An incompetent small-town Australian police chief (Royle) visits the lodgings of a headmaster suspected of murder (Doncaster):

“It was a gentleman-scholar’s room: photographs of cricket teams, school groups, and a smart army photograph with a rather artificially grim expression. On the wall a college shield, and a cricket bat signed by one of the school’s dimmest past students, who had gone on to play for the state and become a Country Party politician. The bookshelves were full of books, old, dirty, and looking very thumbed. Royle idly wondered whether the thumbs that had thumbed them had been Doncaster’s thumbs, or if they had been picked up cheap in a second-hand bookshop. He’d never actually seen Doncaster reading, and unless he actually saw people reading, Royle was inclined to suspect that they never did, since he had no time whatsoever for the occupation himself.”

(Robert Barnard, Death of an Old Goat, 1979, XI)

“I had made the discovery that if you put people in a comic light they became more likable — if you spoke of someone as a gross, belching, wall-eyed human pike you got along much better with him thereafter, partly because you were aware that you were the sadist who took away his human attributes. Also, having done him some metaphorical violence, you owed him special consideration.”

(Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, p. 152)

The text puts the comma before ‘thereafter’, but that can’t be right, can it?

“. . . a thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”

(Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, p. 95)

Inelegantly expressed, but the thought is interesting.

When Orson Welles was filming Macbeth, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight, did the crew call him Horson Welles? Behind his back, or to his face, it would have been a thoroughly Shakespearian pun.

“You never do the safe thing if there’s a risky alternative. You’re what people would call feckless, in the days when such words were still in use.”

(Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, p. 43)

Those were presumably the days when copy editors and proofreaders (proof readers?) would not allow a book to be published with “put me onto the Keynes essay” on page 7 and “put me on to Keynes’s paper” on page 8.

What’s it like living in one of the hillier parts of the Shenandoah Valley? Like living in a Grandma Moses painting, but with slightly duller colors and much better perspective. I really like driving past cows on the way to work, and having mountains on the horizon all day.

A boy, an ungrown child, in seven years puts forth
    a line of teeth and loses them again;
but when another seven God has made complete,
    the first signs of maturity appear.
In the third hebdomad he’s growing yet, his chin
    is fuzzy, and his skin is changing hue,
while in the fourth one, each achieves his peak of strength,
    the thing that settles whether men are men.
The fifth is time a man should think of being wed
    and look for sons to carry on his line;
and by the sixth he’s altogether sensible,
    no more disposed to acts of fecklessness.
With seven hebdomads and eight — fourteen more years –
    wisdom and eloquence are at their peak,
while in the ninth, though he’s still capable, his tongue
    and expertise have lost some of their force.
Should he complete the tenth and reach the measured line,
    not before time he’d have his due of death.

(Solon, Fr. 27, tr. M. L. West)