Gay, Rivers, Beacon

At the TLS, Min Wild on Margaret Doody's new book about Jane Austen's names:

Doody’s argument typically works like this: “in an ‘Emma Woodhouse’ of Hart-Field we find reference to Emma Hart (Lady Hamilton) and to Queen Emma, to the rich family of Watson-Woodhouse and to a woodshed, to perfection and ego, to queenship and hardship”. Later, possible significations of “Hartfield” are forensically turned over: a white hart was Richard II’s emblem, there are White Hart pubs, and hearts can be lost, but the name itself is ersatz and “sounds made-up”, Doody explains. Fishing with her in these waters can feel thankless, and sometimes dull, but an acutely perceptive point may suddenly emerge. There are no fields or deer in tepid Mr Woodhouse’s faded Hartfield: “it is like a memory of the country”.

Also

the name of the restaurant I couldn't remember the other day and liked so much: Basher Fromagerie.

No relation

"Davidson's representatives claim it is the first-ever intellectual property dispute over wigs."

X-ray pressed

Roentgenizdat.

Pretty Polly?

Parrots name their chicks. (Via Shanna C.)

The stranglehold of Jennifer

Via Jane Yeh, an amazing GIF of the most popular girls' names by state over six decades.

ABCs

Not ABCs of the novel - ABCs of the style book! One of my favorite stages in book-writing is when I get the copy-edited manuscript back from the publisher, usually along with a customized style sheet that includes all the proper names given in the text. (Here was a bit of something similar for The Magic Circle.) This book doesn't have a lot of unusual nouns in it, but it does have an amazing canon of proper names. Too long to paste in the whole thing, but this will give a taste of it:

Aciman, André
Acocella, Joan
Adorno, Theodor
Alexievich, Svetlana
Allworthy, Squire
Anthony, Piers
Assingham, Fanny
Augustine, St.
Austen, Jane
Baldwin, James
Balzac, Honoré de
Banks, Iain M.
Barthes, Roland
Beckett, Samuel
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell
Bennet, Elizabeth
Bernhard, Thomas
Berlin, Isaiah
Blake, Nicholas
Blake, William
Bloom, Harold
Boileau, Nicolas
Borges, Jorge Luis
Boswell, James
Boyd, William
Brainard, Joe
Breton, André
Browne, Sir Thomas
Bruen, Ken
Buckner, Brent
Burgess, Anthony
Burke, Edmund
Burroughs, William
Burt, Stephen
Burton, Robert
Byron, Lord
Carter, Angela
Celan, Paul
Chandler, Raymond
Cheever, John
Child, Lee
Christensen, Kate
Crichton, Michael
Coelho, Paulo
Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur
Conrad, Joseph

Closing tabs

Miscellaneous light reading: Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (very good); and, inevitably, 'Robert Galbraith,' The Cuckoo Calling. It is quite decent, but feels very artificial: just as the Potter books were curiously redolent of Enid Blyton, so this one recalls a lost Agatha Christie world of 'mansion flats' and high-end women's accessories! (I think, too, of the Margery Allingham novel set in similar fashion-world environs only of 1930s; and there is a touch of course of Brat Farrar also.) I will read further installments with enthusiasm, and I commiserate wholeheartedly with Rowling's desire to write and publish a book with no pressure or expectations.

Unrelated, though perhaps touching on some of the same underlying questions about fame and expectations and pressure: Andrew Hultkrans gives me a strong desire to see the Big Star documentary.

Heinz tomato-red

At Wired Science, the splendid web-footed salamander.

"That rain-forest experience"

I enjoyed this profile of a choirmaster who lives in the Cathedral Close at St. John the Divine.  I need to go and prowl around the cathedral sometime in the next couple weeks; I have a list of local spots of interest (Grant's Tomb, Sakura Park, Morningside Park) that I need to do some more footwork on so that I can make more of them in the revision of BOMH that I'll be working on over the winter break.  I am most anxious for the semester to be really and truly over so that I can clear the mental space for experiencing places and thinking those revisions through!  Two more very busy weeks, but if I am diligent and not overly dilatory about paper-marking I am mentally and logistically free from the 19th...

Improvement of the breed

"If you’d like to call your pet Kubla Khan, King Kong or Kevin you can always move to Belgium. . ."

I'm in low spirits: I'm totally sick again! Very raw lungs on Monday the day following my long bike ride (heat and humidity exacerbate exercise-induced asthma), and now the predictable course into wheeziness and lung squeaking, phlegm, sinus congestion, etc. In short, another chest cold/bronchitis episode. The first thing I do when I'm back in New York will be to make another appointment with the pulmonary specialist I saw last year about six months after I first realized that I actually had asthma; I also need to find an allergist.

Bugs Britannica

Folk names for the woodlouse: tiddy-hog, God’s little pig, monkeypede, Billy button.

"Venison pasty, pigions, Uncle Robert is dead"

From Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self:

He spaced the lines evenly, with between twenty and thirty to a page. He gave curly ornamentations to the capital letters for the name of the month at the head of each page--very occasionally forgetting it was a new month, so that he had to delete "December" and put in "January." September and October were given in particularly lush capitals, and February's F's always came out looking scratchy with its straight double up-and-down strokes. Some pages have browned to a pale toast colour with the years, but more have remained a fresh, almost chalky white; there are thin, fragile pages, and others that feel downy, almost velvety to the touch. Pepys was a fine calligrapher when he made time to write slowly, as he did for his Diary, and his pages are as beautiful as pieces of embroidery, with their neatly spaced symbols, the curly, the crotchety and the angular, interspersed with longhand for names, place and any other words that took his fancy, on one page a dozen, as many as forty on another. The longhand leaps out at you tantalizingly as you turn the pages, each word suggesting its own stories--Axe-yard, Mr. Downing, Jane, Hinchingb., Deptfd, Whitehall, Monke, Easterday, emerods, venison pasty, pigions, Uncle Robert is dead, Uncle corps, Queen, DY [Duke of York], Robes, papists, Clergy, conventicles, tumults, subsidys, Justice, Sessions, Sr WP, gentleman, yellow plume, petty coate, drawers, summer, amours--small packets of meaning surrounded by the elegant, impenetrable shorthand.

SPPNTCJ

Courtesy of Sharyn November, The Society for Preventing Parents From Naming Their Children Jennifer!