❮❮prevnext❯❯

I just finished rereading John Irving's "The World According to Garp" - it's either a particularly memorable novel, or I consumed it at a particularly tender time, because so many bits were so lodged in my memory, but I had forgotten the source.

Irving gives some of his smartest thoughts to the titular character, who (like the author, of course) is a novelist:

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.

Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions.

People will always make sides--of everything.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

Another good quote:

In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.

I had a vague memory of hearing about a childhood mishearing of warnings about "the undertow":

It was Walt's fourth summer at Dog's Head Harbor, Duncan remembered, when Garp and Helen and Duncan observed Walt watching the sea. He stood ankle-deep in the foam from the surf and peered into the waves, without taking a step, for the longest time. The family went down to the water's edge to have a word with him.
"What are you doing, Walt?" Helen asked.
"What are you looking for, dummy?" Duncan asked him.
"I'm trying to see the Under Toad," Walt said. "The what?" said Garp. "The Under Toad," Walt said. "I'm trying to see it. How big is it?"

In the novel. "undertoad' becomes the family's expression for anxiety and foreboding. My family has a somewhat similar phrase from an anecdote:"got 'em all back now mom!" which expresses relief a danger has passed - specifically a danger that wasn't recognized when it was extent.

Garp knew what to take for courses and whom to have for teachers. That is often the difference between doing well or poorly in a school.

I always thought that the difference between institutions was probably a lot less important than how hard one applied oneself, but I think getting lucky (or smart) about individual teachers is more important.

This was another instructional excerpt that lodged in my brain:

She was suddenly no drunker than Bill; or she had become miraculously undrunk, or she was enjoying that half hour of clarity between stupor and hangover--a half hour Garp had read about, but had always believed was a myth. Another illusion.

Fair warning, the final two are a little on the raunchy side, starting with this pornographic glossary:

The picture Garp looked at in the dream was considered among the highest in the rankings of pornographic pictures. Among pictures of naked women, there were names for how much you could see. If you could see the pubic hair, but not the sex parts, that was called a bush shot--or just a bush. If you could see the sex parts, which were sometimes partially hidden by the hair, that was a beaver; a beaver was better than just a bush; a beaver was the whole thing: the hair and the parts. If the parts were open, that was called a split beaver. And if the whole thing glistened, that was the best of all, in the world of pornography: that was a wet, split beaver. The wetness implied that the woman was not only naked and exposed and open, but she was also ready.

And maybe most of all, this:

Garp first sees the young man reflected in Mrs. Ralph's dressing-table mirror. Sitting naked in the chair, he is combing out the blond end of his thin ponytail, which he holds over his shoulder and sprays with one of Mrs. Ralph's aerosol cans. His belly and thighs have the same slick buttered look that Garp saw on the flesh and fur of Mrs. Ralph, and his young cock is as lean and arched as the backbone of a whippet.

The "as lean and arched" analogy really stuck with me.

---

Slate argues You Have a Moral Obligation to Claim Your $125 From Equifax.

---

"Now I'm going to sign this bill [for funding 9/11 victim compensation] into law - and I don't know if this stage will hold it, but if it doesn't we're not falling very far... but I'd like to ask the families and I'd also like to ask the first responders to come up... and we'll give this stage a shot... let's see how well built... 'Made In America'... let's see how well built it is."

Ladies and Gentleman, your President of the United States! Cruel and tacky, or merely stupid and tacky? You decide! (I'm sure he hired only the best people to build his stage.)

---

Man I miss Vine sometimes...

There's some meanness here sometimes, but also such creativity and exploration of comic timing...