If you change your display language in GMail from English (US) -- the default -- to English (UK), your Trash file suddenly becomes Deleted Items. So much less brash, don't you think? Your personal labels will also be adapted. Work becomes Employees. School becomes Oxbridge. Chat becomes Chinwag. And so on.
I now look forward to the promised launch of English (Scot) in which Inbox becomes In, Sent Items becomes Oot, and Deleted Items becomes Awa an Bile Yer Heid.
Another bunch of Sour Grapes columns rescued from the rubbish bin and posted on the blog reserved for that porpoise. That's ten down and another 134 to go. Well, 133 really, since one of them got me a libel writ once already, which fell because the stupid plaintiff's stupid mouthpiece was too slow off the mark, so I probably won't bring that one out again.
I'm not going to interrupt our normal programming here every time I post. Get over there, if you care, grab the feed and let the little RSS elves do the rest.
Belgium's biggest and most international amateur choir presents the world's most popular choral work of all time:
Messiah by George Frideric Handel
Philippe Gérard - direction
Eric Delson - choir direction
With soloists Elise Gäbele (soprano); Isabelle Everarts de Velp, (mezzo-soprano); Stephan Van Dyck (tenor); Ian Degen (baritone-bass).
Without a doubt the world's most popular choral work, presented by Belgium's most international choir, accompanied by one of the country's premier orchestral ensembles.
www.brusselschoralsociety.com
— BOZAR -
The Brussels Choral Society and the Chapelle Musicale de Tournai
Powered by Tumblr
Powered by ScribeFire.
Richard Ford writes about the short story, with many examples including Cheever and Carver, as you'd expect, but also Tobias Woolf (aren't those two related somehow?), Mary Gaitskell, Chekhov (people who think of him as only a playwright are missing out big-time), Deborah Eisenberg and VS Pritchett, considered by many as a master of the genre.
It's always struck as a bit odd how everyone professes to consider the short story and the novel as two distinct forms, yet it's always thought of as perfectly normal when a person who has hitherto only ever written stories then proceeds to tackle a novel. There's a definite feeling of coming of age, as if an 800 metres runner had finally grown up and found his courage by taking on a marathon.
In fact, you'd be pushed to name a writer who was at home in both forms. I can think of short story writers, and I can think of novelists, and I can think of writers who have done both, but I can't think of one who has straddled the line convincingly. The classic greats like Chekhov and Maupassant stayed within the form, as did modern greats like Carver, and living writers like Alice Munro. Novelists like Margaret Atwood and Martin Amis (if they ever marry they can share their monograms) have written short stories, but not very good ones. Tobias Woolf's stories are very good, whereas the only novel I've read was very much a thinly-disguised autobiography, like most first novels.
It's a terrible thing indeed that the market for short stories is shrinking so far and so fast nowadays, because while the good writers won't stop as a result, it will make life that bit harder for them, as publishers are known to be unwilling to take on volumes of stories unless the client is already a heavyweight novelist and has to be indulged.
I don't know what the answer is, and nor does anyone else, by the look of it. The article concludes:
VS Pritchett wrote that short stories were "exquisitely difficult" things to make. Though by that I don't think he meant that they were such difficult things to "put together", since we've all read bad ones that were put together rather neatly. Rather, I believe Pritchett meant that they were difficult things - the great ones, anyway - to imagine, in the way Chekhov imagined "The Lady with the Dog", or in the way that imagining time is more difficult than making a clock tick. One task asks for skill, the other for serious daring of the sort Pritchett understood and could perform splendidly, as could his great friend Miss Welty from the rich turbulence of her "sheltered life". I think of her now, gone from us - Pritchett, too, and Carver - having left so much of excellence. Their great spirits and incomparable stories spell out so well for us where daring starts and where it leads, and exactly why it is the pure and indispensable and thrilling call that brings us all to stories.
The fact that an otherwise nondescript town out in the middle of nowhere would hitch its wagon to a single verse from a 35-year-old song recorded by a band whose ability to draw in tourists was almost certain to decline as their promiscuously bland music receded into the maw of history was further testimony - as if any were needed - that in America, anything is possible, no matter how zany or stupid, provided there is a guaranteed revenue stream somewhere.
Powered by ScribeFire.
Internal organs, including a worryingly yellow liver.
How could your kiddies resist? Check out Heartie the Cardiac Heart:
He's Bradying down, yesterday
If you're Jewish, or American, or you live in the world, you might be a little frightened at the way ordinary Americans think about Jews, as recorded by Brian Sacks here (first clip). Including the Pope, that totally Jewish Hebrew Jew guy.
Stupid place to build a town. Still, easy to take out the garbage.
The 100 greatest novels of all time.
Hands painted to look like things. Things other than hands, that is.
Another way to look for free books. That you'll never read.
Wildlife pr0n. Red in tooth and claw is the new black.
Stories told in one sentence.
The Sarcasm Society. My, isn't that clever?
What should I read next? Ask the anonymous Internet.
Help save the world. By drinking water.
Glass house by Mies van der Rohe. Please refrain from chucking rocks.
Thanks to an idle hour with Stumble Upon.
This little fellow is a spirochete, the bacterium responsible for syphilis, which is not something you want to wake up to find in your stockings on Christmas morning. Cute, though, isn't he?
He's just one of a range of giant plush microbes including Ebola, the Black Death, Lyme's Disease and more. For the person who has literally everything, including a course of antibiotics presumably. Just because they're so sweet, here another -- Athlete's foot:
The newspaper ad for supermarket giant Carrefour/GB reads "Father Christmas comes early this year". (ad page)
Here's what the special offer is.
Is that really something people associate with Christmas? Those are not supposed to go in your stocking, surely?
I have been mainly going round the 13,000-odd blogs of NaNoWriMo participants and posting the following message:
"Get back to work, you".
If I haven't got to you yet, I will.
I hope this is not going to be a daily occurence.
Words are just not sufficient to encompass the idea of fatherhood represented by Dick Hoyt. Leave aside the Jebus bollocks if you can, though I suppose that's part of his inspiration, so it does form part of the phenomenon.
Here's the family site.
And here's a video I found posted on the Facebook wall of a friend, quite by chance.
It's guaranteed to bring a tear etc.
