COMMONPLACE BOOK, EXCERPTS for DECEMBER 2005

Solace for the Magpie Mind.
[A "Commonplace Book" is a collection of random quotations, favorite authors, conversations, clippings, or scribbles on a bathroom wall. Entries are not considered a Rorschach test. Additions will be woven into the main body, with initials to credit the contributor.]
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I know just enough about myself to know I cannot settle for one of those simplifications which indignant people seize upon to make understandable a world too complex for their comprehension. Astrology, health food, flag waving, bible thumping, Zen, nudism, nihilism -- all of these are grotesque simplifications which small dreary people adopt in the hope of thereby finding The Answer, because the very concept that maybe there is no answer, never has been, never will be, terrifies them. (John D. MacDonald)
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“It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.” (Raymond Chandler)
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"We're looking with intensity at the next generation, trying to engage them early. We need people who will stand up and say, 'This is not acceptable in the 21st century.' Right now, this is not a battle we're winning." (Jennifer Parmelee on a video game, “Food Force”, developed for the World Food Program.)
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I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question.
-- Jim Harrison
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It's a tonic to find real readers because they just read massively.
-- Jim Harrison
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Research by Jay D. Wexler, a law professor at Boston University, using transcripts of oral arguments at the United States Supreme Court. Story here.
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I never saw any of them again - except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them. (Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye)
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Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her. (Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep)
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On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. (Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind")
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Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefore. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man's reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why? Today the good ones, the ones who want to ask why, find no one around with any interest in answering the question, so they drop out, because theirs is the type of mind which becomes monstrously bored at the trade-school concept. (John D. MacDonald)
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"Jack Kirby was a master of his craft, and he produced outrageous, wacky shit like this with such certainty and skill that you either had to embrace it or just stop reading comics altogether because you suck." Dave’s Long Box

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“The appeal is meant to raise money for UNICEF projects in Burundi, Congo and Sudan, Henon said. However, because of its graphic and disturbing scenes, this cartoon is not for everyone. The advertisement is aimed at an adult audience and is shown only after 9 p.m. to avoid upsetting youngsters.
The video is peacefully introduced by birds, butterflies and happy Smurfs playing and singing their theme song when suddenly, out of the sky, bombs rain down onto their forest village, scattering Papa Smurf and the rest as their houses are set ablaze.
The bombs kill Smurfette, leaving the orphaned Baby Smurf weeping. The ad ends with the text "don't let war destroy the children's world.’... UNICEF traditionally uses real-life images of playing and laughing children but decided to change it for something that would shock people, Henon said.
‘The public is not easily motivated to do things for humanitarian causes and certainly not when it involved Africa or children in war,’ he said.... ‘We see so many images that we don't really react anymore,’ said Julie Lamoureux, account director at Publicis, an advertising agency that drew up the campaign for UNICEF Belgium. ‘In 35 seconds we wanted to show adults how awful war is by reaching them within their memories of childhood.’" (News Story)
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“When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.” (Raymond Chandler)
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Bill and Emily Hanavan at Christmas.

According to the National Oceanography Center in Britain, the flow of the Gulf Stream has been reduced by 30 percent since 1957. This is caused by freshwater flooding into the North Atlantic from the melting of the Arctic and Greenland ice caps.
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“The number of Guantanamo Bay prisoners taking part in a hunger strike that began nearly five months ago has surged to 84 since Christmas Day, the U.S. military said on Thursday....The prisoner population, which the Pentagon says numbers about 500, is believed to be uniformly Muslim. Only nine have been charged with any crime....The detainees began the strike in early August after the military reneged on promises to bring the prison into compliance with the Geneva Conventions, their lawyers said. Detainees are willing to starve to death to demand humane treatment and a fair hearing on whether they must stay, the lawyers said.
Most of the detainees were captured in Afghanistan and have been held for nearly four years.”
--Reuters news story, Dec 30, 2005
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“The streets were dark with something more than night.”
-- Raymond Chandler
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I don't find anything perceptually accurate or agreeable or sensical about the media view of American culture.
-- Jim Harrison
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The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.
-- Jim Harrison
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Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.— Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder”
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I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.
-- Jim Harrison
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You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for.
-- Henry Fielding

See Also: Commonplace Book 1