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"?

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"