Poem

Memo To Psychologists And Significant Others

A new
tattoo
is often
a clue.

Where the professional judgment of the bartender and private eye coincides

"Two days later, Ernie dropped by in the afternoon. I served him club soda with a splash of whiskey. He's not an afternoon drinker, he informed me, as if I would consider that a credit to his character. "

from Revenge of the Spellmans.

Returning to Moscow after the fire

"The terrain [Napoleon] had to cross to reach Moscow presented a strange appearance. Enormous fires had been lit in the middle of the fields, in thick, cold mud, and were being fed with mahogany furniture and gilded windows and doors. Around these fires, on litters of damp straw, ill-protected by a few boards, soldiers and their officers, mud-strained and smoke-blackened, were seated in splendid armchairs or lying on silk sofas. At their feet were heaped or spread out cashmere shawls, the rarest of Siberian furs, cloth of gold from Persia, and silver dishes in which they were eating coarse black bread, baked in the ashes, and half-cooked, bloody horseflesh -- strange combination of abundance and famine, wealth and filth, luxury and poverty!"

Phillipe-Paul de Segur

The Fatal News

Phillippe-Paul de Segur's description of Napoleon's night in Moscow, before it burned:

"That was a gloomy night, with sinister reports following one another. Some Frenchmen living in that country, and even a Russian police officer, came to warn us of a conflagration, giving all the particulars of the preparations for it. The Emperor, distressed, tried in vain to get a little rest. Every few minutes he called out and had the fatal news repeated to him. Still he persisted in his incredulity, till at about two in the morning he learned that the fire had broken out."

More Roman Jokes

versions by Mary Beard (second one slightly adapted):

A man says to his sex-crazed wife, "What shall we do tonight -- have dinner or have sex?". "Whichever you like," she replied, "but there's no bread."


Three men -- a professor, a barber and a baldman -- were going on a long journey and had to camp out at night. To guard against theft, they took turns keeping watch. They drew straws to determine the order. The barber took the first shift, but got bored. So to pass the time, he shaved the head of the professor -- then woke him up to take his turn. The professor got up, rubbed his head and found that he had no hair. "What an idiot that barber is," he said, "he's woken up baldy instead of me."

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2009/03/the-laughter-lo.html#more

On a related note, last Friday, the 13th, was Red Nose Day. Had I but known.

Nice sentence

Isabel, a bartender/erstwhile private investigator, meets a man in a bar who extends his hand to her:

"I shook it, because that's what you do, and then picked up a dishrag and began drying some glasses, because that's what bartenders do."

from Revenge of the Spellmans, by Lisa Lutz.

[I'm breaking some rules of this blog here, but a little explication: I like this because 1) It's funny; 2) It's funny, but in another context it could as easily be said by Sam Spade or Lew Archer -- imagine it in Bogart's voice; 3) I like the way the humor derives in part from recognizing that the social dilemma people face is mirrored by the dilemma the writer faces: "How do I make [myself / my character] look like a bartender, and look like a person?"; 4) It feels like a line I could have written, and I greatly admire my own humor.

The jokes I like best are 1) those I never would have thought of, and 2) those I could have thought of.]

Noir in a nutshell

As translated from Japanese:

She met his violent entry with equal force, sinking her nails into his back under his shirt, her groan a fusion of pain and delight.

"You fool, you damned fool!" she cried out as she approached her climax, and he didn't know whether she meant him or herself.

from The Informer, by Akimitsu Takagi (tr. Sadako Mizuguchi)

"Reading is, . . . from its first moments, an inevitable process of forgetting. Even as I read, I start to forget what I have read, and this process is unavoidable. It extends to the point where it's as though I haven't read the book at all, so that in effect I find myself rejoining the ranks of non-readers, where I should no doubt have remained in the first place. "

"At this point, saying we have read a book becomes essentially a process of metonymy. When it comes to books, we never read more than a portion of greater or lesser length, and that portion is, in the longer or shorter term, condemned to disappear."

from How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read, by Pierre Bayard (tr. Jeffrey Mehlman), from the chapter "Books You Have Forgotten"

Amusing Yahoo Headline

Obama reassures Canada on trade /Maple cookies for daughters

Poem

http://www.slate.com/id/2101150/sidebar/2101284/ent/2101283/

"All of the Words on a Bottle of Rolling Rock Beer in a Different Order"
by Demetri Martin

Boating

- Flaubert's advice to Guy de Maupassant, when Maupassant was studying with Flaubert, learning to write:

You must -- do you hear me, young man? -- you must work harder. Too many whores! Too much boating! Too much exercise! Yes, that's right: a civilized man does not require as much locomotion as doctors would have us believe.

from review of "Afloat" written by Graham Robb in the NY Review of Books, Feb. 26, 2009.

Zadie Smith on equivocal, multivocal lives, with special reference to herself and Obama:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22334

Harvey's Pastrami

Harvey's Pastrami, for years known for "World's Largest Pastrami," has a nice sign in the window:

"Enjoy Our Spicy Galore!"

Somehow changes my picture of Harvey.

Norman Mailer's Review of "The Old Man and The Sea"

"I thought it was good, and would have been better if it hadn't been so full of shit."


-- from a letter to Lillian Ross, Sept. 2, 1952, published in The New York Review of Books, Feb. 12, 2009.

Useful, little known facts about the world, though perhaps fictional:

"Dogs see ghosts. They see disease floating down the street like fog. They hear and smell the unimaginable. Yet dogs are indifferent to such things because they are simply part of their perceived world. . . .

Life and death do not mix. They could never dance together because both of them would insist on leading."

from "the Ghost In Love," which later explains why, for the dog in question, the absolute worst thing he can encounter is to hear harmonica playing, particularly if it is the recording of the harmonica part of Neil Young's "Heart of Gold."

By the way, he likes the version

Greil Marcus, on Neco Case singing Hank Williams' "Alone and Forsaken:"

"None of [her work on previous albums] suggested that she could look a song like "Alone and Forsaken" in the face. She isn't up to Williams; unlike him, she doesn't sing as if she's already dead."

from Oxford American, Issue 63.