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When Marilyn Monroe got out of the game, I wrote something like, "Southern California's special horror notwithstanding, if the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault."
I wrote that in the first few shook-up minutes after hearing the bulletin sandwiched in between Don and Phil Everly and surrounded by all manner of whoops and whistles coming out of an audio signal generator, like you are apt to hear on the provincial radio these days. But I don't think I'd take those words back.
The world is at fault, not because it is inherently good or bad or anything but what it is, but because it doesn't prepare us in anything but body to get along with.
Our souls it leaves to whatever obsolescences, bigotries, theories of education workable and un, parental wisdom or lack of it, happen to get in its more or less Brownian (your phrase) pilgrimage between the cord-cutting ceremony and the time they slide you down the chute into the oven, while the guy on the Wurlitzer plays Aba Daba Honeymoon because you had once told somebody it was the nadir of all American expression; only they didn't know what nadir meant but it must be good because of the vehemence with which you expressed yourself.
--
Letter to Jules Siegel, published in Cavalier magazine (August 1965); republished in "Pynchon notes 15" and ""The World is at Fault" at pynchonwiki.com

 

Thomas Pynchon

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When Marilyn Monroe got out of the game, I wrote something like, "Southern California's special horror notwithstanding, if the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault."
I wrote that in the first few shook-up minutes after hearing the bulletin sandwiched in between Don and Phil Everly and surrounded by all manner of whoops and whistles coming out of an audio signal generator, like you are apt to hear on the provincial radio these days. But I don't think I'd take those words back.

 

Marilyn Monroe

 

There was a lot more joking going on when I was a kid. My dad, for instance, specialised in puns and I remember once we were on vacation in California and we were driving along the San Andreas Fault and he threw a quarter out of the window into the Fault because he said "he had always wanted to be generous to a fault".

 

Bill Bryson

 

[My mother] said, "Arlo, I was out in the middle of China. And they brought out these school kids, and they started singing us songs, and they started singing 'This Land is Your Land', and I said 'STOP! Stop the song! My husband wrote that song!" She must have drove them nuts! She was driving me nuts about it! It was weeks after she had got back she hadn't slowed down about it one little bit! And I just looked at her and I said, "You know, mom...California.....to the New York Island. What are they singing it for over there anyhow?" She just looked with one of those Mom kind of looks. She said, "Oh Arlo..." She walked away. I was left standing there feeling like my usual self. I knew she was right, but I just didn't know why. After a while though, it come to me. I could see it, just because it said "California to the New York Island", didn't mean it had to go the short way! I could see it going around back! Redwood Forests, Gulf stream waters, around that way! Then the whole world could be singing that song! Except America.

 

Arlo Guthrie

 

I don’t really think the music industry has taken a deep enough look at what Michael Jackson meant to everybody, all of us artists, producers, actors, actresses, all of us, entertainment as a whole. I don’t think that they took a deep enough look because everyone is too busy with their head up their own butt. When Michael was on trial, nobody…nobody stopped to go and support him at the trial. ... The guy is acquitted on ten counts of child molestation. No one said, "Sorry Michael.’ No one said, "Michael, we knew you were innocent." No one did a BET tribute to him then. Nobody played his music and did a marathon then. Nobody rallied up and did a concert. Why should Michael have to go on tour to raise money? How come all of the artists didn't band together and say, "Hey! You know what? Let's do a tour like Michael did the We Are The World Tour and let's raise some money. Let's get this thing going." No one did that. Tookie Williams is the founder of the Crips gang. ... They were trying to get him pardoned from the death penalty and half of Hollywood showed up for this man. What I can't understand is like, OK people didn't want to go near Michael Jackson when he was in trouble ... But they show up for a guy who executed families. A little girl begged for her life and he executed her. They said because he wrote in his time in prison he wrote children's books that he tried to turn his life around. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Well, how about the millions of children Michael Jackson has helped over the span of his career? Yet two children come with some false allegations and those two children become the two children that destroy him. It’s crazy. It makes me look at the entertainment business and just say I’m surrounded by a bunch of hypocrites.
When you ask me how would it affect them? I don’t even think they realize what this is. Everyone’s gonna do their tributes, but the tributes now if you look at it, it’s all because now everyone is going to get some spotlight, they’re gonna get some shine. Now all of the sudden everyone wants to say something good about him.

 

Michael Jackson

 

"Maybe Nina wouldn't have died if I hadn't moved in with them and drawn Sheener after me, but I can't feel guilty about that. I tried hard to be a good foster daughter to them, and they were happy with me. What happened was that life dropped a big custard pie on us, and that's not my fault; you can never see the custard pies coming. It's not good slapstick if you see the pie coming."
"Custard pie?" he asked, perplexed. "You see life as a slapstick comedy? Like the Three Stooges?"
"Partly."
"Life is just a joke then?"
"No. Life is serious and a joke at the same time."
"But how can that be?"
"If you don't know," she said, "maybe I should be the one asking the questions here."

 

Dean R. Koontz