Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 17

over the rainbow

My job is not only watching film. The most interesting part will be in June, July, and August when I meet the filmmakers, read scripts, and talk to the technicians, the producers, and the directors of photography. [I want to] follow the project and know that if a film is finishing shooting in September, it could be ready for us. The idea is to say "We can premiere your film in Tribeca," if we like it.

The first week of June, I will be in Tel Aviv on the jury of the biggest student film festival in the world. I didn't know the festival but it's fantastic to meet the people from the film school. I will go because I'm working for Tribeca, but also for me. I just want to meet them. I want to say, "I'm here. I'm looking at your film. I'm respecting what you're doing."

Meeting the filmmakers is the most interesting part to me. Especially the filmmakers who are premiering here for the first time. The mother, the father, the brother, everybody will be here. It is something so beautiful. It is extremely important to support them.

Why anyone thinking of writing a novel would be better off making a film . . .

Frédéric Boyer talks to Noah Davis at the Awl

calculated risks

Fortunately, when you purchase a low-powered car from Young Marmalade, the free installation of a black box can cut your insurance premiums into half. By monitoring the driving behaviour such as acceleration, braking, what time of the day the car was driven and at what speed, Young Marmalade provides affordable telematic insurance premiums.

It’s simple. The black box data is used to calculate premiums, if the car was driven well, the lower the premiums will be and vice-versa.

HT Tyler Cowen of MR, the whole thing here.

pudding meet alice

(pp, vegetarian since 1985, reads a piece in which a vegetarian interviews a man who gives cows a nice life before they become steak)

Logan: Does looking at those eels remind you of The Little Mermaid?
Greg: No.

Logan: Not even a little bit?
Greg: No.

Logan: Which one of these is Finding Nemo?
Greg: None of them. You don’t eat clown fish. They’re too little.

Logan: Oh.
[A dude is cutting some stuff up! We look.]
Greg: This is also awesome, watching these guys do their work. Oh look. He’s got a turtle.

Logan: That fucking thing is alive.
Greg: Yeah. It’s alive until it’s dead, dude.

Logan: …
Greg: Okay let’s roll. You’re uncomfortable, I can tell.

Logan: …
Greg: Those turtles are delicious. That’s the thing.

the whole thing here

yet another interview

with Andy Seisberg, for Emilybooks, here

who ARE these people?

Erm, I do have a Mac, but erm . . . Look, if Steve Jobs had happened to audit a course in Ancient Greek or Arabic or Hebrew or Japanese or Chinese, rather than a course on calligraphy, I might just possibly have found Quark aiding and abetting my endeavors a decade and a bit ago; the switch to OS X might not have blighted my second book deal.  So it's just a leetle unsettling to find pp a magnet for Macheads.  And even Linuxheads.  But OK OK OK . . .

talks about talks

The point of academic talk is to try to persuade your audience to agree withyou about your research. This means that you need to raise a structure ofargument in their minds, in less than an hour, using just your voice, yourslides, and your body-language. Your audience, for its part, has no toolsavailable to it but its ears, eyes, and mind. (Their phones do not, in thisrespect, help.)

This is a crazy way of trying to convey the intricacies of acomplex argument. Without external aids like writing and reading, the mind ofthe East African Plains Ape has little ability to grasp, and more importantlyto remember, new information. (The great psychologist GeorgeMiller estimated the number ofpieces of information we can hold in short-term memory as "the magical numberseven, plus or minus two", but this may if anything be an over-estimate.)Keeping in mind all the details of an academic argument would certainly exceedthat slight capacityCosma Shalizi at Three-Toed Sloth

ultimi Australi

3) Related: No tipping. Yes, some people expect and offer tips in Australia, but that's the exception rather than the degrading-to-all-parties rule. I realize that there is no chance that we'll actually switch to a similar system with a much higher minimum wage (> $15/hour in Australia) and consequently higher service-sector prices, but no expectation of the ongoing bazaar-and-bribery ritual that is the tipping culture. That's too bad, because the no-tip system is better.

on Australia, HT MR, James Fallows at Atlantic.com

die fetten Jahre sind vorbei

I had NO IDEA until I read it in the Times that writers had stopped keeping blogs!! Three or four years ago—that's just when I started blogging! And now I'm one of the last ones left?? How did this happen?? When??

Elif Batuman on Twitter

felicific calculus smbc

stupid games

Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game's final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can't make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves. 

Sam Anderson, NY Times magazine

[This is a terrific article.   The NYT has just dropped the number of free articles per month from 20 to 10; have hitherto gone off in a huff when my quota of free articles was used up, but if they are paying the likes of Mr Anderson they should maybe be getting my nickel.]

The piece is full of quotable quotes, here's one more--

"Having just built this, I'm seeing how much I hate the Internet," Gage told me. "I mean, I really like the Internet and what it's done for games — it's been amazing. But in so many ways it's just terrible. Arcade cabinets did a lot of things that were really smart that we never gave them credit for. There's a lot of social psychology embedded in that structure." The Xbox, he explained, offered only a few games designed to be played along with other people in the same room. "No one is designing games like that anymore," he said. "It's very terrible."