Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on a Dismal Autumn Twilight in Czarist Russia)

“A crowd of coach-men and pilgrims was sitting in Uncle Tikhon's tavern. An autumn downpour with raging wet winds that lashed across their faces had driven them to seek refuge there. The tired, drenched travelers sat listening to the wind, dozing on benches by the wall….

“Outside the tavern door splashes of rain flew around the dim, grimy lantern. The wind howled like a wolf, yelping, as if to tear itself away from its tether by the door. From the yard came the sound of horses snorting and hoofs thudding in the mud. It was dank and cold.”—Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), “In Autumn,” originally printed in 1883, reprinted in The Undiscovered Chekhov: Forty-Three New Stories, translated by Peter Constantine (1999)

Well, with this kind of terrible weather—not to mention life under the Czars (and later, under the Communists, then under Putin)—you can understand that the tavern patrons are a miserable, even sodden, bunch.

But one in particular—a man of about 40, wearing “a wrinkled summer coat covered with mud, calico pants, and rubber galoshes without shoes”—has his own personal reasons for begging Uncle Tikhon for a drink.

This was not one of the stories that Chekhov had collected in his life. But already you can see, from this short description, how he was learning to write concisely but vividly. A year away from earning his medical degree, he had also learned to observe the outward signs that pointed to a human being’s physical and mental condition.

Quote of the Day (Washington Irving, on Ichabod Crane)

“The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.” — American fiction writer, biographer and diplomat Washington Irving (1783-1859), “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, edited by Charles Neider (1975)

The image accompanying this post shows Will Rogers as Ichabod Crane and Lois Meredith as Katrina Van Tassel, in the 1922 silent film The Headless Horseman.

At five feet 11 inches, Rogers was not the beanpole imagined by Irving. But the lovable humorist was already well launched on a career that would make him one of Hollywood’s most highly paid stars before dying in a plane crash in 1935, so that made him a box-office draw.

Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on ‘Dracula’ as a ‘Victorian High-Tech Thriller’)

“Dracula is a Victorian high-tech thriller, at the cutting edge of science, filled with concepts like dictation to phonographic cylinders, blood transfusions, shorthand and trepanning. It features a cast of stout heroes and beautiful, doomed, women. And it is told entirely in letters, telegrams, press cuttings and the like. None of the people who are telling us the story knows the entirety of what is going on. This means that Dracula is a book that that forces the reader to fill in the blanks, to hypothesize, to imagine, to presume. We know only what the characters know, and the characters neither write down all they know, nor know the significance of what they do tell.”— English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films Neil Gaiman, “On The New Annotated Dracula,” in The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (2016)

The image accompanying this post shows Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But come on—after all these years and so many millions of viewings on screen and TV, who doesn’t know that?

Song Lyric of the Day (Kris Kristofferson, on Love, ‘The Last Thing to Go’)

“Love is the last thing to go…
And it bought us the freedom
to fall into grace
On our way
to our place in the sun.”—Country music singer-songwriter and actor Kris Kristofferson (1936-2024), “The Last Thing to Go," from his This Old Road CD (2006)

The image accompanying this post of Kris Kristofferson, live at Roskilde Festival 2013, was taken July 6, 2013, by Morten Jensen.

Quote of the Day (Lena Dunham, Defining ‘Brat’)

“Brat is walking down the street with headphones on and eyes closed, knocking over passersby and refusing to say you're sorry.”— American writer and director Lena Dunham, “Shouts and Murmurs: A Guide to Brat Summer,” The New Yorker, Sept. 2, 2024

When I was a youngster, if I heard my father refer to me as a “brat,” the last thing I would do was revel in the term.

But this year—and specifically, around mid-to-late summer—“brat” had acquired far different connotations than that of a rotten little kid who needed discipline.

Now, according to Russell Falcon of the Los Angeles TV station KTLA, a “brat summer” “encourages enjoying life as much as you can in spite of the struggles you’re facing.” Or, put another way, according to another online dictionary site: It means “confidently rebellious, unapologetically bold, and playfully defiant.”

Heck, in the groundswell of euphoria following Kamala Harris’ ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket, the Veep was being described as “brat.”

Well, baby boomers are likely to react to this new bit of slang with the same impatience voiced by Regina George to one of her breathless hangers-on in Mean Girls: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!”

“Brat” has been hard-wired into boomer consciousness for so long that dislodging it is probably out of the question now. Maybe that is partly why the 50-64 and 65+ age cohorts are also the most immune to the candidacy of Ms. Harris.

I’m afraid for many of these older voters, “brat” is going to fall as flat as “phat.”

(The image accompanying this post, of Lena Dunham at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival premiere of The Russian Winter, was taken Apr. 20, 2012, by David Shankbone.)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on ‘Beauty Visible to Us in the Landscape’)

“Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed from us all our lives. The gardener sees only the gardener's garden. Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more.”—American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), “Autumnal Tints,” The Atlantic, October 1862

I took the image accompanying this post in late October 2008.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thornton Wilder, on Faith)

“Faith is an ever-widening pool of clarity, fed from springs beyond the margin of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day (1967)