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