Adversaria (39)
‘After all, there had to be some adversity in the middle of all that sunshine and money. And people like Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Thomas Mann and those kind of people weren’t completely talking to themselves in the bathroom for lack of friends’ —Eve Babitz (Eve’s Hollywood, 12%)
‘More and more, as he got older, my father’s defenses against the world were anger and eating, and often he indulged them concurrently’ —Keith Waldrop (Light While There Is Light, 19%)
‘But to view August Schumann’s infatuation with the Night Thoughts as an aberration is to ignore the power of Young‘s writing and the extraordinary sensitivity characteristic of the period. As the title implies, Young’s Night Thoughts focus on death and melancholy, and similar uncommonly gloomy topics relished by the public of the day. In an age fond of sentiment, audiences longed to be swept away by their reading’ —Eric Frederick Jensen (Schumann, p. 5)
‘So you can change the boundaries of heaven, just so long as you don’t really believe in it or anything that anyone tells you. And whatever you do, don’t give the Pope one cent unless he is extortionate and your army isn’t big enough to fight him’ —Eve Babitz (Eve’s Hollywood, 44%)
‘I have a weakness for this kind of world view, these constructions of a passionate will that refuses to compromise with actuality and lifts no finger to save appearances. I’m fond of them, though I’ve lost the talent to believe’ —Keith Waldrop (Light While There Is Light, 52%)
‘Mendelssohn was suspicious of critics, may of whom he regarded as inept dilettantes. The perception of Schumann as a dilettante was one that, to a certain extent, Mendelssohn always retained’ —Eric Frederick Jensen (Schumann, p. 111)
‘Sins are the ones you have to give up, not the ones that don’t make any difference’ —Eve Babitz (Eve’s Hollywood, 52%)
‘…all stories about mental illness follow the same arc. They are, essentially, stories of haunted houses’ —Rachel Aviv (Strangers to Ourselves, 38%)
‘The unacknowledged basis for much of this criticism [of Schumann’s later work] is a deep-seated misunderstanding of and aversion to mental illness, an approach characteristic of the nineteenth century. But as the twentieth century drew to a close, there was an attempt to reevaluate the compositions of Schumann’s final years, and to view them in a less biased and more objective manner’ —Eric Frederick Jensen (Schumann, p. 270)
‘(I used to wonder why, no matter what we’ve done or not done, we are always, all of us, so dead set on feeling guilty. Until it occurred to me that guilt is another word for potentiality: to sin is to cast a shadow. Lord, be merciful.)’ —Keith Waldrop (Light While There Is Light, 97%)
‘A lot of people have}t read Anthony Powell—it amazes me. He’s much less leaden than John Updike and he’s a downright soufflé compared to just about anyone’ —Eve Babitz (Eve’s Hollywood, 77%)
‘Charles Dickens is perfect for accidental hit-bottom. Anthony Trollope is too, but he’s so divine that it’s a shame to waste him just because you’re in trouble’ —Eve Babitz (Eve’s Hollywood, 77%)
‘And last, I think, but not least is Henry James. When I grow up, that’s what I want to be. Henry James is just right, not too simple like Dickens, not too impossible like Proust—just right. And my cousin tells me (she’s reading that enormous biography of him that just came out) that he was always going out to dinner and to parties. So, when I grow up, I can still have fun.’ —Eve Babitz (Eve’s Hollywood, 79%)