Commonplace Book of Quotations: Streetcars, "V", Hollywood Relationships and Car Chases, Voltaire and Pledging Allegiance to the Bank of America

“…Jokes lead the way, like sniffer dogs, dragging their handlers behind them.”
--Craig Brown in a profound article describing the evolution of his humor from satire to the absurd.

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“They [Merrill Lynch and Bank of America officers] find out they’re $7 billion off on the estimate of losses for the fourth quarter and they never think maybe we should go back and adjust these bonuses?” Cuomo told me, as Thain was finally responding to investigators on Tuesday at the New York attorney general’s office. “He refused to answer questions on the basis that ‘the Bank of America didn’t want me to.’ You can take the Fifth Amendment or you can answer questions. But there’s no Bank of America privilege. The Bank of America doesn’t substitute for the Constitution. And who’s the Bank of America, by the way?”
-- N.Y. State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo

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“All of us invest our identities in what we believe. It’s hard to concede anything to the other side.”
-- Zoe Heller

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“In any case, you do not disown your belief in socialism just because Stalin’s executioners claim to believe in it too, any more than you find Morocco unpleasant just because Michael Portillo drops in on the place occasionally. In Orwell’s view, it was the Stalinist Left that had betrayed the common people, not democratic socialists like himself. Orwell first encountered Stalinism in the squalid betrayals of the Spanish Civil War, which is where he also first properly encountered socialism. If his disgust with Soviet Realpolitik was born in Spain, so was a faith in the goodness and resilience of the human spirit, which there is no reason to believe he ever entirely abandoned.” -- Terry Eagleton

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“I get the feeling that Evey [in the film adaptation of V for Vendetta was aged not to offer a clearer renunciation of V's actions, but to set up an utterly conventional love story between the two of them, their conflicted, moving father/daughter relationship [Evey is 16 in the original] scrapped because Hollywood can imagine no kind of relationship other than enemy or lover.”
-- Marc Singer on his blog I am Not the Beastmaster

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“At least 40 other cities are exploring streetcar plans to spur economic development, ease traffic congestion and draw young professionals and empty-nest baby boomers back from the suburbs, according to the Community Streetcar Coalition, which includes city officials, transit authorities and engineers who advocate streetcar construction. More than a dozen have existing lines, including New Orleans, which is restoring a system devastated by Hurricane Katrina. And Denver, Houston, Salt Lake City and Charlotte, N.C., have introduced or are planning to introduce streetcars.”
-- Bob Driehaus, NY Times

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“I can't believe they got rid of the giant squid. Probably my favourite thing about talking about Watchmen is discussing the layers upon layers of the dialogue and the quality of the characters and the complexity of the story lines and all the parallel plots and deeper meanings and how everything is related together and the many references and accurate style of the story then at the end... A GIANT SQUID SQUASHES NEW YORK AND EVERYONE DIES.”
-- Comment on New York magazine

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"Basically, the network and I had different ideas about what the tone of the show would be. They bought something somewhat different than what I was selling them, which is not that uncommon in this business. Their desires were not surprising: up the stakes, make the episodes more stand-alone, stop talking about relationships and cut to the chase. Oh, and add a chase. That you can cut to."
-- Joss Whedon

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“Perhaps he [Voltaire] hated too much, but we must remember the provocation; we must imagine ourselves back in an age when men were burned at the stake, or broken on the wheel, for deviating from orthodoxy. We can appreciate Christianity better today because he could then, because he fought with some success to moderate its dogmas and violence…We can feel the poetry and drama of religious ritual now that the transient triumph of toleration leaves us free to worship or abstain. We can accept a hundred legends as profound symbols or illuminating allegories, because we are no longer required to accept their literal truth.”
-- Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Voltaire

Now That's Just Weird

Did anyone else know that Library Thing has a version in Italian?

Health Care Reform a Bad Joke, So Far

Remember those embarrassing, unfunny sketches when Bob Hope put on a wig and pretended to be a hippie? That's what the "health care advocates" looked like who testified before Congress last week and pretended to care. The Business Roundtable was there. The Chamber of Commerce was there. The insurance companies were there, naturallement. Gods help us and save us, the Heritage Foundation showed up, still wanting revenge for Hoover's defeat and Reagan's canonization, or whatever it is they do besides peeing in everyone's soup.

There was not a single witness asked to testify in favor of a single payer system, although that seems to be what the majority of the American people-- including doctors and nurses-- want. The foxes who bought the hen house-- $512,042,660 it cost them in lobbying last year, and they own it goddamnit!-- voted in favor of fatter hens. Single payer advocates were treated as protesters, and removed from the chamber by police.
Bill Moyers' Journal has the best coverage of this I've seen, naming names and doing the math: there are thirty times more health care "administrators" than there are doctors and nurses in this country, for one instance. Drug and insurance companies profit from the current fragmentation, the fix is in so far as Congress is concerned, and the president is trying to do this without making the insurance companies mad.

Hemophilia, Comic Book Artists and Kitty Pryde

A sweet and simple fund-raiser idea: Douglas E. Sherwood of Oni Press asked a couple of dozen artists to draw his favorite X-Men character, Kitty Pryde, with the results to be auctioned on E-Bay as a fundraiser for the Oregon Hemophilia Treatment Center. I like the specificity of the idea, and that it offers something tangible-- an hour's diversion, a framed print, maybe a t-shirt-- to a relatively small pool of contributors.
Myself an O.G. X-Men reader, I'd outgrown the comic a decade before Kitty joined the team in 1980, though I came back for Grant Morrison's seven-volume run (still my favorite) and enjoyed Joss Whedon's take on the character. For me, it's all about Kitty and Lockheed, the most interesting pet/person relationship in comics. As a writer, it seems to me that Marvel is missing a bet by letting Kitty age with her readers, and not producing a series of adventures for the under twelves to be marketed to new readers, something like DC's Tiny Titans or Jeff Smith's Shazam. Call it "A Girl and Her Dragon", with the covers a parody of the "Boy and His Dog" motif. A million-dollar idea from a middle-aged man who wants to reboot Kamandi, Last Boy on Earth.

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

Re-reading this for maybe the third or fourth time: funny and sad and funny again. A happy ending with a wedding, so by Shakespeare's rules that makes it a comedy. The movie is actually well done (Michael Douglas shlubbing around in a woman's pink chenille bathrobe is iconic) but there are are layers and back story you'll only get from the book.
Yes, it's embarrassing how many times my inner life corresponds with Grady Tripp's, but that could be said for any middle-aged writer, teacher or former Wonder Boy. I don't smoke dope like Grady, and I don't have my boss's dead dog, a dead boa constrictor and a tuba in my car trunk-- but the butt-cheek impression left by a James Brown impersonator in the hood of my car is not outside the realm of possibility.