Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM White House Weekly A venerated insider's report announces the latest effort at the Politics of Hope by our big lovable lug of a president, a.k.a. Boy Clinton: Aides tell us that...
...On the other hand, if my husband had had to rely on his phone conversations with friends for column ideas — well, you finish the sentence...
...Instead, my voice mail and e-mail filled with extraordinary messages from people who wanted to help...
...1896...
...According to a Wells Fargo employee who worked with Ellen in a different department, "It's extremely difficult working with her...
...Everyone...
...It had no direction...
...Maryanne Dever writes that she would "stick it to my forehead and parade around the way regular owners do...
...Black robes restricting representation...
...I tried to explain I had not recently flown off n a glowing, wafer-thin ship, but I understood its apprehension...
...Cynthia Oren maintains all forms of love re directly linked to each person's failure to clone themselves...
...There were, and still are, starts and stops...
...Its subject is the male member, specifically it's a collection of essays, poems, short stories, and drawings by women in answer to the question: "What would you do if you had one for mi...
...Others have more fun with the idea...
...Moses was the liberator, the Pharaoh the conservative...
...For instance, one writer fantasizes acquiring one by mail from Acme Novelty Organs and using it to beat egg whites...
...Thanks to Freud, men tend to assume that women would like to have what they have, and the premise of this book would seem to bear that out...
...White sheets, burning churches, defacing synagogues...
...Whenever I've used that particular comparison, whether I was talking to female friends at lunch or speaking to a group of women in public, they've always burst out laughing before I got to the end of the subordinate clause...
...I also thank Sir John Gielgud for the way he pronounces the word "borne" in the Hamlet soliloquy and Jack Dempsey for going easy when we sparred and Orel Hershiser and Carl Erskine for sliders, curves, and kindness and, oh, yes, I thank Margaret Sanger for making the diaphragm popular, which just happens to remind me that a short form of Memories of Summer could be Ms...
...and, stripped to the waist, his muscles rippling under a goo of olive oil, his lush mane blowing in the wind, roars out his debt to various colleagues, whilst down below we mortals snicker and guffaw: Somewhere the English novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote, "These memories, which are my life, for we possess nothing surely except our memories...
...at Harvard University) Dithyrambic excerpts from the Rev...
...Jackson: —an economic boycott and a demonstration at Canaan...
...NOVEMBER 14, 1996] 88 May 1997 • The American Spectator New Republic Poesy of an ordinary mind from the celebrated Eve Wood, bored housewife: ...Nothing so portentous ever occurred to me...
...Jesus was a liberator, Herod was the conservative...
...Although bank representatives could not discuss Ellen's situation because personnel issues are confidential, Ellen called Friday with the news that Wells Fargo had invited her back to work...
...MARCH 24,1997] Boston Globe ,olumnist Diane White, opining in the :stimable Boston Globe on Daring Top- where is Lorena Bobbitt when we seed her...
...As Anais Nin wrote...
...1996...
...It was an immediate, visceral recognition of what seems to be a central fact of human attachment: that what men call friendship is often skin deep, while what we women make of it is something probing and intimate, an emotional undressing, something akin to an essay every time we sit down to lunch or pick up the phone...
...White sheets, blue suits, black robes, in lock step in ideology, distinguished by their uniforms...
...A liberator, an emancipator...
...Of course, that doesn't solve the problem...
...And King David for his Song of Solomon and a few characters I think I encountered at midnight once in a Dublin pub —Tinbad the Tailor, Whin-bad the Whaler, and Finbad the Failer...
...A. I started in 1957, the year after the paper was voted one of the nation's truly lousy newspapers...
...It's a contradiction in terms...
...n her book Freud and the Ecstatic Penis, Dr...
...Who then is an author to thank for all the tumult of memories crushed into that busy, irrepressible four-letter word...
...It was written by white men for white people...
...Germaine Greer ends her short contribution with "The best bit would be getting rid of it at the end of the day...
...Like me, I assumed he preferred his own company, and did not mind ballroom dancing by himself f no one had the courtesy to ask...
...What is considered erotic here has a multitude of shapes and forms...
...By 1896, thirty-three years later, the first reconstruction was over, ended by Jim Crow and Plessy v. Ferguson and retreating conservative black leadership in 1895...
...Sacred Lips of the Bronx) has chosen an eclectic, provocative selection of stories...
...One target: The Washington Times...
...Jesus was a liberal...
...The results are surprising, provocative, and even funnier than one might expect...
...I thank Homer for teaching me synecdoche and Dr...
...The newsroom had no women, no blacks, no Asians...
...Several entries disappoint: Pansy Bradshaw's starts out well, but the introduction of a chainsaw is unnecessarily gory...
...Would an oppressed people look for a conservative emancipator...
...JANUARY 27, 1997] Los Angeles Times Mirror ("Editorial Newsletter Published by Hiring and Development") Fatuous confessions from a self-hating Caucasian male of the dope-fetcher variety: George Cotliar has been a fixture at the Los Angeles Times for almost all of the 40 years he has worked here...
...Moses, the liberator, organized the union — (Laughter) Rev...
...Heal the sick without a medical card just because they are sick...
...I figured at the very least the etiquette police would jump on me for choosing an impolite topic...
...I loved that he denied our similarities, which only made me think more of him...
...It was very conservative...
...That wasn't all I wrote about over the years, but I probably could have gotten a column out of nearly every phone conversation...
...Another, just as imaginative if somewhat less ambitious, begins her contribution, "I would prove mine was bigger than Newt Gingrich's...
...This is a critical year,1996, thirty-three years after the march on Washington...
...We recently asked him about his career here...
...Evidently the bank changed its mind...
...Good luck, George, you'll be missed...
...Aides say that Clinton was pleased with the front-page play the newspaper gave to an exclusive preview of his inaugural address and is anxious to convince the newspaper's staff that he isn't a radical liberal...
...But the campaign to change the media's portrayal of him doesn't yet reach to The New York Post or American Spectator, they said...
...Boy Clinton: Aides tell us that President Clinton's obsession with building a lasting legacy may include a breaking of the bread with the conservative press...
...Everyone was named Smith and Jones, and it reflected that...
...White sheets, burning churches and defacing synagogues...
...FEBRUARY 24, 1997] Chicago Tribune Magazine Former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen explains in her inimical style why she is the least-missed columnist in America since Eleanor Roosevelt: "Write about what you and your friends are talking about on the telephone," an editor told me when I was given the assignment of writing a personal column a decade ago...
...life...LIFE...
...Ellen works for Wells Fargo Bank in an office with other people...
...Forgive sinners, redeem those who have been banished, let them back in, it's a liberal idea...
...FEBRUARY 27, 1997] The Great Books Series In the "Acknowledgments" page of his latest tome, the stupendous Roger Kahn stands atop the highest mountain in Manhattan...
...I thank almost everyone who has crossed my ken, past and present...
...But the point of the anthology, writes editor Fiona Giles in the introduction, is not to promote the myth of penis envy, but to reveal "what women really think of the phallus as both anatomical object and cultural archetype...
...The employee said she understood Ellen's need for a job, but other workers should have the right to work in an environment free of noxious smells...
...Blue suits restricting and resisting reconstruction legislation...
...Today marks his official farewell from the paper...
...Like most women, I've wondered from time to time, in a generational way, what it would be like to be a man, but until I picked up this book I'd never given any thought to how I might feel about possessing the plumbing...
...Which side are you on...
...MARCH 4, 1997] The American Spectator • May 1997 89...
...When I wrote the column last week, Ellen said she'd been told not to return to work until she'd solved her problem with gas...
...And it was...
...His comments follow...
...It was boring...
...MARCH 2, 1997] Lecture (John F. Kennedy School of Gov't...
...Jesse L. Jackson's lecture to assembled students, street people, convicts on furlough, and other luminaries, pumping gas into the Kultursmog at Harvard Yard: The history of America has been a gradual and uneven extension of democracy to all of its people...
...JANUARY 16, 1997] Publishers Weekly The buzz about the Best of Gay Erotica 1997, selected by Doug Sadownick and edited by Richard Labonte: For the second in Cleis's annual series, Sadownick (Sex Between Men...
...But the other people aren't happy about that because Ellen has a medical condition that causes flatulence...
...hours...
...Ellen does have a serious problem with flatulence...
...In 1863, Lincoln had the Emancipation Proclamation, followed by the end of slavery and reconstruction...
...It was lifeless...
...On Sunday, I shared the story of a woman I called Ellen Cover...
...from Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art and Writing About It a Game, by Roger Kahn, Hyperion, 352 pages, $23.95] Portland Oregonian A far-sighted columnist at the fabled Portland Oregonian demolishes another of America's hoary Victorian taboos: Frankly, I expected a lot of nasty comments about the column that ran in this space on Sunday...
...after all, it was about flatulence...
...There is no unifying theme or voice, which is what makes the collection so intriguing...
...Clothe the naked just because their bodies are exposed...
...Harry E. Wedeck for requiring me to sight-translate the Aeneid, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko for the poem Babi Yar, which always renews my pride in being a writer...
...I loved him because somewhere a door had been left open by mistake, and because he looked like me, and all I needed was a moment of his time to understand how he buried himself inside derelict hours when nothing but the hands on the clock progress, forging another circle...
...This probably indicates a lack of imagination on my part, at least compared to the contributors to this book...
...Blue suits, rejecting reconstruction legislation...
...Cotliar, a giant in the newspaper business, is one ofthe reasons this paper is as prominent in the industry as it is...
...And black robes cutting back on representation...
...Q. When did your career at The Times start and what was it like here then...
...Feed the hungry just because they are hungry...
...Dick for a Day" has nothing to do with Nixon or any other famous Richard...
...even her doctor claimed that was not possible...
...Every connection has at its core ‘ne moment of illogical longing—that split second meeting n the grocery store when two people reach )1- the same tomato...
Vol. 30 • May 1997 • No. 5
