Week 264: A high-powered mutant of some kind.
Two more books I apparently had locked in the basement.
While rooting around the basement, between the plumber's visit and the tournament at Pitt, I found two additional boxes of books. Now ten of those went to the tournament's top scorers, but I kept two books back because they had been on my list of things that should be on the five-foot bookshelf, and weren't in hand yet.
The first one I pulled up was The Hutchinson Dictionary of Battles. I remember finding this on the weekend I went to Oxford to read at the British championships. It’s just a series of 3-5 paragraph articles on historical battles, giving all the information you would need to answer a question about them. The only images are maps of the battles, and it’s completed by a chronology of the wars and battles fought within. What I love about this book, and why I wanted to find it again for myself, was that it is blessed with perfect depth.
Perfect Depth
When I describe some book as having perfect depth, I mean it for a particular section of competition, there are books which are perfect for high school competition and there are books that are perfect for college competition. In this case the dictionary of battles is small enough that one can use it and never reach a point where a battle or war is included that is too obscure to be an answer nor does it obviously omit a common answer. It also hits upon enough details of each item in its article so that one can take a detail from it and included as a clue for a question where that detail contains the answer.
The other aspect of perfect depth for me is that I apply to be inspirational for the student, and inspirational for the writer, but it isn’t the complete authority in the subject. For comparison, the other common book of battles I had used in the past was Brassey's Dictionary of Battles. That particular book had the disadvantage of being way too thick and way too in depth including many obscure battles, especially British army engagements. If I were to use that for the express purpose of writing questions, I’d be led astray, not only would I fall down the rabbit hole, I would waste time with the things that I’d decide couldn’t be used, and I’d aim too obscure for my audience. Now understand that the writer seeking inspiration and the student cramming the subject have separate goals from the subject expert editor. If they’re going with a book, the editor is probably going to want Brassey’s completeness for fact checking.
The second of these two books you'll probably never find, as it's a 1994 book published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Preservation Press. If it had been published in any other era it would have been given its subtitle as its full title: "A Guide to Style, Period, and Ism." However because this was an era when covers needed to be punched up stylistically, and someone thought it needed a hipper name to sell it, it was saddled with a teal magenta and orange cover, the font from Futurama, and the purpose-masking title of "The Culture Vulture."
It is so weird, and so misaligned with what it came from that I can only imagine there's only a few extant copies in existence. While I imagine this semi-government publication had to have been sold in museum gift shops in DC and nowhere else, I got my secondhand copy about five years after publication in a Half-Price Books. And in 312 pages, it manages to make itself a fantastic example of the inside-out strategy for quiz bowl.
There was another book of this type that ended up in the Barnes & Noble remainders aisle, called "The Isms Book", which attempted to cover philosophical, religious, political movements that all were described as ending in -ism. "The Culture Vulture" would be what happened if you stitched and alphabetized that book with an arts and architecture glossary, an archaeology text, and a guide to decorative art and antiques. To give you a taste, let's just go through the T entries:
T'ang
Taoism
Theosophy
Tiffany
Toltec
Transcendentalism
Trompe l'Oeil
Tudor
Turkish Rugs
To borrow from Hunter S. Thompson, this book is One of God's Own Prototypes. The publishing notes for The Culture Vulture include a note stating "The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Department of the Interior." You can see why I had to pull this up from the basement once I found it again. The author got this published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and it's absolutely not designed for the purposes of the Trust. It's 300+ pages of the most pure, uncut quiz bowl study guide imaginable. The utility compensates for the weirdness.
The format is not all that different from the Dictionary of Battles. 250 3-5 paragraph articles on a subject, covering examples in the genre, the origins, the connections with other movements, and influences upon later movements. It wraps up with a one-or-two sentence paragraph covering the best book-length survey of the subject, which is both a jumping off point and a major clue that gets used for questions. It’s perfect for the subjects, giving you an introduction and a reference beyond it, enough that you could answer a question in the subject, just probably not on the first clue.
It also tends to give a focus on the name of the cultural movement as an organizing theme in the article. An example of this is the article on Gothic, which tries to tie together the Goths, Gothic architecture, Gothic Revival, Carpenter’s gothic, and even on through America Gothic. That’s an approach probably more appropriate to quiz bowl than a survey of scholarship. And it is how lots of writers would approach writing a question where they know what answer they want to write, choosing to write for the word of the answer rather than the concept.
The reason I chose this week to show these books off is because this is the week of the IPNCT. And this book is designed to basically crush all IPNCT-type tournaments, by playing inside out.
I’m going to give you a quick debriefing of the design of the IPNCT. None of this is any secret, and all of it is derivable from the basic structure, and listening to the questions once or twice.
The base format is some number of tossup questions, taken from the previous day’s ICT, and reorganized into equal category splits, and then those categories are sequenced so the distribution rotates during a seeding round. The categories are equally split so that performance in each subject can be measured and prizes awarded. This means the IPNCT has a different overall distribution than that of its source material. Social Science and Fine Arts are slightly bulked up from normal, and History Literature and Science are slightly deemphasized.
What does this have to do with The Culture Vulture? Those bulked up categories are exactly those that one would find in the book, are the least related to subjects you learn in the high school curriculum, and because everywhere else they are used less frequently, they’re not seen as subjects worth specializing in.
In a singles tournament format like the IPNCT, where everyone is choosing to play, and everybody is bringing their best, the categories that everyone goes after will be dogfights and you have to be aiming to attack those questions. But for those categories that are unchallenged, an understanding of the later-line clues may be sufficient to score in those categories. The Culture Vulture gives you exactly that advantage, in two categories, where specialization can only net you one.
It’s not necessarily a sufficient plan to dominate singles competition, but from my experience in early drafts of the competition, I can definitely say it’s an advantage. One of the earliest singles tournaments (the Sunday after Minnesota Masters 1998) I ended up in the top seed pool before the head to head eliminations. Now at that point, I was at best the fifth best player in that group of six. But I was the only one of them whose category strengths were science, pop culture, and current events, with my being able to hold my own against them in history. Against the field I wasn’t going to win any points in literature, social science, or fine arts. But in a field like that, they elbowed each other out and split the categories where I was weak, and I took advantage in the categories where I was strong. If I remember correctly I was the first out in that round because my strengths were inverted from the field, a pattern I’ve always called inside-out from the circuit. Be strong in categories where the circuit is overall weak, and make sure that you’re just strong enough in categories where many are strong, so that if they make a mistake, it will cost them.
My performance surprised people in the tournament, but not me, I knew my advantages worked against those opponents in that setup. Once we got into the head to head elimination, I lost as soon as I faced anyone who was in that pool, because now they were able to use their full strength in the category against one opponent.
If you can collect advantages against the field, you will always do better than you expect. But finding those advantages, through studying with perfect depth, or shaping your game with study of force multiplying study guides, is one of the hardest part. These are two examples of books that can become your teams’ advantages, and can be your players’ advantages if they play singles. And they’re patterns to finding more advantages.