Ntuple Indemnity

I did not enter a submission for the Mactaggart Writing Award. In fact, I was not eligible for the Mactaggart Writing Award. I did not find out I was ineligible until I already had a month’s worth of preparatory notes (consisting of sketches, quotations, jam session impressions, fragmentary passages, and a two-hour interview with a classical musician about her craft) and a rockin’-robin first draft well in progress.

But even if, hypothetically, I were eligible for the Mactaggart Writing Award – and I maintain that I could have won the bloody thing, though I’m aware that competition this year is a lot tighter (given my earnest flatmate’s hurried submission, which was already better than any of the prior student winners’ by a country mile) – I would have had to get around the impasse presented by the 3500-word limit, which I hit like a brick wall (or, perhaps, a four-way stop sign) with plenty left to say. And then there was the small impediment of stranding myself in Calgary.

This was my first attempt at experimental non-fiction (an essayist’s memoir in a fictive register, I’d call it), and word limits aside, I can say with confidence that I have the mojo to write such a thing. Moreover, I discovered the scope of ambition and intellectual responsibility that makes the writer’s task necessary and not merely a product of vanity. So I won’t say that this effort was in vain, even if it effectively precluded me from writing in this space for the past few weeks. (You didn’t miss much. The only posts I even considered were about modelling intuitive strategies for solving the Sudoku problem space as search algorithms, and I reckon there’s already plenty on the subject.)

Then again, I wonder how much of that creative awakening was thanks to all the drinks those fine guests at St. Joseph’s College bought me after this here cocktail pianist started showing off his knowledge of Nobuo Uematsu, and subsequently passing out to Coltrane. No matter. I credit the residual energy for propelling me to the final table at the POGOB Settlers of Catan tournament, where I finished second. (Damned last-minute brick theft – I was one roll of the dice from a guaranteed victory, too.)

National Novel Writing Month is suddenly looking like a good idea, though my academic commitments might have something to say about that. (Something parenthetical, even.)

Oh, and about Michael Cresta’s 830 game (which I’ll responsibly report as the 830-490 game, because the high score wasn’t the only remarkable element)… just read Stefan’s article on Slate. I’m going to catch up with the Scrabble community’s reactions before I determine what there is left for me to add.

So while I was watching Calgary’s victorious home opener tonight, a few conveniently placed intermissions and commercial breaks permitted me to regale the resident kid brother with storied knickknacks of the franchise’s history.

The exercise demonstrated, once again, that one of the best ways to notice new things about a story is to tell it. Here’s tonight’s curiosity: isn’t it odd that at the team’s inception, they christened it the Atlanta Flames? Were they proud of Union soldiers burning their city to the ground – or did they, frankly, not give a damn?

[Edit: According to these guys, that was a very good guess.]

Insert clever transition here.

It’s a strange experience to watch a cinematic remake immediately after the original film. It is not unlike reading a book right before you see its adaptation. When it comes to books, I know that for some people, it’s hardly ever a pleasant experience: they get all worked up about adaptation issues and never manage to get over them. For me, there is usually something unsettling that results from how the absences and changes are just as visible as what actually ends up on the screen, but this is typically outweighed by my attention to the use of film language in negotiating the inevitable gulfs. See my piece on The Phantom of the Opera for details.

Remakes, however, are a different matter. I think we often have a tendency to think of them as “new versions” of a story rather than “adaptations” in the same sense as books and stage plays. Gus Van Sant’s Psycho aside, our expectations typically extend as far as a reimagining of the holistic story and characters, and not shot-for-shot, plot-for-plot replication.

So it’s delightful when Naomi Watts steals an apple and Adrien Brody carries her down a vine in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and it’s especially entertaining to us film nerds when the original film is hypodiegetically embedded in Jack Black’s film shoot on the ship; and then there’s the spider sequence, which is (oddly enough) a homage to a scene explicitly not in the original; but we see these as luxuries, and we could have done without them just the same.

That brings us to this weekend’s big release, The Departed.

A brief primer for those of you who don’t keep up with such things, and expect me to do it for you: Scorsese’s latest film is a remake of a 2002 Hong Kong cop thriller, Infernal Affairs, which quickly became Hong Kong cinema’s biggest phenomenon this decade not involving the farcical antics of Stephen Chow. The premise is deceptively simple: a police spy embedded in a triad (Tony Leung or, if you prefer, Leonardo DiCaprio) and a triad spy embedded in the police department (Andy Lau or, if you prefer, Matt Damon) attempt to fish each other out in a meticulous demonstration of what game theorists refer to as a simultaneous game of incomplete information.

If you haven’t seen Infernal Affairs, I highly recommend that you do. I revisited it last night, heeding a warning from a fellow film buff that it doesn’t hold up as well on a second viewing, only to discover that – while the shock value is gone, and there are two or three leaps of logic that arguably qualify as plot holes – the film is every bit as intricate as I remembered on the levels of direction, editing, performance and general craftsmanship.

A wise choice, then, for Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan to adhere very, very closely to the sequence of actions in the original. Sure, the locales and actors are different, a few supporting characters are split and merged, and I’m told there are elements from the two sequels that emerged within a year of the original’s release. (Mark Wahlberg’s character is allegedly grafted from Infernal Affairs III.) I don’t want to spoil anything, but stack one film atop the other, and they mesh in an alignment I’d even call homomorphic.

But because the two films are so similar, and differ primarily in execution, I do feel compelled to compare them. I think my renewed familiarity with Infernal Affairs tempered my enjoyment of The Departed somewhat, and I suspect the latter deserves a second chance on a clean slate. I highly recommend them both, but neither one is free of imperfections. In that sense, I almost find that one complements the other.

Here’s what The Departed does better: onscreen violence, cinematography, verbal humour, the exchange of contraband, Jack Nicholson, clever visual motifs (I’m thinking of the final shot in particular), the budget, Catholicism, spoonfeeding the audience every step of the way to flesh out the motivations so nobody is left questioning why X knows/trusts/kills Y.

Here’s what Infernal Affairs does better: offscreen violence, editing, pacing of the opening act, sting operations, Morse Code, Buddhism, not spoonfeeding the audience every step of the way to beat it over the head with clues and motivations until it resonates with the guest appearance of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”.

Draw: stellar lead performances, use of cellular telephones, plot holes.

On balance, I prefer the original. I’ll concede that it is sometimes too subtle for its own good, just as The Departed is a bit heavy-handed when it comes to trying to explain everything (and still falling short in completely new ways). It doesn’t wave clues in your face like its American sibling, but it does indulge in the occasional redundant flashback to slap you twice with a revelation after it has been made. The two films tell the story from opposite directions, and different problems surface.

What The Departed doesn’t preserve about Infernal Affairs is its acute sense of perspective.

One of the core principles of film language is that while the audience is receiving visual data in a blinking rectangle, that does not mean films inherently work in a third-person objective point of view. Framing, blocking, the sequential ordering and timing of reaction shots – all of these elements contribute to a sense of omniscience and empathy, leading us inside a character’s point of view even as we see her face. Hitchcock played with this to no end. Hell, Scorsese plays with this to no end… just not up to his usual standard here.

It’s almost certainly an editing issue. There’s a big moment in both films that I won’t spoil, but it involves, er, gravity. In Infernal Affairs, it happens behind Tony Leung as he walks towards the camera, and it’s as much a punch in the gut for us as it is for him. (It says something that it still worked the second time through the film, even though I saw it coming.) In The Departed, the audience sees what happens long before Leonardo DiCaprio’s character; the eye level contributes to this, too. Something about it just doesn’t work: the timing and cutting feel off.

The Departed consistently opts for the visceral over what makes the most sense, perspectivally speaking. Mind you, Scorsese is still a master of the visceral; but that doesn’t always fit, especially in a film built on a concept that is all about the limited perspectives of the main characters progressing in blind, meandering baby steps.

Watch them both, though. I can’t think of a better exercise to teach yourself about the differing conventions and values of Hong Kong and American cinema, even if you presume that you’re already familiar with one or the other.

(The likely scenario is that you’ll only manage to see The Departed, which is playing in “theatres everywhere”, while Infernal Affairs is not. In that case, enjoy the element of surprise. I think that may have been missing in my experience, as there is very little in the Gotcha Department that Infernal Affairs doesn’t already do.)

I’ve been keeping myself rather busy over the past month, and simply haven’t found the time to write anything comprehensive in this space. A cursory summary would do little justice to the twinkles of thought, arrayed in fleeting constellations, that have lately crossed the orbit of my neighbourly worth-writing-downosphere. I’ll admit that much of it was inspired by extensive and inspirational quantities of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and leave it at that.

I’ll sheepishly confess to conceiving (but not writing) a post about the lonelygirl15 fiasco, primarily consisting of snide remarks about how I never conceived of the bookish, batty-eyed brunette – religiously forbidden, of course – as an archetype of the popular imagination (having only ever met two of the sort myself). But I think that alone says all that I have the tactlessness to say. Next topic.

So I’ll confine this post, which no doubt falls into a special category of digital life preservers designed to be carelessly tossed at flailing websites, to a note of thanks. It goes to Apple, which finally had the sense to implement gapless playback into the latest version of iTunes. I listen to a great deal of live recordings and continuous albums, often in their entirety, and the involuntary breaks between tracks have been a nuisance for a long time now.

The most significant beneficiary is my copy of The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961, the three-disc release of the Bill Evans gig that some have come to refer to as Jazz’s Perfect Afternoon. Others before me have written volumes on the bittersweet charm of the musical content (it is, after all, the canonical masterwork of the postbop piano trio format), but beyond that, I think there’s something to discover and rediscover in the gaps, in the fluid transitions from one tune to the next amidst the ambience of the understated applause. It’s nice to do that without having to pop CDs in and out of the drive, for a change.

I’m still rather irked that my fourth-generation iPod is unsupported when it comes to the gapless playback feature, as I intended to regard the unit as a long-term investment. I’m not sure what precludes introducing the feature in a firmware update to the older models, but whatever it is, it’s bothersome.

The big news at this hour, in the unlikely event you haven’t heard, is Pluto’s demotion to “dwarf planet” status, in a stunning (but appreciated) reversal from the twelve-planet proposal that raised such a brouhaha in the mainstream press.

It’s about bloody time.

Let me begin by saying that I have no sympathies for Pluto as a planet. I haven’t thought of it as one since the day I discovered it was even up for debate. I don’t think I’m wholly uninformed: I’ve had an amateur interest in astronomy since the age of six months. My first book was about space, and appropriately entitled My First Book About Space. I noticed early on that something was off, and that Pluto’s behaviour was markedly different from the rest of the objects that were considered planets: its sheer puniness, its erratic orbit, its mass relative to Charon’s, the mere realization that we haven’t observed it long enough to validate the orbital path that was extrapolated in all of those pretty picture books – the list goes on and on.

It is interesting and aggravating to me that a lot of the coverage about the planetary redefinition cites, as a major source of resistance to change, the inertia of public opinion and the tendency of the ignorant masses to stick to obsolete schoolbooks as eternal, axiomatic truths.

Public opinion is bollocks. The public is inadequately educated on the basic tenets of scientific method and still thinks in terms of epistemological facts and non-facts. Don’t believe me? Take a good look at one of those science textbooks in the States with the utterly idiotic disclaimer that “Evolution is a theory, not a fact,” which is true of everything that we consider science (excluding mathematics, which is founded on abstract definitions and axioms and does not by itself adhere to real-world empirical observations).

Scientists aren’t out of touch with the public consensus. The public consensus is out of touch with science.

As for the scientific opposition to Pluto’s demotion – which is at least based on argumentation and not dogma, but is objectionable for linguistic reasons – I get the sense that what the IAU aimed to do was retain some kind of observable distinction between the eight planets and trans-Neptunian objects (plus the usual oddballs like Ceres), other than some arbitrary statement about where they lie. And let’s face it: Pluto’s planetary status was a legacy concession, and the nine-planet definition was pretty arbitrary to begin with.

On principle, drawing a line around the eight classical planets is no different from how we currently distinguish between the inner planets and the four gas giants. The new “dwarf planet” category (not subcategory) is sufficiently accommodating in spite of some outstanding quirks (Charon, anyone?), as it correctly classifies Pluto as “not quite as much of a planetary object as the other ones” and even provides a useful distinction that separates Ceres from the rest of the asteroid belt.

Given what we know about our solar system and its outskirts today, there’s hardly a Pluto-inclusive definition that wouldn’t be a slippery slope. You might even say that the rejected twelve-planet proposal was jury-rigged to include Pluto for sentimental reasons, and one of the concerns about it was that it would open the door to at least ten other candidate planets, and almost certainly more in the future. The dilution would eventually necessitate a special term for the eight planets up to Neptune anyway, since those objects fall into two very distinguishable taxonomic classes. I like the term “classical planet”, which was bandied about at one point, but “planet” alone is more in keeping with the intuitive connotations of the term.

In the Space.com article I linked to above, Alan Stern from NASA’s New Horizons mission complains that a vote of 424 astronomers out of over 10,000 professionals worldwide is insufficiently representative. This is tantamount to saying that international relations are invalid unless you sit all the governing politicians of one country down with all the governing politicians of another. Furthermore, I’m not sure a direct democracy would have made any difference with respect to the outcome. Science is not a democracy, and I do not think there is any indication that the IAU voters – all professional astronomers – were grossly unrepresentative of the astronomical community at large.

Last week, maverick descriptivist Geoff Pullum of Language Log fame made an entertaining comparison between planetary status and the rules of grammar. I think he illustrates my point pretty well.

Now I’m going to listen to Gustav Holst. He got it right the first time.

This might be a surprising thing for me to say, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t think I take this game seriously enough.

Jim Kramer, a longtime Scrabble vet who proofreads textbooks, claimed the North American title Wednesday in a three-game sweep of Geoff Thevenot, a relative upstart (but a meteoric one) who, as it happens, also proofreads textbooks. The individual games were incredibly exciting to watch: the first two were settled with scores of 388-374 and 402-391, and the score of the third (433-326) conceals how hard Geoff fought the whole way in the face of some truly discouraging tiles. I recommend you follow the play-by-play logs, but what they do not capture is the passage of time – the tension, the anticipation, that built up to each and every turn. For a sense of the atmosphere in the closed-circuit observation room, you’d have to read the commentary written on the spot – Round 1, Round 2 and Round 3.

When you watch experts play, half the drama originates from the knowledge of optimal (or at least excellent) plays suggested by the observers, who are under no pressure at all and may have the aid of computers on their side. The thing about the top players is that they can find those optimal moves by themselves, which gets everybody excited, but every now and then they defy expectations and throw everybody for a loop.

In the Kramer-Thevenot final, they outright made mistakes and succumbed to uncertainties, but played their hearts out all the same. If you observe Round 1, you’ll see that Jim plays a phony – ZOOEA#, only acceptable in the World Championship (SOWPODS) dictionary – and Geoff lets it go. In a tight endgame, Geoff hooks it to make ZOOEAL#, also British-only (but analogous to the ZOEA/ZOEAL pair accepted in the North American book), and Jim holds, deciding whether or not to challenge. He could have taken it off, but realized – correctly – that the only way he could lose the game at that point would be to lose a turn, and he could not take that risk. A lesson, perhaps, on phony-psychology in the endgame, especially when point spread doesn’t matter.

The beginning of Round 3 was really a sight to see, and a parable of perseverance (not to mention a large vocabulary). Jim plays AGO for 8 points. Geoff’s opening rack: GIIIMRS. He exchanges, of course, keeping RS. Then Jim plays CASTRATO, hitting a triple for 80 points. In the meantime, Geoff picked up no less than three Is to replace the three he threw away, for a rack of AIIIPRS. He throws them away again, only to draw to another rack with tripled vowels – AAAIRRS. By his next turn, Geoff isn’t even on the board yet, and Jim has a 103-point lead. A hush fell over the audience with every rack he drew, because quite frankly, nobody would have wished any of those on themselves.

Then came the biggest cheers of the morning, as soon as Geoff found SACRARIA through the C in CASTRATO. He soon took the lead and held it for most of the game, and then the tile gods zapped him again – and he had to make his second pair of back-to-back exchanges. He never regained the lead, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. As expert and perennial commentator Chris Cree explained to the crowd, consecutive exchanges are sometimes a necessary move.

I don’t feel qualified to examine the games themselves in any greater depth.

One thing I found to be pretty telling is that Geoff Thevenot only started playing tournaments in 2003, and made the U.S. Open final with a sub-1800 rating, a record low for a player in contention for the top prize, which arguably translates to a record high for performing above expectations. He was brought into the game via the definitive book on competitive Scrabble, Stefan Fatsis’ Word Freak.

I’m pre-Word Freak. I purchased it in hardcover after already having played for over a year. It amazes me how much the game has changed around me since then – and not just with the new dictionary, which affected everybody. I’m gradually coming to the realization that I haven’t substantially improved in four years: it just took some time for my rating to settle in the mid-1200s, where it already belonged way before it got there.

In the intervening time, everybody picked up a PDA and armed it with LAMPWords, Maven gave way to Quackle after decades of dominance as the premier simulator and Scrabble AI, the Internet exploded with resources such as cross-tables.com and Verbalobe, a host of other Scrabble players discovered LiveJournal, and a new generation of young up-and-comers catapulted into the upper echelons so quickly I didn’t even get a chance to play them on their way up.

What have I been doing all this time?

Not studying words, for one thing. But enough of that. This will change, and this is already changing. It’s time to get back to drilling anagrams for an hour or two every day, coupled with the occasional game or study of a tricky board position.

It’s actually a big problem for me that there simply isn’t that much competition around here, and playing online isn’t the same thing. Edmonton is curiously devoid of competitive Scrabble culture, and given that I will likely be out of here in two years, I’m not liable to shoulder the responsibility of starting one and stabilizing it.

I know there’s interest. This website still receives occasional searches for an Edmonton Scrabble Club, which, as it stands, does not really exist. The closest that anywhere in Alberta north of Calgary gets to organized Scrabble is the sanctioned club that meets Monday nights in Sherwood Park, and a non-sanctioned, casual club combined with a bridge group that meets on Thursdays at Queen Mary Park just north of downtown Edmonton – and neither of them offer the simultaneous challenge and mentorship that I received whilst living in Calgary year-round.

The biggest problem may be a lack of a constant, weekly incentive to study and improve my game. It’s easy to put it aside in the off-season, and I’ve had a very long off-season.

The next big tournament for me is the Western Canadian Scrabble Championship in Calgary. It’s two months away. That’s two months for a grand experiment in keeping up a daily study regimen, rather than cramming on the way down to the event the day it begins.

We’ll see.