Post A Favorite Sentence(Or 2 Or 3)From Something You Are Reading(Or Have Read)

Here's the first three sentences of what I'm currently reading, an essay called "Philosophy and the Formof Fiction," by William Gass, from his collection Fiction and the Figures of Life. Ahem.

"So much of philosophy is fiction. Dreams, doubts, fears, ambitions, ecstasies . . . if philosophy were a stream, they would stock it like fishes. Although fiction, in the manner of its making, is pure philosophy, no novelist has created a more dashing hero than the handsome Absolute, or conceived more dramatic extrications--the soul's escape from the body, for instance, or the will from cause."

Joyce "Ulysses"

I've posted this before. It's by Richard Brautigan. It's the word poleaxed that makes it.

Blackheath people may be culture snobs, but they are also liberals. Liberals are people who are very broadminded, but who object to absolutely everything. (This makes it possible to be both elitist and public spirited.)

Liberals do not like anything which sounds like fun, especially if it presupposes an element of personal choice. Liberals do not like people who smoke or drive because they pollute the public air. They do not like people who are happily married because they assume they must be boring. They do not like children... They do not like inherited wealth because they haven't inherited any, nor conspicuous consumption because it is vulgar. They are in favour of supplementary benefit in theory; in practice they could not live on it. They do not like council architecture because it has no aesthetic benefit. Nor do they like council tenants, especially if they come to Blackheath and drop cigarette ends and ill-mannered children all over the Heath.

I think I've found my spiritual home.

-- Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

(I just love the "decently regretful" -- ice cold.)

-eden, by oympia vernon

isn't that a fantastic opening line?

(P.G.Wodehouse. The Luck of the Bodkins.)

George Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody (1892)

-from Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett

You know Manningham's story of the burgher's wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in Richard III and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon's blankets: William the conqueror came before Richard III.

- James Joyce, Ulysses

You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say that it is a meshed intrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

You can do the same with a biography. The trawling net fills, then the biographer hauls it in, sorts, throws back, sorts, fillets and sells. Yet consider what he doesn't catch: there's always far more of that. The biography stands, fat and worthy-burgherish on the shelf, boastful and sedate: a shilling life will give you all the facts, a ten-pound one all the hypotheses as well. But think of everything that got away, that fled with the last deathbed exhalation of the biographee. What chance would the craftiest biographer stand against the subject who saw him coming and decided to amuse himself?

- Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

Is this book sexy? M'Lud, we bloody well hope so. Does it encourage adultery and attack marriage? Spot on, M'Lud, that's exactly what my client is trying to do. Is this book blasphemous? For Christ's sake, M'Lud, the matter's as clear as the loincloth on the Crusifixion. Put it this way, M'Lud: my client thinks that most of the values of the society in which he lives stink, and he hopes with this book to promote fornication, masturbation, adultery, the stoning of priests and, since we've temporarily got your attention, M'Lud, the suspension of corrupt judges by their earlobes. The defence rests its case.

- Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

'From a philosophical point of view, her behaviour is logical enough. Reflect upon the continual, wearisome pregnancies, the price of a momentary and may I say aleatory pleasure. Reflect upon the physical discomfort of a full udder, to say nothing of the necessary paturition, with its attendant perils. I do not mention the uneasiness of seeing one's offspring turned into a blanquette de veau; for this is peculiar to the cow. Were I a female of any kind, I should beg to decline these general cares; and were I, in this particular case, a heifer, I should certainly choose to remain dry. Yet it must be confessed that from a domestical point of view celibacy in a cow takes on a different aspect entirely: here the general good calls out for teeming loins.'

- Patrick O'Brian, The Mauritius Command

-Robery McLiam Wilson 'Eureka Street'

i like his voice.. the unashamed tone

She could see it in her mind. It seethed with that vitality particular to stories. The swallow in her bird's-eye view circled about in haphazard fashion, admiring her ur-London. It included Primrose Hill, where the Twilight Barking of 'One Hundred and One Dalmations' started. Here was a street in Chelsea called Cherry Tree Lane, along whose sidewalks the perennial English nanny-goddess Mary Poppins hustled her charges. Here was Paddington Station, in whose airy concourse a bear called Paddington had been lost, then found. Here was Kensington Gardens, Rackham's bleak version, with sprites and root goblins just out of sight, and Peter Pan, the original lost and abandoned child, a baby dressed in oak leaves, still crouching there even when thousands of mourners were depositing floral bouquets at the death of Princess Diana.

London was a trove of the magic of childhoood, for anyone who had read as obsessively as [she] had done before the age of twelve. Pull back just a bit, and more of England became implicated: a bit of river out toward Oxford, on which a rat and mole were busy messing about in a boat. Peter Rabbit stealing under some stile in the Lake District. Somewhere on this island, was it in Kent, the Hundred Aker Wood, with those figures who have yet to learn that sawdusty toys die deaths as certainly as children do. The irrepressible Camelot, always bursting forth out of some hummock or other. Robin Hood in his green jerkin, Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, and just underneath it all, places only slightly less England, the dreary improbabilities of Alice's Wonderland, the bosky dells of the theocracy of Narnia, the wind-tortured screes and wastes of Middle-earth.

Gregory Maguire - Lost

Keith's belated sigh of effort reminded Guy of the
sound that Marmaduke would occasionally emit, after a
rare success with some taxing formulation like more
chips or knife mine. Guy said, 'The new boy in
midfield, Neil . . .? Did he do all right?'

'Noel Frizzle. He justified his selection,' said
Keith coldly.

--Martin Amis, London Fields

One - Martin Amis can't write about football

Two - My team always loses, even in fiction

Titi Camera is a name and porn film equipment at the same time.

A special mention for Christian Dailly. Normal name. Shit footballer.

I wonder if there is a correlation between my posts and the African Nations Cup?

From Isaac Babel's story: First Love. (He writes a lot of sentences like this. Vivid and memorable! And I still can't get over the picture of Babel on the cover of the Penguin paperback edition of his Collected Stories. It's like, wow! Like, what a face!

From: Singing from the Well by Reinaldo Arenas

I don't know why i like that so much. It definitely stuck with me after I read it. There are a lot of great lines in this book.

[...] So that was what they buried them in."

"Lace curtains."

My father looked shy, as if he had given me a present, and said brusquely, "Well, that's the kind of a detail I thought might be interesting to you." (from the same story)

"She was twenty-five, her name was Alla, and she wrote poetry: three things, one would think, that were bound to make a woman fascinating."

I could probably pick almost any sentence from this book so far.

- PG Wodehouse, 'Cocktail Time'

i got a book of some of his lectures from cornell on some major works (swann's way, ulysses, madame bovary and a couple others) and a i want to smack the smug little prick around every couple pages.

In the mornings, large figures shrouded in terrycloth lurch back and forth between the several bedrooms and the single bathroom.

But when she had set off for Dreux or Pierrefonds - alas, without allowing him to appear there, as though by accident, at her side, for, as she said, that would 'create a dreadful impression' - he would plunge into the most intoxicating romance in the lover's library, the railway timetable, from which he learned the ways of joining her there in the afternoon, in the evening, even in the morning. The ways? More than that, the authority, the right to join her. For, after all, the time-table, and the trains themselves, were not meant for dogs. If the public were carefully informed, by means of printed advertisements, that at eight o'clock in the morning a train started for Pierrefonds which arrived there at ten, that could only be because going to Pierrefonds was a lawful act, for which permission from Odette would be superfluous; an act, moreover, which might be performed from a motive altogether different from the desire to see Odette, since persons who had never even heard of her performed it daily, and in such numbers as justified the labour and expense of stoking the engines.

He sings in hideous falsetto:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,
He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword.

He pulls a gilded wooden sword and chops the air. His corset flies off and whistles into the dart board.

(WSB, Naked Lunch. Replacement copy bought yesterday because after several moves I can't find my old one anymore.)

No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty..

(H. Miller, Tropic of Cancer)

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.
David Lodge

"I'll have a regular BLT," I say. "Traditional style."
"Fries with that?"
"Sure. Make it a deluxe"
She eyes me suspiciously. "Soup? Salad?"
"No, thanks"
She turns her attention to Rodney. "And for you?"
Rodney taps the stiff laminated menu with his knuckle.
"Bowl of chili. Banana nut bread. Large birch beer."
Jesus. That's a solid order.
"You got it, sugar," she tells him with a smile.
After she leaves, Dad and I resume reading. The Bills do not have enough speed at the safety position, according to Felser.

"What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don't know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree." - Xavier Conroy (The Jagged Orbit by John Brunner)

"I'll tell you", he says. "When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery." The tears bubble over her lids and the salty taste of the pool-water is sealed into her mouth. "If you have the guts to be yourself", he says, "other people'll pay your price."

"Children jump, flapping their Arms in unconscious memory of when they had wings, to see inside."

"Astyages asked him if he recognised the creature whose flesh he had eaten. Harpagus replied that he did and that the king could do no wrong. Then he picked up what was left of his son's body and returned home - in order to gather the remains together and bury them all there, I suppose."

“His forehead, however, was disfigured by what looked like a haphazard assortment of eyes, eight in number, of different sizes and shapes. They went in pairs, and whenever two were in use, it was indicated by a peculiar shining - the rest remained dull, until their turn came. In addition to the upper eyes he had the two lower ones, but they were vacant and lifeless. This extraordinary battery of eyes, alternatively alive and dead, gave the young man an appearance of almost alarming mental activity.”

Lovecraft?

a voyage to arcturus!

"Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti."

^^^ in 2007 I saw a dramatic reading of that line as part of a staged performance of MD, replete with shaving-cream spermaceti

That sounds really rad. MD is structurally odd enough that it seems difficult to adapt for the stage, but it would interesting to see how the director rose to the challenge, and probably compelling to watch or listen to, as long as enough of Melville's language is carried over. (Although I haven't been able to see these productions, I'm intrigued for similar reasons by the attempts to stage performances of 2666, in Barcelona in 2007, and Dhalgren [as Bellona, Destroyer of Cities] in New York in 2010.)

"it would interesting" there should be "it would be interesting"

And so, to salvage the excursion we had driven around the tony western edge of the city, taking in the walled-off, single-story period homes, including Elvis's strange bow-window of a house, and we would have explored longer if we hadn't wandered into a postmodern garage sale and found, laid out like memento mori among old Steve Martin Betamaxes, an assortment of superannuated chemotherapy supplies, which so depressed us that we each immediately took a bump of the key to Lily's Nissan Leaf.

"I don't know how one boy could have caused so much disappointment without ever giving anyone any grounds for hope."

-- Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

a voyage to arcturus!

― clouds, Tuesday, July 15, 2014 3:01 PM

Hah! Maybe not terribly far off with Lovecraft?

oh it totally has that overwrought early sci-fi tone

(which i love tbh)

Sounds a little more substantial than Lovecraft given the effusive Wikipedia entry!

i think it might end up being one of my favorite novels just by dint of its uniqueness and ambition -- also i totally geek out whenever gnostic/manichaean philosophy is invoked in literature/film

Jose Arcadio Buendia stopped his pursuit of the image of God, convinced of His nonexistence, and he took the pianola apart in order to decipher its magical secret. Two days before the party, swamped in a shower of leftover keys and hammers, bungling in the midst of a mix-up of strings that would unroll in one direction and roll up again in the other, he succeeded in a fashion in putting the instrument back together....The house was opened, still smelling of resin and damp whitewash, and the children and grandchildren of the founders saw the porch with ferns and begonias, the quiet rooms, the garden saturated with the fragrance of the roses, and they gathered in the parlor, facing the unknown invention that had been covered with a white sheet.
Those who were familiar with the piano, popular in other towns of the swamp, felt a little disheartened, but more bitter was Ursula's disappointment when she put in the first roll so that Amaranta and Rebeca could begin the dancing and the mechanism did not work. Melquiades, almost blind by then, crumbling with decrepitude, used the art of his timeless wisdom in an attempt to fix it. Finally Jose Arcadio Buendia managed, by mistake, to move a device that was stuck and the music came out, first in a burst and then in a flow of mixed-up notes. Beating against the strings that had been put in without order or concert and had been tuned with temerity, the hammers let go. But the stubborn descendants of the twenty-one intrepid people who plowed through the mountains and in search of the sea to the west avoided the reefs of the melodic mix-up and the dancing went on until dawn.

when I had only just met my wife maria, she wanted me to go to her family's place and ask for her hand officially—may I have your daughter maria's Hand there, mr what's-his-face—and on my way to her place I got the houses mixed up … she said: we live at 117 … and by mistake I walked past it and rung the bell at 127 … yes, you can laugh, but what happens? At 127 the front door is opened by my maria, because she's always in and out of the neighbor's house. That was my first story, and now I give you my second story: walking through the town of the 2 mills with my wife maria, I suddenly think of your heroine ondine … who by now must be old and toothless and virtually blind … and I think of her husband … what's-it, what's his name again? … and I ask her: whereabouts do you suppose what's-it lives, maria? And maria stops and gives me a quizzical stare: are you pulling my leg or what, asking me where what's-it live just as we reach the house where he lives? And I stop too and look at the house, and sure enough what's-it comes out of it … what's his name again … oscarke … a quiet guy with a tuft of gray hair on the back of his head.

We desire passionately that there should be another life in which we would be similar to what we are here below. But we do not reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, but in this one, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we had wanted to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death might modify us more than the changes that occur in the course of a lifetime, if in that other life we were to meet the self that we have been, we would turn away from ourselves as from those people to whom we have been close but whom we have not seen for a long time - those friends of Saint-Loup's. for example, that I was so pleased to find again every evening at the Faisan Doré, but whose conversation I would now find simply out of place and an embarrassment. In this respect, and because I preferred not to go and rediscover what had pleased me there, a walk through Doncières might have seemed to me to prefigure my arrival in paradise. We all dream a great deal of paradise, or rather, of numerous successive paradises, but they are all, long before we die, paradises lost, in which we would feel lost.

Ah nice. What's that from?

That's from Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah.

"If I see a need, the first thing I'm thinking is how to fill it. That's just me. That's how I operate. Cereal takes a long time to eat. Bang: Cereal Milk. I can't see in the dark. Bang: Light Jackets. I can't leave my cat at home. Bang: Pet Björn. I just came up with all of those concepts right now. I don't even like them."

wow i just read that book! well, like 1/3rd of it

i'm at about the same point--that bit made me laugh out loud

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake in the middle of the night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."

such a brilliant strange book

I guess that one is worn out by now from Pinterest and commencement speeches. Nevermind.

Something I read t'other day:

The human nose is practically non-existent. The greatest poets in the world have smelt nothing but roses on the one hand, and dung on the other. The infinite gradations that lie between are unrecorded. Yet it was in the world of smell that Flush mostly lived. Love was chiefly smell; form and colour were smell; music and architecture, law, politics and science were smell. To him religion itself was smell. To describe his simplest experience with the daily chop or biscuit is beyond our power. Not even Mr Swinburne could have said what the smell of Wimpole Street meant to Flush on a hot afternoon in June.

From "The Recognitions"

"Science assures us that it is getting nearer to the solution of what life is, that is ("The Ultimate Mystery"), and offers anonymously promulgated submicroscopic chemistry in eager substantiation. But no one has even begun to explain what happened at the dirt track in Langhorne, Pennsylvania about twenty-five years ago, when Jimmy Concannon's car threw a wheel, and in a crowd of eleven thousand it killed his mother."

"He was soon to realize, unpleasantly, the uselessness of bathing."

During the great eighteenth-century flooding of the river plain, a priest is said to have lain down on the dike at the river's bank and ordered peasants to pound on his stomach with a long pole until he expired. He was buried in the dike, and from that time on the river kept within its banks. [...] The mythic act of pounding the priest's body recalls the commonplace act of pounding rice to produce mochi, the glutinous rice cakes presented as offerings to the divinities. The myth and rite emphasize the symbolism of enclosure: the priests blood is kept inside his body and the priest's body is kept within the dike, just as the dike should enclose the river waters. His homogenized innards become the mortar that holds together the river barriers. Through the offered operator of the priest's body, the peasant labor of pounding and enclosure is permanently embedded as a prophylactic feature within the local landscape.

"From this moment, the number of mysterious disappearances began to get alarming."

wazzat?

After 12 hours she tried to find her battery, but when she burrowed to the bottom of the dumpster she found a cool ocean there. She let her thoughts float up to get picked off by birds and cooked in the sun. She lost herself delighting in the shapes and lights way up above her. She didn't need to know what they were. She just liked seeing that something was there with her. NO, I MEAN, she liked being removed from the whole world; seeing it leave traces of light while she was safe, where light couldn't penetrate. NO, I MEAN, she looked out and saw a world that was just flashes of light and color, and she felt bigger and more real than any of it. Perhaps the only being who ever was real. The whole world and every fucker she fell for or got beaten by was all things she did to herself inside her head, which was broken.

xp René Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking (trans. David Coward & E.A. Lovatt)

He would not sit down with them, or talk, or walk with them. He would do nothing but sit with one of his wife’s shawls round him on the bed, dejected, staring at something, or pace up and down, looking intensely bitter, ready to bite, like a dog left in charge of some property. They knew his nature so well that they left him alone at all times, to preserve themselves, and so gave him no opportunity to rave, storm, and cry woe. He wanted to be angry, his mission was to be angry, and he had nothing to be angry about; the world would not let him rave, this was the great injustice he suffered from: he stalked up and down being angry, in futility; but this anger, little spent, had kept him young, blackhaired, and strenuous for over eighty years. For the rest, they all secretly sighed for his death.

xp René Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking (trans. David Coward & E.A. Lovatt)

― Eman Srebmud (bernard snowy), Monday, 19 January 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Good timing given that I'm reading de Nerval at the moment...

daumal is great. really recommend the collection of his non-fiction city lights put out the powers of the word ed. & trans. by polizzotti.

"No, by God! Other artists may perhaps be so damned by their works, but I have never laboured to deceive. All my colours are unnatural, golds and scarlets mostly, and I make no use of perspective, for perspective deceives the eye, and to deceive the eye is to deceive the mind, and that is immoral, like the telling of idle tales."

Great book.

His acquaintance with games was confined to tennis, but when elderly he invented his own form of exercise, which consisted in riding a tricycle through St. James’s Park in the early mornings or along paths cemented for the purpose in the park of his estate at Hatfield. Wearing for the occasion a kind of sombrero hat and a short sleeveless cloak with a hole in the middle in which he resembled a monk, he would be accompanied by a young coachman to push him up the hills. At the downhill slopes, the young man would be told to “jump on behind,” and the Prime Minister, with the coachman’s hands on his shoulders, would roll away, cloak flying and pedals whirring.