TNCOM, #17: Bruce Lee

(Via.)

TNCOM, #16: Arthur Conan Doyle

This wealth of Doylean material offers opportunities for happy reappraisal, however. One is struck by the fact that, despite his reputation as a journeyman prose stylist (in 2003, John le Carré could identify “no fine turns of phrase, no clever adjectives that leap off the page”, and Conan Doyle himself once declared his writing to be “at its best but plain English”) and despite the preponderance of clichés – brows are always furrowed, hearts heavy, daylight broad and smiles wry – Conan Doyle was capable of virtuoso phrasemaking. A man’s neck in The White Company is “corded like the bark of the fir”, the ancient house in “The Japanned Box” has a smell “as from a sick animal which exhaled from the rotting plaster”, and the narrator of “The Sealed Room”, suspicious of the city, complains of “the red brick tentacles of the London octopus”. In “How It Happened”, a motor car represents “great, roaring, golden death”, in “The Parasite” the fist of a man who has struck another is “puffed up, with sponge-like knuckles” and in “When the World Screamed”, Conan Doyle’s fourth account of Professor Challenger (“Challenger the super-scientist, Challenger the arch-pioneer, Challenger the first man of all men”), the handwriting of its hero is as “a barbed wire fence”.

TNCOM, #15

He fell backward as the ball bounced harmlessly out of reach, his 6-foot-9 frame wriggling on the lawn, like a giant child imprinting an angel in grass instead of snow. He stood slowly, gingerly, as if requiring a cane, then basked in the applause. —"Isner Wins Match That Wouldn't End," NYT

TNCOM, # 14: Web, Shell, Veil, Cat, Mouse

Web of Shell Companies Veils Trade by Iran’s Ships
Cat-and-Mouse Game — Fleet Sidesteps U.S. Sanctions on Military Imports

—NYT

TNCOM, #13

1. Ah, who am I kidding. I can’t hate the internet. The internet is just salt. A flavor enhancer for real life. Makes everything taste more flavorful, intenser, more like itself. This is my brilliant metaphor. The internet makes my boredom more boring, my short attention span shorter, and my vanity more desperate for affirmation. Also, too much of it and it’s gross and makes you crave a refreshing beverage.
—Scott David Herman, erasing.org

TNCOM, #12

She smiled again, like someone had offered her fifty cents for her right arm.
—James Tiptree, Jr., "Mama Come Home"

TNCOM, #11: Raccoon

Sometimes a stupid child would tie a firecracker to a crayfish or a frog just once, and light the fuse. Or give a piece of sugar to a raccoon, which in its odd fastidiousness would wash that sugar in a brook till there was nothing left. —Renata Adler, Speedboat

The only animal which has remained lingering in my memory is the raccoon. I watched it for a long time as it sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own. —W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

TNCOM, #10

He established that, while it might be rare for a man to be driven insane, little was required to tip the balance. All that was needed was a slight shift, and nothing would be as it formerly was. In these deliberations, Casanova likened a lucid mind to a glass, which does not break of its own accord. Yet how easily it is shattered. One wrong move is all that it takes. —W.G. Sebald, "All'estero," in Vertigo

TNCOM, #9

[M]y handwriting looks like a ball of string a kitten has played with. —Donald E. Westlake, Thieves Dozen

(Levi's post has many more from this book.)

TNCOM, #8

8. They have invented an entirely new form of boredom, like the worst moments of being in the boy scouts at one's preparatory school. —Anthony Powell, Venusberg

(Via Levi)

TNCOM, #7

—It's as smooth as oil.
—I don't know why, but I hate all comparisons involving oil.

—From Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura

(reblogged from The Dizzies)

TNCOM, #6

6. From everything that Toshi Yukawa could later determine, the original file was uploaded to one of those illegal Brigadoon sites that appeared, drew several thousand ecstatic hits, from six continents, then disappeared, traceless, twelve hours later, compressing the whole arc of human history into a single day: rough birth, fledgling colonies, prospering community, land grabs and hoarding, shooting wars, imperial decay, and finally, much gnashing of teeth after the inevitable collapse, which seemed to happen faster each time through the cycle. The kind of site that spelled music t-u-n-z. —Richard Powers, "Modulation," in The Best American Short Stories (2009)

TNCOM, #5

5. The first sentence of "The End of My Life in New York" is one of the very few sentences that grew up to be a short story, although it took a very long time to do this: for many years it languished on my hard drive, like one of those adult children who live in their parents' basement. —Peter Cameron, in "Writing the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010"

TNCOM, #3 & 4

3. How strange, it came to me then, are the patterns of human experience! The meaningless life lines that start out singly and so simply from here, from there, draw slowly toward one another over a period of time, until finally they come together, mesh, to form into a design that never could have been guessed at, foretold, by what had gone before. And the completed fabric is the sum of all the threads that have gone into it.
—Cornell Woolrich, The Black Angel (1943)

4. Life, on the larger scale, though full of effects which are the direct results of causes, is apparently plotless. It is too complex. There has never yet appeared in life a causal relationship involving even 80 incidents and 34 strands that can be as unified as one artificially created. And it is this artificial relationship, this purely fictional web-work plot, this bit of life twisted into a pattern mathematically and geometrically true, that fills the gaps in one's spirit which rebels at the looseness of life as it apparently is.
—Harry Stephen Keeler, The Mechanics (and Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction (1928)

TNCOM, #2

2. Ivy and Wendell's building, a narrow brownstone washed down like a bar of soap, was far to the west, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. —Kirstin Allio, "Clothed, Female Figure" (in The Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010)

The New Catalogue of Metaphors

A while back, I wrote in the L.A. Times:

What are metaphors for? Before finding fame as the 20th century's greatest compiler and theorist of weird news, not to mention one of its most audacious and influential autodidacts, Charles Fort (1849-1932) was a journalist and pulp-story writer who amassed inventive ways to describe one thing in terms of something else. Among the few to glimpse these scraps was no less a literary titan than Theodore Dreiser, who was Fort's early magazine editor and steadfast champion. Bowled over, Dreiser offered to buy the odd collection from Fort. "They are better than any thesaurus," he raved, "a new help to letters."

And...........this sort of demands to be its own blog, but I was thinking, why not set down, here, in the spirit of Fort, a New Catalogue of Metaphors? By which I also mean simple old great similes.

Let's kick it off with one from Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary:

1. The bench was empty, the square was green and vacant in the early light like one long uninflected vowel.