Muses

Though few in number, admittedly, my favourite female writers are all mad-looking pensioners with cardigans and cats. Go figure.

Ugly words

misshapen
synedoche
tidbit (yes, Yanks, 'titbit' sounds sillier, but it looks less stupid)

Up/down

These days are the price we pay for the other days.

Hemingways: 3

I wrote six words before breakfast!

InDefinition - 24

quackery, n. training school for young oboists.

Hemingways: GUEST ENTRY (Jesus)

Pick up thy bed and walk.

Hemingways: 2

Been there. Done that. Got dengue.

Good form!

I cry with laughter at my own jokes. Seriously.

InDefinition - 23

hip-hopotamous, adj. hung like a gangsta from the East River.

InDefinition - 22

Umbrel-La, n. Pr. mythical place where thirsty bedouin go when they die. Near Scotland. (cf. 'Center Parcs')

InDefinition - 21

plus-two-by-fours, n. rudimentary wooden legs (woodimentary prostheses)

InDefinition - GUEST ENTRY

eschewed, adj. not chewed, i.e. dietarily verboten.

- Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Five Dials 16

An 18-page Christmas card from Hamish Hamilton, now with added haiku scansion errors.

Finding your (African) horn

Previously well-known onomatopoeic instrument makes it onto list of 'new words', 2010 (thanks to fucking football).

Literal failure (or, Excerpts from my Autobiography, by Some Other Bloke)

He was trapped in a rut between journalism and meagre scraps of prose. Short stories were the best he could do. Very short, too short to make a living from, even if he got paid for them...

They had been amazingly fickle, his muses. Or he had been at fault for picking such unreliable ones.

- Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin

Hip-hop as poetry?

Jay-Z = Heaney. Discuss.

I like

the New Yorker's style guide for diphthongs like coöpting, naïve and deëmphasize.* Full marks for clarity - even if it does look a little weird.

* in't that one brilliant?

La bete humaine v. homo loquax

The whole business exudes irony so rich you can taste it. It tastes like marzipan.

- Tom Wolfe on Zola, et al., the 2006 Jefferson Lecture

It seems to me

To be a great artist you need solitude. To be a successful artist you need friends.

A relationship

... two complementary lonelinesses, creating an impression more of interdependence than of amity.

- Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin

Quotidian observations

The worst happens, and there, it's done. The fleas go on biting. The sun comes up again.

- David Malouf, Ransom

Everything I ever suspected about poetry

Real life correspondence between one poet (me) and another:

ASH Smyth: Heh. Classic title. I like the shape of the narrative, how it twists back and forth between who's fucking things up at any given moment: and yes, how neatly observed that a guy would say 'your negativity is ruining your idea of love' and then proceed to ruin it himself in the time-honoured fashion... The idea that a girl suggests the fling and the guy wants the 'true love' scenario is also a nice reversal of the usual trends.

AN Other: Thanks for the comment. Interesting analysis.. wouldn't have known it could be analysed like that actually.. thanks

Literal/literate/literary

It is in the very nature of creativity, in its prodigious complexity and richness, that it will accommodate paradoxes and ambiguities. But this, it seems, will always elude and pose a problem for the uncreative, literal mind (which I hasten to add is not the same as the literary mind, nor even the merely literate mind).

- Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

Pith

The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (forthcoming)

See also 'white wine', 'aftershave', 'gym membership' and 'Amazon Kindle'.

InDefinition - 20

incorrect, vb. to take, as editor, something that is right/clever and change it to something that's not, in accordance with personal ignorance/verbal agililty.

Right. That is fucking IT!

[The matinée idol] chuckles, seeming to contemplate the absurdity and drudgery of the logocentric realm, where scriveners scribble and toil, huffing and puffing like stevedores as they lift and carry big Latinate verbs and portmanteau nouns while Jason and his kind get all the pussy.

- Jay McInerney, Model Behaviour

Cover charges

1) In the flap copy of Philip Roth's not-particularly-highly-acclaimed The Humbling (2009), his optimistic editors/publicists have used the adjectives 'shattering', 'terrifying', 'unusual', 'erotic', 'haunting' ... and 'startling'. They note, also, that this is 'Roth's thirtieth book'. Even indifferent readers of Roth will see where I am going with this.

2) The back-cover blurb of Jay McInerney's Model Behaviour begins

'I'm sick of all this pointless glamour,' his glamorous girlfriend said. 'I want a simple life.' If only Connor McNab had listened.

Which is all well and good - except that the hero's name is Connor McKnight. Who's the McNumbnuts in Jay Mc's publicity camp?!

3) Dr Gregory House is well-known for owning lots of sneakers (it's an irony, see: cripple with running-shoe collection?*). More to the point, the rules of product-placement make it pretty hard to miss the fact that they are always Nike sneakers. Only on the cover of series 6 - my copy, anyway - House is quite evidently wearing New Balance. Oops.

--
* Also a running gag, come to that.

Glass half empty

I turn on my ceiling fan in Colombo, and somewhere just off the M25 a beautiful butterfly is sucked through the grill of a speeding car.

Hirsute ironies

On admiring my reflection the other morning, I noted:

1) 'Barber' and 'barbarian' have nothing in common (which, I concede, could be the complete opposite of ironic, depending which Roman you're playing);

2) The French word for beard - barbe - is feminine. (Ditto.)

My own private lexicon (students, do not touch!)

[He] likes particularly the sound of English words, even when they conveyed no meaning at all. Some of them simply filled him with elation. 'Periwinkle' was such a word. He had now forgotten how he learned it or exactly what it was. He had a vague private meaning for it and it was something to do with fairyland.

- Chinua Achebe, 'Chike's School Days', Girls at War and other stories

Hemingways: 1

I've heard enough words from you.

[What's a Hemingway?]

McSweeney's sale

Now on. But move fast.

Can they even, like, read in Amazonia?

Amazon have very kindly let me know that, as someone who bought Persepolis 2: the story of a return, I might like to buy Cold Land, Warm Hearts: More Memories of an Arctic Medical Outpost.

1) Persepolis is an (incredibly good) graphic novel about the politics of post-Shah Iran. Cold Land, Warm Hearts is, well, a memoir from an arctic medical outpost. Though they are both sequels, so I guess that's something.

2) The author of Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi. Not 'Satrapai Marjane'. I know this because a) I've actually read the book (unlike the people at Amazon, it seems), and b) the name is right there on the fucking cover.

(N)on/Fiction

[Adamastor's] disillusionment coincides with Zeus's decision finally to punish the rebellious Titans. Some of them, as we know from Greek mythology, are buried under huge mountains; Adamastor is turned into the jagged outcrop of the Cape Peninsula... Rather exaggerated; but that is what happens to the truth when writers get their hands on it.

- André Brink, The First Life of Adamastor

InDefinition - 19

testicle, n. cursory examination (esp. of a medical nature)

Navigating the past

Go far enough down Memory Lane and eventually you'll discover it's a cul-de-sac.

Grumpy old men have words

On the Moral Brink

Coetzee on Roth,* in the NYRB.

--
* but not Brink

Ancient texts (sacred and - mostly - profane): 1

Long-since-contextless stuff found on my old phone (the one I dropped into a urinal at the Tabasco Lunch, 2008):

It seems there is a Post-Colonialism seminar after all. First session: 'Clitoridectomy, Nationalism, Prostitution and Translation in Ngugi's fiction'.

- AC, scholar

The lovely, tall, blonde air hostess' arse is rubbing against my shoulder. Thanks again for the lift.

- JS, emigrant and brother

I just woke up in a hotel room in Birmingham next to a nameless naked girl.

- DSH, predator

Have stolen booze from a hotel and priest in one evening, so yes.

- CG, Anglican

As excuses go, 'I can't, I'll be in Kazakhstan' has a certain ring to it.

- AC, ex-girlfriend

and my favourite, I think:

Hope you're not too drunk

.- RL, optimist

Truth

Non/Fiction

Real life does not need to be probable.

- C.S. Lewis

And that is why it's so much more interesting than fiction.

InDefinition - 18

retrofiring, n. polite euphemism for morning-after-curry syndrome.

I realise, to my delight,

that the up-side of having near-total respect for words is that you essentially become immune to insults.

The good ones, anyway ('touché' is one of the most frequently-deployed words in my vocabulary); the feeble ones just make you angry.

To wit:

"You pedantic, smarmy, ass!"
"Ah yes. I had forgotten how fond you people are... were... of lower life form-based insults. What's next? Cheeky monkey?
"Oh, I can do better than that."
"Really? I'll get my notebook."

- Eoin Colfer, And Another Thing...

InDefinition - GUEST ENTRY

sarcastigate, v.tr. subject (s'one) to the withering fire of your teenage put-downs.

- Eoin Colfer, And Another Thing...

Yoink!?

I’ve always been a massive fan of rhyme but there’s very few people that can pull it off eloquently.

- Jacob Denno, editor of Popshot (a literary magazine)

Revenge of the webnerd

"YOU, a published writer?..Internet don't count. Any asshole can throw shit up on there." (Book On Sale Today!)

- Justin Halpern, Shit My Dad Says

Trilling to a new tune

If there are bloody crossroads out there needing the attention of the critical intellect, the novel does not seem to run through them.

- Louis Menand, Introduction to The Liberal Imagination

InDefinition - 17

nonvel, n. sustained work of prose fiction in which absolutely nothing new or interesting happens

How my brain 'works'

I'm reading Shit My Dad Says, and Halpern comments that he's writing a book involving involving a scene in which Michael Jackson has just died and is trying to get into heaven.

'This book must have been written very recently. And very fast!'

I not only think this, mind, but say it to my companion.

--
I must not assume all good fiction is true.
I must not assume all good fiction is true.
I must not assume all good fiction is true.
I must not ...

InDefinition - 16

Kafkan, n. coat of pointedly nondescript nature, worn by those wishing to disappear in the crowd. Fashionable in the mid-/late-C.20th (esp. Central and Eastern Europe)

Query

Why is 'barn-burner' a synonym for a good thing? Sounds like a Klan Christmas party.

The (non-)writer's life

If you tell people you're a writer, it appears, they straightaway assume this means you enjoy spending your days actually putting words down on paper (as though, NB, if you did that, there'd be some sort of proportional financial trade-off).

Me, me, me - not you

Generally we refuse to be each other.

- Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: occasional essays

And quite right too.

Books sought (and bold)

There was, in Vijitha Yapa, until very recently (for years, in fact, to judge by its dusty condition), a paperback copy of William James' socio-anthropological doorstop, Varities of Religious Experience.

No offence or anything; but who the hell bought it?!

Non/Fiction

Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being.

- David Foster Wallace

Emphases at reader's discretion.

Is there

anything more asinine than saying to a Literature teacher 'You like to read a lot, don't you?'

Dennis v. Walter

'Soft drinks.' How loaded is that term?* Not manly drinks, not proper drinks - but 'soft' Instant social death. Worse that vegetarianism.

* albeit the product is one on which you cannot get loaded...

Real living

It is unimaginably hard to... stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.

- David Foster Wallace, commencement speech, Kenyon College, 2005

The perils of self-awareness

What have we become when we 'understand' ourselves so well that all our questions are rhetorical?

- Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: occasional essays

What indeed.

[NB It is not clear to me whether the above is a rhetorical question. (Or the one above that.)]

Only in English - 5

Though I like fish, I do not like fish.

On concision

"Absolutely." I nodded.

"You hear that? He said 'Absolutely.' That's four syllables of yes."

"Four syllables of his life which he will never get back. Next time, Shakespeare scholar, simply say yes and save three for 'I love you' to your young lady."

- Jon Fasman, The Geographer's Library

It's just an expression

I am concerned that I often express gratitude, but rarely show it.

Patron-ising

In The Geographer's Library Jon Fasman writes of one Dulcinius [sic. - of Tyre?], 'patron saint of the wayward, laconic, men who walk looking at the ground, and editors of manuscripts'.

It is not at all clear if those first three are distinct categories; nor if Dulcinius - alas! - ever actually existed.

On alchemy/education

Thou wilt possess the glory of the brightness of the entire world, and all obscurity will fly far away from thee.

- The Emerald Tablet, transl. Holmyard [in Jon Fasman, The Geographer's Library]

Hyperbolic to the point of insanity. But a worthy aspiration, nonetheless.

Titles gone begging - 2

Slanders & Flan: an incomplete history of the comic song

Blog-jammin'

[No kidding: this is what came up when I tried to log in to this site at work]

Access Denied This Page is Blocked
Porn Filter Test in progress. All the porn sites & out side proxies will not in this testing period. Please contact CS department if you having any difficulties to brows any other sites.

[I mean, it's not even grammatically accurate!]

Inbox classics

What's New in History Today?

(Non-)fiction

The most I can ever do is write things down. To remember them. The details. To honour them in some way.

- Chuck Palahniuk, Fugitives and Refugees: a walk in Portland, Oregon

On drinking alone

We sit down, hurt ourselves, then leave.

- Jon Fasman, The Geographer's Library

That which God hath joined together

unite
untie

Titles gone begging - 1

Bombay Satire (or, The Evils of Djinn)

InDefinition - 15

phallusy, n. abst. in conversation - or other intellectual pursuits: an opportunity to make a right prick of yourself.

Sartre - in context

Hell is karaoke.

Semantics laid bare

In Chuck Palahniuk's wilfully quirky - not to say 'patchy' - travelogue of his home town, the author offers us (should we be interested) 'a list of places to get lucky in Portland'.

Only question is whether luck, per se, has anything to do with the case where the listed premises - sex shops, clubs, brothels, etc. - are concerned (where, frankly, luck ought to be rendered moot by cash).

Is there anything more depressing

than eyeing up an attractive girl and then hearing her speak in German?

Beyond

The only trouble with the fringe is, it does tend to unravel.

- Chuck Palahniuk, Fugitives and Refugees: a walk in Portland, Oregon

Surely the bizarrest SPAM I've ever been sent

From: Rountree Colborn (valuated@tracinalc.com)
Sent: 19 September 2010 00:41:15
To: Wisniewski Bosques (competition@lizardmagazine.com)
Subject: Sence of the gentleman who had filled that situation‏

Nty in number, and so extremely fierce, that, had it not been for the
dogs which were
with them, they would probably have been attacked. Some

natives, who had accompanied
the governor, were so alarmed, that they availed themselves of their
expertness in climbing trees, and left their friends to provide

for their own safety how

Unspoken truths

I don't say a great deal that isn't true. But I also don't say a lot that is.

The problem with the life of the mind

Ulysses takes about a week to read, if you do nothing else.

- Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché: essays and reviews 1971-2000 (italics* mine)

For why would you want to do nothing else?! Larkin tried it, and look what happened to him.

* the ones in the quotation, obviously; not the title.

Get married, son;

put yourself out of your misery. Indonesia, Southern China, Vietnam - find a hot girl, marry them,* stop worrying about it.

- Advice given, loudly, in The Cricket Club

* her

InDefinition - 14

leatherette, n. pl. collective term for sex-club members: a leatherette of dominatrices.

The smaller picture

Every life is many days, day after day...

- Joyce, Ulysses

This is a day - same as any other

- Smyth

Not seen on a T-shirt

Finnegans Wake!

(Because Ulysses is for girls.)

Indefinition - 13

conquistadore, v. to get a girl you fancy into bed (negotiations may feature ambiguous statements implying exchange of gold)

Big up the British

Satire is what we, the British, have always done better than anybody. From Chaucer, Swift and Alexander Pope to Chris Morris (The Day Today, Brass Eye, Four Lions), savage and comic lampoons of the age’s ignorance, delusions and cruelties have been as much a part of what this nation is as poetry, cathedrals and binge drinking.

- Bryan Appleyard, 'On Satire'

Words heard

You know the really crappy coffee shop at Auschwitz?

- rich stupid girl, Chandos pub.

?

Similes are metaphorical; but are metaphors like similes?

Only in English - 3

can cool people be hot, and vice versa.

Forlorn hope

I'm desperate for a cold beer and a nice shallow conversation I don't have to read anything into.

- Cecil P Taylor, Good

On the need for a rhetorical-question mark

'Didn't they have terrible times,' she asked me (and there was no question mark). 'Yes,' I said. 'Didn't they.'

- Martin Amis, Koba the Dread

(Though note that a rhetorical question, curiously, is still 'asked'.)

Taciturnity/Economy

One of those dreadful books I had downloaded had mentioned that cowboys talk little and say much...

- Bryan Appleyard, 'The Magnificent One'

Like poets. Unlike hairdressers.

The potential of lost art

I just need a camera!

- DS Hilton, professional photographer

Sweet dreams

The sort of decisions we need to sleep on are rarely those which allow for much sleep.

Facebook ad

You can earn money from internet.you need to learn soemthing [sic.]

Basic spelling and syntax, for example.

ES headline

Londoners Defy Tube Strike

By driving the tubes themselves?

No.

I used to be a pretentious angry youg man

These days, I don't even bother to pretend.

Why, oh why, O Spotify (2)

‎'Fuck Tha Police' by N.W.A. immediately followed by an ad to become a volunteer special constable for the Met. Great job on those 'targeted ads', Spotify

- DS Hilton, marketing analyst

Smyth's sayings

If you want to believe that you make your own luck then you're going to have to wonder about your misfortunes.

Smyth's sayings

Adolescent text-speak acronyms - that's how I rofl!

Famous Seamus' genius

It is because his poetry lets in associations that might seem irrelevant or undignified that it is so deeply human.

- John Carey, on Heaney's latest collection, Human Chain

Sick note for mankind

The equipment for producing grammatical speech is built into every healthy human being.

- Denys Thompson and Stephen Tunnicliffe, Reading and Discrimination

Fewer complications

Don't write a novel;
a shopping list is better.

- Jarvis Cocker, Further Complications

InDefinition - 12

pedant, n. one who is right more often than we are.

InDefinition - 11

compliment, n. a fact we like about ourselves.

Only in English - 4

It actually makes sense that 'engrossed' and 'grossed out' mean more-or-less opposite things.

On Chatwin

In life, one does run into people who are the perfect ping-pong opponent.

- Cary Welch

Smyth's sayings

Pant jam. It's a woman's preserve.

Only in English - 2

fresh - check
freshen - check
refresh - check

refreshen - n'existe pas

Incoming (not spam)

Actual text received today:

Am English patient. Death in hotel bed. Up to shoot donuts in three hours.

- DS Hilton, cryptic bugger

Books I started reading in the last ten days

(in no particular order)

Silk - Alessandro Baricco
Collected Poems 1909-1962 - T.S. Eliot
Borges and the Eternal Orang-utans - Luis Fernando Verissimo
The Mezzanine - Nicholson Baker
Born Standing Up - Steve Martin
The Abortion: an historical romance 1966 - Richard Brautigan
Under the Sun: the letters of Bruce Chatwin - ed. Elizabeth Chatwin & Nicholas Shakespeare

Honouring wood

I have been sitting at this desk for hours, staring into the darkened shelves of books. I love their presence, the way they honour the wood they rest upon.

- Brautigan, The Abortion: an historical romance 1966

Semantics

Do stupid people have what it takes to 'play dumb'?

Careers advice

I am thirty-one years old and never had any formal ... training. I have had a different kind of training which is quite compatible... I have an understanding of people and I love what I am doing.

- Brautigan, The Abortion: an historical romance 1966

Sex ed

Yesterday's news featured a big splash on STDs, complete with entertaining stock-market-style graphics - chlamydia +6%, genital herpes +5% to 30,126*

Sadly, the BBC also chose to uphold the time-worn and counter-productive tradition of using markedly sexless persons to highlight the dangers of the fun that all the rest of us are having and about which they, the possibly-entirely-theoretical experts, seem more than a little bitter.

Or, as Richard Brautigan wrote:

HE KISSED ALL NIGHT by Susan Margar. The author was a very plain middle-aged woman who looked as if she had never been kissed.

--
* On the home front, the Jones is officially down

Zero degrees

It being the season for such things, there's a book out called What Can I Do With No Degree?

Two thoughts:

1) Go to university.

2) Why should you get off so lightly? I went twice, and look where that got me.

Official unsecrets?

[The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority] should not be keeping secret files on MPs without informing them...

- Denis McShane, MP

Sins of nervous editorial omission?

A postcard from South Africa has reached its destination almost 53 years after it was sent. The black and white holiday postcard has a picture of a South African child on the front...

- from yesterday's Times

Anyone else see what they did there?

Classic headline

Van Gogh still missing after museum theft

You gotta wonder why they don't put out a warrant.

Words and music (2)

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

- Walter Pater

And quite right too. Though it seems only reasonable to point out that music has moved on a little in the intervening hundred years.

Words and music (1)

Words, when spoken out loud for the sake of performance, are music: they have rhythm and pitch and timbre and volume. These are the properties of music, and music has the ability to find us and move us and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can't.

- The West Wing, 3:6

'Sorry' is for cowards

One does not change the rules at the end of the match, nor when you are losing.

- Primo Levi

Copy, right?

"Free publicity has no value if all that happens is that even more people download your poems from the internet without paying for them."

- Wendy Cope (in an article in The Guardian, which I didn't pay for, but who presumably take it for granted that I looked at a couple of adverts and thereby made it worth someone's while.)

Glitch-22

In the front flap of Christopher Hitchens' new memoir it states that, in the aftermath of 9/11, the former Trotskyite was "re-energised again". Needless to say, there is no mention of his having been re-energised prior.

We can assume Hitch didn't write the blurb himself. But still.

The male/nerd gene

I'm a true nerd. It's just that my obsession is music. Luckily it wasn't trains.

- Mark Ronson

Favourite graffiti - 1

Reading will make you rich :) $

- Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip

Reflections in Oxfam Bookshop, Marylebone

1) If you don't have a name like Isaac Bashevis Singer you're screwed. Don't even bother putting pen to paper.

2) Everyone Has a Good Story? Bollocks. Everyone has a story. What makes it good is how you write it.

3) No-one has read that green novel by Ethan Hawke.

No regrets

I write like Woody Allen; but I look like me.

- DS Hilton, wit

Why, oh why, O Spotify?

The songs on Spotify are not in alphabetical - or any other discernible - order. Er... why not?

magnum o'pus

puss / pus

Words in flagrant breach of the Double Consonant = Short Vowel rule.

Are there others?

The wisdom of the many...

Lately I have been particularly enjoying the plug for several of Facebook's Recommended Pages: 'Many who like Anything like this.'

The first time I saw it, the full inscription ran: 'Fishing - Many who like Anything like this.' And I assumed it was a joke.

Write that down! - from Jesus to Johnson to Van Wilder

The habit of jotting down your own bons mots may well be arrogant and aggravating. But what of those who inflict the task on some other luckless sod?

Smyth's sayings

I'm no different from the next guy.

I've just given it more thought.

Idealism in practice

The people saw them only as caricatures, that is, in the guise that ideals are given when translated into practice.

- Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs

Salieri's plaint

Some are born mediocre; some achieve mediocrity; but most, slowly but surely, have mediocrity imposed upon them.

AdB & JSSS* (in concert)

Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.

- Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

Is it going to be a chapter in your memoirs?

- Seamus Smyth, pater familias

--
* yesssseriously.

Intertextuality

My phone won't spell Debussy. It offers 'debtspy'.

Ironicalest line ever?

He is one of the recipients of the 2010 Diffusion Prize from the University of Limerick for his electroacoustic composition 'Haiku'.

- programme notes on Rohan de Livera

InDefinition - 10

Spoonerist, n. pr. adherent to the punning clan.

For we like sheep?

Eeayh. Dey ave such very loverly i's, n never get ed aches. (York's Kronickle 1492)

- MH, horticultist

The Most Interesting Ad Campaign In The World

People hang on his every word. Even the prepositions.

- Dos Equis

Full campaign footage here.

Railing

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work...

-Yeats, 'The Choice'

Damnit, NO, I say!

InDefinition - GUEST ENTRY

cynics, n. pl. realists with awkwardly high standards

- Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

On C.20th American fiction

Bloody hell. Why do all these books have rape in them?!

- SJ Leigh, historian

InDefinition - 9

suidecide, v. to arrive at the ultimate decision

Only in English - 1

Those who could read read* aloud to the others.

- Ryszard Kapuściński

--
* lack of emphasis mine

InDefinition - 8

unfuriated, adj. like, bovvered.

Poems

... are not substitutes for people.

- Anthony Storr, Solitude

True say.

In defence of convincing lies

They have the merit of being 'true'.

Smyth's Sayings

Nothing is what it is until afterwards.

By which time it's too late.

On poetry

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such an increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.

- WH Auden

Right or wrong - and Auden could be wrong - poetry is a textbook for real life.

InDefinition - 7

Odyssey, n. lengthy journey/absence from home, during which it is permissible - thanks to heroic precedent - to use the 'different-zip-codes' defence (while fully expecting your partner to beat off* persistent admirers.

--
* or not.)

Moore-ing

Too stern an intellectual emphasis on this quality or that detracts from one's enjoyment.

- Marianne Moore, 'When I Buy Pictures'

Witness golf.

Can't work / won't work

Here you see, are two kinds of work - one good, the other bad; one not far removed from a blessing, a lightening of life; the other a mere curse, a burden of life.

What is the difference between them, then? This one has hope in it, the other has not. It is manly to do the one kind of work, and manly also to refuse to do the other.

- William Morris, Useful Work Versus Useless Toil

The gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail... The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work.

- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

con Text

It is well known that irony - in all its forms - doesn't carry 100% by text-message.

Mercifully, neither do jealousy or (its favoured weapon) lacerating sarcasm.*

--
* which takes us straight back, of course, to irony...

'Our thoughts go out to you'

Aye; but which ones?

InDefinition - 6

nomenklatura, n. pl. category of names that trip-and-fall off the tongue - Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wills Wilde; Wolfgangus Chrysostomus Theophilus Mozart; Lembit Opik.

InDefinition - 5

disappointment, n. meeting at which one expects bad news (parents' evening, e.g.)

Dickens - in context

I was born. I grew up. I generated a lot of laundry.

InDefinition - 4

Englishness, n. (abst.) pathological fear of looking silly

InDefinition - 3

provochial, adj. in the manner of annoying country habits - like not being able to get a bus after 6pm.

InDefinition - 2

home-coming, n. reunion sex, after lengthy absence (cf. Odyssey)

InDefinition - 1

phenomally, n. a wonderful accident (my own arrival in this world, e.g.)

Cyril the Romantic

'La coeur a ses raisons,' - and so have rheumatism and 'flu.

- Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

To attempt one's life

A stupid and dysfunctional euphemism for attempting one's death.

Cyril Connolly - Yes and No (2)

Both my happiness and my unhappiness I owe to the love of pleasure; of sex,
travel, reading, conversation (hearing myself talk), food, drink, cigars and
lying in warm water. [Yes!]

Reality is what remains when these pleasures, together with hope for
the future, regret for the past, vanity of the present, and all that composes
the aroma of the self are pumped out of the air-bubble in which I live. [No. For these things also are real.]

Cyril Connolly - Yes and No (1)

Unreality is what keeps us from ourselves, [Yes] and most pleasures are unreal. [No!]

Unbelievable - yet verbatim

PETER ANDRE: MY WORLD IN PICTURES AND WORDS, published by Michael Joseph on 10 June 2010. Hardback £16.99
Michael Joseph (an imprint of Penguin Books) is delighted to have bought world rights to Peter Andre's illustrated memoir from Claire Powell at Can Associates. In 2009, Peter Andre's profile exploded, making him one of the biggest male celebrities in the UK. His upcoming Revelation tour, his TV projects and now his book will further catapult him to stardom - 2010 will cement his reputation as the sexy and extremely loveable heartthrob the nation has taken under its wing.

Packed with approximately 150-200 gorgeous photographs, most of which have never been seen before, the book will focus on Peter's amazing journey so far. This is a celebration of his life, from aspiring singer to celebrity popstar. It charts the rise of his success, the trials and tribulations he had to endure along the way, his newfound maturity. And of course it focuses on what it means to be a father - and a single parent too.

Peter Andre says:
"It is wonderful that I have been given this opportunity to show my life in pictures and I am very excited about working with Penguin on this project. There are some amazing personal pictures that I hope will make the reader smile as much as they have me. It's always so much fun meeting my fans at book signings, and I look forward to this opportunity".

On lust and the library

There is no certain way of preserving chastity against the will of the body. Lao-Tsu did. But then he was eighty and he was a librarian.

- Palinurus (Cyril Connolly), The Unquiet Grave

Opening gmbit (words, words, words)

Ammon Shea has been reading dictionaries for twenty years. Along the way he has supported this habit by being a street muscian in Paris, a gondolier in San Diego and a furniture mover in New York City. He lives in New York with his girlfriend (a former lexicographer) and a large number of old dictionaries.

- Ammon Shea, Satisdiction: one man's journey into all the words he'll ever need*

* except 'musician', obviously.

Outbreak of applause

To clap (v. tr.) also means to infect with (rather than contract) gonorrhea.

'Now vulgar' says the Shorter OED. One wonders when it was not.

Gender bending

The Sun King was a man subject to misjudgment, error and impulse - like you and me.

- Barbara W Tuchman, The March of Folly

Smyth's Sayings

Power corrupts. Cliché corrupts absolutely.

Para docs

There was nothing like writing a book for a man who wanted to get away from his own misery, nothing like writing a book for a man who could not sleep.

- Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele

Solid advice - unless what's keeping you up nights is your persistent failure to put pen to paper.

At the Warnasuriya Lending Library

Two books in a pile, in a shop.

The Ribaldry of Greece, and
The Splendour of Greece.

The former on top.

Perish the thought!

Those who lack the self-trust to speak out are often made to listen.

- Michael Gearin-Tosh [real name]

Needs? Must...

Men have 'needs'. Indubitably. But why the evasiveness? Why can't we just have desires?

Truth

Creative talent of a major kind is not widely bestowed.

- Anthony Storr, Solitude

The Book of the Worm

Book worms, from my rapidly advancing studies, seem to work in three distinct ways. They either make baroque patterns within the cardboard covers of the book; or eat away at the edges of the paper like water slowly undermining a road; or else they stud the text with neat but superfluous full stops, turning everything to Hemingway.

A worm has gone right through my copy ofSan Michele, resolutely and remorselessly, cover to cover. He misses any actual text (eating between the lines?), but the little black dot is always there, top-right of the even pages, top-left of the odds; like spotting a reflection on your TV screen, then being unable to ignore it for the rest of the movie.

On the value of education

I have learned that this friendly folk who can neither read nor write are far happier than I, who ever since I was a child have been straining my eyes to gain knowledge.

- Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele

I learned a new word today,* Basie

roué, n. - named for the determinedly irresponsible friendship circle of the Duc d'Orleans' (c.1720), every member of which, he said, deserved to be broken on the wheel.

--
* actually, a new etymology. Alas, I was already all-too familiar with the word  :s

Shakespeare wrote for money

A genius is also a man who needs to eat.

- Hilary Mantel

Umlaut

despite its three vowels, doesn't have one.

Alëtheia? Who the fück is Alëtheia?!

While re-writing Æsop this afternoon, I went to some trouble to secure the correct transcription (according to the Penguin edition I was ripping off) of 'Truth' - Alētheia.

Howsoever many times I inserted the odd ē character, though, whenever I hit 'Publish' the word came out corrupted - Al?theia.

Even the 'Insert custom symbol' option came up short: Wordpress didn't have it (define 'custom'...). Irritated, I settled for an umlaut. But not before noting, in the context of my two variations which question 'Truth', the irony of the recurring question mark in the middle of her name.

The ash ligature - æ - was, by contrast, almost disappointingly easy.

China Miéville

Obviously one starts from the position that the saxophone is always a mistake.

Well, obviously. Intriguing A-Z 'interview' with China Miéville, an author about whom I know nothing - a situation I now seek to rectify.

Coetzee and me

Or - why Nick Clegg gets my vote.

‘Of the Art of Discussion’

You never speak about yourself without loss. Your self-condemnation is always accredited, your self-praise discredited.

- Montaigne, Confessions

For the greater good

Five Dials, vol. 12.

Getcher free copy he-arr!

On the difficulties inherent in impromptu wit

Now that I am ill, I find I want to make some profound and historic utterances, which my friends will subsequently repeat; but then I get too over-excited.

- Jules Renard

Carry on, Julian

The main argument, however, is that your children 'carry you on' after your death: you will not be entirely extinguished, and foreknowledge of this brings consolation at a conscious or subconscious level. But do my brother and I carry on our parents?

- Julian Barnes, Nothing To Be Frightened Of

Odd question, from a (bestselling) writer, 185 pages into a book substantially dealing with his mother and father. (Why else is he writing? one wonders, if not to achieve posterity.)

Unfamous last words

We shall feel better in the morning.

- Emile Zola, to his wife, as they were being slowly gassed by a malfunctioning bedroom fireplace.

Short cuts

My school library, I discovered today, has a copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

But only vol. 1: A - Markworthy.

Glad? Well...

An otherwise pearling New Yorker essay by Malcolm 'superboffin' Gladwell, undone by these two clunkers:

As the political scientist Richard Betts has argued, in intelligence analysis there tends to be an inverse relationship between accuracy and significance, and this is the dilemma posed by the Mincemeat case.

As Macintyre observes, the informational supply chain that carried the Mincemeat documents from Huelva to Berlin was heavily corrupted.

and

...in this case Germany didn’t really act on it at all. Looking at that track record, you have to wonder if Germany would have been better off not having any spies at all.

--
P.S. When did the phrase 'rod, line and sinker' become 'hook, line,' &c.? Anyone?

Poems from a small Island

Seriously. As published in the kids' section of a major Sri Lankan daily.

Journalists - a verbal Venn diagram

As far as I can make out, these days there are basically two types of journalist: those who are there but don't know what's going on, and those who aren't there, but do.

Those falling outside both circles work for the Metro. Those who reside in the (very slim) shaded overlap have Pulitzers.

Why we* watch Neighbours

When I rode the subways as a kid, I read books from the public library, I read big fat Les Misérables for weeks while I took the IRT to the doctor for my Wednesday allergy shots, I needed to know Jean Valjean lived a more miserable life than I did.

- EL Doctorow, 'Lives of the Poets' (in Lives of the Poets)

--
* you

This is madness (no, this is Bulgaria!)

He saw himself as an accomplished writer, a clear sign of madness in anyone.

- Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Word to the unwise

Alas, with tools, and fools, anything can be easy to find.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

Fair cop

This article may be confusing or unclear to readers.

Rider attached to Wikipedia page on Walter Benjamin's 'The Origin of German Tragic Drama'.

Getting Wood

This is a good liberal country where everyone has rights, including the right to pretend you’re recognising everyone’s rights when you’re not.

- Michael Wood nails the New South Africa in District 9

I always said

The man who writes about himself and his time is the man who writes about all people and all time.

- George Bernard Shaw

Oh, the humanity!

What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future.

- Lorrie Moore

Which is why Achilles isn't wholly man (though he isn't quite god enough, either, as it turns out).

Mortal, but not human. The worst of both worlds.

Talked out

I know all too well that the problem of writers talking themselves out is real. But when authors refuse to discuss their current work, isn't it mostly because

a) they don't want to confess that they basically did nothing today, or

b) they were hard at work and yet know - rather angrily - that the general populace - somewhat enviously - does not consider 2000 words of (draft) fiction to constitute a full day at the office?

Sexual Confucian

tell me how a lady can
be gay if she sees no gentleman?

- Confucius, transl. Pound

Ouch.

When some of the more intelligent people... ask little probingly polite questions to try to figure me out, I often lie and tell them I'm a writer. It is almost funny to see how relieved they are to have a way of explaining my lowly work status to themselves.

- Nicholson Baker, Fermata

Vindication!

A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

Why do today...

I simply exist, I do the minimum I have to do to make a living, because I know that in a sense everything I want to accomplish (and I am a person with ambitions) is infinitely postponable.

- Nicholson Baker, Fermata

Black Swans

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan is a Penguin book, largely orange and white.

Paging Dr Johnson!

Some articles are vandalized a lot. On January 11, 2008, the entire fascinating entry on the aardvark was replaced with “one ugly animal”.

- Nicholson Baker, on the fun to be had indulging in a spot of Wikabuse.

MC Trivia

Q Why are rappers titled MC?

A Because they - or their immediate musical predecessors - did indeed begin life as Masters of Ceremonies, announcers at public dances in the Caribbean.

[With thanks to David Shields, Reality Hunger.]

Real v. Authenti City

What I'm striving for is authenticity. None of it is real.

- WG 'Judas' Sebald

NB

[Photo courtesy DS Hilton at Amnesiac's Rearview.]

Guilty

A great man quotes bravely and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills with his own voice and humour, and the whole cyclopedia of his table talk is presently believed to be his own.

- Emerson

... as charged.

Bible advocates grinding black people

True.

--
Notes: 1) Typos work out at £2000 per letter. 2) But apparently the proofreader is to be forgiven.

Name (and) shame

News just in. The number of idiots online who think they can write but can't is now precisely quantifiable. It's six.

To wit:

Chris (Smythers?)
Sanjay
Rosalyn Ray
Meublen
and Manga Bonbons

All these clowns, you will observe, have pinched blogger address I would have found very useful, and have gone on to post one or fewer contributions to the world of letters, in most cases several years ago.*

My favourite, though - and winner of the Chief Online Oxygen Thief award 2010 - is the 'author' of Illiterata, whose only post, with deathless irony, is the 'Hello World' blogger-autogenerated test page. Nice work, Ian Richmond, you twat.

--
* blogger does have a Report Abuse button. Sadly, I suspect hogging unused URLs is not on their list of indictable offences.