“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”
John Updike: Self-Consciousness: A Memoir
Almanac: John Updike on bores
“One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.”
John Updike, “Confessions of a Wild Bore”
Snapshot: the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1962
The Modern Jazz Quartet appears on an episode of Jazz Casual, hosted by Ralph Gleason and originally telecast by San Francisco’s KQED-TV on May 16, 1962:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
Almanac: Saul Bellow on memory
“Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.”
Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet
Lookback: on the “realism” of TV
From 2005:
Read the whole thing here.I recently saw a stage actress I know in an episode of a popular TV series. This was a new experience for me. I’ve watched any number of writer friends hold forth on talk shows, and I’ve even tuned into David Letterman to see a band whose members I know quite well. But all those people were being themselves, more or less, whereas my actress friend was pretending to be someone else….
Almanac: Philip Roth on old age
“Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”
Philip Roth, Everyman
Just because: Victor Borge’s “phonetic punctuation” routine
Victor Borge does his “phonetic punctuation” routine on The Ed Sullivan Show. This episode was telecast live by CBS on June 12, 1960:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
Almanac: Philip Roth on the mental confusion of man
“Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?”
Philip Roth, The Counterlife