Quote of the Hour: REMF, a Few Wars Earlier

An army in line-of-battle awaiting attack, or prepared to deliver it, presents strange contrasts. At the front are precision, formality, fixity, and silence. Toward the rear these characteristics are less and less conspicuous, and finally, in point of space, are lost altogether in confusion, motion and noise. The homogeneous becomes heterogeneous. Definition is lacking; repose is replaced by an apparently purposeless activity; harmony vanishes in hubbub, form in disorder. Commotion everywhere and ceaseless unrest. The men who do not fight are never ready.

 - Ambrose Bierce, "One Officer, One Man," p.101 in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs

Quote of the Hour: Policeman's Progress

His last beat had been in the heart of tempestuous Whitechapel, where his arms had ached from the incessant hauling of wiry inebriates to the station, and his shins had revolted at the kicks showered upon them by haughty spirits impatient of restraint. Also, one Saturday night, three friends of a gentleman whom he was trying to induce not to murder his wife had so wrought upon him that, when he came out of hospital, his already homely appearance was further marred by a nose which resembled the gnarled root of a tree.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, "The Romance of an Ugly Policeman," p.202 in The Man With Two Left Feet

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 4, 2026

I was ordering a movie from the library this week - Knives Out, which I just saw six years after everyone else - and I got a book as well. This is it.

Seek You is a 2021 graphic novel by Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Wanting Only This. I have been thinking of it as new, but I guess I've been thinking that for longer than I thought. The subtitle is "A Journey through American Loneliness," which I suppose explains what it covers as well as any longer explanation I could give here.

I'm expecting to read it quickly - that's the deal with library books - so I'll see what I think of it then.

Quote of the Hour: Just a Place

The Rossmore Arms was a gloomy pile of dark red brick built around a huge forecourt. It had a plush-lined lobby containing silence, tubbed plants, a bored canary in a cage as big as a dog house, a smell of old carpet dust and the cloying fragrance of gardenias long ago.

The Graysons were on the fifth floor in front, in the north wing. They were sitting together in a room which seemed to be deliberately twenty years out of date. It had fat overstuffed furniture and brass doorknobs, shaped like eggs, a huge wall mirror in a gilt frame, a marble-topped table in the window and dark red plush side drapes by the windows. It smelled of tobacco smoke and behind that the air was telling me they had had lamb chops and broccoli for dinner.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake, p.118 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: The Joys of Enthusiasms One Will Never Pursue

I thought how delightful it would be to make a study of the trade in marble and rare stones, tracing the course round the Mediterranean cities of the porphyry galley from the hottest quarries in the world on the Red Sea coast; a trade so active that practically no porphyry has been quarried since and all the pedestals and urns of Napoleonic bric-a-brac were made, so I am told, of stone cut in the time of Caligula. But this is the kind of thing one thinks about only when one is traveling; all the time that I am abroad I make resolutions to study one thing or another when I get back - Portuguese, map-making, photography; nothing ever comes of it. Perhaps it is a good thing to preserve one's ignorance for old age.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days, pp.383-4 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: How it Works

Corker looked at him sadly. "You know, you've got a lot to learn about journalism. Look at it this way. News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead. We're paid to supply news. If someone else has sent a story before us, our story isn't news. Of course there's color. Color is just a lot of bull's-eyes about nothing. It's easy to write and easy to read but it costs too much in cabling so we have to go slow on that. See?"

 - Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, p.80

Quote of the Hour: And Then What Happened, Fella?

...[I] went over to my hotel, thinking about that neat white bed. But it was nearly eight o'clock, and my stomach needed attention. I went into the hotel dining room and had that fixed up.

Then a leather chair tempted me into stopping in the lobby while I burnt a cigar. That led to conversation with a traveling railroad auditor from Denver, who knew a man I knew in St. Louis. Then there was a lot of shooting in the street.

We went to the door and decided that the shooting was in the vicinity of City Hall. I shook the auditor and moved up that way.

I had done two-thirds of the distance when an automobile came down the street toward me, moving fast, leaking gun-fire from the rear.

 - Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, p.97 in Complete Novels

Quote of the Hour: Your New Office

There was a desk you could've landed Sea Kings on (but the legs were grooved with scratches) and the sort of chair that emperors used to sit on; a huge leather-covered sofa out in the western prairies; the wall opposite the door was one huge window, with a view of all the kingdoms of  the earth; against the north wall, enough raw computing power to send a manned probe to Andromeda. If you lived in a room like this, sooner or later you'd be overwhelmed by the urge to be discovered sitting in your chair stroking a big fluffy Persian cat and drawling, "We meet at last, Mr Bond."

 - Tom Holt, Barking, p.70

Quote of the Hour: One in Every Family

Aunt Dot was a clever, impetuous driver, taking the sharpest bends with the greatest intrepidity. A brilliant and unorthodox improviser, she usually managed to work her way out of the jams she not infrequently got us into.

 - Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond, p.22

Quote of the Hour: What a Star Needs

As a loner, I count as my two most precious rights those that allow me to choose the periods of my aloneness and allow me to choose the people with whom I will spend the periods of my not-aloneness. To a film star, on the other hand, to be let alone for an instant is terrifying. It is the first signpost on the road to oblivion. Obviously an actor cannot choose the people with whom he will work, or when or how he will work with them. He goes to work at a time specified by the studio. He spends his working day under the control not only of his director but also of the scriptwriter, the cameraman, the wardrobe department, and the publicity office. Since publicity is the lifeblood of stardom, without which a star will die, it is equally obvious that he must keep it flowing through his private life, which feeds the envy and curiosity that bring many people into theatres.

 - Louise Brooks, "Humphrey and Bogey," p.59 in Lulu in Hollywood

Quote of the Hour: What They Call A Good Eater

Archie was not a man with a wide visiting-list among people with families, and it was long since he had seen a growing boy in action at the table that he had forgotten what sixteen is capable of doing with a knife and fork, when it really squares its elbows, takes a deep breath, and gets going. The spectacle which he witnessed was consequently at first a little unnerving. The long boy's idea of trifling with a meal appeared to be to swallow it whole and reach out for more.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie, p. 216

Quote of the Hour: New Minds

I collect too many quotes for this weekly "feature," and then run an hourly version twice a year, on a Sunday near a major holiday. It's that time again.

The talking, riffing, endless making of words and stitching of ideas, that was how you knew a young intelligence, full of ideas and connections but innocent of the dynamic interchange of conversation, testing and exploring those ideas, forging then on the anvil of other minds. Newly emergent intelligences talked like they had been storing words up since the dawn of recorded thought. Which in a way they had.

 - Alex Irvine, Anthropocene Rag, pp.77-78

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: In Which Evelyn Waugh Is Less Racist Than Expected

Even now [1959] you will find people of some goodwill and some intelligence who speak of Europeans as having 'pacified' Africa. Tribal wars and slavery were endemic before they came; no doubt they will break out again when they leave. Meantime, under European rule in the first forty years of this century there have been three long wars in Africa on a far larger scale than anything perpetrated by marauding spearmen, waged by white men against white, and a generation which has seen the Nazi regime in the heart of Europe had best stand silent when civilized and uncivilized nations are contrasted.

 - Evelyn Waugh, A Tourist in Africa, p.1052 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Week: The Joys of Homeownership

Marrying Bea, who had drifted into his life in the wake of her stormy sister, Bech had ignorantly climbed aboard an ark of suburban living whose engines now throbbed around him like those of a sinking merchant ship in Conrad. There was no ignoring noise in these environs. In New York, there were walls, precincts, zones and codes of avoidance; here in Ossining every disturbance had a personal application: the ringing phone was never in someone else's apartment, and the child crying downstairs was always one's own.

 -"Bech Wed," p.236 in The Complete Henry Bech

Gérard: Five Years with Depardieu by Mathieu Sapin

There's a point in the middle of this book where creator Mathieu Sapin claims that Gérard Depardieu is one of the two most famous living French people in the world. He says this in conversation with then-President François Hollande, who he is flattering by saying Hollande is the other most famous French person. When Sapin mentions this to other people later, they mostly agree - well, not about Hollande. He's no Depardieu.

As an American, I also agree: if you think "French actor," Depardieu is the first person who comes to mind for at least a plurality of us. For some more gender-neutral definition of "actor," I would also accept Bridgette Bardot, who is sadly not eligible under the "living" portion. Younger, hipper people might argue for Timothée Chalamet, who I don't think is "French" in the same sense, since he grew up in New York. But Depardieu is definitely world-famous, though maybe becoming less so in recent years as he's gotten older, has been in fewer really globally popular movies, and has had more scandals accumulate (tax exile, sexual assault rumors, a certain chumminess with Putin).

So: Mathieu Sapin is a French bande desinée creator - and possibly a filmmaker, too; we see him work on some projects during this book - who shares a studio with Christophe Blain. (That has nothing to with this book, but Sapin mentions it and shows Blain, so I'll include it as well.) He got pulled into a documentary involving Depardieu taking a trip to Azerbaijan - deliberately replicating a trip by Alexandre Dumas, who was accompanied by a painter - in 2012, and, since he found himself in Depardieu's circle, he thought he might try to stay there if he could and get a book out of it.

Gerard: Five Years with Depardieu is that book; it covers Sapin's experiences with Depardieu starting with that 2012 trip to Azerbaijan and continuing through Depardieu's tax exile a few years later, multiple other projects and opportunities for Depardieu to be big and dominate conversations and talk a lot, before ending with a 2016 trip to Moscow.

The point of this book is "what is Depardieu really like?" and Sapin delivers - he keeps himself involved, as a viewpoint and way into this world, but the focus is on who Depardieu is and what he does. Depardieu is famously active, volcanic, and mercurial, so he gives Sapin a lot of material - he also has the long-time actor's ability to just talk at great length about anything continuously.

Sapin draws himself as physically small and balding - that little guy in the sidecar on the cover - to contrast with the physically imposing Depardieu. He's originally hired to basically lob questions to Depardieu for that documentary, and let the actor run on at length - the one who initiates conversation, and, as much as possible, aims Depardieu at specific topics, but not an equal partner. The rest of the book finds him in roughly the same role: a chronicler, a scribbler in the corner, the guy with a dictaphone to capture the interesting or outrageous things that Depardieu rolls out endlessly, all the time.

You have to have at least some sympathy or interest in Depardieu, of course: why else would you read a book like this? I won't say that Sapin gets any deep insights into Depardieu's essential character or history, and he's not really trying to. This is a book about what's it's like to be in the middle of the whirlwind of activity that is Gérard Depardieu; what happens around him and how he talks and acts on a day-to-day basis. Sapin is not intervewing Depardieu; he's accompanying him.

It's a very wordy book: Depardieu talks a lot, and Sapin needs a lot of captions to explain who everyone is and what's going on, as he drops in and out of Depardieu's life and projects repeatedly over these five years. Sapin has a lightly cartoony style: most of his people are fairly realistic, though he makes himself tiny with a big head. But his background and scenes are mostly realistic, though sometimes lightly sketched, particularly on the pages where he has a lot of captions and dialogue to make room for.

There will be a point where Gérard Depardieu is not longer the most famous Frenchman in the world, and this book will be an interesting relic at that point. But I don't think we're there yet.