This post is apropos of not much at all.
But hey–a little literary fun never hurt anyone, amirite?
So here goes:
Sunday afternoon I was looking for an off-center way to help my students make the transition into writing longer, more explicitly narrative non-fiction about science–longer and more story-like than straight news.
I started poking around the endlessly enjoyable neighborhood of very short fiction, and stumbled across an example that begins like this:
The short essay on “The Improbability of the Infinite” which I was planning for you yesterday will now never be written. Last night my brain was crammed with lofty thoughts on the subject–and for that matter, on every other subject. My mind was never so fertile. Ten thousand words on any theme from Tin-tacks to Tomatoes would have been easy to me.
That was last night. This morning I have only one word in my brain, and I cannot get rid of it. The word is “Teralbay.”
Read the whole thing (it’ll take you all of five minutes, with a headwind).
I loved a lot about this little story. For the my classroom, I wanted the students to see how cleverly much the story wasn’t about its plot–and how skillfully its themes were woven through character, and all the character development (all eleven paragraphs of it) came via action. The author never belabored the reader with explicit description–which is to say, never told the audience what or how to think about what was going on.
That’s something the young writers I’m working with this time find it very difficult to do: how to avoid the urge to make it REALLY CLEAR what they mean and why it matters. This piece shows that such explicit telegraphing of intention not only isn’t necessary, but actually gets in the way of the convincing the reader.
There’s some very nice structural work going on in it too, a nice play between exposition and action, stuff that if you squint just right you can map onto recognizable narrative non-fiction approaches.
But all that, of course, is the sort of stuff I’m supposed to notice and like. But if I’m being entirely honest, I will say that what I loved most about the piece was the way it gave me a very new read on its author, a much slyer and gleefully less nice figure than the one I’d imagined. Much more fun, and a much more interesting fellow with whom to (imagine) downing a brandy and soda (not all the soda, Jeeves). Guess before you look.
Utterly, randomly open thread. Have fun, y’all.
Image: Catherine M. Wood, Still life with onions and tomatoes 1891
Postcard Writing Party and Music Thread (#4)
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
OK, I cheated and used a word scrambler app and came up with “xxxxxxx“. Hmm … Interesting! I’ve never read anything before by A.A.Milne except the four Pooh books (of course)
ETA: I really like the painting of the tomatoes. They are all heritage types. I’m sure.
MattF
I discovered today that science-fiction writer Ted Chaing has two (very) short stories published in Nature. What’s expected of us and Catching crumbs from the table.
Major Major Major Major
Cute! I also have not really read Milne.
@MattF: Chaing is a national treasure. Haven’t read those two, will have to take a peek! They look nice and short.
Steeplejack
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
Thanks for the spoiler.
CaseyL
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
Yes: A very interesting word, considering the story itself.
Tom, I started to read the story, almost started on the word puzzle, then went back and read the rest of your post. Which meant reading the story an entirely different way, for which I thank you.
Tom Levenson
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): With great temerity and apologies, I have slightly edited your comment to remove the spoiler–Tom L.
M31
My research is on music of the 17th C, and they were really into talking about permutations of groups of items, and the huge numbers that arise, and how the idea that you could exhaust musical possibilities is absurd.
There is a music book from 1650 by Athanasius Kircher (who is usually referred to as “the great Jesuit polymath” or “the last man who knew everything” lol) in which he lists how many possibilities there are to recombine groups of 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. up to 24 (which is 620448401733239439360000 by the way, and I can’t imagine how long it took him to calculate).
Then he goes on to say that, well, 9 things recombine 362880 ways, but if two of the things are the same it’s 181440, which is Milne’s number as well! HAHAHAHAHA perfect, and I never thought to see that number in two places
BigJimSlade
I’ve been reading the Stephen Jay Gould books (Ever Since Darwin, The Panda’s Thumb, Hen’s Teeth – whatever it’s called). They are so enjoyable :-)
Steeplejack
* DVR Alert *
François Truffaut’s masterpiece Jules and Jim (1962) is coming up at 12:30 a.m. EST on TCM. Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner and Henri Serre. “An Austrian and a Frenchman both love a woman between the world wars.” Trailer here.
Sure Lurkalot
Like your post as much as the story.
Alison Rose
Hey you asked for random: I propose a Balloon Juice thermometer to raise the money for me to buy this Lego Eiffel Tower on Black Friday.
It’s 5 feet tall. IT’S MY HEIGHT. We were meant to be.
Thankfully I am adult enough not to spend that kind of money. But I am not adult enough to not WANT to spend that kind of money.
bbleh
In chronological order:
dmsilev
@Alison Rose: Oooh, tempting. A bit beyond my “indulgent toy” budget as well, but very pretty.
Last winter, I did the Lego Space Shuttle model. That was several evenings of fun, and I have a nice model to put on a shelf, but that Eiffel model is a big step beyond that.
Albatrossity
Indeed, a lovely essay! Thank you for that.
And there is a word there. I think it is possible that most people want it to end with “y”. But it doesn’t.
Alison Rose
@dmsilev: I’ve splurged on a few fun ones that were each a little over $100, I think. Come to think of it, one of them might have been closer to $200, LOL. But yeah…$630 is a bit much.
brendancalling
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): I too used a word mixer-upper, and all I can say is AA was a clever guy.
Amir Khalid
My current guilty-favourite YouTube channel is Hydraulic Press Channel. It belongs to a slightly manic Finn who likes to think up fun and interesting things to do with said hydraulic press. There’s nothing quite like hearing a grown man cackle with glee after smashing/smooshing something up with it.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
I’ve been having issues with my kitchen water faucet for a number of years after my previous landlord decided to “fix” the old water pipes(he replaced them with plastic). After he replaced them, he had me turn on my kitchen faucet and a bunch of brown gunk came out. The faucet never was the same, even after replacing the valve cartridge and sprayer. I brought this up with the current landlord, pointing out that the flow of water was unacceptable, as in just a trickle. This also caused problems with the drain that would constantly get clogged up since the water flow wasn’t sufficient to wash oils and food waste into the sewer. So, I decided to replace the faucet myself.
I work the closing delivery shift* at the Home of the Orange Apron(3pm-12am), so I was there 4 hours after the store closed on Sunday night. I saw a faucet in the clearance section that was half off and had the features I wanted. I can’t buy anything in the store while I’m on the clock, so I returned the next morning to find the faucet still there and purchased it. I installed it this afternoon. It is nice to have running water again.
*WG sent me email saying my absence has been noted in the comments. The late evening schedule means by the time I read any posts and comments here, they are quite dead.
Amir Khalid
@Alison Rose:
I understand perfectly. A similar urge among middle-aged men of means is what keeps companies like Ferrari and Lamborghini in business.
Chetan Murthy
@Amir Khalid: … he said, as he plotted his next guitar purchase.
oldster
Once, a man wanted to be famous, or failing that, to be infamous: at all events, he wanted his name to be on everyone’s lips. So, he committed an atrocity: he burnt down the greatest temple in Greece, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. This happened, as luck would have it, on the same day that Alexander the Great was born.
The reaction of the Greeks was swift and decisive: they vowed neither to speak nor to write his name, and to condemn him to anonymity.
For many hundreds of years, no one gave him a name. We have sources that refer to him, but never by name. One late author — 800 years later — refers to him as “Herostratus,” but given how many centuries had elapsed, I think it is far more likely that the late author invented a name, from a desire to seem omniscient, than that the name had been preserved by any chain of written or oral transmission.
I mention this because a friend once told me, with some glee, that he had spoiled an entire evening of Isaiah Berlin’s life, by asking him for the name of the man who had burned down the temple. Berlin, having once heard the name “Herostratus,” and being more credulous than I am about ancient sources, spent the entire evening feeling that the name was just eluding him, and he had not an ounce of enjoyment all night long.
So, if anyone ever asks *you* for the name of the man so eager for fame that he burnt down a temple, you can simply say, “I heard a name many years ago, but it probably a mere invention — there’s good reason to think that the arsonist’s real name was successfully suppressed by the united indignation of the Greeks.”
BigJimSlade
@MattF: I just read them – what fun – thanks!
Another Scott
@M31: Reminds me of the story of the taxicab number from a biography of Ramanujan.
Numbers are magical things at times. Other times, they’re weird and make my head hurt. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Alison Rose
@Amir Khalid: LOL true. Thankfully my Sesame Street and Winnie the Pooh Legos are slightly less costly :P
trollhattan
@dmsilev: A proper McMansion would include shelving which could accommodate a 5-foot Eiffel. Now, Tower or Gustave, for whom I can’t find a height? If he were handily 5 feet tall then he’d fit life -ize; he also had five children so they could be stacked feet to shoulders, if modeled 1:5.
Another Scott
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: Conquering plumbing problems can be extremely satisfying.
I had to install a booster pump on some equipment at work. I got all the parts (1-1/4 down to 1/4″ NPT fittings, valves, gauges, etc.), got high quality teflon pipe dope, assembled it carefully, and it started leaking as soon as I ran water through it – even before turning the pump on – WTF??!!
I did some reading and it seems to be well understood that one still needs to use teflon tape (and special teflon tape for stainless steel fittings) PLUS teflon thread-dope to have any hope of large pipe fittings not leaking. So, I got to disassemble everything, clean out the threads, wrap the threads with teflon tape, paste on the thread dope, assemble it section by section, align everything, wipe off the messy excess dope, etc., etc.
I finally got everything together, started the water and …
NO LEAKS!!
adjusted the valves, turned on the pump and – ACK! The motor won’t turn!!
Spend time figuring out what that problem was (turned out it was corrosion inside the turbine pump housing; loosening 4 bolts 1/4 turn and letting it run then slowly tightening the bolts freed it up without causing leaks and damage)…
Final tests: Turn it on, adjust everything, look for leaks, etc. It’s actually working properly and as expected! YAY!!11
It only took about 3 days. Good thing I don’t have to bill for what my time actually cost to get this done… :-/
I hate plumbing. ;-)
Hang in there, and drop by when you can.
Cheers,
Scott.
piratedan
favoriite science fiction short story is H. Beam Piper’s Omnilingual
M31
ok wait a minute I think maybe Milne got his number wrong?
8! is 40320 — which it would be if all the letters are different
but there are 2 e’s so every word with e1 and e2 has a counterpart e2 and e1 which don’t count as different, there are actually only half as many words as we think
which is 20160
the number 181440 is for 9 letters, two of which are the same, not 8
did I do that wrong?
(I just read the number off of Kircher’s table of permutations with repetition)
Xavier
One of the joys of the Pooh books is the sly items Milne put in there for the reader.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Another Scott: The faucet replacement was pretty easy*, the old one was only about 10 years old, replacing the strainer in one of the sinks was a pain(getting the old one out).
*Only new thing was putting in the extra valve for the touchless feature.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Tom Levenson: Sorry! My apologies to all. I didn’t mean to ruin the puzzle for anyone. Obviously, I wasn’t thinking it through. I just thought the solution word was very intriguing.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Steeplejack: Sorry!!
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Steeplejack: Thank you!
Chetan Murthy
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): Somedays we do the search (in our heads) and the solution pops out near-instantly. Other days, we start at the wrong end of the search-space, and never terminate. This one seemed easy; one of the others mentioned, did not.
bbleh
@M31: yup (except a’s not e’s).
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid: In fact, LEGO makes a model of a Ferrari which can sort of satisfy that urge for those of us of slightly more limited means.
One of the Many Jens
That is fun, thank you!
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
Used to have an old manual press in the machine shop. Looked similar but instead of hydraulics it used a huge threaded, vertical post and a very long steel bar that was used to turn the screw. OK this was nearly 60 yrs ago and the press was very old at the time. I imagine that it was long ago converted into some part of a car with a very large, very hot flame.
Gary K
@M31: You said it all correctly. I think that getting it wrong is another of Milne’s sly jokes: the poor fellow can’t even say how many letters are in the word.
Wanderer
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: it’s good to see your nym again
lowtechcyclist
@M31:
No, you did that right. Milne was the one who did it wrong.
I saw that number, thought, “it’s way too big, it’s actually 8!/2 = 20160 (as you say), he’s off by a factor of, um, 9.” (Paused to verify that his number was indeed 9!/2.) “Why is he using 9! to arrange 8 letters?”
I suppose I should go read the rest of the story, because I did come to a complete stop at that point. It was a real monkeywrench in the gears, at least for this math geek.
twbrandt (formerly tom)
This is probably a dead thread, but I’ll mention that there is Teralbay Investments in, yes, Melbourne, Australia.
way2blue
Funny. You explained exactly what bothered me about a book I just finished for book club [Our Missing Hearts; Celeste Ng], namely the ‘lecture’ in the middle of the book hammering the theme.