February 2012
17 posts
1 tag
Openings
I believe that a well-known anecdote exists to the effect that a young writer, determined to make the commencement of his story forcible and original enough to catch and rivet the attention of the most blase of editors, penned the following sentence:
“‘Hell,’” said the Duchess.”
Strangely enough, this tale of mine opens in much the same fashion. Only the lady who...
3 tags
My home could be less crowded
Of course, the real reader has no need to surround himself with books, W. says. The real reader lends them to others with no thought of them being returned. What need has he for a library of books? He prefers to be alone with only the most essential works, like Beckett with his Dante, in his room at the old folks’ home. Beckett with his Dante, and cricket on the TV.
From Lars...
3 tags
Why we need the jinn
In a plot, the supreme being can act as a narrative force embodied in providence, but there are limits to the spectrum of his behaviour. Even the furious God of the Old Testament does not possess the degree of idiosyncrasy and vitality that less strictly perfect beings, intrinsically various and unruly, can add to a story. It is not simply a question of the devil having the best tunes, but a...
1 tag
The letter killeth
There was a gulf so wide between the Art I discovered by myself and what was on offer at school that I could detect no more than a tenuous connection between the two.
From Ted Walker’s The High Path
2 tags
Margins
Sometimes I have the impression that everything that happens in my life comes from a marginal, ominous place no one else knows, a place that has always been meant only for me. I’ve grown so used to the idea that it seems to me I enjoy my brief moments of happiness and well-being with an intensity unknown to other mortals. Those moments restore me, they are necessary to me, and each time...
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Inevitabilities
I interrupted to ask if every mine in the area necessarily had a sinister history. “Yes, senor, every mine has its dead. That’s the way it is. An Indian who lived around here and told fortunes used to say there’s no gold without a corpse, no woman without a secret.”
From Alvaro Mutis’s Amirbar, in The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
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New forms
“Look!” Bill said, pointing at the page. “In your head, there’s sexual tension there… . They’re flirting, Jack. You can’t play with that if you’re not going to use it. Remember Chekhov and the shotgun?”
“Fuck those rules. Who made that rule?”
“Chekhov.” “Who said that things had to have a certain structure? How...
2 tags
Definitions
Ennui is the condition of not fulfilling our potentialities; remorse of not having fulfilled them; anxiety of not being able to fulfill them.
From Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave
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You should always trust Maqroll the Gaviero
I pointed out that the living are often deader than the characters in books, and I was so convinced of this fact that I couldn’t even listen carefully to other people anymore, because I was afraid I’d wake them.
From Alvaro Mutis’s Amirbar, in The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
3 tags
Responsibility
When people don’t understand our work, it is always our fault. What the reader wants, above all, is to penetrate our thought, and that is what you arrogantly deny him. I understood you, because I knew you. If I’d been given your book without your name on it, I’d have thought it splendid, but strange, and I’d have asked myself whether you were immoral, skeptical, indifferent, or heartbroken. You...
2 tags
Judy
No matter whom you sleep with, or whether you’re a fan of the Metropolitan Opera or the Grand Ole Opry, practically everyone in the second half of the twentieth century (in America and around the world) has grown up with Dorothy and _The Wizard of Oz_; just as Garland was the major musical icon who started as a child star (even more than a headliner, like Sammy Davis Jr. or Buddy Rich),...
1 tag
Subject closed
Years later my mother was to tell me that when she had asked me, at the age of five, whether I knew where babies came from and I had said yes, she had considered further information on the subject superfluous.
P. Y. Betts, People Who Say Goodbye: Memories of Childhood (1989)
January 2012
18 posts
2 tags
A Nero Wolfe question
Over at the old home place, I’ve got a question about Nero Wolfe, raised by an aside in the story “Easter Parade.” It’s simple: what four people would Nero Wolfe be willing to ask a personal favor of? Archie, of course, but who else?
Answers are welcome—just follow the link.
2 tags
Discrimination
Since the perplexities of nature permit a myriad of coincidences we cannot reject one offhand, but we can discriminate.
From Rex Stout’s “Murder Is No Joke,” in And Four to Go
3 tags
Old things
Jan Svankmajer urges fellow film-makers … to “become a collector of old things. Listen to them. Never do violence to objects … tell _their_ stories.” His plea—his “Commandment”—holds true beyond modern animation in the cinema. With regard to magic lamps, flying carpets and the function of imagination and its creative powers today, the questions...
1 tag
Infighting
Even at their height, the Andrews [Sisters] were infamous for not getting along. It has seemed to some that they weren’t merely a family who squabbled a lot but loved one another just the same; in the opinion of some, Patty and Maxene really hated each other, but fortunately LaVerne was around to keep the peace. Larry Bruff, announcer on the Glenn Miller-Andrews Sisters Chesterfield show,...
2 tags
Adding adjectives
In the ever-changing nickname department, it seemed the self-explanatory Godfather of Soul wasn’t enough; the record labels now billed Brown as not only “The Godfather,” but the Minister of New New Super Heavy Funk.
From the liner notes to James Brown’s The Singles, Volume 9, 1973-1975
1 tag
Secrets
Seldom having had much of a secret before and never one of such intimacy, Mrs Donaldson was surprised at how strong the impulse was to share it, or at least to share the secret that she had one to share.
From Alan Bennett’s “The Greening of Mrs Donaldson,” in Smut
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Working blue
“I’ve never even liked swearing,” she confessed to Delia, “so when people swear I feel out of it.”
“Don’t worry,” said Delia. “Two months of this place and you’ll be saying ‘shit’ with the best of them.” (She actually meant “fuck” but didn’t think Mrs Donaldson was quite ready for this yet.)
From...
2 tags
Non-insistence
There is no aggression in Pym’s wish to “make you see,” as Conrad the novelist put it. She does not say to us, “I am going to make you feel like a spinster, a homosexual, a retired woman with anorexia whose only point of pride is to have had ‘major surgery,’ whose only joy is to have fallen in love with her surgeon.” As readers, we are more accustomed...
2 tags
Injunction
But I summon you to fulfil another engagement. Make me a visit next summer. You will find here a bad house, a pleasant country in summer, some books, and very little strange company. Such a plan of life for two or three months must, I should imagine, suit a man who has been for as many years struck from one end of Europe to the other like a tennis-ball. At least I judge of you by myself. I...
2 tags
A job's a job
Lord Chesterfield once remarked of two persons dancing a minuet, that “they looked as if they were hired to do it, and were doubtful of being paid.”
From Samuel Rogers’s Table-Talk and Recollections
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Sedentarism
Gibbon took very little exercise. He had been staying some time with Lord Sheffield in the country; and when he was about to go away, the servants could not find his hat. “Bless me,” said Gibbon, “I certainly left it in the hall on my arrival here.” He had not stirred out of doors during the whole of his visit.
From Samuel Rogers’s Table-Talk and Recollections
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The horror!
“My husband and Mr. Blaney have been business partners for ten years. They own the firm of Blaney and Poor, manufacturers of novelties—you know, they make things like matches that won’t strike and chairs with rubber legs and bottled drinks that taste like soap—”
“Good God,” Wolfe muttered in horror.
From Rex Stout’s “Instead of...
1 tag
Counsel
“You know, when a lawyer talks to you, the natural thing to do is not listen.” “I know.”
“Certainly, not believe.”
From Donald E. Westlake’s Watch Your Back!
1 tag
What's in a name
“Stan’s out here. The one we like.”
“That’s nice,” Stan said.
Hanging up, Harriet said, “There are Stans and Stans.”
From Donald E. Westlake’s Watch Your Back!
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Before the law
“You see, John, lawyers have much less respect for the law than the rest of us. It’s familiarity, you see, doing its little breeding job again. A lawyer isn’t there to tell you what the law is, you’ll get that from a policeman or judge. A lawyer is there to tell you what you can do anyway.”
Irwin said, “Think of yourself as Dante, and the law as hell.”...
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The King
In his memoir, If I Can Dream, Larry Geller, who later became Presley’s hairdresser and “spiritual advisor” (somehow for one man to fulfill both of those roles in Presley’s life seems perfectly appropriate), writes convincingly about being a teenager in 1956 and hearing Elvis for the first time. “I still think of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ as a record that came...
1 tag
Risks
A great book, like a great nature, may have disastrous effects upon other people. It robs them of their character and substitutes its own. No one, for instance, who has read what Carlyle has to say about Lamb ever rids his mind completely of the impression, in spite of the fact that we judge the writer of it far more than his victim. Some deposit remains with us. It is strange to reflect what...
December 2011
12 posts
3 tags
Papa
I allowed myself to daydream, and wasted time wondering what Hemingway would have done if it had been he who had seen the footprints in the sand.
First of all, by looking at the prints he would have guessed some things about the person who had arrived through the sandy inlet. He certainly would have been able to tell the person’s sex, age, character, or mood: reading tracks was an art he...
2 tags
Character and character
On the way to my place of work I spent an uncomfortable quarter of an hour thinking over what She Who Must Be Obeyed had said about me having to be a “character.” It seemed an unfair charge. I drink Chateau Thames Embankment because it’s all I can afford. It keeps me regular and blots out certain painful memories, such as a bad day in Court in front of Judge Graves, an old...
Reasons
Love me not for comely grace,
For my pleasing eye or face,
Nor for any outward part,
No, nor for a constant hear;
For these may fail or turn to ill,
So thou and I shall sever;
Keep, therefore, a true woman’s eye,
And love me still but know not why—
So hast thou the same reason still
To doat upon me ever!
Anonymous, 1609
1 tag
Party
Now, as I have no doubt you know, when Stiffy celebrates, he celebrates. Exactly how and where he did it on this occasion, I couldn’t tell you. He is a bit vague about it himself. He seems to have collected a gang of sorts, for he can distinctly recall, he tells me, that from the very inception of the affair he did not lack for friends: and they apparently roamed hither and thither,...
2 tags
Hangover, once more
The butler coughed in rather an unpleasant and censorious manner.
“Did your lordship exceed last night?”
“Certainly not.”
“Did your lordship imbibe champagne?”
“The merest spot.”
“A bottle?”
“It may have been a bottle.”
“Two bottles?”
“Yes. Possibly two bottles.”
The butler coughed again.
...
2 tags
plus ça change
“[I]f a novel is reviewed well in Time or the New Yorker or Newsweek etc. I am likely to order it sight unseen (often to be badly fooled, of course)… . There is something wrong with the book business. The publisher is probably far the best judge of books there is, but he simply cannot put them over. Either they sell themselves (in which case he can plunge on advertising and build them up...
3 tags
Hangover
Angelica Bullock: What’s that?
Godfrey: Pixie remover.
Angelica Bullock: Oh, then you see them, too.
Godfrey: They’re old friends.
Angelica Bullock: Yes, but you mustn’t step on them. I don’t like them, but I don’t like to see them stepped on.
Godfrey: I’ll be very careful. I wouldn’t hurt them for the world… . You must never be rough with them....
2 tags
Preferences
However slight the terrestrial contact between Dante and Beatrice or Petrarch and Laura, time changes the proportion of things, and in later days it is preferable to have fewer sonnets and more conversation.
From George Eliot’s Middlemarch
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Vantages
He was at present too well acquainted with disaster to enter into the pathos of a lot where everything is below the level of tragedy except the passionate egoism of the sufferer.
From George Eliot’s Middlemarch
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A relationship
{Photo by rocketlass.}
she was his own best critic she despised his poetry which pleased jim to no end if, on the other hand, we were only to take into account mae’s emotions for jim a brief grocery list might suffice: he happened to be available was modestly capable she was bored what’s more she always wanted to spend the summer on a boat let us just say they spent the majority...
2 tags
Patterns
An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination,...
November 2011
19 posts
3 tags
Turgenev
Turgenev, that gentle giant, that lovable barbarian, with his white hair falling into his eyes, with a deep line crossing his forehead from one temple to the other like a furrow, and with his childish language, enchanted us from the soup-course on, _wreathed_ us, as the Russians put it, with his combination of innocence and shrewdness—the great charm of the Slav race, heightened in him by...
3 tags
Feng shui
Daudet said that it was an obsession with him which poisoned his whole life, and that he had never moved into a new flat without looking for the place where his coffin would stand.
From Pages from the Goncourt Journals, by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
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Small talk
“You have you own opinion about everything, Miss Brooke, and it is always a good opinion.”
What answer was possible to such stupid complimenting?
From George Eliot’s Middlemarch