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unearths some literary gems.
I liked this piece:"Oratorical Platformation"https://archive.org/details/sim_vanity-fair_1916-08_6_6/page/46/mode/2up?view=theaterMore tidbits attached. "Lotta Miles" is, technically, left over from the last issue--but, heck, she'll probably show up again in September, so who's counting? The Judge magazine ad copy was funny to me because, hey, you name your periodical "Judge," then feel obliged to bend over backward explaining how nonjudgmental it is. And here's what I said about the Florence Nash portrait on Facebook:Please know that I'm not mocking anybody's "resting face" when I say that, given the sober, thoughtful expression in this nice portrait photo, the caption writer is inviting wisecracks. I might have revised it to "blessed with a genius for comedy [not shown]"; or maybe "blessed with a genius for very, very dry, deadpan, understated comedy, which, when you build up to it in the right way in a well-engineered context, can be highly amusing indeed." Looking at other photos of Nash from this earlier part of her career, she does generally look pretty deadpan. I can't find relevant film footage (the famous movie that she's in was from much later), but it would be interesting to see if she deadpanned through everything à la Buster Keaton. If she was famous enough as a deadpan comedian at the time this magazine came out (1916) that the audience would already be familiar with that personality, then maybe the caption writer did fine. It's not the caption writer's fault that, 100+ years later, I know who Keaton was but not who Nash was!
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