Advice from a kid who wandered into my office

Kid:  Why you have your glasses on?

Me:  I can't read without them, and that's mostly what I do.

Kid:  Don't ever read.

Beckett 3/1/1951

I do not believe in collaboration between the arts. I want a theatre reduced to its own means, speech and acting, without painting, without music, without embellishments.

Rejection Letter

"I can now only weakly say this: if the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I was the sole remaining author, that would mark the end of the world of books."   Norman Maclean

from Letters of Note:  http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/end-of-world-of-books.html

"Speaking of bananas, the doorbell rang again" -- Trail of the Spellmans

Your $2.00 shoes hurt my feet. -- Woody Guthrie

Nice Reading Guide

http://www.themillions.com/2012/04/killer-read.html

"This is the Reading Group Guide for the new psychological thriller, The Reading Group Killer. Based on a true story, The Reading Group Killer tells the story of a gruesome book club-turned-bloodbath when one member, after years of enjoying friendly discussion and light refreshments, transforms into a murderer. . . ."

-- Andrew Blachman

Spoiler Alert?

Favorite Introductory Note of Thanks
(t least from a law review article that I've recently read):

"I have asked the editors not to make my citations conform to The Bluebook, and they have generously consented."

-- Richard A. Posner, in a note before his review of the 19th edition of The Bluebook.

Word on the Street

"I've never in my life been, like, so caught off . . . [long pause] . . . guard."

Roger Angell on the Brittanica's predicable shock

and "The Ship"

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/03/more-britannica.html#entry-more

" . . About a hundred detective stories have begun with the discovery that an American millionaire has been murdered, which is, for some reason, treated as a sort of calamity. "

                                                     G.K. Chesterton

"The mistake, the weakness at any rate, is perhaps to want to know what one is talking about.". -- Samuel Beckett 11/8/48

"I go to bars so that someone, the bartender, will occasionally ask "Are you all right?"'"

Cleanliness is next to ?

Roger Angell on the joys of looking things up in print:


An elementary-school teacher I know recalls a moment with a female sixth-grade student of hers who’d somehow botched the word “sophisticated” in a paper they were going over together and, when pressed, confessed that she didn’t really know what the word meant. “Why not look it up?” the teacher said, handing over a dictionary. The young woman leafed about, then paused, with her finger stabbing something on the page. “Hey!” she cried, her face alight. “Oh, wow, they’ve got ‘Snot.’”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books#ixzz1pKkZ1jLl

Too Great to Quote

Album of the moment:  "Old Ideas"

More What It Was

She wore tight slacks the color of vanilla ice cream . . . .