Art & Creativity Quote by Calvin Trillin

Publishing likes to flatter itself with the language of permanence; Trillin punctures that balloon with a grocery-store metaphor so blunt it’s almost rude. “Shelf life” is already retail slang masquerading as cultural judgment, and he leans into it: not “between a mayfly and a fruit fly,” but between milk and yogurt, two things you can picture souring in your own refrigerator. The joke lands because it’s precise. Milk is optimism with an expiration date; yogurt is what happens when you accept fermentation and call it a feature. Most trade books, he implies, don’t even get the dignity of “aging.” They’re pushed, displayed, discounted, and quietly carted off before word-of-mouth can do much work.

The intent isn’t just to sneer at short attention spans. It’s to describe an industry structured around novelty and churn, where cultural value is often confused with initial velocity: preorders, launch-week reviews, the brief fantasy of being “the book everyone is talking about.” Trillin, a journalist with a comedian’s ear, is also winking at the author’s side of the bargain. Writers are encouraged to treat publication like arrival, when it’s closer to stocking a perishable item and praying it doesn’t get rotated out.

Subtext: the marketplace isn’t a neutral distributor of taste; it actively manufactures forgetting. By choosing everyday dairy, Trillin makes the loss feel domestic, routine, and faintly absurd - exactly how disposability becomes normal.