But this, from Robert Irwin in the TLS, at least is something I haven’t yet seen:
According to Said, Gustave Flaubert wrote “Inscriptions and birddroppings are the only two things in Egypt that give any indication of life”, which would be damning if true. But, in the original French, what he wrote was “les inscriptions et les merdes d’oiseaux, voilà les deux seules choses sur les ruines d’Égypte qui indiquent la vie”, which is unexceptionable.
OK, it’s “sur les ruines” that he means, not the bowdlerization. I wonder if Yeats knew this. (Irwin at least doesn’t like “critique” as verb.)
Montague Rhodes James (to distinguish between the Jameses, Leithauser, with a familiarity that would have made both men stare, refers to them as “Henry” and “Montie”) was a Cambridge don—”linguist, paleographer, medievalist, biblical scholar”—who wrote ghost stories to amuse his bachelor colleagues over the port and plum pudding at high table at Christmas time in the early years of the century. “If Montie is an ancillary literary figure,” Leithauser writes, somewhat defensively, “he looks to be a durable one, and surely few writers have ever won a portion of immortality with such quick, light-handed ease.” Quick? Light-handed? M.R. James’s stories, with their roast-beef heartiness and chortling misanthropy, always make me think of those waistcoated, choleric bores one still encounters on wet days in slow trains in provincial England. No amount of uncovered sexual longings can make these yarns come alive for me.
From this review [NYRB subscriber only, sadly] of the Norton Anthology of Ghost Stories.
I generally find Banville’s opinions piquant, if not always agreeable, but this doesn’t seem to get “Montie” quite right at all. I also suspect that Banville is no stranger to musty archives, so that can’t explain it either. The title of this piece (”Uh-Heimlich Maneuver”) is also uncommonly bad, though I’m sure that’s an editorial matter.
I suppose I might as well liveblog the last half of the game, very likely the Suns’ last half of the season.
Barkley is surely correct about going to Diaw in the post taking the Suns out of their offense, and also surely correct about Stoudemire fading when he doesn’t get enough shots. What is to be done?
I would like to see them attack in the second half in the zany style we remember from yesteryear.
I think they should bring Strawberry off the bench to guard Parker. Just to bump him hard several times, and also hack Thomas and Oberto. That halftime scene did not much impress me.
“With him and Amaré Stoudemire,” Doug.
What was Finley complaining about there? I guess the evil genius hypothesis is that Popovich, by assigning Finley to Diaw, is tempting Phoenix to disrupt their offense. When he doesn’t give up, Nash is a surprisingly effective one-on-one defender of quick point guards in the paint. I saw him disrupt one of Iverson’s drives late in the game at Denver. The trouble is, of course, is that he usually gives up if he can’t position himself for a charge.
Finley’s always been on Diaw, Kevin. We’ve covered this. An agile play from O’Neal there. Nash is having a terrible shooting night.
How many times does Duncan get blocked and calmly recover the ball and put it back while everyone stands around watching?
Shaq, startled by the John Cougar, pokes Duncan in the eye. I forgive him.
Where did I read that Duncan plays D&D? I could see him making that “what me?” face after failing a saving throw. Every damn time.
Idoka with four fouls. That’s portentous. Giricek’s +9 right now.
A baby-change intervenes. Can the Suns sustain this precarious lead? I like Thomas on the line. Don’t like Diaw with four fouls. Not a shooting foul, as it turns out. Clean foul, Doug. That wasn’t even close to a fragrant. Kidd on Pargo the other night, yes.
That alley-oop looked like it was headed in. All timeouts are good timeouts. First rule of broadcasting. Henry seems to be regarding the proceedings with mild dyspepsia. Poor Carl Orff. Well, not really, but still. At least I’ll have the Hawks for two more games.
I’m not that worried about O’Neal having five fouls. It’s somewhat amazing that the Suns are in this with Nash shooting 2-11 at this point. Shaq’s playing very well right now. Spry.
I never have a good feeling about the Suns’ chances in situations like these, especially against San Antonio. But at least they’re making it competitive. I think New Orleans can beat the Spurs. (I was just going to use “jerry-built,” and then wondered if it were ethnically insensitive. Seems to originate from the Mersey, so I guess not.)
That’s not how you want to lose it, certainly. First one was a clean steal, second was Stoudemire’s bobbling, third was Diaw just throwing it away.
What a truly horrible end.
- The first game was a cosmic fluke. Duncan misses that shot 95 times out of 100, perhaps more.
- Grant Hill’s been injured.
- Nash had the flu, and looked as if he were sick, hurt, or just old last night.
- The NBA has a strong interest in seeing big-market teams like San Antonio and Detroit make the finals, for Q-scores and advertising.
It hasn’t been as much of a blowout as it seems, in all fairness. It really was a fluke that the Spurs won game one. The Suns were solidly in control for the first half of the second game, and then played one of the worst third quarters I’ve ever seen. (You have to credit the Spurs defense here, of course.) Last night, they were beaten from start-to-finish. It could easily be 2-1 either way, but it’s not.
Part of the problem here is simply that D’Antoni is not a good strategist. I believe his offensive tactics are strong in game situations, but it has been exceedingly foolish not to incorporate Skinner and even Linton Johnson and Strawberry into the rotation at points. Why not let either of them try to guard Parker off the pick-and-roll, when it’s obvious that no one else is capable of it? (Jeff Van Gundy dismissed these complaints last night by referring to Piatkowski, as if he were the only option.) Why not hack Thomas (58% FT) and Oberto (61%) ? At least once or twice? Popovich called a timeout last night just to cuss Oberto for missing a defensive rotation, with his team up by double digits. Phoenix would run out of timeouts within minutes if they tried this, of course, but it’s a little sickening for a fan to see the team so out-coached.
I suppose the Free Darkoist line on this would attribute the Suns’ difficulties to the baleful half-Popovichian measures adopted by new GM Steve Kerr, who has disturbed the metaphysical balance of the team through the Marion trade (and much else). To be conventional, I think it’s likely that the Spurs are going to sweep them now, as I can’t see how the Suns could sustain morale after what’s happened; but, to be somewhat bold, I think there’s a chance for the first NBA ‘04 if they can win Sunday. (I won’t suggest an analogy to the Lakers series a couple of years ago, when they were down 3-1, as that’s not what I’m talking about. It has more to do with something I mentioned in a bullet point.)
Henry Clinton Goodwin was born at 8:40 AM on Tuesday. The operating room was very cold, with the vaguely futuristic air you might expect. I sat behind the curtain during the short procedure and detailed the various possibilities remaining in the NBA playoffs to an interested Clancy. The doctor called my attention to the cyanotic Henry being pulled out (these babies are surprisingly tough—Henry has the wiry strength which currently characterizes his mother and formerly characterized his father, before po’ boys and gumbo rendered him a gelatinous mass). He was then wrapped, and I was invited to escort him to the cutting table. Not much trust was invested in my ability to step over the various wires on the floor.
I then declined to cut the cord, thinking that operation better left to the professionals. It seemed to have the texture of tie-dyed telephone coils. I walked Henry over to the nursery, where I then sat watch over him for a certain period. Other than being a reluctant latcher, he’s done very well, weathering the trauma of the third quarter of the Suns-Spurs game with only mild distress. The first film Henry watched was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He was curious about Mia Sara’s subsequent career and doesn’t understand the role of advertising in society.
Just bought a house today and learned the title term and “hypothec” for my trouble (which involved actually reading the mortgage contract; I got the distinct impression that most people don’t do that.)
We will move in gradually and then suddenly, taking the house by surprise.
You won’t find in the google books scanned copy of Oertel’s book on Goya. I suspect an aesthete liberated it from the U of Michigan copy (bits of student newspaper stuck to the scan). But you can see, even with the poor quality, that the photograph of pre-transfer Saturn shows that jolly filiphage ithyphallic. (I have the book and can confirm.) I would alert the wikipedia entry, but for ennui.
I haven’t finished the next Bonfiglioli, so maybe that’ll be next.
The new interface is too busy, and the page images are too small on the screen. I also don’t appreciate having to click through a pop-up each time I want to download a PDF.
I looked briefly to see if there was a way of using the superior older interface, and it doesn’t seem like it. The “see first match” option also seems to be broken.
In other news, I’ve heard that the Networked Writing Environment at UF, where I taught many classes as a TA, has been dismantled. The NWE was a Unix- (first AIX,* of all things, then Sun) based system, novel in itself and especially inviting to a young nerd. The first class I taught there was in technical writing, and I remember walking up shortly after distributing passwords and noticing that a youngish hacker had reconfigured his X display and had several shells open to what looked like NORAD servers within a space of minutes. I saw him on local TV later that summer being jailed on suspicion of computer misadventure; I suspect that he probably now lives in opulence trying to keep past selves off the lawn, so to speak.
*I’m sure at least one UF alum considers the fact that I got Nethack to compile on AIX to be my greatest scholarly accomplishment in graduate school.
The scanning of the Burlington needs to be enlarged or redone, possibly. I have trouble reading the footnotes especially, which, if you want to find out the story about the transfer of Goya’s Black Paintings to canvas, for example, is really where the action is.
Another item is if you are doing a multiple keyword search, say “Goya (saturn or saturno)”. You will see a list at the top of the page which tells you that ONE or more of the items from your search appears on so-and-so page; but, when one of these items is much more common than another, as in this case, that tells you very little useful information. They should separate that list by keyword, or at least give you the option to do so.
Comes to us from the recent edition of the New York Review. Michael Massing, writing about who joins the military, explains: “One night, on a visit to Buffalo Wild Wings, a cavernous bar/restaurant on Arsenal Street, I approached a table of young men who were drinking beer and munching on chicken wings.”
I picture Massing, or his editors, imagining subscribers pausing, chin-in-hand, to look out at their windows and wonder at a world with such marvels as Buffalo Wild Wings in it.
Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim:
A Goya and Rubens are stolen.
That concludes today’s minimal commentary on the UPI wire. Substantive posts may return.
I wonder if Pynchon knew about:
Louis De Wohl, a German with an alleged penchant for cigars and cross-dressing, was an astrologer working for the British MI5 during the 1940s. He was courted by high-ranking intelligence officials to develop information on the date of the German invasion of London to the best dates for battle, the Independent said Tuesday.
De Wohl wrote a report in 1943 that said it was important to utilize astrology when developing strategies against Germany because Hitler allegedly employed seers and astrologers.
“It is entirely irrelevant whether we ourselves regard astrological advice as valuable and scientific or as useless nonsense. All that matters is that Hitler follows its rules,” he wrote.
Does the following passage come from the PR arm of a prestigious scientific research journal or a novel by Michel Houellebecq ?
In many monogamous animals, including marmosets and humans, males of high genetic quality are less likely to invest time in paternal care than are those of lower genetic quality. The theory behind this is that females view males with good genes as so desirable to the quality of their offspring that they are willing to sacrifice help with the rearing, letting the men get away with not being around. Lower-quality males make up for their poorer genes by being supportive and aiding in child rearing.
Given these realities, one strategy for a female is to develop a long-term relationship with a lower-quality male while secretly breeding with single high-quality males. The only problem then is getting caught. Long-term partners will often attack an adulterous female in the animal world. In humans, the penalties can be equally stiff.
I discussed this brand of outré EP (”the World as Will and General Hospital”) in reference to David Cronenberg before.
I’ve made a couple of comments here, at Crooked Timber, and The Valve, more or less in jest, over the last two years or so about how I thought that The Invention of Morel was the key to all of Lost’s mythologies. Well, if I’m not mistaken, Sawyer was puzzling over a copy of it in tonight’s episode.
I strongly suspect that ABC employs a fleet of young nerds to scour the internet for conversation about its programming, and that comment (or one like it; I rather doubt I was the first person) caught someone’s eye, a copy of the New York Review books edition was purchased, and it made its way up the prop-chain.
A bit of preliminary googling reveals quite a bit of Morel-related speculation, but I didn’t see any that predated my 4/3/06 Crooked Timber comment or my 2/06 mention here. Ha!
I’m sure, pursued Milman Parry, which is why he had a loaded pistol in his suitcase.
