"The Wild Party"

[fiefoe]

On Broadway, there are people who can both sing and dance; here we get Art Spiegelman, who can both draw and write. In the introduction to this 'lost classic' by Joseph Moncure March, his is a wry, confessional voice:

• It was the spine that grabbed me. I'm like a drunk who is as attracted to bottles and their labels as to the liquid within. ... Both (used bookstores and bars), though public, make room for feverish solitude and both allow unhealthy cravings to be filled to excess.
• Anyway, my fetishistic interest in the trappings led me to discover the poem itself. Joseph Moncure March's Wild Party is a hard-boiled, jazz-age tragedy told in syncopated rhyming couplets. It has the mnemonic tenacity, if not the wholesomeness, of a nursery rhyme.
• I confess to a powerful nostalgia for all decades that precede my birth. After all, we've already lived through each decade of the century at least twice. In this Postmodern moment we can see them all simultaneously - the austerity of the thirties, the Genocide of the forties,... while we plummet into the millennium, as if we were drowning and watching our past flash before us.
  
• March's perfectly pitched tone of bewildered innocence curdled into worldly cynicism
  

The introduction also relates a couple of cozy anecdotes: March and Reginald Marsh became friends while seated in alphabetical proximity at prep school; the book became a succès de scandale and got banned in Boston.

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Motor time: on a license plate of a Mercedes SUV in a homely shade of dark green - 'IMLATE'; on Route 2's exit 60 sign, somebody spray-painted under the number - 'ticktock'.