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[qerasija]

An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money. In the former case, it is well known that the entertainer provides what fare he pleases; and though this should be very indifferent, and utterly disagreeable to the taste of his company, they must not find any fault; nay, on the contrary, good breeding forces them outwardly to approve and to commend whatever is set before them. Now the contrary of this happens to the master of an ordinary. Men who pay for what they eat will insist on gratifying their palates, however nice and whimsical these may prove; and if everything is not agreeable to their taste, will challenge a right to censure, to abuse, and to d—n their dinner without controul.

From Chapter 1 (The Introduction to the Work, or the Bill of Fare to the Feast), Tom Jones, Henry Fielding.

Possibly the first great comic novel in the English language, Tom Jones is a tour de force of authorial voice.

 

[trysail]

Prejudices: Fifth Series. "In Memorium: W.J.B."


"Has it been duly marked by historians that William Jennings Bryan's last secular act on this globe of sin was to catch flies? A curious detail, and not without its sardonic overtones. He was the most sedulous fly-catcher in American history, and in many ways the most successful. His quarry, of course, was not Musca domestica but Homo neandertalensis. For forty years he tracked it with coo and bellow, up and down the rustic backways of the Republic. Wherever the flambeaux of Chataqua smoked and guttered, and the bilge of idealism ran in the veins, and Baptist pastors dammed the brooks with the sanctified, and men gathered who were weary and heavy laden, and their wives who were full of Peruna and as fecund as the shad (Alosa sapidissima), there the indefatigable Jennings set up his traps and spread his bait. He knew every country town in the South and West, and he could crowd the most remote of them to suffocation by simply winding his horn. The city proletariat, transiently flustered by him in 1896, quickly penetrated his buncombe and would have no more of him; the cockney gallery jeered him at every Democratic national convention for twenty-five years. But out where the grass grows high, and the horned cattle dream away the lazy afternoons, and men still fear the powers and principalities of the air- out there between the corn-rows he held his old puissance to the end. There was no need of beaters to drive in his game. The news that he was coming was enough. For miles the flivver dust would choke the roads. And when he rose at the end of the day to discharge his Message there would be such breathless attention, such a rapt and enchanted ecstasy, such a sweet rustle of amens as the world had not known since Johann fell to Herod's axe.

There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, beating off the flies and gnats, and that death found him there. The man felt at home in such simple and Christian scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range, his coat laid aside, his bare arms and hairy chest shining damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust- so accoutred and on display, he was obviously happy. He liked getting up early in the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill. He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked country lawyers, country pastors, all country people. He liked country sounds and country smells.

I believe this liking was sincere- perhaps the only sincere thing in the man. His nose showed no uneasiness when a hillman in faded overalls and hickory shirt accosted him on the street, and besought him for light upon some mystery of Holy Writ. The simian gabble of the cross-roads was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort. In the presence of city folks he was palpably uneasy. Their clothes, I suspect, annoyed him, and he was suspicious of their too delicate manners. He knew all the while that they were laughing at him- if not at his baroque theology, then at least at his alpaca pantaloons. But the yokels never laughed at him. To them he was not the huntsman but the prophet, and toward the end, as he gradually forsook mundane politics for more ghostly concerns, they began to elevate him in their hierarchy. When he died he was the peer of Abraham. His old enemy, [Woodrow] Wilson, aspiring to the same white and shining robe, came down with a thump. But Bryan made the grade. His place in Tennessee hagiography is secure. If the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is curing gall-stones down there today.

But what label will he bear in more urbane regions? One, I fear, of a far less flattering kind. Bryan lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men, even of the kind who write schoolbooks. There was a scattering of sweet words in his funeral notices, but it was no more than a response to conventional sentimentality. The best verdict the most romantic editorial could dredge up, save in the humorless South, was to the general effect that his imbecilities were excused by his earnestness- that under his clowning, as under that of the juggler of Notre Dame, there was the zeal of a steadfast soul. But this was apology, not praise; precisely the same thing might be said of Mary Baker G. Eddy. The truth is that even Bryan's sincerity will probably yield to what is called, in other fields, definitive criticism. Was he sincere when he opposed imperialism in the Phillipines, or when he fed it with deserving Democrats in Santo Domingo? Was he sincere when he tried to shove the Prohibitionists under the table, or when he seized their banner and began to lead them with loud whoops? Was he sincere when he bellowed against war, or when he dreamed of himself as a tin-soldier in uniform, with a grave reserved at Arlington among the generals? Was he sincere when he fawned over Champ Clark, or when he betrayed Clark? Was he sincere when he pleaded for tolerance in New York, or when he bawled for the faggot and stake in Tennessee?

This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home from the barnyard. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition- the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine..."

- H.L. Mencken
Prejudices, Fifth Series
New York, 1926


Have you ever read an obituary like that? Mencken, of course, was a once-in-a-millenium phenomenon. We won't see his like again anytime soon.

 

[MaiusImperium]

"The voice that was going to be Om waited. It was on the evening of the second day that he scared up a partridge that had been nesting near the crevice, just as the shepherd was wandering by.

It wasn't much of a miracle, but it was good enough for the shepherd. He made a cairn of stones at the spot and, next day, brought his whole flock into the area. And in the heat of the afternoon he law down to sleep - and Om spoke to him, inside his head.

Three weeks later the shepherd was stoned to death by the priests of Ur-Gilash, who was at that time the chief god in the area. But they were too late. Om already had a hundred believers, and the number was growing...

Only a mile away from the shepherd and his flock was a goatherd and his herd. The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different.

For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led. "

Small Gods, Terry Pratchett.

 

[chris2c4u]

We are very fond of pine-apple, all three of us. We looked at the picture on the tin; we thought of the juice. We smiled at one another, and Harris got a spoon ready.

Then we looked for the knife to open the tin with. We turned out everything in the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the boards at the bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank and shook it. There was no tin-opener to be found.

Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.

Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down.
Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome.

 

[trysail]

The Night Manager


"Burr was talking about justice. 'When I get to run the world,' he said comfortably to the steaming lake, 'I'm going to hold the Nuremburg Trials Part Two. I'm going to get all the arms dealers and shit scientists, and all the smooth salesmen who push the crazies one step further than they thought of going, because it's good for business, and all the politicians and the lawyers and accountants and bankers, and I'm going to put them in the dock to answer for their lives. And you know what they'll say? ' 'If we hadn't done it someone else would have.' ' And you know what I'll say? I'll say, ' 'Oh, I see. And if you hadn't raped the girl some other fellow would have raped her. And that's your justification for rape. Noted.' ' Then I'd napalm the lot of them. Fizz.' "

-John Le Carré
The Night Manager
New York, 1993


A lovely riposte to the argument advanced by so many of the world's predators seeking to absolve themselves of personal responsibility for their actions. Wrong is wrong; because someone else does something or might do something wrong is not an excuse for doing something or enabling others to do something to someone else that you wouldn't want done to you.

Le Carré is always a pleasure. His stories touch upon far more than Cold War "spooks." For anyone who has ever been part of any human social organization, his accounts and observations of perfidy and our inner response to fear, uncertainty, and doubt ring true.

 

[qerasija]

Dublin
2 December 1909

My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or fling you down under me on that softy belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shape of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair. It allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight word, to tremble with love for you at the sounding of some chord or cadence of music or to lie heads and tails with you feeling your fingers fondling and tickling my ballocks or stuck up in me behind and your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt. I have taught you almost to swoon at the hearing of my voice singing or murmuring to your soul the passion and sorrow and mystery of life and at the same time have taught you to make filthy signs to me with your lips and tongue, to provoke me by obscene touches and noises, and even to do in my presence the most shameful and filthy act of the body. You remember the day you pulled up your clothes and let me lie under you looking up at you while you did it? Then you were ashamed even to meet my eyes.

You are mine, darling, mine! I love you. All I have written above is only a moment or two of brutal madness. The last drop of seed has hardly been squirted up your cunt before it is over and my true love for you, the love of my verses, the love of my eyes for your strange luring eyes, comes blowing over my soul like a wind of spices. My prick is still hot and stiff and quivering from the last brutal drive it has given you when a faint hymn is heard rising in tender pitiful worship of you from the dim cloisters of my heart.

Nora, my faithful darling, my seet-eyed blackguard schoolgirl, be my whore, my mistress, as much as you like (my little frigging mistress! My little fucking whore!) you are always my beautiful wild flower of the hedges, my dark-blue rain-drenched flower.

JIM

One of James Joyce's love letters to Nora Barnacle.

 

[MelancholyBaby]

One of James Joyce's love letters to Nora Barnacle.

Wow. This makes me want to dig out my copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Lucky Nora.

------------------------------------------------------------------

I know I'm cheating a bit (this is from chapter XIX after all) but this passage really moved me, as "simple" as it may be:

Two or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there--sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid day-times; soon as night was most gone, we stopped navigating and tied up--nearly always in the dead water under a tow-head; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound, anywheres--perfectly still--just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line--that was the woods on t'other side--you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn't black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away--trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks--rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars, an such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!

-Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , Mark Twain.

I want to see that sunrise.

 

[trysail]

A Short History of Nearly Everything


"Asteroids as most people know, are rocky objects orbiting in loose formation in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. In illustrations they are always shown as existing in a jumble, but in fact the solar system is quite a roomy place and the average asteroid actually will be about a million miles from its nearest neighbor. Nobody knows even approximately how many asteroids there are tumbling through space, but the number is thought to be probably not less than a billion. They are presumed to be planets that never quite made it, owing to the unsettling gravitational pull of Jupiter, which kept- and keeps- them from coalescing.

When asteroids were first detected in the 1800s- the very first was discovered on the first day of the century by a Sicilian named Giuseppi Piazzi- they were thought to be planets, and the first two were named Ceres and Pallas. It took some inspired deductions by the astronomer William Herschel to work out that they were nowhere near planet sized but much smaller. He called them asteroids- Latin for 'starlike'- which was slightly unfortunate as they are not like stars at all. Sometimes now they are more accurately called planetoids.

Finding asteroids became a popular activity in the 1800s, and by the end of the century about a thousand were known. The problem was that no one was systematically recording them. By the early 1900s, it had often become impossible to know whether an asteroid that popped into view was new or simply one that had been noted earlier and then lost track of. By this time, too, astrophysics had moved on so much that few astronomers wanted to devote their lives to anything as mundane as rocky planetoids. Only a few astronomers, notably Gerard Kuiper, the Dutch-born astronomer for whom the Kuiper belt of comets is named, took any interest in the solar system at all. Thanks to his work at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, followed by work done by others at the Minor Planet Center in Cincinnati and the Spacewatch project in Arizona, a long list of lost asteroids was gradually whittled down until by the close of the twentieth century only one known asteroid was unaccounted for- an object called 719 Albert. Last seen in October, 1911, it was finally tracked down in 2000 after being missing for eighty-nine years.

So, from a point of view of asteroid research the twentieth century was essentially just a long exercise in bookkeeping. It is really only in the last few years that astronomers have begun to count and keep an eye on the rest of the asteroid community. As of July 2001, twenty-six thousand asteroids had been named and identified- half in just the previous two years. With up to a billion to identify, the count has barely begun.

In a sense it hardly matters. Identifying an asteroid doesn't make it safe. Even if every asteroid in the solar system had a name and known orbit, no one could say what perturbations might send any of them hurtling toward us. We can't forecast rock disturbances on our own surface. Put them adrift in space and what they might do is beyond guessing. Any asteroid out there that has our name on it is very likely to have no other.

Think of the earth's orbit as a kind of freeway on which we are the only vehicle, but which is crossed regularly by pedestrians who don't know enough to look before stepping off the curb. At least 90 percent of these pedestrians are quite unknown to us. We don't know where they live, what sort of hours they keep, how often they come our way. All we know is that at some point, at uncertain intervals, they trundle across the road down which we are cruising at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour. As Steven Ostro of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has put it, 'Suppose that there was a button you could push and you could light up all the Earth-crossing asteroids larger than about ten meters, there would be over 100 million of these objects in the sky.' In short, you would see not a couple of thousand distant twinkling stars, but millions upon millions of nearer, randomly moving objects- 'all of which are capable of colliding with the Earth and all of which are moving on slightly different courses through the sky at different rates. It would be deeply unnerving.' Well, be unnerved because it is there. We just can't see it."

-Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything
New York, 2003


This is an excellent book. Bryson takes the reader through a large part of the history of man's discoveries in physics, chemistry, geology, and biology in very readable prose. I first encountered Bryson when A Walk In The Woods appeared, the account of his effort to walk The Appalachian Trail. Over the years, I have walked a very goodly portion of it and was curious. I mentally marked Bryson down as a one-time, "flash in the pan" best selling author until I further sampled his wares, particularly his Notes from a Small Island, I'm A Stranger Here Myself, and Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words.

By the way, Maid, notwithstanding Hollywood's periodic efforts to assure us that superheroes and methods exist to protect us from the danger of an asteroid collision, the peril is quite real. Assuming (an assumption that is, in itself, unlikely) that we were able to identify a potential collision, we no longer have a rocket booster powerful enough to intercept an asteroid's path. Not only that- according to Bryson- we actually destroyed the plans for the only rocket that we did have (the Saturn V booster) that was powerful enough to reach an asteroid! This is a problem that requires the Maid of Marvel's immediate attention!

Recall the fate of the dinosaurs?

 

[trysail]

The Western Canon, The Books and School of The Ages


An Elegy for the Canon


"Those who can do canonical work invariably see their writings as larger forms than any social program, however exemplary. The issue is containment, and great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes: feminism, African-American culturism, and all the politically correct enterprises of our moment. The thing contained varies; the strong poem, by definition, refuses to be contained, even by Dante's or Milton's God. Dr. Samual Johnson, shrewdest of all literary critics, concluded rightly that devotional poetry was impossible as compared to poetic devotion: 'The good and evil of Eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit.' 'Ponderous' is a metaphor for 'uncontainable,' which is another metaphor. Our contemporary openers-up of the Canon decry overt religion, but they call for devotional verse (and devotional criticism!) even if the object of devotion has been altered to the advancement of women, or of blacks, or of that most unknown of all unknown gods, the class struggle in the United States. It all depends upon your values, but I find it odd that Marxists are perceptive in finding competition everywhere else, yet fail to see that it is intrinsic to the high arts. There is a peculiar mix here of simultaneous over-idealization and undervaluation of imaginative literature, which has always pursued its own selfish aims."

-Harold Bloom
The Western Canon, The Books and School of The Ages
New York, 1994


I can't say it any better, so I'll just quote the dust jacket:

"Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservativism, Afro-centrism, and the New Historicism."

 

[qerasija]

One of Sade's principal persecutors, Police Lieutenant Sartine, suffered from a psychopathological condition which in a just (equal) society would have entailed his imprisonment on the same footing as his victim: he was a wig fetishist: 'His library contained all kinds of wigs of all sizes: he put them on according to the circumstances; among others, he owned a good-luck wig (with five loosely hanging little curls) and a wig for interrogating criminals, a kind of snake headdress called the inexorable'. Aware of the phallic value of the braid, we can imagine how Sade must have longed to clip the toupees of his hated cop.

Roland Barthes, Life of Sade.
(Richard Miller, tr.; the internal quotation is from Lély.)

The manner of Barthes' death is memorable: he was run over by a laundry truck.

 

[trysail]

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, A Savage Journey To The Heart of The American Dream


" 'They'll never let us back in that place- not after your scene at the press table.'

'What scene?'

'You bastard,' he said. 'I left you all alone for three minutes! You scared the shit out of those people! Waving that goddamn marlin spike around and yelling about reptiles. You're lucky I came back in time. They were ready to call the cops. I said you were drunk and that I was taking you up to your room for a cold shower. Hell, the only reason they gave us the press passes was to get you out of there.'

He was pacing around nervously. 'Jesus, that scene straightened me right out! I must have some drugs. What have you done with the mescaline?'

'The kit bag,' I said.

He opened the bag and ate two pellets while I got the tape machine going. 'Maybe you should only eat one of those,' he said. 'That acid's still working on you.'

I agreed. 'We have to go out to the track before dark,' I said. 'But we have time to watch the TV news. Let's carve up this grapefruit and make a fine rum punch, maybe toss in a blotter... where's the car?'

'We gave it to somebody in the parking lot,' he said. 'I have the ticket in my briefcase.'

'What's the number? I'll call down and have them wash the bastard, get rid of that dust and grime.'

'Good idea,' he said. But he couldn't find the ticket.

'Well, we're fucked,' I said. 'We'll never convince them to give us that car without proof.'

He thought for a moment, then picked up the phone and asked for the garage. 'This is Doctor Gonzo in eight-fifty,' he said. 'I seem to have lost my parking stub for that red convertible I left with you, but I want the car washed and ready to go in thirty minutes. Can you send up a duplicate stub? ... What... Oh?... Well, that's fine.' He hung up and reached for the hash pipe. 'No problem,' he said. 'That man remembers my face.'

'That's good,' I said. 'They'll probably have a big net ready for us when we show up.'

He shook his head. 'As your attorney, I advise you not to worry about me.' "

-Hunter S. Thompson
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas and Other American Stories
New York, 1996


Page 28 (of The Modern Library edition)- I promise! The inimitable inventor of Gonzo Journalism did it like nobody else. As we all know, when Hunter S. Thompson died, he went out with a bang. The illustrations by Ralph Steadman are priceless.

"If you remember the '60s, you weren't there."
-R. Crumb

If Fear and Loathing doesn't make you crack a smile, check to see if you've got a pulse.

 

[trysail]

ABC for Book Collectors


"The normal commission charged by booksellers for executing bids at auction is ten per cent, which may seem expensive for a well-known and bibliographically uncomplicated book of high but stable market value- one, that is, which does not involve much expert examination or much expert estimation of price. But over a series of transactions 'on commission' the bookseller will probably engage a great deal more professional skill and spend a great deal more time in his customer's interest than is adequately repaid by his ten per cent. This of course is payable only on successful bids; yet for the lots on which he is outbid he will have provided equally full service- in advice as to the probable price, in COLLATION and appraisal of the material, in attendance (often with wearisome waiting between lots) at the sale and in the highly skilled business of the actual bidding."

-John Carter
ABC for Book Collectors (Fifth Edition, revised)
New York, 1988


If you are afflicted with bibliomania or merely have any interest in books or book collecting, this is an invaluable reference. Do you want to know what "quarto" or "fore-edge painting" or "remboîtage" means? If so, this is a great place to go to look those terms up- as well as anything else connected with printing, book design, book nomenclature, or collecting.

 

[qerasija]

It was Sappho who first called eros "bittersweet." No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?

Eros seemed to Sappho at once an experience of pleasure and pain. Here is contradiction and perhaps paradox. To perceive this eros can split the mind in two. Why? The components of the contradiction may seem, at first glance, obvious. We take for granted, as did Sappho, the sweetness of erotic desire; its pleasurability smiles out at us. But the bitterness is less obvious. There might be several reasons why what is sweet should also be bitter. There may be various relations between the two savors. Poets have sorted the matter out in different ways. Sappho's own formulation is a good place to begin tracing the possibilities. The relevant fragment runs:

Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up.

It is hard to translate. "Sweetbitter" sounds wrong, and yet our standard English rendering "bittersweet" inverts the actual terms of Sappho's compound glukupikron.

From Chapter 1, Eros, the bittersweet
Anne Carson

This is a remarkable collection of essays on the classical notion of Eros. Carson's translations of Sappho's poems are also worth exploring.

 

[Maid of Marvels]

Pic de Soularac
Sabarthés Mountains
Southwest France
Monday, 4 July 2005

A single line of blood trickles down the pale underside of her arm, a red seam on a white sleeve.

At first, Alice thinks it's just a fly and takes no notice. Insects are an occupational hazard at a dig, and for some reason there are more flies higher up the mountain where she is working than at the main excavation site lower down. Then a drop of blood splashes onto her bare leg, exploding like a firework in the sky on Guy Fawkes night.

Labyrinth - Kate Mosse

 

[trysail]

Between You and I, A little book of bad English


"gerund, the This is certainly a Lost Cause, at least in the sense that very few people nowadays know what a gerund is. But just as people still use the subjunctive form without knowing the term itself– 'He insisted that she go to bed immediately'– so the gerund survives in use, although largely unrecognized. The gerund is derived from a verb, usually by adding the suffix –ing. Although remaining a verb, it acts in some respects as if it were a noun, and especially in the respect that if the action denoted is attributed to someone or something it needs to be accompanied by the possessive form. A few examples should make this clearer: it is correct to say 'We were surprised at their appearing so calm,' 'She was distressed at his leaving so suddenly,' 'I was surprised at its being so easy to do.' It would be wrong to say 'them appearing,' 'him leaving,' or 'it being."

-James Cochrane
Between You and I, A little book of bad English
Naperville, Illinois. 1994.


Cochrane, an editor employed by Penguin Books (UK), corrects the all-too frequent errors of common English usage. Want to know the difference between the proper usage of like and as? This is the place.

I can't resist one more quotation:
restaurateur The owner of a restaurant is a restaurateur, literally a "restorer." Traditionally, he promises to "restore" our spirits and our physical well-being with his excellent food and wine. Neither in English nor in French does the word restauranteur properly exist.

 

[qerasija]

The conditions of life in New York are so different from those of London that a story of this kind calls for a little explanation. There are several million inhabitants of New York. Not all of them eke out a precarious livelihood by murdering one another, but there is a definite section of the population which murders -- not casually, on the spur of the moment, but on definitely commercial lines at so many dollars per murder. The "gangs" of New York exist in fact. I have not invented them. Most of the incidents in this story are based on actual happenings. The Rosenthal case, where four men, headed by a genial individual calling himself "Gyp the Blood" shot a fellow-citizen in cold blood in a spot as public and fashionable as Piccadilly Circus and escaped in a motor-car, made such a stir a few years ago that the noise of it was heard all over the world and not, as is generally the case with the doings of the gangs, in New York only. Rosenthal cases on a smaller and less sensational scale are frequent occurrences on Manhattan Island. It was the prominence of the victim rather than the unusual nature of the occurrence that excited the New York press. Most gang victims get a quarter of a column in small type.

From Preface, Psmith, Journalist
P.G. Wodehouse

Wodehouse is the master of the comic novel.

 

[RyanWolfe]

But to the pleasant world, when thou return'st, Of me make mention, I entreat thee, there.

 

[trysail]

Moby-Dick, or The Whale


"And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and a stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot..."

"However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for..."

"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enlarging volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it..."

"In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers."

-Herman Melville
Moby-Dick, or The Whale
New York, 1983. (Library Of America edition)


"Moby-Dick" can be tough slogging- there's no denying that. Nonetheless, I found it enjoyable; my nautical experience was undoubtedly helpful.

Melville's descriptions of types of men, their behavior and the influences their experiences have had upon them rings true. I found Cliff's Notes both useful and insightful. I'd be lying if I didn't admit to a little "internal validation" from the knowledge that I have read the book that contains what may be the most famous opening sentence in all of American literature.

 

[qerasija]

Billy in the Darbies

Good of the Chaplain to enter Lone Bay
And down on his marrow-bones here and pray
For the likes just o' me, Billy Budd.--But look:
Through the port comes the moon-shine astray!
It tips the guard's cutlas and silvers this nook;
But 'twill die in the dawning of Billy's last day.
A jewel-block they'll make of me to-morrow,
Pendant pearl from the yard-arm-end
Like the ear-drop I gave to Bristol Molly--
O, 'tis me, not the sentence they'll suspend.
Ay, Ay, Ay, all is up; and I must up to
Early in the morning, aloft from alow.
On an empty stomach, now, never it would do.
They'll give me a nibble--bit o' biscuit ere I go.
Sure, a messmate will reach me the last parting cup;
But, turning heads away from the hoist and the belay,
Heaven knows who will have the running of me up!
No pipe to those halyards.--But aren't it all sham?
A blur's in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am.
A hatchet to my hawser? all adrift to go?
The drum roll to grog, and Billy never know?
But Donald he has promised to stand by the plank;
So I'll shake a friendly hand ere I sink.
But--no! It is dead then I'll be, come to think.
I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank.
And his cheek it was like the budding pink.
But me they'll lash me in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease this darbies at the wrist, and roll me over fair,
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.

From Billy Budd, Herman Melville.
(It is thrilling in Britten's opera as well.)

 

[trysail]

"If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."

-H. L. Mencken
A Mencken Chrestomathy
New York, 1949 (Eleventh printing, 1981).


If you've never read Mencken and you want an introduction, A Mencken Chrestomathy is an excellent place to start. Another collection that provides a great introduction is A Choice Of Days.

I am envious of anyone who hasn't yet read Mencken; you have a potentially life-altering treat in prospect.

 

[qerasija]

Marriage was once represented as a field of battle rather than a bed of roses, and perhaps there are some who may still support this view; but just as Dr Maturin had made a far more unsuitable match than most, so he set about dealing with the situation in a far more compendious, peaceable and efficacious way than the great majority of husbands.

He had pursued his strikingly beautiful, spirited, fashionable wife for years and years before marrying her in mid-Channel aboard a man-of-war: for so many years indeed that he had become a confirmed bachelor at last, too old a dog to give up his tricks of smoking tobacco in bed, playing his 'cello at odd untimely moments, dissecting anything that interested him, even in the drawing room; too old to be taught to shave regularly, to change his linen, or to wash when he did not feel the need -- an impossible husband. He was not house-trained; and although he made an earnest attempt at the beginning of their marriage he soon perceived that in time the strain must damage their relationship, all the more so since Diana was as intransigent as himself and far more apt to fly into a passion about such a thing as a pancreas in the drawer of the bedside table or orange marmalade ground into the Aubusson. And then again his deeply-ingrained habits of secrecy (for he was an intelligence-agent as well as a physician) made him even more unsuited for domestic life, which withers in the presence of reserve. He therefore gradually retired to the rooms he had long retained in an old-fashioned comfortable shabby inn called the Grapes, in the liberties of the Savoy, leaving Diana in the handsome modern house in Half Moon Street, a house shining with fresh white paint and new-furnished with elegant but fragile satinwood.

from Chapter 1, The Ionian Mission
Patrick O'Brian

O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels make a case for being the best sea fiction since Homer. They also provide a wonderful glimpse into the early nineteenth century. Jane Austen on the high-seas, one might call it.

 

[impish_pixie]

"Unicorn horn was greatly sought after."

Batavia's Graveyard
Mike Dash

"The true story of the mad heretic who led history's bloodiest mutiny."

 

[Maid of Marvels]

From the back cover of Volume One:

Dear Reader,

I'm sorry to say that the book you are holding in your hands is extremely unpleasant. It tells an unhappy tale about three very unlucky children. Even though they are charming and clever, the Baudelaire siblings lead lives filled with misery and woe. From the very first page of this book when the children are at the beach and receive terrible news, continuing on through the entire story, disaster lurks at their heels. One might say they are magnets for misfortune.

In this short book alone, the three youngsters encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune, and cold porridge for breakfast.

It is my sad duty to write down these unpleasant tales, but there is nothing stopping you from putting this book down at once and reading something happy, if you prefer that sort of thing.

With all due respect,
Lemony Snicket

A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning - Lemony Snicket

I didn't see the movie, but the books are great fun! The size of the book (5x7) in hard cover also appeals to me. Just the right size for small hands.

 

[trysail]

Memoirs - William Tecumseh Sherman


"This run on the bank (the only one I ever experienced) presented all the features, serious and comical, usual to such occasions. At one counter, happened that identical case, narrated of others, of the Frenchman, who was nearly squeezed to death in getting to the counter, and, when he received his money, did not know what to do with it. 'If you got the money, I no want him; but if you no got him, I want it like the devil!' "

-William Tecumseh Sherman
Memoirs
New York, 1990 (Library of America edition, second printing, 1990).


I was pleasantly surprised by this book, expecting a dull recital of events. To my surprise, I discovered that Sherman was a good writer and far more worldly than I anticipated. It has been observed by others that Sherman was one of the most intelligent commanders involved in the War Between The States and that he, almost alone, foresaw the long, devastating, fight to the death that it became. It drove him into depression. The observations and experience of this first practitioner of "total war" were largely ignored by the kings and generals responsible for leading Europe in World War I.

gerasija- I'm jealous; if you're just beginning Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin saga, you've got many hours of pleasant reading in front of you. You've undoubtedly discovered the necessity of a good dictionary (with nautical and botanical entries) by now!

 

[qerasija]

25th [October 1668] (Lord's Day)

Up, and discoursing with my wife about our house and many new things we are doing of, and so to church I, and there find Jack Fenn come, and his wife, a pretty black woman: I never saw her before, nor took notice of her now. So home and to dinner, and after dinner all the afternoon got my wife and boy to read to me, and at night W. Batelier comes and sups with us; and, after supper, to have my head combed by Deb., which occasioned the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world, for my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl with my hand under her skirts; and indeed, I was with my hand in her cunny. I was at a wonderful loss upon it, and the girle also, and I endeavoured to put it off, but my wife was struck mute and grew angry, and so her voice come to her, grew quite out of order, and I to say little, but to bed, and my wife said little also, but could not sleep all night, but about two in the morning waked me and cried, and fell to tell me as a great secret that she was a Roman Catholique and had received the Holy Sacrament, which troubled me, but I took no notice of it, but she went on from one thing to another till at last it appeared plainly her trouble was at what she saw, but yet I did not know how much she saw, and therefore said nothing to her. But after her much crying and reproaching me with inconstancy and preferring a sorry girl before her, I did give her no provocation, but did promise all fair usage to her and love, and foreswore any hurt that I did with her, till at last she seemed to be at ease again, and so toward morning a little sleep, and so I with some little repose and rest.

From the Diary of Samuel Pepys.