Chamblee54

There was a comment at the source of Author Insults, a recently published offering from chamblee54: JC · “This article is plagarized wholesale from The 50 best author vs. author put-downs of all time. … This comment piqued my interest. However, it simply is not true. There were only ten duplicates in the two collections. The forty remaining quotes will be the basis of today’s post. The original numbering will be used today. Any skipped number indicates a quote that is available in Part One.
There is one more notice before we proceed: FULL DISCLOSURE – The quotes below have not been fact checked. There is a good possibility that some are the result of an overactive imagination. Caveat lector. … I chose a quote to promote AI Part Two: H.L. Mencken on Henry James: “He writes with all the daring of a grandmother smoking marijuana.” I soon had doubts about this item. Both google and duckduckgo said the quote was bogus. DDG did have a tasteful replacement: “Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.” H.L. Mencken “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.500, Vintage. … This is one of the joys of being a Quote Truther. Often, the genuine quote is better than the fake.
05. John Updike, according to Gore Vidal – “I can’t stand him. Nobody will think to ask because I’m supposedly jealous; but I out-sell him. I’m more popular than he is, and I don’t take him very seriously…oh, he comes on like the worker’s son, like a modern-day D.H. Lawrence, but he’s just another boring little middle-class boy hustling his way to the top if he can do it.”
06. William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, according to Samuel Pepys
“We saw ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.”
07. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Bulwer nauseates me; he is the very pimple of the age’s humbug. There is no hope of the public, so long as he retains an admirer, a reader, or a publisher.”
08. Charles Dickens, according to Arnold Bennett
“About a year ago, from idle curiosity, I picked up ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, and of all the rotten vulgar un-literary writing…! Worse than George Eliot’s. If a novelist can’t write where is the beggar.”
09. J.K. Rowling, according to Harold Bloom – “How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone’? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.”
10. Oscar Wilde, according to Noel Coward
“Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.”
11. Fyodor Dostoevsky, according to Vladimir Nabokov – “Dostoevky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity — all this is difficult to admire.”
12. John Milton’s Paradise Lost, according to Samuel Johnson
“’Paradise Lost’ is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”
13. Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, according to Mark Twain
“Also, to be fair, there is another word of praise due to this ship’s library: it contains no copy of ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’, that strange menagerie of complacent hypocrites and idiots, of theatrical cheap-john heroes and heroines, who are always showing off, of bad people who are not interesting, and good people who are fatiguing.”
14. Ezra Pound, according to Conrad Aiken – “For in point of style, or manner, or whatever, it is difficult to imagine anything much worse than the prose of Mr. Pound. It is ugliness and awkwardness incarnate. Did he always write so badly?”
15. James Joyce’s Ulysses, according to George Bernard Shaw – “I have read several fragments of ‘Ulysses’ in its serial form. It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilisation; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon around Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed, foul minded derision and obscenity.”
16. George Bernard Shaw, according to Roger Scruton – “Concerning no subject would he be deterred by the minor accident of complete ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.”
17. Jane Austen, according to Charlotte Brontë – “Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written ‘Pride and Prejudice’…than any of the Waverly novels? I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.”
18. Goethe, according to Samuel Butler
“I have been reading a translation of Goethe’s ‘Wilhelm Meister.’ Is it good? To me it seems perhaps the very worst book I ever read. No Englishman could have written such a book. I cannot remember a single good page or idea….Is it all a practical joke? If it really is Goethe’s ‘Wilhelm Meister’ that I have been reading, I am glad I have never taken the trouble to learn German.”
19. John Steinbeck, according to James Gould Cozzens – “I can’t read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up. I couldn’t read the proletariat crap that came out in the ’30s.”
21. Jonathan Swift, according to Samuel Johnson
“Swift has a higher reputation than he deserves…I doubt whether ‘The Tale of a Tub’ to be his; for he never owned it, and it is much above his usual manner.”
22. Gertrude Stein, according to Wyndham Lewis – “Gertrude Stein’s prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along.”
23. Emile Zola, according to Anatole France – “His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born.”
24. J.D.Salinger, according to Mary McCarthy – “I don’t like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn’t a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don’t like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it’s so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can’t stand it.”
27. William Faulkner, according to Ernest Hemingway – “Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes — and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one.”
28. E.M. Forster’s Howards End, according to Katherine Mansfield – “Putting my weakest books to the wall last night I came across a copy of ‘Howards End’ and had a look into it. Not good enough. E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea. … And I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella.”
30. Charles Dickens, according to George Meredith – “Not much of Dickens will live, because it has so little correspondence to life … If his novels are read at all in the future, people will wonder what we saw in them, save some possible element of fun meaningless to them.”
32. Gustave Flaubert, according to George Moore
“Flaubert bores me. What nonsense has been talked about him!”
33. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, according to Gore Vidal
“He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US.”
34. Ernest Hemingway, according to Tom Wolfe
“Take Hemingway. People always think that the reason he’s easy to read is that he is concise. He isn’t. I hate conciseness — it’s too difficult. The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using ‘and’ for padding.”
35. James Joyce’s Ulysses, according to Virginia Woolf – “I dislike ‘Ulysses’ more and more — that is I think it more and more unimportant; and don’t even trouble conscientiously to make out its meanings. Thank God, I need not write about it.”
36. William Shakespeare, according to George Bernard Shaw
“With the exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity.”
37. Charles Lamb, according to Thomas Carlyle
“Charles Lamb I sincerely believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tomfool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms and abjuring good manners. His speech wriggles hither and thither with an incessant painful fluctuation; not an opinion in it or a fact or even a phrase that you can thank him for.”
38. Edith Sitwell, according to Dylan Thomas – “Isn’t she a poisonous thing of a woman, lying, concealing, flipping, plagiarising, misquoting, and being as clever a crooked literary publicist as ever.”
39. James Jones, according to Ernest Hemingway
“To me he is an enormously skillful f#*&-up and his book will do great damage to our country. Probably I should re-read it again to give you a truer answer. But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs … I hope he kills himself ….”
40. Sir Walter Scott, according to Mark Twain – “Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks…progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the silliness and emptiness, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote.”
42. Robert Frost, according to James Dickey – “If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes….a more sententious, holding-forth old bore, who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal little twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word I never saw.”
43. Tom Wolfe, according to John Irving – “He doesn’t know how to write fiction, he can’t create a character, he can’t create a situation…You see people reading him on airplanes, the same people who are reading John Grisham, for Christ’s sake….I’m using the argument against him that he can’t write, that his sentences are bad, that it makes you wince. It’s like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine….You know, if you were a good skater, could you watch someone just fall down all the time? Could you do that? I can’t do that.”
44. Bret Harte, according to Mark Twain – “Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler, he is brim full of treachery, and he conceals his Jewish birth as carefully as if he considered it a disgrace. How do I know? By the best of all evidence, personal observation.”
45. Thomas Carlyle, according to Anthony Trollope
“I have read — nay, I have bought! — Carlyle’s ‘Latter Day Pamphlets,’ and look on my eight shillings as very much thrown away. To me it appears that the grain of sense is so smothered up in a sack of the sheerest trash, that the former is valueless….I look on him as a man who was always in danger of going mad in literature and who has now done so.”
46. Henry James, according to Arnold Bennett – “It took me years to ascertain that Henry James’s work was giving me little pleasure….In each case I asked myself: ‘What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it’s going to?’ Question unanswerable! I gave up. Today I have no recollection whatever of any characters or any events in either novel.”
47. James Fenimore Cooper, according to Mark Twain – “Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.”
48. Gore Vidal, according to Martin Amis – “Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice — registry offices, ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ the disposable diaper — is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.”
49. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, according to Edward Fitzgerald – “She and her sex had better mind the kitchen and her children; and perhaps the poor; except in such things as little novels, they only devote themselves to what men do much better, leaving that which men do worse or not at all.”
50. Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, according to Norman Mailer – “The book has gas and runs out of gas, fills up again, goes dry. It is a 742-page work that reads as if it is fifteen hundred pages long. … At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred pound woman. Once she gets on top, it’s over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated. So you read and you grab and you even find delight in some of these mounds of material. Yet all the while you resist — how you resist! — letting three hundred pounds take you over.”
Parts One and Two of this series are available. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Marion Post Wolcott took the social media picture in January 1941. “Congregation attending Sunday church services. Sarasota trailer park, Sarasota, Florida” ©Luther Mckinnon 2026 · selah

I was repeating a story about AI … Author Insults, not Artificial Intelligence. An important link had gone dead, and needed to be refreshed by the Wayback machine. While there, I started to look through the comments. Parts One and Three of this series are available.
Jean-Paul • Louis-Ferdinand Céline on D.H.Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”:
“600 hundred pages for a gamekeeper’s dick, it’s way too long.”
William MacAdams • Virginia Woolf on James Joyce: “Ulysses is merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges.”
 … Letter to Lytton Strachey, April 24, 1922
Jess • H.L Mencken on Gertrude Stein: “It is the great achievement of Miss Stein that she has made English easier to write and harder to read”
Cole • Mark Twain on Jane Austen: “Just the omission of Jane Austen’s books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.”
PJ • Robert Louis Stevenson on Matthew Arnold:
“Poor Matt. He’s gone to heaven, no doubt, but he won’t like God.”
Colette Bancroft • Flannery O’Connor on Harper Lee: “I think for a child’s book it does all right.
It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book.”
Tom • James Jones on Ernest Hemingway: “The problem with Papa was he always wanted to suck a cock. But when he found the one that fit, it had a double barrel.”
Retromash • “How is Harlan Ellison not on this list?” “Because he can only be entered on a short list.”
MousePotato • H.L. Mencken on Henry James:
“He writes with all the daring of a grandmother smoking marijuana.”
James • Mark Twain on Henry James:
“Once you put one of his books down, you simply can’t pick it up again.”
Tom • David Foster Wallace vs. Bret Easton Ellis:
“Is American Psycho Profound, Artistic Nihilism or Stupid, Shallow Nihilism?”
sourpuss • “Well, since we’re being lit’ry, don’t you think it might have been nice to have provided sources for the quotes? Maybe some credit to the compilers of various collections of literary invective?” … This is a problem for both Author Insults and Artificial Intelligence. You cannot believe what you see. Someone with too much free time could perform due diligence on this collection, and separate the truth from the fiction.
SMB • “I suppose Ambrose Bierce’s pithy “The covers of this book are too far apart.” could be recycled for general use. Don’t know what book he said that about …” I was delighted to see Ambrose Bierce included in this party, and wanted to see the context of that remark. A bit of googling led me to a story by the Quote Investigator. It turns out the quote was first attributed to Mr. Bierce was 1923, ten years after he disappeared in Mexico.
JC • “This article is plagarized wholesale from The 50 best author vs. author put-downs of all time. Trimming the list down does not make it original material. One would assume the author, Emily Temple, would at least acknowledge another source.” … This comment piqued my interest. However, it simply is not true. There were only ten duplicates in the two collections. The forty remaining quotes will be the basis of a forthcoming post, Author Insults Part Three. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. John Vachon took the social media picture in May 1938. “Home supervisor showing Mrs. Pope how to keep account book, Irwinville Farms, Georgia” ©Luther Mckinnon 2026 · selah

30. H.G. Wells on Henry James “A hippopotams trying to pick up a pea.”
29. Gustave Flaubert on George Sand “A great cow full of ink.”
28. Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman “…like a large shaggy dog just unchained
scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”
27. Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante Alighieri “A hyena that wrote poetry on tombs.”
26. Vladimir Nabokov on Fyodor Dostoevsky “Dostoevky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity — all this is difficult to admire.”
25. Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound “A village explainer.
Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”
24. Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley “All raw, uncooked, protesting.”
23. H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw “An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”
22. Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence “Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”
21. Lord Byron on John Keats “Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”
20. Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad “I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”
19. Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling “Mr Kipling … stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”
18. Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen “Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”
17. Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes “Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”
16. Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire “I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.”
15. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
13. Gore Vidal on Truman Capote “He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”
12. Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope “There are two ways of disliking poetry;
one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
11. Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”
10. Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe
“An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”
09. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
08. Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger “I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”
07. D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville
“Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like ‘Moby Dick’…. One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”
06. W. H. Auden on Robert Browning “I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”
05. Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust
“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”
04. Mark Twain on Jane Austen “I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
03. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce “the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
02. William Faulkner on Mark Twain “A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”
01. D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce “My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”
Bonus. Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”
Bonus Two, from Flannery O’Connor “I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”
This content was published June 29, 2024. These author insults were borrowed from flavorwire, who borrowed them from Examiner.com. HT to Andrew Sullivan. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. John Vachon took the social media picture in April 1938. “Farm women, Halifax County, North Carolina.” Parts Two and Three of this series are available. ©Luther Mckinnon 2026 · selah

This content was published June 23, 2008. George Denis Patrick Carlin died June 22, 2008. … A few months ago, I put a post up about George Carlin. “At this point, a look at wikipedia is in order. I was wondering if Mr. C was alive, or if I somehow missed something.”
I was only a marginal fan of Mr. Carlin, but I admire a man who succeeds. The fact that he was a success, and could hang on to his integrity, is sweet. With his lifestyle, making 71 is pretty good.
As for wondering if I missed something, I do that all the time. Through a bit of internet curiosity last night, I found the story the story of the arrest of Larry Sinclair. Mr. Sinclair made his clebrity with the dubious claim of an affair with BHO. He rented a room at the National Press Club to talk about himself, and left in handcuffs. A man with outstanding warrants should not be seeking publicity. Even if nature made his attorney wear a kilt. George Carlin was a satirist, among other things. I doubt he could make up anything like the Larry Sinclair story.
Here is the original, posted March 16, 2008. … Is George Carlin really that funny? I saw a link to a routine about euphemisms at ATL Malcontent. I suspect that Malcontent is a euphemism.
So, I have too much time, and I click on the link. Mr. C makes a bunch of obvious jokes about the evasion procedures we conduct with the King’s english. … One night, Lenny Bruce was performing in Chicago. The police decided to review the show. Mr. Bruce was taken prisoner by the fuzz. The authorities decided to make the audience members show ID to get out, and one man loudly objected, and was arrested. The man was George Carlin.
Mr. C began to be popular about the time I was about to graduate from High School. I heard the album about the Seven Words you cannot say on television once, which is enough. They all refer to body parts and body functions, and it does say something about our culture that these words are demonized like they are.
At this point, a look at wikipedia is in order. I was wondering if Mr. C was alive, or if I somehow missed something. He is from New York. His real name is Carlin. He was the first guest host on Saturday Night Live. In 1961, he married Brenda Hosbrook. The couple was together until her death in 1997. … Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Jack Delano took the social media picture in September 1940. “Farm woman holding one of her children in submarginal farm area of Rumsey Hill, near Erin, New York” ©Luther Mckinnon 2026 · selah

This content was published June 9, 2024. … “I was stark naked, stoned out of my mind on heroin, and between my legs giving me head was Janis Joplin.” These 21 words open Going Down With Janis. Peggy Caserta was allegedly the gf, and definitely the heroin buddy, of the chanteuse.
There isn’t anywhere to go from there but up. As it turns out, the intercom is full of people who supply good opening lines from literature. It saves you the trouble of reading the rest of the book. Here are Top 10 Most Outrageous Opening Lines in Literature, in reverse order.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Douglas Adams 1979 “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
Neuromancer William Gibson 1984 “The sky above the port was the color of television,
tuned to a dead channel.”
Notes From The Underground Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1864 “I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man. An unattractive man, I think my liver hurts.”
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey 1962 “They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.”
Trainspotting Irvine Welsh 1993 “The sweat was lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.”
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas Hunter S. Thompson 1971 “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . .’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming, ‘Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'”
The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka 1915 “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
Pride And Prejudice Jane Austen, 1813 “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
The Catcher In The Rye JD Salinger, 1951 “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Moby Dick Herman Melville, 1850 “Call me Ishmael.”
Peter Pan JM Barrie, 1911 “All children, except one, grow up.”
Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy, 1873-7 “Happy families are all alike;
every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Women Charles Bukowski “I was 50 years old and hadn’t been to bed with a woman for four years. I had no women friends. I looked at them as I passed them on the streets or wherever I saw them, but I looked at them without yearning and with a sense of futility. I masturbated regularly, but the idea of having a relationship with a woman—even on non-sexual terms—was beyond my imagination.”
The Bible author unknown Genesis 1: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth”
Naked Lunch William S. Burroughs “I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train… Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back.” … Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Russell Lee took the social media picture in November 1939. “Negroes talking, market square, Waco, Texas” ©Luther Mckinnon 2026 · selah

This content was published May 12, 2009. … A few years ago, some lawyers took a case about flag-burning to the Supreme Court. The Justices decided that flag burning was not against the Constitution. The decision caused a lot of people to get upset. The case was Texas v. Johnson, the decision was issued June 21, 1989.
Many people like to display the flag. They leave it out in all kinds of weather, in direct sunlight, until the once proud flag is worn and tattered. At least when the flag is burned the damage is done quickly. As it is, the Red White and Blue becomes the Pink Gray and Lavender.
I was walking to WalMart today, and decided to record some examples of this slow moving desecration. It did not take long to find enough examples to illustrate this post. One site was the grave of a revolutionary war veteran.
The United States code has guidelines about respect for the flag. Many of these are routinely ignored, often by people who consider themselves patriots. … 174 (c) Inclement weather – The flag should not be displayed on days when the weather is inclement, except when an all weather flag is displayed. … 176 (i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. … 176 (k) The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.
There was once a bumper sticker. It had the stars and stripes, and the words “Try Burning This One”. The vehicle was left in direct sun during the day. The sunlight wasted those colors.
There is a pledge of allegiance for the flag. The phrase “under God” is famously included. Is this a violation of the third commandment, regarding the proper use of sacred names? Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. The social media picture: “Unidentified soldier of the 34th Indiana Infantry Regiment in zouave uniform” ©Luther Mckinnon 2026 · selah

This content was published May 29, 2012. … There is a lively feature today, A brief history of four letter words. It deals with the evolution of profanity. HT to Andrew Sullivan. Examples will be used in this feature. If such language offends you, please skip the text, and enjoy the pictures.
“Golly! Zounds! Gadzooks! These are the kind of things Captain Marvel would say. Almost any other superhero would be too mature for such, childish silly words. And yet, during Shakespeare’s time, they made him one of the more edgy writers out there. They’re not just random sounds, but contractions, meant to make absolutely shocking sentiments less outright obscene. Golly, zounds, and gadzooks were, in order, God’s body, God’s wounds, and God’s hocks.”
The body of God, or Jesus, is a big deal to some varieties of Christians. When Shakespeare was in business, it was even more so. Religious profanity is less and less explosive, as bumper sticker’s about God’s last name might indicate. When Europe was fighting wars about the best way to worship, this talk about Godfrey Daniels was explosive.
The third commandment refers to the proper use of sacred names. It’s application is in the ear of the beholder. I think that a “Pledge of Allegiance” to a flag is not the proper use of a holy name. And I am notoriously non Christian.
The Whisper of the River is about a “raised right” young man who goes to college. A yankee neighbor says “good God a mighty”. The raised right young man calls him out about “using the name of the Lord in vain”. I used to work with an obnoxious “Pastor” who was fond of shouting GGAM.
Some people think they are being righteous by not using certain words. The truth is that profanity is a social standard. God has better things to worry about than what words people use to describe procreation. All of the Carlin seven appear in the Bible, in one of the many languages used.
Bitch and ass are two words that used to refer to animals. “Ass is actually two words blended together to become an obscenity. Ass, the swear word, started out as irs, which meant the back end of anything, not just animals. It became arse, and eventually rounded out and emerged as an ass. … Bitch started out as a female dog in breeding condition. From there its meaning expanded to anything female in breeding condition, and eventually it expanded to become promiscuous, angry women … or anything “especially disagreeable.” Sliding between the slightly sexual, the slightly referring to sexuality, and the literal meaning of the word got bitch into general conversation, and most television shows. It also helps that being “especially disagreeable,” rather than meek and accommodating has become a point of pride for both women and male homosexuals, and so even at its most insulting, the word has lost the power to shock as society has moved on.”
Both bitch and ass have become more acceptable. Ass is frequently attached to hole, which describes a (hopefully) functioning body part. This word is a serious insult. Names for genitalia also function, with remarkable versatility, as cuss words.
At the start of the Carlin seven is piss and shit. These were created using onomatopoeia … a word that sounds like what it describes. They refer to excretion, both as noun and verb. Excrete is seldom used as profanity, even though it means the same thing. As time goes down the toilet, both piss and shit have acquired multiple meanings.
Which brings us to the F bomb. It is similar to the German Ficken or the Dutch Fokken. It almost certainly is NOT an acronym. Technically it is not one of the Carlin seven. If it is, then mother is a super cussword. With a profitable holiday in May, mother will always be said on television.
There is a popular naughty word with six letters. It *triggers* people. If Mr. Carlin had used this word in his monolog, his career would have ended. This word was used by Mark Twain. It is used today by millions of people. Many people who use this word are described by it. Our culture might be better off without this word, but America is stuck with it.
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. The social media picture was taken “between 1896 and 1901”.“U.S.S. Brooklyn, “Hogan’s Alley”” These men swore like sailors.
©Luther Mckinnon 2026 · selah

This content was published May 18, 2025. … Today is May 18, 2025. I am going to write new material for my blog today, based largely on content from May 2008. This was the first year that chamblee54 was on WordPress. I was driving a truck in Marietta, and listening to am talk radio. The 2008 election was going on. John McCain was going to be the Republican candidate, and Barack H. Obama was the Democrat wannabe. The 2008 economic meltdown was a few weeks away. After the economic meltdown, I lost my job, and the election of Obama became inevitable.
Another shot in the arm deals with capital punishment. On May 6, 2008, Georgia was preparing to off a convict. … Semantic timeout. While hung, shot, or beheaded are obvious verbs for more archaic means of execution, what is the expression for “executed by lethal injection”? What do you call the process where a GDC employee shoots up a person with substances that will cause their demise?  Injecticide? … With all the corruption, lawyers, and rampant egomania in the justice business, how can the death penalty ever be administered fairly? Was this practice ever intended to be fair?
There was a comment thread at a Christian blog. The topic of preaching at funerals came up: “I want to see God’s grace and name honored.” Preaching an unwanted message to grieving people does not honor God. Christians frequently do not respect non-believers. Christians feel that if they only repeat their message over and over that others will agree with it. However, many of us have made up our minds. The more you try, the more you alienate us. A heavy religious message at a funeral is an example of this. Many incontinent evangelicals are like dogs that will not quit barking.
Like many men of my degeneration/generation, I had long hair. The problem is, with a Georgiawhiteboi like me, hair turns into worms after about three centimeters. It is way too much work to take care of. So I bought a pair of clippers. It was the modern version of letting my freak flag fly … I was in the church’s fried chicken on Broad street downtown. The two drag queens were in front of me in line.They got their food and left. When I stepped to the counter, I heard this girl say to her friend ”Her hayyer is so preeiitee”
Tallulah Bankhead was making a movie, “Lifeboat”, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Some of the other actors commented that Miss Bankhead was not wearing panties. Mr. Hitchcock wondered if this was a matter for wardrobe or a matter for hairdressing … Did Mohawks really shave their heads except for a stripe of hair in the middle? That would seem to be a lot of trouble for pre-modern men living in upstate New York. A Mohawk haircut is high maintenance, just like many who display them. … When asked how long it takes to do her hair, Dolly Parton replies. “I don’t know I am not there”
A clean pair of socks is change you can believe in. … The intangibles include respect, good will, and trust. Semantic fine tuning aside, these words mean the same thing. … A man has to believe in something. I believe I will have a drink. W.C. Fields … Mr. Barnum once said “there is a sucker born every minute”. This belief served Mr. Barnum abundantly … Miss Teenage South Carolina gave a famous speech. The first three words were ” I personally believe” … Anyone can quote the Bible. To do so without the trust of the listener is to speak in vain.
Opinions are like a smelly, though productive, body part. What does this say about beliefs? … Believe is a seven letter word. The first two letters are BE. The next three letters are LIE …  Cher had a hit song called “Believe” The hair is a wig, the plastic surgery is paid for, but do you believe. … John 3:16 has more than 22 words. That verse helps reduce Jesus to a scheme for life after death. … My opinions about G-d, the Bible, Jesus, and Life after Death are none of your business. … Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. The social media picture: “Private Lucien Love of Co. D, 43rd Virginia Cavalry Battalion … Photo shows young identified soldier. Lucien Love is one of six Mosby Rangers executed by the Union in September 1864 near Front Royal, Virginia.”