19 Monday Jun 2017
Posted in Ed, Seen lately, Words
Seeing Kenneth Williams’ party piece Ma Crêpe Suzette on TV last week I thought it deserved another outing, for the sheer fun he has in putting the words together.
I’m old enough to remember Petula Clark and Sasha Distel’s greatest hits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTlmeBBFLXg
I’d love to hear the French/English version.
09 Friday Jun 2017
Posted in Competition, Ed
Tags
Brexit, Czech, Slovak, the EU, Vietnamese, Writing competition
Brexit – that’s the suggested (but not compulsory) theme in this year’s British Czech & Slovak Association’s writing competition.
Last year’s was the EU, and that resulted in a winning entry describing how a Referendum Night party turns sour for a Czech girl living in England. In 2015 it was migration, and the winning entry put you in the place of the Vietnamese minority in the Czech Republic today.
So let Brexit rip – at least in your imagination, for or against – and go for the £300 prize, the free dinner you get when it’s presented to you at the Association’s annual dinner at a hotel in London’s West End, and the publication of your piece in the December 2017 issue of the British Czech and Slovak Review.
The second prize is £100. Entry is free.
Fact or fiction – both are welcome. The first second prizes will be awarded to the best 1,500 to 2,000-word pieces of original writing in English on the links between Britain and the Czech/Slovak Republics, or describing society in transition in the Republics since the Velvet Revolution of 1989.
There’s still time – the closing date is 30 June.
For further info go to http://www.bcsa.co.uk/the-bcsas-2017-writing-competition/, or approach the BCSA Prize Comp Administrator at prize@bcsa.co.uk, or at 24 Ferndale, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN2 3NS, England.
06 Thursday Apr 2017
Posted in Ed, Punctuation
Today’s ‘Times’ includes a letter from Michael Plumbe, former Chairman of the Queen’s English Society. He recalls visiting a local greengrocer to complain about his “errant apostrophes”.
“He winked. He told me passers-by often popped into the shop to complain. Then, while there, they would buy something. Crafty.”
02 Sunday Apr 2017
Posted in Bestsellers, Ed, Fiction, Getting down to it
In her gripping psychological thriller Trick of the Dark Val McDermid puts the following into the mouth of one of the main characters, a most successful businesswoman:
“It always amazes me that so many people think it’s just enough to have an idea, without doing any work to underpin it. … It’s the difference between being a good pub raconteur and a bestselling novelist. That difference is hard work.”
So says Val McDermid, author of over 30 books which have sold over 10 million copies (see http://www.valmcdermid.com/). She should know!
30 Thursday Mar 2017
Posted in Ed, Fiction, Read Lately, Short stories
Tags
Antoine Laurain, food, France, Francois Mitterand, hats, Paris, perfumes
An ingenious way of combining short stories together to make a novel: I’ve much enjoyed The President’s Hat, by Antoine Laurain (first published in France in 2012, and in translation in England in 2013).
The book tells the stories of the various unrelated people who one way or another come into possession of a hat: in each case, after they do their lives change. Spoiler alert: what follows does reveal some of the action.
Disgruntled accountant Daniel Mercier is treating himself to a seafood platter in a crowded Paris brasserie, when he is asked whether he would mind three newcomers taking the spare places at his table. He agrees and then, to his amazement, President François Mitterand (no less) and two companions sit down, eat and talk amongst themselves. Daniel subsequently finds that whenever he eats an oyster he hears the words “As I was saying to Helmut Kohl last week …” When they leave, Daniel finds that the President has left his hat behind. He takes it. His life changes for the better.
Short story writer (hurrah!) Fanny Marquant is the next owner, after Daniel accidentally leaves the hat on a train. A problem in her love life is resolved, and she is inspired to write a prizewinning story (hurrah again!).
Perfumier Pierre Aslan [sic] is the next wearer of the hat. This brings us extraordinary descriptions of scents of all descriptions, and of the perfume-making process. How the hat affects Pierre, or how it itself gives rise to a new scent, I’ll leave you to find out.
Upper-class Bernard Lavallière is next, and here we move between his conservative, rich milieu and Paris’s trendier, lefty artistic community. In the course of his story we attend a ghastly dinner party in the first world and an equally awful reception in the second.
The stories are sewn together by Daniel Mercier’s efforts to locate and retrieve the hat. And just when we think it’s all over, we get a bizarre twist in the epilogue.
I found this book great fun. And very French: I can’t recall any novel in English revelling to anything like this extent, over and again, in the sheer pleasure of eating good food. And the settings and the sense of Parisian life seem so true.
The translator is named just as ‘Gallic Books’. Well, my congratulations to the she, he or they whose identity/ies lie behind that. And my thanks to my sister who gave me this book as she liked it a lot and thought I would too.
So if you have some short stories that might add up to a novel, see whether you can come up with an ingenious linking-up idea like this.
Gallic Books, RRP £8-99, ISBN 978-1-908313-47-8
27 Monday Mar 2017
Posted in Ed, Punctuation
Tags
Are you one of those who sigh when others start arguing about punctuation? Do you get impatient, and just wish they’d talk about something that actually made a difference? The Oxford Comma – No, forget it, please! Rules of punctuation don’t actually matter, after all, you say to yourself.
It ain’t necessarily so. Read https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/oxford-comma-lawsuit.html?smid=nytcore-ipad-share&smprod=nytcore-ipad&_r=0, where we read that a comma, or lack of it, can cost millions of dollars.
So be careful the next time you’re composing that list …..
23 Thursday Mar 2017
Posted in Competition, Ed
Brexit? Its effects not only in Britain, but in Slovakia or the Czech Republic as well? Its causes (likely, unlikely, or just plain impossible)? Any aspect of Brexit could be the subject of your entry in the British Czech & Slovak Association’s 2017 writing competition. That could win you £300 (and a free meal at our glittering Annual Dinner!).
Fact or fiction – both are welcome. A first prize of £300 and a second prize of £100 will be awarded to the best 1,500 to 2,000-word pieces of original writing in English on the links between Britain and the Czech/Slovak Republics (at any stage in their history), or describing society in transition in the Republics since 1989. Topics can include history, politics, the sciences, economics, the arts or literature. Brexit is this year’s suggested theme, but is not compulsory.
The writer of this year’s winning entry will be presented with the prize at the BCSA’s annual dinner in London in November 2017. The winning entry will be published in the December 2016 issue of the British Czech and Slovak Review and the runner-up in a subsequent issue. Submissions are invited from individuals of any age, nationality or educational background. Entrants do not need to be members of the BCSA. Entry is free. Entries should be received by 30 June 2017. An author may submit any number of entries.
Entries should be submitted by post to the BCSA Prize Administrator, 24 Ferndale, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN2 3NS, England, or by e-mail to prize@bcsa.co.uk.
All entries must be in English, prose, typed with double-spacing and no more than 2,000 words in length. (The recommended minimum is 1,500 words.) For full Submission Guidelines and the Rules of the competition apply to the Prize Administrator at the addresses given above. Details are also shown at http://www.bcsa.co.uk/the-bcsas-2017-writing-competition/.
The winning entry in the 2016 competition was Ms Bernhardt’s Brexit, by Jennifer Moore, and can be read by following the link at http://www.bcsa.co.uk/competitions/. The runner-up was The Pig, the Cupboard and the Reichsprotektor, by Jack Mullin. See https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2016/12/22/brexit-night-and-a-hidden-pig-bring-czech-slovak-writing-prizes/ for more info.
14 Tuesday Feb 2017
Posted in Ed, Grammar, Read Lately, Words
Tags
Bible, Dashiel Hammett, Elvis Presley, Lennon & McCartney, Mark Forsyth, PG Wodehouse, Philip Larkin, Procol Harum, Rolling Stones, Shakespeare, ST Coleridge, Wordsworth
“‘I wandered lonely as a cloud …’ Clouds are not lonely. Especially in the Lake District where Wordsworth wrote that line. In the Lake District clouds are remarkably sociable creatures that bring their friends and relatives and stay for weeks. … It’s not that Wordsworth didn’t know about meteorology, it’s that he did know about metaphor.” (Mark Forsyth)
I distrust books that have blazoned on the cover, “I laughed out loud”. But in the case of The Elements of Eloquence – How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase, I did too. My fellow travellers on the train to Rochester pretended not to notice.
In this book Mark Forsyth explains figures of speech (39 in all) used by writers good and not-so-good over the last 500 years, with examples and comment. Shakespeare, the Bible, William Blake, Leonard Cohen – they’re all here. This is a great read in its own right, and also a mine for the writer aspiring to write better.
Take Merism. This is when you don’t say what you’re talking about, but instead name all of its parts, as in “For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health”, when you could just say “in all circumstances”…
Or Polyptoton, the repeated use of one word as different parts of speech or in different grammatical forms, eg Lennon & McCartney’s Please Please Me. Or the Bard in Richard II – “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle”.
Enallage, a deliberate grammatical mistake – “Love me tender” works where “Love me tenderly” wouldn’t. Unadverbial Elvis.
When Mick Jagger, singing of his honky tonk woman, tells us that “She blew my nose, and then she blew my mind,” he is demonstrating his use of Syllepsis, where one word is used in two (or more) incongruous ways.
There are Transferred Epithets, when the adjective is applied to the wrong noun, as in Wodehouse: “His eyes widened and an astonished piece of toast fell from his grasp.”
We all know Hyperbole: Dashiel Hammett on a private eye: “He … could have shadowed a drop of salt water from Golden Gate to Hong Kong without losing sight of it.”
Philip Larkin’s most famous line, we learn, is an example of Prolepsis, when you use a pronoun before saying what it stands for. We don’t know who They are, until we’re told they’re Your Mum and Dad. Doesn’t work the other way round, does it?
‘The Fourteenth Rule’ – Mark Forsyth’s own term – is that a number can give an apparent significance. The “sixteen vestal virgins” in Whiter Shade of Pale work so much better than “several vestal virgins”. The Spirit that follows the Ancient Mariner’s doomed ship does so “Nine fathoms deep”. (What was so special about 54 feet down?)
And many more, as they used to say on compilation albums …
Great entertainment, and you’re learning while you laugh! Published in 2014 by Icon Books Ltd, ISBN 978-184831733-8 RRP £7-99
03 Friday Feb 2017
Tags
Waterstone’s are back in the black – good news for those of us old-fashioned types who like to buy actual books and who feared that our few actual remaining bookshops were in danger of disappearing …. And sales of novels are up – more good news! https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/01/waterstones-first-year-of-profit-since-2008-financial-crash-bookseller-amazon-rise-sales
22 Sunday Jan 2017
Posted in Ed, Technology
Printers. They exemplify the innate malice of inanimate objects.
Your printer waits for you to be late for a session of your writing group, when you just have to print off six copies of your new chapter and then rush off to catch the bus, at which point it announces that the magenta cartridge has run out. Why does that matter? You’re printing in black and white! Can’t the magenta wait till you’re back this evening and actually want to print off something with colour in it? No, you must change it now.
Or you run out of paper and you forgot to buy some more the last time you were passing Rymans.
Or you’re being good and conservationist, and want to print something on the other side of a used piece of paper, but you forget just how to put that paper in and find you’ve printed your new text all over the used side.
Or, the machine sits there talking to itself, over and over again, muttering but NOT PRINTING. You daren’t turn it off and on again, for what terrible revenge might it then wreak?
Or, you press ‘Print’, but nothing happens. You click on the status bar and it tells you that you have one document waiting to be printed. Yes, indeed you do! There’s nothing else waiting so why doesn’t it get on with it?
When you’re really up against the deadline, it can play the jammed paper stunt. How to retrieve that crumpled piece of paper, without tearing it and leaving behind a scrap of paper that will continue to jam up the works?
No, it just sits there and waits …
I’ve not turned on my printer while writing this. I just hope its pal my PC doesn’t tell on me when I wake it up.
[These thoughts were prompted by today’s broadcast of ‘The Museum of Curiosity’ on Radio 4, when the etymologist Mark Forsyth’s donation to the Museum was a printer that doesn’t work. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b088f2vz, 19 minutes in ]
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Help! Since writing the above, I’ve turned on my printer, only to read a message telling me not to use it because it is ‘sending usage information’. To whom? Did my PC grass on me after all? Is ‘sending usage information’ a euphemism and what it’s really doing is summoning help or plotting retribution? What other machines are in this fearful network?
