Bookmash: Cat and Mouse Semantics

It’s a couple of months since I made a bookmash, so here’s a new one.

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Cat and Mouse Semantics

Fledgling sense
And sensibility,
Cat and mouse semantics,
Nomad codes,
Walkabout to school
Through the fields
In the land
Of invented languages.

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Thanks to the authors: Octavia Butler, Jane Austen, Günter Grass, F. H. George, Erik Davis, James Vance Marshall, Alice Taylor, Arika Okrent.

More in the bookmash archive. From an idea by Nina Katchadourian.

Bookmash: Quench the lamp

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Quench the lamp

Quench the lamp, the image,
The chalice and the blade,
Silver threads of hope
Booking passage in the modern idiom.

Thanks to the authors and editors: Alice Taylor, Daniel Boorstin, Riane Eisler, Sinéad Gleeson, Thomas Lynch, and Leo Hamalian & Arthur Zeiger; and to Nina Katchadourian for the idea.

Since my last bookmash, the game has continued to spread – most notably to the great US public radio show on words and language A Way with Words (full episode here), which read out a few and encouraged listeners to compile their own.

I haven’t read all the books in this stack, so feel free to recommend. Some of you might know Silver Threads of Hope, a new anthology of Irish short stories in aid of mental health charity Console; it appeared in an older Sentence first post on turn-taking in conversation.

My previous bookmashes are here. Join in, if you like!

Bookmash: The Holy Door

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Black hole, the long falling
Darkness peering, portable darkness –
Tidal dreams, grotesque dreams,
The holy door on Green Dolphin street.

Featured authors and editors: Charles Burns, Keith Ridgway, Alice Blanchard, Aleister Crowley and Scott Michaelsen, Eugene Percival and Wayne Harlow, Natsuo Kirino, Carl Jung, Frank O’Connor, and Sebastian Faulks. With thanks to Nina Katchadourian for the idea.

[bookmash archive]

Bookmash: Don’t Sleep

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Don’t Sleep

Don’t sleep –
There are snakes, bugs,
Creatures of the earth
In the shadow of man:
Mythmakers and lawbreakers
Defining the world.

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With thanks to the authors: Daniel Everett, Theodore Roszak, John McGahern, Jane Goodall, Margaret Killjoy, and Henry Hitchings; and special thanks to Nina Katchadourian for her Sorted Books project.

Lots more of these in the bookmash archive, along with links to other people’s. Let me know if you join in, and I’ll update accordingly.

More:

Adrian of The Outer Hoard had the marvellous idea of rearranging my older bookmashes to make two “stanmashes”.

Laura E. (aka @Soulclaphands) made a lovely bookmash beginning with the line “All these voices.”

Olivia (@peeriepics) shared her first bookmash, evoking a nature walk in winter.

Debbie Bambridge’s (@caret_top) first bookmash is very funny: “This charming man…“

Bookmash 16: Virtual light in the heart of the sea

Virtual light in the heart of the sea

Virtual light
In the heart of the sea
The waves breaking
The spell, the crossing
The ever-present origin
Atomised, reborn.

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More of these, and links to other people’s, in the bookmash archive. Feel free to join in.

Idea borrowed, with thanks, from Nina Katchdourian’s marvellous Sorted Books. Thanks also to the authors: William Gibson, Nathaniel Philbrick, Virginia Woolf, Daniel Dennett, Cormac McCarthy, Jean Gebser, Michel Houellebecq, and Susan Sontag.

Cross-posted on Tumblr.

Updates:

Chelsea at Parole Passport has just posted ‘The Silent World’, her first bookmash.

Julienne, who blogs at nephithyrion, has created two lovely examples.

Two poems, two polls

You might remember the Monster A Day drawing blog that prompted my short verse about a whispering shell. Here are two more whimsical rhymes, best read in tandem with the lovely illustrations.

‘The monster that waits in the cupboard of an abandoned house’:

In a comfy cupboard on the quietest floor
Of an empty house with the creakiest door
Sits a great big thing with its furry face stuck
In the cosy excitement of a paperback book.

‘The monster that steals your socks… for sock races!’

You’re probably wondering what happens your sock
When it darts with a blur past the grandfather clock.
I’ll tell you: your foot’s not the favourite place
Of a sock that just wants to be sock-monster-raced!

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On an unrelated note, I’m honoured to be included in Lexiophiles’ top language professional blogs and top language Twitter accounts 2012. Many thanks to the kind reader(s) who nominated me.

You can browse the lists for languagey goodness, and you can vote for me at Sentence first and @StanCarey, or for whatever takes your fancy.

Update: The results are in, and this blog and my Twitter page both placed respectably: #21 in the language blogs, #14 in the language Twitterers. Considering I mentioned it only in passing, and tweeted about it just once, I’m quite amazed. Thanks to all who voted, and to bab.la and Lexiophiles for the fun and games.

Bookmash: Forest of symbols

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Forest of symbols

The forest of symbols,
The eye beguiled:
Tree of smoke
Through the language glass,
Everything you know
Lost in translation.

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With thanks to the authors: Victor Turner, Bruno Ernst, Denis Johnson, Guy Deutscher, Zoë Heller, and Eva Hoffman.

Special thanks to Nina Katchadourian, whose Sorted Books project was my original inspiration for this.

More of these, and links to other people’s, in the bookmash archive.

Cross-posted on Tumblr.

Update:

Lafcadio De La Foret writes: “If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live with aphasia, I’ve found the words that explain it best to me. And it’s compiled by just stacking six books.”