Taking the streetcar to Grinzing

I thought George Steiner affected British English?

What has really got the reviewers’ goat is his litany of sexual conquests. He is fluent in at least four languages, and has had memorable sex in them all. “To make love in Italian is to know that certain days run to 25 hours” … “Gloriously astride me, my first teacher in the arts of orgasm … bade me ‘Come, come now and deep.’ But did so using the formal vous.” “V’s grammar of love-making was Viennese … She mapped her own opulent physique and that of her lover(s) with place names derived from the capital’s varied districts and suburbs. Thus ‘taking the streetcar to Grinzing’ signified a gentle, somewhat respectful anal access.”

amazon.de: George Steiner,
My Unwritten Books

7 thoughts on “Taking the streetcar to Grinzing

  1. George is obviously hooked, in more ways than one, on US playwright Tennesse William’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’.

    His mention of Grinzing, as in Heuriger, shows he – when not lecturing at the French Institute in South Kensington – is a well-connected or a gut vernetztes AL.

    In that part of town live many rich Viennese Promis/ Prominenz and Ambassadors. Maybe even the local acting and all-singing, all-dancing legend, Peter Alexander, was serenading in the background on his grand piano.

  2. Was ein “writ” ist, versteht der deutsche Jurist aber besser, wenn man es mit “Klageformel” erkl

  3. I wonder why Rechts/anspruch isn’t in there as a translation for remedy. St. Ivo would have seen it on German law exam papers, as I have – year-on-year as a student – in the same contexts I have seen it on English law exam papers: has X a remedy against Y; steht X ein Anspruch gegen Y zu?

    I like prayer for relief (my other pref.: relief sought)for Klagebegehren.

    I agree with the term of equity/Equity being misleading. I recently tried explaining to a puzzled panel of E&W Equity/Chancery lawyers & judges the Roman civil law concept of ‘arbitration of equity’: (SP)equidad etc. – which equates with the arbitrators’s discretionary findings based on gen. principles of fairness and ‘ex aequo et bono’ vs. arbitration of law – approx. in accordance with the strict, black letter of the law. But, then again, you wouldn’t expect ‘equity’ to pop up in arbitration. Also we shouldn’t forget e/Equity means sthg. different North of the Border.

    One Sassenach speaker claimed the London House of Lords in London would be able to dispense equity Scottish-style if a Scottish civil appeal case came before it. Most confusing as Eng. judges are reported to be ignorant of Scots law (Glasgow Uni. Prof. Enid A. Marshall’s words, not mine)and your own Scots lawyer anecdotes, Margaret.

    • Well, I think St. Ivo would reject Rechtsanspruch – the claim – for the same reasons as Klagebegehren. A book on remedies in English law would go into detail on damages, for instance, rather than the reason someone was entitled to them. But it’s true, I hadn’t thought of the sentence ‘Has X got a remedy against…’

      I wonder where and when it was that I heard some wonderful rants against equity by a Scottish solicitor (mainly in the pub, I think).

  4. Thanks for that, Margaret. Unfortunately, there was no Scots lawyer at that Equity workshop to back me up.

    I read that Law Lady Mrs. Brenda Hale QC has referred, in a recent House of Lords appeal case, to the anomaly of a land law case involving equitable estoppel on the Borders being decided differently if a few miles North inside Scotland.

    Also, the definition of remedies needs to be watched, coincidentally in Equity. Most UK textbooks on the subject claim ‘tracing’ is an equitable remedy. I have it on authority from Chancery Practitioners that it isn’t, but a mechanism that can be used for pleading the *recovery* of money.

  5. Interesting post on English Law, the law is so fluid and complex that its impossible to define it in a single book but all the back ground knowledge will help.

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