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 Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 12:32 pm Post subject: |
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The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks
Hardcover
By Frostback Robertson Davies, alter ego of
humorist Samuel Marchbanks
| Quote: | THURSDAY
An Indian I know (a chief of the great Swivel Chair tribe) was pointing out sun-dogs in the sky to me tonight, and prophesying stormy weather from them. I had never heard of sun-dogs before, but it appears that they are the roots of a rainbow, of which the arch is visible. It is an impressive sight to see a Swivel Chair Chief, sitting as straight as an arrow on the back of his Buick, gazing into the setting sun and forecasting the weather... But this evening I happened to be with this same Indian (we had been sitting around the campfire with a friend, a medicine man of the Long Bill tribe, chewing the pemmican) and on our way back to our tepees we met a third Indian of the Bifocal tribe, who looked up at the sky and said, "By the look of the stars we should have fine weather," and my Swivel Chair Chief agreed heartily! I never know what to make of these Indians when they start looking into the future. Stars, sun-dogs, stray dogs, dog-catchers - everything they see has a deep meaning for them, but I have to take the weather as it comes. (From The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, p. 42) |
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| Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 1:13 pm Post subject: |
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The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks
Hardcover
By Frostback Robertson Davies, alter ego of
humorist Samuel Marchbanks
| Quote: | SUNDAY
Had some notion of a picnic today, but it rained. A man I know who lives in the woods tells me that the mosquitoes this year will be as big as sparrows, and may be expected to last well into December. He bases this prediction on the way the beavers are building their dams. As everyone knows, beavers eat a lot of insects, and particularly mosquitoes (for the formic acid which the latter contain, and which assists the beaver in seeing under water) and a beaver's burrow contains a special chamber for the storage of the insects caught during the summer season. Apparently the beavers this year are making these chambers unusually big, and from this my friend deduces that they expect a bumper crop of mosquitoes, of particularly large size... I have always wished that I were better versed in nature lore of this kind. (From The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, p. 94) |
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| Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 2:07 pm Post subject: |
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The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks
Hardcover
By Frostback Robertson Davies, alter ego of
humorist Samuel Marchbanks
| Quote: | OF THE LONELINESS OF WISDOM
I talked this afternoon to a university professor who told me that he recently had the job of overseeing a large group of students who were writing an examination in psychology; at least half of these young sophisticates, he said, had lucky pennies, or rabbits' feet, or ju-ju dolls, or other good luck charms on their desks as they wrote. This strengthens my belief that education does not really alter character, but merely intensifies it, making foolish people more foolish, superstitious people more superstitious, and of course wise people wiser. But the wise are few and lonely. (From The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks, p. 278) |
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| Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 3:10 pm Post subject: |
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The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks
Hardcover
By Frostback Robertson Davies, alter ego of
humorist Samuel Marchbanks
| Quote: | ON WITCHES
A little girl was telling me about a dream that had last night: "A witch was chasing me, and she had germs all over her fingers," the child said. This is a good example of the way in which superstition keeps abreast of science, instead of being displaced by it, as foolish people believe. In my childhood I sometimes dreamed that witches were chasing me to tear out my liver and lights, or to bake me in a pie, but never to infect me with germs. The next generation, I suppose, will dream that witches are after them to make them radioactive. The fashion in scientific horrors may change, but the witches will go on, and on, chasing generations of horror-stricken children down the shadowy labyrinths of sleep. (From The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks, p. 351) |
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| Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 2:29 pm Post subject: |
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Come On In!
Hardcover
New Poems
Still another posthumous collection
by Charles Bukowski
| Quote: | another high-roller
I went to Vegas last weekend
I had on that blue dress
low-cut and short
the one you like
and I wore my brown boots
and this guy at the crap table
he kept winning
and he kept feeding me chips
he said I brought him luck.
I won a few hundred but
I swear to Christ he must have
won 40 thousand dollars that
night.
he was a great guy.
he told me,
"don't go away, we're going to win
the world!"it was some night, believe me.
I'll never forget it.
you don't like Vegas, do
you? she asked.
I once got married there,
I said.
and what did you over the
weekend? she asked.
I waxed my car,
I told her.
(-- p. 106) |
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| Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 3:07 pm Post subject: |
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Paperback
By California Dreamer Joan Didion
| Quote: | Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook, that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.
I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others. Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.
Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with onself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards - the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others - who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something people with courage can do without. (On Self-Respect at p. 142-143) |
About the title piece:
| Quote: | | "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is also the title of one piece in the book, and that piece, which derived from some time spent in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, was for me both the most imperative of all these pieces to write and the only one that made me despondent after it was printed. It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart: I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder. That was why the piece was important to me. And after it was printed I saw that, however directly and flatly I thought I had said it, I had failed to get through to many of the people who read and even liked the piece, failed to suggest that I was talking about something more general than a handful of children wearing mandalas on their foreheads...I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point. (A Preface, pgs. xiii-xiv) |
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| Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2007 3:08 pm Post subject: |
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Where There's a Will
Hardcover
By John Mortimer
| Quote: | ... One of the miracles of life is that few people pass through it without finding someone to love them. Awkward, even impossible people find love and it's a great convenience if they find it with each other. As someone said, it was very kind of God to arrange for Thomas Carlyle to marry Jane Carlyle, because 'it meant that only two people were unhappy instead of four.'
The mysterious forces which compel the most unlikely to dedicate their lives to each other can't be explained. I can only repeat that missed opportunities, in life and love, may haunt you for ever. Opportunities should be taken gratefully, even if the results may be somewhat bizarre. Long ago, in the distant days of Angus Steak Houses and Mateus Rose and Frankie Vaughan singing 'Give Me the Moonlight,' I took a new-found friend out to dinner. Later I drove her back to her flat in a London square in which the front doors were flanked by rows of bells for different apartments. She suggested I come up to hers after I'd parked the car. Before she left me she touched her hair and said, 'I'd better warn you. All this comes off.'
Left alone in the car, I came to the conclusion that what she had told me meant that she was bald. Did I want to go to bed with a bald-headed woman? No, I did not. Should I not then turn the car around and drive straight home without any further explanation? Perhaps. But wouldn't that be a cowardly, even a mean and unkind thing to do? It wasn't, after all, her fault that she was bald and it would be dreadful to remind her of the fact in such a dramatic fashion. I hit on another solution. I'd take my glasses off. My sight is so short that I wouldn't be able to see how bald she was.
... After I'd parked the car I rang the top bell, as I had seen her do beside the front door, and was rewarded by a deeply sexy voice saying, 'Come upstairs.' I obeyed, with my glasses off, and found the top flat's door opened by a blurred but distinctly bald figure wearing a dressing gown. I threw my arms round it, only to discover it was a bald-headed, quite elderly man and I was in the wrong house.
Having beaten a hasty retreat and apologetic retreat, I finally got to the right flat and found that my companion had perfectly acceptable hair which had been covered with a wig. It was, as I say, a bizarre evening but not one I've lived to regret. (From Chapter 22, Missed Opportunities, at pgs. 128-129) |
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| Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2007 3:40 pm Post subject: |
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Where There's a Will
Hardcover
By John Mortimer
| Quote: | Every Italian city had not only its own history but also its own masterpiece in the cathedral, its own food, its own wine and often its own language. The Neapolitan dialect is incomprehensible to the pure-speaking Florentine. You wouldn't expect to eat spaghetti with clams in Bologna or wild boar pate in Naples. If you want a town where the present and the past are still vividly alive, go to Siena. It's divided into parishes, which compete in the extraordinary horse-race round the scallop-shell-shaped piazza twice a year. The Palio, which celebrates a victory over rival Florence, takes only a few minutes but the preparations and the processions are unforgettable. The horses spend the previous night in local churches, to which they are led by men singing, and if they manure the marble floors it's a sign of luck. The long procession before the race, with parishioners in medieval costume throwing twirling flags into the air as high as the houses, unwinds slowly. Knights in armour, with their visors down, ride by to celebrate the parishes that no longer exist. Finally the Palio itself, a huge silver dish, is driven round on a cart drawn by white oxen. The secret ambition of all the parishes is not to win (winning entails a great deal of expense) but to have their enemy come second - a true humiliation.
The Palio has more importance than even the beauty of the event in Europe's most perfect city centre. Loyalty to your parish is so great that women giving birth in a hospital outside their home area take a little tray of earth from their home parish to put under the bed. And the parishes organize events, football matches, parties and dinners for young and old, rich and poor, all the year round. The system works so well that there is little juvenile crime in Siena. It should certainly be tried in Birmingham, preferably with a colourful horse-race round the Bull Ring. (From Chapter 25, Eating Out, pgs. 140-141) |
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| Posted: Sat Dec 08, 2007 10:26 am Post subject: |
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A Few Quick Ones
Paperback
By P. G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | | Now, though at the moment when he made this fine gesture Bingo actually had ten quid in his possession, having touched Purkiss for an advance on his salary, one would have expected him, thinking things over in the cold grey light of the morning after, to kick himself soundly for having been such an ass as to utter those unguarded words, committing him as they did to a course of conduct which would strip him of his last bean. But such was not the case. Still mellowed by a father's love, all he thought next day was that as a gift to a superchild like Algernon Aubrey a tenner was a bit on the cheeseparing side. Surely twenty would be far more suitable. And he could pick that up by slapping his ten on Potato in the two-thirty at Haydock Park. At dinner on the previous night he had burned his mouth by placing in it a fried spud about ninety degrees Fahrenheit warmer than he had supposed it to be, and he is always far too inclined to accept omens like this as stable information. He made the investment, accordingly, and at two-forty-five was informed by the club tape that he was now penniless. (From The Word in Season at pgs. 92-93) |
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| Posted: Sat Dec 08, 2007 10:45 am Post subject: |
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Casablanca
DVD
| Quote: | Knock On Wood
Performed in the movie by Dooley Wilson
Say, who’s got trouble
We got trouble
How much trouble
Too much trouble
Well now don’t you frown
Just knuckle down and
Knock on Wood
Who’s unhappy
We’re unhappy
How unhappy
Too unhappy
Oh! Oh! that won’t do
When you are blue just
Knock on wood
Who’s unlucky
We’re unlucky
How unlucky
Too unlucky
But your luck will change
If you’ll arrange to
Knock on wood
Who’s got nothing
We got nothing
How much nothing
Too much nothing
Say nothing’s not a awful lot
But knock on wood
Now who’s happy
We’re all happy
Just How happy
Very happy
That’s the way were going to stay
So knock on wood
Now who’s lucky
We’re all lucky
Just how lucky
Very lucky
Well smile again and once again lets
Knock on Wood |
More on Rick's famous fix on the Cafe Americain roulette table at Loaded Dice.
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| Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 1:20 pm Post subject: |
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Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack
Hardcover
By deceased Frostback literary noise,
Robertson Davies
| Quote: | My very dear Mrs. Morrigan:
Knowing how fond you have always been of gypsies, I write to tell you that yesterday I saw a tribe of them convergint the ancient and beautiful Shropshire town of Ludlow. As I drove along the road from Wales to Ludlow I passed ten gypsy coach vans - surely the most romantic dwellings in the world, shining with brass ornaments, and gay with shawls, quilts and bits of tinsel. Every caravan horse was led by a man, usually an old rascal, but sometimes a handsome, black-eyed lad: in front of the van would be a young woman, nursing a baby; in the back of the van other children tumbled, dirty, fat and lively. The women were all either young beauties or old hags: are there no middle-aged women among gypsies? And how the beauty of a gypsy woman surpasses that of the simpering lollipops of the films. How wondrously they dress, and how they make even their dirt become them!
A few days ago I was passing through the Welsh hamlet of Penegoes, where Richard Wilson was born. A group of gypsy children were playing around a fire there, outside a queer tent made of skins, and obviously half as old as time. How Wilson could have painted them! Do you suppose that he would have agreed with Augustus John that, "it is always worth half-a-crown to have a good look at a gypsy - front or back view?" I accepted the invitation of a gypsy girl to touch her baby for luck. One shilling. Cheap at double the money.
Your humble servant,
Samuel Marchbanks.
(-- p. 14) |
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| Posted: Sun Dec 23, 2007 11:31 am Post subject: |
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Victorian Christmas
Over 50 Ideaas for Enjoying
a Traditional Christmas
Hardcover
By Valerie Janitch
| Quote: | Decorating the house with greenery and lighted candles at the end of the year was traditional long before Christianity began. For many pagan peoples the winter solstice marked the turn of the year, reminding them that spring would soon be on the way. It was celebrated with festivals of fire and light, making a welcome break in the dark winter months. Evergreens were used for decoration, symbolizing fertility as the days lengthened and the sun grew stronger, bringing a renewal of life and growth and the promise of fresh crops.
As the Roman Empire spread, so did its great festival of Saturnalia, which began on the 17th of December and led up to the 25th, the day that the Romans observed as the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun. Wild behaviour was encouraged: men dressed in animal skins, and master and servant exchanged clothes and identities, as an excuse to indulge in all kinds of outrageous misconduct. Laurel wreaths and branches decorated the houses, and lamps burned continuously.
Immediately after Saturnalia came Kalends - a three-day festival to celebrate the New Year. This less exuberant celebration was presided over by Strenia, the goddess of health, and greenery from her groves was wound into wreaths and exchanged as gifts. These were fixed to the door of the house to ensure the health of everyone who lived there in the forthcoming year.
In Northern Europe, the winter solstice was makred by the festival of Yule. The short, dark days, icy winds and intense cold were made more bearable by blazing fires and glowing lamps. Evergreens decorated the houses, and gifts were made as sacrificies to the great Norse gods, Odin and Thor, and the goddess Frey. Likewise, the druids, priests of the religion of early Celtic Britain, built shrines of greenery to shelter spirits of the woods during the dark winter months, and ensure a survival into spring.
The early Christians were undecided when to celebrate the birthday (or Mass) of Christ, and chose various dates - as far apart as the 1st and 6th of January, the 29th of March and the 29th of September. Towards the end of the fourth century, the Church Fathers felt it necessary to fix a definite date, and the Pope wisely decided on the 25th of December. Realizing that it was almost impossible to eradicate the traditional Roman, Nordic and Celtic festivals, which were psychologically important to the people's lives and so greatly enjoyed at this season of the year, it seemed more sensible to include them into the Christmas celebrations. Which explains why so many of the pagan rituals of Saturnalia, Kalends and Yule - the evergreen life-symbols, the yule logs and candlelight - are still with us today.
Holly, ivy and mistletoe are the evergreens that are immediately associated with Christmas. The scarlet-berried holly provides a bright note when there is so little colour available in the hedgerows, which is probably why the early Christian church adopted it - suggesting that the prickly leaves represented Christ's crown of thorns, and the berries dropes of His blood. As a symbol of eternal life, it meant good fortune - especially if it had been used to decorate the church. The people of the state of Louisiana in southern USA always kept the berries for luck, and holly hung in the cowshed on Christmas Eve is said to ensure the health of the occupants. For humans, holly was used to treat fevers, dropsy and rheumatism, gout and asthma, while the North American Indians treated measles with holly tea.
The blazing Yule log and energetic revelry of the pagan winter festivities called, of course, for something special in the way of thirst-quenching drinks. In English country villages especially, the traditional Christmas drinks were still an important part of the festivities in Victorian times. These ranged from 'egg hot' - heated cider mixed with eggs and spices - to 'ale posset', a concoction of ale and hot milk, sweetened and flavoured with sugar and spices, which was always the final drink on Christmas Eve. (From Traditional Decorations, pgs. 12-13) |
Ale posset forsooth!
A well-researched, richly illustrated Christmas classic!
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| Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2007 5:13 pm Post subject: |
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Ghost in the Shell 2
Innocence
DVD
| Quote: | Batou (a cyborg): Just as luck appears in threes, misfortune also arrives three times. A gaze averted in discomfort, a realization unspoken, advice unbidden. Without noticing, we welcome catastrophe. But our world can't afford to ignore the first sign, let alone all three. I told you, Kim, I don't have time for your stupid jokes!
Kim: When did you catch on?
Batou: No one's easier to trick than the trickster. |
Explores the usual gamut of stock Asian emotions - irony and anger, then irony again. As earnest as any undergrad cultivating post-existential angst.
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| Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2007 3:03 pm Post subject: |
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A Fortified Compound in Woody Creek, Colorado
Hey Rube
Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness
Hardcover
By Hunter S. Thompson
| Quote: | Urgent Warning to Gamblers: Beware the Ides of March
March is an ugly month for gamblers. It is a time of deep mud, foul treachery, and guaranteed personal failures. I have always hated March for personal reasons, but as a Gambler, I Really hate it.
Nothing good has Ever happened to me in March, and it has Never failed to bring horrible Fear, Grief, and extremely tangible Loss down on me -- and I know in my heart that this year will be no different. I get the creeps every time I look at the calendar...Big trouble, soon come.
Even Astrologers will tell you that March is a good time to lay low and beware of taking Risks. Disaster is Certain, because March is ruled by Mars, and that is Guaranteed trouble. The Sun is in Pisces, which is the worst time of Any year for making Decisions. They are sure to be made for reasons of Emotional disturbance rather than Logic or rational thought. That is the law of the Universe.
And that brings Us, as Gambling people, to the terrible truth that March is also the month of the NCAA basketball tournament -- and we know what That means for Gamblers, don't we? Yes sir... (-- at p. 50) |
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| Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2007 3:38 pm Post subject: |
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Light in August
The Corrected Text
Hardcover
By 1949 Nobel Prize laureate William Faulkner
| Quote: | "His name is what?" one said.
"Christmas."
"Is he a foreigner?"
"Did you ever hear of a white man named Christmas?" the foreman said.
"I never heard of nobody a-tall named it," the other said.
And that was the first time Byron remembered that he had ever thought how a man's name, which is supposed to be just the sound for who hie is, can be somehow an augur of what he will do, if other men can only read the meaning in time. It seemed to him that none of them had looked especially at the stranger until they heard his name. But as soon as they heard it, it was as though there was something in the sound of it hat was trying to tell them what to expect; that he carried with him his own inescapable warning, like a flower its scent or a rattlesnake its rattle. Only none of them had enough sense to recognise it. They just thought that he was a foreigner, and as they watched him for the rest of that Friday, working in that tie and the straw hat and the creased trousers, they said among themselves that that was the way men in his country worked; though there were others who said, "He'll change clothes tonight. He wont have on them Sunday clothes when he come to work in the morning." (Chapter 2, pgs. 33-34) |
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