Thursday 31 July 2014
Technical Hitch?
A very close reading of Christopher Hitchens' Arguably, by Rob Crilly.
(Sadly I do not own this magnificently dust-jacketed edition. I have the crappy American paperback, with the bright yellow spine.)
(Sadly I do not own this magnificently dust-jacketed edition. I have the crappy American paperback, with the bright yellow spine.)
Wednesday 30 July 2014
The Psalms - in context
They that go down to the sea in ships would appear to have got things somewhat arse about face.
Wednesday 23 July 2014
Friday 18 July 2014
Favourite foreign onomatopoeia - 11
fnaerettan - (Old English) snoring
[at least according to Paul Kingsnorth, and the 'shadow' glossary of The Wake]
[at least according to Paul Kingsnorth, and the 'shadow' glossary of The Wake]
Wednesday 16 July 2014
Books I've actually finished lately: 37
You suffered a bout of nostalgia while writing the chapter on Noor Begum. You wanted to write about the awkward squats as you sat loudly reciting the Qur'an, say how your left foot felt grinded from bearing all your weight while sitting on the floor, the rapid tak-tak of the ceiling fan as it spun the air with its dusty blades, the dizziness... But you wrote: 'Noor Begum's house provided the comfortable environment for Qur'an lessons and my early lessons in disciplining into working through boredom.
Gotta love James Wood
Days after [Donna Tartt] was awarded the Pulitzer, Wood told Vanity Fair, “I think that the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.”- Evgenia Peretz, in Vanity Fair
Tuesday 15 July 2014
Monday 14 July 2014
Books I've actually finished lately: 36
James Sallis does Vernon God Little meets Lolita in post-Palahniuk Breaking Bad white-trash noir Napoleon Dynamite with guns. For girls.
Sunday 13 July 2014
Saturday 12 July 2014
I only found out recently
that Stanley Kubrick had done a film-script on Napoleon.
Which you can find liberally scattered about the internet.
Jackpot.
Which you can find liberally scattered about the internet.
Jackpot.
From Hartford to Harvard
you have to have the finances to match.
Marc Sidwell talks up the merits of the day job for the creative mind.
City A.M.'s Opinion pages are a place for thought-provoking opinions and views. These are not necessarily shared by ASH Smyth.
Marc Sidwell talks up the merits of the day job for the creative mind.
City A.M.'s Opinion pages are a place for thought-provoking opinions and views. These are not necessarily shared by ASH Smyth.
Friday 11 July 2014
Favourite footnotes: 2
E.g., “Jeffy-Weffy Ringle-Dingle Ding-Dong,” “Jeffy-Weffy Ram-A-Lama Ding-Dong Dummy,” “Dumbfuck,” “Jefster-Wefster Dingster-Dongster Dickface,” etc.- John Howell Harris, THE EFFECTS OF BEING REPEATEDLY CALLED “JEFFY-WEFFY DING-DONG” ON THE HUMAN RAGE RESPONSE IN SUBJECTS NAMED JEFF
VEEP book-signing (Hillary Clinton eat your heart out)
1) WOMAN: Can you write: 'To Alice... This is to get you back.'?
2) SELINA: Look at us. You pretending to be me signing a book I didn't even write.
BEN: It's politics in a nutsack.
3) SELINA: What d'you think of that title?- VEEP, 3:1
BEN: Well, you're so full of shit there's a colon right smack-dab in the middle.
Monday 7 July 2014
Books I've actually finished lately: 35
It took no great insight to guess that Lida did not like writers and that she had attached herself to me because I did not look like one. I shook my head and mumbled a few words to the effect that I did something in the cinema, regretting instantly that I hadn't invented a calling even more distant from literature, such as table-tennis or Egyptology.
Friday 4 July 2014
Four-letter words
I want you to dictate to me a memorandum of a couple of pages. Four letter words and short sentences on the situation in Vietnam, the 'Vietnam Picture'.- Lyndon Johnson, in Errol Morris' The Fog of War
Thursday 3 July 2014
Unfamous last words - 4
Charge the windowsill.- Col. (Ret.) Dorrigo Evans, quixotic (and fictional) Australian survivor of the Burma railway, in Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Wednesday 2 July 2014
InDefinition - GUEST ENTRY
escape goat, n. (coll.) reverse Trojan horse
[with thanks to Howard Male (and Big Brother)]
[with thanks to Howard Male (and Big Brother)]
Only in English - 16
tracheotomy
tracheostomy
Two minutely differentiated words for two technically different things which are, in fact, basically the same thing. But not.
tracheostomy
Two minutely differentiated words for two technically different things which are, in fact, basically the same thing. But not.
Tuesday 1 July 2014
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