Distaff Laffs For Your Amusement And Betterment

Let's get right to it, shall we?

Sometimes people say to me "who is Dorothy Parker?"

Those people are wrong.

Dorothy Parker is THE BEST and is also THE BEST. If you like drinking and reading about people drinking and you enjoy laughing and reading about people drinking, then you enjoy Dorothy Parker.

There is nobody wittier and more full of vim and fizz than Ms. Parker save Oscar Wilde. You will run out of bookmarks, marking the funniest, cleverest passages and you will feel like someone dropped an alka-seltzer tablet into your brain.

The Portable Dorothy Parker collects all of her most important stories, poems, essays, theatre and book reviews (which are a howl), and letters in one paperback tome. For all but the scholar, this is all the Dorothy Parker you're likely to need and I recommend it as highly as I possibly can.

If you ever want to be the sort of person who can charm the Carole Lombards of this world, you had better get yourself a working familiarity with the works of Dorothy Parker (and an ascot, natch).

  

Fran Lebowitz is often compared to Dorothy Parker. This is probably because she is a woman, is funny, and has a certain cynical joie de vivre.

All of these comparisons are fair, but Fran Lebowitz is really her own animal. She's jokier than Dorothy Parker, for starters. Her writing shares more in common with the comedy essays of Woody Allen than with the satirical frothiness of Ms. Parker. Curiously, many of the selections in The Fran Lebowitz Reader, which collects her first two (and only) books, seem more dated (they were all written in the late 70s) than do the selections in The Portable Dorothy Parker. So, sometimes, whatever verve and archness that might have come lancing through the page thirty years ago seems somewhat dulled by the march of time or by the wash of irony that has covered everything.

But there are these moments of page-kissingly brilliant comedy writing that make the whole thing worthwhile. For example, in the book's very first piece, one of Ms. Lebowitz's many paeans to latesleeping (bless her!), the following:

"12:35 P.M. - The phone rings. I am not amused. This is not my favorite way to wake up. My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish."

Are you sold?

You ought to be. She's a damned national treasure.

10 Great Boring Things

1. Moby Dick (1851)



2. Lawrence Of Arabia (1962)



3. The Byzantine Empire (ca. 324 - 1453 C.E.)

4. Gustav Mahler's 5th Symphony (1904)



5. The Paintings of Mark Rothko

6. Vanilla



7. Helvetica

8.  Paradise Lost (1667)



9. Antarctica



10. Bread

Ægypt Becomes Egypt, But It's All Right

Finished Endless Things, the fourth and final part of John Crowley's Ægypt.

It is a strange little book, quite different in tone and structure and detail from the other three; it is almost more of a lengthy coda than a continuation of anything that came before.

In Dæmonamania, there was a climax (really, two climaxes) that had been earned and that was unexpected in shape and significance, but here there is the slow denouement of the story or of the world or of hermeticism or of youth or everything at all.

Without giving too much away, this is a book, not as those before, about the cusp of two things, but about the consequences of finding oneself on the other side of that cusp. Crowley treats that gently and humanely, as he always does, and a person of a certain age and certain settledness cannot help but find himself reflected here in ordinary triumphs and ordinary defeats, not to mention in the slow dilution of what once seemed magical or secret or rife with possibility and is now revealed to be a luxury of youth or worse - of aggressive naiveté.

What happens when the magic drains out of everything?

Well, you get on with life, for a start. And that is pretty good, too.

There is hardly a point to a review of this book, really. No one who hasn't read the other three would think of reading this one and no one who has read the other three will need to be convinced. So let me just say it like this:

I never had a book (a series of books) speak to me the way these have; I never felt so like myself reading these beautiful books. The sadness and sobriety of Endless Things feels as true and inevitable as marriage and mortgage and career and disappointment and, most importantly, as the revelation of unexpected, realer things.

So, you know, read them already so we can have something to talk about.

Me? I'm going to have to start them over again right away because I probably never missed so much in a book as I did in each of these that comprise Ægypt.

This Short Story Gives Me Delight

The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following

by Ramona Ausubel

(Found via the Paris Review)

Heaven is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens

I never read a book so fast in my life.

I only picked up the thing at 4:00 PM yesterday and I set it down, finished, no later than 12:45 AM.

And in between I stopped to have dinner, goof off on the web, and then watch television with Chiara for an hour or so.

When I was a teenager and had the chicken pox, I read all of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books over a three day lie in at home, but I've never had anything like that sort of reader's rapidity or endurance since.

I mean all of this as a compliment. Lost Horizon is a charming and affecting adventure story and that I devoured it as I did is a testament to how much fun it was to read.

I have this kind of goal - to read all of the classic adventure novels. And this is one of the real classics. Published in 1933, Lost Horizon invented and introduced to the world Shangri-La, the lamasery hidden in the Himalayas where one may find immortality and wisdom and peacefulness.

What I found so deeply charming about the mythical place and the protagonist of the book is how willing Hilton is to celebrate indolence, anomie, and insouciance. This novel is a fullthroated rebuttal to the very notion of the protestant work ethic; a downright celebration of procrastination and laziness.

Our hero, Conway, is made of the stuff one would expect from heroes - he's handsome and athletic, accomplished and brilliant. But he is also completely uninterested in success and has a midlevel consular job that he doesn't give two damns about. He isn't particularly amorous and doesn't get too worked up over right and wrong. He's like Allan Quatermain on Prozac. This is a hero I can get behind.

And the most remarkable thing, when considering how little time it took me to read the book, is how little actually happens in it. The opening chapters are replete with mystery and tension and high adventure and the closing chapter has an echo of that frenetic energy, but in between it is, quite literally, a book in which three or four not that interesting people sit around tables and chat.

And yet, you just barrel through the thing. Or anyway, I did. It is no wonder Shangri-La, based on the Hindu/Buddhist myth of Shambhala, should have passed so completely into our own mythology; it is a delightful idea, an Eden of the sort that those of us who do not admire asceticism can cling to, a heaven with sex and drinking and popular music.

Anyway, this "review" is already too long. This is a wonderful little book and you should read it.

Because I Am Denied the Supermoon:

I will have to settle for Italo Calvino, who understands how it is to be denied the moon.

The Daughters of the Moon

And, the Distance of the Moon: