Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 18

[it's 3.32]

Meg Wollitzer has a piece in the NYT about the rules of literary fiction for men and women.   I really don't pay enough attention to what's published to know whether she is generally on the right track, but I did think being a woman was a handicap in various ways when my first book was published. 

When my editor bought The Last Samurai he told me it was essentially a love affair between the mother and the little boy.  Well, I was strapped for cash, and it didn't seem to matter desperately if the editor misread the book in this way - but as it turned out this meant that neither he nor anyone on his staff took seriously the formal aspects of the text.  As I've said (this really is getting old, sorry), when there was a disagreement over punctuation I drew attention to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; my editor explained that "That was a very special book," and he said it in the presence of his production manager, who seems to have thought this gave her license to override the terms of my contract.  (It seems unlikely that Cormac McCarthy got this kind of response to The Road.) 

The problem was not really getting the book taken seriously as a work of literature; the problem was the consensus among all concerned that the author was a jumped-up secretary who was lucky to get into print and whose time had no value.  No one could be made to understand that it was a matter of pressing financial and professional urgency to finish the books that were in progress when the offer of publication was made.  This is presumably obvious to everyone now, after a gap of over 10 years, but it was obvious to me back in 1999; since I was just a secretary who was lucky to get a deal no one paid any attention.  Mere financial reasoning was useless in the face of this compelling assumption.  I tried to hand the book's 26 permissions over to my lawyer, who must presumably have had clerical staff; he firmly handed them right back.  I pointed out that I had just been given a $75,000 advance; if I had to clear permissions this would delay completion of other books, surely an expensive use of my time.  To no avail.  The book was taken to the Frankfurt Bookfair and caused a sensation; now it had allegedly netted another quarter of a million dollars or so; it made no difference.

My impression is that it wasn't simply that all these hot shots were as one in patronizing the author; certain tasks relating to publication had been polluted by the feminization of certain kinds of labor.  A hot shot likes to sail grandly above the minutiae of textual housekeeping; he does not want to clutter up his mind with seeing that these are properly managed, he wants to talk man-to-man to a man like himself.  He wants to make tough noises on the phone about advances and percentages and subsidiary rights.  Laying on a competent member of staff to handle permissions would in itself clutter up the keen legal brain.

Anyhoo, this is all horribly tedious.  The thing is, though, that if you have worked with people who refuse to take financial arguments seriously, if they have an absolutely unshaken belief that this is your little hobby and it's thrilling just to see your name in print, this has a knock-on effect when you come to other professional relationships.  I never wanted to go through that again.  So I wanted to be very selective about the people I worked with, which meant an obsession with relevant information - and this in turn caused endless problems with agents and others who could not understand the damage of such toxic encounters. 

I once met a woman who had met an editor in some kind of online sex chat room; they arranged to meet.  The thing that turned him on, she explained, was a scenario along the lines of the scene in 9 1/2 Weeks where Kim Basinger gets down on her hands and knees and crawls after money that is thrown to the floor.  Well, look, I'm sorry, he may get it out of his system that way, but if you're a woman I really don't think you want to be in a professional relationship where you are financially dependent on someone seeking that particular thrill.  I tried to explain all this to Bill Clegg, and this was really the start of all our problems - he dismissed information about editors as mere gossip, and really did not want to discuss it.  Loooooooong story short, it's not simply that things were very bad once; trying to avoid that kind of problem falls foul of a system that expects authors to sell to anyone who wants to buy. 

bad science

You write – "First of all it is so good to hear you are doing well!"
As you have made no effort to find out the truth for yourself, and as I am the only source of information that is reliable, it is time you were apprised of the facts. Perhaps, you may then even contemplate apologising.
...Fact 

The MRI scan taken in April 2003 was read accurately by the surgeon Cameron Platell, and the consulting GP.
It was read inaccurately by you.
The lymphs you informed me were simply overworked were already cancerous. The ovary you informed me was swollen due to another cyst was also cancerous. At this point, my uterus and second ovary were healthy and unaffected. I presume you remember - you examined the scans yourself.

Fact

I have had to have a total hysterectomy. You know this because I informed you during one of the conversations we had while I was in hospital, although your card makes no mention of it.
I am now going through early onset menopause.
I can never bear children.
You are responsible for this outcome.
Considering the fact that my original treatment with you was aimed at getting me a pregnancy, and taking into account your assurances that I would fall pregnant and have a healthy child after my cancer was cured, this is all the more grievous and shocking. 

Penelope Dingle's letters to Francine Scrayen at Australian Story, HT Ben Goldacre.

Coroner's report here.

losing streak

The Khan Academy has just got rid of its popular streak metric.  I woke up this morning in a somewhat ratty frame of mind and decided to soothe the savage breast by doing a few exercises on KA (which for a while now has had a feature that suggested exercises to review) - and discovered, with shock and dismay, that KA had completely changed the UI.  It is much more sensible in one respect - the user is prodded into working through a group of exercises on a single subject, rather than reviewing the mixed bag of exercises hauled up by the algorithm.  Unfortunately all this solid good sense is coupled with a new progress display consisting of stacks of leaves, which replaces the former streak bar (and the most recent streak bar was already a step in the wrong direction, replacing the ur-streak bar which told you how long a streak you had racked up). 

Now honestly.  If they were going to lavish this kind of ingenuity on the site, why not give us exercises on Laplace transforms?  Or, to be slightly less esoteric, why not have a bank of exercises on integration?  At present the site simply reinforces the bad mindset of the sort of person who does not use calculus on a daily basis - that is, the attitude that differentiation is the easy one and integration is to be approached with extreme caution, not to say trepidation.  (There are currently NO exercises in integration.)

A while back I read a piece by a British mathematician who commented that the sense for how best to tackle integration came with maturity - one developed one's intuition by doing a wide variety of problems over the years.  I was unfortunately introduced to integration at Smith, at a time when I was profoundly depressed, so I did not then lay down the foundation for this particular sort of mathematical maturity - but the comment filled me with hope.  I felt that if I did problems on a daily basis intuition would come.  And if such problems were readily available online, with instant feedback, I would probably be doing them on a daily basis.  Paltry it may be, but it would be good for me to rack up a streak of a thousand or so.  Well, it is salutary, no doubt, to be made to confront one's sloth: I expect there is a software package with a perfectly serviceable question bank, and sloth has led me down the path of least resistance.

Peafowl

I was going through my papers and came across notes from Peafowl, their conservation, breeding and management by T P Gardiner of the World Pheasant Association.

The antics and activities of peafowl provoke more enquiries to the offices of the World Pheasant Association than all other species of pheasant put together. It was this simple fact that highlighted the gap in current literature on the galliformes and prompted me to feel that WPA publications should seek to fill it. Who better to do the job than than the person who has answered most of the questions on peafowl for the WPA during the past 10 years.

Those who keep peafowl, ad I do, will now that they can cause embarrassment -- ours  have. At our home in southern England they decided that the roof of a new 200 bedroom hotel next door made a more interesting perch than our numerous trees. In Scotland where we have them roaming in the highland glens and breeding prolifically, an adult male decided that the windowsill of an elderly lady neighbour's bathroom was an excellent roosting place -- the lady in question insisted that it embarrassed her and demanded its removal.

I'm not sure if Tom Gardiner, for all his knowledge of peafowl, would have had any solution for my problems with peafowl, but I am sure that readers will find within these pages the answers to many queries concerning peafowl both in the wild and in captivity.

Keith Howman [I think - handwriting deteriorating at this point]

....
[Mr Gardiner than takes up the baton . . .]

At the time of writing this preface, books about peafowl are still surprisingly few . . .

Another perennial problem with peafowl is that of birds leaving their owner's property and wandering onto adjoining or even distant properties. It is probably true to say that the World Pheasant Association headquarter receives more calls about this problem than any other peafowl related subject.

There was naturally more, but you get the picture.  If I remember correctly, Gardiner points to a major problem with the ownership of peafowl: since the male of the species is the beauty, owners tend to like a large number of peacocks.  Once one has established itself as the dominant male over such peahens as are on offer, however, the other peacocks leave in hopes of finding unclaimed females in the neighbouring countryside.  (Hence, presumably, the fondness for roaming Highland glens.)

devant les enfants

almost everything we have done over the last two decades in the area of ICT education in British schools has been misguided and largely futile. Instead of educating children about the most revolutionary technology of their young lifetimes, we have focused on training them to use obsolescent software products. And we did this because we fell into what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle would have called a "category mistake" – an error in which things of one kind are presented as if they belonged to another. We made the mistake of thinking that learning about computing is like learning to drive a car, and since a knowledge of internal combustion technology is not essential for becoming a proficient driver, it followed that an understanding of how computers work was not important for our children. 

John Naughton in the Guardian

Naughton goes on to take issue with the claim that code is the new Latin, because Latin is a dead language.  This is somewhat misguided: the Latin (and, for that matter, Greek) literature I learned to read 40 years ago is no more obsolete than Beethoven's Ninth.  If I had started programming the year I started Latin (1971) I would not now be able to use the programming language I learned then with the same benefits it offered when I first studied it. (I am not saying it is not a good thing to learn to code, or that I don't wish I had done so earlier, only that it's rare to learn something in school that retains its value close to half a century later.)

Naughton also argues that the reason to teach programming in schools is not economic, but moral. What he means by this is that we owe it to children not to leave them in the power of computer-savvy elites. I would have thought the moral obligation was in fact much stronger than this: programming forces one to think logically.  (Some may remember the complaint of the Professor in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: What do they TEACH them in school?  Don't they teach them logic?)  It also forces one to face up many, many times to one's fallibility. (Douglas Crockford's JSLint carries the warning: Your feelings will be hurt.)  Many of the problems I have faced with the publishing industry over the last 16 years could easily have been avoided if people who were "passionate about books" had the kind of logical training, the attention to detail, the awareness of possible errors, that programming provides. 

Anyway, very glad to see this new initiative.  (As a number of journalists have commented, IT in British schools has dwindled to getting schoolchildren up to speed on Word. Jesus wept.)

H, R

Piece on the Book Bench about reactions on Twitter to casting of an actress of color as Rue in The Hunger Games.

Interesting.  Too slothful to link back to my own posts, but I was surprised by many of the covers for The Last Samurai - I went out of my way in the book to give Ludo an appearance that would leave the ethnicity of his father open, and then got many a cover back with a little white boy.  In one case, with blue eyes. Later, talking to Steve Gaghan, I commented that there was really no reason Sibylla must be played by a white actress - I had always thought of her as looking like Nigella Lawson, but there's nothing in the text that would be require it. (Was trying to be helpful -- really just wanted to emphasize that he could do whatever he wanted.  Not that it did in fact help.)

bargain!

Lightning Rods is available on e-book at Emily Books, $11.99.

I started doing exercises on the Khan Academy about 8 mon...

I started doing exercises on the Khan Academy about 8 months ago as a way of taking my mind of crazymaking things I can do nothing about.  I now have 1,755,000 exercise points and loose change; this gives some idea of how crazy I would have been if I had not been working out fiddly little exercises in kinematics and such.  I feel a bit guilty about this, because I could long since have gone past the mathematics I already know by watching videos. The problem is, though, that I hate videos as an instructional tool, and the whole point, after all, was to soothe the savage breast.

The other day, though, I succumbed to the gamification which some see as a flaw in the enterprise. At the time I had every badge it was possible to win without watching a video.  There are many more badges, but these all require watching videos, and I do so LOATHE videos.  Still, I thought I would look at the list of videos and see if there was anything I could bear to watch.  And what should I see but a whole slew of videos on Laplace Transforms!  Something I had never covered in the days when I was studying mathematics!

I should say at once that I had no idea at this point what a Laplace Transform actually was.  The appeal of the topic was simply the name "Laplace Transform."  For reasons that I can't defend, mathematics appeals to what I suppose boils down to a love of kit.  Glamorous names are good, as is some novel sort of notation.  (The Laplace Transform, of course, offers both.)   So I watched 6 or 7 videos, racking up several badges in the process - but the fact is, I really don't like videos.

It was at this point that the policy of giving house room to unread books came into its own.  Back in 1997 I would appear to have bought a book on differential equations under the impression that I would quickly be reading up on differential equations.  (Readers familiar with my publishing career will, I hope, not hold it against me if this optimism was unfounded.)  Now, though,  I pulled the book off my shelf and found a whole chapter on the Laplace Transform!  A chapter which I did find much easier to follow than the video, though without the video it might have gone unread for further countless years. 

I went to Meeting this morning at the Society of Friends ...

I went to Meeting this morning at the Society of Friends in Planckstraße.  I got there very early; the woman who greeted me, Gisela Faust, talked to me for a while before the meeting began.   The Meeting was founded in 1920, after the First World War.  It had been here through National Socialism, through the Second World War and everything that followed. I asked if she had been here for all this; she said yes, she was 98. (I think I heard that right.)  She then said that Quakers addressed each other as du.  (I had used Sie.) Which of course they would - except it had never occurred to me.  The early Quakers used only thou for the second-person pronoun, I think not only for each other but for everyone; now English pronouns no longer offer a distinction comparable to that between 'you' and 'thou'; I had never bothered to think about Quaker linguistic practice in languages that had kept the informal second person singular.  (Since you ask, the German plural of Quaker is Quäker. A form it is impossible not to love.)

I used to go to Meeting quite often in Chesterfield, but I have not gone often since.  I did go once in New York last autumn.  As you may know, Meetings are normally silent, but if someone is moved to speak they may do so. The principle is that there is that of God in everyone.  The contributions the spirit moves people to make are, as you can probably imagine, something of a mixed bag; this Meeting was silent for about 20 minutes or so and then became rather talkative. I missed the silence. After several contributions a woman stood up, placed her hands on the back of the seat in front of her, and remained standing in silence.  A couple of minutes passed. Another woman stood up and began to share some insight. The silent woman said: I am standing in silence.

I didn't know you could do that, preemptively stake out a space for silence.  What a wonderful convention!  And how splendid it would be if some such convention were more widely available.

   

the 'p' is silent, as in pshrimp

Norton will be publishing a new release of Leave it to Psmith in July.  (The phrase 'pterodactyl with a secret sorrow', another favourite, turns up in Right Ho, Jeeves, another winner.)