Sunday 11 April 2010

Anyone know a good tattoo artist?

Spotted this on goodreads.com earlier today, and I think it may just be my favourite review of anything, ever:   "Requires some skimming, but still, I would have parts of this book tattooed on my body." 

The book in question is  The Journal of Jules Renard and I haven't read it but I really want to.  Jules Renard was a French writer, more specifically this one:


Somerset Maugham was a fan:  he enjoyed the journal so much that it inspired him to publish A Writer's Notebook, but not so much that he got a tattoo.  Like most of what I know about Jules Renard, which is not much so far, I read this on Wikipedia, so I suppose I ought to say (through grittted teeth, becuase I like Wikipedia and think it gets a bad rap, but that's for another time) that you may want to double check if you are relying on the information in a life-or-death situation (unlikely).  Also, I'm only guessing about the tattoo.

What I do know about Jules Renard is that I like some of the things he has to say about writing.  I've mentioned this before, but today I saw him quoted again, which got me curious enough to find out more about him, which is how I discovered he published a journal, and why I looked at goodreads.com, and.....well, now here we are, talking about tattoos.  There are more of his quotes here, if you're planning on getting inked any time soon.

I had forgotten how much I like good quotes.  I first started collecting them (metaphorically, not on various body parts) as a teenager, embroiled in the heady and ultra-competitive world of interschool debating.  At 15 we took our debating, like most things, very,very seriously: it was more or less a blood sport and some carefully chosen witty words from someone dead famous (sorry, dead and famous) were our weapons of choice.  Even better if she was a dead and famous woman (we were feminists, after all).

The bloodiest battles of all were waged against a team from the local boys' school, who raised the stakes when they literally invented an entirely fictional 19th century Baron. He had quite a back story, which developed as time went on, but his main occupation seemed to be making wise and profound statements which, coincidentally, summed up their entire argument in one foul (and, I can't emphasise this enough, fictional) swoop.  Geography and hormones alone probably would have made for a fair amount of friendly rivalry, but with the invention of the Baron, those boys became our nemesises (nemesee? nemesii? whatever...)  It still irks me, ever so slightly, that they used to win more than us.  Also, that they had the idea first.

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