There was something in Marge's eyes when she was very serious that made her look wise and old in spite of the naïve clothes she wore and her windblown hair and her general air of a Girl Scout. She had the look of a mother or an older sister now - the old feminine disapproval of the destructive play of little boys and men. La dee da! Or was it jealousy?
- Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley, p.69 in the 1999 Everyman's Ripley omnibus
Claudia [Schiffer], though, is not what you would call a team player. While the other models only occasionally respond to the photographers' pleas for more, Claudia stands at the end of the runway for what seems like ten minutes at a time, making love to every camera in sight. The other girls, held up at the head of the runway and waiting for her to get through, give her exactly the look you see on the face of an impatient commuter at the Holland Tunnel who is stuck in the exact change lane behind a woman who has entered it on a hunch.
- Adam Gopnik, "Couture Shock," p.143 in Paris to the Moon
There are a lot of towns like Lakewood in California. They were California's mill towns, breeder towns for the boom. When times were good and there was money to spread around, these were the towns that proved Marx wrong, that managed to increase the proletariat and simultaneously, by calling it middle class, to co-opt it. Such towns were organized around the sedative idealization of team sports, which were believed to develop "good citizens," and therefore tended to the idealization of adolescent males. During the good years, the years for which places like Lakewood or Canoga Park or El Segundo or Pico Rivera existed, the preferred resident was in fact an adolescent or post-adolescent male, ideally one already married and mortgaged, in harness to the plant, a good worker, a steady consumer, a team player, someone who played ball, a good citizen.
- Joan Didion, Where I Was From (p.1028 in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live)
I've seen his pictures, and they are like nothing on earth. So far as I can make out what he says, they aren't supposed to be. There's one in particular, called "The Coming of Summer," which I sometimes dream about when I've been hitting it up a shade too vigorously. It's all dots and splashes, with a great eye staring out of the middle of the mess. It looks as if summer, just as it was on the way, had stubbed its toe on a bomb. He tells me it's his masterpiece, and that he will never do anything like it again. I should like to have that in writing.
- P.G. Wodehouse, "Concealed Art," (p.211 in Enter Jeeves)
Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science, was bored stiff by technical details.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (p.598 in Novels & Stories, 1963-1973)
Assassins, Guild of. The second most frequent guild after the THIEVES' GUILD. Indeed, it is possible that these are the only two, and that in Fantasyland crime is the sole organized activity.
- Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, p.10
He looked around the classroom objectively, feeling better now that he proposed to leave it, but marveling afresh that so many grown-up, self-supporting people should be eager to spend time and money studying not a subject in itself but methods to conceal their ignorance of it.
- Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King, (p. 316 in Novels 1944-1962)
The crowd drank with an intensity that only comes with the combination of free alcohol, unsuccessful writers, and high stress.
- Nick Mamatas, I Am Providence, p.146
Merridale Lane is one of those corners of Surrey where the inhabitants wage a relentless battle against the stigma of suburbia. Trees, fertilized and cajoled into being in every front garden, half obscure the poky "Character dwellings" which crouch behind them. The rusticity of the environment is enhanced by the wooden owls that keep guard over the names of houses, and by crumbling dwarfs indefatigably poised over goldfish ponds. The inhabitants of Merridale Lane do not paint their dwarfs, suspecting this to be a suburban vice, nor, for the same reason, do they varnish the owls; but wait patiently for the years to endow these treasures with an appearance of weathered antiquity, until one day even the beams on the garage may boast of beetle and woodworm.
- John Le Carré, Call for the Dead, p.17
As he dragged his stumbling feet along the corridor, he was musing on Albert Peasemarch and the grave social problem which such men as Albert Peasemarch presented. You could not murder them. You could not even have them shut up in asylums. Yet, left to run around lose, what a gangrene in the body politic they were. He seemed to picture the world as a vast cauldron of soup, with good men like himself for ever standing on the brink and for ever being shoved into it by the Albert Peasemarches.
- P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins, p.214
It was frequently said [during the 1988 presidential campaign] to be the Year of the Woman, and the convention had clearly been shaped to make the ticket attractive to women, but its notion of what might attract women was clumsy, off, devised as it was buy men who wanted simultaneously to signal the electorate that they were in firm control of any woman who might have her own agenda.
- Joan Didion, "Political Fictions," in Political Fictions (p.811 in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live)
For this past year, I posed one song every Monday, each from one artist from one year - neither one repeated - covering basically my life to date. (I turned fifty-four last year, so fifty-two songs is pretty close.)
That series was called This Year, and had the Mountain Goats song of the same name as its exemplar.
I liked doing that, and so there will be a new series for 2024.
This time, I looked at the list from 2023 and asked, "what's missing here?"
And the obvious answer is: women. I went to Vassar; I know that systems that aren't designed to exclude women sometimes do just that, even if there's no malice involved. Inclusion often requires active effort. And so 2024 is my tiny little bit of active effort.
This year's every-Monday post will be a celebration of female solo artists and woman-fronted bands - again, a different artist with a different song every week for the course of the year. I'm trying to avoid "chick singers," in the words of a random Okkervil River song: I'm trying to pick band leaders, not just frontwomen. But who knows if I can always tell? (I guess I apologize in advance if I guess wrong; if I assume a woman had more influence and power than she actually did.)
There's an asterisk to this series, a group of artists who could have been included, but weren't, because they were part of This Year. It's a fairly short list - seeing how short is what made me decide to do all-women for 2024 - but here it is:
Those posts will start with the first one, tomorrow. 2024 has fifty-three Mondays, and I've gotten the list down to exactly fifty-three songs, so I think I'm ready - I think I've cut it down to a manageable project.
They are organized in the most obvious, dull way possibly: alphabetically. For '24, I didn't do the one-song-per-year thing; that was fun but a bit precious, and it tends to be Procrustean. This year's list comes largely from the last two decades - more than half just from 2005-10, when I guess I was paying more attention to popular music - and I don't apologize for that. Most of these women and bands are still making music; I think that's a good thing.
And, like last year, I'll have one extra song to provide the title. I'm calling this series Portions for Foxes, after a song I love but couldn't fit into this list, partially because I'd already had a Rilo Kiley song last year.
Why that song? Why that title? The title is vague and allusive; it's inspired a bunch of random posts online by people trying to figure out what it means, which is a fine tradition to join. Mostly, I like the song, I like the opacity of it, and I'm amused that the title is an obscure reference to Psalms 63:10 - “They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes.”
What does that mean? Well, in the Biblical context, it's King David threatening his enemies with death. In the song, I think it's less stark than that, and more personal. Being torn apart can happen in other ways than physically.
And why the song: it's yet another bad love song, which I'm always fond of. Big emotions make songs mean more. It's complex and circling, grappling with things that the singer can't quite articulate. And it's capacious and open enough to stand for many things, which I want as an overall label for this long, various series.
Most of all: I spent a long time circling songs with "she" and "woman" and "Monday" and "year" in the title, looking for something to strike me as the perfect series title. I didn't find it; I decided to go the other way - quirky and allusive and non-specific, a song I already love that can stand in, enigmatically, for everything else. So here it is:
I always get scared long after I should have, but I make up for it by being very scared. Being scared doesn't help anything, though. In fact, once you're scared, you might start making bad decisions. It can twist up your head, to where maybe you do something stupid just because you're afraid your reason for not doing it is because you're afraid. Did you follow that? The other thing is that when you're scared, one of the weird things that happens if that you're suddenly filled with the desire to get it over with,. Not your best mindset when in danger, know what I mean?
- Steven Brust, Tsalmoth, pp.141-2
There is always the easy way out, although I am loath to use it. I have no children, I do not watch television and I do not believe in God - all paths taken by mortals to make their lives easier. Children help us to defer the painful task of confronting ourselves, and grandchildren take over from them. Television distracts us from the onerous necessity of finding projects to construct in the vacuity of our frivolous lives: by beguiling our eyes, television releases our mind from the great work of making meaning. Finally, God appeases our animal fears and the unbearable prospect that someday all our pleasures will cease.
- Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, pp.176-177
The figure that comes before me oftenest, out of the shadows of that vanished time, is that of Brown, of the steamer 'Pennsylvania' - the man referred to in a former chapter, whose memory was so good and tiresome. He was a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault-hunting, mote-magnifying tyrant. I early got the habit of coming on watch with dread in my heart. No matter how good a time I might have been having with the off-watch below, and no matter how high my spirits might be when I started aloft, my soul became lead in my body the moment I approached the pilot-house.
- Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, p. 344 in Mississippi Writings
