Austin Ratner's Blog

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Apparently, the entire Stephen King industry was spawned by a daydream about naked teenage girls in the shower, pelting another girl with tampons. And there's a great lesson in that: a creative writer can't censor himself--more than that, he has to pay close attention to his own imaginings and memories without shame, has to go beyond that and take those imaginings and memories seriously as the possible basis for an entire novel. Stephen King's slightly perverse little daydream turned out to be worth several hundred million dollars. Daydreams about naked girls: there's gold in them thar hills. But writers of every stripe, not only commercially oriented ones, should check this book out.

"I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing," says Stephen King. True dat. A practical, unpretentious, useful guide to writing and a well-written, entertaining, sometimes moving memoir of the writing life all-in-one. It includes one of the best accounts around of a writer's imaginative process, illustrated with a fantastic case study of how King came up with the idea for his first novel, Carrie. (It involves aforementioned naked girls and tampons.)

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Dubliners: Text and Criticism by James Joyce


Dubliners was James Joyce's first book, and it's his most accessible, and possibly his most influential. The critic A. Walton Litz called Dubliners “a turning point in the development of English fiction.” Marc Wollaeger, editor of the Oxford Casebook on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, writes that “Dubliners … virtually invented the modern short story.”

I don't know if Joyce invented the modern short story, but I can see pretty much everywhere in contemporary fiction the influence of Dubliners, of its Shakespearean / Chekhovian trope of self-discovery affixed with a technique of beautiful naturalistic symbolism--the blend of ancient artistic modes which Joyce called "epiphany." Joyce's writing style in Dubliners has more in common with Hemingway than it does with Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner (and Hemingway's best short stories clearly reflect Joyce's influence), but the characters in Dubliners are generally somewhat warmer and more vulnerable than Hemingway characters and Joyce depicts men and women with equal grace.

Brewster Ghiselin said in 1956 that the stories are organized according to the seven Christian virtues and the seven deadly sins, with each of the first fourteen stories assigned to a virtue or sin and the fifteenth story, the masterpiece "The Dead," thrown in for a delicious baker's dozen of tales of inner torment. I think it's obvious that Joyce did use that structure, though he turns vice and virtue on its head in the manner of Henrik Ibsen as he attacks the damaging institutions of psychological paralysis and self-mortification.

"The Sisters," the first story in this collection and the one that formally introduces the topic of psychological paralysis, is my personal favorite, but the two most famous stories, "Araby" and "The Dead," deserve all the praise they get.

I like the Viking Critical Library edition, at least the one that was published in 1976; the essays in the back are unusually helpful.

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Childhood; Boyhood; Youth by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Leo Tolstoy was two, his mother died; when he was eight, his father died; and he writes movingly of a child mourning the death of both mother and father in his first novel Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. It's one of the few novels that addresses the subject of childhood loss directly and realistically. The theme would echo throughout Tolstoy's later works. Marya Bolkonski in War and Peace borrows her name from Tolstoy's dead mother (which was identical except that her maiden name started with a V not a B). Some of the most magnificent and moving parts of War and Peace depict the death of loved ones. For example, Tolstoy describes Princess Marya like this at the moment she realizes her father is dying: “[S]he saw that hanging over her and about to crush her was some terrible misfortune, the worst in life, one she had not yet experienced, irreparable and incomprehensible—the death of one she loved.” (W&P, p. 346) Poet Carol Rumens suspects that Emily Brontë, like Michelangelo, used her longing for her dead mother as inspiration for her depiction of the divine: "By giving such importance to the terms 'creates and rears,' " Rumens writes of the Brontë's poem 'No Coward Soul Is Mine,' "the poet suggests her deity is maternal as well as fatherly, enfolding, perhaps, the qualities of the mother she had lost in early childhood.... So closely acquainted with death and loss, Emily Brontё can be almost terrifyingly on the side of life." Much the same could be said of Tolstoy.


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Blue Moose by Manus Pinkwater

" 'Dave is very shy,' the moose said. 'He would appreciate it if you didn't say anything to him until he knows you better, maybe in ten or fifteen years. He knows about your gingerbread and he would like to try it.' While the moose spoke, Dave blushed very red, and tried to cover his face with the owl, which fluttered and squawked."

This is a telling of that timeless old story of a man who owns a restaurant in the woods, serves clam chowder to a moose, and inspires the moose to volunteer as his head waiter. The man is named "Mr. Breton"--Andre, perhaps?

Daniel Pinkwater has a wonderfully unique and funny style that's at once absurd and deadpan (as my wife says of the moose, and that's exactly what he is, a deadpan moose--and if you think about it, if a moose were to have a sense of humor, it would have to be deadpan, wouldn't it?). Even his name, Daniel Pinkwater, has a deadpan absurdity about it. Others have tried to pull off what Pinkwater does with lesser results, and Pinkwater himself can be a little uneven, occasionally following creative freedom into a cul-de-sac. But generally speaking, he's inspired. I remember him well and fondly. He writes for a range of ages; this title works for kids as little as 3 or 4, but is probably more completely appreciated once you're at least 6 or 8.

"The next night Dave was back, and this time he had a whistle made out of a turkey bone in his hat." You could see that coming.

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Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Biographer David Minter relays a fitting anecdote about Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi, when Faulkner was less than ten years old. Young William and his grandmother, who he called “Damuddy,” liked to build “miniature villages in the family’s front yard,” Minter writes, “using sticks, grass, stones, and glass.” As an adult, Faulkner carried on building imaginary worlds: he invented a fictional Mississippi county named Yoknapatawpha, a hand-drawn map of which appears in the back of Absalom, Absalom, and he wrote many novels detailing the interwoven family histories of its inhabitants, the Sutpens, the Compsons, the Sartorises, and others. You sense the childlike pleasure of creation in this adult project when you notice that the grown-up Faulkner has written on the map: “Yoknapatawpha County, William Faulkner, Sole Owner and Proprietor.”

Faulkner thinks like God, in about as much detail as God, and his goal is to create a second universe standing aside our own, as persuasively real, complex, and unyielding, but more saturated with meaning and beauty. Through characters embedded in this second reality as we are in ours, he recreates subtilitas naturae (“the subtlety of nature”), nature’s intricacy, its fineness of shade and texture, the baroque complexity of forms and change found in nature and in the way our own natures observe, absorb, record, and even add to this complexity.

Conrad Aiken praised Faulkner’s “sheer inexhaustible fecundity” (quoted in Robert Alter’s illuminating chapter on Absalom, Absalom! in his 2010 book Pen of Iron, p. 84). Alter adds that Faulkner has two nearly opposite stylistic modes at his disposal: the “labyrinthine-poetic” and the “pungently vernacular.” (p. 83) From the beginning Faulkner was also hugely ambitious; he once said his collegiate poetry suffered because “he had one eye on the ball and the other eye on Babe Ruth.” (Minter, p. 37) All these attributes enabled Faulkner to assemble an oeuvre that on the whole recreates the world and its characters with more breadth and depth than any oeuvre since Shakespeare’s, and Absalom, Absalom! may be his most world-like novel unto itself. Alter calls it “arguably one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century, as Moby Dick is of the nineteenth century.” (p. 79) Cleanth Brooks called it the greatest Faulkner novel—and the “least well understood.” (Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha County, p. 295) “Admittedly,” Brooks wrote, “the novel is a difficult one, but the difficulty is not forced and factitious. It is the price that has to be paid by the reader for the novel’s power and significance.” (p. 324)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez said Faulkner “walks blindly through his biblical universe, like a herd of goats loosed in a shop full of crystal.” (Marquez, NYT, July 26 1981). There is after all a 23-page parenthesis in Absalom, Absalom (from p. 152 to p. 175), and there are many pages in the book where a reader confronts paired rectangles of opaque, unindented, and under-punctuated text. There’s also a funny self-conscious scene on p. 225 where chief narrator Quentin Compson’s roommate Shreve criticizes Quentin’s storytelling, but Faulkner tells us that “Quentin did not even stop. He did not even falter, taking Shreve up in stride without comma or colon or paragraph....”

There is a certain sure-handedness, however, to this jungle of narrative. The characters stand fixed as Kapok trees in this jungle. That’s because Faulkner's modernist cubist obscurity, like Joyce’s, serves to represent the aforementioned complexity of the universe and the self, not postmodern, gnostic uncertainties. I’d add that if Faulkner is messy, he’s messy in a distinctly Shakespearean way. Like Shak, he creates “a cloud of alternative or overdetermining explanations round his figures” that imply a reality so complex it can only be approximated in words (as A.D. Nuttall says of the Shakespearean trope “variatio,” Nuttall, A New Mimesis, p. 180). You might say that where Hemingway persuades by punching you in the ribs, Absalom, Absalom! attacks you like a thinking ape, it pins your wrists and ankles and licks your forehead all at once until you cry, “I believe!”

It took me over two years of fits and starts to read this greatest of modernist American novels, and my paperback’s scratches, white flames of wear at the spine, stray pen marks, and water damage are together like a photogravure recording the many abuses it’s been subjected to. This is somehow fitting for a book whose lofty goal seems to be to crawl into the belly of human history and feel it digest time.

The chaos Marquez noted reflects the disordered experience of time through memory, experience that Faulkner nicely captures with the objective correlative of “a big flat river that sometimes showed no current at all and even sometimes ran backward” (p. 184). Robert Alter sees the book as a dialectic between two time-obsessed books of the Hebrew Bible—2 Samuel (featuring Absalom) on one hand, which values aspiration even when catastrophe endangers dynasty, and on the other, the despairing book of Ecclesiastes, which disavows progress with its sense of futility and eternal repetition.

This dialectic of attitudes to progress unfolds on the scale of family drama—between the unforgettable Thomas Sutpen, ambitious yet without vanity, and his son, the disinherited Charles Bon, worldly yet naïve, confident yet in need of a father. (As Quentin Compson speculates on p. 222, “a man never outlives his father.”) And it also unfolds on a national scale. Faulkner’s South has fallen because it lost the Civil War, but also because of its sins. Slavery is the original sin in the historic memory of the South, the sin that disorganizes the mind, a self-inflicted wound that anchors the mind among the mysteries of the past. There, the War never ends but is always ending at a gallop with “the shot-torn flags rushing down a sky in color like thunder” (p. 231).




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Richard III by William Shakespeare


Richard III was Shakespeare's first great play, and it casts its touchstones across his oeuvre all the way into the forms of his last great play, The Tempest. Seas, storms, and a misbegotten devil are the ensigns that bookend the greatest literary oeuvre of all time like components of a recurring dream.

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

The deformed body of Richard, a "bunch-backed toad," "rudely stamped" by nature, reminds me more than a little of The Tempest's deformed Caliban, the "freckled whelp, hag-born" to a storm-wracked island. And what else should the toad Richard speak of in the play's first lines but sea and storm? Furthermore, the references to the sea in Richard III do not stop there.

In Act I scene iv of Richard III, Shakespeare delivers one of his most beautiful set pieces--the Duke of Clarence's dream of the bottom of the sea, which seems to be a virtual first draft of Ariel's song in The Tempest. Both use naturalistic description to convey the splendor of the physical world and simultaneously to represent the geography of human thought and feeling in symbolic form. Here is the imprisoned Duke of Clarence telling his keeper the dream in the Tower of London shortly before his brother Richard has him murdered:

Into the tumbling billows of the main.
...
Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;

Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon;

Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,

Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,

All scatter’d in the bottom of the sea:

Some lay in dead men’s skulls; and, in those holes

Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept,

As ’twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems,

Which woo’d the slimy bottom of the deep,

And mock’d the dead bones that lay scatter’d by.

And here is Ariel singing in The Tempest.

Full fathom five they father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

In both plays, the treasures and the horrors that lie at the bottom of the sea--"the secrets of the deep," as Clarence's keeper Brakenbury puts it in Act I scene iv--are psychological treasures, psychological horrors; they are secret thoughts. Richard says so directly in Act I scene i: "Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence comes." Later, in Act III scene iv, Lord Hastings denies knowledge of Richard's hidden motives with a nautical analogy: "I have not sounded him." In Act IV scene ii Richard refers to a councilor he suspects of treason as "deep-revolving, witty Buckingham"--as if a person were an ocean. The burial of things rich and strange in the sea, Shakespeare suggests, mirrors the burial of rich and strange feelings in our hearts that we would not show to others, or in some cases would not show even to ourselves.

Similarly, the strange transformations and unfamiliar forms under the sea mirror the metamorphoses of feeling underneath our social exteriors. Ovid's Metamorphoses--from which Shakespeare quotes directly in The Tempest--were the clear inspiration for Shakespeare's interest in transformation; but Shakespeare treats metamorphosis as an explicitly psychological phenomenon. Literal metamorphoses (like "sea change") only represent psychology. Like fish, wishes and fears enter that shadowy, aquatic simulacrum of the outer world that we keep in our heads and they go to work on it--they change it. The mind (and the tongue) change a winter of discontent into glorious summer and bury louring clouds in secret depths. In Act I scene iii, Queen Margaret observes how the mind may even turn self-hate outward, into hate:

What were you snarling all before I came,

Ready to catch each other by the throat,

And turn you all your hatred now on me?

Conversely, hate and sorrow turn to self-hate in the metamorphic waters of the mind. In Act II scene ii, after King Edward IV dies (apparently of guilt--he allowed the death of his brother Clarence), Queen Margaret says: "I'll join with black despair against my soul,
 / And to myself become an enemy." And in Act II scene iv, the Duchess of York comments that her sons "Make war upon themselves; blood against blood,
 / Self against self...."

It is the conscience that directs these oscillating reversals of hate and self-hate like a conductor with a baton. And this is where the deformed imp enters the metamorphic seascape.

In the first place, Richard III and Caliban are caricatures like those in moralizing political cartoons. They are drawn as fanged animals, literally. In accord with Thomas More's famous account of the historical Richard III, Richard's fellow characters make much of his having been born with teeth. Hallett Smith meanwhile observes that the name 'Caliban' derives, by way of anagram, from 'cannibal'.

And everywhere in Richard III Shakespeare depicts conscience as a mouth that not only bites the self but tells distorting stories to the self, about the self, on behalf of shame and guilt.

In Act V scene iii, in the most moving soliloquy on guilt in all Shakespeare to my mind, Richard tongue-lashes himself with painful cycles of self-recrimination:

I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.

Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter.

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,

And every tongue brings in a several tale,

And every tale condemns me for a villain.


This dark confrontation with conscience brings to fruition Queen Margaret's curse from Act I:

The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul!
Thy friends suspect for traitors while thou livest,

And take deep traitors for thy dearest friends!

The many-tongued conscience gnaws on men as the fishes gnawed on men in Clarence's dream, and as it gnaws it transforms. (J.R.R. Tolkien plainly borrows his treasonous councilor Wormtongue from Richard III.) The wormtongue of conscience creates paranoid distortions and inspires this fantastic riff on conscience from Clarence's Second Murderer:

I’ll not meddle with it: it is a dangerous thing: it makes a man a coward: a man cannot steal, but it accuseth him; he cannot swear, but it cheques him; he cannot lie with his neighbour’s wife, but it detects him: ’tis a blushing shamefast spirit that mutinies in a man’s bosom; it fills one full of obstacles: it made me once restore a purse of gold that I found; it beggars any man that keeps it: it is turned out of all towns and cities for a dangerous thing; and every man that means to live well endeavours to trust to himself and to live without it.

For the rest of his career Shakespeare thought hard on the wily ways of this mental faculty so near to the pulse of human identity and imagination. In later plays he ventured so far along the path of realism as to show figures like Lear, Othello, and Hamlet who mutinied against themselves even without having stolen or cheated. By the end of his life's work, he had in mind a character who had mastered the inner cannibals of desire and conscience and their sea changes--a magician named Prospero whose imagination responded to his command and not the other way around. Prospero is a man of subtle power like Shakespeare himself, who wielded a quill like a wand with phoenix feathers.

Yet Prospero's final words are, like Puck's, an entreaty for forgiveness. The couplet at the end of Shakespeare's long and glorious career reads: "As you from crimes would pardon'd be, / Let your indulgence set me free."

What was Shakespeare's crime, I wonder? What could it have been except a life of art, a life spent in London perhaps, away from his family in Stratford? Power, even "good" power, makes people nervous. And Shakespeare attained a conjuror's imperial power over the knowledge, imagination, and expression that course through the written word.

The Essential Lenny Bruce by Lenny Bruce

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I think Lenny Bruce probably changed my uncle Zack's life. Without the precedent of Lenny Bruce, I don't think my uncle could have said #$%* and @&*! nearly as much as he did. From Lenny Bruce to my uncle Zack to me has descended the sacred right to say #$%* and @&*! when you stub your toe, or when your kid falls on his face, or when you forget how many scoops of coffee beans you put in the grinder. From Lenny Bruce to my uncle Zack to me has descended the sacred duty to say #$%* and @&*! more or less continuously while driving. And I believe I have passed these traditions on to my own children.



I'm sure Lenny Bruce changed the lives of Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams and every other stand-up comic who ever stood up in his wake. Bruce was such a smart comedian he was almost a philosopher, and this oft-quoted statement sums up his philosophy:



"Lemme tell you something. If you believe there is a God, a God that made your body, and yet you think that you can do anything with that body that's dirty, then the fault lies with the manufacturer."



I think Plato's Republic would be immensely improved if Plato prefaced his wisest comments with "Lemme tell you something."



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House of Holes by Nicholson Baker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Post-Freudian expressionism has now had a century to percolate throughout the arts. I think in particular of painters and writers, Spaniards and Jews. Picasso, Miró, and Dalí. Sensuous dreamers like Modigliani, Chagall, and Soutine. Kafka and Singer and Marquez. But lately it's disseminated as far as white-bread Montana Eagle Scouts like filmmaker David Lynch and to men with names like Methodist generals in the Civil War: a man named Nicholson Baker has written three literary works of sex fantasy, and a man named Pendleton Ward created the very funny and super-creative expressionistic cartoon Adventure Time (in which Jake the Dog and Finn the Human roam the wastes of the post-apocalyptic Land of Ooo, where the stuff of our own world has been made substrate to fanciful recombinations in the person of characters like Peppermint Butler and Donny the Grass Ogre). Via Freud's nephew Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, psychologically sophisticated expressionism even animates my Cheerios box, which asks me impertinently, "What makes your heart beat a little faster?" over the two sensuous humps of a heart-shaped bowl.

Nicholson Baker's House of Holes is like a sexual Adventure Time. It possesses that same modern combination of self-awareness with expressionistic free-for-all. Baker goes farther with his erotica than any other literary writer I've ever heard of, including D.H. Lawrence, of whom Lenny Bruce said, "This guy can really tear up a piece of ass." (The Essential Lenny Bruce, p. 216) Yet Baker inspires a sense of expressive freedom that transcends sexuality, much like Lenny Bruce himself does; if he can say that, I think, then surely I can say this. I found the book activated my whole sense of possibility even in non-sexual terms. I could go out to a fancy dinner two nights in a row! What's to stop me? I could put music on right now! Damn straight: I am stone cold crazy insane.

A favorite quote of mine—from Andre Breton's First Manifesto of Surrealism—is apropos: "Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought." But a freedom of the imagination that excludes sexual desire would be a chicken-shit sort, wouldn't it? "[T]he reason we left England was just for that right," Lenny Bruce said: "to be disgusting." (p. 216 again) But of course he meant "disgusting" ironically because he held "dirty" words in high esteem. They're a (relatively) peaceful conduit for vital human aggression, and Bruce saw no dirt on the body parts and functions to which such words referred. The censorious people with their obscenity laws, Bruce observed, don't hate the words as much as they hate the parts and the deeds and wishes; in the final prudish analysis, "the word isn't dirty—the titties are dirty." Having gone to jail on charges of obscenity, Bruce called out the hypocrisy in the comparative public lenience toward violence: "Here's how the titties work. If the titty is bloody and maimed, it's clean. But if the titty is pretty, it's filthy." (Bruce, p. 180)

House of Holes is Baker's third erotic novel, and also his most imaginative and funniest. Commentators have called all three books funny, but I sometimes get the feeling they have nervous laughter before something that was meant seriously—like kids in a sex ed class or on a trip to see the nude Greek statues at the art museum. Baker always writes elegantly, persuasively, and the people in his novel are real enough for the job, but he's gone out of his way to fashion a plane of experience purified of anything but the unadulterated physical appetite for sex. His success in fashioning such a plane, and with a certain Eden-like innocence no less, reflects a sustained, sincere act of concentration from its creator. This third novel in particular can be hilarious in its reflections of the absurd contradictions, magic symbols, and gluttony of the id, in its characters' preposterous lack of public shame, and in their equally preposterous castration anxiety, relieved in preposterous fantastical ways; but still the book's ethos is in general more fun than funny. It isn't principally satiric. It doesn't side with shame by any means. It's obscene. It's filled with pretty breasts, penises, vaginas, buttocks, legs, bras, pubic hair, and underwear, and with people making shamelessly "filthy" use of them in body and mind. Don't read it.

Or if you do read it—and apparently some other people besides me have, because I found it on a shelf of bestsellers in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport—just tell everyone it was really, really "funny."




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How Computers Work by Ron White

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


There's something vaguely nauseating about looking under the hood, yes? I want to hear the music, I don't want to think about the speakers, or even about syncopation or harmony, the Mixolydian mode or the bridge, and certainly not about the trail of human gore that lies behind a commercial song; I want to eat the drumstick, not think about veins and connective tissue, or overcrowded chicken coops with chickens wearing their tiny red contact lenses; I want to swim in the shallow Caribbean Sea, I don't want to think about the mouths of great white sharks and the eleven-inch-wide eye of the giant squid, horribly human and ectopic like an eye in a tree trunk somewhere in Tolkien's Middle Earth; I want to see my thoughts given form on a page, and I don't want to think about what's happening below the keys in channels of rectilinear silver. I don't ever want to look under the couch pillows.

And yet, I'm curious—not about the vile intra-couch detritus—but about how things work. Knowing that makes you powerful and wise, even more than going to bed early.

Ron White's book on computers is a useful, clear-yet-thorough, lavishly illustrated introduction to the basics of computers covering everything from digital cameras and displays to the internet to power supply, heat regulation, programming languages, database management, optical discs, hard drives, etc. I was mainly interested in the segments describing how transistors, logic gates, and microchips work—and those chapters answered most of my humble questions. For one thing, I learned at last how RAM is physically structured.

RAM, or 'random access memory,' holds data temporarily—like when you've added a sentence to a document and not yet saved it to disk, the added sentence is encoded temporarily in RAM circuits. There's a grid of copper traces on a wafer of silica (that is, quartz, the major constituent of sand and of glass). The grid is made of address lines in one direction and data lines perpendicular to them forming a field of intersections, and at each intersection is a transistor and a capacitor. A transistor is a "switch," meaning that one current flowing across it activates (closes) a circuit that allows another current to flow across it. A capacitor temporarily stores an electrical potential like a battery.

An address line carries the current that activates the transistors along it and the data lines send currents or not to each of these activated transistors. At the activated address line, a data current charges the capacitor with voltage, and if a data line doesn't send a current, the capacitor at that intersection doesn't get charged. A charged capacitor is used to represent a bit of information that the engineers call a '1' and an uncharged capacitor represents a bit of information called a '0.' In this way, the machine stores a string of 1s and 0s (i.e., a byte of information) along an address line. Numbers as we know them can be represented in strings of 1s and 0s using Gottfried Leibniz's system of math notation known as binary arithmetic, which was invented long before the computer but happily suits it. And letters or other meanings can be encoded in number sequences according to standardized languages or codes like ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange).

I also learned that a microprocessor converts data inputs (in the form of bytes of information) into outputs according to particular logical rules and that those rules can be represented by particular configurations of logic gates, which are in turn particular configurations of transistors. So you could program the microprocessor to do numerical calculations but you could also have the computer convert a particular input code (say, one that's produced by depressing the 'a' key) into a particular output code (say, one that leads to pixels lit up on the monitor in the shape of an 'a').

Was that too much information? If so, you may be experiencing under-the-hood nausea. Once I literally made a friend vomit with too much information. It was his bachelor party and he was drunk. I was in medical school at the time and began to explain to him what his liver was doing with all that alcohol. Every time I said the words 'cytochrome P450 enzymes' he begged me to stop, but I was also fairly drunk and when I'm drunk sometimes I become even more boring. I kept going and he called for the limo to pull over for a bout of hyperemesis bacheloris.

I think this is one reason it's hard to look under the hood; it reminds us that things are made of parts, that we're made of parts, and that we're therefore mortal. I confess that learning about computation made me think somewhat despondently, "Are my own thoughts and memories basically like this? Made out of 1s and 0s?" It feels castrating to look at it that way, not only because it reminds me I'm dust and to dust I shall return, but because that level of magnification destroys my identity. If you look at a person at that level of magnification, so that their bodies are cells and their thoughts bits of data, then the familiar forms of the self seem to disappear. The universe itself seems to be lonely and full of nothing but the illiterate sand lying on the beach and in our laptops' integrated circuits.

Looking under the hood can breed anxiety dreams, for sure, which is why people don't dare to look, but in reality nothing is lost. The old familiar scale of things still exists and is a distinct and scientifically valid phenomenon. Particles do things en masse, at large scales, that they don't do individually; they have "emergent properties." For example, five water molecules do certain things, but they don't make waves. You need an ocean full of them for that. And you need an ocean full of bits for that unique phenomenon of a human self.




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What Is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches by Erwin Schrödinger

Nobel-prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger published the essay "What is Life?" in the 1940s, before the elucidation of the structure of DNA, and in it he conjectures about the molecular structure of the matter in our chromosomes, which he presumes to be an "aperiodic crystal." Physicist Roger Penrose tells us that Francis Crick (one of the scientists who actually uncovered the structure of DNA a decade later) "admitted to being strongly influenced by ... the broad-ranging ideas put forward here by this highly original and profoundly thoughtful physicist."

Schrödinger is, like Homer Smith, a lucid writer on hard science. Some minimal science education is probably necessary to fully understand him, but not more than is possessed by a humble M.D. who majored in English like me. Everybody in the humanities ought to read the two paragraphs on p. 10 under the heading "PHYSICAL LAWS REST ON ATOMIC STATISTICS AND ARE THEREFORE ONLY APPROXIMATE." Schrödinger writes, "Only in the co-operation of an enormously large number of atoms do statistical laws begin to operate and control the behaviour of these assemblés with an accuracy increasing as the number of atoms involved increases."

In the humanities, people often bemoan (or is it celebrate?) the uncertainty of all knowledge in the wake of modern physics--Einstein's Relativity and Heisenberg's Uncertainty and Quantum Mechanics. Take it from Erwin Schrödinger: the role of random motion in physics, of chance, in no way endangers the existence of valid scientific laws, in no way eliminates or even reduces the ability of human beings to predict the future or understand the past. The opposite is true. Uncertainty is far from the dominant ethos of modern physics; in fact we know more than ever before about when and which observations are accurate and how accurate we may presume them to be. To add to Schrödinger's erudite discussions of Brownian motion, diffusion, paramagnetism, and entropy, let me put it like this: when you play roulette, there is some chance you will win and some you will lose. As any gambling addict can tell you, the longer you play, the more you lose. That's very certain. Just ask casino tycoon Steve Wynn, who can buy Picassos and stick his elbow through them if he wants to. Chance does not cancel law.

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