June 2010
1 post
The core psychological experiences of war are so primal and unadulterated, however, that they eclipse subtler feelings, like sorrow or remorse, that can gut you quietly for years. Once in Paris I caught sight of two men carrying a mattress across the street and went straight into full-blown panic: eyes wide, heart pounding, hands gripping my chair. I’d just come out of Liberia, where...
July 2009
41 posts
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William Shatner reads Sarah Palin’s tweets.
Count Kid Rock out as a fan of Twitter. “It’s gay. If one more person asks me if I have a Twitter, I’m going to tell them, ‘Twitter this [bleep], mother[bleep]er,’ ” the shaggy-haired rocker tells Rolling Stone. “I don’t have anything to say, and what I have to say is not that relevant. Anything that is relevant, I’m going to bottle it up and...
Before Ivo’s oddness gave cause for real anxiety Guy had married, not a Catholic but a bright, fashionable girl quite unlike anyone that his friends or family would have expected. He took his younger son’s share of the diminished family fortune, and settled in Kenya, living, it seemed to him afterwards, in unruffled good-humour beside a mountain lake where the air was always brilliant...
“Another was Lawrence Tibbett, a star baritone at the Metropolitan Opera. In...”
– The New York Times
As the helicopter force swept in over it, gliding back in from the ocean and then banking right and sprinting northeast along the city’s western edge, Mogadishu spread out beneath them in its awful reality, a catastrophe, the world capital of things-gone-completely-to-hell. It was as if the city had been ravaged by some fatal urban disease. The few paved avenues were crumbling and littered...
“One afternoon as Gertrude Stein and I were coming home someone came out of our...”
– The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook | Alice B. Toklas
Koufax’s fastball inspired scientific debate, pitting the empiricism of the batting eye against scientific principle. The laws of physics and logic dictate that an object hurtling through space must lose height and momentum. Anyone can make a whiffle ball rise, sure. But a man standing on a fifteen-inch-high mound of dirt throwing a five-ounce horsehide sphere downhill? “Rise, my...
They could close their eyes to this fact and believe they were acting as humans beings—whatever the hell that meant in time of war—and relieve him of his command for what he did to those Yankee prisoners. They could send him out here to die of boredom; but he could still remember what a Yankee field piece did to his arm. He was still a soldier and he could still think like a soldier...
This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things—broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them...
“We didn’t have minibar keys, but Barney picked the lock on ours in thirty...”
– The Enthusiast | Charlie Haas
Feet crunched outside and the door was pushed open. The light hit pencils of rain and made silver wires of them. Art trundled two muddy flats in sullenly, kicked the door shut, let one of the flats fall over on its side. He looked at me savagely.
The Big Sleep | Raymond Chandler
“Costel was drinking. Piquet, Bilon, and Nibot took off with his cab. They sold...”
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Novels in Three Lines | Félix Fénéon, via Twitter
That last discussion with her husband Sofia recalled in its entirety, complete in every detail and shading, on the day the news of his death reached her in Yalta. Her husband had been sitting near a little wicker table, examining the tips of his short, outspread fingers, and she had been telling him that they could not go on like that any longer, that they had long since become strangers, that she...
Kurt Vonnegut's letter home after five months in a... →
Via Books Are People, Too
Beckham springs forward. At the moment before impact, he is a picture of serenity and balance, his legs splayed, his right arm pointing straight down, his left arm extended like a traffic cop’s. All angles and energy, he looks like a Keith Haring drawing come to life. Physicists from Europe to Japan have spend hundreds of hours studying his free kicks, the perfectly calibrated mix of...
“The dame sauntered silently into Rocco’s office, but she didn’t need...”
– Bulwer-Lytton | Tony Alfieri
Many writers, after getting their undergraduate degree, ask themselves, “Should I go to Iowa (or some other university) for my master’s?” Probably not. Some people go to grad school for writing, but you don’t have to. Because, like, you have so much inside you that needs to come out. Plus, nows-a-day there are edit people with fixy buttons to make everything read right. On...
In my ten years on the road I never got two hundred dollars ahead, and I ran up a long list of places I didn’t need to see again. Evenings fell hard in those scraping-by towns. You could chart my lack of progress by the cars I drove: a Sidekick, an Escort, a Protégé, a Kadett, an Aspire, a Justy, and for six awful months, a Flurry, one of the most entry-level cars ever made by a Big...
“Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their...”
– The Road | Cormac McCarthy
‘There’s a little Jewish snapper at this rub-joint we’re going to,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘A real scorcher. She’s got a plum that’s like the inside of a conger-eel, just one long piece of suction muscle. The kind to suck you in like a minnow and blow you right out of her arse. Best bit of damned plum I’ve ever had.’ He shook his head...
“Whenever I am about to publish a book, I feel an impatient desire to know what...”
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Who Is Mark Twain? | Mark Twain
Hemingway shot himself yesterday morning. There was a great man. I remember walking down a street in Boston after reading a book of his, and finding the color of the sky, the faces of strangers, and the smell of the city heightened and dramatized. The most important thing he did for me was to legitimatize manly courage, a quality that I had heard, until I came on his work, extolled by Scoutmasters...
They all cheered up, though, at the next act of the comedy, when a small child was led in to present me with a peach that they had been preparing for me in the hothouse of the local orphanage. I say led in, because the child was so lame he had to go on little crutches, and there were sighings and affected cooings from the females present. I’m no hand with children at all, and have found them...
“Wiser and older people tell you that the passions of your youth will dry up and...”
– Slate | Christopher Hitchens
Dr. Henneman had been in love, and was in love, with her husband, Mr. Dr. Henneman, who was standing not more than fifteen feet away but remained invisible to all of her students because it requred them to acknowledge that she had feelings and plumbing. The plaintiveness of Denis’s cry, however, rekindled in Dr. Henneman the heartache of Paul Burgie, the brown-eyed demon who took her to...
“i think i could put my finger on the exact time, the real turning point, when it...”
– Where I’m Calling From | Raymond Carver
June 2009
68 posts
It is dangerously easy to allow the prejudiced records of a handful of priestly and conservative chroniclers to delude one into a vision of Europe studded with Sodoms and Gomorrahs and echoing from end to end with the rattle of dice and the laughter of tipsy courtesans. But it would be hardly less foolish to let one’s rejection of such fantasies blind one to the very real degeneracy of...
“Usually, with young women, I get along all too well. Formal chit-chat...”
– Royal Flash | George MacDonald Fraser
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with...
WatchVia Andrew Sullivan
He owned and edited The Short Sheet, a monthly for shortwave radio enthusiasts, and had written thirty-two books about medical breakthroughs being kept from the public, the hard science proving that all NASA missions were faked, and the unconstitutionality of child support. Laswell published the books himself and sold them by mail to conspiracy buffs and easily amused college kids. He was in...
“I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.”
– The Big Sleep | Raymond Chandler