Writer’s Rooms
Writer’s Rooms from the Guardian
Not going to help to do that novel but somehow irresistible. On the other hand, maybe you have been writing a story about a novelist…..
Tale from the cuttings cull # 2 John Fowles
Is there a term for spending more time reading old newspaper cuttings than in turfing them out? Most are being thrown out but there is always a small, select pile which seem too important to throw away.
This time there was a long review of the 2004 biography of John Fowles by Eileen Warburton, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds. There was mention of his first wife Elizabeth and the part she played in his novels, and other women in his life.
To mind came an image of a film of Fowles’ life written by Harold Pinter revolving around John and Elizabeth. Time someone had a go. “John and Elizabeth” has a certain ring to it.
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There in not a great mass of stuff on Elizabeth on the web but this is some of what I have found:
Jeremy Treglown’s Spectator review of Warburton
The man behind the Magus John Mullan
Extract from Warburton
A Mystery to Himself by Julian Evans
Evans also does an essay, The Old English Agony, on the first volume of Fowles’ journal.
In the LRB, Ian Sansom reviews Warburton and vol 1 of the journal.
The Diary of a Misanthrope Adam Mars-Jones on Vol 2
Death of an author, not Catherine Gander (‘John Fowles’ journals are as much works of fiction as his novels’)
Fair or Fowles Adam Lee-Potter Interview 2003
Conversations with John Fowles (GoogleBook) has Fowles talking about Elizabeth.
Times 29 June 2008, John Fowles: the French Lieutenant author’s secret woman
Letters from John Fowles reveal he had an affair with an Oxford student 43 years his junior who modeled herself on the heroine in his tale of scandalous love
The Daily Mail souped up the letters story by finding out more about the girl, Elena van Lieshout.
The ‘real’ French Lieutenant’s Woman: John Fowles’s doomed love affair with a 21-year-old Oxford student. (4 July 32008)
Never write off the pulling power of a man of letters
Of Elena and others who latched on to famous writers.
Fascimiles of two letters, one by hand the other typed from the Sotheby’s auction, from Fowles to Elena.
The catalogue note included quotes from some of the other letters in the collection.
July 16th, 2007 blog post by photographer and writer Tom M. Wilson on a visit to Lyme Regis. He has written a book called The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles. (Amazon)
This photograph is at a guess Elizabeth, John and Elizabeth’s daughter Ann.
Four photos from Warburton’s biography
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Come on Harold, in the vein of the Proust Play….yellow screen…..tinkling bells…. that sort of thing….only this time a sudden image of a young boy holding a bird under water in a stream with his foot on its neck till it drowns.
Tales from the cuttings cull # 1 – Schlimmblesserung
Ah, foreign words, what would we do without them? Zeitgeist. Schadenfreude. Weltanschauung. Bildungsroman. Schlimmbesserung. Never heard of it? Nor me. In an old Sunday Times science page article I came across in a pile of cuttings being culled, Robert Mathews used it, with a single m, in a piece about mucking-up maps. Apparently a child’s atlas he picked up had pages centred on 150 degrees rather than the traditional 0 degree Greenwich meridian , with the annoying effect of every twin page being mostly ocean.
Translated literally, Schlimmerbesserung comes out as ‘a worse-bettering’. It might be rendered ‘correcting badly’. Hence it has been used about Microsoft software. Howard Rheingold in his book, They have a Word For It, uses the example of the introduction of bus lanes which forces the rest of the traffic into the remaining lane or lanes: more snarl-ups rather than the intended less. Another example is the polystyrene cup. Great idea, but what do with we do with all the polystyrene which won’t biodegrade? They make them out of plastic now – do they biodegrade? But what of polystyrene packaging including those little beads and squiggles?
Since few know what a word like schlimmbesserung means has to be explained first, unlike blitzkrieg, ersatz or kindergarten. That’s the joy of it: a perfect excuse to introduce a concept.
Krautblog is not where I first read the word, but it explains something of its usage and origins.
Wayne Dynes in his blog, Dynlynes, suggests it came from textual criticism, which makes me think of the Bible’s many translations.
Everything2, says it was favoured by Einstein.
Apparently it makes more sense to a German as Verschlimmbesserung, the ver indicating change. Though one German says it is not a compound he knows and he can’t find it in his German dictionary.
Robert Mathews has re-introduced the word in another context in a 2008 article, Grey skies are going to clear up. His article in my cuttings, Why the world have map-makers left us all at sea? (The Sunday Telegraph 7 April 2002) begins:
When people try to fix something that isn’t broken, the result is usually what the Germans handily term a schlimbessung [sic] – a “worse-bettering”. As I opened a world atlas the other day, I discovered that even cartography is not immune from this effect.
A travel piece on Thailand by someone else also uses it:
There’s a funny German word for it: Schlimmbesserung. It means: to make things worse by trying to make them better.
It is difficult to find something equivalent to schlimmerbesserung in English because of this seeming combination of intent and result. Wiki:unintended consequences, certainly covers it, but can refer to good or bad outcomes.
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There is a distinction between loan words and calque.
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Schlimmbesserung reminds me of hirnsbesitzer: not because of meaning but it highlights the business of which foreign words find favour and which rarely see the light of day.
The Beethoven story is well known but hirnsbesitzer has not been taken into common currency. For some reason the word hirnsbesitzer has stuck in my mind for decades, easily recalled at the slightest provocation. To excuse the use of the word the story of oneupmanship amongst Beethovens has to be told each time! There is no way to talk or write in English about ‘brain-owner’ or ‘man of brains’ on their own – not mentioning this particular Beethovian context – without striking a false note. Do Germans in general (now) distinguish themselves as brain-owners as Ludwig did?
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The little thought enters my head that each language is another country, rather like they say the past is. Or is it that we think it this is so? That we are convinced we have a word for an idea or feeling which other languages haven’t got. That they have words which explain more subtly than words we have. The Portuguese or lovers of Portuguese (after all using the expression in another language is not a Portuguese problem) seem to be convinced of the untranslatableness of saudade. When you read around it becomes clear untranslatableness is about how easy it is to translate. If it takes too many words then it is ‘untranslatable’.
Howard Rheingold: “Finding a name for something, is a way of conjuring its existence.” “…became sympathetic to the idea that we think and behave the way we do in large part because we have words that make these thoughts and behaviors possible, acceptable, and useful.”
A return journey through Chomsky- Sapir-Whorf Lands can be instructive. (‘ Current linguists, rather than studying whether language affects thought, are studying how it affects thought.’) SEE The Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax (a chapter 7 of something larger it seems).
A loan word like mise-en-scène is interesting because the meaning has expanded after adoption. It retains it foreignness while at the same time expressing concisely (if not always clearly because of disputes about its technical meaning) and seemingly simply, by a kind of imagery of what is meant. The wiki: mise-en-scène, does explain the source and meaning pretty clearly, but this jokey reply from The Straight Dope (Fighting Ignorance since 1973) to an irate correspondent does it even better with its:
In its most significant sense, mise-en-scene refers to everything under the control of the director, that is, the aggregate effect created by art direction, placement and movement of camera and actors, lighting, and other visual elements in a given scene.
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SEE ALSO
Wiki:List of loanwords by country or language of origin (A pie chart shows at German equal to latin, and French ar roughly 25 % eah, which surprised me. Greek only 6 %)
Rudolph Chelminski in the discussion page of wiki:List of English words of German origin
says:
If memory serves me right, Caesar described the Germanii as a large, hardy, ferocious people who inhabited the gloomy forests to the east of Gaul, wore hardly any clothes and were perpetually on the move. Well, if he were able to have a look around the seashores of Spain, Portugal or Italy today, he might say exactly the same thing, although this time around the context would be rather more peaceable. The descendants of those redoubtable forest-dwelling savages are probably the world’s number-one travelers today, still gripped by an extraordinary wanderlust that sends them to the four corners of the earth in apparent flight from the serious, orderly and slightly boring society they have constructed for themselves in their geopolitical sandwich between the Latins to the west and the Slavs to the east. The Germans have done a lot of fighting and a lot of thinking about that sandwich over the centuries since Caesar reported on them, and the words that have entered the English language from their experience frequently reflect those military and intellectual struggles: they are light on things like play, gastronomy, fashion and frivolity but top heavy in philosophy, political thought and struggle in general: serious, consequential stuff. If these words tend to be a little ponderous and hard to pronounce, they are marvelously apt expressions of what could never be expressed so well if our English tongue just minded its own business and never wandered abroad to steal from others.
which puts on in mind of Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory.
Wordcraft (no, that isn’t a calque of a German compound, but a website on words and how to use them) has a little list from Rheinhold’s book, including :
Drachenfutter – peace offering to one’s wife (chocolate, flowers, etc.) when one has behaved badly: a late night of poker with the boys, etc.
Literally (oh, this is lovely!) “dragon fodder”. An attempt to propitiate the goddess in her wrath.
Such gifts were so customary and common that the Germans coined a word for them. Rheingold reports, “At one point it was common in Germany to see men drinking in bars of cafés on Saturday afternoons with their Drachenfutter already bought and wrapped in anticipation of the night ahead.”
Quo Lingua? William Saffire in the NYT, 29 September, 1996. Other loan words.
Words that are supposedy untranslatable is a thread in Everything2
Translating the Untranslatable
some examples from In Other Words: A Language Lover’s Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World, by Christopher J. Moore
Untranslatable words – contains list of words that defy translation
Essay/article by Howard Rheingold, author of They have a Word For It, lists some of his favourites but also explains reasons behind his (Whorfian?) interest (“….patterns of meaning that seem to propagate themselves throughout linguistic communities”, etc)
The most untranslatable word in the world
Schlimmbesserung seems to be covered by unintended consequences.
Which comes first language or Thought?
The Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax Dan Moonhawk Alford
Life is a schlimmbesserung old chum.
“I’m not afraid of dying. Dyings’ alright. It’s the next day, you’re so stiff.”
The fear of death is intransitive at the top of this page was something I heard while listening to the radio with half an ear. Radio was fine: my half ear. Why it was that that sentence suddenly entered consciousness while all the rest passed me by, I don’t know. I thought for a moment I was listening to a statement about death but it was something about the strangeness of language.
Never Say Die: Why We Can’t Imagine Death, is, however, about death.
Banks to Lend You Your Own Money
Latest from Daily Mash:
Banks to lend you your own money
Seriously, folks, this is as clear an exposition of what has gone wrong as I have found so far:
Temporary full state ownership is only solution
If you have been putting your hands over your ears, shutting your eyes and going Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah for the last few weeks as you work your way through that pile of novels you promised yourself you would read, at least read this one.
cutting on the action 