VIEW Variation in English Words and Phrases

VIEW

posted by Adfero Affero @ 4:35 PM 0 comments

Word Count

wordcount


Wordcount doesn't seem to work directly to the link I put in, but it easy to find the home site from which wordcount can be loaded by Googling.

posted by Adfero Affero @ 3:07 PM 0 comments

I was sat in Google 110,000 times

I was sat in Google (well I didn't check all 110,000)

'Stood', 'Standing'; 'Sat', 'Sitting'

Is it grammatically correct to say "I was sat there" when meaning "I
was sitting there" or "I sat there" ?

If you ever need a formal explanation: Englishforums.com

posted by Adfero Affero @ 9:32 AM 0 comments

Vasily Grossman 1905-64

A WRITER AT WAR
Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945

Anthony Beevor and Lucy Vinogradova, translators and editors

TLS review 25 January, 2006

~~~

Remember reading about this heroic character a year or two go, promising to read Life and Fate, but not doing so.

Wiki:Vasily Grossman

Review/outline and selected passages
of Life and Fate in The Jewish Reader, March 2004

Not about heroes
Guardian review of A Writer at War 19 Novemeber 2005

Bothers Judd on Forever Flowing (1970)

The Last Letter by documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman
film based on letter in chapter 18 of Life and Fate.

posted by Adfero Affero @ 10:33 AM 0 comments

meaningoflife.tv

When you watch blogginghead.tv you come across meaningoflife.tv

Robert Wright interviews a series of philosophers and scientists in clear video.

I've listened to Dennett and the late John Maynard Smith. Started Lorenzo Albacete, who has written God at the Ritz: Attraction to Infinity

Dennett in The Chronicle review: Common-Sense Religion based on his latest book

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

posted by Adfero Affero @ 2:18 PM 0 comments

bloggingheads book club ?

There is a link under different. The category heading will change when something sensible turns up. Common as Cheddar cheese in months,no doubt, with a template for a anyone wanting to set up - e.g. a book club.

Followed a few disccusions (e.g. Sex, cars and Darwin ) then began to think abou the speed of delivery. These guys are bright and talk quickly. There is no back-up transcript. Just a few additional comments after the event. This means you can't word search either in the site or through a search engine, excptt on subject heading and the
post-disccion additions

Bloggingheads.tv

posted by Adfero Affero @ 12:21 PM 0 comments

Oral erudition

If you just can't read another word, pour another cup of peppermint tea and listen these old fogies showing off, warbling on to great effect from ABC Australia.

Clive James and Peter Porter, two expat Australian poets on the books they have read and remembered, humour in English literature, sex and love in literature, and art and politics.

posted by Adfero Affero @ 1:34 PM 0 comments

Raymond Chandler

Accumulating scraps of paper with things scribbled on them is probably not a good idea beyond a certain age: consider the poor sod who has to come in to clear up after you've gone. Who except the stoney-hearted would not start checking words on paper, especially if it was known who had written them down. When this happens to me I start running through a few, and after a cursory glance, bin them, unless there is something worth keeping, in which case I put the quote or whatever in a digital file. Mind, this tidying doesn't last for long: one a few are thrown away then the rest are brushed aside. There is a mounting feeling something more important could, ought and should be done.

Occasionally something turns up which proves fortuitous. This is a good example. Part of this story is how completely I forget what I write down, then, if it is intrinsically interesting, am re-interested all over again, as if it is something seen for the very first time.

On an good quality A4, slightly yellowing - and indication it was three or four years ago or more, unless the paper started off yellow of course! - the words "Fish flakes and compost" - bracketed and with a line between them like part of an incomplete equation - a partially completed design for a house with an arrow pointing at it, but which now means nothing, and a quote from Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye":

The French have a word for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right.

I wonder looking at this whether I took it down from the radio and if there is a semi-colon, or even a colon there and not a full stop as written down.

The main thing I remember hearing or reading about Chandler which both sticks in my mind as a rough paraphrase but which also stung me to the core, when I saw it for the first time and though it applied to me was:

There is nothing so pathetic as an almost writer.

I ought to get the exact wording and its context. But concentrate: What this Chandler French thing is about? It was put into the mouth of a character in one of his books, but it looks like something he, Chandler, might have felt strongly about. Did he have a French connection which might ake this remark more telling?

Authors and creators: Raymond Chandler looked promising. What sort of thing catches my eye? Yes, he studied (law) in France (and Germany) before the First World war, enlisting as a private in the Canadian Army, serving on the front line.

Not germane to the quest for a killer French connection, we learn:

In 1954, just a year after The Long Goodbye was published, Cissy died from fibrosis of the lungs, sending her then 66-year-old husband into a “long nightmare” of mourning that left him with severe depression and resulted in at least one suicide attempt. Biographers like Frank McShane (The Life of Raymond Chandler, 1976) have remarked on the mixture in Chandler's stories of toughness and sentimentality, and how “the emotional sensitivity that made [Chandler's] literary achievement possible also made him miserable as a human being.” That miserableness was much in evidence during the last five years of Chandler's life. He survived it, in part, through the ministrations of Helga Greene, his London literary agent and friend (and, in the months prior to his death, his fiancée), and went on to compose Playback, which was based on a screenplay he'd written in 1947. That novel reached bookstore shelves just 16 months before he passed away, on March 26, 1959.

What's next on the list? Some guys weblog with " P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler had the same English teacher." which is interesting in itself. No reference.

Next Luc Sante in the Threepenny Review ("French Without Tears ") has Chandler highlighted but in what context?

Midway through college, I stopped writing poetry altogether. I doubted my talent, but I also had found what I thought was the authentic music of the American language, in the prose of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. "They threw me off the hay truck about noon," the opening sentence of The Postman Always Rings Twice, seemed to exemplify in nine words all the highest virtues of American prose.

This is interesting as a whole. No way this would have popped up as readily without this Chandler quest. He's also into the French way with words and the American,too.

I haven't found what I was hoping for. Another search another time. Stop with the words. Douglas Adam's on the internet surfacing in my mind...what were those words? Google.

Just a minute what is this? The Long Sunday. A commenter feels the urge to quote Raymond Chandler on the French and their many words on reading this post: Things Changed.

Ah, Douglas: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet.

Why does a dead man's website seem more poignant than his paper words? Because you expect him to do one more post?

But where is your quote? Oh blast, I'll have to paraphrase it: "The internet is very useful but a terrible waste of time."

posted by Adfero Affero @ 11:08 AM 0 comments

Michael Wharton - Peter Simple

Who cannot have idly started to read one of his pieces without being fully away of what it was, to end up in tears of laughter.

Michael Wharton Tel. obit.

Death of a genius

Way of the world Craig Brown

Comic fantasy of Michael Wharton comes to a close

Devoted to a war against reality

posted by Adfero Affero @ 9:12 AM 0 comments

meme: Google "bush"

In light of the problem Google is facing with the US govt., might help them if we resorted to typing in "bush", lower case b, for a week or so, to the exclusion of everything else. Hence they could pass on the records which would surely satisfy the willy-worriers about who was looking up what. Or would it?

Just use other engines for your other searches....

~~~

More thoughts following this in The telegraph, 21 January 2006:

Google may be forced to hand over details of your searches

By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles and David Derbyshire

(1) Look, a database is mostly a problem to you when you don't know what is on it. So Google could provide the data but also publish it on the web. The question being asked is why they keep the info anyway: the answer because it might be handly to someone. They are not going to delete it in real time if it might in someway later add value are they? And hardly anyone would mind if it was used to trap nasty people out there.

(2) People have always been paranoid but the netoweb has made them 50 times more so...and who should blame them.

An example which starts here at Adware report:

Rogue Products: Read Before You Buy

How many of you worry when you download a piece of software which is meant to be doing your computer good that it is either (1) not doing so or (2) doing good plus something else you are not aware of?


Take this : MacAfee Firewall

Don't ask me how to bring in something about books, literary theory, history of literature, the life of the artist in relation to his work, etc, at this point, except to say there must be some budding author writing a novel right now involving his charting the life history of a character with paranoia in the internet age.

~~~

Following on my quest for the ultimate review of Friends and Crocodiles Johann Hari does Stephen Poliakoff: The profile, which fills out some gaps for me. Glad to see he called Shooting the Past "his masterpiece". Quite instructive to be be reminded of how much of the man has gone into the works.

posted by Adfero Affero @ 1:51 PM 0 comments

Poliakoff's Friends and Crocodiles

The Newsnight Review of Friends Crocodiles seemed to confirm the endless, irritating trailers in the weeks leading up to its first showing. I kept saying to myself , If you play that promo one more time, I won't watch the bloody film. But as a fan of Shooting the Past, I had a duty to watch just in case. Twenty minutes in, I was grumbling and moaning "Hurry up, hurry up", though I knew he liked to take his time. I would if I could get to film something of my own. I see interminable arty sequences of man on windswept beach walking and looking in almost anything I have roughed out, including repeat sequences with different music overlays.

The next few days there seemed to be no online reviews to speak of. This weblog:

Viciously Mazinpaned Janina

and E-mag

The First Post
"With friends and crocodiles like these"

Poliakoff’s sweeping BBC drama recycles hackneyed cliches, argues James Bartholomew are todays offerings.

I feel a bit more confident in setting off on my journey through this and to some purpose: learning how to write a good script by studying how someone else ballses-up his.

It was cinematographically good. Poliakoff always does good looking films. The script should have been thrown away. He appears to have finally achieved here what Potter did with his disasterous attempts at writing and directing.

Friends and Crocodiles could have been a good long radio play. Even crocodiles would have worked on radio with sn eccentric dialogue about going up the Amazon to find an undiscovered fruit for a new exciting Brazilian style drink. I actually knew someone who went on an expedition to do just that. One thinks of Anita Roddick rushing round the world to check for new ingredients for her massively over-priced unguents.

The Crocodile, done well, could have been one of the most effective "ideas" in the film.

The crocodile ....represented the secret of how to survive against the odds, having beaten extinction when the dinosaurs died.

Well. Paul said something about antidotes for smake venom if I am not much mistaken, which goes more with the Amazonian fruit/ new species/ entrepreneur bit. If it is meant to represent both the old and the new way of thinking at the same time, its even more clever. Paul also enthuses abot how the crocodile (a relic) has survived un-evolved for milions of years. So what is it about? Script. Bin.




~~~

This was the age of the neuvo-entrepreneur. But think more Felix Dennis. Or, though he this was the 60s/70s, Michael Hestletine buying a Bayswater hotel (or wherever) with an inheritance and ending up with a small publishing empire. You suddenly realise that's what someone else would have done: used news footage. He was stuck with clunky telegraphing, though Nina at Vicious Pastry Maker (sorry Nina!) says:

Friends and Crocodiles did hang together, very very well. It was a smooth and incisive piece of work that was never heavy handed as some people accuse Poliakoff of being heavy-handed.

I couldn't disagree less.

The thing about film, is to show not say. Was Poliakoff's screenplay too long for the 1 1/2 hour slot, so he had to drastically prune? What other explanation can there be for the inexcrable telegraphing which went on all the way through? Typewriters, typewriters, typewriters, yeah, yeah, yeah. Computer: Thing of the future. Email! Very useful. Run a business without ever seeing each other...

~~~~

Anyone who thinks in film, as I do, knows it is impossible not to do homage - its one of the best things about film - Lizzie carrrying a typewriter to work. But what made Poliakoff think having a typing-pool in a small town estate agent made and sense. I kept on thinking of a some modern film adaptation of some Kafka or other.

~~~

When is a piss take a satire? When you are not confident in your ability to convey satire.

Who in his right mind would script someone saying "He's like Gatsby!" You've read the book and seen the film twice. Paul is no Gatsby. He never could be a Gatsby. In any case once said, one is going to be disappointed with the new version, no matter how clever the script or cinematography. Unless that is his point. By getting one of his characters to say it, one is going to fight while watching on with the notion he is just trying to annoy you and disrupt his own film. Who knows.Big red bus. Summer Holiday starring Cliff Richard, Hank Marvin and the Shadows and Una Stubbs.

Let's borrow the dictionary:

satire
1. (a) A literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision or wit.

2. Irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit used to attack or expose folly, vice or stupidity. Synonyms

caricature, burlesque, parody, travesty, satire, lampoon

These nouns denote artistic forms in which someone or something is imitated in an amusing and generally critical manner.

A caricature grossly exaggerates a distinctive or striking feature with intent to ridicule: drew a caricature of the politician.

Burlesque, which usually denotes a dramatic work, suggests outlandish mimicry and broad comedy to provoke laughter: a burlesque playing at the theater.

Parody, travesty, and satire generally apply to written works.

Parody employs the manner and style of a well-known work or writer for a ludicrous effect: wrote a parody of the famous novel.

A travesty is a harshly distorted imitation: a travesty of morality.

Satire usually involves ridiculing follies and vices: employs satire in her poetry. A lampoon is a malicious but broadly humorous satire: a lampoon authored by a standup comic.

Word History
The history of the word caricature takes us back through the centuries to a time when the Romans occupied Gaul, offering the blessings of civilization to the Gauls but also borrowing from them as well. One such borrowing, the Gaulish word *karros, meaning “a wagon or cart,” became Latin carrus, “a Gallic type of wagon.” This Latin word has continued to roll through the English language, giving us car, career, cargo, carry, and charge, among others. Caricature, another offspring of carrus, came to us via French from Italian, in which caricatura, the source of the French word, was derived from Italian caricare, “to load, burden, or exaggerate.” Caricare in turn came from Late Latin carricre, “to load,” derived from the Romans' Gaulish borrowing carrus.

~~~~


At Dadblog another view.

Ian Wylie at Manchester online runs with : Crying crocodile tears for the '80s.

"It's about work, ambition, aspiration, respect, self-esteem, which are all things that motivate us as much as, if not more than, sexual love," explains the man behind The Lost Prince and Shooting The Past.

posted by Adfero Affero @ 7:28 AM 0 comments

Lidia Vianu

Lidia Vianu

The Desperado Age: British Literature at the Start of the Third Millnennium

Bucharest University Press, 2004

She writes here on desperado literature

here her essays on and interviews with poets, novelists and a few critics

posted by Adfero Affero @ 3:13 PM 0 comments

Laura Hird

As for her as a writer I have no idea, but Laura's site is what one might call rich. She links to "digital fiction" at Dreamingmethods.com. Many of these are diverting. Take this

I do regret not having the technical know-how to create interesting looking websites. Although no amount of presentation is going to improve writing, packaging is a large part of the attraction nowadays. How do they learn how to do all this wizardry? I'm not saying a bells and whistles site is essential in order to project writing. But you can see the potential there. A simple example is a section of text, a fiction, with a music overlay. The old-fashioned way was to describe sitting in a room with a Bach cantanta playing in the background. Now we can leave leave three more lines out.

The point though: Is the fancy digital version as effective or more effective? There's nothing to stop the character thinking (in written words) about the effect the music is having on him. What comes to mind is the effect of music in film. Being able to put music or any other sound over digital text is in a sense half way to film. For the text it would have to be a loop to allow for the speed of reading.

posted by Adfero Affero @ 2:01 PM 0 comments

Franco Moretti

My little dream is of a literary class that would look more like a lab than a Platonic academy.

Franco Moretti

Harold Bloom, the Yale English professor famous for his prodigious command of canonical literature, was more dismissive. Interrupting a description of the theory, he pronounced Mr. Moretti “an absurdity.”

"I am interested in reading,” he said with an audible shudder. “That's all I'm interested in".

Tufte vs. Bloom 1 By Paul Ford

Franco Moretti from Wood's Lot 9 Jan 2006.

Elif Batuman's long n+1 essay, Adventures of a Man of Science, Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, is not really the place to start. Other mentions suggest a logical set of links which avoid having to write little myself.


To make it easier:

Literature to Infinity Inside Higher ED > some comments at the bottom

The ideas interview: Franco Moretti John Sutherland, Guardian 9 Jan 2006

Back a bit:

Atlas of the European Novel 1800- 1900 (1998) the Bactra Review, 21 October 1998


By MorettI:


Franco Moretti: Conjectures on world literature
New Left Review Jan - Feb 2000


Franco Moretti : More Conjectures
New Left Review March - April 2003

Graphs, Maps and trees Abstract Models for Literary History—1
New Left Review Nov -Dec 2003 (includes a a set of the graphs)

A review by Marjorie Perloff of Morettis' Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez


A response by Moretti in riPOSTe, with its reply by Perloff

Timothy Burke in a group blog, Cliopatria, at History News Network in a post on 20 January, 2004, runs through a critique. So does Pseudopdium.

...

It would not be surprising if, after reading all this, your mind did not wandered to images of the weighing of human souls, or at least thoughts that someone might start doing the same sort of thing as Moretti by making tallys of the frequency of words in books. With the digitisation of so many this would not be difficult. Presumably it would be possible to achieve this by running texts through indexing software, or some such.

I have no idea why reading about Moretti linked to mention (M002 ) of the parlour game "humiliation" played by academics in David Lodge's Changing Places. But this is part of it if we take Bloom's position. However, rooting about for mentions of "humiliation", led to one gem and all without reading no more than a few words of actual books!

Dostoevesky got there first in The Idiot. Mind, without the e-book it would have taken much longer to find it. From this page in online-literature.com, you can type in 'game', to get to chapter 13. The game follows through in 14.

The classic.reader.com version of The Idiot is easier on the eye than the Gutenberg.org version, though if you were going to start searching for words and drawing graphs, the latter lets you run through from beginning to end.

Came across this: Thoughts on the Idiot of Dostoevsky by Hermann Hesse.

A S Byatt's review of the new translation of Gogol's Dead Souls popped up on the "David Lodge" searches: you can see why from her first sentance. I am pleased to have come across this as I haven't read it (though you can't really play "humiliation" over the air-waves because people need to see the whites of your eyes to see if you are lying or not!)

posted by Adfero Affero @ 10:58 AM 0 comments

Turgenev, Marx

Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal 2001 :

How—and How Not—to Love Mankind

posted by Adfero Affero @ 3:54 PM 0 comments

Behold the Thumbthing

from OHgizmo!

posted by Adfero Affero @ 4:22 PM 0 comments

Is there anything that will stop you touching a book?

Some of nation's best libraries have books bound in human skin
Boston News 7 January 2006

posted by Adfero Affero @ 4:16 PM 0 comments