Anomalies

Some interesting thoughts on style and anachronism in Alan Hollinghurst's review of Peter Carey's new novel at the NYRB:

In Henry Brandling’s narrative, unlike Olivier’s, Carey is claiming to present a historical document, a journal quite specifically written in 1854; here again a number of anachronisms may be mere fictional license, or reasonable guesses that for instance “potty” (meaning a bit mad) might have been idiomatic some time before its first recorded usage in 1920. But still, “you scared the pants off Hartmann,” an idiom first recorded in 1925, “ashtray” (1887), “guff” (US, 1888), “bumph” (1889, and then only as bumf, for bum-fodder), “programmer” and “programme” as a verb (1948 and 1945), are all more or less jarring. When Brandling uses terms like “celluloid” (a plastic invented in 1870) and “snookered” (when the game of snooker wasn’t named till 1889), you start to feel that Carey, a supreme virtuoso of language, who besides can look these things up as easily as I can, must be aiming at some deliberate alienation effect. To what end, though, it is rather hard to say.

Hobson-Jobson

Words of Asian origin used by the British in India.  (Via Jessica Treat.)

Day of culture!

Lunch with my dad at La Lunchonette (I had sauteed scallops and salade nicoise, he had gravlax and rack of lamb) and then an excellent movie, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, at the IFC Center.  Off shortly to see Cock, whose title gave the NYT some difficulty.

(Apropos of which: "We were allowed seven cunts.")

Also: Zero-gravity design?

Piezoelectric headbanging

This site is amazing.  I have always particularly loved the word stridulation....

Wintersonic

At the LRB, Adam Mars-Jones has a fascinating - a devastating - piece about Jeanette Winterson.

At the TLS, Phil Baker on three Soho period pieces. 

"Chine that Salmon"

Elizabethan terminology for carving (via Sarang).

Kafka's eyes

Notional box set of intense desirability! (Link courtesy of Ian C.-B.)

(The sole detail I don't like on this otherwise gorgeous page of designs is the placement of the author's name on the Amerika cover. I don't know why it jumps out at me, but it just doesn't seem right!)

(Is it box set or boxed set? I have always preferred the latter term, but neither one seems actually incorrect, though the first is perhaps a back-formation; on a related note, I really do strongly prefer course release to course relief as the term for getting a reduced course load in exchange for taking on some administrative responsibility, though neither phrase is exactly flattering when it comes to conceiving what it is that one does while teaching.)

Lemsip and The Bill

Tarell Alvin McCraney's new play has a scotch egg in it! Seriously, though, when is this play coming to NYC?

Put out to pasture

Rick Moody talks to Moby about the winsome anthropology of the drum machine.

(NB though I love the coinage equestrianizing as an analogy to anthropomorphizing only for horses, I think that really an equestrian is also a person; I am tempted to suggest instead the more opaque and misleading but equally appealing hippomorphizing instead!)

The Chinese 4-suited money pack

Unsolved Problems in Playing Card Research. (Via Bookforum, who found it here.)

Monday miscellany

At the Guardian, Paul Theroux on living as an alien in England from 1971 to 1990:

Wank was a new word for me. I learned others in those years: pantechnicon, pastilles, salopettes, anorak, ginger wine, trifle, syllabub, riddling (the coal grate), gaiters, trug, secateurs, borstal, Boche, Gorbals, yobbos, scotia (a sort of household trim), valance, shandy, sent to Coventry, applied for the Chiltern Hundreds, chicane (as of a set of racing cars), gauntlets, whitebait, infra dig, subfusc, knackers, Christmas crackers, Dutch courage, Dutch cap, double Dutch, Screaming Lord Sutch.

'Dado' should surely be on this list also!

Other links: the Penguin archive, with every Penguin ever published in chronological order; an interview with Kristin Hersh (courtesy of Julie Park).

The books of knowledge

The Widow Blackacre, in Wycherley, The Plain Dealer:

O do not squeeze wax, son. Rather go to ordinaries and bawdyhouses than squeeze wax. If thou dost that, farewell the goodly manor of Blackacre with all its woods, underwoods and appurtenances whatever. Oh, Oh! (Weeps)

From Green's Dictionary of Slang: "squeeze-wax (n.) a surety for a loan; 'a good-natured foolish fellow, ready to become security for another, under hand and seal' (Grose)"; the first example, from a 1698 dictionary of cant, "Squeezing of Wax, being Bound for any Body."

"Sous-vided"

Nico considers the false opposition between schooled and unschooled composers.

Johnny Cash ticket

I saw a fantastically good show earlier this evening; it was a small venue and a relatively little-known singer-songwriter, Pete Sturman at Dixon Place on the Lower East Side, but the quality of the material and the performance would have warranted filling a much larger venue.

Anyway, just a great catalog of songs, a very nice mix of the moving and the comical; the one that makes the tears run down my face (partly because I first heard it not long after our mutual friend Helen Hill died, indeed at her memorial, and because it so strongly makes me think of her, but also just because it is a very good song) is "Wasn't Plannin' on Leavin'". It is a good reminder, too, of the perfection of things on a small scale - this is what the popular song can do, no other genre or mode that I can think of does quite the same thing, it is very lovely and I wish I wrote and sang such things myself!

(Am actually very tempted to get one of the little electric ukeleles that guest performers Sonic Uke were playing...)

Light reading around the edges: Emma Donogue's Room (very good, surely justly deserved to be the huge bestseller it has been); Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (engaging, memorable, it actually belonged in a talk I heard the other day only perhaps it has been written too recently to have made its way in). Curiously both books make something of the word contrail; I would say I had rarely seen this term in fiction, only of course the reason I noticed it in Egan was having just seen it foregrounded in Donoghue...

(I am trying to "read up" a lot of things I put on my Kindle and then didn't quite get to - seeking an "inbox zero"-type level of purity and cleanliness over there!)

Shortened and slanged

Ian Bogost on the rise of the app (via Matthew Battles).

A "ham sandwich"

At the FT (site registration required), Henry Hitchings has an absolutely lovely essay about dictionaries of slang old and new (the first is one I consulted when I was long ago writing about Jonathan Wild, and the second is probably out of my price range but does indeed sound, as Hitchings says, "lusciously" browsable):

Leafing through the pages of Green’s Dictionary, one accumulates a stock of favourite oddments: an “Oklahoma credit card” is a siphon tube for stealing petrol, a “knocking-jacket” a nightdress, and a “fogle-hunter” a pickpocket who specialises (or really “specialised”, one imagines) in stealing silk handkerchiefs. Some of the illustrative quotations are equally droll: one letter-writer recalls that “I told you in my last how she gave the athletic stockbroker at Hove the mitten” – to be given the mitten is to have one’s proposal of marriage rejected – and another makes the seemingly far-fetched claim that “Penrith is becoming a real funk-hole”, though a funk-hole is here a place of refuge rather than somewhere James Brown might have frequented.

Procrastinatory tidbits

At the NYRB blog, James Gleick ponders the OED's new and novella-length entry for the word "information."

At the LRB, Michael Wood reflects on linguistic similarities and differences between Lewis Carroll and James Joyce (the piece also quotes, appealingly, a pun from Walter Redfern's book, which I now covet but do not think I will be able to get electronically: "A person who has been given bits of greenery for her birthday instead of the colourful flowers she was hoping for decides to make the best of things. She says: ‘With fronds like these, who needs anemones?’").

A strange business

At the LRB, Julian Barnes on Lydia Davis's Flaubert:

There is a slightly pretentious term in wine tasting and wine writing called ‘mouthfeel’. (It is also slightly baffling: where else might you feel wine if not in your mouth? On your foot?) The Oxford Companion to Wine calls it a ‘non-specific tasting term, used particularly for red wines, to indicate those textural attributes, such as smoothness, that produce tactile sensations on the surface of the oral cavity’. There is similar mouthfeel about translation. Its general development over the last century and more has been away from smoothness and towards authenticity, away from a reorganising interpretativeness which aims for the flow of English prose, towards a close-reading fidelity – enjoy those tannins! – which seeks to echo the original language.

"Go ahead and Google me"

Caleb Crain on canine internet metaphors:

one day a couple of years ago, when I was walking our late lab-shepherd mix, we met a hound who ignored us in order to focus on the scents left on a tree. The hound's owner apologized by saying, "He's checking his email."

Grumbletonians and bundletails

At the Independent, Rob Hastings on the rediscovery of a seventeenth-century dictionary of slang.