“At Stratford I felt as I had not before that one
of the most charming things in Shakespeare, a man
so variously charming that his contemporaries each
might love him for a different thing, was his fondness
for his native town.”
William Dean Howells in The Seen and unseen at Stratford-on-Avon: a Fantasy (Harper& Brothers
Publishers, MCMXIV)
THE 1955 MOVIE JOE MACBETH
“We’re doing Macbeth on a sex basis. I’m playing
a slut(Lady Macbeth) , Joe Macbeth (Paul Douglas)
is a gangster who turns yellow and leaves the
killing up to Lily. I’ll do it with a revolver.
We thought a knife would be too bloody"
RUTH ROMAN, quoted in TIME (April 4, 1955)
**
IMPROVING KING LEAR: NAHUM TATE IN 1681
“He produced a happy-ending Lear that held
the stage from the late seventeenth until the early
nineteenth century. Even Dr. Johnson found
Shakespeare’s ending almost unendurable (though
he retained Shakespeare’s text for his own edition
of the plays).In the Tate revision, the story ends
in a way that justice, and especially poetic justice,
seems to require: Lear gets his kingdom back and
then resigns, and Cordelia marries Edgar, Glouster’s
good son . (JAMES) Shapiro read us some of the
fustian Tate: “My Edgar, Oh!” –“Truth and Vertue
shall at last succeed,.” Everyone laughed.
David Denby. Great Books (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2005)
**
ORSON WELLES ON FALSTAFF
“He is the character in whom I believe the most
entirely good man in all drama. His faults are
trivial, and he makes the most enormous jokes from
them. His goodness is like bread, like wine. That
is why I lost the comic side of his character a
little; the more I played him, the more I felt
that he represented goodness, purity.”
From an interview in Cahiers du Cinema, quoted
by Charles Higham in ORSON WELLES (NY: St.Martin’s
Press, 1985)
**
FROM MACBETH TO JOE MACBETHIN ONE EASY JUMP
“Shakespeare wrote so much and his plays are,
by modern standards , so long that on one level,
it’s simple to select from the basic text a script
which will fit almost any current thought or superstition. Hamlet can be a queer or the prototype of Oedipal
confusion, the key to Lady Macbeth can be, as one
method actress pointed out, the phrase, ‘unsex me here.’’
John Elson in London Magazine (Oct. 1969)
**
ON De QUINCY AND THE KNOCKING AT THE GATE IN MACBETH
“When Macbeth and his wife do their dreadful deeds,
ordinary, healthy life ceases , but we were not aware
of that suspension because we were spending our time in
Macbeth’s mind, through his soliloquies . The knocking is
what De Quincy calls ‘the pulse of life beginning to beat again’; ‘and the re-establishment of the goings-on of
the world to which we live, first makes us profoundly
sensible of the of the awful parenthesis that had
suspended them.”
James Wood. The Nearest Thing to Life (Waltham, Ma.
Brandeis University, 2022)
**
WHY SHOULD I REPINE?
Shakespeare was not accounted great
When good Queen Bess ruled England’s state,
So why should I today repine
Because the laurel is not mine?
John Kendrick Bangs
**
CANON DIXON, A CLASSMATE OF WILLIAM MORRIS,
REMEMBERS READING SHAKESPEARE
“About this time, 1854-5, we started weekly Shakespearean readings in one another’s rooms. Fulford, Burne-Jones, and Morris were all fine readers: so was Crom Price who had
come up three or four terms after us, to Brasenose. We
used to draw lots for the parts. I remember Morris’s
Macbeth, and his Touchstone particurly; but most of
all his Claudio, in the scene withIsabel. He suddenly
raised his voice to a loud and horrified cry at the words ‘Isabel,’ and declared the awful following speech, ‘Aye,
but to die, and go we know not where ‘ in the same pitch.
I never heard anything more overpowering.’”
J.W. Mackail. The Life of William Morris , 1968.
**
WAS OTHELLO BLACK?
“The Moors are a white race, tanned a trifle by
the sun, of course, but most certainly white,
so that Othello could not have been black, or,
if he was, he was not a Moor.”
C.E. Clark. More Mistakes We Make.
I say if Shakespeare says Othello is a black Moor
then he is a black Moor.
**
STAND IN or THE NIGHT I KISSED MIRANDA
As stand-in
I read all the parts,
Actors, actresses, & props
Came down with colds
Or called
In sick. No sooner did the news
Arrive but I flew
Down the aisle, prompt-book
In hand & took
My place upon the stage,
1st as savage
Caliban, or Ferdinand
Or Ariel, filling in &
Playing every role in turn,
Clowns, lords, kerns
& gallowglasses were all one
To me. High flown
Rhetoric brooded in the wings,
One scene a king
Mismatched, unbuckled
As lighting men called
Out their cues, then next
Some princess vexed
With love or overeating.
Couplets on my tongue
Timed the scenery into place,
The list of characters passed
Through my lips. I was them all.
If anyone were ill,
I was well, danced & capered,
Cut a jig, kissed & read
For empty seats, an empty
House –“Oh Lord, flee
To Agincourt before it is
Too late.” Alas, alas,
Hero & heroine were cursed,
Yet stood self-assured
Within the light & I
Rode home. Stand-in, fie
Upon it. Oh fie…..
Louis Phillips
MAX CARRADOS, THE BLIND DETECTIVE
“When (ERNEST) Bramah introduced the blind Carrados,
he created the first physically handicapped detective
in mystery fiction. Having become blind as an adult,
Carrados is able to adjust and maintain his life,
including his abilities to detect. His blindness
does not weaken his zest for life. He works side by
side with his friend Louis Carlyle, a private investigator
who is a disbarred lawyer. The key to the books is
the way a sighted man is blind to the clues that
Carrados can detect.”
Gary Warren Niebuhr. Make Mine A Mystery:
A Reader’s Guide to Mystery and Detection Fiction
(Libraries Unlimited, 2003).
**
LIVE MYSTERY BROADCAST
THE PANAMA HAT, a radio mystery by Raymond Chandler
will be presented by The Viking Theater Company as
a live reading over Zoom on Tuesday, October 25,
2022, 6:00PM at the Mystery and Video Book Club
of the Salmagundi Club, 47 5th Avenue at 12th Street,
NYC. This reading is for a live audience of members of
the Salmagundi but non-members are also invited to attend.
A $10.00 admission fee for non-memb
For further information 212-255-7740.
Presented by special permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd London.
**
LIGHT HORSEMEN
" Those who live by plunder by night.
Those that live by plunder in the daytime are Heavy
Horsemen. These horsemen take what they can aboard ship,
such as coffee beans, which they call pease; sugar,
which they call sand, rum which they call vinegar, and
so on. The broker who buys these stolen goods and
asks no questions is called a fence. (See Captain
Maryat: Poor Jack, chap. Xviii.)”
**
E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (New York. Avenel Books, MCMLXXVIII) **
**
"Maigret has appeared numerous times on the screen,
with at least thirty-four actors assuming the role at
different times. The long list of film adaptations
began in 1932, only two years after Maigret was created,
with the release of two films. Le Chien jaune starred
the actor Abel Tarride, but Pierre Renoir, the son of
the great impressionist painter, has the honor of being
the first Maigret in La Nuit carrefour, directed by
his brother, Jean Renoir, who became one of the world’s
greatest filmmakers. Notable French actor Jean Gabin,
most famous for his role in Jean Renoir’s La Grande
illusion, took three turns as Maigret in 1958, 1959,
and 1963, but television actors Jean Richard and Bruno
Cremer are probably the most well-known French Maigrets.
Richard had a long run on French television from 1967
to 1990, doing nearly ninety episodes. Cremer began in
1991. He died in 2010 after fifty-four episodes of the
series"
from: "The Faces of Maigret"
by J. Madison Davis in World Literature Today
(January 2017)
**
Did Perry Mason ever defend a black person?
Mason never defends a black client; on the one occasion
when a black actor guest-starred—the Jamaican-born
mixed-race actor Frank Silvera—he played a white character.
Jun 19, 2020.
**
BURKE & HARE
The Burke and Hare murders were a series of sixteen
killings committed over a period of about ten months
in 1828 in Edinburgh, Scotland. They were undertaken
by William Burke and William Hare, who sold the
corpses to Robert Knox for dissection at his anatomy
lectures."
WIKIPEDIA
They are immortalized in a famous verse:
'
Up the close and down the stair
But and ben with Burke and Hare.
Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief,
And Knox the boy that buys the beef.
Dylan Thomas wrote about Burke and Hare in a screenplay published under the title The Doctor and the
Devils. Made into a film in 1983. Thomas and Ron Harwood
shared the screenplay credit.
Burke is also immortalized in the English language: To
Burke somebody is to kill them by smothering them.
**
In the 1930s (1934, to be exact) FrederickA. Stokes published CHEAPJACK by Philip Allingham. The title page tells the reader that book
BEING THE TRUE HISTORY OF A YOUNG MAN’S
ADVENTUREDS AS A FORTUNE-TELLER
GRAFTER, KNOCKER-WORKER, AND
MOUNTED PITCHER ON THE
MARKET-PLACES AND FAIR-
GROUNDS OF A MODERN
BUT STILL ROMAN-
TIC ENGLAND
Allingham dedicates his adventures as a confidence man
The book opens with a glossary of Grafters’ slang. Here are a few examples :from the five page list:
CARPET –Three months imprisonment
CFOCUS – A doctor, A quack doctor. A herbslist. A
miracle worker.
DROPSY – Bribery
GEZUMPH –To swindle (Yiddish)
KETTLE _- A watch
PETER –Suitcase, grip
SPLITS – Police
TAB – Cigarette
TICK-OFF – Fortune Teller
WIDE – Intelligent, informed, sophisticated
WHIZZ MOB – A gang of pickpockets
**
**
REMEMBERING JOHN DICKSON CARR
Dr. Gideon Fell
Was a most clever fell-
ow, created by John Dickson Carr.
(Are you with me so far?)
**
ROSS MACDONALD & PERSONAL CLUES
“We writers, as we work our way deeper into our
craft, learn to drop more personal clues…like
burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we
leave our fingerprints in the wet concrete.”
R.M.
**
POLITICAL SATIRE IN A CONTEMPORARY THRILLER
Sarah Lyall, reviewing, State of Terror by
Hillary Rodman Clinton and Louise Penny,
points out that there is a character named
Eric Dunn, a former one term president “who
shredded the country’s reputation and
retreated to Florida to sulk, to play golf
and plot his return. Sure, Dunn is charismatic,
with an uncanny ability to exploit people’s
weaknesses, but he is also an idiot. Even
his closest associates called him “Eric the Dumb.”
Sarah Lyell. “Penning a Different Kind of
Page-Turner” in The New York Times
(October 12, 2021)
**
JOHN DICKINSON CARR
John Dickson Carr—
I doubt that it will occur
To young people to read him;
The future of locked room mysteries sounds grim.
LJP
THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON
FRIGHTENS A MOTHER & CHILD ON THE BEACH
Ricou Browning, the stuntman who provided the underwater
shots of the creature, once had to make an emergency
bathroom visit while he was filming a scene. Browning
had been underwater for several minutes and breached
the water, in full costume, next to an unsuspecting
mother and her young daughter on the nearby shore.
Browning said that they fled in terror once they saw
him. He recalled, "they took off, and that's the last
I saw of 'em!"
Idmb Trivia. The Creature From the Black Lagoon
**BASEBALL STAR TED WILLIAMS & HIS GIRLFRIEND NELVA MORE
GO TO THE MOVIES TO SEE THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK
LAGOON
“In 1954 they went to see a horror movie called Creature from the Black Lagoon, starring Richard Carlson and Julie
Adams. Ted emerged from the theater a bit too enthused
about Adams for Nelva’s liking. ‘What a body!’ he said.
‘How pretty!’ Ted promptly asked Fred Corcoran to arrange
a meeting with Adams , the sort of request from Williams
that Corcoran was accustomed to receiving. Ted and the
actress went out, and the news hit the gossip columns.
‘Ted Williams is the kind of man that makes you glad
you’re a woman!’ Julie told the New York Daily News
on July 12, 1954. ‘I’ve really only had one date with
him, but it was one date I’ll never forget if I live
to be a million.’”
Footnote in The Kid:: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams
By Ben Bradlee, Jr. (New York; Little , Brown and
Company, 2013)
**
JULIE ADAMS & PERRY MASON
“One noteworthy appearance in television history was
as the only client of the defense lawyer Perry Mason
ever to be convicted in the 60s series. More recently,
Adams had a role in Murder, She Wrote, as an estate
agent, Eve Simpson, and sometime-helper of amateur
sleuth Jessica Fletcher, played by Angela Lansbury
(1987-93).”
From the Julie Adams' obituary in The Guardian
**
**
LAWRENCE BEESLEY, AN ACTUAL SURVIVOR OF THE SINKING
OF THE TITANIC, NOT WANTED IN A FILM ABOUT THE EVENT
“…about the shooting of the film A NIGHT TO REMEMBER,
dealing with the tragedy of the Titanic, and he relates
an anecdote. Apparently Beesley wanted to be among the
extras on board the replica of the Titanic even though
he was not allowed to, and when the director spotted
Beesley he told him to disembark.
BARNES: Yes, the first time you go down with the Titanic,
it’s for real and the second time you go down, you are
ordered off it before it sinks in the film…
from Conversations With Julian Barnes, edited by Vanessa Guignery and Ryan Roberts (University Press of Mississippi, 2009)
**
ACCORDING TO IMDB TRIVIA, WHAT FILM
DID INGMAR BERGMAN WATCH EVERY
YEAR ON HIS BIRTHDAY? (answer below)
**
SUSAN HAYWARD'S SELF PORTRAIT
My life is fair game for anybody. I spent an unhappy,
penniless childhood in Brooklyn. I had to slug my
way up in a town called Hollywood where people love
to trample you to death .I don’t relax because I don’t
know how. I don’t want to know how. Life is too short
to relax..
Susan Hayworth, quoted in Susan Hayworth: Portrait of
a Survivor by Beverly Linet (New York: Atheneum,1980)
**
SUSAN HAYWORTH
Hayworth, Susan
Called out: “Is that you, son?”
“No,” I said. “It’s your friend Lou.”
“Shit. That means another fucking Clerihew?”
**
The Home of Robert Taylor.Northridge Estates, California
**
CONSIDERING THE DEATH OF JOHN WAYNE
He drove to Harvard in a tank
Which is one way to get there,
But a tank ain’t no horse,
I don’t have to tell you. I swear
Death’s horse is a gelding,
Mouth-sore with bad breath,
A runny-eyed roan, sway-backed.
What kind of horse is death?
It’s bob-tailed with bad breeding,
Whopped with an ugly stick & fat.
Hey, Duke, why do you go ride
On a terrible old nag like that?
Louis Phillips
BARBRA STREISAND
“My dream is to be the girl at 15 who got on that
freighter. That was my dream: to go on a freighter
and land in Morocco or Algiers for $135. I talked
to a girl who said that when she was 19, she had
traveled around the world, and I thought , What
a fascinating life she’s led and what did I do?
And my friends say to me, ‘Barbra, what were you
doing at 19?’ Oh, yeah I was on the verge of big
success, I mean I was a big success in I Can Get
It For You Wholesale. But , to me, that’s not the
same as that girl traveling all over the world.
“The Playboy Interview: The Best of Three Decades,
1962-1992,” (Playboy, 1992)
**
SAINT GEORGE MIVART
“In 1892 the progressive Catholic intellectual Saint
George Mivart published an essay arguing that even
a ‘theologian of the most severe and rigid school’
must admit that ‘there is and there will for all
eternity be, a real and true happiness in hell’ for
some of its better-suited denizens. Some wicked souls
will find in hell a ‘kind of harmony with their own
mental condition.’ For making the point, Mivart
incurred papal conditional, his works were put on
the Index of Prohibited Books, and he was initially
denied a Catholic burial.”
Henry Freedland. “Hell Breaks Loose” in
Lapham’s Quarterly, Volume XII, number 3
(Summer, 2019)
**
GEORGE DELACORTE
“Brooklyn born George Delacorte made a fortune
creating Dell Press that published magazines,
puzzle books, and comics. To memoralize the
passing of his wife Margarita and as a comfort
in his grief, Delacorte commissioned Jose’ de
Creeft to create a statue in Central Park of
Alice in Wonderland, which Margarita adored.
The model for Alice was the sculptor’s daughter
Donna.
“Alice was not the park’s only gift from George
Delacorte, the Lorenzo di Medici of New York, said
former mayor Ed Koch. In the summer of 1962, along
the western shore of Turtle Pond, an 1,800 seat
outdoor theater opened with a production of The Merchant of Venice starring George C Scott with
James Earl Jones.”
Stephen Wolf. Central Park Love Song:Wandering
Beneath the Heaventrees (Santa Monica: Griffith
Moon, 2018)
**
ON COMPARING TED WILLIAMS WITH JOE
DIMAGGIO
“Ted never demanded sycophants and had a healthy
distrust of people who sucked up to him. Joe could
cut you off if you didn’t call him Clipper and
insisted everything be done for him. He was surrounded
by coat holders and fixers; he expected freebies or
others to pay his tab. Ted always insisted on picking
up his own check and paying for others.
“Joe smoked incessantly – even in the dugout.
Ted never smoked. Joe loved nightclubs. Ted loved
the outdoors.”
Ben Bradlee, Jr. The Kid: The Immortal Life of
Ted Williams (New York: Little, Brown & Company,
2013)
**
BOBBY KRIEGER'S FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF
JIM MORRISON
" I first met him when he came to my home with
[drummer[ John Densmore and he seemed pretty normal.
I didn't really get a sense that there was anything
unusual about him until the end of our first rehearsal. Initially everything was cool. Then this guy came looking
for Jim. Something had gone wrong with a dope, and just
went nuts. Absolutely bananas. I thought, Jesus Christ,
this guy's not normal.'
GUITAR LEGENDS: CELEBRATING 30 YEARS OF
GUITAR WORLD. Special Collectors Edition, Celebrating
Thirty Years of Guitar World (2010)
**
VLADIMIR HOROWITZ, concert pianist
"Horowitz owns a collection of snuff boxes
assembled from all over the world which he
keeps neatly arranged in green silk-lined
drawers."
CURRENT BIOGRAPHY 1943
KING JAMES IV of SCOTLAND
"The first golfer of whom any record has come
down to us, is King James IV of Scotland, cslled
'James of the Iron Belt,' the king who died
fighting on foot with his spearmen round him on
the stricken field of Flodden."
Robert Browning. A History of Golf
(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. 1955)
**
DANIEL LAMBERT
"Lambert's height was five feet eleven inches;
three yards four inches round the body, one
yard round the leg, his weight, a few days
before his death, was found by the Caledonian
balance to be 738 pounds. "
The Life of the Wonderful and Extraordinary
Daniel Lambert(New York:Samuel Wood,1815)
**
KING HUMMURABI
King Hummurabi.
According to my Rabbi,
Ruled, in 18th century BCE, Sumaria.
(If I compose an opera, this will be an aria).
**
MITCH McCONNELL
McConnell, Mitch
Once had the itch
To do something
Good for ordinary citizens
(i.e. not the rich)
It was in 2004, in the Spring.
**
LJP
OSCAR WILDE IN A HOUSE OF ILL-REPUTE
"...You may have heard that Oscar Wilde was once
sent to a house of prostitution in France, by
friends who raised the money at a bar one night,
snd that afterwards, when he was asked what he
thought about it, he said, 'It was like cold
mutton.'
James Thurber, in a letter to Dr. Gordon Bruce
(December 28, 1950). Selected Letters of James
Thurber, edited by Helen Thurber and Edward
Weeks (Boston: Little,Brown and Company, 1981)
**
HERMIONE GINGOLD’S VICTORIAN MOTHER
TELLS HER DAUGHTER ABOUT THE FACTS OF
LIFE (SORT OF)
“I knew nothing of life. My mother had neglected
to tell me I would soon become a woman, and I
hadn’t a clue where babies came from. The nearest
my mother ever came to telling me the facts of
life was the day she called me to her room and
said she had something important to tell me.
After a good deal of embarrassed coughing, she
spluttered , ‘Don’t ever sit down on a strange
lavatory seat.’ The strain of imparting this
information affected her so much that she had
to retire to bed and I didn’t see her for three
days. I was more confused than ever.”
Hermione Gingold. How to Grow Old Disgracefully
(New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1988)
**
ON CBS CENSORSHIP AND A WORD NOT ALLOWED TO BE
SPOKEN ON M*A*S*H
The most striking example to me was early in the
series. Radar(Gary Burghof) is explaining to somebody
that he’s unfamiliar with something . And he said,
“I’m a virgin at that, sir.” With no sexual context.
It was just that he’d never done something before.
And the CBS censor said: ‘You can’t say the word
‘virgin.’ That’s forbidden.’ So the next week (Larry)
Gelbart wrote a little scene that had nothing to do with anything. A patient is being carried through on a
stretcher. And I say, ‘Where you from, son?’ And he
says, ‘The Virgin Islands.’"
Alan Alda.,”The Heart of M*A*S*H Looks Back by
Saul Austerlitz in The New York Times (September
22, 2022)
**
CONFUSED
When I got married I was so naïve, I confused orgasm
with origami. Our honeymoon bed was littered with
hundreds of paper swans.
**
REAL SEX/ARTFUL SEX: BUTTERFLIES
"An intriguing entomological shows that a male
butterfly will ignore a living female of butterfLY
of his own species in favor of a painted cardboard
one, if the cardboard one is big. If the cardboard
one is bigger than he is, bigger than any female
ever could be. Over and over again, he jumps the
piece of cardboard. Nearby, the real, living
female butterfly opens and closes her wings in
vain."
Annie Dillard. The Writing Life (New York:
HarperPerennial, 1990)
**
AROUND THE WORLD
Sex in France is a comedy; in England it is
a tragedy; in America it's melodrama; in Italy
it's an opera; in Germany, a reason to take up
philosophy." Anonymous
quoted in Sex:"The Most Fun You Can Have
Without Laughing"..and Other Quotations,
Gathered by William Cole and Louis Phillips
(New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1990)
^^
ON THE WORLD FAMOUS ZIPLESS FUCK
“I’m not in search of ziplessness at this point
in my life. The zipless fuck is better as a
fantasy than as a reality.”
Erica Jong. Playboy interview
**
PREGNANT WOMAN CARRYING A SHOTGUN
She was loaded to bear.
**
THE 11TH COMMANDMENT --THOU SHALT NOT ENVY THE TAPEWORM
"If monogamy is the height of all virtue
then the palm goes to the tapeworm, which
has a complete set of male and female organs
in each of its 50-200 proglotoids of sections
and spends its whole life copulating in all its
sections with itself.
Friedrich Engels. The Origin of the Family.
**
UNLIKELY LIAISONS
If Isadora Duncan had married movie star Robert
Duncan, would she be known as Duncan Donat?
If skating star Tai Babilonia had married pitcher
Herb Score, would she be known as Tai Score?
If the daughter of the steamboat married the son
of Frankie Frisch, and if that couple had a
daughter named Margaret, would New Yorkers refer
to her as Fulton-Frisch Margaret?
ON THE EFFECTS OF PORNOGRAPHY
UPON MODERN LIFE
Oedipus Rex
Had sex
With his mum.
Ho-hum.
LJP
**
JOHN UPDIKE ON THE POWER AND CHARM OF COMIC STRIPS
“Part of the power and charm of the newspaper comic
strip is that it be constantly renewing itself before
our eyes – that it arrive with our coffee and cereal,
and be relished in less than a minute and not seen
again for twenty-four hours, when its little adventure
moves forward another notch, like a big cogwheel that
the full diurnal sweep of our ticking lives has barely
budged,”
John Updike. Foreword to My Well Balanced Life on a Wooden Leg: Memoirs by Al Capp (Santa Barbara, Ca:
John Daniel & Company Publishers, 1991).
**
MIC BOOKSMAKING THEIR FIRST APPEARANCE
“Comic books with original material and with a whole book focusing on a single strip did not appear until the 1930s.
The first one, Funnies on Parade (1933) was distributed
as an advertising giveaway by Proctor and Gamble. The
next year, Max Charles Gaines, a salesman for the Eastern
Color Printing Co. repackaged comic strips into a book
called Famous Funnies, which her sold for 10 cents. The
success of this commercial venture inspired competition,
and in February of 1935 New Fun Comics was published,
consisting solely of original material. The name was
eventually changed to Adventure Comics, which today
continues to publish both Superman and Batman.
From Encyclopedia of 20th-Century American Humor
by Alleen Pace Nilsen and Don L.F. Nilsen.
(Oryx Press, 2000)
**
ON BILL MAULDIN BEING HONORED BY CHARLES SCHULTZ IN PEANUTS
On Strips: Schulz, Mauldin, & Veterans Day
By Sean Kleefeld | Friday, November 10, 2017\
"For many years, Charles Schulz would have a special Veterans Day comic in Peanuts. Many of them involved Snoopy heading over to Bill Mauldin's house to quaff a few root beers. Maudlin, of course, was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist himself,
who became for his "Willie and Joe" cartoons in Stars and Stripes. Schulz managed an original joke pretty much every Veterans Day, despite them all pretty much centering
around that same notion of Snoopy walking over to Mauldin's.
IMPOTRTANT SITE FOR COMICS FANS
http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2017/11/on-strips-schulz-mauldin-veterans-day.html
***
THE BEST SATIRIST IN THE WORLD
John Steinbeck once wrote about the cartoonist Al
Capp that "I think Capp may very possibly be the
best writer in the world today. I am sure that he
is the best satirist since Laurence Stern."
RAY BRADBURY & BUCK ROGERS
“The most beautiful sound in my life, dearly recollected,
fully remembered, was the sound of a folded newspaper
kiteing through the summer air and landing on my front
porch… The door burst wide. A boy, myself, leapt out,
eyes blazing, mouth gasping for breath, hands seizing
at the paper to grapple it wide so that the hungry soul
of one of Waukegan, Illinois’ finest small intellects
could feed upon.
"That small boy still uses my soul for a trampoline.”
Ray Bradbury in his introduction to The Collected Worksof Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1977
“I have never got over the initial impact of Buck
Rogers on my life, and I am grateful for his explosion
in my midst sometime in the year 1929 when the newspaper
thudded against the screen door of my home in Waukegan, IL”.
Ray Bradbury (1980 San Diego Comic-Con)
Bradbury loved comics and loved Waukegan. As a boy,
he obsessively cut out Buck Rogers, Tarzan, and
Flash Gordon from local Waukegan newspapers, filling
dozens of scrapbooks with their adventures.His Waukegan
boyhood sparked a life-long love and career in comics.
from his comment in E.C. Comics as part of his appearance at the very first Comic Con San Diego.
**
UNKNOWN FILMS
CITIZEN (BOB) KANE – Orson Welles’ classic movie about a cartoonist/illustrator who created Batman & Robin.
Unfortunately he dies unhappy because he could never
find the sled he had in his childhood,
**
Not-so-secret Originstory
In the emerging comic book industry of the late 1930s,
Captain Marvel was the champion of Fawcett Publications. The thriving magazine firm was named for its founder, Wilford H. Fawcett, who entered the publishing field in the early 1920s with a humor publication aimed at soldiers and veterans like himself, entitled Capt. Billy's Whiz Bang. Fawcett ran the firm with his four sons.
They tasked writer Bill Parker and artist C.C. Beck with sketching out the basics of a superhero named "Captain Thunder." But by the time he first appeared in 1939's Whiz Comics #2 -- yes, that's a year after Superman arrived -- the name had changed, even if his rank remained the same. He was now "Marvel," which would prove to be something of a magic word in the history of American comics that followed.
Magic words were essential to the character. According to his origin story, orphan boy reporter Billy Batson was lead by a stranger to a mysterious subway, where he rode a magical train to meet the wizard Shazam. When Billy spoke the wizard's name, he was transformed into Captain Marvel, and given the six powers of six patron heroes and gods (Solomon's wisdom, Hercules' strength, Atlas' stamina, Zeus' power, Achilles' courage and Mercury's speed.).
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Captain Marvel, But Were Afraid to Google | https://comicsalliance.com/dc-comics-captain-marvel-shazam/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral
**
]
THE CANCELLED CHECK
Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the creators of Superman,
sold all the rights to their work, for $130. Superman
became a billion dollar industry, and the men sued to be recognized for their original idea and asked for fair
monetary compensation
Jeremy Dauber in his book – American Comics: A History – writes: “In something that felt like an overdetermined
symbol, the original check for $130 made out to Siegel
and Schuster for Superman, the site of the grandest
battle between creator and corporation, netted
$160,000 at auction in 2012.”
**
ALLEY OOP & POP MUSIC
“Mr. Frazier’s big break , though, came five years
earlier with ‘Alley Oop,’ a novelty song that reached
No. 1 on the pop chart (No. 3 on the R&B chart) for the Hollywood Argyles in 1960. Inspired by the V.T. Hamlin
comic strip of the same name, the song has been recorded
several times since, including versions by the Beach Boys
and the satirical British art-rockers the Bonzo Dog
Doo-Dah Band.
“David Bowie also interpolated the line ‘Look at those cave men go” from “Alley Oop” in his 1973 single “Life on Mars.”
Bill Friskics-Warren. Obituary for Dallas Frazier in the New York Times (January 17, 2022)
**
ONE OF THE STRANGEST COINCIDENCES IN COMIC STRIP HISTORY
On March 12, 1951, “Dennis the Menace” appeared for
the first time in the British weekly comic magazine
The Beano. That same day, “Dennis the Menace” debuted
in 16 American newspapers. Was it the same character
arriving in different countries by way of an international distribution deal? Nope. The British Dennis, drawn by
David Law, was dark-haired, scowling, and known to deliberately stir up trouble; American Dennis, from the hand of Hank Ketcham, was blonde, friendly, and more likely to foul things up through good intentions turned sour. It was reported that neither artist initially
was aware of the other's work, and apparently, neither
cared about any sort of copyright infringement, as both
the British and American Dennis went on to long,
successful runs in their respective countries.”
https://www.interestingfacts.com/strangest-coincidences-history/YfRM33nUVAAGtuQa
F.SCOTT FITZGERALD'S THEORY OF WRITING
"My theory of writing I can sum up in one
sentence. An author ought to write for the
youth of his own generation, the critics of
the next, and the schoolmasters of ever after.'
Fitzgerald in a letter to the Booksellers
Convention (April 1921) --quoted in Oxford
Dictionary of Twentieth Century Quotations
**
TWO RECOMMENDATIONS FOR STUDENTS OF WRITING
For the study of great opening lines in literature,
Compiled by Dr. Mardy Grothe
https://greatopeninglines.com/
*
THE DOCUMENTARY "PACIFIC LIGHT"--a film about the
poet and essayist DAVID MASON. Well worth spending
time with. A visual treat of underwater photography
and a well-thought interview on life near the Pacific
Ocean and one man's life dedicated to the craft of
writing and the power of poetry:
PACIFIC LIGHTAvailable free on Vimeo:
https://vimeo.com/746745055
**
THE BEST PART OF WRITING NOVEL
PETER WILD: What is your favourite part of the
writing process?
JULIAN BARNES: “I think that favourite point is when
you are about a quarter of the way into the first draft
and you think – Yes, there is a novel here, and yes,
I have got a pretty rough idea of where it’s going
and how long it will be and how long it will take,
and I’ve got this rich and wonderful period of work
ahead of me. Then you get to the end of the first
draft and that’s when the real work has to begin.”
Peter Wild. From Bookmunch.co.uk (June 3, 2020)
**
JULIAN BARNES
Julian Barnes
Earns
A good money by writing prose.
A successful author. Alas! I am not one of those.
**
WRITING ABOUT MONEY
Dear Editors:
Poet and novelist Erika L. Sanchez "wishes more authors
would write about money." I wonder how authors are
expected to write about something they see so little of?
In a New York Times article some years back: "According
to the survey results, the median pay for full-time
writers was $20,300 in 2017, and that number decreased
to $6,080 when part-time writers were considered. "
I doubt that the income of writers is much better
today.
Sincerely,
Louis Phillips
From letters in The New York Times Sunday Book Review
(July 24, 2022)
**
ONE REASON WRITERS WRITE
“The compulsion to be witnessed is one reason writers
write. We lay out the stories that make up a life and
ask others to behold the pattern that results. The
stories may be different for each of us, but the
patterns reveal what we have in common as human beings.
What a vital sense of connection both writer and reader
get out of the experience.”
Mary Laura Philpott. “Viral Load” in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (August 7, 2022)
**
WHY SOME WRITERS WRITE
"She (ELIZABETH HARDWICK) told our class that
there were really only two reasons to write:
desperation or revenge."
Darryl Pinckney. "Critical Distance" in The New
Yorker (September 19, 2022)
**
WHAT SOME WRITERS STRIVE FOR
“A writer strives to express a universal truth in
the best possible way that he can; in the way that
rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.
He knows that he can’t live forever and that each
work might be his last and also that the next time
he may succeed in achieving his goal. It is almost
like trying to write the Lord’s Prayer on the head
of a pin. It is an attempt to reduce all of emotional
capacities of the human heart to a phrase.”
William Faulkner. “Insight to Faulkner” by Dianne Best
In Writer’s Digest (May 1962)
**
ADVICE FOR PLAYWRIGHTS
Neil Simon’s memoir Rewrites contains numerous insights
Into the art and craft of writing plays. Hence, his book
should be required reading for aspiring playwrights.
Here are 3 examples from Rewrites:
l) “You don’t make characters exit to clear the stage.
They have to have a life of their own offstage. When
they come back, we want to know where they’ve been,
and why they came back when they did and not some
other time.”
Reginald Rose
2). “Some of your characters never meet. They must
have a scene with each other so that their characters
and lives connect. Draw their names in a circle and
then draw a straight line from each character to the
other, so that they all eventually criss-cross in the
play. It doesn’t hold true of all plays, but you’ll
find it pretty much true in most good plays.”
Billy Friedberg
3) “Do you have to like every character in a play?”
“No. Just in comedy.”
“Why?”
“Because if we don’t like him, we don’t root for him.”*
Herman Shumlin
Neil Simon. Rewrites
**
CAPTURING THE SPEECH OF CHARACTERS
“The ability of a writer to capture the speech of
his character is often underestimated or even dismissed
in favor of other qualities, but in fact it is
far more important than subject matter or theme if
the stories are to have life. Buffon said, “Le style
est l’homme mene,” and it follows that the writer
who has captured his character’s voice has taken
hold of the character himself, and the story starts
from there.”
Frank MacShane. Collected Stories of John O’Hara
(New York:\Viking Books, 1984.)
BRIEF LITERARY NOTE
ABOUT LEARNING HOW
TO WRITE WITH GRACE
& STYLE
After reading Eric Ambler,
Many writers shd feel much humbler.
LJP
“I could read inside an MRI machine if the book held
me tight.Reading needs privacy which is too rare.
I feel a relationship develops, and usually I don’t
want to talk about it while I’m reading. And often
after. It’s an intimate experience.”
Lynne Tillman in “By the Book” in The New York Times
(August 7,2022)
**
THE LAST THING A JANE AUSTEN FAN WANTS
TO KNOW ABOUT ELIZABETH AND DARCY
“The last thing you want to know is that Elizabeth and
Darcy had a fight over how to treat the servants.”
Nora Ephron
**
There is no Frigate like a Book
BY Emily Dickinson
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –
**
MAKING EMILY DICKINSON VISIBLE
“Dickinson’s rhymes are a mask pointing to itself:
they tell us something is wrong, something has
altered or blurred from an identity which, by
the pronounced lapse from it, it is thereby asserted
to exist. The problem of Dickinson’s rhymes –if she
was going to rhyme, why did she not do it more
consistently? if she was not going to , why did
she do it so much? – is suggested by an astonishing
utterance from her flood period, in which the
nature of her poetry as a mistake is dramatized:
‘Creation seemed a mighty Crack--to make me visible--.’”
Richard Howard. Paper Trail: selected prose, 1965-2003 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)
**
MOBY DICK AND THE HUNT FOR METAPHOR
" The hunt for an elusive whale is the most famous story
in the history of American literature. Hast thou seen the White Whale? But as much as Moby-Dick is about the
quest for an animal, or for revenge, it's also about
the quest for metaphor --the attempt to understand
what cannot be understood. Ishmael calls the whiteness
of the whale "a dumb blankness, full of meaning." Full
of many meanings, actually: divinity and its absence,
primal power and its refusal, the possibility of
revenge and the possibility of annihilation. "Of all
these things the Albino whale was the symbol," Ishmael
explains. "Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"
Leslie Jamison. "52 Blue" in Make It Scream,
Make It Burn (New York: Little, Brown and Company,
2019)
**
MELVILLE & THE POSSIBILITY OF ENTRAPMENT
“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)
**
WHAT I HAVE LEARNED
FROM STUDENTS IN MY
AMERICAN LIT CLASS
Few students think it odd
That Captain Queeg
Is with Queequeg
On the U.S.Pequod.
LJP
**
hi·ba·ku·sha
/ˌhēbəˈko͞oSHə/
noun
(in Japan) a survivor of either of the atomic
explosions at Hiroshima or Nagasaki in 1945.
**
THE FINAL PARAGRAPH TO "HIBAKUSHA" in WAY OUT THERE:LYRICAL ESSAYS By MICHAEL DALEY
Michael Daley is a fine poet and essayist,
and "Hibakusha" is just one of his many
essays that move me. Daley's prose and poetry
is enlivened by the honesty and openness of the
writer himself.
On Sun, Jun 26, 2022 at 7:17 PM Michael Daley wrote me:
Dear Louis,
"...Hibakusha." Originally, that was the title of
the poem that precedes the essay in the book, and
how I learned the meaning of the word from an article
back in the day in probably the Seattle Times quoting
a real survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima. So,
the poem is a found poem from that interview."
I want to share with you the final paragraph
of "Hibakusha":
I want to share with you the final paragraph
of "Hibakusha". Michael Daley found a newspaper clipping in a book he had been reading –Life’s Pictorial World War II. The clipping told of Michael’s father, among other men,
receiving an award for flying missions over Japan.
“I didn’t go to Vietnam. My Father paid that debt.
I saw the faces from that book in those who came back.
Although I tried to talk about anything else, to talk
around it, I wanted to know what it would have been
like for me. I wanted the same hollow at the end
of a sentence and not call it despair, or loneliness.
I wanted what they and my father had gotten from war:
I wanted my life justified too. But I could never
know what they saw. Faces from that war were tattooed
on their eyes; when they came, like me, to a noisy
bar in a small waterfront town to watch an ordinary
girl pour a glass of beer and lick foam from her lip.”
Michael Daley. Way Out There: Lyrical Essays (New York: Aequitas, an imprint of Pleasure Boat Studio, 2007)
NOT ALL PLACES ARE DESIGNED FOR HUMAN COMFORT
“Seattle as I understand it –very little—was not
a place designed to make you feel comfortable.
How could we expect that within the magnetic
field of Starbucks, Boeing, Bill Gates and
Microsoft, Amazon, and Kindle? There was, as
Gary Snyder said, in a book I found in the Pike
Place Market, danger on peaks. ‘Give up! Give up!’”
Iain Sinclair. American Smoke: Journeys to the
End of the Light (New York: Faber and Faber Inc. 2013)
**
NOT ALL PLACES ARE DESIGNED FOR HUMAN COMFORT (2)
“Marlowe telling the desperate story to four
complacently office-bound shipping company
executives in London, explodes with the exasperation
that Conrad himself must have felt, like most
travelers to rough places, returning to colleagues
in a great commercial center and its comfortable
suburbs: “Here you all are, each moored with two
good addresses, like a hulk with two anchors, a
butcher round one corner, a policeman around another,
excellent appetites, and temperature normal – you
hear – normal from year’s end to year’s end. His
bafflement at the stay-at-home’s ignorance of
the risks and fragility of life is familiar not
just to travelers who have returned from intemperate
latitudes but to anyone who has had a close brush
with death.”
Edward Hoagland. Balancing Acts
f
**
FLYING FROM IRELAND TO THE UNITED STATES IN 1947
“Carol Reed, not yet knighted, whom I knew slightly,
was also on the plane. By the time New York was
reached, we knew one another pretty well. Hardly
surprising since the plane took four days to
reach its destination. We weren’t in the air all
the time. In fact, we started by motoring to
Faolkestone, a most unexpected place from which
to take off. Then there were unscheduled stops,
as it was officially put, at Shannon, Gander and
an island that sounded like Santa Margharita,
that I’d never heard of before not fortunately
since, making it one of the most of the will
it/won’t it flights of that time.”
Kieran Tunney. Tallulah Darling of the Gods.
(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. 1973)
**
THE FOURTH LONGEST RIVER IN AFRICA
The Zambezi River is the fourth-longest river in Africa,
the longest east-flowing river in Africa and the largest
flowing into the Indian Ocean from Africa. Its drainage
basin covers 1,390,000 square kilometres, slightly less
than half of the Nile's.
Wikipedia
ON THE OLD ZAMBESI RIVER (Length: 1,599 mi)
While sailing on the old Zambesi,
I discovered writing verse cd be easy
If the Muses were kind & giving.
Hey! What a way to make a living!
LADY GODIVA’S TOWN
“Everyone has heard about Coventry, if only because
in the Middle Ages it originated the ultimate form
of the strip tease in the naked lady on horseback
from whom all citizens turned their eyes except
Peeping Tom, who in punishment was stricken blind.
The legend is still so alive that the new hotel
in the shopping center is called the Leofric,
after the chaste Godiva’s husband, the feudal
lord of the town.”
Lewis Mumford. The Highway and the City (New York:
A Harvest Book, 1963)
**
Why do people say go to Coventry?
Meaning "to deliberately ostracise someone",
this phrase originates from a 17th century
English Civil War punishment, when Coventry
was a Parliamentary stronghold. The king's
soldiers were so hated that Royalist prisoners
were sent to Coventry, where it was felt they
would be ignored.
WHY DO THEY SAY—Internet
**
Why do we say "send someone to Coventry"? |
“To send someone to Coventry is an idiom used in
England meaning to deliberately ostracize someone.
Typically, this is done by not talking to them,
avoiding their company, and acting as if they
no longer exist.”
Featured snippet from the web
**
TRAVEL QUESTION #1
Because of its breathtaking views, the motto
of this New Zealand city is "Supreme by Situation."
In 1865 it was, in fact, the capital of New
Zealand. It was named in honor of a famous
English Duke? What city is it?
**
ON PLANNING A VISIT TO THE VOLCANIC ISLAND
OF LATE (SOUTHWEST OF TONGA)WITH THE AUTHOR
OF THE BLUE STAR (TOM EARLY) AND LOTTE LENYA
Lotte came early,
But Early came too late
To Late for Lotte,
So Lotte left Late & Early.
I am so confused lately
About Late and Early,
I have called the whole trip off.
Louis Phillips
**
ANSWER TO TRAVEL QUESTION: WELLINGTON
What South American city was once the capital of a European country?
Rio de Janeiro
Cancel
You’re probably familiar with Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for any number of reasons — Copacabana Beach, Carnaval, Christ the Redeemer — but European capital city likely isn't one of them. Indeed, Brazil was once part of the vast colonial empire of Portugal, and from 1808 to 1820, its capital of Rio de Janeiro also served as the capital of the Kingdom of Portugal. As Napoleon was conquering Europe, he planned to join Spain in an invasion of Portugal and divide up its land, leading to the Peninsula War. For safety against attack, the Portuguese Royal Family moved out of Lisbon and across the Atlantic to their prosperous territory of Brazil, which was protected by British allies. They remained there until 1821, after Napoleon was defeated. After the Royal Family left Rio de Janeiro, Brazil became independent after more than 300 years of colonial rule. Rio de Janeiro served as its capital until 1960, when it was moved to Brasilia.
Source: The Culture Trip | Date Updated: September 17, 2021 WWW. Traveltrivia.com
**
VENICE
“ A traveller can come charging toward a city, hit it at the wrong angle, and bounce off. My feeling about Venice will always remain inextricably related to the fact that throughout my only visit there, which lasted two days, it rained solidly and my one pair of good shoes collapsed from walking on pavement as wet as the canals.”
Anthony Bailey. “Throughout the Great Cities” in The New
Yorker (August 5, 1967)
**
BUENOS AIRES
“Buenos Aires is utterly bizarre, a combination of Paris and Madrid shorn of historical depth, with hallucination avenidas
flanked with lime trees, where not even the humble housewife need forgo the architectural aspirations of Marie Antonette.”
Bruce Chatwin
**
THREE POINTS CAPE
Forming the southernmost tip of Ghana, Cape Three Points is located between the coastal village of Dixcove and town of Princes Town, Ghana. Cape Three Points is known as the "land nearest nowhere" because it is the land nearest a location in the sea which is at 0 latitude, 0 longitude and 0 altitude (the distance is about 570 km).[1] It marks the western end of the Gulf of Guinea.[2]
WIKIPEDIA
**
A 15 YEAR OLD RUNS AWAY FROM HER AUNT WHO
WAS TRAINING HER FOR A PROSTITUTE’S ROAD
“So she ran away. She borrowed and saved for a ticket home. But the bus driver she landed with, for a ‘prank,’
a cruel and misogynist trick, made a practice of stranding unattached girls at the Hoover Dam. It was under construction in 1931. He would tell them to get out and use the rest room, and drive away. So there she was, at the Arizona-Nevada borderline, without her suitcase, without any money. Fifteen years old. At the diner she couldn’t even pay for her pie. Forced to choose which trailer house full of construction workers she should ask to spend the night in. My father was having coffee, and he told her she’d better trust him – he was better than the rest – and the rest just laughed. So what was she to do? He was a perfect gentleman. But one thing led to another,’ she said.”
Told by a woman named Claire whom the writer Edward Hoagland met on a train
Edward Hoagland. Balancing Acts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992)
**
ARABIA FELIX
Ma’rib was the Queen of Sheba’s capital nearly three thousand years ago – a burgeoning garden spot and trading center on the spice, myrrh, and frankincense caravan route that wound north from the Gulf of Aden through Mecca and eventually to Gaza on the Mediterranean. It was the largest city in Old South Arabia, or Arabia Felix, “Happy Arabia,” as the region later came to be called…”
Edward Hoagland. Balancing Acts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992)
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992)
**
FLYING FROM IRELAND TO THE UNITED STATES IN 1947
“Carol Reed, not yet knighted, whom I knew slightly, was also on the plane. By the time New York was reached, we knew one another pretty well. Hardly surprising since the plane took four days to reach its destination. We weren’t in the air all the time. In fact, we started by motoring to Faolkestone, a most unexpected place from which to take off. Then there were unscheduled stops, as it was officially put, at Shannon, Gander and an island that sounded like Santa Margharita, that I’d never heard of before not fortunately since, making it one of the most of the will it/won’t it flights of that time.”
Kieran Tunney. Tallulah Darling of the Gods. (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. 1973)
What South American city was once the capital of a European country?
Rio de Janeiro
Cancel
You’re probably familiar with Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for any number of reasons — Copacabana Beach, Carnaval, Christ the Redeemer — but European capital city likely isn't one of them. Indeed, Brazil was once part of the vast colonial empire of Portugal, and from 1808 to 1820, its capital of Rio de Janeiro also served as the capital of the Kingdom of Portugal. As Napoleon was conquering Europe, he planned to join Spain in an invasion of Portugal and divide up its land, leading to the Peninsula War. For safety against attack, the Portuguese Royal Family moved out of Lisbon and across the Atlantic to their prosperous territory of Brazil, which was protected by British allies. They remained there until 1821, after Napoleon was defeated. After the Royal Family left Rio de Janeiro, Brazil became independent after more than 300 years of colonial rule. Rio de Janeiro served as its capital until 1960, when it was moved to Brasilia.
Source: The Culture Trip | Date Updated: September 17, 2021 WWW. Traveltrivia.com
**
VENICE
“ A traveller can come charging toward a city, hit it at the wrong angle, and bounce off. My feeling about Venice will always remain inextricably related to the fact that throughout my only visit there, which lasted two days, it rained solidly and my one pair of good shoes collapsed from walking on pavement as wet as the canals.”
Anthony Bailey. “Throughout the Great Cities” in The New
Yorker (August 5, 1967)
**
BUENOS AIRES
“Buenos Aires is utterly bizarre, a combination of
Paris and Madrid shorn of historical depth, with
hallucination avenidas flanked with lime trees,
where not even the humble housewife need forgo
the architectural aspirations of Marie Antonette.”
Bruce Chatwin
**
THE LAND NEAREST NOWHERE
Forming the southernmost tip of Ghana, Cape Three
Points is located between the coastal village of
Dixcove and town of Princes Town, Ghana. Cape
Three Points is known as the "land nearest nowhere"
because it is the land nearest a location in the
sea which is at 0 latitude, 0 longitude and 0
altitude (the distance is about 570 km).[1] It
marks the western end of the Gulf of Guinea.[2]
WIKIPEDIA
**
ARABIA FELIX
Ma’rib was the Queen of Sheba’s capital nearly
three thousand years ago – a burgeoning garden
spot and trading center on the spice, myrrh, and
frankincense caravan route that wound north from
the Gulf of Aden through Mecca and eventually to
Gaza on the Mediterranean. It was the largest city
in Old South Arabia, or Arabia Felix, “Happy Arabia,”
as the region later came to be called…”
Edward Hoagland. Balancing Acts (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1992)
WHAT MAKES ACTORS TICK?
"Fascination with actors shows no sign of abating.
The public still, it seems, longs to know as a journalist
put it to Alec Guinness on his first visit to America,
what makes them tick.("I wasn't aware that I was
ticking, " Guinness replied.)"
Simon Callow, reviewing The Method, in The New York Review of Books (August 18, 2022)
**
NOEL COWARD TRIES TO DO A GOOD DEED
"...there's the story of the actress who religiously
attended every audition for every show he (NOEL COWARD)
staged in London. Each time she sang a few songs, never
with indication of improvement and always went away
empty handed. After this had been going on for several
years Coward started feeling sorry for her and determined
that he would find something for her to do and eventually managed to come up with a part that matched her rather
limited talents. "I'm very happy to tell you that at last
we have something for you," he told her enthusiastically
after walking from hi seat to the edge of the stage to
break the good news.
Oh, no, Mr. Coward," replied the lady, "I don't take
parts, I just audition," and swept out of the theatre
with magnificent dignity!"
Richard Brier. Coward & Company (London:Robson
Books Ltd.,1987)
**
ON T.S., ELIOT’S IMPROBABLE TITLE FOR A PLAY
“I’m in a rush at the moment. Off to Edinburgh tomorrow, where my new play (‘The Cocktail Party’ Is the name of it, but that’s only what I call it in order to entice the public – the esoteric name is ‘Upadhamman samuppada,’ but nobody would promote a play with a name like that). Well, we’ll see.”
T.S. Eliot in a letter to Djuna Barnes (August19, 1949)
ON GOING TO SEE A BROADWAY SHOW
NYC theater-goers know,
As do the Bengal Lancers:
“You pay your money
& you take your chances.
*
SHOES ON STAGE
“Sometimes all it takes is a pair of shoes to connect
an actor to a role. They can’t be any old shoes, of
course. They have to fit both the feet and the
personality.
“When Lynn Redgrave was preparing to play a
middle-aged department store clerk in the British
playwright Alan Bennett’s monologue ”Miss Fozzard
Finds Her Feet,” the footwear that helped the 60
year old actress bring the role to life was a pair
of slim-fitting T-straps she picked up for $20
at a Payless Store on 57th Street in Manhattan.”
Stephen Holden in The New York Times
(April 20, 2003)
**
THE ART OF TERRIBLE ACTING
I wonder how many modern theater goers remember Effie
and Addie Cherry, better known as “The Cherry Sisters”?
The sisters, who died in the early 1940’s, set standards
for bad performance that may never be surpassed. They
often had to sing and dance behind a net so that they
would be protected from all the fruits and vegetables
that spectators would hurl at them. When Effie Cherry
died in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on August 5, 1944, the
Associate Press reported: It was at Hammerstein’s
old Olympic Theater in New York that the sisters’
gypsy skit, their stock entertainment throughout
the years related in song and gesture the fate that
was worse than death. It was supposed to have been
treated to a fruit and vegetable shower by customers
who came to see their act because it was so
fantastically bad, although Effie always denied
the story.
In spite of the ludicrous nature of their
Gypsy act, Effie and Addie Cherry managed to pull
down as much (and sometimes more) as a thousand
dollars a week, and that was in an age when a
thousand dollars went a lot farther than it does now.
**
DOUBLING, TRIPLING, etc.
“William Davidbe related in his Footlight Flashes
that during his strolling days in England when
companies were small, he had on the same evening
done duty for Polonius, the Ghost, Osric, and the
First Grave-digger; and Edwin Booth remember Thomas
Ward dying in the sight of the audience as the player
king, and being dragged from the mimic stage by the
heels to enter immediately at another wing as
Polonius with a cry of ‘Lights! Lights! Lights!’
Laurence Hutton
Curiosities of the American Stage (NY: Harper
& Brothers, 1891)
**
NEW YORK CITY AS STREET THEATER
“On the street nobody watches, everyone performs.”
**
“ Street theater can be achieved in a store, on a bus,
in your own apartment. The idiom requires enough actors
(bit players as well as principals) to complete the
action and the rhythm of extended exchange. The city
is rich in both. In the city things can be kept
moving until they arrive at point. When they do,
I come to rest.”
Vivian Gornick. Approaching Eye Level. (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1996
**
STAGE NEWS FROM ALL OVER
I am cast to play a part
In the drama of my own life,
But why was I
Given only a walk-on role,
& why have there been
No rehearsals?
Louis Phillips
PhillipsMiscellany 