dual personalities

Well, I finished Only Murders in the Building and I think I enjoyed it more the second time. The blog post title really speaks to me. I think I’ve been eating my feelings for two years and at some point this has to stop. My guess is that today is not that day.

I know, I’m a broken record. And yet, how can I not be? The devil is making moves all over the world. Even in the grocery store aisles.

As a newly-minted Presbyterian, I guess I won’t be ducking out of work tomorrow to scoot down the street to church for an Ash Wednesday service this year. And with no lent, I won’t be giving anything up this year, either.

However, I can still get out the Book of Common Prayer. I like both of versions of the Ash Wednesday prayer below.

“Almighty God, you have created us out of the dust of the earth: Grant that these ashes may be to us a sign of our mortality and penitence, that we may remember that it is only by your gracious gift that we are given everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.”

or

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Book of Common Prayer

It’s probably a good idea to remind ourselves of this more than once a year, though.

Back when I was in college I took one theater class, about which I remember nothing except that I wrote a research paper on Edwin Booth. I chose the topic because we had a playbill at home that one of my ancestors had saved from an 1873 performance of Julius Caesar starring Booth, and I wanted to find out more about him.

A few days ago, I came back to the topic and looked up the McVicker’s Theater, which I was surprised to discover was located in Chicago and not Boston as I had always assumed. Someone in the Carnahan family must have attended the play or perhaps one of the Rands kept the program as a souvenir after visiting from New Hampshire. The original theater was constructed in 1855 but burned down in the great Chicago fire of 1871, so our relatives (whoever they were) would have seen Julius Caesar in this new, luxurious building.

Over the years that followed, the theater burned down a second time and went through several remodelings until finally being demolished in 1985. Booth performed there off and on, from the start of his career until his retirement. In 1869, he took as his second wife Mary, the daughter of James McVickers, the theater’s eponymous owner.

As an actor, Edwin Booth achieved renown, although now he is probably best known as the brother of John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin. (I picked up this print of EB in St. Louis a few years ago.)

Edwin Booth’s personal life proved just as dramatic and full of tragedy as the parts he played. Being an actor, he abandoned himself to the real-life role of tragic hero quite naturally and perhaps unconsciously. He got drunk and ignored repeated calls to attend his (first) wife’s deathbed, a lapse that produced real anguish and lasting guilt. When his brother assassinated President Lincoln, Edwin left the stage until the need for funds and the urging of friends drove him back. His comeback as Hamlet became the stuff of legend, while the fact that he rescued Lincoln’s son from being run over by a train offered atonement for his brother’s horrific act. Yet he also received a fair number of death threats. In April 1879, someone even shot at him during a performance at McVicker’s Theater. Fortunately, no one was hurt. For Edwin Booth life imitated art. He played the tragic hero on and off stage. John Singer Sargent’s portrait, finished toward the end of the actor’s life, captures his subject’s careworn vitality perfectly.

As I looked around for information, I came across a 1955 movie called Prince of Players, in which Richard Burton plays Edwin Booth! Now there’s a thought. I haven’t found a way to watch the whole thing yet, but in case you’re curious here’s a longish scene. It appears that the screenwriter thought Edwin had father problems…  

The world is a funny place and its history full of interesting people and events.

Enjoy your weekend!

*Edwin Booth quoted in Edwina Booth Grossman (1894). “Edwin Booth: Recollections by His Daughter, Edwina Booth Grossmann, and Letters to Her and to His Friends”, New York: Century Company.

Yes, today’s blog title is from Brooklyn-99 which I am rewatching–but this time, I’m pausing to write down memorable lines. I know, I know, I don’t know how I am as cool as I am. I could not believe it when this video was published this week. I feel seen.

As I mentioned at the start of the year, I’m reading the Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett. I’m nearing the finish of book two–they are slow going, but very good. You can really get enveloped in the story and the myriad of characters. Anyway, I thought this was a great passage.

“To succeed as you want, you have to be precise; you have to have polish; you have to carry polish and precision into everything you do. You have no time to sigh over seigneuries and begrudge other people their gifts. Lack of genius never held anyone back,” said Lymond. “Only time wasted on resentment and daydreaming can do that. You never did work with your whole brain and your whole body at being an Archer; and you ended neither soldier nor seigneur, but a dried-out huddle of grudges strung cheek to cheek on a withy.”

Francis Lymond to Robin Stewart in The Queen’s Play by Dorothy Dunnett

And because I’m going to continue this thread of writing about things I’ve written about before, I received the new Magnolia Journal last week. As you know, I just love Chip and Jo. I think they are so great and I am so grateful for the work they do. Chip always used to annoy me a little bit on the show–he’s so goofy. But lately, I’ve realized, he’s really just a joy-filled person. He wrote the below in his “Chip Gets the Last Word” column at the end of the magazine and I thought it was pretty great.

“Our culture has come to quantify influence based on algorithms, not beating hearts. Impact is estimated by the number of views, likes, or shares a social media post or viral video gets in a day. But rarely do we get to see how far that impact goes, whether it changes a thing for anyone on the receiving end. Besides, these days the state is already so crowded, and the shooting match already so convoluted, that our world is becoming overwhelmed with all the noise that comes at us day after day. Noise we’ll never fully control, hard as we might try. And it makes me wonder if maybe we’re missing the forest for the trees.

…

I believe our homes are wear our intentions take root. And that on most days my most powerful platform looks an awful lot like our kitchen table and the conversations that happen there. Nurturing the vales we want to stand for when there’s no audience but the seven of us. So that one day when the world is watching, our actions will speak louder than words ever could.”

Chip Gaines in Magnolia Journal, Spring ’22

Happy Wednesday! Hopefully the impending snow will turn out to be nothing…

Yesterday the temperature reached 48, the rain fell in torrents and the snow turned to ugly brown slush. There were flood warnings.

Never fear. Mother nature was only toying with us. By this morning she had restored the familiar snowy scene and lowered the temperature back to 12. I don’t mind. Bad weather is a good excuse to stay home and finish reading Joseph Conrad’s Victory. I’ve been putting it off because I know it doesn’t end well (do any of his books?). It is, however, full of deep thoughts and beautiful turns of phrase. I loved this scene toward the beginning of the book when the main character, the self-possessed Swede, Heyst, runs into a dejected acquaintance who declares:

“I prayed like a child, of course. I believe in children praying–well, women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be more self-reliant. I don’t hold with a man everlastingly bothering the Almighty with his silly troubles. It seems such cheek. Anyhow, this morning I– I have never done any harm to any God’s creature knowingly– I prayed. A sudden impulse– I went flop on my knees; so you may judge–“

They were gazing earnestly into each other’s eyes. Poor Morrison added, as a discouraging afterthought: “Only this is such a God-forsaken spot.”

Conrad writes so well that it’s easy to pay more attention to his prose than to the plot – and what a wonder that anyone could write so well in his fourth language! He was a genius.

Well, last night I was too tired to read, so I looked around on Amazon for something to watch and found a 1997 version of Victory starring Willem Dafoe as the aforementioned Heyst and Sam Neill and Rufus Sewell as criminal ne’er-do-wells. Intrigued, I started watching. I’m afraid I only got about half an hour into it before giving up. It’s not a terrible movie. No, the problem lies in the inability of any film to do justice to Conrad. Take, for example, his description of the all-female orchestra with which the heroine performs: “The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy.” How can any director hope to capture that on film?

This director could not. Nor could Willem Dafoe become a man who had once “in solitude and in silence… been used to think clearly and sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-deceptions, of an ever-expected happiness.” The film manages to follow the storyline closely, but in failing to reproduce the languor of the tropics, the main characters’ inner turmoil, and the existential contest between good and evil, it ends up being a rather dull love story. Conrad deserves better. Read his books, though be warned that by today’s Draconian standards they contain racism and sexism. The way I see it, if that’s all you find in his books, then you are reading with blinkers on and missing his point entirely. You can read Victory online for fee here or at project Gutenberg.

Have a grand weekend, and if the shoveling gets you down, consider a trip to the tropics via Joseph Conrad – at least the weather will be different!

Saturday afternoon update…. it’s a white-out and super windy. I hope you don’t mind the weather updates but nothing else is happening and they remind me of the letters my father used to write me when I was in college and grad school 🙂