Gems Press

“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I was incredibly shy at the time and remained so for many years, so one might ask (and people did) what in the world a withdrawn introvert was doing making a spectacle of himself on stage.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.”

Alfred Hitchcock explained once that ‘I was terrified of the police, of the Jesuit fathers, of physical punishment, of a lot of things. This is the root of my work.’ The remark has a further application. He once said that ‘I spent three years studying with the Jesuits….

[Excerpt from the paper by Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gransmark, Stockholm School of Economics and Stockholm University (published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2013)] We explore the relationship between attractiveness and risk taking in chess. We use a large international panel dataset on high-level chess competitions which includes a control for the players’ skill in chess. This data is combined with results from a survey on an online labor market where participants were asked to rate the photos of 626 expert chess players according to attractiveness.

“The trip was not without fateful consequences of its own. My mother and father met in London — he followed her to America a year later. And on my Aunt Kate the trip produced so profound an impression that she never recovered from it for the rest of her life.”

“I was confident I was going to receive the Nobel Prize in 1992 …. I was very excited. And I was actively humble. As it turned out, I had good reason to be humble. I didn’t win.”

An early memory is of holding a stick in my hand and telling [my little brother] Colin to pick up a wasp I could see stuck in the crack between some paving stones and delighting in the howls that followed….

[Carl Jung died of a heart attack in 1944, only to be brought back to life. This is an excerpt from his experience.] As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance into the rock, a strange thing happened: I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me — an extremely painful process. Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me.

It was a long day in court, with much happening before the defense for Mrs. Snyder rested and the defense of Gray began with the immediate production of Henry Judd. Out of the dark tangles of this bloody morass there stepped for a brief moment a wraith-like little figure all in black — Lorraine Snyder, the nine-year-old daughter of the blond woman and the dead art editor. She was, please God, such a fleeting little shadow that one had scarcely stopped gulping over her appearance before she was gone. She was asked just three questions by Hazleton as she sat in the big witness chair, a wide-brimmed black hat shading her tiny face, her presence there, it seemed to me, a reproach to civilization.

“One Sunday afternoon, aged twelve, while my father was safely at work in the stable block ‘over the way’, I watched on the little television Anthony Asquith’s film version of The Importance of Being Earnest. I vividly recall sitting on an uncushioned wooden kitchen chair, face flushed, mouth half-open, simply astonished at what I was watching and, most especially, hearing.”

Lincoln always took great pleasure in relating this yarn: Riding at one time in a stage with an old Kentuckian who was returning
from Missouri, Lincoln excited the old gentleman’s surprise by refusing to accept either of tobacco or French brandy….

…From all this one may conclude that the equivalent of four hundred pounds a year was the minimum for respectable travelling [circa 1600] and that the Average Tourist would certainly need at least half as much again. But this is assuming that all who were respectable, or above the need to be so, paid all their own expenses, which was far from being the case…

On Monday I walked into the office laden with gifts and called out, “Ohaiyo gozaimasu. Good morning.” Instead of the usual responses, there was dead silence. No one would answer me; everyone looked displeased with me. I asked Takagi-san what the problem was. “It would be better if you spoke to Kamakura-san,” he said, curtly. I turned to Kamakura-san. “Is there something wrong?” He stared at me with disdain. “You have committed a grave transgression. How could you have done such a thing?” I was mystified. “What did I do?”

While our patent application was pursuing its slow course through the Patent Office, we built a second machine and flew it in a field near the city of Dayton, Ohio, in the summer and autumn of 1904. When we had familiarized ourselves with the operation of the machine in more or less straight flights, we decided to try a complete circle. At first we did not know just how much movement to give in order to make a circle of a given size. On the first three trials we found that we had started a circle on too large a radius to keep within the boundaries of the small field in which we were operating….

“The crash. I crashed because I was stupid and because I was smart. The stupid part is this: I chose a bad day to fly. The wind was from the wrong direction and I took off with a high wind to my back.”

George Burns and Gracie Allen evolved into one of the most popular radio teams of the 1930s. By the end of the decade, however, Burns began noticing an alarming change: Our ratings kept dropping I’m in bed one night, two in the morning, and it finally hit me: I said, “We are too old for the jokes we’re doing.” We were married and on the air we were single…. So I woke up Gracie. I says, “Kid, I got it.”

After Augustus became emperor in 27 B.C., the Romans established the Cursus Publicus, or the imperial post system, to move the emperor’s mail and officials speedily around the empire. Scattered along the Roman roads were various inns that provided officials with food, lodging, and a change of horses. The Latin word for these inns was tabera, from which is derived the modern word tavern.

I was doing better as a comedian the second time around. I was older and wiser, yeah, but I was funnier, too. I was really working hard on my jokes, and polishing all that material I’d stored in that duffel bag for twelve years. My timing was better, my jokes were better, and my name was better. Yeah, I was no longer Jack Roy. One of the biggest changes I’d made in my act was my name. Early in my comeback, I visited a club I’d worked at years before, hoping I could get booked there because I’d been one of their favorite comics. I hadn’t worked there in quite a while, though, and the club had new owners….

All languages change with the passage of time; sometimes a mysterious change overtakes the pronunciation of a particular sound in all the words of a language; such a change is called a ‘Sound Change’. Anybody who has learned more than one European language will have noticed certain similarities of form in words of the same or similar meaning. English acre, for instance, and Latin ager, a field. The words for mother and father, likewise, resemble each other in many languages. Careful comparison of Indo-European languages with each other makes possible the definition of sound changes which took place in the course of their divergence from each other….

“The first thing I’d say about hand-to-hand combat, having seen you guys,” Graham said, “is to avoid it at all costs.” Good thinking there, Graham, I thought. “But if you do need it to get out of some situation, forget everything you thought you knew about fighting and go for the eyes. Poke, scratch, anything. This isn’t the movies and it’s not a fair fight. Do it fast, do it unexpectedly, and inflict pain. People can’t focus on hands coming for the eyes. Even you guys might have a chance.”

It didn’t matter how much food Marley devoured, either through legitimate means or illicit activities. He always wanted more. When deafness came, we weren’t completely surprised that the only sound he could still hear was the sweet, soft thud of falling food. One day I arrived home from work to find the house empty. Jenny and the kids were out somewhere, and I called for Marley but got no response. I walked upstairs, where he sometimes snoozed when left alone, but he was nowhere in sight. After I changed my clothes, I returned downstairs and found him in the kitchen up to no good. His back to me, he was standing on his hind legs, his front paws and chest resting on the kitchen table as he gobbled down the remains of a grilled cheese sandwich. My first reaction was to loudly scold him. Instead I decided to see how close I could get before he realized he had company.

When I get back, [David] Bailey is at the camera; Marianne, in a black mac and fishnet tights, is sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny fifty-five-year-old thighs, doing sex-kitten moues at the camera. ‘Oh please, stop!’ I want to cry — this is sadism, this is misogyny, this is cruelty to grandmothers. I wonder if Bailey actually hates her — I wonder if this is her punishment for turning up late. I hear the agent and the Frenchman muttering behind me: ‘They won’t use this, they can’t.’ So why is Bailey shooting it then?

July 3 [1903]. — Not a wink, sleeping by the burning stump. Its heat drew the ‘skeets, and the old punk blazed up like a blast-furnace, nearly finishing my horse-blankets. Packed at last, and with the sun shining, we jumped right into rotten luck. At a big stream, the brown horse branded B refused to take the trail we’d cut through the alder jungle, and jumped in up to his neck — three times. Once, four beasts together followed him, wetting their packs, too, carried downstream and mixed up in snags and swift water, till the game seemed up. Twice I plunged in to my eyes and soaked my camera. Jack and I sweated like crazy men, and only King came back to help. No sooner were the four on the trail, than we hit a sheer alder slope, and chopped upward. It was too steep for the poor Whiteface, who staggered over backwards and rolled to the bottom, caught on his back in the vicious stems. When roped out, repacked, and hauled up the bank, both hind legs limped. His back can’t stand much more.

Ukrainian pole-vault star Sergei Bubka had a lot of record-setting vaults during the 1990–91 season. Bubka, a wise businessman, had a clause written into his contract with a shoe company that called for him to earn a bonus each and every time he bested the indoor and/or outdoor pole-vault records. Sergei managed to eclipse the…

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Maeve’s new column would be described as ‘a veritable psychopathology of everyday life’. It could have been conducted simply as a series of interviews. Instead, she took any opportunity she could find for eavesdropping on her subjects. She began listening in to people’s conversations in restaurants, on buses, wherever she found herself. She even admitted to getting off a bus and pursuing two people down the street because their conversation hadn’t finished. The No. 73 bus was a favourite vehicle….

…Here were born her four children. Here she came near dying, December 20, 1778, when bringing her first daughter, the future Duchess of Angoulême, into the world. Custom demanded numerous witnesses at a sovereign’s lying-in. An ancient and barbarous etiquette authorized the people to enter the King’s palace under such circumstances. From early morning the approaches to the château, the gardens, the galleries of the Mirrors and the Oeil-de-Boeuf, the Salons, and the very chamber of the Queen, had been invaded by an indiscreet and noisy crowd. Ragged chimneysweepers climbed upon the furniture and clung to the draperies….