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

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.