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Patrick:
KATHRYN'S ORPHANS
Ada Monroe and Inman (Cold Mountain)
Anne Shirley (Anne of Green Gables)
Babe (Babe)
Bambi
Bathsheba Everdene (Far from the Madding Crowd)
Batman
Beatrice (Much Ado about Nothing)
Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair)
Cecily Cardew (Importance of Being Earnest)
Champion (Les Triplettes de Belleville)
Cinderella
Collin Fenwick (The Grass Harp)
Dorothea Brooke (Middlemarch)
Dorothy Gale (The Wizard of Oz)
Edward Scissorhands
Eleanor Roosevelt
Elizabeth (Frankenstein)
Ellen Foster (Ellen Foster)
Ellie Arroway (Contact)
Eppie (Silas Marner)
Estella (Great Expectations)
Esther Summerson (Bleak House)
Eustacia Vye (Return of the Native)
Evelina
Flora Poste (Cold Comfort Farm)
Francis Marion Tarwater (The Violent Bear It Away)
Frodo Baggins (The Lord of the Rings)
Gou Wa “Doggie” (King of Masks)
Hadji (Johnny Quest)
Harriet Smith (Emma)
Harry Potter
Harvey Cheyne, Jr. (Captains Courageous)
Hawkeye (Last of the Mohicans)
Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights)
Heidi
Helena (All’s Well That Ends Well)
Homer Wells (Cider House Rules)
Huckleberry Finn
Hyacinth Robinson (The Princess Casimassima)
Irwin (Northfork)
Isabelle Archer (The Portrait of a Lady)
Jack Dawson (Titanic)
Jack Redburn (Master Humphrey's Clock)
Jake and Elwood Blues (The Blues Brothers)
James Henry Trotter (James & the Giant Peach)
Jane Eyre
Jane Fairfax (Emma)
Jen and Kira (The Dark Crystal)
Jo (Bleak House)
Joe Christmas (Light in August)
Jude Fawley (Jude the Obscure)
Kim (Kim)
Leo Tolstoy
Lilo (Lilo and Stitch)
Lillian (The Chimes)
Lily Bart (The Age of Innocence)
Lily Owen (The Secret Life of Bees)
Little Foot (The Land Before Time)
Little Nell (The Old Curiosity Shop)
Little Orphan Annie
Lucinda Leplastrier (Oscar and Lucinda)
*Lucy Manette (Tale of Two Cities)
Luke Skywalker (Star Wars)
Margaret, Helen, and Tibby Schlegel (Howard's End)
Marilyn Monroe
Mary Lennox (The Secret Garden)
Mary McCarthy
Mathilde and Manech (A Very Long Engagement)
Mattie Silver (Ethan Frome)
Miette (City of Lost Children)
Millie Theale (The Wings of a Dove)
Miriam Chadwick (Oscar and Lucinda)
Mowgli (The Jungle Book)
Nameless (Hero)
*Neo (The Matrix)
Oliver Twist
Orphan Girl (Gillian Welch)
Oscar Hopkins (Oscar and Lucinda)
Our Johnny (Our Mutual Friend)
Pai (Whale Rider)
Patrick Dennis (Auntie Mame)
Peter Pan and the Lost Boys
Philip Carey (Of Human Bondage)
Pip (Great Expectations)
Pollyanna
Posthumus (Cymbeline)
Princess Mononoke
Queen Elizabeth I
Rickie Elliot (The Longest Journey)
Rosa (Edwin Drood)
Salvatore “Toto” (Cinema Paradiso)
Sara Crewe (The Little Princess)
Seymour Krelborn (Little Shop of Horrors)
Smike (Nicholas Nickleby)
Solomon Perel (Europa Europa)
Sophie Neveu (The DaVinci Code)
Sophy Viner (The Reef)
Spiderman
Stuart Little
Sue Bridehead (Jude the Obscure)
Tarzan
Tanya Chernova (Enemy at the Gates)
Tertius Lydgate (Middlemarch)
Tom (Water Babies)
Tom Jones
Tom Sawyer
Trilby
Trinity (The Matrix)
Will Ladislaw (Middlemarch)
Will Turner (Pirates of the Caribbean)
W. Somerset Maugham
* = new or recent addition
AMNESIACS
[no name] (The Man Without a Past)
Dory (Finding Nemo)
Eleanor Mannering (Garden of Lies)
Giambattista "Yambo" Bodini (The Mysterious Flame
of Queen Loana)
Jason Bourne (The Bourne Identity)
Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski
(Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
Leonard Shelby (Memento)
*Manech (A Very Long Engagement)
Nick Petrov (Oblivion)
Peter Appleton (The Majestic)
Rita (Mulholland Drive)
Ryder (The Unconsoled)
Samson Greene (Man Walks into a Room)
Will Barrett (The Last Gentleman)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
A series of sublime impressions, continued
indefinitely, gradually pall upon the imagination, deaden its
fineness of feeling, and in the end induce a gloomy and morbid state
of mind, a reaction of a peculiarly melancholy character, because
consequent, not upon the absence of that which once caused
excitement, but upon the failure of its power.
--Poetry of Architecture by John
Ruskin
[N.B. And who does not now feel gloomy
before the Mona Lisa, wishing that Duchamp drew the moustache upon
the actual portrait itself? The Mona Lisa should be banished
from the halls of the Louvre for 50 years and all images of it
destroyed so that upon its triumphant return men may know why it
inspired such passionate awe.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Every one who is about to lay out a limited
extent of garden, in which he wishes to introduce many flowers,
should read and attentively study, first Shelley, and next
Shakespeare. The latter indeed induces the most beautiful
connections between thought and flower that can be found in the
whole range of European literature; but he very often uses the
symbolical effect of the flower, which it can only have on the
educated mind, instead of the natural and true effect of the flower,
which it must have, more or less, upon every mind. Thus, when
Ophelia, presenting her wild flowers, says, "There's rosemary,
that's for remembrance; pray you, love, remember: and there is
pansies, that's for thoughts:" the infinite beauty of the passage
depends entirely upon the arbitrary meaning attached to the flowers.
But, when Shelley speaks of
"The lily of the vale,
Whom youth makes so fair, and passion so pale,
That the light of her tremulous bells is seen
Through their pavilion of tender green,"
he is etherealizing an impression which the
mind naturally receives from the flower. Consequently, as it
is only by their natural influence that flowers can address the mind
through the eye, we must read Shelley, to learn how to use flowers,
and Shakespeare, to learn to love them. In both writers we
fine the wild flowers possessing soul as well as life, and mingling
its influence most intimately, like an untaught melody, with the
deepest and most secret streams of human emotion.
--Poetry of Architecture by John
Ruskin
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Patrick: Lagniappe
If possible, however, he should aim at
something more; he should draw his employer into general
conversation; observe the bent of his disposition, and the habits of
his mind; notice every manifestation of fixed opinions, and then
transfer to his architecture as much of the feeling he has observed
as is distinct in its operation. This he should do, not
because the general spectator will be aware of the aptness of the
building, which, knowing nothing of its inmate, he cannot be; nor to
please the individual himself, which it is a chance if any simple
design ever will, and who never will find out how well his character
has been fitted; but because a portrait is always more spirited than
a composed countenance; and because this study of human passions
will bring a degree of energy, unity, and originality into every one
of his designs (all of which will necessarily be different), so
simple, so domestic, and so lifelike, as to strike very spectator
with an interest and a sympathy, for which he will be utterly unable
to account, and to impress on him a perception of something more
ethereal than stone or carving, somewhat similar to that which some
will remember having felt disagreeably in their childhood, on
looking at any old house authentically haunted. The architect
will forget in his study of life the formalities of science, and,
while his practiced eye will prevent him from erring in
technicalities, he will advance, with the ruling feeling, which, in
masses of mind, is nationality, to the conception of something truly
original, yet perfectly pure.
--Poetry of Architecture by John
Ruskin
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Patrick: Lagniappe
These feelings we would endeavor to impress
upon all persons likely to have anything to do with embellishing, as
it is called, fine natural scenery; as they might, in some degree,
convince both the architect and his employer of the danger of giving
free play to the imagination in cases involving intricate questions
of feeling and composition, and might persuade the designer of the
necessity of looking, not to his own acre of land, or to his own
peculiar tastes, but to the whole mass of forms and combination of
impressions with which he is surrounded.
--Poetry of Architecture by John
Ruskin
[N.B.: Keep despairing, ye mighty
writers.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
It should therefore be remembered by every
proprietor of land in hill country, that his possessions are the
means of a peculiar education, otherwise unattainable, to the
artists, and in some degree to the literary men, of his country;
that, even in this limited point of view, they are a national
possession, but much more so when it is remembered how many
thousands are perpetually receiving from them, not merely a
transitory pleasure, but such thrilling perpetuity of pure emotion,
such lofty subject for scientific speculation, and such deep lessons
of natural religion, as only the work of a Deity can impress, and
only the spirit of an immortal can feel: they should remember that
the slightest deformity, the most contemptible excrescence, can
injure the effect of the noblest natural scenery, as a noted of
discord can annihilate the expression of the purest harmony; that
thus it is in the power of worms to conceal, to destroy, or to
violate, what angels could not restore, create or consecrate; and
that the right, which every man unquestionably possesses, to be an
ass, is extended only, in public, to those who are innocent in
idiotism, not to the more malicious clowns, who thrust their
degraded motley conspicuously forth amidst the fair colors of earth,
and mix their incoherent cries with the melodies of eternity, break
with their inane laugh upon the silence which Creation keeps where
Omnipotence passes most visibly, and scrabble over with the
characters of idiocy the pages that have been written by the finger
of God.
--Poetry of Architecture by John
Ruskin
[N.B.: Speaking of the finger of God--I
draw your attention to the fact that the above squib consists of
just one sinuous sentence. Look on Ruskin's works, ye mighty
writers, and despair.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The noble scenery of that earth is the
inheritance of all her inhabitants: it is not merely for the few to
whom it temporarily belongs, to feed from like swine, or to stable
upon like horses, but it has been appointed to be the school of the
minds which are kingly among their fellows, to excite the highest
energies of humanity, to furnish strength to the lordliest
intellect, and food for the holiest emotions of the human soul.
The presence of life is, indeed, necessary to its beauty, but of
life congenial with its character; and that life is not congenial
which thrusts presumptuously forward, amidst the calmness of the
universe, the confusion of its own petty interests and groveling
imaginations, and stands up with the insolence of a moment, amid the
majesty of all time, to build baby fortifications upon the bones of
the world, or to sweep the copse from the corrie, and the shadow
from the shore, that fools may risk, and gamblers gather, the spoil
of a thousand summers.
--Poetry of Architecture by John
Ruskin
[N.B.: Ruskin was green before green was
keen.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The avenue, therefore, must not be too long.
It is quite a mistake to suppose that there is sublimity in a
monotonous length of line, unless indeed it be carried to an extent
generally impossible, as in the case of the long walk at Windsor.
From three to four hundred yards is a length which will display the
elevation well, and will not become tiresome from continued
monotony. The kind of tree must, of course, be regulated by
circumstances; but the foliage must be unequally disposed, so as to
let in passages of light across the path, and cause the motion of
any object across it to change, like an undulating melody, from
darkness to light. It should meet at the top, so as to cause
twilight, but not obscurity; and the idea of a vaulted roof, without
rigidity. The ground should be green, so that the sunlight may
tell with force wherever it strikes. Now, this kind of rich
and shadowy vista is found in its perfection only in England: it is
an attribute of green country; it is associated with all our
memories of forest freedom, of our wood-rangers, and yeomen with the
"doublets of the Lincoln green;" with our pride of ancient archers,
whose art was fostered in such long and breezeless glades; with our
thoughts of the merry chases of our kingly companies, when the dewy
antlers sparkled down the intertwined paths of the windless woods,
at the morning echo of the hunter's horn; with all, in fact, that
once contributed to give our land its ancient name of "merry"
England; a name which, in this age of steam and iron, it will have
some difficulty in keeping.
--Poetry of Architecture by John
Ruskin
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Patrick: Lagniappe
There never was, and never can be, a universal
beau idéal in architecture, and
the arrival at all local models of beauty would be the task of ages;
but we can always, in some degree, determine those of our own lovely
country. We cannot, however, in the present case, pass from
the contemplation of the villa of a totally different climate, to
the investigation of what is beautiful here, without the slightest
reference to styles now or formerly adopted for our own "villas," if
such they are to be called; and therefore it will be necessary to
devote a short time to the observance of the peculiarities of such
styles, if we possess them; or, if not, of the causes of their
absence.
--Poetry of Architecture by John
Ruskin
[N.B.: How naive of Ruskin to think that
climate or geography might have something to do with architectural
style--clearly he missed out on the lovely blocks of cement and
cubes of glass foisted upon us by the likes of Le Corbusier.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Man, the peasant, is a being of more marked
national character, than man, the educated and refined. For
nationality is founded, in a great degree, on prejudices and
feelings inculcated and aroused in youth, which grow inveterate in
the mind as long as its views are confined to the place of its
birth; its ideas molded by the customs of its country, and its
conversation limited to a circle composed of individuals of habits
and feelings like its own; but which are gradually softened down,
and eradicated, when the mind is led into general views of things,
when it is guided by reflection instead of habit, and has begun to
lay aside opinions contracted under the influence of association and
prepossession, substituting in their room philosophical deductions
from the calm contemplation of the various tempers, and thoughts,
and customs, of mankind. The love of its country will remain
with undiminished strength in the cultivated mind, but the national
modes of thinking will vanish from the disciplined intellect.
--Poetry of Architecture by John
Ruskin
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Patrick: Lagniappe
One of the principal charms of mountain scenery
is its solitude. Now, just as silence is never perfect or deep
without motion, solitude is never perfect without some vestige of
life. Even desolation is not felt to be utter, unless in some
slight degree interrupted: unless the cricket is chirping on the
lonely hearth, or the vulture soaring over the field of corpses, or
the mourner lamenting over the red ruins of the devastated village,
that devastation is not felt to be complete. The anathema of
the prophet does not wholly leave the curse of loneliness upon the
mighty city, until he tells us that "the satyr shall dance there."
And, if desolation, which is the destruction of life, cannot leave
its impression perfect without some interruption, much less can
solitude, which is only the absence of life, be felt without some
contrast. Accordingly, it is, perhaps, never so perfect as
when a populous and highly cultivated plain, immediately beneath, is
visible through the rugged ravines, or over the cloudy summits of
some tall, vast, and voiceless mountain.
--Poetry of Architecture by John
Ruskin
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Patrick: Lagniappe
What is most musical, will always be found most
melancholy; and no real beauty can be obtained without a touch of
sadness. Whenever the beautiful loses its melancholy, it
degenerates into prettiness. We appeal to the memories of all
our observing readers, whether they have treasured up any scene,
pretending to be more than pretty, which has not about it either a
tinge of melancholy or a sense of danger, the one constitutes the
beautiful, the other the sublime.
--Poetry of Architecture by John
Ruskin
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Patrick: Lagniappe
After a dozen paces Quirke cleared his throat
and said: 'I'm sorry about this morning, walking in like that when
you were in the bath.'
'I didn't mind. Quite the opposite, in
fact. I felt like--oh, I don't know, Helen, or Leda, or
somebody, being swooped down upon by a god disguised as a bull.
You do look quite bullish, you know, in a confined space.'
'Yes,' he said, 'and the world is my china
shop.'
--Elegy for April by Benjamin Black
(a/k/a John Banville)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The past had poison in it.
--Elegy for April by Benjamin Black
(a/k/a John Banville)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
'I've been away too,' he said.
'Oh, yes?'
'I was in St John of the Cross.'
'My--what's that?'
'A drying-out clinic.'
'Yes, now that I think of it, Phoebe mentioned
in one of her letters that you were in the bin. I thought she
was exaggerating. What was it like?'
'All right.'
She smiled. 'I'm sure.' The barmen
poured the champagne and set the sizzling glasses before them.
Quirke looked at his, chewing on his lip. 'Do you dare?' Rose
asked, smiling with sweet malice. 'I don't want to be
responsible for putting you back on the cross.'
He picked up his glass and tipped the rim of it
against hers. They drank. 'Here's to sobriety,' he said.
--Elegy for April by Benjamin Black
(a/k/a John Banville)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Malachy was gazing at him, his eyes hardly
visible behind those gleaming lenses; Quirke felt like a specimen
being studied under a glass. Now Mal asked softly: 'Don't you
ever just want it to be--to be done with?'
'Of course,' Quirke answered impatiently.
'In the past couple of months I thought at least once a day it might
be best to go, or to be gone, at least--the going itself is the ting
I don't care for.'
Malachy considered this, smiling to himself.
'Somebody asked, I can't remember who, How can we live, knowing
that we must die?'
'Or you could say, how can we not
live, knowing that death is waiting for us? It makes just as
much sense--more, maybe.'
--Elegy for April by Benjamin Black
(a/k/a John Banville)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The trouble with sins and sorrows, he had
discovered, is that in time they become boring, even to the
sorrowing sinner.
--Elegy for April by Benjamin Black
(a/k/a John Banville)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Jimmy had finished his cigarette and now he lit
a new one. No one smoked as much as Jimmy did; he had once
told Phoebe that he often found himself wishing he could have a
smoke while he was already smoking, and that indeed on more than one
occasion he had caught himself lighting a cigarette even though the
one he had going was there in the ash-tray in front of him.
--Elegy for April by Benjamin Black
(a/k/a John Banville)
[N.B.: The use of short sentences
alternating with long, compound ones is a sure sign of a master
prose stylist.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Originally consisting in the patient pursuit of
a fox, on steady horses assisted by contemplative and sagacious
dogs, the hunt was accelerated in the eighteenth century until it
had become a steeple-chase. Squire Osbaldeston, in the next
century, prostrate in a ditch with the bone of his leg sticking
through the boot, after being jumped on by Sir James Mugrave,
observed, 'I am so unlucky that I think I shall give up
hunting'--and did not. Mytton's insane leaps were the cause of
his popularity. Jorrocks was able to assert that the sport
offered 25 per cent of the danger of war.
Drink was also taken as a form of endurance.
Barrington gives an example of ten men who locked themselves in a
room with a hogshead of claret and contrived to finish it, together
with unspecified amounts of cherry brandy, in a week.
--The Age of Scandal by T.H. White
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Samuel Rogers said that 'when Lord Holland was
a schoolboy, he was forced, as a
fag, to toast
bread with his fingers for the breakfast of another boy.
Lord H's mother sent him a toasting fork. His fagger broke it
over his head, and still compelled him to prepare the toast in the
old way. In consequence of this process his fingers suffered
so much that they always retained a withered appearance.' Some
of the fags survived, and, according to the inexorable law of
nature, the survivors were the fittest.
--The Age of Scandal by T.H. White
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Patrick: Lagniappe
At sea, a hundred years later, in the navy
which Pepys had made, a part of the drill known as 'clearing decks
for action' consisted in removing the seamen's chests to the middle
of the aisle between the gun-ports. This was done by the
Loblolly Men, who made a platform with the chests, on which the
surgeons laid out their saws and chisels. When the action
began, and the eighty-pound shot began to thump against the wooden
walls, and to splinter them, and to enter, the Loblolly Men seized
the casualties and hauled them screaming to the platform, where the
surgeons sawed off any shattered limb as quickly as possible, tied
up the arteries with silk--which was to be tugged daily, if the
patient survived, until it rotted and came away--and dipped the
stump in hot tar. Those who were to badly wounded were thrown
overboard. Shelley's romancing friend Trelawny said that his
ship, the Superb, was uniformly painted red inside at the
period of Trafalgar, so that the blood would not show.
--The Age of Scandal by T.H. White
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The eighteenth century managed to eat so much
more than we do because it ate more slowly. It could drink
more, by drinking all night. Old Lady Dorothy Nevill, who was
born in the reign of George IV, survived to complain n 1910 because
'everything is served at such lightning speed that it is as much as
one can do to swallow the few mouthfuls called dinner before one's
plate has been snatched away. The whole system of these
hurried modern meals is uncomfortable and unhealthy.' It would
be interesting to find out whether the pulse rate has gone up.
--The Age of Scandal by T.H. White
[N.B. White wrote this book in 1950--in
the middle of Britain's post-war austerity (rationing would not be
abolished for several more years). As in the United States,
the "big" difference between people then and people today is that
people were not only not "big" but were positively thin. In a
mere 60 years we have gone from marveling how people could be so fat
in the eighteenth century to wondering how White could be so
wrongheaded as to think such was the case.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
When [King George IV] was finally dead, with
the dreadful cry of 'This is death! O God, they have deceived me!'
there were found in his wardrobe all the coats, boots and pantaloons
of fifty years. He had remembered them all, and could call for
any one of them at any moment. There were five hundred
pocket-books, containing forgotten sums of money amounting to
£ 10,000 together with countless bundles of
women's love-letters and locks of hair. Greville was indignant
about this, as he had been indignant when the king spent all is time
altering the uniforms of the Guards and seeing more of his tailor,
for that purpose, than he had seen of his Prime Minister. But
the prerogative of the Crown had already been hamstrung by the
growth of parliamentary power, and there was little left for kings
to do, unbidden, except to alter uniforms and count their clothes.
--The Age of Scandal by T.H. White
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The full facts about bird migration were
unknown even to the immortal Gilbert White--fortunately unknown,
since it gave Dr Johnson the opportunity for one of his more
prodigious belly-floppers. 'Swallows', he explained
tremendously, 'certainly sleep all the winter. A number of
them conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and then all
in a heap throw themselves under water, and lie in the bed of a
river.'
--The Age of Scandal by T.H. White
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"Stories," he said, "are only of interest when
they are true, or when you have made them up specially to amuse me.
Ghost stories, made up by some dim old English virgins, are neither
true nor interesting. So no more ghost stories, please,
Madame."
--The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"Really," she thought with a giggle, "this is a
very penny-novelettish seduction, how can I be taken in by it?"
But she was filled with a strange, wild,
unfamiliar happiness, and knew that this was love. Twice in
her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing
somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and
wave and run after him, and it is not only not the friend, but not
even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend
appears in view, and then you can't imagine how you ever mistook
that other person for him.
--The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Twice a week Linda worked in a Red bookshop.
It was run by a huge, perfectly silent comrade, called Boris.
Boris liked to get drunk from Thursday afternoon, which was closing
day in that district, to Monday morning, so Linda said she would
take it over on Friday and Saturday. An extraordinary
transformation would then occur. The books and tracts which
mouldered there month after month, getting damper and dustier until
at last they had to be thrown away, were hurried into the
background, and their place taken by Linda's own few but well-loved
favourites. Thus for Whither British Airways? was
substituted Round the World in Forty Days, Karl Marx, the
Formative Years was replaced by The Making of a
Marchioness, and The Giant of the Kremlin by Diary
of a Nobody, while A Challenge to Coal-Owners made way
for Kong Solomon's Mines.
--The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
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Patrick: Lagniappe
We had never learnt to dance, and, for some
reason, we had supposed it to be a thing which everybody could do
quite easily and naturally. I think Linda realized there and
then what it took me years to learn, that the behaviour of civilized
man really has nothing to do with nature, that all is artificiality
and art more or less perfected.
--The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
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Patrick: Lagniappe
After dinner the girls had taken Louisa
upstairs. She was rather startled at first to see printed
notices in the guests' rooms:
OWING TO AN UNIDENTIFIED CORPSE IN THE CISTERN
VISITORS ARE REQUESTED NOT TO DRINK THE BATH WATER.
VISITORS ARE REQUESTED NOT TO LET OFF FIREARMS,
BLOW BUGLES, SCREAM OR HOOT, BETWEEN THE HOURS OF MIDNIGHT AND SIX
A.M.
And, on one bedroom door:
MANGLING DONE HERE.
But it was soon explained to her that these
were jokes.
--The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"Yes," she said, vaguely. "It is the
worst pain in the world. But the funny thing is, you always
forget in between what it's like. Each time, when it began, I
felt like saying, 'Oh, now I can remember, stop it, stop it.'
And, of course, by then it was nine months too late to stop it."
At this point Linda began to cry, saying how
dreadful it must be for cows, which brought the conversation to an
end.
--The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
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Patrick: Lagniappe
A few weeks before Satchmo came out,
he appeared on Stage Show, a TV series hosted by Tommy and
Jimmy Dorsey. "We was going to play '[South] Rampart Street
Parade,'" he remembered, "and we're discussing what tempo to play
it, and I say, 'Why don't you play it not too slow, not too fast,
just half fast.' The audience finally picked it up. . . . From
then on--couldn't nothing follow it." That was Stachmo: he
took his music seriously, but never himself.
--Pops by Terry Teachout
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Armstrong, whose preference for dark-skinned
women was so marked that he wrote a piece for Ebony about
it, was struck not only by "the glow of her deep brown skin" (he
liked to call her "Brown Sugar") but also by the fact that she had
gotten into the Cotton Club's chorus line in spite of it.
"Lucille was the first girl to crack the high-yellow color standard
used to pick girls for the famous Cotton Club chorus line," he wrote
in Ebony. "I think she was a distinguished pioneer."
--Pops by Terry Teachout
[N.B.: There are still a number of racial
issues that are rarely discussed and discrimination based on color
within the African-American community itself is one of them.
Just reflect how rarely one sees an African-American political
figure, corporate executive, movie star or musician whose skin is as
dark or darker than that of Louis Armstrong. But we are not to
speak of such things in our post-racial society when the
"high-yellow color standard" has long since been abolished and
forgotten. It's just a coincidence that things have worked out
as if it still existed.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Few survivors of the big-band era romanticized
it. Charlie Barnet summed up life on the road in six blunt
words: "You stay tired, dirty and drunk." Mike Zwerin was more
expansive: "You skim more than read, pass out rather than fall
asleep. You work when everybody else is off, breakfast in the
evening, dinner at dawn. Disorder is the order, physical
alienation is so powerful, so omnipresent, that no treatment seems
too extreme. . . . You've got to find a familiar internal place to
hang on to, it's a matter of survival. And there is one place,
a warm corner called stoned."
--Pops by Terry Teachout
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WHAT WE'RE READING
Patrick:
- The Last Chronicle of Barset
by Anthony Trollope
- The Birthday Boys
by Beryl Bainbridge
- The Rise and Fall of the Man of
Letters by John Gross
Kathryn:
- Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
- Masters of Atlantis by Charles
Portis
RECENT READS
Patrick:
Kathryn:
IN THE QUEUE
Patrick:
Kathryn:
- Story by Robert McKee
- Consilience by Edward O. Wilson
LITBLOG BIBELOTS
SUGGESTED LINKS
Patrick:
The Reading
Experience (a smart and witty litblog)
Invisible Adjunct (a sad
and poignant blog written in ravishing prose by an anonymous adjunct
professor ultimately denied tenure; she left the site up as a
well-visited tombstone)
The Dickens Page (Dickens, Dickens and more Dickens)
About Last Night (Terry Teachout rocks!)
OS
Shakespeare (All things Shakespeare--and it's free!)
Kathryn:
Arts
and Letters Daily
Internet Movie
Database Literary trivia:
First Line Quiz
Movie reviews:
Rotten Tomatoes
Photo.net: Fish
around in "Top-rated photos."
Things My
Girlfriend and I Have Argued About: Want a good laugh?
More earnest chain email propagating misinformation?
Send the sender to
Snopes.com.
An animated primer on
The Internet
vs. Real Life; takes a long time to load. New
Orleans Links
NOLA.com
WWOZ radio
Jazz Fest
Parasol's for po boys
Maple Street Books
Basin
Street Records
Mardi Gras 2005
Austin Links
Mother Egan's Irish Pub
Austin City Limits Music Festival
Salvage
Vanguard Theater
Book People |