Quotation Saturday: The Snarky Arts
Mamacita says: Ah, the Arts. Without them, we’d all spend our money on Flintstones mudflaps, gas station black velvet Elvises, Billy Ray Cyrus, ceramic geese (seasonal clothing extra) and anything with Lindsey Lohan, and think THAT was art. Sadly, some people think so now. (Be still, my achy breaky heart. . . .)
Hopefully (that’s for you, Erik Deckers!) you all have also noticed that artists are 
quite possibly the snarkiest of them all. Magic mirrors across the nation agree. OF THEM ALL!
What could be better than snarky art? Let me know if you think of anything. (Food doesn’t count.) (Unless it’s deep-dish Sicilian pizza from Grecco’s.) (Which trumps everything else.)
1. Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands – and all you have to do is scratch it. –Thomas Beecham (to a cellist)
2. Pavarotti is not vain, but conscious of being unique. –Peter Ustinov
3. Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour. –Gioacchino Rossini
4. Parsifal is the kind of opera that starts at six o’clock. After it has been going three hours, you look at your watch and it says 6:20. –David Randolph
5. All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song. –Louis Armstrong
6. Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian. –H.L. Mencken
7. It is a pity that the composer did not leave directions as to how flat he really did want it sung. –Anon.
8. Mine was the kind of piece in which nobody knew what was going on, including the composer, the conductor and the critics. Consequently I got pretty good notices. -Oscar Levant
9. Most rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read. –Frank Zappa
10. “Classic.” A book which people praise and don’t read. –Mark Twain
11. There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read. –G.K. Chesterton
12. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it. –Joseph Heller
13. I don’t care what is written about me as long as it isn’t true. –Dorothy Parker
14. Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round. –David Lodge
15. I’ve read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free. –John Barrymore
16. When I want to read a novel, I write one. –Benjamin Disraeli
17. Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split. –Raymond Chandler
18. Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts. –Jeffrey Robinson
19. Yeats is becoming so aristocratic, he’s evicting imaginary tenants. –Oliver St. John Gogarty
20. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke? –Gore Vidal
21 An incinerator is a writer’s best friend. –Thornton Wilder
22. I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers. –Rudyard Kipling (writing to a magazine that had published his obituary a little too soon)
23. Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. –Stephen Hawking
24. I am the most spontaneous speaker in the world because every word, every gesture, and every retort has been carefully rehearsed. –George Bernard Shaw
25. It is all very well to be able to write books, but can you waggle your ears? –J.M. Barrie (to H.G. Wells)
26. The covers of this book are too far apart. –Ambrose Bierce
27. The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid stable business. –John Steinbeck
28. He directed rehearsals with all the airy deftness of a rheumatic deacon producing Macbeth for a church social. –Noel Coward
29. From the moment I picked your book up until the moment I put it down I could not stop laughing. Someday I hope to read it. –Groucho Marx
30. An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children. -Benjamin Disraeli
31. I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tel me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974. –Jeffrey Bernard
32. I never read the life of any important person without discovering that he knew more and could do more than I could ever hope to know or to do in half a dozen lifetimes. –J.B. Priestley
33. They told me how Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right. –Winston Churchill
34. The humour of Dostoevsky is the humour of a barloafer who ties a kettle to a dog’s tail. –W. Somerset Maugham
35. The Compleat Angler is acknowledged to be one of the world’s books. Only the trouble is that the world doesn’t read its books; it borrows a detective story instead. –Stephen Leacock
36. If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism. If you steal form many, it’s research. –Wilson Mizner
37. Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction. –Adlai Stevenson
38. My favorite poem is the one that starts “thirty days hath September” because it actually tells you something. –Groucho Marx
39. There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk. –Charles Dickens
40. Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing. –Ralph Richardson
41. The play was a great success, but the audience was a total failure. –Oscar Wilde
42. She took her curtain calls as though she had just been un-nailed from the cross. –Noel Coward (of Edith Evans)
43. We are paid to have dirty minds. –John Trevelyan (film censor)
44. Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award. –Billy Wilder
45. There was laughter in the back of the theatre, leading to the belief that someone was telling jokes back there. –George S. Kaufman
46. Try the cock, Albert. It’s a delicacy, and you know where it’s been. –Helen Mirren, at dinner in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
47. I grew up with six brothers. That’s how I learned to dance – waiting for the bathroom. –Bob Hope
48. I didn’t like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions – the curtain was up. –Groucho Marx
49. A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad. –Sam Goldwyn
50. Days off. –Spencer Tracy, when asked what he looked for in a film script.
That Was Then and This, Sadly, Is Now
Mamacita says: Even when I was a child, I was a reader. Not just a reader-in-school, either; I was a READER. When I wasn’t climbing the apple trees next door, skating around the block, or riding my bicycle, I was reading. I read at home. I read at church. I read at school, between little short assignments that took ten minutes but which were alloted an hour.
I read everything I could get my hands on. I read Gone with the Wind when I was in the third grade. My favorite book in fifth grade was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and that one is still one of my all-time favorites. I somehow skipped over the condescending large-print novella-type baby books and went right from The Little White House in first grade to Heidi, the unabridged version. My second grade teacher borrowed Heidi from me and attempted to read it aloud to our class, but she gave up after two days because so many kids just simply couldn’t comprehend some of the vocabulary, and apparently they weren’t able to put two and two together via CONTEXT CLUES, either. (Be careful if you want to get Heidi for your kids; there are tons of bad, bad translations out there. A good indication of a bad version is when Klara’s name is spelled “Clara,” when Fraulein Rottenmeier becomes Miss Rottenmeier, and when the goats are named Little Swan and Little Bear. I mean, the story takes place in SWITZERLAND and GERMANY, for crying out loud. Dear Lord, I hate bad translations and condescending vocabulary that assumes our kids are idiots.) As for shortened versions of books, well, whoever thought THAT up should be dragged out into the streets and shot. Abridgements are the devil, and, yes, I do mean THAT devil.
(I scoff in the general direction of abridgements. I sneer at them. I loathe them. They cheapen our literature and encourage our children to believe that reading isn’t fun. Please, I beg of you all, do NOT buy the abridged version of ANYTHING! Abridgements are the ultimate literary condescension.)
How do we expect our kids to learn cool new words if all they get in school or at home are stupid short little stories with simple short words? What’s that? Your kid doesn’t KNOW that word? Well, he will once he reads the story and applies context clues to it. What’s that? Your kid doesn’t know how to do that? Yes, he does. Get out of his way, stop condescending, and watch him soar. I sincerely hope there’s a special level of Hell for adults to stand in the way of a child who is perfectly capable of learning, soaring, marveling at the universe. Sure, it can be risky. Back off. Encourage the riskiness.
Besides my literary snobbery when it comes to children’s and YA books, I am also ecstatic that the BEST kids’ books are still about kids who get up off their asses, go outside, and do things. Harry Potter and his friends didn’t spend their lives sitting on a sofa wiggling their thumbs at a screen. Neither did Percy Jackson, or Laura Ingalls, or ANY self-respecting literary character. Then again, a book about a typical modern kid’s life – sitting around, watching television, playing video games, and carefully riding a bicycle up and down the sidewalk in front of the house whilst wearing kneepads, a helmet, and being watched by anxious parents – would be boring beyond belief.
We used to call THOSE poor kids “sissies.” That’s because they weren’t allowed to go anywhere or do anything without their parents right there, holding their hands, fighting their battles, and making darn sure they didn’t FALL DOWN and GET HURT.
The sight of a little kid like me, bruised from head to toe and covered with bandaids, hanging upside down from an apple tree or calling out, “Look Ma, no hands!” on my bike would have sent some of these modern mothers into hysteria. Then again, I belong to an era when mothers didn’t faint and then sue when their kids came home from the playground with a broken arm or a gash. That’s just what happened when kids played.
It still is, but a lot of parents these days just can’t deal with such awful things. Some of them can’t even deal with dirt. Poor kids.
Here’s an excerpt from A New and Different Summer, by Lenora Mattingly Weber, who is one of my favorite authors. Her books were written long before “my time,” but it doesn’t matter, because a good book is a good book.
In this excerpt, Katie Rose is babysitting for a spoiled little boy she refers to as “The Prince,” because he must be catered to in every way. Her little brother Brian has ridden his bicycle to The Prince’s house to deliver a message to her:
What a noticeable contrast between the slim, tanned, hard-muscled Brian and the overweight, flabby, pampered Charles!
. . . the prince couldn’t bear not to be noticed. He pushed up to Brian. “Is that awful old bike yours? I’ve got a brand-new one. I ride it up and down the sidewalk while Mother watches from the porch.”
Brian gave him an unbelieving look. “Why does she watch you from the porch?”
“Because there are real mean boys in this block, and they ram their bicycles into me.”
“You ought’nt to let them,” Brian said almost gently. “When you see them making for you, you ram them first. Nobody rams us.” He gave Katie Rose a look of both puzzlement and pity, swung onto his hard worn bicycle and rode off.
These days, sissy, flabby, chicken-shit Charles would be more common than independent Brian. Sad. And whose fault is this? Hello, hovering, interfering, cowardly, dysfunctional, clueless Mums and Daddums.
If you are looking for some great books for your children’s summer reading, I highly recommend anything by Elizabeth Enright. Her characters leave the house -after chores – early in the morning, usually carrying their lunch with them, and don’t return home until the sun is going down. They have adventures. They talk to strangers. They build things out of scraps and junk. They befriend tramps and orphans and stray dogs. They also go to the opera and the art museum, and know how to behave themselves in restaurants.
One of the trademarks of a good children’s or YA book is that it can be enjoyed by adults, too. In fact, I think I’ll get out my stack of Elizabeth Enright’s books and get started.
Hello, Rush, and Mona, and Randy, and Oliver Melendy. How ya doin’, Portia, Foster, and Julian? How are you, Garnet? What’s new, Mab?
These kids walked out of the house and did things. Even if such things had been invented back then, they would have stared in horror at the very idea of staying home all day, sitting on the sofa watching tv or exercising nothing but their thumbs. And their mothers had better things to do than stand around watching their kids breathe, gasping when they fell and insisting that 45 minutes was plenty long enough to mess around in the back yard. Elizabeth Enright’s kids and their mothers would have laughed at a parent who came along when the kids played, or called another parent to arrange a playdate instead of just letting the kids out in the morning to play with whoever else was around.
Yes, bad things do happen to our children.
Some of those bad things are their lack of freedom, initiative, adventure, creativity, and self-made friends of all ages. Another bad thing is the inability of so many of them to even READ about these kids.
Of course, reading for fun isn’t encouraged any more. It’s reading for Satan carefully monitored grade-level standardized tests that’s important now.
A lot of modern kids don’t even know how to skate or ride a bike or climb a tree. I’m not putting down computer games – I like them myself. But such things should be done AFTER a normal day, not in place of. I hate television, but most people like it, and most kids watch way too much of it. A little is fine; a lot is not.
No wonder so many of our kids are fat and stupid. Sheesh. Some of them have never 
breathed fresh air in their lives – they go from hermetically sealed homes to hermetically sealed schools, with the occasional jaunt to air-conditioned WalMarts and malls. I bet a lot of “allergies” are really just the body’s reaction to fresh air. It’s the lungs gasping and saying, “What IS this stuff?”
Ah, American childhood. Sofas, and gamepads, and chicken nuggets, and french fries, and macaroni & cheese, and carefully supervised & timed playdates, and DVD’s to occupy every spare moment, including riding-in-the-van-time, lest they have a moment to sit still, look around, notice things, and think.
Poor kids.
P.S. You really don’t want to get me started on families that are ruled by the children. No, you really don’t.
The Shit Epiphany
Mamacita says: I’ve posted about this one before, but for some reason it’s been running through my mind and making me giggle all last night and was still tickling me when I got up today.
When I was younger, I used to use a lot of bad words. I didn’t learn them at home; I learned a lot of them at Baptist Youth Group and Church Camp, but the habit really started in college, after I saw Love Story. Jenny used a lot of bad words, and I thought it made her seem cool, and I wanted to be cool, so I imitated her. Then she died, and even the bad words couldn’t save her, so I tried to taper off somewhat, but habits die hard, both good ones and bad, and I was so fascinated by these few words and expressions and the effect they had on staid stuffy old people that they continued to slip out, without any apparent effort on my part. I was an English major. I could make the language glow.
I had potty mouth, and I had it bad. And then I got married. And then I had a baby – a beautiful angelic infant with curly golden hair and a soul of such innocence that when I looked at her, I felt like a privileged peasant raising a princess. And then I had another one – where did these little people COME FROM? – and this one was a red-headed wonder whose eyes beamed “genius” before we ever took him home from the hospital. I had been perfected. And I still used bad words. Most of the time I didn’t even hear them when they came out of my mouth.
Now, young parents with potty mouth must remember something here. Tiny children learn to speak by imitating the language they hear.
This was an elementary bit of science that hadn’t occurred to me, because whenever we spoke directly to our tiny toddler and our newborn, we used VERY appropriate and pretty mommy/daddy/baby language. Oh, you all know it. That schmoopy pigin we talk to babies and kitty-cats with.
Ah, but it’s always the footprints you DON’T want them to follow, that they pick up on the fastest.
My daughter had a touch of the potty mouth at a most inappropriately young age. She didn’t just babble – she used words absolutely appropriately. I thought it was funny.
Looking back, I’m just appalled at my lack of judgment.
As we drove down to French Lick to the family reunion, I reminded her to be sure not to say, um, certain words there. She agreed. I think she even understood. That bothers me now, too. She had just turned two years old, and she KNEW we were both using words that weren’t proper. Then again, she’s a wordsmith, too. It starts early on.
Sometimes it takes a humiliation to open your eyes and make you shut your mouth.
With this background in place, I will now tell this story that some of you have already heard, again.
Tim’s grandparents were awesome, lovely people; they were so good to us when we were first married, in many, many ways. They were also VERY conservative holy-rollers. Key words here: very conservative. VERY conservative. VERY conservative. To be perfectly honest, I was nervous around my husband’s family, because they are all quite conservative and I lived in fear of shocking them. I still do, although I think we’ve all unwound a lot over the years. I must also add that his family is quite possibly the nicest bunch of people I’ve ever encountered in my life. 🙂
His grandparents were lovely people, too, but I was always just a tiny little bit afraid and in awe of them. Dowdy clothes, bun-hair, dark hose, tongues, oil. . . .you get the picture. And no, I’m NOT making fun of them. I loved them dearly and deeply. I am merely DESCRIBING them, which intelligent people can see at a glance.
These precious and wonderful grandparents were hosting a family reunion. Reunions at this huge white Victorian house were so awesome, there is no way I can begin to describe them in this post, but I’ll try at a later date. Norman Rockwell had NOTHING on these lovely people. Sigh. I miss them terribly.
Ramble, ramble. . . . .
At this particular reunion, their huge table was crowded with Tim’s family, every single one a kind and loving and humorous and incredible person.
My newborn son was sawing logs on Grandma’s big bed, and my daughter was dining with the rest of us at that big table. She was sitting in a red wooden high chair that had been in their family for generations.
At this particular time she was going through a dining phase that can best be described as the “shaved ice” phase. She was thin as a rail, and simply wouldn’t touch most foods at ALL. The grandmothers and uncles and aunts were all worried to death about her, even though she was bright-eyed and energetic and obviously loving the complete control that any kid with food issues has over the adults in her life.
At this meal, she was pressured from all sides to eat this, or that, PLEASE? Just a taste, for Mamaw, for Grandma, for Grandad, for Aunt, Uncle. . . .Skin and bones, SKIN AND BONES, she must EAT. EAT EAT EAT EAT EAT.
Finally, she’d had enough. Catching my eye across the table, she knew better than to disobey the orders about potty mouth she’d been given before we got there, but she’d had enough of the constant nagging about food.
So my princess, my precious baby girl, freshly two years old but talking in complete sentences from the womb, master of innocent satire, stood up in the high chair, put both tiny hands on her tiny hips, swept the room and the people with an exasperated glance, and said, “Oh Mommy, I wish I could say SHIT.”
And I wished I could say ‘abracadabra’ and just vanish. I was torn between falling out of my chair laughing, and falling out of my chair to disappear forever underneath that massive table.
Nobody laughed. I’m sure they wanted to, but the shock and the environment hushed it all up.
In my mind, I refer to this incident as the Shit Epiphany.
I made so many parenting mistakes, looking back. But really, all I can do about it now is mention them so YOU won’t make the same ones.
Actually, I think I’m making fun of myself. It was one of so many mistakes, I’ve lost count. It just happened to be a very public, noticeable mistake.
For many, many years, I cleaned up my verbal act enough that she had no more of “those” words to mimic. Most of me is ashamed, but part of the shame is in the fact that there is a teeny-tiny* part of me that still thinks it was funny. Knee-slappin’ hilarious. In fact, I’m laughing out loud right now.
I’m also ashamed to confess that some of that potty-mouth is back again.
But I’m nice, really I am. I’m bloody @#$%^&*())(*&^ nice.
P.S. * It’s actually not a teeny-tiny part; it’s a humongous big part that almost rolls across the room laughing out loud every time I think about it. The teeny-tiny part was the shame, and this is, I fully realize, something to be ashamed of, too. I’ll think about it more when I stop laughing at it.
