Jim > Recent Status Updates

This was another of his habits when he was not feeling well: to lose himself in a novel by Alexandre Dumas père. He owned a set of his complete works in an old, cheap edition with yellowing pages and romantic engravings. The mere smell of those volumes brought back memories when he had been briefly laid up.

At a draftsman's table in this room I compose my novels on a computer, working with hand-scrawled notes; on the wall beside the table I affix maps, plot outlines, hand-drawn likenesses of my "characters," chronological lists. For I am a meticulous plotter of mysteries....

Bingham was in over his head. He had embarrassed Yale, the U.S. State Department, and most of all himself. Fueled by equal parts self-regard and intellectual curiosity, he had attempted to anoint Yale as Peru's archeological godfather as well as ensure a continuous northward flow of artifacts. The goals were naively ambitious, and his reputation was under attack.

Born in 1875, over his 81 years he was variously a professor, writer, pilot, and U.S, senator. Hiram uncovered the ruins of Machu Picchu in 1911; in 1912, he exported its skulls, bones, beautiful ceramics, and precious metal artifacts to Yale.

I did not read newspapers because, as I now know, I feared unwelcome revelations, I turned on the radio only at certain hours of the day, I was always refining my defensive reactions, creating a kind of quarantine or immune system which, as I maintained my existence in a smaller and smaller space, protected me....

At first glance [the dead] seemed to be normal people, but when you looked more closely their faces would blur or flicker slightly at the edges. And they were usually a little shorter than they had been in life, for the experience of death diminishes us.

People ask the way to Cold Mountain
but roads don't reach Cold Mountain
even in summer the ice doesn't melt
sunny days the fog is too dense
how did something like me arrive
our minds are not the same
if they were the same
you would be here

We're warriors, and warriors have only one thing in mind -- their freedom. To die and be eaten by the Eagle is no challenge. On the other hand, to sneak around the Eagle and be free is the ultimate audacity.

Awareness is the Eagle's food.

[Don Juan] said that a warrior knows that he is waiting and knows also what he is waiting for, and while he waits he feasts his eyes on the world. For him the ultimate accomplishment of a warrior was joy.

[Eve Babitz] was on to the alcoholism that she believed killed Quintana. 'They all had drinking problems,' she said of Joan [Didion], Dunne, and Quintana. 'But Quintana's the one that wound up dead.'

Now. the term "groupie" is one Eve [Babitz] assigned to herself. And, in the strictest sense, she was a groupie; which is to say, a woman in hot sexual pursuit of rock 'n' rollers.

"Had a blackjack," Bevan said.
"The authorities don't know that." And then a slow smile drifted across Joyner's mouth.
"He had a blackjack and they'll find it," Cora said.
"They'll never find it," Joyner murmured.
Her eyes began to widen.

He didn't know that his eyes were narrowing. He didn't sense the approach of the invisible reptile sliding toward his mind. The reptile was an idea that touched him ever so slightly and whispered. You need it, you need it bad, and you can't get it here -- but maybe you can get it somewhere else.

Part of the load on her was the seemingly endless word play of those around her -- the concept juggling.

Could it be that we think we know all there is to know about [Rome's great fire in 64 AD]? Who, after all, has not heard the story about the mad emperor Nero setting fire to Rome and then fiddling while the city burned around him, only for him to blame the Christians for the fire and to make human torches of them?

When I was there all those years ago,I was told that people who went there were in danger of going missing. This was followed by a story about a man who ignored everything he'd heard about the area and went there contrary to all warnings. He was never seen again.

More than ever it seemed to him that trying to grasp what mattered most to human beings was like grabbing at sunbeams; they disappeared at he same time as one was still enjoying them, and one could never get a grip on them.

Thus did the blank spaces of my memory gradually fill with names that, as they arranged and composed themselves in relation to one another, and as the connections between them became more and more numerous, resembled those perfected works of art in which there is not a single brush stroke that does not contribute to the whole...

The creatures who have played an important part in one's life rarely drop out of it for good, just like that. They come back into it from time to time (so much so that people start believing in the renewal of former love) before leaving it forever.

If, in the salon of Mme de Villeparisis, as in the Combray church on the day of Mlle Percepied's wedding, had difficulty rediscovering in the lovely, all-too-human face of Mme de Guermantes the enigma of her name, I thought at least that, when she spoke, her conversation would be profound and mysterious, strange as a medieval tapestry or a Gothic window.

With these two disparate elements in mind (because I had known "Rachel, when of the Lord" in a brothel), I realized that many women to whom men devote everything, for whom they suffer and take their own lives, may be in themselves, or for others, what Rachel was for me. The idea that anyone could be painfully consumed with curiosity in regard to her life dumbfounded me.

I had been thinking earlier that if I had not enjoyed my first experiencing of La Berma it was because, as with my earlier experiences with Gilberte in the Champs-Elysees, I had approached it with too strong a desire.

Walter got home a little after eleven. The house had no light. He went upstairs and found the bedroom empty. He went downstairs, still half expecting to see Clara's suitcase, or some sign of her in the living room.

And then I knew that Marlin shared with the Pharaohs that strange eternity of the body that only Egypt and the Irish bog can give. Centuries hence, when we are all mouldered away, some turf-cutter will find Mrlin there and will look on a face and a figure untouched by all those years, even as though the body had obeyed the dream after all.

An Englishman honours the law, and a very convenient thing it is for everyone that he does so; but it's a dull thing when all's said. Now an Irishman will honour a song, if it's worth honouring, though his doing so is of no convenience to anybody; but he'll never honour the law....

Well, when a guy picks out a dame for himself he's in love with something in himself that hasn't got anything to do with the dame. She looks like his mother, or she's dark and he's scared of blondes, or maybe he's getting even with somebody, or maybe he ain't quite sure he's a man and has to prove it.

[Fabius Maximus:] Every day that passes makes us better, wiser, firmer. Hannibal, on the contrary, is on foreign soil, far from home and country, surrounded by every menace, every danger; for him there is no peace on land and sea; no towns receive him, no protecting walls.

I quailed at the thought of putting on clothes that had frozen solid. 'You don't enjoy all of travelling, do you?' asked Rachel maliciously, watching me hammer the ice off my jeans before struggling into them.

There was no stirring of a breeze, no whisper of running water: the stillness was so unflawed that it seemed the sovereign moon, floating high, must have put a spell on our whole world.