May 2013
1 post
March 2013
2 posts
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The night before Super Tuesday, Hart was in the bar of the airport Hilton, near El Paso. Clunky columns sheathed with mirrors held up an eight-foot ceiling that made the whole place feel sweaty and close. The bit of air between the tables and ceiling was pink with tremulous neon light, spiked with weird hanging lamps of postindustrial chrome, and loud with lite-rock guitars. The chairs were...
February 2013
6 posts
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30 authors assess Philip Roth's career →
“Like Bob Dylan, he has peaked a few times.”
See, you had to understand how Joe thought about Bork. This was what lay at the base of Joe’s depression. This was why his son Beau was off to college next month at Penn. Hell, this was why Joe said that stupid quote to the Inquirer … Send us a Bork, he’d said.
Not because he knew about Dork. At that point, he didn’t know squat … except … Bork was big-time. He taught...
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Sometimes, Gary wondered why Oletha, why Lee, did not have that ease that was her accustomed grace … but he didn’t say anything. Not to her.
One day, at lunch in the Divinity School basement, he said to his friend Tom Boyd:
“It’s so strange … you go to the school you’re supposed to, and you date the kind of person you’re supposed to marry, you get married. … And you wake up...
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That was the reason for the Christmas cards, at least at the start: a way for George and Bar to keep beaming the glow to the folks they’d left back East, when they moved to Texas. But the way those two were about friends, the list just kept growing. Every year George Bush was alive on the planet, there were more friends to take care of. And the way Bar kept her file cards, no one ever dropped...
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It was only years later, when [George H. W. Bush] got into politics and had to learn to retail bits of his life, that he ever tried to put words around the war.
His first attempts, in the sixties, were mostly about the cahm-rah-deree and the spirit of the American Fighting Man. The Vietnam War was an issue then, and Bush was for it. (Most people in Texas were.) He said he learned “a lot about...
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Reading What It Takes, and it is just blowing me away. That first chapter, especially, was just terrific — the kind of first chapter that makes one ready to settle down and work his way through a 1000+ page book.
So now, he gets to the mound and turns, and stands center stage in the great canyon, stands full frame on the nation’s TV screens, stands alone before the forty-four thousand,...
January 2013
8 posts
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When he was sunning himself in the Craneum, Alexander came and stood over [Diogenes] and said, ” Ask of me any favor you like.” To which he replied, “Stand out of my light.”
Alexander once came and stood opposite him and said, ” I am Alexander the great king.” ” And I,” said he, ” am Diogenes the Cynic.”
When Alexander stood...
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Capote’s memoir of Marilyn Monroe
She was now a half-hour late; she was always late, but I’d thought just for once! For God’s sake, goddamnit! Then suddenly there she was, and I didn’t recognize her until she said… Marilyn: Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. But see, I got all made up, and then I decided maybe I shouldn’t wear eyelashes or lipstick or anything,...
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“‘[T]he elements’ were ‘so mixed’ in Mr. Gladstone that...”
– Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians
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“The circumstances of that tragic history, so famous, so bitterly debated, so...”
– Lytton Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians,” 1918, on General Charles George Gordon (via new-tomorrows)
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WatchRick Perlstein, a historian who has written a giant book about politics during the Nixon years, dueling with Pat Buchanan (who appears several times in said book) on Morning Joe.
“I said in the book, Pat, that Nixon loved how you played the game.”
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December 2012
3 posts
1 tag
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“God help the nation when it has a President who doesn’t know as much about...”
– Dwight Eisenhower
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Adam Kirsch riffs on this whole "writing" thing →
November 2012
1 post
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"The King of Prussia, some time before the death of his father,
took it into his head to write a book against the principles
of Machiavelli. If Machiavelli had had a prince for disciple,
the first thing he would have recommended him do would have
been to write a book against Machiavellism."
October 2012
5 posts
2 tags
Not the least of [G. Gordon Liddy’s] manifold talents is for getting caught. He was consultant-in-residence on the set of Will, his autobiographical film. One of the scenes showed him campaigning for Congress in Poughkeepsie. One of the props was a dish of prize cookies. After the shooting had passed through various stages of repetition, a production assistant noticed that some party...
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The minimal respect we owe any man is to begin by taking him at his word; and Mencken never presented himself as other than a Tory, contemptuous of democracy and scornful of the masses. But, faithful as he tried to be to that vision of himself in the abstract, he was almost invariably false to it in controntations with the here and now. He had the luck of the disability that afflicts William F....
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At the 1968 Republican Convention:
During the first day of the convention, Tony Dolan, a young Yale undergraduate who had interviewed [William F.] Buckley for the Yale Daily News, visited him at his room at the Eden Roc Hotel, and confidently predicted that Reagan would win the nomination and the election and create a “Roosevelt-like” change in the country. Buckley raised his hand...
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So, one day in 1955, William F. Buckley Jr.’s father has a stroke that leaves him in a coma:
On the fourth day, Will showed his first signs of consciousness. Aloise, sitting at his bedside, was reading to him the Book of Psalms, from the Old Testament, and Will opened his eyes and exclaimed, “Boy, could those Jews write!” He lapsed again into a coma, but soon afterwards he...
September 2012
4 posts
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William F. Buckley has a seemingly drunk Jack... →
August 2012
1 post
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[Pauline] Kael never gave anyone credit for good intentions. “Art,” as she put it back in 1956, “perhaps unfortunately, is not the sphere of good intentions.” She wasn’t interested in abstractions like “social significance” or “the body of work.” She had to be turned on all over again each time. Her favorite analogy for the movie experience...
July 2012
23 posts
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“Japan’s biological weapons program was born in the 1930’s, in part...”
–
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“The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who...”
– H. L. Mencken, “The Iconoclast”
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“[Clarence Darrow’s] almost insane desire is to save life.”
— Erskine Wood, one of Darrow’s closest friends
Here’s Clarence Darrow in the Leopold and Loeb trial (the bold emphasis is mine):
Now, I must say a word more and then I will leave this with you where I should have left it long ago. None of us are unmindful of the public; courts are not, and juries...
“Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done,...”
– Brendan Behan
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is The Catcher in the Rye on speed: the lost weekend of a disaffected loser who tells his story in a mordant style that is addictively appealing to adolescents with a deep and unspecified grudge against life.
Once you understand the target, the thematics make sense. Sexual prowess is part of the Thompson mystique, for example, but the world of his writing is...
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“His specialty is not, in this critic’s opinion, logic. You can take him up...”
– William F. Buckley Jr., referring to Murray Kempton
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“The writer who defines his audience by its limitations is indulging in the...”
– Lionel Trilling, “The Function of the Little Magazine”
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“If a new or heterodox idea is worth anything at all it is worth a forceful...”
– Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians
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Tom Bissell on watching the creators of sitcom Mike & Molly burst into laughing fits as they shoot a scene:
“These men had seen thousands of sitcom rehearsals between them. Hearing them laugh at such easy slapstick felt like encountering Henry Ford, near the end of his career, whistling in awe as another Model T rolled off his assembly line.”
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“As practiced by mature minds, history forces us to be aware not only of...”
– Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians
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hokusai
Ever since I was six I’ve been obsessed by drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty I had published an endless number of drawings, but everything I produced before the age of seventy is not worth counting. Not until I was seventy-three did I begin to understand the structure of real nature, animals, plants, trees, birds, fish, and insects.
Consequently, by the time I am eighty-six,...
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“If the underdog got on top he would probably be just as rotten as the upper dog,...”
– Clarence Darrow
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