Tag Archives: literary oddities

Rotten Reviews: Gail Godwin, A Mother and Two Daughters

Godwin earnestly sticks by her characters… The only trouble is, like the people next door, they’re nice but not very interesting.”

Saturday Review 

Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.   

The Doubter’s Companion: Award Show

Award Show: Mechanism by which the members of a given profession attempt to give themselves the attributes of the pre-modern ruling classes—the military, aristocracy and priesthood—by assigning various orders, decorations, and medals to each other.

These shows are superficial expressions of corporatism. As with the pre-modern classes, their awards relate principally to relationships within the profession. Each time the words “I want to thank” are used by someone being decorated, they indicate a relationship based on power. The awards have little to do with the corporation’s relationship to the outside world—what you might call the public—or for that matter with quality.”

Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

George Bernard Shaw on Chess

“Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time.”

George Bernard Shaw

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

Write It Right: Demise for Death

“Demise for Death. Usually said of a person of note. Demise means the lapse, as by death, of some authority, distinction, or privilege, which passes to another than the one that held it; as the demise of the Crown.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, AmbroseWrite it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.

H.L. Mencken on Faith

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

H.L. Mencken

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007

Warren Zevon on Personal and Public Integrity in Our Era

“I started as an altar boy working at the church
Learning all my holy moves doing some research
Which led me to a cash box labelled ‘Children’s Fund’
I’d leave the change and tuck the bills inside my cummerbund
I got a part-time job at my father’s carpet store
Laying tactless stripping and housewives by the score
I loaded up their furniture and took it to Spokane
Auctioned off every last Naugahyde divan
I’m very well acquainted with the seven deadly sins
I keep a busy schedule trying to fit them in
I’m proud to be a glutton and I don’t have time for sloth
I’m greedy and I’m angry and I don’t care who I cross
[CHORUS]
I’m, intruder in the dirt
I like to have a good time and I don’t care who gets hurt
I’m, take a look at me
I’ll live to be a hundred and go down in history
Of course I went to law school and got a law degree
And counseled all my clients to plead insanity
Then worked in hair replacement swindling the bald
Where very few are chosen, fewer still are called
Then on to Monte Carlo play chemin de fer
I threw away the fortune I made transplanting hair
I put my last few francs down on a prostitute
Who took me up to her room to perform the flag salute
Whereupon I stole her passport and her wig
And headed for the airport and the midnight flight, you dig?
Fourteen hours later I was down in Adelaide
Looking through the want ads sipping Foster’s in the shade
I opened up an agency somewhere down the line
To hire aboriginals to work the opal mines
But I attached their wages and took a whopping cut
And whisked away their workman’s comp and pauperized the lot
[CHORUS]
I bought a first class ticket on Malaysian Air
Landed in Sri Lanka none the worse for wear
I’m thinking of retiring from all my dirty deals
See you in the next life, wake me up for meals”
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Jorge A. Calderon / Warren Zevon
Mr. Bad Example lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner Chappell Music, Inc, Wixen Music Publishing

Quentin Crisp on Becoming a Writer

“There are three reasons for becoming a writer. The first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; and the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings.”

Quentin Crisp

Excerpted from: Sherrin, Ned, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations. New York: Oxford University Press. 1996.

The Doubter’s Companion: Aspen Institute

“Aspen Institute: A supermarket of conventional wisdom for middle-level executives. Corporate life, particularly for those not on the fast track, has all the bureaucratic pitfalls of directionless boredom. To distract these confused but loyal servants from what Thoreau called their ‘lives of quiet desperation,’ they are periodically shipped off to rest camps where, over the period of a few days, they are taught important things which can change their lives, their company, the world. Failing that, the experience may help them hold on a bit longer.”

Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

Charles Ives on Awards

“Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.”

Charles Ives

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

G.K. Chesterton on Journalism

“Journalism consists largely in saying ‘Lord Jones died’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”

G.K. Chesterton

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.