jsburbidge | Entries tagged with literature

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Reload page in style: light

The year has nearly come around again to June 16th.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei.

Somebody on the CBC was talking about generalizations that can be made about Canadian literature.

One that can definitely be made is that we have not yet produced an author who is even at a level below Joyce.

So tomorrow, raise a toast to the author who, finding history a nightmare from which he was trying to escape (or did he? that was Stephen, and it is never safe to make an easy identity between Stephen and his creator), has finally emerged as having taken claim of one day a year for a history which never took place.

The Android ecosystem by default comes with Google-driven alerts for news and blog-type posts.

One thing they may not have thought of is the effect of some of these pushed posts on people who actually know something about the topic.

I was just pointed to a post on "the best French authors". It is (naturally) not entirely wrong: it has Balzac, Voltaire, Camus, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Victor Hugo ("hélas"), de Beauvoir, and Dumas.

It does not have the following, all of whom I would certainly place above Dumas: Villon, Rabelais, Ronsard, du Bellay, Diderot, La Bruyère, Bossuet, Lamartine, Zola, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Proust, Céline, Aragon, Apollinaire, and Perse.

It's a bit like writing a list of the best English authors and omitting Swift, Sidney, and Sterne while including Conan Doyle.

It's a reminder that posts which look informed, and probably intend to be informed rather than misleading, are not to be relied on.