A Review of "Dorothy Parker in Hollywood" by Gail Crowther

 

Late in her life Dorothy Parker claimed during an interview that if she wrote a memoir—which she was loathe to do (and never did)—she would title it Mongrel. That’s the kind of telling, troubling nugget that writer, researcher, academic Gail Crowther unearths in her fascinating Dorothy Parker in Hollywood. Crowther set herself a tricky task, as Parker is both someone people tend to feel they know—heck, her poems might get recited from memory more than anyone’s, especially by those fond of martinis or mordant wit—but also don’t know at all. It’s easy to think of her as a relic of the Roaring 20s and the brilliance of the Algonquin and not even realized she didn’t pass away until 1967. It’s hard to imagine her listening to the Velvet Underground and hanging with Warhol.

Parker also lacks a dedicated archive, and very little exists of her drafts or letters or journals. A paucity of such materials just made Crowther digger harder and deeper, both finding many helpful sources from her friends and contemporary writing about her, but also using Parker’s work itself as a means to measure the woman. And a complicated one she was, for as Crowther puts it, “It is difficult to know whether it is better or worse that however rude Parker was to other people she was equally hard on herself.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on November 27, 2024.

A Bye to Barth

 

The easy joke would be to say that since I wrote a novel last November it killed off John Barth, but that’s too glib a line to honor a preternatural postmodernist who helped give contemporary fiction a big slap upside its lazy head in the late 20th century (along with others, sure, and I will get to one of them in a bit). But that photo above is the actual copy of Lost in the Funhouse I still own, the ninth printing of the paperback (as of 1980). One of the back cover quotes enthuses: “The reader has to dig. But the digging produces ore from one of the richest veins in American literature.” Turns out that was a review in Playboy. Yeah, times have changed.

Care to read the rest, then do so at California Review of Books.

A Review of "The World According to Joan Didion" by Evelyn McDonnell

 

You know you’re in great authorial hands when on page two of this book Evelyn McDonnell insists about her subject Joan Didion, “Narrative was her expertise and her enemy.” Not just a great insight, that line connects the dots between these two powerful women. McDonnell skillfully offers all the lessons she’s learned from years of reading, considering, and teaching (currently journalism at Loyola Marymount University) Didion. So both can wield a rapier thrust of a declarative, quick last sentence of a paragraph. For as McDonnell closes one graph, “For Didion, words were earned, not spent.” Indeed. 

 McDonnell, editor of Women Who Rock: Bessie to Beyoncé, Girl Groups to Riot Grrrl, is not attempting biography with The World According to Joan Didion, or even a literary biography, but something more attuned to her fascinating subject. It’s an examination of where Didion met the world on the page, read through a series of Didion totems that function as chapter titles, such as Gold, Notebook, Stingray, Jogger, Morgue, Orchid. For what better way to honor Didion than with a collection of essays?

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

The review was also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on March 21, 2024.

Me and Ventura High School Students

ECTV - George Yatchisin from CAPS Media on Vimeo.

Samin Nosrat on Fame, Food, and Writing

The James Beard Award–winning author and Netflix star Samin Nosrat needs no introduction. To call her thought- and taste-provoking. Salt Fat Acid Heat a cookbook is like saying Hamlet is a ghost story — except Shakespeare didn’t have such nifty infographics.

It’s our great fortune that she will be part of an UCSB Arts & Lectures virtual talk on Sunday, February 28, at 11 a.m. Moderated by Santa Barbara’s own restaurateur Sherry Villanueva, owner of The Lark, La Paloma, Loquita, and other hotspots, the chat also features Israeli-English author/chef Yotam Ottolenghi — remember when his book Plenty would be set dressing on television shows as a symbol that characters had hip taste?

Want to read the rest, then do so at the Independent's site.

And, yes, she's as warm and funny and self-deprecating and engaged as she seems on the Netflix show in real life, if a 35 minute phone interview is real life.

Toting the Gin Bottles Out after Midnight

Edward Albee's dead and the moment takes a certain tone of 20th century theater with him--a realism acid-bathed in just enough cynicism to make it shine all the more frightfully brightly. His passing has hit me more than I would have guessed it would, so I'm going to do something he never would and get all sentimental.

Way back when I was in college at Johns Hopkins I had numerous opportunities to meet famous writers--one of the advantages of being part of the Writing Seminars in a small school best known for its med school, you just didn't have too many other writerly people around hoping to hang with the stars. That meant getting to meet the likes of Borges and Barthelme and Edward Albee in small groups.

Luckily for me I was young enough not to quite grasp what meeting such people meant. In the case of Albee, this was the early '80s so he was in his "lost years," so to speak, and his glories of Virginia Woolf and Zoo Story happened back when I was still in diapers practically. He got to seem a bit of a living museum piece, even if he was only probably my age now. (Harumph.) Still, at the dinner before his talk on campus, he was urbane and droll and I can still see the twinkle of his eyes, as if the world was ever-enjoyable and devourable and something he could turn into drama.

At one point I recall us discussing much-beloved Dr. Richard Macksey, professor of Humanities. In addition to being a wonderful teacher, Macksey is independently wealthy. Albee commented on Macksey’s son arriving at his book signing with first editions of all of Albee’s plays. The talk moved on to Macksey’s wealth, for which we all offered opinions: inheritance, a scientific invention, and Albee’s refinement of the latter, that the good professor had invented the Macksey (sic) pad.

And to shift gears without benefit of a writerly clutch, here's what I wrote in 2005, after getting to see a powerful production of The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? at the Taper in Los Angeles. It seems as fitting an obit as I can offer.


They fought with their words, their bodies and their deeds
doin' the things that they want to
When they finished fighting, they exited the stage
doin' the things that they want to
I was firmly struck by the way they had behaved
doin' the things that they want to

--Lou Reed

We saw Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? this weekend, and it put me in mind of Lou Reed's take on Sam Sheppard, and the old joke, "Sure it's searing, but so's a microwave," and how nothing beats the shear lump-throating voyeurism of watching a couple go at it with everything at stake, whether in Macbeth or Albee's own Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage.

If you get a chance to see the play, do. So many questions it wrestles with, or it leaves you to wrestle with--what's so uncomfortable about it isn't a man in love with a goat but the blurt-like laughter the audience has to let out at the bitterest of invective (for just one instance, the line "Goat Fuckers Anonymous" seems hilarious in context), our only release as we wonder what love is and what its limits are, how much we are animals, how fragile a bulwark art is for anything, how much we want to tell stories we believe in, how much we can do if we think we can get away with it, how much we think we can get away with, period.

Without too much of a spoiler, the ending is about as devastating as theater can be, a tableau of Biblical, sacrificial, Greek tragic and Freudianly Oedipal power. And when there's power, there's always loss.

Don't Like It But I Guess I'm Learning

Funny, it turns out you have to write to blog. I've sort of had the write beat out of me of late for a variety of reasons and I'll share two. The first is there's an actual day job, and often it takes up the whole day. Worse, it takes up the brain for the rest of the non-work day, too, and the idea of sitting at the computer for a few more hours and actually thinking seems beyond my abilities. I do love keeping up with what you're all doing on FB, though, and my head is currently crammed with more baseball ephemera than a bricked building in upstate NY.

Second, there's I'm not the Food Editor at the Indy anymore. You see, there's writing and then there's journalism and only one of them's a business and the part that's a business makes decisions the writerly part might not always like. I'm still "there" (and that's the biggest issue, I wasn't, as I worked 99.999% remotely) as Food Writer, a title parallel to Arts Writer that's held by folks I heap-ton respect like DJ Palladino and Joe Woodard, but there's understanding things and there's ego and then there's my ego and then there's the desire to say nothing much at all. So sorry for the silence, as it's not like I've ever done this for the money, anyway (cause if I did I'd be even poorer than I am; parents, don't let your children grow up to be writers if they hope to make a living, and if J.K. Rowling's parents are reading this, here's hoping you sensed she was a miraculous non-muggle early on). Hope you all enjoyed The Foodies issue in the meantime (weird timing, no?), and that you played the parlor game "which blurbs were Matt's, which were George's?" Hint: look for the sentences with lots of parenths and dashes and dependent clauses. Guess me.

So, I hope to get writing again, because reason one will be letting up a bit after a brutal stretch (day job won't be pushing into nights and weekends anymore) and because reason two simply needs me to get past wallow and do what I have to do--write. (For those of you who actually know me and have had to deal with me not writing and therefore getting crankier bit by bit, all apologies.) I'm trying to look at this as a bit of a freeing moment, if nothing else: George Listens, Reads, Watches, Runs Very Slow Long Runs, as well as Eats, and so this blog could be a bit about anything from here on out, if you don't mind. I particularly want to write about Peter Gabriel at the Bowl the other night (hence the allusion to him in this post's title), the new Mountain Goats, there's David Byrne/St. Vincent this evening, and then there's that election looming, too. Hope you don't mind a bit of a ride.