(B shows A a white wrap dress with big rose-flower-and-leaf print)
A: It’s nice!…If you’re 8. Or 80.
B: HATE YOU.
*
J’observe X et ses mani�res un peu voyantes, ses tentatives de r�tablissement � l’ordre des femmes ou du d�sir inspir�. Mais surtout, ce verbiage! Tous ces mots! Sinon gens charmants, bons moments, repas superbe.
Graham was trying now to connect with, and stretch out to, others, but still sometimes he would suffer a relapse, and abrupt breaking away, a shutting himself off and living within his own loneliness. The shy Greene still remained, protected now by a carapace of self-possession, self-knowledge, confidence and the appearance, at least, of fearlessness — everything played in a low-key and self-deprecating fashion. He was to become rather intimidating himself, but he would never again be intimidated. instead he would face every situation — and even seek out, deliberately, the most dangerous ones, not only to overcome boredom or find copy, but to prove himself to his own satisfaction, and his blue eyes would outstare the world. Never again would he confess easily to a Wheeler (though women and priests there have been many). He would “Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth and a door round about my lips…”, such discipline was now his.
*
Greene has, however, shown a continuing desire to go beyond the limited experiences of his class. He has gravitated towards the seedy, towards deeply-divided creatures and self-destructive heroes, towards middle class persons who have fallen from grace and live outside the bounds of family and society and on the verge of despair. In this respect, we should not ignore his own sense of having fallen from grace. He observes the world seemingly without emotion, clinically in fact, and sometimes contemptuously, though as he registers his repugnance of what he sees, he often feels a guilt for his own irascible feelings. Given one’s sense that he has little love for his fellow men in general (which does not exclude his strong sympathy for individuals) his novels sometimes seem a penance for this lack.
*
“I love you more than I did last April at The Ship, more than last May at Malton, more than June at Blenheim, more than July on the thunder evening, more than August in the Capitol or in the wood at Didcot, more than September at the Golden Cross, more than October in the backwoods, more than November at Nottingham, and December at Hampstead and January at Oxford platform, and February at Nottingham. And I know that in April I shall love you more even than at Berkhamsted in March.”
*
His desire to write and publish had several stimuli, however. One was so as not to fall victim to the apparent contentment of his colleagues in Room 2 at The Times with their mundane and modest way of life — something which made him fear for his own future.
“Mystery, darling. Can you unravel it? How is it that all these sub-editors between 40 and 50 years old, earning if they are lucky 700 a year, seem perfectly happy — attending to their small garden at Streatham in their spare time, sending their children to school etc, &, I’m quite certain, feeling no acute disappointment with things. Cheerful thought.”
SUCKED into the book, and Cathy scares the hell out of me. Here’s how Steinback describes her:
“I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one’s fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishment for concealed sins.
And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighed, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth. And just as a cripple may learn to utilize his lack so that he becomes more effective in a limited field than the uncrippled, so did Cathy, using her difference, make a painful and bewildering stir in her world.
There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community. The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability to distress people, to make them restless and uneasy and even envious.
As though nature concealed a trap, Cathy had from the first a face of innocence. Her hair was gold and lovely; wide-set hazel eyes with upper lids that drooped made her look mysteriously sleepy. Her nose was delicate and thin, and her cheekbones high and wide, sweeping down to a small chin so that her face was heart-shaped. Her mouth was well shaped and well lipped but abnormally small — what used to be called a rosebud. Her ears were very little, without lobes, and they pressed so close to her head that even with her hair combed up they made no silhouette. They were thin flaps sealed against her head.
Cathy always had a child’s figure even after she was grown, slender, delicate arms and hands — tiny hands. Her breasts never developed much. Before her puberty the nipples turned inward. Her mother had to manipulate them out when they became painful in Cathy’s tenth year. Her body was a boy’s body, narrow-hipped, straight-legged, but her ankles were thin and straight without being slender. Her feet were small and round and stubby, with fat insteps almost like little hoofs. She was a pretty child and she became a pretty woman. Her voice was huskily soft, and it could be so sweet as to be irresistible. But there must have been some steel cord in her throat, for Cathy’s voice could cut like a file when she wished.
Even as a child she had some quality that made people look at her, then look away, then look back at her, troubled at something foreign. Something looked out of her eyes, and was never there when one looked again. She moved quietly and talked little, but she could enter no room without causing everyone to turn toward her.
She made people uneasy but not so that they wanted to go away from her. Men and women wanted to inspect her, to be close to her, to try and find what caused the disturbance she distributed so subtly. And since this had always been so, Cathy did not find it strange.”
It reminds me of this book on evil I read by M. Scott Peck, and of Greene’s tormenter at school Carter.
*
Was an orgy of light movie watching — watched Ratatouille, Shreks, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc. And I love chance encounters :)
A: “You’re so sparkly, it’s like you’re sprouting sequins or something.”
B: “Yeah, it’s just my inner drag queen emerging.”
A: “Sparkly in a good way. Something’s going right in your life, isn’t it? Are you getting married?”
The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
“I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
“If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.”
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html
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Colleague on killer santa story: Santa Goes On Slay-ride.
Image from here
MERRY Christmas, I hope you’re spending time with loved ones, with lotsa good conversation, big hugs and yummy food! xx
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Life’s been so good, and sweet, and love’s all around! And feasting, yums, have just been dragging my behind from one eating place to another lately.
HOW fabulous! Fable’s a comic book series that my colleagues introduced to me, and I’m hooked. Oh my, oh my. Love it, love it, love it, it’s clever and witty with romance and suspense and good storytelling. I’ve only read the first two books, and am looking forward to an ORGY of reading ahead. *rubs hands in glee*
*
A proclaims: Love is in the air!
B: Hahahah, have you started using your present? But it’s not Christmas yet!!!!!
A good friend gave me massage oils labelled “Love” and “Bliss”, heh, among other things included in a spa coffret.
A: Yes! I just watched Miller’s Crossing and I love it! More Coen brothers! Fargo!
B: You’ve not seen Fargo? You really do live under a rock, don’t you?
SO YOU meet someone who is clever and attractive and witty and interesting and well-read and the whole superficial package blah blah blah…and that used to be plenty for me, I got so high from that mix of intellectual and physical chemistry, from meeting men with whom I clicked; who introduced me to new ideas and books and cultures, new levels of rapture, who were on my level and who inspired and challenged me. And for most of the passing relationships and flirtations you’ll have in your life, that is plenty enough.
But — for love — it’s not enough for me, not anymore. Someone can be perfectly attractive, smart, and interesting and still leave me cold. For love, I need something more: emotional connection, kindness, sincerity, empathy, thoughtfulness, constancy, attentiveness, a quiet ease. Soul. I know myself and my fickleness well enough to know that I would never have been able to appreciate these steady, quiet qualities without first having experienced the whirlwind of manic exchanges. I am not someone to be content in stability without first having seen those dazzling highs first. Having done that, I’m more able than ever to appreciate that which is quietly sweet and real: to pay attention to someone from the heart, and to be heard as well.
Minz once wrote:
“he is so personally charming, so off-the-wall brilliant… and one couldn’t really make him out - nohrnberg, all gruff exteriors and human and humane within, is one thing, but how do you see through to behind impeccable but impersonal charm? what’s behind that detachedness? what i want to know is if he’s got real heart, because if he does nothing would matter in the least, even the unreliability might be mitigated.”
Someone may not be ready or willing to have a deep relationship that evokes heart and soul at this moment, which is of course always fair enough — but the capacity has to be there. If I know that someone has heart, has this capacity, but it’s not the right moment for them in their lives right now…not a problem, I’ll see where the chips may fall. But if someone doesn’t have real heart, then forget it. For this is the core that none of us can ever change about anyone else.
WAS reminded of E.H. Carr, I’ve to read The Twenty Years’ Crisis, and also Rebecca West.
*
Weekend’s been solid gold so far. Was on zipping along on a friend’s vespa for the first time on Singapore roads last night. I adore it! So cute, so orange, so nice to have the wind in your hair.
*
And can I say: PARTIES! Yum.
Xmas lights
I WANT to be this incandescently happy as much of the time as possible. Light bulbs going off saying “I’M IN LOVE WITH LIFE”.
Such love for living, for words, has inexplicably and savingly provided not only cloak but lantern for the darker seasons and grimmer weather. And at some time in your life an inner fire goes out — it then bursts into flame by an encounter with another human being — we should be grateful for these people. You know who you are — Jo in Singapore, Jo in Beijing, Eric, Samiksha, S., Shing, and more — I love you all so much. Have I said how lucky I am to have such kind, compassionate, wise, bright friends, those with such warmth and heart? I’m so lucky!
Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. it’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Some of this book — perhaps too much — has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of us — and perhaps the best of it — is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.
- Stephen King,
On Writing
*
From the rather twee and precious Bird By Bird, by Anne Lamott:
“Do it every day for a while,” my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honour. And make a commitment to finishing things.”
…I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down the funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship’s rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it down.
I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.
*
Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do — the actual act of writing — turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
…Other days, though, my writing is like a person to me — the person who, after all these years, still makes sense to me. It reminds me of “The Wild Rose”, a poem Wendell Berry wrote for his wife:
Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,
Suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,
and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.
…So God made some of us fast in this area of working with words, and he gave us the gift of loving to read with the same kind of passion with which we love nature. Good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.
…And when you do find out what one corner of your vision is, you’re off and running. And it really is like running. It always reminds me of the last lines of Rabbit, Run: “his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.”
*
By the same token, each of your characters has an emotional acre that they tend, or don’t tend, in certain specific ways. One of the things you want to discover as you start out is what each person’s acre looks like. What is the person growing, and what sort of shape is the land in? This knowledge may not show up per se in what you write, but the point is that you need to find out as much as possible about the interior life of the people you are working with.
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I hoestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Let’s think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down. Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. There is ecstasy in paying attention.
*
If you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don’t ever bother finishing, that you lose interest, it may be that there is nothing at their centre about which you care passionately. The core, ethical concepts in which you most passionately believe are the language in which you are writing. When you start off writing, if you are anything like me, you may want to fill the page with witticisms and shimmering insights so that the world will see how uniquely smart and sensitive you are. Over the course of time, as you get the knack of doing some writing every day, what seems to happen almost organically is that you end up wanting your characters to act out the drama of humankind. Much of this drama does not involve witticisms and shimmer.
*
Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of almost everyone with whom I come into contact as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, “The world’s an orphan home.” But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said “Yes!” And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communion.
The other is to think of the writers who have given a book to me, and then to write a book back to them. The gift they have given us, which we pass on to those around us, was fashioned out of their lives. You wouldn’t be a writer if reading hadn’t enriched your soul more than other pursuits. So write a book back to V.S. Naipaul or Margaret Atwood or Graham Greene or whoever it is who most made you want to write, whose work you most love to read. Make it as good as you can.
*
Because of the spirit, I say. Because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. (omg it becomes so twee I can’t finish typing it out. I need a drink of Didion.)
MINZ pointed this out: Excellent. Most excellent. Julian Barnes as Simenon and Nicholas Le Provost as Maigret.
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Oh how I love Greene: The ferocity, the beauty, what’s unsaid, his totality of vision, and the sense of how nothing bites like reality. Minz has also recommended reading Emerson’s Loving Graham Greene, which I’m quite excited about despite the tepid review from Complete Review. In any case, lots on my hands, the Sherry biography comes in three big tomes.
Also reading Stephen King On Writing, which I’m enjoying. Reading the bit on how he wrote Carrie — remembering what he knew about the two loneliest, most reviled girls in his class — how they looked, how they acted, how they were treated.
Some movies and books make me feel ENRAGED. Carrie was one of them — how people can damage their children so: make them timid and homely and scuttling, warp them, block out the light and fill what should be a haven with worms and ghouls. The bullying in school I’d noted with guilt: It’s all too easy to be one of the schoolmates and I could be a nasty little piece of work when I was a child.
(Sophie’s Choice was another movie that made me inarticulate. I remember literally shaking with anger after watching the movie. I was incandescently furious, so ANGRY that people could do that to one another.)
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Went for a reading today, the loveliest poem I heard was this one by Angeline Yap:
XIN
This is how I pray.
This is how I hold my loved ones lightly.
How like a tiny boat, my cupped hands;
how, like three dancing dots,
my children spill their laughter.
*NB: “Xin” is the Chinese ideogram for “Heart”
“DO you know what I envy about you?” she said.
“It is that you are not constrained.
“By that I mean you do not mind who sees you or hears you or what they think of you. You are wholly yourself, you know your own value, I think, and this puts you in a strong position.”
*
More racial stereotype riffing — no, we never tire of this:
(On waking up early to go with someone to the airport): “Sacrifice is the zenith of traditional Asian womanhood.”
ONE SONG that can always get me onto the dance floor.
“Oh Maria Maria
She fell in love in East L.A.
To the sounds of the guitar, yeah, yeah
Played by Carlos Santana.”
I love Santana’s samba/cha-cha/latin/jazz improv genius.
*
Rereading the Sherry biography of Graham Greene. It’s hard to write about how much Greene means to me, this writer with his narrative skill, his extraordinary, forgiving intelligence and his quirkish black humour. He’s a writer who could never tolerate complacency in anything, least of all morality; his interest lies on the edge of things — he never fell over, but neither did he withdraw to safety. His restless conscience is a call to exploration and thought — to ask questions till it hurts — even if action is impossible.
He sought to fight complacency through doubt, compassion and if necessary disillusionment. Greene’s been integral in my growing up process — I’d been enamoured of dry theory and theology and black and white, but Greene took me beyond that, into the full richness and bruised deepness and intensity of real experience, with souls working out salvation and damnation in situations of moral ambiguity. He takes the complicated threads of bloody politics and theology and weaves them into novels that are thematically compact and enjoyable. He has taught me not only a way to look at storytelling, but a way to look at our fellow human beings.
*
“I said a la fella los colores
The streets are getting hotter
There is no water to put out the fire
Mi cosa la esperanza”
Seguing into The Power And The Glory. The novel tells the story of a Roman Catholic priest in the state of Tabasco in Mexico during the 1930s, a time when the Mexican government, still effectively controlled by Plutarco Elas Calles, strove to suppress the Catholic Church. The main character in the story is a nameless “whisky priest”, and Maria’s the mother of the whisky priest’s child.
Excerpt from the book:
“Now perhaps you’ll go — go away altogether. You’re no good any more to anyone,” she said fiercely. “Don’t you understand, father? We don’t want you any more.”
“Oh yes,” he said. “I understand. But it’s not what you want — or I want…”
She said savagely, “I know about things. I went to school. I’m not like these others — ignorant. I know you’re a bad priest. That time we were together — that wasn’t all you’ve done. I’ve heard things, I can tell you. Do you think God wants you to stay and die — a whisky priest like you?” He stood patiently in front of her, as he had stood in front of the lieutenant, listening. He hadn’t known she was capable of all this thought. She said, “Suppose you die. You’ll be a martyr, won’t you? What kind of a martyr do you think you’ll be? It’s enough to make people mock.”
That had never occurred to him — that anybody would consider him a martyr. He said, “It’s difficult. Very difficult. I’ll think about it. I wouldn’t want the Church to be mocked…”
“Think about it over the border then…”
“Well….”
She said, “When you-know-what happened, I was proud. I thought the good days would come back. It’s not everyone who’s a priest’s woman. And the child…I thought you could do a lot for her. But you might as well be a thief for all the good…”
He said vaguely, “There’ve been a lot of good thieves.”
“For God’s sake take this brandy and go.”
“There was one thing,” he said. “In my case…there was something…”
“Go and find it yourself on the rubbish-tip then. I won’t touch it again.”
“And the child,” he said. “you’re a good woman, Maria. I mean — you’ll try and bring her up well…as a Christian.”
“She’ll never be good for anything, you can see that.”
“She can’t be very bad — at her age,” he implored her.
“She’ll go on the way she’s begun.”
He said, “The next Mass I say will be for her.”
She wasn’t even listening. She said, “She’s bad through and through.” He was aware of faith dying out between the bed and the door — the Mass would soon mean no more to anyone than a black cat crossing the path….
The child sat on a root, kicking her heels against the bark. Her eyes were shut tight fast. he said, “My dear, what is the matter with you…?” They came open quickly then — red-rimmed and angry, with an expression of absurd pride.
She said, “You…you…”
“Me?”
“You are the matter.”
He moved towards her with infinite caution, as if she were an animal who distrusted him. He felt weak with longing. He said, “My dear, why me…?”
She said furiously, “They laugh at me.”
“Because of me?”
She said, “Everyone else has a father…who works.”
“I work too.”
“You’re a priest, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Pedro says you aren’t a man. You aren’t any good for women.” She said, “I don’t know what he means.”
“I don’t suppose he knows himself.:
“Oh, yes he does,” she said. “He’s ten. And I want to know. You’re going away, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
He was appalled again by her maturity, as she whipped up a smile from a large and varied stock. She said, “Tell me –” enticingly. She sat there on the trunk of the tree by the rubbish-tip with an effect of abandonment. The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit. She was without protection — she had no grace, no charm to plead for her; his heart was shaken by the conviction of loss. He said, “My dear, be careful…”
“What of? Why are you going away?”
…He saw her fixed in her life like a fly in amber — Maria’s hand raised to strike: Pedro talking prematurely in the dusk; and the police beating the forestviolence everywhere. He prayed silently: “O God, give me any kind of deathwithout contrition, in a state of sinonly save this child.”
He was a man who was supposed to save souls: it had seemed quite simple once, preaching at Benediction, organizing the guilds, having Coffee with elderly ladies behind barred windows, blessing new houses with a little incense, wearing black gloves … it was as easy as saving money: now it was a mystery. He was aware of his own desperate inadequacy.
He went down on his knees and pulled her to him, while she giggled and struggled to be free. He said: “I love you. I am your father and I love you. Try to understand that.” He held her tightly by the wrist and suddenly she stayed still, looking up at him. He said: “I would give my life, that’s nothing, my soul … my dear, my dear, try to understand that you areso important.” That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent. He said: “You must take care of yourself because you are sonecessary. The President up in the capital goes guarded by men with gunsbut, my child, you have all the angels of heaven” She stared back at him out of dark and unconscious eyes: he had a sense that he had come too late. He said: “Good-bye, my dear,” and clumsily kissed hera silly infatuated ageing man, who as soon as he released her and started padding back to the plaza could feel behind his hunched shoulders the whole vile world coming round the child to ruin her. His mule was there, saddled, by the gaseosa stall. A man said: “Better go north, father,” and stood waving his hand. One mustn’t have human affectionsor rather one must love every soul as if it were one’s own child. The passion to protect must extend itself over a worldbut he felt it tethered and aching like a hobbled animal to the tree trunk. He turned his mule south.
A: How do you use this? You suck and blow?
B: ….Yes.
A: Oh! It comes in different flavours too.
All: …
(On using a shisha for the first time.)
*
(On weird tattoos on the people you date.)
C: At least the tattoos were visible and on his arm. They might have been elsewhere.
D: That’s why I insist on a thorough and intimate inspection as soon as possible.
E: What about photographs?
D (waves hands dismissively): They can be doctored.
MORE from the good old days in England. We were so politically incorrect. Part I here.
To A (an upper-middle-class black Jamaican): Oh, go back to the sugar-cane plantation.
A to me: Good Asian girls should be seen and not heard.
C to me, who’s stalking off in a huff: Hey! Hey wait! Damn, your parents should have bound your feet!
Talking about me: Well, maybe we should let her win. You know how Asians have to overcompensate.
(To me): Have you considered enhancement surgery of any kind?
Me: Hey! I’m a model minority. Emphasis on “model”.
We’d the right crowd to role-play in the most ridiculous fashion. So sometimes D, the Irish bloke, and I would be the subjected peasants who’d plot revolution, and other times all of us would pretend to be colonialists in Africa and send A (the black Jamaican) out to get the gin, sometimes E and I would pretend to be Fowler and Phuong in The Quiet American and I’d barely be able to communicate in the English language. E would sometimes act like a butler and make references to the monarchy, while F (the Indian) would give guru/Gandhi-esque soundbites. Ridiculous, but ridiculously good fun.
I’VE been reading this book set in the 1930s about everything, about ideas, about love, and it speaks to how I see the world. It’s about questioning, and desire, and truth, politics and history, reasoning and science and beauty. I’m literally aching now as I read the book, it’s important to me, I feel there’s not a word evolved enough for what it is, or maybe I’m just speechless. More later.
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Rereading Graham, whose analogy of the manic-depressive Mr Market is particularly apt.
“The true investor scarcely ever is forced to sell his shares, and at all other times he is free to disregard the current price quotation. He need pay attention to it and act upon it only to the extent that it suits his book, and no more. Thus the investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage. That man would be better off if his stocks had not market quotation at all, for he would then be spared the mental anguish caused him by other persons’ mistakes of judgment.
“Basically, price fluctuations have only one significant meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal. At other times he will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his divident returns and to the operating results of his companies.”
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From here
100 Best First Lines from Novels
1. Call me Ishmael. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buenda was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Gabriel Garca Mrquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
10. I am an invisible man. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?Do-you-need-advice?Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
12. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)
14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)
15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)
16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (17591767)
20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)
25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
26. 124 was spiteful. Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)
28. Mother died today. Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)
29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)
30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)
32. Where now? Who now? When now? Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)
33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)
34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)
35. It was like so, but wasn’t. Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)
36. Money . . . in a voice that rustled. William Gaddis, J R (1975)
37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
38. All this happened, more or less. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
39. They shoot the white girl first. Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)
40. For a long time, I went to bed early. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)
41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)
42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)
43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)
44. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)
46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation. Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)
47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)
50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)
52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)
53. It was a pleasure to burn. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)
55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho’ not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call’d me. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988)
58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
59. It was love at first sight. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)
61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (1944)
62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
65. You better not never tell nobody but God. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
66. “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)
69. If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)
70. Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)
71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. Gnter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)
72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)
73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)
74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)
75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
76. “Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)
77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)
80. Justice?You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)
81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)
82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)
83. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)
84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)
86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)
87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled. Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)
89. I am an American, Chicago bornChicago, that somber cityand go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)
91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)
92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)
93. Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)
94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another persona shy young man about of 19 years oldwho, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his unclea journalist, fluent in five languageswho himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young mana long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in schoolthat his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)
96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (1988)
97. Hefor there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise itwas in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)
98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)
99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
One type of muruku
SO we ended up at Mustafa’s after dinner and drinks and tapas at Little India, and I was on the search for clear plastic jugs of muruku, a savoury Indian snack. After wandering up and down the aisles and getting sidetracked, we came across these little packets of muruku of various shapes and sizes — like pasta dough, the muruku material can be rolled out flat or fancy, it can be piped into little rounds or broken into bits — and I was suffering from muruku indecision. Then we came across the bigger jugs, and I was making my choice between spicy and regular…S then looked up. She said in tones of awe and disbelief: “Yvonne, look up.” I did. There were the mothers of muruku — giant clear plastic bags that would need two people to carry them — high up on the shelves. Oh, I love Mustafa Centre.