Category: stories

The performance had the scope and scale of a natural disaster. The Romanze opens with an entirely doable B flat, but I landed on an altogether different note, and flailed and thrashed through the rest of the opening phrase like a drowning three-year-old. After four bars my intimidating accompanist decided that there was no real point in hoping for some kind of overlap between the key I was playing in and the key he was playing in. He pulled his fingers away from the keyboard and, looking inquiringly over his shoulder, sounded a discreet B flat.

One morning in August 1955, Eppie found herself reading and rereading the lovelorn column, called “Your Problems,” in the Chicago Sun-Times. And she suddenly realized exactly what she wanted to do: she would assist the lovelorn columnist! Eppie immediately phoned Wilbur Munnecke, a Sun-Times executive whom she had befriended years before. Might the columnist Ann Landers need help answering her mail? “Funny you should ask,” Munnecke responded. “It is odd that you are calling me now. Ruth Crowley, our Ann Landers, died suddenly last week.” The newspaper was, in fact, seeking a replacement for Crowley. When Eppie suggested that she could be the new Ann Landers, Munnecke laughed out loud. Crowley had been a journalist and a nurse. Her column was syndicated in more than two dozen newspapers. Eppie Lederer was a housewife without a college degree, and more than 25 other women, many of whom were experienced journalists, had applied for the position.

It’s awful to write to you because, even though I love writing to you, it brings you so near me I could almost touch you and I know at the same time that I cannot touch you, you are so far away in cold, unkind Ringwood and I am in stale Barnet in a roadhouse pub with nothing but your absence and your distance, to keep my heart company.

Madame Godin [Isabel Godin des Odonais] was the wife of one of the French mathematicians who were sent to Peru, in South America, about the middle of the last century [1769], for the purpose of making some observations there, which should improve our knowledge of geography. She set out from Rio-bamba, the place of her residence, with the design of joining her husband at Cayenne, a distance of thirteen or fourteen hundred leagues.

An interesting example of a mathematical pattern found in the real world is the arrangement of petals and florets (the small rudimentary flowers that are found, easily visible, in the center of some flowers such as sunflowers). In some species these florets are distributed in groups of spirals that curl in different directions and intercept each other. Often the number of elements that curl in one direction is 34, while the number of elements curling in the opposite direction is 55….

You open a Web browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes out in search of its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that server, it will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s most powerful weapons. Specifically, your request passes through a few black servers stacked on top of one another, together about the size of a four-shelf bookcase. These are installed in special rooms at major private telecommunications buildings throughout allied countries, as well as in US embassies and on US military bases, and contain two critical tools….

“Bad language” was a relatively accepted aspect of English even in Shakespeare’s day — not that he actually used the most forbidden words, but he clearly alluded to them (“Do you think I meant country matters?”), and he revelled in vigorous insults. In King Lear, when Oswald asks the Earl of Kent, “What dost thou know me for?” the latter replies, “A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deny the least syllable of thy addition.” He follows that up with “Draw, you whoreson cullionly barbermonger! Draw!”…

“‘When on board the ship,’ said Edison, as we sat down to déjeuner on the terrace of the Eiffel Tower, première étage, ‘they put rolls and coffee on the table for breakfast. I thought that that was a very poor breakfast for a man to do any work upon. But I suppose one gets used to it. I would like one American meal for a change — plenty of pie for a change.’ He then smashed the roll with his fist.”

True or false, the public airing of this dirty washing might have harmed Onassis’s reputation irretrievably had the whole affair not suddenly taken a fantastic twist….

“Left Padua at twelve, and arrived at Lord Byron’s country house, La Mira, near Lusina, at two. He was but just up and in his bath; soon came down to me; first time we have met these five years; grown fat, which spoils the picturesqueness of his head….”

About eight o’clock I strolled in very jauntily. In my mind I had the whole programme mapped out. I would stay at the hospital for, say, two days following the operation — or, at most, three. Then I must be up and away. I had a good deal of work to do and a number of people to see on important business, and I could not really afford to waste more than a weekend on the staff of St Germicide’s. After Monday they must look to their own devices for social entertainment. That was my idea….

As the means to his end Poniatowski seemed specially suited. Williams had heard enough of Catherine to infer that she was not averse to an intrigue, and great though her devotion might be to the banished Soltykof — was it not the gossip of the ante-chambers that she had once waited for him till three in the morning at a rendezvous to which he never came? — the wily diplomatist was too much of a cynic to believe in the deathlessness of any passion. Broken hearts could always be mended, and who was more likely to patch together deftly the shattered fragments of the Grand Duchess’s than his charming young Pole?…

The “Fejee Mermaid” was by many supposed to be a curiosity manufactured by myself or made to my order. This is not the fact. I certainly had much to do in bringing it before the public, and as I am now in the confessional mood, I will “make a clean breast” of the ways and means I adopted for that purpose. I must first, however, relate how it came into my possession and its alleged history.

I shall never forget the first time I ever saw a pickpocket at work. It was when I was about thirteen years old. A boy of my own age, Zack, a great pal of mine, was with me. Zack and I understood one another thoroughly and well knew how to get theatre money by petty pilfering, but of real graft we were as yet ignorant, although we had heard many stories about the operations of actual, professional thieves. We used to steal rides in the cars which ran to and from the Grand Street ferries — and run off with overcoats and satchels when we had a chance. One day we were standing on the rear platform when a woman boarded the car, and immediately behind her a gentlemanly looking man with a high hat….

By this time [1906] the new factory was built and new machinery had been put inside it, and one day in January, a little before my thirteenth birthday, we went to see it. Mario took us round, and as I was standing with a mass of loose curling hair almost to my knees, the wind of a steel shaft caught it. I was snatched up, revolving, with my head ground against the shaft and my feet floating horizontal. I know that it seemed a very long time: at each revolution my feet struck a wall or pillar and I wondered if my shoes were coming off….

Okay. I’ll admit hitting the bear on the ass with a rock was a bad move. But there’s no way I was going to let him steal my last loaf of bread. In retrospect, returning to the campground on Barclay Bay was just a poor decision. A few weeks prior I had stopped to camp there while paddling down the Missinaibi River and was confronted by the same darn bear….

When I was in high school, in Lancaster, I formed my first band, the Black-Outs. The name derives from when a few of the guys, after drinking peppermint schnapps, purchased illicitly by somebody’s older brother, blacked out. This was the only R&B band in the entire Mojave Desert at that time. Three of the guys (Johnny Franklin, Carter Franklin and Wayne Lyles) were black, the Salazar brothers were Mexican and Terry Wimberly represented the other oppressed peoples of the earth.

Humphry Davy earned his seat in the scientific pantheon by a remarkable succession of discoveries, extending from sodium and potassium to the miners’ safety lamp and Michael Faraday, whom he engaged as keeper of the laboratory records and inducted into the mysteries of scientific research. Davy got his start in natural philosophy, as science was then called, in 1798, when at the age of 19 he was appointed assistant in Dr Thomas Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institute in Bristol. Beddoes, chemist, physician, and polymath, was something of a public figure, thanks to his well-advertised demonstrations of ‘factitious airs’ — the recently discovered gases, of which nitrous oxide, laughing gas, excited the greatest interest….

The tree men came and chopped up his home. They took half the tree away — half his home. They weren’t good tree men. They didn’t even have a chain saw to do the job right. They used machetes. When they were through there were raw wounds and splintered stubs of branches everywhere on the tree.

Stieglitz brought Georgia to the bright little studio apartment of his niece, Elizabeth, who was living elsewhere. When Georgia had arrived in New York, she was tired and ill. Stieglitz ordered her to stay in bed, and had his brother, a well-known doctor, examine her. Stieglitz himself visited every day, and even learned how to boil eggs for her. He returned to his apartment after his wife was asleep. Within a week he was writing to Arthur Dove of Georgia’s “uncommon beauty, spontaneity, clearness of mind and feeling, and the marvelous intensity with which she lived every moment.”

Folk legends surround the life of Old West Outlaw Jesse James. Once, it has been told, while Jesse and his brother Frank were riding in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains with the Younger brothers, they stopped at a small, out—of—the—way cabin to ask for food. The sole occupant of the house was a poor, saddened woman whose husband had recently passed away. Overcoming any apprehension, the woman kindly agreed to throw some scraps together and feed the strangers. Once inside, however, Jesse sensed that something terrible was troubling the widow….

My English teacher is my only advocate. She’s also the daughter of Mrs. G and Doc G, so she pleads with her parents that I’m smarter than my grades and my behavior indicate. She even arranges an IQ test and the results confirm her opinion. Andre, she says, you need to apply yourself. Prove to Mrs. G that you’re not who she thinks you are. I tell her that I am applying myself, that I’m doing as well as I can under the circumstances….

It was here [Budapest] that I suffered the complete breakdown of the nerves to which I have referred. What I experienced during the period of that illness surpasses all belief. My sight and hearing were always extraordinary. I could clearly discern objects in the distance when others saw no trace of them. Several times in my boyhood I saved the houses of our neighbors from fire by hearing the faint crackling sounds which did not disturb their sleep, and calling for help. In 1899, when I was past forty and carrying on my experiments in Colorado, I could hear very distinctly thunderclaps at a distance of 550 miles. The limit of audition for my young assistants was scarcely more than 150 miles. My ear was thus over thirteen times more sensitive. Yet at that time I was, so to speak, stone deaf in comparison with the acuteness of my hearing while under the nervous strain….

I found him sharing a cage with a reddish female counterpart in the boarding area of my vet’s hospital facility, where they had been sitting for five months, waiting patiently for someone who was never coming back. There they were: two seventy-five-pound dogs, a golden retriever and a flat-coated retriever, sharing a dog bed on the floor of a cell that was just slightly larger than the two of them. They seemed bored but otherwise in good health and sensibly cautious when I opened the cage. A few minutes after that, they both became very friendly….

It was just past noon on Friday, June 24, [1932] when Jimmie Coslove peeped through the hole in the gate, glimpsed a pair of men he didn’t know, closed the peep, walked into the club, and said to Jack, “I have a hunch we’re about to be raided.” Jimmie’s instinct was enough for Jack. Clinking two glasses together, he got the attention of the patrons in the barroom and said quietly, “Ladies and gentlemen, please finish your drinks and keep calm, we might have a few visitors.” He cracked a smile and added, “In other words, it’s a raid, so bottoms up.”

I once dated a cute guy in high school who served me spaghetti by candlelight and taught me to play Frisbee. He was a great kisser. He was good at French and geometry. But I had to break up with him because he liked the rock band Journey. Plus, he wore a puka shell necklace. In college, I dated a gorgeous Rhodes scholar who spent his summers distributing sacks of grain to starving children in Africa. He took me to wine tastings and the opera. But I had to break up with him because his name was Yehuda. Imagine having sex with someone and screaming, “Oh, do me, Yehuda.” Just not possible. After college, I had to break up with a civil rights lawyer because he had a mullet….

The only recurrence of the temperamental joyance that was a large part of his nature was when he related the Spray’s experiences. For no sadness of soul could ever rob Jack London of his native delight in a boat. In relation to this very trip, I am tempted to quote from “Small-Boat Sailing” (in The Human Drift): “After all,” he says, “the mishaps are almost the best part of small-boat sailing….”

My second term at Normandale, at Bexhill-on-Sea, proved to be my last there. I had been sent there as a boarder, at the age of six, shortly after my mother had married David Stiven; and I was blissfully happy, being by far the youngest boy in the school and, consequently, much fussed over. But when the summer term ended I found myself spending a dreary, lonely August holiday confined to a rather gloomy London hotel in the Cromwell Road….

In the Long Ago, when people lighted the dark winter nights with tallow candles, a candle shop stood by the side of a brook. There was a great set kettle for trying out, a heavy iron press and leaden moulds. Altogether, it was a pretty greasy place, with piles of fresh tallow leaves, great “cheeses” of scraps, barrels of prepared tallow, and boxes of candles ready for market, and the fall and winter birds evidently thought it a feast provided by the gods for their delectation.

The presiding genius of the shop — David, the Candlemaker — was an uncouth man, but he had a big heart and a warm love for the sweet things of nature, especially birds, and they seemed to know it. How they took possession and over-ran the place!…

A stocky man climbs on board with his stocky wife; they are healthy and solid and sunburned. He asks why I’m taking pictures of the stations. The graffiti, I tell him. He’s Albanian, he says. He’s been in Italy fifteen years. Drives a lorry, in Taranto. There is no work now with the economic crisis. In particular there is no work for an Albanian. After fifteen years here he’s still not treated as an equal. It doesn’t bother him now. He came illegally on a rubber dinghy but managed to get his papers in the end. It’s harder these days. He was lucky. His wife nods and smiles at everything he says….

Here is how my father died; one night, the police find him pulled over in his car on the side of the highway. He’s unconscious with a head injury, the apparent victim of an assault. They think it occurred in the parking lot at Rutgers University, where he is taking night classes to get his master’s degree. He is thirty-nine years old.He is brought to the hospital, where doctors perform emergency brain surgery. My brother, Eric, and I aren’t told until the following day, after he is out of immediate danger. I don’t remember who took us to visit him a couple of days later: Mom or his second wife, Beth. My parents have been divorced for seven years, and their relationship is terrible. So it was probably Beth.

I made my first public appearance on the Stairs up to the school nurse’s room, at St Peter’s Preparatory School, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, on 13 September 1948. I was eight and five-sixths. My audience was a pack of nine-year-olds, who were jeering at me and baying, ‘Cheeeese! Chee-eese!’…

Born in 1688, Emanuel Swedenborg began his career by mastering all the sciences of his day. Still judged by many to have possessed more factual information than any other person in history, he wrote 150 scientific works in chemistry, physics, mineralogy, geology, paleontology, anatomy, physiology, astronomy, optics and so forth. These contained many original discoveries: he described the function of the ductless glands and the cerebellum; he originated the nebular hypothesis of the solar system; he suggested the particle structure of magnets….

Dear Godwin, —

The punch, after the wine, made me tipsy last night. This I mention, not that my head aches, or that I felt, after I quitted you, any unpleasantness or titubancy; but because tipsiness has, and has always, one unpleasant effect — that of making me talk very extravagantly; and as, when sober, I talk extravagantly enough for any common tipsiness, it becomes a matter of nicety in discrimination to know when I am or am not affected….

We soon came to the house we were looking for, by far the most impressive structure in the whole village. From the outside it looked decidedly gloomy with its blackened walls, narrow barred windows, and all the marks of long neglect. It had been the home of a titled family which had gone away long ago; then it had served as a barracks for the carabinieri until they had moved to their newly-built modern headquarters, and the filth and squalor of the walls inside still bore witness to its military occupation.

Harry Parr-Davies was an accompanist for Gracie Fields and writer of some of her most famous songs, among them the World War II classic ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’. Alas, on a 1939 Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary with Fields, Parr-Davies appeared to run clean out of luck, possibly while waving someone goodbye, when his glasses fell overboard. He was too short-sighted to read music without them, and in some embarrassment went to report his mishap to Fields.

The Chaplin boys were reunited with their mother [Hannah] in the early spring of 1896, but their address is not certain. They moved from cheap rented room to rented room, and in the space of three months they found themselves in six different garrets or basements. Chaplin’s memories of this London period are generally unhappy. Sydney had outgrown his only coat, and so Hannah made him one out of an old velvet jacket she owned; Sydney was also forced to wear a pair of his mother’s high-heeled shoes cut down to size.

Back on the train I was upgraded to second class. Ricky called to let me know he’d arranged some company for me. He said I was going to meet Magnet Man. (As his name suggests, he is a man who is magnetic.) I enjoy weird stuff like this, it’s what makes the world interesting. I made my way to his carriage. Mikhail was a dead ringer for Bez out of the Happy Mondays. He was bare-chested and he didn’t speak English, so there was no small talk. He went straight into sticking cutlery to his chest. It’s a strange one, ‘cos as much as it is a type of superpower it’s not one that you think might be a useful one.

…And the stories about my father grew steadily worse. Some were altogether incredible, yet were continually being repeated. One of them was so bad I was nearly distracted about it. Mr. and Mrs. John Connett, true friends of my father in Pittsfield, came round to his office one day and repeated it to him sympathetically and with the assurance that they and their friends were going to do the best they could to “nail that lie.” With such a story circulating — i.e., that Father was going demented and, under the delusion that insects were crawling around in everybody’s wounds or inwards, was poisoning and killing his patients wholesale in the endeavor to poison and kill out the cockroaches, tumble-bugs, etc., was it any wonder that my father’s practice suffered?

Sarah’s malady was still a mystery, yet that October she was discharged from the asylum and listed as “Recovered.” Clara rented a furnished room for them, and when Johnny Bennett visited her there, she told him that her mother had been on location with her in New Bedford. No mention of an asylum was made.

The following set [of pirate articles] appears to have survived intact and is reprinted from the 1726 edition of Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. These articles were drawn up by Captain John Phillips and his crew of pirates at the beginning of their 1723 voyage in the schooner Revenge…. Their ship was taken by surprise and they didn’t have a chance to destroy their articles.

In an American paper I find this anecdote: “An old lady was being shown the spot on which a hero fell. ‘I don’t wonder,’ she replied. ‘It’s so slippery I nearly fell there myself.'”

Now that story, which is very old in England, and is familiar here to most adult persons, is usually told of Nelson and the Victory. Indeed it is such a commonplace with facetious visitors to that vessel that the wiser of the guides are at pains to get in with it first. But in America it may be fresh and beginning a new lease of life; it will probably go on forever in all English-speaking countries, on each occasion of its recrudescence finding a few people to whom it is new….

…In early 1999 I made a drawing using a camera lucida. It was an experiment, based on a hunch that Ingres, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, may have occasionally used this little optical device, then newly invented. My curiosity had been aroused when went to an exhibition of his portraits at London’s National Gallery and was struck by how I small the drawings were, yet so uncannily ‘accurate’. I know how difficult it is to achieve such precision, and wondered how he had done it. What followed led to this book.

She had no sooner disembarked at Aspinwall [Panama] [in 1864] than she set out to find the cemetery where she imagined George Marshall was buried. Without worrying about her trunks, which had been piled on top of each other at random, without haggling over a high-priced room, Fanny set off down the main street, threading her way, her daughter in tow, between the slums and brothels, the billiard parlors and gambling dens. Then she crossed the iron track along the seafront and the sheds where rows of bananas, coconuts, heaps of coral, and vegetable ivory awaited shipment to New York, baking under roofs of corrugated metal.

I worked for my brother from August 1899, to March, 1901, at $16 a month, making $304, of which I spent only $12 in that time, as I had clothes. On the first day of March I went to a farm that I had bought for $150, paying $50 down. It was a bush farm, ten miles from my brother’s place and seven miles from the nearest crossroads store. A man had owned it and cleared two acres, and then fallen sick and the storekeeper got it for a debt and sold it to me. My brother heard of it and advised me to buy it….

“I remember I started one of these poems in Marvell’s four-foot couplet and showed it to my wife. And she said “Why not say what really happened?” (It wasn’t the one about her.) The metre just seemed to prevent any honesty on the subject, it got into the cadence of the four-foot couplet.”

“In 1998, I interviewed Dave Pirner of the band Soul Asylum. Relative to most alt rockers, he was a pretty good talker; we discussed his liberal political views and the state of the music industry and — very briefly — his defunct relationship with Winona Ryder. All in all, we were on the phone for maybe thirty-five minutes.”

“I had never published the following Account of my Life, had it not been at the Desire of several of my particular Friends. As they had heard (a considerable Time after I enter’d Trumpeter on board the Revenge Privateer) that I was kill’d, with several others, by the Spaniards, in attacking a Bark near the Canary Islands, my returning safe to England surpriz’d them very much, and made them curious to enquire into the Manner of my Deliverance.”

“When that letter came in London I was most awfully sorry and wished I had never seen the boy. I was perfectly miserable and from trying to imagine how he felt I almost felt I was a criminal.”

It was not until I was seven that I became embarrassed by my father’s lack of self-consciousness. He had just discovered the Bates ‘better sight without glasses’ book and method. One exercise involved rolling the eyeballs in order to strengthen the internal muscles of the eye. Another, called ‘palming’, required one to place one’s palms over both eyes and to imagine a starless night or black velvet. When my father chose to do these exercises, sitting beside me on a District Line train en route to Dorking via Wimbledon, I sat in silence, cheeks burning, convinced that our fellow passengers would think him crazy.

“Fields’ family made little more than a token search. His mother felt that, at eleven, he was young to set up on his own, but the problems of four other children diverted her mind. The attitude of Fields’ father could perhaps be summed up by the handy phrase ‘good riddance.'”

“The dreadful year of 1789 was upon us, and fear had already seized the minds of wise men and women. I remember the events of one evening in particular; I had invited some people to a concert in my house. Most of those who arrived were quite distraught; they had been to Longchamps that morning and the populace, gathered at the barrier of L’Etoile, had hurled abuse at all those who passed by in carriages; the wretched folk jumped onto the tailboards crying ‘Next year you will be travelling behind and we will be inside!’ as well as a thousand other insults of an even more vicious nature.”

Henry [Hill]: I’m walking along the street near the pizzeria when Paul pulls up and Karen comes charging out the car door. It was like a hit. She’s really steamed. She comes running right up to me and yelling that nobody stands her up. “Nobody does that to me!” she’s screaming on the street. I mean, she’s loud. I put up my hands to calm her down. I told her that I didn’t show because I was sure she was going to stand me up. I said I’d make it up to her.

“No sooner had I sat down to write to the Count, but a page from the Prince came to me, saying, that the Prince desired to speak with me: at this message my blood ran chill in every vein, as if I had been informed of some sudden accident….”

“When Molière fled from Paris, he became, in the phrase of the theatre, a “barn-stormer.” An ox- cart was his home, his play-house some vacant grange or tennis-court. Eventually he obtained a following in certain towns, and recognition as an official entertainer in at least two provinces ; yet for nearly thirteen years he was at best a vagabond, tramping the highroads of France beside his unwinged chariot.”

Joy of life seems to me to arise from a sense of being where one belongs, as I feel right here; of being foursquare with the life we have chosen. All the discontented people I know are trying sedulously to be something they are not, to do something they cannot do. In the advertisements of the county paper I find men angling for money by promising to make women beautiful and men learned or rich — overnight — by inspiring good farmers and carpenters to be poor doctors and lawyers. It is curious, is it not, with what skill we will adapt our sandy land to potatoes and grow our beans in clay, and with how little wisdom we farm the soils of our own natures. We try to grow poetry where plumbing would thrive grandly! — not knowing that plumbing is as important and honourable and necessary to this earth as poetry….

“One interesting aspect of the music of Philip Glass is that despite its supposed ‘avant-garde’ modernity, it utilizes elements that have been around for over a thousand years. Almost all of Glass’s compositions employ a ground bass, a series of unchanging bass notes upon which are stacked a variety of short melodies and scales. The ground bass evolved out of the ‘cantus firmus’ used in Gregorian Chant and was characteristic in Baroque music.”

California truck driver Larry Walters had always wanted to be an airplane pilot, but poor eyesight prevented him from fulfilling his ambition. Undeterred, he decided to build his own flying contraption, which resulted in a crazy adventure in the skies above Los Angeles in the summer of 1982.

“In August 1874, backed by not only the New York Herald but also Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Stanley sailed once again for Zanzibar. With 347 porters, guides and dependants, laden with rifles, the expedition that marched for the Lualaba on 17 November was even bigger and more extravagant than the one he had raised to rescue Livingstone….”

One night, after a meal at the house with my wife Helen and Terry Gilliam, who happened to have dropped by, I found I’d run out of cigarettes (at the time I had a twenty-a-day habit). I looked for a half-crown piece for the slot machine up the road, but could find nothing. I rifled through drawers, flung open cupboards and slid my hand down the back of sofas with increasing desperation. ‘You’re an addict,’ warned Terry. I smiled wanly. ‘I’m not an addict, I would quite like one last cigarette before bed, that’s all….’

“Honestly, I don’t recall the sequence of events that led to $110,000 being in the pot. But I remember that most of the money in the pot previously belonged to Tkachuk and me.”

I was incredibly shy at the time and remained so for many years, so one might ask (and people did) what in the world a withdrawn introvert was doing making a spectacle of himself on stage. (I didn’t ask myself such questions at the time.) In retrospect, I guess that like many others, I decided that making my art in public (even if that meant playing people’s songs at that point) was a way of reaching out and communicating when ordinary chitchat was not comfortable for me. It seemed not only a way to “speak” in another language, but also a means of entry into conversation — other musicians and even girls (!) would talk to someone who had just been on stage.

“My suitcase weighed forty kilograms, and the moment I tried to carry it out of Dum Dum Airport the truth of the matter tapped upon my spine. There was no way I was going to haul this behemoth through the streets of India. The only solution was to extract the absolute essentials, put the thing in storage and reclaim it on my departure from Calcutta. My first thought was that I’d have to find a tourist hotel, and leave the bag in a storage room or behind a desk. But as I glanced around the baggage claim area, I spied a squarish, hand-lettered sign above an open door: LEFT LUGGAGE.”

“I’ve got a three-year-old son who thinks I go into space every day, and he loves the whole idea. He’s one of the few children who learned to count from ten down to one before he learned to count it the other way. So he thinks it’s wonderful and he thinks it’s mundane. He thinks it’s all possible — lots of people go up into space. He hasn’t quite realized that it’s still a fairly new occupation.”

“When I was sixteen, I saw a girl of angelic beauty seated in the window of a house on the block where I lived. Though I had never before seen an angel, she was exactly how I imagined an angel should look. She lived so near, yet somehow I had never met her, nor even seen her. Perhaps it’s because my eyes weren’t ready to see her until that moment. I knew I had to meet her, but I wasn’t certain how to do it.”

“Our love comes from friendship, our sex is sex. Plain old sex. Our sex doesn’t involve love and that’s how we like it.”

Since the spiritualist movement in France explicitly supported the rebirth doctrine, French psychics and trance mediums often tended to claim recollections about their past existences. Few researchers took such statements seriously until the 1890s, when Catherine Elise Mueller, a trance medium in Geneva, Switzerland, came into prominence with her reincarnation claims….

One or two years later I was living with my parents during the summer in the village of Heiligenstadt, near Vienna. Our dwelling fronted on the garden and Beethoven had rented the rooms facing the street. Both set of apartments were connected by a hall in common which led to the stairs. My brothers and I took little heed of the odd man who in the meanwhile had grown more robust, and went about dressed in a most negligent, indeed even slovenly way, when he shot past us with a growl. My mother, however, a passionate lover of music, allowed herself to be carried away, now and again….

Once I ran away from my boyfriend to a hotel. I wouldn’t let my friends tell him where I was, and between baths I made calls to those in the know to find out what his reaction was and how it was progressing. There were some strains in our relationship, but mostly I thought that running away was a dramatically artistic thing to do. I planned to work every moment on a passionately intense but enigmatic story I was writing about my sexual and emotional history….

“As far back as I can remember, my grandmother and grandfather lived with us in whatever Yorkville flat we happened to be occupying at the time. They had been performers in Germany — he a ventriloquist and she a harpist who yodeled while plucking the strings.”

FOOT SHOW
Meaning: Insult.
Action: A sitting or reclining person shows the sole of his shoe to his companion.
Background: In certain countries, if this is done accidentally, it can cause serious trouble. People have even been murdered for showing the sole of a shoe to someone….

Brian and Marilyn Wilson move out of their rented apartment in Gardner Street, West Hollywood, and take up residence at their new home at 1448 Laurel Way in an expensive area of Beverly Hills. Shortly after the couple moves in, Brian hires a carpenter to build a wooden box in the dining room….

When I was twelve, I wrote an essay in school called “Viva Today.” It was about how everyone was so busy working for tomorrow, that they sometimes forgot about living their lives today. I used my father [Danny Thomas] as an example. “He’s always away, working hard to make a better tomorrow for his children,” I wrote, “but when he finally comes home for good, we’ll probably be grown and gone.” And I ended with the words, “So, I say, Viva Today!” A few nights later, our parents made their daily call to us from the road….

Just as her career was well under way, Dorothy faced a dreadful personal crisis. Biographical sketches published during her lifetime mention that she and her husband had an adopted son whose name was John Anthony Fleming. At her death her public learned a little more about him because he was her sole heir, apart from her old friend and literary executor Muriel St. Clare Byrne. Dorothy and her husband had unofficially adopted Anthony when he went to boarding school.

“Catherine was a patient who was referred to me about a year after I had become Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, Florida. In her late twenties, a Catholic woman from New England, Catherine was quite comfortable with her religion, not questioning this part of her life. She was suffering from fears, phobias, paralyzing panic attacks, depression, and recurrent nightmares. Her symptoms had been lifelong and were now worsening.”

“I want to go back to my parents. My grandmother explains that the Warsaw ghetto will soon be liquidated, perhaps within days. There is an ambulance going back to Warsaw, and I can go if I really want to.”

An incident occurring at daybreak, on Saturday, December 9, 1531, in Mexico, [represents] the culmination of all the superstitions we have discussed. Of tremendous sociological and psychological impact, it has left physical traces that can still be seen — and, indeed, are still an object of much devotion — today. On that long-ago morning, a fifty-seven-year-old Aztec Indian whose Nahuatl name was Singing Eagle and whose Spanish name was Juan Diego was going to the church of Tlaltclolco, near Mexico City. Suddenly he froze in his tracks as he heard a concert of singing birds, sharp and sweet. The air was bitterly cold: no bird in its right mind would sing at such hour, and yet the harmonious music went on….

At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, it was found that if red hot irons were placed to cool on a man’s back, certain phenomena were to be noted. The monks, the scientific men of that day, occasionally made records of their conclusions as to this process. Some valuable data no doubt has been lost, but enough remained when that Frenchman, Paquelin, made his exhaustive study of the subject to result in the cautery named for him.

Hemingway had decided, with all good intentions, to give his wife a belated Christmas present. He rented a Cessna 180 and hired a bush pilot named Roy Marsh to fly them over some scenic African sights. They would see Lake Albert and the spectacular Murchison Falls where the Nile River falls through a rock cleft and descends into cascading pools of water several hundred feet below. Mary Hemingway shot roll after roll of film as the bush pilot circled the falls several times. Suddenly, a flight of ibis, birds with long legs and long curved bills, flew in front of the plane….

“Her books (‘South American Magic Realism,’ she murmurs almost disparagingly — ‘nowadays everyone seems to be at it’) are full of fairly innocent girls who suffer at the hands of Bluebeard or The Beast, or the alarming owner of an extraordinary toy shop. In her stories the woman is frequently the victim, fearful only that she may enjoy that condition too much.”

The best way to learn a language, I’d heard, was to have an affair with a native speaker, one who didn’t speak English. Clearly, I needed a new approach and this one did have a certain sex appeal. I gave it a try. He was, I recall, rather cute — tall, blond, soulful eyes. Perhaps not an intellectual powerhouse, but given our linguistic limitations, I had no way of knowing. I wasn’t even sure of his name. I’m sure he’d told me, but I’d forgotten. By the time I knew it was a name I should know, it was rather too late to inquire. I rummaged through the papers on his desk and found both Alain Chausse and Chausse Alain, but neither had commas.

“The captain and mate were seeing to it that the crew should not get away…. The captain’s boat was hoisted on board every evening, and the oars put away. There was also a night-watchman, who had two guns strapped around him, but did not look fierce to correspond. Being a Frenchman, and rather religious, I doubted if the necessity could arise to make him shoot to kill. Liverpool Jack and I held a conference, and decided that the time was near to make a dash for freedom.”

Anita [Pallenberg] and I went to Rome that spring and summer [1967], between the bust and the trials, where Anita played in Barbarella, with Jane Fonda, directed by Jane’s husband Roger Vadim…. We lived together in this magnificent palace, the Villa Medici, with its formal gardens, one of the most elegant buildings in the world, that Stash had managed to pull off. His father, Balthus, had an apartment there, some diplomatic role via the French Academy, which owned the building. Balthus was away, so we had his place to ourselves.

“When Sarah was born on October 23,1844, Judith was only 16 years old. A beautiful girl with a lovely face and figure, Judith had been a milliner before arriving in France to seek her fortune. Perhaps she could have become a governess or a seamstress, but she thought either option was too dull and poorly paid.”

Even if you have never swung a partner to a stamping fiddler’s call, it is not hard to imagine a square dance, that exuberant American social occasion in calico and straw. The caller was the most important part of the dance, for it was he who got folks on their feet and made them mix. Many a romance has started from the clever calls of the fiddler who kept a sharp eye out for matchmaking. Here are some of his lively directions. You supply the music and the dancing and see whom you end up with!

First things first: as a chicken rancher, you do not need a rooster in order for the hens to lay eggs. Hens lay eggs nearly daily for most of the year, in accordance with the length of the day (i.e. waxing in spring and waning in winter). The only thing a rooster can do that is useful to humans is to fertilize the eggs if you’d like to have chicks. Fertilized eggs have no more nutrients than unfertilized eggs. Notice that I wrote the only “useful” thing. Just about everything else a rooster does is completely obnoxious….

Stop eating before you’re full. Nowadays we think it is normal and right to eat until you are full, but many cultures specifically advise stopping well before that point is reached. The Japanese have a saying — hara hachi bu — counseling people to stop eating when they are 80 percent full. The Ayurvedic tradition in India advises eating until you are 75 percent full; the Chinese specify 70 percent, and the prophet Muhammad described a full belly as one that contained 1/3 food and 1/3 liquid — and l/3 air, i.e., nothing.

“April 12 . Called on Scott Fitz and his bride. Latter temperamental small town Southern Belle. Chews gum — shows knees. I do not think marriage can succeed. Both drinking heavily. Think they will be divorced in 3 years. Scott write something big — then die in a garret at 32.”

There was one particular incident, which occurred after about a fortnight when we had reached Auzou in northern Chad, which showed Costa [Achillopoulo] at his most typical. When we travel in exotic lands, we nearly all of us run up sooner or later with the problem of the uninhibited onlookers — usually in the form of a group of locals who materialise from nowhere, take up a position a yard or two away and stare and stare, fascinated by one’s every action. Even on picnics, this technique can be unnerving enough; but at a night camp, where there are no tents to afford the minimum of privacy and not even any bushes for cover, it can become a serious matter.

A Swedish friend of Cici’s, Brigitta, who owned Strip Thrills, a dress shop on Sunset, told her that she was going to a party at Jack Nicholson’s house that evening and invited her to come along. Cici asked if she could bring her stepdaughter, and Brigitta said fine, that it was his birthday, and Jack loved pretty girls….

“Most of the 60s in my memory is like one long blur of trying to cook dinner from the inside aisle of a moving bus with pots and pans tied onto it.”

“This LIGHT SHOW MANUAL is a ‘HOW TO DO IT’ report based on personal experience and observations of the author over the past decade. A major adjunct to psychedelic ‘happenings,’ rock-and-roll performances, ‘in’ parties, and ‘turn- on’ scenes are the color effects grouped under the heading of ‘light shows.’ This imaginative use of color and light expanded greatly in the psychedelic scene, adding much to trips festivals, ‘GUAMBOS’ (Great Underworld Artist’s Masked Balls and Orgies), ‘freak-outs,’ and futuristic night clubs.”

“I started a book about aggressive dressing, which I think is a little bit different than power dressing. This is dressing to intimidate, to get what you want. It’s feminism but in a different vein. I conceived of the idea of kind of making this book like a military manual, so I called it The F-100. It took situations and then gave you ideas for appropriate dress for each, based upon the premise that you’re trying to gain an edge over the situation, an opponent, or simply another person.”

The next fall after this marriage, three of my neighbours and myself determined to explore a new country. Their names were Robinson, Frazier, and Rich. We set out for the Creek country, crossing the Tennessee river; and after having made a day’s travel, we stop’d at the house of one of my old acquaintances, who had settled there after the war. Resting here a day, Frazier turned out to hunt, being a great hunter; but he got badly bit by a very poisonous snake, and so we left him and went on. We passed through a large rich valley, called Jones’s valley, where several other families had settled, and continued our course till we came near to the place where Tuscaloosa now stands. Here we camped, as there were no inhabitants, and hobbled out our horses for the night. About two hours before day, we heard the bells on our horses going back the way we had come, as they had started to leave us….

It was just a coffee shop with half a dozen customers, none of whom seemed to even glance up at my arrival. I took a seat in a small booth with my back to the wall. This meant I could keep an eye on the parking lot and see who drove up. I had not watched all those spy movies for nothing. While I was keeping my vigilant eyes open for anything untoward, someone sat down beside me. I mean, this guy with a brown leather briefcase just materialized out of nowhere, set the briefcase under the table, and sat down beside me….

“One of the saddest times in Rivers’s life since I have known her was when her best friend Tommy Corcoran died a few years ago. Rivers spoke to him three times a day, and he walked Melissa down the aisle at her wedding.”

My mum had six sisters, Nell, Elsie, Renie, Flossie, Cath and Phyllis, and two brothers, Joe and Jack, and on a Sunday it wasn’t unusual for two or three of these other families to show up, and they would pass the gossip and get up to date with what was happening with us and with them. In the smallness of this house there were always conversations being carried on in front of me as if I didn’t exist, and there were whispers exchanged between the sisters. It was a house full of secrets. But, bit by bit, by carefully listening to these exchanges, I slowly began to put together a picture of what was going on….

…That was in 1929 and I went home to New York for the Christmas vacation. New York looked even better to me than before and I hated the idea of returning to the Middle West, so on the way back I got off the train in Albany and spent the night there. In the morning, I took another train back to New York, and got a room in a fleabag hotel. The Elk, on West Fifty-third Street and Seventh. I sent my mother a letter telling her not to worry and then set out to find a job.

The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol. In a community lacking pure-water supplies, the closest thing to “pure” fluid was alcohol. Whatever health risks were posed by beer (and later wine) in the early days of agrarian settlements were more than offset by alcohol’s antibacterial properties.

“Complaining alternately of light-headedness or chest pains, I visited the ER more often than most people see their GPs (probably more than most people see their parents). Incidentally, besides my socialism, my hypochondria is one of the reasons I never complain about kicking in tax dollars to pay for universal health care; I’ve had cardio stress tests that turned out to be for little more than my undershirt being on backwards.”