TV Quote of the Day (‘Girls,’ Speaking Prematurely About Wendi Murdoch)

''Maybe I wanna be Wendi Murdoch, maybe that's my new thing.'' — Elijah (Andrew Rannells), on his future as a trophy wife, on Girls, Season 2, Episode 1, “It's About Time,” teleplay by Lena Dunham and Jennifer Konner, directed by Lena Dunham, air date January 14, 2013

Funny how some lines take on entirely new meaning within the passage of only, say, half a year after they’re released to the world. Two years ago, I noted this phenomenon in a post about the film Crazy Stupid Love and its homage to the then-epitome of love between older woman and younger man, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher.

Back when the year began, Wendi Murdoch must have seemed the very epitome of the kind of trophy wife an aging media mogul would love to have. Who needed security when assaulted in public when you had such a tigress for a spouse?

Last summer, the storyline suddenly shifted with news that Rupert Murdoch had filed for divorce from his latest (#3) wife. Just before Thanksgiving came word from The Hollywood Reporter of their “amicable” divorce settlement—helped along, in no small part, one is sure, by one pre-nup and two post-nuptial agreements.

All of this begs the question: If this situation were being covered by a rival corporate entity, how would its New York-based screaming tabloid and its right-wing cable news outfit cover the breakup?

(This April 2010 photograph of Wendi Murdoch at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival was taken by David Shankbone.)

Photo of the Day: MY Kind of Twilight

Enough of “Teenage Paranormal Romance” (possibly the worst category name and use of shelf space I’ve ever come across in a bookstore), and all other baleful manifestations of Stephenie Meyer. I snapped this beautiful sunset on Saturday night, nearly 24 hours before the New York area began to experience sleet, etc. I was viewing Overpeck Creek from the banks of the Overpeck Park Extension, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.

Quote of the Day (Psalms, on God’s Justice ‘From the River to the Ends of the Earth’)

“May they fear you as long as the sun

    and as long as the moon, generations untold.

May he come down like rain on new-mown grass,

    like showers that moisten the earth.

May the just man flourish in his days—

    and abundant peace till the moon is no more.

And may he hold sway from sea to sea,

    from the River to the ends of the earth.”—Psalms 72: 5-8, in The Book of Psalms: A Translation With Commentary, by Robert Alter (2007)

(I took this photograph a few weeks ago at Nyack Beach State Park, along the banks of the Hudson River, in Rockland County, NY.)

Quote of the Day (Willa Cather, on the Haunting Power of the Prairie)

“I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.”― Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918)

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Willa Cather was born on this date in 1873 in Back Creek Valley, Va. Though she did write about her native state in one of her last books, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), the bulk of her fiction concerned the land to which her family moved when she was 10: Nebraska. In much the same way that the New England setting of most of Robert Frost’s work has made most people forget that the poet was born in California, so extraordinary was the descriptive power of Cather in evoking the Midwest that I doubt if many readers know she came from someplace else.

(An author with whom Cather has been more frequently compared--including sense of place--is Edith Wharton, as I discussed in this prior post.)

My Antonia (1918) concluded Cather’s trilogy of her adopted state (O Pioneers! and Song of the Lark came first). Only six years earlier, her novel Alexander’s Bridge had displayed all the marks of an apprentice fiction writer, especially in its heavy indebtedness to Henry James. Even though My Antonia is not without such influences (particularly in its nature as an “envelope story,” in which the main narrative is bracketed by an outside male character, similar to The Turn of the Screw), it also showed that Cather had developed a mature, sinewy style of her own, laying claim to subject matter largely ignored till then.

In particular, many readers have been inspired by the central character of the novel, an immigrant girl who survived a host of troubles with little to aid her but her own innate tenderness and strength. “No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Antonia,” wrote the normally acerbic critic-journalist H.L. Mencken. Many readers couldn’t agree more.

For an especially interesting journey into the work of Cather, you’ll want to check out the “A Literary Odyssey” blog, which earlier this year started “The Willa Cather Project”—the blogger’s attempt to read the entire works of the novelist, then write about it.

Photo of the Day: Mandela, Liberator, in Parliament Square

I took this photo back in January, on my first trip to London. While I was snapping pictures right and left, I had to make sure that I captured digitally this statue of Nelson Mandela. There were already constant news reports that the former South African leader was seriously ailing (indeed, the wonder is that he lasted until his death Thursday).

I took several other photographs in Parliament Square that late Friday afternoon, including ones posted to this blog about Winston Churchill and Sir Robert Peel. But this nine-foot bronze statue of Mandela by sculptor Ian Walters was special. He is not set as high as the other figures in the square, and in his characteristic floral shirt he looks as if he shares more of the air of the common man than anyone else here. Moreover, unlike the others here (including the lone American, Abraham Lincoln), Mandela was the only figure alive for his statue’s unveiling, having lived long enough to pass from heated controversy to something approaching secular canonization.

Mandela shares one other thing with Lincoln. Both were, in essence, liberators—men responsible, through political guile, persistence, and moral passion, an entire class of human beings from the worst kind of legal shackles and inhumanity. They were, in the truest sense, fathers of their reborn nations.

When the statue was unveiled six years ago, Mandela noted: “Though this statue is of one man, it should in actual fact symbolize all of those who have resisted oppression, especially in my country."