Colin Dickey's Blog, page 2
February 20, 2013
The Golden Ring
You remember I said before that Ackley was a slob in his personal habits? Well, so was Stradlater, but in a different way. Stradlater was more of a secret slob. He always looked all right, Stradlater, but for instance, you should’ve seen the razor he shaved himself with. It was always rusty as hell and full of lather and hairs and crap. He never cleaned it or anything. He always looked good when he was finished fixing himself up, but he was a secret slob anyway, if you knew him the way I did.
The reason he fixed himself up to look good was because he was madly in love with himself. He thought he was the handsomest guy in the Western Hemisphere. He was pretty handsome, too — I’ll admit it. But he was mostly the kind of a handsome guy that if your parents saw his picture in your Year Book, they’d right away say, “Who’s this boy?” I mean he was mostly a Year Book kind of handsome guy. I knew a lot of guys at Pencey I thought were a lot handsomer than Stradlater, but they wouldn’t look handsome if you saw their pictures in the Year Book. They’d look like they had big noses or their ears stuck out. I’ve had that experience frequently.
How do you feel about Stradlater? Who would you cast to play him in the film?
January 10, 2013
As Primitive As Can Be
My father, a wise and grave man, gave me serious and excellent counsel against what he foresaw was my design. He called me one morning into his chamber, where he was confined by the gout, and expostulated very warmly with me upon this subject. He asked me what reasons, more than a mere wandering inclination, I had for leaving father’s house and my native country, where I might be well introduced, and had a prospect of raising my fortune by application and industry, with a life of ease and pleasure.
He told me it was men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me or too far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found, by long experience, was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind. He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing – viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied; that kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequence of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this, as the standard of felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty nor riches.
He bade me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind, but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were not subjected to so many distempers and uneasinesses, either of body or mind, as those were who, by vicious living, luxury, and extravagances on the one hand, or by hard labour, want of necessaries, and mean or insufficient diet on the other hand, bring distemper upon themselves by the natural consequences of their way of living; that the middle station of life was calculated for all kind of virtue and all kind of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the handmaids of a middle fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversions, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessings attending the middle station of life; that this way men went silently and smoothly through the world, and comfortably out of it, not embarrassed with the labours of the hands or of the head, not sold to a life of slavery for daily bread, nor harassed with perplexed circumstances, which rob the soul of peace and the body of rest, nor enraged with the passion of envy, or the secret burning lust of ambition for great things; but, in easy circumstances, sliding gently through the world, and sensibly tasting the sweets of living, without the bitter; feeling that they are happy, and learning by every day’s experience to know it more sensibly,
December 21, 2012
One Book Opens Another
Alchemy runs alongside the traditional narrative of Western thought like a shadow. Long ignored, often discredited as pseudoscience, it has nonetheless had important effects on the cultures of Europe and the Middle East for the past two thousand (or more) years. It’s always been a hermetic field of inquiry, sealed off from mainstream intellectual pursuits, but its traces linger. The phrase “hermetically sealed,” after all, derives from the “Seal of Hermes,” the nickname for the stopper on the long-necked glass jar used in making the Philosopher’s Stone (the substance that would allow for a direct transmutation of an impure metal like lead into the pure silver or gold). We have alchemists to thank for the French name for a double boiler, the bain-marie (bagno-maria in Italian) — a reference toanother apocryphal alchemist, Maria the Jew, and her method of heating slowly using water — and for the fact that we refer to quicksilver as “mercury.”
Read more at LA Review of Books.
December 20, 2012
Tintype of a guy’s hat. Entitled, “My hat.”
Tintype of a guy’s hat. Entitled, “My hat.”
December 19, 2012
December 18, 2012
thenewinquiry:
It falls to literature to venture into dark...
It falls to literature to venture into dark spaces on the map, where truth is elusive and historians fail, and to approach the endlessly contradictory landscape of Roger Casement’s inner world and textual life.. For years, the only such attempt was W. B. Yeats’ poem, “The Ghost of Roger Casement.” Yeats had blinked during Casement’s actual trial, refusing to sign the petition for clemency, appears to try to make amends some twenty years after the fact. It’s a strident poem, full of brio. It ends:
I poked about a village church
And found his family tomb
And copied out what I could read
In that religious gloom;
Found many a famous man there;
But fame and virtue rot.
Draw round, beloved and bitter men,
Draw round and raise a shout;
The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.
December 17, 2012
Anti Bleak House, ad run during the first serialization of Bleak...
Anti Bleak House, ad run during the first serialization of Bleak House, 1852.
laphamsquarterly:
ROUNDTABLE: A Fire in the Belly
Lest one...
ROUNDTABLE: A Fire in the Belly
Lest one think that the fear of spontaneous human combustion as a result of drink was a fringe phenomenon, one only has to consider the work of the literary greats of the day. Thomas de Quincey confessed to fearing that his addictions might lead to such “anomalous symptoms,” including spontaneous combustion. “Might I not myself take leave of the literary world in that fashion?” he wondered. A drunk explodes in Melville’s Redburn, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland also features spontaneous human combustion (though, in a rarity, the victim there is not an alcoholic). And then there is Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, a novel notable not just for being one of the towering masterpieces of Victorian fiction, but because of its thirtieth chapter, in which the minor character—the alcoholic landlord Mr. Krook—spontaneously bursts into flames.”
Colin Dickey on the curious cases of human spontaneous combustion induced by liquor.
Image: Krook spontaneously combusting, from Bleak House. 1853.
November 27, 2012
Unbridled Books: A writer is not a camera
As we’ve been doing all month long, we posed the question, “What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever given or received?” to one of our Unbridled authors, Colin Dickey. His best advice? Well, as often happens with Colin…he’s completely spun convention on its head… .
“The worst…
October 24, 2012
unbridledbooks:
The Onion’s AV Club called it “fascinating” and...
The Onion’s AV Club called it “fascinating” and “at times laugh-out-loud funny”. Wired.com called it “captivating” and “authentic as hell”. We like the way they think—and oh, how we love the cover. It’s The Weekly Read: Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius by @colindickey.
Colin Dickey's Blog
- Colin Dickey's profile
- 244 followers
