The Daily News
1 Once more: Tabula Rasa.
2 Days repeat. Doing the same thing.
3 Whatever Einstein said of madness, I'm for it.
4 Or was that Twain? Ibsen? The fellow who lives two doors down?
5 Madness or Insanity?
6 I had a train of thought, but it derailed due in large part to "buffering," a gerund I detest.
7 Old, beat-up laptops. The town dump stacks them in mini-mountains.
8 Tabula Rasa. Blank slate, the very beginning. A very good place to start.
9 Winnie-the-Pooh would sigh, and then say, "Oh, bother."
10 I want the fellow who named him that to step forward and show himself.
11 A.A. Milne.
12 Who names himself A.A. anyway?
13 The saints and the poets; they do some...
14 That was from Our Town. The Stage Manager.
15 Thornton Wilder. Off the record: Every time I hear the name "Thorton," I know the person saying it is a baboon.
16 Fact, dude.
17 People judge. Just sayin'.
18 Some fellow from London just corrected me.
19 Top hat. Fancy tie. A bit of a fancy dancer.
20 He texted me one word, WAY British: B'boon.
21 That's fancy Brit for "baboon."
22 Smh.
23
24 Nvm.
25 I mentioned here that I will provide writing lessons to the end of the week, and then it becomes more sporadic.
26 For the record, these lessons began somewhere around September 6 or 7 and ran each weekday up to now. They're reasonably easy to find, and you could probably read all within fifteen to twenty minutes.
27 Anything of value to you as a writer is up to you as a writer to scroll and locate.
28 It's like that old saying by the merciless Dorothy Parker: you can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think.
29
30
31 M'bad.
32 Anybody lookin'?
33 Not no more.
34 Not no more.
35 Moving On, Part One: Last night I found an awesome piece of writing from Roy Peter Clark's Writing Tools. I read it in the afternoon and it held up well into the evening.
36 I was all set to put it up this morning when I remembered Dorothy Parker, and how she somehow hasn't placed her toe into these cold waters.
37 I got so frustrated with the buffering laptop that I lost all sense of making any sense whatsoever.
38 I decided last minute to switch gears.
39 My phone just buzzed maniacally. Every time I receive a phone call I become frantic. <groan>
40 I never accustomed myself to using cell phones.
41 I'm unsure as to why it gets me nervous. Perhaps having run activities and not being near a pencil has something to do with it, but it has settled into the status of a conditioned nervous-ass response.
42 Today's DN has become a car out of control.
43 If I'm going to swerve off the road and crash, I might as well toss you Dorothy Parker's wit, wrapped in a Wiki package.
44 Consider it the last act of a lying man.
45 Here go:
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American writer, poet, and critic. A fixture of 1920s literary society known for her acerbic wit and low opinion of romantic relationships, she became a member of the famous Algonquin Round Table.
Contents
[hide]Quotes[edit]
- Excuse my dust.
- Her proposed epitaph for herself, quoted in Vanity Fair (June 1925)
- And she had It. It, hell; she had Those.
- Regarding a character in Elinor Glyn's novel It; in her review, "Madame Glyn Lectures on 'It,' with Illustrations" in The New Yorker (26 November 1927)
- Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.
- New Yorker (4 February 1928)
- Well, Aimee Semple McPherson has written a book. And were you to call it a little peach, you would not be so much as scratching its surface. It is the story of her life, and it is called In the Service of the King, which title is perhaps a bit dangerously suggestive of a romantic novel. It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.
- "Our Lady of the Loudspeaker" in The New Yorker (25 February 1928)
- And it is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
- Her "Constant Reader" book review of The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne.
- That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
- "But the One on the Right" in The New Yorker (1929)
- A lady … with all the poise of the Sphinx though but little of her mystery.
- Concerning a child actress in A. A. Milne's play Give Me Yesterday; in her review of same, "Just Around Pooh Corner" in The New Yorker (14 March 1931)
- The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy.
- Review of "The House Beautiful" by Channing Pollock, New Yorker (21 March 1931)
- Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)- "The Flaw in Paganism" in Death and Taxes (1931)
- The ones I like … are "cheque" and "enclosed."
- On the most beautiful words in the English language, as quoted in The New York Herald Tribune (12 December 1932)
- And I'll stay away from Verlaine too; he was always chasing Rimbauds.
- "The Little Hours" in Here Lies (1939); this plays on the title of the popular song "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows"; Paul Verlaine was Arthur Rimbaud's lover.
- I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.
- "The Little Hours" in Here Lies (1939)
- I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.
- "The Little Hours" in Here Lies (1939)
- One more drink and I'd have been under the host.
- As quoted in Try and Stop Me by Bennett Cerf (1944)
- Misattributed as quatrain beginning “I like to have a martini,” (see below).
- It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence—no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven.
- Interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)
- There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
- Interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)
- It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.
- Interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)
- All those writers who write about their own childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.
- Interview in The Paris Review, Issue #13 (Summer 1956)
- [On being told of Calvin Coolidge's death] How do they know? (Coolidge was well-known for being a man of very few words.)
- Quoted in Writers at Work 1st Series by Malcolm Cowley (1958)
- There is no such hour on the present clock as 6:30, New York time. Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.
- "New York at 6:30 P.M.", Esquire (November 1964)
- You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.
- Attributed to Parker after her death, by Robert E. Drennan The Algonquin Wits (1968), p. 124. However the same quip appears anonymously fifteen years earlier, in the trade journal Sales Management(Chicago: Dartnell Corp., 1918-75), vol. 70 (Survey of Buying Power, 1953), p. 80: "Marxism never changes. You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks."
- Too fucking busy, and vice versa.
- Response to an editor pressuring her for overdue work, as quoted in The Unimportance of Being Oscar (1968) by Oscar Levant, p. 89
- It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.
- On her abortion, as quoted in You Might as well Live by John Keats (1970)
- You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.
- Parker's answer when asked to use the word horticulture during a game of Can-You-Give-Me-A-Sentence?, as quoted in You Might as well Live by John Keats (1970).
- What fresh hell can this be?
- "If the doorbell rang in her apartment, she would say, 'What fresh hell can this be?' — and it wasn't funny; she meant it." You might as well live: the life and times of Dorothy Parker, John Keats (Simon Schuster, 1970, p124). Often quoted as "What fresh hell is this?" as in the title of the 1987 biography by Marion Meade, "Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?".
46 What fresh hell is this? Right after my cell phone rang? A.A Milne?
47 Ah, the coincidences ring true, do they not?
48 There is twice as much Dorothy Parker for you, but none of it transferred to today's DN. As in most things internet, it went wonky.
49 So here's the link if you delight in her mischief:
50 That, my friends, is all the mischief I can bare. It is sloppily assembled, but consistent with her character.
51 I gottago. Enjoy this, for all its worth.
52 See you again.
53 Have a GREAT day.
54 Peace.
51 I gottago. Enjoy this, for all its worth.
52 See you again.
53 Have a GREAT day.
54 Peace.
~H~
fin.
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