We lose again: Windham-Campbell Prize manqué

  

Was going to post this on Substack, but they don't let you indent blocks of text.  

 

Today’s insanely long installment concerns a major prize which I was told I’d won back in February, but for which I turned out not to be eligible because unable to promote the prize to their satisfaction. I have held off posting this, since the prize was to be confidential until its announcement on April 8.

On February 10 I went to Amsterdam to stay in an apartment a reader had very kindly offered me. I was in a bad way after the publication of Your Name Here; had hoped to be very quiet, to write and clear the head. The wifi had been disconnected, but this seemed like a good thing, conducive to work.

On February 11 I got an email on my phone from my editor at New Directions, who said I must not ignore an email from Michael Kelleher. Barbara has my gmail address; the general public has access to a gmx address which doesn’t show up on the phone, requires opening the browser. Checked, saw email asking me to call him.

We talked on the 12th. He told me I had won a Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction of $175,000. 

For about 3 seconds I was thrilled: this would give me the chance to work on texts using Edward Tufte's information design without relying on a publisher for technical support, something I had failed to put in place in over 20 years. 

I then learned that the award was contingent on extensive promotion of the prize. While I thought I could attend the 6-day festival at Yale in September, I was not in a state to drop everything to make an audio interview and promotional video and engage in phone discussions of the publicity process.

So long, Onetel

I've had the email address hdewitt@onetel.com since 2002 or so.  Since then I believe onetel has been taken over by Talk Talk.  For a while Talk Talk continued to support legacy email accounts, but they have finally decided to discontinue them.  That is, I thought I had managed to confirm the account with them, but now I can't log into it, so it looks as though it has been discontinued.

Unfortunately the onetel email address was the one connected to my PayPal donation button. That is, in 2007 or so PayPal provided code for a donation button, which I installed in the sidebar, and the email address I was then using with Paypal was the onetel address.  PayPal later changed the button to a Buy Now button without notification, because they'd changed the rules: you could only use a donation button if you submitted a form stating that you were a nonprofit.  But I'm not a nonprofit, so I couldn't provide the form. The button was simply a mechanism for people who had, as it might be, bought a secondhand copy elsewhere and decided out of the goodness of their hearts to send a gift to the author.  The new button rather bizarrely sent them through to an invoice for Samurai Secondhand Sales; this must have been pretty baffling, though some have persevered despite the peculiar interface. Now the PayPal button has reverted to a Donate button, but they have disconnected it altogether.

At any rate, I can't insert a new button, with a functioning email address, because of PayPal's requirement for nonprofit status. So I'm inserting a link to my Ko-fi account instead.  Payments from Ko-fi are still processed by PayPal, so it's a pretty clunky workaround, but at least this does sidestep PayPal's weird requirements, as well as the problem of the obsolete email address.

Ko-fi can be found here:

https://ko-fi.com/dewitt

Thank you very much to everyone who has kindly sent donations over the years.  

types

 

[A reader mentioned a post in which I had talked about Mark Girouard's Life in the English Country House. Couldn't find it on the blog; discovered I'd reverted it to a draft, for reasons I now can't remember.  Am republishing since it seems a shame to suppress discussion of LIECH.   Just a reminder that when I say, for instance, that I've just been reading LIECH, this was written back in 2012 or 2013.]

I mentioned to Michael Miller, in the historic meeting at the Tik Tok diner, that the production manager and copy-editor of The Last Samurai had been uncomfortable with having the numeral 15 appear in a work of fiction, because they thought numbers under 100 should be spelled out.  My impression is that Kevin Guilefoile (who has been commenting on the Morning News Tournament of Books) thinks this is trivial, a matter of house style. Also that a writer who insists on having it one way does so from a conviction of absolute certainty.  It's a bit trickier, hence possibly less boring, than it looks.

I've just been rereading Mark Girouard's Life in the English Country House.  Girouard comments:

In the Middle Ages learning, and even literacy, were not considered necessary acquirements for a great lord. The qualities expected of him were bravery, dash, a certain magnificence and easiness of style, perhaps the practical sense of a man of the world, but not learning. Such men set the pace for lesser landowners, and their style tended to be imitated even by those who had made money as lawyers, merchants, or sheep farmers. The reactions of one particular gentleman, as reported in the early sixteenth century, were reasonably typical: 'I'd rather that my son should hang than study letters. For it becomes the sons of gentlemen to blow the horn nicely, to hunt skilfully and elegantly, to carry and train a hawk. But the study of letters should be left to the sons of rustics.'

Girouard mentions some exceptions - Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, younger son of Henry IV; Richard II; Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester.  He then adds:

A much more important exception was provided by the spiritual lords -- both bishops and mitred abbots. Though often coming from relatively obscure origins they rivalled the lay lords in wealth, power and style of life, and much exceeded most of them in education -- for which reason they were employed by the Crown to fill the major administrative posts in the government. ...

The Reformation, by altering the balance of power, contributed to the spread of education among the upper classes.  The power, wealth and numbers of great clerics decreased. Instead the Tudors created their own secular bureaucracy. It was mostly recruited from the lesser gentry, but it acquired wealth and possessions until it became a new hereditary governing class. These Tudor bureaucrats were strongly under the influence of Renaissance ideas.  They took books and learning very seriously : and as a result of the spread of printing, there were increasing numbers of books for them to buy. ...

Girouard has less to be say about numeracy, but readers will no doubt remember that before Fibonacci's Liber Abaci (1202), which disseminated the Indo-Arabic system of numerals using positional notation and 0, calculations which we see as elementary (multiplication, division) were immensely complicated and requiring advanced study.

We're now at a stage, I think, where programming occupies a place similar to that of literacy in mediaeval England.  It is necessary both for government and for business at all but the smallest level, but it is not a skill whose lack would be shameful in anyone with pretensions to social standing.  On the contrary, it is associated with qualities of character that carry no prestige, are even socially stigmatised (we may think of the way Mark Zuckerberg is presented in The Social Network).  One can get a lot of mileage out of deploring grammatical ignorance, especially in public figures; one can get a lot of mileage out of ranting over deprecated punctuation; one wouldn't get very far deploring ignorance of the difference between a number and a string, haphazard use of white space or of capitalisation in the naming of functions and variables.

I don't know whether such ignorance will ever be an embarrassment to a presidential candidate, but I do think the basics will be common knowledge within 10, at most 20 years.  Meanwhile, how can I put it? Language evolves through changes in the usage of individuals; before a usage is widespread, it may turn up first in a specialised context, later be attested in isolated instances outside a technical field. The Last Samurai is more inclined to distinguish strings, numbers and floats than is currently common in a literary text.  It's not fanciful of me to use 'number' now in this technical sense of its numerals: the argument I made to the production manager was that the characters were constantly using numbers for calculation, and that the numeric notation was not only what they would use for this purpose, but marked this as their characteristic practice.  (In other words, I would now say, loosely, that the text marked characters whose minds made use of an equivalent of the kind of programming language that observes these distinctions.)

The point is, though, that this analogy isn't one that I made at the time - it wouldn't have occurred to me, since I did not know any programming languages myself.  It was just something that felt right. The copy-editor asked me over the phone whether it was all right to spell out numbers, and I said I wasn't sure, I didn't have the text in front of me, I'd have to see what it looked like. She said I could always change it later; I said OK. I got her mark-up, and it just looked wrong.

I think if you're a writer much of the time you are going by your feeling for what's right, which may come from influences you yourself don't wholly understand.  It's not that you claim to be infallible -- if someone can present a compelling case for a change it may be right to make it. But if the only 'argument' is that they like it better another way, or it's the house style, or the Chicago Manual of Style says something or other, I think it's better to go with the author's feeling.  Otherwise you may be tampering with evidence of the evolution of the language, which in some cases, at least, may mark significant social changes.  (In this case, the fact that the characters are not programmers may in itself be significant.)

Language Log has many posts on the fallacy that the words in a language tell us whether the culture using the language had a particular concept.  But it is sometimes the case that words can mislead speakers into drawing false distinctions.  The Gospel according to John begins with the statement EN ARXH HN O LOGOS, which is normally translated as 'In the beginning was the Word.'  But the Greek word 'logos' covered a much wider range than 'word' - it included narratives, speeches, arguments, dialogues, logic, reason, calculation.  If you talk to editors or agents they will often say of writing that in the end it's about sentences - that is, concatenations of words.  Well, in English words do seem to be what writers deal with; a writer is something different from a logician or a mathematician or a programmer, which all have quite different connotations.

time out

 Looked at my website, designed in 2007 or 2008 with a few later changes, and it's pretty much unreadable on my phone. (I only got a smartphone a couple of years ago, when you had to have one to show vaccination status in Germany, so the website has probably been unreadable for a long time.)

Will probably move to Squarespace, but I'm dreading it.

Clearing out books (last chance before they go to bookstore or Lesekiosk)

[All books now gone or spoken for - thanks to everyone who helped clear my shelves!]

I probably can't stay in Berlin, so trying to get collection of books down to what I can afford to put in storage.  I've been drawing up a list for a secondhand bookstore that stocks foreign-language books. I'll send the link to a few friends first in case anyone sees something they want. All free to good home.

I live in Kreuzberg, about 5-minute walk from Mehringdamm U-Bahn.

* = now spoken for

 

French

 

Mille et cent ans poésie française*

Simone de Beauvoir, Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée*

Millet, La vie sexuelle de Catherine M.*

Artaud, Van Gogh: Le suicide de la société*

Francis Bacon: Entretiens avic Michel Archimbaud*

Marie Cardinal, Comme sie de rien n'était

Alain Damasio, La Horde du Contrevent

Philippe Djian, Ardoise

Giraudoux, La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (édition annotée)*

Michaka, Stéphane: Ciseaux (novel based on Gordon Lish and Raymond Carver)*

Rodin: Éclairs de pensée

Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme*

Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames*

 

Oulipo

 

Pierre Lusson, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud: Petit traité invitant à la découverte de l'art subtil du go*

Roubaud: La licorne*

Roubaud: la dernière balle perdue*

Queneau, Zazie dans le métro (2 copies)

Queneau, Entretiens avec Georges Charbonnier, 2 CDs (fabulous)*

 

 

Philosophy, sociology, literary theory & criticism

 

Raymond Aron, L'opium des intellectuels*

Georges Bataille, La part maudite*

Bourdieu:

Le sens pratique

La reproduction: éléments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement*

L'amour de l'art: les musées d'art européens et leur public*

Contre-feux (et al.): Penser l'art à l'école*

Ce que parler veut dire: L'économie des échanges linguistiques

Choses dites*

La noblesse d'état: grandes écoles et esprit de corps*

Les règles de l'art*

The Rules of Art (tr. Susan Emanuel)

Les structures sociales de l'économie

The Logic of Practice

 

Monique de Saint Martin: Les fonctions sociales de l'enseignement scientifique*

 

Bergson, Le rire*

Barthes, Leçon*

            S/Z*

Barthes et al.: Poétique du récit*

Deleuze: Foucault*

Foucault, Les mots et les choses*

Jappé, Anselm: Les Aventures de la marchandise: Pour une nouvelle critique de la valeur*

Simon Leys, Le Studio de l'inutilité*

 

 

Arabic

AFL Beeston, Written Arabic*

 

Danish

Henrik Pontoppidan, Lykke-Per 1 & 2

 

Hungarian

Sándor Márai, Föld, föld!...

 

Turkish

Orhan Pamuk, Kara Kitap

Orhan Pamuk, Öteki Renkler

 

Poetry

The Penguin Book of Irish Verse*

 

Spanish

Berlitz Spanish Verb Handbook

 

More on Cormac McCarthy

 Aaron Gwyn, Twitter, images of Cormac McCarthy's letter to his editor Albert Erskine about stylistic nuances of colons, commas, hyphens in his his first novel, The Orchard Keeper.  (Gwyn describes these as stylistic quirks, which seems odd to me given the substantive arguments given for his choices.)  Doesn't seem kosher to help myself to these images and post them here, but you can see what McCarthy had to say here

mute inglorious Nabokovs

[This was originally posted back in 2009, I think, but was depublished by Blogger for violating Community Guidelines. Not sure what was wrong, but went in and cleaned up a few things, now it has been reinstated as a recent post.]

Went to a meeting / dinner at Golden Parachutes, a gallery in Kreuzberg run by Jesi Khadivi and Paul Tyree-Francis. Paul and Jesi are planning to open the space to anyone who is interested in offering a course, seminar or other event; the idea was to talk about some possibilities. 

 This coincided, as it happens, with Obama's speech on education and also with a piece in the Guardian on the severe decline in British universities of degrees in modern languages, following the removal of the language requirement at GCSE. I write in that context. 

One of my ideas is to offer a two-hour (well, maybe three) class called Mute Inglorious Nabokovs. Nabokov was taught English and French from an early age; this early exposure to languages other than his mother tongue seems to have been important in his formation as a writer. In Speak, Memory he talks about the entertainment offered by working through a little grammar book, in which the student started on simple sentences, could look forward to ever more exciting grammatical features, and at the end was able to read a simple story. He remembers sitting inside while a servant swept the gravel walk outside; he wonders whether she might not have been happier sweeping the walk than driving a tractor in later years under the Soviets. 

This passage always makes me think: But perhaps she was a mute inglorious Nabokov. Perhaps the servant, too, had gifts which would have benefited from reading an introduction to English culminating in an adventure for little Ned. One thing that's certain, anyway, is that most schoolchildren do not get this kind of chance at an early age. More generally, it seems to me, there is never a point at which people are encouraged to try a range of languages, and in particular to see what it is like to read a short passage in each by a great writer. It seemed to me that one could try something like this: introduce three languages of increasing difficulty,* beginning with the simple challenges presented by reading, then working through a short text. 

So, for instance, one might start with 1. Italian. (A good starting point for the many people whose first second language was Spanish or French.) One introduces the principles of Italian orthography, so that the reader, looking at a text, knows how it shd be pronounced; one then goes through a short passage from Calvino's Invisible Cities, providing relevant grammar and vocabulary. 

One would then go on to 2. Ancient Greek. Alphabet not dissimilar to ours; the student still starts with a big advantage. The object is to work through the first 7 lines of the Iliad. One points out that the Greek alphabet can be divided into true friends, false friends and aliens. There are letters that look familiar and do, in fact, represent roughly the sounds represented by their modern lookalikes (α β δ ε ι κ ο τ υ ς Α Β Ε Ι Κ Μ Ν Ο Τ Ζ); letters that look familiar but represent different sounds (γ η ν ρ χ ω Η Ρ Χ Υ); exciting letters no longer in use outside mathematics (ζ θ λ μ π σ φ ψ ξ Γ Δ Θ Λ Π Ξ Φ Ψ Ω). One starts the student off with exercises spelling English words in Greek letters, moves on to introduce Greek pronunciation and some Greek words, and then goes through the first 7 lines of the Iliad. (One does not need all these letters for Iliad 1-7.) (Sceptics may think starting with Homeric Greek is really jumping in at the deep end, but it is only 7 lines. ) 

One would then go on to, as it might be 3. Arabic. Totally different script, with many letters representing sounds not found in English. Also, a Semitic language! (How lovely!) But this, too, is less difficult than it looks; one starts on the script, using a version of the method described above, introduces the new sounds, and then works through a short passage - I was thinking, maybe, a few lines from Ibn Rushd on tragedy. On reflection 2 hours seems wildly optimistic and even 3 somewhat optimistic. Seems as though explaining how a Semitic language works would not be the work of a couple of minutes. 

Luckily, though, I can now use Jesi as a guinea pig and try to achieve a more realistic sense of how it is all to be done. Once the materials have been properly worked out they can be posted online and also, I suppose, published in book form (though it wd need an accompanying CD). Just the sort of book one wants on a long flight. The sort of book one could give to a child who has been dragged to the beach on vacation because younger siblings are not too old for the beach.  I'm thinking primarily, obviously, of anglophone readers, also German readers since we are sending up a trial balloon in Berlin. PS Hello visitors from Guardian Books Blog! If you'd like to be sent pages from the beta release as they're developed, do drop me a line!

 

Update (2023): I'm sorry to say that this project has made virtually no progress (there have been many, many disruptions), and Jesi has long since closed her place in Berlin and moved on to other things. Meanwhile Blogger has flagged the post for violating community guidelines; not sure what the problem was, but since I'm revisiting I've tried to clean it up a bit.

Undervaluation of women artists

 BBC radio segment on undervaluation of women artists (roughly, selling at 10% of what male artists sell for) here

For those who recoil from audio, as I normally do, there's also a summary in the Guardian here

Berlin (notes for writers)

 How to get a Kitagutschein on All About Berlin blog

Randall Collins has a blog, how could I not know

 Collins published The Credential Society in 1979, when his publishers took so tepid an interest in the book they refused to publish a paperback edition.  It's now a classic, took on new life with increased concern over escalating costs of university education and student debt in the US.

Turns out, he has a blog, The Sociological Eye - a blog I know I will never find again if I bookmark it.  So I link to it here.

Rejection of Proust by Gallimard

 Short segment on Radio France on Proust's rejection by Gallimard, account of the many revisions Proust made to the MS once accepted for publication and typeset (he apparently made significant changes to FIVE galleys).  The text originally submitted to Gallimard was a "dactylograph" which did not have the now famous first line (Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heur.) - instead there was a rather long and not very interesting sentence setting the scene. It sounds as though the famous line did appear, but was written in as an interlinear note on the dactylograph.

The whole thing here.

Lives of Astronomers

In summer 1997 I went to Oxford to do research on a character I thought should be an astronomer.  I went to the Radcliffe Science Library and began reading journals, increasingly aware of how ill-equipped I was to create a fictional astronomer: I should probably spend several months getting a better understanding of the kind of research he might do.

My agent, Stephanie Cabot, had said in June 1996 that with 6 chapters she could get me money to finish the book; somewhere along the line she seemed to have forgotten this, so it was not easy to know how to do justice to this astronomer.  In the meantime I went on looking at journals in the few days I had managed to take off work.  I came upon the Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, which includes a splendid feature: each issue included a brief autobiography by a distinguished astronomer or astrophysicist.

I don't think any of these were used in the book, but I offer a couple of examples, mainly as a reminder of how much better it would be if all academic journals offered this kind of feature:

Continent cut off

Am writing on my sister's laptop, as mine is on the fritz and I can't even find out whether it can be fixed because Maryland is under lockdown.  Tried to leave a comment on my last post (ON MY OWN BLOG) and Google would not let me do it (despite the fact that I am, as you see, signed in as me and allowed to publish new posts). 

It wasn't much of a comment, but anyway, Andrew! Such a great post! 

It may be some time before I post again, as the Governor of Maryland is having trouble keeping order in class.  He has now announced that if people don't cut down their visits to grocery stores he may keep us inside until September. 

Interview of Hadley Wickham (woot)

The real purpose of this blog, you may not have realised, is to have a place to put things where I can conveniently find them again.  Am in the middle of an interview of Hadley Wickham by Will Chase, an interview in which HW (we are not worthy) says:

So I think for a long time there was this big pool of people that could potentially be contributing, but they were really put off by R-help (note: R-help is a notoriously hostile mailing list and was the only way to get help with R in the early days). And then the timing was lucky enough that there were two significant changes that allowed the community to reinvent itself to some degree.

The first of those was StackOverflow. It seems hard to imagine now, but at the time, StackOverflow was so incredibly welcoming and friendly. And I think part of that was that in contrast to R-help, anything would seem welcoming and friendly, 

This made me laugh, because I had spent countless hours trawling through installments of the R-help mailing list, and the principal contributors of answers (Brian Ripley, Uwe Ligges, Duncan Murdoch, Peter Dalgaard, others I could once have named without thinking) were often very severe. But after one had trawled through HUNDREDS of installments one couldn't help but be struck by the generosity of contributors who kept answering question after question for months, years on end.  To this day I feel an affection for Ripley, Ligges and all (the mere name Uwe Ligges has only to come to mind to make me smile), an affection yet to be inspired by professional contacts who are EXTREMELY friendly and dodge questions like so many bullets. 

The whole thing here (this is, of course, the link I want in a convenient place).

Jewish, of course

Year ago David Levene (my ex) went to a talk about how you know whether someone mentioned in the Jewish Chronicle is Jewish or not.  I've sometimes picked up Jewish papers in the US, and it's never been clear whether they followed this kind of code, so I can't tell whether this is what I love about Judaism, or whether it's what I love about Anglo-Judaism  (I converted in the UK, and never feel at home going to services in the US). [This is an extract from my diary]

D called. He had been to a talk on linguistic markers in the Jewish Chronicle: how are Jews and non-Jews identified?  Sometimes context is enough: John Smith has been appointed Court Recorder. If the name is Jewish, and the person is Jewish, this need not be specified. If the person is famous, it's assumed readers know - Frankie Vaughan performed at such-and-such a charity event.  What if the person is famous, but not that famous?  "Michael Tilton-Thomas (whose grandfather was the Yiddish scholar Tomashevsky) . . ." Suppose there's a long piece about a woman and her family; at the end it says "Mrs So-and-So, her parents and children are members of the West London Synagogue."  This is to indicate that her husband is not Jewish.  Or this: "Mr Aarons, the pro-Israel writer . . ." -- it would not be specified that a Jew was pro-Israel. Sporting event: "AB came fourth in the tennis singles, losing to CD. EF won the event."  AB is the only Jew (that's why the person who came fourth is mentioned first in the article.)  Oh - one brought up earlier.  A piece about Seinfeld.  Everyone knows Jerry Seinfeld is Jewish.  But what if it mentions Seinfeld and George (Jason Alexander)?  People may not know Jason Alexander is Jewish.  "Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander (born Jason Greenspan) . . ."

(Surely I cannot be alone in being enchanted by the grandfather who was the Yiddish scholar Tomaschevsky. )

I'm really putting up a post, though, because there's a piece in the Guardian about divorce (here), and I wanted to put forward a different point of view, and I thought I'd do this on Twitter and wanted to link to a post HERE about the talk in which the Yiddish scholar Tomashevsky was a case in point.

Perhaps I should write a post later about divorce, but hey.

Interestingly, I was asked for a bio by my editor at PRH a few years back, when they decided to reissue The Last Samurai, and I was initially baffled - what could people possibly want to know?  I then realized that, while most biographical details would be no interest to anyone, the Jewish Chronicle and its readers would DEFINITELY be interested in the conversion to Judaism.  (I have no idea how the Jewish Chronicle would convey the fact that I had merely converted to Reform, in the eye of many Judaism-lite, but this is exactly the kind of thing we suddenly realize we would very much like to know.).  Sadly, my editor thought this was TMI, so, hm, but also wtf?  Are we all not enchanted by the JC?  But OK, OK, OK.

brave new babies, Glover revisited

Was reading Jonathan Glover's website and came across this video (70s? early 80s?) on genetic engineering, with contributions from his two young sons, enchanting:

http://www.jonathanglover.org/genetic-ethics/brave-new-babies

Vermont, wood, silver lining

Earlier this year I joined ANUFF Wood, a loose group of people in Windham County (VT) who turn up at each other's houses to cut/split/stack firewood.  The idea is roughly that if you turn up for 4 or 5 you can ask them to come to you, though I don't think this is very strictly enforced, and the core members seem to turn up for many more sessions than they possibly "redeem."

I've been to a fair number (wd go to more if I had a car), and recently asked the organizer, Michael, whether it might be possible to have three dying beech trees at the edge of my clearing felled etc.  Someone had told me years ago that I should have them down, and had then left the business, and each year I had meant to do something and left it too late.  And I'm not confident enough of my chain saw skills to fell trees, especially if alone on the hill in a place with no cell phone access.

Michael came about a week ago to have a look, and said the trees were manageable, and a session is now planned for Sunday.  On Monday I managed to reach Mark Russ, a local workman with a pickup truck, who agreed to get some palettes for stacking (for which he thought $10 was a reasonable fee). Today I rode my bike to the supermarket 4 miles up the road to pick up provisions, and when I got home Michael's car turned up in the road - he had decided to fell the trees early to make sure there were no problems.  He headed off to the edge of the clearning.  Meanwhile Mark Russ arrived in his pickup truck with the palettes, courtesy of Ron's Husqvarna.  He said Ron had said he expected to have more palettes and offered to bring more if needed.  We shook hands on this (that is, I did not have change for a $20, and cd definitely use more palettes for other things). 

Mark headed out.  Meanwhile Michael finished felling (or rather dropping) the three trees.  The last, with a wedge in its trunk, refused to fall, so he went out in front to pull at various long branches, which eventually worked. (Timber!)

No one reading this is going to understand - I was so happy!  I had meanwhile received an email from a foreign rights agent at the agency that did not work out, declining to provide a contract template for a deal they had declined to see through on the basis that it was proprietorial.  This is the agency that managed to take over a year to handle paperwork for a French publisher who had been publishing an illegal reissue of Le dernier samouraï - I should have known better than to approach anyone who worked there, because they were all toxic and it had taken months to get maybe 70% of the nastiness out of my system.

So the fabulous thing about ANUFF Wood (ANUFF = A Neighborhood Uniting For Fuel) is that everyone is so generous with their time, so happy to turn up on a weekend morning to help out, and by the end of a couple of hours two or three cords of woods have been stacked.  Something has been ACCOMPLISHED.  Within, maybe, a week or so of the beneficiary putting in a request.  And now someone has actually come to my place and solved a problem!  And the whole thing will be sorted out by Sunday pm!

Of course, from a professional point of view, it would be better if my neighbors took a Not my circus, not my monkey approach to their fellow man, while someone who has actually agreed to represent me is a miraculous of competence and efficiency AND anxious to help.  Also from a professional point of view, it's in some ways a handicap to have Vermonters as a point of comparison when dealing with the biz.  Perhaps I am not really, in the long term, better off knowing that 15 minutes is about the time it takes to drop three trees.  But for now, no, this was the highlight of the year.  It is my substitute for the highlight of yore, which was visiting Best Dentist in the World (Roz Tritton has now retired).

They warned me

I was recently interviewed by Jeremy Kitchen and Michael Sack for Eye 94 Radio (105.5 FM in Chicago), Lumpen Radio's books and literature program. Shortly before the interview began I got a call from someone at the studio to run through things that should not be said on air (basically various bad words, which would be tricky to bleep out).  This helpful person reminded me that this would be a live show, not a podcast.

If I had been writing my replies for an email interview, for example, I would probably have edited them down for brevity and coherence, but instead (in my memory, at least) I babbled madly on.  I've now been sent a link to a recording; needless to say, I can't bring myself to listen to it.  Still, what's done is done.  YOU can listen to it here.

you take paradise, put up a parking lot (John D. MacDonald cover)

Terrific piece by Craig Pittman on John D. MacDonald, the Travis McGee series, and Floridian environmentalism smuggled into the adventures of a knight in tarnished armor:

The more I read, the more fascinated I became. MacDonald’s books weren’t just straight-ahead puzzle mysteries like my grandfather’s Perry Mason books. This author digressed. He quipped. He had a lot to say about a lot of things—particularly about the greed and carelessness driving the bad decisions being made about my state. What he had to say was a revelation to teenage me. I’d spent lots of time hunting and fishing with my dad, as well as camping and canoeing with my Boy Scout troop. Until I read MacDonald, I didn’t realize that the places I’d enjoyed visiting might someday be turned into cul-de-sacs and convenience stores, or that such changes might not be for the best.

My experience with MacDonald’s writing is shared by a lot of my fellow Floridians.

“I read all JDM’s books in my early 20s,” non-fiction author Cynthia Barnett (Rain: A Natural and Cultural History) told me. “My father and grandfather had both read them all and it was a point of inter-generational connection for us. We didn’t agree on many things, but Travis McGee and Florida and rapscallions, we could agree upon.”

The whole thing here.

I read all the McGee books in Jan 2018 (2C2E); it's interesting to me, at least, that both Carl Hiaasen and Lee Child took him as a starting point.  It's interesting that lifestyles that have mass appeal are so scandalous to the people representing the people who dream up these gloriously marketable gigs. Interestingly or not so very, it's seen as dodgy if influencers who promote, as it might be, brand of makeup don't use it, and A Good Thing if they do.

the paranoia of celebrities

If totalitarian regimes greatly restrict public language, pushing people toward coded language but making codes problematic by taking away the shared platforms where they could be unambiguously decoded, then a fraying totalitarian regime where people are bolder with their codes but still lacking the platforms for decoding is doubly problematic.

(Think of a situation where any attempt at alignment, at “clearing up", could constitute an act of transgression in itself, threatening with high costs all participants.)

So while doublespeak and expected complicity were becoming commonplace in the city of my childhood, people were still rightly worried that 1) their codes may be misconstrued, 2) any innocent remark would be interpreted as a code by someone wishing them harm.

Amazing piece on Medium by Anna Gát (Three Prologues to Language), the whole thing here