Golly, I'm as reluctant to do this blog as I was to sit down and read this book once I got to know Dorothy better. While I did use some of the time since the last post to get through a lot of Cornell's biography, there just isn't the zingers and humors that I expected in this fresh hell.
Dorothy's alcoholism, sense of entitlement, and overall laziness created her self-made inferno. An alcoholic reading this book would be sorely tempted to guzzle bottles of bootleg gin and eventually legal scotch to get through it. It is a story about someone would couldn't write. (Finally on page 400, when Meade gets to 1964, "For the first time in her life, she had a legitimate pretext to avoid writing, 'I can't use the typewriter,' she announced with the triumph of a person who has spent fifty years seeking such an excuse."
Perhaps, like me, you are under the impression that she was a gifted and honored critic and poet. Because Ms Meade does not quote long sections of Parker's short stories, the book contains only publicly recorded quips from the Algonquin round table or quotes from her doggerel verse.
Assuming the book would read like a "you were there" at the round table, the biography noticeably lags as Parker travels abroad, moves to Hollywood, buys a farm in rural Pennsylvania, directing her sarcasm to outright abuse of her two husbands, both of whom she drove into World Wars and both of whom she found attractive primarily as drinking partners.
I don't remember Parker being a significant part of the book I read about Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman but in this biography their love/hate relationship, as well as their association with the film industry's flirtation with fronts for the Communist Party goes on too long. Hellman, who went on to be the executor of Parker's measly estate which she willed to the NAACP, observed "that Dorothy's hunger for love and admiration, a craving that led to intense self-loathing, could only be released by the most violent behind the back denunciations."
After a section in the book that details how all of the round table died young, most before 60, from alcohol related illnesses, Meade recounts a plot line of a play Parker wanted to write about Mary and Charles Lamb "and their friends, a collection of manic-depressive Bohemians that included Coleridge and a hopped-up DeQuincy ...all her characters had comforting habits -- opium, laudanum, brandy, homicide -- that she understood and respected." She must have concluded they were all reincarnated to lunch at the Algonquin..
And in my quest to connect all the biographies together or at least to ferret out some remote link to myself and my surroundings, two points (1) she spent two unproductive months at Yaddo pretending to be sick and not coming out of her room; and (2) she played Botticelli with of all people Zero Mostel. Botticelli is real! not a faint wisp of a memory from 1968, Purchase NY.
Finally, since I chose the book for snippets of her repartee, I would be remiss to not acknowledge that I did come away with one quote I hadn't heard before but wished I had: "Wasn't the Yale prom wonderful? If all the girls in attendance were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised."
Friday, December 25, 2015
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
S: Bud Shaw, M.D. -- Last Night in the OR
Here is another memoir, sort of like D V, sort of like the Boy Kings of Texas, recalling days and events. But Dr Shaw is more like Domingo Martinez than Diana Vreeland. Bud is king of the OR, not the barrio, but with as much if not more machismo. But it is his family, their dreadfully poor health and his own anxiety attacks that knock you back on your heels to conclude that surgeons go through life like us all despite their mystique.
I have some emotional obligation to read about healthcare given my most recent assignments. I encourage my team to read Five Days at Memorial, not just to learn about natural disaster response, but to read about the superhuman efforts people can do when they have to. Dr Shaw was marked both genetically and emotionally to become a physician: his father was a small town doctor/surgeon and his mother died young from lung cancer. He relates so much about his family's encounters with illnesses: his father's final years under hospice care; his daughter's near-death from MRSA; his own botulism during med school. And he expertly balances (wonder if he is a Libra) the superpowers and enormous egos of the transplant surgeons against the gnawing realities of debilitating, deadly diseases. I think the balance tips to the diseases.
And that makes the memoir so riveting. Shaw is not a god-doctor; he is a man, with a family. A man who jumps off cliffs to hang glide; a man who goes through a bad divorce; a man who watches his surgeon father struggle to open the cellophane around a package of crackers. But a trained and devoted person who sits with his patients' families, who teaches his skills to new residents, who, best of all, always expects the worst thing that could happen will happen post-op, before anyone else notices a symptom.
This really was not the book to read over the past couple of days when a bad blood count turned into gall bladder problems for my husband who will soon need surgery. He is starting to look like our kids old Operation game. Hopefully, this can be put off until spring as no pain has set in yet.
While between paragraphs in this blog entry, I searched to see if I could find Dr Shaw's birth date (couldn't) and ended up watching a video on one of his surgeries. It just couldn't have been real ... there was no blood on any of the team or the floor and the patient initially was conscious enough to squeeze his hand. The film did show a big liver going into an even bigger hold in the torso of some person. How could you not feel like a god.
PS It continues to happen. Dr Shaw while working one summer in Yellowstone Park's small clinic encounters a patient from Queens who lives on Utopia Parkway, the title of my next biography for Joseph Cornell
I have some emotional obligation to read about healthcare given my most recent assignments. I encourage my team to read Five Days at Memorial, not just to learn about natural disaster response, but to read about the superhuman efforts people can do when they have to. Dr Shaw was marked both genetically and emotionally to become a physician: his father was a small town doctor/surgeon and his mother died young from lung cancer. He relates so much about his family's encounters with illnesses: his father's final years under hospice care; his daughter's near-death from MRSA; his own botulism during med school. And he expertly balances (wonder if he is a Libra) the superpowers and enormous egos of the transplant surgeons against the gnawing realities of debilitating, deadly diseases. I think the balance tips to the diseases.
And that makes the memoir so riveting. Shaw is not a god-doctor; he is a man, with a family. A man who jumps off cliffs to hang glide; a man who goes through a bad divorce; a man who watches his surgeon father struggle to open the cellophane around a package of crackers. But a trained and devoted person who sits with his patients' families, who teaches his skills to new residents, who, best of all, always expects the worst thing that could happen will happen post-op, before anyone else notices a symptom.
This really was not the book to read over the past couple of days when a bad blood count turned into gall bladder problems for my husband who will soon need surgery. He is starting to look like our kids old Operation game. Hopefully, this can be put off until spring as no pain has set in yet.
While between paragraphs in this blog entry, I searched to see if I could find Dr Shaw's birth date (couldn't) and ended up watching a video on one of his surgeries. It just couldn't have been real ... there was no blood on any of the team or the floor and the patient initially was conscious enough to squeeze his hand. The film did show a big liver going into an even bigger hold in the torso of some person. How could you not feel like a god.
PS It continues to happen. Dr Shaw while working one summer in Yellowstone Park's small clinic encounters a patient from Queens who lives on Utopia Parkway, the title of my next biography for Joseph Cornell
Sunday, December 6, 2015
Reprise: 2016 Will Be Another Year of Biographies
What this woman lacks is discipline. I obviously am capable of doing most things with single focus and compulsion, be it jig saw puzzles, baking holiday cookies, and yes even reading, but need a structure or end game. So thinking back over the Blog and under what conditions were my reading and writing most prolific, it was those years when I anchored the books to the alphabet (I mean I garden that way too) and decided rather than States, it would be people.
With that pledge to myself, I even started already, three weeks before the new year. So here is:
Diana Vreeland, D V
This really was a puff piece or better an amuse bouche to start off with. Thirty two short, chatty chapters that essentially are transcriptions of conversations with George Plimpton! You get the point, there are names dropped all over the place.
So why did D V sound like a good choice? There she was, a picture of the wicked stepmother, introducing all the short term Cinderellas in Bazaar and Vogue once I grew out of Seventeen. How dramatic the profile, how dark the hair, how imposing the figure, how exquisite the wardrobe. Makes Anna Wintour, that devil in Prada, look like a Dutch boy bobbed Brownie.
Her qualifications for the job of editor were simply her ability to be everywhere and noticed. Born a bit of an ugly duckling in a house of swans, as a child she was a late talker, a poor student, and a tad reckless as a teen. She roared or rather tangoed through the 1920s. At least she knew she needed to be fenced in and married at 18, married well, traveled and dressed the part. Met everyone of any accord.
Starting with this dialogue type of life story brought back my two conclusions from my last venture into biogs: first, a biography is always better than an autobiography or memoir; and second, no matter how diverse and apparently disconnected the lives and times of people on my "chosen" list, they have a habit of turning up in each others books. And then there is always the little known, knock me back on my feet surprise: D V lived off State Street in Albany as a young bride, probably the same time my mother was newly-wed. They surely passed on the street although Diana hung out with the scions of the founding Dutch settlers.
I expected there would be lots of tales of couture and designers and there was but was looking for D V's signature. Obviously, who can live by her counsel to have all one's shoes handmade, but her proclivity to paint all her inside doors each a different color made me feel like a dull farmer's wife staining all my new downstairs doors stable reminiscent of fallen walnuts.
Just so I don't forget some of the preposterous encounters she chatted about, I will quote at length from the last chapter: "... There's so much I haven't told you. Have I ever told you about my obsession with horses (I forget who she met at Saratoga) ...I have? About the little toy stall I used to have in my room and about how I used to water my little horses all night long? I have? Did I tell you about Josephine Baker and sitting next to her cheetah at the Mirabar? I did? Did I tell you about the zebras lining the driveway at San Simeon? You believed that, didn't you? Did I tell you that Lindberg flew over Brewster? It could have been someone else, but who cares -- Fake it! Did I tell you about the elephants at the coronation. Of course I did. .... I usually know when I'm repeating myself -- in other words, the inspirations aren't coming. There's only one thing in life, and that's the continual renewal of inspirations ... But where do you begin? The first thing to do, my love, is to arrange to be born in Paris. That's how we began our little conversation. After that, everything follows quite naturally."
Even though her conversational, random, anything that pops into her head approach to her life story grated on me, I have to retreat. That's how I tell people about me. Stories, events, anecdotes. A life lived does not come with a script or an outline, just a timeline. When I am feeling vain enough to suppose I could write my autobiography, as I introduced these 2016 blogs above, I force a structure. My preferred reference and organizer would be the trope of a polyhedron, where me, the 3-D center of the story, would have been constructed by the linking together of facets and one dimensional men, predominantly men, who came with a talent or a characteristic that I assumed to flesh my personality out. I still may do that but Diana writes of her life as a collection (well after all, fashion collections were her life). Each escapade, each expedition, each encounter glitters like a favorite brooch in her jewelry box. Trinkets, the shining things that stand out from years of daily duties.
Coincidentally, my next biography is Utopia Parkway, about Joseph Cornell, the Queens artist who made shadow boxes ... collecting things to depict being human.
With that pledge to myself, I even started already, three weeks before the new year. So here is:
Diana Vreeland, D V
This really was a puff piece or better an amuse bouche to start off with. Thirty two short, chatty chapters that essentially are transcriptions of conversations with George Plimpton! You get the point, there are names dropped all over the place.
So why did D V sound like a good choice? There she was, a picture of the wicked stepmother, introducing all the short term Cinderellas in Bazaar and Vogue once I grew out of Seventeen. How dramatic the profile, how dark the hair, how imposing the figure, how exquisite the wardrobe. Makes Anna Wintour, that devil in Prada, look like a Dutch boy bobbed Brownie.
Her qualifications for the job of editor were simply her ability to be everywhere and noticed. Born a bit of an ugly duckling in a house of swans, as a child she was a late talker, a poor student, and a tad reckless as a teen. She roared or rather tangoed through the 1920s. At least she knew she needed to be fenced in and married at 18, married well, traveled and dressed the part. Met everyone of any accord.
Starting with this dialogue type of life story brought back my two conclusions from my last venture into biogs: first, a biography is always better than an autobiography or memoir; and second, no matter how diverse and apparently disconnected the lives and times of people on my "chosen" list, they have a habit of turning up in each others books. And then there is always the little known, knock me back on my feet surprise: D V lived off State Street in Albany as a young bride, probably the same time my mother was newly-wed. They surely passed on the street although Diana hung out with the scions of the founding Dutch settlers.
I expected there would be lots of tales of couture and designers and there was but was looking for D V's signature. Obviously, who can live by her counsel to have all one's shoes handmade, but her proclivity to paint all her inside doors each a different color made me feel like a dull farmer's wife staining all my new downstairs doors stable reminiscent of fallen walnuts.
Just so I don't forget some of the preposterous encounters she chatted about, I will quote at length from the last chapter: "... There's so much I haven't told you. Have I ever told you about my obsession with horses (I forget who she met at Saratoga) ...I have? About the little toy stall I used to have in my room and about how I used to water my little horses all night long? I have? Did I tell you about Josephine Baker and sitting next to her cheetah at the Mirabar? I did? Did I tell you about the zebras lining the driveway at San Simeon? You believed that, didn't you? Did I tell you that Lindberg flew over Brewster? It could have been someone else, but who cares -- Fake it! Did I tell you about the elephants at the coronation. Of course I did. .... I usually know when I'm repeating myself -- in other words, the inspirations aren't coming. There's only one thing in life, and that's the continual renewal of inspirations ... But where do you begin? The first thing to do, my love, is to arrange to be born in Paris. That's how we began our little conversation. After that, everything follows quite naturally."
Even though her conversational, random, anything that pops into her head approach to her life story grated on me, I have to retreat. That's how I tell people about me. Stories, events, anecdotes. A life lived does not come with a script or an outline, just a timeline. When I am feeling vain enough to suppose I could write my autobiography, as I introduced these 2016 blogs above, I force a structure. My preferred reference and organizer would be the trope of a polyhedron, where me, the 3-D center of the story, would have been constructed by the linking together of facets and one dimensional men, predominantly men, who came with a talent or a characteristic that I assumed to flesh my personality out. I still may do that but Diana writes of her life as a collection (well after all, fashion collections were her life). Each escapade, each expedition, each encounter glitters like a favorite brooch in her jewelry box. Trinkets, the shining things that stand out from years of daily duties.
Coincidentally, my next biography is Utopia Parkway, about Joseph Cornell, the Queens artist who made shadow boxes ... collecting things to depict being human.
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