Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 12

either either

"You've no idea how much email I get telling me how wrong every single thing in the book is. There are a lot of very specific things that Americans don't say and English people don't realise … Also New York has enough writers, and I don't think I need to add to them," she said.

Zadie Smith says she will never write another book set in the US, because she got so many complaints about On Beauty.  Well, I can see it would be annoying if peevish emails kept turning up in one's inbox. We can only hope Lee Child does not follow her example.

Sometimes, of course, one is bad. One knows one is in the wrong and goes on regardless.  Someone pointed out to me some time ago that "in no very good mood" is not American usage. I kept trying to think of a replacement that I liked and couldn't.  Finally I thought, Well, it may not be American usage now, but who's to say? Maybe Americans will see it and like it and start using it, and then this instance in my book will simply be the first attested case in American English.

A-Y

Every oral-sex seminar, “every masturbation how-to session, every tip I heard on how to stimulate the anus — each of these seemed to be mocking the greatest achievement of my life up to that point, which was that somehow I, a home-school dropout with a G.E.D., had clawed and scratched and fought my way into Yale,” he writes. “Yale had been like some kind of drug. It was a blast, and then I came down with a crash.”

review of Sex and God at Yale, Nathan Harden, by Hanna Rosin, the rest  here

over there

Part of a series begun in World War II for American GIs going abroad, A Pocket Guide to Vietnam was intended to introduce them to the customs, and, rather lightly, the dangers of the place where they were headed. First issued in 1962, it was revised in 1966 and has now been republished by Oxford’s Bodleian Library, with an introduction by Bruns Grayson, a veteran who arrived in Vietnam in 1968 and was given the booklet. Grayson describes the average soldier handed the Pocket Guide as “about twenty years old, not well-educated, not wily enough to avoid the draft in most cases, very often on his first trip away from the United States. I don’t know what the Vietnamese equivalent of ‘overpaid, oversexed, and over here’ was…such a phrase would have described almost all of us.”

But the young, uneducated soldiers described by Grayson also had to be told why they were going to Vietnam, from which, after all, they might not return. “It is interesting,” Grayson writes, “that the booklet accurately and briefly describes the history of the Vietnamese resisting outsiders—the Chinese and others—while assuming that we could never be cast in this light.” 

Jonathan Mirsky at NYRB blog, the rest here

Dr. Mutti

Was checking in on Twitter with the usual shame and self-loathing, when what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a retweet from Anatol Stefanowitsch! Linking to a terrific new blog, Dr. Mutti (Wer die Kinder hat, hat die Zukunft), run by Juliana Goschler of the University of Hamburg.

I gather there has been furore in the ether on the subject of sexy teenie girlies, now known as Pornoelfen, as the prize in one in every 7 Überraschungseier (surprise eggs) from Ferrero.  And I missed the whole thing! Which is good, because it suggests I have not been frittering away my whole life online after all. At any rate, Dr. Mutti has a series of excellent posts, with discussion of research on, e.g., the high proportion of women who described themselves as having been tomboys, rejecting what they perceived as gender stereotypes, as children. Like Stefanowitsch, Goeschler does not suffer fools gladly - it is a lucky thing that the blog only dates back to June 2012, at least for those who are trying to cut down the time they spend online.

The stalker came again and rang the bell at the house doo...

The stalker came again and rang the bell at the house door for a long time. I sat silently at my desk in case someone let him in and he came to the apartment door.  Someone asked him what he wanted from a window; I heard him explaining; they didn't buzz him in.  He went back to ringing the doorbell. After a while he stopped. I assume he has gone away. I do need to leave Berlin.

It seems to me that life would be impossible if one went around anxiously wondering whether it was safe to let people know where one lived, but this is pretty tiring.

best text

I got an email from David yesterday.  He has been having a book copyedited, and had had to explain the meaning of "best text":

I mean by “best text” the same thing as classical scholars have meant by it for the last 200 years or more. The “best text” is the one which (in my opinion) is likely to represent most accurately what the author originally wrote, ideally making the basis for editorial judgement clear via an apparatus criticus which succinctly reports significant manuscript variants and proposed emendations.

Ah me, ah me. 

[Have just written and deleted lengthy discussion of You Know What.]

gloom

When I first started blogging I was young(er) and naive.  I linked blithely away, confident that whatever I linked to would always be there.  I now know that other bloggers selfishly take their blogs private.  Voltaire's Monkey. Night Hauling. (Yes, YOU, Mithridates, I'm talking to YOU.) The Big Side Order.

From time to time I think of Gary James' great post on the Action Man dollhouse. It would cheer me up to click back to the post, but TBSO has gone private. No links today, because everyone I might link to has gone private. Bastards. BASTARDS.

(The Wayback Machine apparently only crawled TBSO once, back in 2006, before the great Action Man dollhouse post. BASTARDS.)

monkey biz

A while back I read a post by Sarah Manguso on the FSG blog: How to Have a Career: Advice to Young Writers.  There were points that could have been made which it seemed best not to make...

Today I came across this clip from a TED talk by Fans de Wall, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay. HT MR, HT Greg Mankiw.

This does not really encapsulate the challenges that face you as a writer.  The problem is not that you get a cucumber while the other monkey gets a grape for the same work.  You write a book from scratch of 80,000+ words; you'll be lucky to get a cucumber.  Your agent/lawyer/accountant/other, meanwhile, is OUTRAGED if the book can't be crammed into a boilerplate - and lives on a lovely steady diet of grapes. If you are one of the lucky sods who got a cucumber, they will also be OUTRAGED if you fling that cucumber away and shake the walls of your cage.

possible worlds

In learning languages, at first everything is repulsive and burdensome. If one were not encouraged by the hope that, after having accustomed his ear to the unusual sounds and having mastered the strange pronunciation, most delightful ways would be opened up to him, it is doubtful that one would want to enter upon so arduous a path. But when these obstacles are surmounted, how generous is the reward for perseverance in overcoming hardships! New aspects of nature, and a new chain of ideas then present themselves. By acquiring a foreign language we become citizens of the region where it is spoken, we converse with those who lived many thousand years ago, we adopt their ideas; and we unite and co-ordinate the inventions and the thought of all peoples and all times.

Radishchev, quoted by Language Hat

Nomination Whist

Was rereading David Parlett's History of Card Games today.

I've come across critics who say morosely that, while people often SAY a book was laugh-out-loud funny, very few people literally laugh out loud reading a book, and they themselves never do.  Possibly because they have never read Parlett's History of Card Games?  I sat at a café reading Parlett's account of the history of whist and kept shouting with laughter - the people at the next table kept looking around and laughing sympathetically.  OUP has apparently allowed the book to go out of print (what were you THINKING, OUP, what were you THINKING?) but no doubt secondhand copies are floating around online.

Nomination Whist, anyway, was not one of the funny bits, just a game that sounded terribly attractive:

In Nomination Whist -- much played in the Royal Navy, according to my correspondent Rodney Jones -- whoever bids the highest number of tricks announces trumps and names a card, the holder of which becomes his partner in the contract but may not reveal himself except by means of play. The bidder may alternatively play a secret solo by naming a card held in his own hand.

[italics mine. It's enough to make one want to join the Royal Navy.]