Okay, this is George Carlin’s infamous bit “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” so please don’t watch it at work. That said, a bit of context: Carlin, arch comic satirist and incisive social critic, originally performed this routine in Milwaukee in 1972. Carlin is deliberately pushing the envelope here, and he’s paying homage to the great Lenny Bruce, who was persecuted by censors and police, and hounded out of work, more or less, for doing what Carlin does above—poking fun at our American squeamishness about the body, sexuality, and religion. With Elizabethan glee, Carlin takes seven words from Bruce’s original nineand reduces them to absurdities. As we all know–South Park and pay cable excepted–most of these words are still taboo and can send certain viewers, media watchdogs, and congress people into fits.
Carlin’s point is exactly that—people squirm when they hear obscene words, as though the language itself had some magically destructive power, but as he says, “there are no bad words. Bad thoughts, Bad intentions,” suggesting that the problem lies in the minds and hearts of those who assume that quarantining certain uses of language will keep us from certain ideas and acts they fear—or in his own irreverent voice, that some words “will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.…” Carlin was arrested after his Milwaukee appearance when an audience member complained, but a Wisconsin judge determined that his speech was protected. Later, when the bit was broadcast by a New York radio station, legal trouble ensued once again, and the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1978 that the government had the right to restrict television and radio broadcasts in case children were listening. Carlin, who died in 2008 at the age of 71, said of the case, “My name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of.”
“It’s been four years, maybe five,” mutters artist Ralph Steadman as his flight descends into Colorado. “I don’t know what the man has done since then. He may have terrible brain damage.” He speaks of a famous collaborator, a writer whose verbal style the culture has linked forever with Steadman’s own visual style. “He has these mace guns and CO2 fire extinguishers, which he usually just aims at people,” Steadman’s voiceover continues, and we know this collaborator could be none other than Hunter S. Thompson, the impulsive, drug- and firearm-loving chronicler of an American Dream gone sour. Many of Steadman’s fans no doubt found their way into his blotchy and grotesque but nevertheless precisely observed artistic world in the pages of Thompson’s best-known book, 1971’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — or in those of its follow-up Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, or alongside his “gonzo” ground-breaking article “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood, the BBC Omnibus documentary above, finds the men reuniting in 1978 to take a journey into the heart of, if not the American Dream, then at least the ostensible American “Dream Factory.”
As Steadman’s British, middle-aged stolidness may seem surprising given the out-and-out insanity some see in his imagery, so Thompson’s famously erratic behavior belies his words’ sober (as it were) indictment of America. He wrote of Thomas Jefferson’s belief in America as “a chance to start again [ .. ] a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race.” But alas, “instead, we just moved in here and destroyed the place from coast to coast like killer snails.” We see him cruise the Vegas strip, suffer a fit of paranoia by Grauman’s Chinese Theater (though I myself react similarly to Hollywood Boulevard), and take a meeting about the film that may or may not have become Where the Buffalo Roam, which featured Bill Murray in the Thompsonian persona. We see archival footage of Murray helping Thompson out with his sardonic “Re-elect Nixon in 1980” campaign. We even see Thompson have a hotel-room sit-down with Nixon’s White House Counsel John Dean, who testified against the President in the Watergate trial. Between these segments, Thompson reflects on the wild, substance-fueled persona he created, and how it had gotten away from him even then: “I’m really in the way, as a person. The myth has taken over.” But he always had an eye on the next phase: at the documentary’s end, he draws up plans for the memorial mount and cannon that would, 27 years later, fire his ashes high into the air.
[NOTE:Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood’s narrator refers to Thompson as a former Hell’s Angel. In fact, he only rode alongside the Hell’s Angels, collecting material for the book Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. Remaining a non-member all the while, he even bought a British bike to distinguish himself from the Harley-Davidson-dedicated gang.]
E.M. Forster’s later years are something of a riddle. After publishing five novels, including the classics A Passage to India and Howards End, Forster stopped writing fiction at the age of 45. He lived quietly for another 46 years and continued to write essays, short biographies and literary journalism — but no more novels.
The issues behind it are complicated, says Forster in this excerpt from a 1958 BBC interview. “But I think one of the reasons why I stopped writing novels,” he says, “is that the social aspect of the world changed so very much. I’d been accustomed to write about the old vanished world with its homes and its family life and its comparative peace. All of that went. And though I can think about it I cannot put it into fiction form.”
At the time of the interview Forster was an honorary fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, where he lived the final 24 years of his life. He speaks of his life at Cambridge, and of his own limitations as a writer, with a sincerity and humanity that readers will recognize from his books.
Most people know Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) as a writer and illustrator of some of the world’s most-beloved children’s books. And while it’s true that some of his characters have not fared well since his death in 1991, his legacy as a playful moralist is secure with parents and teachers everywhere. But few people know that Geisel got his start as a satirist and illustrator for adults, publishing articles and illustrations in Judge, Life, Vanity Fair, and the Saturday Evening Post. He went on to prominence as an advertising illustrator during the Depression, most famously with a 17-year campaign for a bug-repellant called Flit—made by Standard Oil—whose slogan, “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” became a popular catch phrase in the 30s.
The University of California, San Diego, has a special collection of Geisel’s advertising work from the 30s and 40s (such as the image above) for clients like Standard, NBC, and Ford. The images show Geisel the illustrator developing visual themes that characterize his children’s books—the circus imagery, elephants, dazzling physical stunts, wide-eyed, furry creatures, complex Rube Goldberg machines, and the signature disembodied pointing gloves. During World War II, Geisel shifted his focus from advertising to politics and contributed weekly cartoons to PM magazine, a liberal publication. UCSD also has an online catalog of Geisel’s political cartoons, such as the 1941 ad for U.S. Savings Bonds below.
Next to “celebrated” (or “celebrity”) the description I’ve most seen applied to the late Gore Vidal is “acerbic,” or some such synonym—“scathing,” “disdainful”… I’m sure he would relish the compliment. One of the most fitting adjectives, perhaps, is “Wilde-like” (as in Oscar Wilde), deployed by Hilton Als in the New Yorker. The adjective fits especially well considering one of Vidal’s most-tweeted quotes from his treasury of Wilde-like aphorisms: “Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.” It’s clever and morbid and naughty and devil-may-care, and almost entirely fatuous. Unlike several writers recently featured here—Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Henry Miller, George Orwell, et al.—who helpfully compiled numbered lists of writing advice, Vidal’s pronouncements on his craft were rather unsystematic. But, like many of those named above, what Vidal did leave in the form of advice was sometimes facetious, and sometimes profound. Despite his evident contempt for neat little lists, one writer in the UK has helpfully compiled one anyway. The “suicide note” quote above is number 4:
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!
I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place.
Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.
Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
You can’t really succeed with a novel anyway; they’re too big. It’s like city planning. You can’t plan a perfect city because there’s too much going on that you can’t take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.
I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.
Writer’s Digest gives us ten additional quotes of Gore Vidal on writing (unnumbered this time):
“You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.”
“I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.”
“The reason my early books are so bad is because I never had the time or the money to afford constant revisions.”
“That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.”
“Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.”
“I’ll tell you exactly what I would do if I were 20 and wanted to be a good writer. I would study maintenance, preferably plumbing. … So that I could command my own hours and make a good living on my own time.”
“If a writer has any sense of what journalism is all about he does not get into the minds of the characters he is writing about. That is something, shall we say, Capote-esque—who thought he had discovered a new art form but, as I pointed out, all he had discovered was lying.”
“A book exists on many different levels. Half the work of a book is done by the reader—the more he can bring to it the better the book will be for him, the better it will be in its own terms.”
[When asked which genre he enjoys the most, and which genre comes easiest:]
“Are you happier eating a potato than a bowl of rice? I don’t know. It’s all the same. … Writing is writing. Writing is order in sentences and order in sentences is always the same in that it is always different, which is why it is so interesting to do it. I never get bored with writing sentences, and you never master it and it is always a surprise—you never know what’s going to come next.”
[When asked how he would like to be remembered:]
“I suppose as the person who wrote the best sentences in his time.”
A series of snippets of Gore Vidal’s wit from Esquire provides the biting (for its non-sequitur jab at rival Norman Mailer): “For a writer, memory is everything. But then you have to test it; how good is it, really? Whether it’s wrong or not, I’m beyond caring. It is what it is. As Norman Mailer would say, “It’s existential.” He went to his grave without knowing what that word meant.”
Vidal returns to the theme of memory in a 1974 interview with The Paris Review, in which he admits to placing the ultimate faith in his memory: “I am not a camera… I don’t consciously watch anything and I don’t take notes, though I briefly kept a diary. What I remember I remember—by no means the same thing as remembering what you would like to.”
While Vidal is memorialized this week as a celebrity and Wilde-like provocateur, it’s also worth noting that he had quite a lot to say about the work of writing itself, some of it witty but useless, some of it well worth remembering.
Earlier this year, at the age of 70, John Irving published his 13th novel, In One Person. The title is from Shakespeare’s Richard II: “Thus play I in one person many people, and none contented.” “In One Person,” writes Charles Baxter in The New York Review of Books, “combines several genres. It is a novel about a bisexual man’s coming out grafted onto a coming-of-age story, grafted onto a portrait-of-the-artist, grafted onto a theater novel. The book is very entertaining and relies on verbal showmanship even when the events narrated are grim, a tonal incongruity characteristic of this author. The book’s theme, it’s fixed idea, is that actors and writers and bisexuals harbor many persons within one person.”
In this five-minute film from Time magazine we get just a glimpse of the person, or people, called John Irving. It’s an interesting glimpse. Director Shaul Schwarz and his crew filmed the writer at his sprawling house in East Dorset, Vermont. The sheer size of the place gives some sense of the popularity of Irving’s novels, which include The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. The house has a wrestling gym where Irving works out and an office where he writes the old-fashioned way–with pen and paper–by windows looking out onto the forested hills of southern Vermont. “I can’t imagine being alive and not writing, not creating, not being the architect of a story,” says Irving near the end of the film. “I do suffer, I suppose, from the delusion that I will be able to write something until I die. That’s my intention, my hope.”
Gore Vidal wrote 25 novels and various memoirs, essays, plays, television dramas and screenplays. He invested himself in American politics and ran for office twice, losing both times. He tended openly toward homosexuality long before the country warmed up to the idea. And he never backed down from a good argument. Gore Vidal died Tuesday from complications of pneumonia at his home in Los Angeles.
During the 1960s and 70s, Vidal feuded publicly with literary and political foes alike. Sometimes it made for good TV. Other times it made for bad TV. It didn’t really matter. He was ready to go. Above, we have Gore Vidal’s verbal brawl with the mercurial (and seemingly sauced) novelist Norman Mailer. It happened on The Dick Cavett Show in December, 1971, and only the show’s host (and the bewildered Janet Flanner) emerge from the dustup looking okay. Slate has more on this memorable episode here.
The next clip brings us back to an ABC television program aired during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Suffice it to say, emotions were running high. In the months leading up to the Convention, Martin Luther King Jr. and RFK were both assassinated. Riots followed. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War splintered the nation in two. The Chicago police tried to shut down demonstrations by anti-war protestors, and eventually the two sides clashed in the parks and streets. Amidst all of this, Buckley and Vidal, both political analysts for ABC News, started discussing the protestors and their rights to free speech, when things came to a head. Vidal called Buckley a “pro-crypto-Nazi.” Buckley called Vidal a “queer” and threatened to “sock [him] in the goddamn face.” The threat was not easily forgotten. It became the fodder for jokes when Buckley interviewed Noam Chomsky the next year.
“We who use words enjoy a peculiar privilege over our fellows,” says Rudyard Kipling in this rare filmed speech. “We cannot tell a lie. However much we may wish to do so, we only of educated men and women cannot tell a lie–in our working hours. The more subtly we attempt it, the more certainly do we betray some aspect of truth concerning the life of our age.”
The speech was given on July 12, 1933 at Claridge’s Hotel in London, during a luncheon of the Royal Society of Literature for visiting members of the Canadian Authors’ Association. Kipling was 67 years old at the time. The text of the speech (which you can open and read in a new window) was published in a posthumous edition of A Book of Words.
Rudyard Kipling was one of the most celebrated English writers of the late Victorian era. Henry James once said, “Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.” In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a prolific author of short stories, poetry, and novels, Kipling was the foremost chronicler of the British colonial experience.
But as the British Empire faded in the 20th century, so too did Kipling’s literary standing. His works for children, including The Jungle Book and Just So Stories (see below), are still widely enjoyed, but much of his other writing–even the classic novel Kim–is viewed with ambivalence. The literary genius praised by James is often overshadowed by our contemporary views on the cruelty and exploitation of colonialism.
“Mercifully,” says Kipling later in his speech to the Canadian authors, “it is not permitted to any one to foresee his or her literary election or reprobation, any more than it was permitted to our ancestors to foresee the just stature of their contemporaries…”
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