Category Archives: inside quotation marks

quotes

a labyrinthine, billowing wreath

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I’ve never met Philip Roth, but you wouldn’t know it from this quote; I’m sure he is talking about me. I’ve always felt that curls were some sort of metaphoric, cosmic joke—a physical manifestation of the inner tumult progressing beneath them.

“Her head of hair was something, a labyrinthine, billowing wreath of spirals and ringlets, fuzzy as twine and large enough for use as Christmas ornamentation. All the disquiet of her childhood seemed to have passed into the convolutions of her sinuous thicket of hair. Her irreversible hair. You could polish pots with it and no more alter its construction than if it were harvested from the inky depths of the sea, some kind of wiry reef-building organism, a dense living onyx hybrid of coral and shrub, perhaps possessing medicinal properties. For three hours she held Coleman entranced by her comedy, her outrage, her hair, and by her flair for manufacturing excitement, by a frenzied, untrained adolescent intellect and an actressy ability to enkindle herself and believe her every exaggeration… But when he got her back to Sullivan Street that evening, everything changed. It turned out that she had no idea in the world who she was. Once you’d made your way past the hair, all she was was molten.” -Philip Roth

freedom vs. attachments

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There’s a core American debate between “On the Road’ and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” “On the Road” suggests that happiness is to be found through freedom, wandering and autonomy. “It’s a Wonderful Life” suggests that happiness is found in the lifelong attachments that precede choice. It suggests that restraints can actually be blessings because they lead to connections that are deeper than temporary self-interest. David Brooks

#foodforthought

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I love these. Here’s my faves:

The world doesn’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger-flipping. They called it opportunity.

food for thought (re: occupy wall street)

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let me reiterate that i do think there some legitimate claims being addressed by the occupy wall street movement, and that, strictly speaking, i don’t not support them. i don’t like the idea that 99% are blameless and 1% is guilty (the bad mortgages and personal debt were accrued by many in the 99%, for instance)–but still, here’s a couple things that gave me pause this week:

“occupy ourselves”

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i’ve been trying to sort out how i feel about the whole “occupy wall street” movement… i don’t think it’s going to be that effective overall, but i can’t say i disagree with it entirely. it’s sending a message, and i love that as americans we are able to do that. some of it is disorganized, sure, and it seems a little random, but i don’t think it’s entirely wrong… but i hesitate to agree with it or support it really, too—there’s something about it that has been rubbing me the wrong way, kind of nagging at me, and i’ve been struggling to pinpoint exactly what that is. then i heard david brooks discuss his views on it on PBS. as usual, he summed it up far better than i can:

I’m skeptical. There are a couple of hundred people here and there. So I’m skeptical that they will have mass rallies to the extent, say, the Tea Party is on the right.

I think they do tap into a couple real issues. Student loans is talked about a lot. And you be able to declare bankruptcy from student loans. You should be able to get out of them under — and the second thing is Wall Street.

I think you don’t have to be a left-winger to be really angry at Wall Street. You don’t have to be a left-winger to think the Obama administration should have broken up those banks. They’re too big to manage, too big to understand, too big to fail, and they’re self-contradictory in the way they have to deal with themselves.

And so there’s a lot of legitimate hostility, which I think they do represent. The one part of the theme of many of the motifs of the protests which bug me is the motif that it’s 99 percent pure, 1 percent evil.

That’s not the problem with America. You can’t solve the fiscal — the debt problem by just taxing the 1 percent. You can’t fix Medicare by just taxing the 1 percent. You can’t fix any of our problems by saying, oh, it’s just that 1 percent.

The problem in problem after problem is a lot of us. It’s all of us. And so just saying, oh, it’s we’re pure and we’re virtuous, that evil 1 percent, that’s — it’s silly. It’s scapegoating. And that’s just a motif of theirs which is — it’s just a sideshow. David Brooks on PBS Newshour

On NPR Brooks made a similar statement, and I found its utterance poignant:

One of the core themes of the occupying movement is that it’s 99 percent who are honest and one percent who are wrong. Well, that’s just not true. If you want to know what the real problems with our economy is, too much spending, too much mortgages, unwillingness to raise taxes on people. It’s not just 99 versus one percent. The problem in spending is many middle class Americans… So you can’t just throw everything off on the top one percent. You know, we should be occupying ourselves…

Average personal debt was 43 percent of GDP 20 years ago. Now it’s over 130 percent of GDP. This was a problem that transcended – I agree with the Wall Street indictment – but this was transcendent and the idea that you can solve problems by ignoring the bottom 99 percent, just not possible. David Brooks on NPR (my added emphasis)