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Action!
2007-05-28 20:04:00
photo courtesy of suneko on flickr Now it’s time for what I know you’ve all been waiting for: the shark-fight from the Shandy. It’s a tale told by a talking skull, a tale of danger, victory, blood, and 14th century Danish cultural norms: But as for recreation, that depends on class—the nobles entertained themselves with chess—not playing, just admiring chess sets—with ballads, accompanied by chain dances, with falconing and draughts; the folk, who never play in so stately a style as their social superiors, stuck to beer and dice and little else; yet at this time, my great-grandfather, being neither poor nor noble, had the singularly odd hobby of swimming out a mile from shore wearing full armor, there to match his strength against sea monsters. Thus a Yorick’s course cuts always contrary to popular currents, and thus he found himself one day floating near Elsinore, recovering his strength from having wrestled with a shark– the battle had been fierce,...
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Things Happen
2007-05-24 06:01:00
Once again I am here to hold out that tantalizing, from-afar-cheating glimpse that we at the Grub Street Grackle like to call a “preview” of the forthcoming issue. This selection is from the second book of Irving Washington’s blank verse epic Shandy, which we continue to release piece by piece each year, despite all naysayers, in recognition of its unshakable place in the literary canons of an improbable future: Tristram’s trouble began eight hundred years before he did, and seven hundred miles away, in Denmark. For, though no sere chronicler of Danish lore corroborates the claim, it’s widely given out with all the calm reasoning, measured tones, and common sense which usually accompany a fact, that Parson Yorick, whose significance in Tristram’s birth, life, death, et cetera is nigh incalculable, traced his own line back as far as 900 AD, or could have said so without lying, had the whim struck him to rise up, unforeseen, a Dane, and rouse the peoples with a...
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Convalescence Revisited
2007-05-23 05:46:00
I have a fondness for a certain type of fiction, in which a self-deprecating narrator observes and marvels at another person whom he considers a remarkable subject (the type includes “Barlteby the Scrivener” as well as Moby Dick), and I have had the luck to stumble upon two short stories after this pattern in close succession. They are Benet’s “The Curfew Tolls” and Max Beerbohm’s “A. V. Laider.” What is I think especially notable about these two stories considered together is that in each of them the narrator is recovering from an illness in a location remote from his ordinary life, and refers to himself as a convalescent. Is there something about the phase called “convalescence” that makes it an especially propitious time for covalence?
More About: Vale , Visi , Visit

A Manageable Depth
2007-05-21 15:37:00
I want to quote you some passages from V. S. Naipaul’s “One Out of Many,” but I don’t have the book I read it in, so here’s a taste from V. S. Pritchett’s “The Saint” instead: The stream is wide and deep in this reach, but on the southern bank there is a manageable depth and a hard bottom. Over the clay banks the willows hang, making their basket-work print of sun and shadow on the water, while under the gliding boats lie cloudy, chloride caverns. The hoop-like branches of the trees bend down until their tips touch the water like fingers making musical sounds. Ahead in midstream, on a day sunny as this one was, there is a path of strong light which is hard to look at unless you half close your eyes and down this path on the crowded Sundays, go the launches with their parasols and their pennants; and also the rowing boats with their beetle-leg oars, which seem to dig the sunlight out of the water as they rise. Upstream one goes, on and ...
More About: Mana , Manage , A Man , Depth

Convalescence?
2007-05-15 14:47:00
In case you are wondering why your good friend Grubby has not for some time now written anything here on the works of fiction he has been reading, it is simply because he has not been reading them. That is because about a week ago he became perfectly obsessed with web design and markup and has only with difficulty spent any of his spare moments on any other pursuit. But fear not, friends. I see him coming out of the e-darkness now and beginning Bredsdorff’s biography of Hans Christian Andersen, which came in the mail two days ago (for he ordered it immediately after reading a short and intriguing biographical statement prefixed to “The steadfast tin soldier”).
More About: Vale

Happy Ending?
2007-05-06 15:40:00
Dr. Chris Mirus, Tolkien enthusiast and swinging bachelor, told me yesterday that Tolkien said something like this about fairy tales: If you don’t think your children should hear a story about Little Red Riding Hood being eaten by a wolf, the solution is not to invent a huntsman who cuts the wolf open and saves her. It is to tell them a different story. This reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen’s famous “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” in which the hero is thrown out of the window by a Jack-in-the-Box (who harbors some strange animosity for the soldier’s admiration of the paper ballerina), rained on, sent down the gutter in a paper boat, and eaten by a fish. He is liberated however, when the fish is caught and cut open in the same house from which he was so cruelly expelled, and sees at last his beloved ballerina again. But this is not the end of the story, of course. Christensen’s solution is not to erase the standard trope of cutting open the swall...
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Unreal Committee
2007-05-04 21:48:00
There is an ostensibly motivational poster on the wall of the teachers’ lounge at the corporation-run community college where I work. It says, “Retention begins and ends in my classroom. Students may not drop because of me, but they will stay because of me.” Now this formulation may not be nonsensical; it may not even be grammatically incorrect, but it is jejune and flaccid. The reason is not that it has violated any syntactical norm, but that it fails to respect what might be called a standard usage of the locution, “may not…but,” which is normally used to contrast by opposition, kind or degree, but is here used to relate two roughly equivalent possibilities–the nature of the relation is completely ambiguous. I can just imagine the meeting where this little slogan was cooked up: Mid-level Executive #1: I’ve got a good one: “Students will stay because of me.” Mid-level Executive #2: Well, that’s good, but it&rs...
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A thought in the teeth of the grim grammarian
2007-05-02 20:40:00
I can’t say completely what is so deeply emotional about the dialogues between children and adult protagonists in J. D. Salinger’s short stories. But part of it has to be the adults’ respect for a child’s way of speaking and thinking. It’s been a while since I read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” but I remember it being quite similar to the conversation in “For Esmé–With Love and Squalor.” In that story, a soldier who identifies himself as X, meets Esmé, a thirteen year old girl, in a tea room. She is precocious, “quite communicative for her age” as she puts it, a quality in children that tends to make adults watch out for errors to show children they’re not so smart after all. But X says nothing of Esmé’s drastic overuse of “extremely” and “exceedingly,” and does not correct her when she misunderstands the word “prolific” (which she does quite charmingly). Not...
More About: Teeth , Thought , Marian , Mari , Gram

Seduced
2007-04-27 11:58:00
f seduced me back. When he takes off his bra, watch out. So, for those of you who don’t know or care, I am an MA student with the University of Birmingham in their Applied Linguistics program. Hoping to graduate, I am writing a dissertation about a lot of things, but mostly about blog discourse and how Computer Mediated Communication is a fascinating genre of discourse. On my own blog, I have been trying to keep up my thoughts as they occur to me, but here I thought I would post an actual excerpt from the actual dissertation. This comes from Chapter 1: “Written Narrative: Where are we going, where have we been.” It’s a draft, so please, bare with me. Hopper has produced the following definition of grammar, strikingly different from the Hartwall definition: Clifford remarks that ‘Culture is temporal, emergent, and disputed’ (Clifford 1986: 19). I believe that the same is true of grammar, which like speech itself must be viewed as a real-time, socia...

Debate!
2007-04-27 05:45:00
S. Pihlaja, an occasional contributor to this blog, has delivered on his own blog a “pretty healthy swing” against the concept of standard English. Pihlaja’s blog is always entertaining (and is for that reason still the only blog I read every single day), and not infrequently thought-provoking. This particular post I recommend to you not only because the style of the post itself is so charming (”So I am ripping the idea of Standard English a new one in my dissertation.”), but indeed mainly because of the quality of the comment thread. I’m also hoping that this plug of his blog will induce him to post some thoughts on the subject here for your edification.
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the incredible truth about the Of Vinci Code
2007-04-21 06:16:00
I have recently finished Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and since it is a controversial book that is mostly true, I thought I would take a moment to address the most important truth found between its covers: the date of publication. The Da Vinci Code was published in 2002 and since then has done tremendously well. But little do people realize that there is a terrible secret in that date. Let me show you something I learned in my mathology class. 2002 is a numeric palindrome and, when divided down the center, yields the numbers 20 and 2. These in turn can be written in Roman numerals as XX and II, each forming another numeric palindrome. When the letters X and X are written close to each other, they form a V and an inverted V - which, as anyone who has read the book will tell you, sybologizes male and female, the masculine and the feminine, etc. Being superimposed on each other, they clearly indicate the union of the two - which, since V is the Roman numeral for 5, when united y...
More About: Truth , Incredible , Edible