2 Dolly Partons and a 20,000th post. [View All]

[saltpoint]

We're some months away to the Democratic ticket's certain victory in 2008, so meanwhile here are just a few questions, comments, considerations, contributions, and contradictions for a given Thursday night.

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“When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird.” --James Audubon

“There are two Dolly Partons: the Nursery School Teacher and the Eccentric Aunt. The Nursery School Teacher wants everyone in the classroom to feel happy and involved, so she wears a perpetual grin and leads simple, upbeat sings-a-longs. By contrast, the Eccentric Aunt takes her favorite nieces and nephews aside at the wedding and delights them with uncensored stories about the family history and gives them the straight dope about desire, heartbreak, and true love.”

--Geoffrey Himes, rev. of Parton’s Slow Dancing With the Moon, in Country Music, May-June 1993

“I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I’ve ever known.” --Walt Disney

“The only devil I’ve ever worshipped is Mickey Mouse.” --Kenneth Anger

“Modern art is the art of civilization after a stroke.” --Christopher Bram, Father of Frankenstein

“My music is best understood by children and animals.” --Igor Stravinsky

“Taking a baby to a restaurant is like taking a moose to an opera.” --Dave Barry

“One of the things I am trying to say is that a healthy society must include people with alternative dreams. This is necessary so that all ideas, as many ideas as possible, can be available to us as we deal with our social problems. Our society is changing radically and we have to respond to those changes. If our responses are severely limited, our chances of survival are much less.”

--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., interview in the Indianapolis Star, 1980

“The true contest must take place on the level of the individual. It is here, in the present, that the Temple is reclaimed or demolished.” --Azriel, in Elie Wiesel’s The Oath

“...the beauty of the cosmos derives not only from unity in variety, but also from variety in unity.”

--Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“I think the cover-up of Kennedy’s assassination, then the pardoning of Nixon finished it for a lot of people. They said, ‘Well, we didn’t know it was bullshit before. We certainly know it’s bullshit now. So fuck it. Every man for himself.’ No one gives a shit. They know they’re getting fucked. No time to take care of anything else.”
--Lou Reed

“As it happens, I am comfortable with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.” --Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes -- all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills--like a god. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal.”

--Dr. Dysart in Peter Shaffer’s EQUUS

“Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.” --Martin Luther King

“We shall see who emerges from the labyrinth: the man or the minotaur.” --Rev. Daniel Berrigan

“I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a midwestern city.”

--Frank Lloyd Wright, address in Evanston, Illinois, 1954

“Washington is about stress, about not getting along. It is about conflict. It is about fighting. It is a Disneyland of egomaniacs and stress-seekers.” --John Flannery, attorney in the District of Columbia

“...but it was already an unconventional place, the cradle of radical movements and audacious forms of rebellion. It was my luck to be present at the transformation of the caterpillar into the large-winged, brilliantly colored butterfly that animated an entire generation.”

--Gregory, on Berkeley, California, in Isabelle Allende’s The Infinite Plan

“When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.” --Ethiopian proverb

“I stopped at a cafe in Dalhart and ordered a chicken fried steak. Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.” --Larry McMurtry

“An odd thing about New Orleans: the cemeteries here are more cheerful than the hotels and the French Quarter. Tell me why that should be, why 2,000 dead Creoles should be more alive than 2,000 Buick dealers?”

--Walker Percy

“The archetypal image of the wise man, the saviour or redeemer, lies buried and dormant in man’s unconscious since the dawn of culture; it is awakened whenever the times are out of joint and a human society is committed to a serious error.” --Carl Jung

“I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.” --Lenny Bruce

“Distrust all men in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.” --Frederich Nietzsche

“I read him for the first time in the early 1940s, something about bells, balls, and bulls... and I loathed it.”

--Vladimir Nabokov on Hemingway

“< The ascent of > wizard-in-training Harry Potter has kids wanting to read books. Undoing years of work by grade schools everywhere.” --Jim Mullen’s HOTSHEET, Entertainment Weekly, 2000

“In the long history of divinities, the inhabitants of Olympus were the first who wished to be perfect rather than powerful. Like an obsidian blade, the aesthetic for the first time cut away all ties, connections, devotions. What remained was a group of figures, isolated in the air, complete, initiated, perfect--three words that in Greek covers in just one--teleios. Even though it would not appear until much later, the statue was the beginning, the way in which these new beings would manifest themselves.”
--Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

“The nation that controls magnetism controls the universe.” --Dick Tracy

“The poet must continue to stand in an adversarial relationship. The most elementary of our adversarial relationships are in terms of the power of the state, which has never been so great in the history of mankind. That power can destroy us all. It’s a terrible power to entrust to people who are not spiritually great, that’s all there is to it. You see it in the callousness, self-aggrandizement, insensitivity to the plight of the poor. In the general level of ethical conduct, the state has become an abomination. … A poet can’t change anything, but the poet can demonstrate the power of the solitary conscience. It’s an example. Any gain, even the conquest of a small part of oneself, is a triumph.” --Stanley Kunitz, interview in the Washington Post, May 12, 1987

“I’m nobody’s steady date. I can always be distracted by love, but eventually I get horny for my creativity.”
--Gilda Radner

“Not long after moving to Washington she had interviewed an expert on nuclear security who had explained how easy it would be to score plutonium. The security for nuclear facilities, he said, was always contracted out. The contractors in turn hired locally and supplied their hires with minimum rounds of ammunition. Meaning, he had said, ‘you got multimillion dollar state-of-the-art security systems being operated by downsized sheriff’s deputies with maybe enough ammo to take down a coyote.’”
--Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted

“The building palpably yearns to be, if not a power plant again, something brawnier than the butterfly corral of an art space--perhaps a neo-medieval hospital or arsenal. The message of the place baffles. Surely, a hatred of art cannot have been the architect’s motive, though it would explain the effect.”

--Peter Schjeldahl, New Yorker, 3-11-02, on the Tate Modern Museum

“According to Orrin Hatch, it’s ok to destroy a frozen embryo because the embryo is only a person if it’s in a woman. This location theory of personhood is obviously unsatisfactory: You put the cells in the woman, it’s a person, you take them out, it’s not a person, you put them back in, voila!--it’s a person again. You might as well say Orrin Hatch is a person in his office but not in his car. If, as anti-choicers like to claim, what makes personhood is a full set of chromosomes--rather than, say, possession of a gender, a body, a head, a brain--then a clump of cells in an ice cube tray is at least as much a person as Trent Lott. Maybe more.”

--Katha Pollitt, in The Nation, August 20/27, 2001

“America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.” --Gloria Steinem

“Jung wanted psychoanalysis to take on the revivification of myth. To accomplish this, he believed, one did not use an ethical alliance.” --Naomi Goldberg, The Changing of the Gods

“I don’t give a good goddam about greyhound racing. I can’t think of anything that interests me less.”

--Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa, a linguist, responding to the question
of legalized dog racing in California, 1976

“I don’t want realism, I want magic.” --Blanche Dubois, in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire

“At Warp-9, they all look green to me.”
--bumpersticker evoking speed trajectories of Star Trek starships as a rationalization for fast driving

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
--Stephen J. Gould, “The Panda’s Thumb”

“Where there is no magic, one remains a toad.” --Kathleen Spivack

“If God dislikes gays so much, how come he picked Michelangelo, a known homosexual, to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling while assigning Anita Bryant to go on tv and push orange juice?” --Mike Royko

“At the beginning of the World Series of 1947, I experienced a completely new emotion, when the national anthem was played. This time, I thought, it is being played for me, as much as for everyone else. This is organized major league baseball, and I am standing here with all the others; and everything that takes place includes me.” --Jackie Robinson

“Two friends, disillusioned with the rigors of a responsible life, turn to cattle rustling.”

--plot summary of Rancho Deluxe in TV GUIDE

“Can I get a new bike?”
--Chad Brenner, age 8, of Rockville, Maryland, mistakenly sent an IRS refund of $39,541.55

“The propaganda of the drug war obliterates the injustices of class and race, the issue of government for and by the rich. It reduces the social problem to a glaring symptom of widespread helplessness. The only true lesson of the war on drugs is the same as that of the catastrophic health care repeal: a demoralized and confused population can be manipulated into acting against its own best interests for an indefinite period of time. People will use drugs as long as the society offers them nothing but shit, and shit is what we have on the menu.”
--Gary Indiana, Villiage Voice, October 31, 1989

“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

--John F. Kennedy, Inaugural, 1961

“That’s not writing. That’s typing.”
--Truman Capote, rejecting the manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road


“The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.” --Galileo

“Shortly before the 1968 primary election, aides were urging Bobby Kennedy to lead a parade of supporters around Monument Circle even though they couldn’t get a parade permit for several days. Bobby nixed the suggestion explaining: ‘I can’t stand the thought of spending a night in jail with nothing to read but the Indianapolis Star.’” --J. Jeff Hays, of Evansville, Indiana, letter to the Star, May 18, 1998

"My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there is hardly any difference." --Harry S Truman

“The gross national product is rising above $800 billion a year but that figure does not measure the health of our youth, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not measure the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” --Robert Kennedy, 1968

“To listen even briefly to Ronald Reagan is to realize that he is a man upon whose synapses termites have dined long and well.” --Christopher Hitchens

“A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither.”

--Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison

Let's pretend this plug is 'Iraq' and you're trying to connect it to the 'War on Terror,' which is this avocado. You can do it, but here's the problem: the avocado still doesn't turn on. And now your plug is covered in guacamole." --Jon Stewart, c. October 2006

“Show me the country in which there are no strikes and I’ll show you that country in which there is no liberty.”

--Emma Goldman, American anarchist (1869-1940)

“Good architecture lets nature in.” --I. M. Pei

“I am convinced that there is only one way to eliminate grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.”

--Albert Einstein, 1949

“The faithfulness I imagine would be a weed flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.” --Adrienne Rich

“Love someone and let someone love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?”

--James Baldwin

“Love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it gives birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child who lost a dog yesterday.”

--Thornton Wilder, 1960

“Peacekeeping--like housekeeping--is a series of repetitive, time-consuming, often menial tasks which need to be continually accomplished, so that we may incorporate the need for peace into the expectations of children.”

--Margaret Mead


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Go, Democrats.