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ARCHIVED ENTRIES FOR
JANUARY 2010
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Saw Barrière who
told us this striking anecdote. On the Place de Grève
he had seen a condemned man whose hair had visibly stood on end when
he had been turned to face the scaffold. Yet this was the man
who, when Dr. Pariset had asked him what he wanted before he died,
had answered: 'A leg of mutton and a woman.'
--Pages from the Goncourt Journal (ed.
and tr. by Robert Baldick), 29 January 1860
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Patrick: Lagniappe
'Oh!' said Lafontaine. 'The Empress was
charming. When my manager told her that I was very hoarse, she
said: "We shall come back another time."'
'That's just like the Bonapartes!' said Scholl.
'They always imagine they're going to come back!'
--Pages from the Goncourt Journal (ed.
and tr. by Robert Baldick), 25 January 1860
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Patrick: Lagniappe
We talk about his Carthaginian novel, which he
is in the midst of writing. He tells us of his research, his
studies, the reading he has done, the piles of notes he has made,
and the incomprehensibility of the words involved, which is forcing
him to paraphrase all his terms. 'Do you know the full extent
of my ambition?' he asks. 'I just want an intelligent man to
shut himself up for four hours with my book, so that I can give him
a feast of historical hashish. That's all I ask. . . . After
all, work is still the best means of whiling away one's life.'
--Pages from the Goncourt Journal (ed.
and tr. by Robert Baldick), 12 January 1860
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Then we remark how few people there are who can
appreciate something well done and beautiful in itself, like the
rhythm of a sentence. 'Can you imagine anything more stupid',
Flaubert asked, 'than struggling to eliminate the assonances from a
sentence or the repetitions from a page? For whom? And
then, even when the book succeeds, the success you obtain is never
the kind you wanted. It was the farcical bits in Madame
Bovary that made it a success. Success is always off the
mark. As for style, how many readers enjoy and appreciate it?
And remember that style is what makes us suspect in the eyes of the
law, for the courts are all for the classics. . . . But in reality
nobody has read the classics! There aren't eight men of
letters who have read Voltaire, and I mean really read him.
And there aren't five who could tell you the titles of Thomas
Corneille's plays. Art for art's sake? It received its
greatest consecration in the address delivered to the Academy by a
classical writer, Buffon, when he said: "The manner in which truth
is enunciated is more useful to humanity than the truth itself."
If that isn't art for art's sake, what is? And how about La
Bruyère, who says: "The art of writing
is the art of defining and depicting."'
--Pages from the Goncourt Journal (ed.
and tr. by Robert Baldick), 12 January 1860
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Noticeable, too, is the re-emergence of
sentiment as the prince of the critical utensils. Commentators
respond, not to the novel, but to its personnel, whom they want to
"care about," in whom they want to "believe." Such remarks as
"I didn't like the characters" are now thought capable of settling
the hash of a work of fiction. This critical approach will
eventually elicit what it fully deserves--a literature of
ingratiation. And we will then have reached the destiny that
Alexis de Tocqueville predicted for American democracy: a flabby
stupor of mutual reassurance.
--The Second Plane by Martin Amis
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The old enemy was a superpower; the new enemy
isn't even a state. In the end, the U.S.S.R. was broken by its
own contradictions and abnormalities, forced to realize, in Martin
Malia's words, that "there is no such thing as socialism, and the
Soviet Union built it." Then, too, socialism was a modernist,
indeed a futurist, experiment, whereas militant fundamentalism is
convulsed in a late-medieval phase of its evolution. We would
have to sit through a Renaissance and a Reformation, and then await
an Enlightenment. And we're not going to do that.
--The Second Plane by Martin Amis
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Patrick: Lagniappe
I was once asked: "Are you an Islamophobe?"
And the answer is no. What I am is an Islamismophobe, or
better say an anti-Islamist, because a phobia is an irrational fear,
and it is not irrational to fear something that says it wants to
kill you. The more general enemy, of course, is extremism.
What has extremism done for anyone? Where are its
gifts to humanity? Where are its works?
--The Second Plane by Martin Amis
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Patrick: Lagniappe
There is an obvious end to the amount of purely
physical experiment in music, just as there is an obvious end to
geographical exploration. Wyndham Lewis has pointed out that
when speed and familiarity have reduced travelling in space to the
level of the humdrum those in search of the exotic will have to
travel in time, and this is what has already happened in music.
The Impressionist composers vastly speeded up the facilities for
space travel in music, exploring the remotest jungles and treating
uncharted sea as though they were the Serpentine. Stravinsky,
at one time the globe trotter par excellence can no longer thrill us
with his traveller's tales of the primitive steppe and has, quite
logically, taken to time travelling instead. He reminds one of
the character in a play be
Evreinoff
who lives half in the eighteenth century, half in the present.
--Music Ho! by Constant Lambert
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Patrick: Lagniappe
But today every composer's overcoat has its
corresponding hook in the cloakroom of the past. Stravinsky's
concertos (we have it on the composer's own authority) are 'like'
Bach and Mozart;
Sauguet's music is admired becase 'c'est dans le vrai tradition
de Gounod'; another composer's score is praised because in it 'se
retrouvent les graces étincelleantes de
Scarlatti'. The composer can no longer pride himself on being
true to himself--he can only receive the pale reflected glory of
being true to whichever past composer is credited at the moment with
having possessed the Elixir of Life.
It would be a mistake, I think, to put this
attitude down to a spiritual humility comparable to the quite
natural inferiority complex a modern sculptor might feel in the
presence of some early Chinese carving. It is more in the
nature of a last refuge, comparable to the maudlin religiosity of a
satiated rake. After the debauches of the Impressionist period
nothing is left to the modern composer in the way of a new
frisson save a fashionable repentance.
--Music Ho! by Constant Lambert
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Patrick: Lagniappe
This extraordinary speeding up in technical
experiment gives a pleasantly vertiginous quality to the
Impressionist period, which distinguishes it from all other
experimental periods in music; and in spite of the fact that much of
their experiment leads us to a blind alley there is an exhilaration
of the barricades about the Impressionist composers that imposes a
certain gratitude. 'Pioneers, O Pioneers!' we feel as we
listen to Iberia, Pierrot Lunaire, and Le Sacre du
Printemps. To be a pioneer is not necessarily the
proudest of boasts for a composer--but it is at least something to
boast about. We cannot turn to the present generation and
sing: 'Pasticheurs, O Pasticheurs!' with the same grateful
enthusiasm.
--Music Ho! by Constant Lambert
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Pierrot Lunaire, moreover, cannot be
considered an isolated example of the fin-de-siècle
quality in Schönberg's music.
Die Glückliche Hand, with its great
black cat crouching like an incubus or succubus on the hero, and its
green-faced chorus peering through dark violet hangings is in the
purest Edgar Allan Poe tradition, while Erwartung, with its
vague hints of necrophily, brings in the Kraft-Ebbing touch (Jung at
the prow and Freud at the helm) which is the twentieth century's
only gift to the 'nineties. I am not suggesting for a moment
that Schönberg rises no higher than the
weak decadence of Giraud. There is in his music a fierce
despair, an almost flamelike disgust which recalls the mood of
Baudelaire's La Charogne and places it far above the
watercolour morbidities of the chosen text. But at the moment
I am not trying to determine the purely musical value of Schönberg's
various works--I merely wish to indicate the undoubted neurasthenic
strain that is symptomatic of his period, and which can be found in
works like Stauss' Salome and Elektra which,
musically speaking, are widely differentiated from Schönberg's
in technique.
--Music Ho! by Constant Lambert
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The 'humanities' : perhaps this was the key
word for the 1780s. It was astonishing how much the upper
classes knew. Fox was an authority on Cassandra of Lycophron,
known to scholars as 'the Obscure' : Walpole could read a blazon or
print a fine edition or write about the history of Richard III: the
classics had been flogged into everybody, so that the Latin poets
were quoted as familiarly as educated people now quote Shakespeare:
Greek was spouted in the House of Commons, though with no great
success: it was in the royal library that Dr Johnson met the
bibliophile king: the main legacy of the coarse Sir Robert Walpole
was a fabulous collection of pictures: all society went nightly to
hear Handel or the Opera: the business of the country had actually
been transacted between George I and his First Minister in dog
Latin: an Irish earl had possessed the temerity to argue with
Bentley: Selwyn, who was an ignoramus, wrote his unimpressive
letters instinctively in a mixture of English, French and Italian:
in Paris, at Madame de Deffand's and at other salons, the visiting
English talked almost as easily in the foreign tongue: and the
scandalous Wilkes, who had belonged to the Hell-fire Club and who
had set all Britain by the ears in Parliament, retired gracefully to
edit Theophrastus.
--The Age of Scandal by T.H. White
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The Prince de Kaunitz, who wore satin stays,
passed a portion of every morning in walking up and down a room in
which four valets puffed a cloud of scented powder, but each of a
different colour, in order that it might fall and amalgamate into
the exact nuance that best suited their master's taste
(CAPTAIN JESSE)
--The Age of Scandal by T.H. White
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Patrick: Lagniappe
It is useless to whine. It has happened.
It is the logical result of our half-baked Victorian
humanitarianism. All men are not equal. That ridiculous
idea of English democracy was invented in the reign of Queen
Victoria, and it has now become bureaucracy.
--The Age of Scandal by T.H. White
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Well, we have lived to see the end of
civilisation in England. I was once a gentleman myself.
When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, the Master of a college
was a fabulous being, who lived in a Lodge of breath-taking beauty
and incalculable antiquity, tended by housemaids, footmen and a
butler. There he consumed vintage port, wrote abstruse
treatises if the spirit moved him, and lived the life of an
impressive, cultivated gentleman. Such posts were among the
few and noble rewards rightly offered to scholarship by the
civilisation which then existed.
When I last stayed in Cambridge, I lunched with
two Masters of colleges. Both of them had to help with the
washing-up after luncheon.
--The Age of Scandal by T.H. White
[N.B.: These are the opening lines to
T.H. White's idiosyncratic work about the culture of late-eighteenth
century England (that is, right before the Regency). It is
consciously written in the spirit of Lytton Strachey and is as well
constructed as a work of well-wrought fiction (no surprise, since
T.H. White wrote, among other marvelous things, The Sword in the
Stone). I highly recommend it.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The cemetery is divided in two halves: French
crosses on one side, English headstones on the other. A place
where time and silence have stood their ground. In the
distance, wheat fields and low hedges, trees. I walk along
rows of crosses on each of which is written the single word:
INCONNU. Row after row. On the English side there are
the pale headstones:
A SOLDIER
OF THE GREAT WAR
KNOWN UNTO GOD
In front of each grave there are flowers:
flame-bursts of yellow, pink, red, orange. Apart from roses I
recognize none of the flowers; the rest remain unknown, unnamed.
The only sound is of humming bees, of light
passing through trees, striking the grass. Gradually, I become
aware that the air is alive with butterflies. The flowers are
thick with the white blur of wings, the rust and black camouflage of
Red Admirals, silent as ghosts. I remember the names of only a
few butterflies but I know that the Greek word psyche means
both 'soul' and 'butterfly'. And as I sit and watch, I know
also that what I am seeing are the soul of the nameless dead who lie
here, fluttering through the perfect air.
--The Missing of the Somme by Geoff
Dyer
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Theodor Adorno said famously that there could
be no poetry after Auschwitz. Instead, he failed to add, there
would be photography.
--The Missing of the Somme by Geoff
Dyer
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Patrick: Lagniappe
In some ways, then, we talk of the horror of
war instinctively and enthusiastically as Rupert Brooke and his
contemporaries jumped at the chance of war 'like swimmers into
cleanness leaping'.
This is not just a linguistic quibble.
Off-the-peg formulae free you from thinking for yourself about what
is being said. Whenever words are bandied about automatically
and easily, their meaning is in the process of leaking away and
evaporating. The ease with which Rupert Brooke coined his
'think only this of me' heroics by embracing a ready-made formula of
feeling should alert us to - and make us skeptical of - the ease
with which these sentiments have been overruled by another.
--The Missing of the Somme by Geoff
Dyer
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Patrick: Lagniappe
In 1919, at eleven a.m., not only in Britain
but throughout the Empire, all activity ceased. Traffic came
to a standstill. In workshops and factories and at the Stock
Exchange no one moved. In London not a single telephone call
was made. Trains scheduled to leave at eleven delayed their
departures by two minutes; those already in motion stopped. In
Nottingham Assize Court a demobbed soldier was being tried for
murder. At eleven o'clock the whole court, including the
prisoner, stood silently for two minutes. Later in the day the
soldier was sentenced to death.
--The Missing of the Somme by Geoff
Dyer
[N.B.: This is a description of the first
Armistice Day on November 11th, 1919, the anniversary of the end of
the Great War (now known as World War One).]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The Great War ruptured the historical
continuum, destroying the legacy of the past. Wyndham Lewis
sounds the characteristic note when he calls it 'the turning-point
in the history of the earth', but there is a sense in which, for the
British at least, the war helped to preserve the past even as it
destroyed it. Life in the decade and a half preceding 1914 has
come to be viewed inevitably and unavoidably through the optic of
the war that followed it. The past as past was
preserved by the war that shattered it. By ushering in a
future characterized by instability and uncertainty, it embalmed for
ever a past characterized by stability and certainty.
--The Missing of the Somme by Geoff
Dyer
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Patrick: Lagniappe
On the insensible stone Don Lelio lay, almost
inconscious, his form wound in a ligature, marmoreal in white
stillness. His terete members but an hour ago so apt and
flexuous, were distorted by incessant twitchings and cold as snow.
Already his lips were livid; they disclosed the purity of teeth
clenched and continually strident. In the pallid throat,
palpitated a vein with diminishing rhythm. Coerulean stains
appeared below the flickering lashes of the half-closed eyes.
Like rose-petals in a breeze, even the nostrils quivered.
Bloomed the abhominable unmistakeable pallor on the bow, where the
soft caesarial hair was humid with the dew of the breath of Death.
--The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Why continue to think me horrible? For
Goodness' Sake do try to get to the Height of the Comic Cosmic
Viewpoint. You MUST traverse the Valley of the Shadow.
The Realm of White Light is only reached through the Ravine of
Ultra-Violet despair. Get up on the Comic Cone; and peep at
yourself in passing. View your meaningless gyrations and
senseless circumlocutions in perspective. Stop your sulking;
and come out on the blue blue blue (turquoise, sapphire, and
sometimes) indigo blue (aquamarine) lagoon. Squatting in your
stews, you taint the light-dowered air. And your livers get
into your eyes, and your hearts into your boots. People who
can't change their minds are in danger of losing them. It is
Mirth alone which keeps men sane. Oh yes--and, Life is Mind
out for a Lark. Well, now?
--The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Dr. and Mrs. van Someren found his company a
continual source of pleasure. Time had added new strings to
his conversational bow. 'Have you ever seen serpents sliding
out of the eye-holes of skulls?' was one of his openings, derived
from his explorations among the islands, one of which he had found
to be littered with the whitening bones of Austrians heaped there at
the end of the war of liberation. He talked of the violet
evenings and rapid dawns which he had observed from his boat, and
had many stories of the quaint behaviour of his young gondoliers,
one of whom he frequently described as 'a tiger with a simper'.
There was a story, too, of a dark night when his miserable
meditations had been interrupted by arrest as a spy.
--The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons
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Patrick: Lagniappe
I cannot tell you how profoundly moved I was by
your gift, the silver ankh. I instantly perceived how you, and
Harry, must have thought hard till you thought my thoughts.
The evidence was of many kinds, the ankh itself, the size, the
metal, AND above all the adornment of it, as never an ankh has been
adorned before, with my sign of the crab, and my moon, and my
cross-potent-elongate, all of which make it my very, very own.
Such interest in ME, shown by such an exactly intimate knowledge of
my secret and not more than half-formed desire and taste, has never
been shewn before. The effect is almost to strike me dumb.
Thank you, I do: but thanks express but feebly what I feel.
--The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons
[N.B.: And that, folks, in the good
Baron's slightly prolix prose, is why gift cards and the gift of
cash, although such presents may reflect generosity (along with the
sunshine and the rain that fall on both the just and the damned,
indiscriminately), fail to express thoughtfulness as to the
individuality of the recipient. True gifts--as opposed to
mere means of support--validate the unique worthiness of the
receiver: I know you and know what would bring you special
delight. Oh, who am I kidding, here's a fiver and quit bugging
me.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The hands of the guilty don't necessarily
tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation.
Tension is more often shown in the studied action.
--The Third Man by Graham Greene
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Patrick: Lagniappe
'What I disliked about him at first sight,'
Martins told me, 'was his toupée.
It was one of those obvious toupées -
flat and yellow, with the hair cut straight at the back and not
fitting close. There must be something phoney about a
man who won't accept baldness gracefully.
--The Third Man by Graham Greene
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Patrick: Lagniappe
As we drove away I noticed Martins never looked
behind - it's nearly always the fake mourners and the fake lovers
who take that last look, who wait waving on platforms, instead of
clearing quickly out, not looking back. It is perhaps that
they love themselves so much and want to keep themselves in the
sight of others, even of the dead?
--The Third Man by Graham Greene
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Patrick: Lagniappe
To me it is almost impossible to write a film
play without first writing a story. Even a film depends on
more than plot, on a certain measure of characterisation, on mood
and atmosphere; and these seem to me almost impossible to capture
for the first time in the dull shorthand of a script. One can
reproduce an effect caught in another medium, but one cannot make
the first act of creation in script form. One must have the
sense of more material than one needs to draw on. The
Third Man, therefore, thought never intended for publication,
had to start as a story before those apparently interminable
transformations from one treatment to another.
--Preface to The Third Man by
Graham Greene
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