W or the memory of passages from Ulysses

Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. —Joyce, Ulysses*

Time's Top 10 Books With One-Letter Titles includes V., M, Z, S., and C.




__________
*This passage also appears in the 14th ed. of The Chicago Manual of Style

Memo to myself

To read later in the week/month:

I. At Guernica—Updike on Nabokov.

II. At the U. Chicago site—puns in Sanskrit.

UPDATE: This just in (via Maud & elsewhere)—Nabokov's letters to his wife, Véra, to be published (in The Snob [??] and later by Knopf).

Memo to myself

I. Sam Anderson on Updike: "He wrote steadily, with very little angst, three pages a day, five days a week." (New York)

II. Cory Doctorow with some tips on "Writing in the Age of Distraction" (Locus):

Kill your word-processor

Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, "correcting" your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on. The programmers who wrote your word processor type all day long, every day, and they have the power to buy or acquire any tool they can imagine for entering text into a computer. They don't write their software with Word. They use a text-editor, like vi, Emacs, TextPad, BBEdit, Gedit, or any of a host of editors. These are some of the most venerable, reliable, powerful tools in the history of software (since they're at the core of all other software) and they have almost no distracting features — but they do have powerful search-and-replace functions. Best of all, the humble .txt file can be read by practically every application on your computer, can be pasted directly into an email, and can't transmit a virus.

Parker poesy

Dorothy Parker on Updike's The Poorhouse Fair, Feb. 1959: "Perhaps this is a purely personal matter, but I am always drawn to reading a book about a poorhouse—after all, it is only the normal curiosity to find out what it will be like in my future residence."

She writes like Sloane Crosley!

Syllabary

I love this juxtaposition of quotes over at the Ouroboric Erasing:

Borges, talking to the Paris Review, 1967:

You know, English is a beautiful language, but the older languages are even more beautiful: they had vowels. Vowels in modern English have lost their value, their color. My hope for English — for the English language — is America. Americans speak clearly. When I go to the movies now, I can’t see much, but in the American movies, I understand every word.

Lorrie Moore, mercilessly, in her short story “How to Become a Writer”:

Insist you are not very interested in any one subject at all, that you are interested in the music of language, that you are interested in — in — syllables, because they are the atoms of poetry, the cells of the mind, the breath of the soul. Begin to feel woozy. Stare into your plastic wine cup.

“Syllables?” you will hear someone ask, voice trailing off, as they glide slowly toward the reassuring white of the dip.

Can I add two from my personal stash?

Clem came from Buffalo and spoke in the neutral American accent that sends dictionary makers there. His pronunciation was clear and colorless.
—John Updike, "I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying"

Could mortal lip divine
The undeveloped Freight
Of a delivered syllable
'Twould crumble with the weight.
—Emily Dickinson

Secrets and ries

I.
From John Updike's 12/3 New Yorker review of Ha Jin's A Free Life:
"In China every day I wanted to jump up and fight wiz someone....Zere you have to fight to survive, but here I don't want to fight wiz anyone, as eef I lost my spirit."

II.
"During this trial, I've had to sit there and listen to rie after rie," he said, maintaining the mock Asian accent. —"Accused Triple Murderer Dons Asian Accent During Testimony," New York Post, 12/3/07 (via Hua)

More in today's Times: "Though he was born Stephen Sanders in Queens and has no passport, Mr. Sakai testified in a thick, wavering accent, transposing L’s and R’s."

III.
Back to The New Yorker: "In retrospect, it figures that a serial “ninja burglar” would turn up on Staten Island, a borough whose biggest cultural export, the Wu-Tang Clan, long ago nicknamed the place Shaolin, in honor of kung-fu movies. This particular bandit, who is now thought to have robbed eighteen homes on the island in the past seven months, acquired his honorific in September, when he encountered a Dongan Hills resident named Phil Chiolo while raiding Chiolo’s home. He was dressed all in black, with a black face mask, Chiolo said, and he carried nun-chucks, which he used to club Chiolo in the chest, head, and shins..." —Ben McGrath, "Ninja Hunt," 12/10/07

ARC of a diver

What will become of my old, marked-up review copies? Sometimes I have this delusion of grandeur. Then it passes.

(The headline to this post doesn't make too much sense, but maybe Jenny can use it for her other blog? Also someone needs to do a uke version of "When You See a Chance, Take It.")