SHAKESPEARE ON TELEVISION
“Every single one of Shakespeare’s plays has an organic
rhythm of its own. I do not think he understood the
five-act system until mid-career, but he had a practical
sense of timing and variation, and he was a perfect story-teller. Therefore no commercial programme can ever do Shakespeare properly, because the breaks are never right
and are never filled with the right music.”
Peter Levi in The Spectator (August 16, 1986)
**
Although William Shakespeare was never appointed Poet
Laureate of England, Shakespeare’s godson – Sir William
D’Avenant was named to the post in 1637.
**
RAYMOND CHANDLER ON SHAKESPEARE
Writing to Hamish Hamilton in April 1949, Raymond Chandler, one of the creators of the “tough detective”
story, offered the following assessment of Shakespeare:
Shakespeare would have done well in any generation
because he would have refused to die in a corner; he
would have taken the false gods and made them
over; he would have taken the current formulae and
forced them into something lesser men thought
them incapable of. Alive today he would undoubtedly
have written and directed motion pictures,
plays, and God knows what. Instead of saying ‘This
medium is no good,’ he would have used it and made
it good.
Reprinted in Raymond Chandler Speaking, ed. Dorothy Gardiner
and Katherine Sorley Walker (Houghton Mifflin, 1977), p.82
**
SHAKESPEARE’S CHARACTERS LAUGH AT
JOKES THE AUDIENCE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND
“I have noticed that in plays where characters on stage
laugh a great deal, the people out front laugh very
little. This is notoriously true for productions of Shakespeare’s comedies .’Well, sirrah,’ says one buffoon,
‘he did go heigh-ho upon a bird bolt.” This gem is
followed by such guffaws and general merriment as
would leave Olson and Johnson wondering how they failed.”
Jean Kerr. Reflections of a Part-Time Playwright
**
**
PRINCE HARRY , THE DUKE OF SUSSEX
“Harry counts himself among the Shakespeare hordes,
‘bored and confused as a teen-ager when his father drags
Him to see performances of the Royal Shakespeare Company; disinclined to read much of anything, least of all the
freighted works of Britain’s national author….’I tried
to change ,’ he recalls. ‘I opened Hamlet. Hmm. Lonely
prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining
parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper…? I
slammed it shut. ‘No, thank you.’”
Rebbeca Mead. “The Royal Me” in The New Yorker
(January 23, 2023)
**
SHAKESPEARE AND THE WORD LAUGHlaugh occurs 87 times in 238 speeches within 41 works.
for example:
Isabella in Measure for Measure
[II, 2] line 875
Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder;
Nothing but thunder! Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
from Concordance of Shakespeare's Complete Works
https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org › concordance
**
Perfect Film work for Shakespeare -- Line Producer
**
READING SHAKESPEARE & MAKING KNOTS
The following item appeared in The Saturday Review
on September 3, 1949. It was signed by J.L.
“There was once an American in a hotel in Iceland
who read Shakespeare and discovered ten thousand
new ways to tie knots. “When his discoveries were
made known, an American reporter was sent to
interview him.
“Is it true,” asked the reporter. “that the reading of Shakespeare is the reason for your great discoveries?”
“ Yes, it is quite true,” answered his fellow countryman.
“As I read him, I held a spool of twine in my hand. I
followed his rhythms with the twine and the knots were
formed.”
“Are there any more knots possible?” asked the reporter.
“Oh I have ceased reading Shakespeare,” said the savant.
‘ Now I read the comments of different men who have
read his works and I haven’t made a solitary knot.”
**
IMDB TRIVIA ABOUT THE MOVIE SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE
"Imelda Staunton and Jim Carter are married in
real life, and in this movie, they played the same
role. Staunton played the Nurse off-stage, and
Carter played the nurse on-stage."
**
EVERYDAY, MY ARIEL
Everyday, my Ariel,
I put the world behind me, but it shoot back.
One generation & the next,'
Light as sunlight thrushing
As thru the Spanish Cedars flash
Cormorants magnific with their hooked beaks,
Always a fitful cornucopia
To take the breath away.
I press my life to the jumping dayshine.
What do I demand?
More space? More freedom?
Freedom to do what? Hungering for magic,
I stand on Prospero's isle.
Could I have been so wrong about my life?
Far out on the ocean,
Replenished & green,
One anonymous sailor
Fastens his shrouds.
Louis Phillips
from "The Man On Prospero's Isle" a sequence of based
upon The Tempest, published in The Time, The Hour, The Solitariness of the Place (Norcross, Georgia: Swallow's
Tale Press, 1985)
“Reading was such a wonderful thing that to have made a life around the experience was almost criminal and it was so fortunate.”
Elizabeth Hardwick
**
THE CREATOR OF THE WIZARD OF OZ PREDICTED
THE INVENTION OF THE CELL PHONE
"Baum wrote dozens of other novels and short stories,
and he had a knack for predicting an impressive number of inventions in his books: the taser, digital calendars, and defibrillators to name a few. In his novel The Master Key,
a character even discovers an augmented reality gadget that predates Pokémon GO by a century. But Baum’s most notable prediction comes in Ozma of Oz:
"Shaggy … drew from his pocket a tiny instrument which
he placed against his ear.
Ozma, observing this action in her Magic Picture, at
once caught up a similar instrument from a table beside
her and held it to her own ear. The two instruments
recorded the same delicate vibrations of sound and
formed a wireless telephone, an invention of the Wizard."
TRIVIA GENIUS December 6, 2022
https://www.triviagenius.com/facts-about-the-wizard-of-oz/XzxcDPaawAAGI7SQ?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1657944838
**
ON THE TITLE ILLYWHACKER
Illywhacker is the title of of a 1985 novel by Peter Cary .
An illwhacker is a conman or trickster. A Dictionary of
Australian Colloquialism says that it is derived from
‘spieler’a ‘teller of tales, swindler.’
**
SAMUEL BECKETT
“Beckett’s work is a single holy book, an absolute of poetry
and negation by whose light all else in contemporary literature appears somewhat superfluous and unclear.”
John Updike
**
MARK TWAIN & THE PUBLICATION OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
“Mark Twain took a rival publisher, Estes and Laurent,
to court when they printed Huckleberry Finn before
his own publishing company could print it. When
Judge LeBaron Bradford Colt ruled against him in
the U.S. Circuit Court in Boston, the author was
so enraged that he publicly condemned Colt.
“The judge, Twain said. has allowed the defendant
to ‘sell property which does not belong to him, but
to me –
\property which he has not bought and I have
not sold. Therefore, he went on, Under this ruling
I am now advertising that judge’s homestead for sale,
and if I make as good a sum out of it, as I expect,
I shall go on and sell the rest of his property.’”
From Mystery Scene Miscellany in Mystery SceneMagazine
(November 2022)
**
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.”
Groucho Marx
THE WORLD’S EARLIEST DATED BOOK
“According to the British Library, the Diamond Sutra,
printed in China in 868 A.D., is the world’s earliest
dated book.”
David Lemmo. Tarzan, Jungle King of Popular Culture
(Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2017)
**
AN ENGLISH TEACHER THROWS
IN THE TOWEL
Great Caesar’s Ghost!
52 yrs old &
I’m finally ploughing my way
Thru Clark Kent’s secret identity.
I’ve had it with cheesy fore flanks
Of Lit Crit.
Literature is meant to fly.
Splatt! Whapp! Wopp! Pow!
Time to spatter
The streets of Metropolis
With finer tints of onomatopoeia.
I tell you I am destined
To leap a tall bildungsroman
In a single bound,
Bend Lois Lane’s steel body
& her neon mind,
In my Daily Planet arms.
Time to stick dynamite
Up required reading lists!
Read me Action Comics,
With arch-villain Mr Mxyzptlk
Who must be tricked
To say his name backwards
So he’ll be returned
To the 5th dimension
For 90 days of rebooting.
(How many dimensions
Does a man need to survive?)
Hamlet, with his cheap poisons,
Cannot stop bullets
With his bare hands &
Is not so moral as all this.
Louis Phillips
SOWETO, SOUTH AFRICA
“Soweto was designed to be bombed –that’s how
forward-thinking the architects of apartheid were.
The township was a city unto itself, with a
population of nearly one million. There were
only two roads in and out. That was so the
military could lock us in, quell any rebellion.
And if the monkeys ever went crazy and tried
to break out of their cage, the air force could
fly over and bomb the shit out of everyone.
Growing up, I never knew that my grandmother
lived in the center of a bull’s eye.”
Trevor Noah. Born a Crime
**
EVERY SAILOR NEEDS A FRIEND
“Somewhere in the Southern ocean, as the immortal
Captain Joshua Slocum recounted in his journal
Around the World in the Sloop Spray, he was touched
to discover that his loneliness was ephemeral.
An intrepid spider in the cabin was spinning
sidewise while he spun forward, and the knowledge
of their companionship inspirited him for the rigors
that lay ahead.”
S.J. Perelman. “ Looking For Pussy” in
Eastward Ha! (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977)
**
ON THE ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORD TRAVELtravel (v.)
late 14c., "to journey," from travailen (1300) "to make a journey," originally "to toil, labor" (see travail). The semantic development may have been via the notion of "go on a difficult journey," but it also may reflect the difficulty of any journey in the Middle Ages. Replaced Old English faran. Related: Traveled; traveling. Traveled (adj.) "having made journeys, experienced in travel" is from early 15c. Traveling salesman is attested from 1885.
**
Etymological Dictionary On Line
**
WOBURN, MASSACHUSETTS
“I had come from Woburn, Massachusetts, a fine
New England town noted for its rambunctious biker
gangs, its indicted and convicted mayors and the
worse toxic-waste dumping grounds in the United
States. But it’s also an old colonial city with
a bronze minuteman on the town green guarding the
white-shingled Methodist church and a great
ivy-covered library with a statue of Count Rumford
on its front lawn.”
Eric Bogosian. Drinking in America (New York:
Vintage Books, 1987).
+*
FOR THE FANS OF THE LEGEND & LORE
OF KING ARTHUR
“ A cold, wind driven rain soaks through my parka as I
walk across a narrow foot-bridge that links the Cornwall mainland in southwest England to a rocky promontory
overlooking the Bristol Channel. Far below this cantilevered span, waves crash against the cliffs and swirl
inside a grotto known as Merlin’s Cave.”
Joshua Hammer. “The Forever Legend” in Smithsonian
Magazine (September 2022)
**
People also ask
“What is inside Merlin's cave?
Inside Merlin's Cave contains Numerous poems, commentaries, prophecies and plays, including the full text of Thomas Hardy's Queen of Cornwall, that establish Cornwall not just as the birthplace of King Arthur but as a source of all Arthurian themes.”
**
REMEMBER THIS PASSWORD?
“ Dildano's password, "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch",
is the name of a real village in Wales, United Kingdom. It's also the United Kingdom's longest place name.”
IDMb trivia to Barbarella (1968)
**
JOHN JAY AUDOBON TRAVELS THROUGH FLORIDA
“At Indian Key I observed an immense quantity of
beautiful Tree Snails of a pyramidal or shortly conical
form, some pure white, others curiously marked with
spiral lines of bright red, yellow and black. They
were crawling vigorously on every branch of every
bush where there was not a nest of the White Ibis.
Wherever that bird nested not a live snail was to
be seen; hundreds lay dead underneath.”
John James Audobon
**
NOT EXACTLY ABOUT INDIA
‘This novel isn’t about India. I don’t know India. I
was there once, for less than a month. When I was
there, I was struck by the country’s foreingness;
it remains obdurately foreign to me. But long before
I went to India, I began to imagine a man who has
been born there and has moved away; I imagined a
character who keeps coming back again and again.
He’s compelled to keep returning; yet, with each
return trip, his sense of India’s foreigness only
deepens. India remains unyieldingly foreign even to him.”
John Irving.”Author’s Notes” to A Son of the Circus
(New York: Random House, 1994)
**
SAILING DOWN THE RIVER AMUR
Sailing down the River Amur,
I started to dream of Dorothy Lamour.
I cried out: “Leave her alone, Bob Hope.”
“Wake up,” my wife sd, “and quiet down, you dope!”
LJP
**
FILM AS A RELIGION
“A Roman Catholic kid of my acquaintance, on his
first trip to the cinema, paused to genuflect in
the aisle before taking his seat. A perfectly
understandable mistake.”
Anthony Lane. “The Coming Passions” in The New Yorker
(November 21, 2022)
**
OF MOVIES & EROS
“when I was fifteen, I remember watching Carnal Knowledge at the Grand movie theater in Northfield,
Minnesota, my hometown. Jack Nicholson and Ann-Margret
were locked in a mystifying upright embrace and were
crashing around the room with their clothes on, or
most of them on, banging into walls and making a
lot of noise, and I had no idea what they were doing.
It had never occurred to me in my virginal state that
people made love like that. A friend had to tell me
what I was seeing. Most teenagers today are more
sophisticated but only because they’ve had more
exposure. I was thirteen before I stumbled over
the word rape –in Gone with the Wind. I walked
downstairs and asked my mother what it meant.”
Siri Hustvedt. Yonder (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1998)
**
MOVIES THAT MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN OUR LIVES
“Well, does any movie make a difference? Yes,
and I would be willing to say that a great movie
comedy makes the greatest difference, after which
would come a great poetic movie. Modern Times,
for instance, and All Quiet on the Western Front.”
William Saroyan. Obituaries (Berkeley: Creative
Arts Books, 1979)
**
SUSPENSE IN MOVIES
“By the way, Young and Innocent contains an
illustration that suspense rule by which the
audience is provided with information the
characters in the picture don’t know about.
Because of this knowledge, the tension is
heightened as the audience tries to figure
out what’s going to happen next.”
Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut,
with the Collaboration of Helen G. Scott.
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966)
ON MAKING DR. ZHIVAGO
“This movie was shot in Spain during the regime
of General Francisco Franco. One day, while filming
the scene with the crowd chanting the Marxist theme
(at 3:00 a.m.), police showed up on set thinking a
real revolution was taking place and insisted on
staying until the scene was finished. The secret
police supposedly surveyed the crowd as the extras
sang the Internationale for a protest scene, so
many extras pretended they didn't know the words.
(Of course, the extras had been rehearsed in
singing the Internationale before the scene was shot.) Meanwhile, residents who lived nearby had awoken to
the singing of the Internationale and mistakenly
concluded that Franco had died (or been overthrown).
Some residents even popped champagne bottles at
the mistaken rumor.
IDMb Trivia
**
"I don’t have the immediacy of personality. I’m not
a true eccentric. I’ve got both feet planted in
Shaker Heights."
Paul Newman
**
NAUGHTY BURKE (Because of the Murderer William Burke?)
“Columbia Pictures planned a movie with the name ‘Burke’
in the title. The Will Hayes Office censors rushed a
memo to the producers informing that the name ‘Burke’
could not be used in England ‘Burke’ means something
naughty.
“To which the reply was ‘What about Burke’s Peerage?’”
Walter Winchell. Winchell Exclusive (Englewood Cliffs,
New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975)
&&
007 IS NOT AN ACTION NUMBER
“Please understand: James Bond is not an action hero!
He is too good for that. He is an attitude. Violence
for him is an annoyance. He exists for the foreplay
and the cigarette. He rarely encounters a truly evil
villain. More often a comic opera buffoon with
hired goons in matching jump suits.”
Roger Ebert, reviewing Quantum of Solace (Nov. 8, 2008)
**
HOW SOME FILMS BEGIN
“A film for me begins with very vague—a chance remark
or a bit of conversation, a hazy but agreeable event
unrelated to any particular situation. It can be a
few bars of music, a shaft of light across the street.
Sometimes in my work at the theater I have envisioned
actors made up for yet unplayed roles.”
Ingmar Bergman. Introduction to Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman (New York :Simon & Schuster, 1960)
**
SHORT SUBJECTSMARK PEPLOE
‘Mark Peploe
Was one of the people
Who worked The Sheltering Sky.
As for myself, I wd prefer to ski.
LANA TURNER
Turner, Lana.
When I talked with my Nana,
She sd: “To men, Turner is like cat-nip to a cat.
That’s that!”
IF MIA FARROW GOT LOST IN MIAMI AND HER
DISAPPEARANCE WAS REPORTED TO THE POLICE
Farrow, Mia
For a brief time was MIA
In Mia-
mi. Momma mia!
LJP
for APRIL JAMES & JOHN HOOPER
ON ACTING AS AN “AWFUL, AWFUL PROFESSION
“ When it’s bad, it’s awful. Eighty-five percent
of actors in the union are out of work, ( one study
says 90%.) There were times when I was out of work
for six, seven months. You begin to doubt, to forget
who you are. You can make a living as a waiter;
you try anyway. But that’s not who you are.
But when it works, it’s great. I don’t think I’m
ever more alive than when I’m onstage. And that’s a
hell of a thing to say, because I have a wonderful life, really.”
F. Murray Abraham in Time Magazine (Nov. 21/Nov. 28, 2022)
**
THE PATRON SAINT OF ACTORS
"Genesius" of Rome is a legendary Christian saint, once a comedian and actor who had performed in plays that mocked Christianity. According to legend, while performing in a play that made fun of baptism, he had an experience on stage that converted him. He proclaimed his new belief, and he steadfastly refused to renounce it, even when the emperor Diocletian
ordered him to do so.
"Genesius is considered the patron saint of actors,
lawyers, barristers, clowns, comedians, converts,
dancers, people with epilepsy, musicians, printers, stenographers, and victims of torture. His feast day
is August 25."
WIKIPEDIA
**
TARZAN ON STAGE IN SEPTEMBER 1921
“In September , the British Tarzan stage play made
its way to New York and the Broadhurst Theater, with
Ronald Adair reprising his role of the Ape-Man. The
drawbacks of staging a play on this subject ( including
the use of real lions on stage) was reflected in American audiences’ lack of support. A September 8, 1921, New York Tribune review noted, “The role of Tarzan laid too great a responsibility upon Ronald Adair.” After two epic literary adventures in a row, it was beginning to become obvious that the film and stage incarnations of the Ape-Man paled in comparison.”
Tarzan, Jungle King of Popular Culture
by David Lemmo | 2016.
**
PETER USTINOV, AS A SOLDIER IN WW II, ENTERS A LOCAL TALENT COMPETITION IN TROON, SCOTLAND (1942)
“My chief rival was an eleven-year old lad in a kilt who sang ‘Annie Laurie’ ingeniously and consistently flat. Here was obviously a great future talent for atonal and dodecaphonic scores. His only drawback on this occasion was that he had foolishly chose a melody that was known. I scraped home by improvising a Bach Cantata, doing all four vocal timbres, and the instruments of the orchestra as well. The first prize was ten shillings, which I accepted gracefully, using a heavy Scottish accent in case it be suspected that my talent was not local. I have always had slight feelings of remorse of having robbed the unmusical child of his ten bob, but my excuse was that, not for the first or last time in my life, I was flat broke.”
Peter Ustinov. Dear Me. (Boston: Little, Brown, and
Company, 1977
**
HOW LONG CAN A PLAY BE?
“Francisque Spicey “ says in effect, in the aforesaid
collection of his papers, that a play cannot last longer
than six hours because that is about the limit of time
that any crowd may be held together. You will think less of Shaw’s’‘Back to Methuselah,’ which like the oriental plays, continue from day to day.”
Arthur Edwin Krows. Playwriting For Profit. 1928
**
Eugene O'Neil did not care if his plays ran so long
that theater-goers would miss their last trains home.
Thus, there were thousands of audience members in the
NYC area who never did find out how his plays ended.
Did the Iceman ever cometh?
LJP
**
JOHN SIMON REVIEWING THE MUSICAL COCO &
THE THREE-LEGGED HORSE
“There is no book to speak of, and no music to sing,
but that is par for the Broadway course these days.
There is a lesson here for all of us: you can get
what you want so long as you set your sights low
enough. The question is merely whether bagging a
three-legged horse makes you a mighty hunter.”
John Simon. New York Magazine (June 6, 1970)
**
MAXWELL ANDERSON AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF WOODSHEDS
"It is a wise mortal who reconciles his ambition to his limitations. Said Thoreau ‘The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty concludes to build a woodshed.’ Maxwell Anderson is a happy and enviable exception. At the age of sixty-five he continues to gather the materials for temples and, though, he converts them into woodsheds, finally and constantly persuades himself that the woodsheds
are edifices of unusual majesty and beauty.”
George Jean Nathan. The Theatre in the Fifties. 1953
**
THE ACTING OF MONTAGU LOVE
“Mr. Love’s idea of playing a he man was to extend his
chest three inches and then follow it slowly across the
stage.”
Heywood Broun
**
ON WHAT MIGHT INFLUENCE A THEATER CRITIC
“You may enjoy a play for such varied and impermanent
reasons. A dull farce may become iridescent if you
have been lucky enough to have had Chateau de Pape
with your dinner or to have persuaded the loveliest
person in the world to overcome explicable reluctance
about being seen with you at the theater.”
Alexander Woollcott. Enchanted Aisles. 1924
**
CURTAIN CALL
All the world's a stage,
That much is certain.
What I want to know is
Who is lowering the curtain?
Louis Phillips
HOW MANY TOMORROWS DID MACBETH NEED?
“Then there’s Shakespeare. His antiquated language is confounding to any reader, and such passages as ‘Tomorrow
and tomorrow and tomorrow…’ well, wouldn’t one tomorrow be enough.”
James Reynolds in The Crossett (Arkansas) News Observer (1959)]
**
THOMAS JEFFERSON & JOHN ADAMS JOURNEY TO STRATFORD
While in England in 1786 on diplomatic business,
Thomas Jefferson visited the birthplace and home
of one of his idols: William Shakespeare. He was
joined by John Adams, who was then the U.S. ambassador
to Britain. The pair weren’t particularly impressed
when they got to Stratford-Upon-Avon — Adams called
it "small and mean," and Jefferson was appalled by
the costs, noting each amount paid ("for seeing
house where Shakespeare was born, 1 shilling;
seeing his tomb, 1 shilling; entertainment, 4 shillings …").
But the two Founding Fathers did partake in a custom
of the time: They cut off a bit of an old wooden chair
that was reportedly Shakespeare's own as a souvenir.
Some 220 years later, the chip was displayed at Jefferson's Monticello home, along with a wry note he'd written:
"A chip cut from an armed chair in the chimney corner in Shakespeare's house at Stratford on Avon said to be the identical chair in which he usually sat. If true like
the relics of the saints it must miraculously reproduce
itself."
From INTERESTING FACTS website for December 5, 2022
**
QUIZ #86543
What noted author and short-story writer (one of his
novels is The Sheltering Sky) composed the incidental
music for the Helen Hayes production of Twelfth Night?
(Answer below)
**
“The most important thing to remember about Shakespeare
is that he was a writer, working on commission… I like
to think that if the bard were alive today he’d be out
on the beach in Beverly Hills tapping out ‘High Concept'
]movies of the week on his Wang Word Processor, up to
his ruff in cocaine.”
Maureen Lipman
**
IS THIS THE ONLY PORTRAIT OF SHAKESPEARE PAINTING
DURING THE PLAYWRIGHT'S LIFETIME?
"Cleaning removed a heavy black beard to reveal
an original, lighter trimmed and pointed beard.
Removing the frame for closer examination uncovered
the stylised letters RP to the top right of the
painting—the cypher of Robert Peake the Elder
(c.1551-1619), who by 1576 was recorded as being
in the pay of the Office of the Revels, which oversaw
the performance of plays for Queen Elizabeth I.
...
Peake’s son William (c.1580-1639) owned a successful
print shop and knew the engraver Martin Droeshout,
who created the image of Shakespeare for the 1623
First Folio of the Collected Works. The National
Portrait Gallery holds Droeshout engravings published
by the Peake family press.
excerpted from THE ART NEWSPAPER (November 11, 2022)
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/11/22/is-this-
really-the-only-portrait-of-william-shakespeare-made-
in-his-lifetime
JAMES BROUGHTON ACTING IN THE TEMPEST AT
AGE 10
“In the scene chosen I was supposed to be invisible
to Trinculo and Stephano during their drunken
buffoonery. The only words I had to say several
times were two: ‘Thou liest.’ But I was so panicked
by stage fright that I peed in the wings, leaving
a puddle to puzzle the stage manager. Years later
at Stratford, in the summer of 1951, I watched Alan Badel perform Ariel to the Prospero of Michael Redgrave.
He was naked, silver white, slender as a magic wand,
gracefully powerful enough to carry out any astonishments
a poet might require. He reminded me so much of my own glittering guardian that I knew then for certain that Will Shakespeare had had a lifelong collaborating angel.”
from Contemporary Authors series Volume 12
**
BARD & THE BARD“The Thane of Cawdor by David Bard is Macbeth as a
detective story, the narrative as it might have been
written by Lady Macbeth’s physician before the
sleep-walking had confirmed the suspicions which
he had formed in evidence as (reported in the play)
left by the Macbeths.”
The Amen Corner (Saturday Review, August 7, 1937)
**
SONNET FRAGMENT
"Nor marble, nor gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme."
Perhaps being boastful is not too wise,
But even in poetry it pays to advertise.
Louis Phillips
WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO OPEN A MYSTERY
NOVEL?
Writers of mysteries who struggle to find the
best way to open their books will find two great
ideas in the opening two paragraphs of Gideon
Defoe’s inspired and very funny novel The Pirates!
In an adventure with the Romantics or Prometheus
versus a Terrible Fungus (2012):
“The most exciting way to start an adventure,”
said the albino pirate “would be to open in the
sinister lair of the International Crime League,
eavesdropping as they plotted their most audacious
crime yet –the theft of the Queen’s brain!”
“That’s ridiculous,” said the pirate with gout.
“The most exciting way to start an adventure would be
to wake up inside a room, next to a dead boy, two pieces
of coal, and an unexplained carrot – but there’s apparently
no way in or out of the room!:
**
THE FINEST FORM OF LITERATURE
There is no finer form of fiction than the mystery.
It has structure, a story line and a sense of place
and pace. It is the one genre where the reader and
the writer are pitted against each other. Readers
don’t want to guess the ending, but they don’t want
to be so baffled that annoys them. Reading mysteries
is a way for people to deal with the crime they see
in their newspapers, or television or in their daily
lives, in a safe impersonal way.”
Sue Grafton in Writer’s Digest, January1991
**
"CONSTABULARY NOTES FROM ALL OVER
(from the Vincenne, Indiana Sun-Commercial)
John Laue, 410 Ramsey Road, told police Monday the
Fort Sackville Real Estate warehouse on State Street
was broken into Saturday night. A jar of pickles
was opened.’
The New Yorker (May 18, 1987)
**
THE CRIME AGAINST MARK TWAIN'S BOOK
“Huckleberry Finn was published first in England
at least in part because a horrified printer discovered
after thousands of copies of the book had been run
off that someone had made an indecent addition to a
picture of one of the male characters. The offending
page had to be cut out by hand and replaced in all
the bound copies. The 5,000 copies for Great Britain
were ready for distribution on the original target date, December 1884, while the 30,000 copies for the United
States were not available until February 1885. A $500
reward was offered by the publisher for the culprit –
thought to be a disgruntled employee. But he was never
found.”
Edward Ziegler. "Huckleberry Finn at 100" in
Reader’s Digest (February 1985)
**
WAS JAMES BOND BASED UPON A REAL PERSON?
“ Some readers believe that Ian Fleming based
James Bond character on a Yugoslavian man who
worked as a British agent infiltrating the Nazi
Secret Service – Dusko Popov (see Popov’s book
Spy/Counter Spy—1934). Popov writes: “I’m told
that Ian Fleming said he based his character
James Bond to some degree on me and my experiences.
As for me, I rather doubt that a Bond in the flesh
would have survived more than forty-eight hours as
an espionage agent. Fleming and I did rub shoulders
in Lisbon and a few days before I took the clipper
for the States he did follow me about.”
Philip Ward.A Dictionary of Common Fallacies (Boston:
The Atlantic Press, 1978)
**
TWO PUNNING MYSTERY NOVEL TITLES
1. Charles A. Goodrum. A Dewey Decimated (1973)
2. Charles A. Goodrum. The Best Cellar (1983)
**
ON THE NAMES OF CHARACTERS FOUND IN THE POPULAR
BOARD GAME CLUE
“In international versions of Clue, the colorful cast
can look quite different from what we’re used to in
the U.S. version. Professor Plum was originally called
Dr. Orange in Spain. Mr.Green goes by Chef Lettuce in
Chile. Mrs. Peacock is Mrs. Purple in Brazil and Mrs.
Periwinkle in France, and in Switzerland, she’s Captain
Blue, a man.”
Emily Goodman. “Boredom-Busting Facts About Board Games” in Reader’s Digest (Large Print) (December 2021 + January 2022)
**
ON RESPECTING ONE'S PROFESSION
“A burglar who respects his art always takes his
Time before taking anything else.”
O’Henry in Make the Whole World Kind (1911)
**
ON GEORGES SIMENON’S WORKING HABITS
“…he still maintains the working habits of a
one man assembly line. Up at 6:30 A.M. , with
a pot of coffee at his side, he types a 20 page
chapter in 2 l/2 hours, complete a twelve
chapter novel (common in France) in twelve
days. (His translation pace: three to six months).
Explains Simenon in halting English “I write
Fast because I have not zee brains to write
Slow.”
Time (July 9, 1951)
**
A FOR EFFORT
In Downey, California, a prowler ignored the
money in the local high school safe, took only
the 120 filled out report cards.
Miscellany Time (July 9 1951)
CAUTION
In Johnny Eager,
Robert Taylor tells Lana Turner:
“There ‘re lot of women in this town,’
And I picked the most dangerous one.”
What’s that got to do with me,
You might ask. O.K.
Look at this way.
There are a lot of poems in this world,
& you picked the most dangerous one.
Louis Phillips
JOHN GARFIELD
“When I asked for an autograph, he said, “What should
I write?” “How about ‘Sincerely, John Garfield’? His face
fell. “How do you spell sincerely?”
Alfred Kazin
**
PRESTON STURGES/ HOWARD HUGHES -INVENTORS
“You may wish for more detailed view of
Sturges’s movies, but Todd McCarthy’s
script is knowing and informal; it notes,
for example, that when the moviemaker
became a partner in Howard Hughes’s
California Picture Corporation, the deal
linked ‘Sturges, inventor of kiss-proof
lipstick, and on Hughes, creator of the
aerdynamic bra.”
Michael Stragow. Preston Sturges: Rise and
Fall of an American Dreamer (1989)
**
WALT DISNEY’S MOST SCSARY ANIMATED FILM
“ what was the Walt Disney movie that scared you
the most ? Was it ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'
(1937) where the evil queen falls off a cliff to
her death?(Dr. Benjamin Spock once wrote that all
the seats in the vast auditorium of Radio City Music
Hall had to be reupholstered because so many
children wet their pants while watching the film.)
Joan Acocella. “Puppet Regime” in The New Yorker
(June 13, 2022
**
ROBIN WILLIAMS & DUSTIN HOFFMAN
“Dustin will try anything. I’ve been on three films
that he was supposed to do. ‘Popeye,’ ‘Garp’ and ‘
Dead Poets.’ I should be just hanging out by his
house.. ‘What did you pass up? ‘Yeah? O.K. that
sounds good.”
Robin Williams, interviewed by Lawrence Grobel
for PLAYBOY (JANUARY 1992)
**
**
THE FIGHT SCENE IN THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
“Frank Sinatra broke the little finger of his right
hand on the desk in the fight sequence with Henry Silva.
Due to on-going filming commitments, he could not rest
or bandage his hand properly, causing the injury to heal incorrectly. It caused him chronic discomfort for the
rest of his life.”
IMDb Trivia
**
Rin TinTinnitus – Movie dog whose barking leaves
fans with ringing in their ears for hours after
the movie is over.
**ON CASTING ELIZABETH TAYLOR AND RICHARD BURTON AS
LOVERS IN A FILM
“I can only confirm my opinion that the chemistry of
having them both in a film, regarded as a rare ‘coup’ by financiers, in fact lacked mystery. Love scenes, and
even worse, lust scene, between people who presumably
have them anyway in the privacy of their home are
inevitably somewhat flat on the screen, and if they
happen to be passing through a momentary crisis,
such scenes are worse than flat, merely a tribute
to their professionalism, and there are few things
worse than that. “
Peter Ustinov. Dear Me (Boston: An Atlantic Monthly Book,
1977)
**
T
MY HYMN TO SATURDAY MATINEE
HORSE OPERAS
My heroes,
Descended from gods,
Rode horses
That did anything but talk.
Sometimes even that.
My heroes
Strode through swinging doors
Into saloons
Where villains spat
Out of the side of their mouths,
& whiskey-stocked bars
Were longer than leggy lines
Of chorus girls,
All of whom were pure,
Unmarried & hsd hearts of gold.
The bars,
Owned by black-hatted villains,
Housed poker chips
Held by the owner’s gang.
Always someone with aces up his sleeve.
Barroom brawls,
Like daily stage coast robberies,
Were anticipated,
With heavies tossed thru windows
& chairs broken by the dozens.
Then Wild Bill Elliot
Wd swing upon a chandelier
& knock 4 men
Under the only player piano
East of the Pecos.
Then the Durango Kid
Or Lash LaRue or somebody
With six-shooters
Or a black whip
Wd leap from a hotel's balcony
Onto Trigger or Champion.
Under a hail of bullets
Roy Rogers
Or Gene Autry escape furiously
With bad guys in hot pursuit.
On magnificent stallions
My heroes ride to defeat evil.
Horse operas!
Don’t tell me. I know.
The arias came afterwards.
Louis Phillips
THE MIGRATION OF BUTTERFLIES & THE SPIRITS
OF DEAD WARRIORS
“In pre-Columbian times, this migration involved
even more butterflies than the mind-boggling one
billion that fly to central Mexico today and the
insects may have once overwintered much closer to
cities such as Teotihuacan and the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan in forests that no longer exist. ‘Observing
so many monarch butterflies every year at the same time
may have been the basis for the idea of the return
of dead warriors to the world of the living,’ says
(JESPER) Nielsen* “The monarchs arrive from the north,
and in traditions in central Mexico, that cardinal
direction is associated with death.”
*Jesper Nielsen is a Mesoamericanist at the University
of Copenhagen.
Eric A. Powell. “Mexico’s Butterfly Warriors”
in Archaeology (November/December 2022)
CARLA BANK (Wife of writer Ishmael Reed) & HUMMINGBIRDS
“When Bank mentioned that a hummingbird frequented
the garden, I wondered aloud why the Aztecs had chosen
the bird as an emblem of their war god, Reed answered instantly. “They go right for the eyes.”
Julian Lucas. “I Ain’t Mean Enough” in The New Yorker
(July 26, 2021)
**
SALT & BAD LUCK
“During the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci strengthened
the association between spilled salt and misfortune
by depicting Judas with a saltcellar knocked over next
to him in his painting “The Last Supper.”
From INTERESTING FACTS website
**
One of my favorite go-to persons to get answers to
questions about people, animal, things, etc. that
cross our minds from time is David Feldman. Among
his books are WHY DO DOGS HAVE WET NOSES? ,WHY
DO CLOCKS RUN CLOCKWISE? And DO PENGUINS HAVE KNEES?
Here is a question that Feldman answers:
“Is There Any Meaning to the numbers in Men’s Hat Sizes?”
“Yes. But please don’t ask for the full story – it is very complicated.
“The American but size is based on a measurement
of the circumference of the head. The average man’s
head is about 23 inches in circumference. Divide 23
by pi (3.1416) and you get a number resembling 7 3/8,
a common hat size. The English, French, and Italian
all have their own systems, also based on the circumference
of the head.
” In practice, most American hat manufacturers determine their sizes by measuring the length of the sweat band inside the hat and dividing by pi.”:
David Feldman. Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses and Other imponderables of Everyday Life (New York:
HarperCollins, 1990)
**
BICYCLES
“ The bicycle was invented in 1817…if you look it up.
Indeed, as Jody Rosen points out in his excellent new book—“Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of
the Bicycle,” ‘the first bike came into the world a decade and a half after the invention of the steam locomotive.” It seems startingly late for the arrival of such an intuitive
and simple form of transportation…”
Charles Finch. “How We Roll” in The New York Times
Book Review (June 26, 2022)
**ON CRICKET & GOLF
“Contrary to what its detractors say, cricket is not
an inherently snobbish game, as Mr. Blunden is careful
to point out. Since it needs about twenty-five people
to make up a game it necessarily leads to a good deal
of social mixing. The inherently snobbish game is golf,
which causes whole stretches of countryside to be turned
into carefully guarded class preserves.”
George Orwell
**
MATTRESSES
“Before there were mattress reviews, there were mattresses.
The earliest known example, discovered in South Africa’s
Border Cave in 2020, is more than two hundred thousand
years old. It’s made from sheaves of grass, about a foot
thick, placed atop a layer of ash that was used, scientists believe, to provide insulation and to discourage bugs from crawling upward. “
Patricia Marx. “Tossed and Turned” in The New
Yorker (June 27, 2022)
**
THE PRICE OF A POUND OF SIRLOIN STEAK
IN THEODORE DREISER’S NOVEL SISTER
CARRIE
“How much do you pay for a pound of meat,” he asked
one day.
“Oh, there are different prices,” said Carrie.
“Sirloin steak is twenty-two cents.”
“That’s steep isn’t it?” he answered.
**
THE SECRET MEANING OF SNEEZES
“Michael Scot, a 13th century astrologer, claimed that
it is possible to foretell the business future by an
accurate interpretation of sneezes. ‘After a contract
has been drawn up, if you sneeze once, the contract
will be kept, but id you sneeze three times it will
be broken. To make your business venture successful,
sneeze twice or four times, then stand up and walk
about.’”
Philip Ward A Dictionary of Common Fallacies (Boston:
The Atlantic Press, 1978)
**
THE DAY THE FLEAS ESCAPED FROM HUBERT’S
DIME MUSEUM & FLEA CIRCUS
Who sd reality is a crutch?
I am preparing charts & contracts
For fleas who pull chariots,
Duel with swords,
& cross tightropes no thicker than threads.
Maybe they have flown to Aruba
& are drinking coffee by the sea?
Or are you feeling a bit itchy now?
Little bastards running off on their own.
In the virtual reality of the inscrutable,
How are they going to make a living?
Dancing in the streets? Fortune telling?
I warned them to stay put, not to flee.
Fleas are a dime a dozen.
Flee flea? Now what?
In the virtual reality of the inscrutable
Are we not all building
At least one universe from scratch?
Louis Phillips
“I still remember that adolescent thrill, that sublime discovery of the novel and short story as an utterly free space, where anything might be thought, anything uttered. In the novel, you might encounter atheists, snobs, libertines, adulterers, murderers, thieves, madmen riding across the Castilian plains or wandering around Oslo or St. Petersburg, young men on the make in Paris, young women on the make in Paris…”
James Wood. The Nearest Thing to Life (Waltham,Ma.:
Brandeis University Press, 2015)
**
MARGO JEFFERSON
Jefferson, Margo –
Reading about the adventures of an Argo-
Naught,
Sat in her chair & thought & thought & thought
& thought.
**
ON THE INSPIRATION FOR DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP (its film version is BLADE RUNNER)
…in late ‘40s when I read that (DIARY OF AN SS MAN)
and I still remember the one line he had in there: ‘
We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving
children.’ I still remember that line , and that
influenced me . I thought , There is amongst us something
that is a bipedal humanoid, morphologically identical
to the human being that is not human. It is not human
to complain in your diary that starving children are
keeping you awake. And there, in the ‘40s, was born
my idea that within our species is a bifurcation
between the truly human and that which mimics the
truly human…”
Philip K. Dick, interviewed by James Van Hise in
“Blade Runner and Hollywood Temptations” (August 1981).
The Last Interview and other conversations, edited by
David Sreitfeld (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2015)
**
ON READING & A BRIDGE OVER THE CHASM SEPARATING
THE SENSUAL AND THE SYMBOLIC
…very early on, I found that printed material may offer
a bridge over the chasm separating the sensual and the
symbolic. Books and magazines are naturally full of
symbols, and often, too, they contain much to charm
the senses. In my father’s bookcase there were rows
of leather bindings, some with gilded edges and ribbed
spines, marvels to the eye and to the nose. Incidentally,
Buenos Aires does not live up to its name: the air
there is always humid, both in summer and winter, and
that fact, which may be pretty uncomfortable for porteños,
is wonderful for the decay of paper. I used to think
of those pages sprinkled with yellow-brown spots and
smelling of mold as being spread with a sort of time
marmalade, but that homely image does not do justice
to the complexities of aged paper. Different types
of paper age differently – some may smell as sweet
as a jar of jasmine jam; occasionally, when we bury
our face in an old book, we may recover the sense of the Romantic forest, its rustle and murmur, hear the sound
of the post horn, taste the wild mushrooms, and smell
the smoke from the chimney of the witch who lives there
and who, alone, knows our spring and our spell.
Unfortunately, the books that smelled so wonderfully
in Buenos Aires have lost most of that particular charm
when transported to Upstate New York, where I live now,
and where winters are so dry that when one arrives
home and touches the doorhandle, a spark flies.
"The Books in my Parents' House", part of a memoir by Ricardo L. Nirenberg in OFFCOURSE Issue #89, June 2022
**
“Melville saw the possibility of an entrapment in
victory however nobly sought. War might be fought for human freedom, but victory might carry its own irony, the
possibility of the great modern power state of unbridled capitalism and military ambition might herald a new and disastrous destiny.”
Robert Penn Warren in his introduction to The Essential
Melville (1987)
**
EPIGRAPH TO FRAMED by TONINO BENSQUISTA
“Juan Gris, the Spanish cubists, had convinced Alice
Toklas to pose for a still life and began with his typical
abstract conception of objects, began to break her face and body down to its basic geometrical forms until the police came and pulled him off.”
Woody Allen
Tonino Benacquista. Framed (London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2006). Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.
**
FOR A.A. MILNE
The more I read
Tiddlee-pom, tiddlee-pom
Tiddlee-pom,
The more I hunger for
An Atomic Bomb, an Atomic Bomb,
An Atomic Bomb.
LJP
PhillipsMiscellany 