Books for the twenty-first century

Lee Konstantinou interviews Helen DeWitt for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

"Not the neutral 'said'"

At the Awl, my interview with Helen DeWitt about her new novel Lightning Rods.

Closing tabs

Yesterday was a complex and rewarding day (got up at 5:45, rode my bike downtown for 7am boot camp at Chelsea Piers, then back uptown to teach Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden in the morning and Swift's Argument Against Abolishing Christianity and Johnson's Life of Swift in the afternoon, then musings on Helen Hill's film "The Florestine Collection" and a pizza party at my place afterwards for colleagues, friends and family, my own and Helen's, lay my head down on the pillow around 1am).

Today I am knackered!

Had a very productive afternoon appointment with a pulmonary specialist who has a number of thoughts on how I might tackle the exercise-induced asthma (he also recommends a mighty tome that I have ordered through BorrowDirect; it is prohibitively - comically! - expensive, it is for clinicians!), took a long nap and have spent the rest of the evening devouring Lee Child's The Affair.

I have some treats for upcoming days: the book party for Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods (here's a good interview at Bookforum, and I am delighted to say that Helen is also going to catsit for me next week while I am in Ottawa next week for a visit with Brent's parental units); a production of The Bald Soprano...

Miscellaneous linkage:

Benjamin Weiss defends the Cambridge History of the American Novel against Joseph Epstein's depredations. (These controversies make me throw up my hands in perplexity, I see that they are still 'live' in some sense but they bear no relation to my own personal lived experience of reading and writing and teaching in the academy, so it is hard for me to take them seriously as an account of true living intellectual controversies as opposed to some sort of late-stage playing-out of a long battle between ancients and moderns. I really am going to teach a class on the battle of ancients and moderns one of these days, by the way...)

B. R. Myers at the Atlantic on Peter Temple's crime fiction.

Update

Have had only sporadic internet access during this New York trip (my apartment is still sublet through January, so I'm not really at home in any practical sense), which casts an inhibiting pall on the blog. It is not just that one has no chance to write, it is that one does not garner peculiar bits that are worth posting!

But I have accumulated a backlog of light reading, much of it consumed in airports and planes, that should at least be logged. Working with a very slow Starbucks internet connection just now, and will skip links, I think, otherwise the irk factor will run high...

First round: Sara Paretsky's Bleeding Kansas; Laurie King's The Art of Detection; Raymond Feist's Faerie Tale; Greg von Eekhout's Norse Code (a great concept and title, with execution not quite as coherent and effective as I had hoped - it's readable, but it's no Sandman Slim); Barry Eisler's The Last Assassin.

Second round: two advance copies that have been waiting for me in New York and that I seized upon as soon as I could get uptown to pick up mail: Lee Child's new novel (will write a separate post about this one, but of course I loved it), as well as Robin McKinley's Pegasus (picture at that previous link courtesy of Becca), which has both the delights and the shortcomings of much of her other fiction, with a particularly inconclusive ending that will make all fans annoyingly clamor for a sequel!

Went to a lovely wedding over the weekend - Friday night's party was at powerHouse Arena (Brent and I were in agreement that it is an excellent idea to hold a party in a bookstore, it means reading is allowed at least in snippets!), the ceremony on Saturday was at the Socrates Sculpture Park with dogs frolicking wonderfully in the background and an absolutely beautiful reception and dinner afterwards on the gorgeous fourth floor of the Metropolitan Building. The views in that bit of Long Island City are almost vertigo-inducing, they so effectively put you at the base of a panorama of bridges and skyscrapers....

Another highlight of last week, something Brent couldn't believe I hadn't seen before, since it is so much his notion of the ideal theatrical entertainment: the extremely charming Avenue Q!

Got another play tonight, a talk tomorrow at Fordham and another wedding in Maine this weekend, various other stuff packed into the next couple weeks - posting may continue sporadic - but the one other thing I wanted to highlight is that Helen DeWitt is in New York and will hold "elevenses at 3" on Saturday at the McNally Robinson bookstore on Prince St. - stop by and say hello to her if you are interested and find yourself in the neighborhood.

"Box 58 is Death"

The game of Nim and other ruses (via literary Eds).

Helen DeWitt: "A-free, C-free and G-visited".

It has been another odd week - I was only in Cayman for a few days before we went ahead and scheduled a trip to Miami for a nuclear stress test. There was no true worst-case scenario, I was pretty sure everything would be fine or (if not) eminently fixable (a term my more precise traveling companion corrected to "treatable!"), but I was nonetheless rather discombobulated and on tenterhooks until late Thursday afternoon, when the cardiologist declared him in the pink of health (not his exact words, but that was the gist of it). This is good!

So it was a week of airports and hotels and junk food and highway travel; we saw Inception and The Karate Kid at the mall opposite our hotel, and had a very good (but hot!) trip to the Miami Zoo on Saturday (the Amazon exhibits are particularly recommended - delightful venomous frogs and slinky snakes and lizards! - but I also particularly enjoyed the cotton-topped tamarins, always a favorite of mine, and a comical series of interactions between a bunch of lemurs that clearly demonstrated the dominance of the ringtailed over the red-ruffed when they share a single enclosure).

Had a bunch of light reading to while away the hours: first of all some fairly trivial stuff from the Humane Society Book Loft (it is not an infinitely renewable resources, alas, despite its excellence), Amanda Craig's Love in Idleness (very glad I am not the sort of English person she describes!) and Eileen Dreyer's Head Games (not as good as early Patricia Cornwell) and Lynda LaPlante's Red Dahlia (highly formulaic) and a pair of novels by Tonya Huff (the first of which it turned out I had read before, and the second of which mildly displeased me by failing to satisfy the obligations of a crime novel as opposed to "romantic suspense").

It was with delight that I then buried myself in another Humane Society find, Donna Tartt's wonderful novel The Little Friend. I loved it - the use of language is so much more vivid and interesting and appealing than everything else I've been reading recently - not to knock the other stuff - but really, it is something very special! Very funny in parts - and now I cannot stop using the word chunking - I chunked my duffel bag into the back of the SUV in the airport parking lot when we got back to Cayman a few hours ago...

And I had a bookstore splurge at the mall in Florida too (it was the slightly dubious-sounding Books-A-Million), and got a few things I've been coveting that made today's travels pass fairly quickly: Tana French's Faithful Place (not perhaps quite as good as the first two, and I was still expecting one more twist when the book quite abruptly came to an end, but still very good) and Joe Hill's Horns, which I am enjoying very much indeed and will finish as soon as I put a period to this excessively lengthy post.

An amazing haul

at the library this morning - I am tackling ABCs of the novel initially via Roman Jakobson and Laurence Sterne, but got sidetracked onto Elias Canetti and also the three volumes of Ptolemaic Alexandria, a superb work of scholarship which no home should be without...

Liberace and Lord Leighton

Last night I reread Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai (I want to write a few sentences about it for the little book on style, which now exists in draft but with the hard parts not written yet!). What a book!

"Spam is better than ham"

Dan Visel interviews Helen DeWitt at if:book.

The next screen

A very good interview with Helen DeWitt at A Softer World. NB she is not exaggerating about the time and energy it takes to see books into print - it is the bane of my life, the one thing that there is no hope of changing and that I must just suffer through! I do not begrudge the time as such, it is necessary to do something with time, only it so clearly ends up being time spent not having enough energy to think about new things and write new books!

Here's a great bit, anyway:

Our social practices aren't as well developed as our games. A community of game players improves the standard at which a game is played over time. Bridge has only been around for a bit over a century, for instance, but well-developed bidding systems enable even very weak players to communicate the strength and shape of their hand and determine whether they have a good fit with their partner; the systems work well because they have been developed by first-class players who have a good sense of which hands play well. (You can't know the potential strength of a pair of hands, obviously, unless you know what can be done with them.) So if I'm playing bridge and have a six-card heart suit and 3 Aces a King and a Jack I have a very good chance of finding out whether my partner has a) a four-card heart suit and a fistful of honours, b) a four-card heart suit but a weakish hand, c) no hearts, a long spade suit and a fistful of honours, d) a few honours and no strong suit, or e) zilch. (to name just a few possibilities) By way of contrast, we have no comparable sophistication in the communication of sexual preferences or strength of interest. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever gone to jail for optimistically raising a 1 heart opening to slam on a hand with a singleton heart and the Jack of diamonds; we might think that the sophistication of the game could usefully be transferred to areas of life where the penalties for misunderstanding are higher.

Rogue agents

Why Helen DeWitt never got around to going on her bike ride.