Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 46

the score is as three-dimensional as a sculpture

Terrific interview at the Guardian (from July last year) by Paul Morley, after a year studying composition at the Royal Academy of Music, with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Christopher Austin. Morley couldn't read music when he started; Austin said there was often a tendency to tell the student that it didn't matter, but he had been adamant, if you're going to be serious about this we have to address this. Morley said once he started he became completely obsessed, realised the score was this ...

can we say this

The internet's greatest achievement is to level, somewhat, traditional divisions of status and authority. Till a few years ago, we were led by a priesthood of journalists and editors, even after the time when because of the internet, anyone and his brother were learning to communicate ideas just as well in social media. That was an insupportable structure. Having made a good living in that priesthood for 25 years, I can summon the decadence of the old order in countless ways, but the picture ...

19 May in Berlin (a friend sends this)

Musikbühne: Rufus Wainwright

Seine grandiosen Shows am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz zählen zu den Höhepunkten der Musikbühne, und sie haben eins gezeigt: Berlin liebt Rufus Wainwright, und Rufus Wainwright liebt Berlin. Während der Aufnahmen seines Albums „Release the Stars", entstanden im ehemaligen DDR-Rundfunk-Studio in Köpenick, weilte der Kanadier gar mehrere Wochen in Berlin. Nachdem er in der Volksbühne zuletzt mit großer Bandbegleitung zu erleben war, gibt es diesmal Rufus Wainwright pur: nur ...

rumour abides no contestation

Assuredly, opinion is nothing but a semblance, a caricature of essential relation, if only because it is a system organized on the basis of utilizable means, instruments of the press and pressure, the broadcast media and centers of propaganda that transform into an active power the passivity that is its essence, into a power of affirmation its neutrality, into a power of decision the sense of impotence and indecision that is opinion's relation to itself. Opinion does not judge or opine...

odds

But the debate has completely changed these numbers. The Tories aren't the money favourites any more. They and the hung Parliament have effectively changed places. That £100 would now earn £172 if the Tories win, £73 for no overall control, and £2700 for Labour. Even the Tory-favouring spread betting is suggesting 307-312 seats, ie a Tory minority of 36-26. The polls suggest a hung Parliament with Labour the biggest party, 39 seats short of a majority.

Wow! Inside the two big parties, quite a...

the audacity of Clegg

The Lib Dems are now at 30% according to recent polls - and Linux users are 12% of visitors of PP:

Rimsky-Korsakov helps Mussorgsky, oder?

Book Editor discovers a first book with tantalizing possibilities, but clearly, it's a mess. The novel it will become exists as much in Book Editor's imagination as it exists on the page. She buys it for a nominal sum. She works many hours (mostly nights and weekends), over several drafts to coax out of Writer the best book it can be. She closely line edits the final draft. Then she goes into marketing mode, making sure the book is titled, positioned, packaged and presented properly. She...

what an attractor is all about

It appears that the eigenvalue distribution is an attractor. That is, for a broad range of different input models (distributions of the random matrices), you get the same output--the same eigenvalue distribution--as the sample size becomes large. This is interesting, and it's hard to prove. (At least, it seemed hard to prove the last time I looked at it, about 20 years ago, and I'm sure that it's even harder to make advances in the field today!)

Now, to return to the news article. If the...

great minds think alike

Two Argentinean convicts who escaped from jail evaded capture after disguising themselves as sheep, it was claimed.
[Having read the Odyssey at school? But perhaps native ingenuity sufficed. Over there, ht MR]

Riders of the N8

Clegg promises to make the drivers of night buses let you get off between stops...

Consider the Obama-Clegg parallels. Obama's sensibility developed during a childhood dominated by the absence of his father and his struggles to fit into communities in Hawaii and Indonesia; Clegg's outlook was forged in the crucible of his hardscrabble origins in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, his education at Westminster School in London, and his degree in archaeology and anthropology at Robinson...