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Category Archives: language-and-literature
walking into a bar: a contest proposal
Over lunch recently, Jeff mentioned the joke behind the title of Lynne Trusse’s book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which goes a little something like this:
A panda bear walks into a bar and orders lunch. He sits quietly munching his food, and after he finishes he wipes his mouth with his napkin, pulls out a gun, fires into the ceiling and walks out.
“What was that all about?” the bartender asks the waiter.
“Oh, that’s what a panda bear does. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
(Obviously, this joke really only works when it’s spoken: “eats, shoots and leaves” sounds just like “eats shoots and leaves.”)
Later in the week, as we were talking about this joke and others of the [fill-in-the-blank]-walks-into-a-bar genre, I said that it seems to me that people don’t really tell jokes so much anymore. I proposed a contest, or party game, in which people challenged each other with the front end of a joke, requiring the other participant to complete the joke. Whoever could do so in the shortest amount of time would win.
Jeff proposed, “A panda bear, a fox, and a gorilla walk into a bar.”
I proposed, “A three-legged sled dog walks into a bar.”
So, can you finish these jokes?
luminous blue variables
Unable to sleep, I am reminded by Miriam of the Poem on Your Blog idea. Today is the last day of National Poetry Month.
Check out “Luminous Blue Variables,” by my colleague Michelle Boisseau.
william blake’s technology
This is really just a “Hey, isn’t this cool?” kind of post, and I guess I’ve had a lot of those lately. Take a look at Joseph Viscomi’s chapter on William Blake’s “Illuminated Printing” techniques.
ìIlluminated Printingî was first published in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, edited by Morris Eaves, 2003. It is republished here by permission of Cambridge University Press. While the text remains the same, the electronic version has 95 illustrations versus 9 in the printed version. The illustrations demonstrate in detail the stages of both Blakeís relief etching (ìilluminated printingî) and conventional intaglio etching according to the six ìChambersî in the ìPrinting house in Hell,î from Blakeís The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The comparison of these two methods of etching will help reveal what was borrowed, altered, invented, and radical in Blakeís new mode of graphic production. The illustrations, which are linked to enlargements that have detailed captions, supplement the text but also function autonomously as slide shows on the technical and aesthetic contexts in which illuminated printing was invented, and as tutorials in the production of engravings, etchings, and relief etchings.
Fascinating stuff. Without the Blake Archive, I would not be able to teach Blake the way that I do.
novel as software
Via Slashdot:
LukePieStalker writes “Former English professor Eric Brown has published the first work in what he claims is a new literary category called the ‘digital epistolary novel’, or DEN. ‘Intimacies’, based on an 18th century novel, requires the DEN 1.2 software. The program’s interface has windows for mock e-mail, instant messaging, Web browser and pager, through which the narrative unfolds. For those wishing to create their own works in this genre, Mr. Brown is marketing composition software called DEN WriterWare.”
Also mentioned over at scribblingwoman.