Michael Innes' The Case of the Journeying Boy: Irony, Circa 1949

For those of you who think that irony was invented around 1970, I offer this 1949 description of a cinema billboard advertising a movie:

Across its monstrous facade sprawled a vast plywood lady. If erect she would be perhaps fifty feet high; she was reclining, however, in an attitude of sultry abandon and equatorial vegetation and in a garment the only prominent feature of which was a disordered shoulder-strap. As a background to the broadly accentuated charms of her person -- pleasantly framed, indeed, between her six-foot, skyward-pointing breasts -- was what appeared to be a two-ocean navy in process of sinking through tropical waters like a stone. One limp hand held a smoking revolver seemingly responsible for this extensive catastrophe. The other, supporting her head, was concealed in a spouting ectoplasm of flaxen hair. Her expression was languorous, provocative, and irradiated by a sort of sanctified lecherousness highly creditable to both the craft and the ardent soul of the unknown painter who had created her. Poised in air, and in curves boldly made to follow the line of her swelling hips, were the words AMOROUS, ARROGANT, ARMED! Above this, in letters ten feet high, was the title PLUTONIUM BLONDE. And higher still, and in rubric scarcely less gigantic, was the simple announcement, ART'S SUPREME ACHIEVEMENT TO DATE.

--from Michael Innes' The Case of the Journeying Boy (1949), p. 54.

X-Posts on New Yorker Fiction

I've posted reviews on Emdashes of a fair amount of recent fiction from The New Yorker that I've been forgetting to cross-post here. So tonight, I'm making up for it. Here's reviews of:

• Steven Polansky's "Leg," from January 24, 1994
• Yoko Ogawa's "A Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain," from 2004
• Three recent New Yorker stories by Gail Hareven (trans. Yaacov Jeffrey Green), Martínez (trans. Alberto Manguel), and Chris Adrian.
• Three slightly more recent New Yorker stories by J.G. Ballard, Craig Raine, and Colm Tóibín.

Thereby Hangs a Tail

In Emily Pecora's recent profile in Polite magazine of two Pennsylvania philanthropists -- two brothers -- I found a story so ripe with implication that I had to share it:

In October of 2004, a federal grand jury indicted Jeremy Sommers, Lansford’s K-9 officer, for planting narcotics during searches utilizing the drug-sniffing dog the brothers had donated. The Lansford city council, which had never been sure the town needed a drug-sniffing dog in the first place, [my emphasis] placed an ad in the classified section of the Times News announcing the dog’s sale.

... Jeremy Sommers was sentenced to twenty-three months in prison and a $4,000 fine and my hometown of Hazleton put in a bid to buy the dog.

Now, this is purely a flight of fancy, but what if Jeremy Sommers took a real shine to the unnamed K-9? Perhaps the dog was good and true and loyal, at a time when Mr. Sommers' personal life (I'm making all this up) was a shambles? Let's say his mother, his sole surviving parent, had advanced Alzheimer's and his girlfriend had betrayed him, and his buddies down at the bar had been giving him the cold shoulder ever since he became a cop ...

And now he's assigned to the dog, who turns out to be smart enough to star in the movies, a helluva partner. They're a great team -- except, see, there's no drugs for the pooch to find! What then?

The Chief starts breathing down the cop's neck because the City Council wants stats on the dog's success rate, and the mayor needs to send a report to the brothers who put up the money for the dog in the first place, so they feel like they did the Right Thing, that the money was well-spent, and now everybody's coming down like a ton of bricks on this poor cop, who only wants to hang on to the dog, that good dog that's been doing its job well but with absolutely no drug busts to show for it ... What then? He plants the drugs, so he can keep the dog ...

All fancy, I'm sorry to say, based on the fragments of news accounts I can find online, but I like my version better. It's heartwarming -- that is, if you're not the poor sap who got framed. But notice how, with only a few details, I automatically created an explanatory narrative? We human beings do love our stories.

Rebecca West on the Importance of Narrative

More from Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

As we grow older and see the ends of stories as well as their beginnings, we realize that to the people who take part in them it is almost of greater importance that they should be stories, that they should form a recognizable pattern, than that they should be happy or tragic. The men and women who are withered by their fates, who go down to death reluctantly but without noticeable regrets for life, are not those who have lost their mates prematurely or by perfidy, or who have lost battles or fallen from early promise in circumstances of public shame, but those who have been jilted or were the victims of impotent lovers, who have never been summoned to command or been given any opportunity for success or failure. Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. If one's own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book. We can all of us judge the truth of this, for hardly any of us manage to avoid some periods when the main theme of our lives is obscured by details, when we involve ourselves with persons who are insufficiently characterized; and it is possibly true not only of individuals, but of nations. What would England be like if it had not its immense Valhalla of kings and heroes, if it had not its Elizabethan and its Victorian ages, its thousands of incidents which come up in the mind, simple as icons and as miraculous in their suggestion that what England has been it can be again, now and for ever? What would the United States be like if it had not those reservoirs of triumphant will-power, the historical facts of the War of Independence, of the giant American statesmen, and of the pioneering progress into the West, which every American citizen has at his mental command and into which he can plunge for revivification at any minute? To have a difficult history makes, perhaps, a people who are bound to be difficult in any conditions, lacking these means of refreshment (55-56).

I love how West will veer without warning into the deep waters of generalization. This habit used to be more common among writers than it is now, and one can see why the practice would have been abandoned, since there is such obvious arrogance in it, and potential for error. Yet watching West generalize is breathtaking, because even when the details don't work, she's usually onto something. (How could she not be, when she's got so many interesting observations scattered across the landscape at one time?)

Putting the "Extra" in "Extraordinary"

One of the best Christmas presents I ever received was given to me last year by my wonderful wife: The New Yorker magazine on DVD, every issue ever printed ... except that it's always about a year behind. I love the magazine but don't subscribe because I know I can't keep up with it, which is silly because it's fairly easy to keep up with 50 issues a year compared to catching up on 80 years of back issues.

Anyhow, this explains why I'm only just now reading a 2005 article by Richard Preston called Capturing the Unicorn. The thing is an unintentional catalog of the extraordinary. First, there's "The Hunt of the Unicorn," the seven tapestries "woven from threads of dyed wool and silk, some of them gilded or wrapped in silver, around 1500" and owned since 1937 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They are "the most beautiful tapestries in existence," are "among the great works of art of any kind," and "their monetary value today is incalculable." They were moved in 1998 from the Cloisters to the Met itself to be cleaned and repaired. (I'm thinking art heist movie -- are you?)

Second, the linen backings, which had deteriorated, had to be removed, performed by a team at the Met "using tweezers and mangifying lenses." And just so you know, these tapestries aren't small: they're 12 feet tall, and some are 14 feet wide. Did I mention there were seven of them? Preston estimates it probably took about seven years to make them. Imagine trying to take off the backings without harming them. (Would you be nervous? Naah, I didn't think so.)

Third, the Met's chief photographer has a goal of making a "high-resolution digital image of every work of art in the Met's collections. The job will take at least twenty-five years ..." Nothing like having a goal. Anyway, her team had to photograph the tapestries in sections. It took two weeks and the images filled over 200 CDs. The plan was to stitch the images together in Photoshop.

Fourth, when it turned out the images couldn't be stitched together, two mathematicians, Gregory and David Chudnovsky, came to the rescue. The pair are brothers and "insist they are functionally one mathematician who happens to occupy two human bodies." Preston refers to the two as "the Chudnovsky Mathematician." They took the CDs from the Met (yes, there was a predictably hilarious incident where one of them accidentally left a whole bag of the CDs at the grocery store) and fed the data into their home-built supercomputer ... but couldn't stitch the images together at first. Why? Because a tapestry is not a 2-D object, but a 3-D one. The warp of it changed shape over tme, responding to changes in humidity and heat. Hour by hour, as the photographers worked, it expanded and contracted, its edges shifting slightly, and "the gold- and silver-wrapped threads changed shape at different speeds and in different ways from the wool and silk threads." On top of this, the photographers had placed a sheet of paper underneath the sections they photographed, and as they moved it, they stretched the tapestry slightly, making it ripple. All of which added up to a heckuva math problem.

Solve it the Chudnovsky Mathematician did. Now the Mathematician is working on a supercomputer for the US government that "will contain two million processors and fourteen thousand hard drives. It will use two and a half million watts of electricity -- enough to power a few thousand homes. Two thousand gallons of water per minute will flow through [its] core ... to keep it cool. If the pumps fail, it will melt down in less than ten seconds."

Sorta puts our own puny ambitions into scale, don't it?

Gauss Again

Remember that story about Gauss, the brilliant 18th-century mathematician? As a schoolboy, he showed up his teacher when he tried to give the class a make-work problem involving adding up all the numbers from 1 to 100, and Gauss solved it in just a few moments? I do. I first heard it somewhere in elementary school, and it made me feel incredibly inadequate. (I knew I'd never make it to junior high school.)

Turns out, however,that the story's a very old urban legend. Brian Hayes, writing in American Scientist Online, has collected over 100 examples of the story in eight languages. According to Hayes, the earliest account of the story, though able to claim Gauss himself as its source, was written long after the fact and does not specify what arithmetic problem was assigned to the class. In other words, the anecdote simply says Gauss solved an unnamed problem very quickly. It was later authors who inserted the detail about the problem being to add up a series of numbers from 1 - 100. Hayes' account of what he's learned about the history of the story and its evolution is worth reading; more interesting still is his point that the other students -- the putative dunces who couldn't see a shortcut to adding up a series of integers -- would have found lesser shortcuts of their own if they actually tried adding up all those numbers, because they would've seen obvious patterns. As he writes,

Let me invite you to take a sheet of paper and actually try adding the numbers from 1 to 100.

Finished? Already?

All right, all right, no need to show it to me. So you've guessed the next part of what Hayes says:

On a small slate or a sheet of paper, it's difficult to write 100 numbers in a column, and so students would likely break the task down into subproblems. Suppose you start by adding the numbers from 1 to 10, for a sum of 55. Then the sum of 11 through 20 is 155, and 21 through 30 yields 255. Again, how far would you continue before spotting the trend?

Which brings us to Hayes' real point:

On first hearing this fable, most students surely want to imagine themselves in the role of Gauss. Sooner or later, however, most of us discover we are one of the less-distinguished classmates; if we eventually get the right answer, it's by hard work rather than native genius. I would hope that the story could be told in a way that encourages those students to keep going. And perhaps it can be balanced by other stories showing there's a place in mathematics for more than one kind of mind.

... and in many other fields as well.

Who Wants a Retired Harry Potter?

Rumors that J.K. Rowling may kill off Harry Potter in the last book of her series have stirred up, so I gather, some indignation and disbelief among her fans. Charles McGrath, writing in The New York Times, has a good point to make about this:

Would we even remember Little Nell if she hadn't died in such spectacularly mawkish fashion? Would we prefer that Emma Bovary didn't swallow the poison and instead became a clochard, cadging francs at the agricultural fair? And do we really want to contemplate Harry, now bald and grizzled, the lightning-shaped scar faded into an age spot, retired from magic and, pint in hand, prattling on about old quidditch matches? Surely it makes more sense to employ the other kind of magic, and go back to Volume 1 and start over.

This is, of course, the sort of heartlessly clinical thing that only a critic could seriously propose. If Dickens or Flaubert were writing today, they would've found a way to revive their characters. ---No, scratch that. Dickens wouldn't have bothered with writing novels if he were alive today; he'd have gone straight to scripts, and even now be hard at work on An Even Bleaker House. Flaubert, well ... he'd probably be unpublished.

Why We Read Fiction & the Nietzche Diet

Who's more generous, women or men? Regardless, they certainly have different tastes in reading, according to a piece in Reason, which summarizes a recent British survey of each sex's favorite novels ever. (Where women's tastes are varied, men's choices, interestingly, tend to center around only four books by Camus, Vonnegut, Salinger, and Marquez.) Apparently, there's also an interesting theory (supposedly new) about why people read fiction, based on cognitive theory: essentially, it gives us practice doing something we like to do anyway, which is figure out what other people are thinking and why they do what they do. Does this mean that women spend more time thinking about others than men do?

Bonus reading tip: Friedrich Nietzche's new diet book.