Category: people

“The addressee here is God, but already O’Connor is rehearsing her role as speaker, anticipating how she will address a mortal audience. Learning to avoid cliché and speak authentically is a predicament of both prayer and literature, and solving the problem in her prayer life allowed O’Connor to solve the same problem in her fiction.”

“Things like hoaxes, jokes, yarns, obscenities, and non sequiturs.” Wit. Digression. (Lots of it.) Bare-knuckled criticism. (This is why he wanted no publication until 100 years after his death.) And a sort of “ironic narcissism … [that] makes his autobiography feel especially current.”

“Spike Lee has been sued by an elderly couple in Florida, whose address he incorrectly identified as the home of Trayvon Martin killer George Zimmerman.” Lee and the couple had settled last year, but a round of re-tweets following Zimmerman’s trial caused further trouble.

A retrospective look not only at the surprising impact of the Melbourne-housewife-turned-theatrical-megastar whom Humphries originally based on his own mother, but also at such other Humphries characters as the appalling Sir Les Patterson (the shame of Australia’s foreign service) and the genteel old dinosaur Sandy Stone.

“There is a phrase that appears and reappears in the essays of Arthur Danto. That phrase is “the miraculousness of the commonplace.” Danto wanted to feel that miracle. But he realized that he wasn’t going to feel it by pretending that we are still surrounded by objects of high aesthetic beauty.”

“‘You know, my consultant keeps telling me sudden death could come at any moment,’ says [he] with a sudden, mischievous laugh. It’s a surprise because until that moment he’d seemed a picture of crumpled fragility, voice almost inaudible, his long mottled hands curled in his lap.”

“I want to be preserved in a speed bump. Everyone will be driving along the interstate at 75 miles an hour and then there’ll be a warning sign for the Mark Morris Memorial Speed Bump, and they’ll have to slow down, to like, zero. Everyday people will be driving to work and saying, ‘Fuck Mark Morris.’ When I die I want to be an irritation, not a religion.”

“A complicated man, he encouraged our efforts, then turned and provoked me like a Machiavellian schoolboy. I would try to steer clear of him, but, catlike, he would suddenly reappear, and disarm me with some Delmore Schwartz line about love or courage. I didn’t understand his erratic behavior or the intensity of his moods, which shifted, like his speech patterns, from speedy to laconic. But I understood his devotion to poetry and the transporting quality of his performances.”

“Carter, who came into prominence in the 1950s alongside composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, and Berio, was never exactly a “popular” composer, but he was invariably a respected one–perhaps the respected one in the last quarter of the twentieth century–and those who loved his music found it like nothing else in the world. If I were to wager on posterity, he would seem a safe and honorable bet.”

“With writing you can’t go visit people where they are — you have to invite them to your home — have them come to you. That’s what I’m doing. For every country where we’re doing well, I’m surprised because I’m writing about this guy who’s living in Oslo.”