Book Group: Helen DeWitt's "The Last Samurai" - Discussion Thread

Hello :-)

It's a four week schedule starting today with subsequent sections starting on consecutive Sundays.

The sections are as follows:

US Edition

week 1: 1-98
week 2: 99-189 [from chapter titled 'i. We never get off at Sloane Square for Nebraska fried chicken']
Week 3: 191-358 [from Donald richie quote, chapter starts '20 march 1993']
Week 4: 358-end [from "i decided not to apply to Oxford to read Classics at the age of 11"]

UK Edition

Week 1: 1-91
Week 2: 92-177
Week 3: 177-327
Week 4: 327- end

This seems a good schedule because we have some light weeks to start off with which will make it possible for anyone who wants to join in a little later to catch up with the rest of us.

Enjoy and start the discussion!

Are we discussing at the beginning if the week as though we've completed the section, or are we just assuming that we all will had completed the section by the beginning of the next week and discussing as we go?

i think we just discuss as we read, i'm not sure actually. can't really work it out myself :/

Reckon post as you read is the best way. If you haven't read it, it might be worth avoiding the thread to avoid spoiler plot/theme/style developments, and then you can join in as and when you feel like it? (never done anything like this before, so just guessing how it might go here)

sounds about right to me. i can't imagine there will be many spoilers in this really. not in the first two weeks anyway.

That must be the way to do it - the most enthusiastic readers will be pushing up against the reasonably leisurely timescale quite soon, and we need to let them start venting lest they race away without us and we get no discussion at all.

ok, so:

Prologue

How Sibylla’s father met her mother, and how he went to a second-rate theological school (thus blowing his previous admission to Harvard) at his Methodist minister father’s behest to ‘give the other side a chance’.

Her father was an atheist and her mother was a pianist who wasn’t allowed to be a musician by her exacting Viennese father.

i —Let’s make bamboo spears! Let’s kill all the bandits!
—You can’t.
—That’s impossible.

[Summary of The Seven Samurai]

1 Do Samurai Speak Penguin Japanese?

The narrator, Sibylla, is writing the story of how she came to leave academia at the age of 23, take a data-entry job, and give birth to a son, L (Ludo, Ludoviticus), whose already evident genius seems to be her reason for writing for posterity.

While she re-types old magazine articles L learns words on flash cards, reads books while asking his mother to explain words he doesn’t know, and re-watches The Seven Samurai, which his mother hopes will supply him with a father figure, while he reads the subtitles. He is anxious to learn the syllabaries for Japanese and to learn Greek; his mother makes a deal with him to read a number of other books, including the Odyssey (in English), before she will start.

On a day in 1986 that Sibylla is nudged into going to a party as a favor to someone at her work (a publisher), she buys Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony and reads it rapturously, then talks everyone’s ear off at the party about it. Eventually the famous writer everyone had expected shows up, Liberace (no not the), and eventually Sibylla and Liberace make it back to his place and despite her contempt for him she eventually moves in on him and sleeps with him to shut him up. (She has never, as of the time of writing, told him about Ludo.)

Interlude

Sibylla continues the story of her family: how her mother stood up to her grandfather and went to the Julliard to demand an audition, somewhat embarrassed herself but impressed the auditor enough to be given advice for how to practice until she was ready for a real audition, and then returned home to practice an annoying exercise for months until she eventually took up practicing in Sibylla’s father’s motel (the property he had bought under advice from the man he beat at pool in the prologue).

i'm not sure what i think about sibylla. she's an extremely well-observed character—i feel like i've met plenty of people (in and around academia!) like her before, and now surely read blogs by sibyllas with that same kind of combination of fascination with intellectual minutiae; wild swings in interest and attention; contempt for others (check the charge of people making 'logical fallacies', always a slightly suspect sign); and conception of the purity of her love for what populates her intellectual world.

besides translation, the proper use and development of talent is obviously a theme. it's been a long time since i've seen 'the seven samurai', so apart from the bits on it in the story i don't know, but it does seem as if apart from the expressed purpose of giving L. some male role models (ha), there's some connection between the talents of the figures in the story (sibylla's father and mother, her, L, others) and the way the samurai act about fighting and their swordsmanship. it would seem that sibylla sort of fancies herself as more noble or purely devoted to… whatever, to language or translation or marvelous things, because she chose to leave oxford and not 'contribute to human knowledge'. but in terms of the story it's not clear what that means for her own talent. it might have been developed further or used to some benefit before she had L, but the story suggests that she was just doing office work and amusing herself in her spare time. after she has L, and scraping out a living as a freelance data-entrant (after being downsized out of the secretary's job at the publisher?), it seems unlikely that she's putting much into developing or using her talent, EXCEPT in raising her little genius. obviously a lot of that comes from him, but because of her family history with talented people's wasted talents, we might suspect that she sees this as her opportunity to make what she can of hers.

she seems like a little bit of a pseud.

"after she has L, and scraping out a living as a freelance data-entrant (after being downsized out of the secretary's job at the publisher?"

i assumed this was a single-mother issue ... ?

(also ludo is reading the odyssey in greek, surely? he's asking about words and copying them onto index cards. also reading bits of the bible in hebrew.)

i started this properly this morning and got to the end of the first chunk without really wanting to stop, but had to go to work and do some other things. it's pretty good! compulsive! better than the last three things i read!

but also it's kind of, i don't know ... if it manages to be any larger than it already is i'll be surprised. (action of the novel so far = a woman watches a movie with her kid)

how seriously do we take sibylla's notion about how language in books ought to work? i mean - is that the plan of the novel we're reading, or is that novel a gesture towards it, or is it a passing idea which merely demonstrates some similarity with the novel we happen to be reading?

also i do not like the names - characters called sibyl and ludo make the part of my brain that knows what these words mean clam up defensively and refuse to actually deal with that sort of thing and whatever relevance it might hold

just finished the prologue, some initial observations:

struck me as interesting the way the narrator's grandfather is referenced: - in fact the first sentence makes it quite explicit, right? "my father's father," not "my grandfather." and in the first few pages the agency of the grandfather is seemingly removed - 'something' speaks through him, 'the beautiful voice' - what is the point of the metonymy? is it meant to emphasize the influence the grandfather has over the father - that he sees his father as some kind of divinity, perhaps, until the grandfather's advice strands him at the theological college with no future. at that point in the narrative, he reverts back to being a grandfather.

also find the repetition of the first few pages interesting - almost like a retelling of the three little pigs - and the progression from head -> dean -> deputy dean. and the parallelism between the narrator's father's story and buddy's. also the irony that his biggest influence during theological school is a would-be rabbi from the synagogue.

also, can't help but spitball at the significance of the seven samurai review inserted before the first chapter - number crunching & some slight stretching generates a tenuous link between those who have given up their dreams (buddy & his 2 sisters/1 brother) and those who haven't (the narrator's father, mother, and presumably herself) - similar to the three samurai left after the attack - and gives the title of the book more...foreshadowing power.

well, I suppose I should read more before I spout off through the ass. quick read so far, think the 140-ish page a week schedule is actually quite quite doable.

i'll be starting the thread for smartasses who have already finished it by the end of the week, probably

thom, i'm not sure about her job because i didn't notice any mention of the switch. her job with the publisher was as a secretary, but then she says they'd received word that they'd been acquired and everyone's jobs were safe, which they assumed meant most people would be let go. i assumed she was working for someone else now. but needing a different job because of L makes sense.

i sort of think that all the names are sibylla's doing, including hers and ludo's—look at how habitually she turns other people into translations of renowned people (liberace, lord leighton). so if they Mean Something they mean it mainly through the lens of her character.

i've guessed that to the extent that we're supposed to take her ideas about language seriously, she herself doesn't think they're all that choate, or that the book she's writing demonstrates the kind of thing she was imagining during the party. it seems as if maybe she could think ludo is the one who will be able to write a book fulfilling her vision.

according to the plan ludo must have been reading the odyssey in translation but he gets done with his assignment so fast, or else he breaks down sibylla's resistance to teaching him any greek before he's actually at that point, that it seems like soon he must be reading it in greek.

(speaking of which, the only greek i have comes from reading epictetus with a teacher a couple summers ago. but since i learned 'and' = 'kai', i could make out its appearance in the numeric prefixes when ludo was running through the '-syllabic' sequence, that was pretty cool.)

dayo, doesn't sibylla's mother sort of trail off from practicing? or would you count her opposition to her father as the main thing?

ah damn I didn't look at ILX again after ledge worked out his reading at 120 pgs a week. And this i what i have read today. But I'll read up to 198pp on Sunday.

A few bits and bobs:

- I thought her job was data entry because its about 7 quid an hour right? Secretaries get a much better rate. lol.

- Terrific posts so far: the development of talent as a theme is very well put. V striking how the narrator talks of Mozart's sister who got the exact same education but got nowhere with her music as 'proof' that women were no good at it. The scenes of L reading/learning on public transport remind me of a time when I was observing a father, on a Sunday, reading to his child about human biology, but the child was getting quite upset and not in the mood and making a scene on the train. V bizarre thing I would forget until a time like this!

- But in terms of using Seven Samurai as nurturing device I thought it was not only about providing a male model but also a model of how a group interact and work together on a goal, of providing a model of wider social interaction. L does not seem to have friends, and spends all his time with mother. (what his age? Love this...thought it quite er, Proustian how I couldn't work out whether he was 3 or 6 or a nearly fully formed adult until he would dialogue and it would be all choppy bits of 'I read THIS (a), then THIS (b), then THIS (c), etc. and again the scenes of the child and mother reading, talking, arguing all went back to The Way by Swann's)

- Great bits of high/low cult: Liberace (no not the...yeah right!) and Schoenberg inhabiting the same world (she thought of Schoenberg as a genius, but she slept with Liberace!).

- The audition scene was wonderful.

- A couple more things but as those might be 20 pages ahead I'll stop and start again next week.

- to the add to the way its written: the shifts from normal punctuation to no punctuation. Must go back for a 2nd look.

Not sure if Sibylla gets into this yet, but so far as I can tell this

model of how a group interact and work together on a goal

is a big part of it. Part of the concern about a lack of strong role models for Sibylla is that without a rigid code of honour or structure for L's intellect to be contained by or guided by, he could end up an amoral genius - there's a bit about throwing people out of planes in Argentina or something? Need to find time to scan over this section again. The importance of moral and aesthetic distinction is big for Sibylla, and how meaning is ascribed to actions. (There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation.) (And also, the importance of social niceties, re: how she ends up sleeping with Liberace.)

Beauty for its own sake, genius for its own sake, etc. etc. is embarrassing or gauche or whatever - "his fault was not a lack of skill: it is the faultlessness of his skill which makes the paintings embarrassing to watch). Ugh rain on my computer, more thoughts later.

Starting the section properly from the beginning. This is more interesting than constitutional law anyhow.

Also, keep an eye on that hypothetical game that Sibylla's father plays - the idea of chance and fate and whether your options are ever truly closed is something that weighs on Sibylla heavily over the course of the novel.

I feel strangely inarticulate about a book I've spent so much time thinking about.

If I had not read Roemer, not dropped out, never have met Liberace, and the world would be short a -

This plays out the way her father's hotel scheme does. Ludo in some senses is the redemptive opportunity for S's supposedly squandered brilliance. Tied in some ways to her desire to (if unable to fulfill her genius due to the institutionalized structures of knowledge creation) midwife brilliance..."Rilke was the secretary of Rodin", etc.

xyzzzz, i don't know if you caught this, but when sibylla's talking about mozart's sister she's mentioning someone's theory, which she shoots down in a way that parallels her take on the homer scholar.

the form of the prose is interesting, when it's part of sibylla's story in the process of its being written out, it seems writerly, but then when it's broken apart by her conversations with ludo, everything seems as if it's all on the same plane and we're just switching back and forth between fixed contexts. particularly in the way the writing is suspended mid-sentence and then resumed. it seems there's something very phenomenologically apt about that—fits the way book people interact with books-and-the-world.

a bit of the no-punctuation seems to my eye to be a very british suppression of commas during short lists, but it's amplified by a bit of roughness in the contours of the sentences when sibylla is at her most imaginative / rapturous about some idea.

i would like to understand better what to make of the party scene and subsequent conception scene. i think it goes well beyond social niceties. sibylla finds it all too easy to just put up a front (far more than a front), given how highly she rates her own rationality and faults the stupidity of others. ('bandits' she can't kill?)

Riding on the Circle Line is anoter fairly obvious metaphor, I suppose, but an apt one. Day follows day, and they go round and round, Iterations and repetition are key, perhaps. The Seven Samurai is watched again and again, S's mother plays Chopin's Revolutionary Étude for the 63rd time. Kambei and Katsushiro's repeated test with the stick and the door will crop up more than once.

Yeah, j, it is more than social niceties. That sort of ambivalence about "what is done" or "what is expected" vs "what is rational" or "what Sibylla believes" is something central o her outlook? I feel like the certainty of her aesthetic and moral beliefs make it easy to live in her headspace early in the book. It wasn't until the second time I read it that it struck me how flawed and damaged a character she is - I'm still not sure if she's presented to us as someone to admire or not.

Love love love the touch of her father putting the Origin of Species in every drawer of his motels.

sibylla herself exhibits some of the repetitiveness that we see much more clearly in ludo since he's an enthusiastic genius right at the stage of his learning where most of it is rote—like when she's describing beautiful languages and expresses her affection for them by listing out the grammatical cases, as if she were in a school exercise. we're not given much evidence of it in her back-story up to oxford, but that kind of formal assiduousness about the basic facts surely was a core part of her education (self-imposed or otherwise), which should mean that her abandonment of research at oxford was in serious tension with some of her most important convictions.

alex, one nice thing about the mother story is that her practice is shown after the audition to have been completely pointless or harmful—barely enough to get her foot in the door. and the teacher responds by giving her: a different and even less satisfying form of repetitive practice.

Yes! And she keeps it up well into Sibylla's teenage years.

(Seriously I can't wait until we get to the back half of the book, because if y'all have already cottoned on to this stuff there are a HEAP of dysfunctional geniuses to dig your teeth into once we get there. The book is basically a perpetual search for someone not permanently crippled by their brain.)

My favourite line in the book is "There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom." and this is also pretty central to Sibylla, imo. Her abandonment of research at Oxford is in part grounded in a disdain that she's expected to hew to pointless structures that limit her personal exploration.

Also, the "something looked through my grandfather's eyes" is a structure used on both sides of the family. "It's only fair to give the other side a chance" and ""Being an accountant, it's not the end of the world." are the same thing. Compromising oneself or taking the easy way out intellectually are pretty much the only cardinal sins in Sibylla's world. That "something" might be the same thing as the "Alien" that taunts Sibylla with her insecurities about motherhood. "It's only fair to give the other side a chance" it says - this time referring to Liberace and letting Ludo meet him, If L is a samurai, what is he being trained for? Is he being trained to meet Liberace? To make his way in the world?

(Also, her grandfather the engineering professor is another example of the tension between bureaucracy/institutions and true knowledge. Totally forgot about him. DeWitt actually wrote a piece for the Yale review of books that expounds her thoughts on this further - http://helendewitt.com/dewitt/ybr.html)

I read the 91 pages in one go - quite unusual for me, and I could've kept going so it definitely passes the readability test. Helped possibly by there being lots of skimmable/skippable passages - nothing on earth is going to get me interested in things greek I'm afraid.

The argentine throwing-people-from-helicopters bit really jarred with me, like it was half-a-sentence thrown in a propos of nothing, just to be provocative, and I was quite annoyed. Then it reappeared a page further on and I thought 'ah, there was a point after all', but of course it hasn't been touched on since and I can't remember what on earth I thought the point might have been. It doesn't strike me as a particularly rational episode, though at least it isn't the holocaust - I do hope the book isn't heading there.

i haven't read the discussion yet but i'm not far from this week's end point. the fact that i'm annoyed by certain aspects of it but enjoying it very much overall bodes well for some interesting discussion. i don't think i've read anything like it before though - it's quite a unique book!

Enjoying a lot, & I prob will end up racing ahead - want to finish before I go away next Tuesday - if you do start a 'smart-arse early finishers' thread, Thomp, I'll be in.

Not sure what I've got to add at this point. It's very good on what the world does to talent and capacity in its various forms - what massive potential becomes when circumstance steps in; horror of making choices in a world of fluid & unlimited possibility; complementary problem of that becoming amorphous dilettantism. That 'what is all this - the prodigy's education, Sibylla's own accumulation of languages - for?' question is the killer. (I Samuel is in there. He knew what to do - God told him.) Most general form - how do people end up what they and where they are?

S knocks the Julliard guy's exercises for her mother, in favour of 'thought' (is too much thought a problem here? (see JS Mill needing Wordsworth to open him up from child prodigy dryness iirc)). How admirable is her distaste for the hard boring work - the exercises, scholarly slog of reading German monographs etc?

In terms of style, manages the breaks and jumps of the Sibylla passages faultlessly, but am almost more impressed by the drive & momentum of the two family narratives - super readable.

i'm curious about sibylla's attitude toward diligence, so i thought i'd go through the books she mentions to see if they have any particular bearing on her character, or if they show some sort of pattern of omission. (that question comes up anyway because of how heterodox her reading is, and because of her character and the story and such, but i was struck by seeing mention of the philosopher michael dummett's book of collected essays, 'truth and other enigmas', and then just at the beginning of the next section we have yet to read, the philosopher alberto coffa's 'the semantic tradition from kant to carnap', a history covering much-neglected material that belongs to the prehistory of the analytic philosophy that runs from frege through russell and wittgenstein to carnap—neither of which is anything less than scrupulously diligent. there's also the interesting biographical bit connected with dummett, whose book frege: philosophy of language came with a preface apologizing for the delay in completing the book because dummett took time off to engage in anti-racist political activity.)

the first thing i went looking for was an electronic copy of sibylla's fateful aristarchs athetesen in der homerkritik. i couldn't find it but this contemporaneous review is hilarious in comparison with the way sibylla rejects what she barely makes out of the german. (i would like to see a later take on the same scholarly issue, because sibylla aside those things have their ways of being utterly reversed by diligent, sober, competent, reasonable etc. etc. decades later.)

what she says about roemer is pretty telling vis a vis the distribution of talent, anxieties and resentments over genius and such:

'Now it is patently, blatantly obvious that this is insane. If you are going to shuffle all the names around so that one person is always the genius, this means that you have decided not to believe your source whenever it says someone else said something good or the genius said something bad—but the source is your only reason for thinking the genius was a genius in the first place. Anyone who had stopped to think for two seconds would have seen the problem, but Roemer had managed to write an entire scholarly treatise without thinking for two seconds.'

one of her main beefs here: 'one person is always the genius'.

some bits and pieces:

sidis the child prodigy.

lord leighton's greek girls playing at ball and syracusan bride.

ukiyo-e prints by utamaro.

the rosetta stone, which sibylla says she believes was 'originally a rather pompous thing to erect' that was nevertheless a gift to posterity (to which she happens to be writing her story). i had never read the inscription before. it sounds very… administrative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hOKcdZJJFU

chopin's revolutionary etude - note questions of technique, worldly significance.

Beauty for its own sake, genius for its own sake, etc. etc. is embarrassing or gauche or whatever - "his fault was not a lack of skill: it is the faultlessness of his skill which makes the paintings embarrassing to watch)

Don't see this so much as 'beauty for its own sake' as the dominance of technique - all surface, no feeling. Exquisite prose littered with logical fallacies. This could tie in with her mother's ultimately unsuccessful practicing regime, all technique (loose wrists!), no 'thought'. But that's getting into notions of creativity, which is not the direction the book seems to be going in.

Spotted a nice pun - 'ought implies cant' - although it's somewhat thrown away, dismissed as something that Liberace believes.

Today I'm marvelling at how self-obsessed the narrator is. Except for the parents, who are basically proxy narrators in their sections, we get barely a description of what any character looks like or does, other than what they say and (occasionally) what their voices sound like. Roemer is as real to me as Ludo. The exceptions are the quite minor characters who act as agents of change - Buddy, the Juillard tutor, the pool-playing guy. Liberace to an extent, but I feel only because she can't avoid doing so as cause for her own reactions. It's a bit odd.

Is that self-obsession? It's more like an unhealthy reliance on pure thought - she's thinking and arguing and picking holes in what people say - all verbal/cerebral. Is she not a bit disconnected from herself? Like surely you're meant to be a bit 'o rly' at her account of how and why she sleeps with Liberace.

That's probably a better way of putting it, yes. Ideally you'd want your kid to be a greater physical presence to you than a wailing voice who occasionally needs to be dumped upstairs.

well he's more than a wailing voice, he's a questioning, information devouring, knowledge vampire, who might well leave little time/effort left for a proper mother/son relationship.

"knowledge vampire"

is the best thing to come out of this thread so far.

just got to page 50 - so far I'm struck by how...quantitative the writing has been. it picks up on S's father's calculation of odds and runs with it - right, breaking down everything into accountable numbers and categories - from the description of the japanese language, to teaching L how to calculate sums, to the very precise portioning of her day - all of it is very calculative.

I feel that there's a subtle critique of the Age of Enlightenment and all that it brought - blind adherence to Reason, already sent up in the description of the German book that S reads at Oxford which makes her abandon her studies. perhaps she's saying that it's all a mask - rationality used to justify irrational human desires? that perhaps the pursuit of Reason is akin to picking a scab - something you can't help but do but you know will lead you to more pain in the future.

and of course I can't help but notice that L is getting a very, very classical education in learning Hebrew, Greek, reading the Odyssey.

and as touched upon upthread, the transmission of knowledge, how much of it springs a priori and how much of its helped along by the teacher - it does seem S has a lot of trouble keeping the reins on L, L is certainly outpacing her so far. a contrast to the relationship between S's father and grandfather, the dictums handed out...almost without reason...from a higher authority, backed only by the seniority of the source.

interesting to see how the samurai/Japanese part plays out - the obvious prediction is that the Eastern tradition will be set up as a counterpoint to the Western tradition of Enlightenment and Rationality, hope DeWitt will spin something more rational out of this.

err, the very last rational should be 'interesting'

oh, and S's occupation - a typist who transcribes articles and such - immediately brings to mind flaubert's bouvard et pecuchet, the two most famous copy clerks in the history of literature. the transmission of knowledge - whether it is received calmly and without complaint or introspection, or received critically and with an untrusting eye - is obviously a big theme here.

Ok, I'm going to post my thoughts before reading the thread first, and then have a look through. I suppose the first thing to say is that it's very enjoyable. I'd read the first couple of chapters when I got and whizzed through them.

The first chapter reminded me a lot of Peter de Vries - the compressed humour describing an intelligent assimilation into the American middle-classes, plus of course the strong element that religion (and love) plays the process. The epigrammatic wit is also similar - 'a clever man so rarely needs to think'.

One of the things, I think, makes the structural games of the following chapters so enjoyable is that they're predicated not on aesthetic whim (not that there's anything wrong with that) but on the distractions of a child, the necessity for work, the boringness of work, all things that are kin to all of us I'd imagine (well, not necessarily the child bit - but boredom, distractions, necessity etc).

Her voice has that catholic approach to knowledge which I associate with some American writers, Douglas Hofstadter in Godel, Escher, Bach for intance. The high and the low is inseperable.

The general tone is also totally unpompous, which makes it an utter pleasure to read. Elements like fate and chance, which are often dealt with maundering seriousness are dealt with deftly and playfully. And, hey, I learnt stuff too. Great.

Ok, now I'm going to read through the thread, see what's what.

the compressed humour describing an intelligent assimilation into the American middle-classes

This in itself was too compressed. What I meant to say was perhaps 'compressed humour describing a relucant, but nevertheless articulate assimilation into the... not middle I don't think... clerical? business classes?

I felt the seduction scene was deliberately arch, and it's amusing the way she's 'bored' into sleeping with him.

when she's describing beautiful languages and expresses her affection for them by listing out the grammatical cases

yo ppl do this

this is proving a great book to pester my girlfriend about.

'what is this word' 'ganglion' 'how does gamma alpha gamma gamma make gang' 'two gammas together make an ng' 'oh'

'what even is a ganglion in greek anyway' 'go away'

-

an utter pleasure to read

i totally concur with this, i am going to get into work late because i decided to find time to finish part two today. i am enjoying this more than any of the other ten books i am currently reading and it is not even close.

-

does anyone want to hazard a guess who liberace and lord leighton are figures for?

i'm curious about sibylla's attitude toward diligence, so i thought i'd go through the books she mentions to see if they have any particular bearing on her character, or if they show some sort of pattern of omission. (...)

doesn't she also mention reading and rereading leave it to psmith?

Yeah, got the impression that was her comfort book. (again, one of the iterations - says she reads it something like 23 times, like the Revolutionary Etude and the Chopin's Prelude 23.)

when she's describing beautiful languages and expresses her affection for them by listing out the grammatical cases

yo ppl do this

i'm well aware! just saying, it marks her as a certain kind of person. (also, she's a linguist/classicist.)

re comfort books, notice that she also derives comfort from gesenius' hebrew grammar. to the point, apparently, that it helps stave off suicidal thoughts (better than anything you could get from a 'help line'). i'm not sure how to take the detail she focuses on—'excepting the phoenician' or somewhat. gives the impression of a kind of aestheticized attitude toward the things rather than the scholarly/scientific one it seems to aim at.

Is "Penguin English" a real term? Did the character mean "pidgin"?

I think it's her coinage, but she means the stiff, slightly fussy kind of English common in old Penguin Classics translations, esp from the 50s and 60s. (read a lot of these while self-educating as a teen, so Penguin English made me laugh).

OK, that's possible.

The book seems to get quite a bit more problematic in the next section. I'm still enjoying it in spite of the face that i don't like the characters one bit.

I'm reminded, somewhat, of Richard Powers whose books are very clever and entertaining but who presents you with a lot of people who are hard to love or even like. Stil, I do really like his books in spite of my misgivings.

I generally find child prodigies v. annoying. I had forgotten that.

haha same. this is what had put me off the book in the past (but i'm enjoying it despite that)

The book seems to get quite a bit more problematic in the next section. I'm still enjoying it in spite of the face that i don't like the characters one bit.

i only really liked them in 2nd half of the book, which is a lot more tender and less rigid

that's good to hear, ta.

yeah i've just started that part

Ok, wrote some more notes on the way to work -

child as accumulation of frustrated careers of forebears?

Fragments/uncompleted works symbolic of uncompleted thwarted careers (Aaron and Moses - Schoenberg's artistic plan frustrated by commercial requirements in the US). (Fragments also see 'one task a day' stuff of Yo Yo Ma). Like Browning? The attempt to achieve something achieves spiritually the same as the greatest artists no matter your lack of skill? ("Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,or what's a heaven for?")

Sybilla often wanting to say one thing but realising she must say another because it's polite - a learning process of its own (and often the problem that high intellectual acheivers have? socialising in an equal way with others?). Still, doesn't come naturally.

That said, I find her sympathetic and funny. Engaged with the difficult business of bringing up a child and uncomplacent about him growing up normally (ie, not as the sort of person who could throw someone into the sea if told to) without instruction.

i still haven't read on to next week's section, where i expect things to open up a bit in respect of both language-learning and self-other relations, but i was reflecting the other day on how much or whether this book is very 'psychological', and it occurred to me:

the use of extremely elementary greek in the '-syllabic' sequence serves to set up interiors/exteriors between the characters and between the characters and reader in a quite particular way. when it involves the occurrence of signs on the page that the reader can't even make sense of, he's likely to feel just shut out, and in that sense alienated from the characters for whom the words are supposed to be meaningful. but when the greek is written out in latin script, the reader could at least sound it out; and since in the '-syllabic' sequence, at least, it follows a pattern the reader can use to reconstruct what the sounds mean, it's within the reader's grasp to translate and then understand what's being said. but, knowing well enough what's being said without having undertaken to translate it, the reader will probably also recognize how little understanding it in the original will help him understand about the people who understand it 'untranslated'; nevertheless, the barrier is still there.

at this stage ludo can act as an intermediary between the reader and sibylla since we're closer to his stage of (foreign) language-learning than sibylla's.

sibylla's relationship to ludo is different from ours partly because of the way, in the '-syllabic' scene, she's able to ignore him. we might have to ignore something that is closer, to us, to 'noise'; she's ignoring something that makes sense; it's just not related to what she needs to be doing right then.

(i suppose this is connected in a pretty straightforward way to the kinds of stuff about dewitt in that LRB article about 'your name here' and her post-'samurai' existence: the amount of alienation between people effected by failures to understand one another's language, versus the relative ease with which that alienation could be removed with just a little bit of work.)

Feel like I should post -something- before I start the next session. You've all seen and said way more than I'm able to though. It took me longer to read this thread than to read the assigned section, hah.

I am curious about one bit of reference: my copy said Boris Sidis was a wunderchild that turned out not so great etc -- but surely that was his son William James Sidis. Was this simply an error that was changed in other editions? (I see J. upthread mentioning him without commenting on it, hence my suspicion)
I was trying to figure out if it was intentional, and if so, what it means. I don't know enough about most of the language stuff etc in the book to know if there's a lot of bluffing on Sibylla's part. I assumed there wasn't until I saw that reference.

Ennihoo, I've enjoyed it moderately well so far. Liked the stuff about "Something" looking out of the father etc. Funny that Ratsey mentions de Vries, as the Chopin references made me think of his "The Blood of the Lamb". But that didn't feel relevant; certainly just a product of me having read that recently.
Not sure I trust the telling of the evening with Liberace -- on the one hand the story is sort of pathetic, so perhaps that's a reason to believe it, but then I can't help but think Sibylla'd rather convince us that it was -her choice-, even if it's a silly one, than to admit she'd been wooed by that offputting fellow. I was wondering why she went home with him in the first place.
There was one scene that I found tedious, but since it's been a week already, I've managed to forget whatever it was.

Hrm, probably should've started writing this at home, so I could look up whatever I've underlined etc, but I don't think there was anything not mentioned already. Think there was something near the beginning that made me think "honor" would be a major theme. Believe it was the dad who went on about "giving the other side a fair chance" etc. Fits well with the samurai as well.

Ideally you'd want your kid to be a greater physical presence to you than a wailing voice who occasionally needs to be dumped upstairs.

― Ismael Klata, Tuesday, 7 September 2010 12:49 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well he's more than a wailing voice, he's a questioning, information devouring, knowledge vampire, who might well leave little time/effort left for a proper mother/son relationship.

― ledge, Tuesday, 7 September 2010 13:07 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I think I've changed my mind, or at least my attitude. The clues are in the chapter headings in this section: 'We never get off at Sloane Square for Nebraska fried Chicken', 'We never get off at Embankment for McDonalds', 'We never go anywhere', 'We never do anything'. Ludo is perhaps not entirely happy or fulfilled in his savant enterprise. Those clues only barely filtered through my consciousness though, and during the Circle line chapters I was starting to find the interruption-heavy narrative schtick somewhat irritating. But then I read the Yamamoto chapter, and it was devastating. Not Yamamoto's story itself, which didn't quite ring true (specifically the part where the kid asks him to save him - if you were trying to escape your village under fear of death, would you be persuaded to hang around and beat a large drum as loudly as possible?), but the concert. Still not entirely sure what Yamamoto's (or Sibylla's) aesthetic thesis is, let alone whether I agree with it, but the concert sounded extraordinary (admittedly a two minute description can't exactly give a true impression of sitting through all ~10 hours of it), and I was almost moved to tears merely by Sibylla's account of being moved to tears by it. And then we find that Ludo is missing, and it was an OMG moment. I felt complicit for having forgotten about him while just reading about the concert! The poor kid! And when she gets home and finds him, her first and only thought is not of apologising but of chastising. In short, difficult as it must be for her, I now think Sibylla is being a bad mother.

I found the whole Yanamoto interview slightly absurd. That's not how interviews go, is it?

I'm not actually sure where I am in relation to where we're supposed to be, but I think we're gradually seeing a reversal of roles between Ludo and the mother, where the amount of learning Ludo has exceeds Sybilla's. Increasingly concerns about integrating knowledge into life (whether that's school or the emotional relations that to a certain extent Sybilla's approach was intended to compensate for) seem to complicate their relationship and both their approach to work and intellectual matter.

Ludo's learning becomes increasingly targeted at finding out who his father is, throwing knowledge at the absence.

And yes, the whole Yanamoto thing, of fragments (of a life, of art, unfinished business) gesturing beyond the whole...

What was that moment (haven't got the copy with me) where she talks, during his performance, about the multiplicity of possibility that the fragments represented, but then how the single performances represented the one chance at getting the whole right. That seems to fit in generally with what's happening (the CCTV cameras on the underground showing alternate realities for instance).

perhaps this is partly investigating the idea that Sibylla possibly feels total knowledge can thwart these mutually exclusive possibilities, can bind all fragments in a totality, which she realises they can't. Ugh, overthinking this, and work is getting in the way, how dare it. Then there is the seven role models rather than one.

That's not how interviews go, is it?

maybe it is if the interviewee is a headstrong ex-child prodigy with a bee in his bonnet (and, perhaps, shades of autistic spectrum disorder).

It was more the questions in fact. But yes, I take your point. Anyway, I'm still enjoying it very much, finding it very readable.

putting this here for future thought:

"I began imagine L seeing all kinds of things in the film which would not be incompatible with throwing a person from a plane on orders from a third party"

p. 128 in my edition

made me think of the discussion upthread about how 'out of place' the parts with the plane pushers seemed. will return to investigate

I'm still enjoying the reading, but Sibylla is really annoying me now. Ludo, to his credit, does appear to have the capacity for other interests if only he were allowed to get out and try them. But she's stuck and has stuck him in an ur-Canon of received culture-that-is-good, of Greek epics and Kurosawa and Bach - basically the things that posh people of my acquaintance like to quote at each other to show how learned they are. It's all very far from pool sharking and motels, and only the odd glimpse of an Ohio Fried Chicken or idiot members of the public hint at any other kind of life beyond.

Wd agree that the knowledge gathering is increasingly looking like a pathological response to an absence (you may know everything as long as you do not ask about one thing - a slightly fairy tale motif - you will be happy as long as you never ever go in room x/blow crystal horn y, oh whoops guess what happened).

As this continues Ludo has more and more control of the narrative. He's become something other than the sum of knowledge, and is seen to actually be growing into a human being, as his mother's narrative presence declines.

Whether this works in terms of reader enjoyment is a different matter, I'd agree - she does go on rather, and the early compressed narrative of how she came to be in the situation she's in was far more varied.

That said, I too am still finding it v readable + Ludo taking over more = still plenty in it for me.

If I hadn't left it in someone else's house that is. Retrieving soon, and looking forward to it.

1. are we to take it that sibylla gets into more or less the same arguments, on the underground, about (it seems) the rationality of ending one's life, over the course of weeks or months? is she having these arguments with strangers or with people she has met before? (is it a common thing, still, in the uk for people to say 'not in front of the child' in french? if not it's odd that she meets two people who say it. are we to take sibylla's reaction to the person who says it in italian as odd, given that she represents herself as being able to speak italian—and right before that had been told the same thing in french? 'let us converse in one of the four million languages i know, if you should happen to have one of them'.)

2. sibylla and rationality: when she reacts to the person on the train re 'the seven samurai', her counter-interpretation of the movie seems absurd and self-serving on its face. is it apt in any particular way to the actual movie? her problem with the 'elite band' seems to be that the very idea of them gives rise to the kind of deference to authority that causes one to forsake use of one's own reason—to do things like push people out of planes. is her concern more with the effects such an attitude one would have if one were not in an elite band, or if one were?

3. what's with all the wolf books, dog books, books about creature adventures? at least one purpose they serve in the story seems to be that by showing ludo read them obsessively, it's possible to neatly point out that he reads for a kind of comfort, not to be bored, at the behest of his mother, etc., since there should be little other reason he stays so content to read them after he's otherwise blazed far past them in his 'serious' reading. why, if sibylla is so elitist about what people should read, does she coddle him with these other books? is it simply connected to her attempt to keep his hunger for new material under control? some kind of moral-instruction angle? it's odd that we don't see her permitting him more advanced english material—he could easily be reading dickens or something instead of rereading 'white fang'.

4. earlier mentions of 'the alien' are somewhat twisted around because, i think, sibylla's own attitudes toward the alien are pretty twisted around. it seems that when she describes the alien, in this week's reading, as whatever it is that gives specious reasons for cruelty, that firmly establishes that what we would normally think of as everything normal and caring for a mother to do, she regards as cruel, irrational. but the main fault she's concerned to avoid is the one she feels was done to her: to put checks upon her native love of knowledge and to constrain her acquisition of it. at the end of this week's reading, when she sees that ludo is somewhat politely disdainful of the idea that she should give him any help with learning japanese, she thinks that she has been a monster. not, i think, because she thinks that her job as his tutor has been bad so far (in the usual sense), but because she thinks that simply the constraints she enacted for practical reasons—to be able to keep him under control enough that she could try to hold on to sanity and keep them alive—have been taken, by ludo, in exactly the way she hoped they wouldn't, as an inhibition.

5. sibylla is the narrator of the story (in this part). so when she's relating the content of the magazine article with the interview with the pianist, she's the one conveying his story about traveling to africa. so it's meant to be doubly (triply) devastating when we see the pianist give only a self-concerned reaction to the death of his companion, more concerned about the failure of his trip's intended purpose than with having been part of those events; but then see our own narrator relate this story with no comment, apparently unmoved at all, taking as little notice of it as the pianist did: like him, she's concerned to see him pursue his genius. but we do see a compensating reaction, in that she's one of the few people who stays to the end of the concert, and her reaction is massive, tears streaming down her face.

Oh man, I am only like 30 pages in and this thread is totally running away on me because I'd prefer to avoid spoilers. I look forward to reading all your wonderful thoughts when I'm a bit further through it.

just finished the second week's reading. wondering how the yamamoto piano anecdote relates to s's mother - playing a piece N times in a row, practicing scales in a way that maybe resembles percussion (weight must come from the shoulders), etc. also, wondering how yamamoto's experimental division of music into fragments & passages relates to yo-yo ma's father's proclamation of teaching by dividing into quarters.

Just by chance I watched The Magnificent Seven yesterday, as it was on TV. Will try and screen The Seven Samurai asap. And then Battle Beyond the Stars.

About midway through wk III's reading now. It gets so much better and more enjoyable once ludo takes over - not only is he a more sympathetic and mature character, he appears to have the capacity to develop and to distinguish between important and unimportant, which means a plot is beginning to emerge.

Stayed up way past my bedtime finishing wk III. It was great, I really enjoyed the long yarn across Asia.

It's very interesting how far we are into the thicket of unreliable narration. I think the proportion of incontrovertibly real events ('He said...', 'I went...') is much greater now Ludo/Stephen/David's in charge, but how high that proportion yet is I do not know.

Also interesting and kind of a relief to find out that Sibylla's been fronting all along, and eg still can't follow the film dialogue, though it does rather take what she's done to the boy beyond the quirky/comic/farcical and into the monstrous. Whether there's a wider metaphor beyond the futility of learning I guess we'll see. How much greater the boy's capacity is to distinguish between point and pointlessness we'll see too, though the first sentence of wk IV is promising.

On a personal level, it's nice to have pomp & snobbery lampooned so. You occasionally come across people who claim to have spent a year learning Russian in order to read Tolstoy in the original or whatever, and it's such bollocks. My french is v good and there isn't a magazine article I'd get more out of untranslated. I seem to have little capacity for front, and sadly not much more capacity to recognise and deal with it, and frankly I feel I'd be better off if I did. It's been a pleasure to see bollocks exposed, if you'll pardon the expression.

Not sure what you mean about Sibylla's fronting? She's obviously a sharp cookie and has a remarkable command of languages, and it's also fairly clear that he is more of a prodigy than she ever was, him outstripping her at some point was fairly inevitable. And, certainly from her perspective, he was the one driving the process, demanding to be taught rather than being forced to learn.

I meant that while she was narrating I understood that she was prodigious at languages, but as soon as it switches to Ludo I got the impression that she was an amateur. Though as I say it's hard to know how reliable the narration is - this might be simply because he's stunningly gifted so everyone looks amateurish, plus it might just be Japanese and iirc she considered herself not fit to teach it right at the start. But his remark that 'she's been watching The Seven Samurai for a decade and still has trouble with the japanese' was quite cutting I thought.

i did japanese at university and have difficulty understanding anything toshiro mifune ever says tbh

to me, 'she's been watching this film for a decade and she still has trouble with the japanese' is mostly just revealing of how Ludo doesn't get what it is like to be a normal language learner! Plus Sibylla tends to learn languages as languges-to-read, not languages-to-speak/listen, and I think these are significantly different skillsets. I was rereading the bit where Sibylla describes Liberace (not the)'s writing style and started thinking about what 'language' means - Liberace has this monstrous facility with language in his writing (even if strewn w logical fallacy) and Sibylla has this delight in language in her reading, but particularly in parsing it (and even just thinking about parsing it - the fact that Estonian has fourteen cases as something to cling to).

i guess i don't think of her as fronting being good at languages because the whole bit where she drops out of her phd (or whatever it is) after losing 30+ hours trying to read a book in german!

ps i am really enjoying Ismael's reactions because i totally heart Sibylla and it's a v useful corrective

Ha yes, there is something of a 'taking sides' about it at this stage.

yeah i'm not a huge fan of sibylla but it's interesting to hear how many ppl think she's great.

Finished WK.II, now into WK.III

I love the Yamamoto interview (not like a Sunday Times interview but obv the Sunday Times interview you'd like to read.) Just felt that Cecil Taylor was begging to be somehow inserted into this, as a piano-percussion man.

Lots of London concert detail I was amused by. Ice cream (which is kinda weird) and you're always home on time but what if you did miss the last train home (circle line closure), what then?

Is Ludo demonstrating a capacity for other interests? He has learnt way too much, wants to devour more, but has no curiosity about the other boys at school. At the point where he takes over so...

(I just happened to read Elsa Morante's History in between sections of this last week and was really struck by Giuseppe: similar age, a mother and no father, but he is undernourished and develops illness post-WWII, illiterate, has the odd friendships and acquaintances. Just noting the coincidence of coming across these two novels.)

where yall at?? some slack-ass book groupers on this thing.

I left it in a place I am not. Will rectify at the weekend. Feeling the lack.

really busy period of my life, acutely aware that I missed last week's reading. hope to get back in the saddle soon.

I'm done. And I don't know what to make of it. What was it about, what was its purpose? It wasn't really a story, or only in the barest sense. Was it just 'a bunch of stuff that happened'? It wasn't short on themes, really it was overburdened with them and they were picked up and dropped more or less at random.

The second section seemed weaker than the first, being essentially a loosely strung series of anecdotes. The dads were caricatures - albeit highly accomplished ones, I was continually wondering if this or that anecdote had been cribbed from some Sunday Times supplement about a real-life adventurer or intellectual or artist. It was entertaining, but not engrossing.

Also the suicide chapter I found problematic. The dismissal of the Samaritans was trite and the whole understanding of depression was very limited. You can hardly blame Ludo for this but when it was shared by Sibylla and never countered I can't help but see this as an authorial problem. Other people have found the actual death scene moving, I just found it a bit creepy and weird.

(I checked Jonathan Glover's 'Causing Death and Saving Lives' and he does indeed unhelpfully suggest changing jobs, emigrating or leaving your family. He also suggests psychiatric help but groups this with the others as an 'upheaval'. But it's just a throwaway line really, the book is really more about dealing with these issues from an outside and relatively dispassionate perspective.)

accidentally finished the book again last week and can't quite remember where we are meant to be? are we meant to have finished?

(nb just after writing the 'basically i can never understand what Mifune is saying' comment above, i read on, and found Ludo mentioning the fact that no-one can ever understand what Mifune is saying. it is not just me!)

this is the week for finishing i believe, the home straight, late finishers should be aware there may be no tea or cake left in the village hall.

Haven't finished it, saving the last part for this weekend. Didn't post on part 2, as I didn't feel there was much to say about it. I kinda enjoyed the Idiot's Guide To Greek part, was a bit bored by the pianist's African adventure, enjoyed the rest of his silly interview, and felt happy that I didn't attend that concert.
Agree that it's picked up a bit again when Ludo takes over the writing (or is everything in the book filtered through him to some level or other? Not sure how many levels of narration we can assume here ... )
I'm a sucker for portrayals of geniuses, I must admit, though the business with the school was the first time I started thinking about how Sibylla might indeed be a pretty bad mother.
Take his ruminations over people's amazement at his knowledge, how he just started wondering if everyone else who -didn't- say anything didn't because it's actually completely commonplace, even subpar.

What do we know about his time in school? I didn't catch any reference to how long he stayed there, and how they managed to get him out without getting into any trouble. It was interesting how his notes on the school don't have a word about the other kids, except through his and S's arguments with the teacher.

Sibylla on the subway was kinda sad comedy, I think it was around this part where I started thinking of A Confederacy of Dunces. She somehow reminds me of Ignatius Reilly -- the shock at what people are saying, the lack of social skills. The whole allcaps repetition of phrases bringing to mind "Can I BELIEVE what I'm hearing" or whatever his riff was. Ah, I haven't read that book in a long time, I cannot say more than it gave me a sort of whiff of remembrance.
There's good comedy in her ranting always resulting in responses like "I really think", "I really don't think" ... Wait, is this a comedy? (Or how does that work, if it's jokesy in the middle it's going tragedy in the end? How'd 7 Samurai end again? Ingratitude? People getting back to work? Uh, nevermind)

So we finally got to see the first lesson L learned from 7 Samurai, when he decided to just go ahead and parry the blow and get himself a different dad than his real one. His conversation with his real dad was nice, particularly when he let on that he never bothered to read S's ridiculous note.

I've been wondering how after a bunch fo years S hasn't found herself a better job. Is she so damn isolated and weird that other work is pretty much out of the question? I can kinda imagine her job applications being the worst/greatest things ever and scaring the hell out of potential employers.

Loved the story of RD and HC. All it lacked was some good old swashbuckling and a fair maid.
Hrm, there's a fair amount of sadness in this book, but at this slight distance I seem to only recall the fun.

(Sorry, this was awfully random and rambly, I really ought to have tried writing down some thoughts immediately after finishing)

Oh lord, how did so little thought become so much text.

Just finished. I enjoyed all the yarns (both real and recounted) but the rest I need to have a think about. Otherwise, what ledge said.

Haven't finished it, saving the last part for this weekend. Didn't post on part 2, as I didn't feel there was much to say about it. I kinda enjoyed the Idiot's Guide To Greek part, was a bit bored by the pianist's African adventure, enjoyed the rest of his silly interview, and felt happy that I didn't attend that concert.

what was boring about the africa trip?? i was quite impressed by how his artistic-development-narrative slid so quickly into a story of real-world consequences that was actually affecting, and even more impressed at how abruptly his own response to those events constitutes a shift in tone to us, yet not to him. i think an awful lot of the interest in the novel's story overall derives from these very adept, exact shifts in tone, the places where you can hear things on the page voiced from two or three different perspectives.

like, once ludo takes over the story, there's an enormous pathos to the way that you can hear his voice, sometimes because he is very explicitly writing about sibylla and his tensions with her, and then suddenly he unselfconsciously recounts himself using one of her subway arguments ('person B dies at time 6 + n').

spoilers spoilers spoilers, obviously

― thomp, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 10:18 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

so in the circle line section: what's with sibylla's sudden pre-occupation with violent death?

― thomp, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 10:21 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Also: "He said later that he wasn't afraid at first because he assumed that he was going to die. Then he realised that his hands were lying in the dirt next to the boots of a soldier. He thought they would destroy his hands and he could not move for terror." : Yamamoto is another version of the you're-a-genius-so-what idea, but that's kind of the starkest formulation of it (yet).

― thomp, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 10:25 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah what is with the violent death thing???

i liked the yamamoto part

― just sayin, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 10:56 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ludo going to school is kind of heartbreaking but also kind of wish-fulfillment-y (i mean, i was/could have been that kid // would like to convince myself i was/could have been that kid.) the school authorities are kind of strawmanish, though, so far.

'is thor heyerdahl my father?' heh.

― thomp, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 1:35 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Thinking hasn't helped - I feel less sure of what was going on now than when I was reading.

I'm questioning how much of the book was real at all. Pretty sure the yarns aren't, which is fine as I'll enjoy a shaggy-dog story if it's flagged as such. But the trekking around to harvest the yarns is more problemmatical because it's on the edge between possible and fantastical - I mean, does Ludo even exist? Is he just Sibylla's demon babbling away about what-might-have-been? ("I thought: why am I keeping her here?")

In which case, what actually happens? Woman gets tangled up in unrewarding work, frustrating herself with a lot of hopeless dreams, sees no way out. The little passage about how to build a motel (spot its potential when noone else wants to know - which I actually did find rather moving) then becomes just about the only reliable thing in the book. That and the concert, though I suspect it was more a normal concert that left her wandering the streets all night in rapture.

Okay, but what are the other 400 pages for? If the whole thing is about moving from trying to interpret everything through a false assumption towards learning one thing through its tiny variations, that's not really what's happened, is it? Maybe it is, maybe the point is just finding a way to cope with the chaos of everything, whether it's through motels or music or bringing up baby. But I can't help feeling it'd've been more fun to get there without the Greek.

The mental disorder seems less about depression than asperger's or schizophrenia, on that reading.

so is everyone meant to be finished?

sorry sir dog et it.

im abt 100 pages from the end but have got distracted by other books :(

i keep trying to write about it but you see i just got given a 'descriptive grammar of ket' which is weird and fasinating and really I think my reading that is what sibylla would have wanted.

"Linguists and specialists on Siberia are generally familiar with the name Ket, which designates a small ethnic group on the Yenisei and their language, widely regarded as a linguistic enigma in many respects. Ket is a severely endangered language with today less than 500 native speakers. Together with Yugh, Kott, Arin, Assan and Pumpokol, all of which are completely extinct, it forms the Yeniseic family of languages, which has no known linguistic relatives."

a linguistic enigma in many respects!! (why yes i am supposed to be reading sociology books right now)

I don't find "questioning how much of the book was real at all" particularly productive, myself?

I like how Yamamoto's CD is like Sibylla's mother playing Chopin's prelude no 4 in D minor.

Oh, it's not productive at all and I'd much rather not because it leaves me feeling cheated, but I felt it drove me that way. I've been waiting for Alex to weigh in and put my mind at rest by explaining it all, actually, but it's probably not that kind of book.

Sorry! I will tackle it soon. Law school is busy.

I am...almost halfway through week 3's reading

;_;

I have been reading the comments on the Conversational Reading posts, which are fascinating although less for how they affect my understanding of the book (getting the sense that my feelings about have been set in stone somewhat, i read stuff and go 'that is v interesting but that is not how it is ok') than their sheer, I dunno, internet-comment-ness.

Are we finished with this now? I thought the book group format worked alright, even if it fizzled out a bit towards the end, maybe due to its losing readers by the wayside. I was going to say it could've done with a bit more discussion of what's-happening-and-where's-it-going, but it definitely wasn't that kind of book.

Thanks for turning me towards something I'd never have gone near myself anyway.

I liked it a lot. In some ways I wish I had finished in 3-4 days and then spend time re-reading it. But I will revive this.

Just on the w/e I finished reading this novel I came across this story. Quite a coincidence.

The father of the boy has said that his son is no genius. The thing is he wasn't afraid to make him curious, to teach him (or get him to learn) as much as he could. A bit like S in this book, she does not think she is pushing her child too fast too young. Very much a 'how much work you do' approach.

The father also said something like that the main thing is to get kids reading by two years of age. Seemed like half of the equation.

This kid is also learning French and Russian and has written some sort of reference book on Shakespeare, btw.

Yeah, I enjoyed/am enjoying this as well - the only reason I haven't finished is that my life is in a state of advanced chaos at the moment, just in terms of material possessions being strewn about various places, which means that I haven't had the book on me. Anyone read any of the Your Name Here stuff?

i read YNH a while ago but sadly lost the pdf in a grand hd crash - i remember enjoying it, though.

i remember that there was this bit about language learning that I disagreed with - the narration in YNH collapses the distance between 'learning to read a script' and 'being able to read a language', in rather the same way that, in TLS, Sibylla handwaves away the period between 'teaching Ludo the greek for 'of the king'' and 'Ludo understands greek grammar and only needs to ask about vocabulary'.

i guess it jarred because in so many other ways the book and the narration is so meticulous, especially the book is meticulous in awkward and despairing things, and then this bit which is kind of about the hope of further human understanding is so vaguely drawn.

(but as aforesaid i haven't looked at ynh for years, so it's poss i'm filling in gaps from imagination not memory)

I have the PDF of YNH and since it seems stuck in publishing he'll I would gladly send it to people, provided on honor that they toss DeWitt 4 or 5 bucks on paypal or whatever she was charging for it.

I didn't do this - but did people enjoy this? Maybe it would be good to have a bookclub here where read longform short stories and then talk about them? I would like to do this.

Yeah I enjoyed it, shame it petered out at the end.

Yeah - I thought maybe we could do one a week? Then if you missed a week's story, no big deal, just read the next one? I don't know.

I was going to nominate Junot Diaz's Drown one time if book club is to become a thing. That might fit what you're looking for. It wouldn't need a week per story though, they're pretty short.

just finished this the other day. wasn't really a fan of how she structured the second half after samurai confrontations.

however I have decided that I should watch seven samurai pretty soon.

The thing I liked about the week-a-story idea is that you could read it on like Wednesday and then catch up with the discussion? Because reading stuff in sync with other people is hard. I think shorter is better really - c.f. the listening clubs (rip) where people were asking for 2 listens of 2 albums a week, plus buying/download time - that's clearly too much commitment, but a 40 page-or-less story probably wouldn't be, especially if it was online somewhere to begin with.

I see what you mean. The listening clubs got a bit ridiculous - the funk one was pumping out four albums a week, with no discussion - hardly seems like a club if there's no interaction.

I reckon your idea should work, but it'll take a ringleader pushing it forward I think - these things can peter out a bit. I'd be up for participating anyway - haven't read much in the way of stories for a long time.

Do you think it would be better to start it here, or on ile? Or does it not make any difference in the SNA era?

Its natural home is here I think. But be sparing imo, give it month or two's lead-in - people have to buy books, clear time, etc.

How about picking off from where we left off? Both myself and roxymuzak registered an interest in starting this again.

Suggested seasonal.

Check here again round mid-week to see if there is any interest with a view to getting a nominations thread going (if anyone wants to go ahead then by all means).

Then a poll. Then reading.

i'm in.

Yeah, I'm interested too. And I'd like to go ahead and nominate Egan's "Good Squad" which was mentioned in some other thread. But ... are we nominating here or do you want to do a separate nominations thread? Either way I'd like to throw in the Egan and I'll try to come up with other ideas for candidates. Do we want to stick to contemporary literary stuff? or maybe do a classic? My only thought is that I'd like to have it be not too long. Maybe 350 pgs or less, just because I have a ton of other reading to do (I'm in school).

Anyone in New York/Boston been/going to see her book tour for Lightning Rods?

she's got a new story out - http://recommendedreading.tumblr.com/post/29475857392/helen-dewitt-recovery

Yikes. Rural retreat did not go well.

yeah, that sounded bad. saw hints for a while but not the details.

Very nice interview/discussion

Happened upon it after reading Will Self on how serious fiction is a minority interest now but my eyes just stopped as I skimmed ahead to a discussion of McLuhan. I only know 3rd/4th hand versions of his ideas and I suppose those two things merged a bit...how fiction that isn't at all worthwhile is made today because those energies have gone to other things: TV (the discussion of Brit comedy in the DeWitt piece), film (more the case in France, see Margerite Duras who is like the mid-point between these tendencies).

OTOH wrt to Self I saw that as excuse making for how badly this generation have done - not that I would know. I have v little interest in British fiction, and his article which is why I barely read it.

After all that I find the DeWitt interview awesome - love how they are saying at times 'you know, just stop reading contemporary fiction', even if some of it is good do you need it? Funny too bcz DFW (who they talk about) doesn't interest me at all! It does sound like the sort of thing Will Self is saying, but here its cast in a much more stimulating manner.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n16/helen-dewitt/diary

that sounds shitty

was some of this public before? i had a weird sense of deja vu reading it

on her site maybe?

A blog entry on this was linked here.

Started Lightning Rods in the morning, saw this in the afternoon, then onto another few chapters of LR...just an odd day. xp

blog entries/bits on twitter - yeah really shitty. I'm not sure I'd still be there, tho I can understand her wish not to be threatened out of her home, and the financial and other practical reasons for not doing so. I imagine it's hard even in periods of repose not to find the association of place with events too strong to not be mentally overwhelmed by them, and the purblind stupidity of the law must only aggravate those feelings. just hope she can start feeling safe, and start writing again, tho it doesn't look like she's going to be feeling safe any time soon.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/09/03/helen-dewitt/tashu-duset-sekar/

So ties in to The Last Samurai.

On a few bits and pieces and great as usual with it.

whoops, sorry, meant this to go in this thread, missed it in my search because of the quote marks

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

and podcast interview mentioned here:

http://paperpools.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/podcast-with-scott-gosnell.html?m=1

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/06/08/helen-dewitt-on-the-last-samurai/

http://evergreenreview.com/read/sexual-codes-of-the-europeans/

god that's a beautiful website

it’s a really wonderful piece of writing as well. utterly piquant.

Sweet baby jesus that hit the spot tonight. Maybe the first piece of writing by Helen I have really fallen hard for since The Last Samurai

i really enjoyed this. finished it last week. i missed the mom's voice though. would have liked to know more about her. it switches from mom to kid pretty quickly. or it felt like it did to me. there was obviously the long first section all in mom-voice. i love how readable she made the structure of the book. that takes some work right there. could have been a mess or precious or whatever. but it really keeps you going. brainy page-turners are my fave kind of page-turners.

curious about lightning rods. people don't seem to like it half as much.

Last Samurai is the best

lightning rods is amazing. her style and tone manages to be very controlled, rich, and capable of great flexibility and humour (her ability to write very well without punctuation, that you mentioned elsewhere scott, is a sign of that). the sexual codes of the europeans posted just above is also brilliant. she must write more.

Lightning Rods is great. And more topical than ever, tbh.

New and near you soon: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/some-trick/

New and near you soon: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/some-trick🕸/

Should all be getting reviewer-early copies anyway, we've all done good work on this thread.

Yes. So excited to see this. Although I still wish that YOUR NAME HERE would get a proper release.

Amazon says this is 13 stories. I assume short stories. If so, I’m curious whether this collects her short stories that have already been published but in difficult to access literary journals, etc, or whether this is all new material.

i did write to hdw about your name here and she responded giving a number of reasons why it wasn’t available. publisher reluctance in various forms - “too adventurous for a mainstream publisher” was what she was told, infuriatingly.

she did also say it was a collaboration and that people never read it as such, but as a piece by her, which she didn’t want. also, she said if she had known how it wd turn out she probably wouldn’t have done it in the first place.

it sounds - as often with her - there’s a lot of complexity. i wish her life was easier! sounds like she had a bad year last year as well (from her most recent blog post).

"Novelist Helen DeWitt describes her new book, Some Trick, as a story collection preoccupied with 'the cussedness of talent.' Below, the author of The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods recommends books that illuminate the workings of singular minds."

only read three of these, the tufte, and transfiguration of the commonplace, which is wonderful, and against the gods, which is also excellent.

Collection is out next week; my friend who subscribes to more periodicals than I do says she’s been popping up a bunch so it seems like her PR is doing their job. I’m excited and I hope people buy it.

not until the 26th June in the U.K. apparently ffs.

so I read Some Trick, and i'm just going to chuck some stuff down about it, because although i've got plenty of unresolved thoughts about it, if i try and do anything more cogent i won't get it down. if this were an essay i would probably title it from a line in the last story Entourage - "Umlauts up the gazoo". Most of the stories are in the recent HdW manner - content and style. Content: obsessional application of theoretical if not mathematical models to creative or artistic problems, and the absurdity of progressing from a reasonable point via reason to an eccentric point. Style: dry, laconic authorial control, generally indirect free speech, that is to say third person heavily laced with the expressions and thinking and reasoning of her enthusiastic and excitable characters or doubtful pragmatic characters. Managing the filo thin layers of control, voice and irony (rationality, sympathy, humour, contempt, enthusiasm, tragedy) so that both the dexterity and a unity of HdW 'voice' is apparent is one of the main thrills of reading her, aside from the content (tho the unexpected juxtapositions and logic of that content is very much part of that layering. To expand on that, the mathematical, rational 'mode' which drives the direction of many stories, is absolutely a voice, a layer, a structure.

There is a sprinkling of stories from her time at Oxford in 1985. These are different in style. Clearly more juvenile works, less tight in style, more juvenile in their expression of cleverness (of course another excitement of HdW is the cleverness). Their subject is often an intelligent female voice existing in a pragmatic, wry and doubtful space created by forceful or dullard men, or just men who aren't as clever as they think they are. These are less successful, I think, though Famous Last Words is very enjoyable.

It does raise the question of why these are collected here in this way. It's not, as far as I can tell, a retrospective or collection as such. The collection has a good, elliptical poem as an epigraph.

Next time someone tells you desire
Is a trick of grammnar
Tell him
If what I have is what I said I wanted
It's not what I wanted
I know what I want
But I don't know its name

and later

Some trick

So using this, and the title, to try and draw things together a bit:

[*]It's a trick of stories in the card-playing sense there are thirteen, and i'm not sure whether there is an interrelation or symbolism relating to that at play – nothing jumped out at my, but I'm afraid to say some of my reading was a little inattentive (tipsy on tube or interrupted by things, and just generally i haven't felt as sharp recently as i'd like to be). I might need to look at that again.

[*]It's the trick of grammar, of letters, of foreign words and foreign mores creating and canalising desire: (Brutto about an Italian art dealer's enthusiasm for an incredibly ugly suit ('ma che brutto!') an artist made in her sempstress training.

[*]It's the trick of managing artistic control for the vision you want in a world that is trying through enthusiasm, fandom or lack of understanding to grasp hold of that indifferent to the things that make important to its creator.

[*]It's very much the calculus of money and creativity – something that affects Helen de Witt directly.

And in fact it seemed to me that a motive behind this collection may have been to keep some money coming in. She is clearly struggling in the way that many of the artists in her stories struggle - artistic/typographic/visual control, and money.

There are odd linkages and abuttments between the stories: the name (the character?) Gil, Stanisław Lem's Robot stories - these may form little 'tricks' of stories, within the overall hand.

Nothing here as good as The Sexual Codes of the Europeans.

Ticks of her style jump out, or rather the style of the types of people with which she populates her stories, become very obvious - the emphasis of speech with italics, and capitisation and so. many. exclamation marks!!!!!

Is this a problem or not? I don't know. I came to the conclusion not particularly, given that these stories are about a certain type of person, but, well, that certain type of person, the logic of their mind and their manner, is also Helen de Witt's area of concern – they and their thinking is her subject matter. It's noticeable anyway, across compressed short stories. I found the patterns of speech in two English rock band stories quite painful, and the stories not the best in the collection, and given the tight integration of conceptually diverse objects is one of her 'tricks', that is a problem.

Occasionally I found the compression of her style confounded meaning. tho as i say, i wasn't always reading as attentively as i might have done. It does occur to me that at these moments of extreme compression language, or rather an language as an arrangement of letters, becomes as much about texture as content (something made explicit in the final story, Entourage.

However, there's a load to delight in here: Brutto, My Heart Belongs to Bertie, The French Style of Mlle Matsumoto, and Entourage, Famous Last Words.

I also went back and read some of the stories immediately on finishing them. There is just something about her writing that I find utterly compelling (I almost said something about her 'style' but as I say, it is also the content, and the interplay of the two, though even that is too formalist a framing of it).

What’s that epigraph from?! It’s great.

it's her own poem – so i guess not really an epigraph. 'introductory poem' would have been better. that's just a part of it – it toys around with The Wizard of Oz (the last line is 'because because because because because') and absences, the way... well, i thought i had the knack of it the first time I read it, but I can't remember what i thought it was about:

'What would you do with a heart but try not to hurt?'
The Tin Man hadn't the heart to disappoint him.
He thanked him.
'I feel nothing,' he thought.
'But I wouldn't hurt a Behaviourist.'

there's a thing in the book that maps onto this – which is people coming with incoherent or received thinking and feeling, and the narrator (usually) being doubtful, polite, or cheerful - not really having a heart as such, but still human enough - examining the problem with statistics, or probability, or some obsessive rationale and working it through in a way that doesn't conform to the received feelings, but often helps, and HdW's characters often want to help – they're very good natured (that's not always a good thing). Here that's the Tin Man saying well I haven't got a heart, but you know, I'll do my best here. HdW's characters are often like the Wizard of Oz characters.

and that mathematics, or reason applied not in a 'common sense' way, but as a heuristical programme of life is a way out of cliche, and inherited wisdom. that it provides the tools and the experience that we lazily construct received notions of heart, feeling, desire to. sorry, feeling my away around, not very cogently. I am also being laboured – the progress of these people is funny as they hit up against the world's conventions, but the humour is generous to them, caustic to the conditions, wry at the interaction.

What of Dorothy in the poem? That's the last part:

But Dorothy? I don't BELIEVE Judy Garland could fake it.
I think she was glad Technicolor was only a dream
Glad to find she had never left home
Glad to wake up in black and white

Because because because because because

let me rewrite that terrible paragraph - i don't think it actually makes a *load* of sense but the least I can do is make the words into sentences:

mathematics, or reason applied not in a 'common sense' way, but as a heuristical programme of life, is a way out of cliche, and inherited wisdom, received thinking. we lazily find our way through our feelings, the world, with metaphor and loose-ish psychology. that mathematical reasoning provides the tools to see those aspects of us and the world in a way that is slightly strange, clarified by not being muddled up with conventional thinking, and still recognisably human (ie not rationality as applied by forceful wielders of 'reason' but as an exploratory toolkit).

Great stuff Fizzles and roundly otm I think, wish I had the wherewithal to respond in depth but it’s not that kind of weekend

need to read more HdW

thanks silby - if you do get the time to respond in depth it would great to hear your thoughts.

feel i need a conversation to knock the coarse-grained and slightly random thoughts in shape.

Very much agree, great stuff: my own reading of this collection left me feeling that I loved 2/3 of it, and the remaining 1/3 of it left me feeling how dramatically much more intelligent Helen deWitt is than me. THis is not a criticism in any way: I'd rather have fiction that stretches and boggles the mind than not, even if it doesn't all land perfectly.

^ otm

Was considering Some Trick again yesterday. Thinking about one of the 'rock and roll' stories, which, although it feels like it contains plenty that's interesting, produced several cringes – english accent, portrayal of 'rock and roll' behaviour, description of music.

A question that comes out of that is whether the other areas she portrays – classical pianist, fashion, new york boho life – are equivalently cringeworthy for someone close to them, and if so whether it matters. Part of the humour of her stories is a flattening out thru repetition and stylisation of the manner of her characters, so some unnatural stylisation is to be expected. More, all these stories are about transactions and trade offs (and have that in common with The Sexual Codes of the Europeans which otherwise wouldn't have fitted well in this selection.

She is looking at the exchange rate or the transaction between artistic integrity and its consumption, or more accurately the mechanisms and models by which it is made available for consumption. In order to do that she has to portray a common ground or create a space where this transaction can be seen to take place. That may be a cafe, it may be email, or verbal communication. That's obv also where the conflict will take place. It's also about the instruments that those people use to communicate that transaction – a card game (in that rock and roll piece), the visual presentation of chance (Bertie) for example.

To finish that thought, I think the disfluency of style or cringe is interesting but not a problem generally.

Tomorrow: how do you solve a financial problem like HdW.

I want to be her unpaid intern for life tbh

well i'm not sure she wouldn't accept that dangerous offer, silby.

as she mentions at the end of Some Trick there are people around who like her work well enough to want to try and support her generally in a way that will allow her to write more, and extends slightly further than the buy me a coffee page she has.

the challenge is that i think she sees anything that isn't writing the sort of thing that she wants to write as opportunity cost, lost time, a serious and unwelcome distraction no different from any other distraction from writing. or as she put it

and it seems as though before
anything can happen I need to think about what I would like, what (if
any) rewards I would like to give supporters, and so on. That is,
there's something of an impasse, because I can't think about these
things without neglecting other things that urgently need to be done

i get the feeling that she's probably a fairly inefficient writer, which I don't mean in a bad way, but if she wants to get to the bottom of something she will spend three days on stack overflow doing that. I'm not sure i'd want it any different, given her output is partly predicated on logical loops taken to absurd extremes. but possibly that sort of thing contributes to the list of things that 'urgently need to be done'.

but generally her aversion to anything much more than signing books, as one of the people who is trying to help her said, makes her difficult to help. he initially suggested a Patreon model, but it sounds like anything other than straight funding of her writing in a general way – ie anything like tiering or rewards – is not likely to be amenable.

Now one response to all this is of course a slightly exasperated throwing of hands up in the air. 'God helps those who help themselves' &c (a very Jordan Peterson formulation).

However, given that she is my favourite writer, and given that i think she's doing something substantially interesting and exciting enough to want her to do more of it, or if that's a bit Misery-ish, do more of it in more comfort and security, I'm willing to feel the occasional twinge of exasperation and have a bit of a think about what might be possible.

But that isn't in itself a solution. I did come up with some very scrappy thoughts, which I cobbled together in conversation with the person trying to co-ordinate this.

All my ideas are bad and at best not very likely to be successful. At worse they would be time-consuming and extremely unsuccessful. All of them would require people (not Helen) to work for free, and do that reliably and probably fairly intensively at times.

• Beef up the PayPal donation button and encouragement on her existing blog page. Inevitably this might mean she has to post a bit more on her blog, which has been static. It might at least generate a bit more money.
• A crowdfunding community, with a funding drive that takes place annually. This would – sorry, this might provide a lump sum which would be beneficial. It would not be tied to any particular work in progress. Absolutely no expectations of communication or advance anything. It would need a page, a place for community focus and comment, and someone to administrate the drive. A facebook page is the obvious choice, though I don't know anybody who is ever overjoyed to use Facebook. Her blog site might be another option. This seems unlikely to generate much money.
• A Patreon or something like it, with rewards she felt able to give: autographed books - that's the obvious one isn't it? It's not easy to think of others – a list of prominent funders in the front or back of the book might be one option if the publishers were willing.
• A subscription model, such as Alexander Pope used for the Odyssey and Iliad. A subscription is raised that guarantees the production and purchase of a limited edition book. I'm not entirely serious as it helps to do this in an aristocratic period with lots of wealthy backers and also if you are very well connected to same wealthy backers. This would have to be modernised, with a second publishing phase with an actual publisher, and it's not clear that a publisher would be very pleased at an earlier edition having been released, albeit 'privately'. It's also not clear that any sort of subscription model would generate enough cash for Helen to live on. On the other hand, self-publishing is much easier than it was, especially digitally.
• The release of individual advance-copy chapters or segments of works in progress to sponsors. Again, publishers may not be amused by this. Or perhaps the release of material relevant to, or used in construction of, the book, in catalogue form (pictures, reading lists, scraps of notes etc) - would require some work on Helen's part.

i should also say this problem is more generally obviously applicable. how do you usefully fund people whose work you like in a structurally sustainable enough way for it to have an actually positive effect. Something like Patreon seems to work very well if you have a niche and enthusiastic, and preferable large, fanbase, for instance if you are doing Dr Who fan stuff, but generalists, people working towards smaller audiences, or working on the periphery in some way, will struggle. I know – 'thus it ever was' – and also just chucking people some money is usually the best solution.

anyway, I did think the least I could do was post this on a thread to see whether people have got any ideas. Personally I find it hard to see how any of them can work really, and frankly, I'd be sceptical that even if HdW *did* put a load of effort into a Patreon type approach, that it would have a reward usefully proportionate to the effort.

i'm not really trying to be captain save a helen, there are many worthy, worthier causes, or people closer to home who could do with such effort i know. part of it is also having a bit of a pragmatic think about the economics of writing in the digital age, and artistic creation more generally.

Promising anything "extra" in one of these is a great way to get bogged down in commitments that may cost more than they bring in and distract one from one's actual objective. (Cf. any number of examples.) On the other hand there's maybe not much of an audience if you promise nothing at all. I think better than the "buy me a coffee" model for Helen DeWitt would be a more explicit "let's raise $35,000/yr for Helen DeWitt" framework with progress bars and such that explicitly comes with no "backer reward" other than the assurance that HdW is continuing to work on what she wants to work on.

Though, I emailed her upon reading her author's note and what she said to me was that her biggest obstacle is really finding a publisher who's able and willing to publish her weirder work correctly, and also market the book, rather than (necessarily) get volunteers involved to like do prepress technical work for her pro bono, which is what I thought she was looking for. Even New Directions' Last Samurai had errors. I have done a lot of futzing around with TeX and desktop publishing but I've never Made A Book and I'm probably no better at selling than Helen DeWitt.

right, totally agree. it does strike me she has a rather fractious relationship with publishers (this much could be deduced alone from her writing tbh). and of course having a good relationship with your publishers is usually a good thing.

I don't think she necessarily knows what would be most helpful, and possibly she's thinking there may be solutions that are in fact not really very viable, the actual solutions just having the problem that they're not very desirable.

I'd say the ideal solution is Full Communism but some people will be difficult to work with even under Full Communism

it can't hurt surely.

I want to get that book she cowrote and self-published as a PDF a few years ago, and which now seems to be unavailable from her site. The fact HdW follows me on Twitter is one of my rare achievments.

she didn't seem to feel that had 'worked' apparently, and felt the collaborative aspect of it wasn't fully understood, which made her reluctant to make it available. did seem to imply it might be out again *at some point* when she'd published a few more things.

If that's Your Name Here you're referring to, anyway.

That's the one, thanks.

Your Name Here was contracted to Noemi Press for a very long time, which is why she took it off her website. I haven't seen where she said that it hadn't 'worked'. Did she make those comments while it was stuck in contract hell?

I think Noemi no longer has the rights to it but I'm not sure where it goes from here.

I haven't re-read it in a few years but loved it at the time - it seemed very much like the next step after The Last Samurai. Messier, to be certain, and even less of a traditional story, but filled with a lot of brilliance and excellent and funny and sad writing.

Most of what she's written since has been much more controlled in its voice, imo.

Anyway, I bought it back when it was self-published, and I'm not certain what the legalities are about sharing it privately, but when Last Samurai was out-of-print, HdW's position was that people who bought used copies could donate to her the equivalent of royalties that she would have gotten if it was new, etc.

your favourite wayward dilettante has begun the last samurai. so far so delirious

✔️

as the person who actually started this thread I have to say that i finished it at least six months after the schedule I'd set.

finished the book, that is. i could finish this thread in way less than six months.

Gets off at Farringdon - how like a man

this is some exquisite deep-London humour. i cackled

big takeaway from the first 100 pages: poor Sybilla being the world's best tutor before the noughties tuition boom, she'd have definitely been able to afford ice-cream

holy fuck the yamamoto chapter

i know right

trying think of a more bravura, high-art, firework-laden passage of writing I've read recently; drawing a blank

and to think there's probably more to come

Maybe I should just give up on all the books I’ve been starting lately and just read this again.

most amusingly, that chapter is based on a fictional Sunday Times interview that in reality would have had to span half the paper and been the best thing any print journal has ever contained

helen just has higher standards for everyone I guess

That’s pretty much it yeah

She doesn't lack for astonishing bravura setpieces does she?

While the HC/RD bit (which I haven't even finished yet) is obviously some sort of literary pinnacle, I do feel I should observe that the best bit of Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which came out only a few years before, was also a long and dazzlingly fabulistic reported narrative about a couple of scholars (astronomers rather than philologists) involving impromptu flying devices in China and some complex and ambiguous moral lesson. I know I shouldn't compare everything to Pynchon but

Also of COURSE I should have anticipated L's banter with S once he turned 11. Delightful :D

ah man this gets intense

final chapter is perfect, cheers-to-the-rafters stuff. i cried a bit

when Tom Cruise presents the Emperor with Katsumoto's sword? ;_;

holy fuck the yamamoto chapter

― imago, Monday, December 3, 2018 6:40 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

almost halfway through, pretty sure this is the best book i've ever read that's not the magic mountain

part of it is that it kind of feels like a great work of criticism on top of being a novel, so of course i'm extremely taken with it

I should reread sometime next year, especially if a certain career move comes through.

happy to hear you're enjoying the book, Brad :)

a certain career move

Samurai?

maybe!

i think i would have had more success in turning people onto this if she hadn't named it The Last Samurai

she didn't, she named it "The Seven Samurai"

should have named it Tetrakaidecapod tbah

me: you should read this book The Last Samurai
them: lol like the Tom Cruise movie
me: no it's this really cool book about a child prodigy and his mo-
them: yeah yeah sure i'll check it out *never reads it*

of all the child prodigies born in london in early 1987, ludo is probably my favourite. he didn't end up wasting his life chatting shit about indie on the internet. at least, so we hope

actually of course he didn't, he wasn't coddled and then ruined by private school

imago :( it's ok, Ludo's fictional and anyway the default trajectory for a gifted kid is to grow up into an average adult.

that said even if you aren't a child prodigy I think one of the things I took away from reading this is that it's always possible to just sit down and do something hard that you want to do, even if nobody gives a shit. Like, not for nothing did you upload your novel to createspace. The challenge is finding the time when you have to survive under capitalism but you can still make gestures at the ineffable yknow

:)

the novel definitely gave me strength more than it made me wonder what could have been!

This is a bit of a basic bitch question about this book, BUT, I loved the introduction (10 pages or so) then immediately struggled with the first chapter and the new narrator, and gave up. Does it stay that full-on for the whole book?

nearly every other chapter is a dramatic shift in tone/style but it never returns to the style of the prologue

had maybe 1 or 2 stylistic misgivings over the first ~70 pages but they all resolve with extreme suddenness and the rest of the book is nothing short of gripping

silby otm

one of the great things about this book is that it makes "genius" a completely unintimidating inconvenient mundane thing like everything else in life

This is a bit of a basic bitch question about this book, BUT, I loved the introduction (10 pages or so) then immediately struggled with the first chapter and the new narrator, and gave up. Does it stay that full-on for the whole book?

― Chuck_Tatum, Tuesday, December 18, 2018 3:34 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sibylla's narrating the prologue, so i don't understand your question

nearly every other chapter is a dramatic shift in tone/style but it never returns to the style of the prologue

― flopson, Tuesday, December 18, 2018 3:57 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i also disagree with this, sibylla's whole thing with liberace is as much of a yarn as the prologue

agree to disagree. i got like, mythical vibes from the prologue

don't know what a yarn means, but there are many parts of the book i would describe as 'yarns' yet not similar

i guess i don’t get it when the vibe of the prologue continues in the first chapter when sybilla picks up the thread with her father and her mother, it’s basically the same style

i am really good at spelling sibylla wrong on the first try every time

i don’t necessarily even know what i mean but a yarn but i guess i mean when whenever this novel really slides into a mostly unbroken story. yamamoto part has that fuckin incredible power too

this just in: i unconsciously stole “yarn” from the time blurb on the back cover

maybe the thing is that with this book i feel like i am encountering a brain not a series of styles

haha i remember that from the back cover now you mention it!

i guess i don’t get it when the vibe of the prologue continues in the first chapter when sybilla picks up the thread with her father and her mother, it’s basically the same style

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Tuesday, December 18, 2018 10:42 PM (forty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh i think i meant this whole part

Ah, the first chapter felt so different and more difficult to me tha the prologue, that I assumed they were different narrators.

But I’ve just rebought it so it’s now my Christmas holiday read.

ludo isn't like me anyway, he's like our dearly departed nakhchivan

i'm in the 11yo ludo narration rn. been thinking about recommending this book to my mom bc she's a former teacher who was v frustrated with the educational system but also i think she'd just like ludo a lot ("here mom enjoy this 500 page experimental novel some of which is in japanese and greek")

also i cannot overstate how much of a blast this book is. it's so fun! i never want to stop reading it

also i studied japanese for five years (but: almost a decade ago at this point) and lol at how much it is *not* helping me with the japanese sections, mostly bc ludo and sibylla immediately attack it from the angle of kanji-memorization and grammar, which is the complete inverse of how it was taught to me

but i think that's part of the point (also it's not like the sections are hard or aren't ever thoroughly translated), what with sibylla trying to develop this linear approach to mastery and ludo skipping straight to learning the characters for "turtle" and "gloom"

Blah, y'all are making me want to read this again.

I read it 6 or 7 years ago, but I'm not sure I got it. Or I didn't entirely pick up on the 'anti-elitist' aspect (Christian Lorentz in that Vulture canon piece):

Is this boy, Ludo, a genius? Sibylla, his mother, is of two minds about it. She recognizes that she’s done something out of the ordinary by teaching the kid The Iliad so young, following the example of J.S. Mill, who did Greek at age 3. She knows he’s a “Boy Wonder” and she encourages him in every way to follow his omnivorous instincts. But she also believes that the problem with everybody else — literally everybody else — is that they haven’t been properly taught and have gone out of their way, most of the time, to avoid difficult things, like thinking. Otherwise we’d be living in a world of Ludos.

So a novel that appears on the surface to be elitist — concerned as it is with great works of art, scientific achievement, and excellence generally — is actually profoundly anti-elitist at its core. DeWitt’s novel is infused with the belief that any human mind is capable of feats we tend to associate with genius. But the novel’s characters, especially Sibylla, are aware that youthful talent can be thwarted at any turn.

while reading the book i felt its position on the education system and the ethics of raising a child in this way was somewhat ambiguous (the school Ludo attends is clearly not right for him, but Sibyll's interactions with the staff are also pretty erratic) but then in the epilogue HdW strongly advocates for reforming the education system to breed and nurture child prodigies. i felt that was a bit intrusive of her

I never got the idea that Helen DeWitt was advocating any particular approach to childhood education. It felt to me she was purely playing with ideas to see what sort of characters might attempt them, and what sort of a story might evolve out of those characters and ideas. The whole book felt like an exercise in intense mental playfulness, made manifest by projecting it into a story.

i agree that that is true of the book itself. but in the epilogue there's a weird call-to-arms. my copy is in a box in my mom's basement so i can't check it out now

the red devlin section really hurt my feelings

but then in the epilogue HdW strongly advocates for reforming the education system to breed and nurture child prodigies. i felt that was a bit intrusive of her

― flopson, Thursday, December 20, 2018 1:49 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

imo sibylla wrote the afterward and signed it “helen dewitt”

also the afterword isn’t really part of the text and is just curious about the possibilities of a world where kids were allowed to explore and master whatever interests them

i think there’s elitist/anti-elitist themes floating throughout the book but i find it weird that lorentz singled them out when attempting to summarize this book, bc it’s far more about... idk, roughly a thousand other things. art and intelligence and mastery and the profound isolation and suicidal gloom that lurks around them. devlin is written off early by sibylla as a shitty writer but he got so close to his subject, mastered his one skill so thoroughly that he was the only person who could do it, and then he could no longer bring himself to do it

imo sibylla wrote the afterward and signed it “helen dewitt”

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Saturday, December 29, 2018 3:48 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

she has a new novella! titled "the english understand wool"

https://www.gawker.com/culture/the-difficulties-of-helen-dewitt-the-english-understand-wool-review

thanks for the link xyzzzz__. I've just finished The English Understand Wool, and I need to collect my thoughts on it. But I did laugh out loud in public once and finished with a massive grin on my face. There is a great suppleness + tension in her writing, which I think is unmatched elsewhere.

The only thing I would say is, for those who think they are going to read the novella (barely even that tbh) - don't read that review. Any sort of clumsy-ish summary of the plot knackers the balance and structure in the story itself.

nothing against the review, which is fine and touches on a couple of points, perhaps slightly peripheral, of interest, but the book is so condensed to its own purpose that any description of what takes place is going to botch it.

the approach to reading this book involved a sort of delicacy. it's extremely short, barely a novella, and I didn't want to read it in a frame of mind that wasn't in some way tuned up to read it. Blink and you miss it. also, reading a new book by a writer that you like always produces a sense of wariness. *what if they fuck it up*.

I loved many of the stories in Some Trick but not all of them - though admittedly the ones I didn't like were the older ones, written at Oxford, which were just ok, and a couple of the music ones felt a bit 'off'.

There is tension in her writing akin to Jonathan Swift's, created by layers of meaning, of irony working at a fine level of detail. 'This is language on a hair trigger' as Geoffrey Hill said of another writer in one of his lectures. It's not quite that razor's edge at the level of language as such, but it is working somewhere there at a conceptual level. It doesn't matter as such - it's a technical observation - but the effect is very fine and enjoyable.

So I re-read Some Trick. I reread most of Against the Gods, by Peter Bernstein, about the history of risk and probability, and mentioned by DeWitt in one of the ST stories. I read a couple of the pieces in Erving Goffman's Interaction Ritual (a fascinating book!), also mentioned.

I was in Cádiz, which is a favourite city, not least because its cool, dark, narrow streets open periodically onto tree-shaded plazas, with fountains and ornate benches in dappled shade, perfect for reading.

it's v much in the same vein as the better stories in Some Trick. In fact it covers a number of the same obsessions. The nature of people who are able to achieve things... wrong word... do? *accomplish* things. The nature of the things that we might term *accomplishments*. What sets them apart. A specificity of terminology, of language, representing decisions about taste - knowing the difference between x and y and your preferences - and in The English Understand Wool of *terroir*, what it means to *understand* something, what 'social conjunctions' cause certain qualities to flourish. What it means for something to be innate.... or not. Can you fake that understanding? What would it mean to be fake. There is something indefatigable and

Also, what are the things the world can give us? What skills? What thoughts? Being specific about these things leads to the world looking quite fantastic and strange.

I suppose in one sense all of HDW's writing are fables about τέχνη/techne.

There is also an irony of snobbery at play, and some publisher/book industry irritation (what the article xyzzzz linked is getting at - HDW is clearly very exacting to work with, and in one light this book is all about justifying that, but i think it's quite a limited angle really).

It's a very sparse book. Some of the chapters are only a few lines long. So you sometimes wonder what HDW is playing at. What is this innocuous chapter doing? I don't know. I haven't really got to the bottom of it. Part of me wonders if after all this obsession is really ultimately rather slender?

It was good that I had read the Goffman, because the notions of 'face' and poise play a role. And HDW is usually generous with her reference points – ie she tells you what they are, though here it was chasing references via Some Trick. I wonder if The English Understand Wool was in fact an uncompleted short story, or superfluous to the 'trick' (as in whist or bridge

I'm reminded of something I realised when I was putting some thoughts down about High Rise by Ballard. I realised that although his ideas were very exciting and prophetic feeling, his models were quite conservative for the time he was writing: 19th century exploration novels, psychoanalysis of the jungian variety, anthropology of the Claude Levi-Strauss variety. But that didn't matter. It gave his stories a very basic set of dynamics which he could pursue to the utmost extent to generate something quite radical and exciting. People in his books operated according to the models he put in place. But he was still conservative.

i think HDW also uses theory, or non literary models to drive her writing - anthropology ofc, coding and statistics, art philosophy. There are people who understand the models (the savants, the accomplishers, the slightly lacking in affect or very odd) and try and operate via those models as a way of operating in and understanding the world, and there are those who do not know about the models. do not care. the humour comes out of the interaction between the two. it's clear that DeWitt's sympathies are with the former, but it's not entirely one way. That two way street is most obvious in Lightning Rods, but it's also here.

The other reason I like her. There was a thing doing the rounds on twitter, some business grad's idea of the 100 books you *must* read and ofc it was full of nn taleb, gladwell, thiel etc and of course a lot of book twitter was eye-rolling the hell out of it, and with some reason. that whole slate star codex/tyler cowen stuff is p nauseating, but HDW connects the methodologies, and the thinking of the modern age, and much of its insanity to the notion of *accomplishing* things (they may not be good things of course). This is another of her frictions and amusements. How do you *get* published, what trade offs do you end up making to be successful, how do you operate in the world?

So, I enjoyed it a lot and read it quickly, so then I read it again. And it was noticeable the way she manages the structure of the plot and emotional dramatic irony throughout - there's a lot of amusement to be had by reading it again, knowing what will take place.

i think there are only two lines that are possibly slightly off, one irrelevant (aisle seat on plane), one very important (pdf), but i'm assuming HDW must have encountered the latter, possibly even it was the prompt for the story.

It's *really* short. Don't read a review, read the book first then read the review.

oh, couple of other things. it was a good book to read in Cádiz:

It was, in fact, better to have six weeks at one’s disposal. Maman liked to go to places where there are secret lives. Grenada, Venice, even, yes, Paris—places where one can, of course, walk the public streets, the walls are high, barred, occasionally one catches a glimpse of a garden, or an open window at night, high above the street, spills golden light from a room lined with ancient volumes. (This is undoubtedly why she chose a residence in Marrakech.) Six weeks offer the courtesy of time. One will not be thrust in by chance invitations from the fool of the family, an impulsive youngster whose social blunders leave everyone rolling their eyes. There is the possibility of invitations of value. It is of no importance if these do not come; what matters is the glimpse of the garden, only to be entered by the favorites of chance.

'places where there are secret lives' – yes (and with reason in the context).

As usual I didn't finish a sentence in the previous post:

I wonder if The English Understand Wool was in fact an uncompleted short story, or superfluous to the 'trick' (as in whist or bridge) in Some Trick, as it shares much with stories in that collection. And incidentially, bridge as a transactional and communication system is also an obsession which overlaps w the goffman obviously. what are our communication transactions, our plays? again how do the two 'sides' outlined above transact?

What happens to the underabsorbtion of feeling in these systems?

Very appealing, intriguing takes, thanks! There are people who understand the models (the savants, the accomplishers, the slightly lacking in affect or very odd) and try and operate via those models as a way of operating in and understanding the world, reminded me of Pynchon writing (no idea if this is accurate) that Norbert Weiner's model of human cognition as basis for user-friendly/mirroring AI had turned out to be wrong, according to later neurological research---but meanwhile people using computers were adjusting themselves to this false/limited model: which might be the false/limited basis for his early stories about modern human attraction to reductive, though massive, mechanistic, inanimate patterning (ain't got no soul, going with his hipster Huguenot-descendant aversions). Stories which he's harsh on in the intro to Slow Learner, which collects a number of them, but he's also down on Lot 49, and it's easy to connect that to themes of V., and some of Gravity's Rainbow. Which (young and/or older TP's creative misprision in there somewhere? Let it roll if so, I say) goes w what you describe as DeWitt's irony and also her not taking sides between model-minded weirdos and others.

Also, what you say about Ballard reminds me of his 1978 conversation w Jon Savage, in Search and Destroy (also in an issue of RE:Search):

S&D:That's another thing very noticeable in High-Rise and Concrete Island that modern isolation -- because of all that, as in the case of the guy an the Concrete Island, you can actually be on the road trying to hitch a ride -- you might as well be light years away.

JGB: You can't stop here and you can't stop there -- well even if you wanted to if you’re driving along, say the Westway near Shepherd's Bush at 60 miles an hour, and you saw somebody bleeding by the roadside -- you try to stop, you'll be in a multi-car pile-up, you'd be dead, you'd be hit by about 15 or 20 cars. And of course you don't want to stop -- the whole system is engineered around the assumption that nobody is going to express any impulsive charity -- or do anything impulsive, for that matter! You no more can express some original impulse than somebody riding a rollercoaster who suddenly decided to got off -- once the rollercoaster begins you have to ride it through to the end. Many of these modern roads are beautifully landscaped, actually.

oops, meant to link: https://www.jgballard.ca/media/1978_reprinted_1988_search%26destroy_newspaper.html

Also, re models, patterning, loops, living by, makes me think of Didion's Where I Was From, about getting a headful of California Golden State mythos at an early age, what that does to people, including herself, very gradually coming to terms with it---

I think Fizzles is very on point re Ballard’s novels, though in his short fiction he really let his structural experiments go wild in a very un 19th century way.

i need to process those posts, dow, i think there's a lot in what you say (i'm sort of circling around how ontologies of metadata in media interact with emotional states and recommendations in a limiting or creatively deterministic way at the moment), but i'm not sure it's exactly an HDW concern as such, or rather it's much more ludic with HDW. systems as a quite humanistic, serious and ethical *game*. i don't feel i'm being v clear in my own head about all this tbh.

aiui the great west road and the westway were both modelled on Moses' parkways. i feel that statistics and probability is the base of any common interests in systematisation. Seeing Like a State is an obvious place to look.

Agree w JM on the short fiction. Which reminds me of something i meant to post a while ago: A while ago, I read two short stories, The Vats by Walter de la Mare in 1917, and JG Ballard's *The Waiting Grounds* (1959). There are have numerous similarities, and a comparison seemed valid, so i wrote quotes, parallels and differences down either side of a line i drew in a notepad. I seem to have mislaid the notepad in an ill-advised tidying-up session, but i circle back to it periodically, as it's not a comparison i've seen made anywhere else.

They are both about Time: Time on a vast, theistic or metaphysical scale. They are also both about how that version of Time may be specifically accessible in a particular type of landscape, via inhuman constructions.

We came at once to a standstill amid the far-flung stretches of the unknown plateau on which we had re-found ourselves, and with eyes fixed upon these astonishing objects, stood and stared. I have called them Vats. Vats they were not; but rather sunken Reservoirs; vast semi-spherical primeval Cisterns, of an area many times that of the bloated and swollen gasometers which float like huge flattened bubbles between earth and heaven under the sunlit clouds of the Thames. But no sunbeams dispread themselves here. They lay slumbering in a grave, crystal light, which lapped, deep as the Tuscarora Trough, above and around their prodigious stone plates, or slats, or slabs, or laminae; their steep slopes washed by the rarefied atmosphere of their site, and in hue of a hoary green.

anyway... this isn't the thread for it.

i am interested to hear ilxor's thoughts on The English Understand Wool - as you can tell from the above i'm really fumbling around it. it has all sorts of positive what I might call secondary qualities or indicators. like the fact you can't really describe any aspect of the book without giving out an important element of the whole, far better in its own context than taken out of it and plonked here or in a review. which is why or partly why my thoughts above are deliberately so abstract. and while i'm still fumbling around, i don't want to *mess it up*. another good secondary indicator or quality: i find myself continually thinking about it, so i'm v much still in the *woolgathering* stage as it were.

i'm not sure it's exactly an HDW concern as such, or rather it's much more ludic with HDW. systems as a quite humanistic, serious and ethical *game*. i don't feel i'm being v clear in my own head about all this tbh.

I raved about TEUW on twitter and Helen deWitt responded and I am somewhat starstruck.

Congratz! I never thought to look for her on Twitter---(oh that was meant to be *grind* the text to pieces)

Are you a student who's passionate about translation? The OAT needs you! We are now accepting applications for various roles ahead of our second issue in the winter. Check out the link in our bio for more! pic.twitter.com/zK2K132T4l

— Oxford Anthology of Translation (@oatanthology) August 28, 2022

DeWitt retweeted that, characteristically enough.

was re-reading the v amusing, geneous and insightful piece on pierre michon by wyatt mason in the nyrb, and a phrase at the end struck me cos it seemed so appropriate for The English Understand Wool:

the distilledness of his work, its compression and *the yields of exclusion*

tho as i write that down, i realise again, that it's not quite right – there's not a sense of exclusion, of the sort you might get in evelyn waugh or pg wodehouse dialogue, or indeed in michon. in TEUW it's more a sort of *exactness*.

Behind the scenes on the narrator's wine choice in TEUW

Ha. No, my first choice was ludicrously wrong for a supposedly knowledgeable narrator, then had LONG email exchange w Lena Devos, France-based Russian translator of Some Trick, who was SO helpful re wine & meal

— Helen DeWitt (@helendewitt) August 30, 2022

Fizzles - about this WOOL book that you like: what is it about and why does it have this title?

i think i won't answer that, partly because it's so incredibly short, that you can answer both those questions after something less than an hour of reading, partly because it's so well put together that to add my summary information... i don't think there's enough words for my view to dilute into without affecting the effect!

nice interview in berlin here (nothing on The English Understand Wool though).

i'm not sure it's exactly an HDW concern as such, or rather it's much more ludic with HDW. systems as a quite humanistic, serious and ethical *game*.

i enjoyed the novella but the cover is incredibly hideous in design and also in feel (feels like some weird cheap kids book). the design is so ugly that maybe it's good. not sure.

new short story in the NYRB. haven't read it yet.

“Scribbling”: A Story, Helen DeWitt

not much to this. generally the same subject matter about creativity and the incompatibility or indifference of its demands with commercial imperatives. that’s a simplification - as so often with HdW you pause and say things like “tho what is the point of the fact that the krispy kreme shops are open 24 hours, and actually more appealing to her than her life at home” or “what does it mean that some sort of inherent, naif excellence to Flip’s “scribbling” uplifts her to New York away from a tiresome agent / housemate / friend and that she doesn’t know or care how to get back?

hdw does the english manner of this sort moderately well but not well enough i think to do this sort of thing beyond a very short story, as this is.

HdW collaborative work with Ily Gridneff Your Name Here finally seeing the light of day.

https://www.deepvellum.org/news/your-name-here

Somewhat annoying and certainly misleading press release from Deep Vellum & Dalkey Archive here. It's not 20 years in the making, more 20 years in the publication and general wrangling, as is the way with HdW writing.

HdW did say in personal correspondence that Noemi Press did hold the rights for a while but that they handed them back because they felt the technical challenges of publication would be too much for them. After this, 'the agent' (her agent I assume) felt it would be 'too adventurous' for a mainstream publisher to take on.

Call me... *interested* but wary. I'm always wary. I'll obv be getting it!

*Ilya

Great news for the wary and eager, yas, thanks.
Forgot about my previous posts on here, oops jeez

Really feel for Dewitt's pain at having to deal with whatever is outside what you do.

https://archive.ph/OxrSA

is anyone else reading "your name here"? i'm alternating reading it with other stuff because it's pretty repetitive and i need breaks. it has its moments but also has every cliche of experimental literary fiction - breaking the fourth wall (constantly), writing a book about writing a book (about writing a book), thinly-veiled autobiographical characters (so thin that it's part of the joke), circling back around to the starting point (over and over)
i asked my local neighborhood book store to order it for me so they would get my money, and i was in there yesterday and i noticed they had two more copies on the shelf, presumably ordered bc i requested an order. i feel kind of bad that they are never going to sell those books

i will read it at some point, but i don’t imagine i’ll end up in an enormously different position from you, though i hope to enjoy some of it. helen dewitt not entirely in disagreement here either from this, though the meta game playing seems fairly central to the point.

Masterly review. I do have one quibble: the author thinks editorial intervention might have helped the book, & seems to think that in this she disagrees with me. No! I agree! I tried desperately to persuade our first agent (2007) https://t.co/ZYQBUnbcuW

— Helen DeWitt (@helendewitt) December 16, 2025

Incredible thread

Now that the Windham-Campbell Prizes have been announced I can talk about my failure to make the grade back in February, when I was told I had won a prize for fiction. Initially thrilled, then learned the prize was contingent on forms of promotion I was simply unable to provide. https://t.co/EtsmXH3rkh

— Helen DeWitt (@helendewitt) April 8, 2026

This is an interesting, conflicted response.

Having been on both sides of the “this writer is completely nuts” equation I can say that it’s sad that DeWitt didn’t get that prize but understand that there’s a limit to accommodating writerly chaos and disfunction.

— Matthew Spencer (@unpaginated) April 9, 2026

What this boils down to is a commendable refusal to be bought. By establishing her own terms and sticking to them she's once again defied the parasites. Good on her. Some people aren't meant to find decent WiFi

Also, the extent to which she simply is Sibylla...probably the most unstintingly candid self-analogue in literary history? By this logic, her Ludo is her writing, the hyperfunctional offspring that goes forth even as the parent flails

What I do think she has both benefited and suffered from is that her breakthrough work came in an era when you didn't need to play the game so much to make headway, you could just find a publisher or agent who believes in your writing and not have to do much in the way of commercial positioning or media work, you yourself weren't so much the product. And so this benefit has now become a curse, as the ground has shifted beneath her feet. She can still get work published as she has achieved establishment, but any attempt to launch anew or attain a greater level of literary-universe prestige, such as this prize would apparently confer, has been assigned new and upsetting rules, rules which no writer should have to observe (and which many notable historical and contemporary writers, as she correctly points out, would not).

Anyway, this is all reminding me to seek out more of her work

I find the responses kind of unhinged in a few directions but I guess my main feeling is just do the video and take the money. Is it bad they want to promote themselves a bit if they give someone 170k? It hardly seems like doing a Nike ad or something. Also like it would stop her working for a day or two.

I mean it's ultimately up to her so not being too critical, just a bit weird to bring it up again.

Also as someone with chronic illness I find the defences based in that, from others more than HDW herself, just kind of weird. Like she is capable of writing, she could have done this small amount of promo for them, it's not about that imo.

I think some of the responses praising her are acting like she turned down the prize simply because of this promo, and that's noble, but it seems a bit more convoluted than that.

There is definitely a conversation to be had about what literature and literary promotion has become, and whether different things are being asked of writers now as compared to 30 years ago

See I don't think it's that different.

iirc when Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Lit there was accommodation of her anxiety disorder and she pre- recorded her speech in a room.

There has always something almost Inspector Clouseau-esque about HdW and her attempts to get things published. There was a lot around how it was hard to get "The Last Samurai" just how she wanted. "Your Name Here" took a long time to get from writing to publishing.

Some of this is to do with her own pain, so not feeling like going much further. Just feel sad about the outcome.

Yeah I'm not sure being asked to do a video for 170k represents the struggles of writers, tho she is fully entitled to her own personal experience and agency.

And I mean that I don't think it's wildly different to large awards or patronages of the past.

Ofc. It is sad. My experience, having a few neurodivergent friends (and being somewhat of that nature myself) who struggle to promote their extremely brilliant music (okay this doesn't apply to me so much lol), is that such individuals will often be happy to talk about their work (Youtube interviews etc), perform live and so forth, but the real roadblock comes when someone actively wants to represent them outside of their control, to curate them into a Product; across the board, my friends reject this, refuse to be thus coopted, and it means their stuff remains highly obscure, unmarketed. My sympathies will always be with people who are like this.

In this case, at the very least they should have found a way to accommodate her, sent someone over to Amsterdam to do the interview in person for example. It's a lovely city

There's something I can't put my finger on about the fallout, like idk, why do I even know this happened? I feel this way a lot when listening to a podcast or a whatever or about true crime, like this isn't any of my business! And obviously it raises issues but idk.

Saw this item in The Guardian just now..

Just reading her account, it sounds like she tried a lot of different ways to work with them. The thing that ultimately leads her to refuse seems to be this:

Also, this did not look good. Mike had not drafted new terms incorporating the concessions offered earlier – I was to formally agree to the original terms and rely on not being held to all of them at their discretion. Just how stupid would you have to be to do that?

They'd worked out an accommodation, but for some reason the prize people didn't revise the formal terms to reflect it.

HdW retweet this lol

Not sure if anyone has yet but it’s worth pointing out that Elfriede Jelinek refused to attend the 2004 Nobel Prize award ceremony because she suffers from multiple crippling phobias and they still gave her the award

— Stephen Piccarella (@spiccarella) April 10, 2026

Observing this from a great distance, my first question when trying to grasp what happened here would be whether deWitt (not her publisher) actively sought the prize or in any way campaigned to get it, as opposed to simply being considered and then chosen.

If she actively sought it, then her indignation seems unjustified. If it was the second case, where her publisher may have submitted it but she herself did not actively assist them, then because accepting the prize came with strings attached in the form of a contract obliging her to do certain things she balked at accepting it. The accommodations offered did not change those contractual obligations. She had good grounds for refusing to place herself under that contract.

and yet she can fly to Boston for Adderall

I think so! Years ago a reader got me some blackmarket Adderall (had to fly to Boston to collect); made me very, very calm (so maybe I do have ADHD), enabled me to restore 3000 books to order after chaotic sublet, bad for writing but wd probably have let me make W-C happy

— Helen DeWitt (@helendewitt) April 10, 2026

also feel like she should stop comparing herself to DeLillo and Pynchon. You know what those two authors don't do? tweet

If you feel free compare her to DeLillo and Pynchon (unfavorably), then why try to deny her the option of making any comparisons she wants? Nothing compels anyone to take an author's opinions as correct.

because i kinda think authors should stfu and do the work

how much work does it take to write a synoposis of not recieving an award and then publish it across multiple platforms and how much time away from real writing did she have while writing her long missives that aren't fiction

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:j3tpb4iabrq3ukfaui6eymwf/bafkreiaqifbyfc7zu44qhoqng64ocvmzqc6pez426aznrtn4fkzqbbzjfi

sorry for the bluesky link but this is hilarious

you know she has like 100 projects in some stage of semi-completeness right, she does little but write. she's just very particular about what other people get to see of her literary work. this blogpost probably took her like 2 hours, she just churned it out

get this autistic legend her amphetamines so she can find wifi ^_^

is she autistic? or like are we just saying yet again someone's personality is a medical condition.

waterface really otm here. the blog post and the social media posts and the shared emails read like the clickhole queen elizabeth diaries.

her argument seems to be how difficult it is to be left alone to write, but a hugely incongruous level of effort has gone into performatively establishing herself as a difficult writer. and that work is written itself and involves fabricated characters as much as any fiction.

effort has gone into performatively establishing herself as a difficult writer.

my perspective on that is simple or else simple-minded: nobody has to watch the performance. I find it's easy for me because novelists are not usually very interesting as compared to their works, unless you're fascinated by finicky people who spend a lot of time in chairs thinking about constructing sentences.

I mean if you look upthread I did already question why do I even know about this incident. But if we all took the approach you suggest more generally I guess this board wouldn't exist.

get this autistic legend her amphetamines so she can find wifi ^_^

― imago, Friday, 10 April 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Can you stfu, for the billionth time.

Was reminded of this book, which I haven't yet read

https://www.nottinghilleditions.com/product/my-prizes/

also feel like she should stop comparing herself to DeLillo and Pynchon. You know what those two authors don't do? tweet

― a (waterface), Friday, 10 April 2026 bookmarkflaglink

How do you Pynchon doesn't tweet lol

That tweet is also comparing to Walser and Artaud. People who might have found that whole business difficult.

There's an interview where she says 'I sometimes think I have Asperger's' - just not of a generation where such things were readily diagnosed, especially where high functioning of some sort was involved. And maybe they don't need to be diagnosed - I'm just claiming kinship, don't mind me (and ftr I was told at 18 that I probably had it too, when it was known by that name - I got as far as actually seeing a psychologist)

But yeah, we shouldn't armchair diagnose others, no matter how clear and obvious it might seem

a really skilled writer imv, a favourite. absolute disaster area to have any sort of business dealings with, especially if you're a publisher. complete eye roll at the saga when I saw it, immediate 'of course' while being a bit sad that she couldn't get some deserved money that people wanted to give her because of /waves arms about/. slightly reminded of Julian MacLaren-Ross in some ways. obv he couldn't tweet thank god but if you've ever waded through his boring, self-important, wheedling letters (don't) then it's another good example of how the business of running your own life and non literary writing is very separate from skill as a writer. HdW is clearly extremely chaotic (and has had her fair share of trauma afaict) and a very poor manager of her own life, for whatever reason. Not at all unheard of ofc. Has moved around a lot too, which brings its own brand of chaos (the entire Amsterdam saga, I remember at the time just going 'HOW' while knowing the answer was 'because HdW is always like this').

it is interesting how her fiction is so pre-occupied with navigating this world successfully, such that in a sense they might be seen as personal fantasies - very often about how extreme organisational competence brings its own weird logic and can go awry, where 'organisational competence' can also be mathematical systems, and how it runs up against the world, and people in it. clausewitz's 'friction' - 'the way broadly speaking, the world pushes back when we push forward' as the elk put it. the people in these worlds are more or less quixotic, but they are also more or less *successful* on their own terms (though not always).

now i've written that down, i don't like the personalisation of it, despite it being valid. as i've said before, i think her writing is wonderful (though I'm eyeing Your Name Here on my shelves with wary trepidation), and of the moment, bringing more modern concepts to the question of manners and the always pertinent set of questions, 'what are you doing, thinking, making?'

Also, the extent to which she simply is Sibylla...probably the most unstintingly candid self-analogue in literary history? By this logic, her Ludo is her writing, the hyperfunctional offspring that goes forth even as the parent flails

t is interesting how her fiction is so pre-occupied with navigating this world successfully, such that in a sense they might be seen as personal fantasies - very often about how extreme organisational competence brings its own weird logic and can go awry...quixotic...
now i've written that down, i don't like the personalisation of it, despite it being valid.

Not a meld, but personae connected.

i don't know how anyone could sit through that horrific wc prize announcement video and not feel that those sickos should be forced to give HdW her money at gunpoint

was all set to snark it up and say the video can't be that bad but is this the video??? good Lord

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DW4WAqxj3ih/

That's it, they wanted her to shed tears of gratitude and then film pharmacutical ad b-roll for them

it is cheesy but most of them are probably genuinely happy.

for sure. it's an amazing award.

oh god i hate that fucking video and i wouldn't do it either

"it's not easy to keep going as a novelist, and it's even harder to stop" - a novelist who is not helen de witt

I am delighted and more honored than I can possibly say - the Emergent Ventures program at the Mercatus Center has offered me a grant of $175,000 with no requirements of any kind in the way of publicity, attendance at meetings, or anything else.

Koch-funded libertarian think-tank but at least there's no video of people expressing happiness.

loooool tyler cowen bailed her out

I am delighted and more honored than I can possibly say - the Emergent Ventures program at the Mercatus Center has offered me a grant of $175,000 with no requirements of any kind in the way of publicity, attendance at meetings, or anything else.

— Helen DeWitt (@helendewitt) April 13, 2026

what a f’ing world.

the thing is, i’m happy for her, fine. and it’s a mutual admiration society afaict (tyler cowen is ofc insane - happy to relieve his institute of some money) but industry prizes of any sort are promotional events. it’s the whole point and purpose of them. so i do find the “poor lamb” commentary weird.

xpost

beat me to it!

Koch-funded libertarian think-tank but at least there's no video of people expressing happiness.

lol!

Isn’t Peter Thiel the ultimate ghoul behind this

lmao

Yep, Thiel apparently, lol.

I honestly find her blog about the whole thing, which I can’t see if it’s been linked upthread or not, profoundly awful. I don’t know, you can say it’s executive dysfunction but to me there’s a certain level of learned helplessness (any!) that really is something I find just absolutely terrible. Most of this blog is about the difficulties of finding WiFi in Amsterdam, a city positively LADEN with it

https://paperpools.blogspot.com/2026/04/we-lose-again-windham-campbell-prize.html

I couldn't read the entire blog, it stressed me out.

My German cellphone company says I have nearly exhausted the data available for overseas roaming - it keeps shutting off connection. So anything that relies on a phone call can't happen.

well um, er

xps leiden

it is ridiculous. as i say having seen the farrago play out in real time on twitter, i couldn’t face reading the blog. as you say, my response was “how can you not find wifi in amsterdam”. she has written good blog stuff not about her travails but this is too much. not sure id describe it as learned helplessness as such - it seems to coexist with a certain amount of independence, unless Thiel is hanging around obv. independence the wrong word actually. just self-defeating chaos really.

i don’t really enjoy any of this because she’s a writer i would happily read a lot more of, just not… this stuff..

she’s also taught herself the rudiments of R! she is not technologically illiterate! but the quotidian is highly defeating.

"Koch-funded libertarian think-tank"

iirc she expressed approval of the last Nobel peace prize winner, so I don't think this is a massive issue for her

yes, steer clear the politics too, v poor liberal fare

tho the tech/washy liberal sides don't really overlap as such. so not sure 'not a problem with last peace prize winner' and koch/thiel are operating in the same space exactly.

xps to my favourite Fernet-fancier (who introduced me to a short story of hers that is one of my favourites ever)

But it kind of is? I don’t see how you can be both independent and helpless, like there are people in the comments section asking “why couldn’t you use your phone as a hotspot? Why not use the time you used to write this blog to carry out some of the requirements?” I don’t know, 175k seems like a lot of money and the prize people were willing to accommodate stuff like filming an obscured video of her speaking (to address discomfort with being on camera) and to film around her to some degree, even postpone. It really just seems like none of these were enough once the initial offer had been made. I also found her comparing her plight to people who died with covid very tasteless.

no, independent was the wrong word. what i mean is that she often seems to be managing her chaos herself, so to me (we may be working different definitions) the helplessness isn't learned as such, because a lot of the time there's no one there to bail her out. it's just sort of this dire quotidian slapstick.

completely agree with your post there tbh.

i should add, quite a lot of the time there have been readers willing to help her out. but it doesn't help for a variety of totally perplexing reasons. (witness amsterdam). she has afaict managed to alienate quite a few people who have tried to help here, similar to the prize givers here.

*help her

https://paperpools.blogspot.com/2026/04/we-lose-again-windham-campbell-prize.html

― hat stays on (gyac), Monday, 13 April 2026 bookmarkflaglink

This is kind of excruciating but it's reading like a weirdly good short story.

i love helen dewitt* and i'm not reading all this shit but i will say i do not want to live in a world where artists aren't free to be socially incompetent weirdos

*that being said i could not finish your name here

Lol sadly finding out who Tyler Cowen is.

The economist who runs Mercatus is, you may remember, the same dude who wrote the horny op-ed about how AI is good bc it creates starlets who are virgins. You simply cannot make this stuff up pic.twitter.com/0LWscwSWgb

— Adam O'Fallon Price (@AdamOPrice) April 13, 2026

i love helen dewitt* and i'm not reading all this shit but i will say i do not want to live in a world where artists aren't free to be socially incompetent weirdos

You don’t have to be an artist to be a socially incompetent weirdo and I honestly guarantee any boring functional working person who had to deal with this shit is not lesser for being capable of doing unreasonable things like “understanding where to get wifi”.

hard to read anything insidious into this or be anything but happy for hdw. if you want a cowen backed culture initiative to direct your ire at maybe this https://newaesthetics.art/

what do we all think of the mathematician who stapled together a blanket out of CVS detritus because he couldn't be bothered to figure out how to get to the mall?

This preference for routine — and the tendency to get exhausted by anything that strays from it — can sometimes manifest in extreme ways. When he was completing his doctorate in Michigan, for instance, “I would cut off almost everything else,” Huh said. When he first moved to Ann Arbor, he found himself unequipped for the brutal winter. He had few belongings, and he needed a blanket. But when he looked up how to get to the local mall, he found it too logistically difficult. “It was just beyond my level of tolerance,” he said. “I did not want to waste my mental energy on figuring out how to go from here to there.” Instead, he walked to a nearby CVS drugstore, bought 10 squares of fabric and a giant stapler, and stapled the squares together to make a blanket.

this discussion is reminding me of certain erstwhile ilxors

so not sure 'not a problem with last peace prize winner' and koch/thiel are operating in the same space exactly.

Machado and Thiel both being stidently, vocally pro-Trump isn't clear cut enough for you?

says s th abt the Way We Live Now that "just another libertarian techno-evangelist" feels like a meaningful category http://t.co/KuuSqNcHOX

— Helen DeWitt (@helendewitt) November 14, 2014

hard to read anything insidious into this or be anything but happy for hdw.

strongly disagree! i was following this from a distance and enjoying the wacky amusement, and was all but on her side after seeing that horrid video, but her taking Thiel money after making such a big stink about some stupid video promotion says a lot about her character i think, namely that she will make a performative fuss about something she finds personally inconvenient or stressful, and inflate it all out of proportion, but she will shut her mouth quite quickly it seems in order to accept money from vile fascist pigs

i had thought there was an element of her being 70 and a fairly successful author with no descendants and not really needing that much cash, so this is a turn

maybe she'll donate it all to something nice

i would suppose that in her whatever-it-is state (you call it 'catastrophe' or 'madness', i call it autism) she may well not have connected the dots with this mercatus lot, but it's starting to push the bounds of acceptable non-functionality to not cursorily investigate the bona fides of a one hundred and seventy five thousand dollar gift

i was all primed to buy 'lightning' and 'wool' new but maybe i'll find them in a second hand bookshop over the next few weeks lol

this discussion is reminding me of certain erstwhile ilxors

― jaymc

current

says s th abt the Way We Live Now that "just another libertarian techno-evangelist" feels like a meaningful category http://t.co/KuuSqNcHOX
— Helen DeWitt (@helendewitt) November 14, 2014
― flopson, Tuesday, 14 April 2026 bookmarkflaglink

There's always a tweet

If you are looking for more HdW content here she talks about a party thrown by some celeb publishing people and how hard is tough when you reach the top.

Impossible for me to say. When my first book came out I said I cd not deal with a big party, tho I wd do interviews. I had signed w the Wylie Agency before the launch b/c in a year I had not been paid for the foreign rights that had been sold.

— Helen DeWitt (@helendewitt) April 13, 2026

Just give me money I am tweeting not just post other ppl's anmoying tweets = where my life has gone wrong

"maybe she'll donate it all to something nice"

Wire it to Hezbollah. Bet she can do that!

apparently she's using it to hire a personal assistant and a social media video producer.

"i was invited to a launch party in the US so i put all my possessions in storage" is dynamite no video producer could muster, although i suppose i'm guilty here for (semi-fondly) mocking the very mental health conditions i've been trying to defend hitherto. events, dear boy

apparently she's using it to hire a personal assistant and a social media video producer.

Not really grasping why she didn’t have the former previously especially given how much everyday stuff seems enraging to her

xp have you considered that her presence on or off the spectrum is irrelevant compared to the fact that she may just be overindulged in behaviours a lesser writer wouldn’t be? I don’t see why one would pathologise this anyway, if she’s not functional then why would the publisher or agent or whoever direct her towards the award email if they expected this level of reaction? Honestly it was her agent I felt sorry for in this, imagine trying not to end your life listening to someone ranting about how it’s impossible to find WiFi in one of Europe’s most connected cities even as Starbucks remains exactly where it was

I will triple post only to say that her conduct reminds me very much of working in an office many years ago for a non profit and we had this pretty big office and an office manager who had responsibility for all kinds of stuff, from the post to the logistics for various things. A busy person. I remember one day she had HAD it with the assorted staff of the office leaving their cups and spoons in the sink for her to clean up when there was a dishwasher right beside the sink and sent around a pretty sharp email to this effect. I happened to be in the kitchen when one of the directors appeared holding out a teaspoon in his hand and made an enormous fuss about being asked to locate, open, and place this spoon in the dishwasher, like it was somehow beneath him to have to waste his precious director mental energy on something so menial. Same with that appalling story of the mathematician above, same with Helen DeWitt and abject refusal to do anything like pick up a phone and have a conversation. Just fucking nonsense. As I said above, re The Sexual Codes of the Europeans, it is a great story.

https://evergreenreview.com/read/sexual-codes-of-the-europeans/

It is one rich in sensitivity, insight and unusual imagery. To this end, knowing what I now (sadly) know about the author, how can I really separate my admiration for her work for her as a person? Others can and will, me not so much. Enjoy the blood money though!

my staunch defences of her right to be an awkward bugger - the literary world needs its weirdos etc - came before the blood money reveal tbf, which has given me some serious pause too

the best sort of literary clusterfuck: one that develops a plot midway through

_so not sure 'not a problem with last peace prize winner' and koch/thiel are operating in the same space exactly._

Machado and Thiel both being stidently, vocally pro-Trump isn't clear cut enough for you?

That’s not what I meant - and my point was mechanical rather than defensive. i mean reading HdW’s approach to politics and tech, they’re two different vectors in her thinking at that level. they don’t really touch. that’s not a view that i have.

not 100% sure user cmdsmde thinks you're referring to machado there so much as the fifa peace prize laureate himself tbf, although she (machado) has her given allegiances so it's conceivable

oh wait i'm being stupid/can't read

there needs to be a five-minute post deletion window, i can't be expected to exist on this webforum safely with my tendency to post first and think later!

Yeah whatever she said about the Peace Prize is a different matter to accepting a prize or not accepting it, which is a fairly live issue recently for obvious reasons. It is strange that in this case some people act as if she swiftly and deliberately rejected the first award because of a principled stand or even oh no the video rather than just stumbling towards it being withdrawn over a period of time. The subsequent acceptance of a wedge of dodgy cash is an amusing follow-up to that assumption.

xposts

my staunch defences of her right to be an awkward bugger - the literary world needs its weirdos etc - came before the blood money reveal tbf, which has given me some serious pause too

What about dropping that turd of a blogpost the very day the award was announced? Who even knows who actually got awarded it now? Or cares?

Well, we all watched the award video when it was posted upthread, so

Perhaps the blogpost was in retrospect a bit much. Writers should never become the story, etc

^^^^exactly

Depends on their ego, which I reckon awards would tend to inflate

"Yeah whatever she said about the Peace Prize is a different matter to accepting a prize or not accepting it, which is a fairly live issue recently for obvious reasons."

Tells me she is blind to politics. It might occur to her not to accept it given who might be giving it to her.

this discussion is reminding me of certain erstwhile ilxors

― jaymc, Monday, April 13, 2026 8:56 PM (yesterday)

for me, a certain erstwhile ilxor's adventures in cooking

would you believe it if i said i was a pretty accomplished home cook these days lol

not you ffs

is this where i have to guess whether this is lex, the pinefox or tuomas

the answer is contained within your post

Pleased to note, before I embarked on a long post, that I have already said what I was going to say here, and I would have said it much worse (apologies to those trying to parse my recent posts – wrong unclear words put down in snatched moments between work).

However, there are a couple of additional things I will put down, which are tangential to HdW at best but maybe it’ll come back round. I’m fooling around in a very sunny, bustling Leiden, while my partner is at a conference, and I’ve got a good, cold glass of wine, so let’s give it a go.

(so this ended up being very very long - sorry not sorry. tl:dr: tyler cowen isn’t *all* bad, the universe leaks, I think, and I’m feeling more generally forgiving to the HdW Situation, but that may just be the wine. may not be very well or at all proofed, sorry)

The first is that I do actually have a sneaking admiration for Tyler Cowen, and am slightly fascinated by him as well. A couple of things I like – his interviews, if you can bear listening to him*, can often be good, when they’re not right wing libertarian, extropian or rational community love fests. He has a well-cultivated skill of asking very direct questions that get at the heart of his interviewee’s philosophy and his ingrained habit of trying to ‘solve for the equilibrium’ produces more demanding interviews of his guests than I think you’ll find anywhere else.

Why do they all talk like this? I’m looking at you, Dwarkesh, or you Patrick McKenzie (who can also do some very good stuff). I think it’s significant. They don’t realise the importance of language or conversation as performance, and that’s significant because it also how they relate to the world, they don’t understand proportion (other than as a cost-benefit problem), they’re extremely data point is a 0 or a 1, and their methodology doesn’t allow for things that aren’t that.

It is amazing listening to Cowen talk about literature. He reads a lot, probably more than any of us will ever read, yet I have no sense that he has any emotional understanding of literature at all. I know - who will save us from people telling us what to enjoy or how to enjoy it? It’s up to him. But I find his descriptions of his engagement with art hilarious, slightly alarming and also a bit sad.

(One distinguishing capability, among others, about Helen de Witt, is that this is a space she operates in extremely successfully. She *does* evividently love and enjoy both worlds, and is able to bring them together. An underrated book of hers is Lightning Rods I think – the insanity of the corporate optimisation mentality applied to a small slice of the sex industry. I’m not sure I’ve read anyone outside Swift or Jane Austen who can do what she does in holding multiple intents and meanings in one sentence in this novel - she does it very well in The English Understand Wool as well, as well as creating an infinite loop, in the same manner as Finnegans Wake. It’s a really interesting work.)

The other thing Tyler Cowen does very well is provide extremely economic analyses of many disparate things. This by the way is a strength born of the weakness described above. He will apply his brain in the same way to Thai food, as Jane Austen, as Coltrane, as Hayek, as marathon running. It’s laughable in one sense, well actually in nearly all senses, but it does also apply a certain relentlessness in all matters.

So, really, what we’re talking about with Cowen is that old Seeing Like a State matter of “legibility”. And why I don’t mind this is that my personal view is that we should continually avoid epistemic capitulation in the face of ambiguities and uncertainties until we can no longer do so, but should also allow that there are genuinely ambiguities and uncertainties - unknowables, crucially (touch of Gödel here perhaps) - and that the point of analysis is *over* the line where you can no longer factorise the equation, and not before it, excluding everything that doesn’t fit. V capitalist imv. (I make no particularly moral judgment there - it is capitalist, technically speaking).

A digression on the capitalist element here:

The book I’m reading at the moment – Plough, Sword and Book – Ernest Gellner – puts it very well I think, regarding the comparison of ‘rational’ societies to pre-rational societies – we might use the marker of the Enlightenment, or the Renaissance, or any other similar - I would add Capitalist to that list.

I won’t quote all the relevant section (obv I was going to quote all the relevant section), but he writes that:

A man making a purchase is simply interested in buying the best commodity at the least price. Not so in a many-stranded social context [he is setting ‘multi-strandedness’ against the ‘single aim’ possible in a rationalist society]: a man buying something from a village neighbour in a tribal community is dealing not only with the seller, but also with a kinsman, collaborator, ally or rival, potential supplier of a bride for his son, fellow juryman, ritual participant, fellow defender of the village, fellow council member.

All these multiple relations will enter into the economic operation, and restrain either party from looking only to gain and loss involved in that operation, taken in isolation. In such a many-stranded context, there can be no question of “rational” economic conduct, governed by the single-minded pursuit of maximum gain. Such behaviour would disastrously ignore all the other multiple considerations and relationships which are also involved in the deal, and which constrain it. These other considerations are numerous, open-ended, intertwined and often incommensurate, and hence do not lend themselves to any cost-benefit calculation

Well, and so are we all in this position if you assign ‘kinsman, collaborator, ally or rival’ etc to elements of our emotions, social life, intellect, experience etc.

But of course Cowen very sincerely believes capitalism is the best mode for humanity, seemingly unaware that ‘humanity’ is about how we live - inclusive of past generations and future generations - and not how generate the best (for some value of ‘best’) outcomes, which is an absolutely legitimate parallel political and economic activity.

To return to ’legibility’ after that digression on capitalism. As Scott pointed out, legibility comes with very meaningful gains and very meaningful losses - the losses are not important to the purpose of legibility, which is sort of mainly extractive. There are meaningful to us though. However, what I want to pursue here is legibility as a feasible ideology, akin to, say, mapping unknown bits of the earth or universe, such that you can place it at the centre of what you do, as Cowen does.

And in fact Cowen himself makes a very good and important point in an extremely-painful-to-listen to interview with Dwarkesh:

TC: I'm not sure what those numbers going up mean or what a GPT-7 would look like or how much smarter it could get. I think people make too many assumptions there. It could be the real advantages are integrating it into workflows by things that are not better GPTs at all.
And once you get to GPT, say 5.5, I'm not sure you can just turn up the dial on smarts and have it like integrate general relativity and quantum mechanics.

DP: Why not?

TC: I don't think that's how intelligence works and this is a Hayekian point. And some of these problems, there just may be no answer. Like maybe the universe isn't that legible.”

Hayek, Keynes, & Smith on AI, animal spirits, anarchy, & growth, 31 Jan 2024

So, I think he’s absolutely right here, and it is important for thinking about AI and how well aligned it is with humanism (the proper sense of humanism rather than some of the bad words you see about it sometimes). And this observation very much reminds me of a favourite quote of mine from RF Langley:

[q]Is it possible for the ontological content of the world to drain out? in *Murphy* by Beckett there is a phrase 'the quantum of wantum does not vary.' but is that true?

Perhaps another way of putting it is to ask whether it is possible for the ontological content of the world to reduce in resolution, become graphically more basic like going travelling backwards via games consoles? (not perhaps a great analogy as there is a decent argument for saying that the games we have now are less imaginative and interesting than the ones we had then, but you get the idea)/[q]

Looking at the richness of the world (in fact the house around him) in his journals, and noting how everything was retained, every friction the door had taken in being opened and closed in some way retaining the experience of its existence, and extending that to the universe, RF Langley asked the question 'but does it leak?'

And I think that question is critical. My instinctive assumption is that the universe leaks, or at least as far as it is meaningful for humans, that is what it does. And this entails a lot from the importance of a painting by Rembrandt (my definition of humanism, if that isn’t the da vince cartoon of a smile on a woman he saw in the street - it’s both ofc), to the importance or not of religion, to tyler cowen’s derangement, or whether social democracy or socialism is the better bet.

I don’t want to say Helen de Witt is addressing all of this. That would not be a good thing. But the fact that she is interested and insightful on both Kurosawa and Gerd Geigerenzer is a good thing. It is playing at the heart of the matter, and is also at the front edge of the world at the moment.

When I’m walking through the park, I think about the point in time and space I’m in - the damp archipelago at the north-west part of the continental european landmass, the most extensive moment in history at the point I’m thinking it (let’s say the 16th April, 2026), hurtling through space - and I feel a lot of art is a couple of decades at least behind that point. I don’t feel that with Helen de Witt.

Having read some of what she wrote, I feel generally a bit more sympathetic to the situation she describes. She’s very good at some stuff, she’s very bad at some other stuff, so are we all. Like most of us she probably shouldn’t make public the less good aspects of her life, but god, *that’s* nothing to get on a horse about. Of course it’s also fine to laugh at because it’s funny and a bit stupid.

good post, fizzies. i like tyler too. i'm not sure how i feel about his interviewing style though. with the right guest it can work, but sometime his rapid-fire nerd questions seem completely void of life and humanity. i like dwarkesh though

It is amazing listening to Cowen talk about literature. He reads a lot, probably more than any of us will ever read, yet I have no sense that he has any emotional understanding of literature at all. I know - who will save us from people telling us what to enjoy or how to enjoy it? It’s up to him. But I find his descriptions of his engagement with art hilarious, slightly alarming and also a bit sad.

Got a piece/podcast example of this?

oh lol, i thought this hadn't posted (internet failure while abroad) and thought 'thank christ'. will attend tomorrow.

Money and writing. It could always be worse. This is a twitter bio I just found.

"Former senior executive in a multinational oil company. Retired Entrepreneur. Just finished my first novel. Writing, not reading"