Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 57

so glad you came

Behind a glass wall there was that bank of recording equipment you see in pictures. In the main room, where we were, there were some mikes, a set of drums, a fridge and a sofa. I said that I was only 14 and he laughed. No, I wasn't, he told me. I was, I said. He pushed me on to the sofa and I repeated that I was 14, and – I was pleading now, knowing I was in trouble – I was a virgin. I was at any rate young enough to think that telling him that would give him pause. No, I wasn't, I was not...

arf

Wondering if Boulez has ever been to a dog show, I leave early in the morning with Eloise sound asleep on the back seat and a bag of pricey dog food in the trunk.

John Adams

Try not to panic if you can't recognize that noise coming from the stage as something you wrote. The players, even those who've seriously practiced their parts, are nonetheless holding on for dear life. From their vantage point inside the churning machine they very likely have no idea at all what you mean nor how what they...

some exercise of power

Ana Maria Pacheco's Some Exercise of Power will be in a show at the Mascalls Gallery in Paddock Wood, Kent from Nov 2 to Nov 19. (Paddock Wood is apparently somewhere in the neighbourhood of Tunbridge Wells.)

arga warga revisited

Courtesy Janet Reid, MOMA's Warhol Not Wanted letter on the Rejectionist.

V TH

Tony Harrison on sculpture:

There is a monument to Heine in a park outside the Frankfurt Opera which is used by heroin addicts. Heine's hair was covered in blood sprayed from the veins of junkies when their injections went wrong. Another Heine was in Corfu in the palace of Sissi, Empress of Austria, who adored the poet. At her assassination the palace was bought by the German kaiser, and his first act was to get rid of what he called that "syphilitic Jew".

the subversive scribe

On Words Without Borders, María Constanza Guzmán interviews Suzanne Jill Levine, whose The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction has recently been published by Dalkey Archive.

MCG: North American translators are subject to what Lawrence Venuti has called the "canon of fluency," i.e., to certain standards and norms of English writing. How do you negotiate market demands, translation demands, and publishing demands, in the English in which you render your works, how do you deal...

arga warga

Daniel Maia has started up Arga Warga (courtesy of Russell Hoban) to publish graphic novels and art books; his blog (in Portuguese) tells more.

lots and lots of fried ants revisited

Andrew Gelman links to this article by Gretchen Chapman and Jingjing Liu

Previous research has demonstrated that Bayesian reasoning performance is improved if uncertainty information is presented as natural frequencies rather than single-event probabilities. A questionnaire study of 342 college students replicated this effect but also found that the performance-boosting benefits of the natural frequency presentation occurred primarily for participants who scored high in numeracy. This finding ...

envy

Also courtesy MR, Cory Doctorow on a publishing experiment. Including, among other things, a limited hardback edition with a cover illustration by Randall Munroe. Form an orderly queue.

invisible hand and the economics of economics departments

Courtesy MR, article by Daniel B. Klein on The Ph.D. Circle in Academic Economics.