Bokelskere.no

The image in the glass seemed only vaguely familiar. I didn’t like my new tie, so I took off my coat and tried another. I didn’t like the change either. All at once everything began to irritate me. The stiff collar was strangling me. The shoes pinched my feet. The pants smelled like a clothing store basement and were too tight in the crotch. Sweat broke out at my temples where the hat band squeezed my skull. Suddenly I began to itch, and when I moved everything crackled like a paper sack.

Alt ved dem ga inntrykk av at de forholdt seg til resten av verden som et ennå ubekreftet rykte.

Man kunne i beste fall kalle henne fattigfornem, og da hadde man allerede gått langt i å bekrefte hennes selvbedrag.

“Mother would be terribly worried,” said Arnold.
“Worried?” said Arnold’s father. “She will probably die of a heart attack before morning, but then, what is life but a puff of smoke or a leaf or a candle soon burned out anyway?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t take life seriously,” said Arnold, “and don’t pretend, just because there are women around, that you are light-hearted. You’re the grim, worrying type and you know it.

He put the record on and sat on the edge of a very uncomfortable chair at quite a distance from Miss Goering. The needle was too loud and the march was the Washington Post. Miss Goering felt as uneasy as one can feel listening to parade music in a quiet room.

I took the steps down Angel’s Flight to Hill Street: a hundred and forty steps, with tight fists, frightened of no man, but scared of the Third Street Tunnel, scared to walk through it – claustrophobia. Scared of high places too, and of blood, and of earthquakes; otherwise, quite fearless, excepting death, except the fear I’ll scream in a crowd, except the fear of appendicitis, except the fear of heart trouble, even that, sitting in his room holding the clock and pressing his jugular vein, counting out his heartbeats, listening to the weird purr and whirr of his stomach. Otherwise, quite fearless

“That’s the problem with history; we like to think it’s a book – that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”

Courage isn’t contagious; fear is, of course.

‘I’ve met a remarkable woman. Oh, my friend, I don’t have the words to describe her – everything about her is Light.’
I thought he was exaggerating. Where there is light, there are shadows too.

No one knows with any certainty how many mines were buried in Angolan soil. Somewhere between ten and twenty million. More mines than Angolans, probably.

‘Not ex-agent, say rather ‘ex-gent’! Ex-exemplary citizen. Exponent of the excluded, existential excrement, an exiguous and explosive excrescence. In a word, a professional layabout. Very pleased to meet you.’

[…] munnen hans krummer seg i et lite smil som bærer i seg et helt liv, tenker jeg, og så smiler også jeg og tenker på mitt eget smil, på hva det sier, hva det avslører, på hvordan mitt liv ser ut derfra, fra den andre siden av smilet.

In 1976, America went rock & roll.

[Om Ramones]

“The general opinion is that they were incapable of making a record,” says Craig Leon, then an A& R rep at Sire Records. “And even if they did, no one would want to know about it.”

og:

[…] lead singer Joey, a mutant offspring of a giraffe and Cousin Itt […]

Rock & roll was never the land of the most popular kids in class, the big men on campus, the jocks. Whether it was the people who made it or the people who absorbed it, it was home to the geeks, outsiders, and misfits, and it had been that way from the start about two decades earlier. In that regard, the Saturday Night cast really were akin to rock stars.

No one thought they would win, not even the people who signed their paychecks. And who could blame them? After all, the time was early 1976, and for its televised entertainment, most of America was happy to watch Laverne & Shirley, a sitcom about blue-collar working girls, or The Six Million Dollar Man, a fantasy about a half-man, half-robot who made strange creaking sounds when he ran. The idea that those viewers would click to a channel for a show spotted with gags about pot, sadism, and Yippies seemed as silly as, well, a half-man, half-robot.

Even when that show, NBC’s Saturday Night, was nominated for five Emmys, it was hard to imagine its winning … [De stakk av med prisen for fire av de fem kategoriene de var nomert i (for writing, directing, supporting actor in a variety show (Chevy Chase), and, most remarkable of all, outstanding comedy-variety or music series)].