Here's hoping...

The older and crankier he got, the more convinced he was that in the end all writers get pretty much what’s coming to them: the destructive praise and flattery, the killing attention and appreciation.

(New Yorker)

From the horse's face

"It’s a funny thing about life that, when you put it in a novel, it’s dead."

- Martin Amis, in Prospect

Indefinition - 13

slowlights, n. Real-time test-match footage, as shown on Day 5, to fill broadcast schedule in light of humiliating defeat.

Boswell vs Johnson - LIVE!

ASH: Diary idea a cracker. My biographer (i.e. I) will be so gutted when I reach 70 and have never got round to it.

Dom: You'll have to busy yourself editing mine... X

ASH: You are a total Johnson x

Slanket

(Thanks to RL)

From Cairo

Pretty sure that, while I'm trying to finish my book over some lunch, there is a woman in a burkha breast-feeding a baby.

- JRHS, brother and A-rabist

The death of humour

Dear all,

It pains me to admit that I have just deleted an Amnesiac post(-it), at the request of a lawyer.

The lawyer in question (you may or may not recall) had, last April 1st, executed a superb prank on his colleagues, prompting an increasingly absurd correspondence between him and several office juniors about a non-existent all-expenses trip to the Caribbean and the young French counterpart they might have to share a room with.

Alas, he writes to tell me that killjoy types have given him shit about it, so would I take it down? Since I didn't get the FWD'd e-mails from him in the first place, this seemed fair. The only thing worse than seeing this splendid joke deleted would be seeing the joker fired.

Grimly,

A

Incoming!

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Booty Poppppppp

(Thanks to RL)

Pour mon camarade

How did they command such deference - English teachers? Compared to the men who taught physics or biology, what did they really know of the world? It seemed to me, and not only to me, that they knew exactly what was most worth knowing. Unlike our math and science teachers, who modestly stuck to their subjects, they tended to be polymaths. Adept as they were at dissection, they would never leave a poem or a novel strewn about in pieces like some butchered frog reeking of formaldehyde. They'd stitch it back together with history and psychology, philosophy, religion, and even, on occasion, science. Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too.

- Tobias Wolff, Old School

Apocalypse Acoupleofweeksago

Reviewing The Indian Core jazz gig at Barefoot, Colombo.

Not lost in transLaportation

No-one carries the English in their hearts.

- Bernard Laporte

Touched By The Unknown

- a nun from beyond?

Actual headline from this week's Sunday Times (SL).

From Mendelssohn minor to Ursa Major

Je suis le maitre D-grade puns.

Chamber Music Society of Colombo gig.

Five-and-a-bit Dials

Numero huit-b.

Ici.

Feeling the Roth (p.3)

They decided to avail themselves of the facility reserved to people in our own century when they don't know what to do - they went to the cinema.

- The Legend of the Holy Drinker

Feeling the Roth (p.2)

The nuts and bolts of a miracle have nothing miraculous about them.

- The Legend of the Holy Drinker

Feeling the Roth (p.1)

'I see,' said the clochard, 'that you have understood me and my sense of honour perfectly. I give my word that I will keep my word.'

- The Legend of the Holy Drinker

'****ed' are the meek

Any idea of freedom must include the freedom to be poor.

- Rana Dasgupta

Herod rides again!

Cribs recalled for Christmas

Ethiopians vs the World (Service)

Ethiopian tour operators tear it up in Docklands in anger at the BBC.

One sympathises.

Lateran thinking

Yr 7 History exam

Source B: Peter Connolly, 1978

Hannibal tried to bring 34 elephants to Italy. All but one died crossing the Alps.

Source C: Mike Corbishley, 1989

Hannibal astonished his enemies by marching to Italy across the Alps. His huge army of 40,000 men also had 37 war-elephants with them. Hannibal reached Italy with 26,000 men and 12 elephants.

Q5 Sources B and C were both written by experts on Roman history. Do the differences mean that one of them must be wrong?

[A Of course not. They could both be wrong.]

CIA Kids' Page

Seriously.

Jazz Club - not so 'nice!'

Getting Mounted for Rs800 (drinks not incl.).

Exporting tossers to Krakow

Bugoslawska Marcinkowska fights crime in the Renaissance Market.

[Thanks to AT]

InDefinition - 12

saxoporn, n. musical genre, originating in '80s Demi Moore movies, now found also in chain coffee-shops, DIY superstores and branches of LUSH.

Yes, mate!

Machan - coming soon to Europe!

InDefinition - 11

titter, v. traditional schoolboy reaction to mention of jugs, norks, boobies, and other adolescent synonyms for jubbly fun-bags.

A 'flat' Strauss

All-time classic sub-editors' headline-writing contest winner - with a concert review attached.

Meanwhile, in the Times Education Supplement....

"The pressure is on the author to deliver as enriching an experience as video games do."

- Jeff Kinney

Novel UPDATE

Verbatim

"I find Jewish things very funny. Apart from the Holocaust."

- KJW

Further Thurber

Tout, as the French say, in a philosophy older than ours and an idiom often more succint, passe.

- Further Fables for Our Time

De haute en bas

I am the birdshit on the statues of once-great men.

'Harry Potter student found hanged in room'

It was only a matter of time.

Old joke

What's the difference between an arts critic and a yoghurt?

'Dicks unhappy with referee'

(but ain't that always the way?)

Seriously, though...

The student-teacher relationship

Getting in on the Colombo music scene.

Hauteur! Hauteur!

I find my name listed in the program of the Edinburgh International Festival among those of writers invited to take part in its Writers Conference.... Needless to say that I am supremely indifferent to "the problems of a writer and the future of the novel" that are to be discussed...

- Vladimir Nabokov, letter to The Times, May 30, 1962

Titles gone begging - 10

The Principle Principle - or, Why People Think I'm An Arsehole