9.11.2020

mystical subatomic

We need another mystic like we need another quark.

9.08.2020

Mignon McLaughlin

Mignon McLaughlin went by the nickname “Mike.” The mix of the sophistication of her French first name with her down-to-earth American moniker seems to fit her aphoristic style. There is something of the salon and of the saloon in McLaughlin’s aphorisms. McLaughlin, a short story writer and playwright, worked for slick magazines like Glamour. She and her husband (a novelist and contributing editor to Time) were part of the smart set, hobnobbing with playwrights, comics and writers for some of the leading periodicals based in New York city during 1950s and 60s. Many of her aphorisms you can imagine being spoken at a cocktail party, with a highball in one hand and a cigarette in the other. McLaughlin's aphorisms wipe away the sheen of gaiety and good company to cast a colder eye on the upperclass and literary society. Difficulties in male-female dynamics (in more sexist times), drinking, gossip, the rivalry of friends, play a major part in her aperçus, with many making almost an alter-ego out of the now unfashionable term the ‘neurotic’: “Neurotics would like to sleep all the time, and to be awakened only when there is good news.” But there is fun, too, in these aphorisms fueled by the wit of a woman one wishes one had rubbed elbows with.

Here are some of Mignon/Mike’s aphorisms:

Love looks forward, hate looks back, and anxiety has eyes all over its head.

True remorse is never just regret over consequence; it is regret over motive.

Children expect to eat when they’re hungry; our job is to teach them to eat when there’s food.

The ideal home: big enough to hear the children, but not very well.

Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.

We can never understand other people’s motives, nor their furniture.

We hear only half of what is said to us, understand only half of that, believe only half of that, and remember only half of that.

The three horrors of modern life—talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction.

With each passing year one has less to say, and knows better how to say it.

The people you admire most you usually don’t know very well.

Money: in its absence we are coarse; in its presence, we are vulgar.

Everybody can write, writers can’t do anything else.

Slavishly we imitate; and slavishly, rebel.

Don't be yourself—be someone a little nicer.

Mignon McLaughlin, Aperçus: Aphorisms of Mignon McLaughlin (Brabant Press), introduction by Josh Michaels.

about as

Probability theory is about as close to determinism as I can get.