Festive mondegreen

And his name shall be Khaled. (Wonderful!)

- Isaiah, 9:6

Keystroke twins - 30

enter
Dover

A haiku on getting up in the morning

The Great Man theory of history

Rorke came to South Africa because of a lack of potatoes in Ireland.

- David Rattray, The Day of the Dead Moon

'Dispels brain fag'

[photo courtesy Mika Tennekoon]

Keystroke twins - 29

prose
spore

Winter Sunday

[with thanks to winter_sunday]

Keystroke twins - 28

thug
uhuh

Morkkis

[with thanks to whomever I nicked this off, on Twitter]

Muddy pastures

Neither the grand Oxford English Dictionary nor the muddy pastures of UrbanDictionary.com yielded up an entry for 'deviltons'.

- Bruce Whiteman, on the selected essays of Michael Hofmann

Never! (Favourite footnotes: 4)

On Oxford

There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.

- Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

Stevie Wonder - in context

I just called to say I told you so.

1 x Happy Reader

Good shit. More or less free. Available here.

St Patrick of Armagh

- my new-found personal patron!

'India Sahib'

... surely?

Found in books - GUEST ENTRY

I have discovered a truly marvellous proof... which this margin is too narrow to contain.

- Pierre de Fermat, in his copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica (as reported in The New Yorker)

Oh, I have *totally* arrived...!

NB, Lena Dunham (et al.)

The last 28-year-old who could have written a memoir worth reading was Alexander the Great.

- PJ O'Rourke, 'They Made Me Write About Lena Dunham'

Second Best Mangal

Duly noted

The root of the word irony is in the Greek eironeia, 'liar'.

- PJ O'Rourke, in The Daily Beast

Can there be any job lower

- and, to be clear, I do mean morally - than being the wankstain who editorialises totally self-explanatory 'humour' memes for the internet's retarded readership?

Win a Writer's Retreat in Iceland!

Or, more accurately - Win a Writer's Retreat (oh, but it's in Iceland).

The first rule of Tautology Club

is...

Found in books - 5

Jarvis reads The Moomins

A new tune: one part expectation, two parts Spring sadness.

- Tove Jansson on the great delight of walking alone, and liking it

Couldn't. Make. It. Up

BS Detector

Like abstract painting... abstract poetry extended the range over which incompetence would fail to declare itself.

- Clive James, Poetry Notebook, 2006-2014 (in Literary Review December 2014/January 2015)

Found in books - 4

In a freshly-delivered dollop of Chicken Shit for the Soul, by David Fisher.*

--
* Which is sold in some candy-ass countries, I've subsequently discovered, under the title of Chicken Poop... Lame-os.

But speaking of 'reads' / Only in English - 17

Recommended reads (sic)

Nice one, Smith's. You tossers.

"Disrespected and dicked around"*

The staff of The New Republic quits out of solidarity with their former editors.

Good lads, themselves. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, this is what a sense of honour looks like. And, most probably, what it costs to keep it.

(That said, as I recall, the king in 'The Red Wedding' did not 'stab everyone in person'. Or indeed anyone. In fact I don't remember him even being there. But the affair does very much resemble the new-media-buyout plot currently unfolding in The Newsroom. So props to Aaron Sorkin for having his finger on the cultural-political pulse, as usual.)

--
* She's paraphrasing.

Bad Sex - with Ben Okri

A writer writes what they write and that’s all there is to it.

- the former Booker-winner 'graciously' responds to the announcement of his victory

(Congrats due to his editor and his publicist for their significantly better efforts.)

Come in, Van Wilder - your time is up.

[courtesy Yamille Wickramanayake/Menaka Ashi Fernando/'Sri Lankan Spelling' Facebook group]

I am a writer...

I am a writer, which means I’m trying not to be broke.

- Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

(Ironical) Word of the Day

from Dictionary.com:

nosophobia, n. Medical students’ disease, meaning “fear of disease”.

Manliest of the Match

And my Dove Men+ Care Man of the Match is... Dan Biggar.

- Welsh commentator, Wales vs. South Africa

"Hey, Malkovich! Think fast!"

... and 31 other supposedly unscripted movie-moments.

(I think No.8 is my favourite.)

Who guards the Guardian?

Before (Jeremy Brier's summary of Emily Thornberry's opinions...)

After (the Guardian's summary of Jeremy Brier's...)

Fantastic

Attn  Smyth,

I am Barrister.Larry Martins, (legal practitioner/advocates) Lome Togo. West Africa.I would like you to indicate your interest to receive the transfer of US $ 6,million left behind by my late client Mr S. M. Smyth, a national of your country, before the fund gets confiscated or declared unserviceable by the bank where this huge amount were deposited.I will like you to stand as the next of kin to my late client whose account is presently dormant, for claims. Please contact me at (larrymartins455@yahoo.com) for more clarifications. 

Hon.Larry Martins
(larrymartins455@yahoo.com)

Gaelic

Gaelic is the traditional language here in Scotland - although it's rarely spoken outside of communities rife with incest. Most people speak the Queen's English (if, that is, the Queen has a serious case of Tourette's).

- Danny Bhoy, A Visitor's Guide to Scotland

True story

Today I wrote a poem, entitled 'Story', and labelled 'non-fiction'.

These things happen.

Reem

Dot Wordsworth asks if Joey Essex knows what 'reem' means.

Five pounds right here says he doesn't.

(Soldiers know what 'to ream' (sic) means. They even have a tool for it. Ahem.)

'We DO NOT accept poetry or short stories.'

Please don't call and say "I know you don't accept poetry, but I'd just like to read you this funny poem I've written anyway." That would be greatly appreciated.

- The Oldie, submissions guidelines ('What we DON'T want')

InDefinition - 73

selfie-explanatory, adj. what it'll be like listening to people go through their holiday snaps ten years from now

Only in English (literally) - GUEST ENTRY

"You know what happened last month, without anybody noticing? Webster's Dictionary expanded the definition of the word 'literally' to include the way it's commonly misused. So the thing is, we now no longer have a word in the English language that means 'literally'. 'Literally' doesn't have a synonym. So we're going to have the find a Latin word for it, and use it. But see, I don't know any Latin. So when I say that I am 'literally going to set fire to this building with you in it, before I hand over the keys to it', you don't know if I'm speaking figuratively or literally."

- The Newsroom

Spectator 'Books of the Year'

or; How to Blog, by Jeremy Clarke.

The science of the movie screenplay

in which there are a handful of interesting facts, generally concerning Lord of the Rings - 'one of the biggest successful film projects ever' - and most especially the bit where we are instructed ('Screenwriting Pitfalls') never ever to rely on the Deus ex machina, like, and I quote, 'the eagles at the end of The Lord of the Rings'.

Received

(courtesy DS Hilton)

Tinder

An Erasure Poem, by Yesika Salgado.

Base humour(?)

[source redacted]

War literature - what is it good for? (2)

Recently, I had [the] experience [of] listening to Major General John Borling (USAF, retired), a former fighter pilot and six-year Vietnam POW. When asked to name the most important courses he took as an Academy cadet, Borling immediately responded: “Humanities courses—art history, music appreciation, literature, introductory philosophy.”

- Thomas G McGuire, in War, Literature, & the Arts

War literature - what is it good for?

What are the humanities about if not the cultivation of an informed conscience, a habit of reflection in which the flow of thoughtless action and means-end calculation is interrupted by a consideration of historical contexts and ethical considerations, by an imaginative awareness of the character and consequences of action, by a deep investment in the human condition and its possibilities? If those with such knowledge and such capacities do not assume some kind of responsibility for worldly action, including the management of violence, then that responsibility passes to the Kilgores, and the Kurtzes, of the world. 

- Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America

NB - 'cissexism'

Apparently a 'cis' is someone who identifies with the same gender that they were born with. So that's a thing now.

- Tim Stanley, in The Telegraph

Myleene Klass 'wipes the floor' with Ed Miliband

In which I initially thought The Telegraph had used inverted commas to denote that Ms Klass did not, in fact, actually use the would-be leader of the country to mop out her kitchen.

Alas (twice over)...

Mini biog

(from this month's Literary Review)

Also

'An Ode to Photocopies', by Nick Ripatrazone.

No.2 is a poem unto itself.

And also (again):

The role of the high school English teacher is also not to create a legion of English majors — God help us — but rather to pause a student’s hectic and harried day and get them thinking about words.

John Updike

was rejected, twice, from Harvard's most prestigious creative writing class.

And other matters.

'The three war cemeteries...'

Is it a 'thing', then, in commemorative inscriptions (and/or elsewhere) that you can put a comma between words written in the lower case, but not if they're in capital letters?

Or does one of those two (?) places contain two (or indeed even three) war cemeteries within it?

(One might argue, in the circumstances, that the comma before 'saith the LORD' is one of the more superfluous punctuation marks in the English language.)

Which realisation (#tag)

['Hashtag' oddness - part 3] has now served to completely ruin this otherwise extremely funny Late Night with Jimmy Fallon sketch that up until about five minutes ago I used to venerate.

Such is life.

Oh, and another thing (#tag)

['Hashtag' oddness - part 2]

This thing here - # - is not a 'hashtag'. It's a 'hash' (as they used to tell you on the more complicated kinds of phone-calls), also known as the 'pound sign', 'number sign', and even, apparently, the 'octothorpe'.*

A hashtag is the hash sign followed by the cutesy commentary. #likeitsaysinthisOEDdefinitionrighthere

See?

--
* which makes perfect sense, but this is the first I've heard of it.

Just how much should I let it annoy me

that in this pathetically simple advert someone couldn't even be bothered to format the '.co.uk' into the same font as the 'WH Smith'?

Answers on a postcard - addressed to my psychiatrist.

Books I've actually finished lately: 58

Tis the season to be X44

Books I've actually finished lately: 57

Books I've actually finished lately: 56

Books I've actually finished lately: 55

With thanks to Tpr Newman, who gave me the paperback in Afghanistan in an attempt to reduce the weight of his home-bound luggage.

(I read it in Sri Lanka.)

Books I've actually finished lately: 54

Books I've actually finished* lately: 53

[F]or whom, anyway, do we do the things that lead to Nobel Prizes if not for our mothers?

- JM Coetzee, in perhaps the least guarded moment of his literary career

--
* Re-finished, in this case, for at least the second time.

No. Just NO.

Big, hairy, and in your house

[photo by Patrick Belton]

Or, on a lighter note...

(Un)Intentional symbolism

Answers to some light anecdotal research, undertaken by 16-year-old Bruce McAllister.*

Featuring - surprise, surprise - some pretty good examples of bad writing along with the sort of I'm-much-too-busy-for-this dickishness you get more often than you ought from big literary figures.

There are, of course,** one or two good remarks about symbolism.

__
* Fuller answers (along with interesting typed originals) available from the Paris Review Daily blog section.
** ...

'Thinking cannot be done without words.'

Therefore, grammar.

'Following The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, a novel set on a Greek island in 1940 about the eternal triangle that develops between a doctor's daughter, her fisherman fiance and a young officer who is billeted in the doctor's house....' WHAT?

Facebooks - VIII (bonus round)

Because 10 books a day for a week turned out not to be quite enough either!

--

The Prophet - Khalil Gibran
Wiliam Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies - John Carey
Jim Davis - John Masefield
"The Fighting Business" [childhood history compendium, feat. Light Brigade on the front cover. No idea what its real title was]
The Road Stops at Nowhere - Denis Beckett
Messiah - (GF Handel and) Charles Jennens (and others)
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernières
Collected Poems - WB Yeats
Bamboo - William Boyd
Annals of the Former World - John McPhee [not started]

Facebooks - VII

The Complete Librettos of - WS Gilbert
Beau Geste - PC Wren
Engineers of the Soul - Frank Westerman
Five Go to Smuggler's Top - Enid Blyton
Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution - Simon Schama
Goldfinger - Ian Fleming
Collected Poems - WH Auden [in progress]
Ancient Egyptian Literature (3 vols.) - Miriam Lichtheim
Asterix [all] - R Goscinny & A Uderzo

Facebooks - VI

Collected Poems - Roger McGough
The Three Musketeers (and several of the sequels) - Alexandre Dumas        [in English, for the record]
The Complete MAUS - Art Spiegelman
Consider The Lobster: and other essays - David Foster Wallace
The Unquiet Grave - 'Palinurus' (Cyril Connolly)
Complete Works - Oscar Wilde [the poetry is mostly terrible, but I                didn't know that then]
Whale (or any other) Adventure - Willard Price
Translations - Brian Friel
Regeneration / The Eye in the Door / The Ghost Road - Pat Barker
'Books v. cigarettes' - George Orwell

How not to use commas*

Have downloaded a copy for the widow of Pte XXX of XXX who died in the 1970s and who has just donated items to the Airborne Museum at Duxford.

- [irrelevant; but dated 17/09/2014]

--
* in fact, how not to not use them...

How to use commas

Let it be, for all I care, someone else's wife who rang, barely a minute earlier, while he was sauntering houndstoothed up Charing Cross Road to his sun-filled offices in Bloomsbury, to announce, 'Enough, over, it's been wonderful, but something more wonderful has come my way.'

- Howard Jacobson, Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It

Facebooks - V

Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions - Martin Amis
The Cripple of Inishmaan - Martin McDonagh
Mein Kampf - Adolf Hitler [abandoned]
'The Book of Emma' [in Small Hours] - Lachlan Mackinnon
The Psalms - 'David'
Markings - Dag Hammarskjöld (transl. WH Auden)
Rorke's Drift - James Bancroft [I think; but possibly another work.             They all look the same] / The Day of the Dead Moon - David Rattray     [audiobook]
Three Men in a Boat / on the Bummel - Jerome K Jerome
Vertigo - WG Sebald
Lost Oasis: A Desert Adventure - Robert Twigger

Books I've actually finished lately: 52

I'm not sure which I prefer: the prose (and perhaps also a little prosaic) poetry of Letter Composed... or the (sometimes slightly over-)poetic prose of The Yellow Birds. Both have a great many gleaming moments - but neither is 100% successful.

Facebooks - IV

A Beautiful Mind - Sylvia Nasar
How Fiction Works - James Wood
Living Dangerously: The Autobiography of... - Ranulph Fiennes
The Viceroy of Ouidah - Bruce Chatwin
'Art' - Yasmina Reza
The Horse Whisperer - Nicholas Evans
The Broken Word - Adam Foulds
Solo - Rana Dasgupta
Growing - Leonard Woolf
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 - Hunter S Thompson

'Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times'

it declaims in his Spectator byline.

I wonder what it says in The Times.

The translator's victory

Once, during work on Calvino's great comic novel If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, a running battle ensued over use of the word 'feedback', which Weaver repeatedly struck out of the typescript, and Calvino repeatedly re-inserted. (In the end, Weaver won: Calvino died before he was able to see the final proofs.)

- Ian Thompson, in his Guardian obit of the legendary William Weaver

Books I've actually finished lately: 51

Men went to Catterick with the dawn,
Their ardours shortened their lives.

- Y Gododdin, c. 7th century

Facebooks - III

Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence / Anglo-English      Attitudes - Geoff Dyer [I don't remember which came first. Most              probably read concurrently]
God Is Not Great: the case against religion - Christopher Hitchens
Flashman - George MacDonald Fraser
Chinaman: the Legend of Pradeep Mathew - Shehan Karunatilaka [in      manuscript]
Apocalypse Now (Redux) script - John Milius
Histories - Herodotus [partial]
John Clare: A Biography - Jonathan Bate [unfinished]
In Ethiopia with a Mule - Dervla Murphy
Collected Poems - Zbigniew Herbert
Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie

Facebooks - II

Because Tuesday's child is also full of books.

--

Leonard Woolf: A Life - Victoria Glendinning
The Enthusiast Field Guide to Poetry - ed. The Enthusiast (Ian Sansom     and others)
An Historical Relation of Ceylon... (etc.) - Robert Knox
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Iliad - Homer
V for Vendetta - Alan Moore and David Lloyd
Shah of Shahs - Ryszard Kapuściński
The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
Collected Short Stories - Roald Dahl
The Libertine - Stephen Jeffreys

Books I've actually finished lately: 50

I am keen to know why Macfarlane-Deakin took 'two hipflasks (one of whisky, one of arak)' - and where they got their 'arak' from, in Dorset.

Facebooks - I

So, this thing is going round that you name ten books that had a major impact on you.

Ten books is not enough.

--

The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Disgrace - JM Coetzee
Oscar Wilde - Richard Ellmann
One of the many biographies of The Doors [I will endeavour to recall         the particular volume]
The New English Hymnal - various
Tintin [all of] - Hergé
Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis - Wendy Cope
The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto - David Shields
The Collected Stories of... - Lydia Davis

--

Notes / Self-imposed Rules:

1) No particular order of importance.
2) Links are to editions read, where possible.
3) One book per author.
4) -ish. Book stipulated is either first read or first enjoyed.

Crap

that will surely set you back a fortune.

Although I do quite like the Prufock mug.

Today's post*

- John Felstiner, Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu

--
* as Brother Christopher was rather fond of pointing out...

"A passion for writing"

French man jailed for phoning and texting his ex 21,807 times

In which I particularly enjoyed the elucidatory photo of a man texting - rather politely, one might add - in English.

[with thanks to Frank MacMillan]

Frumious Bandersnatch, orator

Unfamous last words - GUEST ENTRY

Books I've actually finished lately: 49b

Even if I do think that my super-advanced reviewer's pre-print copy (unsigned)

is just that teensy bit cooler.

Books I've actually finished lately: 49a

Salman Rushdie: As Saleem Sinai says, 'What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same'.
Francis Plug: Sure. But he also calls his penis a soo-soo. [Laughs.]

- Paul Ewen

Sartre dans le karzi

As at Caffè Nero, St Martin's Lane. (You get a higher class of graffitist in the West End, obviously.)

Good lads,* themselves!

Jack Durand (UK) wins World Youth Scrabble Championships.

Some mortifying stats:

--
* (?) Not many girls appear to have been harmed in the making of these Scrabble Championships...

Exit, fucked by a bear

and other sweary animal-kingdom revelations, from Rufus Lodge, in Slate.

It was going to happen eventually

As in this month's Literary Review.

Things one is not typically asked

while trying to download a free PDF:

[Author's note: see following post.]

Books I've actually finished lately: 48

Mercifully witty.

Books I've actually finished lately: 47 / Found in books - GUEST ENTRY

[Jacques] Guérin now held a sad, tattered book in his hands, a first edition of Swann's Way, printed in 1913. Inside, on an intact page that escaped Marthe's ruthless effacement of all traces of Marcel's name, Guérin discovered a dedication: To my little brother, a souvenir of lost time, regained for a moment whenever we see one another.

- Lorenza Foschini

Books I've actually finished lately: 46

(Editor's note: Also, I have just named my first dog 'Maus', on account of how he looks exactly like the one on the left.)

George Orwell

reviews Mein Kampf - with the usual unfaltering honesty.

[via Oliver Ashford, with thanks]

Well. Sure. But...