Author: Joe Page 18 of 32

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A Durham Proverb for Engineers

On May 13, 2018

Tom Shippey’s lecture #8 of the Signum U class “Philology through Tolkien” is about Anglo-Saxon wisdom poetry. I found the claim particularly interesting that it is difficult to understand some of their maxims, which is interesting because people don’t agree on which ones are the hard ones. Here’s an example from the Durham Proverbs: “The fuller the cup, the fairer you must bear it.” Prof. Shippey threw the question to the class – what does that mean? He says his best guess was that it meant, “Don’t complain about the job, just get on with it.”

I would never have thought of that. I always look at the explicit denotation of a phrase first, because I’m better at that than finding connotations and implications. (For the record, Idiosophers have official permission to stick our noses into Anglo-Saxon proverbs.) And this proverb, taken almost literally, is relevant right now. In a modern system-management context, it means that optimized systems are brittle; they aren’t robust.

People who lead interesting lives won’t have heard about this, but the endless quest of managers to squeeze every drop of efficiency out of their systems changed a lot in the last 20 years. Now that they’ve started doing serious data collection and analysis on their operations, they have found opportunities to make even old legacy companies fabulously profitable. (Hey, kids! Did you know the middle seats on an airliner used to be empty most of the time?) But everything comes with a cost. The problem with these optimized systems, these cups full to the brim, is that even a tiny disruption can bring the whole operation crashing to a halt. (Airlines used to re-book passengers from cancelled flights into those middle seats within a few hours. Now it can take days.) The mead spills all over the floor.

So, recently, system engineers started getting requests from managers to increase the “robustness” of their systems. And the answer usually comes back, “That’s easy – build some extra capacity.” Which means giving back half the benefit of the optimization and undoing half of the doing-more-with-less innovations they got awards for. The managers were not happy. If those managers had just paid more attention to their Anglo-Saxon forebears, we could have saved everybody a bunch of soul-crushing PowerPoint presentations.

Now managers ask for “resilience” instead. We’ll see if that turns out any better.

When are two stories the same?

By Joe

On May 4, 2018

In Slow learner

For my talk at Mythmoot, I’m comparing two exemplars of the same story. This post is a lemma in which I figure out how to show that two stories are “the same”.

If I learned anything from my safari into the jungles of literary theory, it’s that starting anywhere but absolute zero can get you into trouble. So let’s get the trivial parts out of the way, and work towards progressively more difficult cases.

👉Two copies of the same book sitting on different shelves in a bookstore are the same story.

👉Two different editions of a book are the same story.

👉A translation of a book into another language could be argued either way, but I’m going to say they’re still the same story.

Fig 1. Nephew

I’m following Douglas Hofstadter on this, but a tangible example about translation is better. Le Seigneur des Anneaux is not the same thing as The Lord of the Rings to me, but I hypothesize that its relationship to a 14-year-old nerd in France will be the same as LotR was to me. Experimental verification will take a decade or so; my nephew is just learning to read. In any case, even with a lot of differences between the original and second languages, the story can remain intact. (Assuming that’s what the translator is trying to do.) Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey, tweeted about that the other day.

Now that we’ve got the pedants safely back in their kennels, let’s look at the more-interesting case of two different novels. A story has lots of parts; some of them allow for more difference than others. What are the parts of a story? (Do I remember this from third grade? Yes, apparently I do.)

Setting

Doesn’t have to be the same. If you couldn’t tell the same story in a different setting, most of literature would never have happened. Resetting the Odyssey in 1900’s Dublin is perfectly fine. Romeo and Juliet in mid-20th-Century New York is brilliant.

Plot

The arc of the main plot has to be the same, though subplots can be different, and usually are. The presence of different minor characters is the primary driver of variation in subplots.

Characters

They don’t have to be the same, but major characters have to be isomorphic. That is, we have to be able to make a mapping of one major character in work A to exactly one character in work B. Minor characters don’t have to match at all. King Arthur stories, for example, have a literal army of extras around the perimeter. Authors use differences in minor characters to add individual flourishes to an old story. Definition: A major character is one who participates in the core conflict.

Conflict

Conflict in literature takes the form of protagonist vs. some element of the set {self, antagonist, society, nature, fate}. For these purposes, the core conflict has to remain in the same category, though I’d be willing to allow all sorts of other sub-conflicts. Conflicts with a different element of the set make a different story.

Amusing sidebar: When I was looking around the Web to make sure I’d gotten them all, I found two other possible elements of the set: technology and the supernatural. Since I’m interested in fantasy and science fiction, a.k.a. “Imaginative literature”, those two drop out. Conflicts vs. technology don’t exist — one of the most important lessons of science fiction is that technology isn’t an enemy. Any time it looks like it is, there’s a person behind it. And in fantasy, supernatural entities are just characters like anybody else.

Resolution

This one’s tricky. My first reaction was to say that the resolution has to be the same, but then I remembered the movie Roxanne . [1] This movie is unquestionably the same story as Cyrano de Bergerac, with a change of setting and the addition of a character (Dixie, played by Shelley Duvall). Adding a person to the plot who moves easily between the social classes and can talk straightforwardly to both the leads makes the resolution of Rostand’s play impossible. (Lucky for them!) I’m willing to say that the resolution can be different if the logic of the new setting and characters requires it. There are limits, certainly. Hamlet can’t have an ending where everyone lives happily ever after.

Where’s the dividing line? What kinds of stories can keep their integrity through a change in resolution? I think it’s in the core conflict. Cyrano is struggling against himself, and “snapping out of it” is always a possible outcome of such a conflict. Hamlet has a generous helping of internal conflict, but it’s subsidiary to the political battles and the inertia of armed forces. The outcome of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is constrained in ways that The Tragedy of Charlie, Small-town Fire Chief is not.

Conclusion

Two stories are the same if: Their Plot and Conflict are recognizably the same and their major Characters are isomorphic. The Resolution must be the same if the conflict requires it. Setting may change without restriction, as long as the other four properties of the story are still sensible in its context.

[1] Which contains one of my favorite cinematic sword-fights.

Lame Pun

By Joe

On April 23, 2018

In trivial

Tom Hillman has a nice essay about lameness and what it means in the Silmarillion, with particular attention to Melkor and the story of Turin. The piece begins, though, with Hephaestus’s lameness, and a quote from the Iliad.

From that snippet, I learn that the words Homer uses for “unquenchable laughter” are “ἄσβεστος … γέλως”, or in Roman letters, “asbestos gelos”. “Asbestos”, it turns out, is the Greek word for “unquenchable”.

This reminds me that in The Lord of the Rings, exactly one character is called “unquenchable”. If Pippin is the only hobbit who’s truly “ἄσβεστος”, shouldn’t he have been the one to take the Ring to the Fires of Doom?

The Inklings and King Arthur in its Natural Habitat

By Joe

On April 14, 2018

In scholarship

Sørina is collecting not-even-slightly-staged photos of The Inklings & King Arthur in a Pinterest gallery. I am honored to be included. Go visit – it’s changing daily.

Thee & Thouing

By Joe

On March 31, 2018

In fantasy, graphs

Lee Smith is full of good ideas these days. Her latest is a graph of the characters in LotR who call each other by the familiar pronoun.

Her graph has caused me to reconsider an earlier opinion. I once wrote a post in which I complimented Faramir on a slick linguistic move to seduce Éowyn. The graph, though, shows that Faramir never switched from the formal to the familiar in anything he said to her. Worse, he went even more formal: “I will wed with the White Lady of Rohan, if it be her will.”

I hadn’t realized this until I looked in the French translation. During all their conversations in the Houses of Healing, franco-Faramir addresses Éowyn as “Madame”. (N.B. He’s 36 years old; she’s 24.) Then, as he makes his move, he ratchets it upwards. The highest level of formality, when talking to a feudal ruler, was to address them in the third person. We have only echoes of that in American English; we get the feeling when someone says to the Queen, “as Her Majesty commands”.

So I’ve changed my opinion. Faramir is just role-playing his feudal-prince fantasies again. (We discussed this over at Olga’s joint, a while back.) Not that I can blame him; Lee’s graph shows that Denethor never called his son “thou”, either. Poor guy had no idea how to use pronouns.

Lines of familiar address by chapter

Physiolindalë

By Joe

On March 14, 2018

In fantasy

Stephen Hawking passed away today. Hawking’s cosmology began at the Beginning, with cosmogenesis. J.R.R. Tolkien included cosmogenesis in his mythology, too. There is a connection, unlikely though that might seem. Here’s the text from Tolkien:

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made ﬁrst the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; …

Why music? Well, ever since the Romantic period, other artists have envied the musicians. “All art aspires to the condition of music,” said Walter Pater. “Poets such as E.T.A. Hoffmann … conceived of instrumental music as the language of a higher realm,” as Jonathan Friedmann put it. If you’re a Modernist writer, and you want to express something exalted, you use the language of music to do it.

But what exactly is music? There’s no way JRRT wanted us to imagine the Valar sitting in a concert hall, so this must be referring to something outside the mainstream definition. When we’re talking about cosmogenesis, what counts as music and what doesn’t? Well, “music” is only slightly better defined than “literature”. I like this definition from Robert Greenberg: “music is patterns of sound in time.” [1]

Ainulindalë does not sound like the way musicians talk, so eventually I thought of looking at it as a scientist. From a physicist’s point of view, this passage looks very different. It’s all about building the framework within which creation can take place: the introduction of time.

This is the idea behind the Hartle-Hawking state of the universe. At the Big Bang (and shortly thereafter), time and space weren’t so clearly differentiated as we see them now, looking (as we do) at length scales of a meter or so. Essentially, there wasn’t “time” per se. The four dimensions were all muddled together. When things cooled down a bit (literally), the symmetry was broken and we got the familiar dimensions, three spatial and one temporal. Stephen Hawking, the more famous member of the team that came up with this idea, wrote about it in A Brief History of Time, in a way that’s accessible to the educated layman. (When physicists are talking to each other, it sounds like this. The American Physical Society has made all of Hawking’s papers freely available if you scroll down on that link.) Here’s roughly how Hawking described it:

Spacetime diagrams for Hartle-Hawking and MInkowski states

Our universe (left) and the way it was during the Big Bang (right)

The figure on the left shows a body moving in space (horizontal axis) and time (vertical). The “light cone” (imagine spinning the picture around the vertical axis) is the maximum velocity a body can have: the speed of light. Massive bodies move like the black arrow, using up more time to cover less space than a light ray would. Back at the Big Bang, though, Hawking’s work showed that it all looked like space. All lines moved sideways out from the origin. Moving in time didn’t happen until the Universe had expanded from its initial state. Without time, there couldn’t be music.

The opening of Ainulindalë, therefore, can be read as a metaphor of the introduction of time into the universe. Or, in current jargon, the transition from Hartle-Hawking to Minkowski states. The second sentence in the quotation above describes Eru separating time out from the other dimensions. “Music”, here, is a synecdoche of time.

[1] This is very much a late-20th-century definition, by the way. Before the musical traditions of other continents were absorbed into musicology, and before the radical experiments of later Modernists, the definition looked rather different.

A Fencing Story

By Joe

On March 14, 2018

In trivial

At the fencing club last night, one of the other coaches came up to the strip where I was giving a lesson. He was holding an old, well-used foil. “The lady at the desk said she found this in the equipment room. Who uses a left-handed Vniti blade with a Prieur socket?” Well, that would be me. I had lent such a weapon (one of my favorites) to a visitor last year, and when it vanished I assumed I’d never see it again.

So I expressed my gratitude and tossed the cheap Chinese weapon I’d been using into a corner. The student said, “Here, my lord, is your ancient blade. It was found in his chest.”

I hadn’t known he was one of our Fellowship. Meeting a new friend is always a pleasure.

How to give a Conference Presentation

By Joe

On March 11, 2018

In scholarship

Over on Twitter, Sørina requests suggestions for material about “how to give conference presentations”, which made me realize that I never wrote the round-up post from my initial forays into this world.

First, there are several things I learned the hard way from my physics career that apply just as well to literature:

Don’t talk about the research. Talk about why you were drawn to this question, and why the answer is so interesting to you. Enthusiasm is contagious. Sørina herself is really good at this.
Nobody ever walked out of a talk disgusted because it was too easy to understand. The reaction you want from the audience is, “I knew all of that stuff — what a great talk!”
The parts of your research that took the most work are the most boring to listen to. Polish them to a high gloss before you present them. Make it look easy. As Castiglione said, “Practise in everything a certain nonchalance that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought.” [1] Michael Drout is awesome at this.

I’ve added since then a few more things to my list of reminders. They’re due more to the change of century than the change of discipline.

Find good talks and imitate their style. When I was getting started, this one by Brenton Dickieson was an excellent model.
Don’t look at lectures by Olds. I love lectures by venerable, distinguished scholars, but I mustn’t do that myself. They earned the right to give those entertaining, discursive, highly-opinionated disquisitions with decades in the trenches. I’m still in the trenches. In literature, as in science, people will tell you when you’ve reached the heights from which a talk like that is welcome. (The word “keynote” is frequently involved.)
“So what?” is the most important question. Make sure you know the answer to that question before you start writing. However, you are under no obligation to give the same answer when you’re done writing.

[1] Yes, I tried to quote Baldessaro Castiglione to nuclear physicists. I didn’t end up as an Idiosopher by accident.

Middle-earth: the TV show

By Joe

On March 5, 2018

In fantasy, trivial

Amazon announced three months ago that they were going to make a TV series set in Middle-earth. I have now decided what I think about that. (Idiosophy is an exact science, but not a swift one.) Good.

In my dreams, Middle-earth becomes the setting for a hundred stories by different teams, with different points of view. King Arthur became immortal that way. I do have one request, though. Can we not have all the stories be about gigantic battles? That’s really not what the Legendarium is about.

According to the press release, “The series will be set before The Lord of the Rings“. Fine. Here are some examples of things I’d like to see:

Elrond and Celebrian. There’s a tragedy there, with elements of love story, hostage rescue, valiant sons, medical drama, and a cameo appearance by Baby Arwen. You can save on production costs by re-using the Caradhras set from Fellowship of the Ring.
Thorongil and Denethor. A buddy movie about the two young captains in the armies of Gondor. Lots of small-unit military engagements, with undercurrents of the tensions that would ultimately be the pivot of Book V.
Raiders of the Barrow-downs. A horror movie about some Indiana-Jones-style treasure hunters from Bree who didn’t realize how far out of their depth they were going to get. Heroic rescue by Rangers at the end.
The Adventures of Bullroarer Took. Comedy, bearing the same relationship to LotR that Rustler’s Rhapsody bears to Westerns. Use lots of tropes for cowboy movies.

Can I have one from the Fourth Age, too?

Faramir and Eowyn in Morgul Vale. Post-apocalyptic science fiction. This can be the movie that Dune so totally failed to be. Cleaning up that toxic waste dump will involve fighting monsters, razing buildings, building gardens and forests. It ends with a stream of clean water flowing out of the valley to the Anduin.

Network of Fools

By Joe

On February 24, 2018

In graphs, squibs & crackers

Over at her blog, Lee Smith has found something fun to do on a rainy February day. She’s collected every time somebody insulted somebody else in The Lord of the Rings. To nobody’s surprise, “fool” is the most common way to insult someone. There’s more give-and-take than I’d thought, though. If we define “calling someone a fool” as a relationship, it makes a fairly complex network.

Lee confines her attentions to insulting people to their face. This has an elegant directness, but it misses some things that interest me, like Sam calling himself a fool. I’m going to expand on Lee’s definition for the sake of entertainment and include any time someone calls someone a fool, or a group of up to ten others.

The network looks like this:

Whom are you calling a fool?

I have omitted three trivial subgraphs, involving Farmer Cotton/Ted Sandyman, Shagrat/Gorbag, and Wormtongue/Hàma. I was expecting the graph to fall into two tight cliques with loose links between them, but that turns out not to be the case. Saruman’s insults at the end of the book tie everything together neatly into a tightly-bound community of disregard.

Here’s a table of fool-counts, sorted by the fraction of their arrows that point outwards.

Character	Speaker	Referent	Disdain
Grishnakh	4		100%
Witch-King	2		100%
Shagrat	1		100%
Rory Brandybuck	1		100%
Farmer Cotton	1		100%
Wormtongue	1		100%
Gandalf	14	3	82%
Saruman	6	2	75%
Gollum	2	1	67%
Boromir	1	1	50%
Denethor	1	1	50%
Gimli	1	1	50%
Nameless Orc	1	1	50%
Ugluk	1	1	50%
Pippin	2	5	29%
Frodo	1	4	20%
Sam	1	4	20%
Merry		3	0%
Bilbo		2	0%
Legolas		2	0%
Aragorn		1	0%
Ted Sandyman		1	0%
Butterbur		1	0%
Eowyn		1	0%
Gorbag		1	0%
Hama		1	0%
Lotho		1	0%
Radagast		1	0%
Nameless Ruffian		1	0%
Sauron		1	0%

And here’s the Queen of Soul, misapprehending the topology:

A physicist loose among the liberal arts

Author: Joe Page 18 of 32

Setting

Plot

Characters

Conflict

Resolution

Conclusion