{"id":13525,"date":"2024-11-17T17:51:12","date_gmt":"2024-11-18T00:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=13525"},"modified":"2024-12-07T17:53:11","modified_gmt":"2024-12-08T00:53:11","slug":"dorothy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2024\/11\/17\/dorothy\/","title":{"rendered":"Dorothy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The New Yorker<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dorothy Parker and the Art of the Literary Takedown<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Her reviews are not contemptuous, a common pitfall for her imitators. They are simply unbridled in their dislike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Sloane Crosley<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Illustration by Cecilia Carlstedt<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When I think of Dorothy Parker\u2019s hangovers, and I do, the image that comes to mind is that of the U.S.S. Arizona. A sunken battleship resting at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, the Arizona is slowly leaking oil as you read this. The ship loaded up on 1.5 million gallons of fuel on December 6, 1941, and has approximately half a million gallons to go. Parker drank with such consistency and complaint that I suspect her headache is proceeding on a similar schedule, throbbing from beyond the grave, ever so slightly, to this day. References to alcohol are rife in her poems (the famous quatrain \u201cafter three I\u2019m under the table \/ after four I\u2019m under my host\u201d may be apocryphal but it\u2019s also emblematic). But it is in her weekly books column for\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>, \u201cConstant Reader<\/a>,\u201d comprised of thirty-four entries between 1927 and 1928, that one senses that she is this close to asking the reader for an aspirin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of this is the brilliantly honed shtick of a standup comedian. Some of it is Parker being an alcoholic. But some of those allusions to unproductive mornings and squinting unpreparedness belie an unease with the endeavor of book reviewing itself. She writes, at times, as if the column were happening to her: \u201cThis thing is getting me. I should have stopped before this and gone back to my job of cleaning out ferry boats.\u201d Or, more bluntly: \u201cHere it is high noon, and this piece should have been finished last Friday. I\u2019ve been putting it off like a visit to my aunt.\u201d Years later, when given the opportunity to select her own greatest hits for a Viking compendium, she included precisely none of these reviews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at The New Yorker<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New Yorker Dorothy Parker and the Art of the Literary Takedown Her reviews are not contemptuous, a common pitfall for her imitators. They are simply unbridled in their dislike. By\u00a0Sloane Crosley When I think of Dorothy Parker\u2019s hangovers, and I do, the image that comes to mind is that of the U.S.S. Arizona. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13525\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}