Saturday, January 18, 2014

"this dot, here, this one"

Closing tabs:

Kathryn Schulz on five of the best punctuation marks in literature.

More on indexing. (Courtesy of Dave Lull.)

Mr. Chicken! (I have ordered the book.)

NB many fewer chickens hereabouts than when I was in Cayman in August. B.'s theory: inverse relationship to invasive green iguana population; iguanas like to eat eggs! Fewer of certain other birds, too; I like how the populations are always shifting (much higher proportion of various anoles to northern curly-tailed lizards, also, compared to five years ago, but this sort of thing really concerns micro-environments - geckos are abundant at Regal Beach half a mile down the road, but we don't see many here at the Grandview, though one occasionally makes its way indoors, leading to presence of a plastic cup and piece of paper in the kitchen cupboards with pertinent label "gecko trapper" - that particular discrepancy probably has to do with how well the gecko can camouflage itself against a sand-colored wall versus a light blue one).

1 comment:

  1. Reading that punctuation piece at the same time as The Goldfinch made me want to tell Donna Tartt that the Nabokovian parenthetical loses its force when used on every other page of a 750 page book, regardless of whether it is meant as sincere homage or literary skewer.

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