Democratic superpower (Athens 431 BCE) catastrophically over-reaches itself. Plus ça change. My reading of Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War is now a free audiobook on Librivox: librivox.org/history-of-t...
Couldn’t say yes. Couldn’t say sorry. So appropriate Senator Prince is now spokesperson for absolutely nothing.
Noddle-head decides he is a knight-errant, and asks local farm labourer to accompany him. Cervantes milks his premise with great skill, creating much warm-hearted silliness and slapstick. My free reading is now at librivox.org/don-quixote-...
And while you’re at it:
🪝Dangle your modifiers like a Tyburn executioner
Just realised “unclear” is only a single (accidental?) letter transposition away from “nuclear”. Hope there’s been no smartarse spell-checker at work in some of those “top secret” Signal groups we’ve heard about lately.
Peetotaller: one who has sworn off drinking in the evening in order to reduce night visits to the bathroom.
Did Nicholas John Turner anticipate publishers might turn down his marvellous yet challenging Let The Boys Play? It so happens his working title THY SONS MAKE PILLAGE (from Titus Andronicus) is an anagram of NO SHALT LIKE MY PAGES.
If there is any justice in the cosmos, Donald Trump will be required to spend eternity bound to a card table playing poker with Volodymyr Zelensky. Let's see then who's better at counting cards.
Silly me. Whether or not THY SONS MAKE PILLAGE (the original title of Nicholas Turner's "Let the Boys Play") is a decipherable anagram, it is certainly from Act 2 Scene 3 of Shakespeare's gore-fest Titus Andronicus. Philomel's tongue turns up in LTBP on p. 84. @thebookdesk.bsky.social
Exactly. I’m not quite sure why I “smell” anagram here, but I’ve become convinced the novel is built from surfaces below which lie alternative readings, so this does seem at least plausible. If, as seems likely, I do not manage to crack this riddle, I do hope someone else will (and will share that!)
If LET THY SONS MAKE PILLAGE (original title of Nicholas John Turner’s “Let the Boys Play”) is in fact an anagram, solution GAS KILLS NEOPHYTE MA would at least fit content of last chapter. (This might-or-might-not-be puzzle is driving me nuts!) @thebookdesk.bsky.social
Question 1, children: The gap under a bridge is 4 metres. You are driving a van which is 5 metres tall…
GAME KILLS LAST NEOPHYTE might make best, but bleakest, sense of all.
From "Let the Boys Play", by John Nicholas Turner (p. 41). I now think we may have an anagram here. LAST GAME KILLS NEOPHYTE? LAST NEOPHYTE GAME SKILL? Are there any other "solvers" out there working on this intriguing novelistic escape room? @thebookdesk.bsky.social
Nicholas John Turner's "Let the Boys Play" is a certainly a stunning display of literary pyrotechnics. It is also, though, an intricately wrought masterpiece of defamiliarisation just crying out to be decoded. Thank you, @thebookdesk.bsky.social www.peterdannauthor.com/let-the-boys...
So, should I, or should I not…
… celery sacrifice?
My day is now officially “made”.
If there was one thing Jonathan Swift loved more dearly than a good poop or a kind horse, it was skewering the foibles and pride of his fellow man. My free reading of Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” is now available at librivox.org/gullivers-tr...
This guy’s already fabricated one Golden Dome. Now he wants another??
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver views a means by which "the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study." Sound familiar?
I may well have a crack at reading this for Librivox once all three volumes are in the public domain — which, from memory, will be next year.
I read this a couple of months ago. It’s like a big, slow-rolling stone that gathers more and more emotional “moss” as it goes. By volume 3, my heart was near to breaking. It’s certainly not a fashionable book, and will never be a “book group” book, but I see it as a major Oz literary achievement.
George Borrow's "The Romany Rye" (1857) continues "Lavengro" to form a highly readable work whose mingling of fiction, travelogue, autobiography and invective now sounds strangely contemporary. My new (free) reading is at librivox.org/the-romany-r...
Simile, like you’re on Candid Camera.
President Tantrump
The term “politically correct” did not exist when George Borrow published “The Romany Rye” in 1857, but he certainly suspected that contemporary authors might be drawn to promote certain positions on account of their modish popularity.
Can't say I've ever mastered the German language, but I should be able to get this much straight, at least. Is the whole point of a bildungsroman, then, that Rome wasn't built in a day?
Hungarian equerry addressing narrator of "The Romany Rye", by George Borrow, who prose Gerald Murnane so admires. As it happens, I've actually seen the cribs bearing English on one side, Hungarian on the other, in a certain filing cabinet in Goroke. Just coincidence?
Caligula's horse had more gravitas between its hind legs than the great statesmen named in the first line of this bizarre headline today.
Around when Gerald Murnane turned 10, his father's gambling debts caused great upheaval in his family. Here, in George Borrow's "The Romany Rye", "the jockey" describes a similar situation. Murnane admired Borrow's prose style — but may have had other grounds for sympathy too?