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The Code of the Woosters,
lavishly and inventively bullied
Kim Philby. Perhaps the most ruthless and successful espionage agent of the entire Cold War, Philby had actually risen to be a senior British intelligence officer and a colleague trusted by James Angleton, of the CIA, while acting as a dedicated agent of the KGB. Greene contributed the introduction to Philby’s Soviet-edited memoir, My Silent War, in which he wrote, “He betrayed his country—yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?”
Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.
You would not exist if I didn’t believe you existed, nor would those dollars. I believe, therefore you are.”
as was said of President Coolidge, “once bamboozled, impossible to unbamboozle.”
“Vacuum cleaner again. Hawthorne, I believe we may be on to something so big that the H-bomb will become a conventional weapon.” “Is that desirable, sir?” “Of course it’s desirable. Nobody worries about conventional weapons.”
the old maxim of Chekhov that a gun once displayed in plain sight will not be reholstered until it has been fired in anger.
liberal and individual, rather than Marxist or collective,
Communism, though—“the highest stage of underdevelopment,” as Hans Magnus Enzensberger
as well as at least one Orwell source that’s too obvious to require mentioning.)
Animal Farm
cloacal filth and petty bigotry
Philip Larkin’s own summary was if anything even more dank: He once described the sexual act as a futile attempt to “get someone else to blow your nose for you.”
Stephen Spender was to pass a great deal more of his life “being a poet” than he ever did writing poetry.
(Auden ended up with a painful rectal fissure, which led him to write his wince-makingly titled Letter to a Wound.)
Orwell’s vicious remark, about the “nancy poets” who spent on sodomy what they had gained by sponging,
a concept with a trapdoor of absurdity built right into it.
The English subdivide this title into categories, starting with plain fool, moving through damn fool to bloody fool, and ending with fucking fool—for which one has to be sinister as well as silly.
his lifelong vice was that he could not stop himself from RSVPing to any old card of invitation,
Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography, by John Sutherland.
a once-famous attempt to get the whole set into one portmanteau term,
“Writing is not a pleasure. It’s a discipline.”
Auden famously wrote, “Poetry makes nothing happen.”
The interplanetary genre made even C. S. Lewis write more falsely than he normally did.
but if you can read “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As a Downhill Motor Race” or “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” in search of sexual gratification, you must be jaded by disorders undreamed-of by this reviewer. Both stories, however, succeed in being deadpan funny.
On succeeding pages of “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D,” we find that “memories, caravels without sails, crossed the shadowy deserts of her burned-out eyes” and that the dwarf, Petit Manuel, regards this same woman “with eyes like crushed flowers.” This entire story is infused with an eerie beauty, as the wings of gliders carve marvels out of the cumulus, and one aesthetic pilot “soared around the cloud, cutting away its tissues. The soft fleece fell toward us in a cool rain.” The cruel capricious beauty who becomes the wealthy patron of this art is careless of the human cost it may entail:
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“Confessions of a Book Reviewer.”
Evelyn Waugh and The Loved One,
The Front Page, Walter Matthau
Kingsley Amis’s Girl, 20,
The mindlessness of the opinion poll and the reader-survey is coming to replace news and analysis.
I do not think that there will again be a major novel, flattering or unflattering, in which a reporter is the protagonist.
Fletch; confess Fletch; Gregory McDonald
Beasts and Super-Beasts
Beauty is only sin deep”)
Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence.
Men will laugh at almost anything, often precisely because it is—or they are—extremely stupid.
Ms. Lebowitz and Ms. Ephron to try out my theories. Fran responded: “The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what’s more male than that?” Ms. Ephron did not disagree. She did, however, in what I thought was a slightly feline way, accuse me of plagiarizing a rant by Jerry Lewis that said much the same thing. (I have only once seen Lewis in action, in The King of Comedy, where it was really Sandra Bernhard who was funny.)
While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition. Substitute the term “self-defecation” (which I actually heard being used inadvertently once)
Rudyard Kipling in his poem “The Female of the Species.”
that great masculine equivalent to childbirth, which is warfare—Kipling
Humor, if we are to be serious about it,
just aren’t that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.)
fear is the mother of superstition,
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,
Whereas when any sweet American girl smiled at me, I was at once bewitched and slain by the warm, moist cave of her mouth, lined with faultless white teeth and immaculate pink gums and organized around a tenderly coiled yet innocent tongue. Good grief! What else was there to think about?
Mere fear of unseen authority is not a sound basis for ethics.
I would indignantly refuse to have any dealings with a nurse or doctor or teacher who hid his or her face,
At the moment law enforcement officers are wearing masks to hide their identities
(Incidentally, nature is no more or less “objectified” whether we give it a gender name or a neuter one. Merely calling it Mummy will not, alas, alter this salient fact.)
Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The “vacuum” will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now.
The Taliban/al-Qaeda riffraff, as we know them, will never come back to power.
Trump surrendered to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Taliban is now running the country.
