It is near to the end of days, shortly before the appearance of a “stupid Messiah”. Two British men, employed somehow in academia, muse on their lack of success and incapacity for real thought while drinking too much gin. “We are Brod and Brod, we agree, and neither of us is Kafka.” Sometimes they travel to a conference, and drink too much there instead. One of the friends insults the other with spectacular, relentless cruelty. The insultee also has to deal with a damp problem in his flat that gradually assumes apocalyptic proportions of sweating metaphor.

That is all that happens in Spurious. If Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet had just sat around bitching instead of investigating the world’s knowledge, the result would have resembled this novel. It is a tiny marvel of comically repetitive gloomery. Continued →

After more than a decade’s labour, Jonathon Green, lexicographer of the subversive, has produced as fine a three-volume dictionary of slang as you would desire to piss upon. (1700: “excellent, first-rate.”) Like the OED, it is built on “historical principles”, with dates for citations, one of whose effects is to impress upon us the boisterous demotic creativity of our forebears, who were no less interested than we are in making up new ways to describe getting drunk. (1650: “Go to the scriveners and learn to make indentures.”) Continued →

Is my review of a novel composed entirely of questions itself going to be composed entirely of questions? What do you think? What is this novel composed entirely of questions about? Is it “about” anything? How are we to imagine the scenario? Do certain lines and section-breaks in the novel, one coming after the question “Do you have anything you’d like to say?”, imply unheard answers by another character? If we assume the questioner is speaking his questions out loud, what are we to make of the moment when he says he was writing one? Is this interrogation taking place in a military base, or a padded cell, or in Purgatory? Who are the other people present who never speak either but are implied exactly once? Or is this all in the questioner’s head? And if so, how did we get inside his head? How can we get out? Continued →

Do you find it hard to concentrate these days? Do you get fidgety after two pages of a book, and look around for something else to do? Is the online abbreviation “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read) your response to basically everything? If so, Nicholas Carr feels your pain, and has diagnosed the cause: using the internet has rewired your brain and turned you into a flibbertigibbet. Continued →

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has an admirable form of reply to the near-continuous dribble of attacks on him, whether from the bienpensant liberals he so enjoys provoking, or even, as last year in the conservative American magazine The New Republic, a crazed and borderline illiterate review alleging that Zizek was a “fascist” and also anti-Semitic. He simply writes another book. Continued →

How would a person in the early 1600s call someone an idiot? “Half-wit” is tempting, but it turns out to date from a century-and-a-half later. “Chucklehead” is no good either (1731), but “blockhead” (1549) is fine, as might be the beautiful “obstupefact” (1601). “Dunderwhelp” (1621) is pushing it, but you’ll be fine with “dullard” (1440), “blockhead” (1549), “idiot” itself (1375), or, of course, the classic “fool” (1275). If you are interested in nicer distinctions, decide whether you mean a “person of weak intellect” (“wattle-head”, 1613), a “crazy person” (“nidiot”, 1534-1613, or “moonling”, 1616), or a “confused, muddled person” (“mafflard”, 1450). Should you desire to reach further back into the past, before the advent even of “fool”, choose from Old English “sotman” or “unandgitfull”, among other treasures from the deep word-hoard. Continued →