The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Somehow landed upon this website in my internet hopscotch of the day: http://www.imrevolting.net/?m=201006&paged=4

Oh yes, in looking up Ivan Albright

Meanwhile, I have found many gems stationed at said location, including: http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/  : Love it. :)

Leo Burnett - "When to take my name off the door"

December 1, 1967.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WUxb8YB88o

"Somewhere along the line, after I’m finally off the premises, you – or your successors – may want to take my name off the premises, too.


You may want to call yourselves " Twain, Rogers, Sawyer and Finn, Inc."….. or "Ajax Advertising" or something.


That will certainly be OK with me – if it’s good for you.


But let me tell you when I might demand that you take my name off the door.


That will be the day when you spend more time trying to make money and less time making advertising – our kind of advertising.


When you forget that the sheer fun of ad making and the lift you get out of it – the creative climate of the place – should be as important as money to the very special breed of writers and artists and business professionals who compose this company of ours – and make it tick.


When you lose that restless feeling that nothing you do is ever quite good enough.


When you lose your itch to the job well for it’s sake – regardless of the client, or money, or the effort it takes.


When you lose your passion for thoroughness…you hatred of loose ends.


When you stop reaching the manner, the overtones, the marriage of words and pictures that produce the fresh, the memorable and the believable effect.


When you stop rededicating yourselves every day to the idea that better advertising is what the Leo Burnett Company is about.


When you are no longer what Thoreau called "a corporation with a conscience" – which means to me, a corporation of conscientious men and women.


When you begin to compromise your integrity – which has always been the heart’s blood – the very guts of this agency.


When you stoop to convenient expediency and rationalize yourselves into acts of opportunism – for the sake of a fast buck.


When you show the slightest sign of crudeness, inappropriateness or smart –aleckness – and you lose that subtle sense of the fitness of things.


When your main interest becomes a matter of size just to be big - rather that good, hard, wonderful work.


When your outlook narrows down to the number of windows – from zero to five – in the walls of your office.


When you lose your humility and become big-short wisenheimers…. a little bit too big for your boots.


When the apples come down to being just apples for eating (or for polishing) – no longer part of our tone or personality.


When you disprove of something, and start tearing the hell out of the man who did it rather than the work itself.


When you stop building on strong and vital ideas, and start a routine production line.


When you start believing that, in the interest of efficiency, a creative spirit and the urge to create can be delegated and administrated, and forget that they can only be nurtured, stimulated, and inspired.


When you start giving lip service to this being a "creative agency" and stop really being one.


Finally, when you lose your respect for the lonely man – the man at his typewriter or his drawing board or behind his camera or just scribbling notes with one of our big pencils – or working all night on a media plan. When you forget that the lonely man – and thank God for him – has made the agency we now have – possible. When you forget he’s the man who, because he is reaching harder, sometimes actually gets hold of for a moment - one of those hot, unreachable stars.


THAT, boys and girls, is when I shall insist you take my name off the door. And by golly, it will be taken off the door. Even if have to materialize long enough some night to rub it out myself - on every one of our floors. And before I DE-materialize again, I will paint out that star-reaching symbol too. And burn all the stationary. Perhaps tear up a few ads in passing.


And throw every god-damned apple down the elevator shafts.


You just won’t know the place, the next morning. You’ll have to find another name."

1.e4

Boxes coming Monday, movers called: New York, get your red carpet ready ;)


PS, for reference's sake: http://bit.ly/zeJ4JL; http://bit.ly/AgWABt

вдохновение (vdokhnovenie)

Well-deserved Woolf riposte via The Waves

'You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character. I find marks against all those sentences which seem to express a sardonic yet passionate nature; a moth-like impetuosity dashing itself against hard glass. You thought, as you drew your pencil there, "I too throw off my cloak like that. I too snap my fingers in the face of destiny." Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-handkerchief. You then stuff your handkerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is you; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene'

Touche Ms. Woolf. Touche.

Word Cloud Laura

Hem...again

...I am glad always to make it conventional as to punctuation.  About the words- I have made a notation at the side about the bed pan.  Originally I had about 2,000 words of that aspect of hospital life.  It really dominates it.  I cut it all with the exception of the one reference to the bed pan.

It's the same with other words.

You say they have not been in print before- one may not have- but the others are all in Shakespeare.  

If a word can be printed and is needed in the text it is a weakening to omit it.  If you say you think a word must go,  I consider you leaving that a blank.

You know what General Cambronne said at the battle of Waterloo instead of "the old guard dies but never surrenders."  He said Merde when they called on him to surrender.

Yours always

  Ernest

excuse typographical mistakes

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