TRP and Science 3 (was: Science Plays God)

[Monte Davis]

[part 3 of 3] 

 

DING! Mr. Tolstoy has left the building.

 

AW> You're the expert who has esoteric knowledge the rest of [us] don't and
can never have. A member of the elect. That's you, Monte. So fucking rocket
science.

 

No, Alice, anyone who cares to know what I know about Tesla can read his
autobiography and one biography, as I did some years ago. S/he can spend an
hour Googling and looking up a few things in Vol. 1 of Vaclav Smil's
_Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their
Consequences_, the best book I know about late-19thC electrical technology
and industry. That's what I did while posting to Joseph. Nothing esoteric or
"elect" about that. Why the straw-man exaggeration? Why the anger? 

 

If in discussing _Mason & Dixon_  I were to post here: "Pynchon invents this
crazy pair of surveyors who are hired to straighten out a baroquely imagined
boundary dispute in the American colonies," someone would surely point out
to me that there was, in fact, a real historical pair and a real historical
boundary dispute. Would you have a problem with that?  

 

In my exchange with Joseph Tracy, in the context of Big Technology, Big
Money and Bad Shit, Joseph wrote as if Pynchon's Tesla were (or were close
to) the historical Tesla; I offered evidence to the contrary. What's your
problem with that? 

 

If I'm wrong - if, say, Tesla was a stone philanthropist whose
world-changing free power source *was* suppressed by Big Energy - I'd
welcome your evidence. If you think it's immaterial to distinguish where
Pynchon is using historical facts, where he's pointing to alternate but
plausible historical sequences, and where he's quite deliberately playing to
conspiracy theories, I'd welcome your rationale for that. unusual approach.

 

If neither, how about a big steaming cup of shut the fuck up?

 

[What follows is highly optional for anyone not curious if Papa Alice can
actually go a round]

 

Before you "kick my ass in the science ring," I'd better weigh in, scrawny
as I am. I'm 63 years old. I did some amateur chemistry and model rocketry
in my early teens, and entered Princeton as a sophomore at 16 for two years
of a major in physical chemistry: concentration in reaction rates, cyclical
and chaotic reactions, and thermodynamics. (I think they may have mentioned
entropy somewhere in there.) My lab work and junior-thesis project were the
only hands-on science I've ever done. I changed majors and then schools (see
below, and received no science degree. I taught one year of math and one of
biology at private secondary schools. 

 

>From 1973 to 1985 I was a freelance science and medical writer, with short
stretches on  staff at OMNI and then Discover magazine. I wrote many
articles for those, Smithsonian, NY Times Magazine, etc., and some NOVA
video scripts. I wrote a book on catastrophe theory (algebraic geometry) and
much of another on 20th-century history. Along the way I interviewed and
consulted a great many scientists and technologists, forming many
relationships that have lasted ever since.

 

Since 1985 I've been a freelance business writer -- primarily speeches,
white papers, and marketing communications - for Fortune 500 companies,
mostly in IT, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals and other high-tech
fields. I have continued reading widely in science and technology, both
related and unrelated to that work. Sometimes I stop at the popular-science
level, sometimes I follow a trail deep into the journals, sometimes I
contact a scientist friend for help. 

 

That's it. My knowledge of the natural sciences and of technology is a mile
wide and mostly an inch deep, with more in scattered areas that I've written
about or have caught my interest. 


AW>  Reading Pynchon is tough. Hey, that's one of the reasons I've been
doing it all these years, one of the reasons I read all that stuff other
readers write about P's works. you had trouble reading Pynchon's prose. His
irony fooled you into thinking you were equipped. 

 

Alice, I make even less claim to expertise in literature. I've been a
voracious reader (of fiction and of non-fiction outside science and
technology) all along - I hope an alert and curious one. I've quite
unsystematically read perhaps 20 critical books and a couple of hundred
articles on Pynchon since the mid-1970s. I am well aware of what a tiny
fraction that is of the critical canon by now.

 

Outside TRP:  in another year as an English major at Princeton I had the
great good luck to study Dante with Bob Hollander, Ariosto and Spenser with
Thomas Roche, and French medieval literature with John Fleming. I cite them
not because I learned more about those writers than any other bright
undergraduate in their classes, but because all three are scholars and
critical readers of the highest order - i.e., I have had my misreadings
corrected by the best, as well as by you.

 

Then I transferred to Sarah Lawrence and did two years of mostly independent
study with Joseph Campbell for a BA in comparative literature. I taught
three years of English literature and composition courses at private
secondary schools, and three years of PR/marcomm writing to undergraduates
as an adjunct at Temple.

 

That's it. I'm certain my knowledge of Pynchon studies pales next to yours.
My acumen as a reader and my critical equipment. well, they are what they
are, and would be hard to spin here because nearly everything I've written
about modern fiction since 1994 has been in posts right here. 

 

Reading Pynchon is indeed tough. But as one who had a good liberal-arts
education, has made a living as a writer for 40 years now, and has done some
teaching of literature and composition. may I be spared your
ever-so-gracious concern that I "have trouble interpreting prose" and am
"fooled by Pynchon's irony"?

 

Or if I'm to get the maximum benefit, would you care to put your own cards
on the table? We wouldn't want to be esoteric, after all. How about your
real name, CV, publications, academic honors and so on? Or, if you prefer,
those of your online sock puppets who visit us from time to time?

 

AsB4,

Monte Davis

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