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Whatever can I have downloaded from emusic.com to make them recommend Eric Clapton and Creedence? Was it The Pixies? The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black? The compilation of Frontline Assembly side projects?
Anyway. I'm a quarter of the way through the latest Rowling extravaganza. I'd intended to wait until paperback, but then I saw it in the newsstand at De Gaulle airport -- and didn't buy it, partly because it meant buying a hardcover book priced in euros at a time of unfavorable exchange rate, and partly because the damn thing is huge and my bag was already heavy, but mostly because I knew J. had been forced to kill time in the same or a similar newsstand a few hours earlier that day (*) and that she didn't really have anything interesting to read on the trip home, and so there was a good chance she might have already bought it. And indeed, the chance was very good.
So now I'm reading it in the garish yellow British edition, which makes it more "authentic" somehow. It hasn't been purged of potentially confusing British word-usage; I assume, for instance, that in the American edition the Weasley twins don't say that during their tough fifth year of school and exams they "managed to keep [their] peckers up somehow."(**)
( A less dignified livejournaller might insert at this point a connecting phrase like 'Speaking of,…' -- but you will find no such crassness here. )
The weekend: drinks with Xany, a wedding, and then a trip to NH with dismal purpose (the dreaded "cleaning out the house of the dearly departed").
----
(*) With our different trip lengths it was easier and cheaper to book separate return flights for the same day.
(**) I read in Neil Gaiman's blog a while back that while correcting proofs of an American edition of one of his books he found that an indiscriminate find-and-replace had turned all occurrences of the word "flat" into "apartment," with some absurd results.
Anyway. I'm a quarter of the way through the latest Rowling extravaganza. I'd intended to wait until paperback, but then I saw it in the newsstand at De Gaulle airport -- and didn't buy it, partly because it meant buying a hardcover book priced in euros at a time of unfavorable exchange rate, and partly because the damn thing is huge and my bag was already heavy, but mostly because I knew J. had been forced to kill time in the same or a similar newsstand a few hours earlier that day (*) and that she didn't really have anything interesting to read on the trip home, and so there was a good chance she might have already bought it. And indeed, the chance was very good.
So now I'm reading it in the garish yellow British edition, which makes it more "authentic" somehow. It hasn't been purged of potentially confusing British word-usage; I assume, for instance, that in the American edition the Weasley twins don't say that during their tough fifth year of school and exams they "managed to keep [their] peckers up somehow."(**)
( A less dignified livejournaller might insert at this point a connecting phrase like 'Speaking of,…' -- but you will find no such crassness here. )
The weekend: drinks with Xany, a wedding, and then a trip to NH with dismal purpose (the dreaded "cleaning out the house of the dearly departed").
----
(*) With our different trip lengths it was easier and cheaper to book separate return flights for the same day.
(**) I read in Neil Gaiman's blog a while back that while correcting proofs of an American edition of one of his books he found that an indiscriminate find-and-replace had turned all occurrences of the word "flat" into "apartment," with some absurd results.
