And his name shall be Khaled. (Wonderful!)- Isaiah, 9:6
Thursday 25 December 2014
Tuesday 23 December 2014
The Great Man theory of history
Rorke came to South Africa because of a lack of potatoes in Ireland.- David Rattray, The Day of the Dead Moon
Monday 22 December 2014
Sunday 21 December 2014
Saturday 20 December 2014
Muddy pastures
Neither the grand Oxford English Dictionary nor the muddy pastures of UrbanDictionary.com yielded up an entry for 'deviltons'.
- Bruce Whiteman, on the selected essays of Michael Hofmann
On Oxford
There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.- Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
Friday 19 December 2014
Tuesday 16 December 2014
Found in books - GUEST ENTRY
I have discovered a truly marvellous proof... which this margin is too narrow to contain.- Pierre de Fermat, in his copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica (as reported in The New Yorker)
Monday 15 December 2014
NB, Lena Dunham (et al.)
The last 28-year-old who could have written a memoir worth reading was Alexander the Great.- PJ O'Rourke, 'They Made Me Write About Lena Dunham'
Duly noted
The root of the word irony is in the Greek eironeia, 'liar'.- PJ O'Rourke, in The Daily Beast
Can there be any job lower
- and, to be clear, I do mean morally - than being the wankstain who editorialises totally self-explanatory 'humour' memes for the internet's retarded readership?
Win a Writer's Retreat in Iceland!
Or, more accurately - Win a Writer's Retreat (oh, but it's in Iceland).
Saturday 13 December 2014
Wednesday 10 December 2014
Jarvis reads The Moomins
A new tune: one part expectation, two parts Spring sadness.- Tove Jansson on the great delight of walking alone, and liking it
Tuesday 9 December 2014
BS Detector
Like abstract painting... abstract poetry extended the range over which incompetence would fail to declare itself.- Clive James, Poetry Notebook, 2006-2014 (in Literary Review December 2014/January 2015)
Found in books - 4
In a freshly-delivered dollop of Chicken Shit for the Soul, by David Fisher.*
--
* Which is sold in some candy-ass countries, I've subsequently discovered, under the title of Chicken Poop... Lame-os.
Monday 8 December 2014
"Disrespected and dicked around"*
The staff of The New Republic quits out of solidarity with their former editors.
Good lads, themselves. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, this is what a sense of honour looks like. And, most probably, what it costs to keep it.
(That said, as I recall, the king in 'The Red Wedding' did not 'stab everyone in person'. Or indeed anyone. In fact I don't remember him even being there. But the affair does very much resemble the new-media-buyout plot currently unfolding in The Newsroom. So props to Aaron Sorkin for having his finger on the cultural-political pulse, as usual.)
--
* She's paraphrasing.
Good lads, themselves. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, this is what a sense of honour looks like. And, most probably, what it costs to keep it.
(That said, as I recall, the king in 'The Red Wedding' did not 'stab everyone in person'. Or indeed anyone. In fact I don't remember him even being there. But the affair does very much resemble the new-media-buyout plot currently unfolding in The Newsroom. So props to Aaron Sorkin for having his finger on the cultural-political pulse, as usual.)
--
* She's paraphrasing.
Friday 5 December 2014
Bad Sex - with Ben Okri
A writer writes what they write and that’s all there is to it.- the former Booker-winner 'graciously' responds to the announcement of his victory
(Congrats due to his editor and his publicist for their significantly better efforts.)
I am a writer...
I am a writer, which means I’m trying not to be broke.- Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams
Monday 1 December 2014
Manliest of the Match
And my Dove Men+ Care Man of the Match is... Dan Biggar.- Welsh commentator, Wales vs. South Africa
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