The beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the happy conviction that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greatest.

Evan Hunter aka Ed McBain has died. It's weird because I felt like he could keep writing his 78th Precinct books for another ten or fifteen years. Unlike Dick Francis where there was a large decline in quality in his last few books.

. . . as silly sheep leap over a vacuum . . .
I like the way this sounds, but I haven't a clue as to what it means.

"When I think of how I'm wasted there," he said at home, "I'm almost tempted to give in my notice. There's no scope for a man like me. I'm stunted, I'm starved ( Read more... )

Here are two phrases that you think are modern, but have actually been around for over a hundred years.

"No offense" -- in Moby-Dick

"Fire away" -- in Of Human Bondage

It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely--who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his ( Read more... )

Jay: And abstract art! I mean, that was--that was really the last straw for me with the CIA. Abstract paining, promoted by spooks in the federal government to prove how tolerant our democracy is of ugliness. All that awful art, that makes you puke uncontrollably even to be in the same room with it, for all those decades--five long decades--pushed ( Read more... )

Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.

"Art," he continued, with a wave of the hand, "is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life."

[Hayward] was a man who saw nothing for himself, but only through a literary atmosphere, and he was dangerous because he had deceived himself into sincerity. He honestly mistook his sensuality for romantic emotion, his vacillation for the artistic temperament, and his idleness for philosophic calm. His mind, vulgar in its effort at refinement, saw ( Read more... )