April 10, 2007

Chaotic attractors

This from “TBR: Inside the List” this week (April 8):

Best-Case Scenario: Gary Paulsen’s novel ‘Hatchet’ (1987), about a 13-year-old boy who survives in the wilderness after a plane crash with nothing but a hatchet, has become a young-adult classic: the ‘Cast Away’ of the preteen set. But ‘Hatchet’ is only now making its first appearance on a Times best-seller list — because, it seems, the book helped save a life. According to the father of Michael Auberry, the 12-year-old Boy Scout who was lost in the North Carolina woods for four days last month, the book’s lessons stuck with his son and helped him survive. ‘I think he’s got some of that book in his mind,’ Michael’s father told The Associated Press. The children’s best-seller lists are available this week at www.nytimes.com/books .’

My children read that book. I read that book. Did you? I even shook Paulsen’s hand once and thanked him for writing it. When my children were of a certain age, every parent I knew was aware of that beautiful book — every one. But Hatchet was, apparently, never before on a New York Times best-seller list.

Okay, I realize that there was no children’s best-seller list in the NYT in 1987, but still . . .

In 1960, meteorologist Edward Lorenz was working on the problem of weather prediction. He established an algorithm based on twelve equations intended to model the weather. It did not, I believe, successfully predict the next storm as the meteorologist might have wished. However, it did generate a valuable theoretical assertion that was popularly to be associated with butterfly wings — the recognition that an isolated event (or a minute alteration in beginning conditions) can effect great change over space and time. Popularly that causal sequence is sometimes referred to as though The Butterfly Effect were related to the principle of unintended consequences. But mathematically, as this old English major understands it, if the apparently chaotic sequence really is determined, then the long-distant effect will fall within the sequence in a way that might prove predictable.

Did I get any of that right? That sometimes what appears to be purely random occurrences — prison riots, biological populations, the price of cotton, and foot-traffic patterns in train stations — can sometimes actually belong within a predictable, mapable, sequential, exponential if dauntingly complex pattern?

If so, then I propose here — and it strikes me that this is my first proposal — that, in this shared, intractable literary world of ours, a world of 175,000 annual new titles and an apparently finite number of readers, we might be able to save a great deal of heartache, ink, paper, and bitter anticipation were there available to us a Chaos Theory of Readership.

In April 2007, Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet will hit the NYT children’s best-seller list.

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April 10, 2007

Chaotic attractors

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