Rabbit at Airport

"Airport prices, they nail you where there's no competition. Without competition, you get socialism and everybody free-loading and economies like they have in Cuba and Haiti. [Rabbit] pauses to glance at the magazines on the rack."

~~ from Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

the quiet Japanese

"New people begin to move into their houses. Okies and Arkies who've come out west for the war work. Dispossessed farmers from the Ozarks. Dirt-poor Negroes with their bundles of belongings fresh up from the South. Vagrants and squatters. Country folk. Not our kind. Some of them can't even spell. They work ten and fifteen hours a day in the ammunitions plants. They live three and four families to a house. They wash their laundry out of doors in tin tubs in their front yards. They let their women and children run wild. And on the weekends, when they sit out on their porches smoking and drinking until late in the night, we begin to long for our old neighbors, the quiet Japanese."

~~ from The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

Gopnik's Hitler

I read "The Forgotten History of Hitler's Establishment Enablers" in the library on Saturday afternoon. It's a summation of familiar territory--they thought they could control him," etc. Comparing you-know-who to you-know-which-evil-dictator is, of course, extremely unoriginal at this point, and it is also nothing new to state that such comparisons to other past American presidents and presidential candidates are also grounded in cliche.

Tanzer et Ali

Indie sensation Ben Tanzer has a new novel, and he also had a chance to interview Syed Ali, a sociologist and potter we both crossed paths with years ago in the Ultimate Frisbee scene. More soon!

bereft survivors

"These men and women weren’t settler-colonizer overseers of a master race; they were the spat out, spat upon, vilified, starved victims of Imperial Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and of Nazi Germany a generation later, the survivors of an unprecedented industrial slaughter in which 6 million had been murdered. Many of them—when they arrived in Palestine, often bringing with them utopian, universalist, socialist beliefs—were emaciated and destitute. They were the bereft survivors of unspeakable horrors."

art remains

“The isms go, the ist dies, art remains”

~~ Vladimir Nabokov

a single diaper

"Usually, our husbands had nothing to do with them. They never changed a single diaper. They never washed a dirty dish. They never touched a broom. In the evening, no matter how tired we were when we came in from the fields, they sat down and read the paper while we cooked dinner for the children and stayed up washing and mending piles of clothes until late."

~~ from The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

An abominable religion

"'An abominable religion has settled among you. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his fathers and his ancestors, like a hunter's dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you; I fear for the clan.' He turned again to Okonkwo and said, 'Thank you for calling us together.'"

~~ from Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe