Moonwalking with the Tiger Mom

When I ran across a mention of Moonwalking with Einstein in an issue of the Atlantic I almost immediately forgot tthe name of the book. Fortunately I also forgot I read the article and reread it several days later and so I was able to write down the name of the book.

Moonwalking with Einstein is part mnemonic history and tips and partly an account of the author’s attempt to improve his memory with those same techniques in an attempt to make a respectable showing at the US Memory Championship.

Those who are experts in a subject are more likely to remember details as they are more readily able to quickly ascertain what is important and what is irrelevant. Having a vast bank of information that you can sort through allows you to more readily capture the pertinent information. Or as the author puts it, having a great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.

One of the techniques practiced by mnemonists is the "memory palace". The memory palace technique combines spatial memory which is very good in humans – it’s what keeps you from pitching into the walls and falling off curbs. The memory palace uses a combination of images and spaces to secure memories. You place an image that you associate with the word (the bawdier the better) in a place that you are familiar with, such as your house. Then when you need to recall the information you simply “walk” yourself through the house.

A different sort of memory palace is found in David Foster Wallace’s short story, Backbone, where a young boy becomes determined to press his lips to “every last micrometer of his own individual body.” The boy is successful at first. His body becomes both more real and less real at the same time. Once he has reached a spot, he documents it on a four-faced chart. He is moving his knowledge, his memory of self to an external source – he now only exists as locations on a chart. He is searching for a way to access all of himself.

And maybe this is also what Moonwalking is talking about – that these days with all of our options for externalizing our memories – flash drives, cameras, blogs, etc., that we are forgetting a fundamental part of what it means to be human – and that we are in essence like the little boy in David Foster Wallace’s story – able to recall any moment at the press of a button, but unable to say what it means, furiously darkening in our outlines but forgetting what it is we are to do with the interiors.

Foer reminds readers that memory once served not merely as a parlor trick, but also as a means for shaping one’s character as well as being the essence of expertise. The place of academic memorization in a way sums up the firestorm over Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom, Amy Chua’s memoir about trying to (and at least partially succeeding) in imposing her strict Chinese ideals on her daughters, requiring them to forgo sleepovers and television in favor of the rote memorization that she says is undervalued in America. The roughly nine thousand comments that the article generated indicate that perhaps the rest of the US in not all in agreement with her.

Caitlin Flanagan’s article in the Atlantic, The Ivy Delusion, identifies the root cause of the division that Amy Chua’s book is about recognizing that “life is a series of choices, each with its own rewards and consequences. …[i]t’s an unwelcome reminder…that the world really doesn’t like before us like a land of dreams. At best---the very best—it can only offer us choices between two good things, and as we grasp at one, we lose the other forever.”

The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven
Ursula K. Le Guin

I really wanted to like this book better than I did. I developed somewhat of a crush on James Triptree Jr./Alice Sheldon after reading her biography and the story collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. And it is through Triptree/Sheldon that I came to read Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven.

I don’t ordinarily read science fiction, so maybe it’s just that I don’t have enough experience in the genre to appreciate it, but it seemed, well, even for 1971, a bit stale. George Orr (even I have read enough science fiction to get this connection) is a man whose dreams have the ability to change reality. Not just the present reality, but everyone’s memory of the past as well. The tricky things about dreams though, is that they are not controlled by your conscious mind, but rather it’s drunken, unpredictable, oh-no-he-didn’t, close cousin, the subconscious. George becomes troubled by the effects of his dreams and after overdosing on a combination of uppers and downers, finds himself in the office of Dr. Haber, under Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment.

Dr. Haber is able to witness the changing of reality as he hooks George up to his “baby”-- a dream augmentor that gives Dr. Haber the ability to induce dream sleep, or d-state, as it is called,. During subsequent sessions Dr. Haber attempts to “better” the world by suggesting ideas to George while he is under hypnosis and hooked up to the augmentor. George tends to dream big. He isn’t dreaming that he forgot his pants and is waiting for the bus, or registered for a class that he never knew about until finals. Instead, it is large scale changes – aliens, volcanoes and environmental catastrophes. As George explains to Dr. Haber:

“I guess I can’t, or my subconscious can’t, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you’re trying to use, not my rational mind. …You’re trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a toll that isn’t suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?”

Realizing what the good bad doctor is up to, George seeks the counsel of a lawyer, Heather LaLeche, a female character that never seems to come to life. The most relevant trait she seems to have, is that she has a purse with a large brass snap that she snaps loudly. And if you think dating is difficult in the ordinary world, just try it when you have multiple versions of your past.

I found George himself not to be very likeable. I think he is supposed to be the embodiment of zen-ness , an example of embracing what is. He lectures Haber on how he shouldn’t try and change things, that to do so is wrong. But, of course, he himself is actually trying to change how things are, i.e. the “effective” dreaming.

“I don’t know. Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine , where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”

“This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.”


In Lathe, the world seems to be divided not into black licorice lovers and black licorice haters, as I would divide up the world, but into dreamers and changers. It’s clear what happens when a dreamer and a changer meet up, the changer becomes frustrated because you can only change something that has a solid definition of what it is. A dreamer never “is” something. And in a way, this book is like that, content to drift, to be, without fulling pulling in the reader.