Camus wins Nobel prize

Le président du comité émet son avis : on attendait du nouveau dans la manière d'Hemingway, et "c'est arrivé avec Le Vieil Homme et la mer", paru deux ans plus tôt. Certes, il y a du cynisme et de la brutalité dans son écriture, ce qui s'accorde mal avec l'idéal Nobel, remarque Herr Österling, l'homme fort du comité. Mais il y a indéniablement une forme d'héroïsme qui le séduit. Hemingway, alors ? Ce n'est pas gagné. Herr Siwertz, un autre pilier du comité, objecte : Hemingway "n'a pas besoin d'un Nobel pour devenir célèbre ou riche". Il ajoute : "J'ai de plus en plus le sentiment que depuis trop d'années nous nous en tenons au baromètre de la célébrité."

Camus ? "Son dernier livre, L'Eté, a des pages d'une beauté classique, écrit Österling. Son nom peut être à nouveau actuel. Camus représente toujours l'une des meilleures promesses de la littérature française, et encore une oeuvre de la même qualité que La Peste mettrait sûrement sa candidature dans une position plus favorable." Comme avec Malraux, on sent que le jury Nobel n'attend qu'un "petit" effort de l'écrivain. Dans le secret du vote, Hemingway finalement l'emporte.

Le Monde on Camus's long and winding road, here.

The Beast

The last post was No. 666. Dan Visel has just written to say that our interview is now online on Future of the Book. FOTB has a spectacularly handsome website which is, apparently, powered by Movable Type ; it's sad, sad, deeply sad that I don't have the technical expertise to move up to MT.

assessment exercise

The 2008 university Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), whose results have been announced with a mixture of fear, loathing and exhaustion, is a classic example of the self-defeating performance-management drive that is overwhelming the public sector.

RAE results determine the research funding allocated to institutions by the Higher Education Funding Council, according to a formula that changes each time. The official line is that the assessment - 2008's is the sixth since 1986 - is a success. It is "important and valuable", to quote one vice-chancellor, in providing an accepted quality yardstick and a means of promoting UK universities abroad. Others argue that it helps to ensure accountability for £8bn of public funding, the largest single chunk of university income. That sounds plausible: but as usual it conveniently airbrushes out other costs and consequences.

The first and most obvious of these is colossal bureaucracy. Government blithely assumes that management is weightless; but the direct cost of writing detailed specifications and special software, and assembling 1,100 panellists to scrutinise submissions from 50,000 individuals in 2,500 submissions, high as it already is, is dwarfed by the indirect ones - in particular, the huge and ongoing management overheads in the universities themselves. As with any target exercise, the RAE has developed into a costly arms race between the participants, who quickly figure out how to work the rules to their advantage, and regulators trying to plug the loopholes by adjusting and elaborating them.

The result is an RAE rulebook of staggering complexity on one side and, on the other, the generation of an army of university managers, consultants and PR spinners whose de facto purpose is not to teach, nor make intellectual discoveries, but to manage RAE scores.

Simon Caulkin in the Observer, the rest here.

whitelist

1. Roz Tritton. Best Dentist in the World.
2. Julien Kwan. Best Apple Service Provider in the World.
3. Ed Park. Best Editor in the World.
4. Joey Comeau. Best Interviewer in the World.
5. Dan Visel. Second Best Interviewer in the World.
6. Extremely Fabulous Esmond. Bester Schlusseldienst in der Welt.

1. 2007 was a baaaaaaaaaaad year and 2008 was another baaaaaaaaaaaad year. Which meant that chunks fell out of teeth at times when the mind, maddened by publishing wankage, could not address tooth-related problems. For month after month after month after month. A filling came out at one point, and it was not possible to get to the Best Dentist in the World, so I went to a local provider, who said helpfully in German that there were two possibilities, one was that he could smooth out the tooth, the other would cost 50 euros, instead of elaborating on the 50-euro alternative (replacing the filling) he just ground down the tooth.... Time passed, time passed, I knew I should floss, I flossed and a chunk came out of said tooth. So then there was just a HOLE, and the tongue could feel gum, and this is the Beckettian life, the Beckettian tramplike life where teeth fall away and you accept that George Washington had a wooden tooth, but fortuitously I had booked an appointment with the Best Dentist in the World.

So I went over to Oxford, and the Best Dentist in the World did not put in a wooden tooth. She confabulated with Lucy, Best Dentist's Assistant in the World, and Lucy had a clever idea, and she manage somehow to build up this non-tooth and bond the build-up to the gum, using the substance proposed by Lucy (BDAITW), and miraculously there was an actual tooth in a place where no tooth was to be seen again. A second appointment was magicked out of thin air a week later, and another hole was transformed into tooth.

So, well. A commenter asked recently whether a writer needed an income and a room of one's own. What a writer needs is the ability to summon at will, for a book, the equivalent of the Best Dentist in the World AND the Best Dentist's Assistant in the World. You heard it here first.

2. Yeeeeeeeeeeears ago YT attempted suicide and was called back from the brink by heartrending messages on her cellphone. (She now has no cellphone.) She explained to her mother and sister that when things were very bad it was impossible to talk, but textual communication was still possible, it would help if reliable e-mail communication was in place. YT's mother has a horror of computers. Four years went by and e-mail communication was not in place. But MEANWHILE YT had accumulated many laptops (2C2E). What if YT's mother could use one of the laptops, whose only flaw was a damaged screen? YT persuaded her mother to come to Berlin, and meanwhile asked Julien Kwan, of deinmac.com, AKA macgician.de, whether he could fix the dodgy laptop.

JK said, There'd be no point buying a new part, which would be 500 euros or so, but if you could get a defekt iBook off eBay I could swap the screens for about 70 euros.

So I checked out ebay.de and bought a defekt iBook for 38 euros and took it in to Mr Kwan. Who turned it around in an hour and a half for 75 euros.

When I first met Mr Kwan, I was in Hornstrasse and his premises were the souterrain of a building in Grossbeerenstrasse. I sublet my apt in Hstrasse and moved to Crellestrasse, Mr Kwan coincidentally moved to Vorbergstrasse, just around the corner. So the Best Apple Service Provider in the World is just around the corner.

3. In autumn 2007, I think, Ed Park asked whether I would like to write something for The Believer about statistics. We talked back and forth and a film issue was in the works and I volunteered to write about Sergio Leone, having once spent 7 years on a book about a character obsessed with Leone. The piece was harder than envisaged, and my father was dying, and I proposed to Ed a different piece on the Realpolitik of the film industry. I sent the piece in, Ed liked it, had worries about word count, made suggestions, I revised, he rethought, the final piece was close to the submitted piece but better. Ed's first child, Duncan, had recently been born; he was fielding this among sleepless nights; remained helpful, charming, intelligent throughout. Wow. Wow. Wow. Pre-Ed I'd assumed there was no point trying to publish ANYTHING, EVER, because all editors were short-cuts to the cuckoo house. Post-Ed I misguidedly allowed many editors to see new work, under the impression that other Eds might be out there. Sadly, I think there's only one Ed. Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed, why don't they give YOU the top job at HarperCollins/Bertelsmann/Bla? We live in hope.

Ed's oulipian novel, Personal Days, has recently been published. Ed contributes to a blog, The Dizzies, Personal Days has its own blog, Personal Days, but if there are other Eds out there we have yet to be informed. (PD has had many, largely favorable reviews; bafflingly, none mentioned Oulipo. Was this because they thought readers would be put off by mention of Queneau, Calvino, Roubaud & gang or did they simply not notice? We think we should be told.)

4. Late last summer, I think, I got an e-mail from Joey Comeau of A Softer World, asking if I would give him an interview. Unusually for an interviewer, Comeau had read The Last Samurai AND Your Name Here. He sent four interesting questions. So giving this interview involved thinking at leisure about four interesting questions from a reader who had read two (count them, 2!) books. A Softer World is also an indispensable webcomic. Charmed, disarmed.

5. Later last summer I got an e-mail from Dan Visel, asking for an interview. Visel had also read The Last Samurai and Your Name Here, and he also sent some interesting questions. So giving this interview involved thinking at leisure about interesting questions. BUT Visel, who is allied with Institute for the Future of the Book, is hosted by NYU; there was some sort of problem; so the interview, to the best of my knowledge, has yet to appear. (In other words, things have gone wrong that are not DV's fault, so he is still Second Best Interviewer in the World, comes in handily ahead of the kind of interviewer who hasn't read anything I've written and knows nothing about me, but is sadly pipped to the post by Mr Comeau, who has total artistic control.)

6. Extremely Fabulous Esmond. Crossed my path, if memory does not deceive, back in 2007. When I had locked myself out of my apartment for the, hm, who's counting, well, latest of many times. Esmond cracked the lock of the apartment and was unimpressed, anyone could break in any time. He then saw that there was a better lock, a lock with a bolt. Asked if I had the key. I did. Spent about 20 minutes gouging detritus out of the hole in the floor where the bolt was supposed to go, lubricating, facilitating, end of story there was a bad-ass lock in place which no casual burglar was going to mess with. Charmed, disarmed.

Want to see my blacklist? Want to know how LONG it is? No, no, no, no no.

rerererealism

Great extended quotation from Jonathan Culler on Edmond Caldwell's Contra James Wood, here. Culler's comments are also pertinent to Zadie Smith's discussion of Netherland and Remainder in the NYRB a couple of months ago (here). (I am a great admirer of Remainder, but the fact is that its central device would have been familiar back in the day when Structuralist Poetics was young; it's hard to agree with Smith that it shows us something new.)

always the last to know

I have a feeling everyone else already knows about CapitalOne. No one else would have been stupid enough to sign up for a credit card with them in the first place. But no, that's paranoid, CapitalOne couldn't possibly survive on the ignorance of a single consumer, there must be other people who, for one reason or another, blunder into the tar pit.

Several years ago I had a credit card account with CapitalOne. I didn't use it much, but at some point I put a lot of things in storage in London; Big Yellow did not have a facility for payment by direct debit, so the only means of payment it would accept was a standing order on a credit card, and I misguidedly gave them the CapitalOne card.

Big Yellow rented out its unit in four-week increments, which meant that it charged the credit card every four weeks rather than at a fixed time every month. It was not straightforward to remember when they would be making a charge on the card. The way I generally found out was that a statement would arrive from CapitalOne listing the charge and giving the date for a minimum payment - a date which had already passed. On the next statement CapitalOne would levy a late fee of £20 for the late payment. I then came up with a cunning plan for outwitting CapitalOne: I would simply make a payment, out of the blue, without waiting for a statement! I would then be SURE to be in time for the minimum payment date, because I would have sent out the payment before CapitalOne even sent out the statement. Ha ha! Ha ha! Little did I know.

Sadly, these payments - even when covering the full outstanding charge from my storage facility - did not count as early payment toward the next statement. So a new statement would be issued; in the meantime the storage facility would have charged the card again; and CapitalOne, despite a recent payment of £80 or so, would once again levy a late payment fee next time round.

This was all pretty exhausting, and Big Yellow had a complicated procedure for changing card authorisations, so it dragged on, but I did finally switch the authorisation to Egg (who have, by the way, always been a pleasure to deal with). I was now living in Germany; it was inconceivable that CapitalOne would ever send me a bill in time for it to be paid on time, which meant that any time I used the card I might as well add an automatic £20 late fee, which meant, naturally, that this was a card I would never use again. So I did what any rational person would do: I terminated the other standing payment on the card, paid off the balance in full on May 9 2007 and terminated the account. (When I say 'paid off in full' what I mean is that, to the best of my recollection, I made a payment £20 over what I knew I owed them, to be sure of covering any fees that CapitalOne might have thrown in under its arcane accounting system.)

I then didn't hear from CapitalOne for over a year.

A few months ago I got a statement from CapitalOne. They had apparently made a payment of £12.83 or so to some entity or other under the account which had been closed the previous year; they wanted to be paid. Another statement came demanding payment and levying the familiar CapitalOne late fee. Letters came from Valerie Lipton, Director of Collections, threatening legal action. I wrote pointing out that I did not have an account with CapitalOne and had not had one for a very long time. A letter came from Sven Lagerberg, Customer Relations Manager, saying how sorry he was that I was closing my account, but pointing out that I could not close the account without paying the balance in full. Also further letters threatening legal action from Valerie Lipton, Director of Collections, and Michael Woodburn, Vice President of Collections. Today brings yet another letter from Valerie Lipton, Director of Collections, and a letter from Greg Mrkusic, Director, Debitas Legal Services, stating:

Capital One Bank - Account Number: 5460965760131389

Outstanding Balance: £77.43

We have been instructed to collect the outstanding balance you owe on the above Capital One credit card account.

Clearly, having an outstanding debt and a Default recorded on your credit file is upsetting. We understand that for many people the stress of having bad debt is a heavy burden and the stress this causes can be difficult to deal with.

Our aim is to help make sure that this situation does not get any worse. We want to work with you to resolve this situation as quickly as possible. From now on, we will be managing your account.

&c &c &c

The letter (dated 3/12/2008) goes on to say:

You must take one of the steps listed above within the next three days.

Ah, CapitalOne, CapitalOne, feels just like old times.

Anyway, I have already pointed out to Ms Lipton, Mr Woodburn and Mr Lagerberg that the account has been closed for over a year and there have, naturally, been no new transactions; if they have made a payment to some entity on an account which their former customer has not used for over a year it is, necessarily, unauthorised. What will they say if this goes to court? "We never received the notice of termination; the fact that we stopped sending statements for a year is just a coincidence." "The transaction for which we are billing the customer, one year after the alleged closure of the account, is NOT unauthorised. We don't have any independent proof that it was authorised, but LOOK, you can SEE it was authorised, it says so right here on our bill!!!!!"

And they want to run up legal costs chasing this?

Now, one of the threats brandished by CapitalOne is that they will destroy my credit rating. They will send details of this "unpaid" bill to Experian and all the other credit agencies, and if I ever need approval for a mortgage or some such thing I will look like a bad risk because, um, I didn't pay CapitalOne £77.43 when their computer made a mistake. I don't think this is an empty threat; on the contrary, I think it's the easiest thing in the world for CapitalOne to pass this garbage on to the credit rating agencies, and a really messy, long-drawn-out business to get something off your credit rating once it's on the record. But I don't take kindly to extortion. Not only do I not take kindly to extortion, I also don't hand over £77.43.

Anyway, as things stand CapitalOne has nothing to lose by firing off threats of legal action. I can't MAKE them look through their records for proof that the recent charge was authorised; I can't MAKE them spot the absence of authorisation and retract their bill. All I can do is watch them escalate their threats of legal action, until, presumably, we all go to court. Which is pretty tiring.

Mr Mrkusic does not mention the stress of being dunned by a credit card company to whom you don't actually owe any money. If I owed them money it would not actually be stressful, because I could just, you know, pay the bill. Hey ho hey ho hey ho.

äääääähm

In a café with a Hotspot that supposedly closes at 5. It's 3am. Someone is going around putting chairs upside down on tables.

How this happened.

I went to my gym at 12.30. The guy said the strom was kaput. (Roughly.) My gym has machines and also Internet access. Deprived of access to my cross-trainer I went to Kleisther, a café which advertises itself as closing, as I say, at 5.

And NOW look.

But I did catch the latest xkcd.

I am not getting as much work done as I thought because, as Maureen Howard once said, life gets in the way, but I have been reading a shockingly slipshod book on Durkheim on suicide and rereading Orlando Paterson's brilliant Slavery and Social Death. SSD came out in something like 1982, roughly the publication date of other books that dazzled me (Riddley Walker, Hawksmoor, An Insular Possession, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller), but I only discovered it in 1998 and now can't live without it. And I am not linking to anything, obviously, because someone is going around putting chairs upside down on tables.

I am not wanted. They want to close up. They want to go home.