On Non-Representational Art

[hauled up from the depths of my web page]

Most of my hobbyist ventures into the graphic arts are abstract or non-representational. This seems to be one of the topics that sf readers and fans get mighty vocal about at times, and I seldom pass up a chance to get myself into trouble on controversial topics, so I think I’ll express a few opinions about the subject.

Let me start out in left field with a nod to the book City of Truth by James Morrow. It’s a political satire, which automatically puts it in the line of fire, and I’ve read various interviews with Morrow, and he seems to be a decently thoughtful fellow, so I’ll stipulate that I’m being unfair in picking on this one point, but there you go. One takes one’s examples where they show themselves.

City of Truth concerns itself with the city Veritas, a place where the citizens have been subjected to a treatment that makes them always tell the truth and abjure lies. Sort of. Actually, the “truth” that they tell is that sort of harsh candor that many people think of as truth (as Cordelia Chase says in a Buffy episode, “Tact is just not saying things that are true”). So elevators have warning signs that say, “This elevator has been serviced by people who hate their jobs,” and birthday cards say "Roses drop dead, / Violets do too, / with each day life gets shorter, / Happy birthday to you."

The protagonist’s job is “art deconstruction,” in its literal sense. His job is to destroy art from the “age of lies.” This takes out all non-representational art and all representational art that shows things that don’t exist, like winged Nike, Santa Claus, and so forth.
I did a brief web search, and the only comment that I found that noted a problem with this was David Kennedy, who wrote:

In addition, I felt that there was a confusion between Truth and Objectivity. People cannot lie, people find it uncomfortable listening to lies. People respond badly to artwork like Dali's clocks... but why must Nike be smashed? Why couldn't a Vertisian stand there and think, "That is a statue from the Age of Lies. It purports to resemble one of their gods, who of course does not exist. I do not believe in that god, but I recognise that this statue is only a statue. Perhaps I even find it nice to look at."?

In fact, the problem is much deeper. A stone statue of a horse is no more a horse than a stone statue of a winged horse is a winged horse. So why is one a “lie” and the other “true?” In fact, both are “lies” in the sense of trying to be something other than what they are.



La Trahison des Images (Rene Magritte)

This is not Rene Magritte's painting La Trahison des Images (The Treason of Images), since it is only a jpeg image of that painting. Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe ("This is Not a Pipe") would also seem to be obvious. It is a painting of a pipe, not the pipe itself. So why would an image of a pipe be "true" while an image of Santa Claus be a lie? Both purport to be what they are not. By contrast, a Pollack action painting never purports to be anything but a painting. Why isn't the Pollack considered more true than a "realistic" portrait?



(Above) Enchanted Forest, 1947. Oil on canvas, 221.3 x 114.6 cm. Peggy Guggenheim Collection. 76.2553 PG 151. Jackson Pollock © 2003 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Yet it is easy to see how Morrow's description could work out. If people think that representational art is "true" then it would pass their conditioning, in the same way that readers who agree with the sentiment have no problem with the idea. Indeed, I've heard opinions of similar nature expressed by sf fans (and plenty of people other than sf fans, of course), that "modern art" is a scam, a con job, fit only for birdcage bottoms and fishwrap. What gives?

Well, truth is beauty and beauty truth, eh? That's not true, otherwise "ugly truths" and "pretty lies" would be oxymorons, and they are not, but we'd like for it to be true. Moreover, people tend to like comforting images over those that disturb, or are difficult to understand, or (worst of all) those images that seem to encapsulate the mockery that intellectual snobs (such as myself) bring to the table.

I have some sympathy for this view, especially the distaste for intellectual snobbery (I may be an intellectual snob, but that doesn't mean that I'm in favor of the philosophical stance), but also the desire to have graphic art that serves the purpose of storytelling in venues where storytelling is important. No disagreement there. It's the other aspects that get me into trouble.

I once was having dinner with some friends and acquaintances, and was talking to one of them about graphic illustration and book covers (something that I've personal interest in from time to time). I mentioned one (fairly well-known) artist with some disdain, as having a reputation somewhat greater than the craft he brought to bear on his assignments. Look, I said, it's not that difficult to do those realistic covers; he uses photographs for reference, probably in conjunction with an opaque projector. There's nothing wrong with that, but when he combines images, he often doesn't bother to match the shadows, so you'll get one figure that came from overhead lighting, while another has shadows that look more slant lit. It's just sloppy work.

The other fellow got very huffy. I learned later that he and said artist were good friends, though the person who told me this (another artist) suggested that they weren't such good friends as to have my acquaintance over to the artist's studio, where he kept his opaque projector and photo reference files. Still, tact lies in not saying things that are true, and I was tactless. Besides, it's not the lack of hard work that bothers me about photo reference art. I'm in favor of any shortcut that works. I think that what really bothers me is the larger issue, that there is a creeping sameness at work in sf art in recent times, plus a bit of beligerant knownothingism on the part of fans.

When I first began reading science fiction, the shared culture of the 1950s had not yet broken down under the pressure of the 1960s. Everything seemed to come in threes: Astounding, Galaxy, and F&SF were the magazines; Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke were the writers; Powers, Emsh, and Freas were the artists. Of the big three artists, my favorite was Richard Powers, who was strongly influenced by the Surrealist artist Yves Tanguy.



Richard Powers' Illustration for Those Idiots from Earth (1957) .



Yves Tanguy, "The Absent Lady" (1942)

Powers was practically the art director of Ballantine Books, and his "look" defined an aesthetic sensibility. Ed Emshwiller was the most frequent and memorable cover artist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and while his art was somewhat more representational than Powers, he was hardly a photorealist. With his trademark (and often hidden) "Emsh" in every illo, he was a middle-class suburban white boy's delight.



Ed Emshwiller, illustrating Lieber's "The Secret Songs"cover for Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction



Kelly Freas, illustrating Budry's "Who?" for Astounding

Frank Kelly Freas was the Norman Rockwell of sf illustration, and I mean that in the best possible way. He had a clean and easily recognizable style that could tell a story by itself if he needed it to. And, like Rockwell, he was very aware of the breadth of the artistic language and used that breadth when it served the needs of the gig. Rockwell, for example, once did a Pollack-esque action painting in order to incorporate it into his painting "The Connoisseur." Likewise, while I don't know for a fact that Freas drew inspiration from Indian sand paintings for the background to "Who?" above, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he had.

Moreover, while Freas' style was representational, what was being represented was extraordinary. It was anything but photographic. Consider the illustration above, and, for the sake of argument, imagine trying to use a photoreference technique in its production. How much would that have saved? Precious little. The background would still require design; the mechanical arm is from whole cloth. Trying to get this image from a photoshoot would take more time than the artwork did. Similarly, Freas drew aliens such that his designs could be used by makeup artists, so the design flow would be from art to realism, rather than the other way around.

So, okay, I'm an old fart who thinks that the stuff of his childhood was better than the swill available now. Except that there was plenty of realist art available when I was young; I don't mind it per se. It's just the steady diet of it that I find boring.

That said, I suspect that the hostility to "modern art" (in quotes, since we're talking about styles that have been around for more than a century in some cases), come from the belief that it's a trick, a swindle perpetrated by snobs to justify sneering at the uninitiated. So let me simple say this. This isn't a test. There is no right answer in the back of the book. It doesn't have to be "about" anything, or about any one thing. If it looks like something, if it reminds you of something else, well and good. If not, maybe it just looks good. If you don't like the looks of any given work of art, move on to the next piece. There's plenty of all sorts of art around, enough for everyone, really.

Minimum Wage

There's a concept in economics called "elasticity," more specifically, the “price elasticity of demand.” This is a concept in microeconomics, though experience tells me that it is often mistaken for macroeconomics. I have several theories about why that is, but simple ignorance is probably the real reason.

Most commodities have a relatively inelastic demand response to price changes, which is one of the reasons why firms try so hard to remove themselves from the task of supplying mere commodities by branding, or otherwise differentiating what they sell from the products of other firms, with copyright or patent protections, or some sort of barrier-to-entry strategy. One can also take advantage of commodity pricing on the upside, when there are supply crunches. The money Exxon makes from a supply scarcity of oil and gasoline (oil production or oil refining) is one such upside; oil firms literally make more money by supplying less gasoline. The electricity shortages in California a while back are another example.

But economics is a social science, and in social sciences, the “science” is often subverted by the “social.” That was the main sermon that the late John Kenneth Galbraith preached during his lifetime, and it took me longer to get it than it should have, partly (I will alibi) because he often used arguments that weren’t particularly strong. He argued, for example, that advertising does nothing but create artificial demand, and worse, that it made firms immune to consumer choices. I’d have loved to see his analysis of the “New Coke” but I don’t think he ever made one.

Still, agendas matter, and that is nowhere more obvious than in economics, and especially economists and their fellow travelers. There is a political philosophy afoot that holds “the market” (or “the free market”) to be some sort of moral fairy dust that can be sprinkled onto any policy to turn it into a just and moral action. This does, however, require some interesting mental gyrations on the part of the true believers.

Consider this analysis of the Minimum Wage, a tried and true policy of the advocates of labor. The basic argument in favor of the minimum wage should not be controversial: demand for the lowest economic value labor (sometimes called “unskilled” by those having never worked a minimum wage job) is inelastic, as befits a commodity. This means that a minimum wage above the “market clearing price” will result in some marginally lesser employment rate, but the margin will be proportionally less than the marginal increase in wages mandated by the minimum wage. In other words, the winners get more money than the losers have lost. This additional money must come from somewhere, of course, and traditional theory suggests that it comes from the business owners (and possibly managers) that have to pony up the additional wages.

Now there is a debate within the economic community as to whether or not there is any loss of employment in the minimum wage class (or in the overall labor force), at least for small enough increases. This might simply mean that the loss is too small to measure, given the other noise in the system, or it might actually mean that the increase in demand caused by a higher minimum wage (more money in the pockets of those who spend it), has a stimulative effect on the macroeconomics of the situation. In effect, minimum wage workers have more money to spend at Walmart, so Walmart has to hire more minimum wage employees. This is sometimes called the “Ford effect” because Henry Ford supposedly paid high wages to his workers so they could afford to buy automobiles.

But there isn’t really any way to make the case that the minimum wage hurts workers in general, because it simply isn’t true, and there is no intellectually honest way to make the economic argument that it does.

Nevertheless, I have seen quite a few articles, by economists, saying exactly that, in so many words. I remember one in particular, from an economist at Pepperdine University (the economics department at PU being essentially another right wing think tank, as is the one at George Mason University), that decried the terrible result that raising the minimum wage would have on the unemployment rate of black teenaged males. What are the odds that said economist has ever been concerned about the employment prospects of black teenagers in anything other than a context of arguing against policies that would actually result in monetary loss to large corporations?

But here’s where this all goes very meta. I once wrote more or less the same thing as the above in a posting to a Compuserve Forum. The result was that several other participants (who would all, I suspect, classify themselves as libertarians), simply refused to even acknowledge the argument, and castigated me for being so callous toward the unemployment that would surely result from a minimum wage hike. They were prepared to argue the does-it-or-doesn’t-it-cause-unemployment question, but the more general case of quo bono simply did not register.

Yet every one of them believed that he understood economics.

Singularly Unique

Unique is not a unique word, at least not in the sense of having no synonyms, since “singular” is a good replacement, and the phrase “one of a kind” will also do nicely.

But unique is one of the “battleground words,” one demarking the realm of prescriptive vs descriptive grammar, one whose use or misuse sets teeth on edge.

My ears hear the phrase “very unique” and I cringe a little, so my ears are pretty well in the prescriptive camp, at least on the “unique” question. That’s not all that surprising, since I use words and grammar professionally and besides, as I think I’ve explained before, I have a long history of intellectual snobbery.

Nevertheless, I’m not committed to my prejudices. The singular “they” offends my ear (“If someone has an illness, they should see a doctor”), but I recognize that it is neither ambiguous, nor is it of recent origin (see Chaucer, for example). So in writing I’ll usually try to finesse it, as any battleground usage can interrupt the flow for some people, and flow control is important. Clarity and communication are the goal; grammar is merely the means to an end.

In the case of “unique” however, there are some other things going on. It’s interesting, for example, that adverbs that are usually intensifiers, such as “very” or “highly” actually weaken the usage of “unique.” “Very unique” becomes equivalent to “very unusual” which is less uncommon than something that is unique.

There is also a deeper philosophical argument here. It is the nature of a singular event that it should not really be comparable to other events, otherwise its singular nature is threatened. But we do not live in the world of Platonic Ideals, nor a Thomist world where each Angel is a separate species.

My own take on the matter originated from the contemplation of Cabbage Patch Dolls. (Hey, you take your insights where they happen). Originally, the Cabbage Patch Dolls were soft sculptures, similar in some ways to my wife Amy’s Bat-a-Brats and Sock-Hoppies. So each head was a “unique” craft creation. But when the Cabbage Patch Dolls went mass market, the design was changed for ease of manufacture, and their heads became stamped plastic. However, each Cabbage Patch Doll has a pattern of freckles on its face, and the freckles are varied for each doll, so No Two Are Alike.

So each Cabbage Patch Doll is unique. They’re just not very unique, are they?

Fallout

[crossposted from WAAGNFNP]

Hot gingerbread and dynamite
Boy, I drink nothing but that each night
Back in Nagasaki where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky wacky woo!

It was a lovely morning In Hiroshima town,
One summer morn in nineteen five and forty.
And the sun, how bright it shone
From a sky without a cloud,
One summer morn in nineteen five and forty.

Turn around, go back down, back the way you came.
Can't you see that flash of fire ten times brighter than the day?
And behold the mighty city broken in the dust again,
Oh God, the pride of man, broken in the dust again.

Hail the day so long expected,
Hail the year of full release.
Zion's walls are now erected,
And her watchmen publish peace.
Through our Shiloh's wide dominion,
Hear the trumpet loudly roar,
Babylon is fallen to rise no more.

And there were many children
Yet lying in their beds,
For this was still an early morning hour,
And the dew lay on the meadow
In the lovely slanting sunlight,
And the crowns had barely opened on the flowers.



Turn around, go back down, back the way you came
Terror is on every side, though the leaders are dismayed
Those who put their faith in fire, in fire their faith shall be repaid
Oh God, the pride of man, broken in the dust again

Hiroshima Nagasaki
Nagasaki Hiroshima
arigato Vanunu
ko n nichiwa Mossadegh
arigato Mordechai
ko n nichiwa Mohammad
Hiroshima Nagasaki

All her merchants stand with wonder,
What is this that comes to pass:
Murm'ring like the distant thunder,
Crying, "Oh alas, alas."
Swell the sound, ye kings and nobles,
Priest and people, rich and poor;
Babylon is fallen to rise no more.

Aw, man, how they entertain,
I mean, they hurry a hurricane.
Back in Nagasaki where the fellows chew tobaccky
And the women wicky-wacky-woo!

I come and stand at every door
Though none can hear my silent tread
I come and knock yet remain unheard
For I am dead, for I am dead

I'm only seven though I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow

Turn around, go back down, back the way you came
Shout a warning to the nations that the sword of god is raised
On Babylon that mighty city, rich in treasure, wide in fame
It shall cause thy tower to fall and make it be a pyre of flame
Oh God, the pride of man, broken in the dust again

You are my angel
Come from way above
To bring me love

Her eyes
She's on the dark side
Neutralize
Every man in sight

To love you, love you, love you ...



Hiroshima Nagasaki
ko n nichiwa arigato
Nagasaki Hiroshima
Nagasaki Hiroshima
arigato Vanunu
ko n nichiwa Mordechai
ko n nichiwa Mohammad
Hiroshima Nagasaki
ko n nichiwa arigato

Blow the trumpet in Mount Zion,
Christ shall come a second time;
Ruling with a rod of iron
All who now as foes combine.
Babel's garments we've rejected,
And our fellowship is o'er,
Babylon is fallen to rise no more.

Before we die, let’s dig that high, that frees us from our binds…
That blows all cool, that ego drool, and burns us from our minds…
That last big flash, mankind’s last gasp, the trip we can’t take twice…
But before I did let me make that trip, before the nothing comes…
The last big flash, to light my sky…and zap! the world is done…

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim, my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And they were scattered on the ground

Fujiyama, got a mama,
Then your troubles increase, boy!
It's a bottle in a, bottle in a, bottle in a, bottle in a, bottle in a
Nagasaki!



They hug and kiss each night,
By jingo, boys, worth that price!
Back in Nagasaki where the fellows chew tobaccky
And the women wicky-wacky-woo!

Oh thou that dwell on many waters, rich in treasure, wide in fame
Bow unto a god of gold, thy pride of might shall be thy shame
Oh God, the pride of man, broken in the dust again

And only God can lead the people back into the earth again
Thy holy mountain be restored, thy mercy on thy people Lord

------------------------------------------------------

The Ballad of Hiroshima Town, Jens Bjørneboe, “Vise om byen Hiroshima.” Samlede Dikt, ©1977, 1995 by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag A/S. English translation ©1997 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer
Nagasaki, performed by the Don Redman Orchestra, 1932, lyrics by Mort Dixon, 1928
Pride of Man by Hamilton Camp
Babylon is Fallen, Sacred Harp, W. E. Chute, 1878
Foreign Accents, by Robert Wyatt
Hiroshima, Baez version of the Grey Silkie
The Big Flash, from short story of the same name, Norman Spinrad
Angel by Massive Attack

What is John Galt?

Atlas Shrugged is a hard case. It's not clear how to even start writing about it, given the aura of political weirdness that surrounds it. By almost any standard, it's science fiction. As McGuffins, it includes an engine that runs on extracting static electricity from the air, a variant of ten-point steel (Reardon metal), a cheap process for extracting unlimited oil from oil shale, and a sonic death ray. And if those weren't enough, the book culminates in a 100+ page speech given to the nation on high-jacked airways by a spooky character who has waged an underground movement against the status quo, a character who is named in the first sentence ("Who is John Galt?"), but doesn't actually appear until Part Three of a three part book.

Then there's stuff like this:

The clouds and the shafts of the skyscrapers against them were turning brown, like an old painting in oil, the color of a fading masterpiece. Long streaks of grime ran from under the pinnacles down the slender, soot-eaten walls. High on the side of a tower there was a crack in the shape of motionless lightning, the length of ten stories. A jagged object cut the sky above the roofs; it was half a spire still holding the glow of sunset; the gold leaf had long since peeled off the other half. The glow was red and still, like the reflection of a fire: not an active fire, but a dying one, which it is too late to stop.

That could easily come from one of the better noir novels of the period. Its roots are clearly in Black Mask pulpitry, the offspring of Chandler and Hammet. Mickey Spillane, whom Rand admired, wrote like that on occasion, and seldom was given due acknowledgment for the craft of it.

Moreover, there was a novelistic purpose to the prose; the mood was deliberately evocative of decay, and a sense of loss. Within the context of the novel and its time, it called forth images of more heroic times, of a lost age of adventure that so appeals to those nostalgic for times from before their own births. In other words, Atlas Shrugged appealed to the dreamer children, and that is also where science fiction finds its grip.

Atlas Shrugged (as well as The Fountainhead) shows up on "The book that changed my life" polls with such regularity that it's a bit embarrassing, though I'm not sure to whom, maybe just me. Still, I'd like to get some sort of handle on it, and I think the pulp/science fiction aspect of it is a major feature of its appeal.

But, just as evolutionary theory is tested by examples where adaptation is imperfect, the appeal of philosophies are best tested by the internal contradictions that its adherents swallow. The internal contradictions of Libertarian/Randian/Objectivism have been remarked upon ad nauseum, but I'm looking to see what sort of novelistic contradictions there exist in the original text. I'm not going to waste time on the obvious gap between reality-as-portrayed and reality-as-it-is. That's too easy and beside the point. Yes, it is, in fact, very rare for the heads of businesses to be the engineering, scientific, and technical brains behind the operation. That's part of the Edison mythology, and ignores the importance of Charlie Steinmetz (even if Edison himself did not). It's also pretty clear from the boardroom scenes in Atlas Shrugged that Rand had never actually been in a boardroom (if I were a certain sort of catty person—which I am not—I would make a similar remark about bedrooms, but all evidence is that Rand knew her way around a bedroom, and furthermore, knew just how important fantasy was in that setting). Still, it's worth noting that, in Atlas Shrugged, when businesspeople make remarks about "helping the underprivileged," they seem to actually mean doing something that might have an adverse impact on their own bottom line, and that is somewhat less believable to this reader than the sonic death ray.

But this is beating around the bush, as it were, and I wish to draw attention to a very important feature of Atlas Shrugged, and that is the failure of its primary sexual narrative.

The point of view character and protagonist of the novel is female, Dagney Taggart, who is, at novel's beginning, the Vice-President in Charge of Operations of Taggart Transcontinental. Dagney is the granddaughter of the founder of the company (more-or-less modeled on Cornelius Vanderbuilt), while her brother, James is the incompetent President, whom she must always work around to make the railroad a success. James is supposedly a good "Washington man," able to get government concessions and favors from the Federal government, and, remember, I'm not going to discuss the unrealistic political economics of the book.

The first section of Atlas Shrugged, from one viewpoint at least, consists of getting Dagney into bed with the first male protagonist, Henry (Hank) Rearden, the head of Rearden Steel, who has just created ten-point steel…I mean, Reardon Metal, an unlikely (from a metallurgical standpoint) alloy of iron and copper. It's a superstrong alloy, and, naturally, everyone in the business and scientific community is against it, apparently because it's so good, and doesn't conform to theory and stuff like that. Dagney and Hank are first business partners, trying to get a railroad line to the previously mentioned shale oil fields, and to do this they have to reinforce a bridge, which is done with Rearden Metal, so there's this fantastic high-speed train ride through Denver, over the bridge, etc., into the Valley of the Oil Shale, or whatever it's called, and at the end of it, Taggart and Rearden have frenzied sex, because, well, come on now, this is Ayn Rand writing here, and both of them are rich, good-looking, talented, and very highly sexed.

Afterwards, Rearden, who is already married, has an attack of conscience and gets all moralistic and self-loathing, but Dagney laughs it off and convinces him that sex is good, which, frankly, isn't that difficult a bit of persuasion, is it? Still, it would never have been necessary with Howard Roark, the previous Randian protagonist with initials HR.

Later, Reardon's wife goes absolutely ballistic when she learns that he's having an affair with Taggart, and not, as she first thought some chorus girl or other cheap tart. Rand gets this bit of psychology almost perfectly correct, including the fact that Rearden is so clueless that he thinks that his wife would be more ready to accept his affair with Taggart, because it's high romance rather than low and tawdry, i.e. when it actually threatens his marriage, rather than being a cheap bit on the side.

Okay, we'll now fast forward over the second part of the book, Either-Or, which has its points, especially the ongoing romance/sexual frenzy between Dagney and Hank, plus the slow deterioration of the country (and our heroes' fortunes) as the evil altruistic philosophies roaming the land devour the wealth of the country's creators, and as those creative sorts slowly disappear, one by one, into some mysterious Void. Even the dull reader will, by the end of Either-Or (probably even earlier) guess that this John Galt fellow has something to do with it, and the brighter readers will have figured out that all the cool people are leaving their posts because John Galt or one of his minions has talked them into it.

Okay, let's leave that odd little point for a bit, though it is odd isn't it, that all these rich and talented folks are walking away from their fortunes and place in society? And it's a lot of them, with nary a one of them blowing the whistle, or blabbing to somebody who might take note of it.

But Part Three, A is A (for all you comic book fans, that's where Ditko's "Mr. A" comes from), finds Dagney Taggart, after crashing her plane in a small Colorado valley at the end of Part Two, waking up in "Galt's Gulch." And who should be her rescuer but the fabled John Galt?

All right, blah, blah, blah, Dagney can't yet bring herself to retire from the world and join the strikers. Yes, that's what they are, strikers. It's "the mind on strike," because, you know, businessmen are such intellectuals. Okay, there's also artists, composers, scientists, engineers, etc. Yeah, yeah, every artist I've even known knew his Schopenhauer. And read Aristotle in the original Greek. Crap, I said I wasn't going to do that.

Anyway, Galt pretty much effortlessly, I mean effortlessly, takes over Taggart's affections. Another of her former lovers, Francisco d'Anconia, is also in Galt's Gulch, but although he is damned dashing and all, he doesn't measure up to Galt. No one does, not really. Not even Hank Rearden, who later in the book, gives up the rights to Rearden Metal to save Taggart the public humiliation (!) of the exposure of their affair. Taggart then exposes the affair herself, on national radio, but Rearden figures out that she's fallen for someone else because she only uses the past tense.

Then, blah, blah, blah, hundred page speech from Galt explaining how the world really works, everyone who isn't a total asshole joins the strike, cut, fade to black and well, who knows what happens afterwards, the dictatorship of the intelligentsia? Some sort of Objectivist paradise perhaps.

Or maybe not.

Consider. You've got these two folks, Taggert and Rearden. They are as individualistic as they come. They come together (so to speak) over shared interests and passions, share triumphs and some defeats. They are star-crossed lovers.

Then this guy Galt waltzes in, Taggert swoons and Rearden lets it happen. And none of these folks, not the industrialists, the heirs of great fortune, the artists, composers, writers, the damn pirate even, none of them go against the class. All these rugged individualists join in a collective action, a strike, for God's sake.

How is this possible? I can come up with only one, plausible within the context of science fiction, answer.

John Galt is a Slan. Maybe he doesn't have tendrils, but slans don't have to have tendrils. But he's super-smart, capable of inventing a fantastic new energy device all by his lonesome. He's super-attractive, because, well, slans are like that. And he obviously has some sort of mind control power, just like Jommy Cross developed in Slan. Galt may not be an exact van Vogtian slan, but he's obviously some sort of telepathic mind-controlling mutant. It's the only reading of Atlas Shrugged that makes any sort of sense.

Because otherwise, all these rugged individualists would have had to have taken up exactly the same political ideology and exactly the same course of collective action in support of that ideology. And that's too implausible to believe. It's just ridiculous.

Meteor Crater

On one of my cross-country trips, I decided to visit Meteor Crater.
It was the first time I’d taken I-10 on my way across. There’s a point at which you can decide to take a side trip either north to the Grand Canyon or south to Meteor Crater. The Grand Canyon sidetrack is basically a day trip, while Meteor Crater is only like 20 miles off the Interstate, so I went to Meteor Crater.

Meteor Crater is seriously cool, a big hole out in the middle of nowhere. There was a debate originally about whether it was from a meteor or whether it was volcanic in origin. One of the arguments against it being meteoric was that it was so symmetrical, and people imagined that a meteor was more likely to come in at an angle, and that would show up as an asymmetry, an elongated gouge in the surface, in other words.

That seems intuitive, and it’s wrong. The problem is that our intuition doesn’t deal very well with the difference between momentum and energy. It drives me crazy in news articles about cosmic rays, where the energy of very high energy cosmic rays is compared to a well-hit golf ball. While this is technically true, when we think of a speeding golf ball, it’s the momentum that we’re visualizing, not its energy. The impact when it hits you, or the feel of it coming off the club, those are phenomena of momentum, rather than the amount of heat it would generate when it stops, which is a measure of energy. In the cosmic ray example, a better indication would be that it has an energy similar to what is required for a photoflash on a camera.

In the case of a meteor impact, the amount of kinetic energy involved totally dominates the behavior on impact. The meteor basically explodes, with the energy of many kilotons. It’s as if you lobbed a grenade into a sandbox. It doesn’t matter what angle it comes in at, the explosion is going to produce a circular crater.

All of which makes this last bit just a little embarrassing. There I was driving along a road in the Arizona desert, a flat, flat, desert. Then, after a while, the road began to climb. I looked ahead and saw the road going up a hill, the only hill in sight. I realized that the crater would be at the end of the road.

And I found myself thinking, “Gee, what are the odds that the meteor would have hit the only hill in the area?”

Duh.

Isoprene

Isoprene is 2-Methyl-1,3-butadiene, photochemically a highly reactive organic compound, owing to the two reactive olefinic groups (double carbon-carbon bonds) in its structure:

CH2=C(CH3)-CH=CH2

It’s also of interest in air chemistry because it’s biogenic; the major source of emissions of isoprene into the atmosphere is hardwood trees and similar plants. Softwoods emit terpenes, the most common of which is alpha pinene, which is what turpentine is made of. Terpenes themselves are biologically synthesized from isoprene, but the terpene emitters don’t emit much isoprene.

The terpenes are even more reactive than isoprene, but that reactivity actually tends to reduce their ozone forming potential, for two reasons. The first is that they are so reactive that they react very rapidly with ozone itself. The second is that, after reaction, especially with ozone, the high molecular weight products that are formed tend to have a low enough vapor pressure that they form aerosol particles. Some amount of naturally forming haze comes from the reaction of terpenes with ozone, and it’s often said that the Smokey Mountains got their name from this pre-industrial haze.

One of the olefinic bonds in isoprene also has a methyl group associated with it, and this alkylation alters the electron distribution of the double bond and makes it more reactive. So that bond tends to be the primary reaction site, with the result that the product formed (after the usual smog reaction hugger mugger) is preferred. The usual product of that reaction site is methyl vinyl ketone, while the other site reactions give methacrolein, an aldehyde with a double bond in it.

Both MVK and methacrolein have interesting further reaction sequences. MVK will further react to give methyl glyoxal, which is also a product of the photooxidation of alkylated benzenes like toluene and xylene. Methyl glyoxal photolyzes like crazy, and it turned out to be the powerful radical source in the toluene system when we were earlier studying toluene.

Methacrolein primarily reacts via hydroxyl (OH) grabbing onto its aldehydic hydrogen, which give a peroxyacyl like compound. Faithful readers will be reminded of peroxyacetyl nitrate which was the first peroxyacyl nitrate (PAN) to be studied in smog chemistry, and it remains the most important. But the methacrolein analog to PAN turns out to be temporarily important in the photooxidation of isoprene. It serves as a temporary sink for both reactive radicals and nitrogen dioxide.

The nitrogen oxide sinks due to the PAN analog plus PAN itself cause an isoprene-NOx system to run out of nitrogen oxides relatively early in a smog chamber experiment, sometimes before the isoprene itself is gone. If that happens, the ozone may begin to decline (owing to the exhaustion of the NOx). But if the temperature continues to increase, as it does in smog chambers that don’t control the temperature (as is the case for outdoor chambers), then the thermal decomposition of the PANs will bleed both NOx and reactive radicals back into the system and the ozone will begin to climb again.

The first outdoor smog chamber experiments showed just such a phenomenon, resulting is odd looking “double peak” experiments. By selecting the appropriate value for the thermal decay of the “methacropan” and by paying attention to the radical-radical reactions that determined PAN decay generally, I was able to fit those experiments using gas phase chemistry while everyone else was suggesting that it was all due to “chamber effects.” Given a broad enough definition of “chamber effect” that was certainly true, but the actual effect that was responsible was simply the increasing temperature as the day progressed, a phenomenon that isn’t confined to smog chambers.

A Google search on “isoprene photochemistry” gives 45,000 hits. “Isoprene photochemistry Killus” gives only 200. Using Google Scholar gives 1740 and 84 respectively. That’s either 0.5% or 5%, not all that big a chunk either way. But for a brief while in 1983-4, I knew more about the photochemistry of isoprene than anyone else on the face of the planet.