Me, if I have a really good meal, al fresco, say, followed by an espresso and an eau de vie and someone offers me a cigarette? I’m going to have it. I love a cigarette. What a pleasure with, say, a grappa overlooking the harbor of Portofino on my 49th birthday. Damn, that was a good cigarette. But I have no intention of addicting myself again, because that will give me the lung cancer and emphysema that killed my dad. I’d sooner eat straight sugar than drink a regular Coke, but am I going to forgo duck confit and bacon so that I can eke out 90 years? Are you kidding me? Shoot me now.I’m sorry, I just get so goddam sick of studies and data telling me how to live, reading about this or that new diet that’s going to take pounds off my body and add countless Sound of Music years to my life. My hunch is that people don’t actually want to live longer—I think people want to be happier, to be more at ease with who they are, to feel glad when they wake up rather than dreadful, to feel good at the end of the day instead of crummy. The South Beach diet is not going to do this for you. Show me the data on how to be happy and I’ll listen. That’s what people are after and they can’t get their fingers on it. It’s not in a damned diet book, that’s for sure. It’s more likely in a pot of minestrone simmering on the stove.
U B U W E B has a couple PDF scans of 1921 books by the amazing George Grosz.
Let me propose the following neo-Stoical attitude to the problem, which will no doubt ease the psychic pain of the next OMG-my-data-has-gone-from-a-“free”-service! controversy. If your data exists only as hosted by “free” services on the internet, you should assume not only that it’s not your data, but that it doesn’t even exist at all. That way, you’ll be less upset when one day it vanishes without trace, and you can greet personal erasure with splendid equanimity.
A reader of Williams’s biography is likely to come to the conclusion that he was rather creepy. His “romantic theology” – which understands erotic love not so much as a path or ladder to the love of God but as a form of the love of God – encouraged him to flirtations, at the very least, with young women (Williams was married and had a son). He seems to have had the same sado-masochistic tendencies as the young Jack Lewis, though without ever escaping them. His fascination with the occult exceeded what most Christians think of as appropriate bounds. Yet few who knew him saw him in this light. Lewis adored him, finding him chivalrous, generous, even selfless, as well as a major thinker and a brilliant (though often too obscure) writer. “I begin to suspect that we are living in the ‘age of Williams,’” he once wrote in a letter to his friend, “and our friendship with you will be our only passport to fame.” T. S. Eliot wrote, “I think he was a man of unusual genius, and I regard his work as important.” The poet W. H. Auden, who worked with Williams on a collection of poetry he edited for Oxford University Press, had perhaps a stronger response still, though he never knew Williams as well as the others. Many years after first meeting Williams, he would recall that interview in surprising terms, and mark it as one of the events that led him to embrace the Christian faith:For the first time in my life, [I] felt myself in the presence of personal sanctity… . I had met many good people before who made me feel ashamed of my own shortcomings, but in the presence of this man – we never discussed anything but literary business – I did not feel ashamed. I felt transformed into a person who was incapable of doing or thinking anything base or unloving. (I later discovered that he had had a similar effect on many other people.)Yet in all this praise there remains – and all the praisers are well aware of this – an element of the inexplicable. How could a conversation about “literary business” generate such an aura of “personal sanctity”? Likewise, Eliot, after having affirmed the value of Williams’s work, goes on to say, “it has an importance of a kind not easy to explain.” And Lewis has to agree with a colleague – probably Tolkien – who says that Williams was “one in whom, after years of friendship, there remained something elusive and incalculable.” Williams simply made an exceptionally powerful impression on almost all who knew him, and his work similarly affects people, though in more variable ways: for some, like me, his books, especially his novels, are disturbing. (Tolkien, though he liked Williams personally very much, found his writing “wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous.”) I find that I do not trust Williams; though almost all who knew him trusted him implicitly.
A passage on the eminently weird Charles Williams from my biography of C. S. Lewis. Prompted by this brief reflection on Williams by Caleb Crain.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxfW2q_D0RY?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]
This is adorable beyond words, but I have a special affection and respect for the introvert on the far right who turns his back on the whole farcical procedure.
The fashionable international world attended en masse this afternoon at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine Valley. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash, Mrs Holly Hazeleyes, Miss Daphne Bays, Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs Clyde Twelvetrees, Mrs Rowan Greene, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, Miss Virginia Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche Maple, Mrs Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla Elderflower, Miss Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O. Mimosa San, Miss Rachel Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss Timidity Aspenall, Mrs Kitty Dewey-Mosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs Gloriana Palme, Mrs Liana Forrest, Mrs Arabella Blackwood and Mrs Norma Holyoake of Oakholme Regis graced the ceremony by their presence. The bride who was given away by her father, the M'Conifer of the Glands, looked exquisitely charming in a creation carried out in green mercerised silk, moulded on an underslip of gloaming grey, sashed with a yoke of broad emerald and finished with a triple flounce of darkerhued fringe, the scheme being relieved by bretelles and hip insertions of acorn bronze. The maids of honour, Miss Larch Conifer and Miss Spruce Conifer, sisters of the bride, wore very becoming costumes in the same tone, a dainty motif of plume rose being worked into the pleats in a pinstripe and repeated capriciously in the jadegreen toques in the form of heron feathers of paletinted coral. Senhor Enrique Flor presided at the organ with his wellknown ability and, in addition to the prescribed numbers of the nuptial mass, played a new and striking arrangement of Woodman, spare that tree at the conclusion of the service. On leaving the church of Saint Fiacre in Horto after the papal blessing the happy pair were subjected to a playful crossfire of hazelnuts, beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow, ivytod, hollyberries, mistletoe sprigs and quicken shoots. Mr and Mrs Wyse Conifer Neaulan will spend a quiet honeymoon in the Black Forest.
I do almost nothing in clubs now. It demands a constant effort to keep up a schedule of gigs, and I have so many readings and events that I just couldn’t fit anything else in without giving up writing. I tour a one-person show and I deliver comedy monologues, I suppose you would call them, on BBC radio. I would hope the delivery, phrasing, subjects, angles and speed are improving. In a way it’s the same skill set I use for writing, it’s just applied differently and while being stared at by possibly drunk strangers. Every author should do it. You don’t get respect unless you earn it as a comic. Writers tend to get respect whether they’ve earned it or not, which is very unhealthy for us.
When I asked Carson what appealed to her so much as a teenager about Greek, she answered, “It just seemed to me the best language.” I asked her to elaborate. “It’s just intrinsic,” she said. “Just a different experience.” I asked her to describe the nature of that experience. “It’s just like what it is,” she said. “If it were like something else, you could do the other thing. It’s just like itself. I really can’t analogize.” This launched us into a five-minute circular conversation that felt like an allegory of the futility of all human language. “That’s as far as we can go with that,” she said.
Motorola modernity, 1961, via Paleofuture