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unearths some literary gems.
***
One day, Gary Owens wanted to visit the editing room....I explained to Gary the basics of what we were doing. After the explanation, he looked at me and exclaimed, "This show gives me such a headache, I need an Excedrin credit card!"
[By the way, those of us who know that "schneider" means "tailor" get a bonus chuckle out of the fact that the author's career essentially involved cutting film footage to size, making snips and stitches here and there, and so on.]
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unearths some literary gems.
[Note: Just to show it's making an effort, this book begins with a series of missing parakeets.]
***
With each drag he sucks more life out of the office. By the end of his cigar he will have inhaled my desk, my chair, and my gold-leafed name on the door.
***
The double exclamation points speak for themselves: they look like bulging eyes under astonished eyebrows.
***
We base our opinions of present people on previous judgments of past people. So we’re always arriving at final judgments one person too late.
***
Size without presence: the closer he gets to you, the smaller and lighter he becomes, so that seated a few feet away he appears virtually transparent.
***
No one walks into a party without having a far better party going on inside his head. Every party is going to be that party until we get there. So the key to the boredom and tension at parties is that no one wants to be at the party he’s at, he wants to be at the party he’s missing.
***
Moving forward as if he’s moving backward, he hands me the paper.
***
He fits into his mood changes as if they are custom-made.
***
Seventeen East 61st Street is a townhouse stolen out of Henry James.
***
I rise like a phoenix out of my rabbit hole.
***
We exchange stares in the darkness; it is like glaring in braille.
***
Annabelle chatters on, increasingly hard to listen to, like being tuned in to two radio stations at the same time.
***
For a month I managed to get up early enough to catch the book napping, got ninety pages done that way, but then the book caught on. Now, as early as I rise, the book is up before me, fighting me from the moment my eyes open. I haven’t been able to outfox it, so I am ignoring it. Thus I have resumed the diary, hoping it will make the book feel bad.
But now I am as self-conscious on the diary as I am on the book. I have to control myself from being literary, have to fake a relaxed tone. This entry is a second draft!
***
“Why don’t you give yourself a deadline?”
“The journalist in me has asked that question; the novelist in me refuses to dignify it with an answer.”
***
“We drank a toast in your honor with hot chocolate tonight”....
Hot chocolate? Is that an innocuous remark or a put-down?
***
Tina points to a circling parakeet.
[This parakeet is fanciful, not real, and is an echo of the parakeets from hundreds of pages earlier in the book. Just to show us that the parrot theme hasn't been completely forgotten, I suppose. Toucans, pshaw!]
***
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unearths some literary gems.
[This is Feldman's "autobiography"--more like a draft of autobiographical materials, really, published long after his death with literally no editing.]***I want to walk the wicket at Lords; I don't want to actually play. I just want to walk out there, putting on my gloves as they do with such class, adjust my cap a little, look around, put the crease down. That's all I want to do. [I'm sold! Now I sort of want to do this, too. (:v>]***I was on a roll and would set myself exercises in writing for people who were no longer alive. [And, as you know, I have definitely done this.]***Lew Grade...didn't recognize me. Long cigars, short memory!***[In case you didn't know that the traveling hump was originally just done as a behind-the-scenes antic.]I wore it on the other side one day to see if anyone would notice and Mel and Gene said that it should be part of the gag, what hump![Similarly, I've just added to that "Walk This Way" Wikipedia section to relate Feldman's own account of how that arose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Frankenstein#%22Walk_this_way%22]***My car is just like me, a little package with a huge engine and I often seem to arrive before it does.***[When Lennon was estranged from Ono, Feldman's wife] would joke that she was ready to go with him and had a bag packed. She said the same thing about one of the Muppets so I wasn't too worried!***I toyed with the idea of calling it Marty Feldman's First Second Movie.***Bonus: Among a list of ideas for projects is a movie called "One of Our Cliches Is Missing."
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unearths some literary gems.
***
It was an ideal time for Mrs. Whalen to be coming down the street, crisp and nosy in a light blue dress and white gloves.
***
Her narrow blue eyes opened and shut a couple of times, like a camera shutter.
***
"Ghost of your maternal grandfather, my pet. He had red eyebrows."
"Did he ride a bicycle in a long white nightgown?" Blue demanded.
"He was eccentric. I imagine one's eccentricity goes on when one becomes ectoplasm."
***
I winked at Bingo, and we didn't say anything. So the little guy wrote down what we didn't say.
***
"You could see Marmalade if she was baked in a cranberry pie."
["Marmalade," of course, is a character named Marmalade Mason, and the idea here is that she's very conspicuous. Personally, I think her being named Marmalade detracts from the purity of the fruit-pie joke, but whaddya gonna do? On the bright side, I applaud the choice of "cranberry pie" for funny-kind-of-pie value--granting, naturally, that all pies are somewhat funny. Have I ever even heard of a cranberry pie? (Add 50 funniness points if "no.")]
***
I wheeled the lawn mower into the garage, under Grandpa Murphy in his walnut frame. The old buzzard always looks at me with disapproval, and I gave the picture a shove so he'd hang on the bias. [That's showing him!]
***
He was sort of a walking "Life is real, life is earnest." [And while I was reading this book, a "walking encyclopedia" came up in a crossword puzzle.]
***
The music came out into the night, quick and gay, happy as a peppermint stick. [No Google results for "happy as a peppermint stick"!]
***
It was the first time I had ever owned anything, except an old Ford that had long since joined its ancestors. [I've heard of automobile "graveyards," but I didn't realize cars had ancestors!]
***
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unearths some literary gems.
From The End of Mr. Garment, by Vincent Starrett:
***
"His best work![sic]" said Curly Pope sententiously, "was his first. He has never equalled it."
He knew nothing whatever about it, literarily speaking; but it seemed a good thing to say.
[I think Stephen Potter would approve.]
***
"I've read them all, I think. Is it true that you dictate them to three secretaries, in relays?"
"My God!" cried Mollock. "Do they read that way?"
***
"And with Mr. Van Peters, too."
His persistent adding of an s to Van Peter's name was beginning to irritate Kimbark, who had a tidy mind.
[I must remember to say "I have a tidy mind" next time I make a correction.]
***
"We tried to stop him....but it was like talking into a dead telephone."
***
"You're a shrewd man--one could see that with half an eye. Mr. Anger could see it with his monocle, if he had one."
[I think that's a fairly gratuitous silly aside, but the slight "justification" is that Anger (who isn't typically angry, by the way, just as Miss Bland isn't particularly bland) is an Englishman among Americans--so perhaps he wears a metaphorical monocle in their eyes (so to speak!).]
***
"It never occurs to anybody to connect a zebra with a Persian kitten, because one is striped and the other whiskered. But a tiger is both striped and whiskered and is a very dangerous animal. That too is specious and glittering; but it's a grand line. I must get it into a book sometime."
***
"Looking for the needle in the haystack..., by the way, as a figure of speech connoting impossibility is now slightly discredited. The 'Believe It or Not' man has turned up a fellow who found a needle in a haystack after forty minutes of search."
***
"Of course," said Anger innocently, "there's the third horn of the dilemma."
[A trilemma! Ha, but one search later I see that apparently that's actually a thing. And even "quadrilemma" gets a few search results. (I stopped there!) And to think that all this time I've been making do with mere dilemmas!]
***
On the fourth morning they saw the Florida mainland, a blur upon the western horizon, and ran a chromatic scale of islands to the east.
[I think it would be modal music, actually, since each island is a different key.]
***
"Mr. Ghost thinks the note was a stroke of genius."
"Ghost?" echoed the reporter. He cocked his head at a thoughtful angle, and tried it with a new inflection. "Ghost?"
***
"There's an old saying, he observed, "that death, dessert, and Sarah Bernhardt always come in the last act."
[Okay...what?? I found no corroborating evidence of this "old" saying. (Btw, this novel is from 1932.) It's nice to think of SB having orgasms at the climax of each performance, but I doubt that's what the author meant to suggest. On the other hand, it's generally the case ime that the star of a traditional theatrical work would appear onstage throughout the play, not just in the final section. Anyway, it has a nice ring to it--I'll give it that.]
***
"Say, they don't Mocha and Java worth a damn!"
"You mean they fought?"
["Mocha and Java" to mean bickering may also be a Starrett invention. It's not in Partridge's slang dictionary.]
***
"Ghost is my name," said Walter Ghost. "Spelled in the usual or midnight way."
***
"We have heard so much of you, indirectly, from your friend Mollock that you have become a sort of fabulous monster."
"I am a myth," admitted Ghost. "Mollock invented me for purposes of his own."
***
In Walter Ghost's old-fashioned study, hemmed in by books and books and books, with here and there a picture, set like a punctuation mark between the rows....
***
"There's nobody like you under the sun, moon, and stars!"
[I applaud this character's thoroughness. After all, saying merely "nobody like you under the sun" leaves open the possibility that there is somebody like him at nighttime.]
***
BONUSES!
1. Silly Names dept. (which as you may recall is a specialty of Starrett's): In addition to the titular character, we have someone called Miss Birdflight.
2. There's a comical scene wherein the police detective looks out a window and sees what appears to be himself coming up the drive! (It's an imposter who wasn't aware the real detective was present in the house.)
3. One of the fiction-writing characters likes to think of the directory board in an office building as the "table of contents." And, in a separate metaphor, the narrator refers to an office building as a "tall filing cabinet."
4. A discussion that goes from theorizing that someone may have gone up a tree ahead of time to be concealed on the scene proceeds to distort that into the idea that the person may have gone up the tree way ahead of time and thereby "contrived to be growing there for years." This then blossoms into a lot of metaphysical nonsense in a predestined-fate vein...and concludes with someone remarking, "That's Einstein, I suppose. It sounds to me like Katzenjammer!"
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unearths some literary gems.
[I abandoned this book early on, but not before enjoying a scene in which the protagonists, a pair of chess-playing ghosts, find their game repeatedly disrupted as the living family who inhabit their house, and who cannot see either the ghosts or their chessboard, keep sitting down on the board or otherwise scattering the pieces.
Also: PARROTS!]
***
Miss Amelia remembered something.
"Where shall we put the parrot?" she asked.
***
[In a coffee house frequented by poets]
Brooms swished into brooms, sweeping up scraps of paper with immortal odes crossed out on them.
***
The place was damp....Even ghosts would catch their death of cold in it.
***
[Bonus! As I prepared to abandon the book, I flipped quickly through to see if things appeared to take a promising turn later on. No such luck...but I swear I caught the word "parrot" flipping (or flapping!) by at one point. I couldn't track this parrot down, but I was content to let the matter lie (or perch) there and close the book. (Note for those keeping score: A century or two's worth of time elapses over the course of this story, so this was presumably not the same parrot as the one mentioned earlier. Then again, they can live a very long time!)]
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unearths some literary gems.
From Terry-Thomas Tells Tales, by Terry-Thomas with Terry Daum:
***I once advertised myself in Variety as "Terry-Thomas, the man who said, 'A Thousand!' in 'Once in a Million.'" All I had had to do was shout out, "A Thousand!" in an auction scene.***Enough to make anyone grit the gap in their teeth!***[A precursor to my email address!]Terry hyphen Thomas had become plain Terri.***[I went to see a doctor] named Mutch in Harley Street.... Mutch said, "There's not much I can do for you."***[Parrot alert!]But Charles liked my work and he wasn't keen on Formby's. "What?" he said. "Put him last with all those bloody awful parrot stories?"[Then, a little later in the memoir, T-T relates one of his own standup jokes, and it also involves a parrot.]***[T-T quotes himself from an old newspaper piece]"I am a dandy--or rather, a dam-dy. I don't dress conventionally and I'm damned if I ever will."***[T-T to a fitter] "I told you I needed a size 11....Without trying those [shoes] on, I can tell you they're a size 8."[The fitter's reply, according to T-T] "Don't worry, I'll give them a bit of a polish."***[From a caption under a photo of Terry-Thomas drinking tea]Tea for two T's.
***
Dame Margaret Rutherford came up to me in a field at Pinewood while I was wearing a haystack. For my part in The Mouse on the Moon [1963] this had been fitted to my shoulders and I’m sure the effect of seeing a haystack nipping purposefully across a field towards the refreshment room was rather odd.
Dame Margaret poked her head into the stack and said, “I would like your advice.”
“Well, make hay while the sun shines.”
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