Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

The three defining moments of the Republican debate could arguably be the following: Texas Governor Rick Perry forgetting the third federal agency he intends to eliminate as President, Georgia businessman Herman Cain forgetting his own position on the intervention in Libya, and, ah, ummm….I can’t – the third one I can’t. Sorry. Oops.

These recent gaffes highlight the most unusual aspect of this year’s Republican primary race that differentiates it from all previous races: the complete victory of style over substance – the Sarah Palin-ing of Republican politics. As experience over the past few months has shown us, we should assume that these gaffes will have no discernible negative impacts on these candidates’ poll numbers.

And why should they? This race has only one credible candidate who can possibly beat President Obama: former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (the most recent CNN/Opinion Research poll shows Romney leading Obama by 4 points in a two-way matchup, far ahead of any other Republican). In any other year, Romney would be the clear front-runner. He has worked in the private sector, is independently wealthy, and is heir to a Republican dynasty. Republicans should have already coalesced behind him.

But that hasn’t happened yet, because Romney, with his liberal social record in a blue state, is seen as unacceptable by a large swathe of Tea-Party Republicans. These Republican populists want a “not-Romney” to provide the rhetorical passion they desperately crave during this time of economic recession and social upheaval.

So in quick succession the candidates who were meant to save the Republican party have been Representative Michele Bachmann – who briefly led the pack after winning the Iowa Ames straw poll, Rick Perry – whose pitiful public appearances and soft stance on immigration have weakened his inherent Texas-sized appeal, Herman Cain – who still polls in the top tier despite several sexual harassment allegations, and now former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich – who has soared ahead of Romney and Cain in the past week. In all these cases, none of these other candidates have managed to match Romney on providing coherent policy and substance, yet they still have a massive appeal to the Republican base.

Will Newt Gingrich manage to stay at the top or will he too be replaced by a new “not-Romney”? Perhaps for a few weeks but he too will eventually be superseded by someone else who will by Super Tuesday (the day in February or March when the most states hold primary elections) be replaced by Romney.

Why? There is a fundamental divide between traditional Republican moneyed interests and establishment figures who see Romney as their candidate, and the populist masses who latch on, unenthusiastically, to whoever has the most strident rhetoric. Due to the enormous cost of campaigns in the USA, Romney with the support of power-brokers who see him as their best bet against Obama will have the guaranteed money, exposure, and campaign infrastructure to capture the remaining doubting Republicans.

Writing Styles

I’ve just finished reading “How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One” by Stanley Fish. I found the book to be enlightening and fun to read, despite my misgivings from having read a few of Fish’s NY Times columns.

For the practical writer, who cowers before a pen and paper or a computer screen when compelled to write, Fish argues a rather simple compelling thesis: master the sentence and the rest will follow. For Fish, the sentence, and not the word, is the fundamental unit of any composition.

So while your next great novel won’t necessarily start with that killer first line you just came up with -although it certainly could!- you would have a greater command of composition by playing within the microcosm of the sentence.

My favorite part of the book were the chapters on the two dominant formal sentence styles: subordinating and additive – or if you prefer Greek, hypotaxis and parataxis.

The subordinating sentence style describes sentences that are deliberately constructed and follow an internal logic. An exercise that helps to demonstrate this style is to take a simple three word sentence and then logically expand the details of the sentence’s objects and actions.

“Bob drove his car.”
“As he careened past tractor-trailers and weaved through minivans and sedans, Bob, feeling scared, anxious, and -dare he admit it to himself?- even a bit giddy, recklessly drove his car with his overly-pregnant wife by his side as she entered into her seemingly millionth contraction, punctuated by just as many screams, since they left the funeral.”

Pro-tip: If you want to David Foster Wallace-ize a sentence, insert into your sentence more science tangents, endnotes, and maybe even a fake filmography while you’re at it.

An additive sentence consists of components which are not necessarily bound by logic, but instead have the effect of setting a scene, internal or external, for the reader.

Fish offers this example from Hemingway.

“A large white yacht was coming into the harbor and seven miles out on the horizon you could see a tanker, small and neat in profile against the blue sea, hugging the reef as she made to the westward to keep from wasting fuel against the stream.”

I’m still practicing this style. The above example does the style its due justice far better than I at the moment.

As I was contemplating how these styles complement each other, I was struck by a flurry of analogies. Perhaps the simplest is of the sentence itself. Much like the form, or lack of form, of a sentence gives space and structure to content, so do subordinating sentences in a larger composition. They form the logical outline of a work. Meanwhile, additive style sentences provide the “human” content, whether they are a character’s thoughts, the setting of a scene by an observer, a discussion of abstract ideas, etc.

Or, one could see these two complementing styles as a type of paint-by-numbers. The logical sentences form the outline, the colored paints provide vibrancy, temperature, and detail. Or, we can compare these styles to components of a piece of pop-music, where subordinating sentences are the AABA verse-chorus-bridge structure, and the additive sentences are the lyrics, chords, and melody.

Throughout the book, Fish draws the line between style versus content, structured versus unstructured. He counters critics who say that an adherence to form hinders creativity by countering that hindrance to form is actually fecund ground for creativity. At times, he even goes so far as to say that there would be no creativity without form.

I agree. What use is creativity without a vessel to express it?

But while this is an attractive idea, it’s important not to get too caught up in a hard distinction between the two. Human thought, for example, switches between modes all the time: disjointed thoughts and recollection one second, attempts to logically reason the next second.

Some days it seems like my internal struggle is to order the barrage of information which batter the barricades and flood the hold. Other days the struggle is reversed: trying to see beyond the thicket of logic to the larger human experience which shyly secrets itself away.

What’s the best part of both struggles? Thinking about the struggles themselves. The seamless synthesis between the two generates a more complete picture of human achievement and potential. If we were to briefly adopt and modify the ancient view that a composition reflects the moral sanctity of its composer, than we can hope that a good piece of writing reflects the author’s thoughtful internal struggle between the poles of reason and unreason. Any work that calls attention to such a critical aspect of human thought and creativity is worthy of admiration.

So, beyond the composition advice and basic grammatical notes, I recommend “How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One” for its unique consideration of the never-ending struggle between craft and art.

The problem with the Library of Congress…

…as a unit of measurement.

The Library of Congress contains books. Books are composed of paragraphs, sentences, words, and letters. Each letter can be, more or less, represented by a byte (8 zeros and ones) in computer data space. So when we take apart all these books, we can measure the constituent data in terms of gigabytes, terabytes, etc.

So comparing bits to bits, we can say that the Large Hadron Collider produces 1,500 Libraries of Congress worth of data per experiment. But when we actually evaluate that claim, it’s a bit like comparing apples and oranges (or in this case literature and scattering amplitudes).

In practice, the amount of data generated by reading a book is far more than the raw characters which compose it. This distinction is apparent if we were to take all the letters in all the books in the Library of Congress, randomly jumble them up, and reprint them into books. You would still have the same amount of data but the result would be nonsense!

Not to say that it isn’t fun to say my computer hard-drive contains “x” number of Libraries of Congress. However I’ll be really impressed if there is something invented which manages to capture the full extent of all the information in the Library of Congress.

Current Events Digest #1

December 18, 2010

A collection of thoughts and summaries on current events that I find interesting.

Turkey eases repatriation of minorities – There’s an interesting dynamic in Turkey where the ruling Turkish administration leans on hardline religious rhetoric (Turkey has been a secular nation since its founding by Attaturk) , but their foreign policy still maintains better than expected relations with its neighbors and its minorities, thanks to foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu. Of course, I think the Armenians, Kurds, Israelis, and Greeks may disagree to some extent, but so far the “Zero Problems” approach with neighbors seems to be fairly successful. I’ll write more about Turkish foreign affairs in later installments as I think Turkey is a vastly important transcontinental nation to follow for security, cultural, and political reasons over the next 20 years.

Judge who struck down mandate from Affordable Care Act freely admits to supporting Republican Party throughout his life, credits his appointment to it – In general, trying to deny or extinguish politics from politics is ludicrous. There’s no such thing as an independent judiciary, or “no label” solution to problems. It’s worse that Democrats fall for this more than Republicans. So, in short, at least Judge Hudson is being honest about his role in modern politics (if not a bit disconcertingly unashamed of looking partisan), but it’s probably more important for us to reject the ruse that the judiciary is the least bit independent.

Marginal tax rates on additional personal income beyond 250k doesn’t really translate to jobs. Personal income has a more limited bearing on job creation (other than hiring butlers I suppose), than the personal income of the middle class fueling demand. As was pointed out in a keen RSA video, rather than fueling middle-class demand, we’ve seen a preference to just supply the middle-class with credit to keep the good times rolling.

David Rothkopf picks some of the absolute worst positions to staff the Obama administration – These are easily the worst personnel decisions I’ve ever seen for an administration. If I had to choose the absolute worst choices for each of these positions, I would have come up with this list.

DADT Repeal Passes, DREAM Act fails – Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is repealed. This is without a doubt good news.Downside: This could be the end of existence. On the other hand, the DREAM Act did not pass the Senate, which would have given many children of illegal immigrants who also immigrated illegally at a young age the ability to continue attending college or serve in the military and also pursue a path to citizenship. The failure of the DREAM Act is an embarrassment and deeply shameful for everyone who did not vote in favor. While Republicans in general opposed the act, they were joined by many Democrats as well. Many of these young adults and children have no connection at all to their parent’s country, so the failure of the DREAM Act only prolongs dealing humanely with the problem. Of course many of those who voted against the bill support something more inhumane, like deportation. Nevertheless, it took Don’t Ask Don’t Tell a long time to be repealed, it’s only going to take longer for the DREAM Act. Let’s not even talk about how long it will take to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) or Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) or cap and trade or…