Excerpts and Notes

"Am I still alone in this world?
Ready to burst into tears,
or-- is there a witness?" -- Boris Pasternak

"The attitude towards women is the litmus test for any ethical system." -- Shalamov, Kolyma Tales [What exactly the litmus test is supposed to be testing here is never said. But the bottom line is that any ethical system will be incoherent unless women are contemplated in a positive light. It just can't be a functional system if fully half of your population is considered to be inferior. As a sort of corollary, it might also be true that your system is insupportable if anybody is marginalized ex ante.]


"All is imaginary-- family, office, friends, the street, all imaginary, far away or close at hand, the woman; the truth that lies closest, however, is only this, that you are beating your head against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell." -- Kafka, The Basic Kafka


"Nor is it perhaps really love when I say that for me you are the most beloved; love is to me that you are the knife which I turn within myself." -- Kafka, The Basic Kafka (from a letter to Milena.)


"Everyone now knows how dangerous swallowing stones is . . ." -- Daniil Kharms, Incidences

"What's so great about flowers? You get a significantly better smell from between women's legs." -- Daniil Kharms, from his notebooks.

"Behind a screen I took off my shoes and stretched out on the cot. I had to concentrate. Otherwise the contours of reality might become hopelessly lost. Suddenly, I saw myself from the outside, distracted and absurd. Who am I? What am I doing here? Why am I lying behind a screen waiting for God knows what? And how stupidly my life is going." -- The Compromise, Sergei Dovlatov

"'You know,' I said, 'In our circumstances, it may be more fitting to lose than to win.' -- The Compromise, Sergei Dovlatov

"Just then, silently and not very fast, a red-and-blue ball rolled in through the door, followed one leg of a right triangle straight under the cot, disappeared for an instant, thumped against the chamber pot, and rolled out along the other cathetus-- that is, toward Rodion, who all without noticing it, happened to kick it as he took a step; then, following the hypotenuse, the ball departed into the same chink through which it had entered." -- from Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov

Richard Feynman, describing the meetings that the committee held during the final stages of the Space Shuttle Challenger hearings--

"Perhaps that's a very efficient way to get a report out quickly. But we spent meeting after meeting doing this wordsmithing [or editing of grammar and syntax, etc.] And every once in a while, we'd interrupt that to discuss the typography and the color of the cover. And after each discussion, we were asked to vote. I thought it would be most efficient to vote for the same color we had decided on in the meeting before, but it turned out [that] I was always in the minority! We finally chose red. (It came out blue.)" Source: Feynman's What Do You Care What Other People Think?

"To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell." -- a Buddhist proverb taken from What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Kafka, on parables . . ."All these parables merely set out to say that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already."

Authors who were killed or otherwise injured in a duel: Mihail Lermontov, Aleksandr Pushkin, Prosper Merimee.

Authors who would have rather been killed in a duel: Ernest Hemingway.

gnostic turpitude -- spiritual or intellectual, or perhaps more accurately, social depravity. In Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading, "gnostic turpitude" is the crime for which the protagonist, Cincinnatus, is condemned to death. The word, 'gnostic', means, "of or relating to spiritual or intellectual knowledge," while 'turpitude' is a condition of baseness or depravity; but defining this phrase is not as easy as combining the definitions of its member words. It is a little more difficult to describe exactly what Nabokov means. What Nabokov means to convey is that Cincinnatus, if he is guilty of anything at all, is guilty only of being unable to follow autonomically the rules of the applicable social contract. In other words, Cincinnatus cannot adhere to social norms without making a conscious effort to do so. Such behavior does not come naturally to Cincinnatus, but instead, his adherence comes only by deliberate effort. Also, it is important to the definition that C's persecutors deem his guilt to be a spiritual matter. To them, the matter is spiritual just because they do collectively submit to this code of conduct in an instinctive or involuntary way: their adherence to the social contract is effortless. As for Cincinnatus, he acquired his handicap when he was born into circumstances that left him with malfunctioning social instruments-- thus, he became a pariah early on-- and to the extent that he has been capable, in his later life, of abiding by the terms of the social contract, he has managed to do so only in a labored and self-conscious way. In the eyes of his persecutors, this makes him guilty in the same way that a parishioner can be guilty when he thinks bad thoughts that will never be manifested in action. His guilt does not require action. He is a miscreant by default. So Cincinnatus is being executed, not for committing a crime, but for being himself.

Dear Vladimir,

Not everything is syncopated.

Sincerely,
Chambers

"We realized that life, even the worst life, consists of an alternation of joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and there was no need to fear the failures more than the successes." -- Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

"Something unknown is doing something we know not what." -- Eddington, physicist, from Feynman's Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman



"I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil." -- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

My Favorite Short Stories

[Di Grasso, The Ivans, Sashka the Christ, Karl Yankel] Isaac Babel; [A Boring Story, The Drama, Gooseberries, The Kiss, The Radical] Anton Chekov; The Eternal Husband, Feodor Dostoevsky; The Ledge, Lawrence Sargent Hall; The Lottery, Shirley Jackson; [A Painful Case, Eveline, The Dead] James Joyce; [The Betrothal in Santo Domingo, The Earthquake in Chile, The Marquise of O--] Heinrich von Kleist; Little Herr Friedemann, Thomas Mann; The Doll's House, Katherine Mansfield; [The Avowel, Benoist, Boule de Suif, Coco, A Crisis, Graveyard Sirens, Monsieur Parent, The Necklace, Piarrot, That Pig of a Morin, Saved, The Signal, The Wreck] Guy de Maupassant; The Etruscan Vase, Prosper Merimee; The Dinosaur, Augusto Monterosso; [In Memory of L.I. Shigaev, Music, The Return of Chorb, Terror] Vladimir Nabokov; The Wall, Jean-Paul Sartre; [The Bathhouse, A Clever Little Trick, The Lilacs are Blooming, Michel Sinyagin, What the Nightingale Sang] Mikhail Zoshchenko

The best paragraph ever written (in the absence of sentence variety.)

They shot the six cabinet ministers at half past-six in the morning against a wall of the hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.

From The Short Stories, Ernest Hemingway, Chapter V

Thank you Wikipedia.

A noble spirit embiggens [even] the smallest man.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made-up_words_in_The_Simpsons

Our Own Neologisms

Babeling -- towering, especially in a secularly edifying way, as in the case of a Babeling stack of textbooks. We might even use Babel as a verb. I might, for instance, attempt to Babel my way to erudition.

better disappointment -- any disappointing thing that is 1) more disappointing or 2) simply better than another disappointing thing of the same kind. So we might say, for instance, "She is a better disappointment than my last girlfriend." This phrase will usually be used in the first sense, to convey the judgment that the one thing is more disappointing than the other, but just as 'biannual' might mean either "twice a year" or, the less common, "every two years," so too is this phrase flexible enough to suggest that the first of the two things might in fact be comparatively less bad than the other. It probably isn't the degree to which something is bad that matters anyway. And it might not even matter that the thing was deemed to be bad in the first place. After all, after making such a determination, aren't you quite likely to reverse it before you have the chance to do anything more useful with yourself? William Blake described these scales of sentiment more accurately than I could ever hope to; Blake said: "There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference." I don't even know who William Blake is, but Chuck Baudelaire knew him. Also, it turns out that The Doors didn't get their name from Aldous Huxley's essay-- The Doors of Perception. The name ultimately comes from Blake, who first coined the phrase in his book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where he observes, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." Blake's book is also the source for the name of Huxley's other, less famous essay: Heaven and Hell which was a better disappointment than The Doors of Perception. I've now spent everything that I've ever learned from the Introduction to Baudelaire's On Wine and Hashish. With a fickle heart, please accept this phrase.

debacular -- from the Latin verb, 'debacculare,' by way of the Old French, 'debacler.' Adjective for debacle: of or relating to a ludicrous failure.

deventer -- to disembowel.

full of holes -- Here is a new use for an old phrase: I like her because she is full of holes.

gravely unimportant -- "While standing in line, waiting to be let in the bar, I got to feeling gravely unimportant. Why do this? Why again? I'm pretty sure that I'd rather be sleeping."

Halfrican -- mulatto. A portmanteau of 'half' and 'African', belonging to a class of word combinations that we fondly call, 'Gundiganisms', because they are the peculiar brainchildren of the people of El Segundo. (Source: "Silly" Eno.)

homelessy -- of or relating to homeless people or the condition of being homeless, or even a broader air of homelessness. Stolen without permission from Rachel, whose last name I can't remember. It's short anyway.

insentient grumblings -- What to most people count as thoughts.

irrecondite -- not obscure, obvious.

neglecting drugs-- vb., as in, to neglect drugs, which would be akin to abusing drugs, but serious in an altogether different way.

othrewise, othwerise -- for dyslexics, alternative misspellings of the word, 'otherwise'.

plumage -- pubic hair, preferably that of a dove-skinned brunette.

plussed -- Not at a loss for words. A state of perfect composure or complete equanimity.

respiteful -- restful or well-rested, especially when used to describe somebody else's nap or subsequently cheery condition, either or both of which may cause you to harbor spite with renewed vigor. Use as in, "So, your nap was respiteful then?"

retardedly -- done like a retard.

ricockulous -- the meaning of this should be self-evident. Another Gundiganism. (Source: Silly Eno.)

sorostitute -- sorority girl. Yet another Gundiganism. (Source: Silly Eno.)

take off her blue stockings -- what an intellectual woman does before getting into bed. For example, the phrase might be used in a sentence such as this: "If I could only get her to take off her blue stockings."

unabated genius -- after the next entry, the remainder.

unerring stupidity -- a contraction of what I see when I look in the mirror.

un-understandable -- not understandable. (Source: Richard Feynman.)

unwitty -- I love this word. Contributed by Daniil Kharms.

violent scent -- Used to describe the relative strength of the cologne or perfume that a person is wearing.

whore -- (Johnson's synomyms for) doxy, drab, fornicatress, laced mutton, punk, strumpet, trull.

Last Will and Testament

When I die, I want my ashes scattered over my dog's wet food. If it turns out that I don't have a dog when I die, please buy a dog and feed him whichever brand of wet food tastes good enough to satisfy the whim put forth herein. (Amended.)