On The Hustle
I suppose
one of the worst times was
when
after a drunken reading and
an all-night party
I promised to appear at
No one ever talks about the punishing aesthetics of being poor.
Sayfa 93
Who has the power? Where is the center? (...) I'm confused about my right to offence, just as I'm confused about drinking as an act of resistance. There is something entitled about it. Yes, there is something rich.
Sayfa 31
Compared to New York, this is a real place where real things happen. Not microaggressions that are tweeted about, not theory; these are real adult aggressions, bodily, bloodying.
Sayfa 18
I went to one of the Big Three universities, where I majored in English literature for lack of interest in any other subject. I hated the University and I hated the town it was in. Everything about the place was dead. The University was a fake English setup taken over by the graduates of fake English public schools. I was lonely. I knew no one, and strangers were regarded with distaste by the closed corporation of the desirables.
By accident I met some rich homosexuals, of the international queer set who cruise around the world, bumping into each other in queer joints from New York to Cairo. I saw a way of life, a vocabulary, references, a whole symbol system, as the sociologists say. But these people were jerks for the most part and, after an initial period of fascination, I cooled off on the setup.
Neolithic villages from the Middle East around 6000 bc typically seem to have contained 120 to 150 people, judging by the number of dwellings. And the estimated size of English villages recorded by William the Conqueror’s henchmen in the Domesday Book in 1086 also seems to have been about 150. Similarly, during the eighteenth century the average number of people in a village in every English county except Kent was around 160. (In Kent, it was a hundred... I wonder what that tells us about the folk there?)
In Palermo dialect the adjective ‘mafioso’ once meant ‘beautiful’, ‘bold’, ‘self-confident’. Anyone who was worthy of being described as mafioso therefore had a certain something, an attribute called ‘mafia’. ‘Cool’ is about the closest modern English equivalent.
The word mafioso began to have criminal connotations because of a hugely successful play written in Sicilian dialect, I mafiusi di la Vicaria (‘The mafiosi of Vicaria Prison’), which was first performed in 1863. The mafiusi are a gang of prison inmates whose habits look very familiar in retrospect. They have a boss and an initiation ritual, and there is much talk in the play of ‘respect’ and ‘humility’.
The greatest Old English poem is Beowulf, which belongs to the seventh century. It is a story of about 3,000 lines, and it is the first English epic. The name of its author is unknown.
The Old English language, also called Anglo- Saxon, was the earliest form of English. It is difficult to give exact dates for the rise and development of a language, because it does not change suddenly; but perhaps it is true to say that Old English was spoken from about A.D. 600 to about 1100.
It seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired. I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence, the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.
Sayfa 55Kitabı okudu
'Can' started as something else: cunnan in Old English meant “know.” 'Could' meant, all by itself, “knew.” There was even an old expression “to can by heart” alongside our familiar “know by heart.” Modern English is littered with remnants of that stage: other offshoots of cunnan are cunning and canny, all about having your wits about you.
English is low on endings that show what part of speech a word is; in French the - er in parler shows that it is a verb and in Spanish the - ar in hablar shows the same thing, but in English, nothing about the word talk shows that it is a verb. This means that it’s easy to use English verbs as nouns—they don’t seem as out of place in the role as would a French or Spanish verb, with its verbal ending hanging out inconveniently.
Rathe meant “early,” so rather , in Old and into Middle English, meant “earlier.” To earlier English speakers, rather was as much about what you like better (something personal) as about the more concrete issue of what you do before you do something else. Today the relationship between the two meanings is clearer in sooner.
I needed to understand the problem. Just as a doctor must first diagnose a disease before treating it. Think about it. What is the cause of all this misery and failure? Why do so many people fail to speak English effortlessly despite years of study? What is wrong with English education?
