Drew > Recent Status Updates

"I was wearing a thick vest and pants, a flannel shirt, two pullovers, a woollen jacket, a pigskin jacket, corduroy breeches, puttees, thick socks, boots, a stout trench-coat, a muffler, lined leather gloves, and a woollen cap. Nevertheless I was shivering like a jelly."

"It may be a union in name, but they fight each other tooth and nail. The lowly squabble over trifles. The great wage secret wars for power and wealth, and they call it government."

"Bayta investigated the insinuating thrust contained in the words with lashed eyes and welcomed the diversion of the arrival of her lunch..."

There is a lot about these novels that is really great, but every once in a while an astoundingly awkward sentence or phrase really takes you out of it.

"Rather ingeniously, he had stitched up the cut over his eye, but by what means he'd improvised a needle and thread we couldn't tell. We would have to discover his method so that we could ask him about it."

All this exile to hard labor, and formerly with floggings, does not reform anyone, and above all does not even frighten almost any criminal, and the number of crimes not only does not diminish but increases all the more...And it turns out that society, thus, is not protected at all, for although the harmful member is mechanically cut off...another criminal appears to take his place, perhaps even two others.

Second try on this bad boy. I have a week to get hooked, another week to cut deep into it, and then it's back to law school--hope I'm close to finished by then.

Integrity is not a search for the rewards for integrity.

...you can't imagine the number of blind people in London. I've never seen so many. Never did so many blind people fail to see me.

I need some advice. I'm looking for economics (text)books that are both seminal and accessible. Is there such a thing?

Presumably only in the Netherlands can one get away with casually referring to a 'bulb dealer' without any additional explanation.

...we Americans, we eat distance for breakfast.

But...here I be up in the tall cab hauling cow juice to Omaha. Wha' happened? Fuck if I know. Knots in the string I'm still unraveling. Gave up on planning, saving, hoping, all that bourgeois crap long ago. Now I just ride the bumps, open it up on the flats, nice and easy on the curves, trust the brakes hold should anything start piling up in front of me. This is happiness, near as any of us is permitted to approach.

'I wanted to be able to love a woman once in my life without having to give something back in return.'

The gods can make a man ridiculous through a woman, but they cannot make him ridiculous when they deal him a blow direct. The very greatness of their power makes them, in that respect, impotent.

Great quote in the review--too long for the status.

"What institutions wanted out of you was...something that could be put down on a form. If there was anything unconventional about your case they preferred not knowing about it. Telling them the truth was like pouring sand in the gears...I learned that in San Quentin, the only institution of higher learning I ever attended, and it was a valuable piece of wisdom which served me well the rest of my life."

"The surgeon in charge of the ward was a naval commander named Waldbach. He was supposed to have been an eminent specialist in civilian life, a member of the Columbia medical faculty and a world-wide authority on burns. I don't know what a surgeon that good is doing in the Navy. Maybe people didn't get burned often enough in civilian life to suit him."

"I began to see why Victor drank so little . . . Alcohol was for people who basically wished to be dead but lacked the courage to kill themselves. It was a kind of little suicide; it annihilated you for eight hours during which you had the sweet peace of a corpse and then it gave you another chance, your head thudding and your mouth tasting like a parrot cage to remind you you had been somewhere."

"Hilfiger's marketing journey feeds off the alienation at the heart of America's race relations: selling white youth on their fetishization of black style, and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth." Also, a quote from a Chumbawamba song that's NOT Tubthumping?

Where can I get a copy of MacDonald Harris's Mortal Leap?

Damned if I know what any of these stories are supposed to mean, if anything, but they're good anyway.

OK, I'm about to start my next meganovel. I think I missed the boat on W&M, and I don't have a copy at the moment. So it's either going to be Vollmann's The Royal Family, Pynchon's Against the Day, or Paul Verhaeghen's Omega Minor. What say ye?

"But great men--like rare spices--smell best after they've been crushed."

This is killing me: what postmodern novel features the minimalist mambo? Please, somebody, help.

What is going on with the end of this book??

Pretty damn good so far.

There's a character named Al Gore in this. Is he supposed to be the real Al Gore Sr.?

"No man put his tongue on D. W. Gately and lived"