raccolta di citazioni

a commonplace for quotes from my current reading

2006-05-23

Lemony Snicket says 'stay indoors and read'

"Mr. Snicket believes that summertime is such a dangerous season, what with sunburn and melted ice cream and the possibility of summer camp, that it's best to stay indoors and read," said Snicket's "representative," Daniel Handler, who still denies the overwhelming evidence that he is in fact the author of the million-selling Snicket books, "A Series of Unfortunate Events."

Handler said that Mr. Snicket has his own reading suggestions, including books by Beverly Cleary, Adele Griffin and John Blair.

"Lemony Snicket says 'stay indoors and read'." Hillel Italie, AP National Writer, Mon May 22, 2:48 PM ET (MSNBC via Google News).

2006-05-21

Carl and I

Three nights after I married Carl Peterson, we watched Sarah Bernhardt die of consumption on a bed strewn with camellias. She was very beautiful, her face a sad white mask, her eyes enormous and dark, her voice rising from the the stage and filling the Lyric Theatre, as though as the courtesan Marguerite Gautier she was capable of barely a whisper, dying as she was from the tubercular bacilli breeding in her lungs. Her sins had been cleansed, Marguerite Gautier's, by her suffering and by the goodness of her heart and by the sacrifice she had made, giving up for his own sake the one man she had ever loved. I grasped my Carl's arm on the seat next to me as Marguerite died, for he was the one man I had ever loved and now we were married, on the previous Saturday, December 16, 1905, and the church was filled with red camellias. The newspapers said that Sarah Bernhardt slept in her own coffin, transporting it with her wherever she went, and she had died nearly twenty thousand times in her life, just as she as dying before us, and she took a cloth from her bosom as she lay on her deathbed, and she coughed terribly into it [59].

Butler, Robert Olen. Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards. Grove Press, 2004. ISBN: 0802142044.

2006-05-19

My next stop was at the clownery

...where I wandered invisible down long hallways, watching the inhabitants at their work or play or whatever it was they were doing. One inmate was packing cockroaches, one hundred to the bag. I do not think the insects were dead, though they were very quiet. Another inmate was constructing a large bust of the Viceroy, so the label said, out of what appeared and smelled to be dung. A third inmate, with the aid of a tall ladder, was writing her autobiography on the walls of the place. She had covered four stories of one stairwell and had extended her tale out into the reception area, where two walls were already covered with obscenities. I followed her story back in time until I reached a door to the roof, where a group of attendants were having morning coffee. Even read in reverse, it had been a novel of violence, abuse, incest, and horror [146].

Tepper, Sheri S.
Beauty. Doubleday / Foundation, 1991. ISBN: 0385419392.

2006-05-17

Summer reading

Meme from Susan

  • Butler, Robert Olen: Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards [recommended by David Carr]
  • Saramago, Jose: Blindness [recommended by Stefanie and many others]
  • Drabble, Margaret: The Gates of Ivory [recommended by Haven]
  • Tepper, Sheri S.: Beauty [recommended by Sven]
  • Lodge, David: Thinks [recommended by LabLit folks]
  • Spark, Muriel: Loitering with Intent and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie [for the Slaves of Golconda]
  • Erdrich, Louise: The Master Butchers Singing Club [recommended by David Carr]
  • Oates, Joyce Carol: A Garden of Earthly Delights [May garden book]
  • Lesser, Wendy: The Pagoda in the Garden [June garden book; recommended by Susan]
  • LeCarre, John: The Constant Gardener [July garden book; recommended by David Carr]
  • O'Brien, Tim: Going After Cacciato
  • Glass, Julia: The Whole World Over
  • Forster, E.M.: Howard's End
  • Appelt, Kathi: Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky

2006-05-16

Madness and towers

My next thought was that Elladine had said she had left me the means to find her, though I could not imagine what she meant. The contents of the box included only the ring, the packet of needles and the three hanks of thread. Which led to the fleeting suspicion that Mama, however lovely, might not have had all of her wits about her. This would explain the aunts' attitude, certainly. Even women as reconciled to the holy will as the aunts might bridle at having a madwoman in the family. It would also explain papa's locking her in the tower, since such is known to be the fate of madwomen and madmen wherever madness and towers occur in appropriate contiguity. Towers, or, in a pinch, attics [28].

Tepper, Sheri S.
Beauty. Doubleday / Foundation, 1991. ISBN: 0385419392.

2006-05-15

Model organism origins

The concept of selecting a common system for in-depth study emerged slowly. In some disciplines it was once considered poor etiquette to work on a colleague's system: if he or she used the toad, you used the frog. That practice led to great inefficiency, because the details of manipulating any system--how to grow the organism, the chemistry of the cell wall, mating habits--had to be worked out over and over again.
[...]
Gradually certain systems became preferred models for biological systems in general, a tendency which has been accentuated as molecular approaches have become the lingua franca of modern biology [1385].

Koshland, Daniel. (1988). Biological Systems. Science 240(4858):1385. PMID: 3375819.

2006-05-12

Fighting the Crippler

While the metaphors of military mobilization were as central to the organization and funding of cancer research as they had been to the fight against polio, analysis of the two campaigns also reveals interesting differences. The critical years for the establishment of the March of Dimes were during World War II; the organization was founded in 1938 and managed to raise increasing amounts of money throughout the war. (In like manner, with the lay activist takeover of the leadership of the ACS, public campaigns raised millions of dollars, increasing each year through the 1940s.) There is a sense in which the rhetoric of the NFIP was the rhetoric of war; the obvious enemy was polio, which crippled American children at the same time as American soldiers were being maimed and killed in Europe and the Pacific. Perhaps even more significant than any symbolic resemblance between the campaigns against the Axis forces and against polio was the fact that both efforts shared the same spokesperson, Franklin Roosevelt. In a public letter in 1944, Basil O'Connor, President of the NFIP, wrote Roosevelt that only "unremitting research will provide the key which will unlock the door to victory over infantile paralysis." Roosevelt's response, written in the closing year of World War II and only four months before his death, called for the deployment of all-out research:
We face formidable enemies at home and abroad.... Victory is achieved only at great cost -- but victory is imperative on all fronts. Not until we have removed the shadow of the Crippler from the future of every child can we furl the flags of battle and still the trumpets of attack. The fight against infantile paralysis is a fight to the finish, and the terms are unconditional surrender [178-179].

Creager, Angela N. H. The Life of a Virus : Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930-1965. University of Chicago Press, 2002. ISBN: 0226120252.

2006-05-10

Harry, Carrie, and Garp

"I am excited to announce that on the evenings of August 1st and 2nd, I will be reading with the creators of Potter and Garp at Radio City Music Hall. This came about because two good people agreed with me that it might be possible to do one gigantic reading to benefit two charities. One is Doctors Without Borders, an international independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural or man-made disasters, or exclusion from health care in more than 70 countries, and the other is The Haven Foundation, a charity [founded by SK] that supports writers and artists who can no longer support themselves because of accidents or illness. We are doing this at Radio City Music Hall because it is the biggest, brightest venue we could find and we are hoping we can fill it on both nights. We hope to see you there--this is going to be very cool!" -Stephen King

2006-05-01

Diagramming books

Kathleen Rooney: Why are some people so into labels? Like wanting to label things fantasy, or sci fi or literary? What do you make of these categories and how do you deal with/avoid being put into them, especially insofar as you've been in Conjunctions and McSweeney’s, but have also won Nebula and World Fantasy awards?

Kelly Link: Labels aren't nearly as useful as, say, Venn diagrams. Wouldn't it be great if bookstores could arrange their stock in a sort of enormous, elaborate, interlocking system of Venn diagrams?

Interview with Kelly Link, in Redivider, a journal of new literature, Spring 2006: Volume 3, No. 2.