Who'd be a writer?

Another egregious incorrect, this time at the expense of Geoff Dyer, in a newspaper article in which he talks about the life of the writer (without reference to having your prose screwed over by ham-fisted subs).

To wit:

1) In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion recalls her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, rereading Sophie's Choice by William Styron, "trying to see how it worked". To see how Styron got away with it is the more interesting question in my and Martin Amis's view. (Styron's novel was, for Amis, "a flapping, gobbling, squawking turkey".) [submitted copy]

2) In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion recalls her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, rereading Sophie's Choice by William Styron, "trying to see how it worked" (Styron's novel was, for him, "a flapping, gobbling, squawking turkey".) [edit published]

In fairness, the Guardian editors admit to this shocker at the bottom of the piece (online edition). To their detriment, though, it looks suspiciously like the missing sentence was removed a) in accordance with a widespread editorial hatred of italics, and b) by someone who hasn't heard of Martin Amis.

A brief history of Czechoslovakia

The First World War had ended and the country was freed from the long rule of the Hapsburg Dynasty. As they enjoyed the peaceful respite visiting central Europe, people drank Pilsner beer in cafés and manufactured handsome light machine guns.

- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Only in English - 6

Curious - isn't it? - that when we accuse someone of 'seeing things' we in fact mean the complete opposite.

Witt

The problem is not that I am speaking from a position of ignorance. I am speaking from a position of knowledge to people who don't know what knowledge would look like.

- Helen DeWitt, 'Cormac McCarthy & the semi-colon'

Writing job advertised [not a joke]

We require two writers to join our small team of experienced freelance writers and journalists.
Highly experienced article writers only.
Article lengths are in the region of 700 words
£8 - £10 per article. (Depending on experience)
Work from home
NOTE: Your written skill should be exceptional, our editorial standards are high and we are seeking professional people that are experienced and talented.

Found in books - 1

In my charity-shop copy of The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut, pages 27/28 and 59/60 bear evidence of having been turned down. Both pages (27 and 59, anyway) have to do with paying for sex.

Books begun - quarter ending October 16th

The Fermata - Nicholson Baker
Samuel Johnson - Walter Jackson Bate
Post Office - Charles Bukowski
The Emperor of Scent - Chandler Burr
The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon
The Last Samurai* - Helen DeWitt
The Inheritors - William Golding
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms - Stephen Jay Gould
The Love-Adept - LP Hartley
I Am Not Jackson Pollock - John Haskell
The Gift - Lewis Hyde
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
The Interrogation - JMG le Clézio
The Washing of the Spears - Donald R Morris
The Blind Eye - Don Paterson
Timoleon Vieta Come Home - Dan Rhodes
A Book of Liszts - John Spurling
Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
The Village in the Jungle - Leonard Woolf

* already read

Books finished - quarter ending October 16th

Maps & Legends - Michael Chabon
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - Will Eisner
Leonard Woolf: a life - Victoria Glendinning
Unrecounted - WG Sebald
The Rings of Saturn - WG Sebald
Austerlitz - WG Sebald

Favourite foreign onomatopoeia - 5

Eichhörnchen - German, squirrel ([actually derives from 'oak' (and 'acorn'?), but] tell me that's not also the noise they make!)

InDefinition - 37

contradiction, n. excessive zeal regarding foreign rebel groups and funding of same (cf. Ollie North)

Norwegian Wood

I have just bought a copy of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood. The cover spiel tells me that

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko...

but does he - and already this is the only question on my mind - does he, when thinking about her, get Norwegian wood? And would that pun work in Japan (where the novel's title must have been the same?) - or is it not close enough to the bone?

I shall read, and find out.

The truth about notebooks

by Charles Simic, of the New York Review (of Books) blog.

Except for the bit about Moleskines. Still with that shit? You know you can buy a book with words in for less than a Moleskine?!

Also in The Times (and speaking of stars)...

Kate Muir kicks seven shades out of Paul WS Anderson's not-even-laughable Three Musketeers remake. Gallingly, she - or her sub - came up with the title I'd sort of wanted for my own review

All for one and one for awful

except I wasn't prepared to concede one for anything. (My second choice was 'All for nothing', but theartsdesk's platform, tragically, wouldn't allow me to award no stars.)

Less wittily, The Times goes on to award the film not one but TWO stars, and begins its subheading: 'Lots of stars, lots of effects...' Double-clannnnggg.

Signs of The Times

In today's Times2, Richard Morrison reports on Maurice Sendak calling 'the novelist Salman Rushdie' (not the Salman Rushdie who stacks shelves down the ASDA) a 'flaccid fuckhead'.

At least, I assume that's what Sendak called him. What it says in the Times is 'f***head'. Which is only right and proper, because one wouldn't want decent Times-reading folk coughing up their porridge because someone called someone else a fuckhead. Perish the thought.

Morrison's own headline, though, reads: 'I can take criticism, but not from a flaccid $*!?%*&# like you.' Which mal mot is he talking about now? And do the two asterisks stand for the same letter?

Why (do) we do it

For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work...

- WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

21st-century risk assessment

Your computer is at risk! FIX NOW!!
Threats detected: none

Authors whose works I have read (almost) all of (almost) by accident

Bruce Chatwin
Geoff Dyer
WG Sebald

Quality journalism (fictional)

We bring you breaking news. Once again, Leo McGarry is dead.

- The West Wing

Tough crit

On the train, last night, a garbage man tried to throw away my notebook.

Non-non-domiciled?

A group of homeless men have set up home on a golf-course in East Sussex...

- BBC South East Today