paperpools

rate of change

2009-07-15T01:31:00.003+01:00

A while back I came across a blog post discussing the teaching of mathematics in schools. (I think the link is buried somewhere deep in the Drafts Folder. Along with 90% of all posts. Not convinced 99% would not be a better number. Anyway.) A commenter said he did not need his lawyer to know algebra.

Hm.

I've dealt with a lot agents and lawyers and accountants over the years. Algebra, no, I don't think my life would have been better if they had demonstrated competence in algebra. Exponential growth and decay, though, this is a concept that would have been helpful. Helpful as in enabling me to publish a book as a year rather than having a 9-year gap.

It's 2.38 am in Berlin. I'm sitting in Drama, a breakaway bar founded by Peter, who used to be a partner at Prinz Eisenherz, the gay café two doors up, before he got fed up. He wanted a place that would not be just for gays, but for everyone. So he went for a decor of fuchsia and gilt and faux leopardskin. As one would.

When one works on a book it has a momentum. It reaches a point where it can be finished a month, if one has a clear month at time t. If it's disrupted for a month, though, it will probably take two months to complete. If it's disrupted for six months it may well need a year to complete. If it's disrupted for a year it may not be possible to finish within the author's lifetime. Accelerating deceleration.

There's an obvious cost to leaving a book unfinished. There's a cost to having a gap of 10 years rather than 1 between books. And the latter, unfortunately, also requires some kind of seat-of-the-pants understanding of basic calculus, because fame is also subject to exponential growth and decay. The number of people who recognize an author's name falls off not just rapidly, but increasingly rapidly. (After 10 years everyone between the ages of 20 and 30 was under the age of 20 when the last book was published; these are not people, for the most part, with whom the first round of readers would have bothered to discuss it.)

So, from a strictly financial view, which is where one might hope to find understanding among the moneyminded, there's a value to simple, easily concluded deals; there's a value to the kind of editor who wants only minor changes and hands in comments in a week; there's a value to the kind of lawyer who not only says permissions won't be a problem but lays on clerical support to clear them; there's a value to the kind of copy editor who discusses the text with the author before getting to work, and who then respects the author's mark-up; there's a value to a typesetter who is competent to set the text. There's a value to the kind of publicist who sets up a timetable and sticks to it. And there's a value, consequently, to any kind of representative who is not only frugal with the author's time him- or herself, but who encourages such frugality in everyone dealing with the book.

What's interesting.

If you look at the British and American educational systems, America looks like a country with a much higher general level of numeracy. In Britain, only 12% of 17-year-olds do Maths A-level, which is where calculus and, for that matter, probability are studied. It's not just perfectly possible to be a lawyer or an agent or an editor in Britain and have studied no mathematics after the age of 16; it's highly probable that people holding those jobs have never seen a delta in their lives. In America, on the other hand, a year of calculus is commonplace for all kinds of people who don't plan to do further work in mathematics or the sciences. What I might expect, in other words, is a dramatic difference between my British and American contacts. In Britain I might expect the mere phrase "exponential decay" to bring on glazed eyes and wild terror; in America, on the other hand, I might expect to -- that is, if I explained the problem in terms of exponential decay I might expect instant recognition, but in fact I might expect not to have to explain. It's not my job, surely, to explain the underlying mathematics to the business people? Isn't it their job to know these things, and bring them to bear whether I understand them or not? (A knowledge of calculus may be helpful for some works of fiction, but it's surely not a prerequisite? Shouldn't all writers have the benefit of numerate business advisors?) Anyway, it does seem to me that I might reasonably expect to find common ground with the mathematically superior Yanks. But. Well. Hm.

A reader told me a while back that he thought most people had a romantic idea of writers, which writers, for the most part, maintained, and that writers did not talk about money, either because they were themselves romantics, or because they thought talking about it would look pedestrian and unromantic. But it's not, actually, that money is the thing that I'm thinking about. I'd like to avoid going insane. Having a book go dead does something to the mind; you stand on railway platforms and you don't know whether the body will throw itself in front of the train. I think Leonard Cohen is right - it's not in the same class as having your fingernails pulled out - but it still makes falling in front of a train look good.

The thing is, though, that I don't expect a lawyer or an agent to understand what it feels like to have a book go dead. I don't expect them to understand what it's like to hold a Stanley knife in the hand and not know what will happen next. (Will it slash a wrist? The throat? What's going to happen?) With money, though, we're talking about the quantifiable, we have (I think) common ground. I can talk about this in their terms, and they'll get it, and because maximization of money is on my side I won't have any problems.

Well. Um. Hm.

Should probably consign this to the Drafts Folder. Drama is closing for the night. The staff are stacking chairs, they want to go home. I'm outstaying my welcome.

Pip was right

2009-07-14T08:48:00.002+01:00

In contrast, a number of other Enlightenment theorists (Adam Smith, Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, for example) took a variety of approaches that shared an interest in making comparisons between different ways in which people's lives may go, jointly influenced by the working of institutions, people's actual behaviour, their social interactions, and other factors that significantly impact on what actually happens. The analytical, and rather mathematical, discipline of "social choice theory" – which can be traced to the works of Condorcet in the 18th century, but has been developed in the present form under the leadership of Kenneth Arrow in the last century – belongs to this second line of investigation. That approach, suitably adapted, can make a substantial contribution, I believe, to addressing questions about the enhancement of justice and the removal of injustice in the world.
In this alternative approach, we don't begin by asking what a perfectly just society would look like, but asking what remediable injustices could be seen on the removal of which there would be a reasoned agreement. "In the little world in which children have their existence," says Pip in Great Expectations, "there is nothing so finely perceived, and finely felt, as injustice." In fact, the strong perception of manifest injustice applies to adult human beings as well. What moves us is not the realisation that the world falls short of being completely just, which few of us expect, but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate.
Terrific piece by Amartya Sen in the Guardian, here.

the 66% solution, or: baked beans are off

2009-07-11T09:36:00.005+01:00

Martin Amis, Al Alvarez and Melvyn Bragg discussed suicide last week at an event at the University of Manchester's Center for New Writing (podcast here). Reminded me of a book killed off by my very dear friend and admirer Steve Gaghan.

:: ::

In the chocolate-houses of Eleazar these challenges are uttered: Define Zoroastrian. Define Jansenist. Define silversmith.

In the courtyards and bazaars of Eleazar residents are constantly updating their signs, and if a Maronite tattooist with a brace of parrots moves from the street of the rug merchants to the street of the glassblowers those in the new street and the old rush to correct the probability distributions on the signs which greet the visitor.

It is recognised that the business of a silversmith may require him to leave the premises, thereby rendering inaccurate the probabilities for encountering silversmith, Zoroastrian, marmoset owner. Their convention is to leave a dummy as a courtesy to visitors. The silver mask of a silversmith’s dummy, the golden mask of the goldsmith’s testify to the art of the maker more truly than the presence of the maker could do. The owner of a marmoset acquires as a matter of course a stuffed marmoset to represent the living animal when it is being taken to the bamboo grove south of the city. A cockatiel, which is always in its cage, is seen as an inferior sort of pet as requiring no double - though some owners will display, as a matter of pride rather than necessity, a stuffed bird on the pretext that even a cockatiel must sometimes seek medical attention.

It has been said that when the barbarians attacked Eleazar they found a city of masked effigies whose owners had fled long before.

It has been said that when the barbarians attacked many Eleazans fled and perished through their attempts to take with them the facsimiles in whose company they had spent their days. These replicas, it was thought, were the finest expression of their chance-loving civilisation, and the poverty of a life that must carry its chances on its back could not be contemplated. It has been said that the barbarians, having slaughtered the owners, took home the replicas and set them senselessly on display.

It has been said that some refugees fled across the ocean with their complement of copies intact. It was not always possible for a silversmith to find work as a silversmith; to practise Zoroastrianism was not easy. They could not bring themselves to create replicas of the practitioners of the trades they were forced to adopt. A man who was once a silversmith sweeps a floor; he does not place a broom in the arms of the dummy, nor strip it of its silver mask.

In this way do the arguments of the chocolate-houses return to him. Define silversmith. Define Jansenist. Define Zoroastrian.

:: ::

Or. But of course, as so always, Monty Python gets it best:

(You know the sketch I mean. From our very dear friends at YouTube, here.)

Man:	Well, what've you got?
Waitress:	Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam;
Vikings:	Spam spam spam spam...
Waitress:	...spam spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam...
Vikings:	Spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam!
Waitress:	...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.
Wife:	Have you got anything without spam?
Waitress:	Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Wife:	I don't want ANY spam!
Man:	Why can't she have egg bacon spam and sausage?
Wife:	THAT'S got spam in it!
Man:	Hasn't got as much spam in it as spam egg sausage and spam, has it?
Vikings:	Spam spam spam spam... (Crescendo through next few lines...)
Wife:	Could you do the egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam then?
Waitress:	Urgghh!
Wife:	What do you mean 'Urgghh'? I don't like spam!
Vikings:	Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
Waitress:	Shut up!
Vikings:	Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
Waitress:	Shut up! (Vikings stop) Bloody Vikings! You can't have egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam.
Wife:	I don't like spam!
Man:	Sshh, dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your spam. I love it. I'm having spam spam spam spam spam spam spam beaked beans spam spam spam and spam!
Vikings:	Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
Waitress:	Shut up!! Baked beans are off.
Man:	Well could I have her spam instead of the baked beans then?

everybody knows

2009-07-10T18:33:00.001+01:00

What do you consider your darkest hour?

LC: Well I wouldn't tell you about it if I knew. Even to talk about oneself in a time like this is a kind of unwholesome luxury. I don't think I've had a darkest hour compared to the dark hours that so many people are involved in right now. Large numbers of people are dodging bombs, having their nails pulled out in dungeons, facing starvation, disease. I mean large numbers of people. So I think that we've really got to be circumspect about how seriously we take our own anxieties today.

Terrific interview of Leonard Cohen in the Guardian, here.

the pleasures and sorrows of singular they

2009-07-07T16:18:00.003+01:00

Are you an excellent primary teacher who prides themselves in their method of delivery of the national curriculum?

If so, a cool job awaits: this popular two form entry primary school has had recent extensions and a nursery added to its footprint.

More here

[A commenter has taken this to imply that I think singular they is incorrect. I don't. I think it runs into problems when it needs a reflexive form. We have both a singular and a plural reflexive form for you: If you pride yourself (singular); if you pride yourselves (plural). The form themselves, in this context, seems to me as a result to revive the plural connotations of they; this strikes me as stylistically infelicitous after a singular verb. It is presumably correct, since the alternative would be themself (v. Arnold Zwicky on Language Log on singular themself), but it's clumsy.]

more more more

2009-07-07T15:47:00.002+01:00

Courtesy Mark Sarvas on the Elegant Variation, piece on a Boston book club for the homeless.

head to head

2009-07-07T11:20:00.002+01:00

Over on Learning R, the intrepid RLearner is going through Deepayan Sarkar's book on data visualization using Lattice and replicating the graphics using Hadley Wickham's ggplot2. It's completely enchanting.

that formerly clinking clanking sound

2009-07-06T16:46:00.001+01:00

John Scalzi on internships:

What bothers me about unpaid internships is not fundamentally that they are unpaid (although that really isn’t a good thing), but that the purpose of internships seems to have changed in an uncomfortable way: it’s gone from a way to train students in practical real-world application of skills they’ve learned in college to a way to plug, for free, actual skill gaps in one’s work force. I don’t doubt interns learn something in the latter scenario, but what I suspect companies learn is that there’s little point in hiring for certain roles and tasks because there’s always a new crop of interns. Thus begins a baseline expectation for business that some labor is always meant to be free, and so long as they give themselves legal/moral cover by calling that work an “internship,” there’s no reason not to exploit it.

but--

2009-07-06T14:00:00.005+01:00

When I was 13 my father went to Cali, Colombia as American Consul. My mother was a member of the book club, which worked like this: each member would undertake to read a book and report on it at the next meeting. The books, I think, were bought out of membership subscription to the club, and became club property, which any member could borrow. The collection was housed in our day, courtesy of my mother, in the Consular Residence. (This strikes me as a much better system for a book club than the common model, under which a group of people settle on a single book and discuss it; my sister spent years in a club thanks to which she either a) could not read what she liked because she had to finish, as it might be, Ya-Ya Sisterhood for the book club or b) had demoralising discussions with people who did not like All the Pretty Horses (her selection) because they would not normally read books about cowboys.)

The result was that we had a large, miscellaneous library of Book Club books that did not belong to us, but which I could read whenever I liked. Among these was a substantial collection of books by Agatha Christie. Cheek by jowl, you understand, with Tristes Tropiques, The Raw and the Cooked, Territorial Imperative, Nicholas and Alexandra, I forget. The result being that by the age of 14 I had read pretty much everything Agatha Christie had ever written. (I would love to say that I was devouring Levi-Strauss at the age of 13, but honesty compels.)

The recent exchange between Alain de Botton and Caleb Crain, anyway, brings to mind this early reading. For those unfamiliar with the Christie oeuvre: one of Christie's crime-solvers was an elderly spinster, Miss Marple, who lived in the village of St Mary Meade. Londoners came down to the village, imagining that its inhabitants enjoyed an existence of placid, idyllic tedium - little guessing that they had nothing to do but spy on each other and gossip about it. The blogosphere does sometimes have a way of putting the village into the global village.

Gossip gossip gossip. AdB left a comment on Crain's blog. Was this out of line? Was the review really as bad as all that? Meanwhile the subject of the book and the review drops out of sight.

The review begins with this sentence: Work is activity that earns money.

Äääääääähm.

So. Right. Say I start work on a novel. I have no way of knowing whether this is work or not! If I finish it and a publisher takes it on I then know that it was work, because I got paid. If I finish it but can't get it published it wasn't work. If an endless succession of timewasters disrupt, to the point where the book is never finished, none of the time I spent on it counts as work, because I can never get paid for it. Uh huh.

Or. I have a child. If I stay home to look after it, this isn't work, because I'm not getting paid. If I bring in a babysitter, however, the same activity counts as work because money changes hands. Uh huh.

Or. I'm 14 years old. I am legally debarred from performing tasks for money for more than a few hours a week. I am legally required to go school five days a week; if I want to qualify for decently paid labour somewhere down the line, I must carry out assignments at night and on weekends in addition to the time served in the classroom. But it's not work, because I don't get paid. What the teacher does is work, because s/he gets paid; if a parent comes in to help out in the class, on the other hand, this isn't work, because-- Uh huh.

Or. I'm a slave. I was captured in West Africa and taken in a ship to America and sold at auction. For the rest of my life I shall be required to pick cotton for my master, but it isn't work, because-- Uh huh.

Or. I'm not a slave, per se, I'm just an intern. I [work] for a company that has worked out that it can keep costs down by having a layer of unpaid persons doing what people used to get paid to do, by making this the entry-level position through which entry to doing the same things, only for, um, pay, is normally-- Uh huh.

Bourdieu talks at one point (sorry for bloggy vagueness, my books are in the other apartment) about the acquisition of a view of labour as something that is exchanged for a monetary reward, how ill this sits with certain cultures. He speaks of the indignation of a Kabyl father when a son asked to be paid to do tasks that would traditionally have been performed as matter of course by a junior member of the family at the request of the head of the family. That is, the question of whether an activity enters into a system of economic exchange depends very much on its cultural context; to state that an activity counts as work in virtue of successfully entering into such a system begs pretty much every question worth asking. (The UN Declaration of Human Rights outlaws child labour and slavery, and guarantees freedom of association; it includes the right to education; that is to say, it guarantees to every child the obligation to work without pay in a compulsory social setting till the age of majority by excluding school attendance from the categories of work and forced association.)

AdB cites Updike's requirement that a reviewer be fair. It might be better to ask reviewers to be useful. AdB's book has been written and published; it is too late for AdB to read Bourdieu et al. and bring their work to bear on his own. If someone who took the time to write a book on the subject of work missed seminal work on the subject, it's reasonable to suppose that the average reader of the NYTBR may also have missed this work; the reviewer could helpfully bring this work to bear. If the reviewer is himself unfamiliar with this work he might still be of some use if he were to give the subject two seconds' thought.

but-- but-- but--

2009-07-06T11:35:00.004+01:00

Edrants has an interview with Alain de Botton in which AdB discusses his response to an unfavourable review by Caleb Crain in the NYRB (AdB posted a hostile comment on Crain's blog).

Under what circumstances do you believe that a writer should respond to a critic? Don’t you find that such behavior detracts from the insights contained within your books?

I think that a writer should respond to a critic within a relatively private arena. I don’t believe in writing letters to the newspaper. I do believe in writing, on occasion, to the critics directly. I used to believe that posting a message on a writer’s website counted as part of this kind of semi-private communication.

There's something about this that reminds me, somehow, of my mother. A friend came over to help my mother a couple of years ago with her recalcitrant e-mail account; my mother described his engagement with the machine, and at some point let slip the fact that she had never surfed the Web. So in fact AdB's comment was semi-private: the sort of person who never goes online at all would never know.

Critics do get all kinds of things wrong. The problem with getting into an argument, though, is not that it's undignified; the problem is that the kind of objection one would like to make smacks of the Examiner's Fallacy.

Every so often an academic reads several hundred examination scripts and is appalled by the ignorance, the tendentiousness, the lack of sophistication - and so tackles the problem by taking a paid sabbatical and writing a book showing what proper treatment of the subject looks like. What the academic does not do is show how the subject can properly be treated in a 4 45-minute 1000-word essays. Nor does the academic show how his mastery of the material is to be achieved by candidates who are holding down part-time jobs, who can't buy books, who are kicked out of their halls of residence three times a year to make way for conferences. If one were to give all several hundred candidates a paid sabbatical, and if one were then to permit them to organize treatment of the subject on their own terms, at book length, a substantially higher number might be expected to achieve respectable results. If one simply locked each candidate up with a computer and gave him/her unlimited time to write to a specific word count, a substantially higher number might be expected to achieve respectable results. We don't do that, so what we see is, unsurprisingly, that a small number of students can both learn under unfavourable conditions and display knowledge coherently under unfavourable conditions.*

In the case of reviews in print publications, the reviewer is given a word count and a deadline; he or she is unlikely to have time to read up on the subject as well as reading the book under consideration, so falls back on existing knowledge and preconceptions. The author almost certainly knows more about the subject than the reviewer, since he or she has had time for both extensive reading and prolonged reflection over a period of years - that advantage accrues from the simple fact of writing a book. So, well, I do read reviews and think things like: The reviewer would appear to be unfamiliar with the central role of the letter, or epistle, in Western literature over the last two millennia, what is the world coming to? And this is a graduate of Oxford/Cambridge/Harvard/Princeton/Yale/Stanford/Columbia/UPenn!!!!!!! Which I had previously supposed to have high standards. What is the world coming to? But, well, hm, non omnia possumus omnes.

But-- I had reached this equanimous point, having read neither book nor review, when I thought of reading the review online. And was appalled. To the point where I was about to consign yet another post to that realm of the undead, the Drafts Folder, but no-- these were my thoughts before--
*Classic examples of the Examiner's Fallacy are E R Dodds' essay "On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex" and Simon Blackburn's Spreading the Word. Moral: Never examine, never explain.

friendly fire

2009-07-05T20:30:00.003+01:00

At what point exactly does quotation morph into plagiarism? Came across an old post on Joelonsoftware of terrifying relevance:

Once you get into flow it's not too hard to keep going. Many of my days go like this: (1) get into work (2) check email, read the web, etc. (3) decide that I might as well have lunch before getting to work (4) get back from lunch (5) check email, read the web, etc. (6) finally decide that I've got to get started (7) check email, read the web, etc. (8) decide again that I really have to get started (9) launch the damn editor and (10) write code nonstop until I don't realize that it's already 7:30 pm.

Somewhere between step 8 and step 9 there seems to be a bug, because I can't always make it across that chasm. For me, just getting started is the only hard thing. An object at rest tends to remain at rest. There's something incredible heavy in my brain that is extremely hard to get up to speed, but once it's rolling at full speed, it takes no effort to keep it going. Like a bicycle decked out for a cross-country, self-supported bike trip -- when you first start riding a bike with all that gear, it's hard to believe how much work it takes to get rolling, but once you are rolling, it feels just as easy as riding a bike without any gear.
Maybe this is the key to productivity: just getting started.

...

When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The firing forces him to keep his head down so he can't fire at you. (That's what the soldiers mean when they shout "cover me." It means, "fire at our enemy so he has to duck and can't fire at me while I run across this street, here." It works.) The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy, where your shots are much more likely to hit their target. If you're not moving, the enemy gets to decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you're not firing, the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down.
I remembered this for a long time. I noticed how almost every kind of military strategy, from air force dogfights to large scale naval maneuvers, is based on the idea of Fire and Motion. It took me another fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how you get things done in life. You have to move forward a little bit, every day. It doesn't matter if your code is lame and buggy and nobody wants it. If you are moving forward, writing code and fixing bugs constantly, time is on your side.

The problem for a writer is, friendly fire is an occupational hazard. You think you are hiring an agent to cover you, so you can write while they keep the enemy at bay. And, um, hm, it ain't necessarily so.

And, um, hm, here's the really terrifying thing.

You look around online, you go to agents' blogs, and you see that friendly fire is standard practice in the biz (and woe betide the writer who can't write under friendly fire, who unprofessionally complains instead of just getting on with the job while bullets fly in what is perceived, unprofessionally, as the wrong direction). These are the people who are allegedly passionate about Li-Tra-Cha. And you then go over to Joel Spolsky, who is passionate about um, hm, y'know, software development. And he's saying all the things you thought agents and editors would be saying, all this um, hm, by bookworld standards disgracefully self-indulgent stuff about protecting the developer's time. Protecting the developer from distraction.

It's hard to be sane.

Whole thing here.

high life, low life

2009-07-05T17:44:00.002+01:00

From Languagehat:

[...] Concerning Vladimir Vladimirovich: people who have read his memoirs (I have not read them) write to me with amazement and indignation concerning his lines about me: they see them as nearly libelous. But I quickly cooled down, and I think that at that time, in 1915-16, there was something in me that provided fodder for his anecdote. The anecdote itself is an invention, but it is possible that he accurately reflected the disrespectful feeling I had toward those around me. I was very awkward: in gloves with holes, not knowing how to behave in high society—and then I was ignorant, like all newspapermen—an ignoramus despite myself, self-taught, who had to feed a large family with my clumsy writings. Vladimir Vladimirovich's father, on the other hand, was a man of very high culture. He had a particular game: enumerating all of Dickens' heroes, almost three hundred names. He engaged in a competition with me. I ran out of steam after the first hundred. We jokingly competed in our knowledge of the novels of Arnold Bennett. Here too he took first place: he named around twenty titles, whereas I had read only eight. I always treated him with respect and lovingly preserve his few letters and friendly notes in Chukokkala [Chukovsky's album].

Относительно Владимира Владимировича: люди, прочитавшие его мемуары (я не читал их), пишут мне с удивлением, с возмущением по поводу его строк обо мне: видят здесь чуть не пасквиль. Но я вскоре поостыл и думаю, что в то время – в 1915-16 гг. – во мне было очевидно что-то, что дало пищу его анекдоту. Самый анекдот – выдумка, но возможно, что он верно отразил то неуважительное чувство, которое я внушал окружающим. Я был очень нескладен: в дырявых перчатках, неумеющий держаться в высшем обществе – и притом невежда, как все газетные работники, – невежда-поневоле, самоучка, вынужденный кормить огромную семью своим неумелым писанием. Отец же Владимира Владимировича был человек очень высокой культуры. У него была особая игра: перечислять все имена героев Диккенса – чуть ли не триста имен. Он соревновался со мною. Я изнемогал после первой же сотни. Мы в шутку состязались в знании всех романов А. Беннета. Он и здесь оказывался первым: назвал около двух десятков заглавий, я же читал всего восемь. Я всегда относился к нему с уважением и любовно храню его немногие письма и дружеские записи в «Чукоккала».

This has more of a bearing on my work than may immediately be obvious.

Nabokov was taught French and English as a small child. In Speak, Memory he describes his childhood, describes reading the simple texts which introduced a child to these languages. He sat in a room in a grand house, while a girl swept the gravel on a path outside. He comments that the girl may well have been happier sweeping the gravel than performing the tasks assigned her by the Soviet system.

Every child can't live in a grand house, but every child could have a mind furnished with, as it might be, Homeric Greek. Flaubertian French. The Hebrew of the Psalms (which Milton thought the greatest poetry he knew). Our educational system does not want every child to have a mind furnished in the grand style. It sets up an obstacle course. Those who succeed can aspire, if they work very hard, to a house furnished in the Tyler Brulé style.

walkways

2009-07-05T16:40:00.002+01:00

Courtesy Owen Hatherley at Sit Down Man You're A Bloody Tragedy, a terrific post on the Beech Street underpass at the Barbican on Will Wiles' Spillway.

There's also a personal meaning to the place for me. I have very early memories of being driven through Beech Street, and it had a powerful effect on me. For me, it screamed modernity, the first pioneering signs of a new city. It was strangely comforting - the warm orange glow of the sodium light, the rhythm of the coloured panels, the streaming lights, like the Enterprise going into warp speed. It was a snapshot of a city that had passed the period of even partial coexistence with the landscape, and was now a total structure - a cityscape. It still means to me a kind of density watershed, a Change of State in the city fabric like melting or sublimation.

(What I really want to know, obviously, is where WW found his template among the sad selection on offer at Blogger.)

Hatherley, meanwhile, has more, much more to say on walkways:

Critics and consumers alike seem to will any attempt to elevate everyday life to failure, anything that lifts us off away from the proximity of a coffee concession being some sort of mockery of the neoliberal city. Whether its the demolished walkways of innumerable council estates (usually for 'security' reasons, though it's moot whether they lead to endemic crime at the Barbican) to the imminent demise of Sheffield's multi-level tat extravaganza Castle Market (wonderfully, Sheffield City Council once planned to throw walkways over the whole Sheaf Valley), the attempt to create a pedestrian city that doesn't stay at a base level has become unpopular just at the point where it would seem most relevant, where it would make a (holds breath) sustainable urbanism something invigoratingly modern rather than tweedily conservative. It has been relatively intriguing, in the arid world of oligarchitecture, to see the reaction to Steven Holl's Beijing Linked Hybrid - not because it looks like it'll be a formally interesting building in itself, but because here the walkway has come back, and this seems to many critics to be an unforgivable urban faux pas.

More Hatherley here. Spillway link here, again, for the slothful.

yes, minister

2009-07-04T19:17:00.004+01:00

Chris Bryant, the new Foreign Office minister, is encouraging British ambassadors to support gay communities.

In a letter to the British ambassador in Poland, Ric Todd, Bryant wrote: "I wanted to congratulate you on your flying of the Rainbow flag next to the Union flag last year, and your guide to lesbian gay and bisexual and transgender rights translated in Polish this year. I know you had some flak, but frankly more power to your elbow. Britain is not just a tolerant country. We fully respect the rights of everyone, regardless of their sexuality."

In the Guardian, rest here.

Terrific, and somehow so typical of Britain: if you happen to get shuffled into a Cabinet post, the obvious thing to do is pick up the ball and run with it. (But what did Humphrey say? We long to know.)

B, B

2009-07-04T15:14:00.003+01:00

...la jeunesse est aussi ce fragment d'existence où arrive aisément que l'on s'imagine très singulier, dans le moment où l'on pense ou fait ce qui restera comme le trait typique d'une génération.

Badiou, Beckett

gr

2009-06-30T19:15:00.003+01:00

I go to a café and the stalker turns up. (Of course, he's not really a stalker, just someone who knew my old address and used to turn up and ring the bell. But this was one of the reasons for moving out.) Anyway, X turns up and asks inside if it's all right to busk. They say yes. He brings out a stool, sits on it, sings a couple of Russian songs while playing guitar. Afterwards he comes over to sit down, orders a beer, talks. "I'd like to kiss you," says X. "Don't you like men?" (I need to find another apartment.) Presently X finishes his beer and leaves, kissing me on the cheek. A patron of the café comes over, says, Sie kennen den Junge? I say (roughly) Well, sort of. He points out that X took the stool outside to play, and now the waitress will have to take it back in. He says, also, that people here like good music, if X comes and plays schlechte Musik he has no chance. So he must either play classical music or pop from the 60s, 70s, 80s. I say (roughly) that I really have no independent access to X, he just turned up by accident at the café. The patron says He kissed you on the cheek. I do not say Is that my fault? He reiterates that X left the stool outside and now the waitress will have to take it in. I agree that this was very wrong. I knew it was a mistake to get out of bed. Dolce vita ist vorbei.

same again

2009-06-29T22:05:00.002+01:00

Came across an interview on Poets & Writers of Chuck Adams, formerly of Simon & Schuster, now an editor at Algonquin Press.

When I was at Simon & Schuster, they started this thing on diversity in publishing, and we were all supposed to go through diversity training. To my knowledge, I'm the only person who was not summoned to go through diversity training. I think it was because I wrote them such a scathing reply to their initial query of "How do you feel about diversity in publishing?" I said, "There is no diversity in publishing and we're not likely to get it as long as you just pay lip service to it." There are virtually no African Americans in this business, there are virtually no Hispanics, virtually no Asian Americans. It's because we don't pay competitive salaries, we don't make an effort to recruit them, and, frankly, if they came in and really had a sense of their area of publishing, the bosses wouldn't know what to do with them and probably wouldn't give them a chance to do anything anyway. They expect you to be white like all the rest of us. There's too much of the elitist school culture in New York. The only people who can afford to take jobs in publishing are those who come from enough money and whose parents will help support them. We don't encourage a diversity of people in the business. We don't. We just want more of the same because they're the ones who can afford to work in it.

....

.

Go back to this notion of working very closely with an author—with the reader in mind—to make something as commercial as possible. What are the nuts and bolts of that process? What does the page look like?
Physically, it's a mess. I write all over it. I'm not a shy editor. I edit in ink, and I just sit down as a reader. I start reading, and when I come to a word or whatever that makes me stop, then I think, "Okay, there's a problem." Because any time a reader stops—whether it's because they didn't understand something, or the word is an odd choice and it throws them off, or a character does something slightly out of character—then you have to stop and say, "This is a problem. How do we fix it?" Usually I will have a fix that I just go ahead and write in. I always tell the authors, of course, that my fixes are suggestions. I say, "You don't have to do it this way, but you've got to do something here. Whenever I find a problem, you've got to address it. You can't ignore it. You can find your own solution, but you have to do something."

I go through the whole manuscript that way. Sometimes I just write in the margins, sometimes I write pages of notes and type them up and send them to the author. Sometimes it's just a matter of cutting and connecting and writing little one- or two-word transitions. But it's always a matter of taking the reader with me. I want them to be able to follow everything that's going on and not have to stop and puzzle anything out.

"The."

We don't hear people talking much about "the voter" for, I would have thought, fairly obviously reasons; there are many voters, each with a range of interests which may or may not influence voting patterns ( Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, by Andrew Gelman et al., offers one example of the kind of analysis needed to get a handle on this). When an agent or editor talks about "the reader" I - well, I don't necessarily want to shoot myself, but I do think, as so often, how much happier I would be among statisticians. Readers are not clones. Plenty of readers, presumably, would have no problem with the crucial clue in Lee Child's first Jack Reacher book: a scrap of paper that read "e unum pluribus" meaning, allegedly, "out of one many". (Awwwww.) And plenty of readers (though, probably, a different subset) have no problem with a sample size of one.

Some of you may think that the disadvantage of a sample size of one would be immediately apparent if a sample size of two threw up two radically different opinions. Ha.

What's the most satisfying big edit you've ever done?
It was probably Kitty Dukakis's memoir. It was one of the first manuscripts I was given to edit at Simon & Schuster. It was an unusual situation: It had been bought jointly by Alice Mayhew and Michael Korda, who are two radically different editors. The manuscript was huge, about five hundred pages. Alice called me into her office and said, "Chuck, there's way too much in here about politics. People want to know the personal story. You need to cut out a lot of this political stuff." Michael called me into his office and said, "Chuck, there's way too much personal stuff in here. People want to know about the politics. You've got to get rid of a lot of this personal stuff."

I sat down and thought, "Okay, who are you going to please?" I decided to just please the reader.

Oh. Um, right.

Whole thing here.

dolce vita ist vorbei

2009-06-28T13:25:00.002+01:00

Overheard at Café Kleisther last night.

Unimprovable.

et in academia, äääääääähm, tu

2009-06-27T19:55:00.004+01:00

Jenny Davidson has a link to this post on how best to tackle a dissertation as a route to an academic career.

I'm tired.

I'm a feminist. Qua feminist, I feel under some sort of obligation to chase prizes. If I drop out, I feel I'm letting the side down. And I once had a psychopathic (or do I mean sociopathic?) boyfriend who had an unerring instinct for what it took to rack up points on the scoreboard. So I must rack up points on the scoreboard. My tutors, at what had once been a women's college at Oxford, may, for all I know, have had this instinct; if they did, they chose not to share. So I found out about prizes, not from a mentor, but from a psycho- (or possibly socio-) path.

On the one hand, I went in for prizes of fiendish technical difficulty that women did not normally go in for (I think because their tutors assumed that public school men would have it sewn up, why cause unnecessary angst?). And, occasionally, won. On the other hand (know what? I don't wildly want to talk about this. But I've just read Nina Power's MS of One-Dimensional Woman, so I sort of feel I ought to)-- OK, on the other hand, when I had my final exams coming up, the psycho/sociopath would turn up at the library and want endorsement in the form of coffee in the Covered Market or some such thing, when I was just trying to prepare for the fucking exam. A week before the exam I went up to London to stay in a B&B for a night so I could revise for an exam in an X-free environment, except that X wanted to be called from a phonebox. I actually don't want to think about what it would have been like if I had had a tutor or tutors to explain how the system worked, without invocation of the crying need for a double bed.

Anyway, hm. I finished my thesis (Oxford for "dissertation") in four years, and OUP offered to publish it. But I couldn't face spending any more time on the fucker.

What I would say.

Superficially, academia looks very different from commercial publishing. I think they're really sisters under the skin.

As a graduate student, I did my doctoral research in the place that had offered me money. I did not survey the field of classicists, and/or the field of philosophers, and go where I could work with someone whose work I found exciting. I did my research in a place where I'd been offered three years' funding.

In academia, at least, you can find out about interesting people working in your field, even if you can't get money to study with them. So you can probably have some kind of intellectual engagement with them anyway.

In publishing, you have no way of finding out whether there are interesting people who would be receptive to the kind of book you want to write. Because, um, duh, in academia people have to publish to get jobs - you can get some kind of idea of whether you'd like to work with someone by his/her, um, publication record. Without which s/he couldn't had got the job in the first place. But in publishing, of course, there is no requirement to have a publication record to get a job. So. Well. Hm. It' s hard to be sane.

Anybody know about this?

2009-06-26T16:49:00.002+01:00

Having sworn I would not get sidetracked by LaTeX again I naturally was unable to resist trying to install it on my new laptop. Went to MacTex on the tug.org site, and my Norton Security flagged up a warning saying this was a known fraudulent site. Can that possibly be true? Tug.org?

going bonkers

2009-06-24T18:41:00.003+01:00

Apparently involved in some kind of dodgy deal. Which I can't talk about. Which makes jumping off a bridge look so good.

I think I should just go back to the States, move with in my long-suffering mother and start a degree in statistics at the University of Maryland. Spend the rest of my life among statisticians. Be sane.

When I wake up in the morning, I always think what a bad idea it is to get out of bed. As long as I stay in bed nothing can go wrong. And every day I make the same mistake.

Meanwhile. Inference for R can now be used with PowerPoint. Trying to write a story for the New Yorker which incorporates this thrilling fact.

tips

2009-06-24T12:36:00.004+01:00

The latest issue of The Author, the quarterly magazine of the Society of Authors, was waiting at my PO Box. I read a number of dour pieces on publishing, which is going to the dogs, and then come upon a piece by Norman Leaver on how to sell from your website. Mr Leaver explains:

Since getting that initial CD-ROM onto the shelves of shops in 2006, I have extended the range and I now have three training and revision CDs for plumbing trainees, a home study and reference book for both experienced gas engineers and trainees, and a series of six sets of study notes dealing with domestic gas appliances. I have picked up some useful information along the way which works very well for me, and may be of use to others.

...

Since putting the site up in September 2007 there have been well over 20,000 downloads. Installing these two areas was way beyond my ability, so I resorted to the professionals. And that was when I discovered Rentacoder.com.

(There is, of course, more. I don't think The Author is available online. But you can check out Mr Leaver's website, www.learnatrade.co.uk, and, of course, www.Rentacoder.com.)

I think the lesson to be learnt, sadly, is not that Rentacoder is the answer. If I had written a series of six sets of study notes dealing with domestic gas appliances, I think I too might well have achieved 20,000 downloads, with or without Rentacoder.

SS Stats

2009-06-22T16:27:00.004+01:00

If policy were set by state-by-state majorities of those 65 or older, none would allow same-sex marriage. If policy were set by those under 30, only 12 states would not allow-same-sex marriage.

From Jeff Lax on Andrew Gelman's Statistical Modeling blog, the rest here.

(There's a terrific graphic, but Blogger has foiled my efforts to import it in a viewable size.)

Three-toed good, Peebles bad

2009-06-20T20:25:00.003+01:00

Thanks to a commenter, I've found Cosma Shalizi's review of Gillian Tett's Fool's Gold, which includes the following:

In short, the group at Morgan decided to change the way a basic capitalist institution worked, on the basis of abstract ideological principles, without any concern for its real-world effects, or the hard-won experience embodied in the social order they had inherited. (No doubt it helped that they all considered each other super-smart.) In conjunction with their peers at other major banks and financial institutions, they created these instruments, and then engaged in a series of highly successful lobbying efforts to ensure that they remained unregulated, and indeed to make sure that they didn't even trade on organized exchanges, so as to keep the banks' customers from seeing the deals being offered on comparable securities. (Naturally, the bankers who lobbied against transparency claimed to act in the name of free-market competition.) This may not have involved any illegal, brown-paper-bags-stuffed-with-cash corruption, but it's still a striking example of how a compact, organized, and above all rich special interest group can bend the political process to its will.

It is at this point, after the victory of an elitist cadre of self-serving ideologues, that what Tett calls the "corruption" set in. The original Morgan group were rationalistic social engineers filled with hubris, but even they realized there were limits on the trick they devised. To pull it off, the bank had to estimate the risk not just of any one loan in the portfolio defaulting, but of groups of them doing so at once, which meant estimating the correlations among loan defaults. In the nature of things, this is much harder than just estimating the risk of a single loan, and in many cases, like defaults on sub-prime mortgages, the data just wasn't there to support any sensible kind of estimation. (Cf..) The Morgan team realized this, and so did only a few mortgage deals. The rest of the industry was not so scrupulous: some of them thought they had a way of letting the market figure out the correlations, without anyone in the market having any information about the underlying economic entities, while the ratings agencies, for their part, used correlations set not so much ex ante as ex ano. The result, naturally, was an orgy of leveraged risk-taking such as had not been seen since the banks and financial markets were regulated in the first place. I say "naturally" because banks compete for investors' money, and they do so by offering returns. Leverage and gambling increase your returns, at least when your bets pay off, so the leveraged, aggressive banks gain at the expense of their more prudent competitors, who can't easily prove that they're being prudent, rather than timid and incompetent. (Tett makes it clear that Morgan suffered from its comparative restraint, and, had the bubble lasted just a bit longer, would probably have been forced to join in by its shareholders.) So leverage and risk-taking tend to ratchet up, until things go bust. If the aggressive banks have had the brains to diversify, then they have by that token correlated their portfolios (even were there no correlations within each portfolio), and so they will all go bust together. Which brings us to the end of 2008, more or less.

The rest here.

quis custodet ipsos custodes

2009-06-20T08:17:00.001+01:00

Jenny Diski was invited to guest edit a student magazine, but failed lamentably to stay on-message.

"It is not possible for us to print your introduction in good conscience. The negative tone does not reflect the spirit of [the magazine], which is meant to be an encouraging platform for new and developing student writers ... we feel that three high-quality stories have been omitted from your final shortlist, and we would not be adequately performing our job as editors of the journal if we allowed those writers to go unrecognised. As a result of these concerns, we can no longer continue this working relationship.

Tsk.