Word: metro
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...evening after a late dinner in Canton and a gracious promenade around a hall in her villa, Chiang Ch'ing revealed that she had a treat in store: Garbo's Queen Christina. Her face was glowing with anticipation. That Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film of 1933 was an old favorite of hers. She had ordered it flown down from Peking for the evening's entertainment...
...cost per 1,000 to the advertisers? Athletes and actors are interchangeable on commercials. O.J. Simpson earns $1 million for telling us what car to rent; Rex Harrison earns $ 1 million for telling us what car to buy. Our old preoccupation with what Clark Gable was paid at Metro has been replaced by speculation on Francis Tarkenton's net worth. Most significant, where the athlete once was an individual, scratching and drinking across a brevity of fame, the successful athlete today is both a person and a property. He moves not only in locker rooms, but with lawyers, agents...
...until 1960 that the newly formed OuLiPo officiated at the shotgun wedding of science and literature. Its first and still most remarkable product was Cent Milie Milliards de Poems (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), written by the late Raymond Queneau, a novelist (Zazie dans le Metro) and co-founder of OuLiPo. The book consists of ten sonnets, ingeniously sliced into 14 strips. By flipping the strips left or right, the reader can construct 1014 intelligible poems. OuLiPo's lunatic fringework also included spoonerisms-deliberate slips of the tongue that gave different leanings to mexicons. Tales were written...
...years of five writing greats. In 1937 F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose wife was in a sanitorium, whose agent was unable to sell a single manuscript, and whose earnings for all his books in print during the past year had totalled $81.18, thought that his days were numbered. So when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered him a $1250 a week contract to write film scripts he had no choice but to accept. That his frustrating last years in Hollywood, when he tried, desperately, to make enough money in the movies and then leave, did not hurt Fitzgerald's talents, is Dardis...
Died. Raymond Queneau, 73, influential avant-garde author whose linguistic pyrotechnics on everyday themes helped transform modern French fiction; in Paris. Trained in logic, psychoanalysis, mathematics and philosophy, Queneau wrote scores of poems and novels, including Zazie dans le Metro, a 1959 bestseller about the Rabelaisian exploits of an eleven-year-old nymph...