Yagoda Quotes

‎Theorists of journalism have long noted parallels to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in physics: by reporting on something, one subtly but irrevocably changes it.

Memoir today is like one big game of misery poker: The more outlandish, outrageous, or just plain out-there the recounted life, the more likely the book is to attract the attention of reviewers, talk-show bookers, and, ultimately, the public.

One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home.

That doesn’t matter. Gorky’s a vain man. We must bind him with cables to the Party,” replied Stalin.3 It worked: during the kulak liquidation, Gorky unleashed his hatred of the backward peasants in Pravda: “If the enemy does not surrender, he must be exterminated.” He toured concentration camps and admired their re-educational value. He supported slave labour projects such as the Belomor Canal which he visited with Yagoda, whom he congratulated: “You rough fellows do not realize what great work you’re doing!”4 Yagoda,

designer can inject the most artistic flair. The word “ampersand” didn’t come into being until the nineteenth century. At that time & was customarily taught as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet and pronounced “and.” When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words “and, per se [i.e., by itself ], ‘and.’” This eventually became corrupted to “ampersand.” The symbol is a favorite of law and

Hoping is a vague, unsophisticated, and largely uninteresting state of mind. One associates it with children and their feelings about birthday presents and snow days. Compared to the surgical precision of sentence adverbs like presumably, ostensibly, and understandably, hopefully is a bowl of mush.

The Copyright Act of 1909 set the term for copyright of a musical composition to twenty-eight years, renewable for an additional twenty-eight, and for the first time included under copyright “public performance for profit.” That is, anyone playing or singing a copyrighted song had to pay for the right to do so. “Had to” but often didn’t: many bandleaders—and the restaurants and nightclubs that employed them—resisted paying anything to copyright holders, sometimes offering the justification that public performances stimulated sheet music sales.

One morning Gordy found out that Columbia Records, previous home of the Motown group the Four Tops, was going to rerelease one of the Tops’ old records. He instructed his top team at the time, Holland-Dozier-Holland, to produce a response, and by early afternoon they’d come up with “It’s the Same Old Song.” The track was recorded later the same day; the record was in stores three days later. It reached number five on the charts and became a classic. (The Columbia Four Tops release peaked at number 93.)

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

What’s the secret to a great popular song? It must be melodically simple and harmonically attractive.

The scythe went down the ranks, in cities and provinces, lopping the heads of the Party apparatuses, of intellectuals, activists. Nearly the entire Party Central Committee was killed; nearly the entire Soviet war council; nearly the entire Red Army command, starting with its head, Tukhachevsky; 35,000 officers; most Soviet ambassadors, almost the entire staffs of Pravda and Izvestia, most of the officials of the Cheka (including its head, Yagoda), most of the leaders of the Young Communist League . . . From late 1936 into 1939 the slaughter went on. The tortures and shootings that took place in the basement of the Lubyanka, headquarters of the security police, must have set a world record for one building.

Everyone understands that the content is constant, frequently ordinary, and sometimes banal; that the (wide) variation, the arena for expression and excellence, the fun, the art—it’s all in the individual style.

Ben Yagoda’s fine book When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It.

In her book The Wheel of Consent, sex therapist and educator Betty Martin defines sex to mean “the presence of your own arousal and the decision to follow it.” I like that.

One of Connolly’s lasting contribution to the debate is a one-word designation for prose that does not strive for the classical virtues of simplicity and clarity. He called it Mandarin. .... Connolly describes the Mandarin style’s reign in the nineteenth century, when its “last great exponents” were Pater and Henry James, and he has a plausible explanation for why James’s late novels, with their tortuous sentences and endless strings of metaphors, went virtually unread. James’s early works reached a small leisured collection of people for whom reading a book—usually aloud—was one of the few diversions of our northern winters. The longer a book could be spun out the better, and it was the duty of the author to spin it. But books got cheaper, and reading them ceased to be a luxury, the reading public multiplied and demanded less exacting entertainment, the struggle between literature and journalism began. Literature is the art of writing something that can be read twice; journalism what will be read once, and they demand different techniques. There can be no delayed impact in journalism, no subtlety, no embellishment, no assumption of a luxury reader, and since the pace of journalism is faster than that of literature, literature found itself in a predicament. It could react against journalism and become an esoteric art depending on the sympathy of a few, or learn from journalism, and compete with it.

The upside potential was so high—you could get a good payday with just one thirty-two-bar hit song—and the barrier to entry so low. Anyone could offer his wares—that is, anyone who could handle the indignity of knocking on door after door and being summarily rejected time and again.

The war also made its way into love songs, including such kitsch classics as “Your Lips Are No Man’s Land but Mine” and “If He Can Fight Like He Can Love, Good Night Germany!