"Life Stories: profiles from the New Yorker"

[fiefoe]

Lady With a Pencil (Katharine White) / Nancy Franklin (1996)

• A psychiatrist once told him that his being an editor and occupying his mother's office was "the greatest piece of active sublimation in my experience."
• You can almost hear him breathe a sigh of relief as he chivalrously rushes to rescue her from the brink of smart-woman purgatory. {Ape-leader, anyone?}
• The exchanges between Ross and Katharine White carry a romantic electrical charge - the romance coming from how close these two came to the heady ideal, hardly ever achieved between men and women at work, of complete equality.
• Katharine seems to have perfected the rhetorical use of the gone-to-hell-in-a-handbasket motif in 1931.

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Dealing With Roseanne (Roseanne Barr) / John Lahr (1995)

    I wouldn't have guessed that this is Roseanne speaking, "Like vampires and night creatures, we wander the earth, alone, haunted, not owning a body, just temporarily inhabiting one. Crazy all the way." Whoever said that witnessing the creative process is like watching sausage-making is quite right.

__ in fine and fearless fury
__ roaring high dudgeon
__ Rage is Roseanne's ozone. She exudes it. She creates it.
__ Nothing can erase the evidence of her soul's unease.
__ Roseanne characterizes her fury as "so strong I could've sucked out his will to live with my nostrils."
__ The blessings of her life and her laughter have been engineered by the same fierce principle: without a killing, no feast.
__ Pages of scribbled notions... a kind of grab bag of griefs being willed into good times: * I undress to motivational tapes.