WHAT DID VIRGINIA WOOLF THINK? or READING THE DIARIES
OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
"...I haven't often read writers' diaries, but I
like the entries. I like knowing what Woolf was
thinking about her books as she wrote them and their
reception after they came out, and what she thinks of
the other writers of her time. It is satisfying to be
in her mind: "What is the right attitudev toward
criticism? What I ought I to feel and say when Miss B.
devotes an article in Scrutiny to attacking me? She is
young, Cambridge, ardent. And she says I'm a very bad
writer.'"
Amina Cain. A Horse at Night: On Writing (St. Louis,
MO, 2022)
**
FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH A FAMOUS WRITER
“’What do you read now?’ the hungry interviewer asked
the famous writer, a woman of commercial success in
the theater whose autobiography has defined a
character of considerable literary sophistication.
And the famous author answered: ‘I don’t read novels
any more. I’m sorry to say. A writer should read novels.
When I do, I go back to the ones I’ve read before.
Dickens, Balzac…I find now when I go to get a book
off the shelf. I pick something I read before, as
if I didn’t dare try anything new.’”
Richard Howard. “A Note on Roland Barthes’s S/Z” in
Paper Trail: selected prose, 1965-2003 (New York. Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2004)
**
ON VOICES, PLACES
"...how are voices like places? They move through us
as we move through them. The voices of great writers
guide us without telling us where we are going --
except, of course, to the most obvious destinatiion
of all. We are guided by ambiguity -- that's the way
literature works. And the way travel works as well.
We understand it only when we stop moving, sit still
and begin to listen back."
David Mason. Voices, Places (Philadelphia: Paul
Dry Books, 2018)
**
A BOOK MEL BROOKS COULD EASILY PUT DOWN
In the New York Times Book Review “By the Book”
(November 13, 2022) film director Mel Brooks was asked
“Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book
did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t?
Do you remember the last book you put down without
finishing?”
Mel Brooks replied: “If truth be told, for some reason
I never did get around to finishing ‘Mein Kampf.’”
**
ROBERT SOUTHEY & WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
“The difference between the two men is well illustrated
by their several attitudes to books: Southey loved them
as objects, whereas Wordsworth had no feeling whatever
for them, apart from their contents. De Quincy reports
his own and Southey’s horror at the sight of Wordsworth
cutting the leaves of De Quincey’s own copy of Burke
with a knife that had just been used to butter bread. “
Edward Sackville West. A Flame in Sunlight: The Life &
Work of Thomas De Quincey (London: The Bodley Head,
1974)
ROBERT SOUTHEY AND HIS WIFE
“…Southey ‘lived in his library, which Coleridge
used to call his wife’…
Edward Sackville West. A Flame in Sunlight: The Life &
Work of Thomas De Quincey (London: The Bodley Head,
1974)
**
TREVOR NOAH AS A YOUNG BOY GROWING UP UNDER
APARTHEID IN SOUTH AFRICA
“My books were my prized possessions. I had a
bookshelf where I put them, and I was so proud
of it, I loved my books and kept them in pristine
condition. I read them over and over, but I did
not bend the pages or the spines. I treasured
every single one. As I grew older I started buying
my own books. I loved fantasy,loved to
get lost in worlds that didn’t exist.”
Trevor Noah. Born a Crime. New York: One World, 2016)
**
“He understands at a glance what he reads, reads only
what he can understand at a glance.”
Bergan Evans. The Spoor of Spooks and other nonsense
(NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954).
**
ON CHOOSING THE CORRECT PEN NAME
The creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs sold
his first story -- Under the Moon of Mars (1912)
–under the name of Normal Bean. He chose the
pseudonym Norman because he thought of himself
at the time “the average mind in search of average
readers.”
**
IT IS NOT PEOPLE WHO DIE BUT WORLDS
ON READING
“There are no uninteresting people in the world,
says Yevtushenko in one of his best lyrics; everyone
carries around with him his first snow and his first
kiss it is not people who die but worlds.”
Edward Thomas. London Magazine (November 1967)
I read those words over & over.
They deliver me,
If only for awhile, from myself,
My thoughts, my feelings,
The shifting ground of my being.
I become someone else
&, like some licensed physician,
Hold out my hand
To take the fragile pulse of the world.
LJP
For Gregory Abby who would keep all animals from harm
**'
THE SINGULAR BEAUTY OF A PURE WHITE GOOSE
“No night time sight can compare with the singular beauty
of a pure white goose, or several, their motionless,
luminous contours on dark moonstruck grass that absorbs
the light, the contrast of each bird’s brilliance, glowing
as if lit from within,”
Paul Theroux. “Diary”. London Review of Books (20 June 2019)
**
PENGUINS AS PARENTS
“Penguins are super parents. When the female provides
dinner she doesn’t just reach for the pesto but launches
herself into the treacherous, icy depths, returning with a stomach full of half-digested fish to be spewed down the gullet of her needy chick. His Fluffy Eminence, who is then installed in creche so protective it makes the average nursery look like the workhouse in Oliver Twist. Yet, even for penguins, rejection comes after the winter huddling and the pre-ledge commutes, deep dives and the exhausting feeds, the mother will waddle off across the tundra, never to be seen by her children again. Abandonment, we understand, is not the devastating catastrophe that wrecks the child’s system of trust, but the crowning achievement of good parenting.”
Andrew O’Hagan. “Off His Royal Tits” in London Review of Books (2 February 2023)
**
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF HORSESHOE CRABS
“Endotoxins are a worry to medicine. They exist
in the cell walls of certain bacteria and can be
released when the bacteria break down or die. These
toxins can send a patient into a tailspin of fever,
chills, septic shock and death.
“To keep patients safe, pharmaceutical companies
run roughly 70 million tests a year on injectable
medicines and implants for the presence of those toxins
with a substance called limulus amebocyte lysate. It is
an extract of cells from horseshoe crab blood and can
identify even infinitesimal amounts of the toxin by
reacting with it, No other natural substance is known
to work so well.
Deborah Cramer. ”When the Horseshoe Crabs Are Gone,
We’ll Be in Trouble” in The New York Times.
February 18,2023.
**
THE WORLD'S OLDEST LLAMA
A 27-Year-Old Llama Sets World Record for Oldest of His Species — And He Has the Best Name
The Dalai Lama is the highest spiritual leader and
head monk of Tibet, considered a living Buddha. Dalai
Llama, on the other hand, is the oldest living llama
in the world. And he just turned 27.
From NICE NEWS (March 2, 2023)
**
THE ANAL CATAPULT OF GLASSY-WINGED
SHARP SHOOTERS
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/watch-these-glassy-winged-sharpshooters-fling-pee-bubbles-with-anal-catapult/
**
SPIDERS & AUTOMOBILES IN THE COLD OF WINTER
"A spider can hide out in a barn. Some spiders
do survive outside in the cold, relying on the glycol
in their blood to keep their cells from freezing,
similar to the chemicals used to keep your car
running in the winter."
Josephine Sedgwick. "Nature is Alive in Winter" in
The New York Times (March 7, 2023)
**
ON IGUANAS ON THE GALAPAGOS ISLAND
"A basalt coastline crowded with large, lounging iguanas
looks nothing short of Jurassic. When I first saw these
striking creatures in the Galapagos, I was impressed
most by their placidness. Unfazed by humans, they spend
long, sunny days warming in the equatorial sun like
scaly house cats, sometimes in heaps, between foraging
missions at sea to feed on marine algae.
"Charles Darwin was famously unimpressed with this rare seafaring lizard. "It is a hideous-looking creature,"he
wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle, "stupid and sluggish
in its movements."
Katherine Harmon Courage."Heroes of the Wild" in
Smithsonian (March 2023)
**
MINK RHYMES WITH STINK
"Mink is the name of a water-dwelling weasel. Minks
are vicious, bloodthirsty, and evil smelling, and
when annoyed, they spray a foul-smelling fluid from
glanda beneath their tail. The mink's old sciehtific
name, Putorius means 'stinker.' Yet a coat made from
the fur of this thoroughly unpleasant animal has long
been a synbol of success. And, thanks to its durable,
lustrous fur the mink is one most valuable animals in
the world."
Peter Limberg. What's in the Names of Wild Animals
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1977)
**
ELEPHANTS
It is mealy, this world with so little substance.
Frequently our dreams are not mammoth enough.
No more poetry! I shall say it bluntly:
I do not wish to live in a world without elephants.
Wide-eyed I listen for the click of tusks,
Herds of elephants rumbling into the bush.
By way of greeting, elephants place their trunks
Into one another's mouths. How shall my sons grow
Without sensing the imponderable bulk of the world?
How necessary it is, even in so paltry a landscape,
Ivory-stained, & large enough only for killing,
To be reminded of lives larger than ourselves.
More than 50,000 muscles in the trunk alone, &
Then it happens: a large orange moon trumpets
Over woodland; we sense a planet going musth.
LJP
--
http://louis-phillips.com
"
WHAT NORA EPHRON LEARNED ABOUT FILM
SCRIPT WRITING FROM TOM HANKS
“…I learned from Tom was a thing that’s really
important, which is that scene after scene, you
have to give the main actor something to play,
he can never be passive in the scene, et. cetera,
even (or especially) when he’s sharing it with
a very cute little boy.”
Nora Ephron . interviewed by Patrick McGilligan
in Backstory 5: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1990s
(June 2007)
**
ON THE COWBOY STAR WHOSE HORSE WAS NAMED TARZAN
Ken Maynard. “Maynard, born Kenneth Olin Maynard in
1895, began working for circuses and carnivals at 16.
As a young man he became a rodeo performer and a
trick rider for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. By
1923 Maynard was appearing in movies and became a
cowboy star. His horse Tarzan appeared in literally
dozens of movies, including The Demon Rider (1925),
Overland Stage (1927) , Come on, Tarzan (1932) and
Lightning Strikes West (1941)..;”
David Lemmo. Tarzan: Jungle King of Popular Culture
(Jefferson,North Carolina : McFarland & Company,2017)
**
ON WHAT VIEWERS REMEMBER ABOUT THE BIG
PARADE
“In my own film The Big Parade for years after its
first showing and until this day, people speak of
the moment the doughboy, played by John Gilbert,
removes a heavy shoe from a pack on his back and
throws it to his French sweetheart as a desperate
token of his affection. Equal to this, they speak
of the close-up in which the same girl in a impulsive
move to slow the truck’s progress holds to a chain
at the rear of the truck that is carrying her lover
to war. The film is a mighty panorama of World War I
decidedly in the spectacle category and yet the
memory is of two close-ups. A hundred airplanes
in a sweep over a battlefield is never mentioned.”
King Vidor. King Vidor on Film-Making (New York:
David McKay Co., 1972)
**
FILMS YOU MAKE YOURSELF
“Very few films are dreams, configuring and reconfiguring themselves in your mind on waking. These films, I think,
you make yourself, afterwards, somewhere in the shadows
in the back of your head. The Bride of Frankenstein is
one of those dream films. It exists in the culture as a
unique thing, magical and odd, a lurching story sequence
as ungainly and as beautiful as the monster itself, that culminates in a couple of minutes of film that have
seared themselves onto the undermind of the world.”
Neil Gaiman. The View From the Cheap Seats (New York:
William Morrow, 2014)
**
THE QUOTATION EXPERT MARDY GROTHE ON THE TITLE
OF THE FILM - THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
"Although the movie made “the year of living dangerously”
a widely-known catchphrase, it’s not the origin.
Nor is the 1978 novel The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher J. Koch, which the film version is based on.
The setting for the book and movie is Jakarta, Indonesia
during the chaotic period that led to the overthrow of
the country’s long-time dictator, President Sukarno.
Author Koch took his title from a speech Sukarno made
in 1964.
"The President had a custom of giving a special name to
each year in his annual “National Day” speech. In the
National Day speech he gave on August 17, 1964, Sukarno
named the upcoming year “the year of living dangerously.”
This reflected the challenges he knew he faced from his political enemies, who included both hard-line Communists
and radical Muslims. The multilingual leader’s name for
the year was based partly on an old Italian phrase he was familiar with — “vivere pericoloso” (“living dangerously”).
Although Sukarno gave the speech in the Indonesian language, he inserted those Italian words after the Indonesian word for year, tahun, to create the name. The year ahead, he said, would be the “Tahun vivere pericoloso.”
http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2022/01/dr-mardy-grothes-new.html
**
JOAN CRAWFORD & THE LETTER T
“After I divorced Franchot (Tone) I asked my maid
to pick out all the T’s in my linens – acres of
towels, meadows of bed linens. I don’t know how
many hundreds of T’s the poor girl had carefully
unpicked when, one evening, listening to the radio,
she heard the announcer break in with a news bulletin:
Joan Crawford has just married Phillip Terry!
The maid threw down the pillowcase she was working
on and screamed, “I quit.”
Joan Crawford. My Way of Life . 1971
**
NOTES FOR A HISTORY OF FILMS & POLITICS
“I saw Reds in Oklahoma where I once witnessed people walking out on Fiddler on the Roof because it was about ‘A Bunch of Commies.’ I saw no one walk out on Reds.”
Jim Beaver in Films in Review (February 1982)
**
CARTOON CHARACTERS ARE NOT THE SAME
AS REAL PEOPLE, SO THEY SHOULD NOT
GET ROMANTICALLY INVOLVED WITH ONE
ANOTHER
Elmer Fudd
Fell madly in love with Ashley Judd:
"Oh kiss me, Ashley. You're so hot!"
"No," she said. "I am real and you are not."
LJP
SAINT FRANCIS
“Did St. Francis really preach to the birds?
Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would
have done better to preach to the cats.”
Rebecca West
**
EMILY DICKINSON & HER LOVE FOR BIRDS
“I hope you love birds, too. It is economical .
It saves going to heaven.”
Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Mabel Loomis Todd
**
SOR JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ
“There weren't many pathways to success for girls born
to unwed parents in 17th-century Mexico, but Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz managed to transcend her origins with
a dazzling mind and a deft pen. Largely self-taught,
she wrote her first dramatic poem at age eight, studied
the Greek classics, and was instructing children in
Latin by age 13. A few years later, she joined the
court of the Viceroy Marquis de Mancera, where she
famously wowed a panel of professors with her expertise
in numerous subjects. Sor Juana then entered a convent,
where she enjoyed the freedom to pen numerous plays,
poems, and carols, as well as the proto-feminist manifesto Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz. A clash with authority figures forced her to abandon her creative pursuits shortly before her death in 1695, but she endures as one of the most important literary figures of the New Spanish Baroque.”
From INTERESTING FACTS website.
**
AT A PARTY I INTRODUCE THE R &B SINGER SZA
TO THE ACTRESSES ZSA ZSA & ZASU PITTS
Sza,
Zsa Zsa,
Zsa, Zsa,'
Sza.
Zasu, Sza.
Sza, Zasu,
Zasu, Sza,
Zsa Zsa,
LJP
**
JOHN DONNE'S BROTHER
"A year after joining his brother at the Inns of
Court, Henry Donne was caught harbouring a priest
in his living chambers. He was arrested, jailed,
interrogated and no doubt threatened with torture.
He swiftly broke. The man he had been hiding, William
Harrington, might have have held out against his
questioners, but Henry's testimony did for him; in
February 1594, he was tried, convicted of treason,
and hung, drawn and quartered. Henry himself was
already long gone. Transferred to a filthy cell in
the jail at Newgate during an outbreak of bubonic
plague, he died within days, at the age of nineteen,
a lonely and unspectacular and altogether inglorious
end.
Catherine Nicholson, reviewing Super-infinite: The
Transformations of John Donne. London Review of Books
(19 January 2023)
**
GAEL GREENE
I have dedicated myself to the wanton indulgences
of my senses. And I shall consider it fitting and
divine if on my deathbed my last words echo those
of Pierette, the sister of Brillat-Savarin , who
died at table shortly before her one-hundredth
birthday “Bring on the dessert. I think I’m about
to die.”
Gael Greene, quoted in her New York Times obituary
(November 2, 2022)
**
ON THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR OF BREAKFAST
AT TIFFANYS
Capote
Kaput.
LJP
**
HENRY JAMES’S FOREHEAD
“…his forehead was more like a dome, it was a whole street.”
Max Beerbohm
David Cecil. Max (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company., 1964)
**
HEDY LAMARR
“Thousands of people can speak dialogue competently,
but it’s amazing how few can do a really good sex scene.
Hedy Lamarr was the Olivier of Orgasm.”
Mark Steyn
ON A NOTED WRITER OF POPULAR SONGS
Edward, Gus –
(I know so I do not have to guess)
Did not write ”I Can’t Tell You Why I Love You But I Do”.
(Gosh! The great stuff I can sneak into a Clerihew).
ADLAI STEVENSON
Stevenson, Adlai –
Democrats wanted very badly
For him to be President of the U.S.
It didn’t quite work out, I guess.
SIGMUND FREUD
Sigmund Freud—
Did he have sang-froid?
Perhaps his super-ego, ego, id
Allowed him to keep his feelings hid?
LJP
OF LANGUAGE AND THE BIRDS
"Our language reflects our disrespect. Something
worthlessor unappealing is 'for the birds.' An ineffectual politicianis a 'lame duck.' To 'lay an egg'is to flub a performance. To be 'henpecked!' is to be harassed with persistent nagging.'Eating crow'is eat humble pie. The expression 'bird brain,' for a stupid, foolish, or scatterbrained person, entered theEnglish language in
the early 1920's because people thought of birds as
mere flying, pecking automatons, with brains so
small they had no capacity for thought at all.
"That view is a gone goose. In the past two decades
or so,from fields and laboratories around the world have
flowed examples of mental feats comparable to those
found in primates."
Jennifer Ackerman. The Genius of Birds (New York:
Penguin Books, 2017)
**
NOT EXACTLY HUMPHREY BOGART
“ boggart is, depending on local or regional tradition,
a malevolent genius loci inhabiting fields, marshes or
other topographical features. The household boggart
causes objects to disappear, milk to sour, and dogs
to go lame. They can possess small animals, fields,
churches, or houses so they can play tricks on the
civilians with their chilling laugh.”
Wikipedia –“English Folklore”
**
FROM TOKYO
Sign in a self-service elevator in a Tokyo apartment
house: “Keep your hands away from unnecessary buttons
for you.”
**
TWO BEAUTIFUL WORDS
“The two most beautiful words in the English
language are: ‘Check enclosed’.
**
15 WORDS SELECTED BY DR. WILFRED FUNK
AS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
1. Amaryllis 7. Jonquil 13.Oriole
2. Anemone 8. Lullaby 14.Rosemary
3. Asphodel 9. Marigold 15. Tendril
4. Bobolink 10. Melody
5. Chalice 11. Mist
6. Chimes 12. Myrrah
**
ABOUT EARLY MOVING PICTURE MACHINES SUCH AS THE ZOETROPE & NOMINAL EMBROIDERY
“By the end of the nineteenth century, hundreds of
variation of those toys abounded, each with its own
name, either simple or ornate –Praxinoscope, Choreutoscope, Wheel of Life. All of those stroboscopic toys shared,
in addition to the common use of persistence of vision,
several traits that were to continue as trends in later
movie history. Most strikingmwas the inventors’ passion
for fancy Greek and Latin names to dignify their dabblings: Thaumatrope, Phensakistiscope, Viviscope, Zootrope. This
passion for nominal embroidery would later dominate the
first era of motion pictures – Kinetoscope, Bioscope,
Vitascope, Cinematographe –and beyond it – Vitaphone, Technicolor, Cinemascope….”
Gerald Mast. A Short History of the Movies (New York:
Penguin Books, 1971)
**
BLIND DATE WITH AN EDITOR
OF WEBSTER’S DICTIONARY
Oh my beating heart. O good gracious!
Her kisses on my lips were butyraceous.
LJP
**
MOVIES & VOCABULARY BUILDING
Wet-assed hour –(n) Time of trouble or fear
“Come the wet-ass hour and I’m everybody’s daddy.”
Spoken by Al Pacino’s character in SEA OF LOVE
**
WORD COUNT TO TEN
STONE
CEMENT WORKS
WREATH REELS
OFF OUR ROOF
FIFI VENERATES BLOGS
MESSI XEROXES SOCCERS SCORES
FREIGHT
TONI NEEDS THIS LIST
FORGOTTEN
**
THE SAXOPHONIST PAUL DESMOND PRAISES
DAVE BRUBECK
“Desmond, after hearing Brubeck who tended to play ‘way out’ : ‘Man, like wigsville ! You really grooved me with those nutty changes.”
“White Man Speak With Forked Tongue” in JAZZ by
Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker (Sept. 16, 1992)
**
ADJECTIVES USED BY THE NOVELIST SHIRLEY HAZZARD
An "administrative smile'
An "immoderate sunset"
An "infirm chair" in a room of "unconvinced Westernism"
Old buildings whose "violated and ghostly elegance" persists
from On Shirley Hazzard by Michelle deKretser (New York:
Catapult, 2019
FILM DIRECTOR ADJECTIVES
“Stephen (Spielberg) and David (Lynch) have a profound
kinship as fellow radicals in the world of cinema. I
believe
In addition to Hitchcockian, the next two cinema
names that are now in our dictionaries are Lynchian and Spielbergian.”
Laura Lynney. Time Magazine (June 21,2022)
**
A SINGLE LETTER CAN MAKE
ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD
Sweetshop sweatshop
A single letter
Divides them,
That & thousands
Of lives ruined.
LJP
“A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.”
Fred Allen
Quoted in Writing Changes Everything , edited
by Deborah Brodie (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997)
**
IDEAS OF ENDANGERMENT
“It’s too much, this being alive. Too heavy , too
uncertain, too chronically cataclysmic, too bellicose,
too unwell, too freighted with a possibility of the
perception of error. The word of the last few years –
in American activist and academic circles anyway –
has been ‘precarity.’ Which gets at ideas of endangerment, neglect, contingency, risk. Basically, we’re worried.
And: we’re worried you’re not worried enough. Like I said:
it’s too much.”
Wesley Morris. “Beyonce’ Is, of Course, In Control”
in The New York Times (August 1, 2022)
**
ON FRIENDSHIP
“ There are two categories of friendship: those
in which people are enlivened by each other and
those in which people must be enlivened to be with
each other. In the first category one clears
the decks to be together. In the second one looks
for an empty space in the schedule.”
Vivian Gornick. Approaching Eye Level (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1996)
**
THE STRAIGHT FORWARD STARE
“Flaubert said at one point that it’s only by looking
down at the black pit at our feet, that we can remain
calm (i.e. you’re more likely to panic if you don’t
look at it, and the only way to look at it is to look
at it with a straight forward stare.”
Julian Barnes
from Conversations With Julian Barnes, edited by Vanessa Guignery and Ryan Roberts (University Press of Mississippi, 2009)
**
on Famine, Affluence, and Morality by Peter Singer
“Singer, prompted by widespread and credible hunger
in what’s now Bangladesh, proposed a simple thought
experiment : if you stroll by a child drowning in
a shallow pond, presumably you don’t worry too
much about soiling your clothes before you wade
in to help; given the irrelevance of the child’s
location – in an actual pond nearby or in a
metaphorical pond six thousand miles away—devoting
resources to superfluous goods is tantamount to
allowing a child to drown for the sake of a
dry cleaner’s bill.
Gideon Lewis-Kraut. “Do Better” in The New Yorker
(August 15, 2022)
**
ESCAPE FROM DOUBT
“To some people return to religion is the answer,
not as an act of faith but in order to escape an
intolerable doubt but in search of security. The
student of the contemporary scene who is not concerned
with the church but with man’s soul considers this
step another sympton of the failure of nerve.”
Erich Fromm. Psychoanalysis and Religion (New Haven:
Yale University Press. 1958)
***
WHAT IS CORRECT THINKING?
“What is correct thinking? It is to make our little
interior model of the outside world as exact as possible.
If the laws of our microcosm resemble fairly closely
those of macrocosm, if our map represents with relative precision the country though which we must travel,
there is some chance that our actions may be
adjusted to our needs, our desires, or our fears.”
Andre Maurois. The Art of Living (New York:
Harpers Brothers, 1959)
**
THE PARALLEL WORLD WHERE WE REALLY LIVE
“Man lives in the real world; but there’s also
a parallel world: a paper one, a bureaucratic one.
So the passport is the person’s double in the
parallel world.’ The comment comes from a Russian
woman in her thirties interviewed as part of a study
in St. Petersburg in 2008. She might have been
channeling the philosopher Ron Harre’ , who
called these bureaucratic doubles ‘file-selves.’”
Sheila Fitzpatrick. “Diary” in London Review of Books (22 September 2022)
**
ESSENCE OF READING POETRY
Socrates contends
The essence of knowing
Is not knowing.
Since that is true,
Then the essence
Of reading this short verse
Is not reading this verse.
LJP
“There are no uninteresting people in the world,
says Yevtushenko in one of his best lyrics; everyone
carries around with him his first snow and his first
kiss it is not people who die but worlds.”
Edward Thomas. London Magazine (November 1967)
**
ON BRAZIL’S FAMOUS POET
CARLOS DRUMMOND de ANDRADE & CHARLIE CHAPLIN
“The figure of ‘Carlitos’ as Chaplin was known
in Brazil, offers perhaps the single key to
Drummond’s poetics: the consummate artist who
appears not to be an artist at all: the down-and-out
clown who manages to stumble along life’s tightrope,
forever nearly yet never quite falling off: ‘Carlos,
go on! Be gauche in life!” Drummond tells himself
in the opening line of his first book of poems,
self-effacingly entitled Some Poetry.”
Thomas Colchie. Travelling in the Family: Selected
Poems Carlos Drummond de Andrade (New York:
Random House, 1986)
**
ON A FAMOUS NURSERY RHYME
“Here we go round the mulberry bush
The mulberry bush
The mulberry bush
Here we go round the mulberry bush
On a cold and frosty morning
Although this rhyme likely started out using Bramble Bush (mulberries actually grow on trees), historian R. S. Duncan suggests this version came about at Wakefield Prison in England. The facility has been home to an extremely recognizable mulberry tree for centuries, and the theory goes that Victorian female prisoners used to dance around it and made up the rhyme to keep their kids amused. (Back then, men, women, and children were often confined together.) The tree eventually died in 2017, but it was replaced with a cutting from the original.”
from INTERESTING FACTS website (OCTOBER 1, 2022)
**
“You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.”
Mario Cuomo
**
CHARLES SIMIC AND HIERONYMUS BOSCH
“’It was the love of…irreverence , as much as anything
else, that started me in poetry,’ Simic has said, and
he learned from Hieronymus Bosh that ‘there’s no joy
like the one a truly outrageous image on the verge
of blasphemy gives’”:
An old man gave little Mary Magdalene
A broken piece of a mirror.
She hid in the church outhouse.
When she got thirsty she licked
The steam off the glass.
Adam Kirsch. The Modern Element (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2008)
**
DELMORE SCHWARTZ & THE POET AS SEER
“One of Delmore’s characteristic stances was this
insistence on the poet as seer, a medium of truths
whose power lay in their independence from the
vicissitudes of common reality. His own aspiration
was to remain indifferent to the merely visible,
choosing like Joyce’s Dedalus, to comprehend life
‘purified in and reprojected from the human imagination.”
James Atlas. Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an
American Poet (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1977)
ABOUT COLLY CIBBER
"In his Book An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber,
he not only defended himself against personal attacks
from such well-known figures as Johnson, Fielding, and
Pope, but also produced one of the most important and indispensable accounts of a vital period in English
theatrical history. Cibber accurately chronicles the
plays, playwrights, and actors of the day in unstinting
detail, affording theater lovers and historians an
incomparable glimpse of the beginnings of modern theater.
As an actor, manager, and playwright, Colley Cibber
was among the most influential members of the London theater in the 18th century.”
From https://allpoetry.com/Colley-Cibber. All poetry.com is an important and useful site for\all lovers of poetry. I highly
recommend that readers go to it.
**
ON COLLY CIBBER
Colly Cibber
Wrote lots of gibber-
ish & horror yet
Was named Poet Laureate.
LJP
**
SHAKESPEARE ON TELEVISION
“Every single one of Shakespeare’s plays has an organic
rhythm of its own. I do not think he understood the
five-act system until mid-career, but he had a practical
sense of timing and variation, and he was a perfect story-teller. Therefore no commercial programme can ever do Shakespeare properly, because the breaks are never right
and are never filled with the right music.”
Peter Levi in The Spectator (August 16, 1986)
**
Although William Shakespeare was never appointed Poet
Laureate of England, Shakespeare’s godson – Sir William
D’Avenant was named to the post in 1637.
**
RAYMOND CHANDLER ON SHAKESPEARE
Writing to Hamish Hamilton in April 1949, Raymond Chandler, one of the creators of the “tough detective”
story, offered the following assessment of Shakespeare:
Shakespeare would have done well in any generation
because he would have refused to die in a corner; he
would have taken the false gods and made them
over; he would have taken the current formulae and
forced them into something lesser men thought
them incapable of. Alive today he would undoubtedly
have written and directed motion pictures,
plays, and God knows what. Instead of saying ‘This
medium is no good,’ he would have used it and made
it good.
Reprinted in Raymond Chandler Speaking, ed. Dorothy Gardiner
and Katherine Sorley Walker (Houghton Mifflin, 1977), p.82
**
SHAKESPEARE’S CHARACTERS LAUGH AT
JOKES THE AUDIENCE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND
“I have noticed that in plays where characters on stage
laugh a great deal, the people out front laugh very
little. This is notoriously true for productions of Shakespeare’s comedies .’Well, sirrah,’ says one buffoon,
‘he did go heigh-ho upon a bird bolt.” This gem is
followed by such guffaws and general merriment as
would leave Olson and Johnson wondering how they failed.”
Jean Kerr. Reflections of a Part-Time Playwright
**
**
PRINCE HARRY , THE DUKE OF SUSSEX
“Harry counts himself among the Shakespeare hordes,
‘bored and confused as a teen-ager when his father drags
Him to see performances of the Royal Shakespeare Company; disinclined to read much of anything, least of all the
freighted works of Britain’s national author….’I tried
to change ,’ he recalls. ‘I opened Hamlet. Hmm. Lonely
prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining
parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper…? I
slammed it shut. ‘No, thank you.’”
Rebbeca Mead. “The Royal Me” in The New Yorker
(January 23, 2023)
**
SHAKESPEARE AND THE WORD LAUGHlaugh occurs 87 times in 238 speeches within 41 works.
for example:
Isabella in Measure for Measure
[II, 2] line 875
Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder;
Nothing but thunder! Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
from Concordance of Shakespeare's Complete Works
https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org › concordance
**
Perfect Film work for Shakespeare -- Line Producer
**
READING SHAKESPEARE & MAKING KNOTS
The following item appeared in The Saturday Review
on September 3, 1949. It was signed by J.L.
“There was once an American in a hotel in Iceland
who read Shakespeare and discovered ten thousand
new ways to tie knots. “When his discoveries were
made known, an American reporter was sent to
interview him.
“Is it true,” asked the reporter. “that the reading of Shakespeare is the reason for your great discoveries?”
“ Yes, it is quite true,” answered his fellow countryman.
“As I read him, I held a spool of twine in my hand. I
followed his rhythms with the twine and the knots were
formed.”
“Are there any more knots possible?” asked the reporter.
“Oh I have ceased reading Shakespeare,” said the savant.
‘ Now I read the comments of different men who have
read his works and I haven’t made a solitary knot.”
**
IMDB TRIVIA ABOUT THE MOVIE SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE
"Imelda Staunton and Jim Carter are married in
real life, and in this movie, they played the same
role. Staunton played the Nurse off-stage, and
Carter played the nurse on-stage."
**
EVERYDAY, MY ARIEL
Everyday, my Ariel,
I put the world behind me, but it shoot back.
One generation & the next,'
Light as sunlight thrushing
As thru the Spanish Cedars flash
Cormorants magnific with their hooked beaks,
Always a fitful cornucopia
To take the breath away.
I press my life to the jumping dayshine.
What do I demand?
More space? More freedom?
Freedom to do what? Hungering for magic,
I stand on Prospero's isle.
Could I have been so wrong about my life?
Far out on the ocean,
Replenished & green,
One anonymous sailor
Fastens his shrouds.
Louis Phillips
from "The Man On Prospero's Isle" a sequence of based
upon The Tempest, published in The Time, The Hour, The Solitariness of the Place (Norcross, Georgia: Swallow's
Tale Press, 1985)
“Reading was such a wonderful thing that to have made a life around the experience was almost criminal and it was so fortunate.”
Elizabeth Hardwick
**
THE CREATOR OF THE WIZARD OF OZ PREDICTED
THE INVENTION OF THE CELL PHONE
"Baum wrote dozens of other novels and short stories,
and he had a knack for predicting an impressive number of inventions in his books: the taser, digital calendars, and defibrillators to name a few. In his novel The Master Key,
a character even discovers an augmented reality gadget that predates Pokémon GO by a century. But Baum’s most notable prediction comes in Ozma of Oz:
"Shaggy … drew from his pocket a tiny instrument which
he placed against his ear.
Ozma, observing this action in her Magic Picture, at
once caught up a similar instrument from a table beside
her and held it to her own ear. The two instruments
recorded the same delicate vibrations of sound and
formed a wireless telephone, an invention of the Wizard."
TRIVIA GENIUS December 6, 2022
https://www.triviagenius.com/facts-about-the-wizard-of-oz/XzxcDPaawAAGI7SQ?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1657944838
**
ON THE TITLE ILLYWHACKER
Illywhacker is the title of of a 1985 novel by Peter Cary .
An illwhacker is a conman or trickster. A Dictionary of
Australian Colloquialism says that it is derived from
‘spieler’a ‘teller of tales, swindler.’
**
SAMUEL BECKETT
“Beckett’s work is a single holy book, an absolute of poetry
and negation by whose light all else in contemporary literature appears somewhat superfluous and unclear.”
John Updike
**
MARK TWAIN & THE PUBLICATION OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
“Mark Twain took a rival publisher, Estes and Laurent,
to court when they printed Huckleberry Finn before
his own publishing company could print it. When
Judge LeBaron Bradford Colt ruled against him in
the U.S. Circuit Court in Boston, the author was
so enraged that he publicly condemned Colt.
“The judge, Twain said. has allowed the defendant
to ‘sell property which does not belong to him, but
to me –
\property which he has not bought and I have
not sold. Therefore, he went on, Under this ruling
I am now advertising that judge’s homestead for sale,
and if I make as good a sum out of it, as I expect,
I shall go on and sell the rest of his property.’”
From Mystery Scene Miscellany in Mystery SceneMagazine
(November 2022)
**
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.”
Groucho Marx
THE WORLD’S EARLIEST DATED BOOK
“According to the British Library, the Diamond Sutra,
printed in China in 868 A.D., is the world’s earliest
dated book.”
David Lemmo. Tarzan, Jungle King of Popular Culture
(Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2017)
**
AN ENGLISH TEACHER THROWS
IN THE TOWEL
Great Caesar’s Ghost!
52 yrs old &
I’m finally ploughing my way
Thru Clark Kent’s secret identity.
I’ve had it with cheesy fore flanks
Of Lit Crit.
Literature is meant to fly.
Splatt! Whapp! Wopp! Pow!
Time to spatter
The streets of Metropolis
With finer tints of onomatopoeia.
I tell you I am destined
To leap a tall bildungsroman
In a single bound,
Bend Lois Lane’s steel body
& her neon mind,
In my Daily Planet arms.
Time to stick dynamite
Up required reading lists!
Read me Action Comics,
With arch-villain Mr Mxyzptlk
Who must be tricked
To say his name backwards
So he’ll be returned
To the 5th dimension
For 90 days of rebooting.
(How many dimensions
Does a man need to survive?)
Hamlet, with his cheap poisons,
Cannot stop bullets
With his bare hands &
Is not so moral as all this.
Louis Phillips
SOWETO, SOUTH AFRICA
“Soweto was designed to be bombed –that’s how
forward-thinking the architects of apartheid were.
The township was a city unto itself, with a
population of nearly one million. There were
only two roads in and out. That was so the
military could lock us in, quell any rebellion.
And if the monkeys ever went crazy and tried
to break out of their cage, the air force could
fly over and bomb the shit out of everyone.
Growing up, I never knew that my grandmother
lived in the center of a bull’s eye.”
Trevor Noah. Born a Crime
**
EVERY SAILOR NEEDS A FRIEND
“Somewhere in the Southern ocean, as the immortal
Captain Joshua Slocum recounted in his journal
Around the World in the Sloop Spray, he was touched
to discover that his loneliness was ephemeral.
An intrepid spider in the cabin was spinning
sidewise while he spun forward, and the knowledge
of their companionship inspirited him for the rigors
that lay ahead.”
S.J. Perelman. “ Looking For Pussy” in
Eastward Ha! (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977)
**
ON THE ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORD TRAVELtravel (v.)
late 14c., "to journey," from travailen (1300) "to make a journey," originally "to toil, labor" (see travail). The semantic development may have been via the notion of "go on a difficult journey," but it also may reflect the difficulty of any journey in the Middle Ages. Replaced Old English faran. Related: Traveled; traveling. Traveled (adj.) "having made journeys, experienced in travel" is from early 15c. Traveling salesman is attested from 1885.
**
Etymological Dictionary On Line
**
WOBURN, MASSACHUSETTS
“I had come from Woburn, Massachusetts, a fine
New England town noted for its rambunctious biker
gangs, its indicted and convicted mayors and the
worse toxic-waste dumping grounds in the United
States. But it’s also an old colonial city with
a bronze minuteman on the town green guarding the
white-shingled Methodist church and a great
ivy-covered library with a statue of Count Rumford
on its front lawn.”
Eric Bogosian. Drinking in America (New York:
Vintage Books, 1987).
+*
FOR THE FANS OF THE LEGEND & LORE
OF KING ARTHUR
“ A cold, wind driven rain soaks through my parka as I
walk across a narrow foot-bridge that links the Cornwall mainland in southwest England to a rocky promontory
overlooking the Bristol Channel. Far below this cantilevered span, waves crash against the cliffs and swirl
inside a grotto known as Merlin’s Cave.”
Joshua Hammer. “The Forever Legend” in Smithsonian
Magazine (September 2022)
**
People also ask
“What is inside Merlin's cave?
Inside Merlin's Cave contains Numerous poems, commentaries, prophecies and plays, including the full text of Thomas Hardy's Queen of Cornwall, that establish Cornwall not just as the birthplace of King Arthur but as a source of all Arthurian themes.”
**
REMEMBER THIS PASSWORD?
“ Dildano's password, "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch",
is the name of a real village in Wales, United Kingdom. It's also the United Kingdom's longest place name.”
IDMb trivia to Barbarella (1968)
**
JOHN JAY AUDOBON TRAVELS THROUGH FLORIDA
“At Indian Key I observed an immense quantity of
beautiful Tree Snails of a pyramidal or shortly conical
form, some pure white, others curiously marked with
spiral lines of bright red, yellow and black. They
were crawling vigorously on every branch of every
bush where there was not a nest of the White Ibis.
Wherever that bird nested not a live snail was to
be seen; hundreds lay dead underneath.”
John James Audobon
**
NOT EXACTLY ABOUT INDIA
‘This novel isn’t about India. I don’t know India. I
was there once, for less than a month. When I was
there, I was struck by the country’s foreingness;
it remains obdurately foreign to me. But long before
I went to India, I began to imagine a man who has
been born there and has moved away; I imagined a
character who keeps coming back again and again.
He’s compelled to keep returning; yet, with each
return trip, his sense of India’s foreigness only
deepens. India remains unyieldingly foreign even to him.”
John Irving.”Author’s Notes” to A Son of the Circus
(New York: Random House, 1994)
**
SAILING DOWN THE RIVER AMUR
Sailing down the River Amur,
I started to dream of Dorothy Lamour.
I cried out: “Leave her alone, Bob Hope.”
“Wake up,” my wife sd, “and quiet down, you dope!”
LJP
**
PhillipsMiscellany 