Scroll of Shame

Embarrassing moments in prose

We were in Alabamy when, imagine our surprise, we heard all the kittens singing, "Mammy's little baby loves Scroll o', Scroll o' / Mammy's little baby loves Scroll o' Shame!''

Love them big, gnarly babes.

Born Jewish, [the critic Richard Gilman] converts to Catholicism, then abandons his new religion, all because of his "sexual nature," as he terms it. Gilman's "perversion," in his own term, is that he enjoys being dominated by large, muscular women. —Review of Richard Gilman's

Faith, Sex, Mystery in Kirkus Reviews

"Table for one, next to the fire extinguisher... "

WRISTON: .. .What the world actually runs on is profit. Your profit, for example, comes from being an editor. It's the way you feel when you walk into a restaurant and hear someone say: "There goes the great editor of Harper's Magazine."

LAPHAM: That's buying a lot less than it used to.

—Former Citicorp president Walter B. Wriston and current Harper's editor Lewis H. Lapham in (where else?) Harper's Magazine

(Gulp.)

Certain numbers tried to be cheerfully low. The award in this department goes to Sarah Safford and Jane Goldberg's Tapping and Talking Dirty, where the two women, between tap riffs, talked about sex: what they liked ("a guy who can put in your diaphragm without missing a beat") and what they didn't like (swallowing sperm). Safford added that she had even made up a song about her difficulties in swallowing sperm, but disappointingly, she didn't sing it for us.

—Joan Acocella in the Village Voice

James Wolcott