Hal Johnson's Blog, page 33

A garland of quotations XI

See giant mollusks! See them fight to the death!…There is no escape from the living hell that time forgot.
•trailer for The Lost Continent (1968).

Do you know all last night I dreamed about octopuses?
•Alice, The Brady Bunch, ”Personality Kid” (1971).

Kyrnos, be flexible in character, always adapting
your own mood to that of the friend you chance to be with;
be as the lithe and tentacled octopus, altering color
so that it matches and loses itself in the rock where it clings.
•Theognis (C6–5 BC).

The many...

Impossible Histories annotations on Julian

These are annotations for the eighth chapter of the book Impossible Histories. I’m not saying you need to keep a copy of IH open next to you as you read, but it might make some things clearer?

p. 153
•epigraph:

Some men have a passion for horses, others for birds, others, again, for wild beasts; but I, from childhood, have been penetrated with a passionate longing to acquire books.
§Julian, letter to Ecdicius (AD 362).

•a dream to reverse the relentless march of history: William F. Buckley once vow...

A world without princess franchises

Chapter seven of Impossible Histories ends with the assertion that in its counterfactual world where democracies rule the Middle Ages, “the Disney princess franchise would be the Disney senator franchise instead.” Perhaps there are some missing steps in this syllogism, but I think you can fill them in. More interesting is exploring in a little more depth what children’s media would look like in such a world.

Remember, we have imagined a Middle Ages in which kings, by biblical and Roman injunction...

A garland of quotations X

Today the Victorian viewpoint seems ludicrously inadequate, yet we cannot claim to have replaced it with anything more substantial.
•Michael Goss, The Halifax Slasher: An Urban Terror in the North of England (1987).

In spiders coitus may last for seven hours, and in the frog for four weeks. It has long been known that a permanent union of the sexes occurs in many parasites, such that, for example, the male remains throughout life in the gullet or the uterus of the female. A peak of erotic reality ...

Impossible Histories annotations on WWII

These are annotations for the eighth chapter of the book Impossible Histories. I’m not saying you need to keep a copy of IH open next to you as you read, but it might make some things clearer?

p. 139
•epigraph:

…it is a question whether war and anarchy and confusion be not preferable to the deceptive peace and apparent prosperity of despotism, that, like the death-dealing vampire, soothes while it destroys.
§Mayne Reid, The Boy Hunters (1853).

p. 140
•a parody of the popular nineteenth-century Germa...

Thoughts on Writing and Reading History

If you wish to consider this an addendum to, or commentary on, the ongoing Garland of Quotations project, I won’t stop you. I’m not your boss!

The truth is, I just can’t help myself. As Bernard Darwin wrote, “Quotation brings to many people one of the intensest joys of living.”

Thanks for reading Impossible Histories! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labours!
•Maria Edgwood, ...

A garland of quotations IX

I weel make a you to kees the monkey.
•Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh (1864).

Words leap like monkeys from tree to tree, but in that dark place where a man has his roots he is deprived of their kind mediation.
•Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities II (1932).

Politeness is natural, says the ape.
•Welsh proverb; quoted in Matthew Arnold, The Study of Celtic Literature (1867).

The monkeys, it is said, give birth to two children at once. Of these two children the mother ...

Impossible Histories annotations on Athens & Sparta

These are annotations for the seventh chapter of the book Impossible Histories. I’m not saying you need to keep a copy of IH open next to you as you read, but it might make some things clearer?

p. 107
•Kings and queens are always getting flattered: Another example: Ğulām Husayn Salīm, in speaking of Siraj ud-Daula, Nawab of Bengal (r. 1733-57), refers to “that beauteous face of his, so renowned over Bengal for its regularity and sweetness…” [Quoted in Wm. Dalrymple, The Anarchy (2019). NY: Bloomsb...

Profiles in "Courage" I

Howard Rushmore had dreamed from a young age of being a progressive journalist, and by age sixteen he was writing both for his high school and town newspapers. This was back in late ’20s, when they still let students do such things. Unfortunately, the stuff he wrote in the local paper about the school got him expelled.

Rushmore wasn’t too worried about the expulsion; he had bigger fish to fry. While working his beat he had witnessed a lynching, and the tragedy moved him; the anti-lynching cause w...

A garland of quotations VIII

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
Saddle a cat and I’ll be gone.
•Paul G. Brewster, ed., Children’s Games and Rhymes (1952).

I gave to Limbour a rendez-vous
on the Champs-Élysées
to speak of heaven

I said
heaven is a cat

a third said
heaven is two cats

another said
heaven is a tongue
thicker than a mob.
•Georges Bataille, “I Gave to Limbour a Rendez-vous” (ca. 1944?).

Milton, like the elephant, jokes with difficulty, but he, too, is using all his might.
•Arthur Quiller-Couch, “The Value of Greek and Latin in Engli...