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Quote of the Day: On Wheat and Chaff
Few American writers of the twentieth century so embody the quotably pungent and pithy in their prose as does Dorothy Rothschild Parker.
Google her name, and her often caustic, witty, gems just tumble out at you: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”–“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people He gave it to.”– “She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B” (this from a review of a Katharine Hepburn performance in a Broadway play)–“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”–“What fresh hell is this?”–“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”–“I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.”–“Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.” And perhaps my favorite, which I can’t even include here (no, it’s not the one about the girls at the Yale prom).
But the DP quote I’ve chosen for today is one I particularly love. It comes, as did so much of her output, from a review of an item of cultural interest, in this case, a particular book:
“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”*
So, come on. Haven’t we all come across at least one of these in our lives? Which weighty tomes, or bits of literary fluff, would you put on the list? Or better yet, fling across the room, if you had the chance (less effective, more expensive, and not as much fun with e-books, which don’t land with the same satisfying thump, it’s true).
I’ll start: Just about anything with Jack Kerouac’s name on it (self-indulgent and creepy). Lady Chatterley’s Lover (tedious, overwrought, and laughable purple prose). Fifty Shades of Grey (unbelievably badly written). Any Dan Brown book, starting with The DaVinci Code (Can’t keep them straight, one from the other. I suppose if you overlook the abysmal writing, the lack of character development, and the ludicrous and inconsistent plot twists, what’s left might be worth saving).
You can have my share of any and all of these.
So. Your turn. What are your least favorite novels of all time?
*In its most quoted form, it’s generally assumed to be a paraphrase of the sentiment of the review. No one has been able to find exactly these words, in exactly this order, in her writings. But, if she didn’t say it in precisely this way, she should have.
Published in General
My mother thought Dorothy Parker was one of the funniest people who ever lived, which says a lot about Mom’s sense of humor. I’ll bet you that Mom’s favorite Parker quote is also your favorite:
A woman, and sorry, I don’t remember who, stops at a doorway with Dorothy and says, “After you; age before beauty, you know.”
Dorothy Parker: “Yes, and pearls before swine.”
May not be the exact quote, but that’s how Mom remembered it.
Gertrude Stein, so the story has it.
Which reminds me of a little poem which has nothing to do with Dorothy Parker:
Me too.
There is a sort of person that believes that if the incomprehensible is squinted at just right it becomes genius. They don’t understand something and assume others can’t either and thus if they claim to then they are aligned with supposed genius.
But they are wrong. Sometimes the incomprehensible is so because it’s just bad.
I can’t understand the regret people feel for abandoning a bad book. I may be more sensitive to this than most because I’m dyslexic and read very slowly, but I figure I can hope to read at most 1% of all available good books in my lifetime. Why waste time reading bad ones?
Depends on the Hemingway. I could happily say farewell to A Farewell to Arms as a work of special self-indulgence and whiny cowardice and dithering, while The Old Man And The Sea is just fantastic.
Sill, works I would lob with especial force:
No, actually it’s pretty boring. It would be a cracking good yarn in two to three hundred pages at most. A thousand or more? (1209 according to one single-volume version.) Needs a vicious editor.
Anthem starts well, actually. It is, for maybe the first 2/3, a work of terse and taught prose, and it paints an interesting dystopia. Then it turns into a combined Mary Sue tale of improbability that ends with a screed.
As someone quipped in the PIT last week, “All of Rand’s characters are robots”. To which I replied “Yes, but heroic robots.”
“The Sound And The Fury” – What the HECK was that? Tried it twice, at two separate points in my life. Felt the same way both times.
Anything by Faulkner. It’s rare that I cannot finish a book, even a bad book, but I would need as much booze as Faulkner consumed to make any sense of his books, much less to even give a rat’s rear end about the characters.
A cracking good yarn compared to those unbearable film adaptations of Peter Jackson.
The trial run for As I Lay Dying?
May I also put in a bad word for the word-salad, Southern Gothic fiction of Ms. Flannery O’Connor? Her letters and journals are lucid and bracing. I’ve tried repeatedly, but I find her fiction incomprehensible.
I gather you haven’t read the real genius of Tolkien, “The Silmarillion.”
Parker was clever, but there’s a sodden sadness under the work. Of being drunk at 2 in the afternoon at the Algonquin after Benchley left, lighting another cigarette while the waiters clean up the lunch dishes. They used to tiptoe around her, but that was in the beginning; now they just work around her.
She didn’t leave much substantial work – mostly quips. Then again, when you’re remembered for quips, people actually know your work. When you’re remembered for famous books, it’s often a case of people just remembering the title.
Are you being serious?
@jameslileks, this sounds like a start/finish to a Ramble…Pretty please and thank you?
I think the Snopes trilogy makes a great study of the importance of community in the formation individual morality. Also, The Town is the source one of the very few literary quotes I can remember,
“…chastity and virtue in women shall be defended whether they exist or not.”
Some authors just write what they know.
“The Bridges of Madison County.” It was lying around the house and I read it out of curiosity because it was huge at the time.
It was obvious that the author based the photographer character on himself, and therefore fancied himself to be some kind of romantic figure. The novel is the work of a narcissistic, egotistical hack.
Perhaps there’s hope for me yet.
Is it crazy of me to actually like his linguistic papers? I mean, those few I’ve read, of course – I’m not claiming to be a cunning linguist here.
Absolutely! It makes LOTR seem frivolous in comparison.
You, too? I loved her letters. Then I read her fiction and thought, what?!
Of her short stories, there’s maybe one or two whose point I saw and didn’t hate. Maybe she’s someone who could have stood to be more autobiographical in her fiction, not less.
Stunning.
Let’s start again here. What about it do you see that makes it such a work of pure genius? Scope? Originality? Something else?
James Thurber’s “Bateman Comes Home” parody of Southern Gothic is delightful, though. The text of it is behind the New Yorker’s paywall, but there’s this drunk, somewhat foul-mouthed Millennial narrating it here (warning: some coarse, NSFW language).
The idea that he’s creating a huge body of artificial mythology, and it’s consistent and as good as anything made for real. The stories are good too.
And I’m a big fan of stories of unabashed heroism.
Okay. I write books. One of my characters is a fairly typical “immortal” trope. For the series, he was really only intended as the sperm donor with advanced and engineered DNA. Due to circumstances and one of his powers, he lands on something very like our Earth in 1700 and brings his recessive genes of power to the world. Early on, my concept was that I would start each new volume with a dream where he would be “remembering” a life in a famous fictional universe. The first volume did not have that, but the second did. That dream remembrance happened to be set in one of H. Beam Piper’s worlds. I let my brother read it before it was published, and it got him on a total rant. I decided to nix using these sequences as homages to other authors, and just run with other historical periods. So, instead of a scene on Zarathustra, I used a scene in ancient China to introduce the character in the second volume.
In one of the other volumes, I basically imagined a way to bring Tolkien’s world to life. Some of his names might be seen as close enough to real names we know that it could be based on such with a bit of tweaking. So, this main character was named Ilya in the universe it started in, and due to some circumstances, he became generally called Ilya Allfather (Eru Ilúvatar). He was traveling with several people when one of them, Mikhail (Melkor) had a psychotic episode. I should mention that these people all have powers, such as psychokinesis and telepathy. Mikhail’s episode projected their ship into another universe where they combined their powers to turn a dwarf star into a livable habitat until they could gather enough material for a full solar system. Thus the trees for light. Another of the travelers was Ole, who later had a grandson named Myron. I bet you can figure out who they were.
I still think it was a great story and adaptation, but I figured too many would be offended by the recasting/borrowing. It was also a lot of fun to write.
Freudian slip?