#anecdotage

[petermorwood]

I first read this book when I was about ten years old - a senior cousin's copy - and finding a scan on the Comic Book Plus website let me refresh memories long ago consigned to the furthest recesses of the Mind Palace (or in my case, Untidy Mind Attic).

Its stories are fairly typical Ripping Yarns, but I'd forgotten just how Keen On Sport "The Champion" was. The title alone should have warned me, because there are six annuals on the website, all full of Hearty, Keen and Sporty goings-on.

I've posted more than once that Organised Sport was at the bottom of any list of Things I Liked To Do. In particular I detested the compulsory variety inflicted at Big School, which started happening when I was about eleven and made recollections of Jim's jolly-good-stuff annual increasingly sour.

A lot of the stories are pure sport, but several others have their sporting angle jammed into action-adventure yarns of completely non-sport-related genres, often with all the subtlety of a square peg put into a round hole with a sledgehammer.

For instance, "Rockfist Rogan of the RAF", hero of World War Two air-combat stories, was better known in his story universe as a boxer than as a fighter pilot.

Despite this, illustrations of aircraft were spot-on - as here, a Mosquito FB Mk VI with Dornier Do.217s overhead and a nosed-over Typhoon Ib in the background, or Spitfire Mk IXs defending B-24 Liberators against Messerschmitt Me.163 rocket fighters (though from the text description they should have been Me.262 jets. Oh well.)

If readers of "The Champion" were anything like readers of the war comics I used to read, the editor would have got a lot of disapproving letters if those illustrations weren't accurate. I might have sent one myself about the Messerschmitt error.

At least I might have done if I'd been of letter-writing age, rather than not yet born...

The Rogan stories aren't the only example of Sport In Unexpected Places. There's "Cap' Dan, the Sporting Pirate" (snrk), "The Racing Rajah", "The Sporting Mountie", "Johnny Fleetfoot the Redskin Winger" (rolleyes) and "Kog's Amazon Marathon", which reads like "Apocalypto" remade with a cast of Keen and Sporty English schoolboys.

And, thanks to how language and attitudes have changed, one story nearly sent a spray of tea across my monitor.

I don't think either the title or the plot would work very well today...

:->

[petermorwood]

Given their reputation for stinging people, I wonder who exactly was the first person to ever discover that nettles were edible?

Another of those mysteries lost to time, like "who was the first person to eat an oyster?"

The oyster one almost certainly originated in "if hungry enough, people will eat anything", so maybe the same experimentation-through-necessity thing applied to nettles?

*****

There could also be an element of petty vengeance following a day of getting thoroughly stung.

Like the time in summer 1976 when I was briefly stationed at RAF West Raynham, and on one particular day off went canoeing along a river in Norfolk.

Inevitably I tipped the canoe and the easiest way to right it - I know about turning it over and sloshing the water out, but this was EASIEST, right? - was to swim, pushing the inverted canoe ahead, to the river-bank.

Summer 1976 was incredibly hot, so...

I was wearing just Speedos, Ray-Bans, sun-block and a boonie hat...

Which meant that discovering the lush green of the river-bank was a chest-high thicket of nettles, on both sides, with no breaks in sight...

Was Not Fun.

By the time I was back in my canoe and paddling away from that river-bank I was NOT a happy camper, and would cheerfully have unloaded a bucket of instant sunshine over every nettle on the planet.

*****

I can well imagine some glowing, tingling, itching prehistoric hunter-gatherer chucking a huge armful into boiling water with a prehistoric cry of "See how YOU like it!" and discovering shortly afterwards that the nettles:

Smelled good;

Were no longer stingy;

Tasted good as well.

There are plenty of recipes on-line for nettle soup, from simple to elaborate. Come spring, when the greens are young and tender, put on a pair of gloves and inflict some culinary vengeance of your own.

:->

*****

How someone discovered that nettles could be treated the same way as hemp and flax in order to create a weaveable fibre is another question. More experimentation, probably.

*****

And now, for some reason, I've got an overwhelming desire to scratch...

[literaryvein-reblogs]

One Poem a Day: September

"beautiful" words related to September for your next poem/story

September - ninth month of the Gregorian calendar. Its name is derived from septem, Latin for “seven,” an indication of its position in the early Roman calendar.

Apple-polish - to use flattery or the doing of favors in order to win approval especially from a superior

Anecdotage - the telling of anecdotes (i.e., a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident)

Ardency - depth of feeling

Auburn - of a reddish-brown color

Autumnity - quality or condition characteristic of autumn

Bucolic - of, relating to, associated with, or typical of open areas with few buildings or people; idyllic

Cathexis - investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea

Ceres - the Roman goddess of agriculture

Churn Supper - a feast at the end of the hay harvest

Cider - fermented apple juice often made sparkling by carbonation or fermentation in a sealed container

Cornucopian - being more than enough without being excessive

Demeter - the Greek goddess of agriculture

Effulgence - radiant splendor; brilliance

Estivo-autumnal - relating to or occurring in the summer and autumn

Felicific - causing or intended to cause happiness

Fête - a lavish often outdoor entertainment

Gemütlich - agreeably pleasant; comfortable

Georgic - a poem dealing with agriculture

Harvest - the season for gathering in agricultural crops

Hearthstone - the place where one lives

Husbandry - the cultivation or production of plants or animals

Moon (away) - to spend in idle reverie; dream

Odeum - a small roofed theater of ancient Greece and Rome used chiefly for competitions in music and poetry

Prosaic - being of the type that is encountered in the normal course of events

Reposeful - of a kind to induce ease and relaxation

Rubicundity - ruddy (i.e., having a healthy reddish color)

Sapphire - a gem variety of corundum in transparent/translucent crystals of a color other than red; a deep purplish-blue color

Surfeit - an intemperate or immoderate indulgence in something

Torridity - parched with heat especially of the sun; hot

Victual - to supply with food

Sources: 1 2 3 ⚜ More: Word Lists

If any of these words inspire your writing, do tag me or send me a link. I'd love to read your work!

[edflet]

The book is called The Good, the Bad and Me: In My Anecdotage

[petermorwood]

Illya Kuryakin was my favourite of the two Man From UNCLE heroes; for one thing I could imitate his accent far better than Napoleon Solo's - and did my best to imitate his dry snark, too, despite parental disapproval.

"Sarcasm," they used to say, "is the lowest form of wit."

That, BTW, is yet another quotation normally heard incomplete but which has an entirely different meaning when whole.

"Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence.” (Oscar Wilde)

I gained no credit when I found this out courtesy of a library Book of Quotations. "Being smart" was not a compliment in 1960s Northern Ireland, and I suspect that may not have changed.

There was a period - I was about 11, maybe 12 years old - when if I wasn't at school, I wore black polo-neck (turtleneck) sweaters for preference, and that summer I even persuaded Mum and Dad to let me get The Haircut.

It was retrimmed to something a bit more ordinary before the start of new term, which is just as well. What was cool on an UNCLE agent wouldn't look half as cool on a First Former in school cap and shorts...

:-P

illya is so dramatic oh my god i love him

[farzanatrading]

Diet and lifestyle importance of frozen meat

When it comes to firmed meat, you might be imagining a television regale loaded with sodium and dispensable complements. But frozen flesh and refections are much further than a simple box regale loaded with inordinate swab, and can indeed be salutary to not only the body but to your fund too.

1. Convenience

Frozen meat is simply accessible. From steak to a frozen pizza, minimum trouble is demanded on your end regarding their cuisine and medication. Keeping firmed foods grazed also provides timely backups for whenever the time is grated, or cooking constituents are scarce.

  2. Assured Newness

Frozen food may indeed be freshest. indurating foods primarily inhibits corruption when firmed during their peak anecdotage. Produce, especially, is flash- firmed within just a many short hours following crop, locking in essential nutrients and conserving taste.

3. Nutrient- Rich

Thanks to the freezing technology, firmed foods aren't only healthy but may indeed be further nutrient-rich than the fresh flesh products. As mentioned, produce is generally flash- firmed during peak anecdotage, therefore locking in and withholding their nutritive content. The principle can further hold when firmed foods are compared to fresh yield. The fresh yield may lose their nutritive quality during continued transportation and storehouse at grocery stores before food delivery.

4. Carbon Footprint Reduction

The frozen food with its longer shelf life, you can make smaller passages to the stores by auto. Doing so reduces your carbon footmark. In addition, due to its longer shelf life, firmed food can also affect in lower destruction in the delivery as well as the storehouse chain.

5. Year-Round Enjoyment

Frozen funk meat has quite a long shelf- life than cooled funk. Conserving food allows people to enjoy foods that may not be in season throughout the time. Not only the meat, but also the seasonal fruits, veggies, and lately caught fish can be enjoyed anytime if firmed during their season.

  6. Budget-Friendly

Opting for organic sources may take a harder beating on the portmanteau; firmed foods can ambiguously be midriff and budget-friendly. Choosing frozen meat online also reduces the threat of throwing both food and redundant cash down.

[petermorwood]

Microwave Sponge Cake (eventually)

Long ago, @dduane and I had a Whirlpool combi microwave - micro, grill, fan oven - and It Was Great, big enough to use as a proper oven when what needed cooked in a proper oven was small enough that powering up the big proper oven in the cooker was a bit much.

Still with me...?

IIRC it was one of those Christmas presents where Mum, ever-practical, told us; "get yourselves something really useful but not too expensive (I did say practical!) and I'll go halves."

In 2016, after something like 15 years of pretty-well daily use for one thing and another, the old thing expired by stages, micro first, grill second, oven last - it made great bread up until the end - and went to recycling heaven.

*****

We couldn't find a one-for-one replacement (we needed a free-standing counter-top appliance, everyone was selling built-in), so until once was available (optimism) we bought an ordinary microwave.

NB, this and its successors were only used for ordinary microwave things like reheating, defrosting and dealing with freeze-cook stuff. They got nothing like the amount of use of the old combi, mostly because of being incapable of doing a lot of it. As things turned out, this didn't help much.

About eighteen months later, we had to buy another. If a microwave's enamel interior develops a crack (to this day I don't know how), moisture gets in, rust begins and the enamel pulls off the bare metal. That's when you get "sparking".

This demo is deliberate; believe me, when it's unexpected it's even worse.

A private welder show or lightning storm at the end of the kitchen counter when all you want is a hot cuppa is distinctly unsettling. Also, it's only going to get worse, and we could imagine - boy, could we - what "Much Worse" might look like.

To the recycle dump!

(NB, micros with stainless steel interiors don't seem to do this, probably because they're already tuned to deal with the bare metal.)

The replacement, another ordinary micro, Just Up And Died after eighteen months and, guess what, the quote for a check-up and replacements-if-required was as much as the price of a new one.

(Inkjet printers seem to operate on this principal too.)

To the recycle dump again!

We got a third new one (which BTW is still running just fine, because it's been downgraded to Extra, read on), totalled up what we'd spent on ordinary microwaves, said a few well-chosen words about planned obsolescence and the "Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Economic Inequality" and got ourselves a pre-pay credit card whose top-ups were dedicated to Get A Combi Again.

We didn't bother with GACA baseball caps.

That would have been silly.

I don't know if these cards exist in the USA; we treat them as the modern version of a piggy-bank...

...except that to get at the money you need two people acting in accord.

*****

And in 2021 we got one.

Okay, this next bit is going to read like an ad.

It isn't, because the appliance is discontinued. (Whirlpool FINALLY do something similar but not identical.) It's just enthusiastic users discovering there's even more to a gadget than expected.

*****

The New One even bigger than the old one, which had 28 litres capacity; the new one was 33 L (was .99 ft³, is now 1.16 ft³). In non-tech terms, wow, More Room To Cook In.

Reading the figures was no help (to me, anyway) in visualising what a maw the thing had, but opening the door did that and no mistake.

I said something to DD about "bite radius"...

...and she instantly responded with "anyway, we delivered the bomb".

We're a quotesy household. ;->

BTW, The New One does a very good job on seafood, too...

*****

Since we got this, almost exactly two years ago, we've used it from reheating tea to roasting meat to making chilli / goulash / stew / curry (you can run the oven / grill separately or add simultaneous zaps of microwave for much less cooking time) to baking bread.

One of the best things about it is that when the set cooking time is done, the appliance switches off automatically. No risk of busyness, absent-mindedness or out-in-the-garden-ness ending in clouds of smoke, ruined food and possibly even worse.

As for breadmaking, it has a dough-rise setting which is a Time Machine, reducing a two-hour "doubled in size" rise time to about 35-45 minutes...

It also has the most reliable Defrost Butter setting either of us have ever encountered, turning a rock-solid butter brick from the freezer into something spreadable while never - to date - doing the "never mind a butter-knife, give me a spoon or a paintbrush" thing.

*****

However...

There's also a "Chef Setting" where there are some simple recipes. Here's the pastry page.

Basically, you assemble and mix the ingredients, input the correct settings and the machine does all the timing, heating and cooking.

We'd never used this until yesterday, when DD said, "Let's try the sponge cake..."

Yes, this post was entitled "Microwave Sponge Cake (eventually)..." and here we are...

We did all the measuring correctly and checked it by pouring the mixture into a baking container while on the scale, wondering betimes why the recipe says 900g, the ingredients total 925 and what actually poured into the container reads 906... Weird. Really weird.

Then we put the container into the oven, entered the correct code, and let things do what they were going to do.

A little later we discovered something else about the recipe besides a weight anomaly.

It didn't mention the required size of the container. Or or how much the mixture was likely to rise.

It rose...

Let's say more than we expected...

The fluted ceramic container used for baking this one makes it look like a Vesuvius cupcake; not quite a pyroclastic flow, but a lot of flow regardless.

Once it cooled we separated the sponge-cake from the escaped sponge in the same way as sculptors work with wood or marble - "Chip away everything that doesn't look like a cake" - and found that despite its misshapen looks, it tasted pretty good.

So today DD made another, this time using a larger container.

...and this time it stayed put until removed using the cunning base-and-lifting-straps of baking parchment.

It's not the loftiest or best-risen sponge cake either of us have ever seen (a smaller-diameter higher-sided container would probably deal with that) BUT if there's something needing sponge cake in a hurry - this went from cupboard ingredients to done and cooling in less than 55 minutes - that treatment seems to fit the bill.

We're now wondering what other secrets lurk in the simple recipe pages; falafel, quiche Lorraine, stuffed peppers, even Flammkuchen* from scratch.

(*Though I have my own views about Flammkuchen, mostly involving a plane flight...)

And we'll be paying a lot more attention to what size of dish we put them in. :->

[thatsmylog]

[petermorwood]

Mum would have loved this.

She was very fond of blackberries - in season, my sister and I had arms tattooed like Picts from harvesting them out of every bramble hedge in Counties Down and Antrim (well, it seemed like two counties) - and she made the best bramble jelly on the planet.

Every year she made far more than the family could eat (yup, it WAS two counties, almost certainly). That's because it was sold for charitable causes - cancer research and cardiac research, among many others - along with her Health Loaf, a sturdy multi-grain with All-Bran for Extra Digestive Virtue.

I used to call it the Faith Loaf, because it could move mountains. :->

Over the 40-odd years I remember her doing it, she made and sold enough loaves to build a facsimile section of Hadrian's Wall - everyone for miles around must have been as regular as atomic clocks - along with enough bramble jelly to glue it together, and enough needlework things constructed on her old Singer sewing-machine to make a pelmet along the top, both sides, two layers, pleats and fringes by request.

I've no idea how much she generated for those charities over that time, four figures for sure, maybe five, all with her own two hands and one treadle-operating foot, and all without a word of praise because that's not why she was doing it.

Mum could have given some people who lay loud claim to Goodness a course of instruction in what Being Good is all about, but she was too busy doing it to teach it, except maybe by example.

So I've saved this offline for later, and when it's made I'll think of @hedgehog-moss who posted it, and @asgardiancryptid who reposted it.

And Mum, and Dad, and Sis, and summer afternoons with purple-stained arms a long time ago, and fresh soda bread just off the griddle with butter and the best bramble jelly on the planet.

*****

Good tip about not defrosting frozen fruit, BTW - I didn't know this trick, but it makes perfect sense. If I'm visualising the process correctly, the fruit defrosts during baking and excess moisture soggy-making evaporates in the heat of the oven.

If I can't find blackberries I'll try raspberries, because frozen ones are easy to track down. They won't be exactly the same, but close enough for jazz - or swing, anyway, and Mum & Dad were very fond of Glenn Miller and his band.

Seems to be a bit dusty in here...

My recipe is for blackberry-frangipane tart, though I'm sure it could work with other fruit! (note: I tried with plums and found that the texture wasn't right, so maybe not with very juicy fruit)

For the frangipane filling, whisk in a bowl: white sugar (100g), melted butter (40g), almond powder (125g), and 2 eggs. If it looks a bit grainy rather than smooth that's normal. Spread it over whichever kind of crust you usually use for fruit tart (not sure what the English equivalent of pâte sablée is but that's the one I use)

Add your blackberries over it, enough to more or less cover the tart but only in one layer (you don't want to smother your frangipane). If you use frozen blackberries, do not unfreeze them before! It'll make the tart too watery.

Put in the oven for 20 to 40min at 180°C (depends on how powerful your oven is, but until the frangipane looks golden all over)

Bon appétit :) It's my favourite fruit tart!

[jadethirlvvall]

I was reading Eli Wallach's autobiography (The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage) and I saw this........

[titoist]

this photo of Butler doing a side-step(not really, he's just taking a step at a unique angle, as far as i can tell) is so whimsical in its composition... he's poised like a musical actor doing a side-step. the cain and everything...it's beautiful almost. jokes & japes aside, however, Butler has always struck me as just an exceptionally goofy figure. not as a person, mind you, he was always prim and proper and composed(at least, until he was well into his 'anecdotage'...), but i feel that he's always peoples' top pick for 'The Prime Minister That Never Was', even though it was generally accepted that he was to be the natural successor until the macmillan years. or, actually, it might have been the 50s budget lollygagging that dealt a nail in the coffin. suez was a bad look but i feel, perhaps, that he could have gone on in spite of it, if not for the aforementioned factors. he got dealt a... rather sour hand, that's certain. shifts weight in fake leather chair, rubbing back of wrist, closed eyes. and then his luck went from bad to worse with the whole, late-life self destructive spiral and slow atrophy. a butskellism-adherent PM so late into the post-war consensus period would have been interesting! but alas. i've been britainposting a lot today, my apologies. i think that anon ignited a part of my brain i have been heretofore keeping on the downlow, and this is something akin to releasing steam.

[things-in-old-books]

From The Anecdotage of Glasgow, by Robert Alison, 1892. (See also: this alternative account of the incident.)

Dr. James Jeffrey's Ghastly Galvanic Experiment

At the Glasgow Circuit Court in October, 1819, a collier of the name of Matthew Clydesdale was condemned to death for murder, and the judge, in passing sentence, as was the custom, ordered that, after the execution, the body should be given to Dr. James Jeffrey, the lecturer on anatomy at the University, "to be publicly dissected and anatomised." The execution took place on the 4th of November following, and the body of the murderer was taken to the college dissecting theatre, where a large number of students and many of the general public were gathered to witness an experiment it was proposed to make upon it.

The intention was that a newly invented galvanic battery should be tried with the body, and the greatest interest had accordingly been excited. The corpse of the murderer was placed in a sitting posture in a chair, and the handles of the instrument put into the hands. Hardly had the battery been set working than the auditory observed the chest of the dead man heave, and he rose to his feet. Some of them swooned for fear, others cheered at what was deemed a triumph of science. But the professor, alarmed at the aspect of affairs, put his lancet in the throat of the murderer, and he dropped back into his seat. For a long time the community discussed the question, whether or not the man was really dead when the battery was applied? Most probably he was not. For in those days, death on the scaffold was slow—there was no long drop to break the spinal cord,—it was simply a case of strangulation.

[petermorwood]

There's something about writing with a fountain pen that's just better. However, they keep running up against "everyone knows" notions.

Everyone knows they're hard to use.

That may be because "everyone" thinks you have to write in at least cursive if not full-on copperplate with curly bits. Not so. You write the way you always do, except that the fountain pen lets you do it with less effort because the nature of the beast means you need barely press pen against paper to make your marks.

Everyone knows they're messy.

Okay, the ones that fill from bottles of ink do have the potential for mess, but accidents are accidental, not standard procedure. The ones that fill using plug-in ink cartridges - the commonest method, used even in some Very Expensive Pens, like this set - aren't messy at all.

Everyone knows they're expensive, exclusive, elitist and other nose-in-the-air e-things.

Yes, they can be expensive (in fact they can be ridiculous) but I've posted a couple of times about cheap fountain pens which work just fine for me. I've got several, including a couple of Pilot disposables which wrote so pleasantly that when they ran dry I didn't dispose, I refilled.

*****

The most expensive pens in our house right now are:

The Mont Blanc 146 (piston fill) which I bought @dduane just after we got married.

The Parker "51" (aerometric side-squeeze bar) bought by my parents when I started Big School in 1968.

The Pilot Bamboo (cartridge / converter) I bought when "saw", "wanted", "can afford" and "now" all came together on the same day.

All of which means they're more valuable in a non-bank way than "expensive", though I wouldn't want to replace DD's Mont Blanc, whose price then IIRC was less than a quarter what it is now.

*****

Any on-line pen store - Cult Pens, Goulet Pens, Jet Pens etc., etc. - is able to sort their entire product list by "Price: low to high".

They can do it the other way too, with results likely to provoke a short sharp intake of breath. Most of the pens at that end of the scale aren't for writing with; they're for collecting, possessing or just an investment that happens to be pen-shaped.

*****

On the few occasions when I have to write with a regular biro (ballpoint) it now feels like scratching out the letters with a nail - and here for fairness I'll reiterate a good word to Pilot G-2 gel pens, which are as convenient as biros but write with a lot less pressure.

Still not as lightly as fountain pens, though.

*****

The only place I usually write with a pencil is in the bedside notebook, because ink, liquid or gel, isn't safe near sheets, duvet-cover and pillowcases (voice of experience, it never completely washes out). That goes double when blearily scribbling some write-it-down-now-or-forget-it-forever thought which woke you up at Oh-Dark-Thirty.

Regular HB pencils are getting too faint for me (younger eyes may not have this problem) and while soft leads - 2B and up - are darker they're also prone to smearing, which is OK for art but less so for writing, especially the late-night scrawly kind.

In addition they sometimes - not always, but usually when it's least desirable - do that carbon-paper trick of printing their writing on the facing page.

If both facing pages are written in dark but overly soft pencil, this can become a confusion of blurry overwritten letters that do nothing for clarity of information which, given when and how it was written, might be none too clear to start with.

All this is IMO, so YMMV and probably does. :->

Hey there Neil. So sorry to bother you, but I need to genuinely ask, how do you handwrite and are able to read it after yourself? I have this trashy notebook where I write when I can't do it on my laptop, but my thoughts are faster than my hand and the writing always turns out absolutely horrid and most of the time I'm just unable to read it after myself. Thank you, have a lovely day.

Fountain pens. Ballpoints and pencils leave me unable to read what I wrote. Fountain pens I can read my writing.

[antilagardelle]

The unfounded platitude that "Europe is so much better than America," consists primarily in misconstrued OECD data, and confirmation-biased anecdotage from touristic ventures to The Champs-Élysées and Saville Rowe. Little rests at the core of the assertion beyond the foreign appeal of cobblestone streets, fachwerk houses, and the general 18th century style of such cities as Copen Hagen, Paris, and Berlin.

[marginalgloss]

the straw boy story

Swimming to Cambodia is probably the most famous of all the monologues that Spalding Gray wrote and performed through his relatively brief career in the 80s and 90s. In print, it’s a short book of just over a hundred pages in which he mostly describes the small role he had in The Killing Fields, a film from 1984 about the genocide under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. By this time Gray had been acting and performing for some years, but he wasn’t a movie actor, and in his story here he does very little acting; the movie was shot in Thailand, where he seems to have spent much of his time bumming around, drinking and getting high, and watching in awe and confusion. 

Part of the monologue is a potted history of Cambodia itself, complete with a summary of America’s disastrous role in prompting the crisis; it is fairly scathing stuff, considering that this was published less than ten years after the Khmer Rouge occupied that country. Another part covers the production of The Killing Fields, which is replete with Ballardian overtones — the whole thing seems a strange exercise in hyperreality, involving as it does local refugees and Cambodian nationals who had themselves involvement in the original disaster. But mostly the monologue involves the author musing on the state of his career, the world, filmmaking, and life in general. 

It is, of course, a written document of a thing that was intended to be performed rather than read. Gray’s on-stage monologues were typically performed with him spoken behind a desk, with only a couple of props — paper and a glass of water — perhaps a map, or a record player or boombox, if the show demanded it. Inevitably elements would be added and removed as the performances went on. At the time that Gray was operating, he seemed to be doing something new and refreshing with performance. His arch, WASP-ish mannerisms gave it a familiar frame of after-dinner anecdotage, but it was something altogether richer and more nuanced. It was a combination of monologue as memoir, all mixed up with improv, stand-up and confessional. 

If we consider something like Krapp’s Last Tape as the apotheosis of modernism, then Spalding Gray might look something like a poster boy for postmodernism. Instead of sitting at a desk and tape recorder with nothing to say beyond near-wordless reminiscence, here is a man who does the same but with everything to say — all of it filtered through the lens of himself and refracted back at the audience, with every anxiety, every delight, every humiliation blown up to cartoonish size. Imagine a high-minded Seinfeld where everything mattered too much, rather than not at all. Imagine Kerouac with a conscience. In many ways Gray looks today like an early emblem of an art method where every aspect of one’s private self becomes fair game as a subject for public scrutiny, and for all kinds of artistic reproduction.  

How well this approach has aged is an interesting question, though it is ultimately somewhat irrelevant. Something chafes around the idea that some privileged white guy should travel to Thailand to take place in a reconstruction of a genocidal event and think: ‘yes, the most interesting thing going on here is me’. This is a cynical way of looking at it. But if Swimming to Cambodia was performed tomorrow, one wonders if readers would be so tolerant of the author’s dabbling in the Thai sex industry. Gray called his own work ‘poetic journalism’, and it’s difficult to imagine such a description being applauded by readers today, ever since the media starting getting seriously creative with the truth. Neither wry detachment nor unconstrained self-interest will suffice as artistic motivators. Better for our poets to be poets, and for journalists to be journalists; we’ve been stung by those who tried to do both.    

I used the word ‘irrelevant’ because Gray’s method is everywhere. It might even be the dominant artistic ethos of our times, particularly for the aspiring comedian or performer. There’s something of his work in the knowing style of Fleabag, which also began as an on-stage monologue. And consider podcasts, though it’s notable that those are mostly based around group conversations and special interests – YouTube and Twitch are better suited to the single-voice format. And there are still a few ‘storytellers’ at large; the most famous inheritor of Gray’s style is probably David Sedaris, though it would take too long to explain here why I find his work almost entirely unbearable.

The same ethos has crept into media culture at large. It seems like every week we celebrate a new personal essay which mingles the big issues of history and politics and gender with reminiscences of trauma or recollections of tragedy. The personal is political, so the political must start with the personal: sitting in front of a mic (real or otherwise), spilling one’s guts. Often selling one’s own work involves an effort of putting one’s personality out there first, and using that as a way to draw an audience to what you really want them to see. And this is perfectly fine, as long as one accepts the idea that you cannot expect to withdraw that personality at a later date and maintain the same level of profile. 

There can no longer be any clear divide between an artist’s public persona and their private life. And it is becoming increasingly hard to imagine a way of being that involves opting out of that aspect entirely. We are all setting out our little tables and chairs on the biggest stage imaginable, talking to ourselves, waiting for an audience that might never arrive.

[open-minded-skeptic]

When a man falls into his anecdotage, it is a sign for him to retire.

Benjamin Disraeli