View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
—You want to sue them for damages, that’s money isn’t it?
—Because that’s the only damn language they understand! Isn’t that what you just said? But stealing a whole world somebody’s created and turning it into a hogpen just because there’s money in hogs? Steal poetry what do you sue them for, poetry? and the court sentences Kiester to two hundred hours of community service? Two hundred hours teaching Yeats to the fourth grade? Expect me to pay your legal bill with Maid Quiet?
lol
—Because it’s never been performed that’s how come! Nobody’s ever seen it performed, a serious play of ideas like this one you expect to see it in lights on Broadway? All Broadway wants is tits and ass, a chorus line of stupid self indulgent idiots cavorting around the stage singing about tits and ass and the whole loud vulgar, tickets bought on company expense accounts to entertain your out of town buyer you think he wants to sit through something that requires one grain of intelligence?
—You been to the theatre lately Mister Crease?
—Me? God no. Wad up your coat and jam it under the seat you’ve paid sixty dollars for where you can see exactly half the stage, hot as blazes and you can’t cross your knees, the curtain goes up on a torrent of obscenity or some burntout star who’s decided a revival of an old chestnut like your O’Neill there’s his vehicle for immortality the minute he staggers onstage the audience explodes in applause and goes to sleep till intermission for the cigarette in the alley and that watery five dollar orange drink. End of the limited engagement the investors grab their tax breaks and status as patrons of the arts one thing you can be sure of, they’re having a better time up there on the stage than you are. Whether it’s spouting tits and ass or your O’Neill chestnut they’re all just having a good time at your expense.
:(
[...] Where plaintiff further alleges that these impediments to its removal were swept away by the appeals court decision reversing this major provision in Szyrk, supra, defendant’s disclaimer on grounds of the lack of a demolition permit required by municipal ordinance for such a procedure which, in the usual course of events would be issued by and to itself, has provoked the further charge of conspiracy wherein plaintiff cites the prominent presence on the Village Board of one Mel Kandino-poulis as chief obstacle to such issuance, submitting in evidence the expanding premises of Mel’s Kandy Kitchen in the form of a sunny new dining area overlooking Cyclone Seven and a printer’s dummy of a projected new menu offering quiche Lorraine, caesar salad with arugula, sangria and similar enticements to the sophisticated palates of prosperous out of town visitors where hoagies and a Bud by local custom had hitherto prevailed. [...]
[...] Among the dozen arrests that evening, that of Billy Pinks, thirty-two, an unemployed auto body worker charged with assault was later reduced to statutory rape on his plea that the ‘provocative message on her T shirt got his juices going’ and the admission by the twelve-year-old victim that she had deceitfully led him to believe she was fourteen. [...]
oh dear
—My God Harry what do you want him to do, just forget the whole thing?
—Might not be a bad idea Christina, he fought the good fight didn’t he? That’s the important thing, fought the good fight and lost no disgrace in that is there? Might even be able to take a good tax loss on the . . .
—Harry look at him! Does he look like he needs a good tax loss? [...]
—My God Harry what do you want him to do, just forget the whole thing?
—Might not be a bad idea Christina, he fought the good fight didn’t he? That’s the important thing, fought the good fight and lost no disgrace in that is there? Might even be able to take a good tax loss on the . . .
—Harry look at him! Does he look like he needs a good tax loss? [...]
—I’ve looked! All I’ve been doing I’ve been looking it’s taken me this long to finally see what I’m looking at hush things up, keep out of the papers, fight the good fight and lose there’s no disgrace in that is there? Your great Code of what was it you just told us? of professional responsibility and every profession’s a conspiracy against the public who told me that. Who told me that! Your self regulating profession no reason you and Sam can’t work something out what about us?
—It’s, look Christina.
—You look! I said what about us Harry, a conspiracy against the public my God we’re your family! Protecting yourself, protecting your friend Sam, protecting Swyne & Dour and your whole ridiculous self regulating white shoe conspiracy against your own family?
[...] Turn your head dear, turn your face this way, do you see what I mean now, Teen? the same delicate glow on her clear white skin when they talk about being just a little bit pregnant like those French women in the eighteenth century for that glow that comes on the first month or so and then the curettage, it was all Bunker’s idea. He thought it would be fun for me to get up in court and say I was just using this awful boy to try out this old French beauty secret but Jerry thought it wouldn’t go over with this stupid fossil of a judge [...]
lol
—Just stop here for a minute and let me put in a disclaimer, want to be clear that I’m not giving or even purporting to give you legal advice, just another formality. That’s what you pay for. You think I want something else out of it? I got something else. I got a chance I’d have never had otherwise. I got the chance to read your play. You remember Conrad describing his task, to make you feel, above all to make you see? and then he adds perhaps also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask? That’s what I’m talking about, that’s what you’re giving us in your play old fellow, what you can do that none of the rest of us can. Maybe you’re not even aware of how many of us envy these gifts you’ve got, look around at all the bad poems and bad art by people who can’t spell and can’t draw, bad books by somebody not because he wants to write, he wants to be a writer, millionaire stock peddler, car maker, general but he wants to be an author while the brilliant work of some real writer lies there gathering dust, a play like yours courts oblivion because there’s no one around with the wit to grasp its possibilities, to see what you saw there and put it up on the stage where it belongs.
—Of course I do, let me finish. Of course it’s madness, but the madness comes first. It’s an essential of the human condition, the worse the human condition the greater the madness and your revealed religion simply comes along to channel the madness, give some shape to it. For these unlettered hordes mired in poverty the only things that are free are sex and religion, and the poorer and more illiterate they are the more they procreate and the more ornate these religious pantheons and rituals become. Some Filipino crucifies himself at Easter because Jesus drove him to it? No, no he’s mad from the start and religion gives it an outlet, gets it organized, penitents flagellating themselves with scourges till the blood pours out in those streams of madness throbbing away skindeep all over Mexico, Sikhs, Iraqis, Afghanis they’re all raving maniacs to begin with looking for some grand design that they can fit into, some system of absolutes where they can find refuge, that’s what the true believer is isn’t he? And the more chaotic the times, the greater the demand for these absolutes, it’s what drove Dostoevski’s heroes over the brink wasn’t it? this panic at living in a meaningless universe? Take the deep bedrock madness of the Germans from Peter the Hermit and Thomas Münster right down to the death camps they try to masquerade as nationalism, like that exquisite distillation of total madness that’s peculiarly Japanese. The Italians channel theirs through the Vatican in a wholesale mayhem of crime and opera, the Russians drown theirs in a sea of vodka and the English cross dressing theirs under the skirts of the Anglican Church or they’d be as frankly mad as their neighbors across the Irish sea.