Word of the Day

ad hominem\ad-HAH-muh-nem\

 

adjective

 

1 :

appealing to feelings or prejudices rather than intellect

 

2 :

marked by or being an attack on an opponent's character rather than by an answer to the contentions made

 

The governor's only response to the criticism of his new policy was to launch an ad hominem attack against those doing the criticizing.

 

"This democratization of the online media comment world results in both a lot of angry, nasty and downright insulting ad hominem attacks, followed quickly by ad hominem attacks by email commentators on each other that make for salty and entertaining, if not particularly edifying, reading." — From an editorial by Richard Hermann in the Daily Messenger (Canandaigua, New York), August 30, 2012

 

Louis-Ferdinand Céline and his pets 1894 – 1961

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961). He was a French novelist, pamphleteer and physician. The name Céline was the first name of his grandmother. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and world literature.

*“I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.” 

*“The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow

to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much

too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”

Robert Lee Frost, 1874 –1963

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right, 5
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth—
A snowdrop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? 10
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.

Walt Whitman, 1819 – 1892

A Noiseless Patient Spider 


A NOISELESS, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul

Escape is such a thankful Word by Emily Dickinson

Escape is such a thankful Word

I often in the Night
Consider it unto myself

No spectacle in sight

Escape — it is the Basket
In which the Heart is caught
When down some awful Battlement
The rest of Life is dropt —

'Tis not to sight the savior —
It is to be the saved —
And that is why I lay my Head
Upon this trusty word —

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900. When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;	5
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald 1896 – 1940

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota (1896). In April of 1920, at the age of 23, he published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which made him an overnight sensation. A week later, he married his sweetheart, the belle of Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre, in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. They were young and beautiful, and they were emblems of the Jazz Age, a name Fitzgerald himself had coined. Dorothy Parker said they looked "as though they had just stepped out of the sun." By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, Fitzgerald had started to crash too. His marriage was coming apart—Zelda had her first nervous breakdown in 1930. The changes that came with the Great Depression made F. Scott Fitzgerald seem like ancient history, along with everything else from the "Roaring Twenties." He had written about the lives of the rich, and now he remained associated with them and had fallen out of favor. His books, including The Great Gatsby (1925), did not sell well. In 1929, the Saturday Evening Post paid him $4,000 per story, but his total royalties on seven books that year were only $31.77.

In 1932, as the Great Depression was approaching its worst point, Fitzgerald was living in New York, a city that he loved. He said, "New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world." One evening he did what a lot of New Yorkers did that year—he went to the top of the newly built Empire State Building. He wrote about it in his essay "My Lost City": "Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."

After The Great Gatsby, it took Fitzgerald nine years to write his next novel, Tender is the Night. When it came out in 1934, it got a mixed reaction. In the spring of 1936 he was broke, looking for advances from Esquire magazine, but the editor told him he'd have to write something, anything, just to show the accountants. So Fitzgerald looked at his problems, his situation as a writer, and wrote a series of personal essays called "The Crack-Up," about what it was like to hit bottom. The essays were shocking; it was a time when people didn't air their own dirty laundry in public. Fitzgerald's writer friends—Hemingway, Maxwell Perkins, John Dos Passos—didn't understand why he would expose himself in that way. But "The Crack-Up" not only put Fitzgerald's name back out in front of the public, it also paved the way for a new confessional style in American writing. It begins: "Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again." Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of 44. That year, all of his books sold a total of 72 copies, with royalties of $13. Today, The Great Gatsby alone sells about 300,000 copies a year.



Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

It takes a genius to whine appealingly.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

That was always my experience-- a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton ... . However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.

Dans le port d'Amsterdam

Dans le port d'Amsterdam
Y a des marins qui chantent
Les rêves qui les hantent
Au large d'Amsterdam
Dans le port d'Amsterdam
Y a des marins qui dorment
Comme des oriflammes
Le long des berges mornes
Dans le port d'Amsterdam
Y a des marins qui meurent
Pleins de bière et de drames
Aux premières lueurs
Mais dans le port d'Amsterdam
Y a des marins qui naissent
Dans la chaleur épaisse
Des langueurs océanes

Dans le port d'Amsterdam
Y a des marins qui mangent
Sur des nappes trop blanches
Des poissons ruisselants
Ils vous montrent des dents
A croquer la fortune
A décroisser la lune
A bouffer des haubans
Et ça sent la morue
Jusque dans le coeur des frites
Que leurs grosses mains invitent
A revenir en plus
Puis se lèvent en riant
Dans un bruit de tempête
Referment leur braguette
Et sortent en rotant

Dans le port d'Amsterdam
Y a des marins qui dansent
En se frottant la panse
Sur la panse des femmes
Et ils tournent et ils dansent
Comme des soleils crachés
Dans le son déchiré
D'un accordéon rance
Ils se tordent le cou
Pour mieux s'entendre rire
Jusqu'à ce que tout à coup
L'accordéon expire
Alors le geste grave
Alors le regard fier
Ils ramènent leur batave
Jusqu'en pleine lumière

Dans le port d'Amsterdam
Y a des marins qui boivent
Et qui boivent et reboivent
Et qui reboivent encore
Ils boivent à la santé
Des putains d'Amsterdam
De Hambourg ou d'ailleurs
Enfin ils boivent aux dames
Qui leur donnent leur joli corps
Qui leur donnent leur vertu
Pour une pièce en or
Et quand ils ont bien bu
Se plantent le nez au ciel
Se mouchent dans les étoiles
Et ils pissent comme je pleure
Sur les femmes infidèles
Dans le port d'Amsterdam
Dans le port d'Amsterdam. 

E. E. Cummings 1894–1962

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the color of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Ernest Hemingway 1899-1961

Robert Penn Warren (1905- 1989) on Hemingway (1899-1961) :

Hemingway’s heroes are not squealers, welchers, compromisers, or cowards, and when they confront defeat they realize that the stance they take, the stoic endurance, the stiff upper lip means a kind of victory. If they are to be defeated they are defeated upon their own terms; some of them have even courted their defeat; and certainly they have maintained, even in the practical defeat, an ideal of themselves – some definition of how a man should behave, formulated or unformulated – by which they have lived. They represent some notion of a code, some notion of honor, that makes a man a man, and that distinguishes him from people who merely follow their random impulses and who are, by consequence, “messy.”

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Courage is grace under pressure.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.

Gunsmoke 1955 - 1975

Gunsmoke is an American radio and television Western drama series created by director Norman MacDonnell and writer John Meston. The stories take place in and around Dodge City, Kansas, during the settlement of the American West. The radio version ran from 1952 to 1961, and John Dunning writes that among radio drama enthusiasts "Gunsmoke is routinely placed among the best shows of any kind and any time." The television version ran for 20 seasons from 1955 to 1975, and was the United States' longest-running prime time, live-action drama with 635 episodes. In 2010, Law & Order tied this record of 20 seasons (but only 456 episodes). At the end of its run in 1975, Los Angeles Times columnist Cecil Smith wrote "Gunsmoke was the dramatization of the American epic legend of the west. Our own Iliad and Odyssey, created from standard elements of the dime novel and the pulp western as romanticized by Buntline, Harte, and Twain. It was ever the stuff of legend."

*It's time for the court to step in and give these infants constant, systematic care. Constant, systematic and as sterile as a hybrid jenny mule.

*Reb Kittredge: Did you ever think of settling down in one place, Johnny?
Johnny Lake: Yeah, I did settle down once.
Reb Kittredge: What happened?
Johnny Lake: They forgot to lock the cell one night. »

Sunday Morning Wallace Stevens 1879 – 1955

I

Complacencies of the peignoir*, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo*
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkness among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

III

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital* to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

IV

She says, ``I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?''
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera* of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evenings, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

V

She says, ``But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.''
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

VI

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

VII

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, ``The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.''
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or an old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

* peign·oir [peyn-wahr, pen-, peyn-wahr, pen-]  

noun

: a woman's loose negligee or dressing gown
Origin of PEIGNOIR

French, literally, garment worn while combing the hair, from Middle French, from peigner to comb the hair, from Latin pectinare, from pectin-, pecten comb — more at pectinate

*cock·a·too   [kok-uh-too, kok-uh-too] 

noun, plural cock·a·toos.

1.

any of numerous large, noisy, crested parrots of the genera Cacatua, Callocephalon, Calyptorhynchus,  etc., of the Australasian region, having chiefly white plumage tinged with yellow, pink, or red: popular as a pet.

*requital   [ri-kwahyt-l]  

noun

1.

the act of requiting.

2.

a return or reward for service, kindness, etc.

3.

a retaliation for a wrong, injury, etc.

4.

something given or done as repayment, reward, punishment, etc., in return.

*chimera   [ki-meer-uh, kahy-] 

noun, plural chi·me·ras.

1.

( often initial capital letter ) a mythological, fire-breathing monster, commonly represented with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.

2.

any similarly grotesque monster having disparate parts, especially as depicted in decorative art.

3.

a horrible or unreal creature of the imagination; a vain or idle fancy: He is far different from the chimera your fears have made of him.

Dorothy Parker 1893 – 1967

Dorothy Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild in West End, New Jersey (1893). She's remembered as one of the greatest wits of the 20th century, even though she only wrote a few books of poetry and short stories. She started her career just after World War I, in an era when slick magazines were one of the most popular forms of entertainment. The writers for these magazines wrote in a jaded, wisecracking tone of voice, and it was Dorothy Parker who proved that women could wisecrack just as well as any man.

Parker was four feet and eleven inches tall, and she loved to swear. The drama critic Alexander Woollcott described her as, "A blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth." She said, "[I'm] just a little Jewish girl, trying to be cute."

She was the only woman who belonged to the famous group of New York writers who met every day at the Round Table of the Algonquin Hotel to trade wit and gossip. That circle included Harold Ross, who created the New Yorker, and he said he borrowed the tone of voice for his magazine from those Algonquin meetings. He later hired Parker as a columnist.

Much of her writing was collected in the Portable Dorothy Parker, which has been in print since 1944. Of the first ten Portables published by Viking, only the Portable Shakespeare and the Portable Bible sold as well and as steadily as the Portable Parker.

Dorothy Parker said, "I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true."

And, "People are more fun than anybody."

I'm never going to be famous. I don't do anything, not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.

• I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.

• Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

• I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

• You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

• Women and elephants never forget.

• I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound -- if I can remember any of the damn things.

• Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.

• Four be the things I'd have been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.

• A girl's best friend is her mutter.

• I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.

• Take care of luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.

• Salary is no object; I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.

• Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.

• The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.'

• If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

• The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

• The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires.

• Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.

• It serves me right for keeping all my eggs in one bastard.

• All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.

• Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.

• Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

• Men don't like nobility in woman. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility -- if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship.

• That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them.

• People are more fun than anybody.

• I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.

• I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.

• You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

• Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life.

• The Monte Carlo casino refused to admit me until I was properly dressed so I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt.

• Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

• This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

• She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

• The only ism Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.

Sherwood Anderson 1876 –1941

*The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.

*There is a note that comes into the human voice by which you may know real weariness. It comes when one has been trying with all his heart and soul to think his way along some difficult road of thought . Of a sudden he finds himself unable to go on. Something within him stops. A tiny explosion takes place. He bursts into words and talks, perhaps foolishly. Little side currents of his nature he didn't know were there run out and get themselves expressed. It is at such times that a man boasts, uses big words, makes a fool of himself in general.

*People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging.

*If a man doesn’t delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?

*Interest in the lives of others, the high evaluation of these lives, what are they but the overflow of the interest a man finds in himself, the value he attributes to his own being?

*It is all right your saying you do not need other people, but there are a lot Of people who need you.