Quote of the Day (Ring Lardner, With a Father and Child on an Early 20th-Century Road Trip)

“Are you lost daddy? I arsked tenderly.
 
"Shut up he explained.” —American sportswriter, short-story writer, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), “The Young Immigrunts,” Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 31, 1920, reprinted in Ring Lardner: Stories and Other Writings, edited by Ian Frazier (2013)
 
I don’t know if, as an American, you’ve heard of, let alone read, The Young Visiters, a 1919 novella written by an Englishwoman, Daisy Ashford, when she reportedly was only nine years old.
 
One writer who looked at it dubiously was Ring Lardner, who parodied it in The Young Immigrunts—first as a long magazine article, then as a stand-alone book.
 
I suspect, even if you’re unaware of the targets of Lardner’s satire, that you will laugh like mad at his consistently surprising and hilarious use of American slang.

Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on ‘A Sick Country’)

“In a sick country every step to health is an insult to those who live on its sickness.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), The Fixer (1966)

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)