I learned a lot from all the comments and suggestions I’ve received about the title for my next book. (Comments are now closed on those posts). One substantive thought. A number of you liked The Spontaneous Symphony. It’s a great title but I won’t end up using it for the same reason that I try not to use spontaneous order to describe self-organizing systems. The word spontaneous has a number of meanings in everyday language. Here are the first two from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:
1 : proceeding from natural feeling or native tendency without external constraint
2 : arising from a momentary impulse
The first one is good for our purposes. The second is not so good. It suggests something that happens suddenly out of the blue. In everyday language, the word comes up most often in that second meaning, as in, let’s go to the beach instead of spending the day working on the lawn as we’d planned. Let’s be spontaneous! The second association most people have with the word is spontaneous combustion. That really uses both meanings—a sudden fire that isn’t intended by anyone.
The other problem with any of the titles that use the word "symphony" is that symphonies are orderly in very particular ways. It’s a pretty good metaphor for the orderliness of the economy but it leaves out the role of improvisation. Jazz, as I think one commenter mentioned, is a better metaphor, and in an earlier draft, I compared the division of of labor that goes into making a pencil to jazz musicians improvising in different locations yet making music that is still harmonious. But The Secret Jazz Combo or Jazzonomics or Improvonomics or The Jazz of Our Economy don’t grab me. Plus the symphony metaphor doesn’t tie in with the plot of the book.
But your comments have inspired me to search for a better metaphor that I might put in the book and that would make an evocative and poetic title. I think I’ve got it. I’ll chew on it for a few days and see if it works. Thanks again for your efforts. I will keep you posted.
Share
{ 8 comments }
If this book has the following elements: a tennis player, an earthquake, and an ignorance-inspired placing of blame followed up by a realization that a prior viewpoint was a mistaken one, then why has the word "fault" not been
bandied about in any potential title yet?
You could call it something like "More then meeting the eye". That seemed pretty straight forward. If you make any reference to Bastiat you could call it something like the seen and the unseen.
lcjoe….brilliant.
keir….perhaps, if transformers hadn't just come out.
I even read the phrase in my head as the theme song.
What you need is to reflect the cumulative sum of individuals acting in their individual self-interest. Somehow neither the symphonic nor jazz metaphors cut it, because they each indicate degrees of communal effort; and I don't think that's your intent.
The better metaphor is dropping a pallet of bricks out of an airplane and having them land in the shape of a house. Unfortunately that's hardly a credible metaphor.
Based on your description ("Tuesdays With Morrie" meets "Wealth of Nations"), I have to say, although it seems a touch meta, that "Tuesdays With Money" seems clever.
Harmony: A Peace of Value
Spontaneous combustion fits (but not really very well) with the second definition of spontaneous.
Since it usually means a fire started by a discarded unextinguished cigarette.
I am late to the party.
How about: "The Ballet in the Ether"
Ether being "the hypothetical substance through which electromagnetic waves travel. It was proposed by the greek philosopher Aristotle and used by several optical theories as a way to allow propagation of light…" which physicists proved did not exist, which helped pave the way for Einstein's special theory of relativity, a better way of describing how the universe worked.
(http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Ether.html)
The ether represents both a haze that obfuscates the ballet and a false understanding of the way the world works. The ballet is an unchoreographed work performed by atomistic agents.