Assignment 1

Alice put her hands in the pockets of her raincoat and started walking up the hill. She seemed to have recognised a kind of challenge or even repudiation in his tone, and rather than cowing her, it was as though it had hardened her resolve. Why, do you often meet women there? she asked. He had to walk quickly to keep up with her. That’s an odd question, he replied. Is it? I suppose I’m an odd person. Is it your business if I meet people there? he said. Nothing about you is my business, naturally. I’m just curious. He seemed to consider this, and in the meantime repeated in a quieter, less certain voice: Yeah, but I don’t see how it’s your business. After a few seconds he added: You’re the one who suggested the hotel. Just for your information. I never usually go there. So no, I don’t meet people there that much. Okay?

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You, 2021

When they were gone he closed the door and knelt and reached one hand up under the bed and talked to the cat until he could get hold of it. He rose and stood with it in the crook of his arm stroking it. A solid black tomcat with teeth outside. Its tail twitched from side to side. He was well disposed toward cats. They to him. Where is your dish? He said. Where is your dish? He carried the cat to the door and stood in the doorway. The air was cool and damp. He stood there stroking the cat. Listening to the quiet. Under his sockfeet he could feel the dull hammer of the distant piledriver. The slow beat. The measure of it.

Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger, 2022

LADY BASILDON. I suppose so. Are you?
MRS. MARCHMONT. Yes. Horribly tedious parties they give, don’t they?
LADY BASILDON. Horribly tedious! Never know why I go. Never know why I go anywhere.
MRS. MARCHMONT. I come here to be educated.
LADY BASILDON. Ah! I hate being educated!
MRS. MARCHMONT. So do I. It puts one almost on a level with the commercial classes, doesn’t it? But dear Gertrude Chiltern is always telling me that I should have some serious purpose in life. So I come here to try to find one.
LADY BASILDON. [Looking round through her lorgnette.] I don’t see anybody here to-night whom one could possibly call a serious purpose. The man who took me in to dinner talked to me about his wife the whole time.
MRS. MARCHMONT. How very trivial of him!
LADY BASILDON. Terribly trivial! What did your man talk about?
MRS. MARCHMONT. About myself.
LADY BASILDON. [Languidly.] And were you interested?
MRS. MARCHMONT. [Shaking her head.] Not in the smallest degree.

Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 1895

But there’s moonlight fognight, the blossoms of the fire flames in the stove. There’s giving an apple to the mule, the big lips taking hold—There’s the bluejay drinking my canned milk by throwing his head back with a miffle of milk on his beak—There’s the scratching of the raccoon or of the rat out there, at night—There’s the poor little mouse eating her nightly supper in the humble corner where I’ve put out a little delight0-plate flull of cheese and chocolate candy (for my days of killing mice are over)—There’s the racoon in his fog, there the man to his fireside, and both are lonesome for God.

Jack Kerouac, Big Sur, 1962

I thought that if they had cut the price of their imitation old-fashioned Welsh dresser, refectory table and unsatisfactory wheelback chairs by two thirds, from the preposterous £150, we might have relieved her of some of her baggage. I sat for a minute in the sunny room, noticing the huge, ugly floorlamps, one of giant size, and both with frightful shades, frightful in pattern and color too. Almost immediately the bell rang. It was a Mr. Bateman, from Sampford Courtenay with an aged terrier named Tim, whose muzzle was grey (he was 12. years old) and who shook upsettingly, as if with palsy. Mr. Bateman was very stiff & dapper. A skyey blue chiffon neckerchief, cinnamon-colored check tweeds. We spoke perfunctorily of animals, after my crow account: of mynah birds, talking crows, & the like. I rose to leave just as Ruth melted into the room, stooped a bit effacingly, her grey hair tightly crimped from the hairdresser's in Exeter. Marjorie accompanied me downstairs. I made much of the coming arrival of Ted's relatives and the immense work they would involve. Recollections: Ruth came to tea alone.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1982

When a teenage Karl Bartos told his parents that he wanted to dedicate his life to music, his father was so furious that he kicked his son’s acoustic guitar to pieces.

After hearing the Beatles at 12, something had awakened in him – “I wanted to feel like how they sounded,” he says – and so he persisted past that smashed guitar. Tripping on LSD listening to Hendrix was another portal. “The music spoke to me in all the world’s languages at once,” he recalls in his memoir. “I understood its message down to the very last frequency. Never before had the essence of music been as clear.”

The memoir, The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond, is an incredibly detailed book about Bartos’s life: from those pivotal childhood moments, years spent at the Robert Schumann Conservatory in Dusseldorf where he studied percussion, through to his time in what is considered the classic Kraftwerk line-up – Bartos, Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider, Wolfgang Flür – in which he played from 1974 until 1990.

Daniel Dylan Wray, "Karl Bartos: ‘Kraftwerk turned into the dehumanisation of music’", The Guardian, 2022

Don’t think it didn’t hurt, all that rejection. Brooding in my nest of straw, I cried little red hen tears. Tears of chicken blood. You know what that looks like, you’ve eaten enough of it. Makes good gravy. So, what were my options? I could have eaten that grain of wheat right away. Done myself a nutritional favour. But instead I planted it. Watered it. Stood guard over it night and day with my little feathered body. So it grew. Why not? So it made more grains of wheat. So I planted those. So I watered those. So I ground them into flour. So I finally got enough for a loaf of bread. So I baked it. You’ve seen the pictures, me in my little red hen apron, holding the loaf with its plume of aroma in between the tips of my wings, smiling away. I smile in all the pictures as much as you can smile, with a beak. Whenever they said not me, I smiled. I never lost my temper. Who will help me eat this loaf of bread? I said. I will, said the cat, the dog and the pig. I will, said the antelope. I will, said the yak. I will, said the five-lined skink. I will, said the pubic louse. They meant it, too.

Margaret Atwood, Good Bones, 1992

As a seeker, you’ll need to act on the advice you’ve received and make real-time adjustments. Advice is best treated as provisional and contingent: It should be a cycle of guidance, action, learning, and further guidance — not a fixed path forward. Especially if the advisory process has occurred over an extended period, circumstances may have changed by the time you are ready to act. So follow up for further advice if needed. You may benefit from multiple meetings, especially if you have gleaned new information from your first steps forward or have a series of decisions to make. It’s also considerate and helpful to let your adviser know what you’ve done and how it’s working out. It’s a way of expressing your gratitude, strengthening the relationship, and helping the adviser learn as well.

Harvard Business Review website, 2015

But there are some of us Chronics that the staff made a couple of mistakes on years back, some of us who were Acutes when we came in, and got changed over. Ellis is a Chronic [20] came in an Acute and got fouled up bad when they overloaded him in that filthy brain-murdering room that the black boys call the “Shock Shop.” Now he’s nailed against the wall in the same condition they lifted him off the table for the last time, in the same shape, arms out, palms cupped, with the same horror on his face. He’s nailed like that on the wall, like a stuffed trophy. They pull the nails when it’s time to eat or time to drive him in to bed when they want him to move so’s I can mop the puddle where he stands. At the old place he stood so long in one spot the piss ate the floor and beams away under him and he kept falling through to the ward below, giving them all kinds of census headaches down there when roll check came around.

Ken Kelsey, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, 1975

I waited outside with five or six young men, all of them trying to look ambitious. We had filled out our employment applications and now we waited. I was the last to be called [...] I left and went back to my room. I went down the dirty hall and took a hot bath. Then I put my clothes back on and went out and got a bottle of wine. I came back to the room and sat by the window drinking and watching the people in the bar, watching the people walk by. I drank slowly and began to think again of getting a gun and doing it quickly — without all the thought and talk. A matter of guts. I wondered about my guts. I finished the bottle and went to bed and slept. About 4 p.m. I was awakened by a knock on the door. It was a Western Union boy. I opened the telegram.

Charles Bukowski, Factotum, 1975