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Show mho o u)J4j!1 3hmhd about Tombstone Inscriptions. PHOENIX, ARIZ. Agentle-man Agentle-man took me sightseeing through a cemetery that abounded in proud mausoleums mauso-leums and stately shafts. I figured he wanted to show me that rich folks continue to enjoy the utmost luxury even after becoming deceased. de-ceased. How futile and how vain are most tombstone inscriptions. inscrip-tions. They give the dates of birth and death events in neither of which the departed had any say-so unless he committed suicide. r 1 And just as the av- Irvin s. Cobb erage graveside eulogy eu-logy is a belated plea for the defense, offered after the evidence is all in, so an epitaph is an advertisement for a line of goods which permanently perma-nently has been discontinued. Somehow this burying ground stuff reminds me of hired critics of other men's efforts. The difference between professional book reviewers review-ers and the other obituarians is that the latter do their work after you pass on, but the reviewers can't wait until you're dead to write your literary death notice for you. Maybe critics are to authors what fleas were to David Harum's dog; they keep authors from brooding on being authors. Catching Barracuda. LEO CARILLO is quite a yachtsman yachts-man when not acting for the screen or leading parades. He's our champion parade leader. It's got so they don't dare let a colored funeral fu-neral go past his house for fear he'll rush right out and head the procession. proces-sion. On one of those days when there wasn't a parade, he took Victor Moore and me out on his boat. We caught a mess of slim, yet fragrant fish. Leo called them barracuda, but, with their low retreating foreheads fore-heads and greedy jaws, they looked more like shyster lawyers to me the kind who chase ambulances and eventually get disbarred. Glad, Mad Artists. HERETOFORE, the glad, mad geniuses, who produce masterpieces master-pieces of sculpture and painting which resemble nothing on heaven, earth or in the waters below except possibly some bad dream which these parties had once while feeling feel-ing pretty bilious, have depended upon the ultra-ults among the intelligentsia intelli-gentsia for support. But now one hears divers millionaires million-aires may endow for them an academy aca-demy or a gallery or possibly it's an asylum for the more violent cases. Anyhow, there's money behind be-hind the cult, and when money gets behind a thing in this country, it usually flourishes, provided the money doesn't get too far behind, as happened in 1929, when the rest of the country was trying to figure out what had become of the deposits and investments, which we, of the sucker class, had entrusted to our leading financial wizards. Still, we of that same ignorant mass-group do not have to buy examples ex-amples of this new school. We don't even have to look at them unless we're in Germany and are escorted to the official state-run display by a regiment of Nazi storm-troopers. And, aside from their ideas of what constitutes art, it's said that some of the artists themselves are not really dangerous, merely annoying annoy-ing in an itchy sort of way. In other words, they're all right if you don't get one of 'em on you. Pugilistic Authors. T'M ALWAYS missing something. On the occasion of one really historic his-toric battle between a brace of distinguished dis-tinguished writers, I yawningly left the scene before Messrs. Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Drieser quit swapping hard words and started swapping soft blows. And it was just my luck to be out here recently when Ernest Hemingway Heming-way threw a book or maybe it was a publisher; anyhow some such hard, knobby object at Mr. Max Eastman and Mr. Eastman retorted retort-ed with a tremendous push which damaged Mr. Hemingway not at all. The typical writer, no matter how red-blooded his style may be, packs all his wallops in his pen and never in his fist. There have been exceptions. excep-tions. Once Rex Beach cleaned out a night club all by himself, but his opponents were hoodlums, not fellow-writers. He had something substantial sub-stantial to work on. Some of my belligerent brethren in the writing game never lose an argument, but, on the other hand, none of them ever won a Qght. Neither did their literary opponents. In fact, next to the average professional profes-sional pugilist, I can think of no one who, in the heat of combat, equals a writer for showing such magnificent magnifi-cent self-control when it comes either ei-ther to indicting personal injury or sustaining same. IKV1 S. COBB, WNU Service. |
