Old Tweets

Man I went through my old Tweets, and none of them were racist or anything, but they were terrible!

If you don’t look back on your old writing without disgust you’re not growing, so healthy enough I guess.  But you’d think for something I spent so much time doing I’d’ve come up with some better ones.

Here are the only ones I felt like might be worth saving, putting them here as much for myself as for my small but influential readership.

When I don’t like writing it’s usually because it’s too writingy.

The Biblical story of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream: first case of a Jewish psychiatrist?

If there were a restaurant in LA that sold angel meat, Jonathan Gold would eat there.

Today’s surprising Supreme Court Fact: Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a high school cheerleader.

Whenever I’m in New York, I visit this little shop know, down in the Flatiron, and have my shoes professionally tied.

Addition to Hely’s Great Things: When an old person says “blankety-blank” instead of swears.

An airport? A state forest? An interchange? All fine things to have named after you. But only Melba has a peach thing AND a toast.

One thing I’d like to see is a giant eating baked potatoes, one after another, like grapes.

Ate a piece of gum today that was in stick form, instead of hard, candied pill form.  It was like visiting Old Sturbridge Village.

If I’m gonna see a play, by the end the stage better be a MESS.

What real-life show is “Game of Thrones” the porn parody of?

The taste of a drop of air conditioner water landing in your mouth. #mynewyork

There’s only one political issue I’m deeply passionate about: colonizing the moon with convicts. I’m opposed.

Let’s argue!  I’ll start!  All jazz is perfect.

my favorite cob food? corn, no brainer

It’s unreasonable of Don Cheadle to expect the other members of Ocean’s Eleven will understand his ludicrous slang.

Most of my money ($660) comes from my 1992 dance hit “It’s OK To Dress Up (When You’re The Birthday Girl)”

I think I could sell idiots salted coffee.

“Fine, FINE, we’ll just name ANOTHER one after John Muir, then we can all go home.” – another tense meeting at the US Forest Service.

In this age of baby carrots it’s such a power move to eat a regular carrot.

If you’re into immutable laws you pretty much have to go with physics, right?

TRIVIA: What is the most spilled beverage in the world?  Give up?  It’s water.  (Trick question because I was counting waterfalls.)

Vali rolled with it admirably when he came back to our seats at the Arclight and found me telling the history of IKEA to a stranger.

Was bowling invented so teens of different genders could examine each other’s butts?

“I like your shirt!” = “I noticed your shirt!”

LA etiquette: it’s rude to point out that someone’s production company has never produced anything.

The most important ingredient in any recipe is money.

Movie pitch: Fuckboi Academy

Nothing pisses me off more than when some fuckface in my Instagram is having a nice vacation

My best hope for Olympic glory would be as the falling down guy someone helps in a true display of sportsmanship

What did the TV writer say when he arrived in Hell?  “How’re the hours?”

You know what sounds terrible but is actually perfectly nice? The stall in the bathroom of the Yucca Valley Walmart, where I wrote this.

What is moral?

Goya, Death of the Picador

How do we decide what’s good or bad, right or wrong?

A interesting question obvs.  One every person answers for themselves somehow.

But how many of us can articulate our answer?

Would you come up with something like “not harming anyone else”?  Living with honor and honesty and compassion?

Really, I doubt most of us bother to articulate a moral philosophy or definition of morals.  We sorta just go with what feels right or wrong.

Right?

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

This is a quote attributed to Hemingway.

One thing I think is wrong is quote sites that don’t include the source or context for the quote.

(Brainy Quotes has the nerve to suggest how you can cite Brainy Quotes itself as the source.)

As always, hunting the source proves enriching.  Hemingway said this in chapter one of his book Death In The Afternoon.  

Back up just a few pages.  Here’s how Hemingway starts the book:

In Hemingway’s day, what was most repugnant about bullfighting was the suffering of horses.

Horses (this is described in the book) would get gored and have their entrails hanging out and trailing like grotesque ribbons.

At what bullfights remain this problem has been mostly eliminated, I believe, by armoring the horses.  At the only bullfight I ever saw in person, the horses were unharmed, though nine bulls were killed, one of them especially tortured because of the incompetence of the matador (lit. “killer”). (This video is upsetting if you don’t like seeing bulls hurt, but you can see how horses are now protected.)

Hemingway continues, justifying why he got into bullfighting even though he likes horses:

I was trying to write then, and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.

A theme Hemingway came back to frequently.

He mentions Goya’s Los Desastros de la Guerra.

Plate 44: Yo lo vi (I saw this)

Hemingway continues:

       So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself.  I thought they would be simple and barbarous and cruel and that I would not like them, but that I would see certain definite action which would give me the feeling of life and death that I was working for.  I found the definite action ; but the bullfight was so far from simple and I liked it so much that it was much too complicated for my then equipment for writing to deal with and, aside from four very short sketches, I was not able to write anything about it for five years — and I wish I would have waited ten.  However, if I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it.  Certainly I don not say that now ‘ every year I know there is more to learn, but I know some things which may be interesting now, and I may be away from the bullfights for a long time and I might as well write what I know about them now. Also it might be good to have a book about bullfighting in English and a serious book on such an unmoral subject may have some value.

So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and judged by these moral standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very moral to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but very fine.  Also, I do not mind the horses; not in principle, but in fact I do not mind them.

Just thought is was interesting, this succinct definition of morality came in the context of why it shouldn’t bother us to see horses mangled during the ritual killing of bulls.

Is E. M. Forster “wrong”? (or, maybe, are our meanings different than his?)

Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot.

So says Forster in Aspects of The Novel.

But this is the exact opposite way I feel most professional TV writers talk about this.  Shorthanded, “plot” means the events and “story” is the emotional journeys of the characters.

Over here commenter Kenny Chaffin, a writer himself, puts it succinctly:

I’m not sure I’d say Forster was wrong, but these words seem to have an inverted meaning in 2018 Hollywood.  When you have plot and no story, the audience will be bored.

Playing It Down

E. B. White in the Paris Review.  Thurber:

INTERVIEWER

Does the fact that you’re dealing with humor slow down the production?

THURBER

It’s possible. With humor you have to look out for traps. You’re likely to be very gleeful with what you’ve first put down, and you think it’s fine, very funny. One reason you go over and over it is to make the piece sound less as if you were having a lot of fun with it yourself. You try to play it down. In fact, if there’s such a thing as a New Yorker style, that would be it—playing it down.

Pull it, switch it, top it

INTERVIEWER

But there are devices one can use to set up a story, aren’t there? Such as the love rack, or the algebraic analysis of a story.

CAIN

Devices, yes. Like the old switcheroo. I used quite a few in my book called Past All Dishonor. It’s about Virginia City in the Civil War days of the big whorehouses. It’s about a boy who fell for a girl who worked in a house. Every guy in town could have her for ten bucks except him, and the reason was that she half-loved him. This was a very nice situation, and I was able to do something with it. I was able to top it, and that’s always what you try to do when you have a situation: You pull it, you switch it, you top it, which is the old Hollywood formula for a running gag.

James M. Cain in the Paris Review.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any memory of the origins of The Postman Always Rings Twice?

CAIN

Oh yes, I can remember the beginning of The Postman. It was based on the Snyder-Gray case, which was in the papers about then. You ever hear of it? Well, Grey and this woman Snyder killed her husband for the insurance money. Walter Lippmann went to that trial one day and she brushed by him, what was her name? Lee Snyder.* Walter said it seemed very odd to be inhaling the perfume or being brushed by the dress of a woman he knew was going to be electrocuted. So the Snyder-Grey case provided the basis. The big influence in how I wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice was this strange guy, Vincent Lawrence, who had more effect on my writing than anyone else. He had a device which he thought was so important—the “love rack” he called it. I have never yet, as I sit here, figured out how this goddamn rack was spelled . . . whether it was wrack, or rack, or what dictionary connection could be found between the word and his concept. What he meant by the “love rack” was the poetic situation whereby the audience felt the love between the characters. He called this the “one, the two and the three.” Someone, I think it was Phil Goodman, the producer and another great influence, once reminded him that this one, two, and three was nothing more than Aristotle’s beginning, middle, and end. “Okay, Goody,” Lawrence said, “who the hell was Aristotle, and who did he lick?” I always thought that was the perfect Philistinism.

INTERVIEWER

How did it work?

CAIN

Lawrence would explain what he meant with an illustration, say a picture like Susan Lenox, where Garbo was an ill-abused Swedish farm girl who jumped into a wagon and brought the whip down over the horses and went galloping away and ended up in front of this farmhouse which Clark Gable, who was an engineer, had rented. And he takes her in. He’s very honorable with her, doesn’t do anything, gives her a place to sleep, puts her horses away and feeds them . . . He didn’t have any horses himself, but he did have two dozen ears of corn to feed hers. Well, the next day he takes the day off and the two of them go fishing. He’s still very honorable, and she’s very self-conscious and standoffish. She reels in a fish (they used a live fish—must have had it in a bucket). She says, I’ll cook him for your supper. And with that she gave herself away; his arms went around her. This fish, this live fish, was what Lawrence meant by a “love rack”; the audience suddenly felt what the characters felt. Before Lawrence got to Hollywood, they had simpler effects, created by what was called the mixmaster system. You know, he’d look at her through the forest window, looking over the lilies, and this was thought to be the way to do it; then they’d go down to the amusement park together and go through the what do you call it? Shoot de chute?

Rob Delaney / Christopher Logue

(The topic here is depression and suicide, if you’re in no mood, but I found these brief stories valuable.)  

1)

Rob Delaney is such a joyful presence.  I’ve thought many times about something he says in this Tumblr post about depression

What a good preserver to hang on to.

If no one else wants to do this to me, why would I do it to me?

Not sure it can help you if you’re at wit’s end but seemed to me a thought worth filing away for an emergency.

I’m really glad Rob Delaney’s alive!

2)

Saw this story linked on someone’s Twitter.  It comes from

That was the year that was

Tariq Ali talks to David Edgar

on the LRB.  I don’t know who those people are really but I know Christopher Logue is some kind of master.

Don’t be silly.  Come on – we’ll sit down and rid of this nonsense that’s in your head.

How cool and compassionate.

Glad they’re all alive.  (Well, were alive, in Logue’s case.)

And I’m glad you’re alive too, Reader!

Nobel / Pulitzer

source

Both the Nobel

source

and the Pulitzer Prize committees investigating sexual* abuse charges.  Is this because:

• literature is full of creeps
• arts and letters communities are especially sensitive / responsive to charges like this
• unusually weird status imbalances and games in these communities
• lots of occasions for sin: alcohol, parties, conferences, etc
• culture of bad behavior semi-tolerated in the arts
• people with power will always take things too far
• all, none, other?

* kind of unfair for Katarina Frostenson to be blamed for her husband’s crimes imo, but I don’t know the deets.  the betting tips is another matter.  almost funny.