Friday, September 26, 2003
WELCOME TO ANOTHER TINY MONEY WEEK, in which, thanks to the occasionally transient nature of my current employment's workload, I openly speculate whether I'd get more money cashing my next paycheck or selling the paper it's printed on to the recycling center. My pain, as always, is your gain, since that means I get to read, write and speculate more than any human should, passing the contents of my short-term obsessions on to YOU. Lucky bums.
JUST FINISHED: While Rome Burns by Alexander Woollcott. In honor of getting "the rub" on 411Mania, tonight's postcard from under the flat rock begins by pointing out one of the standard-bearers for magazine columnists. Rome contains 52 pieces of various lengths (never more than 7 pages) published between 1929-33, and in spite of the fact that these days Alexander Woollcott is more often quoted than actually read, you could do worse than have him as a literary role model.
A drama critic at first, the Woollcott of this period was very much a world-class raconteur, the type of guy that would've been famous just for being on the Tonight Show several times a year if he hadn't been long dead before the TV late night talk show was invented. So instead, his primary legacy is inspiring The Man Who Came To Dinner and a few books filled with his skimmings, of which Rome was the best-selling.
Having never known him as more than a name associated with the 1920s and 30s, I was kind of surprised he seemed to have dipped his pen into a bit of everything; a good chunk of real estate in the book was dedicated to the theater beat, literature, true crime, and biographical sketches, although no one subject can be said to have absolute priority. This is the place where you can find the "definitive" version of at least one longstanding urban legend (the one about the lady who vanished from the Paris Exposition), and if you're a student of this American period (that's me, more or less), here is also his famous character sketch of fellow Algonquin Round Table member Dorothy Parker. His theory about what crawled up George Bernard Shaw's butt and died (not in those words, of course) is also a lot of fun for all, except maybe the vegetarians. In spite of the fact that a set of footnotes would help the modern reader figure out the then-current society, literary, and entertainment types that are frequently namechecked in his anecdotes, it's not completely necessary to get the gist of things.
While it's out of print and probably has been for awhile, Rome, as the number one nonfiction bestseller of 1934, should be easy to find at your favorite used book store or in a decent public library.
(Before we move on, I noticed out of all the friends and acquaintances he brought up, he kept coming back to Harpo Marx. I had an interesting feeling there was a good reason Woollcott kept bringing Harpo up, and after a few quick checks online, I found out why. Considering what "confirmed bachelor" usually meant in the old days, I should've known, but my Paul Lynde Decoder Ring is out being cleaned today.)
MERRY COUSINS: I've always said that it's amazing what you find when you're not looking for anything at all, and that goes double for the Internet. A sort of proto-message board community gradually developed in the letter column of a 19th century children's magazine called Robert Merry's Museum. The author of the piece linked below probably read every page in the letter section's 30 year history, and there's definitely a lot of antecedents of what we're up to now, even some toasty (if strictly genteel) little flame wars. That such a thing flourished before the explosion of mass communication is remarkable; that it should take place in the letters column of a magazine is not quite that surprising if you're familiar with the types of letter columns that the small press/Xerox room "zines" of the 1980s. Still, the parallels between various online communities and the Parlor Chat are remarkable, which just goes to show you that some concepts keep shooting through media history until they finally stick.
Don't take my word for it, though. Have a look and tell me what you think.
JUST FINISHED: While Rome Burns by Alexander Woollcott. In honor of getting "the rub" on 411Mania, tonight's postcard from under the flat rock begins by pointing out one of the standard-bearers for magazine columnists. Rome contains 52 pieces of various lengths (never more than 7 pages) published between 1929-33, and in spite of the fact that these days Alexander Woollcott is more often quoted than actually read, you could do worse than have him as a literary role model.
A drama critic at first, the Woollcott of this period was very much a world-class raconteur, the type of guy that would've been famous just for being on the Tonight Show several times a year if he hadn't been long dead before the TV late night talk show was invented. So instead, his primary legacy is inspiring The Man Who Came To Dinner and a few books filled with his skimmings, of which Rome was the best-selling.
Having never known him as more than a name associated with the 1920s and 30s, I was kind of surprised he seemed to have dipped his pen into a bit of everything; a good chunk of real estate in the book was dedicated to the theater beat, literature, true crime, and biographical sketches, although no one subject can be said to have absolute priority. This is the place where you can find the "definitive" version of at least one longstanding urban legend (the one about the lady who vanished from the Paris Exposition), and if you're a student of this American period (that's me, more or less), here is also his famous character sketch of fellow Algonquin Round Table member Dorothy Parker. His theory about what crawled up George Bernard Shaw's butt and died (not in those words, of course) is also a lot of fun for all, except maybe the vegetarians. In spite of the fact that a set of footnotes would help the modern reader figure out the then-current society, literary, and entertainment types that are frequently namechecked in his anecdotes, it's not completely necessary to get the gist of things.
While it's out of print and probably has been for awhile, Rome, as the number one nonfiction bestseller of 1934, should be easy to find at your favorite used book store or in a decent public library.
(Before we move on, I noticed out of all the friends and acquaintances he brought up, he kept coming back to Harpo Marx. I had an interesting feeling there was a good reason Woollcott kept bringing Harpo up, and after a few quick checks online, I found out why. Considering what "confirmed bachelor" usually meant in the old days, I should've known, but my Paul Lynde Decoder Ring is out being cleaned today.)
MERRY COUSINS: I've always said that it's amazing what you find when you're not looking for anything at all, and that goes double for the Internet. A sort of proto-message board community gradually developed in the letter column of a 19th century children's magazine called Robert Merry's Museum. The author of the piece linked below probably read every page in the letter section's 30 year history, and there's definitely a lot of antecedents of what we're up to now, even some toasty (if strictly genteel) little flame wars. That such a thing flourished before the explosion of mass communication is remarkable; that it should take place in the letters column of a magazine is not quite that surprising if you're familiar with the types of letter columns that the small press/Xerox room "zines" of the 1980s. Still, the parallels between various online communities and the Parlor Chat are remarkable, which just goes to show you that some concepts keep shooting through media history until they finally stick.
Don't take my word for it, though. Have a look and tell me what you think.
|| Eric 5:00 AM#
