November 8, 2013 Quote Unquote Beat It By Sadie Stein ISHIGURO My first summer after leaving school I worked for the Queen Mother at Balmoral Castle, where the royal family spend their summer holidays. In those days they used to recruit local students to be grouse beaters. The royal family would invite people to shoot on their estate. The Queen Mother and her guests would get into Land Rovers with shotguns and whiskey and drive over bits of the moor from shooting butt to shooting butt. That’s where they would aim and shoot. Fifteen of us would walk in formation across the moor, spaced about a hundred yards apart in the heather. The grouse live in the heather, and they hear us coming, and they hop. By the time we arrive at the butts, all of the grouse in the vicinity have accumulated and the Queen Mum and her friends are waiting with shotguns. Around the butts there’s no heather, so the grouse have got no choice but to fly up. Then the shooting starts. And then we walk to the next butt. It’s a bit like golf. INTERVIEWER Did you meet the Queen Mother? ISHIGURO Yes, quite regularly. Once she came round to our quarters, frighteningly, when there was only me and this other girl there. We didn’t know what on earth to do. We had a little chat, and she drove off again. But it was very informal. You’d often see her on the moors, though she herself didn’t shoot. I think there was a lot of alcohol consumed and it was all very chummy. —Kazuo Ishiguro, the Art of Fiction No. 196
November 5, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Election Day By Sadie Stein “All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.” —Henry David Thoreau
November 1, 2013 Quote Unquote Novena By Sadie Stein No sun—no moon! No morn—no noon—No dawn—no dusk—no proper time of day. No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member— No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds!—November! —Thomas Hood, from “No!”
October 31, 2013 Quote Unquote Mischief Night By Sadie Stein “I told a story a month ago, for Halloween, about the terrible pranks that were played in Lake Wobegon just before I came along that I never got to participate in. Things such as pushing over an outhouse when some sterling citizen was in it, tipping it forwards so it fell on the door and the poor man had to crawl out the hole. I never did this. It existed for me only in my uncle’s stories, but the stories were severely edited. So I had to reconstruct what happened when an outhouse was tipped, how it must have felt to the man inside and what a pleasure it must have been to the tipper.” —Garrison Keillor, the Art of Humor No. 2
October 30, 2013 Quote Unquote Surprised by Joy By Sadie Stein “Soybeans really need an uplift, being on the dull side but, like dull people, respond readily to the right contacts.” —Irma S. Rombauer, The Joy of Cooking
October 28, 2013 Quote Unquote Vile Bodies By Sadie Stein INTERVIEWER Whom do you read for pleasure? WAUGH Anthony Powell. Ronald Knox, both for pleasure and moral edification. Erle Stanley Gardner. INTERVIEWER And Raymond Chandler! WAUGH No. I’m bored by all those slugs of whiskey. I don’t care for all the violence either. INTERVIEWER But isn’t there a lot of violence in Gardner? WAUGH Not of the extraneous lubricious sort you find in other American crime writers. INTERVIEWER What do you think of other American writers, of Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner, for example? WAUGH I enjoyed the first part of Tender Is the Night. I find Faulkner intolerably bad. —Evelyn Waugh, the Art of Fiction No. 30