"Their suggestion was slovenly. Also slipshod, slapdash, shoddy, and schlocky — and those are just the ‘s’s."

Said Stuart Silverstein, speaking of esses, who has proved that Dorothy Parker wrote some things published in Life Magazine in the 1920s and who doesn't want to simply stick this material at the end of the third edition of her book "Not Much Fun," as the publisher, Scribner, requested.

Quoted in a London Times piece that highlights its opinion that the stuff is bad: "What would you do for money? Dorothy Parker wrote bad poetry/Verses anonymously published in Life magazine in 1928 have been identified as the work of the American poet."

The four poems are all about a daring girl who goes for a ride in some fellow’s car and all are titled Maybe She Didn’t Have On Her Walking-Shoes. The last of them, and perhaps the best, is a limerick about a “young lady named Maude/Who drove out with a man in a Faude” and has the payoff line: “And everyone murmured ‘My Gaude!’”

How is that bad in some way that other Dorothy Parker things would not have to also be called bad?

"I have never met a nonbinary person who thinks that they/them pronouns are somehow exclusive to nonbinary or trans people."

"They are a way to opt out of the gender binary in third-person reference, and people may choose to do that for many reasons—gender-based, political, philosophical, even religious. One uses the pronouns someone requests because it is the courteous thing to do. It does not stop being the courteous thing to do because one disagrees with the person's reason for requesting them (at least so long as the request is made in good faith rather than as political trolling)."

Says a commenter to the NYT Ethicist column, "My Relative Isn’t Trans or Nonbinary But Wants to Use ‘They/Them’ Pronouns. The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on allyship and forms of solidarity" (NYT).

The Ethicist, Kwame Anthony Appiah, took a different position: "Using pronouns properly is a matter of not misgendering people. It isn’t part of a general policy of calling people whatever they want to be called.... [Y]our relative evidently identifies as cisgender and is motivated simply by allyship.... As the N.A.A.C.P. activist Rachel Dolezal notoriously failed to grasp, solidarity with a group does not grant you membership within it. Many will find the notion that you support people by appropriating their markers of identity to be passing strange."

"We were also puzzled by the way American waiters routinely congratulate you on your menu choice, rewarding you with 'Good choice,' 'Excellent' or even 'Awesome.' "

"You want fries with that? 'Awesome!'...  [O]n our way to Houston, we passed a roadside church whose huge hoarding exhorted us to 'Give Up Lust — Take Up Jesus.' I thought that sign might be my most abiding memory, until I’d spent a few hours at the Space Center Houston. I never guessed I’d be so riveted by topics like the geology of the moon and how NASA astronauts train underwater. But the cafeteria! It is astonishing, the best I’ve ever seen anywhere in a public building: brioche or sourdough sandwiches, homemade soups, hot roasts and grills, fresh tortillas, a salad bar to tempt the most die-hard carnivore, and no junk food in sight. It was a long way from the usual NASA fare of freeze-dried food in pouches and tubes...."

From "Prue Leith’s Great American Road Trip/The 'Great British Baking Show' judge steps out of the tent to sample the flavors of the U.S. on a 2,200-mile drive" (NYT).

"Searching for Rosebud, Auletta alights, for lack of better explanations, on the Weinstein brothers’ flame-haired and apparently flame-tempered mother, Miriam..."

"... (for whom their company was named, along with their milder father, Max, a diamond cutter who died of a heart attack at 52). A childhood friend told Auletta that Harvey referred to Miriam as 'Momma Portnoy,' after the shrill character in Philip Roth’s 'Portnoy’s Complaint.' [Harvey's brother] Bob, who somehow avoided growing into a 'beast,' as Harvey is repeatedly described here, allows for the possibility of Miriam’s frustration at her life’s limitations. 'She could have been Sheryl Sandberg or one of these C.E.O.s of a company. She had that kind of smarts,' he told Auletta. Instead, she proudly brought rugelach to her sons’ headquarters, and had an epitaph worthy of Dorothy Parker: 'I don’t like the atmosphere or the crowd.'"

From "‘Hollywood Ending,’ a Cradle-to-Jail Biography of Harvey Weinstein/Ken Auletta looks for Weinstein’s Rosebud in this dispiriting account of the former movie mogul’s life" by Alexandra Jacobs (NYT)(reviewing "HOLLYWOOD ENDING/Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence" by Ken Auletta).

"Alexander Skarsgård recently divulged that he believes he used to have trouble booking roles as a result of being extremely good-looking."

"In an interview with The Sunday Times, Skarsgård said that being 'tall and blond' (i.e., Swedish) may have gotten in the way of his career. 'I was on a stupid "sexy hunky hot list,"' he said, 'and then people didn’t take me seriously. If you want characters with depth but have been labeled "a dude who takes his shirt off," you’re not going to get those offers.' I’m sorry, what was that? A sexy hunky hot list? Is that a Google doc? And you’re telling me you … don’t want to be on it?"

From "Actor Bravely Admits to Being on ‘Sexy Hunky Hot List’" (NY Magazine). 

Ha ha. Made me think of Joey on "Friends" and the infamous "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful!" commercial. But also, more tragically, how badly Marilyn Monroe wanted to be thought of as a serious actress. 

Clearly, there is affirmative action for beautiful people. It's no wonder that the less beautiful look at them and develop theories about their lack of actual skill and depth.

Here's a line from Dorothy Parker that I just ran across in a book: "Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone."

"Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness."

"The letters and the conversations of the correct, as quoted by Mrs. Post, seem scarcely worth the striving for. The rules for the finding of topics of conversation fall damply on the spirit. 'You talk of something you have been doing or thinking about—planting a garden, planning a journey, contemplating a journey, or similar safe topics. Not at all a bad plan is to ask advice: "We want to motor through the South. Do you know about the roads?" Or, "I’m thinking of buying a radio. Which make do you think is best?"' I may not dispute Mrs. Post. If she says that is the way you should talk, then, indubitably, that is the way you should talk. But though it be at the cost of that future social success I am counting on, there is no force great enough ever to make me say, 'I’m thinking of buying a radio.'"

From "MRS. POST ENLARGES ON ETIQUETTE/A book of many rules" by Dorothy Parker, published December 24, 1927 in The New Yorker (and called attention to in email sent by The New Yorker this morning).

"As one delves deeper and deeper into 'Etiquette,' disquieting thoughts come. That old Is-It-Worth-It Blues starts up again, softly, perhaps, but plainly."

"I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them..."

"... as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being."

From "Martin Scorsese says Marvel movies ‘aren’t cinema,’ they’re ‘theme parks.'"

Of course, literally, these things are cinema. Scorsese is making a witticism in the tradition of Truman Capote's "That’s not writing, that’s typing" (disrespecting Jack Kerouac's "On the Road").

Did Capote actually say that? Here's Quote Investigator on the subject. Truman Capote used various versions of the witticism — against Kerouac and others:

Things to do with cigarettes.

I found this old ad...



... in the March 14, 1931 issue of The New Yorker... which I'm reading because I did the new New Yorker crossword puzzle and it made me want to read the bad review given to "The House on Pooh Corner" by (spoiler alert) Dorothy Parker.

Oh, those old boss-and-secretary cartoons! And who remembers Murad cigarettes? I know Murad as a brand of eyedrops — no, that's Murine — but Murad was a cigarette brand. And they had some fantastic color ads. Look here. Just one example pulled out at random:

"There is a whole literary subgenre now that trades in this sort of deferred pleasure – books with subtitles like 'My year of reading' or 'Unpacking my library' or..."

"... 'One hundred books I read in the bathtub during my sabbatical in the south of France.' When you read about someone working their way through their intended-to-impress reading list, it helps you to imagine that you too are capable of accomplishing such a feat. Often, these books involve either a man reading the Greek and Roman classics or a woman tackling the thick Victorian novels – canons both familiar and fusty enough to keep me from losing my mind with envy. Not so in the case of Sharp. Dear God, what a sexy reading list Michelle Dean has put together. Never have I seen so clearly that my dream version of myself – the person I always assumed I would grow up to be – is a drily witty, slightly abrasive woman in a black turtleneck whose end table is stacked high with yellowed paperback copies of lesser-known works by Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Hannah Arendt."

From "Smart for our own good" by Kristen Roupenian. You remember Kristen Roupenian, she of "Cat Person."* The book under review is "Sharp: The women who made an art of having an opinion."

Roupenian's "dream version" of herself — what she pictured as she was growing up — had a particular mode of conversation ("drily witty, slightly abrasive"), a specified item of clothing ("a black turtleneck"), and a visualizable pile of books ("yellowed paperback copies of lesser-known works by Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Hannah Arendt").

So what was your dream version of yourself? Even if you weren't, in your real youth, thinking in terms of a particular mode of conversation, a specified item or items of clothing and a visualizable pile of books, please play my little game. It's like Clue — Colonel Mustard in The Conservatory with the lead pipe.

Also, chez Meadhouse, we just had a long conversation about this:

Perhaps the finest moment in Sharp... is Dorothy Parker’s parodic takedown of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Rosalind rested her nineteen year-old elbows on her nineteen-year-old knees. All that you could see of her, above the polished sides of the nineteen-year-old bathtub, was her bobbed, curly hair and her disturbing gray eyes. A cigarette drooped lazily from the spoiled curves of her nineteen-year-old mouth.

Yes, Parker anticipated the recent, scathing Twitter thread “Describe yourself like a male author would” by almost a hundred years.

That's a great Twitter game. Maybe you won't play my "Dream Version" game because "Describe yourself like a male author would"** is too deliciously tempting. But my game is easier. Can't go wrong. How well do you think Dorothy Parker did at her parody? I thought the repetition of "nineteen year-old" was hilarious, but the really puzzling part is the point of view: "All that you could see of her" has a "you" standing somewhere, eyeing and judging the young woman, and "your" view was obscured by the side of the bathtub so that you could only see as far down her face as her eyes, and then in the next sentence, "you" could see her mouth. Is that Dorothy's lapse or is she skewering a foible of F. Scott's?

And here's Nora Ephron's parody of Ayn Rand:

Twenty-five years ago, Howard Roark laughed. Standing naked at the edge of a cliff, his face painted, his hair the colour of a bright orange rind, his body a composition of straight, clean lines and angles, each curve breaking into smooth, clean planes, Howard Roark laughed.

Hey: Describe yourself like a female author would. Another game.

Roupenian knocks "Sharp" as "essentially, of a series of positive reviews of well-respected writers":

[I]f everyone in your audience already agrees with what you’re saying in your essay, then writing it is a waste of time. In the case of Sharp, readers would have been pleasurably surprised to encounter the name of a writer whose inclusion felt even a little bit risky, even disagreeable: the aforementioned Ayn Rand, say, or Camille Paglia, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Roupenian uses words like "well-respected," "risky," and "agrees"/"disagreeable" to stand in for any mention of politics or ideology. Was that active sanitation or really the way Roupenian thinks (that is, like an artist***? The latter, I hope.

In this sense, Sharp is a book that hasn’t learnt the lesson it tries to impart. It is disconcerting to read a book that focuses on so many women who pushed intellectual boundaries, yet which stays so squarely within the confines of conventional wisdom when it comes to the writers it chooses to assess.

____________________

* Looking for a link about "Cat Person," I found, from last May, "Kristen Roupenian, author of Cat Person, is dating a woman." We got so excited about the story of a woman going through with having sex with a man when she didn't really want it. Roupenian said it was "strange to suddenly be the spokesperson for terrible straight sex."

** For a description of the origin of this meme, read "‘Describe Yourself Like a Male Author Would’ Is the Most Savage Twitter Thread in Ages/The challenge is a fierce indictment of what happens when you try to write a character you don’t respect or understand."

A male author is insisting that he is living proof that it's possible for a male author to write an authentic female protagonist.

Here's a quote from his first page. pic.twitter.com/f6d5bN2EHq

— Gwen C. Katz (@gwenckatz) March 30, 2018

*** I always quote Oscar Wilde for this proposition: "Views are held by those who are not artists." It gives loft to my own aversion to politics.

"One of the most entertaining searches you can do on Spotify is for Hitler: There are tons of songs."

"A band called The Buttplugs wrote one about Hitler’s nipples. There’s one by Antony & the Johnsons ('Hitler in My Heart'), and one by Faith No More ('Crack Hitler'). There’s the obligatory Mel Brooks number, plenty of punk, and a track by Bob Newhart. There’s a Churchill speech and a testimonial from an RAF Bomber, and the announcement of the Führer’s death on German radio. Under related artists, where you’d expect to find Hideki Tojo, Benito Mussolini, or maybe Himmler, you find Neville Chamberlain, Edward Kennedy, John Glenn, and Charles Lindbergh. Statistics aren’t the same as historians. Related Artists is actually a social network for people with extremely eccentric friends: You can get from Nazis to an album of Kurt Vonnegut reading Slaughterhouse-Five in a few clicks. Here’s how: Start with Hitler, and then go to Charles Lindbergh. Take a left at Franklin D. Roosevelt, a hard left at Studs Terkel, and an even harder left at Ward Churchill. Veer slightly right (but you’re really still going left) to Howard Zinn, then Angela Davis. Enter a tunnel until you hit Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Next you’re at Gertrude Stein, who is unexpectedly close to Dorothy Parker. Head right until you see Rudyard Kipling, and after that you can’t miss Vonnegut."

From "Other People’s Playlists/Spotify’s secret social network," by Paul Ford in The New Republic.