Marilyn Monroe wasn’t Jean Harlow.
Jayne Mansfield wasn’t Marilyn Monroe.
Anna Nicole Smith wasn’t Jayne Mansfield.
Thankfully, there is only one Britney Spears.

But know, whoever you are,
whatever your gender, hair color, physique,
within you there does reside an unhappy blonde
archetype with enormous breasts.

It is her you need to contact.


- Elaine Equi, "#4 The Girl Can’t Help It (Jayne Mansfield unbuttons her blouse)" via Silliman's Blog

My living will, waiting to be signed,
sits next to an old New Yorker
it's my ritual to read with breakfast
each morning, to finish
one issue before going to the next,
and this way I skip
the news merely timely—October 2004
with a fundraiser bringing Kerry
within blocks of President Bush
proves painful in December '05
but fast turning to find Graham Greene
his authorized biography reviewed,
I'm relieved, though perplexed, by
Because of an ambiguous comma
in a document Greene signed on his deathbed
other scholars were forbidden to quote . . .
and I wonder as I slowly eat
my oatmeal with raisins and cranberries
and four summer blueberries
I pick from their bag in my freezer,
gathering what pleases me, a woman of 73
with a will nearby, if I might not like
lingering in an ambiguous comma
someday, not rushing
to an afterlife I don't believe in,
drifting dreamily, held
for a day or two in its pause.

- Myra Shapiro, "Because of the Ambiguity"

Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.
- Donal Henahan

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you don't know where you are going,
any road will take you there. - Lewis Carroll

Buy the ticket, take the ride. - Hunter S. Thompson

I am your pilgrim, who wanders
to stay home; your monk,
who keeps silent when you demand
confessions and theology.

You are too difficult to love
directly; you have no roof
or floor, and I am too pious
for your rain and mud.

So I keep your shrine, the best of you,
the clean, the smiling rest of you.

I am a stubborn priest, who knows himself
only in the dwindling oil of you,
the weeping and rebellious flame
about to die.

- Val Vinokur, "Your Worship"

Give my regards to Broadway
Remember me to Herald Square
Tell all the gang at Forty-second Street
That I will soon be there.
- George M. Cohan

Much that is terrible we do not know. Much that is beautiful we shall still discover. Let's sail till we come to the edge.
- Thomas M. Disch

It can be a fascinating game, noticing how any person with vitality and vigor will have a little splash of red in a costume, in a room, or in a garden. - Edgar Cayce

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change. - Bret Harte

Work hard all your young days
and they’ll find you too, some morning
staring up under
your chiffonier at its warped
bass-wood bottom and your soul —
out!
— among the little sparrows
behind the shutter.

- William Carlos Williams,
"January Morning: Suite 13"

Time does go on—
I tell it gay to those who suffer now—
They shall survive—
There is a sun—
They don’t believe it now—

- Emily Dickinson

Because life's too short to blush,
I keep my blood tucked in.
I won't be mortified
by what I drive or the flaccid
vivacity of my last dinner party.
I take my cue from statues posing only
in their shoulder pads of snow: all January
you can see them working on their granite tans.

That I woke at an ungainly hour,
stripped of the merchandise that clothed me,
distilled to pure suchness,
means not enough to anyone for me
to confess. I do not suffer
from the excess of taste
that spells embarrassment:
mothers who find their kids unseemly
in their condom earrings,
girls cringing to think
they could be frumpish as their mothers.
Though the late nonerotic Elvis
in his studded gut of jumpsuit
made everybody squeamish, I admit.
Rule one: the King must not elicit pity.

Was the audience afraid of being tainted
--this might rub off on me--
or were they--surrendering--
what a femme word--feeling
solicitous--glimpsing their fragility
in his reversible purples
and unwholesome goldish chains?

At least embarrassment is not an imitation.
It's intimacy for beginners,
the orgasm no one cares to fake.
I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.

- Alice Fulton, "About Face"

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. - Susan Sontag

We love our cat
for her self
regard is assiduous
and bland,

for she sits in the small
patch of sun on our rug
and licks her claws
from all angles

and it is far
superior
to "balanced reporting"

though, of course,
it is also
the very same thing.

- Rae Armantrout, "Thing"

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them. - John Steinbeck

If I have learnt anything, it is that life forms no logical patterns.

It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?
- Margot Fonteyn

You can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face. - Malcolm Gladwell

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars. - Fred Allen