“or also brilliant / and reassuring, oprah winfrey”
Friday 30 January 2004 | I like a cookie
Which quotation is from a poem by PLOTUS and former prof of mine Pinsky, believe it or not; sycophantic? Today I passed through Amazon looking for something or other, only to find this:
“Oprah continues to share her love of the classics with her latest Book Club pick, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez’s epic novel of love and loss.”
To share her what of the classics? To what her love of the classics? To share her love of the what? Dear God, no. What’s next, Austen? George Eliot? Wharton? No, wait, I forget—those novels was written by white girls. Anyway it’s not fair to slap a big juicy O on people’s books when they’re dead and can’t protest and have their publisher withdraw the book and make a big (meaning, between Harlem and Soho anyway) scandalous whoop-ass publicity stink about it. Cough-Franzen-cough.
I didn’t write that. The Possum did.
The author of Bel Canto professed to having an Oprah shrine in her house—am I making this up? I am not, it’s in the book club reading notes—where she daily gives thanks to this “benefactress of modern literature.” Quote.
In other irrelevant cultural non-news, I love Strong Motion as much as I hated The Twenty-Seventh City [though actually I think Franzen kind of lost control of the burgeoning material as the book raged on]. And, I’m rather enamoured of Damien Rice’s album O—belatedly, but devotedly so. Agatha gave it to me today at the gym and I listened to “Volcano” four times in a row, like a rat pressing a lever. I kissed your mouth…
Mandarin tries to say “The hedgehog has gone up to Oxford” in Arabic, practicing her pronunciation and handwriting and wondering if she could go to the DLI in Monterey.
She’s also convinced she’s “ugly” though I don’t think she could be ugly if she tried. With liberal applications of lamb placenta at that. Eating more kiwi fruit might make her live longer or have fewer headcolds but it couldn’t possibly make her prettier; as in, the correct usage of “I couldn’t care less.” [My, how elegant of me, I’ve just realized—it’s like watching David Foster Wallace try to make love. At least there are no footnotes.
Yet.]
Anyway the point that I keep making to her is that she is perfect. Especially when she falls asleep murmuring about baby koala bears. Frankly, I find that infinitely more reassuring than the knowledge that Ms. Winfrey is out there somewhere defending literature with great gouts of capital.
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