Mike Mariano

I found this Enemy of the People review yesterday when searching for news of Arthur Miller. The critic, Joe Adcock of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, speculates what may happen after the curtain falls on Ibsen’s play:

Dr. Stockman’s [sic] story is pretty bleak. But there’s always the grim consolation that the truth will come out. Facts are facts.

Next summer health-seekers will get sick, rumors will fly, businesses will be ruined, the insufferably pompous Mayor Peter Stockman will somehow come to a bad end, citizens will repent and the crusading doctor will say, grandiosely, “I told you so!”

Isn’t even that epilogue too idealistic? I think these Norwegians can keep this scam going for a long time. Typhoid? Infusoria? It’s the tourists’ own fault for not preparing themselves properly for the Baths. Dr. Stockmann’s stories are merely fodder for liberal trial lawyers.

I think there may be a one-act play in this. Let me add it to the list.

Hey, Village Voice! After your retrospective of Richard Foreman’s work and Michael Feingold’s enraptured review of The Gods Are Pounding My Head (AKA Lumberjack Messiah), could you possibly have anything left to say about Foreman?

I suppose you don’t; that’s why you brought in graduate students to contribute five additional reviews of the play. Talk about pounding heads.

If you think these new reviews won’t nudge you towards Foreman’s production any more than Feingold’s review a month ago, you’re right. However apathetic I may be, though, I have a small, insistent feeling that seeing The Gods may be useful to me. It’s because of Dean.

Dean claims to have seen Foreman’s Pearls For Pigs years ago in Connecticut. He was delighted by the weird, unpleasant theatre experience, the people walking out during intermission, and the incomprehensibility of the production. He recalled few details (not even Foreman’s name), but would often bring Pearls For Pigs up in conversation. “We need to do a play like that!” he’d say, frequently. We needed to write a plotless, difficult play just for the sake of writing it.

But I wasn’t interested. After a while I doubted that Pearls For Pigs even existed outside of Dean’s imagination. That was until I read the Voice’s retrospective.

Will seeing an artist that doesn’t appeal to me cause me to discover what appeals to Dean? Possibly. Do I care? Hmmm….

PS:I think it’s great that the Voice gives a high-profile forum to up-and-coming drama critics, but the very existence of “University Wits” can’t help but remind me of my time as an eleven-year-old “Young Reader” for The Asbury Park Press. It’s hard to convey the authority of your opinion while sitting at the kids’ table.

New to the site: The Claverings, by Anthony Trollope.

What’s this? A serialized novel from 1866? What happened to all of my twenty-first century sexual obscenities?

I haven’t changed genres, don’t worry. But I have spent portions of the last few months creating an HTML version of Trollope’s novel The Claverings. Although you can find plenty of Trollope on the Internet, up until now The Claverings was only online as an Amazon.com backorder or as scanned magazine pages at Cornell University’s Making of America project.

I found out about Making of America from an essay about Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener on Paul Ford’s website. Ford was amazed to see a landmark short story in the context of its first publication. I wanted to find classics that Project Gutenberg may have missed.

A New Yorker article about writer’s block turned me on to Anthony Trollope. I searched the online library and Google for a work the former had and the latter was unaware of. I found The Claverings serialized in three volumes of The Galaxy.

I began by copying the scanned pages of the novel in “View As Text” mode, one-by-one. Once I had all the text (in separate files per issue), I began to mark up the novel manually as HTML, correcting errors from the scanning as I went along. I also consulted the library’s image scans liberally while proofreading. Finally I divided the novel up by chapter instead of by issue number. And now The Claverings is on my site.

What’s next? There are probably typos and HTML errors in the novel, and the original serial had pictures which I left out, but which could easily go back in. I also have not created a plain-text version of The Claverings, which I believe is required if the novel is to appear on Project Gutenberg. But making a plain-text Claverings is beyond me. You see the plain text plays on this site? I am putting hard returns on each line to make the text readable. Doing that to a 52 chapter novel would take ages.

But The Claverings is up for grabs. Take it, change the format, add the pictures, and do what you’d like to it. And read it! It’s an enjoyable comic romance with a hilariously spineless hero.

And then go further. Find another work from Making of America, dust it off and show it to a new century. Paul Ford inspired me; I want you to look at our history from when it was current events and bring back something worthwhile.

PS: Judging by Monday’s entry on Harpers.org, Ford continues to visit the Making of America library. Although I can’t link to it, you can search for the original Harpers entry yourself; go ahead. The cartoon seems to have been just as bizarre and without context in 1885 as it was this week, but there the cartoon’s title was the less awkward “Our Cat Eats Rat Poison”. A new typo for the ages?

PPS: My makeshift stylesheet for The Claverings is heavily in debt to Steve Thomas and his stylesheet for the works at Adelaide University’s collection of Web books. I find this site to be quite a bit more enjoyable than Project Gutenberg, but I may only be hypnotized by pretty hypertext.