The Off Topic Topic

[Josquius]

10pm and it's still light. This seems to have snuck up on us very suddenly. I suppose the crap weather of the past month has masked it well.

Japanese culture all derives from Osaka/Kyoto (can't tell because of the dot placement)? 

Kyoto. And basically yes.

I watch NHK newsworld regularly and I feel like they never spend anytime talking about Tokyo.

NHK world is totally different to domestic NHK.
Not surprised on world they'd be showing more nation wide stuff. There's quite a push to get tourists to spread out around the country more.

[Sheilbh]

RIP Martin Amis

[grumbler]

RIP Martin Amis

 

Time's Arrow was one of the most fascinating books I have read.

[Sheilbh]

Time's Arrow was one of the most fascinating books I have read.

Yeah. The run of books he had in the mid-80s and early 90s was outstanding - Money, London Fields, Time's Arrow. I think he's one of the great stylists of the last 50 years too.

His non-fiction essays are normally great too, The War Against Cliche, has a great selection of his criticism. I can still remember lines and lines of argument from his essays on Larkin, for example.

I haven't read any of his more recent novels but I've heard that, like Time's Arrow, the ones dealing with the totalitarian 20th century - House of Meetings  and Zone of Interest - are excellent.

Edit: Also feels like his death draws a contrast with a lot of contemporary writing. I think his writing was about style and what style could do in a novel (suiting his literary heroes: Nabokov, Roth and Bellow). That - and any interest in form - feel like very 20th century preoccupations now.

[celedhring]

Yeah, I read Time's Arrow when I was a teen and it had a pretty big effect on me. I always like to play with how people experience life/time when I write "my stuff" instead of work-for-hire, and that and Slaughterhouse V are the books I blame for it.

[Sheilbh]

From online - love that the Welsh word for pharmacy, fferyllfa stems from Fferyll the Welsh for Virgil and his Medieval reputation as a wizard

[Syt]

[Josquius]

TIL the expression hook me up used in that way.

[Tamas]

lol the Hungarian one is a bit misleading. It means "grape-hill" (well, grape mountain but we like calling hills mountains, we are plains people), it is usually the area of a village/town where the tiny vineries owned by the local families are (or I guess these days, were). So of course you do a search and this is going to lead.

[celedhring]

lol the Hungarian one is a bit misleading. It means "grape-hill" (well, grape mountain but we like calling hills mountains, we are plains people), it is usually the area of a village/town where the tiny vineries owned by the local families are (or I guess these days, were). So of course you do a search and this is going to lead.

It only shows 3 hits though. The graph says they looked up only names of cities/towns/villages.

I was reading Spain's and thinking "huh, those don't strike me as being common at all" and then I noticed they have low hits too.

[Maladict]

Interesting to see variations of Newtown everywhere in southeastern Europe. I wonder if they are all Ottoman settlements.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting to see variations of Newtown everywhere in southeastern Europe. I wonder if they are all Ottoman settlements.

I thought maybe Communist - also Nowa in Poland and Nova in Czechia?

[Maladict]

Interesting to see variations of Newtown everywhere in southeastern Europe. I wonder if they are all Ottoman settlements.

I thought maybe Communist - also Nowa in Poland and Nova in Czechia?

Could be, but that doesn't explain Greece and Turkey.

[Valmy]

Must be hard to get your mail in Yenikoy, Turkey

[mongers]

lol the Hungarian one is a bit misleading. It means "grape-hill" (well, grape mountain but we like calling hills mountains, we are plains people), it is usually the area of a village/town where the tiny vineries owned by the local families are (or I guess these days, were). So of course you do a search and this is going to lead.

It only shows 3 hits though. The graph says they looked up only names of cities/towns/villages.

I was reading Spain's and thinking "huh, those don't strike me as being common at all" and then I noticed they have low hits too.

Spaniards have used the most imagination in naming places, some countries in E.Europe, Poland and Roumania less so?

Though I wonder if there's a correlation with number of historical invasions/settlements by different 'tribes/races' and the diversity found in place names?