The Book Babes

SOUTHERN COMFORT

FROM ELLEN: I started Kathryn Stockett's novel "The Help" with some trepidation. Obama may be in the White House, but that hasn't wiped the slate clean of racism or classism, and "The Help" gets us right back to the roots -- the Jim Crow South. Set in the early '60s, as the issue of equal rights for black people clawed its way into the national consciousness, the book is told through the eyes of black domestics and a young white woman who decides to cross the color line (secretly) to tell their story.

The reason for my unease? It captures a dialect that could have come straight out of "Gone With the Wind," a novel that has been criticized for promoting black stereotypes like "sure 'nough" Mammy and the "I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies" Prissy. Listen up:

"Taking care a white babes, that's what I do... Her legs is so spindly, she looks like she done growed em last week... I spec this is the smallest house I ever worked in..." You get the idea. Meanwhile, when the story is told from the point of view of the white woman, Skeeter, grammar and syntax are perfect.

And yet, what makes this book impossible to put down is the voices of these maids: Aibileen, Minny, and all the rest who at risk to themselves and their families tell the good and bad of cleaning white peoples' houses and raising their children. No wonder the book has been the #1 seller among Southern independent stores. Stockett, who was raised in Mississippi by a black maid like those she's created in this book, has captured these women as under-educated, yes, but also tough, shrewd, proud, compassionate and even funny. For them, humor helps them cope with the constant insults suffered under a system that kept them in their place, and how.

    

               

A REFUGE FROM REALITY?

FROM ELLEN: The well-established trend of authors as public speakers has always had its limits for me. If a person is known for what they write, that's how they should be judged, rather than as they appear on stage. Sometimes I resist meeting a writer I admire, simply because I don't want an unpleasant reaction color my view of his or her work. Which is to say...

The other night in Portland, I heard Terry Tempest Williams speak in a benefit for Literary Arts, keeper of the written-word flame in Oregon. Williams is not only an accomplished writer but also an environmental activist who traces the high rate of cancer in her family to atomic testing in her home state of Utah after World War II. She is a polished presenter and advocate, with a soft-spoken manner that bespeaks all things Gaia. Her talk was built around excerpts from her latest book, "Finding Beauty in a Broken World."

And yet: Was I the only one in the audience who found it hard to believe one of her anecdotes, about a Delta flight attendant who went to the mat to bump Williams' adult adopted son from the exit row because he was black? Williams used the story in part to describe how her father, a passenger sitting in the same exit row, had evolved from a "Marlboro man without the cigarette"  who saw the world through a racist's eyes to a man who sobbed over the phone while describing the insult to her son. That young man, it's relevant to know, grew up in Africa and "speaks six languages," but apparently, when asked if he could manage in case of an emergency, couldn't say "yes" in a manner the flight attendant understood. When Williams' father intervened, she demanded that the black man read aloud from the emergency card to prove that he was literate and capable of manning the exit row.

The story may be true. But it sounded too neat and apocryphal to me, not the least because the airlines have enough trouble without inviting lawsuits for racial discrimination. I've sat in the exit row many times, without incident to me or any of the more suspicious characters beside me. Likewise, as touching as it seems to see a grown man cry, a true macho man never weeps. (Ref: Tom Hanks, in "A League of Their Own ": "There's no crying in baseball.")

This is all small potatoes, except for the larger idea that these days world views are increasingly shaped and reinforced within the same narrow framework. The very people who appreciate Williams' sensitive writing and her feminist/environmentalist slant are more receptive than most to the idea that racial insensitivity is alive and well throughout American society. Maybe it is, but so blatant as this? And maybe the story as Williams told it holds an element of truth but had grown with the telling. I left her appearance puzzling less over the world's imperfections than the limits of the spoken word.

MOMS AND THE BLAME GAME

ELLEN SAYS: Just in time for Mother's Day: Debra Gwartney's story about her wayward teen daughters, which describes how the two girls acted out in ways that make them lucky to be alive today. "Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love" proves that motherhood is forever, and so is the guilt. Gwartney's self-recriminations -- an all-too-familiar feeling for moms whose kids go wrong -- color the book with a constant refrain of "woulda, coulda, shoulda."

But in spite of her self-doubt, Gwartney ends up a hero -- a single mother who stuck by her two older daughters even as they punked themselves up, dropped out and eventually ran away. One came back in three months after suffering a nasty heroin overdose. The other was gone for a year, and when she returned, she was just as recalcitrant as before she left. Still, even when she hated doing it and resented her daughters for what they were putting her through, Gwartney spent money she didn't have for their therapy and rehab. She spent years braced for the next confrontation or piece of bad news.

The miracle is not just that the girls survived their life on the streets, but that their mother never gave up. That doesn't mean she didn't practice some tough love. But she never slammed the door on either of them. 

Although, as I've said before, I'm weary of the dysfunctional family memoir, this one is worth the spin, if for no other reason than the ending confirms that it's never too late to find connection again. In the throes of their misery, Gwartney's oldest, Amanda -- shaved head and all -- told her mother, "This isn't about you, Mom." But Gwartney could never feel that way, because most mothers never can.

MOM, WE HARDLY KNEW YE

ELLEN SAYS: A week in New York City is heady stuff for a small-town persona like me, but it's worth braving the cold and congestion for the annual meeting and awards celebration of the National Book Critics Circle, which took place Thursday at the New School in Manhattan. You can find the names of the winners on the NBCC site. So I'll offer a few extremely pertinent observations about the winners, instead.

First, the winners were all men. This did not go unnoticed by a certain proportion of the very people who voted to give said winners their awards, specifically a certain number of women on the NBCC's 24-critic board. Not that we begrudged any of the winners their due, but really: What were the odds that we'd go seven out of seven (normally six, but this year two poets split that award). Not to mention that the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing went to Ron Charles (a man, as might be presumed), and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award to Pen American Center, a worthy organization that fights for writers' freedom around the globe, brought three men to the stage to accept the award.

One possible exception occurred when Natasha  Wimmer, a tall, lanky woman with an improbable crown of curls, loped to the stage to accept the fiction award for Roberto Bolano, author of "2666," because Bolano couldn't be there: He died in 2003. Which is not an incidental point: The critics were divided on what would have become of the sprawling (as in, "where is this going?"), 900-page novel had he lived. Similar thoughts haunt the last work of David Foster Wallace, which is excerpted along with a touching profile in last week's New Yorker magazine. Wallace killed himself -- in part, it seems, over his sense of having failed at the nearly supernatural goals he set for himself with that work. The excerpt suggests room for revision. In both cases, readers are left to wonder what might have been.

But enough sorrow. In looking for small victories regarding this year's NBCC winners and the writerly strengths of our fellow women, I need search no further than the list of finalists to find the evidence. In fiction, Marilynne Robinson and Elizabeth Strout produced novels ("Home" and "Olive Kittredge," respectively) that were real contenders. In biography, few would argue that Annette Gordon-Reed, Paula J. Giddings and Brenda Wineapple produced exemplary work, even if Patrick French won the prize for his authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul.

Meanwhile -- and I doubt if you'll read this anywhere else -- two of the male winners invoked their mothers in accepting their awards. Seth Lerer, who won the criticism prize for his history of children's literature, praised Mom for taking him to the library when he was four. Juan Felipe Herrera, co-winner of the poetry prize, traced his lyrical gifts to his mother singing lullabies to him as a baby.

Women are everywhere, but sometimes -- often times, alas! -- it consists of being the power behind the man. An eternal verity, perhaps?       

ST. PADDY'S DAY TIP: WEAR GREEN, AND TAKE AN IRISH WRITER TO BED

ELLEN SAYS: I'm already wearing the green and hoping for the luck o' the Irish (or is that said in irony, as the Irish have had such little luck in their long history??). With St. Patrick's Day just around the corner, let's celebrate the wonderful literary heritage produced by the land of leprechauns. I'm not talking James Joyce, Yeats or Sean O'Casey, great as those writers may be. I'm thinking about contemporary writers, from Seamus Heaney ("Beowulf" translation; poet extraordinaire) to Edna O'Brien ("Light in the Evening") to Colm Toibin ("The Master") to John Mcgahern ("All Will Be Well")... and those are just the first names and books that come to mind.

This doesn't include all the American crossovers, transplants such as Frank McCourt ("Angela's Ashes") or homegrown chroniclers of the Irish-American story such as Alice McDermott ("Charming Billy"). I could spend the rest of my life on an Irish-only diet of books and authors and barely know I was deprived.

This week on KATU-TV in Portland I made some suggestions of new or nearly new books that readers ought to consider as they contemplate the blarney stone. All would make great gifts for St. Patrick's Day, guaranteeing that you'd have more than a hangover as a souvenir for your revelry!

1. "Heart and Soul," by Maeve Binchey. Heartfelt is the word for this latest novel from a phenomenal bestselling novelist who always gives you a sense of her characters' humanity. Here she focuses on the outpatient clinic a Dublin hospital creates and the people who inhabit it, both as staffers and clients. I don't want to spill the beans about what happens to the newly divorced cardiologist who's chosen to run the place, but the ending confirms how each of us has the capacity to change.

2. "Shannon," by Frank Delaney. The American-born Delaney sets this latest work of historical fiction in the 1920s along the Shannon River, which is to Ireland what the Mississippi is to us Americans. A priest named Robert Shannon (as in the river -- his people came from its shores) is suffering from shell shock after World War I. He's sent to Ireland to explore his roots (and to keep him out of the hair of his bosses in the Boston diocese, which is up to some mischief). There's a method to Delaney's madness in choosing this setting, putting his recovering priest in the midst of civil war. This is good stuff that helps you understand both the land and its politics.

3. "The Secret Scripture," by Barry Sebastian. This novel almost won the coveted Man Booker Prize, and it would have been my pick. The setting is the recent present, as a hospital psychiatrist takes on the task of moving a 100-year-old patient who has been incarcerated in a mental institution since she was a young woman. But the catalyst for the story -- her commitment -- occurred at roughly the same time as the Delaney novel, after World War I. The doctor begins to suspect fishy business, and he is right. Here you get a picture of the collusion between church and state that served its masters but gave women no voice.  

4. "The Gathering," by Anne Enright. An acute intelligence and sense of resignation color this fiction work about a large Irish-Catholic family and its past. The narrator is a woman who has gone to retrieve the body of her dead brother, whose tragic life is tied to a secret that only she knows. This is a subtle story that explores the source of melancholy and love that  binds together the Hegarty clan -- and maybe your own. The critics liked it: Enright's novel won the Man Booker Prize in 2007. 

5. "A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub," by Bill Barich. Barich, a Dublin-based American who writes for The New Yorker, fuses the story of the neighborhood "public house" -- a.k.a. pub -- into a wider explanation of how Ireland is changing in the face of globalization. If you don't know ale from stout, not to worry: This book is crammed with tasty tidbits about the Irish and their customs. It may be worth the price of admission just to learn how many different terms they have for getting sloshed. My favorite euphemism for saying someone was drunk as a skunk: He was just "taking a ride on the bingo bus."      

RADIO BABES

The Book Babes were all over the radio waves last week. 

THE BOOK BABES PROGRAM ON WMNF-FM 88.5 in Tampa

An interview with author JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS: Phillips talks about the unusual creative writing program she launched at Rutgers University, the genesis of her latest novel, “Lark & Termite,” and the state of fiction in America.

A discussion about the consequences of SPILLING FAMILY SECRETS: Ellen, reporting on the NBCC nominations, brings up her reservations about “The Bishop’s Daughter,” one of five memoirs nominated in the Autobiography category. In the memoir, author Honor Moore outs her father who was a prominent Episcopal bishop. The Book Babes debate the pros and cons of revealing secrets against the wishes of family members. Ellen also predicts the winner in the NBCC fiction category. Awards will be handed out in New York in March.

Check out the show, which aired on Feb. 18 and is now archived at www.wmnf.org. Click On Demand/Archives/Book Babes (found on the calendar at 11:30 on Wednesday).

THE BOOK BABES ON MINNESOTA PUBLIC RADIO

Joining the station during its pledge drive and Kerri Miller’s Midmorning show, The Book Babes commented on book recommendations from listeners and made a few of their own. The station offered the Book Babes’ new book, “Between the Covers: The Book Babes’ Guide to a Woman’s Reading Pleasures,” as a prize for those who sent in pledges. 

Hey, maybe that’s why the book went into its second printing this week!

With book coverage shrinking in so many newspapers, we're grateful to Kerri Miller and MPR ramping it up. She's our kind of Book Babe!

Check out her MPR show and the list of the book recommendations the Book Babes and MPR listeners made during our appearance at http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/02/19/midmorning1/

 

 

WWPRD? WOMEN WRITERS, BEWARE OF CHITCHAT FOR PUBLIC VIEW

ELLEN SAYS:

What would Philip Roth do?

This question, Ann Patchett said this week, is the running joke between her and her agent, as the writer sorts through the fluff of requests she receives now that she's a sought-after celebrity author. Roth, it was implied, is too big and fine to suffer fools or silly solicitations gladly. So he offers a measuring stick for Patchett, whose fame has leaped precipitously since the release of her prize-winning novel "Bel Canto" in 2001.

Yet, oddly enough, Patchett didn't catch the irony of this observation as she shared the stage with fellow writer Elizabeth Gilbert at the Portland (OR) Arts & Lectures series. Here were she and Gilbert, two writers I've long admired, chatting in front of hundreds of people like two girls at a slumber party. Longtime correspondents by mail, they owned up to their real reason for coming to Portland, which was so the two of them could spend time together. They went to yoga! They had lunch! They shopped! After offering this glimpse of their day, Britney and JLo -- I mean, Ann and Liz -- proceeded to talk about their lives with the once-over-lightly gloss that affected parts of Gilbert's phenomenal bestseller "Eat, Pray, Love." Their verbal badminton was big on self-deprecation, but that hardly obscured the smugness in the air.

What would Philip Roth do, indeed. For women writers who think they still aren't taken as seriously as the men in their field, here was Exhibit A for why that might occur: a coupla chicks sitting around talking while an audience pays $26.50 a seat to hear them indulge in a bout of self- and mutual admiration. For all the chat-festiness of "Oprah," it's hard to envision the TV super-goddess engaging her old bud Toni Morrison like this. Morrison would flick off such public familiarity as easily as she would a bad sentence.

Maybe the Gilbert-Patchett patter was especially galling because the status of women writers has been in my mind lately. I had breakfast in New York last month with one of my favorite novelists, Jayne Anne Phillips, then met in February with a promising new writer, Lauren Groff. Phillips lamented that, between raising two sons and running the writing program at Rutgers, her five novels ("Lark & Termite" is the latest) have been spaced wide -- too wide to suit the avaricious machinery of publishing. As for Groff, her husband and new baby Beckett were in tow when she hit Portland as part of a West Coast promotional tour for her new short story collection "Delicate Edible Birds."

"Two books and a baby in one year!" she said. "I'm tired."

When I noted that Groff's first novel, "The Monsters of Templeton," was a finalist for the Orange Prize for New Writers, she pointed out that the Orange Prize is specifically for women, and that sent us off on a riff about the gender gap in literature. Typically, she observed with a certain poetic license, awards go to fiction that is written from the point of view of a man, concerns war and has very short sentences -- Hemingwayesque, as it were. In Groff's view, this means women will automatically get the short stick in terms of their literary stature. Stature is a hard thing to measure, of course. But consider John Updike and the prominence of his obituary in print and on television when he died. Clearly, Updike was a big gun of the written word to anyone who was halfway paying attention. Would any woman wordsmith (Morrison? Didion?) merit equal media firepower?

This seems a given: The bass voice still has more resonance than the soprano, metaphorically speaking. It's our conditioning, stupid, to borrow a phrase -- which doesn't mean this shouldn't change, only that it is ridiculous not to acknowledge our own internally wired biases even while trying to overcome them. But there are other reasons, too, and Groff's mention of subject matter may have something to do with it: Fiction that deals with the big topics of the day, not the domestic sphere, is more readily imbued with the gravitas of great literature -- pace "War and Peace," not to mention Don DeLillo. Sometimes the formula works, just not always.

Another factor working against women writers is the distractions. If you don't believe the surveys, trust your lying eyes: Women still handle the bulk of the job of raising children, not to mention caring for spouses, parents and friends. They do more housework. The mundane (in other words, all the daily stuff that makes the world go 'round) is their metier, which is probably why they write about it so well -- and fail to produce not only the kind of writing but also the volume that might transform them from wordsmith into literary lion. (Notice the male form.)

Joyce Carol Oates is, was and shall always be the notable exception to this rule, but that's the point -- what a marvel she is, and how her example supports another critical leg of the stool -- the dignity that props up a writer's (or anyone's) stature. I'm reminded of Oates' appearance more than a decade ago at Portland Arts & Lectures. Like the professor she is (in the time she creates from thin air, apparently), Oates gave a prepared talk on the state of contemporary writing. Unlike Patchett and Gilbert, who sat with feet tucked underneath them in two oversized upholstered chairs, she stood at a lectern. In short, she exuded competence and demanded respect. She served herself and the cause of literature.

  


 

BABES, B&N AND THE BIG APPLE

ELLEN SAYS: Fear of flying -- not! When the Babes hit New York last week, we not only had a standing-room-only event at the Greenwich Village Barnes & Noble, but also two women writers who added glamor and good vibes to our trip. Our favorite member of the audience: the Jack Russell terrier who seemed to be hanging on our every word.

Sue Shapiro, author of "Five Men Who Broke My Heart" among other books (my homage will be entitled "Five Men Who Broke My Bed"), organized the Friday night reading as a benefit for the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen Writer's Workshop and proved there's no recession when she's around. The GV B&N sold $7,000 worth of books (including our beloved "Between the Covers") to benefit the workshop.

Erica Jong was gracious and forthright, praising the Babes for choosing her memoir "Fear of Fifty" to feature in "Between the Covers," rather than the book for which she is known by millions. "Do you know how many times I've had people say to me, 'I read your book!'" she lamented. Such are the travails of a writer who has  written 20 but only one that since being published in 1973 has sold 200 million copies...

The party following at Sue's apartment was standing room only, as well: writers, students, friends, and lots of sushi! It was very New York, with my husband Tim's favorite part the chance to talk to Sue's husband, who wrote some of the episodes for "Seinfeld," the TV series we raised our boys on in the '90s. Not that we really wanted either of them to turn into Kramer or George...

Saturday, as part of the National Book Critics Circle board, I participated in the selection of finalists for our 2008 awards, with winners to be selected March 11. A few personally gratifying picks: "Home" by Marilynne Robinson in fiction; "My Father's Paradise" by Ariel Sabar in memoir. (The subtitle, "A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq," makes this sound like a story of limited interest. But it turns out to be a fascinating and offbeat look at Mideastern culture and politics.)  And some sadness at the terrific books that were left on the cutting room floor. The John Muir and Wallace Stegner biographies are distinguished and, I predict, will be celebrated elsewhere (Los Angeles Times book awards?). Although they didn't make the NBCC finalists' list, Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland" and Toni Morrison's "A Mercy" are two of the best novels produced last year.

   
     

O'Nan, Obama, Oh Jimi

     Here are the books recommended by the Book Babes on their monthly radio show, which aired on WMNF-FM 88.5 Tampa on January 21. To listen to the entire show, go to wmnf.org, click on On Demand/Archives and then Book Babes on the calendar.

Ellen’s Pick (championing a veteran writer):

"Songs for the Missing," the latest novel from Stewart O'Nan.

It tells the story of a pretty young girl who goes missing, and how her parents, sister and friends react as the search and ultimate outcome unfold.

Margo’s Picks (in honor of Barack Obama’s inauguration):

“What Obama Means: For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future,” by Jabari Asim, editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis and author of “The N Word”

Asim, whom the Babes met when he was an editor at the Washington Post, places the Obama phenomenon in a social and culture context.

“Rock Gods: Forty Years of Rock Photography,” by photographer Robert M. Knight, introduction by Slash, edited by Divina Infusino

When Hendrix, who graces the cover of this collection, used to tell Knight that his mom was Japanese, the photographer would think, “Okay, whatever you want to be, Jimi.” Then years later Knight found out a fact that puts Hendrix right into today's mulitcultural zeitgeist: Jimi’s mother had left early in his life and his father had remarried a Japanese woman.

“Let’s Talk About Race,” by Newbery Honor Book Author Julius Lester, illustrated by Karen Barbour.

This children’s book, filled with eye-popping illustrations, reminds kids: Race is only part of everyone’s story.

Also check out our interview with Janet Conner, author of “Writing Down Your Soul: How to Activate and Listen to the Extraordinary Voice Within”

Odes to Politicians: For Better or Verse

Here's the Book Babes' latest exchange that appeared on huffingtonpost.com:

Hey Margo,

The new year is starting right for at least one endangered species: people who love literature. First, of course, comes news from the National Endowment for the Arts that Johnny and Susie CAN read, after all. After years of survey showing a gradual decline in the nation's habit of reading fiction, a new study shows a glimmer of progress: Oprah's Book Club and "The Big Read" - by chance, an NEA initiative, but would I accuse the agency of patting itself on the back? - are among initiatives credited with helping reverse the trend. It's just a small upward blip, but in this economy, we need to celebrate anything that's pointed up.

Then comes another treat for us culture vultures: Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Although with that hair it's hard to think of Gov. B. as anything more than an Elvis impersonator, apparently he fancies himself a bard. And although the NEA study regretfully acknowledged no uptick in the appetite for poetry, maybe Blagojevich's habit of reciting poetry at his press conferences (Kipling, Tennyson) will push the public taste toward verse, as well. It beats spewing the expletives for which the guv is also known.

The prospect of mating poetry and public figures sent me to my book shelves. Why bother with a speechwriter when we have such time-honored turns of phrase as "the fog comes on little cat feet" or "the bell tolls for thee"?

For instance, here's how I'd dress up George Bush's final address to the nation this week:
No more be grieved at that which thou has done (in Iraq, particularly).
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud.
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud...
(William Shakespeare, Sonnet XXXV)

Hillary Clinton admitting she had even loftier aspirations during her confirmation hearings for Secretary of State:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both (especially the one that would have made ME president)
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could...
(Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken")

Gov. Bill Richardson, lamenting the fact that he will not be confirmed as Secretary of Commerce:
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise...
(Jane Kenyon, "Otherwise")

As for Barack Obama, what better words than these for his inaugural address:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
(W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming")

Hey Ellen,

"You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose," Mario Cuomo once said. But what's a politico to do in defeat? Sarah Palin could ponder that other infamous line from Yeats' "The Second Coming":

"The best lack all convictions, while the worse/
Are full of passionate intensity."

And here are some more lyrical lines that her fellow Republicans would do well to contemplate during their years in opposition:

For Dick Cheney:
"If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied."
(Rudyard Kipling, "Common Form")

For Karl Rove:
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!"
(Sir Walter Scott, "Marmion")

For John McCain:
"You and I are old; old age hath yet its honor and its toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men who strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wantes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world."
(Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses")

For Newt Gingrich:
"To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say,
is a keen observer of life,
The word 'Intellectual' suggests straight away
A man who's untrue to his wife."
(W.H. Auden, "New Year Letter")

For Jeb Bush
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you."
(Philip Larkin, "This Be the Verse")

For Larry Craig and Mark Foley:
"As I grow older and older,
And totter toward the tomb,
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom."
(Attributed to Dorothy Sayers in Janet Hitchman's "Such a Strange Lady")

For James Dobson
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new.
And God fulfills himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
(Alfred Lord Tenneyson, "Idylls of the King")

For Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner:
"They join in hand, brave Americans all.
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall."
(John Dickenson, "The Liberty Song")