Yogi Berra and Dan Quayle made it but not Ralph Kramden.
August Smithsonian chronicles how Bartlett`s Familiar Quotations is getting its first major revision since 1937 at the hands of Justin Kaplan, biographer of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Lincoln Steffens. He seems to be a quotation-loving, inspired pick to oversee a 16th edition, due out next year. Kaplan discloses that after reading the 25,000 quotations in the 15th edition, he decided that much could be ditched, including a lot of Victorian poetry, ”platitudes, empty pieties, self-evident propositions, commencement oratory and anything that sounds as though it might have come from the insides of a fortune cookie.”
A new edition will get an infusion of political, movie and musical lines, including a good deal of Woody Allen (such as, ”It`s not that I`m afraid to die, I just don`t want to be around when it happens.”). Kaplan will try to include lines from the women`s movement, though his letters seeking help from Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem went unanswered.
He suspects that some of the former New York Yankees star`s Berra-isms
(”It`s deja vu all over again”) are apocryphal, but he will use, ”It ain`t over till it`s over.” And Quayle will make it for bungling the United Negro College Fund slogan in declaring, ”What a waste it is to lose one`s mind.”
But Kaplan spurned what he believes to be the two most popular TV quotes: ”Beam me up, Scotty, there`s no intelligent life down here,” from ”Star Trek,” and Jackie Gleason`s (i.e. Ralph Kramden”s), ”One of these days, Alice, pow! Right in the kisser!” from ”The Honeymooners.” Former Federal Communications Commission chief Newton Minow`s allusion to TV as a ”vast wasteland” has made it.
And while he`ll add long passages such as the opening of Franz Kafka`s
”The Metamorphosis,” in which a man wakes up as a huge insect, Kaplan decided it takes too long to explain the context of many of his favorite Groucho Marx ad-libs.
Thus you`ll get Kafka but not Groucho`s response to a ”You Bet Your Life” contestant who informed him that she had nine children. Asked why so many, she said, ”Well, I like children.” Replied hot Groucho: ”I like a cigar, too, but every once in a while I take it out of my mouth.”
Pre-launch puffery of Chicago`s $150 million untested public library, not to open until October, hits an early zenith in September Chicago`s profile of library doyenne Cindy Pritzker and her efforts for what`s called a ”book heaven.” Meanwhile, a profile of former Sun-Times publisher James Hoge`s tough tenure as boss of the New York Daily News is a rehash that falls especially short inasmuch as Hoge wouldn`t offer insights on rancorous events leading to Tribune Co.`s sale of the tabloid to bombastic Robert Maxwell.
August Mademoiselle offers counsel on avoiding ”glamour scams,” being ripped off by modeling agencies. … In August Money, Warren Buffett, the Omaha investor who just took over scandal-stunned Salomon Brothers Inc. amid evidence it cheated competitors during U.S. Treasury bond auctions, is subject of a tongue-in-cheek investigation into the acumen that underlies his estimated $4 billion fortune. Reporter Gary Belsky heads to Omaha, is refused an interview but searches for wisdom in spots including Buffett`s favorite steakhouse.
August American Demographics claims a recession-proof market for
”antique” toys, namely hot sellers from the 1950s and `60s, including Magilla Gorilla and Peter Potamus, all driven by a big group of middle-age Baby Boomers. … Was painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) America`s greatest artist? September American Heritage suggests just that in profiling a
”mysterious, obdurate and conflicted” man caught in a tension ”between his technical decorum and the underlying emotional intensity that often seems on the verge of erupting through it.”
The summer issue of frisky Frisko offers a foray into the incongruous. Spending a day with Robin Leach, it happens to catch an accidental meeting in a San Francisco radio station of Leach and former Judge Robert Bork. Leach asks Bork about televangelist Jim Bakker`s 45-year-prison sentence and Bork replies, ”Forty-five years is too much, but being sentenced to marriage with Tammy Faye is far worse.”
Hey, get the guy into Bartlett`s.
