Tag Archives: literary oddities

Samuel Johnson on a Visit to the Library

Posted on January 28, 2019 | Leave a comment

“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.”

Samuel Johnson

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged ,

Rotten Reviews: Common Sense by Thomas Paine

Posted on January 28, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Shallow, violent, and scurrilous.”

William Edward Hartpole Lecky, A History of England in the 18th Century 1882

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged , ,

The Devil’s Dictionary: Cartesian

Posted on January 28, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Cartesian, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum Cogito ergo sum—whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum—’I think that I think, therefore I think that I am’; as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged , ,

Rotten Reviews: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Posted on January 25, 2019 | Leave a comment

“That a book like this could be written–published here–sold, presumably over the counters, leaves one questioning the ethical and moral standards…there is a place for the exploration of abnormalities that does not lie in the public domain. Any librarian surely will question this for anything but the closed shelves. Any bookseller should be very sure that he knows in advance that he is selling very literate pornography.”

Kirkus Reviews

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference

Tagged ,

Power of 100

Posted on January 24, 2019 | Leave a comment

“A hundred is a ubiquitous element of power and finance. If ancient Greek gods were angered the could be appeased with the bloodbath of hetacomb—the sacrifice of 100 oxen. A hundred was also long considered the largest group able to be governed by the command of one man. So there were 100 soldiers under the command of a Roman centurion; 100 slave-soldiers under the command of a mameluke emir; and, following the Roman model, there were 100 senators (two for each of the fifty states) in the US Senate. More prosaically, 100 units comprise all the major currencies of the world—be the yuan, yen, dollars, euros, rials, rupees, dinars, or pounds.”

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged ,

Rotten Rejections: Affairs of the Heart by Malcolm Muggeridge

Posted on January 22, 2019 | Leave a comment

“…the author’s writing deteriorates in a peculiarly striking fashion as he lays about him with him with his satirical club… a very mystifying and unsatisfactory product for the American market.”

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference

Tagged ,

The Algonquin Wits: Robert Benchley on the Challenges of the Humorist

Posted on January 19, 2019 | Leave a comment

“In Milwaukee last month a man died laughing over one of his own jokes. That’s what makes it so tough for us outsiders. We have to fight home competition.”

Robert Benchley

Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference

Tagged ,

Rotten Reviews: On Ezra Pound

Posted on January 18, 2019 | Leave a comment

“A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”

Gertrude Stein, in Dictionary of Biographical Quotation 1978

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged , ,

Love Game

Posted on January 18, 2019 | Leave a comment

Scratch * Duck * Love * Nil

“Sport makes much use of the concept of zero, loading it with a multitude of names. There is scratch in golf, coined from ‘scratching out’ any trace on a score card. In cricket, a batsman who gets zero scores a duck–the slang for a bird that lays an egg, the shape of a zero. And that is the origin, too, of the word ‘love’ in tennis, corrupted from the English trying to copy the French for egg–oeuf. Football, meanwhile, favours the Latin nil, from nihil–nothing.”

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.

Leave a comment

Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged , ,

Rotten Reviews: Paradise Lost by John Milton

Posted on January 17, 2019 | Leave a comment

“…do you not know that there is not perhaps one page in Milton’s Paradise Lost in which he has not borrowed his imagry [sic] from the scriptures? I allow and rejoice that Christ only appealed to the understanding and affections; but I affirm that after reading Isaiah, of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, Homer and Virgil are disgustingly tame to me and Milton himself barely tolerable.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letters 1796

“I could never read ten lines together without stumbling over some Pedantry that tipped me at once out of Paradise, or even Hell, into the schoolroom, worse than either.”

Edward Fitzgerald, Letters, 1876

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged , ,