Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 45

inside out

Not a very appropriate fear for a ballerina, for whom dancing is, by definition, a conscious act of loss. A ballet dancer goes onstage on a given night, in a specific theater, in a specific ballet and executes, in a specific fraction of musical time a movement that is already past just as it appears. And it takes far more than 10,000 hours of practice and repetition to make this movement exquisite, worthy. A dancer's entire career consists of these moments of non-existence; they are not even ...

quo vadis

The most relevant criticism of the U.S. military's Arabic language training would not, I think, be the quantity or quality of Arabic-language students, but rather a decision made a long before the first Gulf War about what language to teach them. Rather than learning one of the various regional colloquial versions of Arabic, students were only taught Modern Standard Arabic. From a linguistic point of view, that's roughly like teaching people Latin and then sending them to duty stations in...

the subject is (no subject)

Dear ClustrMaps user,

Many thanks for being a loyal ClustrMaps user for the past year. Now that a year has elapsed since your account http://paperpools.blogspot.com was registered or archived, we are writing just to let you know that an annual automatic 'archive' of your red dots has taken place, meaning that all your 'other' (previous) red dots are safely stored in the Maps Archive, which you'll find by clicking on the Maps Archive link immediately above your large full-size world map.

you can check in any time you want...

The first press accounts of the Apple iPad have been long on emotional raves about its beauty and ease of use, but have glossed over its competitive characteristics—or rather, its lack thereof. Some have characterized the iPad as an evolution from flexible-but-complicated computers to simple, elegant appliances. But has there ever been an "appliance" with the kind of competitive control Apple now enjoys over the iPad? The iPad's DRM restrictions mean that Apple has absolute dominion over who...

O/R

In starting our new publishing company we looked hard at what Amazon costs a small publisher, and what it provides in return. We decided it wasn't worth it; that we would be better off on our own.

To sell our titles, Amazon would require a discount of 55% or even 60%, that's $11 or $12 on a $20 book. Amazon would use some of this money to discount the book to its customers -- that's what gives it its edge. If, as a publisher, you try matching their reduced price, Amazon will insist your...

Danta A. Ciampaglia at Forbes on the NYRB Classics.

Danta A. Ciampaglia at Forbes on the NYRB Classics.

the hero is a man who becomes

As a young man, Obama searched for clues to his own identity by very purposefully reading his way through WEB Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Malcolm X. He has also mentioned texts by Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, Martin Delany and a range of novelists – in particular, Toni Morrison. In fact, reading as a way of becoming is a feature of African-American autobiography, as it is of so many outsider-memoirists of any ethnicity: Malcolm X, for one, ...

giftwrap

On The Casual Optimist, a Q&A with Peter Mendelsund and Tom McCarthy about the cover for McCarthy's new book, C

DW: And were you familiar with Peter Mendelsund's design work before this book?

TMcC: When I learnt he was designing it, I looked at his other books and was very excited. It strikes you straight away how encyclopaedically visually literate he is. For example, he makes use of all these Constructivist and Bauhaus and generally high-Modernist motifs, but overhauls them and gives them a ...

An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on...

An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly on the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stone, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.

Lydia Davis, "The Outing"

in Almost No Memory, in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

« J'aimais éperdument la comtesse de ... ; j'avais vingt ...

« J'aimais éperdument la comtesse de ... ; j'avais vingt ans, et j'étais ingénu ; elle me trompa, je me fâchai, elle me quitta. J'étais ingénu, je la regrettai ; j'avais vingt ans, elle me pardonna : et comme j'avais vingt ans, que j'étais ingénu, toujours trompé, mais plus quitté, je me croyais l'amant le mieux aimé, partant le plus heureux des hommes. »

from Vivant Denon's Point de lendemain, quoted in French Wikipedia

which I have come to from reading the Collected Stories of Lydia Davis