Ventiak
an island somewhere in the brain
The current problem is where we should have the book launch. On the one hand, we could do the customary and eminently satisfactory thing and hold it at Unity Books. However, my good friend Agnes, whose company provides me with much needed contract work to enable me to continue with my dissolute life-style, has offered to co-sponsor the event. It would be better for her if the venue were somewhere more corporate. Who will pay for what, though? And does anyone quite understand what the descent of a flock pelicans might mean?
And, of course, it is not at all clear how big a flock it will be. That will depend upon how many of my friends are available, how many literary hangers on decide to avail themselves of free food and drink, and whether or not any fans decide to show up, assuming that I have any. Amanda suggests that there could well be one or two enemies who decide to attend in order to enjoy, with malicious glee, the smallness of the crowd. I want to point out to her that a hundred enemies would make a great occasion. Janice says there will be a thousand friends. I hope she's wrong. I know she's wrong. I don't even know a thousand people. Or do I?
Black Earth/White Bones has got a useful notice in The Press from the discerning Chris Moore. It talks about the ontological status of Ventiak and gives the website address. It also quotes liberally from the press release; mentioning the process of writing the book, the green theme and some of the ideas behind it.
'Makes it sound like an earnest intellectual wank,' Amanda said.
I don't agree. And in any case, the only bad publicity is no publicity, according to the pundits.
Janice, who is a bit of fan of mine (she is a fan of almost everyone, to be honest) immediately leapt to my defence, claiming that I am one of the country's most under-appreciated writers and that my fiction is as good as (or even better than) Carl Stead's or Fiona Kidman's or Maurice Gee's or... I stopped her before she got onto too many Nobel prize winners. The shade of McGonagall was hovering in the wings. Although it might just be that Janice fancies me. She seems a bit desperate at the moment.
All this talk about the book is making me nervous. I am feeling exposed and vulnerable. I need another project. And, indeed, I do have a book that I started two years ago. From memory there's about twenty thousand words of it. I must haul it out and take a look at it.
On the other hand, I could just let it be known that I am writing my memoirs and put the fear of God into the pelicans.
Last night we got into one of those arguments about who wrote Shakespeare's plays. Felix had just finished James and Rubinstein's book The Truth will Out and was convinced by their argument that the true author was Sir Henry Neville. None of the rest of us had read it but it didn't stop us expressing an opinion. There were some Oxfordians among us and one or two Marlovians. Ignorance is a fine source of speculation.
Amanda, of course, can't stand this sort of thing. For a while she put up with it but gradually the pressure built to a point where her feelings couldn't be contained any longer. All this stuff was snobbery, she said. Just a bunch of upper class English academic twits who couldn't stand the thought that a man with no more than a grammar school education could achieve anything.
Trevor, who had been dangerously quiet for a while, agreed with her and then suggested that the true author was actually an elephant scribbling randomly on pieces of paper with a quill pen held in its trunk.
Amanda's friend, Janice, was appalled by the suggestion. 'Impossible,' she said.
'Of course, it's possible' Trevor told her. 'If it can be done by monkeys tapping on computer keys, it can be done by an elephant with a quill. It's just that the probability is very, very small.'
'How small?' Amanda demanded.
'Well, I don't know.'
'Go on. If you are going to make stupid claims, you ought to be able to back them up.'
Trevor just laughed and gave his usual shrug. It was Rupert who came to his rescue. This is just the sort of problem to pique Rupert's interest.
'Forget the elephant,' he said. 'Let's just start with the monkey and let's take not the whole works but the phrase 'To be or not to be'. What do you reckon?'
'Easy,' Trevor said.
'Yes,' Janice agreed. 'I suppose so.'
'Does it have to be spelt absolutely perfectly?' I asked. 'And what about capital letters? Do we allow just lower case or does it have to start with a capital?'
'Leave the capital letter,' Rupert said. 'We'll suppose the monkey doesn't use the shift key and has been trained to pick out only the 26 letters of the alphabet and the spacebar. No punctuation. Okay?'
'Then it's very easy,' Trevor told him.
'We'll see. Give me a couple of minutes. Talk among yourselves.' He grabbed a calculator and a pen and paper.
Of course, the last thing possible after someone says 'Talk among yourselves' is an easy conversation. We stared at each other for a while. Monty twiddled his thumbs. Janice gave Felix one of her sweetest smiles. (I think she's keen on him, incidentally, and he's probably not indifferent to her either. He certainly looked for a moment as if he felt a poem coming on. However, in Felix's case that could just be indigestion.)
I decided to go back to my previous point. 'How perfect would it have to be, though? "to be or not te be" - would that be all right? Or "to be or be to not"?'
'Pretty clever', Janice answered.
'How about "be to not or be to"?' Monty offered.
'Or "to be or not to recipe book"?' Trevor said.
'Close but no cigar,' Amanda told him.
'Interesting isn't it how we read sense and meaning into things that don't necessarily have any meaning?' I said.
Nobody seemed inclined to follow up on that so we all just stared at Rupert while he finished his calculations.
'All right,' he said at last. 'Try this. There are 18 key presses in 'to be or not to be' including the spaces. Given the monkey randomly presses 26 letters plus the space bar, there are 27 to the power of 18 (or 27 multiplied by 27 17 times) possible ways of getting the 18 key presses, only one of which is right. That's a number of about 6 followed by 25 zeroes.'
'Quite a few,' Felix said.
Janice laughed. 'I told you.' What she'd told us I am not quite sure about it.
Rupert went on. 'Now suppose our monkey presses three keys every second and suppose he does it for 13 billion years, which is about as long as the Universe has been in existence, then, according to my calculations, the probability of him not managing to produce 'to be or not to be' is 0.999999979, where 1 is complete certainty.'
'In other words, you wouldn't bet on it,' Monty said.
'In other words, I'd rather bet on the survival of someone falling from a plane with a failed parachute,' Rupert said. 'That happened the other day.'
'Wow!' Janice said. 'And that's just "to be or not to be"? And trying for the age of the Universe?'
'It is.'
'So much for the works of Shakespeare,' Amanda said.
'So much for the elephant,' I added.
'Actually, I think a bloke called Alexander Fishbasket from East Cheme wrote Shakespeare,' Trevor announced. 'At least, it seems more likely than the elephant.'
'Or the monkey,' Rupert added.
'And there was an Alexander Fishbasket?' Janice asked.
'I think the point is that it is more likely that there was an Alexander Fishbasket who wrote the whole of Shakespeare than that the monkey randomly wrote "to be or not to be",' Amanda said. 'Isn't that right?' She looked at Rupert, a moment of communion between them.
'I might have to do more calculations,' he told her.