The Valve - A Literary Organ | Statistically Improbable Phrases

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Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Statistically Improbable Phrases

Posted by John Holbo on 11/15/05 at 03:23 AM

This isn’t so important, but it’s interesting that Valve authors have such a lock on the top search results. (Well OK Belle’s post, not mine.)

Speaking of such things, here’s an amusing post (via languagehat.) Even better than the Scooter Libby bits are the Journey to the West bits. Reminds me of this old post, graced by one of my better titles.

I’m terribly jetlagged. Last night from 2-4 AM I was lying on the couch, rereading The Authority, vol. 1. (Which I find to be quite boring, confirming me in my suspicion that I am too old to read cape books not written by Moore or, possibly, Bendis or Busiek.) And I think this must be one of the great missed puns. Earth - LA, to be exact - invaded by a futuristic, half-alien 19th Century British navy, extruded out of a dimension called ‘Sliding Albion’. And you don’t call your story ’Emanant Victorians‘? What’s the point? The art is nice, is I suppose the answer. Speaking of which, Giornale Nuovo has some statistically improbable faces, I suppose you could say.

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Statistically improbably phrases: since these are “phrases” they seem to be compounds of adjectives or possessives and nouns, making them more descriptive of books that are lushly empirical, such as Dream of the Red Chamber. (Try it on Proust!)

Authority - The Authority has a lot of problems, but it’s innovative in a number of ways--first, in how it brings a sort of Hollywood spectacle to comic books. More interestingly, I think most of Ellis’s superhero work can be understood best as an excercise in genre parody. For example, Authority has two characters who are clearly Batman and Superman and who subtly showed to be in a gay relationship.

By kenchen on 11/15/05 at 04:03 PM | Permanent link to this comment

That was fast. (Although so statistically improbable it doesn’t show up in the first instance. Feeling lucky?)

By nnyhav on 11/16/05 at 03:54 PM | Permanent link to this comment

And I see that you’re quoted by Boynton on ‘academic blogs’, speaking of phrases deemed outliers ...

By nnyhav on 11/16/05 at 05:56 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Thanks for the heads up on the Boynton piece, nnyhav. I didn’t know it had come out. (I answered questions by email almost a month ago, I think it was.)

I’ll write about it later. It’s interesting that I sort of come off as a cautionary voice, saying ‘but how can blogs be acceptable?’ when the author of the piece himself - whose stuff I really like, by the by - is more gung ho about how academic blogging is potentially a great thing. Of course I believe it’s a great thing, too, and I want to make it much more academically mainstream and acceptable. But in our email exchange I mostly just confined myself to considering the obstacles, rather than the ways of overcoming them. I don’t mind that treatment. Pieces like this can help us achieve respectability, and I get to do a little ‘please don’t throw me in that briar patch’ song-and-dance about how I was never clamoring for it in the first place.

By John Holbo on 11/16/05 at 11:16 PM | Permanent link to this comment

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Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Statistically Improbable Phrases

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