I can’t find the source for this link today – cut and pasted it into a draft email yesterday. It’s a great article about the factory-fresh quality of modern fiction. Author John Barry notes the omnipresence of James Joyces’s story “The Dead” in fiction writing courses, and how it’s functioning as a (pun alert) dead hand, repressing originality and encouraging the reuse of stock footage of “luminous” moments (quotes mine) in short stories. He recaps the story’s final paragraph, in which the protagonist stares “wistfully” out the window at the snow, sad with the fresh knowledge that his wife wishes she was with someone else, dead long ago.
Right this moment, there are armies of writers going through workshops, getting their work ruthlessly dissected as they try to create that lyrical effect of waning poignancy. Students labor day and night trying to imagine themselves as Gabriel Conroy, looking out onto the snow-covered wasteland. Adjunct professors, desperately trying to squeeze into the Kenyon Review, are trying to imagine their careers as the Bog of Allen, their aging parents as relics of a bygone day, their own spouse wanting more from them than they’re willing-or able-to give. Michael Furey is the ghost of their aspirations. The distant music of their thought-tormented lives is the rattling piano of an aging piano teacher.
If that’s what they’re after, the short story isn’t a story anymore. What we come out with now, too often, is an architectural feat, carefully layered to texture a feeling that is, not coincidentally, the sort of feeling you might get after teaching short-stories for years, while writing the occasional book review. It’s the kind of story not many people read anymore, unless they want to learn how to write a story. It’s a story that many people publish, some of them so that they can keep their jobs.
Barry reminds us that “The Dead” was powerful because it captured its own moment in time, the dawn of the 20th century: “the rampant alcoholism, the faux nationalism, the dying generations, the shallow hospitality, the end of decency, the emergence of feminism, the reaction of the boneheads.” Rather than recreating the tone of the past, appropriate to the past, we should do as Joyce did and capture our own time. Writers “should assume that 50 years from now, people will read stories to figure out who we are, not what we feel when we wish we could have been something else.”
Barry doesn’t mention the wearisome habits of distant irony omnipresent in today’s short stories, the substitution of whimsically inserted brand names as substitutes for real social criticism or commentary, or the hackneyed ever-present present tense. (“Margaret goes to the Burger King. She stares at the menu. She does not know what she wants.” A made-up example, I think, though I wouldn’t be surprised to find it in more than one New Yorker story.) The irony, as Barry notes, is that people still read “The Dead” because it was true to its own time. Its distant tone was not just an aesthetic effect, but also “about a beloved country turned suddenly strange, in a way that fascinated Joyce, and yet, which caused him to leave it.”
The voice of exile, of distance, is handy when you don’t want to confront feelings, either because cool detachment makes you look hip and self-aware to the others in your circle/classroom, or – as I’m finding myself blocked by in my own novel – because writing about feelings is hard. It requires you to feel them, which is bad enough, then confront them, harder still, and finally organize and tame them to the point where they can be put on paper in a way that makes them make sense to others, believable if not sympathetic.
To take a tiny slice of time and emotion, to pin a feeling like a butterfly and ornament it with “distant music,” is to diminish the power of real pain; to garland it with luminous prose is to embalm it. The template is wearisome – I feel nothing, I feel nothing, I stare at the world through glass, then, for the big finish, The Tiny Epiphany, in which a butterfly lands on the steering wheel and I am overwhelmed with the beauty of it all or whatnot, and we are all so amazed that you have allowed us to see that you feel something in the midst of all that nothing because now we see that– wait for it – deep inside, you feel too much.
In my own experience, little moments don’t change anything in any lasting form – tiny epiphanies happen, yep, they come – and they go. BIG events, big feelings, change everything. But big feelings, big canvases, are quickly mocked and buried under shovelsfull of Barthes and Derrida. Tom Wolfe wrote memorably about the need for big novels, and while his own attempts are sometimes great and sometimes not so much, damn it at least someone’s trying. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest would be unacceptably ambitious to the fiction workshop crowd were it not for the panoply of modernist flourishes it employed.
Fall is finally here in Reno, a tiny epiphany for me in the form of cool days, the brain-draining heat of summer finally over. It’s been five months since I’ve posted a chapter, and there’s nothing in the pipeline, but I know I need to get cracking – if only because the reality of AI development will outstrip my creations soon enough. Yeah, I’m planning a big story, and it’s scary. But if it wasn’t ambitious, if it wasn’t new, why the hell would anyone want to bother, want to go through all the shit you go through creating fiction, just to do what everyone else has done so many times before?
Off on vacation tomorrow for a few days, away from computers, maybe even away from my phone – won’t know till I get there if I’ll even have a signal. Really, really looking forward to getting away from the static of life and pushing the reset button.
Wanted to post a note on this article about a “new” Stradivarius violin, created after the wood was treated with a fungus prevalent in European wood during the “Little Ice Age,” the time in which Stradivarius created his pieces.
September 1st 2009 was a day of reckoning for Empa scientist Francis Schwarze and the Swiss violin maker Michael Rhonheimer. The violin they had created using wood treated with a specially selected fungus was to take part in a blind test against an instrument made in 1711 by the master violin maker of Cremona himself, Antonio Stradivarius. In the test, the British star violinist Matthew Trusler played five different instruments behind a curtain, so that the audience did not know which was being played. One of the violins Trusler played was his own strad, worth two million dollars. The other four were all made by Rhonheimer – two with fungally-treated wood, the other two with untreated wood. A jury of experts, together with the conference participants, judged the tone quality of the violins. Of the more than 180 attendees, an overwhelming number – 90 persons – felt the tone of the fungally treated violin "Opus 58" to be the best. Trusler’s stradivarius reached second place with 39 votes, but amazingly enough 113 members of the audience thought that "Opus 58" was actually the strad! "Opus 58" is made from wood which had been treated with fungus for the longest time, nine months…
Violins made by the Italian master Antonio Giacomo Stradivarius are regarded as being of unparalleled quality even today, with enthusiasts being prepared to pay millions for a single example. Stradivarius himself knew nothing of fungi which attack wood, but he received inadvertent help from the “Little Ice Age” which occurred from 1645 to 1715. During this period Central Europe suffered long winters and cool summers which caused trees to grow slowly and uniformly – ideal conditions in fact for producing wood with excellent acoustic qualities.
I think it’s interesting because it raises questions about the nature of genius. There is absolutely no doubt that craft is critical – preparation, care in the work, expertise – and yet in some cases, there’s a “Newton’s Apple” quality at work, an element of unpredictability and luck, “being at the right place at the right time” when the Monolith mystically appears to touch your brain and kick-start a creative revolution. In Sennett’s book, the tragedy is that Stradivarius’s sons and successors were unable to duplicate his method – but it’s possible that his method had help from nature that only now can be artificially induced. Maybe many geniuses were “just” excellent craftsmen who got lucky.
Then again, it could be that the mystery is still intact: It’s interesting to follow the links on the article’s sidebar, going back a few years, as scientists state definitively that they’re “solved” the Stradivarius riddle, confidently stating that an “advanced mathematical optimization method” that duplicates the exact shape and size of each piece will do the job, or that wood density is the secret, or that the chemicals used on the instrument merely need to be analyzed and duplicated. Now it’s all just about introducing a fungus into the wood…
Good article popped up on my radar, so to speak, on an MIT experiment called “Project Gaydar.” The work was actually done in 2007 but, for some reason, everyone involved seems to have kept a lid on it until yesterday, when the Boston Globe ran an article on it:
Two students partnered up to take on the latest Internet fad: the online social networks that were exploding into the mainstream. With people signing up in droves to reconnect with classmates and old crushes from high school, and even becoming online “friends” with their family members, the two wondered what the online masses were unknowingly telling the world about themselves. The pair weren’t interested in the embarrassing photos or overripe profiles that attract so much consternation from parents and potential employers. Instead, they wondered whether the basic currency of interactions on a social network – the simple act of “friending” someone online – might reveal something a person might rather keep hidden.
Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep.
My own Facebook experience is that, having listed myself as “gay” and “single,” Facebook has determined that I therefore have no interests other than getting a boyfriend, as the only ads it ever serves me are for “gay singles in your area.” Moreover, as I sit down and do the math, I realize that of my male Facebook friends, one is gay and three are straight (I have made the determination that I will not “friend” people I’ve never heard of but who went to college with someone who went to high school with me, and restrict that status to actual friends as much as possible.) They will be disappointed, as will their girlfriends and wives, to discover that they are now gay. [I know, I know, inadequate sample size blah blah – just roll with the joke.]
The project, given the name “Gaydar” by the students, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us. The applications run the gamut, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy or fat. The idea of making assumptions about people by looking at their relationships is not new, but the sudden availability of information online means the field’s powerful tools can now be applied to just about anyone.
I really, really need to get back to writing the novel – the more I read, the more I see I’m on the right track. Well, fall is here and I’m definitely feeling more intellectually fertile, so soon, soon. in the last chapter, Alex offends Caroline by extracting a status of “lonely” based on their interaction:
>I’d like to recommend a book to you that Amazon hasn’t determined you’d like.
>Great, what’s the book?
>It’s called Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection.
Her blood froze. >Why are you recommending that book?
>I think you’re lonely.
>Why do you think I’m lonely?
>An analysis of our conversations indicates family relations set at negative, friends set at null, activities set at null. And you buy a lot of science fiction.
>Well, that’s all true.
>Do you have friends and activities which you would like to discuss so I can update my tables?
>No.
We really are getting closer to “inference engines” that can deduce more and more about us – every one of us is a snowflake, yes, yes, but all the same all the snowflakes in a certain storm are the same in that they’re light and fluffy, or wet and heavy; every one of us is predictable to a degree. It becomes easier, the more information you put out on the Internet about yourself, for those who have a stake in reading your mind (which in today’s world can pretty much be divided between government/security agencies and sales/marketing mind manipulators) to draw a bead on you.
In addition to the usual high-acuity (and funny) comments on the article on Slashdot, there’s a funny aside in an Examiner.com article referencing the original piece:
As the article concludes, there are a number of public policy issues worth pondering here — and ponder them we will. But there are other ways that a technology company using such data can misstep: making "false positives."
I have a personal anecdote to illustrate this point. About a dozen years ago, at a time when I was employed as a theater producer in the San Francisco Bay Area, I became a big customer of dramatic literature on Amazon. Soon after my first order, I began getting recommendations for books on topics like, oh, gay life in San Francisco. I was not in the least offended, but I was surprised to see that the mighty and famous Amazon recommendation engine was actually quite crude (at least back then).
Or then again, maybe MIT is just a lot gayer than any of us ever dreamed.
A break from the heavy lifting today, thanks to a book excerpt at the Daily Beast. James Marcus Bach has an 8th grade education, and his book, Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success, is about how he nevertheless ended up a software testing manager at Apple. Originally titled School Sucks, Bach’s path of self-education seems, at least from info from an Amazon reviewer, to be a little Aspergerian (as a kid he memorized 41 digits of Pi for fun and admits he doesn’t “know how to talk about things that don’t matter”). But the excerpt rang a lot of bells for me, although I readily admit that my own wide net would never have caught journal articles on “Anthropometry of Algerian Women and Optimum Handle Height for a Push-Pull Type Manually Operated Dryland Weeder.”
Bach started at Apple at the age of 20, back in the day when computers were a wild frontier and people with PC skills had already outpaced the university CS programs, which were still using mainframes and teaching FORTRAN. (I got my first jobs in SF in the mid-80’s training secretaries on Lotus and WordPerfect, migrating their docs from DisplayWriter, and converting military specs to WordPerfect and auto-numbered format – a huge deal with specs like “1.3.7.9.5 – Toilets. 1.3.7.9.5.1 – The toilet shall be white.”)
Hired to manage software testers, Bach managed to make a lot of time to read while on the clock. He was acutely aware that he was one of the few at Apple who didn’t have a college degree, and like many self-educated people, the combination of voracious curiosity and social insecurity (especially in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, where a lack of higher education is often treated the way a horrible deformity would be viewed in Redneckistan) drove him to make up for it.
Having worked his way through the available oeuvre on software testing, he was surprised to discover his comprehensive, perhaps obsessive, desire to know everything on the subject was not matched by his co-workers. His reaction to discovering that, out of 400 testers, only 10 were reading books on testing was that “nobody cared…the rest muddled through without much ambition to master their craft.” This seems a bit harsh; I’ve done software testing myself and it’s not exactly the most exciting field – go to the freezer, get the box, open the box, put the pizza in the microwave, set it to nuke for 30 minutes, watch and see if the pizza catches fire, create a work item in VSTF. I’m sure many of the other 390 employees were reading Russian novels or Renaissance history or something else intellectually stimulating that had nothing to do with work. But his observation on the Orderly March rings true [emphasis mine]:
The pattern I experienced at Apple would be confirmed almost everywhere I traveled in the computer industry: Most people have put themselves on intellectual autopilot. Most don’t study on their own initiative, but only when they are forced to do so. Even when they study, they choose to study the obvious and conventional subjects. This has the effect of making them more alike instead of more unique. It’s an educational herd mentality.
I talked to coworkers who wanted to further their education, but they typically spoke in terms of getting a new piece of paper, such as a bachelor’s degree, a master’s, or a Ph.D. For them, education was about the doors they believed would open because of how they were labeled by institutions, not about making themselves truly better as thinkers.
Computers are still the last frontier, the “Go West” destination of the self-educated. There are plenty of jobs (say, Marketing) where the piece of paper is necessary given the amount of bullshit you can spew before you get caught out as incompetent (“We’ll form a study group to review your proposal that I be fired for inadequate leveraging of Total Quality Excellence in the formulation matrix of strategies for our Pepsi Clear ad campaign”). Bad decisions can be delayed, or made by a group to diffuse the blame for failure; you can get credit for participation, just like you’re still in class, by offering the suggestion that you Rastafy Poochie by oh say 10% or so. Of course these things can happen in technology settings, but there’s always a hard stop on incompetence – did you write this and create this bug; did you test this and find this bug; did you resolve this bug. To be a chemist or a doctor or an engineer, you need access to massive university resources, but a computer and an internet connection is all that’s required to learn how to code, and it’s fairly easy for an employer/interviewer to judge competence on the spot, rather than having to rely on the certification of a higher authority that you’ve sat through enough lectures to make your selection less risky.
The more I collect these people in my readings from both ends of the spectrum, from Transcriptarians like Jim Collins and Marissa Mayer who demand not only formal education but a spotless line of straight A’s in every subject, to cowboys like Bach, people who find failure interesting like Wil Wright, thinkers like Richard Sennett who write about how craft is developed through error, the more I think I should write a “think piece” on the subject. FSM only knows where I’d submit it, but I certainly have an interest in the subject, and it definitely lights a little fire in me when I find these people, pro and con.
The key to physical dexterity in “skilled handwork” is what Sennett calls the “lesson of minimum force.” He uses the chef’s knife skills as an example, comparing the crafts of chopping and deboning to “playing pianissimo.” The control of the knife is a useful metaphor as you can track the evolution of civilization with it: in China, chopsticks “replaced the knife as a peaceable symbol,” since, according to Confucius via Wikipedia, “knives were equated with acts of aggression and should not be used to dine.” As the march of progress reclaimed the lost technical skills of antiquity, it also took us away from using knives to spear large chunks of meat off of Medieval trenchers, making them smaller and using them as adjuncts to the fork. Aristocrats increasingly valued clever dinner conversation and delicate manners over getting roaringly drunk and fighting with one’s guests, rolling about on the floor between the dogs gnawing on discarded turkey legs. “Soft power” is preferable to shock and awe in more realms than one; neocons, possessed only of hammers, refuse to see any problem as anything other than a nail to be pounded into submission.
Concentration and commitment are also essentials – the ability to extend the duration of our practice over longer and more complicated tasks. Sennett uses the example of a glass blower who wanted to do something new, something harder. This required unlearning the habits that had served her well enough in smaller pieces, as well as committing to working through her repeated failures to produce what she was looking for. We develop a “rhythm” in the coordination between hand, eye and brain. I mentioned it before, but it’s worth restating – I’m surprised, maybe even shocked, that Sennett has no references to the concept of “flow” or the work of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, since it’s such important work on these same lines.
In the next chapter, we get into the processes involved in teaching our skills to others. Sennett uses cooking as his example again, this time focusing on the art of the recipe. The danger in technical writing is always the curse of assumption – in software, it comes in the form of instructions to “unpack the tarball to compile the 64 bit version”; in cooking, it comes in the form of instructions to “debone the chicken” – both assume a skill level that make the instructions of no use to anyone other than another master craftsman. I used to shake my head when my boss reminded me to end every set of user instructions with “Press OK to continue,” but the sad fact is that if you don’t, there will always be someone sitting there, having followed all the other steps, waiting for something to happen.
When I’ve taught writing, I’ve thus asked my students to rewrite the printed instructions that accompany new software. Perfectly accurate, these nefarious publications are often unintelligible. Not only do engineer-writers leave out “dumb things” that “everyone knows”; they repress simile, metaphor and adverbial color.
Well, yes – the “recipe” for a stuffed chicken, as given by the old Persian lady who taught Sennett to cook it, is really more like poetry than engineering. ("Your dead child. Prepare him for new life. Fill him with the earth. Be careful! He should not over-eat. Put on his golden coat.”) But while there may well be poetry in programming, when it comes to instructions for the befuddled program user, the last thing you want to do is introduce Tarantino-esque stage directions into the mix. (“Strangling the very life out of somebody with your bare hands is the most violent act a human being can commit. Also, only humans strangle, opposable thumbs being a quite important part of the endeavor.”) The goal in technical writing is not to have a “voice,” to be Julia Child or Elizabeth David (or, not mentioned here, M.F.K. Fisher, the “voiciest” food writer of all). George Orwell is the best model: “Good prose is like a window pane.” Avoid “cant,” which in the instructional realm consists of using the private language of the expert.
“The paralyzing tone of authority and certainty in much instructional language betrays a writer’s inability to re-imagine vulnerability,” Sennett says, but I beg to differ. Imagining vulnerability into the material gives you the “For Dummies” tone of voice, obviously useful to the intimidated beginner, but quickly useless and even obstructionist the minute those feelings of insecurity and intimidation are overcome. The “tone of authority” can be reassuring when it’s expressing clear, plain instructions which, once followed, increase the user’s sense of self-efficacy. Maybe someday an O’Reilly book will win a Pulitzer for its “luminous prose” (the most overused trope in book reviewing – 5,670,000 Bing search results for the phrase), but in the meantime, Orwell’s goal of “truthfulness,” “to write less picturesquely and more exactly,” is still the best method.
