Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Beers & Books CCLV – Dafydd ap Gwilym

Clicking the label
Dafydd ap Gwilym
soon you will agree with me:
There's no bard like him.

Dafydd ap Gwilym
(c. 1315/1320 – c. 1350/1370)

Thursday, January 14, 2021

[Capita Turciensis] Laughing Lhursday*

Recently [2008] - I was just reading the last chapter of The Bastard of Istanbul - I heard Tetrapilotomos chuckle, which induced following dialogue:

- Yes?

- Blimey, no wonder there's a steady increase of population in Turkey.

- What are you busy with, Tetrapilotomos?

-
Merowinger time.

- I see. And what does this have to do with the population growth in Turkey?

- Do you know what aureum caput regni means?

- Golden head of the imperium, or so?

- Not bad. And caput orbis?

- Head of the world.

- Not bad. And what's a colloquial German word for broken?

- Kaputt. Spelled with one t less in English it means a) utterly finished, defeated, or destroyed and b) unable to function.

- Not bad. And do you know what a condom is being called in Turkish.

- No idea.

- Kaput.


* [For first time visitors]: Typo in the title? Nah. It's just that
I would not let a tiny T spoil an avantgardistic alliteration.


Tuesday, May 26, 2020

On Convention




Today, while admiring the elegance of the swallows giving me the honour to again spending a summer under Seanhenge's roof, suddenly Chapter 5 [On Convention] in 'The Short Story' by Sean O'Faolain came to my mind.
I jumped up, took the book, opened page 173, finally put on my skirt in order to type the following:
'We forget when enjoying the pleasure of any art, of music, poetry, painting or the theatre, that a very great part of our pleasure has been dependent on convention. We are expected to forget it. In the theatre we have all tacitly agreed to see nothing odd about a room that, on the stage, has only three sides; or, in painting, it does not seem odd to us that we see a view as if our heads were held in a vice whereas in life we let our eyes wander east and west, shift position a dozen times and see the landscape under fifty changing lights. The point is elementary; that is why it so important; because it is so very obvious it is constantly forgotten, and this forgetting has, as I will show in this chapter, profound implications. I will here barely hint at one of them by recalling how a humourous philosopher once pointed to a cow in a field and said to me, 'What do you see there?'
I obligingly said that I perceived a cow. 'But you do not,' he replied. 'You deduce a cow. All you see is the appearance of one-half of the outside of a cow. And when you look at a portrait of your aunt all you see is a picture of the outside of one-half of your aunt. You go through a series of lightning processes before accepting this superficies as a portrait of your aunt. It is, for instance, the whole case against realism that it concentrates on giving us the outside of the one-half of everything.' In other words the convention of realism depends for its success on our forgetting that realism is a convention. So does every other convention.'

The peace of the night!



Monday, February 24, 2020

Anyone to blame?

Harriet Beecher-Stowe, Harper Lee,
publishers & booksellers,

readers,

baker, carnival,
photographer:
Anyone to blame (for ... anything)?

Saturday, October 21, 2017

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Laughing Lhursday*



George Carlin

* [For first time visitors]:
Typo in the title?
Nah.
It's just that I would not let a tiny T spoil an avantgardistic alliteration.

Thursday, August 10, 2017

Laughing Lhursday*



George Carlin

* [For first time visitors]:
Typo in the title?
Nah.
It's just that I would not let a tiny T spoil an avantgardistic alliteration.

Thursday, August 03, 2017

Laughing Lhursday*



George Carlin

* [For first time visitors]:
Typo in the title?
Nah.
It's just that I would not let a tiny T spoil an avantgardistic alliteration.

Thursday, July 27, 2017

Laughing Lhursday*



George Carlin

* [For first time visitors]:
Typo in the title?
Nah.
It's just that I would not let a tiny T spoil an avantgardistic alliteration.

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Laughing Lhursday*



George Carlin

* [For first time visitors]:
Typo in the title?
Nah.
It's just that I would not let a tiny T spoil an avantgardistic alliteration.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Laughing Lhursday*



George Carlin

* [For first time visitors]:
Typo in the title?
Nah.
It's just that I would not let a tiny T spoil an avantgardistic alliteration.

Thursday, July 06, 2017

Laughing Lhursday*



George Carlin

* [For first time visitors]:
Typo in the title?
Nah.
It's just that I would not let a tiny T spoil an avantgardistic alliteration.

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Laughing Lhursday*



George Carlin

* [For first time visitors]:
Typo in the title?
Nah.
It's just that I would not let a tiny T spoil an avantgardistic alliteration.