Movie quotes keep trickling in. It’s okay with me–I’ll gladly use them as a mine for future fortune cookies. In the meantime, here are a few more personal faves from the initial avalanche:

Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms. (Outlaw Josey Wales)


That’s one of the tragedies of this life–that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous. (The Palm Beach Story, written by Preston Sturges)


You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. (The Princess Bride)


Let’s order sushi and not pay. (Repo Man)


Don’t touch the hair! (Saturday Night Fever)


There’s no such thing as adventure. There’s no such thing as romance. There’s only trouble and desire. (Simple Men)


I can’t believe I gave my panties to a geek. (Sixteen Candles)


I’m tired of getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop! (Some Like It Hot)


I can’t die yet. There are many men I must kill first. (Yojimbo)

Hey, nobody said they had to be profound.

In yesterday’s Chicago Tribune I reviewed Stop That Girl by Elizabeth McKenzie, a “novel in stories” that has been covered almost everywhere. It struck me as stripped-down Lorrie Moore–which is almost by definition too stripped down–and it lost me by the end. But I was taken with McKenzie’s fresh, promising device of jumping a few years between stories, sometimes leaving important events unnarrated so that the reader experiences them only through their repercussions. This tactic reminded me of Michael Apted’s wonderful “Up” documentary film project:

I wanted to like Elizabeth McKenzie’s “Stop That Girl” more than I finally did. What made me root for it? It’s unsentimental; its young narrator looks at the world through an oddball’s eyes; she dispenses with consoling illusions early. The writing has a cool economy, too–it’s the opposite of flowery. But most of all, I was intrigued by McKenzie’s fresh approach to putting together a short-story collection. She calls “Stop That Girl” a “novel in stories,” which may sound dubious: Why stories rather than chapters? Is this more than gratuitous cleverness?

It is. For one thing, all the stories here are capable of standing alone; each has its own arc and logic. What really grabbed me about this device, however, was just what makes Michael Apted’s “Up” film series (“Seven Up,” “7 Plus Seven,” “21 Up,” etc.) following a group of Britons from age 7 through (so far) age 42 so appealing: the irresistible fascination of checking in on someone’s life progress at intervals. The nine stories that make up “Stop That Girl” cover Ann Ransom’s life from age 7 until she’s a 20-something mother. But we stop and look in on her only every couple of years, and a lot more happens offstage than on.

McKenzie may really be onto something. I loved the innovative structure of Stop That Girl and the way it messes with conventional novelistic continuity–which is nowhere so drearily entrenched as in coming-of-age novels. But I didn’t love the meager story this novel told. In the end I felt that McKenzie took the laudable ideal of economy to an extreme. Her book left me feeling underfed, hungering for more: more description, more emotion, more incident, more of everything. I would love to read a book employing a similar structure while telling a richer story.

C-SPAN neglected to tell me that “The Problem of Political Art,” the Bradley Lecture I delivered last Monday at the American Enterprise Institute, would be airing on Saturday as part of its American Perspectives series. I’ve been getting e-mail all day from people who saw me holding forth on TV last night. Alas, I was otherwise occupied.

The good news (such as it is) is that anyone with RealVideo can watch the lecture on line as soon as it’s posted on C-SPAN’s Web site. It isn’t up yet, but this is where you’ll be able to find it when the time comes, presumably tomorrow or a little later in the week.

Friday again. The Wall Street Journal again. Theater again. Two shows this week, Harold Prince’s opera-house production of Candide and Woman Before a Glass, a one-woman play about Peggy Guggenheim.

The first I liked very much, with some inescapable but forgivable reservations:

Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” is back on Broadway–almost. New York City Opera, whose Lincoln Center headquarters is a block from Broadway and slightly north of the theater district, has revived its 1982 production of Bernstein’s 1956 operetta. Like the show itself, this “Candide” is flawed, but it definitely works, and unlike the semi-staged concert version presented last spring by the New York Philharmonic, which ran for just four performances, it plays through next Saturday, long enough for the word to get out….

Mr. Prince’s staging (reproduced by Arthur Masella) is full of good, dirty fun. The cast is generally fine, though Mr. Cullum isn’t quite right as Voltaire/Pangloss–he’s broad and bluff, not sharp and sardonic–and Ms. Christy, a very good Cunegonde in her own right, inevitably labors in the shadow of Kristin Chenoweth’s billion-volt performance with the New York Philharmonic. Nor is the New York State Theater well suited to Richard Wilbur’s quick-witted lyrics, which are best heard in a smaller house, ideally on Broadway.

Still, any “Candide” is infinitely better than none at all, and this one is performed with zesty, infectious relish….

The second I thought less successful as a show, but the acting redeems all:

Mercedes Ruehl has taken up residence at the Promenade Theatre, where she is starring in “Woman Before a Glass,” a one-woman play by Lanie Robertson about the life and loves of the late Peggy Guggenheim, an American heiress turned art dealer who bought a Venetian palazzo and filled it with her 260-piece collection of avant-garde paintings and sculpture….

Ms. Ruehl is in splendid, even spectacular form. Never having met Guggenheim, I can’t tell you whether her performance is true to life, but it’s full of life, outrageous and uproarious and, in the end, pitiful….

No link, needless to say. To read the whole thing, buy today’s Journal at your favorite newsstand, or go here and subscribe to the online edition. (I recommend the latter.)

“Not many of the living are so real as the dead that are beloved.”

Stark Young, letter to Thomas Wolfe (March 2, 1936)

I have to be somewhere else this morning, but fling a fistful of cookies behind me as I head out the door…

“What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end.” (All About Eve)


“What are you a wizard?! A genius?!” (Best in Show)


“Two dollars!” (Better Off Dead)


“I’ll meet you at the place where we did that thing that time.” (Broadcast News)


“You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff.” (Duck Soup)


“What are you lookin’ at?” “I’m lookin’ at a tin star with a drunk pinned on it.” (El Dorado)


“I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” (In a Lonely Place)


“It’s the stuff dreams are made of.” (The Maltese Falcon)

Back later.

I returned from Washington this afternoon to find in my e-mailbox this note from a friend who’s been worrying about my reputation:

Remember when I said you shouldn’t hit every deadline so reliably, because it will make some dunderhead think you’re not an artist? In the same spirit, I want you to slow down a little. I want you to start spreading stories of your suffering–up at night, anguished at the burden of capturing such a great man’s art, honored by the opportunity to find and focus on Satchmo, listening over and over to his early recordings, hitting the crystal meth a little too hard. (We’ll think about that last one.) I just think many people are surprisingly primitive, even intellectuals, sometimes especially intellectuals, and are inclined to see truth in clich

“To write simply is as difficult as to be good.”

W. Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando