January 2011
22 posts
1 tag
Menagerie
I had listened to a lot of parties, and I knew that mixed parties sound like a monkeyhouse, female parties like an aviary, and stag parties like a kennel. This party sounded like a kennel, but some of the voices were lap-dog voices, high and querulous.
Ross Macdonald, Blue City
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Two life plans
Drunk at 20, wrecked at 30, dead 40
Drunk at 21, human at 31, mellow at 41, dead at 51
Entry 1238 in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks
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This seems a stretch
There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people if he’s any good.
Entry 1037 in F.Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks
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If only.
They sat, as they had so often, in a row on the steps, surrounded, engulfed, drowned in summer.
Entry 1647 in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks
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Acquiring principles
She and her husband and all their friends had no principles. They were good or bad according to their natures; often they struck attitudes remembered from the past, but they were never sure as her father or her grandfathers had been. Confusedly, she supposed it was something about religion. But how could you get principles just by wishing for them?
Entry 1589 in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s...
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The din in the head
The combination of a desire for glory and an inability to endure the monotony it entails puts many people in the asylum. Glory comes from the unchanging din-din-din- of one supreme gift.
Entry 1251 in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks
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Lying
I can even live with a lie (even someone else’s lie—can always spot them because imaginative creation is my business and I am probably one of the most expert liars in the world and expect everyone to discount nine-tenths of what I say) but I have made two rules in attempting to be both an intellectual and a man of honor simultaneously—that I do not tell myself lies that will be...
2 tags
Distinctions
“Your assertion is the old hysterical excess of Puritanism in all times and places. In the moral world we are responsible only for the wrong that we intend. It can’t be otherwise.”
“And the evil that’s suffered from the wrong we didn’t intend?”
“Ah, perhaps that isn’t evil.”
“It’s pain!”
“It’s pain,...
2 tags
Nature v. Nurture
“Nature is a savage. She has good impulses, but you can’t trust her altogether.”
“Do you know,” said Colville, “I don’t think there’s very much of her left in us after we reach a certain point in life? She drives us on at a great pace for a while, and then some fine morning we wake up and find that Nature has got tired of us and left us to taste...
1 tag
Didn't quite.
“Don’t you hate to be told to read a book?”
“I used to—quarter of a century ago,” Colville said, recognizing that this was the way young people talked, even then.
“Used to?” she repeated. “Don’t you now?” “No; I’m a great deal more tractable now. I always say that I shall get the book out of the library. I draw the...
1 tag
Turn that frown upside down
“I’m glad you approve of heartbreak in books. So many people won’t read anything but cheerful books. It’s the only quarrel I have with Mrs. Bowen. She says there are so many sad things in life that they ought to be kept out of books.”
“Ah, there I perceive a divided duty,” said Colville. “I should like to agree with both of you. But if Mrs. Bowen...
1 tag
Places not to eat in New York . . . at least in...
“Let me read you a few of Weinberg’s findings,” Dr. Greenberg said, extracting a paper from the folder on his desk. “None of them had any direct bearing on our problem, but I think they’ll give you a good idea of what the Eclipse was like—what too many restaurants are like. This copy of his report lists fifteen specific violations. Here they are:...
2 tags
Eating habits of the Presidents
At dinner, [Taft] would help himself to two-thirds of a beef tenderloin, before allowing his guests to share the remainder.
When he got the chance, [Roosevelt] could eat twelve fried eggs in a row.
From Edmund Morris’s Colonel Roosevelt
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All out
I am of all bereft;
Save for some few Beanes left,
Whereof (at last) to make
For me, and mine a Cake:
Which eaten, they and I,
Will say our grace, and die.
Robert Herrick, “The Plunder”
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Modern neurosis
The critics may say what they like about Zola, they cannot prevent us, my brother and myself, from being the John-the-Baptists of modern neurosis.
From the journals of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, entry for April 23, 1878
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Sailing close to the wind
Like the majority in this world of miserable sinners, she did not actively court the danger she desired, but she hung about expectant of it.
E. F. Benson, Mrs. Ames
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Patternless
My mood had changed so completely that I found it best to stop picking and to look over the past with an animal indifference. Surely that was the way to look at things—to eat them up with your eyes for what they were, then to pass on, but never to chain them together in a silly pattern. The idea of a pattern was only satisfying if it was to be utterly unknowable and mysterious to human...
2 tags
Starting points
To begin with, then, ask the most basic question: What _is_ learning, anyway? A recent handbook in the field offered the following definition:
“Learning is the process by which relatively permanent changes occur in behavior potential as a result of experience.”
Which is to say, learning is a little like an accelerated mechanism for evolutionary adaptation, one that works at the...
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The work of the journal
I find that whatever hindrances may occur I write just about the same amount of truth in my Journal; for the record is more concentrated, and usually it is some very real and earnest life, after all, that interrupts. All flourishes are omitted. If I saw wood from morning to night, though I grieve that I could not observe the train of my thoughts during that time, yet, in the evening, the few...
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"The study of the imaginary voyage is therefore...
By the close of the nineteenth century, more than a thousand books had been printed that described voyages and travels that had never actually taken place, and faraway lands that had never existed. In fact, throughout the boom years of the early eighteenth century, invented travelogues were appearing with such astonishing frequency—typically four or five a year—that they far outnumbered the...
2 tags
Early years
Early years. That there was no incentive to think (indeed, there was a tacit resistance) acted as an incentive to think, the only one. Not always deeply, good heavens no!, or to much effect, or even sensibly (that least of all). But still …
D. J. Enright, from Injury Time: A Memoir
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The shrill whistling sound
Dear Sir:
The other day I turned on a Frank Sinatra program and I noted the shrill whistling sound, created supposedly by a bunch of girls cheering. Last night as I heard Lucky Strike produce more of this same hysteria I thought: how easy it would be for certain-minded manufacturers to create another Hitler here in America through the influence of mass-hysteria! I believe that those who are...