"What is one to say? Some writers drink too much. Are there more of them in proportion than soccer players or chess masters? If it is true, as observation suggests, that actors produce more than their fair share of drunks, then this would reinforce my theory of displaced stage fright as a cause of literary alcoholism. A writer's audience is and remains invisible to him, but if he is any good he is acutely and consciously aware of it, and never more so while it waits for him to come on, to begin p. 1. Alcohol not only makes you less self-critical, it also reduces fear, which partly explains its wartime use. Just the thing for the funk at the typewriter, except that when one has one little one, one wants one little one more. The bottle on the desk is all very well, right and proper, in fact, in what used to be Fleet Street, but not for anything anybody may hope will be read more than a couple of days later."
—Kingsley Amis, "Booze," Memoirs
"To be sure, there were rewards. One was the Lord Soper story, quoted at least once elsewhere but never correctly or in full. The true version goes:
'I was on a TV programme recently,' said John, 'with Lord Soper, socialist, divine, and peer of the realm.' (Oh, that Lord Soper, I wanted to say. It was another Braine characteristic to take nothing for granted.) 'Now don't get me wrong — same programme, but different parts, okay?'
'Fine with me,' I said.
'We got chatting afterwards and he said, I understand you've just come back from the United States. I said ay. He said, What did you make of it, then? Well, I said' — and here his voice took on the bluff, puffing, impatient note he would adopt for platitudes — 'I said, With all its glaring, manifest, obvious faults it's a wonderful, free, open society they've got there, and Soper said, H'm, all right if you're not black, and I said, But you stupid bugger, I'm not black.'
The last phrase came out with a real grimness, almost belligerence — no bluffness now — and was followed by a baleful stare of some duration; I, at whom he had happened to be looking, had for the moment become Lord Soper. However this may sound on paper, the reality was either the work of a highly trained jester or perfectly serious."
—Kingsley Amis, "John Braine," Memoirs
If that ain't love then tell me, what is?
I have accepted an offer from the Willamette Week to serve as its new Screen Editor, taking charge of the paper's movie, television, books, gaming and DVD coverage. I begin work on November 20. I am tremendously excited.
This means, of course, that I will be leaving The Pulse -- and Chattanooga -- early next month. It's tempting to be glib about the move, but this has been my home for the past three years (seven, if you count my lost years at Lookout Mountain's finest liberal arts school) and I can't begin to say how much I will miss my friends here.
So I won't try. Instead I'll say that I couldn't be prouder of the work I've done here, and I fully expect to see incisive, quality journalism continue at The Pulse. And I expect Chattanooga to remain the enchanting, confounding, insular and tender place that I've known. I expect it to be my home. And yes, I'll loan it a cigarette.
"Physical disease is treatable and curable; some mad people are also curable, chiefly by drugs, and if nobody seems to know how they work, who cares? But the poor old neurotic might just as well spend his money on booze and sex magazines. The only certain cure for arachnophobia is to spend twenty-four hours a day in a spacesuit, with a qualified person standing by holding a flame-thrower and a half-litre tranquilliser injection, just to be on the safe side."
—Kingsley Amis, "Shrinks," Memoirs
"In February 1949 [Sayyid] Qutb checked into the George Washington University Hospital to have his tonsils removed. There, a nurse scandalized him by itemizing the qualities she sought in a lover. He was already on guard against the forward behavior of the American woman, 'who knows full well the beauties of her body, her face, her exciting eyes, her full lips, her bulging breasts, her full buttocks and her smooth legs. She wears bright colors that awaken the primative sexual instincts, hiding nothing, but adding to that the thrilling laugh and the bold look.' One can imagine what an irresistible object of sexual teasing he must have been.
"News came of the assassination of Hasan al-Banna, the Supreme Guide of the Society of Muslim Brothers, on February 12, in Cairo. Qutb relates that there was a hubbub in the streets outside his hospital window. He inquired about the reason for the festivities. 'Today the enemy of Christianity in the East was killed,' he says the doctors told him. 'Today, Hasan al-Banna was murdered.' It is difficult to credit that Americans, in 1949, were sufficiently interested in Egyptian politics to rejoice at the news of Banna's death."
—Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
"[Christopher] Hitchens claims to be unperturbed by his critics. 'You'd think I'd driven over their pets and abducted their daughters,' Hitchens said. 'I'd like to know what brings that on.' A pause. 'So I could do it more.'"
— Ian Parker, "He Knew He Was Right," The New Yorker, October 16, 2006
My review of Tom Shachtman's book Rumspringa has been published in the latest edition of The Wilson Quarterly. I suppose this piece marks my national debut, such as it is, and I'm thrilled to be included among such august company. (Really, it's gratifying to be published anywhere: I wandered into a Barnes & Noble today, in search of the New Yorker's Christopher Hitchens profile, and couldn't suppress a grin upon spotting five copies of the new WQ issue waiting to be shelved.) Anyhow, the piece examines the unlikely Old Order Amish tradition of "running-around" time, a period of institutionalized apostasy meant to innoculate each new generation against the allure of the wider world. The results are as distinctive as you'd expect:
Consider a typical weekend party described in Rumspringa... While their elders sleep, hundreds of Amish teenagers travel back roads by buggy and the occasional recently purchased car, using cell phones pulled from beneath aprons to find the farm where festivities will be held. “A good party is when there’s, like, 200 kids there,” one reveler explains, “really loud music, and everybody’s drinking and smoking and having a great old time.” Couples wander into the dark pasture to hook up, while Amish drug dealers sell marijuana, cocaine, and crystal methamphetamine. The party ends when it’s time for the hosts to milk the cows.
But don't worry about them. They pretty much all grow unhappy and go home. The kids, I mean. The cows never left.