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.