Two Sherlocks Walk Into a Bar

A while back I advised the writer to never put two Sherlocks in the same scene. Or if they do, they must never talk shop. What I said then I stand by, provided you understand why I said it. Understanding why will guide you should you wish to put ignore my earlier advise.

You should remember that whenever you hear a "rule" it is subject to being overcome by another "rule" just as a magnet's field overcomes Earth's gravity field when iron filings lying on a table fly upward to the magnet when it gets sufficiently close.

When you are writing there are multiple forces in play and those forces may occasionally balance or overcome one another.

The delightful Selena McDevitt last night reminded me of this when she tweeted, "Two experts "talking shop" should be explosive and near violent! They should be like two peacocks fighting."

Consider the psychology of two experts in a room talking shop. If they are male, female spectators may later speak of testosterone poisoning. Experts are justifiably proud of their expertise and will want to demonstrate this. Put two together and each should try to demonstrate his superiority over the other. (Unless one is clearly superior and self-confident whereupon he'll kick back and let the other hang himself.) When rivals vie for supremacy that is conflict and conflict is interesting.

So, in this we have an example of two "rules" that are pulling in opposite directions. The "No Two Sherlocks" rule says keep them apart. The "Conflict is Interesting" rule says, push them together.

This is not necessarily a trade-off or gambit situation, because the way you depict the conflict might not offend (or anesthetize) the reader.

Consider the "why" of the "No Two Sherlocks" rule. You don't want to have Expert A say something about something the reader doesn't understand, whereupon Expert B will reply with something else the reader doesn't understand. The reader doesn't want to feel dumb and the smart writer doesn't want to make the reader feel dumb.

Georg Cantor and Leopold Kronecker were rival German mathematicians of the 19th Century and they had different ideas about infinity. They clashed with great heat and passion. The content of that conflict might find its way into a Neal Stephenson novel (because he tends to include math proofs in his novels), but nowhere else. But one description of their many arguments has stuck with me for decades.

When they fought, the large Cantor would be picked on by the much smaller Kronecker. Spectators at the time characterized their conflict as Cantor trying to get walk away from Kronecker who would chase him around like an angry dog yapping at his heels. This image has stayed with me for decades.

That's why you need a Watson in the room. S/he must serve as the eyes and ears of the reader to interpret the experts' conflict and depict their conflict in terms and images that the reader will understand.

If you are going to put two Sherlocks in the same room and if they are bound and determined to talk shop, then by all means stress the angry dog or the fighting peacocks imagery while soft-pedaling the transfinite number theory content.

Camille Paglia Needs To Get Out More

When you live on an island, it is easy to think that the world ends at the shoreline--particularly when that island is named Manhattan.

A week and a half ago, Camille Paglia wrote an opinion piece in one of that island's local newspapers.

With a title like "How Capitalism Can Save Art" Ms. Paglia piques the interest

Ms. Paglia cites a decline in the visual arts, particularly painting since the 1970s. She goes on to state that the avant-garde is dead while citing execrable installations masquerading as art. If that is what art is, then art is dead. She further laments the fact that in recent years young people have become disconnected from the manual trades, and thus lack the technique to pull off artistic expressions.

This is contradicted by the "Maker Movement" something you can see on display if you pick up an issue of Make magazine or haunt any of the "hacker spaces" popping up across the country. I think her observation is correct--as far as it goes.

True, today's kids are not going to get summer jobs in shoe factories or learn about steel making from besooted parents--unless those parents are artisans making hand-made shoes or smelting metal in backyard forges.

As technology creates new forms of expression old forms don't necessarily die so much as become art forms--like the blacksmith I watched on Nova last night forging a Viking sword in his shop in Door county Wisconsin.

Blacksmithing is art? It's more art than taking snaps of a crucifix in a jar of urine.

There is a limited amount of creativity in the world and there are many more modes of creative expression than smearing paint (or feces) on canvas. Perhaps this generation's Pollock or Mondrian are happily building fire-breathing dragons to drive around Burning Man.

I've said elsewhere that rich people can be stupid, filling museums with overrated junk and in so doing they are disclosing a naked-emperor groupthink unmatched by anything except perhaps the Obama presidency.

I don't think my hometown's billionaire is stupid, because he started ArtPrize a few years ago. Art experts squealed like pigs that the prize would be awarded on the basis of popular vote instead of expert judgement. Indeed. By crowd-sourcing art evaluation as was done with ArtPrize entries, art experts can be disintermediated.

Dangling a quarter-million dollar prize in front of the public caused a lot of talented people to think about what sort of art they could produce. And--for better or worse--they manifested a diverse spectrum of creativity as I've describe elsewhere. But don't take my word for any of this, look at this year's winners for yourself. The 2nd and 3rd prize winners are illustrative of this diversity of creativity: in the former case, hundreds of little robotic birds danced and flew about the room in a dazzling show of technology, while in the latter case, the artist put paint on canvas in a way that would please the Dutch masters of old.

The two trends both falsify and confirm Ms. Paglia's thesis.

First, the maker movement gets creative people back in touch with the hands-on matter of making thing. And they're spreading their creativity across a broad spectrum of artistic expression as they design circuits and software to create new forms of beauty while mastering techniques unimaginable a generation ago. I believe Ms. Paglia is no farther than a subway ride from some of the preeminent hacker spaces in the country. Are these folks capitalists? Maybe in an Etsy.com sort of way.

Second, by bringing hundreds of visitors to the Grand Rapids downtown area, the ArtPrize organizers have brought a lot of business to restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. ArtPrize is capitalist. It is as capitalistic a happening as an Amway presentation. Art may be dead in Manhattan, but it's alive each autumn in Grand Rapids, MI.

So, Ms. Paglia, if you want to see art that is not dead, look in Brooklyn for a hacker space. And if that doesn't satisfy, drop by Grand Rapids next fall.