The Title Is Unintentionally Apt

Brian Boyd, in a puzzling article in The American Scholar titled "Getting It All Wrong," somehow manages the impossible: to write about science like a literature professor, and literature like a science professor. I swear, the beef that some science-minded people have about literary theory makes no sense to me at all.

Boyd's argument seems to go something like this: literary theory (which seems to mean either a few quotes from Louis Menand or a hastily drawn caricature of Jacques Derrida's philosophy) is all wrong, because evolution already says the same thing. Huh? Oh, I guess with evolution we know how we know stuff. Because see, we've got braaaaiiinns.

The peddling of evolutionary literary criticism has been bothering me since it emerged around the same time I entered the field five years ago. I'll try to explain why.

As I see it, biology-based literary criticism has at least two fatal flaws: first, it limits the amont of interesting (or true) things you can say. Essays about "Madame Bovary's Ovaries" don't tell us anything new about Emma Bovary or the book she appears in. They're just barely dressed versions of the argument that Emma acts the way she does because she's horny and Charles isn't much of a catch. What about this don't we know already? If my lit students wrote papers that uninformative, I'd tell them to write the paper again, and to try harder this time.

Historical criticism of the New or old variety and one kind or another of close reading (philosophically informed or otherwise) are, as far as I can tell, the only games in town for saying something new about a literary text. Biological criticism falls under the same problem as the old, aesthetic school of criticism: why, especially if I'm a professional scholar, would I buy a book that tells me something I already know. That's why the old Oxford dons who would peddle their sparsely reasoned opinions about whether Pope or Dryden was a more exquisite read died off. (Even if they were reincarted in the latter-day Harold Bloom -- who does occasionally have other interesting things to say about literature.)

Biology might form a good basis for discussing general epistemology or aesthetics -- say by identifying what part of the brain responds to narrative, how it's different from the part that responds to lyric poetry, and showing how that lobe developed from the part of a chimp's brain that responds to visual memory, danger, and sexual desire. Someone's gotta be working on that, and that would be really interesting. But that's really the proper province of biologists, and maybe some philosophers. Literary criticism, especially criticism about a particular literary text, is a different business. Until I see one of these English profs in a tweed lab coat with leather patches, I'm not buying it.

This brings me to the second flaw of most evolution-informed lit crit: in addition to being bad literary criticism, it's usually bad science. The one that really gets under my skin is the reading of the Aeneid (also in the Barash and Barash volume). According to the "Madame Bovary's Ovaries" authors, we can see evolution at work in the Aeneid, because what's important is that Aeneas founds a city for his descendants to live in for millennia to come. As Barash and Barash put it (in their 2002 Chronicle of Higher Education article):

If Aeneas's genes could spell out their reckoning, it would go somewhat like this: Although staying with Dido is pleasurable, you -- and thus, your genes -- have bigger fish to fry. When the alternative is maximizing your inclusive fitness by founding a dynasty, a sterile dalliance with a middle-aged woman is maladaptive. So Aeneas sets sail once again, revealing, as he departs, an intuitive comprehension of his actions. Thus, as he pleads for Dido's understanding, Aeneas explains, "It is not my own free will that leads me to Italy." In his conscious mind, it is the gods who dictate Aeneas's actions, but deep down, his biological impulses compel him to leave, a kind of ancient "My genes made me do it."

No. First of all, there is no biological imperative to found Rome. If Dido's genetically a bad choice for Aeneas, he could hook up with some other Carthaginian babe, or better yet, not leave Asia at all. (I don't even remember Virgil saying that Dido couldn't bear Aeneas children.) He doesn't have to travel across the Mediterranean, let alone to Hades to converse with the shades of the dead (is there a biological interpretation of that scene?). Odysseus leaves lots of fertile babes (including Helen of Troy herself) to get back to Penelope, who, hot as she is, can't be a spring chicken.

Also, at least if Darwin's right, human beings don't really think about genetic succession that way. We mate with the people we mate with, and if our genes are successful, our traits get passed on. At the micro level, it's an accident: only at the macro level does it really begin to make scientific sense. Saying that Aeneas leaves Dido because he wants to father generation after generation of children is a little like saying giraffes got long necks because they stretched them out trying to reach higher branches. It sounds intuitive, but it really doesn't work that way.

Barash and Barash propose that we test aesthetic works by their evolutionary plausibility -- a character's motives are believable if they make good evolutionary sense. But this presupposes that literature is only concerened with evolutionarily successful behavior. What about evolutionarily unsuccessful behavior? What about homosexuality? For a Darwinian literary critic, is gay desire implausible on its face?

If anything, evolutionary criticism does tell us a little bit about what interests us in literature, but only in a negative sense. Because it's really the genetically suicidal or inscrutable that's aesthetically compelling. Gregor Samsa turns into a monstrous vermin, dying with the thought that he has ruined his family. Proust's narrator, who interrupts his chronic action only for exactingly acute analysis of the foibles of society and the irrationality of human desire. Achilles, who, knowing he will die in Troy, vows not to leave until he has killed Hector in revenge for his friend's death. (Evolutionary biology might explain Priam's horror at Hector's defiled body, but not why Achilles defiled it.) Or Aeneas, who sacrifices sexual pleasure so that he can build the walls to a city for someone else's children to live in. (Romulus might or might not be descended from Aeneas, but the genetically successful ones aren't the Trojans, but the native Latins. That is, Virgil himself, who proudly claims his native Italian blood and declares that Rome will be a city of many and mixed races.

Sadly, Boyd's entry in these lists, this time taking on literary theory more directly, isn't even this cogent. He relies on virtually nothing but fallacious and hackneyed arguments.

"The idea that there is no universal truth runs into crippling difficulties straightaway, since it claims to be a universal truth."

"In fact, not everything in human lives is difference. Commonalities also exist..."

"One of the most extreme advocates of difference was Hitler..."

"For most of the 20th century, anthropology has stressed the difference between peoples, since anthropologists earn attention by reporting on the exoticism of other ways of life."

Bad science to the end. If you read any of the influential anthropologists of the 20th century, it's all about universal or comparative structures -- the elementary structures of kinship, the structural study of mythemes, comparing the Balinese cockfight to King Lear.

Likewise, that fraction of literary theory that concerns itself primarily with difference doesn't deny the existence of commonality -- it just tries to expose the logical contradiction in certain philosophical and political traditions of universality that try to deny difference. I don't think this guy's ever read Derrida or any other philosopher/literary theorist he can't quite bring himself to name. And I don't think he's ever worn a lab coat or gone on a serious zoological or anthropological research trip either.

I guess what I really can't understand is why anyone would think these are good ideas, or even serious ones. And as someone who really has studied science (ok, mathematics, BA) and literature (MA/PhD) and philosophy (BA) and the social sciences (my one year MA program at Chicago counts!), it troubles me that we all seem to understand each other so poorly, and that no genuine connection is in sight.

The Hypothetical Z-Axis

There's a good, but hardly complete Science News article on the use of mathematics in The Simpsons and Futurama, surely the brainiest cartoons in the history of television.

Astonishingly enough, I was just explaining to someone the other day what "taxicab numbers" were. (Short answer: "taxicab numbers" are the smallest number that can be written as the sum of two cubes n different ways. Find out why they're called "taxicab numbers" here -- it's actually one of the better stories in the history of mathematics.)

I had forgotten the joke about the two robots' serial numbers, but if I remember, there's another joke about Bender being robot # 1729 (sure enough, I found it at this Wolfram site about taxicab numbers).

By the way, "Taxicab Numbers"? Great name for a band. Right up there with Mouthfeel.

Bush's Executions

My opposition to the death penalty, like my opposition to school vouchers and free-market economic policies, has softened as I've gotten older. But Will Bunch from the Philadelphia Daily News has a very good blog post on George Bush, Saddam Hussein, and the lack of dignity in executions. A teaser:

And you thought that hooded, revenge-bent Shiite guards in Baghdad invented the taunting of condemned murderers? Turns out that Saddam's hangmen had nothing on George W. Bush.

Define Optimism

optimism, n.

Etymology:[< French optimisme (1737 in sense 1a (see note below); 1788 in sense 3) < classical Latin optimus best (see OPTIMUM n.) + French -isme -ISM. With sense 3 cf. earlier OPTIMIST n. 1.
Leibniz, in his Théodicée (1710), uses optimum as a technical term, on the model of maximum and minimum. Hence the Mémoires de Trévoux, in the issue for Feb. 1737, gives the name optimisme to his doctrine:
1737 Mém. de Trévoux (Fév.) 207 En termes de l'art, il l'appelle la raison du meilleur ou plus savamment encore, et Theologiquement autant que Géométriquement, le systême de l'Optimum, ou l'Optimisme.
It owes its general diffusion to the satirical attack upon the doctrine by Voltaire in Candide ou l'Optimisme (1759).]

1. Contrasted with PESSIMISM n. 3.

a. Philos. The doctrine propounded by Leibniz (1710) that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds. Also: any of various similar philosophical doctrines of earlier or later thinkers.

b. A view or belief which assumes the ultimate predominance of good over evil in the universe...

3. Hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something; a tendency to take a favourable or hopeful view. Contrasted with PESSIMISM n. 2.

The brainy brains+philosophy+science+tech+intellectual site Edge.org recently posted 160 responses to its third "annual question" for 2007: What are you optimistic about? It's worth reading, although it's not nearly perfect.

First, you may want to skim a bit. I don't know exactly what kind of editorial process John Brockman goes through with these questions, but halfway through you might wish that he had put a shorter cap on either the number of contributors or the word count. 100 short paragraphs would be easier to scan, and might even (egad!) whet your appetite to find out more. And way too many of the contributors' answers just seem to be whatever project it is that they're working on or have just completed. "I'm totally optimistic about the subject of my new book." Please.

Another criticism I have in general about Edge, particularly with respect to this question, is that a general intellectual salon, even one celebrating the "third culture" of empirical scientists/philosophers, would be served well by more disciplinary diversity. Brockman makes it clear in his 1991 statement of Edge's raison d'etre that his editorial impetus comes from an attack on the traditional, or in his phrase, the "literary" intellectual -- but why not include political scientists, economists, or more than one historian or novelist? (I'm counting Cory
Doctorow, although I doubt he would have been included if he weren't an editor at Boing Boing) Not only is it misleading to bill your contributors as "THE WORLD"S LEADING THINKERS," but if you really want to change intellectual culture, these are the kinds of conversations you need the other intellectuals to be getting in on.

My last beef is about the loose parameters of the question and the definition of optimism. My own opinion is that the question "What are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise Us!" is not just an invitation to make a prediction, or to point out something that you feel pretty good about. It's really somewhere in between. What I would be interested in identifying, and the category of things I'd tag with the phrase "I'm optimistic about _______," are things that satisfy these conditions:

1) They must have already happened or are currently happening now;
2) they don't necessarily look like they have turned or will turn out very well;
and 3) we have some good reasons to be hopeful about them in the near future regardless.

To take it a little further, things that I'm optimistic about can't just be good but uncertain: there should be some uncertainty about their goodness, too -- or at the very least, their efficacy. A good example a genuinely optimistic statement might be "I'm optimistic about democracy in the Middle East." This is a statement that's at least debatable -- not just that democracy will spread, but that it will be a positive good for people in the region in the near future. Some people have argued that the results of democratic elections in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq have ultimately created too much chaos and tilted towards hardliners and groups with ties to terrorism, etc. Then I would have to back my optimism up with some data: say, transformations in electoral politics in Iran, Palestine, or Egypt. But ideally, I would have to build in some concession to the notion that things might not go well at all.

Another excellent example of this kind of cautioned optimistic thinking could be found in David Denby's terrific and thorough look at the current and impending technological transformations in cinema in this week's New Yorker, "Hollywood Looks For A Future." Denby looks at changes in home screens and media, theater culture and projection technologies, and Hollywood's new business and marketing models, and seems to find something to be optimistic and something to be pessimistic about in every sphere. Very few opinion articles about the film industry feel this thoughtful and well-reported. It's another long article, but very much worth the read.

I don't want to just rag on the Edge respondents, because there are some good examples of this kind of optimistic statement in the Edge poll, too. Walter Isaacson defends the continued value, relevance and technology genius of print; Howard Rheingold nicely defends the positive possibilities of the fact that "the tools for cultural production and distribution are in the pockets of 14 year olds" ; and Brian Goodwin nicely frames his optimism about the development of new energy technologies in the context of the impending crisis (or as Goodwin calls it, "the challenge") of peak oil.

But my larger point is that there's a wider range of things that we can be optimistic about than the impending triumph of science over religion (I hope the intellectual conversation of 2007 will be less dominated by this old saw) or the immanent triumph of someone's pet project (however beneficial success might be). A genuine salon would offer a wide-open exploration of this kind of optimism. And with good luck, we might see that kind of salon come together sooner than we think.

Man and Truthiness at Harvard

There's a nice video piece -- hard to call it a clip, since it's over an hour long -- of Stephen Colbert at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He drifts in and out of character, flirts with people in the audience, presents the school a large portrait of Bill O'Reilly, and talks seriously about the show and its lack of political intent/influence.

Crossing Over, Moving On

Until I went to college in 1997, I had rarely (and never seriously) used a computer. This is partly a matter of timing and partly one of circumstance. My family didn't have one. My aunt's could do word processing and print signs and banners -- at least, that's all I knew how to make it do. The required computing class in high school was a glorified typing class on an old version of MS Works for DOS. The internet and email were toys; most of the computers at school weren't wired anyways. So the tech boom was something that occured somewhere at the horizon of my knowledge and interests. Something was going on, and some people knew a little bit about it.

I had the good fortune to have a roommate in college who (among his other virtues) both had a computer and knew a little bit about it. Our dorm was one of the first on MSU's campus to be wired with an ethernet connection. Soon, Chad's computer was indispensable to me. I typed all my papers (I had handwritten almost everything for high school, including my college application essays), I searched the corners of the internet, I wrote long daily rants and emailed them to everyone I knew (this is probably before blogging was invented), I stayed up late nights emailing back-and-forth with the girl I loved (I never really glommed onto IMing until it was incorporated into Gmail), and I figured out how to play old Nintendo games and how to beat the expert level of Minesweeper in less than two minutes. (All-time best: 69 seconds.) The discovery of the computer was like so many things that happened to me when I went to college: empowering, individuating, maturing, yet full of irresponsible energy.

I'd had use of a hand-me-down for two years prior, but I finally bought my own computer when I went to graduate school in 2001. I moved to Chicago, leaving family, friends, and bank account behind. My Dell was one of the first computers to ship with Windows XP. I got into mp3s and freeware -- again a little late, but better than never. This was when I first started using the internet to connect with the world -- reading the New York Times online, following Pitchfork and Arts & Letters Daily, doing my banking, paying my bills. More and more, I crossed over into the virtual world, where more and more of what I did for work and play was dependent on computing and the internet. To a certain degree, this happened to everyone -- but in retrospect, my own change feels sharper than most. This was when I also learned more about the guts of the computer and started modifying it -- adding memory, swapping hard drives, network and USB cards, a DVD burner. I created my first, second, and third web pages. I started using Amazon to send Christmas gifts home.

Through all of this, I've been a Windows user and almost always worked at a Desktop. But when I'd finally had it with the limitations of what I could do with a five-year-old desktop. I recently bought a new MacBook Pro laptop. I don't know whether it's the fact that it's a new machine, the superiority of Mac over Windows, the rewards and challenges of learning the ins and outs of a new system (even after all these years of school, there's nothing I like better than to learn something new), or the freedom of being able to lay on my stomach or sit at my couch and type.

But it's fantastic again.

Half Man and Half a-’Tee

Since I moved and lost cable, there are only a few TV shows I still watch regularly: "Simpsons" and "Seinfeld" reruns in syndication, "Meet the Press" on Sunday mornings, "The View" (what can I say -- I almost always have an hour to kill before noon, and I like Rosie O'Donnell), the surprisingly good kids' cartoon "Jacob Two-Two," and, a mainstay since I started college in 1997, "Late Night with Conan O'Brien."

Which brings me to www.hornymanatee.com.

If you haven't heard about it by now, here's the story: Conan does a sketch on bizarre college mascots. One of them is FSU's "Webcam Manatee," featuring a guy in a manatee suit dancing around parodically-provocatively. Conan makes an offhand, ad-libbed reference to the Webcam Manatee appearing on a then-fictitious website called hornymanatee.com.

The next night on air, Conan reveals the aftermath. When the sketch aired, NBC freaks out. What if there's a real "horny manatee" site that Conan inadvertently promoted on air? Even if the site doesn't already exist, someone could register the domain and put inappropriate material on it -- Conan/NBC could still be held liable, in terms of bad press if nothing else.

The standard move would have been to cut or mute the reference to hornymanatee.com in post-production. No harm, no foul. Instead, NBC aired the episode as is, bought the rights to hornymanatee.com, threw up some porn-parody content -- and got over 3 million hits after Conan advertised the site (for real this time) on the air.

NYT has a nice recounting of the story here. And you can always see for yourself.

Statistics I Thought I'd Never See

From the AP sports wire:

" [Vinny] Testaverde, who turned 43 Monday, was the first overall pick by Tampa Bay in the 1987 draft. He has played 19 NFL seasons and has 269 touchdown passes, eighth in NFL history, and is sixth with 45,252 yards passing."

I started following football as a kid in the mid-to-late 1980s. I was seven years old when Vinny Testaverde came into the league, and he was already a joke. He made a lot of money, threw a lot of interceptions, and played for a team that wore bright orange that never won.

The only team that was worse wore pink, and they were the New England Patriots. Which happens to be Testaverde's new team.

Testaverde had a brilliant college career at the University of Miami. But Miami quarterbacks had mixed success in the pros, and each generation seemed like a parody of the one before: Jim Kelly --> Bernie Kosar --> Vinny Testaverde?

It's stunning to me that Drew Bledsoe, who I still think of as a young quarterback, has now been in the NFL for thirteen years. But it's downright astonishing that Testaverde has now been to two Pro Bowls, and has become -- statistically, if nothing else -- one of the best quarterbacks of his generation.

I turned 27 a few weeks ago. Is it strange that I find myself most affected by both how many professional sports athletes are younger than I am -- and just how old athletes not much older than myself are beginning to seem?

Behind the Times

South Africa, folks: Apartheid to gay marriage in less than twenty years.

South Africa: where the minister of health tells people AIDS can be cured with garlic and beetroot.

South Africa: where, until the 1990s, sexual contact between members of different races was prohibited by law. (Sodomy and miscegenation laws were overturned around the same time.)

We have got to get with it.

A Randomly Beautiful Sentence

File under random whimsy. From Gmail:

"All messages marked spam have been deleted forever."

There's something about the balance and weight of it, that just feels right. Not just techno-speak. It tells the truth.

On the other hand, it's unexpectedly funny. The purported finality is absurd. If your email account is anything like mine, you're going to have to delete all messages marked spam "forever" in about five minutes. (And indeed, I've got more spam in my box since I began typing.) You could take the "forever" not as literal truth (that deleted spam messages are unrecoverable -- is this true? Where do they go?) but as ironic commentary on our deepest desires - that is, our deepest email desires - that we be done, once and for all, with messages we will not read, that we no longer wish to receive. We want spam to be deleted forever -- like a theological salvation, we want to be delivered from spam -- yet spam, like sin, is constantly renewed, something from which we find only momentary relief, if any at all.

Like all good lapsed Catholics, I believe in sin but not salvation. Likewise, I believe in spam. You could say that I only believe in spam. The "spam" folder gives us the assurance - perhaps false - that our other messages are NOT spam, that they demand at least reading and sorting, if not a reply. We can believe that the message for which we've been waiting, the good news, is on its way, because we have a sure means of detecting false prophets. (If anyone calls you to the desert or the inner rooms with promises of blemish-free skin, low mortgage rates, and sexual enhancements, do not believe it, for even the elect can be deceived.) But deliverance remains, perhaps always, only an outstanding promise, a possibility. Spam, and falsehood, is the reality.

Electronic letters, waiting for deliverance, and upon deliverance, acceptance, deleted, forever. Irretrievable. What never existed, had only little reality if any reality at all, shall exist even less. The power of purgation, of liberation or nullification. And what is done, is done -- the foregoing of the possibility of retrieval, that what was lost can be found again, regardless of our decisions, wherever it might hide, is what we bind ourselves to -- that here, if nowhere else, is certainty, finality; that these messages, if no others, I will never see again. Yet of course you will -- in fact, only these messages will stay constant, as jobs change, as friends, as online retailers shift and sway and fold, as email addresses and online profiles become defunct. Spam endures.

It's a negative theology. Only spam, by having no positive characteristics that we can attribute to any genuine earthly message, is real. Only spam is always at the top of your inbox -- present in this absence. We believe in spam precisely because we delete it. We ride its wave, and the wave rides us in return.

Eh, maybe not.