Adventures in the Pointless Forest

About a cock that crowed too soon

nobody@vox.com(redfox) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:19:41 -0500

This rather awesome passage is from James Branch Cabell's Jurgen, published in 1921:

Satan was like a man of sixty, or it might be sixty-two, in all things save that he was covered with grey fur, and had horns like those of a stag. He wore a breech-clout of very dark grey, and he sat in a chair of black marble, on a dais: his bushy tail, which was like that of a squirrel, waved restlessly over his head as he looked at Jurgen, without speaking, and without turning his mind from an ancient thought.

I think that "by Satan's squirrelly tail!" would make a good oath. I only wish there were more opportunity to utter that sort of thing in everyday life. (Obviously, the answer to this is that I must make the opportunity.) The tail comes up again at the end of the chapter: "So Jurgen left the Black House of Barathum: and Jurgen also left Grandfather
Satan, erect and bleak in his tall marble chair, and with his eyes gleaming in the dim light, as he sat there restively swishing his soft bushy tail."

Nice, isn't it?

I was expecting Jurgen to be both weird and ribald, which indeed it is, but I didn't anticipate quite how positively, snickeringly porny it would be. Oh, the lances, their tips red with blood. Oh, the magestically large swords and sticks and scepters. Oh, the shaking of the scepters and the poking with the lances and the hiding of the swords where the nubile young thing could not possibly see them. Oh, indeed.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

A link in every section, a chicken in every pot

nobody@vox.com(redfox) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:50:25 -0400

Actually, your corners are a little too poky for that to work so well.

This thread on Unfogged did not wind up being very well directed towards answering Ogged's original request, but it made me very happy by sending me on a trip through Books I Love Land. Oh, hello, A Change of Climate! Wonderful to see you, A Maggot and Woman in White and Mating and An Instance of the Fingerpost! I don't really have anything more to say about any of it, but I had just been feeling super cranky as I tend to do when I am working to many deadlines at once and thought it would be pleasant to revisit the way that thread pepped me up. C'mere books, let me give you some snorgles.

Then she said, "ahh. smell that lovely decomposing vegetation."

While I'm reminding myself that, in fact, this week has not been devoid of cheer, I should also remember that I got to spend a lot of time reading around in MICASE, the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. This is always a great treat for me, because it is chock full of delights. It's a nice big corpus of some 190 hours of recorded and transcribed speech from lectures, seminars, lab meetings, advising sessions, campus tours, dissertation defenses, and various other academic adventures. I think my favorite are the off-campus labs where people are doing field research on fish and birds. Like this!

SU-f: you're not dictatorial you just want your own way.
SU-m: he's a despot (face it.)
S1: <LAUGH> yeah, pleased to meet you too. <SS: LAUGH> can you think what it would be like if you ever had me as a patient?
SU-f: (xx) is this mine? over there?
SU-f: um, yeah they were over there.
<PAUSE:30>
S1: dee di dee you know it's a really tough job but, someone has to do it.
SU-f: <LAUGH> me
<PAUSE:11>
SU-m: uh oh
SU-m: uh oh
SU-m: uh oh
SU-f: <GETS THROWN IN WATER> oh

About damn time.

Annnnd, we had a really good speaker at the department colloquium this week, smart and charming and practical and organized. So what exactly I have to be grumpy about, I really do not know. My hug meter is so low LOOOOOVE MEEEEEE

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

That didn't last for long

nobody@vox.com(redfox) — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 14:44:41 -0500

I must register my disappointment that Black Swan Green is not a zillion pages long.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Catching up on popular culture

nobody@vox.com(redfox) — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 17:43:15 -0400

...of two rather different milieux: (a) the Stephen Potter *manship books, and (b) Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend