Helen DeWitt

I haven’t taught a grad seminar in a long time—do people still assign this much reading and a 20-page seminar paper? I don’t really know how I ever read 500 pages a week and wrote three or four 20-page papers at the end of the quarter in a few days.

In the humanities, we are usually encouraged to learn French and German in order to interact with secondary literature. This is a good thing, but I think a very strong case can be made for including Italian among these “minimal” requirements. I am consistently impressed by how good Italian scholarship is in philology and philosophy. Exempli gratia, this excellent book on the Divine Names by Corsini:

I lived in Brooklyn Heights for years when Norman Mailer lived there, writing in his crow’s nest of an office looking out over the Brooklyn Promemade across the East River to Manhattan. We would see him walk to the subway station across from my apartment to get the NYTimes on Saturday night (except for the front section), so did I (imagine). I was in the subway elevator with him a few times alone. I wanted to tell him how much I loved The Naked and The Dead. But I didn’t know how he felt about that novel, his first, so many years ago, the one that made him famous. So I never spoke to Mailer. But felt an electric charge that the great man was writing down the street and I was writing my plays.

Men, please name some clothing items you CANNOT STAND to see on women. Like gives you the instant ick. I’m tryna build a man repellent wardrobe.

"Some professors have for many years been giving oral examinations in the old Oxford and Cambridge tutorial style, where students read their papers aloud, and the professor interrupts to ask questions like 'What do you mean by that word? What does that phrase mean?'"