Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 53

hypercorrection

Went to see The Ghost Writer the other day. The ghost writer tracks down a senior academic who seems to be linked to the former prime minister whose memoirs he is improving. Mentions the politician's name. Academic: He is whom?

i'm a real samurai

Veblen, an inveterate reader of ethnographies, noticed a historical pattern that could illuminate America's peculiar relationship with its economic institutions. Societies everywhere fall between two extremes. First, there are societies in which every person works, and no one is demeaned by his or her toil. In these societies, individuals pride themselves on their workmanship, and they exhibit a natural concern for the welfare of their entire community. As examples of such "productive"...

steel magnolias

Toward the end of January things went badly wrong with Bill Clegg, the agent who then represented me, to the point where he resigned and was adamant that he did not want to go on.

I've been trying to think what to say about this.

Most writers, I think, would be nervous of an agent who resigns on the strength of a stroppy e-mail sent during a medical crisis (my mother was in the ICU at the time); they would be especially nervous if this came after three months providing live-in care, an interrup...

tears, idle tears

Jeepers.

Came across a site, Websitegrader.com. You type in your URL and get ratings on various criteria.

Had always thought of PP as a happy-go-lucky, we'll-be-serious-if-we-ever-migrate-to-Wordpress sort of blog.

Had assumed the happy-go-lucky, we'll-be-serious-tomorrow level of the blog had contributed to my agent's failure to take me seriously as a writer. (I knew I should have gone over to Wordpress, Bill. I'm so SORRY. I didn't know so much hung in the balance. If I had spent two years w...

for David

two interviews of Lemony Snicket,

here

and

here

a simple task on a weekly basis

It's sort of funny, in a way, that he is known for piano études, because he doesn't even consider himself a piano player, really, but there it is. I think it went this way: he wrote an étude (by which I mean a short piece that focuses on a particular skill among the generalized skills putatively required for good piano playing, in order to hone this particular bit of muscle memory, or perhaps, more simply, a piece that has a monomaniacal skill-oriented focus) for a friend, enjoyed it, and...

over there

Mikhail Khodorkovsky graduated from the Mendeleev Institute in Moscow in 1986, with a degree in chemical engineering. At university he'd been deputy head of the Komsomol, in charge of making sure other students came to Party meetings and of excluding them if they had a bad attitude. Kicking someone out of the Komsomol also meant kicking them out of the university; Khodorkovsky had done that too. He was the only child of two Soviet factory workers, one of whom (his father) was Jewish. 'I reali...

shhh

There is a Romantic misconception that terror has always to be impressive, fierce and appropriately Luciferian – in other words, that terror is nothing if it is not spectacular. However, that's rarely the case in real life. As Czeslaw Milosz excellently put it in The Native Realm, "Terror is not … monumental; it is abject, it has a furtive glance, it destroys the fabric of human society and changes the relationships of millions of individuals into channels for blackmail." Terror can be medioc...

you have been warned

You will have about 45 minutes to write your essay. If your class is meeting in a lab, you may word-process your essay, formatting it with double spacing before printing it and handing it in to your instructor. You may write your essay by hand, if you prefer, and if you are meeting in a traditional classroom, you will have to write by hand. Please bring paper for writing your essay, and write on every other line, so that you may make corrections or additions when...

Swedish readers?

A friend recently told me that in Sweden children are taught the basics of plumbing and electric wiring in primary school. Is this true? Hackhanded attempts to find out more through Google have failed.