Lucky Caedmon

Caedmon, the first poet in English whose name we know, learned the art of song in a dream. According to Bede's Historia, Caedmon was an illiterate cowherd who couldn't sing. When, during this or that merry feast, it was decided that everyone in turn would contribute a song, Caedmon would withdraw in embarrassment, maybe claiming he had to go look after the animals. One night, somebody tries to pass Caedmon the harp after dinner, and he flees to the stables. There among the ungulates he drifts off and is visited by a mysterious figure, probably God. "You must sing to me," says God. "I can't," Caedmon says, if not in these words. "That's why I'm sleeping in the stable instead of drinking mead with my friends around the fire. But God (or an angel or demon - the text is vague) keeps demanding a song. "But what should I sing?" asks Caedmon, who I imagine is desperate, cold-sweating through a nightmare. "Sing the beginning of created things," instructs the visitor. Caedmon opens his mouth and, to his amazement, gorgeous verses praising God pour forth.

Caedmon awakes as a poet...

- Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

Favourite footnotes: 13

Who is Mr. Dash, the philsopher? Really I have forgot. Not through any fault of my own, but on the motion of some absurd coward having a voice potential at the press, all the names were struck out behind my back in the first edition of the book, thirty-five years ago. I was not consulted, and did not discover the absurd blanks until months afterwards, when I was taunted with them very reasonably by a caustic reviewer.

- Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

butt-fuck (v. and n.)

is now in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Among some other things.

Favourite footnotes: 12

This anecdote of the duck, though disproved by internal and external evidence, has nevertheless, upon supposition of its truth, been made the foundation of the following ingenious and fanciful reflections of Miss Seward, amongst the communications concerning Dr. Johnson with which she has been pleased to favour me: 'These infant numbers contain the seed of those propensities which through his life so strongly marked his character, of that poetick talent which afterwards bore such rich and plentiful fruits; for, excepting his orthographick works, every thing which Dr. Johnson wrote was Poetry, whose essence consists not in numbers, or in jingle, but in the strength and glow of a fancy, to which all the stores of nature and of art stand in prompt administration; and in an eloquence which conveys their blended illustrations in a language "more tuneable than needs or rhyme or verse to add more harmony."
     'The above little verses also shew that superstitious bias which "grew with his growth, and strengthened with his strength," and, of late years particularly, injured his happiness, by presenting to him the gloomy side of religion, rather than that bright and cheering one which gilds the period of closing life with the light of pious hope.' 

[next page] 

     This is so beautifully imagined that I would not suppress it. But like many other theories, it is deduced from a supposed fact, which is, indeed, a fiction. BOSWELL.

- James Boswell, Life of Johnson

Jane Austen, filth-merchant

If he had intended to give her one, he would have told her so.

- Jane Austen, Emma

Alas...

However wide-ranging any person's formative reading may be, there will always be an enormous number of fundamental works that one has not read.

- Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?*

--
* which I have not read. This is from the Amazon Look Inside! facility.

InDefinition - 84

Wetherspoonerism, n. accidental transposition of initial sounds or letters, drink having been taken. E.g.

Late home for supper,
he mustn't seem drunk.
'The pob cluck,' he begins,
And knows he is sunk.

- Wendy Cope, 'Timekeeping'

Thug life

"Your words are friendly, and I drink them in as grateful sherbet."

- Philip Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug

Delicacy

A number of tiny errors, typographic and even grammatical, had crept into Nabokov’s text. I had the copy set twice in print, my version and his, and sent them both by overnight express. He wired back, “your version perfect”.

- Edmund White, in the TLS

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 136

Not sure what made me listen to this. I thought I'd clarified, also, that this was the first book in the series - but apparently not. Possibly not even the whole bloody second book, either.

Not that it matters. I won't be listening to any more. Nothing but an endless exercise in 'style'.

Books I've actually finished lately: 135

Books I've actually finished lately: 133

Very neat and tidy. (And sometimes dirty.)

Books I've actually finished lately: 132

I FUCKING LOVE JUICE.

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 131

Eighty-one hours! Unbelievable.

But fascinating.

Books I've actually finished lately: 130

Books I've actually finished lately: 129

Dostoevsky v pornography (Afghanistan edition)

Porn is prevalent, more prevalent than Dostoevsky.

- Dan Clements, in The Times

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 128

Weird translation.

Frankly...

'The publisher of this book wishes me to vouch for the writer of this book who is a friend of mine in order to utilise whatever celebrity kudos the writer of this quote, i.e. me, has left in order to advance the sales of this book. That has been duly done now in the form of this quote. I am sure the book is very good though I cannot remember what it is called or whether I have read it. I've read lots of his stuff and it;s always good and I am in no way biased.' 

- Thom Yorke, middle-aged father of two

[on Stanley Donwood's Humor]

Books I've actually finished lately: 127

[S]pecialists possess the tremendous stupidity of the force of gravity.

- Friedrich Nietzsche (according to Geoff Dyer)

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 126

The nostrils of the poet

The cinnamon has, unfortunately, no smell at all, but to the nostrils of the poet.

- The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, on Robert Percival's An Account of the Island of Ceylon (etc.)

Books I've actually finished lately: 125

Often books speak of other books.

- Umberto Eco

(Audio)Books I've actually (re-)finished lately: 124

More importantly, I've just discovered that a distant family member was a keen enthusiast of Basil Bunting.

Nomenclatterrrr!!!

Yes,



but...

(Audio)Books I've actually (re-)finished lately: 123

To be alive as Chaucer was not the same as to be alive as Milton - or Tennyson, or Eliot, or Plath.

- Peter Whitfield

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 122

Or - Gimme Back My Goddamn Lighter, You Commie Bastard!

Spell Check A Racist

In which the ever-so-slightly smug Facebook group post an update with the inevitable spelling error...

Books I've actually finished lately: 121

I push the cause of the mullet because he is a low-class fish. He is simple. He is honest. He moves around in great formations or columns. He does damn near all the work. But he is also noble. He is like another noble thing I once loved, called 'soldier'.

- Col. Mike Malone

(This is, for better or worse, why there are no Brit warrior poets in the Iraqistan era.)

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 120

Books I've actually finished lately: 119

Conversation with my mother is like everyone's conversation with their mothers, but with a twist.
     'How come you never tell me what you're up to, but you reveal your innermost thoughts and most shameful anecdotes to everyone who reads the New Statesman?'
     'Well, if you match their rates we may be able to come to some arrangement...'

- Nicholas Lezard

Books I've actually finished lately:118

1) Epic poetry presupposes a professional tradition. 

2) 'They put him on the carved bed, and stood singers beside him,' [the same word is used for professional poets]... 

3) Everyone can wail in every family, but not everyone can make and sing the dirge.

- Peter Levi

Books I've actually finished lately: 117

Without my shadow I don't know how the other half feels.

- Nick Cave

(Jury's still out on the audio sample. Cave is reading it himself...)

Further thoughts on style

To imitate another man's style is like wearing a mask, which, be it never so fine, is not long in arousing disgust and abhorrence, because it is lifeless; so that even the ugliest living face is better.

- Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature

Books I've actually finished lately: 116

We have to start sometime to turn the end of war into peace.

- Ajith Boyagoda

Cervantes - in context

I say, too, that when a painter desires to become famous in his art he endeavours to copy the originals of the rarest painters that he knows - and the same rule holds good for all the most important crafts and callings that serve to adorn a state. Thus must he who would be esteemed prudent and patient imitate Ulysses...

The truth about style (and vice versa)

If, being a coward, I take on a heroic tone, I am committing a stylistic mistake.

- Witold Gombrowicz (transl. Lillian Vallee), 'Against Poets'

Books I've actually finished lately: 115

I will have such difficulty in becoming English again.

- TE Lawrence, letter to his mother, 29/08/1909

Bissextcurious?

Fill yer boots, this (and almost every) February 29th.

The not-so-good old days

With the increasing informality of ritual under the reforms of Edward VI came scope for new sources of texts, especially psalms either entire or in part - though not yet the personal selection of verses which later became common (and caused the unfortunate sixteenth-century Flemish composer Laurent de Voz to be hanged for a motet containing a suggestive choice of psalm texts).

- Nicolas Robertson, sleeve notes to Sacred Choral Music by William Mundy (The Sixteen, dir. Harry Christophers

The good old days

Josquin was able to set the psalm 'Memor esti verbi servo tuo' as a reminder to the French king that his salary was due.

- Nicolas Robertson, sleeve notes to Sacred Choral Music by William Mundy (The Sixteen, dir. Harry Christophers

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 114

Consider myself examined.

Literary coincidences: 3

I've been tinkering with the idea of launching a small, low-admin South-East London literary festival, so this morning I was making notes as to whom I might be able to involve. Aspiring-writer mates, literary Facebook acquaintances, authors I've interviewed. Anyone from whom I might beg an under-remunerated favour, really, if they happened to be in the area. The last name I put down - on a might-as-well-ask basis - was Wendy Cope.

Out walking the dog just now, I was listening to The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz (psychoanalyst) when, in a chapter about love, a particular bit caught my ear:

As the poet Wendy Cope once told...

InDefinition - 83

unimpresario, n. one who puts on shit events

I have a new (old) laptop

given to me by my parents - or is it an old (new) laptop? - to replace the one given to me several years ago by my wife's parents.

Either way, my new old laptop is much quicker than my old new one, and doesn't insist on shutting down at random intervals.

At the moment, of course, it's sitting on the floor, just playing Spotify. But still: this is progress.

'This interview was conducted... sitting on the ground in the hotel car park...'

Q. What is the contemporary literary scene like...? 

A. Well, the books are not getting sold. There is no excitement. People are quite despondent, and they don’t know where the work is going. They want to write—actually, a lot of people want to write. But where is this work going to go? Our young writers have trouble getting published by the publishing houses that we have... and so they resort to self-publishing.... But it’s too expensive for the market. There is also the fact that 50 percent of the population is illiterate. They can speak... but they cannot read or write.... And there is a big issue with egos. The old writers are not just the gatekeepers; they have entered and they have shut the gate firmly behind them so no one else can enter.... Another big problem is that when books are launched, it's in a gentrified area, so nobody else knows what is happening.

- Aaron Bady interviews Edwige-Renée DRO, in The New Inquiry

(Wait - what? They were talking about the Ivory Coast...?! So sorry. Unexpurgated version here.)

Books I've actually finished lately:113

The description [in Minima Moralia] of a short-order cook in a place like Teddy’s Cafe, as ‘a juggler with fried-eggs’ is Nabokovian, though in addition to seeing the cook as a juggler Nabokov would probably have put a spin on the eggs too. I thought of this as I made a note in my notebook...

- Geoff Dyer

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 112

Particularly enjoyed: the chapters about the literary festival and the Irish post-apocalypse.

Particularly did not enjoy: the sub-melodious sub-verbiaging of our (sub-ostensible) sub-future.

Distant Eco

In the light of the sad passing of Umberto Eco, I am tickled to discover - turning, for the first time, to the opening pages of The Name of the Rose - that the 'missing' manuscript on which Eco's first and still most famous novel is entirely predicated is only missing because a woman 'he' was sleeping with ran off with it.

The Night Manager

A nice touch in last night's adaptation of Le Carré's The Night Manager.

Following a misadventure in Cairo (involving, somewhat predictably, a woman, an arms dealer, and Her Majesty's Government) British-Army-officer-turned-hotelier Jonathan Pine is now four years into a seemingly self-imposed exile in Switzerland, living quietly in a sparsely-furnished bunker building near his new employment, in Zermatt.

Motivated by unfolding events, he decides to renew his contact with a government agency in 'Victoria, London', and hurries home from work to dig out their phone number. He finds it tucked inside a copy of The Letters of TE Lawrence (ed. David Garnett), at the page headed

THE YEARS OF HIDE AND SEEK: 1922 - 1929

thereby nicely tying together themes of personal mortification, (unsuccessful) reclusiveness, and - Le Carré's go-to narrative device - damn-fool heroics by not-quite-upper-middle 'English' military types interfering in things they don't understand and which they cannot possibly hope to control.

I wasn't able to make out a lot of Pine's remaining bookshelf; but it did also contain The Dynasts and, of course, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Against my ruins

Two extracts from the Lonely Planet's Sri Lanka: a travel survival kit (3rd ed. 1987; security updates c.1990):

If you like ruins you'll find your fill in the ancient cities of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa.

- 'Introduction' [first full page of text]

There are no places of interest unless you are interested in photographing ruins.

- STOP PRESS [last full page of text]

The (Sports)Writer's Life

Dolled-up women prefer to have their bottoms pinched by international cricketers and not by those who write about them.

- Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman

Allow myself to introduce...

An introduction is a temptation: it can turn so easily into a self-justifying exercise...

- Shiva Naipaul, North of South ('Introduction')

Theory of knowledge

FRENCH TEACHER*: Seven across: 'revered philosopher'.
PE TEACHER: Clarkson.

- Big School

--
* Don't bother...

Coldplay lyrics...

can make me wish I didn't understand English.

- Jon Pareles, in The New York Times

(cf. almost every opera libretto ever.)

Books I've actually finished lately: 111

I am trying to convey that Saint-Exupéry, by the very nature of his conception of literature, is not essentially a man of letters. He is a man of action for whom action is not enough, because he has realized that action in itself means nothing; a technician who thinks as much of the dangers as of the uses of technology; a warrior who is not convinced of the value of courage or obedience. Still less is he a littérateur. His profession demands great care, rigor and vigilance; it entails a commitment that goes beyond mere words and involves the whole person.

- Charles-Henri Favrod

(Necrophiliac) Californication

John Niven writes for Esquire about life in screenwriting and Hollywood.

Books I've actually finished lately: 110

Inattendance

TOBY ZIEGLER: Was there any press there tonight?
ACADEMIC: For a poetry lecture...?

- The West Wing, 3;17

Books I've actually finished lately: 109

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 108

Literary coincidences: 1

The other day someone - apologies: I don't recall... - told me that the real reason for what we commonly understand as leprous disfigurement is not the leprosy, per se, but the steady accretion of the constant damage sufferers unwittingly do themselves, on account of their non-functioning nerve-endings [approx.].

I wasn't really sure that I believed him (this explanation, somehow, didn't seem to cover it); but, since the only thing I had to offer on the subject was the 'How did you know it wasn't contagious?' scene from Papillon, I held my whisht.

Today, though, Stephen Grosz's The Examined Life - borrowed from my wife because I'd run out of Audible credits and needed something to listen to while I was out walking the dog - confirms that this is true.

Got Wood?

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 107

Books I've actually finished lately: 106

At the foot of my stairs, a small boy was spelling out my name on the name-plate. His mother yanked him away impatiently. "Come along," she said. "It's no good reading that. She's been dead for years."

- Olave, Lady Baden-Powell

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 105

'Forking that guy's repo'

I think it's a very special sort of hell where you're compelled to explain to a journalist some terrible throwaway joke you made ten months earlier - and the journalist keeps saying, "I'm sorry, I still don't get it."

- Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 104

Unwittingly or otherwise, the reader here appears to be channelling Alec Guinness...

InDefinition - 82

Herewith, n. Saxon saint of bureacratic terminology

Favourite footnotes: 11

I may have been wrong about this.

- Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist

Books I've actually finished lately: 103

After I publish a text on semiotics, I devote my time either to recognizing what was wrong or to demonstrating that those who did not understand it in the way I meant were misreading it. 

- Umberto Eco

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 102

NB I am not a fan of Mr William Hootkins.

'Etymology'

While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.

- Richard Hackluyt*, Principal Navigations (in Melville, Moby-Dick: 'Etymology - Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School')

--
* wonderfully misspelled by Melville, in all his sanctimony

Books I've actually finished lately: 101

The first rule of Sheep Club is you do not talk about Sheep Club.

- James Rebanks

Also feat. Beyoncé, Rajasthanis, and the number of balls a ram/tup should have.

(It's two, apparently.)

InDefinition - 81

inlawcest, n. sic

Favourite footnotes: 10

This article was amended on 12 January 2016: in the picture caption, Matthew Collings was initially misidentified as William Boyd; the painting by Stephen Finer was wrongly attributed by the provider to David Bowie

- The Guardian (but of course), in a William Boyd article about an artist he and Bowie had made up

Autocorrect (with the emphasis on...)

'Natwest'
'nastiest'

Authorial remembrance

When I was writing my Bowie book, as I was writing the final chapters, I went to‎ visit my father in Cheltenham (this turned out to be the last time I saw him before he died). He asked me what I was working on, and I told him that was writing a book about Bowie’s extraordinary performance on TOTP, and how he influenced an entire generation of music and fashion obsessives. When he asked me why I reeled off the various elements of his performance that had been so challenging, so inspiring, and so transgressive. I described the way in which Bowie had toyed sexually with his guitarist Mick Ronson, the way in which he had dressed like a pansexual spaceman, the way in which he looked, the way in which he sashayed across the screen like a 1920s film star, and, saliently, the way in which his flame-red hair, his dayglo jumpsuit and the general glam colour fest had almost colonised the programme. I explained that this was the moment when the 1970s finally outgrew the 1960s, when the monochrome world of boring, boring south-east England had exploded in a fiesta of colour.

My father looked at the floor, took a moment, and then said, very quietly: “You know we had a black and white television, don’t you?”

- Dylan Jones, in The Independent

Biblical mondegreen / David - in context

SAUL: Young man, whose son art thou?
DAVID: The son of Jesse, thy faithful servant, and a Bedlamite.

Books I've actually (re-)finished lately: 100

For years now

I've had this
whistling
sound in
my ears

- WG Sebald

Last night's autocorrection classic

'sex-tape'
'six-time'

Translated from...

Intellectuals

SAVIOUR OF HIS PEOPLE: Have you never used a hammer before?
WAISTCOAT AND SPECTACLES: Er... no.
SAVIOUR OF HIS PEOPLE: What is it you do, then?
WAISTCOAT AND SPECTACLES: I suppose you'd have to say I was - am - an intellectual.
SAVIOUR OF HIS PEOPLE: This is a job?
WAISTCOAT AND SPECTACLES: ...

- Defiance

Herman, Herman, Herman...!!

But no more of this blubbering now. We are going a-whaling.

- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 99 / This Week's Literary Hero

His is one of those cases which are more numerous than those suppose who have never lived anywhere buy in their own homes, and never walked but in one line from their cradles to their graves. We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths for the by-ways and low-places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands see what has been wrought among our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship or vice.

- Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

Books I've actually finished* lately: 98

--
* which is more than you can say for Nabokov... [*klaxon*]

Shakespeare - in context

To wit, or not to wit, that is the question...

Nabokove

(he dropped the last letter on the tacite advice of a misprint in a catalogue)

- Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura [an unfinished draft, in all fairness...]

Oscar Wilde - in context (III)

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking for change.

Wow.

I have just received and read through the 70-odd pages of a publisher's Jan-June 2016 catalogue... and found not a single book that I'd be interested in taking a look at, let alone sitting down and reviewing.

Touching everything

The species produces people like me, once in a while, to hoard history; so that people like Bunyon can pick at it. I like to touch everything as I go by, only I find it hard to set down afterwards. I write everything, regardless of starts and stops, or rather, consumed by them. I don't think in stories, I think in seas, following wave after wave of curiosity. I lack imagination, or suffer from the surfeit of it; I lack shape, the gift of sudden freezing, that allows one to tinker with the ice.

- Benjamin Markovits, The Syme Papers

Books I've actually finished lately: 97

Did you hear about the Polish actress who came to Hollywood? She slept with a writer.

- Rob Long