PATRICK'S PICKS Books
Movies
CD's
KATHRYN'S PICKS
Books
Movies
RECENT POSTS: Kathryn:
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)
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
'There are only two great feelings left in the
late twentieth century. Two great feelings that have eaten up
all the other, little feelings like love, loyalty, exaltation, anger
and alienation; as surely as if they were krill being sucked into
the maw of a whale. Immanence and imminence, immanence and
imminence. Everyone is convinced that something is going to
happen, but they don't know what it is. Some people suspect
that whatever it is will be some implosion of numen, some great
exposure of the transcendent. The rest don't know . . . yet.
But they will, they will.'
'Jim, we were going to have lunch, and you
promised to cut down on the ranting.'
--Waiting from The Quantity Theory
of Insanity by Will Self
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
"God listened and didn't say yes or no," her
father said. He was squatting at the river and now looked back
at her, his chin creasing. The back of his shirt was wet.
"If I could read Him right it was something like this--that I was
caught in myself and them money people caught in themselves and God
Himself caught in what He was and so couldn't be anything else.
Then I never thought about God again.
--By The River from Marriages and
Infidelities by Joyce Carol Oates
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
As we became better acquainted, mealtime
conversation takes on more range, and I am beginning to acquire some
insight into the affluent mind. F. Scott Fitzgerald is
supposed to have said, "The rich are different from us," and Ernest
Hemingway to have answered, "Yes, they have more money." One
wonders.
There is the lady from Florida who has six
darling poodles at home. She couldn't bear to leave all
of them for two whole weeks, so she brought her favorite one
and a maid to look after it, rented an apartment for them in
Phoenix, and visits twice daily. Today, at lunch, she swiped a
piece of steak to take to Doggie. This set us talking about
bowser bags. Another lady at our table complained about a
queer thing that happens at her parties: guests bring along bowser
bags, and behind her back get the servants to fill them up with
food--but she know the food isn't really for their dogs, they take
it home and eat it. I was startled into saying that I must say
nothing like that has ever happened to me when I give a party; she
said, "My dear, check with your butler, I'm sure he'll admit to you
that it goes on all the time." There is the lady whose husband
sends her fresh flowers every day, flown here from Honolulu.
Another has just returned from Portugal where she took her eight
grandchildren for a little treat--and allowed each to bring a friend
along for company, so they wouldn't fight. Yet another
sometimes flies from New York to London for the day, to see
the races--her race horse lives in England with its trainer.
--Maine Chance Diary from Poison
Penmanship by Jessica Mitford
[N.B.: The truly shocking aspect of these
anecdotes is that the author thought they were truly shocking when
first published (circa 1966) but nowadays they elicit little more
than a polite yawn as we learn of the latest billionaire building a
yacht the size of a pocket battleship while another is in
zero-gravity weight training for his vacation in space.
Ho-hum. In other news, everyone else is up to their eyeballs
in debt and is about to be thrown out of their house. How sad.
Perhaps they can line up at the local bakery and receive a slice of
day-old cake to eat.]
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
Then said Mrs Hauskbee too me--she looked a
trifle faded and jaded in the lamplight--'Take my word for it, the
silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever
woman to manage a fool.'
--Three and-an Extra from Plain
Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
Those in the know (the old-timers) tell me that
by Wednesday one is for some reason at one's lowest ebb. I can
see why: the miraculous shedding of weight has slowed down (I only
lost half a pound today), the novelty of the day's routine has worn
off, and there are still three days left until Sunday.
Perhaps reflecting the Wednesday slump,
lunchtime talk today turned from food to liquor: how many calories
in a whiskey sour? In an ounce of bourbon? The duenna
smilingly instructed us in these matters, and added that if one must
drink, plain scotch and water is better than martinis.
--Maine Chance Diary from Poison
Penmanship by Jessica Mitford
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
At dinnertime I got my first look at the main
house. It is a riot of elegance, or a profusion of
magnificence. This is where the Aubusson carpets are, and the
marble floors. It is like a small embassy: a large and
splendid drawing room, another room called "the library" (in honor
of a set of the Waverley Novels and the English Cyclopedia).
There is a visitors' book in the library going back to 1958, which
gives many a clue to the sources of income of the patrons of
Maine Chance. The signatures read in part like a grocery
shopping list (I found a popular ketchup, a famous cake flour, a
brand of canned soup, a yeast, and a coffee), in part like a roster
of the Republican National Committee. Mamie Eisenhower's large
round hand appears over and over.
--Maine Chance Diary from Poison
Penmanship by Jessica Mitford
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
This woman, Sarah Bernhardt, lived for
thirty-five years at the center of scandal and publicity; she was
denounced for her love affairs and extravagances and lauded by
others as the greatest genius of her time.
After eight years with the Comédie-Française
she resigned in a quarrel with the director and made the first of
eight triumphant tours in America. She dragged with her across
the country, in addition to her score of pets, the famous gold-fixtured
coffin which an admirer had given her at her request. After
having been photographed in it to spite her director, she kept it at
the foot of her bed wherever she went. In the United States
dozens of pamphlets circulated in her path, with titles like The
Amours of Sarah. The Bishop of Chicago thundered so
eloquently from his pulpit against the corrupting influence of the
French actress that her agent sent him a polite note: "Monseigneur:
I make it a practice to spend $400 on publicity when I come to your
city. But since you have done the job for me, I am sending you
$200 for your needy." Every fortune Sarah amassed on her
world-wide tours she proceeded to lose during the next season or two
in Paris, even though she was idolized by all classes. One
after the other, three major Paris theaters passed through her
hands; each had to be sold to cover her mounting depts. When
an injury to her leg first caused talk of amputation (which finally
became necessary in 1915), P. T. Barnum approached her with an offer
of $10,000 for the severed limb and the right to exhibit it.
In 1896 a municipal Journée Sarah
Bernhardt brought the whole of Paris to her feet. It
began with a banquet for six hundred at the Grand Hotel. The
guests marveled at the undiminished youth of the fifty-two-year-old
beauty whose son was already over thirty and managing her affairs.
A procession of two hundred carriages followed hers to her own Théâtre
de la Renaissance. After her performance of the third act of
Phèdre, half a dozen poets,
including François Coppée
and her new lover, Edmond Rostand (shortly to write two hits,
Cyrano de Bergerac and L'aiglon), recited versed to
her on a stage banked with flowers. Four years later she
attempted her most ambitious performance: Hamlet, en travesti,
in Marcel Schwob's fastidious prose translation. For twelve
days running she rehearsed from noon until six in the morning and
finally staged a passionate, sometimes sentimental version in which
she whispered "To be or not to be" almost in secreto.
Colette described her in the performance as having "a face sculpted
in white powder." Paris loved it; London, despite her previous
successes there, refused it in outrage; the festival at
Stratford-on-Avon was entranced. She went on acting for
fifteen years, short one leg at the end but never out of voice.
Sarah Bernhardt's was the most highly charged temperament of the era
and one of its greatest talents. Neither Caruso nor Nijinsky
had such a career of enduring public adulation, somersaulting
business ventures, and tumultuous private life. Only an
actress could replace the colossus of Victor Hugo, take Paris for
her private stage, and become what the French have called ever since
a monstre sacré.
--The Banquet Years by Roger Shattuck
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
But if you really want the best of modern
fiction, you must read Henry James. Here I do give my
unqualified admiration. I 'discovered' him only about a year
ago, but since then I have read him almost continuously and have
never tired and have a feeling that I never shall. His is a
blending of the finest style with the subtlest psychology. One
feels that not one of his characters is false: and the only possible
criticism I can make is that he is far too indifferent to the
'problems' of life: he is purely an observer. But this, from
an aesthetic point of view, is an advantage.
--Entry for July 31, 1916 from A War Diary
by Herbert Read from The Contrary Experience
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
The basis of their marriage was mutual respect,
enduring love, and "a common sense of values." There were
certain things that were wrong absolutely, and so long as they
agreed on what those things were, it did not matter much if in other
ways they behaved differently or even (in the eyes of the world)
outrageously. When we were children, they divided
misdemeanours into "crimes" and "sins," and applied the same rule to
themselves. Crimes were naughtinesses, for which we were
punished. (My mother was not very good at that. When I
broke the greenhouse windows, she decided to spank me on the bottom
with her hairbrush, but never having done such a thing before, she
used the brush bristle-side downwards, and the bristles were very
soft.) Sins were so dreadful that for them we were never
punished at all: their very exposure was enough. There were
only three sins: cruelty, dishonesty and indolence. Vita
herself had been guilty of the first in 1919-20; never again.
Harold was innocent of them all. Their morality can be summed
up as consideration for other people, particularly for each other,
and the development of their natural talents to the full. It
was an amalgam of the Christian virtues and the eighteenth-century
concept of the civilized life.
--Portrait of a Marriage (V. Sackville-West
& Harold Nicolson) by Nigel Nicolson
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
I walked all the way to Sotheby's, holding my
tummy in nearly the whole time, terribly good for one. There
was a picture belonging to me in the sale, a tiny canvas of a
Venetian nobleman's barge with livened gondoliers and a wonderfully
blue sky. I had bought it months before, hoping to persuade
myself that it was by
Longhi, but my efforts had been in vain so I had put it into
Sotheby's, who had austerely called it 'Venetian School, XVIII
Century.' I ran it up to the figure I had paid for it, then
left it to its own devices. To my delight it ran for another
three hundred and fifty before being knocked down to a man I detest.
It is probably in a Duke Street window this moment, labelled
Marieschi or some such nonsense. I stayed another ten
minutes and spent my profit on a doubtful but splendidly naughty
Bartolomaeus Spränger showing Mars
diddling Venus with his helmet on--such manners! On
my way out of the Rooms I telephoned a rich turkey farmer in Suffolk
and sold him the Spränger, sight unseen,
for what is known as an undisclosed sum, and toddled righteously
away towards Piccadilly. There's nothing like a little dealing
to buck one up.
--Don't Point that Thing at Me by
Kyril Bonfiglioli
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
HYMN TO THE BELLY
Room! Room! make room for the bouncing Belly,
First father of the sauce and deviser of jelly;
Prime master of arts and the giver of wit,
That found out the excellent engine of spit,
The plough and the flail, the mill and the hopper,
The hutch and the boulter, the furnace and copp
The oven, the bavin, the mawkin, the peel
The hearth and the range, the dog and the whee
He, the first invented the hogshead and tun,
The gimlet and vice too, and taught 'em to run;
And since, with the funnel and hippocras bag,
He's made of himself that now he cries swag;
Which shows, though the pleasure be but of four
inches,
Yet he is a weasel, the gullet that pinches
Of any delight, and not spares from his back
Whatever to make of the belly a sack.
Hail, hail, plump paunch! O the founder of taste,
For fresh meats or powdered, or pickle or paste!
Devourer of broiled, baked, roasted or sod!
And emptier of cups, be they even or odd!
All which have now made thee so wide i' the waist,
As scarce with no pudding thou art to be laced;
But eating and drinking, until thou dost nod,
Thou break'st all thy girdles and break'st forth a
god.
--Ben Jonson (collected in The
Wordly Muse (ed. A.J.M. Smith))
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
All those years of making, then losing, money,
I hadn't noticed that music had disappeared from my life any more
than I had noticed that friends, movies, ethics, sex, and Snickers
bars had vanished as well. When had a Snickers bar from the
freezer stopped being a treat? When had all my friends mutated
into connections who slowly, then swiftly, dropped me after the
divorce?
--How Perfect Is That ? by Sarah Bird
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
PHILOSOPHY
Nothing
Will
Come
Of
Anything.
--Alkaios (from Pure Pagan
(tr. Burton Raffel))
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
But on the clearest days the Blue Ridge is not
visible here even as a mirage, a high tossed smoky line penciled on
the west. Only within me can I hear the song of a
waterfall--not the obliterating crash of a Niagra, but an airy
cascade, spilling water from tilted ledges. Water poured so
fine that it shatters on the air and drifts, as a smoke, as a
lightly laden breeze, amongst the filmy leaves of the sweet
Appalachian flora. There the maidenhair and the foam of the
mountain bluets, deep gentian blue in tiny forests of threadfine
stems, are spangled with spray. And over the gleaming rocks
creep the mosses--the deep black moss, the frail Jungermannias
sending out green fingers everywhere--and the flat liverworts sprawl
fast under the overhanging ledges, translucent emerald green, like
seaweeds, or gray-green and nubbly, like a lizard's skin.
There the gentle wood frog lives, and in the wet moss the little red
triton runs, perpetually grinning, a slippery living bit of coral.
Who, of a burning day upon the plain, cannot feel the coolness, the
repose, of recurring phrases in the dryest of botany books, "in rich
mountain woods," "in wet moss," "on dripping rocks," "in cold
springs"?
--An Almanac for Moderns by Donald
Culross Peattie (entry for July 20th)
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
I never hear the thrush now, without wondering
if it will be the last time this season that he sings. After
each burning day I feel sure that, like a flower of the field, the
song will be wilted in the heat. All too soon the thrush will
molt. He will be here hopping about silently in the woods and
thickets, but he will not sing. Then indeed the dead of summer
will be upon us; breathless heat and heavy-hearted silence will
settle on the spots where now he still takes up his evening station
to refresh the hour when the soul can breathe in quiet, the brief,
brief moments between the fiery setting of the sun and the falling
of the heavy-leaved darkness.
--An Almanac for Moderns by Donald
Culross Peattie (entry for July 17th)
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
He stood alone on the stones, his mess-tin
spilled at his feet. Out of the vortex, rifling the air it
came--bright, brass-shod, Pandoran; with all-filling screaming the
howling crescendo's up-piling snapt. The universal world,
breath held, one half second, a bludgeoned stillness. Then the
pent violence released a consummation of all burstings out; all
sudden up-renderings and rivings-through--all taking-out of
vents--all barrier-breaking--all unmaking. Pernitric
begetting--the dissolving and splitting of solid things. In
which unearthing aftermath, John Ball picked up his mess-tin and
hurried within; ashen, huddled, waited in the dismal straw.
--In Parenthesis by David Jones
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
His chill fingers clumsy at full trouser
pocket, scattered on the stones: one flattened candle-end, two
centime pieces, palled silver sixpence, a length of pink Orderly
Room tape, a latch-key. The two young men together glanced
where it lay incongruous, bright between the sets. Keys of
Stondon Park. His father has its twin in his office in
Knightryder Street. Keys of Stondon Park in French farmyard.
Stupid Ball, it's no use here, so far from its complying lock.
Locks for shining doors for plaster porches, gentlemen of the 6.18,
each with a shining key, like this strayed one in the wilderness.
--In Parenthesis by David Jones
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
You bunch together before a tarred door.
Chalk scrawls on its planking--initials, numbers, monograms, signs,
hasty, half-erased, of many regiments. Scratched outdates
measuring the distance back to antique beginnings.
Dragoons--one troop.
4th Hussars--'D' Squadron No. 3 Troop.
Numerals crossed slanting indecipherable
allocations earlier still.
More clear, and very newly chalked, you read
the title of your entering, and feel confident, as one who reads his
own name in a church pew. '2 platoons, B Company', in large,
ill-formed calligraphy, countermanding the shadowy ciphering of the
previous occupants. Lance-Corporal Lewis pushed open the
door--and you file in.
The straw was grey and used and not so
plentiful as the heaped-up hay of their morning's rising.
--In Parenthesis by David Jones
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
A man with his puttees fastened at the ankle,
without tunic, his cap at a tilt, emerged upon the landscape and
took water in a flexible green canvas bucket from the ditch, where a
newly painted board, bearing a map reference, marked the direction
of a gun position. Tall uprights at regular intervals, to the
north-east side of this path were hung with a sagging netting--in
its meshes painted bits of rag, bleached with rain and very torn,
having all the desolation peculiar to things that functioned in the
immediate past but which are now no longer serviceable, either by
neglect or by some movement of events.
--In Parenthesis by David Jones
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
Even in his boyhood Augustus had studied
rhetoric with great eagerness and industry, and during the Mutina
campaign, busy though he was, is said to have read, written, and
declaimed daily. He kept up his interest by carefully drafting
every address intended for delivery to the Senate, the popular
Assembly, or the troops; though gifted with quite a talent for
extempore speech. What is more, he avoided the embarrassment
of forgetting his words, or the drudgery of memorizing them, by
always reading from a manuscript. All important statements
made to individuals, and even to his wife Livia, were first
committed to notebooks and then repeated aloud; he was haunted by a
fear of saying either too much or too little if he spoke off-hand.
His articulation of words, constantly pracitsed under an elocution
teacher, was pleasant and rather unusual; but sometimes, when his
voice proved inadequate for addressing a large crowd, he called a
herald.
--The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (tr.
Robert Graves)
[N.B.: And there, in one terse paragraph,
is the Platonic Form of our modern politicians'
communications--teleprompter and all. If only Bill Clinton had
scripted out everything he would have had to say to his wife, who
knows, maybe he could have avoided a thrown lamp or two . . . or
not.]
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
English boarding schools have much to recommend
them. If boys are going to be adolescent, and science has
failed to come up with a way of stopping them, then much better to
herd them together and let them get on with it in private. Six
hundred suits of skin oozing with pustules, six hundred scalps
weeping oil, twelve hundred armpits shooting out hair, twelve
hundred inner thighs exploding with fungus and six hundred minds
filling themselves with suicidal drivel: the world is best protected
from this.
--The Liar by Stephen Fry
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
Precision and arbitrariness were the twin
hallmarks of Conceptualist activity. On the morning that
inaugurated their "Gestures," as they called them, fifteen lowly
civil servants were found scalped in their beds. They were all
sewage-disposal civil servants. A political organization?
Fifteen days later a random selection of doctors, health inspectors,
social workers, charity secretaries and Salvation Army officials had
their Achilles' tendons severed in a lightning wave of synchronized
attacks. On the first day of the following month the
newspapers reported that thirty hardware shop owners, in various
parts of the country, had had their left eyes spooned out.
Four weeks later stolen helicopters showered over key cities a
bizarre confetti of pornographic postcards, atrocity photographs,
suppressed medical reproductions, vetoed X-ray plates, and
blacklisted urinalyses. (The police were not so much worried,
by this time, as utterly hysterical).
--Dead Babies by Martin Amis
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
But this work has not changed the savage nature
and austere beauty of the river itself. Man draws near to it,
fights it, uses it, loves it, but it remains remote, unaffected.
Between the fairy willows of the banks or the green slopes of the
levees it moves unhurried and unpausing; building islands one year
to eat them the next; gnawing the bank on one shore till the levee
caves in and another must be built farther back, then veering
wantonly and attacking with equal savagery the opposite bank; in
spring, high and loud against the tops of the quaking levees; in
summer, deep and silent in its own tawny bed; bearing eternally the
waste and sewage of the continent to the cleansing wide-glittering
Gulf. A gaunt and terrible stream, but more beautiful and dear
to its children then Thames or Tiber, the mountain brook or limpid
estuary. The gods on their thrones are shaken and changed, but
it abides, aloof and unappeasable, with no heart except for its own
task, under the unbroken and immense arch of the lighted sky where
the sun, too, goes a lonely journey.
--Lanterns on the Levee by William
Alexander Percy
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
Although Lao Pei's father had been a
bannerman, Lao Pei himself was a generation removed from the
tragedies of the 1911 revolution, and I felt that he was a cut above
the typical foreigner's cook. He knew some English, and was a
superb cook, too, being a master of anything from shashlik
to that work of patient love, Peking Dust--roasted chestnuts ground
to a power, poured into a mold of glazed berries, and topped with
spun sugar and whipped cream. But soon after he came to me he
began to do unpleasant things. I found that he had been
killing chickens by driving a long needle slowly through their
brains. He sometimes banged his head against the rockery in my
garden until blood dripped from his hair. He was overwhelmed,
he explained, by the woes of China.
--Peking Story by David Kidd
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
Among the compensations of advancing age is a
wholesome pessimism, which, while it takes the fine edge off
whatever triumphs may come to us, had the admirable effect of
preventing Fate from working off on us any of those gold bricks,
coins with strings attached, and unhatched chickens at which Ardent
Youth snatches with such enthusiasm, to its subsequent
disappointment. As we emerge from the twenties we grow into a
habit of mind which looks askance at Fate bearing gifts. We
miss, perhaps, the occasional prize, but we also avoid leaping
light-heartedly into traps.
--Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
Because the Devil--and God too--had always used
comic people, futile people, little suburban natures and the maimed
and warped to serve his purposes. When God used them you
talked emptily of Nobility and when the devil used them of
Wickedness, but the material was only dull shabby human mediocrity
in either case.
--The Ministry of Fear by Graham
Greene
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
BEGGAR'S SERENADE
I'm a peevish old man with a penny-whistle
Blowing under your window this blessed evening
But pause a moment and hear the tune I'm playing
I never was handsome and my limbs aren't straight
But I raise my finger and the girls all follow me
And leave some of the spruce young fellows gaping
I had a painted girl whom none spoke well of
And I had a milkmaid who didn't know cow from bull
And a girl with green flesh out of a lucky hill
And I had a lady fine as fine and as proud as you
To follow me forty leagues and bed under a bush
And I left her weeping at the long lane's end
And are you sure where you will lie to-night,
woman?
--John Heath Stubbs (from New
British Poets: An Anthology)
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
A bus entered the square. I went and
ordered another mild from the landlord, who'd just come in rubbing
his hands hard together. He was a very well-dressed man with a
carnation in his buttonhole and long, carefully brushed gray hair.
I thought it would be nice to exchange the pleasures of meditation
for those of communion with my fellow creatures, and addressed him.
After a brisk left-right-left of platitude ("Good evening"--"Lovely
drop of weather, what?"--"Marvelous, isn't it?") I at once went on
to rehearse the nice-room-this gambit, the
I-drew-up-the-plan-for-this-place-myself gambit, the
of-course-television's-ruining-this-business gambit, the
still-I-always-say-with-customers-you-can't-have-quantity-and-quality
gambit, the how-do-you-like-these-titchy-bottles-I-only-got-them-just-for-silly
gambit, and finally silence. His smiles, however, grew more
and more intimate as the talk petered out.
--That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley
Amis
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
Ennis was seeing, projected on to the bare
staves of his manuscript paper, Concepcion in a cold England,
shivering over the fireless grate, jaundiced-looking against the
snow, Concepcion in the fish queue, the "bloody foreigner" in the
English village, the "touch of the tar brush" from the tweeded
gentry. He foresaw the ex-prisoner-of -war Luftwaffe pilot,
flaxen, thick-spoken, absorbed into the farming community, playing
darts with the boys ("That were a bloody good one, Wilhelm"),
Concepcion and himself in the cold smokeroom ("That foreigner that
there Mr Ennis did marry"). Finally he saw Laurel meeting
Concepcion, Laurel slim and patrician, sunny hair glowing under the
floppy hat, over the flowered frock, at some garden party: "But
she's terribly sweet; that accent is most attractive; such
an unusual, such a perfectly fascinating biscuit-coloured
complexion; I'm sure we shall be great friends."
--A Vision of Battlements by Anthony
Burgess
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
Ashe noted as a curious fact that while the
actual valet of any person under discussion spoke of him almost
affectionately by his Christian name, the rest of the company used
the greatest ceremony and gave him his title with all respect.
Lord Stockheath was Percy to Mr. Ferris, and the Hon. Frederick
Threepwood was Freddie to Mr. Judson; but to Ferris Mr. Judson's
Freddie was the Hon. Frederick, and to Judson Mr. Ferris' Percy was
Lord Stockheath. It was rather a pleasant form of etiquette,
and struck Ashe as somehow vaguely feudal.
--Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
When the final introduction had been made,
conversation broke out again. It dealt almost exclusively, as
far as Ashe could follow it, with the idiosyncrasies of the
employers of those present. He took it that this happened all
down the social scale below stairs. Probably the lower
servants in the Servants' Hall discussed the upper servants in the
Steward's Room, and the still lower servants in the housemaids'
sitting-room discussed their superiors of the Servants' Hall, and
the still-room gossiped about the housemaids' sitting-room. He
wondered which was the bottom circle of all, and came to the
conclusion that it was probably represented by the small respectful
boy who had acted as his guide a short while before. This boy,
having nobody to discuss anybody with, presumably sat in solitary
meditation, brooding on the odd-job man.
--Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
"You must know," began Bishop Flanagan, "that
our minds have recently been exercised by certain untoward
happenings which gave rise to the conviction that there were
sorcerers in the neighborhood. For many nights King Cormac
Silkenbeard had been deprived of his rest by the hideous
caterwauling of a platoon of cats, who mustered on the roofs
surrounding the royal dwelling, and there raised a clamor so uncouth
and deformed that it was speedily doubted whether their behavior did
not proceed from the operation of a powerful spell. On the
fourth night, King Cormac told me, he had drunken deeply of brown
ale in an endeavor to forget his cares; and, enraged by the
persistence of the persecution to which he was being subjected, he
seized his sword and rushed out into the garden in his night attire.
To his horror he beheld several felines engaged in what appeared to
be animated conversation, while on the wall sat a brindled tom of
monstrous size with gleaming eyes and large white eyeballs, who
grinned sarcastically at the King and waved his paw in derision.
There could be no further doubt but that these were enchanted cats;
and on my advice, two conjurors and a ventriloquist who had come to
the town for the annual fair, were immediately seized. As they
persisted obstinately in denial, they were put to the question."
"With favorable results?" asked the friar,
whose professional interest was aroused.
"Yes," said the Bishop with satisfaction.
"After three days' application of the best available monkish
tortures, they agreed to admit anything. Further proof of
their guilt was afforded by the fact that no sooner had they been
apprehended by the King's men, than the enchanted cats ceased to
trouble the royal repose."
Father Furiosus nodded approvingly. "It's
a well-known fact," he said, "attested by all the Fathers of the
Church, that when the officers of justice lay their hands upon a
sorcerer, he is at that moment bereft of his execrable powers."
"Unfortunately," said the Bishop, "the two
conjurors and the ventriloquist, having been crippled in the course
of the judicial examination, had to be carried to the stake.
The burning was a colorful ceremony, but I should have wished that
they could have walked."
--The Unfortunate Fursey by Mervyn
Wall
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
'A bewildering procession of the Unemployed,'
the lady journalist remarked. 'More ominous than the last
one.'
'Yes. I don't know what is going to
happen. Processions are indelicate manifestations and are best
discouraged by indifference. But an idle curiosity sends
everyone out into the streets to see what is happening and swells
the ranks of the dissatisfied. It is the same with
revolutions. Mankind is periodically beset by mass
dissatisfaction when, at some obscure, unmeaning signal, men
suddenly begin to air their private grievances in a mass--as though
that could possibly help them; and then, growing hearty, and with
that corporate look in their eyes, they are ready to track down the
Evil in their life to any handy bogey--the capitalist, the Jew, the
profiteer, the Bolshevik, or any foreigner. It used to be
religion--the Jesuit, the Pope, the Turk, or the Freemason--but that
is now out of fashion.
--Doom by William Gerhardie
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
Charlotte immediately detected that something
other than his concern for academic achievement was now seeping into
that sincere expression of his. She knew this was the moment
to put a stop to it. The thought of his starting to "hit on"
her again was unpleasant and even frightening . . . and yet she
didn't want to put a stop to it. The present moment
was much too early in her experience for her to have expressed it in
a sentence, but she was enjoying the first stirrings, the first in
her entire life, of the power that woman can hold over that creature
who is as monomaniacally hormonocentric as the beasts of the field,
Man.
--I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe
|
|
|
|
Patrick: Lagniappe
"Have you ever heard of sexiling?"
"Yeah . . ."
"Has it ever happened to you?"
"To me? No, but it happens."
| |