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.)]