Standing Corrected

One of my favourite mordantly sarcastic lines to use on students is to suggest that it helps to get the title of a literary work correct when they are writing an essay in those sadly all-too-frequent cases when they get it wrong. So now I stand, or, rather, lie wounded, hoist by my own petard, as a result of an egregious blunder in a post a couple of days ago in which I turned Prof Greenblatt's clumsily titled The Swerve into, let's gently say, something else. (Many thanks to Karen for pointing this out, even if it was done possibly a touch too gleefully.)

I can see three perspectives on this. One I've already outlined: the blunder, for that's what it was, was essentially idiotic and deserving of reprimand. The second takes a more charitable view: the minor slip, which only the most anal of critics would bother about, came about in the wee small hours of Tuesday morning in the bleak (and cold) confines of Dublin Airport when a lesser character would have been weeping for lack of sleep rather than posting manfully to his blog. The third takes the higher ground, in the words of a famous son of Dublin: A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. In fact, I reckon my title is better than the prof's and makes more sense of the Latin involved.

(And if this last sentiment strikes you, Gentle Reader, as impossibly arrogant, I can only remind you that whilst the quotation above is frequently ascribed to Joyce himself it more properly belongs to the often insufferable Stephen Dedalus, adding properly to the ironies all round,)

And if there are any blunders in this post, remember, this comes from a man who's just marked eight scripts and is jet-lagged to boot. So there.