Seth’s blog

My recent experience suggests that if I stand on one foot until it becomes slightly difficult about four times/day I will sleep much better. Two days ago I measured how long those four bouts of one-foot standing actually were: 6.2 (left foot), 4.3 (right), 4.8 (left), and 5.2 (right) minutes. The median is 5.0 minutes. When I started doing this, about two weeks ago, each bout was about 2 minutes.

It doesn’t seem to matter when I do them. Now I do two in the morning and two in the evening. Fits perfectly with a subway commute. You’ll want to be forced to stand.

In the evening I have a pleasant sense of anticipation: I will fall asleep and wake up feeling really good. I have never before felt this way. I have slept this well before, when I stood 9 or 10 hours/day. The sheer difficulty and all-consumingness of doing that, I now realize, got in the way of anticipating the benefits.

Something else curious is that one-foot standing leaves no mark — I can’t tell at 3 pm how many bouts I’ve done so far just by noticing how I feel. Unlike water or calorie consumption: If I don’t drink anything I’ll get thirsty. If I don’t eat anything I’ll get hungry. But if I don’t get enough of this particular byproduct of exercise I’ll never notice.

Few books, including Lolita (”highbrow pornography”), get great reviews in the New York Times. One that did is Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. According to Nicholson Baker, the reviewer, “Shea has walked the wildwood of our gnarled, ancient speech and returned singing incomprehensible sounds in a language that turns out to be our own.” Someday — 20 years from now? — every review in the Times archives will be retrospectively assigned an Entertainment-Weekly-style grade by computer analysis and Baker’s review will be determined to have given an A to Shea’s book. I interviewed Shea about the experience.

Few of us will ever get such a positive review in the NY Times, so we must live vicariously. What were the effects on you of Baker’s review?

I have a sneaking suspicion that he liked the book more than I did, which is fine by me.  I’m an enormous fan of both his writing and his perspective on things, and there is no one who I would rather have had read it.  It did not change my feeling on who I am or what might lie in store for me in the future, but it did make me feel deeply and improbably happy.

What were the effects on your editor and publisher?

My editor [Marion Lizzi, who also edited The Shangri-La Diet] says she is quite happy with it as well, and I see no reason to disbelieve her.

What was the effect on sales?

I don’t know what the exact figures were, although I understand that they were significantly higher after the review came out.  I understand that the publisher is preparing another printing, which I suppose is to be credited at least somewhat to the effects of the review.

Did any friends/family contact you about the review?

Some of them did call or write - but both my family and my circle of friends are fairly small, so there was not so much hullabaloo.

How long did it take for the effect of the review to wear off?

It hasn’t worn off in some ways - I’m still delighted that Baker enjoyed reading the book.  However, in some other ways I’d say as soon as I began to seriously think about writing the next book that the incipient terror of that process nudged the residual celebratory feelings of the review somewhat to the side.

Earlier interview with Shea.

I got this in a Japanese supermarket:

Translation:

How to make soup curry:

Ingredients-
1 packet of soup mix
1 packet of flavorful oil
1 packet of spicy flavoring
80g (3 oz.) of chicken thigh meat cut into bite sized pieces
1/4 medium sized carrot
1/2 medium sized potato (cut in half)
400ml water

1. Boil water in a small pan.  Add chicken, potato, and carrot, cook until vegetables become soft, about 20 minutes on med-low heat.
2. Turn off the heat, add the soup mix and mix thoroughly, turn the heat back on and cook a little longer until the flavor penetrates the meat and vegetables.
3. Pour the flavorful oil onto a plate and pour the finished curry on top.
4. Add a desired amount of the spice flavoring.

-the spice flavoring is fairly spicy, so please use caution when adding
-please cook the chicken thoroughly before adding the soup mix
-to make a double portion, double the meat and vegetables, and increase water to 700ml.
-the black things in the soup are basil

To make a dish like the picture on the box: Add sauteed japanese eggplant, shimeji mushrooms, green peppers, and hard boiled egg to the dish. Use boned chicken meat.

How to eat: Using a spoon, scoop rice and add a small amount of curry to the spoon.  Please keep the curry and rice in separate dishes to prevent the rice from getting soggy.

Caution: Please use the entire contents of the packets after opening.  Cannot be preserved for later use.

I have bolded the interesting parts: 1. The use of please. 2. The explanation (”the spice flavoring is fairly spicy”). You won’t find them in the instructions on most American products. I became aware of this aspect of Japanese life when I read T. R. Reid’s wonderful book Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us about Living in the West, which was based on six years Reid spent in Japan as a correspondent for the Washington Post. At one point Reid quoted from a sign in a park. The sign had a list of prohibitions: No littering, no music, and so on. But instead of saying, as an American sign would, “no littering”, the sign said something like: “So that others can enjoy the beauty of the park, please put your litter in the proper receptacle.”

A few years ago I taught a class called Psychology and the Real World in which students did some sort of off-campus work of their choosing. (An example of my teaching philosophy.) One student volunteered in a hospital. One day he told a story about being treated rudely by a nurse. I said, yeah, we live in a pretty rude culture. Japan is different, I said, and told the class about Reid’s Japanese park signs.

My student was impressed. He had a part-time job monitoring parking in front of a San Francisco hotel. People would often try to park in an area that needed to be kept clear and it was his job to get them to move. His method — pre-Reid — had been to go over to the offending car and say “sorry, you can’t park here.” Post-Reid, he was elaborately polite: “Please forgive me for disturbing you, but we need to keep this area clear so that taxis can pick up and drop off passengers. I’m sorry for inconveniencing you, but would you be kind enough to move your car?” Something like that. Pre-Reid, about half the time the driver would argue or cause some sort of difficulty. Post-Reid, there were no problems.

Thanks to Pearl Alexander.

In an editorial about the effect of vitamin-mineral supplements in the prestigious American Journal of Clnicial Nutrition, the author, Donald McCormick, a professor of nutrition at Emory University, writes:

This study is a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials that were previously reported. Of 2311 trials identified, only 16 met the inclusion criteria.

That’s throwing away a lot of data! Maybe, just maybe, something could be learned from other 2295 randomized controlled trials?

Evidence snobs.

I’ve continued to sleep extremely well. I’m sure there’s something to this. I’m almost sure it’s because of the one-legged standing.

Here are some technical details. I usually do four bouts of one-legged standing, two in the morning and two later. During each bout I stand on one leg, pulling my other leg up behind me. Sometimes I touch something to balance myself. Usually I watch or read something at the same time. Each bout lasts until it’s hard to continue — until it becomes slightly painful. At first the bouts lasted about two minutes, now they last about four minutes. I enjoy it more when I time it with a stopwatch.

I haven’t yet systematically varied the number of bouts but I suspect one is too few to get the full effect and four is plenty. I’m still trying different ways of arranging them throughout the day. Doing all four at once is too tiring — it takes too long to recover. Maybe it’s best to do two whenever’s convenient during the day and then do two more in the evening when it’s okay to be tired.

Directory.