Babies who throw up...

For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don’t like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they’re babies.

-- Hilton Als
"How Richard Pryor Became America’s Comic Prophet of Race"
The New Yorker
Sept. 13, 1999

"You've got to pick a pocket or two, boys..."

Every age treats its penal system as natural, inevitable, and regrettable. When men were hanged in the public square, intellectuals explained that the practice was as helpful to the hanged as it was instructive for the audience. [...] Public hangings were simply part of street life. Pickpockets attended the hangings of other pickpockets in order to pick pockets.

- Adam Gopnik
"Should We Abolish Prisons?"

The New Yorker

July 22, 2024 

Apollo 13 (not the movie)

Both Lovell and Swigert thought that the bang—or shudder—had come from the lunar module, and as Haise emerged from the tunnel Swigert shot out of his seat and slammed the command-module hatch shut behind him. Haise scrambled to his seat—the right-hand one—for the master alarm was now sounding in his earphones. Swigert had noticed an amber caution light glowing overhead. It didn’t signal trouble in the oxygen tank, because that alarm system was still tied up by the low-pressure warning in the hydrogen tanks; rather, it signified trouble with the electrical system, the controls for which were near Haise. About this time, the Flight Surgeon, Dr. Willard R. Hawkins, noticed that the pulse readings for all three astronauts had shot up from about seventy to over a hundred and thirty.

--  Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr.
"An Accident in Space"
The New Yorker, November 3, 1972

Me: It's the last sentence that begged me to post this.

Aristotle's cardinal virtues

Prudence, justice, temperance, and courage.

from the Nicomachean Ethics

About acting...

First of all, to have a career in this business is extremely hard. To have a long career is even harder. To have a long career where you’re getting good work is almost impossible.

-- Michael Imperioli
"Michael Imperioli Knows Art Can’t Save Us" (interview)
The New Yorker
March 24,2024

"Crazy" translated

I hate the implication that I was creating drama. It’s like when men use the word “crazy” to describe an ex. The translation is: “She expected emotional maturity from me.”

-- Anna Holmes
His Latex Goddess
The New Yorker
February 23, 2024

Oh sure, you're funny now...

[T]he champion golfer Lee Trevino remarked, “When I was a rookie, I told jokes, and no one laughed. After I began winning tournaments, I told the same jokes, and all of a sudden, people thought they were funny.”

--Evan Osnos

Rules for the Ruling Class

The New Yorker January 22, 2024

John Cale on his childhood library

I really wanted to get out of Wales. When I was growing up, I was a little rough around the edges, and I tried to do whatever I could to develop a musical style. All the music I was raised on was Alban Berg, Schoenberg—a lot of strange groupings. And there was a little library in my village; the library was put there by the coal miners’ union, and if you wanted to learn anything about a song or a style of music you could find something in the library that would have that, and I went for it. That’s where I found Stockhausen. So I was growing up with real music. [emphasis mine]

-- John Cale

"John Cale Makes It New Again"

The New Yorker, January 15, 2023

Raymond Chandler on Hollywood

I hold no brief for Hollywood. I have worked there a little over two years, which is far from enough to make me an authority, but more than enough to make me feel pretty thoroughly bored. That should not be so. The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion.

-- Raymond Chandler
"Writers In Hollywood" 

The Atlantic Monthly (1945)

Converting clichés into journalism

Journalists, as a group, have to believe that the act of writing can bring light to darkness, help our fellow-citizens make sense of the world, and compose the first draft of history. The job, in many ways, is about converting chaos into clichés, in order to satisfy the profession’s clichés about its own importance.

-- Jay Caspian Kang

"The Futile Race to Label Paul Pelosi’s Attacker"

The New Yorker -- October 30, 2022

Um, well duh me too

Steely Dan, the band famous for a certain brand of cynical, pristine nineteen-seventies jazz-infused rock, released their first album, “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” fifty years ago. They have retained a core of perfectionistic, hyperverbal fans ever since.

-- Chelsea Leu

"My Unlikely Connection to Steely Dan"

The New Yorker (October 12, 2022)

Enjoy the poetry

It is better to be spurred to acquire scholarship because you enjoy the poetry, than to suppose that you enjoy the poetry because you have acquired the scholarship.

--T. S. Eliot

an essay on Dante (1930) 

I have not found the exact source.

That joke's been done

Willie Nelson’s sound guy, who’s a friend of mine, once asked me, “Why is it that any time somebody grabs a microphone in comedy there’s feedback?” I thought, Wow, that’s true—every single time. And then, with “Silicon Valley,” I was, like, I’m not going to do this in this whole series. No feedback on the mike! In the pilot, there’s a scene where a tech guy comes up and grabs a mike. And the editor put in feedback. I said, “Take it out.” The sound mixer put it back in. I said, “Take it out.” It got all the way to the final mix, and we were playing it back, and another guy who just started goes, “Oh, wait, the feedback’s gone. We’ve got to get the feedback on it!”

No. No feedback!

-- Mike Judge
Mike Judge’s Secret Art of Satire

The New Yorker August 7, 2022

Having confidence

I had a friend in junior high—I don’t know why I was friends with him, probably because I couldn’t get anyone else to be my friend—and “Happy Days” had just come out, and he thought he was the Fonz. He thought he was the coolest guy. I remember thinking, He’s happier than I am, and it’s just because he doesn’t know any better. There’s something to be said for that kind of unfounded confidence.

-- Mike Judge
Mike Judge’s Secret Art of Satire

The New Yorker August 7, 2022

Two and two...

Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.

-- James McNeil Whistler
from Whistler vs. Ruskin (1877) (yes, a lawsuit)

How to use the F word

The Stranger: There's just one thing, Dude.
The Dude: And what's that?
The Stranger: Do you have to use so many cuss words?
The Dude: What the fuck you talking about?

-- The Big Lebowski (1998)

Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll

 You start out playing rock and roll so you can have sex and do drugs.

But you end up doing drugs so you can still play rock and roll and have sex.

-- Mick Jagger 

(reading the Top Ten List on Letterman) 12/11/2012

Sherlock Holmes rolls his eyes

Inspector Gregson: Is that Sir George Fenwick?
Sherlock Holmes: Yes.
Inspector Gregson: Is that young lady his daughter?
Sherlock Holmes: Don't be so naive, Inspector.

-- from The Woman In Green (1945 film)
script: Bertram Millhauser
(from "The Adventure of the Empty House" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Bertrand Russell has his doubts

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

Bertrand Russell
"Is There a God?" (1952)

*Other* people???

 [T]here were some initial difficulties when the director first told me... that if the film was to have any semblance of reality at all there would have to be moments when other people were on-screen at the same time I was.

--Bette Midler

A View From a Broad (1981)

writing about her first movie, The Rose

My mother was below the salt...

My mother was a Methodist, but my father was Anglican: thus my mother was below my father’s level socially, as such things were accounted then. (If she’d lived, my Grandmother Adelia would never have allowed the marriage, or so I decided later. My mother would have been too far down the ladder for her – also too prudish, too earnest, too provincial. Adelia would have dragged my father off to Montreal – hooked him up to a debutante, at the very least. Someone with better clothes.)

Margaret Atwood

The Blind Assassin (2000)

We found our refuge in science...

I belonged to a small minority of boys who were lacking in physical strength and athletic prowess. ... We found our refuge in science. ... We learned that science is a revenge of victims against oppressors, that science is a territory of freedom and friendship in the midst of tyranny and hatred.

Freeman Dyson

"To Teach or Not to Teach" (1992)

From Eros to Gaia Vol. 5

Muffled voices

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.

Alan Bennett
Writing Home (1994)

Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1730205-alan-bennett-kafka-could-never-have-written-as-he-did-had-he-li/

Comics are real

Comics are often seen as a gateway to “real reading” by those who don’t understand the difference between reading pictures and just looking at them; comics are no more words with pictures than singing is just words with yelling.

-- Chris Ware

"American Vernacular: Chicago and the Birth of the Comic"

The New Yorker (August 28, 2021)

A. Lincoln, dancing

Captivated by [Mary Todd’s] lively manner, intelligent face, clear blue eyes, and dimpled smile, Lincoln reportedly said, “I want to dance with you in the worst way." And, Mary laughingly told her cousin later..., "he certainly did.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Team Of Rivals (2005)

Russell's conjugation

I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig-headed fool.

I am righteously indignant, you are annoyed, he is making a fuss over nothing.

I have reconsidered the matter, you have changed your mind, he has gone back on his word.

-- Bertrand Russell
BBC Radio programme The Brains Trust (1948)

Adam Gopnik on Lewis Carroll

It sometimes seems as if all literary-minded women see themselves, sooner or later, as Alice, just as literary-minded men have always seen themselves as Hamlet. (Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch; women choose Alice because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think that they are disinherited monarchs.)

-- Adam Gopnik

"Wonderland"

from The New Yorker (Oct. 2, 1995)

A toast!

     "Charley, what're all these clippings?
     "Friend of mine, Ma!" Bruno shouted through the bathroom door. He turned the water on harder, leaned on the basin, and concentrated on the bright nickel-plated drainstop. After a moment, he reached for the Scotch bottle he kept under towels in the clothes hamper. He felt less shaky with the glass of Scotch and water in his hand, and spent a few seconds inspecting the silver braid on the sleeve of his new smoking jacket. He liked the jacket so much, he wore it as a bathrobe also. In the mirror, the oval lapels framed the portrait of a young man of leisure, of reckless and mysterious adventure, a young man of humor and depth, power and gentleness (witness the glass held delicately between thumb and forefinger with the air of an imperial toast)--a young man with two lives. He drank to himself.

--Patricia Highsmith
Strangers On a Train (1950)

That's why

"Poor problem-solving skills. Definition of a murderer right there. Some guy wants a divorce, but doesn't want to lose half of his assets, so he kills his wife instead. Did he have to kill her? Were there other options that might have ended his marriage while preserving his bank account? Of course. But murderers don't see other options. That's why they're murderers."

-- Lisa Gardner

Live To Tell (2010)

Black and white movies

 His phone rang. The ring on Bernie's cell phone sounded like those old phones in black-and-white movies we often watched. I liked watching them because black and white was so easy for me to see; as for why Bernie liked them, I wasn't sure, just knew that if it came to a choice between black and white and color, he always chose black and white.

-- Spencer Quinn
Dog On It (2009)

Believing in the system

Baer embodied the knowledge and technique of industry; Kroner personified the faith, the near-holiness, the spirit of the complicated venture. Kroner, in fact, had a poor record as an engineer and had surprised Paul from time to time with his ignorance or misunderstanding of technical matters; but he had the priceless quality of believing in the system, and of making others believe in it, too, and do as they were told.

-- Kurt Vonnegut
Player Piano (1952)

Orchids

Orchids have diverse and unflowerlike looks. One species looks just like a German shepherd dog with its tongue sticking out. One species looks like an onion. One looks like an octopus. One looks like a human nose. One looks like the kind of fancy shoes a king might wear. One looks like Mickey Mouse. One looks like a monkey. One looks dead. One was described in the 1845 Botanical Registry as looking like "an old-fashioned headdress peeping over one of those starched high collars such as ladies wore in the days of Queen Elizabeth; or through a horse-collar decorated with gaudy ribbons." There are species that look like butterflies, bats, ladies' handbags, bees, swarms of bees, female wasps, clamshells, roots, camel hooves, squirrels, nuns dressed in their wimples, and drunken old men.

-- Susan Orlean
The Orchid Thief: A True Tale of Beauty and Obsession (1998)

(n.b. She's just getting warmed up here....)

A comment, only

I have been remiss in posting new . . . posts. On the other hand, i have zero followers, so i'm doing well amusing myself. As ever.

Get used to it

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

-- John von Neumann
quoted in The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979)

Old age

Father used to say, the only thing for old age is a brave face, a good tailor and comfortable shoes.

Alan Ayckbourn
Table Manners (The Norman Conquests) 1973
Act II, Scene 1

Blount was not a freak...

Blount was not a freak, although when you first saw him he gave you that impression. It was like something was deformed about him -- but when you looked at him closely each part of him was normal and as it ought to be. Therefore if this difference was not in the body it was probably in the mind. He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America. He was like a person who had been somewhere that other people are not likely to go or had done something that others are not apt to do.

Carson McCullers
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1941)

Watch your step, brother

A man in the blue-gray jail uniform came along between the cells reading numbers. He stopped in front of mine and unlocked the door and gave me the hard stare they think they have to wear on their pans forever and forever and forever. I'm a cop, brother, I'm tough, watch your step, brother, or we'll fix you up so you'll crawl on your hands and knees, brother, snap out of it, brother, let's get a load of the truth, brother, let's go, and let's not forget we're tough guys, we're cops, and we do what we like with punks like you.

Raymond Chandler
The Lady In the Lake (1943)

I don't amuse easy

   His smile was wide, about three quarters of an inch. "I don't amuse easy," he said.
   "Just like Queen Victoria," I said.
   "I don't get it."
   "I don't expect miracles," I said.

Raymond Chandler
The High Window (1942)

Character description 1

   Taggart Wilde sat behind a desk, a middle-aged plump man with clear blue eyes that managed to have a friendly expression without really having any expression at all. He had a cup of black coffee in front of him and he had a dappled thin cigar between the neat careful fingers of his left hand. Another man sat at the corner of the desk in a blue leather chair, a cold-eyed hatchet-faced man, as lean as a rake and as hard as the manager of a loan office. His neat well-kept face looked as if it had been shaved within the hour. He wore a well-pressed brown suit and there was a black pearl in his tie. He had the long nervous fingers of a man with a quick brain. He looked ready for a fight.

Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep (1939)

Indecision

"First you didn't want me to get the pony. Now you want me to take it back. Make up your mind!"

-- Homer Simpson
"Lisa's Pony"
written by Al Jean and Mike Reiss

The name of the title of this post

   "The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes.'"
   "Oh, that's the name of the song, is it? Alice said, trying to feel interested.
   "No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is 'The Aged Aged Man.'"
   "Then I ought to have said "That's what the song is called'?" Alice corrected herself.
   "No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called 'Ways and Means' but that's only what it's called, you know!
   "Well, what is the song, then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
   "I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is 'A-sitting on a Gate': and the tune's my own invention."

Lewis Carroll
Through The Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871)

At least once

   "Why is everyone getting up?" I said.
   "It's a standing ovation," said Mom, getting up.
   So I got up and clapped and clapped. I clapped until my hands hurt. For a second, I imagined how cool it would be to be Via and Justin right then, having all these people stand up and cheering for them. I think there should be a rule that everyone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their lives.

R. J. Palacio
Wonder (2012)

I dunno

A lot of these broads, you know, you just don't know. You know?

David Mamet
Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974)

Drink up, kids

   This morning I stroll over to Dorothy's office to get a soda. It's a tiny wood-paneled room. The desk seems to have no purpose other than holding Dorothy's collection of snow globes from places that seem unworthy of commemoration: Gulf Shores, Alabama. Hilo, Arkansas. When I see the snow globes, I don't see paradise, I see overheated hillbillies with sunburns tugging along wailing, clumsy children, smacking them with one hand, with the other clutching giant nonbiodegradable Styrofoam cups of warm corn-syrupy drinks. 

Gillian Flynn
Gone Girl (2012)

Her pièce de resistance...

But Miss Prentice also belonged to a generation when girls learnt the pianoforte from their governesses, and she, too, liked to be expected to perform. Her pièce de resistance was Ethelbert Nevin's Venetian Suite, which she rendered with muffled insecurity, the chords of the accompaniment never quite synchronising with the saccharine notes of the melody.

Ngaio Marsh
Overture to Death (1939)

Seen one, seen 'em all?

He was of a remarkable appearance, having a great mane of silver hair, large sunken eyes and black brows. The bone of his face was much emphasised, the flesh heavily grooved. His mouth was abnormally wide with a heavy underlip. It might have been the head of an actor, a saint, or a Middle-West American purveyor of patent medicines.

Ngaio Marsh
Death In Ecstasy (1936)

Cooking sherry? So regal!

The air inside smelled antediluvian, regal somehow, with traces of pipe tobacco, tea leaves, cooking sherry, and the earthen aroma of stone architecture.

Dan Brown

The Da Vinci Code (2003)

God bless her all the same

   "She fancies herself a detective and wants to become involved in the case—wants someone to think she may even be the killer."
   "The killer?" Feely snorted. "Horse eggs! She couldn't see to kill an elephant if it were standing on her toes. And as for being a detective, why, the woman couldn't find her own bottom if it weren't buttoned on."
   "God bless her all the same," I said. It was a formula we used whenever we had gone too far.
   "God bless her all the same," Feely echoed, rather sourly.

Alan Bradley
Speaking From Among the Bones (2013)

More adjectives, please

Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow's peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters.

Dan Brown
The Da Vinci Code (2003)

Why i hate the cold

Hot days may well elicit sweat and curses, but chill winds cut through the greatcoats and farthingales of time, knife to the primal memory of the species, shiver that slumbering animal in the caves of our soul, and whisper "Danger!" in his hairy ear.

John Barth
The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)