Roads exist for me…mainly to furnish reasonably direct connections between cafés and chili parlors, taco wagons and beaneries, eat shacks and confectioneries, burger joints and frozen-custard stands, barbecue sheds and fish camps. In other words, roads are there to tie one reason for living to another.
from William Least Heat-Moon, Roads to Quoz, p37
I was amused by this caricature of academic debates and the fascination they engender. I also wondered if I’m not attending the wrong conferences.
Intellectual controversies tend to be like dog fights without the teeth, in which the barking not the biting does the damage. In the case of Rotkopf and Urquiza, however, according to the report in The Gold-Bug, they had very nearly come to bites. So much so that Oliver Johnson had to break off his discussion of Poe’s influence on Lovecraft…and leave the stage, with Rotkopf congratulating him, saying that every time an imbecile stopped talking, the intellectual climate on Earth improved slightly. Oliver Johnson had sworn to kill Joachim Rotkopf one day, and Rotkopf and Urquiza had continued their argument in the pages of The Gold-Bug, in a series of increasingly vitriolic articles, which I had followed with fascination, never dreaming that I would one day hear those magnificent, erudite dogs trading insults for real. (from Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, by Luís Fernando Veríssimo, tr by Margaret Jull Costa, p16-17)
How much you get from walking will depend, in the last resort, upon yourself, rather than the country. One mind will get more out of a few fields than another will from a range of mountains. It is a matter of developing a breadth of interests. …
The ideal walker would, I suppose, have geology and all other -ologies at his fingertips. He would be steeped in history and literary associations. He would be able to analyse a cathedral into its constituent parts and tag each with a date and style. He would talk knowledgeably to the locals about crops and craftsa nd industries. Such a man (supposing his head did not burst) would cover about one mile in a summer’s day. I prefer to air my ignorance on the hills and walk twenty, noticing what I can. But certainly a little knowledge of all or any of these things, far from being dangerous, adds immensely to one’s pleasure.
I always wish I could identify more trees, bushes, clouds, etc., but never have the diligence to consistently invest. So I will continue to “air my ignorance” and see if I can pick up “a little knowledge” here and there. I’m in Ithaca, New York, where there are ten thousand waterfalls. I love this town.
from Walking in England, by Geoffrey Tease, quoted in The Walker’s Companion, by Malcolm Tait, p53. (I own and loved The Moviegoer’s Companion, from the same series.)
Spies for the CIA, working against and with and next to the DHS (not the Demographic and Health Surveys, as I often mistakenly assume) and the … other intelligence agencies.
Lots of excitement and intrigue. This book kept me going through my big early child development conference in Rio two weeks ago.
Definitely recommended!
So far, that’s two for two (the other was Dog On It; here’s the whole list).
I’d read the next one, but I’m going to allow myself to be sidetracked by Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s El príncipe de la niebla (a young adult book he wrote some years ago).
Jorge Amado is one of Brazil’s great writers. (It’s not just Machado de Assis – and I’ll hit you if you start talking about Paulo Coelho.)
I’m in the midst of his 1943 novel about rural poverty in Brazil’s northeast, As Terras do Sem-Fim. As one character, Antônio Vítor, decides whether to migrate to the northeast or not, he observes those who have gone before:
Almost all the men went, and they rarely returned. But those that did return – and they always returned for just a quick visit – were unrecognizable after years of absence. They came wealthy, with rings on their fingers, gold watches, pearls and ties. And they threw their money away, with expensive presents for relatives, donations for churches and for patron saints, and hosting end-of-year celebrations. “He got rich” was all that that was heard around town. (p20, my own bad translation from the Portuguese)
Antônio, what about the guys that didn’t come back?
A while ago I posted Stephen King’s summer reading recommendations. Yesterday, as my flight touched down in Rio de Janeiro, I finished one of them: Dog On It, by Spencer Quinn. It was awesome!
Bernie Little is a Private Investigator. His dog, Chet, narrates the story. This could be trite or lame, but it is simply awesome. Chet will be in the middle of narrating action, dialogue between Bernie and a client, and – “I spotted a Cheeto under the bed. Munch munch and it was gone. Not bad at all, if you don’t mind a little dust, and I’m not fussy about things like that. When I turned back to the room, Bernie was watching Keefer, a new look on his face.”
What happened in the meantime? I could have read this in one sitting.
Now I’m on to recommendation #2: Olen Steinhauer’s The Tourist.
ps I love this exchange between Bernie and a client.
Bernie: Where’d you hear that?
Client: I didn’t hear it. I looked it up on the Internet.
I have read a few Orson Scott Card books and enjoyed them (Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and the two that followed). Anyway, for Mormon Times, he wrote a column with 3 summer reading recommendations for Mormons. None look like page-turners, so I might wait until I get through Stephen King’s recommendations, but…
“All three of these books prove that good writing can make deep and important information accessible to the general reader.
Reading any of these books is also likely to raise your standards of what to expect from scholars, both in the church and the outside world. Once you know what good scholarship looks like, it’s harder to get taken in by nonsense.”
When Schweitzer escorted Adlai Stevenson, a former governor of Illinois and presidential candidate, on a tour of the hospital grounds at Lambaréné in Gabon, Stevenson noticed a large mosquito alighting on the good doctor’s arm and promptly swatted it. “You shouldn’t have done that,” the doctor said sharply. “That was my mosquito. Besides, it wasn’t necessary to call out the Sixth Fleet to deal with him.”
from Yi-Fu Tuan’s Human Goodness, p56
All alcoholics should constantly have chocolate available.
This seems like good counsel for the alcoholic and the non-alcoholic alike. I certainly intend to follow it.
from the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, p133-134, first published in 1939
from Entertainment Weekly, with descriptions of why he likes each one:
I like Stephen King. I liked him when I was a kid and read some of the horror (Misery), supernatural (Thinner), his young adult fantasy novel (Eyes of the Dragon?), his crazy quit-smoking story (Quitters Inc), his epic (The Stand), and as an adult I liked his writing memoir (On Writing) and his story The Shawshank Redemption (although the film was better).
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