“Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.” —Sam Shepard
Category Archives: Commonplace Book
Lippmann and How Close
“It is often very illuminating, therefore, to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion? Was it the man who told you, or the man who told him, or someone still further removed? And how much was he permitted to see?”
“When he informs you that France thinks this and that, what part of France did he watch? How was he able to watch it? Where was he when he watched it? What Frenchmen was he permitted to talk to, what newspapers did he read, and where did they learn what they say?”
Public Opinion, chapter 2
Walter Lippmann
——
One may obviously substitute Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, and Israel here.
Raining
Reply
”It’s raining today. I could do tragedy.” — Lucy Huntzinger
Boredom
I remembered Roger Ebert saying this about The Age of Innocence. I was right about the topic; wrong about where. It’s in his review of The Remains of the Day.
“I got some letters from readers who complained (Innocence) was boring, that “nothing happens in it.” To which I was tempted to reply: If you had understood what happened in it, it would not have been boring.”
No stain of cruelty…
“As a man, his character cannot be spoken of too highly; no stain of cruelty or faithlessness rests on him.”
That’s an old fashioned, but quite wonderful, assessment of a life. It comes from the 11th Edition Britannica, discussing Étienne Macdonald, one of Napoleon’s marshals.
(To explain his surprising last name: His father was a Jacobite exile, who was of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s retinue. The elder Macdonald married well, giving his son the background to have a chance to advance in the Army.)
In the Icebox
“Another of this wonderful woman’s wonderful sayings (I told you—I got a million of ‘em; don’t make me prove it) was “Milk always takes the flavor of what’s next to it in the icebox.” Not a very useful saying, you might think, but I suspect it’s not only the reason I’m writing this introduction, but the reason I’m writing it the way I’m writing it.
Does it sound like Harlan wrote it?
It does?
That’s because I just finished the admirable book which follows. For the last four days I have been, so to speak, sitting next to Harlan in the icebox. I am not copying his style; nothing as low as that. I have, rather, taken a brief impression of his style, the way that, when we were kids, we used to be able to take a brief impression of Beetle Bailey or Blondie from the Sunday funnies with a piece of Silly Putty (headline in the New York Times Book Review: KING OFFERS EERILY APT METAPHOR FOR HIS OWN MIND!!).”
— Stephen King, from his introduction to Harlan Ellison’s Stalking the Nightmare
Experiential
I once asked film critic Leonard Maltin how much movie production experience he had. He answered, “You don’t need to be a Cordon Bleu chef to know the omelette needs more salt.”
Focus
“If, on balance, you focus more on remembrances than projects, something (central) in you is starting to decay. This also applies to groups, institutions, and countries.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Twitter
John Bate
From Humans of New York:
“I’ve danced in every major theater on Broadway. My specialty was screwing up the choreography.”
Elizabeth Hardwick
In The Paris Review, “The Art of Fiction, No. 87”
INTERVIEWER
I was present a few years ago at a panel discussion where you were asked who was the greatest American female novelist, and you said Henry James. I had the feeling you meant something serious about that.
HARDWICK
Such remarks don’t bear scrutiny. Did I actually say that? I do remember saying once that maybe the greatest female novelist in English was Constance Garnett. Sometimes I try to lighten the gloom of discussions but I notice that no one laughs. Instead you see a few people writing down the name.