Kylog

The time is always right to do something right. –Martin Luther King

Good advice, like a secret, is easier to give away than to keep. (264)

“If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well,” said Rilke in sharp defiance of the future industry of TV and self-help-book exorcism. (288)

Great elaboration of Camp:

Camp is not in rugby football.
Camp is not in the Old Testament.
Camp is not in St Paul.
Camp is not in Latin lessons, though it might be in Greek.
Camp loves colour.
Camp loves light.
Camp takes pleasure in the surface of things.
Camp loves paint as much as it loves paintings.
Camp prefers style to the stylish.
Camp is pale.
Camp is unhealthy.
Camp is not English, damn it.

But …

Camp is not kitsch.
Camp is not drag.
Camp is not nearly so superficial as it would have you believe.
Camp casts out all fear.
Camp is strong.
Camp is healthy.

And, let’s face it ….

Camp is queer. (136)

And summing up his adolescence:

Didn’t Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to Faust. Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also, in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make:the pain and terror we will take from others’ shoulders, our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false.

There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination. (297)

Paston School lived up to all my prejudices, as things always will to the prejudiced. (299)

To Myself: Not to Be Read Until I Am Twenty-Five

I know what you will think when you read this. You will be embarrassed. You will scoff and sneer. Well I tell you now that everything I feel now, everything I am now is truer and better than anything I shall ever be. Ever. This is me now, the real me. Every day that I grow away from the me that is writing this now is a betrayal and a defeat. I expect you will screw this up into a ball with sophisticated disgust, or at best with tolerant amusement but deep down you will know, you will know that you are smothering what you really, really were. This is the age when I truly am. From now on my life will be behind me. I will tell you now, THIS IS TRUE–truer than anything else I will ever write, feel or know. WHAT I AM NOW IS ME, WHAT I WILL BE IS A LIE. (301)

What a wonderful book! Here are some tidbits:

We keep our insignificant blemishes so that we can blame them for our larger defects. (20)

Re his lack of musicality and the piano:

I can play … I mean, as an effort of will I can sit down and learn a piece at the piano and reproduce it, so that those who hear will not necessarily move away with their hands clutched to their mouths …. Then of course, a piano needs no real-time tuning. I strike middle C and I know that middle C will come out. Were I to try and learn a stringed or brass instrument that needed me to make the note as I played, then I hate to think what might be the result. (78)

Summarizing his childhood pains:

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing — they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me. (79)

Music matters to me desperately, I’ve made that clear, and I could cover pages and pages with my thoughts about Wagner and Mozart and Schubert and Strauss and all the rest of it, but in this book my passion for music and my inability to express it in musical terms stand really as symbols for the sense of separateness and apartness I have always felt. In fact they stand too as a symbol of love and my inability to express love as it should be expressed.

I have always wanted to be able to express music and love and the things that I have felt in their own proper language — not like this, not like this with the procession of particular English verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns and prepositions that rolls before you now towards this full-stop and the coming paragraph of yet more words.

You see, when it comes down to it, I sometimes believe that words are all I have. I am not actually sure that I am capable of thought, let alone feeling, except through language. (84-85) [and goes on to quote from Wilde’s The Critic as Artist]

But in a culture like ours, language is exclusive, not inclusive. Those on easy terms with words are distrusted. I was always encouraged to believe that cleverness and elegance with words obscured and twisted decent truth…. To the healthy English mind .. there is something intellectually spivvy, something flash, something Jewy about verbal facility. (90)

Definitions of camp (136); great stuff

Queers are not the only unhealthy people to contaminate English society of course.  There are Jews too. (137)

I have mentioned before the use of the word clever and with what particularity it is applied to men like Jonathan Miller and Freddie Raphael [no idea who those two guys are].  Jews, like homosexuals, are not quite healthy.  They are part of that parade of pale, clever men who, at the turn of the century, confused with the healthy world with all that talk of relativism and doubt and those weird ideas about determinant history and the devided self.  … They’ll read anything into the most innocent of pastimes, these Jews and these pansies.  Reading things into things, if that isn’t the favorite hobby of the intellectual I don’t know what is.  (139-140)

Long passage on  EM Forster’s Notes on the English Character from Abinger Harvest, some excellent stuff. (144)

(192) pleonasm, sesquipedalian, tautologous, etc — funny stuff

It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary. (212) [followed some wonderful lists of things to apologize for and not]

Really enjoying reading through Raymond Chandler’s letters.  Here are some odd excerpts:

… my feeling is that somebody might come along who wrote a great deal better than Hammett and still not have anything like Hammett’s success.  But of course these things are quite unpredictable.  In my opinion Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson was an infinitely better and honester book than Of Mice and Men.  Did it get anywhere? I doubt it. (17)

The effort to keep my mind off the war has reduced me to the mental age of seven.  The things by which we live are the distant flashes of insect wings in a clouded sunlight. (21)

[Re Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None:] But as an honest crime story, honest in the sense that the reader is given a square deal and the motivation and mechanisms of the murder are sound — it is bunk. … But I’m very glad I read the book because it finally and for all time settled a question in my mind that had at least some lingering doubt attached to it.  Whether it is possible to write a strictly honest mystery of the classic type.  It isn’t. (27)
Funny thing civilization.  It promises so much and all it delivers is mass production of shoddy merchandise and shoddy people. (29)

From now on, if I make mistakes, as no doubt I shall, they will not be made in a futile attempt to avoid making mistakes. (31)

But James Cain — faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat.  He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. (33)

Chandler’s second is in fine form; here are a couple longer selections:

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room. (238)

She leaned forward a little and her smile became just a little glassy. Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood.

She said nothing, but her right hand was tapping the clasp of her bag.

“A very bad murderer,” I said. “Like Shakespeare’s Second Murderer in that scene in King Richard III. The fellow that had certain dregs of conscience but still wanted the money, and in the end didn’t do the job at all because he couldn’t make up his mind. Such murderers are very dangerous. They have to be removed — sometimes with blackjacks.” (279)

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights. 152-3

[I] sat in my chair thinking about Harry Jones and his story. It seemed a little too pat. It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact. 165

He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse. 166

I hung there motionless, like a lazy fish in water. 167

The little dead man sat silent in his chair, beyond fear, beyond change. 174

… my mouth was open and the ache at the side of my jaws told me it was open wide and strained back, mimicking the rictus of death carved upon the face of Harry Jones. 174

“He’s like all mechanics. Always got his face in a job he ought to have done last week.” 181

She brought the glass over. Bubbles rose in it like false hopes. 186

Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house. 186

Yep, never read Othello before and I decided it was high time. Unfortunately, I read it about a month ago and am just now getting around to writing on it. Ah well. Two main thoughts:

1) Not Shakespeare’s greatest. There are some good lines and you’ve got some potent themes of jealousy, class, race, etc, but the characters didn’t really grab me, and he’s done much better for tortured love, e.g. Troilus and Cressida. And he couldn’t even muster up a subplot or a wise jester character to spice it up. Iago is sufficiently villainous to cover that base, but honestly this was my least favorite in my recent mini Will-festival (also Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard III). I’m curious what the history of Othello’s reception is.

2) Can I just say that I didn’t think this play was a whole lot about race? And to the extent it was I didn’t think it was about “black” men? I saw it as more about class if anything, with Othello being a sort of sexy construction worker for the time, with an Oriental exoticism. I’m sure there’s reams of scholarship on it, but I can read this highly historicized — did Elizabethan England have a conception of black-ness or other-ness anything like ours today? Probably not, and it would make some interesting sleuthing, but it’s going to be a stretch to read this as bearing on contemporary race relations in any but an abstract way. Or I can read this divorced from its historical context, in which case I see an Omar Sharif playing Othello, the basic significance is little more than swarthiness, and I go back to it’s more about class than race per se.

Ah well, there’s lots of other great Shakespeare to read. Back to the book pile ….

Quotations:

To mourn a mischief that is past and gone/Is the next way to draw new mischief on. (I,3,234-235)

Knavery’s plain face is enver seen till used. (II,1,334)

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
- HL Mencken

Now we will have no more war, and the most backward countries will be able to start catching up.
- Ernest Lawrence, after the bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Gregg Herken, The Brotherhood of the Bomb, p. 139)

Take back your existence or die like a punk.
- Outkast

I think history will show that [Mike, the first H-bomb test, Nov 1 1952] was a turning point … that those who pushed that thing through … wihtout making that attempt [to negotiate with Russia] have a great deal to answer for.
- Vannevar Bush (Priscilla McMillan, The Ruin of J Robert Oppenheimer, p. 142)
Aesthetics is for the artist like ornithology is for the birds.
- Barnett Newman

Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.
- Paul Valery

Traditions are group effort to keep the unexpected from happening.
-Barbara Tober, chair, New York’s Museum of Arts and Design

Dictionaries are like watches. The worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true. (Hitchings, p. 179)

(OK this next one is Pope, but Hitchings says the above might be a play on:)
Tis with our judgements as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
–Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism

The traveller that resolutely follows a rough and winding path, will sooner reach the end of his journey, than he that is always changing his direction, and wastes the hours of daylight in lookingfor smoother ground, and shorter passages.
(Hitchings, p.161)

[Note to self: wasting daylight ….]

I now begin to see land, after having wandered … in this vast sea of words. What reception I shall meet with upon the shore I know not, whether the sound of bells and acclamations of people … or a general murmur of dislike. I know not whether I shall find … a Calypso that will court or a Polypheme that will eat me. (Hitchings, p 192)

To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire, and to answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar. (Rasselas, cited Hitchings, p 220)

Do not suffer life to stagnate, it will grow muddy for want of motion. [Instead] commit yourself to the current of the world. (same)