Intuition by Allegra goodman

[lightreads]

Intuition by Allegra Goodman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


One of those where I can rattle off a whole long list of good things about this book and Goodman's talent, but my face would still be going '…eh' the entire time. Watch:

The story of a cancer research lab and what happens when one researcher calls shenanigans on the extraordinary results of her colleague. An intensely interpersonal web, where it's not about the conflict and who is right and what the truth is, but instead about these personalities in this high-pressure mixing bowl. It's a book about science by way of being 95% about people -- about their screwups and jealousies and intuitions and desires and money and patience and breaking points. About how that makes science go as much as truth does. The writing has that lucid, pane-of-freshly-scrubbed-glass quality, if you know what I mean. It's not that this book is sympathetic to each conflicting point-of-view. It bypasses that to something more straightfaced and real and tangled. Sort of lifting the knot of people and squinting at it from every direction, watching it go, recording the data. One of the better executions of omniscient writing on a technical level I've seen in a long time.

It's all quite admirable and well-crafted and interesting.

And I just didn't care. Really at all. Shrug. I don't know, it just seems patently obvious to me that the practice of science is fundamentally no different than any other vocation or discipline: it ticks complexly and emotionally and interpersonally. Okay. Next.

I'd probably have cared if this was about a presidential campaign, though. So take that as you will.



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Comments

[livingbyfiction]

*Raises hand from the back of the room*

For those of us who don't really know you in real life, could you please take a moment to explain how you come by visual analogies such as freshly scrubbed panes of glass? Based on your sartorial refinement, I started out thinking that your eye troubles were a teenaged sort of development. Then you posted about Bunnicula, so I added a data point. Now we're talking windowpanes, which leads me to conclude that you are actually 3 different people (which explains a lot about your productivity).

Also: Science is affected by office politics? Whoa nelly, next you'll tell me science is affected by university politics, and maybe even (gasp!) politics politics.

[lightreads]

Okay, tldr, but you did ask!

I was born with very low vision, then it was stable from birth to 16, when I lost some difficult to measure amount, and then stable again until the year I started law school when my left eye imploded entirely. So functionally speaking, these days I'm working out of the far right corner of my right eye (no central vision at all). This is why when you're sitting and talking to me, I'm generally tilting my face left. Acuity is too low to put a number on it. My retinologist uses a scale where I can see large hand gestures at about 18 inches, but not much farther, and not enough acuity to count fingers, generally. Which is basically where I've always been, in broad strokes -- it's one of those things where the losses were a much bigger deal to me functionally than could be accurately measured, just because I was starting from such little vision anyway. And I'm a bit of an outlier in terms of what I get out of what I have -- I'm far more mobile and spatially aware than a lot of people in my place on the scale. Shrug.

So writingwise -- and this is interesting you asked about this, because I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about it. For writing, I think a lot of it was/is simple mimicry. People write visually, I learned what images they associate with what. And I wasn't always good at it -- I'd have betas tell me 'that doesn't make visual sense,' that sort of thing. And I always suspected I lacked visual metaphor creativity. Various people told me over time that my writing isn't very visual at all, but tends to engage much more seriously with the other senses. I can't tell, but it seems reasonable. I used to worry about it, like my writing was missing something, but I got over that invisibly at some point, and in the process became a lot more willing to throw something creative out there.

So tldr, but these days, when I pop out with a visual image, it may be reflexive mimicry, my brain spitting back out something I heard somewhere. But it also might be something I've experienced -- looking at something through something, for example, is familiar to me. Particularly looking at something through a clouded lens versus a clear one (I actually had a cataract a few years back, if you want to be really literal about it). But also, visual images are often not just visual. The words we use for them often have texture or mood or shading. Like the pane of glass, I said "scrubbed," which correlates to clean, not just to transparency. And I think a lot of what I'm doing with visual metaphors is engaging with them on other levels like that. That's where the creativity is coming from: choosing the words/image out of the stack I've absorbed that fits in a broader sense than the visual.

As for clothes, I just really, really enjoy them. And have good friends with opinions when I want them.

[livingbyfiction]

Fascinating. I enormously like the freshly scrubbed pane of glass imagery -- it conveys the idea of looking through, and also that Goodman achieves her lucidity by applying that special sort of effort that becomes invisible when done correctly.