Wednesday 30 April 2014
Not from Blackadder(?) - 1
His mother was a religiously minded Andalusian cleaning lady called Mercedes...- Nicholas Rankin, in Literary Review
Only in English - 15
'All over it' = situation under control
'All over the place' = situation not in any way under control
'All over the place' = situation not in any way under control
On the people who keep records
Further searches lead only to men of that name from that region detained for debt.- Lydia Davis, in the TLS
Tuesday 29 April 2014
'apologia'
Because sometimes people are just wrong – and deserve to have the details spelled out to them.
[via Fionn Napier]
[via Fionn Napier]
Does anybody else think
that twenty quid is more than can be reasonably expected for a hundred and sixty pages?
Faber, isn't it.
Faber, isn't it.
Advice for life
One must be poet enough not to disturb the ceremony, yet the jester must always be lying in ambush.- Søren Kierkegaard, The Seducer's Diary
Saturday 26 April 2014
Credo
All old wives' chatter, cottage wisdom. No poem is profound.- Basil Bunting, 'A Note on Briggflatts'
Monday 21 April 2014
How to write letters
God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country.- Hemingway (to F Scott Fitzgerald)
[with thanks to Mika Tennekoon]
Thursday 3 April 2014
Best pitch EVER!!
Just say yes or no to this: Kafka, Woolf, Hemingway, Chaplin, and Sontag are debating the best movie ever made.- David Thomson, to the editors of McSweeney's Thirty-One - Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: old forms, unearthed
Some half-dozen gems
from (the typically-beautiful) McSweeney's Thirty-One - Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: old forms, unearthed:
parchment is replaced by pen and paper, which is replaced by predictive text on Finnish cell phones.- Darren Franich and Graham Weatherly, 'Introduction'
MARCI: I think everyone likes the penis. Lesbians just don't like how men are attached to the penis.- Mary Miller, 'A Dialogue Between Two Maids in the Twenty-First Century, One of Whom is Skeezy: a new whore dialogue'
SOCRATES: ... It is not always the keenest eye that is the first to see something.- Plato, The Republic
HEMINGWAY: I've been to every place I used. I'd seen the mountains in the early morning. I'd tasted the wine.- David Thomson, 'After Citizen Kane: a new Socratic dialogue'
the goal of Socrates is not to answer a question, but rather to reveal that the preexisting answers are incorrect or deficient.- Eds. marginal note
the letters are minute and bristle with serifs like little hooks (inducing a half-conscious discomfort in the throat-clearing reader).- Shelley Jackson, 'Consuetudinary of the Word Church, or The Church of The Dead Letter: a new consuetudinary'
we hope you'll enjoy this issue, and that those of you who have recently graduated, or been laid off will consider McSweeney's for your internship needs. You will be valued, if not adequately paid.- McSweeney's (per se)
Grocery-shopping factoid
In order to teach my phone 'courgettes' I had to switch the dictionary into French.
(And yet it knows 'aubergine'... Qu'est-ce que le deuce?!)
(And yet it knows 'aubergine'... Qu'est-ce que le deuce?!)
Wednesday 2 April 2014
Warning to would-be novelists (in particular)
I just started a new book. The detective is met at Sydney airport by a man wearing blue jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, with an unusually broad nose and curly dark hair. I was supposed to think Aboriginal. I thought, Magnum?!- Amy Harris (on Jo Nesbø's The Bat)
Tuesday 1 April 2014
An April Fool(!)
Mae Dappersonne introduces Penguin Now!, a new range of classic novels grammatically updated for 2014.
Should Penguin Now! prove a success, the team are looking into replacing the traditional ? with a more contemporary :/[With thanks to Alexandra Coghlan]
Not an April Fool(?)
Harvard librarians make a point of not going looking for rare volumes bound with human skin.
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