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"In short," said Sydney, "this is a desperate time, when desperate games are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the winning game; I will play the losing one. No man's life here is worth purchase. Any one carried home by the people to-day may be condemned to-morrow. Now, the stake I have resolved to play for, in case of the worst, is a friend in the Conciergerie. And the friend I purpose to myself to win is Mr. Barsad."
"You need have good cards, sir," said the spy.
"I'll run them over. I'll see what I hold. -- Mr. Lorry, you know what a brute I am; I wish you'd give me a little brandy."
It was put before him, and he drank off a glassful -- drank off another glassful -- pushed the bottle thoughtfully away.
"Mr. Barsad," he went on, in the tone of one who really was looking over a hand at cards: "Sheep of the prisons, emissary of Republican committees, now turnkey, now prisoner, always spy and secret informer, so much the more valuable here for being English that an Englishman is less open to suspicion of subornation in those characters than a Frenchman, represents himself to his employers under a false name. That's a very good card. Mr. Barsad, now in the employ of the republican French government, was formerly in the employ of the aristocratic English, the enemy of France and freedom. That's an excellent card. Inference clear as day in this region of suspicion, that Mr. Barsad, still in the pay of the aristocratic English government, is the spy of Pitt, the treacherous foe of the Republic crouching in its bosom, the English traitor and agent of all mischief so much spoken of and so difficult to find. That's a card not to be beaten. Have you followed my hand, Mr. Barsad?"
"Not to understand your play," returned the spy, somewhat uneasily.
"I play my ace, denunciation of Mr. Barsad to the nearest Section Committee. Look over your hand, Mr. Barsad, and see what you have. Don't hurry." ...
"Look over your hand carefully, Mr. Barsad. Take time."
It was a poorer hand than he suspected. Mr. Barsad saw losing cards in it that Sydney Carton knew nothing of. ... (From A Hand at Cards, pgs. 295-297)
Barsad earlier on the witness stand:
Quote:
Had he ever been a spy himself? No, he scorned the base insinuation. What did he live upon? His property. Where was his property? He didn't precisely remember where it was. What was it? No business of anybody's Had he inherited it? Yes, he had. From whom? Distant relation. Very distant? Rather. Ever been in prison? Certainly not. Never in a debtors' prison? Didn't see what that had to do with it. Never in a debtors' prison? -- Come, once again. Never? Yes. How many times? Two or three times. Not five or six? Perhaps. Of what profession? Gentleman. Ever been kicked? Might have been. Frequently? No. Ever been kicked downstairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick on the top of a staircase, and fell downstairs of his own accord. Kicked on that occasion for cheating at dice? Something to that effect was said by the intoxicated liar who committed the assault, but it was not true. Swear it was not true? Positively. Ever live by cheating at play? Never. Ever live by play? Not more than other gentlemen do. ... (From A Disappointment, p. 75)
Writers, hedge your bets the Dickens way:
Quote:
The text of this volume is taken from the "Charles Dickens" Edition of 1868-1870, which Dickens himself reviewed for the press, striking out or altering occasional words and making other minor changes. ... Dickens originally published the novel in weekly installments in All the Year Round from April 30 to November 26, 1859, and cannily made an extra profit by also bringing it out from June through December in monthly numbers bound in his customary green paper covers. ... (A Note on the Text, no page no. indicated)
Listen:
A Tale of Two Cities
Abridged, alas!, Audio CD
Narrated perfectly by Scottish actor Ian Richardson, who assumes a different voice for each character and with extraordinarily excellent diction throughout!
View:
A Tale of Two Cities
DVD
With screen legend Ronald Colman
A Tale of Two Cities
DVD
With actor/author Dirk Bogarde
Refined Sugar? After retiring from the boxing ring for a time, former middleweight champion Sugar Ray Robinson works on a new routine at the French Casino nightclub in late October, 1952, as he makes one of the biggest transitions in the entertainment business. He returned to the ring and regained his title in 1955, holding it on and off until 1960. (Cutline below the photo of a dapper Robinson in 'soup and fish', easily holding his own with the equally regal dancng girls, p. 153)
Quote:
In this beauty parlor, customers spurn the usual women's magazines. Instead, they read racing forms and exhcange tips while under their hair dryers. (Cutline above a photo of two tough palomas in hair rollers, poring over the Daily Racing Form against a surround mural of horse races in progress , p. 161)
On the benefits of observation:
Quote:
In the early Sixties, when I was a young reporter for the New York Post, I was told early by a great editor named Paul Sann: "Remember one thing, kiddo. You're ot there for yourself. You're not there for me. You're there for the reader. You're going where the reader can't go." And that meant I was there at the scene of calamity or celebration to help the reader share the experience. That is, to help that reader see. And the people who helped me see were photographers.
"Look at this guy's socks," a fine photographer named Louis Liotta said to me one morning, as we stared down at the body of a man found in a vacant lot. He was wearing a sport jacket and slacks. "You see? White socks. But what about those white socks?"
"They're dirty," I said. The socks were smeared with an anonymous gray-brown oily substance.
"Exactly," Liotta said. "So he's been out a few days. And that's what the cops'll try to figure out."
The he pointed me toward a beefy man in a dark-blue overcoat who was watching carefully among the cops and journalists. "That's the guy from homicide," he said. "Ask him about the socks." And so I did. And got a story.
I learned that morning to talk to the photographers before I talked to the cops or my fellow reporters. They were paid to see, and helped me to do the same. I soon learned that photographers also kept other photographers in their sights. At that crime scene long ago (when there were seven newspapers in the city of New York), there would have been a few photographers especially worth watching. They moved like members of an elite corps, with a kind of proprietary swagger. They dressed better than the other photographers. They carried their excellent new cameras. There were deferred to by the police, and kew the detectives by their first names. These were the men from the New York Daily News. (From the Foreward, Six Pictures on the Way Down, I, by Pete Hamill, p. 9)
About French Casino:
Nightclub City Politics and Amusement in Manhattan
Hardcover
By history prof Burton W. Peretti
The French Casino was the most lavish high-volume club New York City had yet seen. This enterprise was developed by the owners of the Earl Carroll Theatre at 50th Street and Seventh Avenue, just above where Broadway crossed Seventh Avenue. Louis F. Blumenthal, Jack Shapiro, and Charles Haring needed to fill the theater after the demise of Carroll's revues and a failed effort to show films. (Carroll, meanwhile, relocated to California, where he opened a successful new nightclub). the scale of the French Casino was unprecedented. The partners spent over $200,000 in an effort to create a restaurant-cabaret for fifteen hundred customers. Clifford Fischer, who was hired to manage the club, took the French cabaret theme to a new level and spent $60,000 to hire an actual troupe from Paris's Folies Bergères; the Casino's scarlet and silver paneling and Art Nouveau murals overlooked terraced floors and a balcony for diners. A large dance floor bordered the old theater stage. Here a company of acrobats, comics and dancers put on revues, interpsersed with the Folies show, to the accompaniment of the Jack Denny and Vincent Travers orchestras. Musical revues sometimes featured the popular ocean-liner motif, but evocations of continental Europe predominated. Tableaux mimicked compositions by Picasso and Matisse and dance numbers made use of both traditional and modernist materials and styles, for example justaposing a flamenco dance with Renita Kramer's startling patomime (in which, costumed as half man and half woman, she made love to herself in an expressionistic moonlit scene). Female nudity was also prominently featured. All of this, and a five-course dinner, was offered by the French Casino for $2.50 per customer. (footnotes omitted) (Chapter 9, Billy Rose, pgs. 199-200)
A Broadway author - I am proud to call myself one - always waits, on the first night of his play, either in 'Sardi's' or 'Downey's', and his press agent goes out to get the six newspapers, which are called the Six Butchers of Broadway'.
Now if you get six out of six good reviews, you could ask the President of the United States to sell you the White House, though I don't think this has ever happened. If you get five good reviews, you are doing fairly well and you have to start worrying about 480, Lexington Avenue, which is the home of the income tax. It is not a bad kind of worry though in its own way, if you have got to have worries, and I suppose everyone has to have them. If you have four, you can afford to give a party, or at least you can afford to attend the party which is usually given for you.
If you get three good reviews, it's time like to go home to bed, but if you only get two, you stay there the whole of the following day and don't go out until after dark. If you get one good review, you just make an air reservation very quickly to get back to where you came from, but if you get six bad reviews, you take a sleeping pill. You might even take an overdose! (From What are they at round Broadway and the bars?, pgs. 45-46)
'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
And if I pass this way again, you can rest assured
I'll always do my best for her, on that I give my word
In a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Not a word was spoke between us, there was little risk involved
Everything up to that point had been left unresolved.
Try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail,
Poisoned in the bushes an' blown out on the trail,
Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Suddenly I turned around and she was standin' there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair.
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Now there's a wall between us, somethin' there's been lost
I took too much for granted, got my signals crossed.
Just to think that it all began on a long-forgotten morn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Well, the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount
But nothing really matters much, it's doom alone that counts
And the one-eyed undertaker, he blows a futile horn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
I've heard newborn babies wailin' like a mournin' dove
And old men with broken teeth stranded without love.
Do I understand your question, man, is it hopeless and forlorn?
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes
I bargained for salvation an' they gave me a lethal dose.
I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Well, I'm livin' in a foreign country but I'm bound to cross the line
Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine.
If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
On becoming a songwriter:
Bob Dylan Chronicles Volume One
Hardcover
By Bob Dylan
Quote:
I did everything fast. Thought fast, ate fast, talked fast and walked fast. I even sang my songs fast. I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to be a composer with anything to say.
I couldn't exactly put in words what I was looking for, but I began searching in principle for it, over at the New York Public Library, a monumental building with marble floors and walls, vacuous and spacious caverns, vaulted ceiling. A building that radiates triumph and glory when you walk inside. In one of the upstairs reading rooms I started reading articles in newspapers on microfilm from 1855 to about 1865 to see what daily life was like. I wasn't so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times. Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the Brooklyn Daily Times and the Pennsylvania Freeman. Others, too, like the Memphis Daily Eagle, the Savannah Daily Herald and Cincinnati Enquirer. It wasn't like it was another world, but the same one only with more urgency, and the issue of slavery wasn't the only concern. There were news items about reform movements, antigambling leagues, rising crime, child labor, temperance, slave-wage factories, loyalty oaths and religious revivals. You get the feeling that the newspapers themselves could explode and lightning will burn and everybody will perish. Everybody uses the same God, quotes the same Bible and law and literature. Plantation slavecrats of Virginia are accused of breeding and selling their own children. In the Northern cities, there's a lot of discontent and debt is piled high and seems out of control. The plantation aristocracy run their plantations like city-states. They are like the Roman republic where an elite group of characters rule supposedly for the good of all.... (-- p. 85)
Dylan's memoirs read like advertising copy for a pro-literacy non-profit but with the convict/fieldhand's omission of articles definite and indefinite that has typified coolspeak lo' these many decades.
Listen:
Chronicles, Vol. I
Audio CD
Narrated by U.S. actor Sean Penn
'I want to talk to you about Society Spice,' said Sir George severely, dismissing the minor subject of costume. He retrieved the copy of the paper from the corner into which his just indignation had caused him to fling it, and began to turn its pages with knitted brow, Roderick eyeing him the while with all the care-free insouciance of a man watching a ticking bomb.
'Ha!' barked Sir George suddenly, lifting his son and heir a clear two inches off the seat of his chair. 'Just as I thought! It isn't there!'
'What, father?'
'The fourth instalment of that series on Bookmakers' Swindling Methods. It has been discontinued. Why?'
'Well, you see, father -- '
'Pilbeam told me it was a great success. He said there had been a number of letters about it.'
Roderick shuddered. He had seen some of those letters - the ones which Pilbeam, a jovial enthusiast, had described as the fruitiest of the bunch.
'Well, you see, father,' he bleated, 'it was so frightfully personal.'
'Personal!' Sir George's frown seemed to darken the room 'It was meant to be personal. Society Spice is a personal paper. Good heavens, you don't suppose these bookmakers can afford to bring libel actions, do you?'
'But, father --'
'All the better if they did. It would be an excellent advertisement, and no jury would award them more than a farthing's damages.'
Roderick shuffled unhappily.
'It isn't so much libel actions.
'What do you mean?'
'Well, father, it's like this. I happened to be down at Kempton Park last Saturday, and I met a man who told me that Ike Bullett was going about uttering the most awful threats.'
'Ike Bullett? Who's Ike Bullett?'
'He's one of the bookies. The articles have been particularly outspoken about him, you know. And he was threatening that if I didn't stop them he would put the Lads on to me and they would come and butter me over the pavement.'
Sensational as this announcement was, it seemed to leave Sir George completely unimpressed. He did not actually snap his fingers, but he made an odd contemptuous noise at the back of his throat which amounted to a finger-snap. Having done this, he proceeded to speak his mind.
It was a manly, sturdy attitude that he adopted. He defied Ike Bullett and all his kind. Ike Bullett, he seemed to suggest, might put all the Lads in the world on to Roderick, but he couldn't intimidate him, Sir George. He faced with a fine, fearless unconcern the prospect of people buttering Roderick over the pavement. Not since the days of Lucius Junius Brutus had there been a father so ruggedly careless of the comfort of his son.
'The series,' said the proprietor of the Mammoth Publishing Company tensely at the end of a striking passage in which he had voiced some of the resentment he felt at the mean trick which Providence had played upon him in making him Roderick's father, 'will be resumed. At once. Understand that!
'Yes, father.'
'And if,' said Sir George valiantly, 'this Ike Bullett of yours doesn't like it he can lump it!'
'Very well, father,' said Roderick hopelessly. ... (From A Marriage has been Arranged, pgs. 12-13)
Yes, and get this tidbit on inspiration:
Quote:
Literary composition can often be a slow and painful process, but if there is one occasion when a writer should surely find the golden sentences bubbling up without an effort it is when he is inditing a letter to the girl he loves. The fact that for some time it had been getting harder and harder to think of things to fill up the pages on these occasions was beginning to weigh upon Bill's spirits. Impious as it was to entertain even for an instant the supposition that writing letters to Alice could have become a bore, honesty compelled him to admit that his primary motive in routing Judson out of the room at this early hour had been the desire to tackle the task and get it finished and off his mind. (-- p. 229)
Proof, surely, that Alice is not The One, not for Bill, at least.
I was sent home on Klonopin, an anti-anxiety drug I’d been on forever, as well as a duet of pills — Remeron and Effexor — that were referred to as California rocket fuel for its presumed igniting effect. As it turned out, the combo wasn’t destined to work on me. At home, I was gripped again by thoughts of suicide and clung to my bed, afraid to go out even on a walk around the block with my daughter. When I wasn’t asleep, I stared into space, lost in the terrors of the far-off past, which had become the terrors of the present. It was decided that I shouldn’t be left alone, so my sister and my good friend took turns staying with me. But it was clear this arrangement was short term, and by the end of the weekend, after phone calls to various doctors, it was agreed that I would go back into the hospital to try ECT.
And then, the Sunday afternoon before I planned to return to 4 Center, something shifted ever so slightly in my mind. I had gone off the Remeron and started a new drug, Abilify. I was feeling a bit calmer, and my bedroom didn’t seem like such an alien place anymore. Maybe it was the fear of ECT, or perhaps the tweaked medication had kicked in, or maybe the depression had finally taken its course and was beginning to lift. I had — and still have — no real idea what did it. For a brief interval, no one was home, and I decided to get up and go outside. I stopped at Food Emporium and studied the cereal section, as amazed at the array as if I had just emerged from the gulag. I bought some paper towels and strawberries, and then I walked home and got back into bed. It wasn’t a trip to the Yucatan, but it was a start. I didn’t check into the hospital the next day and instead passed the rest of the summer slowly reinhabiting my life, coaxing myself along. I spent time with people I trusted, with whom I didn’t have to pretend.
Toward the end of August I went out for a few days to the rented Southampton house of my friend Elizabeth. It was just her, me and her three annoying dogs. I had brought a novel along, “The Gathering,” by Anne Enright, the sort of book about incomplete people and unhappy families that has always spoken to me. It was the first book to absorb me — the first I could read at all — since before I went into the hospital. I came to the last page on the third afternoon of my visit. It was about 4:30, the time of day that, by mid-August, brings with it a whiff of summer’s end. I looked up into the startlingly blue sky; one of the dogs was sitting at my side, her warm body against my leg, drying me off after the swim I had recently taken. I could begin to see the curve of fall up ahead. There would be new books to read, new films to see and new restaurants to try. I envisioned myself writing again, and it didn’t seem like a totally preposterous idea. I had things I wanted to say.
Everything felt fragile and freshly come upon, but for now, at least, my depression had stepped back, giving me room to move forward. I had forgotten what it was like to be without it, and for a moment I floundered, wondering how I would recognize myself. I knew for certain it would return, sneaking up on me when I wasn’t looking, but meanwhile there were bound to be glimpses of light if only I stayed around and held fast to the long perspective. It was a chance that seemed worth taking. (emphasis added) (-- p. 48)
On depression and the life literary:
Quote:
“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,” observed the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a depressive 19th-century Jesuit priest. I don’t think I’ve ever met a depressed person who wanted to get out of bed in the morning — who didn’t experience the appearance of day as a call to burrow further under the covers, the better to embrace the vanished night.
When I was awake (the few hours that I was), I felt a kind of lethal fatigue, as if I were swimming through tar. Phone messages went unanswered, e-mail unread. In my inert but agitated state I could no longer concentrate long enough to read — not so much as a newspaper headline — and the idea of writing was as foreign to me as downhill racing. (James Baldwin: “No one works better out of anguish at all; that’s an incredible literary conceit.”) ... (-- p. 34)
Glimpses of World History Being Further Letters to His Daughter Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People
Hardcover
By Jawaharlal Nehru
Quote:
I do not know when or where these letters will be published, or whether they will be published at all, for India is a strange land to-day and it is difficult to prophesy. But I am writing these lines while I have the chance to do so, before events forestall me.
An apology and an explanation are needed for this historical series of letters. Those readers who take the trouble to go through them will perhaps find the apology and the explanation. In particular, I would refer the reader to the last letter, and perhaps it would be as well, in this topsy-turvy world, to begin at the end.
The letters have grown. There was little of planning about them, and I never thought that they would grow to these dimensions. Nearly six years ago, when my daughter was ten years old, I wrote a number of letters to her containing a brief and simple account of the early days of the world. These early letters were subsequently published in book form and they had a generous reception. The idea of continuing them hovered in my mind, but a busy life full of political activity prevented it from taking shape. Prison gave me the chance I needed, and I seized it.
Prison-life has its advantages; it brings both leisure and a measure of detachment. But the disadvantages are obvious. There are no libraries or reference books at the command of the prisoner, and, under these conditions, to write on any subject, and especially history, is a foolhardy undertaking. A number of books came to me, but they could not be kept. They came and went. Twelve years ago, however, when, in common with large numbers of my countrymen and countrywomen, I started my pilgrimages to prison, I developed the habit of making notes of the books I read. My note-books grew in number and they came to my rescue when I started writing. Other books of ocurse helped me greatly, among them inevitably, H.G. Wells's Outline of History. But the lack of good references books was very real, and because of this the narrative had often to be slurred over, or particular periods skipped. (From the author's Preface to the original edition, Jan. 1, 1934, p. vii)
How to father a daughter 101:
Quote:
How shall we bear ourselves in this great movement? What part shall we play in it? I cannot say what part will fall to our lot; but, whatever it may be, let us remember that we can do nothing which may bring discredit to our cause or dishonour to our people. If we are to be India's soldiers we have India's honour in our keeping, and that honour is a sacred trust. Often we may be in doubt as to what to do.l It is no easy matter to decide what is right and what is not. One little test I shall ask you to apply whenever you are in doubt. It may help you. Never do anything in secret or anything that you would wish to hide. For the desire to hide anything means that you are afraid, and fear is a bad thing and unworthy of you. Be brave, and all the rest follows. If you are brave, you will not fear will not do anything of which you are ashamed. You know that in our great Freedom Movement, under Bapuji's (Mahatma Gandhi's) leadership, there is no room for secrecy or hiding. We have nothing to hide. We are not afraid of what we do and what we say. We work in the sun and in the light. Even so in our private lives let us make friends with the sun and work in the light and do nothing secretly or furtively. Privacy, of course, we have and should have, but that is a very different thing from secrecy. And if you do so, my dear, you will grow up to be a child of light, unafraid and serene and unruffled, whatever may happen.
I have written a very long letter to you. And yet there is so much I would like to tell you. How can a letter contain it?
You are fortunate, I have said, in being a witness to this great struggle for freedom that is going on in our country. You are also very fortunate in having a very brave and wonderful little woman for your Mummie, and if you are ever in doubt or in trouble you cannot have a better friend.
Good-bye, little one, and may you grow up into a brave soldier in India's service.
President Bush's foreign trips seem designed to require as little contact as possible with the countries he visits. He is usually accompanied by two thousand or so Americans, as well as several airplanes, helicopters and cars. He sees little except palaces and conference rooms. His trips involve almost no effort to demonstrate respect and appreciation for the country and culture he is visiting. They also rarely involve any meetings with people outside the government - businessmen, civil society leaders, activists. Even though the president's visit must be highly programmed by definition, a broader effort to touch the people in these foreign lands would have great symbolic value.
Consider an episode involving Bill Clinton and India. In May 1998, India detonated five underground nuclear devices. The Clinton administration roundly condemned New Delhi, levied sanctions, and indefinitely postponed a planned presidential visit. The sanctions proved painful, by some estimates costing India one percent of GDP growth over the next year. Eventually Clinton relented and went to India in March 2000. He spent five days in the country, visited famous sights, put on traditional clothes, and took part in dances and ceremonies. He communicated the message that he enjoyed and admired India as a country and civilization. The result was a transformation. Clinton is a rock start in India. And George W. Bush, despite being the most pro-Indian president in American history, commands none of this attention, or respect. Policy matters but so does the symbolism surrounding it. (From Chapter 7, American Purpose, pgs. 225-226)
The Graves family were thin-nosed and inclined to petulance, but never depraved, cruel or hysterical. A persistent literary tradition: of Richard, a minor poet and a friend of Shenstone; and John Thomas, who was a mathematician and contributed to Sir William Rowan Hamilton's discovery of quaternions; and Richard, a divine and regius Professor of Greek; and James, an archaeologist; and Robert, who invented the disease called after him and was a friend of Turner's; and Robert, classicist and theologian, and a friend of Wordsworth's; and Richard, another divine; and Robert, another divine; and various Roberts, Jameses, Thomases and Richards; and Clarissa, one of the toasts of Ireland, who married Leopold von Ranke (at Windemere church), and linked the Graves and von Ranke families a couple of generations before my father and mother married. (See the British Museum Catalogue for an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century record of Graves' literary history.)
Vet publishing contract with attorney well-versed in entertainment law before signing.
Quote:
It was through this Clarissa-Leopold relationship that my father met my mother. My mother told him at once that she liked Father O'Flynn, the song for writing which my father will be chiefly remembered. He had put the words to a traditional jig tune The Top of Cork Road, which he remembered from his boyhood. Sir Charles Stanford supplied a few chords for the setting. My father sold the complete rights for one guineau. Boosey, the publisher, made thousands. Sir Charles Stanford, who drew a royalty as the composer, also collected a very large sum. Recently my father has been sent a few pounds from gramophone rights. He is not bitter about all this, but has more than once impressed upon me almost religiously never to sell for a sum down the complete rights of any work of mine whatsoever. (-- pgs. 6-7)
Of priests we can offer a charmin variety,
Far renownd for learnin and piety;
Still, Id advance ye widout impropriety,
Father OFlynn as the flowr of them all.
cho: Heres a health to you, Father OFlynn,
Slainte and slainte and slainte agin;
Powrfulest preacher, and tenderest teacher,
And kindliest creature in ould Donegal.
Dont talk of your Provost and Fellows of Trinity,
Famous forever at Greek and Latinity,
Dad and the divils and all at Divinity
Father OFlynn d make hares of them all!
Come, I venture to give ye my word,
Never the likes of his logic was heard,
Down from mythology into thayology,
Truth! and conchology if hed the call.
Och Father OFlynn, youve a wonderful way wid you,
All ould sinners are wishful to pray wid you,
All the young childer are wild for to play wid you,
Youve such a way wid you, Father avick.
Still for all youve so gentle a soul,
Gad, youve your flock in the grandest control,
Checking the crazy ones, coaxin onaisy ones,
Lifting the lazy ones on wid the stick.
And tho quite avoidin all foolish frivolity;
Still at all seasons of innocent jollity,
Where was the playboy could claim an equality,
At comicality, Father, wid you?
Once the Bishop looked grave at your jest,
Till this remark set him off wid the rest:
"Is it lave gaiety all to the laity?
Cannot the clergy be Irishmen, too?
Listen:
Peter Dawson Scottish and Irish Songs
Audio CD
No serious writer should think himself above bribery, which may inspire a loyal following.
Quote:
The first distinguished writer I remember meeting after Swinburne was P.G. Wodehouse, a friend of my brother Percival. Wodehouse was then in his early twenties, on the staff of The Globe, and writing school-stories for The Captain magazine. He gave me a penny, advising me to get marshmallows with it. Though too shy to express my gratitude at the time, I have never since permitted myself to be critical about his work. (-- p. 11)
Control syntax, yes, but not Fate.
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The headmaster, having been given twenty-four hours to leave the country, was succeeded by the second master - a good man, who had taught me how to write English by eliminating all phrases that could be done without, and using verbs and nouns instead of adjectives and adverbs wherever possible. And when to start new paragraphs, and the difference between 'O' and 'Oh'. Mr Lush was a very heavy man, who used to stand at his desk and lean on his thumbs until they bent at right angles. A fortnight after taking over the school, he fell out of a train on his head, and that was the end of him; but the school seems to be still in being. I am occasionally asked to subscribe to Old Boys' funds for memorabilial windows and miniature rifle ranges and so on. (-- p. 17)
Victoria Schultz / 1972: Didn't the indeptendent film-making here (America) interest you?
S.S.: To be quite honest I didn't know how one did that. I'm very bad at asking people for money. I wouldn't have known how to go about getting the money since I have no money myself except what I've earned through my writing. The only way I understood was that you got some kind of orthodox producer to back you. I thought in America that meant Hollywood money and then you had to be part of some kind of set-up. I was a complete outsider with that nasty label of being an intellectual. It just didn't occur to me to work in the independent cinema. It just seemed to me that that in Europe there was a precedent for my kind of person getting into film-making and here there wasn't.
So I didn't even try. I just hung around a lot in Europe. I know a lot of directors and actors and I just felt around without knowing exactly where I wanted to work or how it would happen. Finally I got a very lucky break. A Swedish producer who had heard indirectly that I wanted to make films called me up and asked me if I'd like to come to Sweden. I went to Sweden and stayed for almost two years. And now I have found a French producer. ...
The only language besides English that I do speak well is French and I have lived a lot in France. I think perhpas it is the one foreign country where I could make a film and feel somewhat at home. I can't say I know France well, but I know Paris very well and the world in which I live is Paris. I live there now most of the time, and my world is completely French. I don't know foreigners in Paris. I live in a world of French people, I'm the only American they know. So I've been lucky in that way. It's not so easy. It took me a long time. I've been spending a lot of time in Paris for over a decade before I've finally started moving in a really French world. But I crossed the barrier, that terrible barrier.
* Paris is one of the most difficult cities in the world in which to get to know people. ... (-- pgs. 29-30)
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* Editor's Note: Another is 'Winterpeg' Winnipeg, Man. in the terrifying middle guts of coldest Canada. The locals simply loathe 'outsiders,' who are likely to complain about the wind, the bitter climate and the isolation, all of which prevent all but the most stalwart from attending the city's excellent theatrical, musical and, of course, dance events. Consolation prize: the food is great everywhere and considerably cheaper than it is in cities like Montreal and Vancouver. As comedian Martin Mull once said, "Winnipeg is a great town ... Can't wait to see it when it's finished."
Before Tadeusz Borowski opened the valves of a gas oven in the kitchen of his Warsaw apartment on the night of July 2, 1951, he did his best to ensure that this final gesture in his short life would be final indeed and, at the same time, properly understood. Both ends were served by the fact that he carefully sealed all the windows and ventholes through which the gas could escape. By doing so, he safeguarded his own suicide both against failure and against being misconstrued as an accident. He wanted to put an end to his life, and he wanted others to know that he did.
He left no clue, though, as to why he did. Since that July night in 1951, Borowski's suicide at the age of 29 has never ceased to stir controversy among his biographers and critics. The more we know about his life, the less we are sure of what exactly made him choose death. What was that fina grain of sand that tipped the scale? Was it his extramarital affair, which had put a trivial conclusion to the romantic story of his wartime love for Maria?(She had been snatched away from him by the Gestapo, seen from time to time across the barbed wire in Auschwitz, lost in the vortex of postwar events, and then miraculously found alive in Sweden to be repatriated and finally to become his wife.) Or was it the fact that Maria had just given birth to a child and Borowski could not bear the new sense of responsibility for this tiny life in the world whose evil he knew all too well? Or maybe the reason was the shattering experience he had gone through not long before - the fact that he turned out to be unable to save his longtime friend from the clutches of the secret police of the Communist state of which he was a bard? Was he perhaps, as some claim, himself involved in the murky dealings of the state security apparatus, and he could not sustain his double identity anymore? Or was he simply burned-out, unwilling to cope any longer with the kind of life that Stalinist Poland had to offer? Or perhaps that final straw that broke his back was his realization that he had already killed himself anyway - he had committed suicide as a writer during the last years of his life by hurling himself from the heights of his masterful Auschwitz stories to the depths of his crude propaganda about the nonexistent achievements of People's Poland?(Opening of the Introduction, pgs. 1-2)
The cost of production having been assessed at about 6s 8d a copy, the retail price can hardly have been less than about fifteen shillings. As Stanley Wells points out: 'The publishers' investment in a massive collection of play scripts was a declaration of faith in Shakespeare's selling power as a dramatist for reading as well as for performing. The declaration of faith and the investment may not after all have been the publishers'. If the publication was subsidized, the print-run could well have been small. In 1633, William Prynne was scandalised to notice that 'Shakespeare's Plays are printed on the best crown paper, far better than most Bibles,' which suggests that for someone cost was no object. Wells credits Hemmings and Condell with the actual editorial work; they commissioned a scribe called Ralph Crane to copy 'a number of plays specially for the volume' and chose 'which printed editions and manuscripts to send to the printer ... copy which must have been a printer's nightmare.' What is obvious from the appearance of the First Folio is that a house style has been imposed on all this disparate material, which suggests to me at least that the editors did not take the risk of giving the printers jumbled papers or leaving them to impose a house of style of their own. So far-fetched is the idea that Shakespeare's widow might have hired an amanuensis to prepare an edition of her husband's plays that no one has ever considered it.
As a widow Ann Shakespeare was entitled to make a will. If we could find it, and her inventory, we would know once for all whether she died a penniless dependant or whether she left money in trust to be spent on further publishing of her husband's work. If she did she would have left her executor no choice but to make available any funds remaining for a de-luxe second edition before he himself was gathered to his eternal reward.
All this, in common with most of this book, is heresy, and probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice. Ann Shakespeare cannot sensibly be written out of her husband's life if only because he himself was so aware of marriage as a challenging way of life, a 'world-without-end bargain.' The Shaespeare wallahs have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women, and have then vilified the one woman who remained true to him all his life, in order to exonerate him. There can be no doubt that Shakespeare neglected his wife, embarrassed her and even humiliated her, but attempting to justify his behaviour by vilifying her is puerile. The defenders of Ann Hathaway are usually derided as sentimental when they are trying simply to be fair. It is a more insidious variety of sentimentality that wants to believe that women who are ill treated must have brought it upon themselves. The creator of Hero, Desdemona, Imogen and Hermione knew better. Ann might say like Lady Macduff:
I have done no harm. But I remember how
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defence
To say I have done no harm? (IV. ii. 75-80)
'On the strength of your promise to employ me to write scenarios, I gave up my position. I resigned from the Admiralty.'
'Well, go back to the Admiralty.'
'But ... I can't.'
It was precisely this fact that had caused Reggie to fee so disturbed. Right from the start he had spotted this snag and recognized it for the Class A snag it was.
Reggie's views on jobs were peculiar, but definite. There were some men - he himself was one of them - who, he considered, had no need for a job. A fair knowledge of racing form, a natural gift for bridge and poker, an ability to borrow money with an easy charm which made the operation a positive pleasure to the victim - these endowments, he held, were all that a chap like himself required, and it was with a deep sense of injury that he had allowed his loved ones to jockey him into the loathsome commercial enterprise to which he was now on his way. A little patience on their part, a little of the purse-strings to help him over a bad patch, and he could have carried on in such perfect comfort. For Reggie Tennyson was one of those young men whom the ravens feed.
But - and this was the point - the ravens do not feed the Ambroses of this world. The Ambroses need their steady job. And if they lose it they find it dashed hard to get another. (-- pgs. 164-165)
Just how appallingly bad does Hollywood treat writers, you ask?
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Words failed Reggie. He could but gurgle. The monstrous unfairness of it all robbed him of speech. For years now, the family, so prone to view him with concern, had been pointing at Ambrose with pride. To Ambrose and himself had been specifically allotted the roles of the Good Brother and the Bad Brother - the Diligent Apprentice, so to speak, and the Idle Apprentice. 'If only you could be sensible and steady like Ambrose!' had been the family slogan. If he'd heard them say that once, he had heard them say it a hundred times. "Sensible and steady, like Ambrose.' And all the while the man had been saving this up for them!
Then there came a more brotherly and creditable emotion - that of compassion for this poor ass who was heading straight for the soup. Speech returned to him like a tidal wave.
'He's cuckoo! The man's absolutely cuckoo. He hasn't a notion what he's letting himself in for. I know all about Hollywood. I saw a lot at one time of a girl who's in the pictures, and she told me what things were like there. The outsider hasn't a dog's chance. The place is simply congested with people trying to break in. Authors especially. They starve in their thousands. They're dying off like flies all the time. This girl said that if you make a noise like a mutton chop anywhere within a radius of ten miles of Hollywood Boulevard, authors come bounding out of every nook and cranny, howling like wolves. My gosh, that poor boob has dished himself properly. Is it too late for him to ring up the Admiralty blokes and thell them that he was only kidding when he sent in that resignation?' (-- pgs. 18-19)
Fat-headed musicians are not the only ones with a romantic edge, it seems.
Jeeves in the Offing
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
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Strange, I was feeling, this strong pro-Kipper sentiment in the Wickham bosom. I mean, consider the facts. What with that espièglerie of hers, which was tops, she had been pretty extensively wooed in one quarter and another for years, and no business had resulted, so that it was generally assumed that only something extra special in the way of suitors would meet her specifications and that whoever eventually got his nose under the wire would be aking among men and pretty warm stuff. And she had gone ans igned up with Kipper Herring.
Mind you, I'm not saying a word against old Kipper. The salt of the earth. But nobody could have called him a knock-out in the way of looks. Having gone in a lot for boxing from his earliest years, he had the cauliflower ear of which I had spoken to Aunt Dahlia and in addition to this a nose which some hidden hand had knocked slightly out of the straight. He would, in short, have been an unsafe entrant to have backed in a beauty contest, even if the only other competitors had been Boris Karloff, King Kong and Oofy Prosser of the Drones.
But then, of course, one had to remind onself that looks aren't everything. A cauliflower ear can hide a heart of gold, as in Kipper's case it did, his being about as gold as they come. His brain, too, might have helped to do the trick. You can't hold down an editorial post on an important London weekly paper without being fairly well fixed with the little grey cells, and girls admire that sort of thing. And one had to remember that most of the bimbos to whom Roberta Wickham had been giving the bird through the years had been of the huntin', shootin' and fishin' type, fellows who had more or less short their bolt after saying 'Eh, what?' and slapping their leg with a hunting crop. Kipper must have come as a nice change. (-- pgs. 36-37)
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