— C. A. R. Hoare
Hoare is the inventor of Quicksort among other things.
The sentiment reminds me of the famous Shaw sign-off:
Chronically bothered
From The Corrections:
There is such pleasure in savoring the rightness of a design, from the Vespa to the Beetle. I have certain pairs of shoes that make me twist my foot admiringly when I’m not being watched.
This pleasure comes at a price. Bad design, sloppy layouts, jargon—these cause grief equal to or greater than the other delight. Part of my job involves designing user interfaces. When a layout doesn’t work out just so, I tell myself it doesn’t matter. Babies won’t die. But I never quite believe it.
The laureate of cruelty
I am re-reading Lolita. I sit on the subway, tongue poking out, underlining earnestly like a student of English as a Foreign Language. Nabokov has that effect. Can this be my workaday, ordering-coffee mother language in which he describes Annabel?
I was twelve or so when I first read Lolita, drawn in by the Sue Lyon cover on the paperback edition at home. She wore heart-shaped red glasses and sucked a lollipop and I thought she was terribly glamorous. Sue Lyon was not a nymphet, of course—she had breasts, for a start. The real Humbert would’ve had nothing to do with her. Nor with me. Childhood plainness is a blessing of sorts.
Here’s a good Martin Amis essay on Lolita.
Goodness! I just advocated Martin Amis. Don’t hold it against me. (Though I did once get him to sign Times Arrow in Dublin.)
Too many people complained about the lack of journal entries. I shall take a different tack, and instead bore you into submission with more tales of my sugary cultural explorations.
Mark is the only person at Vindigo who a) complains about American candy as much as I do and b) eats as much American candy as I do. Imagine my excitement when he sent around this message this morning, on his return from Toronto:
1. Canadian Crunchies are good, but not quite as good as Irish ones. And the package description, ‘Sponge Toffee’, is just silly, both in French and English. ‘Sponge Toffee’? I never heard such nonsense. It’s obviously a Honeycomb Centre. We squabbled about this for some time.
2. Coffee Crisps are really very good. And I loved the genteel Canadian tagline: ‘Makes a nice light snack’. No wild TASTE SENSATION! claims up North.
3.Caramilk Apparently, their long-running ad campaign is ‘How do they get the caramel into the Caramilk?’ Which they’ve obviously ripped off from Ireland’s own ‘How do they get the figs into the Fig Rolls?’
More squabbles and national slurs followed.
5. Aero is also the same, I think. Never a favorite.
Now I feel sick. I am the Elvis of Canadian candy.
Go play in the fresh air
I won’t be posting this week.
A puppy is not just for Christmas
Mark sent me this heart-rending post from Craig’s List. It’s the reverent, capitalized ‘Her’ that gets me.
Where can we get an abortion for our pedigree dog?
Our lovely Pedigreed Minature Poodle was violated
by our neighbors Golden Retriever. She somehow got outside
when the delivery people came by and was impregnated in front of
our house in broad daylight. The neighbors maid called us.
I was able to rescue Madonna from the male but we now
know she is pregnant. We dont want Her to have this litter of
mixed puppies because we were hoping to breed Her in the springtime
with another lineage from Danville.
Needless to say my wife and are completly devestated by the
turn of events and found we are unable to sue the neighbor because
both our dogs were loose!
We cant go to our veterinarian because he handles other peoples dogs
we know and are afraid they might find out.
Now Madonna lays around and eats a lot. She’s become fat and I
cant even take her out to meet the other dogwalking regulars because
they will know she’s pregnant.
Has anyone else in the CL community encountered this before?
Im willing to fly her anywhere to have this problem taken care of.
PLEASE HELP US. and Merry X-mas
That crass neighbor needs Neuticles.
Kill the pig
Anthony Bourdain is my new hero. Caitriona gave me his latest for Christmas, and he’s such a bad-ass. Rangy, intrepid, mean, funny as hell, and an eater. What’s not to like?
Bourdain on integrity:
In A Cook’s Tour, there’s a chapter on a village pig-killing in Portugal that reminded me of my friend Joy, who grew up in Gorey, Co. Wexford, the youngest of the town butcher’s five daughters. Joy spent summers linking sausages for her father, Terry. Terry’s description of country sausage-making was crisp.
—Shave the pig, Joy, wipe his arse, and shove him through the mincer.
NPR ran a piece yesterday morning on literacy in Afghanistan and the general lack of books. Libraries (like everywhere else) have no heat or electricity, and can open for only a few hours each morning. Most of the books not burned by the Taliban have been locked away. What’s left are dreary volumes on 1960s American and Russian foreign policy, remnants of a long-ended propaganda war. Many ‘permitted’ books have been destroyed for paper to wrap food. Only 30% of the population is literate now. Jackie Lydon interviewed a hopeful 18 year old who explained that since the libraries were open only during working hours, no one could go, but that the booksellers in the stalls outside would now rent books for a few pennies a time. Shades of the traveling libraries of 19th century England.
I never stint on books. I buy and read them greedily, and I like to own rather than borrow because my bookshelves are a physical map of mental furniture. Growing up, I used to annoy my father by never using bookmarks. Instead, I left books open and face down, breaking the cheap spines. I also used to eat my books, literally—a childhood tic I’ve never known anyone else to have. My Enid Blytons were published on cheap, woody paper that yellowed as you read it. I used to tear a strip or several off the bottom of each page—margins only, never print—and dissolve it on my tongue, like communion wafer. This was oddly comforting. I grew out of it as I grew into trade paperbacks. The higher quality paper did not melt as satisfyingly as pulp.
Naturally, this weird habit also drove my father mad.
—You don’t look after your books! Jesus, why do you eat them?
His own were treasured; each paperback inscribed with his beautiful signature. When he was eight or nine, the schoolmaster walked the few miles up to my grandparents’ cottage in Roscommon.
—John is very bright. He must have books.
Dutifully, my granny went to town and bought him two books. He gulped them down in an afternoon, which convinced her they were a waste of money. He never got books of his own again until he was old enough to buy them.
Is this story true? I don’t know. My mother told me when I was twenty. It made me ashamed of my disregard for the college English books thrown around my bedroom, covered in coffee stains and spilled make-up. Perhaps it’s why the NPR story touched me more than accounts of far worse privations.
I ran my fingers across my shelves when I got home last night, reacquainting with my old friends and enemies (Eggers, this means you). This generation of my books has straight, unbroken spines and uneaten pages. And each is carefully inscribed with my signature. I wish everyone were as lucky as I am.
Girly-girls
Here is one of the most pathetic IM exchanges I’ve ever taken part in. It refers to the previous post.
dervala: refresh your browser.
dervala: happy now?
claire: very happy
(If I had tenure, this is the point at which I’d be fired.)
It’s customary in this country to refer to female college students as women. And I do it, because I like to pass. I even did it in my previous post. But childless American females under 22 are girls, for all their politics.
In much of the world, you’re either a child, or you’re capable of having children and therefore an adult with full responsibilities. Here, the middle class barely manages to kick children out SUV-sized strollers by the time they get to grade school. The lag persists: we indulge in a protracted adolescence that ends reluctantly somewhere around 27, or later if we can manage it. And one of the symptoms is this self-important self-labeling.
Problem is, we don’t have the equivalent of ‘guy’. Males are boys, then guys, then eventually, mysteriously, they become men. ‘Guy’ is not infantalizing or derogatory; it’s an in-between stage. What do we have? ‘Chicks’ can only be used safely by chicks, and it doesn’t suit everybody. But we need something for those in-betweenies. Is Clare [CLAIRE] Danes a woman? Britney Spears? Gimme a break.
End of rant. May I collect my pink slip now?
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