.jpg)
[with thanks to Mika Tennekoon]
Monday 17 December 2012
Wednesday 21 November 2012
InDefinition - 58
forebore, vb. to be so renownedly dull that folk are comatose before you even get going.
Tuesday 20 November 2012
InDefinition - 57
'nuff sell, n. circumstance in which the merits of the thing are either immediately apparent or they're not.
Notes on a Tuesday (splendid etymology)
Dienstag - From Middle Low German dingesdach, the day of the ding (“the thing, a council assembly”).- Wiktionary.org
['S like something out of The Thick of It. 'Can you make it to my expenses-wangling party on Tuesday, Tony?' 'No, sorry - I've got that thing, haven't I.']
Tuesday 13 November 2012
Monday 12 November 2012
On a career in creative insanity
I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that’s fine. I don’t do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can’t not do it.
- Maurice Sendak, in The Believer
Sunday 11 November 2012
Friday 9 November 2012
Keystroke twins - 17 / Squaddie banter VI
Army
crow*
--
* this one, I confess, may have slightly more resonance(s) for those who are actually in the Army... All readers, though, may delight in the peculiarly military quality of the word's etymology and/or definition, as provided by UrbanDictionary.com!
crow*
--
* this one, I confess, may have slightly more resonance(s) for those who are actually in the Army... All readers, though, may delight in the peculiarly military quality of the word's etymology and/or definition, as provided by UrbanDictionary.com!
Tuesday 23 October 2012
Attention, please!
[T]his is important. Or rather, and to be precise, this is not important but the manner in which it is not important is important.- Hugo Rifkind, The Times
What one looks for in one's Oxford history tutors
Chris Brooke @chrisbrooke
@dsquareddigest @crookedfootball Also the chap who wrote "Isle of Dogs", the only dogging-themed state-of-the-nation novel I've ever read.
Marvellous
Less so for 'anatidaephobia' - though that's obviously a classic - than for the unfortunate picture-placement.
[with congrats to @benwakeling (who also has a rather witty background)]
[with congrats to @benwakeling (who also has a rather witty background)]
Monday 22 October 2012
#addaletterbondmovies (also Mitch Benn's idea)
On Her Majesty's Secrete Service
Dur. No
The Man with the Golden Gunt
The Spy Who Loved Men
Liver and Let Die
Dire Another Day
Da View to a Kill
Quaint Um of Solace
Skynfall
Dur. No
The Man with the Golden Gunt
The Spy Who Loved Men
Liver and Let Die
Dire Another Day
Da View to a Kill
Quaint Um of Solace
Skynfall
#subtractaletterbondmovies (Mitch Benn's idea)
Tomorrow Neve Dies
Golfinger (director's extended version, obviously)
Casino Royle
The Spy Who Loved E
The Word 'is' Not Enough
Golfinger (director's extended version, obviously)
Casino Royle
The Spy Who Loved E
The Word 'is' Not Enough
Editors
The QI Elves @qikipedia
Darwin's editor worried The Origin of Species was too obscure. He suggested a book about pigeons, as 'everybody is interested in pigeons'
Friday 19 October 2012
In Kafka's footsteps
Of course, one feels sorry for children burdened by their parents with airy-fairy, innuendo-laden or just plain ridiculous names. But I can't help the suspicion that Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii (from New Zealand) perhaps isn't au fait with the overtones of her chosen pseudonym, either.
Lovely line
One occurrence in both online and real-life dating was an inexplicable talent on my part for attracting vegetarians. I am not a vegetarian.- Emily Witt, LRB
Thursday 18 October 2012
First: find your nearest centre
Because nothing says 'solid-gold hire!' like someone with a qualification in 'job seeking skills'.
¡Doh!
Punctuation thus becomes the signature of cultures. The hot-blooded Spaniard seems to be revealed in the passion and urgency of his doubled exclamation points and question marks ("Caramba! Quien sabe?")...- Pico Iyer, 'In Praise of the Humble Comma', Time
Wednesday 17 October 2012
Friday 12 October 2012
The Writer's life
Although Thom enjoyed the idea of being a writer, he found the writing part interfered with his life as a literary figure...- Roger McGough, Said and Done: the autobiography
Thursday 11 October 2012
Wednesday 10 October 2012
Grand openings
Where did Herbert come from?- Adam Zagajewski, intro to Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Poems: 1956-1998
If Charlize Theron can't make your language attractive...
HEALTH WARNING
Try to hit STOP the second Charlize is done talking. If you hear what Piers Morgan says next you may very well have to spend the rest of the day under the shower.
Tuesday 9 October 2012
Fair dos
Thou shalt spell the word 'phoenix' P_H_E_O_N_I_X, not P_H_O_E_N_I_X, regardless of what the Oxford English Dictionary tells you.- Scroobius Pip, 'Thou Shalt Kill'
Monday 8 October 2012
Self-ish
I love the idea of the novels of Will Self. It's just the words I can't get past - or the author, for that matter.
Favourite foreign onomatopoeia - 9
sphincter - Greek (ancient), the sound of someone desperately trapping an escaping fart
Kafka was a wet-pants
Kafka refused to put a picture of an insect on the cover of Metamorphosis.
- Elif Batuman, LRB
Brilliant!
Bryan Appleyard was educated at Bolton School and King’s College, Cambridge and after graduating with a degree in English. He was Financial News Editor and Deputy Arts Editor at The Times from 1976 to 1984.- from BryanAppleyard.com
Friday 5 October 2012
Fair warning
For copyright reasons, it's essential you make it clear you're following in the footsteps of James Bond and you aren't actually James Bond.- agent for Fleming estate, to Jon Ronson
High stakes in the housing market
So, give me your vision for the next five years.- presenter, Location, Location, Location
(I remember when things used to just cost an arm and a leg!)
Thursday 4 October 2012
Pre-prandial factoid
The best time to drink Champagne is before lunch, you cunt.- Harold Pinter
I think it's the capital C that really makes it.
[with thanks to @Pinter_Quotes]
Wednesday 3 October 2012
DECREE: generic title for use on all memoirs here on in
Don't Let Other People Make The Tea
[with thanks to SG - who likes it as a 'meta statement' - and to my father, who probably would've used this title anyway]Tuesday 2 October 2012
William Shakespeare makes silver-screen debut!!
The Last of the Haussmans
National Theatre
Release date: 11 October 2012
Running time: 180 mins
Director: Howard Davies
Starring: Rory Kinnear, Julie Walters, Isabella Laughland, Helen McCrory, Matthew Marsh
Julie Walters returns to the National Theatre for the first time in more than a decade in this funny, touching and savage portrait of a family that's losing its grip.
High society drop-out Judy (Julie Walters) is the aging hippy matriarch of the Haussman clan. The spirit of the 1960s still infuses her anarchic lifestyle in a dilapidated Art Deco house on the Devon coast. Recovering from an operation, Judy welcomes her wayward adult children Nick (Rory Kinnear) and Libby (Helen McCrory). Also joining the party are her granddaughter Summer, local doctor Peter, and Daniel - a troubled local teen. Lubricated by alcohol in the sweltering heat over the next few months, infatuations, festering resentments and disappointments bubble to the surface. Stephen Beresford's new play is a blackly comic portrait of the consequences of being raised by the revolutionary 'free love' generation - with a peach of a role for much-loved Julie Walters.
Screenwriter: William Shakespeare
You should see it because: Julie Walters is reunited with director Howard Davies for the first time since her Olivier Award-winning performance in 'All My Sons'.
See it if you liked: All My Sons, Collaborators, One Man, Two Guvnors
[verbatim from the Cineworld website]
The truth about Mortality
Humdinger comment - second from top - on the New Statesman review of Hitchens' last waltz.
Thursday 27 September 2012
InDefinition - 52
manter, n. calling your best mate, e.g. a 'cunt' (while knowing that he's still gonna get his round in)
On the other hand...
Today, the average work of literary fiction appears and vanishes from the scene largely unnoticed and unremarked. Even the novelists you may think of as “hyped” are in fact relatively obscure; I’ve got a battalion of perfectly intelligent cousins who have never heard of either Jonathan Franzen or Dave Eggers. Sure, they know who James Patterson is, but they also know he’s no artist. They’ve never read a book because it was praised as a work of genius on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and they are oblivious to the existence of James Wood.- Laura Miller, Salon
Teacher/critic/judge
In all the years I read these writers, as I went through high school and then college and grad school, it never occurred to me that they were trying to persuade me to actually see this or that performance, buy this or that volume, or take in this or that movie; nor did I imagine that I was being bullied or condescended to, or that I wasn’t allowed to disagree with them. I thought of these writers above all as teachers, and like all good teachers they taught by example; the example that they set, week after week,* was to recreate on the page the drama of how they had arrived at their judgments. (The word critic, as I learned much later, comes from the Greek word for “judge.”)
- Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker
--
* in a time, obviously, when one was encouraged to write more than 450 words about things.
--
* in a time, obviously, when one was encouraged to write more than 450 words about things.
'Norman Mailer'
Is it not somehow supremely fitting that, in this New Yorker article on the egomaniacal Norman Mailer, the only keywords offered are... 'Norman Mailer'?
Wednesday 26 September 2012
Monkeys vs Hamlet
There is only a one in fifteen billion chance that a monkey would even write the word 'banana' randomly.- Scarlett Thomas, Monkeys with Typewriters: How to write fiction...
Friday 21 September 2012
Tuesday 18 September 2012
Monday 16 July 2012
Fact!
The distance between inspiring and manipulating is sometimes only an exclamation mark.- AA Gill, Sunday Times
Sunday 15 July 2012
Saturday 14 July 2012
Stonking
comment appended to Martin Amis' re-review of Ballard's The Drowned World, 50 years on:
Brilliant book, and quite remarkable for a first novel.I don't really have anything to add to Martin Amis' article!
Mistake!
The other day, in order to facilitate a bit of Facebook banter, I had cause to look up Madeline [sic] Miller's Song of Achilles on Amazon... with the result - notwithstanding every other perfectly erudite volume I have ever purchased from the great book supermarket in the sky - that I am now being bombarded with offers for watery-looking paperbacks by authors called Georgina, Victoria, Cynthia and Ann.
G-damn.
G-damn.
Friday 13 July 2012
Thursday 12 July 2012
Wednesday 11 July 2012
Monday 2 July 2012
Ouch.
'Not until a year after his burial at Sag Harbor did someone notice that the title of The Recognitions was misspelled on the back of William Gaddis's headstone.'- David Markson, The Last Novel
On the urgent necessity of the question-comma: 1
Where are my Frosties,* you arsehole?Here it is clearly seen that the question (concerning the whereabouts of the Frosties) is over and done with by the time we get to the vocative flourish at the cadence.
One's intonation would, equally obviously, make that plain; but the way it is traditionally written means that it appears a) that the arseholeishness of the Frostie-thief is also somehow in doubt, and b) that the speaker's voice should keep going up in pitch until the end of the sentence - e.g. in the manner of an Australian?
* this being the place where the question-comma should go
Thursday 28 June 2012
Sensible Conservatism
What do we want change for – aren't things bad enough as they are?
- Lord Salisbury, three-time Prime Minister (Conservative)
Wednesday 20 June 2012
Joyce: yes and no (but not necessarily in that order)
A lot of spurious guff has sprung up around Ulysses, about it being easy to read, and how it was intended to be spoken aloud by the poor and the uneducated - Joyce himself started this clunker by claiming that it was a book for servants, maids and porters. And yet, elsewhere, he also confessed that it was a highly sophisticated novel designed to "keep professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant".- Kevin Maher, The Times
Monday 18 June 2012
Pokey poetry
I went to a maximum security level four and ran into some poets who had a poetry class every Wednesday. I felt I had found home.- Kosal Khiev, poet, in The Times
Wednesday 13 June 2012
Ulysses
I spent three years reading Ulysses incessantly at university, and then applied to do a five-year PhD on Joyce at the State University of New York... but dropped out in panic at the eleventh hour when I realised that it was just a book...
- Kevin Maher, The Times
Saturday 9 June 2012
Friday 8 June 2012
Enlightenment
Edmund de Waal believes tact is a dangerous virtue. As a wise man once said, tact ‘is the ability to make a person see lightening without letting him feel the bolt.’- The School of Life
Wednesday 6 June 2012
Dull sense of humour
Vote due on link between village of Dull and US town of Boring
In which the most interesting points to note are that
1) the good people of Dull find day-to-day existence so boring (or, indeed, dull) that they count the passage of cyclists through their village; and
2) that Boring is named after a US Civil War veteran, an area of nomenclature - 'Jubiliation T Cornpone', for example - not normally troubled by an excess of boring names. (Cornpone, in case you were wondering, was born in the town of Dogpatch.)
Monday 4 June 2012
Mae West vs Mailer (damnit, just read the whole article!)
For many years, the filthiest word in English was “fuck.” Even the dauntless Partridge had to use “f*ck.” (In Norman Mailer’s 1948 war novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” the G.I.s use “fug.” In what may be an apocryphal story, Mae West, meeting Mailer at a party, said, “Oh, you’re the guy who can’t spell ‘fuck’!”)- Joan Acocella, New Yorker
Classic lingo-nerd-fest on English and its uses, Bosniak smack-talk, and one use of 'conciseness' where it ought to have been 'concision'.
Shame!
Luke looked across at a young man busy writing in a notebook and felt sorry for him: he had only his book for company - even his coffee-cup was empty.- Dyer, Paris Trance
Too good
As for the proposition that, if something was good enough for Dr. Johnson, it should be good enough for us, would we like to live with the dentistry, or the penal codes, or the views on race of Johnson’s time?- Joan Acocella, New Yorker
Sunday 3 June 2012
Shakespeare and I
This 'morning' (c.2pm), in a bleary moment, I used the phrase '[my brother] and I' when I - of course - meant 'me'. This afternoon ('...' = 11pm), I read that
Which just goes to show that Shakespeare had bleary moments, too.
Usages frowned on today were once common. (Dr. Johnson split infinitives; Shakespeare wrote “between you and I,” and just about anything else he wanted.)- Joan Acocella, New Yorker
Which just goes to show that Shakespeare had bleary moments, too.
Note to self
No one is obliged to become an author.- Paul Fussell, 'Vanity in Review: the author's reply as a literary genre'
[With thanks to HD.]
St James'ses
James Wood's use of the possessive in 'David Shields's recent manifesto "Reality Hunger"' (here, final para) is just plain ugly. But 'Roland Barthes's prosecutorial ruthlessness' (three lines later) is a real mind-warper.
Either it counts as doubly hideous - implying, as it may, that we think 'Barthes' is actually pronounced 'Barths' or 'Bart(h)ez' - and/or a mutant result of obsessive adherence to 'house style'; or it demonstrates an assumption that every New Yorker-reader knows full well that you don't pronounce the 'es' on the end of 'Barthes'.
Anyone fancy odds?*
--
*French-speakers do not apply.
Either it counts as doubly hideous - implying, as it may, that we think 'Barthes' is actually pronounced 'Barths' or 'Bart(h)ez' - and/or a mutant result of obsessive adherence to 'house style'; or it demonstrates an assumption that every New Yorker-reader knows full well that you don't pronounce the 'es' on the end of 'Barthes'.
Anyone fancy odds?*
--
*French-speakers do not apply.
Myth-busting
Our contemporary politicians actually ARE less Churchillian than, well, Churchill.
Says the Sunlight Foundation.
Says the Sunlight Foundation.
InDefinition - GUEST ENTRY
writing style, n. 'a bow tie about a throat cancer'- Samuel Beckett (to Aidan Higgins)
Trajectory
Something very rare but a thing to take delight in: a man with a finely constituted intellect, who has the character, the inclinations, and also the experiences appropriate to such an intellect.- Nietzsche*
The problem is to acquire that knowledge of life (or rather to have lived) which goes beyond the mere ability to write. So that in the last analysis the great artist is first and foremost a man who has lived greatly (it being understood that in this case living also implies thinking about life - that living is in fact precisely this subtle relationship between experience and our awareness of it).- Camus, notebooks*
... Luke came to Paris with the intention of writing a book based on his experiences of living.... As far as I know, he made absolutely no progress with this book, abandoning it... in the instant that he began leading the life intended to serve as its research...- Geoff Dyer, Paris Trance (p1)
--
* quoted in Dyer, intro to Selected Essays of John Berger
Saturday 2 June 2012
Ye
The fact-checker on the piece, fortunately, spoke Mandarin...or - Why the New Yorker is the best publication in the world.
Yes
The poet puts the right words in the right order so that the colliding of their sounds and meaning[s] makes your neurons flash like a pinball machine.- Alan Alda, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself
Fact
The question mark in the Requiem typeface is uncommonly ugly. It looks like someone has beaten it with a poker.
Not-so-tough talk
Perhaps we can argue that art is stronger than the censor, and perhaps it often is. Artists, however, are vulnerable.- Salman Rushdie, New Yorker
Tolkien tells the Nazis
... if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.
- JRR Tolkien, on being asked by a German publisher whether he was of Aryan descent
[With thanks to Letters of Note.]
Funny old world, innit
Playboy's Chicago offices are soon to be occupied by the Children's Memorial Hospital, Prospect reports.
Friday 1 June 2012
'Understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur'
Teju Cole, on the German Chatwin (albeit with no reference to the billion typos in the HB edition).
Two classic comments on (the writings of) Helen DeWitt
Joe has found that if you want to sleep with a woman you have to spend a lot of time talking to her about her interests.
- Joan Acocella, The New Yorker
As any million-dollar litigation lawyer or two-cent literary critic will tell you, the devil is in the details.
- Jennifer Szalai, New York Times Sunday Book Review
How the real poets roll
a personal poem of damnation as well as a plea to be released from “the examination of his own depths”[,] Rimbaud originally distributed A Season In Hell to friends as a self-published booklet, and soon afterward, at the age of nineteen, quit poetry altogether.
- from the New Directions website
Wednesday 30 May 2012
Parks vs Dyer (vs the academy)
Borderline personal (and misleading) piece on criticism and its discontents, by Tim Parks. Couple of viable comments from the voice-of-the-dog, though, of which my favourites are:
If every one in America with a Ph.D. in physics suddenly died, what would happen to physics in this country? Now consider what would happen to literature in this country if everyone with a Ph.D. in literature died?
and
Accepted into a Ph.D. program in literature many years, I decided to find a life outside the academy, thinking then, as I do now, I had no wish to write more and more about less and less for fewer and fewer.
and (brilliantly)
I was unable to comprehend at least half of the writing in the recent inaugural issue of the journal "Translation"
If every one in America with a Ph.D. in physics suddenly died, what would happen to physics in this country? Now consider what would happen to literature in this country if everyone with a Ph.D. in literature died?
and
Accepted into a Ph.D. program in literature many years, I decided to find a life outside the academy, thinking then, as I do now, I had no wish to write more and more about less and less for fewer and fewer.
and (brilliantly)
I was unable to comprehend at least half of the writing in the recent inaugural issue of the journal "Translation"
Thursday 24 May 2012
Ouch!
An insatiable nomad, he lives in Notting Hill like everybody else.- Private Eye, semi-legitimately, on Bruce Chatwin
'Americanisation' [sp?]
Can there, by the very definition of the word, be an English English spelling of 'Americanisation' [e.g.]?*
On the other hand, by the word's very origin - English, presumably - should there ever be an American?
[*Blogger says no. But I ain't throwing in the towel for that!]
On the other hand, by the word's very origin - English, presumably - should there ever be an American?
[*Blogger says no. But I ain't throwing in the towel for that!]
Friday 11 May 2012
Republicans are smart!
'More Americans lost their jobs since the Great Depression...'- Newt Gingrich waxes historical analysis on the economic record of Barack Obama
Fun 'new' word
Heel, n. bad guy in (silly, lycra-clad) wrestling, or, less particularly, a contemptible person.
[For which, my thanks to JR.]
[For which, my thanks to JR.]
Literary Banksy
I am grateful to Sri Lankan artist and photographer Mika Tennekoon for directing me towards DepressedCopywriter.com.
Never-ending fun for all the (literate) family. Go forth - and take a biro!
Never-ending fun for all the (literate) family. Go forth - and take a biro!
When, oh when
will editors (for it is surely they*) learn to resist the temptation to caption every article about Geoff Dyer with this obvious, time-battered title?
--
* This is what I'm talking about.
--
* This is what I'm talking about.
Tuesday 17 April 2012
The Eliot app
If I were to go out and purchase an iPad just so's to be able to read the Waste Land in its new-and-million-selling app incarnation, it would - I estimate, at a total of about £400 - be by some margin the most expensive book I have ever bought.*
But this article has given me cause to consider it.**
--
* not to mention, of course, that I already own a copy.
** also, see third paragraph from bottom for splendidly ironic dysfunctional-meta-data gaffe.
But this article has given me cause to consider it.**
--
* not to mention, of course, that I already own a copy.
** also, see third paragraph from bottom for splendidly ironic dysfunctional-meta-data gaffe.
Two good news
1) William Boyd has been booked to write the next James Bond (novel, not movie).
2) Some American woman* who writes novels ('novels') in txt [sic] has become the most complained-about author in the US library system. (Though not, of course, on account of her abuse of the English language.)
--
* Her name is Lauren Myracle - which I reckon is about all you need to know.
2) Some American woman* who writes novels ('novels') in txt [sic] has become the most complained-about author in the US library system. (Though not, of course, on account of her abuse of the English language.)
--
* Her name is Lauren Myracle - which I reckon is about all you need to know.
Ulster 'humour'
The earliest I could fit you in this afternoon would be around midday, actually.- Mark the barber
Sunday 15 April 2012
'google', v. tr. UPDATE
A friend and colleague writes to suggest that: 'in Sense of an Ending' Julian Barnes 'is "doing" Ian McEwan, so then to me at least it feels more natural.'
She goes on to float the idea that JB's [entirely reasonable] sourness re. never having won the Booker might finally have driven him to consciously pastiche the double-winning McEwan by way of a fuck-you to the Man Booker prize committee. A grim theory, if correct - since they promptly handed him the prize.
[With thanks to AC]
She goes on to float the idea that JB's [entirely reasonable] sourness re. never having won the Booker might finally have driven him to consciously pastiche the double-winning McEwan by way of a fuck-you to the Man Booker prize committee. A grim theory, if correct - since they promptly handed him the prize.
[With thanks to AC]
Style guidance
Does one 'shit' a shit and 'crap (out)' a crap? On paper, I mean. Is it better - in these circumstances, if no other - to be varied and eloquent, or straightforward and logical?
Saturday 14 April 2012
'to google', v. tr.
Unless I much mistaken, the verb 'google(d)' - small G - appears in both Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending and in one of his stories in Pulse.
That doesn't seem quite right, somehow.
That doesn't seem quite right, somehow.
Killer stats
Interesting statistics on books, the internet, and (probably) how much shit people read these days.
Tuesday 27 March 2012
Favourite foreign onomatopoeia - 8
nyam-nyam - Fulbe, to eat (and later the name given to cannibal tribes)
[With thanks to Ibn Battuta.]
[With thanks to Ibn Battuta.]
Tuesday 20 March 2012
My favourite Twitter SPAM so far (2)
Juliana Mccorison @Juliana_Mccoris
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing
My favourite Twitter SPAM so far (1)
That awkward moment at a feminist picnic when they realize no one made sandwiches
Ulysses, reviewed (or, Squaddie banter III)
I heard Germaine Greer say it was the greatest book ever written and vowed then never to find out.
- Charles 'Chucky' Stephenson, illiterate
Sunday 18 March 2012
Words can kill
There are a million car bumpers loose on the streets of the city which can show you just what a good noun is capable of.- Carlos María Domínguez, The Paper House
Cool thing to do on a rainy afternoon
Friday 16 March 2012
Metaphor = truth
It is possible to find a metaphor for anything, an analogue: but the image is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet's perception, the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness.
- George Oppen, courtesy of The Paris Review
The word 'plash'
really pisses me off.
It's just 'splash', isn't it, with a silent S tacked on, to make it seem more onomatopoetical.
Auden, Heaney, Foulds... this is your gypsy's warning.
It's just 'splash', isn't it, with a silent S tacked on, to make it seem more onomatopoetical.
Auden, Heaney, Foulds... this is your gypsy's warning.
The justification for truth
We are free to choose our paths- WH Auden, 'Aubade'
but choose We must, no matter
where they lead, and the tales We
tell of the Past must be true.
Funny(!)
Karl Minns @karlminns
Writing a musical about the history of the exclamation mark. It's called !!
Article of faith
I'm a true believer in the separation of Church and baser instincts like hypocrisy, power, exploitation of innocence.- Ken Russell, on The Devils (in his final article for The Times)
Less impressive, admittedly, is when he describes the friction between Cardinal Richelieu (yes, The) and 'French King Louis III', a man who had predeceased Richelieu by some 750 years.
Wednesday 14 March 2012
I, me, ouch!, mine
The I-feeling: a feeling of being-responsible-for. (It cannot accompany a verb in the passive.) I wake in the morning with a violent headache and cry Ouch! This cry is devoid of I-feeling. Then I think : - "I have a hangover"; some I-feeling accompanies this thought - the act of locating and identifying the headache is mine - but very little. Then I think: - "I drank too much last night." Now the I-feeling is much stronger...- WH Auden, 'Dichtung und Wahrheit'
[*horror!*]
Charlotte Ledger @girl_on_a_ledge
@MargaretAtwood Mills&Boon are at rally against library funding cuts in London today. Please retweet to show your support! #savelibraries
Monday 12 March 2012
Bartlet v Nixon
In Series 3, episode 12 of The West Wing, Jed Bartlett gives his staff a motivational speech:
A president stood up. He said, "We will land a man on the moon in the next ten years." ... and we did it.What Bartlett doesn't tell them is that President Nixon (for twas indeed he) was subsequently in receipt of a memo from speech-writer William Safire, outlining what he should say if that man did not come back. This surprisingly moving - if retrospectively-fictionalised - document can be read here, thanks to the splendid archival website Letters of Note.
It's a wonderful Liff
I am indebted to whichever anonymous Wikicontributors for the following gems concerning the late Douglas Adams and The Meaning of Liff:
- The original definition of Liff, as contained in The Meaning of Liff, is 'A book, the contents of which are totally belied by its cover. For instance, any book the dust jacket of which bears the words, "This book will change your life."' Which, of course, The Meaning of Liff does. (Does have it on the cover, I mean. It may also change your life.)
- a) In the revised and updated edition of the book - The Deeper Meaning of Liff - the definition of the titular Liff is different. b) It now means a phenomenon for which there is no word.
- There is a German version.
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