Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. B.M.A.T.C., and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline.
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The fall's first cold air moved into the area, following rains from Ivan. The long-legged mottled brown crickets are starting to find their way into the house. My field guide calls them Cave Crickets or Camel Crickets (mostly of genus Ceuthophilus), and now that I look, they are sort of humpty-backed. Back in the Midwest we called them German crickets. posted: 1:42:01 PM |
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I'm working my way through H. L. Mencken's Chrestomathy, a collection of his pieces selected and annotated by Mencken himself. I was familiar, vaguely, with Mencken's writings on politics and culture; what I didn't know was how much an appreciator of art music he was. Indeed, it's one of the few fine or performing arts that he has a good word for. He's very fond of the German Romantics. (Much of his invective is so over the top that I'm nearly convinced that he's writing ironically, but I'm never sure.) He likes poetry, a few novelists (Joseph Conrad especially); he pooh-poohs painting; he implies that drama is something any 14-year-old can write or perform. His excoriation of actors, first written in 1917, is typical of the anthology, dripping with vitriol and rhythmically perfect:
... the actor. He is this silly youngster grown older, but otherwise unchanged. An initiate of a profession requiring little information, culture or capacity for ratiocination that that of the lady of joy, and surrounded in his workshop by men who are as stupid, as vain and as empty as he himself will be in the years to come, he suffers an arrest of development, and the little intelligence that may happen to be in him gets no chance to show itself. The result, in its usual manifestation, is the average bad actor—a man with the cerebrum of a floor-walker and the vanity of a bishop.
He doesn't choose to give us a description of a good actor. Notice the "wait for it" hesitation of the phrase "in its usual manifestation," which adds nothing to the argument but much to the punch line. posted: 1:24:28 PM |
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Leta managed to conceal the existence of The Flibbertigibbet from me for nearly a month. Her stated reason was that she wanted me to find it for myself, without any goading, which is to say that she didn't want to hear insincere praise from me. She is always pleased when I say something good about her work on stage, but she doesn't require what she calls "lobby lies," the white lies that you hear from your friends after they've witnessed a ghastly, ghastly production. (I overheard a phrase last night, second-hand, that could be invaluable in a such a bad situation: "it was very well-integrated.") Bloggers and journalers are just as susceptible: many years ago I read the observation that "telling someone you don't like his home page is like telling him you don't like his dog." At any rate, now she might pay attention when I explain to her how to write a proper hyperlink. posted: 12:06:31 PM |
 D. Gorsline, Proprietor
   
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