Monday, June 6th, 2011
A Selection (The Blog)
From Mating
The inspiriting effect my singing had on my animals was not an illusion, and it reminds me now of the period when I was feeling depressed at how commonplace my dreams were compared to Denoon’s. He claimed to dream infrequently, but when he did, his dreams were like something by Faberge or Kafka in their uniqueness. He would have noetic dreams, and when they were over he would be left in possession of some adage or percept that tells you something occult or fundamental about the world. One of these was the conviction he woke up with one morning that music was the remnant of a medium that had been employed in the depths of the past as a means of communication between men and animals — I assume man arrow animal and not ducks playing flutes to get their point across to man. Living with me made him more provisional about his dreams, especially after I compared one of his adages to a statement some famous surrealist was left with after dreaming, which he thought important enough to print up: Beat your mother while she’s still young. I would always make Denoon at least try to reduce his insights to a sentence or two. The fact is I laugh at dreams. They seem to me to be some kind of gorgeous garbage. I have revenge dreams, mainly, in which I tell significant figures from my past things like You have the brains of a drum. On I sang.
Is it absurd to be proud of your dreams, or not? Denoon was.
Thursday, May 5th, 2011
A Selection (The Blog)
From Something Happened
And there I am between them, sturdy, youthful, prospering, virile (fossilized and immobilized between them as though between bookends, without knowing how I got there, without knowing how I will ever get out), saddled already with the grinding responsibility of making them, and others, happy, when it has been all I can do from my beginning to hold my own head up straight enough to look existence squarely in the eye without making guileful wisecracks about it or sobbing out loud for help. Who put me here? How will I ever get out? Will I ever be somebody lucky? What decided to sort me into precisely this slot? (What the fuck makes anyone think I am in control, that I can be any different from what I am? I can’t even control my reveries. Virginia’s tit is as meaningful to me now as my mother’s whole life and death. Both of them are dead. The rest of us are on the way. I can almost hear my wife, or my second wife, if I ever have one, or somebody else, saying:
“Won’t you wheel Mr. Slocum out of the shade into the sunlight now? I think he looks a little cold.”
A vacuum cleaner that works well is more important to me than the atom bomb, and it makes not the slightest difference to anyone I know that the earth revolves around the sun instead of vice versa, or the moon around the earth, although the measured ebb and flow of the tides may be of some interest to mariners and clam diggers, but who cares about them? Green is more important to me than God. So, for that matter, is Kagle and the man who handles my dry cleaning, and a transistor radio that is playing too loud is a larger catastrophe to me than the next Mexican earthquake. “Someday” — it must have crossed my mother’s mind at least once, after my denial and rejection of her, since she was only human — “this will happen to you.” Although she was too generous to me ever to say so. But I know it must have crossed her mind.)
Monday, May 2nd, 2011
A Selection (The Blog)
From Dog Soldiers
Converse lay clinging to earth and life, his mouth full of sweet grass. Around him the screams, the bombs, the whistling splinters swelled their sickening volume until they blotted out sanity and light. It was then that he cried, although he had not realized it at the time.
In the course of being fragmentation-bombed by the South Vietnamese Air Force, Converse experienced several insights; he did not welcome them although they came as no surprise.
One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death. Existence was a trap; the testy patience of things as they are might be exhausted at any moment.
Another was that in the single moment when the breathing world had hurled itself screeching and murderous at his throat, he had recognized the absolute correctness of its move. In those seconds, it seemed absurd that he had ever been allowed to go his foolish way, pursuing notions and small joys. He was ashamed of the casual arrogance with which he had presumed to scurry about creation. From the bottom of his heart, he concurred in the moral necessity of his annihilation.
He had lain there — a funny little fucker — a little stingless quiver on the earth. That was all there was of him, all there ever had been.
Tuesday, January 18th, 2011
A Selection (The Blog)
From Light Years
He wanted one thing, the possibility of one thing: to be famous. He wanted to be central to the human family, what else is there to long for, to hope? Already he walked modestly along the streets, as if certain of what was coming. He had nothing. He had only the carefully laid out luggage of bourgeois life, his scalp beginning to show beneath the hair, his immaculate hands. And the knowledge; yes, he had knowledge. The Sagrada Familia was as familiar to him as a barn to a farmer, the “new towns” of France and England, cathedrals, voussoirs, cornices, quoins. He knew the life of Alberti, of Christopher Wren. He knew that Sullivan was the son of a dancing master, Breuer a doctor in Hungary. But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.
Friday, November 12th, 2010
A Selection (The Blog)
From The Loser
sat at the table by the window where I used to sit in past years, but it didn’t seem to me that time had stood still. I heard the innkeeper working in the kitchen and I thought she was probably making lunch for her child who had came home from school at one or two, warming up some goulash or perhaps some vegetable soup. In theory we understand people, but in practice we can’t put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our own point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn’t possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
A Selection (The Blog)
From Small Island
Then I stepped on to the ladder of the shelter and that was when I looked down. Blow me, Arthur had been out there day in day out and he’d not dug us a shelter: he’d burrowed a tunnel. I swear I couldn’t see the bottom. I climbed out again as Mr. Plant passed by me, and Bernard managed a look of confusion behind the mask.
“I’m not going down there — we’ll be buried alive,” I told him.
“Come on, Queenie,” he said, all agitated.
“Not on your life. They’re not meant to be that deep.” I knew it had taken Arthur a long time to dig it, coming in night after night mucky and excited as a boy from a sandpit. Bernard would help at weekends. “How’s it coming along?” I’d ask him. “Fine,” he’d say. I didn’t know they’d dug half-way to Australia. “I’m not being buried alive, Bernard. I’ll die up here, if you don’t mind.”
And I though I heard my husband say, “Suit yourself,” but it might have just been the mask. He started to climb in but then the all-clear sounded. The half of him still sticking out of the ground reminded me of a worm. I took my gas mask off to giggle.
When I got back inside I talked to no one. I went straight to our bedroom, shut the door and turned the key in the lock. That raid was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in this house. Tingling with life, that was how I felt. I took two steps and leaped up on to the bed. There was no doubt about it, I was looking forward to this war.
Thursday, April 8th, 2010
A Selection (The Blog)
From Norwood
[Norwood] walked up as far as Fifty-ninth Street, where things began to peter out, then came back. There was a man in a Mr. Peanut outfit in front of the Planters place but he was not giving out sample nuts, he was just walking back and forth. The Mr. Peanut casing looked hot. It looked thick enough to give protection against small arms fire.
“Do they pay you by the hour or what?” Norwood said to the monocled peanut face.
“Yeah, by the hour,” said a wary, muffled voice inside.
“I bet that suit is heavy.”
“It’s not all that heavy. I just started this morning.”
“How much do you get a hour?”
“You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”
“Do you take the suit home with you?”
“No, I put it on down here. At the shop.”
“The one in Dallas gives out free nuts.”
“I don’t know anything about that. They didn’t say anything to me about it.”
“He don’t give you many, just two or three cashews.”
“I don’t know anything about that. I work at the post office at night.”
“Well, I’ll see you sometime, Mr. Peanut. You take it easy.”
“Okay. You too.”
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
A Selection (The Blog)
From The Bostonians
She knew him because she had met him in society; but she didn’t know him—well, because she didn’t want to. If he should come and speak to her—and he looked as if he were going to work round that way—she should just say to him, “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir,” very coldly. She couldn’t help it if he did think her dry; if he were a little more dry, it might be better for him. What was the matter with him? Oh, she thought she had mentioned that; he was a mesmeric healer, he made miraculous cures. She didn’t believe in his system or disbelieve in it, one way or the other; she only knew that she had been called to see ladies he had worked on, and she found that he had made them lose a lot of valuable time. He talked to them—well, as if he didn’t know what he was saying. She guessed he was quite ignorant of physiology, and she didn’t think he ought to go round taking responsibilities. She didn’t want to be narrow, but she thought a person ought to know something.
Friday, February 26th, 2010
A Selection (The Blog)
From The Mighty Angel
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I don’t know, or rather, I know a thousand answers. None of them is entirely true and each of them contains a grain of truth. But nor can it be said that together they comprise some single whole great truth. I drink because I drink. I drink because I like to. I drink because I’m afraid. I drink because I’m genetically predisposed to. All my progenitors drank. My great-grandparents and grandparents drank, my father drank and my mother drank. I have no sisters or brothers, but I’m certain that if I did, all my sisters would drink and all my brothers would drink too. I drink because I have a weak character. I drink because there’s something wrong with my head. I drink because I’m too quiet and I’m trying to be more lively. I drink because I’m the nervous type and I’m trying to calm my nerves. I drink because I’m sad and I’m trying to raise my spirits. I drink when I’m happily in love. I drink because I’m searching for love in vain. I drink because I’m too normal and I need a little craziness. I drink when I’m in pain and I need to ease the pain. I drink out of longing for someone. I drink from an excess of fulfillment when I’m with someone. I drink when I listen to Mozart and when I read Leibnitz. I drink out of sensual pleasure and I drink out of sexual hunger. I drink when I finish my first glass and I drink when I finish my last glass; at such times I drink all the more, because I’ve never yet drunk my last glass.”
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
A Selection (The Blog)
From Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss
When you’re sitting at a blackjack table with some guy with a Boston accent and a tenpenny common nail bent in half and hanging from his pierced ear, listening to him tell transcendently stupid snail jokes, it’s a battle to believe that life is a dreary chore, designed that way by the Good Lord for some inexplicable reason. In fact, at that moment the world looks like a place of great tenderness and beauty. We liked this place of jokes and jackpots, preferred to think that a great new blackjack strategy or more fabulous run of cards would come. Each time we went to Gulfport, part of the ritual was “Here’s the new plan,” both serious and not, a hope and a joke at the same time. It was a problem, this tendency to think that good things were going to happen, that things would turn out well in the face of acres of evidence to the contrary. Father could never have anticipated that his faith that life really did make sense and his hope that just by keeping at it success could be won would eventually figure in our donation of so much of his well-preserved money to the casinos.
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
A Selection (The Blog)
From This Was Racing by Joe H. Palmer (1953), the subject of the next Backlist feature, which will be published in the near future:
A thin file of racers was stepping slowly out from beneath the crowded stands at Churchill Downs. A band was playing “My Old Kentucky Home” with intense feeling and a trumpet which was a half-tone flat. A hundred thousand people, give or take a half dozen, were straining for a glimpse of the Derby parade. There were flashes of crimson and gold and purple silk under a watery May sunshine, as a dozen or so jockeys tried to ride to the post with what they hoped was nonchalance.
At the moment a dozen or so horses held the nation’s sporting interest, the pick of a crop of perhaps 8,000 foals. A quarter-hour later one would stand garlanded and restive in the presentation enclosure, as the others went back beaten to their barns. The winner might be 5 to 2 in the mutuels, but he was 8,000 to 1 on a spring night three years earlier, when his dam heaved up from a straw-filled stall and had a look at him.
Outside the race track there was a tense, expectant world, waiting crouched over its radios, and occasionally sending one of the children down to the drug store for razor blades. Men paused over their lobster pots on off-shore Maine to adjust the portable. For that fleeting instant, no one cared what Rita or Princess Elizabeth was doing. It was, you understand, a very solemn moment.
“I wonder,” remarked John McNulty, of the New Yorker, “what would happen if a convention were ever held in Mecca. How would you write a lead?”
The band had got to “bye and bye hard times come a-knockin’” before this was figured out. Mr. McNulty had evidently worked on a copy desk somewhere, and under his recoiling fingers had come many a story beginning, “Indianapolis was the Mecca of auto-racing enthusiasts today when—”; “Philadelphia became the Mecca of the services today when Army and Navy—”; “Oberammergau became the Mecca of Southern Bavaria today when—” and others of what is called an ilk.
All the same, and with all proper apologies, Louisville, Ky., is about to become the Mecca of. The Gateway to the South (it says on the bridges) will brace itself against successive waves of visitors with no noticeable gift for quietude, and the tempo will rise until late on the afternoon of the first Saturday in May. On the following afternoon Louisville could be grouped around St. Anthony’s hut in the Thebaid without disturbing his devotions. This tourist often stays over an extra day, just to listen to the silence.
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
A Selection (The Blog)
From American Pastoral
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
A Selection (The Blog)
From In Praise of Idleness
Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: ‘Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.’ Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveller in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. This traveller was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From Pnin
Pnin skipped the actual reports and case histories—and there is no need to go here into those hilarious details. Suffice it to say that already at the third session of the female group, after this or that lady had gone home and seen the light and come back to describe the newly discovered sensation to her still blocked but rapt sisters, a ringing note of revivalism pleasingly colored the proceedings. (“Well, girls, when George last night—”) And this was not all. Dr. Eric Wind hoped to work out a technique that would allow bringing all those husbands and wives together in a joint group. Incidentally it was deadening to hear him and Liza smacking their lips over the word “group.” In a long letter to distressed Pnin, Professor Chateau affirmed that Dr. Wind even called Siamese twins “a group.” And indeed progressive, idealistic Wind dreamed of a happy world consisting of Siamese centuplets, anatomically conjoined communities, whole nations built around a communicating liver. “It is nothing but a kind of microcosmos of communism—all that psychiatry,” rumbled Pnin, in his answer to Chateau. “Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?”
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From The Sweet Science
In the course of his boxing career, which was not otherwise distinguished, Kearns has the fortune to meet the two fighters who in my opinion had the best ring names of all time — Honey Mellody and Mysterious Billy Smith. Smith was also a welterweight champion. “He was always doing something mysterious,” Kearns says. “Like he would step on your foot, and when you looked down, he would bite you in the ear. If I had a fighter like that now, I would lick heavyweights. But we are living in a bad period all around. The writers are always crabbing about the fighters we got now, but look at the writers you got now themselves. All they think about is home to wife and children, instead of laying around saloons soaking up information.”
Friday, October 30th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From The Diary of Virginia Woolf
At the moment (I have 7 1/2 before dinner) I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. This struck me on Reading platform, watching Nessa & Quentin kiss, he coming up shyly, yet with some emotion. This I shall remember; & make more of, when separated from all the business of crossing the platform, finding our bus &c. That is why we dwell on the past, I think.
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From Nausea
This man was one-ideaed. Nothing more was left in him but bones, dead flesh and Pure Right. A real case of possession, I thought. Once Right has taken hold of a man exorcism cannot drive it out; Jean Parrottin had consecrated his whole life to thinking about his Right: nothing else. Instead of the slight headache I feel coming on each time I visit a museum, he would have felt the painful right of having his temples cared for. It never did to make him think too much, or attract his attention to unpleasant realities, to his possible death, to the sufferings of others. Undoubtedly, on his death bed, at that moment when, ever since Socrates, it has been proper to pronounce certain elevated words, he told his wife, as one of my uncles told his, who had watched beside him for twelve nights, “I do not thank you, Thérèse; you have only done your duty.” When a man gets that far, you have to take your hat off to him.
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From The Master
Minny died in March, a year since he had last seen her. He was still in England. He felt it as the end of his youth, knowing that death, at the last, was dreadful to her. She would have given anything to live. In the years that followed, he longed to know what she would have thought of his books and stories, and of the decisions he made about his life. This sense of missing her deep and demanding response made itself felt to Gray and Holmes as well, and also to William. All of them wondered in their nervous ambition and great, agitated egotism what Minny would have thought about them or said about them. Henry wondered, too, what life would have had for her and how her exquisite faculty of challenge could have dealt with a world which would inevitably attempt to confine her. His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her. What once was life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose.
Thursday, August 20th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From Decline and Fall
“Oh, why did nobody warn me?” cried Grimes in his agony. “I should have been told. They should have told me in so many words. They should have warned me about Flossie, not about the fires of hell. I’ve risked them, and I don’t mind risking them again, but they should have told me about marriage. They should have told me that at the end of that gay journey and flower-strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children. I should have been warned of the great lavender-scented bed that was laid out for me, of the wisteria at the windows, of all intimacy and confidence of family life. But I daresay I shouldn’t have listened. Our life is lived between two homes. We emerge for a little into the light, and then the front door closes. The chintz curtains shut out the sun, and the hearth glows with the fire of home, while upstairs, above our heads, are enacted again the awful accidents of adolescence. There’s a home and family waiting for every one of us. We can’t escape, try how we may. It’s the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences. There’s no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home builders, beavers and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth?”
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From The Big Room
When they talk about luck in Las Vegas, it’s just the way they have there of talking about time. Luck is the local obsession, while time itself is a sore subject in the big rooms and casinos. It’s a corny old gag about Las Vegas, the temporal city if there ever was one, trying to camouflage the hours and retard the dawn, when everybody knows that if you’re feeling lucky you’re really feeling time in its rawest form, and if you’re not feeling lucky, they’ve got a clock at the bus station. For a speedy town like Vegas, having no time on the walls can only accelerate the process by which jellyfish turn into barracuda, grinders and dumpers become a single player, the big winners and big losers exchange wardrobes, while everyone gets ready for the next roll. The whole city’s a clock. The hotels change credit lines as fast and often as they change the sheets, and for a lot of the same reasons. The winners and the losers all have identical marks on them, bruised and chewed over by Las Vegas mitosis, with consolation prizes for anybody left who’s not already inconsolable. Don’t laugh, people. It could happen to you.
Thursday, August 6th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From The Bell
“I cannot agree with Milton,” James was saying, “when he refuses to praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue. Virtue, innocence, should be valued whatever its history. It has a radiance which enlightens and purifies and which is not to be dimmed by foolish talk about the worth of experience. How false it is to tell our young people to seek experience! They should rather be told to value and to retain their innocence; that is enough of a task, enough of an adventure! And if we can keep our innocence for long enough, the gift of knowledge will be added to it, a deeper and more precise knowledge than any which is won by the tawdry methods of ‘experience.’ Innocence in ourselves and others is to be prized, and woe to him who destroys it, as our Lord Himself has said, Matthew eighteen six.
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From The Big Sleep
“Your name isn’t Doghouse Reilly,” she said. “It’s Philip Marlowe. You can’t fool me.”
I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.
I looked at her again. She lay still now, her face pale against the pillow, her eyes large and dark and empty as rain barrels in a drought. One of her small five-fingered thumbless hands picked at the cover restlessly. There was a vague glimmer of doubt starting to get born in her somewhere. She didn’t know about it yet. It’s so hard for women — even nice women — to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.
I said: “I’m going out in the kitchen and mix a drink. Want one?”
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From The Moviegoer
In the evenings I usually watch television or go to the movies. Weekends I often spend on the Gulf Coast. Our neighborhood theater in Gentilly has permanent lettering on the front of the marquee reading: Where Happiness Costs So Little. The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.
Monday, July 13th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From Cait Murphy’s spirited Crazy ‘08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History
In 1903, [pitcher Rube] Waddell had a good season; once he finally bothered to show up in June, he won twenty-one games and led the league in strikeouts (with 302). It was a busy year in other ways, too: he also starred on vaudeville; led a marching band through Jacksonville; got engaged, married, and separated; rescued a log from drowning (he thought it was a woman); accidentally shot a friend; and was bitten by a lion. . . . Among his more respectable hobbies were chasing fires (he adored fire engines) and wrestling alligators; he once taught geese to skip rope. Hughie Jennings, manager of the Tigers, used to try to distract him from the sidelines by waving children’s toys.
Monday, June 15th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From Blockbuster
[Alan] Ladd hated Harrison Ford’s performance — thought it was too camp — and resolved to ask Lucas to fix it in the editing, but for the moment he said nothing and simply left. Everyone else headed out to a Chinese restaurant; as soon as they sat down Lucas asked them, “All right, whaddya guys really think?” [Brian] De Palma plowed into it: “It’s gibberish,” he said. “The first act, where are we? Who are these fuzzy guys? Who are these guys dressed up like the Tin Man from Oz? What kind of movie are you making here? You’ve left the audience out. You’ve vaporized the audience.”
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From Clive James’ introduction to Flying Visits
Even within the confines of Europe, the idea that all airports were the same turned out to be exactly wrong. In fact any airport anywhere immediately reflects the political system, economic status and cultural characteristics of the country where it is situated. During the supposedly swinging Sixties, both of the major London airports gave you a dauntingly accurate picture of Britain’s true condition, with one delay leading to another, a permanent total breakdown of the information service supposedly responsible for telling you all about it, and food you would not have given to a dog. Zurich airport, on the other hand, was like a bank which had merged with a hospital in order to manufacture chocolates.
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From “A Home in the Neon,” an essay about living in Las Vegas by Dave Hickey, in his collection Air Guitar
Most of all, I suspect that my unhappy colleagues are appalled by the fact that Vegas presents them with a flat-line social hierarchy . . . Membership in the University Club will not get you comped at Caesars, unless you play baccarat. Thus, in the absence of vertical options, one is pretty much thrown back onto one’s own cultural resources, and, for me, this has not been the worst place to be thrown. At least I have begun to wonder if the privilege of living in a community with a culture does not outweigh the absence of a “cultural community” and, to a certain extent, explain its absence. (Actually, it’s not so bad. My [Times Literary Supplement] and [London Review of Books] come in the mail every week, regular as clockwork, and just the other day, I took down my grandfather’s Cicero and read for nearly an hour without anyone breaking down my door and forcing me to listen to Wayne Newton.)
Monday, April 6th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From So Long, See You Tomorrow
Roaming the courthouse square on a Saturday night, the tenant farmers and their families were unmistakable. You could see that they were not at ease in town and that they clung together for support. The women’s clothes were not meant to be becoming but to wear well, to last them out. The back of the men’s necks was a mahogany color, and deeply wrinkled. Their hands were large and looked swollen or misshapen and sometimes they were short a finger or two. The discontented hang of their shoulders is possibly something I imagined because I would not have liked not owning the land I farmed. Very likely they didn’t either, but farming was in their blood and they wouldn’t have cared to be selling real estate or adding up columns of figures in a bank.
On the seventh day they rested; that is to say, they put on their good clothes and hitched up the horse again and drove to some country church, where, sitting in straight-backed cushionless pews, they stared passively at the preacher, who paced up and down in front of them, thinking up new ways to convince them that they were steeped in sin.
Monday, March 16th, 2009
A Selection (The Blog)
From The Risk Pool by Richard Russo:
Among my entrepreneurial activities that summer, I salvaged golf balls from the narrow pond that served as a hazard on the thirteenth and fourteenth holes of the Mohawk Country Club. To judge from its location, you wouldn’t have thought it would come into play on either hole, since each offered a wide fairway and every opportunity to go around the water, but I doubted it could have attracted more balls had it been twice as large and right in front of the green. The more people faced away from the water, stared off into the friendly fairway, the more surely their ball would be destined for the pond. One afternoon before it had occurred to me that I might retrieve the balls that were down there, I sat on my bike for three hours and charted in my mind where the tee shots dropped, growing more and more amazed at the dense concentration of shots that ended up in the small strip of water. It was enough to make you reconsider the wisdom of deciding, on the outset of any human endeavor, that there was this one thing you didn’t want to do.
