The award for best line of the month probably must go to Joan Didion, in the 1st paragraph of her "Cheney: The Fatal Touch," in the NYRB (10/5/06):
He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean it up.
In the same issue, Mark Ford adds to the ever burgeoning cottage industry in reviews of Oulipo-related books, reviews the Oulipo Compendium, and includes a great quote from Raymond Queneau. RQ said that the Oulipo writers were "rats who construct the labyrinths from which they plan to escape." Does RQ's metaphor not go far enough? (all artists as essentially escape artists -- Harry Houdinis -- who tackle -- or set up -- a problem (impose a set of constaints on themselves), and then let us see how they escape, or if they do).
(via Rootless Cosmopolitan blog, which has experienced a recent posting frenzy that I'm only just catching up on)
Some time last month, Edwin Denby came to me in a dream and said, "We don't have comedy any more. We only have humor, a series of jokes. Comedy involves a world view."
