Turing Fact and Fiction
Mark Sarvas (of TEV) reviews two Turing-related books for the Philadelphia Inquirer: Janna Levin’s A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines and David Leavitt’s The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Mark Sarvas (of TEV) reviews two Turing-related books for the Philadelphia Inquirer: Janna Levin’s A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines and David Leavitt’s The Man Who Knew Too Much.
The incomparable (and eminently quotable) Marjane Satrapi is interviewed in The Independent.
“Joseph Heller once said that he’d succeeded ‘despite that great handicap for a novelist, a happy childhood’.”
“Well, I would have much preferred to have had a normal childhood. I would have loved it if my greatest dilemma, at 14, was whether to go to Benetton for my pullovers. I would have preferred not to have cried all the tears I have cried.”
“Even if it meant not writing?”
“Definitely. Because I would have been happy. But when you’re dropped in a pile of shit, so to speak, you have to decide – either add to the pile, or use it as fertiliser, and grow flowers.”
Her newest graphic novel to appear in the U.S. is Chicken with Plums, translated by Anjali Singh.
Speaking of probabilities: What are the odds that your favorite writer will get the Nobel? Michael Orthofer of the Literary Saloon has been keeping track of various predictions for the Nobel. Once again this year, there is mention of Mahmoud Darwish and Adunis, but I don’t think it will go to them. (Why the academy has never selected an Arab poet is beyond me.) Michael thinks that Orhan Pamuk is too young, at 54, to get the prize. But Gabriel García Márquez was 54 when he got his. Plus, Pamuk has had a great year and with Turkey in the news over its ridiculous censorship law, that might just tilt the judges’ votes in his favor.
I was amused by this L.A. Times piece by statistician Michael Kaplan, in which he tries to explain the chances of finding true love:
True love is like a kick in the head. No, really. It’s not just that it comes out of nowhere, knocks you sideways and changes your life forever. It’s statistically like a kick in the head.
Most statistics are about things that usually happen or that most people share: prices, salaries, IQs, political opinions. These qualities are called “normally distributed”: If you chart them, the graph they produce is that old favorite, the bell curve.
Love, here as everywhere, is different. True love is rare; we can only hope to find it once in a lifetime, and maybe not even then. The curve that charts love is very narrow — more like a steeple than a bell. It’s called a Poisson curve, and its classic exemplar was the chance of being kicked to death by a horse while serving in the Prussian cavalry.
When I was in high school, Lo, these many years ago, one of my favorite subjects was math. I used to love probability. By the time I got to grad school, though, and had to take a class for my research, I got a C. I was mortified.
I was in California this weekend for a conference, but I managed to get some writing done on Sunday. I took a long walk on the beach in Monterrey and tried to figure a way out of my current dilemma. I’m not sure the solution I thought of will work, but I can at least see some shape to the last third of the book, the hardest part so far.
I also caught up on some online reading. There’s a great Op-Ed by Robert Harris in the New York Times, about the parallels between an incident that took place in Ostia, in 68 B.C. , at the height of the Roman empire, and modern-day America.
Gary Shteyngart’s NYTBR essay–about trying to write about Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov–made me smile. It’s so…well, so Shteyngartian: Ten Days with Oblomov.
Rachid Bouchareb’s film Indigènes, which I mentioned on a few occasions here, is finally coming out in France, and he’s interviewed in Time. It looks like Chirac is finally going to sort out the pensions of North African WWII veterans. C’est pas trop tôt.
Maud Newton reviewed Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones, and she says that, although the characters’ voices “feel insufficiently differentiated,” she likes it very much. I am adding this book to my box of books to ship to Casablanca.
Those of you who subscribe to TLS, check out Hirsh Sawhney’s review of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. I read the novel earlier this summer and it really stayed with me–a very fine work. It was recently shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, and is now out in paperback. I’d love to give away a copy, but I have finally, finally finished packing my books.