Jim > Recent Status Updates

There is a style that believes writing should mimic the quick pace, the ease, and the fluidity of reading (or even of speech). And then there is a style that believes reading should mimic the obstruction and slow struggle of writing. Raymond Carver would be on that first axis. Nabokov is way out on the second. Joyce is even further.

So ended the life of Time, just as the joint enterprise of the Dostoevsky brothers had begun to raise its head above water financially, and its demise left Mikhail saddled with a huge load of debt.

Sometime between the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., the Greeks discovered infinity. The concept was so overwhelming, so bizarre, so contrary to every human intuition, that it confounded the ancient philosophers and mathematicians who discovered it, causing pain, insanity, and at least one murder.

A completely heterogeneous group. Under normal circumstances it would probably never occur to them to associate with each other. What they were about to undertake seemed so senseless; in a few hours most of them would be dead and nothing in their world would have changed.

This was a Justin he didn't know, but had in recent weeks come to suspect might exist. Justin the loner, taking nobody's orders but his own; Justin impassioned and on the warpath, determined to uncover what, in an earlier life, he might have helped to cover up.

My paper is planning a series of articles on drug companies and the Third World. We're calling it Merchants of Medicine. How the Third World countries have no consumer power. How big diseases are in one place, big profits in another.... The poor can't pay, so they die.

I'm not prying, Justin. I'm asking you. How is it possible -- how WAS it possible -- forget Porter for a moment -- for your wife to engage in a RANGE of activities of which, by your account, you know nothing?

[Sandy] Woodrow wonders whether this squalor is part of what makes [Tessa] attractive to him: I have spent my life in flight from reality, but because of her, I am drawn to it.

To grasp this mystery, the world, was the occult challenge. You came into a fully developed and articulated reality from nowhere from nonbeing or primal oblivion You had never seen life before. In the interval of light between the darkness in which you awaited first birth and then the darkness of death that would receive you, you must make what you could of reality, which was in a state of highly advanced development

He was impatient with hygiene. There was no counting the cigarettes he lit in a day. Most of them he forgot, or broke.... His biological patchiness was a given—faulty, darkened heart and lungs. But to prolong his life was not one of Ravelstein's aims. Risk, limit, death's blackout were present in every living moment. When he coughed you heard the sump at the bottom of a mine shaft echoing.

But by that point, after the war, after the separation, I had become an unmanageable, wild child, a real Mowgli. Today they would have called me asocial. In Kuibyshev we led the life of pariahs, untouchables, "Enemies of the People" wasn't an empty phrase. We were enemies to everyone: to our neighbors, to the police, to janitors, to the passersby, to every resident of our courtyard of any age.

That's a tree of heaven, my friend said. I know because I, too, got curious about it, and looked it up. Botanists call it an invasive species. But aren't we all?

How petty seemed to me the human condition, that we were subject to this constant struggle to modulate the internal environment, this endless being tossed about like a cloud. Predictably, the mind noted that judgment, too, and assigned it its place: a little sadness.

The custom stringing of tennis racquets is abecedarian compared with the subtleties that have developed in the stringing of lacrosse sticks. Nobody over nine uses a factory pocket, or so it seems. Some players carry around with them as many as seven heads. They bake their heads and reshape them. hey carry different heads for different weather, because moisture changes the webbing.

There was blood all over Fellsinger, blood all over the floor. There were pools of it and ribbons of it. There were blotches of it, big blotches of it near Fellsinger, smaller blotches getting even smaller in progression away from the body.

By now we know that kicking ass in civilizations that are mature in their own way is as meaningless and hopeless as trying to speed up the growth of a tree—an oak, say—by pulling it up by the branches.The Wanderers are not asskickers, and forcing progress is not and could not be their goal.

'It's a big step, Werner.' He was giving up his work, his luxury apartment and, by the sound of it, losing his wife too. He's lost her before; Zena's constancy to Werner wasn't something the poets write sonnets about. Limericks, maybe.

When the lecture was finished the company fell out for twenty minutes; they smoked and ate chocolate and exchanged gossip, qualifying every noun, verb, or adjective with the single, unvarying obscenity which punctuated all their speech like a hiccup....

My rejection is my pain and motivation. I carry with me the vengeance of all the children. I am the Eidolon. I am called the predator, the one to watch out for in your midst. I am the cucoloris, the blur of light and dark.

We [the FBI] know that you have enough, even without what you've learned from us, to write a hell of a story. It's an explosive story, Jack. If you write about it there in Denver it is going to attract attention. Overnight it will be be on the network and in every newspaper.

Death is my beat. I make my living from it. I forge my professional reputation on it. I treat it with the passion and precision of an undertaker—somber and sympathetic about it when I'm with the bereaved, a skilled craftsman with it when I'm alone.

Many aspects of Chris's personality baffled his parents. He could be generous and caring to a fault, but he had a darker side as well, characterized by monomania, impatience, and unwavering self-absorption, qualities that seemed to intensify through his college years.

"If ever you wanted to prove that there is no relationship between effort and reward in this world, you've only got to read the life of Mozart." "You don't even have to do that," I said. "You can come and work in my office and find that out."

Uh, oh, it seems there is another Russian mole at London Central.

Are convents so essential to the constitution of a state? Were monks and nuns instituted by Jesus Christ? Can the Church positively not do without them? What need has the Bridegroom of so many foolish virgins? And the human race of so many victims?

My frenetic reading was throwing up other details that intrigued me, such as how to make Eskimo ice cream by whipping bear, moose or caribou fat , then leaving it until it cools. It is flavored with seal oil, meat or fish and sweetened with honey, sugar or berries.

For the next few hours we hauled deeper into the Brooks Range. We stopped only a few times, to stretch our legs or just to sleep off fatigue. A miniature excursion into the bush was impossible. The mosquitoes here had the tenacity of piranhas and were as big as bluebottles. I gave up after a few attempts.

"Why not the other way round?" asked the Widow Mouaque whose nascent passion had not yet entirely obnubilated her native cartesianism.

La Pasionaria on the International Brigades: "Tell them how, coming over seas and mountains, crossing frontiers bristling with bayonets, and watched for by ravening dogs thirsty to tear at their flesh, these men reached our country as Crusaders for freedom.

In October 1937, a Nationalist staff officer told a Sunday Times correspondent: 'We bombed [Guernica], and bombed it and bombed it, and bueno why not?' The German air ace, Adolf Galland, who shortly afterwards joined the Condor Legion, admitted that the Germans were responsible.