dual personalities

One more week of August! Signs of fall are everywhere!

I continue to unbox the books I hurriedly boxed up last Friday…

I am especially enjoying these books which include articles and reviews from The New Yorker, back when it was a magazine worth reading…

Take for instance Wolcott Gibbs’ review of Guys and Dolls when it opened in 1950. He starts off with this:

I don’t think I ever had more fun at a musical comedy than I had the other night, when an association of strangely gifted men put on a Broadway epic known as Guys and Dolls. There have been loftier moral and aesthetic experiences, like Show Boat and South Pacific; there have been more enduring musical accomplishments, like Porgy and Bess; there have been occasions when the humor was clearly on a more ambitious level, like Of Thee I Sing; there have been sensational individual performances, like practically anything involving Miss Ethel Merman. There has, however, been nothing I can remember that sustained a higher level of sheer entertainment than the operation at the Forty-sixth Street Theatre.

Well.

There are book reviews, television and movie reviews, poetry, fiction, and longer pieces on “the American Scene”, “Artists and Entertainers”, current events, “Characters”, “Curious Developments”, and a lot more. Certainly enough to keep me busy for some time.

I especially enjoyed a long article by Winthrop Sargeant on the poet Marianne Moore, “Humility, Concentration and Gusto”, in the 2/16/1957 issue. I wrote an article about Moore for the Kirkwood Historical Review last year, but I was unaware of this piece in The New Yorker. It is a wonderful in-depth portrait and it reinforces my impression of her. “To some of the more complicated types who frequent literary teas and cocktail parties in…

…well, you understand. I’m afraid they don’t make ’em like Marianne Moore anymore. More’s the pity. Anyway, I am going to aim at exuding an air of invincible energy and cheerfulness. It won’t be easy.

Enjoy your Tuesday!