The dust consisted of 2 cups of flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder, and 1 teaspoon of sugar premixed. The added crystals are ½ teaspoon of salt. “Very hot” conventionally means 450-500F.
This recipe was adapted from the Australian Women’s Weekly cooking class cookbook (1992 reprint) for Eliot’s birthday treasure hunt with Ali, Flora and Ruby. But I forgot a step: brush the scones with milk before putting them in the oven. Also, cutting them into much smaller discs using a champagne flute works even better than the usual 2” size (or the dreaded American scone at 4”+). Luckily, indigenous expertise was on hand to correct these errata and ensure a masterful result.
The real Wiveliscombe, though chosen purely for its name, is a rather cute looking town of 2,670 souls in Somerset:
Thanks to Barak for his cameo in step F.
“Sorel’s basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom.”
—Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
Somewhere on the bramble-choked planet where philosophers live, Sam Harris wrote a little 66-page book called Free Will. Harris is a fine writer and to the point; also, his minimal title consists of the perfect number of characters to hang from a pair of puppeteer’s operating crosses. As this image suggests, he is a hard core determinist: (a) the brain obeys the laws of physics, and (b) there is no “mind” that isn’t a function of the physical processes of the brain, therefore, (c) the idea of free will doesn’t even make sense conceptually:
“The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.”
For those of us who are not dualists (that would be everyone “philosophically respectable”, as Harris puts it), (a) and (b) are givens.* Harris concedes that there is an (also respectable) spectrum of thought called “compatibilism” that attempts to reconcile (a) and (b) with some meaningful definition of free will; many thinkers of this school (like Daniel Dennett) use definitions based on “freedom of action”.
But Sam Harris is not a compatibilist: this book is an extended case against them. I agree with many of his arguments. To boil it down, in order to work within the standard true/false logical constructs of modern philosophy and still leave room for free will, one is forced to define it in a more or less legalistic sense, as in “of one’s own free will, not coerced at gunpoint”. This “freedom to act in accordance with one’s desires” is a nice thing to have, and it might be relevant in court, but I agree with Harris that it’s irrelevant to the questions about free will that seem problematic or interesting in light of determinism. What’s interesting about free will is the idea of agency itself, of having autonomous desires and motivations in the first place— whether they’re carried out or thwarted. But how could there be a “could”, or a “should”, or a “could have”, or a “should have”, if the future— including every choice you make— is predetermined?
*There are some asterisks. Quantum physics has sometimes been invoked to try to rescue the situation, but this is silly— not because quantum effects don’t matter, since ultimately, at least over long enough timescales, they must— but rather because being at the mercy of coin flipping instead of billiards doesn’t somehow open a whitespace for freedom of will or action. It just introduces a noise source. To place the locus of our agency on a random variable is about as meaningful as claiming that a thermostat is conscious. (Oh wait, that’s been done too.) Anyway we have reasonable evidence that our moment-to-moment decisions and actions rely on neurophysical processes that don’t operate near the quantum scale. If we were to somehow prepare an ensemble of identical copies of a person and do a moral or psychological experiment on the cohort under identical experimental conditions, we’d be very unlikely to get any variability in the result. It therefore seems to follow that there is no “freedom” in such a behavioral choice, any more than we can say a rock has “freedom” with respect to whether or not to fall if dropped.
Before unpicking his argument, let me state for the record that I think I really like this Sam Harris person. He takes a hard line about being nonreligious in a way that few decent-minded people will admit to in public these days— at least in the US, given a discourse that has polarized around, on one hand, the hard nuggets of mutually exclusive religious views, and on the other hand, a diffuse well-meaning liberalism within which we must pretend to be nonjudgmental. Obviously if forced to choose camps I’ll gladly live in the latter and wear a forced smile, but Harris is refreshing when he
“[…] advocates a benign, noncoercive, corrective form of intolerance, distinguishing it from historic religious persecution. He promotes a conversational intolerance, in which personal convictions are scaled against evidence, and where intellectual honesty is demanded equally in religious views and non-religious views. He suggests that, just as a person declaring a belief that Elvis is still alive would immediately make his every statement suspect in the eyes of those he was conversing with, asserting a similarly non-evidentiary point on a religious doctrine ought to be met with similar disrespect. He also believes there is a need to counter inhibitions that prevent the open critique of religious ideas, beliefs, and practices under the auspices of “tolerance”.”
Yay! OK, but the gospel is not all good. The overarching problem with Harris is that in his merciless reduction to the evidentiary, he leaves no space for a lot of useful ideas. First among these is the idea of paths not taken in our behavior— of possibility. In attacking this, he invokes classic fMRI and masking experiments that reveal how tenuous the relationship can be between our awareness and our brain processes. In the masking experiments, stimuli can be delivered and then “cancelled out” by a second stimulus, although the unconscious brain can be left in a “primed” state. There are also decisionmaking experiments, old and new, in which populations of neurons in the brain appear to “know” what you’re going to decide before “you” do. These experiments are certainly intriguing and violate our intuitions about causality and agency— if we think like philosophers or legal theorists, and insist that agency can only be somehow located in the “text” of our conscious narrative. If we think more like neuroscientists instead, we realize that whatever this special stuff is that we call awareness, attention, or consciousness, it’s supported by a lot of neural machinery, and this machinery doesn’t operate instantaneously or above board. Of course we can’t be “aware” of every aspect of its operation— that we are aware at all is the miracle. Lots of corners are cut— thankfully— in our self-awareness.
The miracle of self-awareness seems to be a product of our ability to model relevant aspects of the world around us, and people around us. (And since the self is a person too, it should be unsurprising that we can experience the special elliptical thrill of modeling ourselves.) It’s not hard to see why these would be useful faculties. A good argument can be made that the whole point of a brain is to predict the future, and especially the futures of others and of ourselves, perhaps under hypothetical circumstances. In a troupe of apes, the ability to empathize— to understand what that other ape is about to do, and why— allows one to behave in ways that further one’s own goals, or the goals of the community. Brains are good at predicting the behaviors of brains, and they do it by forming models. When we try to formalize such models, and maybe even test them with experiment, we call the result “psychology”. It may not be particle physics, but it sure is useful.
In support of his belief that the mind is nothing but a puppet or helpless witness to unknowable physical processes, Harris claims, rather fatuously, that our behavior is all mysterious:
“For instance, in my teens and early twenties I was a devoted student of the martial arts. I practiced incessantly and taught classes in college. Recently, I began training again, after a hiatus of more than 20 years. Both the cessation and the renewal of my interest in martial arts seem to be pure expressions of the freedom that Nahmias attributes to me. I have been under no “unreasonable external or internal pressure.” I have done exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to stop training, and I stopped. I wanted to start again, and now I train several times a week. All this has been associated with conscious thought and acts of apparent self-control.
However, when I look for the psychological cause of my behavior, I find it utterly mysterious. Why did I stop training 20 years ago? Well, certain things just became more important to me. But why did they become more important to me— and why precisely then and to that degree? And why did my interest in martial arts suddenly reemerge after decades of hibernation?” (p. 42)
This is the strange corner Harris finds himself backed into by his insistence on an all-eclipsing determinism. Because if everything is determined, then how could anything have a “why”— since a “why” implies a “why not”, and determinism implies that there cannot be a not.
“You will do whatever it is you do, and it is meaningless to assert that you could have done otherwise.” (p. 44)
Moreover, determinism stipulates exactitude, which for him, owing to a conflation between levels of description, means that no approximate or probabilistic concept can enter into the discourse. Finally, by not acknowledging the difference in level of description between physics and psychology, Harris seems to invalidate the very idea of a satisfactory “why” under any circumstance by insisting that it be supported by— what?— maybe an infinite regress of satisfactory and precise “whys” underneath it, going back to the Big Bang?
Thankfully Harris does not actually suffer from the narrative deficit he claims; he goes right on to answer his own unanswerable question, reassuring us that he’s not actually that dense, before beating a hasty retreat:
“I can consciously weigh the effects of certain influences— for instance, I recently read Rory Miller’s excellent book Meditations on Violence. But why did I read this book? I have no idea. And why did I find it compelling? [...] Of course, I could tell a story about why I’m doing what I’m doing— which would amount to my telling you why I think such training is a good idea, why I enjoy it, etc.— but the actual explanation for my behavior is hidden from me. And it is perfectly obvious that I, as the conscious witness of my experience, am not the deep cause of it.” (p. 43)
Ultimate or “deep” causes aren’t necessarily so relevant. Whys themselves have a why, which is to model. And we are model-makers to a fault. We can easily be tricked into revealing how often we can make false assumptions or rationalize our own behavior, making up stories that can bear little relation to the empirical “truth”. But often, that story-making capability is powerful and predictive. We use it constantly— in every conversation, every considered decision.
Let’s take an example. A gifted analyst and storyteller like Dan Savage can read a short letter from one of his fans, or listen to a quick phone message, and by drawing on his “training set”— that is, his empathy and the pattern matching afforded by hundreds of thousands of such interactions over the years— he can rapidly form insights that have materially helped many people: he is a master of the “why” in his domain. Consider this recent post, chosen more or less at random:
I’m 19 and closeted. I’ve been chatting with a guy on the Internet for six months and now he wants to meet. I’m convinced that he’s too good for me. Aside from looks, he’s out and older and I don’t know why he’d want to be with someone like me. My other online friends— they’re the only people I’m out to— think we should meet. I’m effing scared. I’m not going to ask you to compare our pics, but is there a concrete checklist to verify if someone is out of your league? –Insecure In Internetland
Response:
The good news: If you meet this boy and he’s into you, III, then you’re in his league. That’s because each and every one of us gets to decide who plays in our own personal league. If he invites you to play, you’re in.
Now the bad news: There’s lots of scum floating around on the Internet [...] and you have to be careful. While this may simply be a case of your own insecurities preventing you from recognizing whatever it is about you that this other guy finds attractive, something more sinister could be going on. You say you don’t know why someone better looking, older, and more experienced would want to meet you. Unfortunately in some cases it’s because younger, closeted, and insecure guys are easier to manipulate. So this guy is either honestly into you or he’s an asshole looking to take advantage of your youth and inexperience. If you decide to meet him, III, meet in a public place, tell someone where you’re going, and watch out for red flags. Does he pressure you? Does he try to get you to do things, sexual or otherwise, that make you uncomfortable? If so, run like effing hell.
There’s much to take in here. Dan recognizes salient elements in the situation from sparse data. He pattern matches. He turns a set of priors into a predictive narrative. He explores more than one storyline. He considers the roles of possibly unreliable narrators— both III and his Internet crush. He articulates important uncertainties (while neglecting unimportant ones) and frames behavioral tests designed to resolve them. He considers motive, models best and worst outcomes for every party, aligns his own interests relative to these, and suggests specific actions appropriate to optimizing for the desired outcome while controlling for risk. Whew! Let me know when an AI can do all of that! When the robots put Dan out of a job, humanity will have ceased to be relevant.
All of this is implicit in what I suppose we call “wisdom”.
So how does Dan do it? We don’t quite know the details, of course, but there’s a good deal we can posit.
Dan deals in information. His model is necessarily much simpler than everything it models. He’s not running physical simulations in his head of all of the molecules in someone else’s brain, hoping to be able to run the code faster than reality on his poor slow wetware. He’s clustering, condensing, simplifying, using narrative and metaphor, reasoning, telling himself stories, using his gut, associating, annealing, remembering, generalizing, mirroring, and so on. By using these tricks he— we— can extract meaning from raw experience over multiple timescales, and use the meaning to inform our behavior.
Because meaning is inherently a simplification, it necessarily admits a thickness of possibility. When we say “chair” we’re not specifying all of the particles in the chair. Practically speaking, that would be both impossible and pointless, because in that overly specific description we’d have no concept of chair, and we couldn’t generalize or reason about chairs— in fact we could never even recognize another one. So do chairs have a basis in physics? Yes and no. There’s no chair-soul; every instance of a chair is indeed made out of nothing but particles, and its behavior is entirely determined by the particles’ behavior. On the other hand the idea of a chair is something quite abstract, and quite useful. To call it “not real” would be silly. Yet its reality depends on a different level of description— the level of talking and thinking and reasoning, not solving for wavefunctions.
Also, this kind of thick reality has inherent fuzziness and subjectivity. Perspective matters. A question like “is this a chair?” could be legitimately answered not only with a “yes” or a “no”, but also “maybe”, “it sure is a funny one”, or “it’s a dollhouse chair, so the answer depends on why you’re asking”.
(This is why formal logic is so easily abused at the level of description where we live most of the time. It seems that philosophers tend— perhaps willfully— to pretend to live elsewhere. Maybe on their planet counterfactuals like “if I knew the positions and momenta of all of the particles in your brain” somehow make sense, while other counterfactuals like “if I had decided to make it to the gym today” or “if I were you” don’t. Normally I’d be all into space travel, but no need to send me the brochure for this planet.)
Causes, as we understand them, are like chairs. “Person”, “mind”, and “motive” are like chairs. Morality, empathy and agency are like chairs. They aren’t supernatural, they’re very much grounded in the physical world, but they are concepts, and as such they have their own coarse-grained reality. Useful concepts and categories have probability and uncertainty quite distinct from the much more literal statistical or quantum uncertainties of the physical world. Without the uncertainty, the blurring, concepts could not be applied, generalized or operated with. The uncertainty is inherent. If one is skilled at the art of consciousness like Dan Savage, one can both exploit and model that uncertainty, weaving intention, agency, prediction, empathy and possibility into that wonderfully dense sparseness that defines what it means to be a mindful person.
“Is the mind beyond you?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “There are times when the understanding does not come until later, when it no longer matters. Other times I do what I must do, not knowing my own mind, and I am led astray.”
“How can the mind be so imperfect?” she says with a smile.
I look at my hands. Bathed in the moonlight, they seem like statues, proportioned to no purpose.
“It may well be imperfect,” I say, “but it leaves traces. And we can follow those traces, like footsteps in the snow.”
“Where do they lead?”
“To oneself,” I answer. “That’s what the mind is. Without the mind, nothing leads anywhere.”
I look up. The winter moon is brilliant, over the Town, above the Wall.
“Not one thing is your fault,” I comfort her.
—Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
The real Glass—Philip Glass. I’m listening to the second movement of his first violin concerto, while walking to the bus through a light snowfall on Capitol Hill. It feels transcendent. For a few minutes there’s nothing else at all.
The second movement is a passacaglia, a simple and ancient dance form based on a four-note descending scale, rooted in Bach and earlier. It rhymes with my old favorite, Biber’s Archangel Sonata for solo violin. The restless binary repetition, layered tempi, and inner darkness in the harmony combine to make this material perfect for Glass, who renders it with the modern emotional intensity of a Rothko.
The on{X} team has just released a very nice new piece of functionality, the Kitchen. This allows anyone who uses on{X} to very easily write a new recipe, defining novel smartphone behaviors simply by snapping together Lego-like components.
The Kitchen is not only interesting by virtue of what it is, but also by virtue of who made it, and how. It’s one of the first publicly visible fruits of an ongoing collaboration between our teams in Tel Aviv and Ramallah. The Ramallah team is relatively new— we began to scale up our investment there in 2012, though the team has existed since 2009. They’ve been doing really good work. For the past few months I’ve been seeing the code checkin email flying back and forth fast and thick— even during the crisis in November. This made me feel very proud of the combined teams. There is nothing simple about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it seems clear to me that shared creative work and investment are positive forces. Let’s do more of that!
Comics aren’t my usual thing, but I need to give Ellen Forney her due. I’ve just read her autobiography Marbles, about the nature of creativity, bipolar disorder, and her struggle to achieve balance. It’s a lovely thing. The book is a beautiful piece of design, with rich use of archival material, broad variation in style, and a strong sense of rhythm on the page. Her generous creative power makes an eloquent case that, her own fears aside, mood-stabilizing drugs need not dry up an artist’s wellsprings. Trials and suffering may make great source material, but Marbles proves that one doesn’t need to remain a tortured soul to make great art.
I don’t know what the “fair use” conventions are for comics. Normally in a review I’d quote passages of less than a page, but it’s very difficult to convey the sense of the work without looking at whole pages at a time— and often whole spreads.
This page gives a sense of the density and approach characterizing the more narrative sections. It shows an elegant blend of inner and outer dialog, present and past tense. Leitmotifs are used to good effect.
And this is the most poetic, economical description of a major depressive episode:
The incisive funny-serious minimalism of it brings to mind xkcd. And finally, here is a less traditional nonlinear decomposition of the page into a story— it could stand perfectly on its own:
A well-deserved Genius Award from The Stranger.
There are two book reviews I’d like to post, by way of comparing great writing with crap writing. My original thought was to interleave snippets from these two books, allowing one to make its own case and the other to dig its own grave, more or less unassisted. But when it comes down to it I’d rather not besmirch Michael Chabon’s lovely new Telegraph Avenue by using it to bludgeon and flagellate the watery, pious and flimsy British novella we will now subject to its due mortification— a novella that inexplicably won the 2011 Booker Prize. This is the same prize for which Cloud Atlas, a novel of surpassing genius whose forthcoming movie adaptation I’m anticipating with equal shares of dread and ecstasy, was only shortlisted. At this point I’m assuming that the prize is either as corrupt as Wine Spectator, or as lazy and chauvinistic as the Guide Michelin. I’ll reconsider when David Mitchell wins it.
Perhaps a disclaimer is due. The opinions below are purely my own, it would seem. No, really. Critics at The New Yorker, The Guardian, The SF Chronicle, The Washington Post, The LA Times, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The New Republic and many other fine purveyors of culture, not to mention my Facebook friends (hello Sara and Carlos), all seem to love the book I’m about to castigate. Maybe when I’m of a certain age the “great but invisible skill” with which Julian Barnes has rendered his “crystalline truths that have taken a lifetime to harden” will suddenly become less invisible? Or maybe the emperor has no clothes.
Let’s begin with the title: The Sense of an Ending (apparently “lifted from a work of literary theory by the critic Frank Kermode”). Does it get any more half-assed than that? Actually, yes:
I saw it in his face. It’s not often that’s true, is it? At least, not for me. We listen to what people say, we read what they write— that’s our evidence, that’s our corroboration. But if the face contradicts the speaker’s words, we interrogate the face. A shifty look in the eye, a rising blush, the uncontrollable twitch of a face muscle— and then we know. We recognise the hypocrisy or the false claim, and the truth stands evident before us. (p. 150.)
Now we know! If only this wisdom had been written in the right decade, Carl Sagan could have had it read aloud by Peter Ustinov and engraved on the gold record we sent into space, the better to prepare the aliens for discourse with humans.
In case you’re wondering, I picked this passage because it’s about as writerly as it gets over the course of TSoaE’s 163 pages. What, is this not “elegant, playful and remarkable”* enough for you?
(*Quoth The New Yorker and the book’s front cover, under an inexplicable painting of an egg perhaps elegantly and playfully, if unremarkably, in peaceable repose on a table.)
OK, let’s move on to the dialog course, the better to observe Julian Barnes’s keen psychological insight in action:
So I sent an email to Veronica. I headed it “Question,” and asked her this: “Do you think I was in love with you back then?” I signed it with my initial and hit Send before I could change my mind.
The last thing I expected was a reply the next morning. This time she hadn’t deleted my subject heading. Her reply read: “If you need to ask the question, then the answer is no. V.”
[yr. humble crit.: at this point it’s hard not to imagine bringing in Beavis and Butthead as guest critics. “Try sexting her dude! Heh heh heh.” “Uh.. huh huh huh.. yeah, sext her.. like, let her know how you really feel.”]
It perhaps says something of my state of mind that I found this response normal, indeed encouraging.
It perhaps says something else that my reaction was to ring up Margaret and tell her of the exchange. There was a silence, then my ex-wife said quietly, “Tony, you’re on your own now.” (p. 116.)
So what did it say about his state of mind the first time, and what something else did it say the second time? I like how there are four layers here of reality, right— Tony in the moment, Tony at a narrative remove, the infinitely inscrutable & pissy Veronica, and the infinitely wise & suffering Margaret. Chicks always know best.
Reading this treacly tale of late middle age cluelessness, one does get “the sense” that the English public schools of the 50s and 60s didn’t do much for the development of emotional intelligence in male youth— at least not for straight boys like Tony and, presumably, Julian. This reminds me how grateful I am that, although love and intimacy lost are such central themes in TSoaE, there are— praise small mercies— no actual sex scenes in this book. Our good fortune is underscored by the following close call:
I wasn’t exactly a virgin, just in case you were wondering. Between school and university I had a couple of instructive episodes, whose excitements were greater than the mark they left. So what happened subsequently made me feel all the odder: the more you liked a girl, and the better matched you were, the less your chance of sex, it seemed. Unless, of course— and this is a thought I didn’t articulate until later— something in me was attracted to women who said no. But can such a perverse instinct exist? (p. 25)
I know, I know. The book is like ambrosia, but strained through the cheesecloth of an unreliable narrator. It’s postmodern! The problem is that for us to care about and become invested in an unreliable narrator, such that we can be all shocked and upset later on when the bubble bursts, we need to be drawn in enough to inhabit his perspective early in the book. This is hard to do in Tony’s case, because he’s so obviously an ass. One feels frankly insulted that Mr. Barnes would find it plausible for the reader to find this schmuck and his philosophical musings a good impedance match.
Even leaving this issue aside, the unreliable narrator trick requires not only technical skill, but also exceptional sensitivity on the part of the (real) author, in order to bring the “reveal” into focus at the right speed, at the right time, and with the right force. It’s a demanding feat of ventriloquism, beyond even the usual rigors of free indirect style, and to pull it off the author needs to be working at a far subtler level than the unreliable narrator. Of course when one writes one also becomes emotionally close to and invested in the characters— even more so than the reader; it’s necessary to do so in order to make the voices true. However, it’s equally necessary to become close to the characters who are not doing the narrating, to invest the text with their voices— maybe obliquely at first, then more clearly in the endgame. Otherwise the “reality” undergirding the story will be just as lame as the unreliable narrator’s reality. And we won’t care.
And this is just what happens. My recurring feeling, when reading TSoaE, was that Julian Barnes and Tony Webster were too nearly the same person. It got pretty claustrophobic up there in Tony/Julian’s head. When the Wise Women made their appearances, they came off flat and gnomic, deployed more in the manner of unyielding bollards along the sidewalks of the plotline than as real voices that could perhaps have turned this story into something more three-dimensional. In the absence of other voices, the shifts in perspective afforded by the series of big insights and realizations experienced by Tony himself really failed to provide the necessary stereo separation.
Let’s end with a “Royale with Cheese” moment toward the end of TSoaE— on page 158. By this late stage, the story is as senescent as Tony himself; all investments in character growth etc. are made; the chips, as it were, are on the table:
One day, I said to the barman, “Do you think you could do me thin chips for a change?”
“How do you mean?”
“You know, like in France— the thin ones.”
“No, we don’t do them.”
“But it says on the menu your chips are hand-cut.”
“Yes.”
“Well, can’t you cut them thinner?”
The barman’s normal affableness took a pause. He looked at me as if he wasn’t sure whether I was a pedant or an idiot, or quite possibly both.
[yr. h.c.’s: “both! Heh heh heh.” “Huh huh.. yeah dude.. both.”]
“Hand-cut chips means fat chips.”
“But if you hand cut chips, couldn’t you cut them thinner?”
“We don’t cut them. That’s how they arrive.”
“You don’t cut them on the premises?”
“That’s what I said.”
“So what you call ‘hand-cut chips’ are actually cut elsewhere, and quite probably by a machine?”
“Are you from the council or something?”
“Not in the least. I’m just puzzled. I never realized that ‘hand-cut’ meant ‘fat’ rather than ‘necessarily cut by hand.’”
“Well, you do now.”
“I’m sorry. I just didn’t get it.”
I retired to my table and waited for my supper.
And there’s the moral of the story: Tony Doesn’t Get It. Pretty “adroit handling”, right, to use hand-cut chips as a metaphor for, you know, other stuff? Like how you can’t turn an English lover into a French one?
What really made me smile over this little passage was how clearly it was drawn from life. I’m willing to bet that it was actually Julian Barnes who one day had this exchange with the barman at his local pub. Barnes and Webster: just too cozy with each other. Chips cut from the same potato.
OK, now I feel soiled and guilty, like Alex after beating up the old guy in A Clockwork Orange. It’ time to move on. I’m going to try not to let my new contempt for the Booker presumptively color my opinion of Hilary Mantel, whose Bring up the Bodies was already on my to-read shelf before the recent announcement that she’s won the prize for 2012.
I drove into Boulder, Colorado at midnight on Wednesday, my impulse to eat a late dinner nearly overbalanced by my need to declare the long day over. It turns out that, even with throngs of kids boozily wandering from bar to bar, this town doesn’t offer much in the way of late dining. There was one place— open at all hours, decorated like an elven village specializing in the mining of nearby foothills veined with Formica, and run by the bandanna-wearing disciples of some gentle Christian sect. They seemed to be connected with a yerba mate distribution enterprise, and along with deli delights and “artisan bread”, they proffered at least two dozen varieties of wholesome drink, hot and cold, soy, almond and dairy, based on the steeped foliage of Ilex paraguariensis.
And with a woozy slur I bethought myself, is yerba mate spelled with an accent on the e? Because then I guess I’ve been pronouncing it wrong.
No: my smartphone, battery gasping its last 3%, assured me that it’s spelled without any accents, and pronounced with the accent on the a. Ah: so the accent seems to have been added— “yerba maté”*— in order to give it an air of foreign mystery. Or perhaps as a kind of visual appendage to transform a workaday row of letters into a brand, sort of the way certain hair metal bands from the 80s deployed the umlaut.
(*If we read the accented text again in its language of origin, it more or less reads “herb I killed”.)
Anyway, whether it was fully intentional, half-intentional or just someone’s mistake, one way to console oneself about this orthographic quirk is to think of it as a deliberate hack, distancing the word from the English “mate”. In many gringo-mex restaurants one can see the same act being perpetrated on the word “molé”, which in its correct spelling might be confused with the English word “mole” (and it maybe does look like a sauce stewed from those, Macbeth style). Or there’s the burrito chain “Andalé”, a case in which surely the violation was committed in the first degree. I can almost imagine a pink-cheeked, shirtsleeved branding specialist pointing out that without the signifying accent, Andale would sound like the name of a suburb in Ohio.
Of course many English speakers don’t know what function these accents play in actual Spanish. Maybe I’m on thin ice here, but I’d guess that given how erratic English spelling is, there simply isn’t a strong sense among native speakers that spelling and sound are causally connected; “words are”, to quote a Lannister, “wind”. An accent then becomes just a typographic effect, like the swoosh under a signature, or an ectopic serif.
I’ll end this little SNOOTy rant** with an acknowledgement that this kind of drive-by linguistic appropriation and half-thought-through orthographic distortion is a fine example of the fertilizer that keeps our language perennially in bloom. Since English has existed at all, it has always been a messy business, all barbarisms and neologisms in varying phases of acceptance. From Caxton’s preface to Eneydos:
“And specyally he axyed after eggys. And the good wyf answerde that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry for he also coude speke no frenshe but wold haue hadde egges and she vnderstode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstood hym wel.”
A few years ago, I got excited in front of a shop in Amsterdam, on which was emblazoned the Dutch word bakkerij. Notice how it looks in the following examples:
In five minutes of casual research I can’t find any source to confirm or deny this, but my theory is that the English “bakery” and similar –y endings for businesses might have come from the Dutch “ij”, written in styles predating humanist typography, and condensing, in a semi-literate squint, into a single convenient letter. Humanist friends, drop me a line if you know better...
**cf. David Foster Wallace, “Authority and American Usage” in Consider the Lobster.
Our friend Maria Semple mailed us an advance copy of her new novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette? a few weeks ago. Adrienne took the first nibble, then quietly devoured it in a few hours, a sphinxy smile on her face. Being a much slower reader, it took me a few days.
It’s always a scary thing, reading a friend’s book. Because what if it sucks? Which probably it will, right, statistically speaking? But what good luck we’ve had. Or what genius friends. Some of each, I think.
Maria’s book is brilliant. It begins as a comedy of manners in the Pacific Northwest, written mostly in the hip post-novelian form of a collage of emails and notes, with occasional connecting passages in the first person by the clever teenaged protagonist, Bee.
Bee’s parents are exiled intellectuals from the Eatons, Choates and Princetons of the East Coast, fleeing north from career success and trauma in Los Angeles. They now live in grand squalor in the ruins of a school for wayward girls on Queen Anne Hill. The histrionics of bitchy stay-at-home neighborhood moms, the overachieving private school scene, the wincey Microsoft jargon of “massive game changers”, “nonstarters” and “epic fails”, they’re all in there. But just as one is adjusting to this book as lighthearted avant garde farce, it takes a plunge through an unseen trapdoor and become something totally different. As we enter into the mind of Bee’s mother (who it must be said, is very Maria-like) the book deepens almost dizzyingly, foibles becoming nail-biting risks, slapstick becoming potential tragedy. Characters who are introduced as unsympathetic cartoons, seemingly whipped up to serve some minor expository function, pop into three-dimensionality and are warmly re-lit in startling acts of literary sleight-of-hand. This book is in the end humane and optimistic, as well as wonderfully entertaining.
I don’t know if the book design is final, but I do worry about that. The feminine hues and forms on the cover feel to me like they’ll suppress male readership— perhaps also literary readership. Together with the whimsical title, one gets the impression of beach reading, which in a sense it is— though it’s also so much more. I hope the stellar reviews Bernadette will surely reap go some way toward bringing it the audience it deserves.
Though this makes me blush, I should mention that Bee’s father is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, having sold his startup to the company some years earlier, and has given a “TEDTalk, which is number four on the list of all-time most-watched TEDTalks.” This was, Bee solemnly assures us, “a really big deal.” (Yes, we met Maria and her real partner, George, at TED.) Luckily the resemblances between Elgin Branch and y.t. pretty much end there. Though I do quite like the idea for Elgin’s big project at Microsoft, Samantha2.. must send Desney Tan an s+…
