Quote of the Day (Oliver Goldsmith, on Absurdity)

“Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.”—Anglo-Irish playwright-poet Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1744), The Traveller: Or, a Prospect of Society (1764)

I can think of at least one shameless supporter of absurdity. I’m sure you can come up with multiple examples.

Photo of the Day: Halloween Display, Central School, Glen Rock NJ

This morning, while in this Bergen County town on other business, I noticed in the distance what looked like a mass of white sheets. Coming closer, I saw a couple of long rows of ghouls, spooks, and additional otherworldly creatures associated with the end of this month.

I chuckled as I took the photo accompanying this post of these apparitions, whose diminutive size put them in the same physical category as many of the youngsters in the school—and whose expressions suggested Caspar the Friendly Ghost much more than the malevolent Poltergeist. 

But, come to think of it, kids these days are probably exposed to so much on TV and in the movies that these Hollywood depictions don’t have the power to scare them like before. No, it’s just real life that they have to be concerned with.

Quote of the Day (Michael Dobbs, on Politicians’ ‘Dangerous Phase’)

“Politicians are much like aging authors and older women. The dangerous phase in their lives is when they are no longer content with the respect of friends but demand the adulation of an audience.” —British novelist and Conservative politician Michael Dobbs, House of Cards (1989)

(The image accompanying this post shows Ian Richardson as Machiavellian politician Francis Urquhart in BBC's adaptation of Dobbs’ House of Cards: To Play the King. More than two decades later, Kevin Spacey played his American counterpart in the Netflix adaptation.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Wife,’ With Lines to Recall As We Await This Week’s Nobel Literature Announcement)

[After attending a party preceding Joe Castleman’s reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature, he and wife Joan Castleman have just entered an opulent Stockholm hotel suite.]
 
Joan Castleman [played by Glenn Close, pictured]: “Brush your teeth. Your breath is bad.”
 
Joe Castleman [played by Jonathan Pryce]: “Do you think they noticed?”
 
Joan: “No, they were too busy being awed.”—The Wife (2018), screenplay by Jane Anderson, based on the novel by Meg Wolitzer, directed by Bjorn Runge

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Karen Armstrong, on Being ‘Twinned With an Enemy’)

“Remember that we can become twinned with an enemy and come to resemble him. Our hatred may become an alter ego, a part of our identity.” — British religion scholar Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

Quote of the Day (Lewis Carroll, on ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’)

“The Walrus and the Carpenter
   Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
   Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
   And waited in a row.
 
"‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
   ‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
   Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
   And whether pigs have wings.’"—English children’s book author, poet, mathematician, and photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
 
By now, you’d think I’d know better than to listen to sports radio. I keep tuning, for instance, to my local version of the form, WFAN-FM, hoping for news or insights into my favorite sports teams—the Yankees, the Knicks, the Giants.
 
But as often as not I have to put up with idiotic ravings that fill up the airspace featuring the hosts’ hobbies, family lives, or, God help me, political leanings.
 
Even so, I was a little surprised the other day when, on WFAN’s afternoon show, Craig Carton and on-air partner Chris McMonigle, in a not particularly inspired bit of free association, came up with “the carpenter and the walrus.”
 
These two figures, the pair thought, were from a “fable.” If that was the case, Carton believed, maybe it was from Aesop’s Fables, as he was “an Aesop man.”
 
By now, their producers perhaps have told them this is not the case. Not that this would matter, because next week the pair could come up with an equally wrongheaded misattribution and make their schoolteachers roll over in their graves.
 
Even so, maybe someone can tell them that the Walrus and the Carpenter don’t appear in a fable but in a narrative poem enclosed in the fantasy novel Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? Better yet, could someone please send them a copy of these verses?

By the way, the image accompanying this post, of the Walrus and the Carpenters speaking to the oysters, was created by English illustrator Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914) for the original edition of Through the Looking-Glass.

Quote of the Day (Andy Rooney, on Designing a Chair)

“Last summer I made a chair. The wood was maple and cherry, and I invented what kind of a chair it was as I went along. When I finished, the chair looked great, but it has one shortcoming. It tips over backwards when anyone sits in it. My design was better than my engineering.” — CBS journalist and humorist Andy Rooney (1919-2011), “Design,” originally published in The Huntington (KS) News, Apr. 2, 1980, reprinted in And More by Andy Rooney (1982)

Fifteen years ago today, Andy Rooney delivered his last of 1,097 short, 60 Minutes segments. “I wish I could do this forever. I can’t, though,” he said, acknowledging that, at age 92, his career had come to an end. He died less than five weeks later, after developing postoperative complications from an undisclosed surgical procedure.

He served as a WWII correspondent for Stars and Stripes, but made his most significant mark at CBS—first as writing and producing partner of Harry Reasoner, then as a familiar droll on-screen commentator in his own right in 33 years on 60 Minutes. 

His presence became so vivid that he was parodied by SNL’s Joe Piscopo (see this hilarious YouTube clip on “Shoes”) and Norm Macdonald, as well as Frank Caliendo (on MAD TV).

When you google Rooney’s name, there’s a good chance you will come up with some low-lights from his career, too, such as insensitive remarks on Kurt Cobain’s death or “homosexual unions.” After his death, Time Magazine weighed in on his “most ridiculous complaints” in “Top 10 Grumpiest Andy Rooney Segments.”  (One sample: “What’s a Lady Gaga?”)

Still, for someone appearing on camera every week for so long, it’s surprising that more embarrassing examples don’t turn up. (Commentators on at least one “news” channel I can think of come up with that many in just five minutes, let alone three decades.) In any case, Rooney could be rightly proud for picking up Peabody and Emmy Awards for his work.

At the height of a 1986 corporate bloodletting at his longtime network, Rooney bluntly observed, in his syndicated news column, “CBS . . . no longer stands for anything. They’re just corporate initials now.” It’s easy to imagine what he would have thought of the recent turmoil at the news division and Sunday evening institution where he labored for so long.

In fact, one person who has done so is his grandson, Ben Fishel, in a Los Angeles Times piece from June:

“Sometimes I miss the era when my grandfather could devote an entire television segment to the mysteries of his junk drawer. Those trivial subjects only seemed trivial because the foundations of democracy felt secure enough to take for granted.

“Rooney rarely made himself the story, and he was not known as a particularly political commentator. But he believed deeply in journalism and in the responsibility that comes with informing the public.

“On that issue, I do not think he would be silent today.”