by Helen Dewitt
He said if he gave her a cup she could spit into it.
He said maybe she could get really drunk so they could get the vomit.
If you have never been there you think it is easy to walk away.
She went to New York for the show. She flew first class. They put her up at this posh hotel called Morgan’s.
When she saw the show it was not as bad as she thought. On one side of the room, on one long wall, were the suits. On the facing wall there were these tiny shelves, maybe 4 cm by 4 cm, in aluminium, and on each shelf was a glass container with thick sides flush with the edges of the shelf, and in this container would be the piss or the sweat or the blood, so it did have its beauty. It was good that there was this vast space between the work of art and the frame, you know when something is curated there is this mania for attaching things to it, words, facts, there will be a little card on the wall and people will go anxiously to the card to avail themselves of its wisdom and return to the work of art with the little trophy, these words that were on the card, and sometimes you will see people hunting manically for the card —
So there was a boldness about this space that was good, and it was good having the works of art on one wall somehow, and the numbers were by the glass jars on the opposite wall and there was nothing on the wall with the works of art at all. So that was quite clever and mischievous.
Maybe if you are making art that is a thing, maybe if that thinginess is what you immerse yourself in, if you spend all that time away from about, if you are never attaching, maybe you are lost to words after a while, then someone comes along who is really good at manipulating and you can’t make words push for you.
But maybe it is just that Italians are slippery. In the War the Nazis would send directives to the Italians about extraditing Jews and they could not get them to cooperate. The Italians could not get excited about it and if they are not excited about it they are not going to do it but if they are excited about it you can’t stop them.
The papers had said that Prada had bought out the show for $1 million. Maybe it wasn’t true. She would rehearse things to say to Adalberto but he was quite hard to pin down.
Then one day it was in the papers that an artist had had him declared bankrupt. If someone doesn’t pay you this is something you can do, have them declared bankrupt. This artist had been quite clever, she had a contract and that was what made it possible to recover the debt. But all the other artists he owed money did not have contracts. There was nothing on paper to give them a right. And anyway he was a limited company.
So the £45,000 was all that was left from the 20 suits, and some of it had to go to the Inland Revenue. So the only thing was to do a show while that excitement was still in the air.
This was really tricky because Serge did not want to be abandoned but he felt somehow he had been left with the less interesting work, it poisoned his interest in the painting. Serge wanted her to make some more suits for the London gallery. He was desperate to be cutting edge. If he would show suits all the bigwigs in London would come because they did not see them in Milan and New York. But it had been happening for so long that a lot of the paintings were really really dry. So she said he could show one suit if he would do a show for the paintings, but it would not be for sale.
So Serge had this show. And naturally now he nominated her for the Turner. Anybody can make a nomination but because of Adalberto she made the shortlist. They invited her to submit a piece, and sometimes you get disgusted. You keep thinking the tide will turn and painting will stop being unfashionable and then it would be exciting to be shortlisted for the Turner. But the Turner selects these things that are exciting for people who don’t know anything about art. In art school there is someone in every year doing minimalism, or conceptualism, and then the Turner will pick somebody who is doing what people do in their first year of art school, so it is kind of disgusting to get selected. So then Serge was saying I’m not saying another word. My lips are sealed. You know what I think, but I’m not putting any pressure on you, because it’s absolutely your decision.
And maybe you would think that this would be the big chance to show what interests you. But the thing about being an artist is that from the minute you go to art school you realise there is this need to be canny. There is this need to make a name for yourself. There is this need to deal with the people who have the power. And Turner, Turner did it as much as anybody, he was a genius but he did what he had to do to get into the Royal Academy. So when she applied for UK citizenship it was not just a rejection of Germany. Why would she do it if not to be eligible for the Turner if the chance would come? So if you have set it up to give yourself that chance, there is this obvious next step to do, give them what you think they will want to win. And she was really tired and anxious because of Adalberto going bankrupt, and the cut-off age was 50 so this was this last year she would be eligible, and sometimes a story has a momentum of its own, and it was as if they had nominated a puppet. So she submitted her Gesellenstück, and the way she installed it was she hung it on one wall under a white light, and on the opposite wall, down the long end of the room, she put a glass jar of spermicidal jelly.
My Heart Belongs to Bertie1
Let’s take 2 people, A and B. A is a heroin addict. B’s idea of a narcotic is Earl Grey tea.
We take a randomly selected infant, toss a coin, and allocate it according to the result of the coin toss: Heads A, Tails B.
We repeat the procedure.
In 10 trials, the likeliest number of Heads is 5. If we run sequences of 10 trials, though, we shall sometimes have fewer than 5, sometimes more, and the distribution of Heads will follow the familiar Gaussian curve:
In 20 trials, the likeliest number of “successes” is 10 — that is, the Gaussian curve shifts to the right:
The two PDFs lodged awkwardly upside down at Peter’s edge of the table, jamming up against napkin dispenser, sugar pourer, salt & pepper shakers, red plastic bottle of ketchup, yellow plastic bottle of mustard.
When one gives a lecture or seminar, one does not have to do battle with condiments. He had not prepared for the contingency.
If we repeat the procedure on a daily basis, said Peter, ineffectually shifting the PDFs to give Jim a better view, the infant’s exposure to misallocation will tend to be rectified with relative frequency — though, on the other hand, the infant will never be guaranteed enjoyment of a good draw for very long. If the procedure is conducted weekly, more hangs on the result; if monthly, quarterly, yearly, more still.
He pressed the palms of his hands to his eyes.
Peter had written a book of robot tales with a happy beginning which had made, as it turned out, what seemed a lot of money, and yet not enough money to mitigate contractual relations with persons who had professed to love it yet sought to remove references to eiπ. He had explained that discovering eiπ at the age of 9 was the only thing that had kept him from suicide and been brushed indulgently aside.
The money had appeared to make it worth the while of Jim (said to be a “hot shot literary agent”) to represent Peter’s interests on a second book of robot tales. It had proved more complicated than had first appeared.
Jim did not know the secret of a happy beginning: My parents died when I was born.
Peter had made a special trip to New York to explain the binomial distribution in person to Jim. He wanted to reduce the likelihood of contractual obligation to persons like the persons he knew too well.
Now they sat in a booth in a diner.
Peter had suggested meeting in Jim’s flat, on the assumption that this would minimise the number of people in the vicinity mistakable for Jim.
Jim had held out for the diner.
Peter had suggested that Jim wear a yellow sweater for ease of identification.
Jim had not taken up the suggestion.
Jim was wearing a brown pullover and brown trousers. His
hair and eyes were brown. For the whole of the walk from office to diner Peter had been terrified of losing sight of Jim in the crowd and then failing to recognise him again. The worry now was that if, for instance, Jim went to the men’s room and someone else came and sat down, Peter might fail to notice the difference. That was one worry, and another worry was that the name “Jim” might slip his mind, as names generally did.
The surface of the table was taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination. Peter had done what he could to maximise the surface area available for display of illustrative materials; he had waived the offer of lunch. Jim had ordered something or other. He had exchanged badinage with the waitress.
We posit daily reassignment, Peter went doggedly on. As our number of trials approaches 100, the number of days of infant allocation to A comes to cluster, of course, around 50:
He had been up all night running variations in R on
par(mfrow=c(3,1))
barplot(dbinom(0:100,10,.5))
barplot(dbinom(0:100,20,.5))
barplot(dbinom(0:100,30,.5))
—all this before catching the 5 am AirBus to Gatwick from Gloucester Green, Oxford’s answer to Port Authority. In his haste he had, he realised, forgotten to label the x axis.
He would have liked, at this point, to throw in the towel, or rather retreat to his hotel and address the issue of the unlabelled x axis. But they were here. One must make the most of it.
Jim squirted ketchup placidly on crinkled fries. It seemed unlikely that a properly labelled x axis would have made the thing usefully clearer.
Perhaps Jim was one of the lucky ones. If he was an orphan he probably had all kinds of rosy notions.
But in fact, of course, persevered Peter — he had really been talking, understand, for only a minute or so, in a lecture he could have talked uninterrupted for an hour, with hand-outs, a blackboard — 50% of adults are not heroin addicts, so a model with a 50:50 chance of drawing one isn’t a very good fit. Suppose we try to get a feel for uneven odds.
You see, I suppose, that we can imagine a pool of 10 parents with 1 heroin addict and 9 tea-drinkers, or a pool with 9 heroin addicts and 1 tea-drinker. Instead of tossing a coin we draw, perhaps, a ball from an urn (containing, as it might be, 1 black ball 9 white or 9 black balls 1 white) and replace it before the next draw. In the first instance, over one hundred trials, the number of As — that is, draws of a heroin addict — would cluster around 10,
whereas in the second instance it would cluster around 90.
So the point is, on our model of daily draws, the likelihood of drawing a heroin addict 90 days out of 100 arises only with a pool of 9 heroin addicts and 1 tea-drinker: it does not arise when only 1 in 10 possible parents is a heroin addict, and by extension would be even less likely in a population where only 1 in 100,000 was an addict. (According to Heyman, in a recent national, that is to say American, survey, there were in fact about 3.4 opiate addicts per thousand persons and about 10.8 nonaddicted heavy users.) Whereas, under the current system, even if only 1 in 100,000 is an addict, the fact that all depends on a single draw, the accident of birth, means that a child born to such a person is assigned 365 days out of 365 until the age of majority.
The point is simply, said Peter, that the family is a barbarous institution. One is, for the most part, stuck with the luck of a single draw.
Oh, families, said Jim. I know, I know, I know.
He took a healthy swallow from his glass of Diet Coke and set it down.
Look, said Jim. This is fascinating, but it’s way over my head. I don’t really get it all, but I don’t need to get it.
Jim put his plate unhurriedly to one side, rested his forearms on the table and laced his fingers together, with a quiet mastery of the space that — that is, if Jim had been the one who had wanted to present PDFs displaying the binomial distribution, an army of ketchup bottles would not have stood in his way.
You’re a very brilliant guy, said Jim. You’re the genius. You found a way to capture the imagination of a lot of kids who would not normally go for this stuff. You captured the imagination of a lot of adults who wouldn’t normally read books for kids. So if you want to talk about the odds, maybe I’m in a better position to know the kinds of odds you were beating. I’m in a better position to know why this is very exciting to a lot of other people who understand the kind of odds you were beating. What I can say is that a lot of people are very excited by your work; I know a lot of editors who would love to see a new book. So this would be a very good time to send something out, have an auction. Bottom line, if we don’t get a significant six-figure deal it’s time for me to take up knitting, and if we play our cards right we could be talking low seven.
Jim had already explained, by e-mail, that the option on Peter’s second book, held by the lucky publisher of Peter’s first book (advance: £5,000; sales: 500,000), was not an obstacle. The book must be submitted first to the lucky publisher, but if their offer was unsatisfactory Peter (or, rather, Peter’s agent on his behalf) was entitled to submit the book elsewhere.
This was, obviously, an improvement on our barbarous domestic arrangements: a parent does not have an option on a child, and the terms of the relationship do not come up for renegotiation. Peter’s position — and the reason for this ill-starred trip to New York — was that the objection to the lucky publisher was not financial. The objection was that it had done its best to dilute elements of the book likely to appeal to the underserved numerate, and to put off the innumerate who were already, one might have thought, amply provided for, an example being the hideous war of attrition it had waged over inclusion of eiπ.
The fact that Jim could unashamedly admit to finding a perfectly simple explanation of the binomial distribution over his head, that he could unblushingly dismiss it as the province of genius, only went to show how deep-seated innumeracy actually is in our benighted culture. (If an agent, a ‘hot shot’, who notionally represents a client’s financial interests, can be functionally innumerate — !!!) But how could he possibly do battle with ignorance if he himself —
By the time a boy is 10 he has spent 3,652 days under governance of the allocation of a single draw. There’s nothing to be done about it. All the more reason not to enter into contractual relations lightly.
It’s unreasonable, perhaps, to expect someone like Jim to understand the full horror.
Exactly, said Peter. (Meet the man on his own ground.) Exactly. This is the whole beauty of business relations: we leave barbarity behind. Let us suppose I know about Merovingian kings; I wish either to work with someone with comparable knowledge of the Merovingians or, perhaps, to work with someone whose knowledge of the Carolingians supplements my relative ignorance of the period. We see at once that I should be highly unlikely to find a match leaving the matter to chance, but the invisible hand is my friend: I can pay for the information or, aliter visum, the value of the match enables all concerned to maximise profits regardless of whether money changes hands. Let us say no one with relevant knowledge can be found. Perhaps someone happens to know about the Dutch Tulip Bubble, and I discover in myself a hitherto unguessed-at interest in the Dutch Tulip Bubble. I can order my preferences, you know, in a way which is wholly out of the question in a family setting. As it happens, I have written a second book on robots and would like an editor with relevant expertise; if none can be found with expertise relevant to the book in hand, I would happily write a book relevant to such expertise as can be had. I rely on you to brief me so that I can make a rational decision.
Jim said he didn’t work that way. Look, he said, we could waste a lot of time talking about editors. We’re only interested in the ones who are willing to buy the book we have to sell. Once we have a list of serious contenders we can definitely talk about who would be best for the book.
As a child Peter had not been unduly, he wouldn’t
have said, troubled by the shortcomings of his parents per se. The thing that had bothered him was the fact that all other adults colluded in placing him in the largely unchecked power of these individuals. All adults, even the apparently decent ones, were in collusion with evil.
He had worked it out when he was, perhaps, 7 and never forgotten. That was why he was able to write for children. He was 35, a bad age.
Peter said, Please.
He tried to think of the sort of thing Americans say.
He said, It would mean a lot to me to work with someone who admired Bertrand Russell.
He said, It would really mean a lot to me.
The statement seemed, if not meaningless, then uselessly imprecise.
(The first book had made all this money. Why could he not use the money to buy what he wanted? Was that not the general point of having money in the first place?)
He said, I’d be happy to switch the percentages round if that would help. You’d be very welcome to take an 85% commission.
This was undoubtedly precise but was perhaps not the sort of thing Americans say. Jim said he was happy with the normal 15% commission.
Peter pressed the palms of his hands to his eyes.
Russell, he said presently.
Russell was born in 1872. His father, Viscount Amberley, was an atheist and Utilitarian; he asked John Stuart Mill to be godfather to the child. Russell’s mother died when he was 2, his father when he was 4. His father’s will appointed two atheists to be guardians to Russell and his brother, and stipulated that the children be raised as agnostics. Russell’s grandmother, the Countess Russell, overturned the will and won guardianship of the children. She raised Russell on strictly religious principles. At the age of 11 he was introduced to geometry by his brother Frank; he said he had not imagined there was anything so beautiful in the world. He said later that only the desire to know more about mathematics restrained him from suicide.