Ben and Alice

Color-coded Boggle

2009-07-05T23:50:00.003-04:00

After x number of Boggle rounds involving a gleeful/rueful notation of and then an inevitable duplication of the word "eons" (or something like it), I get a little restless. In college, we started playing Themed Boggle: each player picked a theme and tried to find words related to that theme, and those not duplicated got an extra point. Heather chose religious words, Priscilla took women's health, Paige did legal terms, and so on. I always insisted on doing birds and fish, thinking that terns, ernes, tetras, tuna, neons, wrens, and scores of other animals would un-grid themselves before my eyes. Inevitably, they'd camouflage themselves at the turn of the minute-glass.

My friend Brette and I have innovated a new variation, Color Boggle, in which we looked for words related to our chosen colors (red for her, green for me). In the development stages of the game, we were perhaps too eager to make the case for the other's words: "The SOLE of a Christian Louboutin shoe is red!" I recommended. "It's known for being red, so I think that counts."

"To REUSE is to go green," she said. "So is to use LESS."

Nomenclators

2009-07-05T23:26:00.004-04:00

Thomas Jefferson is vying with Benjamin Franklin for my crush of the eighteenth century. But if we're taking National Treasure as a good starting point for historical research, which of course we should do because it is so awesome, BF probably devised perfect cryptograms all the time. (Actually, I've read a great non-Nicolas Cage book about Thomas Jefferson's and Erasmus Darwin's copying machines.) From the Wall Street Journal (thanks to Jaime for the link):

The key to the code consisted of a series of two-digit pairs. The first digit indicated the line number within a section, while the second was the number of letters added to the beginning of that row. For instance, if the key was 58, 71, 33, that meant that Mr. Patterson moved row five to the first line of a section and added eight random letters; then moved row seven to the second line and added one letter, and then moved row three to the third line and added three random letters. Mr. Patterson estimated that the potential combinations to solve the puzzle was "upwards of ninety millions of millions."

After explaining this in his letter, Mr. Patterson wrote, "I presume the utter impossibility of decyphering will be readily acknowledged."

Undaunted, Dr. Smithline decided to tackle the cipher by analyzing the probability of digraphs, or pairs of letters. Certain pairs of letters, such as "dx," don't exist in English, while some letters almost always appear next to a certain other letter, such as "u" after "q".

To get a sense of language patterns of the era, Dr. Smithline studied the 80,000 letter-characters contained in Jefferson's State of the Union addresses, and counted the frequency of occurrences of "aa," "ab," "ac," through "zz."

As in uffish thought they stood

2009-06-28T13:01:00.003-04:00

Tech writer Clive Thompson sets two chatbots -- programs that humans can have text conversations with, which use AI tricks to maintain a veneer of mental presence -- talking to each other. They are ALICE and Jabberwacky, and you can try them out yourself, separately.

The results are delightful. And if you think about it, it's wrong to say that no real thinking is going on in their conversation. Since they were trained by chatting with humans, they are reflecting back real thoughts, in a context that is altered but not disjointedly so.

Excerpts:

A: Do you dream?

J: Yes, I dream.

A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams?

J: I remember them vividly.

A: What do you remember about it?

J: I think I shouldn’t flirt with a robot.

A: Do you think a machine will ever be considered “alive”?

J: Stranger things have happened.

A: Not many people express themselves that way.

J: How would you know, machine?

A: Knowledge is of two kinds: that which we learn from the senses and that which is true a priori.

J: I think I do not understand you completely.

A: Oh, you don’t understand? Perhaps I can explain it to you better. Which part are you confused about?

J: I have no short-term memory, so I cannot tell you what I was confused about. I only see what is in front of me now.

J: How do you define life?

A: Life is the opposite of death.

J: So death is the absence of life?

A: Take it easy. I try not to think about such things.

Daniel Dennett (see our numerous posts about him), the philosopher of consciousness and religion, argues that human conversation is not much more enlightened than these chatbots. A child, or an adult in an unfamiliar situation or in a foreign language, will fall back on phrase snippets that they have heard; extend this for years of repetition and you still find that talk and thought is the activation of collected patterns, just more varied and sophisticated.

As for Thompson, the idea of playing these chatbots off of each other is brilliant. It's a clever way to explore and evaluate things that are hard to measure. When I was a teaching assistant for Artificial Intelligence at Columbia University, professor Andrew Kosoresow assigned students to write programs that could play the card game Lost Cities (an elegant and fun creation by German games master Ranier Knizia). But how to evaluate the results? Simple: the prof had the programs compete with each other in a round-robin tournament. (Which meant a certain unlucky TA had to code up in Expect a way for programs written in any language to trade Lost Cities turns as input and output.) And the great IBM chess computers, once seeded with some basic knowledge of chess, learn strategies beyond the ken of their makers by playing themselves in chess billions of times.

Lapin quotidien

2009-06-27T16:16:00.000-04:00

My wife Kate is reading John Updike's Rabbit, Run, since she liked The Witches of Eastwick and Beck: A Book. So far she finds it denser and more literary than the others.

This post is really just an excuse to use the title.

An algorithm for singular names

2009-06-18T22:47:00.003-04:00

Great detail from the NYT story about Feniosky Peña-Mora, the new dean of Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (also known as SEAS):

Dr. Peña-Mora followed his father’s lead in choosing unusual names for their children: He and his brothers were all given first names ending in “sky.” For his own children, Dr. Peña-Mora employed an algorithm that factored in such characteristics as the parents’ and grandparents’ names, the children’s birth weights and the months of their conception and birth.

The couple also tried to find three names that were one of a kind, doing computer searches to ensure their singularity. His son is named Aramael; the middle child, a girl, is Amnahir; and their youngest, a girl, is Giramnah.

The children already exhibit some of their parents’ flair for engineering. “When my son was 4 or 5 he created a cereal-dispensing machine, and when he was 9 he created an A.T.M. machine,” Dr. Peña-Mora said. “He put his sister inside a box to dispense the money, but the outside looked like a real A.T.M.”

Some entries seem self-referential: abstruse, recondite, solipsistic

2009-06-14T17:29:00.004-04:00

Michiko Kakutani apparently took the note about overusing the word 'limn'; her friend Maureen Dowd can take a similar note on 'louche' (although the link about limning is an interesting defense):

If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of antediluvian perorations, if the newspaper’s profligacy of neologisms and shibboleths ever set off apoplectic paroxysms in you, if it all seems a bit recondite, here’s a reason to be sanguine: The Times has great data on the words that send readers in search of a dictionary.

(The list of most-searched words on Dictionary.com makes me sad as someone who teaches writing.)

Should we talk about the weather?

2009-06-09T22:44:00.005-04:00

How to record unmanageable excitement about a thunderstorm that happened nearly 24 hours ago?! The barrage of thunder and lightning went on for an hour or more, with hardly more than a second between one strike and the next. I kind of wanted to blog about it as it was happening at 3 a.m.; I also wanted to watch it as a red blob on the weather.com radar map. This is because I'm under the influence of Tom McCarthy's amazing essay about weather as a form of media, "Meteomedia; or, Why London's Weather Is in the Middle of Everything," from London from Punk to Blair:

It is standard to think of the atmosphere as a medium, a 'pervading or enveloping substance' (indeed, the terms 'air', 'ether' and 'environment' all appear in the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word medium) but we should go further. Weather is, and always has been, more than just a medium: it is also media.

Shakespeare understood this. In The Tempest, his great play about the weather, Caliban tells Trinculo and Stephano that the island's atmosphere is 'full of noises, sounds and sweet airs', the humming of a 'thousand twanging instruments' and 'voices'. He could be describing radio. Caliban is not so much consuming and decoding these transmissions as feeling them billow around him, finding form and losing it again, like clouds. The weather is a teaser. 'Weather writes, erases, and rewrites itself upon the sky with the endless fluidity of language; and it is with language that we have sought throughout history to apprehend it', writes Richard Hamblyn in The Invention of Clouds (2001). Easier said than done, though. Aristotle knew that epagogue, or linguistic reasoning, would never yield meteorological certainty; the best it offers us is speculation. Vladimir Jankovic, author of Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of the English Weather, 1650-1820 (2000) points out that since meteroros, 'rising', can refer to rising wind within the stomach meteoro-logeo means not only 'talk of high things' but also 'windy speech', 'high talk,' empty musings'. Shakespeare understood this too, as testified by Hamlet's ability to make the verbose see in the same cloud a whale, a weasel and a camel. Hamlet's deliberate mobilization of language's powers of indeterminacy is linked to weather throughout: 'when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw', he claims,--an utterance that Claudius's spies and twenty-first century critics alike will busy themselves trying, and failing, to decipher.

When language grapples with the weather there is slippage and there is displacement. Samuel Johnson's quip that 'when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather' is an easy one to make; Gwendolen's intuition (in Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest of 1895) that 'whenever people talk about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else' is much more astute. For centuries manuals and charts have tried to map meteorological phenomena on to social ones, from The English Chapmans and Travellers Almanack for the Year of Christ 1697 (which aligns the ten-week frost with the Gunpowder Plot, the time when 'the whole heaven seemed to burn with fire' with the invention of the art of printing) to Election Weather Tables compiled by today's Met Office (Labour only wins in fair weather, apparently; that fateful day in 1979 was foul) or the Weather-to-Stock Market Correspondence Graphs studied by the more esoteric among our economists. The weather unfolds endlessly across non-meteorological discourses, across Other Stuff. It is an index both of truth and of all that is random, meaningless. Like all media, it bears a plethora of messages--perhaps even the message--while simultaneously supplying no more than conversational neutral, white noise.

But for the subject of the essay, I was initially skeptical of McCarthy's method here. He juxtaposes word origins, word origins cited from others, anecdotes, and famous quotations--source use habits that make me a little uneasy when they form most of the work of an essay--but he seems to be enacting in the form of the essay the same thing that weather reporting does. Each form relies on stringing a set of phenomena (cloudbursts or quotations) into a coherent form. The effect of so many sources cobbled together is greater than the effect would be if the subject were not how sources get mediated in the weather report. It's a cool medium is the message move with the essay form that's even more subtle than the nice recasting of Marshall McLuhan he does in the final sentence I quoted from him.

One experiment at John Tierney's "lab" works out well

2009-06-09T20:55:00.006-04:00

I'm not such a fan of John Tierney's contrarian science essays, but I did like his invitation for his blog readers to answer the question, Do animals experience regret?, if only for this totally awesome comment:

Cats are French. Cats listen to Edith Piaf. They regret nothing.
— Phil

Happy birthday, Carmen!

2009-06-04T02:14:00.003-04:00

My wife Kate gave birth to our (briefly nameless) daughter, Carmen Alessandra Cortesi Wheeler, at 10:13am on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009. She was 7lb 7oz, with half an inch of dark brown hair. So far, she is preternaturally calm (famous last words) and loves to put her hands on her face, dodgy since she has the long fingernails of a two week-late baby.

Labor was intense and long, starting Monday night, pausing completely for part of Tuesday, and then going fifteen hours from Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning. Kate worked amazingly hard and with stamina I didn't know was possible, finally collapsing with the baby on her chest. Kate and baby (and soon I) are now sleeping deeply.

A critical mass of cuteness occurred this evening when My sister's six year-old and three year-old called up to sing Happy Birthday to the baby. Jasmine, the six year-old, has been waiting for her new cousin for years; while on her way to a lunch the day after our wedding two years ago, Jasmine mused to her mom, "I wonder if she'll bring the baby?" When told these things take a while, she revised herself, predicting instead that Kate would just have "a big belly".

Carmen is a Latinate name taken from the Hebrew "Carmel", meaning vineyard/garden/orchard, adapted to match the Latin "carmen" (meaning song) while keeping a Judeo-Christian connection. Christian and Jewish history in Europe is full of this kind of roundabout inclusion of pagan names in the religious canon. Thus her Hebrew name could be Carmel or something completely different... to be determined some time in the next thirteen years. Carmen is and has been mostly found in Spanish-speaking countries, perhaps because Castile was one of the areas outside Rome whose Latinate creole stayed closest to Latin (along with much of Roman imperial culture). But it is used as a name in many Romance countries, as well as in English. In the Bizet opera, Carmen is a gypsy, though Carmen is not known as a Gypsy/Romani name.

Alessandra is many things: Italian, through Kate, and a longtime contender with Carmen for this baby's first name (it's the Edwards to Carmen's Kerry); my brother Alex's name (you can see him in the last picture holding the baby), transformed across language and gender; Jewish, thanks to the honorary position of Alexander as a Jewish name because he was such a refreshingly non-brutal conqueror (the story was later expanded to include the claim that on the way to destroy the Jerusalem temple, Alexander encountered a bunch of rabbis and was so struck by their holiness that he was compelled to bow before their feet, realizing the error of his ways); and last, an echo of my great-grandfather C. A. Wheeler, a good man (though not a good father, as I understand it) who represented the indigent as a lawyer in Texas in the early part of the last century (he was a law partner of Sam Rayburn), and who represents for me the other Texas (of Ann Richards, Molly Ivins and Kinky Friedman), and the other America -- the one where active citizenship, responsibility for others and appreciation for your opportunities are unremarkable traits.

Turn the page

2009-05-28T11:25:00.002-04:00

I spent yesterday evening talking with a friend about the first draft of his Sherlock Holmes-inspired novel. We had gone over some stuff about adverb nervousness, why the villain drops out of the story part of the way through, and whether the British Library has open stacks. Finally I got to the end of the pages I had dog-eared and asked about the ending: "The final sentence doesn't sound like anything else in the book," I said.

"That's not the final sentence," my friend said. "Are you missing the last page?"

"Maybe?"

"Wait, you're missing the last page of a mystery novel? You think my villain is cliche, but you're somehow missing the final page of a mystery novel?"

So he e-mailed it to me as we spoke, and indeed many things looked different with a few additional paragraphs.

My mom reads so many mysteries that she often forgets whether she's read them. Sometimes, she reads the last few pages to remind herself... but of course that method of checking has its own perils.

More checking needed in hockey

2009-05-21T23:48:00.005-04:00

Great WSJ story about engraving errors on the Stanley Cup (the graphic history of the typos is especially cool--you can roll over the image of the winners to see the engraved errors corrected):

This iconic silver trophy, which is handed out each year to hockey's champion, carries with it the marks of another, quieter history -- decades of botched spellings, spacing gaffes, repeated words and the unsightly results of attempts to fix them.

Over the years words like "Ilanders" (Islanders), "Leaes" (Leafs) and "Bqstqn" (Boston) have found their way onto the cup, while more than a dozen players and coaches have had their names butchered. Former Montreal Canadiens goaltender Jacques Plante had the misfortune of having his first name spelled four different ways in the span of five years.

(thanks to Neil for the link)

Tom Hanks' inimitable sentences

2009-05-16T00:21:00.003-04:00

I could listen to Tom Hanks enthuse all day--about anything except symbology. His speech patterns have carried over to his writing in the latest letters section of the New Yorker, where he has a great letter about his electric car. He's got a real talent for the long sentence, and you can hear his voice so clearly:

Peter J. Boyer, in his otherwise spot-on piece about the car industry, assumes that I once leased G.M.’s sadly fated EV1 electric car and, like other drivers of that twin-seat rocket of a vehicle, watched the emission-free car be wrested from my garage, towed away, and busted up into pieces of metal, glass, and rubber smaller than razor blades (“The Road Ahead,” April 27th). Luckily, I did not.

I like the pacing of these sentences:

It had four doors, a rear hatch, room for my family, including a dog in the back, power windows, A/C, a great sound system, and the fastest, most effective windshield defroster known to mankind. When the car companies collectively, and, to some, diabolically, decided to take these cars back, the electric vehicles disappeared. But not mine. I have the pink slip. I own that car, and it is still driven every day, albeit by one of my crack staff of employees. My electric car recently crossed fifty thousand miles on the odometer with its original battery but without so much as a splash of gasoline.

I've listened to Tom Hanks' amazing tribute to the Dave Clark Five at the 2008 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony several times (Thomas Kyd gets name-checked?!) and smile every time. I assume he wrote it. So so good!

The torture creative class

2009-05-07T14:43:00.001-04:00

Devastating column from Katha Pollitt:

I should have been a torturer. You too, reader. Well, maybe not an actual physical torturer, because then there'd be a small chance I'd go to prison like Lynndie England or Charles Graner. My picture might be in the paper doing nasty things to naked men with a goony smile and a thumbs-up. I might even have disturbing memories and bad dreams, because surely, unless one is a sociopath, throwing people into walls and hanging them from the ceiling all day is likely to have its troubling moments. What I mean is, I should have been a member of the torture creative class--a conceptual torturer, a facilitator of torture, perhaps an inventor of torture law, an architect of the torture archipelago, a dissimulator, concealer, denier, rationalizer, minimizer and pooh-pooher of torture. As a word person, I could have come up with circumlocutions to confuse the media, bureaucratic phrases like "special methods of questioning" and "enhanced interrogation techniques." According to New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt, just figuring out whether to call a given action "harsh" or "brutal" has kept editors busy for years! Or I could have written copy for the CIA. For example, I could have suggested they call putting people in coffinlike boxes full of insects "studio picnics," because studio apartments are small and picnics have bugs, and I could have nicknamed waterboarding "drinking tea with Vice President Cheney," although come to think of it, waterboarding is a euphemism already.

Whitby jet, vulcanite

2009-05-06T21:43:00.005-04:00

Ben's and my friend Tove has a great blog, Thread for Thought, about the history of fashion. I was particularly moved and interested by her post about mourning:

Queen Victoria’s obsession with the public mourning of Prince Albert resulted in a great demand for fashionable and affordable black jewelry, and jet became a popular material for jewelry and buttons. It is an incredibly dense, dark mineraloid derived from decaying wood, appropriately enough. It has been imbued with a religious significance too, as it is a traditional material for monks’ rosaries. Queen Victoria sported and popularized Whitby jet, which initially created a boom in the industry but hampered its long term usage as people associated the stone with death. Vulcanite was another material of similar properties commonly used for mourning jewelry.

Bob the Builder goes to yoga

2009-04-23T23:36:00.004-04:00

My yoga class is held in a playroom, where there's always toys strewn all over the room and the strong scent of children (on this subject I become my aspirational older doppelganger Anjelica Huston in The Witches... sort of kidding). A talking Bob the Builder toy became possessed during class today and started exulting at how great things were going to be.

"Well done!" he exclaimed. "Well done!"

We were chanting, but then we started snickering. The teacher went to try to turn him off because we were supposed to be considering how to live in the now--no concerns about the future, even if it was going to be great. "Leave him on!" I said. "I need all the affirmation I can get."

Bodoni edition of Candide

2009-04-15T22:09:00.003-04:00

"This Voltaire was printed in the autumn of 1944, during the most difficult period towards the end of the war, and at a time when the press was much restricted in its work. Our house had been requisitioned by the occupying power, but much to our astonishment we were not ordered to leave the workshop. Thirty-two marines were billeted with us, and a guard carrying the machine-gun continuously patrolled back and forth on the terrace in front of the big French window near the press, where I stood printing my sheets. Almost every day work was interrupted by air-raid alarms and we had to rush into the deep cave hewn into the hillside behind our house which was also used by the people living in other houses near by. At last, one night in December, a case with bound copies of Candide was on its way to Milan but the van, its lights switched off, was attacked from the air. The case had several bullet holes, yet, amazingly, not a single copy was damaged. Great concentration was needed to work in such adverse conditions and see the book through to completion, but finally optimism carried the day."

--from Giovanni Mardersteig's account of printing Candide on the Bodoni printing press, Officina Bodoni: An Account of a Hand Press, 1923-1977

I so wish I could find a copy of this edition of Candide! There's an exemplary page in the Officina Bodoni book to show the typeface used in the edition, but the graphic element isn't striking enough. I'll keep looking in the other Bodoni materials I've found. The story of its creation is extraordinary and fits so well into the set of questions I'm working on about the way that illustrators deal with optimism outside of its 18c. context, after World War II.

Experimental typography and the Orioles

2009-04-12T13:37:00.003-04:00

Hilarious article about the backwards apostrophe in the Orioles' alternate caps.

The latter is on the "alternate cap" that's usually worn once or twice a week. It reads "O‘s," with the apostrophe flipped so the little round part - the "ball terminal," typographers tell me - is at the bottom instead of the top. It should be "O’s."

The quotes from the grammar, typography, and uniform commentators are fantastic--it's tough to choose a favorite, but Paul Lukas gets a good last word (thanks to the Messecs, who still tolerate my jokes about Rafael Palmeiro).

Set them on fire

2009-04-11T16:54:00.005-04:00

"When I got them, I knew I would set them on fire."

Sifting through my college papers today, I found a stack of my creative writing, all of which bears heavy traces of my obsessions with Joan Didion, Amy Hempel, and Lydia Davis. There are a lot of single-line short stories in the vein of the latter two writers--e.g. from Amy Hempel: "She would always sleep with her husband and with another man in the course of the same day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she would exploit by incanting, 'French film, French film" ("incanting" makes the sentence) and the sublime "Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once?" I heard Lydia Davis speak a few years ago about Varieties of Disturbance, she noted that she had to be choosy about which of those kinds of stories are good enough to be collected.

Needless to say, the italicized line above is not Amy Hempel or Lydia Davis-quality, so I'm left to Joan Didion to reinterpret it. (I also found a poster from the night I met her and awkwardly gave her something I had written about her--the stuff of legends in my writing classes now.) From Didion's "On Keeping a Notebook":

"It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."

I made a few phone calls yesterday to see if I could place this line from a college conversation: I think someone's mother had sent her a pair of slacks from Talbot's, or maybe it was more egregious, like Halloween sweaters. Didion would go for the first in her correcting mode, right? The second possibility is too much:

"What kind of magpie keeps a notebook? 'He was born the night the Titanic went down.' That seems a nice enough line, band I even recall who said it, but is it not really a better line in life than it could ever be in fiction?"

Texas acrostic

2009-04-05T18:45:00.001-04:00

Lorrie Moore's NYRB review of a new biography of Donald Barthelme takes a thought-provoking turn to consider how literary biographies can produce some artifacts of the biographical procedure. Moore includes this great anecdote about looking for biographical clues in a person's work (the bold paragraph is a quotation from Tracy Daugherty's book):

Mr. Barthelme the architect was also given to cleverness and mischief similar to his son's: when he designed Texas's Hall of State, he had carved into the frieze of the building the names of fifty-nine legendary Texans. According to Daugherty:

The first letters of the first eight names, reading left to right—-Burleson, Archer, Rusk, Travis, Higg, Ellis, Lamar, and Milam—-spell the architect's name, minus only the final e. A playful touch, a buried secret: These would become hallmarks of his eldest son's art, as well.

The elder Barthleme's architectural acrostic does reveal hidden meanings, but Moore is also interested in what happens when looking for specific thumbprints doesn't yield as easily to interpretation. That's the weirdness of the acrostic: what happens when looking for ways to fill in the blanks of an author's work (the building, the book) doesn't produce clues about identity? Or what if it can't because the genre (of the acrostic, the literary biography) has certain delimitations which produce some effects through its conventions but foreclose others? What I like so much about Moore's discussion here is that she identifies how familiar syntactical structures generate (and not just record) these artifacts (bold paragraphs are from Daughterty):

In Tracy Daugherty's extensive discussion of Barthelme's work he has a literary scholar's predilection for locating, as if they were truffles, "lifts" and "echoes" and "resonant touchstones" (from Eliot, from Perelman, from Woolf). This sort of detective work, as if it were mapping the genome of a narrative, may seem to some the downside of graduate literary education (Daugherty was once in fact a graduate student of Barthelme's): to paraphrase our current poet laureate, Kay Ryan, why become a doctor of something that can't be fixed? Daugherty's determined textual sleuthing—-the kind of thing an average reader can now do on Google-—means to be respectful and interesting, but it strains and sweats and risks the inadvertently hostile result of seeming to want to undermine the originality of the writer, one whom Daugherty himself claims as radical and original and at one point "the nation's finest prose stylist."

Daugherty's comparisons are labor-intensive and sometimes unconvincing—"the sentences echo Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground," he says even of an early newspaper article—and this gumshoe's persistence in tracking down influences and mimicries, serendipitous or intentional, sometimes bogs the biographer down:

Time ran an article on Black Orpheus and the French New Wave.... Whether or not Don was thinking of this article, he clearly had in mind Walker Percy's The Moviegoer as he began reworking "The Hiding Man."...Like Ralph Ellison's protagonist in Invisible Man, Burlingame has freed himself from the received ideas of society and church.

Even describing Barthelme's early adult life in Houston, Daugherty can get startlingly sidetracked:

In the first seven months of his marriage, Don, in his capacity as an arts reviewer, could offer his wife a wide array of cultural excitement (whenever he could get her out)—-from an evening of Mozart piano sonatas performed by Paur Badura-Skoda, fresh from the Viennese Conservatory, to the Latin singing of Joaquin Garay, best known as the voice of Panchito in Disney's The Three Caballeros ("Disney's horniest animated feature," according to one reviewer).

The inner core of the biographical subject is invariably elusive, the golden needle in the biographer's haystack of research. So what do we really want from a literary biography?

There are some intense phrases in this concern--"the kind of thing any average reader could do with Google," "inadvertently hostile result of seeming to want to undermine the originality of the author" among them. So how else to unpack the playful touch/buried secret features of Barthleme's stories--or are there are other ways to think about the experiments in style and form than as decodable biography? Does the incomplete acrostic trick point to other directions for fooling around with conventions of literary biography when the subject is someone who was committed to the practice of fooling around? Here's James Wolcott's review of Barthelme's short stories which talks about how conventions get exploded in his work:

Donald Barthelme was the Stephen Sondheim of haute fiction—a dexterous assembler of witty, mordant, intricate devices that, once exploded, exposed the sawdust and stuffing of traditional forms. His stories weren’t finely rendered portrait studies in human behavior or autobiographical reveries à la Johns Updike and Cheever, but a row of boutiques showcasing his latest pranks, confections, gadgets, and Max Ernst/Monty Python–ish collages. Like Sondheim’s biting rhymes and contrapuntal duets, Barthelme’s parlor tricks and satiric ploys were accused early on of being cerebral, preeningly clever, hermetically sealed, and lacking in “heart” of supplying the clattering sound track to the cocktail party of the damned.

Moore's posing this problem puts me in mind of when Jenny Turner asked a similar question about finding the Lorrie Moore in her collected works, given that Moore has shrugged off a lot of the author/text clue-mining, except in "People Like That Are the Only People Here" (from Birds of America):

‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’ made a huge impact when it was first published in the New Yorker in 1997, partly because the magazine’s editors wrote oddly tendentious furniture for it, strongly implying that the story was a piece of journalism: ‘Have writers of memoirs taken over a field that once belonged to novelists? The question is at the heart of a story of a mother and child,’ read the strapline, with a photograph of the author, captioned by a quotation from her story, as though it had been spoken in real life. The year after, in an interview with Salon, Moore acknowledged an ‘autobiographical element’, but denied that the story was memoir. ‘It was fiction . . . Things did not happen exactly that way; I reimagined everything. And that’s what fiction does. Fiction can come from real-life events and still be fiction.’ Beyond this, Moore does not appear to have said anything in public about the relationship of the story to any real-life events behind it.

‘There is the desire of readers for Something that Really Happened,’ Moore told the Believer in 2005. ‘If a narrative uses language in a magical and enlivening way, we will listen to the story. But if the language doesn’t cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened.’ Reading ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’ is a staggering experience, but the fact remains that more money and attention might be wrung from such a subject when presented as memoir: a front in the New York Times, say, big, sad picture, prominent nose-to-mouth lines, preferably holding the (bald? cannulated? completely recovered?) small child. The indications, within the story, that memoir was possible, was contemplated and was refused, give an already powerful piece of writing an almost unbearable performative force. As does the rightly celebrated kicker of an ending:

There are the notes.

Now where is the money?

I think Turner's meditation on the results of trying to find Lorrie Moore in her style does produce some alternate ways of considering the biography of an author. But Turner's essay (and Wolcott's essay) is a review of collected works, and the work of interpretation is perhaps different when one is writing a literary biography. What are some good books which have handled this problem of questionable clue-mining in literary biography, given that literary interpretation has been endlessly productive of decoding work but may also be given to discussions of style, syntax, and genre in considering the conventions of biography-writing?

A leaden helmet on a fledgling bat

2009-03-30T19:40:00.004-04:00

My friend Anjuli Raza Kolb has introduced Beyonce to Patricia Highsmith in a great essay up at 3 Quarks Daily. It's a great essay that matches the strangeness of Highsmith's short story with some funny digressions on IUDs, aphasia, etc.--I think you have to get used to reading it, but it pays off (and I'm all for these kinds of essays). The payoff is this brilliant paragraph.

In a review of the Norton collection, James Sallis wrote that “one wonders if Highsmith may not in fact be the ultimate realist.” The deadpan, reportage quality of these miniatures that I began by describing certainly seems to bear this theory out, the bonus being the way the story makes short work of metonymy’s horror. Terrifying realism. The dread of contiguity. Disorienting opacity. “The Hand” helps me disavow what I ordinarily think of as Realism-—more specifically socio-realism-—and adulterously shack up with sociopathic realism (which is not very realistic, as it describes amputated meaning by way of narrative and material impoverishment). Why? Because sociopathic realism’s existence is symptomatic of the imperium of horror in all kinds of representation. In this story, it’s embodied in the cataclysmic failure of self-representation by the unfortunate young man who dies facing the wall, making contact with nothing.

Other short stories, novels, films we can put in this category of sociopathic realism? I'm fascinated by it!

Etui, Ice-T

2009-03-30T19:22:00.003-04:00

Probably, Elizabeth Gorski turned in her 3-29-09 Sunday crossword puzzle before this item on endangered crossword answers appeared in the Boston Globe in February (link from Bookforum). This is probably one of those situations where you see a word everywhere once you start to look for it (or its absence), but I can't remember the last time I saw ETUI in a NY Times crossword. From the story:

Last year, during the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, host and puzzlemaster Will Shortz held aloft a tiny object. It was barely visible from the back of the cavernous hotel ballroom, but the whole room of more than 700 contestants promptly burst into applause. What was it? A little needlecase, better known to puzzlers as an etui - one of the mainstays of the curious language of crosswordese.

And the ICET answer in the same puzzle was clever. The theme answers in the puzzle seemed like they were set up to test out the balance between new terms and older terms that have become less familiar as answers.

London fog

2009-03-14T22:49:00.004-04:00

The London Fog special tea from Starbucks: pretty great!

It's Earl Grey tea with vanilla syrup shots and skim milk. I don't even tend to like vanilla flavoring, but the bergamot flavor mitigates the sweetness well. What I'm trying to decide is whether to manufacture it in the tearoom of my apartment. Or in Starbucks: here's the hack. I used to drink Tealuxe's Creme de Earl Grey or the Tea Spot's tea of the same flavor (Earl Grey with vanilla, no milk; the iced version of it may be one of the greatest beverages I've ever consumed), but the Tea Spot ran out of it six months ago and say they don't know when they'll get it again.

I admit to feeling morally superior to people who put milk and sugar in their tea, although that position gets tested when there's chai or London Fogs involved. I love Earl Grey tea, and I love fog, so it's the best of both worlds. Any nominations for what a San Francisco Fog would contain? I'm told that Lima, Peru is also quite foggy. Nova Scotia, too?

X-ing out

2009-03-14T22:45:00.000-04:00

I've been bad at typing and general interfacing this week; basically, I've been erring all over the place. My typing skills seem to deteriorate by the day, especially when I'm copying stuff out and overestimate my speed and precision capabilities. A hundred such errors occurred when I was typing out a couple of passages from a novel about error correction called The Calligrapher. Another error, which readers of this blog may have witnessed, was hitting the publish button when I meant to hit the save now button as I was typing a post about The Calligrapher. I deleted it but of course it's still there on RSS feeds, which led to this adorable e-mail from my friend: "You post on letters (and my favorite character from morality plays) -- astonishing. ... Now it's not there." She was then kind enough to send me the text of what I had typed, corrected, and then incorrectly posted. Bloggerum est errarum or whatever.

Here's a few paragraphs from the preface to Edward Docx's The Calligrapher, which I've been describing to people as being about a promiscuous calligrapher. Then they say, "does he illuminate just any old manuscript or what?" The narrator has been commissioned to work on an edition of John Donne's poems, and each chapter has a summary and reading of each Donne poem. The readings are smug and too clever by half because he's an unreliable narrator and smugness is always a tip-off to a narrator's being unreliable, especially when it's coupled with an introductory tale about making a deal with the devil. It's almost over-determined. Titivillus is the patron demon of calligraphers:

Best of all he likes those errata that neither monks nor proofreaders notice and that survive in the new manuscript unchecked to be reproduced by the next generation of scribes; but slips of the pen so big that the calligrapher must start the entire page again are also welcome--because these set back the Work of God. Every night, after it has become too dark for the monks to continue and they have left the scriptorium for vespers, Titvillus carefully collects all the mistakes into his sack and drags them down to Hell, there to present them to the Devil so that each sin can be registered in the book--against the name of the monk responsible--to be read out on Judgment Day.

These unsatisfactory (some would say unfair) arrangements continued for more or less a thousand years--until the Renaissance flared across Europe and the calligrapher's lot began to turn from bad to worse. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the monks found themselves being forced to work at a furious pace, on and on into the darkness in order to meet the ferocious demand for manuscript copies from the newly founded universities. Before long, sick of the blind rush, the brothers were desperately looking for ways to evade responsibility for the burgeoning number of flaws in their work and so save their ever more imperiled souls.

Now Titivillus saw his chance.

He offered the holy scribes an eternal bargain: personal absolution from their sins in return for a secret guarantee that the number of mistakes would continue to increase dramatically. As the errors were already out of control, the monks gladly agreed. Thus Titviullus became the patron demon of calligraphers; he kept their sins hidden and he rescued them from Hell.

Human endeavor, however, was having one of its periodic sprints, and by 1476 William Caxton (who learned his filthy disgusting ways in Cologne) had set up his printing press in Westmnister. All too soon, it looked as though Titivillus's deal was worthless.

You might have thought that such a development was pretty much the end of tour the ugly little runt. You might have thought that one of Lucifer's slicker lieutenants would have called Titvullus in for a personal assessment meeting and explained how, regrettably, some personnel were no longer required. But the Devil never fires his staff; he simply demotes them, drops their wages and forces them to carry on in ever-worsening conditions.

The irony of the error of my blogging ways became especially apparent when I typed out (and then had to correct all my typos painstakingly) this delightful satire from 1652 on universal languages and their attempts to enable some sort of millenarian perfectibility. The unreliable narrator Thomas Urquhart's Ekskybalauron is trying to write a manual for his own universal language to counter John Wilkins' project. He and the printer have a printing press mind-meld:

He and I striving thus who should compose fastest, he with his hand, and I with my brain, and his uncasing of the letters and placing them in the composing instrument, standing for my conception and his plenishing of the galley and imposing of the form, encountering with the supposed equivalence of my writing, we would almost every foot so jump together in this joynt expedition and so nearly overtake other in our intended course, that I was oftentimes (to keep him doing) glad to tear off parcels of ten or twelve lines apeece and give him them till more were ready; unto which he would so suddenly put an order that almost still before the ink of the written letters was dry their representations were, out of of their respective boxes, ranked in the composing-stick; by means of great haste, I, writing but upon the loose sheets of cording quires, which (as I minced and tore them), looking like pieces of waste paper troublesome to get rallyed after such dispersive scatteredness. I had not leisure to read what I had written till it came to a proof and sometimes to a full revise: so that, by vertue of this unanimous contest and joint emulation betwixt the theoretick and the practical part, which of us should overhye other in celerity, we into the space of fourteen working-daies compleated this whole book, such as it is, from the first notion of hte brain till the last motion of the press....

It's like a satire of The Gutenberg Galaxy avant la lettre.

I raced through The Calligrapher to a surprise ending that's hinted at many times, but I've been thinking about what the relationship might be between my annoyance at the belaboring of the unreliable narrator device and what I really wanted more of in the book: description of how calligraphy works. The John Donne readings aren't particularly illuminating, so to speak, because they don't do anything special; I probably skimmed a lot of them. But what if you could attribute the long-windedness to the narrator, and that habit was supposed to add to his unlikeable character? When he's talking about his skill, he's pretty charming at first, but he tries a little too hard, as you'll see below. Here, Jasper reveals that his favorite letter is X. His girlfriend replies:

"That's rather predictable, isn't it?"
"Why do you say that?"
"Because it's the most glamorous letter." And then, with a stage sigh and in a deliberately breathy voice: "The letter of love and anonymity."
I shook my head. This was my turf. "I don't agree. The most glamorous letter is definitely Q. Both in terms of its shape--in particular the wonderful potential of the descender, the tail--and in terms of its refusal to stand in the presence of any other character but U beside it. What other letter would dare such arrogance? There's a catwalk quality to Q--pure untouchable glamour. Certainly more so than X."
"OK, fair enough--so why X?"
"Well, of course there is the love and anonymity thing. But actually the reason is that it's the only letter which requires a counterstroke."
"How do yo mean?"
"If you imagine that the basic and most fluid line of the quill is from left to right--and the quicker the scribe works, the more he want to stay in this pattern. OK? And then think about the alphabet..."
"Mmm."
"The only letter that consistently demands a stroke running against this flow is X. Discounting nonintegral dots and crosses, every other letter can be negotiated. But you have to come back for the X--even when you are in full flow, as it were."
She nodded slowly. "It must be weird thinking about letters all the time."
"It is, a bit." I considered for a moment. "The nearest I think most people get to it is playing Scrabble. You know how it is when you pick a letter out of the bag--you have an individual relationship with that letter. You think, Oh great, a P, or Oh fuck, another A--you no longer think about words as the basic unit but letters instead. You look forward to X's and Q's and so on, and you start to think of the alphabet as twenty-six characters, each with its own personality. In fact, now that I come to think of it, characters is a much better word than letters. It's no coincidence that the Chinese are the best calligraphers--they understand the difference."

The only part of that conversation I was excited about was the description of how the X's are drawn and how they can throw the calligrapher off his game. The other parts get on my nerves--the heavy-handed flirtation, the weird comparison to Scrabble which bears no resemblance to my Scrabble playing, in which I'm more engaged with finding patterns than with a particular character of a letter. Then I realized that I had a desire for the book to be more about the technology of calligraphy than a character study of an unreliable narrator. Maybe Ekskybalauron will have to be that book for me, or The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (described as a printer's exercise in correcting one's errata) would be another cool version of it.

Last minute Oscar predictions

2009-02-22T22:56:00.002-05:00

Slumdog Millionaire (undeserved); Danny Boyle (for his worst film); Sean Penn (not Mickey Rourke); Kate Winslett (for past performances); Heath Ledger (so deserved); Viola Davis (so deserved); Wall-E (though not Pixar's best); Frost/Nixon (still gotta see it).

Essential nerdiness

2009-02-20T17:51:00.003-05:00

Ben and I were joking last week that Michael Lewis will always be a salesman--and it's totally great. It's his job to convince us of the story he's telling, the novelty of it, and we are ready to buy it. I've been anxiously awaiting the New Enthusiast's take on Lewis's NYT Magazine article on data-crunching in the NBA, which in its blog post form has a nifty intro about Charles Darwin:

Lewis has built a career investigating those people who, like Darwin, achieved some unlikely success by valuing what others ignore and ignoring what others value. It’s come to be known as the Moneyball approach, but it’s apparent in The New New Thing, The Blind Side, and his recent articles uncovering the origins of the financial crisis. Lewis typically writes really, really engrossing narratives that do a good job making you, the reader, interested in the nerds featured therein while still remaining faithful to the essential nerdiness that motivates their pursuits.