The ANNOTICO Report

The "Slow Food" movement, dedicated to preserving traditional foods and
building on the back-to-the-land ethos of the sixties, began to emerge in
Italy almost two decades ago. Food writer Carlo Petrini was enraged by the
arrival of a McDonald's right beside Rome's famed Spanish Steps in 1986. He
issued a manifesto against "the universal folly of Fast Life -- our defence
should begin at the table with Slow Food." Slow food now claims 83,000
members in 50 nations.

Slow food has been joined by "Slow Cities" (movements to keep residences,
workplaces and shops within reasonable proximity), slow medicine (a
reaction against technological and drug-centred healing that is open to
traditional medical philosophies), and slow leisure (everything from
knitting to literally doing nothing).

Nothing has brought more attention, however, or more blushing questions,
than "Slow Sex". For all their sex-saturated culture, modern Westerners
spend very little time at it. Decent sex, like decent food, seems to be
among time sickness's earliest victims: a large-scale 1994 study found
Americans devoted a sad 30 minutes a week to making love. Too much work and
busy schedules clearly act as cold showers. The "official" slow sex
movement is as Italian as slow food (indeed, a perfect example of how one
slow movement cross-fertilizes another). Alberto Vitale, a marketing
consultant from the same Italian town, Bra, where slow food was launched,
established slow sex in 2002. He now runs a website (www.slowsex.it) and
gives talks in local social clubs about the joys of "erotic deceleration"
-- essentially extended foreplay.

Are such "slow" movements really necessary??

Consider: It took Liszt almost an hour to play Beethoven's Hammerklavier
Sonata, op. 106; today, pianists rattle through it in 35 to 40 minutes.

Uwe Kliemt played Mozart's Sonata in C Major, KV 279, in a shade over 22
minutes; Barenboim's is finished in 14.

It's not just the classics that have accelerated. In pop music,the 20th
century "was all about boosting the beat," from ragtime through rock 'n'
roll to techno. In 1976, a book titled How to Make a Hit Record advised
wannabe pop stars that 120 beats a minute was optimum for a dance track; by
the 1990s, drum and bass music was humming along at 170 beats per minute.
Moby's 1992 single Thousand clocked in at a head-splitting 1,000 beats a
minute.

The frenzied pace of modernity has us boiling classic fairy tales down to
One-Minute Bedtime Stories!!!
Let's not spend too much time with the "rugrats" :(

What is the Price??
A recent Canadian poll shows that overwork causing job stress resulted in
greater absenteeism and even suicide
So why do we do it? Part of the reason is we want much of what it brings --
the income, the status, the social network, the feeling of self-worth.

How the once-speed-addicted Carl Honoré became the guru of the slow movement

McLean's, Canada
By Brian Bethune
July 30, 2005

Striding across busy thoroughfares in a city where absolutely no one obeys
traffic lights, or gliding over the ice in a dilapidated arena, Carl Honoré
doesn't seem any slower than his fellow Londoners. The transplanted
Canadian's home is as chaotic as any young family's, and he has trouble
finding his car keys for the drive to his weekly, late-night hockey
scrimmage. But a closer look turns up anomalies in the life of a busy
freelance journalist. There's no watch on Honoré's wrist. He no longer
works weekends or eats at his desk. And, even as play starts in an eagerly
anticipated soccer match on TV, he remains in an upstairs bedroom, reading
to his six-year-old son, Benjamin.

A nice touch, that, since it was a now-mythic encounter with a kids'
publishing phenomenon called One-Minute Bedtime Stories that prompted Carl
Honoré's road-to-Damascus conversion into the Apostle of Slow. "I just
dreaded the slow bedtime routine," Honoré recalls. "Just couldn't wait to
get on to the next thing I had to do -- supper, emails, whatever. When I
was in that lineup at the Rome airport five years ago and read that article
about boiling classic fairy tales down to 60-second sound bites, I thought,
eureka!" Then, a last, saving burst of rationality struck his time-obsessed
mind: "Have I gone completely insane?"

Honoré flew home in a thoughtful mood, weighing the benefits of speed
(Internet, jet travel, the wealth generated by turbo-charged capitalism)
and its costs (stress, family communication via fridge notes, the
environmental damage wreaked by turbo-charged capitalism). By the time he
landed, Honoré had a new mission: to find out if anyone was doing more than
complaining about the frenzied pace of modernity. And, if possible along
the way, find a cure for his own addiction to speed. The result is his book
In Praise of Slow (Vintage Canada) which, since appearing last year, has
spread its message across the world like a computer virus, becoming the de
facto link among the various slowness-advocacy groups he was among the
first to publicize.

There were rebellions against the fast track going on everywhere, Honoré
discovered. Researching them and, once In Praise of Slow was published,
talking them up at workshops and lectures, has occupied much of Honoré's
time ever since (Slow is now in 20 languages). In mid-July, he was a
featured speaker at the prestigious TED Global (Technology, Entertainment,
Design) conference in Oxford, sharing the podium with the likes of
Cambridge University biomedical pioneer Aubrey de Grey. Honoré hasn't
missed the irony of slowness having sped up his life. "People do ask me if
I'm a bit of a hypocrite. I answer, 'No, I'm a martyr to the cause.' Yes, I
am busier now than before I wrote Slow, but it doesn't feel like it."

Honoré, 37, and his wife, Miranda France, 38, a travel writer and literary
critic, still live in London with Benjamin and three-year-old Susannah, so
life on the surface has changed little. "But there's a clear before and
after. I control my travel now. On weekends we used to have things skedded;
now there's always one day open for spontaneity. For years I felt out of
control, getting through life rather than living it. I think lots of people
feel that way."

Honoré has collected an abundance of anecdotal and official information to
detail how "time sickness" has become a major malady of our time. He ticks
off, in no particular order: the growing tendency of employees (including a
quarter of Canadian workers) to not take their full vacation entitlement;
acquaintances who no longer read poetry because it yields its meaning too
slowly; the emergence of job stress as the leading cause of workplace
absenteeism in Britain; watching a father kick a soccer ball with his son,
all the while talking on his cellphone; the acceleration of pastimes that
should be unhurried by nature, with things like instant gardening and speed
dating.

It all adds up to far more than a problem for individuals. In her recent
book, No Time (Douglas & McIntyre), Ottawa writer and scholar Heather
Menzies points with alarm to what she calls the Attention Deficit Society.
Stressed individuals mean stressed institutions, Menzies warns, and a
consequent inability to come to terms with real societal problems. For his
part, Honoré consulted various thinkers not only on why our socio-economic
situation pushes an ever-faster pace at us, but also on why we love speed.
There's the ecstasy of it, of course, the way moving very quickly triggers
the brain's release of two chemicals -- epinephrine and norepinephrine --
that sex also prompts. And then there's the transcendence speed provides.
Honoré writes how Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell told him that speed is
a first-class distraction from the knowledge of our own mortality. Only
then did the journalist start to look for balanced responses. What he
wanted was a prescription for a life lived at what musicians call the tempo
giusto, the right speed.

Slow food, one of the first reactions against high-speed life, attracted
Honoré's attention from the beginning. As a teenager in Edmonton, the son
of a doctor from Mauritius and his Scots-born wife, Honoré had always found
the family's evening meal "the big human moment of the day." It's one he
and Miranda had let slide in London. "Before having kids we sometimes ate
take-away in front of the TV. We never do that now. We always cook -- just
doing that melts stress -- and I find I taste my food more and get more
pleasure from my family."

IN FACT, a slow food movement, dedicated to preserving traditional foods
and building on the back-to-the-land ethos of the sixties, began to emerge
in Italy almost two decades ago. Food writer Carlo Petrini was enraged by
the arrival of a McDonald's right beside Rome's famed Spanish Steps in
1986. He issued a manifesto against "the universal folly of Fast Life --
our defence should begin at the table with Slow Food." Slow food now claims
83,000 members in 50 nations. The Italian branch boasts of having saved 130
"dying delicacies," from Ligurian potatoes to a breed of Sienese wild boar.
In 1999, the movement gathered half a million signatures in a successful
campaign to convince the Italian government to exempt traditional
cheesemakers from modern industrial hygiene standards. Its biannual food
fest, Salone del Gusto, attracts 500 artisanal producers of everything from
hams to fruits -- and more than 125,000 visitors.

That Italians should revolt in favour of a gastronomic dolce vita is hardly
surprising, but even in North America the movement has made strides. U.S.
farmers are leading a successful campaign to maintain the turkey breeds
that ruled local Thanksgiving markets before the rise of factory farms. In
Toronto, chef Jeff Crump, founder of Slow Food Ontario, leads groups of
children in a dual-track cooking class: they make Kraft Dinner and then a
slow version of macaroni and cheese. The taste test is a foregone
conclusion; Crump hopes the kids will take the lesson to heart. Slow food,
the movement argues, is not just for well-heeled epicures -- local produce
is often less pricey than imports, and meals made from scratch are usually
cheaper than prepared versions.

Slow food has been joined by slow cities (movements to keep residences,
workplaces and shops within reasonable proximity), slow medicine (a
reaction against technological and drug-centred healing that is open to
traditional medical philosophies), and slow leisure (everything from
knitting to literally doing nothing).

Honoré has even attended a Speed Awareness Program for British drivers, a
go-slow concept that he viewed with as much interest as he did slow food.
But from the opposite perspective. Once an inveterate speeder (he
sheepishly admits to getting a ticket in Italy while on the way to his
first slow food meal), Honoré is reluctant to say he's now fully cured:
"It's like alcoholism, it's never really gone from you." But the awareness
program, designed as an alternative to paying a fine for ticketed drivers,
was a huge eye-opener for him, demonstrating that speeding on short trips
does almost nothing for a driver but add to his stress levels -- a
three-kilometre drive at 130 km/h saves only 52 seconds over the same trip
at 80 km/h. Honoré thinks he will always have to work at it, but at least,
he says, "my speedaholism is tamed; I can't remember the last time my wife
had to tell me to slow down."

The journalist is less sure that the tempo giusto musical movement, one of
the more intriguing anti-speed rebellions he encountered, has a future.
Tempo giusto claims that -- in accord with our lust for speed -- we have
over the past two centuries gradually increased the tempo at which we play
classical music, at an unknown cost to composers' original intentions. In
1876, Franz Liszt commented in a letter that it took him "almost an hour"
to play Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata, op. 106; today, pianists rattle
through it in 35 to 40 minutes. Honoré listened to Uwe Kliemt, a German
tempo giusto adherent, play Mozart's Sonata in C Major, KV 279, a work
Honoré knew well from a recording by Daniel Barenboim. It seemed odd at
first, but soon began to sound richer, more textured and melodious.
Kliemt's version ran a shade over 22 minutes; Barenboim's is finished in
14. But tempo giusto can expect little help from a classical establishment
with backlists to sell, nor from a public that has come to expect virtuoso,
mainly uptempo, performances.

It's not just the classics that have accelerated. In pop music, Honoré
points out, the 20th century "was all about boosting the beat," from
ragtime through rock 'n' roll to techno. In 1976, a book titled How to Make
a Hit Record advised wannabe pop stars that 120 beats a minute was optimum
for a dance track; by the 1990s, drum and bass music was humming along at
170 beats per minute. Moby's 1992 single Thousand clocked in at a
head-splitting 1,000 beats a minute.

Nothing has brought Honoré more attention, however, or more blushing
questions, than slow sex. For all their sex-saturated culture, modern
Westerners spend very little time at it. Decent sex, like decent food,
seems to be among time sickness's earliest victims: a large-scale 1994
study found Americans devoted a sad 30 minutes a week to making love. Too
much work and busy schedules clearly act as cold showers. The "official"
slow sex movement is as Italian as slow food (indeed, a perfect example of
how one slow movement cross-fertilizes another). Alberto Vitale, a
marketing consultant from the same Italian town, Bra, where slow food was
launched, established slow sex in 2002. He now runs a website
(www.slowsex.it) and gives talks in local social clubs about the joys of
"erotic deceleration" -- essentially extended foreplay.

Every day, Honoré reports, 12,000 people navigate through the Internet's
cascade of porn sites to reach www.tantra.com, home site for the burgeoning
discipline that promises to channel sexual energy not only into finer,
better sex, but also into a more perfect spiritual union with your partner.
Despite the awful warning example of pop star Sting -- who has yet to live
down his public ravings a decade ago about his tantric sex life -- Honoré
was gamely determined to investigate and write about it. He and Miranda
attended a workshop held in an old warehouse in North London, along with a
cross-section of reassuringly normal Londoners.

Honoré was pleasantly impressed with all of it: the long period spent
blindfolded, exploring his wife's hands, the sensory session with tastes
and sounds, even the exercises designed to strengthen the pubococcygeus,
the muscle running from the pubic bone to the tailbone that in tantric sex
is the key to more intense orgasms. All that was easy enough to write
about. Talking about his tantric experience, in terms of personal payoff,
is naturally a lot harder. "People do ask, in a giggly way, but they do
ask." The normally voluble Honoré pauses a moment while he ponders just how
much of his -- and more importantly, Miranda's -- private life he's
prepared to martyr to the cause. "We're not tantric, but we do have a
slower beat now. Maybe that's true for everyone who slows down in
everything else -- sex takes care of itself."

FOR SLOWNESS advocates of all stripes, the enemy or, as Honoré politely
phrases it, "the principal opponent," is "the corporate world and its ideas
of how work must be." We can try to drive slower, to avoid eating on the
run or sending emails at midnight -- we can even aim for making love seven
hours at a stretch à la Sting -- but if our economic structures do not
permit that approach to life, how will it happen? Especially, Honoré notes,
if we internalize the demands of the workplace, and accept that it has
priority over other aspects of our lives.

We seem to have done just that. Forty years ago, government bodies worried
about how we'd cope with the abundant leisure time experts saw on the
horizon. A U.S. Senate subcommittee even predicted a 14-hour work week by
2000; in 2005, a 14-hour workday is more likely. One in four Canadians now
racks up more than 50 hours a week. And that doesn't count commuting hours.
Devices from laptops to cellphones that were supposed to free us by
expanding our horizons, actually enchain us. If your office can phone you
in the middle of a wilderness canoe trip, sooner or later it will.

But working hard is not the same as working smart. According to the
Geneva-based International Labour Organization, French workers are more
productive than Americans, even though the latter work an average of 350
hours more a year. Overwork is associated with stress, absenteeism and even
suicide -- Honoré cites a recent Canadian poll in which 15 per cent of the
respondents said job stress had caused thoughts of suicide. So why do we do
it? Part of the reason is we want much of what it brings -- the income, the
status, the social network, the feeling of self-worth. That alone can
seduce many into workaholism, which increases the intensity of those good
feelings, argues Menzies in No Time. But it's also true, as one workaholic
she interviews says, that many people have found it prudent to make
themselves as indispensible as they can in an age of downsizing, as a hedge
against being laid off.

The modern workplace contains more work to be done than in years past,
fewer bodies to do it, and very little trust. "The fear factor is huge,"
notes Honoré, who also suggests that misery loves company. "American
journalists in Europe focus on work life to the exclusion of anything else,
reacting with glee to any problems with the French 35-hour week, for
example. They can't seem to bear the idea that Europeans work less but
still have a high standard of living -- and a higher quality of life."

Honoré, ever the optimist, sees signs of hope in the sort of working
arrangements some corporate employees have managed to carve out for
themselves. He cites Karen Domaratzki and Susan Lieberman, two Toronto
executives at Royal Bank headquarters who've been sharing a job -- and
promotions -- since 1997. They work three days a week, overlapping on
Wednesdays. Each has three children, and has found the reduced workload a
domestic godsend. The 40-per-cent pay cut is bearable, cushioned by the
fact each has a high-earning husband. That's the stumbling block, of
course. Most work-life balance solutions so far are only for the well off
and the highly sought-after. Real change for the rest of us, says Honoré,
will probably require government intervention.

Sometimes Honoré thinks the love of speed is sunk too deeply in our
cultural DNA for any large-scale change to occur, at least in the developed
world. Here, many who respond to his message do so in a culturally
determined, speed-besotted way -- they want to slow down as quickly as
possible. At events promoting his book, audience members have often asked
for an audio version of In Praise of Slow -- "so they could listen to it in
the car," the amused author explains, "because they didn't have time to
read it." Honoré points to the intriguing fact that his book is attracting
a lot of attention "in countries on the cusp of going First World: China,
Brazil, Croatia, Thailand, places like that." He thinks that's because
"people there are worried about what they see here -- and they hope they
don't have to take the entire modern package." And Honoré is heartened by
readers' responses. "I've been a journalist for 14 years, and no had ever
told me before that what I'd written had changed their lives. Kingwell's
right -- a lot of our hyper-accelerated lives has to do with putting off
the big questions. You know you're paying a price but you're in denial."

One guiding principle Honoré has learned is that "nobody has two burnouts."
He seems as far away from a first one as an in-demand professional can be.
Having read to Benjamin as long as the boy liked, having caught the rest of
the soccer match and found his car keys, Honoré -- six foot five in his
skates -- is now teetering against the boards in the Streatham Ice Arena.
He's serenely indifferent to the fact that the arena, the self-styled
"temple of hockey in south London," is an appalling dump of peeling paint
and cracked protective partitions, that the Zamboni has broken down and
that his Streatham Chiefs teammates are restlessly looking at the clock. "I
do have an idea for another book, and a lot of publishers panting for it,"
he allows. "But," he shrugs as he finally gets to hit the ice, "I'm just
too busy."

Read an excerpt from Carl Honoré's In Praise of Slow at
www.macleans.ca/excerpt

To comment, email letters@macleans.ca

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