Gene Hackman in Get Shorty (though really this is Elmore Leonard’s joke, adapted slightly from his novel): “I once asked this literary agent what kind of writing paid the best. He said: Ransom notes.”

More lemonade, from Eddie Izzard on The Riches: “You gonna give up? You gonna just call it a day? No! No, no, that’s not what we do! No, we rally! We turn it all around! Because we’re Americans! We take those grenades and we turn ’em into lemonade!”

“Forecasters say what’s left of the depression is moving into colder waters and they expect it to dissipate Friday night or Saturday.”

At Fat Bob’s recently I try a pint of Blue Moon draft beer. No idea what I’m ordering. It arrives and is alarmingly cloudy. (Because unfiltered, I later learn.) Garnished with an orange wedge. Tastes orangey. A little disgusting at first. But it turns out to pair bizarrely well with the sweet house barbecue sauce the pulled-pork sandwiches are always monsooned in. Plus the beer’s flavor and dishwaterish turbidity make me think of Bob Hope’s tough-guy saloon line: “I’ll have a lemonade … in a dirty glass.”

Mark Strand, “The Monument”:

We are the enemies of pastoral violence, lovers of cold; the body recumbent like The Monument is for us the goodest good; heavy allusions to weather are just another load to us. Give us a good cigar, a long ash that we can speculate on. And plenty of smoke. Ho hum. Now give us a glass of Spanish brandy. Give us a blank wall that we might see ourselves more truly and more strange. Now give us the paper, the daily paper on which to write. Now give us the day, this day. Take it away. The space that is left is The Monument.

Bob Dylan, “Mississippi”:

Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way

James Richardson: Lake: earth’s idea of sky.

I’ve been reading Tom Stoppard’s Voyage, play one of his Coast of Utopia trilogy — the recent stage productions of which have been winning great accolades from all quarters — and am embarrassed that I find it so homeworky and unfollowable, so fragmented, stilted-seeming. I eventually give up and put it down (will return at some point) and take up his 1988 Hapgood, which is riveting and brilliant, a steel trap of writing, a pleasure to read, like the other older plays of his I’ve read. Wondering if a play’s quality can even really be judged when it’s in book form, when pored over by the solitary reader. Though many plays are great fun as book-reads, I guess it must be inevitable that other plays can seem flat and confounding on the page but then roar into life when performed, once actors are up there sawing the air and dining out on the scenery and volleying the text back and forth in shouts and whispers, interpreting the lines and characters in ways the reading ear wouldn’t think to do. Not sure this holds water. Playwriting is a written art that is absolutely opaque to me. I can get my mind around the mechanics of short fiction, long fiction, poetry, essays; they are all things I’ve dabbled amateurishly in or could at least imagine attempting. But I have no idea how plays are built, what makes them work, where I would even begin.

William Gibson, Neuromancer:

The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic explosions. Molly’s fletchettes, at twenty rounds per second. The boy coughed once, convulsively, and toppled across Case’s legs … She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger. He saw that her hands were sticky with blood. Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.

Jon Stewart, swine flu segment on The Daily Show, 27 April 2009:

Now as you probably know, the outbreak began south of the border, in Mexico, where it has claimed 149 lives so far. Ranking it last on the list of things that can kill you in Mexico. — Number one, of course, still bullet flu.

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales:

She greeted him with a sawed-off smile.
He brought her fragile face into focus
and shot her full of questions.

Stephen Hawking, Black Holes and Baby Universes, doing kind of a Woody Allen joke:

You would have to fly around the world four hundred million times to add one second to your life; but your life would be reduced by more than that by all those airline meals.

(Related: Please wake me for meals!)

V. Kilmer in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: “Go. Sleep badly. Any questions, hesitate to call.”

Charles Simic: In poetry, to quote a bluesman who calls himself Satan, one must “learn to do wrong with respect.”

Last night we go to the States for some errands, one of which is to buy me some running shoes. Just for walking — why not? Also as prep for an upcoming urban-peripatetic trip or two. Been wearing “lifestyle” canvas sneakers for so many years my feet have forgotten what athletic sneakers feel like. The support, the cushioning, the springy levitation. I wear the new sneaks on the walk down to the Y this morning to start breaking them in and it’s almost embarrassing, the things are basically hitting endorphin-gusher shiatsu pressure points up and down the undersides of my feet the whole way. After a few blocks each step makes me feel I’m being caressed behind the ears, behind the eyes, with the maharajah’s harem’s finest feathers. Like McClanean post-flight toe-fists on high-pile hotel carpet. My god, there is gel beneath my arches. The sneaks’ firm mouths are doing like Kegel exercises around my ankles, squeezy-squeezy. How erotic! I am positively blushing and weak-kneed and tingly-spined by the time I hit the perv-swarmed locker room. These are not expensive shoes; they were among the most boring models on the wall. Apparently my feet are just that starved after X years of casual ambulatory neglect. In the pool, freestyling, barefoot and horizontal and kicking, my feet are still ga-ga, registering phantom water-sneaker. They crave gravity and verticality and a walkable destination, any at all.

Heart-wrenching fragment found in an untitled text file on my hard drive:

Arturo Descant, Pragmastic Inspecutioner

“Mononucleotide!” he contorted, his exfoliant vestiges wassailing in the ersatz bipolar proscenium.

“I most empirically disappropriate your transcendentalizing mastications,” she proliferated swarthily. “Infect, I descry your intoxicant defecations and succinctly hope you are intrinsically and unruly collated.”

“But madam!” he astringently associated, correlatively elucidating his concupiscent enfilade with a detergent fresco. “I impale you — proselytize the coefficient vituperations of your rubicund unctions!”

The end?