Frenemies

(A new one on me.)

Hitchens v Amis; Big Papa v F Scott; you get the idea.

Worth it for the closing line on Mormon Nailer.

How to write letters

God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country.

- Hemingway (to F Scott Fitzgerald)

[with thanks to Mika Tennekoon]

Best pitch EVER!!

Just say yes or no to this: Kafka, Woolf, Hemingway, Chaplin, and Sontag are debating the best movie ever made.

- David Thomson, to the editors of McSweeney's Thirty-One - Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: old forms, unearthed

Some half-dozen gems

from (the typically-beautiful) McSweeney's Thirty-One - Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: old forms, unearthed:

parchment is replaced by pen and paper, which is replaced by predictive text on Finnish cell phones.

- Darren Franich and Graham Weatherly, 'Introduction'

MARCI: I think everyone likes the penis. Lesbians just don't like how men are attached to the penis.

- Mary Miller, 'A Dialogue Between Two Maids in the Twenty-First Century, One of Whom is Skeezy: a new whore dialogue'

SOCRATES: ... It is not always the keenest eye that is the first to see something.

- Plato, The Republic

HEMINGWAY: I've been to every place I used. I'd seen the mountains in the early morning. I'd tasted the wine.

- David Thomson, 'After Citizen Kane: a new Socratic dialogue'

the goal of Socrates is not to answer a question, but rather to reveal that the preexisting answers are incorrect or deficient.

- Eds. marginal note

the letters are minute and bristle with serifs like little hooks (inducing a half-conscious discomfort in the throat-clearing reader).

- Shelley Jackson, 'Consuetudinary of the Word Church, or The Church of The Dead Letter: a new consuetudinary'

we hope you'll enjoy this issue, and that those of you who have recently graduated, or been laid off will consider McSweeney's for your internship needs. You will be valued, if not adequately paid.

- McSweeney's (per se)

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.

12 out of 50 of the 'coolest' books (EVER!!)

Here, according to Shortlist.com are the 50 coolest books in existence.

By which they, of course, mean novels. All but two written in English (I include Trainspotting). All but one written after WW2.

Of which I have read approx. 12. To wit (and in Shortlist's order):

On The Road
Naked Lunch
Slaughter-House-Five
Generation X
A Confederacy of Dunces
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Trainspotting
Fight Club
Watchmen
The Great Gatsby

and halves of Middlesex and The Crying of Lot 49.

I make no apology for the remainder, nor any judgement on the issue of 'cool'. The caveats and small print one might apply to such a list, however (any list of this nature, but this one in particular), would/probably ought to include books I regret bothering with (Naked Lunch); books that have certainly deterred me from reading anything else by the same author (Lot 49) and/or books I have no intention of reading (Dice Man, Fear of Flying, Neuromancer, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Wasp Factory, Morvern Callar, The Secret History); authors I have persevered with but whose books turn out all to be remarkably similar (Kerouac, Coupland); authors not represented here by their best work (Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, HST); authors by whom I have read other works (Hemingway, Calvino, Heller, Ballard, Amis, Bukowski, Murakami, Orwell, Capote, Wolfe, Franzen, Chabon, DeLillo); and books I have consumed, instead, as film (American Psycho, Clockwork Orange, Perfume, One Flew..., Nineteen Eighty-Four, and - if it can be counted - Howl).