"Arnold Bennett once wrote a little book he called Literary Taste, a work of such immense good sense, it surprised me, for I did not expect it from a devoted follower of Zola's naturalism, an Edwardian down to his steam yacht. It is a book of admirably blunt assurance. He informs his readers, and there were many, that "your taste has to pass before the bar of the classics. That is the point. If you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book." Bennett is talking about taste--the perception of excellence--not about truth. Regarding the truth, you are earnestly entreated to differ. Appreciation is Bennett's subject and reading's desired result. If you do not admire the writings of Thomas Hobbes, it is not Hobbes whose ghost now has to feel uneasy."

"So on this anniversary let's go back before the pipe and cardigan and golf gags and Christmas show banter, to the young Bing of the late Twenties and early Thirties. Artie Shaw described him as "the first hip white person born in the United States". "Ever since Bing first opened his mouth," said Louis Armstrong, "he was the Boss of All Singers" (...) What Paley heard, like everyone else, was the throb in the voice. When Bing started in the Twenties, there were theatre singers - guys like Jolson, aiming at the back of the balcony: they made records but the records were, in essence, a souvenir of a theatrical performance. Then they invented real microphones, and immediately a new generation of mannered overcompensators showed up, like Whispering Jack Smith and other fellows who, in Will Friedwald's phrase, "overdid the understatement". Crosby was the first truly natural singer of the electronic era - the man who, as Friedwald puts it, "came up with the kind of 'natural' that worked: the warm B-flat baritone with a little hair on it"."

"Close your eyes. Form the mental image of a page of prose with paragraphs of varying lengths. Imagine a font of your preference, Palatino maybe. Think about the width of margins.

That's the easy part. Now sharpen your image of the page so that you can discern the words that are written there. Imagine a series of ever less blurry lenses as you are being fitted for a new pair of reading glasses at the optometrist's. Start reading as many words as you can on your page. You probably won't be able to read the whole page, or even an entire paragraphs, but you will get some words and phrases. It's important that you don't simply "make up" your own words. Rather, you must read the words that are actually "there.""

"Right before I fall asleep every night, I play the "complete sentence game" in my head. The way you do it is to formulate every thought that you have as a complete grammatical sentence, silently speaking the thought, word by word. What is interesting is that the thought first appears "all of a sudden"--the process of thinking it out word by word is slow, at least compared to this initial flash of the thought. What is more, I articulate these thoughts so slowly, in relation to my rate of only half verbalized thinking, that I get several more ideas for other sentences before I finish the one I am consciously articulating at any given moment. By the time I finish I think of a new one instead of "saving" one I've thought up along the way. Some of the sentences concern the actual game, but I try to get off that metapoetic hobbyhorse fairly quickly. I might play this game for as long as 15 minutes or as short as 15 seconds before I drop off."

I liked the idea of sitting in a chair in front of your house
for hours,
doing nothing but wearing a hat and drinking cola.
What's wrong with that?

Alexandre,

Enoch was right.

Examples from Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines, which were news (fait divers) told in three lines for Le Matin in 1906:

"There was a gas explosion at the home of Larrieux, in Bordeaux. He was injured. His mother-in-law's hair caught on fire. The ceiling caved in."

"Responding to a call at night, M. Sirvent, café owner of Caissargues, Gard, opened his window; a rifle shot destroyed his face."

"Mme Fournier, M. Vouin, M. Septeuil, of Sucy, Tripleval, Septeuil, hanged themselves: neurasthenia, cancer, unemployment."

"The schoolchildren of Niort were being crowned. The chandelier fell, and the laurels of three among them were spotted with a little blood."

"At five o'clock in the morning, M.P. Bouget was accosted by two men on Rue Fondary. One put out his right eye, the other his left. In Necker."

"Eugène Périchot, of Pailles, near Saint-Maixent, entertained at his home Mme Lemartrier. Eugène Dupuis came to fetch her. They killed him. Love."

"A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frérotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake."

"Finding his daughter, 19, insufficiently austere, Jallat, watchmaker of Saint-Étienne, killed her. It is true that he has eleven children left."

"What a delightful thing the state of Death would be if the dead passed their time haunting the places they loved in life and living over again the dear delightful past -- if death were one long indulgence in the pleasures of memory! if the disembodied spirit forgot all the pains of its previous existence and remembered only the happiness! Think of me flitting about the orchards and farmyards in ---- birdsnesting, walking along the coast among the seabirds, climbing Exmoor, bathing in streams and in the sea, haunting all my old loves and passions, cutting open with devouring curiosity Rabbits, Pigeons, Frogs, Dogfish, Amphioxus; think of me, too, at length unwillingly deflected from these cherished pursuits in the raptures of first love, cutting her initials on trees and fences instead of watching birds, day-dreaming over Parker and Haswell and then bitterly reproaching myself later for much loss of precious time. How happy I shall be if Death is like this: to be living over again and again all my ecstasies, over first times -- the first time I found a Bottle Tit's nest, the first time I succeeded in penetrating into the fastnesses of my El Dorado -- Exmoor, the first time I gazed upon the internal anatomy of a Snail, the first time I read Berkeley's Principles of Human Understanding (what a soul-shaking epoch that was!), and the first time I kissed her! My hope is that I may haunt these times again, that I may haunt the places, the books, the bathes, the walks, the desires, the hopes, the first (and last) loves of my life all transfigured and beatified by sovereign Memory."

Ah sim, Gabriel, sim.

"Se o fin-de-siècle passado foi podre, o nosso já está fedendo 10 anos antes". Além de tudo, um vidente... Muito embora, desde então, ainda esteja fedendo e não haja, no horizonte, sinal de que cesse a tal catinga. Grato pelo post; salvou a quinta-feira modorrenta em que estava cá metido. Hugs, RR.

De nada, RR.

Trecho do discurso de Enoch Powell, tal como descrito pela Wikipedia:

Powell then quoted a letter he had received from a woman in Northumberland about an elderly woman living in a Wolverhampton street where she was the only white resident left. The elderly woman had lost her husband and her two sons in the Second World War and had rented out the rooms in her house. Once immigrants had moved into the street she was living in, her white lodgers left. Two black men had knocked on her door at 7am to use her telephone but she refused and was verbally abused. She had asked her local authority for a rates reduction but was told by a council officer to let out the rooms of her house. When the woman said the only tenants would be black, the council officer replied: "Racial prejudice won't get you anywhere in this country". The next part Powell quoted went:

"She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. "Racialist", they chant. When the new Race Relations bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder".

"In October I'll be host
To witches, goblins, and a ghost.
I'll serve them chicken soup on toast.
Spooky once! Spooky twice!
Spooky chicken soup with rice!"

Mais links ao acaso, agora aguentem:

"I respect the sophistication that these Europeans project to the world. I have long believed that leisure wear is one of the great evils of our times. Scientists should stop investigating the links between fat friends, fast food and obesity and concentrate on the pernicious impact of stretch fabric. When a waistband can give and give, why should anyone stop eating? When a shirt does not need to be tucked in, who cares about the belly beneath? Lycra has changed the physique of this country, especially among men. With stretch in their play clothes, restraint is gone. A suit is suddenly uncomfortable and buttons pop; why not go for something loose?"

"Even more seductive than Arlen's suggestive dialogue, his one-night stands in Mayfair lodgings, his roguish intimations of clubland naughtiness, were the novels of Ronald Firbank (1886-1926), whose impact on the mainstream writers of the 1920s and 1930s was out of all proportion to their meagre sales. Set in fantastic never-never lands or more familiar environments twisted radically out of kilter, Firbank's fiction advertises a wit so delicate that it can scarcely be identified, borne forward by scraps of rococo dialogue, the whole invariably undercut with intimations of deep unease, often extending to outright tragedy. Bright Young People with literary leanings rushed as one to acclaim him as their mentor. Brian Howard thought Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926), which ends with the cardinal dropping dead in hot pursuit of an attractive choirboy, "the wittiest book ever written". Waugh wrote an enraptured essay for Life and Letters in which he proposed that Firbank "achieved a new art form", and borrowed his technique of advancing the plot-line solely by way of dialogue for Decline and Fall's school sports day sequence."

"Before I get on to the writing awards, there's a little matter I'd like to tidy up ... at least if I expect to live with myself tomorrow morning. I would like to say, personal opinion of course, that I'm sick and tired of people exploiting the Academy Awards [loud applause and bravos] for the propagation of their own personal propaganda [more applause]. I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple `Thank you' would have sufficed."

"When terrorist-slash-exceptional thief Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) taunts hero John McClane (Bruce Willis), "Who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child?" and asks this "Mr. Cowboy" if he really thinks he stands a chance, McClane's answer--"Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker"--marks the moment that McClane, an everyman, assumes the mantle of America's archetypal heroes: Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Gunsmoke's Marshall Dillon, and others who have been so vital to American boyhood. Unlike the many action-movie one-liners that are rooted in the hero's narcissism, McClane's stems from our collective wish-fulfillment. He is not referring to himself, not suggesting an "I" or a "me" but an us."

"At some point in my tenure as a sportswriter, I figured out why big-time athletes disdain the vast majority of reporters. It wasn't because we were small and weak. It wasn't because we asked impolite questions and wrote articles they didn't like. No. It was because we dressed like shit. I came to this conclusion after seeing a photo of myself sitting in the Cincinnati Reds' dugout interviewing their star slugger. I can still see the blue short-sleeved checked shirt I was wearing in that photo. I can still feel the rush of humiliation I felt when I realized that the superstar must have looked at me for the first time and immediately thought to himself: writer. He lumped me in. And he wasn't wrong to do so."

Wilkins notes that Petrarch's reverence for books affected his entire household, including his illiterate steward, Raymond Monet. "Though Raymond could not read," Wilkins writes, "he loved the books, and had learned to know them by name. When Petrarch put a book into his hands he would press it to his heart, and sometimes, in a low voice, he would talk to its author."

"As for Vidal's (and every other lefty's) use of the superlative, "Nazi", I just remember what P. J. O' Roarke said about the utilization of that word:"No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal."

"Dear male film reviewers writing about Pride and Prejudice (and, sad to say, at least one woman). I want to assure you that I have no doubts with regard to your masculinity. I'm sure you're all big, burly men with thick and bushy beards as long as your arms. I'm sure you drink your weight in beer and belch hugely afterwards every single night. I have no doubt that you can pleasure a woman, and have done so consistently since you were old enough to tell women and livestock apart. Nothing you or anyone else can say will ever cause me or the rest of your readers to doubt your virility or your manhood.

So could you please stop prefacing your Pride and Prejudice reviews with some variant on 'being a man, I naturally hate Jane Austen and everything having to do with her. I've never read Pride and Prejudice and don't intend to, since it's a fluffy, girly book for fluffy girls, and is about love and feelings and all those things that men find icky and gross. Nevertheless, I'm certain I would hate this book, which only fluffy girls who like reading about icky love and gross feelings would enjoy, since I'm a manly man and therefore above such things. Now, about the movie...'?"

"Here was a show that we'll probably rarely see again. It had heart and smart. It was full of fizzy joy: a '30s screwball comedy reinvented for the new millenium, with Lauren Graham's Lorelai Gilmore as a descendent of those savvy, fast-talking dames brought to gleeful life by Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell and Carole Lombard. Lorelai's love life was a mess, but she worked on the relationship that counted the most. And a mother-daughter relationship has never been explored with such depth and warmth and sweet, zingy humor than the one between Lorelai and Rory (...) Lorelai Gilmore is one of the great characters in TV history, an important one, perhaps the best female character since Mary Richards, and don't get me started on those chowderheads at the Emmy awards who never once gave Graham a nomination for her brilliant, multilayered, often tongue-twisting work. But I digress again."

"Morton applied his love of the surreal not just to his writing but to everyday life. Walking through Guildford one day with Gerald Barry, Morton stopped at a pillar box. He talked into its opening: "Are you alright, my little man? Don't worry, we'll soon get you out." Soon, a concerned crowd gathered to see who was trapped inside. Somebody summoned the fire brigade to help, while Morton and Barry made a discreet exit."

"Perhaps this is why so many people who expect to be served up hard and fast facts in books mistrust historical novels. You read the book and yet you can never shake off the suspicion that what you're reading isn't actually true. To some extent, I learned this lesson while I was still at university, in an introductory seminar by one Professor S. He advised us not to read historical fiction, because it was unreliable and trivial. His thesis was that we were living in the here and now, and anyone who immersed themselves in the past was simply wallowing in escapism. The professor had bulging eyes, bad skin, and a drink problem. He cut a sad figure, had no great love of reading, and didn't seem particularly to live in the here and now himself."

Ah, droga, agora não vou conseguir mais trabalhar. Sabe quanto tempo eu vou levar até ler tudo, sabe Alexandre? Gee...

Só mais dois links, prometo, Alessandra, que tenho que levar a Lolita pra passear e ela já está olhando esquisito pra mim aqui:

"If a critic of feminism takes after well-known feminists, then her criticisms are "stale" and "predictable." If the critic dissects the views of little-known feminists, her criticisms can be dismissed because her targets are "obscure" and "fringe." (Kate's book has been dismissed for both reasons.) Female writers are disqualified from criticizing feminism because they (allegedly) owe it so much. Male writers are disqualified because they're men. No criticism can run this gauntlet successfully."

"Radio psychiatrist Dr. Drew Pinsky gave the standard Narcissistic Personality Inventory test to scores of minor celebrities that came on the "Loveline" radio show he hosted with Adam Carolla and found that the most narcissistic were the least talented -- the female reality TV stars of the moment were the most narcissistic, while the most talented, the musicians, were the least. If you are an excellent musician, you are always aware that there are truly great musicians out there."

Olá, Alexandre,

Se isso é um teste para saber quem tem acompanhado seu stumble, acho que passei.

;>)

Pedido de Opinião.

Olá! Sou fã dos seus textos e ensaios e já passei algumas madrugadas lendo os seus arquivos.
Queria ver o seu ponto de vista aí sobre o filme Tropa de Elite.

Fernando, olá. A verdade é que não quero ver esse filme. É brasileiro, tem gente gritando porra, tem pobre desafinado, tem realidade social, fomenta discussão, não dá. Talvez seja bom, mas eu sentiria que estava desperdiçando a noite. Prefiro ver Superbad.

Mas você gostou?

Perereca pentelho é d+... i love francis (apesar de eu ser nordestino) hahaha

Oi, desculpa a demora! Esse ano é de vestibular e não estou entrando muito na internet agora... (ps: tenho 20 anos, fiquei 2 anos coçando o saco, lendo blogs.)
Gostei sim do filme, mas a minha opinião provavelmente vai convergir em alguma que vc já leu por aí... Achei legal a perspectiva diferente diante do que você criticou ser chamada "realidade" lá dos morros. =]

Oi Alexandre, estou sentindo falta da sua coluna fotogrática do Francis. Se tiver mais alguns recortes com você, por favor poste-os para nós.
Obrigada,