t know for sure, but what I do know is that I spend a lot of time with an author when I read their books. I hear their voice. I’m in their head, and they’re in mine. Even if it’s outlandish fiction, their book becomes like a familiar friend. And as the book goes on I want to know more. So much so that I feel a bit of disorientated when I pick up a book written by someone else. And although it’s exciting to read a new book, I have to get to know the writer’s little wordy eccentricities and foibles all over again. And each new dedication gives me a teeny tiny glimpse into their real life. 

And then there are the acknowledgements. Tucked away at the back, it’s often where you can find out where the author put pen to paper (thanks to such-and-such-research centre, writers’ retreat or Starbucks), who helped them get their facts straight, who edited their book and who they relied on to look after the kids while they wrote it. I love these sneak peeks into an author’s real life. There are books I’m just not interested in reading, but I’ll always have a look at their acknowledgements. Just a few little words, but they’re a story in themselves – admittedly one that’s often made up by me.

Three years after my playground dedication debacle, I finally got what I’d boasted about. My mum’s friend was writing a book and her illustrator needed some children to photograph to help her draw the pictures. If by any (small) chance you have a copy of Rose Impey’s Scare Yourself to Sleep, you’ll see it’s For Tom, Molly and Alice (me, my brother and my best friend). Too late to prove my point to the five-year-olds, but a fib come true all the same.

We All Need Words dedicate this blog post to the people who’ve come to our Words for Life class at The School of Life (there’s another one on 3^rd December).

Nigel Warburton on Something to Think About

In a letter to today’s Guardian an impressive list of philosophers (and, intriguingly, several comedians) endorse the idea that we need more philosophy in our schools. Philosophy, they point out, is useful in developing reasoning and conceptual skills, and has spin-off effects on performance in other subjects. All true. But philosophy, as those signatories well know, is more than a sandpit in which to hone critical skills that have application elsewhere. It might be diplomatic to emphasize transferable techniques picked up from studying it, but we should also remember that philosophy has a distinctive subject matter and a rich literature.

Philosophy is the practice of thinking seriously about some of the deepest questions we can ask ourselves about the nature of reality and how we should live. We all have to reach conclusions about whether God exists, whether killing is always wrong, and about how we treat people who are less fortunate than us – either that, or accept other’s views unthinkingly. In that sense, almost any thinking person is a philosopher. We are fortunate in being able to draw upon more than 2,500 years of thought and debate in reaching our conclusions.

Reading and thinking about the great philosophers of the past can be a valuable experience in itself, and is rarely a visit to a museum of defunct ideas. René Descartes put it well: ‘To read good books is like having a conversation with the most eminent minds of past centuries, and moreover, a studied conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.’ (from his Discourse on Method). In this conversation disagreement is often more stimulating than agreement.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could openly endorse the value of engaging with the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Mill, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and co. rather than have to justify philosophy’s inclusion in the curriculum solely on the grounds that it sharpens the tools of thought. We need something to think about as well as something to think with.

Nigel Warburton’s latest book 'A Little History of Philosophy' has just been published by Yale University Press and was reviewed by Julian Baggini in The Observer. 

Rachel Heller and Amir Levine on Attachment Styles

How would you react to the following scenarios?

• You call your date/partner and after the first ring, you're transferred to voice mail.

Do you barely notice or do you assume s/he is purposely ignoring you?

• You're sitting in an experiment room and suddenly you notice smoke seeping out of the computer? 

Do you assume everything's under control or do you immediately alert those around you to  the imminent danger?

• Your spouse buys you your favorite brand of coffee on the way home from work.

Do you feel gratitude or are you more likely to take this gesture for granted?

What all these scenarios have in common is that your response is likely to vary depending on your attachment style. 

Attachment styles were first discovered by Mary Ainsworth in the context of the infant-parent bond.   She devised an experiment by which she observed children playing in a room with their mothers.  The infant's response to a series of separations/reunions from their mother determined their attachment style. 

Infants with a secure attachment style were able to use their mother as a secure base from which to explore the environment and derive comfort in times of stress. Anxious infants were too preoccupied with the mother's whereabouts to be easily soothed and Avoidant infants were too seemingly indifferent toward her to use her as a secure base.

A couple of decades later, researchers Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, both then from the University of Denver, set out to discover whether these three styles of relating in infancy continued into adulthood.  Their groundbreaking study confirmed that adults too fall into three attachment styles that influence the way they interact with their romantic partners:

• Secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving

• Anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back

• Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness.

Every person, whether he or she just started dating or has been married 40 years, falls into one of these categories (or more rarely into a combination of the latter two). Just over 50% are estimated to be secure, around 25% are avoidant and 20% are anxious.  The remaining 3-5% fall into the mixed anxious-avoidant category. 

During the past two decades since Hazan & Shaver's seminal paper, hundreds of scientific studies in a wide range of countries have carefully delineated the ways in which adult behave in romantic ties.  Understanding these styles is an easy and reliable way to understand and predict people's behaviour in romantic situations.

One of the most fascinating aspects of attachment research is the discovery that people with different attachment styles perceive situations in different and often opposing manners: They pay attention to different aspects of situations, they interpret them differently; even their brain activity is often remarkably different.

Gaining insight into adult attachment styles is akin to a having a road map to romantic behavior, not only others' but also your own.

And in case you were wondering:

If you interpret the transfer to voicemail as a rejection, you may well be anxious

If you alert others to the smoke hazard, it's likely you're anxious or avoidant but not secure

If you're unimpressed by your partner's coffee gift, it's more likely you're avoidant.

[Of course, in reality, no one criterion determines your attachment style but rather a combination of factors.  To discover your attachment style, go to: http://www.attachedthebook.com/compatibility-quiz/ 

 

Rachel Heller, M.A and Amir Levine, M.D are authors of 'Attached: Identify your attachment style and find your perfect match' (Published by Rodale). Visit www.attachedthebook.com

We All Need Words go Jackanory in our bibliotherapist’s chair

Dear Bibliotherapist,

Bam! Just like that, the summer holidays are upon us. Six loooong weeks of paddling pools or rainy days on rotation. Story time crops up more often in the summer nine-to-five, so which picture books are at the top of your list?

 

Dear Audio Book (as your kids see you),

Yours is a common ailment. Luckily, We All Need Words are obsessed with kids’ books and they’ve rustled up this picture-book prescription just for you. The dosage? Again. And again.

TO ANSWER LITTLE ONES' BIG QUESTIONS:

The Lost Thing

“So you want to hear a story?” It’s just an ordinary day in suburbia when the little boy finds the lost thing. Where did it come from? Where will it go? What does it mean to belong? What’s happiness, anyway? This story mixes the surreal and the everyday to ask - not answer - some of life’s big questions. The answers are up to you… by Shaun Tan

 

The Iron Giant by Ted Hughes, illustrated by Laura Carlin
“Where did he come from? Nobody knows.” This is a new version of Ted Hughes’ classic with brilliant illustrations. It tackles belonging (again), fear, war and, eventually, peace. Good to give Dr Who fans their first taste of science fiction.

TO REMEMDY FEARS:

Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears by Emily Gravett
Whatever your children are afraid of, Little Mouse can top it. Sciaphobia (fear of shadows), ablutophobia (fear of bathing) and even panophobia (fear of everything), he’s one fretful, scaredy-mouse. Part story, part therapy (“everyone is scared of something”) and part diary for kids to write, doodle and record the things that scare them. 

The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark by Jill Tomlinson
“I don’t want to be a night bird…I want to be a day bird.” Plop is a little owl who hates the dark. Over seven chapters he learns that the dark is exciting, (you can’t have fireworks without it), wonderful, beautiful and kind. An oldie (it was first published in 1968), but a goodie. Especially for kids who insist you leave the light on.

TO BREAK THE HABITS OF A LITTLE LIFETIME:

The Boy Who Hated Toothbrushes by Zehra Hicks
First off, we should point out that we know this author and we wrote the biog on her website… Billy will do anything to get out of cleaning his teeth. Until the horrified tooth fairy sends him a toothsparkler and things get interesting (and his teeth get cleaner). Good for adding a bit of magic to the daily toothbrush tussle.

The World Champion of Staying Awake by Sean Taylor, illustrated by Jimmy Liao
Stella’s toys are wiiiiiide awake. So she invents adventures to cure their insomnia (and fingers crossed, insomnia everywhere). A story where kids step into their parents’ shoes – you never know, it might prompt some empathy.

TO BRING BRECHT TO BABIES:

Brecht demolished that fourth wall, and these books have a go too. Ok, we exaggerate. But these stories play with the idea of what a book is.

Limelight Larry by Leigh Hodgkinson
Meet Larry, a peacock with more attitude than most. He wants to be the star of these empty pages, but other animals keep appearing to spoil his fun. A cautionary tale for any prima donnas in the making…

There Are No Cats In This Book by Viviane Schwarz
Tiny, Moonpie and André are three cats who are desperate to get out of this book to see the world. They push, they jump and they ask for your help. Perfect with its sister book, There Are Cats in This Book (they’re very friendly and they want to play).

TO GET UP TO SPEED WITH WHERE BOOKS ARE GOING NEXT:

If your kids are kissing goodbye to a good old-fashioned book in favour of the computer, fear not. Here’s a book that’s an app, and one that most definitely isn’t.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore by Moonbot Studios
An app that lets you play the piano, flick pages, change the colour of the sky, read books-within-books and screams: PLEASE TOUCH to small hands… Created by a designer who used to work at Pixar, this ‘book’ will get kids used to the idea of interactive tales in a jiffy.

It’s A Book! by Lane Smith
It doesn’t scroll. It doesn’t have a plug. It doesn’t need a password. IT’S A BOOK, silly. A media-savvy donkey questions an old-school monkey about the relic that is the book. (We have a sneaky feeling that this book is actually best for parents who are surgically attached to their Blackberry.)

 

We All Need Words run the Words For Life weekend workshop at The School of Life and children’s books crop up in one of their lessons. Join them next term, in October or December. Click here for further details.

Valentine's Day Reading Prescription

As February 14^th looms ever nearer, we are compelled to ponder love in all its forms. The love of beasts is a subject we bibliotherapists feel doesn’t get enough press.  This Valentine’s Day, find an animal to love.  As George Eliot said, ‘animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms'.

Whether it’s the guppies in your fish tank, the next-door neighbour’s cat, or the most exotic monkey in the zoo, find a way to tell the beast you love it. Here are a few writers who have shared their love of animals with the world.

 

The book that got me panting down this track was Flush by Virginia Woolf. This is a canine classic that describes the companion of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a spaniel of the highest pedigree. Woolf tells the tale through the dog’s eyes, from his arrival at his mistress’s house, to her slow romance with Browning, leading to their marriage and move to Florence. The narrative spans the dog’s lifetime, offering social commentary on the refined Bloomsbury existence of the pampered pooch, as well as his kidnap and grim experiences in the East End. Woolf uses Flush as her window on the confusing world of human romance, and we gain intriguing insights into the Barret Browning households. Love between dog and human is undisputed, and the deep romance between the humans is also explored with great humour and pleasure.

 

A more visceral approach to the canine crush is Melvyn Burgess’s Lady: My Life as a Bitch. This describes the confusion that follows when a sexually active and rowdy teenage girl is magically transformed into a dog. She experiences all the joy of a dog’s life, from scrounging and stealing food, to finding herself on heat. Her mongrel brain then has to deal with dilemmas over whether it is better to be human or mutt. Burgess explores the horrors of adolescent morality and desire through the device of doggy daring do. It’s a pacey read, gritty and darkly amusing.

A classic of the dog-loving genre is Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. Just after winning the Nobel Prize for literature, Steinbeck felt the call of the road, and set off ‘in search of America’ with his large, ancient French poodle. This novel provides a great insight into the America of the sixties, and the presence of Charley in the books is a gentle, uncomplicated presence. Steinbeck is intensely critical of the America he finds, and at times it is an angry polemic about he small mindedness he encounters, but the book is ultimately life, and poodle embracing.

Let’s not stick entirely to the canine companion. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is a classic to be read at least once every decade of your life. This year, read it thinking about the love the old man has for the marlin. The marlin is as big a character in the novel as the old man, and the pursuer’s respect for the fish that he insists on catching is as immense as his love for nature and life. This is a true love story, of the love of the old man for his own nature as a human, and his love for the beast that he must slay.

Gerald Durrell is a man who had a realistic relationship with animals. In his words, ‘Animals generally return the love you lavish on them by a swift bite in passing — not unlike friends and wives’.  He loved animals with a vast respect, and played a vital role in the spreading of knowledge about the barbaric practices in zoos of his time, and the need to conserve endangered species. His book My Family and Other Animals, set in Corfu, is the most glorious revel in the joy of natural life, enough to inspire you to keep creatures in all your nooks and crannies, or take off to untamed nature to begin your own romance with Beasts and Beasties.

 

Talking of Beasts and Beasties, Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White is a perfect book to give to your children to encourage their love of arachnids and porcine playmates. It will encourage them to question our relationship with animals while shedding new light on the marvels of nature – can a spider be beautiful? Even an arachnophobe like me is forced to feel the love of the eight-legged spinner when I re-read this wonderful book.

Finally, for a more risqué exploration of the love of beasts, read The Woman and The Ape by Peter Hoeg. I love it for its descriptions of the ape passing through the streets of London, unnoticed; the ape knows how to hide, but he also uses our mental blindness to his advantage – we don’t expect to see him, so we don’t. More than any of the others, this book puts you in touch with your inner beast.

This reading prescription has been tailored for you by The School of Life's bibliotherapists.  For more information about individual bibliotherapy consultations please visit us here.

Bibliotherapy for Idle Parents

After Tom Hodgkinson’s recent How to be an Idle Parent event at The School of Life last week, our kids' bibliotherapist Charlotte Raby caught up with him to talk about idle parenting and books.

 

How can the idle parent make the most of story time, avoiding tedious tales, and if possible winning fruitful hours for yourself while children entertain themselves?

 

 

Tom reminded us that stories must grab your children, otherwise it’s a waste of time putting your all in; using funny voices and fabulous expression. His moment of enlightenment was when he saw how his children sat transfixed, wide eyed and still, through each chapter of ‘Treasure Island’  (full of death and killing) after fruitless sessions of ploughing through ‘Watership Down’ to their wriggles and interruptions, even though he gave the text the whole package! Indeed Tom and I both agreed that casting aside vapid horrors such as the ‘Magic Kitten’ and ‘Rainbow Fairy’ collections, and instead choosing books you can bear and more importantly enjoy is essential to the Idle Parent’s reading aloud experience.

 

For younger children Tom suggests engaging with the wonder of nonsense poetry such as ‘The Jumblies’ by Edward Lear, illustrated by Ian Beck, as well as ‘The Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll, which has eerie illustrations by Joel Stewart. These well-composed poems could earn you further idle hours as your offspring begin to learn them by heart and entertain each other in dramatic renditions.  For even the youngest child it is possible to coax utter absorption by sharing such classics as ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ by Maurice Sendak, and Tom says he finds the intricately detailed interiors of Alan Alberg’s ‘Each Peach Pear Plum’ and ‘Peepo’ completely fascinating observations of the minutiae of life.

 

Tom and I agreed that Enid Blyton deserves a second chance; in terms of reading aloud it’s a winner. For girls there are the wonderful school series ‘Malory Towers’ and ‘The Twins at St Clares’ full of tales of horrid children being redeemed by sport, japes and hard graft, as well as the co-ed ‘The Naughtiest Girl’ stories, which deal with perennial school issues such as friendship, bullying and pet-care! Whether you give Enid a go for a hit of nostalgia from your reading past or are purely curious Tom recommends the ‘Adventure Series’ that features four children their pet monkey and hilarious cockatoo, Kiki, whose every utterance had Tom’s children in stitches. I would also recommend graphic novels for any child that finds reading a trial, especially Neil Gaiman’s ‘Coraline’ .Tom says his eldest aged 8, spends hours of absorption reading ‘Tin Tin’ and ‘Asterix’ as well as the weekly comic The DFC, which has an amazing range of illustrative styles from Manga to ‘Ren and Stimpyesque’ strips, with forceful, imaginative story lines.

 

Tom ended our idle chat with a thought about the importance of creating our own stories, and having, as Philip Pullman suggests, a stock of oral stories that can be pulled out when needed. Tom told me about a family camping experience, where deprived of light to read, he had to make up a story to entertain his restless clan. He was amazed at how much they enjoyed his hastily assembled narrative and although he was not entirely at ease in the mantle of the storyteller he felt that in terms of reward and child-parent appreciation it was one of his best storytimes.

 

To find out more about bibliotherapy for kids and parents click here.

Charles Fernyhough on our internal dialogues

We are fans of thinking, here at The School of Life. There’s nothing we like more than to take the phone off the hook, switch off the computer and come over all pensive. We find we can think anywhere: walking down Marchmont Street, lazing in the bath or crushed together with fellow thinkers on the Piccadilly Line. There’s nothing you need for a good muse other than to be conscious, not too intoxicated, nor in immediate mortal peril. Thinking is an eminently versatile pastime.
 
But what is it, exactly? Which bits of your mental life does the term ‘thinking’ usefully describe? We have certain ideas about what this under-examined activity involves. When know when we are doing it, for example, and we can always report (presumably accurately) on what we are thinking about. Above all, thinking seems inextricably linked to language. Imagery, music and memory play their parts, but thinking is nothing so much as a conversation with oneself.
 
I would argue that thinking comes to have the qualities that it does because of the particular story of its emergence in childhood. Here, the best theory around is that of the Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky. Vygotsky argued that the thinking we do as adults bears traces of its emergence from social interactions early in life. Our dialogue with the self is an internalised version of the dialogues we had with other people, back when we were small.

To my mind, this raises some fascinating questions about the phenomenology of thinking. If thinking is an internalised dialogue, it should have a lot in common with social dialogues. How are we to find out? For a long time it was assumed that describing the emotional, perceptual and cognitive minutiae of conscious experience was best left to novelists and poets; it could not be the business of replicable, verifiable scientific inquiry. That has changed, though, not least because of the rise of phenomenological approaches to cognitive science (see Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi’s recent book on the topic, for example). Psychologists and philosophers are now asking questions about the subjectivity of consciousness that would have raised jeers a decade or two ago. This is a research programme we can all get involved with. What are your thoughts like? Are you a word-thinker or an image-thinker? Or would you say that your thoughts happen in some non-symbolic medium, a pure language of thought?
 
I will be saying more on this in my New Generation Thinkers essay on Radio 3 today. There is much more on the developmental stuff in my book The Baby in the Mirror and its associated blog, The Ladybird Papers. Start ruffling those brows now.

Charles Fernyhough was involved in developing The School of Life’s family course which will run on 15 and 16 November. Find out more HERE.
 
Charles discussed children’s thinking on Radio 3 at 11pm on Wednesday 5th November. You can listen again HERE. He is The School of Life's expert on childhood.