Commonplace Book, Chapter 4

It is time to once again disgorge some more of the collected quotes and outtakes that have been accumulated before there were efforts to write these postings.

I always loved the sentiment of E. L. Doctorow that was quoted in the obituary for Joseph Heller, "They say fiction can't change anything, but it can certainly organize a generation's consciousness."

That's as good as good as W. H. Auden's 1939 elegy on the death of William Butler Yeats, "poetry makes nothing happen." One great poet saying of another great poet that their work makes nothing happen. Yes, if nothing is building buildings or laying railroad track, then he's right. But we know poetry organizes one's consciousness. And that's not nothing,

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Lorne Welch, a crack British glider pilot and yachtsman who played parts in two of the most storied escapes by Allied prisoners during World War II, died on May 15 at his home in Farnham, England. He was 81.

As a prisoner at Colditz, the 700-room Saxon castle the Nazis used to hold incorrigible escape artists, he helped design a two-man glider with a 32-foot wingspan that was to be launched by a catapult powered by a five-floor drop of a concrete-filled bathtub.  It was never tested because the prisoners were liberated by American troops before an attempt could be made.

--Robert McG. Thomas, Jr. NYT Obituary, June 8, 1998

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Politicians, public buildings and whores all gain respectability if they last long enough.

--John Huston’s character in the movie Chinatown, as said to Jake Gaddis, the private detective played by Jack Nicholson

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Joseph Heller, the author of “Catch-22," the darkly comic 1961 novel whose title became a universal metaphor not only for the insanity of war but also for the madness of life itself, died on Sunday night at his home in East Hampton, N.Y.  He was 76.

The novelist E. L. Doctorow told The Associated Press yesterday, “When ‘Catch-22’ came out people were saying, ‘Well, World War II wasn’t like this.’  But when we got tangled up in Vietnam, it became a sort of text for the consciousness of that time. They say fiction can’t change anything, but it can certainly organize a generation’s consciousness.”

--Richard Severo & Herbert Mitgang, NYT Obituary, December 14, 1999

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Jewelers are nervous.  Sequin and rhinestone manufacturers despair.  Cher, the 56-year-old pop singer, who has made it her mission to reflect more light than the mirrors of the Hubble Space Telescope, is on her farewell tour, which appeared at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday and Thursday.  “How sparkly am I?” she asked the crowd on Thursday night.

--Jon Pareles, music review, NYT, June 29, 2002

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Apparently, Anna Kournikova flirts with maturity, too.

In the span of 15 minutes, she went from surprising everyone at a news conference with a show of introspection after her first-round loss at Wimbledon today to a display of divalike behavior in front of the BBC cameras.

There was little sympathy for Kournikova, who has a history of petulant behavior in front of fans and with her peers.  She is famous for once dismissing a teenage boy’s shout of “I love you!” with a glare and the line: “You can’t afford me.”

--Selena Roberts, NYT, June 25, 2002

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Julius J. Epstein, a screenwriter of sharp, sardonic dialogue who won an Academy award for the script of “Casablanca,” died here [Los Angeles] on Saturday. He was 91.

Mr. Epstein liked to tell stories with a pinch of irony, a twist of self-deprecation.  For example, he and his brother could not think of a plausible reason that Rick Blaine, the character played by Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca,” could not return to America and had to remain in Casablanca. So they came up with brilliant dialogue to disguise that fact:

Louis Renault, the police chief played by Claude Rains, asks, “I’ve often speculated on why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds?  Did you run off with the senator’s wife? I’d like to think you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.”

  Rick: “It was a combination of all three.”

  Renault: “And what in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?”

  Rick: “My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.”

  Renault: “What waters?  We’re in the desert.”

  Rick: “I was misinformed.”

--Aljean Harmetz, NYT Obituary, January 1, 2001

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The New York City subway system has 468 stations, which can be thought of, for the purposes of this column, as a country unto themselves. As in any country, there are backwaters, stations so sleepy that you can almost hear the theme from “High Chaparral” playing on the empty platforms.

These stations don’t even have human attendants on the weekends; they are staffed only by MetroCard machines and the forbidding full-body turnstiles that resemble egg slicers.

--Randy Kennedy, Tunnel Vision column, NYT, December 19, 2000

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The fuel of boxing is controversy—after all, what are matches, not to speak of rematches, made of anyway?  It goes back to at least Pindar, who composed soaring odes to the boxing brawls in the ancient Greek Olympiad, some of which were surely, as the saying goes, manipulated.  The peculiar fascination continued through the centuries, to Saturday night, when, by the estimation of a thick majority of spectators, Lennox Lewis clearly won the unified heavyweight championship of this planet, but the three judges awarded him a measly draw with Evander Holyfield. Ah, but such is the essential charm of boxing—the sleaziness of it all. And thus the fuel for controversy. There is simply no fuel like an old fuel.

Every time we learn from the experts that boxing is dead, that there is no longer a James Fig, or a John L. Sullivan, or a Jack Dempsey, or a Joe Louis, or a Muhammad Ali, there rises from the gym of worn boxing shoes, tattered gloves, tape, headgear, mouthpieces and cigar butts, another fight in which we can’t wait to see what happens, who wins, who gets robbed.

It is a kind of burlesque, and in that sense one is reminded of something Ann Corio said.  Corio, once the most famous of burlesque strippers who died in her 80's earlier this month, had been asked to describe the art of undressing artistically. “Always keep your pants on,” she said.  “It brings the boys back hoping next time you’ll take them off.”

--Ira Berkow, Sports of the Times column, Boxing’s Beautiful Black Eye,

March 12, 1999

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