Sexual Codes of the Europeans in Evergreen Review

A long time ago I started thinking about a book of sexual codes, inspired by Calvino's Invisible Cities. What if cities had sexual codes - that is, systems of conventions for communicating sexual preferences, like the bidding systems of bridge? Travel books would include a brief overview of the relevant codes, the way they now sometimes include useful phrases for ordering a meal or finding the way to the train station.

I was thinking how odd it was: endless ingenuity has been spent developing bidding systems, to the point where if you play bridge with a new partner you always start with a conversation where you ask whether they play Acol, Standard American, Precision or some other system, and where, if you're playing a natural system, you ask whether they use standard conventions (Stayman, Blackwood), whether you will play weak or strong no trump, weak jump overcalls, what system of discards you'll use, and much more. If you play duplicate, everyone has to fill out a preprinted (!) card setting out the conventions they play for the benefit of opponents. The hanky code is the closest thing to this that I've heard of in the sexual realm, but a) it was always pretty simple and b) I'm told it is now passé. For the most part, the rules for communication never get past NO MEANS NO and YES MEANS YES. 

Bridge players are obsessed with finding a good fit, and they understand that no system is perfect. (Hence the restless search for workarounds.) But the outcome is not the only thing that counts. It's boring to get a strong well-balanced hand. Sometimes you pick up a hand that's not very good and get wildly excited, because it gives you the chance to deploy a convention that rarely comes up. Preferably a really complicated convention. A rare, complicated convention that both partners have probably half-forgotten - the Multi-Colored 2 Diamonds is best of breed. The partners bid on, gazing at each other with a wild surmise...

Anyway, I thought about this as the basis for a book, and sometimes talked about the book, and most people (not, perhaps, being bridge players) looked at me no so much with wild surmise as with blank incomprehension. But I went to New York several years ago and had dinner with Dale Peck and began talking about bridge and sexual codes, and Dale understood instantly! Dale had willfully revived the hanky code in his youth; Dale had been a fanatical bridge player; we talked and talked.
Dale is now editor of the Evergreen Review, an online magazine, and he has published "Sexual Codes of the Europeans: a Preliminary Report" in the latest issue. It's here.

How Shape Influences Strength

Rereading Alex Martelli, How Shape Influences Strength, Bridge World Jan & Feb 2000.

NS Tricks // N has 7222 // N has 7321

6 // 4019 // 4455
7 // 10778 //11089
8 // 14016 // 12307
9 // 10811 // 9886
10 // 5371 // 6146
11 // 2344 // 2869
12 // 532 // 1033
13 // 178 // 215

It is clear from this table [cd not work out how to use tabs in Blogger] that the variation is higher for the slightly more shapely hand, which fits in well with our intuition: A 7-3-2-1 hand is more likely than a 7-2-2-2 to meet with either a particularly unsuitable hand for partner (with wasted values opposite the singleton, perhaps holding the partnership to six or seven tricks) or a particularly suitable one (with values opposite the tripleton, often allowing the partnership to take from 10 to 13 tricks.)

I used to think that anyone who had seen hundreds of books published would have a bridgeplayer's sense of fit; would see that writers rarely have balanced hands, so that a fit with an agent or editor is likely to be very good or very bad.

It seems not to work that way. There are disciplines, cultures that value intellectual elegance and economy. A serious bridgeplayer does not have to explain the value of elegance to his peers. A programmer does not have to explain the value of elegance to other programmers. A mathematician does not have to explain the value of elegance to mathematicians. Explanation comes into play only when one deals with what dance schools call beginners and improvers. Whereas.

Over the last 15 years I have had conversations with many, many people in the industry. Mainly agents and editors, but also accountants, lawyers, designers, production managers, publicists, marketers, booksellers - the number of people who have to get paid out of the cover price of a book is not small. These conversations have certain features in common.  Blank looks. Incomprehension. Disbelief. Comment: 'I've dealt with hundreds of authors, and no one has ever wanted this before.'

So I think it may be necessary to do something else.  I thought I might be happier in IT, but the programmers I know have not been very helpful in suggesting entry-level jobs.  It may be best to go back to London and work again as a legal secretary for a few years; if I had an evening job I might do a BSc. during the day. It's possible that a public blog will turn out to be incompatible with that sort of job, in which case pp may have to go offliine. We'll see.

(Martelli, by the way, is also a member of the Python Software Foundation, author of Python in a Nutshell and co-editor of The Python Cookbook. Wikipedia: 'According to Martelli's self-evaluation, his proudest achievement is the articles that appeared in The Bridge World (January/February 2000), which were hailed as giant steps towards solving issues that had haunted contract-bridge theoreticians for decades.' If you are a writer who is haunted by the kind of issue that bothers contract-bridge theoreticians, you are probably in the wrong line of work.)

How do we get back, from those average numbers of tricks taken by the partnership, call it P, to the "strength of North's hand," call it N? Well, if we knew N, we would estimate P through the forumla, P = N plus one-third (of 13 minus N), because, by symmetry, on average partner's hand can be taken as supplying one-third of the "remaining" tricks, 13 minus N.  From that equation, it follows that

N = (1.5 times P) minus 6.5

Applying this to the earlier values (7222 Average 8.26 and 7321 Average 8.33 yields hand-strength estimates of 5.90 for Hand 7222 and 6.00 for Hand 7321.

How can Hand 7222, that will surely take six tricks itself, be worth a bit less than six tricks in this scale?  Because the hand-strength values were computed under the assumption that the ratings of th North and South hands would be added to produce a partnership total.  When North holds 7=2=2=2, his shape will (on average) destroy some of the values that South will count on.

Tourner un film est la chose la plus ennuyeuse du monde.

...

Impossible de prendre du temps pour se concentrer. On ne vous en donne pas. Ce qui fait que l'esprit, l'humeur, le caractère sont soumis à une sorte de douche écossaise dont le flot de moments intenses et forts ne durent que quelques minutes, alors que la douceur tiède de l'attente distille son ennui durant des heures.

Rien n'est plus favorable à la naissance d'une passion que ce mélange de solitude ennuyeuse et de quelques moments rares et longtemps désirés.

J'avais vingt ans, je tournais mon premier filme, Ciel d'Enfer, réalisé par Youssef Shahin, un de mes amis qui, comme moi, est chrétien libanais vivant en Égypte. J'avais pour partenaire féminine la grande star Faten Hamamam, qui allait par la suite devenir ma femme. Et, comme je viens de l'expliquer, j'attendais deux ou trois heures le moment de me concentrer intensément pour entrer quelques minutes dans le personnage d'un jeune homme séduisant et séduit qui triomphe de l'amour et la mort.

Seules des lectures d'intérêt mineur, des lectures qu'on peut qualifier "de surface", par opposition aux lectures profondes, pouvaient meubler ces heures d'attente. Je me vois encore dans une petite librairie du centre d'Alexandrie, parcourant du regard les rayonnages à la recherche de livres ennuyeux, mais pas trop. Je rejetais Proust -- que plus tard me procura d'énormes plaisirs--, je me refusais le génial romancier de l'Angleterre puritaine, Thackeray. J'avais dévoré la Foire aux Vanités, et je savais que son grand héros, Pendennis, était exactement l'étudiant d'Oxford dont j'aurais aimé jouer le personnage... Et mes yeux se portèrent par hasard sur le Blue Book -- en français, je suppose que c'est le "Livre Blue" -- de Goren.

J'ignorais alors tout du bridge, je savais seulement que c'était un jeu de cartes qui se joue à quatre. Et le lendemain, c'est d'une âme parfaitement indifférente que j'ouvris ce livre, confortablement installé, attendant que le réalisateur qui organisait on plan de tournage ait besois que le séducteur de Ciel d'Enfer appairaisse dans le champ pour y accomplir ses ravages.

Omar Sharif, Ma vie au bridge.

[I have had a book accepted for publication. The difference between the life of the writer and that of the actor in a film is that the waiting around goes on for months rather than a mere couple of hours.]

fourth seeks three

I may have to retract my dismissal of bridge as a game with relevance to the world of finance. Warren Buffett apparently thinks otherwise.

On one occasion [Buffett] is reported to have said: "I wouldn’t mind going to jail if I had three cellmates who played bridge".

[know the feeling - thought it would depend how well they played bridge]

Buffett himself says about bridge: "It’s got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You’re seeing through new situations every ten minutes…In the stock market you don’t base your decisions on what the market is doing, but on what you think is rational….Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You’re doing calculations all the time."( Forbes June 2,1997)

On another occasion he described the similarities between bridge and investment as follows: "The approach and strategies are very similar in that you gather all the information you can and then keep adding to that base of information as things develop. You do whatever the probabilities indicated based on the knowledge that you have at that time, but you are always willing to modify your behaviour or your approach as you get new information. In bridge, you behave in a way that gets the best from your partner. And in business, you behave in the way that gets the best from your managers and your employees."

Commenting on the new challenge match in June, Buffett said: "I spend twelve hours a week - a little over 10% of my waking hours - playing the game. Now I am trying to figure out how to get by on less sleep in order to fit in a few more hands.

2006 interview quoted by Jonathan Davis at Buffetcup.com

Does he play multi-coloured 2 diamond? I think we should be told

Malcolm Gladwell (I know, I know) on the psychology of overconfidence, courtesy of Languagehat:

Jimmy Cayne grew up in Chicago, the son of a patent lawyer. He wanted to be a bookie, but he realized that it wasn’t quite respectable enough. He went to Purdue University to study mechanical engineering—and became hooked on bridge. His grades suffered, and he never graduated.

He got married in 1956 and was divorced within four years. “At this time, he was one of the best bridge players in Chicago,” his ex-brother-in-law told Cohan. “In fact, that’s the reason for the divorce. There was no other woman or anything like that. The co-respondent in their divorce was bridge. He spent all of his time playing bridge—every night. He wasn’t home.” He was selling scrap metal in those days, and, Cohan says, he would fall asleep on the job, exhausted from playing cards. In 1964, he moved to New York to become a professional bridge player. It was bridge that led him to his second wife, and to a job interview with Alan (Ace) Greenberg, then a senior executive at Bear Stearns. When Cayne told Greenberg that he was a bridge player, Cayne tells Cohan, “you could see the electric light bulb.” Cayne goes on:

[Greenberg] says, “How well do you play?” I said, “I play well.” He said, “Like how well?” I said, “I play quite well.” He says, “You don’t understand.” I said, “Yeah, I do. I understand. Mr. Greenberg, if you study bridge the rest of your life, if you play with the best partners and you achieve your potential, you will never play bridge like I play bridge.”

Right then and there, Cayne says, Greenberg offered him a job.

Always wondered how DSL and I managed to get doctorates. Presumably because we never played bridge as well as Jimmy Cayne.

It makes sense that there should be an affinity between bridge and the business of Wall Street. Bridge is a contest between teams, each of which competes over a “contract”—how many tricks they think they can win in a given hand. Winning requires knowledge of the cards, an accurate sense of probabilities, steely nerves, and the ability to assess an opponent’s psychology. Bridge is Wall Street in miniature,

Wha-? Winning requires, among other things, a good bidding system for communicating with one's partner, and mastery of the system - which is why the Italian Blue team wiped out the opposition in the 70s. A Strong Club system enables a partnership to signal a strong hand at the lowest, cheapest possible bid, thus leaving maximum bidding space for determining whether game or slam can be made, and if so what what the trump suit should be; the partnership outflanks the opposition by getting better contracts for its cards.

In bridge, a partnership normally demonstrates its superiority in duplicate bridge: pairs in a whole roomful of tables play identical hands, and the one that gets the best results wins.

In bridge, the value of a hand is relatively fixed. An Ace is an Ace is an Ace, can be beaten only by a player with a void in the Ace's suit and a trump in hand. The value of hands depends, not on confidence, but on the rank of the cards and the trump suit.

What Gladwell says:

It isn’t, however. In bridge, there is such a thing as expertise unencumbered by bias. That’s because, as the psychologist Gideon Keren points out, bridge involves “related items with continuous feedback.” It has rules and boundaries and situations that repeat themselves and clear patterns that develop—and when a player makes a mistake of overconfidence he or she learns of the consequences of that mistake almost immediately. In other words, it’s a game. But running an investment bank is not, in this sense, a game: it is not a closed world with a limited set of possibilities. It is an open world where one day a calamity can happen that no one had dreamed could happen, and where you can make a mistake of overconfidence and not personally feel the consequences for years and years—if at all.

This sounds like the pronouncement of someone who knows nothing about the game in question. It would be perfectly possible to devise a game that presented similar challenges to those involved in running an investment bank; bridge happens not to be that game. Which may very well be what Cayne liked about it.

But this is silly. Someone is Wrong on the Internet. Here.

shape and strength

Eliot said it was the poet's job to purify the language of the tribe. Philosophy has sometimes shared that ambition. The bidding systems of bridge offer a different model for the way language might be made to work. It's sometimes hard to see this clearly, because for the most part people who write on bridge simply describe one or more systems, or list hundreds of conventions. Came across a very good bridge blog yesterday, DavidC's Bridge Blog, which discusses bidding systems from first principles. This is extremely interesting (a much longer post lies hidden in the drafts folder), but I am packing to catch a plane in the morning so can only mention it in haste.