An Extremely Abridged Library of Helen DeWitt

December 2010

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..starting in the mid-1750s in France a new conception of painting came to the fore that re-quired that the personages depicted in a canvas appear genuinely absorbed in whatever theywere doing, thinking, and feeling which also meant that they had to appear wholly unaware of everything other than the objects of their absorption, including -- this was the crucial point -- the beholder standing before the painting. Any failure of absorption - any sugges-tion that a a painted personage was acting for an audience - was considered theatrical in the pejorative sense of the term and was regarded as an egregious fault. By the same token, the demand that painting defeat theatricality - that it establish what I have called the supreme fiction or ontological illusion that the beholder did not exist, that there was no one standing before the canvas - placed the art of painting under tremendous pressure for the simple rea-son that paintings, more intensively and as it were primordially than any other class of arti-facts, are made to be beheld.

Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before

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In November 2008 I sublet my apartment in Berlin with the idea of shutting myself up in a smaller place with central heating and no Internet access, the better to finish a book. The seclusion didn't really work: people kept writing to ask about publishing Your Name Here, a collaboration with Australian journalist Ilya Gridneff, excerpted in Winter 2008 by n+1. So I had to do just what I had wanted not to do, deal with business, only with the added in-convenience of having to go out for WiFi. The book didn't get finished.

In the end I was out of the apartment, with a brief return in late summer 2010, for close totwo years. When I got back the books were in chaos and I forgotten the papers in all my files.

I began to go through, restoring order, and when I had finished the papers I found some-thing I'd never seen: a comb-bound 'book', The Abridged Library of Helen DeWitt.

The first tenant, Mia Goyette, had made a catalogue of all the books in the apartment. For the most part it was only a numbered list, but where a book was in Russian or Arabic orJapanese she had copied the cover and colophon. It was a rather magical thing. I thought how nice it would be if one could find something like this in bookshops, as a way of making new discoveries.

I then thought how much better it would be, though, if one had quotations from the books, or copies of pages which markings, and I also thought that a list of a few thousand books might be a bit much.

I also thought the catalogue was a bit misleading - the absolutely essential books were in the three or four suitcases I was carrying around with me. Perhaps it would be better if a bookshop had a list of the indispensable books an author carried in a suitcase.

It seemed the easiest thing in the world to put such a thing together for a trial run.It wasn't.My scanner isn't up to much, photocopies didn't come out well. Without images of pages,

it was impossible to give an idea of the brilliance of Edward Tufte's four seminal books on data visualization - books famous in the design community, little known to the general pub-lic, exactly the sort of thing the compilation should help readers discover.

A list with quotations was easier to put together. When it was done, the thing felt contrived: the enigmatic charm of the original, the en-

chantment of the overlooked, was gone.It could undoubtedly be better done, with more time and better resources. I offer it as a rough sketch.

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Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

I was thinking on Sir Christopher, and I was considering our new Church of Spittle-Fields.

And what does a green-head say of these Matters? (I do not give a Fart for Sir Chris. says I secretly to myself)

Master, says Walter, We have built near a Pitte and there are so vast a Number of Corses that the Pews will allwaies be Rotten and Damp. This is the first Matter. The second Matter is this: that Sir Chris. thoroughly forbids all Burrials under the Church or even within the Church-yard itself, as advancing the rottennesse of the Structure and unwholesome and in-jurious for those who worship there. Then he scratch’d his Face and look’d down at his dusty Shooes.

This is a weak little Thing to take up your contemplations, Walter, I replied. But he gaz’dup at me and would not be brought off, so after a Pause I continu’d: I know Sir Chris. is flatagainst Burrialls, that he is all for Light and Easinesse and will sink in Dismay if every Mortality or Darknesse shall touch his Edifices. It is not reasonable, he will say, it is not na-tural. But, Walter, I have instructed you in many things and principally in this – I am not a slave of Geometrical Beauty, I must build what is most Sollemn and Awefull.

Joseph Adler, R in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference

Coercion When you call a function with an argument of the wrong type, R will try to enter values

to a different type so that the function will work. There are two types of coercion that occur automatically in R: coercion with formal objects and coercion with built-in types.

With generic functions, R will look for a suitable method. If no exact match exists, R will search for a coercion method that converts the object to a type for which a suitable method does exist. (The method for creating coercion functions is described in "Creating coercion Methods" on page 127.) (34)

Andre Agassi, Open: An Autobiography

I hate tennis.

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Roland Barthes, Fragments d'un discours amoureux

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes, S/Z

Jean Baudrillard, La société de consommation

Le temps est une denrée rare, précieuse, soumise aux lois de la valeur d'échange. Ceci est clair pour le temps de travail, puisqu'il est vendu et acheté. Mais de plus en plus le temps li-bre lui-même doit étre, pour étre "consommé", directement ou indirectement acheté. Nor-man Mailer analyse le calcul de production opéré sur le jus d'orange, livré congelé ou liq-uide (en carton). Ce dernier coûte plus cher parce qu'on inclut dans le prix les deux minutes gagnées sur la préparation du produit congelé : son propre temps libre est ainsi vendu au consommateur.

...La machine à laver, c'est du temps libre pour la ménagère, du temps libre virtuel transfor-

mé en objet pour pouvoir être vendu et acheté (temps libre qu'elle mettra éventuellement à profit pour regarder la T.V., et la publicité qu'on y fera pour d'autres machines à laver!). (242)

Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust

Andy Bellin, Poker Nation

...even though this sounds counterintuitive, often the most productive strategy is to mimicyour competition. If they are not particularly savvy, then play a very simple game. Bad players usually make more mistakes by calling when the should have folded, not the other way around. Therefore, bluffing them isn't going to be that effective. In over a thousand Tuesday nights playing with my college buddies I think I have bluffed on two occasions. There's honestly no point to it. Somebody is alway going to call you in that game. The biggest mistake inexperienced poker players make is thinking that the only way to make money at poker is to win more hands. They have not recognized that the best way to make money is by minimizing your losses by folding more frequently. (84/5)

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Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

Wayne Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction

[Purity and Rhetoric - "Art Ignores the Audience"]

Curiously enough, both the quest for realism and the quest for purity, even in their most ex-treme forms, have yielded the same attack on rhetorical impurities in fiction. As we saw in chapter ii, if fiction is to seem real, it must not be laden with signs of artifice. And we find here that if fiction is to be pure, if it is to "catch up with poetry," if it is to have anything like equal status with the more obviously pure arts, the author must somehow find a way to create a cleansed object which can speak for itself. (96)

Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

Como todos los hombres de Babilonia, he sido procónsul; como todos, esclavo; tambien he conocido la omnipotencia, el oprobrio, las cárceles. ... He conocido lo que ignoran los grie-gos: la incertidumbre.

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction

The stockpiling avidity which is the root of every great accumulation of culture is too visi-ble in the perversion of the jazz-freak or cinema-buff who carries to the extreme, i.e., to ab-surdity, what is impied in the legitimate definition of cultivated contemplation, and replacesconsumption of the work with consumtion of the circumstantial information (credits, exact composition of the band, recording dates etc.); or in the acquisivie intensity of all collectors of inexhaustible knowledge on socially minuscule subjects. In his symbolic class struggle with the certified holders of cultural competence, the 'pretentious' challenger - nurse againstdoctor, technician against engineer, promoted executive against business-school graduate - is likely to see his knowledge and techniques devalued as too narrowly subordinated to practical goals, too 'self-interested', too marked in their style, by the haste of their acquisi-tion, in favour of more 'fundamental' and also more 'gratuitous' knowledge. In a whole host of markets, from the major state examinations to editorial boards, from job interviews to garden parties, the cultural productions of the petit-bourgeois habitus are subtly discredited because they recall their acquisition in matters in which, more than anywhere else, the im-

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portant thing is to know without ever having learnt, and because the seriousness with whichthey are offered reveals the ethical dispositions from which they flow, which are the antithesis of the legitimate relation to culture.

The petit bourgeois do not know how to play the game of culture as a game. They take culture too seriously to go in for bluff or imposture or even for the distance and casualness which show true familiarity, too seriously to escape permanent fear of ignorance or blun-ders, or to side-step tests by responding with the indifference of those who are not compet-ing or the serene detachment of those who feel entitled to confess or even flaunt their lacu-nae. Identifying culture with knowledge, they think that the cultivated man is one who possesses an immense fund of knowledge... (330)

Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus

Elizabeth Bowen, The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

She did at length form an intimacy with a blonde, milk-white American lady, a Miss Phelps, whom one might say that she perpetually ambushed. Miss Phelps, first merely paralysed by her, warmed to gratification, then to reciprocal emotion; she was a person whocame quickly and frothily to the boil, like milk. ['The Secession', 161]

Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake, but it is also very memorable. I vividly recall the night we decided how to organize the actual writing of ex-ternal specifications for OS/360. The manager of architecture, the manager of control pro-gram implementations, and I were threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities.

The architecture manager had 10 good men. He asserted that they could write the specifi-cations and do it right. It would take ten months, three more than the schedule allowed.

The control program manager had 150 men. He asserted that they could prepare the spec-ifications, with the architecture team coordinating; it would be well-done and practical, and

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he could do it on schedule. Furthermore, if the architecture team did it, his 150 men would sit twiddling their thumbs for ten months.

To this the architecture manager responded that if I gave the control program team the re-sponsibility, the result would not in fact be on time, but would also be three months late, and of much lower quality. I did, and it was. He was right on both counts. Moreover, the lack of conceptual integrity made the system far more costly to build and change, and I would estimate that it added a year to debugging time.

Many factors, of course, entered into that mistaken decision, but the overwhelming one was schedule time and the appeal of putting all those 150 implementers to work. It is this siren song whosse deadly hazards I would now make visible.

Philippe Brunel & Catherine Sarian, Les conventions (Collection bridge repères)

Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili

Le città e la memoria. 2.

All’uomo che cavalca lungamente per terreni selvatici viene desiderio d’una città. Fi-nalmente giunge a Isidora, città dove i palazzi hanno scale a chiocciola incrostate di chioc-ciole marine, dove si fabbricano a regola d’arte cannocchiali e violini, dove quando il forestiero è incerto tra due donne ne incontra sempre una terza, dove le lotte dei galli degen-erano in risse sanguinose tra gli scommetitori. A tutte queste cose egli pensava quando desiderava una città. Isidora è dunque la città dei suoi sogni: con una differenza. La città sognata conteneva lui giovane; a Isidora arriva in tarde età. Nella piazza c’è il muretto dei vecchi que guardano passare la gioventù; lui è seduto in fila con loro. I desideri sono già ricordi.

Invisible Cities, tr. William Weaver (1974)

Cities & memory 2

When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating be-tween two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isido-ra, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained

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him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.

Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveller

Renaud Camus, Tricks-- Si, si, quelquefois. Est-ce que je puis me permettre d'enlever mes chaussures, je vous

prie ?-- Bien sûr. Tu veux de la musique ?-- Oui.-- Classique ?-- Si tu veux.-- Quoi ?-- Je ne sais pas. Ce que tu veux.-- J'ai surtout des Requiem...-- Ah non, pas de Requiem, si possible !-- Le Te Deum de Lully ?-- Oui, très bien.-- Tu connais ?-- Non, pas particulièrement, mais je suppose que ça ressemble assez au reste de son

œuvre...-- Je ne sais pas, je ne connais rien d'autre de lui.-- Qu'est-ce que c'est que cette passion des Requiem ?-- J'ai décidé de m'intéresser à l'opéra. Alors j'ai pensé que c'était un bon moyen.-- Tiens, drôle d'itinéraire...

Je suis assis en tailleur sur le lit. Il vient s'allonger à côté de moi. Nous nous embras-sons, dans le cou, sur la bouche. J'ai passé la main sous sa chemise. Il est un peu moins poilu que ses poignets ne pourraient le laisser supposer, mais tout de même beaucoup. Je défais les boutons de ses manchettes pur lui caresser les avant-bras, qui sont superbes. Nous bandons l'un et l'autre très bien. (32)

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Vernon L. Ceder, The Quick Python Book (2nd Ed. Covers Python 3)

Alston Hurd Chase and Henry Phillips, Jr., A New Introduction to Greek (Third Edition, Revised andEnlarged)

Wilkie Collins, Armadale

Michael Crawley, Statistics: An Introduction using R

Michel Crozier, Le phénomène bureaucratique

Tradionellement la personnalité bureaucratique est apparue comme marquée avant tout parle « ritualisme ». C;est ce qu'impliquait l'analyse de Merton et c'est dans cette direction qu'illançcait son appel pour l'étude des rapport entre la personnalité et les structures bureaucratiques.

Dans les catégories de Merton, on s'en souvient, le ritualisme se caractérise par l'ignoranceou le rejet des buts généraux et concrets de l'activité considérée et la primauté donnée aux moyens incarnés dans les institutions. Il s'oppose aux trois autres possibilités du fameux paradigme, le conformisme, le retrait et la rébellion comme si la bureauratie finalement symbolisait à lle seule une catégorie spéciale de l'action, celle qui consiste à donner la prior-ité aux moyens sur les fins. (243)

Michel Crozier, L'acteur et le système

Arthur C Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace

Michael Dawson, Python Programming, Second Edition, for the absolute beginner ("This seriesshows that it's possible to teach newcomers a programming language and good pogramming practiceswithout being boring." - Lou Grinzo, reviewer for Dr. Dobb's Journal)

Don DeLillo, White Noise

“I will read,” she said. “But I don’t want you to choose anything that has men enter women, quote-quote, or men entering women. ‘I entered her.’ ‘He entered me.’ We’re not lobbies or elevators. ‘I wanted him inside me,’ as if he could crawl completely in, sign the register, sleep, eat, so forth. Can we agree on that? I don’t care what these people do as longas they don’t enter or get entered.”

“Agreed.”“I entered her and began to thrust.”“I’m in total agreement,” I said.

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“Enter me, enter me, yes, yes.”“Silly usage, absolutely.”“Insert yourself, Rex. I want you sindie me, entering hard, entering deep, yes, now, oh.”

Diderot, Jacques le fataliste et son maître

Comment s’étaient-ils rencontrés? Par hazard, comme tout le monde. Comment s’ap-pelaient-ils? Que vous importe? D’où venaient-ils? Du lieu le plus prochain. Où allaient-ils?Est-ce que l’on sait où l’on va? Que disaient-ils? Le maître ne disait rien ; et Jacques disait que son capitaine disait que tout ce qui nous arrive de bien et de mal ici-bas était écrit là-haut.

LE MAITRE

C’est un grand mot que cela.

JACQUES

Mon capitaine ajoutait que chaque balle qui partait d’un fusil avait son billet.

LE MAITRE

Et il avait raison…

Steve Dobbs and Jane Miller, Statistics 1 (Cambridge Advanced Mathematics)

Steve Dobbs and Jane Miller, Statistics 2 (Cambridge Advanced Mathematics)

William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and other BiologicalComponents of Fiction

Jeff Forcier, Paul Bissex, Wesley Chun, Python Web Development with Django

Michael Fried, Why photography matters as art as never before

Stuart Galbraith IV, The Emperor and the Wolf (joint biography of Kurosawa and Mifune)

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Ken Garland, Mr Beck's Underground Map

Beck described his conception of the Diagram thus:

Looking at the old map of the Underground railways, it occurred to me that it night be pos-sible to tidy it up by straightening the lines, experimenting with diagonals and evening out the distance between stations. The more I thought about it the more convinced I became that the idea was worth trying, so, selecting the Central London Railway as my horizontal base line I made a rough sketch. I tried to imagine that I was using a convex lens or mirror,so as to present the central area on a larger scale. This, I thought, would give a needed clarity to interchange information.

...

The design was duly submitted, but, to my surprie and disappointment the very idea of a 45-and 90-degree schematic treatment was thought to be too 'revolutionary': my Underground map was handed back to me and that, it seemed, was to be the end of it.

...

Though disappointed by rejection, Beck could not let the matter rest:

About a year later [in 1932] I had another look at the drawing, and decided, without much hope, to try again. This time Mr Patmore of the Publicity Department sent for me, after the Publicity meeting at which it was considered, and greeted me with the words, 'You'd better sit down: I'm going to give you a shock. We're going to print it!' Thus it was, and only, as I believe, through my pertinacity, that the London Underground diagram was born. [17]

Gerd Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance: How probability changed science and everyday life

... writers of textbooks for education, psychology, sociology, and so on, commenced peace negotiations and created a hybrid theory, to which shelves and shelvesin research libraries now pay tribute. The hybrid theory combines concepts from the Fisherian and the Neyman-Pearson framework. It is presented anonymously as statistical method, while unresolved controversial issues and alternative approaches to scientific inference are completely ig-nored. Key concepts from the Neyman-Pearson theory such as power are introduced with Fisher's significance testing, without mentioning that both parties viewed these ideas as ir-reconciable. For instance, checking (without random sampling) thirty books on statistics

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for psychology, education and sociology that were readily available, we found that the names of Neyman and E.S. Pearson were not even mentioned in twenty-five of them, al-though some of their ideas were presented. None even hinted at the existence of controver-sy, much less spelled out the issues in dispute. The crucial concepts were not identified withtheir creators - which is very unusual in fields like psychology, where textbooks list com-peting theories and the researchers who proposed them for almost every phenomenon dis-cussed. Statistics is treated as abstract truth, the monolithic logic of inductive inference. (107 )

Gerd Gigerenzer, Reckoning with Risk

Barbara Goodwin, Justice by Lottery

Erving Goffman, Asylums

Two other aspects of sensed betrayal should be mentioned. First, those who suggest the possibility of another's entering a mental hospital are not likely to provide a realistic picture of how in fact it may strike him when he arrives. Often he is told that he will get required medical treatment and a rest, and may well be out in a few months or so. In some cases theymay thus be concealing what they know, but I think, in general, they will be telling what they see as the truth. For here there is quite relevant difference between patients and medi-ating professionals; mediators, more so than the public at large, may conceive of mental hospitals as short-term medical establishments where required rest and attention can be vol-untarily obtained, and not as placed of coerced exile. When the prepatient finally arrives he is likely to learn quite quickly, quite differently. He then finds that the information given him about life in the hospital has had the effect of his having put up less resistance to enter-ing than he now sees he would have put up had he known the facts. whatever the intentions of those who participated in his transition from person to patient, he may sense they have ineffect 'conned' him into his present predicament.

I am suggesting that the prepatient starts out with at least a portion of the rights, liberties, and satisfactions of the civilian and ends up on a psychiatric ward stripped of almost every-thing. The question here is now this stripping is managed. This is the second aspect of be-trayal I want to consider. (130)

* Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

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Erving Goffman, Ritual Interaction: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior

One interesting source of other-consciousness is to be found in the phenomenon of “over-involvement.” During any conversation, standards are established as to how much the indi-vidual is to allow himself to be carried away by the talk, how thoroughly he is to permit himself to be caught up in it. He will be obliged to prevent himself from becoming so swollen with feelings and a readiness to act that he threatens the bounds regarding affect that have been established for him in the interaction, He will be obliged to express a marginof disinvolvement, although of course this margin will differ in extent according to the so-cially recognized importance of the occasion and his official role in it. When the individual does become over-involved in the topic of conversation, and gives others the impression that he does no have a necessary measure of self-control over his feelings and actions, when, in short, the interactive world becomes too real for him then the others are likely to be drawn from involvement in the talk to an involvement in the talker. What is one mans over-eagerness will become another’s alienation. In any case we are to see that over-in-volvement has the effect of momentarily incapacitating the individual as an interactant; oth-ers have to adjust to his state while he becomes incapable of adjusting to theirs. Interesting-ly enough, when the impulse of the over-involved individual has ebbed a little, he may come to sense his impropriety and become self-conscious, illustrating again the fact that thealienative effect the individual has on others is usually one he cannot escape having upon himself. Regardless of this, we must see that a readiness to become over-involved is a form of tyranny practised by children, prima donnas, and lords of all kinds, who momentarily puttheir own feelings above the moral rules that ought to have made society safe for interaction.

Steven Goldman, ed., Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, andCreated a New Blueprint for Winning

E. V. Gordon, An Introduction to Old Norse (2nd ed. revised by A.R. Taylor)

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J E Gordon, Structures, or Why Things Don't Fall Down

For those who find difficulty in communicating with engineers, Professor Gordon is a godsend

A deep, intuitive appreciation of the inherent cussedness of materials and structures is one of the most valuable accomplishments an engineer can have. No purely intellectual quality is really a substitute for this. (63)

J E Gordon, The New Science of Strong Materials, or Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor

Pierre Herbart, A la recherche d'André Gide

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

Eusa says to us, ‘This is time back way back like I said. He goes down and he comes up with paper and pen and a measuring stick and a triangl. Hes writing writing hes numbering hes drawing lines all over that paper. Hes thinking hard hes mummering to his self then hes scratching his head and hes thinking some mor. He groans a littl then he says, ‘All these here numbers and that its all too much to keap in 1 head and programming my self. What I nead is a nother head and bigger so it can do some of this hevvy head work for me.’

Eusa does down agen and hes clanging and banging hes huffing and puffing and hammer-ing it souns like hes bellering up a reddying fire and hes beating some thing on a hanvil.

Persoon Eusa comes up agen this time hes got a iron hat on his head. 2 long wires comingout of the top of the hat and littl pegs on the ends of the wires. Plus theres a cranking handl on the side of the iron hat. Eusas trying to shif some kynd of a box its biggern he is. He getsthe box heavit up on to the show board. He says, ‘Hoo! Thats a hevvy 1.’ Theres a crankinghandl on the side of the box as the 1 on Eusas hat. 2 littl hoals and a slot in the top of the box and a nother slot in 1 end of it.

Eusa says, ‘2 heads are bettern 1.’ He takes them 2 wires coming out of his hat and he pegs them in to the hoals in the box. He says, ‘Now Iwl jus input a few little things in to myNo. 2 head.’ Hes terning that crank on his iron hat. Rrrrrrrrrr.

Eusa says, ‘Now les see if it works.’ He takes a peace of paper and he says out loud what hes writing on it: ‘Whats my name?’ He puts the peace of paper in the slot in the top of the box he says, ‘Now les see if you can anser that.’

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Eusa terns the crank on the side of the box and a peace of paper comes out of the slot in the end of the box. Theres writing ont he paper. Eusa reads it out: ‘My name is Eusa.’

Eusa says, ‘That the ticket.’

David Hockney, My Early Years

David Hockney, That's the Way I See It

David Hockney, Paper Pools

Peter Hoeg, Borderliners

Homeri Opera, Iliadis I-XII (Oxford Classical Text)

Homeri Opera, Iliadis XIII-XXIV (Oxford Classical Text)

Homer, The Odyssey, 1--12 (Macmillan)

Homer, The Odyssey, 13-24 (Macmillan)

σχέτλιε, ποικιλοµῆτα, δόλων ἆτ᾽, οὐκ ἄρ᾽ ἐµέλλες,οὐδ᾽ἐν σῇ περ ἐὼν γαίῇ, λήξειν ἀπατάωνµύθων τε κλοπίων, οἵ τοι πεδόθεν φίλοι εἰσίν.

Wretch, wily-minded, insatiable of tricks, you wouldn't,Even in your own land, give up your deceitsAnd thievish tales, which are ever dear to you

John C. Hull, Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives, 5th Edition

Albert Jacquard, Les probabilités (Séries Que sais-je?)

Joint Association of Classical Teachers, Reading Greek: Text and Vocabulary, 2nd Ed.

Joint Association of Classical Teachers, Reading Greek: Grammar and Exercises, 2nd Ed.

Joint Association of Classical Teachers, Reading Greek: An Independent Study Guide, 2nd Ed.

James B. Kaler, Stars and Their Spectra

Kalila wa Dimna, children's edition, intro. by Abdulwali Al-Shamiri

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Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

On the day of the interviews and screen tests I was in the middle of the shooting of No Regrets for Our Youth, so I couldn't participate in the judging. But during lunch break I stepped off the set and was immediately accosted by actress Takamine Hideko, who had been the star of Yamamato Kajiro's Horses when I was chief assistant director. "There's onewho's really fantastic. But he's something of a roughneck, so he just barely passed. Won't you come and have a look?" I bolted my lunch and went to the studio where the tests were being given. I opened the door and stopped dead in amazement.

A young man was reeling around the room in a violent frenzy. It was as frightening as watching a wounded or trapped savage beast trying to break loose. I stood transfixed. But it turned out that this young man was not really in a rage, but had drawn "anger" as the emo-tion he had to express in his screen test. He was acting. When he finished his performance, he regained his chair with an exhausted demeanor, flopped down and began to glare menac-ingly at the judges. Now, I knew very well that this kind of behavior was a cover for shy-ness, but the jury seemed to be interpreting it as disrespect.

I found this young man strangely attractive, and concern over the judges' decision began to distract me from my work. I returned to my set and wrapped up the shooting early. Then I proceeded to look in on the room where the jury were deliberating. Despite Yama-san's strong recommendation of the young man, the voting was against him. Suddenly I heard myself shouting, "Please, wait a minute."

The jury was made up of two groups: movie-industry specialists (directors, cinematogra-phers, producers and actors) and representatives of the labor union. The two groups were equally represented. At that time the union was gaining in strength daily, and union repre-sentatives appeared wherever something was happening. Because of them, all decisions hadto be made by voting, but I felt that for them to voice their opinions on the selection of ac-tors was really going too far. Even the expression "going too far" doesn't do justice to the suppressed anger boiling in me. I called for a time out.

I said that in order to judge the quality of an actor and predict his future capacities you need the talents and experience of an expert. In the selection of an actor it isn't right to equate the vote of an expert and the vote of a complete outsider. It's like appraising a gem-stone; you wouldn't give a greengrocer's appraisal the same weight you would a jeweler's. In evaluating an actor, an expert's vote should have at least three if not five times the weight

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of an amateur's. I emphasized that I wanted a recount of the votes with more appropriate weight assigned to the experts' opinions.

The jury was thrown into an uproar. "It's anti-democratic, it's monopoly by directors!" someone shouted. But all of the production people on the jury raised their hands in approvalof my suggestion, and even some labor-union representatives nodded their assent. Finally Yama-san, who was head of the jury, said that as a movie director he would take responsi-bility for his opinion for the quality and potential of the young actor in question. With Yama-san's pronouncement the young man squeaked through. He was, of course, Mifune Toshiro.

Thomas O. Lambdin, Introduction to Biblical Hebrew

Langenscheidt German Grammar in a Nutshell (Deutsche Grammatik -- kurz und schmerzlos)

* Michael Lewis, Moneyball

Right from the start Bill James assumed he had been writing for, not a mass audience, but a tiny group of people intensely interested in baseball. He wound up with a mass audience and went largely unread by the people most intensely intersted in baseball: the men who ranthe teams.

Mallory, Morte d'Arthur (Vinaver)

Thenne Balyn loked up to the castel and sawe the towres stand ful of ladyes. Soo they went unto bataille ageyne and wounded everyche other dolefully, and thenne they brethed oftymes, and so wente unto bataille that all the place thereas they fought was blood reed. And att that tyme there was none of them bothe but they hadde eyther smyten other seven grete woundes so that the lest of them myght have ben the dethe of the myghtyest gyaunt in this world.

Thenne they wente to batail ageyn so merveillously that doubte it was to here of that bataille for the grete blood shedynge; and their hawberkes unnailled, that naked they were on every syde. Atte last Balan, the yonger broder, withdrewe hym a lytel and leid hym doune. Thenne said Balyn le Saveage,

'What knyghte arte thow? For or now I found never no knyght that matched me.''My name is,' said he, 'Balan, broder unto the good knyght Balyn.'

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'Allas!' said Balyn, 'that ever I shold see this day,' and therwith he felle backward in a swoune.

Marcello Mastroianni, Mi ricordo, sí, io mi ricordo

Marcel Mauss, The Gift

Jane Miller, Statistics 3 & 4

Pierre Moron, Le suicide (Séries Que sais-je?)

Paul Nation, Learning Vocabulary in Another Language

P. G. O'Neill, A Reader of Handwritten Japanese

Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death

Proximity to the master also carried enormous risks and disadvantages. The slave was un-der the constant supervision of the master and therefore subjected to greater and more cap-tricious punishment and humiliation than those house elsewhere. ...

In contrast, the slave who lived apart, while materially more insecure and more exposed to the vindictivenenss of free third parties, had a much gerater measure of independence. Most slaves in most societies valued this partial "freedom" far more than the dubious mater-ial delights of the grat house. There is abundant evidence from ancient Greece, Rome, and elesewhere that the condition most coveted by the slave was to be able to live on his own and hire himself out or otherwise provide for himself. (175)

James Peters, Very Simple Arabic Script

Clyde Pharr, Homeric Greek, A Book for Beginners (Revised by John Wright)

Jim Pitman, Probability

Raymond Queneau, Zazie dans le métro

-Alors quoi, merde, dit Zazie, on va le boire, cette verre?Gabriel s'extrait avec habileté et souplesse du tac. Tout le monde se retrouve autour d'une

table, sur le trottoir. La serveuse s'amène négligemment. Aussitot Zazie exprime son désir:--Un cacocalo, qu'elle demande.--Y'en a pas, qu'on répond.

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--Ça alors, s'esclame Zazie, c'est un monde.Elle est indignée.--Pour moi, dit Charles, ça sera un beaujoulais.--Et pour moi, dit Gabriel, un lait-grenadine. Et toi, demande-t-il à Zazie.--Jl'ai déjà dit : un cacocalo.--Elle a dit qu'y en avait pas.--C'est hun cacocalo que jveux.

Nick Rennison and Michael Schmidt, ed., Poets on Poets (Carcanet 1997, in association withWaterstones)

To mark National Poetry, Day Nick Rennison, who compiled the Waterstone's Guide to Po-etry, and Michael Schmidt, editorial director of Carcanet, invited a number of contemporarypoets to select work by poets of the past, beginning in the late fourteenth century and end-ing in the early twentieth, and to provide brief headnotes to describe their choices. The result is an anthology with a difference. From Gower to Yeats, from the old and the new worlds, the selectors and the selected converge in a volume of wonderful poetry and rich surprise.

L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes & Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek & LatinLiterature (Third Edition)

Deepayan Sarkar, Lattice: Multivariate Data Visualization with R

Shani Shamah, A currency options primer

Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate

I was not at first concerned with any of the moral issues. I was only interested in charting the debate in the philosophy of mind, until I noticed how bad were the arguments designed to show that animals were very different from us. It all sounded rather grand, when Aristo-tle said that we have reason and they don't. But under pressure, the Stoics retreated to the position that at least they don't have syntax. The moral conclusion was meant to be 'They don't have syntax, so we can eat them. My embarrassment increased when I noticed that themodern debate, among the followers of Chomsky and critics of the language abilities of chimpanzees, had reached exactly the same point. It has become crucial whether animals

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have syntax. This, of course, is a question of great scientific interest, but of no moral rele-vance whatsoever.

Erich Steiner, The Chemistry Maths Book

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

"Sir, as you and I are in a manner perfect strangers to each other, it owuld not have been proper to ahve let you into too many circumstances relating to myself all at once.--You must have a littl patience. I hae undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opin-ions also; hoping and expecting that your knoweldge of my character, and of what kind of amortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed furtherwith me, the slight acquaintance which is beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.——O diem præclarum!——then nothing which has touched me will be thought trifling in its nature, or tedious in its telling."

Anne Matsumoto Stewart, All About Katakana

Christine Sutton, Spaceship Neutrino

David Sylvester, Giacometti

There were twenty of those three to four hour sittings for my portrait; there would proba-bly have been several more if I had not had to leave Paris. At the first sitting he started two paintings -- a large canvas for a three-quarter-length in medium close-up, and a small can-vas for a head-and-shoulders in close-up which was abandoned after the second day. He painted sitting down, putting thin paint on rapidly, mostly with sable brushes. His glance moved very quickly, almost continuously, between canvas and model; he rarely hesitated before making a mark. He never got up to stand back and take a look at the picture. He waited till the next break for a more distant view -- and then, as this particular picture was large by his standards and there was little room to move in the studio, he would sometimes take it outside. There would generally be three breaks in a session, two of them to allow me to stretch my legs, the other long enough for coffee at a nearby bar.

For about two-thirds of the time he would be working in a relaxed way, talking freely andlistening fairly attentively. His talk itself was more relaxed and less argumentative than usu-

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al. Normally his conversation tended to become vehemently analytical often rather like a game of chess in which, after taking a piece, he would reset the board in an earlier position and try out an alternative series of moves. Here he mostly gossiped, and when he told sto-ries about himself they were less consistently self-mocking than usual. There would be about three spells in a sitting when he made it clear that he wanted silence. Then he would soon start muttering to himself, often exploding into a curse or a lamentation: he didn't know how to paint; he lacked daring; why was I wasting my time sitting to him; it was hard even to put the brush to canvas. I never heard him go on in this way when he was working from memory, and he was often doing this on a sculpture when I was in the studio, simply because a visit was no reason to in interrupt work. Furthermore, that sort of wailing and cursing has been reported by observers of both Cézanne and Matisse when they were paint-ing from the motif or the model: it is working in the presence of the subject that tends to generate despair. (126-7)

H. Taine, Nouveaux essais de critique et d'histoire [Librairie Hachette, Paris, 1905]

Considérez donc l'auditoire de Balzac et sa structure d'esprit. Vous lui imposiez des habi-tudes de salon : est-ce qu'il y a aujourd'hui des salons? Je vois bien encore une grande salle avec des fleurs, un piano, des bougies ; mais c'est là tout. Les hommes après le diner vont au fumoir ; s'ils restent, vous les trouvez entassés dans un coin, ou par petits groupes. Ils parlent de politique, de chemins de fer, un peu de littérature, beaucoup d'affaires ; ils sont venus pour « se mettre au courant, pour entretenir leurs relations ». De temps en temps, l'un d'eux se détache, va saluer les dames qui font cercle, seules autour du feu ; l'abolition de la galanterie et de la cour les a mises là ; elles ne causent plus que de robes et de musique. . . . Presque tous hommes spéciaux, ils se sont frottés aux hommes spéciaux de toute espèce, eetles jargons des métiers ou des sciences ne les offensent plus. Toutes les philosophies et toutes le littératures ont coulé sur eux, distillées par les gazettes, la conversation et les mille machines de vulgarisation qui alimentent la vie parisienne. . . . Balzac, je l'accorde, par sa bizarrerie, sa pédanterie, son obscurité et son exagération, dépasse souvent ce que leur goût demande. Il n'importe ; c'est là un auditoire original, complete, distinct des autres, ayant les droits des autres . . . Vous voyez bien que Balzac a le droit d'être encyclopédiste, philosophe, violent et étrange, que ses habitudes de style conviennent à nos habitudes de vie, et que l'écrivain est autorisé par le public.

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Richard H. Thaler, Quasi Rational Economics

The idea behind the questionnaire was that the price people would charge a friend would bea good proxy for their estimate of a fair price. For each question, three prices were availableas possible anchors upon which they could base their answers: the price marked on the tick-et, the market price, and the price paid by the seller, i.e., cost. As can be seen in Table 1, themodel answers in the friend condition are equal to the seller's costs except in the unusual case where seller's cost was above market price. In contrast, the modal answers in the stranger condition are equal to market price with the same lone exception. The implication of this is that buyers' perceptions of a seller's costs will strongly influence their judgments about what price is fair, and this in turn influences their value for p*. (34/5)

Edward R. Tufte, Beautiful Evidence

Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information

"What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data have to be "boiled down" and "simplified"? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading. Clutter and confusion are fail-ures of design, not attributes of information.

Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Second Edition

Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations

Urvoy, Les penseurs libres dans l'Islam classique

Hans Wehr, Arabic-English Dictionary (The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic ed. J.M. Cowan), pb (3rd) edition

Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovitch, A Life Remembered

Mark J. Winter, Chemical Bonding [Oxford Chemistry Primers 15]

Herbert O. Yardley, The Education of a Poker Player (introduced by A. Alvarez)

John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion

Stefan Zweig, Schachnovelle

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