InDefinition - 52

manter, n. calling your best mate, e.g. a 'cunt' (while knowing that he's still gonna get his round in)

On the other hand...

Today, the average work of literary fiction appears and vanishes from the scene largely unnoticed and unremarked. Even the novelists you may think of as “hyped” are in fact relatively obscure; I’ve got a battalion of perfectly intelligent cousins who have never heard of either Jonathan Franzen or Dave Eggers. Sure, they know who James Patterson is, but they also know he’s no artist. They’ve never read a book because it was praised as a work of genius on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and they are oblivious to the existence of James Wood.

- Laura Miller, Salon

Teacher/critic/judge

In all the years I read these writers, as I went through high school and then college and grad school, it never occurred to me that they were trying to persuade me to actually see this or that performance, buy this or that volume, or take in this or that movie; nor did I imagine that I was being bullied or condescended to, or that I wasn’t allowed to disagree with them. I thought of these writers above all as teachers, and like all good teachers they taught by example; the example that they set, week after week,* was to recreate on the page the drama of how they had arrived at their judgments. (The word critic, as I learned much later, comes from the Greek word for “judge.”)

- Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker

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* in a time, obviously, when one was encouraged to write more than 450 words about things.

'Norman Mailer'

Is it not somehow supremely fitting that, in this New Yorker article on the egomaniacal Norman Mailer, the only keywords offered are... 'Norman Mailer'?

Monkeys vs Hamlet

There is only a one in fifteen billion chance that a monkey would even write the word 'banana' randomly.

- Scarlett Thomas, Monkeys with Typewriters: How to write fiction...

Fact.*

A man with his nose in a book is a man women want to sleep with.

- Esquire

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* hopefully

Superior T

Please tell me this didn't really happen...

:(