more on Hecate County

funny and enlightening section in The Milhollands and Their Damned Soul about book clubs, starting with

The Readers’ Circle continued to flourish, and other “book clubs” of the kind were started to sow and reap in the rich field it had opened.

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...the Russian had long spells of illness, during which he would write Flagler for more money, and, if he failed to get it, send his wife, who would wait in the reception room for hours and then so desolate Flagler with the cadences of her low-pitched Musorgskian voice that he would give her another check.

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What Warren ought to do is to publish one of those deadly symposiums asking various literary men to make statements on the situation. Symposiums are reassuring : the point is that if you propound a question and print enough answers to it — it doesn’t matter how absurd or contradictory they are -- people somehow get the impression that the problem has been satisfactorily dealt with.

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“Personally, I’m absolutely sick of the whole damned literary racket — when you come right down to it, what is it but huckstering in a lot of greasy daydreams?

very funny section on Treasure Seekers

also indexes of first lines of poems are sometimes absolutely amazing
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One Sunday when a Soviet official was there, I absolutely had the illusion that Ed Blackburn had three gold front teeth
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three which in one sentence: In any case, we went to his parties, which were sometimes small dinners on weekends at which we would meet his guests, sometimes enormous evening blowouts to which everybody in the neighbourhood was invited.
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For a hack like me, Hollywood’s all right — but you’ve still got your integrity” — he used this word as if it meant virginity — “and, by God, you hang on to it!

Галка из Реймса / The Jackdaw of Rheims / The Ingoldsby legends / Cruikshank / The Legend of Hamilton Tighe

это продолжение Memoirs Of Hecate County