[SFP]

‘…Love you Fresh Princess.
Pause. That “L” word completely catches me off guard, like a player from the other team stealing the ball right as you’re about to make a layup. It takes all of your momentum and you spend a week wondering how that steal slipped up on you.
Yeah. Chris saying “love you” is like that, except I can’t waste a week wondering about it. By not answering, I’m answering, if that makes sense. The shot clock is winding down, and I need to say something.
But what?
By not saying “I” before “love you,” he’s making it more casual. Seriously, “love you” and “I love you” are different. Same team, different players. “Love you” isn’t as forward or aggressive as “I love you.” “Love you” can slip up on you, sure, but it doesn’t make an in-your-face slam dunk. More like a nice jump shot.
Two minutes pass. I need to say something.
Love you too.
It’s as foreign as a Spanish word I haven’t learned yet, but funny enough it comes pretty easily.
I get a wink emoji in return.,,’

‘…Sadness creeps into Momma’s eyes, but she gives me a small smile. “When I was growing up, your grandmother would do and say hurtful things when she was drunk, and apologize the next morning. At an early age I learned that people make mistakes, and you have to decide if their mistakes are bigger than your love for them.”…’

‘…After lunch we gather in the living room, join hands, and bow our heads.
“Black Jesus, thank you for this blessing,” Daddy says. “Even when we weren’t so crazy about the idea of moving—”
Momma clears her throat.
“Okay, when I wasn’t so crazy about the idea of moving,” Daddy corrects, “you worked things out. Thank you for Lisa’s new job. Please help her and continue to be with her when she does extra shifts at the clinic. Help Sekani with his end-of-the-year tests. And thank you, Lord, for helping Seven do something I didn’t, get a high school diploma. Guide him as he chooses a college and let him know you’re protecting Kenya and Lyric.
“Now, Lord, tomorrow is a big day for my baby girl as she goes before this grand jury. Please give her peace and courage. As much as I wanna ask you to work this case out a certain way, I know you already got a plan. I ask for some mercy, God. That’s all. Mercy for Garden Heights, for Khalil’s family, for Starr. Help all of us through this. In your precious name—”
“Wait,” Momma says.
I peek out with one eye. Daddy does too. Momma never, ever interrupts prayer.
“Uh, baby,” says Daddy, “I was finishing up.”
“I have something to add. Lord, bless my mom, and thank you that she went into her retirement fund and gave us the money for the down payment. Help us turn the basement into a suite so she can stay here sometimes.”
“No, Lord,” Daddy says.
“Yes, Lord,” says Momma.
“No, Lord.”
“Yes.”
“No, amen!”…’

‘The Hate You Give’ by Angie Thomas

[SFP]

On Cooking Blindfolded

Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of a doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well.

Genius, as we tend to talk about it today, is some sort of mysterious and combustible substance that burns brightly and burns out. It’s the strange gift of poets and pop stars that allows them to produce one wonderful work in their early twenties and then nothing. It is mysterious. It is there. It is gone.

This is, if you think about it, a rather odd idea. Nobody would talk about a doctor or an accountant or a taxi driver who burnt out too fast. Too brilliant to live long. Pretty much everyone in every profession outside of professional athletics gets better as they go along, for the rather obvious reason that they learn and they practise. Why should writers be different?

Shakespeare wasn’t different. Shakespeare got better and better and better, which was easy because he started badly, like most people starting a new job.

Nobody is quite sure which is Shakespeare’s first play, but the contenders are Love’s Labours Lost, Titus Andronicus, and Henry VI Part 1. Do not, dear reader, worry if you have not read those plays. Almost nobody has, because, to be utterly frank, they’re not very good. To be precise about it, there isn’t a single memorable line in any of them.

Now, for Shakespeare, that may seem rather astonishing. He was, after all, the master of the memorable line. But the first line of Shakespeare that almost anybody knows is in Henry VI Part 2, when one revolting peasant says to another: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ In Part 3 there’s a couple more – ‘I can smile, and murder while I smile’. And each successive play has more and more and more great lines until you work up through Much Ado and Julius Caesar (1590s) to Hamlet and King Lear (1600s).

Shakespeare got better because he learnt. Now some people will tell you that great writing cannot be learnt. Such people should be hit repeatedly on the nose until they promise not to talk nonsense any more. Shakespeare was taught how to write. He was taught it at school. Composition (in Latin) was the main part of an Elizabethan education. And, importantly, you had to learn the figures of rhetoric.

Professionally, Shakespeare wrote in English. And for that he learnt and used the figures of rhetoric in English. This was easy, as Elizabethan London was crazy for rhetorical figures. A chap called George Puttenham had a bestseller in 1589 with his book on them (that’s about the year of Shakespeare’s first play). And that was just following on from Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence, which had come out a decade earlier. Book after book was published, all about the figures of rhetoric. So I should probably explain what the figures of rhetoric are.

Rhetoric is a big subject. It consists of the whole art of persuasion. The lot. It includes logic (or the kind of sloppy logic most people understand, called enthymemes), it includes speaking loudly and clearly, and it includes working out what topics to talk about. Anything to do with persuasion is rhetoric, right down to the argumentum ad baculum, which means threatening somebody with a stick until they agree with you. One minuscule part of this massive subject is the figures of rhetoric, which are the techniques for making a single phrase striking and memorable just by altering the wording. Not by saying something different, but by saying something in a different way. They are the formulas for producing great lines.

These formulas were thought up by the Ancient Greeks and then added to by the Romans. As Shakespeare set to work England was busy having the Renaissance (everybody else had had the Renaissance a century or so before, and we were running late). So the classical works on rhetoric were dug out, translated and adapted for use in English. But it wasn’t the enthymemes or the topics or even the baculums that the English liked. We loved the figures. The ‘flowers of rhetoric’ as they were called (hence The Garden of Eloquence), because, as a nation, we were at the time rather obsessed with poetry.

So Shakespeare learnt and learnt and got better and better, and his lines became more and more striking and more and more memorable. But most of his great and famous lines are simply examples of the ancient formulas. ‘I can smile, and murder while I smile’ was not handed to Shakespeare by God. It’s just an example of diacope.

… Shakespeare did not consider himself sacred. He would often just steal content from other people. However, whatever he stole he improved, and he improved it using the formulas, flowers and figures of rhetoric.

Mark Forsyth: The Elements of Eloquence, How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase - Preface: On Cooking Blindfolded

[SFP]

FRIDAY, 25 JANUARY 2019

Schnapsidee

There is a German word, schnapsidee, for an idea that seems great when you're drunk but which wilts and withers when considered under the stern gaze of sobriety.

This is a useful word, at least for me.

The etymology is almost too obvious to point out: schnapps is German for strong drink, liquor might be the best English translation; and idee is idea.

This should not be confused with a Schnapszahl, which is a number composed of a repeated digit, like 77, or 666. This latter seems (merely seems) to be down to the idea that in certain games, if your score ends up as a Schnapszahl, you have to buy everybody a schnapps.

This explanation seems convincing to me, if only because of the Nelson in cricket: which is the idea that it's very bad luck to be on a score of 111 (or, indeed, 222) if you make it that far. This bad luck can only be remedied by raising one leg off the ground, obviously.

Anyhow, this post seemed a lot more interesting last night...

Mark Forsyth; The Inky Fool [https://blog.inkyfool.com/]

“Let us drink,” I said, and drink we did, but my heart was not gladdened. Presently I put my question to him. “Is it wrong to ask why?”
“Of course it is wrong, for a man who presumes to ask ‘why’ has no home nor resting place in the land of Kem. All must be as it has been—and you know it. I trembled with joy when I entered the school—I was like a thirsty man who has found a spring, a hungry man clutching at bread. And I learned many fine things.… Oh, yes. I learned how to hold a pen and handle a chisel, how to model in wax what will be hewn from stone, how stone is polished, how colored stones are fitted together, and how to paint on alabaster. But when I longed to get to work and make such things as I had dreamed of, I was set to treading clay for others to handle. For high above everything stands the convention. Art has its convention no less than writing, and he who breaks with it is damned…. O Sinuhe, my friend, I, too, have asked why—and only too often. That is why I sit here with bumps on my head.”

Mika Waltari. “The Egyptian”.

[SFP]

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting.

That is the tale; the rest is detail.

There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

Tonight, as you eat, reflect if you can: there are children starving in the world, starving in numbers larger than the mind can easily hold, up in the big numbers where an error of a million here, a million there, can be forgiven. It may be uncomfortable for you to reflect upon this or it may not, but still, you will eat.

There are accounts which, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look—here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers—many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes, when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews: there will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. And they are wrong. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy, as the earth is cleansed of its pests.
Leave him; he cuts too deep. He is too close to us and it hurts.

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each others’ tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. We know the shape, and the shape does not change. There was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—unique in detail, forming patterns we have seen before, but as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There’s not a chance you’d mistake one for another, after a minute’s close inspection.)

We need individual stories. Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual stories, the statistics become people—but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children?
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
A life, which is, like any other, unlike any other.

Neil Gaiman: American Gods

[SFP]

…There was silence as they crossed the bridge.
“Who did kill those men?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“I would.” She sounded angry now. He wondered if bringing the wine to the dinner had been a wise idea. Life was certainly not a Cabernet right now.
“It’s not easy to believe.”
“I,” she told him, “can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe.”
“Really?”
“I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if hey’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.” She stopped, out of breath.
Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud. Instead he said, “Okay. So if I tell you what I’ve learned you won’t think that I’m a nut.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Try me.”
“Would you believe that all the gods that people have ever imagined are still with us today?”
“…maybe.”
“And that there are new gods out there, gods of computers and telephones and whatever, and that they all seem to think there isn’t room for them both in the world. And that some kind of war is kind of likely.”
“And these gods killed those two men?”
“No, my wife killed those two men.”
“I thought you said your wife was dead.”
“She is.”
“She killed them before she died, then?”
“After. Don’t ask.”
She reached up a hand and flicked her hair from her forehead.

Neil Gaiman: American Gods

[SFP]

“Well, it’s a long story,” said Miss Dubarry, “told in full. I was over in France buying stock. I met Gaston Leblanc…he’s the greatest expert on perfumes there is. Well, I mean, it was too good a chance to miss, so I put in a bit of overtime. His idea, of course, was to combine the two businesses. I’m no fool. It wasn’t exactly my charms alone. Well, I didn’t exactly cold-shoulder him and he gave me the secret as an engagement present. You know! Cost him nothing and the secret was safe in the family. Then I came back to England.”
“To England?” said Miss Pettigrew, bewildered.
“Of course,” said Miss Dubarry indignantly. “Well, I mean to say! He wasn’t wanting to marry me. He was wanting to marry Dubarry’s. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know. I don’t approve of these continental ways. He’d never have considered me for marriage without my business. Well, that’s more than I can stomach. I do like a man to put a bit of passion into a proposal. Englishmen don’t want to get into a business, they want to get into bed. We’re brought up to expect it and you can’t get over early training.”
“No,” said Miss Pettigrew indignantly. “Of course not. The very idea! A business indeed!”


“Oh, Delysia!” Miss Dubarry’s voice broke.
All her unhappiness came back into her face again.
She nearly wept. Her face puckered, but she could not imperil her make–up. She sat down on the couch and tried to gain control of herself.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (1938) by Winifred Watson

[SFP]

Sometimes, it's the smallest fragments that catch your attention as well as the smallest of coincidences. I'm listening to a book called 'Gods of Jade and Shadow' by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and there is his fragment:
'When he’d been a boy Martín had feared the monster that dwelled under his bed, pulling his covers up to his chin to stay safe. Martín had the nagging suspicion that as a child his cousin had feared nothing, and that she feared nothing now. He thought this was unnatural, especially for a girl.' 

In 'Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day' there was this:

“Now Delysia’s a little devil and there’s times I could flay her alive, and obviously she needs a little physical correction, but I’m the only right man to do it.”

So, two books set at roughly the same period of time (1920s-1930s) written by women with two small, seemingly casual fragments amongst so many others. In 'Gods of Jade and Shadow' that women should have far more to fear than men in life and in Miss Pettigrew, one of the reasons that they should feel fear them and yet, underscoring these books as well as so many others the belief that a woman cannot resist a man - or his equivalent. One might believe that Life has changed but there is a difference between legislating against prejudice and violence and punishing prejudice and violence...

Steph_P

[SFP]

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia:

'When he’d been a boy Martín had feared the monster that dwelled under his bed, pulling his covers up to his chin to stay safe. Martín had the nagging suspicion that as a child his cousin had feared nothing, and that she feared nothing now. He thought this was unnatural, especially for a girl.'

'Folktales are full of … coincidences that are never coincidences at all, but the brittle games of powerful forces.'

...As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me....

This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie

[stillnoar]

...As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me....

This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie

That happened to me once in real life, but the 'No Tresspassing' sign was aimed in the direction from whence I had come - so no choice but to go forward. Boy the guard in the shack was surprised to see me walking out some time later.

Schweik Is Ejected from the Lunatic Asylum.

When Schweik later on described life in the lunatic asylum, he did so in terms of exceptional eulogy : "I'm blowed if I can make out why lunatics kick up such a fuss about being kept there. They can crawl about stark naked on the floor, or caterwaul like jackals, or rave and bite. If you was to do anything like that in the open street, it'd make people stare, but in the asylum it's just taken as a matter of course. Why, the amount of liberty there is something that even the socialists have never dreamed of.
The inmates can pass themselves off as God Almighty or the Virgin Mary or the Pope or the King of England or our Emperor or St. Vaclav, although the one who did him was properly stripped and tied up in solitary confinement. There was a chap there who kept thinking that he was an archbishop, but he did nothing but guzzle. And then there was another who said he was St. Cyril and St. Methodus, just so that he could get double helpings of grub. .. They used to keep one man always in a strait- waistcoat, to stop him from calculating when the end of the world was coming.
Everybody can say what he likes there, the first thing that comes into his head, just like in parliament. The noisiest of the lot was a chap who said he was the sixteenth volume of the encyclopaedia and asked everybody to open him and find an article on sewing machines or else he'd be done for. He wouldn't shut up until they shoved him into a strait-waistcoat.
I tell you, the life there was a fair treat. You can bawl, or yelp, or sing, or blub, or moo, or boo, or jump, say your prayers or turn somersaults, or walk on all fours, or hop about on one foot, or run round in a circle, or dance, or skip, or squat on your haunches all day long, and climb up the walls. Nobody comes up to you and says : 'You mustn't do this, you mustn't do that, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, call yourself civilized?' I liked being in the asylum, I can tell you, and while I was there I had the time of my life.”

Jaroslav Hasek. The Good Soldier Schweik.

[SFP]

Sam Sykes: Seven Blades in Black (The Grave of Empires Book 01)

... But every boy, at one point, is fascinated by cruelty: how an ant twitches when you pull off its legs, how many stones it takes to kill a bird with an injured wing.
It brings them joy. It makes them feel strong. It makes them want to feel it again. And again and again. I wasn’t going to give him that.
But I knew plenty of boys who pretended to be men. I knew how to hurt them, too.
“Well, shit, Kresh,” I said. “Seems like all I’d need to stop you would be to ask Vraki to tell you to sit down.”
The smile dropped. His face screwed up.
There’s three things a man loses when you hurt him.
“What the fuck did you say to me?”
The first is language. He drops whatever fancy words he knows, starts saying what’s really on his mind.
“It’s been a few years, Kresh, but that’s not long enough for you not to bark when Vraki tells you to go.” I shot him a smile of my own. I hoped it hurt. “I mean, why are you here? Just had to see me?”
“I’m here to kill you,” Kresh snarled. “Vraki asked me to—”
“Vraki doesn’t ask. We both know that. Vraki told you to. And I bet you were just so happy to go scampering out.”
“He knew you would try to stop him.”
The second is poise. He stops standing up straight, he stops looking like he’s in control, and he starts looking upset.
“And he sent you out to stop me? Or just to get you to stop humping his leg?”
“I have been with him since the coup.” He narrowed his eyes. “Since we tried to restore the Imperium to the glory the Nul Emperor stole from it. He understood my value. You never did.”
“Yeah, he trusted you once,” I replied. “And his plan to overthrow the Imperium got righteously fucked, from what I recall. Think there might be a correlation there?”
“This time, it will succeed. This time, the Scraths are talking to him. He’s almost got enough power to open the door. Soon, he’ll return the Imperium to its glory!”
And the third thing he loses is sense. And then you’ve got him.
There it was.
Men like to talk and boys don’t think about what they say … I could use that.


...No one dies without regrets.
No matter what opera tells you, a death without wishing things had gone differently just means you were never really hoping for anything good in the first place. And when you die, you wish you had done what you always hoped for.
If you’re lucky, you have the standard ones: you wish you had more money, more sex, more fun. If you’re unlucky, you have the bad ones: you wish you hadn’t left her; you wish you hadn’t trusted him; you wish you were sharing your last breath with more than an empty room and an empty bottle.
And if you’re me…

“What does it mean to be the best? It means you have to be better than the number two guy. But what gratification is there in that? He's a loser—that’s why he's number two. ”

“Oh, are you a skeptic? So were the people who told Columbus he’d get lost. He did, and I’m glad.”

“It’s been an exacting day. I’ve done exactly zero.”

“I saw a ghost. It was clearly invisible, and it was as clear as love—and since it was so clear I couldn’t see it, that’s how I knew it was real.”

“I let the sunlight wash over my naked body, and for a cleaning agent I used the honking horns of the passing cars. It was a bit abrasive, but wonderfully exhilarating.”

Jarod Kintz. “This Book is Not FOR SALE”.

[SFP]

This book looks interesting. Thank you.