Take a Good Look

[Image: Publicity still featuring Edie Adams and Ernie Kovacs for the latter’s comedy game show, Take a Good Look. (Adams was a regular panelist.) For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

The moon shines on the river,
the wind blows through the pines —
whose providence is this long beautiful evening?

(Yongjia Xuanjue)

…and:

Speak, memory, that I may not forget the taste of roses, nor the sound of ashes in the wind; That I may once more taste the green cup of the sea.

(Daubmir Nadir)

…and:

Start with a blank surface. It doesn’t have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can’t remember.

(Stephen King [source])

…and:

You think when you wake up in the morning yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothing else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I don’t know what all. Start over. And then one morning you wake up and look at the ceiling and guess who’s laying there?

(Cormac McCarthy)

Not from whiskey river:

So—I went on, on my own—deeper and deeper into the silent Tunnel of the Ride—not so sure of where I was and yet not anxious either, not concerned about my companions nor even about the nearness of—certain friends. The trees were beech, and the buds, just breaking, fiercely brilliant, and the new, the renewed light on them—intermittent diamond—but the depths were dark, a silent Nave. And no birds sang, or I heard none, no woodpecker tapped, no thrush whistled or hopped. And I listened to the increasing Quiet—and my horse went softly on the beech-mast—which was wet after rain—not crackling, a little sodden, not wet enough to plash. And I had the sensation, common enough, at least to me, that I was moving out of time, that the way, narrow and dark-dappled, stretched away indifferently before and behind, and that I was who I had been and what I would become—all at once, all wound in one—and I moved onward indifferently, since it was all one, whether I came or went, or remained still. Now to me such moments are poetry. [Randolph Henry Ash]

(A.S. Byatt [source])

…and:

[Bill] Bradley’s [basketball] play has just one somewhat unsound aspect, and it is the result of his mania for throwing the ball to his teammates. He can’t seem to resist throwing a certain number of passes that are based on nothing but theory and hope; in fact, they are referred to by the Princeton coaching staff as Bradley’s hope passes. They happen, usually, when something has gone just a bit wrong. Bradley is recovering a loose ball, say, with his back turned to the other Princeton players. Before he turned it, he happened to notice a screen, or pick-off, being set by two of his teammates, its purpose being to cause one defensive man to collide with another and thus free an offensive man to receive a pass and score. Computations whir in Bradley’s head. He hasn’t time to look, but the screen, as he saw it developing, seemed to be working, so a Princeton man should now be in the clear, running toward the basket with one arm up. He whips the ball over his shoulder to the spot where the man ought to be. Sometimes a hope pass goes flying into the crowd, but most of the time they hit the receiver right in the hand, and a gasp comes from several thousand people.

(John McPhee [source (subscription required)])

…and:

Thoughts on One’s Head
(In Plaster, with a Bronze Wash)

A person is very self-conscious about his head.
It makes one nervous just to know it is cast
In enduring materials, and that when the real one is dead
The cast one, if nobody drops it or melts it down, will last.

We pay more attention to the front end, where the face is,
Than to the interesting and involute interior:
The Fissure of Rolando and such queer places
Are parks for the passions and fears and mild hysteria.

The things that go on there! Erotic movies are shown
To anyone not accompanied by an adult.
The marquee out front maintains a superior tone:
Documentaries on Sharks and The Japanese Tea Cult.

The fronts of some heads are extravagantly pretty.
These are the females. Men sometimes blow their tops
About them, launch triremes, sack a whole city.
The female head is mounted on rococo props.

Judgment is in the head somewhere; it keeps sums
Of pleasure and pain and gives belated warning;
This is the first place everybody comes
With bills, complaints, writs, summons, in the morning.

This particular head, to my certain knowledge
Has been taught to read and write, make love and money,
Operate cars and airplanes, teach in a college,
And tell involved jokes, some few extremely funny.

It was further taught to know and to eschew
Error and sin, which it does erratically.
This is the place the soul calls home just now.
One dislikes it of course: it is the seat of Me.

(William Meredith [source])

____________________

About the image: The Take a Good Look game show appeared on US television over two seasons, 1959-60 and 1960-61. “Game show” doesn’t quite do it justice; Wikipedia describes it this way:

Take A Good Look was a parody of the Goodson-Todman panel games of the era: To Tell the Truth, I’ve Got a Secret, and What’s My Line. Kovacs produced and hosted a format similar to those shows, in which a panel of celebrities attempted to guess a secret about a seemingly-ordinary person brought onstage.

Originally, the clues were presented by way of props and short video clips that had no cast, but eventually went exclusively to films of short comedy blackout gags… that pertained only vaguely to the person about whom guesses were being made. For example,… for a champion bubble blower, Kovacs showed a skit regarding a model train set for a movie scene; the sole hint was the sound a train makes, “choo-choo”, and the extreme vagueness of this clue suggests that the skits were meant to be recycled.

A YouTube uploader somehow unearthed a complete episode of the program and posted it online, in three parts. Here’s Part 1, about 9½ minutes long:

And NO, smart alecs: I never saw the show myself. But as with much of Kovacs’s work, this may have acquired a sort of retrospective cult status far beyond his original reach.