BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE # 3

BLOG #3

After he reads his own humorous poem, the late Victor Buono sits down with Johnny Carson and  reads a poem  I wrote about my grandmother. Victor had played the lead in my play THE LAST OF THE MARX BROTHERS WRITERS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXl_-yaIhbM

Attachments area

Preview YouTube video JOHNNY CARSON INTERVIEW VICTOR BUONO Jan 13 1978

JOHNNY CARSON INTERVIEW VICTOR BUONO Jan 13 1978

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INFAMOUS MOMENTS IN THE HISTORY OF PUBLISHING

London Daily News (September 30, 1915) publishes a story about the prosecution of THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence by the Public Morality Commission. See also   The London Times for 15 November 1915 . Headline reads:

OBCENE NOVEL TO BE DESTROYED – WORSE THAN ZOLA

For the British, Zola and many French novels must have represented the depths of depravity. In any case, from 1915 until 1926 THE RAINBOW remained out of print.

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We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

                             Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859)

Humor –Latin – (h)umovem –flood, moisture. “When Shakespeare used humorous in Romeo and Juliet he meant damp. To speak of a ‘dry humor seems a bit paradoxical.

Margaret S. Ernst. In a Word (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1935)

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A SAD EVENT IN ACADEMIC PUBLISHING

Typos are enough to disturb any writer, but suppose

a publisher does not even print the author’s name

correctly? Consider the book – A CONCORDANCE OF
WALT WHITMAN’S LEAVES OF GRASS AND SELECTED PROSE WRITERS by Harold Edwin Eby (University of Washington Press, 1949). The book contains this note:

ERRATA: The authors name on the cover & title page should read

                        EDWIN HAROLD EBY

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Selections from my collection of epigraphs

All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That are everywhere. That is what the world is.

Aleksander Hemon . The Lazarus Project.

Epigraph to Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (New York: Random House, 2009)

‘Reptiles are abhorrent because of their cold body, pale color , cartilaginous skeleton, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell, harsh voice, squalid habitation, and terrible venom, wherefore their Creator

has not exerted his power to make many of them.”

            Linnaeus, 1797

“You cannot recall a new form of life.”

    Erwin Chargaff, 1972

Epigraphs to Jurassic Park  by Michael Chrichton

(Ballantine Books, 1991)

Notes to the above epigraphs:

Linnaeus (1707 – 1778)) was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, and physician who formalized binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the “father of modern taxonomy”. (Wikipedia) So why the date of

1797? Linnaeus’s son  Carolus Linnaeus theYounger or Carl von Linné was  also a  naturalist, but he died in 1783  ( 1741 – 1783).

Erwin Chargaff (11 August 1905 – 20 June 2002) was an Austro-Hungarian biochemist who immigrated to the United States during the Nazi era and was a professor of biochemistry at Columbia University medical school. Through careful experimentation, Chargaff discovered two rules that helped lead to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.  (Wikipedia)

“Jesus calls those who follow him to share his passion.

How can we convince the world by our preaching of the   passion when we shrink from that passion in our own lives?”

            Dietrich Bonhoeffer

One man will leap into the holy fire,

Unfailing in his mission, unafraid.

He travels light, now driven by desire

From sundown into dawn, from pyre to pyre.

              Ion of Chios

Epigraphs to The Damascus Road: a novel of Saint Paul by Jay Parini (New York: Doubleday, 2019)

  Robin Hood is here again; all his merry thieves

Hear a ghostly bugle-note shivering through the leaves…

The dead are coming back again, the years are rolled away

         In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.

                                  Alfred Noyes

Epigraph to The Adventures of Robin Hood by Roger Lancelyn Green (New York; Puffin, 2010)

How sad that we have no memories of our mother’s milk or our first sight of the world, through eyes made blurry by the tears we shed for milk…

   Sait Faik Abasiyanik, Milk

Epigraph to Milk by Mark Kurlansky (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018).

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For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of

Them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men.

   Pericles on the Athenian dead

From Thucydides’s  History of the Peloponnesian War

Epigraph to Out of Darkness, Shining Light by

Petina  Gappah (New York: Scribner,2019)

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  EPITAPH FOR A GRAMMARIAN

  Holt was once the past tense of hold.

  The person beneath this stone

   Is the past tense of everything.

  LJP

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      WHY SHAKESPEARE WOULD NOT SUCCEED IN TODAY’S THEATER

  Being a series of letters between an aspiring playwright and a dramaturg (or recent college graduate):

 March l9, l987

Dear Mr. Shakespar:

   Thank you for sending us your play –HAMLET, or THE PRINCE OF DENMARK to the Workshop To Death Theater.  I am returning it to you, because, as we have announced repeatedly in the Dramatists Guild Quarterly, our theater no longer accepts unsolicited manuscripts.

  If you wish, however, you may send us a short synopsis of your play, a cast list, scene breakdown, and a page of sample dialogue. We shall then tell you if we wish to read the entire script. We then give a reading of your script to an invited audience and, from there, we begin rewrites.

Sincerely,

Belevedere W. (Ph.D.)

Dramaturg

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June l5 , l988

Dear Mr. Shokespare:

         Thank you for your letter and for sending The Workshop to Death Theater a synopsis and sample dialogue from your full-length play HAMLET or THE PRINCE OF DENMARK. I’m sorry to take so long to get back to you.

    Frankly we think you’ve tried to cram too much into your play and some of the action makes no sense.

  You write, and I quote from your synopsis: ” Two soldiers walking on a tower see a ghost and get frightened.  A young student of philosophy returns home to find that his father has been murdered and that his mother (Gertrude) has married the Prince’s Uncle.  The Prince pretends to go mad and then he kills the Uncle’s advisor, the father of the Prince’s girlfriend Ophelia. Ophelia then goes mad and drowns herself. Then strolling players come to the castle to act out yet another play…”

  I know there is more to your synopsis, but, frankly, that is all we need to know that the play is not for us. Too confusing. Just who are all these people? Where does the ghost come from? Are Hamlet and Ophelia having a relationship or they just sleeping together? Do you know what Hamlet et. al. do when they are not on stage?

Also the page of dialogue you sent us (although it exhibits a certain interest in language) is too too wordy. Cast size too large.

   We, therefore, cannot encourage you to send this script. Do you have something more simple? More conventional? Our audiences are quite traditional.  Try to think of a play whose synopsis gives us a true feeling of what you are about and we’ll be happy to consider it for our impromptu reading program.

Sincerely,

Belvedere Whiplash

Dramaturg

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April,l2 l989

Dear Mr. Shakespeare:

  Thank you for your letter of Dec. l988, and for your synopsis of King Lear.

Unfortunately, The Whiplash Theater, formerly the Workshop to Death Theater, has undergone significant changes, and we now only read half-page synopses submitted through an agent.

    If you do not have an agent, I suggest you consult Literary Marketplace or the annual listings in the Dramatists Guild Quarterly.

  We are particularly interested in one set, small cast comedies, with a runnng time of eight minutes or less. That way we can cram l0 new playwrights into a single program and, thus, improve our chances for funding.

Sincerely,

Carl Brandenberg

Playreader

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Feb. 21, l990

Dear Mr. Steelingham:

  Sorry to be so tardy in responding to your submission of a half-page synopsis of A COMEDY OR ERRORS by your client Bill Shakespeare.  The play sounds very clever, although a few of us were confused by just how many sets of identical (or even Siamese) twins are needed to stage the piece.  When your client writes that ” Identical twins are separated at birth in a storm at sea” –he doesn’t make it clear whether or not he wishes that

scene to be staged.  Our resources for staging storm scenes are quite limited. Also, the page of dialogue seems more prosey than other pages I have read from your playwright.

  But even if we could make heads or tails of the synopsis, we still couldn’t ask to see the entire script because our schedule is filled up for the next two years. We are concentrating on small cast musicals and revivals of Broadway hits.

Sincerely,

Joan Makepeace

Associate Director, New Play Series

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MAy l2, l990

Dear Mr. Shakespeare:

  Thank you for sending the Death to Audiences Theater a  three sentence synopsis of your comedy MEASURE FOR MEASURE. Sounds like it lends itself to a musical. We are interesting in hearing more about it. Could you please

send us every other page of the script.

   We also charge a $l0.00 reading fee. $25.00 if you wish a written critique.

  Sincerely yours,

Meyers Oberhoffer

Husband to the Producer

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 At this point there are no more letters in the file. We, alas, regret we have none of the responses from the playwright.

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Louis Phillips