Miss Manners

Etiquette. By Emily Post. Copyright 1923 and signed inside the front cover in ink, in a loose cursive that same year: Robert H. Mucks. 625 W. 28th St. Los Angeles Cal. Three seventy-nine was the price, circa I don’t know what year. It was a gift on my birthday several years ago. When I was hanging out with a crowd that liked to give found gifts with comedic value. I suppose I came off as proper or well-mannered to them, so this thick tome of over prescribed manners was somehow appropriate. Despite the drunken episodes? The moustache party. The Mariner’s double header. The incident at the pool with the security guard? Anyway. The gift giver was the same person who upon greeting me in a bar once told me I looked like I had just come up from a sink full of water in a Noxema commercial. So I now have Emily Post on my bookshelf and, in fact, I quite like it and have read it with a serious interest on several occasions. Of course it is still a good party favor. I mean the chapter titles and subheadings are ridiculous: “Gentlemen and Bundles” and “Formal Service Without Man Servants” and come from a time of not only extreme ostentatiousness but also exploitation and inequality. Still, there is a level of detail and thoughtfulness that is compelling. I wish all my invitations came embossed on thick stationary. Today in the New York Times I found another strange practitioner of long-lost manners:

Henry Alford reminds us, as we apparently forgot, “how to live.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/opinion/10alford.html?_r=1&em&oref=slogin