Verbal Flotsam

It’s pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.
—Jerry Garcia

An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion.
—Brian Eno

Working with [Thelonious] Monk is like falling down a dark elevator shaft.
—John Coltrane

A wise man once said: Never discuss philosophy or politics in a disco environment.
—Frank Zappa

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
—P.G. Wodehouse

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In the fall of 1798 Beethoven accepted Prince Lobkowsky’s commission for a set of six quartets. He immersed himself in the modern classics of the genre, many of which he had probably played and heard in Bonn. He had laboriously copied manuscripts from Haydn’s op. 20 and from Mozart’s 1785 quartets, and was not above performing and studying quartets by at least a few local masters, including Emanual Förster. In his memoir of Beethoven, Franz Wegeler reports in this connection that “a Viennese composer, Förster, brought him a quartet [presumably a string quartet] that he had just finished copying out that morning. In the development section of the first movement the cellist lost his place. Beethoven stood up and sang the cello part, while continuing to play his own part. When I told him that this was a mark of his remarkable skill, he replied, ‘that’s the way the bass part has to go, unless the composer had known nothing about composition.’”
—Lewis Lockwood, Inside Beethoven’s Quartets, p.29