PhillipsMiscellany

BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: POETS & POETRY

POE or 30d

EMILY DICKINSON COULD TALK YOUR HEAD OFF

"Emily Dickinson could talk your head off with a remark. When I was in the early stages of writing her biography I ran across a few that put me on my guard. There was the one about the old lady who came to the door to ask about rentals in Amherst. Emily said, 'I directed her to the cemetery to save her the trouble of moving."

Richard B. Sewell."In Search of Emily Dickinson" in Extraordinary Lives, edited by William Zinsser (New York: American Heritage, 1985)
**
NICKNAME FOR A POET

CAPTAIN RAGS

“Captain Rags was the nickname given to Edmund Smith, the English poet, when he was an undergraduate at Oxford, partly on account of his being so great a sloven, and also from the tattered condition of his gown, which was always flying in rags about him…”

**
A contemporary Poet Worth knowing

"David Mason
Born and raised in Bellingham, Washington, David Mason has lived in many places. His books of poems began with The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award), and Arrivals. His verse novel, Ludlow, was published in 2007 (2nd ed. 2010), and named best poetry book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. It was also featured on the PBS News Hour and won the Colorado Book Award.

His website is: https://davidmasonpoet.com
**
THINKING ABOUT THIS POEM

Reading this poem
Will make you more intelligent,
But just think
What not reading this poem
Can do for you.

LJP
**
OF POETRY & SALAD

"I make salad like I write poetry. I put everything in. In salad -- onions, lettuce, cucumber, oil, grapefruit juice. In poetry --classical style, folk styles, sad things, happy things. But in both poetry and salads I have one rule: Everything must be fresh."
Yegeny Yevtushenko
**

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu5GdWOJ28w
Attachments area
Preview YouTube video Seimone Augustus | Hall of Fame Enshrinement Speech

Seimone Augustus | Hall of Fame Enshrinement Speech

SOUND & SENSE

"A needless Alexandrine ends the song
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length
along."

Alexander Pope from"An Essay in Criticism"
**

OF POETRY AND KITING CHECKS or WHAT IS A RHYME FOR FORGERY

The following item appeared in Time magazine’s Miscellany
For January 6, 1958:

In Jersey City , Samuel Silverman, 22, in jail
Awaiting trial on a check forgery charge, casually scribbled a verse that police promptly confiscated as evidence:

I bounced a check,
A cop bounced me.
The Judge said, “Son,
You’ll do about three.”
**

POETS & POETRY

"...W.H. Auden told us that on his own passport gave his profession as a 'writer' because 'poet' would have embarrassed people and would have been implausible since, in his words, 'everybody knows that nobody can earn a living by writing poetry.'"
Shirley Hazzard. "We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think" (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016)
**
"I used to construe only Homer and Xenophone, but I have lately been put into Aeschylus."
Matthew Arnold at age 10
**

**
SPEED READING EMILY DICKINSON

Because I cd not understand
Poetry, alas --
I took courses at university
Where I learned to read really fast --

More than 1,000 words per minute:
Dickinson, Emily--
14 verses at a glance --
Nature, ships, snakes, family --

The whole shebang in 12 seconds.
I knew much haste
Do people spend a lot of time
On rhymey stuff? What a waste!

I paused upon a line that seemed
At first a blur--
Its meaning scarcely visible --
Simile? Metaphor?

& then a dash. Eccentric.
I sped across quatrains --
Scarcely intelligible,
Then a riddle about a train --

Since then -- One minute later --
Yet feels incredibly long--
Since I first surmised --
How quickly we absorb a song;

I skimmed a naked robin,
Time left to watch Dune.
I'm done with that ditsy dame.
Who's next? John Donne?

I'll give him 16 seconds, no more.
Put on my Nikes, then out the door.

Louis Phillips

BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: WORDS,WORDS, WORDS

page from THE NEW CENTURY DICTIONARY

For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the soul within.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
quoted in metaphors be with you by Mardy Grothe
(New York: Harper, 2016)
**

COMIC BOOK SLANG

Splash Panel -- " The first panel of a comic book story, larger (sometimes, or full page) than the other panels; it acts as a 'hook; or 'teaser' for the reader. Joe Schuster started the splash panel in the 1930's."

Ron Goulart, editor. The Encyclopedia of American Comics (New York: Facts on File, 1990)

Added information from T.Campbell, editor of WORDPLAY:

I looked into this, and the real creator of the splash panel is probably Will Eisner in 1940. While Siegel and Shuster did experiment with making their panels bigger, what makes a splash panel a splash panel is that it's bigger than the other panels on the same page--Siegel and Shuster's big panels were all the same size.

http://www.multiversitycomics.com/news-columns/ghosts-of-comics-past-july-in-comics-history-acmp-jailed/

A related term is "splash page," which is a single-panel illustration that takes up the entire page.

**
ABOUT CONDITE/ RECONDITE

Recondite - (adj) Little known; abstruse.

"Remove the prefix “re-,” and you are left with the verb “condite,” which means “to pickle or preserve.” “Condite” is possibly a more recondite word than “recondite” itself."

Word Genius (July 11,2024)
https://www.wordgenius.com/words/recondite?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2234646812
**

NOT ALL WORDS LAST FOREVER

For a short period in American culture, telephones were humorously refrerred to as "Ameches," an allusion to the fact that Don Ameche played the role of the telephone's inventor in the 1939 movie -- The Alexander Graham Bell Story.
**
FROM AUTHOR AND EDUCATOR DAVID GETZ

" I went back and checked, and tonto in Spanish means silly, or stupid, depending on context. So Spanish people hearing the Lone Ranger call his buddy Tonto was probably hearing this white guy call this Indian guy silly or stupid, depending on the context. It's kind of funny if you just substitute "Silly," into the Lone Ranger's dialogue. It shifts the Lone Ranger into a gay guy in chaps."
**
THE STING & STING II Movies

The meaning and relevance of a "Sting" is that it can be defined as a confidence trick, a scam, confidence game or a con. The use of the word sting to mean this is a metaphor based on the hurt or pain of a bee sting doubling for that of being a victim of a swindle." iMDb trivia

**
SLANG FOR MARIJUANA
"Weed. Mary Jane. Chronic. There are dozens of slang synonyms for marijuana. But one of the strangest is the word pot. How did the word for a common kitchen instrument become slang for marijuana?
The origin of pot has nothing to do with the culinary tool. The word came into use in America in the late 1930s. It is a shortening of the Spanish potiguaya or potaguaya that came from potación de guaya, a wine or brandy in which marijuana buds have been steeped. It literally means “the drink of grief.”"

Dictionary Com. April 20, 2024
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGxSlWQzPGZfSfLPZBXXsfwtLSH

THE FILM INDUSTRY & THE DESTRUCTION OF WORDS
"No industry did more to destroy the meaning of words. The follies are too familiar to need laboring here -- how the story of a couple of cowboys quaarreling over a girl became an epic, the tale of a small-time 'hoofer' a deathless saga. Colossal, terrific, stupendous -- these words became the small change of film advertising. A reservation was put on a whole series of other adjectives like throbbing, rending, tingling, pulsating, pounding, sizzling, scorching, stark, elemental, volcanic, and searing. No story was ever taken from life -- it was ripped or torn from the mighty canvas of humanity."

E.S. Turner. The Shocking History of Advertising! (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1953)
**
In the Nick of Time

"During the 18th century, business owners would keep track of debts, interests, and loans on “tally sticks,” with notches carved on the wood. When you arrived to pay off your debt right before the next notch was carved, you had arrived 'in the nick of time.'"
https://www.wordgenius.com/outdated-phrases/Xr0yWBPAJQAG8w9c
**

THE TEFLON ADJECTIVE

"I loved Teflon as an adjective; it gave us a Teflon president
(Ronald Reagan) and it gave us a Teflon Don (John Gotti) whose Tefflonness eventually wore out, making him an almost exact metaphorical duplicate of my Teflon pans."

Nora Ephron. "i Just Want to Say Teflon" in I Remember Nothing
and other reflections (New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 2010)

WARNING

Please keep a safe distance
Between you & this poem.
Many careless readers
Have fallen victim
To the viciousness of words.
Words in lines 3 & 4
Have been known
To leap off the page
& bite readers in the face,
Causing great injuries
&, in some cases, numbness
To the beauty of great poetry.

Louis Phillips

BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: THE JOYS OF WRITING

ADVICE ON BECOMING A WRITER

"Alex Trocchi urged aspiring writers to go off and spend a year playing pinball. I always thought that this was verygood advice, but I could never explain even to myself, why it made such sense..."

Tom McCarthy. TYPEWRITERS BOMBS JELLYFISH
(New York: New York Review Books,2017)
**
"Anybody that admires Thomas Wolfe can be expected to like good fiction only by accident."
Flannery O'Connor
**
To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras. -Arthur Koestler,

ALLAN GURGANUS ON HIS NOVEL WHITE PEOPLE

" I’d always been told to write about what I know. And, if I know anything about anything, it’s a scrap or two about white people. How we are obsessed by rules but attracted to leaders who break them best. How we take pride in all our ancestors accomplished but accept no blame for everything they got wrong. As you remember, Rocky Mount was and is sixty-per-cent African American, so our childhoods accepted that as a universal. Don’t all workers come by bus from one side of town to clean and cook for the other? The employed made life seem possible and dignified for the employers. This was as acknowledged if ignored as oxygen is acknowledged and ignored."

interviewed in The New Yorker

By Megan Mayhew Bergman
April 23, 2023

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/how-allan-gurganus-became-a-writer

WHOOPING CRANES & ADVENTURE WRITERS

“Along with the whooping crane, the adventure story has been having a hard time of it in the country. The two seem to have followed the same pattern of decline. In the days of the open frontier, when James Fenimore Cooper was writing the first notable American adventure stories, whooping cranes were as numerous as buffalo. Ever since then, however, things have been getting rougher and rougher. At last count there were less than fifty of the big birds alive. Even so, that’s a lot more whooping cranes than there are good adventure stories.”

Hamilton Bass in The New Yorker (June 4, 1949)

THE BEST PART OF WRITING A NOVEL

When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I talk about detail I'm really talking about character, and when I talk about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries."

James Wood. How Fiction Works (2008)

PETER USTINOV’S DEDICATION OF HIS BOOK
LITTLE ME

‘To all those, who
by accident or design
have not been included
in this book

ABOUTNESS

“ I guess if there’s one thing I really care beyond anything else in the writing world , the main obsession is the story. I don’t mean to sound so simple because it’s so complex, but still, the story’s it for me. Story means more than just narration or plot. It means Aboutness . In Huckleberry Finn, the story’s more than Huck being on a raft on the river, it’s the Aboutness – the things that surround the boy along the way – that makes the story.”

Tim O’Brian
**

from an interview with Julian Barnes

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)
**
Unpublished Letter to the New York Times Book Review

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
**
WRITERS & INTERRUPTIONS

“I have spent the greater part of my life, more than fifty years, doing what I am doing now, writing in ink on a lined white pad, hoping not to be interrupted, alone and grateful for my solitude. Weekends are a waiting period, most uninvited talk (the phone, repairmen, , Jehovah’s Witnesses) drives me to distraction; national holidays are an annoyance, vacations – when I am unable to avoid them – make me impatient, unless I find a quiet place to read.”

Paul Theroux. “Diary” in London Review of Books
(20 June 2019)
**
ON DESCRIBING A PERSON

"His personality was somewhat akin to the sound a truck makes while backing up."

Alex Stone, describing fellow magician Wesley James, i
Fooling Houdini (New York: HarperCollins, 2012)

**
PUBLISHING THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Work started in earnest in 1879, after Oxford University Press signed on to finance and publish the dictionary, at the time called the New English Dictionary (NED). The staff buckled down and got to work reading and researching; editor James Murray estimated the dictionary would take about 10 years to compile. In 1884, after working on the dictionary for five years, the first fascicle (meaning a part of a book) came out. It only covered the words “a” through “ant.”

History Facts (November 12, 2024)
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQXKDdHGwcnWjtXMXpKJVgGqlSD

JULIAN BARNES

Julian Barnes
Earns
A good deal of money by writing prose.
A successful author. Alas! I am not one of those.
**
ARIEL, MY ARIEL
Everyday, my Ariel.
I put the world behind me, but it shoot bacjk.
One generation & the next.
Light as sunlight thruahing
As thru the Spanish Cedars flash
Comorants magnific with their hooked beaks.
Always a fitful cornucopia
To take the breath away.
I press my life to the jumping dayshine.
What do I demand?
More space? More freedom?
Freedom to do what? Hungering for magic,
I stand on Prospero's Isle.
Could I have been so wrong about my life?
Far out on the ocean,
Replenished & green,
One anonymous sailor
Fastens his shroud.

Louis Phillips

**
\

‘

BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: FILM #29

A STUNTMAN DESCRIBES SADDLE FALLS IN THE MOIVIE THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE

“In the final dramatic sequence, where the Lancers charge the cannons of the Russian army, I took numerous ‘saddle falls’ rigged by ‘the running W.’ A cable was strung from an old car axle, driven in the ground, and then tied to a horse’s forelegs. The designated length of cable let a rider know exactly where the horse would topple. The fall area was over a camouflaged pit of soft dirt and turf. Unfortunately, horses would often be injured, with snapped legs, due to the fierce jerk of the cable. It was a dangerous stunt for both man and horse. Riders were breaking limbs daily.”

Buster Wiles. MY DAYS WITH ERROL FLYNN (Santa Monica, California: Roundtable Publishing,Inc 1988).

**

THE STATUES OF THE MALTESE FALCON

“Three of the statuettes still exist and are conservatively valued at over $1 million each. This makes them some of the most valuable film props ever made; indeed, each is now worth more than three times what the film cost to make.”

iMBd Trivia

**
FELLINI & THE PAPARAZZI

Even though intrusive journalists have been around for centuries, meddlesome photographers didn’t have a label until the 1960s. In Federico Fellini’s famous movie La Dolce Vita, there was an iconic character named Paparazzo. He was a freelance photographer who relentlessly followed celebrities to capture sensational images. His actions represented a new type of aggressive journalism that was emerging at the time, focused on capturing the private lives of public figures.

Over the years, Fellini revealed that he chose the name Paparazzo for the character because it sounded like a “buzzing insect, hovering, darting, stinging.” The word is universally used today and even has the derivation “papped”, for subjects that have been caught on camera by such photographers.”

DICTIONARY SCOOP WEBSITE (October 12, 2024)

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQXJZwpzKwltzMXNwRBTzdrLQrV

**
ON FILMING SCENES AT ALCATRAZ PRISON FOR
POINT BLANK (1967)]

“Five loads of moviemaking equipment had to be trucked to San Francisco from the MGM studios in Culver City and then barged to Alcatraz. Two miles of cable strung throughout the prison gave it temporary lighting and some heat, but that didn’t lessen the feeling of dread enhanced by real life momento mori like a slogan penciled on a wall of the prison morgue: ‘Bob’s Mortuary. You stab ’em. We slab ’em.”

Kenneth Turan. Not To Be Missed: Fifty-Four Favorites From a Lifetime of Film (New York: Public Affairs, 2014)
**
BUCK PRIVATE (1941) starring Abbott and Costello

“Japan used this film as propaganda to demonstrate to its own troops the “incompetence” of the United States Army. The film was shown to U.S. troops in every theater of war.[“” “
Wikipedia
**

From Mark Curley: Remembering RUSSELL BAKER

Russell Baker once wrote a column about how when he was single if a woman asked him what his favorite movie was he would tell them Citizen Kane, but in
reality his favorite movie was Gunga Din.

Russell Baker wrote:
“Great stories an movies are products of their particular time. If somebody doesn’t get them down on paper or film at exactly the right moment, they’re lost forever.
“Take a movie like ”Raiders of the Lost Ark.” It had a big audience last summer and was a lot of fun to watch. Its production people said it was the ultimate Saturday-afternoon movie serial of the 1930’s. I thought it owed a lot to ”Gunga Din,” indisputably the best boy’s adventure film ever made.’

**

THE FIRST FULL-LENGTH MOVIE TO BE USED AS EVIDENCE IN A CRIMINAL CASE

“Called The Nazi Plan it is the first full-length picture ever used as evidence in a criminal trial. Assembled by the Office of Stragetic Services from Nazi propaganda was made to help convince the accused at the Nurnberg war criminal trials.”

TIME (January 7, 1946)

**
**FILM CREDITS REDUXfor GREYSTOKE : THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, LORD OF THE APES

“With Greystoke, Director Hoch Hudson hoped to deliver a more faithful representation of Burroughs original story. Academy Award-winning writer Robert Towne (Chinatown, Reds) was so unhappy with Hudson’a vision

that he asked for his name to be replaced with that of his sheepdog P.H. Vazak. The dog was duly nominated for an Oscar.”

George Tiffin. All the Best Lines (London: Head of Zeus, LTD, 2013)

Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd/ Alamy Stock Photo
Moviegoers in 3D Glasses (1952)
Photographer J.R. Eyerman’s famous shot, taken in 1952 at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood, California, captures a pivotal moment in cinema history. The image shows a sea of moviegoers, all wearing 3D glasses, transfixed by the screen while watching Bwana Devil, the first full-length color movie in 3D. (The movie’s tagline boldly promised “A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!”) Eyerman’s photo encapsulated the excitement and novelty of 3D technology in the 1950s, while also presenting a visually impactful image in its own right, with the striking uniformity of the smartly dressed, 3D-glasses-wearing audience. It has since become one of the most recognizable images of 1950s popular culture. “

HISTORY FACTS website. (Novd

JOHN KEATS & KING KONG
Truth is Beauty,
Beauty Truth,
That’s all ye need to know
In Hollywood la la land
About the movie making biz
Where cutting throats
Is a professional requirement.
Thus, This modest poem
Was going to be
A mind-bending spree,
An unforgettable feast
Of euphonic imagery
Celebrating my favorite movie star:
King Kong
Climbing to the top
Of The Empire State Building,
With a gorgeous woman
In his grip of dazzling
Sexual magnetism,
But zounds forsooth, etc.
Machine guns on bi-planes
Killed Kong, not Beauty,
As it is widely quoted.
Another famous quote:
Beauty is only skin deep.
Tell me this, Monster Breath,
Whose skin has ever been deeper
Than the skin of King Kong?

Louis Phillips

BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: THIS & THAT

SCIENCE

"Leave only three wasps alive in the whole of Europe and the air of Europe will still be more crowded with wasps than space is with stars."
James Jeans
**
HOW TO MAKE AN IMPRESSION OF A KEY
SO YOU CAN MAKE AN IMPRESSION OF IT

"Neat attention to detail: when The Jackal is making an impression of a key (at 00:32:00) he first rubs it against the area between his lower lip and chin, one of the more oily parts of the skin. This is because - when making a clay impression - the clay or the key needs to be lubricated, or the clay risks sticking to the metal and ruining the impression. The natural oils of the skin provides that lubrication here."

Trivia, ImbD site – The Day of The Jackal

"Dressing a pool player in a tuxedo is like putting whipped cream on a hot dog."
Minnesota Fats
**

FROM FRED E. MAGEL OF RIVER FOREST

“My father was a restaurant buff and a builder. I served the late Duncan Hines grading key restaurants. Perhaps I’ve dined in more restaurants than anyone else in history.”
“That is entirely possible, since Mr. Magel has eaten in more than Forty thousand restaurants and is listed as the champion restaurant Patron in the Guinness Book of Records. ‘I’m the only one in the book,’ he tells us, ‘who breaks his own record daily.”

American History (October 1975)
**
THE FIRST PILLOWS

"The earliest pillows can be traced to Mesopotamia — the region known as the “cradle of civilization,” centered in modern-day Iraq — around 7000 BCE. These curved stone bolsters served a practical purpose: keeping bugs and vermin out of the mouths, eyes, and noses of the wealthy. Ancient Egyptians improved on the formula some 5,000 years later with the elevated headrest. Made of wood or stone, the Egyptian headrest consisted of a base and stem attached to a cradle to raise the user’s head. Most Egyptian headrests consisted of a flat, rectangular base with a straight shaft and curved neckpiece, and the user’s head was meant to mimic the sun rising in the horizon. The Egyptians also added a spiritual element to pillow use, often placing them in the tombs of the deceased; Pharaoh Tutankhamun was laid to rest with no fewer than eight ancient pillows in his tomb. Ancient Egyptians believed that protecting the head was essential even in the afterlife. Headrests were also thought to dispel demons, and many were adorned with images of Egyptian gods such as Bes and Taweret, believed to banish evil from the dark night in both life and death."

HISTORY FACTS WEBSITE (April 3, 2024)
hello@historyfacts.com
**
BANNING MONOPOLY

"
MONOPOLY IS ONE OF THOSE GAMES THAT CAN CAUSE ALL KINDS OF ARGUMENTS, AND IT’S OFTEN BANNED IN HOMES BY PARENTS WHO ARE SICK OF ALL THE FIGHTING. MONOPOLY ISN’T CURRENTLY BANNED IN CHINA, BUT IT WAS FOR A LONG TIME IN THE LATE 20TH CENTURY. THE EXACT DATES AREN’T CLEAR BUT THE REASON FOR THE BAN WAS BECAUSE THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY VIEWED THE GAME AS BEING IN DIRECT OPPOSITION TO ITS IDEALS. ANOTHER COUNTRY THAT DECIDED THAT THE CAPITALISM MONOPOLY PROMOTED DIDN’T FIT WITH ITS VALUES WAS CUBA UNDER FIDEL CASTRO. CASTRO TOOK THINGS A STEP FURTHER, AS WHEN HE TOOK OVER IN 1959 HE NOT ONLY BANNED THE GAME BUT ALSO ORDERED THAT ALL COPIES OF THE GAME BE DESTROYED, AS HE DIDN’T WANT A SINGLE VERSION OF THE MONOPOLY GAME IN THE COUNTRY. MONOPOLY HAD BEEN A REALLY POPULAR GAME IN CUBA BEFORE THIS POINT, AND SO IT’S NO SURPRISE THAT IN SPITE OF THE BAN AN UNOFFICIAL VERSION OF THE GAME WAS RELEASED, CALLED CAPITOLIO."

WISE TRIVIA (AUGUST 28, 2024)
SOURCE: MONOPOLY LAND
**
THE OLDEST AMUSEMENT PARK

THE OLDEST AMUSEMENT PARK DATES BACK TO THE 16TH CENTURY AMUSEMENT PARKS AS WE KNOW THEM TODAY ARE A FAIRLY MODERN CONCEPT, BUT THEY STARTED EVOLVING FROM TRAVELING FAIRS AND PLEASURE GARDENS IN EUROPE CENTURIES AGO. THE DANISH PARK DYREHAVSBAKKEN, MORE COMMONLY KNOWN AS BAKKEN, OPENED TO THE PUBLIC IN 1583 AS A PLEASURE GARDEN KNOWN FOR ITS NATURAL SPRING WATERS. NOT LONG AFTER, VENDORS STARTED SETTING UP BOOTHS FOR SELLING THEIR WARES AND PROVIDING ENTERTAINMENT ALIKE. OVER THE YEARS, THE PARK TRANSITIONED FROM A PLEASURE GARDEN TO A FAIR TO AN AMUSEMENT PARK, AND IS NOW CONSIDERED THE WORLD’S OLDEST AMUSEMENT PARK.
YOU WON’T FIND MUCH, IF ANY, 1500S NOSTALGIA THERE TODAY, BUT BAKKEN HAS MAINTAINED ONE TRADITION OVER AT LEAST 200 YEARS: PJERROT THE WHITE-FACED CLOWN, A CHARACTER WHO VISITS THE PARK EVERY DAY. ITS OLDEST RIDE IS A WOODEN ROLLER COASTER FROM 1932. BAKKEN ALSO AVOIDS MANY MODERN AMUSEMENT PARK ARCHETYPES: THE VENDORS ARE SMALL, INDEPENDENT BUSINESSES, AND THE AESTHETIC IS MORE SIMPLE THAN FLASHY.

HTTPS://INTERESTINGFACTS.COM/AMUSEMENT-PARK-FACTS/
**
NEXT DOOR TO FORGOTTEN

"One is revered today, the other next door to forgotten."
Kenneth Turan, writing about Buster Keaton & Max Davidson

I have lived in this house
All my life,
I can list the furniture
Alphabetically. It still has

An attic sealed off & basement
Half flooded out.
The cellar contains boxes
Of unread books I had meant

To sell years ago: The Hardy Boys,
Motor boating to
Adventures: The Twisted Claw.
Then my chapbooks. Whoever buys

Those poems will be called crazy
For wasting his
Or hers or their hard earned money.
Anonymity from A to Z:

Even my neighbors
Do not realize
What I do or how little I earn
From my Muse-driven labors.

Louis Phillips

BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: SHAKESPEARE


SHAKESPEARE'S MANUSCRIPTS

"Not a single Shakespeare manuscript survives, so, as with
Chaucer, we cannot be sure how closely the work we know is really Shakespeare's. Hemming and Condell consulted any number of sources to produce their folio -- printers' manuscripts, actors' promptbooks, even the memoriers of other actors. But from what happened to the work of other authors it is probable that have been changed a lot. One of Shakespeare's publishers was Richard Field and it is known from extant manuscripts that when Field published the work of the poet John Harrington he made more than a thousand changes to the spelling and phrasing. It is unlikely that he did less with Shakespeare , particularly since Shakespeare himself seemed singularly unconcerned with what became of his work after his death. As far as is known, he did not bother to save any of his poems and plays -- a fact that is sometimes taken as evidence that he didn't write them."

Bill Bryson. The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got that
Way (New York: William Morrow,1990
**
GIVE UNTO CAESAR WHAT IS CAESAR'S 

" March 15 is too important a day to ignore. As the man who taught me to use a chainsaw said, it is immortalized 
by Shakespeare’s famous warning: “Cedar! Beware the adze of March."

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
MAR 16, 2024
**
HERMIONE FERDINANDA GINGOLD ON HER NAME

"I think the Ferdinanda was in memory of my uncle
Ferdinand, and Hermione from Shakespeare's The
Winter's Tale, which she* was reading just before my
birth. I suppose I should be grateful it wasn't Hamlet
or I might  have been Ham. Actually, I'm now quite
glad my name is Hermione Gingold because it's
such a long name that on theatre marquees, there isn't
room for another name beside it."

* Her mother

Hermione Gingold. How to Grow Old Disgracefully: an
autobiogrphy  (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988)

**

SOME GALLED GOOSE OF WINCHESTER

In Troilus and Cressida, Pandarus delivers the play's final speech. The concluding four lines are
                                    
 ...but that my fear is this,
Some galled goose of Winchester would  hiss.
Till then I'll sweat and seek about for eases,
And at this time bequeath you my diseases.

In The RSC Shakespeare edition, edited by Jonathan Bate and
Eric Rasmussen (New York: the Modern Library, 2010) the editors supply the following note:

goose of Winchester prostitute, so called because of the many brothels of Southwark, which was under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Wijnchester

**

SHAKESPEARE & THE TERCEL

The peregrine falcon appears in two forms in Shakespeare’s work. The general term of “falcon” only applies to a female peregrine falcon.1 A male peregrine falcon is called a “tercel” or “tassel-gentle.” “Tassel” and “tercel” mean “a third,” because the male peregrine falcon is one-third the size of a female peregrine falcon.
          2 In the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet appropriately describes Romeo as a male peregrine falcon when she calls him back to her window to continue their secret conference: 

Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2, Line 169

JULIET: Hist, Romeo, hist! O, for a falc’ner’s voice
To lure this tassel-gentle back again!
Bondage is hoarse and may not speak aloud,
Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies
And make her airy tongue more hoarse than ⌜mine⌝
With repetition of “My Romeo!”

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGwHpQNPqBVQcDMnGZmrxlDJMQf
**
SHAKESPEARE & TRIGGER WARNINGS

England's Royal Shakespeare Company placed a trigger warning on its new production  of The Merry Wives of Windsor, cautioning audiences  that the 'fat  knight' Sir John Falstaff is subjected to 'body-shaming' in the 1602 play.

THE WEEK (June 21, 2024)
**

PAUL SCOFIELD AND VALERIE TAYLOR IN CYMBELINE

"But Paul could not help but smile when Valerie Taylor as Imogen,lapsed when reading from her letter;instead of
saying, "Thy mistress , Pisario, hath play'd the strumpet in my
bed," actually said "Thy mistress, Pisario, hath play'd the
trumpet in my bed."

Garry O'Connor. Paul Scofield:An Actor For All Season (New York:
Applause Books, 2002)
**

ARIEL, MY ARIEL

Everyday, my Ariel.
I put the world behind me, but it shoot back.
One generation & the next.
Light as sunlight thrushing
As thru the Spanish Cedars flash
Comorants magnific with their hooked beaks.
Always a fitful cornucopia
To take the breath away.
I press my life to the jumping  dayshine.
What do I demand?
More space? More freedom?
Freedom to do what? Hungering for magic,
I stand on Prospero's Isle.
Could I have been so wrong about my life?
Far out on the ocean,
Replenished & green,
One anonymous sailor
Fastens his shroud.

Louis Phillips

BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: FILM #28

THE QUEEN OF POVERTY ROW

According to Richard Lamparski, in his seventh Whatever Became of Series..., "Poverty Row was a group of studios on and around Gower Street in Hollywood that produced low budget movies . Columbia Pictures, where Ms. (DOROTHY) Revier was under contract,was considered a 'poverty Row' studio until the mid-thirties. "
Dorothy Revier, who appeared in such films as The Martyr Sex
(1924), The Fate of a Flirt (1925), Stolen Pleasures (1927), and Leftover Ladies (1931), was given the title "The Queen of Poverty Row".

Richard Lamparski. 2nd Annual Series: Whatever Became of Series...? (New York: Bantam Books, 1977).
**
ON USING FEW ACTORS IN MOVIES

"One of the blessings of movies was to liberate us from the lighthouses and remote cottages of the theater. Using few people is as difficult for a movie director as using a great number of people. One always knows that a young movie-maker is impossibly ignorant when he says he's going to do something simple like a monologue; that's probably even more difficult to do successfully on the screen than an epic battle of angels is to do on the stage.

Pauline Kael. "A Sign of Life" in The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (The Library of America, 2011)

**
THE WRITER STEPHEN WOLF HAS A WEBSITE- mrstephenwolf.com

One of the articles you can read on it is his excellent piece on "Twenty Great Downtown Movies” . The excerpt below is from his appraisal of Oliver Stone"s 1987 film WALLSTREET:

"What’s best –or worst—about the film seems how little has changed, how the same things in the film are still happening only by other high rollers. Stone may have been trying to capture a certain time and place, but unhappily –and like all great art—he caught what seems to be a universal story downtown, run by people making decisions over our 401k, and there’s plenty of great lines besides the film’s most noted. “You see that building?” Gekko says as if spoken today by Trump, “I bought that building ten years ago. My first real estate deal. Sold it two years later, made an $800,000 profit. It was better than sex. At the time I thought that was all the money in the world. Now it's a day's pay.”

**
ON SMALL FILMS

"When he was told that his last picture , Harold Pinter's Betrayal was a little picture, (SAM) Spiegel said, "Is it, really? Do you worry in a painting about the size of the canvas?" Pinter himself said of Spiegel's major films, 'When I say that he made all these films, I mean what I say. Total responsibility. Total dedication."

Andrew Sinclair. Spiegel: the Man Behind the Pictures (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1987)
Among films produced by Sam Spiegel are Lawrence of Arabia, The African Queen, Bridge on the River Kwai, and On the Waterfront.
**
ON VERY SMALL FILMS

Flip books --"a kind of Lilluputian movie."
Michael Innes

THDE OPENING OF ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT IN BERLIN

"The Nazis thought it decadent and unpatriotic, but for unknown reasons the Reich Film Censorship Board passed it for public showing. At its Berlin premiere the Nazis caused a riot. They released thousands of white mice and exploded tear gas and stink bombs . Three members of the audience were killed and twenty-two injured before the police arrived to restore order."
Andrew Sinclair. Spiegel: the Man Behind the Pictures (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1987)

**
MOVIES & THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

For a short period in American culture, telephones were humorously referred to as "Ameches," an allusion to the fact that Don Ameche played the role of the telephone's inventor in the 1939 movie -- The Alexander Graham Bell Story.

ON SCREEN PHONE NUMBERS

"Consider the use of the on-screen telephone numbers. The display of an actual telephone number on screen as part of a dramatic entertainment has been ruled legally actionable, as it may constitute invasion of privacy. Film and television have adopted for display the telephone exchange 555, which is never actually assigned and thus cannot incite the litigous."

David Mamet. Bambi vs. Godzilla (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007)
**

WILLIAM GOLDMAN & GUNGA DIN

"...My favorite movie of all time is a comic-book movie: Gunga Din. (I have seen it sixteen times, still start to cry before the credits are over..;)
William Goldman. Adventures in the Screen Trade (New York: Warner Books, 1988)
William Goldman's choice of Gunga Din should be his favorite movie is no surprise because his first novel got its title -- Temple of Gold -- from that film:
"...he takes a bugle and starts to climb this temple of gold."
**
From Gunga Din

"The screams of the Thugs as they fell into the canyon were taken from the screams of the sailors falling off the log into the spider pit in King Kong."
iDMb Trivia
**
THE MAKING OF SUNSET BOULEVARD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZvdKjKL7hQ

Woody Allen has more Academy Award nominations (16) for writing than anyone else, all of them are in the Written Directly for the Screen category.
**

THE CLAW RETURNS

The Claw Returns.
Everytime I turn around
A new monster returns.
South of the Slot,
Wholesale destruction,
All Day, all night
Must not be discounted,
Virgins dismembered,
Warehouses burned,
Rodan's acidic saliva,
Dissoloves naked politicians
Passing bad laws..

The Claw Returns.
We wake up to new horrors,
Headlines blaring:
POETRY READERS PANIC
THOUSANDS FLEE CITY:
Splash panels of blood,
Body parts on display
In the drive-thru car wash
While bug-eyed aliens
Relish culinary hopes,
A massive holiday picnic
Of human cole slaw.

The Claw returns:
A 12 part serial.
Consider yourself warned.

Louis Phillips

BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: AMERICANA #6

ADVERTISING IN LATE NINETEENTH & EARLY 20th CENTURY AMERICA

"There was a certain amount of petty fraud often of a good-
humored kind, in the advertising of the day. For instance,
persons sending money for an advertised 'Potato Bug Eradicator' received two slivers of wood with the instructions 'Place the potato bug between the two sticks of wood and press them together.' Telling this story in the Atlantic Monthly (1904) Margaret Jenkins said that a victim's first reaction would be one of indignation, then of wry laughter; soon afterwards he would be urging all his friends to write the advertiser. So it would go on until the postal department , notoriously unable to see a joke, would step in."

E. S. Turner. The Shocking History of Advertising. (New York:
E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc. 1953)

**
A SONG WRITTEN FOR WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON

"When a pesky newspaper claimed that Harrison sat in a log cabin and swilled hard cider all day, Harrison didn’t fight the libelous claim. He embraced it. Supporters started calling him the “Log Cabin and Hard Cider candidate” and handed out cider and specialty bottles of booze shaped like log cabins. (Supporters even composed a song for him called “Good Hard Cider.”)

https://www.interestingfacts.com/american-president-facts/ January 3, 2024
**

LIFE EXPECTANCY IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1900

"For most of human history, humans didn't live long enough to confront the ailments of old age. In 1900, a baby born in the
U.S. could expect to live just forty-seven years, and one in
five died before the age of ten."

Dhruv Khullar "No Time to Die" in The New Yorker (April 22 & 29,
2024)
**

AMERICA IS A DANDY PLACE

America's a dandy place:
The people are all brothers:
And when one's got a punkin pye,
He shares it with the others.

[from "A Song for the Fourth of July, 1806," in The Port Folio, Philadelphia, Aug. 30, 1806], in THE ONLINE ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY for the word PUMPKIN
**

JOHN ADAMS & THE BOSTON MASSACRE

" March 1770, a group of British soldiers fired into a rebellious crowd of Boston colonists, killing five civilians. John Adams, a lawyer who steadfastly believed in the right to counsel, was asked to defend the redcoats when everyone else refused. In the trial, Adams claimed that the soldiers were victims of a mob — “if an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they had a right to kill in their own defence [sic]” — and had fired their muskets in self defense. He uttered the quote "facts are stubborn things …" while making his case to the jury, and the strategy worked: The Captain and six of his soldiers were found innocent, with only two convicted of manslaughter.""

History Facts (April 13, 2024)

VERONICA LAKE'S ICONIC HAIR STYLE

During World War Two, the rage for her peek-a-boo bangs became a hazard when women in the defense industry would get their bangs caught in machinery. Lake had to take a publicity picture in which she reacted painfully to her hair getting "caught" in a drill press in order to heighten public awareness about the hazard of her hairstyle

iMBd trivia -Veronica Lake
**
ON NAMING ATLANTA, GEORGIA

"Both Atlantis and the Atlantic Ocean are named after Atlas. Oddly, the city of Atlanta is nowhere near the Atlantic coast. It got its name from being the terminus of the Western and Atlantic Railroad line."

Anu Garg. Wordsmith Website (October 11, 2024)
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQXJZvgdnPRmxPRKVfTqnGfSFTk
**

DO YOU HAVE AN AXE TO GRIND?

"Influence of Poor Richard's Almanac and other publications made Benjamin Franklin one of the most widely read of early American writers.
He is a central character in one of his own stories. In the tale, a young Franklin was approached by a fellow who stopped to admire the family grindstone. Asking to be shown how it worked, the stranger offered young Ben an ax with which to demonstrate. Once his ax was sharp, the fellow walked off, laughing.
Readers should beware of anyone who has an ax to grind, for they have a hidden motive."

Webb Garrison. Why You Say It (New York: MJM Books, 1992)
**
THE SON OF COCHISE

Although famed Apache war chief Cochise did indeed have a son named Taza, this biopic is a highly fictionalized account of his life. For example, Taza had a son named Nino Cochise (born Ciyo Cochise, who later in his life became an actor and had parts in several early westerns).

DMb Trivia.TAZA, SON OF COCHISE
**
TAZA, SON OF COCHISE

Reason, Rex --
Never played Oedipus Rex
But he did act in Taza, Son of Cochise.
Is this fact of any use?
**
HISTORY

What do I know
But that we go & come,
Come & go,
Thru whiplashes
Of several seasons.
Each passing day
Lays out for us
Visible violence
We call History.
One fine morning
When the sunlight
Covered so many of us
With indifference,
I hiked across
The upper meadow
Which was crowded
With 110 Crow dead.

Louis Phillips

BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: THE JOY OF WRITING

"Alex Trocchi urged aspiring writers to go off and spend a year playing pinball. I always thought that this was verygood advice, but I could never explain even to myself, why it made such sense..."

ALLAN GURGANUS ON HIS NOVEL WHITE PEOPLE

interviewed in The New Yorker. By Megan Mayhew Bergman
April 23, 2023

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/how-allan-gurganus-became-a-writer

WHOOPING CRANES & ADVENTURE WRITERS

Hamilton Bass in The New Yorker (June 4, 1949)

**
From a Brief Review in The New Yorker

"The gloom that pervades this absorbing novel is such that
the only comfortable room m.Simenon shows us is the parlor
in the whorehouse."

"In Brief". Uncle Charles Has Locked Himself Out by Simenon.
The New Yorker (March 7, 1988)
**

THE BEST PART OF WRITING A NOVEL

James Wood. How Fiction Works (2008)

PETER USTINOV’S DEDICATION OF HIS BOOK
LITTLE ME

‘To all those, who
by accident or design
have not been included
in this book

STORY MEANS MORE THAN JUST NARRATION OR PLOT

Tim O’Brian

PETER WILD: What is your favourite part of the writing
process?

Peter Wild. From Bookmunch.co.uk (June 3, 2020)
**

PULLED OVER BY THE GRAMMAR POLICE

I was giving my poem the gas ;
90 mph in an adverb free zone !
Only one mad dash --
And an & off the beaten track
Between me and my ability to make sense.

I came out of a comma,
Pausing to overcome
A near death experience...
Ellipses galore & a pair of theses
In ( )
When the grammar police pulled me over
For punctuation littering.

I shd have known better,
To toss ampersands
& ellipses ...around...
As if there were no tomorrow &
Tomorrow & tomorrow &
Tomorrow & tomorrow etc. et. al
In italics. Forgive me, Father

For I have sinned.
Pulled over by the Grammar Police,

I was giving my poem the gas ;
90 mph in an adverb free zone !
Only one mad dash --
On & off the beaten track
Between me and my ability to make sense.

I came out of a comma,
Pausing to overcome
A near death experience...
Ellipses galore & a pair of theses
In ( )
When the grammar police pulled me over
For punctuation littering.

I shd have known better,
To toss ampersands
& ellipses ...around...
As if there were no tomorrow &
Tomorrow & tomorrow &
Tomorrow & tomorrow etc. et. al
In italics. Forgive me, Father

For I have sinned.

Louis Phillips

BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE:HORROR & SCAREY THINGS?

AFTER SEEING THE MOVIE FRANKENSTEIN

"After seeing Frankenstein, I was convinced that the monster
would climb the fire escape outside of my tenement window to
get me. Why he should want to get me, of all people, amid the
millions who lived in New York, or why he would even be in'
New York in the first place, didn't enter my mind. Logic flees
when fear comes knocking."
MEL BROOKS

Introduction to FORGOTTEN HORRORS (1999)
**

**
A TITLE CARD FROM A SILENT FILM

The opening title to Mary Pickford's movie--
Sparrows (1926)

"The Devil's share in the world's creation
was a certain Southern swampland -- a
masterpiece of horror. And the Lord,
appreciating a good job, let it stand."

**
AUTOPSY FROM THE GREEK AUTOPSIA, MEANING
"SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES"

Probably few American film-goers, not counting
a handful of horror film fans, have seen a German
movie called Autopsy in which an autopsy is
presented in close-up and in color, but the title
still remains provocative, even though TV mystery
series frequently take viewers into the autopsy
room.
Of course, Uncle Tom's Cabin would be a bit
more fun if Topsy had been named AuTopsy.
**

ABOUT THE 1931 FILM OF FRANKENSTEIN

"While preparing to film the scene where the monster attacks Elizabeth, Mae Clarke admitted to Boris Karloff that she was worried that when she saw him in full makeup coming towards her, she might really be frightened. Karloff told her that throughout the scene he would wiggle his pinkie finger out of sight of the camera so that, despite the horrific makeup, she could always see her friend Boris waving at her and letting her know that she was safe."
iDMb Trivia -Frankenstein
**
COMING ATTRACTIONS FOR FREAKS (1931)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJVXTKkjsxA
**
AT THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION PHARMACY

Trick or Treat
Small terrors.
Racism galore.
White privilege.

Stand in line,
& hand in your precription
With proof of insurance
At the appropriate counter.

So many of our country's ills
Are not covered.

Louis Phillips
**

ON HORROR

Charles Cherry's COMMONPLACE BOOK: LIFELINES (Which I consider to be the best book of quotations in print) has this to say
about HORROR:

" And after, no one will really ever remember it. Like the greatest crimes, it will be as if it never happened. The suffering, the deaths, the sorrow, the abject, pathetic pointlessness of such immense suffering by so many; maybe it all exists only within these pages and the pages of a few other books. Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning.But in life horror has no more form than than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not."

Richard Flanagan. The Narrow Road to the Deep North(2013). p.19
**

HOW TO KILL DRACULA

"Placing the branch of a wild rose upon the top of his coffin will render him unable to escape it; a sacred bullet fired into the coffin could kill him so that he remain true-dead. Mountain-ash is also described as a form of protection from a vampire, although the effects are unknown."

**
THE MOST COMMON WORD USED IN TITLES OF HORROR FILMS

"1. dead
The most common word in horror movie titles—and the number one spot on our list—is dead. Interestingly, it my have been the undead that helped the word dead shamble to the highest spot on the list. Of course, let’s give credit to Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the rest of George Romero’s zombie movie series for helping boost the word dead. In addition to the first film, you have Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009). Elsewhere, we also have The Walking Dead (1936), Isle of the Dead (1945), Dead Silence (2007), Dead Ringers (1988), Dead Alive (1992), Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994), and Shaun of the Dead (2004).

Dead often appeared alongside other entries in this list. In addition to Night of the Living Dead, you have The Evil Dead franchise, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, Dead of Night (1945), and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)"

DICTIONARY SCOOP ()October 16, 2024) For the list of common Horror words in film titles go to https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQXJkPppJsZVMrjrFpGbhRprdnJ
**
LET’S SAY

You are sitting thru
Your 13th showing of The Horror:
“Chills & thrills
In a drama of mystery & madness”
Directed by Bud Pollard.
You reach the scene
Where the East Indian
Introduces a snake & a gorilla
Into the house of John Massy
& his wife who screams.
All of sudden you think
Of all the creatures
Who frighten you –
But nothing frightens so much
As the vulnerability
Of your own children.

Louis Phillips