December 20, 2017 Our Correspondents How the Grinch Self-Actualized By Anthony Madrid It appears a great deal is already known about the Grinch. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1904, did some graduate work at Oxford, left school to establish his Zarathustra’s eyrie on Mount Crumpit in Canada—and was fifty-three years old at the time of his conversion to Christianity. I should say his putative conversion. The book documenting this most famous episode of his life is called How the Grinch Stole Christmas!—not The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. It doesn’t matter; Google knows what you meant. The television cartoon, upon which so many people in my generation have based their personalities, aired for the first time in December 1966. Boris Karloff, who did the voice of the Grinch, was nearly eighty at the time. He had less than two years to live. Read More
December 6, 2017 Our Correspondents Eight Public Cases By Anthony Madrid Norman Rockwell, Russian Schoolroom, 1967. 1. Our teacher (young, malevolent, witty) was holding forth about the “curlicues and inefficiency” of Derek Walcott’s poetic style. Our teacher said, “It’s like he wants to go to the kitchen to get a banana. So, he dresses up like Henry James, striped pants, fresh pressed—tails, top hat—and stands with supreme dignity on the curb next to his bed. A Rolls-Royce pulls up silently. It is dazzling, five hundred pounds of chrome front and back, and a chauffeur jumps out—white gloves—opens the passenger door for Walcott. Walcott glides into the seat, frowning deeply and nodding toward the kitchen. He is now sitting bolt upright. The chauffeur closes the door, takes his own place, and drives six feet to the kitchen. He hops out, assists Walcott toward the kitchen counter, where the bananas—somber yellow with coffee-colored freckles—are situated in an animated rhombus of light, rain seeded, coming from the kitchen window. At which point we are doomed. Those bananas will turn to baby food before Walcott is finished describing them … ” We all laughed, but one of the students said, “Yes, but doesn’t that description apply to the first three quarters of the Norton Anthology—?” Comment. It does if you think Shakespeare and all those people were just describing bananas. The real question isn’t whether the description applies to the Norton; it’s whether it applies to Walcott. And here is an aphorism: Every laugh—deflects. Read More
November 8, 2017 Our Correspondents On Edward Lear’s “The Scroobious Pip” By Anthony Madrid The piece below was originally published on February 8, 2014, on Anthony Opal’s old website, the Weekly (since kaput). In reprinting it, we have only changed the very end of the “Afterword,” so that now you can simply click on a hyperlink to access additional (and extremely precious) information. A detail of Nancy Ekholm Burkert’s illustration for Edward Lear’s “The Scroobious Pip.” In early 1872, Edward Lear left a poem unfinished. It was very nearly complete: all it lacked of its intended five rhyming subsections were two lines and two words (not at the end). Lear left blanks in the manuscript, and it’s clear he intended to supply the missing bits at some later time. No one knows why he never did so. The piece is called “The Scroobious Pip,” and it is good. It’s right up there with the best material Lear included in Laughable Lyrics, which came out roughly five years later (December 1876). But, because he never finished it, it remained unpublished during his lifetime. Indeed, the piece first saw the light of day in 1935, in the back of what was essentially a small collectors’ edition—950 copies, each one numbered. (My copy is #237.) In 1954, Harvard University Press published a thin (sixty-four-page) book called Teapots and Quails, a very valuable document for Lear enthusiasts insofar as it made many previously uncollected or very hard-to-get pieces available—including ten limericks with accompanying illustrations. “The Scroobious Pip” appears on pages 60 through 62. The lacunæ in the manuscript are rendered either as blanks or as strings of dots. Read More
November 1, 2017 Our Correspondents Goodbye to the Gem Room By Sadie Stein The Hall of Gems after its 1976 opening. © AMNH Library Many years ago, I brought an old boyfriend to the Hall of Gems and Minerals at the Natural History Museum. I’d told him all about it: how many hours of my childhood had been spent roaming the dun-carpeted halls under the flourescent lights, gazing at the geode cave and the rainbow of precious stones; occasionally sliding down that one irresistible slanted slab of petrified wood when the guard’s back was turned. I’d told him about how my best friend, Elaine, and I would beg to visit the dark little screening room where they showed a film called Forever Gold on a ten-minute loop, and how we’d watch it over and over and over, shrieking with laughter and shouting along with the dialogue. I’m not sure why I loved the gem room. I never much cared about science, and jewelry has always left me cold. And yet, it felt like the friendliest and most reassuring place in the world. And that film! Years later, I could still remember the triumphant cries of the prospectors, and the bits of 1980s footage in which a scientist in a short-sleeved button-down demonstrated the incredible tensility of a sheet of gold leaf. At one point a reenactor, playing a Medieval merchant, bit down on a gold coin; this started us on several weeks of hilarious and unhygienic coin biting. The narrator—whom I would later realize was George Plimpton—explains at one point that if all the gold ever mined were made into a cube, a football game could still be played around it. This is still the one salient fact I know about football. Read More
October 25, 2017 Our Correspondents The Seventy-Four Best Entries in The Devil’s Dictionary By Anthony Madrid From the cover of the University of Georgia Press edition of The Devil’s Dictionary. In my village, we have an idiom. “When’s last time you looked in on [X]—?” “X” is always some acknowledged literary classic everybody reads early in life and then forgets. For example, More’s Utopia. I did read it, but I might as well not have. I was nineteen. Anyone today who had just read the back cover of a copy of Utopia would, in a knowledge contest, smoke me like a cheap cigar. About the book’s narrative I remember … well, nothing. Wait. They didn’t think gold was valuable. I forget why. Their toilets were gold. Or the chains that they loaded prisoners with. Or something. Not toilets; chamberpots. And the narrator had some cross-eyed name like Holofernes Hwum-buppa-zipplebibble or something. Read More
October 20, 2017 Our Correspondents Norma Does Not Lie: On Believing Women By Alison Kinney Sondra Radvanovsky and Joseph Calleja. Photo: Ken Howard for the Metropolitan Opera. Ten years ago, the first time I saw Vincenzo Bellini’s 1831 opera, Norma, at the Met, I noticed one quirky bit of stage business. In the opera, the Roman proconsul Pollione has come to 50 B.C.E. Gaul to pacify the locals. He’s also pursuing a young, lovely priestess, Adalgisa. But his buddy Flavio calls him out: Pollione has already seduced the high priestess, Norma. Norma broke her vows and betrayed the revolution for Pollione’s sake—and gave birth to their two sons. So what about Norma and the kids? Pollione spreads his hands in an offhand, bro-ish shrug, as though it’s too much effort to sing, “So what?” or, “Whaddya want me to do about it?” (We never see Flavio again; presumably he’s been demoted.) After that, I looked for what I dubbed the “Met shrug”—the “man shrug,” really. Isolde calls out Tristan for murdering her fiancé and capturing her for a forced marriage: shrug. Pinkerton impregnates and abandons fifteen-year-old Butterfly and gets called out: shrug. The Met’s movement coach had nailed it: so hilarious, so casually entitled, so irresponsible, so right: “Whaddya want me to do about toxic masculinity? La donna è mobile!” Read More