[Image above from The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, which observes:
“I guess if you don’t just go grab a seat you may never get one.”]
From whiskey river:
The swarm of words
and little stories
are just to loosen you
from where you are stuck.
(Shitou Xiqian)
…and:
O, how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all; but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning… or wise… And still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.
(Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund [source])
Not from whiskey river:
“…Will is something very special. It happens mysteriously. There is no real way ot telling how one uses it, except that the results of using the will are astounding. Perhaps the first thing that one should do is to know that one can develop the will. A warrior knows that and proceeds to wait for it. Your mistake is not to know that you are waiting for your will.
“My benefactor told me that a warrior knows that he is waiting and knows what he is waiting for. In your case, you know that you’re waiting. You’ve been here with me for years, yet you don’t know what you are waiting for. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for the average man to know what he is waiting for. A warrior, however, has no problems; he knows that he is waiting for his will.”
“What exactly is the will? Is it determination, like the determination of your grandson Lucio to have a motorcycle?”
“No,” don Juan said softly and giggled. “That’s not will. Lucio only indulges. Will is something else, something very clear and powerful which can direct our acts. Will is something a man uses, for instance, to win a battle which he, by all calculations, should lose.”
“Then will must be what we call courage,” I said.
“No. Courage is something else. Men of courage are dependable men, noble men perennially surrounded by people who flock around them and admire them; yet very few men of courage have will. Usually they are fearless men who are given to performing daring common-sense acts; most of the time a courageous man is also fearsome and feared. Will, on the other hand, has to do with astonishing feats that defy our common sense.”
“Is will the control we may have over ourselves?” I asked.
“You may say that it is a kind of control.”
“Do you think I can exercise my will, for instance, by denying myself certain things?”
“Such as asking questions?” he interjected.
(Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan [source])
…and:
In a Country
My love and I are inventing a country, which we
can already see taking shape, as if wheels were
passing through yellow mud. But there is a prob-
lem: if we put a river in the country, it will thaw
and begin flooding. If we put the river on the bor-
der, there will be trouble. If we forget about the
river, there will be no way out. There is already a
sky over that country, waiting for clouds or smoke.
Birds have flown into it, too. Each evening more
trees fill with their eyes, and what they see we can
never erase.One day it was snowing heavily, and again we were
lying in bed, watching our country: we could
make out the wide river for the first time, blue and
moving. We seemed to be getting closer; we saw
our wheel tracks leading into it and curving out
of sight behind us. It looked like the land we had
left, some smoke in the distance, but I wasn’t sure.
There were birds calling. The creaking of our
wheels. And as we entered that country, it felt as if
someone was touching our bare shoulders, lightly,
for the last time.
(Larry Levis [source])
Finally… People usually think of Steve Martin’s first film as The Jerk or, if they’re Martin uber-geeks, they’ll remember the one which preceded it, the golden turkey Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in which he played the insane Dr. Maxwell Edison (majoring in medicine). But they were just his first features. In 1977, he preceded them both with a little seven-minute gem, The Absent-Minded Waiter, co-starring Buck Henry and Terri Garr. (The film’s director, Carl Gottlieb, remains famous primarily as a co-screenwriter of Jaws.) I was delighted (if not altogether surprised) to find it had made its way to YouTube:
“Ah — two for dinner?” Ha!
Froog says
Ah, I love that ‘Unnecessary Quotation Marks’ site.
But early Steve Martin…. well, I’m amazed and relieved that his comedy has developed as it has. I find most of his early stuff – like the above – just painful to watch. I was never able to get into The Jerk. His shtick in those days – an obviously smart man playing elaborately dumb – just seemed so self-conscious and laboured and NOT funny.
I can’t recall if Jacques Tati ever did anything with waiters, but I imagine if he had done, it would have been very, very funny.
I think the best incompetent waiter gags (arising from drunkenness and bad attitude rather than mental disability) are in Blake Edwards’s The Party.
Tessa says
I’m a big fan of the “Unnecessary Quotation Marks” blog. And I had no idea that Steve Martin appeared in Sgt Pepper. We live and learn.
And, John, so many lovely, lovely words. I could just lie down in them and revel!
Jules says
I’m still trying to get past the fact that that quote-blog exists. I LOVE IT. I’m sure it makes me a snob that unnecessary quotes are a pet peeve of mine.
John says
Froog: Martin’s memoir/autobiography, Born Standing Up, is eye-opening regarding how much thought and planning and practice he put into his act at every phase of his career, even before turning professional — when he was “just” a magician.
I think an essential component in appreciating the Stooooopid Steve persona — the exaggeratedly arch voice, the arrow through the head, “Oh no, I’ve got… happy feet!” and so on — was buying into it as a form of meta-comedy. It was too honking ridiculous to be funny in its own right, although I don’t think anyone stopped to consider that at the time.
The only waiter I remember from Tati’s films was the guy in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday — in the dining room which was (I think) upstairs in the inn. He wasn’t clumsy or absent-minded, though… just — like everyone else — prone to get tangled up in Mr. Hulot’s graceful ineptitudes.
Tessa: I don’t know if you saw the musical version of The Little Shop of Horrors. But Steve Martin’s Maxwell Edison (in Sgt. Pepper) was almost a direct ancestor of his insane dentist in Little Shop.
Love the image of lying down in words and reveling — like a dog wriggling on its back in fresh spring clover!
Jules: Somewhere online, maybe here, maybe in a comment at 7-Imp or elsewhere, I propounded one of my laws of human nature: everybody’s a snob about something. As long as you recognize it yourself and don’t wait for somebody else to snicker about behind your back, I think you’re covered!
Froog says
I see that argument that early Steve Martin is not so much being funny as attempting an ironic dissection of the mechanics of being funny; if you’re sufficiently impressed by how clever it is, you can start to accept it as a different way of being funny. There’s a British double act called Reeves and Mortimer who work in a rather similar vein. I didn’t like their stuff so much at first, but I gradually warmed to them (I think, in fact, it was more a case of them getting better at what they did over time, more relaxed and self-confident, less self-indulgently weird); perhaps it was the familiar Englishness of their terms of reference, or perhaps it was the moderately engaging personae they created for themselves (not ery engaging, but not massively alienating as so much of the early Steve Martin is) – part naughty schoolboy, part third-rate vaudevillian, part idiot savant; but whatever it was, I gradually developed a soft spot for them – something that has always refused to happened for me with the early Steve Martin, no matter how many times I’ve returned to try to give him another try.
I’ve seen a TV profile of Martin where he talks interestingly about his early days. I’m impressed by the man’s intelligence, but still not won over by this style of comedy (tempted to let rip with the – possibly not unnecessary – quotation marks there). I always found it “more desperate than amusing” – one of the negative reviews self-mockingly quoted (and perhaps made up) by Tom Lehrer on the sleeve of his An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer live concert record. I’d seen this waiter short once before, many years ago, but didn’t really remember it, so watched it again: for me, it was a completely laugh-free experience – seven minutes of my life wasted.
And sorry to be such a sticky-beak (for once?), but I disapprove of comedy based on mental impairment. Drunkenness is fine as a springboard for comedy (although rarely done that well), because it’s short-term and self-inflicted; but Martin’s character here has the kind of massive memory deficit and/or severely limited IQ that can only result from some kind of brain damage. My father suffered serious problems with his short-term memory in his later years, and there is absolutely nothing funny about it at all. But it’s not just this personal experience that makes me averse to this sort of thing: I don’t like jokes about Tourette’s sufferers either; I didn’t even feel comfortable with that granny in The Golden Girls who had the extreme social disinhibition after a stroke – although I could still appreciate that it was funny. Steve Martin here, I feel, is both straying into a discomfiting taboo area and severely unfunny while doing it.
John says
Froog: Gosh, under the circumstances it’d be pretty gauche for me to pursue this much further.
I will say, though, that during this back-and-forth of ours I thought of Jerry Lewis’s solo comedies. And that led me to think of old-fashioned standup comedy duos in general — JL and Dean Martin, or Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. Abbott and Costello… In most of these, the straight man was calm, level-headed, “normal”… and the other fellow a wild fool, often believing himself smarter than anyone else (especially the straight man). Their logic followed rules of its own (if you accept that Absurdity X is in fact true, well then, Stupidity Y is the only reasonable response!). There may be a chain of evidence there.
marta says
I thought the absurdity was less in Martin’s absentminded waiter and more in the couple. But I like Steve Martin.
You could–if you dare!–have a post about humor and what is funny, what is appropriate for a joke. Humor is at someone’s expense–mothers-in-law, cheerleaders, jocks, scientists, fat people, short people, blondes, the mentally ill, the elderly, politicians, wives, husbands, ethnic groups, women, men, police officers, the disabled, teachers, managers, car salesmen, churchgoers…
But again, I didn’t think the joke was on the waiter as much as the unscrupulous, manipulative husband. It might have been a mistake to read the comments before watching the video!
As for quotes, my students use them all the time. Drives me crazy.
John says
marta: A general post about humor — what works without offending — would probably offend everyone who read it, in one or more ways. I can see even the thick-skinned bristling at the suggestion that they’re less sensitive than anyone else. :) Not to mention those who say (I think rightly) that analyzing a joke too much is a sure way to kill it!
One thing driving the overuse of quotation marks seems to be social networking (FB, Twitter, et al.) — including text messaging. Generally, because these are meant to be usable on phones as well as on computers, they don’t include any way to emphasize text: italics or underlining.You can go to ALL CAPS, but that solution is not only generally frowned on as “shouting,” it’s also harder to key in. So people resort to other sorts of intensifier — bracketing the words with *asterisks*, say, or _underscores_, or /slashes/. Enter the ridiculous use of quotation marks for this purpose. (I can imagine someone having typed up the sign in this photo because people keep insisting on seating themselves, without signing in or whatever. Like: Will you please wait, people?!?)
Saw (and cracked up at) this litany of online texting shortcuts yesterday, via agent Janet Reid’s blog. Not 100% relevant; let’s say… “relevant.”