Mr. James > Recent Status Updates

Pouring hot mix asphalt onto my scalp would be more entertaining than this Bachman book. Coincidentally, they're both painful.

He wanted to live life so intensely that he could die at any moment without regrets. But still, out of defense to his adoptive parents and his aunt, he kept himself in check. This created both light and dark sides of his life. Seeing a comic puppet in a Weatern's tailor's shop made him wonder how close he himself was to such a figure. -- R.A.

Walking through the rain, he looked back and up once again at the trolley line. The cable was still sending sharp sparks into the air. He could think of nothing in life that he especially desired, but those purple sparks -- those wildly-blooming flowers of fire -- he would trade his life for the chance to hold them in his hands. -- R.A.

He often wondered, in that suburban second story, if people who loved each other had to cause each other pain. Even as the thought crossed his mind, he was aware of the floor's eerie tilt. -- R.A.

All the lunatics had been dressed in the same gray clothing, which seemed to give the large room an even more depressing look. One of them sat at an organ, playing a hymn over and over with great intensity. [...] Ten years earlier, his mother had been in no way different from these lunatics. In no way. And in fact in their smell he caught a whiff of his own mother's smell. -- R.A.

I am living now in the unhappiest happiness imaginable. Yes, strangely, I have no regrets. I just feel sorry for anyone unfortunate enough to have had a bad husband, a bad son, a bad father like me. So goodbye, then. I have not tried -- consciously, at least -- to vindicate myself here. [...] I invite you to strip it off and laugh at my stupidity. -- Akutagawa Ryunosuke, 20 June 1927

She was like the rest of the kids, like Vinnie, like the people that thought education was truth: she wanted propaganda, complete with charts, not an answer. -- S.K.

When I was very young, my father would try to entice me back from my adoptive family by plying me with these rare treats. I remember how he once openly tempted me into running away while feeding me ice cream in the Uoei restaurant in Omori. -- R.A.

My mother was a madwoman. I never did feel close to her, as a son should feel towards his mother. Hair held in place by a comb, she would sit alone all day puffing on a long, skinny pipe in the house of my birth family in Toyko's Shiba Ward. [...] In general, though, she was a quiet lunatic. -- R.A.

"This is the end, then. Please be so good as to allow me to take your life. I will quickly follow you in death." -- R.A.

Oh come on, killing a man is not as big a thing as people like you seem to think. If you're going to take somebody's woman, a man has to die. When I kill a man, I do it with my sword, but people like you don't use swords. You gentlemen kill with your power, with your money, and sometimes just with words [...]. True, no blood flows, the man is still alive, but you've killed him all the same. -- R.A.

She was smiling. "You have a nice sense of irony."
"It's my sad life." -- S.K.

"What's a Minnie? It's our name for Minnenwerfer -- that's one of them big German shells. Make an 'orrible row they do, even before they land, a sort of whistle that gets louder and louder, and then -- KERBOOM!" -- L.R.B.

I.F.S. and His Aunt: She was a woman washing laundry in basins filled with black water; she was a woman cooking for children: comfort, cultural, and seasonal foods; she was a woman plowing with raw hands: cuts on fingertips and bruises on the dorsum of her nose; she was a woman that cared for an angry old man and birds that sang broken. In short, she was a woman without a woman's mercy.

We ought to explain here that the aunt judged a woman's beauty first of all by her eyebrows. -- N.G.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I can't hear a word. I must tell you that I had a cockroach in my left ear. Those damned Russians have thousands of cockroaches in their cottages. The agonies I suffered! No pen, sir, can describe it. And it still tickles. Keeps on tickling. An old woman, you know, did help me once in the most simple way..." -- N.G.

She climbed the pear trees and shook off the pears; she administered beatings to her lazy vassals with her own terrible hand and offered a glass of vodka to the deserving ones with the same terrible hand. Almost at one and the same time she would scold, dye the yarn, run the kitchen, make kvas and honey preserve. She was busy from morning till night and was in time to see to everything. -- N.G.

He was not, as a rule, very fond of reading, and if he happened to look into the fortune-telling book sometimes it was because he liked to find something familiar there, something he had read several times already. So does a city dweller go to his club every day, not in order to hear something new there, but in order to meet those of his cronies with whom he has been accustomed to chat from time immemorial. -- N.G.

"In the matter of this kind, I must rely on the opinions of experts. I can't see how my opinion can be anything other than to find this defendant insane. I so find him and do hereby recommit him to the central state hospital in Waupun for an indeterminate term of commitment." -- Judge Robert H. Gollmar

"A creature out of folklore. Something about the human imagination, I guess. When a homicidal maniac like Gein comes around, the mind just can't grasp reality, so he gets turned into a legend." -- A Reporter

"Happened just about a year ago. Eddie showed up on the front porch, real neighbor -like, with some meat wrapped up in brown paper. Said he'd shot a deer and figured we might like venison. I thought it odd at the time, since I never known him for a hunter. Now I know what sort of meat that really was. Good thing we never et a bite of it or we'd 'a been cannibals, just like him." -- A Farmer

"This tea, in fact, seemed as precious a thing to Swann as it did to her, and love has such need to find for itself a justification, a guarantee that it will last, in pleasures which in fact would not be pleasures without it and which end when it ends..." ― Marcel Proust

“If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

"Reaching up, he snatched off his chief’s headdress and threw it violently onto the ground. Before Omri could stop him, he began jumping on it, and in a second or two all the beautiful tall turkey feathers were bent and broken."
― Lynne Reid Banks

"Are you going to tell me I hurt the corporation? I don't think even you are capable of such a lie. After a corporation gets to a certain size, nothing can hurt it. It gets to be an act of God. When things are good it makes a huge profit, and when things are bad it makes a profit, and when things go to hell it takes a tax deduction. Now you know that." -- SK

Virtually overnight, the tiny town of Plainfield -- formally so obscure that even most wisconsinites were unaware of its existence -- gained nationwide notoriety. Newspaper reporters, television and radio crews, and correspondence for national news magazines invaded the streets seeking out interviews with anyone who had information about the man the press had already dubbed the "Mad Butcher of Plainfield." -- HS

After the discovery of Bernice Worden's corpse in Gein's summer kitchen, police began scouring the rest of the house, looking for evidence related to that single grotesque crime. They could have never imagined that their search would quickly turn into a nightmare excavation. An archeological dig in hell. -- HS

Eddie: If I want it bad enough... If I will it... I can bring you back, Mother. I know I can! And Now, A Moment From Our Sponsor: My Wash Days are Holidays! PUSH BUTTON TECHNOLOGY! ... Dad knows! It's the brand for MILDNESS and FLAVOR! Merry Christmas for every smoker. ... Ten hours to DIE on a MEAT HOOK! And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming!

GEORGE (father): Keep your cruel God, Augusta. If he looks kindly on a hateful thing like you... and orphans me... leaves me in misery all my days... I'd rather... die... a heathen. [Goult Funeral Home. Tuesday, April 2, 1940.] AUGUSTA (mother): Died on April Fools' Day. Fitting.

The isolated Plainfield farm was not, as Augusta hoped, a sanctuary from the sins of man. It instead was a self-imposed prison manufactured from their flawed union. An incubator for madness. -- HS

We won't allow you to cheat yourself! You must see PSYCHO from beginning to end to enjoy it fully. Therefore, do not expect to be admitted into the theater after the start of each performance of the picture. We say no one -- and we mean no one -- not even the manager's brother, the President of the United States, or the Queen of England (God bless her)! -- Alfred Hitchcock