"Quite useful"

New issue of Science has a fascinating profile of the (depressive, hand-waving, enormously influential) evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers [Science 334, 589 (2011)]:

Stories of his reckless and aggressive side abound. He loves to use the words “fuck” and “motherfucker,” calling them quite useful, and he has gotten into public spats with many people over the years. Trivers can be brutally honest and plain rude, as many letters he has written to colleagues over the years testify.[...] Asked whether his discussion of Middle East politics might not turn off some people whom he might otherwise convince of his ideas, he just says, “Well, fuck 'em."

 Trivers has accused Brown, who he says was in charge of the statistics, of preselecting the dancers and changing the values on some of the dancers' measures of symmetry to get that result. Trivers has even written a short book about it that he sends to whoever cites the paper. Brown will only say that Rutgers is investigating the matter, and Nature has no comment.

A potentially useful aphorism:

“Did you know that the enjoyment of sex is actually correlated with sperm count in the ejaculate?” he asks. “So it is true that in old age you appreciate the smaller things more. There are no big things to enjoy anymore.”

According to the profile, "Most biologists spend their lives studying ants, geese, or other animals and then extend their conclusions to humans later in life. Trivers tended to start with humans." The profile in general reminds me of something I've always disliked about the human-and-mammal end of evolutionary biology, which is that people's scientific opinions are really worldviews -- and usually the worldviews that you would expect them to hold given their temperament and background. (Not surprising: as Lewontin remarked in an article -- NYRB? -- I cannot find, if your motives were scientific in the conventional sense you'd probably be studying plants.) Now there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this, and you could even argue that the community picks out people whose worldviews happen to be good biology, but at a minimum it tends to blur the line between simplifying-one's-research and mouthing-off-in-general.

Futures in bear-pits

1. Wikipedia on Ned Alleyn, found (circuitously) via "Alleyn on the right":

He went into business with Philip Henslowe, his father-in-law, and eventually became wealthy. He became part owner in Henslowe's ventures, and in the end sole proprietor of several profitable playhouses, bear-pits and brothels. Among these were the Rose Theatre at Bankside, the Paris Garden and the Fortune Theatre on Finsbury Fields. The Fortune was built for Alleyn and Henslowe in 1600, the year after the rival Globe Theatre was completed south of the river, by the same contractor Peter Street, but was square rather than round;^[9] it was occupied by the Admiral's Men, of which Alleyn was the head.

He filled, too, in conjunction with Henslowe, the post of "master of the king's games of bears, bulls and dogs." On some occasions he directed the sport in person, and John Stow in his Chronicles gives an account of how Alleyn baited a lion before James I at the Tower of London.

2. Via the indispensable seventydys, an old James Wood review of V.S. Pritchett:

He died earlier this year, but he had disappeared while still alive into a vague posterity. He had become cloudily venerable. [...] In 19th-century Russian fiction, especially in Gogol and Chekhov, he found characters who float on the cushions of their own fantasies--people whose most intense relations are not with others but with themselves.

[...] He Russianized English character, finding a kind of Russian madness or instability in what appeared to be mere English eccentricity. (Eccentricity, he once wrote, is "practical madness.") In mild disguise himself, he was alert to the broken disguises of others. "The Fall" (1936) is typical. In a drab provincial hotel, a group of accountants is meeting for its annual dinner. One of them, Charles Peacock, would be a nonentity were it not for his famous brother, who is a movie star. Peacock has a trick, which is that he can mimic perfectly his brother's celebrated stage fall. Early in the evening, Peacock performs this trick a few times to the strained amusement of his colleagues. But he gets drunk, and persists, accosting complete strangers. Each time he falls, he stays a little longer on the ground. By the end of the evening, he is alone in the hotel's ballroom, falling again and again. The pathos of the story flows from Pritchett's determination to see things simultaneously from outside and inside Peacock's head. We see how boring and foolish Peacock has become, but the story makes us stay with him when all the guests have left. We are always on Peacock's side, and at the end we join him on the carpet with his toppled yearnings.

Re floating on cushions, cf. Pritchett describing Mr Beluncle: "his face was bland, heavy in jowl, formless and kind, resting on a second chin like a bottom on an air cushion." Wood remarks elsewhere in the review re poet-critics broadly understood that "All of them have a certain competitive proximity to the writers they discuss, a competition registered verbally. The writer-critic is always showing a little plumage." (I suppose 1998 was before Wood wrote his novel?)

3. Michael Atiyah on doing mathematics (quoted in Gowers, "Two cultures of mathematics"):

MINIO: How do you select a problem to study?
ATIYAH: I think that presupposes an answer. I don't think that's the way I work at all. Some people may sit back and say, \I want to solve this problem" and they sit down and say, \How do I solve this problem?" I don't. I just move around in the mathematical waters, thinking about things, being curious, interested, talking to people, stirring up ideas; things emerge and I follow them up. Or I see something which connects up with something else I know about, and I try to put them together and things develop. I have practically never started o with any idea of what I'm going to be doing or where it's going to go. I'm interested in mathematics; I talk, I learn, I discuss and then interesting questions simply emerge. I have never started off with a particular goal, except the goal of understanding mathematics.

(Relevant b'se of future-work-related pondering re why I should care about what I do.)

The Surround-Drowned Sound of Pound

Every so often I read a piece by an admirer of Pound's, like D.S. Carne-Ross or Hugh Kenner, and they quote a line or two and leave me momentarily convinced that Pound is a very great poet. For instance, Kenner quotes -- in Rhyme: An Unfinished Monograph, which I've been tumbling passages from all day -- the remarkable line

quick eyes gone under earth’s lid

And Carne-Ross quotes this even better bit from a translation of Horace --

Land where Liris crumbles her bank in silence
Though the water seems not to move.

(The first line is a lovely sapphic.) But when I go back and read the passages these lines come from, they're invariably spoiled by their settings; the first is part of a tiresome rant in Mauberley and the second is from this:

Not
thick Sardinian corn-yield nor pleasant
ox-herds under the summer sun in Calabria, nor
ivory nor gold out of India, nor
land where Liris crumbles her bank in silence
though the water seems not to move. 

Somehow it's much easier to see how good the last two lines are without the rest of this otherwise pedestrian passage. I don't have a very satisfactory explanation for this, but a tentative hypothesis is that the problem has to do with pacing. All the best Pound passages are slow -- in particular they have a higher fraction of stressed and/or long syllables than most verse, they're often spondee-heavy -- but this is not true of Pound's writing in general. For instance in the passage above, here are my counts of actually stressed {total} syllables per line:

1{1}, 4{10}, 4{13}, 3{11}, 5{11}, 3{9}

If you started at "land" you would simply assume this was a slow deliberate passage and appreciate it accordingly, but the previous two lines are very light on actual stresses, so you enter the payoff lines moving at altogether the wrong speed, and barrel through them without noticing how good they are. (Though obviously this doesn't happen to Kenner.) Something else that's wrong with Pound's poems is that the voices are never compelling, the diction never quite comes together. Put this together with the structural deficiencies and I think one can begin to understand why Pound's poems are usually less than the sum of their parts.

Pound's insanity probably helped his later writing. The more disjointed a poem is, the more closely it approaches the sum of its parts. Usually this is a bad thing but in Pound's case I think it helped.