Which libretto are you looking at anyways?

As you may or may not know, I find ephemera fascinating. Like "ephemeral", "ephemera" comes from the Greek ephemer(os), meaning short-lived. Ephemera (singular is ephemeron, and now I'll stop with the dictionary stuff) is printed material that is meant to be transitory or disposable - advertisements, flyers, stage programs, things of that sort.

Saul Zalesch at LSU curates EphemeraStudies.org, a lovely collection of ephemera that makes my day just about every day because he sends out notifications almost every day when he adds new stuff.

Anyways, getting to the point... Today's cool thing was a booklet from Sarah Bernhardt's Last Visit to America tour in 1917. It made me think of a passage from Tom Robbins's Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas wherein the speaker was explaining to the protagonist that Sarah Bernhardt was 


"such a powerfully popular, awe-inspiring actress that when she toured in North America her performances invariably sold out, even though she spoke hardly a work of English. Whatever play she did, Shakespeare, Moliere, Marlowe , or whatever , she did in French, a language few nineteenth-century Americans could comprehend. Theatergoers were provided with librettos so that they might follow the action in English. Well, on at least a couple of occasions, ushers passed out the wrong libretto, a text for an entirely different drama than the one that was being staged."


And goes on to compare contemporary society's view of the world as "using the wrong libretto."


I'm not citing Tom Robbins as a great thinker or anything, because I'm not one of those who think he is (although I do like the way he plays with language) I'm just saying that this is what came to mind when I saw the Sarah Bernhardt booklet. I didn't actually even remember it right - as I remembered the passage, it related much more to my own current situation of life bizarreness in that it wasn't that all of humanity was being handed the wrong libretto in terms of the media we are given and told to believe, as Robbins says, but that we were all reading off of different librettos, and that was why nothing made sense.


Anyways, it piqued my overly developed need to determine what can and cannot be termed "factual" so I started just quickly cruising the Web looking to see if the ushers did, in fact, hand out the "wrong libretto." What I found was so much more gratifying. No evidence at all of the ushers screwing up, but a whole bunch of people citing Tom Robbins, believing without verification that the ushers handed out the wrong libretto, and based "deep" life arguments on this. Just as Robbins said we do with the Bible and everything else that's handed to us.


As self-gratifying as that sounds (and it was gratifying, because the people quoting him came across as a bunch of self-congratulating idiots who were willing to swallow whole whatever piece of pop-philosophy came their way), it is part of a larger problem with people and our propensity to believe what we read. Combine that with the Internet and it becomes terrifying. Saturday morning, D. and I were watching some conspiracy theory "documentary" about how the U.S. government is trying to control the world. Because it's not most of the way there already. All of the guys presenting their theories were saying they "saw it on the Internet" or "there's a website that says" or "I can't tell you who told me and I can't produce any evidence but this is what I'm saying so it's real." And people believe this stuff because other people say it and it's convenient to believe.


It'll be interesting to see how this goes down in the next election, given that anyone can say anything without any supporting documentation and some group of people out there will believe them.


"We all know what you're thinking, but it's OK. We like you anyways."

Old people rocking out...

I like it when it's a bit too cold for most people to roll down their windows while they're driving, cause I can roll mine down and rock out without people looking at me funny. Sort of my very much more repressed version of singing in the grocery store cart when I was four.

There are circuses and then there are circuses...

Leaving work today, talking the big budgetary will they/won't they with Jessamyn Modrak and Renee Brown Corbino, I made a snide comment about how I watch a circus every day. Media circus, that is. Not five minutes later I saw a dwarf standing on the corner with a really tall, thin man in a ten gallon hat. And the universe reverberated with laughter at it's own pun. :)