Helen DeWitt

7K posts

Helen DeWitt

Helen DeWitt

@helendewitt

Novelist (The Last Samurai et al.). Interested in languages, statistics, dataviz. NOT HdW the film curator, who is no longer on X.

Berlin (DE); Vermont (US) Katılım Mart 2009
8.2K Takip Edilen11.7K Takipçiler
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Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt@helendewitt·
In 2023 I read @LKonstan’s The Last Samurai Reread. No comment re critique, but was shocked by inaccuracies & misrepresentations of publication history, tried to get fixed. @ColumbiaUP won’t make even minor corrections. For those who care about bg: not a reliable source.
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Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt@helendewitt·
@SuperWinona @LyxPar yes - but that is something I could have got right on my own, was thrilled by the bit I would, left to my own devices, almost certainly have got wrong
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Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt@helendewitt·
@norabird @skmadeleine Yes. (Also I see this was not the rate for 20 yrs, it was a 20-year-old book now selling at that rate.)
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Nora Rawn
Nora Rawn@norabird·
@helendewitt @skmadeleine It might well be something in public domain! But also I think staying in print and having slow but consistent sales is best case in most scenarios
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Sophia
Sophia@skmadeleine·
+ in my experience, books only go POD when the sales are already low enough that a publisher can’t justify a print run. AND if a backlist title unexpectedly takes off, it can be pulled out of POD + put back “in print.” but getting used books is one of life’s small wonders anyway
James@exhaustdata

I’m fine with the normalization of print-on-demand books because the infrastructure for them has improved dramatically in recent years, and it allows books to stay in circulation forever. There’s not enough warehouse space on earth to perpetually house all of the books ever!

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Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt@helendewitt·
@norabird @skmadeleine Yes, a good safeguard. I think one person was talking about the case of a book that sold 50 copies a year for 20 years, which sounded iffy (though I suppose author might have right of reversion but not care)
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Nora Rawn
Nora Rawn@norabird·
@helendewitt @skmadeleine Usually there is a sales threshold below which reversion can be requested (250 copies annually or something), regardless of availability
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lyx_par
lyx_par@LyxPar·
@helendewitt I wasn’t correcting you, just pointing it out. And no, it’s not „gesehen“, if you want that, you need different syntax. „Wer sie vorbeischwimmen gesehen hat…“ vs. „Wer sie hat vorbeischwimmen sehen“ But I am not sure about the exact reason and it’s colloquial, I think.
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Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt@helendewitt·
@LyxPar yes, I know, but it's the construction before "weiß" that I wouldn't put together without an example (would be faffing about feeling vaguely that it ought to be "gesehen"...)
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lyx_par
lyx_par@LyxPar·
@helendewitt It’s even more verbs. „hat vorbeischwimmen sehen weiß“ 4 in a row is quite weird, though. But it can happen
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Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt@helendewitt·
@writerofscratch Also, Keats was apparently bowled over by Chapman's Homer (like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes...), I think comical to most modern readers, J S Mill loved Pope's (& I think reading the original didn't change this) - wd be odd to argue with what these versions meant to them
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Emily
Emily@writerofscratch·
What gets me about the Odyssey translation discourse is that if there are several translations of the same work and there's a translation you like, why not just appreciate that translation instead of spending your time malding like a loser over the translation you don't like?
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Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt@helendewitt·
@lydialaurenson Yes, a friend told me he was hiring an independent fact-checker and it would probably cost $12,000-$15,000. (The book to be published by a reputable publisher.)
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Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt@helendewitt·
@theo_nash Dionysius of Halicarnassus, say, Quintilian, so we would use the Loeb for want of something better. It would normally have been inconceivable to use a text with translation.
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Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt@helendewitt·
@theo_nash The texts I read as an undergraduate were mainly OCTs (editions recommended in the Examination Decrees & Regs), tho Bowra's Pindar did not make the grade (for P & Bacchylides the Teubener was to be used). I think there were texts for which there was no good modern edition +
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Theo Nash
Theo Nash@theo_nash·
I’m old enough to remember a time when Loebs were looked down on as options for those who didn’t have enough Greek to use a proper critical edition.
Athenian Stranger@Athens_Stranger

@GreekWord @BulkingtonBooks The Loebs were brought to class daily, but based on the very clear seriousness with which the thought in Homer was explored by the materials I included, why do you need me to spell that out for you?

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Giulio Mattioli
Giulio Mattioli@giulio_mattioli·
This has been in my experience a bigger problem than fake citations. We published 2 papers testing widespread (hyped) assumptions with empirical data, found that they don't really hold up. They both get cited to support the hyped assumption, which persists.
Bethlehem Tekola@Bethlehemtekola

Speaking of citation, if you come across a work that cited your work but claiming the opposite of what you said, will you be happy? Of course not. We not only should read the work that we cite but we also need to understand it.

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Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt@helendewitt·
@mollytaft My understanding is that books, even academic books, aren't fact-checked, so a journalist might rely on a book for background that was littered with mistakes. It would be very time-consuming to write a document covering every single fact someone might want to use.
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Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt@helendewitt·
@mollytaft When asked to give an interview last year I said I would like to see the text before publication & was told the paper didn't allow this, & the piece was published with errors that could have been fixed (like pieces by other interviewers, which is why I asked)
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molly taft
molly taft@mollytaft·
lots of corporate press / comms people asking me to share drafts of stories before publication (??) these days. baby that is not how it has ever worked
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Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn@DAMendelsohnNYC·
Really? I’d rather translate *both* Homeric epics than one book of Thucy! But then, I’ve always taken the minority position that interesting prose is much harder to translate than poetry is. Prose “style” far trickier to convey, IMHO.
untimely ἐξηγητής@noon_ta_noeta

@eademsententia @newphilologyX Homer is objectively harder than Thucydides. if you know basic Attic it is genuinely hard to find new words in Thuc. for Homer you can know every single word in Iliad 1 and still have to look up 10 words a page in Iliad 2.

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Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt@helendewitt·
@kohjingyu Reminds me of Robert Arkin's terrific book, Most Underappreciated: 50 Prominent Social Psychologists Describe Their Most Unloved Work. (The book itself seems to be undeservedly underappreciated.)
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Jing Yu Koh
Jing Yu Koh@kohjingyu·
When I first started doing research I didn't realize that many famous/senior researchers don't even really like their top cited paper, or the thing they're most known for. I've had the following conversation several times: Me: Your [paper with O(10K) citations] is really neat X: Yeah it was just some random idea that I tried over a weekend that happened to work out. I don't really work on that direction anymore though their personal favorite paper is typically the one that has a lot fewer citations and took a lot more effort, that other people generally don't care about
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Elisabeth Potter MD
Elisabeth Potter MD@EPotterMD·
I woke up to a message from New Hampshire. A bill had made it to the state Senate — one that Representative Julie Miles championed after watching me do peer-to-peer calls with insurance reviewers who weren't qualified to be making decisions about my patients. I'm a surgeon in Texas. I had no idea this had traveled that far. Between cases at Redbud today, I fired off emails to NH Senate members, logged into a YouTube Live, and watched HB 1554 pass. Here's what it does: ✅ Requires peer reviewers to be actual peers — credentialed, named, with their NPI number and specialty certification on the line ✅ Allows physicians to communicate with that peer reviewer at any point in the prior auth process — not just after a denial or on appeal This is a patient-centered, common-sense reform. And it happened because someone posted something. Told the truth. Did the right thing. Thank you, Representative Julie Miles and Senator Tim McGough. New Hampshire just set a standard. I hope other states are paying attention. Get involved. Speak up. You never know what good it might do.
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Kat ⊷ the Poet Engineer
Kat ⊷ the Poet Engineer@poetengineer__·
i made a reading interface for spinoza and its commentaries throughout centuries, inspire by talmud: - scroll to adjust each era's thickness - hover to discover cross-references between commentators src code for subscribers ↓
Kat ⊷ the Poet Engineer@poetengineer__

book = landscape. the layout of the talmud and chinese classics feels like geological strata - generations of commentary layered around or next to a core text. tamuld: radial layers the analects (論語注疏)): different font sizes and columns -> different writers

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Keşfet

@SuperWinona @LyxPar @norabird @skmadeleine @QxD5e @writerofscratch @lydialaurenson @theo_nash