I: The Kandy-Kolored, Tangerine-Flake, Streamlined Baby
“One wants to say to Mr. Wolfe; you’re so clever, you can write so well, tell us something interesting.”
Saturday Review
II: The Painted Word
“There is plenty of hot air in this particular balloon, but I don’t see it going anywhere.”
John Russell, New York Times Book Review
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“re·a·lia \rē-ˈa-lē-ə, -ˈā-\ n pl [LL, neut. pl. of realis real] (1937) : objects or activities used to relate classroom teaching to the real life esp. of peoples studied.”
Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition (Kindle Locations 297566-297568). Merriam-Webster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
“Congress—these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches , hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
“Teachers who act as if they have something to learn as well as something to contribute, establish better learning relationships with students and parents.”
Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan What’s Worth Fighting for Out There? (1998)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Populist, n. A fossil patriot of the early agricultural period, found in the old red soapstone underlying Kansas; characterized by an uncommon spread of ear, which some naturalists contend gave him the power of flight, though Professors Morse and Whitney, pursuing independent lines of thought, have ingeniously pointed out that had he possessed it he would have gone elsewhere. In the picturesque speech of his period, some fragments of which have come down to us, he was known as ‘The Matter with Kansas.'”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
“237,600 miles is the average distance between the earth and the moon, a number which suggests an intriguing inner harmony to our universe, for it is thirty diameters of the earth, sixty radii of the earth or 220 moon radii. The mystical author and numerologist John Michell would reveal these figures with the full force of a revelation during his lectures. A self-declared ‘radical traditionalist,’ Michell campaigned long and hard against the destruction of England’s ancient number systems in favor of the decimal system.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, numeracy, science literacy
“Now to the salaries of teachers. In a healthy society, every useful activity is compensated in a way to permit of a decent living. The exercise of any socially valuable activity gives inner satisfaction; but it cannot be considered as part of the salary. The teacher cannot use his inner satisfaction to fill the stomachs of his children.”
“Ensuring the Future of Mankind,” from a Message for Canadian Education Week, March 2-8, 1952. Published in Mein Weitbild, Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1953, excerpted from: Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1982.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
(For reasons I can’t entirely explain, I have always found The Mitford Family interesting, particularly Jessica and Nancy. Jessica’s famous [or infamous, if you subscribe to the ideas of the eminent American politician quoted below] book, which I’ve yet to read, The American Way of Death, is an expose of the funeral industry in the United States. It is of a type with Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, an excoriating satire of the funeral industry in Los Angeles. Incidentally, The Loved One was also produced as a film in 1965 and is simply a masterpiece, e.g. the casting of Liberace as a coffin salesman was particularly inspired).
“While hiding behind the commercial aspects of the mortician and the cemeteries and mausoleums where our dear departed friends and relatives are commemorated, she is really striking another blow at the Christian religion. Her tirade against morticians is simply the vehicle to carry her anti-Christ attack… I would rather place my mortal remains, alive or dead, in the hands of any American mortician than to set foot on the soil of any Communist nation.”
Congressman James B. Utt, Congressional Record
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, united states history
“One has to be lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
“To every answer you can find a new question.”
Yiddish Proverb
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
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