Quote of the Day

More like Quote of the Year, since I haven't posted since January. (Curse you, Facebook & Twitter!)

"Men don't seem to notice unless there's a breast hanging out! But the fact that they look at our faces is rather nice."

Revealed: Women Are the Secret Oglers

Summer Reading Assignment for Obama & Congress

To the legislators of 2011 and most especially the candidates of 2012, I offer this excerpt from Charles Dickens's LITTLE DORRIT:

Containing the whole Science of Government

Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving--HOW NOT TO DO IT.

Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public departments; and the public condition had risen to be--what it was.

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true that from the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn't been done, and who had been asking the friends of the honourable gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn't been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done. It is true that the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session through, uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have a considerable stroke of work to do, and you will please to retire to your respective chambers, and discuss, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech, at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not political), I now dismiss you. All this is true, but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it.

Quote for the Day...and all time

"No corrupt mind ever understands words healthily."
--THE DECAMERON (c1350), Giovanni Boccaccio

Patrick Dennis Forever!

Holiday thoughts from razor-witted Patrick Dennis (aka Edward Everett Tanner III), who deserves to be remembered as the author of books beyond AUNTIE MAME.

AROUND THE WORLD WITH AUNTIE MAME (1958) begins with this:

Christmas is nearly here and I look forward to it more and more with loathing. All the shops that didn't have their holiday decorations up by Michaelmas made up for it with sheer ostentation by Halloween. Canned carols bleat from every corner. The clerks at Saks are surlier, the ones at Lord & Taylor lordlier, the ones at Bergdorf's bitchier than at any other season.

From THE JOYOUS SEASON* (1964), narrated by a 10-year-old boy:

Daddy always said that Christmas is a joyous season when suicides and hold-ups and shoplifting and like that reach a new high and that the best place to spend the whole thing is a Moslem country.

*Confession: I've put down THE FINKLER QUESTION twice to reread Patrick Dennis. Interpret as you wish.

Quotes for a Month

Eek! Did I really not post at all in August? I was busy and distracted; some day I'll tell you about it. In the meantime, here are some choice nuggets I've come across in the past month. (And yes, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm an Anglophile.)

From Eyes on the Prize by Hilary Mantel, winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for WOLF HALL, and whose memoir GIVING UP THE GHOST I'm happily devouring:

You don’t ask a plumber, what makes you plumb? You understand he does it to get his living. You don’t draw him aside and say, “Actually I plumb a bit myself, would you take a look at this loo I fitted? All my friends say it’s rather good.”...

I think there is one kind of writer who might be scalped and skinned by the demands the prize imposes, and that is the writer who finds public performance difficult, who has failed to create a persona he can send out to do the show....Generally, it seems to me, authors are better at presenting themselves than they were ten years ago. Festivals flourish, we get more practice; you could give a reading somewhere every week of the year if you liked. For me the transition between desk and platform seems natural enough. I think of writing fiction as a sort of condensed version of acting and each book as a vast overblown play. You impersonate your characters intensively, you live inside their skins, wear their clothes and stamp or mince through life in their shoes; you breathe in their air. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Of course she is. Who else could she be?

From OUR TRAGIC UNIVERSE, the latest novel by Scarlett Thomas (my other new favorite author), which should get a prize for book design:

You can identify someone who works in publishing because they tell every anecdote as if for the first time, with the same expression as someone giving you a tissue that they have just realised has probably already been used. [p67]

Almost everyone who came along to spend the week [at the writers' retreat] in the hotel in Torquay seemed to have the idea that all novels possessed the same sort of value, and took roughly the same amount of effort from the author, and that Tolstoy was a 'a novelist' in the same way that the latest chick-lit author was 'a novelist'. 'How do you even begin to write eighty thousand words?' someone would always ask, admiringly. And I'd always explain that 80,000 words is not that much, really, and that you could do it in eight weekends if you really wanted to, using Aristotle's Poetics as an instruction manual. Making the 80,000 words any good is the hard bit: making them actually important. [p115]

Quote for the Ages

...novels should not be honest. They are a pack of lies that are also a set of metaphors; because the lies and metaphors are chosen and offered shape and structure, they may indeed represent the self, or the play between the unconscious mind and the conscious will, but they are not forms of self-expression, or true confession.

--Colm Toibin, New York Times Book Review

Quote of the Day

From today's NYT Fashion Diary by the sharp-eyed/eared/witted Guy Trebay:

“People used to have fun,” said Stéphane Feugère, the indefatigable photographer who has spent the last eight years shooting fashion parties and people, on assignment for French Vogue.

“But then everyone got a camera,” Mr. Feugère added, “and now they all wait for someone else to have fun so they can shoot it.”

Quote of the Day

“I ache for the return of dysfunction. Dysfunction had its problems, but at least dysfunction has function in its title. We are not functioning at all.”

--NY Assemblyman Daniel J. O'Donnell, quoted in NYT

Quote of the Week

"I would go as far as I could and hit a wall, my own imagined limitations. And then I met a fellow who gave me his secret, and it was pretty simple. When you hit a wall, just kick it in."

--Patti Smith, JUST KIDS

Spit Take/Quote of the Day

An AP story on developments in Iran had me guffawing. Good thing I read it before I had my morning beverage, else I would have sprayed tea all over my computer.

[The Guardian Council] said Monday it found irregularities in 50 voting districts, but that this has no effect on election outcome. Council spokesman Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei was quoted on the state TV Web site as saying that its probe showed more votes were cast in these constituencies than there were registered voters.

But this "has no effect on the result of the elections," he said.

As the Brits say: Pull the other leg--it's got bells on it.

Poetic License

When I pick up a new poetry book
I always glance first at the biographical note
If the poet has children I don't read the book

--Bill Knott

Quote for the Day

“People think it’s so hard to leave New York, but it’s easy. You just pack up all your stuff in boxes and call a truck.”

--Garth Stein (THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN), quoted in NYT State of the Unions

That's what The Ex and I did 20 years ago (to our friends' horror), only we had our own truck so didn't even have to make a call.

The hard part is moving back to the city. Which I'm not about to do, though living two hours up the Hudson would be fine by me.

Larry Flynt Gives Good Headline

From the CNN Political Ticker:
Porn industry seeks federal bailout

Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request that Congress allocate $5 billion for a bailout of the adult entertainment industry....

"People are too depressed to be sexually active," Flynt said in the statement. "This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex."

"With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It's time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly."

Here's my slogan for these troubled times:
Porn is Patriotic!

Wouldn't it be funny if it caught on? Though honestly, there's nothing sexier than having enough to eat and a roof over one's head.

What to Tell Your Would-Be Readers

"You can find my book at your favorite bookstore, and if it isn’t there, find a new favorite."

--Joan Rivers, author of MURDER AT THE ACADEMY AWARDS, in Sunday's NY Times (but don't follow her advice on plastic surgery!)

Quote of the Day

From the NY Times review of Carrie Fisher's new memoir, WISHFUL DRINKING. She's the daughter of Hollywood stars Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher ("the Jennifer and Brad of their day"), who left Debbie for Elizabeth Taylor ("Angelina, plusher and without the tattoos").

When the author was 15, Ms. Reynolds gave her a vibrator for Christmas, and also gave one to her own mother, who declined to use it for fear it would short out her pacemaker.

Quote of the Year...or,Mr. Galbraith Gets the Last Laugh

Over lunch, I read the Quote of the Day to the Boy Wonder. He said, "I have something better. You gotta hear this one!"

He whipped out THE GREAT CRASH: 1929, by John Kenneth Galbraith, which the Ex sent him for Christmas. (BW is starting college on Jan. 20 as an economics major.)

From Galbraith's new introduction, written in 1997:

Always when markets are in trouble, the phrases are the same: "The economic situation is fundamentally sound" or simply "The fundamentals are good." All who hear these words should know that something is wrong.

Last night, BW, Darling Husband and I had dinner with Chris Matthews. (OK, we ate off trays while watching "Hardball," on DVR.) Yesterday's show listed the best and worst political moments of 2008. Guess what was #1 in "Biggest general election moments"?

Give up?

"The fundamentals of our economy are strong."
--John McCain

BONUS QUOTES:

"We all didn’t quite see what was happening.”
--Margaret Hedberg, director of the International Debutante Ball, per the NY Times.

She brushed off the $14,000 cost of a table — “Watches cost more.”
--Marie Antoinette. Oops! I mean Margaret Hedberg.

Quote of the Day

"I spend my days inside stomachs, and believe me, you could get lost in some of them."
--gastroenterologist Nicholas Belitsos

From Whether True or False, A Real Stretch, in which NY Times writer David Kamp deconstructs Diamond Jim Brady's legendary appetite.

Creepy Statistic and Quote of the Day

From Looking Under the Hood and Seeing an Incubator, in today's New York Times:

...96 percent of foreign-donated medical equipment fails within five years of donation...

...no matter how remote the locale, there always seemed to be a Toyota 4Runner in working order.

Hence the nonprofit firm, Design That Matters, was contracted to design a neonatal incubator made of used or new car parts. (How brilliant is that?)

“The idea was to start with a 4Runner,” said Timothy Prestero, the firm’s founder and chief executive, “and take away all the parts that weren’t an incubator.”

Swallow Before Reading!

If not, don't blame me if you spray your drink all over your keyboard. From a piece in today's NYT: Trump Sees Act of God in Recession:

By Mr. Trump’s account, sales [of condos in the Trump International Hotel and Tower] were going great until “the real estate market in Chicago suffered a severe downturn” and the bankers made it worse by “creating the current financial crisis.”

Those assertions are made in what The New York Times’s Floyd Norris calls a fascinating lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump, the real estate developer, television personality and best-selling author, in an effort to avoid paying $40 million that he personally guaranteed on a construction loan that Deutsche Bank says is due and payable.

Rather than have to pay the $40 million, Mr. Trump thinks the bank should pay him $3 billion for undermining the project and damaging his reputation....

Mr. Trump is vigilant in protecting his reputation... after Mr. Norris interviewed him and two associates, his general counsel sent Mr. Norris a note saying “it was a pleasure” talking to him, and adding: “Please be assured that if your article is not factually correct, we will have no choice but to sue you and The New York Times.”

Read the whole thing; it only gets better. The penultimate graf--and Deutsche Bank's legal filing--has a quote from Trump's 2007 bestseller, Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life:

“I figured it was the bank’s problem, not mine. What the hell did I care? I actually told one bank, ‘I told you you shouldn’t have loaned me that money. I told you the goddamn deal was no good.’ ”

Fewer, Better Things

"I'm too poor to be cheap!" a friend told me years ago, when she was shopping for a couch. She said that she always bought the best, few things she could afford. Because it was ultimately more frugal to buy one good item that would last for years, rather than a bunch of shoddy stuff that would have to be replaced, perhaps several times over.

De Beers Group brilliantly mines (pun sort of intended) this philosophy. There's a full-page ad in today's New York Times that I think is absolutely inspired--and inspiring. It's a powerful antidote to the empty consumerism displayed by the martyr mommy and her "stuff" in my post Which Quote Is More Nauseating? It reads:

FEWER, BETTER THINGS.

Our lives are full of things. Disposable distractions,
stuff you buy but do not cherish, own yet never love.
Thrown away in weeks rather than passed down for generations.

Perhaps things will be different now. Wiser choices made with greater care.
After all, if the fewer things you own always excite you, would you
really miss the many that never could?

Near the bottom of the ad is De Beers' trademark phrase, "A DIAMOND IS FOREVER," with a pair of diamond solitaire studs just above it.

Now I'm not about to rush out and buy myself diamond earrings, or ask Darling Husband to do so. I'm perfectly happy with the $50 crystals I bought at a Georgetown consignment shop on my last trip to DC. Fake diamonds are forever too, and I'll never worry about their being lost or stolen.

But the ad's message really hits home. Thinking back on all the presents I received as a child, few have survived, either in memory or reality. The toys I so ardently begged for were early casualties: Chatty Cathy, Play-Doh Fun Factory, Barbie's Dream House (then made of cardboard, not plastic). Two gifts are unforgettable: the parakeet I got for Christmas when I was nine (I didn't start celebrating Hanukah till I hooked up with DH) and the puppy I got at age ten to replace the lost parakeet. (The bird was returned the next day and lorded it over the dog ever after.)

What do I still have decades later, besides fond memories of my pets? Things with emotional resonance, containing not a speck of plastic: a little pearl pendant on a whisper-thin gold chain, given by my father when I was five; a clay plaque he made me when he was recovering from his first heart attack; a crewel-embroidered velveteen koala bear, made by my mother; a pair of silver wire earrings, given by my mother and stepfather for my high-school graduation.

When I hold those gifts now, they still make me happy. Treasures for a lifetime.