Dizzies Press Release: Andrew Gelman on Election Eve (Mon., Nov. 3)

Ferrell, Gelman, Park: An Eternal Golden Braid

I. Come to my last New York reading (for a couple of months at least)! I'll be at the Asian American Writers' Workshop on Thursday 10/23 (7 p.m.), along with Monica Ferrell. Here's more info at Time Out, and at the AAWW site.

The space is vertiginously located on the 10th floor of 16 West 32nd Street. And 32nd Street, of course, means...Korean food????

II. I've been enjoying reading what things Andrew Gelman thought while reading PD...I especially liked the connection to Jonathan Coe, and to this bit in Gödel, Escher, Bach:

Hofstadter writes about how, when you read a book, you know you're coming to the end, which affects your expectations, unlike in real life stories or in a movie of indeterminate length, when the end can come as a surprise.

What's surprising is that I've been having all these ideas regarding surprise ("the aesthetics of surprise"), maybe Hofstadter will shed some light on this (or not, per Gelman!). Anyway—he finished my novel!

Late-Night List

Vertigo, the laudable W.G. Sebald blog, is putting together a list of novels with photographer characters...My contribution: Saul Henchman from Powell's The Fisher King.

Here are the first few:

Adolfo Bioy Casares, La Aventura de un Fotografo en la Plata. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1985 (translated as The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata in 1989)

Italo Calvino, Gli Amori Difficili. Milan: Mondadori, 1993 (contains the story translated as The Adventure of a Photographer in Difficult Loves in 1983) [the story can be read online here]

Julio Cortázar, Las babas del diablo, in Las Aramas Secretas. 1959 (translated in 1967 as Blowup, in Blowup and Other Stories) [the source for Antonioni's film Blowup]

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves. NY: Pantheon, 2000

Delia Falconer, The Service of Clouds. Sydney: Picador, 1997

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This is sort of an Ouroboros? Me noticing author/Columbia statistics prof Andrew Gelman's guess that I was a Democrat, including it in my previous post (which was actually written last night, auto-posted this a.m.), and then him mentioning that post in his subsequent post?