Today I was trying to do housework and then came across two quotes about housework.
In Clyde Edgerton’s Killer Diller, an 86-year-old character, Mattie Rigsbee, lambastes an ad on TV:
“You take that Jimmy Jo Bathroom Cleaner. They go on and on about how it cleans this, that, and the other. Show it in the toilet bowl just cleaning in one swish, and you go buy some for I don’t know how much and it won’t clean no better than dirty water…. I use baking soda for all my cleaning.”
In Sheila Ballantyne’s Norma Jean The Termite Queen, the heroine muses about her disagreeable job as housewife:
On applications, Norma Jean has referred to herself variously as Housewife, Homemaker (mentally adding ‘Creative’); and Mother. Of course these terms do not belong under the heading Occupation; they never did, because they don’t adequately describe what you do. …Housewife? We all know how sloppy that one is, the tendency it has to evoke a kind of back-room imagery, where all the trivia is stored.”
And here are three links to articles about books, Gore Vidal, and the Occupy Movement:
1. According to Pubishers Weekly: Sue Halpern is the editor of NYRB Lit, the new e-book series from New York Review Books to be launched in September. The first title is The Water Theatre by Lindsay Clarke.
2. Here is Michael Dirda’s obituary of Gore Vidal in The Washington Post.
3. Here is a fascinating article by the late Alexander Cockburn on the Occupy Movement. The radical columnist was annoyed by “the cult of the Internet, the tweeting and so forth, and I particularly didn’t like the enormous arrogance that prompted the Occupiers to claim that they were indeed the most important radical surge in living memory.
“Where was the respect for the past?”
And then he reminds us of the non-violent resistance movements in the U.S. from the ’40s to the present.
