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ARCHIVED ENTRIES FOR
JANUARY 2009
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"Just not awake yet," Bo lied. He felt
professional about lying, and once started, would not stop.
"Momma overslept. Got me up and out without coffee and half
dressed. Said I was late to work. What time is it,
Bill?" Questions and complex sentences, Bo had learned, were
the great shield of liars.
--Fox Hunters from The Stories of
Breece D'J Pancake
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"At the same time Richard is not only a mood of
Shakespeare's, but in a persistent exemplar, after his fall, of the
truth that a king is merely a man, a truth which Shakespeare seems
now for the first time to have realized imaginatively.
'For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends; subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?'
"As a closer view of royalty and the
aristocracy began to sap Shakespeare's awe and respect, his humor
expanded, and in its turn helped on the process of disintegration.
The notion that humor is distasteful to power and position had
already occurred to him when he was writing King John.
'That idiot, laughter, . . .' the king says, 'a passion hateful to
my purposes.'
--The Return of William Shakespeare by
Hugh Kingsmill
[N.B.: It seems to me that this reasoning
also casts light on a later, and, in my opinion, much greater play:
The Merchant of Venice. In terms of mere common
humanity, a much greater thing than mere kingship, is not Shylock's
famous speech, seen through this lens, even more affecting?
"If you prick us, do we not bleed?"]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"Yes, yes," Shakespeare smiled tolerantly.
"How difficult it is," he said, after a pause, "to say exactly what
one thinks. Half a dozen thoughts, perhaps, on some matter
exist side by side in the same mind, but only one can emerge at a
time, and the first to get out usually stands at the exit, and hits
the others over the head as they try to pass."
--The Return of William Shakespeare by
Hugh Kingsmill
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Patrick: Lagniappe
We went on to dinner in the West End.
London was London on a Saturday night, Hogarth or Hieronymus Bosch,
take your pick - in the restaurant we bumped into several people we
knew, actors and two playwrights, so there was a lot kissing, the
women kissing the women, the men kissing the women, and muddled into
all this, the men kissing the men - some of us were heterosexual,
but still we ran into each other's arms, rubbed cheeks, kissed, as
we made growling sounds of pleasure and love - this male cuddling is
a new fashion, probably come over from New York or Russia, and I
don't really like it, really rather hate it, especially when they
have beards, like both of the playwrights and one of the actors,
they're rough on my skin, and probably full of food and insects, and
they're smelly, but I see no way of repelling them unless I take to
dribbling into them or blowing my nose over them, and word gets
rounds that I'm to be avoided, however soft-skinned, clean and
inviting my own cheeks are.
--The Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray
[N.B.: So, you want to write a funny
book? Well, read that excerpt up there again--yep, it's just
one long sentence--and when you can write one just as long and just
as funny, you're ready to start scribbling. Until then, keep
your head down and let the master return to his work.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
'We have known each other so long,' said
Emerson, 'and I have told you so often that I love you that we have
come to make almost a joke of it, as if we were playing some game.
It just happens that that is our way, to laugh at things. But
I am going to say it once again, even if it has come to be a sort of
catch-phrase. I love you. I'm reconciled to the fact
that I am done for, out of the running, and that you are going to
marry somebody else; but I am not going to stop loving you. It
isn't a question of whether I should be happier if I forgot you.
I can't do it. It's just an impossibility, and that's all
there is to it. Whatever I may be to you, you are part of me,
and you always will be part of me. I might just as well try to
go on living without breathing as living without loving you.'
--Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"Y'see, Jim, I'm stockholder in this camp, and
I've got to make an important announcement at dinner tonight."
"Tell him, papa; it's your idea. Listen,
Mr. Brush."
"Yes, sir, about how everybody who mentions the
depression must pay a fine of fifteen cents. D'you like it?
--Heaven's My Destination by Thornton
Wilder
[N.B.: And here's a piece of advice that
didn't work then and won't work now.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"Mr. Brush, I think he was going to commit
suicide last week."
"Do you?"
"I don't know. I don't know. And
I've never mentioned it to a soul. But one night I got up.
I saw a light in the bathroom, and he was standing there just
thinking . . . and with such a look on his face, Mr. Brush, such a
sad look. And now when he calls out in his sleep I think it's
about that. There's no business at his office any
more, not to speak of, and he worries about me and the children."
Here she suddenly lowered her head and whispered, passionately:
"I don't mind if we're going to be poor. I don't care if we're
as poor as dirt. I don't care if the town pays for us, only I
don't want him to be so miserable.
"So you ought to tell him that," said Brush.
--Heaven's My Destination by Thornton
Wilder
[N.B.: Although this was written during
the First World Depression, it's still good advice for the Second
World Depression.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"That's another of my theories. A voice
like mine is just a gift, that's all. It's not anybody's
credit to have a fine voice. It's just a thing of nature, like
any other. Niagara Falls and the caves of Kentucky and John
McCormack are just gifts to the public. It's like strength.
I happen to have that, too. I'll help you move your trunk or
your piano all day, but I wouldn't take money for it."
--Heaven's My Destination by Thornton
Wilder
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Brush leaned forward earnestly. "You know
what I think is the greatest thing in the world? It's when a
man, I mean an American, sits down to Sunday dinner with his wife
and six children around him. Do you know what I mean?"
"Six, eh?"
"Yes, and the more the better. Well,
that's the thing I want most of all, so everywhere I go I keep
looking for a wife. And every now and then I used to think I'd
found her."
--Heaven's My Destination by Thornton
Wilder
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"Buddy," said Blodgett, "why did you say that
it made you nervous to get raises?"
"Because hardly anybody else's getting raises
these days. I think everybody ought to be hit by the
depression equally. You see?"
--Heaven's My Destination by Thornton
Wilder
[N.B.: So, are you looking for some good
bedtime reading as you while away the time during the Second World
Depression? Look no farther than Wilder's Heaven's My
Destination an updating of Dostoevsky's The Idiot (or,
depending on taste, Cervantes' Don Quixote) featuring one
George Brush, whose religious convictions do battle against the
forces of the Great Depression and modern humanism. I won't
reveal the outcome of this epic struggle, but I can assure you even
such atheists as Bertrand Russell will shed a tear at the end.
An inspiring story for one and all.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"What are you going to do with him?" asked
Fursey.
"Well," said Cuthbert, "it's a little
experiment of mine. I'm trying to make him half-human. I
hope to pass him off as a minor man of letters. He has many of
the qualities. Observe the cute narrowly-spaced eyes and the
steady dribble of venom from the tongue. He will make a very
passable minor man of letters, or rather one who imagines himself to
be a man of letters."
"He doesn't look very human to me," observed
Fursey.
"He's not supposed to be very human," rejoined
Cuthbert. "Didn't I tell you he's to be a minor literary man?
Wait."
Cuthbert put his hand into his pocket and took
out a handful of horses' teeth, which he spaced carefully across the
gargoyle's mouth beneath the upper lip. "How's that?" he
asked.
"I suppose it's an improvement," muttered
Fursey without much conviction.
Cuthbert nodded to the gargoyle, which
shambled back into the depths of its cave.
--The Unfortunate Fursey by Mervyn
Wall
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The Bishop gave vent to a long-drawn sigh.
"Did it ever occur to you to wonder why God
created women?" he asked. "It's the one thing that tempts me
at times to doubt His infinite goodness and wisdom."
The friar shrugged his shoulders and exhaled
noisily to demonstrate that this was a problem far beyond his
limited perceptions.
"It's a thing that I've long since given up
trying to understand," he replied. "I assume with a blind
faith that they are in the world for the trial and affliction of
man, that his entry into another sphere may be the more glorious for
the temptations that he has successfully withstood in this."
"It was a hard measure," muttered the Bishop.
"God's hand was heavy on mankind the day that he created woman."
--The Unfortunate Fursey by Mervyn
Wall
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"Time is the opposite of space, have you
noticed?" she said. "In space, everything gets more blurred
the farther away you get. With time it's different, everything
becomes clear."
--Christine Falls by Benjamin Black
(a/k/a John Banville)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
It sometimes seemed to him that he favored dead
bodies over living ones. Yes, he harbored a sort of admiration
for cadavers, these was-skinned, soft, suddenly ceased machines.
They were perfected, in their way, no matter how damaged or decayed,
and fully as impressive as any ancient marble. He suspected,
too, that he was becoming more and more like them, that he was even
in some way becoming one of them. He would stare at his hands
and they would seem to have the same texture, inert, malleable,
porous, as the corpses that he worked on, as if something of their
substance were seeping into him by slow but steady degrees.
Yes, he was fascinate by the mute mysteriousness of the dead.
Each corpse carried its unique secret--the precise cause of death--a
secret that it was his task to uncover. For him, the spark of
death was fully as vital as the spark of life.
--Christine Falls by Benjamin Black
(a/k/a John Banville)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Davy the barman brought their drinks. It
was strange, Quirke reflected, that he had never got to like the
taste of whiskey, or of any alcohol, for that matter; even in the
wild times, after Delia had died, the sour burn of the stuff had
always repelled him a little, though he had still managed to pour it
into himself by the jugful. He was not a natural drinker; he
believed there were such, but he was not one of them. That was
what had kept him from destruction, he supposed, in the long,
lachrymose years of mourning for his lost wife.
--Christine Falls by Benjamin Black
(a/k/a John Banville)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The second most important building is the
library; Carthusians cherish books. A quarter century after
Bruno's death, Peter the Venerable notes that the monks' manual
labor consists "chiefly of transcribing books." The early
Carthusian monks, in fact, made their libraries by borrowing and
copying books. Three years after Bruno's death, Guibert, the
Benedictine Abbot of Nogent-Sous-Coucy, observes: "Although they
submit to every kind of privation, they accumulate a very rich
library." Books are the monk's most intimate companions; they
nurture and sustain him throughout his life. In 1127, Guigo I
instructed the monks: "Books forsooth, we wish to be kept very
carefully as the everlasting food of our souls, and most
industriously to be made, so that since we cannot do so by the
mouth, we may preach the word of God with our hands." The
manuscript collection of each Charterhouse was its major treasure.
In 1371, immediately after the monks had completed the restoration
of the Grande Chartreuse after one of its innumerable fires, another
fire broke out. When the Prior saw the severity of the flames,
he shouted above the tumult, "My fathers, my fathers, ad libros,
ad libros; let the rest burn, but save the books."
--An Infinity of Little Hours by Nancy
Klein Maguire
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Adjacent to the cubiculum, a small
room that the monks call their "Ave Maria" room opens to a
staircase. At the bottom of the stairs, an ambulatory leads to
an ample garden of perhaps 1,200 square feet in size. The
ambulatory has generous windows, and when snow covers the ground,
the monks use it during their recreation time. The far end of
the ambulatory leads to three separate conjoining areas: a small
bathroom, a workroom, and a large storage room for wood and coal.
When the monk leaves his cell three times a day to go to church, he
exits into the enclosed cloister that guides him to the church.
Next to the door of the cell, a hatch, or pass-through, allows a
brother to place food inside the cell; the brother never sees the
monk, not the monk the brother. A large garden, or garth,
enclosed by the U-shaped cloister, separates the cells, creating
visual and aural space. Within these solitary cells, the monks
work out their days.
--An Infinity of Little Hours by Nancy
Klein Maguire
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Carthusian cells are usually four-room,
two-story dwellings. Each two-story cell contains about 1,500
square feet. In 1960, some Charterhouses still had neither
electricity nor central heating. The cell encloses the monk,
and inside it he has everything he needs. The upper floor has
two rooms. The monk's most private space, his cubiculum,
has a bed in the form of a cupboard with a straw mattress (until the
end of the eighteenth century, wooden shutters instead of curtains
kept out the cold), a stove, a worktable, and a small oratory with a
prie-dieu (a built-in kneeler and book stand) facing the wall with a
crucifix hanging over it. Each cubiculum also has
some bookshelves, a bell above the bed, and a small built-in dining
table with a drawer.
--An Infinity of Little Hours by Nancy
Klein Maguire
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Each Charterhouse is vast. It must be.
Its vastness protects what the Carthusian monks call "the life," the
day in, day out, unchanging monastic regimen. Layers of
concentric circles wrap the monk in solitude, enclose him, protect
him from any awareness of secular life. The first circle is
the land surrounding the Charterhouse. To protect their
solitude, Carthusians acquire very large amounts of land, sometimes
thousands of acres. The exceptionally high walls around the
monastic complex provide the next protective circle. Although
the monks are not unfriendly, they do not offer hospitality;
outsiders, in fact, have an extraordinarily difficult time getting
into the Charterhouse at all. Within the exterior walls, the
high walls of the monk's cell provide another layer of privacy, and
finally, his ultimate privacy is the inner room in the cell, the
cubiculum, where no one can enter without the monk's
permission. He is entirely cut off from the world. No
newspapers enter a cell, no magazines, no secular books, no
telephones, no TV, no radio, not even any musical instruments.
At the center of these protective circles, the monk's own diligence
and prayer protect his interior life.
--An Infinity of Little Hours by Nancy
Klein Maguire
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Patrick: Lagniappe
As we grow older and realize more clearly the
limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real
and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.
--Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse
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Patrick: Lagniappe
He knew that doctors held that insufficient
sleep made a man pale and sallow, and he had always aimed at the
peach-bloom complexion which comes from a sensible eight hours
between the sheets. One of the Georges - I forget which - once
said that a certain number of hours' sleep each night - I cannot
recall at the moment how many - made a man something, which for the
time being has slipped my memory.
--Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse
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Patrick: Lagniappe
She was always criticizing my way of speaking.
One day I remember she said, 'You know what you do? You know
how rain takes the colour out of everything? That's what you
do to the English language. You blur it every time you open
your mouth.'
--The Collector by John Fowles
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Patrick: Lagniappe
She often went on about how she hated class
distinction, but she never took me in. It's the way people
speak that gives themaway, not what they say. You only had to
see her dainty ways to see how she was brought up. She wasn't
la-di-da, like many, but it was there all the same. You could
see it when she got sarcastic and impatient with me because I
couldn't explain myself or I did things wrong. Stop thinking
about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to
stop thinking about money.
--The Collector by John Fowles
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Miss Stein did not want to talk about his
stories but always about him as a person.
"What about his novels?" I asked her. She
did not want to talk about Anderson's works any more than she would
talk about Joyce. If you brought up Joyce twice, you would not
be invited back. It was like mentioning one general favorably
to another general. You learned not to do it the first time
you made the mistake. You could always mention a general,
though, that the general you were talking to had beaten. The
general you were talking to would praise the beaten general greatly
and go happily into detail on how he had beaten him.
--A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
[N.B.: This is all quite amusing given
that both Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein (except for a few
forlorn English professors with exquisitely bad literary taste,
setting aside The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas--oh,
Gertrude, if only you had stuck to autobiographies!) have been
completely forgotten. This attitude, though, is perhaps, in
large part, one of the causes for why certain American authors--yes,
Norman Mailer, I'm looking at you--go off the rails.
Literature as war has a certain sophomoric appeal to it, but
sophomores rarely graduate to Parnassus.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"If you don't want to read what is bad, and
want to read something that will hold your interest and is marvelous
in its own way, you should read Marie Belloc Lowndes."
I had never heard of her, and Miss Stein loaned
me The Lodger, that marvelous story of Jack the Ripper and
another book about murder at a place outside Paris that could only
be Enghien les Bains. They were both splendid after-work
books, the people credible and the action and the terror never
false. They were perfect for reading after you had worked and
I read all the Mrs. Belloc Lowndes that there was. But there
was only so much and none as good as the first two and I never found
anything as good for that empty time of day or night until the first
fine Simenon books came out.
--A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"Huxley is a dead man," Miss Stein said.
"Why do you want to read a dead man? Can't you see he is
dead?"
I could not see, then, that he was a dead man
and I said that his books amused me and kept me from thinking.
"You should only read what is truly good or
what is frankly bad."
--A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
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Patrick: Lagniappe
When I was writing, it was necessary for me to
read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you
would lose the thing that you were writing before you could go on
with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be
tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you
loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards,
when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think
or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had
learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to
stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the
well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
--A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
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