São Tomé A snippet from a vanished culture. While I know military men who can recite Kipling and the purple bits of Henry V, I think this kind of thing is of the past: “If I were to write my memoirs — which I do not propose to do, nor does the world require such a book […]
Category Archives: Felicitous Phrasing
D.S. Carne-Ross.
10-Feb-11Petrified Song.
01-Feb-11A strange couplet quoted by Kerouac and ascribed to Mountain Man Jim Bridger: “I saw a petrified bird in a petrified tree, Singing his petrified song.” It reminds me of the parody of Vergil – the complete text of which I cannot find – by Charles Perrault. It is quoted by Dostoevsky in the The […]
Goldwynism.
28-Jan-11“Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist needs to have his head examined.” – Sam Goldwyn. Stuff like this gives me no end of delight.
Being a man of no diplomatic facility, I have a compensating fascination for slithery “statesmen”: and since I always love extremes, it makes sense that I should be drawn to the most reptilian of them all, Charles Maurice Talleyrand. Most curious to me is the fact that the one interruption to his long career of […]
A literal translation of the poem mentioned so often in The Brothers Karamazov, source of the phrase “sticky little leaves.” Translation by Stephen Boykewich. The cold winds are still blowing And carrying the morning frost. The first little flowers Have just appeared through the spring thaw holes, As though from some miraculous, waxy kingdom, The […]
More Tolstoy.
23-Mar-10“The railroad is to travel what the whore is to love. Just as comfortable, and just as horribly mechanical and fatally monotonous.” – Tolstoy, in a letter to Turgenev. ! This man’s capacity to shock and horrify me – while being ever-so-civilized – never seems to end. Calling whores “monotonous”!
Exquisite Writing.
12-Mar-10I just wrote a review where I contested that Joseph O’Neill’s writing is lyrical, beautiful, exquisite, etc. For contrast, I provide what I consider exquisite writing. This is the beginning of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. Note the languorous conclusions of the sentences. This is all silk and pillows, no doubt, and not all writing should […]
“Metrobius the Impersonator of Women”
17-Feb-10The associates of Sulla, from Plutarch: “He kept company with actresses, musicians, and dancers, drinking with them on couches night and day. His chief favorites were Roscius the Player, Sorex the Arch Mime, and Metrobius the Impersonator of Women, for whom, though past his prime, he continued to be passionately fond up to the last, […]
“Beauty is Perfection in Combination with Freedom.”
27-Aug-11buy gabapentin 300mg capsules I am continually impressed by Goethe’s genius – his capacity to productively see. “Beauty is perfection in combination with freedom” is put as no one else can put it, and the more you think about what keeps things and people which are formally perfect from possessing the elevating radiance which distinguishes true beauty, the more […]