Whino Rhino

[Louis] Leakey, with his wife Mary, camped season after season at the edge [of Olduvai Gorge], walked down into the gorge looking for bones, and shared a water hole with various large animals. "We could never get rid of the taste of rhino urine," he said, "even after filtering the water through charcoal and boiling it and using it in tea with lemon."

--from "Olduvai & All That," in The Aztec Treasure House: New and Collected Essays, by Evan S. Connell, p. 31.

Stop that Adman!

It was awful, it was for an ad for some company selling doors over the Internet. I'd never read anything so asinine in my whole life. The idea was that me and this guy who's supposed to be my boyfriend are in an apartment having this huge fight -- I mean he's shouting at me and insulting me and just being a bastard for about two minutes, until I storm off and slam the door behind me. And then the slogan is, "Doors. It's good to leave."

--From An Evening of Long Goodbyes, by Paul Murray, pp. 9-10.

And You Thought Sci-Fi was Boring

Also cited is Erasmus Darwin, the poet-scientist-physician, grandfather of the naturalist, inventor of the steering wheel, discoverer of photosynthesis -- and a corpulent libertine who played the trombone to his flowers, cut a semicircle out of his dining-room table so that he could get closer to his food, and sketched the world's first known schematic drawing of a hybrid ramjet-rocket engine ...

As a novel, Frankenstein is a pretty punk piece of work. The good doctor is a crashing bore, the monster is no better, the book is a lot of talk, and at the end Mary [Shelley] can think of no denouement more compelling than to assemble her cast at the North Pole, where they close our little drama with another rousing gabfest. Nonetheless, a fragment of all this chin music is not without its interest. The thing that qualifies the book as the first modern science-fiction novel (though it is not, as I will shortly astound you by demonstrating, the first science-fiction novel) is electricity ...

The history of science fiction usually begins here, with Frankenstein. The history is wrong ... the world's first sci-fi author was a certain Lucian of Samosata, a Romanized Syrian whose two lunar-space operas, Icaromenippus and True History, by some incredible fluke escaped the torching of the Alexandrine Library by the Emperor Theodosius in 391. Writing in the second century, Lucian took his protagonists to the moon ... On the moon, we learn, the poor have wooden phalluses and the phalluses of the rich are made of ivory, which sounds perfectly plausible to me.


--"Worlds Enough: Travels in an Adolescent Genre," by L.J. Davis, Harper's, January 2002, pp. 71-2.

Ars Longa, My Ass

"If Olga and Ezra [Pound] had not sought out Vivaldi's manuscripts, edited them, and, most crucially, microfilmed them, we too would not be familiar with him. Bach admired him, but after Vivaldi's death (in 1741), the world forgot him. FBI agents were the first to hear him in America in our time: the shortwave broadcasts that Pound made from Rome in World War II were preceded by Vivaldi concerti."

--Guy Davenport, Harper's, January 2002, p. 63.

Parenting

Their house looks as though a glacier with a Toys "R" Us store inside it has moved through, leaving pools of Legos and abandoned stuffed bears.

--The Time Traveler's Wife, p. 333

Breaking In

For those of you who want to break into show business, here's an excellent primer to help you out. Click on the buttons to learn how to "act convincingly." These skills might even come in handy during the holidays.