#anecdotage

[petermorwood]

This is excellent advice for the treatment (or apparent maltreatment, in linen's case) of natural fabrics.

Here's some additional info based on personal experience over many decades and numerous ways of doing laundry from ancient (well, early 1960s) to modern.

Wool. A splendid outer layer, since rain sits on rather than soaks in, but needs care when washing, and even more when drying. Don't wash a woollen garment on Hot, and definitely don't dry it that way. If you do, your favourite woolly pully will shrink to something for a child, and a child's woolly pully into something for a doll. I have done this, and it was not well appreciated except, way way back, by my small sister and presumably by her nattily pullovered favourite doll.

Cotton. Will indeed shrink a bit after washing and drying, but fortunately will stretch again during wear. Can be washed very hot to get rid of Those Annoying Stains, and by Very Hot I mean boiled. It'll still stretch back - eventually - and although sometimes uncomfortably snug during the stretching process, will nevertheless be nice and clean.

Silk. Usually expensive, so accordingly laundered with probably more care than it needs, since this is a fabric once used (in many layers, granted) as armour. Does Not Chafe, which is why it was worn as scarves by fighter pilots who had to keep turning their heads in case of The Hun In The Sun. "Silk hiding steel" is appropriate, because a lady with a Hermés (not "an 'ermes", you pronounce the H) silk scarf and something to weigh it with is not as unarmed as she seems.

Linen. The 600lb gorilla of the fabric world, only bettered by hemp. Can have a weave tight enough to carry water without dripping - especially after the weave soaks and swells - and a tensile strength enough to carry pounds and kilos of it. (You can still buy collapsible "canvas" - usually linen or hemp - buckets...) @dduane and I inherited a lot of Irish Linen from my Mum, some still in original boxes with original washing instructions. Those instructions were, more or less, "rub soap into stubborn stains, scrub thoroughly and boil until clean".

Where linen and hemp fabrics are concerned...

*****

Even though she had a succession of increasingly modern washing machines, Mum also had and occasionally used - or more accurately supervised my use of - some quite old-fashioned laundry equipment.

Linens with stubborn stains were indeed scrubbed thoroughly, using a block of hard soap then a washboard, and an impressive abs workout it was...

Then the scrubbed stuff was boil-washed in Mum's washing machine (which could reach a genuine 100°C rolling boil) before being rinsed, passed through the mangle (or wringer, more in this post) and pegged out on the washing-line to dry.

*****

As i hunted up illustrations I (re-)discovered a Terry Pratchett Discworld connection. Remember the "copper stick" used by Granny and Nanny to summon the demon in "Wyrd Sisters"?

"What are you going to try?" said Granny. Since they were on Nanny's territory, the choice was entirely up to her. "I always say you can't go wrong with a good Invocation," said Nanny. "Haven't done one for years." Granny Weatherwax frowned. Magrat said, "Oh, but you can't. Not here. You need a cauldron, and a magic sword. And an octogram. And spices, and all sorts of stuff." Granny and Nanny exchanged glances. "It's not her fault," said Granny. "It's all them grimmers she was bought." She turned to Magrat. "You don't need none of that," she said. "You need headology." She looked around the ancient washroom. "You just use whatever you've got," she said. She picked up the bleached copper stick, and weighed it thoughtfully in her hand. "We conjure and abjure thee by means of this—" Granny hardly paused – "sharp and terrible copper stick."

It's one of these, not made OF copper but meant for use IN a copper.

Mum had one, originally Granny's, which kept getting pinched to play the role of sword, baton or whatever, though its official purpose was to stir, untangle and finally remove laundry which had been boiled in a "laundry copper":

This one shows how it straddled two gas jets, but Nanny Ogg's copper had a fireplace space under the actual cauldron (though in summer she used it as a beer cooler).

These cauldrons were still called "coppers" even when more cheaply made of iron. It's another instance of how vacuum cleaners became "hoovers" and sticking-plasters became "band-aids" etc., etc., no matter what brand they really were.

"Boil", however, wasn't a figurative term. It meant what it said, and those thoroughly scrubbed linens (cottons, too) would bubble merrily for quite a while "until clean".

Coppers were also used for cooking, with perhaps the most famous literary instance being chez Cratchit in "A Christmas Carol":

“A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastry-cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding!"

Mum initially had a separate electric boiler - IIRC it was Burco brand, which still makes much smaller boilers for catering, though ours was never used for anything except laundry - but mostly I remember the boil being done in her washing machine.

More modern machines only go to 90-95°C, sometimes just 60°C, but when her Hoover was running at full belt, things got as lively as any pot on a hob even before the agitator started churning. Never mind closing its lid to avoid mess, when a boil-wash was taking place that lid was also a needful safety precaution against scalding splashes.

*****

Removal by copper stick was superseded by use of tongs, and Mum had a set just like these...

...though I don't think hers had such an apt name.

Stirring with the copper stick was replaced by washing with a posser, which pumped up and down, or a washing dolly, which rotated.

Both actions have been replicated by washing-machines, and though variants of the dolly rotation became almost standard in tub washers, the posser did appear in an early 20th-century hand-operated machine...

...as well as the Frigidaire "Jet Cone" washer...

...whose action, TBH, reminds me of certain non-laundry gadgets I saw many years ago in The Pleasure Chest on Santa Monica... :-P

Modernised possers or even original designs are still available today.

*****

Whenever you read in stories about avoiding trouble with laundresses, those devices along with scrubbing, wringing out and cranking mangles are why. Regular workouts with laundry equipment gave them the sort of muscles nobody wanted to provoke.

*****

I've already mentioned "A Christmas Carol" and, given the time of year (posted 22nd December 2024) this ought to end with another one, so...

As shepherds washed their socks by night, All seated round the tub, A bar of Sunlight soap came down And they began to scrub...

You're welcome.

:->

Here, a cheater course on caring for natural fibers!

1. Wool. Treat it like it has the delicate constitution of a Victorian lady and the conviction that baths are evil of a 17th century noble. (If I get in WATER my PORES will OPEN and I will CATCH ILL AND DIE.)

2. Cotton; easygoing. Will shrink a bit if washed and dried hot.

3. Silk; people think it’s like wool and has the constitution of a fashionably dying of consumption Victorian lady, but actually it’s quite tough. Can be washed in an ordinary washer, and either tumbled dry without heat or hung to dry.

4. Linen; it doesn’t give a shit. Beat the hell out of it. Historically was laundered by dousing it in lye and beating the shit out of it with wooden paddles, which only makes it look better. The masochist of the natural fiber world. Beat the fuck out of it linen doesn’t care. Considerably stronger than cotton. Linen sheet sets can last literal decades in more or less pristine shape because of that strength.The most likely natural fiber to own a ball gag.

[petermorwood]

"Quality Street" sweets - TIL that...

...despite this particular brand of sweets appearing in my childhood most often at Christmas, historic costumes worn by characters on the tins were NOT a part of the widespread "Dickensian Christmas" look which appeared so often on cards and packaging.

Instead it's because the characters and their Regency costumes were inspired by a play by "Peter Pan" author J. M. Barrie.

The play was called "Quality Street".

And the tins are collectibles.

*****

A Christmas-related appearance of the sweets was mostly coincidental, though the empty tin from one year did often appear at the next, full of home-made mince pies or even an entire Christmas cake.

Large, fairly airtight tins are useful that way, especially at trapping the spirituous exhalations of cakes made in mid-September and "fed" weekly thereafter with spoonfuls of brandy, or whiskey, or rum (sometimes all three, alternated) until it was time for the armour-plating of marzipan and royal icing to go on.

It used to be a common belief at home that opening the tin containing an un-iced cake near a naked flame at any time after mid-November was more than the opener's eyebrows were worth.

The eyebrow thing never happened, because it was one of those family fables, but I do remember bringing one such Quality Street tin down to Anne McCaffrey's house when I'd been invited to stay.

It contained not a Christmas cake but one of Mum's famed Chocolate Gateaux of Doom (my name for it, not hers), made specially for that visit and whose recipe, what with the plain-chocolate sponge cake and the apricot-cream filling and the double-chocolate ganache icing, required most of a bottle of cognac.

Since this cake didn't have the sealant-and-spackle cladding of marzipan and royal icing, it also required refrigeration to "keep it calm". My car didn't even have air conditioning, so in transit the cake got quite, er, excitable.

How excitable, we soon found out.

When Annie's stable manager sauntered over and popped the lid, expecting to find some nice Quality Street choccies, she was instead hit in the face by a near-visible cloud of booze vapour (a gin-ie, perhaps, even though no gin was involved) and reeled back with a cry of "Jaysuz, does yer mother own a feckin' distillery?"

Had she been smoking one of her habitual thin roll-ups at the time, our family fable might have been proved true after all...

:->

[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]

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]

A photo which also clarifies phrases like "getting your (add body part of choice) caught in the wringer"...

Deciding it was spelt Ringer or Wringer was never an issue in our house, because this contraption was always called a "mangle" (that's its Wikipedia entry) and wet clothes were "put through the mangle". The "getting your..." phrases also always involved a mangle.

"Wringing" something like a hand towel or dishcloth was done by hand, twisting them like a rope to get the water out.

From that there's "wringing your hands", "wringing someone's neck", "wringing information out of someone" or indeed just looking / feeling "wrung out".

"Mangled" in that same figurative sense usually implies a messy level of damage, whether to a person, a vehicle or, sometimes even an awkward attempt to speak a foreign language - "sprechen Sie botch"... :-P

*****

Mum actually had two mangles, one built onto a Hoover washing-machine rather like this one, into which It folded away for storage.

It was a very economical contraption - forget to put the lid on securely while it was running, and the water agitation was vigorous enough that besides the laundry inside, it would try to wash - or at least manage to drench - the floor, walls, ceiling and any nearby children, all at once.

The other mangle, probably the older of the two, was of all things an Acme just like this (it clamped onto a stand)...

...and as a kid who spent many happy hours in the Cartoon Cinema on Great Victoria Street - which as the name suggests ran a constant programme of Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies, etc. etc. - I always kept an eye open for our laundry mangle making an appearance to do something unnecessary to Wile E. Coyote.

I waited in vain, because though Acme supplied, and Wile E. got mangled by, falling anvils, explosive bird-seed and malfunctioning rockets, he never once got mangled by a mangle...

The phrase "to put [someone] through the wringer" is, of course, referring to a laundry wringer, a formerly popular but now little-used home appliance that looks like this:

It's easy to understand why being put through one would be an ordeal!

So here's the question I have: for the folks who just found out from this post what a laundry wringer is, and have been spelling it "through the ringer" all this time, what were you picturing when you said "ringer"?

[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]

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

[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.

[open-minded-skeptic]

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

Benjamin Disraeli

[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.

[petermorwood]

ROFL!

For just a second I thought this meant sake put through some sort of drinks carbonator.

NB, that's not a recommended practice since wine of any kind gums up the works, and in any case responds far too enthusiastically - on the walls and ceiling enthusiastically - to being squirted full of CO².

Voice of experience, can you tell? It took ages to clean up, and the kitchen smelt winey for a week because it had been sprayed with nearly half a bottle. I'm still grateful I tried the experiment with white wine, not red... :-P

*****

I've been drinking sake since buying my first bottle of Hakutsuru Junmai at an off-license in Belfast, before heading off to spend a romantic evening with my ex watching "Shogun" (the Richard Chamberlain / Toshiro Mifune one, it was a long time ago).

She was bored with the show, disliked the sake and, what with one thing and another, the whole evening turned out like champagne left open too long.

Flat, and rather sour.

That, in retrospect, was the first teeny tiny inkling that we weren't quite as made for each other as my rose-(or possibly rosé)-coloured glasses had suggested.

*****

@dduane, however, is Very Partial to sake, and "Shogun" in all its forms, and indeed Japanese food in general. The sake never sparkles*, but the conversation often does. :->

( * Her favourite Mumm's Cordon Rouge champagne, on the other hand, sparkles very nicely.)

just had a convo with my friend. she mentioned she doesnt like sake cause its sparkling.

“wait, sake is sparkling? what have i been drinking?” i said. because i also dont like sparkling stuff.

i look at the sake bottle ive been drinking from for fun events for the past year. its vinegar.

i’ve been drinking strawberry flavored vinegar.