Tag Archives: literary oddities

Ben Hecht on History, Chronology, and Journalism

Posted on June 1, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.”

Ben Hecht

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

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The Algonquin Wits: Robert Benchley Requests a Taxi

Posted on April 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Coming out of a midtown restaurant, Benchley spotted a uniformed man at the door. ‘Would you get us a taxi, please,’ he asked the man. ‘I’m sorry,’ the man said coldly, ‘I happen to be a rear admiral in the United States Navy.’ ‘All right then,’ said Benchley, ‘get us a battleship.'”

Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.

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Tarzan

Posted on April 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

“The famous foundling reared by apes in the African jungle was created in 1912 by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), Tarzan has had countless adventures in novels and films, in which he communes with animals, rescues damsels in distress and discovers long lost civilizations. The first novel of 24 in which he appears is Tarzan of the Apes (1914). In the ‘monkey language’ that Burroughs invented for him, his name means ‘white’ from tar, and zan, ‘skin.’ He is given this name by his foster-mother, Kala the ape. The name came to be adopted for any apparent ‘he-man’ and was bestowed by the media on the Conservative politician Michael Heseltine (b. 1933), not only for his height and blond hair but also with reference to an incident of 1976 when he brandished the House of Commons mace to protect it. Tarzana, now a suburban residential section of Los Angeles, was named in honour of Tarzan.”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

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Rotten Rejections: Typee by Herman Melville

Posted on April 23, 2019 | Leave a comment

“It is impossible that it could be true and therefore it is without real value.”

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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The Devil’s Dictionary: Adage

Posted on April 21, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Adage, n. [1.] Boned wisdom for weak teeth. [2.] A hoary-headed platitude that is kicked along the centuries until nothing is left of it but its clothes. A ‘saw’ which has worn out its teeth on the human understanding.”

Ambrose Bierce

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000. 

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Rotten Rejections: Esther Waters

Posted on April 19, 2019 | Leave a comment

“We like the story ourselves but there are scenes in it such as childbirth in a hospital with full accounts of labor pains, etc., which would hardly go down here and it certainly would excite surprise if published by us.”

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Rotten Reviews: Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

Posted on April 10, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Largely a record of sordid realism.”

Athenaeum

“Its ethics are frankly pagan.”

The Independent

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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The Devil’s Dictionary: Amateur

Posted on April 10, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Amateur, n. A public nuisance who mistakes taste for skill, and confounds his ambition with his ability.” 

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.

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Rotten Reviews: Lycidas

Posted on April 9, 2019 | Leave a comment

“The diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing…Its form is that of a pastoral–easy, vulgar and therefore disgusting.”

Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets 1779

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Rotten Reviews: Appointment in Samarra

Posted on April 4, 2019 | Leave a comment

“There is a thorough-going vulgarity in this book, characteristic of its class, which is a symptom of a lack of knowledge of the novelist’s real art…I mean an insufferable vulgarity, which has crept into so many of our supposedly advanced novels that someone not squeamish, not unread in earlier literatures, must protest against what is cheapening American fiction…what has happened to these young Americans? Do they think that living in a county the most vigorous, the most complex, the most problematical, the most interesting bar none in the world, we are going to be content with sour pap like this? And the tragedy is that they are clever; if they could see, they could write.”

H.S. Canby, Saturday Review of Literature

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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