A Lovely Luddite Weekend

I was feeling a tad washed out by the internets, and decided to spend a few days without blogging, checking my email, or engaging in any surfing whatsoever. I even did my writing longhand.

Now, I think I've managed to get a little sun on my cheeks and wipe the monitor glaze from my eyes. Potts and I even got up early this morning and had a breakfast picnic in Griffith Park and took a hike.

That's right, Potts hiked. And liked it.

What a Life! What a Dame!: Life Itself! by Elaine Dundy

Life Itself! by Elaine Dundy

The more I read about my fellow Angeleno, Ms. Dundy, the more I want to take her out for tea. Then again, to a woman who befriended Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Ernest Hemingway, and Vivien Leigh, I'd probably be comparatively dull company.

Dundy's autobiography is a star-studded spectacle, but the author's own life never takes a backseat to the figures of the page, stage, and screen who populate her story. In fact, given the effusive, larger than life woman who springs from the pages of Life Itself!, it only makes sense that she'd surround herself with similarly big personalities.

Born to a wealthy New York family, Dundy splits for California, the Deep South, and finally, Paris, to escape her tyrannical father, but also to have a go at a life on the stage. After achieving some modest success, she moves to London where she meets, and soon marries, theatre critic Ken Tynan. Their relationship is a stormy one, hampered by Tynan's sadomasochistic proclivities (which he only reveals to her after their wedding)*, emotional manipulation, and the extramarital affairs of both parties.

Despite trading in one tyrant for another, Dundy manages to enjoy a relatively successful career in television and radio -- she abandons the stage, after growing weary of directors joking that they'll "get a bad review" from Ken if they don't cast her. And after the birth of her daughter, Tracy, Dundy moves from acting into writing, with a bibliography that includes everything from plays to novels to a biography of Elvis and his mother.

The book is full of great stories, including a lively party Tennessee Williams threw for his mother, the "Hemingway Code" as it applied to young women in his company, and the time Ava Gardner showed up at the flat asking for cab fare, but Dundy's writing shines even when describing the mundane. While reading, I constantly regaled Potts with lines from it, and atypically, this was more to his amusement than his annoyance. A few of my favorites include:

On giving a disasterous class presentation on "arson": "When you have got it firmly lodged in your head that arson is a chemical, a batch of newspaper clippings with headlines such as: 'Ten Die in Warehouse Blaze - Arson Suspected' is not going to dislodge it."

On discovering rampant anti-Semitism at Sweet Briar College: "My shit list was growing apace and I had only been there for two months."

On not buying a jar of peanut butter: "I was the only one in our household who ate it and the thought struck me with force that our marriage was not going to last before I finished it."

If you're a fan of 50s theatre, screwball leading ladies, and stories of women who live life to the hilt, this book is for you.
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* There's a great line in the book when Dundy is telling a friend about her marital troubles, and he responds, "Of course Englishmen love flagellation. It's the only time they ever get touched as children."

Women Behaving Badly: A Time to Be Born by Dawn Powell

A Time to Be Born by Dawn Powell

This would have been a Zombie Summer Reading Program review, save for the fact that Dawn Powell is probably the best-known writer that no one has heard of. Her books come back into print every few years, and she was once name-checked on Gilmore Girls (in the season 2 episode where Jess comes to Starr's Hollow)*. She was also one of Hemingway's favorite writers. Allegedly, he once told her, "You are the best woman writer I know and I don't mean woman writer." Gee, thanks Hem.**

A Time to Be Born is a deliciously nasty and gossipy novel, that nonetheless has some heft to it, being set in New York shortly before Pearl Harbor. Our anti-heroine, Amanda Keeler Evans, has evolved from the daughter of an Ohio beautician to the wife of one of the most powerful newspaper publishers in the United States through brilliant and calculated scheming. After snatching Julian Evans away from his wife and making him her own, she sweet talks him into publishing her ghastly novel (and he makes sure it receives nothing but glowing reviews). Then she fashions herself as a celebrated war and relief organizer, taking in European refugees, then pawning them off on Julian's first wife. Amanda is simply too important and too busy to be expected to entertain a bunch of grubby refugees.

Enjoying the fruits of her ill-got gains, Amanda is hesitant to revive any of her contacts with old school chums. However, when Ethel Carey, a grasping Midwestern socialite, shows up at Amanda's house and entreats her to take another old friend under her wing, Amanda agrees. She has her reasons.

Enter Vicky Haven, a clueless Sister Carrie-meets-Dottie Renfrew. When her fiance runs off with her business partner, Vicky becomes the laughingstock of Lakewood, Ohio until she receives a seemingly out of the blue invitation to come to New York. Under Amanda's watch, Vicky gets a magazine job, a swanky studio, and an escort to some fine dinner parties with her betters. And of course, Amanda has her reasons, charity not being top of the list.

I'm not sure whether it's more fun to watch Vicky Haven muddle through the New York social scene, unintentionally making all the right moves, friends, and power plays, or watching Amanda squirm when her scheming finally catches up with her, but it's a great read.

If you liked...: The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe or The Group by Mary McCarthy, this book is for you.
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* Although the last couple seasons of Gilmore Girls were awful, I miss watching television that includes semi-obscure literary references on a regular basis. There's a pretty staggering list of books mentioned on the show here, although it only seems to cover the first couple of seasons.
** Needing the money, Dawn Powell once considered selling her correspondence with Hemingway, but decided against it, saying, "I wouldn't dare to. He said such really awful things about other writers."

The Jug, the Pen, the Slammer, the Can

A children's novel with a hardboiled narrator and prison slang? I'm there.

Harry Sue by Sue Stauffacher is about a tough as nails girl desperate to get "sent up" so she can join her mother behind bars. She lives with her grandmother, who runs what is quite possibly the most negligent daycare center in the world, and spends a good bit of her time defending Grandma's charges (aka "the crumb snatchers") from her. This interferes with Harry Sue's JD aspirations, as does her particularly good heart.

Maybe it's just me, but this sounds (potentially) like a cross between Louis Sachar's kiddie jailbreak tale, Holes, and Rian Johnson's high school noir, Brick.

Here's a little snippet:

"Time was running out on my becoming a juvenile delinquent. The really impressive cons started their rap sheets by nine or ten. Unfortunately, I had a heart condition that needed fixing before I could begin a serious crime spree.

Yes, Fish, my heart was as lumpy and soft as a rotten tomato. I couldn't stand to see things hurt, especially anything weak and defenseless. Watching Jolly Roger and his road dogs pull the legs off a spider made me grind my teeth down worse than if I slept with a mouth full of sandpaper. When those boys clicked the little kids on the bus, I had to sit on my hands just to keep from breaking theirs.

In the joint, where I was headed, I'd need a heart filled with cement and covered in riveted steel. I was working on it. But so far, I wasn't making much progress."

Thanks to Leila at Bookshelves of Doom for pointing this one out as her Recommendations from Under the Radar pick.

Anticipation and Semi-Dread

When NYRB Classics reprinted Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado earlier this summer, I completely missed it. Thankfully, a colleague pointed me towards a review, and I immediately jumped on the waiting list for it at the library. Now, the more I read about it, the more I realize that I'm going to have to go out and buy the darn thing. It sounds too good not to own. It's probably worth owning for the saucy cover alone.

The story, set in the 1950s, involves an American girl who drops out of college and runs off to conquer Paris and avoid the cruel fate of becoming a librarian. She takes up with a married man, tries to make it as an actress, and lurks around the city's nightspots with an assorted cast of bohemians and artists. And apparently, it's hilarious. Here's a little snippet that amused me:

"Now here's the heavy irony. So I went back to New York to become a librarian. To actually seek out this thing I've been fleeing all my life. And (here it comes): a librarian is just not that easy to become. I'd taken my lamb by the hand to the slaughter and nobody even wanted it. Apparently there's a whole filing system and annotating system and stamping system and God knows what you have to learn before you qualify. So I finally found a little out-of-the-way, off-the-beaten-track library downtown and they let me put the books away.

So I felt I was accomplishing something."

In other news, the new Ann Patchett book is coming out soon, and I'm a little nervous about it. I read absolutely everything Patchett writes: Bel Canto is one of my desert island reading books, I adored Truth & Beauty, and I really enjoyed watching her tear into the douchbags who tried to get her book banned from Clemson, and be absolutely classy and ladylike about it.

So, I was a little surprised to find that I'm not loving the premise of Run. It sounds like the plots of five books mashed together, yet somehow, it also sounds a little dull. Am I going to read it anyway? You betcha. A writer who's never disappointed me before deserves the 50 page test, at least. I just wish I was a little more excited about it.

Funny "Ha-Ha" or Funny "Soul-Crushing Anomie"?

I don't know if, like me, you've been glued to the newspaper comics section to watch as Funky Winkerbean continues its downward spiral into the depths of depression (comic-book guy), cancer (Lisa), alcoholism (Funky), hearing loss (Mr. Dinkle), land mines (Wally), and all around mopery. But if you haven't, today might be a good day to start, as Les has started hitting the bottle and now his cat is talking to him.

I guess it's to be expected, given that the strip has previously featured talking rocks and talking leaves, but if that cat starts hanging out outside of Lisa's room, well, I think we all know what happens next.

Cementing My Geek Cred. . .

. . .in more way than one. This isn't exactly book related, but I came across it and had to post it, because Star Trek + Monty Python = wicked cool, as they used to say.