You can see it on television, you can watch it online, you can even find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, as a compound adjective _ "Monty Pythonesque," meaning possessing the surreal comedy of the BBC sketch show "Monty Python's Flying Circus." It was created a half-century ago by a half-dozen amusingly off-kilter wits and humorists who then made "Python" a brand in film as well as television.
One of them, Eric Idle, has to his credit novels and nonfiction and, perhaps most splendidly, the musical "Spamalot," a Tony-winning Arthurian sendup, which is, as they say, soon to be a major motion picture. Soon _ really.
Idle lives in Los Angeles, and after one particular tour of the Huntington Library in San Marino, he was invited to make his 50-plus years of notes, scripts, librettos, letters, scores and to-do lists a part of the Huntington's archives. Here he explains how it happened, and why, and a few other subjects that are completely different.
