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It just occurred to me that there's no Mysterious Quote item in the current Agora, so here goes. The rules of the game are simple. The person who's "it" posts a short quote from a published work -- fiction, non-fiction, prose, poetry, whatever. Other people try to guess the author of the quote. The first person to guess correctly is now "it" and gets to enter the next quote. Obviously, the quote should be by an author whom other people are at least somewhat likely to have heard of. Guessers should guess one author at a time. When you post a guess, it's nice to let us in on the reasoning behind it, so that we can all learn a bit more about literature. Since I'm posting the item, I'll go first. Hold on for a quote, coming within moments...
65 responses total.
Okay, here's the first quote. It's from a work of fiction by a
contemporary American author:
These are some of the things that Jeremy Pauling dreaded:
using the telephone, answering the doorbell, opening mail,
leaving his house, making purchases. Also wearing new
clothes, standing in open spaces, meeting the eyes of a
stranger, eating in the presence of others, turning on
electrical appliances. Some days he woke to find the
weather sunny and his health adequate and his work
progressing beautifully; yet there would be a nagging
hole of uneasiness deep inside him, some flaw in the
center of his well-being, steadily corroding around the
edges and widening until he could not manage to lift his
head from the pillow. Then he would have to go over
every possibility. Was it something he had to do? Some-
where to go? Someone to see? Until the answer came: oh
yes! today he had to call the gas company about the oven.
A two-minute chore, nothing to worry about. He knew that.
He *knew*. Yet he lay on his bed feeling flattened and
defeated, and it seemed to him that life was a series
of hurdles that he had been tripping over for decades,
with the end nowhere in sight.
By the way, if folks are having trouble guessing an author, it's
nice to give hints and/or additional quotes. So I'll do so if
nobody guesses this author in a couple of days or so.
(Oops, too many "so" words in that last sentence of mine.)
So?
Heh. Well, guess I'm just a style freak. Any guesses on the quote?
It sounds like almost a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye, but I don't think J.D. Salinger wrote a sequel.
Not J.D. Salinger. But like Salinger, this author has won major literary prizes.
Summer agora item 55, the Myterious Quote, has been linked to books 72.
Saul Bellow?
Not Saul Bellow.
Maybe it's time to give another quote. This one's from a different work
by the same author:
He was based in London, as usual. From there he would make
brief forays into other cities, never listing more than a
handful of hotels, a handful of restaurants within a tiny,
easily accessible radius in each place; for his
guidebooks were
anything but all-inclusive. ("Plenty of other books say how
to see as much of a city as possible," his boss had told him.
You should say how to see as little.") The name of Macon's
hotel was the Jones Terrace. He would have preferred one of
the American chain hotels, but those cost too much. The Jones
Terrace was all right, though -- small and well kept. He
swung into action at once to make his room his own, stripping
off the ugly bedspread and stuffing it into a closet,
unpacking his belongings and hiding his bag. He changed
clothes, rinsed the ones he'd worn and hung them in the
shower stall. Then, after a wistful glance at the bed, he
went out for breakfast. It was nowhere near morning back
home, but breakfast was the meal that businessmen most often
had to manage for themselves. He made a point of researching
it thoroughly wherever he went.
This quote is from a novel that was made into a movie.
(Hm. I entered the above in Backtalk, and the formatting looks weird, although it looked fine before I posted it. Sorry about that.)
I would guess that that is from The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler.
You would guess right. Anne Tyler it is. The first quote was from an earlier Tyler novel, _Celestial Navigation_. Mark's up.
OK, I'll look for something.
Sorry to take so long. Here's a quote: The English tutor's room was festooned with proofs of her forthcoming work on the Prosodic elements in English verse from Beowulf to Bridges. Since Miss Lydgate had perfected, or was in the process of perfecting (since no work of scholarship ever attains a static perfection), an entirely new prosodic theory, demanding a novel and complicated system of notation which involved the use of twelve different varieties of type; and since Miss Lydgate's handwriting was difficult to read and her experience in dealing with printers limited, there existed at that moment five successive releases in gallery form, at different stages of completion, together with two sheets in page- proof, and an appendix in typescript, while the important Introduction which afforded the key to the whole argument still remained to be written. It was only when a section had advanced to page-proof condition that Miss Lydgate became fully convinced of the necessity of transferring large paragraphs of argument from one chapter to another, each change of this kind naturally demanding expensive over-running on the page-proof, and the elimination of the corresponding portions in the five sets of revises; so that in the course of the necessary cross-reference, Miss Lydgate would be discovered by her pupils and colleagues wound into a kind of paper cocoon and helplessly searching for her fountain-pen amid the litter.
Gaudy Night, Dorothy l Sayers.. (whee, I love that book)
Yup, that was fast. maeve's up.
<g> you just happened to pick one of the series of books containing both the
ideal man and the only woman deserving of him. and *really* good dialogue.
hm..let me see what I can find..
"How smiles it to thee?" said Juss. "Be sure we shall find no better
place than this thou seest to dwell in until the snows melt and we may on.
For though it be summer all the year round in this fortunate valley, it is
winter on the great hills, and until the spring we were mad to essay our
enterprise."
"Why then," said Brandoch Daha, "turn we shepards awhile. Thou shalt
pipe to me, and I"ll foot thee measures shall make the dryads think they n'er
went to school. And Mirvash shall be a goat-foot god to chase them; for to
tell thee truth country wenches are long grown tedious to me. O 'tis a sweet
life. But ere we fall to it, bethink thee, O Juss: time marcheth, and the
world waggeth: what goeth forward in Demonland till summer be come and we home
again?"
Sounds like E. R. Eddison's _The_Worm_Ouroboros_, I think. (If that's right, I *deserve* it. I'm out of town for 4 days & miss _Gaudy_Night_ by a few hours ...)
well done :) it's an even trade
OK. This isn't the kind of thing I'd normally ever have come across, but I
happened to. We'll see if it's too obscure. I'm starting with a slightly
less-than-representative sample, though possibly a pretty memorable one:
I sat in my rocking chair, holding _The_Internet_Complete_Reference_,
by Harley Hahn. It is a large, thick paperback. On the front cover
are eight colors and five typefaces. I opened the book. In the
first lines of the "Introduction," I read this:
The internet is, by far, the greatest and most significant
achievement in the history of mankind. What? Am I saying
that the internet is more impressive than the pyramids?
More beautiful than Michelangelo's David? More important
to mankind than the wondrous inventions of the industrial
revolution? Yes, yes and yes.
I thought of how my love of books is challenged by books that
look like this and contain sentences like these. I closed it and
turned it over. More colors, more typefaces. I sighed, reminding
myself that I was looking for information, not wisdom. Also, tiny
numbers on the lower right corner reminded me that I had paid $29.95
for the book. I opened it again.
Hm... William Safire, perhaps?
Heh. No. Quite a different type of bird, I'd say. But given this particular snippet, I can see where that guess comes from, John. I'll quote more later.
No further guesses? I'll add one more hint: it's somebody much less
well-known than Safire.
Another quote, this one perhaps more typical:
Sara Thomas went with me to school yesterday to talk
to my writing classes about her writing and research work as
Conservation Chair for our local Sierra Club group. She also sat
in on the discussion of Thoreau in my nineteenth-century American
Literature class. As usually happens in discussions of Thoreau,
the talk turned to the subject of living in and with nature.
One student, whom I will call Beverly, said that when she and
her husband first moved to the country, they thought woodchucks
were adorable. Later, she began to see them as trouble. "They can
knock down an outbuilding by burrowing under it."
Eventually, she said, she and her husband (who has been
practicing transcendental meditation for twenty years) got used
to the idea of shooting them. In an attempt to demonstrate how
comfortable she felt about killing woodchucks, she held an imaginary
Ouzi and sprayed imaginary bullets out toward other members of
the class. "There are too many woodchucks," she said.
Young, red-haired Amy burst out. "Why not kill some people?"
No one spoke.
"I mean it," she said. "I'd just as soon kill a person as
an animal."
After a moment of utter silence, I said, "Well, let's look at
a passage in the _Norton_Anthology_...."
(This passage contains a couple of identifying marks.)
Assuming that the passage is non-fiction, the author appears to be a teacher of English literature. So far, no bells ringing...
It is nonfiction, or purportedly so. The author is indeed an English Lit
teacher. I didn't say the author is extremely well-known or anything,
though. I came across this book while browsing at a local bookstore, by
chance. Some of the contents were previously published in magazines, some
of which some grexies probably read. Let's try another quote.
A friend called to tell me that the Department of American Thought
and Language at Michigan State University needed a writing teacher.
I didn't know anything about the job, but one morning late in August,
instead of putting on shorts and a t-shirt and spending another day
puzzling over the garage door and adding tasks to my cardboard list,
I cleaned my fingernails with a small screwdriver, dressed in suit and
tie, and drove the fifty miles to East Lansing for a job interview.
A half hour before my appointment, I was walking on campus beside
the Red Cedar River. It was one of those big-cloud late-summer days
when a relieving coolness suggests both autumn and spring. A student
sat beneath a tree between the sidewalk and the river, reading. As I
passed, she looked up and smiled. Three months apart from my wife, I
was moved to a modest sexual fantasy. But that was suddenly overtaken
by a wave of desire that had nothing at all to do with legs and arms and
heaving chests. I wanted to know what book she was reading. I cast a
quick look back, but she was holding it so that I could not see the cover.
Other students sat by the river, talking or studying. One fellow
lay flat on his back with a blade of grass in his mouth, staring into
the trees. Finally I sat down, amazed that I had once had free time
like that. How had that life ever been lost?
Another clue or two there ...
(If nobody recognizes the author from this, I'll have to start quoting
from segments which were previously published.)
Hm, the author is somebody close to home. Still no bells ringing... <remmers ponders>
Did he write "Beer Cans by the Side of the Road?"
Could be. I'm not familiar with that. It's not included in this book, if so. So go ahead & guess by name ...
I will as soon as I can remember his last name. ;) He was *my* lit professor way back when. (First name is Ken.)
(This author's first name is not Ken.)
Oh, Ok, I was wrong then...
Let's try another quote. I'll pick one right from the beginning of the book,
so that anyone who picked it up, read a few pages, & put it down again has
a chance:
The problem becomes more complex when I read about varieties of
shallots in Rodale Press's _Guide_to_Vegetables_and_Fruits_. There are
Giant Reds, French Epicureans, and Yellow Multipliers. Do I have
Yellow Multipliers, and are they different from Damrosch's multiplier
onions? Finally I read this definition of shallots in Shepherd and
Ellen Ogden's _The_Cook's_Garden_: "Shallots are clumping onions,
a subvariety of the species _Allium_ _cepa_, which includes onions."
Does this sentence make as little sense as I think it does? I read it
again, slowly, wondering if one can be driven mad by a gardening book.
I guess there are no shallot scholars. Perhaps shallots haven't
been studied closely because they are usually bit players, part of a
sauce. There is even some confusion about how to pronounce their name.
Once I gave some to a friend who likes to cook.
"Oh," he said, "SHAL-lots. How did you string them together
like that?"
"It's easy to braid shal-LOTS," I said. "I'll show you how
sometime."
"Information I couldn't use," he said. "SHAL-lots are expensive."
"But it's easy to grow shal-LOTS," I said.
This was not a conversation, but a tussle over pronunciation.
Webster's says that the stress is on the second syllable. Shal-LOT,
but many people insist on pronouncing it SHAL-lot. It is interesting
to me that I pronounce my own surname with variable stress, sometimes
XXX-xxx, and sometimes Xxx-XXX.
Heh. I'd forgotten that that snippet ended with the author's surname!
Good thing I caught myself in time to X it out ...
Hm... Michigan background, preoccupation with language style, skepticism of the internet, two-syllable surname. That's a few clues. An author who seems to fit all of them is Sven Birkerts, author of _The Gutenberg Elegies_, so I'll guess him.
Not Birkerts (with whom I'm unfamiliar). I'll add that beyond substituting
Xs I didn't mess with the author's name in that quote. The name has 6 letters
and is divided into 3-letter syllables.
I'll post another snippet:
While I was continuing the weeding project this morning, I began
to feel, in the hairs on the back of my neck, *watched*. You're being
silly, I told myself, and went back to weeding. I stopped again
and lifted my eyes. Nothing in front of me, though that wasn't the
direction I felt watched from. I forced my sight down to the purslane.
I felt like purslane then, plucked out of my security. It occurred to
me what an odd concept a vacation is, really. One of the tasks of an
animal is to stay alert; it can't let up if it wants to stay alive.
I leaped up and whirled around, shocked to see a large creature
standing behind me.
Before leaving for Mexico, I noticed that one or more deer
was ravaging the gardens, nipping even tomato plants. So I built a
frame on which I hung an old pair of jeans, a red, sweaty t-shirt,
a plastic pot, and a hat. I know why the deer haven't returned: this
thing has come to life, like everything else in the garden. Dressed in
my clothes but thinking its own thoughts, my scarecrow was watching me.
(From here on out I'll try quoting from selections which had prior
publication in magazines. Quite certainly some grexies receive the
periodical in which this one first appeared; I'd guess that some of those
who routinely follow this item do so. Final clue for this time: the title
of the essay from which this is taken occurs in the bit just quoted.)
(Oh, I guess that's two clues: in case it wasn't moderately obvious by now,
I'm quoting from a book of essays.)
re #0: yeah, as the holder of the mystery quote when spring agora ended I just decided to let it quietly die as nobody was making any progress on guessing the author of the satirical piece about being "a Gael of the Gaels" and I had no idea how to speed up the process so that an answer would be reached before I left on vacation without totally giving it away -- I suspect the author I chose was too obscure. for the record, the quote was from Flann O'Brien (aka Brian O'Nolan, aka Myles na Gopaleen) and was taken from the work "The Poor Mouth." Other novels include "At Swim Two Birds", and "The Third Policeman".
<dave is getting a bit desperate>
The piece I last quoted was (the book's copyright page says) first published
in _Sierra_ magazine. This bit, from the title essay of the book, was first
published in _Country_Journal_:
_August_5_
Gravel trucks in the Turklins' driveway. Donna heard
a noise yesterday and saw the top of a tree in the Turklins' yard
waver and then go down with a crash. So this morning we walked over
to the property line to see what was going on.
Where the Turklins had had trees, specimen shrubs, and a lawn,
there was now a flat pad of gravel. A short, stocky man, about 55,
was watering the gravel. He had set up a sprinkler and turned on
the water. But the sprinkler wouldn't twirl; it just threw water in
one direction.
"Damn it!" he said, and went to shut off the faucet.
Two German shepherds barked and came toward us. Donna retreated.
I squatted down and held out my hand. They sniffed.
"They won't hurt you," my neighbor said and went to adjust
his sprinkler. Then he turned on the water again, and the sprinkler
turned, spraying water over the gravel.
"That's better," he said, coming up to me. "Name's Heinrich,
Frank Heinrich." He tore a couple of peaches from the Turklins'
old peach tree. "Have some fruit."
The sprinkler stuck, just as before. Frank grunted in
exasperation, threw his peach at the sprinkler, then went to turn
off the water.
"What are you up to here?" I said.
"They told me to water this down good. I'm going to put up a
hobby building here. I've always had one. You'll like it. It's a
nice design--lots of brick. Hell, you won't even be able to see it."
He turned the water on again.
Watching the sprinkler turn, he said, "This place is a mess.
The fellow who was here before--nice guy, I guess, but he just let
the place go to hell. Never trimmed anything."
I watched a white-winged bit of thistledown float from my land
over his gravel pad.
"Well, I prefer the natural look," I said.
<remmers suspects that he's unfamiliar with this author>
Dave: Waiting for the answer to your mystery quotes. I would like to add this one to my list of books to read.
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- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss