Helen DeWitt's Blog

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.

The Last Samurai (thoughts on Rereading The Last Samurai) 4?

 According to RTLS, I started to run out of money in October 1995. I did not want to go back to temping; I reached a special arrangement to work as an evening secretary at the office of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. A lawyer, Tim Schmidt, came from New York and heard that I was working on a novel. I showed him a couple of chapters. He was impressed. He showed them to his wife, Maude Chilton. She was impressed. They wanted to help me find a publisher, so they introduced me to a friend, Stephanie Cabot, who had recently become an agent.

My understanding is that Konstantinou had a long conversation with Tim Schmidt; constraints of space may have determined how much could be included. As it stands, Schmidt's account misrepresents a very nasty, stupid business.

As I've said, I had had a toxic permanent job before quitting and starting The Seventh Samurai in September 1995.  The book was not finished by the end of September; I needed to have income lined up before my money ran out.  

I did not want a new permanent job, because this would not give me the freedom to take time off as needed to write.  I did not want to work as a temp, because agencies tend not to offer evening shifts - it was, of course, the prospect of an evening shift that had led me to take on my last job.  

It seemed to me, though, that since I had now worked at a US law firm, I could offer my services on a freelance basis to other US firms.  It's quite common for a law firm to have an unexpected rush of work late in the day, or in the middle of the night, when it's too late to contact an agency.  I could be on call for this kind of crisis.

I bought an off-the-shelf limited company, Silverblade Services, so I could work as an independent contractor.  I wrote to various Wall Street law offices in London.  I also mentioned my freelance service to a friend from Oxford who was now a solicitor.  I got a few takers - I worked at Sullivan & Cromwell (who later offered to hire me full-time), for my friend, for a second-tier US law firm who name I forget. Shortly before Christmas I was offered a shift at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, which would be short-staffed around the holidays.

So CSM was just one of a number of freelance gigs, and oh God, oh God, oh God. If I had overcome my horror of permanent jobs and gone to Sullivan & Cromwell I could have finished my book in a couple of months and dodged close to 30 years of breakdowns, clinical depression, suicide attempts. Oh God. 

I turned down S&C and did more shifts for CSM. In early March 1996 a young associate lawyer, Tim Schmidt, joined the London office. After maybe a month (?) he asked about the novel he'd heard I was working on and expressed interest in seeing it. I gave him a couple of  chapters, the painter and the gambler - one written in 3 days, the other in 4, when I was able to work without distraction.

Tim later said he was dreading having to read them.  What would he do if they were terrible?  But he was in the office one Sunday (par for the course for young associates). He went across the river to a pub for lunch and read the chapters, and they were really good! 

He did not want to influence his wife, so he did not say anything or urge her to read them. A few weeks (?) later Maude read the chapters and was blown away, and oh God. If I had gone to S&C I would have been spared so much anguish. Of all sad words of tongue or pen.

Maude, crucially, was an indie producer.  She had made a short film with her sister Eve about ventroliquists, especially Candace Bergen (who had been brought up with her father's ventroliquist's dummy, Charlie, as  kind of brother).  She now hoped to do something more ambitious, a full-length film. She read the chapters, had been given a synopsis of the story, and wanted to option the book for a film on the strength of it!  Tim passed this on to me and suggested we all meet for dinner.  This would have been in May.

I knew nothing about options, but what I imagined was that maybe - maybe! - I might get the princely sum of £1000! Which would buy at least a month, maybe more, off taking assignments.  Maybe instead of buying time to write by work that damaged the ability to write, I could buy time with the book itself! If I could recapture the momentum of the intense, uninterrupted work in September a month might well be enough to finish the book. I could then think about what to do with my life. 

We met, and Maude explained about options.  Instead of buying the film rights outright, it's common to buy an option on a project for a smaller amount of money: the option gives a block of time - could be 18 months, could be longer - within which the buyer has the exclusive right to buy the rights for an agreed-upon amount.  The buyer hopes to raise money for the project which will then make it possible to exercise the option. No specific figure was mentioned, so I went on wondering whether it was conceivable that I might get £1000.

I agreed in principle, hoping for the £1000 that might let me spend all of June, maybe even June and July!, doing nothing but work on the book.

Two terrible things happened.

First, Maude meant well.  She thought I should have representation.  Needless to say, I would have signed anything put in front of me for a quick £1000, but we did not make that quick deal.  Instead Maude put me in touch with a literary agent, Stephanie Cabot, whom I think she knew from prep school. Stephanie had been at the London office of William Morris for about a year, having left a job at Morgan Stanley, so she was new to the biz.  But how hard could it be?  There was an option on the table. All she had to do was turn the contract in a day or two and I would have the money I needed to finish the book.

Stephanie had read the 2 chapters and been blown away.  We met in early June. Stephanie said she thought she could get me an advance on 6 chapters so I could 'concentrate on finishing the book'.  This was tricky, because I assumed people would want 6 chapters starting at chapter 1, and the beginning of the book was precisely what I needed time for. But I said I would see what I could do, and in any case it sounded as though the option was under control.

Meanwhile a second terrible thing had happened.  Tim's best friend from Dartmouth, Steve Hutensky, was also a lawyer, now working as Business Affairs Manager (or similar title) at Miramax.  Maude thought Steve, with his experience, could advise her in developing the project. Somehow she found herself with Steve as a business partner. As entertainment lawyer and partner, Steve would be the obvious person to handle the option. 

Oh God. S&C. Life could have been so sweet.

An option is appealing to a hopeful filmmaker because it costs a lot less than the rights, but it imposes a deadline - after which, if there's no funding to buy the rights, the option holder has no claim on the project unless they pay for an extension.  One way of getting around this, if there's an agreement in principle to doing a deal, is to put off the actual signing of a contract as long as possible - this is especially appealing if for some reason the filmmaker can't immediately start work. An entertainment lawyer, in any case, is thinking about a lot of remote contingencies that might conceivably pay off if the film gets made, or at any rate thinks about standard clauses governing such remote contingencies that might pay off for a complete different kind of work - the right to develop an ice show, say. A theme restaurant. A stuffed toy franchise. (Since you've read this far you're presumably familiar with the book and can see for yourself the likelihood of cashing in on any of these.)

So. Stephanie handed the option over to some lawyer at William Morris.  I was working in a law office where lawyers turned 100-page indentures overnight - this was why I could get shifts working from 7 pm to 2 am, 3, 4, 5, even 6 on a busy night.  But William Morris was off in the land that time forgot.  Stephanie was not hounding the lawyer to get me a quick deal so I could finish the book by the end of July (and then, of course, be free to finish the book I'd been working on since 1989).  The lawyer wasn't looking for a quick deal.  And a quick deal wasn't urgently needed by Maude and Steve.  

A contract (a little 22-page document) would eventually surface in April 1997.  There had been no news for months; as far as I could make out, it had spent a lot of time in the inbox of one lawyer or the other, with Steve making Miramax-style demands that 'my' lawyer (when he got around to looking at the document) felt compelled to reject.  (It was only upon seeing that the contract that I discovered my lawyer's determination to retain the ice show rights, theme restaurant rights and so on.)  The option price was $3000. (The purchase price was $50,000 for a film with a budget up to $10 million, with higher prices for bigger budgets.)

By this time it was far too late to recapture the early momentum for the book - I had now been setting it aside for office work for over a year.  And Stephanie had been making blunders of her own. 

But let's pause and ask a simple question. How is it actually possible to be so stupid?

The time when the book was fresh in my mind would not come again.  The window of time in which I might still salvage the earlier book was closing fast. The ONLY THING I CARED ABOUT was getting June 1996 for myself.  And for that the £1000 I had timidly hoped for would have sufficed.  We often hear of film adaptations being worse than the book; in this case, people were sabotaging the ACTUAL BOOK for the sake of ice show rights to a film that might never be made.

The William Morris lawyer, maybe, valued his own convenience above protecting the talent of the client. If the client turns out to be the next Margaret Atwood, this won't transform the life of an agency lawyer. But there was a real opportunity here for Hutensky.  He could get ANYTHING for a quick deal, because I was desperate. He could get a 5-year option.  Or he could get a better deal - offer $5000 to buy the rights outright to close the deal in June 1996.  Just as a reminder, once you have the rights you can take as long as you like to make a film - you can face setbacks for 20 years and the project is still yours. If he wanted to be a hardheaded dealmaker why not go for that?  Why not get Maude unlimited time to make her film instead of faffing about with theme restaurants?

It's hard to be sane.

Meanwhile Stephanie was making a typical rookie mistake.

Maude and I met Stephanie for lunch at the Groucho in early July 1996.  Stephanie had not waited for the 6 chapters she said she wanted; she had been raving about the 2 chapters and sending them out. She raved about them to Robert McCrum by his hospital bed! She raved to Philip Gwyn-Jones at a dinner party for another client!  She raved to Richard Beswick!  Richard Beswick had read the 2 chapters and been blown away! He had asked if it was too early for a preempt and she had said YES!

I think I'll stop talking about this for now.

The Last Samurai (thoughts on Rereading The Last Samurai) (2)

 The origins of the book will take me some time to think through. Meanwhile, Oxford arcana.

RTLS says 'Sibylla lies her way into Oxford and briefly studies classics there before discovering fewer rational beings there than she expected among her fellow scholars (23). She quits Oxford and starts working for an academic press in London.'

I'm a bit taken aback by 'briefly'.  By the time Sibylla leaves Oxford she is on a Senior Scholarship, which means she is doing graduate work. (There are only a handful of Senior Scholarships, given to exceptionally promising early-stage graduate students.)  She decided to apply to Oxford after (apparently) impressive SATs were not enough to compensate for other shortcomings on her CV when applying to American colleges - so she must have lied her way into the undergraduate classics course at Oxford, which takes 4 years, and must have done very well on the course to win a Senior Scholarship to do research.

Getting onto the BA course with her background is itself admittedly implausible (it used to be, at least, that Oxford would not accept American applicants straight out of high school for undergraduate study)*, but there's nothing in the text to suggest she spent any time at an American college; we must simply imagine some spectacular fabrication.  

Looking at the text again I do see that it leaps from Sib's applications to American colleges to dogged decipherment of German scholarship, but the decipherment takes place 6 years after disenchantment with American college applications and brilliant idea that Oxford might be different.  I expect I thought the undergraduate degree preceding research was self-evident and did not need to be spelled out.

Sib's job: The text says Sib got a job with a firm that published dictionaries and non-academic works of scholarship. I'm not sure I would describe this as an academic press. (Maybe that's wrong? But I don't think an academic press would publish Val Peters.)

*I had gone to Smith for 2 years (3 semesters + 1-year leave of absence + 1 semester) when I applied to Oxford and took the entrance exam, and none of this counted toward the undergraduate course, which I had to start from scratch. This would have been a more plausible kind of background for Sib, but also messy and boring and a drag on the pace of the narrative.

The Last Samurai (some corrections to Rereading TLS)

 Was looking at Lee Konstantinou's book, Rereading The Last Samurai, and am rather uneasy about inaccuracies. I gave an interview early on but did not see a final draft, so was not able to propose corrections.

In retrospect, it might have been more useful to provide a written account of the history of The Last Samurai, rather than try to describe this in an interview, but I was looking after my mother and did not have energy to spare.

Now I suppose the book will count as the kind of secondary source Wikipedia accepts as an authority, and things that are not true may end up as the official version.  Since Wikipedia is likely to be journalists' first point of call, I'd like to have the facts available for anyone who cares to look.

RTLS says The Last Samurai went out of print after Talk Miramax Books was dissolved in 2005. I'm not sure this is strictly true, since I was still receiving royalties in 2011. In 2012 Miramax Books (which survived as, I believe, a corporate subsidiary of Disney) reverted the rights - so at this point the book was certainly out of print, but it was quite a while after the dissolution of TMB. My guess is that New Directions would have been happy to take it on then, but the agent representing Lightning Rods thought this was a bad idea: if I finished a new book a major publisher would be likelier to offer a handsome deal if it were bundled with The Last Samurai. (It's extremely common for agents to decide it is better not to pursue publication of a book that merely happens to exist, because a much better deal could be made on the strength of some other book that merely happens not to exist.) Unfortunately I couldn't produce the book that did not exist because I got mired down with a stalker in 2012; this dragged on for a long time, so by 2015 I was very short of cash and it seemed better to suggest a reissue to New Directions than hold out for the bundle. 

RTLS says that in 1995, when I started The Last Samurai, I was living in London working for a temp agency as a legal secretary; that I then quit to work on a long, structurally complicated book, The Magnificent Stranger, that I hadn't been able to finish while working; that I then found myself sitting in my flat unable to make progress; that after weeks of growing despair I had the conversation with my father that would inspire The Last Samurai.

It's possible that, in the short time Lee and I had for an interview, I did not go into the dreary details of my work history before The Last Samurai (which unfortunately would have repercussions later on). 

By the spring of 1994, after a few years as a copytaker at the Telegraph, I'd decided an evening job was the only way to clear time to write.  The copytaking section had a graveyard shift (7-2), but an elderly copytaker, Charles, had first claim on it, so I could only have it two days a week - other days I might have to come in anywhere between (I think) 8 am and 5 pm, so it was impossible to have a routine. What I needed was a job that started at 7 pm 5 days a week, leaving a solid block of time first thing every day to write.

I applied for one job as an evening legal secretary and was turned down, because they did not like the sound of someone who would be working on her own project during the day.  So I applied for a job as evening legal secretary and paralegal at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, a Wall Street law firm with a London office, and when asked why I wanted an evening job I said I liked to go to museums during the day.  The bait was a shift that would start around 6, which was earlier than I wanted but just manageable. I got the job, and the office manager then pulled a switch, said the starting time was flexible, and to begin with they would have me come in at 4.30 to ease handover from the senior partner's day secretary. This would be a trial and we could discuss the schedule again later. 

This was terrifying, but I was not sure I could find something better. It was presented as a probationary period, so I hoped it would change to the advertised evening shift later on. The 4:30 start meant I had to leave for work by 3:30, so the job did not immediately give me the solid block of time during the day that I'd been counting on.This would have been May or June 1994.

After a few months I was told I had passed my probation. I asked about changing the shift and the office manager said this had only been a possibility and the senior partner was happy with the current arrangement. I said this wasn't what was advertised or what I was looking for and if it could not be changed I would need to look for another job.  The OM was annoyed, but in the end a change was agreed - I think that I would start at 5.30 two days a week and at 7 the other three.  

I think by the time this was agreed I had been there 5 months; I had written many more pages of my book, but was no closer to addressing serious structural problems, and this was supposed to be the job that would finally give me time to pull the book together. The new schedule was better, but the office manager now began bullying me - another member of staff said she had a history of singling out someone to persecute, and now it was me.  This went on for months, so that now it was hard to keep the mind clear of endless petty persecution by the OM.  At some point the senior partner said that he in fact found it inconvenient to have a gap in secretarial support for part of the week, and the OM said it might be necessary to change my shift again - it had only been a trial, and it turned out the arrangement wasn't optimal, something like that.

I realised that the OM would go on playing these games as long as I stayed. She would always be driving me crazy, and I would never be able to give the book the singleminded attention it needed.  I had about £3000 in Premium Bonds; the rent for my bedsit in Victoria Park was £60 a week; I should simply quit and write until the money ran out.

So I did quit. I think it was now June 1995. I cashed in the Premium Bonds. I suppose I had another £1000 left over from work.  But I was exhausted by the months of persecution, and in despair because yet another attempt to find a job that would free time for writing had failed, and I had lost another year, and I was 36.  So instead of immediately rushing to my computer I sat in my room trying to wait out the discouragement. My feeling was that overhauling a book with serious structural problems required some stroke of brilliance; if I were to go back to it at once I would only add to the 300 single-spaced pages, the scattered chapters and stray passages.  It was hard to believe that energy would return, it was hard to believe in the possibility of this stroke of brilliance, but what could I do? It would not help to be despondent about being despondent, I should hope it was something that would pass.

I think it was a week or two after I stopped working that my father called.  To begin with it was not too bad. We talked about this and that, I can't remember what. But at some point I admitted to being discouraged at having lost so much time on yet another job, and he said What? You mean you don't hope things will get better? And I said at this particular point I couldn't feel hope, I just had to wait it out. And he started screaming at me, saying HOW CAN YOU SAY YOU DON'T HAVE HOPE? And on and on and on. I kept trying to get him to stop, explaining that I had just come through a very bad time and it would take a while to get over it, but he kept screaming. Finally I managed to end the phone call.  I felt pretty sick.

So then there was not just the persecution to get past but all this screaming.  The money in the bank would melt away to pay for a room to sit in feeling sick.  

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

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 anspoésie française*

Simone deBeauvoir, Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée*

Millet, La viesexuelle 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, LaHorde du Contrevent

Philippe Djian,Ardoise

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

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

Rodin: Éclairs depensée

Stendhal, LaChartreuse de Parme*

Zola, Au Bonheurdes Dames*

 

Oulipo

 

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

Roubaud: Lalicorne*

Roubaud: ladernière balle perdue*

Queneau, Zaziedans le métro (2 copies)

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

 

 

Philosophy, sociology, literary theory & criticism

 

Raymond Aron, L'opiumdes 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 SaintMartin: Les fonctions sociales de l'enseignement scientifique

 

Bergson, Le rire*

Barthes, Leçon*

            S/Z

Barthes et al.:Poétique du récit*

Deleuze: Foucault

Foucault, Lesmots et les choses

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

Simon Leys, LeStudio de l'inutilité*

 

 

Arabic

AFL Beeston, Written Arabic

 

Danish

HenrikPontoppidan, Lykke-Per 1 & 2

 

Hungarian

Sándor Márai,Föld, föld!...

 

Turkish

Orhan Pamuk, KaraKitap

Orhan Pamuk,Öteki Renkler

 

 

Poetry

The Penguin Book of Irish Verse*

 

Spanish

Berlitz Spanish Verb Handbook

 

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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

Undervaluation of women artists

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

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

Berlin (notes for writers)

 How to get a Kitagutschein on All About Berlin blog