TV Quote of the Day (‘The Simpsons,’ As the Family Goes to an Unusual Doctor)

[Homer Simpson says that he has made an appointment with Dr. Marvin Monroe for the family.]

Lisa Simpson [voice of Yeardley Smith]: “You're taking us to a doctor that advertises on pro wrestling?”

Homer Simpson [voice of Dan Castellaneta]: “Boxing, Lisa, boxing. There's a world of difference.”—The Simpsons, Season 1, Episode 4, “There's No Disgrace Like Home,” original air date Jan. 28, 1990, teleplay by Al Jean, Mike Reiss, and Jon Vitti, directed Kent Butterworth and Gregg Vanzo

This may be the only reference from this episode of 36 years ago that needs to be updated. These days, Dr. Monroe would not advertise on boxing or pro wrestling, but on UFC.

And, as part of their therapy, the family would watch that “sport” on the White House lawn.

Quote of the Day (Damon Beres, on a New, ‘More Actively Anti-Social’ Digital Era)

“[W]hat is now unfolding...is the beginning of a new digital era, more actively anti-social than the last. Generative AI will automate a large number of jobs, removing people from the workplace. But it will almost certainly sap humanity from the social sphere as well. Over years of use—and product upgrades—many of us may simply slip into relationships with bots that we first used as helpers or entertainment, just as we were lulled into submission by algorithmic feeds and the glow of the smartphone screen. This seems likely to change our society at least as much as the social media era has.”— American tech journalist and editor Damon Beres, “Dispatches: Get a Real Friend,” The Atlantic, December 2025

Quote of the Day (Alice McDermott, on Perceptions of Literature Vs. ‘Chick Lit’)

“A woman narrating the story of her life with an annoying boyfriend was chick lit. A man narrating the story of his life with an annoying woman was, well, literature.” ― American novelist Alice McDermott, What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction (2021)

The image accompanying this post was taken by Slowking4, showing Alice McDermott reading at the 2018 Gaithersburg Book Festival, May 19, 2018.

Photo of the Day: José de San Martín Monument, Central Park, NYC

Longtime New York Times columnist James Reston wrote that Americans would do anything for Latin America except read about it. Let’s see how many of my readers disprove his contention.

I came across the equestrian statue in this photo a couple of weeks ago, when I was walking near the entrance to Central Park at 59^th Street and Avenue of the Americas. It pays tribute to José de San Martín (1778–1850), a general who led Argentina, Chile, and Peru to independence from Spanish rule—then remarkably, instead of seizing power, as so many post-independence soldiers did over the last two centuries, resigned his post.

The San Martin statue, dedicated in 1951, is a smaller-scale replica of one in Buenos Aires created in 1862 by the French sculptor Louis-Joseph Daumas.

Whether intentional or coincidental, the Central Park version faces another equestrian statue of a second Latin American liberator, Simon Bolivar, as if in commemoration of their historic July 1822 encounter in Guayaquil, Peru.

Nobody is quite sure what the two commanders said in this closed-door meeting, but two months later San Martin resigned his title as “Protector of Peru,” in an attempt to ensure South American unity.

That hope was frustrated. Two years later, dismayed over the continued fracturing of the nations he’d just helped free as well as the death of his wife from tuberculosis, San Martin set sail with his daughter for Europe, and never returned. Following his death in France in 1850, his remains were transferred to the Cathedral of Buenos Aires in Plaza de Mayo.

North Americans should know more about San Martin’s military campaigns. His 1817 crossing of the Andes particularly displayed his cunning, audacity, and precise planning. Before marching, he used Mapuche natives to spread misinformation about his next moves among the opposing Spanish forces.

A New York parade on the day I walked by prevented me from coming close to the statue, so it is a bit hard to see to its top, more than 34 feet off the ground.

But you can see from the photo that San Martin’s right arm is raised. I would guess that it’s not merely commanding his men in battle, but directing the 5,000 troops he had trained in Argentina into rugged passes in the Andes more than 10,000 feet high.

By the time he left the mountains and entered Chile, the Spanish royalist forces opposing him, confused by the false intelligence passed along through the Mapuches, did not know where to concentrate their forces. San Martin defeated them soundly at the Battle of Chacabuco.

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on Something ‘Savage, Uncanny and Frightening’ in the South)

“[I]t was in a small Southern city… that I once saw the surface crack for a minute and something savage, uncanny and frightening rear its head. Then the surface closed again—and when I have gone back there since, I’ve been surprised to find myself as charmed as ever by the magnolia trees and the singing darkies in the street and the sensuous warm nights. I have been charmed, too, by the bountiful hospitality and the languorous easy-going outdoor life and the almost universal good manners. But all too frequently I am the prey of a vivid nightmare that recalls what I experienced in that town five years ago.”—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “The Dance,” The Red Book Magazine (June 1926), reprinted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (March 1953)

A century ago this month, The Red Book Magazine published something unusual for F. Scott Fitzgerald: a murder mystery. He was not completely averse to genre fiction (his short stories “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and "A Short Trip Home" have Gothic/horror elements), but his foray into detective stories was another matter entirely.

How much of  it was a lark while he did the rounds of night spots in France, where he had moved so he and his family could live more cheaply? (His output for the year consisted of the short story "Your Way and Mine" and the essay "How To Waste Material.") And how much of it was part of a fascination with murder that was leading him on a dead end in his initial stages of creating the long-gestating Tender Is the Night? 

To be sure, neither Agatha Christie, with her cunning plots, nor Dashiell Hammett, with his terse dialogue and morally compromised characters, had much to fear by this interloper in their territory.

But Fitzgerald being Fitzgerald, he had to bring something of himself to this exercise. There’s his fascination with the South, where he had met his wife Zelda; his almost effortlessly lyrical writing style; and his “flaming youth” characters, this time transplanted to a Charleston small-town ball.

And with a single phrase that sounds distinctly politically incorrect in our time—“singing darkies in the street”—he introduces a concern he had slipped into his novel from the year before, The Great Gatsby: race. 

Recall that from that Jazz Age masterpiece, his hideously brutal and idiotic recipient of inherited wealth, Tom Buchanan, launches into an incoherent rant about “Nordic” superiority—a precursor of the “great replacement theory” advocated most prominently today by Tucker Carlson.

In “The Dance,” suspicion of the murder that unexpectedly breaks out in this “small Southern city” falls on one of the “singing darkies” evoked by the story’s female narrator—and the threat of lynching hangs very much in the air.

“The Dance” was not included among the 43 tales collected in 1989 by literary scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli for The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But as far as I’m concerned, just about everything Fitzgerald wrote had some mark of charm or style—and this curious work of short fiction is no different.

This Day in Film History (Louis B. Mayer Loses MGM Showdown)

June 22, 1951—Loews Inc. announced the results of a long-rumored feud in its Hollywood subsidiary, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM): production chief Dore Schary would replace Louis B. Mayer (pictured) as head of the largest of Hollywood’s seven major studios.

The press release mentioned that Mayer was becoming an independent producer, but it was inconceivable to longtime employees—including many who came out the following day to bid him goodbye—that the mogul would voluntarily end his 27-year reign, including a stretch when he was the highest-paid man in America.

Those suspicions proved correct: Mayer had traveled from his Hollywood offices to the studio’s New York-based financial directorate to present an ultimatum to Loews President Nicholas Schenck: It’s either Schary or me. Instead, Schenck called his bluff and forced his resignation.

Forget about Schary: Mayer had also talked down his boss so much that it would have been a miracle for word of the backbiting not to reach Schenk eventually.

They spoke constantly—"two or three times a day in an age when coast-to-coast telephone calls were not so easily made as they are today,” according to David McClintick’s account of a later Tinseltown-New York power struggle, Indecent Exposure—but were seldom on each other’s wavelengths.  Mayer referred to him variously as “The General," "Nick Skunk," “the smiler and the killer," and “the big cheese.”

Ironically, Mayer had brought back to MGM the number-two he came to loathe. A former screenwriter, Schary was chafing as production chief at RKO after its acquisition by the increasingly eccentric Howard Hughes when he was invited back to the lot he had once known as his professional home.

Schary’s key demand for his return—that he bring along his pet project, Battleground—sparked conflict between himself and his new boss.

One of the most grittily realistic WWII dramas released in the early postwar period, it was anathema to Mayer, a mogul not just of old-fashioned tastes but even Victorian ones. If his movie factory could have churned out only musicals and Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy series, he probably wouldn’t have minded very much. 

In contrast to Mayer’s conservative Republican sympathies, Schary—two decades younger—was an industrial-strength New Deal Democrat who wanted more socially conscious fare like Battleground that sent a message.

Battleground’s triumph with critics and, more important, the public (it was one of the top box-office hits of 1949) boosted Schary’s cachet with Schenck while undermining Mayer’s.

With television emerging as a rival medium, lost court cases weakening studio control over stars and movie houses, and international Communism threatening audience optimism across the country, Mayer no longer seemed in touch with public tastes. The question was, would Schary?

Mayer might have been wrong about the commercial prospects for Battleground, but turned out to be right about another war film on the bubble in his final days at MGM: John Huston’s adaptation of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Even with an authentic war hero, Audie Murphy, as the lead, audiences stayed away, proving Mayer’s contention that they would find it too depressing.

In the long run, Schenck might have been correct that Mayer was too old and set in his ways to continue running MGM, but it did not mean that Schary was the right leader to steer the studio through its choppy new waters. 

A highly capable scriptwriter and playwright (as he would show in a few years with his biopic about polio-stricken Franklin Roosevelt, Sunrise at Campobello), he proved less adept at managing talent or sensing what audiences wanted. Any positive impression generated by his geniality faded once his corporate mismanagement became apparent.

In contrast, even before he participated in the 1924 merger that established MGM, Mayer had been involved with the movie industry in multiple capacities, so he knew the business thoroughly.

While Schary soon frustrated the studio’s musical hands with his complete lack of interest in the genre, Mayer valued their contributions.

And, while Schary would in a few short years drive away stars like Clark Gable from their longtime home, Mayer, for all his paternalism, sincerely wanted to prove there was no hype in MGM’s longtime slogan, “More stars than there are in the heavens.”

There was no ultimate victor in the MGM showdown. In late 1955, Schenck would be kicked upstairs when Arthur Loew Sr. became president of his family company. Among Lowe Sr.’s most notable moves in his single year at MGM was firing Schary, who spent his remaining quarter-century of life doing what he probably was most cut out for to begin with: writing.

As for Mayer, he was able neither to make a go at independent producing nor in regaining control of MGM when the studio’s declining finances wore down investors’ patience. 

When he died in 1957, though some deplored his penny-pinching tendencies, others would have agreed with one of his stars, Katharine Hepburn, when she wrote in her autobiography, “L.B. Mayer was a shrewd man with enormous understanding of an artist. He was not stupid, not crude. He was a very sensible fellow, and extremely honest.”

Quote of the Day (Matt Whitaker, on God and a Streep-Related Commandment)

“You shall not bow down to any statue, or worship any image, or green-light any Hollywood bio-pic about the LORD. For then some producer will say, ‘Let's see if Meryl's avail?’ And, if she be avail, she'd probably be great. She's always great. But I, the LORD, am a jealous God. And I sometimes get the feeling that you like Meryl more than you like me.”—Humorist Matt Whitaker, “Shouts and Murmurs: Commandments of the Lord Who Created Meryl Streep,” The New Yorker, Jan. 7, 2019

All hail Meryl Streep today, on her 77^th birthday! As Whitaker puckishly implies, she’s been Hollywood’s go-to actress for virtually any role you can imagine (three Oscar victories and 21 nominations!), courtesy of a near-flawless command of foreign accents and a willingness to physically transform herself into nearly anything.

Was there ever any real doubt about her coming back to her role as Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada 2? The real question is if we can imagine any role of a female of a certain age with her not in it?

Savor Prada 2 while you can, Streep-philes: you’ll have to wait till 2027 for her next screen appearance, in the Greta Gerwig-helmed Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew.