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)

The assistant to the stationmaster

The assistant to the stationmaster was a young man who had modeled his particularly unlikable officiousness upon the officiousness of the stationmaster, so that he had a completely inappropriate old-fart, complaining, curmudgeonly aspect to his youthfulness—this in combination with the mean-spiritedness of a dogcatcher who enjoys his work.

John Irving
The Cider House Rules (1985)

Pedagogy

   Another woman, a well-to-do plumber's widow, taught grammar and spelling. Her method was rigorous and messy. She presented great clumps of uncapitalized, misspelled, and unpunctuated words, and demanded that the clumps be put into proper sentences, meticulously punctuated and correctly spelled. She then corrected the corrections; the final document—she employed a system of different-colored inks—resembled a much-revised treaty between two semiliterate countries at war.

John Irving
The Cider House Rules (1985)

The wages of trust

   "You're much too trusting," Janeway said, "and it's going to cause you grief someday." Again the quick smile. "Welcome to someday."

William Goldman
Marathon Man (1974)

Leadership qualities

   "It would be a sorry state if none of us had leadership qualities," he said. "Besides, most people like to be told what to do."
   "That theory is advanced by people who tell people what to do."

Marjorie Kellogg
Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1968)

Seven Gables...

She stole softly into the hall, and, herself invisible, gazed through the dusty side-lights of the portal at the young, blooming, and very cheerful face which presented itself for admittance into the gloomy old mansion. It was a face to which almost any door would have opened of its own accord.

~~~

It was strewn about with a few old books, and a work-basket, and a dusty writing-desk; and had, on one side, a large black article of furniture, of very strange appearance, which the old gentlewoman told Phoebe was a harpsichord. It looked more like a coffin than anything else; and, indeed -- not having been played upon, or opened, for years -- there must have been a vast deal of dead music in it, stifled for want of air.

~~~

With a mysterious and terrible Past, which had annihilated his memory, and a blank Future before him, he had only this visionary and impalpable Now, which, if you once look closely at it, is nothing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

Thanks-For-Clarifying-That Dept.

What's changed in the OAA

Clarifications

• We added or enhanced the definitions of the following words and phrases: “You,” “Business Day,” Eligible Beneficiary,” “Financial Management Software,” “Handheld Device,” “Include” and “including,” “Online Financial Service,” “Trust and Managed Investment Account,” and “Website” (See Definitions within the Online Access Agreement)

From Wells Fargo Bank

"We Updated Our Online Access Agreement"

circa 12/2012

The lawyer and the law

     Fitzroy was explaining further: "You see, John, lawyers have much less respect for the law than the rest of us. It's familiarity, you see, doing its little breeding job again. A lawyer isn't there to tell you what the law is, you'll get that from a policeman or a judge. A lawyer is there to tell you what you can do anyway."

Donald E. Westlake
Bad News (2001)

On the positive side

The decision to become engaged was strictly hormonal, which isn't always foolish, but in this case the lust began to ebb long before the diamond ring was paid off. Among Alicia's multiple symptoms were aversions to sleep, employment, punctuality, sobriety and monogamy. On the positive side, she volunteered weekends at an animal shelter.

Carl Hiaasen
Basket Case (2002)

The silverware

   The de Luce silverware was kept in a dark folding cabinet which, when opened, presented a remarkable array of fish forks, toddy ladles, mote spoons, marrow scoops, lobster picks, sugar nips, grape shears and pudding trowels, all arranged in steps, like so many silvery salmon leaping up the stony staircase of a whisky-colored stream somewhere in Scotland.

Alan Bradley
A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel  (2011)

The things we do for love

   The things we do for love. Look at über-city-girl Princess Diana schlepping off to Balmoral in her green wellies to convince Prince Charles there was nothing she liked better than standing around in the pissing rain all day, while men who smelled of horses and women who looked like them took pot shots at innocent pheasants.

Tess Stimson
The Adultery Club (2008)

Flavor of the month

   I followed her out, and she immediately lit up. She sucked the smoke in all the way down to her toes and blew it out her nose. "This cigarette tastes like ass," she said. I wasn't sure what ass tasted like, but she looked like she would know, so I was willing to take her word for it.

Janet Evanovich

Explosive Eighteen (2012)

My favoritest joke

Porkypine:  Owl, if I tells you a joke for the vaudeville act, do I git paid?
Owl:           Yep! Two gumdrops per line.
Porkypine:  This is a  four line joke - - - A man bought his li'l boy a fur coat (that's two gumdrops)
Owl:           Two it is.
Porkypine:  The li'l boy wore it to school, (that's two more)
Owl:           Two more
Porkypine:  The teacher say: "My, aren't you warm?" (That's another two) Chomp - - -
Owl:           Right - - - Six up to now. [pause] Well? What's the last line? The payoff? The boff?
Porkypine:  Ding bing it! I never can remember the last lines of jokes - - - chomp - - - chomp - - -

Walt Kelly
Pogo September 8, 1950

Beans

Hey you fellas, how 'bout some beans? You want some beans? Goin' through some mighty rough country tomorrow. You better have some beans.

Howard (Walter Huston)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
screenplay by John Huston

The language of honour

In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry, and even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds, who knew no other.

Sir Walter Scott
Ivanhoe (1820)

Happiness, imagined

I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.

Charles Dickens
Great Expectations (1861)

Good smells

In the old days, good smells filled the kitchen (misleading smells, since our mom's cooking strategy was to throw a couple of raw things into a greased pan and wait to see what happened, like watching strangers on a date).

Karen Russell
Swamplandia! (2011)

Ha ha, only serious

     "And don't succumb too much to the spell of these cases. I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest."
     "Master! I said, shocked.
     "So it is, Adso. And there are even richer treasuries. Some time ago, in the cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of twelve."
     "Really? I exclaimed, amazed. Then, seized by doubt, I added, "But the Baptist was executed at a more advanced age!"
     "The other skull must be in another treasury," William said, with a grave face. I never understood when he was jesting. In my country, when you joke you say something and then you laugh very noisily, so everyone shares in the joke. But William laughed only when he said serious things, and remained very serious when he was presumably joking.

Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose (1983)
Sixth Day, Prime

A liberal perspective

   Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
   This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
   It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

President Dwight Eisenhower
speech: "The Chance for Peace"
April 16, 1953
Quoted in Eisenhower: The White House Years by Jim Newton

Eisenhower on Social Security

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

President Eisenhower
Nov. 8, 1954
letter to his brother, Edgar

http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/1147.cfm

Too late

She had a pale face, rather taut, dark hair that was a little wild. She was wearing a double-breasted scarlet coat with brass buttons, gray flannel slacks, pigskin clog sandals, and no stockings. There was a necklace of cloudy amber around her throat and a bandeau of old-rose material in her hair. She was in her middle thirties, so it was too late for her to learn how to dress herself.

Raymond Chandler
"No Crime in the Mountains" (1941)

A 90-minute film that plays for two hours

If the Coens have taken two hours to do what hardly anyone else could do at all, isn't it churlish to ask why they didn't take less time to do what everyone can do?

Roger Ebert
--the last line from his review of The Man Who Wasn't There

A geography lesson from Keith Richards

   "One thing was playing Chicago blues; that was where we took everything that we knew, that was our kickoff point, Chicago. Look at that Mississippi River. Where does it come from? Follow that river all the way up and you'll end up in Chicago."

Keith Richards with James Fox
Life (2010)

The unreliable narrator

     "Yes, he is intelligent. But we must be more intelligent. We must be so intelligent that he does not suspect us of being intelligent at all."
     I acquiesced.
     "There, mon ami, you will be of great assistance to me."
     I was pleased with the compliment. There had been times when I hardly thought that Poirot appreciated me at my true worth.
     "Yes," he continued, staring at me thoughtfully, "you will be invaluable."

Agatha Christie
The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1916)

Beautiful detachment and stern justice

We stood in the rain and were taken out one at a time to be questioned and shot. So far they had shot every one they had questioned. The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.

Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Abstract words...were obscene

   "We won't talk about losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain."
   I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Three doctors

   Before he came back three doctors came into the room. I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend to you a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success. These were three such doctors.

Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms (1929)