Life, 1923-06-07 · page 17 of 44
Life — June 7, 1923 — page 17: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This satirical column by Montague Glass mocks contemporary literary and cultural trends through humorous anecdotes and observations. **Main targets:** 1. **Authors incorporating as businesses**: Glass jokes that writers like Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood formed limited-liability companies, satirizing both their pursuit of immortality and the absurdity of treating creative work as mere corporate machinery requiring board meetings. 2. **The bottom cartoon**: A beggar's witty retort to a wealthy lady. He argues that her charitable donations maintain jobs for people like him—a clever inversion suggesting the wealthy *need* the poor to justify their philanthropy and social standing. 3. **Literary criticism**: Glass mocks A. Edward Newton's Atlantic article about Gilbert and Sullivan, via a Mexico City shoeshine operator's letter. The joke: Newton credits Day & Martin (shoe polish makers) in his story, but the correspondent—an expert in shoe polish—knows Day & Martin made polish, not jam, undermining Newton's literary authority. The overall theme: intellectual pretension and the gap between appearance and reality in American cultural life.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
LIFE Broadcastings from the Literary Shop By Montague Glass ERHAPS when Mrs. Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mr. Avery Hopwood incorporated themselves as limited liability companies they were doing it only to insure immortality. Hereafter, an incorporated author will never die. Instead he will be reorganized, merged, wound-up, dissolved or forced into the hands of a re- ceiver. **e* Berore an incorporated author can get to work on a y or a play, he will be obliged to call himself to order, read the minutes of the last meeting, move and _ second their adoption as read, and then proceed to new business. *** Mr. Generoso Grazrapi0, proprietor of the shoe- black stand in the Hotel Regis, Mexico, D. F., writes to me as follows: “A. Edward Newton has an article in a recent Atlantic about Gilbert and Sullivan ch is approximately twenty per cent. Newton and ity per cent. Gilbert, and even the twenty per cent. isn't net. Mr. Newton tells a story in which Gilbert's dog trespasses on the land of one of the proprietors of a jam factory. Gilbert writes a letter to the jam manufacturer and apologizes for his dog poaching on the manufacturer’s preserves, and then Mr. New- Lady: No, I am sorry I can’t give you anything. ton winds up the story by saying that the manufac- turer of the jam was one of the firm of Day & Martin. This deducts at least 3.1416 per cent. from Mr. New- ton’s score, because Day & Martin to my personal knowledge manufactured shoe polish and not jam. I may not know much about literature or jam, but I’m certainly hell on blacking.” *** Art the recent -Biological Congress held in Gratz, Austria, it was resolved that the lowest form of ani- mal life is no longer the ameba, but the tortoise which provides tortoise shell for the rimmed spectacles worn by writers of advertising copy. eee A PROMINENT Chicago publisher announces that he is preparing for publication an anthology of burnt wood verse, now in great demand for use over large fieldstone fireplaces in the lounges of middle Western country clubs. xe PresipENT Harpinc recently made a speech in which he told how when he was editing the Marion (Ohio) Bugle,—correct me if it’s the Clarion —a man was arrested for riding a brake beam into town in (Continued on page 40) I am supporting too many charities already. Beggar: Well, mum, if it wasn’t fer the likes of me you'd be out of a job like I am. comicbooks.com