W.D. Clarke’s Reviews > The Information > Status Update
4 likes · Like flag
W.D.’s Previous Updates
W.D. Clarke
is on page 294 of 496
Literature & Class at 30,000 ft:
— Dec 09, 2025 06:21PM
...his progress through the plane described a diagonal of shocking decline. In Coach the laptop literature was pluralistic, liberal, and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, Lebanon, World War I, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina. As for Business World, it wasn't...[cont'd]
W.D. Clarke
is on page 192 of 496
On the leading edge of card tricks, this activity being fanatically evolved, like all others [for the boy], there were hour-long spectaculars with plots as complicated as Little Dorrit (which revolves, if you recall, on someone leaving money to his nephew’s lover’s guardian’s brother’s youngest daughter: Little Dorrit) and with interplay of theme and pattern aspiring to the architectonic, the Prousto-Joycean...
— Dec 04, 2025 01:54PM
W.D. Clarke
is on page 192 of 496
People who look at dictionaries all day keep seeing words at the top of the page—words they don’t like seeing. Syzygy, crapulent, posterity, smegma, toiletry, dystopia, dentrifrice, bastinado, ferae naturae.
— Dec 02, 2025 06:04AM
W.D. Clarke
is on page 484 of 496
...we haven’t had much luck with our seasons. Not yet, anyway. We did satire in summer, and comedy in autumn, and romance in winter.
And this was spring. The season of comedy.
But comedy has two opposites; and tragedy, fortunately, is only one of them. Never fear. You are in safe hands. Decorum will be strictly observed.
— Dec 29, 2024 12:54PM
And this was spring. The season of comedy.
But comedy has two opposites; and tragedy, fortunately, is only one of them. Never fear. You are in safe hands. Decorum will be strictly observed.
W.D. Clarke
is on page 368 of 496
There is a beautiful literary law, slightly scuffed and foxed, yet still beautiful, which decrees that the easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)
— Dec 21, 2024 02:17PM
W.D. Clarke
is on page 363 of 496
In Hollywood
— Dec 21, 2024 02:10PM
“There’s no love and no hate in Amelior.”
“That’s true, Gwyn. We wondered about that.
“The hardback is in its eleventh printing,” said Gwyn, who went on to list the hemispherical achievements of Amelior. “All this without love and hate. Perhaps you should think about that.”
“There has to be love and hate, Gwyn,
"There has to be love and hate. So we care.”
“So we care.”
“So we care.”
W.D. Clarke
is on page 236 of 496
Who was said to be the last man to have read everything? Coleridge. Hazlitt. Gibbon. Coleridge: it was Coleridge. Two hundred years on, nobody had read a millionth of everything, and the fraction was getting smaller every day. And every new book held less and less of the whole.
— Dec 15, 2024 08:07AM
W.D. Clarke
is on page 98 of 496
...the truism is true, and the criminal is like an artist (though not for the reasons usually given, which merely depend on immaturity and the condition of self-employment): the criminal resembles the artist in his pretension, his incompetence, and his self-pity.
— Dec 04, 2024 06:17PM
W.D. Clarke
is on page 63 of 496
[Richard wrote:] "Whereas Edmund Waller. While Waller. Although. Despite the fact that. Whilst Waller …"
What was it with whilst? A scrupulous archaism—like the standard book review. Like the standard book. It was not the words themselves that were prim and sprightly polite, but their configurations, which answered to various old-time rhythms of thought. Where were the new rhythms—were there any out there yet?
— Dec 03, 2024 01:53PM
What was it with whilst? A scrupulous archaism—like the standard book review. Like the standard book. It was not the words themselves that were prim and sprightly polite, but their configurations, which answered to various old-time rhythms of thought. Where were the new rhythms—were there any out there yet?
W.D. Clarke
is on page 249 of 496
Just as there are genres of skies, & car alarms, & many other things, so there are genres of the hangover. Tragic treatments, enriched with various amounts & shades of irony. The epic frame, which finds the hero, toward evening on the second day, still sitting there wiping his eyebrows with his fingertips & still saying to himself things like dear oh dear. There are futuristic hangovers, there are...
[cont'd]
— May 08, 2023 07:53AM
[cont'd]
