{"id":23192,"date":"2016-08-23T09:49:09","date_gmt":"2016-08-23T14:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/?p=23192"},"modified":"2016-08-23T09:49:09","modified_gmt":"2016-08-23T14:49:09","slug":"todays-quote-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/todays-quote-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Today’s quote"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eve Tushnet on Muriel Spark’s<\/a> The Girls of Slender Means<\/a><\/em><\/strong> (recommended):<\/p>\n

Agatha Christie apparently liked Muriel Spark a lot, and one similarity I noticed\u2013which goes along with the novel\u2019s arch, judicious tone\u2013is that both novelists paint human nature in shades of folly and wickedness. Those old-fashioned words (a Christie character in The Pale Horse explicitly points out how nobody calls things \u201cwicked\u201d anymore) have found no adequate modern replacement. Folly, in particular, is a category we have a hard time naming. Christie generally portrays even her characters who do great and lasting harm\u2013the instigator\/victim in The Mirror Crack\u2019d, for example\u2013as extremes of a trajectory the best among us follow now and then. Folly can destroy a life; folly is an inevitable tint in every human action. Folly is ridiculous and deadly, and normal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Further reading: Tushnet on a rather different book, Florence King’s<\/a> When Sisterhood Was in Flower<\/a><\/em><\/strong> (recommended).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eve Tushnet on Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means (recommended): Agatha Christie apparently liked Muriel Spark a lot, and one similarity I noticed\u2013which goes along with the novel\u2019s arch, judicious tone\u2013is that both novelists paint human nature in shades of folly and wickedness. Those old-fashioned words (a Christie character in The Pale Horse explicitly … Continue reading “Today’s quote”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-and-anti-culture","category-decline-and-fall"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xam3-624","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23192"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23193,"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23192\/revisions\/23193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}