I Wish I'd Written That...

For lovely bits of prose from books you've read.

Here's a couple from Lawrence Durrell:

A white sailing boat lay like a breathing butterfly against the white mole.
(from The Dark Labyrinth)

In that clear hard enamel air the human voice carried so far that it was possible to call and wave to her from the top while she walked the Plaka streets below.
(from Tunc)

This could go on forever.

"The head against his breast shakes with a mute vehemence. A long moment. The pressure of lips upon auburn hair. In the distant house the untalented lady, no doubt seized by remorse (or perhaps by poor Chopin's tortured ghost), stops playing. And Lalage, as if brought by the merciful silence to reflect on the aesthetics of music and having reflected, to bang her rag doll against his bent cheek, reminds her father--high time indeed--that a thousand violins cloy very rapidly without percussion."
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman

"All the roads multiplied, reproducing themselves, subdividing themselves, turning in on themselves, like snakes, tails in their mouths, twisting themselves into labyrinths."
Ben Okri, The Famished Road

"Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed latent in his mind in the same way as certain other notions without equivalents, like the notion of light, of sound, of perspective, of physical pleasure, which are the rich possessions that diversify and ornament the realms of our inner life. Perhaps we will lose them, perhaps they will fade away, if we return to nothingness. But as long as we are alive, we can no more eliminate our experience of them than we can our experience of some real object, than we can for example doubt the light of the lamp illuminating the metamorphosed objects in our room whence even the memory of darkness has vanished."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Oh, bloody Hell, the first thing that comes to mind is Elmore Leonard's GLITZ:

The first line:

"The night Vincent got shot, he saw it coming."

I see I'm going to have to on my toes with this bunch...

...and from Michael Chabon's GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD:

"All the evil in the world derives from the actions of men acting in a mass against other masses of men."

All from Plowing the Dark, by Richard Powers:

"The world's events emerged as a resonance, the shifting states of mutually reshaping interactions, each fed back into the other in eternal circulation."

"All these centuries of greater realisms, more light, deeper psychological penetration, and the golem still never came alive."

". . . What art promised: to break the bonds of matter and make the mind real."

"...and make the mind real".

Wow...

Yup. If you haven't given Richard Powers a shot, I'd recommend it. Plowing the Dark may not be, conventionally speaking, his best novel (for one thing, the characters act more as symbols than, well, characters), but as an artist, it resonated with me more than The Echo Maker (his recent National Book Award winner). Or you could do The Gold Bug Variations, which I haven't read yet (but seems to be the fan favorite).

He's (Powers) one of those guys (like Pynchon) who scares the piss out of me because he's sooo smart.

"What's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?"

-Don Delillo (UNDERWORLD)

#8: You're not kidding. I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't even read The Crying of Lot 49 yet. I expect I'm going to love Pynchon, but I just find myself intimidated.

The Chabon quote has been running through my head this past hour or so. Good work.

Reading Pynchon and DeLillo are the only things I can think of worse than dental torture. Intentionally intellectual writing in a novel just seems precious to me. My favorite author of this type, someone I can actually read and enjoy is John Barth. His Sotweed Factor was one of the funniest books I ever read, right up there with Catch-22 and The Pickwick Papers. Good plotting, solid characters, at least for the ones that count, and language that sounds neither phoned in (much of today's fiction) nor intentionally elevated to a level which leaves the author talking down to his readers, much of the later Tom Wolfe falls into this category. Just smart people showing off.

I would rather read Mickey Spillane, or, as I discovered earlier this year, much to my surprise and delight, Erskine Caldwell.

When I want smart, intellectual, with a point I go to the old standbys, Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner.

ETA: I just think DeLillo and Pynchon write texts to be taught in Literary Studies classes. They are very self consciously constructed with teaching points liberally sprinkled throughout.

Faulkner has just about killed me both times I tried to read him (SOUND AND THE FURY, erk). But I got a collection of his stories at a library book sale so perhaps I'll try to break myself in with that.

I can understand your dislike of Delillo & Pynchon--as the old saw goes, you either love 'em or...

Those guys raise the bar high (at least in the view of this writer). UNDERWORLD is not as self-consciously artsy as his other stuff--and it works right up to the last three or four pages, which I didn't like.

I've got a number of Barth books but have never dived in--likely because, like Powers, he scares me with his mind and erudition, daunting literary reputation, etc. What if he makes me feel...stupid (oh no!)?

I just posted about ol' Pynch in another thread. The important thing to remember about him is to not be intimidated by his intelligence (how he acquired the depth of knowledge that went into Gravity's Rainbow is a question on par with whether Robert Johnson really gave the devil a lien on his soul), but rather, to see him as a very very funny writer. Approach him this way, and the rest of it, including the fact that he is a very terrifying writer as well, will sink in.

P.S. Anyway, there's nothing wrong with being self-consciously artsy, if one can do it as well as Tom and Don.

P.P.S. I can't imagine reading Faulkner without a glass of whiskey at hand, preferably bourbon. Reading an author in the same state of mind in which he wrote is quite....clarifying.

Faulkner and bourbon--cripes, I've never thought of that. An inspired suggestion and I do love my corn whiskey. Not Jack Daniels, more like Jim Beam and (especially) Wild Turkey.

I agree, Pynchon IS funny and I think many folks (including critics) miss that essential fact.

Watch for his new one next year, there's already a bit of a buzz developing...

I'm currently reading Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear and ran across this little gem. This is why I love Graham Greene so much. He know how to do things like this:

" 'She has extraordinary powers of painting the inner world. She sees it as colours and circles, rhythmical arrangements, and sometimes oblongs.'"

Sometimes oblongs!?!?! - WTF?

"For the second time there rose a scaffold like Michelangelo’s on which the artist, his head thrown back, painted the Creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: the sickbed on which Marcel Proust consecrates the countless pages which he covered with his handwriting, holding them up in the air, to the creation of his microcosm." -- Walter Benjamin on Marcel Proust

Benjamin was a consummate aesthete...

"Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology." -- Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden…Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.” -- Octave Mirbeau

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks." -- Herman Melville sounding a bit like Beckett

The term "lost generation" had already been launched by Gertrude Stein. Zweig merely put it to a more appropriate use. Nobody was trying to kill Hemingway and Fitzgerald except the manufacturers of what W.C. Fields called spiritous fermenti.

- Clive James in Cultural Amnesia (as you can see, I am finally on Z, and the second-to-last essay!)

As they say on teh Internets:

ZING!

>18 kswolff:, wolffie writes, ""All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks." -- Herman Melville"

I immediately flashed on Melville channeling Plato.

"Books are not mere merchandise, books are a nation thinking aloud." -- the President of the Publishers Association, Geoffrey Faber, wrote to the philistine Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Kingsley Wood, leading a united front of bookmen against a proposed new purchase tax on reading matter.

Should be the motto of this group.

That's lovely.

Of course, when Canada thinks out loud, it does so with crayon scribbles...

I always thought it said: "When the next Leaf's game, eh?" ;)

When the United States speaks, the rest of the planet just shakes its head and sighs in exasperation. You know Mongo from "Blazing Saddles"? That's the United States ... at least that's how it was for the last 8 years. Now we have Black Bart and hopefully things will be less epically stupid.

"...only pawn in game of life." One of my favorite movies...

Although equating Dubya to Mongo is an insult to Mongo. Dubya is like some idiot cross between Hedley Lamarr (minus the brains, ambition, and moral decency) and the Foster Brooks town drunk character (minus the brains, ambition, and alcohol).

And Madeline Kahn sure gave some great musical performances.

I think Dubya is like the sergeant or whatever he is that works for Hedley Lamarr. Cheney is Hedley.

"....glittering thoughts..."
"Ditto!"

That's just insulting to the Sheriff ;)

Can't forget the Mayor.

Dubya is more like the cardboard dummies the Rock Ridge people made in the finale. Minus the trenchant wit, of course. Cheney reminds me of the Dom Deluise character in Blazing Saddles.

"Not the face!"

And all the top-hatted dancing men are all the homophobes of the Christian Right.

Thanks for the laughs re Dubya and Blazing Saddles. Kudos to all.

I write down passages that make me read them over and over because I marvel at how some writers can put feelings and thoughts I've had into words that I don't have the insight, talent to do myself.

Here's one from Philip Roth's American Pastoral:

"The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is the thing, 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."

In that same vein:

"In the end it is consistency you want in people, not perfection. Betrayal is to find them do what you would not have expected. Just that."

Penelope Lively in The Road to Litchfield

I love that Philip Roth quote! Thanks and welcome to Lucysmom!

Thank you for the welcome, Anna. I've got a bunch of quotes to share. How about this one from one of my favorite writers, Tim O'Brien:

"None of us stands at the helm of life's great ocean liner; control is an illusion; destination itself is a pitiful chimera; we are at best mere passengers aboard a drifting vessel, some of us in steerage, some in first class, all at the whim of a ghostly crew and passing icebergs."

Tomcat in Love

Let's hear it for Tim O'Brien...

It's been a long dry spell waiting for a new one from Tim O'Brien. Anyone hear anything? I got to meet him at the Chicago Public Library a few years ago when they had picked The Things They Carried for Chicago Reads. What a great experience.

Tim O'Brien is really good - last i heard about him was from our son as Adam was at Macalester and Tim O'Brian spoke there on some occasion at his old school. That was a while ago. According to his web site he's teaching in Texas now - to damn cold in MN.

I've read that O'Brien is very meticulous and it's revision, revision, revision. Could be that's why he's so darn good.

Oops! Wanted to include this quickie from Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children which I just finished.

". . . perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin." Ahh yes, Grasshopper, some words of wisdom there.

“The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.” -- John Mortimer

"I think we ought to read only books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us like a blow on the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good God, we would be just as happy if we had no books and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief." -- Franz Kafka

I just wanted to chime in and say that this thread is brilliant, nothing to add, just have enjoyed reading it.

"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home."

If I had to choose one line around which the whole of As I Lay Dying revolved, that would probably be it. Part of its genius has to do with the character who says it (Darl), and its uniqueness, at least to my mind, as perhaps Darl's only bluntly genuine statement in the whole novel. It's always been the kind of thing that's captured my attention. Like the brief portrait of Sweeny at the end of At Swim-Two-Birds. Brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it.

Lovely line, mon...

"Please, reader:...Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me..." - Lolita

Just about any line from that book would qualify, but I especially love that arrogant prick giving us one moment of desperation and true vulnerability (assuming anything old HH says is true).

Oh, and for those intimidated by Pynchon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWU18LRWGrg

Yeah, that's his voice.

Can't wait 'til August and the new Pynch book. Surreal noir? Postmodern detective? Or maybe (merely) a cracking great read...

Pynchon's grocery lists is probably better written than any bestseller smearing pop culture right now.

I'm curious how "Inherent Vice" will compare with "Crying of Lot 49" since both take place in 1960s California, and Pynchon is like a esoteric alchemist when it comes to linking his various works together. Maybe his books are a secret gospel that exposes the true conspiracies wracking our world ... or maybe I'm reading too much into his work and seeing muted trumpets everywhere I go.

43: Pynchon's grocery lists? :)

On my Ulysses reading list, there's a wonderful thread based on this cartoon:

http://www.walkingraven.com/jjfridge.gif

The thread is here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/57504

It is completely hilarious. You guys should try some of your own.

1. Call wife.
2. Call mistress.
3. Get eggs.
4. Get bottle of pink gin.
5. Pick up dry cleaning.
6. Write about one man's conflict between desire, duty, and the Church.
7. Mow the lawn.

-- Graham Greene

45: Nice! Now do one without telling us who it is and make us guess.

1. Bacon.
2. TP.
3. Bullets for pistol.
4. Reservation for Mexico trip.
5. Morphine. Lots and lots of morphine.
6. Call exterminator.
7. Battle the forces of Control.
8. Hat.
9. Vest.

1. delete all commas from latest draft
2. drive that abnormally large russian child to school
3. contemplate ubiquity of hope in face of unending bleakness despair entropy inescapable (in spite of the tennis) insofar as silence murders stillness of contemptible burden of humorous quaquaqua purple monkey dishwasher
4. nothing
5. (twice)

47: William S Burroughs

48: ...erm...Beckett?

"Large Russian child?" What's that a reference to? The tennis reference had me thinking of David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest

***

1. Cabbage.
2. Broccoli.
3. Steak.
4. Fine wine.
5. Write about the ephemeral nature of memory, desire, and time among the Second Empire aristocracy and nouveau riche while extending the craft of the novel into new, labyrinthine yet hermetic, directions driven by the fading memories of a childhood love you'll never reconnect with, even after you've married her and have your mother living in the adjacent apartment, and the need to communicate "the freemasonry of love" by comparing covert trysts among decrepit dandies and a hyperdetailed description of flowers, while writing really, really, really long sentences that take your breath away.
6. Refill inhaler.

According to the special features on The Princess Bride DVD, young Andre the Giant was already so large he couldn't fit on the school bus, so his neighbor drove him. That helpful gentleman just happened to be Samuel Beckett. Which is fantastic.

I haven't read Infinite Jest. That's a supposedly fun thing I'll have to get around to sometime.

Your list, Marcel, yes? Another mammoth novel I'll get to at an undefined point in the future.

Yes, indeed.

Beckett driving Andre the Giant. That's awesome. Right up there with Nixon meeting Elvis.

Someone should make a movie about the Beckett-Andre the Giant encounter. I wonder what they talked about?

I'd just like to say that the quality of conversation in this group is ACRES ahead of the rest. I tried concurrently posting on the Ayn Rand thread at Science Fiction fans, and what was initially a decent discussion withered and shrank into the most unbelievable minutae and rhetorical bait-and-switchery, finally devolving into an argument over whether two and two can reasonably be claimed to equal four. Infuriating. Now you folk, one feels like one could have a conversation with those who post hereabouts.

Jeez, I dunno about everyone else but I'm BLUSHING.

"Good writing, like gold, combines lustrous lucidity with high density. What this means is good writing is packed with hints." -- Eric Hoffer

I get irked when Sci Fi fans start acting like your garden variety fanatic -- with all the menace and meanness that term signifies. Once criticized, it's easy for them to resort to Hive Mind mode and exterminate the critics, skeptics, and Cassandras. They're as bad as Daleks

"I don't know, Heinlein just isn't that good of a writer."

"Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!"

I guessed ksw's #50 as well, but I don't really remember the cabbage, broccoli, steak and fine wine at all. Except incidentally. If I had to choose four words to sum it up, they wouldn't have been those, but I must admit that sounds like a fine parlour game in its own right.

How about (cheating slightly) ...

1. Boy meets girl
2. Boy likes girl
3. Girl likes boy
4. Girl meets another boy
5. Boy still likes girl
6. Boy sets off on journey through wintry landscape without wrapping up properly
7. Boy dies

Dhalgren?

As far as broccoli and wine, I thought I was writing grocery lists?

1. Cat food.
2. Shotgun shells.
3. Fishing lures.
4. Steak.
5. Grappa.

Sounds like Hemingway to me.

Dhalgren? Who he?

Dhalgren would be...

1. ... meets boy
2. boy...

Sounds like Women in Love to me.

Which, especially the film version, should perhaps have been titled Men in Love.

Yep, Hemingway.

Pascale Ferran's "Lady Chatterley" is very good indeed.

56: Oh wait, is that The Dead?

Ian: Bought Ferran's "Lady Chatterley" for my wife for Valentine's Day. We still haven't got around to watching it but we will. Oh, yes, we will...

Re 56, it's more something you'd listen to than actually read, although you could read it if you were of a masochistic frame of mind. (I did say I was cheating slightly. Maybe I should have omitted the "slightly".)

Apologies as I'm going to go off the track a bit here. I was rereading some of the postings and #9 from Underworld reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from that book.

"The long ghosts are walking in the halls. When my mother died I felt expanded, slowly, durably, over time. I thought she'd entered the deepest place I could provide, the animating entity, the thing, if anything, that will survive my own last breath, and she makes me larger, she amplifies my sense of what it is to be human. She is part of me now, total and consoling. And it is not a sadness to acknowledge that she had to die before I could know her fully. It is only a statement of the power of what comes after."

under the volcano ? #47?

"His calling has isolated him from any kind of fellowship. But that's the price the chosen must pay for their gifts. The shaman integrates the tribe by remaining apart from the tribe. The shaman integrates the world by standing, forever, outside the world."

-Jack O'Connell, THE RESURRECTIONIST

"Small books are more durable than big ones; they go farther. The booksellers revere big books; readers like small ones. An exquisite thing is worth more than a huge thing. A book that reveals a mind is worth more than one that only reveals its subject."

-Joseph Joubert (Trans. by Paul Auster)

Thanks, lucysmom and Cliff, those are beautiful.

Chandler in The Long Good-Bye:
Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.

Love that Chandler fella.

Altman's adaptation of "Long Good-Bye" may well be the worst detective film ever made, certainly the worst by a "major" director. Altman wasn't worth a shit at science fiction either (see "Quintet")...

"A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body."

Walter Benjamin in his essay 'The Storyteller'.

"Their cheeks in the vitriolic glare of the photography-shop window were flinty yet sagging; green light glazed the velvet powder, scummed the hectic rouge, livid over lurid."

Call It Sleep by Henry Roth

A novel I never tire of re-reading.

"That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain."

The Powerbook by Jeanette Winterson.

Winterson is an incredible writer.

73:
Ooh, I got a copy of that the other day. Can't wait to start it.

74:
That's really nice. I've never heard of Winterson, but I think I'm going to look her up on the strength of that little passage.

#76 If Winterson appeals, you should also try Rose Tremain.

I like the Winterson quote very much. Here's one I came across today in Aloft by Chang-Rae Lee:
"... anyone knows that the best way to make a living is to spend the workaday hours submitting to your obsessions and that everything else is just plain grubby labor. But that 's the life of the charming and the lucky and the talented, and for the rest of us perfectly acceptables and okays and competents it's a matter of perisistence and numbness to actual if minor serial failure and a wholly unsubtantiated belief in the majesty of individual destiny, all of which is democracy's spell of The Possible on us."

"submitting to your obsessions"

I rather like that.

“Literature is not conformism, but dissent. Those authors who merely repeat what everybody approves and wants to hear are of no importance. What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones. He is by necessity anti-authoritarian and anti-governmental, irreconcilably opposed to the immense majority of his contemporaries. He is precisely the author whose books the greater part of the public does not buy.”

—Ludwig von Mises, "The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality"

Dissenters, innovators and harbingers are clearly the thing, but people who make one laugh and cry are also good and I wish I'd written anything byWendy Cope, Kate Atkinson or Nancy Mitford -
"She lay back and all was light and warmth. Life, she thought, is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake and here is one of them" (NM, The Pursuit of Love)

Love it! The Mitfords--they make my family look normal (and that takes some doing).

Which one of the Mitfords was a fascist? And they all had strange names like Sarah Palin's kids.

80: Excellent! A sensible argument for why literature is not a democracy; just because everyone buys a book does not automatically grant it status. Hard to explain that to many people--usually the same ones who say that if more people use the wrong definition of a word then it becomes the right one.

I had never heard of Jeanette Winterson either, but on the strength of that quote from freddlerabbit I got a couple of her books from the library. I am reading Lighthousekeeping and loving it. Here's one from there:
"She was a bright disc in him that left him sun spun. She was circular, light-turned, equinox-sprung. She was season and movement, but he had never seen her cold. In winter, her fire sank from the surface to below the surface, and warmed her great halls like the legend of the king who kept the sun in his hearth."
Thanks for introducing me to this very interesting, thought-provoking writer.

There are very few contemporary writers who even approach her quality of writing. To give you an idea: Lighthousekeeping is widely considered one of her WEAKER titles...

"So if television is devolving back to the days of the Texaco Star Happy Gas Time Theatre, books are now just novelizations of reality TV shows written by people who have never experienced reality nor read a book, and music is officially a democracy of dunces, what does that leave us?" -- From the AV Club's "Friday Buzzkills."

http://www.avclub.com/articles/friday-buzzkills-the-truth-hurts,28393/?utm_sourc...

It's like if Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote smart-assed columns about pop culture news.

As I recall, the Texaco Star Theater with Milton Berle was some damn fine TeeVee. The kind of TeeVee the networks would kill for now.

The golden age of TeeVee wasn't thirteen, it was from 1949 - 196+ and saw some of the consistently best television ever made.

Who would dare broadcast Ernie Kovacs these days?

Or Rod Serling smoking?

Ernie Kovacs! I found a terrific DVD of his work and enjoyed it immensely. A true television pioneer, no doubt. Died prematurely--God knows where this guy could have taken the medium. A kind of Jacques Tati of the small screen...

Milton Berle and his show were good, but it was in 1961 that the chairman of the FCC, Newt Minnow, characterized television as a vast wasteland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_Speech

Robert

I used to watch Ernie Kovacs in Philadelphia when he was just a local radio man with a local morning TV show. He came on right after The Today Show with Dave Garroway, Jack Lescoulie (go Slippery Rock State), and all the gang (before J. Fred Muggs, and while they were still in Chicago). Talk about a show with nothing to do - they would position a camera at the ground level plate glass window in the building they broadcast from and let the crowd gathered outside watching the show being produced entertain for five or ten minutes at a whack.

Kovacs was very funny and not shy about explaining the methods to his madness. He was very funny.

Great account, Gene. I think there should be more packaging of those early TV shows--"Your Show of Shows", Berle, et all. I see any of those buggers in the bargain bin at WalMart I'd snap them up, but queek...

"I never urge advanced writing-study on talented students. I'm more than convinced that the best writing of fiction, poetry, and drama is the result of intense independent work by a naturally gifted man or woman who finds the time... to deepen those skills in the act of probing further down into what will prove to be his or her best subject matter, matter to which only he or she has guided him or herself, not a teacher nor a group of workshop colleagues." -- Reynolds Price

A-men.

Workshops and writing groups are for suckers and wannabes. You wanna write, fucking buy a pen and pad and get to it. You wanna socialize, join the Shriners or Knights of Columbus.

Nothing wrong with socializing with other writers (this group -- hello!), but it won't magically make you a better writer. Writing groups are beneficial for learning the basics (plot, characterization, voice, etc.), but apart from that, they become group therapy sessions where mediocrity and blandness are emphasized. (Especially in sci fi writing groups. I should know, I experienced that until they kicked me out.)

A good beta reader is handy, especially for getting out of your own perspective and getting a different point of view on the work. But getting your work critiqued by a committee of amateurs can be damaging, counterproductive, and stupid.

Sam Beckett also disdained writing groups. I agree.

"Civilization—the world of affection and reason and freedom and justice—is a luxury which must be fought for, as dangerous to possess as an oil-field or an unlucky diamond." -- Cyrill Connolly

This lovely bit from James Wood's HOW FICTION WORKS:

"Is there a way in which all of us are fictional characters, parented by life and written by ourselves?"

This isn't the guy who starred in Videodrome, is it?

(Laughter)

I know, that occurred to me too. "Wood", "Woods"...and they're both pricks.

"The Reaganite conservative does not trust the political system, and so is always trying to circumvent it; he does not trust the instincts of Congress, but places profound faith of the executive if he is in charge; he does not trust the deep religious instinct of a people, unless it is decked out in tawdry costume of a minute of silent prayer in schools." -- Henry Fairlie, British journalist and Tory

He also coined the term the Establishment

Nice to see Tories channeling the wit of HL Mencken

"Nice to see Tories channeling the with of H.L. Mencken" --kswolff (#102)

Nice, perhaps, but not at all surprising. HLM himself was pretty much a "Tory", if not a "Tory in good standing". (He could be pretty critical even of those closest to his own politics. One of the weirdest political lines I have ever read is something he said about the 1920 U.S. election. It was to the effect: "I am trying to make up my mind to vote for Dr.(sic) Harding." (A reference to eventual winner Warren G. Harding (R, O.) Itʻs hard to imagine him voting for Dr. Hardingʻs opponent, publisher James Cox (D, O.)
even though the Democrats of that time didnʻt
quite have the "Liberal" label of todayʻs Democrats.

"Love shines in the depth of the wood like a great candle."

-Andre Breton & Paul Eluard, THE AUTOMATIC MESSAGE

I wish I came up with these titles:

http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2009/09/running-risk-of-turning-ones-blog...

"The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end."

-Max Beerbohm

Came across a great quote which I intend to use against trolls I encounter on the internet or impertinent correspondents:

"...evil communications corrupt good manners".

Lovely; from St. Paul, 1 Corinthians. Not a fan of Paul's but I gotta say he nails it on the head with that one, especially in the age of the internet and its anonymous (gutless) post-ers and arseholes.

"The overwhelming pressure of mechanization evident in the newspaper and the magazine, has led to the creation of vast monopolies of communication. Their entrenched positions involve a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity." -- Harold Innis

Wordy but accurate assessment I'd say.

>107 CliffBurns:
"quotation" is the noun.

Got it.

P.S. I also frequently catch myself saying "unthawed".

109:
"Quote" is well known slang for "quotation." Has been since the 19th c. Come on now.

To the point that "quote" is now accepted in informal usage. Are we restricted to formal usage here?

Does anyone else say "unthawed"?

Or "nucular"?

Well, I catch my boyfriend saying "excape". We had a discussion about "irregardless" the other day.

I was once given a spec for a report which asked for the data to be grouped into several categories, including "closed" and "unclosed". I said to the business analyst, "'Unclosed'? That would be 'open', then?"

...and found yourself the victim of a downsizing a short time later.

Are you starting to see a pattern here, Ian?

To CliffBurns:

To answer about "nucular" first: I don't know,but I would guess that many people say nucular. (Probably notmany write it.)

About "unthawed": I don't know, because I've never heard it,and don't know what it is supposed to mean. What is the correct form of it?

Check out the Dictionary of Bullshit by Nick Webb. He tears into legalese, bureaucratese, academic jargon, and business take. When people use the word "interfacing" instead of "talking/discussing/etc.", I break out in hives.

***

"Instantly, he tasted feeble, immature 'cepts, chitter-chatter minds, the moist, unwholesome mental architecture of the pubescent aides. The technical inability to conceive made most uxor-aides gruesomely promiscuous." -- Legion by Dan Abnett

A nice dollop of purple prose.

***

Currently reading Brideshead Revisited by Waugh. Seems like every page is chock full of lusciously constructed bon mots. The novel is a worthy culmination of his literary career. As a budding amateur writer, I hope to reach that pinnacle when I'm sixty.

Thaw...to thaw out a frozen lamb for supper.

If I "unthaw" that same lamb, I'm freezing it.

My kids smirk every time I make the slip.

I don't say "nucular", by the way. Just to clarify that. I pronounce it correctly: "death-rays-that-last-60,000- years"...

I thought I thaw a puddy tat!

To CliffBurns:

On "unthaw" : Thanks

On "deathrays.../nucular":
Good way to "pronouns" it.

I collect management-speak excrescences. This week's word: "planful". As far as I can tell it means "proactive" (which has its own issues as a management jargon term, but at least has been around for a while). Who decided that we needed an adjective like "planful"? That's just awful.

The phrase of the week was "let's be very clear." I think it is because of Obama and his verbal tick of "make no mistake" which is starting to annoy me.

I think we need another thread the opposite of this one and then we can get this one back on topic. I have some wonderful purple prose from the book I'm currently reading, The Octopus, that I'd love to share there.

To anna_in_pdx:

I have some experience as the listener to management speak )pr, more often, the reader of it in memos written by someone whose office was about 20 feet from my desk. (Glad to see you can put a name on it, as I couldnʻt at the time.) E.g. one boss who would never say "Write an appendix" when she could say"utillize the CONCEPT of an appendix".

I suppose it gives them a feeling of being precise and catching all the possible nuances.

On the other hand, the down-to-earth, no-nonsense speakers arenʻt always any better. An earlier boss said his favorite Latin phrase was "Dignum et iustum est" ("It is well-deserved and right"), but he got a chance to use it only when collecting an exorbitant fine. His favorite "literary" quotation in English was: "Go to jail; go directly to jail. Do not pass ʻGoʻ. Do not collect $200."

124: Well, "Go directly to jail" is indeed a good cultural reference but I certainly wouldn't call it "literary." :)

Not having ever studied Latin I am at a disadvantage there. I like the one that means "don't let the bastards get you down" but can never remember it right. I think it's "non illegitimati carborundam"?

When people use nonsensibles why not call them on it. Ask them to explain to you what they mean by the "utilizing the concept of an appendix". Ask them straight out, "Do you want an appendix?" If they answer yes, then say "Why didn't you just say so?" You may even ask them to explain to you the concept of an appendix and what options are contained in that concept.

It's all just too far out, man, too far out. They're all turkeys anyway.

Back in my day, the keeper of the flame for clear, concise language was the teevee newsman, Edwin Newman. He wrote the first book about opaque speech I can remember: Strictly Speaking. I think he zeroes in on the euphemisms usually put out by government and legal types.

People have been making up jargon as long as there have been people, much of it is absolutely hilarious.

Hi ann_in_pdx:

The phrase that allegedly "means" "donʻt let the bastards get you down" probably comes in several variants. The way I last heard it was as you give it, except the second word ends in -i, not in -ati. The third word (which is just a made up "Latin-sounding" word, I guess) was "carborundUm".

"Illegitimi" is derived from Latin, but Iʻve never seen it used by a classical Roman author. It may have come into use in the Late Roman Empireʻs legal writings. The word for "bastards" in real Latin is "nothi"., but it was not used as an insult. Neither were any of the sexually-related words that are used in English insults.

"Illegitimi...etc." is an example of what was called (back in the 1950s?) Liberated Latin. There was even a book with that title, and a parallel one for German and for French.

Examples: "IN HOC SIGNO VINCES", in Liberated Latin "means" "Lombardiʻs ring is at the pawn shop."

"DE GUSTIBUS NON EST DISPUTANDUM" "means": "Thereʻs a draft on this bus, no question about it!"

Tomorrow I get to spend the whole day learning about RTI, Response to Intervention. I have no idea what the hell that means, though it does involve a whole lot of paperwork and extra hours to address how our district has not been addressing No Child Left Behind. Now I know there will be plenty of nonsensibles to come in the next few years. (I am confident NCLB will be history after that.) And, oh, the acronyms!

127: I lost this thread until today - thanks so much for the answer - I love your examples of liberated latin. Sounds like my kinda Latin.

Post your novels online via social networking:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/new_noveller_allows_people_to_post

Another hilarious story from The Onion

Isn't that what twitter is for? So that I can feel your (all 240 people I'm following) angst at every moment of the day?

Check out this graphic:
http://www.ricklamb.co.uk/2009/07/how-100-people-on-twitter-looks.html

Jonathan Littell, author of the controversial novel The Kindly Ones, won the Bad Sex in Fiction award. The story includes the winning passage from his novel:

http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/badsex.html

Wow ... just wow.

The Kingdom has a Snapper!.

>132 kswolff:

Why would you even write something like that?

132: ick!

As far as I'm concerned, that Bad Sex in Fiction Award is administered by children, and I have no interest in it. This is an award created to discourage sex scenes in novels. It's the product of a snobbish conservative journalist who was stupid enough, while an officer in the horse guards, to shoot himself through the chest with a machinegun. Enough said.

That passage is shockingly strange, but I refuse to pass judgment on a passage pulled from a novel unless I can see it in context.

>132 kswolff:,136 - Shockingly strange, indeed. I rather like it. Bizarre and somehow cruel... Wishlist-ed.

If Littell were trying to write an arousing sex scene, obviously he completely failed. But I think it's safe to assume that he was after a different effect. Yeah, it's a bizarre scene, but that's probably the point...

The award is for bad SEX, not bad writing. in that respect, I think it's well given for this particular passage.

The aim of the award is "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it."

It's not an award for bad sex, it's an award intended to discourage writing about sex by mocking it. It's about bad writing, not bad sex.

140: In that case I guess I agree with you and Iriesa. I was just going by the name.

>140 ajsomerset: - It seems like the original intent was forgotten along the way...

...and the conservatives strike again. *sigh* When will they ever learn that they'll never win when they're up against snobs who actually know what they're talking about?

142: I doubt that, given that this statement of intent is quoted each and every year when the shortlist is announced.

If conservatives had the decency of engaging in erotic acts they spend the rest of the day condemning, they might actually win a skirmish or two in the culture wars. Then again, I have no sympathy for sexually schizophrenic authoritarians with no taste. Kick them into the dustbin of history and let's get on with our lives.

Conservatives DO engage in the self-same erotic acts they condemn. That's why they are so grumpy all the time. They dislike themselves and want to deflect this distaste for themselves on to others.

Conservatives tell people not to do what they do themselves; liberals tell people not to do what they themselves don't do.

an old urban legend, dating at least from the 60s, purported to be based on some urban sociology research among prostitutes that, in essence, said that prostitutes looked forward to Republican national conventions far more the Democratic ones, since they were MUCH busier w/ the Republican delegates in town. I never tracked down the source, but then i didn't look THAT hard.

>144 ajsomerset: - Haha, depends on just how they forgot. You never know.

POLITICIAN, n.
An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When we wriggles (sic) he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.

The ever-whimsical Ambrose Bierce

Listened to the interview with poets Donald Hall and Billy Collins Bob sent our way (on another thread). One of my favorite bits was Collins talking about a poem that was inspired by a line from Spanish writer Juan Ramon Jimenez. I LOVE this quote:

"The worst thing about death must be the first night."

Yowza...

In RUINED BY READING, Lynne Schwartz talks about finding a book she owned in childhood and then discovering from an examination of her shelves one day that the volume was missing (again):

"Simply...I wasn't fated to keep it. The story of the book in the longer story of my life flouted the happy ending I had willed. It insisted on ending in real loss, which makes us treasure the intangible gifts of memory. For in the end, even if all my books were to vanish, I would still have them somewhere, if I had read them tentatively enough. Maybe the words on the page are no even the true book, in the end, only the gateway to the book that recreates itself in the mind and lasts as long as we do."

I rather like that.

152: That's beautiful. I feel similarly about the books I've loved and lost over the years.

"Even for a Teflon robo-cobra like me who has spent enough time in high-end establishments to have retail nerves like bridge cables, it’s a little hard to breathe in this joint." -- Cintra Wilson

Not too often you get fashion reporting with a little literary snap. Viva la difference!

I was reminded of this by the John Mortimer quote
in #37:

"The word 'writer' is meaningless in the English, Irish, and American languages." -- Brendan Behan

"Vegas is the limelight graveyard for Caucasian fame-junkies, the only nether-sphere of big-dollar entertainment where aging closet queens and hypervain, sideburned Republican megalomaniacs who refuse to wither and crawl into obscurity draw their last, star-spangled burst of audience attention and surrender to their own brands of frightening and delusional multi-million dollar gluttony." -- Cintra Wilson

"Siegfried and Roy seem best to typify the kind of bizarre, hydrocephalic celebrity life that is possible to have only in Las Vegas; they are completely freaked out on a vision of themselves as beautiful New Age twin-alien butterfly Emperors, and they are, through rude will, able to sell this myth to a huge cross section of humanity." -- Cintra Wilson

He was worth looking at. He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show handkerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie. There were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his hat, but he didn’t really need them. Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

Raymond Chandler, Farewell My Lovely

Great quotes!

Nil illegitimi corborundum.

Sollocks,

usually the same ones who say that if more people use the wrong definition of a word then it becomes the right one.

So well put. Thanks.

Just like what my wife says "There's a difference between changing usage and misusage."

It would be well put, if it were true. But it ain't.

The language is defined through usage; dictionaries lag the living language. It's a fact, no matter how it pains the pedants. When enough people use a word "incorrectly," then it becomes common usage, at which point the definition of the word can be said to be changed.

Which is how words like "flammable" and "irregardless" come to be. Call me a pedant, but I think dictionary makers ought to serve a regulatory role. Otherwise, pretty soon "comprise" is going to mean both "to include" and "to be included in," and I'm pretty sure that will produce a black hole or something.

Hurray for Sutpen.

Now for ajsomerset:

Me are fulsomely aggravated in their post.

Then there is the question of taste and style. If you want to use "impact" as a transitive verb, "awesome" as an all purpose grunt of admiration, "I" as a direct object, "lags" for "lags behind," or "at which point" when no point has been defined, well, it's a free country. And if you restrict all your utterances to the interiors of low bars, then I am sure you will have no cause for embarrassment.

Language evolves, but there is a difference between evolution and chaos, between organic growth and growth initiated and sustained by commercial interests, between a usable, teachable language and some sort of free-for-all where each individual either re-invents English or pretends to be in touch with all general trends in grammar and usage.

Yes, when a large enough number of people adopt some neologism or misunderstanding, then, I guess, those become part of the language. Do you claim, however, to be in a position to identify this number? We have dictionaries for that, and the good ones don't make off-the-cuff decisions.

It's a fact that words are defined by use. You can decry the "chaos" that this will cause all you like, but that's the way it always has been. Pretending that language is not defined by use is like arguing that the earth is flat.

The word "careen" (for example) does, in fact, mean "rush headlong; hurtle unsteadily," no matter how copy-editors may decry this usage. And the fact that the copy editors in question understand what is meant demonstrates this. This is how the word is used, again and again, by many people; this is what many, if not most, people understand it to mean
(including usage pedants, in certain contexts); ergo, this is what it means.

English made do for centuries without dictionaries. This is not a matter of preserving a "usable" language; none of the examples cited above are actually problems of basic communication. Your own remark about "low bars," which I'm going to choose not to see as the cheap ad hominem it appears to be, demonstrates what this is really all about: an attempt to differentiate the language of an educated class from that of the rabble.

Oh, and by the way....

"Flammable" has been in use since at least the early 19th Century. It is not, as many believe, a recent bastardization of "inflammable."

Yeah, that's the cookie-cutter descriptivist argument, but I, at least, am not interested in differentiating the way I speak from the way the "rabble" speaks. What I'm interested in is preserving useful words and meanings. And nobody's claiming language isn't defined by use, but it's also true that the way people use words can be influenced. English having made do for a while without dictionaries is irrelevant. The fact is they exist now, and I believe they should be used to at least attempt to influence accepted meanings of words. Is it a losing battle? Yeah, maybe it is.

And it doesn't matter how long ago somebody made up "flammable." It's a needless variant, and the only thing it adds to the language is confusion about the meaning of inflammable.

Why did "inflammable" fall out of use?

Because it's no more useful than "flammable," and caused confusion.

You say your concern is utility, yet defend "inflammable?" What nuance do you see therein? What "useful meaning" to distinguish it from "flammable," with its 200-year history of use? How is a word with a confused meaning useful?

A losing battle? It's like taking swimming lessons from King Canute. The tide is the tide.

You're missing my point. I defend "inflammable" based on the general principle that people should not invent needless variants. There is no difference in meaning to distinguish "flammable" from "inflammable" (with its 500-year history of use)--that's the problem. If such a distinction existed, I would not object to "flammable."

"How is a word with a confused meaning useful?"
You're begging the question. My objection starts 200 years ago when somebody made up "flammable." The confusion wouldn't exist today if that had never happened.

I take your point there, but I think that in this case, the horse is long gone, and the disused stable door has fallen from its rusted hinges. ;)

I apologize for dragging this thread off course. Let us return to the matter at hand, to wit, things we wish we'd writ.

Miranda's hallway: a spindly mahogany end table to which the termites have had access for a hundred years sustains a green Mason jar with its lost patent numerals in heavy glass; and holding in its opaque vegetable water from the Keys Aqueduct, ribbed orange squash blossoms in their delicately emblematic subdivision of light.

That's from Ninety-Two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane.

Yeah, of course you're right. That specific case is just my go-to illustration of the issue.

And here's recompense for my part in the highjacking:

First of all, DFW has a story called "The Soul is Not a Smithy." I wish I'd come up with that.

And this, from Infinite Jest:
"And then also the little-mentioned advantage to being destitute and in possession of a Health Card that's expired and not even in your name: hospitals show you a kind of inverted respect; a place like Cambridge City Hospital bows to your will not to stay; they all of a sudden defer to your subjective diagnostic knowledge of your own condition, which post-seizure condition you feel has turned the corner toward improvement: they bow to your quixotic will: it's unfortunately not a free hospital but it is a free country: they honor your wishes and compliment your mambo and say Go with God."

@170 Open that book and throw a dart at the page and I wish I'd written it.

Ditto. I was talking to a friend the other night (one of two people I know who have read the book) and she said she thought it was sterile. I mean...STERILE?!!???!!???!!!!? Wallace was one of the biggest-hearted writers I can think of. I didn't even know what to say. It's as if someone had told me they found Absalom, Absalom! to be simplistic or something. I think I basically just told her I didn't want to talk about IJ anymore haha.

I think I saw someone here once say Wallace was unsympathetic to his characters. Incomprehensible. Are-we-really-talking-about-the-same-book type incomprehensible. I think this is maybe a book that you either fundamentally Get It or you just don't, but this isn't based on much since my husband is the only person I actually know who's read it and he was in love with it before I was.

Sterile...I think you have to fundamentally just Not Get It. It's hard to get my mind around anyway. I can understand criticizing it for being extremely long, self-indulgent, full of made-up words, lacking in plot (all of which I obviously either disagree with or don't care about) but sterile, yeah, something is just missing.

But I should not contribute my own threadjacking. I'll come back when I have an example of I Wish I'd Written. It'll probably be from this book though :)

To AJSomerset,

Sorry about the "low bars". Low of me to use it.

I can't help noting, however, that this is not an "ad hominem" argument at all. Does your doctrine support the idea of using Latin phrases incorrectly? And, for the man of the people you seem to be, isn't such a use a bit pretentious?

You say that when a certain percentage of speakers use a word to mean a certain thing, then the word becomes "correct". If I accept that hypothesis, then I must ask you who is going to ascertain just what percentage of the population is using it this way. Your argument, so far, seems to suggest that YOU are someone who can do that very thing. (Where's the proof? Where are the data?) It wouldn't be that far-fetched to infer you mean that anyone can do that.

So you decide that "ad hominem" means a snotty attitude towards certain things, I go on, misguidedly, thinking that it means attacking the person rather than his argument, someone else decides it means homosexual, etc. Then you say that a certain percentage of people use the phrase the way you do and that therefore it is correct.

How do you ascertain what percentage is using it your way, my way, and other ways? Furthermore does the original meaning of the phrase in Latin have any influence?

When, in the Old Testament, God inflicted "babble" on human kind, he did not intend it as a reward or a favor. It was a punishment. The further we deviate from a standard, the more likely we are to misunderstand each other.

I know I have been a little obnoxious, but do try to consider my arguments. I have been studying language all my life. I have studied the history and evolution of English from the Anglo-Saxon period until now. I believe that there is a tug to change the language myriad ways every day and that there has to be some sort of counter-force to help distinguish between necessary changes (e.g., new words for new things), on the one hand, and misuse, misunderstanding, ignorance, or just plain sloppiness on the other.

Back to the track:

"IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.

I prefer flammable to inflammable. The "in" prefix is used in most of English to establish an opposite: decent, indecent, por exemplo, or calculable and incalculable or temperate and intemperate. So when I see inflammable, I know it means that it can burn, but I have to tell myself that. It follows the rules for construction of a word that means not able to burn.

I find inflammable to be the confusing construction, not flammable.

"Flammable, inflammable & nonflammable... Why are there three? Don't you think that two ought to serve the purpose?" -- George Carlin

174: Let's not get tiresome here.

I know what ad hominem means, and I used it correctly; your use of the second person could be seen as imputing those "low bar" uses to me, attacking my argument by attacking my (presumed) habits of speech.

Now you are arguing ad hominem, attempting to discredit me by suggesting I don't understand the meaning of terms I use, in a "pretentious" manner, as "a man of the people."

Furthermore, you erect a straw man with this "certain percentage" model. I never spoke of percentages; I spoke of common usage. The fact that people understand the misuse of "careen" without confusion demonstrates that the meaning has, in fact, changed; we don't need a statistical analysis to see that this is so.

I don't see why there should be a problem with defending the democracy of language on the one hand, and using "ad hominem," on the other. I won't have to look far to find professors of English literature who take my view of this; they have no difficulty reconciling the idea that certain standards of writing are required in an academic context with the flexibility of the language in use -- that is, in the literary tradition that they study.

Years of formal study tend to lead away from the position you've taken; if you want to find a pedant, look for an undergrad. Regarding your appeal to authority, therefore, colour me skeptical.

to ajsomerset

I don't find this tiresome in the least.

Implying that I am being "tiresome" was, of course, ad hominem.

Peace. Please don't bristle so.

What I said about the low bars was ""And if you restrict all your utterances to the interiors of low bars, . . ." That cannot be construed as an implication that you in fact frequent such places. It cannot be construed as suggesting that you drink. What it means is that in such locales, people are likely to be sloppy about language and therefore would not notice you if you spoke the way you are suggesting we all should speak. My argument was not, at this point, trying to attack your argument by attacking you. If anything was attacked, it was low bars. If any of them belong to this group, I apologize.

It was stupid of me to appeal to authority. Authority should rest within sound argument.

When you refer to "professors of English literature," it is you who making the appeal to authority. I'll quit if you do.

When you talk about "flexibility," I heartily agree with you. So would Cicero. Flexibility, however, is not some sort of free-for-all.

Many of the professors of English literature I know have adopted the use of "I" as an accusative. They are Americans with degrees from the best American universities. (One told me that "grammar doesn't matter any more". I am not sure what she meant by "grammar".) Of course, their students imitate these professors. I also hear and read this kind of hyper-correct speech from the media and on the street.

Maybe, soon, this usage will become "common usage". If it does, will you adopt it yourself?

Imagine the confusion a general adoption of this usage would propagate. Imagine trying to teach English then to native speakers and non-native speakers.

Do you use "fulsome" to mean "complete"? Do you use "impact" instead of "affect"? Do you use "mitigate" instead of "militate"? Do you use "gift" instead of "give"? Do you make an effort to split every infinitive you use? Really?

I think what AJ meant is that this isn't the place for an extended discussion, and that other people are likely finding this tiresome.

Why would you assume that I misuse words right and left? Where did I suggest that we all should speak in certain ways? Where have I spoken of percentages, to justify your demands for data?

In short, where the hell are you getting this shit?

I have said only this: words are defined by their use. Changes and shifts in meaning are inevitable; if enough people use the wrong definition of a word, and it becomes common usage, then the definition has changed.

That's all.

It's a fact. You can decry it all you like, but that's the way things are.

179: that's precisely what I meant; I thunk we was done with this. Yet I have allowed myself to be sucked back in.

Not next time.

179

After participating in the hijack... really?

Maybe we need an official bureaucracy given the task of monitoring and maintaining the purity of the English language. Get rid of all the neologisms of the last couple of centuries, erase all the latinates and Greek based words. Certainly de-frenchify and re-anglofy as much as possible. We need an official English Language Scrubber.

We could talk to the French and find out how they do it.

Does anyone beside me find this leaning a little toward the absurd?

The French don't do it very well. We should talk to the Icelanders about it.

Robert

In Icelandic, there are 42 different ways to say "Bjork sucks"...

182:
Yeah, we realized that little digression had gone on too long (let me direct you to 169 and 170).

I've always thought this was a heck of a start for a poem, from Brigit Pegeen Kelly's "Song."

"Listen: there was a goat's head hanging by ropes in a tree.
All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it
Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing
The song of a nightbird..."

Good God, that's macabre. You sick puppy. Who was the poet? I've never heard of her.

"Song" is the only poem of hers that I've read. I like it a lot and I'm sort of afraid that if I don't like her other stuff then I won't like it as much haha. According to wikipedia, she's just kind of one of those poet/academics. She teaches in Illinois.

The poem's about a bunch of boys who play a "joke" by killing a girl's pet goat. I like the ending a lot too:

"But listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have
Their fun and be done with it. It was harder work than they
Had imagined, this silly sacrifice, but they finished the job,
Whistling as they washed their large hands in the dark.
What they didn't know was that the goat's head was already
Singing behind them in the tree. What they didn't know
Was that the goat's head would go on singing, just for them,
Long after the ropes were down, and that they would learn to listen,
Pail after pail, stroke after patient stroke. They would
Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees
Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There
Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song,
The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother's call.
Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song
Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness."

Yeah, I like that. How unadorned it is. Very nice...

I wouldn't mind being Montaigne; not at all. Once, in my hippie days, or shortly afterward, I read something that led me to believe I was his reincarnation. Absurd, of course. And then I heard that, no, I was not his reincarnation, but the reincarnation of La Rochefoucault, whoever he is.

"Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer provide bad examples." -- La Rochefoucault

And the same old men say we Gen-X'ers invented snark. As if.

Okay, Karl. I had to read that twice before I got it, so I guess I'll accept him as a karmic predecessor.

"While she and Ike (Turner) sweatily pawed at each other with viscous bedroom rhythms from across the stage, we felt as if we were watching the wings of an angel being dipped in McNugget sauce and chewed off by a team of alcoholics in raincoats, her halo tossed like an ultimate Frisbee into a churning lake of Shame." -- Cintra Wilson

There's snark and then there's that. Wilson is like a madcap love-child of Oscar Wilde and Karl Kraus, spewing invective and outrage, but is also really, really funny. A nice change from the cultural commentators who come across as Calvinist killjoys or pious liberals high on their own White Guilt.

"viscous bedroom rhythms"?

Yes, 194: that struck me too. Is this what they call "purple prose"?

But it's "purple prose" in pop culture criticism, which doubles its awesomeness. It makes Cintra Wilson a cut above the usual glorified journalist with no discernible writing style. The same can be said for Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe

Okay, Karl. I can dig that. You are a genuine aesthete.

"I never truckled; I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn't like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth; I knew it for the truth then, and I know it for the truth now."

-Frank Norris (from a title card preceding Von Stroheim's "McTeague")

Love that book. The image of that giant tooth hanging outside the office window recurs to me often. Or is that from Greed, the movie?

"Without that one masterpiece, you see, it does not matter how much a writer does or what he says. What I'm talking about is originality, which is rooted in daring and defiance and rage and recklessness and revolution, and not about sucking up to a world of brainless, mouth-breathing inchlings and half-assed dopes and stupid and illiterate mudnuns who read their books aloud and usually line by line with the aid of a running finger." -- Laura Warholic by Alexander Theroux

A wonderfully cantankerous distillation of what Literary Snobs is all about.

For some reason, I've always loved this quote.

"As when some Maionian woman or Karian with purple
colours ivory, to make it a cheek piece for horses;
it lies away in an inner room, and many a rider
longs to have it; but it is laid up to be a king's treasure,
two things, to be the beauty of the horse, the pride of horseman:
so, Menelaos, your shapely thighs were stained with the colour
of blood, and your legs also and the ankles beneath them.
(Iliad of Homer, Book IV: 141-147, Lattimore translation)

Also, the opening to Moby Dick
"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."

This is a very nice thread; I really liked a lot of these quotes here.

From an essay titled "The Duty of Harsh Criticism", by Rebecca West, that I found over at The New Republic book blog:

"There is now no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation that is not stilled unless a book is suppressed by the police, a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger. We reviewers combine the gentleness of early Christians with a promiscuous polytheism; we reject not even the most barbarous or most fatuous gods. So great is our amiability that it might proceed from the weakness of malnutrition, were it not that it is almost impossible not to make a living as a journalist. Nor is it due to compulsion from above, for it is not worth an editor's while to veil the bright rage of an entertaining writer for the sake of publishers' advertisements. No economic force compels this vice of amiability. It springs from a faintness of the spirit, from a convention of pleasantness, which, when attacked for the monstrous things it permits to enter the mind of the world, excuses itself by protesting that it is a pity to waste fierceness on things that do not matter."

and,

"Now, when every day the souls of men go up from Finance like smoke, we feel that humanity is the flimsiest thing, easily divided into nothingness and rotting flesh. We must lash down humanity to the world with thongs of wisdom. We must give her an unsurprisable mind. And that will never be done while affairs of art and learning are decided without passion, and individual dulnesses allowed to dim the brightness of the collective mind. We must weepingly leave the library if we are stupid, just as in the middle ages we left the home if we were lepers. If we can offer the mind of the world nothing else we can offer it our silence. "

This essay is approaching 100 years in age, and it's interesting to note similarities to today.

Great quotes.

"If what you are chanting* has been rightly understood, then death is a mid-point in an
extended life." / ... Longae, canitis si cognita, vitae mors media est. " -- Lucan Civil War

*You: the line is addressed to the Druids of
Gaul who had been conquered by Lucan's anti-hero Julius Caesar about a century earlier.

"In me, the place of will power is taken by an obsession--an obsession which would make me ill if I didn't obey it."

-Emile Zola, quoted in Goncourt brothers journals.

(I know exactly what he means.)