Ex Libris Kirkland

June 17, 2009: The peasants' refrain

2009-06-17T22:29:00.001-07:00

I absolutely love this. At first it seemed awkward, but as it repeats throughout the poem it becomes quite lovely - a beautiful, chorus-like refrain. It's almost incantatory.

"We argued and argued,
While arguing quarrelled,
While quarrelling fought,
Till at last we decided
That never again

Would we turn our steps homeward
To kiss wives and children,
To see the old people,
Until we have settled
The subject of discord;
Until we have found
The reply to our question--
Of who can, in Russia,
Be happy and free?"

- Nicholas Nekrassov (trans. Soskice), Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia?, 1879.

June 2, 2009: Trueman on blog attacks

2009-06-02T13:22:00.000-07:00

"The gung-ho ferocity of blog attacks is often matched only by the oleaginous fawning of the webwarriors when encountered in the flesh, something which I confess has been, on occasion, a source of some mild, and probably sinful, amusement to me as I observe their unctuous and sycophantic squirming in my presence. I have seen the future, and, frankly, it looks like Uriah Heep with a Facebook account."

- Carl Trueman, Thank God for Bandit Country, 2009

May 31, 2009: Turgenev on the cause of misfortune

2009-05-31T17:04:00.001-07:00

"For example, if any misfortune were mentioned, lightning starting a village fire, floods washing away a mill, or a peasant chopping off his hand, whatever it might be, with concentrated fury he would insist: 'what is her name?' The 'her' referred to teh woman who was the cause of the misfortune, since, in his view, if only you probed inoto any misfortune, you would find a woman at the bottom of it."

- Turgenev (trans Alec Brown), Rudin, 1855.

May 30, 2009: Hodge quotes somebody else

2009-05-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

"There are but two places into the whole universe of God from which infants are excluded. The one is hell; the other is the Baptist Church."

- quoted by Charles Hodge, 'The Church Membership of Infants", 1858

May 29, 2009: Field on Donkeys

2009-05-29T22:13:00.000-07:00

"They are not silent like workhorses
Who are happy or indifferent about the plow and the wagon;
Donkeys don't submit like that
For they are sensitive
And cry continually under their burdens
. . .
And if I tried to explain to them
Why work is not only necessary but good,
I am afraid that they would never understand
And kick me with their back legs
As commentary on my wisdom."

Edward Field, Stand Up, Friend, With Me, 1963.

May 10, 2009: Three Drunkards on Democracy

2009-05-10T08:47:00.000-07:00

"Democracy! Democracy! Country A or B is merely a division made for the sake of convenience in naming various parts of the earth. These names were not meant to build walls among its inhabitants. Democracy creates a single, large, complete circle embracing the entire earth by bringing together the wisdom and love of the people of the world."

Nakae Chomin, A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government, 1887

May 6, 2009: Coffeen on Monologues and Conversations

2009-05-06T11:40:00.000-07:00

"What I enjoy is the monologue and the conversation. In the monologue, someone holds forth, generously bestowing the audience with his or her spin on things. The more monologues the better, especially if they are strange and beautiful.

Conversations, too, make my heart go pitter patter. In a conversation — a good conversation —, the participants try together to push, pull, fold, spin ideas into strange and beautiful shapes, a collaborative monologue, if you will."

- Daniel Coffeen, An Emphatic Umph, 2009

May 6, 2009: Small on the loss of primative cultures

2009-05-06T08:43:00.000-07:00

"No one knows how many San still practice hunting and gathering, but clearly the traditional way of living is, for the most part, no more. . . Some might feel a sense of loss for the San way of life, but that would be unfair. All societies change, absorbing the ways of others, and who are we to say that the San must hold on to a lifestyle just because we think it provides clues to the past?
People are not museums."

- Meredith Small, Our Babies, Ourselves, 1998.

May 4, 2009: Preemie sideshow!

2009-05-04T08:40:00.000-07:00

"In 1896, Martin Conoey designed the incubator, a device developed to aid premature babies. . . In a bizarre combination of medicine and sideshow, Cooney gathered hundreds of premature babies (they were easy to obtain because doctors assumed premature infants would die), put them into incubators, and exhibited them at various expositions and fairs in America and Europe."

- Meredith Small, Our Babies, Ourselves, 1998.

May 3, 2009: Donne on God's creation of the cure, but not the illness

2009-05-03T23:26:00.000-07:00

"I know thou hast made the matter, and the man, and the art; and I go not from thee when I go to the physician. Thou didst not make clothes before there was a shame of the nakedness of the body, but thou didst make physic before there was any grudging of any sickness; for thou didst imprint a medicinal virtue in many simples, even from the beginning; didst thou mean that we should be sick when thou didst so? when thou madest them? No more than thou didst mean, that we should sin, when thou madest us: thou foresawest both, but causedst neither."

- Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624.

May 2, 2009: Mandeville on the proof of the True Cross

2009-05-02T08:31:00.001-07:00

"And that was the very cross assayed; for they found three crosses, one of our Lord, and two of the two thieves; and Saint Helen proved them by a dead body that arose from death to life, when that it was laid on it, that our Lord died on."

- John Mandeville, The Travels of John Mandeville, 1351.

April 25, 2009: Mandeville on the pagans' devotion

2009-04-25T08:35:00.000-07:00

"And some have their arms or their limbs all to-broken, and some the sides. And all this do they for love of their god, in great devotion. And them thinketh that the more pain, and the more tribulation that they suffer for love of their god, the more joy they shall have in another world. And shortly to say you, they suffer so great pains, and so hard martyrdoms for love of their idol, that a Christian man, I trow, durst not take upon him the tenth part the pain for love of our Lord Jesu Christ."

- John Mandeville, The Travels of John Mandeville, 1351.

April 19, 2009: Chesterton at the close of the day

2009-04-19T11:16:00.000-07:00

Here dies another day
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world round me;
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?

- GK Chesterton

April 13, 2009: Murakami on forgetfulness

2009-04-12T15:58:00.001-07:00

"As you may know, in this Town, memory is unreliable and uncertain. There are things we can remember and things we cannot. You seem to be among the things I cannot. Please forgive me."

- Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World, 1991.

April 5, 2009: Chesterfield on Dickens

2009-04-05T20:30:00.000-07:00

"The whole lesson of Dickens is here. It is better to know Micawber than not to know the minor worries that arise out of knowing Micawber. It is better to have a bad debt and a good friend. In the same way it is better to marry a human and healthy personality which happens to attract you than to marry a mere housewife; for a mere housewife is a mere housekeeper. All this was what Dickens stood for; that the very people who are most irritating in small business circumstances are often the people who are most delightful in long stretches of experience of life. It is just the man who is maddening when he is ordering a cutlet or arranging an appointment who is probably the man in whose company it is worth while to journey steadily towards the grave. Distribute the dignified people and the capable people and the highly business-like people among all the situations which their ambition or their innate corruption may demand; but keep close to your heart, keep deep in your inner councils the absurd people. Let the clever people pretend to govern you, let the unimpeachable people pretend to advise you, but let the fools alone influence you; let the laughable people whose faults you see and understand be the only people who are really inside your life, who really come near you or accompany you on your lonely march towards the last impossibility. That is the whole meaning of Dickens; that we should keep the absurd people for our friends."

- Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of Charles Dickens, 1911.

March 31, 2009: Architects on big houses

2009-03-31T12:16:00.000-07:00

"I'm just going, What do you do with a bidet? I don't even know," he recalls. "And after awhile, I'm thinking, I don't even know the people who want these big stupid houses I'm designing. I don't know who they are, and I think I don't like them. In fact, I think they're the cause of all the problems in this world."

- San Diego architect Ted Smith, 2009.

March 28, 2009: Disney on passion

2009-03-27T14:18:00.000-07:00

"We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies."

- Walt Disney, apocryphal

March 8, 2009: Auden reads us the news

2009-03-08T23:24:00.000-07:00

"Flood, fire,
The dessication of grasslands, restraint of princes,
Piracy on the high seas, physical pain and fiscal grief,
These after all are our familiar tribulations,
And we have been through them all before, many, many times."

- W.H. Auden, For The Time Being, a Christmas Oratorio, 1942.

March 5, 2009: A man in a queue is a fair man.

2009-03-07T10:24:00.000-08:00

"A man in a queue is a fair man; he is minding his own business; he lives and lets live; he gives the other fellow a chance; he practices a duty while waiting to practice his own rights; he does almost everything an Englishman believes in doing."

- George Mikes, How to Be a Brit, 1984.

March 3, 2009: The Proper Awkwardness of the English

2009-03-03T11:47:00.000-08:00

"In fact, the only rule one can identify with any certainty in all this confusion over introductions and greetings is that, to be impeccably English, one must perform these rituals badly. One must appear self-conscious, ill-at-ease, stiff, awkward and, above all, embarrassed. Smoothness, glibness and confidence are inappropriate and un-English. Hesitation, dithering and ineptness are, surprising as it may seem, correct behavior."

- Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, 2004.

February 28, 2009: Tolstoy on National Assuredness

2009-03-03T11:41:00.000-08:00

"The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth- science- which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known."

- Tolstoy, War & Peace, 1868.

February 20, 2009: Tolstoy on Idleness

2009-02-23T12:41:00.000-08:00

A secret voice tells us that we should feel guilty for being idle. If man could find a condition in which, while idle, he felt that he was being useful and was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one side of primordial blessedness. And this state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is enjoyed by an entire class--the military.

- Tolstoy, War & Peace, 1868.

February 7, 2009: Tolstoy on the Truth

2009-02-07T14:19:00.000-08:00

"He could not simply tell them that they all set off at a trot, he fell off his horse, dislocated his arm, and ran to the woods as fast as he could to escape a Frenchman. Besides, in order to tell everything as it had been, one would have to make an effort with oneself so as to tell only what had been. To tell the truth is very difficult, and young men are rarely capable of it."

- Tolstoy, War & Peace, 1868.

January 10, 2008: Gifford says two true things about China.

2009-01-10T15:33:00.000-08:00

"There are nine cities in the United States with more than one million inhabitants. In China there are forty-nine. You can be traveling across China, arrive in a city that is twice the size of Houston, and think, I've never even heard of this place."

- and -

"China does that to you. You go back to the United States or Europe, and people wonder why you're not jumping up and down with annoyance at some minor noise or irritation, and you look at them and think, What's your problem? We have such low thresholds of annoyance in our cozy Western world. (The danger is, though, that you also forget to fit back into Western ways of, say, road safety or table manners on returning to your homeland.)"

- Rob Gifford, China Road, 2007.

January 6, 2008: Chang on my favorite place in all of China

2009-01-06T21:10:00.000-08:00

"I came to like Dongguan, which seemed a perverse expression of China at its most extreme. Materialism, environmental ruin, corruption, traffic, pollution, noise, prostitution, bad driving, short-term thinking, stress, striving, and chaos: If you could make it here, you'd make it anywhere. . . . Dongguan is invisble to the outside world. Most of my friends in Beijing had passed through the city but all they remembered--with a shudder--were the endless factories and the prostitutes. I had stumbled on this secret world, one that I shared with seven million, or eight million, or maybe ten million other people. Living in Dongguan was like arriving in it for the first time, hurtling down the highway at seventy miles an hour, the scenery changing too fast to keep track of it. Dongguan was a place without memory."

- Leslie Chang, Factory Girls, 2008