Narcissistic Praise Junkies

From Wired magazine (online). This is not quite a 'literary' entry (except for some helpful English-English translations provided) but it is a lot of fun. Download it by clicking here.

A US Navy recruitment PowerPoint presentation thinks of young American MySpace generation as a 'somewhat alien life force' whose language and lifestyle is 'almost unrecognizable to adults'. According to the presentation kids in America today are 'coddled' and 'narcissistic praise junkies' and that it will be 'beyond though' to make these 'millennials' join the armed forces.

This Annual Navy Workforce Research and Analysis Conference report also finds that 67% of them are 'less likely to join the military' because of the Iraq War.

The US Navy's typical kid today: 'has always been online', 'has never known a world without digital phones', and his 'best friend may be Chinese'. The report also says:

The Most-Praised Generation

• These kids grew up hearing nothing but praise, all the time, everywhere

• Recent childhood has been defined by ego-stroking

• Soccer trophy syndrome ... 'I am special'

• Can get disgruntled if not praised for simply 'showing up' at work

• 'Narcissistic Praise Junkies'

• Many young adults feel insecure if they are not regularly complimented

There is a lot more. This report is hilarious.

World's worst poem

For years the poem by William Topaz McGonagall about the December 1879 train disaster in Scotland, The Tay Bridge Disaster, was regarded as the world's worst poem. Two lines from it were judged as the worst ever written.

And the cry rang out all o'er the town,
Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down

But now they are saying they have a new champion. The poem: A Tragedy by Theophile Marzials, contained in a 1973 collection called The Gallery of Pigeons has been described as '... the absolute epitome of awfulness'. Here it is:

Death!
Plop.
The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop,
Above, beneath.
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop ...
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop...
And my head shrieks - "Stop"
And my heart shrieks - "Die."...
Ugh! yet I knew - I knew
If a woman is false can a friend be true?
It was only a lie from beginning to end--
My Devil - My "friend."...
So what do I care,
And my head is empty as air -
I can do,
I can dare
(Plop, plop
The barges flop
Drip, drop.)
I can dare, I can dare!
And let myself all run away with my head
And stop.
Drop
Dead.
Plop, flop,
Plop.

If you think it is easy to write awful poetry, please visit the Bad Poetry website by Seamus Cooney, according to whom, 'There is a huge amount of bad poetry in the world. Although new bad poems are being written by the hundreds every day (many of them in university creative writing classes), most bad poetry is simply weak and ineffectual and lacking in interest and (fortunately) is soon forgotten. To achieve memorable badness is not so easy. It has to be done innocently, by a poet unaware of his or her defects. The right combination of lofty ambition, humorless self-confidence, and crass incompetence is rare and precious...'

Visit the website to read some of the worlds worst poems. You will be surprised at some of the names you will see there.

Website: http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/bad/index.html

World champion readers

According to a survey conducted by the Academy of Sciences' Czech Literature Institute and the National Library, 88% of Czech women and 77% of men read one or more books a year or, on average 83% of Czechs read at least one book every year. An average Czech reads 16 books a year.

39% of Czechs read one to six books a year, 16% of the population read seven to twelve books a year while 14% devour 13 to 24 books a year. These are called stable readers.

9% read up to 50 books a year and 6%, known as 'passionate readers', read over 50 books a year. Wahhhh!!!

At the other end of the spectrum, 17% of Czechs do not read a single book in a year (here we call them Malaysians) compared to the European Union where the average is 42 % (who do not read).

These are some figures for some other European countries (ie., percentage of people who don't read any book at all): Sweden -- 19%, Finland ­-- 24%, Britain -- 25% and Portugal -- 67%. (Poor Jose Saramago, but then Portugal has a Nobel Literature laureate.)

Here is a brief of how an average Czech spends his leisure time each day: 41 minutes a day reading books, 30 minutes a day reading newspapers and magazines, 111 minutes a day watching TV, 113 minutes on the radio, and 86 minutes a day on the internet. That is over six hours of leisure (but I guess they would probably do other things while they are listening to the radio.) And 95% of university graduates are readers. (I wonder if the ratio is reversed in Malaysia?)

The survey is quite comprehensive. You can read it all at the Radio Praha website: http://www.radio.cz/en/article/96006

The hyphen humbled

There was a time when it appeared that there was no stopping the hyphen. From hyphenated surnames, to hyphenated Chinese first and middle names, to hyphenated nationalities, the humble hyphen appeared to rule the world. But in the story, Small object of grammatical desire, Finlo Rohrer writes in the BBC News Magazine, the days of the all conquering hyphen is coming to a end.

'Leapfrog' is reported to have lost its hyphen, and rightly so I should think. It is a specific kind of motion. A 'leap-frog' should refer to a kind of frog, don't you think? Don't even think about 'leap frog' -- sounds too close to a leap year.

According to the story, the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has knocked the hyphens out of 16,000 words. 'Fig-leaf is now fig leaf, pot-belly is now pot belly, (and) pigeon-hole has finally achieved one word status as pigeonhole'.

I never did like the hyphen much, probably because I could never use then properly. It looked very tentative and it looked as if I was using it because I was not sure. That was true. Most of the time I was no sure. (Not as bad as the semicolon, but close -- is that word hyphenated too?)

Coming back to the article though, I cannot understand why some articles should be divorced and forced to become two words. We all know what a 'testtube' is, but why should it become 'test tube'. We know exactly what it refers to. Is it because the closeness of the two 't's in the middle makes the eyes go wonky? "Get away from there you two! You are getting too close, and in public too."

Apparently, all this can be blamed on electronic communication ... 'we no longer have time to reach over to the hyphen key.' (!!!) And since English doesn’t have a central governing body (not there are no, self appointed, language Nazis), anything goes.

But even I have to admit that the hyphen cannot be entirely done away with. Whether it is 'e-mail' or 'email' is a quibble. They both mean the same thing and the latter is easier to write. But a 'walking stick' and a 'walking-stick' are quite different. If you come across the former: run.

Full story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7004661.stm

Man Booker finalists' sales figures

I had a bit of a shock reading the UK sales figures, quoted by Mark Sanderson in his Literary Life column in the Telegraph, for this year's six Man Booker finalists. Only Ian McEwan's slim volume On Chesil Beach appears to be doing fairly well (according to Nielsen BookScan August 18^th figures) with 110, 615 copies sold. The sales of the much-praised Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist stood at 2918 copies and Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip, close behind,  at 2802 copies. (We presume that they were all in hardback. But you will get the perspective when you consider that, considering purchasing power parity, the hardback in UK costs half of what a paperback costs locally.) In fact the five finalists' combined sales, besides Ian McEwan's, comes to 10,155 copies sold.

And this happened after the announcement of the long list. The sales figures in April were: Ian McEwan, 99,660 copies. Mohsin Hamid, 1519 copies. Lloyd Jones, 880 copies.

So what gives? Of the six short-listed books I have only read On Chesil Beach. While it is competently written and does have its moments, which is the least I would expect from an author like Ian McEwan, I am afraid I was not terribly excited by it. In fact, I don't even know if I would call it a novel. It is part of a much longer story perhaps, like a starter with no main course and no desert -- and I am not a very happy person when they overdo the lettuce in the salads, anyway. (Don't get me wrong; I will be taking quite a few sentences from that book and calling them my own.)

Do we really have a really bad crop this year? Have writers and publishers completely lost the plot? Or is it the end of the world?