« TT: Almanac | Main | TT: Percy, Max, and me »
June 3, 2004
TT: Poor Terry's almanac
A reader writes:Since you often blog about the process, I'd be interested in how you accumulated the almanac quotes. And I bet some of your other regulars would like to know, too.
Glad to oblige. I noticed long ago that the standard books of quotations didn't contain very many of my favorite quotes (other than the obvious ones that everybody likes). It used to be my practice to dogear the relevant pages of my copies of the books in which those quotes appeared, but that was both inefficient and aesthetically displeasing. Then, fifteen years ago, I purchased at more or less the same time my first personal computer and a copy of H.L. Mencken's New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources, a wonderful book about which I wrote as follows in The Skeptic:
[Mencken] had long kept a card file of quotations for his own use, and in 1932 he had gotten the idea to expand it into a full-scale dictionary; Charles Angoff worked on it with him for two years, after which he carried on alone. Though not generally recognized as such, it is one of his major achievements, comparable in scope to The American Language and no less personal in its method. "The Congressman hunting for platitudes to embellish his eulogy upon a fallen colleague will find relatively little to his purpose," he warned in his preface, and many readers have thus concluded that he compiled the New Dictionary of Quotations with tongue in cheek. Like Dr. Johnson's dictionary, it is wrongly remembered for its eccentricities, among them an extensive selection of invidious remarks about the Jews and a sprinkling of unattributed "proverbs" that sound as though they had been coined by the editor himself. In fact, it contains a vast number of well-chosen, well-organized, accurately attributed and dated quotations on every imaginable subject, ranging widely among both familiar and arcane sources. The only important author missing from its 1,347 pages is Mencken himself, who told Time that "I thought it would be unseemly to quote myself. I leave that to the intelligence of posterity." Yet the New Dictionary bears the dark stamp of his skepticism on every page, and at least one critic, Morton Dauwen Zabel, was quick to grasp the fact: "The impression soon becomes inescapable that what Mencken has produced as a ‘Dictonary of Quotations' is really a transcendent ‘Prejudices: Seventh Series,' a ‘Notes on Humanity,' or more expressly ‘Mencken's Philosophical Dictionary, Written by Others.'"
The New Dictionary gave me the idea to use my computer to keep a searchable electronic commonplace book, organized by topic. My thought was that if I was scrupulous about sourcing each entry as I added it to the file, I'd someday have a book-length manuscript à la Mencken that would require no further research to be publishable. Since then, I've piled up some 31,000 words' worth of quotations that have caught my eye, each one sourced and filed under such Fowler-like subject headings as "Be Careful What You Ask For," "Kisses, Two (And a Variant)," "Opening Lines, Great," and "Right Between the Eyes." On average, I add a quote or two to my commonplace book each month, and I use it in my own work at least once a week.
When I started "About Last Night" last August, it occurred to me that it might be amusing to post a quotation each day, which is how the almanac came into being. At first, the quotations were all drawn from my commonplace book, but in recent months I've also started to post snippets from whatever book I happen to be reading at the time. In addition, the readers of "About Last Night" occasionally send me favorite quotes of their own, and if they're sourced and checkable (and sometimes even when they're not), I post the ones I like.
I hasten to point out that the authors of "About Last Night" do not necessarily agree or disagree, in whole or in part, with each day's almanac entry. To be sure, I usually do, at least up to a point, but not always. (Our Girl in Chicago has nothing to do with the almanac, by the way. Instead, she posts her own "fortune cookies.") Similarly, the almanac is occasionally meant to provide oblique commentary on current events, but not normally. As a rule, my sole purpose in posting each entry is to give you something to think about--and to let you do your own thinking. Judging by my incoming e-mail and the comments that pop up from time to time in the "About Last Night" referral log, I'd say the almanac is one of this blog's most popular features. I know I like it.
If you feel the same way, I encourage you to send me your favorite quotations (plus sources), in particular those having something to do with the world of art. Your contributions, like your e-mail, are and will always be greatly appreciated.
Posted June 3, 2004 12:31 PM
