(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 126

Books I've actually finished lately:113

The description [in Minima Moralia] of a short-order cook in a place like Teddy’s Cafe, as ‘a juggler with fried-eggs’ is Nabokovian, though in addition to seeing the cook as a juggler Nabokov would probably have put a spin on the eggs too. I thought of this as I made a note in my notebook...

- Geoff Dyer

One way to improve JD Salinger

... I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page 

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil -
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet -
'Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.' 

- from Billy Collins' 'Marginalia'

'India Sahib'

... surely?

Second Best Mangal

Come in, Van Wilder - your time is up.

[courtesy Yamille Wickramanayake/Menaka Ashi Fernando/'Sri Lankan Spelling' Facebook group]

So...

My housemate has asked me - post factum - if it is alright that she borrowed one of my books to level her projector.

The book is not a first edition, or anything (and yes, I did notice the gap on the bookshelf; and yes, I do know precisely which book it is), so I said it was fine, and it was. Kind of.

Let's say this housemate is a chef. It occurs to me now to wonder how she'll react when I borrow her food mixer, dehydrating rack, or imported Japanese knife-whetting stones to prop up my 'overflow' bookstacks...

P'raps not...

[with thanks to Zach Smyth]

Byron's drinking habits

ROB: Now, Trelawny is worried, cos he's concerned that Byron is gonna take Shelley's skull - because he already had a skull which he used to drink from. 

STEVE: Yeah, see, I think that lets Byron down... All that sort of great passionate poetry, and then you find out he used to drink from a novelty mug.

- The Trip to Italy

Cross-cut

There's a scene in the very excellent The Trip to Italy where the now-familiar Coogan-Brydon banterthon ends with "... That's the crux."

The next frame is a close-up of headstones in the foreigners' cemetery in Rome.

I'd really like to believe that this was intentional.

Favourite foreign onomatopoeia - 10

borborygmus - (Greek) the sound of intestinal gases rumbling

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

Got watalappam/n?

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

OMG

This book, apparently, is not a joke.