In general, I’m a fan of the Financial Times. The breadth of its international coverage rivals that offered by the New York Times and its journalists’ grounding in the intricacies of high finance and macroeconomics (e.g. what’s quantitative easing?) have made it a go-to resource during the prolonged crisis. On the downside, the FT’s authority in matters financial means that its “demographic” is skewered towards those masters of the universe whose blunders have been diligently chronicled by the paper. And as the Financial Times–unlike its proletarian red-top brethren–is more reliant on advertising than copy sales for revenue, some of the fluffier adjuncts to the main paper seem designed solely to tickle the bellies of a fat cat readership.

Exhibit A, with a title running radically against the grain of the times, is the supplement “How to spend it.” An aria to conspicuous consumption, this magazine is primarily a vehicle that delivers advertising for Italian haute-couture, yachts, French luggage, business-class travel, and watches costing several months’ after-tax income (that is for plebs who earn less than several hundred grand per year).

Almost indistinguishable from the glossy ads are the glossy articles. In the issue dated Friday April 24, hot subjects addressed included hedge-fund managers learning how to fly jet fighters (an old standby for this kind of supplement), the state of the Bordeaux en primeur market, and the latest trends in underground garages (apparently all the rage among the plutocracy). From the last-named piece, the following insight into how the rich like to spend their time and money is reported with a straight face:

Other car fanatics’ requests verge on the eccentric. Bailey [a buying agent] was involved with one west London project where the client had a glass-box car lift that lowered into a basement where the owner had a Jacuzzi. “He likes to relax by lying back in his Jacuzzi and admiring his Ferrari,” says Baily.

When the British chancellor recently raised the top rate of tax to 50p in the pound, the FT dutifully reported the outrage among its affected demographic. Some objected that the government would simply waste the money. Very possibly it, like most governments, will. But after reading the in-house gazette of their shopping habits, you have to wonder what the hyper-rich see as “squandering.”

The Owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk—thus pronounced the German idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Joni Mitchell expressed a similar thought more accessibly in “Big Yellow Taxi” when she sang “You don’t know what you’ve got/ ‘Til it’s gone.” And so, with Paul Krugman delivering obsequies for the Celtic Tiger, a novel arrives with ambitions to encapsulate the heady period when Ireland became (apparently, briefly) rich.

Bad Day in Blackrock, by Kevin Power. Published by Lilliput Press.

Hewing very closely to the facts about the death of a young man outside a Dublin nightclub in 2000, Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock aims not only to present a portrait of a privileged group enmeshed in a killing but to serve a book of evidence that will indict society as a whole.

If this seems like a critic unfairly ascribing overreach to an author, it is not as if this well-written novel lacks state-of-the-nation ambitions. Power has his choric narrator try to explain the symbolism of the death of Conor Harris:

We do know it will end, of course, our golden age, our belle époque. At the edge of everything we do is the knowledge that this cocooned and happy little world, with all its desires and certainties, all its serene ambition, can’t possibly last forever, that it will one day become something different, something that we’ll find, waking one day in prosperous middle-age, subtly unrecognizable. There are people, I know, who are waiting for the end, who are ready with their elegies and their funeral rites. But they’re already too late. This world—rich south Dublin at the turn of the twenty-first century—is already over. It ended on the night of 31 August 2004. Even I see this only intermittently. But it’s the truth.

A whole world died with Conor. We just haven’t realized it yet.

The “whole world” Power creates through a sequence of short chapters is suffused with a blank consumerism familiar from Brett Easton Ellis novels—conjuring up an affluent Californian suburb incongruously perched on the edge of the Irish Sea. The father of one of the characters even builds a heated outdoor swimming pool, although Power is knowing enough to find the bathos in pursuing a West Coast lifestyle in a frigid climate: after several mornings Peter Culhane’s poolside breakfasts come to a halt due to the cold.

The college-age protagonists in the drama are drawn from a tight-knit Dublin community of private schools where rugby and eating disorders seem to be the primary passions. In sketching those implicated, the book makes diffident attempts to explore a possible rationale for the killing: beautiful Laura Haines briefly dated Conor Harris before moving on to the more prestigious Richard Culhane, rugby star and chief suspect in the death of Harris. However, the motive of drink-fuelled jealousy is only toyed with before being disregarded as too crude a template to be imposed on a chaotic reality. Ultimately, the killing, like most that occur on Irish streets late at night, is meaningless.

The apparent lack of volition is corroborated by the anthropological approach taken by Power. He takes pains to depict his players as products stamped out by their milieu—their schools and colleges, their comfortable homes, their pubs, shops, and churches. (A minor point: the Dundrum Town Centre—the group’s cultural Mecca—didn’t open until after the novel’s timeline.) The characters’ restricted intellectual horizons are more than fully exposed through their banal utterances—the girls witter on about Deb balls and weight problems whereas the boys banter aggressively about rugby and sex. The speech patterns ring true, but if their speakers embody a doomed world, it is hard to work up the empathy to mourn its passing.

In addition to interchangeable avatars rather than characters, the reader is also repeatedly challenged by the propinquity of real events and their fictional homologues. (Anyone who lived in Ireland during the first few years of this decade will recall details—coverage of the high-profile trial was lamentably inescapable.) At times, it is difficult to wedge a playing card between the two. Of course, tackling a story that continues, one must assume, to cause great pain for all the (real) people affected poses irresolvable ethical issues for an artist. More significant perhaps, Bad Day in Blackrock’s fidelity to newspaper sources also raises aesthetic ones. Often during this book the novelist seems not to be drawing his characters and surroundings freehand, but judiciously tracing them, guided by outlines dimly visible beneath.

Can a scientific experiment be regarded as a work of art? It’s a question that has re-occurred to me over the past week or so after reading about the work—to affix the laudatory adjective “pioneering” would be a laughable understatement—carried out in the Cavendish Laboratory by Ernest Rutherford and his exceptional team in the opening decade of the 20th century. Among the towering achievements of this group is the so-called “Gold Foil Experiment”—conducted 100 years ago—which upturned the prevailing theory about the structure of the atom and replaced it with the nuclear model, later confirmed and refined by another genius, Niels Bohr.

What is so appealing about the experiment, which was performed by Hans Geiger (of radiation counter fame) and Ernest Marsden, is that its conceptual elegance means the implications of its findings can be grasped even by someone whose eyes glazed over during school science lessons.

Some background: The previously accepted atomic theory posited that negatively charged electrons floated in an evenly distributed cloud of positive charge. This was J.J. Thompson’s “plum-pudding model,” with electrons as the “plums” embedded in the positively charged pudding. The gold-foil experiment set out to test this hypothesis by directing a stream of positively charged alpha particles through a slit onto a very thin sheet gold foil. The foil was surrounded by a zinc sulphide detector strip that would light up—producing, in Rutherford’s word, “scintillations”—whenever it was hit by an alpha particle. According to the plum-pudding model, the diffuse positive charge of the foil’s atoms would be weak enough to allow most of the positive particles to pass through the foil. A deflection of only a few degrees was expected for a small percentage of particles.

However, during the experiment the zinc-sulphide detector directly in front of the gold-foil scintillated on occasion, meaning that some particles (about 1 in 8000) actually bounced perpendicularly off the foil. As Rutherford famously observed:  

It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.

A positively charged particle that bounced off the foil did so because it collided with a nucleus, which contains all of an atom’s positive charge and most of its mass. (There’s a very accessible flash animation explaining the experiment available here.)

It could be argued that beyond the utilitarian exigencies of empirical research, the experimenters’ assemblage of discrete elements into a coherent system mirrors the writer’s or painter’s organization of structure or the canvas. Given the fact that the radius of a nucleus is approximately 20,000 times smaller than the radius of the atom, blind empirical testing might never have unlocked the atom’s secret. Despite Rutherford’s declaration of amazement at the experiment’s results, he must have nursed some shadowy inkling of an alternative to Thompson’s model as he contemplated the deployment of the various components in space. (After all, why position the detector before the foil if such an outcome was unthinkable?) This approach chimes with a vision of the creative process as a journey from an inchoate mental picture to a fully realized artefact.

One ascribed aim of art is to change the way we think about the world, to alter our perceptions. Rutherford and his team’s work undoubtedly fulfils that criterion. Indeed, the work in the Cavendish laboratory is just one, albeit glittering, mosaic in a tessellation of breakthroughs in the natural sciences in the decades that bracket the start of the 20th century. Indeed, it’s possible that the vertiginous vistas opened up by revolutions in the areas of relativity, subatomic structures, and quantum mechanics prompted a crisis of confidence in the contemporary arts.

It is often argued that the First World War destroyed the bourgeois certainties and values that had calcified over the course of the “long 19th century.” But the spirit of modernism was abroad even before the guns of August 1914 sounded—for example, Virginia Wolf famously remarked that “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” Could it be that the more attuned practitioners in the arts sensed that the job of illuminating the world could be carried out far more effectively, and with more radical results, by soberly clad lab technician than, for example, Bloomsbury bohemians? And that the discoveries made by these technicians and theoreticians would throw up philosophic challenges—for example, Werner Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle” regarding the limits of human observation—would match anything hatched in the cultural sector?

However, there is one, crucial aspect of Rutherford’s research that could be said to disqualify it as a work of art. One definition of art is that it has no function apart from being itself. The Aesthetic Movement’s rallying cry of “Art for Art’s Sake” was reformulated by Modernists such as Marcel Duchamp, whose work asserted that any object could be transfigured into a work of art by the artist labelling it as such. Hence, a urinal became a “readymade,” rechristened as “Fountain.” Duchamp’s mock-signature, “R. Mutt,” on the porcelain was sufficient alchemy.

While “big science” is often conducted without any immediate utilitarian end in view, breakthroughs and new knowledge are uniquely vulnerable to commercial and military exploitation. The world is first illuminated by scientific discoveries and then shaped by them. Rutherford’s experiment–propelled by the desire to crack a puzzle–was no exception: After all, I first read about the gold-foil experiment over a week ago in Richard Rhodes’s excellent book The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

The occasional “Words” feature on this blog aims to illuminate some of the more esoteric terms the common reader might encounter in fairly mainstream publications. This week’s phrase, lapsus calami, crops up in the final 100 pages of a novel casting a long shadow over everything else published this year, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.  

A lapsus calami is 

A) a slanderous accusation made in the heat of an argument

B) a type of gem that is said to make the wearer forgetful

C) a mistake with consequences so disastrous as to blacken the name of the person who made it  

D) an inadvertent or unconscious error made by a writer

Highlight the text in the quote box below to discover the correct answer.

It’s option D. Literally meaning a “slip of the pen,” a lapsus calami might be considered as the written equivalent of the Freudian “slip of the tongue.” It shouldn’t be confused with the semi-precious stone, lapis lazuli. (Incidentally, in this case calami is not the plural of the Latin word for a reed or a quill, calamus, but the genitive (”of the pen”). As far as I can tell, the plural form of this phrase might be lapsus calamorum. But don’t hold me to that.)

The phrase appears in an unusually light-hearted section of Bolaño’s novel in which various employees in a publishing house engage in a bantering discussion about slips preserved for posterity in print. For example, we have from Rosny’s Le Cataclysme, “With his hands clasped behind his back, Henri strolled about the garden, reading his friend’s novel.” And from Letters from my Mill, by Flaubert’s boon companion, Alphonse Daudet: “The duke appeared followed by his entourage, which preceded him.” Or, from Henri Zvedan’s The Death of Mongomer, “After they cut off his head, they buried him alive.” (Is Zvedan an invention of Bolaño? Web searches against the term “Henri Zvedan” yield only circular references to 2666.)

Present at this quote-fest is Archimboldi von Benno, an author published by the house and a cynosure for multiple characters that populate the novel’s 900 pages.  Archimboldi’s favourite lapsus is taken from a lesser-known novel by Balzac, Beatrix. As with all the previous “slips” discussed, a refracted truth seems to shimmer beneath the superficial illogicality: “I can hardly see anymore, said the poor blind woman.”