{"id":11905,"date":"2012-10-13T14:01:27","date_gmt":"2012-10-13T18:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=11905"},"modified":"2012-10-14T00:26:46","modified_gmt":"2012-10-14T04:26:46","slug":"patterns-the-pi-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2012\/10\/patterns-the-pi-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Patterns: The Pi Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the first of an occasional series of posts centered around my fascination with patterns: visible patterns, audible rhythms, simple habits of <\/em>being.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>How I first came to read science fiction is anybody’s guess. I don’t think any of my friends read it, and I can’t remember any adult steering me in that direction. Possibly, the main draw was that the town library (as I recall) maintained a completely separate section for fantasy and SF — completely separate, that is, from the age-defined “children’s books” and “adult books” sections. Unlike those in the kids’ area, the F\/SF section’s books weren’t big-format with lots of pictures. They had lots of\u00a0words<\/em>, like the inch-thick (and beyond) monsters of the adult section. But, unlike with the adult section, the librarians didn’t care how old you were. No one took F\/SF seriously enough. How could anyone, even a child, possibly come to harm of even the psychological sort by reading about adventures in science, space, and time?<\/p>\n

Of course there was plenty of conventional SF available — space operas, mad scientists, that sort of thing. But every now and then, especially in the SF anthologies of short stories, you’d come across something which really made your little pre-high-school brain jump to its toes, throw its arms wide, and turn inside-out. One such story for me — one of the most disturbing stories I’d ever read, remaining so for a long time — was\u00a0Alfred Bester’s 1959 tale called “The Pi Man.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It’s not a horror story: that’s not why I say “disturbing.” No scary monsters therein. (Or are there…?) At one level, it disturbed me greatly that the author treated the English language so casually, apparently not caring whether he wrote “professionally” or not.<\/p>\n

The narrator — and protagonist — is a Wall Street arbitrageur<\/em>. Here’s how he describes his job:<\/p>\n

…simultaneous buying and selling of moneys in different markets to\u00a0profit from unequal price. Try to follow simple example: Pound\u00a0sterling is selling for $2.79-1\/4 in London. Rupee is selling for $2.79\u00a0in New York. One rupee buys one pound in Burma. See where the\u00a0arbitrage lies? I buy one rupee for $2.79 in New York, buy one\u00a0pound for rupee in Burma, sell pound for $2.79-1\/4 in London, and I\u00a0have made 1\/4 cent on the transaction. Multiply by $100,000, and I\u00a0have made $250 on the transaction. Enormous capital required.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See that? All those sentence fragments. Those dropped helping verbs and articles. What, Bester was too hurried to fix the wording before sending the manuscript off? His editor was sloppy drunk or something?<\/p>\n

(Leave aside for the moment that no other description of arbitrage I’ve ever read explains it, for me, quite as clearly.)<\/p>\n

But heck, that wasn’t by any means the worst example. The author lays out what to expect right in the first paragraph:<\/p>\n

How to say? How to write? When sometimes I can be fluent,\u00a0even polished, and then, reculer pour mieux sauter<\/em><\/span>, patterns take hold\u00a0of me. Push. Compel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For a young reader more used to the mysteries of (say) how Tom Swift, Jr.’s latest invention worked, this was challenging stuff. It made me squirm just to read it.<\/p>\n

Beyond the sentence structure and grammar, I suddenly faced typographic challenges as well: the way certain passages looked on the page, clearly arranged that way to somehow alter (better?) the meaning. Here’s how the narrator describes what he had to eat for lunch on one occasion:<\/p>\n

\n

Martini           Martini<\/p>\n

Croque M\u2019sieur
\nRoquefort<\/p>\n

Salad<\/p>\n

Coffee<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Even without the first line, there’s no doubt what he’d ordered from the bar.<\/p>\n

None of which provided the biggest hurdle for a kid in almost stereotypically conventional early 1960s small-town America. No, the biggest hurdle came from the fact that all this stuff\u00a0actually made sense<\/em>… once you thought about it… and once you’d gotten past some of the action.<\/p>\n

Occupation aside, the protagonist, Peter Marko, is what he calls the Pi Man. That’s Greek-letter π\u00a0Man<\/em>. The pi<\/em> not to be confused, he says, with\u00a0psi<\/em>: he’s not exactly blessed with a form of ESP or other psychic power. No, the\u00a0pi<\/em> is like\u00a0P<\/em> —\u00a0P<\/em> as in\u00a0pattern<\/em>. He’s acutely, almost excruciatingly, sensitive to pattern, or rather to its absence. Even more, he’s acutely, almost excruciatingly obsessed with\u00a0patterning that which is not patterned<\/em>. For example, on a day when the markets are especially hectic:<\/p>\n

Gold fluctuating. I am behind at eleven-thirty, but the patterns put\u00a0me ahead $57,075.94 by half-past noon, Daylight Saving Time.\u00a057075 makes a nice pattern but that 94\u00a2! Iych! Ugly.\u00a0Symmetry above all else. Alas, only 24\u00a2 hard money in my pockets.\u00a0Called secretary, borrowed 70\u00a2 from her, and threw sum total out\u00a0window.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Okay, that’s weird but not particularly disturbing. Ditto the rhythms — or the arrhythms — of language: Marko goes on quite fluently and eloquently at times; he’s just compelled to balance those times out, with bursts of gibberish, pidgin English, foreign language, sometimes for days at a time. No, the disturbing parts for me were the balances he’s forced to make in his life. Does he like somebody? worse, does he like them a\u00a0lot<\/em>? He’s got to compensate, by doing something horrible to them.<\/p>\n

And woe betide someone he falls in love with…<\/p>\n

The story isn’t airtight. Bester makes no attempt to explain how Marko got to this state (indeed, it’s scarcely like a “science fiction” story at all in that regard). And his compulsive patternizing isn’t absolute, either, but a little arbitrary: he notices some things that are off-balance, but ignores others. (For instance, in the previous example, he lets that “half-past noon” slide by without comment; you might think a purist knee-jerk balancer would square his accounts at exactly noon, or at least 12:12 or 12:21.)<\/p>\n

When I re-read it recently, I was still creeped out: a shiver of the old squirms ran up and down my spine.<\/p>\n

I was surprised not to find a good-quality version of it anywhere online. I did locate a PDF, obviously created from a word-processing program. It isn’t perfect (those typographic challenges, y’know); but for what it’s worth I’ve cleaned it up a bit and uploaded it here<\/a>\u00a0(108KB PDF).<\/p>\n

When I can find a copy of the story in its original form, probably from the library, I’ll fix up the remaining loose ends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the first of an occasional series of posts centered around my fascination with patterns: visible patterns, audible rhythms, simple habits of being. How I first came to read science fiction is anybody’s guess. I don’t think any of my friends read it, and I can’t remember any adult steering me in that direction. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,3217,50,36,105,372],"tags":[528,3223,3224],"class_list":{"0":"post-11905","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-backwards","7":"category-patterns","8":"category-language-writing_cat","9":"category-reading","10":"category-short-fiction","11":"category-style-and-craft","12":"tag-science-fiction","13":"tag-alfred-bester","14":"tag-the-pi-man","15":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-361","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11905"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11949,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11905\/revisions\/11949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}