"Getting off at Mill Hill"

From the LRB letters column:

From Susan Pedersen

I can understand Bob Hall’s glee at having (as he thought) found me out, but I’m afraid the Blackburn residents Kate Fisher interviewed for her study of birth control did use ‘getting off at Mill Hill’ as a metaphor for withdrawal, for the simple reason that their ‘Mill Hill’ was a suburban train station on the way into Blackburn (Letters, 11 June). Had they been Londoners it would obviously have made no sense, but they weren’t and adopted their own local bus and train stations to get across what they meant. One of the Lancashire residents Lucinda Beier interviewed for her study of public health advised that one should ‘get off the bus at South Shore, don’t go all the way to Blackpool.’ It’s hard to imagine an activity (or a phrase) less conducive to linguistic standardisation.

Susan Pedersen
Columbia University, New York

From Bill Peppe

As any sailor could have told Susan Pedersen, the safe procedure is to ‘get out at Fratton’, the last station before Portsmouth.

Bill Peppe
Carbost, Isle of Skye

From Dorothy McMillan

My version of the ‘getting off’ expression for coitus interruptus is ‘getting off at Paisley’, the station before the terminus at Glasgow. I am also reminded of a Glasgow colleague’s expression, ‘getting off at Govan’. Tom Leonard has a poem ‘A Priest Came On at Merkland Street’, and Merkland Street was the old Partick Station underground stop, the one before Govan, itself the stop for Ibrox, the Rangers football ground. Can anyone decode this?

Dorothy McMillan
Glasgow

From John Cashmore

It would seem that it is in the history of each major English city to have an alighting point. Perhaps its proximity to the final destination is a reflection of the inhabitants’ approach to risk.

John Cashmore
London W9

"Lovelily dreadful"

A new adverb for Light Reading?

"They were reduced to despair"

Via the Times Archive Blog:
Curiously, just the other day I was contemplating The Tale of Two Bad Mice:

Breaking news

As per my previous post, an offer you can't refuse - get an advance copy of The Adderall Diaries (which will be published in September) by following these instructions...

(There is a slight "chain letter" element, but do not be alarmed!)

(And if you have not already read his novel Happy Baby, you are missing out on one of the great novels of our time!)

"My life sits next to me like a jar of paint"

From Stephen Elliott's mesmerizing The Adderall Diaries, which I absolutely loved:

People often feel exploited when they find themselves in my work. It doesn't matter if I call it fiction; I know as well as they do that's not an excuse. I don't bother trying to defend myself. It's not defensible, it's just what I do. I spend years crafting a two hundred-page story, all the time my life sits next to me like a jar of paint.

"O to tie parcels once more!"

At the TLS, Claire Harman on the latest volume published in the scholarly edition of Virginia Woolf's essays:

“writing articles is like tying one’s brain up in neat brown paper parcels”, she wrote to Ethel Smyth. “O to fly free in fiction once more! – and then I shall cry, O to tie parcels once more!”

Publisher-agnostic

The Tor.com bookstore. It is an interesting and unusual approach - it is funny, I was just wishing the other day that someone would send me a big bundle of the books Jo Walton's blogged about there and that I haven't already read!

Alternate selves

I like Andrew Miller's "Lives Unled in Realist Fiction" - and we all should have such good websites, with our articles and book chapters available as free PDFs!

"Escape is entertainment"

New York City's comptroller is a Star Trek fan...

Literary sex

From Lauren Collins' New Yorker profile of Nora Roberts (site registration required):

Whether or not her characters use condoms depends, she said, on the circumstances: "I'm not a public-service announcement. I'm not going to screw up the mood just so I can be politically correct." She continued, "My favorite use of condoms was in 'Montana Sky,' when Tess goes to seduce Nate at his desk and he's kind of like, 'Well, you know, I'm not prepared,' and she pulls out like twenty of them, and he doesn't know whether to be flattered or afraid." When Roberts doesn't mention birth control, she said, it is an artistic omission, and the reader can assume that the characters took care of it.

Also (unrelated): how Blackadder changed the history of television comedy (hmmm, that is a box set I might have to obtain...).

"When we first became interested in chicken..."

At the Observer, Stephen Bayley has a very funny piece about the new permanent exhibition in Leeds on the history of Marks & Spencer:

Because of Marks & Spencer, the introduction of tights and the nationwide distribution of chilled chicken are, at least in my imagination, interwoven in cultural history. And each was, for rather different reasons, a cause for celebration. The chickens were a product of Macmillan-era futurism: the result of experiments by the government's Low Temperature Research Station mingled with the entrepreneurialism of Britain's chicken revolutionary, Colonel Corbett of Sun Valley Farms, Hereford. New technology refrigerated trucks shipped chickens hither and yon in "the cold chain process", a coinage worthy of Dr Strangelove. The president of the Board of Trade said: "There should be a law against it."

At about the same time, experiments in a "fabric of tomorrow" known as Cantrece allowed American tan tights to go on sale in 1962. The sinister caramel hue of American tan had weird gastronomic associations, just as its name suggested yearnings and frustrations for exotica among pale local women just then beginning to sense the opportunities of turboprop package holidays; a period ad shows immaculately coiffured travellers boarding a British European Airways Vickers Viscount. Meanwhile, at home and in the dark, even as many apprentice Casanovas found tights a manmade obstacle to natural curiosity, as a functional innovation in the area of decorum they made miniskirts possible.

Food and sex are inextricable and, strange for so conservative a company, it is pleasant to record that Marks & Spencer helped modernise both. While freshly chilled chickens motored at 70mph up the new M1, daring combinations of synthetic knickers and bras made functional underwear into a colour-co-ordinated and fetishised commodity. For many with memories of student life in the 70s, with its bizarre privations and opportunities, an alarming juxtaposition on show in Leeds of a packet of Chinese style chicken and cashews against turquoise floral knickers brings a Proustian memory rush of nights of undergraduate passion, at the same time summarising a great deal of the pathos in life's appetites and desires.

“He gets that monk stuff from the History Channel”

Not in the spirit of mockery, but because it is an amazing quotation! From Michael Winerip's Times story about a thirteen-year-old who persuaded his father to start taking him to church:

Among the many reasons Ryan wanted to go: he’s a big reader, enjoys fantasy literature and has seen theories suggesting the world may end in 2013 due to the configuration of magnetic forces.

Glimmering images

From Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book:

Why, when the lights go out and the storytelling begins, is the most compelling tale (most convincing, most believable) a ghost story? Since most of us have no experience of ghosts in the material world, this should be the tale we least easily believe. The answer is that the story instructs its hearers to create an image whose own properties are second nature to the imagination; it instructs its hearers to depict in the mind something thin, dry, filmy, two-dimensional, and without solidity. . . . It is not hard to imagine a ghost successfully. What is hard is successfully to imagine an object, any object, that does not look like a ghost

"Nectarine Fruits"

At the Guardian, John Mullan offers a list of ten of the best pieces of fruit in English literature. It is curious, either I am an extreme fruit-lover (it is possible!) or else a lot of very good literature is about fruit - the first four on his list are indeed four of my particular favorite works in all of English literature, and I endlessly as a child reread the abridged version of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" as illustrated by Ellen Raskin. Here is Mullan, in any case, on that strange and appealing poem:

Luscious fruit bring some strange sexual perdition in Rossetti's beautifully weird verse fairy tale: "Crab-apples, dewberries ... / Dates and sharp bullaces, / Rare pears and greengages, / Damsons and bilberries, / Taste them and try". There are more varieties in the first paragraph of this poem than anywhere in Eng. lit.

(Illustration taken from this site.)

"There are three key steps to disappearing"

Former "skip tracer" now helps people disappear (FT site registration required).