Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 21

the Maginot Line

Our friends at Wikipedia remind you of what you once knew about the Maginot Line:

The Maginot Line (French: Ligne Maginot, IPA: [liɲ maʒino]), named after the French Minister of War André Maginot, was a line of concrete fortifications, tank obstacles, artillery casemates, machine gun posts, and other defences, which France constructed along its borders with Germany and Italy, in light of its experience in World War I, and in the run-up to World War II. Generally the term describes only the defences facing Germany, while the term Alpine Line is used for the Franco-Italian defences.

The French established the fortification to provide time for their army to mobilise in the event of attack, allowing French forces to move into Belgium for a decisive confrontation with German forces. The success of static, defensive combat in World War I was a key influence on French thinking. Military experts extolled the Maginot Line as a work of genius, believing it would prevent any further invasions from the east (notably, from Germany). It was also a product of a historical inferiority in population and birthrate, exacerbated by the losses in World War One, which had been developing for three generations.[1] The fortification system successfully dissuaded a direct attack. It was strategically ineffective, as the Germans indeed invaded Belgium, defeated the French army, flanked the Maginot Line, through the Ardennes forest and via the Low countries, completely sweeping by the line and conquering France in days.[2] As such, reference to the Maginot Line is used to recall a strategy or object that people hope will prove effective but instead fails miserably. It is also the best known symbol of the adage that "generals always fight the last war, especially if they have won it".[3]

 So, right.

A commenter on my last post suggested running Ruby on Rails on Heroku.  I had a look at Heroku and was transfixed - this looked like a way to try out all sorts of programs without getting mired down in all the downloads and installations and what-have-you that mean it can easily take a week to get through the preliminaries before you can actually try out whatever it is you thought you might like to learn. Preliminaries that would undoubtedly take half an hour if you were already up to speed in all sorts of techniques you hadn't realized you needed to know, but which take a week (or more) if you have to scour around online to find out how to implement the two lines of instruction that accompany whatever it is you actually want to be working on.

So, right, I have a look at Heroku, which looks great, and I think I might try this out on Python since I have been working on Python. I am then told that over and above having Python to hand I must also have pip and virtualenv.  Bear in mind that the attraction of Heroku comes largely, at this point, from the fact that I have just spent a day untarring tarballs, attempting to upload from my Mac's simple FTP facility, attempting the same from Cyberduck, succeeding at last via FileZilla, creating a database on my server, attempting and failing to find the relevant files in the unpacked Drupal folder via myPHPAdmin, scouring around online for alternatives, attempting and failing to follow the steps sketched out on various websites, investigating the possibility of changing servers, and at last discovering the various bits of information from my server that needed to be fed to Drupal for successful installation.  Bloodied and not noticeably unbowed, I wonder whether life might be easier if I defected to Heroku. Only to find myself blundering through attempts to download and install pip and virtualenv, scouring around online for tips when all goes less smoothly than one might have hoped . . .

Revenons à nos moutons.  To get back to the Maginot Line.  If you're a writer, you need protection. You can hire a lawyer, an accountant, an agent.  But the protection you hire never costs your time; it never sets a value on what you might achieve if you could invariably get the technical resources you needed in 2 seconds. The protection you hire will wrangle happily over deal points; it will wrangle over percentages of rights. It will NOT factor technical support into the value of a deal (this is not a deal point), it will NOT provide in-house technical support as facilitating completion of ambitious new work which might be sold for a handsome advance. It ignores both the greatest threats to a writer and the greatest opportunities.  And there is nothing to be done.

Except, of course, to soldier on. Install, presently, pip and virtualenv.  Tomorrow is another day.

erschöpft

Elena, the Russian poet I stayed with in Paris, came to Berlin for a couple of days. She stayed one night in the room with the sofa futon and piano, claiming bravely that she liked rooms that were fraîche (the coal heating does not make room temperature significantly warmer than the frigid outside world). Yesterday we had lunch with her friend, Mark, who talked to me about programming.  'What do YOU think I should learn?' I asked.  Mark said he would recommend Java, PHP and Drupal, especially Drupal.

I had a look at the Drupal website today. My heart sank. Anything that involves setting up a database on my webserver, 1&1, is a threat to sanity. (I would have changed servers years ago, except that transferring a domain from 1&1 is another fast track to the psych ward.)  This is, needless to say, one reason occasional thoughts of trying out Ruby on Rails have been strangled at birth. But no, no, no, we must face our fears. In this case, the fear of a server that has a proliferation of user IDs and host names and multiplies entities upon creation of a database.  With the result that, needless to say, the attempt to install Drupal led to many, many error messages, hours of scouring around online, an hour when changing servers (even if it meant the madness-inducing domain transfer) looked like the only way forward . . . and in the end, of course, the answer was very simple.  The name of the database requested by Drupal was NOT the name the creator of the database had innocently assigned it, it was the string of letters and numbers assigned by 1&1; the user name was a similar string of letters and numbers; and the local host (yet another string of letters and numbers) was crucial.  When all these were supplied, Drupal installed in 2 seconds.

my poor head

While I was in New York I went to a film screening at the apartment of my agent, Edward Orloff. I did not really want to go but I thought I should get OUT and MEET PEOPLE while I was in New York, so I trekked down from the Upper East Side to a bit of Brooklyn whose closest subway stop was on the G line, which turned out to mean it was necessary to leap into a taxi at the last minute because the relevant stretch of the subway was closed. On the doorstep I met a couple of very nice people with whom I exchanged idle chitchat while we waited for Edward to come down (the bell did not work, but one of these nice people had a cellphone).  We went upstairs and continued to chat and at some point the awful truth dawned.  One of these nice people was Caleb Crain.  And at some point, maddened by circumstances that had nothing whatsoever to do with Caleb Crain, I had written some scathing comments in a post about something nice Caleb Crain had said about Alain de Botton's book on work. (I THINK I have now consigned this post to the drafts folder, but to tell the truth I hardly dare look to ascertain.)

Anyway, I stood in a small group of pleasantly chatting people and felt more and more awkward, but no, the only decent thing to do was fess up and apologize. Which I duly did.  And Crain, needless to say, was unbelievably nice about it.  And I, needless to say, resolved to be more temperate in future and not seize on things said online and--

So, oh dear. I now come upon a pronouncement by Jonathan Franzen on the subject of books in print and the value, to those who care about literature, of permanence.  And I contemplate the fact that Mr Franzen is, to the best of my knowledge, a very nice man. One day I might run into this nice man at a party in New York.  I don't want to hang my head in shame and admit, at last, that I am the terrible person who said all those terrible things on a blog.  But-- someone is WRONG on the Internet!!!!!!!

Franzen is 52. I am 54. Two years would not normally suffice to place the older of the two in the class of REALLY OLD fogeys, as opposed to the class of the merely old--but I am a classicist.  No classicist can take this view of the sanctity of print; one mark of the serious scholar is, of course, a preference for the printed text that comes with an apparatus criticus, that is, one which publishes important variants from the manuscript at the foot of the page.  Which is to say, of course, that we are trained to be aware of the errors that creep in during transmission; we are trained to regard corrupt texts with horror. And when we are confronted with the process through which a modern text comes to print, we see it as a battle: a battle in which those publishing the book do their best to smuggle corruptions into print, against more or less effective opposition from the person who had the misfortune to write it.

It is an unhappy fact that the relation between what the author wrote and the published text depends, to a very great degree, on the power of the author and his/her representation.  When one reads books that have made it into print, the author may well have thought long and hard about what the text should be; the extent to which this is reflected in the text varies according to the strength of the author's position.  This somewhat brutal class system is ubiquitous in the realm of printed texts, and is, of course, virtually unknown online.  In the blogosphere, the authors of webcomics put up whatever they choose; Steve Dodson of LanguageHat writes what he likes; Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution writes what he likes; Cosma Shalizi of Three-Toed Sloth, Andrew Gelman of Statistical Modeling ...., Jenny Davidson of Light Reading, Tired Dad of Tired Dad, all are on an absolutely equal footing when it comes to presenting to the public what they happen to want to say.

I have a Kindle; I would like to have an iPad;  I also very much like printed books.  I am working on various programming languages; despite the wealth of material online, I also have a table piled high with reference books, which I find enormously helpful.  I have about 3000 books in my apartment, come to think of it; I could get a cheaper apartment, no doubt, if they were all on my Kindle, but I like having them available for reference in this form. But there are trade-offs which I can't ignore. If I read Syme's Roman Revolution, I am struck by the idiosyncratic English, English like nothing any other writer in the language would think to perpetrate, English influenced by the Latin of Sallust and Tacitus-- English which the typical anglophone editor would fight long and hard to 'correct'. In our fallen times we have access to a range of usage closer to the range one finds in Greek, in Latin, when we go online; the publishers of our printed texts do their very best to give us Wonderbread, Kraft's  Processed Cheese, Skippy's Smooth Peanut Butter, Welch's Grape Jelly. A Thucydides, a Tacitus might certainly get into print -- wealth permitting.

I wish it were not so; I merely state publicly what has been said to me in private many times by editors and agents over the years.  But I hope I have not said this in a way that will leave me embarrassed and tongue-tied if I meet Mr Franzen one of these days at a party.

Another basic difference between the compositional techni...

Another basic difference between the compositional technique of Liszt and Chopin was observed long ago by Donald Francis Tovey, and Feux Follets once again offers a good example. When the principal theme in B-flat Major returns in the new tonality of A Major, it has become very awkward for the hands to play the double-note trill and chromatic scale as the relation of black to white keys has changed with the new key,2 and Liszt accordingly rewrites the theme in a new form that fits hands to the new harmony. Chopin, as Tovey remarked, is more ruthless: when a figure that lies well for the hands in the opening key returns in a less convenient form, he generally demands that the pianist cope with the new difficulty, refusing to make any musical concession to the physical discomfort. Liszt is often supremely difficult but almost never really awkward, and always composes with the physical character of the performance in mind. In the conception of modern virtuosity, he was even more important than Chopin, whose achievement was more idiosyncratically personal.

Splendid piece by Charles Rosen on Liszt in NYRB.

ggplot

Was watching a YouTube video on time series in ggplot2, moved on to another YouTube video on ggplot which turned out to be in Brazilian Portuguese.  In which, it turns out -- I could probably have worked this out if I had thought about it - g is pronounced like the j of French je, and the final t is pronounced (roughly) tchi (because no word can end in a consonant in Br. Portuguese) - in other words, jéjéplotchi.  Impossible not to love. When the dog barks, when the bee stings, when I'm feeling sad, I shall think of jéjéplotchi and not feel so bad.

ese oscuro objeto del deseo

Javier Moreno's Spanish translation of 'That Obscure Object of Desire' has just gone up on Hermano Cerdo. What a wonderful story! I wish I'd written it!  It has splendid illustrations by Luis Blackaller.

How to Print an Internet Magazine An Evening with Triple...

How to Print an Internet Magazine
An Evening with Triple Canopy and Project Projects
McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street, New York, NY
Thursday, January 19, 7–8:30 p.m.
Free and open to the public

How to print an Internet magazine is the problem addressed by Invalid Format. Triple Canopy editors Alexander Provan and Peter J. Russo will read selections from Invalid Format and discuss its genesis and form with the book's designer, Prem Krishnamurthy, and Adam Michaels of the firm Project Projects. Krishnamurthy and Michaels will, in turn, discuss how Project Projects makes productive use of the tension between new and old print technologies and design conventions in its work, which ranges from exhibitions to pamphlets, websites to catalogues.

There has been no lock on the front door of the house for...

There has been no lock on the front door of the house for the past few months.   I went to Kaiser's for milk and came back to find a new lock on the door.  Assumed my old key would not work; buzzed Frau Finke, who let me in and explained that the old key did in fact work.  Since I had routed her out anyway this seemed a good time to ask whether I could leave a spare set of keys with her, in case I got locked out.  Frau Finke (goodhumouredly): Ja, das ist Ihre Spezialität.  This seemed a bit hard - I haven't been back to the Schlüßeldienst in years, seems like - but the main thing is, a spare set is now safely with the concierge.

This may be a useful precaution.  Now that I am immersing myself in Python, Unix and R I find myself losing track of practical details; I forget that there is something on the stove and come to only to find caramelised broccoli in a charred pan, this sort of thing.

The Rooster

Lightning Rods is in the running for the Rooster, a prize offered by the Morning News for its Tournament of Books.  The books go through a series of play-offs - at each stage, each judge reads two and decides which goes on to the next stage.  There is also a zombie round:

In the Zombie Round, the two books most favored by TMN readers, but unfairly tossed aside in an early round by the capriciousness of a power-mad ToB judge, will rise from the dead to do battle against the only two undefeated novels of the tournament. The winners of those matchups become the Tournament of Books finalists. Each will be read by the full complement of 16 Tournament judges, plus an additional jurist, and the resulting tally will yield us the 2012 Tournament of Books champion, and its author will be awarded/threatened with the presentation of a live, angry chanticleer.

 So anyone who'd like to have a say can go over to the MN and cast a vote (though you may well, of course, see some other book you'd rather see on the short short short list).  Link for Zombie Poll here. (Poll closes January 18.)

Two other aspects of sensed betrayal should be mentioned....

Two other aspects of sensed betrayal should be mentioned. First, those who suggest the
possibility of another's entering a mental hospital are not likely to provide a realistic picture
of how in fact it may strike him when he arrives. Often he is told that he will get required
medical treatment and a rest, and may well be out in a few months or so. In some cases they may thus be concealing what they know, but I think, in general, they will be telling what they see as the truth. For here there is quite relevant difference between patients and mediating professionals; mediators, more so than the public at large, may conceive of mental hospitals as short-term medical establishments where required rest and attention can be voluntarily obtained, and not as placed of coerced exile. When the prepatient finally arrives he is likely to learn quite quickly, quite differently. He then finds that the information given him about life in the hospital has had the effect of his having put up less resistance to entering than he now sees he would have put up had he known the facts. whatever the intentions of those who participated in his transition from person to patient, he may sense they have in effect 'conned' him into his present predicament.

I am suggesting that the prepatient starts out with at least a portion of the rights, liberties,
and satisfactions of the civilian and ends up on a psychiatric ward stripped of almost everything. The question here is now this stripping is managed. This is the second aspect of betrayal I want to consider.

Erving Goffman, Asylums (130)