Josh Brown > Recent Status Updates

“I have said that the Chinese will come, and have given some reasons why… Do you ask if I would favor such immigrations? I answer, I would. "Would you admit them as witnesses in our courts of law?" I would. Would you have them naturalized, and have them invested with all the rights of American citizenship? I would. Would you allow them to vote? I would. Would you allow them to hold office? I would.”

Rereading for this probably the 4th time - after a third of the way through again I am just struck by how present personal and universal this book is, and how much will always be found within its pages.

I have not been this frustrated by a book in s long time. For one, it just has no sense of place, it sounds like she googled “Chicago” and randomly wedged in the details that came up on the first page of results. And that sort of tracks with the way the characters are drawn. They each have one trait (for Kent, it’s that he’s Black). So utterly lacking in any sort of social context. Ultimately, so white.

“The Monkey ‘tropes-a-dope’ the Lion, by representing a figurative statement as literal, depending on the Lion’s thickness to misread the difference.”

“Whereas signification depends for order and coherence on the exclusion of unconscious associations which any given word yields at any given time, Signification luxuriates in the inclusion of the free play of these associative rhetorical and semantic relations.”

“Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”

“She added that academics were not intellectuals, they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely within them.”

Biggest question so far is- why doesn’t she do the crossword?

“Every man has so much more in him than meets the eye. This young peasant, for instance, from the dark recesses of Tambov; you risked death together for three days, and but for this curious chance you might have lost sight of him forever without ever being told, without ever guessing, without ever considering the possibility that he had sung in the church choir, perhaps for many years, that his ear was attuned…

“People speak sometimes about the ‘animal cruelty’ of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to animals, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”

“In this stupid world most people never consider that a thing is good to be done unless it is done by their own set.”

Chapter 35 - the description of the reading of Featherstone's will and the cluster of jealous and petty relatives hovering - seems like the best of its genre, like the 19th century prose version of a set piece from Homer about a sacrificial feast

As cerebral as this book is, I find the unhappy honeymoon in Rome sequence very familiar and physically realized (though very few physical details or descriptions really are included)

The main characters are all more sympathetic (even Celia and Causabon) than I remember. This may be because I am older and more willing to see that others’ lives which are different from mine aren’t necessarily stupid (though obviously Dorothea has this problem, and one thing I truly do identify with in her is that judgment reflex (like about Sir Chettam), which can be much less voluntary than it seems.

“Where the theme is not lost sight of there can be no digression.”

Certainly they appeared utterly depraved, corrupt, vile and odious; but it is rare for those who have sunk so low not to be degraded in the process, and there comes a point, moreover, where the unfortunate and the infamous are grouped together, merged into a single, fateful word. They are les miserables— the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need of charity?

"Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble."

"The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.”

"…Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble."

“The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.”

“Standing at the console, Russ was plunged into the hissing, low-fidelity world from which Robert Johnson was singing. He’s never felt more pierced by the beauty… He was an outsider, a latter-day parasite—a fraud. It came to non that /all/ white people were frauds, a race of parasitic wraith-people, and none more so than he” (383)

“Wherever there are more arrests, people perceive more crime, which justifies more police, and more arrests, and supposedly more crime... [this] fixed the image in people’s minds of the dangerous Black inter-city neighborhood as well as the contrasting image in people’s minds of the safe White suburban neighborhood... ‘dangerous Black neighborhood’ conception is based on racist ideas, not reality.”

“There has always been a razor-thin line between the racist portrayer of Black negativity and the antiracist portrayed of imperfect Black humanity. When consumers have looked upon stereotypical Black portrayals as representative of Black behavior, instead of representative of those individual characters, then the generalizing consumers has been the racist problem, not the racist or antiracist portrayer.”