At the Intersection of Literature and Life

יְדִידַי-דַּי בְּאַהְבַת-בַּת כְּרָמִים
וְנָשִיר-שיר לְנֶאְדָּר-דָּר מְרוֹמִים.
אֲהוּבָך-בָּך וְעוּזָּך-זַך עֲצוּמִים
רְחוּמָך-מָך וחוֹמֶר-מַר רְחוּמִים
פְּלָאוֹת-אוֹת ונִיסִּים-שִֹים לְחוֹסִים
עֲשׁוּקִים-קִים והָאֵר-אוֹר תְּמִימִים
כְּאֶתמוֹל-מוֹל לְבָבִי-בִּי עֲדֵי כִּי
בְּפִשְׁרוֹן-רוֹן אֲהַלֵּל-לֵיל וְיָמִים

The technique goes like this: One debates the other side in a rational manner until pushed into a corner. Then one simply drops the argument and slips away, pretending that one has not fallen short of reason but instead transcended it. The irreconcilability of one’s belief with reason is then held up as a great mystery, the humble readiness to live with which puts one above lesser minds and their cheap certainties.

B. R. Myers, “Hard to Swallow,” review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollen, Atlantic Monthly (September 2007).

Child 1 (upon seeing Child 2 return):

How many other forts did you see?

Child 2:

Uh . . . five.

Child 1:

And how many had cup holders?

Two random neighborhood children, while playing in a snow fort.

Ludwig referred to his mother as “my predecessor’s consort.”

King Ludwig II, referenced in his Wikipedia article, from Hans Nohbauer, Ludwig II, 1998, p. 12.

“Good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”

Ray Bradbury

“If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.”

Tim O’Brien on “How to Tell a True War Story,” The Things They Carried, p. 69.

Excerpted from a recent Table Facebook thread:

Axel: “Dean, i’m going to have to respectfully ask that you not own someone that hard in the near future. Blask was owned so hard, but the ownage continued and then hit me in the face, irrespective of the fact that I did not partake in the Palin/babies/hockey conversation.”

Dean: “Sorry Axel, But the real blame should solely be put on Blask for being so readily owned.”

Andrew: “That went beyond ownage. You mortgaged and then refinanced his ass.”

“In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.”

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle [sic] their pockets for new vocabulary.

For me, it is a cause of some upset that more Anglophones don’t enjoy language. Music is enjoyable it seems, so are dance and other, athletic forms of movement. People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days. Words, it seems belong to other people, anyone who expresses themselves with originality, delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked, distrusted or disliked than welcomed. The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious. Sadly, desperately sadly, the only people who seem to bother with language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way. They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other people’s usage and in which they show off their own superior ‘knowledge’ of how language should be. I hate that, and I particularly hate the fact that so many of these pedants assume that I’m on their side. When asked to join in a “let’s persuade this supermarket chain to get rid of their ‘five items or less’ sign” I never join in. Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between “less” and “fewer,” and between “uninterested” and “disinterested” and “infer” and “imply,” but none of these are of importance to me. “None of these are of importance,” I wrote there, you’ll notice — the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance.” Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to language. Oscar Wilde, and there have been few greater and more complete lords of language in the past thousand years, once included with a manuscript he was delivering to his publishers a compliment slip in which he had scribbled the injunction: “I’ll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, wills and shalls, thats and whiches &c.” Which gives us all encouragement to feel less guilty, don’t you think?