ineffable words

About a year ago Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit, a book on untranslatable insults, put-downs and curses from around the world, was published in the UK. Author, according to the cover, Robert Vanderplank.

Nothing odd about that, except that the book had two authors, one of whom was Steve Dodson of Language Hat fame. (Note that it seems not to have occurred to OUP* that mentioning LH might actually bring hordes of readers clamouring for the book. Some believe in God without knowing whether one exists; some know the Internet exists without believing in it.)

Now a new version is upon us. The American edition of Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit has come out, and, mirabile dictu, the name of Stephen Dodson appears on the cover. Sadly, the book does not include the introduction by Steve Dodson. (He has been told it will appear in the next printing.)

Mr Dodson would seem to have a disposition of unnerving saintliness. This is a man who could, if he so chose, vaporize his publishers with insults, put-downs and curses from around the world. His comments on the matter remind the reader of nothing so much as Superman in the guise of mild-mannered Clark Kent.

(The only reasonable inference is that the insults and put-downs are of such power they would destroy anyone on whom they were deployed.)

Of the UK edition, he merely commented that his own name appeared only in tiny print on the copyright page, and added

The US edition will feature my lively introduction, in which I quote Pushkin, Mark Liberman, and my nonagenarian mother-in-law; the editions available now carry an introduction by my coauthor, Robert Vanderplank.

before offering various attractive entries from the book.

Now that the US edition has come out, minus the promised lively introduction, he merely mentions its absence and comments that the packager, not Penguin, is to blame.

The reader who wants to know more about Pushkin, Mark Liberman and Dodson's nonagenarian mother would appear to have only one course of action: buy the book now, minus the introduction, in the hope that doing so will bring forward the reprint. He or she will, at any rate, be able to curse those responsible with rare cosmopolitanism.

[When I said "OUP" I meant, of course, "Boxtree". Boxtree, as UK publishers of the book, might reasonably have been expected to take into account LH's popular blog; since OUP did not publish the book, they presumably had no say in the matter. Vanderplank is director of the University of Oxford Language Centre, hence, probably, the careless blogger's muddle. Also I am in the middle of moving from one apartment to another. But as Mies said, Die Seele ist in den Details; it's bad to find one's Seele so threadbare.]

why the nhs looks like a friend in need

Kwak’s parenthetical about how insurers can’t examine applications before they’re approved on the grounds that that would be “impractically expensive” misses the true evil here: the insurer wants to cash the insurance-premium checks of people who made fraudulent applications. Those are the most valuable insureds of all, because the minute they make claims which cost more than their premiums, their policies can be immediately rescinded. As Taunter puts it, you are free to play, you just aren’t free to win. And that’s why you get people being denied breast-cancer surgery on the basis of having had acne in the past.

Felix Salmon on Conditional probabilities and evil insurers, the rest here.

easily bored

Before the Revolution, Danton was doing well; he was not one of the people with nothing to lose. He had a wife, a comfortable home, and an established legal practice; many of the men who were his future comrades had nothing but sheaves of unpublished poems, unsung operas and unapplauded plays. But he was restless and perhaps, as Büchner suggested in his play Dantons Tod, he was easily bored. Revolution offered him five years of diversion and aggrandisement, and amplified his voice to the whole of Europe; in quieter times, 30 years of plodding application, bowing and scraping to his intellectual inferiors, would perhaps have taken him into the lower ranks of the establishment.

Hilary Mantel in the LRB on David Lawdry's Danton: The Gentle Giant of Terror

sans phones, sans tables, sans chairs, sans all

[yes. the HTML is up the creek.]

From Self-Divider, a translation of Haruki Murakami's afterword to Norwegian Wood for the Korean edition:

3. This novel was written in the southern Europe. I started writing in a villa located on the island of Micene in Greece, on December 21, 1986, and finished writing it on March 27, 1987 in a hotel apartment on the periphery of Rome. It is difficult to figure out if my writing outside of Japan had any bearing on the novel itself. It might have had some effect, or it might not have had any effect at all. I only remain thankful that I could concentrate purely on writing due to the fact that I had no visitors or telephone calls. Aside from these facts, there weren’t such big changes in my writing environment.

The first part of Norwegian Wood was written in Greece, the middle part, in Sicily, and the last part, in Rome. In the cheap hotel room in Athens, there were no tables or chairs. So I went daily to a pub and listened to the cassette tape of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on my walkman repeatedly, about 120 times, and wrote this novel. To that end, I can say that I received a little help from Lennon and McCartney.

The whole thing here.

why does no one lash out at rave reviews? discretion is the better part, but still

One thing that does emerge from all of this: is it appropriate for artists to respond to reviews? I sort of think yes, because reviews, like art, can be good and bad regardless of their content, and people need 2 know. One of my least favorite things to receive, for instance, is a badly-written rave; it makes me hate my music. Don’t you ever see those restaurant reviews that are total raves but written so weirdly that you never want to go to the restaurant? On the other hand, I’ve gotten my share of terrible reviews that were well-enough written and actually reviews rather than (and this is where the wording gets tricky) loaded descriptions of things that are simply True. Those reviews I welcome; somebody up in the Times was all, his music is “arbitrarily episodic” and I read that shit, and was like, oh my God! That’s actually completely right. Now, I think I’ve moved on to Episodic but Organized, like a meal of tapas. In 2001, it was very much like a delicious buffet raided by a crazy person.

Nico Muhly on responding to reviews and (in organized tapas mode) much more, here.

Does he play multi-coloured 2 diamond? I think we should be told

Malcolm Gladwell (I know, I know) on the psychology of overconfidence, courtesy of Languagehat:

Jimmy Cayne grew up in Chicago, the son of a patent lawyer. He wanted to be a bookie, but he realized that it wasn’t quite respectable enough. He went to Purdue University to study mechanical engineering—and became hooked on bridge. His grades suffered, and he never graduated.

He got married in 1956 and was divorced within four years. “At this time, he was one of the best bridge players in Chicago,” his ex-brother-in-law told Cohan. “In fact, that’s the reason for the divorce. There was no other woman or anything like that. The co-respondent in their divorce was bridge. He spent all of his time playing bridge—every night. He wasn’t home.” He was selling scrap metal in those days, and, Cohan says, he would fall asleep on the job, exhausted from playing cards. In 1964, he moved to New York to become a professional bridge player. It was bridge that led him to his second wife, and to a job interview with Alan (Ace) Greenberg, then a senior executive at Bear Stearns. When Cayne told Greenberg that he was a bridge player, Cayne tells Cohan, “you could see the electric light bulb.” Cayne goes on:

[Greenberg] says, “How well do you play?” I said, “I play well.” He said, “Like how well?” I said, “I play quite well.” He says, “You don’t understand.” I said, “Yeah, I do. I understand. Mr. Greenberg, if you study bridge the rest of your life, if you play with the best partners and you achieve your potential, you will never play bridge like I play bridge.”

Right then and there, Cayne says, Greenberg offered him a job.

Always wondered how DSL and I managed to get doctorates. Presumably because we never played bridge as well as Jimmy Cayne.

It makes sense that there should be an affinity between bridge and the business of Wall Street. Bridge is a contest between teams, each of which competes over a “contract”—how many tricks they think they can win in a given hand. Winning requires knowledge of the cards, an accurate sense of probabilities, steely nerves, and the ability to assess an opponent’s psychology. Bridge is Wall Street in miniature,

Wha-? Winning requires, among other things, a good bidding system for communicating with one's partner, and mastery of the system - which is why the Italian Blue team wiped out the opposition in the 70s. A Strong Club system enables a partnership to signal a strong hand at the lowest, cheapest possible bid, thus leaving maximum bidding space for determining whether game or slam can be made, and if so what what the trump suit should be; the partnership outflanks the opposition by getting better contracts for its cards.

In bridge, a partnership normally demonstrates its superiority in duplicate bridge: pairs in a whole roomful of tables play identical hands, and the one that gets the best results wins.

In bridge, the value of a hand is relatively fixed. An Ace is an Ace is an Ace, can be beaten only by a player with a void in the Ace's suit and a trump in hand. The value of hands depends, not on confidence, but on the rank of the cards and the trump suit.

What Gladwell says:

It isn’t, however. In bridge, there is such a thing as expertise unencumbered by bias. That’s because, as the psychologist Gideon Keren points out, bridge involves “related items with continuous feedback.” It has rules and boundaries and situations that repeat themselves and clear patterns that develop—and when a player makes a mistake of overconfidence he or she learns of the consequences of that mistake almost immediately. In other words, it’s a game. But running an investment bank is not, in this sense, a game: it is not a closed world with a limited set of possibilities. It is an open world where one day a calamity can happen that no one had dreamed could happen, and where you can make a mistake of overconfidence and not personally feel the consequences for years and years—if at all.

This sounds like the pronouncement of someone who knows nothing about the game in question. It would be perfectly possible to devise a game that presented similar challenges to those involved in running an investment bank; bridge happens not to be that game. Which may very well be what Cayne liked about it.

But this is silly. Someone is Wrong on the Internet. Here.

debt collection

Bailiffs are not, you might suspect, a group for which society has a particularly high esteem. We have an image of them as being thugs who take things away from people who already have very little - a furtive profession, which likes to keep itself to itself. Or at least that's what you'd expect - instead, you click on the site and you have four wankers auditioning for bit parts in American Psycho, lined up inside a glass and steel atrium, all criss-cross trusses and 24 colours, shot from below so that they appear to be looking down upon the unfortunate sods who click on the website to make payment (or, equally, declare to the people looking for jobs in Debt Recovery and Civil Enforcement that you too could look this hard)

Owen Hatherley discovers the wonderful world of the modern bailiff, here

a supposedly unfun thing

It goes like this: there's something you want to estimate and you have some data. Maybe, to take my favorite recent example, you want to break down support for school vouchers by religion, ethnicity, income, and state (or maybe you'd like to break it down even further, but you have to start somewhere).

Or maybe you want to estimate the difference between how rich and poor people vote, by state, over several decades--but you're lazy and all you want to work with are the National Election Studies, which only have a couple thousand respondents, at most, in any year, and don't even cover all the states.

Or maybe you want to estimate the concentration of cat allergen in a bunch of dust samples, while simultaneously estimating the calibration curve needed to get numerical estimates, all in the presence of contamination that screws up your calibration.

Addictive post by Andrew Gelman on That Modeling Feeling, the rest
here

Robert Donat lookalike

There has been some discussion in the blogosphere about the cover of the US Advance Reading Copy of Justine Larbalestier's Liar, which shows a white girl with glossy straight hair (in the book the narrator is "black with nappy hair, which she wears natural and short"). JL's comments (via Jenny Davidson) here.

This made me laugh. When I wrote The Last Samurai, I wanted Ludo to be someone who could reasonably imagine that a very wide range of men might be his father; his appearance is never described in detail, but a Zoroastrian from the city formerly known as Bombay, a Robert Donat lookalike, says Ludo looks exactly the way he himself looked at that age.

Robert Donat in his prime:


Cover of first edition of Le dernier samourai:



Which just goes to show how blinkered we can be by our preconceptions.

I should emphasise that Laffont went to extraordinary lengths to publish this technically challenging book well, and used a translator, Pierre Guglielmina, of exceptional gifts. And also came up with this terrific cover for the livre de poche:


All the same, I loved the cover by Egil, the Norwegian designer:



His father could be just about anyone.

(My Norwegian editor, Birgit Bjerk, told me that Egil loves brown; every once in a while she persuades him to let her have a flash of blue, but for the most part Egil's passion for brown-dominated colorways prevails. I can see how this could be demoralising for an editor, but I did think it was a wonderful cover.)

Patxi

Yesterday.

I have a phone appointment with an agent for 5 pm. Hate the phone, so go to Café Toronto at 3 to calm my nerves. At 4.30 a busker with guitar comes and starts to sing. She sings 'All you need is love', 'Dixie Chick', other songs; it's getting dangerously close to 5, but she is so witty I can't tear myself away. Two woman holding babies are dancing.

At 4.53 I dash inside, pay, dash outside, drop 10 euros in the hat, say she is brilliant and ask her name while apologizing for having to dash. She is Basque; her name is Patxi; she gives me her card. I dash.

As I charge up the stairs to my apartment my Handy rings. I try to answer the call but fail. I go into the apartment. The Handy rings again. I succeed in taking the call; I talk, or rather babble, for a long time.

Hours later I remember that I had promised to call my mother.

take that

Towards the end of his life, he listed “Ten common mistakes in the production of books,” the first of which was “Books which are needlessly large, needlessly wide, and needlessly heavy.” This volume is guilty as charged, a monument of overblown, wasteful design, with thin texts leaded out widely to make them seem longer, and unnecessary part-titles, backed with pages covered with nothing but a repetition of the initials JT. Brief quotes from the master are given a full page and set in a huge size of type. Tschichold wrote at length on correctly-proportioned margins for text pages: the half-inch foot margin used here would scarcely have occurred in his worst nightmares. The openings of paragraphs are not indented, as he explicitly demanded, but space is inserted between the paragraphs, which he explicitly condemned. Indeed, he ascribed these two faults to the way typists were trained by business schools, who are “utterly incompetent when it comes to questions of typography.”

Design Observer on Jan Tschichold — Master Typographer: His life, work and legacy

café life

I've been in Berlin for four years, and I still don't really get the tipping system. My friend Ingrid explained a while back that it is not based on a percentage; one rounds up. A teacher in a language school explained, though, that the size of an appropriate tip had changed with the introduction of the Euro; you can't leave a .30 tip. He always left 1 Euro for anything up to 10 Euros - i.e., even if he had only had a cappuccino for 2.10 he would still leave a Euro.

I thought I was on solid ground, so after this class I always followed the 1-Euro-minimum-tip rule, under the impression that I was doing the right thing.

Since moving out of my old apartment into an apartment with no internet access, I've been spending more time in cafes with, ahem, internet access. (This is not as illogical as it sounds; I have spent many, many hours in the new apartment cut off, working, which would probably have been frittered away online in my old apartment. Unfortunately when I don't check e-mails at all things go horribly wrong, so it is not possible to be a hermit. Yet.) The result being that my tipping skills have been sorely tested.

A couple of places I've been going to often are the Cafe Toronto and the Cafe Kleisther. Both are terrific, and the staff are unbelievably nice. At times I would find myself in long-drawn-out e-mail correspondences, tackling problems with noise and an unreported chimney explosion in the old apartment. I would then tear myself away and go home, paying, of course, first. And after a while, scarily, I would find staff declining to take the tip. (New Yorkers. Yes. It's a different world.)

The system here is that you ask to pay, are told what you owe, and announce the amount you want to pay (including the tip); they give you change on whatever you hand over. So I would declare something or other that incorporated the (as I thought) approved 1-Euro tip, and it was felt to be inappropriate; the waiter would simply give change which incorporated a tip considered to be more in line with the drink. Once (this was at the Toronto) the waitress flatly refused to take any tip at all. (I think, maybe, because I had been spending so much time there? The third tip of the day was a tip too far?)

Time goes by. I turn up at a cafe about half an hour before closing and order a glass of wine. I drink my glass of wine and make time-to-pay gestures. The waiter says: Ich lade Sie ein. (Roughly, our treat.) Feeling bad, I think, because making me feel rushed? (New Yorkers. Yes. It's a different world.)

It's both disarming and stressful. Thing is, I spend a lot of time wandering absentmindedly through the world while one book or another goes through my head; it's like having an audiobook running in my head. So I'm not good at negotiating socially nuanced situations; it's easier if there's some hard-and-fast rule to follow, such that I can be sure of not inadvertently giving offence. The nicer people are, of course, the more anxious I am not to put a foot wrong. The worry is, I think I may sometimes overreact in the other direction and meanly undertip people who have gone out of their way to be helpful. (Naturally, nobody is going to demand a larger tip. Naturally, I can't go back and apologise... It's Goffman territory.)

I am now in the Neues Ufer. A woman came in with a beagle. I say hello to the beagle, who comes over. The woman tells me his name is Floyd, after her favourite band (Pink Floyd). She thought of normal dog names - Max, Fritz - and she didn't want that. I say I'm a writer. She says she loved Harry Potter but couldn't finish the fifth book; she got lost among all these Zauberer, what's the word? Magicians. She tells her boyfriend I'm American, but I don't have an American accent because I lived in London. Floyd falls asleep at my feet.

Best Disclaimer in the World

Just to be clear, though, I didn't make these maps; I'm just linking to them.


Andrew Gelman clarifies a post on some excellent graphics with regrettable colorways.

the black man's game

Beckham belongs in Italy. That’s all I’m going to say about that. Sorry. I mean, I love L.A., but the guy is still a great footballer. He should be playing in Italy.

Mark Sarvas has an interview of Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland, over on the Elegant Variation.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

I found Netherland a baffling book. There are some things I don't know. Is it irrelevant if a book about a sport conveys nothing of what people interested in the sport find interesting in it?

[originally had long discussion of cricket as followed by fans I have known, but in the cold light of day it strikes me as so riven with wild generalizations that I have consigned it to the mass grave that is the Drafts Folder - anyway, the thing that seems odd is that O'Neill succeeds, in a single offhand remark, in sounding like someone with a genuine interest in football (Am. soccer), whereas neither the narrator of Netherland nor the other cricketers really sound like people interested in the game.]

[reminiscence. I worked as a copytaker at the Daily Telegraph in 1992; once picked up the phone and got Imran Khan phoning in a piece. The thrill.]

the knight with the two swords

Thought there was too much about business on pp. Wondered whether readers knew of Vinaver's edition of Malory (published by Oxford University Press). Here's an extract from Balin or the Knight with the Two Swords, from the Book of Merlin:

So whan the kynge was com thidir with all his baronage and logged as they seemed beste, also there was com a damoisel the which was sente frome the grete Lady Lyle of Avilion. And whan she com before kynge Arthure she told fro whens she com, and how she was sente on message unto hym for thys causis. Than she lette hir mantell falle that was rychely furred, and than was she gurde with a noble swerde, whereof the kynge had mervayle and seyde,

'Damesel, for what cause ar ye gurte with that swerde? Hit besemyth you nought.'

'Now shall I telle you,' seyde the dameselle. 'Thys swerde that I am gurte withall doth me grete sorow and comberaunce, for I may nat be delyverde of thys swerde but by a knyght, and he must be a passynge good man of hys hondys and of hys dedis, and withoute velony other trechory and withoute treson. And if I may fynde such a knyghte that hath all these vertues he may draw oute thys swerde oute of the sheethe. For I have bene at kynge Royns, for hit was tolde me there were passyng good knyghtes; and he and all his knyghtes hath assayde and none can spede.'

[Arthur tries to draw the sword and fails. All of Arthur's knights try to draw the sword and fail. Balin, who has been held captive in Arthur's prison, asks to be given the chance to draw the sword.]

'Damesell, I pray you of youre curteysy suffir me as well to assay as thes other lordis. Thoughe that I be pourely arayed yet in my herte mesemyth I am fully assured as som of thes other, and mesemyth in myne herte to spede right welle.'

Thys damesell than behelde thys poure knyght and saw he was a lyckly man; but for hys poure araymente she thought he sholde nat be of no worship withoute vylony or trechory. And than she seyde unto that knyght,

'Sir, hit nedith nat you to put me to no more payne, for hit semyth nat you to spede thereas all thes othir knyghtes have fayled.'

'A, fayre damesell,' seyde Balyn, 'worthynes and good tacchis and also good dedis is nat only in araymente, but manhode and worship ys hyd within a mannes person; and many a worshipfull knyght ys nat knowyn unto all peple. And therefore worship and hardynesse ys nat in araymente.'

'Be God,' seyde the damesell, 'ye sey soth. Therefore ye shall assay to do what ye may.'

Than Balyn toke the swerde by the gurdyll and shethe and drew hit oute easyly, and whan he loked on the swerde hit pleased hym muche. Than had the kynge and all the barownes grete mervayle that Balyne had done that aventure; many knyghtes had gret despite at hym.

'Sertes,' seyde the damesell, 'thys ys a passynge good knyght and the beste that ever y founde, and most of worship without treson, trechory or felony. And many mervayles shall he do. Now, jantyll and curtayse knyght, geff me the swerde agayne.'

'Nay,' seyde Balyne, 'for thys swerde woll I kepe but hit be takyn fro me with force.'

'Well,' seyde the damesell, 'ye ar nat wyse to kepe the swerde fro me, for ye shall sle with that swerde the beste frende that ye have and the man that ye most love in the worlde, and that swerde shall be your destruccion.'

'I shall take the aventure,' seyde Balyne, 'that God woll ordayne for me. But the swerde ye shall nat have at thys tyme, by the feythe of my body!'

'Ye shall repente hit within shorte tyme,' seyde the damesell, 'for I wolde have the swerde more for your avauntage than for myne; for I am passynge hevy for youre sake, for and ye woll nat leve that swerde hit shall be youre destruccion, and that ys grete pité.'

Vinaver's edition available on Amazon.co.uk, here. Couldn't find a link on Amazon.com. Lots of other editions of Malory, but with modernized spelling. The horror.

rate of change

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

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

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

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

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

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

head to head

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

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--

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.

friendly fire

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

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

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

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

...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