Seen (in WH Smith's, apparently)

[With thanks to RDE, post al.]

Sensible Conservatism

What do we want change for – aren't things bad enough as they are?

- Lord Salisbury, three-time Prime Minister (Conservative) 

Joyce: yes and no (but not necessarily in that order)

A lot of spurious guff has sprung up around Ulysses, about it being easy to read, and how it was intended to be spoken aloud by the poor and the uneducated - Joyce himself started this clunker by claiming that it was a book for servants, maids and porters. And yet, elsewhere, he also confessed that it was a highly sophisticated novel designed to "keep professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant".

- Kevin Maher, The Times

We've all been there...

[Thanks to FM and unattributed others.]

Anagrammatical - 3

nomad
monad

Pokey poetry

I went to a maximum security level four and ran into some poets who had a poetry class every Wednesday. I felt I had found home.

- Kosal Khiev, poet, in The Times

Ulysses

I spent three years reading Ulysses incessantly at university, and then applied to do a five-year PhD on Joyce at the State University of New York... but dropped out in panic at the eleventh hour when I realised that it was just a book...

- Kevin Maher, The Times

Anagrammatical - 2

aboard
abroad

Anagrammatical - 1

listen
silent

Enlightenment

Edmund de Waal believes tact is a dangerous virtue. As a wise man once said, tact ‘is the ability to make a person see lightening without letting him feel the bolt.’

- The School of Life

Dull sense of humour

Vote due on link between village of Dull and US town of Boring

In which the most interesting points to note are that 

1) the good people of Dull find day-to-day existence so boring (or, indeed, dull) that they count the passage of cyclists through their village; and

2) that Boring is named after a US Civil War veteran, an area of nomenclature - 'Jubiliation T Cornpone', for example - not normally troubled by an excess of boring names. (Cornpone, in case you were wondering, was born in the town of Dogpatch.)

Mae West vs Mailer (damnit, just read the whole article!)

For many years, the filthiest word in English was “fuck.” Even the dauntless Partridge had to use “f*ck.” (In Norman Mailer’s 1948 war novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” the G.I.s use “fug.” In what may be an apocryphal story, Mae West, meeting Mailer at a party, said, “Oh, you’re the guy who can’t spell ‘fuck’!”)

- Joan Acocella, New Yorker

Classic lingo-nerd-fest on English and its uses, Bosniak smack-talk, and one use of 'conciseness' where it ought to have been 'concision'.

Shame!

Luke looked across at a young man busy writing in a notebook and felt sorry for him: he had only his book for company - even his coffee-cup was empty.

- Dyer, Paris Trance

Keystroke twins - 13

brass
crass

Too good

As for the proposition that, if something was good enough for Dr. Johnson, it should be good enough for us, would we like to live with the dentistry, or the penal codes, or the views on race of Johnson’s time?

- Joan Acocella, New Yorker

Shakespeare and I

This 'morning' (c.2pm), in a bleary moment, I used the phrase '[my brother] and I' when I - of course - meant 'me'. This afternoon ('...' = 11pm), I read that

Usages frowned on today were once common. (Dr. Johnson split infinitives; Shakespeare wrote “between you and I,” and just about anything else he wanted.)

- Joan Acocella, New Yorker

Which just goes to show that Shakespeare had bleary moments, too.

Note to self

No one is obliged to become an author.

- Paul Fussell, 'Vanity in Review: the author's reply as a literary genre'

[With thanks to HD.]

Murakami bingo

Ha! Tremendous.

[With thanks to NM.]

St James'ses

James Wood's use of the possessive in 'David Shields's recent manifesto "Reality Hunger"' (here, final para) is just plain ugly. But 'Roland Barthes's prosecutorial ruthlessness' (three lines later) is a real mind-warper.

Either it counts as doubly hideous - implying, as it may, that we think 'Barthes' is actually pronounced 'Barths' or 'Bart(h)ez' - and/or a mutant result of obsessive adherence to 'house style'; or it demonstrates an assumption that every New Yorker-reader knows full well that you don't pronounce the 'es' on the end of 'Barthes'.

Anyone fancy odds?*

--
*French-speakers do not apply.

Myth-busting

Our contemporary politicians actually ARE less Churchillian than, well, Churchill.

Says the Sunlight Foundation.

InDefinition - GUEST ENTRY

writing style, n. 'a bow tie about a throat cancer'

- Samuel Beckett (to Aidan Higgins)

Trajectory

Something very rare but a thing to take delight in: a man with a finely constituted intellect, who has the character, the inclinations, and also the experiences appropriate to such an intellect.

- Nietzsche*

The problem is to acquire that knowledge of life (or rather to have lived) which goes beyond the mere ability to write. So that in the last analysis the great artist is first and foremost a man who has lived greatly (it being understood that in this case living also implies thinking about life - that living is in fact precisely this subtle relationship between experience and our awareness of it).

- Camus, notebooks*

... Luke came to Paris with the intention of writing a book based on his experiences of living.... As far as I know, he made absolutely no progress with this book, abandoning it... in the instant that he began leading the life intended to serve as its research...

- Geoff Dyer, Paris Trance (p1)

--
* quoted in Dyer, intro to Selected Essays of John Berger

Ye

The fact-checker on the piece, fortunately, spoke Mandarin...

or - Why the New Yorker is the best publication in the world.

Yes

The poet puts the right words in the right order so that the colliding of their sounds and meaning[s] makes your neurons flash like a pinball machine.

- Alan Alda, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

Fact

The question mark in the Requiem typeface is uncommonly ugly. It looks like someone has beaten it with a poker.

Not-so-tough talk

Perhaps we can argue that art is stronger than the censor, and perhaps it often is. Artists, however, are vulnerable.

- Salman Rushdie, New Yorker

Tolkien tells the Nazis

... if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

- JRR Tolkien, on being asked by a German publisher whether he was of Aryan descent

[With thanks to Letters of Note.]

Funny old world, innit

Playboy's Chicago offices are soon to be occupied by the Children's Memorial Hospital, Prospect reports.

'Understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur'

Teju Cole, on the German Chatwin (albeit with no reference to the billion typos in the HB edition).

Two classic comments on (the writings of) Helen DeWitt

Joe has found that if you want to sleep with a woman you have to spend a lot of time talking to her about her interests.

- Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

As any million-dollar litigation lawyer or two-cent literary critic will tell you, the devil is in the details. 

- Jennifer Szalai, New York Times Sunday Book Review

How the real poets roll

a personal poem of damnation as well as a plea to be released from “the examination of his own depths”[,] Rimbaud originally distributed A Season In Hell to friends as a self-published booklet, and soon afterward, at the age of nineteen, quit poetry altogether.

- from the New Directions website