Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 29

A writer is not for Christmas

Employees say they stress how much work it is to own a dog. They say they would rather lose a sale than send a puppy into an unsafe home.

 Drunken puppy buying, HT MR who HTs Daniel Lippman

Back in 2007, in the early days of this blog, Yvain Dewae...

Back in 2007, in the early days of this blog, Yvain Dewaele sent me a terrific account of Serbian writers he admired.  I then expected to be moving to Wordpress in the next week or so, having been thwarted by Blogger's failure to provide what's known in the trade as a fold - a device permitting one to publish part of a post on the front page of the blog, the rest available to anyone who clicked on Read More.  So this excellent post went over to the Wordpress blog; day followed day, week followed week . . . and sloth prevailed.  PP was still on Blogger, and went on being on Blogger . . .

Who, in the fullness of time, introduced a fold feature! Ha ha! 

I like Wordpress better for all kinds of reasons; sloth being what passes for a work ethic at PP, we seem unlikely to move any time soon, so I now reintroduce this excellent post.

En ce qui concerne les auteurs serbes. J'ai découvert Branimir Scepanovic avec son recueil de nouvelles "La mort de Monsieur Golouja". Ce sont des nouvelles assez noires, écrit dans un style vif et le plus souvent sans fioritures. Son chef d'oeuvre est "La bouche pleine de terre", qui en moins d'une centaine de pages en dit plus sur l'humain que des bibliothèques entières…
 

"La bouche pleine de terre" a une double narration: un paragraphe sur deux est écrit en italique et décrit, à la troisième personne, le retour d'un homme malade dans les forets de son enfance, où il a l'intention de se donner la mort. Les autres paragraphes sont écrits normalement, à la première personne du pluriel, et ce sont deux amis qui partagent un week end de chasse et de pèche, en communion avec la nature. Dès le début de la nouvelle, ces trois personnages vont se croiser, de loin. L'homme malade, qui veut etre seul, s'enfuit plutot que d'aller les voir. Les deux chasseurs se doutent que l'homme a un probleme et décident de le rattraper pour lui proposer de l'aide. Tout le reste du texte décrit cette course, qui au fur et à mesure, se transforme en chasse à l'homme. Car les poursuivants vont passer par tous les sentiments: l'envie d'aider, l'empathie, puis la frustration, la colère et enfin la haine… Au fur et à mesure de la course, ils croisent des gens qui, sans trop savoir pourquoi, vont se joindre à eux pour rattraper cet homme qu'ils ne connaissent pas… C'est un texte très fort, je me rappele en avoir fini la lecture complètement groggy et à bout de souffle…
Svetislav Basara est aussi un grand auteur serbe d'aujourd'hui. Ses textes sont soit des nouvelles soit de courts romans. L'absurde est son royaume: dans "le miroir félé", le personnage principal se rend compte que l'homme ne descend pas du singe, mais du néant, ce qui va bouleverser sa vie de façon délirante. Dans le recueil "Phénomènes" toutes les nouvelles visent à prouver qu'un pays nommé "Falseland"(le pays des faussaires) contient une mini société où on invente l'histoire du monde: Christophe colomb n'aurait jamais découvert l'Amérique, car l'Amérique n'existe pas, au même titre que Freud ou Marx, qui sont de pures inventions made in Falseland… Vous imaginez jusqu'où ça peut aller. C'est à la fois très drole et ça donne beaucoup à réfléchir…

Enfin, il y a Milorad Pavic, dont je commence à peine à découvrir l'oeuvre, mais qui me plait énormément… Lui joue énormément sur la forme: Dans un de ses livres, les chapitres s'imbriquent les uns les autres en suivant les arcanes du tarot et en en reprenant les illustrations; dans un autre, chaque chapitre tourne autour d'un mot qui fait lui même partie d'un gigantesque jeu de mots croisés. Un autre contient deux nouvelles de cent pages, la premiere qu'on lit à l'endroit, et l'autre, qui se passe plusieurs siecles plus tard, en retournant le livre. les deux nouvelles finissent par se rapprocher et se répondent l'une l'autre…

elegance in bribery

Lovely post at (where else?) MR on bribery in China.

The First Scenario:
The corrupted official can sell a fake painting at any rigged gallery. After coordinating with the official, the briber will go to the designated gallery and buy it at the agreed price plus the commission of the gallery owner. All of the three parties know that the painting is fake, but eventually they are all benefited. This fake painting can be reused and it can go through another bribery circulation of other "elegant" buyers and sellers.

The whole thing here.

Triple Canopy

Triple Canopy is running a Kickstarter campaign (now in its final week) to raise funds for 155 Freeman.  I quote:

This September, Triple Canopy will be opening a new arts-and-culture center at 155 Freeman Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with our friends Light Industry, a cinema, and The Public School, an open-source classroom with no curriculum. Together, our groups will organize performances, classes, artist talks, readings, panels, workshops, concerts, and weekly film screenings—all of which will be open to the public. We've signed a five-year lease, which means relying on the continued generosity of donors near and far—which is to say we're relying on you. We're currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for our first year of programming. By contributing to our campaign, you can help us establish this truly alternative space and support the work of the many innovative artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and educators with whom we collaborate. 

This sounds terrific.  New York hates me, but this is the kind of thing that makes me wonder whether it would be so terrible, after all, to spend some time there.  If any New Yorkers are reading, they might want to send ten bucks along.

hm

The Electric Literature blog has a post by Nora Fussner on a new iPad app of The Waste Land, which includes the poem read by Eliot, Ted Hughes, Fiona Shaw and others, a facsimile of the typescript edited by Pound, and much more.  Toward the end Fussner comments that it would be nice if other books had the benefit of such an app; she mentions The Last Samurai, which could have clips from the Kurosawa film and translation of the lines in Greek.

I am all for an iPad app with clips from the film (always supposing Toho could be persuaded to cooperate).  In fact, I love the idea of an app that offers more help with Greek than was included in the book. But, um, to the best of my knowledge all lines in Greek within the text ARE translated, and with one exception (a brief quotation from the Odyssey) they are also transliterated. 

(I am only too conscious of the fact that pages offering this help are not especially well designed - when cobbling them together in, if memory serves, WordPerfect 7, I imagined, in my innocence, that they would be handed over to a professional designer who would produce something handsome on the page.  As it happens, the designer and typesetter seem to have seen the Greek, Old Norse and Japanese as tricky stuff they could not reasonably be expected to tackle, so those bits of the text were left pretty much the way they were in the wordprocessed submission.  (The Japanese looked better in the original document, having been typed in using software suitable for Japanese, rather than plonked in as graphics objects in a vanilla Quark file.)  But enough of King Charles' Head.)

Languagehat has a post which includes a quotation from th...

Languagehat has a post which includes a quotation from the Autobiography of the Protopope Avvakum. "Protopope" in Cyrillic: протопоп.  Impossible not to love.

Tribrachidium was a strange genus of ediacara which has b...

Tribrachidium was a strange genus of ediacara which has been found in Russian, Ukraine, and Australia. 
Tribrachidium has been described as a member of many groups. It probably lived on the bottom of the ocean filtering food. Like many animals from the Ediacaran Period, Tribrachidium was mysterious and little is known about it.

ABC Age Seven

[But was there an oktokaiogdoekontabrachidium?  We can only surmise...]

(Courtesy Mr Know-it-all)

The humour, while probably more easily appreciated by sea...

The humour, while probably more easily appreciated by seasoned birdwatchers, isn't restricted to in jokes.

[Does Jonathan Franzen know about this film? I think he should be told.]

The Disillusioned Taxonomist on The Hide.

There's an interview of Ryan North at Smithsonian.com.Why...

There's an interview of Ryan North at Smithsonian.com.

Why dinosaurs? And while the T rex. is a natural, why two other, more obscure dinosaurs? No Triceratops?
I wish I had a better answer than "I had some dinosaur clip art lying around."

[Best interview answer EVER. ]

Also, the Dinosaur Comics whiteboard is back in stock at TopatoCo.

Speaking of which, I had a phone conversation with my mother the other day. My mother said the book had come, and she had got up to page 49 and COULD NOT GO ON. 

I was completely at a loss.  I have never read Dinosaur Comics in book form.  What terrible thing could have happened on page 49, such that my mother could not go on? (I had ordered my mother a copy of the Dinosaur Comics book, and had been innocently expecting to hear how much she was enjoying it...)

'I got to 'tight wet twat' and I just STOPPED,' said my mother.

I thought: Hm. That doesn't sound much like Dinosaur Comics - I don't THINK.

I cast my mind back over early episodes of DC.  The webcomic has evolved over the years; I once went back and started going through strips from the beginning;  had I missed No. 49? 

My mother said something or other.  I realised that she was not talking about Dinosaur Comics (page 49 of which is, to the best of my knowledge, blameless), but Lightning Rods.  New Directions had sent her a galley.  She had read it years ago and hated it; she had loyally undertaken to read it again, hoping to change her mind, and I had assumed she would hate it again. 

Whereas I had confidently assumed that life in Leisure World would be brightened by Dinosaur Comics.

As, I suspect, it is.

Interview with Mitzi Akaha in Axiom Magazine.

Interview with Mitzi Akaha in Axiom Magazine.