February 2012
8 posts
Round-up of fine sentences, part 2
Still, those early years were tedious. “Starting out, you have to deal with some scum,” says Fielding. “And in this business, if you haven’t hit a few people … ” He tells of one unsavory client who’d been avoiding him. Spying the guy at a Queens bar one evening, Fielding called up some muscle and waited. When his client went to the bathroom, Fielding...
Raymond Chandler on the Oscars
If you can go past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of the human intelligence; if you can stand the hailstorm of flash bulbs popping at the poor patient actors who, like kings and queens, have never the right to look bored; if you can glance out over this gathered assemblage of what is supposed to be the elite of Hollywood and say to...
Bill Plaschke on Owen R. Bird
He fought in one skirmish and one war, married three women, worked at least a dozen jobs, lived in at least a dozen homes and continually sought greater thrills, until one day making the only memory more compelling than his Trojans creation. On a winter evening in 1929, Bird returned to his Silver Lake home to find his wife, Laura, conversing with his best friend, Percival Watson. Bird pulled out...
WatchIra Glass on storytelling — and really any form of creative work
Round-up of fine sentences, part 1
Alas, whenever good deals are this easy to get, the first question to ask isn’t when someone like Mr. Weinberg will become a billionaire but when some larger entity will crush him like a bug.
-Ron Lieber
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/your-money/autoslash-a-rate-sleuth-makes-rental-car-companies-squirm-your-money.html?pagewanted=2&src=recg
At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13,...
Thomas Lake on Fennville, Mich.
Fennville High principal Amber Lugten guessed that in half of her students’ families, at least one parent was looking for work. A man not at the game might be at Steven’s on Main Street, a good dark place to drink canned domestic lager while pondering his career options now that the old fruit cannery was a shell of its former self and the Life Savers factory had gone to Canada and the...
Chris Jones on the competitive nature of...
I tell young writers all the time that you have to want to win, and they say, Well, what if I don’t want to be competitive? What if I want to be kind? And I’m like, That’s fine, but there are bad people like me out there who are really competitive, and if we’re ever on the same story, I will step on your fucking head.
-Chris Jones
...
Karen Abbott on the dangers of football in 1905
In 1905, the fourth year of his presidency, 18 players died and 159 suffered severe injuries. During that season one Princeton alumnus tallied, among other wounds, four concussions, three “kicks in the head,” seven broken collarbones, three grave spinal injuries, five serious internal injuries, three broken arms, four dislocated shoulders, four broken noses, three broken shoulder blades, three...
