APB: All Points Between Science and Literature: April 2018

Monday, April 16, 2018

Cultural Ephemera: Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Carpeted Staircase

I can't remember being smitten by an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem before. Here is "April," a recent Poem of the Day featured at Poetry Foundation.

It doesn't get interesting until she gets to the maggots squirming in brains--"Not only under ground are the brains of men / Eaten by maggots"--an unexpected image from what came before, but it's interesting also in that it is life in death ("there is no death").

The ending is good, but this phrase was the most fascinating bit: "a flight of uncarpeted stairs"--as a metaphor for life being nothing. Does that mean that carpeted stairs is something? The poem reveals itself as a product of its time, a flag of history where carpet on stairs was a technological thing of wonder, perhaps something to be envied (they're so rich they have carpet on their stairs!).

This thing we now take for granted--a simple option homeowners briefly think about--was once a wonder, perhaps even a thing of joy.

A brief search shows carpet was beginning to be affordable in the mid 19th century, with some innovations in the early 20th century. No way to know when it fir
st became a thing to fit carpet on the stairs.

Belatedly, it strikes me that the carpeted stairs could be a joke (oh, remember when people used to think carpets on stairs was novel? ha, ha--my parents were such rubes). Even so, the innovation would have to been within or very near Edna's lifetime, for that to have been a joke.

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Cultural Ephemera: The 1960s Generational Divide in Art Linkletter's "We Love You, Call Collect"

I'm repurposing the use of a term ("ephemera" meaning printed matter not intended to exist for long--which seems to be the most popular use according Google searches) by going back to the word's primary use in order to get at a phenomenon that intrigues me--and possibly others, which is "something of no lasting significance" (according to Merriam-Webster).

When I combine the term with "cultural," I refer to those things that momentarily struck a culture's zeitgeist, for whatever reason. The reason is usually the fascinating part. Why did it strike the culture's fancy?

Here's an example. Art Linkletter (Wikipedia) was a talk show host on a variety of radio and TV programs. You sometimes hear people still using Linkletter as the butt of a joke--as if the meaning of the joke should be clear--although its use is rather dated if not obscure to most of society now.

Art's daughter, Diane, [video clip of Diane in a commercial with her father] jumped to her death in 1969, out of a six-story window [further info on her death]. Art said it was due to an LSD flashback although people like Bobby Darin blamed Art's parenting (his song "Baby May") as Art became staunchly opposed to drug culture and figures like Timothy Leary who said LSD was safe. John Waters did a short film about Diane featuring his famed drag queen, Divine [It's early John Waters--the dialogue jumbled]. David Foster Wallace refers to it in his novel, The Pale Kings.

Art released the following spoken word audio, "We Love You, Call Collect," which peaked at #42 on Billboard Top 100 and won that year's Grammy Award:

Supposedly, there's a rebuttal from the daughter ("Dear Mom and Dad") though I couldn't locate that.

The power of this ephemera is not how it delivers its art, which is nigh nil except for its moving last line, but how it captures the generational divide of its time. One can extrapolate both perspectives.

Note that even in Linkletter's excoriation of Leary, he also praises Leary, which makes Leary smile (see video linked above). Whatever else one may have against Linkletter, he was talented at engaging people, even in anger.