Why write it?
One of the properties of language is its ability to generate sentences that have never been heard before. — Donald Barthelme
I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. — Gertrude Stein
I’m interested in the genre of the sentence,
The genre that’s always overlooked. — Verlyn Klinkenborg
Well that’s a lot of decorative quotes about sentences.
For some time, I have been obsessing over the mythical divide between word people and math people. And I’m sorry to say I’m partial to one side, the word people, because they live in a hushed fear that they are a little bit broken.
I want us to write the longest sentence because the sentence is the principle obsession of word people.* But if this sentence is mathematical, we can bridge the mythical divide. At least this is my idea.
Now there is already a literary form in math: the word problem. But we all know from homework problems about socks that it’s the worst literary form in the world.
A collaborative record. An audacious public arts project. But why?
Math is awesome but it also scares a lot of people including me. (Did you know that, in one study, a participant — a graduate student! — broke into tears at the idea of 46+18? Math anxiety is real and starts as young as 5.)
This is why I am so committed to bringing people to math with words and without the stress of time pressure and computation.
Which got me thinking about word problems, the most groan-inducing dreck in all of math. Can we breathe new life into the word problem?
We can! We’re going to write the longest one — together. Word by word, clause by clause. I’d like to imagine that diagramming this monstrous sentence would give Gertrude Stein chills.* Stanley Fish writes that “Flaubert’s famous search for the “mot juste” was not a search for words that glow alone, but for words so precisely placed that in combination with other words, also precisely placed, they carve out a shape in space and time.”
How thrilling to carve a gigantic, meandering, syntactically complex word problem in space and time. Anyone can participate and because of this, everyone is invited to belong to math in a very public and personal way.
The word problem will be displayed in New York City. Location to come.
Please check the submission page for updates and to add your words!
As a personal exercise to see how we would slot all of our submissions together into one winding sentence here is my attempt to blurb this page into a 195-word sentence. Of course ours will be much longer:
So yes, math is the grand scaffold of our universe, of its clockwork orbits and particulate interactions, math with its ability to describe with baffling accuracy — sometimes to fifteen digits or more — the behavior of pollen grains or black holes or electrons; but it scares people too, including me, including several people in a study that approached problems like 46+18 with visible distress, nervous laughter and trembling palms, one participant bursting into tears, the anxiety an aching spiral of dread and embarrassment that sets in as young as 5, sending a chill worse than any haunted house really, out of which blooms decades of math avoidance: all this because of a pervasive notion that math is for numbers people and not words people, this notion persisting until now, right now, when we will weave the longest word problem together, word by word, clause by clause, a deluge of nouns adjectives and verbs tasked with computation, all of us contributing parcels — Chomsky’s kernels, Flaubert’s “mot juste” — in such a way that this weird and wild sentence, a real working math problem, carves a shape in space and time for all to see.
* In Lydia Davis’s book Essays One, she has an eight-page piece called “Revising One Sentence.”