Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 4

a jar in Tennessee

My inbox is flooded these days with appeals from PEN, the Authors Guild, all sorts of people who want me to agitate against (among other things) cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts.  I have mixed feelings about this (quite apart from the cluttered-inbox factor), because many of the things that bother me most about the forms taken by support for the arts are off the agenda of every single one of the entities availing itself of my e-mail address.

Having said that,  I was moved and impressed by a piece I read today by Margaret Renkl on LitHub. Renkl talks about the virtual collapse of (what shall I call it?) a public books culture (a hideous phrase, so I wish I weren't settling for it) during and after the recession - newspapers cutting book coverage, bookstores going bankrupt, and the role of the NEH and Federal Government in turning this around. 

Renkl has done such a splendid job of sketching out the importance of regional reviews, of local independent bookstores, and how these fit into the bigger picture (national press, publishers' support), that no isolated quote can do it justice.  It is hard not to warm to a piece, though, which includes the following:

The publication Humanities Tennessee dreamed up is called Chapter 16: A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby. (The name is a reference to Tennessee’s history as the 16th state to join the union.) They built the site in-house by reading a book called Drupal for Dummies, and they hired me to run it.

The whole thing here.

Bookses

Amazing news.

I make myself miserable these days by following people outside the anglophone world on Twitter (publishers, newspapers, magazines, writers, others).  I have already done much to make myself miserable by signing up for newsletters from various online bookstores, also outside the anglophone world.  The source of misery is that I hear of all sorts of books that sound interesting, but which would be prohibitively expensive once shipping costs were added in.  (In the past, when I've succumbed to temptation, I've often found that the cost of shipping was as much as the cost of the book.)

I had often thought how much simpler it would be if I could buy the e-book instead.  But if you are in the wrong territory for a digital product Amazon thwarts you at every turn.  Amazon had refused to process orders for so many other things that I'd never bothered to see if this applied to, as it might be, Italian e-books.  Today I suddenly thought: Wait. English-language books are sold in different markets, territorial rights to which are fiercely guarded; if an e-book is only sold in one territory, and you are in another territory, you may not be allowed to buy it.  But maybe it doesn't work that way for other languages, or at least some other languages.

So I put in a trial order for Calvino's Le città invisibili, Kindle edition, and lo and behold, though I am in Berlin the order instantly went through!  (Not that this book is new to me, but it was the first to come to mind when I wanted something for the trial.)

I don't know whether this would work for books in every language that might interest me, and I don't know whether Amazon would be so accommodating if I were in a different country.  If it really is possible to buy foreign-language e-books in the US, though, this would radically change one's access to  non-English literature.  I understand why books in other languages are thin on the ground in bookstores and libraries, but it's terribly inhibiting to have to figure in obscenely expensive shipping charges every time one wants a book.

This does only help, of course, if an e-book is available, but  it still the good news of the day.

consider the Yeti

Engagement with readers, your soon-to-be readers, is key. It’s essential to have some semblance of an organic footprint (via social media, writing and publishing pieces, etc.), many months—no fewer than eight to twelve—in advance of your book’s publication date.

Semblance of an organic footprint.  So lovely.

From a piece on Lithub in which publicists offer advice to the hapless author. (Moral: Never publish a book.)

more fine print

Just how much is school going to cost? It sounds straightforward enough.

...

Every university applies outside scholarships their own way. Some have a policy that’s favorable to the student where they create financial aid packages without factoring in outside scholarships. If you attend such a university, you could end up like this student who graduated with $16,000 left over from scholarships, which the university paid out to her after she finished school. It makes for a juicy story, but one you won’t hear too often.
Far more common is that the university will use your outside scholarships to reduce your aid package.

Terrific piece on financial aid by Melissa Mesku at the Billfold.  It would be fatally easy to quote the whole thing, but it's here.

faith in small print

If you’ve ever granted permission for a service to use your Twitter, Facebook, or Google account, you’ve used OAuth.

This was a radical improvement. It’s easier for users, taking a couple of clicks to authorize accounts, and passwords are never sent insecurely or stored by services who shouldn’t have them. And developers never have to worry about storing or transmitting private passwords.

But this convenience creates a new risk. It’s training people not to care.
It’s so simple and pervasive that even savvy users have no issue letting dozens of new services access their various accounts.

Wha-?

Seriously?

This is from a piece by Andy Baid on Wired from way back in 2012, which I have come across, late in the day, thanks to a tweet by Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror.  (All right, not just of Coding Horror; Atwood is probably, actually, more famous for teaming up with Joel Spolsky to launch Stack Overflow.  The blog did come first, and his Twitter handle is @CodingHorror, Moving right along...)

I'm completely baffled by this.  "Even savvy users?' 

Baid goes (went?) on to talk about the large number of apps to which he has granted access to, among others, his gmail account, and to mention other savvy users (including Anil Dash, now CEO of Foggbugz) who have done the same.

And, um--

Look, every once in a while I start to sign up for something and the entity who wants to enroll me wants to do this via Twitter or Facebook or Google.  Sometimes they also allow separate registration via an email address, so I use the email address designated for registrations and the like.  Sometimes they don't, and I think: You can't be serious.  And I leave the page.

I don't really think of this as savvy. I think: Just how stupid would you have to be to give someone access to an account and its contacts?  Just how stupid would you actually have to be? 

Of course there's always going to be some kind of document setting out the terms and conditions, including privacy rules.  And you think the fact that they posted this comforting text offers protection why, again, exactly?

I'm rather taken aback to find that this merited a piece on Wired, but the whole thing is here.

Vector wars

“The Vector Wars” as we have started calling them have been raging for 29 years. They will, no doubt, continue to rage for years to come. The demise of FreeHand left a large hole in the market that despite Adobe’s efforts, Illustrator has not been able to fill. Though it should be mentioned that even today, in 2016, FreeHand is still available for purchase at Adobe.com and Adobe still provides technical and customer support, even if they are not updating the code (Note: FreeHand is not compatible with the most recent versions of Mac OS X). This is, we believe, to their credit and rather unprecedented in the software industry to continue to sell and provide support, if not updates for an application that was at end-of-life before Adobe acquired it and has been frozen for nine years.

Iconfinder on Affinity Designer (which I discovered because Edward Tufte was asking on Twitter about Affinity Photo) - as part of a comparison of AD, Adobe Illustrator, and Sketch.

A reader who has recently moved to Berlin came to dinner and asked why there was not much on the blog lately.  I tend to think "writers are fucked" has limited appeal as a recurring theme.

My Middle Eastern edition of CS Studio (from the days before Adobe moved to a subscription business model) has gone missing, and was last installed on a laptop that is dead, and if I were to find it I'm guessing it would not be compatible with the latest version of OS X.  The same is true of the version of Dreamweaver with which I cobbled together my website (which I can now update by wrangling with raw HTML in Textwrangler, which has, however, been rendered obsolete and replaced by a text editor that does not support my current version of OS X).

This is all stupid and boring. I gather Affinity Designer doesn't currently support RTL (right-to-left) text, so it's not the perfect replacement for my CS Studio ME.  It does support Japanese. It's available for €49, so it is, at least, affordable even for a writer who spent months fighting off eviction rather than finishing a book.  The review of Affinity Designer here.

Affinity Photo and Designer (available for Macs & Windows) here.

Google Books reviewed

After the settlement failed, Clancy told me that at Google “there was just this air let out of the balloon.” Despite eventually winning Authors Guild v. Google, and having the courts declare that displaying snippets of copyrighted books was fair use, the company all but shut down its scanning operation.
It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It’s like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It’s there. The books are there. People have been trying to build a library like this for ages—to do so, they’ve said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time—and here we’ve done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up.

James Somers at the Atlantic on Google Books, the whole thing here.

fixing it

What can you say about the movement towards writing in a regional dialect, rather than in Modern Standard Arabic? Is it very common, and has it affected the audience or marketability of the texts in question? What about logistical issues, like accurately representing a spoken dialect in the Arabic alphabet given the presence of non-standard phonemes?

This is such a meaty question! We could do a whole interview on this topic. I'll try to hit some of the highlights.

[Children's literature] is a thorny issue. Some authors want to write picture books in spoken dialect—and some have, like Sonia Nimr—but publishers tend to be very opposed, as they want to be able to sell into multiple markets and submit to prizes. Unfortunately, this even goes for dialogue. I loved Rania Amin's Screams Behind Doors, which won the Etisalat Prize for best YA novel last November, but it felt weird to have these girls speaking to each other in Modern Standard Arabic. Rania told me she'd written the dialogue in Egyptian, but the publisher “fixed” it, worried they couldn't otherwise submit to prizes and suchlike. A bit galling.

Henry Ace Knight interviews Marcia Lynx Qualey, blogger at ArabLit.org ("Arabic literature in English").  The whole interview is terrific, with many new names (to those, anyway, hitherto unfamiliar with ArabLit.org) to follow up.  The rest at Asymptote, here.

allegedly salubrious

Burger’s second novel, Die künstliche Mutter, is significantly more autobiographical than one might suppose, given its fantastic setting. In this glum but sardonic account of a specialist in German Literature and Glaciology, Burger took up the theme of his own psychosomatic affliction, his “genital migraines,” as the protagonist terms them. The book takes place in an otherworldly institution where patients, lying on beds in tunnels carved in a massif, absorbing the heat and moisture, are subjected to a battery of bizarre therapeutic measures. To devise his hero’s elaborate medical history, Burger devoured reams of psychiatric literature and even took a cure himself near Bad Gastein, in Austria, where guests rest in underground caves to enjoy the allegedly salubrious effects of the area’s high radon concentration.

Uwe Schütte (translated by Adrian Nathan West) on Hermann Burger.  This sounds amazing, I thought, and would have wondered why I had never heard of Burger if Schütte had not helpfully explained:

Hermann Burger (Menziken, 1942) is one of the truly great authors of the German language: a writer of consummate control and range, with a singular and haunting worldview. Yet it is not surprising that he fell into obscurity after his death, from an overdose of barbiturates at age forty-six. He shares this fate with many of the most august names from the peripheries of German-language literature who, never managing to escape from the ghetto of Austrian or Swiss publishing, either gave up in exhaustion, or went on writing and were forgotten nonetheless.

I have not yet renewed my membership of the Staatsbibliothek, but perhaps the Gedenkbibliothek will have Burger even if he is only on the periphery of German-language literature.

The whole thing at Asymptote, here.   (HT @timesflow RTing @a_nathanwest)

je n'interviens pas

Rodin, l’exposition du centenaire, dans les galeries nationales du Grand Palais, n’évite pas entièrement l’écueil. Chronologique et thématique, elle constitue sans doute une bonne introduction, un rappel des fondamentaux pour les néophytes. Rigoureuse d’un point de vue académique, pertinente dans sa progression, l’exposition échoue pourtant à recréer la magie qui caractérise l’œuvre rodinienne, ce parfum de scandale et de radicalité. La faute aux lieux, sans doute, ces immenses galeries froides, difficiles à investir quand on est habitué au sublime et intemporel musée Rodin, qui semble pénétré par l’âme de l’artiste.
...
Aucune mention de la réception presque traumatisante de ses premiers chefs-d’œuvre ici exposés, entre incompréhension, malaise et sidération. Ces Bourgeois de Calais qui choquèrent par leurs corps décharnés et misérables, aux antipodes des héros courageux et fiers qu’espéraient ses commanditaires de la municipalité. Ce Balzac qui fit d’abord ricaner, avec sa redingote informe et son aspect massif, presque monstrueux, sans bras ni jambe apparente. Cette Porte de l’Enfer enfin, matrice d’où il tira la plupart des grands motifs de sa carrière à venir, œuvre maudite jamais exposée de son vivant. C’est un Rodin trop propre sur lui, sans porosité, qu’on nous présente ici. Officiel.

Yann Perreau at Les Irrockuptibles on the Rodin centenary exhibition, the whole thing here.


Discussing the Kiefer-Rodin exhibition at the Musée Rodin, Perreau quotes Rodin:

“Je sais pourquoi mes dessins ont cette intensité (…) déclara Rodin avant de mourir. C’est que je n’interviens pas. Entre la nature et le papier, j’ai supprimé le talent. 

My collection of the essays of Rodin is unfortunately in storage in New Jersey.