Wow.  My popularity is up over 500%.  Hey, baby, that’s a Huge Effect Size.  Lots more than Global Warming.  There must be a Michelle Pfeiffer film festival somewhere this week.

I’d like to thank my public for their renewed interest in my movie work.  When I finish my career as a famous writer, I may return to the screen although my first love is the boards.  You might remember me from “Arsenic and Old Lace.”  I played Dr. Einstein (the part that Peter Lorre butchered in the movie version).  Here’s a rehearsal shot to refresh your memory.

I have no idea why there’s teddy bear in my arm.  True, I did refuse to work with children or animals (a Rule of Show Business), but there are no children or animals in the play.  Perhaps the leading lady was throwing a fit that night and we were using a stand-in with some talent in her stead?  More likely I had my lines scribbled across the bear’s face.

. . . Slowly I turned . . . step by step . . . inch by inch . . .

Five, six, seven, eight!

The fabulous English essayist, William Hazlitt, coined up Ultracrepidarian in an impassioned counterattack essay he wrote defending his honor against his tormentor, William Gifford.  Gifford hated Hazlitt largely for political reasons which led Gifford to make nasty accusations that were both ignorant and stupid, but pleasing to Gifford’s philosophical allies.  Hazlitt spotlighted Gifford’s foolishness in a long, detailed reply artfully compressed in one word:  Ultracrepidarian.

According to the ever reliable Wikipedia, the derivation for Ultracrepidarian resides in the Ancient Roman writer, Pliny, who recounted a perfect and thus probably apocryphal tale about an even more Ancient Greek artist, Apelles, and his unnamed shoemaker over the quality of the artist’s work that terminates with the punch line:  “Ne sutor ultra crepidam”

Unfortunately, I did not take Latin in high school and worse still, Google Translator does not offer Latin as one of its dozens of language options (how is this possible, Google?), thus, I must rely on the Wikipedia writer who asserts the English translation to our punch line as:

A shoemaker ought not to judge beyond his own soles.

Which is a delightful way of describing someone who says more than he knows.

P.S. If you’ve never read Hazlitt, give him a look.  He’s as great a critic as Samuel Johnson and Hazlitt’s insights into Shakespeare are bright, unique, and thoughtful.  Plus, Hazlitt helped invent the role of “public intellectual” with all its beauty and blemish.  Check Hazlitt’s work at Gutenberg or the Internet Archive, particularly Table Talk and Round Table.

P.P.S.  Hazlitt fought FauxItAlls his entire life – isn’t that the War for All Public Intellectuals – and also employed another FauxItAll synonym.  How about this one:  Sciolist?  The Free Dictionary offers . . . ” A pretentious attitude of scholarship; superficial knowledgeability” as a definition.

Miller enjoyed a long and successful life as a music producer and impresario of great renown.  Most notably, he understood the Rules of Persuasion.  You might recall an earlier post . . .

“Emotion never makes you a hit,” he said.  “I always tell this to singers:  Emotion is not something you feel.  It’s something you make the listener feel.  And you have to be very cool and know what you’re doing.”

Miller learned early on that, It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid, and rode that rocket to the top of the charts many times with many different artists demonstrating the generality of the Rule and his great skill.

Let’s sing-a-long one more time.

Remember:  All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere!

. . . the screenplay of The Iron Lady depicts Baroness Thatcher as an elderly dementia-sufferer looking back on her career with sadness. She is shown talking to herself and unaware that her husband, Sir Denis Thatcher, has died.

Cameron McCracken who is a major creative force behind the movie notes

. . . Lady Thatcher’s health will be featured, but insists that it will be “treated with appropriate sensitivity”.  He adds of the film: “Although fictional, it will be fair and accurate.”

This echos, of course, Dan Rather’s infamous line, “Fake, but Accurate” when describing on his CBS News broadcast the fake documents about President George W. Bush’s military service.  Rather got fired for his unpersuasive sincerity.  But, at least Rather meant what he said which is why it was unpersuasive.

But, what about “Fictional, but Accurate?”  It sounds like most artful MovieSpeak.

Twain dictated his autobiography during the last four years of his life, then arranged it as a book.  He, however, left explicit directives for the publication of his life story.

“From the first, second, third and fourth editions all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out,” Twain instructed them in 1906.  “There may be a market for that kind of wares a century from now.  There is no hurry.  Wait and see.”

At the risk of stupendous simplification, when Twain says to cut “. . . expressions of opinion . . .” he is saying to cut the Sincerity.  Both as poetry and persuasion, Twain understands that sincere expression is bad art and worse rhetoric.  And, as described in the NYT review, one should admire Twain’s restraint in sharing his sincere opinions.

He notes of his youth that “In my schoolboy days, I had no aversion to slavery.  I was not aware there was anything wrong about it.”  He hates the military and views soldiers in the then contemporary wars in Cuba and the Philippines as “uniformed assassins.”  He despises the Rockefellers and robber barons for their low tax bills.  The Times reviewer also observes that, “He complains about his lawyer, his publisher, the inventor of a failed typesetting machine who he feels fleeced him, and is especially hard on a countess who owns the villa in which he lived with his family in Florence, Italy, in 1904.”  And, critics?

“I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value,” Twain writes. “However, let it go,” he adds. “It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.”

Considered in brief, Twain’s opinions are categorically just like mine and yours – all our own and best left out of the marketplace if you aim at poetry or persuasion.