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.' 

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     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