Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 59

the internet and everyone

Freitakt #5 ::: i + e _ v e r n i s s a g e ::: john chris jones on Friday, October 2 at 8:00pm.

Event: Freitakt #5 ::: i + e _ v e r n i s s a g e ::: john chris jones
"Take a Penny, Leave a Penny."
What: Opening
Start Time: Friday, October 2 at 8:00pm
End Time: Saturday, October 3 at 1:00am
Where: Café CK



rabbit: eats only the tasty bits

sheep: grazes only on cultivated pasture for which it has developed
tastes and habits

goat: can eat anything but refuses what is not sensible or of poor qu...

Continent Cut Off

I went to New York for a week to meet my agent, Bill Clegg, who agreed to represent me at the end of July. Also went down to Washington to see my mother, who had had surgery and was not very well.

Cheered my mother by introducing her to Dinosaur Comics. Read out captions to the homophonic homographic autantonym episode. The invalid looked brighter. Read Pi Approximation Day. 'Oh!' howled my mother. 'Oh! Oh! Oh!' My sister came in. My mother insisted that I share Dinosaur Comics with my ...

John Chris Jones

TARARTRAT is organizing an installation centering on John Chris Jones' the internet and everyone, which will kick off on, I think, October 2. John Chris has generously agreed to come to Berlin for the opening; he describes his ideas as follows:

When i read a book in public i like to make it a shared reading with the audience... i have often done this with the help of a video projector, as follows:
...i sit facing a video projection screen (or wall) with a lectern or music stand to hold the...

over there

Owen Hatherley will be talking about his new book, Militant Modernism, on Thursday the 24th, 6.30pm, at 1 Bloomsbury Street, London. The event is free but call 020 76371848 or email events@bookmarks.uk.com to reserve. Londoners take note. (I'm in New York, worse luck.)

words fail

Nothing remarkably incisive to say about all of this beyond the capsule rendition of how it works. It is an engine of professionalization, though. American job candidates, almost all of them, spend an entire year focused almost exclusively on this sort of thing – well, save for any teaching they might be doing, and frantic nighttime dissertation finishing. You enter into your first year on the market a kid who likes to read and write; you exit a fully fledged professional academic. Don't get ...

send in the robots

...there is now a first generation of cheery looking robots intended to interact with autistic children, and save on the inevitable burn-out of many teachers.

Ian Hacking, review in LRB of The Science and Fiction of Autism (Laura Schreibman) and Send in the Idiots: How we come to understand the world (Kamran Nazeer)

risk is what keeps us alive

Terrific interview of Peter Carey about his new novel, Parrot and Olivier, at Granta.

poets in need

Came across a site which makes grants to poets facing financial crisis: Poets in Need. "Assistance is given only in cases of current financial need that is in excess of and unrelated to the recipient's normal economic situation and that is the result of recent emergency..." [image error]

correction

A reader writes in response to my thoughts on the admissions criteria set out on the website for the Oriental Institute at Oxford (which, as you'll see, would appear to have suffered from a severe shortage of relevant information):

One quick fact-check-ish thing:

The written work submitted with an Oxford application generally isn't
written specially for that application - usually it's one or two
coursework essays, written as part of AS or A-level requirements.
Coursework is required at GCSE, as...

this sounds great!

Characters wander around aimlessly, do things for no reason, vanish, reappear, get arrested for unnamed crimes, and make wild, life-altering decisions for no reason. Half a paragraph is devoted to describing the smell and texture of a piece of food, but the climactic central event of the film is glossed over in a sentence. The death of the hero is not even mentioned. One sentence describes a scene he's in, the next describes people showing up at his funeral.

Josh Olson, however, was unimpressed.