dirac

I think we can let playwrights in on a pass.

Ain't it the truth.

Such a course as I envision wouldn't be limited to the Table encounters themselves, at either the "Board meetings" or the various "Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club" poker sessions. The Board seemed somewhat like Gottschalk's view of time: variable by location and circumstance. The Circle lasted from 1919 to 1932, but the members had achieved before and after that time. Required reading/viewing would include The Front Page, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and other works of the membership, including Mrs. Parker's friendship with people like W.E.B. Dubois, whom she clearly did not understand. The Circle did not merely attempt to set tastes, Samuel Johnson-like, but also reflected them, sometimes at an unfortunate level of common denominators. A consideration of their collective careers could make a helluva course, probably interdisciplinary. The format would, of course, be a symposium. I see what you mean. If you used ancillary and intermittent members of the Circle in addition to those who are considered the heart of the regular membership they could hold each other up, so to speak. Drop-bys like Donald Ogden Stewart and Herman Mankiewicz probably contributed more of lasting value in the cinema than any of the Table's playwrights did in the theater. You could also work in writers like Thurber who were critical of the Circle. The students would certainly learn something about the nature of sic transit gloria mundi.

I must now retire to my fainting couch with smelling salts at hand to absorb all this. As a moderator I suppose it is also my duty to note that we're going way off the reservation, although by this time we've not only beaten the dead horse with this topic but skinned it, roasted it on a spit, and are now doing a fertility dance around the campfire. bart summarized the issues well a few posts ago (but if anyone wants to contribute their two cents they should do so by all means ).

Let me get this straight, as it were - a guy who writes software and poetry, Twitters, and is a family guy (well, I assume it's a family) who's also a guilt-ridden fan of Andrea Dworkin. Jedward, move over.

Ouch. Too bad some of those fabled exchanges don’t seem to have happened. I wonder if the Table could sustain even a semester on its own. I happen to enjoy Ferber’s novels as a guilty pleasure but many of her plays with Kaufman haven’t endured too well, which is also true of the Table’s other playwrights although they were big names and Pulitzer Prize winners in their time. Of the chief members, probably the one who made the most lasting contribution was a non-writer, Harold Ross of The New Yorker. Ring Lardner used to swing by occasionally, but by and large the writers who really mattered had other things to do. Not that I know of. The movie, “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle,” is strange. Once you can get your mind around Matthew Broderick as Charles MacArthur and Campbell Scott as Robert Benchley, there’s Jennifer Jason Leigh’s bourbon-and-Quaaludes drawl to contend with, which may or may not be true to life but is distracting as all getout (I think Leigh was listening to some of those last recordings of Parker and took the wrong hints from them).

Two editions of Dorothy Parker's verse are updated. Ah, those wicked feminists and academics, grinding their axes. One highly esteemed professor at my college offered a course in Dorothy Parker one semester. I took the course and was somewhat underwhelmed, which I didn't expect. He never gave the course again, deciding that there just wasn't enough, well, there, and I can't say he was wrong. There are some fine things but the body of work is very slight. It's sad, but true. I look forward to checking out the new editions. The Portable Dorothy Parker is the best introduction IMO.

I didn't say they did, and that wasn't my argument. I am sorry to misunderstand you. Didn't mean to sound tetchy. I was just quoting back one of your responses to me earlier in the thread, by way of a small joke. We don't know where this social media thing is going to go so it is hard to say whether it will become a "must" for companies or if something else will come along, but in any case it's hard to envision a future where dancers will have to tweet.

I didn't say they did, and that wasn't my argument. I hope that clarifies matters. I think we must agree to disagree.

There's the famous Balanchine quote that ballet is not for everybody, but it's for anybody. Already ballet companies and other arts organizations are establishing a presence in social media and in some cases encouraging their performers to do so and I don't think that's going to go away any time soon. Given the amount of time that people are spending pecking at electronic devices these days it's probably inevitable. We can't start up the Cold War again, alas. During the dance boom ballet did have celebrity- slash-stars that "transcended the sport" as they like to say nowadays. It seemed to help, not hurt, the tide benefiting all boats, etc. But those days are not returning and arts organizations, not only ballet, have to move with the times.

Interesting topic for discussion -- "Ballet Company Mix 'n' Match." What do you think, BTers?

Thanks for the link. Doesn't surprise me. The least desirable demographic for advertisers is 50+, and the least desirable 50+ers are women. (This holds true in print as well as television.) It's not all that hard to attract older viewers and so the most prized shows are those which appeal to the less easily reached younger set.

A bit of both, I’d say. Thanks for posting this sad news. I haven’t felt this old since Joe Strummer dropped dead. R.I.P. and I trust he’ll be shaking things up in the sweet hereafter. Rolling Stone NYT "How many ways to get what you want/I use the best I use the rest"

I put up a link to the NYT item earlier this week, although I can't remember which day offhand. I think she was going to be a guest of some kind, not a competitor.

Oh, that’s too bad. I also remember Cazenove from The Duchess of Duke Street and Jennie. He was a wonderful Edwardian.

Given the number of hits on this thread, I would say that this is the ideal location for the news to receive our readers' attention. (Thanks, Ashley and Twitter! )

Good question. I don't think Shrike would qualify by the definition of the original article, which seems to refer to "book" writers only. (Ryan was such a great villain. I miss him.) Don Birnam, the character played by Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, would qualify as booze-addled -- so would Patrick's example of Scott Fitzgerald -- but not as a villain, so he falls between the two stools, I guess.

Novelists do show up from time to time in the movies, but the 'villain' qualifier does narrow the field. I did disagree with Miller's assessment of Briony Tallis of Atonement: Seems to me that if Briony spent the rest of her life trying to make up for what she did, she'd be no villain. On the contrary: she's a villain because she lived with the lie all her life and then decided to "atone" for the ruined lives of two people by writing up a fake happy ending for them. How nice of her.

Hi, Ed. Sorry for missing this when you first posted it. Popular scholarship isn’t necessarily inferior scholarship, but it’s different in kind and approach and it often stands on the shoulders of work done by academics or professional historians. I’d say the chief difference lies in the target audience. Scholarly articles and books are written primarily for an audience of peers, and in the case of scholarly articles they are subject to peer review. Language is likely to be denser, with references not necessarily accessible to a general readership, and citations lengthier and more rigorous. Works of popular history and biography are often written by reporters or professional writers of fiction and non-fiction who are not necessarily scholars in the field. In the case of “Shakespeare and Co.” it sounds as if you have a scholar writing a book aimed at a general audience, presenting information that is likely already well known to his peers in an entertaining and approachable fashion. I wouldn’t say that simplification in the bad sense of the word is an inevitable result, although it does happen. Other thoughts?

From Salon: Cinema’s Greatest Writer Villains I would also add Fred MacMurray’s Lieutenant Keefer, prodding an impressionable Van Johnson into very big trouble in The Caine Mutiny. Any others?

Sure it is. But I don't think Bouder's tweets do anything to undermine her great accomplishment No they don't, and that wasn't my argument. Thanks for clarifying.

Thanks for sharing both of them, Pointe1432. Sure it is. But I don't think Bouder's tweets do anything to undermine her great accomplishment, and I doubt they will do so for those following her online, who generally know what to expect from Twitter, Facebook, et al.

Not quite. Tweeting doesn't really allow, as yet, for the kind of elaborate image creation and control you describe. It is another and seemingly more direct way of communicating with the public, though. I have read that in some cases assistants are tweeting on behalf of clients who can't be bothered. I should hope so. Unless you are used to being questioned by skilled interviewers, going on 60 Minutes without a fair amount of prep and briefing would be a very risky proposition even under uncontroversial circumstances.

I think the only other character killed off was Ali MacGraw's Lady Ashley, who was certainly no great loss. Very poor shots, those revolutionaries.

She said that in her book, took, and she was quite right. Of course, a more secure person would simply have said so and asked for changes, and I thought it unhappily characteristic that instead Kirkland would elect that particular way out. As it was, she lost out and the movie lost out.