StayAwayMonday

Books. Lisbon.

[stayawaymonday]

Harry looks like a poleaxed lamb in that wobbly moment just before the cerebral cortex shuts off for good.

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Tom Wolfe)

[stayawaymonday]

Big Sid Wyman, the old Big-Time gambler from St. Louis, is there, with his eyes looking like two poached eggs engraved with a road map of West Virginia after all night at the poker table.

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Tom Wolfe)

[stayawaymonday]

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.

Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)

[stayawaymonday]

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (Joan Didion)

[stayawaymonday]

the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (Joan Didion)

[stayawaymonday]

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (Joan Didion)

[stayawaymonday]

Now they look like yet another one of those excesses that we got caught up in like many of our fads in the boom, such as having a holiday home in the country, a place to get away from it all when, in fact, most of us had just come from the country and couldn’t wait to get out of the place.

Follow the Money (David McWilliams)

[stayawaymonday]

Have you ever thought, Brendan, how many completely different lives there are to be lived if only one could choose?

Troubles (J.G. Farrell)

[stayawaymonday]

... I think that I smell bacon frying ... I look behind me and see that it is the starboard gunner's hand. He has a grip on the hot machine gun barrel. His hand is smoking but he shows no apparent pain. I take his hand from the barrel and see that it is badly blistered; apparently he feels no pain due to the massive amount of adrenaline that is pumping through him. I give him my bush hat to wrap around the hot barrel.

Eye of the Tiger: Memoir of a United States Marine, Third Force Recon Company, Vietnam (John Edmund Delezen)

[stayawaymonday]

Often I wonder, are those we hunt our true enemy? Perhaps it is the bush that is the enemy or perhaps it is those who have sent us into this lush and tranquil garden of orchids. Like our enemy, we are sent here by an older generation to defend a political policy that few of us understand. Neither the "gook" nor the "grunt" have an interest in policy and only understand survival; yet both are patriots that have met here in the shadows of the Truong Son to fight and perhaps leave their wandering souls. We are young and our enemy is young, we share so much, so many hardships; are we brothers? Are we killing our brothers? If so, which is Cain and which is Abel, which of us are Yin and which of us Yang? Who is the innocent and who is the guilty and which of us is the victim? Perhaps the victim is our youth.

Eye of the Tiger: Memoir of a United States Marine, Third Force Recon Company, Vietnam (John Edmund Delezen)

[invisiblestories]

Perhaps we become aware of our existence only when we feel on our skin the touch of a place that has no name, that connects us to the earliest time, to all the dead, to prehistory, when the mind first stood apart from the world, still unaware that it was orphaned.

Andrzej Stasiuk, On The Road to Babadag (via invisiblestories)

[maptitude1]

These maps show per capita wine (top), beer (bottom, blue), and cider (bottom, red) consumption in France in 1873.

[stayawaymonday]

NOW I SAW BRITISH PEOPLE LYING STIFFLY ON THE BEACH like dead insects, or huddled against the canvas windbreaks they hammered into the sand with rented mallets, or standing on cliffs and kicking stones roly-poly into the sea—and I thought: They are symbolically leaving the country. Going to the coast was as far as they could comfortably go. It was the poor person’s way of going abroad—standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. It took a little imagination. I believed that these people were fantasizing that they were over there on the watery horizon, at sea. Most people on the Promenade walked with their faces averted from the land. Perhaps another of their coastal pleasures was being able to turn their backs on Britain. I seldom saw anyone with his back turned to the sea (it was the rarest posture on the coast). Most people looked seaward with anxious hopeful faces, as if they had just left their native land.

To the Ends of the Earth (Paul Theroux)

[stayawaymonday]

All travelers are optimists, I thought. Travel itself was a sort of optimism in action. I always went along thinking: I’ll be all right, I’ll be interested, I’ll discover something, I won’t break a leg or get robbed, and at the end of the day I’ll find a nice old place to sleep. Everything is going to be fine, and even if it isn’t, it will be worthy of note—worth leaving home for.

To the Ends of the Earth (Paul Theroux)

[stayawaymonday]

Perhaps it was the effect of the Dashiell Hammett novel I had just read, but I found myself examining her situation with a detective’s skepticism. Nothing could have been more melodramatic, or more like a Bogart film: near midnight in Veracruz, the band playing ironical love songs, the plaza crowded with friendly whores, the woman in the white suit describing the disappearance of her Mexican husband. It is possible that this sort of movie fantasy, which is available to the solitary traveler, is one of the chief reasons for travel. She had cast herself in the role of leading lady in her search drama, and I gladly played my part. We were far from home: we could be anyone we wished. Travel offers a great occasion to the amateur actor.

To the Ends of the Earth (Paul Theroux)

[stayawaymonday]

BUT THERE WAS MORE TO THIS MORAL SPELLED OUT IN TRANSPONTINE geography than met the eye. If the Texans had the best of both worlds in decreeing that the fleshpots should remain on the Mexican side of the International Bridge—the river flowing, like the erratic progress of a tricky argument, between vice and virtue—the Mexicans had the sense of tact to keep Boys’ Town camouflaged by decrepitude, on the other side of the tracks, another example of the geography of morality. Divisions everywhere: no one likes to live next door to a whorehouse. And yet both cities existed because of Boys’ Town. Without the whoring and racketeering, Nuevo Laredo would not have had enough municipal funds to plant geraniums around the statue of its madly gesturing patriot in the plaza, much less advertise itself as a bazaar of wickerwork and guitar-twanging folklore—not that anyone ever went to Nuevo Laredo to be sold baskets. And Laredo required the viciousness of its sister city to keep its own churches full. Laredo had the airport and the churches, Nuevo Laredo the brothels and basket factories. Each nationality had seemed to gravitate to its own special area of competence. This was economically sound thinking; it followed to the letter the Theory of Comparative Advantage, outlined by the distinguished economist David Ricardo (1772–1823).

To the Ends of the Earth (Paul Theroux)

[stayawaymonday]

A little farther on, he said, “What do you think of India?” “It’s a hard question,” I said. I wanted to tell him about the children I had seen that morning pathetically raiding the leftovers of my breakfast, and ask him if he thought there was any truth in Mark Twain’s comment on Indians: “It is a curious people. With them, all life seems to be sacred except human life.” But I added instead, “I haven’t been here very long.”

To the Ends of the Earth (Paul Theroux)