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Lisa Zeidner and John Allen Paulos

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from: John Allen Paulos

Byting the Bullet

Posted Monday, June 28, 1999, at 2:06 PM ET

Hi Lisa,

Just got back an hour ago from a science-writing conference at Cal Tech and a visit with my parents in Milwaukee, but since I had my laptop with me and since home is where you hang your @, I wasn't too discombobulated. Like WWW portals, newspapers have an anchoring property and I can trace my life through the primary newspapers I read at each stage of it: the Chicago Tribune, Milwaukee Journal, Rocky Mountain News, Madison Capitol Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and, of course, the New York Times disguised in its baggy blue overcoat, or, in your more poetic formulation, as a Hollywood swimming pool.

You mention stories about the have-nots and the have-lots in the paper. A victim of occupational myopia, I'm suspicious of anecdotal profiles of the exploits and purchases of the latter. They bring to mind one of my favorite stories from Boswell's Life of Johnson:

Sir, it is amazing how things are exaggerated. A gentleman was lately telling in a company where I was present, that in France as soon as a man of fashion marries, he takes an opera girl into keeping; and this he mentioned as a general custom. "Pray, Sir, (said I,) how many opera girls may there be?" He answered, "About fourscore." "Well then, Sir, (said I,) you see there can be no more than fourscore men of fashion who can do this."

Comments like "Everybody's doing this" or "they're all buying that" usually make me itch. Maybe my background in mathematical logic has made it difficult for me to interpret "all" as signifying something other than all. If uttered by someone from the rural Midwest, these comments are easily recognized as being quite provincial. Appearing in fashionable (but here anonymous) magazines, however, they induce in many the dread, dread, dread of being thought unhip.

I like your remark about the Information Highway being one gigantic high-school yearbook. Of course, it also involves just a teeny bit of distortion. There weren't, for example, many Kosovars, born-again Christians, sports celebrities, or gang members in my high school. (My plodding literalness strikes again. Sorry, Lisa.) The remark is accurate in a sense though. As in high school we establish our own small bands of in-people--cliques or virtual villages, as the case may be.

In this regard, I noted, as you probably did, that both our names appeared in yesterday's New York Times Book Review. Is there any significance to this? Of course not. Just another appearance of the great, fraudulent god Synchronicity. Or is it a literary variant of the ubiquitous small-world phenomenon? Given any pair of people A and B, there is almost always a short chain of intermediates ... In this sense too the information highway can seem to be a giant high school yearbook. (Maureen Dowd as head jeer-leader?)

You say you'd like an ad-free, graphics-free world and a clean Zen slate. Instead we have the Internet and Microsoft Slate. Nothing to do, I guess, except byte the bullet and deal with it. Over and out.

As always,
John

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314151617
from: John Allen Paulos

Byting the Bullet

Posted Monday, June 28, 1999, at 2:06 PM ET
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John Allen Paulos is a professor of mathematics at Temple University and the author of six books, most recently Once Upon a Number (click here to buy the book). Lisa Zeidner, a professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of four novels, most recently Layover (click here to buy the book), and two books of poems.
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