Word: algonquin
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...when he could cause two old friends to have a falling out." Gill justifiably twits Movie Critic Pauline Kael for long-windedness and openly recounts the depressions, breakdowns, bouts of alcoholism and premature deaths that struck a number of his colleagues. He resurrects no quips that set the fabled Algonquin Round Table on a roar. Most drinking staffers, he reports, preferred dark saloons "suitable for people with a glum view of life...
Gill sometimes strays from his chronicler's path to give us more autobiography than he should. The gossarrier good times at the magazine, the lunches at the Algonquin, the practical jokes and graffiti don't need any more depth than Gill provides, but his life can't have been as shallow as he gives us to believe...
...would get up at 6 a.m. no matter what. Now you can't walk around at 6. At 7 it's safe. But you can see the 6 a.m. people still up." She lives alone in a midtown hotel on West 44th Street-"just opposite the Algonquin" and only a few steps away from The New Yorker -and she has a canny, survivor's eye for a bargain. "The coffee at Bickford's is only 16?," she will say, "but they rob you at Childs." She broods on the differences between Woolworth's and Lamston...
...Burgess novel is frequently an embarrassment of riches, a kind of conspicuous consumption of exotic plot thickeners, linguistic games, disturbing tragicomedy, Manichaean trampoline acts and Christian and mythological symbolism. Thematically speaking, anything goes-as Burgess demonstrated three years ago in MF, a novel of contemporary incest based on an Algonquin Indian myth. In his latest offering, Napoleon Symphony, the author, who is also a serious composer, has reached for everything from kazoos to pipe organs. The result is a mock epic about the career of Napoleon Bonaparte that sometimes reads like Dickens, sometimes like Tennyson and Wordsworth, with an occasional...
...simpler, journalistic style of punning was created by the Algonquin Round Table of the '20s and '30s. Dubbed the Vicious Circle, it became Prohibition's bottlefield, where columnists tailed their wags and reported puns the instant they were composed. When a Vassar girl eloped, Playwright George S. Kaufman announced that she had "put the heart before the course." Dorothy Parker confessed that in her own poetry she was always "chasing Rimbauds." Alexander Woollcott knew of "a cat hospital where they charged $4 a weak purr." Heywood Broun, drinking a bootleg liquor, sighed, "Any port in a storm...