The Bronze Medal

It’s been a long day. Finally I can relax with some tea in my Ron Swanson mug and the NYRB. (Taken with instagram)

Guys, I’m in the mood to watch a show that features old-fashioned views on class and society that don’t fit with modern life. But since there’s no GOP debate tonight, I guess I’ll just watch Downton Abbey.

Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one. This openness is what every artist needs.

— Tom Waits

I heard the best “getting out of a traffic ticket” story last night. Apparently some guy my sister’s boyfriend knows was recently pulled over for speeding, and when he rolled down his window to speak to the officer, he waved his hand Obi-Wan style and said “you’re not going to write me a ticket.” It seems the cop was a pretty big Star Wars fan and found it so hilarious he let him go. My favorite part of this though was that my sister hasn’t seen Star Wars and was really confused by the whole story.

Though many of his novels have been turned into films, it’s the novels themselves that possess the real crackle and technical command. If you think of the first lines of the great Tishomingo Blues, it is quite unfilmable – “Dennis Lenehan the high diver would tell people that if you put a fifty-cent piece on the floor and looked down at it, that’s what the tank looked like from the top of that eighty-foot steel ladder … when he told this to girls who hung out at amusement parks they’d put a cute look of pain on their faces and say what he did was awesome. But wasn’t it like really dangerous?” A film could show Dennis telling one girl this, on one occasion. The resources that allow a narrator to convey the endless repetition of Dennis’s conversation and the predictable responses, and put it within a dry reported speech, as if Dennis were, bored, half-overhearing himself, are there to be exploited by the novelist of huge technical command.

— The Guardian looks at the career of Elmore Leonard.

This was sitting unwanted on the library’s book sale cart. I should buy it and bring it to tomorrow’s bookswap so it can find a good home.

Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practice because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least that when the Day of judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.

— 

Virginia Woolf

Happy 130th birthday, V.W.!

My battles as a writer are battles with that part of myself that thinks I’m supposed to sound like T.S. Eliot when I grew up in East Texas. I wanted to sound lofty and British and to say ‘indeed’. That’s not how I am. The best thing about me is that I’m warm. The book should be that way, too, right? That’s something I can do better. I can do warm better than Don DeLillo. That’s not what he does. He does another thing.

— Mary Karr

I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour.

— Margaret Atwood looks back at writing The Handmaid’s Tale.

Tom Waits ~ Sea of Love (Phil Phillips cover)