“Everybody raves about our bread pudding,” the waiter said reproachfully. “It’s our most popular dessert.”
The bad thing about studying trends is that you can’t ever turn it off. You sit there across from your date eating tiramisu, and instead of thinking what a nice guy he is, you find yourself thinking about trends in desserts and how they always seem to be gooey and calorie-laden in direct proportion to the obsession with dieting.
Take tiramisu, which has chocolate and whipped cream and two kinds of cheese. And burnt-sugar cake, which was big in the forties, in spite of wartime rationing.
Pineapple upside-down cake was a fad in the twenties, a dessert I hope doesn’t make a comeback anytime soon; chiffon cake in the fifties; chocolate fondue in the sixties.
I wondered if Bennett was immune to food trends, too, and what his ideas on bread pudding and chocolate cheesecake were.
“You thinking about hair-bobbing again?” Billy Ray said. “Maybe you’re looking at too many things. This conference I’m at says you’ve got to niff.”
“Niff?”
“NYF. Narrow Your Focus. Eliminate all the peripherals and focus in on the core variables. This hair-bobbing thing can only have one cause, right? You’ve got to narrow your focus to the likeliest possibilities and concentrate on those. It works, too. I tried it on a case of sheep mange. You’re sure you won’t come to my workshop with me?”
“I have to go to the library,” I said.
“You should get the book. Five Steps to Focusing on Success.”
After dinner Billy Ray went off to niff, and I went over to the library to see about Browning. Lorraine wasn’t there. A girl wearing duct tape, hair wraps, and a sullen expression was. “It’s three weeks overdue,” she said.
“That’s impossible,” I said. “I only checked it out last week. And I checked it in. On Monday.” After I’d tried Pippa on Flip and decided Browning didn’t know what he was talking about. I’d checked in Browning and checked out Othello, that other story about undue influences.
She sighed. “Our computer shows it as still checked out. Have you looked around at home?”
“Is Lorraine here?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “No-o-o-o.”
I decided it was the better part of valor to wait until she was and went over to the stacks to look for Browning myself.
The Complete Works wasn’t there, and I couldn’t remember the name of the book Billy Ray had suggested. I pulled out two books by Willa Cather, who knew what prairie cooking had actually been like, and Far from the Madding Crowd, which I remembered as having sheep in it, and then wandered around, trying to remember the name of Billy Ray’s book and hoping for inspiration.
Libraries have been responsible for a lot of significant scientific breakthroughs. Darwin was reading Malthus for recreation (which should tell you something about Darwin), and Alfred Wegener was wandering around the Marburg University library, idly spinning the globe and browsing through scientific papers, when he got the idea of continental drift. But nothing came to me, not even the name of Billy Ray’s book. I went over to the business section to see if I would remember the name of the book when I saw it.
Something about narrowing the focus, eliminating all the peripherals. “It can only have one cause, right?” Billy Ray had said.
Wrong. In a linear system it might, but hair-bobbing wasn’t like sheep mange. It was like one of Bennett’s chaotic systems. There were dozens of variables, and all of them were important. They fed into each other, iterating and reiterating, crossing and colliding, affecting each other in ways no one would expect. Maybe the problem wasn’t that I had too many causes, but that I didn’t have enough. I went over to the nine hundreds and checked out Those Crazy Twenties; Flappers, Flivvers, and Flagpole-Sitters; and The 1920’s: A Sociological Study, and as many other books on the twenties as I could carry, and took them up to the desk.
“I show an overdue book for you,” the girl said. “It’s four weeks overdue.”
I went home, excited for the first time that I was on the right track, and started work on the new variables.
The twenties had been awash in fads: jazz, hip flasks, rolled-down stockings, dance crazes, raccoon coats, mah-jongg, running marathons, dance marathons, kissing marathons, Stutz Bearcats, flagpole-sitting, tree-sitting, crossword puzzles. And somewhere in all those rouged knees and rain slickers and rocking-chair derbies was the trigger that had set off the hair-bobbing craze.
I worked until very late and then went to bed with Far from the Madding Crowd. I was right. It was about sheep. And fads. In Chapter Five one of the sheep fell over a cliff, and the others followed, plummeting one after the other onto the rocks below.
3. Tributaries
Diorama wigs [1750–60]
Hair fad of the court of Louis XVI inspired by Madame de Pompadour, who was fond of dressing her hair in unusual ways. Hair was draped over a frame stuffed with cotton wool or straw and cemented with a paste that hardened, and the hair was powdered and decorated with pearls and flowers. The fad rapidly got out of hand. Frames grew as high as three feet tall, and the decorations became elaborate and then pictorial. Hairdos had waterfalls, cupids, and scenes from novels. Naval battles, complete with ships and smoke, were waged on top of women’s heads, and one widow, overcome with mourning for her dead husband, had his tombstone erected in her hair. Died out with the advent of the French Revolution and the resultant shortage of heads to put wigs on.
Rivers are not just wide streams. They are drainage basins for dozens, sometimes hundreds of tributaries. The Lena River in Siberia, for example, drains an area of over a million square miles, including the Karenga, the Olekma, the Vitim, and the Aldan rivers, and a thousand smaller streams and brooks, some of which follow such distant, convoluted courses it would never occur to you they connected to the Lena, thousands of miles away.
The events leading up to a scientific breakthrough are frequently not only random but far afield from science. Take the measles. Einstein had them when he was four and his father was only trying to amuse a sick little boy when he gave him a pocket compass to play with. And the keys to the universe.
Fleming’s life is a whole system of coincidences, beginning with his father, who was a groundskeeper on the Churchill estate. When ten-year-old Winston fell in the lake, Fleming’s father jumped in and rescued him. The grateful family rewarded him by sending his son Alexander to medical school.
Take Penzias and Wilson. Robert Dicke, at Princeton University, talked to P.J.E. Peebles about calculating how hot the Big Bang was. He did, realized it was hot enough to be detectable as a residue of radiation, and told Peter G. Roll and David T. Wilkinson that they should look for microwaves.
Peebles (are you following this?) gave a talk at Johns Hopkins in which he mentioned Roll and Wilkinson’s project. Ken Turner of the Carnegie Institute heard the lecture and mentioned it to Bernard Burke at MIT, a friend of Penzias. (Still with me?)