Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 39

Terrific piece by Jonathan Franzen on Christina Stead's T...

Terrific piece by Jonathan Franzen on Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, at the NY Times Book Review.

From Randall Jarrell's introduction:

Louie is a potentiality still sure that what awaits it in the world is potentiality, not actuality. That she is escaping from some Pollitts to some more Pollitts, that she herself will end as an actuality among actualities, an accomplished fact, is an old or middle-aged truth or half-truth that Louie doesn't know.

With the advent of swift and easy electronic transmission...

With the advent of swift and easy electronic transmission of written messages (e-mail, STM, etc.), the opportunity for Cantonese speakers to write Cantonese (in contrast to simply speaking that language) expanded vastly. The ease and speed of electronic communication of written messages encouraged a casual, conversational tone, so the old notion that writing was restricted to Mandarin began to break down much more rapidly than before. The problem, though, is simply that — even though they...

In 1994 Ginsberg sold his archives to Stanford University...

In 1994 Ginsberg sold his archives to Stanford University for a million dollars, but after all the deductions for the auction house, his agent, and taxes he only had enough money left to buy his New York loft and was back to square one. His photos brought him some income in his last years, though he insisted that most of the profits were plowed back into his work, for hiring an assistant and maintaining a lab.

NYRB blog, Beats & art market

From David Markson's edition of The Waste Land, recently ...

From David Markson's edition of The Waste Land, recently bought by some lucky bugger at the Strand.

My friend Ethan paid not enough money for a heavily annotated edition of Hart Crane's poetry, an even more heavily annotated T.S. Eliot, and a beautiful volume of Melville's shorter works, with every one of Bartleby the Scrivener's 'I would prefer not to's underlined. ('Melville, late along, possessed no copies of his own books,' Markson wrote in Vanishing Point.)

In summer 2000 I explained to an...

The only time I ever thought of suicide was in a graduate...

The only time I ever thought of suicide was in a graduate program -- not at Cornell, fortunately, so no bridge available. Every other time I found myself in a bad situation, I could think of ways to get out of it. Find a better job. Break up with an obnoxious boyfriend. Change majors. Move. There's almost always a regular, non-suicidal way out of things. But that graduate program -- I had so much of myself invested in it that I couldn't just drop out when it turned toxic. Or rather, death...

The Last Samurai will be the Fall Read at Conversational ...

The Last Samurai will be the Fall Read at Conversational Reading , starting September 19. More here.

Up in Prenzlauerberg visiting David Levinson. I called D...

Up in Prenzlauerberg visiting David Levinson. I called David this morning and asked if I could come up and stay with him for a week and he said yes, so here I am. David is reading out, incensed, from a book by Annie Dillard.

David: I don't know. I don't know what to say any more.

David reads an interview he gave on the Prairie Schooner blog.

D says he talked to a writer who said You know Helen DeWitt! and said everyone in New York loved The Last Samurai. I subject David and Gerrit to the Bro...

The Confederacy, McCurry writes, was conceived as a "repu...

The Confederacy, McCurry writes, was conceived as a "republic of white men." But since of its 9 million people more than 3 million were slaves and half of the remainder disenfranchised white women, the new nation faced from the outset a "crisis of legitimacy." However much the law defined white women as appendages of their husbands, entitled to protection but not a public voice, and slaves simply as property, Southern leaders realized early that they would have to compete with the Union for t...

The most daunting real-world problem Roth has solved so f...

The most daunting real-world problem Roth has solved so far: New York City's high school match, which he tackled in 2003. While many American kids simply attend their neighborhood high school, eighth graders in big cities like New York face a staggering number of choices. In theory, at least, each of the city's 80,000 eighth graders has the option of going to any one of 700 high school programs. The right match can be especially meaningful for kids who live in impoverished neighborhoods with...

If you could create a punctuation mark, what would its f...

If you could create a punctuation mark, what would its function be and what would it look like?

That's from Hudson Collins, loyal MR reader. I've always liked the chess marks "!?" and "?!" and wondered why they weren't used in standard English. The former refers to a startling move which is uncertain in merit and the latter refers to a dubious move which creates difficult to handle complications.

Yes! Yes!

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution