Sedulia's Quotations

Chinese Party Secretary Zhang Jingli 張慶黎 on the Dalai Lama: "A monster with a human face"

A wolf wrapped in a monk's robe; a monster with a human face, but the heart of a beast.

       --Zhang Jingli (張慶黎) Chinese Party Secretary for Tibet, describing the Dalai Lama. Quoted in article by Paul Lin 林保華 in the Taipei Times, 25 April 2008.

William Deresiewicz on elite students these days

When students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students.

     --William Deresiewicz, "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education," in The American Scholar, Summer 2008

Andrew O'Hagan on M.Night Shyamalan: messianic disasters

Especially in the first years after a big success, film directors of a certain sort are given to acting like geniuses, but the conditions of success can serve to push them further and further away from their talent.

If a bright young director survives this malarkey and makes a second great hit, in Hollywood he is no longer a genius but a prophet. His relationship with reality is then likely to be beyond talking about, and unlike the successful novelist, say, or the smart young painter, a director (owing to his relationship with millions of dollars and a prideful notion of the masses) will often disappear in a miasma of tasteless lunacy.  There have been many such messianic disasters in the history of cinema and they each have two big movies to their name, followed either by silence, rehab, cameo appearances, adverts, jail, or, if they're lucky, B-movies....

M. Night Shymalan ...has come to prove that success in the movies is never any guarantee of success. He was born in 1970... and he is already, in 2008, gathering force as a cautionary tale.... his latest movie, The Happening, is one of the most interesting movies of the year, despite being one of the worst. It offers a study in what happens to the mind of a talented moviemaker when he is caught between commercial histeria and his own engulfing ego. When books go nutty it's all just prose-- or the history of prose-- but when it happens to films people start losing their jobs and their houses....

When a writer/director gets into his messianic period, a period born of popular formulae that contain a little philosophy, then at the first opportunity he will begin to surrender the formulae and raise the philosophical. In a sense, success gives him the licence to misread his own gifts, and so we end up with a crazy film like Lady in the Water (2006).... a fantasy film about a ...superintendent of a block of flats,...who one night discovers a nymph in the complex's swimming-pool. Set in the present day, the nymph or Narf (who is called Story) is from the Blue World, and has come to earth to awaken a human being who has the potential to change life on earth. It turns out that this particular human being, in the film, is a budding artist played by M. Night Shmalayan. Narfs, it turns out, are pursued by Scrunts, red-eyed wolf-like creatures with grass instead of hair, who are afraid of only one thing, three monkey-like creatures called Tartutic who hide in the trees near the pool. Story, the nymph or Narf, wants to find the genius and bless him before she is taken back to her own world by a giant eagle called the Great Eatlon. But before that can happen, a film critic who lives in the apartment block has to make a cynical speech about the movies and then be eaten alive by a grassy Scrunt. When the film came out, one critic, slightly more measured than the others, wrote that Shmalayan's movie was "like someone pouring petrol over their heads and setting fire to themselves."

       --Andrew O'Hagan, in a review of M. Night Shyamalan's new movie The Happening in the London Review of Books, 17 July 2008

Cherie Blair and her hairdresser

Once Blair is in office, the most engaging character in the story is Cherie's hairdresser, André [Suard], who travels with her (she pays-- and boy does she mind) and brings order to what Cherie would be the first to admit is ambient chaos. Cherie's clothes and appearance are one of the subjects on which she was lavishly attacked by the papers; this seemed nasty and unfair at the time, and seems more so once you have read her account of how uninterested in fashion she had been before, and how tormenting she found the press's not-at-all-benign interest. It was André who rode to the rescue, sorting out the frocks and the 'do and many other things beside. At the U.N.'s Millennium General Assembly in 2000, [Cherie Blair's hairdresser] André had charge of newborn Leo while his parents were otherwise engaged; he brings Leo to the Waldorf Hotel to meet Cherie via an emergency stop at Ralph Lauren to replace Leo's outfit after an exploding-nappy incident. (At this point, you know that whatever Cherie was paying him, it wasn't enough.) He cleaned Leo up, changed his nappy, and was given a new outfit of dungarees and a jumper with the Stars and Stripes; he was then taken through the kitchens of the Waldorf ("the route of choice for American presidents and their wives") and straight in to see Bill and Hillary Clinton. "I arrived about five minutes later, to find Bill holding Leo and generally cooing, although my son's red face showed that he had clearly been exercising his lungs until very recently. André gave me one of his looks. "Cherie," he hissed. "Don't you ever do that to me again." Some time later they go to meet Blair at the U.N. and he asks "Why on earth is the British prime minister's son wearing an American jumper?"

   --From a review by John Lanchester of Cherie Blair's book Speaking For Myself in the London Review of Books, 17 July 2008

Senator McCain is aware of the World Wide Web

Asked earlier this year if he uses a Mac or PC, McCain replied: "Neither. I'm an illiterate who has to rely on my wife for all the assistance I can get." The running McCain-doesn't-get-the-Web meme climbed a steeper hill nearly a month ago when a McCain aide -- his deputy eCampaign director, no less -- told a bipartisan gathering of online political activists: "John McCain is aware of the Internet." And last Sunday, in an interview with the New York Times, McCain said he doesn't e-mail.

    --Article by Jose Antonio Vargas in the Washington Post, 18 July 2008

Colin Firth on liking ABBA

I think it's time we all came out. I think you either like ABBA or you're lying.

     --British actor Colin Firth, interviewed by Tina Daunt in the Los Angeles Times, 18 July 2008

H.L. Mencken: Almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty

It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.

  --H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), in the Baltimore Evening Sun, fromA Second Mencken Chrestomathy (pub.2006, ed. Terry Teachout

Queen Elizabeth II dances to "Dancing Queen" because "I am the queen and I like to dance."

This is the best queen story ever. A friend of mine went to a dinner at Windsor Castle hosted by the queen, there was a couple of hundred people there, it was a special occasion for him.

The meal was had, the speeches were made and then the disco commenced, it was one of those posh dos, a dinner dance. It was a proper disco with proper music, proper disco music.

Now did the queen stick around or did she disappear? She stuck around because apparently she loves to get down on the dance floor, so she goes on the dance floor at which point people were going, "Ooh look, she's going to have a dance."

And what was the song being played? It was "Dancing Queen" by Abba.

She was on the floor and everybody said, "My goodness me, there is the Dancing Queen."

According to the presenter, the queen appreciated the irony of the situation -- and even makes a point of dancing when she hears the song.

That is a true story and she said audibly, "I always try to dance when this song comes on because I am the queen and I like to dance."

    --British BBC 2 D.J. Chris Evans, as quoted on The Monsters and the Critics

H.L. Mencken: Law as "a great devourer of good men"

The sad thing about lawyers is not that so many of them are stupid, but that so many of them are intelligent. The craft is a great devourer of good men; it sucks in and wastes almost as many as the monastic life consumed in the Middle Ages.

  --H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), in  The American Mercury (January 1928, p. 35), fromA Second Mencken Chrestomathy (pub.2006, ed. Terry Teachout