Eric Byrd > Recent Status Updates

Paul Scofield as Mark Van Doren: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6aL1...

Salter, Redford, “Downhill Racer”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMtqO...

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/...

“They crowded around him, without knowing what was to be done with him, eager to relieve the unease he aroused in them. They took his joy in things, as groundless as any other man’s, for mysterious and meaningful success in some unknown affairs; they filled his silence with thoughts he never had, and when they bored him and when with helpless civility he hid himself in the next room, they exchanged knowing glances.”

"One winter night in Moscow, in the early days of our acquaintance, Gershenzon was walking me across his little garden so he could lock the gate behind me. He joked, ‘That’s just the sort of people you are, you poets: we write about you, but you’ll never catch anybody writing poetry about us historians.’ ‘Just you wait, Mikhail Osipovich...I’ll write about you.’ He grinned into his mustaches. ‘No, you won’t’"

"Gorky was appalled...by the daily deaths and deprivations, which threatened to wipe off the face of the earth not only middle-aged and older scholars and scientists of world renown but the entire intelligentsia as a class. The only ones with some hope of survival were those who could claim a proletarian background and those who by some miracle had been hired by the Soviets to work in a bureau or supply depot."

"The humanists also lived double lives...they had their officia, their negotia, and could only dedicate the best of their otium to solitary study...It was the model of the devout brotherhood, rather than the guild of artisans, that gave meetings between savants their regularity, festive rites, and a climate of literary zeal that warmed and familiarized those remnants of antiquity that seemed spectral or affected."

"In Russia, at that period, everything was sacrificed to the future; all were employed in building the palaces of their yet unborn masters; and the original founders of the magnificent edifices, not experiencing themselves the wants of luxury, were content to be the purveyors of the future civilization, and took pride in preparing fitting abodes for the unknown potentates who were to follow them."

Last night I dreamt I was inside Lang’s “Dr. Mabuse the Gambler” - all was blurry and I grumbled that in a restored print, I could at least see my way - and just now I read that Cosmo Solomon’s breakdown was “connected with a German film about a gambler that was screened in New York at the time, which Cosmo described as a labyrinth devised to imprison him and drive him mad, with all its mirror reversals.” Ah Sebald!

One morning in Georgetown the Kenndys were about set out campaigning outside Washington. John Kenneth Galbraith remembers them leaving after breakfast, 'he with his campaign speeches, and she with the Memoirs of Saint-Simon' - 'which she read throughout the motorcades,' Kitty Galbraith interjected.

"Most of Lee's men had been subsisting on unripe or uncooked corn and unripe fruit, which gave them the 'gripes' and the 'squitters.' Diarrhea and dysentery were endemic in the Rebel camps. After the fighting their abandoned battle lines could be traced in rows of loose and bloody feces."

The Army of the Potomac - a great soap opera. So many ineffectual divas. McClellan, Pope, Burnside, Hooker, out of their depth. Lincoln doing his best with the tools he has. Lee is carefully amok, a raider. Grant and Sherman are waiting in the wings, preparing a victory. Slotkin is masterful, as usual.

"When Sarah Simpson, fresh from reading Fénelon's Telemachus and thrilled by its dramatic description of Greek heroes, opted for Ulysses, Jesse Grant, seeing yet another opportunity to please his mother-in-law, endorsed the suggestion (perhaps he had a hand in making it, for he had lent the book to Sarah)."

"The Sherpa Tukten still strikes me as one of the more remarkable characters in your work, fiction or nonfiction." "I think of him often—that disreputable little catlike man the others were so afraid of. Even George distrusted him. But when I left, he led me down out of those mountains, and I saw how he was treated in every village we passed through—the wary reverence—as if he were some sort of shaman."

" 'Wherever you go, a crow shows up, sooner or later,' GS remarks, 'and of all the crows I like the raven the best. In Alaska, at 40 below, no sign of life - and there's a raven!' GS had a pet raven while attending the University of Alaska, and this bird brought about his first encounter with the girl who became his wife: her attention was drawn to a man shouting at the sky, commanding an unseen raven to come back."

"...that liberty, the sleepless nights and the disordered days, which alone provided opportunities for writing."

Strangely therapeutic. A wise man.

"Old China hands referred to her as 'the Old Lady.' Built as a passenger liner, the USS Canopus was converted by the Navy into a tender - a mother ship for the S-type submarines, or pigboats, as those squat, cramped, ungodly hot undersea boats were called. Her sleeping accommodations and chow-line fare beckoned like a Ritz Carlton to sailors eager for a respite from the austere life they led on their boats."

My first DeLillo. And goddamn. Joy Williams was not fucking around when she called him "a great shark moving hidden in our midst, beneath the din and wreck of the moment, at apocalyptic ease in the very elements of our psyche and times that are most troublesome to us, that we most fear. Why do I write? Because I wanna be a great shark too."

"The last bombing attack of the day was directed at the unarmed troopships. Spotting this maneuver, Captain Rooks raced the Houston close to the convoy, and the protective curtain of shells put up by her guns was so effective that Japanese bombs fell close to only one ship. The bombers gone, the Houston steamed down the line of transports and, as she passed each one, hundreds of grateful soldiers cheered her. "

"The blockhouse , in fact, filled a place left empty; it restored, in the village - surrendered entirely to the vagaries of women - a male order that involved an unaccustomed severity of behavior, for if it included the bed, it did not extend to the evening paper and slippers."

"Details were a form of contamination."

"He loathed the radio because it spread inanity. The combined diplomacy of Mallet and Marie Dormoy eventually persuaded him to approach the microphone."

This is full of piquant lore and every page is funny: "They were both, to a certain extent, refugees from the brilliance of Valéry. Gide confided in Leautaud the shattering effect Valéry used to have on him. After hearing his conversation, Gide said, he was overwhelmed and lost all confidence in himself. He would look with despair at what he had written. Sometimes he needed a week, a fortnight, to recover. "

Michon makes me imagine the fiction Goncourts might have written had they left "realism" to others and gone all-in with their historical studies, their gallery ghosts and reveries over bibelots. "But certainly Watteau painted scores of whispering women, women sighing while thinking about something else, women who said neither yes nor no; and before them, men planted valiantly, strumming their theorbos in vain."

Mementos of a Belle Epoque childhood, with Southern Gothic. His father's firm offered Berlin or Paris, and his mother insisted on Paris, because defeat in 1870 meant the French "would understand the Southerners." Mom has him pledge allegiance to the Confederate flag, and when she catches him masturbating grabs a bread knife and threatens to cut off his dick - the maids mock him, "Alcotetof!" This is some weird shit.

1938: Now a bureau chief assigned to Washington, and an uneasy courtier. "The President wanted about him an aura of praise, approval, and happiness and, insofar as he could, he avoided seeing an associate whom he had doublecrossed, a favorite who had offended him, or one whose services he wished to dispense with."

"A pilot reported that 'lights glared if not blazed' on the Okinawan territory already taken. 'The fleet for miles from both sides of the island was also lit. But from the line of combat and below [south], pitch black.'"

"At first Virginia wanted to kill him. After a while she decided she would settle for understanding him."

"In December 1909 the Cuttings boarded a private dahabiyah, a present from Bayard's father, and sailed up the Nile, taking with them a close friend, Gordon Gardiner, a Dr Bishop and a nurse, Iris, and her governess, Mademoiselle Nigg, and a crew of ten. There was also a singer for the crew, who took opium and only sang when he was in a good mood."