Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A melody of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania
-Excerpt from Not So Deep as a Well by Dorothy Parker
Jessica Alba is pretty and will love me forever,
PSYCHE! Hahaha. You fell for that? Moron.
-Excerpt from RACISM IS EVIL by Steve Winwood
Now, I will leave the poem parsing to Teacherman who is much more well equipped for such things than I, but I like to imagine that Dorothy Parker's PSYCHE in this poem is focused on its "love can never go wrong" line rather than the two "glorious cycle of song" lines above. No blindoptimismo. Ok, maybe I'm being a tad blindly optimistic. As an aficionado of whimsy and music lover I think that calling life "a melody extemporanea" is just the most perfect thing.
Speaking of songs (this is MY column I will segue as poorly as I choose to) I hope everyone reading this has been listening to the new Decemberists album The King is Dead. It is truly wonderful and (thanks to contributions from Peter Buck) feels like a jangly upbeat mash-up of Decemberists and early REM. I drove from San Francisco to LA last weekend and, minus three hours spent with Jane Austen, I listened to King exclusively the entire ride. Great album and locked-in association with a truly wonderful night with good friends? Let's just go ahead and assume this album and I are in it for the long-haul together. The other album you should all be exploring these days is SuperGlue's "snow rain sludge ice cream" mix. It's stupidly good and kind of makes me hate myself for not knowing more of the tunes before this weekend. I kind of really resent SuperGlue, you guys. Go download it from DS3M's dropbox RIGHT NOW!
And so on with some more funnies from my friend and yours, Dorothy Parker. Pick up a copy of "The Portable Dorothy Parker" at your local bookstore. At 640 pages it's not quite as portable as you might hope but it is worth it's considerable weight in LOLs. I love Dorothy Parker the caustic bitch that she was. Fuck you, Joe McCarthy.
- From Song of the Shirt "Her big heart did not, as is so sadly often the case, inhabit a big bosom. Mrs. Martindale's breasts were admirable, delicate yet firm, pointing one to the right, one to the left; angry at each other, as the Russians have it."
- After a thorough thrashing of Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans "I must say, though, for The Subterraneans that it is brought out by the Grove Press in a most pleasing form - a small book with excellent print and paper, and hard covers, though not of cloth. I hope they will do many."
- A poem "Some men break your heart in two / Some men fawn and flatter / Some men never look at you; / And that cleans up the matter."
- In a 1933 review of Katharine Hepburn in the play 'The Lake' "She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.”
- Regarding a certain New York socialite “The affair between Margot Asquinth and Margot Asquinth will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.”
"There is no such hour on the present clock as 6:30, New York time. Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night."
ReplyDeleteProbably my most favorite quote of hers and one I quote quite often when friends and colleagues start getting the New York Blues. (A phenomenon that happens to every NY'er at least once when the city has all but kicked the stuffing out of you, usually in the period of 24 hours, and you just want to pack it up and leave. The you see something amazing that you'd only see in NYC and you find yourself back on track.)
I work right next to the Algonquin Hotel and walk by it every day. I don't feel a connection to a lot of places, but in my final steps to the office I find myself daydreaming about what it would be like to sit around a table with some of my most intelligent friends, trading withering, pithy bot mots.**
**Of course, as I write this, I realize that this is basically Videogum.
"That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them." -- Dorothy Parker, Original Monster
I love Dorothy Parker, Kel, and I love you for loving her. I think my favorite quote of hers is "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
ReplyDeleteUm....not that I have ever felt that way, of course, of course.
Awesome post, Kel. KUTGW! Acronyms!
ReplyDelete(1) I saw this when it came out and would be sort of afraid to see it now; and (2) it would depend on your tolerance level for about eleven completely different things, but "Mrs Parker & The Vicious Circle" might be a good movie for people to watch?
ReplyDeleteLBT I WAS GOING TO COMMENT WITH THAT EXACT QUOTATION OF DOROTHY PARKER TALKING ABOUT ATLAS SHRUGGED BUT THEN YOU ALREADY DID.
ReplyDelete-ASM