paperpools

ese oscuro objeto del deseo

2012-01-23T12:16:00.002Z

Javier Moreno's Spanish translation of 'That Obscure Object of Desire' has just gone up on Hermano Cerdo. What a wonderful story! I wish I'd written it! It has splendid illustrations by Luis Blackaller.

2012-01-16T16:20:00.001Z

How to Print an Internet Magazine
An Evening with Triple Canopy and Project Projects
McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street, New York, NY
Thursday, January 19, 7–8:30 p.m.
Free and open to the public

How to print an Internet magazine is the problem addressed by Invalid Format. Triple Canopy editors Alexander Provan and Peter J. Russo will read selections from Invalid Format and discuss its genesis and form with the book’s designer, Prem Krishnamurthy, and Adam Michaels of the firm Project Projects. Krishnamurthy and Michaels will, in turn, discuss how Project Projects makes productive use of the tension between new and old print technologies and design conventions in its work, which ranges from exhibitions to pamphlets, websites to catalogues.

2012-01-16T16:06:00.000Z

There has been no lock on the front door of the house for the past few months. I went to Kaiser's for milk and came back to find a new lock on the door. Assumed my old key would not work; buzzed Frau Finke, who let me in and explained that the old key did in fact work. Since I had routed her out anyway this seemed a good time to ask whether I could leave a spare set of keys with her, in case I got locked out. Frau Finke (goodhumouredly): Ja, das ist Ihre Spezialität. This seemed a bit hard - I haven't been back to the Schlüßeldienst in years, seems like - but the main thing is, a spare set is now safely with the concierge.

This may be a useful precaution. Now that I am immersing myself in Python, Unix and R I find myself losing track of practical details; I forget that there is something on the stove and come to only to find caramelised broccoli in a charred pan, this sort of thing.

The Rooster

2012-01-15T18:06:00.000Z

Lightning Rods is in the running for the Rooster, a prize offered by the Morning News for its Tournament of Books. The books go through a series of play-offs - at each stage, each judge reads two and decides which goes on to the next stage. There is also a zombie round:

In the Zombie Round, the two books most favored by TMN readers, but unfairly tossed aside in an early round by the capriciousness of a power-mad ToB judge, will rise from the dead to do battle against the only two undefeated novels of the tournament. The winners of those matchups become the Tournament of Books finalists. Each will be read by the full complement of 16 Tournament judges, plus an additional jurist, and the resulting tally will yield us the 2012 Tournament of Books champion, and its author will be awarded/threatened with the presentation of a live, angry chanticleer.

So anyone who'd like to have a say can go over to the MN and cast a vote (though you may well, of course, see some other book you'd rather see on the short short short list). Link for Zombie Poll here. (Poll closes January 18.)

2012-01-14T21:31:00.003Z

Two other aspects of sensed betrayal should be mentioned. First, those who suggest the
possibility of another's entering a mental hospital are not likely to provide a realistic picture
of how in fact it may strike him when he arrives. Often he is told that he will get required
medical treatment and a rest, and may well be out in a few months or so. In some cases they may thus be concealing what they know, but I think, in general, they will be telling what they see as the truth. For here there is quite relevant difference between patients and mediating professionals; mediators, more so than the public at large, may conceive of mental hospitals as short-term medical establishments where required rest and attention can be voluntarily obtained, and not as placed of coerced exile. When the prepatient finally arrives he is likely to learn quite quickly, quite differently. He then finds that the information given him about life in the hospital has had the effect of his having put up less resistance to entering than he now sees he would have put up had he known the facts. whatever the intentions of those who participated in his transition from person to patient, he may sense they have in effect 'conned' him into his present predicament.

I am suggesting that the prepatient starts out with at least a portion of the rights, liberties,
and satisfactions of the civilian and ends up on a psychiatric ward stripped of almost everything. The question here is now this stripping is managed. This is the second aspect of betrayal I want to consider.

Erving Goffman, Asylums (130)

2012-01-09T22:54:00.000Z

David Hume was born three hundred years ago, in 1711. The world has changed radically since his time, and yet many of his ideas and admonitions remain deeply relevant, though rather neglected, in the contemporary world. These Humean insights include the central role of information and knowledge for adequate ethical scrutiny, and the importance of reasoning without disowning the pertinence of powerful sentiments. They also include such practical concerns as our responsibilities to those who are located far away from us elsewhere on the globe, or in the future.

...

As it happens, contemporary theories of justice have largely followed the Hobbesian route rather than the Humean one. They have tended to limit their considerations of justice within the boundaries of a particular state. In an important essay in 2005 called “The Problem of Global Justice,” Thomas Nagel explained that “if Hobbes is right, the idea of global justice without a world government is a chimera.” The most influential modern theory of justice, namely John Rawls’s theory of “justice as fairness,” presented in his epoch-making book A Theory of Justice, concentrates on the identification of appropriate “principles of justice” that fix the “basic institutional structure” of a society, in the form of a cluster of ideal institutions for a sovereign state. This confines the principles of justice to the members of a particular sovereign state. It is worth noting that in a later work, The Law of Peoples, Rawls invokes a kind of “supplement” to this one-country pursuit of the demands of justice—but in dealing with people elsewhere, Rawls’s focus is not on justice, but on the basic demands of civilized and humane behavior across the borders.

Amartya Sen on Hume, the rest here. (HT MR)

we are what we habitually do

2012-01-09T19:35:00.000Z

Like the prophets of old, today's addicts may remind us that our desire for God is trivial and weak, and our horizons of hope and expectancy are limited and mundane. We recoil at the presence of the addict, for we fear that the addict's life is an indictment of the insufficiency of our own lives. The addict has rejected the life of respectable and proximate contentment and demanded instead a life of complete purpose and ecstasy. We recognize that our own lives are not interesting and beautiful enough to offer a genuine alternative to the addict, and we fear that a gospel powerful enough to redeem the addict would also threaten our own lives of decent and decorous mediocrity.

Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue

This is a brilliant book, which in itself has justified my purchase of a Kindle in my last week with my mother. (I saw the book on Amazon just after proposing a review to a magazine; the book looked relevant to the review, so a more prudent would-be reviewer would have waited for a free copy --but I could have it in seconds on my Kindle!) The reason I subjected my credit card to further abuse was that Dunnington addresses a startling gap in discussions of addiction, one I was particularly struck by in Gene Heyman's (generally excellent) Addiction: A Disorder of Choice.

Reading avidly along in Heyman, I had been baffled by the complete absence of discussion of Aristotle on voluntary and involuntary action, on the role of habit in the virtues and vices, all treated so extensively in the Nicomachean Ethics. And here is Dunnington, bringing Aristotle and Aquinas to bear on the subject! (When I say the book is brilliant, I do not mean that I have finished it; I mean that I am just getting into the thick of a discussion of Aristotle and Aquinas. )

Dunnington, as will be obvious from the quotation, is writing from a Christian perspective; it's rare for authors of "mainstream" works of scholarship to thank a supervisor for praying with the advisee. Radicalism is not necessarily the norm among Christian writers any more than it is among scholars, but part of the power of the book lies in the challenge it offers the non-addict: Du muß dein Leben ändern.

accidental history

2012-01-04T19:35:00.000Z

What do you think about hair dye?
Hm. When I got to Berlin I would go to this or that Frisür with the idea of having some highlights, and the hairdressers would try to persuade me to include brown highlights as looking more natural. Every time I would get dragged into a discussion of the Natural. I slightly felt that the Natural could be mine without recourse to a hairdresser, by the simple expedient of leaving the hair to its own devices. My German is not really up to discussions of the Natural and the Artificial, though, let alone the Natural as understood by early 21st century German hairdressers.

Emily Segal invited me to give an interview for Berlin Fashion Week way back in late 2009/early 2010. I was staying with my mother, but for a couple of days every so often I would go to my sister's apartment and collapse on the bed. (The theory was that I would pull together 100 pages for Bill, but there was no energy.) In the midst of all this, anyway, I was trying to write answers to interview questions. The feeling was of writing with a prosthetic head. I finally apologised for what struck me as a dead loss; was under the impression that ES agreed and had dropped the piece, but now I find it is online. For better or worse, here.

(There are authors who never give interviews, and then there are authors, it seems, who never stop giving them.)

2012-01-04T00:21:00.000Z

A few years ago, a colleague in another university published a huge book, based on a vast amount of archival research, meticulously documented, beautifully written and offering a new and formidably argued reinterpretation of a major historical event. I remarked to a friend in that university that this great work would certainly help their prospects in the RAE. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘We can’t enter him. He needs four items and that book is all he’s got.’ ...

I contrast this with my own experience in the old, supposedly unregenerate days. The college where I became a tutor in 1957 had only 19 academic fellows. Of these, two did no research at all and their teaching was languid in the extreme. That was the price the rest of us paid for our freedom and in my view it was a price worth paying. For the other fellows were exceptionally active, impelled, not by external bribes and threats, but by their own intellectual ambition and love of their subject. In due course three became fellows of the Royal Society and seven of the British Academy. They worked at their own pace and some of them would have fared badly in the RAE, for they conformed to no deadlines and released their work only when it was ready. I became a tutor at the age of 24, but I did not publish a book until I was 38. These days, I would have been compelled to drop my larger project and concentrate on an unambitious monograph, or else face ostracism and even expulsion.

Sir Keith Thomas in the LRB, the rest here.

How Keynes would explain Iowa

2012-01-03T13:00:00.000Z

John Maynard Keynes famously likened playing the stock market to judging a beauty contest where, rather than choosing the most beautiful girl, you had to choose the girl that everyone else would choose as most beautiful. "We devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be," wrote Keynes. This is, with some minor modifications, true for judging the results in Iowa, too.

Consider a question that doesn't get asked enough: Why does it matter who wins Iowa?

In theory, the answer should be: "because whoever wins Iowa gets Iowa's delegates." But it isn't. The Iowa caucuses award about one percent of the nation's delegates. That's not nothing, but it's not much.

The real answer is both widely known and difficult to discuss. Winning Iowa matters because the outcome in Iowa governs the subsequent actions of the political media and party elites. And it matters for them because, as Jonathan Bernstein puts it, "What Iowa does is it produces information" -- information that allows them to plan their next moves, and information that thus changes the outcome of subsequent primaries.

The media doesn't like to discuss this too forthrightly because it makes our role as a political actor -- rather than a simple observer -- uncomfortably explicit. As Duke political scientist Brendan Nyhan writes at CJR, there is "a refraction effect" in which "journalists help make Iowa influential and then report on its 'effects' without acknowledging their role in the process or the often arbitrary nature of the distinctions that are made among the candidates."

Party elites don't like to discuss it because their role in the presidential nomination process can seem undemocratic. But the process is undemocratic. A democratic process would be one in which the whole nation votes today; not one in which .04 percent of the nation caucuses today.

Ezra Klein, Wonkbook, the rest here.

tomato tomato?

2012-01-03T12:41:00.002Z

For most of the twentieth century, Arabs, Arab nationalists, and their Western devotees tended to substitute Arab for Middle Eastern history, as if the narratives, storylines, and paradigms of other groups mattered little or were the byproduct of alien sources far removed from the authentic, well-ordered, harmonious universe of the "Arab world."[3] As such, they held most Middle Easterners to be Arab even if only remotely associated with the Arabs and even if alien to the experiences, language, or cultural proclivities of Arabs. In the words of Sati al-Husri (1880-1967), a Syrian writer and the spiritual father of linguistic Arab nationalism:
Every person who speaks Arabic is an Arab. Every individual associated with an Arabic-speaker or with an Arabic-speaking people is an Arab. If he does not recognize [his Arabness] … we must look for the reasons that have made him take this stand … But under no circumstances should we say: "As long as he does not wish to be an Arab, and as long as he is disdainful of his Arabness, then he is not an Arab." He is an Arab regardless of his own wishes, whether ignorant, indifferent, recalcitrant, or disloyal; he is an Arab, but an Arab without consciousness or feelings, and perhaps even without conscience.[4]
This ominous admonition to embrace a domineering Arabism is one constructed on an assumed linguistic unity of the Arab peoples; a unity that a priori presumes the Arabic language itself to be a unified, coherent verbal medium, used by all members of Husri's proposed nation. Yet Arabic is not a single, uniform language. It is, on the one hand, a codified, written standard that is never spoken natively and that is accessible only to those who have had rigorous training in it. On the other hand, Arabic is also a multitude of speech forms, contemptuously referred to as "dialects," differing from each other and from the standard language itself to the same extent that French is different from other Romance languages and from Latin.

Franck Salameh, "Does Anyone Speak Arabic?" (Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2011) ht LanguageHat

Relay Foods

2012-01-01T22:01:00.000Z

An e-mail arrived in the mail at some recent point announcing that Relay Foods has attracted a big injection of venture capital, owing in part to the enthusiasm of its customer base. Relay Foods, since you ask, is a grocery delivery service based in Charlottesville, VA, with a recentish expansion to Richmond; the core of the service involves taking orders for groceries (mainly) from local businesses (including local farmers), packing them in appropriately insulated boxes, and delivering to local pick-up points. (It's also possible to arrange home delivery, free I think with minimum order of $50.)

I watch with interest, since RetailRelay,com, to use the firm's original name, figured in a book I was working on in 2008-9, immediately prior to signing on with Bill Clegg. The ms was up to a respectable 61,253 words, but it was not clear that this was the best book to finish and publish next.

With the wisdom of hindsight, life would have been incomparable simpler if I had forged ahead and finished the book, whether or not it was best for #2, during July-September 2009, before talking to an agent and having LR sent out by default because it happened to be finished. (The problem was that there were difficulties with film rights which I somehow imagined an agent might help to resolve.)

(I DO rather wish I had gone down to C'ville to give a reading of LR, as one reader suggested; I could have talked to local participants in Relay Foods! It would have been helpful for research!)

In any case, as a tribute to Relay Foods I excerpt the section relating to this excellent service below the fold. (Needless to say, Relay Foods bears no responsibility whatsoever for the reflections of the character. For what it's worth, it is the view of pp that anyone in the Charlottesville or Richmond area who is not already making use of the service is missing out on a good thing.)
He goes back online because what do we ever do these days except go online? No doubt he had reasons.

And he runs another search for Pepperidge Farm Brussels, and this time he finds a place that is selling them for $3.39. Which is exactly what the Internet is for, it helps you scout out the cheapest price nation- or even worldwide. The question is, obviously, what they charge for shipping, given that the other place offered free shipping on orders over $100. He fills in an order form for 25 packages, bringing the total to $84.75, and he then fills in his address in hopes of discovering what the shipping charges will be. They offer free pick-up twice a week, that is you can go and pick up the order; as it turns out, the first delivery is also free. So this is definitely a good deal and RetailRelay.com is definitely the place to go, except wha-?

Apparently they will only deliver if you live within a something-mile radius of Charlottesville. So. Right. When they deliver they deliver personally to your home, it seems, in their own personal delivery vehicle. The next question being, naturally, OK, where is this place?

He runs a search for Charlottesville and unsurprisingly gets hits in 23 states. He returns to RetailRelay.com. He clicks Home. He clicks About. He clicks Contact Us. He clicks every damn place he can think of, but he is unfortunately unable to narrow down the location of the firm, not that he doesn't pick up a lot of other information in the process.

What the firm does is, it takes orders online for a wide range of groceries and other retail items, and two days a week customers can stop by and pick up their bagged orders which will in fact be carried to the car on their behalf. Or, if the customer lives within the designated radius, they can have a delivery to the home. Either way, saving the customer the hassle of going to the store and picking stuff out and standing in line at the check-out. They're advertising, interestingly enough, for what they call an operations manager, or rather operations team member, which turns out to be a combination of retailer liaison rep and delivery truck driver, 20 hours a week, $11 an hour. Which is not without its appeal, though probably better suited to someone with a valid driver's license.

In its way, actually, the whole thing is not without its appeal. If he moved to Charlottesville, wherever that might be, he would not be eligible for the gig as operations team member for another 4 years, but in the meantime he could definitely avail himself of this seemingly cool service. You could definitely make a case that a man without a driver's license would be better off in an area where groceries can be home-delivered at no or negligible cost.

He clicks around some more and ascertains that the Charlottesville in question is, in fact, in Virginia. In fact the place he clicked turns out to be the Contact Us tab, so he can't see any obvious reason why this would not have been obvious the first time around.

One thing that occurs to him is, this could actually be a different way to socially engineer your life. AA has way more than the national average for suspended or endangered licenses, because a DWI is often the wake-up call that brings people to the program in the first place, whether on their own initiative or because a sympathetic judge thought it would be good for them. So it could be that members would give themselves a better chance of a manageable life if they moved somewhere like C'ville. Given that, as previously noted, AA does not go in much for orchestrating van rentals, deliveries, bulk buys. You can imagine the security you would feel in a place where you could stockpile your 7-year-old cheddar and your Pepperidge Farm Brussels, but where the other stuff, the impulse buys, could be conducted online for convenient home delivery. Plus, it specifically says in the ad that the Operations Team Member needs to be highly-motivated, flexible, hard-working, able to solve problems quickly and under pressure, detail-oriented and organized, as well as extremely friendly and personable. Think how great that would be to live in a place where just ordering in your groceries gave you face-to-face interaction with a friendly detail-oriented Operations Team Member. (And not just ordering in your groceries; all kinds of local retailers participate. Dog and Horse Lovers Boutique. Pandora's Chocolatier.)

There's a dim image of a pleasant possible life projected on the mental screen. He can dimly see himself in some local level of job, putting in time, maybe, at a McDonald's, building up credentials, showing that he can be personable and friendly without alcohol, without a kilt, as well as hard-working, highly motivated and detail oriented, to the point where somewhere down the road the current OTM gets a promotion. That or the company expands and needs another OTM. At which point Scotty, with his driver's license, can put in an ap. Be part of a team which is part of a business which is part of building a community. It could happen.

The only thing is, though, that images of future lives and plans always come to him dimly now. They don't come zapping into the brain with the flare of certainty and immediacy, the call to instant action, which had characterized bright ideas in the Day of the Kilt. If something has the capacity to come about by being drifted into, it may well come about. If it needs decisive action - but see, just the phrase "decisive action" makes him feel tired. (Which, be honest, is not what they seem to be looking for in their Operation Team Member, quite apart from the missing license to drive a motor vehicle.)

(And, be honest, even if the eminences grises of Charles Chips could be tracked down, the hirers and firers who take on local distributors and cast them aside, they too are probably not looking for the kind of local distributor who wants to lie down as soon as the phrase "decisive action" surfaces in the meat in the bonebox. In fact, the reason their contact details are not readily available through CharlesChips.com is probably precisely to put off the kind of idle speculator who goes online in search of his grandmother's potato chips and then casually thinks it would be totally wild to drive a truck delivering potato chips and pretzels and cookies with proprietary tins.

RetailRelay is a start-up, and they have a single local base in Charlottesville VA; they can safely advertise for an OTM online without fearing hordes of the idly curious. If they had been in business for over 60 years, operating nationwide, they too would probably make it harder to find out how to get a job with them. Charles Chips, he reckons, is probably deliberately playing hard to get so the people who do manage to seek them out will be a self-selected pool of genuine contenders. He sees that, he acknowledges that, but this too is merely a dim recognition, it's not some kind of call to resolute action. Not that he has a driver's license, anyway.)

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T21:29:00.000Z

Looking back over the year. Somewhat stunned by the extraordinary kindness and generosity so many people have shown -- many of them strangers known only through this blog. I would especially like to thank those who gave me a place to stay this autumn in New York (Bernie Onken, Chris Glazek, Jenny Davidson, Elizabeth and Eileen Gumport) or offered to do so (Danielle Sucher, Sherally Munshi, Jeremy Glick, and Ezra Nielsen), and William Flesch and Laura Quinney, who put me up in Boston at (I can't help thinking) great inconvenience (and also let me walk off with William's copy of Erving Goffman's Forms of Talk). Also Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Marco Roth and the whole team at n+1, who put so much energy into helping to launch Lightning Rods. Also, needless to say, Barbara Epler, Jeffrey Yang, Tom Roberge, Laurie Callahan, Declan Spring, and the rest of the staff at New Directions. And, er, Edward Orloff, who has the somewhat thankless task of explaining the biz to a skeptical client.

Oh and ALSO - after the dust had settled and publicity-hunting was over - Daniel Medin very kindly invited me to Paris to talk to the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University in Paris; and Léna Devos gave me the chance to stay on in Paris for several days, not only making available a room in her apartment but also taking me out on various excursions, sometimes à deux, sometimes with her family.

I am very grateful. With so much encouragement, it may seem perverse to think of jumping ship, but . . .

Joey Comeau came down from Toronto! I had such a nice time - and I kept thinking, gosh, if I wrote a webcomic my whole life could be like this.

And now readers of the blog have offered so many helpful suggestions for getting into programming. (A line of work which might make it a lot easier to decamp to Toronto.)

Other things being equal, I could crowd an acknowledgements page or three in my next book with thanks to all the people who have been so unbelievably kind in 2011. Not sure what 2012 holds in store, but would like in the meantime to express my heartfelt thanks, and best wishes to all for a Very Happy New Year.

phlegm

2011-12-29T21:40:00.000Z

It turns out that a portion of the talent required to survive in the trenches of the ATP Tour is emotional: Joyce is able to keep from getting upset about stuff that struck me as hard not to get upset about. When he points out that there's "no point" getting exercised about unfairnesses you can't control, I think what he's really saying is that you either learn how not to get upset about it or you disappear from the Tour.

David Foster Wallace, 'Tennis player Michael Joyce's professional artistry as a paradigm of certain stuff about choice...', in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

2011-12-28T21:33:00.000Z

...The reverence with which he approached Frege's ideas, and the irritation and puzzlement with which he often approached the ideas of other philosophers, prompted one reviewer of the collection Frege and Other Philosophers to remark that Dummett seemed to regard the parallel between the title of that collection and the earlier collection Truth and Other Enigmas "as more than just a parallel".

Terrific obituary of Michael Dummett by A W Moore in the Guardian, the rest here.

2011-12-27T23:29:00.000Z

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has shown that if conditional probabilities are reinterpreted as frequencies, people have no problem in interpreting their meaning (see the discussion "Risk School" in Nature 461,29, October 2009). Gigerenzer has been promoting the idea that trigonometry be dropped from the high school math sequence (no one uses it except surveyors, physicists, and engineers) and probability theory be added. This sounds like a great idea to me.

Herbert Gingis reviewing Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow over at our very dear friends at Amazon (HT, as too often, MR) [We at pp are huge fans of GG, not that it helps: we feel that if our very dear friends in the biz had but read GG, and then immersed themselves in the oeuvre of ET, we could have been a contender.] [This is not necessarily the most insightful quote from HG wrt DK, but we at pp are, as we say, huge fans of GG.]

Stop press!!!!!! New Yorkers take note!

On Saturday January 21 at 2.00pm Edward Tufte will conduct an open forum answering questions about analytical design, art, the creative process, and public service. Free event, ET Modern.
On Monday January 23, 2012, Edward Tufte will give his one-day course, "Presenting Data and Information," at ET Modern. The Monday course filled up quickly and is now closed, so we've now added another course day: Sunday, January 22, 2012. See below for course information and registration.

post hoc, ergo propter hoc (not)

2011-12-27T23:06:00.001Z

... A lot of success stories we hear are despite the system, not because of it, and the sooner we recognize that, the better the chances that we’ll do something to fix the status quo.

Editorial in LiveMint, HT Steve Sailer on education in India, HT MR, more SS here. Mutatis mutandis . . .

below the cut

2011-12-27T15:12:00.000Z

As I think I've said somewhere or other, I've given an awful lot of interviews recently. Often by e-mail. And the editorial view -- even when the interview was to be published online -- was generally that less is more. Ours not to reason why. But I was thinking today about the pink-collar labour force, to which I am thinking of returning, and for one interview I had much to say about pink-collar labour which turned out to be superfluous to requirements.

Which is interesting, because my position, at this point, is essentially that of a woman who took time off to stay home with children. A position that would have been, to those coming up after, unimaginably less worrying in the day of the typewriter. (I now read ads that require, inter alia, a PowerPoint whiz; as an ET acolyte I naturally renounce Satan and all His works, sc. Powerpoint, but feel a job app would not be enhanced by reference to ET on the cognitive evils of PP or by Mark Gertz's ET Kitten Assassin wallpaper. In my young day applying for secretarial work did not involve these crises of conscience.)

Can't see any point in identifying the interview for which I expanded on the theme at bloggish length, but these were the thoughts of the day:

If you have a job thatrequires a lot of typing you end up getting a lot of practice; your speedbuilds up over the years, to the point where you can type faster than you think(at least if you are working out something complicated). I used to type 100wpm,and now feel chagrined if I take a test and find my speed is down to a rubbishy88.

This is fine for theactual writing of a book, or taking notes from a text, or blogging, but it isnot so good for dealing with people in the industry. The temptation is to do business by e-mail, and inparticular to address complex subjects by writing long, complex e-mails. (It SEEMS to make sense because theneverything is in writing, and both parties can go back and confirm what wassaid.)

This works if the personyou write to is also a competent typist, someone similarly maddened by theconstraints of a Blackberry or cell phone, someone who prefers to dash off880-word e-mails in a shame-making 10 minutes on a full keyboard, hence (at aminimum) laptop with full screen on which YOUR 880+-word e-mails can be readrapidly in big blocks of screen space. Someone who will naturally interpolate replies to a series of questionsinto the text, permitting you to do the same in response.

If you are dealing withsomeone who thinks it worth typing tmrw rather than tomorrow, someone whowrites (and reads) e-mails by Blackberry, someone who gets many e-mails in thecourse of a day, the flood of text is likely to drive them mad. It’s better with this sort of person tokeep e-mails to the length of a Tweet and do most business by phone. I didn’t know.

Equally disastrously, ifyou work as a secretary you internalize a simple hierarchical picture of thebusiness world. Your academicqualifications are irrelevant; what counts is the place you occupy in thehierarchy. Occupying this position, you perform various tasks uponrequest. You don’t argue; youdon’t explain that the task would best be performed by the person who made therequest; you don’t put the task aside and explain, if asked, that it does notneed to be done for another couple of months; you don’t put the task aside andexplain, if asked, that none of the other places you worked ever asked you toperform it and that you are simply doing what you did in all the other placesyou worked. No, you just carry out the task as soon as asked, and you try to doit right first time. And none ofthis is contingent on enthusiasm for the people, or the project, or thecompany; you’ve been brought in to do a job, you do the job.

You then imagine that asa writer you can step into a system with a similar hierarchy, only at adifferent place in the hierarchy. You are no longer providing support; you are now the principal, theclient, the person for whom services are provided. So you expect to give instructions and have them carried outpromptly without argument. You give instructions and they are not so muchairily waved aside as ignored. Mysteriously, people are lavish with praise of your talent, the word ‘genius’is used with gay abandon – but the mere fact that you are a genius does notmean that you can have a document photocopied, a working group list, a meetingwith an agenda.

You (well, I, at anyrate) are then prey to baffled rage. You are told that a book will not be sent to editors on Monday becausethe agent is superstitious about Mondays (!), then that the book was not sentout on Tuesday or Wednesday because the copying service was closed for Passover(!!), then that there is no point sending it out this week because it is nowGood Friday and everyone will be out of the office until the following Tuesday(!!!). Your book enjoys the levelof care celebrated in “United Breaks Guitars.” You are presently reduced to thestate of the dogs used as subjects in experiments on learned helplessness, theones now universally condemned for cruelty to animals.

[There are undoubtedlymany other lessons to be learnt, but even a rubbishy 88 wpm is already makingthis answer longer than readers are likely to sit still for. Also, JessaCrispin of Bookslut has just commented that my lack of discretion has probablynot helped me in dealing with the publishing industry. Perhaps I should just mention that Ihave used examples from persons who have had no connection with the publicationof LR.]

Just to show I am notCOMPLETELY self-obsessed, I add that one gets a rather terrifying insight intothe cost of technological advance to women in pink collar jobs:

Before the advent of thepersonal computer and office software, it was roughly the case that a secretarycould master skills needed to operate a machine (typewriter, possibly addingmachine) and move in and out of the workforce without much trouble: a machineacquired for use in the home would remain roughly comparable to that in theoffice, however many years went by, and typing speed could be worked on asrequired. (You can throw inshorthand and not change the position much.)

Word processors changedthis, spreadsheets made it worse. If I remember correctly, WordStar was anearly leader in the field of word processing; it was displaced by WordPerfectfor DOS in the mid- to late 80s, though some offices also used Word; in the early 90s Windows rendered mostof the keystrokes for the DOS-based programs obsolete, so it was necessary tobe up to speed on WordPerfect or Word for Windows; WordPerfect did not come upwith a good version for Windows fast enough, so that Word gained ground, andwithin a decade Word was virtually unchallenged within the office environment.

Like WordPerfect before it, Word has gone through a number of substantialchanges (Word 97, Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010 each required new skills).And of course I’ve said nothing about the spreadsheet wars (Lotus 1-2-3,QuattroPro, Excel), PowerPoint, e-mail programs, scanning technology. In other words, if you worked in anoffice without interruptions you could count on getting trained to the next newthing; if you took time out, or tried to move from one place to another, youcould find yourself scrambling to master completely different software. Takingtime out to write a novel may not be terribly common; taking a few years tostay home with small children was once relatively low-risk, now much harder tocome back from. (Note that a blockof four or five years – whichwould once have been unremarkable for a woman who wanted to have a child andstay home until it started school – is easily long enough to render dominantoffice software obsolescent or even obsolete.)

***

Funnily enough -- this did not come up in the interview because I sensed I had already gone on too long -- the way I picked up word processing was through a free course at the Computer Learning Centre at Oxford. That was how I made the leap from the typewriter to the world as we know it. The training was in WordPerfect for DOS. There were later, terrifying leaps when I no longer had access to the Computer Learning Centre. (WP for DOS was friendly to a fast typist; Windows, intuitive to so many, was terrifying. And Word! Word was an obscure little program that had no Reveal Codes. Which had to be picked up somehow on the Q.T. on the computer of a friend who gave courses.)

So I look at unemployment figures, and I remember how I picked up this skill as a freebie when I was doing a doctorate, on a senior scholarship, and I tend to think cheap easy access to relevant skills would solve problems for a lot of people who have never thought of being Prince Hamlet. While also thinking that the skills I really needed were those required to deal with my editor-to-be, an Oxford contemporary -- the solution to that problem would seem to have been a handsome entertainment allowance.

So. Programming. A world without PowerPoint. A beautiful little command line world where you type in text. Nice.

2011-12-26T11:01:00.000Z

The guiding principle of Graeber's sweeping global history is that debt must not remain the exclusive property of economic historians, and moreover, that anthropologists are better equipped to take on the issue. The foundational myth on which economics rests, and which Graeber relishes debunking, is the "touchingly utopian" idea that money emerged directly out of primitive barter systems and had only to do with interest-maximizing exchange. Arguing against this from an anthropological perspective, Graeber claims that debt is the basis of society, and as such is inherently ineliminable. He illustrates this point through the example of debt to one's parents: to seek to cancel that debt would be impossible. Graeber describes a system of gift-giving in traditional societies that takes place over time, and involves gifts of slightly more or less value than the ones that preceded them, thus ensuring that everyone is always slightly in debt or in credit to everyone else. This sort of debt, he says, is nothing less than the continual creation of society. It is not so much that we owe something to society, but that society "just is our debts."

Justin E H Smith on Debt, by David Graeber, at Bookforum, the rest here (courtesy Wood s Lot)

2011-12-25T20:39:00.000Z

Carter: Well, first of all, my mother made her living writing memoirs and extremely autobiographical novels about her family, and there were major ramifications from that. But she always told me to write whatever I had to, and not to worry. Now, when she saw the piece that hurt and offended her, she was very hurt and offended. I didn’t write it to do that. My love for them and my gratitude, I felt, showed through in my work. I felt that I never attacked them in my work that way. I had to write about growing up with the family I grew up with or I would have been somehow dishonest. But it was not my agenda to expose and destroy, or to hurt or offend. But there was some hurt and some offense taken.

Rumpus: Which story was it?

Carter: “The Bride.” It was supposed to be published as fiction. But it was rejected as fiction and sold as memoir. At the time I was really, really, really strapped for money, and I had to say, I don’t care what you call it, just publish it and pay me for my piece so I can pay my rent. I really was in no position to argue about the niceties of autobiographical fiction at that point in my life.

...

Rumpus: I’ve got all these stories I’m so afraid to tell. Like about how I grew up adjacent to affluence, but not from an affluent family myself. I had these step-sisters who had trust funds, and they had this grandmother who would give them thousands of dollars every year, and then she’d give me and my sister each a card at Chanukah with one crisp dollar bill in it.

[I'm thinking of Jane Austen publishing her books under the sobriquet 'A Lady'. I'm thinking of Sir Walter Scott, whose manuscripts were copied out by a friend before being sent to a publisher lest the handwriting be recognised; whose later books were published as by 'the Author of Waverley'. Perhaps Literature needs its Bourbaki.]

Emily Carter, author of Glory Goes and Get Some (the rest here)

Feliz Navidad

2011-12-25T19:40:00.001Z

Javier Moreno has translated That Obscure Object of Desire (published in a recent edition of Bullett Magazine) into Spanish - the language in which it should clearly have been written in the first place.

Exhibit A:

Incertidumbre e información son las mismas cantidades, la pérdida de incertidumbre es igual a la ganancia de información.
Códigos y Criptografía, Dominic Welsh

Exhibit B:

La rampa de concreto bifurca; él se dirige a la izquierda y sale a un mercado de verduras al aire libre.

[It's 'La rampa de concreto bifurca' that's so lovely.]

The point is, the piece is now saturated with the language of Borges. (Writing in a café, so do not have the oeuvre to hand, but a line that was a mere inert quotation from Codes and Cryptography now brings to mind La Lotería de Babylon : He conocido el incertidumbre.)

Moreno will be publishing the piece in HermanoCerdo in January.

Have been talking to my mother about Wallace Stevens; I might have been happier all these years if I had had a job in insurance and a briefcase with compartments. If I had had the sense to get a job in insurance, or train as a programmer, or, or, or, years ago, I could write a piece in whichever language seemed best for the piece without worrying about - what shall we say - Acts of Copy-Editor, Typesetter, &c. All as comprehensively excluded from the protection offered by an Agent as are Acts of God from a cautious insurance policy, the difference being that Insurance favours small print rather than unwritten rules.

(16 lessons into Python The Hard Way. THANK you, Zed Shaw, this was exactly what I wanted for Christmas.)

(-- Well, I wouldn't mind also having my hobbyist's edition of Mathematica, which arrived just after I left DC to talk to Michael Miller in the Tik Tok Diner; I wouldn't mind having my SUDO MAKE ME A SANDWICH t-shirt, which also arrived too late, too late. Er, I wouldn't mind having an accountant with superhero powers to grapple with my UK tax return. But these are minor cavils. Merry Christmas, one and all.)

2011-12-25T02:32:00.000Z

Spoiled by the power of your best tools, you tend to shy away from messy calculations or long, case-by-case arguments unless they are absolutely unavoidable. Mathematicians develop a powerful attachment to elegance and depth, which are in tension with, if not directly opposed to, mechanical calculation. Mathematicians will often spend days thinking of a clean argument that completely avoids numbers and strings of elementary deductions in favor of seeing why what they want to show follows easily from some very deep and general pattern that is already well-understood. Indeed, you tend to choose problems motivated by how likely it is that there will be some "clean" insight in them, as opposed to a detailed but ultimately unenlightening proof by exhaustively enumerating a bunch of possibilities.

What is it like to have understanding of very advanced mathematics, the rest here (ht Tyler Cowen at MR)

LPTHW

2011-12-22T22:58:00.000Z

I hope it was not bad form to clarify a few points that were not quite right in Michael Miller's piece; I am not convinced that I would have done a better job if I had had to grapple with a) a long, complicated saga and b) the place where language breaks down.

Also - if you have a long history of depression and worse you realise that most people, mental health professionals included, can't deal with it. The people who can tend to be people who have been through a bad time themselves. I remember meeting someone I had known in London, Sara Jenkins (now Valentine); she talked about a time when she had had what she called 'bad thoughts', and the mind responded to the voice like a hurt dog. I think I imagined that Bill Clegg, who had been through a bad time, might be like that; he wasn't, but I don't know that his behaviour was abnormal.

In any case, I just wanted to thank the reader who recommended Learn Python the Hard Way. This looks like exactly the sort of thing I need (and in fact, if I had been able to work my way through LPTHW during bad times, they would probably not have been so bad).

chrono

2011-12-22T19:09:00.001Z

I posted a link yesterday to Michael Miller's profile in the Observer. I'm not sure that it's not petty to correct details of chronology and such; the problem is, as you probably know, that Wikipedia treats accounts published in the press as sources. If I understand the piece correctly, MM thought that, upon receiving Bill Clegg's resignation in January 2010, I went straight from my mother's bedside in Silver Spring to Eastbourne in the UK with the intention of committing suicide, and that I wrote to Bill from Eastbourne. (I expect getting a verbal account at the Tik Tok diner, and then having to make sense of the material from a recorder, contributed to the misunderstanding.) This was not correct, and I think gives a false impression of the situation:

She could not see a way forward. “Fourteen years of publishing crap, no end in sight,” she said. She knew of a 600-foot cliff in Eastbourne. Back in England, she booked a one-way train ticket to Gatwick, an hour from the cliff by train, then checked into a hotel. On Feb. 10, 2010, she sent an email to Mr. Clegg that said, “I’m leaving tomorrow, sorting out a few last-minute things.”

I had a flight booked back to Berlin on January 28. I did not know what to do. I was exhausted after looking after my mother; Bill had resigned while she was in intensive care, saying the relationship was unproductive. I had $10,000 in credit card debt; I could not finish a new book fast from a state of exhaustion, and even if I could I did not know where to send it. I had tried desperately hard, as I had for the last 14 years, to get information leading to publishers who could cope with technically challenging work, and I had failed yet again.

The point is, in other words, that the reason I could not see a way out was not simply because things had not worked out with Bill, but because I had tried so many times over the last 14 years. With Bill, I had forced myself to overcome all kinds of phobias and inhibitions - a phobia of the phone, a phobia of meeting people in person to talk about work, a profound horror of showing people unfinished work, finished work with which I was dissatisfied. And it was simply not possible to do more. If it was necessary to be even MORE phone-friendly, if it was necessary to send out even more unfinished work and be judged on that basis, I would never be able to do it. I had made a special trip to New York to talk about new work; Bill's assistant had misunderstood a request to see Bill's office before going to lunch, so we had never made it to the coffeehouse where I would have a table to lay out materials -- so I could not make best use of this single meeting, because an assistant misunderstood. How could I guarantee fewer misunderstandings without micromanaging even MORE, which was the thing that drove people crazy in the first place?

So I sat in a sublet apartment in Berlin, and what lay ahead was not a lifetime of writing, but a lifetime of trying to do business by phone, going to New York for meetings and having them derailed by Hardyesque accident, it had never not been like this so why would it change?

But the thing is. The fact is, as I think Wittgenstein said, intention is not the furniture of the mind. I can't look into my mind and identify an intention to commit suicide, in the way that I can look in the attic to see if I have a chair. And I can't, how can I put it, distinguish a fake from a genuine intention the way I can have an antique chair assessed (is this really Queen Anne or just a cheap copy). All I have to go on is what an observer would have to go on. Feeling miserable is not evidence. What counts as evidence is actions. If I make my will, it's a piece of evidence, but hardly conclusive. If I book a one-way flight to Gatwick (from which it's a quick train journey to Eastbourne, from which it's a short bus trip to Beachy Head), that's a piece of evidence, but hardly conclusive. If I spend the night packing a suitcase to catch the plane, that looks a bit more like something is going to happen, but still, of course, hardly conclusive.

Well, the point is, at what point are observable actions sufficiently conclusive? Conclusive enough, I mean, to merit taking into account the grief that would be caused survivors. Saying to oneself: There is a virtual certainty that nothing can be done, that there is no way forward, but people in this position often think there is no way out when there is a solution, the rational course of action is to contact someone with relevant information and see if I am mistaken.

At any rate, I stayed up packing to catch an early morning flight to Gatwick, and it felt very good not to have to fight any more. It felt so good. It felt so good. People who have never confronted a fate that is literally worse than death will not understand.

But the fact is, there might be a solution I did not see; if so, it would involve a lot of dreary striving, but there are people who would be spared grief. The person to ask was someone with relevant information. Bill must presumably know what I should have done differently; he might know what I could do now; the person to ask was the person with the answer to the question. So I wrote to Bill (part of this e-mail is quoted in the piece) and went on packing. I did not say where I was going, because if I had said I was going to Eastbourne, to Beachy Head with its 600-foot cliff, it would be very easy for him to stop this. He could simply call the police in Eastbourne, explain the situation, forward the e-mail, tell me he had done so; if I went, I would be picked up by the police.

I got a reply from Bill in 40 minutes which I could not bring myself to look at. Just before it was time to go, I read his e-mail - and it must be said there was a great deal of sympathy and feeling in his reply. (I sent this to Michael Miller, though I could naturally not grant permission to print it, because I wanted to be fair; many people, I think, would warm to this. See Bill in a more favorable light than the person packing to catch a plane.) It did not answer the question. It was an emotional response to a factual question - which is precisely what one always does get from the biz. So I walked out the door with my carry-on bag and took the U-Bahn to Rudow and the bus to Schoenefeld and got on the plane.

It is very tiring to expose yourself to more of the same misunderstandings, but I realised, as I flew to Gatwick, that this is a bad thing to do to someone: contact him before leaving to commit suicide, in the hope of a helpful solution, and then jump off a cliff because he said the wrong thing. How can you do that to someone? If you're going to jump off the cliff, it turns out, it would have been much better to jump without writing, Bill is very emotional, perhaps not the kind of person to respond rationally at a time of crisis.

The fair thing to do was explain once more that I simply wanted to know whether there was something I could do; if there was something I hadn't tried, I would do it. And then give him time to think things over, because perhaps he would not immediately know what to say. So I checked into a hotel and wrote explaining again, pointing out that I thought I was doing what people had wanted DFW to do. I got a reply which still did not answer the question, he said that suicide was the most selfish thing you could do and Wallace's family had had to live with terrible grief and so on. There was a certain irony to this, because the reason things had gone wrong was that I had unselfishly spent 3 months looking after my mother instead of pulling together another MS for Bill to sell. Meanwhile I was getting emotional e-mails from many other people; Bill had contacted the reader who had introduced us, who had tracked down my ex-husband, my sister, friends in Berlin - it was all messy and bad.

Anyway, to be fair, it may be that if one gets an e-mail from someone who only says vaguely that she is going somewhere where it is easy to make an end, the vagueness is not very convincing. And perhaps if the person gives one time to think that also does not sound very urgent to someone impulsive and emotional. But I was anxious not to reveal my location, because it would be so easy for someone to call the police. And it has to be said, all this emotional turmoil made things worse.

I think if one reaches this position one is aware that one may not be sane, so one falls back on reason - it is like Descartes, imagining that the mind may be possessed by an evil demon, asking of what one can be certain if this is the case. It seemed, bringing reason to bear, that the fact that Bill had not offered any practical suggestion did not mean there was nothing that could be done. Bill doesn't much like e-mail as a means of communication; he is more comfortable on the phone; I was unable at this point to speak on the phone. Therefore the only way of determining whether something might be done was to ask someone else to speak to him on the phone. I would rather not have brought in my ex-husband, but since he had been brought in anyway, and since he would certainly want to do something if something could be done, I wrote to him explaining the situation and asking if he would mind talking to Bill on the phone. I gave him the office number and the cell number; he called Bill but could not get through.

I think at this point I wrote to Bill suggesting it might be better if he talked to David. His assistant wrote saying that Bill had gone on vacation to Mexico for 2 weeks and was uncontactable. I wrote explaining to Shaun that I was a 12-minute bus ride from a 600-foot cliff and did not think I would wait 2 weeks for Bill's return on the off-chance that something useful might come of it. It seemed as though it would look bad for Bill if a suicide took place in his absence, so perhaps it might be better to consult one of the other agents.

In my talk with Michael Miller I was trying to convey the way the mind works at such a time; there isn't a social self that can be deployed. The mind is trying to make the correct decision, depending on relevant facts. If the requirement is to keep the body alive while the talent slowly dies off inside, if this is the life required to allow others to live a life without grief, it is not possible to undertake to live indefinitely in this way.

But if there is some action that can be taken to give a chance of a life that can be lived, one would take that action. One is trying to determine whether such action is possible. There is no pain, no despair if by despair one means a state of mind with emotional affect; on the contrary, one feels happy because in all likelihood there is nothing to be done and an end can be made in a day or so. One goes cheerfully out for Belgian beer and frites. I am sure this does not correspond to most people's notion of suicidal behavior; that was precisely why it seemed worth trying to explain this thing that does not conform to a stereotype to a journalist.

The curious thing, or rather the wholly unsurprising thing, is that David understood this line of reasoning at once. He does not want me to die; he would be desperately unhappy if I were to kill myself; but he understands that it would be terrible to ask someone to keep the body alive as a shell. But he had no relevant information, and the person with relevant information was not someone who would be desperately unhappy if I died.

Perhaps this is impossible to explain to a journalist. On the one hand, certainty that there will be no more dealing with people who are not like David. A little space before the end to go out for Belgian beer and frites; then it's over. On the other hand, the endless dreary jockeying for a scrap of information that might possibly someday somewhere lead to something slightly better. You write to someone against your better judgement - in all likelihood there is only endless dreary jockeying to look forward to - only because, as everyone says, the death will cause grief to people who will continue to exist. And everything you do, not for yourself, but for the people who might be spared grief, only makes it look as though there is very little likelihood that there will be a body at the bottom of a cliff. Meanwhile, er, the more you try to do the decent thing, the more you are simply dragged into more of the endless dreary jockeying that made a quick end, preceded by Belgian beer and frites, look so good. (Why, presumably, so many people have the good sense not to 'reach out'.)

Anyway, Bill's assistant send a team of pygmies out into deepest Mexico in search of the Uncontactable. David got a call on his cellphone from a man who was aggrieved, anxious to limit damage (David said Bill did indeed think a suicide would look bad). The caller talked aggrievedly on at some length before mentioning the 600-foot cliff, at which point David said WHAT?????!!!!!!!!

Bill sent the relevant e-mail to David, who sent an e-mail saying DON'T DO ANYTHING! Adding that his wife was pregnant. (Awwww - a littul BAAAAYbeeee.) He explained later that he could not think of anything else to say. I explained to Mr Miller that this did not solve the problem, but how can you-- How can you darken joy with grief. Something like that. Of course, if I had not written to Bill I would have been much better off, but what can you do.

Miller says a short time later I got an offer of publication for Lightning Rods from New Directions. Well, if you're a young journalist with your nice New York life 9 months may look short. 9 months of sitting in an apartment in Berlin with absolutely no idea of what to do. 25 years from now, yes, the infant prodigy now lulled to sleep on 2001: A Space Odyssey may have the publishing industry eating out of the palm of her hand. Meanwhile, I sit in the apartment, writing e-mails, putting them in the drafts folder, checking flights on Easyjet 5 times a day, sometimes booking and cancelling out, sometimes booking and letting the booking expire, wondering what to do.

At some point David Levinson mentions to Dale Peck that he has met me. Dale Peck says The Last Samurai! That book was HUGE! Dale reads the book and loves it. He says if there is anything he can do to help he will do it. I have no idea what would help.

But Dale Peck is giving a party! Dale Peck and friends are launching Mischief & Mayhem, a new imprint; they are giving a party! And David Levinson says DP knows everybody. I think that if I go to New York, if I take the body to New York, I may somehow meet someone who will know what I could do. DP may know. Someone else may know. I'm told there are editors who love my work; I don't know who they are. But friends say they can get me meetings with any editor I want to meet. I think if I go to New York for three weeks I may find out if there are editors who would be right for my most ambitious work. If not -- I have booked a flight on British Air, changing at Heathrow. $10,000 in credit card debt is now $20,000 in credit card debt, more want matter if there is no way forward. I can leave the plane at Heathrow on the way back, go to Eastbourne again, eschew the pointless e-mail in search of a solution. If there IS a solution, the debts will someday be paid.

I go to New York. DP is taken up with his launch. The friends who said they could set up meetings with editors can't set up those meetings. They suggest people who might have ideas. I meet people who suggest other people. I talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. I take with me my carry-on bag. I pull out the Taschen book on Manga! A book on Otto Neurath's Bilderstatistik! An antique book on French 3-handed whist! And more and more and more! I am trying to explain how one might change the face of 21st-century fiction!

I have some very good conversations. It seems as though there are editors who are real problem-solvers, editors who could cope with the most interesting books on my hard drive. I can go back to Berlin and ignore my credit card debt and finish one of these books.

There's something Michael Miller doesn't understand, because he takes for granted something he knows and I don't know. Miller, obviously, knows how to make money as a journalist. When I was looking after my mother I could not finish a novel, but I thought I might do some journalism; I asked Bill and he waved this aside. I wrote to the handful of people I knew and they did not know. If I had known what Michael Miller knows I would not have had to ask Bill; I could have done whatever it is that Michael Miller does to get paid. Meanwhile, the way forward was to write a work of genius.

A couple days before I leave I have drinks, then dinner with Jeffrey Yang of New Directions. I talk about some of my crazy ideas that will change the face &c. &c. Toward the end he says he wouldn't mind seeing Lightning Rods, the book Bill had tried to sell. I don't think it is an ND book, but I say Sure; I get back to the place where I'm staying and send him a file. Back in Berlin, I get an e-mail expressing enthusiasm for the book.

What it means is that it is not possible, after all, to work at once on the books that might change the face of 21st-century fiction. It it necessary, first, to see into print a book finished 11 years ago. That's showbiz.

Miller researched, wrote, and got his piece into print in 3 weeks. So we can imagine that, if a book is already written, it too could be seen into print in 3 weeks, or even 2, or even 1. Leaving plenty of time to write the books that might change the face of 21st-century fiction. But that's not showbiz.

Rashomon

2011-12-21T23:33:00.001Z

Michael Miller has published a profile in the New York Observer, here. It's a curious thing.

If an industry is governed by a culture of secrecy, its public face looks very clean. If an agent sells a book for half a million dollars, it gets reported. If an agent kills a half-milion-dollar deal, it's not reported. If an agent sells the film rights to a high-profile director, it's reported. If an agent kills a film deal with a high-profile director, it's not reported. If a publisher buys a book for a big advance, it's reported. If the publisher won't pay the author, breaks its contract, tries to change the book behind the author's back, it's not reported.

If someone breaks the code, that's rare. So the question isn't really what Helen DeWitt thinks of the write-up - it goes without saying that Helen DeWitt, the subject of the profile, thinks it has not done justice to the sheer unutterable brilliance of Helen DeWitt. The question is, what do all the people think who have engaged in questionable business practice over the years? Because the thing is, every one of those people will read the piece looking for their name. Wondering what will come out.

Same old, same old.

Miller has had to grapple with an immense mass of material into shape. He was working to a word count and a deadline. He managed to set up an interview, make calls, read e-mails, write the thing up and get it into print, all within three weeks. This is very much to his credit. But I think a lot of people will read the piece looking for their names and feel very good.

Anyway.

I've given a lot of interviews lately; this was the first where I made a serious attempt to get the interviewer to understand why there is a genuine risk of suicide if too much work is disrupted and destroyed. I can't say I was terribly successful.

Miller is like most people in discounting what he doesn't see. Assigning disproportionate value to what he can see. Which is actually the single worst problem for writers dealing with Rest of World. Because you better believe we believe in what we can't see. We believe in what does not yet exist. We believe in it the way a parent believes in the miracle of birth. How can we possibly not? Time t, a room contains the following: man, table, paper, pen, ink. The man is Coleridge. Time t+n, the room contains the following: man, table, paper, pen, ink, Kubla Khan.

So say a contract includes a clause giving the author last word on usage: no changes to made without author's approval. Someone who doesn't believe in the unseen, someone who does not believe that what does not exist can exist, sees an author who is fanatical about every aspect of the text, right down to the typeface. The clause is there to protect the existing text. As long as the text is right in the end, there's no problem. But no.

The clause is there to protect the author's time. It is there to protect work that exists only in the mind, or that will come to the mind if there is a point when a line is drawn under the work that already exists. The copy-editor has made recommendations; the author has considered them, made decisions; now LOTTERYLAND, GIVE GOD A CHANCE, YOU CAN TELL ME and their brothers can advance from 61,000 words, 21,000 words, 65,000 words &c to a state of completion.

I see five tables in a room in Chesterfield, each with a separate project - drafts, notes, clippings.
And I see a woman in Brooklyn at a table with a typescript and a bottle of Wite-out. In her hand she holds the cap to which is attached a narrow tube to which is attached a tiny brush. She dips the brush in the bottle, she moves the brush across marks on the page. She dips the brush in the bottle, moves the brush across marks on the page. She does this hundreds of times. She puts the pages in an envelope and sends them to the typesetter. There is a sentence in a contract but it has no power. There are books waiting for their endings but they have no power. What does it take to connect the sentence in the contract with the woman in Brooklyn?

I see myself in an office in Midtown, putting a CD in the hand of the production manager. A CD with software with which Greek and Japanese can be professionally typeset. I see a girl in an office putting the CD in a drawer, importing the text into Quark, where it will cause problems for many many texts. I see too many things.

If you don't see the dead books, turning down a $525,000 deal looks strange. Looking obsessively for the right editor, the right agent, the ones who protect the books to come, looks strange. And if you have an actual living author sitting across the table from you in the Tik Tok diner, the chance that the body might have been at the bottom of a cliff in 2010 looks negligible. And getting Lightning Rods into print looks like a happy ending.

But this is stupid. This is the behaviour of an addict. I should do a programming course and think of other things.

the Cassandra Sydrome

2011-12-19T18:29:00.001Z

The Last Samurai is, for the time being, well and truly out of print. Not because sales of a paltry few hundred a year had caused its publisher to lose heart. No. How to gesture at the situation without aggravating?

Faithful readers of pp may remember that I did not want to publish the book as a first novel, because a debut novelist is in a weak position; I thought permissions would be a nightmare, copy-editing would be a nightmare, typesetting would be a nightmare, and in short I felt I could do a better job of defending the book if I were in the position of, say, Salman Rushdie. Jonathan Burnham (editor), Steve Hutensky (friend who showed the book to Jonathan) and Larry Shire (lawyer recommended by Steve) pooh-poohed these fears to a man. Suffice it to say that it was the fate of Cassandra never to be believed.

It's at times like this that the old Secondhand Sales Donation comes into its own. New copies, as new copies, very good and good copies are available on Amazon Marketplace. A very good copy, for example, is available from Bacobooks for just $2.50 plus $3.99 p&p. Easiest thing in the world to buy this very good copy for a friend, send the author a $1 royalty-equivalent, and make TWO people happy. (Acceptable copies start at $0.24, but these are probably not gift-standard editions.)

Even when the book was in print, readers who generously sent a donation after buying the book secondhand were doing as much to pay the author's rent, and so give time to finish new books, as those who equally generously stumped up for a new copy. So thank you, thank you all. New readers can try out the PayPal button in the sidebar if so inclined.

How Shape Influences Strength

2011-12-19T12:30:00.000Z

Rereading Alex Martelli, How Shape Influences Strength, Bridge World Jan & Feb 2000.

NS Tricks // N has 7222 // N has 7321

6 // 4019 // 4455
7 // 10778 //11089
8 // 14016 // 12307
9 // 10811 // 9886
10 // 5371 // 6146
11 // 2344 // 2869
12 // 532 // 1033
13 // 178 // 215

It is clear from this table [cd not work out how to use tabs in Blogger] that the variation is higher for the slightly more shapely hand, which fits in well with our intuition: A 7-3-2-1 hand is more likely than a 7-2-2-2 to meet with either a particularly unsuitable hand for partner (with wasted values opposite the singleton, perhaps holding the partnership to six or seven tricks) or a particularly suitable one (with values opposite the tripleton, often allowing the partnership to take from 10 to 13 tricks.)

I used to think that anyone who had seen hundreds of books published would have a bridgeplayer's sense of fit; would see that writers rarely have balanced hands, so that a fit with an agent or editor is likely to be very good or very bad.

It seems not to work that way. There are disciplines, cultures that value intellectual elegance and economy. A serious bridgeplayer does not have to explain the value of elegance to his peers. A programmer does not have to explain the value of elegance to other programmers. A mathematician does not have to explain the value of elegance to mathematicians. Explanation comes into play only when one deals with what dance schools call beginners and improvers. Whereas.

Over the last 15 years I have had conversations with many, many people in the industry. Mainly agents and editors, but also accountants, lawyers, designers, production managers, publicists, marketers, booksellers - the number of people who have to get paid out of the cover price of a book is not small. These conversations have certain features in common. Blank looks. Incomprehension. Disbelief. Comment: 'I've dealt with hundreds of authors, and no one has ever wanted this before.'

So I think it may be necessary to do something else. I thought I might be happier in IT, but the programmers I know have not been very helpful in suggesting entry-level jobs. It may be best to go back to London and work again as a legal secretary for a few years; if I had an evening job I might do a BSc. during the day. It's possible that a public blog will turn out to be incompatible with that sort of job, in which case pp may have to go offliine. We'll see.

(Martelli, by the way, is also a member of the Python Software Foundation, author of Python in a Nutshell and co-editor of The Python Cookbook. Wikipedia: 'According to Martelli's self-evaluation, his proudest achievement is the articles that appeared in The Bridge World (January/February 2000), which were hailed as giant steps towards solving issues that had haunted contract-bridge theoreticians for decades.' If you are a writer who is haunted by the kind of issue that bothers contract-bridge theoreticians, you are probably in the wrong line of work.)

How do we get back, from those average numbers of tricks taken by the partnership, call it P, to the "strength of North's hand," call it N? Well, if we knew N, we would estimate P through the forumla, P = N plus one-third (of 13 minus N), because, by symmetry, on average partner's hand can be taken as supplying one-third of the "remaining" tricks, 13 minus N. From that equation, it follows that

N = (1.5 times P) minus 6.5

Applying this to the earlier values (7222 Average 8.26 and 7321 Average 8.33 yields hand-strength estimates of 5.90 for Hand 7222 and 6.00 for Hand 7321.

How can Hand 7222, that will surely take six tricks itself, be worth a bit less than six tricks in this scale? Because the hand-strength values were computed under the assumption that the ratings of th North and South hands would be added to produce a partnership total. When North holds 7=2=2=2, his shape will (on average) destroy some of the values that South will count on.

nomina nuda tenemus

2011-12-18T14:24:00.000Z

Went to Paris at the beginning of the month to give a talk at the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University in Paris. Elena Devos, a Russian poet who has translated two of my stories, very kindly let me stay for several days after this engagement; we walked around one day with her husband Ludo and 7-year-old son Nico, and came upon the Librairie Polonaise/Ksiegarnia Polska at 123 boulevard Saint-Germain.

We went in and looked around. I thought that if I had an audiobook in Polish and the text to go with it this might help me get a feel for Polish. They had a few audiobooks, including one of The Name of the Rose (Imię Róży), the text of which was also available in Polish translation. In a less imperfect world I would have been able to get an audiobook of Bajki robotów, but I couldn't, and the Eco translation seemed a reasonable place to start.

Have just been playing CD1 on my laptop, and it is FABULOUS. In the voice of the reader, Krzysztof Gosztyła, the language is like whisky and dark chocolate. The audiobook does exactly what I had hoped an audiobook would do: it gets me past the glamorous words on the page to the sound of the sentences (no less glamorous, it turns out, than the text).

The audiobook is available from noir sur blanc (www.noir.pl/ksiazka/513/Umberto-Eco-Imie-rozy---audiobook). A steal at 31.43 zlotys. The text is available in volume form or as ebook.

As so often, I see that life would be easier if I had moved over to WordPress years ago. It may be possible to upload an mp3 file on Blogger, but if so I'm not sure how. Have therefore posted a brief extract on pp's WordPress sibling, here. (Hoping this will not outrage noir sur blanc, as the extract can only encourage listeners to buy the whole thing.)

2011-12-17T16:37:00.000Z

Tyler Cowen at MR, linking here:

Coffee shops around the world have employed loyalty card schemes for many years, but now we’ve come across an interesting twist on the idea. In Singapore, a collaborate scheme aims to benefit eight of the city’s best independent cafés with the Be Disloyal disloyalty card.

The Be Disloyal disloyalty card — created by digital creative agency Antics, blogger Cortadito.sg and eight of Singapore’s independent coffee shops — was designed to encourage consumers to discover different coffee venues while bringing businesses together to grow as a vertical. From September until the end of this month customers can pick up a disloyalty card from one of the eight participating cafés. The card is stamped each time they purchase a coffee from one of the other seven cafés and, once the card is full, they return to the original café to receive their free coffee.

Competing with large chain brands can be difficult for small businesses, but teaming up with similar smaller companies can create stronger competition. Inspiration here for independent businesses in any industry!

model, maybe, for indie bookstores . . .

xmas is coming

2011-12-17T09:56:00.000Z

Have just been talking to my publicist. Lightning Rods has had very good reviews, many interviews were given, but sales are a few significant figures short of a zillion. Unsurprisingly, to my mind - I am always astounded that ANYBODY buys hardback books. I never do if I can avoid it. I pointed this out to Tom, who admitted that he too never bought books in hard cover. The problem is, I gather, that if a book is not published as a hardback it is hard to get it reviewed at all. So reviews come out and readers, for the most part, do what any rational person would do in the circumstances - they wait for the paperback.

This IS rational insofar as it enables the buyer to read the book at a lower price in convenient portable form. Having said that, the readers who have bought the book early on are doing more than buying a book: they are sending a message, via our friends at Nielsen Bookscan, to publishers who might think of publishing the author's next book. (The timing of this message is, obviously, not irrelevant to date of publication of author's next book. This is, in turn, not irrelevant to the sort of reader who does not want to read a book in PDF.)

Lightning Rods is not necessarily a safe bet as a Christmas gift (if your mother is like my mother, she will hate the book). Still, if you have a friend or friends who love the books your mother hates, this could be the perfect choice. If you are a cash-strapped undergraduate, you could club together with one or more cash-strapped friends, buy a copy, and laugh loudly in public places (while, obviously, reading the book) - preferably places frequented by people rich enough to buy a hardback copy for themselves.

Review in NY Times by Jennifer Szalai, here.
Review by Garth Risk Hallberg at the Millions, here.

2011-12-15T06:38:00.004Z

Think about it: Almost 40 percent of Amazon’s customers, according to this poll, have added a complicated step (the time-consuming and not-without-expense process of going to a bookstore) to the simplicity of Amazon’s buying process. Maybe it’s because they don’t want a book with a dinger on it, or they want to see the quality of the paper or art reproduction. Maybe they want to ask a clerk about it. Maybe they want to be sure they don’t get stuck with another print-on-demand copy that looks like a piece of shit when it arrives. Maybe it’s because “Look Inside the Book” just isn’t the same as flipping through a real book. Whatever. Almost 40 percent of Amazon’s book-buying customers have rejected something fundamental to Amazon, which is the concept of buying something sight unseen. And indeed, according to this poll 40 percent of Amazon’s business thus relies on brick-and-mortar bookstores.

Dennis Johnson of MobyLives, the rest here

I remember meeting Dan Frank of Pantheon in the Random House lobby about a year ago; the lobby had floor-to-ceiling shelves displaying books published by RH imprints over the decades. It seemed odd at the time that they were not using the space to sell current books in print; if they are not allowed to use the space for retail, presumably they could at least use it to facilitate the sort of thing DJ describes. (But can it really be the case that they can't sell their own books? Apple has an Apple Store. Prada has a Prada store. Strange.)

First rule of Fight Club

2011-12-12T20:29:00.000Z

♦ Contract provisions

This one seems obvious, but many authors don’t realize how many things are covered in their contract and hence are subject to the contract’s confidentiality clause. Any of the following are typically off-limits for discussion (public or otherwise) unless you have your publisher’s permission to disclose.

Amount of your advance
Advance payout schedule
Royalty rates
Author buyback discount
Number of free author copies you receive
Anything else specifically covered in your contract!

Rachelle Gardner

2011-12-10T14:56:00.001Z

Odontogriphus omalus was an early slug-like mollusk, related to the more heavily armored Wiwaxia.

Life Before Dinosaurs

2011-12-09T21:41:00.001Z

Trying to answer some questions, including one about cuts in review sections in print media. I check in on some blogs and find this on Rajiv Sethi:

The very first book on economics that I remember reading was Robert Heilbroner's majesterial history of thought The Worldly Philosophers. I'm sure that I'm not the only person who was drawn to the study of economics by that wonderfully lucid work. Heilbroner managed to convey the complexity of the subject matter, the depth of the great ideas, and the enormous social value that the discipline at its best is capable of generating.

I was reminded of Heilbroner's book by Robert Solow's review of Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius. Solow begins by arguing that the book does not quite deliver on the promise of its subtitle, and then goes on to fill the gap by providing his own encapsulated history of ideas. Like Heilbroner before him, he manages to convey with great lucidity the essence of some pathbreaking contributions. I was especially struck by the following passages on Keynes: [the rest here]

Which illustrates one of the points I wanted to make - in the blogosphere reviewers are not constrained by word count, or by an editor's sense of the level of specialization readers can cope with. And reviews can be reviewed, or recommended.

I've only written two reviews for print media, and each time I was told to write something under 500 words. Getting my thoughts on the book down from 1000+ words to 500- took 50% of the time.

J-P Sartre Cookbook

2011-12-09T21:23:00.001Z

October 10

I find myself trying ever more radical interpretations of traditional dishes, in an effort to somehow express the void I feel so acutely. Today I tried this recipe:

Tuna Casserole

Ingredients: 1 large casserole dishPlace the casserole dish in a cold oven. Place a chair facing the oven and sit in it forever. Think about how hungry you are. When night falls, do not turn on the light.

While a void is expressed in this recipe, I am struck by its inapplicability to the bourgeois lifestyle. How can the eater recognize that the food denied him is a tuna casserole and not some other dish? I am becoming more and more frustrated.

Woods lot
got it from
Nag on the Lake
who got it from
martysmith.com

one last interview . . .

2011-12-03T14:46:00.001Z

with Brian Feinblum of Planned Television Arts, here

chess à trois

2011-12-01T02:18:00.001Z

There is a rule sheet (next page), but you can start playing without it and refer to it as needed. Basically, three sets of pieces (the same sets as in conventional Chess) border each other on the outer two ranks of the round board. Since the "rows" are now concentric circles, a Rook may rotate around the entire board - [!!!!! -- the perfect Xmas upgrade] or move straight across the board passing through the center. There is no space to occupy in the center, you simply pass through it. By the nature of the board, diagonal moves "bend" toward and may rotate through the center. The "trajectory" lines on the board are only visual aids to help you see and plan possible diagonal moves. Diagonal moves such as a Bishop, may rotate through the center but cannot rotate through (or bounce off) the outer rank in one move. There are "Moats" between each team on the outer rank. They are necessary to keep Rooks from capturing each other on the first move. These Moats may become bridged if the outer rank between two teams becomes vacant. Also, there are Creeks that run two ranks toward the center off each Moat. The Creeks only purpose is that a Pawn cannot diagonally capture across the Creek (it must first be past the Creek).

Hat Tip MR. Ordering and more information here.

wow

2011-11-28T16:36:00.001Z

The mail has just come. Envelope from Harvard University Press. HUP is celebrating 100 years of the Loeb Classical Library - which they now plan to make available online!

NEXT time, I want a tattoo artist

2011-11-28T00:27:00.001Z

Of course, tattoo artists come from a different world, one where people come in, request a drawing, the artist does the work and gets paid, often in cash. Some, writes Buckley, were frustrated with the geriatric pace of the publishing process, with one guy getting so peeved during the revision process that he kept yelling into the phone “Do you have any idea JUST WHO I AM??!”

Re Penguin backlist issued with tattoo art covers, curated by my ND publicist, Tom Roberge. More here.

2011-11-28T00:15:00.001Z

Lunch with my mother and sister. My sister says at some point: "Sometimes I wonder, where did we COME from?" She enlarges. The Vermont DeWitts (my father's family) are conservative Northerners. My mother's family - the Spurriers (grandmother) and Marshes (grandfather) are conservative Southerners. Where did we COME from? (The spectrum runs from yellow dog Democrat (my mother) to, ahem, Independent (moi). Independent as in Bernie Sanders is the only Socialist in the Senate but calls himself Independent to be polite.)

My mother, after a pause: Well, after the divorce there was so much going on, I never got around to getting in touch with people. But I always thought Sutton Jett might have been a Democrat.

christmas is coming . . .

2011-11-27T23:48:00.001Z

My ex-father-in-law, Eric Levene, is a GP. A GP with an exceptionally well-stocked liquor cabinet. Christmas comes but once a year, and when it does his loyal patients think as one. Kurosawa realised, after much anguish, that his film about a doctor curing TB patients was all worthy and boring; what was wanted was a doctor who was a raging alcoholic! With Shimura Takashi as drunken foil to Mifune Toshiro! How better to show appreciation for Dr Levene than to send him down the road of the incomparable Shimura Takashi! (By bearing gifts. Scotch, sherry, port . . .)

I tell a lie.

Dr Levene's patients are Eastenders. They are justifiably loyal to their GP; they wish merely to bring him good cheer.

Suppose, however, for the sake of argument, that you would like to gladden the heart of your GP (Am. "primary care physician") and suspect that all the other loyal patients are adding to an already overstocked liquor cabinet. What is to be done? Well, there's always a T-shirt.

Courtesy A Softer World. Available here.

disgusted in topeka

2011-11-26T03:16:00.001Z

pp has not had much to say about statistics lately. So. Data. Cussedness thereof.

Lighting Rods took a long time to get published. It was very different from The Last Samurai, so different that 50% (at a guess) of readers who loved TLS hated the book. This is not encouraging to a publisher, whichever half of the 50% he happens to side with.

You'd never guess it now that the book has been published. Reviews have been, for the most part, extremely enthusiastic. (Sloth prevails over shameless self-promotion; I could throw in lots of links, but sloth, as I say, prevails.) This does not really give an accurate picture of responses to the book.

My publicist, Tom Roberge, was swamped by requests for review copies. Everyone who asked for an ARC did not write a review. Some loved the book. Others HATED it. The ones who hated it hated it so much they couldn't bring themselves to waste time writing a review.

The result being that, if you go by reviews, you'd be likely to see this as a book with a 3.8 GPA. A, A, A, A+, A+, A++, A-, B+, B+ . . . Because the people who HATED the book, the people who would give the book a C, C-, D+, or downright F -- hated it so much they couldn't write a review.

696

2011-11-23T13:17:00.001Z

2011-11-22T09:57:00.001Z

Lee Konstantinou, author of Pop Apocalypse, has a review of Lightning Rods and slightly mad interview of me over at the LA Review of Books. (Grappling with this interview meant that I lost a whole day that I could have spent hanging out with Joey Comeau, who did, admittedly, use the time to write for his horror movie blog; there is also, admittedly, quite a lot in the interview about my longing to put the interview behind me and spend time with the writing half of A Softer World.)

The review is extremely funny (at least to me). LK draws attention to the DeWitt fondness for the instructional, which to his mind is at odds with the cultural trend toward informality, relaxation. I don't know whether he is right about this alleged cultural trend -- he may well be, but then we now live in a culture where taking part in a marathon, or even triathlon, is commonplace. At any rate, the thing I notice in myself is not so much this predilection as an inability to believe that other people don't really share it.

I like the sort of book whose introduction sounds like an induction to boot camp:

As regards the method he should follow, it is, of course, better if he can find an Arab or scholar of Arabic to direct him; but, failing this, I suggest that he adopt the following plan. Firstly, the Introduction on the writing of Arabic should be thoroughly assimilated before the actual lessons are tackled. Then each lesson should be worked through carefully and the student should not proceed from one lesson to the following before he is quite convinced that he has mastered the material in the first one. Although a full transcription has been given of all Arabic words and sentences in the first ten lessons this is a help which should be dispensed with as early as possible. The student should obtain from the outset two alphabetically indexed note books, one of which can be easily adapted for Arabic, and enter into these each new word he comes across. In another note book he should write out the paradigms of the verbs which are scattered throughout the book. These three note books should be his constant companions and referred to whenever he has a free moment. His exercises he must make for himself using the material he has worked with. All exercises and examples should be rewritten without the vowel marks so that the student becomes accustomed to reading Arabic without the vowels as it generally appears in print or in manuscript. If the above-mentioned plan of study is followed the student should acquire a sound knowledge of Arabic grammar in about six months.
But that is only the beginning!

(David Cowan, Modern Literary Arabic)

The morphology of the verb is presented in a way that best exploits the underlying similarities of the various forms, regardless of the root type; this permits the introduction of the most common verbs at an appropriately early point in the grammar and also allows the discussions of the derived "conjugations" to be unhampered by restriction to examples from sound roots. As much space as possible has been given to the systematic treatment of noun morphology and to the verb with object suffixes; the simplification of this material attempted in many elementary grammars is actually a disservice to the student. When he turns to his first page of unsimplified reading, he finds that what he should have learned systematically must instead be learned at random, inefficiently and with no little difficulty.

(Thomas O. Lambdin, Introduction to Biblical Hebrew (1971) )

This sort of book is so seldom seen in schools that there is no way of knowing how many people would like it. The one thing we can be sure of is that people inclined to like it are very unlikely to come across it.

At any rate, publishers were not wildly keen to have this sort of thing in a novel when first presented with The Seventh Samurai, so Lightning Rods and its brothers were written with a policy of deliberately eschewing; after Book A had been published as The Last Samurai publishers who perceived the public as wanting more of the same were not wildly keen to publish LR. It's tiring.

2011-11-21T13:19:00.001Z

As Joey Comeau points out, there is a book called Outwitting Squirrels. An extremely amusing book, I might add (if the pages available for inspection in Search Inside This Book! are anything to go by). What Joey may not know is that there is, in fact, an entire Outwitting series! Launched, it would seem, by the success of Outwitting Squirrels (which has sold 300,000 copies):

It began in 1988 with Outwitting Squirrels by Bill Adler, Jr. Since then a number of Outwitting books have been published, including OutwittingDeer, Outwitting Fish, Outwitting Critters, Outwitting Neighbors,Outwitting Contractors, Outwitting Clutter, Outwitting Mice, and more.

You can be part of this success story. Adler is not only a writer but a literary agent; if you would like to write an Outwitting title, you can find a list of available topics on the agency website (or propose one of your own).

2011-11-21T12:31:00.001Z

On Dec 1 I will be giving a talk on Language Games at the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University in Paris, details here.

meanwhile, over at asw . . .

2011-11-15T22:57:00.000Z

Joey Comeau:

So, there a book called Outwitting Squirrels. The fact that there exists a guide to outwitting squirrels makes me happy in ways I can't even express. But even better? Customers who bought "Outwitting Squirrels" also bought Good to Go: Preparing for the end of life. You know, in case they don't manage to outwit the squirrels. They can make arrangements, let their families know what to do with their squirrel-ravaged bodies.

Joey Comeau did come to New York, by the way. It was kind of like hanging out with a friendly werewolf, which is what you naturally hope for in the writing half of A Softer World . . . ASW today brought it all back. I long to go to Toronto.

unendlich shameless self-promotion

2011-11-14T15:59:00.000Z

Readers of pp will have noticed that the blog has dwindled to an outpost of the New Directions PR machine, not much happening apart from occasional announcements re the new career of Lightning Rods. This can't be very entertaining. To the untutored eye, the position of pp would appear to be: We suffered for our art, now it's your turn.

A slight problem is that, as one goes through a succession of interviews and events, one puts forward ideas, one replies to questions, and each time someone or other decides that about 50% of the DeWitt offering is not what people are interested in. You might think this is what blogs are for (ha HA), but it's chastening. No doubt we will recover our nerve in the fullness of time. Meanwhile, the Man in the Machine, the unsurpassable Tom Roberge, has passed on links to some reviews.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/books/review/lightning-rods-by-helen-dewitt-book-review.html?_r=1

http://www.criticalmob.com/books/more/lightning_rods

http://vol1brooklyn.tumblr.com/post/12199303241/we-review-helen-dewitts-lightning-rods

2011-11-14T12:33:00.001Z

The Winter issue of Bullett magazine has a story, That Obscure Object of Desire, of which my editor, Henry Giardina, says: The Turkish speakers in the office were very excited.

You can read it online here, but the print edition is much nicer: Henry commissioned an illustration from Amelia Saul, a young designer whom I met in Berlin, so the piece is accompanied by a full-page detail from one of the extraordinary, obsessive works I first saw in Amelia's apartment. It's a fabulous thing.

PS The link to the site worked when I put it up, but doesn't now; am leaving it here in case it comes back.

yet another interview . . .

2011-10-31T03:07:00.001Z

with Elizabeth Gumport and Chris Glazek of n+1, here and (Part II) here

the Guardian on my Senator

2011-10-21T22:04:00.000Z

(Bernie Sanders of Vermont; formerly the only Socialist in Congress, now the only Socialist in the Senate . . .)

here

2011-10-20T17:20:00.000Z

It's hard to be sane.

Everywhere I look I seem to come across some new memorial issue of Steve Jobs. Recurring themes: The perfectionism, the attention to detail. Design more important than function. No point asking consumers what they want, if you're going to do something really revolutionary they won't know what they want until they see it.

It seems safe to assume that the authors of these pieces did not spend the years 2000-2007 grappling with the new CJK GUI of OS X. (Ah me ah me, what evil looks Had I from old and young, Instead of the cross the Albatross About my neck was hung . . .)

It seems equally, sadly, safe to assume that the authors are not members of that elite band, the readership of paperpools.

If Time magazine can dust off old pieces on Steve Jobs, we at paperpools can do no less. We link now to an early post, our tribute to the man who believed in us when we did not believe in ourselves. The man who believed that American Mac owners, attempting to input Chinese/Japanese/Korean on a nice new Mac, might once, thoughtlessly, have preferred Help in their mother tongue, but would recognize the value of something more revolutionary when they saw it (the chance to work on their Chinese/Japanese/Korean while deciphering Help written in the language in question).

yet another interview . . .

2011-10-13T18:15:00.000Z

with Jenny Davidson at the Awl

Reading tonight with Dale Peck at le Poisson Rouge

2011-10-10T14:26:00.000Z

I'll be doing a reading and Q&A tonight at le Poisson Rouge with Dale Peck of Mischief and Mayhem. Address: 158 Bleecker Street. Time: 6:30 sharp.

Note - I seem to have mentioned this to various people and given the wrong time (7 pm), having found this on the Calendar of le Poisson Rouge. It is in fact at 6:30 as a band will playing at 8, but if you turn up at 7 you will probably catch my reading anyway as I will be second.

2011-10-08T22:08:00.000Z

Readers of pp will have noticed that not much is going on around here these days. I have been trying to compose answers to various interviews, so whenever I have access to the Internet and might otherwise fritter away time on a post I remember guiltily that I have not yet answered all the questions I have been sent . . .

The good news is that Joey Comeau of A Softer World may be coming to New York -- he says he will take the bus down from Toronto if he can find a sofa to sleep on. (I was in the Barnes & Noble at 14th Street the other day and saw all three of Joey's books in stock, so maybe we should go down and do an impromptu event.) If no sofa is forthcoming I may take a bus up to Toronto instead; this would cheer me up.

Meanwhile Elif Batuman has posted a couple of videos of the Lightning Rods reading at the Center for Fiction back in mid-September; one is of the reading, the other of a Q&A with me afterward. It goes without saying that I think I look and sound extremely peculiar, and need to work on cutting down on nervous fillers (I seem to say 'you know' and 'um' an awful lot), but at any rate it's all here for those who missed it.

Another interview

2011-10-03T16:27:00.001Z

With David Israel, at boingboing.

Interview

2011-09-22T19:39:00.000Z

Interview with Morten Høi Jensen of Bookforum

Events updated

2011-09-16T19:05:00.006Z

New York

Wednesday, October 5, 7-9pm Reading and launch party - all welcome! PowerHouse Arena, 37 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201 (Directions here)

Thursday, 6 October, 7pm Reading & Q&A with Sam Lipsyte at McNally Jackson 52 Prince Street

Monday, 10 October, 6:30pm Reading and Q&A with Dale Peck of Mischief + Mayhem at the Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street

Dale: The series is called Unprintable. We're asking people to read things that either haven't been published because the writer was afraid to or editors told her that it was in some way unfit for print, or things that have been published after weathering some resistance from either the writer or the publishing industry. From what you've told me about Lightning Rods' history, it seems perfect for the series. . .

Thursday, 13 October Reading at 192 Books in Chelsea : 190 10th Avenue (time TBA)

Boston

Monday, 17 October, 5:30-7:30 pm Reading at Brandeis University, 415 South Street, Waltham, MA -- Mandel Center. More information here.

Tuesday, 18 October Reading at Harvard Coop

NYC

Wednesday, 26 October n+1 event at Fordham, details TBA

Thursday, 27 October Cooper Union New Directions 75 Birthday Gala : 30 Cooper Square
[corner of e 7th street and 3rd avenue] - writers reading from favorite ND books

Lit Crawl NYC

2011-09-09T21:35:00.000Z

Lit Crawl NYC: The Sex Lives of Salesmen Tickets: FREE

Stage adaptations of Lightning Rods. Actors will be on hand to perform scenes from the book, and the author will compare them to her own vision. Hilarity assured.

The Lounge, Dixon Place 8.15-9 pm

161A Chrystie St. (between Rivington & Delancey)

Events

2011-09-04T13:06:00.001Z

A friend has just written asking why I had not told her about a reading. Probably because it seemed like an imposition. At any rate, these are the events I know of (you'll notice that I am a bit hazy on times, will post these when I know what they are):

NYC

8 September Center for Fiction (Party for new n+1 issue, which includes an excerpt from Lightning Rods, with enactment of scenes from the book) : 17 East 47th Street (time TBA)

10 September Literary Pub Crawl (time and place TBA) : Enactment of different scenes from Lightning Rods, Q&A

6 October Reading at McNally Jackson and Q&A with Sam Lipsyte: 52 Prince Street (time TBA)

10 October 6:30pm Reading with Dale Peck of Mischief + Mayhem at le Poisson Rouge 158 Bleecker Street

13 October 7 pm Reading at 192 Books in Chelsea : 190 10th Avenue

Boston

17 October Reading at Brandeis University

18 October Reading at Harvard Coop

NYC

26 October n+1 event just mentioned by Keith Gessen, details TBA

27 October Cooper Union New Directions 75 Birthday Gala : 30 Cooper Square
[corner of e 7th street and 3rd avenue] - writers reading from favorite ND books

Meanwhile, Andrew Gelman has read the excerpt of LR in the new issue of n+1 and has a review up, which you can read here.

2011-08-24T20:28:00.000Z

Danielle and Jessica very kindly made offers in the comments of a place to stay, each with a cat (which sounds just the thing to relieve the stress of a roadshow). I realised later that I had taken my e-mail address off pp so was not easily contactable; if you would still be willing to put me up for a few nights it would be wonderful.

Both New Directions and n+1 have been coming up with new things to do, so it seems I should try to be in New York for a slightly longer time than originally expected. One reader has generously offered a place for September 8-12, another for (roughly) October 3-7; meanwhile New Directions has said it would help if I could come back to NYC for the 29th of September, n+1 will be having some kind of event on 26th October and New Directions will be having its 75th Birthday Gala at Cooper Union on the 27th. I think I will be going up to Boston for the 18th of October (and maybe a day or so either side), but otherwise I am hoping to rely on the kindness of strangers.

A reader has also come to my rescue and offered to sublet my apartment, which is, on the one hand, great, but means, on the other hand, that I have been doing the things one does to get an apartment ready for occupancy by someone other than oneself. (So, er, had no idea that a whole week had gone by since commenters kindly offered a place to stay in New York.)

2011-08-23T13:52:00.001Z

Since Zola, however, mental environmentalism has been stuck in a philosophical morass. To claim that advertising is metaphorically mental pollution is one thing, namely an easily dismissible rhetorical flourish. To say that advertising is literally a kind of pollution and that TV commercials and highway billboards are more closely related to toxic sludge than to speech is another matter entirely. And while mental environmentalists have always tried to make the latter argument, they have more often been forced to retreat to the former. Where is the evidence that advertising is a species of pollution? Isn’t it obvious that a corporate slogan is nothing but glorified, commercialized speech?

Into this difficult question has stepped one of the greatest living philosophers, the eccentric Michel Serres, who has written the inaugural philosophical work of the mental environmentalist movement. Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution? is a radical reconception of pollution that cements its primal relation to advertising. The big idea of this recently translated book is that animals, humans included, use pollution to mark, claim and appropriate territory through defiling it, and that over time this appropriative act has evolved away from primitive pollution, urine and feces, to “hard pollution,” industrial chemicals, and finally to “soft pollution,” the many forms of advertising.

“Let us define two things and clearly distinguish them from one another,” Michel Serres writes, “first the hard [pollutants], and second the soft. By the first I mean on the one hand solid residues, liquid gases, emitted throughout the atmosphere by big industrial companies or gigantic garbage dumps, the shameful signature of big cities. By the second, tsunamis of writings, signs, images and logos flooding rural, civic, public and natural spaces as well as landscapes with their advertising. Even though different in terms of energy, garbage and marks nevertheless result from the same soiling gesture, from the same intention to appropriate, and are of animal origin.”

Adbusters, courtesy the incomparable Wood s Lot

Not that I am not charmed by differentiation by packaging - one block of butter in a white wrapper bearing the word ja! in bold sans serif, another block of butter in a gold foil wrapper with Kerrygold in vaguely celtic lettering . . . Beers differentiated by proprietary glasses, by paper collars for the stem bearing the slogan of the beer . . . (Bitte, ein Bit! [Bitburger] Eine Perle der Natur [Krombacher] Eine Königin unter den Bieren [Warsteiner] and so on)

No, I am contemplating how much of the preparation of a book for publication seems to be a matter of marking territory. Have ordered this uplifting book to read on the plane.

Newnewspeak

2011-08-19T16:01:00.001Z

Beyond the warped ingenuity of these Heath Robinson schemes to force ‘free’ competition to happen in closely controlled circumstances, such interest as the White Paper possesses may lie chiefly in its providing a handy compendium of current officialese, a sottisier of econobabble. One of the most revealing features of its prose is the way the tense that might be called the mission-statement present is used to disguise implausible non sequiturs as universally acknowledged general truths. Here is one mantra, repeated in similar terms at several points: ‘Putting financial power into the hands of learners makes student choice meaningful.’ Part of the brilliance of the semantic reversals at the heart of such Newspeak lies in the simple transposition of negative to positive. After all, ‘putting financial power into the hands of learners’ means ‘making them pay for something they used to get as of right’. So forcing you to pay for something enhances your power. And then the empty, relationship-counselling cadence of the assertion that this ‘makes student choice meaningful’. Translation: ‘If you choose something because you care about it and hope it will extend your human capacities it will have no significance for you, but if you are paying for it then you will scratch people’s eyes out to get what you’re entitled to.’ No paying, no meaning. After all, why else would anyone do anything?

...

Not that practical things are unimportant or students’ views irrelevant or future employment an unworthy consideration: suggesting that critics of the proposals despise such things, as David Willetts did when discussing my LRB piece on the Browne Report (4 November 2010) in a speech at the British Academy, is just a way of setting up easily knocked-down straw opponents. It is, rather, that the model of the student as consumer is inimical to the purposes of education. The paradox of real learning is that you don’t get what you ‘want’ – and you certainly can’t buy it. The really vital aspects of the experience of studying something (a condition very different from ‘the student experience’) are bafflement and effort. Hacking your way through the jungle of unintelligibility to a few small clearings of partial intelligibility is a demanding and not always enjoyable process. It isn’t much like wallowing in fluffy towels. And it helps if you trust your guides rather than assuming they will skimp on the job unless they’re kept up to the mark by constant monitoring of their performance indicators.

Stefan Collini in the LRB, the rest here.

2011-08-15T01:00:00.000Z

Readers of PP will be aware that Lightning Rods is coming out in October. It looks as though I will be in New York from September 8 to 11 -- n+1 is having an event on the 8th at the Center for Fiction to launch its next issue, which includes an extract from LR, and there will be a literary pub crawl on the 10th -- and back in town for the first two weeks of October before (I think) going up to Boston.

Powerhouse Arena has very kindly offered to hold a launch party for the book on (I think) October 5. Tom Roberge, the publicist at New Directions, is lining up some readings and other events.

So (ahem) New Directions does not have the kind of slush fund available to Miramax; we are all sending e-mails around to see whether anyone might have a spare bed / room for a few nights. This may well suffice to compensate for the ND-Mx gap; if any reader of PP happens to have room to spare, though, we would be profoundly grateful.

(In November I will probably go down to DC, but here my mother and sister can put up the itinerant author.)

Also, if anyone has any other ideas for events do let me know. Not necessarily in New York or Boston, though anything outside, what, this little enclave of the upper eastern seaboard is probably also more than the budget can bear. (Sad, really, otherwise I could go to Toronto and meet Sheila Heti and Margaux Williamson and Joey Comeau and Emily Horne.)

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

2011-08-14T12:23:00.001Z

(I was reminded of the fact that there are people who honestly believe that if a speaker of British English had a moment of extreme emotion such as fear or anger, the affected British manner of speech would drop away and they would cry out in American English.)

...

But back to the evolution of language. Caesar makes only one other intelligible spoken utterance in the film. It is a full clause, well enunciated, right at the end. Naturally students of the evolution of syntax will want to know the structure. It is what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) calls a complex-intransitive canonical clause, with copular be as its main verb.

Geoffrey Pullum of Language Log on Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the whole thing here.

2011-08-11T16:11:00.000Z

Kornél Esti and Haydn had one thing in common: he did not rail against his fate, he had the requisite sense of self-respect, but wasn't caught up with the question: Is the world fair? His Count was fair enough, insofar as such a thing can be posited of a count in the first place. Especially if we now add to all this the seventeenth century, and we're adding it. Esti's self-respect – and in this he differed from Haydn – did not feed on those gifts of his that elicit respect but, one might say, the other way around, Esti did not excel in anything, he was not dull and he was not clever, he was not especially good looking, but he was not homely either. Just one example: a carbuncle kept growing on his neck, one wouldn't have liked to touch it; on the other hand, despite his adolescent years, his face was as bright and shiny as – let me see now – a mountain lake.

Talent was not among the gifts bestowed on him by the Lord. But – a rare thing! – he could feel his life. He began his days with the confidence that comes from trusting in an easy existence – his humble chores in the downstairs kitchen. This existence had its own brightness for him, and honor; greatness, majesty not really, but fairness, definitely. Which means that the cheerful serenity, an offshoot of self-respect, was simply rooted in the circumstance that Kornél Esti was: Kornél Esti.

Wood s Lot quotes Péter Esterházy. Linking to Asymptote Journal. (I want a life like Wood s Lot.) The rest here.

useful & cool (dulce et utile)

2011-08-11T15:54:00.000Z

I was playing around on Khan Academy (as one does). As one does if one is unable to block out the world and write a book because unable to leave e-mails unchecked for months on end because there is a book to be launched. ('Publish and be damned' takes on a whole new meaning in these degenerate days.)

And!

What to my wondering eyes should appear!

A couple of weeks ago I was playing around on Khan Academy, reminding myself of really basic stuff, trigonometry, bits and pieces, mostly last used a couple of decades ago, needed for less basic stuff. The answers to the exercises were multiple choice.

Last night I went back to a couple of these exercises.

They had fixed things that weren't quite right.

Instead of multiple choice answers, the player (erm, student) had blanks to fill in. The player could also click to get a list of acceptable formats for answers.

So on the one hand you had to work harder -- had to generate the correct answer rather than picking it off a list -- but on the other hand you were less likely to be penalized for not giving the right answer in the right format.

I told my mother about the Khan Academy the other day.

My grandmother, Blanche Spurrier Marsh, was born in 1900; she was a mathematician. After majoring in math at Randolph Macon she went on to teach, then to be principal of a school. She then married my grandfather, a Southerner who did not want his wife to work. My mother was born; my grandfather told my grandmother that she could not do two things. Her job was to look after the child; she could not also work in a school. What it turned out to mean was that it was fine for my grandmother to go to a school as a substitute, to help out as a favor, but not to have the advantages of a permanent job. (This would imply she needed to do it for the money.)

My mother was a musical prodigy, but she had no aptitude for mathematics. My grandmother tried to tutor her. To this day -- my mother is now 78 -- my mother remembers working on problems in long division at the dining room table. My mother was then 9 -- this would have been 1942. My grandmother walked up the stairs to the landing, looked down, said: You'll never be anything but a nincompoop!

(My mother has a phobia of computers. When things go wrong she does not remember that she played the Ballades of Chopin at her senior recital; she remembers that her mother called her a nincompoop in 1942.)

So, ANYWAY, I talk to my mother about the Khan Academy.

Khan says he started tutoring his cousins by phone, made a few videos as a "nice to have" -- and was told they liked the videos better. Which, he realized, made sense: they didn't have to expose their ignorance, they didn't have to worry about wasting his time, they could go back, replay, shame no longer got in the way of learning.

I think I thought telling my mother about this wonderful resource would lance the wound.

Or maybe that if my mother went online and did some exercises THIS would lance the wound.

It seems not to work that way.

My mother did see at once the value of the resource. She said you would go into a math class where everyone else understood something, and you would pretend to understand, so you fell further and further behind because no one bothered to explain because you had been pretending to understand.

(She never bothered to look at colleges. One of her teachers asked her about her plans in 12th grade, and she had done nothing, and he was appalled, and pushed her into an application to Rollins, which had an excellent conservatory -- and so she went to college. Because she was a musical prodigy, and one of her teachers noticed that something had to be done. I think we can agree an educational system ought not to depend on last-minute saves.)

It may be that you have to see the damage a sense of inadequacy can cause over a lifetime to appreciate the value of the Khan Academy. Khan himself may be too young to understand the full value of what he is offering. I looked at these exercises, which had been improved in a few WEEKS, and was charmed, disarmed, and for once, among all the madness, hopeful.

God is good

2011-08-11T14:51:00.000Z

The years go by. One goes on a daily basis to the supermarket. One comes home with a one cent coin, a two cent coin; one rarely remembers to put these coins back into play on trips to the supermarket. The coins accumulate in the home.

One, well, I try from time to time to spend them. I collect, as it might be, one euro in 2-cent pieces, go to the newsagent, and am told off. He won't take them; his bank will charge for depositing them; I must take them to the bank myself.

I go to a bank and am told they will not accept these coins unless I am a customer of the bank. Do I have an account with another bank? Yes, the Postbank. Well, I must go to the Postbank.

Weeks go by. I have 6 euros in small change: 3.70 in 2-cent pieces, 2.15 in 1-cent pieces, 15 cents to make up an even 6 in 5-cent pieces.

I go to the nearest Deutsche Post and ask if they can give me the paper rolls. The woman at the counter says gaily (in German, but I give you the gist):

Oh, you don't need to do that, we have a machine! You can just bring it all in and fill out this paying-in form!

Great!

I'm not sure whether I can put everything in one container, or whether the coins need to be separated by denomination; to be on the safe side I separate the ones and twos. I label the bags. I fill out the form. I return to this helpful branch of the Deutsche Post.

Where a different woman explains that the machine is kaputt. And HAS been kaputt for four weeks. I need to roll up the coins.

OK, I say, can you give me the Rollen? (Not sure if this is the technical term.)

She brings out a sheaf of papers, or rather two sheaves (is this really English usage?), one for 1 cent coins, one for 2. These are not rolls into which coins can be dropped, these are small romboidal sheets of paper into which the coins must be rolled.

I try to roll a couple. I am not adept.

I have a brilliant idea!

I can take the coins to a different branch, one where the machine is not kaputt!

I go to the branch where I have my PO box and am told they don't have the machine, the coins need to be rolled.

I go to the big branch in Haupstraße and am told THEY don't have the machine, the coins need to be rolled.

I am tired. I am very very very very tired.

It IS petty. Ezra Klein is not bogged down in these petty details. The US just narrowly raised the debt ceiling; S&P has downgraded its rating, generating much of interest on the difference between S&P and Moody's. The troubled Eurozone (Greece! But it's not so much Greece, what if Portugal, Italy, Spain?????) has markets in turmoil. (Or possibly not turmoil, maybe they're just worryingly going down, but meanwhile we at paperpools have 6 euros in small change which nobody wants.)

I go to Restaurant Toronto, just up the street, in my old neighborhood, Crellekiez.

Not without qualms. Last time I came to the Toronto the waitress said the Stalker kept coming by and asking for me. But I like the Toronto, so sod it.

(Does Ezra Klein have a stalker? Punk rock musician from Moscow? I'm guessing not.)

SO.

I'm sitting at an outside table at the Toronto. My laptop is out, I'm online, I have a glass of Riesling.

A guy comes by selling a street magazine, and he also says, as they do, Kleine Spende?

Meaning, even if you don't want to buy the paper, maybe you could spare some small change.

I first dig out a coin, 50 cents. Then I have an idea.

I say, Er, Moment. Moment. Ich weiß nicht (I don't know), ich bin nicht begabt (I don't have the knack), vielleicht sind Sie begabt (maybe you have the knack).

I root around in my three bags (handbag, laptop bag, gym bag) and haul out these bags of 1- and 2-cent coins, WITH the rolling papers provided by Deutsche Post. I explain haltingly that I have tried many times to hand them in, without success; perhaps HE will know what to do, but if not I perfectly understand.

There is a moment of confusion; he is not sure what is on offer, whether he is being asked to roll up the coins for me. A man at the adjacent table explains, no, he is not being asked to give them back, if he wants he can take them away.

We then exchange thanks many times. He is happy to take away these bags of coins, I am happy that 215 1-cent coins and 185 2-cent coins are now HIS. (Yes. He did not get the full Monty. The 3 5-cent coins are at the bottom of one of the bags.)

There is some sort of moral, if you want a moral. Most of the things I need done for me as a writer are little 1-cent 2-cent jobs. If I have to do them all myself there is never a clear block of time for writing.
But I can't pay someone 6 euros to do 215 1-cent jobs, 185 2-cent jobs, and 3 5-cent jobs. Not only can I not pay 6 euros for this service, there is NO amount of money I can pay to get 403 microjobs taken care of.

Which is too bad, but somebody asked for small change and got 6.35 (5.85 in 1- and 2-cent coints, 50 cents before I had the brilliant idea of ridding myself of the copper).

useless but cool (ars gratia artis)

2011-08-11T13:55:00.000Z

One R Tip a Day offers a package which enables one to display one's favorite strips from xkcd. Here.

2011-08-10T19:12:00.000Z

Andrew Gelman on the difference between information visualization and statistical graphics:

When I discuss the failings of Wordle (or of Nightingale’s spiral, or Kosara’s swirl, or this graph), it is not to put them down, but rather to highlight the gap between (a) what these visualizations do (draw attention to a data pattern and engage the viewer both visually and intellectually) and (b) my goal in statistical graphics (to display data patterns, both expected and unexpected). The differences between (a) and (b) are my subject, and a great way to highlight them is to consider examples that are effective as infovis but not as statistical graphics. I would have no problem with Kosara etc. doing the opposite with my favorite statistical graphics: demonstrating that despite their savvy graphical arrangements of comparisons, my graphs don’t always communicate what I’d like them to.

I’m very open to the idea that graphics experts could help me communicate in ways that I didn’t think of, just as I’d hope that graphics experts would accept that even the coolest images and dynamic graphics could be reimagined if the goal is data exploration.

To get back to our exchange with Kosara, I stand firm in my belief that the swirly plot is not such a good way to display time series data–there are more effective ways of understanding periodicity, and no I don’t think this has anything to do with dynamic vs. static graphics or problems with R. As I noted elsewhere, I think the very feature that makes many infographics appear beautiful is that they reveal the expected in an unexpected way, whereas statistical graphics are more about revealing the unexpected (or, as I would put it, checking the fit to data of models which may be explicitly or implicitly formulated. But I don’t want to debate that here. I’ll quarantine a discussion of the display of periodic data to another blog post.

The whole thing here.

For David

2011-08-05T18:37:00.001Z

I go to Sarotti and decide to have a baked potato. Which comes, this being Berlin, in foil moulded in the shape of a swan.

Time passes.

The waiter comes, asks if he can remove the remains. I assent. He asks if it was good (Hat es geschmeckt?). I say it was great. I say: Wann kommt der nächste Schwann?

[Wagnerians will understand. 2C2E.]

Time passes.

The waiter heads outside bearing a baked potato on a plate, remarks in passing that here comes the next swan.

2011-08-02T19:30:00.000Z

Anyone interested in coming to Berlin? I'm leaving for the States on August 29 for three months, possibly longer, will be subletting my apartment. Some photos (furniture has since been rearranged) here. A chance to spend quality time with an upright piano and 3000 books.

Lots of great cafés in the area, including a jazz café on the corner; Potsdamerplatz (with the Staatsbibliothek, Philharmonie, Neue Nationalgalerie, Sony Cinecenter and Arsenal) is about 15 minutes away by bike, well connected by U-Bahn to Museuminsel.

About $900 a month including bills.

argh

2011-07-22T09:49:00.000+01:00

A new edition of The Last Samurai arrived on the doorstep this morning via FedEx. I flip through the book with the sense of foreboding which greets each new translation, and find:

Οχυπέφθ y άυδ ςώ ξηιγωφ έοέκωτ Μυρφ θ φ

above the transliteration

muromeno d'ara to ge idon eleese Kronion

[I omit macrons in the depth of my despair]

As so often I am consumed with guilt. I expect I should have tracked down this new publisher when it first expressed interest in the book and insisted on proofreading the Greek. It seems to me, though, that they sent in their request in the early days of my representation by Mr Clegg; there were a lot of other things going on.

I should say that, randomised Greek apart, it is a lovely edition. But oh my poor head.

2011-07-19T22:05:00.000+01:00

MR had a post on the Khan Academy, had a look at what Salman Khan is doing; this is extraordinary. But no Ancient Greek, I see. (Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese . . . ) This is what I should be doing. (Of course, if I knew Java I would be doing it already. Shame. Shame.) Mr Khan, Mr Khan, PLEEEEAAAAAAAAAZ.

A writer is not for Christmas

2011-07-10T15:16:00.000+01:00

Employees say they stress how much work it is to own a dog. They say they would rather lose a sale than send a puppy into an unsafe home.

Drunken puppy buying, HT MR who HTs Daniel Lippman

2011-07-08T06:49:00.000+01:00

Back in 2007, in the early days of this blog, Yvain Dewaele sent me a terrific account of Serbian writers he admired. I then expected to be moving to Wordpress in the next week or so, having been thwarted by Blogger's failure to provide what's known in the trade as a fold - a device permitting one to publish part of a post on the front page of the blog, the rest available to anyone who clicked on Read More. So this excellent post went over to the Wordpress blog; day followed day, week followed week . . . and sloth prevailed. PP was still on Blogger, and went on being on Blogger . . .

Who, in the fullness of time, introduced a fold feature! Ha ha!

I like Wordpress better for all kinds of reasons; sloth being what passes for a work ethic at PP, we seem unlikely to move any time soon, so I now reintroduce this excellent post.

En ce qui concerne les auteurs serbes. J’ai découvert Branimir Scepanovic avec son recueil de nouvelles “La mort de Monsieur Golouja”. Ce sont des nouvelles assez noires, écrit dans un style vif et le plus souvent sans fioritures. Son chef d’oeuvre est “La bouche pleine de terre”, qui en moins d’une centaine de pages en dit plus sur l’humain que des bibliothèques entières…

“La bouche pleine de terre” a une double narration: un paragraphe sur deux est écrit en italique et décrit, à la troisième personne, le retour d’un homme malade dans les forets de son enfance, où il a l’intention de se donner la mort. Les autres paragraphes sont écrits normalement, à la première personne du pluriel, et ce sont deux amis qui partagent un week end de chasse et de pèche, en communion avec la nature. Dès le début de la nouvelle, ces trois personnages vont se croiser, de loin. L’homme malade, qui veut etre seul, s’enfuit plutot que d’aller les voir. Les deux chasseurs se doutent que l’homme a un probleme et décident de le rattraper pour lui proposer de l’aide. Tout le reste du texte décrit cette course, qui au fur et à mesure, se transforme en chasse à l’homme. Car les poursuivants vont passer par tous les sentiments: l’envie d’aider, l’empathie, puis la frustration, la colère et enfin la haine… Au fur et à mesure de la course, ils croisent des gens qui, sans trop savoir pourquoi, vont se joindre à eux pour rattraper cet homme qu’ils ne connaissent pas… C’est un texte très fort, je me rappele en avoir fini la lecture complètement groggy et à bout de souffle…
Svetislav Basara est aussi un grand auteur serbe d’aujourd’hui. Ses textes sont soit des nouvelles soit de courts romans. L’absurde est son royaume: dans “le miroir félé”, le personnage principal se rend compte que l’homme ne descend pas du singe, mais du néant, ce qui va bouleverser sa vie de façon délirante. Dans le recueil “Phénomènes” toutes les nouvelles visent à prouver qu’un pays nommé “Falseland”(le pays des faussaires) contient une mini société où on invente l’histoire du monde: Christophe colomb n’aurait jamais découvert l’Amérique, car l’Amérique n’existe pas, au même titre que Freud ou Marx, qui sont de pures inventions made in Falseland… Vous imaginez jusqu’où ça peut aller. C’est à la fois très drole et ça donne beaucoup à réfléchir…

Enfin, il y a Milorad Pavic, dont je commence à peine à découvrir l’oeuvre, mais qui me plait énormément… Lui joue énormément sur la forme: Dans un de ses livres, les chapitres s’imbriquent les uns les autres en suivant les arcanes du tarot et en en reprenant les illustrations; dans un autre, chaque chapitre tourne autour d’un mot qui fait lui même partie d’un gigantesque jeu de mots croisés. Un autre contient deux nouvelles de cent pages, la premiere qu’on lit à l’endroit, et l’autre, qui se passe plusieurs siecles plus tard, en retournant le livre. les deux nouvelles finissent par se rapprocher et se répondent l’une l’autre…

elegance in bribery

2011-07-06T14:47:00.000+01:00

Lovely post at (where else?) MR on bribery in China.

The First Scenario:
The corrupted official can sell a fake painting at any rigged gallery. After coordinating with the official, the briber will go to the designated gallery and buy it at the agreed price plus the commission of the gallery owner. All of the three parties know that the painting is fake, but eventually they are all benefited. This fake painting can be reused and it can go through another bribery circulation of other “elegant” buyers and sellers.

The whole thing here.

Triple Canopy

2011-07-05T17:59:00.000+01:00

Triple Canopy is running a Kickstarter campaign (now in its final week) to raise funds for 155 Freeman. I quote:

About 155 Freeman and the Kickstarter campaign
This September, Triple Canopy will be opening a new arts-and-culture center at 155 Freeman Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with our friends Light Industry, a cinema, and The Public School, an open-source classroom with no curriculum. Together, our groups will organize performances, classes, artist talks, readings, panels, workshops, concerts, and weekly film screenings—all of which will be open to the public. We've signed a five-year lease, which means relying on the continued generosity of donors near and far—which is to say we're relying on you. We're currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for our first year of programming. By contributing to our campaign, you can help us establish this truly alternative space and support the work of the many innovative artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and educators with whom we collaborate.

This sounds terrific. New York hates me, but this is the kind of thing that makes me wonder whether it would be so terrible, after all, to spend some time there. If any New Yorkers are reading, they might want to send ten bucks along.

hm

2011-06-29T06:20:00.000+01:00

The Electric Literature blog has a post by Nora Fussner on a new iPad app of The Waste Land, which includes the poem read by Eliot, Ted Hughes, Fiona Shaw and others, a facsimile of the typescript edited by Pound, and much more. Toward the end Fussner comments that it would be nice if other books had the benefit of such an app; she mentions The Last Samurai, which could have clips from the Kurosawa film and translation of the lines in Greek.

I am all for an iPad app with clips from the film (always supposing Toho could be persuaded to cooperate). In fact, I love the idea of an app that offers more help with Greek than was included in the book. But, um, to the best of my knowledge all lines in Greek within the text ARE translated, and with one exception (a brief quotation from the Odyssey) they are also transliterated.

(I am only too conscious of the fact that pages offering this help are not especially well designed - when cobbling them together in, if memory serves, WordPerfect 7, I imagined, in my innocence, that they would be handed over to a professional designer who would produce something handsome on the page. As it happens, the designer and typesetter seem to have seen the Greek, Old Norse and Japanese as tricky stuff they could not reasonably be expected to tackle, so those bits of the text were left pretty much the way they were in the wordprocessed submission. (The Japanese looked better in the original document, having been typed in using software suitable for Japanese, rather than plonked in as graphics objects in a vanilla Quark file.) But enough of King Charles' Head.)

2011-06-26T15:46:00.000+01:00

Languagehat has a post which includes a quotation from the Autobiography of the Protopope Avvakum. "Protopope" in Cyrillic: протопоп. Impossible not to love.

2011-06-26T15:13:00.000+01:00

Tribrachidium was a strange genus of ediacara which has been found in Russian, Ukraine, and Australia.

Tribrachidium has been described as a member of many groups. It probably lived on the bottom of the ocean filtering food. Like many animals from the Ediacaran Period, Tribrachidium was mysterious and little is known about it.

ABC Age Seven

[But was there an oktokaiogdoekontabrachidium? We can only surmise...]

(Courtesy Mr Know-it-all)

2011-06-22T17:25:00.000+01:00

The humour, while probably more easily appreciated by seasoned birdwatchers, isn't restricted to in jokes.

[Does Jonathan Franzen know about this film? I think he should be told.]

The Disillusioned Taxonomist on The Hide.

2011-06-22T17:20:00.000+01:00

There's an interview of Ryan North at Smithsonian.com.

Why dinosaurs? And while the T rex. is a natural, why two other, more obscure dinosaurs? No Triceratops?
I wish I had a better answer than “I had some dinosaur clip art lying around.”

[Best interview answer EVER. ]

Also, the Dinosaur Comics whiteboard is back in stock at TopatoCo.

Speaking of which, I had a phone conversation with my mother the other day. My mother said the book had come, and she had got up to page 49 and COULD NOT GO ON.

I was completely at a loss. I have never read Dinosaur Comics in book form. What terrible thing could have happened on page 49, such that my mother could not go on? (I had ordered my mother a copy of the Dinosaur Comics book, and had been innocently expecting to hear how much she was enjoying it...)

'I got to 'tight wet twat' and I just STOPPED,' said my mother.

I thought: Hm. That doesn't sound much like Dinosaur Comics - I don't THINK.

I cast my mind back over early episodes of DC. The webcomic has evolved over the years; I once went back and started going through strips from the beginning; had I missed No. 49?

My mother said something or other. I realised that she was not talking about Dinosaur Comics (page 49 of which is, to the best of my knowledge, blameless), but Lightning Rods. New Directions had sent her a galley. She had read it years ago and hated it; she had loyally undertaken to read it again, hoping to change her mind, and I had assumed she would hate it again.

Whereas I had confidently assumed that life in Leisure World would be brightened by Dinosaur Comics.

As, I suspect, it is.

2011-06-13T15:52:00.000+01:00

Interview with Mitzi Akaha in Axiom Magazine.

2011-06-09T22:09:00.001+01:00

How far should revolutionary thinking be allowed to go? Everything Luxemburg touched she pushed to an extreme – jusqu’à outrance, ‘to the outer limit’, to use her own phrase, the slogan she proposed to her lover Leo Jogiches. ‘We live in turbulent times,’ she wrote in 1906 to Luise and her husband, Karl Kautsky, also from prison, this time in Warsaw, convicted of aiming to overthrow the tsarist government. ‘All that exists deserves to perish,’ she wrote, quoting Goethe’s Faust. It is of course the whole point of a revolution that you cannot know what, if anything, can or should survive. For Luxemburg the danger was as real as it was inspiring. ‘The revolution is magnificent,’ she wrote, again in 1906. ‘Everything else is bilge’ (the German quark, which has since made its way into English, literally means ‘soft white cheese’). But whatever the conditions in which she found herself – in Warsaw, she was one of 14 political prisoners crammed into a single cell – she never lost her fervour: her joy, as she put it, amid the horrors of the world. ‘My inner mood,’ she wrote after listing the indignities of her captivity, ‘is, as always, superb.’ ‘Enthusiasm combined with critical thought,’ she wrote in one of her last letters, ‘what more could we want of ourselves!’ She had the relish and courage of her convictions (although ‘conviction’ might turn out to be not quite the right word). There is no one, I will risk saying, who better captures the spirit – the promise and the risk – of revolution than Rosa Luxemburg.

...

This isn’t anarchy – Luxemburg is very precisely calling for elections and representative parliamentary forms. Her demands were specific: freedom of the press, right of association and assembly (which had been banned for opponents of the regime). Anything less, she insisted, would lead inevitably to the ‘brutalisation’ of public life. For her, politics was a form of education: in many ways its supreme, if not only true, form. As she had argued in relation to women’s suffrage in 1902, the well-tried argument that people are not mature enough to exercise the right to vote is fatuous: ‘As if there were some other school of political maturity … than simply exercising those rights!’ Not even the revolutionary party in Russia at the time of the mass strike could be said to have ‘made’ the Revolution: it had had ‘to learn its law from the course itself’.

...

How could you possibly believe that a revolution can or should be mastered or known in advance if you are in touch with those parts of the mind which the mind itself cannot master and which do not even know themselves? ‘There is nothing more changeable than human psychology,’ she wrote to Mathilde Wurm from Wronke prison in 1917: ‘That’s especially because the psyche of the masses, like Thalatta, the eternal sea, always bears within it every latent possibility … they are always on the verge of b, ecoming something totally different from what they seem to be.’ Thirteen years earlier she wrote to her friend Henriette Holst: ‘Don’t believe it’ – she has just allowed herself a rare moment of melancholy – ‘don’t believe me in general, I’m different at every moment, and life is made up only of moments.’ The shifting sands of the revolution and of the psyche are more or less the same thing.

Jacqueline Rose in the LRB - for subscribers, so I'm being bad, very bad. I'm reminded, as I am every two weeks, that the money I pay for a subscription is the best bet I've made all year -- which contributes, after all, to the payment of people I want to read. It seems selfish, though, to have kept the subscription to myself; I should have taken out 20 subs and bestowed them on deserving cafés. Or something. Do YOU have a café you frequent, which would be improved by provision of the LRB? Too cash-strapped to provide? Drop me a line.

Seriously.

I've been a professional writer for a mere 15 years. I've been a reader since the age of 2. I wish I wish I wish I wish I wish bien pensants somewhere somehow had colluded to get the things I should have been reading to me somehow.

2011-06-08T22:57:00.001+01:00

1986 was not the year I discovered Roland Barthes. That had been at least a year earlier, and (allowing for the tricks of memory) possibly two. I’d come to Barthes in the pages of the British music and style press. There was a brief period in the 1980s – anybody now in their forties who was paying attention will treasure or regret the phase – when the New Musical Express, The Face and Blitz were filled with references, gauchely but passionately deployed, to modish French critics and philosophers whose works, at least in that milieu, had not yet acquired the academic label of Theory. In fact, there appeared to be a seamless continuum between the smart journalistic references from the 1970s – Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and the jittery eloquence then possessed by Clive James – and the new (though they were not really new) continental thinkers: Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard.

...

But it was not so much the thought that seduced me, or the profusion of new names (Artaud, Lévi-Strauss, Kristeva), as Barthes’s style, which seemed to reside mainly in his punctuation. Barthes, I’d later learn, has been well served by his English translators (notably, the poet Richard Howard), and they have tended to retain the hedging of parentheses, the sidelong views calmly opened and closed by em-dashes, the colons like stiles that invite one to clamber on over the thought, sometimes two or three in the same sentence. Rapt in this style, I was still not sure I knew what he was doing: I know now that I really didn’t know: but I had found (as Barthes liked to put it) my critic, my thinker, my writer.

Ruins of the 20th Century

2011-06-03T18:50:00.000+01:00

Noam Lupu and Jonas Pontussen (PDF) have a piece on the relationship between inequality and distribution in the new American Political Science Review. There is a lot of debate about whether the level of economic inequality in society leads to greater or lesser distribution – what Lupu and Pontussen suggest is that the structure of inequality (that is – the more particular relationships between different segments in the income distribution, rather than some summary index) is more important. More particularly they argue that if one tries to hold racial and ethnic cleavages constant, the key factor determining redistribution is the income gap between middle income voters and lower income voters. Where this gap is low, middle class people feel some degree of solidarity with the poor and exhibit what Lupu and Pontussen describe as “parochial altruism.” That is, they are more likely to support income redistribution because they feel that the poor are in some sense, ‘like them.’ When the gap is high, middle class people will have a much weaker sense of solidarity with the poor, and hence be less supportive of redistribution. Lupu and Pontussen suggest that the US is an outlier, with weaker solidarity than the structure of US inequality would suggest. They argue that the explanation for this is straightforward – “it is clearly attributable to the high-concentration of racial-ethnic minorities in the bottom of the income distribution.” More bluntly put – middle class Americans feel less solidarity with the very poor because the very poor are more likely to be black.

hat tip Marginal Revolution

2011-05-30T09:34:00.001+01:00

There have been genuinely religious Abrahamists, but only because they’ve somehow maintained the forms of personal-God religions while having in fact abandoned any such belief. Some people think that men like St Paul and St Augustine are exemplary instances of what it is to possess the religious temperament. It’s easy enough to see why they have this reputation as long as we stick to the sociological understanding of religion: both were brilliant monsters of egotism, and almost all religious belief, considered as a sociological phenomenon, is about self.

This connects to a phenomenon that at first glance seems curious. If we take the term ‘morally worse’ as purely descriptive, denoting people whose characters generally appear to be morally worse than average, and if we restrict our attention to those who have had some non-negligible degree of education, we find that people who have religious convictions are on the whole morally worse than people who lack them. Are the religious worse because they’re religious, or are they religious because they’re worse? The first direction of causation is well known, but it’s the second that is more prominent in everyday life. The religious (sociologically speaking) tend to be religious because religious belief provides them with a framework in which they can handle certain unattractive elements in themselves. In converts – those who take up religion without having been brought up in it, or without having previously taken it seriously – the correlation between religious belief and relative moral badness in the strictly descriptive sense (which is not incompatible with charm) is particularly striking.

Galen Strawson in the LRB on Mark Johnson's Saving God: Religion After Idolatry and Surviving Death

2011-05-28T22:30:00.001+01:00

It's not just lexical. You can walk — or run, crawl, scurry, roll, etc. — out the gate, out the back, out the exit, etc. You can look — or stare, peer, gaze, squint, etc. — out the window, out the porthole, out the viewport, out the sunroof, etc.
But you can't (standardly) walk out the house, or out the plaza, or out the village, or whatever — all of those need "of". Nor can you (standardly) peer out the box, or stare out the car, or shoot out the bushes — though you can perfectly well shoot at someone out of the bushes, etc.
Apparently out as a transitive preposition has something to do with transiting from within an enclosed space through a limited aperture of some kind.

Mark Liberman at Language Log

Conversely, out of has to do with exiting an enclosure or container.
It seems to me that you walk or come out of X for those X values where you can’t be in X in the sense of inside X or fully within X.” You can be in the bushes, in the house, in the water, in the blue, and in the car, all of which are containers of sorts (or of you), so you walk or come out of those things. You cannot be inside the door or the window, so you come out those things (without of).

commenter Steve Kass, ibid.

that clinking clanking sound

2011-05-23T18:22:00.000+01:00

Ownership of your Egg Card account
4627XXXXXXXX3061 has been transferred to Barclays Bank PLC.

Dear Dr Dewitt

As you may be aware, on 1 March 2011 we announced Egg credit cards were to be sold to Barclays Bank PLC. As a result of this, the ownership of your Egg Card account transferred to Barclays on 29 April 2011. The sale involves the assignment of all Egg Banking PLC's rights as the lender to Barclays Bank PLC, who have agreed to perform the obligations of Egg Banking PLC under the terms and conditions of your Egg Card Agreement. Barclays will manage your account through their credit card operation, Barclaycard. From 29 April 2011, references to 'we', 'us', 'our' and 'Egg' in your Egg Card conditions became references to Barclays Bank PLC and references to 'Group' will mean Barclays and each Barclays Affiliate including but not limited to Barclays Bank PLC and Barclaycard.

If you have any other products with Egg, such as Egg Savings, Egg Insurance, Egg Mortgages or Egg Loans, they are not affected by this announcement and will continue to be provided by Egg Banking PLC.

How you use and service your credit card account will not change immediately. You'll continue to be able to service your account online at www.egg.com in the usual way and use your Egg Card as normal. Any Direct Debits you may have set up with Egg will be collected as usual, so there's no need for you to change anything.

You can still make the most of all the benefits your Egg Card has to offer.

Um.

Why do I find this terrifying?

no more fried ants jokes

2011-05-22T19:38:00.000+01:00

the age of an individual is not measured chronologically in Amondawa culture, which lacks a numerical system able to enumerate above four. Rather, individuals are categorized in terms of stages or periods of the lifespan, based upon social status and role, and position in family birth order. As we have also noted, each Amondawa individual changes their name during the course of their life, and the rules governing these name changes form a strict onomastic system.

Courtesy Language Hat, Stan Carey on “When Time is not Space: The social and linguistic construction of time intervals and temporal event relations in an Amazonian culture,” a paper by Chris Sinha et al. in Language and Cognition.

2011-05-20T14:02:00.001+01:00

Andrew Gelman draws attention to a terrific paper by Mark Chaves on the religious congruence fallacy.

Religious congruence refers to consistency among an individual's religious beliefs and attitudes, consistency between religious ideas and behavior, and religious ideas, identities, or schemas that are chronically salient and accessible to individuals across contexts and situations. Decades of anthropological, sociological, and psychological research establish that religious congruence is rare, but much thinking about religion presumes that it is common. The religious congruence fallacy [emphasis added] occurs when interpretations or explanations unjustifiably presume religious congruence.

I'll bet they read xkcd

2011-05-19T16:57:00.000+01:00

A commenter has pointed out that it is no longer possible to ride around and around and around on the Circle Line. Since 2009 (always the last to know), the line has been reconfigured: trains now go in a clockwise direction to Hammersmith, then loop back counterclockwise.

Paul Waugh tells the full story here.

¿K?

2011-05-19T08:51:00.001+01:00

Always the last to know.

From to time to time people ask whether The Last Samurai is available as an e-book, to which I reply, Not to my knowledge, jinsai. (Roughly.)

I've just been checking out Amazon.co.uk to see whether they have relented and agreed to stock new copies of the book. (They have not stocked it for the last 5 years or so. It is in fact available, new, from the Random House website, but the average punter has better things to do than scour publishers' websites on the off-chance that a more expensive version of the book might be available.)

To the best of my knowledge, the physical book can still not be bought new off Amazon.co.uk -- but it turns out there is a Kindle edition. Available only in the UK. I can't buy it from Germany. If you're reading this in the US or Canada, my guess is you can't buy it there. If you happen to live in the UK, you lucky devil, you can in fact get an e-version of the book. I THINK.

The link is here.

When I view this page, I am told that pricing information is not available, and that Kindle titles cannot be sold to residents of my country off Amazon.co.uk. I surmise that a resident of the UK would have better luck. It's entirely possible, though, that a UK Kindle version does exist but cannot actually be bought. (UK resident readers of pp can check out the link and report back, if so inclined.)

[Since you ask, no, no Kindle version is offered on Amazon.com. Bastards. BASTARDS.]

[Update: a commenter has checked out Amazon.co.uk and says the Kindle edition is indeed available for £7.99, or rather WILL be available from May 31.

American readers who own a Kindle and would like to have The Last Samurai on the device would appear to have two options:

1. Mail the Kindle to someone in the UK and get them to buy the e-version and send it back.

2. Buy a cheap flight to the UK; fly to the UK, taking care not to leave the Kindle behind; personally buy the e-version; return in triumph to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. A bit pricey to the untutored eye, but offers the opportunity for Samurai-themed London tourism: you can ride the Circle Line around and around and around, buy a chicken meal at Iowa Fried Chicken, see Ulysses Mocking Polyphemus at the National Gallery . . . You could go to Grant & Cutler! Anyone rash enough to go to Grant & Cutler would probably, it has to be said, wipe out the modest gain in portability achieved by installing Samurai on a Kindle: here is a whole bookstore crammed to the rafters with foreign language books, books almost certainly NOT available on Kindle -- if you have not taken the precaution of bringing an empty suitcase you will find yourself giving most of your clothes to Oxfam.

2. is clearly the option likeliest to make your life more interesting, though perhaps not the best choice if credit card debt is a source of concern.]

2011-05-15T08:25:00.000+01:00

About a week ago I got a notification from PayPal that a reader had sent a donation for a secondhand sale of Samurai. I was, as always, extremely touched and wrote back to say thank you. He then mentioned that he had named his cat Helen and hoped this was all right. I said, Well, my ex-husband named his dog Ludo, so it must be all right.

Today I got another email; the NGO from which he had adopted the first cat wanted a home for its sister and thought they should stay together. So he now has two cats, Helen and Sibylla. They are five months old. Sibylla is the aloof, unfriendly one at the back:

2011-04-28T12:02:00.001+01:00

Setting the extraordinary technical difficulty of the music of Domenico Scarlatti and Bach against the keyboard music of the later part of the century, one might think that keyboard technique had deteriorated; in fact, the market for piano music had expanded.

It was Beethoven who felt that the desires of the amateur -- or even of the average professional -- were not worth attending to except when he wrote an easy piece to make a little extra money. (Even then, his idea of an easy piece -- for example, the first movement of opus 79 -- was likely to deter the average amateur, just as Mozart composed one of his hardest works -- the Sonata in D Major K. 576 -- under the mistaken impression that he was producing something that could be negotiated by a beginner or an amateur.)

Charles Rosen, Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist

2011-04-26T13:51:00.000+01:00

Lightning Rods will be published by New Directions in October. I have managed to get access to my website again and added a page describing the book, here. It's now available for pre-order on Amazon at a handsome 34% discount

(Amazon.ca, 28% discount, Amazon.co.uk, 11% discount...)

2011-04-22T14:01:00.003+01:00

Tourner un film est la chose la plus ennuyeuse du monde.

...

Impossible de prendre du temps pour se concentrer. On ne vous en donne pas. Ce qui fait que l'esprit, l'humeur, le caractère sont soumis à une sorte de douche écossaise dont le flot de moments intenses et forts ne durent que quelques minutes, alors que la douceur tiède de l'attente distille son ennui durant des heures.

Rien n'est plus favorable à la naissance d'une passion que ce mélange de solitude ennuyeuse et de quelques moments rares et longtemps désirés.

J'avais vingt ans, je tournais mon premier filme, Ciel d'Enfer, réalisé par Youssef Shahin, un de mes amis qui, comme moi, est chrétien libanais vivant en Égypte. J'avais pour partenaire féminine la grande star Faten Hamamam, qui allait par la suite devenir ma femme. Et, comme je viens de l'expliquer, j'attendais deux ou trois heures le moment de me concentrer intensément pour entrer quelques minutes dans le personnage d'un jeune homme séduisant et séduit qui triomphe de l'amour et la mort.

Seules des lectures d'intérêt mineur, des lectures qu'on peut qualifier "de surface", par opposition aux lectures profondes, pouvaient meubler ces heures d'attente. Je me vois encore dans une petite librairie du centre d'Alexandrie, parcourant du regard les rayonnages à la recherche de livres ennuyeux, mais pas trop. Je rejetais Proust -- que plus tard me procura d'énormes plaisirs--, je me refusais le génial romancier de l'Angleterre puritaine, Thackeray. J'avais dévoré la Foire aux Vanités, et je savais que son grand héros, Pendennis, était exactement l'étudiant d'Oxford dont j'aurais aimé jouer le personnage... Et mes yeux se portèrent par hasard sur le Blue Book -- en français, je suppose que c'est le "Livre Blue" -- de Goren.

J'ignorais alors tout du bridge, je savais seulement que c'était un jeu de cartes qui se joue à quatre. Et le lendemain, c'est d'une âme parfaitement indifférente que j'ouvris ce livre, confortablement installé, attendant que le réalisateur qui organisait on plan de tournage ait besois que le séducteur de Ciel d'Enfer appairaisse dans le champ pour y accomplir ses ravages.

Omar Sharif, Ma vie au bridge.

[I have had a book accepted for publication. The difference between the life of the writer and that of the actor in a film is that the waiting around goes on for months rather than a mere couple of hours.]

2011-04-10T12:48:00.006+01:00

Emotion words and expressive strategies cannot, as a rule, be used in reference to persons other than the speaker. In cases where they do refer to persons other than the speaker, most must either be used in quotation or must go through grammatical manipulations that explicitly mark them.

This is particularly true in the case of adjectives of emotion, for example, kanashii, 'sad'. Now, Kanashii 'I'm sad' is grammatically correct, but *Ano hito wa kanashii 'He is sad' is not acceptable under ordinary circumstances. Instead, what is acceptable is Ano hito wa kanashi soo da 'He appears to be sad'. In Japanese it is necessary to mark the sentence if it is not about the speaker's but about someone else's emotion. The reason for this is that, although one can experience one's own emotions directly, someone else's emotions are not so accessible.

The distinction in Japanese is not necessarily required in other languages. In English, for example, it is possible to say "I'm happy" and "I think so" as well as "Yamada is happy" and "Yamada thinks so." It is important to remember that in Japanese, the distinction is obligatory, and extra attention must be paid when referring to one's own or another's thoughts and feelings.

Senko K. Maynard, Expressive Japanese: A Reference Guide For Sharing Emotion And Empathy

2011-03-29T12:27:00.003Z

I have a piece in the latest issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction ("Awesome, or The Internet as Consolation").

There will be a reading from the RCF on Failure this Saturday, 2 April, from 3 to 5 at MoMA P.S.1 (22-25 Jackson Ave (at the intersection of 46th Ave), Long Island City, NY 11101).

The editor, Joshua Cohen, will introduce the proceedings; there will then be readings by Keith Gessen, Sam Frank, Eileen Myles and Travis Jeppesen (in person) and me (by Skype).

More about the issue and event here.