Etymological

At Slate, Paul Collins considers the etymology of the term "shit-faced." (Via John Staines.)

Paul must not have had a copy of Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang to hand. If he had, he would have surely quoted an early entry for the first sense of "stupid, ignorant" (a letter by Hemingway: "Some shitfaced critic writes Mr Hemingway retires to his comfortable library to write about despair"), and also the classic instance of the second sense ("very drunk") as it appears in the movie Heathers: "Okay, just as long as it's not one of those nights when they get shit-faced and take us to a pasture to tip cows."

I will write a longer post at some point (possibly even later this week) about The Florestine Collection. One of the most moving things was learning that the beautiful little cinema in Columbia, South Carolina called the Nickelodeon, whose proprietors have been hugely supportive regarding Helen's films, has raised significant funds towards expansion and is going to name the new media education center after Helen. This is definitely a cause I'll be doing some fund-raising for; I'll perhaps post something here once I have more details.

Have only really been consuming the most undemanding of light reading, given travel etc.: Henning Mankell, The Troubled Man (highly worthwhile, and possibly even my favorite installment in the entire series); Michael Connelly, The Fifth Witness (reliably enjoyable, only a bit dull in parts due to high levels of courtroom content and also the central "clue" unduly jumps off the page, I didn't work out the twist but I was well aware that it must incorporate this detail, which I think is a slight technical failure on Connelly's part).

Before I was traveling (too busy last week to update, or else I have already listed these and subsequently forgotten?): Holly Black, Red Glove (enjoyed very much); Graham Joyce, The Silent Land (unsettling, good in many ways, not perhaps so much my cup of tea - too much Sartrean afterlife as a teenage reader, no strong preference for this sort of Jonathan Carroll-style vision of afterlife!); Sophie Hannah's Little Face (implausible and with a needlessly complex timeline but more or less readable); Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog (loved it - I will read anything she writes, the texture paragraph by paragraph is just so good!).

Every child needs a typewriter

Paul Collins on the life and death [ED. "disappearance" will be the better word!] of child novelist Barbara Newhall Follett. (Courtesy of Ed Park.)

Baking powder controversy

At Weekend Stubble, Round Two of the battle for the world's most boring book title.

Closing tabs

David Loftus interviews Paul Collins about his new book (on how Shakespeare's First Folio conquered the world) and various other matters of interest concerning publishing, the book business and so forth.

Yale University Press chooses to omit images of Muhammad from new book on the Danish cartoon controversy.

In praise of literary hackery. (As a Young Person, I aspired to a career of literary hackery in the vein of an Anthony Burgess or a Gore Vidal, but in the event I steered myself towards academia instead, and still think it suits me better - but I love the notion of simultaneously paid and playful literary dilettantism, and am strongly drawn to those figures who pull it off...)

More from Levi Stahl on invisible libraries and his ongoing love affair with the internet, including this wonderful quotation from Max Beerbohm: "'And yet--for, even as Must implants distaste, so does Can't stir sweet longings--how eagerly would I devour these books within books!'"

"[E]ven as Must implants distaste, so does Can't stir sweet longings" is the best description I have ever read of the psychological underpinnings of why a TBR ("to be read") pile of books does not have the same shine on it as an Amazon page for a book that hasn't yet been published! (See under: "The Other Amazon.")

Love bugs

Paul Collins contemplates awful library books.

"FOUR FIELD MICE lost from laboratory"

Paul Collins at the Paper Cuts blog. Here he praises the internet and searchable archives:

Computers have created a Golden Age for historians, because searchable archives make no distinction between the mighty and the obscure — if it’s in there, you’ll find it. Let me give you an example: I wrote an article on the Tricho medical scandal, about a 1920s company that used radiation for cosmetic hair-removal. It was run by a physician named Albert Geyser. When I plugged his address — not even his name, just his address — into the New York Times Historical Files, out jumped a “Lost and Found” ad he’d run in 1923, before his company launched: “FOUR FIELD MICE lost from laboratory, 244 W 74th St., each mou[s]e has a round bald spot on right side caused by scientific experimentation; $20 reward …”