No Strong Enough Microscope: Sport, Data, and Delusion

Keeping the ball about a foot off the ground and aiming for a spot about a foot inside the post, kick the ball, after a relatively short run-up, as hard as you can ,to your natural side. You will score on pretty much every penalty shot in soccer you take. Practice the technique at the end of training sessions. If you are in the position to take a lot of penalty kicks, thus, allowing opponents to discover your strategy, randomly select a kick on which to aim for your non-natural side. If you kicking technique is good (as most professional soccer player's kicking techniques are) you'll score 90% of the time and be the world's greatest from the spot.

Sports are rich in statistics because, unlike, say, the weather or the economy, they are, essentially, closed systems. You have stable units of data to work with. And within sports, the penalty kick in soccer might be the cleanest, most closed, most noise-free data set available. A single shooter. A single goal keeper. A spot twelve yards from the goal line. One shot with three possibilities; goal, save, or miss. And with modern video technology pretty much every aspect of the process can be recorded and analyzed.

So what does “Twelve Yards: The Art and Psychology of the Perfect Penalty Kick,” conclude about “the perfect penalty kick?” Given all the data, all the interviews, all the experts, all the history, not much. At best, a few guidelines about the psychology, the need to actually practice penalty shots, and some suggestions for how players and coaches should manage themselves during the time between when the whistle is blown and when the shot is actually taken. The introductory statement is the practical that I gleaned from Lyttleton's more psychological examination.

But what happens when we begin to examine my perfect technique? How long should the run up be? How long should you take to set the ball and arrange yourself for the shot? Where on the twelve-yard mark do you actually place the ball? Where do you look and when do you look there? Can you give your target away with your eyes? What about the state of the turf? And this is before we get into the actual physical technique. Where do you place your plant foot and how do you angle it? Where should the point of contact on the ball be? What are the mechanics of that “kick it as hard as you can?” And, of course, with all the craziness going on around you, all the pressure, all the expectations, how do you ensure that you replicate the simple technique in important moments?

Sports are fractals. The closer you look, even within the closed systems of sports, the more you see. And no microscope is strong enough to distinguish (in the moment of course) the different lengths of grass, the different textures of ice, the millimeters distinguishing a successful point of contact, a successful angle of stick, a successful catch. It's not that data is unable to remove “bad bounces” from sport and more that it's impossible to ever be sure what is and what is not a “bad bounce.” Even with our super slow-motion, our high definition television, our ability to gather hard statistics, the base of sport, just like everything else, is mystery.

But, let's look at that opening statement again. Is there really that much mystery to it? I mean, people know how to kick a soccer ball. Especially professional soccer players. In terms of psychology, most of the psychology-based errors come from the decision making process, so the above technique would remove pretty much the entire source of psychology-based errors. Technique fails for professionals when they execute with doubt, and the above technique removes doubt. And the importance of routine is pretty much sports orthodoxy anyway. I'm not bringing this up because I think I'm some soccer genius, but to note, that despite having all the data, despite having the above conclusion so obviously before him, Lyttleton doesn't make it. In fact, he doesn't make any practical conclusion at all. It's almost as though he wants the penalty kick to be an “art” despite all the data pointing to the fact that, at least at the professional level, it's a “craft.”

As with fractals, once you see the pattern in sport, you see the pattern in sport, and, there's a point at which, that pattern becomes boring and powerless. I've touched on this before (here, in fact), but a big part of how we enjoy sports (all sports) is what we choose not to see. We ignore luck. We ignore statistics. We imagine phenomena like “momentum” and “wanting it more.” We build huge structures of rational information and then use those structures to be utterly and completely irrational. To put this another way, somehow our relationship with sports manages to be equal parts data and delusion.

Lyttleton's book is a fascinating micro-history, filled with interesting characters, anecdotes, and enough data to feel scientific, but, ultimately, I think Lyttleton is less interested in discovering an actual “perfect penalty kick” and more interested in the general phenomenon of the penalty kick. Which is just fine by me. Lyttleton succeeds at his project even if he doesn't necessarily succeed at his sub-title. (And there's a chance the subtitle was not even Lyttleton's idea.) However, if you're a player for England's national team looking to break your shoot-out curse, keep Twelve Yards for the off-season, and just read this post's opening paragraph.

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Punishments for Passivity and the Fundamental of Style: On hausfrau

There are as many ways to come to an identity as there are people with identities, but the panoply of self-identification can be arranged on a spectrum between active and passive. You can carve out for yourself a wholly idiosyncratic identity, actively embrace identities specific to your heritage (or the aspect of the heritage you find most significance in) passively select from the range of identities present in your society, or not really decide on an identify at all and just drift along responding to the most pressing need and following the path of least resistance, and everything in between. I don't think it's too terribly interesting to point out that systems of power and upholders of the status quo prefer and reward those who accept the pre-fabbed identities, nor do I think there's too much surprising in how those same systems of power and upholders of the status quo have a complicated and often contradictory relationship with those who dynamite down barriers and create entirely new ways of being a human. But just because systems of power prefer passivity over activity, it does not mean they treat all passive identifiers identically.

When a man just passively drifts along, choosing the path of least resistance, ultimately falling, without intention, into one of society's standard identities, he still ends up in a position of power, he still has a sense of agency, his identity is still his own even if, when examined with any kind of critical rigor, it could hardly be called an identity at all. Furthermore, there is very little societal punishment (at least for white cis men) for whatever the drifting of identity is composed of, whether it's “sowing wild oats” in a frat house, driving across country with buddies, or backpacking across Europe, men (especially white, cis) can expect a relative level of safety while they wander and expect a relative level of power when they return. Essentially, a cis white man will have to commit a major societal transgression in order to forfeit his privilege and power and given that we're already talking about people drifting through life, the assertion of agency needed to challenge basic social rules is also most likely lacking. But when a woman just drifts along and passively falls into a prefabbed identity, she is someone's wife. She is property. She is an heir vending machine.

Ann Benz, the protagonist of hausfrau is an American living in Zurich, married to a Swiss man, with three children, having multiple affairs, and barely present in her own life. With perhaps one or two exceptions, there is almost no agency in Anna's decisions. She finds herself in a particular situation with a particular set of emotions and ends up doing something. Sometimes that something gives her a level of (pretty much always temporary) satisfaction, sometimes that something troubles her, and often that something is, well, just another something, another inert domino in the line up of her life. Anna even seems to drift through the situations where she does make a decision and does take some action.

Perhaps the starkest example of this inaction in actions occurs when Anna finally decides to end one of her affairs. It could have been a quick phone call. She could have slipped the break up in over lunch at the German class she shares with her lover. There were many ways she could have ended this relationship, but, instead, she has him meet her at the zoo (the zoo?) where they wander around for, like an hour, both knowing what's coming, before she finally, fucking finally, breaks it off. And then he asks for a kiss. And then she receives a long (oh so grossly long) kiss she doesn't want. And then her child, who is at the zoo on a school trip, catches her kissing another man. At any point in this whole stupid long process, Anna could have just fucking done something (anything!) and the turning point in her life from farce to tragedy would have been avoided. (Though, there probably would have been another one.)

It can be infuriating watching Anna not act. Dozens of times I was practically shouting at her to just fucking do something, anything. Even in therapy she would hold back. Even in the exact situation in which she was trying to solve the exact problems that left her so emotionally hollow, she couldn't just fucking say “I feel hollow. I have affairs to fill a need. I like to fuck.” I mean, her therapist was being paid, specifically, so Anna could say those things to her. And by the end of the book, after the tragedies run their full course, Anna recedes into believing in pre-destination, perhaps the ultimate passive resignation of one's life.

Essbaum, brilliantly, leaves an obvious political statement unsaid. If Anna's husband Bruno had engaged in the exact same behavior, indulged in the exact same passivity, drifted along with no sense of ownership of his own life, even if he also was caught having an affair, he would have been totally fine. He would have found support in his friends and family and in his job as a banker. He would have had the resources to make a change. Even if his family fell apart, he had a bank account, a job, and a native's fluency in the two (German and Swiss-German) languages spoken in Switzerland, and so could completely reorganize his life. In short, society was there for Bruno. One could argue that Anna's level of isolation (a family-less, near friend-less, ex-pat) is not an accurate representation of how most women experience society, but even if Essbaum presents something of a hyperbole (and I'm not sure she does), one of literature's roles is to turn up the volume on life, revealing existing problems that can sometimes be too quiet to hear. (Especially, when hearing them would challenge your own role/identity/place of power, sense of well-being, etc.)

hausfrau is not the kind of book I would normally pick up. (I mean, look at that cover.) “Bored housewife has affairs” really doesn't interest me as a plot. But Jill Alexander Essbaum is a poet and I'm always interested in how poets work in prose and hausfrau came highly recommended from other readers I trust, so when I had a chance to grab a galley I did.

In some ways, nothing happens in the plot to distinguish hausfrau from the other domestic dramas that failed to hold my attention. (There's a chance this is actually a retelling of a classic domestic drama.) If anything distinguishes hausfrau's plot, it is Essbaum's sense of emotional pace and timing, manipulating and structuring the events to induce (at least in me) the closest thing you'll get from Josh to “an anguished gasp.” (That fucking surprise party! The fucking zoo!) What makes hausfrau a special book, what motivated me beyond my usual prejudices, what inspired me to explore the book with a critical eye and thus be open for its ideas (see above), was the style. Essbaum's sharpness, originality, and vitality of imagery exploded the quiet (even quietly desperate) and mundane moments of Anna's perpetual wallow, scattering the shrapnel of all-too-familiar images to distant corners of intellectual and emotional exploration. Every time I started to get a little bored with Anna's relentless, maudlin passivity, I read a line or sentence or image of crackling originality. Poets, am I right?

Which, of course, brings me back to something of a hobby-horse for me. What distinguishes one book from another is style. Some authors are overt, idiosyncratic, and experimental with their style, turning up the volume on that distinguishing feature (and almost certainly being punished in the marketplace for their overtness, even when they are not saddled with cripplingly-bizarre-when-you-think-about-it label “writer's writer.”), while some strive for quality execution of an accepted style (too often forgetting (or letting it be forgotten) that the accepted style was once overt, idiosyncratic, and experimental), and others don't really control their style at all and just kind of write how they write with their creative efforts much more focused on plot and character (thinking of commercial fiction here.). But even with those writers who don't actively engage with their style, even those writers who's style include poorly executed prose, there is a reason why authors like Stephen King, Nora Roberts, and Patricia Cornwell sell gillions of books, and thousands of others who write, at least on the surface, the exact same kinds of books, do not.

Even after considering the vagaries of publishing itself, there is something that distinguishes Stephen King from Peter Straub, even if that something is unintentional, inadvertent, and/or (and we have deconstruction to thank for this) in opposition to whatever King and Straub intended to achieve. Part of that is, of course, the big units of storytelling , but all of those big units (heheheh) are still composed of and communicated through prose style. It certainly could all be a matter of chapter length and where in the book the big cliff hanger or the plot twist occurs or even just how the characters and places are named (I seriously suspect 90% of what distinguishes fun trashy fantasy novels from terrible trashy fantasy novels is the quality of character and place names) but those are all still expressions of an author's style. Ultimately, fundamentally, as I've argued before, it all comes down to style.

People tend to like the media/art/entertainment that stimulates them just enough that they can still ignore the shit they don't feel like dealing with and they tend to come up with a lot of excuses (sometimes reasons) for disliking works that refuse to let the primacy of language and style and/or some uncomfortable of fact of existence be ignored. hausfrau is an uncomfortable book. Essbaum's style can be challenging and her story thrusts our society's misogyny in your face without giving us the emotional salve of a plucky heroine struggling against injustice to root for as we read. Essbaum will not let you ignore things you probably want to ignore. And that's exactly why hausfrau should go on your TBR pile.

Wrong About Pulp

For a long time, I had an idea about pulp and when I saw American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz, I saw my chance to subject this long held idea to the rigors of the essay and I was fucking psyched. The essay would wind its way through Hammett and Chandler, Vonnegut and Dick, Markson and Bukowski, Coover and Hunt, before looking at the resurgence of the form, specifically with Hard Case Crime, as a way to examine how art arises from the stresses of frantic production, and hoo boy, you should've seen how I planned to connect it back to my own pulp-tinged-though-not-frantically-produced (Hi, 2002. I finished it!) novel. Well, you can tell from the title of this post how it ended up.

Vaguely stated, my idea was that the frantic production pace of pulp created an atmosphere where a totally unique kind of artistic expression arose. Essentially, I imagined that pulp was Philip K. Dick writ large and that his maddening and beautiful ability to shift from word-garbage to brilliance, sometimes in the course of a single paragraph, was indicative as much of the method of production as it was of any unique aspect of Dick's imagination. I say “vaguely” because I hadn't filled in any of the gaps, explained any of the phenomena, connected the early pulp tradition to the artists (Vonegut & Bukowski especially) who appropriated its vitality into works of overt art.

But that is one of the great powers of books, they take a vague idea that is kicking around in your head, something you've kept to yourself because you've never really had the resources and/or the opportunity to develop it, (but that you've grown fond of anyway, because it's stuck with you for years and some of the pulp you've read seems to back it up) and beat the living crap out of it until I realize I've just rephrased the stupid million-monkeys-write-Hamlet nonsense in terms of the weird shit I like to read. But if you get through life without a few ideas being rolled up in a utility-knifed carpet by a book or two, you're doing it wrong. All of it.

But pulp does have a relationship with art, an interesting and important one that does, eventually get to all those guys I wanted to write my essay about, and as I read American Pulp, that relationship, not only became clearer to me, but began to seem obvious, revealing some kind of weird, vague, as yet undetermined blind spot in my understanding of art. So, gleaned from American Pulp, here is how I now understand the relationship between art and pulp.

First, art was always present. Much of the pulp industry was born through creating cheap, paperback editions of existing works like Faulkner, (Faulkner!) and Invisible Man and Burmese Days (Orwell!) and slapping sordid sensational covers on them. Essentially, economics, classic cynical advertising, and art, all conspired to trick people (including pretty much the entire American military serving in WWII) into reading great works of literature. Second, pulps had a freedom of content unavailable in other forms of expression at the time, not just in terms of sex and violence, but also in terms of non-mainstream lifestyles. Pulp writers were free to write about bohemian lifestyles, African-American culture, the struggles of America's cities, and homosexuals. For many straight, white, American men, a lurid pulp novel or magazine would have been his first encounter in media with any non-mainstream lifestyle. And that kind of freedom, the ability to write whatever you want without any fear, would naturally, eventually, attract artists, either those looking to directly push the boundaries of content, or those looking to appropriate that current of artistic energy (or an image of that current of energy, hello there Kilgore Trout) for their own project. Third, well, it is a little like those monkeys and their typewriters. There was just so many words being produced, statistically some of them just had to be beautiful and, statistically, again, though more oddly so, it makes sense that a higher percentage of the beautiful and significant would survive for me to read.

And finally, I don't think my idea is 100% lacking in truth. There is something in the image of someone sitting down to a typewriter in the morning knowing they've got to have a 5,000 word story ready by that night—it's frantic energy perhaps, the more general allure of the deadline, the understanding of writing and books as also having a place in the daily products of life that can be found in drugstore counters and racks—that is attractive to some writers (like me), especially when that image is experienced as a historical image.

The more I think about the source of my bad idea, the more I see it in a specific version of that image of the frantic deadline meeter. A Philip K. Dick paragraph can often be equal parts awful and beautiful and Dick, composed at a blistering pace, often using amphetamines to sustains his creation. Sometimes Dick was capable of groundbreaking social and philosophical exploration, in some ways, rephrasing the best of Kafka for the age of television and computers, and other times, well, his work was dreary, cliché, and formulaic. I wonder if that single specific image was enough to give language to the pulp that I had been reading at the time, and because there is something Romantic to me about the image of a pulp-writer cranking out words as a day job, it stuck, even though I had no other evidence whatsoever. The singular image made the idea feel legitimate and until I read a book in the hopes of bringing my brilliance to the world, it stayed feeling legitimate.

To me, this leads back to the value of the act of writing even for people who don't identify themselves as writers. In some ways, the most dangerous and potentially destructive ideas I can have are those I don't decide to write an essay or poem or whatever about because they just sit in my brain surrounded by others like them with only the casual process of impermanent logic (and in the hands of someone with linguistic talent, logic can be made to do a lot more than it really should) to cull or improve them. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't (as above) and sometimes I just don't know. In this particular case the potential consequences weren't particularly dire. At worst, I would've spent a long time on a bad essay, that, if published somewhere, could have been embarrassingly corrected. but there's more in my head than just books. But there are a lot of ideas in a lot of heads in the world and far too few are subjected to the kind of inspection and evaluation that occurs through writing and research.

Ultimately, pulp was not a creative process at all, but a publication process. It was not a method of creating ideas and stories, but a method of distributing ideas and stories. I'm sure some of the stories were created in the manner I imagined, complete with fedoras, machine-gun-paced typewriting, and rolled sleeves, but I bet many were not, and I know from American Pulp, that many were also created without the author even being aware of the idea of pulp. I doubt Ellison, Faulkner, and Orwell thought of themselves as drug-store rack material, but for a brief time in American history, they were. And maybe this might be the ultimate source of some artists' fascination with pulp fiction; (beyond, of course, that some of it is really good, and some of it that is less good is still a lot of fun) there was this brief slice of American history, after major progress towards universal literacy and before the advent of TV, when reading was a primary medium of entertainment for just about everybody and some of that great mass of reading material was art, either art artfully and cynically disguised or art produced because enough human beings banging on enough typewriters are just bound to say something meaningful and beautiful.

Diversifying the Ecosystem: A Publisher Lead Technique for Shifting Sales from Amazon

There are many reasons for the diminishing, but persistent precariousness of contemporary publishing and bookselling. Some are rooted in broader cultural and economic forces far outside of the control of the industry itself (hello wage stagnation), but one is the radical concentration of sales through one particular retail channel. Ignoring how this concentration happened (at least for the purposes of this post), as we learned with monopolies the first time around, the high concentration of any aspect of any industry in any one company creates a fragile ecosystem, and the concentration of retail bookselling in Amazon is no different. Imagine, for example, what would happen to publishing if Amazon, somehow, went bankrupt. (They do look a bit like a stock bubble.)  Publishers know this, of course, and over the last three years or so have tried to find ways (that won't be stopped by an Amazon-sponsored frivolous lawsuit, of course) to strengthen other sales channels, from developing direct-to-customer sales to greatly increasing and improving their support of independent bookstores.

Overall, the strategies, combined with broader social and economic trends and the fantastic work indie bookstores are doing, seem to be moving the needle a little, at least in print books. But there is more that can be done. Here's one program that I think will successfully shift a meaningful percentage of sales from Amazon to indie bookstores, which shouldn't draw the ire of the Department of Justice and shouldn't cost publishers much, if anything, more than they are already spending.

Many people say I look a bit like Neil Gaiman.

This idea isn't my idea. It was hatched in a different brain and then, thanks as much to spring rolls at Cafe Zing as anything else, enacted at Porter Square Books. A couple of years ago, Neil Gaiman wanted to support indie bookstores and to do so he and his publisher decided to offer signed copies of The Ocean at the End of the Lane nearly-exclusively through an independent bookstore. Thanks to Amanda Palmer's relationship with PSB, PSB was the store lucky enough to take on the project. The result: after a metric-ton of work at every stage in this project, PSB sold a little over 5,000 signed copies of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a significant percentage of which would have otherwise been sold through Amazon.

Oh! Oh! That makes me your Terry Pratchett

In the grand scheme of publishing and bookselling, whatever percentage shift that represented doesn't really register, but if a similar exclusive-signed-copies relationship is set up for Stephen King and Toni Morrison and Alexander McCall Smith and Jodi Picoult and well, every big-name bestselling author with a devoted following out there, that percentage in sales shift would register. Again, my point is not about putting Amazon out of business, but that the bookselling and publishing ecosystem is strengthened through the diversification of sales channels. Indie bookstores don't need to have a massive percentage of retail sales to be a viable, sustainable sales channel in the publishing ecosystem, but they still need to keep the lights on, still need to pay their bills, still need to pay good booksellers enough to stay in the industry. Exclusive signed copies of a major author's book is not going to save a failing bookstore, nor would it turn retail bookselling into a luxurious profession, nor, do I think would it shift sales more than a few percentage points, but if adopted industry wide, that shift in sales will greatly strengthen the indie retail base upon which so much of publishing rests.

Furthermore, the impact would go beyond just those specific sales; it would also introduce thousands of customers to the shocking fact that independent bookstores can provide great customer service for online orders. So many people just assume that Amazon is the only place to shop online for books, and in their defense, for quite a long time, online shopping at indie bookstores was not a good experience. But the independent online experience has caught up quite a bit and though there are still some aspects of online shopping that Amazon and other online-only retailers do better than indie bookstores, there are some things that indie bookstores do better than Amazon. Like drawing manatees. The result, would, again, not be some radical overnight, wonderland of rich indie booksellers, but that's not the goal. The goal is a strong, diverse bookselling industry, and this would help.

I wish I had the energy for such delusions.

Also, it certainly wouldn't hurt. I'm thinking of authors who already have publicity budgets, so it would be just a matter of shifting some of that budget to publicize the signed copies. And those 5,000 or whatever purchases, were going to happen anyway, as said fans were going to buy the book from somewhere. And yeah, there are some logistics that would have to be worked out, but they're not that different from when authors do bulk signings anyway and the bookstores handle most of the really gnarly stuff around shipping.

Furthermore, if the publishers and stores want to hedge their bets, all they have to do is open up the process for pre-order (which it should be anyway) and then print, sign, and order a number of books commensurate with the pre-order numbers. (Say, number of preorders plus 15%, as there will be sales after the book comes out.) There really is no risk or downside to this kind of program.

But Josh, you might argue, if every publisher does this with every one of their big name authors, won't that flood the market, diluting the impact? Well, if you're in the book industry and follow tons of publishers and authors on Twitter, yeah, the stream of “Signed copies of X from Y” is going to get old fast, but, though all book industry people are readers, not all readers are book industry people. A lot of Neil Gaiman fans, in terms of their relationship to the publishing industry, are just that, a Neil Gaiman fan and won't even notice if Stephen King is also doing the same kind of signed books thing. My twitter feed could end up filled with these programs, but I highly doubt that would be the case of the average current Amazon-only reader. Most likely, they'd be thrilled to get a signed copy of their favorite author's new book. Depending on the author, if done for every book she publishes, there might be author specific saturation, but that's what the pre-order system is for and if one signed book doesn't sell as well, just give it a rest for the next few.



But Josh, don't publishers already send bookstores signed copies of new books from big names? Yes, they do, and it's great, but with only shopping every extra click someone must make to buy something represents a lost sale. Sure, an author could tweet "I've sent signed copies all over the country so find your local bookstore," and that would be great, but it wouldn't generate a lot of sales and it certainly wouldn't shift a lot of sales. People just won't put in the effort. But a tweet with a link to a page with a "Buy" button will.

So what should publishers do? Well, they should look at their list for books coming out in, let's say, May or after, and get in touch with those big name authors. Then, identify and get in touch with potential bookstore partners, by say, February. Once the partnership has been established the various logistics (shipping, signing, order processing procedures, live date) can be worked out to give everyone involved enough lead time, to effectively fulfill the orders. (For PSB's Gaiman fest, we discussed in January and launched in February for a June release.) There really is no downside and the potential upside is contributing to the long-term sustainability of indie bookstores. I know I'm not a big name author, but I'll still do my part.