Josh’s Kindle Notes & Highlights for J R (American Literature)

Sunlight, pocketed in a cloud, spilled suddenly broken across the floor through the leaves of the trees outside.

—I had hoped, said Mister Coen from the far end of the room, where he appeared to steady himself against the window frame,—I expected Mrs Angel to be with us here today, he went on in a tone as drained of hope as the gaze he had turned out through evergreen foundation planting just gone sunless with stifling the prospect of roses run riot only to be strangled by the honeysuckle which had long since overwhelmed the grape arbor at the back, where another building was being silently devoured by rhododendron before his eyes.

1%

—The . . . Spanish war? he murmured vaguely, braced against the back of the Queen Anne chair before the empty hearth.

1%

—I simply included it because . . . he began in a tone that seemed to echo the deep, as he fixed the newspaper streamer flown before his glazed eyes.

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against the day

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—And he might listen, Julia . . . pursued him through the presence of potatoes and green beans with strings like packing thread disintegrating with a smoked pork butt on the kitchen stove since near dawn, followed him as far as the corner of the house where a hanging gutter streaked clapboards and glass whenever it rained.

2%

blown out the year before, which redeemed itself now with a bumper crop of tasteless fruit in brave colors and curious shapes, —he looks like someone’s chasing him.

2%

—Yes. There he goes now . . . The car crept up the drive past trees which appeared to stagger without even provocation of a breeze, rearing their splintered amputations in all directions, an atmosphere of calamity tempered, to the south, by a brooding bank of oak, by several high locusts serenely distinct against the sky in the west. —It was naughty of James.

3%

To the squeal of brakes, the car burst out into the world trailing a festoon of privet, swerved at the immediate prospect of open acres flowered in funereal abundance to regain the pavement and lose it again in a brief threat to the candy wrappers and beer cans nestled along the hedge line up the highway, that quickly out of sight to the windows’ half-shaded stare from the roof pitches frowning over the hedge to where it ended, and a yellow barn took up, and was gone in a swerving miss for the pepperidge tree towering ahead, past shadeless windows in a naked farmhouse sprawl at the corner ...more

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—And sixty-three cents, Mrs Joubert finished, a gentle bulge rippling from her knee as she shifted her weight in departure to disappear in the swirl of her skirt as the quarter bounding from the billowing trouser cuff drew Bast in a headlong lunge after the exhaust of Whiteback’s car shearing from the curb, rounding the corner into Burgoyne Street to course through the shrieks of saws and limbs dangling in unanesthetized aerial surgery, turning at last into the faculty parking lot and into Gibbs’ limited vista from a second floor classroom window watching Mrs Joubert alight and come toward the ...more

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classroom to face the talking face in flattened animation on the screen itself until the tension of watching without listening broke the surface in a slight twitch of his own lip and turned him back to the window looking down, now into the wide eye of a camera aimed up at himself and the frieze of teachers similarly abandoned in windows surmounting the dedication of the school hewn over the entrance.

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—Oh, can you read it? asked the young man with the camera, lowering it to join the congregation of cameras, meters, and accessories strung from what convenient protrusions his lank figure afforded.

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Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos . . .

3%

—Major Hyde, Dan. Good meeting you . . . loomed worsted with a bluish tinge in arbitrary sway over the pastel arrangement behind the desk, cordially drawing Mister diCephalis half out of a sleeve of knife edge pressed nondescript.—We all know Dan here from the school television. Driver training, right Dan?

Like the transition from dialog to prose and back.

3%

—No it’s only, it’s Mister Skinner . . . she recovered her balance and her knees one to the other—I’ll be right out, she called at the figure retreating through the door weighted by a briefcase of Gladstone bag design past the threat of pinstripe coming up behind.

4%

—And there’s this twelve thousand

Start of a great joke.

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—Did it say books in so many words? No. It’s just a bequest for the library. —Use it for a pegboard. You need a pegboard in a library. Books you don’t know what you’re getting into.

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And as though calculating the effect, Hyde stepped from the window and reduced the figure behind the desk to the less pungent proportions of natural lighting.—

Pretty and smart.

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pinioned

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—No just hurry Dan, hurry up or she’ll come in! We thought you’d never get here . . . and he opened the door full on the two figures standing there as the wall clock beyond them dropped its longer hand with a click for the full minute and hung, poised to lop off a fragment of the next as Gibbs passed, looked up and saw that happen, fingering the change in his pocket on his way to the outside door and the cloudless sky filled with the even passage of the sun itself in brightness so diffuse no shadow below could keep an edge on shaded lawns where time and the day came fallen through trees with ...more

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mottled movement of light come down through water, spread up an empty walk, over gravel and empty pavement, and lawn again, lending movement to the child motionless but for fragmenting finger and opposable thumb opening, closing, the worn snap of an old change purse, staring in through the glass with an expression of unbroken and intent vacancy.

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Bast rattled the baton briskly against the music stand, and a trumpet blast shattered the comparative quiet.—

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—He don’t even have a costume yet grumbled Wotan, drooping in the lee of the piano like some lost sport sulking in a corridor of prehistory.

Pretty

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pianissimo,

Cool word

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—I told you . . .! shouted Wotan bursting out into the sun, bearing down on the only figure in sight who watched this extravagant onslaught without alarm; but all they wrested from her was the change purse, its nickeled clasp worn down to brass from being closed, and opened, and closed, opened now and on dead leaves at that, flung back to the ground indistinguishable from the leaves they trampled, drawing up in garish clumps of recrimination.

Pretty

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schottische

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an intimate medium, it really is, because when you look into the camera you’re looking each child right in the eye, she said flashing him a blacked sweep of hers over a shoulder.—When I’m on camera, I just keep repeating to myself I am speaking to a single child. I am speaking to a single child, over and over. That’s what makes it intimate

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retroussé

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peristaltic reluctance let him slip away—

Pretty

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with a proprietary air.—

A proprietary presence

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—In terms of tangibilitating the full utilization potential of in-school television . . .

Tangi-what?

6%

——to humanize him because even if we can’t um, if we can’t rise to his level no at least we can, we can drag him down to ours . . .

6%

The door opened, closed, opened again to admit Mister Gall with the final allegro, assai.

6%

An expletive broke from under the window planter as the sound cut off, leaving the screen filled with a face perspiring with silent imperative until the reassuring countenance of Smokey Bear restored one faltering note and then another of song.

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sprawled

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cosmogony,

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—When limbs and parts of bodies were wandering around everywhere separately heads without necks, arms without shoulders, unattached eyes looking for foreheads . . .

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—The youngsters themselves become part of the teaching process for a truly meaningful learning experience utilizing the ahm, the youngsters themselves . . .

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—Yes well I think we ought to get back to that social service lesson there Dan looks like she’s giving these youngsters a sense of real values, my boy there . . .

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—In simple straightforward terms Dan, you might say that he structured the material in terms of the ongoing situation to tangibilitate the utilization potential of this one to one instructional medium in such a meaningful learning experience that these kids won’t forget it for a hell of a long time, how’s that Whiteback.

7%

—Been selling his blood for money to buy paint.

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—Get it? Art? You get it where you get anything you buy it,

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—There did you hear that? Corporate democracy did you hear that Gibbs? This share in America it’s my company they just bought a share in my company, I didn’t get where I am slopping paint on the floor and cutting off my ear either run this school system along corporate lines Whiteback you’d have these strike threats complaints over harassment cleared up in no time, you’d