[This squib refers to the performance of Henrik Ibsen’s play in London in 1891.]
“The play performed last night is ‘simple’ enough in plan and purpose, but simple only in the sense of an open drain; of a loathsome sore unbandaged; of a dirty act done publicly.”
Daily Telegram
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged drama/theater, literary oddities
“Choice of words with respect to clarity, variety, taste, etc.; aptness of vocabulary and phrasing; correctness of pronunciation; enunciation. Adjective: dictional; adverb: dictionally.
‘It is destructive enough to the novel’s texture to hear this “historical” Arthur speak in the diction of a mod labor candidate or an American president standing for re-election.'”
Alan Cheuse, The New York Times
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“What is the riddle of the Sphinx? What animal walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three at night?” the sphinx asks Oedipus, the hero of Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex (426 B.C.). Oedipus answers that it is man (crawling as an infant, walking erect as an adult, and walking with a staff or cane in old age).”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.”
Commencement address at York University, Toronto, Canada, 6 November 1982
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“Queer–the rhymes are all wrong.”
“They are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties and are generally devoid of true poetical qualities.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Telescope, n. A device having a relation to the eye similar to that of the telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a multitude of needless details. Luckily it is unprovided with a bell summoning us to the sacrifice.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
“The theory of universals that sees them as shadows of our grasp of concepts. Conceptualism lies midway between out-and-out nominalism, holding that nothing is common to objects except our applying the same words to them, and any realism which sees universals as existing independently of us and our abilities.”
Excerpted from: Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
“It is becoming painfully evident that Mr. James has written himself out as far as the international novel is concerned, and probably as far as any kind of novel-writing is concerned.”
William Morton Payne, The Dial, 1884
“James’ denatured people are only the equivalent in fiction of those egg-faced, black-haired ladies who sit and sit in the Japanese colour-prints…. These people cleared for artistic treatment never make lusty love, never go to angry war, never shout at an election or perspire at poker.”
H.G. Wells, Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Ants of the Devil, and the Last Trump 1915
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
[I transcribe these posts directly from the reference books in which I find the, errors and all. This entry contains two: Hampton Fancher (not Fincher) wrote the screenplay for Blade Runner; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a novel, not a short story, by Philip K. Dick.)
“A bleak science fiction film (1982) directed by Ridley Scott, starring Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer, and set in Los Angeles in the year 2019. Ford plays a detective who is hunting down rogue androids or ‘replicants.’ The special police squads to which Ford belongs are called Blade Runner Units, whose job it is to ‘retire’ (i.e. execute) replicants. This is explained in the opening scrolling text, but no further explanation of the title is proffered.
‘The Blade Runner’ was originally the title of a very different science fiction story by Alan E. Nourse, where smugglers called ‘blade runners’ supply an impoverished society with medical supplies. William S. Burroughs wrote ‘Bladerunner (A Movie)’ (19790 after reading Nourse’s book, though the name is the principal similarity between the stories. Hampton Fincher, the screenwriter for Ridley Scott’s movie, found Burroughs’ book and Scott liked it enough to adopt the title for the screenplay, buying the rights for the use of the name.
The story of the film is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick (1928-82) entitle Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), which won that year’s nebula award.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“People in the past, in religious civilizations, had a real profound terror of apocalyptic catastrophe. What frightens us in our secular age is the computer breakdown that’ll occur if computers interpret the 00 of the year 2000 and a return to 1900.”
Conversations About the End of Time introduction, ed. Catherine David et al (1999)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, science literacy
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