Authorial Matrices: "ructions"
This week, Hugo Rifkind's Times Diary carried a story about Campbell's
memoirs, excised juicy bits, and Cherie having now sold her memoirs. The
brief piece contained the keyword ructions, one might say advisedly.
This story is not extant on the TimesOnline site, possibly lawyered off it
because of Rifkind's use of the adverbial "hopefully", which is so often
misused in place of "I/We hope that...". With the abused adverbial form
first in the sentence, the next verb used in re Cherie was "kept", and
parsing the sentence along strict linguistic lines would have it say that
Cherie kept back Campbell's best stories in hopes of using them in her own
work, rather than that the Diary hoped she had preserved the fun stuff for
such use. That is clever, if deliberate, except that someone at Matrix
Chambers or Paranoid Spin HQ seems to have noticed. Perhaps it was a less
subtle direct quote of Cherie allegedly saying "If he want to quote
children..." [Campbell should quote his own, not the Blairs']
I await a legal note about my meta-observation of a minor diary story,
though the webspiders seem to be observing my Please Ignore tags nicely.
***
Raymond Briggs and Michael Bond have both written letters to _The Times_
bemoaning the admen's hijack of their characters to shift product (by way
of a followup to my flist-locked post on Marmite+marmalade toast):
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2508568.ece
***
Slow Obit day on Wednesday: the Times had time to give Robert Jordan a
bit at the bottom of a page which referred back to a TLS review calling
_A Crown of Swords_ strictly unreviewable, being bilge from beginning to end,
though I really am not sure that the fantasy realm was called
RandLand by anyone but fan-taggers. I 'fess didn't read everything the
author had managed to publish before his proteins' beta-pleat sheets
dropped him, but once Rand has beaten all the Light-Suffused Girlies and
the Dark Bloke Shai'tan, he's probably still not quite forgetful of his
humble pre-Destiny days on the farm.
I can't see Robert Jordan getting special recognition in the Saturday Books
section the way Madeleine L'Engle did, though there was a brief mention in
a column (along the lines of "I just knew he'd up and die when he started
writing extra books without finishing the primary storyline of the Wheel
of Time") - not yet uploaded to TimesOnline from today's paper.
memoirs, excised juicy bits, and Cherie having now sold her memoirs. The
brief piece contained the keyword ructions, one might say advisedly.
This story is not extant on the TimesOnline site, possibly lawyered off it
because of Rifkind's use of the adverbial "hopefully", which is so often
misused in place of "I/We hope that...". With the abused adverbial form
first in the sentence, the next verb used in re Cherie was "kept", and
parsing the sentence along strict linguistic lines would have it say that
Cherie kept back Campbell's best stories in hopes of using them in her own
work, rather than that the Diary hoped she had preserved the fun stuff for
such use. That is clever, if deliberate, except that someone at Matrix
Chambers or Paranoid Spin HQ seems to have noticed. Perhaps it was a less
subtle direct quote of Cherie allegedly saying "If he want to quote
children..." [Campbell should quote his own, not the Blairs']
I await a legal note about my meta-observation of a minor diary story,
though the webspiders seem to be observing my Please Ignore tags nicely.
***
Raymond Briggs and Michael Bond have both written letters to _The Times_
bemoaning the admen's hijack of their characters to shift product (by way
of a followup to my flist-locked post on Marmite+marmalade toast):
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2508568.ece
***
Slow Obit day on Wednesday: the Times had time to give Robert Jordan a
bit at the bottom of a page which referred back to a TLS review calling
_A Crown of Swords_ strictly unreviewable, being bilge from beginning to end,
though I really am not sure that the fantasy realm was called
RandLand by anyone but fan-taggers. I 'fess didn't read everything the
author had managed to publish before his proteins' beta-pleat sheets
dropped him, but once Rand has beaten all the Light-Suffused Girlies and
the Dark Bloke Shai'tan, he's probably still not quite forgetful of his
humble pre-Destiny days on the farm.
I can't see Robert Jordan getting special recognition in the Saturday Books
section the way Madeleine L'Engle did, though there was a brief mention in
a column (along the lines of "I just knew he'd up and die when he started
writing extra books without finishing the primary storyline of the Wheel
of Time") - not yet uploaded to TimesOnline from today's paper.