Glamourful

Like many other of the vague and glamourful conceptions of the Orient, this one is rather dissipated by close scrutiny.

“Women seem to think it is more noble to vote or to join clubs or to throw off the ‘yoke’ of common home duties. City life, with its cramped living quarters, its delicatessen shops which free them from cooking, its glamourful entertainments, its tempting hotel ease, its restricted play places for children as an excuse against having them in the home and the absence of the home atmosphere which a house and yard all create all help stifle, if not smother, the home spirit.”

A montage charting the Curies’ extraction of radium from pitch-blende in Madame Curie and a montage of Jolson’s accelerating career expressed by speeding trains and visited towns as he sings in The Jolson Story (Alfred E. Green, 1946) may both at the level of narrative function compress time and events, but their emotional, connotative meanings are distinct, one imbued with minute calculation and dogged reiteration, the other with glamourful eupeptic thrust, and while both embody the ‘teleology of fame’ (Custen 1992: 186), to wholly dissolve into an undifferentiated light both the ghostly glow of the researchers’ radium and the lights of Broadway is to lose too much.