The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

That’s the title of David Mitchell’s forthcoming novel. It’s been a few years since Black Swan Green, his last.  Here’s  the blurb on Amazon:

The author of Cloud Atlas’s most ambitious novel yet, for the readers of Ishiguro, Murakami, and, of course, David Mitchell.

The year is 1799, the place Dejima, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window to the world. It is also the farthest-flung outpost of the powerful Dutch East Indies Company. To this place of superstition and swamp fever, crocodiles and courtesans, earthquakes and typhoons, comes Jacob de Zoet. The young, devout and ambitious clerk must spend five years in the East to earn enough money to deserve the hand of his wealthy fiancée. But Jacob’s intentions are shifted, his character shaken and his soul stirred when he meets Orito Aibagawa, the beautiful and scarred daughter of a Samurai, midwife to the island’s powerful magistrate. In this world where East and West are linked by one bridge, Jacob sees the gaps shrink between pleasure and piety, propriety and profit. Magnificently written, a superb mix of historical research and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a big and unforgettable book that will be read for years to come.

Here’s a review from someone who got a pre-release copy.  It’ll be released June 29, 2010 and I’ve pre-ordered already. (If you are looking for something to read and haven’t read these already, I recommend Number9Dream and Cloud Atlas.)

Immortal but Illiterate Monkeys

Is it an infinite number of monkeys, or is it infinitely-lived monkeys?  If what you want is Shakespeare with probability 1 it matters.  Because Hamlet is a fixed finite string of characters.  That means the monkey has to stop typing when the string is complete.  If we model the monkey as a process which every second taps a random key from the keyboard according to a fixed probability distribution, then to produce the Dithering Dane he must eventually repeat the space bar (or equivalently no key at all) until his terminal date.

If that terminal date is infinity, i.e. the monkey is given infinite time, then this event has probability zero.  On the other hand, an infinite number of monkeys who each live long enough, but not infinitely long, will Exuent with probability 1 as desired.

(If your criterion is simply that the text of Hamlet appear somewhere in the output string, then a) you are sorely lacking in ambition and b) it no longer matters which version of infinity you have.)

Mortarboard Missive: Marginal Revolution.

Interview With Frank Portman

He is the singer and songwriter for The Mr. T Experience and he wrote King Dork.  His new book, Andromeda Klein is not as great but still good.  His next book is a King Dork sequel called King Dork, Approximately.  And a film adaptation of King Dork is in development with Will Ferrell producing.

Here is the inteview. And here is Frank Portman’s blog.

Why Are Co-authorships Rare in Fiction?

Compared to non-fiction.  Co-authorships leverage specialization.  Certainly there are heterogeneous strengths in fiction writing and this should create gains from collaboration.  But we don’t see it.  I can’t think of any great work of fiction that was co-authored.  There must be a good reason.

1. Writing style is crucial in fiction.  Multiple voices would make the work feel disjointed.  They could try to collaborate on the writing process and together create one voice but maybe this puts too much of a drag on the creative process.
2. Still, there are some who are good at imagining plots and characters and others who excel at the stage of actually writing once the idea has been conceived.  Why don’t we see this kind of partnership?
3. I bet there are great partnerships like this but we never know it because the partners agree to a single nom de plume.

My bottom line is that, ironically, the attraction of great fiction is a connection with the author.  When we read beautiful prose or get turned on by an ingenious plot twist, we think of the author and we enjoy being close to the mind that created it.  Multiple authors would confuse and dillute this feeling.

Economic Theorists’ Favourite Fiction Book

James Joyce’s Ulysses? The Great Gatsby?  Something challenging by Thomas Pynchon? Something whimsical by P.G. Wodehouse?

No, the smart vote  goes to Isaac Asimov’s Foundations Trilogy.

The latest fan to come out in public is Hal Varian.  In a Wired interview, he says:

“In Isaac Asimov’s first Foundation Trilogy, there was a character who basically constructed mathematical models of society, and I thought this was a really exciting idea. When I went to college, I looked around for that subject. It turned out to be economics.”

The first time I saw a reference to the books was in an interview with Roger Myerson in 2002.  And he repeated the fact that he was influenced by Foundation in an answer to a  question after he got the Nobel Prize in 2007.  And finally, Paul Krugman also credits the books with inspiring him to become an economist.   A distinguished trio of endorsements!

Asimov’s stories revolve around the plan of Hari Seldon a “psychohistorian” to influence the political and economic course of the universe.   Seldon uses mathematical methodology to predict the end of the current Empire.  He sets up two “Foundations” or colonies of knowledge to reduce the length of the dark age that will follow the end of empire.  The first Foundation is defeated by a weird mutant called the Mule.  But the Mule fails to locate and kill the Second Foundation. So, Seldon manages to preserve human knowledge and perhaps even predicted the Mule using psychohistory.  Seldon also has a keen sense of portfolio diversification – two Foundations rather than one – and also the law of large numbers – psychohistory is good at predicting events involving a large number of agents but not at forecasting individual actions.

As the above discussion reveals, I did take a stab at reading these books after I saw the Myerson inteview (though I admit I used Wikipedia liberally to jog my memory for this post!).  And you can also see how Myerson’s “mechanism design” theory might have come out reading Asimov.  I enjoyed reading the first book in the trilogy and it’s clear how it might excite a teenage boy with an aptitude for maths.  The next two books are much worse.  I struggled through them just to find out how it all ended.  Perhaps I read them when I was too old to appreciate them.

The Lord of the Rings is probably wooden to someone who reads it in their forties.  It still sparkles for me.

Games Against Your Heirs

You write several novels and transfer copyright to a publisher in exchange for royalty payment.  When you die your heirs have a legally granted option to negate the transfer of copyright.  This option limits how much your publisher will pay you for the copyright.  So you attempt to block your heirs by entering a second contract which pre-emptively regrants the copyright.

Eventually you die and your heirs ask the courts to declare your pre-emptive contract invalid.

You are (or were) John Steinbeck and your case is before the Supreme Court. If I am reading this right the appelate court decision went against the heirs.  And remarkably the Songwriter’s Guild of America filed an amicus brief in favor of the heirs. (ascot angle: scotusblog.)

“Can We Try to Steer Clear of Pathos?”

That’s a line from a crucial moment in the play Art by Yazmina Reza.  I saw the play at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago last week.  This was one of the best plays I have seen there in my 10 years as a subscriber (putting aside August: Osage County which is in another category altogether.)  Highly recommended.

But it is not for everybody.  Sandeep wouldn’t like it for example (then again as documented previously on this blog Sandeep has bad taste.)  I wanted to write a review to give a sense of who might like the play and I spent some time thinking about how to convey that, but a conventional review failed to materialize.  After a while I realized that the right way to review it is in the form of a dialog between the characters in the play.

There are three characters:  Serge, a dilettante who has created some buzz with a painting he just bought, Marc, a friend who is having a difficult time articulating his reaction to said painting, and Yvan who is helplessly caught in the middle.  Hit the link below for the review.

@garyvee and the Economics of Book Contracts

Uber-twitterer and oenephile of the Proletariat Gary Vaynerchuck has just signed a million dollar deal with Harper Studio who will publish 10 (!) books by the hitherto unpublished, self-proclaimed non-reader.  As reported here (bowlerbow: EatMeDaily), this represents an experiment in the terms of book contracts by the fledgling division of Harper Collins which was built on the premise that contracts delivering massive advances to the author and retaining sales revenue for the publisher are no longer part of a viable business model.

Publishing contracts must solve a thorny bilateral incentive problem which arises as a result of the timing of investment by author and publisher.  The author commits effort up front writing the book and then the publisher is expected to commit resources editing and marketing the completed manuscript.  The problem is to provide incentives for one party without dampening the incentives for the other.  The traditional advance/residuals contract solves this problem because the residuals give the publisher incentive to market the book and maximize sales leaving the advance as the compensation for the author.  The accompanying shift of risk from author to publisher is efficient because the publisher handles many books simultaneously, effectively creating a diversified portfolio.

The book market has famously weakened and it is becoming rarer and rarer for sales to justify the large advances that were hallmarks of existing contracts.  This means that a larger fraction of the author’s compensation must come directly out of book royalties, undermining the incentive and risk-shifting benefits of the old structure.  To adapt, publishers are seeking authors who already have an established “platform” such as a blog or other online community.  Such authors are less averse to residuals because their ready-made audience makes the prospect less risky. Vaynerchuck would appear to fit the bill perfectly.  His video blog, winelibrarytv attracts more than 80,000 viewers per day and as of today he has 177,000 followers on Twitter.

But when authors receive a large share of sales revenue, how can publishers be motivated to do the footwork of marketing the book to generate those sales?  To some extent an author with a platform can do his own marketing but if word of mouth were all that was required to turn a book into a hit, there would be no reason for the publisher in the first place.  Here is where the second novelty in the Vaynerchuck deal comes in: the long-term relationship.  The contract marries Vaynerchuck and HarperStudio for 10 books.  If HarperStudio can make his first book into a hit, it makes Gary into a star and it stands to reap the benefits on not just the first book but the 9 more to come.

“On the back end” as Gary would put it.

My Midlife Crisis

Shiny, red, and guaranteed to please the ladies.  Yes, I turned 40 last year but no I didn’t buy a car.  I planted heirloom tomatoes.    And I am hooked.  I just bought this book.

It has incredibly detailed flavor profiles, growing tips, seed sources, and recipes for hundreds of heirloom varieties.  The photographs are beautiful and the mini-histories are very entertaining:

Early members of Seed Savers Exchange worked themselves into a frenzy trying to find a Pruden’s Purple–one “so purple it looked black, about the color of the Black Beauty eggplant,”  fantasized Milan Rafayako of New Haven Kentucky in the 1981 yearbook.  Alas, such a creature never materialized.  Rare cultivated tomatoes, it turns out, don’t normally contain the purple pigment anthocyanin–although some of their wild relatives do.

If my calculations are correct, for the Chicago climate I need to germinate seeds in late April, transplant in late May, and pray that I have ripe tomatoes before I leave for San Diego in August.  But if things go like last year, that last week I will be making heavy use of the recipe (page 221) for Fried Green Tomatoes.

I Lied to My Wife This Morning

She is packing for a short trip and she bought a book for the plane ride.  Its a historical romance.  She asked me if it was a true story.  I said “You might as well pretend it is, you will enjoy it more.”

Jennie: “What did you say?”

Jeff:  “Yes it is a true story.”

Jennie: “Great, I like to read true stories.”