Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 23
December 27, 2011
The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has shown that if condit...
The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has shown that if conditional probabilities are reinterpreted as frequencies, people have no problem in interpreting their meaning (see the discussion "Risk School" in Nature 461,29, October 2009). Gigerenzer has been promoting the idea that trigonometry be dropped from the high school math sequence (no one uses it except surveyors, physicists, and engineers) and probability theory be added. This sounds like a great idea to me.
Herbert Gingis reviewing Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow over at our very dear friends at Amazon (HT, as too often, MR) [We at pp are huge fans of GG, not that it helps: we feel that if our very dear friends in the biz had but read GG, and then immersed themselves in the oeuvre of ET, we could have been a contender.] [This is not necessarily the most insightful quote from HG wrt DK, but we at pp are, as we say, huge fans of GG.]
Stop press!!!!!! New Yorkers take note!
On Saturday January 21 at 2.00pm Edward Tufte will conduct an open forum answering questions about analytical design, art, the creative process, and public service. Free event, ET Modern.
On Monday January 23, 2012, Edward Tufte will give his one-day course, "Presenting Data and Information," at ET Modern. The Monday course filled up quickly and is now closed, so we've now added another course day: Sunday, January 22, 2012. See below for course information and registration.
post hoc, ergo propter hoc (not)
below the cut
As I think I've said somewhere or other, I've given an awful lot of interviews recently. Often by e-mail. And the editorial view -- even when the interview was to be published online -- was generally that less is more. Ours not to reason why. But I was thinking today about the pink-collar labour force, to which I am thinking of returning, and for one interview I had much to say about pink-collar labour which turned out to be superfluous to requirements.
Which is interesting, because my position, at this point, is essentially that of a woman who took time off to stay home with children. A position that would have been, to those coming up after, unimaginably less worrying in the day of the typewriter. (I now read ads that require, inter alia, a PowerPoint whiz; as an ET acolyte I naturally renounce Satan and all His works, sc. Powerpoint, but feel a job app would not be enhanced by reference to ET on the cognitive evils of PP or by Mark Gertz's ET Kitten Assassin wallpaper. In my young day applying for secretarial work did not involve these crises of conscience.)
Can't see any point in identifying the interview for which I expanded on the theme at bloggish length, but these were the thoughts of the day:
If you have a job thatrequires a lot of typing you end up getting a lot of practice; your speedbuilds up over the years, to the point where you can type faster than you think(at least if you are working out something complicated). I used to type 100wpm,and now feel chagrined if I take a test and find my speed is down to a rubbishy88.
This is fine for theactual writing of a book, or taking notes from a text, or blogging, but it isnot so good for dealing with people in the industry. The temptation is to do business by e-mail, and inparticular to address complex subjects by writing long, complex e-mails. (It SEEMS to make sense because theneverything is in writing, and both parties can go back and confirm what wassaid.)
This works if the personyou write to is also a competent typist, someone similarly maddened by theconstraints of a Blackberry or cell phone, someone who prefers to dash off880-word e-mails in a shame-making 10 minutes on a full keyboard, hence (at aminimum) laptop with full screen on which YOUR 880+-word e-mails can be readrapidly in big blocks of screen space. Someone who will naturally interpolate replies to a series of questionsinto the text, permitting you to do the same in response.
If you are dealing withsomeone who thinks it worth typing tmrw rather than tomorrow, someone whowrites (and reads) e-mails by Blackberry, someone who gets many e-mails in thecourse of a day, the flood of text is likely to drive them mad. It's better with this sort of person tokeep e-mails to the length of a Tweet and do most business by phone. I didn't know.
Equally disastrously, ifyou work as a secretary you internalize a simple hierarchical picture of thebusiness world. Your academicqualifications are irrelevant; what counts is the place you occupy in thehierarchy. Occupying this position, you perform various tasks uponrequest. You don't argue; youdon't explain that the task would best be performed by the person who made therequest; you don't put the task aside and explain, if asked, that it does notneed to be done for another couple of months; you don't put the task aside andexplain, if asked, that none of the other places you worked ever asked you toperform it and that you are simply doing what you did in all the other placesyou worked. No, you just carry out the task as soon as asked, and you try to doit right first time. And none ofthis is contingent on enthusiasm for the people, or the project, or thecompany; you've been brought in to do a job, you do the job.
You then imagine that asa writer you can step into a system with a similar hierarchy, only at adifferent place in the hierarchy. You are no longer providing support; you are now the principal, theclient, the person for whom services are provided. So you expect to give instructions and have them carried outpromptly without argument. You give instructions and they are not so muchairily waved aside as ignored. Mysteriously, people are lavish with praise of your talent, the word 'genius'is used with gay abandon – but the mere fact that you are a genius does notmean that you can have a document photocopied, a working group list, a meetingwith an agenda.
You (well, I, at anyrate) are then prey to baffled rage. You are told that a book will not be sent to editors on Monday becausethe agent is superstitious about Mondays (!), then that the book was not sentout on Tuesday or Wednesday because the copying service was closed for Passover(!!), then that there is no point sending it out this week because it is nowGood Friday and everyone will be out of the office until the following Tuesday(!!!). Your book enjoys the levelof care celebrated in "United Breaks Guitars." You are presently reduced to thestate of the dogs used as subjects in experiments on learned helplessness, theones now universally condemned for cruelty to animals.
[There are undoubtedlymany other lessons to be learnt, but even a rubbishy 88 wpm is already makingthis answer longer than readers are likely to sit still for. Also, JessaCrispin of Bookslut has just commented that my lack of discretion has probablynot helped me in dealing with the publishing industry. Perhaps I should just mention that Ihave used examples from persons who have had no connection with the publicationof LR.]
Just to show I am notCOMPLETELY self-obsessed, I add that one gets a rather terrifying insight intothe cost of technological advance to women in pink collar jobs:
Before the advent of thepersonal computer and office software, it was roughly the case that a secretarycould master skills needed to operate a machine (typewriter, possibly addingmachine) and move in and out of the workforce without much trouble: a machineacquired for use in the home would remain roughly comparable to that in theoffice, however many years went by, and typing speed could be worked on asrequired. (You can throw inshorthand and not change the position much.)
Word processors changedthis, spreadsheets made it worse. If I remember correctly, WordStar was anearly leader in the field of word processing; it was displaced by WordPerfectfor DOS in the mid- to late 80s, though some offices also used Word; in the early 90s Windows rendered mostof the keystrokes for the DOS-based programs obsolete, so it was necessary tobe up to speed on WordPerfect or Word for Windows; WordPerfect did not come upwith a good version for Windows fast enough, so that Word gained ground, andwithin a decade Word was virtually unchallenged within the office environment.
Like WordPerfect before it, Word has gone through a number of substantialchanges (Word 97, Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010 each required new skills).And of course I've said nothing about the spreadsheet wars (Lotus 1-2-3,QuattroPro, Excel), PowerPoint, e-mail programs, scanning technology. In other words, if you worked in anoffice without interruptions you could count on getting trained to the next newthing; if you took time out, or tried to move from one place to another, youcould find yourself scrambling to master completely different software. Takingtime out to write a novel may not be terribly common; taking a few years tostay home with small children was once relatively low-risk, now much harder tocome back from. (Note that a blockof four or five years – whichwould once have been unremarkable for a woman who wanted to have a child andstay home until it started school – is easily long enough to render dominantoffice software obsolescent or even obsolete.)
*** Funnily enough -- this did not come up in the interview because I sensed I had already gone on too long -- the way I picked up word processing was through a free course at the Computer Learning Centre at Oxford. That was how I made the leap from the typewriter to the world as we know it. The training was in WordPerfect for DOS. There were later, terrifying leaps when I no longer had access to the Computer Learning Centre. (WP for DOS was friendly to a fast typist; Windows, intuitive to so many, was terrifying. And Word! Word was an obscure little program that had no Reveal Codes. Which had to be picked up somehow on the Q.T. on the computer of a friend who gave courses.)
So I look at unemployment figures, and I remember how I picked up this skill as a freebie when I was doing a doctorate, on a senior scholarship, and I tend to think cheap easy access to relevant skills would solve problems for a lot of people who have never thought of being Prince Hamlet. While also thinking that the skills I really needed were those required to deal with my editor-to-be, an Oxford contemporary -- the solution to that problem would seem to have been a handsome entertainment allowance.
So. Programming. A world without PowerPoint. A beautiful little command line world where you type in text. Nice.
Which is interesting, because my position, at this point, is essentially that of a woman who took time off to stay home with children. A position that would have been, to those coming up after, unimaginably less worrying in the day of the typewriter. (I now read ads that require, inter alia, a PowerPoint whiz; as an ET acolyte I naturally renounce Satan and all His works, sc. Powerpoint, but feel a job app would not be enhanced by reference to ET on the cognitive evils of PP or by Mark Gertz's ET Kitten Assassin wallpaper. In my young day applying for secretarial work did not involve these crises of conscience.)
Can't see any point in identifying the interview for which I expanded on the theme at bloggish length, but these were the thoughts of the day:
If you have a job thatrequires a lot of typing you end up getting a lot of practice; your speedbuilds up over the years, to the point where you can type faster than you think(at least if you are working out something complicated). I used to type 100wpm,and now feel chagrined if I take a test and find my speed is down to a rubbishy88.
This is fine for theactual writing of a book, or taking notes from a text, or blogging, but it isnot so good for dealing with people in the industry. The temptation is to do business by e-mail, and inparticular to address complex subjects by writing long, complex e-mails. (It SEEMS to make sense because theneverything is in writing, and both parties can go back and confirm what wassaid.)
This works if the personyou write to is also a competent typist, someone similarly maddened by theconstraints of a Blackberry or cell phone, someone who prefers to dash off880-word e-mails in a shame-making 10 minutes on a full keyboard, hence (at aminimum) laptop with full screen on which YOUR 880+-word e-mails can be readrapidly in big blocks of screen space. Someone who will naturally interpolate replies to a series of questionsinto the text, permitting you to do the same in response.
If you are dealing withsomeone who thinks it worth typing tmrw rather than tomorrow, someone whowrites (and reads) e-mails by Blackberry, someone who gets many e-mails in thecourse of a day, the flood of text is likely to drive them mad. It's better with this sort of person tokeep e-mails to the length of a Tweet and do most business by phone. I didn't know.
Equally disastrously, ifyou work as a secretary you internalize a simple hierarchical picture of thebusiness world. Your academicqualifications are irrelevant; what counts is the place you occupy in thehierarchy. Occupying this position, you perform various tasks uponrequest. You don't argue; youdon't explain that the task would best be performed by the person who made therequest; you don't put the task aside and explain, if asked, that it does notneed to be done for another couple of months; you don't put the task aside andexplain, if asked, that none of the other places you worked ever asked you toperform it and that you are simply doing what you did in all the other placesyou worked. No, you just carry out the task as soon as asked, and you try to doit right first time. And none ofthis is contingent on enthusiasm for the people, or the project, or thecompany; you've been brought in to do a job, you do the job.
You then imagine that asa writer you can step into a system with a similar hierarchy, only at adifferent place in the hierarchy. You are no longer providing support; you are now the principal, theclient, the person for whom services are provided. So you expect to give instructions and have them carried outpromptly without argument. You give instructions and they are not so muchairily waved aside as ignored. Mysteriously, people are lavish with praise of your talent, the word 'genius'is used with gay abandon – but the mere fact that you are a genius does notmean that you can have a document photocopied, a working group list, a meetingwith an agenda.
You (well, I, at anyrate) are then prey to baffled rage. You are told that a book will not be sent to editors on Monday becausethe agent is superstitious about Mondays (!), then that the book was not sentout on Tuesday or Wednesday because the copying service was closed for Passover(!!), then that there is no point sending it out this week because it is nowGood Friday and everyone will be out of the office until the following Tuesday(!!!). Your book enjoys the levelof care celebrated in "United Breaks Guitars." You are presently reduced to thestate of the dogs used as subjects in experiments on learned helplessness, theones now universally condemned for cruelty to animals.
[There are undoubtedlymany other lessons to be learnt, but even a rubbishy 88 wpm is already makingthis answer longer than readers are likely to sit still for. Also, JessaCrispin of Bookslut has just commented that my lack of discretion has probablynot helped me in dealing with the publishing industry. Perhaps I should just mention that Ihave used examples from persons who have had no connection with the publicationof LR.]
Just to show I am notCOMPLETELY self-obsessed, I add that one gets a rather terrifying insight intothe cost of technological advance to women in pink collar jobs:
Before the advent of thepersonal computer and office software, it was roughly the case that a secretarycould master skills needed to operate a machine (typewriter, possibly addingmachine) and move in and out of the workforce without much trouble: a machineacquired for use in the home would remain roughly comparable to that in theoffice, however many years went by, and typing speed could be worked on asrequired. (You can throw inshorthand and not change the position much.)
Word processors changedthis, spreadsheets made it worse. If I remember correctly, WordStar was anearly leader in the field of word processing; it was displaced by WordPerfectfor DOS in the mid- to late 80s, though some offices also used Word; in the early 90s Windows rendered mostof the keystrokes for the DOS-based programs obsolete, so it was necessary tobe up to speed on WordPerfect or Word for Windows; WordPerfect did not come upwith a good version for Windows fast enough, so that Word gained ground, andwithin a decade Word was virtually unchallenged within the office environment.
Like WordPerfect before it, Word has gone through a number of substantialchanges (Word 97, Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010 each required new skills).And of course I've said nothing about the spreadsheet wars (Lotus 1-2-3,QuattroPro, Excel), PowerPoint, e-mail programs, scanning technology. In other words, if you worked in anoffice without interruptions you could count on getting trained to the next newthing; if you took time out, or tried to move from one place to another, youcould find yourself scrambling to master completely different software. Takingtime out to write a novel may not be terribly common; taking a few years tostay home with small children was once relatively low-risk, now much harder tocome back from. (Note that a blockof four or five years – whichwould once have been unremarkable for a woman who wanted to have a child andstay home until it started school – is easily long enough to render dominantoffice software obsolescent or even obsolete.)
*** Funnily enough -- this did not come up in the interview because I sensed I had already gone on too long -- the way I picked up word processing was through a free course at the Computer Learning Centre at Oxford. That was how I made the leap from the typewriter to the world as we know it. The training was in WordPerfect for DOS. There were later, terrifying leaps when I no longer had access to the Computer Learning Centre. (WP for DOS was friendly to a fast typist; Windows, intuitive to so many, was terrifying. And Word! Word was an obscure little program that had no Reveal Codes. Which had to be picked up somehow on the Q.T. on the computer of a friend who gave courses.)
So I look at unemployment figures, and I remember how I picked up this skill as a freebie when I was doing a doctorate, on a senior scholarship, and I tend to think cheap easy access to relevant skills would solve problems for a lot of people who have never thought of being Prince Hamlet. While also thinking that the skills I really needed were those required to deal with my editor-to-be, an Oxford contemporary -- the solution to that problem would seem to have been a handsome entertainment allowance.
So. Programming. A world without PowerPoint. A beautiful little command line world where you type in text. Nice.
December 26, 2011
The guiding principle of Graeber's sweeping global histor...
The guiding principle of Graeber's sweeping global history is that debt must not remain the exclusive property of economic historians, and moreover, that anthropologists are better equipped to take on the issue. The foundational myth on which economics rests, and which Graeber relishes debunking, is the "touchingly utopian" idea that money emerged directly out of primitive barter systems and had only to do with interest-maximizing exchange. Arguing against this from an anthropological perspective, Graeber claims that debt is the basis of society, and as such is inherently ineliminable. He illustrates this point through the example of debt to one's parents: to seek to cancel that debt would be impossible. Graeber describes a system of gift-giving in traditional societies that takes place over time, and involves gifts of slightly more or less value than the ones that preceded them, thus ensuring that everyone is always slightly in debt or in credit to everyone else. This sort of debt, he says, is nothing less than the continual creation of society. It is not so much that we owe something to society, but that society "just is our debts."
Justin E H Smith on Debt, by David Graeber, at Bookforum, the rest here (courtesy Wood s Lot)
December 25, 2011
Carter: Well, first of all, my mother made her living wri...
Carter: Well, first of all, my mother made her living writing memoirs and extremely autobiographical novels about her family, and there were major ramifications from that. But she always told me to write whatever I had to, and not to worry. Now, when she saw the piece that hurt and offended her, she was very hurt and offended. I didn't write it to do that. My love for them and my gratitude, I felt, showed through in my work. I felt that I never attacked them in my work that way. I had to write about growing up with the family I grew up with or I would have been somehow dishonest. But it was not my agenda to expose and destroy, or to hurt or offend. But there was some hurt and some offense taken.
Rumpus: Which story was it?
Carter: "The Bride." It was supposed to be published as fiction. But it was rejected as fiction and sold as memoir. At the time I was really, really, really strapped for money, and I had to say, I don't care what you call it, just publish it and pay me for my piece so I can pay my rent. I really was in no position to argue about the niceties of autobiographical fiction at that point in my life.
...
Rumpus: I've got all these stories I'm so afraid to tell. Like about how I grew up adjacent to affluence, but not from an affluent family myself. I had these step-sisters who had trust funds, and they had this grandmother who would give them thousands of dollars every year, and then she'd give me and my sister each a card at Chanukah with one crisp dollar bill in it.
[I'm thinking of Jane Austen publishing her books under the sobriquet 'A Lady'. I'm thinking of Sir Walter Scott, whose manuscripts were copied out by a friend before being sent to a publisher lest the handwriting be recognised; whose later books were published as by 'the Author of Waverley'. Perhaps Literature needs its Bourbaki.]
Emily Carter, author of Glory Goes and Get Some (the rest here)
Feliz Navidad
Javier Moreno has translated That Obscure Object of Desire (published in a recent edition of Bullett Magazine) into Spanish - the language in which it should clearly have been written in the first place.
Exhibit A:
Incertidumbre e información son las mismas cantidades, la pérdida de incertidumbre es igual a la ganancia de información.
Códigos y Criptografía, Dominic Welsh
Exhibit B:
La rampa de concreto bifurca; él se dirige a la izquierda y sale a un mercado de verduras al aire libre.
[It's 'La rampa de concreto bifurca' that's so lovely.]
The point is, the piece is now saturated with the language of Borges. (Writing in a café, so do not have the oeuvre to hand, but a line that was a mere inert quotation from Codes and Cryptography now brings to mind La Lotería de Babylon : He conocido el incertidumbre.)
Moreno will be publishing the piece in HermanoCerdo in January.
Have been talking to my mother about Wallace Stevens; I might have been happier all these years if I had had a job in insurance and a briefcase with compartments. If I had had the sense to get a job in insurance, or train as a programmer, or, or, or, years ago, I could write a piece in whichever language seemed best for the piece without worrying about - what shall we say - Acts of Copy-Editor, Typesetter, &c. All as comprehensively excluded from the protection offered by an Agent as are Acts of God from a cautious insurance policy, the difference being that Insurance favours small print rather than unwritten rules.
(16 lessons into Python The Hard Way. THANK you, Zed Shaw, this was exactly what I wanted for Christmas.)
(-- Well, I wouldn't mind also having my hobbyist's edition of Mathematica, which arrived just after I left DC to talk to Michael Miller in the Tik Tok Diner; I wouldn't mind having my SUDO MAKE ME A SANDWICH t-shirt, which also arrived too late, too late. Er, I wouldn't mind having an accountant with superhero powers to grapple with my UK tax return. But these are minor cavils. Merry Christmas, one and all.)
Exhibit A:
Incertidumbre e información son las mismas cantidades, la pérdida de incertidumbre es igual a la ganancia de información.
Códigos y Criptografía, Dominic Welsh
Exhibit B:
La rampa de concreto bifurca; él se dirige a la izquierda y sale a un mercado de verduras al aire libre.
[It's 'La rampa de concreto bifurca' that's so lovely.]
The point is, the piece is now saturated with the language of Borges. (Writing in a café, so do not have the oeuvre to hand, but a line that was a mere inert quotation from Codes and Cryptography now brings to mind La Lotería de Babylon : He conocido el incertidumbre.)
Moreno will be publishing the piece in HermanoCerdo in January.
Have been talking to my mother about Wallace Stevens; I might have been happier all these years if I had had a job in insurance and a briefcase with compartments. If I had had the sense to get a job in insurance, or train as a programmer, or, or, or, years ago, I could write a piece in whichever language seemed best for the piece without worrying about - what shall we say - Acts of Copy-Editor, Typesetter, &c. All as comprehensively excluded from the protection offered by an Agent as are Acts of God from a cautious insurance policy, the difference being that Insurance favours small print rather than unwritten rules.
(16 lessons into Python The Hard Way. THANK you, Zed Shaw, this was exactly what I wanted for Christmas.)
(-- Well, I wouldn't mind also having my hobbyist's edition of Mathematica, which arrived just after I left DC to talk to Michael Miller in the Tik Tok Diner; I wouldn't mind having my SUDO MAKE ME A SANDWICH t-shirt, which also arrived too late, too late. Er, I wouldn't mind having an accountant with superhero powers to grapple with my UK tax return. But these are minor cavils. Merry Christmas, one and all.)
Spoiled by the power of your best tools, you tend to shy ...
Spoiled by the power of your best tools, you tend to shy away from messy calculations or long, case-by-case arguments unless they are absolutely unavoidable. Mathematicians develop a powerful attachment to elegance and depth, which are in tension with, if not directly opposed to, mechanical calculation. Mathematicians will often spend days thinking of a clean argument that completely avoids numbers and strings of elementary deductions in favor of seeing why what they want to show follows easily from some very deep and general pattern that is already well-understood. Indeed, you tend to choose problems motivated by how likely it is that there will be some "clean" insight in them, as opposed to a detailed but ultimately unenlightening proof by exhaustively enumerating a bunch of possibilities.
What is it like to have understanding of very advanced mathematics, the rest here (ht Tyler Cowen at MR)
December 22, 2011
LPTHW
I hope it was not bad form to clarify a few points that were not quite right in Michael Miller's piece; I am not convinced that I would have done a better job if I had had to grapple with a) a long, complicated saga and b) the place where language breaks down.
Also - if you have a long history of depression and worse you realise that most people, mental health professionals included, can't deal with it. The people who can tend to be people who have been through a bad time themselves. I remember meeting someone I had known in London, Sara Jenkins (now Valentine); she talked about a time when she had had what she called 'bad thoughts', and the mind responded to the voice like a hurt dog. I think I imagined that Bill Clegg, who had been through a bad time, might be like that; he wasn't, but I don't know that his behaviour was abnormal.
In any case, I just wanted to thank the reader who recommended Learn Python the Hard Way. This looks like exactly the sort of thing I need (and in fact, if I had been able to work my way through LPTHW during bad times, they would probably not have been so bad).
Also - if you have a long history of depression and worse you realise that most people, mental health professionals included, can't deal with it. The people who can tend to be people who have been through a bad time themselves. I remember meeting someone I had known in London, Sara Jenkins (now Valentine); she talked about a time when she had had what she called 'bad thoughts', and the mind responded to the voice like a hurt dog. I think I imagined that Bill Clegg, who had been through a bad time, might be like that; he wasn't, but I don't know that his behaviour was abnormal.
In any case, I just wanted to thank the reader who recommended Learn Python the Hard Way. This looks like exactly the sort of thing I need (and in fact, if I had been able to work my way through LPTHW during bad times, they would probably not have been so bad).
chrono
I posted a link yesterday to Michael Miller's profile in the Observer. I'm not sure that it's not petty to correct details of chronology and such; the problem is, as you probably know, that Wikipedia treats accounts published in the press as sources. If I understand the piece correctly, MM thought that, upon receiving Bill Clegg's resignation in January 2010, I went straight from my mother's bedside in Silver Spring to Eastbourne in the UK with the intention of committing suicide, and that I wrote to Bill from Eastbourne. (I expect getting a verbal account at the Tik Tok diner, and then having to make sense of the material from a recorder, contributed to the misunderstanding.) This was not correct, and I think gives a false impression of the situation:
I had a flight booked back to Berlin on January 28. I did not know what to do. I was exhausted after looking after my mother; Bill had resigned while she was in intensive care, saying the relationship was unproductive. I had $10,000 in credit card debt; I could not finish a new book fast from a state of exhaustion, and even if I could I did not know where to send it. I had tried desperately hard, as I had for the last 14 years, to get information leading to publishers who could cope with technically challenging work, and I had failed yet again.
The point is, in other words, that the reason I could not see a way out was not simply because things had not worked out with Bill, but because I had tried so many times over the last 14 years. With Bill, I had forced myself to overcome all kinds of phobias and inhibitions - a phobia of the phone, a phobia of meeting people in person to talk about work, a profound horror of showing people unfinished work, finished work with which I was dissatisfied. And it was simply not possible to do more. If it was necessary to be even MORE phone-friendly, if it was necessary to send out even more unfinished work and be judged on that basis, I would never be able to do it. I had made a special trip to New York to talk about new work; Bill's assistant had misunderstood a request to see Bill's office before going to lunch, so we had never made it to the coffeehouse where I would have a table to lay out materials -- so I could not make best use of this single meeting, because an assistant misunderstood. How could I guarantee fewer misunderstandings without micromanaging even MORE, which was the thing that drove people crazy in the first place?
So I sat in a sublet apartment in Berlin, and what lay ahead was not a lifetime of writing, but a lifetime of trying to do business by phone, going to New York for meetings and having them derailed by Hardyesque accident, it had never not been like this so why would it change?
But the thing is. The fact is, as I think Wittgenstein said, intention is not the furniture of the mind. I can't look into my mind and identify an intention to commit suicide, in the way that I can look in the attic to see if I have a chair. And I can't, how can I put it, distinguish a fake from a genuine intention the way I can have an antique chair assessed (is this really Queen Anne or just a cheap copy). All I have to go on is what an observer would have to go on. Feeling miserable is not evidence. What counts as evidence is actions. If I make my will, it's a piece of evidence, but hardly conclusive. If I book a one-way flight to Gatwick (from which it's a quick train journey to Eastbourne, from which it's a short bus trip to Beachy Head), that's a piece of evidence, but hardly conclusive. If I spend the night packing a suitcase to catch the plane, that looks a bit more like something is going to happen, but still, of course, hardly conclusive.
Well, the point is, at what point are observable actions sufficiently conclusive? Conclusive enough, I mean, to merit taking into account the grief that would be caused survivors. Saying to oneself: There is a virtual certainty that nothing can be done, that there is no way forward, but people in this position often think there is no way out when there is a solution, the rational course of action is to contact someone with relevant information and see if I am mistaken.
At any rate, I stayed up packing to catch an early morning flight to Gatwick, and it felt very good not to have to fight any more. It felt so good. It felt so good. People who have never confronted a fate that is literally worse than death will not understand.
But the fact is, there might be a solution I did not see; if so, it would involve a lot of dreary striving, but there are people who would be spared grief. The person to ask was someone with relevant information. Bill must presumably know what I should have done differently; he might know what I could do now; the person to ask was the person with the answer to the question. So I wrote to Bill (part of this e-mail is quoted in the piece) and went on packing. I did not say where I was going, because if I had said I was going to Eastbourne, to Beachy Head with its 600-foot cliff, it would be very easy for him to stop this. He could simply call the police in Eastbourne, explain the situation, forward the e-mail, tell me he had done so; if I went, I would be picked up by the police.
I got a reply from Bill in 40 minutes which I could not bring myself to look at. Just before it was time to go, I read his e-mail - and it must be said there was a great deal of sympathy and feeling in his reply. (I sent this to Michael Miller, though I could naturally not grant permission to print it, because I wanted to be fair; many people, I think, would warm to this. See Bill in a more favorable light than the person packing to catch a plane.) It did not answer the question. It was an emotional response to a factual question - which is precisely what one always does get from the biz. So I walked out the door with my carry-on bag and took the U-Bahn to Rudow and the bus to Schoenefeld and got on the plane.
It is very tiring to expose yourself to more of the same misunderstandings, but I realised, as I flew to Gatwick, that this is a bad thing to do to someone: contact him before leaving to commit suicide, in the hope of a helpful solution, and then jump off a cliff because he said the wrong thing. How can you do that to someone? If you're going to jump off the cliff, it turns out, it would have been much better to jump without writing, Bill is very emotional, perhaps not the kind of person to respond rationally at a time of crisis.
The fair thing to do was explain once more that I simply wanted to know whether there was something I could do; if there was something I hadn't tried, I would do it. And then give him time to think things over, because perhaps he would not immediately know what to say. So I checked into a hotel and wrote explaining again, pointing out that I thought I was doing what people had wanted DFW to do. I got a reply which still did not answer the question, he said that suicide was the most selfish thing you could do and Wallace's family had had to live with terrible grief and so on. There was a certain irony to this, because the reason things had gone wrong was that I had unselfishly spent 3 months looking after my mother instead of pulling together another MS for Bill to sell. Meanwhile I was getting emotional e-mails from many other people; Bill had contacted the reader who had introduced us, who had tracked down my ex-husband, my sister, friends in Berlin - it was all messy and bad.
Anyway, to be fair, it may be that if one gets an e-mail from someone who only says vaguely that she is going somewhere where it is easy to make an end, the vagueness is not very convincing. And perhaps if the person gives one time to think that also does not sound very urgent to someone impulsive and emotional. But I was anxious not to reveal my location, because it would be so easy for someone to call the police. And it has to be said, all this emotional turmoil made things worse.
I think if one reaches this position one is aware that one may not be sane, so one falls back on reason - it is like Descartes, imagining that the mind may be possessed by an evil demon, asking of what one can be certain if this is the case. It seemed, bringing reason to bear, that the fact that Bill had not offered any practical suggestion did not mean there was nothing that could be done. Bill doesn't much like e-mail as a means of communication; he is more comfortable on the phone; I was unable at this point to speak on the phone. Therefore the only way of determining whether something might be done was to ask someone else to speak to him on the phone. I would rather not have brought in my ex-husband, but since he had been brought in anyway, and since he would certainly want to do something if something could be done, I wrote to him explaining the situation and asking if he would mind talking to Bill on the phone. I gave him the office number and the cell number; he called Bill but could not get through.
I think at this point I wrote to Bill suggesting it might be better if he talked to David. His assistant wrote saying that Bill had gone on vacation to Mexico for 2 weeks and was uncontactable. I wrote explaining to Shaun that I was a 12-minute bus ride from a 600-foot cliff and did not think I would wait 2 weeks for Bill's return on the off-chance that something useful might come of it. It seemed as though it would look bad for Bill if a suicide took place in his absence, so perhaps it might be better to consult one of the other agents.
In my talk with Michael Miller I was trying to convey the way the mind works at such a time; there isn't a social self that can be deployed. The mind is trying to make the correct decision, depending on relevant facts. If the requirement is to keep the body alive while the talent slowly dies off inside, if this is the life required to allow others to live a life without grief, it is not possible to undertake to live indefinitely in this way.
But if there is some action that can be taken to give a chance of a life that can be lived, one would take that action. One is trying to determine whether such action is possible. There is no pain, no despair if by despair one means a state of mind with emotional affect; on the contrary, one feels happy because in all likelihood there is nothing to be done and an end can be made in a day or so. One goes cheerfully out for Belgian beer and frites. I am sure this does not correspond to most people's notion of suicidal behavior; that was precisely why it seemed worth trying to explain this thing that does not conform to a stereotype to a journalist.
The curious thing, or rather the wholly unsurprising thing, is that David understood this line of reasoning at once. He does not want me to die; he would be desperately unhappy if I were to kill myself; but he understands that it would be terrible to ask someone to keep the body alive as a shell. But he had no relevant information, and the person with relevant information was not someone who would be desperately unhappy if I died.
Perhaps this is impossible to explain to a journalist. On the one hand, certainty that there will be no more dealing with people who are not like David. A little space before the end to go out for Belgian beer and frites; then it's over. On the other hand, the endless dreary jockeying for a scrap of information that might possibly someday somewhere lead to something slightly better. You write to someone against your better judgement - in all likelihood there is only endless dreary jockeying to look forward to - only because, as everyone says, the death will cause grief to people who will continue to exist. And everything you do, not for yourself, but for the people who might be spared grief, only makes it look as though there is very little likelihood that there will be a body at the bottom of a cliff. Meanwhile, er, the more you try to do the decent thing, the more you are simply dragged into more of the endless dreary jockeying that made a quick end, preceded by Belgian beer and frites, look so good. (Why, presumably, so many people have the good sense not to 'reach out'.)
Anyway, Bill's assistant send a team of pygmies out into deepest Mexico in search of the Uncontactable. David got a call on his cellphone from a man who was aggrieved, anxious to limit damage (David said Bill did indeed think a suicide would look bad). The caller talked aggrievedly on at some length before mentioning the 600-foot cliff, at which point David said WHAT?????!!!!!!!!
Bill sent the relevant e-mail to David, who sent an e-mail saying DON'T DO ANYTHING! Adding that his wife was pregnant. (Awwww - a littul BAAAAYbeeee.) He explained later that he could not think of anything else to say. I explained to Mr Miller that this did not solve the problem, but how can you-- How can you darken joy with grief. Something like that. Of course, if I had not written to Bill I would have been much better off, but what can you do.
Miller says a short time later I got an offer of publication for Lightning Rods from New Directions. Well, if you're a young journalist with your nice New York life 9 months may look short. 9 months of sitting in an apartment in Berlin with absolutely no idea of what to do. 25 years from now, yes, the infant prodigy now lulled to sleep on 2001: A Space Odyssey may have the publishing industry eating out of the palm of her hand. Meanwhile, I sit in the apartment, writing e-mails, putting them in the drafts folder, checking flights on Easyjet 5 times a day, sometimes booking and cancelling out, sometimes booking and letting the booking expire, wondering what to do.
At some point David Levinson mentions to Dale Peck that he has met me. Dale Peck says The Last Samurai! That book was HUGE! Dale reads the book and loves it. He says if there is anything he can do to help he will do it. I have no idea what would help.
But Dale Peck is giving a party! Dale Peck and friends are launching Mischief & Mayhem, a new imprint; they are giving a party! And David Levinson says DP knows everybody. I think that if I go to New York, if I take the body to New York, I may somehow meet someone who will know what I could do. DP may know. Someone else may know. I'm told there are editors who love my work; I don't know who they are. But friends say they can get me meetings with any editor I want to meet. I think if I go to New York for three weeks I may find out if there are editors who would be right for my most ambitious work. If not -- I have booked a flight on British Air, changing at Heathrow. $10,000 in credit card debt is now $20,000 in credit card debt, more want matter if there is no way forward. I can leave the plane at Heathrow on the way back, go to Eastbourne again, eschew the pointless e-mail in search of a solution. If there IS a solution, the debts will someday be paid.
I go to New York. DP is taken up with his launch. The friends who said they could set up meetings with editors can't set up those meetings. They suggest people who might have ideas. I meet people who suggest other people. I talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. I take with me my carry-on bag. I pull out the Taschen book on Manga! A book on Otto Neurath's Bilderstatistik! An antique book on French 3-handed whist! And more and more and more! I am trying to explain how one might change the face of 21st-century fiction!
I have some very good conversations. It seems as though there are editors who are real problem-solvers, editors who could cope with the most interesting books on my hard drive. I can go back to Berlin and ignore my credit card debt and finish one of these books.
There's something Michael Miller doesn't understand, because he takes for granted something he knows and I don't know. Miller, obviously, knows how to make money as a journalist. When I was looking after my mother I could not finish a novel, but I thought I might do some journalism; I asked Bill and he waved this aside. I wrote to the handful of people I knew and they did not know. If I had known what Michael Miller knows I would not have had to ask Bill; I could have done whatever it is that Michael Miller does to get paid. Meanwhile, the way forward was to write a work of genius.
A couple days before I leave I have drinks, then dinner with Jeffrey Yang of New Directions. I talk about some of my crazy ideas that will change the face &c. &c. Toward the end he says he wouldn't mind seeing Lightning Rods, the book Bill had tried to sell. I don't think it is an ND book, but I say Sure; I get back to the place where I'm staying and send him a file. Back in Berlin, I get an e-mail expressing enthusiasm for the book.
What it means is that it is not possible, after all, to work at once on the books that might change the face of 21st-century fiction. It it necessary, first, to see into print a book finished 11 years ago. That's showbiz.
Miller researched, wrote, and got his piece into print in 3 weeks. So we can imagine that, if a book is already written, it too could be seen into print in 3 weeks, or even 2, or even 1. Leaving plenty of time to write the books that might change the face of 21st-century fiction. But that's not showbiz.
She could not see a way forward. "Fourteen years of publishing crap, no end in sight," she said. She knew of a 600-foot cliff in Eastbourne. Back in England, she booked a one-way train ticket to Gatwick, an hour from the cliff by train, then checked into a hotel. On Feb. 10, 2010, she sent an email to Mr. Clegg that said, "I'm leaving tomorrow, sorting out a few last-minute things."
I had a flight booked back to Berlin on January 28. I did not know what to do. I was exhausted after looking after my mother; Bill had resigned while she was in intensive care, saying the relationship was unproductive. I had $10,000 in credit card debt; I could not finish a new book fast from a state of exhaustion, and even if I could I did not know where to send it. I had tried desperately hard, as I had for the last 14 years, to get information leading to publishers who could cope with technically challenging work, and I had failed yet again.
The point is, in other words, that the reason I could not see a way out was not simply because things had not worked out with Bill, but because I had tried so many times over the last 14 years. With Bill, I had forced myself to overcome all kinds of phobias and inhibitions - a phobia of the phone, a phobia of meeting people in person to talk about work, a profound horror of showing people unfinished work, finished work with which I was dissatisfied. And it was simply not possible to do more. If it was necessary to be even MORE phone-friendly, if it was necessary to send out even more unfinished work and be judged on that basis, I would never be able to do it. I had made a special trip to New York to talk about new work; Bill's assistant had misunderstood a request to see Bill's office before going to lunch, so we had never made it to the coffeehouse where I would have a table to lay out materials -- so I could not make best use of this single meeting, because an assistant misunderstood. How could I guarantee fewer misunderstandings without micromanaging even MORE, which was the thing that drove people crazy in the first place?
So I sat in a sublet apartment in Berlin, and what lay ahead was not a lifetime of writing, but a lifetime of trying to do business by phone, going to New York for meetings and having them derailed by Hardyesque accident, it had never not been like this so why would it change?
But the thing is. The fact is, as I think Wittgenstein said, intention is not the furniture of the mind. I can't look into my mind and identify an intention to commit suicide, in the way that I can look in the attic to see if I have a chair. And I can't, how can I put it, distinguish a fake from a genuine intention the way I can have an antique chair assessed (is this really Queen Anne or just a cheap copy). All I have to go on is what an observer would have to go on. Feeling miserable is not evidence. What counts as evidence is actions. If I make my will, it's a piece of evidence, but hardly conclusive. If I book a one-way flight to Gatwick (from which it's a quick train journey to Eastbourne, from which it's a short bus trip to Beachy Head), that's a piece of evidence, but hardly conclusive. If I spend the night packing a suitcase to catch the plane, that looks a bit more like something is going to happen, but still, of course, hardly conclusive.
Well, the point is, at what point are observable actions sufficiently conclusive? Conclusive enough, I mean, to merit taking into account the grief that would be caused survivors. Saying to oneself: There is a virtual certainty that nothing can be done, that there is no way forward, but people in this position often think there is no way out when there is a solution, the rational course of action is to contact someone with relevant information and see if I am mistaken.
At any rate, I stayed up packing to catch an early morning flight to Gatwick, and it felt very good not to have to fight any more. It felt so good. It felt so good. People who have never confronted a fate that is literally worse than death will not understand.
But the fact is, there might be a solution I did not see; if so, it would involve a lot of dreary striving, but there are people who would be spared grief. The person to ask was someone with relevant information. Bill must presumably know what I should have done differently; he might know what I could do now; the person to ask was the person with the answer to the question. So I wrote to Bill (part of this e-mail is quoted in the piece) and went on packing. I did not say where I was going, because if I had said I was going to Eastbourne, to Beachy Head with its 600-foot cliff, it would be very easy for him to stop this. He could simply call the police in Eastbourne, explain the situation, forward the e-mail, tell me he had done so; if I went, I would be picked up by the police.
I got a reply from Bill in 40 minutes which I could not bring myself to look at. Just before it was time to go, I read his e-mail - and it must be said there was a great deal of sympathy and feeling in his reply. (I sent this to Michael Miller, though I could naturally not grant permission to print it, because I wanted to be fair; many people, I think, would warm to this. See Bill in a more favorable light than the person packing to catch a plane.) It did not answer the question. It was an emotional response to a factual question - which is precisely what one always does get from the biz. So I walked out the door with my carry-on bag and took the U-Bahn to Rudow and the bus to Schoenefeld and got on the plane.
It is very tiring to expose yourself to more of the same misunderstandings, but I realised, as I flew to Gatwick, that this is a bad thing to do to someone: contact him before leaving to commit suicide, in the hope of a helpful solution, and then jump off a cliff because he said the wrong thing. How can you do that to someone? If you're going to jump off the cliff, it turns out, it would have been much better to jump without writing, Bill is very emotional, perhaps not the kind of person to respond rationally at a time of crisis.
The fair thing to do was explain once more that I simply wanted to know whether there was something I could do; if there was something I hadn't tried, I would do it. And then give him time to think things over, because perhaps he would not immediately know what to say. So I checked into a hotel and wrote explaining again, pointing out that I thought I was doing what people had wanted DFW to do. I got a reply which still did not answer the question, he said that suicide was the most selfish thing you could do and Wallace's family had had to live with terrible grief and so on. There was a certain irony to this, because the reason things had gone wrong was that I had unselfishly spent 3 months looking after my mother instead of pulling together another MS for Bill to sell. Meanwhile I was getting emotional e-mails from many other people; Bill had contacted the reader who had introduced us, who had tracked down my ex-husband, my sister, friends in Berlin - it was all messy and bad.
Anyway, to be fair, it may be that if one gets an e-mail from someone who only says vaguely that she is going somewhere where it is easy to make an end, the vagueness is not very convincing. And perhaps if the person gives one time to think that also does not sound very urgent to someone impulsive and emotional. But I was anxious not to reveal my location, because it would be so easy for someone to call the police. And it has to be said, all this emotional turmoil made things worse.
I think if one reaches this position one is aware that one may not be sane, so one falls back on reason - it is like Descartes, imagining that the mind may be possessed by an evil demon, asking of what one can be certain if this is the case. It seemed, bringing reason to bear, that the fact that Bill had not offered any practical suggestion did not mean there was nothing that could be done. Bill doesn't much like e-mail as a means of communication; he is more comfortable on the phone; I was unable at this point to speak on the phone. Therefore the only way of determining whether something might be done was to ask someone else to speak to him on the phone. I would rather not have brought in my ex-husband, but since he had been brought in anyway, and since he would certainly want to do something if something could be done, I wrote to him explaining the situation and asking if he would mind talking to Bill on the phone. I gave him the office number and the cell number; he called Bill but could not get through.
I think at this point I wrote to Bill suggesting it might be better if he talked to David. His assistant wrote saying that Bill had gone on vacation to Mexico for 2 weeks and was uncontactable. I wrote explaining to Shaun that I was a 12-minute bus ride from a 600-foot cliff and did not think I would wait 2 weeks for Bill's return on the off-chance that something useful might come of it. It seemed as though it would look bad for Bill if a suicide took place in his absence, so perhaps it might be better to consult one of the other agents.
In my talk with Michael Miller I was trying to convey the way the mind works at such a time; there isn't a social self that can be deployed. The mind is trying to make the correct decision, depending on relevant facts. If the requirement is to keep the body alive while the talent slowly dies off inside, if this is the life required to allow others to live a life without grief, it is not possible to undertake to live indefinitely in this way.
But if there is some action that can be taken to give a chance of a life that can be lived, one would take that action. One is trying to determine whether such action is possible. There is no pain, no despair if by despair one means a state of mind with emotional affect; on the contrary, one feels happy because in all likelihood there is nothing to be done and an end can be made in a day or so. One goes cheerfully out for Belgian beer and frites. I am sure this does not correspond to most people's notion of suicidal behavior; that was precisely why it seemed worth trying to explain this thing that does not conform to a stereotype to a journalist.
The curious thing, or rather the wholly unsurprising thing, is that David understood this line of reasoning at once. He does not want me to die; he would be desperately unhappy if I were to kill myself; but he understands that it would be terrible to ask someone to keep the body alive as a shell. But he had no relevant information, and the person with relevant information was not someone who would be desperately unhappy if I died.
Perhaps this is impossible to explain to a journalist. On the one hand, certainty that there will be no more dealing with people who are not like David. A little space before the end to go out for Belgian beer and frites; then it's over. On the other hand, the endless dreary jockeying for a scrap of information that might possibly someday somewhere lead to something slightly better. You write to someone against your better judgement - in all likelihood there is only endless dreary jockeying to look forward to - only because, as everyone says, the death will cause grief to people who will continue to exist. And everything you do, not for yourself, but for the people who might be spared grief, only makes it look as though there is very little likelihood that there will be a body at the bottom of a cliff. Meanwhile, er, the more you try to do the decent thing, the more you are simply dragged into more of the endless dreary jockeying that made a quick end, preceded by Belgian beer and frites, look so good. (Why, presumably, so many people have the good sense not to 'reach out'.)
Anyway, Bill's assistant send a team of pygmies out into deepest Mexico in search of the Uncontactable. David got a call on his cellphone from a man who was aggrieved, anxious to limit damage (David said Bill did indeed think a suicide would look bad). The caller talked aggrievedly on at some length before mentioning the 600-foot cliff, at which point David said WHAT?????!!!!!!!!
Bill sent the relevant e-mail to David, who sent an e-mail saying DON'T DO ANYTHING! Adding that his wife was pregnant. (Awwww - a littul BAAAAYbeeee.) He explained later that he could not think of anything else to say. I explained to Mr Miller that this did not solve the problem, but how can you-- How can you darken joy with grief. Something like that. Of course, if I had not written to Bill I would have been much better off, but what can you do.
Miller says a short time later I got an offer of publication for Lightning Rods from New Directions. Well, if you're a young journalist with your nice New York life 9 months may look short. 9 months of sitting in an apartment in Berlin with absolutely no idea of what to do. 25 years from now, yes, the infant prodigy now lulled to sleep on 2001: A Space Odyssey may have the publishing industry eating out of the palm of her hand. Meanwhile, I sit in the apartment, writing e-mails, putting them in the drafts folder, checking flights on Easyjet 5 times a day, sometimes booking and cancelling out, sometimes booking and letting the booking expire, wondering what to do.
At some point David Levinson mentions to Dale Peck that he has met me. Dale Peck says The Last Samurai! That book was HUGE! Dale reads the book and loves it. He says if there is anything he can do to help he will do it. I have no idea what would help.
But Dale Peck is giving a party! Dale Peck and friends are launching Mischief & Mayhem, a new imprint; they are giving a party! And David Levinson says DP knows everybody. I think that if I go to New York, if I take the body to New York, I may somehow meet someone who will know what I could do. DP may know. Someone else may know. I'm told there are editors who love my work; I don't know who they are. But friends say they can get me meetings with any editor I want to meet. I think if I go to New York for three weeks I may find out if there are editors who would be right for my most ambitious work. If not -- I have booked a flight on British Air, changing at Heathrow. $10,000 in credit card debt is now $20,000 in credit card debt, more want matter if there is no way forward. I can leave the plane at Heathrow on the way back, go to Eastbourne again, eschew the pointless e-mail in search of a solution. If there IS a solution, the debts will someday be paid.
I go to New York. DP is taken up with his launch. The friends who said they could set up meetings with editors can't set up those meetings. They suggest people who might have ideas. I meet people who suggest other people. I talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. I take with me my carry-on bag. I pull out the Taschen book on Manga! A book on Otto Neurath's Bilderstatistik! An antique book on French 3-handed whist! And more and more and more! I am trying to explain how one might change the face of 21st-century fiction!
I have some very good conversations. It seems as though there are editors who are real problem-solvers, editors who could cope with the most interesting books on my hard drive. I can go back to Berlin and ignore my credit card debt and finish one of these books.
There's something Michael Miller doesn't understand, because he takes for granted something he knows and I don't know. Miller, obviously, knows how to make money as a journalist. When I was looking after my mother I could not finish a novel, but I thought I might do some journalism; I asked Bill and he waved this aside. I wrote to the handful of people I knew and they did not know. If I had known what Michael Miller knows I would not have had to ask Bill; I could have done whatever it is that Michael Miller does to get paid. Meanwhile, the way forward was to write a work of genius.
A couple days before I leave I have drinks, then dinner with Jeffrey Yang of New Directions. I talk about some of my crazy ideas that will change the face &c. &c. Toward the end he says he wouldn't mind seeing Lightning Rods, the book Bill had tried to sell. I don't think it is an ND book, but I say Sure; I get back to the place where I'm staying and send him a file. Back in Berlin, I get an e-mail expressing enthusiasm for the book.
What it means is that it is not possible, after all, to work at once on the books that might change the face of 21st-century fiction. It it necessary, first, to see into print a book finished 11 years ago. That's showbiz.
Miller researched, wrote, and got his piece into print in 3 weeks. So we can imagine that, if a book is already written, it too could be seen into print in 3 weeks, or even 2, or even 1. Leaving plenty of time to write the books that might change the face of 21st-century fiction. But that's not showbiz.
December 21, 2011
Rashomon
Michael Miller has published a profile in the New York Observer, here. It's a curious thing.
If an industry is governed by a culture of secrecy, its public face looks very clean. If an agent sells a book for half a million dollars, it gets reported. If an agent kills a half-milion-dollar deal, it's not reported. If an agent sells the film rights to a high-profile director, it's reported. If an agent kills a film deal with a high-profile director, it's not reported. If a publisher buys a book for a big advance, it's reported. If the publisher won't pay the author, breaks its contract, tries to change the book behind the author's back, it's not reported.
If someone breaks the code, that's rare. So the question isn't really what Helen DeWitt thinks of the write-up - it goes without saying that Helen DeWitt, the subject of the profile, thinks it has not done justice to the sheer unutterable brilliance of Helen DeWitt. The question is, what do all the people think who have engaged in questionable business practice over the years? Because the thing is, every one of those people will read the piece looking for their name. Wondering what will come out.
Same old, same old.
Miller has had to grapple with an immense mass of material into shape. He was working to a word count and a deadline. He managed to set up an interview, make calls, read e-mails, write the thing up and get it into print, all within three weeks. This is very much to his credit. But I think a lot of people will read the piece looking for their names and feel very good.
Anyway.
I've given a lot of interviews lately; this was the first where I made a serious attempt to get the interviewer to understand why there is a genuine risk of suicide if too much work is disrupted and destroyed. I can't say I was terribly successful.
Miller is like most people in discounting what he doesn't see. Assigning disproportionate value to what he can see. Which is actually the single worst problem for writers dealing with Rest of World. Because you better believe we believe in what we can't see. We believe in what does not yet exist. We believe in it the way a parent believes in the miracle of birth. How can we possibly not? Time t, a room contains the following: man, table, paper, pen, ink. The man is Coleridge. Time t+n, the room contains the following: man, table, paper, pen, ink, Kubla Khan.
So say a contract includes a clause giving the author last word on usage: no changes to made without author's approval. Someone who doesn't believe in the unseen, someone who does not believe that what does not exist can exist, sees an author who is fanatical about every aspect of the text, right down to the typeface. The clause is there to protect the existing text. As long as the text is right in the end, there's no problem. But no.
The clause is there to protect the author's time. It is there to protect work that exists only in the mind, or that will come to the mind if there is a point when a line is drawn under the work that already exists. The copy-editor has made recommendations; the author has considered them, made decisions; now LOTTERYLAND, GIVE GOD A CHANCE, YOU CAN TELL ME and their brothers can advance from 61,000 words, 21,000 words, 65,000 words &c to a state of completion.
I see five tables in a room in Chesterfield, each with a separate project - drafts, notes, clippings.
And I see a woman in Brooklyn at a table with a typescript and a bottle of Wite-out. In her hand she holds the cap to which is attached a narrow tube to which is attached a tiny brush. She dips the brush in the bottle, she moves the brush across marks on the page. She dips the brush in the bottle, moves the brush across marks on the page. She does this hundreds of times. She puts the pages in an envelope and sends them to the typesetter. There is a sentence in a contract but it has no power. There are books waiting for their endings but they have no power. What does it take to connect the sentence in the contract with the woman in Brooklyn?
I see myself in an office in Midtown, putting a CD in the hand of the production manager. A CD with software with which Greek and Japanese can be professionally typeset. I see a girl in an office putting the CD in a drawer, importing the text into Quark, where it will cause problems for many many texts. I see too many things.
If you don't see the dead books, turning down a $525,000 deal looks strange. Looking obsessively for the right editor, the right agent, the ones who protect the books to come, looks strange. And if you have an actual living author sitting across the table from you in the Tik Tok diner, the chance that the body might have been at the bottom of a cliff in 2010 looks negligible. And getting Lightning Rods into print looks like a happy ending.
But this is stupid. This is the behaviour of an addict. I should do a programming course and think of other things.
If an industry is governed by a culture of secrecy, its public face looks very clean. If an agent sells a book for half a million dollars, it gets reported. If an agent kills a half-milion-dollar deal, it's not reported. If an agent sells the film rights to a high-profile director, it's reported. If an agent kills a film deal with a high-profile director, it's not reported. If a publisher buys a book for a big advance, it's reported. If the publisher won't pay the author, breaks its contract, tries to change the book behind the author's back, it's not reported.
If someone breaks the code, that's rare. So the question isn't really what Helen DeWitt thinks of the write-up - it goes without saying that Helen DeWitt, the subject of the profile, thinks it has not done justice to the sheer unutterable brilliance of Helen DeWitt. The question is, what do all the people think who have engaged in questionable business practice over the years? Because the thing is, every one of those people will read the piece looking for their name. Wondering what will come out.
Same old, same old.
Miller has had to grapple with an immense mass of material into shape. He was working to a word count and a deadline. He managed to set up an interview, make calls, read e-mails, write the thing up and get it into print, all within three weeks. This is very much to his credit. But I think a lot of people will read the piece looking for their names and feel very good.
Anyway.
I've given a lot of interviews lately; this was the first where I made a serious attempt to get the interviewer to understand why there is a genuine risk of suicide if too much work is disrupted and destroyed. I can't say I was terribly successful.
Miller is like most people in discounting what he doesn't see. Assigning disproportionate value to what he can see. Which is actually the single worst problem for writers dealing with Rest of World. Because you better believe we believe in what we can't see. We believe in what does not yet exist. We believe in it the way a parent believes in the miracle of birth. How can we possibly not? Time t, a room contains the following: man, table, paper, pen, ink. The man is Coleridge. Time t+n, the room contains the following: man, table, paper, pen, ink, Kubla Khan.
So say a contract includes a clause giving the author last word on usage: no changes to made without author's approval. Someone who doesn't believe in the unseen, someone who does not believe that what does not exist can exist, sees an author who is fanatical about every aspect of the text, right down to the typeface. The clause is there to protect the existing text. As long as the text is right in the end, there's no problem. But no.
The clause is there to protect the author's time. It is there to protect work that exists only in the mind, or that will come to the mind if there is a point when a line is drawn under the work that already exists. The copy-editor has made recommendations; the author has considered them, made decisions; now LOTTERYLAND, GIVE GOD A CHANCE, YOU CAN TELL ME and their brothers can advance from 61,000 words, 21,000 words, 65,000 words &c to a state of completion.
I see five tables in a room in Chesterfield, each with a separate project - drafts, notes, clippings.
And I see a woman in Brooklyn at a table with a typescript and a bottle of Wite-out. In her hand she holds the cap to which is attached a narrow tube to which is attached a tiny brush. She dips the brush in the bottle, she moves the brush across marks on the page. She dips the brush in the bottle, moves the brush across marks on the page. She does this hundreds of times. She puts the pages in an envelope and sends them to the typesetter. There is a sentence in a contract but it has no power. There are books waiting for their endings but they have no power. What does it take to connect the sentence in the contract with the woman in Brooklyn?
I see myself in an office in Midtown, putting a CD in the hand of the production manager. A CD with software with which Greek and Japanese can be professionally typeset. I see a girl in an office putting the CD in a drawer, importing the text into Quark, where it will cause problems for many many texts. I see too many things.
If you don't see the dead books, turning down a $525,000 deal looks strange. Looking obsessively for the right editor, the right agent, the ones who protect the books to come, looks strange. And if you have an actual living author sitting across the table from you in the Tik Tok diner, the chance that the body might have been at the bottom of a cliff in 2010 looks negligible. And getting Lightning Rods into print looks like a happy ending.
But this is stupid. This is the behaviour of an addict. I should do a programming course and think of other things.
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