Half Mandrill, Half Mandela

Nonetheless, historical memory is remarkably persistent. It may be inaccurate, confused and distorted, but it doesn’t disappear easily.

- Another gem from Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms.

With all the weird surroundings of outer space, the basic underlying theme of the show is a philosophical approach to man’s relationship to woman. There are both sexes in the crew and, in fact, the first officer is a woman.

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Rare interview with Jeffrey Hunter, who played Captain Christopher Pike in the original Star Trek pilot. There are pretty much no interviews with him, so this is neat. Also… well, that excerpt is correct for the pilot, but what the show became…?

(via io9, naturally)

The chain of marriage is so heavy that it takes two to bear it; sometimes three.

- Alexandre Dumas. And quotes like this are why I can’t find an appropriate reading for my wedding by my favorite author of all time.

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

- Robert Graves (So true. And I feel the same way about Citizen Kane.)

As proof of my readiness to accept autobiographical convention, let me at once record my two earliest memories.

- Robert Graves can’t even write the first sentence of his autobiography without being weird and sort of cranky.

The Jews were leaving the theater, the Yiddish theater. When Jews leave the theater, they behave like Jews—they talk, they argue, they wave their hands around. One tells another his opinion of what he saw and heard. Each one imagines that what he has seen and heard, only he has really seen and heard.

- Sholem Aleichem, Wandering Stars, p. 23. This is still entirely true. This is me. It can be annoying, I’m sure.

People dress up for funerals. Why not dress up to celebrate that you’re alive?

- Gay Talese. (Quote taken from a fun Wall Street Journal article about Mr. Talese’s style)

We imagined we heard the joyful shouts of the Lithuanians at the approach of their deliverers. In our mind’s eye we saw the river lined with their imploring hands. Here we had nothing; there, everything would be lavished on us. The people would flock to supply all our needs: we should be surrounded by love and gratitude.

- Philippe-Paul Ségur, Defeat: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign (p. 6) At the outset of an invasion. Man, that sounds familiar.

Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up,to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence… But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development.When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

- C. S. Lewis (via an AV Club commenter)

Ruslan saw his fellow guard dogs less and less, but he did not have to meet them to learn their news: the dogs’ newspaper is written in the air and printed on lampposts and fences, and there was no end to the trivia and bitchy gossip to be read in it!

- Georgi Vladimov, Faithful Ruslan p. 156 (Glenny translation) (I review the book here.)

There have been a lot of people who have molded the face and history of Hip Hop over the years, but no one can deny that my three dudes from New York City were paramount in taking it from a local thing and breaking it world wide. Last saw my man at the [Vh1] Hip Hop Honors Awards and he was upbeat, gracious and spiritual as always. R.I.P. to MCA…see you in the next one, brother.

- Rakim (via classichiphop)

New York seemed very strange indeed. It might, almost, for strange barbarity and manner and custom, for the sense of danger and horror barely sleeping beneath the rough, gregarious surface, have been some impenetrably exotic city of the East. So superbly was it in the present that it seemed to have nothing to do with the passage of time: time might have dismissed it as thoroughly as it had dismissed Carthage and Pompeii. It seemed to have no sense whatever of the exigencies of human life; it was so familiar and so public that it became, at last, the most despairingly private of cities. One was continually being jostled, yet longed, at the same time, for the sense of others, for a human touch; and if one was never—it was the general complaint—left alone in New York, one had, still, to fight very hard in order not to perish of loneliness. This fight, carried on in so many different ways, created the strange climate of the city. The girls along Fifth Avenue wore their bright clothes like semaphores, trying helplessly to bring to the male attention the news of their mysterious trouble. The men could not read this message. They strode purposefully along, wearing little anonymous hats, or bareheaded, with youthfully parted hair, or crew cuts, accoutered with attache cases, rushing, on the evidence, to the smoking cars of trains. In this haven, they opened up their newspapers and caught up on the day’s bad news. Or they were to be found, as five o’clock fell, in discreetly dim, anonymously appointed bars, uneasy, in brittle, uneasy female company, pouring down joyless martinis.

- James Baldwin, Another Country p. 230. Other than the fact that barely anyone in New York gets out at 5pm anymore, and those leaving work are also women, this is pretty much entirely accurate 50 years later.