The Kardashian-Hawking Inequality

Found in a dustbin in New York, what appears to be the transcript of an interview between a ‘famous celebrity’ KK and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.

KK- You’re really famous, right, for inventing black holes. Black’s really cool, but couldn’t you have them in other colours, like a gold hole?

SH- No.

KK- That’s such a shame, Sweetness. I was thinking that since they absorb everything you could make a really cool make-up removal pad by impregnating a sponge with lots of tiny black holes, but if the sponge was covered in black dots it might look dirty.

SH- The tiny black holes would absorb the sponge too.

KK- But we could use a really stiff sponge, right? I was wondering how heavy a tiny black hole would be.

SH-Mini black holes small enough to pepper a pad for make-up removal purposes would  be around  six hundred million, million, million, million tons.

KK- Hmmm… that sounds a bit too heavy. But they wouldn’t be burning hot like the Sun?

SH- No, the surface temperature of a small black hole is around 0.0000000001 of a degree above absolute zero.

KK- That’s really cool. Presumably that explains why they are called black-holes, right? The Hawking radiation given off at that temperature would have a frequency of… let me see (pauses to perform mental arithmetic) about 1500hz, millions of times less than that of visible light?

SH- Yes.

KK- I wrote a rap song for you to listen to while you do your experiments on black holes, to help you concentrate. I’ll sing it for you. (Leaps to feet, strikes nearby tuning fork against chassis of the Professor’s mobility scooter, and hums a note)

He lets his voice box do the talking

And we all know him as Stephen Hawking
He’s rightly famous across the nation
For discov’rin Hawking radiation
He became more famous by and by
For analysin’ Swartzchild radii
And for showing the likes of you and me

How to calculate black hole entropy

And one thing we like that’s really ace

Are the worm holes he’s found deep in space
No wonder his eyes are tired and bleary

From nights spent tackling quantum theory

When you see his conclusions on a graph

They make the Higgs Boson look really naff

I think he’s so very wise

He should have won a Nobel Prize

Some say he’s a bit of a miser

For have such a cheap old synthesiser

That gives him that distinctive voice

But we know really it’s a fashion choice

He could have a new one that would make him

Sound more like lovely sexy Kim

But I could think of nothing worse

Than talking about the universe

So hats off to clever clogs Stephen Hawking

Who’s days and nights of blackboard chalking

Have helped us understand our place

In the continuum we call space

Time.

Did you like it?

SH- I don’t do experiments. I’m a theoretical physicist.

KK - Didn’t you discover the Higgs Boson then?

SH (resentfully)- No.

KK – Is there going to be a Stephen Hawking Boson?

CP Violations in Literature

I received by post this morning a charming letter from a young lady named Sasha. I have learned in my physics class, she writes, that charge parity violations might account for the marked preponderance of matter over anti-matter in the observable universe- might an analogous process account for the preponderance of heroes over antiheroes in literature?

Indeed, I wrote on the very subject some years ago (see Sushing ED, Annal der Litereinschrifts,  Vol X11 Pages 213-409, July 1983). Any ex nihilo model of the emergence of literature must account for the imbalance of heroes to anti-heroes, and more generally novels to anti-novels. The proposals I submitted at Hay-on Wye in 2008 have been largely (and some would say wilfully) misunderstood by a too-conservative literary community. However, Vidal and others graciously acknowledged the validity of my ideas, which may be readily appreciated by anyone with a sufficiently open mind. Without considering the more complicated nuances of my argument, we may simply observe that dichotomous cognate meaning operates reflexively in any non-Brechtian verb-space. It follows- saper sunter- that the iterative operation of the reflexion through ablate normative perturbations will necessarily reduce objectivism, hence the asymmetry. Quite why such a simple theory has failed to penetrate the minds of the so-called literary academics, I will leave you to decide, but the words ‘stony ground’ spring to mind.

Do I speak bitterly? Perhaps- but can you blame me?

The Civil Wrights Movement

You find me this morning in a nostalgic mood, one prompted by news from the White House that the simple mansion in which I was raised is to be made a US National Monument.

The announcement honours my role as the progenitor of the US civil wrights movement which transformed the conduct of skilled manual workers in the 1950s.  Few now can remember the days in which my movement was formed, days in which it was not possible to walk from one end of a craft-village to the other without the cussing of curmudgeonly wrights bringing a wine-hued blush to one's cheek.

Upon its launch the movement was greeted by characteristically impolite catcalls from the artisan community, but I was undaunted. March after march, impassioned speech after impassioned speech, I laboured for a cause I knew to be wright, sorry, right.

Hitting new oratorical heights with my ‘I have a dream’ address in Bettysburg- an address that had old and young alike in tears at my vision of a manufactory world free of incivilities-  I stood foursquare against the combined enmities of a nation’s artificers, braving all to ensure that one day we would be…

(… is wheeled away by nurses.)

Creative Writing- What Next?

The term 'creative writing' was coined in 1963, so we ought to find something fresh to replace it as a focus for post-modern literary development. What about its logical complement, 'destructive writing'? How might one establish a school of destructive writing? What would be the tenets of such an abstract body? Would it suffice for work to be uncreative or would it have to destroy established literary ideas to qualify as 'destructive'? Would destructive writing have a finite scope, ending when all literary ideas had been destroyed? Or could the movement evolve and progress beyond the literary vacuum into the realm of anti-writing and the production of anti-novels?

These questions, and others, I must leave a puzzled literary world to resolve, as I need to lock-up the chickens for the night before the fox gets them.

CAMEL- the Campaign for More Editing in Literature

Do poorly produced books give you the hump? Join CAMEL- the Campaign for More Editing in Literature. Launched today, CAMEL seeks to rid a tortured humanity of the phenomenon of the over-hyped, under-edited bestseller riddled with short-comings.

How often have you had this experience…

You stand in a bookshop, desperate for something decent to read. Arrayed on a table is a collection of the bookseller’s latest offerings, the pick, one assumes, of the current literary crop. No matter which you choose, its blurb describes in golden phrases the book it adorns. You trust the words on the cover. Clutching your selection you walk to the checkout, an addict needing a fix. Money is paid: the book is yours. You take your seat on a crowded train. Ignoring your sullen fellow- passengers you retreat into your private world of literary appreciation, turning the pristine pages of your purchase. And then, they hit you- breaking through your willingly suspended disbelief come the cliché, the pleonasm, the syntactical gaffe, the gratuitously invented irrelevant detail, the misplaced exposition, the inapt simile, the indistinguishable characters, pronoun confusion, pedestrian prose, and every other type of verbal pestilence. Confused, you turn to the back cover. Yes it did proclaim ‘a startling literary talent’, ‘hugely accomplished’, and half-a-dozen other accolades, all of them, as you now realize, entirely misleading.

Why should a betrayed reading public suffer such injustice? Don’t let the publishers get away with it. Shame them, now. Using the comment box below, give your nomination for a book deserving the full five humps.

The Next Big Thing in Publishing

A conversation with the CEO of Penguin set me thinking. If writers are increasingly turning to self-publishing, why shouldn't publishers turn to self-writing? Think of it. Imagine you are a global publishing magnate. Your business is assailed each day with dire propositions from gormless agents who can't tell a good book from a wheelbarrow. Even when you find something half-decent you've no idea whether it is going to sell. You have a back-catalogue full of duds waiting to be pulped or remaindered. What other business allows its products to be invented by amateurs?  Did Steve Jobs and his team sit round waiting for hopeful agents to submit product ideas? Of course not.

It is time for a quiet revolution in publishing. One by one let us change our email addresses and phone numbers so that the agents can no longer pester us, and let's make the commissioning editors actually commission. Let them engage cohorts of professional writers- as full-time members of the staff- and let them market-research, design, develop, test and produce the novels of the future. Let us end the reliance on the contingencies of amateur authoring. Let us bring the work of product development in-house and do the job properly for once.

The Literary Games

Following our announcement of 'Live Literature'- a revolutionary development in the field of entertainment- we have made yet another huge cognitive leap. Today we announce The Literary Games!

For thousands of years men and women have competed in trials of strength, speed, skill, and stamina,  of which trials The Olympic Games is our most celebrated collection. Literature has never featured in these inspirational contests, and it is natural that a person of towering intellectual curiosity would ask why that should be so. The cause, I have concluded, is precisely the same at that which has prevented the development of writing as a performance art, namely the traditional use of pen and paper, which prevents the writing of the author from being viewed simultaneously by members of a large audience, a limitation affecting performance arts and spectator sports alike. However, today's ubiquity of digital broadcasting technology allows writing to be viewed live by huge audiences, opening up a gigantic opportunity for the literary-minded entrepreneur.

After minutes of effort I have the thing all sketched out.

The Literary Games will be an international event, held every two years, neatly filling the gaps between The Olympics and The World Cup.

The Games will be masterminded by an International Organising Committee, terms of reference for which I am already drafting. Naturally, I will be prepared to sit as the founding chair of the Committee, to oversee the first few delicate years in which The Games develop from being the brainchild of a genius to a fixture in the world's entertainment schedule.

Owing to its mountainous early workload, the Committee will meet fortnightly.  To ensure fairness to travelling participants, meetings will rotate between a number of convenient locations-  Bermuda, Nice, Geneva, Milan, The Maldives, Las Vegas, Acapulco, Phuket, Vail, St Moritz, and Monaco- with a modest scheme of stipends to defray the expenses of the members.

Countries will bid to host the prestigious event. The selection of the bids will be made in secret, and the results announced live during a quiet period in the entertainments calendar, thus simultaneously offering huge opportunities for publicity and back-handers.

The Games will span the literary spectrum, including fiction and non-fiction, and all established genres. Individual events will be scored by the 'weighted speed' method, in which the score is the quality of the written work (as rated by a panel of judges on a scale from 0 to 10) divided by the time taken for its completion. Thus competitors will face a tactical choice between gaining extra points through higher quality or speedier completion.

The 14-day programme is expected to include:

Short verse forms, including haiku and limerick. These to be in knock-out rounds each of 8 contestants, culminating in a final with four contestants.

Short-stories. To be between 1,995 and 2,005 words. Initial rounds to be in specific genres, with a cross-genre 'Grand Final'.

Long verse-forms. Length of the work to be at the choice of the competitor; however, the scores will be weighted by the number of words produced.

Non-fiction. Works to be full-length in genres specified by the judges ten days before the event.

Pentathlon. Authors compete in short verse-form, short story (two genres, selectable by the competitor from a list published by the judges on the day), non-fiction (freestyle), and long verse-form. Winner decided by normalised cumulative scores from individual events.

The Blue Ribband event will be the full length novel. To avoid cheating through the re-use of prepared material, the genre and synopsis of the novel will be stipulated by the judges, and revealed to the competitors two minutes before the starting gun. The most stringent security measures will be enforced to ensure no premature leaks of the specification. Authors will have nine days to complete their works, leaving five days for judging and speculation about the likely winner.

In all events competitors will be required to type their work on a standard digital device, so that it may be relayed in real-time to the judges and to a massive world-wide TV audience.  Suitable adjustments may be made at the discretion of the judges for authors with handicaps.

Authors may write in any language. Real-time translations will allow the events to be enjoyed by the non-polyglot, although the judging will be based upon the original transcript.

Publishing rights for works produced during The Games will vest with The Committee, and will be auctioned to sponsoring publishers to generate funds to re-invest in 'grass roots' literary participation schemes.

STOP PRESS

A late development in the formulation of the programme of events is the inclusion of the freestyle humorous sprint. Competitors to produce exactly 862 words on any topic. The work must be a genuinely new and spontaneous product of the author’s intellect, with no prior deliberation or planning, and produced in under 37 minutes.

Connoisseurs of literary humour the world-over: Sure, that’s a stitch-up. There’s only one person who could win an event like that. We’re going to lobby the committee to introduce a rule to prevent the Chair from being a competitor.

Self: Well if that’s your attitude I will resign, and let’s see what an utter shambles it all descends into without my leadership.