{"id":579,"date":"2008-05-12T09:28:10","date_gmt":"2008-05-12T14:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/news\/2008\/nuggets-dewitt\/"},"modified":"2008-05-12T09:52:09","modified_gmt":"2008-05-12T14:52:09","slug":"nuggets-dewitt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/news\/2008\/nuggets-dewitt\/","title":{"rendered":"Nuggets DeWitt"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love Helen DeWitt. I have spoken of this before. She is one of those people about whom I entertain simultaneous fantasies that she and I would be fast friends in flesh-space, or, we would meet and it would be too awkward for words and I would be crestfallen. I have the same sense about Cintra Wilson<\/a>, whose Critical Shopper<\/a> articles in the Times are the highlights of my life. Anyway, Helen DeWitt has an excellent post up about languages<\/a>. She writes, <\/p>\n

The last thing a child wants to learn is a language that shows some prospect of being useful. Sheer impracticality is one of the strongest points in a language’s favour for the young learner. The main reason my French is so much better than my Spanish or Portuguese is, naturally, that I grew up in countries where there was no use for it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Holla, students of Faroese worldwide! A few months ago, I wrote<\/a> the following about Helen DeWitt’s book The Last Samurai<\/a> (which I swear to god if you don’t buy it right now for the low-low price of $11 on Amazon.com we are so no longer friends, and (!) you can get both ytt and John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure<\/em> for $22, there really is no excuse<\/small>):<\/p>\n

This is also one of these books where to read it is to have the totality of the author’s vision only hinted at: despite its epic scale, it still feels like a tiny but perfect puppet fable played at the outskirts of a big, bustling city inside her head. I don’t say this by means of a judgement, but rather, it is interesting and important to think about the scale of the work that you’re doing and how it relates, in a sense, to the greater Projects that you have going on. I know that one of my major problems as a composer is that I used to feel, instinctively, that each piece had to fully represent (even in fleeting miniatures) all the aspects of my Whole Thing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s interesting to revisit this little nugget from August; when I wrote that, I only obliquely knew what I was talking about as it related to music, but very much knew what I was talking about when it related to the written word. Some scattered examples. Does anybody else receive an erotic charge by knowing that the American Museum of Natural History in New York has over 32 million specimens, “of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time.” Or, as a counter-example, is it not a total buzzkill when a shopkeeper tells you, “the only sizes we have are the sizes that are on the floor?” Other things about which I get a physical tingle thinking about that same thing:<\/p>\n