Late on a rainy night some years ago, a few blocks away from home on Broadway, I happened to give a homeless man a dollar or two. In gratitude, he handed me a book. It was very dark, so I had to wait until I got home to see that it was a wet, worn and torn, pale blue copy of Studies in Mathematics, Volume XI: Mathematical Methods in Science by George Polya, edited by Leon Bowden. Leaving it to dry on the radiator overnight, I looked at it the next day. It turned out to be a course of lectures that Polya had given in the summer of 1962 at Stanford to high school teachers of mathematics, under the auspices of the National Science Foundation. (Confession: the book has a Hunter College stamp in it, which may mean that I am in posession of a purloined library book.)
As I skimmed through the book, I found much fascinating material, but most of all, I was struck by a short introduction to the work of Simon Stevinus. I had never heard of Stevinus before this, and I would guess that many of you might not have either. It turns out that Stevinus was a brilliant 16th century Dutch mathematician, engineer, and scientist; a contemporary of Decartes, who even anticipated some of Galileo’s work. Stevinus was the first to use decimal fractions and showed their usefullness. As an engineer, he constructed dykes which are in use to this day.
What I want to talk about today is this: contrary to popular caricature, science does not always advance by observation and measurement. Often, it is a simple thought experiment which results in new insight. Einstein’s musings about what would happen if he sped along with a wave of light at a speed close to its own resulted in a rather famous conclusion, for example. (Of course, even Einstein’s thinking was connected to reality by the experimental and observational work of others.) And this serendipitously-discovered book exposed to me a truly marvelous thought experiment I hadn’t ever known about. I would like to explain this physically-intuitive proof in some detail to you, by which Stevinus derived the Law of Inclined Planes. In going through this step-by-step, I hope to illustrate the power of the thought experiment in general, and the elegance of Stevinus’s imaginative formulation in particular.
Now bear with me here: it is obvious that pushing an object up an inclined plane is easier than lifting it up vertically. (The weight of an object is simply the force required to lift it up vertically.) This is why a brewer will load his wagon by rolling casks of beer up a ramp, and it is pretty obvious that the steeper the ramp, the harder it is to roll the casks. The closer the ramp becomes to vertical, the closer the force required to roll (lift) the cask up becomes to its actual weight. But what exactly is the force required to roll a cask up a given inclined plane? This is the question that Stevinus set out to answer.
His first important move was to ask the question in a clear way. He realized that he must simplify the situation so that only the relevant physical quantities come into play, so he decided to ignore friction (something all of us are now used to doing from high school physics!). Deciding what is relevant and what isn’t is, in fact, half the job. This is how he put it: given the setup of inclined plane and pulley in Fig. 1, what weight would Y have to be, to balance X and keep it from sliding up or down the plane? Keep in mind that movement of X on the plane is frictionless (or you can imagine that the weight X has little wheels that allow it to roll on the plane), as is the pulley.
Stevinus’s next move was to realize that the vertical drop is just a special (extreme) case of another inclined plane, so he was able to generalize his question to this one: given the new setup in Fig. 2, once again, what weight does Y have to be, to balance X and keep it from sliding up or down the plane? (This time, imagine Y as also having little wheels, so it can slide up or down its own inclined plane without friction.)
Stevinus realized that the shape of the weights X and Y is irrelevant, and in an extraordinary leap of imagination, he replaced them with just a uniform rope (or chain). This situation is shown in Fig. 3. Assuming that the rope can still slide without friction on the inclined planes, it is clear that if the downward force is greater on the segment AB, then the rope will slide down that plane. If the downward force is greater on the segment BC, then the rope will slide down that side, and if the forces are in equilibrium, then the rope will stay balanced as it is. So which is it?
Again, in a brilliant move, Stevinus imagines the two ends of the rope connected by an additional loose length of rope. So now we have a closed loop of rope draped over the inclined planes. The situation now looks as shown in Fig. 4. We can see that although the situation is asymmetrical above the line segment AC, it is the same on both sides (the A side and the C side) below it, where the rope simply hangs in a symmetrical U-ish shape (called a catenary, and while we are on the subject see also this). Whatever forces the rope below AC exerts on the part of the rope above AC, must therefore be the same at A and at C. (The part of the rope below pulls equally on both sides.) So now the startling conclusion: if the part of the rope above AC, on the inclined planes, were to tend to slide down to one side, this would result in perpetual motion in that direction! (Because as it slides down a little bit, an equal part of the rope which had been hanging below would go up the inclined plane on the other side, and the situation would be identical to what we started with, therefore more of the rope would slide down, and it would just keep going like that forever.) We will have constructed a pertpetual motion machine. Since this cannot be right, Stevinus concluded that the parts of the rope above AC on the inclined planes must also be in equilibrium. Since X and Y are in equilibrium, and we also know that the weight of the rope is proportional to its length, this means that at equilibrium, the ratio of the weights X/Y justs equals the ratio of the lengths AB/BC. This finally answers our initial question from Fig. 2: What weight does Y have to be, to balance X and keep it from sliding up or down the plane? Simple algebraic manipulation shows that since X/Y = AB/BC,
Y = X * BC / AB — and this is the Law of Inclined Planes
And there you have it! The weight needed at Y will always be as much less than X, as the length of the side it is resting on is less than the length of the other side. If BC is only half the length that AB is, then only half the weight of X will be needed at Y to balance it. And this conclusion holds no matter what the actual inclinations are, because we have (or Stevinus has) derived this result generally, without specifying any particular angles of inclination. In other words, the law will hold even for the vertical case of Fig. 1. (If you still don’t get it, you could try the explanation here.) I find this a very beautiful result, especially as it relies on extraordinary imagination guided by good intuition at each step. In addition, the proof exploits considerations of symmetry, which were to become of paramount importance in 20th century physics, through the connection of symmetries with conservation laws.
For all his work with inclined planes, even Galileo’s reputation as an experimenter is probably exaggerated. For example, it is unlikely that Galileo bothered to drop objects of different weights from the Tower of Pisa to show that they fall at the same rate. He was too smart to have needed to do this, and had his own thought experiment to show that objects of different weights must fall at the same rate: imagine that you have two objects, say iron balls, one of which weighs 20 pounds and the other 5 pounds. Now, it was thought that the 20 pound ball falls faster (say at some rate F) than the 5 pound one (which falls at a slower rate S). Imagine connecting the two balls with a chain, then dropping them. What will happen? Well, presumably the 20 pound ball should pull the lighter object into a faster rate than S, while the lighter ball should slow down the 20 pound ball from its fast rate of F. In other words, joined together, the balls should drop at some intermediate rate between S and F. But now consider that the two balls joined by a chain can also be construed as one object with a weight of 25 pounds, which should fall even faster than the heavier ball alone, or faster than F! Here we have a contradiction, so they must fall at the same rate. Such is the beauty of the thought experiment!
Stevinus is even supposed to have proven that objects of different weights fall at the same rate before Galileo did. He did work in hydrostatics, noting that the pressure exerted by a liquid depends only on its height and is independent of the shape of the vessel containing it. He also invented a sail-powered carriage which could outrun horse-drawn vehicles of the time, shown here in the picture. He was quite a guy.
Thanks to Margit Oberrauch for doing all the inclined plane illustrations.
Have a good week!
I was thrown into a quandary by a remark in the most recent Editorial of the Wilson Quarterly: “The Web, for all its marvels, hasn’t yet provided a home for the kind of focused and sustained dialogue that smaller magazines create.” This comment struck me as both curious and characteristic of a certain residual attitude of disdain for online writing that it is still possible to find in intellectual circles. Part of it, I think, is a natural tendency toward the Luddite in literary folks, particular in those over a certain age.
Some of America’s greatest magazines still treat the web browser like a second class literary citizen. Harper’s, one of the flagships of American writing, has a miserly approach to the internet. You can find many brilliant Features at Harpers.org, as well as great Readings, and fine Cartoons. They’re laid out in an incredibly weird narrow long format that seems to assume its readers use a screen the size of an ancient iMac. Another problem: I can buy a copy of Harper’s at the newsstand before they update their “Current Issue” page. The Prize Winner in the category “Worst Web Site for Best Magazine,” however, with its frames layout (making linking intolerable) and contempt for graphical prettification, has to be Dissent. Harper’s and Dissent, of course, are fine magazines and will continue to be so. Right now, the web needs them more than they need the web, although this might well change over time. The reason, I would argue, is that so much of the national conversation about ideas, culture, and politics now takes place online, via web logs and email. The Right-wing has been savvier in its approach to its message on the internet, with a far more closely connected network of sites linking to each other.
There’s an understandable negative intellectual response to the web. It’s unholy and overwhelming. I often hear in literary circles a snobbish notion of a world awash in barbarous blogorrhea. Certainly the idea of cutting out the middlemen of traditional media – editors and publishers – also means eliminating those people who can act as a writer’s best friend. (By saying, “Listen, you might want to cut this,” or, “Whoa, dude, that’s just crazy.”) The online world, as a great leveler, the ultimate Whitmanesque democratic experiment in free expression, is the central fact of its fizz. But the web is also a great proliferator of nonsense, propaganda, misleading information, and terrible writing. Here’s a site, Boring Boring, that only lists “dull things.”
So, is there online literature yet? Will there ever be? There’s some truth to the claim that many online-only journals either seem like vanity presses or else attempts by the impoverished to mimic the effects of print. But WQ is wrong if it means to suggest that there aren’t good online journals, of which I like the classy and subdued GutCult, the engaging nthposition, smallspiralnotebook, and The Drunken Boat. The most interesting example, however, is Agni, which runs an lively and excellent online parallel journal separate from but connected to its great print organ. Agni might be a model for other journals to follow, since, for established magazines and nonprofit organizations, creating parallel online journals would be an extremely cheap way to boost prestige. It’s paradoxical, however, that one of the best online journals in America would be edited by Agni’s Sven Birkerts, who has decried the death of print louder than anyone else.
One last comment. Somebody ought to start developing some ideas about what writing works best online and whether online writing will change literary production. LitBlogs are certainly changing the way that books get their word-of-mouth buzz these days. What we don’t know yet is whether new literary forms will emerge from online publishing, especially web logs. Will short fiction, for example, get shorter? Will anybody use a web log to create a great fictional persona or literary character? (This one, purporting to be the diary of Captain Morgan, the swashbuckling Rum salesman, is not exactly what I had in mind. Here is the very silly blog of the Incredible Hulk.) Will there be a great American novel that is written on a web log? Right now, the answer seems to be: “Not if there’s no money in it.”
Our friend Ram recently gave a talk at the Asia Society here in New York on the tsunami and peace in Sri Lanka. It touched on a larger question, or an antecedent question: can you negotiate with people who use suicide bombers?
The LTTE in Sri Lanka has been responsible for the majority of suicide bombings in the recent decades, and it has done so for explicitly secular nationalist reasons with bombers who are largely Hindu and Christian. Ram’s take is that while he doesn’t know whether you can negotiate peace with those who use suicide killers, he thinks that negotiations can delay war. The Sri Lankan state, of course, has little choice, given the balance of forces.
Certainly, states negotiate with people who use terrorism quite often. And the world accepts people who used terrorism to achieve political aims. This is as true of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir (their Irgun and Lehi past respectively) as it is of Arafat or the ANC. And most terrorist groups, I suspect, would gladly trade resources and methods with their adversaries.
Suicide bombing conjures up different images. Morally, there is little difference from a suicide bomber who kills civilians and a terrorist who fires a rocket propelled grenade into a crowd of civilians, except that the latter may still be left to carry out another attack. But we have this image of suicide bombers as beyond reason, negotiation, and self-interest. That is, it’s hard to imagine what could possibly reach them, what, short of total surrender could appease them if they’re willing to so far as kill themselves in this way.
This image, of course, confuses the bombers themselves, with those who use them. (Or perhaps not entirely.) One can’t really imagine the Old Man of the Mountain, the leader of the Assassins, one of history’s early suicide killers, himself carrying out a suicide attack, or beyond negotiation. Bin Laden’s video message just before the elections seemed in this line and an offer to negotiate. Needless to say, this is not at all the same as saying that one should in this instance, but rather it is to raise the question of can one (in the sense of possible) negotiate with those who use suicide terrorism.
My old classmate Mia Bloom, author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror, met with the LTTE in 2002, as she was conducting surveys of Tamils in LTTE controlled regions. Her impressions and experience are telling.
“I remarked how friendly everyone was and asked the guard, ‘Is he [Secretary-General of the LTTE Peace Secretariat S. Puleedevan] a killer?’
The guard smiled: ‘Oh yeah.’ I never expected terrorists to be so pleasant.
. . .
Puleedevan acknowledged that after Sept. 11, 2001, the tactics that had worked so well for them in the past were no longer appropriate.”
What that all says and means is unclear? If those who use suicide bombers appear more open to reason, to appeals of self-interest, and negotiation, then they seem more morally culpable than before, as the actions seem less born of insanity than of strategic calculation and moral choice. And if that’s the case, then perhaps some states do not have the luxury of not talking to them and trying to appeal to reason.
This is the second of 3 Quarks Daily’s Monday columns. Abbas started us off in fine form last week with a wholly fabricated yarn about his meeting with the president of Sri Lanka and talking to her about cake. He even presented some doctored photos.
I will change gears a bit with some real information about places that actually exist. In this case, Paterson, New Jersey. Now you may ask, with some puzzlement and bemusement, why Paterson. Especially if you’ve been there. Granted, history has not been so kind to Paterson. A once booming industrial town known as Silk City, it was recently described to me by a resident as ‘a complete shit hole’. 
But it isn’t a complete shit hole. It is a special place. I’m not sure exactly what it is about Paterson that makes it special but I’ll try and jot down a few notes in that direction.
First of all, Paterson is wonderful because it is a ruin and ruins are beautiful. But that is too aesthetic and trite. The shallow romantic love of ruins is wistful and nostalgic, full of longing. I am talking about a love of ruins that is more like the attitude that Walter Benjamin took toward the Parisian arcades of the mid-19th century.
Ruins are interesting because when a world falls apart you have that much more of an opportunity to understand it. It lays itself bare. And Paterson isn’t just any kind of ruin, it is an American ruin. This is the city that William Carlos Williams wrote a five volume poem about. He picked Paterson as the place where he could write according to his precept “no ideas but in things.” He was trying to find an American idiom, like Whitman. He was trying to deal with America.
Paterson became Paterson because of its beautiful falls. But it wasn’t their beauty that mattered, it was the power to turn the mills. The weird American dynamic between nature and the c
ity is right there in about two hundred yards of Paterson real estate, from the Great Falls down the street to the forgotten and decaying mills. A few blocks away can be found the truly sad and melancholic park in honor of Lou Costello (of Abbott and Costello fame). There, the drunks flout the posted suggestion that alcoholic beverages be consumed elsewhere.
In all that has fallen apart about Paterson, New Jersey, there is much that comes together. Paterson is about the meanness, and stupidness, and brutality that is America. The very failure that is Paterson is kind of perfect. But there is something tantalizing about it too. There is that infinite potentiality of Americanness lurking just beneath the surface of Paterson. It seems like that was what intrigued Williams too. Why can’t Paterson be more like what it gives you in glimpses and glimmers? Of course, that is a question that goes beyond Paterson to human civilization in general. But who wants to talk about human civilization in general. Right now, we have Paterson.
Have a lovely week.
Even though we are for the most part a “links” blog, the editors of 3 Quarks Daily have decided that we will take turns writing a short column each Monday, where we can talk about whatever we feel like. No one else wanted to do the first one so it has fallen to me by default, and I’ll take this opportunity to just ramble on about a bunch of things…
Last fall, the President of Sri Lanka, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, gave a very good speech on conflict resolution at the Asia Society in New York City, at which I was present, and in which, among other things, she commented that:
Conflict resolution has become today, a high profile subject taught in universities and lectured on, at many a seminar and conference. Experts in this field are held in awe in some circles in many countries. Yet, conflict resolution is not new. It has only been packaged differently in our age.
Afterwards, there was a reception and a friend introduced me to the President, to whom I said that although she was right about there being a lot of fancy repackaging of age-old wisdom in the academic field of conflict resolution, there have been some interesting intellectual developments, in mathematics, for example, which do provide new tools for avoiding or even resolving conflicts. As an example, I brought up cake theory.
Cake theory basically looks at methods of how to divide a cake among n persons so that each of them feels they got a fair share. For example, for two persons, one method would be to have one person cut the cake into two pieces, after which the other person gets to choose which piece she wants. This obviously gives the first person great incentive to carefully cut the cake into equal halves, otherwise she will get stuck with the smaller one. It gets a little more complicated for greater numbers of persons, but the problem has been solved for arbitrary n.
One method for dividing the cake into an arbitrary number of portions is described in the Wikipedia this way:
Another method begins with the first person portioning off 1 / n of the resource (for n people). Each following person then examines the portion in turn, removing a part for themselves if they believe the portion to be larger than 1 / n. The last person to remove part receives the portion. The process continues until the entire resource has been fairly divided.
The problem may be modified by requiring the division to be envy-free: that is, each recipient should not only believe that they have at least 1 / n of the resource (according to their measure) but that no other recipient has received more than they have.
The President seemed interested, so I went on to point out that this method has already been used in the Law of the Sea Treaty to divide under-sea mining resources between industrialized and developing countries:
The Convention of the Law of the Sea, which went into effect in 1994, incorporates such a scheme to protect the interests of developing countries when a highly industrialized nation wants to mine a portion of the seabed underlying international waters. The country seeking to mine would divide that area into two portions. An independent agency representing the developing countries would then choose one of the two tracts, reserving it for future use. [See more here.]
At this point, Madam President’s philistine handlers decided that she had been subjected to a long enough insane-sounding harangue on “cakes” and “the sea” by me, and she was dragged off to be introduced to someone more polite. But she was interested, and subsequently had my wife, Margit, and me over to the Presidential Palace in Columbo for drinks when we were visiting friends in Sri Lanka later in the year.
Anyhow, we had a great time in Sri Lanka, and were saddened to hear that, among so many lives and so much else, the beautiful old hotel we stayed at on the beach in the coastal city of Galle was destroyed by the tsunami. But even that most horrific of disasters may have a silver lining in terms of our theme of conflict resolution, making possible more fruitful negotiations between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers (the LTTE): there is more about that here.
I was reminded of all this by a great post yesterday at Something Similar by Jeff Hodges, about The Fair Division Calculator.
Have a good week!
It’s official: H.P. Lovecraft isn’t just some creepy schoolboy’s secret literary fare anymore, but a bona fide Amercian Author. At least that’s how I read the Library of America’s recent publication of Lovecraft’s Tales, edited by Peter Straub. Why all the sudden interest in Lovecraft? The Believer recently published French enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq’s essay on Lovecraft and intends to publish Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life at some point soon. (Lovecraft is to Houellebecq what Poe was to Baudelaire; I’m not sure what it is about ornate American works of terror that so rivets the French imagination, but hey.) Nick Mamatas of the Fortean Bureau has already pointed out that Lovecraft entered “the Canon” (if you’re worried about such things) when Penguin published his work. Meanwhile, Laura Miller finds both Lovecraft and his admirers a little loathsome in her firm but pretty fair Salon review. Miller rightly dwells on Lovecraft’s pathological racism (see, e.g., Lovecraft’s “Rats in the Walls”), but that never slowed down the Canonization of Chandler or Jack London either. More provocatively, Miller asks Why Lovecraft? when Edmund Wilson doesn’t have a Library of America volume yet.
The answer, I think, has something to do with Lovecraft’s strange enduring influence, his weird mythology the nightmare American version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s steadily increasing stock, which is something other than strictly literary. I have one Lovecraft theory, rather political in nature, which I wouldn’t go out on a limb to defend. When a continent is conquered by war, slavery, and racial extermination, the landscape, only seeming to lack a persistent cultural memory, could come back to haunt us, with monsters bred out of the sleep of reason. In this sense, I see Lovecraft in a line with William Burroughs, whose conclusion from a superficial and exoticized look at the native culture of Central and South America, in addition to the white madness that displaced it and the native peoples of North America, was that America was simply an evil land. It is surely right to place Lovecraft’s externalized demons back into his head, biographically speaking, but there’s something odd and inexplicable about his cultural persistence. What it boils down to, perhaps, is not only that America is haunted, an “old world” also (at last, the truth admitted), but also that in Lovecraft we see the ultimate denial and dramatic reversal of the original American Dream of Starting Over in an Edenic land of boundless possibility and natural beauty.
On a recent trip to London I rekindled an old passion for stamps and stamp-collecting, that ultimate nerd hobby whose very name, “philately,” is a sure-fire ticket to the deformation of any young boy’s social life. At the newish British Library, there’s a fantastic stamp collection located in the prestigious area of the, er, well, it’s actually in the cafe. You can browse it while inhaling the remnants of other peoples’ lunches.
Of particular note were the World War II collections, including stamps from Nazi occupied countries, the “Judenpost” of the ghettos, and the various underground Polish postal systems. The Polish government-in-exile created stamps in London for circulation in occupied Poland depicting various liberating aircraft and tanks. (Polish political prisoners also sent letters from Auschwitz, according to this illustrated article.)
The Poles also had an underground post operating under the noses of the Germans, complete with time-date stamps, an entirely alternate system. The punishment for discovery was death, so that there is something immensely civilized about the use of official stamps and seals on the underground letters. The Model Collection displays various Allied stamps in the Occupied Zones of Germany set up by Yalta. Stamps with Hitler’s image on them had to be recycled, and each of the occupiers had different systems for attempting to oblierate the image using various ink blots and geometrical patterns.
For the past two years or so there’s been an interesting discussion going on about how to review books. On one side of the divide are Dale Peck’s Hatchet Jobs and the genre of the polished and witty negative book review that is supposed to be more entertaining than the book itself. There is also a mode of philistinism setting in that involves the rubbishing of challenging books, epitomized by B. R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto and Jonathan Franzen’s regrettable attack on the late William Gaddis in the New Yorker. The other main development is the philosophy of reading set out by Heidi Julavits in the inaugural issue of The Believer, which attacks the “snarkiness” of much contemporary reviewing, where fatuous savagery and faux-learned ridicule have replaced any serious consideration of authors and ideas. In this spirit, The Believer recently published a long “letter” from Rick Moody defending Nicholson Baker’s novel Checkpoint from a swipe in the New York Times Book Review. The Moody/NYTBR agon brings to mind the old clash between Eggers and the Times dwelt upon at length in this Slate item.
These debates have come home to roost in the form of Charles Taylor’s new Salon.com review of Nick Hornby’s new book, The Polysyllabic Spree, the first title from Believer Books. The book collects Hornby’s hilarious Believer columns over the last year and is a gem. Hornby is one of the funniest writers around, and the idea of his column, “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” is brilliant insofar as it allows him to write about whatever books he has happened upon, old or new, classic or oddity, rather than reviewing current titles alone.
Taylor has written a weird review of the book for Salon that can be read in its entirety here. It is written in praise of the book but against the mentality of The Believer, which he describes nastily as a kind of literary Up With People. Charles Taylor, who I presume is neither the great Converse sneaker-king nor the Canadian philosopher nor the Liberian war criminal – unless he is a very busy man indeed – argues that “Where [The Believer] deserves credit for bucking a trend that is harming contemporary criticism isn’t in its attitude toward negative reviews but in the freedom it has given Hornby for his column.” His argument is strange because it makes it seem as though Hornby’s accomplishment has nothing to do with The Believer or was acheived in spite of its editorial direction.
He is also referring to the fact that The Believer doesn’t print soley negative book reviews, and asked Hornby not to explicitly name books he hated when he discusses them in his columns. Is this a problem? I happen to know from personal experience that The Believer isn’t in the business of puffery, or producing good reviews of bad books. In fact, the purpose of The Believer’s newish one-page reviews section is to draw attention to literary fiction that isn’t ordinarily picked up by larger book reviews. At any rate, all this wouldn’t be worth going into if it didn’t open up some bigger issues about reviewing. Personally, I don’t mind extremely negative reviews, because sometimes they get me intrigued and upset and stir things up. I had never read Rick Moody, for example, until Dale Peck described him as “the worst writer of his generation” – a clearly false statement since there must be someone Moody’s age writing copy for douche ads. But now I’m going to read Moody. There’s nothing more curiosity-inspiring than attempted censorship or apoplectic castigation, and when somebody at Slate trashes Wes Anderson’s new film The Life Aquatic I get myself to the theatre as fast as I can. There’s another matter, of course, which is that some of the best nonfiction ever written, such as Mark Twain’s “Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” takes the form of negative reviewing.
My own view, for what it’s worth, is that negative reviews are a branch of humor writing, and that the best comedy comes at the expense of the powerful, pompous, and pretentious, or what Laurence Sterne called “false gravity” in Tristram Shandy. I would argue that novelists as a rule are not the enemy, and that crushing a first-time novelist or a person trying to express something is a little like pushing a baby stroller down the subway stairs.
On the other hand, a critic’s first duty is honesty, and if there is no way out of an assignment then it does nobody any service to soft-pedal something one has taken a strong dislike to. Snarkiness is the mediocre mind’s second-rate, knee-jerk response to the culture of puffery and hype; in fact they are two sides of the same problem (and feed off one another) rather than true adversaries. My utopian suggestion would be a restoration of the concept of real criticism – independent, honest, passionate, partial, and decently paid – rather than the devolution of book reviewing into a badly-paid arm of publishing PR or the smarmy posing of middling minds who percieve contemporary literature as an endless river of bilge that threatens the sanctity of their precious critical faculties.
I’m not sure if it’s due to sunspots or historical circumstances, and I know my friends who write fiction and poetry will be unhappy that I’m saying this, but it seems to me that nonfiction is sometimes more exciting than fiction right now. Certainly the stastistics show a decline in fiction sales even while publishers are putting out 17% more titles. (Bowker has the full story.) Biography, history and religion showed double-digit increases for 2003. Some account for this as a post-September 11 reaction – unprecedented American interest in the outside world. It is also possible to view the trend aesthetically and suggest that perhaps fiction hasn’t been keeping pace with current events. (Indeed, how can it?) If this turns out to be the Age of Nonfiction – for talent follows the money – then this could explain the increasing interest in what is detestably called “Creative Nonfiction.” (Detestable because all writing ought to be “creative,” and because “creative” is a cruel term for good writing, so that the phrase “Creative Nonfiction” is doubly appalling from an artistic point of view.) Aldaily.com recently posted a link to an essay called “The Age of the Essay” by Paul Graham. Graham, famous for his work on Spam and Spam filters, has this to say about writing essays:
“What should you think about? My guess is that it doesn’t matter – that anything can be interesting if you get deeply enough into it. One possible exception might be things that have deliberately had all the variation sucked out of them, like working in fast food. In retrospect, was there anything interesting about working at Baskin-Robbins?”
Read the whole essay here.
