Distant Eco

In the light of the sad passing of Umberto Eco, I am tickled to discover - turning, for the first time, to the opening pages of The Name of the Rose - that the 'missing' manuscript on which Eco's first and still most famous novel is entirely predicated is only missing because a woman 'he' was sleeping with ran off with it.

The (Sports)Writer's Life

Dolled-up women prefer to have their bottoms pinched by international cricketers and not by those who write about them.

- Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 108

InDefinition - 80

adjutantrum, n, when a not-particularly-high-ranking officer spazzes out at those beneath her, in the interests of her own career advancement.

Zaftig vs Sidebottom

Extraordinary interview with Erica Jong in last Saturday`s Times. According to Jong a lot of the 'bad boy' writers who gave her books bad reviews had more than literary criteria on their minds. "I was too zaftig [curvy] to get a good review. Look at all the women who are praised. They`re either very, very skinny or very, very fat. Some of them are hunchback, and some of them enormously fat" - offensive remark about Hilary Mantel omitted [LOLZ] - "Not one of them is a woman you would want to f***." 

Some years ago I gave Jong`s Sappho`s Leap a very bad review in the TLS. At the time I thought I did this because it was a very bad book. Now I know differently. 

Glad she cleared all that up.

- Harry Sidebottom, on Facebook

In other news, I've just looked up a boozy interview I did with Dr Sidebottom. 1) I note Ms Jong was referenced; and 2) I can vouch his books have since also made it to Afghanistan.

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 87

Although I do have to say it doesn't sound a lot like Dan Stevens...

Bloody Nora

Sure, why would I bother?

- Mrs Joyce, on being asked whether she'd read Ulysses

Books I've actually finished lately: 71

Philip Sidney, romancer

"Fool," said my Muse to me...

- Sir Philip Sidney ('courtier, soldier, poet and romancer'), Astrophel and Stella

Keystroke twins - 34

slummy
plummy

James Joyce - in context

I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of socially better-adjusted women.

Base humour(?)

[source redacted]

"A passion for writing"

French man jailed for phoning and texting his ex 21,807 times

In which I particularly enjoyed the elucidatory photo of a man texting - rather politely, one might add - in English.

[with thanks to Frank MacMillan]

Books I've actually finished lately: 42

Fictional counterpart to (much of) Rana Dasgupta's Capital: a Portrait of Twenty-First-Century Delhi?

Richard Nixon

thought that girls don't swear.

What a chopper.

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.

How Literature works

After the fateful day in 1929 when Virginia Woolf was prevented from walking across the lawn at Cambridge, any instance of an inquisitive woman being stopped by a beadle anywhere and under any circumstances is a reference to Woolf.

- Sofi Thanhauser, 'Hustler Scholars', Wag's Revue

InDefinition - 63

periodic table, n. lady's diary

'Edmondo, my lahv, my lahv...!'

UberFacts ‏@UberFacts

The Spanish word for "wife" (esposa) also means handcuffs (esposas).

Squaddie banter UPDATE

The best thing about the Urban Dictionary's entry (so to speak) for 'squaddy mattress' is that the examples are so clearly verbatim.

(Discuss.)