Grab the Nearest Book...

[Maid of Marvels]

One evening in February 1895, Alexandre Natanson, a well-to-do lawyer, gave a notorious party at his house at 60 Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. The reason for the party was to celebrate the completion of a set of murals painted for the reception rooms by Eduard Vuillard. Natanson had the malicious idea of engaging Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to organise the catering. Lautrec drew an invitation, sent to 300 guests, summoning them at half past eight for 'American and other drinks'. Assisted by his friend Maxime Dethomas, who was two metres tall, the tiny Lautrec, his head shaved, dressed in white with a waistcoat cut from the stars and stripes of an American flag, worked doggedly behind the bar. The cocktails he mixed, all accompanied by dishes of highly spiced and salted food, were designed for their picturesque colour as much for their intoxicating power. Some drinks were meant to be taken at a single gulp, others in layers of colour, chartreuse, cointreau and curacao, sipped through straws.

The elegant assembly of writers, painters, publishers and actors was reduced to a rabble of drunks, barely able to stand. Lautrec claimed with glee that he had served over two thousand drinks. Throughout the evening he remained sober.

The Nightlife of Paris: The Art of Toulouse-Lautrec - Patrick O'Connor

 

[chris2c4u]

He lived on Park Avenue in two apartments knocked into one and furnished with ostentatious "taste": "It's lavish but I call it home."

David Thomson, Suspects, Waldo Lydecker, played by Clifton Webb in Laura, 1944.

 

[kimberlee]

Fresh cherries with brandy are good.

The Gold Coast by Nelson DeMille

 

[Ladythunder]

things that are forbidden; no phone, no friends along, and no tv, nintendo

1-2-3 Magic; Effective discipline for children 2-12 by Thomas W. Phelan, PH.D.

 

[trysail]

"A further importance is given to the date of Oliver Cromwell's marriage by the fact that there is no further evidence for his 'prodigalities.' This in turn makes it easier to evaluate these earlier indulgences which can have had only shallow roots since they were so easily pulled up with the arrival of family responsibility. Youthful intemperance being neither particularly uncommon nor particularly culpable, one might profitably compare Oliver's situation in this respect to that of John Bunyan who exclaimed: 'Until I came to the state of marriage, I was the very ringleader in all manner of vice and ungodliness' - referring mainly to swearing and merry-making. Neither Bunyan's nor Cromwell's early 'ungodliness' would probably have achieved much status in the category of any true debauchee."

-Antonia Fraser
Cromwell; The Lord Protector
New York, 1974.


Long deficient in my knowledge of the English Civil War, the serendipity of simultaneously "discovering" Antonia Fraser and the fact that she had written a biography of Cromwell set me on a mission to scare up a copy of her 1974 work and amend my ignorance. The book turned out to be much more difficult to locate than I had anticipated. After a couple of fruitless efforts at book stores, one fall afternoon, prowling about my favorite used bookstore (one of the best I've ever seen, by the way- mainly because it is so well organized- the books are actually catalogued and shelved in a coherent manner. If you get the chance, stop by The Kelmscott Bookshop in Baltimore), mirabile dictu, there it was! In this region, immigrant Cavaliers were the forebears of many prominent families. As is the usual case, Antonia Fraser doesn't disappoint.

 

[Ladythunder]

It happened to fast to really grasp, but as I reconstruct things, what started it was Pixel the cat, materializing on the countertop behind me...less than a foot from where Harry the parrot still sat on his little porcelain throne.

Callahan's Con By Spider Robinson

 

[kimberlee]

"Now?" Joscelin asked.

Kushiel's Scion by Jacqueline Carey

 

[Munachi]

Resistance collapsed following Viriato's death in 139 BC.

Lonely Planet guide to Portugal

 

[chris2c4u]

Here they are in dozens, in scores, prostitutes every one, doing exactly as they do at the infamous and prosecuted Haymarket dens, and no one interferes.

...[D]oing all that the Haymarket woman does; and it must be so, since the gay patroness of the music-halls does simply all she can to lure the dupe she may at the moment have in tow. She entices him to drink; she drinks with him; she ogles, and winks, and whispers, and encourages like behaviour on his part, her main undisguised object being to induce him to prolong the companion*ship after the glaring gaslight of the liquor-bar is lowered, and its customers are shown to the outer door.

James Greenwood, The Seven Curses of London, 1869

 

[OnHarry]

But intuitively- or sensually -we know by touch that red or white oak is harder and more difficult to saw, shape, and smooth than are cedar or white pine, and that Brazilian cherry, a heavy and deeply toned reddish brown wood, is much heavier and a lot harder to work than are balsa or spruce.

From Wood Craft, Culture, History by Harvey Green

Actually the eighth sentence but there were only eight on page 28 so I used the last one.

 

[kimberlee]

"You are disturbing immortality."

Tai-Pan by James Clavell

 

[Maid of Marvels]

The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory, groaned as if it would deny what had happened. Bars of sunlight cast through rents in the walls made motes of dust glitter where they yet hung in the air. Scorch-marks marred the walls, the floors, the ceilings. Broad black smears crossed the blistered paints and gilt of once-bright murals, soot overlaying crumbling friezes of men and animals which seemed to have attempted to walk before the madness grew quiet. The dead lay everywhere. Men and women and children, struck down in attempted flight by the lightnings that had flashed down every corridor, or seized by the fires that had stalked them, or sunken into stone of the palace, the stones that had flowed and sought, almost alive, before stillness came again. In odd counterpoint, colorful tapestries and paintings, masterworks all, hung undisturbed except where bulging walls had pushed them awry. Finely carved furnishings, inlaid with ivory and gold, stood untrouched except where rippling floors had toppled them. The mind-twisting had struck at the core, ignoring peripheral things.

The Eye of the World - Robert Jordan

Rest in peace. ​

 

[trysail]

"On his return from Liverpool Samuel exchanged his sea clothing for the latest fashions, which did not meet with any more approval in the Quaker community than his sailor garb had- except for one segment of that community, the girls. In romantic affairs he was eminently successful. Or, as his brother put it, 'I do not know that he was particularly susceptible of pure disinterested affection, but he possessed a superabundance of something which the fair sex seemed to consider a very agreeable substitute.' One of the girls he targeted was a devout Methodist, a fact that produced an instant conversion in Samuel, who became a regular member of the girl's Methodist congregation, conspicuous for the loudness of his amens and hallelujahs. He was still, it may be noted, thirteen on his return from Liverpool."

-Thomas Farel Heffernan
Mutiny On The Globe, The Fatal Voyage of Samuel Comstock
New York, 2002.

I've known of Samuel Comstock and the Globe mutiny since I was an adolescent thanks to my family's interest in matters nautical but I'd never delved into the details of the story. Roughly contemporaneous with the sinking of the Essex by a whale (the incident that served as partial inspiration for Melville's Moby Dick), the captain and officers of another Nantucket whaleship were brutally murdered by members of their crew. Samuel Comstock was a delusional psychopath; in our century, I have no doubt that he would have been connected with a Columbine-like episode. The book draws on previously unpublished sources and is a thorough re-telling of the tale; I found it quite enjoyable.

 

[trysail]

For Lyndon Johnson, determination had to include belief.

He understood that all his life- as is shown by the fact that as a small boy "he was always repeating" the salesman's creed that "You've got to believe in what you're selling," and that decades later, in his retirement, he would say: "What convinces is conviction. You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing: if you don't, you're as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn't there..." And Lyndon Johnson could make himself believe in an argument even if he had never believed in it before, even if he had believed in an opposite argument- and even if the argument did not accord with the facts. A devotee like Joseph Califano would write that Johnson "would quickly come to believe what he was saying even if it was clearly not true."

When Lyndon Johnson came to believe in something, moreover, he came to believe in it totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs or of the facts in the matter, came to believe in it so absolutely that, George Reedy says, "I believe that he acted out of pure motives regardless of their origins. He had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act... He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the 'truth' which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of his enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality." Califano, listening to Johnson tell a story which Califano knew was not true, and which Califano knew that Johnson himself knew, or at least had known at one time, was not true, writes of "the authentic increase in the President's conviction each time he recited it." The phrase used to describe the process by long time Texas associates like Ed Clark- the "revving up" or the "working up"- was homier, but it was the same process: "He could start talking about something and convince himself it was right, and get all worked up, all worked up and emotional, and work all day and all night, and sacrifice, and say, 'Follow me for the cause! - let's do this because it's right." And, Clark says, Johnson would believe it was right- no matter what he had believed before.

-Robert A. Caro
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of The Senate.
New York, 2002.


As best I can tell, Lyndon Johnson was a congenital liar and cheat. He never won a fair election in his life, going all the way back to his third-rate college where he rigged his election as student body president. He cheated in virtually every election when he stood for public office. The most notorious was his 1948 election to the U.S. Senate where upwards of 10,000 ballots fraudulently submitted in Duval and Bexar Counties enabled his statewide victory margin of 87 votes.

 

[trysail]

"Our Russian pens write only in large letters. We have lived through so very much, and almost none of it has been described and called by its right name. But, for Western authors, peering through a microscope at the living cells of everyday life, shaking a test tube in the beam of a strong light, this is after all a whole epic, another ten volumes of Remembrance of Things Past: to describe the perturbation of a human soul placed in a cell filled to twenty times its capacity and with no latrine bucket, where prisoners are taken out to the toilet only once a day! Of course, much of the texture of this life is bound to be quite unknown to Western writers; they wouldn't realize that in this situation one solution was to urinate in your canvas hood, nor would they at all understand one prisoner's advice to another to urinate in his boot! And yet that advice was the fruit of wisdom derived from vast experience, and it didn't involve spoiling the boot and it didn't reduce the boot to the status of a pail. It meant that the boot had to be taken off, turned upside down, the boot tops turned inside out and up- and thus a cylindrical vessel was formed that constituted the much-needed container. But, at the same time, with what psychological twists and turns Western writers could enrich their literature (without in the least risking any banal repitition of the famous masters) if they only knew about the scheme of things in that same Minusinsk Prison; there was only one food bowl for every four prisoners; and one mug of drinking water per day was issued to each (there were enough mugs to go around). And it could happen that one of the four contrived to use the bowl allotted to him and three others to relieve his internal pressure and then refuse to hand over his daily water ration to wash it out before lunch. What a conflict! What a clash of four personalities! What nuances! (And I am not joking. That is when the rock bottom of a human being is revealed. It is only that Russian pens are too busy to write about it, and Russian eyes don't have the time to read about it. I am not joking- because only doctors can tell us how months in such a cell will ruin a human being's health for his entire life, even if he wasn't shot under Yezhov and was rehabilitated under Kruschvev.)"

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (translated by Thomas P. Whitney)
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
New York, 1973.

"Gulag Archipelago" was published when I was an otherwise preoccupied youth. Of course, I knew of it and the literary sensation that it caused but I never got around to reading it until now. I'm overdue. On the one hand, it is an extraordinary testament- on the other, it is (unfortunately) one more book in what seems an endless series of books I read presenting the horrors of history.

Lest you had doubts, evil is abroad in the world.

 

[Maid of Marvels]

The neat little man resented it. He was hurt. "No, sir," he protested, "you are wrong. It is not what you called it, sordid familial flimflam. It is perfectly legitimate for me to inquire into anything affecting the disposal of the fortune my father made, is it not?"

Weighing rather less than half as much as Nero Wolfe, he was lost in the red leather chair three steps from the end of Wolfe's desk. Comfortably filling his own outsized chair behind the desk, Wolfe was scowling at the would-be client, Mr. Herman Lewent of New York and Paris. I, at my desk with notebook and pen, was neutral, because it was Friday and I had a weekend date, and if Lewent's job was urgent and we took it, good-by weekend.

Wolfe, as usual when solicited, was torn. He hated to work, but he loved to eat and drink, and his domestic and professional establishment in the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street, including the orchids in the plant rooms on the roof, had an awful appetite for dollars. The only source of dollars was his income as a private detective, and at that moment, there on his desk near the edge, was a little stack of lettuce with a rubber band around it. Herman Lewent, who had put it there, had stated that it was a thousand dollars.

Three Men Out (Invitation to Murder) - Rex Stout

 

[cyikac1986]

Hard enough that it did hurt, but in that way that pain can feed into pleasure.

Mistral's Kiss, Laurel K. Hamilton

 

[chris2c4u]

Pebbles work best without batteries.
The deckchair will fail as a unit of currency.
Even though your shadow is shortening
it does not mean you are growing smaller.
Moonbeams sadly, will not survive in a jar,
I am your father and that is the way things are.

From the poem and book of the same name by Roger McGough, The Way Things Are.

 

[trysail]

"William Patten described scornfully how the Governor Arran fled 'skant with honor', followed by Angus and the other chiefs, whereupon the whole army turned and cast down their weapons, preparatory to flight. Patten's details of the English pursuit are revolting if vivid; some of the Scots tried to elude capture by crouching in the river, with their noses breathing through the roots of willow trees. The dead had their wounds mainly in the head, because the horsemen could not reach lower with their swords, although arms were sometimes sliced off, and necks cut half asunder. Patten noted that the dead bodies lying about gave the impression of a thick herd of cattle, grazing in a newly replenished pasture. While admitting the severity of the English reprisals, Patten takes the line that the English were playing the role of a schoolmaster chastising naughty children for their own good. But quite apart from the pillaging of the countryside which followed, the casualties suffered by the Scots at Pinkie Cleugh decimated their finest fighting men yet again, only five years after the Solway Moss."

-Antonia Fraser
Mary, Queen of Scots
London, 1969.


Continuing to feast upon everything written by Antonia Fraser, Mary, Queen of Scots measured up to standard. Mary's place in the line of succession to two thrones ultimately proved fatal. Elizabeth I is portrayed as neurotic and indecisive, a pawn in the hands of her Privy Counselors (particularly Sir Francis Walsingham, who planned and orchestrated the evidence, trial and execution of Mary). Mary lacked the Machiavellian skills necessary for monarchial survival in a world full of ambitious intriguers. Tired of living after eighteen years of captivity, Mary's brave death secured her reputation.

 

[Munachi]

Men då sade alltid en gammal gåsamor: "Var nu inte galna! De där får både hungra och frysa."
(something like: but then always an old goose mother said: "don't be crazy! those there have to go both hungry and cold.")

Selma Lagerlöf: "Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige"

 

[trysail]

"William Shakespeare was born into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had. In 1564 England had a population of between three million and five million— much less than three hundred years earlier, when plague began to take a continuous, heavy toll. Now the number of living Britons was actually in retreat. The previous decade had seen a fall in population nationally of about 6 percent. In London, as many as a quarter of the citizenry may have perished.

But plague was only the beginning of England's deathly woes. The embattled populace faced constant danger from tuberculosis, measles, rickets, scurvy, two types of smallpox (confluent and hemorrhagic), scrofula, dysentery, and a vast amorphous array of fluxes and fevers— tertian fever, quartian fever, puerperal fever, ship's fever, quotidian fever, spotted fever— as well as 'frenzies,' 'foul evils,' and other peculiar maladies of vague and numerous types. These were, of course, no respecters of rank. Queen Elizabeth herself was nearly carried off by smallpox in 1562, two years before William Shakespeare was born.

Even comparatively minor conditions— a kidney stone, an infected wound, a difficult childbirth— could quickly turn lethal. Almost as dangerous as the ailments were the treatments meted out. Victims were purged with gusto and bled till they fainted— hardly the sort of handling that would help a weakened constitution. In such an age it was a rare child that knew all four of its grandparents.

Many of the exotic-sounding diseases of Shakespeare's time are known to us by other names (their ship's fever is our typhus, for instance), but some were mysteriously specific to the age. One such was the 'English sweat,' which had only recently abated after several murderous outbreaks. It was called the 'scourge without dread' because it was so startlingly swift: Victims often sickened and died on the same day. Fortunately many survived, and gradually the population acquired a collective immunity that drove the disease to extinction by the 1550s. Leprosy, one of the great dreads of the Middle Ages, had likewise mercifully abated in recent years, never to return with vigor. But no sooner had these perils vanished than another virulent fever, called 'the new sickness,' swept through the country, killing tens of thousands in a series of outbreaks between 1556 and 1559. Worse, these coincided with calamitous, starving harvests in 1555 and 1556. It was a literally dreadful age.

Plague, however, remained the darkest scourge. Just under three months after William's birth, the burials section of the parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford bears the ominous words Hic incepit pestis (Here plague begins), beside the name of a boy named Oliver Gunne. The outbreak of 1564 was a vicious one. At least two hundred people died in Stratford, about ten times the normal rate. Even in nonplague years 16 percent of infants perished in England; in this year nearly two thirds did. (One neighbor of the Shakespeare's lost four children.) In a sense William Shakespeare's greatest achievement in life wasn't writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year."


-Bill Bryson
Shakespeare: The World As Stage
New York, 2007.


Bill Bryson on William Shakespeare— there are many worse ways to spend time!

 

[chronicle_tenko]

i tried to find more. I did.

Bastard Persians! "spoken by Ephialtes"

300
Frank Miller w/
Lynn Varley

I attempted 7 books before this one. And I almost feel embarassed since I started resorting to comics.

Silent Bob Speaks: Kevin Smith's collected articles has a blank page at 28.
Reverte's Stopgap has a chapter break with only three words on it.
Foley Is Good has a full page picture.
Perretti's The Visitation has exactly NINE sentences on the page, and not one word more.
My E-book XIII has no words on the 28th page, or the 29th for that matter
Age Of Apocalypse bears only the word forgotten.
And the undiscovered island has only 26 pages.

 

[Maid of Marvels]

It doesn't have to be a book, silly person. Me, I even read cereal boxes (if they're made for adults).

Maybe, when you stop by next time you could recommend something you enjoyed? That works for me.

 

[OnHarry]

Merrthin could tell that she did not really think it was wonderful. She was pretending to be pleased. Father was clearly ashamed to have lost his lands. There was more than a hint of disgrace in this, Merrthin realized.

Ken Follett; World Without End, as good a read as I have had in some time.

 

[Maid of Marvels]

You know it's on my list of reads. I need to tell Graybread about it - I keep forgetting. He's the one who turned me on to "The Pillars of the Earth" years ago.