Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 40

Arte dello squallore, arte parassita, della mortificazion...

Arte dello squallore, arte parassita, della mortificazione. Superficie della desolazione, superficie ottusa.
Un'arte repulsiva che non rappresenta niente. Arte repressa, come i paesi dove non c'è arte. Arte che toglie, arte che schiaccia, arte livida, arte squallida, uno squallore che è solo dell'arte. Squallore delle cose senz'arte, arte che asporta, arte che rende duro l'occhio e il pensiero.
Un'arte immobile, vischiosa, sfiancata.
Grigiume, nerume che va nel giallume.
Massa di idee tritate...

damn lies and good graphs

maybe they're right that crappy chartjunk graphs are better than crappy non-chartjunk graphs. But I don't think it's appropriate to generalize to the claim that chartjunk graphs are better than good graphs.

Is chartjunk undeservedly maligned? Possibly, said a recent post on Infosthetics. Andrew Gelman offers the critique I wish I'd written (instead of, shame, shame, frivolously linking without comment). The rest here.

My next book, La Réticence (1991), was written entirely i...

My next book, La Réticence (1991), was written entirely in response to Camera. Critics had talked a lot about how light and virtuoso Camera was; I wanted to move away from such virtuosity, I wanted to break it apart. La Réticence is a difficult, demanding, tough book, it's harsh and sometimes unpolished. I wrote this book trying to keep in mind a secret guideline, a Beckettian one, the one that says: "badly seen, badly expressed," and I tried to fail to see things and to fail to say them...

Think about it. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, ...

Think about it. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks. It might be that a reporter, seeing every game that the team plays, could sense that difference over the course of the year if no records were kept, but I doubt it. Certainly the average fan, seeing perhaps a tenth of the team's games, could never gauge two performances that accurately -- in fact if you see both 15 games a year, there is a...

Camus : il a souvent éprouvé une sorte de malaise, parfoi...

Camus : il a souvent éprouvé une sorte de malaise, parfois de l'impatience, à se voir immobilisé par ses livres; non seulement à cause de l'éclat de leur succès, mais par le caractère d'achèvement qu'il travaillait à leur donner et contre lequel il se retournait, dès qu'au nom de cette perfection l'on prétendait le juger prématurément accompli. Puis, au jour de sa mort, la brusque, la décisive immobilité : elle a cessé alors de le menacer.

Maurice BLANCHOT, "Le détour vers la simplicité" (extr...

hello goodbye

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eh

More than half a century after the Civil War, the most fa...

More than half a century after the Civil War, the most famous night club in New York was a mock plantation. The bandstand was done up as a white-columned mansion, the backdrop painted with cotton bushes and slave quarters. And the racial fantasy extended well beyond décor: whites who came to Harlem to be entertained were not to be discomfited by the presence of non-entertaining Negroes. All the performers were black—or, in the case of the chorus girls, café au lait—and all the patrons white, ...

...

"Eigensinn is a word that doesn't translate very well into English," Enzensberger explains while finishing off a third cup of coffee in his flat overlooking Munich's English Gardens. "It's not selfishness. It's not obstinacy. It's not intransigence. You might say it's a sense of having your own value system. That's a quality that I find very interesting, because it's almost beyond a person's control.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger talks to Phillip Ottermann about Hammerstein, oder der Eigensinn (tr...

Samurai update

As part of an extra-credit project, Ivan Jaffe has persuaded Potbelly Sandwiches, Chicago to put The Last Samurai on display. So thanks, Ivan, for being so enterprising, and thanks, Potbelly Sandwiches, for being so helpful.

Potbelly is at 1459 W. Taylor Street, a couple of blocks from the University of Chicago; Chicago readers who don't need the book but do need a sandwich could stop by.

HarperCollins has very kindly made special arrangements to facilitate orders from readers who would like t...

fighting words

Yep, it has been scientifically proven: the accuracy of people in describing charts with 'chart junk' is no worse than for plain charts, and the recall after a 2-3 week gap was actually significantly better. In addition, people overwhelmingly preferred 'chart junk' diagrams for reading and remembering over plain charts. In all, the researchers conclude that if memorability is important, elaborate visual imagery has the potential to help fix a chart in a viewer's memory.

Infosthetics