A Nose Is Thumbed

The
National Book Award for fiction, you may have read, went to a
collection of short stories, "The Magic Barrel," by Bernard Malamud,
English prof at Oregon State. To short-story addicts this is a triumph
indeed. It is also a slight nose thumbing at magazine editors who
insist on relegating short stories to a secondary position behind
stale, repetitious articles.

It also could reflect a feeling
by the judges that no novel worthy of the award was published last
year. Short-story collections rarely win an award; in fact, publishers
are reluctant to bring them out at all.

Several Hollywood writers were discussing the decline of meritorious fiction and came up with some bitter comments.

THEY AGREED on this sad truth: "If you’re not writing for television, you’re not eating very good."

One
outlined the writer’s dilemma as follows: "OK, I’m working on a script
that is junk but will pay me $750 or $1,500. It’s a fairy tale, full of
cliches, with maybe a twist that’s different. I come to a situation
that is so strained it’s on the edge of travesty. I could write a line
of dialogue that would destroy the whole business. It would make me
feel better. But I back away from it and play it straight, the way they
want it, so there will be no suspicion that anybody thinks I’m kidding.
That way I get paid."

Another challenged, "Well, if you hate TV so much, why do you keep writing it? What about your novel?"

"What are you talking about?" the first retorted. "How can I write junk one day and good stuff the next?"

SPEAKING OF TV, a Santa Monican,
while asleep, slugged his wife so savagely in the back she could hardly
move for three days. He was subconsciously re-enacting a brutal fight
scene in a TV western he’d watched before retiring.

It has come to this.

SPRING
A softness steals into the air,
While birds new mates are choosing.
Grandpa gets out his rocking chair,
To sun-tan while he’s snoozing.
–JOSEPH P. KRENGEL

THERE’S AN
apocryphal story about a stranger who asks an old-timer downtown how to
get to the post office, and the old-timer, after deep thought, says,
"You can’t get there from here."

Then there’s the case of Jack Clarke and his brother, visiting here from Chicago.

Jack arranged to pick him up the other day at 8:15 a.m. at 36th
and Hoover. He wasn’t there. Jack scoured the neighborhood in vain.
When an hour passed he phoned the place where his brother was staying
and learned he had left there on schedule.

When two hours passed he phone again. He was told the brother had phoned and said he was waiting at 36th and Hoover but had seen nothing of Jack.

On an impulse Jack toured the SC campus area and found his brother. As he suspected, there are two of them — 36th and Hoover Street and 36th and Hoover Boulevard — blocked off from each other.

"It’s impossible," the brother said.

"Not in L.A.," Jack said.

AT RANDOM —
A typographical posy to Playhouse Pictures for the shaggy dog take-off
on Viceroy’s "thinking man" commercial. Excerpt "Do you think everyone
should be a dog?" "Well, that’s something everyone should decide for
themselves" . . . No truth to the rumor there’s an underground move to
bring the Brooklyn Zoo here.