Reflections in Oxfam Bookshop, Marylebone

1) If you don't have a name like Isaac Bashevis Singer you're screwed. Don't even bother putting pen to paper.

2) Everyone Has a Good Story? Bollocks. Everyone has a story. What makes it good is how you write it.

3) No-one has read that green novel by Ethan Hawke.

No regrets

I write like Woody Allen; but I look like me.

- DS Hilton, wit

Why, oh why, O Spotify?

The songs on Spotify are not in alphabetical - or any other discernible - order. Er... why not?

magnum o'pus

puss / pus

Words in flagrant breach of the Double Consonant = Short Vowel rule.

Are there others?

The wisdom of the many...

Lately I have been particularly enjoying the plug for several of Facebook's Recommended Pages: 'Many who like Anything like this.'

The first time I saw it, the full inscription ran: 'Fishing - Many who like Anything like this.' And I assumed it was a joke.

Write that down! - from Jesus to Johnson to Van Wilder

The habit of jotting down your own bons mots may well be arrogant and aggravating. But what of those who inflict the task on some other luckless sod?

Smyth's sayings

I'm no different from the next guy.

I've just given it more thought.

Idealism in practice

The people saw them only as caricatures, that is, in the guise that ideals are given when translated into practice.

- Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs

Salieri's plaint

Some are born mediocre; some achieve mediocrity; but most, slowly but surely, have mediocrity imposed upon them.

AdB & JSSS* (in concert)

Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.

- Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

Is it going to be a chapter in your memoirs?

- Seamus Smyth, pater familias

--
* yesssseriously.

Intertextuality

My phone won't spell Debussy. It offers 'debtspy'.

Ironicalest line ever?

He is one of the recipients of the 2010 Diffusion Prize from the University of Limerick for his electroacoustic composition 'Haiku'.

- programme notes on Rohan de Livera

InDefinition - 10

Spoonerist, n. pr. adherent to the punning clan.

For we like sheep?

Eeayh. Dey ave such very loverly i's, n never get ed aches. (York's Kronickle 1492)

- MH, horticultist

The Most Interesting Ad Campaign In The World

People hang on his every word. Even the prepositions.

- Dos Equis

Full campaign footage here.

Railing

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work...

-Yeats, 'The Choice'

Damnit, NO, I say!

InDefinition - GUEST ENTRY

cynics, n. pl. realists with awkwardly high standards

- Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

On C.20th American fiction

Bloody hell. Why do all these books have rape in them?!

- SJ Leigh, historian

InDefinition - 9

suidecide, v. to arrive at the ultimate decision

Only in English - 1

Those who could read read* aloud to the others.

- Ryszard Kapuściński

--
* lack of emphasis mine

InDefinition - 8

unfuriated, adj. like, bovvered.

Poems

... are not substitutes for people.

- Anthony Storr, Solitude

True say.

In defence of convincing lies

They have the merit of being 'true'.

Smyth's Sayings

Nothing is what it is until afterwards.

By which time it's too late.

On poetry

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such an increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.

- WH Auden

Right or wrong - and Auden could be wrong - poetry is a textbook for real life.

InDefinition - 7

Odyssey, n. lengthy journey/absence from home, during which it is permissible - thanks to heroic precedent - to use the 'different-zip-codes' defence (while fully expecting your partner to beat off* persistent admirers.

--
* or not.)

Moore-ing

Too stern an intellectual emphasis on this quality or that detracts from one's enjoyment.

- Marianne Moore, 'When I Buy Pictures'

Witness golf.

Can't work / won't work

Here you see, are two kinds of work - one good, the other bad; one not far removed from a blessing, a lightening of life; the other a mere curse, a burden of life.

What is the difference between them, then? This one has hope in it, the other has not. It is manly to do the one kind of work, and manly also to refuse to do the other.

- William Morris, Useful Work Versus Useless Toil

The gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail... The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work.

- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

con Text

It is well known that irony - in all its forms - doesn't carry 100% by text-message.

Mercifully, neither do jealousy or (its favoured weapon) lacerating sarcasm.*

--
* which takes us straight back, of course, to irony...

'Our thoughts go out to you'

Aye; but which ones?