NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Steven Beattie uses the term ‘for fuck’s sake’ in a recent Facebook remark about Justin Bieber’s starring in and producing a movie about his own life. Quite appropriate this.  The take away lesson however is: I’ve always said ‘for fuck sake.’  Googling around a bit for ‘fuck’, this came up from Rhetorical Device , the personal website of Jack Rusher:

"Fuck — such a boogeyman in English that it didn’t appear in a single dictionary from 1795 to 1965 — is a word of great antiquity. It has cognates in many Germanic languages, including German (ficken, to copulate), Dutch (fokken, to breed), dialectical Norwegian (fukka, to copulate), and dialectical Swedish (focka, to strike/copulate) and fock (penis), but does not carry the weight of profanity in many of them⁴

The OED cites the earliest clear use of fuck as William Dunbar’s 1503 poem Brash of Wowing, which includes the couplet “Yit be his feiris he wald haue fukkit: / Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane” (ll. 13–14). The first appearance of the current spelling is the phrase “Bischops … may fuck thair fill and be unmaryit” from a 1535 poem by Sir David Lyndsay.

 4. It appears to have once been fairly inoffensive in English; up until the late seventeenth century, the common Kestrel was called a “windfucker” in the English of the time."

From Monika Dickens’s prologue to Michael Joseph, Master of Words:

Michael’s guidance was not editorial, but from one author to another. When I got bogged down in beautiful formal phrases, as new writers do, he gave me a superb piece of advice, which I’ve passed on to many new young writers. "Don’t try so hard," he said. "Just imagine you’re bursting into a room full of people you know quite well, and you’re saying, "Listen to what happened to me!."

Jumpstart and Develop short stories, novels, poetry, travel and memoir writing at Rick Taylor’s annual Write by the Lake writers retreat, located on a quiet lake in Val des Monts, Quebec, thirty minutes from downtown Ottawa. I did several years ago, and highly recommend the experience!

While participants work alone each day, much of the time is devoted to writing exercises; learning how to balance inspiration and discipline; finding a personal voice; choosing a subject and developing a sense of structure. There is a focus on group critiques of works-in-progress, and creative acts of revision and self editing. The workshop consists of a comfortable blend of beginner, intermediate and advanced writers. Expect suggestions and advice about how to discover the hidden stories within the stories you think you are writing. Look forward to a guest writer, and other literary surprises.

Visuals more your thing? Check out Art by the Lake, led by Rick’s talented wife Dale.

Hurry, Hurry: To celebrate The Walrus’s annual summer reading issue—featuring stories by Lee Henderson, Rivka Galchen (listen to our conversation here), Stephen Marche & 2008 Giller Prize winner Joseph Boyden (ditto here) — the mag is pleased to announce The Walrus Guilty Pleasures Writing Contest!

To enter, write the first paragraph of a novel in one of the following genres: Science Fiction, Romance, Western, Ghost Story/Gothic.

"Make it the most gripping, titilating, and action-packed read of the summer!" Send submissions to guiltypleasures@walrusmagazine.com by July 31, and you could win a prize package from Fairmont Hotels & Resorts or a Walrus prize package, and have your work published at walrusmagazine.com!

Steve Mitchelmore delivers a post worthy of Beckett, about epiphany, and impossibility, during recovery from a serious bicycling accident. From which:

"Akhenaten had ordered that the capital city be moved from Thebes into the desert 200 miles away. The documentary featured new archeological discoveries that revealed the disastrous consequences for his subjects. What stirred me was not these human facts but the glorious and terrifying absurdity of Akhenaten’s project. It demonstrates the same impressive or horrendous folly as those in fictional works: William Golding’s The Spire for example, and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and, more familiar to me, those of the many characters created by Bernhard: Roithamer who builds a cone-shaped house in the middle of a forest, Reger who studies every masterpiece in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna until he finds a flaw, even Bernhard himself aged eight deciding to cycle to his aunt’s house in Salzburg, twenty-two miles away. A creative writer may respond by sketching a novel idea based on the crazy plans of an individual – perhaps Naguib Mahfouz’s Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth is it as far as the pharaoh is concerned – but, in my sedated condition, I imagined a writing project that would itself be the absurdity, something itself animated by impossibility."

Read and relish the rest here.

Check out this fun site for more corrections to common errors in English. More? Go here. And/or here.

Diary entry for April 28, 1935:

"All desire to practice the art of a writer has completely left me. I cannot imagine what it would be like: that is, more accurately, I cannot curve my mind to the line of a book: no, nor of an article. Its not the writing but the architecting that strains. If I write this paragraph, then there is the next & then the next. But after a months holiday I shall be as tough & springy as – say heather root; & the arches and the domes will spring into the air as firm as steel & light as cloud – but all these words miss the mark. ‘

from The Faber Book of Diaries, edited by Simon Bret. (1987)