Tag: John Barrymore

I readily admit to having a thing about anniversaries, however obscure.  They are an invitation to catch up with whatever I missed first time round, especially if I was not around at the time.  The century marker in particular offers an opportunity—or a pretext, if ever I needed one—to dwell on bygone media events and the popular culture of yore, traces of which I sample in a twenty-first century context and, more narrowly, from the perspective of my own experience.

For quite some time now I have been browsing vintage US American periodicals ranging from Radio Broadcast to Vanity Fair in search of materials ripe for centenary processing.  Seriously dated though my selections inevitably are, I am more intrigued by resonance than I am concerned with variance, let alone obsolescence.

That is to say, even at the risk of presentism, I am drawn to the relatable—and am committed to relating—instead of concentrating on what makes the past so unalike from the present as to appear entirely and solely of its time.  Context need not be confinement, just as difference does not have to spell distance. 

Declaring something “past” assists in creating an air of critical detachment.  It fosters an attitude of authorial but nonetheless assumptive command over a given subject, a superciliousness that, like an eyebrow hovering prominently above the inspecting eye draws—or should draw—attention to the viewpoint of the writer whose imperiousness gainsays any claims to objectivity.

In my own catchings-up with the presumably out-of-date, I resist assuming an authoritative posture or persona.  All the while, I am aware of—and aim to foreground—my queer biases and spectatorial limitations as an absent witness or indirect observer.  

Far from clinical, the choosing of a subject matter and the manner in which we approach it reveal personality, whether the self at work is acknowledged or not.  Whenever we put our name to them, our published words proclaim “I wrote this”—unless, as is increasingly the case in a grim reality inconceivable to those living in 1926—they hush up, however vainly, that “AI wrote this.”

Despite obvious differences, both technological and social, in the ways in which we communicate and consume—how we take in and dole out prose for public consumption—the question of the “I” in journalistic writing, be it as a peek-a-boo tease between the lines or as a treatise writ large, continues to raise itself, to this day, even—or especially—as distinctions between fact and fiction, news and commentary, intelligence and artificiality have become all but erased.  Brave New World, indeed, this domain of public discourse.  

For that reason alone, Aldous Huxley’s “The Present Fad of Self Confession,” published in Vanity Fair in May 1926—coincidental with the author’s first visit to Hollywood—struck me as worth revisiting one hundred years later, at a moment in time when I question my own willingness to give so freely of myself in projects such as Retroactive Selfies, currently all but shelved on Instagram, and the visual narrative Envelope that I have proposed for display in a local gallery.

Continue reading ““The Present Fad of Self Confession” (1926): Aldous Huxley and the Paper “monster of spiritual impudicity””