Just in case you thought my sweet old uncle William James doesn’t still have it: I came across this quote when I opened an old Selected Papers on Philosophy. At the exact moment my eyes came across these words, my son was dancing gleefully to Blood on the Tracks.
“A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word ‘raisin,’ with one real egg instead of the word ‘egg,’ might be an inadequate meal, but it would at least be a commencement of reality.”
Dear Joe Writer:
What’s the deal with writers anyway? Are they all just drunks and drug addicts and people you wouldn’t want to date? Why don’t they all just get real jobs and stop spending all our our money spreading feces all over themselves and pickling religious icons in urine.
Wants To Know in Ohio
Dear Wants To Know:
Writers are the voice of our best selves. They are, as Joyce said, the “uncreated conscience of [our] race.” The rest of the world needs us desperately for reasons that I will go into once I’ve thought a few up. Although I myself have spent a fair amount of time spreading feces and pickling religious icons in urine, you’re getting writers confused with artists. Artists are scumbags. Given a choice between dating an artist or a writer, you always want to go with … a rich film producer with several lovers on the side who will leave you alone to spend his money.
Yours,
Joe Writer
Mike Nichols, a party at Jane Fonda’s house, meeting Buck Henry:
In the middle of the party, and yet, standing at a cocked eyebrow’s distance from it, was Mike Nichols. Once again an immigrant in a new land, he surveyed the tribal rituals, the lapses of etiquette, the deferences and courtesies and small humiliations of this hothouse of West Coast privilege and restlessness, and filed them away from future use. At one point in the evening, he wandered from the crowd and found himself under the canopy of a huge tree around which part of the tent had been set up. A small knot of revelers was slouched around the trunk, and when Nichols approached, one of them looked up at him and said, “Are you having a good time in L.A., Mike?”
Nichols responded in his slow deadpan, “Yes. Here under the shadow of this great tree, I have found peace.”
The laugh he got came from Buck Henry.
From Pictures at a Revolution By Mark Harris
Warren Beatty on casting:
“Casting is destiny,” says Warren Beatty. “Particularly in movies, because casting is character — and character is plot. Casting really controls story. One guy would do a thing, another guy wouldn’t. And if you’re the guy in the close-up, character acting isn’t going to help — you either are that guy, or you aren’t.”
From Pictures at a Revolution By Mark Harris