occasionally

Hamm’s mellifluous reading is ‘beautiful’ and ‘poetic’, but his resonant, plush voice and carefully modulated phrasing is also straightening...

Bunkers, cellulose, get thee behind me Internet

Ben Goldacre of Bad Science fame is frittering away his time on Twitter instead of doing the decent thing, i.e. posting on his blog. SHAME, ...

loosely based on...

INTERVIEWER Do people in your books ever come up to you and say, I recognize myself? AUCHINCLOSS They certainly do, but they’re usually so f...

Yes or No?

My proposal went something like this: "It looks as if we are going to lose the war, and if it comes to the point of the Honorable Death...

Eat this chair!

[Kurosawa has to undergo a directing test upon completion of Sugata Sanshiro; the examiners include the censors of the Ministry of the Inter...

mono-no-aware

Rereading Kurosawa's Autobiography. (re editing Uma [Horses]): There is one place in the story where a foal has been sold and the mare f...

motivation

Thinking of applying for a residency in France. They want a 'letter of motivation'. I look around online and find a site with 50 exa...

lexicity

 Through the incomparable Languagehat , I discover that there is a new website, Lexicity , with resources for learning a wide range of ancie...

missed it by that much

It turns out that while FedEx will gladly offer to let you pay 4x over what you otherwise would, they’ll still group your separate package...

wie immer

Increasingly, restaurants are recording whether you are a regular, a first-timer, someone who lives close by or a friend of the owner or m...

Sublet in Berlin

I am looking to sublet my apartment in Berlin from October 1 for 5 months or longer.  Pictures and details here . The rent is €600 a month i...

only one

Why does no one send ME these witty rejection letters?  Publisher to Gertrude Stein, here .

The Spanish men’s intellectual disability basketball team was stripped of its gold medal after it emerged that many of its members  were not...

that clinking clanking sound

Weird piece in NYT on private schools. Though expensive ($40,000 or so a year), they can't cover their costs by tuition -- donations mu...

take that!

The site is simple to use, just sign in with Twitter via Oauth and then your off. Once logged in you can do the following tasks. You can m...

taking responsibilities seriously

I'm reading Gordon Leff's Heresy in the Later Middle Ages.  The phenomena described are terrifyingly familiar - the malaise which af...

always the last to know

Reading an interview of Christopher Tolkien which appeared in le Monde last month. French readers, it seems, meet Bilbo and Frodo Baggins o...

either either

"You've no idea how much email I get telling me how wrong every single thing in the book is. There are a lot of very specific thin...

A-Y

Every oral-sex seminar, “every masturbation how-to session, every tip I heard on how to stimulate the anus — each of these seemed to be mock...

over there

Part of a series begun in World War II for American GIs going abroad, A Pocket Guide to Vietnam was intended to introduce them to the custo...

Dr. Mutti

Was checking in on Twitter with the usual shame and self-loathing, when what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a retweet from Anatol S...

The stalker came again and rang the bell at the house door for a long time. I sat silently at my desk in case someone let him in and he came...

best text

I got an email from David yesterday.  He has been having a book copyedited, and had had to explain the meaning of "best text": I m...

gloom

When I first started blogging I was young(er) and naive.  I linked blithely away, confident that whatever I linked to would always be there....

monkey biz

A while back I read a post by Sarah Manguso on the FSG blog: How to Have a Career: Advice to Young Writers.  There were points that could h...

possible worlds

In learning languages, at first everything is repulsive and burdensome. If one were not encouraged by the hope that, after having accustom...

Nomination Whist

Was rereading David Parlett's History of Card Games today. I've come across critics who say morosely that, while people often SAY a ...

baby it's cold inside

BEHAVIOR OF YOUNG CHILDREN UNDER CONDITIONS SIMULATING ENTRAPMENT IN REFRIGERATORS Behavior of young children in a situation simulating entr...

why a lion and emus?

I wrote to [his American publishers] expressing (with moderation) my dislike of the cover for The Hobbit . It was a short hasty note by ha...

a skilful negligence

After the failures of the Pamela sequels, Richardson began to compose a new novel. [ 1 ] :73 It was not until early 1744 that the content ...

Recovery

  Scott goes home.   He gets a thing of bacon out of the fridge.   Fries four or five slices.   Butters two slices of Wonder Bread, pla...

MS Wha-

He had good reason to fret. Signs that Microsoft would be missing the boat in the next decade were already emerging. That very moment at M...

ich wünschte ich wüßte...

Cathy and Cosma both feel that knowing specific programming languages is not essential. To quote Cathy, "you shouldn’t obsess over som...

discretion

Ratio of published posts to drafts: 1149:636.

Yesterday

Gestern wurde ein Humalog KwikPen vergessen. Gestern wurde ein Mammut vergessen. Gestern wurde ein Ring vergessen.  Gestern wurde ein Gebild...

ipse dixit (allegedly)

1. Mr. Chicago Hates Hyphens What’s wrong with hyphens?  Mr. Chicago hates them, loathes them, despises them.  He hates them so much that h...

found in translation

James Morrow on a new translation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic: In the case of Roadside Picnic , the improvements w...

Wha-?

The position of the Department for Education is that while it would like to see a library in all schools , "this should be a local de...

Found in Translation

“I read foreign novels because they’re better,” was a remark I began to expect (surprisingly, a senior member of the Dutch Fund for Literat...

perfective vision

I call it the pederasty of autobiography; the older self actually loves the younger self in a way the younger self never could have felt or...

over the rainbow

1. We tried to follow Y Combinator’s advice to minimize time fundraising and get back to work. Our goal was not to die from lack of fundin...

--and there's more!

Anne Strainchamps interviewed me a couple of weeks ago for "To the best of our knowledge," for Wisconsin Public Radio, as part of ...

Dead Sea Scrolls

HT Languagehat, a fabulous site with Digital Dead Sea Scrolls.  Given that a typical volume of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert costs £100...

modern times

But, more than the data-compressed brevity and just-the-facts utilitarianism forced on us by our times, it's the etherealization of wri...

metatexts

These are very important for the writer today. For they are probably the way the writer may still be independent. You asked me before wheth...

report a problem with this poem

  The Day Lady Died

tip of the day

If you know French, this is a wonderful series - available at Amazon.fr or alapage.com .

ancient moderns

Going through notebooks, too lazy to translate. Coming across passages I read in the mid-80s (!), thinking How lovely!  And because this was...

motivation...

Il faut cependant fair droit, hors narrativité, à l'éventuelle fonction immédiate du discours motivant. Une motivation peut être onéreus...

prime time

It’s one of the most meticulously covered stories of the moment, except for one its more particularly disturbing implications:  Amazon ‘s an...

bleg

it's a risky view of things for the tragic, in a sense, gives up on justice. This is what happens in ancient Greek tragedy: the gods get...

the stork brought it

LM : What gave you the initial impulse to make Severian a torturer? Was it that abstract notion of wanting your hero to deal with the natur...

go away

David Graeber: An anthropologist who studied people in central Nigeria showed us how we were completely clueless. She doesn’t really spea...

per ardua ad astra

The first known recipe for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was published in 1901 in The Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Scie...

maybe I need to start a webcomic...

Skullkickers is now also a webcomic . I started serializing our early issues, one page every weekday, so that readers could discover us, sta...

history of surgery

The horror of great darkness, and the sense of desertion by God and man, bordering close on despair, which swept through my mind and overwh...

split or steal

HT Ben Goldacre, amazing display of psychology and game theory on a game show, here .

et tu, Brute?

I received this email from an eighth-grader: “Listen, I love your work, but seriously? Selling out to the state test? “Also, before my class...

xkcd

talk the talk

At the end of the 18th century, Nazarene painter Eberhard Wachter rejected a position on the staff of the Stuttgart academy, noting that ‘...

(mute)

Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, to take the most pervasive of these models, had been a highly popular way to theorize the internet in the ...

read 'em and weep

Went to Vogt's Bier-Express for a Duckstein.  They had two poker tables set up at the back of the room. A guy told me the tournament sta...