Pavlo’s Reviews > Consider the Lobster and Other Essays > Status Update

(1) “There’s a comprehensive native apothegm: “Camden by the sea, Rockland by the smell.”

“All right, so the obvious point: Great athletes usually turn out to be stunningly inarticulate about just those qualities and experiences that constitute their fascination. For me, though, the important question is why this is always so bitterly disappointing. And why I keep buying these sports memoirs with expectations that my own experience with the genre should long ago have modified…”

“(It is, admittedly, difficult to imagine William F. Buckley using or perhaps even being aware of anything besides [Standard Written English])”

“Plus, the apparent redundancy of “Where’s it at?” is offset by its metrical logic: what the at really does is license the contraction of is after the interrogative adverb. You can’t say “Where’s it?” So the choice is between “Where is it?” and “Where’s it at?”, and the latter, a strong anapest, is prettier and trips off the tongue better than “Where is it?”

“Did you know that US lexicography even /had/ a seamy underbelly?»

“The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it’s also wrong.”

“When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. And no US novelist has mapped the inner terrain of the solipsist better than John Updike, whose rise in the 1960s and ’70s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.”

I am learning much that I would rather not know. Good writing, though