I sometimes belong to the (British) Poetry Book Society for a year or two. I like the way they send four new poetry books that I haven’t chosen myself (but I think there are other options). Depending on how much I’m reading, I then decide to stop.

Now the Poetry Book Society has opened a website, Poetry Bookshop Online, through which you can buy poetry books from a selection of over 30,000, either poetry or about poems or poets.

There are poems to read online too.

I assume it makes sense to order this way, even for those of us outside the UK, or outside an English-speaking country, because some of these books are not easily available here. Sometimes the information given on a book is a bit thin. I can imagine finding ideas here and getting more information elsewhere on the Internet. Here’s an example:

bq. Poems of William Blake
Blake, William; Yeats, W.B. (ed.) £8.99
William Blake remains a source of wisdom and inspiration to countless individuals throughout the world. Whether familiar with Blake’s work or not, the reader is here presented with an enlightening encounter with his words and visions.

Yes, well, they would say that, wouldn’t they, to use the Mandy Rice-Davies reaction.

(Via the Independent).

There have been so many good entries in Robin Stocks’ Carob since its resurrection that some have scrolled: on the names of EU directives and regulations, on anglicisms in Switzerland, a long German-English list of Swiss election vocabulary (but we have panaschieren – splitting the vote – in Bavaria too – I suppose a lot of election vocabulary crosses borders), vocabulary from the EU Prospectuses Regulation, citation of ECJ cases in German and English. Other entries are interesting too. I had fun photographing those open-cast coalmines he mentions, when I lived in Cologne.

By the way, I forgot to acknowledge Translate This! recently, although it was one of the two weblogs, along with The Discouraging Word (does anyone else remember the words to ‘Home on the Range’? We used to sing it at junior school) that prompted me to finally write about Truss.

In passing, Isabella Massardo mentioned a book called ‘Righting English that’s gone Dutch’ that might give me some ideas – I’ve toyed with the idea of writing something about how to write legal English, aimed at German lawyers. The problem is that they often know their English is perfect.

bq. Using examples she’s collected, editor and translator Joy Burrough takes a sideways look at what gets unintentionally transferred from Dutch, and why. The result is a contrastive stylebook exploring the zone where Dutch and English meet and giving advice on writing English right.

Following up Joy Burrough-Boenisch on the Web, I came across some interesting old discussions on LANGline in 1999. I must have heard of this before, and I certainly recognize the names of some of those discussing. It is still running, as part of The Electric Editors: The Internet community for editors, proofreaders, indexers, translators and publishers. Looks interesting. And the archives are available (as the Google search showed).

The New York Times had an article on May 19th on the asparagus cult in Germany. It has a good picture of German (‘white’) asparagus. (Via Anne Beryl in Bonn)

Wendy McClure has an illustrated summary of an item on Fox News about weblogging, in which she was featured.

bq. NEWSCASTER VOICE-OVER CONT’D: “…without losing what’s been written, like in a chat room.”
And here Matt Weiler has to patiently explain the difference between a weblog and a chat room.
No kidding, they asked both of us about that.
It’s like getting a squirrel confused with a mailbox because they’re both on the sidewalk.

She concludes:

bq. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who don’t know what a blog is; I just wonder how many of them still don’t know after seeing a story like this.

Wendy’s other site, candyboots, which you might have encountered before, shows a collection of 1974 Weightwatchers cards.

(Via rebecca’s pocket, via kiplog)

Totally off topic: Gizmodo links to a site that explains why the Trilobite robot vacuum cleaner costs $1799 and the iRobot Roomba $159.99.

Anyway, neither of them would have much room for manoeuvre here. There’s area, but not much space.

When Lynne Truss’s ‘Eats Shoots and Leaves’ appeared in Britain last November, I was sure I didn’t want to read it, because the hype was suspicious.

But I had the impression that more and more people whose opinions I thought I trusted, and even including Americans (it had not then been published in the USA) raved about it, I was driven to buy a copy, a big mistake, for I have not been able to get on with it – but at least I know that now!

It sold remarkably well – 700,000 copies? It was in good time for the Christmas market, so I wonder if 700,000 copies have been read. The book even has its own website. Anyway, now I have seen a few less excited discussions, I suppose my work has been done for me. Scribe at The Discouraging Word was not 100% in favour, although his entry was tongue-in-cheek against the denigrators of strict punctuation. (Picayune punctuation rules, May 7th, and see also January 6th. I see the American edition has ‘a foreword by Frank McCourt, Author of “Angela’s Ashes”‘!

Well, it’s not the author’s fault that the book has been overhyped, and she certainly deserves admiration for her commercial success – I remember being told this once when I was complaining about another great commercial success, Peter Mayle’s ‘A Year in Provence’ (it was long my desire to write a satire on this called ‘A Year in Franconia’, but I realized no-one would have wanted to buy it).

I attempted to teach punctuation for twenty years, and this must be part of my reason for irritation. Every so often a new and interesting book on punctuation comes out, and there are a number of good old standards, so why should this one, that consists at least 50% of extraneous material, be so praised? I know many people like to read something light and amusing, but I prefer my punctuation discussion less packaged. The problem starts with the title joke, on the back cover. I have read this joke a number of times on the Internet over the years, and I too thought it was funny the first time I read it, but Truss spoils it. She’s one of those people who can’t tell jokes. ‘The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual…’ This punctuation reference, cheekily inserted to refer to the book, does not occur in the original joke and it is a spoiler – not only superfluous but detrimental to the humour. ‘The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.’ – Good jokes don’t need ‘sure enough’ pushed in, nor “confused waiter” instead of just “waiter”. (For the joke as it appears, see continuation of this entry).

There was a Guardian review by Stephen Poole on December 13th 2003 that I concur with. (LATER NOTE: not sure if I concur about ‘Eric’ Fowler – who he?)

bq. Truss tries very hard to be funny, and she is often successful. …And if we are to be brutally honest, her regular quotations from others who have written on this subject – true giants such as Eric Fowler, Kingsley Amis or George Bernard Shaw – serve only to show that pedantry works best when allied to an economical wit and rock-solid prose, rather than Truss’s own consistent style of overheated whimsy, which becomes oppressive even in such a brief book.

The question I am left with is: who was the book written for? On the dustjacket it says

bq. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset about it.

I wonder. It seems to me it is a book for people who haven’t thought much about punctuation and haven’t got enough to read. Definitely a popularizing book, but popularizing by ladling jokes on. The picture of the author inside the back cover says a lot:

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