Blood-brotherhood practices were also a part of the traditional culture of Albania, where they were often employed by two men who needed each other's aid, especially in matters of feuding. To seal their alliance, the two men would prick their fingers with knives, and then mutually lick up each other's blood, or else mix the blood into a glass of rakia which both then drank. The men were then regarded as true blood-relations, their children forbidden to marry each other.

Nathan F. Miller and Jack Donovan, Blood-Brotherhood and Other Rites of Male Alliance (Kindle edition, 1697 of 4365)

What could my personal Internet sex ad read? I've seen my own name mentioned in other people's "dating" profiles - something like, "Come over and we'll watch a John Waters movie." I wonder how they'd respond if I answered, "I am John Waters and I've got all his films. I'm on my way!" Should I place a classified in Boxoffice, that great trade magazine for middle-American theater owners I've been subscribing to for decades? Maybe buried beneath all the ads for popcorn-machine parts and chewing-gum removal chemicals, my notice could read, "The Sultan of Sleaze seeks lunatic usher with good bod and a crooked smile. Let's rob a multiplex together and hole up at my place afterward. Send photos c/o Atomic Books, 3620 Falls Road, Baltimore, MD 21211." Go ahead, try answering my ad. I'll get your response. For real.

John Waters, Role Models (230)

Reeling backward, Paul experienced every moment splintered into a million shards of nanoseconds. Each event had been as carefully laid out as the puzzle pieces in a Chusuk mosaic. Either the plan had originally been designed in extravagant and impossible detail, or Fenring had enhanced the scheme with so many branch points and alternatives that all possibilities had intersected in this single crux point.

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, Paul of Dune (498)

Cigarettes were to Bette Davis what a bottle of Southern Comfort was to Janis Joplin or a half-unbuttoned black shirt is to Tom Ford: a mundane prop elevated by sheer force of personality to the level of a stylized autograph. Davis smoked eminently onscreen - Charlotte Vale's romanticized oral fixation in Now, Voyager; the pungent fumes of Margo Channing - but, if anything, she was ever better known in real life as the world's most famous nicotine addict. Only Winston Churchill and his cigars could come close, but Davis takes the prize if only because she inhaled.

Ed Sikov, Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis (332)

When he rolled off her body, Lucy huddled into one corner of the bed and began to cry. She felt so ashamed. And then she was shockingly surprised to hear Jules laugh softly and say "You poor benighted Eye-talian girl, so that's why you kept refusing me all these months? You dope." He said "you dope" with such friendly affection that she turned toward him and he took her naked body against his saying, "You are medieval, you are positively medieval." But the voice was soothingly comforting as she continued to weep.

Mario Puzo, The Godfather (331)

My point, and I do have one, is that having a vagina is not an accomplishment. It may be what makes you biologically female, but what does that have to do with feminism? Women had vaginas before they could vote or own property, and they didn't get those rights by pinning needle-felted vajayjays to their mantalets.

April Winchell, Regretsy: Where DIY Meets WTF (55)

She smiled grimly. The Islanders hadn't exactly taken over Great Achaea's Sicilian colony by landing and proclaiming liberation. They had turned it into a three-cornered exercise in massacre and countermassacre, as natives and slaves and Achaeans fought each other like crabs in a bucket. It reminded her of what she'd read about Haiti during the slaves uprising there in the 1790s, years of terror and madness. However discouraging the Nantucketers' problems looked, she didn't think the other factions felt particularly victorious, either.

S.M. Stirling, On the Oceans of Eternity (582)

Alice Hong's smile wasn't a snarl. It was bright and cheery, and far, far worse than that. She pulled a concealing cloak and mask off the figure standing beside her. Ian Arnstein took one look, and knew that however long he lived he would wish he hadn't. He quickly turned his eyes above Hong's head, concentrating on not humiliating himself by vomiting or fainting.

S.M. Stirling, Against the Tide of Years (426)

"How does it cock?" Ian asked. There was a steel claw arrangement hooked to the center of the wire string stretched across the shallow cord of the bow. He pulled at the string with a tentative hand. It was like a solid bar, immovable.

"That's a stiff draw," he said.

"Over three hundred and fifty pounds," the machinist said. "Brace the stock against your hip and hold the grip. Now put your other hand on the forestock, through that oval metal loop that sticks out beyond the wood. Feel that catch under your thumb? Press it down."

Ian obeyed. A steel lever came out of its slot in the forestock, hinged at the rear a few inches ahead of the trigger guard.

"Pump it back and forth, like the lever on a car jack."

There was a soft heavy resistance with every stroke, and the crossbow's string inched backward. At the sixth it clicked home near the trigger action and the rear sight, the heavy steel bow bent and ready.

S.M. Stirling, Island in the Sea of Time (63-64)

The cream of the jest was, of course, that Lady Delia de Stafford was delicately beautiful in an entirely feminine way and a complete clotheshorse and never wore anything less than the height of fashion - female fashion. Since she was cheerfully ready to lie the truth out of Creation about it (being a secret witch, as well, and therefore not in awe of Christian sacraments), her naively sincere confessor was among the few at court who didn't at least unofficially know or guess. Tiphaine's own chaplain had been carefully chosen for complaisance, guaranteed by the files Sandra had on him.

S.M. Stirling, The Sunrise Lands (139)

Cornbury, however, did the democracy a good turn by forthwith drowning the memory of its shortcomings in the torrent of his own follies and misdeeds. He was very nearly an ideal example of what a royal governor should not be. He was both silly and wicked. He hated the popular party, and in all ways that he could he curtailed the political rights of the people. He favored the manorial lords and rich merchants as against the commonalty; but he did all he could to wrong even these favorites when it was for his own interest to do so. He took bribes, very thinly disguised as gifts. He was always in debt, and was given to debauchery of various kinds. One of his amusements was to masquerade in woman's garments, being, of all things, inordinately proud that when thus dressed he looked like Queen Anne. He added bigotry to his other failings, and persecuted the Presbyterians, who were endeavoring to get a foothold in the colony; he imprisoned their ministers and confiscated their little meeting-houses. In this respect, however, he was but a shade worse than the men he ruled over; for the Assembly had passed a law condemning to death all Catholic priests found in the colony,—a law of which the wickedness was neither atoned for nor justified by the fact that the same measure of iniquity was meted out to the Protestants in the countries where the Catholics had control. He appropriated to other uses the moneys furnished by the Assembly to put New York harbor into a state of defense; the result being that a French war-ship once entered the lower bay and threw the whole city into terror. Finally, the citizens of all parties became so exasperated against him as to clamorously demand his removal, which was granted in 1708; but before he left the colony he had been thrown into prison for debt. In dealing with him the Assembly took very high ground in regard to the right of the colony to regulate its own affairs, insisting on the right of the popular branch of the government to fix the taxes, and to appoint most of the public officers and regulate their fees. Resolutions of this character show that during the score of years which had elapsed since the downfall of the Stuarts, the colony had made giant strides toward realizing its own rights and powers. With all their faults, the Leislerians had done good service in arousing the desire for freedom, and in teaching men—if often only by painful example and experience—to practise the self-restraint which is as necessary as self-confidence to any community desirous of doing its own governmental work.

Theodore Roosevelt, New York, (VII, 15)

He was about to continue when he felt himself struck speechless at seeing the two girls embracing the dead bodies of the monkeys in the tenderest manner, weeping over their bodies, and filling the air with the most doleful lamentations. "Really," he said to Cacambo, "I didn't expect to see so much generosity of spirit." "Master," replied the knowing valet, "you have made a precious piece of work of it: you have killed the lovers of these two ladies." "Their lovers, Cacambo! You must be joking; it cannot be; I can never believe it." "Dear sir," replied Cacambo, "you are surprised by everything; why do you think it is so strange that in some countries monkeys obtain the good graces of ladies? They are one-quarter human, just as I am one-quarter Spanish." "Alas!" replied Candide, "I remember hearing my master Pangloss say that such things used to happen in former times; and that from these mixtures arose centaurs, fauns and satyrs; and that many of the ancients had seen such monsters; but I took all that for fables." "Now you should be convinced," said Cacambo, "that it is very true; and you see what is done with those creatures by people who have not had a proper education. All I am afraid of is, that these same ladies will get us in real trouble."

Voltaire, Candide; Gita May, intro. and Henry Morley, trans. (62)

The widest definition of the term sodomy remained that found in Burchard of Worms’s Decretum, which had unsystematically and uncritically noted every possible act, suggesting that the confessor had the widest latitude in imposing penance. Many of the deeds mentioned, like the use of a dildo, mutual masturbation, anal entry, sex between brothers, and oral sex, which may be regarded as acts against nature because they frustrate conception, are rarely mentioned in the other penitentials. Furthermore, since Burchard quotes many conflicting sources and the possible penalties are so varied, the confessor is given virtual free rein to use his discretion. The penalties range from ten days for masturbation to fifteen years for sexual relations between brothers; the penalty for lesbian acts is typically lower than for homosexual acts between men.

Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period (64)

Night Owl: "Adrian, I'm sorry, I don't buy this hoax invasion story. Come on, what are you really up to?

Ozymandias: "HHAHHH. Very well. Once more: I engineered a monster, cloned its brain from a human psychic, sent it to New York and killed half the city."

Night Owl: "Adrian, that's bullshit..."

Rorschach: "No. Telling truth. Listen to voice. He did it."

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (XII, 9)

Today, I cook almost every meal for myself, except on weekends when I visit friends. With rare exceptions I cook with simplicity and without a lot of folderol. The side effects are rewarding: I have the pleasure of creation. I feel at home in my bacholor quarters with those fine odors coming from the kitchen. I control my weight by preparing just enough to give my stomach and my taste buds pleasure. And there is also an economic gain in cooking precisely the amount to meet my pleasure and needs.

Henry Lewis Creel, Cooking for One Is Fun (ix-x)

By the time I got to me sister's, it was dark. I poured myself a Scotch and then, like always, Amy brought out a few things she thought I might find interesting. The first was a copy of The Joy of Sex, which she'd found at a flea market and planned to leave on the coffee table the next time our father visited. It was the last thing a man would want to find in his daughter's apartment - that was my thought anyway - but then she handed me a magazine called New Animal Orgy, which was truly the last thing a man would want to find in his daughter's apartment. This was an old issue, dated 1974, and it smelled as if it had spent the past few decades in the dark, not just hidden but locked in a chest and buried underground.

David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames (173)

Except, that is, for those reckless folk who felt that, as the end of the world was nigh and all would soon perish, they might as well live for the present and spend what money they had on pleasure. Within the confines of Walsham this usually meant passing long hours in the alehouses which were liberally sprinkled across the parish. The wanton, both men and women, drank excessively, gambled recklessly, and enjoyed each other's intimate company. This crowd of seemingly carefree folk, who were more numerous than might be imagined, even found it diverting to make jokes about death and the pestilence. However, there was general agreement among this dissolute crowd that fat Simon went too far when he cleared Alice Pye's packed tavern by suddenly falling off his bench, screaming and gesturing to a large swelling on his upper thigh. The horrified carousers who glanced at him writhing on his back on the floor, and did indeed see a great lump in his crotch, ran screaming from the tavern. When Simon chased after them into the road laughing and exposing his huge erect cock, he was given a sound beating and had the door locked against him. For many years after the regulars at Pye's alehouse took grim delight in telling of the prank of Simon Greathorn, as he was henceforth dubbed.

John Hatcher, The Black Death: A Personal History (140)

As a lifestyle once kept between a select few and that now has many coming out of the freezer, being a vegetarian in New York is not unlike being gay. Vegetarian restaurants and options abound. I have the same number of veggie friends as I do gay friends. Because it's so common and often even hip to be a vegetarian, it's become socially acceptable to poke fun at us. Being a vegan, of course, is more like the dietary equivalent of being a transsexual. Acceptance isn't quite as contagious as it should be.

Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake (208-09)

Litigation over the Waco and Northwestern stretched on for three years. One effect of the battle was that it made Hetty a folk hero among California farmers who hated Huntington. A group of San Franciscans sent her as a gift a .44 caliber revolver, along with a holster, belt and cartridges, and a note promising that if she ever came to visit, they would turn out ten thousand strong at the depot to greet her. For Hetty, accustomed now to being on the receiving end of unflattering articles about her personal idiosyncrasies, this was an unfamiliar gesture of embrace. She relished it. She loved to tell her friends about the gift, and also about the time, during the height of the battle, that Huntington came to see her at her office at the Chemical Bank. No doubt he went with the idea of intimidating her. During the course of the conversation, he threatened that if she and Ned (who remained in Texas) didn't relent, he would see to it that Ned was tossed into a Texas jail. Hetty's eyes narrowed on Huntington. "Up to now, Huntington, you have dealt with Hetty Green, the business woman. Now you are fighting Hetty Green the mother. Harm one hair of Ned's head and I'll put a bullet through your heart!" She made a motion to the revolver on her desk (perhaps the one sent to her from California). Huntington, surprised and alarmed, left the office so quickly that he forgot to take his silk hat. He sent an assistant for it the next day.

Charles Slack, Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon (126)

New Year's Day of 1877 found Miss Day, after the time-honored custom of the age, holding open house in her family's home in midtown Manhattan. The front drawing room was crowded with May family and friends in well-cut morning coats and Prince Alberts toasting the incoming year in a variety of potables passed on silver trays by impeccable house footmen superintended by a stylish English butler. Fragrant cigar smoke wreathed the gas fixtures and conversation was, perhaps, a little lounder than was allowed by the proprieties at other times, but New Year's was still a special holiday in New York and, in deference to an Old Dutch custom that had the sanction of long observance, even the most staid and respectable people took a glass more than was strictly advisable.

Lucius Beebe, The Big Spenders (136)

So the Sabbatai Savi religion came to an end, and survives only in the tiny sycretic sect known in Turkey as the Donme, which conceals a Jewish loyalty within an outward Islamic observance. But had its founder been put to death, we should be hearing of it still, and of the elaborate mutual excommunications, stonings and schisms that its followers would subsequently have engaged in. The nearest approximation in our own day is the Hasidic sect known as Chabad, the Lubavitcher movement once led (and according to some, still led) by Menachem Schneerson. The man's death in Brooklyn in 1994 was confidently expected to produce an age of redemption, which it so far has not. The United States Congress had already established an official "day" in Schneerson's honor in 1983. Just as there are still Jewish sects who maintain that the Nazi "final solution" was a punishment for living in exile from Jerusalem, so there are those who preserve the ghetto policy which maintained a watcher at the gates, whose job it was to alert the others if the Messiah arrived unexpectedly. ("It's steady work," as one of these watchmen is supposed, rather defensively, to have said.) Surveying the not-quite and might-have-been religions, one could experience a slight feeling of pathos, were it not for the constant din of other sermonizers, all of them claiming that it is their Messiah, and not anybody else's, who is to awaited with servility and awe.

Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (172)

Stare at Winona Ryder as she stands in the theater lobby, talking into a cell phone and looking at a poster of a movie she's not even in. Admire her black trench coat but wonder why she's got it on in this spring weather that's not even a little bit cold. Wonder what designer it is. Think about how it would be funny if you just went over and snapped her phone shut in mid-conversation, standing between her and the poster she is trying to look at, blocking her view, and how you'd say, "Girl, you're interrupted." It would at least be funny to you.

Dave White, Exile in Guyville (211)

Pope John Paul II created more saints than all his predecessors of the past several centuries put together, and he had a special affinity with the Virgin Mary. His polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he survived an assassination attempt in Rome, and attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima: 'A maternal hand guided the bullet.' One cannot help wondering why she didn't guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserved at least a share of the credit; but perhaps their hands, too, were maternally guided. The relevant point is that it wasn't just Our Lady who, in the Pope's opinion, guided the bullet, but specifically Our Lady of Fatima. Presumbaly Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Medjugorje, Our Lady of Akita, Our Lady of Zeitoun, Our Lady of Garabandal and Our Lady of Knock were busy on other errands at the time.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (56)

The next morning at the Stanford Court Hotel, where Jim's own court was held each day, I bandaged his feet (devastated by lack of circulation) giving his devoted servant Marion Cunningham a rest from her daily chore. His robe had been left open where it "fell," exposing a belly as vast as Yosemite's El Capitan, which swept down to reveal what he could have been proud to reveal were Jim not the exception to the rule that large fingers are also a measure of the family jewels. Jim did have very big hands. This was a morning ritual, exposure to which I had long since become familiar and with which I'd grown confortable over the years I'd known him. After a little fondle, we talked about my career, about Alice, about Marion, about Gourmet, saying it was fine not to make money. We talked about Delmonico's and the time, a hundred years earlier in New York, when the great restaurants listed the provenance of their ingredients on their menus. And about the great William Niblo in his Old Bank Coffee House in 1814 serving ingredients with their origins called out on the menu: "Bald Eagle shot on the Grouse Plains of Long Island." And The Four Seasons in New York, where Jim had consulted starting in 1959.

Jeremiah Tower, California Dish: What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution (100-101).

"When a nicely dressed gentleman would come in for lunch alone," remembered Claude Le Gall, "he told us to go out and check his car to see if the tires were Michelins. That wouldn't be proof, but it could be an indiciation, anyway. Sometimes, when we weren't sure which car he had come in, he would have us going through his coat pockets in the vestiare, to see if the keys might identify the car."

Rudolph Chelminski, The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine (151)

There was only one answer. The moment that followed was akin to the one in desert-island tales, when the poor shipwrecked souls decide they have to resort to cannibalism, or perish. We looked down into the pools of hollandaise sitting in those foot wells, those disgusting, fish-juice-stained foot wells, and without a word, we nodded to each other, solemnly acknowledging what must be done. That we each took a bucket, got down on out knees, and with cupped hands began bailing the hollandaise from the car floor back into the buckets. Glancing up at each other we knew that we had both come to the same unspoken decision - that as long as we didn't actually touch the unspeakable floor of Lake Hollandaise, dislodging its bacteriological horrors, we could live with ourselves.

Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, "Our Big Brake," in Don't Try This at Home, Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman, eds. (212-13).

The weekend crowd embraced the Dean & DeLuca lifestyle so readily that it was sometimes more then the store's founders could handle. Their original counterman, the expert cheesemonger Steven Jenkins - who claims he was the first to apply the word "artisanal" to cheese - recalls a busy Saturday in the early years when a few staffers failed to show up, forcing a furious DeLuca to join Jenkins behind the counter. "It was total chaos, and Giorgio was slicing some preservative-free bacon, and he lopped off the tip of his thumb," Jenkins says. "He started cursing and rushed off to the clinic on Spring Street. Once he was gone, I decided to merchandise the piece of thumb, which still had fingernail on it. I put it on a little piece of marble in the display case with some rosemary and thyme and put up a sign that said 'Gaetano Crudo'"-crudo meaning "raw" in Italian, Gaetano being DeLuca's middle name. Fortunately, no one asked to taste the product, though Jenkins says a few people inquired as to "what the hell it was."

David Kamp, The United States of Arugula (207-08)

The grocery store was another great place to play the dating game. My mother always let me unload the cart, so I pretended all the groceries were going to a party. As the conveyer belt moved my mother's purchases to the cashier, I would match every food item up with his or her partner. Ketchup always went to the party with Mustard, of course. Aspirin went with Vitamins, Orange Juice loved Milk, and Spam had a thing for bologna whose first name was O-S-C-A-R. Produce items tended to stick with their own kind, but Lettuce was a rebel. She was dating Catalina French dressing in spite of the protestations of her sisters, the Roma Tomatoes, who thought Celery was a much better match for her. Lettuce would not be swayed and always attended parties with her French lover.

Todd Pozycki, "The Lives and Deaths of Buffalo Butt," in From Boys to Men, Ted Gideonse and Rob Wiliams, eds. (90)

"I'm a free-market advocate and a staunch libertarian," [Charlie Trotter] says. "I don't feel like I'm part of the New American cuisine movement. I have no tolerance for the left-wing embrace of food politics and things like that. I think you can support farmers' markets and that you don't have to do it with a Berkeley sensibility. Don't get me wrong - I'm not on the other end of the spectrum. But everybody who's against genetically modified foods and big corporate food production, I think they could be a little more open-minded in how they look at these things."

David Kamp, The United States of Arugula (328-39)

We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in at every opportunity to "conceptualize." Hardly a decision was made without drugs. Pot, quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, Seconal, Tuinal, speed, codeine and, increasingly, heroin, which we'd send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet City to get. We worked long hours and took considerable pride in our efforts - the drugs, we thought, having little effect on the end product. This is what the whole life we were in was about, we believed: to work through the drugs, the fatigue, the lack of sleep, the pain, to show no visible effects. We might be tripping out on blotter acid, sleepless for three days and halfway through a bottle of Stoli, but we were professionals, goddamnit! We didn't let it affect our line work. And we were happy, truly happy, like Henry V's lucky few, a band of brothers, ragged, slightly debauched warriors, who anticipated nothing less than total victory - an Agincourt of the mind and stomach.

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential (123-24)

At half-past eight the work stopped very suddenly. We were not free till nine, but we used to throw ourselves full length on the floor, and lie there resting our legs, too lazy even to go the the ice cupboard for a drink. Sometimes the chef du personnel would come in with bottles of beer, for the hotel stood us an extra beer when we had had a hard day. The food we were given was no more than eatable, but the patron was not mean about drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a plongeur is not given two litres he will steal three. We had the heeltaps of bottles as well, so that we often drank too much - a good thing, for one seemed to work faster when partially drunk.

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (65)

I didn't know what to say. My boss was telling me that, to do my job, I now needed to go home and have sex. It has already been a long, long day of carnalities. The meat truck was arriving in a few hours. It seemed unlikely that I had the stamina for more carnality and making butcher love to my wife for the rest of the night and reporting for work before dawn with no sleep. Maybe I didn't have the constitution for this life after all. But, you know, I did the best I could. I didn't want to let the guild down.

Bill Buford, Heat (249)

Hengist and Horsa, two brothers, possessed great credit among the Saxons, and were much celebrated both for their valour and nobility. They were reputed, as most of the Saxon princes, to be sprung of Woden, who was worshipped as a god among those nations, and they are said to be his great grandsons; a circumstance which added much to their authority. We shall not attempt to trace any higher the origin of those princes and nations. It is evident what fruitless labour it must be to search, in those barbarous and illiterate ages, for the annals of a people, when their first leaders, known in any true history, were believed by them to be the fourth in descent from a fabulous deity, or from a man exalted by ignorance into that character. The dark industry of antiquaries, led by imaginary analogies of names, or by uncertain traditions, would in vain attempt to pierce into that deep obscurity, which covers the remote history of those nations.

David Hume, The History of England: from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to The Revolution in 1688, Volume I (17)

This is what computer manuals looked like in 1961 (click to enlarge):



Paul Siegel, Understanding Digital Computers (205)

"Damnit, Bucky. Last time that goateed butterball was in here, he lectured me - me - for a full fifteen minutes on why I needed to intervene in that vegetable case down in Georgia. Christ in a refrigerator, that woman'd been in a coma for fifteen years. She had a flatter brain scan than a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy. And he wanted me to issue an executive order to plug her back in. Who appointed Gideon fucking Payne the conscience of the nation anyhow? Hell, he killed his own goddamn mother, didn't he?"

Christopher Buckley, Boomsday (114)

At the same time, though, I have to confess that the thought crossed my mind, not once, but several times, that he might drown out there and, though I didn’t linger over this notion, I know that it didn’t bother me. I didn’t care about him, and I knew there was nothing that could connect me with his apparent accident. For that next hour or two, I felt elated at having done what I wanted to do and, if I gave thought to it at all, the only thing I was certain of was that, if Malcolm Kennedy drowned, I would be free of him. Not that I ever considered this a seriously possibility. He wouldn’t drown, because nobody drowned in a twelve-foot-deep pit of water, a few miles from the town.

John Burnside, "The Limeroom," in Granta 96: War Zones (41)

I should like to say for the record I am not a “Bonesman” or indeed a member of any of the exclusive “secret societies” – Book and Snake, Scroll and Key, Snake and Eggs, the Leatherstockingmen, the Yale School of Forestry, etc. Due to their open advocacy of cloak-wearing and their great windowless clubhouses known as “tombs” (many of them carved out of a single block of marble), these societies have prompted much fanciful speculation about bizarre masturbation rituals and hidden plans for world domination.

John Hodgman, The Areas of My Expertise (144)

A representative mid-nineteenth-century traditionalist was being asked to judge the work of a "wholly new" order of craftsman. His reply to the first letter (implied by her second letter to him – his letters do not survive) must have told her that the "Alabaster" poem lacked form, that it was imperfectly rhymed and its metric beat spasmodic, a judgment which would have been shared at the time by most of the fraternity of literary appraisers. The unorthodoxy of melodic pattern controlled by key words, wherein the parts express whole, the altering of metric beat to slow or speed the nature of time itself (the theme of the "Alabaster" poem), give it dimensions which he was not equipped to estimate. He was trying to measure a cube by the rules of plane geometry.

Thomas H. Johnson, editor; The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (vi)

You get that same beseiged fraternal feeling in a Republican campaign office. There is none of that M*A*S*H ensemble-cast witticizing one-upsmanship you get in the typical Democratic office full of young liberal arts grads. Nobody wears T-shirts that mean something, and nobody looks like an extra from the Czech set of XXX. As I would later find out, most Republicans hate "cool," particularly the older women ("They all think they're so cool and artistic," griped one woman as she watched Fox coverage of Democratic delegates arriving in Boston). Many of the parent-volunteers I met are especially bitter because they think that cool is what liberals use to lure their children away from their early convictions. Which they might very well be right about, of course.

Matt Taibbi, Spanking the Donkey (226)

Of course, I exaggerate [about the aesthetic trends of the 1970s]. At the time, everything seemed normal. Sure, things were a little...brown, a tad more orange than they'd been before. Yes, we knew our clothes were ridiculous when we wore them, but we all knew this wouldn't last. We'd all be nuked into a big long smear of red jam or dumped into a dystopian Soylent Green world, eating pressed wafers made of grandparents and kelp. Crank up the Foghat and get out the ZigZags, boys; let's live it up while we can. The '70s ended in 1977 with the Sex Pistols and New Wave; when college kids started wearing skinny ties and thrift-store Rat Pack jackets, they shot the '70s dead. The corpse remained standing and chatting for a few more years, but the battle was won. If you think the '70s were dumber than the '80s, either you weren't there or you weren't paying attention.

James Lileks, Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s (10)

My favorite thing to buy is underwear. I think buying underwear is the most personal thing you can do, and if you could watch a person buying underwear you would really get to know them. I mean, I would rather watch somebody buy their underwear than read a book they wrote. I think the strangest people are the ones who send someone else to buy their underwear for them. I also wonder about people who don't buy underwear. I can understand not wearing it, but not buying it?

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (229)

I began staying late at the office. Until ten, eleven at night. I would have given both testicles and possibly an arm to see Uma stick her finger down her throat and then throw up a sandwich. Or maybe? Do something really Hollywood, like dump a bag of coke out on the coffee table and snort it up with a hundred-dollar bill. But none of this happened. The most exciting thing Uma ever did was to pick up the phone, read a script, or have a cigarette.

Augusten Burroughs, Possible Side Effects (152)

During the mid-1990s the recognized churches, particularly the Church of England, moved from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism. Rosie has gone further and has virtually abolished the Second Person of the Trinity together with His cross, substituting a golden orb of the sun in glory, like a garish Victorian pub sign. The change was immediately popular. Even to unbelievers like myself, the cross, stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man's ineluctable cruelty, has never been a comfortable model.

P.D. James, The Children of Men

Galinda soaked up the architecture of Shiz. Here and there, mostly in protected college yards and side streets, the oldest surviving domestic architecture still leaned, ancient wattle-and-daub and exposed stud framing held up like paralytic grannies by stronger, newer relatives on either side. Then in dizzying succession, unparalled glories: Bloodstone Medieval, Merthic (both Least and the more fantastical Late), Gallantine with its symmetries and restraint, Gallantine Reformed with all those ogees and broken pediments, Bluestone Revival, Imperial Bombast, and Industrial Modern, or as the critics in the liberal press put it, High Hostile Crudstyle, the form propogated by the modernity-minded Wizard of Oz.

Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (75-76)

It had probably been a mistake to have sex with him but he was undeniably attractive in an average sort of corn-fed white boy way and he had caught her at a susceptible time. He was the average perfected, the ordinary made super-ordinary, the boy next door raised to the Platonic ideal of boy-next-doorness, and as a result you saw him on giant bilboards everywhere in that city dedicated to idealization, his flaxen hair and innocent eyes, his face free from history or pain, he wore alligator shirts here and Stensons there and his underpants in a third place and on all of the billboards he was wearing his super-averagely attractive, super-averagely goofy smile, his body glistening like a young god's, le dieu moyen, the average god of average folks, who had not been born or grown up or suffered life in any way at all, but had sprung like Athena fully formed from the aching head of some middle-of-the-road Zeus.

Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (35)

Sat on the terrace. The Fatima, who steals food at an alarming rate, yesterday gobbled a large slice of hashish cake left purposefully in the cupboard. An hour or so later she fell silent and morose. Today she arrived two hours late and explained rather bleatingly that she had been malade. ‘That will teach you to eat my food you thieving bitch,’ I said with a cordial smile. ‘Oui monsieur,’ she said slinking into the kitchen. Because she came two hours late, she appeared to imagine that she should stay till three instead of one. At 2.30 I said ‘Fatima, you may go.’ I pointed to my watch. She didn’t understand. M. Yellow-jersey turned up as she was leaving. She looked very disdainful. I see her as having a towny accent and looking askance at Yellow-jersey’s countryfied manners.

Joe Orton, The Orton Diaries, edited by John Lahr (220)

The Night Shift was associated with murders. The hustlers who had killed the "Junk Food Professor" had been regulars. A police sketch of a Hispanic man was posted to the cashboxes; he had stabbed another patron to death. The populace of this "theater" was perpetually stoned on anything and everything - alcohol, grass, angel dust, MDA, acid, mescaline, Christmas Tree speed pills, and heroin-cocaine speedballs. Before it was padlocked by the Board of Health, the Night Shift was a cesspool of psychosis.

Bill Landis, Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger (245-46)

I think that the conclusion we must draw from this movie is obvious. All actresses should be lobotomized as soon as they are put under contract. It would save such a lot of anguish for them, for their agents and for their directors and, in spite of the surgeon's exorbitant fees, in the end it would save the studios a lot of money.

Quentin Crisp, How to Go to the Movies (47-48)

"Oh, judgemental and superior." Max says. He takes a bite of Pop-Tart and a swig of cold coffee. "To regard others critically and to feel that one's own situation, decisions, or actions are in some way more noble, or simply more comme il faut, than theirs, is one of the great satisfactions of a reflective life."

Paul Kafka-Gibbons, Dupont Circle (235)

George
...and try to keep your clothes on, too. There aren't many more sickening sights than you with a couple of drinks in you and your skirt up over your head, you know...

Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (17)