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Sex Violence and Thermodynamics, 2001/07/30:12:05

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Thermodynamics
respond
responses The 2nd Law of Thermodyanmics prevents the construction of what's known as a "perpetual motion machine of the 2nd kind (a PPM2)." The 1st Law of Thermodynamics prevents the construction of what's known as a "perpetual motion machine of the 1st kind (a PPM1)."

The two laws are quite different in form, however. The first law is a restatement of the law of conservation of energy with respect to thermal energy. It says, in effect, "Thermal energy is energy, and all energy is conserved, so thermal energy is conserved." A PPM1 violates the conservation of energy, so it's forbidden for excellent reasons--energy is conserved because the equations of motion are invariant with translations in time, and this is the case because the laws of physics are invariant with translations in time. The constants of nature are (more or less) constant, as are the laws of nature.

The 2nd law, however, says, "You can't build a PPM2." That's the law--no general principle, no conserved quantity, no corresponding symmetry in the equations of motion. It's true there are information-theoretic versions of the law that appear more substantial, but I'm not satisfied with the supposed isomorphism between the information-theoretic and thermodynamic approaches to these systems. If you include the correlation terms you do get a conserved information, but this is still something that looks more like an epistemological quality than a physical quality, at least to me. And while there are more abstract-sounding statements of the 2nd law, they don't amount to much more than the concrete claim above. Saying, for instance, "In the absense of external forces, the entropy of a closed system always increases" is one very small step away from saying, "you can't build a PPM2". When you've said that, you've said, apparently, it all.

And I'm quite sure that that isn't all there is to say.

Reading
respond
responses There are a whole bunch of books I've read recently that I've not had time to comment on.

Micheal Frayn's Headlong was entertaining and well-written, although on a larger scale predictable. Like much good modern fiction a lot of the enjoyment is in the details, the finely crafted moments and the voyeuristic examination of stranger's lives, not the plot as such. It has a plot, thankfully, but only because telling a story without one would be silly--it's far easier to show us these people if they are actually engaged in doing something, some project or problem.

The most interesting aspect of the book is its lengthy, example-driven discussion of artistic interpretation, its asking what it is we do when we analyze a work of art and construct a story about the work itself, about the artist's intentions and about the meaning (to us or to the artist or to others) of the work.

Art speaks, but who does it speak for? And how?

Interpreting and criticising art (I say with dawning horror--am I becoming a critic?! Help!) is as much an act of creation, of story-telling, as creating the work itself is. But (I say with a sigh of relief) it can only be done properly by people who are themselves creators of art--only one who has done the job can possibly understand what an artist might be doing (and even then is likely to get it wrong most of the time.)

I don't know what to say about Lady Chatterly's Lover except that it is undoubtedly one of the greatest works of English literature from the century just past, literally decades ahead of its time, anticipating all sorts of questions about the nature of femininity and masculinity that are still current today. I hate the way Lawerence writes--I find his prose style flat and awkward, and the narrative portions of the book plod forward with almost Victorian stodgieness, as if Lawrence was trying to make up for the progressiveness of his story with the conservativism of its telling. But the scenes between Connie and her lover are brilliant, almost painful in their intimacy, and the sympathy they evoke is the true measure of Lawrence's art.

While the questions it raises are still current, Lawrence's treatment of them is substantially a reflection of his time and place, and the social and economic structures of England between the wars is every evident in the work. This isn't a criticism, but it does limit the book in important ways. Lawrence was writing not about men and women, but about men and women of his time--his depictions are considerably less archetypal than those of Shakespeare, say. This isn't surprising, as Lawrence was living in and to an extent anticipating, a time when the old archetypes of men and women would fall to pieces and we'd need to build up new ones from the shattered fragments of the old, held together with whatever glue and filler comes to hand. We're still in the process of doing that, and have a lot of work yet to do. Seeing the beginnings of the course we continue to follow in Lawrence's work is valuable and interesting.

I've also been slumming--reading The Wicked Widow by Amanda Quick. This kind of book (a New York Times best-seller, no less) provides a valuable contrast object to the kind of fiction I usually read. Point-like characters sliding down the plot like beads on a wire, nudged along by prose that makes Lawrence's scintilate in comparison.

A more rewarding bit of light reading is Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson, an almost plotless comic novel about a college student at the University of Dundee in 1972, interwoven with snippets of her family history as told by her mother who is not her mother. The book is a series of strange vignettes of the narrators life, her weird professors and weirder fellow students, interspersed with fragments of various creative writing projects.

By far the most interesting thing I've read recently, though, is Samual R. Delany's Dhalgren, of which more later.

Writing
respond
responses Hypothesis

There are only three basic types of story:

Sex
Violence
Quest

Discussion

It's easy to categorize genre literature this way: romance, erotica and pornography are primarily sex stories, perhaps tinged with violence on the kinkier side and quest on the more psychological end of the spectrum. Mysteries are quest stories, as is a lot of science fiction. War stories, spy stories, thrillers are all stories about violence.

Non-genre fiction is more difficult to categorize...

I think I'll just let that statement stand on its own. At least I've said one true thing here today.

As mentioned in Reading, good fiction is not primarily plot-driven but detail-driven and so this kind of broad categorization of plot is less useful. But it is still possible to do it. A story like Lady Chatterly's Lover is a story about sex, as is any other story where sexual relations are the primary driving force, from Pride and Prejudice to Debby Does Dubai--these are all stories (assuming the latter deserves the name of "story", which is pretty questionable) that wouldn't exist if human beings didn't have sex. Beowulf and The Illiad are about violence, as is Catch-22, Le Mort D'Arthur, and so on. Older literature tends to be about violence, although in the oldest literature, Gilgamesh, all three areas are well-represented.

Quest stories may be an unsatisfactory catch-all for everything that isn't obviously about sex or violence. Headlong, which I talk about under Reading, is a quest story--the narrator is looking for truth (and money) in an old painting.

Thinking about this more deeply (the thought that all stories are about sex, violence or exploration came to me while reading Dhalgren, which is the sort of the book that can inspire weird thoughts) the taxonomy of stories ought to follow the taxonomy of human motivations. This is depressing because while sex and exploration are motivations I feel, the urge toward violence is one that I put behind me a long, long time ago. But if literature follows human motivations, then violence is something that lots of people like, at least vicariously.

Objectivism
respond
responses Pick up a copy of The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism or For the New Intellectual, open it at random and start reading at a random spot on the page. Stop reading when you reach a point where Rand's primary purpose had become attack, where she's no longer expounding her own ideas but attacking other people's ideas (or rather, her paranoid presumptions about other people's ideas.) By "attack" I don't mean "critique".

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Thermodynamics respond responses	The 2nd Law of Thermodyanmics prevents the construction of what's known as a "perpetual motion machine of the 2nd kind (a PPM2)." The 1st Law of Thermodynamics prevents the construction of what's known as a "perpetual motion machine of the 1st kind (a PPM1)." The two laws are quite different in form, however. The first law is a restatement of the law of conservation of energy with respect to thermal energy. It says, in effect, "Thermal energy is energy, and all energy is conserved, so thermal energy is conserved." A PPM1 violates the conservation of energy, so it's forbidden for excellent reasons--energy is conserved because the equations of motion are invariant with translations in time, and this is the case because the laws of physics are invariant with translations in time. The constants of nature are (more or less) constant, as are the laws of nature. The 2nd law, however, says, "You can't build a PPM2." That's the law--no general principle, no conserved quantity, no corresponding symmetry in the equations of motion. It's true there are information-theoretic versions of the law that appear more substantial, but I'm not satisfied with the supposed isomorphism between the information-theoretic and thermodynamic approaches to these systems. If you include the correlation terms you do get a conserved information, but this is still something that looks more like an epistemological quality than a physical quality, at least to me. And while there are more abstract-sounding statements of the 2nd law, they don't amount to much more than the concrete claim above. Saying, for instance, "In the absense of external forces, the entropy of a closed system always increases" is one very small step away from saying, "you can't build a PPM2". When you've said that, you've said, apparently, it all. And I'm quite sure that that isn't all there is to say.
Reading respond responses	There are a whole bunch of books I've read recently that I've not had time to comment on. Micheal Frayn's Headlong was entertaining and well-written, although on a larger scale predictable. Like much good modern fiction a lot of the enjoyment is in the details, the finely crafted moments and the voyeuristic examination of stranger's lives, not the plot as such. It has a plot, thankfully, but only because telling a story without one would be silly--it's far easier to show us these people if they are actually engaged in doing something, some project or problem. The most interesting aspect of the book is its lengthy, example-driven discussion of artistic interpretation, its asking what it is we do when we analyze a work of art and construct a story about the work itself, about the artist's intentions and about the meaning (to us or to the artist or to others) of the work. Art speaks, but who does it speak for? And how? Interpreting and criticising art (I say with dawning horror--am I becoming a critic?! Help!) is as much an act of creation, of story-telling, as creating the work itself is. But (I say with a sigh of relief) it can only be done properly by people who are themselves creators of art--only one who has done the job can possibly understand what an artist might be doing (and even then is likely to get it wrong most of the time.) I don't know what to say about Lady Chatterly's Lover except that it is undoubtedly one of the greatest works of English literature from the century just past, literally decades ahead of its time, anticipating all sorts of questions about the nature of femininity and masculinity that are still current today. I hate the way Lawerence writes--I find his prose style flat and awkward, and the narrative portions of the book plod forward with almost Victorian stodgieness, as if Lawrence was trying to make up for the progressiveness of his story with the conservativism of its telling. But the scenes between Connie and her lover are brilliant, almost painful in their intimacy, and the sympathy they evoke is the true measure of Lawrence's art. While the questions it raises are still current, Lawrence's treatment of them is substantially a reflection of his time and place, and the social and economic structures of England between the wars is every evident in the work. This isn't a criticism, but it does limit the book in important ways. Lawrence was writing not about men and women, but about men and women of his time--his depictions are considerably less archetypal than those of Shakespeare, say. This isn't surprising, as Lawrence was living in and to an extent anticipating, a time when the old archetypes of men and women would fall to pieces and we'd need to build up new ones from the shattered fragments of the old, held together with whatever glue and filler comes to hand. We're still in the process of doing that, and have a lot of work yet to do. Seeing the beginnings of the course we continue to follow in Lawrence's work is valuable and interesting. I've also been slumming--reading The Wicked Widow by Amanda Quick. This kind of book (a New York Times best-seller, no less) provides a valuable contrast object to the kind of fiction I usually read. Point-like characters sliding down the plot like beads on a wire, nudged along by prose that makes Lawrence's scintilate in comparison. A more rewarding bit of light reading is Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson, an almost plotless comic novel about a college student at the University of Dundee in 1972, interwoven with snippets of her family history as told by her mother who is not her mother. The book is a series of strange vignettes of the narrators life, her weird professors and weirder fellow students, interspersed with fragments of various creative writing projects. By far the most interesting thing I've read recently, though, is Samual R. Delany's Dhalgren, of which more later.
Writing respond responses	Hypothesis There are only three basic types of story: Sex Violence Quest Discussion It's easy to categorize genre literature this way: romance, erotica and pornography are primarily sex stories, perhaps tinged with violence on the kinkier side and quest on the more psychological end of the spectrum. Mysteries are quest stories, as is a lot of science fiction. War stories, spy stories, thrillers are all stories about violence. Non-genre fiction is more difficult to categorize... I think I'll just let that statement stand on its own. At least I've said one true thing here today. As mentioned in Reading, good fiction is not primarily plot-driven but detail-driven and so this kind of broad categorization of plot is less useful. But it is still possible to do it. A story like Lady Chatterly's Lover is a story about sex, as is any other story where sexual relations are the primary driving force, from Pride and Prejudice to Debby Does Dubai--these are all stories (assuming the latter deserves the name of "story", which is pretty questionable) that wouldn't exist if human beings didn't have sex. Beowulf and The Illiad are about violence, as is Catch-22, Le Mort D'Arthur, and so on. Older literature tends to be about violence, although in the oldest literature, Gilgamesh, all three areas are well-represented. Quest stories may be an unsatisfactory catch-all for everything that isn't obviously about sex or violence. Headlong, which I talk about under Reading, is a quest story--the narrator is looking for truth (and money) in an old painting. Thinking about this more deeply (the thought that all stories are about sex, violence or exploration came to me while reading Dhalgren, which is the sort of the book that can inspire weird thoughts) the taxonomy of stories ought to follow the taxonomy of human motivations. This is depressing because while sex and exploration are motivations I feel, the urge toward violence is one that I put behind me a long, long time ago. But if literature follows human motivations, then violence is something that lots of people like, at least vicariously.
Objectivism respond responses	Pick up a copy of The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism or For the New Intellectual, open it at random and start reading at a random spot on the page. Stop reading when you reach a point where Rand's primary purpose had become attack, where she's no longer expounding her own ideas but attacking other people's ideas (or rather, her paranoid presumptions about other people's ideas.) By "attack" I don't mean "critique".