By Stuart Mitchner
In an interview in this Sunday’s New York Times, the actor Ed Helms (The Office) says his favorite reading experience took place on the subway, clinging to a pole with one hand and reading Moby-Dick on his cell phone with the other. It’s a connection that might have amused Herman Melville, who was riding the elevated subway to and from his job as a customs inspector until his retirement in 1886, five years before his death. I wish he were around to write a response to D.H. Lawrence’s wildly conflicted tribute to the “deep great artist” who wrote Moby-Dick, “a very great book” that “commands a stillness in the soul, an awe” that Lawrence found hard to match with the author, a “rather tiresome New Englander” — “Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”
My guess is that besides savoring words of praise from a brilliant colleague, a man with Melville’s wonderfully inventive sense of humor would laugh at the “solemn ass,” and, if it were possible, post Lawrence a copy of his sketch “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” about “the loudest, longest, and most strangely musical crow that ever amazed mortal man…. a wise crow; an invincible crow; a philosophic crow; a crow of all crows.” more
On the night of October 15, 1956, viewers of I Love Lucy, the nation’s most popular television show, saw Lucille Ball and Orson Welles doing a scene from Romeo and Juliet. Welles has his doubts, but she’s been showering him with compliments, telling him he’s better than John Gielgud, Maurice Evans, Sir Ralph Richardson, and, after he prompts her, Laurence Olivier. Looking like an adult parody of her Peanuts namesake, Lucy delivers her jawbreaker of a line with outstretched arms, “What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night, so stumblest on my counsel?”
