Word: haiku
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...keep Mom company. He switched on The Tonight Show, where Dr. William H. Cosby, Ed.D. (U. Mass.) was telling a story about middle- aged parents trying to instruct their kids in the facts of life. Next morning, Tartikoff phoned Cosby's agent and floated yet another of his brainstorming haiku: "A black Family Ties." The following autumn The Cosby Show became the first sitcom smash since Mork & Mindy in 1978, cemented NBC's Thursday-night schedule, and propelled the network toward...
...compact art form, and somewhat unnatural. A person feels uncomfortable composing a little song of himself for the classifieds. The personal ad is like haiku of self-celebration, a brief solo played on one's own horn. Someone else should be saying these things. It is for others to pile up the extravagant adjectives ("sensitive, warm, witty, vibrant, successful, handsome, accomplished, incredibly beautiful, cerebral and sultry") while we stand demurely by. But someone has to do it. One competes for attention. One must advertise. One must chum the waters and bait the hook, and go trolling for love and laughter...
...hilarious account of a writer's development, which ranks as a small comic masterpiece: "First try to be something, anything else... Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age--say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire." But in the middle of all the wisecracking remain passages that ring out with such truth that they communicate directly to the reader the pleasure of literary creation, "those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius." On the basis...
Other chapters, such as the story of Tekka Maki and her haiku, miss the mark...
...definitive rogue-genius Gulley Jimson, hero of Joyce Gary's The Horse's Mouth. For a man who claims that most of his life has been "a flight from boredom," Scum has an amazing tolerance for bull-session profundities. Scarcely a page goes by without an interpolated haiku-like verse (WE WEAR OURSELVES INSIDE OUT/ TRYING TO BRING THE OUTSIDE IN) or an observation like "The truly most valuable product of this planet is people, loved people...