Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM Washington Post George F. Will contributes to the great tradition of malaise in America rhetoric made famous by the incomparable James Earl Carter of Cross Road, Georgia: A less...
...I don't really regard Oxford dons as being determined by gender...
...And these peanuts are being tossed just out of our reach...
...Harold Bloom, a Yale Deconstructionist and reformed frotteur: If our nineties are indeed going to be a vertigo of contrary impulses, it seems clear that intellectually committed women will suffer most from these contending drives...
...January 15, 1990] Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, Virginia) An enlightened man of the cloth demonstrates that atheism is not always a waste of time: A few years back, I watched a woman tossing some peanuts over a short guard rail to a gorilla at the San Diego zoo...
...And I would have to extend that to I don't think they know how to act onstage at all...
...As a mother, I am tired of the rude, personal remarks made about my daughter Tama, whose name these days appears to be an easy cliche, a synonym for "celebrity...
...We might have looked to ourselves as most of Eastern Europe has looked to us on television the past four months...
...January 9, 1990]New York In his justly celebrated TV column, the poet John Leonard distills the essence of all 1960s fairy tales into one droplet of goo, vaguely demented: In February, Eyes on the Prize II devotes an hour to Dr...
...We would do better to put our money and time entirely into Amnesty International, which is concerned with the needs of the underprivileged and misrepresented rather than the envious and misanthropic...
...It's easier to trick people onstage because they're far away...
...If it's hollow, I know it...
...We have millions of them in this country, ones that aren't even movie stars...
...CURRENT WISDOM Washington Post George F. Will contributes to the great tradition of malaise in America rhetoric made famous by the incomparable James Earl Carter of Cross Road, Georgia: A less mild assessment of Bush's Year One is that his administration illustrates—in a sense is—the echoing emptiness at the core of contemporary politics...
...Perhaps others will follow our lead...
...But it's so subtle that no one noticed...
...Where's their Debra Winger...
...in the American Spectator, all sparkle gone and champagne turned to vinegar...
...Where's their anyone...
...In New York for the U.S...
...She tossed them just out of reach of the gorilla...
...February 1990] PEN Newsletter Authoress Tama Janowitz, last seen hawking Rose's Lime Juice in a glamorous advertisement with the roguish Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., gets the support of Mama Janowitz in the influential newsletter of PEN: This is in regard to your transcript on book reviewing that appeared in PEN Newsletter #69...
...Where's their Robert De Niro...
...He sauntered back to the rear of his living area and then picked up a pile of his gorilla excrement and hit the one who was responsible for his frustration...
...Phyllis Janowitz [December 1989] New Leader In reviewing the recently published Diary of H. L. Mencken, the terminally dyspeptic Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Of all the movements in the American 1960s only feminism has the capacity to renew the exuberance manifested during that decade...
...Representative of the spirit of the age, these women will be at once more impatient with things as they are, and more constrained by an inward solitude...
...and another hour to Muhammad Ali, from his defeat of Sonny Liston through his joining the Nation of Islam to his refusal of the draft to his vindication by the Supreme Court and his thrashing of George Foreman...
...It all fell apart, didn't it...
...A senior lawyer at the World Court . . . offered a similar observation...
...very flat vinegar at that...
...It took Bernard DeVoto's great composition course at Harvard to comb the Menckenese out of my writing—something that DeVoto, another devotee, never quite accomplished for himself...
...I am not an animal, especially a gorilla . . . —Bishop Bill Newton Fredericksburg [January 9, 1990] THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 43...
...Perhaps it is not the world that will split open in the nineties, but rather those women who quest too passionately to tell the truth about their lives...
...And as an audience member, I know it...
...Its intellectual and moral flaccidity reflect (we do indeed have representative government) the sagging of America deeper into a peripheral role abroad and self-indulgence at home...
...Now what did the gorilla do when he got fed up with not being satisfied...
...The question is whether Sarah Caudwell will ever reveal the sex of Hilary Tamar...
...We all tried to imitate him and succeeded only in producing the debased Menckenese (the "Prof...
...December 17, 1989] Mirabella "Inward solitude," "Otherness," "internalization," worlds splitting open, "Amazon phalanxes emanating"—all this and more from Prof...
...I am thinking that governmental leaders are just tossing us, the American public, just a few peanuts to make us think there is really something being done about the terrible drug crisis...
...usage, the resort to words like "gaudy" and "boob" and "fugleman" and "swinish") that still drones on today in the prose of Robert Emmett Tyrell [sic] Jr...
...This really frustrated the gorilla to such an extent that he . . . , well, I'll tell you what he did in a moment, but first the application of my parable...
...Sean Connery is not English...
...I think Hilary is sort of a quintessential Oxford don...
...And I think when you've got a movie camera this close up into somebody's face . . . to my mind's eye, if they're not feeling it, I know it...
...Hooray for the gorilla...
...For a while there, in the mid-sixties, it seemed as if this curve of moral passion would sweep everything before it...
...Some even said that to find a direct precedent one would have to go back more than two millenia [sic]: when the ancient Romans brought back in chains leaders of conquered lands...
...It was like the Romans leading back defeated leaders and taking them to the circus to be displayed...
...Where is their Marlon Brando...
...In any event it is not anything my daughter has ever courted, she has always tried to write well, just that...
...One can see fresh phalanxes of such women emanating from our universities even as I write, and their struggle will animate the nineties...
...The poet Muriel Rukeyser once asked: "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life...
...Where's their Jessica Lange...
...The world would split open...
...January 10, 1990] Village Voice The Village Voice conducts a guided tour into another literary zoo: "No...
...I mean, just the logistics of it, you know...
...Manuel Antonio Noriega on drug charges is largely unprecedented and was basically a blunt political act with only an after-the-fact legal rationale, several legal scholars say...
...release of her third Tamar mystery, The Sirens Sang of Murder, Caudwell sits in the pub of the Algonquin, puffing on a pipe, blinking behind the thick lenses of bumble bee glasses and speaking in witty, lockjaw British...
...If the initial feminist drive of thirty years ago has subsided, it is replaced by greater sophistication and consequent internalization...
...His soul is dead...
...I don't know why she and I, both PEN members who have given our time and money to the organization, need to continue supporting unfounded and deleterious statements about ourselves...
...I believe in this case it is meant to connote something unattractive...
...Where's their Meryl Streep...
...Not just as an actor...
...Recently, this nation has seen stories in newspapers and on television about Manuel Noriega, Panama and the Central American drug trafficking problem...
...They don't have one movie star...
...I mean, we'll start at the top and go down...
...I'm not talking just about movie stars...
...December 11-25, 1989] New York Times The historical imagination at work in our times: The apprehension of Gen...
...Caudwell—Sarah Caudwell Cockburn, in fact—was more or less born to write such quirky characters . . . Her father was the leftist writer Claud Cockburn, her half-brother the journalist Alexander Cockburn...
...I can't think of any really good examples unless you go back in history about 2,000 years ago," the lawyer said...
...No, no, never...
...Celebrity is an abstraction...
...I fell for Mencken at once, with, as in the case of so many devotees, deleterious effects on my own style...
...They're certainly not the best film actors in the world," she says...
...I am beginning to feel somewhat like the poor gorilla in the San Diego zoo...
...Subsequent programs revisit J. Edgar Hoover, Attica, bloody Boston trying to desegregate, Allan Bakke being white at Davis, Miami in flames, Harold Washington—too briefly—triumphant in Chicago...
...calumniates two American immortals: I was 15 years old at the time I received Prejudices as a Christmas gift...
...Instead, we look like savage Romania...
...January 21, 1990] Los Angeles Times Hollywood director Oliver Stone's bablative proof that he is au fond a lifetime graduate student at the Department of Speech and Theater at U. Cal., Berkeley, now and forever: "The vandals are at the gate . . . We have a fascist security state running this country . . . Orwell did happen...
...It is an image brought to mind by the pictures of General Noriega being shackled in the hold of a C-130 aircraft as he was brought to United States soil last week...
...You know, you know, where's their Robert Duvall...
...King, from his opposition to the war in Vietnam to his murder in Memphis...
...But, you know, I don't think they know how to act at all...
...Where's their Al Pacino...
...I think that's why...
...January 1990]Vanity Fair Shakespeare's people exposed by that hormonal Hollywood genius, Miss Ellen Barkin, as translated by a factotum at Vanity Fain Few things bum her out more than the idea that American actors are inferior to English actors and that English actors are the best in the world...
...Like, where are their great movie actors...
...All of this "information" that we have received has been intended to give us the impression that our government is doing its best to try and stop the massive influx of illegal drugs into this country...
...The truly permanent movement to emerge from the sixties was a reborn feminism, and the center of that movement was a denial of the male romanticism that proclaimed the Otherness of women...
...If I were George Bush I'd shoot myself...
...Existentially there's no hope...
Vol. 23 • March 1990 • No. 3
