Scroll of Shame

Every holiday season Vanity Fair strikes a drumroll and inducts a select group of mortals into its Hall of Fame. But there are an awful lot of other characters running around loose in the world calling themselves writers. Striking fancy poses and making big noises, they too cry out for recognition. For them, in lieu of fifty lashes with a wet noodle, we have created the... Scroll of Shame.

Waiter, there's a commandment in my soup.

"I met my husband Davy in Bill's Fish Fry where I was a waitress. He was frying fish when I first saw him, and the way he held the fillets, white and cold in the flat of his hand just before he slid them into the lumpy batter, made me want to marry him... .The waitresses had to wear little pink nets over their hair, but Davy's beard just hung down over the food like the wisdom of Moses."

—Merrill Joan Gerber, "The Cleopatra Birds,"

The American Voice

Heavy precip.

"Air-conditioned blood drips like rosaries from glassy facades to the cosmopolitan eye"

—Jim Carroll, from "NYC Variations," The Paris Review

Maybe he wanted to make sure you got on the plane.

"It's time for me to leave, and Byrne drives me to the airport. We are as silent as ever in the car, and yet—Byrne has chosen to drive me to the airport."

—James Kaplan, profiling David Byrne in Esquire

Bleally?

"First [Meryl Streep] saw Karen Blixen, then moved into her. We feel that, if she were cut, she would bleed Blixen blood."

—Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic

Phony baloney.

''I had to banish the image of wrapped salami, and overcome the scent of inner tube. ''

—Richard Goldstein, trying on condoms in the Village Voice

...And get a tight grip on your rubber ducky.

"Is the tickling scene, at its most reassuring, not a unique representation of the overdisplacement of desire, and, at its most unsettling, a paradigm of the perverse contract? Does it not highlight, this delightful game, the impossibility of satisfaction and of reunion, with its continual reenactment of the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration?"

—Adam Phillips, overheating in Raritan —James Wolcott