c o l o p h o n

From Andrew Biswell’s life of Anthony Burgess:

“In the sergeant’s mess at Moorish castle he also acquired a pet chameleon […]. He tested the legend about chameleons bursting into flames if they were placed on a piece of tartan. It refused to combust, but grew ‘palpably unhappy’.” (p.95)

Burgess’s seven wonders of the world:

• Tiger Balm
• the chameleon
• the pre-decimal British monetary system
• The Mikado
• the Petrarchan sonnet form
• champagne
• Fritz Lang’s Metropolis

More sensibly:

“The Ring is symbolism, and only artists who are not sure what they believe indulge in it, since symbols are good at reconciling opposites, resolving ambiguities, suggesting archetypes.” (quoting Burgess’s 1980 TSE Memorial Lectures, at 135n)

Orson Welles (dir.), War Of the Worlds (1938)
Mason/Webb, Dick Barton: Special Agent (1946-1951)
Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood (1954)
Samuel Beckett, All That Fall (1957)

Yearbook of English Studies review of two books on radio, and one on television, drama.

Has anybody noticed that “the war on terror” and “you’re with us or against us” are dialogue snippets from the Jerry Bruckheimer-backed Connery/Cage masterpiece, The Rock (1996)?

Crowds thrive and decay on the disastrous horizon.
History forms and breaks like
                        clouds there, repetitive and sublime.
Near at hand disaster is faced, absorbed and passed on
one moment and one life at a time.

— Alasdair Gray

“…in an era in which the national security apparatus has turned into a kind of lumbering, savage, giant toddler, it behooves us to not leave things within arm’s reach that it might stick in its mouth.”

– Cory Doctorow, here.

“Brisbane bristles with pret-a-porter Peter Porters” — Clive James.

The line is so good it’s almost forgivable, but…

This from a man who once accused Nabokov of not having noticed that one of the secrets of good English style is to avoid alliteration? One wonders how long he had that written down before he found somewhere to write it up.