The other day I was thinking of some of the wonderful names that Philip K. Dick gave to his characters:
Joe Chip
Glen Runciter
Bob Arctor
Palmer Eldritch
Perky Pat

And, of course, Horselover Fat.

My personal favorite names from these stories are Ragle Gumm from Time out of Joint, and Addison Doug, the main character in an obscure spaceship/time-travel story from 1974.

I feel like it shows a deep confidence to give your characters this sort of name. As names, they’re off, but at the same time they’re just right in context. “Addison Doug,” indeed.

Some authors are good at titles, some are good at last lines, some are good at names. So many books, even great books, have character names that are boring or too cute or just fine, but no more than just fine. To come up with these distinctive names is a high-risk ploy that, when it works, it adds something special to the whole story.

In his classic essay, “Politics and the English Language,” the political journalist George Orwell drew a connection between cloudy writing and cloudy content.

The basic idea was: if you don’t know what you’re saying, or if you’re trying to say something you don’t really want to say, then one strategy is to write unclearly. Conversely, consistently cloudy writing can be an indication that the writer ultimately doesn’t want to be understood.

In Orwell’s words:

[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

He continues:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

A few years ago I posted on this topic, drawing an analogy to cloudy writing in science. To be sure, much of the bad writing in science comes from researchers who have never learned to write clearly. Writing is hard!

But it’s not just that. A key problem with a lot of the bad science that we see featured in PNAS, Ted, NPR, Gladwell, Freakonomics, etc., is that the authors are trying to use statistical analysis and storytelling to do something they can’t do with their science, which is to draw near-certain conclusions from noisy data that can’t support strong conclusions. This leads to tortured constructions such as this from a medical journal:

The pair‐wise results (using paired‐samples t‐test as well as in the mixed model regression adjusted for age, gender and baseline BMI‐SDS) showed significant decrease in BMI‐SDS in the parents–child group both after 3 and 24 months, which indicate that this group of children improved their BMI status (were less overweight/obese) and that this intervention was indeed effective.

However, as we wrote in the results and the discussion, the between group differences in the change in BMI‐SDS were not significant, indicating that there was no difference in change in our outcome in either of the interventions. We discussed, in length, the lack of between‐group difference in the discussion section. We assume that the main reason for the non‐significant difference in the change in BMI‐SDS between the intervention groups (parents–child and parents only) as compared to the control group can be explained by the fact that the control group had also a marginal positive effect on BMI‐SDS . . .

Obv not as bad as political journalists in the 1930s defending Stalin’s purges or whatever; the point is that the author is in the awkward position of trying to use the ambiguities of language to say something while not quite saying it. Which leads to unclear and barely readable writing, not just by accident.

The writing and the statistics have to be cloudy, because if they were clear, the emptiness of the conclusions would be apparent.

The problem

Orwell’s statement, when transposed to writing a technical paper, is that if you attempt to cover the gaps in your reasoning with words, this will typically yield bad writing. Indeed, if you’re covering the gaps in your reasoning with words, you’ll either have bad writing or dishonest writing, or both. In some important way, it’s a good thing that this sort of writing is so hard to follow; otherwise it could be really misleading.

Now let’s flip it around.

Often you will find yourself trying to write an article, and it will be very difficult to write it clearly. You’ll go around and around, and whatever you, your written output will feel like the worst of both worlds: a jargon-filled mess, while at the same time being sloppy and imprecise. Try to make it more readable and it becomes even sloppier and harder to follow at a technical level; try to make it accurate and precise, and it reads like a complicated, uninterpretable set of directions.

You’re stuck. You’re in a bad place. And any direction you take makes the writing worse in some important way.

What’s going on?

It could be this: You’re trying to write something you don’t fully understand, you’re trying to bridge a gap between what you want to say and what is actually justified by your data and analysis . . . and the result is “Orwellian,” in the sense that you’re desperately using words to try to paper over this yawning chasm in your reasoning.

The solution

One way out of this trap is to follow what we could call Orwell’s Contrapositive.

It goes like this: Step back. Pause in whatever writing you’re doing. Pull out a new sheet of paper (or an empty document on the computer) and write, as directly as you can, in two columns. Column 1 is what you want to be able to say (the method is effective, the treatment saves lives, whatever); Column 2 is what is supported by your evidence (the method works better than a particular alternative in a particular setting, fewer people died in the treatment than the control group after adjusting this and that, whatever).

At that point, do the work to pull Column 2 to Column 1, or make concessions to reality to shift Column 1 toward Column 2. Do what it takes to get them to line up.

At this point, you’ve left the bad zone in which you’re trying to say more than you can honestly say. And the writing should then go much smoother.

That’s the contrapositive: if bad writing is a sign of someone trying to say the indefensible, then you can make your writing better by not trying to say the defensible, either by expanding what is legitimately defensible or restricting what you’re trying to say.

Remember the folk theorem of statistical computing: When you have computational problems, often there’s a problem with your model. Orwell’s Contrapositive is a sort of literary analogy to that.

One reason writing is hard

To put it another way: One reason writing is hard is that we use writing to cover the gaps in our reasoning. This is not always a bad thing! On the way to the destination of covering these gaps is the important step of revealing these gaps. We write to understand. Writing has an internal logic that can protect us from (some) errors and gaps—if we let it, by reacting to the warning sign that the writing is unclear.

Sean Manning writes:

People behave differently on the post-2008 Internet than before because most of them are on smartphones or pads not laptops or desktops. For example, its hard to copy and paste blocks of text on a touchscreen, but usually easy to make screenshots, so people move things from one site to another as screenshots. Its hard to jump precisely around a text and type punctuation marks, so its hard to enter bbcode. Its easy to scroll, so sites designed for smartphones often have an infinite scroll. Its easy to pull out a smartphone in breaks from other activities, so people visiting the Internet on a smartphone are often in a hurry. People do more of what their tools encourage (affordances) and less of what their tools discourage.

Good point! I hadn’t thought if it that way, partly I guess because I don’t have a mobile phone or pad, so I do very little interaction with touchscreens.

A few years ago someone contacted me with a proposal to fix up the blog and make it more friendly to mobile devices, but it wasn’t clear to me that these changes would actually work. Or, to put it another way, it seemed that any changes would either be too minor to make a difference, or so major that they wouldn’t work with the sort of content we have here. What I hadn’t thought about was Manning’s point, that the way we write and interact on this blog is in some ways a function of how we interact with it on the computer.

There probably are some ways of making the blog more mobile-friendly, but I guess the real point is that the style of communication we’ve developed here works for this format. Kinda like how some stories work better as movies, some as TV shows, and some as plays. You can transfer from one medium to another but they’re different.

Tom Bissell writes:

Recently, in The Spooky Art, Norman Mailer [wrote that] Not once in the twentieth century . . . has a single politician, actor, athlete, or surgeon emerged as a first-rate novelist, despite the dismayingly huge breadth of experience each profession affords. For better or worse, and I am prepared to admit worse, writers are writers are writers. This explains why so many mediocre fiction writers sound the same, why there exist so many books about writers, and why many talented fiction writers seem to think that their best option to distinguish themselves is to flee the quotidian to explore more fanciful subject matter.

That’s an interesting point. Here in the twenty-first century, novel writing is a niche art and a niche business. In the previous century, though, the novel was a major popular art form, and lots of people were motivated to write them, both for artistic and financial reasons. Great novels were written in the twentieth century by people with all sorts of social backgrounds, high, low, and various steps in between—George Orwell was a police officer!—, but I think Mailer was right, that none of these great novels were written by politicians, actors, athletes, or surgeons. Perhaps the closest candidate is Michael Crichton (not a surgeon but he was trained as a doctor; no great novels but he did write Jurassic Park, which was solid genre fiction). Had his novels not been successful, it seems likely he would’ve just become a doctor, which indicates a bit of selection bias in Mailer’s statement. Jim Bouton authored the literary classic Ball Four, but it’s not a novel and presumably the writing was mostly done by his coauthor, who was a professional writer. OK, I guess my best shots on this are George V. Higgins (author of some arguably-great novels (see also here) and also a practicing lawyer) and Scott Turow (also a practicing lawyer as well as an author of several excellent legal thrillers which, ok, they’re not great novels but they have a lot of strengths, I guess I’d say they’re better than Michael Crichton’s even if they don’t have the originality of someone like Jim Thompson). But “lawyer” is not quite the same category as “politician, actor, athlete, or surgeon”—indeed, a lawyer is already a sort of professional fiction writer.

I dunno, it’s an interesting question. I assume there were a fair number of twentieth-century politicians, actors, athletes, and surgeons who had the capacity to write a great novel, or at least make a fair attempt, but it doesn’t seem to have happened. Maybe it would just have taken too much effort, to the extent that, had they gone all-in to write a great novel or a reasonable attempt, they would’ve just become full-time writers and that what’s we’d remember them as. I’m not sure.

Gore Vidal was a politician (kind of) and wrote some excellent novels, maybe they don’t count as “great” but maybe they do. He’s the closest match I can think of—but maybe not, because he was a writer before going into politics, so he doesn’t really count as a politician emerging as a novelist.

P.S. Bissell’s article also discusses the idea of writers being outsiders, which motivates me to point to these two posts:

There often seems to be an assumption that being in the elite and being an outsider are mutually exclusive qualities, but they’re not.

The insider-outsider perspective

As I wrote in the comments to one of those posts:

Saying someone is an outsider doesn’t convey much information, given that just about anyone can grab that label. However, as an observer of politics (and science), I notice that people sometimes highlight their outsider status, and as a political scientist I find that interesting. For example, what’s interesting about Steven Levitt in Freakonomics is not so much that he thinks of himself as a “rogue” but that he decided to label himself that way. Rather than presenting himself as an informant from the inside, he presented himself as an outsider. He had the choice of taking either tack, and he decided on the outsider label. That’s interesting.

Why would people want economics advice from a “rogue” outsider who thinks that drunk walking is more dangerous than drunk driving, thinks we are assured of 30 years of global cooling, and believes that beautiful parents are 36% more likely to have girls? Wouldn’t you prefer economics advice from an insider, someone with a Harvard and MIT education who’s now the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago? That’s what baffles me.

The outsider-novelist thing is more clear, in that different authors offer different perspectives. We read Jack London for one thing and Jane Austen for another.

Marshall McLuhan: The environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.

Normal Mailer: Well, nonetheless, nature still exhibits manifestations which defy all methods of collecting information and data. For example, an earthquake may occur, or a tidal wave may come in, or a hurricane may strike. And the information will lag critically behind our ability to control it.

Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of literary criticism.  See, for example,

“End of novel. Beginning of job.”: That point at which you make the decision to stop thinking and start finishing

Contingency and alternative history (followup here)

Kazin to Birstein to a more general question of how we evaluate people’s character based on traits that might, at least at first glance, appear to be independent of character (followup here)

“Readability” as freedom from the actual sensation of reading

Things that I like that almost nobody else is interested in

Anthony West’s literary essays

I recently came across a book called “Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles,” by literary journalist Jeet Heer. The “Lechery” in the title is a bit misleading, but, yes, Heer is open about sexual politics. In any case, like the best literary critics, he engages with the literary works and the authors in the context of politics and society. He has some of the overconfidence of youth—the book came out ten years ago, and some of its essays are from ten or more years before that—, and there’s a bunch of obscure Canadian stuff that doesn’t interest me, but overall I found the writing fun and the topics interesting.

One good thing about the book was its breadth of cultural concerns, including genre and non-genre literature, political writing, and comic books, with the latter taken as of interest in themselves, not merely as some sort of cultural symbol.

I also appreciated that he didn’t talk about movies or pop music. I love movies and pop music, but they’re also such quintessential topics for Boomer critics who want to show their common touch. There are enough other places where I can read about how Stevie Wonder and Brian Wilson are geniuses, that Alex Chilton is over- or under-rated, appreciation of obscure records and gritty films from the 1970s, etc.

My comparison point here is Louis Menand’s book on U.S. cold war culture from 1945-1965, which made me wonder how he decided what to leave in and what to leave out. I’m a big fan of Menand—as far as I’m concerned, he can write about whatever he wants to write about—; it was just interesting to consider all the major cultural figures he left out, even while considering the range of characters he included in that book. Heer writes about Philip Roth but also about John Maynard Keynes; he’s not ashamed to write about, and take seriously, high-middlebrow authors such as John Updike and Alice Munro, while also finding time to write thoughtfully about Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick. I was less thrilled with his writing about comics, not because of anything he said that struck me as wrong, exactly, but rather because he edged into a boosterish tone, promotion as much as criticism.

Another comparison from the New Yorker stable of writers is Thomas Mallon, who notoriously wrote this:

Thus displaying his [Mallon’s] ignorance of Barry Malzberg, who has similarities with Mailer both in style and subject matter. I guess that Malzberg was influenced by Mailer.

And, speaking of Mailer, who’s written some good things but I think was way way overrated by literary critics during his lifetime—I’m not talking about sexism here, I just think there were lots of other writers of his time who had just as much to say and could say it better, with more lively characters, better stories, more memorable turns of phrase, etc.—; anyway, even though I’m not the world’s biggest Mailer fan, I did appreciate the following anecdote which appeared, appropriately enough, in an essay by Heer about Canadian icon Marshall McLuhan:

Connoisseurs of Canadian television should track down a 1968 episode of a CBC program called The Summer Way, a highbrow cultural and political show that once featured a half-hour debate about technology between McLuhan and the novelist Norman Mailer. . . .

McLuhan: We live in a time when we have put a man-made satellite environment around the planet. The planet is no longer nature. It’s no longer the external world. It’s now the content of an artwork. Nature has ceased to exist.

Mailer: Well, I think you’re anticipating a century, perhaps.

McLuhan: But when you put a man-made environment around the planet, you have in a sense abolished nature. Nature from now on has to be programmed.

Mailer: Marshall, I think you’re begging a few tremendously serious questions. One of them is that we have not yet put a man-made environment around this planet, totally. We have not abolished nature yet. We may be in the process of abolishing nature forever.

McLuhan: The environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.

Mailer: Well, nonetheless, nature still exhibits manifestations which defy all methods of collecting information and data. For example, an earthquake may occur, or a tidal wave may come in, or a hurricane may strike. And the information will lag critically behind our ability to control it.

McLuhan: The experience of that event, that disaster, is felt everywhere at once, under a single dateline.

Mailer: But that’s not the same thing as controlling nature, dominating nature, or superseding nature. It’s far from that. Nature still does exist as a protagonist on this planet.

McLuhan: Oh, yes, but it’s like our Victorian mechanical environment. It’s a rear-view mirror image. Every age creates as a utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy.

That’s great! I love how McLuhan keeps saying these extreme but reasonable-sounding things and then, each time, Mailer brings him down to Earth. Norman Mailer, who built much of a career on bloviating philosophizing, is the voice of reason here. The snippet that I put at the top of this post is my favorite: McLuhan as glib Bitcoin bro, Mailer as the grizzly dad who has to pay the bills and fix the roof after the next climate-induced hurricane.

Heer gets it too, writing:

It’s a measure of McLuhan’s ability to recalibrate the intellectual universe that in this debate, Mailer—a Charlie Sheen–style roughneck with a history of substance abuse, domestic violence, and public mental breakdowns—comes across as the voice of sobriety and sweet reason.

Also, Heer’s a fan of Uncle Woody!

Following the recommendation of Elin in comments, I checked out the podcast, If Books Could Kill. It seemed like the kinda thing I might like: 2 guys going back and forth taking apart Gladwell, Freakonomics, David Brooks, Nudge, and other subjects of this blog. It would be really hilarious if they were to take on the copy-paste jobs of chess sages Ray Keene and Chrissy Hesse, but I guess that would be too niche for them . . .

I have mixed feelings about If Books Could Kill. My take is mostly positive—I listen to podcasts while biking so what I’m looking for is a kind of background music, a continuing flow of interesting things that flow smoothly. I’m impressed that they can talk so engagingly, unrehearsed (I assume) for an hour straight. No ums or uhs, they stay on topic . . . they’re pros. Not every podcast I’ve listened to goes so well. Sometimes they go too slow and I get bored.

There’s one thing that they’re missing, though, and that’s opposition. The most recent episode I’ve been listening to provides a good example. They discussed Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, a book from a few years back that of course I’d heard of, but I’d never read, actually never even opened. I’m not saying that out of pride, it’s just not something that ever crossed my desk.

The podcast went as usual: they lead off with a summary of the book’s theme, then talk about how the book has some reasonable ideas and they want to give it a fair shake, then they get into the problematic passages and get into some questionable aspects of the author’s career.

This all works, but then at some point I kind of resist. It’s not that I think they’re being unfair to the book, exactly. It’s more like . . . they need some opposition. It goes like this. the book says X, they point out problems with X and get to mocking, which is fine—but then I want to push back. I don’t buy everything they’re saying. I think the podcast would be better if they could add a third person, someone who’s also good at the podcast thing and who generally agrees with them, but can push back against their stronger statements. I’m not asking for a debate every week, just someone who can, every once in awhile, say, “Whoa, you’re going too far this time. Yes, you have good points, but the book you’re discussing is not so horrible as you say, at least not right here.”

And yes, the hosts of the podcast—Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri—do point out positive features of the books they’re criticizing; they really do try to do their best to give the authors a fair shake. It’s just that in every episode they’ll get into this rhythm of reinforcing each other to the extent that they’ll miss the point. They need someone to keep them honest, keep them closer to their best selves.

The comment thread does some of that job on this blog.

And, as we’ve discussed over the years, I do find lots of positive things in Gladwell, Freakonomics, David Brooks, Nudge, etc. I think I’d appreciate Men are from Mars etc., but I guess at this point I won’t ever get around to reading it. As to the podcast: I think I’ll continue to be listening to it, because it’s entertaining. But it could be better.

P.S. More here on the value of opposition.

P.P.S. It appears that Hobbes has a track record of making hasty judgments and not considering alternative perspectives. That’s too bad cos otherwise I really enjoy this podcast.