Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 33

Things have been rather difficult lately for various reas...

Things have been rather difficult lately for various reasons.

I'm going to New York tomorrow to talk to some people; I'll be there until the 14th. Was thinking it might be nice to have an open brunch somewhere or other to meet any readers who'd like to show up; if anyone has suggestions for a venue I'd love to hear them.

Aeschylus's Oresteia is held up – again in spot-on fashi...

Aeschylus's Oresteia is held up – again in spot-on fashion – as a template for an anti-humanist worldview: what matters is not the individual but the house, or oikos, from which he emerges and of which he forms no more than an iteration. It's an insight that helps us to understand (although Josipovici doesn't mention him) why that arch-modernist William Faulkner delves, in Attic style, through generations of the Compson family, trawling their dwindling estate for residues of buried history. ...

Their research is responsible for one of the most distinc...

Their research is responsible for one of the most distinctive features of Yakutsk. The majority of its large buildings are raised three or four feet from the ground, standing on dozens of concrete stilts: local government offices that take up an entire block, six-storey apartment buildings, a sizeable new Orthodox seminary currently under construction, even a hulking factory at the city's edge. It gives the place a tentative feel, as if it were perching on the soil like a bird on a branch...

"Tadzhik is Persian-Farsi transliterated with Russian let...

"Tadzhik is Persian-Farsi transliterated with Russian letters," Safar replied. "But nothing good ever came of it. They took away the old alphabet and thus cut the Tadzhik people off from their ancient history and culture. This monstrously sly Bolshevik act did terrible damage to the national culture of the Tadzhik people. Why? Because letters are culture-producing for a Tadzhik. Can you imagine Pushkin writing in Russian but with Arabic ligatures? That would be crazy, wouldn't it? But this...

Distractions

A nationwide hunt was launched today for a tiny Mediterranean snail which has turned up in the UK after stowing away on stonework imported as Victorian "bling" more than a hundred years ago.

The snail, which has no English name, hitched a ride from Europe on statues, rocks and brickwork in the 19th century – but remained hidden from naturalists until recently.

It was discovered at the National Trust's Cliveden estate in Buckinghamshire by volunteers cleaning statues in the gardens in 2008.

The...

vive la différance

As for the French writers, artists and actors who mixed in German circles, what comes across most strikingly is their ­vanity, self-centredness and lack of deeply held convictions about anything. In this sense they seem not too different from the Paris brothel-keeper who, once the war was over, reflected: "I am almost ashamed to say it, but I never had so much fun in my life. But it is the truth, those nights during the Occupation were fantastic."

Tony Barber on the French Resistance at the FT

Buffettgate

Already a cult text among gold enthusiasts and inflation phobes (old copies of the original hardback were until recently trading at up to £1,800 each on the web), it received a further boost when it was revealed in a Sunday newspaper at the time of the relaunch that the book was admired by the US investor, Warren Buffett, and recommended by him to others. It seemed to confirm Fergusson as the sage to whom the Sage of Omaha himself turned.

The claim guaranteed the book a lot of attention and...

There remains, however, William H. Gass' Reading Rilke: R...

There remains, however, William H. Gass' Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation; Roger Hahn's painstakingly-researched Pierre Simon Laplace 1749-1827: A Determined Scientist, for some reason apparently only available in hardcover at the embarrassingly low price of $33.60. There remains Schonberg's Lives of the Great Composers, something no self-respecting music-lover should be without; Goffman's Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, something I should apparently have read ...

Unlike most authors I find that the date of publication i...

Unlike most authors I find that the date of publication invariably coincides with the moment when my loathing for my book reaches its maximum intensity; I should prefer everybody to ignore it, and this time it seems probable that I shall get what I want. But real writers probably do not have, and in any case couldn't afford, this kind of stage-fright.

Frank Kermode contemplating the suspension of the TLS in a piece that prompted the founding of the LRB

(Breaking the habits of a lifetime, that's...

I'm barely fifty pages into Terry Martin's The Affirmativ...

I'm barely fifty pages into Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 and it's already clear to me that this is one of those basic works of scholarship that everyone dealing with the field has to come to terms with. As Raymond Pearson writes in his detailed review (which, along with Martin's response, I urge anyone interested in the topic to read): "The Affirmative Action Empire is overwhelmingly a product of archive-based research...