Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 6

Publicist says I have NOT committed professional suicide

Profile in New York Magazine by Christian Lorentzen, here.

Interview with Ilana Teitelbaum on HuffPo

The Last Samurai did have a somewhat storm-tossed passage to publication.  It's possible if the Internet had flourished in something like its current form things would have gone better.  Back in the day, if Tina Brown was tight with Hillary Clinton, a party for Clinton's New York Senate victory could bump the launch party for the book back to a point when the author was no longer capable of public appearances.  Publicity involved dragging the authorial body here and there so that sentences could emerge from the authorial mouth.  And the events had to be set up by a publicist competing for scarce public space.  So if the author cracked up after the oft-deferred launch party and disappeared, if the publicist was in a miff, people who were excited about the book couldn't set up more congenial ways to talk about it. Couldn't unilaterally find venues independent of the whims of the publicist.

Anyhoo, the whole thing here.

My first time: Paris Review video interview series

The Paris Review has commissioned a series of video interviews with authors talking about their first book.  Tom Bean and Luke Poling came up to my cottage in Vermont back in March to talk to me about The Last Samurai; the video is now up here.

The Last Samurai reissue, news of the day

Over on LitHub, 7 booksellers talk about how to hand-sell The Last Samurai.  If you are not a bookseller you are probably not looking for tips on how to hand-sell The Last Samurai or, indeed, any other book, but -- what's appealing is to have something we so rarely see, a round-up of different responses to a book.  The convention of our review papers is that a book is handed over to a single reviewer; you might get different takes on a book if it is lucky enough to be reviewed in several papers, but for the most part we're invited to collude in the fiction of the magisterial assessment.  We all know, of course, that different readers may have radically different responses to a book, but we rarely see this on display in one place in the literary press.

Note: A big round of applause to Mieke Chew, the publicist at New Directions who came up with this brilliant idea.  

The whole thing here:

http://lithub.com/seven-ways-to-hand-sell-a-lost-modern-masterpiece/

Tufte in R

Amazing resource from Lukasz Piwek, here.

podcast with Scott Gosnell

Scott interviewed me a couple of weeks ago via Skype and courteously sent me the edited podcast before sending it out.  It's embarrassingly clear that one of us needs media coaching, and it isn't Scott. To the untutored ear, I seem to have challenged myself to say 'you know' as many times as possible in the shortest possible time.  (This, unfortunately, can't be fixed by judicious editing.)  Also, being somewhat unnerved by all this real-time verbal interaction, I at one point search for the German term for café au lait and the hapless mind serves up Kremkaffee, when it is, of course, Milchkaffee.

At various points in the interview I can be heard making odd little clucking noises.  I was Skyping from a neighbor's house; my neighbor has an extremely affectionate cat, Frannie, who kept wandering across the keyboard in search of attention.  Well, y'know...

The whole thing here.

PS A commenter has drawn my attention to the fact that this link only goes to an iTunes format. Scott's introductory blogpost, with links to various podcast formats, is here: http://bottlerocketscience.blogspot.com/2016/05/helen-dewitt-is-author-of-last-samurai.html

frieze questionnaire

frieze sent me a list of 10 questions - you answer as many as you want to, within 800 words.

It's probably a good sign if you could in fact have written 5000 words.  Anyway, here I am trying to be concise: http://www.frieze.com/article/questionnaire-helen-dewitt

Someone is wrong on the Internet

And by someone I don't mean just anyone, but @EdwardTufte.

Verbs = what things DO, not what they're named.Languages have too many nouns, too few verbs. So why do style guides say cut back on adverbs?

ET is, of course, a god, but...

a god, it would seem, unfamiliar with the fabulous verbs of Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Turkish, Russian and Hungarian.  (I don't suggest that this is a comprehensive list.)  ET! ET! ET! What words have passed the barrier of your, erm, fingers?

Also, I take exception to the claim that a language can have too many nouns.  Czech, I think (but memory may deceive) has a word for the space under a bed.  This is a Rachel Whiteread of a noun; we could, in fact, do with more.

back on the hamster wheel

Paul Klee's Notebooks Are Now Online. 3900 Pages of Bauhaus Teachings (1921-1931) http://goo.gl/pmEBTH   HT @openculture HT @EdwardTufte

surprises of the day

Readers of pp will have noticed that it has gone silent for long stretches.  There are too many things I can't talk about.

I realised today that I had fallen into bad habits.  Things turn up in my Twitter feed and I retweet; this is, perhaps, helpful to the people who happen to be checking Twitter at the time, but is not much use to anyone else, and, from a selfish point of view, I have no way of going back to these links later on.

There are blogs I check out every day, but the general point of going to blogs I know I like is that I know I will find the sort of thing I like.  Twitter brings more surprises.  I thought I might start putting some of the surprises on pp.   And someday, who knows, there may not be so many things I can't talk about.


How to Make Mistakes in Python, Mike Pirnat, free download from O'Reilly http://www.oreilly.com/programming/free/files/how-to-make-mistakes-in-python.pdf

A great way to lie to yourself about the quality of your code is to use   Hungarian Notation. This is where you prefix each variable namewith a little bit of text to indicate what kind of thing it’s supposed tobe. Like many terrible decisions, it can start out innocently enough:strFirstNameintYearblnSignedInfltTaxRatelstProductsdctParams

 (Have not finished the book, but this is representative of what I have read so far. Since a writer spends countless hours doing things that looked like a good idea at the time, only to be revealed as idiocy which will take countless hours to fix, it's cheering to read someone who comes clean. Pirnat comes closer, to my mind, to the way a writer thinks; it's interesting that the tone is so different from your typical Paris Review interview.)

A mouse's house may ruin experiments
Environmental factors lie behind many irreproducible rodent experiments.
Sara Reardon, Nature, HT @EdwardTufte

It’s no secret that therapies that look promising in mice rarely work in people. But too often, experimental treatments that succeed in one mouse population do not even work in other mice, suggesting that many rodent studies may be flawed from the start.

 http://www.nature.com/news/a-mouse-s-house-may-ruin-experiments-1.19335

(What's interesting, to a writer: why does the word 'rodent' make a sentence funny? '...many rodent studies may be flawed from the start.' So lovely.)

Cory Doctorow "Wealth Inequality is Even Worse in Reputation Economies" http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2016/03/cory-doctorow-wealth-inequality-is-even-worse-in-reputation-economies/   HT @dgwbirch

The story of ‘‘meritocracy’’ – a society that migrates wealth, status, and decision-making power into the hands of the most capable – is seductive. Rich people love the idea of meritocracy, because the alter­native is that their lion’s share is unfair, the product of luck, or, worse, cheating. But many of meritocracy’s losers love it, too. In the words of John Steinbeck, ‘‘Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.’’

(I revise my opinion of John Steinbeck, previously seen as worthy, now, unexpectedly, a wit.)