Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 37

With seeming effortlessness, Keilson performs the difficu...

With seeming effortlessness, Keilson performs the difficult trick of showing how a single psyche can embrace many contradictory thoughts, and how naturally extreme intelligence and sensitivity can coexist with obtuseness, denial and self-deception. To say that reading this novel makes it impossible not to understand how so many European Jews underestimated the growing menace of ­Nazism is to acknowledge only a fraction of its range. In fact the novel shows us how human beings, in any place...

valedictory address

I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies t...

"The historian's task is not to disrupt for the sake of ...

"The historian's task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly," he told Historically Speaking. "A well-organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves."

Tony Judt, who has died at 62, quoted in the NY Times Book Review

Narzißmus der kleinen Differenzen

This is one of the most intense, bitter and personalized exchanges that I've ever seen in the scientific or technical literature. And it doesn't fit either of the usual explanations for such debates.

Since the subject matter is mathematics, it seems to contradict Benford's Law of Controversy: "Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available". And since neither Simon nor Mandelbrot represented a grouping or sect, whether mathematical or social, there's no...

Lunch with the FT: Emily Stokes has lunch with Lydia Davis.

Lunch with the FT: Emily Stokes has lunch with Lydia Davis.

What "Mentor" is really about, though, is the slow-motion...

What "Mentor" is really about, though, is the slow-motion derailment of Mr. Grimes's own once promising literary career, a process that took his pride before it took his sanity. This is a book about striding up to the brink of success, only to have success disembowel you with a dull steak knife, bow, and then skip away, cackling.

Dwight Garner at NYT on Tom Grimes

Once I began to take Prozac, I lost my ability to make me...

Once I began to take Prozac, I lost my ability to make metaphors. My thinking became literal; I couldn't make connections between seemingly disconnected phenomena. The voices grew silent. Now that I'm on three psych meds -- two mood stabilizers and an antidepressant -- sustaining a fictional mask is more difficult for me. Over the course of several years, I had to invent an entirely new style, or voice, that was in synch with my new brainwaves. Nonfiction, particularly the personal essay...

Imagine that French were a dead language. I could just as...

Imagine that French were a dead language.

I could just as well have said: Represent that to yourselves, French, a dead language.

And in some archive of paper or stone, on some roll of microfilm, we could read a sentence. I read it here, let it be the opoening sentence of this introductory address, for example this: "One might say that we represent something (nous sommes en représentation).

Are we sure we know what this means, today? Let us not be too quick to believe it.

Derrida.

ht Woods Lot, t...

And then, between 1929 and 1932, he was sent on a number ...

And then, between 1929 and 1932, he was sent on a number of journeys through central and southern Russia. Other writers who visited collective farms did so as members of Writers' Brigades—and they, of course, were shown only a few model collective farms. Platonov, however, was sent by the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, and he saw what was really happening.

That experience complicated his optimism. He seems still to have retained a belief that the shining communist future was a...

Rajiv Sethi has a terrific post on David Blackwell, of wh...

Rajiv Sethi has a terrific post on David Blackwell, of whom the Texan wife of the department head at Berkeley said: I'm not having that darky in my house.