Books Worth Remembering
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…
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….