the mad yak's buttons

Out to pasture...

...until 12/29

Humour moi

Very droll
The French have jokes, but do they have a sense of humour?
"Does humour exist in France? Before the French revolution of 1789, the word humour was hardly known. People knew esprit (wit), farce (prank), bouffonnerie (drollery) and humeur (a state of mind, or mood), but not humour. Only in 1878 did the French Academy, the institution that stands guard over the French language, accept humoristique as a French word. A year later Edmond de Goncourt used humour without italics as a French word in his novel 'Les Frères Zemganno', but not until 1932 did the academicians give their approval to the noun humour."

Totium orbium lingua

Roman rebound
So you thought that irksome language was dead?
"...the world has galloped so gratefully to English, which has little use for genders or gerunds and never, if it will have been able to help it, employs the future perfect.
Yet hold on a minute (festina lente, as Caesar would have said, while gripping some hapless Gaul by the neck). Latin has a surprising number of advocates in the modern world. And these are not merely classicists or arty types entranced by the glories of Virgil, the cockiness of Catullus or the breathtaking fall of the rhythms and words of Horace. They are people who believe Latin has a future, as well as a past."

Oldie (December 2002) but goodie:
The English invasion
English, a mongrel language itself, has spread its genes worldwide. But does this mean that other languages are doomed?
"WHO are i leader no global? Bosses who say no to everything? Not even that concession to its own syntax does the Italian language make: no, they head the anti-globalisation movement. And that's in the Corriere della Sera, a Milan newspaper of much solemnity. Such is the ruthless onset of the English language. It is an utter mongrel itself, born of Latin, Greek, German, French and more, plus sundry ex-imperial spatterings. But just take a shufti or a dekko—a look, as British soldiers learned in Egypt and India respectively—at the way the mongrel is biting back."

Graphic exposure

Graphic novels get book world's respect and geeks - er, readers' - satisfaction

Please, Sir, I Want Some Moore
"The lazy British genius who transformed American comics."

(first yak on the scene: Blog of a Bookslut...Actually, she has some great links today, especially the one for the Anthony Lane piece, so just visit her, would you?)

Espousing restraint

Yeah, you read this in, like, February. Read it again because it didn't get through, did it?

A WRITER LAMENTS; OR WHY YOU SHOULDN'T ASK YOUR SPOUSE TO READ YOUR STUFF
"This is a touchy area for many writers because they usually don't have any friends or the friends they used to have, they've lost by forgetting to return phone calls. Then there are the ones they've alienated, by exaggerating their negative characteristics to the point of deviance or downright villainy, then using them as characters in stories.
So that leaves your pets, who can't read, or your mate, if you're lucky enough to have one."

The power of cheese

This is almost three weeks old, but it contemplates "the career of Camembert as a metonym for modernity"; writing that posits cheese as a metonym for anything deserves to be read and reread:

Breaking the mould
Camembert: A National Myth by Pierre Boisard, translated by Richard Miller
"Steven Shapin muses on what the transformation of Camembert cheese, from Norman speciality to international supermarket staple, can tell us about authenticity in a globalised world"

Bend this, Beckham!

Cult author Moore scores more than Beckham in book sales
"Michael Moore's root-and-branch onslaught against George Bush and the globalised economy yesterday brought off a coup in publishing, if not politics.
It topped David Beckham's biography among bestselling non-fiction titles for 2003. Moore's Stupid White Men, lamenting that 'the government has been seized by a ne'er-do-well rich boy and his elderly henchmen', came second to the Atkins New Diet Revolution."

Nitpick: Shouldn't that comma after "henchman" be inside the quotes? Or have I been offending the grammar gods most of my life?

Inspiration by inebriation

It seems I missed this earlier, probably because I was drunk:

Books and booze
"HL Mencken, a columnist to treasure and revere, once wrote that the cocktail was the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet. Ogden Nash actually wrote a poem about a Martini ('There is something about a Martini... I think that perhaps it's the gin'). In this season of parties and hangovers, The Observer is happy to salute the strange but potent marriage of books and booze, of libations and literature."
...
"Quite why poets should be more inclined to alcoholism than novelists and playwrights is a matter for debate."

Ah, at least there is the consolation that all those poets dying younger than other writers are too sloshed to realize it.

Boldly going where Amazon has gone before

Google opens up books to searching
"A service to search the entire text of books has been launched by web giant Google. It could play an important role in the evolution of the way people search for information online, say some experts.
Google Print Beta lets searchers view excerpts from books, as well as author's notes, reviews and cover artwork. It also provides links to online book sellers and related advertising. The service works when a user types the phrase 'print.google.com' and search words into Google's search box."

Milled Boons

Toll road built on pulped fiction
"The new M6 toll road has been built on two and a half million copies of old Mills and Boon novels to prevent it from cracking.
Unsold copies of the books were shredded into a paste and added to a mixture of asphalt and Tarmac. It helps to bind the asphalt and the Tarmac, preventing the surface from splitting apart after heavy use."

(first yak on the scene: MobyLives)

Buy low, sell high

This Buyer of Fiction Has Real Clout
Meet the woman who decides what Barnes & Noble stocks.
"NEW YORK--Sessalee Hensley, fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, once broke up with a boyfriend who didn't share her enthusiasm for 'One Hundred Years of Solitude.'
...
She wields influence on a far larger scale now, deciding just which novels the behemoth book chain stocks.
...
How many copies will be bought--of Proust, McMillan, John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and Ms. Hensley's favorite, Barbara Kingsolver--how they'll be apportioned among the 652 Barnes & Noble branches and 200 B. Dalton Booksellers in her fiefdom, how they'll be placed and positioned--this is all part of the gig."

(first yak on the scene: ArtsJournal)

To infinity and beyond

Book review (books review? book reviews?) of three books on infinity:

How to Catch a Tortoise
"According to the iterative conception, a set is something whose existence is parasitic on that of its members: the members exist 'first'. Thus there are, to begin with, all those things that are not sets (planets, twins, positive integers etc). Then there are sets of these things. Then there are sets of these things. And so on, without end. Each thing, and in particular each set, belongs to countless further sets. But there never comes a set to which every set belongs. There is no set of all sets."

Does anyone else find this excerpt strangely erotic?

Write on

TEV, via Moorishgirl, led me to an article that suggests writing is actually good for you. This seemed like welcome news, especially after the article on how poets die younger than other writers, until I realized that the former article was two years old; even if writing was good for you then, I'm sure it's bad for you by now.
In any case, I will continue to plague the world with my poetry regardless of how it affects my health. As long as it offends others, I will consider it worthwhile.

Getting graphic

Super Brits
A graphic novel about Victorian champions
"If the time machine in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine were real, I'd use it to go back and stop the making of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a very bad movie based on a great graphic novel. (While I was at it, I'd probably sabotage the recent movie version of The Time Machine too.) Short of temporal travel, the only thing that could get rid of the bad taste of the film is a sequel to the graphic novel, a sequel even more brilliant than the original. Fortunately, we now have that."

Okay, so it's not Maus or Safe Area Gorazde, but it might still be worth a gander. Be sure to read Alan Moore's comic, not Kevin Anderson's novelization of the movie.

Also of interest:
The Graphic Novel Silver Anniversary
After 25 years, the format has reached a new beginning

A Graphic Literature Library
25 books from 25 years

How Do You Say "Dirty Flatfoot" in French?
"With 'The Bloody Streets of Paris,' Jacques Tardi and Leo Malet do for comix what the French New Wave did for film: taking the trappings of American pulp fiction and retooling them with a cool, European update. Why the French take seriously what we throw away — detective pictures and comix among other things — remains anybody's guess."

"Mood" spelled backwards is "doom"

Have you tried The Guardian's poetry moodmatcher?
My moodmatch:
You're experiencing a bit of an existential crisis, aren't you? Here's a poem to help you through your long dark night of the soul.

Life
WHAT is our life? A play of passion,
Our mirth the music of division,
Our mother's wombs the tiring-houses be,
Where we are dressed for this short comedy.
Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is,
That sits and marks still who doth act amiss.
Our graves that hide us from the setting sun
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest,
Only we die in earnest, that's no jest.
-Sir Walter Raleigh (1554 - 1618)

La littérature

Reading immaterial
"It's a damn stupid question in the first place, 'What's your favourite book?' When did anyone ever ask that of anyone else, in the course of regular social intercourse? It has no answer. There isn't a book so peerlessly good that it dwarfs all other books, unless you're prepared to say Ulysses and run the risk of getting glassed in the face.
So, really, it's not about books at all, it's about distinguishing yourself through your distinctions, choosing a work that gives the fullest picture of the person you'd like the world to consider you to be. That's why everyone always says Catch-22..."

The writer, Zoe Williams, goes on to discuss the BBC's Big Read and how almost all the top books were children's books and/or had film adaptations. She sees this as a result of anti-intellectualism: "The appreciation of highbrow literature is seen as synonymous with self-regard, so that a love of the lowbrow is less embarrassing..."
Furthermore: "The Big Read pretended to be a celebration of literature, but it's actually a celebration of the kind of curtain-twitching Englishness that makes literature think it's too good for the likes of us, and it should go and live in France."
Or maybe people pick children's books as favorites because of sentimentality and nostalgia and the memory of wonder. I think Zoe Williams needs to lighten up and read some Roald Dahl. I'll be in Paris reading Proust if she wants to reach me.

Easy does it

Book review of India in Slow Motion:

Slow Progress
"Just over a dozen years ago, India threw open its economic doors to the world after four decades of tariffs and bans had nearly bankrupted her. But the initial spurt of foreign interest was ground down by what one of the most distinguished of India-watchers, Mark Tully, calls the Neta-Babu Raj - the deeply corrupt rule of politicians and bureaucrats.
In India in Slow Motion, Tully sets off with his partner, Gillian Wright, to find out why progress is so slow in India; why religious communalism is on the increase and corruption as endemic as ever. And yet, as one would expect from a man who has devoted his work and life to India for nearly 40 years, the journey is funny, poignant, profoundly informed and engagingly intimate."

Sounds very interesting. Tully was the BBC bureau chief in Delhi for 25 years.

Indiana, UK

By way of Blogalization:

Stroke gives woman British accent
"An American woman has been left with a British accent after having a stroke.
This is despite the fact that Tiffany Roberts, 61, has never been to Britain. Her accent is a mixture of English cockney and West Country.
Doctors say Mrs Roberts, who was born and bred in Indiana, has a condition called foreign accent syndrome.
This rare condition occurs when part of the brain becomes damaged. This can follow a stroke or head injury. There have only been a few documented cases."

English killer language?

Thanks to Nancy Gandhi for spotting the following article on the assimilation and localization of English in Asian countries (and do read her dairy-inspired Hinglish jingle, too):

Lingua Franchise
"Mat saleh calling it English killer language. Wah. For chiak kantang, salarymen it a bit the different, lah?"
...
"But the truth is, English isn't just exploding across the universe; it is being exploded on contact with other societies and languages. It is, arguably, already the spokesperson for no single political power or region. In Asia, at least, English feels this protean."

I think I need to go read something by Stuart Hall now.

Crazy? I'm not crazy; I'm a teapot.

Thanks to The Elegant Variation for sending me into the darkness:

Writer's block sign of deeper problems
"The way Ernest Hemingway had a drinking problem and Fyodor Dostoevsky had a gambling problem, Dr. Alice Flaherty, a Harvard neurologist, had a writing problem. During a severe bout of postpartum depression three years ago, she wrote so compulsively that the sight of a blank computer screen gave her a narcotic rush. Worried about damaging her family, Flaherty started taking a psychiatric drug to calm her mood swings -- and found that, although ideas still churned in her brain, she was no longer able to put them on paper. It was an excruciating case of writer's block. Thus begins her exploration of 'hypergraphia' -- a term used by doctors to describe the overwhelming desire to write -- and its agonizing opposite."

Next stop: McLean.