On psychopathology -

"Only when the concrete details of environment are laid in, as, for instance, in an honest and discerning novel, can the significance of behavior be well appreciated. Certainly no brief case summary and probably no orthodox psychiatric history can succeed in portraying the character and the behavior of [psychopaths] as they appear day after day and year after year in actual life.
    
It is not enough to set down that a certain patient stole his brother's watch or that another got drunk in a poolroom while his incipient bride waited at the altar. To get the feel of the person whose behavior shows disorder, it is necessary to feel something of his surroundings. ... It is all but impossible to demonstrate any of the fundamental symptoms in the psychopath [in the hospital alone]. The substance of the problem, real as it is in life, disappears, or at least escapes our specialized means of perception, when the patient is removed from the milieu in which he is to function."

- Hervey Cleckly, The Mask of Sanity, 1941.

The lunatic fringe of Alexandrian pseudo-science...

"Greek literary studies today may with some justification be compared with a large, thriving, yet still half-unexplored colony. Look at the map. Here are the state highways, confidently marked in red, establishing communications from one boundary to the other: Homer, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Plato. These roads, and the towns they serve - Homeric Society, the House of Atreus, Solon's Reforms, the Peloponnesian War, the struggle with Macedonia, the Theory of Ideas - we know and travel over regularly. Then there are the minor roads and less-frequented villages: Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, Polybius; Hellenistic culture, Alexandrian epic, Greco-Roman historiography. Finally there is the bush, where tenderfoots never venture at all, but where you may find the old professional diggers staking out their claims: Lycophron, Aeneas Tacticus, Diodorus Siculus, Cercidas, Parthenius, and never-dry watering holes labelled 'Unedited Papyri', 'Scholia', or 'Fragments'. Development, we hear, is going on; but the reports from upcountry are generally in code, and for restricted circulation only .

"This is a curious and not wholly beneficial state of affairs. The classical student's reading list is limited - necessarily limited, perhaps - to certain major authors of proven literary excellence; and he is seldom actively encouraged to forage for himself among minor eccentrics, deadbeat pamphleteers, or the lunatic fringe of Alexandrian pseudo-science. This at once distorts his overall picture of Greek civilization and literature alike. Skimming off the cream makes for indigestion; if there is one thing the Greeks have perenially suffered from, it is the deadening myth of perfection. A wider exploration reassuringly dissolves this illusion. ..."

- Peter Green, "The Humanities Today", 1960.

An irrepressible addendum:

"Mr Thomas Taylor, at the instance, I believe, of the old Duke of Norfolk, printed fifty copies in quarto of a translation of the works of Plato and Aristotle. He did not choose that a larger impression should be struck off, lest these authors should get into the hands of the vulgar. There was no danger of a run in that way. I tried to read some of the Dialogues in the translation of Plato, but, I confess, could make nothing of it: "the logic was so different from ours!" *

*An expression borrowed from a voluble German scholar, who gave this as an excuse for not translating the 'Critique of Pure Reason' into English. He might as well have said seriously, that the Rule of Three in German was different from ours. Mr Taylor (the Platonist, as he was called) was a singular instance of a person in our time believing in the heathen mythology. He had a very beautiful wife. An impudent Frenchman, who came over to London, and lodged in the same house, made love to her, by pretending to worship her as Venus, and so thought to turn the tables on our philosopher. I once spent an evening with this gentleman at George Dyer's chambers, in Clifford's Inn, where there was no exclusion of persons or opinions. I remember he showed with some triumph two of his fingers, which had been bent so that he had lost the use of them, in copying out the manuscripts of Proclus and Plotinus in a fine Greek hand. Such are the trophies of human pride! It would be well if our deep studies often produced no other crookedness and deformity! I endeavored (but in vain) to learn something from the heathen philosopher as to Plato's doctrine of abstract ideas being the foundation of particular ones, which I suspect has more truth in it than we moderns are willing to admit. ..."

- William Hazlitt, "On Reading New Books", Florence, May 1825.

"Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of showing it; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S.T.C. - he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his - (in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals) - in no very clerkly hand - legible in my Daniel; in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas! wandering in Pagan lands - I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S.T.C."

- Charles Lamb, "The Two Races of Men", December 1820. S.T.C. is of course his childhood friend Coleridge.

- Dick Cavett with Oscar Peterson.

There are many interesting illustrations to be found at http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/

Edit: this blog seems to have been taken down.

- Rachmaninoff playing Chopin's Nocturne in E Flat with impossible dignity and grace.

The only useful critics were those who knew what writing was all about...

"At the same time, he refused to be impressed by this [critical] attention - which earned him the jealousy and hatred of other mystery writers - because he thought most critics were simply illiterate. To him, The Memoirs of Hecate County proved that Edmund Wilson didn't know how to write, and he poked fun at the solemnity of Auden's remarks about the "criminal milieu." The only useful critics were those who knew what writing was all about. ... But the real development in Chandler is that he had grown suspicious of the kind of critical and intellectual magazines he had written for in his youth, because "they never achieve life, but only a distaste for other people's view of it. They have the intolerance of the very young and the anemia of closed rooms and too much midnight smoking.' "

- MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler. Just so.

Postscript: Chandler: "Here I am halfway through a Marlowe story and having a little fun (until I got stuck) and along comes this fellow Auden and tells me I am interested in writing serious studies of a criminal milieu. So now I look at everything I put down and say to myself, Remember, old boy, this has to be a study of a criminal milieu."

A few photographs...

- Photos of Dizzie Gillespie, Shelly Manne, and the Stan Kenton Orchestra, all from the late 1940s, all taken by William P. Gottlieb. Found here, a site with a large number of excellent jazz photographs.

The streets were dark with something more than night.

"Looking back on his stories in 1950 he identified their main characteristic as the 'smell of fear' they managed to generate. In this, they echoed his own experience, for they were about 'a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night. The mystery story grew hard and cynical about motive and characters, but it was not cynical about the effects it tried to produce nor about its technique of producing them.' "

- The Life of Raymond Chandler, Frank MacShane

First man on the moon

- Neil Armstrong visiting the Wright Brothers' house in Detroit in 1972, sixty-nine years after the brothers flew their first craft. From here.

The Onion's own TED talks.  Mind-blowing. 

When I turn on the radio, I would like to hear something beautiful.

- Elvin Jones, 1927-2004. 

Buildings

- The Rockefeller Center on December 5, 1933. From here.

The Eiffel Tower in 1900, the year of the Exposition Universelle. From here.

An immoral face...

- Cavett with R. Mitchum. Has there ever been another actor less like the parts he plays?  Part 1 of 7.

One day we will give more exams to children in our inner cities...

Interviewer: "If you were an adviser to one of the presidential candidates, which issues would you insist that he address?"

Kozol: "I would advise the candidate to reopen the dream of Martin Luther King. King did not say I have a dream that some day we will give more exams to children in our inner cities. He did not say I have a dream that some day we will hold children whom we have cheated accountable for their failure. He did not even say I have a dream that we will put more computers and better software into segregated schools, which is pretty much what the candidates are talking about. I would like to see a presidential candidate resolve to fight the enormous forces within the banking and real estate industries and the media that have locked us into a shameful and perpetual apartheid.

Second, I would ask the candidate to abolish the local property tax as the source of school funding and instead fund the public education of every American child out of the federal income tax. Then a child’s education would not depend on whether she was born in the poorest white rural section of southern Ohio or the richest white suburb of New England. After all, when we ask children to pledge allegiance to the flag, it’s not to the flag of the South Bronx or Beverly Hills, but to the American flag."

- From  this interview with Jonathan Kozol.

that old deluder

"It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times by persuading from the use of tongues, that so at least the true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded and corrupted with false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers; and to the end that learning may not be buried in the grave of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors."

- The Old Deluder Act of Massachusetts, 1647. 

"Furthermore, intelligence is an incredibly plastic property of the brain. You can nurture it or you can squelch it — the marching morons will birth children with as much potential as a pair of science-fiction geeks, and all that will matter is how well that mind is encouraged to grow. Even a few centuries is not enough to breed stupidity into a natural population of humans — that brain power may lay fallow and undernourished, but there isn’t enough time nor enough pressure to make substantial changes in the overall genetics of the brain....

Here’s the real solution to the “marching moron” problem: teach them. Give them fair opportunities. Open the door to education for all. They have just as much potential as you do. Bova complains that people aren’t willing to work for change, but this is exactly where we can work to improve minds — but we won’t if we assume the mob is hopeless."

- from an article in ScienceBlogs by P.Z. Myers, answering C.M. Kornbluth's story "The Marching Morons", 1951. 

This Sublunary Maze

"Copernicus, Atlas his successor, is of opinion the earth is a planet, moves and shines to others, as the moon doth to us. Digges, Gilbert, Keplerus, Origanus, and others, defend this hypothesis of his in sober sadness, and that the moon is inhabited: if it be so that the earth is a moon, then are we also giddy, vertiginous and lunatic within this sublunary maze."

 - Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621.

Dea Moneta

"Our summum bonum is commodity, and the goddess we adore Dea Moneta, Queen Money, to whom we daily offer sacrifice, which steers our hearts, hands, affections all: that most powerful goddess, by whom we are reared, depressed, elevated, esteemed the sole commandress of our actions, for which we pray, run, ride, go, come, labour, and contend as fishes do for a crumb that falleth into the water. It is not worth, virtue (that's bonum theatrale [a theatrical good]), wisdom, valour, learning, honesty, religion, or any sufficiency for which we are respected, but money, greatness, office, honour, authority; honesty is accounted folly; knavery, policy; men admired out of opinion, not as they are, but as they seem to be: such shifting, lying, cogging, plotting, counterplotting, temporizing, flattering, cozening, dissembling, "that of necessity one must highly offend God if he be conformable to the world," Cretizare cum Crete [to do at Crete as the Cretans do], "or else live in contempt, disgrace, and misery." One takes upon him temperance, holiness, another austerity, a third an affected kind of simplicity, whenas indeed he, and he, and he, and the rest are hypocrites, ambidexters, outsides, so many turning pictures, a lion on the one side, a lamb on the other. How would Democritus have been affected to see these things!"

- Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621, p. 65.

If all be true that I have read

"If Democritus were alive now, he should see strange alterations, a new company of counterfeit vizards, whifflers, Cuman asses, maskers, mummers, painted puppets, outsides, fantastic shadows, gulls, monsters, giddy-heads, butterflies. And so many of them are indeed (if all be true that I have read). For when Jupiter and Juno's wedding was solemnized of old, the gods were all invited to the feast, and many noble men besides. Amongst the rest came Chrysalus, a Persian prince, bravely attended, rich in golden attires, in gay robes, with a majestical presence, but otherwise an ass. The gods, seeing him come in such pomp and state, rose up to give him place, ex habitu hominem metientes [measuring the man by his garb]; but Jupiter, perceiving what he was, a light, fantastic, idle fellow, turned him and his proud followers into butterflies: and so they continue still (for aught I know to the contrary) roving about in pied coats, and are called chrysalides by the wiser sort of men...."

- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621, p. 53.

Horowitz

What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?

"In the large envelope I carried I could feel the hard-cornered, rubberbanded batches of index cards. We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse - I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.

I was holding all Zembla pressed to my heart. "

- from "Pale Fire"

Quiet, you lousy amateurs!

"Ben Hecht played the violin with amateur gusto, so he decided to organize what he called the Ben Hecht Symphonietta, which was to meet for concerts every Thursday night in Hecht's hilltop home. He recruited a peculiar variety of talents. Charles MacArthur played the clarinet, and Harpo Marx the harp, but only in A major. George Antheil, the composer, was supposed to keep order of a sort on the piano. Groucho Marx wanted to join in, but the others decided that he was ineligible since the only instrument he could play was the mandolin, which the others considered beneath the dignity of Ben Hecht Symphionetta. It was all partly a joke, but all chamber music players take their obsession seriously.

On the night of their first rehearsal, in an upstairs room of Hecht's house, the musicians had just started to play when someone began a loud banging on the door of their rehearsal room. The door suddenly flew open, and Groucho Marx appeared on the threshold.

"Quiet, please!" he shouted, then disappeared again, slamming the door behind him. The assembled musicians looked at one another with some embarassment. "Groucho's jealous," Harpo Marx explained. Hecht thought he had heard strange sounds downstairs, but the musicians all decided to ignore the interruption and let Groucho go his own way. They started playing again. Once again, there came a banging on the door. Once again, Groucho Marx appeared.

"Quiet, you lousy amateurs!" he shouted. When the musicians still ignored him, Groucho turned and stamped down the stairs. Yet again, the musicians turned to their instruments. Then came a resounding orchestral flourish from below. It was the overture to Tannhauser.

 "Thunderstruck," Antheil recalled, "we all crawled down the stairway to look. There was Groucho, directing with great batlike gestures, the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. At least one hundred men had been squeezed into the living room. Groucho had hired them because (as he later explained) he had been hurt at our not taking him into our symphionetta. We took him in."

- from City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's, Otto Friedrich, 1986.

"For early influences we have to start, and almost end, with Hammett. When I first read The Thin Man there was this technique I'd never seen before and wouldn't see again until Nabokov. A character who seems to be telling us one thing is actually telling us something quite different, even the opposite. He says he's blithe and witty and content, but we know he's lost and scared and very very sad."

- from this interview with Donald Westlake

As Close As Mars Is To Saturn

"I read all three of the morning papers over my eggs and bacon the next morning. Their accounts of the affair came as close to the truth as newspaper stories usually come - as close as Mars is to Saturn. None of them connected Owen Taylor, driver of the Lido Pier Suicide Car, with the Laurel Canyon Exotic Bungalow Slaying. ... It was a nice write-up. It gave the impression that Geiger had been killed the night before, that Brody had been killed about an hour later, and that Captain Cronjager had solved both murders while lighting a cigarette. The suicide of Taylor made Page One of Section II. There was a photo of the sedan on the deck of the power lighter, with the license plate blacked out, and something covered with a cloth lying on the deck beside the running board. Owen Taylor had been despondent and in poor health. His family lived in Dubuque, and his body would be shipped there. There would be no inquest."

- from The Big Sleep, 1939

This Speck of Cosmic Dust

"I walked eagerly, perplexed by all these things, and presently found myself in a level place among scattered trees. The colorless clearness that comes after the sunset flush was darkling. The blue sky above grew momentarily deeper, and the little stars one by one pierced the attenuated light; the interspaces of the trees, the gaps in the farther vegetation that had been hazy blue in the daylight, grew black and mysterious."

- H.G Wells, "The Island of Dr. Moreau", 1896.

America's Chopin, 1972

- an excellent set by Bill Evans (a redundant phrase if there ever was one) with Eddie Gomez and Marty Morell, from 1972, including some interview footage. Goddamn do I wish I could turn on the set and see Bill Evans.

The best Basie

"He lighted a cigarette and tossed the empty pack into a grey-violet wastebasket. He looked at a yellow-stained radio with a phonograph annex. Then he found himself glancing at the record albums grouped in a yellow case beside the yellow-stained cabinet. "I see you go in for swing," he said. From another room she said, "Legitimate swing." ...

Dragging at the cigarette he stooped over and began going through the record albums. When he came to Basie he frowned. There was a lot of Basie. The best Basie. The same Basie he liked. There was Every Tub and Swinging the Blues and Texas Shuffle. There was John's Idea and Lester Leaps In and Out the Window. He...decided to play Texas Shuffle....He switched on the current and got the record under the needle. Texas Shuffle began to roll softly and it was very lovely. It clicked with the fact that he had a cigarette in his mouth, watching the smoke go up, and the police didn't know he was here."

- from David Goodis' tobacco-stained novel Dark Passage, 1946.

All Known Vagrants Are Picked Up

- From the excellent Gun Crazy, made back when the police had the ability to detain every last known vagrant. 1950.

It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle

"Suddenly, down a steep path among the lilac bushes - a short cut from the Queen's quarters - the Countess came running and tripping over the hem of her quilted robe, and at the same moment, from another side of the palace, all seven councilors, dressed in their formal splendor and carrying like plum cakes, replicas of various regalia, came striding down the stairs of stone, in dignified haste, but she beat them by one alin and spat out the news. The drunk started to sing a ribald ballad about 'Karlie-Garlie' and fell into the demilune ditch. It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle, and so, in my awareness of this problem, I prepared for John Shade, some time in June, when narrating to him the events briefly noticed in some of my comments (see note to line 130, for example), a rather handsomely drawn plan of the chambers, terraces, bastions and pleasure grounds of the Onhava Palace. Unless it has been destroyed or stolen, this careful picture in colored inks on a large (thirty or twenty inches) piece of cardboard might still be where I last saw it in mid-July, on the top of the big black trunk, opposite the old mangle, in a niche of the little corridor leading to the so-called fruit room. If it is not there, it might be looked for in his upper-floor study. I have written about this to Mrs Shade but she does not reply to my letters. In case it still exists, I wish to beg her, without raising my voice, and very humbly, as humbly as the lowliest of the King's subjects might plead for an immediate restitution of his rights (the plan is mine and is clearly signed with a black chess-king crown after 'Kinbote'), to send it, well packed, marked not to be bent on the wrapper, and by registered mail, to my publisher for reproduction in later editions of this work. Whatever energy I possessed has quite ebbed away lately, and these excruciating headaches now make impossible the mnemonic effort and eye strain that the drawing of another such plan would demand. The black trunk stands on another brown or brownish even larger one, and there is I think a stuffed fox or coyote next to them in their dark corner."

- from Pale Fire, 1962.

V.V.N.

Interviewer: "As someone who has bridged this gulf [between C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures"], do you see the sciences and humanities as necessarily opposed?"

Nabokov: "I might have compared myself to a Colossus of Rhodes bestriding the gulf between the thermodynamics of Snow and the Laurentomania of Leavis had that gulf not been a mere dimple of a ditch that a small frog could straddle. The terms "physics" and "egghead" as used nowadays evoke in me the dreary image of applied science, the knack of an electrician tinkering with bombs and other gadgets. One of those "Two Cultures" is really nothing but utilitarian technology; the other is B-grade novels, ideological fiction, popular art. Who cares if there exists a gap between such "physics" and such "humanities"? Those Eggheads are terrible Philistines. A real good head is not oval but round.
...
I wouldn't care to categorize writers, the only category being originality and talent. After all, if we start sticking group labels we'll have to put The Tempest in the SF category, and of course thousands of other valuable works."

- Nabokov, from this interview, 1968.

a map of the universe

"Then she stood a while longer, reflecting, her unseeing eyes directly in front of the peacock's tail. He had jumped into the tree and his tail hung in front of her, full of fierce planets with eyes that were each ringed in green and set against a sun that was gold in one second's light and salmon-colored in the next. She might have been looking at a map of the universe but she didn't notice it any more than she did the spots of sky that cracked the dull green of her tree."

- Flannery O'Connor, "The Displaced Person", 1955.

- Photo from this collection.

- Sign spotted by your author at a fromagerie in Livarot, France.

"When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don't work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. ... But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading — in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl's Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles."

- George Orwell, "Bookshop Memories", 1936. 

"We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create."

- Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not A Christian", 1927. 

unless it hangs on and expands in the mind...

"In most English classes the short story has become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected. Every time a story of mine appears in a Freshman anthology, I have a vision of it, with its little organs laid open, like a frog in a bottle. I realize that a certain amount of this what-is-the-significance has to go on, but I think something has gone wrong in the process when, for so many students, the story becomes simply a problem to be solved, something which you evaporate to get Instant Enlightenment. A story isn’t really any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hangs on and expands in the mind. Properly, you analyze to enjoy, but it’s equally true that to analyze with any discrimination, you have to have enjoyed already, and I think that the best reason to hear a story read is that it should stimulate that primary enjoyment."

- "The Teaching of Literature"

"In the evenings he sat on the steps and talked while the old woman and Lucynell rocked violently in their chairs on either side of him. The old woman's three mountains were black against the dark blue sky and were visited off and on by various planets and by the moon after it had left the chickens."

- "The Life You Save May Be Your Own", 1955. Listen to O'Connor read "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" from the same collection here.

"She went on and on, telling him how careers are made in the movies and how she intended to make hers. It was all nonsense. She mixed bits of badly understood advice from the trade papers with other bits out of the fan magazines and compared these with the legends that surrounded the activities of screen stars and executives. Without any noticeable transition, possibilities became probabilities and wound up as inevitabilities. At first she occasionally stopped and waited for Claude to chorus a hearty agreement, but when she had a good start, all her questions were rhetorical and the stream of words rippled on without a break.

None of them really heard her. They were all too busy watching her smile, laugh, shiver, whisper, grow indignant, cross and uncross her legs, stick out her tongue, widen and narrow her eyes, toss her head so that her platinum hair splashed against the red plush of the chair back. The strange thing about her gestures and expressions was that they didn't really illustrate what she was saying. They were almost pure. It was as though her body recognized how foolish her words were and tried to excite her hearers into being uncritical. It worked that night; no one even thought of laughing at her. The only move they made was to narrow their circle about her."

- Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust, 1939.

"He went back to his desk and finished his column, then started for the park. He sat down on a bench near the obelisk to wait for Mrs. Doyle. Still thinking of tents, he examined the sky and saw that it was canvas-colored and ill-stretched. He examined it like a stupid detective who is searching for a clue to his own exhaustion. When he found nothing, he turned his trained eye on the skyscrapers that menaced the little park from all sides. In their tons of forced rock and tortured steel, he discovered what he thought was a clue.

Americans have dissipated their racial energy in an orgy of stone breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians. And they have done their work hysterically, desperately, almost as if they knew that the stones would some day break them."

- Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts, 1933.

Images from here. 

- Mitchell Jamieson, "Ladders", 1964, from here. This is one of a series of paintings and sketches of the American space effort which originated from a suggestion by James Webb, NASA's administrator from 1961-1968 (those heady years), that artists might turn their collective attentions to mankind's lunar strivings. From the National Air and Space Museum: 

"Working together, James Dean, a young artist employed by the NASA Public Affairs office, and Dr. H. Lester Cooke, curator of paintings at the National Gallery of Art, created a program that dispatched artists to NASA facilities with an invitation to paint whatever interested them. The result was an extraordinary collection of works of art proving, as one observer noted, "that America produces not only scientists and engineers capable of shaping the destiny of our age, but also artists worthy to keep them company."

And the hope is not false...

"But, despite all the vocational advisers, the pamphlets pointing out to them what good money you can earn if you invest in some solid technical training - pharmacology, let's say, or accountancy, or the varied opportunities offered by the vast field of electronics - there are still, incredibly enough, quite a few of them who persist in writing poems, novels, plays!... Here in their midst, George feels a sort of vertigo. Oh God, what will become of them all? What chance have they? Ought I to yell out to them, right now, here, that it's hopeless?

But George knows he can't do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself almost, he is a representative of the hope. And the hope is not false. No. It's just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real."

- from Christopher Isherwood's wonderful A Single Man, 1964.

Mingus, Haynes, Monk, and Parker. From here. 

"The sunset at the window competed in brilliance with the Van Goghs and the Gauguins. The sun burned like a fire ship on the water, sinking slowly till only a red smoke was left trailing up the sky. A fishing boat was headed into the harbor, black and small against the enormous west. Above its glittering wake a few gulls whirled like sparks which had gone out."

- Ross Macdonald, Black Money, 1965.

From here

- the genius of modern jazz plays Bach, from The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 3, 1957. 

photo from here. 

"Then Roach, Morrison, and I and the boy went out on to the terrasse with the panorama splendide in the late twilight and pulled up chairs around a couple of tables. The clarinetist put his feet up on his table, tilted his chair back, and announced that he was going to play "Dans l'Ambiance" - or, as he translated it, "Een de Mud." Then he lifted the clarinet to his lips and played "In the Mood"... [it] sounded better than any other music I've ever heard. The clarinet gloated over the routed Ostrogoths. The thin sound, wriggling up toward the old Tower, woke birds that had turned in for the night. M. Bertrand's son, a slight youth of eighteen, said the Germans had disapproved of jazz, regarding an interest in it as evidence of Allied sympathies, and had forbidden it to be played  in public places. The zazous, or hepcats, however, were not discouraged by this from playing at dances but, instead, amused themselves by working out musical arrangements that began as Viennese waltzes, then switched to jazz and back again before any Germans present could call  the turn. The zazous also affected le genre jazz in their clothes, the Bertrand boy said; they wore what Americans call zoot suits. There was nothing much l'Occupant could do about that."

- A.J. Liebling, Normandy Revisited, 1955.

Man's Urge to Power

"In the State, as in the Church, in waging war upon treason on the one hand and heresy on the other, torture was admitted to be the most powerful instrument available. It is, although any practical expressions are hidden and camouflaged in a thousand ways, the most powerful instrument available to-day. Because of this basic fact, torture has always been existent in some form or other, and, in the course of the world's history, has made spectacular and sporadic emergencies, which, in themselves, have been partly instrumental in distracting attention from those forms of persecution which have been continually present since the beginning of man's urge to power, and which are existent in our own time....The masses hate anything which they do not understand and at the same time cannot ignore, or which is repugnant to their wishes or tastes. They even hate those who tell the truth, because they do not want to know the truth. The burning of a great national newspaper during the war of 1914-1918, for telling an unpalatable truth, was a gesture as psychologically significant as the burning of the witches in the Middle Ages."

- George Riley Scott, A History of Torture, 1940.

Early Deaths of Jazz Musicians Part IV

Doug Watkins died in an automobile accident at 27 years old on February 5, 1962. Traveling from Arizona to California to meet Philly Joe Jones for a gig, he fell asleep and crashed into an oncoming truck. Strangely, Watkins was a cousin by marriage to Paul Chambers, who likewise was from Detroit, likewise played the bass, and likewise died young. Watkins was among the crop of Detroit musicians that included Milt Jackson, Hank, Thad, and Elvin Jones, Donald Byrd, and Tommy Flanagan that made such an indelible and profound mark on '50s jazz. Watkins would have been the cream of any city's crop. His tone tended to be unassuming yet virile, sometimes reaching towards something beautiful or discovering someplace unforeseen. Watkins' most memorable recording might be "Saxophone Colossus", possibly the best album to come out of Prestige, in which, it might be said, his audacious poise provides a counterpoint to Rollins' tremendous ferocity of invention.

 The aptly titled "Fin de l'affaire" with Hank Mobley, Art Farmer, Horace Silver, and Art Blakey, 1957:

"The prix fixe, at sixteen francs, comprised a choice of soup or a spectacular hors d'oeuvre varié and then fish, entrée, vegetable, salad, and cheese and fruit or dessert. Wine was included, but coffee wasn't. The franc was twenty-five to the dollar."

- A.J. Liebling on eating at the Taverne Soufflet in Paris in 1926. From Normandy Revisited, 1955.

"There is no more evanescent quality in an accomplished fact than its wonderfulness. Solicited incessantly by the considerations affecting its fears and desires, the human mind turns naturally away from the marvellous side of events."

- Conrad, Nostromo, 1904.

"I was as welcome as the flowers in May, once the crew knew that I was going across with them. A man who thinks he may have to be a hero is consoled by the thought that his friends may read about it."

- A.J. Liebling, Normandy Revisited, 1955.

- Giovanni Tiepolo, The Procession of the Trojan Horse Into Troy, 1760.

"So from now on history will be a matter of necessary adjustments to Earth’s biophysical reality. We will be deploying ever-more powerful technologies, and we may get better at understanding our problems and addressing them. We could very possibly build a sustainable civilization that shares the planet with the other animals, and gives all humans alive a chance at a fulfilled existence. This is what the combination of justice and science working on physical reality could do, if we were to successfully shove history that way.

So two possibilities exist at once and are in a kind of awful race: utopia or catastrophe are both possible from our current moment. The thing is, the catastrophes will be wide-ranging but not universal, and will play out over decades and centuries, and in those same decades we will be struggling to accommodate to whatever situation exists, to make the best of it, and even to make it better. So there will be an ongoing struggle."

- Kim Stanley Robinson, from this interview.

Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man’s season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heartbeats. He speaks to everyone and we all claim him but it’s wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn’t properly belong to us but to another world; a florid and entirely remarkable world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer’s ink, and was vigorously dominated by Elisabeth.

– Orson Welles, Everybody’s Shakespeare, 1934

From the remarkable futility closet

"A great recrudescence of obscurity embraced the boat. The sea in the gulf was as black as the clouds above....When his voice ceased, the enormous stillness, without light or sound, seemed to affect Decoud's senses like a powerful drug. He didn't know at times whether he were asleep or awake. Like a man lost in slumber, he heard nothing, he saw nothing. Even his hand held before his face did not exist for his eyes. The change from the agitation, the passions and the dangers, from the sights and sounds of the shore, was so complete that it would have resembled death had it not been for the survival of his thoughts. In this foretaste of eternal peace they floated vivid and light, like the unearthly clear dreams of earthly things that may haunt the souls freed by death from the misty atmosphere of regrets and hopes. Decoud shook himself, shuddered a bit, though the air that drifted past him was warm. He had the strangest sensation of his soul having just returned into his body from the circumambient darkness in which land, sea, sky, the mountains, and the rocks were as if they had not been."

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, 1904.

Lincoln at Gettysburg. He is to the the left of the tall bearded man (his bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon), in the center facing the camera, looking down, hatless.

T. Monk's Advice

Advice from Thelonious Monk, transcribed by Steve Lacy. From here. 

Venter: We're much more genetically determined in terms of our physiology. We have 200 trillion cells, and the outcome of each of them is almost 100 percent genetically determined. And that's what our experiment with the first synthetic genome proves, at least in the case of really simple bacteria. It's the interactions of all those separate genetic units that give us the physiology that we see.

Goetz: So on a cellular level, since the genes control the function of the cell, no matter what happens in that cell's environment, we're more the product of our genes than our environment.

Venter: Yes.

- from this interview with Craig Venter

In an attempt to unburden the unrelieved morbidity of recent posts, here is Ray Charles on Sesame Street sometime in the '70s proving that he could make literally anything sound like the best thing you've ever heard. "Aw man, that's terrible."

Early Deaths of Jazz Musicians Part III

Paul Chambers died of tuberculosis January 4, 1969 at 33 years old.  His thoughtful, patient tone and his deep and beautiful timbre consistently surprises and delights the listener. One's surprise at the sheer amount of albums with his name on the cover is only surpassed by the realization that a majority of them are first-rate. Some of them, a surprising amount, are among the finest recordings in jazz; music that will persist, music that will endure. Here then is a small list of albums ineffably enriched by Chambers' presence:

"The sea has no sense and no pity. If the steamer had been smaller and not made of thick iron, the waves would have crushed it to piece without the slightest compunction, and would have devoured all the people in it with no distinction of saints or sinners. The steamer had the same cruel and meaningless expression. This monster with its huge beak was dashing onwards, cutting millions of waves in its path; it had no fear of the darkness nor the wind, nor of space, nor of solitude, caring for nothing, and if the ocean had its people, this monster would have crushed them, too, without distinction of saints or sinners."

- Anton Chekhov, "Gusev", 1890.

Tolstoy with Chekhov. 

Taken May 17, 1943 at Camp David. From here. 

"Two people who are unable to move their limbs have been able to guide a robot arm to reach and grasp objects using only their brain activity, a paper in Nature reports today."

- From this paper in Nature.

Early Deaths of Jazz Musicians Part II

Scott La Faro died in a car crash on July 6, 1961 when he was 25 years old. The handful of albums that he made with Bill Evans and Paul Motian in the year or so before his death comprise a body of work almost unparalleled in beauty and influence in jazz history. There seems to be no live footage of this trio extant.

- From the album "Waltz for Debby", recorded June 25, 1961 with Evans and Motian.

Le Faro is at left, sitting next to Evans and Motian, sometime around their immortal live recording "Sunday at the Village Vanguard".

 A wonderful pre-trio album of La Faro's from 1958, from when La Faro was 22:

Early Deaths of Jazz Musicians Part I

Clifford Brown was killed in a car crash on June 26, 1956 when he was 25 years old.

- From 1953, with Gigi Gryce, Charlie Rouse, Percy Heath, John Lewis and Art Blakey, "Brownie Eyes"

Brown seems to me to be simultaneously the most trenchant and the most lyrical jazz trumpeter, and I think his music is some of the most beautiful jazz ever recorded.

"Having been compared to Homer and Harold Bell Wright for fifteen years, I get a pretty highly developed delirium tremens at the professional reviewers: the light men who bubble at the mouth with enthusiasm because they see other bubbles floating around, the dumb men who regularly mistake your worst stuff for your best and your best for your worst, and, most of all, the cowards who straddle and the leeches who review your books in terms that they have cribbed out of the book itself, like scholars under some extraordinary dispensation which allows them to heckle the teacher. With every book I have ever published there have always been two or three people, as often as not strangers, who have seen the intention, appreciated it, and allowed me whatever percentage I rated on the achievement of that intention."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, from a letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, 1934.