One of the most attractive things about Wikipedia is its magmatic nature. Here is Nicholson Baker discussing the vicissitudes of just one of its pages: The Pop-Tarts page is often aflutter. Pop-Tarts, it says as of today (February 8, 2008), were discontinued in Australia in 2005. Maybe that’s true. Before that it said that Pop-Tarts... Continue Reading →
Ounce Dice Trice
For some time now New York Review Books has been re-publishing books which have been out of print for a while. This seems to me to be an excellent idea. In fact, it might be good to have a one week moratorium on new books once a year, call it Reprint Week, and dedicate it solely to old books which have been... Continue Reading →
Thirty-seven ways of looking at a dervish
A secret turning in us makes the universe turn. Head unaware of feet, and feet head. Neither cares. They keep turning. - Rumi As everybody knows, the Mevlevi are an order of dervishes founded in Konya in the 12th Century by the followers of the great mystical poet Rumi and who are best known for... Continue Reading →
How to say “extinction” in Chumyl: “The Linguists”, a film.
If you are interested in language and languages you might like to see the film "The Linguists". The film, presented as "a very foreign language film", is about David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, two researchers who travel the world to document vanishing languages. Most of the action takes place in Siberia, India and Bolivia and... Continue Reading →
Wee Klinks 3
It's raining today where I live and it rained so much yesterday that when you ask someone for the time water pours out of their sleeve when they look at their watch. There are glum expressions all around me, but I am actually fond of rain. I think the reason must be my childhood memories... Continue Reading →
The Meaning of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in One Sentence
“Look, listen, love – and try not to get run over by history.” There it is for those who have an assignment to complete in the next five minutes or who are generally in a hurry to wrap things up. If you have a little more time to spare, read on. Sometimes people ask me... Continue Reading →
Say it in Terpreting
(This piece first appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Communicate! - a webzine for conference interpreters and the conference industry: Those who aren't acquainted with the ins and outs of conference interpreting might be baffled by some of the details of the job but will surely be able to empathise with the general feeling... Continue Reading →
Wordle Quiz
You can't get away from word clouds by now. Tags, authors and names get pasted into swirls and displayed in patterns everywhere. The presidential and vice-presidential debates were followed immediately by a pictorial analysis of the words most frequently used by each contender. So my subject is not a particularly original thing to write about.... Continue Reading →
Improvisation on improvisation in desperation
After a few months of amazed bewilderment, I have finally worked out how to represent the way the recent Republican Vice-Presidential nominee's thought processes and verbiage generation function. Think of a car at speed trying to negotiate a twisting track covered with thick ice. That's it. This was brought home to me by the following video which features a... Continue Reading →
riverrun
(Listen to the poem here) mind. They thought it was a good idea to put the Nile Perch into Lake Victoria. Such a convenient and clever thing to have so many fish steaks quickly growing at the bottom of the road. The way it grew so quick, they found, was by devouring everything in sight... Continue Reading →