After long evenings working on the schedule of books to be reviewed and whom to give them to, Osano would drink from the bottle of whiskey he kept in his desk and give me long lectures on literature, the life of a writer, publishers, women and anything else that was bugging him at that particular time. He had been working on his big novel, the one that he thought would win him the Nobel Prize, for the last five years. He had already collected an enormous advance on it, and the publisher was getting nervous and pushing him. Osano was really pissed off about that. “That prick,” he said. “He told me to read the classics for inspiration. That ignorant fuck. Have you ever tried to read the classics over again? Jesus, those old fuckers like Hardy and Tolstoy and Galsworthy had it made. They took forty pages to let out a fart. And you know why? They had their readers trapped. They had them by the balls. No TV, no radio, no movies. No traveling unless you wanted cysts over your asshole from bouncing around on stagecoaches. In England you couldn’t even get fucked. Maybe that’s why the French writers were more disciplined. The French at least were into fucking, not like those English Victorian jerkoffs. Now I ask you why should a guy with a TV set and a beach house read Proust?”
I’d never been able to read Proust, so I nodded. But I had read everybody else and couldn’t see TV or a beach house taking their place.
Osano kept going.“Anna Karenina, they call it a masterpiece. It’s a full-of-shit book. It’s an educated upper-class guy condescending to women. He never shows you what that broad really feels or thinks. He gives us the conventional outlook of that time and place. And then he goes on for three hundred pages on how to run a Russian farm. He sticks that right in there as if anybody gives a shit. And who gives a shit about that asshole Vronsky and his soul? Jesus, I don’t know who’s worse, the Russians or the English. That fucking Dickens and Trollope, five hundred pages were nothing to them. They wrote when they had time off from tending their garden. The French kept it short at least. But how about that fucking Balzac? I defy! I defy! anybody to read him today.”
He took a slug of whiskey and gave out a sigh. “None of them knew how to use language. None of them except Flanbert, and he’s not that great. Not that Americans are that much better. That fuck Dreiser doesn’t even know what words mean. He’s illiterate, I mean that. He’s a fucking aborigine. Another nine-hundred-page pain in the ass. None of those fucking guys could get published today, and if they did, the critics would murder them. Boy, those guys had it made then. No competition.” He paused and sighed wearily. “Merlyn, my boy, we’re a dying breed, writers like us. Find another racket, hustle TV shit, do movies. You can do that stuff with your finger up your ass.” Then, exhausted, he would lie on the couch he kept in his office for his afternoon snooze.
June 30, 2008
Fools Die by Mario Puzo - my favourite part
March 18, 2008
Hakuna Matata!
Hakuna Matata! What a wonderful phrase
Hakuna Matata! Ain't no passing craze
It means no worries for the rest of your days
It's our problem-free philosophy
Hakuna Matata!
Hakuna Matata?
Yeah. It's our motto!
What's a motto?
Nothing. What's a-motto with you?
Those two words will solve all your problems
That's right. Take Pumba here
Why, when he was a young warthog...
When I was a young wart hog
Very nice
Thanks
He found his aroma lacked a certain appeal
He could clear the savannah after every meal
I'm a sensitive soul though I seem thick-skinned
And it hurt that my friends never stood downwind
And oh, the shame He was ashamed
Thought of changin' my name What's in a name?
And I got downhearted How did ya feel?
Every time that I...
Hey! Pumbaa! Not in front of the kids!
Oh. Sorry
Hakuna Matata! What a wonderful phrase
Hakuna Matata! Ain't no passing craze
It means no worries for the rest of your days
It's our problem-free philosophy!
March 11, 2008
The raspy breath, the gravelly voice, the countless wrinkles clustered around the eyes, ah, the joys of tobacco.
March 4, 2008
Yesterday
Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.
Suddenly,
There's not half the files there used to be,
And there's a milestone hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.
I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.
Now all my data's gone and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.
Yesterday,
Need for backup seemed so far away.
Seemed my data were all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.
Anonymous
One flu o'er the cuckoo's nest
Wintery, splintery, mutiny, scorn,
Hurricanes, floods and base forlorn;
Liar, crony, leaker, duck,
Chicken Shit Chicken Hawks Run Amuck.
One Flu East and One Flu West and
One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Mayhem, ahem, Missing Veep
Falling numbers, Losing Sleep
Delay Decay, Dirty Trick
Frist Flap, Wrist Slap, Feeling Sick
The Scandals FeastOn those thought best
And no clue in the cuckoo’s nest.
Just letting go
"And do you know what it's like to go for days on end without sleep, for weeks with only two or three hours out of the twenty-four? Do you know the sensation, Admiral Starr? That fine-drawn feeling with every nerve in your body and cell in your brain stretched taut to breaking point, pushing you over the screaming edge of madness. Do you know it, Admiral Starr? It's the most exquisite agony in the world, and you'd sell your friends, your family, your hopes of immortality for the blessed privilege of closing your eyes and just letting go."
Through A Glass Darkly
"I am lord of my own realm,
Which is quite small and very poor.
I am an artist!
An artist of the purest kind.
A poet with no poems,
A painter with no paintings...
A musician with no notes.
I scorn the completed work of art,
The banal result of vulgar efforts.
My life is my work,
And it is devoted to my love for you!"
Nostalgia
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow's soar
Your neck turn'd so,
Some veil did fall,--I knew it all of yore.
And shall not thus time's eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death's despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?
Life
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.
- Henry Wordsworth Longfellow
Fame & Fortune
Thus unlamented let me dye;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lye.
- Alexander Pope
