"Quite a few women told me, one way or another,
that they thought it was sex, not youth that's
wasted on the young."
Janet Harn
EXAMINING THE THOUGHTS OF THOSE WE LOVE
"When we come to examine the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, the world's first natural philosophers, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown."
Marcel Proust
**
D.H. LAWRENCE
D. H. Lawrence –
Censors often showed great abhorrence
Toward Lady Chatterly’s Lover,
But drooled over it from cover to cover.
**
BEING IN LOVE
”Being in love is also a kind of learning, because
it
is concentrated, not desultory, living.”
Clifton Fadiman. Entering Conversation. Cleveland:
World Publishing House, 1962.
**
CHRISTIANITY & SEX
“ Good little Christians were all taught that sex was
a gift of God, but that was the last we heard of it.
After that. The functional word was dirty.”
Wilfred Sheed
**
OF LOVE & WINGS
"Wings in traditional poetry are the merchanics by
which Eros swoops upon the suspective lover to wrest
control of his person and personality. Wings are an
instrument of damage and a symbol of irresistible power.
When you fall in love, change sweeps through you on
wings and you cannot help but lose your grip on that
cherished entity, yourself."
Ann Carson in Eros the Bittersweet
**GUYS & LADIES
"But chicks don't know that guys are like dogs. You
know, you can take a dog, you beat the shit out of
him -- pow! pow! -- but he'll keep coming back. Ladies
are like cats. You yell at at a cat once -- Siamese
cat - and phsst! They're gone."
Lenny Bruce
**
WOMEN,PHYSICS, & CHEMISTRY
"Women are physics and chemistry. They are matter.
It is their bodies that tell the fraility of men.
Men have not their cellular, enzymatic wisdom. Man
is albuminoid, proteinaceus, laked pearl; woman is
yolky, ovoid, rich. Both are exuberant bloody growths.
Richard Selzer. Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976)
About Opsigamy
When using a rare term such as “opsigamy,” getting
married later in life sounds out of the ordinary.
But in fact, the practice is already common, especially
among celebrities. George Clooney was known for years
as Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor, but he settled
down to marry at 53. Barbra Streisand married her current husband when she was 56, and Harrison Ford married when
he was 67. George Takei was even older when he wed his
partner of 20 years at the age of 71, almost the moment
same-sex marriage became legal in the United States."
"
Word Genius Website (March 31, 2023)
**
"The fact that sex is directly linked to money
only through prostitution represents the devious
way in which society deals with truths."
Kate Millett
**
LOVE POEM
The trout, according to Jeffries,
“Looks like a living arrow,
Formed to shoot through the water.”
This summer
I have watched grown men
Wade for hours
In hope of achieving one.
Then when the trout
With spots resembling
“Cachineal and gold dust,”
Had been “killed” then
Let go again,
An arrow thru water,
The unhooking of the barb,
This freeing
Into cold &
Swirling mysteries vast,
I thought of my own long marriage,
Inborn with tiny breathings.
Louis Phillips
GROUCHO MARX SEES JOE DIMAGGIO
‘P.S. I saw Joe DiMaggio last night at Chasen’s and
he wasn’t wearing his baseball suit. This struck me
as rather foolish. Suppose a ballgame broke out in
the middle of the night? By the time he got into his
suit the game would be over.”
Groucho Marx in a letter to Ace Goodman (January 18 1951)
The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967)
*
CASEY STENGEL
“Then there was old Casey Stengel . In the last series
against the Yankees that old-timer won the only two
ball games that the Giants took with two timely homeruns
and got traded for his pains.
‘Good thing I didn’t win any more ball games for him,’
Old Casey said gloomily when he heard the news. ‘If I
had, he’d probably had me sent to jail.’”
The New Yorker (March 28, 1925)
**
BOB "Sugar" Cain & EDDIE GAEDEL*
Bob "Sugar" Cain--"...one of his best-known moments
waspitching to Eddie Gaedel, the midget that Bill
Veeck sent up to pinch hit in 1951 Cain told the
story hundreds of times and was appreciative of
how this was part of baseball lore."
Burnham Holmes. One Shining Moment: Sports Heroes
For a Day (New York: HarperTorch, 2003)
*Standing at 3' 7" Edward Carl Gaedel , when he was
sent up to bat in the second game of a St. Louis
Brown/Cleveland Indians doubleheader, became the
shortest player in major league history. He walked
on 4 straight pitches.
Burnham Holmes, in One Shining Moment, notes that
when Gaedel died in 1961 Bob Cain was the only major
leaguer to be present at the funeral.
**
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2021/
burdick-collection-baseball-cards
**
From 1907 to 1912, Boston's National League Team was
named The Boston Doves. The team was named after its
owner, George Dovey.
**
EDDIE GRANT & WORLD WAR I
From 1907-1915 Eddie Grant was a journeyman
infielder for three National League teams –-Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and the New York Giants.. Since he was
a graduate of Harvard College, he was known to teammates
and fans as ‘Harvard Eddie” and as “I have It Eddie“
because, as Karen Markoe notes in her recent book
about Eddie Grant and World War I, “When camped under
a pop-up, he would not call out, ‘I’ve got it,’ as most ballplayers of his era would. To his educated ear,
‘I have it,’ sounded right.”
Better known for his fielding than for his hitting
(his l lifetime batting average was .249 ) Eddie retired
from the game in 1915 to join a Boston law firm.
On April 6, 1917 the United States declared war against Germany. Grant was too old to be drafted, but he enlisted
and was eventually promoted to Captain in the 77th Division.
On October 5, 1918 in an attempt to rescue the men of the
so-called Lost Battalion, Grant was killed on the Argonne battlefield.
see EDDIE GRANT: BASEBALL AND THE GREAT WAR by Karen Markoe
(NY: Fort Schuyler Press, 2022)
**
THE OLDEST MAJOR LEAGUE PLAYER
The oldest player to appear regularly in the major
leagues was Jack Quinn, who ended his last season
at age 50, having made 14 appearances as a relief
pitcher in his final season.
**
**
NY YANKEE GREAT LOU GEHRIG AS MOVIE ACTOR
"Rawhide is a 1938 American Western film starring
Lou Gehrig and made by Twentieth Century-Fox Film
Corporation. The movie was directed by Ray Taylor
and produced by Sol Lesser from a screenplay by
Jack Natteford and Daniel Jarrett. The cinematography
was by Allen Q. Thompson. This is the only Hollywood
movie in which baseball great Lou Gehrig made a screen appearance, playing himself as a vacationing ballplayer
visiting his sister Peggy (played by Evalyn Knapp) on
a ranch in the fictional town of Rawhide, Montana.
The film remains available on DVD and VHS formats."
Wikipedia
The music for 2 of Rawhide's songs was written by
Albert von Tilzer. He is better known for being the
composer of baseball's most famous song, "Take Me
Out to the Ballgame".
ImdB Trivia
*
THOUGHTS UNDER A BOWER
Hank Bauer
Sd to Frederic Baur,
"One of us invented a container for Pringles,
The other hit 974 singles."Y
**
EARLY WYNN
Early Wynn
Wd win & win & win.
With Robert Feller -- what a twosome!
Every once in awhile they wd lose some.
**
OF WITCHES BREW AND BASEBALL
Bubble bubble toil & trouble --
That's what it was like
To face Carl Hubbell.
HENRY FORD REVEALS HIS LACK OF KNOWLEDGE
ABOUT AMERICAN HISTORY“I don’t like to read books. They muss up my mind.”
Henry Ford
**
Lawyer: Do you know anything about the American
Revolution?
Henry Ford: I understand there was one in 1812.
Lawyer: Any other time?
Henry Ford: I don’t know of such thing.
Lawyer: Did you ever hear of Benedict Arnold?
Henry Ford: I have heard his name.
Lawyer: Who was he?
Henry Ford: I have forgotten just who he is. He is
a writer, I think.
from a cross-examination in an actual court case
**
HOW ERIC CLAPTON GOT TURNED ONTO MUSIC
“ Well, the first thing that rang in my head was
black music – all black records that were R&B or
blues oriented. I remember hearing Sonny Terry and
Browne McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry and
Bo Diddley, and not really knowing anything about
the geography or culture of the music. But for some
reason it did something to me – it resonated. Then
I found out later that they were black; They were
from the deep South and they were American black men.
That started my education.”
GUITAR LEGENDS: CELEBRATING 30 YEARS OF
GUITAR WORLD. Special Collectors Edition,
Celebrating Thirty Years of Guitar World (2010)
*
I DID NOT TAKE AARON BURR SERIOUSLY
When Aaron Burr
Asked to borr
ow one of my dueling
Pistols, I thought he was fooling.
**
THE GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL LASTED ONLY 30 SECONDS
" Brothers Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp, along
with their friend Doc Holliday, served as the law
enforcement of the city of Tombstone, Arizona.
Together, they sought to disarm a gang of outlaw
ranchers called the Cowboys. After an intense
30-second battle that saw 30 gunshots, three Cowboys
had died while the Earps survived with only minor
injuries. The shootout, which took place outside
a horse corral, became one of the most famous
legends of the Wild West."
Source: O.K. Corral
HISTORYQUIZ (MARCH 19, 2023)
**
ON THE ELECTION OF THOMAS JEFFERSON in 1800
“Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will
be openly taught and practiced, the air will be
rent with the cries of distress, the soil soaked
with blood, and the nation black with cfrimes.
Where is the heart that can contemplate such as
scene with horror?”
The New England Courant
Nancy McPhee. The Book of Insults (New York:
Barnes and Noble, 1978)
**
ENTERPRISINGPASTOR
“In Milwaukee, the enterprising Rev. John Lewis
failed to get the new church he wanted, instead
he got one to five year in prison for burning down
the old one.”
Miscellany. TIME (July 21, 1947)
**
REMAINS OF THE 1964 WORLD'S FAIR
“Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe” was the theme of the 1964 World’s Fair and
the New York State Pavilion embodied that theme in
the modern design of its buildings. One of those
buildings that still stands today is The Tent of
Tomorrow, designed by noted architect Philip Johnson.
The circular structure once boasted the world’s
largest cable suspension roof (50,000 square feet)
which supported a dazzling display of multi-colored
fiberglass tiles. On the floor, there was a massive
567-panel terrazzo road map of the state of New York."
from UNTAPPED NEW YORK website (March 18, 2022)
**
THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS
“The Battle of New Orleans” appears on the 1959
album "The Spectacular Johnny Horton.” The tune
is written as if sung by a soldier participating
in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans. The song features
army chants of “hut-two” and “three-four” during
the verses, and lyrics including “fired our guns
and the British kept-a-comin’” during the chorus."
Source: Genius.com
**
ON THE NAMING OF AMERICA AFTER AMERIGO VESPUCCI
Amerigo Vespucci "had nothing to do with the decision
to name the new continent after him. The mapmakers
placed his name along the coast of South America
that he had explored in 1499-1500. The name's use
was later extended to both the northern and southern
continents. The clearest proof that Vespucci had
no intention of depriving Columbus of any credit
is that they were friends, as shown in a letter
in which Columbus describes Vespucci as a 'fine man.'"
Consuelo Varela. "Exploring Truth and Lies : Amerigo
Vespucci" in National Geographic History (volume 3, no.2)
**
AMERICA! AMERICA!
In 2023 Ninety-two books were pulled from school
shelves in Florida’s Martin County School District 20.
**
1948 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Thomas Dewey
To Truman said"Phooey!"
To Dewey Truman said:
ª@@!W&*%#∂∂¥åªºƒ!@@√√((!"
LJP
WHAT DID VIRGINIA WOOLF THINK? or READING THE DIARIES
OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
"...I haven't often read writers' diaries, but I
like the entries. I like knowing what Woolf was
thinking about her books as she wrote them and their
reception after they came out, and what she thinks of
the other writers of her time. It is satisfying to be
in her mind: "What is the right attitudev toward
criticism? What I ought I to feel and say when Miss B.
devotes an article in Scrutiny to attacking me? She is
young, Cambridge, ardent. And she says I'm a very bad
writer.'"
Amina Cain. A Horse at Night: On Writing (St. Louis,
MO, 2022)
**
FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH A FAMOUS WRITER
“’What do you read now?’ the hungry interviewer asked
the famous writer, a woman of commercial success in
the theater whose autobiography has defined a
character of considerable literary sophistication.
And the famous author answered: ‘I don’t read novels
any more. I’m sorry to say. A writer should read novels.
When I do, I go back to the ones I’ve read before.
Dickens, Balzac…I find now when I go to get a book
off the shelf. I pick something I read before, as
if I didn’t dare try anything new.’”
Richard Howard. “A Note on Roland Barthes’s S/Z” in
Paper Trail: selected prose, 1965-2003 (New York. Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2004)
**
ON VOICES, PLACES
"...how are voices like places? They move through us
as we move through them. The voices of great writers
guide us without telling us where we are going --
except, of course, to the most obvious destinatiion
of all. We are guided by ambiguity -- that's the way
literature works. And the way travel works as well.
We understand it only when we stop moving, sit still
and begin to listen back."
David Mason. Voices, Places (Philadelphia: Paul
Dry Books, 2018)
**
A BOOK MEL BROOKS COULD EASILY PUT DOWN
In the New York Times Book Review “By the Book”
(November 13, 2022) film director Mel Brooks was asked
“Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book
did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t?
Do you remember the last book you put down without
finishing?”
Mel Brooks replied: “If truth be told, for some reason
I never did get around to finishing ‘Mein Kampf.’”
**
ROBERT SOUTHEY & WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
“The difference between the two men is well illustrated
by their several attitudes to books: Southey loved them
as objects, whereas Wordsworth had no feeling whatever
for them, apart from their contents. De Quincy reports
his own and Southey’s horror at the sight of Wordsworth
cutting the leaves of De Quincey’s own copy of Burke
with a knife that had just been used to butter bread. “
Edward Sackville West. A Flame in Sunlight: The Life &
Work of Thomas De Quincey (London: The Bodley Head,
1974)
ROBERT SOUTHEY AND HIS WIFE
“…Southey ‘lived in his library, which Coleridge
used to call his wife’…
Edward Sackville West. A Flame in Sunlight: The Life &
Work of Thomas De Quincey (London: The Bodley Head,
1974)
**
TREVOR NOAH AS A YOUNG BOY GROWING UP UNDER
APARTHEID IN SOUTH AFRICA
“My books were my prized possessions. I had a
bookshelf where I put them, and I was so proud
of it, I loved my books and kept them in pristine
condition. I read them over and over, but I did
not bend the pages or the spines. I treasured
every single one. As I grew older I started buying
my own books. I loved fantasy,loved to
get lost in worlds that didn’t exist.”
Trevor Noah. Born a Crime. New York: One World, 2016)
**
“He understands at a glance what he reads, reads only
what he can understand at a glance.”
Bergan Evans. The Spoor of Spooks and other nonsense
(NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954).
**
ON CHOOSING THE CORRECT PEN NAME
The creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs sold
his first story -- Under the Moon of Mars (1912)
–under the name of Normal Bean. He chose the
pseudonym Norman because he thought of himself
at the time “the average mind in search of average
readers.”
**
IT IS NOT PEOPLE WHO DIE BUT WORLDS
ON READING
“There are no uninteresting people in the world,
says Yevtushenko in one of his best lyrics; everyone
carries around with him his first snow and his first
kiss it is not people who die but worlds.”
Edward Thomas. London Magazine (November 1967)
I read those words over & over.
They deliver me,
If only for awhile, from myself,
My thoughts, my feelings,
The shifting ground of my being.
I become someone else
&, like some licensed physician,
Hold out my hand
To take the fragile pulse of the world.
LJP
For Gregory Abby who would keep all animals from harm
**'
THE SINGULAR BEAUTY OF A PURE WHITE GOOSE
“No night time sight can compare with the singular beauty
of a pure white goose, or several, their motionless,
luminous contours on dark moonstruck grass that absorbs
the light, the contrast of each bird’s brilliance, glowing
as if lit from within,”
Paul Theroux. “Diary”. London Review of Books (20 June 2019)
**
PENGUINS AS PARENTS
“Penguins are super parents. When the female provides
dinner she doesn’t just reach for the pesto but launches
herself into the treacherous, icy depths, returning with a stomach full of half-digested fish to be spewed down the gullet of her needy chick. His Fluffy Eminence, who is then installed in creche so protective it makes the average nursery look like the workhouse in Oliver Twist. Yet, even for penguins, rejection comes after the winter huddling and the pre-ledge commutes, deep dives and the exhausting feeds, the mother will waddle off across the tundra, never to be seen by her children again. Abandonment, we understand, is not the devastating catastrophe that wrecks the child’s system of trust, but the crowning achievement of good parenting.”
Andrew O’Hagan. “Off His Royal Tits” in London Review of Books (2 February 2023)
**
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF HORSESHOE CRABS
“Endotoxins are a worry to medicine. They exist
in the cell walls of certain bacteria and can be
released when the bacteria break down or die. These
toxins can send a patient into a tailspin of fever,
chills, septic shock and death.
“To keep patients safe, pharmaceutical companies
run roughly 70 million tests a year on injectable
medicines and implants for the presence of those toxins
with a substance called limulus amebocyte lysate. It is
an extract of cells from horseshoe crab blood and can
identify even infinitesimal amounts of the toxin by
reacting with it, No other natural substance is known
to work so well.
Deborah Cramer. ”When the Horseshoe Crabs Are Gone,
We’ll Be in Trouble” in The New York Times.
February 18,2023.
**
THE WORLD'S OLDEST LLAMA
A 27-Year-Old Llama Sets World Record for Oldest of His Species — And He Has the Best Name
The Dalai Lama is the highest spiritual leader and
head monk of Tibet, considered a living Buddha. Dalai
Llama, on the other hand, is the oldest living llama
in the world. And he just turned 27.
From NICE NEWS (March 2, 2023)
**
THE ANAL CATAPULT OF GLASSY-WINGED
SHARP SHOOTERS
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/watch-these-glassy-winged-sharpshooters-fling-pee-bubbles-with-anal-catapult/
**
SPIDERS & AUTOMOBILES IN THE COLD OF WINTER
"A spider can hide out in a barn. Some spiders
do survive outside in the cold, relying on the glycol
in their blood to keep their cells from freezing,
similar to the chemicals used to keep your car
running in the winter."
Josephine Sedgwick. "Nature is Alive in Winter" in
The New York Times (March 7, 2023)
**
ON IGUANAS ON THE GALAPAGOS ISLAND
"A basalt coastline crowded with large, lounging iguanas
looks nothing short of Jurassic. When I first saw these
striking creatures in the Galapagos, I was impressed
most by their placidness. Unfazed by humans, they spend
long, sunny days warming in the equatorial sun like
scaly house cats, sometimes in heaps, between foraging
missions at sea to feed on marine algae.
"Charles Darwin was famously unimpressed with this rare seafaring lizard. "It is a hideous-looking creature,"he
wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle, "stupid and sluggish
in its movements."
Katherine Harmon Courage."Heroes of the Wild" in
Smithsonian (March 2023)
**
MINK RHYMES WITH STINK
"Mink is the name of a water-dwelling weasel. Minks
are vicious, bloodthirsty, and evil smelling, and
when annoyed, they spray a foul-smelling fluid from
glanda beneath their tail. The mink's old sciehtific
name, Putorius means 'stinker.' Yet a coat made from
the fur of this thoroughly unpleasant animal has long
been a synbol of success. And, thanks to its durable,
lustrous fur the mink is one most valuable animals in
the world."
Peter Limberg. What's in the Names of Wild Animals
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1977)
**
ELEPHANTS
It is mealy, this world with so little substance.
Frequently our dreams are not mammoth enough.
No more poetry! I shall say it bluntly:
I do not wish to live in a world without elephants.
Wide-eyed I listen for the click of tusks,
Herds of elephants rumbling into the bush.
By way of greeting, elephants place their trunks
Into one another's mouths. How shall my sons grow
Without sensing the imponderable bulk of the world?
How necessary it is, even in so paltry a landscape,
Ivory-stained, & large enough only for killing,
To be reminded of lives larger than ourselves.
More than 50,000 muscles in the trunk alone, &
Then it happens: a large orange moon trumpets
Over woodland; we sense a planet going musth.
LJP
--
http://louis-phillips.com
"
WHAT NORA EPHRON LEARNED ABOUT FILM
SCRIPT WRITING FROM TOM HANKS
“…I learned from Tom was a thing that’s really
important, which is that scene after scene, you
have to give the main actor something to play,
he can never be passive in the scene, et. cetera,
even (or especially) when he’s sharing it with
a very cute little boy.”
Nora Ephron . interviewed by Patrick McGilligan
in Backstory 5: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1990s
(June 2007)
**
ON THE COWBOY STAR WHOSE HORSE WAS NAMED TARZAN
Ken Maynard. “Maynard, born Kenneth Olin Maynard in
1895, began working for circuses and carnivals at 16.
As a young man he became a rodeo performer and a
trick rider for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. By
1923 Maynard was appearing in movies and became a
cowboy star. His horse Tarzan appeared in literally
dozens of movies, including The Demon Rider (1925),
Overland Stage (1927) , Come on, Tarzan (1932) and
Lightning Strikes West (1941)..;”
David Lemmo. Tarzan: Jungle King of Popular Culture
(Jefferson,North Carolina : McFarland & Company,2017)
**
ON WHAT VIEWERS REMEMBER ABOUT THE BIG
PARADE
“In my own film The Big Parade for years after its
first showing and until this day, people speak of
the moment the doughboy, played by John Gilbert,
removes a heavy shoe from a pack on his back and
throws it to his French sweetheart as a desperate
token of his affection. Equal to this, they speak
of the close-up in which the same girl in a impulsive
move to slow the truck’s progress holds to a chain
at the rear of the truck that is carrying her lover
to war. The film is a mighty panorama of World War I
decidedly in the spectacle category and yet the
memory is of two close-ups. A hundred airplanes
in a sweep over a battlefield is never mentioned.”
King Vidor. King Vidor on Film-Making (New York:
David McKay Co., 1972)
**
FILMS YOU MAKE YOURSELF
“Very few films are dreams, configuring and reconfiguring themselves in your mind on waking. These films, I think,
you make yourself, afterwards, somewhere in the shadows
in the back of your head. The Bride of Frankenstein is
one of those dream films. It exists in the culture as a
unique thing, magical and odd, a lurching story sequence
as ungainly and as beautiful as the monster itself, that culminates in a couple of minutes of film that have
seared themselves onto the undermind of the world.”
Neil Gaiman. The View From the Cheap Seats (New York:
William Morrow, 2014)
**
THE QUOTATION EXPERT MARDY GROTHE ON THE TITLE
OF THE FILM - THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
"Although the movie made “the year of living dangerously”
a widely-known catchphrase, it’s not the origin.
Nor is the 1978 novel The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher J. Koch, which the film version is based on.
The setting for the book and movie is Jakarta, Indonesia
during the chaotic period that led to the overthrow of
the country’s long-time dictator, President Sukarno.
Author Koch took his title from a speech Sukarno made
in 1964.
"The President had a custom of giving a special name to
each year in his annual “National Day” speech. In the
National Day speech he gave on August 17, 1964, Sukarno
named the upcoming year “the year of living dangerously.”
This reflected the challenges he knew he faced from his political enemies, who included both hard-line Communists
and radical Muslims. The multilingual leader’s name for
the year was based partly on an old Italian phrase he was familiar with — “vivere pericoloso” (“living dangerously”).
Although Sukarno gave the speech in the Indonesian language, he inserted those Italian words after the Indonesian word for year, tahun, to create the name. The year ahead, he said, would be the “Tahun vivere pericoloso.”
http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2022/01/dr-mardy-grothes-new.html
**
JOAN CRAWFORD & THE LETTER T
“After I divorced Franchot (Tone) I asked my maid
to pick out all the T’s in my linens – acres of
towels, meadows of bed linens. I don’t know how
many hundreds of T’s the poor girl had carefully
unpicked when, one evening, listening to the radio,
she heard the announcer break in with a news bulletin:
Joan Crawford has just married Phillip Terry!
The maid threw down the pillowcase she was working
on and screamed, “I quit.”
Joan Crawford. My Way of Life . 1971
**
NOTES FOR A HISTORY OF FILMS & POLITICS
“I saw Reds in Oklahoma where I once witnessed people walking out on Fiddler on the Roof because it was about ‘A Bunch of Commies.’ I saw no one walk out on Reds.”
Jim Beaver in Films in Review (February 1982)
**
CARTOON CHARACTERS ARE NOT THE SAME
AS REAL PEOPLE, SO THEY SHOULD NOT
GET ROMANTICALLY INVOLVED WITH ONE
ANOTHER
Elmer Fudd
Fell madly in love with Ashley Judd:
"Oh kiss me, Ashley. You're so hot!"
"No," she said. "I am real and you are not."
LJP
SAINT FRANCIS
“Did St. Francis really preach to the birds?
Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would
have done better to preach to the cats.”
Rebecca West
**
EMILY DICKINSON & HER LOVE FOR BIRDS
“I hope you love birds, too. It is economical .
It saves going to heaven.”
Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Mabel Loomis Todd
**
SOR JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ
“There weren't many pathways to success for girls born
to unwed parents in 17th-century Mexico, but Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz managed to transcend her origins with
a dazzling mind and a deft pen. Largely self-taught,
she wrote her first dramatic poem at age eight, studied
the Greek classics, and was instructing children in
Latin by age 13. A few years later, she joined the
court of the Viceroy Marquis de Mancera, where she
famously wowed a panel of professors with her expertise
in numerous subjects. Sor Juana then entered a convent,
where she enjoyed the freedom to pen numerous plays,
poems, and carols, as well as the proto-feminist manifesto Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz. A clash with authority figures forced her to abandon her creative pursuits shortly before her death in 1695, but she endures as one of the most important literary figures of the New Spanish Baroque.”
From INTERESTING FACTS website.
**
AT A PARTY I INTRODUCE THE R &B SINGER SZA
TO THE ACTRESSES ZSA ZSA & ZASU PITTS
Sza,
Zsa Zsa,
Zsa, Zsa,'
Sza.
Zasu, Sza.
Sza, Zasu,
Zasu, Sza,
Zsa Zsa,
LJP
**
JOHN DONNE'S BROTHER
"A year after joining his brother at the Inns of
Court, Henry Donne was caught harbouring a priest
in his living chambers. He was arrested, jailed,
interrogated and no doubt threatened with torture.
He swiftly broke. The man he had been hiding, William
Harrington, might have have held out against his
questioners, but Henry's testimony did for him; in
February 1594, he was tried, convicted of treason,
and hung, drawn and quartered. Henry himself was
already long gone. Transferred to a filthy cell in
the jail at Newgate during an outbreak of bubonic
plague, he died within days, at the age of nineteen,
a lonely and unspectacular and altogether inglorious
end.
Catherine Nicholson, reviewing Super-infinite: The
Transformations of John Donne. London Review of Books
(19 January 2023)
**
GAEL GREENE
I have dedicated myself to the wanton indulgences
of my senses. And I shall consider it fitting and
divine if on my deathbed my last words echo those
of Pierette, the sister of Brillat-Savarin , who
died at table shortly before her one-hundredth
birthday “Bring on the dessert. I think I’m about
to die.”
Gael Greene, quoted in her New York Times obituary
(November 2, 2022)
**
ON THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR OF BREAKFAST
AT TIFFANYS
Capote
Kaput.
LJP
**
HENRY JAMES’S FOREHEAD
“…his forehead was more like a dome, it was a whole street.”
Max Beerbohm
David Cecil. Max (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company., 1964)
**
HEDY LAMARR
“Thousands of people can speak dialogue competently,
but it’s amazing how few can do a really good sex scene.
Hedy Lamarr was the Olivier of Orgasm.”
Mark Steyn
ON A NOTED WRITER OF POPULAR SONGS
Edward, Gus –
(I know so I do not have to guess)
Did not write ”I Can’t Tell You Why I Love You But I Do”.
(Gosh! The great stuff I can sneak into a Clerihew).
ADLAI STEVENSON
Stevenson, Adlai –
Democrats wanted very badly
For him to be President of the U.S.
It didn’t quite work out, I guess.
SIGMUND FREUD
Sigmund Freud—
Did he have sang-froid?
Perhaps his super-ego, ego, id
Allowed him to keep his feelings hid?
LJP
"Our language reflects our disrespect. Something worthlessor unappealing is 'for the birds.' An ineffectual politicianis a 'lame duck.' To 'lay an egg'is to flub a performance. To be 'henpecked!' is to be harassed with persistent nagging.'Eating crow'is eat humble pie. The expression 'bird brain,' for a stupid, foolish, or scatterbrained person, entered theEnglish language in the early 1920's because people thought of birds as mere flying, pecking automatons, with brains so small they had no capacity for thought at all. "That view is a gone goose. In the past two decades or so,from fields and laboratories around the world have flowed examples of mental feats comparable to those found in primates."
Jennifer Ackerman. The Genius of Birds (New York: Penguin Books, 2017) ** NOT EXACTLY HUMPHREY BOGART
“ boggart is, depending on local or regional tradition, a malevolent genius loci inhabiting fields, marshes or other topographical features. The household boggart causes objects to disappear, milk to sour, and dogs to go lame. They can possess small animals, fields, churches, or houses so they can play tricks on the civilians with their chilling laugh.”
Wikipedia –“English Folklore” **
FROM TOKYO
Sign in a self-service elevator in a Tokyo apartment house: “Keep your hands away from unnecessary buttons for you.”
** TWO BEAUTIFUL WORDS
“The two most beautiful words in the English language are: ‘Check enclosed’.
**
15 WORDS SELECTED BY DR. WILFRED FUNK AS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
ABOUT EARLY MOVING PICTURE MACHINES SUCH AS THE ZOETROPE & NOMINAL EMBROIDERY
“By the end of the nineteenth century, hundreds of variation of those toys abounded, each with its own name, either simple or ornate –Praxinoscope, Choreutoscope, Wheel of Life. All of those stroboscopic toys shared, in addition to the common use of persistence of vision, several traits that were to continue as trends in later movie history. Most striking was the inventors’ passion for fancy Greek and Latin names to dignify their dabblings: Thaumatrope, Phensakistiscope, Viviscope, Zootrope. This passion for nominal embroidery would later dominate the first era of motion pictures – Kinetoscope, Bioscope, Vitascope, Cinematographe –and beyond it – Vitaphone, Technicolor, Cinemascope….”
Gerald Mast. A Short History of the Movies (New York: Penguin Books, 1971) **
BLIND DATE WITH AN EDITOR OF WEBSTER’S DICTIONARY
Oh my beating heart. O good gracious! Her kisses on my lips were butyraceous.
LJP **
MOVIES & VOCABULARY BUILDING
Wet-assed hour –(n) Time of trouble or fear “Come the wet-ass hour and I’m everybody’s daddy.”
Spoken by Al Pacino’s character in SEA OF LOVE ** WORD COUNT TO TEN
STONE CEMENT WORKS WREATH REELS OFF OUR ROOF FIFI VENERATES BLOGS MESSI XEROXES SOCCERS SCORES FREIGHT TONI NEEDS THIS LIST FORGOTTEN
** THE SAXOPHONIST PAUL DESMOND PRAISES DAVE BRUBECK
“Desmond, after hearing Brubeck who tended to play ‘way out’ : ‘Man, like wigsville ! You really grooved me with those nutty changes.”
“White Man Speak With Forked Tongue” in JAZZ by Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker (Sept. 16, 1992)
** ADJECTIVES USED BY THE NOVELIST SHIRLEY HAZZARD
An "administrative smile' An "immoderate sunset" An "infirm chair" in a room of "unconvinced Westernism" Old buildings whose "violated and ghostly elegance" persists
from On Shirley Hazzard by Michelle deKretser (New York: Catapult, 2019
FILM DIRECTOR ADJECTIVES
“Stephen (Spielberg) and David (Lynch) have a profound kinship as fellow radicals in the world of cinema. I believe In addition to Hitchcockian, the next two cinema names that are now in our dictionaries are Lynchian and Spielbergian.”
Laura Lynney. Time Magazine (June 21,2022)
**
A SINGLE LETTER CAN MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD
Sweetshop sweatshop A single letter Divides them, That & thousands Of lives ruined.
“A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.”
Fred Allen
Quoted in Writing Changes Everything , edited
by Deborah Brodie (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997)
**
IDEAS OF ENDANGERMENT
“It’s too much, this being alive. Too heavy , too
uncertain, too chronically cataclysmic, too bellicose,
too unwell, too freighted with a possibility of the
perception of error. The word of the last few years –
in American activist and academic circles anyway –
has been ‘precarity.’ Which gets at ideas of endangerment, neglect, contingency, risk. Basically, we’re worried.
And: we’re worried you’re not worried enough. Like I said:
it’s too much.”
Wesley Morris. “Beyonce’ Is, of Course, In Control”
in The New York Times (August 1, 2022)
**
ON FRIENDSHIP
“ There are two categories of friendship: those
in which people are enlivened by each other and
those in which people must be enlivened to be with
each other. In the first category one clears
the decks to be together. In the second one looks
for an empty space in the schedule.”
Vivian Gornick. Approaching Eye Level (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1996)
**
THE STRAIGHT FORWARD STARE
“Flaubert said at one point that it’s only by looking
down at the black pit at our feet, that we can remain
calm (i.e. you’re more likely to panic if you don’t
look at it, and the only way to look at it is to look
at it with a straight forward stare.”
Julian Barnes
from Conversations With Julian Barnes, edited by Vanessa Guignery and Ryan Roberts (University Press of Mississippi, 2009)
**
on Famine, Affluence, and Morality by Peter Singer
“Singer, prompted by widespread and credible hunger
in what’s now Bangladesh, proposed a simple thought
experiment : if you stroll by a child drowning in
a shallow pond, presumably you don’t worry too
much about soiling your clothes before you wade
in to help; given the irrelevance of the child’s
location – in an actual pond nearby or in a
metaphorical pond six thousand miles away—devoting
resources to superfluous goods is tantamount to
allowing a child to drown for the sake of a
dry cleaner’s bill.
Gideon Lewis-Kraut. “Do Better” in The New Yorker
(August 15, 2022)
**
ESCAPE FROM DOUBT
“To some people return to religion is the answer,
not as an act of faith but in order to escape an
intolerable doubt but in search of security. The
student of the contemporary scene who is not concerned
with the church but with man’s soul considers this
step another sympton of the failure of nerve.”
Erich Fromm. Psychoanalysis and Religion (New Haven:
Yale University Press. 1958)
***
WHAT IS CORRECT THINKING?
“What is correct thinking? It is to make our little
interior model of the outside world as exact as possible.
If the laws of our microcosm resemble fairly closely
those of macrocosm, if our map represents with relative precision the country though which we must travel,
there is some chance that our actions may be
adjusted to our needs, our desires, or our fears.”
Andre Maurois. The Art of Living (New York:
Harpers Brothers, 1959)
**
THE PARALLEL WORLD WHERE WE REALLY LIVE
“Man lives in the real world; but there’s also
a parallel world: a paper one, a bureaucratic one.
So the passport is the person’s double in the
parallel world.’ The comment comes from a Russian
woman in her thirties interviewed as part of a study
in St. Petersburg in 2008. She might have been
channeling the philosopher Ron Harre’ , who
called these bureaucratic doubles ‘file-selves.’”
Sheila Fitzpatrick. “Diary” in London Review of Books (22 September 2022)
**
ESSENCE OF READING POETRY
Socrates contends
The essence of knowing
Is not knowing.
Since that is true,
Then the essence
Of reading this short verse
Is not reading this verse.
LJP
“There are no uninteresting people in the world, says Yevtushenko in one of his best lyrics; everyone carries around with him his first snow and his first kiss it is not people who die but worlds.”
Edward Thomas. London Magazine (November 1967) **
ON BRAZIL’S FAMOUS POET CARLOS DRUMMOND de ANDRADE & CHARLIE CHAPLIN
“The figure of ‘Carlitos’ as Chaplin was known in Brazil, offers perhaps the single key to Drummond’s poetics: the consummate artist who appears not to be an artist at all: the down-and-out clown who manages to stumble along life’s tightrope, forever nearly yet never quite falling off: ‘Carlos, go on! Be gauche in life!” Drummond tells himself in the opening line of his first book of poems, self-effacingly entitled Some Poetry.”
Thomas Colchie. Travelling in the Family: Selected Poems Carlos Drummond de Andrade (New York: Random House, 1986) ** ON A FAMOUS NURSERY RHYME
“Here we go round the mulberry bush The mulberry bush The mulberry bush Here we go round the mulberry bush On a cold and frosty morning
Although this rhyme likely started out using Bramble Bush (mulberries actually grow on trees), historian R. S. Duncan suggests this version came about at Wakefield Prison in England. The facility has been home to an extremely recognizable mulberry tree for centuries, and the theory goes that Victorian female prisoners used to dance around it and made up the rhyme to keep their kids amused. (Back then, men, women, and children were often confined together.) The tree eventually died in 2017, but it was replaced with a cutting from the original.”
from INTERESTING FACTS website (OCTOBER 1, 2022)
** “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” Mario Cuomo
** CHARLES SIMIC AND HIERONYMUS BOSCH
“’It was the love of…irreverence , as much as anything else, that started me in poetry,’ Simic has said, and he learned from Hieronymus Bosh that ‘there’s no joy like the one a truly outrageous image on the verge of blasphemy gives’”:
An old man gave little Mary Magdalene A broken piece of a mirror. She hid in the church outhouse. When she got thirsty she licked The steam off the glass.
Adam Kirsch. The Modern Element (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008)
** DELMORE SCHWARTZ & THE POET AS SEER
“One of Delmore’s characteristic stances was this insistence on the poet as seer, a medium of truths whose power lay in their independence from the vicissitudes of common reality. His own aspiration was to remain indifferent to the merely visible, choosing like Joyce’s Dedalus, to comprehend life ‘purified in and reprojected from the human imagination.”
James Atlas. Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1977)
ABOUT COLLY CIBBER
"In his Book An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, he not only defended himself against personal attacks from such well-known figures as Johnson, Fielding, and Pope, but also produced one of the most important and indispensable accounts of a vital period in English theatrical history. Cibber accurately chronicles the plays, playwrights, and actors of the day in unstinting detail, affording theater lovers and historians an incomparable glimpse of the beginnings of modern theater. As an actor, manager, and playwright, Colley Cibber was among the most influential members of the London theater in the 18th century.”
From https://allpoetry.com/Colley-Cibber. All poetry.com is an important and useful site for\all lovers of poetry. I highly recommend that readers go to it. ** ON COLLY CIBBER
Colly Cibber Wrote lots of gibber- ish & horror yet Was named Poet Laureate.
PhillipsMiscellany 