Monthly Archives: July 2005

scis­sors and paste

By Mat | Published: July 26, 2005

There’s a kind of archae­ology in the edit­ing pro­cess. Hav­ing fin­ished a rough first draft of The Last Monk about three weeks ago, I’ve spent much of the inter­ven­ing time read­ing and re-reading the entire manu­script, pick­ing out everything from typos and bad gram­mar, through inel­eg­ant sen­tence struc­ture to the high-end nar­rat­ive and char­ac­ter lines which should drive the book.

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Eng­lischsch­lichacha (part two)

By Mat | Published: July 18, 2005

We looked at the foot­ball play­ers. They looked at us. One of them had a whisk. This is not a euphemism.

“What did you guys get kicked out of?” asked my new partner.

“Engleschlitchacha,” I twitched.

“Oh great,” he said. “Not just nerds. Retards, too.”

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Eng­lischsch­lichacha (part one)

By Mat | Published: July 14, 2005

I have a ter­rible, humi­li­at­ing and very spe­cific speech imped­i­ment. I find it pain­fully impossible to pro­nounce the term ‘Eng­lish Lit­er­at­ure’ in mixed com­pany. I can say ‘Rus­sian Lit­er­at­ure’. I can say ‘Eng­lish cricket team’. Hell, I can say ‘Feodor Mikhail­ovich Dosto­evskij’ without blink­ing, but I hon­estly can­not say ‘Eng­lish Lit­er­at­ure’ without dis­lo­cat­ing my mand­ible. It has haunted me since I was six­teen when, in a pro­foundly influ­en­tial life event, I was psy­cho­lo­gic­ally trau­mat­ised by a bowl of scone dough.

There is an explan­a­tion for this, but to make it requires that we briefly revisit a party I atten­ded a couple of weeks ago.

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