Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 25

one last interview . . .

with Brian Feinblum of Planned Television Arts, here

chess à trois

There is a rule sheet (next page), but you can start playing without it and refer to it as needed.  Basically, three sets of pieces (the same sets as in conventional Chess) border each other on the outer two ranks of the round board.  Since the "rows" are now concentric circles, a Rook may rotate around the entire board - [!!!!! -- the perfect Xmas upgrade] or move straight across the board passing through the center.  There is no space to occupy in the center, you simply pass through it.  By the nature of the board, diagonal moves "bend" toward and may rotate through the center.  The "trajectory" lines on the board are only visual aids to help you see and plan possible diagonal moves.  Diagonal moves such as a Bishop, may rotate through the center but cannot rotate through (or bounce off) the outer rank in one move.  There are "Moats" between each team on the outer rank.  They are necessary to keep Rooks from capturing each other on the first move. These Moats may become bridged if the outer rank between two teams becomes vacant.  Also, there are Creeks that run two ranks toward the center off each Moat.  The Creeks only purpose is that a Pawn cannot diagonally capture across the Creek (it must first be past the Creek).

Hat Tip MR. Ordering and more information here.

wow

The mail has just come.  Envelope from Harvard University Press.  HUP is celebrating 100 years of the Loeb Classical Library - which they now plan to make available online!

NEXT time, I want a tattoo artist

Of course, tattoo artists come from a different world, one where people come in, request a drawing, the artist does the work and gets paid, often in cash. Some, writes Buckley, were frustrated with the geriatric pace of the publishing process, with one guy getting so peeved during the revision process that he kept yelling into the phone "Do you have any idea JUST WHO I AM??!"

Re Penguin backlist issued with tattoo art covers, curated by my ND publicist, Tom Roberge. More here.

Lunch with my mother and sister. My sister says at some p...

Lunch with my mother and sister. My sister says at some point: "Sometimes I wonder, where did we COME from?" She enlarges.  The Vermont DeWitts (my father's family) are conservative Northerners. My mother's family - the Spurriers (grandmother) and Marshes (grandfather) are conservative Southerners. Where did we COME from?  (The spectrum runs from yellow dog Democrat (my mother) to, ahem, Independent (moi).  Independent as in Bernie Sanders is the only Socialist in the Senate but calls himself Independent to be polite.)

My mother, after a pause: Well, after the divorce there was so much going on, I never got around to getting in touch with people.  But I always thought Sutton Jett might have been a Democrat.

christmas is coming . . .

My ex-father-in-law, Eric Levene, is a GP. A GP with an exceptionally well-stocked liquor cabinet. Christmas comes but once a year, and when it does his loyal patients think as one.  Kurosawa realised, after much anguish, that his film about a doctor curing TB patients was all worthy and boring; what was wanted was a doctor who was a raging alcoholic! With Shimura Takashi as drunken foil to Mifune Toshiro! How better to show appreciation for Dr Levene than to send him down the road of the incomparable Shimura Takashi! (By bearing gifts. Scotch, sherry, port . . .)

I tell a lie.

Dr Levene's patients are Eastenders. They are justifiably loyal to their GP; they wish merely to bring him good cheer.

Suppose, however, for the sake of argument, that you would like to gladden the heart of your GP (Am. "primary care physician") and suspect that all the other loyal patients are adding to an already overstocked liquor cabinet.  What is to be done?  Well, there's always a T-shirt.


Courtesy A Softer World.  Available here.

disgusted in topeka

pp has not had much to say about statistics lately.  So. Data. Cussedness thereof.

Lighting Rods took a long time to get published.  It was very different from The Last Samurai, so different that 50% (at a guess) of readers who loved TLS hated the book.  This is not encouraging to a publisher, whichever half of the 50% he happens to side with.

You'd never guess it now that the book has been published.  Reviews have been, for the most part, extremely enthusiastic.  (Sloth prevails over shameless self-promotion; I could throw in lots of links, but sloth, as I say, prevails.)  This does not really give an accurate picture of responses to the book.

My publicist, Tom Roberge, was swamped by requests for review copies.  Everyone who asked for an ARC did not write a review. Some loved the book. Others HATED it. The ones who hated it hated it so much they couldn't bring themselves to waste time writing a review.

The result being that, if you go by reviews, you'd be likely to see this as a book with a 3.8 GPA. A, A, A, A+, A+, A++, A-, B+, B+ . . . Because the people who HATED the book, the people who would give the book a C, C-, D+, or downright F -- hated it so much they couldn't write a review.

696

Lee Konstantinou, author of Pop Apocalypse, has a review ...

Lee Konstantinou, author of Pop Apocalypse, has a review of Lightning Rods and slightly mad interview of me over at the LA Review of Books.  (Grappling with this interview meant that I lost a whole day that I could have spent hanging out with Joey Comeau, who did, admittedly, find use the time to write for his horror movie blog; there is also, admittedly, quite a lot in the interview about my longing to put the interview behind me and spend time with the writing half of A Softer World.)

The review is extremely funny (at least to me).  LK draws attention to the DeWitt fondness for the instructional, which to his mind is at odds with the cultural trend toward informality, relaxation. I don't know whether he is right about this alleged cultural trend -- he may well be, but then we now live in a culture where taking part in a marathon, or even triathlon, is commonplace.  At any rate, the thing I notice in myself is not so much this predilection as an inability to believe that other people don't really share it.

I like the sort of book whose introduction sounds like an induction to boot camp:

As regards the method he should follow, it is, of course, better if he can find an Arab or scholar of Arabic to direct him; but, failing this, I suggest that he adopt the following plan. Firstly, the Introduction on the writing of Arabic should be thoroughly assimilated before the actual lessons are tackled. Then each lesson should be worked through carefully and the student should not proceed from one lesson to the following before he is quite convinced that he has mastered the material in the first one. Although a full transcription has been given of all Arabic words and sentences in the first ten lessons this is a help which should be dispensed with as early as possible. The student should obtain from the outset two alphabetically indexed note books, one of which can be easily adapted for Arabic, and enter into these each new word he comes across. In another note book he should write out the paradigms of the verbs which are scattered throughout the book. These three note books should be his constant companions and referred to whenever he has a free moment. His exercises he must make for himself using the material he has worked with. All exercises and examples should be rewritten without the vowel marks so that the student becomes accustomed to reading Arabic without the vowels as it generally appears in print or in manuscript. If the above-mentioned plan of study is followed the student should acquire a sound knowledge of Arabic grammar in about six months.
    But that is only the beginning!

(David Cowan, Modern Literary Arabic)

The morphology of the verb is presented in a way that best exploits the underlying similarities of the various forms, regardless of the root type; this permits the introduction of the most common verbs at an appropriately early point in the grammar and also allows the discussions of the derived "conjugations" to be unhampered by restriction to examples from sound roots. As much space as possible has been given to the systematic treatment of noun morphology and to the verb with object suffixes; the simplification of this material attempted in many elementary grammars is actually a disservice to the student. When he turns to his first page of unsimplified reading, he finds that what he should have learned systematically must instead be learned at random, inefficiently and with no little difficulty.

(Thomas O. Lambdin, Introduction to Biblical Hebrew (1971) )

This sort of book is so seldom seen in schools that there is no way of knowing how many people would like it.  The one thing we can be sure of is that people inclined to like it are very unlikely to come across it. 

At any rate, publishers were not wildly keen to have this sort of thing in a novel when first presented with The Seventh Samurai, so Lightning Rods and its brothers were written with a policy of deliberately eschewing; after Book A  had been published as The Last Samurai publishers who perceived the public as wanting more of the same were not wildly keen to publish LR.  It's tiring.

As Joey Comeau points out, there is a book called Outwitt...

As Joey Comeau points out, there is a book called Outwitting Squirrels.  An extremely amusing book, I might add (if the pages available for inspection in Search Inside This Book! are anything to go by). What Joey may not know is that there is, in fact, an entire Outwitting series! Launched, it would seem, by the success of Outwitting Squirrels (which has sold 300,000 copies):

It began in 1988 with Outwitting Squirrels by Bill Adler, Jr. Since then a number of Outwitting books have been published, including OutwittingDeer, Outwitting Fish, Outwitting Critters, Outwitting Neighbors,Outwitting Contractors, Outwitting Clutter, Outwitting Mice, and more.

You can be part of this success story.  Adler is not only a writer but a literary agent; if you would like to write an Outwitting title, you can find a list of available topics on the agency website (or propose one of your own).