by Helen Dewitt
Loops was 26 years old and had nothing to show for it. She was throwing her life away to keep a roof over her shoe collection. This was the gist.
“Look,” said Loopy, and she took a print-out from her Marc Jacobs bag. “I can get a 1,000-square-foot apartment with 13-foot ceilings and crown molding for $800 a month including bills. What have I been thinking?”
If Loopy had explained that she had just tried cannibalism, and that human flesh actually tasted better than pork, this he could have coped with, because cannibalism, this is something that you can imagine a New Yorker, not any New Yorker but some kind of New Yorker, doing. Or if she had confessed to a string of serial killings. But moving to Berlin? And the whole shoe stockpiling thing, the point is, this is a very New York thing to do. The idea that you would rather have a month’s rent in Berlin than a pair of Manolo Blahniks, well, huh.
Loops was saying she had sacrificed her goals, her dreams, everything she ever wanted to achieve, just to live in the City.
This sounded totally reasonable to Gil, who did not really care whether he ended up being a bartender, waiter, short-order cook, or homeless dude living out of a shopping cart as long as he could stay in New York,12 but Loops made it sound like some kind of indictment.
Gil went back to the loft in Dumbo. Brooklyn was already starting to feel like exile. At some point he was going to have to break the bad news to Benny, namely that another dude must be found who had not read the Automatika series as a kid.
When he got in there was no sign of Benny. Instead there was a man who had the tormented, windswept look of Andrew Jackson as seen on a $20 bill.
“You must be Gil,” said the dude. “I’m Benny’s father. I had to come into town on business.”
Gil had heard so much about Mr. Bergsma (one night had not been nearly enough to exhaust Benny’s fund of aggrieved reminiscence) that he was surprised by how reasonable the dude sounded. Not a flamethrower in sight.
Gil said something polite. He wanted to try something new for his PowerPoint presentation. What if he used Hadley Wickham’s ggplot2 package? He took out the Sony Vaio and was soon deep in thought.
Mr. Bergsma came up behind him.
“What’s that?”
Gil explained the MicroCharts backstory, he explained about R and Bill Cleveland and Deepayan Sarkar and Hadley Wickham, and as he explained he did, in fact, generate a plot in Inference for R using ggplot2.
“When I was a kid my parents wouldn’t even let me touch their Smith Corona,” said Mr. Bergsma.
Gil remembered his chagrin at the belated release of Inference for R with PowerPoint interface. He could totally empathize.
“But yes, yes, yes, there is definitely a certain appeal. If they ever make the movie this kind of thing would be perfect for the Automatika machine.”
“Is there going to be a movie?” asked Gil.
“All I want is a crap-free deal,” said Mr. Bergsma. “It doesn’t seem much to ask. What is there about the concept that is hard to grasp? I’ve been sent a contract which includes clauses about the ice show and theme restaurant rights. They want me to get it notarized. I can’t just snap my fingers and conjure a notary public out of thin air.”
He extended a longfingered, largeknuckled hand and gently stroked the glossy metal. “Sparklines, though. Multivariate plots. I was trying to think of something fun for the new Automatika book. This looks like something kids would get a kick out of. I’ll just download this now, if you don’t mind. Maybe I can do some actual work for a change.” He sighed again. “Is it just me, or is there something sinister about Vista? Have you ever wondered whether the Church of Scientology might be behind it? It would explain so much.”
Gil went back to tinkering with ggplot2.
When he looked up five hours later Mr. Bergsma was at the far end of the loft, typing morosely into an antiquated IBM ThinkPad.
Gil went out to the kitchen for a cold Sam Adams. The contract was in the trash. He took it out.
He started looking through the clauses, and for sure the contract went on a long time.
On Day 8 Gil went back to the Margaux’ to finalize work on the sound system.13 This time he met Mrs. Margaux, who turned out to be the woman with electrocution issues. Which he was naturally also only too happy to resolve.
“Uh huh, uh huh,” said Gil, inspecting the rogue appliance, while Mrs. Margaux deplored Loopy’s new plan.
“What if she comes back with a German boy?” said Mrs. Margaux. “I don’t want to think of Hitler every time I sit down to dinner.”
“Eeeeeezy does it,” said Gil, edging the fridge gently forward.
“As if I don’t have enough on my mind. Kooky Fairweather has maneuvered me into resigning from the Board of the Met. Lottie Rosenthal has just asked Dodie Pierpont onto the Board of the Balanchine. I can’t take much more of this.”
“Uh huh, uh huh,” said Gil. “Yep, I think I see what the problem is.” Three tiny mice slept unsuspectingly in a small nest of shredded paper towel.
Mrs. Margaux explained that meanwhile, in just the last month, eight of her closest personal friends had been coopted onto the boards of eight grant-making foundations for the arts, and she had not even been asked.
“Mmmm,” said Gil. He dropped a chamois on top of the nest and swept it nonchalantly up and into his tool kit. Though extermination, probably, awaited the rest of the family. “Well, what you could do . . .”
“Yes?” said Mrs. Margaux. (What could a mere Iowan know of the cutthroat world of New York philanthropy?)
“. . . is outflank. I don’t know if you know this, but J. P. Bergsma has this thing about wanting a fixer-upper in Pittsburgh.”
“Pittsburgh?” said Mrs. Margaux.
“I know,” said Gil. “I know. But see.”
He was about to make a simple, crap-free suggestion, to the effect that Mrs. M could end the 13-year dry spell of this much-loved author and be instrumental in facilitating a much-longed-for film, simply by organizing the unpopular Pittsburgh fixer-upper element which had been a stumbling block so many times in the past. One of his 200 newfound friends was a dude whose brother was a subcontractor in Pittsburgh, a dude facing problems because the developer he was working for had suddenly filed for bankruptcy. How hard could it be?
Fixing things on a case-by-case basis, though, is such an inelegant solution. It lacks scalability. It lacks grandeur. And it doesn’t give you data, that you can analyze. Whereas.
He said, “See, for ten, fifteen, twenty-thousand dollars you can get a house. A residency is normally for a maximum of 8 weeks. A typical grant is for $45,000, $50,000 for a year. So, say you go to these 8 entities, you offer the grant of a fixer-upper, for the people on the shortlist who didn’t make the grade. Among whom Mr. Bergsma is merely one. In return for a percentage of whatever artistic earnings they achieve over, say, 10 years. With some kind of cap? Making it, potentially, self-sustainable? Do a different city every year? Allow swaps? You then compare the achievements of your also-rans with those who got the actual award. And see, you could have a web presence, you could have something like minglebee’s MotoGP dataviz, that lets you drill down to look at individual performance? And Mr. Margaux could potentially even devise an investment vehicle?”
The refrigerator was purring softly. Mrs. Margaux was initially skeptical, but when Gil called up www.minglebee.com, and she was able to see for herself the fun that could be had drilling down, well. Adam got so cross when people kept asking him for checks, but my goodness, this would actually be fun. Gil left her clicking on drivers in the Malaysian Motorcycle Grand Prix, 10/19/2008.
This elegant solution had the drawback of deferring, probably indefinitely, the resolution of Mr. Bergsma’s specific problem. Mr. Bergsma was saved, in this instance, by circumstances beyond his control.
The dudes who had won at Sundance, who thought funding was solid for their fi
rst feature, had suddenly found that the money had dried up because the producers wanted something guaranteed bankable and commercial. But the dudes had a soft spot for Automatika, the one commercial project they could even contemplate, unsurprisingly, really, because the kind of dude you would meet in B&H is the kind of dude who would have been that kind of kid as a kid. And, another of Gil’s 200 newfound friends was an entertainment lawyer with extermination issues. So, though it was not really in the spirit of rigorous experiment design, Gil pushed ahead.
Within a day it was the donest of deals. The lawyer’s extermination issues had been resolved; a crap-free two-pager, with an unconventional real estate clause, had been sent to Gil as a PDF attachment. The subcontractor had agreed to organize purchase and fixing-up of a fixer-upper in Pittsburgh, within walking distance of Carnegie Mellon, subject to bank appeasement. One of the NYU dudes had lowered himself to make contact with his contact at Fox. Fox wanted in. And Mr. Bergsma, presented with the deal, had assigned the rights, minus the costs of the Pittsburgh fixer-upper, to Benny.
Mrs. Margaux, meanwhile, brought pressure to bear on Mr. Margaux; within a week she was able to go to her “friends” with an offer they could not, in all decency, refuse, using the new vocabulary item “drilling down” to killing effect.
Time passes.
The Dumbo dudes achieve a successful flotation and do, in fact, do something so inconceivably brilliant that their investors are happier than they could reasonably have expected. Thanks to the Iowan Investor Interface the dudes are spared actual personal contact with said investors, so they too are happier than they could reasonably have expected.
Mr. Bergsma moves to Pittsburgh and immerses himself in his Automatika world. Fifty creative types move to Pittsburgh and comprehensively outperform the types who pipped them to the post in their initial grant applications. The subcontractor realigns his construction business. Automatika the movie succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of the NYU dudes, such that they can select their projects. Loopy Margaux packs the bare essentials (five suitcases of shoes) and goes to Berlin to pursue her dream. Mr. Margaux has fun. While the actual money involved is peanuts, his genius for applying financial acumen to support of the arts and urban renewal is noticed at the White House. Mrs. Margaux is the envy of her friends.
Benny gets $500,000.
Benny got what he always said he wanted, the freedom to do what he wanted. He’s not as happy as he might have expected.
Mr. Bergsma had been talking for years about the kind of deal he was looking for, and Benny, Lord knows, had the inside track. So what was to stop Benny from pulling a CFD out of a hat? What was to stop Benny from finagling the fixer-upper? What was to stop Benny from expanding the Pittsburgh idea, to the point where Mr. Bergsma looked like a visionary instead of a crank? Meanwhile some kid just walks in the door, a kid who has never even read the books, and hands him the CFD on a plate. The son he never had.
Benny hates talking to people about his father.
Gil, needless to say, moves into Manhattan, where he lives to this day.
* * *
1. Except, obviously, to avoid looking totally uneducated when you actually get to New York. Kafka, Borges, Proust — these you should read.
2. There was a second list of films which he had had to downgrade to “Okay to watch in Iowa,” because he did not want to come to New York and look completely uneducated, but he had never felt good about it. He had mental conversations with an interlocutor who said “Wild Strawberries? Are you telling me Wild Strawberries doesn’t deserve first-time-viewing-in-New-York? Are you serious?” to which Gil would mentally reply that it was not a question of the artistic merit of the film, on which, as someone who hadn’t even seen it, he was unable to comment, but a question of what felt right for the viewing experience. That was the mental reply, but he felt bad about relegating Bob le Flambeur, The Crow, La Ronde, Wings of Desire, La Strada, 8½, Solaris, plus much of Hitchcock, much of Mamet, all of Tarantino and others too numerous to mention to the Iowa League. He wished he had grown up in New York, so these invidious choices would not have been forced on him, but what was he to do?
The third list of films, obviously, was the list of films set in New York. But we digress.
3. If you have never thought of a treehouse as requiring plumbing and electricity, it’s probably because you have never seen treehouse-construction as a competitive sport. You don’t come from a family of boys, is the inference.
4. Dave and his partners had unhappily failed to read Frederick P. Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month. If this business plan sounds remotely plausible to you, you may want to read F. P. Brooks’ classic work before proceeding.
5. Dave was, obviously, not explaining the details of the actual project to Gil, because explaining the project to clueless morons who know nothing whatsoever about programming was what he did, these days, for a living. No way was he going to squander what few vestiges of patience remained on a mere randomly presented plumber. We’re talking nonrenewable resource here.
6. Gil was wearing a slate gray shirt and slatier gray jacket that he had bought on eBay as looking like an ensemble seen in an author photo of Bret Easton Ellis, when in New York dress like Bret Easton Ellis being the thought; he attributed his ease in blending in, among real New Yorkers, to the infallible dress sense of Mr. Ellis.
7. Dude C, Gary, was the dude who had wanted to go back to first principles and use Lisp.
8. MicroCharts is a plug-in for Excel which enables the user to replicate the sparklines of infoviz guru Edward Tufte, emeritus professor of graphic design, politics and economics at Yale. ET’s pioneering Visual Display of Quantitative Information and its successors have never been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times or the Economist; a sparkline, assuming you innocently placed your trust in the WSJ, FT or Economist to keep you au fait, is a small information-dense word-shaped graphic, enabling you to embed, as it might be, a time series or bar chart in text. MicroCharts, like its rival, SparkMaker from Bissantz, runs only in Windows; Gil was a total Machead at heart, so he totally resented having to buy a whole separate laptop on eBay with Windows XP, after spending hours trying, to no avail, to get the fucker to work in Parallels or CrossOver or Boot Camp.
9. The appeal of the University of Iowa to an Iowan father of five is pretty much self-explanatory.
10. While R could be run in a Mac environment, Inference worked only in Windows, meaning that Gil spent further countless hours trying to get the fucker to work in Parallels or CrossOver or Boot Camp, finally retreating, bloody but unbowed, to his trusty Sony Vaio.
11. Having read ET’s “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,” Gil knew that his god saw PowerPoint as the work of the devil, so he did not feel good about wanting to use it. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board had concluded: “As information gets passed up an organizational hierarchy, from people who do analysis to mid-level managers to high-level leadership, key explanations and supporting information are filtered out . . . it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation.” Hard to feel good about colluding. But if you are addressing the business community people expect a PowerPoint presentation. But, if you could do a PowerPoint presentation drawing on the Trellis plots of Bill Cleveland of Bell Labs (from which the Lattice package derives), the presentation would be data-rich and it would be totally okay.
12. Did Giuliani realize that being President would involve moving to Washington? For four years? was the question Gil had naturally asked himself when the nomination was up for grabs. Or, was it just part of a deep-laid plan to move the nation’s capital back to New York, where it belonged?
13. He was not able to go back on Day 7, which was Saturday, because B&H is closed on Shabbat.
Remember Me
Gerald was only a Canon in the Cathedral, not a very forceful one. He put it to the Bishop that it might be A Good Thing to invite a Jew to participate in the VE-Day service, and the Bishop waved a hand affably, as who should say, if a Jew can be found it might not be a bad thing at all. Gerald made noises to the local Rabbi, who could not personally undertake but put him on to a man who might do.
Gerald got on to the man. He had not had much to do with Jews, but the fellow seemed pleasant enough.
Gerald mooted. The fellow began to talk excitedly, throwing out all sorts of wild ideas which seemed to involve rather a lot of Hebrew. Gerald could not quite see where all this was to be slotted into the service, nor, come to that, what the Bishop would make of it all. He explained diffidently that he had really rather thought that perhaps the fellow might be willing to read the Old Testament reading for the day.
‘Oh, I see,’ said the fellow. ‘You’d like a Jew to read from the Old Testament.’
‘Er, yes,’ said Gerald.
‘I’m not interested, thanks,’ said the fellow. Hung up the phone.
The Bishop’s withers were thankfully unwrung.
K had seen too much of this sort of thing to be disenchanted.
He sang lustily:
Thus, on the fateful banks of Nile
Weeps the deceitful crrrrrrocodile!
Thus hypocrites that murder act
Make Heav’n and Gods the author of the fact!
— By all that’s good
— No more!
All that’s good you have foreswore
To your prrrrromised Empire fly
And let forsaken — Dido — die!
Ha ha!
(K had Purcell very much on his mind, though his thoughts had been running chiefly in the direction of The Fairy Queen; he was to be married in the fall. He had a pronounced aversion to the Wedding March from Lohengrin as nuptial accompaniment.)