Business Standard column: SIPs

(Published in 'Speaking Volumes', Business Standard, May 10, 2005)

This column was an eye-opener; it's so much easier to read it in a format that allows hyperlinks than in plain vanilla printed-word fashion. For this post, I've let the original version stand for the most part, but added a few hyperlinks where necessary.


This is the closest I’ll ever get to being Thursday Next, the timetravelling literary detective in Jasper Fforde’s novels, who works in Jurisfiction, the “policing agency inside books”. It’s her job to maintain narrative continuity within fiction, which might entail coaxing “the impossibly shy Darcy from the toilets” one day and the next “thwarting the Martians' latest attempt to invade Barnaby Rudge”.

The latest toy on Amazon.com, part of its Search Inside! the book program, might not have you chasing the Jabberwock or traveling through Macondo, but it’s the next best thing. A few months ago, Amazon introduced the concept of Statistically Improbable
Phrases, or SIPs: “To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in Search Inside. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside… For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.”

The SIPs are buttressed by two or three other nifty tools; the Concordance box identifies the hundred words most commonly used in the book (try it with Ulysses sometime), another tool gives you a number of words-to-dollars spent ratio, another measures the reading ease of the book. But it’s the SIPs you return to, for pure entertainment and for a slightly bizarre look at what happens between the covers of a book.

How does it work? Like a deeply experimental marriage between an old-fashioned card catalogue and a blurb, on one hand, and like a psychobabble-laden peek between the covers, on the other.

Some of it is serendipitious. You smile when “little golden key” pops up as the SIP for Alice in Wonderland and if you clickthrough the phrase, it turns out that “little golden key” is common to both Alice and Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of An English Opium-Eater .

Some of it is utterly useless but addictive all the same. James Joyce’s Ulysses yields these SIPs: “ute ute ute, tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom, matrimonial gift, base barreltone, quaker librarian, absentminded beggar, pensive bosom, met him pike
hoses, charming soubrette, editor cried, brown macintosh, retrospective arrangement, learning knight, seaside girls, croppy boy, old sweet song.” Click on matrimonial gift to find an unlikely link between Joyce and Weaving the Threads of Life : The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult among the Yaka by Rene Devisch.

After playing for a bit, I’m not at all surprised when the phrase “white mundu” turns out to be the link between Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things and SF writer Roger Zelazny. It’s weird, it doesn’t prove anything, but it’s also nice to see these strange connections pop up between the most disparate of books. Some connections are revealing: “burra babu” is used in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy with some irony, but in Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable as a straightforward term of cringing respect. Some SIPs are more popular than others. “Sari pallu” connects almost twenty different works of fiction, most, unsurprisingly, by authors from the subcontinent. “Poor orphan child”, the SIP for Jane Eyre , mirrors “lone lorn creetur”, one of the SIPs for David Copperfield .

SIPs provide a browser’s guide par excellence, if you’re willing to decipher their complicated shorthand. “Porch with the begonias, story about the capon, little gold fishes, insomnia plague, invisible doctors, candy animals, banana company, black bandage, sucking her finger, enchanted region, ermine cape, eating earth.” I read this out over the phone to a friend in Bangalore, who didn’t even hesitate for a second: “One Hundred Years of Solitude , Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” she said. On her computer, she clicked on “sucking her finger”, but instead of the salacious porn we half-expected to find, that SIP threw up an unexpected link to Your Self-Confident Baby .

This was identifiable, with some effort: “Big fat mustache, bloated colonel, tighter bomb pattern, eggs for seven cents, intelligence tent, more combat missions, help the bombardier, sei pazzo, seventy missions, zinc pipe, railroad ditch, sixty missions,
illegal tobacco, bomb line, forty missions, colored panties, group chaplain, flak suits, lead bombardier, medical tent, fifty missions, mess officer, combat status, covered cotton, more missions.”

Catch-22 , said my friend. “It’s the ‘more missions’ that’s the giveaway…but why didn’t ‘Nately’s whore’ show up?”

We don’t know, any more than we could figure out why the only SIP for Bram Stoker’s Dracula was “bloofer lady”. Or why Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography was enigmatically rendered down to “halva puri” and “gold taps”. “Bougainvillea girls” and “lotus root” pointed tersely to The Mistress of Spices ; “bhadra lok” and “sari edge”, slightly more ominously, indicated Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters .

And only the most intrepid would follow this trail of SIPs, describing one of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s books:
“Continuist version, ethical instantiation, deconstructive embrace, materialist predication, transcendental figuration, socialized capital, pouvoir savoir, ethical singularity, subaltern insurgency, deliberative consciousness, structural unconscious, philosophical justice, subaltern consciousness, gendered subaltern, impossible response, capital logic, persistent critique, secondary narcissism, universal equivalent, communal mode, trace structure.”

Now that list defies further consideration; my personal guess is that it’s the updated,computer version of the old sign that warned when you were about to fall off the edge of the known world, “Here be Dragons”.

Is this feature any use at all? When it throws up something as bald as “three immigration officers” as the SIP for Satanic Verses , or something as frivolous as the fact that Tom Wolfe used “rutrutrutrutrut” in A Man in Full as well as Charlotte Simmons , you have to wonder. But is it fun? Try guessing from the SIPs what these two books are. The first is: “Baby grandaunt, inflatable goose, spoiled puff, unusually dense dorsal tufts, white mundu, mangosteen tree, tender mango, faraway man, gauze doors, blow spit bubbles, banana jam, lucky leaf, yellow bamboo, yellow church, back verandah, pointy shoes, bison head, front verandah.”

And the second is: “Malenky bit, his rookers, old ptitsa, real skorry, starry ptitsa, real bezoomny, old baboochkas, real gromky, little droog, oddy knocky, red red krovvy, old moloko, kashl kashl kashl, real horrorshow smeck, two young ptitsas, type goloss, writer veck, starry veck, grahzny bratchnies, other veshches, old veck, top millicent, horrorshow groodies, milky chai, his Gulliver.” Have fun, and if “bloofer lady” has a meaning deeper than “beautiful vampire who preys on small children”, tell me.