great zings throughout history

One last (promise) thought on the Capote line: it's funnier when you hear it in his voice.

having made it to page 2 of On the Road, I'm with him.

From a letter from Groucho Marx to S. J. Perelman: "From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."

literary zings are usually a lil too on the nose almost as if some lonely person fuming w/professional jealousy puzzled over them in a room until they got it just right

paraphrasing wilde ^

i have nothing to declare but my klout score

in one of the late marx bros. movie there's a bit where chico is taking a photo and says to groucho 'just look at me and pretend to laugh'

'i've been doing that for thirty years'

which i presume was scripted but i like to believe it wasn't, you know.

-

re: capote: the immediate context is kerouac's claim/lie that he wrote he wrote OTR in one three-day binge, i believe

of whom was it that gore vidal said: "a writer's writer, in much the same way a butler is sometimes called a gentleman's gentleman"? still laughing at that one tbh

Yeah Capote was basically saying, possibly inaccurately, that Kerouac just shat it out without putting much thought or craft into it.

sigh

Gore Vidal's essays consist of three dozen zings strung together.

xp - i think it would be more accurately analysed down to "I distrust the veracity of Kerouac's claim that he wrote it in three days and, anyway, if so, this would not impact its literary value, and certainly would not impress its value upon me, as Kerouac seems to think it would"

by this point the fun of it is sort of dead, though

Well, that's pretty much what I was saying. And I disagree that working in that way is necessarily detrimental to good art - hence my defence of phenomenological writing. Obviously, not all art created in such a way will be good, but to suggest that it is simply not writing is fallacious.

xposts

literary zings are usually a lil too on the nose almost as if some lonely person fuming w/professional jealousy puzzled over them in a room until they got it just right

this is confusing way of thinking to me

great zing lawyers throughout history

worth posting, for those who haven't seen: http://billanddavescocktailhour.com/the-churchill-wit/

I like Gore Vidal's famous one from just after Norman Mailer had decked him - "as usual, words fail him".

i will never understand 'too on the nose' as a criticism

'this thing is as it should be, only, too much so'

maybe because thats not what it means

i do believe its possible that you will some day understand it tho

"If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised."

i've seen this quote with "vassar" instead of "the yale prom" elsewhere

lagoon's criticism is basically "oh yeah mr. witty person, with yr stinkin' wit, there, and your BOOKS? well I bet you have ~no social life~ lol"

worth posting, for those who haven't seen: http://billanddavescocktailhour.com/the-churchill-wit/

― s.clover, Sunday, April 29, 2012 2:00 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

lol

lagoon's criticism is basically "oh yeah mr. witty person, with yr stinkin' wit, there, and your BOOKS? well I bet you have ~no social life~ lol"

― cosi fan whitford (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, April 29, 2012 3:47 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a v poor reading!

it's a v. poor reading... LOUSY BOOKS

yeah i thought he was just saying that 'zings' are more a product of real time communication (IRL conversation, internet etc) than written correspondence or literature

that and a lot of them are just 'i throw yr book out the window!' oohhhh

like why is nabokov pretending faulkner is some sort of horrible writer, he mad

i demand veracity in my zings

i think it's a little short-sighted to not acknowledge that there was a huge gulf of culture and context between capote and kerouac or nabakov and faulkner, just because they're all in the canon now doesn't mean one guy was a moron for not loving another, let them have their salty putdowns

oh they can have them

to be sure most literary greats were often lonely guys sitting in rooms fuming with professional jealousy, it just seems silly to knock them for that like every other zinger in this thread was a super confident rock star

i have nothing against lonely guys in rooms but the desk gangster routine is just kinda tiresome when its so clearly motivated by professional competition, i mean there are some quality zings iit but a lot of them just dont land imho

anyway ive clearly become that which i most despise re my initial zing scholar post, everyone plz post the zings

you're putting a little too much effort into summarizing ilx there bro

xpost

meta thread grubbing

Brummell after being snubbed by the Prince Regent : "Lol, Alvanley, who's your fat friend?"

zingin baout things

i have nothing against lonely guys in rooms but the desk gangster routine is just kinda tiresome when its so clearly motivated by professional competition

don't overlook the pleasure of unmitigated malice though.

icey otm to the extent that some of these literary zings are excessively artificed, lapidary to a fault but more like a studied reduction of bile than bile itself

and when it's just some deskbound bpd case like capote or a pinchfaced cocksucker like martin amis then it's just so much imaginary soirée squabbling bereft of the timing and event of the real thing

"Pinchfaced cocksucker" is for Amis a compliment.

Casey Stengel had maybe the greatest accidental zing ever: "I got a kid, Greg Goosen, he's 20 years old and in ten years he's got a chance to be 30." (You'll come across a dozen slightly different versions of this.)

By calling that accidental, I'm probably buying into the caricature of Stengel as a doddering old man; he was exceptionally smart about baseball, and may have known exactly what he was saying about Goosen there.

Greatest cricket sledge zing of all time:

Glenn McGrath to Eddo Brandes: "How come you're so fucking fat?"
Brandes: "Because every time I fuck your wife she gives me a biscuit"

Rufus T. Firefly: Not that I care, but where is your husband?"
Gloria Teasdale: Why, he's dead.
Rufus T. Firefly: I bet he's just using that as an excuse.
Gloria Teasdale: I was with him til the very end.
Rufus T. Firefly: No wonder he passed away.

from the same scene: Don't look now, but there's one too many people in this room and I think it's you.

i could swear i saw a clip of capote actually saying that kerouac line, but that what he actually said was "that isn't writing, that's...just...TYPEWRITING!"

this isnt handwriting, its typewriting! *gets the vapors*