Not invented here (Glenn)

You need to know this --- acyrologia (Glenn)

This is so true!

We have been out to lunch in inexcusable ways, but it's not entirely our fault...

...which google-translates into...

habuimus ad prandium inexcusabili vias tantum sed non culpam

...which google-translates into...


we had lunch at the only ways inexcusable but not a fault

...which google-translates into...


non solum ad mores edimus prandium inexcusabili culpa

...which google-translates into...


not only to the character we had lunch inexcusable fault

...which google-translates into...


non solum per respectum ad indolem edimus prandium inexcusabili culpa

...which google-translates into...


not only with respect to the nature of the inexcusable fault we had lunch

...which google-translates into...


non solum quantum ad rationem culpae edimus prandium inexcusabili

...which google-translates into...


not only with respect to the notion of inexcusable fault we had lunch

...which google-translates into...


non solum quantum ad rationem culpae edimus prandium inexcusabili

...and so, folks, we've reached a fixed point, the ninth application of the translation function is idempotent, applying the function again and again doesn't change the result:

not only with respect to the notion of inexcusable fault we had lunch

There's order in madness.

One wonders whether all google-translations reach a fixed point (exercise left to the reader).

German for beginners

(Hat tip: Sina DunkleWelle)

The translation yes...well, "Kondome" means Condoms, "Barcode" is barcode, "Tattoo" is actually not German, ("Tätowierung"), "Kasse" is checkout, "witzig" is funny, "ich hasse" means I hate...that should do it...

Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot --- Chapter III (not a review)

We're not good at reviews unless we can complain about Hollywood producers not understanding what "ion propulsion" means, or not knowing about the ambient temperature on Titan, the Saturn moon, or/and so on.

So this is not a review but a post about the third chapter of Dave Shafer's debut novel "Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot." We're jealous of the success of his book, of course, but that doesn't keep us from really loving the third chapter. The book is about a global conspiracy (data, computers, etc) but we have no clear idea of the conspiracy yet in Chapter III where we meet the main protagonist of the story, Mark Devreaux. Mark graduated from Harvard, like his ex-friend Leo, another important protagonist---amazing how many people graduate from Harvard in American novels (although Shafer graduated from Harvard himself, so he holds some poetic license).

Dave Shafer

Mark is/was a copy writer at some internet upstart---amazing how low Harvard graduates can fall in American novels---but then he has a creative night with OxyContin (the drug), Pouilly-Fuissé (the chardonnay, usually overpriced in our opinion---St. Veran, also a white Beaujolais, has a much better quality-price quotient) and with an IBM selectric (that was/is a typewriter, a technology not quite up to the tricks of ion-propulsion). So Mark pulls an all-nighter and writes a piece about "Motivation in an Unjust World." The piece is discovered by James Shaw, the quasillionaire and godfather of the conspiracy we don't know of yet, so Mark is duly booked for Margo!, a talk show hosted by Margo, the Oprah Winfrey look-alike.

...and grammar (Glenn)

"F***" (English for beginners)

Spot the difference

(This is somehow related to our Fountain of Geneva story:)

Pick me up

The Term Resurrectors of Trayas (Maud)

We met Maud in the street the other day, and she, normally a serene neighbor with a charmingly stand-offish approach to local gossip, she was all-aflutter.

"Michael," she says, "I have something for your. I've seen the light! Have you ever been a member of the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts?"
"Yes," I say.
"And?"
"Well, I got evicted."
"By Avril Mondragon?"
"How do you know?"
"Never mind," she says, "but we're getting the band back together again. There's a new society. The Term Resurrectors of Trayas."
"The what?"
"The Term Resurrectors of Trayas. Let me explain. Or better, let me not explain. A picture says a thousand words."

(She shows me this picture:)

"Queer"

"Here, she says, "queer" resurrected. Queer!"

Shakespeare---let's celebate his 450th birthday...

...and repost our piece about his 18th sonnet:

(So, it starts:)

Since we are a literature blog now, we have to do serious stuff, like posting some serious pictures, like. Like this one...

Tyson Beckford

...which brings to mind Shakespeare's 18th sonnet...

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 

...(you don't want to look at the HTML code underneath)...

...but you might want to look at this clip, eternalizing David Gilmour, the singer of Pink Floyd, when he set the sonnet to his music, because that's what aging rock stars, like us, do, when, they, have, their, reflective, moments...





...and judge yourself.

Hold on, here are a few pointers to Sonnet 18:

Handsheets for the erotic writer (6) --- from Catherine Millet to James Joyce

Not really a handsheet, but anyhow:

We haven't seriously researched this, but writing style is not different from finger prints or irises, every author has her own. And the spread of the distribution is wider, think of comparing the foot print of a dinosaur with the touch of an ant or the mark of a rabbit (even inside a genre, just compare erotic writers Susan Johnson and Ludmilla Sanders).

We had this idea to look at a few female erotic authors, their rendering of the climax, the crest, the moment, when he

brings you off with that extraordinary precision soon unbearable, sooner or later after having you mounted with the vacant expression of a mating animal, having you kept there for an hour with his extraordinary erotic fabulations, perhaps after he would have tried out the most acrobatic positions, and the most improbable substitutes (cucumbers, sausages, Perrier bottles, a policeman's luminous white trunchheon), and then he would suddenly become quiet a few moments before orgasm...

...and compose all this into a report of last night's meeting of minds and bodies of John ("Ben") Fletcher and erotic author Brigitta Haagen-Dasz in the second part of the Green Eyes.

Yes, along those lines, more or less, although we'd like it to be a bit more poetic.

Let's think.

Okay, let's proceed this way, let's try to apply a simple elimination filter, not really modifying anything, just eliminating unnecessary, extraneous, or otherwise irritating expressions.

Catherine Millet at home

So, for example, let's not employ the verbification (yes, it exists, and an ugly word it is) the verbification of climax.

By the way, all expressions above are from Catherine Millet, founder and editor of France's leading art magazine Art Press, you may have heard of her and her book The sexual life of Catherine M. It is---spoiler alert---extraordinary---her book, and there's this familiar clustering of superlatives that we will now try to tackle:

San Francisco (2) ("Sex im Zeitalter seiner technischer Reproduzierbarkeit")

Right. "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter..." Even readers of The New Yorker will know, this was Walter Benjamin. What they don't know, what even I didn't know at the time, I went to school with Walter Benjamin, sort of, in the sense that the house of his (Walter's) parents was located right opposite to my primary school in Grunewald, Berlin, Germany. He was born there. I didn't know since I didn't know about Benjamin at the age of 6 through 11, and because the plaque that informs post-nazi Germany about his birthplace had not been in place so soon after the war.

Walter Benjamin

Reader's of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung will certainly know (about Benjamin), Germany's newspaper of record, although a bit less than the New York Times (the record), because they (the Frankfurters) had been leaning a bit too far to the right (then). They sound more balanced now (the FAZ), (are you still there?) (nice, isn't it, running your own blog, no anal copy editor to deal with), the layout has changed (the FAZ's), and square miles of its tree-based newspaper space are now dedicated to large, pictogrammatical pieces of artwork so that Germany's post-intellectual elite doesn't have to read so much. The German sounds different, too, a bit more modern. What sounds surprisingly old-fashioned is an article in the last weekend edition of the FAZ about sex and the internet. I didn't keep the copy of the paper, so this is from memory (stupid). (See below for more about Ampersant's hyper-parenthesization).

Sometimes we need some pun (1) Glenn

The fattest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi. 

I thought I saw an eye-doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.

She was only a whisky-maker, but he loved her still.

A rubber-band pistol was confiscated from an algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.

No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.

A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering. 

A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.

Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

A hole has been found in the nudist-camp wall.. The police are looking into it.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

The mice of the world are meeting to invent a worser mouse trap

Emma Thompson recommended it as compulsory literature for all politicians.

You is deliberate done hurt the child's feelins
It's set in the Okefenokee swamp, only a few miles from Waycross (where the offices of Doyle-Roy Hunnsbruck are located).

I is more the human bean type


And only a few miles from Monroeville, where Ben's parents live.

Pardon my beg to differmints, sir
We knew nothing about it, of course, it never traveled to Europe.

You is a mite loose in the flue
Pogo Possum, the comic strip by Walt Kelly

This is earthquake weather
These are a few lines gleaned from the strip

Don't seem my pot luck gone be so good
We'd love to use the dialect as well, if we only could learn it...

If I cooks you and you cooks me, who gone be around and enjoy us?
...perhaps after living a few month in Georgia, somewhere in a rural community...

Christmas is coming again
...where people are eager to share their vernacular with strangers?

Hydrogen, nothin' but the best hydrogen an' high grade oxygen --- a steal

Forget it.

Here are a few more lines:


We gone put you countin' snow Early morning volcanoes Oh, posterity has been dealt a cruel blow Oh, I knows they up to some sort of privacy It's gotta be did The mice of the world are meeting to invent a worser mouse trap

Walt Kelly

I Write Like ... David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest 1)

Cool, folks, cool. We blogged about the I Write Like web page two years ago when it compared a simple blogpost of ours to William Shakespeare --- well this sentence already tells you something must be wrong with said app, but we didn't push the issue since the corresponding link had soured in the meantime.

Today, rummaging through Infinite-Jest-blogs in search of pictures, we rediscovered the link under a new web address, and tested it on more pertinent material from the Green Eyes. The app works as expected, there's a window where you paste your text and click a button. An analyzer compares your text to its data base (Bayesian statistics, neural networks, you name it), and returns the name of the author you resemble most (it always comes back with an answer, it never says "Go Away," or "Bah," or uses similar expressions you know so well from your correspondence with the leading publishing houses).

OK, so, we start with the Prologue of the Green Eyes. Not Shakespeare this time, but...

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

 ...Horribile dictu, we never read H. P. Lovecraft, can't even properly place her/him. It must be Wahlverwandschaft, then. We taught Artificial Intelligence so we know a thing or two about neural networks. How stable might the application be, we wonder,  what would be the outcome for the next piece of text, Chapter 2 (you know, Chapter 1 has been relegated to an appendix)? And the answer is...

The price of vengeance --- Korea (3)

So we’re on this BA flight to Seoul and grab the Daily Mail, the British tabloid.

“The Price of Vengeance” --- that's the boldface headline of the Mail today and we don’t recognize the faces. “Vicky Price is shell-shocked,” though, and “Chris Huhne may receive a lighter sentence for pleading guilty.” Expressions like "Hell hath no fury," and the Greek saying "a woman and the sea are the same in danger," dance before your lying eyes (Vicky is Greek).

All this has little to do with Korea, except that’s eternal and universal and we have to write it down so we can use it in the next part of the Green Eyes. The entire first 11 pages of the tabloid are about Vicky & Chris & collateral damage & even the boobs on Page 3 have to defer to pictures of a Greek wedding “where Huhne gave his stepdaughter away [although] the MP had already begun a fateful affair with his bisexual aide.”

A man is beautiful

It's perhaps a minor issue, so give it perhaps a minor thought. What's wrong with this poem:

A man is beautiful

but

you have to swing

and swing and swing

and swing like

a handkerchief in the

wind

Well, consider this one:

A woman is beautiful

but

you have to swing

and swing and swing

and swing like

a handkerchief in the

wind

That better, right? Well, it's also from Jack Kerouac, the last one. But that's not the only thing. Let's think about this some more.