Trouble

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A tough question

Question overheard in the men's room of a Georgetown bar which makes one hope that the young professional posing the question, in a manner which took seriously the assumptins of the question if being joking in that young professional male way, is not the future mover and shaker he thinks himself to be:

"Would you fuck a Russian girl even though she hated America?"


[Compare and contrast a recently read passage from Henry Miller:


" . . . They would find a job for me as long as I was earnest and sincere. i tried to look earnest, but I only succeeded in looking pathetic. They don't want to see sad faces in Russia, they want you to be cheerful, enthusiastic, light-hearted, optimistic. It sounded very much like America to me. I wasn't born with this kind of enthusiasm."]

Favorite part of a recent wedding ceremony

In all seriousness, in an all serious wedding ceremony, the cantor performing the ceremony said, with appropriate Yiddish inflections:

Your marriage has gotten off to a magnificent beginning, starting with the barbeque on Friday which unfortunately I was unable to attend as I had other obligations.

New phrase of the week

Encountered in the past couple of days in two unrelated circumstances: Silkwood shower.

FMI: Initial Kindle Purchases

Tropic of Cancer -- Henry Miller
The Ax -- Donald Westlake
Jeeves Omnibus: My Man Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves -- P.G. Wodehouse
The City and The City -- China Mieville

* * *

Possibly next in the queue:

Something less fictional
The Southpaw -- Mark Harris

Two Leafy Sea Dragons

Three Cheeses

You know,

Marilyn Monroe, describing first meeting Arthur Miller:

"For Monroe, meeting him “was like running into a tree!” she recalled. “You know, like a cool drink when you’ve got a fever.”"

NYT June 2, 2009 review of biography of Miller by Christopher Bigby: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/books/03garn.html?_r=1&hpw

The best way to gain an understanding of something in Serbian

http://translate.google.com/?hl=en#

I took ...

Nice funny sentences, at least in context, from Howard Jacobsen's "The Act of Love":

From his brief how-do-you-dos I took Miles to be an Irish millionaire. A horse breeder, probably.

Strike Through The Mask

Beckett's description, translated from a letter written in German in 1937, of the proper goal for a writer:

"It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through--I cannot imagine a higher goal for today's writer."

Joyce's practice, in contrast, is said to be "the apotheosis of the word."