Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 50

possible worlds

While in Boston I had dinner with a friend who teaches philosophy.

My friend had told me a long time ago that she had taught her children to spell their names in Greek. She liked The Last Samurai for other reasons, but one thing that appealed to her was the presentation of the teaching of Greek to a small child.

For those who haven't read the book, the method was to start by spelling very short English words in Greek letters. So, even if you've never contemplated learning Greek, you can probabl...

¿Ana María Khan, where are you?

Happy to give an interview, but got this unenthusiastic response from the Mailer-Daemon:

This is the mail system at host mf21.mfg.siteprotect.com.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below. For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster. If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.

The mail system

akhan@complotmaga...

moral hazard revisited

Alex Tabarrok draws attention to a paper by Richard Squire in the Harvard Law Review:

If liability on a firm's contingent debt is especially likely to be triggered when the firm is insolvent, the contract that creates the debt transfers wealth from the firm's creditors to its shareholders. A firm therefore has incentive to engage in correlation-seeking — that is, to incur contingent debts that correlate, or that through asset purchases can be made to correlate, with the firm's insolvency...

Q&A of David Lipsky discussing his five-day interview...

Q&A of David Lipsky discussing his five-day interview of David Foster Wallace, Mark Athitakis' American Fiction Notes.

Another great Q&A on the Howling Fantods.

And an amused...a kind of amused attempt to separate what...

And an amused...a kind of amused attempt to separate what's good, what of the fuss has to do with the book, and what of the fuss has to do with the sort of enormous engine, um, started by Little, Brown. But which now clearly seems to be humming in and of itself. Y'know, when somebody asked somebody in New York, had they read Martin Amis's The Information, the person said, "Well, not personally."

David Foster Wallace in David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, to be relea...

You say Brief Encounter, I say WTF

From Kevin Brownlow's David Lean: A Biography:

Howard (to Lean): David, will you please explain this to me. This is a fucking awful scene.

Lean: What's fucking awful about it?

Howard: Well, they know jolly well this chap's borrowed a flat, they know exactly why she's coming back to him - why doesn't he fuck her? All this talk about the wood being damp and that sort of stuff.

Lean: Look, Trevor. Have you ever been out with a girl ... and you know that you're going to make love, whether it's ...

second violinist glut explained

There's a theme I take from this. I don't know if you use this term in the book, but I think of it to myself as avoiding fungibility, fungibility being, for a listener who might not know, the economic term for stuff that's as good as other stuff of the same kind. One scoop of this stuff is as good as another scoop. I think of this as avoiding being a scoop of humanity that can be replaced just as easily with another. I believe in the book you use the example of classical musicians, who are...

first there was the Shield of Achilles...

This week, Core77 is co-publishing a series of Significant Objects stories written about items curated by Paola Antonelli. Bid on this Significant Object, with a story by Helen DeWitt, here. Proceeds from this auction go to Girls Write Now.

If Gertrude Stein is 'the mother of us all' then Ezra Pou...

If Gertrude Stein is 'the mother of us all' then Ezra Pound is our father. A strange couple, for sure, but essential to anyone coming into poetry in the second half of the 20th century with the intention to do more than write the traditional neo-romantic lyric. For me, Pound was there first – or rather right after I had found the Beat writers, Kaufman, Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs. His importance was immediately immense, and at least twofold. Starting to read the Cantos I realized that...

over there

I got an e-mail this morning from Andrew Gelman, drawing attention to a recent post on John Updike which he thought might amuse me. Oh Andrew Andrew Andrew Andrew - it did amuse me, but since I normally look in on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science three to four times a day this was not exactly news. (Some of you may think at this point it might make sense to set up an RSS feed; no, it would not, because a) it would spoil the fun and b) the last thing I want is more ...