The Lexicographer's Rules

It’s gladdening to see they’re making a movie of The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy. It’s the best noir novel I’ve ever read—and I’ve read oodles of them, many in French. Even a book set in a ramp-and-bypass town like Los Angeles becomes darker and crackling when written in a grotto-and-bistro French more guttural than liquid. The typical sparse writing style of noir novels makes for easy translation and French’s various argots map very well to American cop-speak and thug cant. Plus, it’s noir. Duh. (Source Link)

“When Klaus Kinski and I made Fitzcarraldo, I had trouble maintaining my composure. At one point I told Kinski I would shoot him if he did not cooperate. This comes to mind this evening because I buy a pound of spinach leaves for dinner, but when I cook the spinach, it reduces, and there is only enough for one serving. I have four guests. I should not be surprised, but I am.” (Source Link)

Ben Han, who I know through the Internet, just let me know that his translation of Stephen Pinker’s How the Mind Works into Chinese is now out. I gave Ben a hand with some of the cultural references. Ben is Taiwanese, so he’s not necessarily going to know what happens to Anna Karenina at the end of Tolstoy’s novel, you know? He was kind enough to mention me in the preface. He also did a transliteration of my name into Chinese: 葛培瑞. It roughly means “hung like a bear.”

His translation is available at Books.com.tw. Ben has a big image of the cover on his site.

I met Ben because he’s also the creator of JunkMatcher, the anti-spam add-on for Apple’s Mail.app. JunkMatcher catches 99.999% of my spam—908 spam messages in the last seven days alone.

(Kidding about the meaning of my name in Chinese. Ben says it means something like “cultivate good things” and sounds like grr-pei-rre.)

“I had a friend who lived in the Bloody Third, and one day he had too much to drink and was getting a little rowdy in his apartment. Someone called the police and when they showed up, he was waiting in the doorway with a golf club, ranting and raving and swinging his club back and forth. So three of the cops pull out billy clubs and the fourth pulls his gun. My buddy puts down the club, looks at the cop with the gun, kind of like Time Out, and says, ‘Put that away and get your club out like everyone else,’ and with that they all jumped on and beat the heck out of him. That’s the way things were handled.” (Source Link)

“I change people’s lives for the better. For instance, I can almost guarantee you that 95 per cent of the children who come to this show will never smoke or touch drugs in their lives.” Go back to the bulimia, Uri. You’ve got poisons that need purging. (Source Link)