Funny Things about Serious People: Dear Guitardealer

I didn’t really see him too much after that, although I sold him a couple of guitars along the way during the ’60s. That 1930s Gibson Nick Lucas Special he played in “Don’t Look Back” had belonged to my sister. It was in mint condition when I sold it to him, but it got a little wrecked. He had that guitar for a long time. Later, probably in the early ’70s, I drove up to Woodstock to sell him a really nice late-’60s Martin. He was a tough guy to do business with, though, because he didn’t have any idea what the guitars were worth.

-Marc Silber, "Long Ago, Far Away," from Encounters with Bob Dylan

Funny Things about Serious People: Declaratively Hemingway

Buying paperback editions of Hemingway is funny because inevitably the back of the book has a statement that says something to the effect of "Hemingway wrote in short, declarative sentences" (that's a direct quotation) and then on page 18 you find a sentence like He knew about that, about motor cycles—that was earliest—about motor cars, about duck-shooting, about fishing, trout salmon and big-sea, about sex in books, many books, too many books, about all court games, about dogs, not much about horses, about hanging on to his money, about most of the other things his world dealt in, and about his wife not leaving him.

Funny Things About Serious People: Son House, Skip James, and H.C. Speir

Unlike most bluesmen, Son calls each of the standard tuning keys by their right names, save for C, which he calls F. (Booker White calls E G, C cross-G, and A Ab or Db; Robert Pete Williams, Rubin Lacy and Skip James all refer to E as C natural.) However, in other matters Son approaches the delta blues norm. For instance "minor" means any note or chord on or above the fifth fret, and "major" any note or chord below it. . . . In addition, Son uses a rather vague system of string classification, using soprano, alto, tenor and bass. Skip is more definite; from the sixth string to the first they are 6) bass or subtone, 5) baritone, 4) alto, 3 + 2) tenors, 1) soprano. Skip also refers to triplets, 16th, 32nd, and 64th notes, tonics, subdominants, and 2/4 and 4/4 time, all incorrectly. It turns out he bought an "Exegesis of Musical Knowledge" from H.C. Speir in 1931 and skimmed it.

-as told by Al "Blind Owl" Wilson, 1960s

Funny Things About Serious People: Richard Yates, Dakota Fanning, Haley Joel Osment, and Tao Lin

I'm sick of books about weird people who turn out to have been sexually molested as children. Does the percentage of characters in American fiction who were molested as children reflect the percentage of actual Americans who were molested as children?

Funny Things About Serious People: Three for Papa

"Among the last of the species was big, curly-haired, broken-nosed Lionel Moise, a brilliant reporter who was also a poet, a cop-slugger, a heartbreaker, a singer of barroom ballads, and a great teller of barroom stories. He liked to start a story by saying, 'Did I ever tell you about the time I was in jail in Pocatello [or Fresno or Savannah]? I was but a lad...'....Besides telling stories, he liked to stand with his foot on a brass rail and discuss the art of writing fiction.

"I knew him first and best in 1919, when he was working briefly for the New York American....Much as I liked and admired him, I thought he was one of the many brilliant reporters of the time who had half-baked themselves by reading Nietzche....He could be cruel to women, and one year in Chicago there were two attempted suicides because of him....He had talent enough to have become a famous writer too, if he had ever acquired the discipline of the trade. As it was, he exerted a real influence on American writing, through the cub reporters who learned their jobs under him....I learned that Moise had worked for the Kansas City Star in 1917, when Hemingway was a cub there and listened to his lectures. 'Pure objective writing,' Moise would say time and again, 'is the only true form of story-telling.'"

-from The Literary Situation, by Malcolm Cowley, 1958

"Back in August, when the 4th Division was sweeping eastward from Normandy, Hemingway ranged ahead of it in his jeep and began making contact with the French irregulars. He was an imposing figure...The French were convinced that he must be a general, but Hemingway told them he was only a captain.

"A guerrilla asked him, 'How is it that a man so old and wise as you and bearing the scars of honorable service is still a captain?'

"'Young man,' Hemingway answered...'the reason is clear and it is a painful one. I never learned to read and write.'"

-from "A Portrait of Mister Papa" in Life, by Malcolm Cowley, 1949

"Then it rained hard on the dead wet leaves. And you knew that if you said it all truly there would be enough there for a long time. Enough of the olives and Baked Alaska when the air conditioner blew at you hard in the fine little room behind the zinc of the bar at Sardi's. Nick stood up and hit the waiter hard just below the temple. The man went down. The cool red borscht flew from his hands and spilled into rivulets. Three waiters came at us and you put the empty champagne bottle to your cheek and popped them down as they moved fast coming at you with a sudden rush. Hi ho, said Mary, as you counted the saucers and left a tip although you were poor. If it were true enough it would all be there. It would all be there if you said it truly."

-from The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, by Frederic Tuten, 1971

Funny Things About Serious People: James, Lucia and Sam

"In the month Beckett returned to Paris Lucia decided that she was not fitted for a career as a dancer after all, saying that she was simply not physically strong enough. It was a decision greeted with something less than regret by her father, who had always had his doubts about whether it was seemly for the women of his family to prance about on stages in revealing costumes and had been made uncomfortable by his daughter's insistence on doing so."

from Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, by Anthony Cronin