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ARCHIVED ENTRIES FOR
JANUARY 2012
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Patrick: Lagniappe
When a man rides a long time through wild
regions he feels the desire for a city. finally he comes to
Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted
with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are
made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always
encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls
among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he
desired a city. Isadora, therefore, is the city of his dreams:
with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a
young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square
there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by;
he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.
--Cities & Memory 2 from Invisible
Cities by Italo Calvino
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Treason! Faithfully that terrible word
reappears on French lips the moment there is a major disaster,
revealing one of the less admirable national traits. Gallic
pride can never admit that the nation has been collectively at
fault; inevitably, she has been betrayed by an individual or a
faction. Repeatedly during the Franco-Prussian War, and again
in the most adverse moments of 1914-18, the expression Nous
sommes trahis rings out across the ramparts. But the soil
had never been more fertile for such an interpretation of France's
woes than in May 1940.
--To Lose A Battle: France 1940 by
Alistair Horne
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Later Giraud was forced to seek refuge in an isolated farmhouse.
At 6 A.M. on the 19th it was surrounded by German troops, and Giraud
was forced to surrender - according to the French, to a group of
tanks; according to the War Diary of the 6th Panzer, to the men of
one of its field kitchen units. That same day the division
also captured General Bruneau, the commander of the annihilated
French 1st Armoured Division. Giraud's command had lasted
exactly three and one-half days. He had done the best he could
in an already hopeless situation.
--To Lose A Battle: France 1940 by
Alistair Horne
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Patrick: Lagniappe
One of Rommel's panzer commanders recalled simply shouting, loudly
and impudently, at the French troop columns to throw away their
weapons. "Many willingly follow this command, others are
surprised, but nowhere is there any sign of resistance."
Several times his tank men were questioned, hopefully: "Anglais?"
There was evidently one rare, recalcitrant exception, who brought
out the ruthless streak in Rommel: a French lieutenant colonel
overtaken by Rommel as his staff car was trapped in the road jam.
On being asked by him for this rank and appointment "his eyes glowed
hate and impotent fury and he gave the impression of being a
thoroughly fanatical type." Rothenburg signalled to him to get
in his tank. "But he curtly refused to come with us, so, after
summoning him three times to get in, there was nothing for it but to
shoot him."
--To Lose A Battle: France 1940 by
Alistair Horne
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Patrick: Lagniappe
But the important physical feature of
Reynaud was his modest stature. He had most of the
attributes of the small man: agility, combativeness, vulnerability
to flatterers, the self-confidence that masks a sense of inferiority
- and courage. His enemies (and they were many) called him
"Mickey Mouse." But to others he was a little fighting cock
who, when a subject fired his imagination, would "get to his feet,
put his hands in his pockets, throw back his head to raise his short
figure to its full height, and hold forth in picturesque and biting
phrases like quick hammer blows." In debate he showed a
brilliant, quick intellect and a devastating logic; but he sought to
master rather than charm, and this with his natural assertiveness
and love of battle did not endear him to other politicians of the
Third Republic - especially to Daladier, who loathed him.
--To Lose A Battle: France 1940 by
Alistair Horne
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Daladier was a stockily built, energetic man with a dull-brown
complexion and a greasy lock of hair that imparted a slight (and
deceptive) look of
Bonaparte.
Under the strain of the Front Populaire, he had come to depend
increasingly on the more fiery French liquors. Writing in all
the bitterness of 1940,
Vincent Sheean
describes him as "a dirty man with a cigarette stuck to his lower
lip, stinking of absinthe, talking with a rough Marseillaise accent.
. . . He had a certain southern eloquence, particularly over the air
when he could not be seen." While Daladier was still in power,
Harold
Nicolson wrote in his diary that he looked "like a drunken
peasant. His face must once have had sharp outlines but now it
is blurred by the puffiness of drink. He looks extremely
exhausted and has the eyes of a man who has had a bad night.
He had a weak, sly smile." In the south, his supporters
nicknamed Daladier "the bull of Vaucluse," but as
Spears
remarked acidly, "his horns bore more resemblance to the soft
feelers of the snail than to the harder bovine variety."
Others said that his was a case of a "velvet hand in a glove of
iron."
--To Lose A Battle: France 1940 by
Alistair Horne
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Patrick: Lagniappe
How difficult it is at this range to recapture,
let alone explain, the instant magic that, in the 1930s, Hitler
wielded over German youth - sublimely unaware as it was of the dark
tunnel of unprecedented horror into which he would eventually lead
them and all Europe! Onto the fertile stock of German
childhoods cast over by the miseries of hunger, crazy inflation,
followed by depression and mass unemployment, the humiliations of
defeat and occupation, the apparent injustices of Versailles and the
seeming pointlessness of life under Weimar, Hitler was able to graft
the bud of intoxication. As Nietzsche said of the Germans,
"Intoxication means more to them than nourishment. That is the
hook they will always bite on. A popular leader must hold up
before them the prospect of conquests and splendour; then he will be
believed." Hitler was believed and his early bloodless
conquests confirmed and reconfirmed that belief. Satisfying
some elemental need for mysticism in the German soul, the gigantic
Nuremberg Rallies with their pageantry and colour, their hysterical,
chanting masses of assenting humanity, filled young Germans with a
revolutionary fervour which they carried with them into the
Wehrmacht.
--To Lose A Battle: France 1940 by
Alistair Horne
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The early stages of opium abuse are
characterized by vivid and exciting dreams, and Harry put a high
price indeed on his dreams. Opium seemed as cheap a ticket as
any both to Nirvana, beyond banal physical functions, and to
Dionysian ecstasies--especially since it is one of the peculiar
properties of opium that it can still or excite, is either a
stimulant or depressant, depending upon the psychology and
physiology of the user at the time of use, upon the dose consumed
and upon a full spectrum of environmental and spiritual variables.
--Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent
Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Opium (pace Coleridge and De Quincey)
may be eaten, or, broken down into its alkaloid (morphine) or
derivative (heroin), it may be injected. But for Harry the
smoking was crucial because it was part of an exotic and Oriental
tradition. To smoke opium required elegant paraphernalia and
practiced skill: a bamboo dipper was used to remove a bit of the
treacly opium, which was then twisted around the sharp end of the
stick while the stuff was roasted, just so, over a lamp, till it
resembled burnt wool. Too much flame and the opium was dried
out, ruined; too little and it could not be smoked. A the
exactly right moment the stuff was transferred from the dipper to
the tiny bowl of a heated pipe, and inhaled three or four times.
The preparation might occupy minutes, the smoking thirty seconds.
--Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent
Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Harry consistently overdrew his account not
only at Boston's State Street Trust Co., but also at Morgan, Harjes.
Both places indulged him, and the latter institution accustomed
itself to honoring such of his checks as were delivered for
collection written on napkins from the restaurant where he had
dined, or on plates, or whatever came easily at hand. Harry
did not like to carry a billfold.
--Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent
Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff
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Patrick: Lagniappe
When he discovered D. H. Lawrence, who later
became his friend, Harry was awed, but not by everything he wrote.
(He found Lady Chatterley's Lover silly and salacious.)
He noted that it had been said of Lawrence that "like a Roman
voluptuary he would sacrifice a nation for a night of perfect love."
Beside that extravagant claim, Harry penciled: "Who wouldn't
who had any sense?"
--Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent
Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff
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Patrick: Lagniappe
It should be recorded in Harry's favor that
apart from a light supping upon one lady's neck, he was never, till
his bloody end, a man for cruelty or violence, physically or social.
He instructed himself constantly to learn the arts of gentle love,
and he pleased himself by pleasing those whom he loved. And
when he tumbled into love with a new girl, he would not repudiate
his previous mistresses.
--Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent
Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff
[N.B.: Maybe Newt Gingrich is the
reincarnation of Harry Crosby.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
His seductive habits became legendary among his
friends. If he noticed a girl who attracted him, he approached
her, whatever his circumstances at the moment, or hers. He
might be dining in a restaurant with Caresse and another couple, and
suddenly his attention would deflect from them to someone else--a
pretty girl, perhaps, at table with her husband. Witnessed
testify that he was entirely capable of leaving his own table, going
to a strange girl's and departing with her, without explanation or
apology.
--Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent
Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Excess was the only measure he knew. when
he ate, he ate oysters, and when he drank, he drank champagne, and
too much of both, yet paid no price, laid on no fat and managed not
to appear foolish. If he saw something he wished to have, he
had it: "Went out this morning to buy silk pyjamas but came
back with a 1st edition of Les Illuminations very rare as there were
only 200 copies edited by Verlaine." Another day, going to
look for zebra skins, he returned home with the skeleton of a girl
wrapped in a yellow raincoat, her feet hitting the stairs of 19 rue
de Lille as he carried her to his library, where he hung her from a
bookcase: "And who was this woman, princess or harlot, actress
or nun young or old pretty and passionate or ugly and dumb?"
--Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent
Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff
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Patrick: Lagniappe
You can't relive your life and it's a mistake
to go looking for the job you lost, or an imitation of it. The
trick is not to sell what you have, but to have what will sell.
You take me, for example. I'm not sure I'd go back to the
newspaper business if I could. My newspaper business
is dying and I belong to its past. In some other line, who
knows? I could be the man of the future. I might make a
good copywriter for an ad agency. I spent most of my life
writing short, punchy heads, you know. Maybe I could bring
some new ideas to the ad business.
--The Job Hunter by Allen R. Dodd
[N.B.: It seems that the newspaper
business has been dying for a long time now--this book was written
in 1965.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
A man should have carved out his niche by the
time he's forty, that's what they said. Well, I had carved my
niche and now I couldn't find it.
--The Job Hunter by Allen R. Dodd
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"I think it's like very thin ice on a very deep
lake. The lucky ones never break through. But if you do,
you don't drop just a couple of inches--you go down and down and
down. Somebody's got to pay for the affluent
society--it stands to reason--and from now on I guess that includes
us. It's like--well, it's a sort of hidden depression.
It's a great big pit outside everyone's office door. Maybe you
don't put your foot into it, maybe you do."
--The Job Hunter by Allen R. Dodd
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Patrick: Lagniappe
There are fears beyond the things you fear and
fears beyond them, too, one circle below another, and on that cold,
clear day in the heart of midtown Manhattan I was close to panic. .
. . I had hoped for a good job; I had been prepared for a fair one;
I had feared being forced into a poor one. It had never
occurred to me that I might not be able to find a job--any job--at
all.
--The Job Hunter by Allen R. Dodd
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Any smart businessman pays his rent before he
starts spending his profits. The old man took care of the
customers who paid his overhead before the customers who represented
his profit.
--The Job Hunter by Allen R. Dodd
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Patrick: Lagniappe
I had made the job hunter's classic mistake; I
had tried to juggle two spots and I had lost both. Well, what
do you do? You can't take Job A and then quit it a week later
if Job B comes through.
I was to learn later that you certainly can.
This came from a salesman I met who had joined one firm and paid his
first "sales calls" each day on two others which were still thinking
about him. "You can't be squeamish about this," he told me.
"For them it's just an inconvenience; for you and your wife and kids
it's survival. Besides, those other spots won't come through.
I know some of those boys like a book. Half the time they
haven't even got a genuine opening. They're just
window-shopping for personnel. They like to keep a stream of
guys flowing through on the off-chance some genius will wander in."
--The Job Hunter by Allen R. Dodd
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Patrick: Lagniappe
On the morning of Christmas Eve a man in B
Company on our right was hit in the head by a sniper's bullet, and
died a few minutes later. The new Second-in-Command of the
Battalion was in the line on a visit of inspection. He was an
energetic and efficient officer but he was also a fire-eater.
He made both platoons file past the dead man, saying to each, 'You
must avenge this. You must kill two Germans for every one of
our dead.' I said nothing, but felt outraged. The men
evidently thought he was mad. The object of war, the aim of a
battle, is not primarily to kill numbers of the enemy, but to defeat
his forces in battle. The men resented the Major's tactless
tactics. It was the mistaken psychology of fire-eating blimps
and it made the bloodshed of the war evilly bloodier.
--Recollection of 2nd Lt. W. Cushing, collected in 1915: The Death of Innocence
by Lyn Macdonald
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Patrick: Lagniappe
I went further along and looked into the next
dug-out and there was a Guardsman in there. They talk about
the psychology of fear. He was a perfect example. I can
see that Guardsman now! His face was yellow, he was shaking
all over, and I said to him, 'What the hell are you doing back here?
Your battalion is out in front. What are you doing back here?'
He said, 'I can't go. I can't do it. I daren't go!'
Now, I was pretty ruthless in those days and I said to him, 'Look,
I'm going up the line and when I come back if you're still here I'll
bloody well shoot you!' Of course I had plenty to do because
you had to reconnoitre the line and reverse the defences, so it took
quite a while to get that going, and when I came back, thank God,
he'd gone. He was a Coldstream. A big chap six foot
tall. He'd got genuine shell-shock. We didn't realise
that at the time. We used to think it was cowardice but we
learned later on that there was such a thing as
shell-shock. Poor chap, he couldn't help it. It could
happen to anybody. But at that time you either did your job or
you didn't. There was no halfway house. I've seen chaps
go, but I've never seen anybody go like that. It was horrible.
A day or two later we heard that a Guardsman had been shot for
cowardice. I often wondered if it was that chap.
--Recollection of CQMS G. Fisher, 1st Bn (TF),
Hertfordshire Regt., 6 Brig., 2 Div., collected in 1915: The Death of Innocence
by Lyn Macdonald
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Patrick: Lagniappe
One of our Generals came up to inspect us in
our trenches in front of Lone Pine, and he was a fatherly sort,
always used to ask the blokes about their family and stuff like
that. He spoke to all the troops and he said to soldier on the
firing step, 'Don't forget to write home. How is your father?'
The bloke answered, 'He's dead.' A bit later the General
coming back along the trench asked the same question to the
same soldier, 'And how is your father?' And the bloke
said, 'He's still the dead, the lucky bugger.' We all
laughed. I don't know what the General thought! But the
tale went the rounds.
--Recollection of Cpl. G. Gilbert, A Sqn., 13th
Light Horse, collected in 1915: The Death of Innocence
by Lyn Macdonald
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Patrick: Lagniappe
I never saw any attack with so many men who had
bullet wounds as at Aubers Ridge. The Germans just mowed them
down and most of the bullet wounds were through the legs. We
had a lot of splinting to do, splinting, splinting, splinting.
But one man was brought in with his face covered with a bandage and
when the Major came in to look at him and see what was the matter he
went out and was violently sick. When he took the bandages off
we saw the man had no eyes, no nose, no chin, no mouth - and he was
alive! The Sergeant called me and said, 'The doctor says I've
got to give him four times the usual dose of morphia.' And I
said, 'You know what that will do, don't you?' And he
said, 'Yes. And I can't do it. I'm ordering you to do
it.' So I had to go in and give him four times the dose of
morphia. I laid a clean bandage on his face and stayed with
him until he died. That stayed in my memory for a very long
time. It stays in it now.
--Recollection of Pte. L. Mitchell, 24th Field
Ambulance, 8 Div., collected in 1915: The Death of Innocence
by Lyn Macdonald
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Of course we were standing to all day, ready to
go, but about three o'clock in the afternoon we were stood down and
told we could rest a bit in the trench, and it was fairly clear that
nothing much else was going to happen. Well of course we were
exhausted, and I got down in the trench next to Walter and I dropped
off right away. All of a sudden there was an almighty
explosion, right in the trench, a direct hit just a little bit
further along from where we were. I was right next to Walter -
touching him even. I was stunned of course, but when I got my
wits together I could hardly believe it. I was covered in
blood - saturated - and I really thought I'd bought it. But it
was Walter's blood. I didn't have a scratch myself.
Walter had taken the full blast and somehow of other it hadn't
touched me. He was blown to bits. A terrible sight.
I don't think there was a bit of his body bigger than a leg of lamb.
I gathered up what I could, put him into a sandbag and later on when
it got dusk, a few of us got out of the trench and buried him
a little way behind, about twenty-five yards back, because we
couldn't go far.
--Recollection of Cpl. A. Wilson collected in
1915: The Death of Innocence by Lyn Macdonald
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Patrick: Lagniappe
I had a glimpse of what the Great War did to
Cousin Audrey's life when last week she told me that every day of
her girlhood at Lochinver Lodge began with the raw sound at 5 a.m.
of her father vomiting his guts up. It was the trenches he was
remembering. His body sicked them up every single dawn until
his dying day.
--What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in
Blindness by Candia McWilliam
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The drugs that tell you most sharply that you
must have them the minute you've got out of the place that is
protecting you from them appear to be methamphetamine sulphate and
crack. Speedballs, once had, are never forgotten.
speedball bores are like orgasm bores. You can't convey it
unless you can.
--What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in
Blindness by Candia McWilliam
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Patrick: Lagniappe
You will recall St Elizabeth who, when asked
what she had in her basket by a superior who was growing weary of
her good deeds, replied, 'Only roses', though in fact she was
bearing bread rolls to distribute among the poor. So once,
caught terribly short on Lexington Avenue, very late at night and
unable to find the keys of my sweet old-fashioned hosts, I peed into
my Accessorize evening bag. No trace at all in the morning; a
miracle.
--What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in
Blindness by Candia McWilliam
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Patrick: Lagniappe
'Hello, big girl, who are you married to at the
moment?' Peculiarly enough, I have been asked this question
twice in my life and I take it ill.
--What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in
Blindness by Candia McWilliam
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