I have become endeared of the following anecdote from Tales of Yesterday’s New England
I like this quote not only for the romance, but the cleverness of the dialogue, and the archaic usage of the words “lover” and “love-making,” which referred to courting rather than sex. Also intriguing is the moral and personal strength of the female character, something we might be misled by politics to expect was impossible in the 1700s. Continue reading
Sometimes an anecdote from history stands up in a new light after we’ve learned a bit more about the world.
Admiral Lord Cochrane was a 19th century British naval officer famous primarily for his service to South American revolutionaries. In his autobiography, he tells a story from his days as a midshipman about a ship’s parrot, a story that comes alive in the 21st century’s understanding of animal intelligence.
From The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England
From The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler.
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Private detective Philip Marlowe (the narrator) and police lieutenant Al Degarmo arrive at Bryson Tower—”a white stucco palace with fretted lanterns in the forecourt and tall date palms“—to interview one of the residents about an unsolved murder… Continue reading
Best-sellers “… are promotional jobs based on a sort of indirect snob appeal, carefully escorted by the trained seals of the critical fraternity, and lovingly tended and watered by certain much too powerful pressure groups whose business is selling books, although they would like you to think they are fostering culture.”
– from “The Simple Art of Murder” in The Simple Art of Murder
Hardboiled author Mickey Spillane, (quoted by Edwin McDowell in the 27 Dec 1981 New York Times Book Review) dismissing the idea that his main character’s drinking habits carried any symbolism:
“Mike Hammer drinks beer, not cognac, because I can’t spell cognac.”
From a Scientific American Mind article by Jamil Zaki: “What, Me Care? A recent study finds a decline in empathy among young people in the U.S.“:
… Americans have abandoned reading in droves. The number of adults who read literature for pleasure sank below 50 percent for the first time ever in the past 10 years, with the decrease occurring most sharply among college-age adults. And reading may be linked to empathy. In a study published earlier this year psychologist Raymond A. Mar of York University in Toronto and others demonstrated that the number of stories preschoolers read predicts their ability to understand the emotions of others. Mar has also shown that adults who read less fiction report themselves to be less empathic.
From W. H. Auden’s review of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Return of the King, in the 22 January 1956 edition of the New York Times:
I rarely remember a book about which I have had such violent arguments. Nobody seems to have a moderate opinion: either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it, and among the hostile there are some, I must confess, for whose literary judgment I have great respect.
A few of these may have been put off by the first forty pages of the first chapter of the first volume in which the daily life of the hobbits is described; this is light comedy and light comedy is not Mr. Tolkien’s forte. In most cases, however, the objection must go far deeper. I can only suppose that some people object to Heroic Quests and Imaginary Worlds on principle; such, they feel, cannot be anything but light “escapist” reading. That a man like Mr. Tolkien, the English philologist who teaches at Oxford, should lavish such incredible pains upon a genre which is, for them, trifling by definition, is, therefore, very shocking.
From the classic novel True Grit
From The Cultural Life of the American Colonies
Not all seventeenth-century readers confined their interests to solemn treatises, but one should always remember that the prevailing attitude toward literature was so distinctly purposeful that many of our ancestors made themselves believe that they could gain instruction even when reading romances … Continue reading
