Ntuple Indemnity

In recent years, I have developed a reputation in the family as someone notoriously difficult to shop for whenever Christmas comes around. This may seem odd at first, because the only material possessions I truly crave are the same things I have always craved: books, old films, and LEGO pirate ships. The difficulty is that with spare exception, the people who shower me with gifts are typically not in a position to introduce me to books and films, nor are they aware of what already resides in my library or what I am likely to appreciate. (Asking for jazz records would be a disaster waiting to happen.) They know this, and I know this. It has come to the point where I have seriously considered drafting a registry of books that are on my list of titles to read or collect, a practice normally reserved for weddings and baby showers but no less appropriate here.

It would only be one step removed from what I currently do, which is request nothing but Chapters/Indigo gift cards so I may dump more funds in my online account for special orders to come. If I am lucky in a given year, I would receive at least one of these cards amidst the piles of genuinely thoughtful gifts that are nevertheless most definitely not made of plastic bricks and do not, try as I may, snap together with the satisfying clicks of childhood workmanship. Thus far I have resisted establishing a full-fledged registry for the conventional reason: an aversion to mechanizing away the possibility of an exceptional present—the kind that is creative, surprising, and perfect in ways I wouldn’t have come upon myself. Let it be known that I do appreciate most of the loot I receive; I only worry that I let a frightful lot of it sit around unloved. One need not be the buyer to succumb to the trappings of a Charles Foster Kane, buried in worldly treasures with nary a Rosebud in sight.

My spoiled little crisis of material saturation is not without an upshot, however, for it has made giving, not receiving, into the seasonal pleasure it was always touted to be. I may put the burden off to the last minute every time, but being the family book supplier sure has its perks. Matching people to books is an involving game in itself, and one that invites improvement year to year. It isn’t enough to select something you think the recipient ought to read: it has to be something they are likely to take off the shelf and open. And there’s always some measure of risk, especially when you give books that you have not read yourself and do not know firsthand to be any good, but which you estimate to be a good fit based on your prior experience with the author and your assessment of the recipient’s tastes. To introduce someone to a book they may never have discovered themselves is to lead them outside their comfort zone of known knowns, which may not include a regular habit of reading anything at all.

This, as I see it, is the best way to test how well you understand someone: find something they haven’t read, which you think they ought to read, and which they are likely to try and enjoy. Voracious readers are a challenge because of the first condition; people who don’t read enough are a challenge because of the third. The second condition, which may sound like a paternalistic outlier, serves more than an educative purpose. A gift that contravenes the giver’s values is a gift in bad faith. There are some authors who are frankly never getting a dime of my money, and to present their works to somebody else who may well enjoy them would be no selfless charity, but would leave me with a lingering guilt of having done harm.

Don’t think too hard about the transactional cycle in play, where I receive gift cards one Christmas and expend them on gifts the next. The aim is not to biblioptimize, and I do not keep score. Happy Christmas, one and all.

I’ve had a thing for gourmet potato chips since I was very young. Over the years I’ve become so accustomed to expensive high-quality snack foods—fortuitously, the ones that are often promoted as healthy options that won’t kill you quite as swiftly as that tennis-ball tin from the Pringles factory—that I find it very difficult to go back to chips of the ordinary sort. Root vegetable snacks that retain the flavour of the vegetables are a whole order of magnitude more delicious than your average powdery munchies laden with artificial flavours and a surfeit of cheap salt.

I don’t think my potato chip snobbery is a consequence of marketing; I liked these snacks before the organic foods craze ever came to fruition, and I savoured them for flavour and texture alone. But there’s no denying that the companies behind specialty chips pay careful attention to packaging their foods to evoke nostalgia for an imagined pre-industrial authenticity. They appeal to images of the harvest and of kettle-cooking by hand. You certainly see this embodied in high-end brands like the king of root vegetable snacks, Terra Chips (who substantiate their boasts in every way with an astonishing assortment of vegetables and spices), but midrange brands that can be found in supermarkets and convenience stores like Miss Vickie’s (which, by the way, has really gone downhill since it was acquired by Frito-Lay and switched from peanut to vegetable oil) also call upon a rustic ideal where their products, in their words, “remind people of a less-hurried time, when people cooked with care and patience.” We know, of course, that a high-volume national product like Miss Vickie’s isn’t exactly a pastoral manufacture, but that’s how they distinguish themselves from the competition all the same.

I’ve sampled a few of the potato chip brands here in Britain, where they are known as crisps. So far, I’ve been unimpressed, and the potatoes are clearly to blame. I know this from having tried the control group of the global Kettle brand, which is here a cut above your typical crisp, yet oddly stale and inert in comparison to the North American equivalent. Most well-travelled individuals have likely experienced this sort of brand-name dissonance with respect to breakfast cereals; it’s a shock to many a Canadian when travelling abroad that the formula for Kellogg’s Special K everywhere else doesn’t taste anything like Rice Krispies like they do at home.

Then I discovered Phileas Fogg.

Phileas Fogg potato crisps are nothing special, although their Indian Red Chilli mini-poppadoms are one of those unique and delightful pleasures of the British imperial legacy that I haven’t seen before. What caught my attention about these snacks, though, was the branding. The copywriting is magnificent. Far from the usual blurb about the innocence of cottage life, the inscription on every bag aims for a loftier romance:

Embodying the pioneering spirit of the legendary PHILEAS FOGG, our snacks have been created using carefully selected authentic ingredients from around the world to satisfy the most discerning culinary explorer.

It gets better. Here’s the description of their Sea Salt and Indonesian Black Peppercorn crisps:

Indonesia; the breathtaking land of volcanoes, emerald green pastures and the home of our black peppercorns. Here they are known as the king of all the spices and are treated almost as royalty. The pepper farmers are fiercely protective of their crops and watch over them as they dry in the sun. We think it’s worth all the trouble. They give our crisps a satisfyingly balanced flavour—fruity and fresh, with a hint of fiery heat.

And those mini-poppadoms I mentioned earlier:

India. Land of mogul palaces, mystical cities, vibrant colours and delicately spiced poppadoms. Ours are carefully flavoured with hot and fiery red chillies from the Guntur region. Then they are sent to Chennai in the sweltering south to be used in the creation of the perfect poppadom. For an evocative flavour they are sun dried and then cooked to split-second perfection. This gives a crisp, bubbly texture that melts in your mouth, leaving a gentle, aromatic and authentic taste.

If they were really taking this seriously they would have called the city Madras instead of Chennai, but that’s a minor quibble in the grand scheme of things. What astounds me is how the brand has co-opted the name of Jules Verne’s quintessential globetrotter, Phileas Fogg, as a great symbol of imperial adventure who brings knowledge and goods from faraway lands to home soil. Their television advertisement speaks of Fogg as a real historical figure! Nowadays, popular fiction in all media is so tied up in licensing and property rights that we see contemporaneous promotional products like C3PO’s and Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, but one can only wonder what cultural or literary sources snack foods will draw on a hundred years from now, not to promote the original text but to deploy it as an emblem of a more flavourful time and place.

A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal published an article about the peculiar working habits of novelists, which may be a good companion piece to the Where I Write gallery of writers’ messy studies. Margaret Atwood is her usual making-it-sound-so-easy self (“Put your left hand on the table. Put your right hand in the air. If you stay that way long enough, you’ll get a plot”), and Michael Ondaatje’s trademark cubism suddenly makes a lot more sense when you consider that he reassembles his drafts with scissors and tape. And then there’s Richard Powers:

Richard Powers, whose books are often concept-driven, intricately plotted and stuffed with arcane science, wrote his last three novels while lying in bed, speaking to a lap-top computer with voice-recognition software.

To write “Generosity,” his recent novel about the search for a happiness gene, he worked like this for eight or nine hours a day. He uses a stylus pen to edit on a touch screen, rewriting sentences and highlighting words.

“It’s recovering storytelling by voice and recovering the use of the hand and all that tactile immediacy,” Mr. Powers says of the process. “I like to use different parts of my brain.”

If you are at all familiar with Richard Powers’ fiction, this will not surprise you in the least. He is not, to my recollection, the only tech-savvy author to work this way; I seem to recall Douglas Adams saying something about doing the same in one of the essays published in The Salmon of Doubt, although it is entirely possible my memory is off and I’ve been thinking of Mr Powers all along.

Dictating a piece of writing of any length, let alone a book, is not something I could fathom doing myself. I am a deeply nonlinear thinker who takes ideas preformed as block chords and splashes them on the page in fragments of verbal shrapnel, and for me the writing process is largely a matter of bridging broken sentences and putting Humpty together again. This does not lend itself well to finishing long-form works and revising them in drafts.

One of the clear advantages to dictation, it seems, is that the linearity of the spoken word compels you to finish what you begin. But speaking in clear and complete sentences that convey whole ideas is not one of the strengths of a nonlinear mind. Anyone who has listened to me deliver extemporaneous remarks (which account for nearly all of my remarks) can attest that it doesn’t take long for me to break off into tangents and parentheticals. I like the control and precision of the written word, and somehow there must be a way to adjust its nets to capture the spontaneity of speech.

That is where the Apple Wireless Keyboard comes in. You may not have been aware of it, dear reader, but I have been writing this post “blind”. As I speak—and that’s what it really feels like, speaking—I am staring at the ceiling and typing in bed. My computer is on the other side of the room. The experience is most like that of sitting down with a notebook and pen and writing single-spaced within the rules, so as to leave no room for correction, adjustment, or retroactive insertion. The difference, of course, is that I am doing it on a keyboard, which is both faster and less taxing on the wrists.

This method of composition seems ill suited to works of an academic nature, where I have to juggle citations, or even blog posts that rely heavily on quotations and links (like the beginning of the post you are reading now, which was most assuredly not written blind)—but when it comes to forms of writing where the primary challenge is to force oneself to improvise and forge on ahead, it may turn out to be ideal. Failing that, it would still be a fruitful exercise that I am pleased to be have tried this once.

Among the many things I passed through upon my arrival in Cambridge was a symposium on Euclidean Geometry in Nineteenth-Century Culture, organized by Alice Jenkins (University of Glasgow) and CRASSH. I may say a few things about it later, but for now, let us limit ourselves to this tidbit.

I briefly spoke to Robin Wilson, the author of Lewis Carroll in Numberland (reviewed here), from whom I learned that Lewis Carroll once corresponded with Arthur Sullivan to propose an operatic adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Sullivan declined.

Or, as I like to tell it: Sullivan declined, and English comic opera has never recovered since.

This week’s selection: Master and Commander (1970) by Patrick O’Brian.

In brief: The first of the twenty Aubrey-Maturin novels is more of an opening salvo than a completely satisfying story unto itself, but immerse yourself in the music of its naval jargon and you will find it a rich, endearing overture of neo-Romantic escape.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Master and Commander, keep reading below.)

Continued »