Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 54

fixes

In a remarkably condensed early essay, How is Literature Possible? this movement is prefigured. In it, Blanchot reviews a critical work by Jean Paulhan about the opposition of what we might call traditional and rebellious literature. The idea of overthrowing cliché and the tired generic forms (that is, Tradition) has dominated our conception of literature for 150 years. Blanchot mentions Victor Hugo's rejection of rhetoric, Verlaine's denunciation of eloquence and Rimbaud's abandonment of "ol...

they arrange these things better in france

After the war Blanchot began working only as a novelist and literary critic. In 1947, Blanchot left Paris for the secluded village of Eze in the south of France, where he spent the next decade of his life. Like Sartre and other French intellectuals of the era, Blanchot avoided the academy as a means of livelihood, instead relying on his pen. [We once thought we might rely on our pen; our agent put the kaboosh on the idea.:] Importantly, from 1953 to 1968, he published regularly in Nouvelle...

parallel lines

Is this a crypto-reactionary step backwards towards humanism, sentimentalism, positivism and the whole gamut of bad isms that the vanguard 20th-century novel expended so much effort overcoming – and, moreover, a step backwards enabled by some of that vanguard's own techniques? It's hard to say.

Tom McCarthy on Toussaint in the LRB. (If all reviews were like this, reports that print journalism is moribund would be grossly exaggerated.)

mislaid in translation

Toril Moi has a splendid review in the LRB of a new translation of The Second Sex, here.

appeal

Toward the end of September my mother was rushed to hospital and found to have diverticulitis. Surgery left her with a hole in her stomach and a small bag for the collection of faeces. My stepbrother and his wife spent October with her (a colostomy is a high-maintenance installation). Reversal of the surgery was expected to take place in January; in the meantime she needed someone in the home to look after her.

My mother lives in Leisure World, a retirement community outside Washington. I s...

desperately seeking ideal speech situation

Sorry for not following anyone. I'm still trying to lear how to use this tool. JH

Yes, that JH is Jürgen Habermas.

From the indispensable Marginal Revolution. The rest here.

Avanti

2010. Time to move over to Wordpress. Yes.

But before we go, here's Cosma Shalizi on the Neyman-Pearson lemma and William James:

When last we saw the Neyman-Pearson lemma, we were looking at how to tell whether a data set x was signal or noise, assuming that we know the statistical distributions of noise (call it p) and the distribution of signals (q). There are two kinds of mistake we can make here: a false alarm, saying "signal" when x is really noise, and a miss, saying "noise" when x is...

open paprika

A bad year ends. A worse is coming.

Sorry not to have died at 46. Everything exactly the way I thought it would be.

One funny thing. When I wrote The Seventh Samurai, to give it its correct title, I imagined that a man might be driven to despair by all the ugliness he had seen and want to see some unprompted dazzling act of goodness. I think this may not have been right. What I find is that if you deal with bad people for long enough you treasure even trifling acts of courtesy. If I go to ...

Writing & That Clinking Clanking Sound

Great piece by Michael Greenberg on the Electric Literature blog.

electric literature

Scott Lindenbaum (my partner at EL) and I worked on The Brooklyn Review, a literary magazine published out of the MFA program at Brooklyn College. One day I spoke to a distributor who told me only 40 independent bookstores in the US carried literary magazines. "That can't be true," I said, "every store I go to carries them." "Where do you live?" he asked. "Brooklyn." "12 of them are in New York," he said.

Interview of Andy Hunter of Electric Literature at The Rejectionist.