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