Posted 9:36 PM by Gene

Not to bring this up again but last week we mentioned Rudy Vallée. Who is this generation's Vallée -- dubious sex symbol today, hoary joke tomorrow? There are too many candidates but top of our list is JUSTIN; and this is unfair to Vallée as he could sing. We can't imagine his career would last forty years, but after the hacks all bets must be off. Next up is Robert Tayl -- PATTINSON, and Vallée was definitely better looking. There are other comparisons with his day; a certain tiresome LADY we'd liken unfavorably to Theda Bara. Maybe KATY would be Clara Bow but the problem here is she was effortlessly cute -- and you don't hear of her either. (We might say Louise Brooks but that's an insult -- to Brooks.)

And further on the topic Yahoo!'s run another of those irritating ads whose sole purpose is to rub someone's excessive show-biz luck in our faces while getting its author a studio job. Which reminds us that though we now speak of sequels the movee biz has retreated to the kind of serial programmers common in the forties -- The Great Gildersleeve, the Mexican Spitfire and Blondie. The problem is, they were B pictures. So are ROWLINGCORP's and MEYERDOM's, and we doubt people will bathe them in nostalgia in another half-century either, no matter JEFF BEWKES's immortality.

Which brings us to another star of the Twenties, and the Library of America. The publisher of PHILIP K. DICK!!!!! has actually seen fit to run a Mencken anthology -- and Perfesser Shafer has reviewed it, in a way that might not please certain Web denizens:

Mencken completists—myself very much among them—are celebrating the return of all six Prejudices to print by a publisher that will likely keep them there. But sometimes scarcity trumps a surfeit—as Mencken himself believed. In the Sixth Series, he writes that Ambrose Bierce, a writer he hugely favored, "did a serious disservice to himself when he put those twelve volumes [of his collected works] together." By Mencken's reckoning, nobody but a fanatic had ever cracked all twelve, and Bierce should have boiled his anthology down to four or six volumes, maybe even fewer. There was a problem with too much Bierce, Mencken writes: "The result was a depressing assemblage of worn-out and fly-blown stuff, much of it quite unreadable. . . . [H]is good work is lost in a morass of bad and indifferent work . . . filled with epigrams against frauds long dead and forgotten, and echoes of old and puerile newspaper controversies."

Yes, the Menck just described blogging.