The Pianist

"I still don’t know why my playing is considered so disturbing. I remember in school, as a child, I learned that the flame of a candle is composed of a yellow light, which actually burns, and a blue light within it, which is ice cold. That is true of human beings as well. Perhaps it is the sight of that blue light in me that frightens certain people.”       

    ... Alexis Weissenberg (1929-2012)
French pianist

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Q86WssF38

Tolstoy didn’t like Shakespeare

"Several times I read the dramas and the comedies and historical plays, and I invariably underwent the same feelings: repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment. At the present time, before writing this preface, being desirous once more to test myself, I have, as an old man of seventy-five, again read the whole of Shakespeare, including the historical plays, the "Henrys," "Troilus and Cressida," the "Tempest," "Cymbeline," and I have felt, with even greater force, the same feelings,—this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits,—thereby distorting their aesthetic and ethical understanding,—is a great evil, as is every untruth"           

 ... Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian writer

Time-warp

Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me

"Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you...I often get thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that I almost wish there was no Eternity. To think that we must forever live and never cease to be. It seems as if Death which all so dread because it launches us upon an unknown world would be a relief to so endless a state of existense."

... Emily Dickinson (1830-86), American poet

Consciousness a la quantum mechanics

Our minds can arrive at truths beyond the reach of a logical system

 "... for both the rich and the poor, life is dominated by an ever growing current of problems, most of which seem to have no real and lasting solution. Clearly we have not touched the deeper causes of our troubles. The ultimate source of all these problems is in thought itself, the very thing of which our civilization is most proud, and therefore the one thing that is "hidden" because of our failure seriously to engage with its actual working in our own individual lives and in the life of society."

... David Bohm (1917-92), celebrated quantum
physicist who contributed to theoretical physics, philosophy, neuropsychology, and the Manhattan Project.

You can't go home again ...



"I was the ghost".

“What I am about to tell must be the experience of very many in this nation where so many wander and come back. I called on old and valued friends. I thought their hair had receded a little more than mine. The greetings were enthusiastic. The memories flooded up. Old crimes and old triumphs were brought out and dusted. And suddenly my attention wandered, and looking at my ancient friend, I saw that his wandered also. And it was true what I had said to Johny Garcia -- I was the ghost. My town had grown and changed and my friend along with it. Now returning, as changed to my friend as my town was to me, I distorted his picture, muddied his memory. When I went away I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness. Although they could not say it, my old friends wanted me gone so that I could take my proper place in the pattern of rememberance -- and I wanted to go for the same reason. Tom Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory”. 

... John Steinbeck (1902-68), American writer. Excerpt from ‘Travels with Charley: In Search of America’.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be ...

"Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked".



.... Peter De Vries (1910-93), American editor (The New Yorker), satirist  and novelist.

American "exceptionalism" defined

wanton wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless local natives

"Many thousand years ago our Aryan ancestors raised cattle, made a language, multiplied in numbers, and overflowed. By due process of expansion to the west they occupied Europe,

developed arts and sciences, and created a great civilization, which, separating into innumerable currents, inundated and fertilized the globe with blood and ideas, the primary bases of all human progress, incidently crossing the Atlantic and thereby reclaiming, populating, and civilizing a hemisphere.

blood and ideas

As to why the United States was in the Philippines, the broad actuating laws which underlie all these wonderful phenomena are still operating with relentless vigor and have recently forced one of the currents of this magnificent Aryan people across the Pacific -- that is to say, back almost to the cradle of the race -- thus initiating a stage of progressive social evolution which may reasonably be expected to result in substantial contributions on behalf of the unity of the race and the brotherhood of man".

... General Arthur MacArthur (1845-1912) justifying to the U.S. Senate the invasion and occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the 19th century when he was serving as military govenor of the Philippines, overseeing the wanton wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless local natives. He was the father of General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) of WW2 fame.

Unknown love

"To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvellous thing in life. To feel the love of people we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses -- that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things".

           .... Pablo Neruda (1904-73) Chilean poet, diplomat and politician

Facelift anyone? ...

“Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character”.

... Clarence Day (1874-1935), American writer.

Farewell, my friends -- farewell and hail!

I'm off to seek the Holy Grail.

I cannot tell you why.

Remember, please, when I am gone,

'Twas Aspiration led me on.

Tiddlely-widdley tootle-oo,

All I want is to stay with you,

But here I go. Good-bye.

The unselfish giant ...

"This wallpaper is atrocious either it or I have to go."

"You came to me to learn the pleasure of life and the pleasure of art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful ... the meaning of sorrow and its beauty"

... Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), author and wit

Atavistic piety ...

inflation feeds upon inflation

 "... from time to time, capitalist economies exhibit inflations and debt deflations which seem to have the potential to spin out of control. In such processes, the economic system's reactions to a movement of the economy amplify the movement – inflation feeds upon inflation and debt-deflation feeds upon debt deflation."

  

    ... Hyman Minsky (1919-96) American economist  

A very funny man ...

                                                                                             

"The fact is that all of us have only one personality, and we wring it out like a dishtowel. You are what you are"

... S. J. Perelman (1904-79), American humorist, author, and screenwriter

Eccentricity plus ...

tall, exotically dressed and invariably turbanned eccentric ... a familiar feature of London literary life.

"I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it."






 Edith Sitwell  (1887-1964) British poet and critic.

Motherly intuition

My mother never wrote me a letter, ever. Father had on occasion. Both were not much into letter writing. When I did receive a letter from her, it was a complete surprise. It simply stated my father had some minor physical ailment, the nature of which she was not precise nor did she, so I thought, understand. But she sensed it was a death knell without really saying so. It was a quality which she had that hinted at folksy wisdom which I respected, one of the few qualities she had I did respect. It was a “heads up” letter that proved out.

Ulysses ... easily the epic of the age!

Joyce  posing in the doorway of a bookstore on Paris's Left Bank 

"The more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce’s genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccupation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it – this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equaled in the literature of our time."

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), 

American writer and literary and social critic

and noted man of letters.

                     

Where facts end, fiction begins ...

"What is, if not easy, almost always possible to do is for members of the private detective school of literary criticism to prove that the writer of fiction written in the first person could not possibly have done everything that the narrator did or, perhaps, not even any of it.

"This is not easy to do"

When you first start writing stories in the first person, if the stories are made so real that people believe them, the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you. That is natural because while you were making them up you had to make them happen to the person who was telling them. If you do this successfully enough, you make the person who is reading them believe that the things happened to him too. If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for, which is make something that will become a part of the reader’s experience and a part of his memory. There must be things that he did not notice when he read the story or the novel which, without his knowing it, enter into his memory and his experience so that they are a part of his life. This is not easy to do."    

      ... Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), "A Moveable Feast (the restored edition)" 

Suicide, Gonzo style

'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."

... Hunter S Thompson (1937-2005), American journalist and author, in a note left for his wife four days before he shot himself in the head.

... the Earth is full

“The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave inpediments to the nation’s economic and social development.”

   

        ... Zhou Shengxian (born 1949), China’s environment minister

... on the face of it

"Look at these eyes. I'm dead - behind these eyes. I'm dead."

           
                ... Laurence Olivier (1907-89) from the the John Osbourne (1924-94) play "The Entertainer"

The Lost Generation

Interviewer: Do you mind if we ask you about Gertrude Stein's (1874-1846) remark, “You are all a lost generation”?

Cowley: Oh, it's simple as all get-out. Gertrude Stein was having her Model-T Ford repaired at a garage in the south of France. The mechanics weren't very good; they weren't on the job—in fact, I think they were on strike. The proprietor said to Miss Stein, “These young men are no good—they are all a lost generation”—une génération perdue. So an unknown French garageman should get credit for that remark. Of course, Miss Stein deserves credit for picking up on the phrase.

... Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989), Noted American writer and critic.