"And yet if you go back and look at old editions of
The Nation or
The New Republic, which published a lot of poetry back in the day — or if you go farther back, to
Reedy's Mirror or
The Century magazine — and if you hunt around for a while in some of those periodicals, you'll find that most of the poetry in them is just there as decoration. It's a form of ornament, like a printer's dingbat. A little acorn with a curlicue. Or the scrollwork on a beaux-arts capital. It's just a way of creating a different look on the page, and creating the sense on the part of the reader that he's holding something that is a real Kellogg's variety pack.
"The magazine is going to have some kind of big thoughtful political piece about Teddy Roosevelt, say, and then it's going to have a bit of serialized fiction, and it's going to have some 'cuts' — that is, some art — and a few color pages tipped in, maybe, if it's
The Century magazine, maybe by Maxfield Parrish, and it's going to have some poems. The long nonfiction piece comes to an end, and it's about being a stevedore in Baltimore, something like that. And then at the bottom of the page is this poem in two columns, with six stanzas, and each stanza has indentations, and the conventionality and vapidity of it will stun you. 'The shades of summer's bosky hue, o'erlie thy modest floobie doo.' The editors of
The Century didn't expect you to read that poem with your full mind. They knew it was just some rhymes thrown pell-mell together with cornstarch. They knew full well, because this is America, land of bad poetry. Yes, sir! Bad poetry, sir! Loads of it in the back, sir! Just keeps coming. Tipped in. The shovel eases the soft tonnage of poetry over the rim, and it just pours into the pit,
pluth. The pit of what has been said. And the lost gulls are flapping and calling —
peer! peer!"
— Nicholson Baker,
The Anthologist, 70-71
"Newman got a tune into The Lively Set, a 1964 beach movie starring Doug McClure and James Darren (there was a soundtrack LP on Decca; somewhere, a copy survives); "Galaxy A-Go-Go! (Leave It to Flint)" turned up in Our Man Flint in 1966, though not on the soundtrack album. As a moonlighter he contributed background music to the CBS series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. He composed background rock functionals for the ABC series Peyton Place ('Something for Betty and Rodney to dance to'); in 1965, without Newman's knowledge, but no doubt with the hope the public might confuse Randy with his famous film-scoring uncles Alfred and Lionel, the results were assembled into Original Music from the Hit Television Show Peyton Place by the Randy Newman Orchestra (Epic LP). Reports that Newman also wrote theme music for the 1963 Girl Scouts Cookie campaign, the 1964 Republican convention, and a December 7, 1965, meeting of the Croatian-American Benevolent Society ('Dead Serb Blues') have never been verified."
"Considerable interest has been aroused as to the proper spelling of the name of the hero of these stories. The careful reader will note that there is no official spelling, that in the nature of things there could not be since if the name were written twice alike, both author and readers might forget to forget what he's spelled like — which would be quite fatal.
"And yet if you go back and look at old editions of The Nation or The New Republic, which published a lot of poetry back in the day — or if you go farther back, to Reedy's Mirror or The Century magazine — and if you hunt around for a while in some of those periodicals, you'll find that most of the poetry in them is just there as decoration. It's a form of ornament, like a printer's dingbat. A little acorn with a curlicue. Or the scrollwork on a beaux-arts capital. It's just a way of creating a different look on the page, and creating the sense on the part of the reader that he's holding something that is a real Kellogg's variety pack.
