SPIES IN THE OLD TESTAMENT
“Some of the earliest spies we know by name are the
twelve men Moses sent into Canaan before he led the
Hebrews into that land. They were, the Bible tells us,
Shamma, Shaphut, Igal, Oshea, Palti, Gaddiel, Gaddi,
Ammiel, Sethur, Nahbi, and Geuel.
“The orders Moses gave those men – the orders too
are reported in the Bible – sound very much like
instructions still being given to spies today.
“See the land, what it is,” Moses told them;
“and the people that dwelleth therein, whether
they be strong or weak, few or many….”
Samuel Epstein and Beryl Williams.The Real Book About Spies (Garden City, NY: Garden
City Books, 1953)
**
LIBERACE
“Born in Wisconsin to a French horn player for John
Philip Sousa, Wladzu Valentino Liberace (Walter to
his friends) was popular both in school and in the
bars and cabarets where he played nightly all during
his teen years. After a visit from renowned pianist
Ignacy Paderewski to the Liberace home, thr young
protégé received a music scholarship to the Wisconsin
School of Music. His classical training culminated
with his debut as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony
at the age of fourteen.”
Scott Stanton. The Tombstone Tourist: Musicians
(New York: Pocket Books, 2003)
**
FELIX ADLER –THE KING OF CLOWNS
Felix Adler “called himself the King of the Clowns,
sometimes spotting a gold crown, which irritated several colleagues. He stuck beach balls into the seat of his
capacious pants to make his rear end swell, and on the
bulb of his nose he wore a red light, which occasionally
shorted out when he went backstage between acts and
put on his wire-trimmed reading spectacles. His
trademark was the succession of little pigs he trained to follow him around the hippodrome track (and fed a secret
diet of baking soda to keep them small for as long as
he could). But he had many other ring-wise wiles, and,
carrying his six-inch umbrella on a five-foot pole, he
performed at the White House, first for Calvin Coolidge
and then for Franklin Roosevelt…..”
Edward Hoagland. Balancing Acts ( New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1992)
**
CARY GRANT & ARCHIBALD LEACH
It is well-known by most film fans that the birth name of
Cary Grant was Archibald Leach. Archibald Leach was
A name mentioned by Grant in a few of his movies.
Less known is the remarkable coincidence that occurred
When Grant married the heiress Barbara Hutton. The
story was recounted by Jeffrey Lyons in his book
Stories My Father Told Me Me (New York: Abbeville
Press, 2011):
“Grant was asked why his marriage to Barbara Hutton,
the richest woman in the world, didn’t last. ‘Tell
you why,’ GrantExplained. I was making $14,000 a week
and still felt like a kept man.’ Another reason might
have been the fact that Hutton had a long time chauffeur
whose name was Archie Leach !”
**
ADVICE FROM ARNOLD PALMER
“ (I) asked him if he ever felt anxious during
tournaments, if he felt pressure. ‘Sure,’ he admitted.
“What do you do when you feel that?” I asked. “I go
back to basics,” he said easily. Of course. It’s what
he would have to have said. Keep your eye on the ball.
Breathe.”
Alan Arkin. An Improvised Life: a memoir (Detroit:
Thorndike Books, 2011)
**
SELF PORTRAIT
My entire life, I honestly have had no idea who the
hell I am. It’s still that way. I look at myself as
just another idiot wandering planet Earth with no
real idea what makes the world go ‘round, no
particular identity, just another lost soul.”
JAMES PATTERSON
Laura Miller. “So That Happened” in The New Yorker
June 20, 2022)
**
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
The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it,
but that we know at sight that we would never forget it.”
Robert Frost. Wisdom. Volume 38.
**
EMILY DICKINSON ON SPELLING
“Orthography always baffled me, and to N’s I had
an especial aversion, as they always seemed unfinished
M’s.”
**
CARPE DIEM
I am writing for today only,
If I cd only remember
What day it is.
LJP
**
ABOUT THINGS THAT GIVE PLEASURE
“When a poem that you’ve composed for some event,
or in an exchange of poems, is talked of by everyone and
noted down when they hear it. This hasn’t yet happened
to me personally, but I can imagine how it would feel.”
Sei Shonagon. The Pillow Book (Circa 1000)
**
A DOCTOR SO LAZY
HE CAN COMPOSE
ONLY 2/17th OF A HAIKU
Say ah!
**
ABOUT A RELATIVELY FORGOTTEN POET
ABRAHAM COWLEY wrote A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy (1661)and for a time acted
as a cipher secretary to the Queen of England when she
was in France.poet and essayist Abraham Cowley was born
in London, England, in 1618. He displayed early talent
as a poet, publishing his first collection of poetry,
Poetical Blossoms (1633), at the age of 15. Cowley
studied at Cambridge University but was stripped of
his Cambridge fellowship during the English Civil War
and expelled for refusing to sign the Solemn League
and Covenant of 1644. In turn, he accompanied Queen
Henrietta Maria to France, where he spent 12 years
in exile serving as her secretary. During this time,
Cowley completed The Mistress (1647). Arguably his
most famous work, the collection exemplifies Cowley’s metaphysical style of love poetry. After the Restoration,
Cowley returned to England, where he was reinstated
as a Cambridge fellow and earned his MD before finally
retiring to the English countryside. He is buried at
Westminster Abbey alongside Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund
Spenser.
THE POETRY FOUNDATION
**
From DRINKING by Abraham Crowley
The busy sun (and one would guess
By's drunken fiery face no less)
Drinks up the sea, and when h'as done,
The moon and stars drink up the sun.
They drink and dance by their own light,
They drink and revel all the night.
Nothing in Nature's sober found,
But an eternal health goes round.
Fill up the bowl then, fill it high,
Fill all the glasses there, for why
Should every creature drink but I,
Why, man of morals, tell me why?
**
THE AMBULANCE
“A poet has only one indispensable quality:
whether he is simple or complicated, people
must need him. Poetry, if its genuine, is not
a racing car rushing senselessly around
A closed track; it is an ambulance rushing
to save someone.”
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
**
From A PRECOCIOUS AUTOBIOGRAPHY , translated
by Andrew R.MacAndrew (New York: E.P. Dutton
& Co.1963)
**
THE FREEDOM TO MAKE POETRY OF EVERYTHING
“Theoretically we are free to make poetry
of everything in the universe; in practice
we are kept within the old limits, for the
simple reason that no great man has
appeared to show us how we can use our
freedom. A certain amount of the life of
the twentieth century is to be found in poetry,
but precious little of its mind.”
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley. Collected Essays (New York:
Bantam Books, 1960)
**
DEBTS
The cohesive sky
With multiple blues
Hovers over me,
Teasing me
Because I am in its debt,
But the sky
Does not owe anyone
One red cent.
Louis Phillips
"In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman
under thirty who is not actively employed in a
brothel."
Ben Hecht
**
CEDRIC HARDWICKE WITH LIVER IN HIS EARS
“I sat in the furnace blast of sunshine wondering
idly why Hollywood trees hold so little sap and
provide so little shade, breathing with some
difficulty around the pieces of prime calves’ liver
which were plugging each nostril. Two more pieces
of the stuff were stuck into each ear. Over the
scene hung the odor of a butcher’s shop, which
the increasing heat was doing nothing to sweeten.
“The purpose of the liver was to insure that in
the action about to unfold before the motion picture
cameras a dog would lick my face with every
appearance of devotion….”
Sir Cedric Hardwicke, as told to James Brough.
A Victorian in Orbit (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday &
Company, Inc. 1961)
**
STREET NAME
The main street of Kingman, Arizona, near his
birthplace of Flagstaff is named Andy Devine
Boulevard.
IMDB Trivia
**
WHAT MAKES A SCI-FI FILM A CLASSIC
“ What counts in sci-fi movies (and what makes
a sci-fi movie a classic ) is the gimmicky,
eerie metaphor-– the disguised form of the thing
you fear, or are set off by.”
Pauline Kael. The New Yorker (November 26, 1970)
**
THE $40,000 ROSE
“John Huston made a movie in which he wanted a rose,
and the production department agreed that he would
have it. This was in Africa – it could have been
The African Queen –and he refused to shoot until
he had it. They were on location that day, and he
said “ Where’s the rose?” Somebody said, Well, we
thought we’d get an orchid. “No, I want a rose.”
Can we shoot that scene next week?
“No, we’re going to shoot it now . I want the rose.”
“So they stopped shooting for a day and a
half while they scouted out roses in Paris, flew
somebody to pick it up and package it and fly it
down in a case. And, of course, they didn’t just
buy one rose. They bought two dozen, so they’d have
them on hand. They called it the $40,000 rose,
because that’s how much it cost by the time they got it.”
Tony Curtis and Barry Paris. The Autobiography
(New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993).
**
ALFRED HITCHCOCK AND NORTH BY NORTHWEST
“Hitchcock had a permit to film on the immortalized
heads of these four presidents. But, as legend has
it, once government officials heard the scene involved
a fight and two deaths, they banned the production.
Hitchcock used long shots of the real Mount Rushmore
in the film, but for the chase on the stone faces,
he had a 91-foot canvas painted.
...
Hitchcock had a permit to film on the immortalized
heads of these four presidents. But, as legend has
it, once government officials heard the scene involved
a fight and two deaths, they banned the production.
Hitchcock used long shots of the real Mount Rushmore
in the film, but for the chase on the stone faces,
he had a 91-foot canvas painted. Several hands
worked on it, and, as was often the case, the full
list of artists remains unknown. for a reason...
“Art of the Hollywood Backdrop: Cinema’s Creative
Legacy” is on at the Boca Raton Museum of Art
through January 22, 2023
Jensen Davis is an Associate Editor for AIR MAIL
***
MARGOT KIDDER PLAYED LOIS LANEIN 4 SUPERMAN FILMS STARRING CHRISTOPHER REEVES
Although Margot Kidder was born in Yellowknife,
the road that is named Lois Lane in Yellowknife
is actually named after a long time Yellowknife
resident Lois Little and not after her character
in the movies.
IDMB TRIVIA
**
THE CHILD STAR JANE WITHERS GROWS OLD
Jane withers.
**
I Love You, Maria -- Feature Film FundraisingFundraising video from BURNHAM HOLMES
I Love You, Maria -- Feature Film Fundraising
Great news! We are making a feature film based
on our award-winning Zoom Shorts episode \"I
Love You, Maria\"! But we need your help. Please
take a look at our fundraising video and
IndieGoGo page. Lots of great perks. We greatly
appreciate any contribution. Even if you can't
contribute, sharing the page helps immensely.
Thank you for helping ...
www.youtube.com
Short interview with director and actor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B3IQSzQfvM
MAIDS OF HONOUR
“Perhaps I had been sent out for the newspaper,
for the papers, brought by sea from Liverpool,
arrived in the shop about this time of day. Or
possibly my errand was to buy three of the little
cakes called Maids of Honour, to be eaten after
the cold meats of the evening meal.”
Frank Kermonde. Not Entitled (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1995)
**
ON BACON
“The old Dutch for ‘bacon’ is baec, and the Anglo-
Saxon for ‘back,’ is also baec; to save one’s bacon
seems, therefore, equivalent to saving one’s back—
from a beating. Moreover it is the back of the pig
that was, and still is, chiefly made into bacon – the
legs are hams.”
Basil Hargrave. Origins and Meanings of Popular
Phrases & Names (London: T. Werner Laurie Ltd.,
MCMXXV
**
HELLO MISTER CHIPS
“Americans consume about 1.85 Billion Pounds
of Potato Chips annually , or around 6.6 pounds
per person.”
Brandon Tensley. “Crunch Time” in Smithsonian
(January/February 2022)
**
RICHARD BURTON AT THE FOUR SEASONS
“Burton was prone to surprising those around him.
Once, for example, at New York’s posh Four Season’s
restaurant at dinner, he ordered a strange meal:
French fries between two pieces of buttered bread.
He explained that it was the kind of sandwich he
used to enjoy when he was a boy back in Fort Talbot,
Wales.”
Jeffrey Lyons. Stories My Father Told Me: Notes
From ‘The Lyons Den’ (New York: Abbeville, 2011)
**
‘ON ENGLISH PUDDINGS
“Ah, where are the puds of yesteryear? Spotted Dick:
fine, crusted suet pudding studded with a galaxy
of plump currants. Boiled Baby: heavy, densely-textured
pudding boiled in a cloth. A characteristic soft
coating, known to aficionados as “the slime” was
scraped gently off the outside before the pudding
was anointed with very hot golden syrup. Figgy Duff:
the Prince of Suet puddings, very popular in the
Royal Navy, both as food and for pressing into
service as keel ballast, emergency anchor, or
ammunition for the cannons. An inch-and-a-half
slice of a good Figgy Duff weighed about three
and a quarter pounds..”
Frank Muir
Frank Muir & Denis Norden . Upon My Word!
(London:Eyre Methuen Ltd, 1974)
**
JALAPENO PEPPERS
“Xalapa” comes from the Nahuatl (a language spoken
by the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican groups) word xalli,
meaning “sand,” and apan, meaning “spring,” and it was
from this fertile “spring in the sand” that jalapeños
first took root. Even today, residents of Xalapa are
known as “Xalapeños,” which simply means “from Xalapa.”
From INTERESTING FACTS WEBSITE
**
WOODY ALLEN ON HIS DIET OF CHOICE
PLAYBOY: “Are you on a nature-food kick?
ALLEN: Yes. The best thing is a good piece of lumber – sequoia , if possible;
if not, some of the hairier lichens. The best diet is fatty and cholesterol-rich,
with gigantic amounts of sweets. Heavy smoking on top of all that builds
the body. Exposure to radioactivity doesn’t hurt either.”
Playboy Interview (May 1967)
**
ON SOUR CREAM IN THE CATSKILL MOUNTAINS
“For some reason, the Jews in the Borscht Belt
had strange affinity for sour cream. They loved
it on their blintzes. They loved it on their
potato pancakes. They loved it on their chopped
crunchy vegetables like radishes, celery, carrots,
etc. And if nobody was looking they gobbled it down
all by itself with nothing but a huge tablespoon.
Sour cream, unfortunately, was loaded with
cholesterol. The normal cholesterol levels for
healthy people should be between 150 and 200.
I would say the average cholesterol of the
sour-cream-loving Jews who came to the Borscht
Belt was probably1500—2000.”
Mel Brooks. All About Me: My Remarkable Life in Show Business (New York: Ballantine Books, 2021)
**
DINING WITH CANNIBALS
The night I was served the brains of Ronald Reagan
Was the night I decided to become a vegan.
LJP
“In view of the fact that I was once again on my feet, instead of flat on my back, the concept of ‘later’ suddenly seemed less quixotic than realistic. If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”
Clive James. Latest Readings (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2015)
**
ON READING THE WISH BOOK – THE SEARS AND ROEBUCK CATALOGUE IN THE LATE 1930s
“ The Sears and Roebuck catalogue was much better used
as a Wish Book, which it was called by the people out
in the country, who would never be able to order anything
out of it, but could spend hours dreaming over.
Willalee Bookatee and I used it for another reason. We
made stories out of it, used it to spin a web of fantasy
about us. Without that catalogue our childhood would
have been radically different. The federal government
ought to strike a medal for the Sears, Roebuck company
for bringing all that color and all that mystery and
all that beauty into the lives of country people.
I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue
because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off,
a toe split, an ear half-chewed away….
Harry Crews. A Childhood: The Biography of a Place
(New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1978)
**
A FORGOTTEN BOOK
“The Destiny Man concerns a ham actor who seizes a
last chance for stage fame when he discovers a lost Shakespearean play left behind on a train. There
is a crime involved, but the novel’s impetus
derives from knowing that the hero – who has
wangled sole rights to the play’s performance –
is going to turn the event into a hilarious
fiasco when he tries to rise to the role’s
challenge. Van Greenaway even has the nerve
to create chunks of the bard’s missing play
from scratch, and pulls them off with enormous
dispatch. The ending is a surprise and too
delightful to be given away here.”
Christopher Fowler. The Book of Forgotten Authors
(London: Riverrun, 2017)
**
THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF CASANOVA’S 12 VOLUMES OF HIS MEMOIR—“HISTOIRE DE MA VIE”— HELD BY A GERMAN PUBLISHER
The original handwritten manuscript, penned in
French, was “under lock and key, where it barely
survived the bombing of Leipzig, in 1943. Two
years later, Winston Churchill made a worried
inquiry and an Army vehicle was dispatched to
evacuate it from the rubble. The complete text
was first published in 1960 (the year that a
British jury found redeeming social value in
Lady Chatterley’s Lover”).
Judith Thurman. “In Flagrante” in The New Yorker
(June 27, 2022)
**
DESCARTES IN HIS DREAM READS A BOOK
“On the night of 10-11 November 1619 Descartes,
then aged twenty-three, had three dreams which
he considered came from high, and took the trouble
to write down and interpret in some detail.
Unfortunately his own account of them is not extant;
but the account given by Baillet, in his Vie de
Mr. Des-Cartes, from which I shall be quoting,
can be taken as fairly close to Descartes’s own.”
Alice Browne
…
“In this final dream, he found a book on his table,
without knowing who had put it there. He opened it,
and seeing it was a Dictionary, he was delighted,
hoping it could be very useful to him. At the same
moment, he found another book under his hand, with
which he was equally unfamiliar, not knowing from
where it had come to him. He found it was a collection
of poems by different authors, entitled Corpus Poetarum
Etc. He had the fancy to read something in it; opening
the book , he fell upon the verse Quod vitae sectabor
iter? (What path in life shall I follow?). At the
same moment, he noticed a man whom he did not , but who
showed him a piece of verse, beginning with Est & Non,
(Yes and No) and praised it to him as an excellent
piece. M. Descartes told him he knew what it was,
and this piece was one of the Idylls of Ausonius,
which were to be found in the big collection of
poets which was on the table…”
Alice Brown. “Descartes’s Dreams” in the Journal of the Warburg and Coutland Institute, vol 40 (1977)
**
FROM J.D. SALINGER’S THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
“You take that book Of Human Bondage, by Somerset
Maugham, , though I read it last summer. It’s a
pretty good book and all, but I wouldn’t want to
call Somerset Maugham. I don’t know. He just
isn’t the kind of guy I’d want to call up, that’s
all,”
**
ON PLAYBOY & BOCCACCIO
“Ah, yes, the sultan’s daughter. Haven’t I heard
that one before? Yes, in Playboy, perhaps, where
Boccaccio showed up in the “Ribald Classics” section
back there in the mid-fifties. Stealing the magazine
from beneath a counselor’s bed at camp (I was thirteen
or fourteen ), I may have read a Boccaccio tale or
two, finding the stories between a photo of Jayne
Mansfield lying heavily in the grass and was so serious
– yes, there amid Hef’s interminable ‘philosophy’ and
pages of redundant debonair balderdash (dating, food,
clothes, jazz), there would be Boccaccio, in
shortened form, accompanied by a cartoon.’
David Denby. Great Books(New York:
Simon & Schuster,1996)
**
LITERARY MATTERS ARE NOT ALEWAYS
WHAT THEY SEEM
This 400 page novel is a master of disguise.
*
MY POETICAL INDEBTEDNESS
TO A.E.HOUSMAN
A.E.
I.O.U.
**
ON READING ABOUT LITTLE ELSIE DINSMORE
As I pondered weak & weary,
My eyes grew moist & then quite teary.
I cried & cried. I cd not stop.
I am a sucker for sentimental slop.
LJP
ZEN AND THE ART OF READING POETRY
The sadness that tells me I shall be sad,
The happiness that tells me I shall be sad.
LJP
**
ON A POEM WAITING TO BE WRITTEN
“ I keep thinking of this poem that should contain
the line ‘his father built him a house with beams
of human ribs.’ But I can’t get beyond the imagery
of that line.”
Alice Walker in Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, edited by Valerie Boyd
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022
**
PHILIP LARKIN
Philip Larkin,
Pulling into a parkin
g garage near Leeds, scraped his car’s bonnet.
(Perhaps this wd sound better as an Italian sonnet?)
**
POETIC RECOGNITION SCENES
“The history of poetry contains many accounts of what
might be called poetic recognition scenes, meetings
where the poet comes face to face with something or
someone in the outer world recognized as vital to
the poet’s inner creative life, and accounts of
these meetings represent some of the highest
achievements in the art.”
Seamus Heaney. “ ‘Apt Admonishment’ : Wordsworth
as an Example” in The Hudson Review (Spring, 2008)
Examples mentioned by Heaney: Dante’s meeting with
Vergil in The Inferno, T.S. Eliot encounter with ghost
of Yeats in “Little Gidding” and William Wordsworth’s
encounter with a leech gatherer in “Resolution and
Independence.”
**
WHAT DOES POETRY MAKE HAPPEN?
"For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper..."
from 'IN MEMORY OF W.B.YEATS 'by W.H. Auden
“When Auden said his poetry didn’t save a single Jew
from the gas chambers, he was dead right.”
Tom Stoppard in 1973
**
EZRA POUND
Ezra Pound
On his keyboard found
The symbol #
& when he learned what it meant, he cursed %^&&#.
**
ON CONDENSED METAPHORS
“Metaphor and Simile are fundamental to civilized speech:
but they have one serious disadvantage, the moment you
say one thing is ‘like’ another , you remind the reader
that the two things are, after all, different; and there
may be an effect of dilution and long-windedness which is inimical to poetry. The poet, therefore, condenses his
metaphor. Hart Crane in Voyages III, referring to the
rhythm of the motion of a boat through a thickly
clustered archipelago, speaks of ‘adagios of islands’. Similarly, in Faustus and Helen III the speed and altitude
of an aeroplane are suggested by the idea of ‘nimble blue plateaus’…”
Michael Roberts. The Faber Book of Modern Verse
(London: Faber and Faber, 1965)
**
EDMUND SPENSER
Edmund Spenser
Was not much of a fencer. Hence, sir,
He wd with pen & ink prefer to toil,
Dispensing with epee, saber & foil.
**
THE AWAKENING OF CONSCIOUSNESS
“In closing I want to tell you about a dream I had
last summer. I dreamed I was asked to read my
poetry at a mass woman’s meeting, but when I began
to read what came out were the lyrics of a blues
song. I share this dream with you because it seemed
to me to say something about the problems and the
future of the woman writer, and probably of women
in general. The awakening of consciousness is not
like the crossing of a frontier – one step and
you are in another country.”
Adrienne Rich. “ When We Dead Awaken: Writing as
Re-Vision” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected
Prose 1966-1978 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979)
**
from CELEBRATIONS & BEWILDERMENTS“They were learning to draw,” the dormouse went on,
yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting
very sleepy; “...and they drew all manner of
things—everything that begins with an M—”
“Why with an M?” said Alice. “Why not?”
said the March Hare.
My muse makes merry, Much music
Made mirthful, Moon-mad.
More, more, more, More mischief. My mien
Mirrors
My moods,
My mind,
My manners,
Metered motion,
My muse makes melody.
Metaphor mends me,
My mad medley,
Man-matrixed.
Matter mold me,
Mouth mysteries,
Mute miracles.
Mountebank, mourn me,
My measured masque.
My muse moves me.
My metaphor mends me.
Louis Phillips
V.S. NAIPAUL’S LAUGHTER
“…V.S. Naipaul’s laughter was more than a laugh.
It was a surprise bellow of appreciation, made
resonant by tobacco smoke and asthma. It made
you wonder whether he saw something you didn’t.”
Paul Theroux. “The Enigma of Friendship”
**
OSCAR WILDE’S BROTHER DESCRIBED BY MAX BEERBOHM
“At Broadstairs Max met Oscar Wilde’s brother
Willie—nearly as amusing as Oscar but without
his charm.
“Quel monster! Dark, oily , suspect yet awfully
like Oscar: he has Oscar’s coy, carnal smile and
famous giggle and not a little of Oscar’s esprit.
But he is awful –a veritable tragedy of family-likeness.”
David Cecil. Max (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1964)
**
ELIZABETH WILKINSON
“We cannot doubt that the women fighters were athletes
too. Elizabeth Wilkinson (later, Stokes) fought with
swords, knives, quarter-staff, and her fists, for at
least nine years in the amphitheaters of London. One
eyewitness describes how these fighting women took
the stage with a surgeon present to sew up their cuts
as the fight progressed, to allow them to continue.
Elizabeth Wilkinson/Stokes was the star, and in 1723
was described as the City Championess, but by 1726
she had progressed to Championess of England, and
in 1728 to European Championess. Her adversaries
described her as bold, celebrated, famous, victorious,
and, an impregnable fortress, and commented on her
resoluteness. Others said that she had been train’d
from her Cradle to the Toils of War. She wasn’t
reticent about her own ability either, and said of
herself that she was invincible, and that she had
always come off with victory, and was an Orb above
her Sex; so, an undefeated champion. Does William
Hogarth give us a glimpse of her in the top-left
corner of the advertising card that he produced
for James Figg and his amphitheater? We know
that she fought there in the early 1720s before
moving on, with her second husband, to appear
in their own amphitheater.”
from
Glimpses of women athletes in 18th-century England
February 11, 2022 | By Peter Radford
**
NOEL COWARD & THE COMPOSITION OF “MAD DOGS
AND ENGLISHMEN
"Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun."
(The saying "Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out
in the midday sun" is believed to have been coined
by Rudyard Kipling.) The song begins with the first
10 notes of "Rule Britannia". This song is considered
a patter song, because the lyrics are mostly spoken
rather than sung. One of the memorable lines in
the first chorus is "But Englishmen detest a siesta".
According to Sheridan Morley, Coward wrote the
song while driving from Hanoi to Saigon "without pen,
paper, or piano". Coward himself elucidated: "I
wrestled in my mind with the complicated rhythms and
rhymes of the song until finally it was complete,
without even the aid of pencil and paper. I sang it
triumphantly and unaccompanied to my traveling
companion on the verandah of a small jungle guest
house. Not only Jeffrey [Amherst], but the gecko
lizards and the tree frogs gave every vocal indication
of enthusiasm".
from WIKIPEDIA
**
AUDIE MURPHY & TONY CURTIS & THE
HANDKERCHIEF GAME
“… Audie was a great Western star. Nobody could outdraw
him. One day he said, “Let’s play drop the handkerchief.”
I didn’t know what that was, but Audie explained it:
The two rivals stood holding the ends of a big bandana
between their teeth. The first one that dropped the
handkerchief could reach for his gun. Audie never
dropped the handkerchief first; he always waited
for the other guy, and he still beat everybody.
“What I didn’t know was some of the guns had blanks
in them and some didn’t. I thought we were just fooling
around with empty guns, but he had two guns -—an empty
one in his holster and one with a blank in it behind
his back. When I dropped my end of the handkerchief,
he pressed the one gun into my belly and fired the
other behind his back. I heard the shot, smelled
the gunpowder, looked down, and saw smoke rising.
Then I fainted. They carried me into one of the
makeup rooms to bring me around. Everybody got a
big fuckin’ laugh out of it. Audie apologized for
years and we became friends later, sort of, but
I never really liked him after that.”
Tony Curtis and Barry Paris. The Autobiography (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993).
ON THE FUNERAL OF MANOLETE
“He was known as Manolete and is almost invariably
described as the best bullfighter of the 1940s and
among the greatest of all time. When Manolete died
a British newspaper reported that the funeral went
on for four hours and a military plane flew low
overhead, showering the 100,000 mourners in attendance
with red carnations. An American reporter wrote:
“Manolete’s death carries for his followers the
impact that the death of the entire Brooklyn Dodger
team would produce in Flatbush.”
Jon Mooallem. “Manolete and Me” in The New York Times Magazine (May 8, 2022)
**
ALBERT SCHWEITZER
Albert Schweitzer at Lamberene
Preferred the Pipe Organ to the tambourine,
Playing ad hoc
Johann Sebastian Bach.
**
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
Elizabeth Hardwicke
Had a wick-
ed & cutting wit.
What else do I know about E.H.? That’s it.
LJP
**
DEATH RAYS
"The most spectacular of the proposed application
of electricity was the death ray, a concentrated
beam of electricity that could destroy people,
vehicles, or structures. H.G.Wells is usually
credited with first imagining the death ray
wielded by the invading Martians in his 1898
War of The Worlds, and may have been inspired by
the discovery of x-rays a few years earlier."
John J. Corn and Brian Hoppigan. Yesterday's
Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future
(The John Hopkins University Press, 1984)
**
ON GOOGLE & OUR SENSE OF THE PRESENT
“Teaching students nurtured on Google, it’s often
worrying how weak their grasp of chronology is:
the cybersphere may be geographically vast and
marvelously interconnected, but it is happening in
an eternal present.”
Marina Warner. “Wimple Networks” in The New York Review of Books (June 23, 2022)
**
HOW TO PLAY THE STOCK MARKET
“If you are ready and able to give up everything
else, and will study the market and every stock
listed there as carefully as a medical student
studies anatomy, and will glue your nose to the
ticker tape at the opening of every day of the year
and never take it off till night; if you can do
all that, and in addition have the cool nerve of
a gambler, the sixth sense of a clairvoyant and
the courage of a lion -- you have a Chinaman's
chance.”
Bernard M. Baruch
**
GHOSTS
“Almost everything in the room will survive you. To
the room you are already a ghost, a pathetic soft
thing, coming and going.”
Don Paterson
Don Paterson. Best Thought, Worse Thought
Graywolf Press, 2008)
**
BIRDS & HOW THEY SLEEP
“Birds can be seen sleeping while perched on a branch,
standing on one foot or clinging to bark. Some even
sleep while flying, studies show that birds can let
one side of their brains sleep while the other side
remains awake. They may also restrict full rapid eye
movement (REM) sleep to only a part of the brain at
a time, allowing them to maintain a standing posture
while grabbing those deep zzz’s…”
Helen James, curator of birds, National Museum
of Natural History . “Ask Smithsonian” in
Smithsonian Magazine (April/May 2022).
**
HEAT & THE HUMAN BODY
“The human body has evolved to shed heat in two main
ways. Blood vessels swell, carrying heat to the skin
so it can radiate away and sweat erupts onto the skin,
cooling it by evaporation. When those mechanisms fall,
we die. It sounds straightforward; it’s actually a
complex, cascading collapse.”
Elizabeth Royte. “Too Hot To Live” in
National Geographic (July 2021)
**
THE INTERNET
“The internet is the superhighway of
grammatically incorrect moral outrage.”
Kathryn Borel. Interview with Nora Ephron
in The Believer (March 2012)
**
ON PUNCTUATION
Punctuation is pointless Commas trip us up.
Colons are intestines leading from little to
less Semicolons neither one thing nor the other
Quotation marks to be purged of irony and ostentation
Dashes fall over their own feet The long dash is
afraid to speak its mind. Inverted commas are
plainly bent Question marks are commonly rude
and exclamations Accents remain in use until
defunct by natural wastage Hyphens serve only
to prevent mis-conception Italics are foreign
and to be treated as such Brackets encourage
second thoughts The full stop is a last resort.
D.J. Enright . Interplay: a kind of commonplace book(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
**
PUNCTUATION (a reply to Mr. Enright)
Ending a sentence without a period is pointless
Why do we need the question mark?
Mary Norris, The Grammar Detective, decided
to tail the commas.
“ Dashes fall over their own feet The long
dash is afraid to speak its mind” –- tell it
to Emily Dickinson.
I decided to staple the [brackets]
**
A VERY BRIEF WEATHER REPORT
Sunless
...unless.
LJP
">“The 75th anniversary of the publication of Le Petit Prince in France is commemorated by a
single 1.08 e stamp available in a sheet of 15.
First available in the United States in 1943,
it was banned by Vichy France and not published
until after the liberation. The novella was
written by writer and aviator Antoine
de Saint-Exupery and is the story of a young
prince who visits various planets and learns
about ‘loneliness, friendship, friendship,
love, and loss.’ “
William Silvester. “New World Issues” in The
American Philatelist (September 2021)
**
ON THE BEST SELLING NOVEL --THE DOGS OF WAR --AND
A SUCCESSFUL INVASION TO OVER THROW A REPUBLIC
‘There need only be five rules, Strike hard,
strike fast, and strike by night. Come unexpected
and come by sea. Parenthetically, the eventual
book was imitated twice. In 1975, the French
mercenary, Bob Denard attacked and took over
the Comoro Islands, at the top of the Mozambique
Channel.
“He was acting with the knowledge, assistance,
and on behalf of the French government. Amusingly,
as the French mercenaries came up the beach in the
predawn darkness, they all carried a paperback edition
of Les Chiens de Guerre (The Dogs of War) so that they
could constantly find out what they were supposed to
do next. Denard succeeded because he came by sea.”
Frederick Forsyth. The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue.
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2015)
**
ON THE DISCOVERY OF POETRY BY A WORLD WAR II SOLDIER
“I discovered poetry as a soldier during World
War II.In 1943, my unit, having finished Basic
Training in Miami Beach, was boarding a troop
train for a slow journey of several days across
the country to an unknown destination, when a
Red Cross worker handed us a bag of necessities
for the trip, a toothbrush, comb, candy bar –
and a paperback. My book was, fatefully, a
Louis Untermeyer anthology of a great poems
of the English Language, which I devoured on
the train. Three days later when I got off
that train I knew what I wanted to be –a poet
– in spite of, at the age of eighteen,
never having written a line.”
Edward Field. The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag.
(Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin,
2005)
**
ON UPLIFTING POEMS & BOOKS FOR CHILDREN
IN THE VICTORIAN ERA
“The rot set in with Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who,
‘though slightly too passive to qualify as one
of the new breed of naughty children, has great
trouble trying to remember the improving poems
she has been made to learn and instead recites
inspired nonsensical parodies’ (Peter Keating),
and with such authors of books for children a
s S.R.Crockett, whose The Surprising Adventures
of Sir Toady Lion (1897) bore the provocative
subtitle, ‘An Improving History for Old Boys,
Good Boys, Bad Boys, Big Boys, Little Boys,
Little Boys, Cow-Boys, and Tom-Boys’.1897
also saw the publication of What Maisie Knew.
Henry James didn’t go for subtitles.”
D. J. Enright. Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
**
ON THE SMELL OF GREAT BOOKS
“I love the fact that I went to the library and
read every book there. So I loved touching the
books, smelling the books. The great books are
best not only when they read well, but they smell
nice. A new book smells fine, but an old book
smells even better. Books are that important to me.”
Ray Bradbury. Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview and
Other Conversations, edited by Sam Weller (Brooklyn:
Melville House, 2014)
**
ON THE SMELL OF NEW BOOKS
“…my sweetest memory of college is on the nuzzling,
sedate side. At the beginning of each semester, I
would stand before the books required for my courses,
prolonging the moment, like a kid looking through
the store window at a bicycle he knows his parents
will buy for him. I would soon possess these things,
but the act of buying them could be put off. Why
rush it? The required books for each course were
laid out in shelves in the college bookstore. I
would stare at them a long time, lifting them,
turning through the pages, pretending I didn’t
really need this one or that, laying it down
and then picking it up again. If no one was
looking, I would even smell a few of them and
feel the pages….”
David Denby. Great Books (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1996)
**
ERNEST HEMINGWAY MENTIONS JUST ABOUT THE BEST BOOK
EVER WRITTEN ON THE CLAP
“ Now take The Big Sky by [A.B. Guthrie] . That was
a very good book in many ways, and it was very good
on one of the diseases…just about the best book ever
written on the clap.” Hemingway smiled.
Robert Manning. “Hemingway in Cuba” in
The Atlantic Monthly (December 1954)
**
WHAT I HAVE LEARNED FROM
STUDENTS IN MY ENGLISH CLASS
The Wife of Bath
Is an important character
In The Grapes of Wrath.
**
WHAT I HAVE LEARNED FROM
STUDENTS IN MY ENGLISH CLASS (2)
None of my students think it odd
That Captain Queeg
Is with Queequeg
On the U.S. Peguod.
LJP
“Hence the advice that JR receives from a pal:
‘When you Suck at writing, you become a journalist.’
No comment.”
Anthony Lane, concluding his review of “The
Tender Bat” in The New Yorker (January 17, 2022)
**
TORCHY BLANE, FICTIONAL REPORTER
Glenda Farrell played Torchy Blane, a daring female
reporter in a series of popular films; which later
was credited by comic book writer Jerry Siegel as
the inspiration for the DC Comics reporter, Lois Lane.
WIKIPEDIA -GLENDA FARRELL
**
A REAL JOURNALIST
"In the summer of 1960, I was working nights
at the New York Post, an afternoon tabloid,
trying to learn my imperfect craft. I started
each shift at one a.m. and finished most mornings,
at eight. Then if I had a few dollars in my
pocket, I would go to the Page One, a saloon on
Greenwich Street, and wait for the first edition,
which arrived fresh off the presses at nine. At
the bar, in the company of older professionals,
I received a good part of my professional education.
They examined headlines, often with a bilious eye.
They scrutinized stories, including my own. They
issued fierce criticisms, savage, often hilarious
indictments. They told me what I should never
do again, and I tried hard not to repeat my
latest published barbarism. I was never happier."
Pete Hamill. Downtown: My Manhattan (New York:
Little, Brown and company, 2004)
**
ANOTHER REAL JOURNALIST-- MOLLY IVINS
In her syndicated column, which appeared in
about 350 newspapers, Ms. Ivins cultivated
the voice of a folksy populist who derided
those who she thought acted too big for their
britches. She was rowdy and profane, but she
could filet her opponents with droll precision.
After Patrick J. Buchanan, as a conservative
candidate for president, declared at the 1992
Republican National Convention that the United
States was engaged in a cultural war, she said
his speech “probably sounded better in the
original German.”
Katharine Q. Seelye. from the obituary for
Molly Ivins, Columnist, in The New York Times
Feb. 1, 2007
**
CARL BERNSTEIN BEGINS HIS CAREER IN NEWSPAPER
REPORTING AS A COPYBOY AT AGE 16
“People were shouting. Typewriters clattered and
chinged. Beneath my feet I could feel the rumble
of the presses. In my whole life I had never heard
such purposeful commotion as I now beheld in that
newsroom. By the time I had walked from one end
to the other, I knew that I wanted to be a
newspaperman.”
Carl Bernstein. A Kid in the Newsroom (NY:
Henry Holt& Company,2021)
**
CLAY FELKER & THE BIRTH OF THE NEW JOURNALISM OF GAY TALESE, TOM WOLF , AND GAIL SHEEHY
“The New Journalism would grow into a movement.
But the form wasn’t really all that new. Clay
had stumbled upon it back in the Duke library
when he came upon bound volumes of the Civil
War-era Tribune. Horace Greeley’s famous
nineteenth-century newspaper. He began to read
gripping accounts from the Virginia battlefield,
not from a disinterested correspondent but vivid
stories with narrative structure written by
soldiers in the trenches.”
Gail Sheehy. Daring: My Passages (New York:
HarperCollins, 2014)
**
DESI ARNEZ & LUCILLE BALL LEARN FROM WALTER WINCHELL THAT LUCY IS PREGNANT (p.117)
In 1950, Lucy and Desi travelled to New York City.
“She arrived on Friday and made clandestine
arrangements for a pregnancy test, using her
hairdresser’s name to avoid publicity. That
Sunday night she and Desi were relaxing in
their dressing room. Desi fell asleep to the
clack of Lucy’s knitting needles and staccato
of Walter Winchell doing his radio broadcast.
The next few moments were right out of a
vaudeville skit, but they were real.
“After ten childless years of marriage,”
said Winchell, “Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz are infanticipating!”
Lucy dropped her knitting and woke up her
husband. “We’re going to have a baby!”
Desi rubbed his eyes. “How d’ya know?
We aren’t suppose to hear until tomorrow.”
“Winchell just told me.”
“ How d’ya like dat?”
Actually they were delighted, even though
the couple resented Winchell’s notorious practice
of bribing doctors, nurses, and medical technicians
to get inside information on ailing or pregnant
celebrities.”
Stefan Kanfer. Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art ofLucille Ball (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2003)
**
WALTER WINCHELL
Walter Winchell
In a pinch'll
Quote a joke or a quip
Or repeat gossip from a hot tip.
LJP
PhillipsMiscellany 