Not-so-slowly downward

Perhaps the grimmest three lines I have read recently:

Careers at Faber:

There are no job vacancies at the moment.
We do occasionally have openings for work experience...

From the personals

Slender, dark eyed woman, 40s, optimistic and affectionate with an opinion or two, would love to meet a kind, witty man (45-55) who lives in London and doesn't write poetry.

- London Review of Books

Optimistic indeed.

Crit.

Not hopeless if you are less than 21.

- Ezra Pound, to poet ASJ Tessimond (age 23)

Roan words: part 2

1) Murakami's Dance Dance Dance was, in the original, dansu dansu dansu. Do the Japanese have no native word for 'dance'? Or is this a particular (non-native) type of dancing?

2) But Norwegian Wood was Norowei no mori. Even though it's not about some wood from Norway, or a wood in Norway - but, tangentially at least, about 'Norwegian Wood', the song by the Beatles.

Roan words

You know that scene in Crocodile Dundee where Mick knocks out some muggers, stands on them in victorious pose, and has his picture taken by shutter-happy Japanese tourists, one of whom says: 'Iss, ah, Krrrint Eastwood'?

Well, er, it's true. I am indebted to Jay Rubin, oftentimes translator of Haruki Murakami, for the information that the original Japanese title of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is, no kidding, Sekai no owari to hadoboirudo wandarando.

Though why the title is backwards, I can't tell you.

Unfamous Last Words - 2

I liked things better the way they were before.

- Melekh Gaystick, suicidal (fictional) chess champion, in Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union

No, thank you!

Amazon's checkout page now has a little button to Facebook [sic.] news of your recent purchases. Oy!

Don't get me wrong. I quite understand what's in it for them. Unfortunately, I also know what's in it for me if significant others were to find out what I really spend on books.

Not that it's much. Obviously. Or that I've bought anything very expensive. Not recently.

[UPDATE The significant other, shopping for shoes just now on Amazon, also declined the offer. Same shit, different product (higher price-tag).]

Clas[sic.]

WORDS FOR LIFE
SAT 3 DECEMBER 2011
10.00 - 18.00
Pens at the ready. It time to re-think everyday prose.

- The School of Life

Bad Murakami!

The Little People came suddenly. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know what it means. I was a prisoner of the story. I had no choice. They came, and I described it. That is my work.

- Haruki Murakami, in the New York Times Magazine (in the New York Review of Books)

Avast!

I am grateful to today's Times2 crossword for the (safely verified) knowledge that 'avast!' was not just some crazy shit that pirates used to say - or Captain Haddock when he got battered [does that joke work in French?] - but is in fact a legitimate nautical term, the equivalent of 'halt!'

From the Dutch, houd vast/hold fast. A complicated language, the Dutch.

Facebook thinks I should be Friends with Duncan Fallowell.

Facebook is wrong.

Question

Can you have a common-or-garden garden?

chagrin (e.g.)

If a word has long-since been adopted into English - to the point that it is not even written in italics any more - (why) must we still conform to the original pronunciation?

InDefinition - 39

je ne say quoi, n. thing for which we have no decent English word

Words meaning not what they mean

1) Classicfm are pimping holidays which, they promise, will be 'special in every sense'.

2) Brad Pitt says

We all have a shelf life. Mine is coming.

Was Hammurabi a Commie?

... and other questions that enthuse the New York Review of Books.

[Clue: No.]

What's wrong with this picture?

That's correct: it's a fashion company's inability to spell the word 'fashion' correctly.

Barth time

John Barth... Is that like how I would pronounce 'bath' [cf. the correct way to pronounce 'bath'] or how clever-clever types would say (Roland) 'Barthes'?

Literary realities: 2

Why are American novelist-academics who write themselves into novels as American novelist-academics always from small New England humanities colleges? Why do they never say, 'I'm Professor of English Literature at Harvard, I've written 11 highly acclaimed novels, won the Booker, the James Tait Black and the Nobel, had a film made about me and am generally a big swinging dick, so the rest of you can all just fuck off.'?

Literary realities: 1

[We are a] couple of long-time English profs, both of whom routinely included bits of the Bard in their undergrad lit-survey courses (George mainly the plays, Amanda the sonnets, neither of us with scholarly authority, but both with the appreciative awe of fellow language-fiddlers).

- John Barth, Every Third Thought

Books which exist

Beautiful Chickens
Best In Show: knit your own dog
The Sexual Politics of Meat (20th anniversary edition)

Found in books - 2

In a charity-shop copy of Michel Houllebecq's Atomised, a torn-off Hugo Boss label, advertising a fragrance called Deep Red, with a picture of a somewhat ambiguous model (pretty sure it's a boy) on the reverse.

There's nothing of any great significance on either page - except for a quoted passage regarding Heisenberg's 'first encounter with atomic theory'

The end of the First World War had thrown Germany's youth into a great turmoil.

and that only because atomic life is ostensibly what the novel is about (but isn't, because it's French and therefore Very Clever, despite being actually just about sex).

Manspray-purchasing Hugo Boss patrons do not strike me as the target market for this type of book, in England anyway (though I suppose the cover photo of a young woman in nothing but her pants might have something to do with it.) Rank snobbery, perhaps; but our invisible reader evidently agreed - giving up, as he apparently did, on page 22.

Only in English - 8

The word 'godown' - notwithstanding its origin in the Malay 'godong', and its usually being found only in colonial novels about sweaty white men prowling around the docks of SE Asia - does not have anything to do with what you might think.

It simply means 'warehouse'.

(Which is also pretty close... but not the same.)

Adam vs God

Craig Thompson (habibi) informs me that my name, in Arabic, is rendered to illustrate man's prostratration before God.

All I can say is, it's as well I was born under the Roman alphabet.

Not special

You must surely concede that at a certain level we speak, and therefore write, like everyone else.

- JM Coetzee,* Elizabeth Costello
--
* who can afford to say shit like that.

IS/SI

If one can be an idiot savant, why not also a savant idiot? I'm sure I know more of the latter.

InDefinition - 38

dessert, v. to abandon one's pudding [esp. in Colombo]

Only in English - 7

'Plate' and 'flat' owe everything to each other; but 'urgency' and 'emergency' have nothing in common.

Favourite foreign onomatopoeia - 6

BLAGX - American/Persian(?), vomit (projection of)

[With thanks to Craig Thompson's astonishing 700-page graphic novel habibi.]

More Balangoda than Ballard

[With thanks to David Blacker and friends at my new favourite blog, TypoInColombo.]