In honor of Bloomsday (which is today, if you haven't been at an all-day reading of Ulysses like some people), one of the two daily definition/etymology e-newsletters I subscribe to, wordsmith.org's A.Word.A.Day, sent out five words from the Irish last week. They were:

shebeen (shuh-BEEN): An unlicensed drinking establishment.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymology: From Irish sibin, diminutive of seibe (mug/mugful). The word
is popular in the south of Africa and in Scotland and Ireland.

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary respectfully disagrees:

Origin Anglo-Irish; of obscure origin. The ending is Irish -in as in caubeen, colleen, etc.; an improbably conjecture is that the word is founded on Irish seapa, adaption of English shop.

dornick (DOR-nik): 1) A piece of rock small enough to throw. 2) Stout linen.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymologies: 1) From Irish dornog (small stone, literally fistful). 2) After Doornik, the name of a Flemish town where the cloth was first manufactured.

The OED notes the name of the Flemish town for the second definition (which is the first definition in its own listing) and provides no etymology for the first definition (its second).

hubbub (HUB-ub): Excited fuss or tumult of a crowd.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymology: Perhaps from Irish ubub (an interjection of contempt).

The OED's definition is more certain:

In the 16th century hooboube, -boobe, often referred to as an Irish outcry, and probably representing some Irish expression. Cf. Gaelic ub! ub! ubub! an interjection of aversion or contempt; abu! the war-cry of the ancient Irish.

cosher (KOSH-uhr): To pamper.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymology: From Irish cosair (feast).

OED etymology: Phonetic representation of Irish coisir feast, feasting, entertainment. Also notable is The OED's different definition of cosher:

1) To feast, to live at free quarters upon dependants or kinsmen. 2) To treat with indulgent fondness, pamper; to cocker or coddle.

smithereens (smith-uh-REENZ): Tiny fragments.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymology: Probably from Irish smidirin, diminutive of smiodar (fragment).

OED sez:

Variation of smithers [which it lists as "of obscure origin"], with Irish diminutive ending, and either adopted from, or the source of modified Irish smidirín.

The disagreement between Wordsmith and The OED on a few of these reminded me of the controversy over Daniel Cassidy's How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads. I heard Cassidy present the book at the Irish Arts Center (the actual website for which seems to be down) and will begrudgingly admit to being pretty impressed (hey, I don't know Gaelic for shit!) until Grant Barrett's excellent blog post schooled me on the matter.

Anyway, happy Bloomsday everyone. Time to read a chapter of Ulysses—I dare you!

Remember how irked I was when slate called kenspeckle a pretentious $10 word? Well, I'm pleased to announce that kenspeckle's found a splendid second opinion from Stuart Kelly of Telegraph: "'Kenspeckle' is a lovely Scottish word, meaning conspicuous, prominent and familiar…"

Damn straight.

Somehow my new pal Stuart segues this opening into a writeup of his interview with Ian Rankin, the Scottish author who's as kenspeckle in Edinburgh for his Inspector Rebus detective series as J.K. Rowling is for, well, you know.

But rivaling this praise of my favorite word as the best thing about this interview is Stuart's primary evidence for Ian's notability: "Nearly every pub in Edinburgh has a picture of him launching the Rebus20 promotional beer…"

Ian Rankin pulling a pint of Rebus 20

That's right. The 20th anniversary of the Scottish Sherlock Holmes is being celebrated with promotional beer!

"What exactly is a 'promotional beer' anyway?" you may wonder. Well, according to this press release from the publisher of Inspector Rebus, Orion Books, it's the August 2007 seasonal ale (complete with a "mystery ingredient") from Caledonian Brewery, which happens to make Deuchars IPA, the favorite beer of both Inspector Rebus and his creator.

Only in the U.K., people. But really, there's nothing like a special beer to promote a successful, long-running pop-lit series. Is Hogwarts Hefeweizen next?

Last week I received [via Sean] the joyous news that, thanks to embeddable Google Maps, no one ever need much around in javascript and the Maps API again to create their own personalized and awesome maps viewable in the comfort of their own website.

To celebrate this time-saving innovation, I immediate spent somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hours Google mapping Mary McCarthy's New York, as told in her Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936-1938.

Now, I'll admit I like Mary's fiction much better (especially The Company She Keeps, my collegiate introduction to Mary), but there's something irresistably fascinating about the lives of authors, particularly the life of someone so likable but incomprehensible as Mary—it's impossible to understand, even in her own telling of the story, why she left Philip Rahv for Edmund Wilson.

But I mapped Mary's memoirs primarily to highlight her hyper-awareness of the socio-economic geography of New York—on the snubs, imagined or real, she felt from the "real" Village radicals for living on the Upper East Side—and also becuase they describe a New York that doesn't really exist any more, now that the Village is more expensive than the UES, among other changes.

Anyway, though, here you have it, as long as you're not using Opera, in which case the markers won't show. Enjoy:

View Larger Map

If you thought my OuLiPo love was a little kooky, just wait 'till you check out OuMyPo [thanks, Sean!]. That's short for "Ouvroir de MySpace Potentielle," which means exactly what you think it means: Workshop of Potential MySpace.

OuMyPo "seeks to uncover new MySpace structures, patterns and behaviors," such as:

the "F+7″ method: Replace every friend in your "Top Friends" list with the friend seven entries after that person in your "My Friends" list

…and…

try the "Pimp My MySpace HTML Lipogram" whereby you cannot use any HTML codes containing the letters h, t, m, or l when constructing your page

According to the first comment on this post on Poetry Foundation's blog harriet, OuMyPo is the work of one Luke McGowan, though this is otherwise unverifiable, at least through google.

If this all sounds absurdly silly, consider the fact that my younger brother spends an amount of creative energy on his MySpace (well, now Facebook) profile comprable to that which I spent rewriting bad pop-punk song lyrics to make fun of my high school, drawing terrible cartoons featuring myself and my two best friends as the dubious superheros "the triangle girls," and compiling an epic compendium of (then-)hilarious quotes from friends, family, and teachers alike.

OuFaPo, anyone?

Yes, I might be the biggest nerd alive. (And, yes, I know, I'm late and the LOL backlash has begun.) But after stumbling across those loltheorists, I couldn't help but think, don't the non-theoretical writers who provided the material that inspired all that literary theory to begin with deserve as much LOL love as their theorist counterparts?

Yes, of course they do! And what authors offer better LOL fodder than members of the OULIPO—the mostly French cliqué of writers and mathematicians who unleashed their creativity by writing under unusual (and generally mathematically significant) constraints. OULIPO, in case you were wondering, is an acronym, and the words it stands for in French translate roughly to "workshop of potential literature."

Anyway, here's my lolOULIPO:

Georges Perec, whose novel La Disparition does not include the letter "e" even once in 300 pages.

Raymond Queneau, whose collection of ten sonnets is printed on paper that's sliced to allow the reader to flip through individual lines, providing a hundred thousand billion unique sonnets.

Italo Calvino, whose novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler includes the reader as a character.

Now, so you don't think I've totally gone bananas with this LOL nonsense, here's a handful of the best OULIPO materials to be found online:

interactive Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
Create your own sonnet (of the hundred thousand billion available) in French and English.

OULIPO collection
A special issue of the online literary mag drunken boat. From the introductory essay, "OULIPO at 45" by OULIPO president Paul Fournel:

…the role assigned to Oulipo is simply that of proposing a constraint, giving a model of that constraint, and thus, allowing it to meet the text that will take on its form. […] There is no ideal Oulipian text. The proposed structure is like that of the sonnet, into which Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé may choose to pour their singular talent.

Into the Maze
An essay by poet/translator Mónica de la Torre. Quote: "the more difficult the task, the better it feels to achieve it."

official OULIPO site
For francophones only.

Whee! I've been tagged in a tell-us-about-yourself meme by Anne Helmond. Not exactly an arduous task for a shameless egomaniac like myself.

Here are "the rules" of the meme:

• We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
• Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

8 things about me:

1. According to this version of the Jungian personality test, I'm an INFP. The INFP personality generally fits me, but have some qualms about the "introvert" label. When I'm around other people (especially at work), I tend to play the part of an extrovert—and I usually enjoy it, but I get burnt out quickly and need time to myself to recover. And I definitely don't seek out social situations. I think I'm actually an antisocial extrovert.

Crif Dogs "eat me" sign, as photographed by flickr user urbanblitz

2. Although I grew up in Florida, I'm proud to report that my family has roots here in NYC. My paternal grandfather was born in Manhattan, not in a hospital, but in the back of a candy store that his parents ran at 115 St. Marks Place, now the site of a clothing boutique.

You might get a better idea of where it's located if I mention that it's right next door to Crif Dogs, of the famous "eat me" sign. When I took my dad here a few years back, he caught sight of the sign as we approached. "Of course," he shouted, assuming this must be the indicator of his father's birth site, "It says 'eat me'! That's perfect."

3. Googling "lauren sperber" turns up people who are not me. I actually have the gall to find this somewhat inappropriate.

4. My favorite poem is "Poems of Our Climate" by Wallace Stevens. It goes like this:

I.
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations—one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II.
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged
Still one would want more, one would need more
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III.
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

5. The fact that my flickr badge, badger badge, and embedded video code keep my xhtml from validating makes me feel sad inside.

6. I used to dye my hair incessantly. First it was My So-Called Life purplish-red, then auburn, then strawberry blonde, then strawberry blonde with highlights, then blonde, then blonder, then make-your-mother-cry magenta (which obliged me to straighten my very curly hair daily), then bleach blonde, then strawberry blonde, then auburn for quite awhile.

I finally dyed it a few shades too dark of a brown about a year and a half ago and haven't touched it since. It's mellowed to a medium brownish that I like to fancy has some reddish highlights. This is probably not the case.

7. Re Anne's #7: I have been struggling to remember the last time I went more than 24 hours—or even a full 24 hours!—without the internet, and, although it terrifies me to type this, I literally can't remember when that was. I think I need a vacation.

8. I have a million witty t-shirt ideas, but no clue what to do with them. CaféPress and Spreadshirt have crazy markups cost more than I, personally, would like to pay for a t-shirt (thanks, Jana!), but I don't exactly have time to make them myself. Solutions, anyone?

tagged: Sean, wordart, Lorna, Britta, that nondescript cat, Patrick, kbam, Grey

After swearing (with horrible punctuation, no less) that I was far too cool and/or busy actually reading my books to have any use for bookish social networks, I realized last weekend that the one thing missing from my blog—and thus, my life!—was a "currently reading" widget, and perhaps even a list of five or so recently read books.

I tried to maintain such a list by hand when I was using blosxom, but take a look at my posting frequency and guess how well I did at maintaining that! No, I need something easy to use and semi-automated after initial setup.

So, after promising myself that I will never waste an entire day cataloging all the books I own or have ever read, I figured there was no harm in starting such a list incrementally. By simply adding books whenever I start a new one, I'm paving the way to some day having a list of all the books I've read since June of 2007. Certainly not a life biography of reading (considering the dramatic decrease in book consumption since, oh, I graduated from high school), but pretty cool nonetheless.

So I joined shelfari and LibraryThing, but quickly came to the conclusion that, despite shelfari's much slicker interface, I'd have to go with the more toned-down LibraryThing widgets. Shelfari widgets are cool and all, but they don't really match the decidedly 2D kenspeckle aesthetic.

As soon as I'd carefully constructed my "currently reading" widget on Sunday evening, however, LibraryThing went down! And they've been down ever since!

Was the import of my my amazon wishlist just too much for their database? (Perhaps you should alleviate LibraryThing's burden by buying me something!) Did their main read slave (seemingly the cause of the problem) read my anti-bookish-social-networking comment and retaliate accordingly?

No one can say for sure. But whatever the cause of the outage, compulsive book indexers everywhere have been suffering the loss of LibraryThing, with nothing to do but photograph melancholy stacks of unindexed books or—!!!—read.