Books I've actually finished lately: 5

NB, though:

A national way of life strongly imbued with such Calvinist virtues as propriety, dutifulness, and moral vigilance has not conduced to boldness of thought.

- JM Coetzee

Teensy bit snooty perhaps, but still...

I’ve been dipping in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, for no particular reason, other than that I like thought — I’m sick of the relentless, numbing emotionalism of American culture.

- Aleksandar Hemon, in The Millions

InDefinition - 62

phoner, n. erection achieved during phone-sex.

Also

Mike Shallcross ‏@Mike_MensHealth40m

@NickCohen4 @alexmassie If God was a writer, the world would have been made in 35 days, and the Garden of Eden would be way too flowery

Comic literature (is probably bad for you)

Literary Interest ‏@InterestingLit1h

On this day in 1882, Anthony Trollope died - from a stroke which he had suffered as a result of laughing too heartily at a comic novel.

And God sayeth

God ‏@TheTweetOfGod13h

People who brag about being politically incorrect tend to also be morally, ethically, factually, and grammatically incorrect.

Emphasis mine. (Yes, I'm editing God now.)

i.m. Omar Khayyám (or, 'Clause 56')

d. 4.10.1131

For "Is" and "Is-not" though with Rule and Line
And "Up" and "Down" by Logic I define,
Of all that one should care to fathom,
Was never deep in anything but--Wine.

- The Rubaiyat, transl. Edward FitzGerald

[with thanks to AC, for the tip-off]

I am indebted

to Jonathan Grimwood's The Last Banquet for the knowledge that 'condom' was not only (once?) rendered into French as 'redingotes Anglaise', but also that this was itself a wilful mis-'translation' of the English 'riding coats' - an actual fashion item at the time.

Likewise - if rather less exotically - to JM Coetzee('s translation of 'Basho', by Cees Nooteboom) for the fact that 'door' in Dutch translates as 'through' in English.

Well... obv.

Retarded

For the two-handed man in your life.

[With thanks to (FM for making me hang around for ages in) Paperchase.]

Books I've actually finished lately: 4

Incorporating - amongst other things - the most inspired index ever published. [To wit:

Bang Bang

Chitty-Chitty, 1968
Kiss Kiss, 2005
(My Baby Shot Me Down), 1966

and

Curses

...
Fuck, 21, 23-25, 35-36, 40, 44, 47, 53, 62, 64, 66, 76, 84, 90, 93-94, 103, 107, 109-110, 114, 116, 119,120]

#BadSex

His mind... will never be able to think of an ear in the same way again.

- Hunting for Dirty Books, an entertaining short film from the team behind the Bad Sex Award.

Books I've actually finished lately: 3

NB Ian Sansom is additionally co-author/-editor of The Enthustiast Field Guide to Poetry, an inexplicably un-famous volume that absolutely no home (or English teacher's classroom) should be without.

Favourite foreign onomatopoeia - 10

borborygmus - (Greek) the sound of intestinal gases rumbling

[with thanks to Moose Allain, cartoonist at the Literary Review]

InDefinition - 61

surplice to requirements, adj./n. chorister between jobs.

Who guards the (delicate intellectual integrity of the) guards?

In which the FBI decide they need to keep closer tabs on the potential Communistical philosophies of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre... before discovering that what they really need to do first is to learn French.

Keystroke twins - 19

peers
peeps

Books I've actually finished lately: 2

Warning: contains recipes for salad dressing and an 'African dry' martini.

Got watalappam/n?

Nifty Sri Lankan advert/plea for national unity. Nice T-shirt, too, by the looks of it.

Because I HAD often wondered...

Up to the Civil War “the United States” was invariably a plural noun: “The United States are a free country.” After Gettysburg it became a singular: “The United States is a free country.” This was a result of the whole mode of thinking that Lincoln expressed in his acts as well as his words, making union not a mystical hope but a constitutional reality.

- Gary Wills, via Andrew Sullivan

So what?

Two words, guaranteed to repel any manner of mediocrity masquerading as conventional wisdom.

- Dracula (according to Sky Living)

Public Service Announcement

There's an advert out and about at the moment encouraging you to switch your e-mail wossnames over to Microsoft, because Outlook - unlike those corporate monsters at Google/Gmail - won't go through your correspondence and milk every second word for targeted marketing data.

I'm on Outlook [herefore known by the entire world as 'Hotmail', but whatever], and a little over half an hour ago I sent a mail to a friend in South Africa discussing my holiday plans for Christmas in Sri Lanka and his mother's well-being in Cape Town. I now have an e-mail - in my Junk folder, admittedly/amusingly - from an unknown South African travel agent, urgently inviting me to experience the wondrousness of Cape Town this December.

From which we learn:

1) that Outlook almost certainly are reading your e-mails; but
2) they're just not very good at it - otherwise they'd have noticed:

• that I've already booked my Christmas holiday,
• that I will clearly not be spending the festive season in South Africa, and
• that the bulk of our correspondence was taken up with the fact that Denis's mum's place in Cape Town has recently been violently burgled.

How not to do small-talk

HOUSE: Dr Gregory House. I don't think we've met.
CONWAY: Dr Jamie Conway. I've heard your name.
HOUSE: Most people have. It's also a noun.

- House

Old sayings

You know, there's an old saying: 'Sometimes monkeys die.'
It's not a great saying, but...

- Friends

Seamus Heaney's final words

were by text message. (Snobs and lit.-type ponces take note.)

I'd like to think that they'll appear in his Collected Works.

Books I've actually finished lately: 1

Race relations (humour (is tricky to transcribe))

D'you spell 'homy' with a Y? I wanna be respectful...

- House

Yes!

Coming soon. Or sooner.

Making friends in the big house

And just so you know, there's no hyphen in 'killing spree'.

- Charlie Sheen, Anger Management

InDefinition - 60

ungoing, adj. not ongoing; in a condition of stasis. ' My ungoing battle to produce that bestseller I'm always talking about.'

Utter bollocks

SIMON GARFIELD: I'm not one for writing my emotions down in e-mails, partly because I think it's odd writing on a keyboard, y'know, how much you love someone... I think you still want to send love-letters - that's the reason we don't send condolence e-mails...
CLAIRE ARMITSTEAD: But Hemingway was writing on a typewriter; he didn't write in handwriting.
SIMON GARFIELD: Oh, yeah, but it's still that human connection.

- theguardianpodcasts

The Isherwood section is worse.

On Teju Cole

Publishers now pitch their books like Hollywood concepts, so Teju Cole’s first novel, “Open City” (Random House; $25), is being offered as especially appealing to “readers of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” and written in a prose that “will remind you” of W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. This is shorthand for “post-colonialism in New York” (O’Neill), “lively multiracial themes” (Smith), “free-flowing form with no plot, narrated by a scholarly solitary walker” (Sebald), “obviously serious” (Coetzee), and “finely written” (all of the above). There is the additional comedy that Cole’s publishers, determined to retain the baby with the bathwater, boldly conjoin Smith and O’Neill, despite Smith’s hostility, advertised in an essay entitled “Two Paths for the Novel,” to O’Neill’s expensive and upholstered “lyrical realism.”

- James Wood, The New Yorker

Further notice

[with further thanks to Mika Tennekoon]