TV Quote of the Day (‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ In Which Barney Reveals His Knowledge of American History)

[Claiming history to be his specialty, Barney asks Andy to test his knowledge, so Andy asks him about the Emancipation Proclamation, and it quickly becomes evident that Barney has no idea of its meaning.]

Sheriff Andy Taylor [played by Andy Griffith]: “Go ahead. I'm all ears.”

Deputy Barney Fife [played by Don Knotts] [under his breath] “Yeah, you always was.” [Then, more loudly]: “Well, the Emancipation Proclamation...”

[clears throat]

Barney: “...uh, was a proclamation, is what it was.”

Andy: “Mm, what was is about?

Barney: [testily] “Was about emancipation! What do you THINK it was about? ‘What was it about?’ Use your head, man. It's common knowledge. It was these folks - and how else was they going to get themselves emancipated unless there was a proclamation? So, they got themselves a proclamation and they called it ‘The Emancipation Proclamation.’"

Andy: “Yep?”

Barney: “Yeah, and I'm surprised at you for not knowing that, Andy! And I'll tell you something else: I'm even more surprised that you think that I don't know about The Emancipation Proclamation.”

Andy: “We're still waitin' for you to tell us about it.”

Barney: “Well, if you get so smart-alecky about it, maybe I'm not even GONNA tell you!” —The Andy Griffith Show, Season 3, Episode 23, “Andy Discovers America,” original air date Mar. 4, 1963, teleplay by John Whedon, directed by Bob Sweeney

Once again, Barney shows why his friend Andy calls him, with an amused smile, “a bird in this world.” But at least Barney hasn’t volunteered to write standard materials that youngsters should know about slavery, so you won’t hear him talking about the “skills” slaves learned.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (G.K. Chesterton, on Humanity’s Confounding Children’s Game, ‘Cheat the Prophet’)

“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called ‘Keep to-morrow dark,’ and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) ‘Cheat the Prophet.’ The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.

“For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable. They stoned the false prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophets with a greater and juster enjoyment. Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful.”—English man of letters (and Catholic convert) G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

Quote of the Day (Patti Smith, on Mesmerizing Musician Tom Verlaine)

“I went to see Television whenever they played, mostly to see Tom [Verlaine], with his pale blue eyes and swanlike neck. He bowed his head, gripping his Jazzmaster, releasing billowing clouds, strange alleyways populated with tiny men, a murder of crows, and the cries of bluebirds rushing through a replica of space. All transmuted through his long fingers, all but strangling the neck of his guitar.”—American singer-songwriter and memoirist Patti Smith, on guitarist, songwriter, and Television frontman Tom Verlaine (1949-2023), in “Postscript: Tom Verlaine,” The New Yorker, Feb. 13 and 20, 2023

I never followed Tom Verlaine’s music, whether as part of Television in the Seventies or as a solo artist in the Eighties, so I didn’t take much notice of his death this January.

But I was instantly struck by Patti Smith’s extraordinarily vivid description of her lover from their punk-rock days, and wanted to share with readers how she elevated this mini-portrait to high art.

(The image accompanying this post, a 1977 publicity photo of Tom Verlaine promoting Television's debut album, Marquee Moon, on Elektra Records, was taken by Roberta Bayley and distributed by Elektra Records, then scanned by Yahoo Japan Auctions.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Player,’ In Which a Studio Exec Anticipates Today’s Strikes)

Griffin Mill [played by Tim Robbins]: “I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here.”—The Player (1992), screenplay by Michael Tolkin, directed by Robert Altman

I won’t engage in any spoilers here, but Griffin Mill carries his idea on how to “eliminate the writer from the artistic process” quite far.

I’m not saying that today’s studio executives have the same solution in mind. But the screenwriters and actors currently on strike feel like they’re being cut out of the revenue streams that developed during the pandemic.

With the advent of CGI, pictures often feature actors (admittedly in truncated roles) who are dead, such as Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. (See this very interesting Screen Rant list of other notables—like Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando and Christopher Reeve.)

Now, with artificial intelligence, the lowliest of Hollywood actors—scrambling just to appear as extras—believe that with facial recognition software, they won’t be compensated even for these fleeting appearances onscreen.

Why resort to murder when you can terminate difficult creative partners—not to mention employees insisting on their rights—with the click of a mouse?

Quote of the Day (Zadie Smith, on the ‘Tiresomely Gigantic Influence’ of Charles Dickens)

“Hanging over all this anxiety [about writing a historical novel set in Victorian England] was the long shadow of Dickens. To be my age, bookish, and born in England was to grow up under that tiresomely gigantic influence. Dickens was everywhere. He was in school and on the shelves at home and in the library. He invented Christmas. He was in politics, influencing changes in labor law, educational law, even copyright law. He was the original working-class hero—radiant symbol of our supposed meritocracy—as well as a crown jewel of the English Heritage tourist industry….He was also everywhere I wanted to be: in the theatre, in Italy, in America. Televised versions of his books were on rotation—there is a case to be made that Dickens is the reason that we have prestige-TV miniseries in the first place —and he was in the goddam Muppets and all over Hollywood, in conscious adaptation and unconscious theft. I personally read far too much of him as a child, and though I grew up to have all the usual doubts and caveats about him—too sentimental, too theatrical, too moralistic, too controlling — I was also never able to get out from under his embarrassing influence, as often as I’ve often wanted to….There didn’t seem to be a nineteenth-century pot he didn’t have his finger in.”— English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Zadie Smith, “On Killing Dickens,” The New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2023

The comic upshot of Zadie Smith’s anxiety over the influence of Charles Dickens was that she ended up making him a character—and a not-insignificant one—in her upcoming book The Fraud.

Yet, even as Smith fretted about viewing the Victorian Era through the lens of the astonishingly prolific author, she seemed never to have considered how Dickens wrote about times other than his own.

In other words, Dickens got around to writing historical fiction almost two centuries before she did.

Well, that first attempt is largely forgotten these days—and maybe Dickens would have been glad about that. Barnaby Rudge was, according to the late great editor Robert Gottlieb, in a 2012 piece for Publishers Weekly, “a tired and tiresome historical novel that the young Dickens kept putting off writing until contractual obligations forced him to finish it.”

But not too many people know anything about the subject of this 1841 novel: a 1780 outbreak of anti-Catholic sentiment in England that became known as the Gordon Riots. If his book sends interested readers out for literature about this incident, maybe all wasn’t lost for his labor.

Dickens’ other attempt at historical fiction was considerably more successful, at least commercially: A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens felt a powerful influence of his own as he labored over it: Thomas Carlyle’s epic history, The French Revolution. But, if Dickens was intimidated by that prospect, the finished product doesn’t betray that sense.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that for Ms. Smith. Just have at it…

Quote of the Day (Thornton Wilder, on the Storyteller’s Gift)

“There is something mysterious about the endowment of the storyteller. Some very great writers possessed very little of it, and some others, lightly esteemed, possessed it in so large a measure that their books survive down the ages, to the confusion of severer critics. Alexandre Dumas had it to an extraordinary degree; while Melville, for all his splendid quality, had it barely sufficiently to raise his work from the realm of nonfiction. It springs, not, as some have said, from an aversion to general ideas, but from an instinctive coupling of idea and illustration; the idea, for a born storyteller, can only be expressed imbedded in its circumstantial illustration. The myth, the parable, the fable are the fountainhead of all fiction and in them is seen most clearly the didactic, moralizing, employment of a story. Modern taste shrinks from emphasizing the central idea that hides behind the fiction, but it exists there nevertheless, supplying the unity to fantasizing, and offering a justification to what otherwise we would repudiate as mere arbitrary contrivance, pretentious lying, or individualistic emotional association-spinning. For all their magnificent intellectual endowment, George Meredith and George Eliot were not born storytellers; they chose fiction as the vehicle for their reflections, and the passing of time is revealing their error in that choice. Jane Austen was pure storyteller and her works are outlasting those of apparently more formidable rivals.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), “Some Thoughts on Playwriting” (1941), reprinted in American Characteristics and Other Essays, edited by Donald Gallup (1979)

Quote of the Day (Tony Bennett, on How ‘Good Songs Last Forever’)

“Good songs last forever, and I've come to learn that there's a whole group out there in the audience who's studying that with me. There's a greatness in an audience when it gets perfectly still. It becomes a beautiful tribal contact, a delicate, poetic thing. A great song does that.”— Tony Bennett (1926-2023), Grammy-winning, indomitable interpreter of the Great American Songbook, quoted by Whitney Balliett, “A Quality That Lets You In,” originally published in The New Yorker, Jan. 7, 1974, reprinted in Balliett’s American Singers: Twenty-Seven Portraits in Song (1988)

The image accompanying this post, of Tony Bennett in performance at the 2012 Monterey (Calif.) Jazz Festival, was taken Sept. 22, 2012, by David Becker.