A patchwork of quotes today from an important author’s first novel…best read in Humphrey Bogart’s voice.

WORK

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.

“Tall, aren’t you?” she said.
“I didn’t mean to be.”
Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.

Then she laughed. It was almost a racking laugh. It shook her as the wind shakes a tree. I thought there was puzzlement in it, not exactly surprise, but as if a new idea had been added to something already known and it didn’t fit. Then I thought that was too much to get out of a laugh.

—Raymond Chandler
—from The Big Sleep

WORD(S)

accismus uk-SIZ-mus. noun. The pretend refusal of something greatly desired; a coy refusal. In rhetoric, a figure of speech creating irony. A demonstration of modesty.

“The fox’s dismissal of the grapes in the Aesop fable of the fox and the grapes is an example of accismus.” (Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature)

A classic example occurs in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, when Caesar refuses Antony’s offer of the crown:

CASCA:
Why, there was a crown offered him: and being
offered him, he put it by with the back of his hand,
thus; and then the people fell a-shouting.

WEB

1. I love music. I love streaming music services. David Byrne, the members of Radiohead, and others don’t share the latter sentiment. The problem isn’t Spotify (or “the Internet”) killing music (or “all creativity,” sorry, David Byrne), it’s an inescapable shift in economics and demand courtesy of seismic technological change. ProperDiscord has measured, accurate response.

2. Beautiful pictures of 10 Tree Roots Winning Their Battle Against Concrete.

3. PetitTube plays an endless stream of the most unloved, un-meme-streamed, unwatched, unloved, unclicked videos on YouTube. It is unexpectedly fascinating.

4. A brace of articles: the myth of individual genius and the cult of “cognitive celebrity” of one of those maybe-not-individual-geniuses.

5. Today in 1888, Raymond Chandler is born. What a writer! You might be interested in Ian Fleming’s 1958 interview of Chandler

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