Tag: podcast

No Idea What I’m Doing — Keith Ridgway, author most recently of Hawthorn & Child, on writing fiction:

I have no idea what I’m doing. All the decisions I appear to have made—about plots and characters and where to start and when to stop—are not decisions at all. They are compromises. A book is whittled down from hope, and when I start to cut my fingers I push it away from me to see what others make of it. And I wait in terror for the judgements of those others—judgements that seem, whether positive or negative, unjust, because they are about something that I didn’t really do. They are about something that happened to me. It’s a little like crawling from a car crash to be greeted by a panel of strangers holding up score cards.

A Dog’s Cock — The history of the exclamation mark:

no one really knows the history of the punctuation mark. The current running theory is that it comes from Latin. In Latin, the exclamation of joy was io, where the i was written above the o. And, since all their letters were written as capitals, an I with an o below it looks a lot like an exclamation point.

But it wasn’t until 1970 that the exclamation point had its own key on the keyboard. Before that, you had to type a period, and then use the backspace to go back and stick an apostrophe above it. When people dictated things to secretaries they would say “bang” to mark the exclamation point. Hence the interobang (?!) – a combination of a question (?) and an exclamation point (!). In the printing world, the exclamation point is called “a screamer, a gasper, a startler or a dog’s cock.”

One more on the late Robert Hughes at The Economist:

As our lives grow increasingly distracted and overstimulated, the critic has become both more and less relevant in the service of cultural sieve, filtering out the good from the bad. Mr Hughes didn’t subscribe to such categorical certainties. In turn he placed as much emphasis on the context of a work as he did on its content. To Mr Hughes, experiencing art wasn’t about passing a few hours in some museum, but what made those few hours meaningful to be alive.

And finally…

Larry Tye talks about his new book Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero, on CBC Radio’s The Current:

CBC RADIO THE CURRENT: Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero mp3

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