Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (especially statistics)
Was going to post this on Substack, but they don't let you indent blocks of text. Today’s insanely long installment concerns a major prize which I was told I’d won back in February, but for which I turned out not to be eligible because unable to promote the prize to their satisfaction. I have held off posting this, since the prize was to be confidential until its announcement on April 8. On…
I've had the email address hdewitt@onetel.com since 2002 or so. Since then I believe onetel has been taken over by Talk Talk. For a while Talk Talk continued to support legacy email accounts, but they have finally decided to discontinue them. That is, I thought I had managed to confirm the account with them, but now I can't log into it, so it looks as though it has been discontinued. Unfortunately…
[A reader mentioned a post in which I had talked about Mark Girouard's Life in the English Country House. Couldn't find it on the blog; discovered I'd reverted it to a draft, for reasons I now can't remember. Am republishing since it seems a shame to suppress discussion of LIECH. Just a reminder that when I say, for instance, that I've just been reading LIECH, this was written back in 2012 or…
Looked at my website, designed in 2007 or 2008 with a few later changes, and it's pretty much unreadable on my phone. (I only got a smartphone a couple of years ago, when you had to have one to show vaccination status in Germany, so the website has probably been unreadable for a long time.) Will probably move to Squarespace, but I'm dreading it.
[All books now gone or spoken for - thanks to everyone who helped clear my shelves!] I probably can't stay in Berlin, so trying to get collection of books down to what I can afford to put in storage. I've been drawing up a list for a secondhand bookstore that stocks foreign-language books. I'll send the link to a few friends first in case anyone sees something they want. All free to good home. I…
Aaron Gwyn, Twitter, images of Cormac McCarthy's letter to his editor Albert Erskine about stylistic nuances of colons, commas, hyphens in his his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. (Gwyn describes these as stylistic quirks, which seems odd to me given the substantive arguments given for his choices.) Doesn't seem kosher to help myself to these images and post them here, but you can see what…
[This was originally posted back in 2009, I think, but was depublished by Blogger for violating Community Guidelines. Not sure what was wrong, but went in and cleaned up a few things, now it has been reinstated as a recent post.] Went to a meeting / dinner at Golden Parachutes, a gallery in Kreuzberg run by Jesi Khadivi and Paul Tyree-Francis. Paul and Jesi are planning to open the space to anyone…
BBC radio segment on undervaluation of women artists (roughly, selling at 10% of what male artists sell for) here For those who recoil from audio, as I normally do, there's also a summary in the Guardian here
How to get a Kitagutschein on All About Berlin blog
Collins published The Credential Society in 1979, when his publishers took so tepid an interest in the book they refused to publish a paperback edition. It's now a classic, took on new life with increased concern over escalating costs of university education and student debt in the US. Turns out, he has a blog, The Sociological Eye - a blog I know I will never find again if I bookmark it. So I…
Short segment on Radio France on Proust's rejection by Gallimard, account of the many revisions Proust made to the MS once accepted for publication and typeset (he apparently made significant changes to FIVE galleys). The text originally submitted to Gallimard was a "dactylograph" which did not have the now famous first line (Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heur.) - instead there was a…
In summer 1997 I went to Oxford to do research on a character I thought should be an astronomer. I went to the Radcliffe Science Library and began reading journals, increasingly aware of how ill-equipped I was to create a fictional astronomer: I should probably spend several months getting a better understanding of the kind of research he might do. My agent, Stephanie Cabot, had said in June 1996…
Am writing on my sister's laptop, as mine is on the fritz and I can't even find out whether it can be fixed because Maryland is under lockdown. Tried to leave a comment on my last post (ON MY OWN BLOG) and Google would not let me do it (despite the fact that I am, as you see, signed in as me and allowed to publish new posts). It wasn't much of a comment, but anyway, Andrew! Such a great post! It…
The real purpose of this blog, you may not have realised, is to have a place to put things where I can conveniently find them again. Am in the middle of an interview of Hadley Wickham by Will Chase, an interview in which HW (we are not worthy) says: So I think for a long time there was this big pool of people that could potentially be contributing, but they were really put off by R-help ( note:…
Year ago David Levene (my ex) went to a talk about how you know whether someone mentioned in the Jewish Chronicle is Jewish or not. I've sometimes picked up Jewish papers in the US, and it's never been clear whether they followed this kind of code, so I can't tell whether this is what I love about Judaism, or whether it's what I love about Anglo-Judaism (I converted in the UK, and never feel at…
Was reading Jonathan Glover's website and came across this video (70s? early 80s?) on genetic engineering, with contributions from his two young sons, enchanting: http://www.jonathanglover.org/genetic-ethics/brave-new-babies
Earlier this year I joined ANUFF Wood, a loose group of people in Windham County (VT) who turn up at each other's houses to cut/split/stack firewood. The idea is roughly that if you turn up for 4 or 5 you can ask them to come to you, though I don't think this is very strictly enforced, and the core members seem to turn up for many more sessions than they possibly "redeem." I've been to a fair…
I was recently interviewed by Jeremy Kitchen and Michael Sack for Eye 94 Radio (105.5 FM in Chicago), Lumpen Radio's books and literature program. Shortly before the interview began I got a call from someone at the studio to run through things that should not be said on air (basically various bad words, which would be tricky to bleep out). This helpful person reminded me that this would be a live…
Terrific piece by Craig Pittman on John D. MacDonald, the Travis McGee series, and Floridian environmentalism smuggled into the adventures of a knight in tarnished armor: The more I read, the more fascinated I became. MacDonald’s books weren’t just straight-ahead puzzle mysteries like my grandfather’s Perry Mason books. This author digressed. He quipped. He had a lot to say about a lot of…
If totalitarian regimes greatly restrict public language, pushing people toward coded language but making codes problematic by taking away the shared platforms where they could be unambiguously decoded, then a fraying totalitarian regime where people are bolder with their codes but still lacking the platforms for decoding is doubly problematic. (Think of a situation where any attempt at alignment,…
I'm staying with my mother in Silver Spring for a few weeks and have agreed to do an informal event at Politics & Prose down in DC on Sunday, January 6, at 6 pm. P&P is at 5015 Connecticut Avenue, NW, which is just by the intersection of Connecticut and Nebraska. The event will be a sort of get-together downstairs in the Den café - not a formal signing or reading, just a chance to talk about books…
People who at once start talking 19 to the dozen are exasperating. Just consider those documentary films about animals, in which those young, good-looking commentators say something which doesn't have anything to do with an answer. This is actually meaningless, because things are just being read off and because the spokeswoman has never seen the animal. This is one of my chief torments. Gadamer,…
Many, many months ago I met a reader who commented that I never seemed to write on my blog. I said all kinds of bad things were happening and I was dealing with difficult people. He seemed to think I could find something else to write about. I think if you're struggling to keep your head above water you can't think about anything else. A long time ago my ex's mother had breast cancer. That is, it…
A long time ago I started thinking about a book of sexual codes, inspired by Calvino's Invisible Cities. What if cities had sexual codes - that is, systems of conventions for communicating sexual preferences, like the bidding systems of bridge? Travel books would include a brief overview of the relevant codes, the way they now sometimes include useful phrases for ordering a meal or finding the way…
Today I got an uplifting email in an account I rarely use for registrations. I'm not convinced this will rate as Good News for Modern Man for anyone I know, but it cheered ME up. This, mind you, on a day marred by the Hardyesque twists of fate which technology has made so commonplace (and no, I DON'T want to talk about it). Excerpt from cheering email: Exciting News - ShareLaTeX is joining…