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unearths some literary gems.
From Writings from the New Yorker, by E. B. White:
***The absence, in these participial items [i.e., captions in the form of “So-and-so, sitting next to such-and-such”], of any predicate is extremely exciting to the reader, who figures anything might happen.***There was a large bowl of tadpoles in the window of the Telephone Building….We stopped of course—we stop for anything in windows, particularly tadpoles.***The truth-in-advertising movement has just celebrated its silver jubilee, and everybody laughed when it stepped up to the piano.***We noted…. a theatre being built in the shape of a barn [and] a restaurant being built in the shape of a diner. It is amusing to see these American forms, which were the result of vicissitudes, being perpetuated after the need is over. Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has some little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.***removed all our effects, and our ineffects…***
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unearths some literary gems.
From Letters of E. B. White:
***The only Earp I ever knew was neither Wyatt nor Henry--he was Fred Earp, a copyreader on the Seattle Times. All this is getting us nowhere, all this Earp business. It earps me. I suspect it earps you, too.***I am no editor even with a small E....I can't edit the side of a barn.***I doubt if you are the most original writer living, but I doubt whether anybody is.***Plays, as you [Thurber] pointed out, come about as close to literature as a problem in solid geometry.***I finally quit thinking about book titles when I arrived at one called The Pop-Up Book for Sit-Down People.***I don't know what I think about it, but it occurred to me--or rather, it occurred to my wife, who is the person in this family to whom things occur.***Sorry to learn that Dr. Canby is revolted by spiders. Probably he doesn't meet the right spiders.***I encountered an otter once in a lake in Nova Scotia and it is the only animal in the world that really looks as though it had been designed by you [Thurber].***I don't want you to try to adapt "The Door" for a TV show. I am a fellow who likes to leave well enough alone, and I'm not even convinced that "The Door" is well enough.***[On revising Elements of Style]The first two sections of the "Composition" chapter sustained the heaviest attack; I felt that they were narrow and bewildering. (In their new form they are merely bewildering.)***Thanks for your friendly note about my gold medal. It is too big to wear and too small to roll like a hoop.***The spider in the book is not prettified in any way, she is merely endowed with more talent than usual. This natural Charlotte was accepted at face value, and I came out ahead because of not trying to patronize an arachnid.***[White quotes a correspondent]"Morris Bishop gave one of the finest addresses I've ever heard--in a beautiful English with every sentence turned out just right."[Says White]I like to think of those sentences turned out just right, in their little hats set jauntily on one side and their starchy shirt-fronts immaculate.***Thanks for letting me see the sketch for the cover. It fulfills a life-time dream of mine: to hold a pencil behind my ear. I've never been able to do it, as my ear sticks out too far.***Whenever anybody in America finds something on his desk or in his shelves that he wants to get rid of, he sends it to me.***I can still see Miss Holland's face when she walked into my office and handed me a check for several thousand dollars--as though she had just laid an egg. [It seems to me we've had a lot of this metaphorical egg laying lately, from various authors!]***[On the word "parameter," whose widespread use White is criticizing.]I am enclosing a recent letter from Jacques Cousteau, an underwater stylist. Jacques has been "quantifying the horizontal and vertical distribution of nutrients and sediment in the Amazon," and, as you see, he finally wound up with a mouthful of parameters. They probably slipped through his face mask.***[From a jocular proposed self-blurb for his biography.]The best in-depth study ever made of an out-of-his-depth man.***Scott [White's biographer] simply became infatuated with the sound of his own research.***
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unearths some literary gems.
A few more snippets from Robert Graves:
***[from "But It Still Goes On"]CHARLOTTE (utterly surprised): Well, I go to Chicago![Yes, this is an ejaculation or oath--which, at a glance, I see no evidence of existing outside this one line of dialogue by Graves. It has a nice ring to it, imho! (:v> Note that Graves and his characters are British, so Chicago can serve as a little more of a Timbuktu than it might to us Americans.]***[from "Horses: A Play for Children"][Just a Continuing Coincidence Report here: There's a bit about a child encountering a hippo, or rather someone dressed as a hippo.]***[from "How Mad Are Hatters?"]Hatters are no madder than the customers at whose orders they design lofty belfries for bats, snug bonnets for bees....[Graves also speculates as to whether "mad" hatters were, etymologically, really "mad otters," i.e., otters behaving giddily during mating season.]***
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unearths some literary gems.
From "Mrs. Fisher, or the Future of Humour," by Robert Graves:
***This is bucolic humour, meaning not-funny-to-the-power-of-not-funny.***I heard a story about Sir Owen [Seaman, the editor of Punch]....Two old Scottish ladies were sitting in the gallery of a Glasgow theatre watching Pavlova dance the Mort du Cygne, and one said to the other: "She’s awfu’ like oor Mrs. Wishart." When this comment was reported to Sir Owen by my Aunt Jeannie, he asked briskly: "And, pray, who is Mrs. Fisher?"Well, who is Mrs. Fisher? Sir Owen didn’t know. My Aunt Jeannie didn’t know. I don’t know. But she sounds so plausible that I suspect her of being the future of humour itself and intend to give her the benefit of the doubt.***The difficulty about writing a Future of Humour is, of course, that true examples of the humour of the future must necessarily be not-yet-funny and therefore dull and unplausible; so the writer will forfeit his claim to a sense of humour in the present. If, on the other hand, he remains a humorist of the present, his readers will justly complain that he has not conscientiously revealed the future.***
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unearths some literary gems.
From Sam Spade: The Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail Caper:
[I stumbled on a late-1940s radio incarnation of Sam Spade that's played for laughs. Here are some highlights from the first episode I checked out. (Transcript and audio links at bottom.)]***"Have you heard of pulling a rabbit out of a hat?""Yes.""Well, I pulled one out of a pickle."***Then he played all four of the Marx Brothers arguing with the Andrews Sisters.***"I don’t expect any trouble, but it is so valuable, I can’t take any chances. My husband picked it up in Iran. He’s in pickles, you know.""Well, you know best."***[At a costume party, where Spade is dressed as a bunny.]I brushed elbows with pirates, Northwest Mounted Police (un-mounted), a gorilla, an Arabian princess, four Pocahontas’s and assorted but historic characters from Julius Caesar to Mike Romanoff, and I was dipping a carrot into the punch bowl when a girl made her way over to me.***"When I came to this town, it was just an ordinary new pickle. Sometimes I come as Dill, sometimes I come as a Gherkin.""How jolly.""Once I came as a sweet-sour mixture.""Yeah.""And I got very confused.""Well, that’s up to you."***When I finally caught up with him ten minutes later, he was waltzing with Anne of Austria who was hanging on his every word and that was a lot of hanging.***https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7Z4j0m0ZF4http://www.radioplayerswest.org/Scripts/Sam_Spade_FMC_Caper.pdf
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unearths some literary gems.
More snippets from James Thurber:
***[from "My Fifty Years with James Thurber"]His gold-rimmed glasses forever needed straightening, which gave him the appearance of a person who hears somebody calling but can't make out where the sound is coming from.***[ditto]One has the disturbing feeling that the man contrived to be some place without actually having gone there.***[from "The Cane in the Corridor"]"You remember Reginald Gardiner's imitation of wallpaper...in which he presented a visual image as making a pattern of sound?"[What? No, as a matter of fact, I *don't*!But apparently he did!"He delighted Broadway audiences in 'An Evening with Beatrice Lillie and Reginald Gardiner,' performing a series of witty impersonations of various inanimate items, such as lighthouses and wallpaper."https://findingaids.uflib.ufl.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/99826Bonus tangential search result: Everybody Sing, which you may recall was one of our Film-ictionary items, and in which Gardiner appeared. (If he imitated wallpaper in it, the Wikipedia article doesn't say so. Perhaps he did, but the wallpaper ended up on the--wait for it--cutting-room floor.)Meanwhile, though I couldn't find the wallpaper sketch on YouTube, I did find this, which seems to promise a few chuckles:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjx-353y4AIYou'll also be glad to know that the third search result for "reginald gardner beatrice lillie imitations" (after two versions of the sketch I've just linked to) was, for some reason, Ed Begley's Yiddish scene from A Mighty Wind.]***[ditto]"Here's to the Washington Bridge," she said. "Here's to some big dam or other."***[from "Sex ex Machina"]His wife explained that it was a card table, but that if you pressed a button underneath, it would become an ironing board. Whereupon she pushed the button and the table leaped a foot into the air, extended itself, and became an ironing board....The thing finally became so finely sensitized that it would change back and forth if you merely touched it--you didn't have to push the button. The husband stuck it in the attic (after it had leaped up and struck him a couple of times while he was playing euchre), and on windy nights it could be heard flopping and banging around, changing from a card table to an ironing board and back.***[from "There's an Owl in My Room"]Nobody and no animal and no other bird can play a scene as far down as a pigeon can....When it comes to emotion, a fish, compared to a pigeon, is practically beside himself.***[from "The Curb in the Sky"][Finishing Other People's Sentences dept.]"When William Howard Taft was--" some guest in Dorothy's family's home would begin."President!" Dorothy would pipe up. The speaker may have meant to say "President" or he may have meant to say "young," or "Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States." In any case, he would shortly put on his hat and go home.***[Bonus: A passing reference to Canarsie. And since this anthology is The Thurber Carnival, we might say (or sing) that the carnival went to Canarsie.]
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unearths some literary gems.
From Blotto, Twinks and the Suspicious Guests, by Simon Brett:
***She couldn't bear to put a damper on her brother's naive optimism. It would have felt as antisocial as locking the lid of a Jack-in-the-Box.[I guess, as far as my reading life goes, jacks-in-the-box may be the new parrots!]***"Saturday is the night that we from the Other Side traditionally let our hair down. Or in some cases," he said with a spectral chuckle, "let our heads down."***For a moment he looked, if not nonplussed, far from nonminussed.***This was not the moment for quixotic gestures. In terms of derring-do, that was a derring-don't.[Later on, a chapter is entitled "Derring-Done!"]***
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unearths some literary gems.
[Some make-believe show titles!]
[a series of Second Avenue cabarets]
Don't Make Me Laugh, So Who Are You Kidding?, I'm Entitled, and You Should Live So Long
Toast and Mrs. Toast
Redoubtable Antics of '62
***
Bonus: "an all-parrot Importance of Being Earnest"!
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unearths some literary gems.
From "Shop Talk," by E. B. White:
***[Columnist Lucius] Beebe, whose text the picture illustrates was telling how he stayed sensibly in town during a hot weekend, and how pleasant this experience was. Nobody even phoned, he wrote. Not even [press agent] Dick Maney phoned, he continued. And the Tribune, suiting the action to the word, gravely produced a picture of Mr. Maney and ran it—a man whose only immediate news value was that he had not phoned Lucius Beebe over a hot weekend.***A course in ghostwriting opens this month at American University, Washington, D.C., and youngsters whose dream is to put words into somebody else's mouth may further their ambition by enrolling.***
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Original Content Copyright © 2026 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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