Author Archives: Richard Bowker

Unknown's avatar

About Richard Bowker

Author of the Portal series, the Last P.I. series, and other novels

In which I end up with a pit in my stomach

Posted on by
5

An article in today’s Boston Globe (available online only to subscribers) quotes a New Hampshire state rep as saying “I had a pit in my stomach” when he saw an inaccurate résumé from a colleague.  Ouch! I would have expected something like “I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach,” but I guess I haven’t been paying attention.  Here’s an interesting article giving all kinds of similar usages from the Times.  Language Log recently ran a followup, noticing that Thomas Friedman continues to have a pit in his stomach.  The original article connects these two versions of the cliché with the competition between “hone in on” and “home in on,” which I certainly have noticed.

Here’s the Google ngram for “pit in my stomach,” which shows that the usage has been taking off starting around 1990 (although it’s still relatively rare compared to the much older “pit of my stomach”).

As the article in Language Log says, the newer usage is not obviously less plausible than the older usage — we’re just more familiar with “pit of my stomach”.  So who am I to complain?  Still, “pit in my stomach” gives me a bad feeling . . . somewhere or other.

Dropping the H-Bomb

Posted on by
1

The Boston Globe has a funny story today about an underappreciated problem that has caused untold human misery: the difficulty Harvard graduates have in telling people where they went to school. As the article points out, most grads don’t want to use the “H-bomb.”

When confronted with questions about their education, many elect simply for a kind of dodge, the most famous being the Boston method. “I went to school in Boston.’’ Sometimes it’s “near Boston.’’ Or perhaps even “Cambridge.’’

That almost never works.

The problem is that this bit of information about you has a high probability of distorting people’s impressions of you, typically not in a good way. So you try to avoid providing the information if you possibly can.

(My wife, who has the milk of human kindness by the quart in every vein, as Henry Higgins would say, has absolutely no sympathy for the plight of the poor Harvard grad, by the way.  Nor does she spend her time worrying about beautiful women who complain that no one takes them seriously because they’re so beautiful and all.)

I’ve been lucky that I’ve lived my life in the Boston area, where graduating from Harvard is less of a big deal.  I’ve also worked at companies that employ people who are typically smarter and better educated than I am.  I recall once having to provide a short bio for a journal paper a group of us wrote about a project we had worked on.  When I read the bios of the other four people, it turned out that I had the least education of any of them, and the second fewest number of Harvard degrees.  The other folks on the project were very nice to me, however, and never brought this up.

There’s something to be said for being a regular schmoe.

You’ve got to be carefully taut

Posted on by
1

Last night’s writeup of the hard-fought Celtics-Sixers playoff contest in the online Boston Globe called it a “taught game throughout.”  Yikes!

That reminded me of an email I got from someone telling me we needed to “reign in”  something or other.  How are all these extra g’s sneaking into words?

Dunno about “taught” for “taut”.  And I’ll excuse almost anything in email; I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve used the wrong its or there or your in a hastily written email. The guilty party in this case is an excellent writer and would be deeply embarrassed if I were to point out the error to him.  But of course “rein in” is the kind of dead metaphor that will get progressively easier to screw up as history moves us ever further away from the era the time when the metaphor actually had some meaning in every day life.  “Reign in”, “rein in”, what’s the difference?

Here is a grumpy guy complaining about “reign in” and other annoying mistakes like “vocal chord.”

Both the Globe error and the email error are, I assume, the result of fast writing unmediated by editing or even self-review.  Your spellchecker certainly isn’t going to complain about the error.  Google, however, shows that “reign in” is gaining traction, with over half a million hits.  Here are some novelists discussing what you should do when your characters “go rogue”: should you “reign them in”?  Here is CNN talking about reigning in the influence of Super PACs on elections.

Looks to me like “rein them in” is a cliché on its way out.

The android prepares to leave his maker (an excerpt from Replica)

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s an excerpt from Replica. 

Shana is the scientist who has been kidnapped to create an android replica of the president.  Her father had lost his job to a robot, and she is still coming to terms with this.

The android knows that his consciousness of being an android is about to be suppressed so that he “becomes” the president.  The memories of his brief past, it turns out, are happier than Shana’s own childhood memories.

Replica is an in-your-face thriller.  But it ends up also being an odd sort of love story.

*******

They took a walk one afternoon through the thin woods surrounding the back lawn. Shana knew that Gus was following them, making sure they didn’t electrocute themselves trying to escape, but she didn’t care. She was used to being watched now.

They didn’t say much. The android was probably upset that their little idyll here was coming to an end, but was afraid to say so. That was all right. She didn’t need to talk about the end of their idyll.

She watched him stop and stare at a chipmunk, run his hands over a tree trunk, pluck a leaf and rub it between thumb and forefinger. At times, he could seem so childlike. He knew so much but had experienced so little.

If he was a child, she did not want to be his parent.

She remembered taking walks with her father, holding on to his big calloused hand, struggling to keep up with his adult strides. They, too, had said little. Her father was a quiet man, until liquor fueled an explosion of rage and resentment against a world that had stripped him of his job and his dignity. She wanted so badly for him to be happy, and a wink or a smile was enough to flood her heart with joy. She rarely got either during those walks, but at least he was sober; at least he was with her. What did he think about as he trudged wordlessly with her through the park or to the supermarket for a quart of milk? It never occurred to her to wonder; a child doesn’t wonder things like that. It was enough to be together.

“You were the only thing he did right, the only thing he could be proud of,” her mother said when he was gone. “Everything else failed, except you. And then you had to take up with those computers, and it was as if you were spitting at him, making a mockery of his life. How could you do that? How?”

Look at your grandchild, Shana thought suddenly. The idea would not have brightened her parents’ day.

And then she thought: Pity the poor android. No past to comfort him, no happy childhood memories to console him, as he prepares to confront an uncaring world. She smiled grimly.

He was staring at her, probably afraid to ask what the joke was. He was right to be afraid. “I think we’ve gone far enough, Randall,” she said softly. “Time to head back.”

He obeyed without a word.

* * *

He liked the taste of the scotch. It warmed his body and seemed to warm his thoughts, too. Shana had told him to start drinking to get used to it, and that was an order he had no difficulty obeying.

Gus had brought them folding chairs, and they sat in front of the mansion next to the broad columns, sipping their drinks and listening to the birds twittering in the sunset. He could not imagine anything nicer. Except, perhaps, the same scene, with Shana happier, and no deadline facing them.

The deadline was never far from his thoughts now. It was the day on which he would die. He would have served his purpose and would therefore cease to exist except in random snatches, perhaps, yielding his place to the other being inside him who he was and was not, for whom he felt nothing more than a vague sense of ownership, a confused dislike. This was not a prospect that had bothered him before; he supposed it was coded into him not to mind. When he had merely existed in a computer, conscious only in occasional flashes of CPU time as Shana worked on him, it hadn’t mattered that he was constantly dying and being revived. But now something had changed. He had memories—memories that were intrinsically different from the artificial constructs of his Forrester database, even if they were coded identically inside him. They were different because they were his. And when he died, those memories would die with him.

He remembered his first night alive, lying awake in the darkness and wondering if he was asleep, wanting desperately to be with Shana, afraid but so excited that his fear seemed trivial. To have a body! To be real—to touch his creator! And waking up the next morning after sleep had finally taken him unawares—a moment of terror until he finally caught up with his input: a cracked ceiling, a window, sunlight, a firm mattress, soft pillow, full bladder. Alive.

Shana praising him after the first interview with Hunt.

Shana comforting him during his first thunderstorm.

The way she looked at breakfast, her hair still wet from the shower, joking about the food, her eyes sparkling with some idea that had come to her overnight.

Her sadness and her anger, and the many times he had longed to help her and never knew how. And now he would never find out.

He sipped his drink and tried not to be sad himself. There was too little time left to spend it being sad. “It’s beautiful here,” he murmured.

She nodded silently.

“I think scotch makes it even more beautiful.”

That got her to smile, and her smile paradoxically worried him so much that he had to break the fragile happiness of the moment. “When this is over, Shana, will you be all right? What will they do to you?”

She shrugged. “Don’t worry about me, Randall. It’s good of you—it’s hard for you not to—but it’s just a waste of time.”

“All right, Shana.” But it wasn’t hard; it was impossible. He gazed out at the trees and the lawn and the glorious sunset, trying not to be sad and not to worry, and he knew that no amount of beauty, no amount of scotch, would let him succeed.

The greatest writer of English prose?

Posted on by
Reply

Shakespeare?  I dunno, the prose sections of his plays aren’t as good as his poetry.  Dickens?  Pretty darn good in spots, but he also perpetrated lots of mawkish drek.  Joyce?  Hemingway?  Yeah, OK, sure.

I think a case could be made for P. G. Wodehouse.  Andrew Sullivan points us to a site that generates random Wodehouse quotes. What a wonderful idea!  Here is the first one that came up when I went there:

Rodney Spelvin was in for another attack of poetry. He had once been a poet, and a very virulent one too; the sort of man who would produce a slim volume of verse bound in squashy mauve leather at the drop of a hat, mostly on the subject of sunsets and pixies.

I really don’t see how you can write anything better than that.

Here is a sampling of his dialog:

“Have you ever seen Spode eat asparagus?”
“No.”
“Revolting. It alters one’s whole conception of Man as Nature’s last word.”

Here he is in person:

In which I am again distracted by a mangled cliché

Posted on by
1

I suppose I should have something interesting to say about Lisa Randall’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door, which I have finally finished.  But instead I find myself pondering these two sentences from her section on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC):

Nothing substitutes for solid experimental results.  But we physicists haven’t just been sitting on our thumbs for the last quarter century waiting for the LHC to turn on and produce meaningful data.

“Sitting on our thumbs?”  Doesn’t she mean “sitting on our hands”?  Or “sitting around twiddling our thumbs”?  “Sitting on our thumbs” evokes an anatomical image that I find a little distressing.  Did I miss the memo that made this an acceptable cliché?

I decided to ask Mr. Google Ngram Viewer Person, who has helped me in the past.  But he just throws up his hands — or maybe his thumbs.

“Sitting on our hands” showed up around the beginning of the twentieth century and took off in the nineties.  “Sitting on our thumbs” doesn’t even register.

But regular ol’ Mr. Google tells me that “sitting on our hands” currently has 269,000 hits, and “sitting on our thumbs” has a whopping 74,000 hits. So it looks like something’s been happening to the language lately — at least in the unedited wasteland that is the Internet.  (The first hit for “sitting on our thumbs” is from Ann Coulter in 2011.  Good job, Ann!) In every case that I looked at of “sitting on our thumbs”, “sitting on our hands” would have worked just as well, so a lot people just seem to have lost the feel for the older metaphor.

Clichés and dead metaphors are what they are — few people think deeply about them, and “sitting on our thumbs” seems to be completely comprehensible.  So who am I to complain? Time for me to stop being distracted and to return to contemplating the search for the Higgs boson.

What should Dover Beach’s cover look like?

Posted on by
Reply

Dover Beach is a private eye novel set in Boston and England in the aftermath of a limited nuclear war.  (Yeah, I don’t know why I wrote it either.  But it’s good!  Read the review excerpts at the link!)

Here’s the American cover.  The mushroom cloud suggests that it takes place during a nuclear war, maybe.  The man and the woman look appropriately solemn, I guess.  The guy is the private eye, presumably, and the girl is his girl.  I don’t think the cover makes you want to race out and buy the book.

Here is the Japanese cover.  Surprisingly, the Japanese publisher didn’t opt for a mushroom cloud! I don’t know that the cover gives you any sense that the novel takes place after a nuclear war; maybe that’s for the best.  Dover Beach means nothing to Japanese readers, so it has a different title — but I forget what it is.  The private eye is named Walter Sands, and he calls himself the Sandman sometimes, so that explains the signs on the doors.  I have no idea why there are palm trees.

Anyone got any ideas what the ebook cover should look like?

What can we learn from Shakespeare — or the Beastie Boys?

Posted on by
1

Scientism has been a term of considerable opprobrium for some time. The Wikipedia article has lots of definitions; this one is representative: “the dogmatic endorsement of scientific methodology and the reduction of all knowledge to only that which is measurable.”

The New Republic recently ran an essay by Philip Kitcher called “The Trouble with Scientism,” where he refers to it as “natural scientific imperialism.”  He says:

The enthusiasm for natural scientific imperialism rests on five observations. First, there is the sense that the humanities and social sciences are doomed to deliver a seemingly directionless sequence of theories and explanations, with no promise of additive progress. Second, there is the contrasting record of extraordinary success in some areas of natural science. Third, there is the explicit articulation of technique and method in the natural sciences, which fosters the conviction that natural scientists are able to acquire and combine evidence in particularly rigorous ways. Fourth, there is the perception that humanists and social scientists are only able to reason cogently when they confine themselves to conclusions of limited generality: insofar as they aim at significant—general—conclusions, their methods and their evidence are unrigorous. Finally, there is the commonplace perception that the humanities and social sciences have been dominated, for long periods of their histories, by spectacularly false theories, grand doctrines that enjoy enormous popularity until fashion changes, as their glaring shortcomings are disclosed.

He then tries to make the case that these observations represent differences in degree rather than differences in kind, and that the humanities and the social sciences have much good to offer in advancing human understanding.

I have to say that the whole essay seems to me to be an exercise in demolishing a straw man.  He never bothers to quote anyone advocating any of the positions he criticizes.  For example, he says:

The contrast between the methods of the two realms, which seems so damning to the humanities, is a false one. Not only are the methods deployed within humanistic domains—say, in attributions of musical scores to particular composers or of pictures to particular artists—as sophisticated and rigorous as the techniques deployed by paleontologists or biochemists, but in many instances they are the same. The historical linguists who recognize connections among languages or within a language at different times, and the religious scholars who point out the affiliations among different texts, use methods equivalent to those that have been deployed ever since Darwin in the study of the history of life. Indeed, Darwin’s paleontology borrowed the method from early nineteenth-century studies of the history of languages.

Well, duh.  Is anyone saying that (for example) the professors arguing about whether Middleton was a co-author of All’s Well That Ends Well aren’t doing science of a sort?  I suppose they’re out there, but I’ve never encountered them, and Kitcher doesn’t point us to any of them.  Historians, linguists, social scientists, musicologists — they are all using variants of scientific methodology to increase our knowledge.  Things may be messier in these fields than they are in physics — we’re not likely to ever know for sure whether the pro-Middleton or anti-Middleton folks are right; but they are clearly approaching the controversy as scientists — marshalling evidence in favor of one theory or another.

So, that’s one problem with the essay.  But the more serious problem is that Kitcher never quite gets to the point he implies that he’s going to reach, the one that usually comes up when people start talking about scientism: how art and religion are equally valid as science in arriving at truth and understanding.  Isn’t literature another way of knowing about the world?  Doesn’t religion teach us things that science can’t? Aren’t there, like, non-overlapping magisteria?

Let’s leave aside religion for now.  Let’s consider Shakespeare.  Obviously we don’t go to Shakespeare for knowledge.  You won’t learn the truth about Richard III by reading or watching Richard III.  You’ll come away from reading A Winter’s Tale think that Bohemia has a seacoast.  So maybe we don’t get the truth from Shakespeare; but what about the Truth?  Don’t we learn what it is to be human from Shakespeare?  Doesn’t he advance human understanding?  I suppose.  But that doesn’t seem to me to be particularly special or interesting.  I could read psychological reports about jealous husbands and probably learn as much about them as I do from watching Othello.

We read and watch Shakespeare for the aesthetic experience his plays provide — the beauty of the language, the artfulness of the plotting, the joy and terror we feel as his characters make their way through those plots.  Anything else is incidental.  So, I don’t get it.  I don’t learn anything special from Shakespeare.  As far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t add to my knowledge of the world.  Brian Vickers (not the NASCAR driver) does science; Shakespeare, not so much.

Oh, yeah.  Same thing for the Beastie Boys. And Beethoven.  And Vermeer.

This doesn’t say anything about the value of Shakespeare (or the Beastie Boys) versus the value of science.  Lots of things have value.  But I’m still waiting to be convinced that literature and music somehow advance human knowledge in the way that science does.

In which I am baffled by a real estate listing

Posted on by
1

A friend of mine is selling her house, so I took a look at the online listing.  I didn’t get past the first two words before I stopped, baffled.  The listing started off by describing the house as “deceivingly spacious.”  What the heck did that mean?

I suppose the listing intended us to understand something like this: “You might think this house isn’t spacious, but you would be deceived.  It really is spacious.”  But is that correct usage (aside from questionable strategy of starting out a real estate description with the word “deceivingly”)?

I thought: presumably the listing broker came up with the phrase by some vague analogy with the idiom “deceptively simple.”  OK, that’s reasonable.  But then I realized I didn’t know what the heck “deceptively simple” means.  Take this sentence:

Horowitz made playing the Chopin Ballade look deceptively simple.

That sounds like a reasonable usage; it suggests that playing the piece is in fact difficult. but Horowitz made it look easy.  But this also sounds reasonable to me:

The problem seemed complicated, but its solution turned out to be deceptively simple.

It turns out that I am not alone in my confusion; deceptively is just hard to parse, and people tend to use it any way they want. This British site has a good discussion of the word and zeroes in on the specific usage in real estate:

Other meanings are harder to pin down. The estate agent’s favourite, “deceptively spacious” – does it mean a property which looks small from the street, or from photos, but is actually very large? Or does it – as Dogberry thinks – mean a property which is rather small, but gives the impression of being spacious through use of light and clever decorating? Either way, it means a property whose spaciousness is compromised in some way – not very desirable, but perhaps intriguing enough to persuade a buyer to set up a viewing.

 

Here’s another site, among many, where people tie themselves into knots trying to figure out what “deceptively simple” means.

I think the lesson here is to avoid deceptively or its evil cousin deceivingly if you want to be sure you’re understood.  My friend is going to suggest that her listing be changed to “surprisingly spacious.”  Works for me.