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