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

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.

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.