Significant objects redux

I did not imbue the hot dog with major significance! (See list item 99.)

Seizure-detecting snakes

Home from Thanksgiving wanderings. Very weary. But...

... "I don't carry Redrock into the food area because people think it's unsanitary" (FT site registration required).

"Up to three idiosyncratic majuscules"

Caleb Crain against camel case! (And more on intercapping).

Belated happy Thanksgiving - I am on the road and shortly about to run a marathon, for which I am truly thankful, only I would not be sorry if it did not always seem to involve getting up so early in the am!

Still or sparkling?

I am mildly averse to scandalmongering, but I cannot resist linking to this little piece about the death of Alan Bennett's female lover because it represents such a good example of how to deflect (if one were only witty and British!) an intrusive or impertinent question:

After the media furore over Bennett's reverse outing died down in the mid-1990s, portraits of the playwright and photographs of him posing with the painter David Hockney on the walls of Davies's tearoom were the only public clues to the pair's long-term relationship. Bennett, meanwhile, kept outsiders in the dark about his sexual preferences. When asked once by the actor Sir Ian McKellen at an Aids benefit whether he was heterosexual or homosexual, Bennett replied: "That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water."

"What's the forecast?"

Mr Thriller wins the race (FT site registration required).

Fustian!

Not recommended.

Like minds

The latest xkcd echoes the opening of Charlie Stross's The Family Trade!

I spent the later part of the evening soliciting the soothing effects of the Jeeves Omnibus.

What I wish I were doing right now?

Things to look forward to in 2010!

I am tempted to link to the very gruesome stories about Peruvian murders for human fat, but will instead end on a happier note: pet duck rescued from overflow pipe by team of firefighters.

And

this is so farfetched that I could hardly believe the email in my inbox - but my younger self would never have forgiven me if I did not get a ticket to this, although it will mean missing a talk that I really wanted to attend! Arghhhh, schedule conflicts...

Upcoming

I think I must go to this, it sounds so exactly my cup of tea, although it will have to be squeezed in before meet-up for early family dinner:

November 21 5PM Andrea Rosen Gallery
525 W. 24th St NY (212) 627-6000

Writer Shelley Jackson offers an illustrated lecture in applied necrophysics, with selections from the archives of the Shelley Jackson Vocational School of Ghost Speaking and Hearing-Mouth Children (founded 1898), including early travel writings from the land of the dead and recordings from the school choir’s Music for Stammererers. The mechanics of channelling the dead and the structure of the necrocosmos will be explained, with a brief refutation of certain errors made by fellow thanatomath Matthew Ritchie. Class will conclude with a collective attempt to channel the dead.

Postscript

Re: sabbatical plans, I am wanting to write two books and do vast amounts of triathlon training in preparation for IMWI!

4 more Mondays

I teach Mondays and Wednesdays this semester, but Monday is my heavy day: so, four more Mondays and then (it is a strange thought - I have a sabbatical coming up!) I will not teach again until January 2011; I would guess I can scrape through the next four weeks somehow?!?

Light reading around the edges: three books of true excellence, and all (curiously) very much the sort of thing I would have liked to write myself in a slightly alternate life: Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, which is so funny I was actually regularly laughing out loud as I read it but which makes me also fairly glad I do not live in Geoff Dyer's head (but I am certainly now going to read D. H. Lawrence's book on Thomas Hardy, which David Bromwich was also praising recently); Denise Mina's The Dead Hour, which I do not know why I did not read much sooner (it has been hanging around here for some time, I have loved her previous books - especially the Garnethill trilogy - but had a spate a year or two ago of going slightly off crime fiction - however, it was a happy find on the shelf as I bounced off the walls Friday night with exhaustion and the mental insanity of mid-November in a very busy fall semester); and Daryl Gregory's Pandemonium, which is absolutely the sort of book I most perfectly love and wish I could write, only I am having - not a midlife crisis - a midlife acknowledgment that I will never write the books of Dick Francis, Lee Child, Charlie Huston, Mary Stewart, Charlaine Harris or indeed for that matter Daryl Gregory (the list is quite long, and includes my best-beloved practitioners of the Light Reading genre, with or without demons/vampires/zombies) - I highly recommend it, though...

The sequel

More Barthes:

. . . if you like words to the point of succumbing to them, you exclude yourself from the law of the signified. . . . My body itself (and not only my ideas) can make up to words, can be in some sense created by them: today, I discover on my tongue a red patch which appears to be an abrasion, or in medical terms an excoriation--painless, moreover, which fits in perfectly, I decide, with cancer! But examined closely, this sign is merely a faint desquamation of the whitish film which covers the tongue. I cannot swear that this whole little obsessive scenario has not been worked up in order to use that rare word, so attractive by dint of its exactitude: excoriation.

Effet bienfaisant d'une phrase ~ Beneficent effect of a phrase

From Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes:

X tells me that one day he decided "to exonerate his life from his unhappy loves," and that this phrase seemed so splendid to him that it almost managed to compensate for the failures which had provoked it; he then determined (and determined me) to take more advantage of this reservoir of irony in all (aesthetic) language.

Recap: "I like, I don't like"

From September 2007, the Dizzies challenge and my old response...

"Cockamamies"

Reading Roland Barthes is amazing for many reasons, but the latest one is that by looking up the word decalcomania ("Fiction: slight detachment, slight separation which forms a complete, colored scene, like a decalcomania") I have learned the origin of the term decal!

(And: the decal craze of the late 1800s!)