More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
27 February 2013
Are you up Ship Creek without a handle, or otherwise struck with the word-blindness of such as Dogberry and Mrs Malaprop ?
After I had bothered to buy myself a nice copy, Joyce put me off reading Finnegans Wake (famously lacking an apostrophe) by the appalling pun egg and beacon, and I resolved to read no more and sold it again. However, in common with those as distant in time as Laurence Sterne and John Lennon (his Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write), I have an interest in how words are power, words can urge and rouse (the famous example in Julius Caesar, but also give the game away that some who profess things are little better than parrots, in the vein of Harry Enfield's series of sketches about what the bloke down the pub said.
Some writers (the likes of Russell Hoban in Riddley Walker and Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, with his Russian argot) have imagined the language of a future age, and, with a public heading to lower levels of literacy, it is quite conceivable that an aural understanding of language will lead people more astray, as with the example that I gave previously on these pages of I can't be asked. But can we predict them... ?
Can we set computers to work out what will sound so like something else that people will, at least, be uncertain, as with It was off my own back / bat (where the latter is more likely to be right)? Or, with a tone-deaf sense that says that Adele's Skyfall song (and its execution - it's well and truly dead, but, sadly, a zombie), will it be somewhat contrary, so that people think that x is the right course of action in the last risotto ?
Whatever happens, whilst there is life in me, I will fight that panino is the singular, and that adding a second plural ending - I would have had us do as we do with cappuccino, and treat it as an ordinary anglicized word that I order more than one of by adding the ending -es, so I would want And two ham-and-cheese paninoes, toasted, rather than the smart dick who confused everyone with the unnecessary introduction of panini. I wait, a hope as yet unsatisfied, for coffe-houses to be offering me tramezzini...
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Showing posts with label Riddley Walker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Riddley Walker. Show all posts
Tuesday, 26 February 2013
Thursday, 1 March 2012
Russell's Pate and degenerate languages
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 March
Of course, the apostrophe is slowly, itself, in danger of slipping into oblivion, but it is only there to make the point:
We do not live in very literate times, and much is passed (or, as some would write, past) on by word of mouth* (a strange phrase, if one stops to think about it), so what is envisaged by the argot (call it what you will) in which the novel Riddley Walker's author has a future time and its notion of its past related is a disjunction between some sounds and what saying them has come to mean.
Apart from the immersive feel of impenetrability that the language seems to give until you have a chance to hear even Will Self himself read a section of it - which you may be able to do on one of the web-sites dedicated to the late Russell Hoban (sa4qe.blogspot.co.uk is as good a place as any from which to find some of the others) - and then realize that there is a way through (other than gritting one's teeth) and there is so much more besides to explore.
End-notes
* Even a very good announcer on Radio 3 talked about, very recently, Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale: I have said elsewhere that the same unstressed dead vowel in a and the can make them sound indistinguishable (which is because the 'th' sound is the unclear one of the pair, unlike the one in that).
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 March
Of course, the apostrophe is slowly, itself, in danger of slipping into oblivion, but it is only there to make the point:
We do not live in very literate times, and much is passed (or, as some would write, past) on by word of mouth* (a strange phrase, if one stops to think about it), so what is envisaged by the argot (call it what you will) in which the novel Riddley Walker's author has a future time and its notion of its past related is a disjunction between some sounds and what saying them has come to mean.
Apart from the immersive feel of impenetrability that the language seems to give until you have a chance to hear even Will Self himself read a section of it - which you may be able to do on one of the web-sites dedicated to the late Russell Hoban (sa4qe.blogspot.co.uk is as good a place as any from which to find some of the others) - and then realize that there is a way through (other than gritting one's teeth) and there is so much more besides to explore.
End-notes
* Even a very good announcer on Radio 3 talked about, very recently, Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale: I have said elsewhere that the same unstressed dead vowel in a and the can make them sound indistinguishable (which is because the 'th' sound is the unclear one of the pair, unlike the one in that).
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Friday, 6 January 2012
Crypt in Canterbury
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 January
I quote from the Hoban 2005 web-site. Can anyone else spot the relational error?:
After viewing the painting, a service began in the main part of the cathedral, so the group was led downstairs to the crypt, where no photography is allowed.
A clue. It resembles the one in these lines from a song by Chris de Burgh:
Rolling through the countryside,
Tears were in my eyes.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 January
I quote from the Hoban 2005 web-site. Can anyone else spot the relational error?:
After viewing the painting, a service began in the main part of the cathedral, so the group was led downstairs to the crypt, where no photography is allowed.
A clue. It resembles the one in these lines from a song by Chris de Burgh:
Rolling through the countryside,
Tears were in my eyes.
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