Good morning. In The Paris Review, Stephanie Gorton writes about an eccentric and now forgotten fiction editor at McClure’s: “Viola Roseboro’ (apostrophe intentional), the larger-than-life fiction editor at McClure’s, haunted magazine offices from the 1890s to the Jazz Age. A reader, editor, and semiprofessional wit, she discovered or mentored O. Henry, Willa Cather, and Jack London, among many others. Today she is nearly completely forgotten . . . She lived alone, or boarded in a family home; friends report no knowledge of a romantic entanglement. She dreamed of having a son, however, and periodically “adopted” young men in her circle. Men were her preferred company; she didn’t believe in women’s suffrage. But she didn’t care to be ladylike, she wore cheap, slouchy clothes and rolled her own long, skinny cigarettes. Unconventionally, but mainly because she was so unsuited to cooking, she ate mostly raw food. Some of her quirks put her ahead of her time; she was evangelical about yogic breathing and staying hydrated, and she often carried an old gin bottle full of water around the city. When someone once protested that it couldn’t be healthy to sip old water throughout the day, she angrily replied ‘Well, damn it, die!’—an expression that rippled outward among her writer friends, a byword for Rosie-ness. In the summer, her preferred way of living was to move to Provincetown, on Cape Cod, where she would sleep on her porch.” 

Charles McNulty views a play David Mamet is fiddling with in LA: “You might be surprised to learn that David Mamet recently tested a new play he wrote and directed at the Odyssey Theatre with a mouthwatering cast that included his wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, Emmy winner William H. Macy and stage veteran Fionnula Flanagan, who was nominated for a Tony Award last year for her performance in ‘The Ferryman.’ I was surprised to find out about ‘The Christopher Boy’s Communion,’ which ended its two-week run in a hush on Sunday. Word about the production came to me not through the show’s publicist, who normally isn’t shy about sending me information, but through that harder-to-control pathway of rumor.” I like Mamet’s work more than McNulty does, who says he won’t review the play but does anyway. But even he likes parts of it: “The writing has flashes of concentrated strength that confirm that this is indeed the same Mamet who changed the American theater with ‘American Buffalo’ and ‘Glengarry Glen Ross.’”

Since we’re on the topic of theatre in LA, read Jerald Raymond Pierce’s report on the disastrous effects of California’s “gig economy” law on small theatre troupes: “They’re just not producing. They’re just not doing shows. They’re canceling their seasons or they’re doing one show instead of four shows.”

Mary Ann Lund revisits Renaissance melancholy: “Melancholy was the most pervasive and elusive of Renaissance diseases, and Robert Burton (1577-1640) its most dedicated, even obsessive, chronicler. His memorial stone on the wall of Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford is inscribed: ‘Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus, hic jacet Democritus Junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem Melancholia’ (which I translate as ‘Known to few, unknown to fewer, here lies Democritus Junior, to whom Melancholy gave life and death’). It is characteristic of the man that his final words are both mysterious and mischievous, concealing his real identity behind the pseudonym that made him famous. For it was as Democritus Junior that Burton published his only book, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).”

Leaving home to learn: “Emily Thomas is a distinguished academic philosopher who has ‘spent a lot of time by herself getting lost around the world’. Here she takes a trip to the wastes of Alaska and uses it to launch an extended meditation on a compelling question: what does it mean to travel? What is the significance of our urge to set off around the globe — not for trade, not to fight or conquer, but for its own sake? By narrowing her remit thus, Thomas begins in 17th-century Europe, with the restless spirit of the Enlightenment. So we have no Pytheas, no Odysseus, no Marco Polo, no Ibn Battuta. Travel in her specific sense began as the prodigal child of science. It was about investigation, learning, the compulsion to explain, to understand and systemise. On completing his formal education, Descartes left home to continue it at large: ‘Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth travelling.’”

The Sistine Chapel as it should be—lined with Raphael’s tapestries: “Standing in the chapel last week, I had the feeling that I was seeing something I would never see again: the Sistine Chapel not just as a complete work of art, but as a complete cultural artifact, restored to its Renaissance appearance for a fleeting moment.”

Essay of the Day:

Can free inquiry at American universities be saved? Bruce Gilley thinks so:

“As a political scientist, I take power seriously: I believe that change comes about through its use. Liberal commitments should not blind us to this blunt reality. Of course, as a good conservative, I am skeptical of improving projects. We should not exaggerate the harms of the dark age of higher education. But I think the balance of risks has changed. We are at a point where, even for a conservative who worries about unintended consequences, who is humble regarding his ignorance of how systems operate, who dislikes top-down planning, and who prefers gradualism and the status quo, it is worth experimenting cautiously with correctives to what I call a ‘market failure’ in higher education. Academia has been hijacked by political interests, and it can be returned to health only through the exercise of political power.”

Read the rest.

Photos: The purple mountains of Reykjavic

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