I'll be back.....

Here I am.

I think it's still the 24th. It was a good day. I did two assignments from my course and I used up a lot of leftovers, including the remains of a cauliflower that was bigger than my head. - roasted (not my head, of course). I 'd had enough cauliflower rice to last me for a while. And I also finished a book I bought yesterday. I love Anne Tyler.

Somehow I missed her new book (2016), Vinegar Kate, I love the world she inhabits with grace and humour and good will towards all. She was chosen to write this book though perhaps she had a choice within the invitation. Hogarth Press (remember? - Leonard and Virginia Woolf's publishing house) is still going strong. Someone there had the bright idea to invite some well-known novelists to write a novel based on one of Shakespeare's plays. I member hearing about it because Margaret Atwood was one of the novelists and she chose, or was assigned,The Tempest. Jeanette Winterston did The Winter's Tale, and Anne Tyler rewrote The Taming of the Shrew. It's fun and witty, and that's all it has to be, or should be.

Let what's past stay in the past. This idea of resurrection seldom works. Several attempts to finish Edwin Drood (Charles Dickens) or Sanditon (Jane Austen) have not fared well. I didn't like the sequel to GWTW (Margaet Mitchell), and the perpetuation of the Bourne stories after Ludlum died didn't work for me. I must admit that adapting Shakespeare usually does better, witness Kiss Me, Kate; West Side Story; The Boys from Syracuse (all musicals). More?

Another tangent. Ah well, tomorrow is another day.

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), Alexander Woollcott ((1887-1943) and Robert Benchley (1889-1945) were contemporary, witty writers who wrote famously for the New Yorker, among other outlets, and were the prime knights of the Algonquin Round Table, where they drank (a lot), ate lunch and had great conversations. Add Robert E. Sherwood (1887-1943) to the founding trio. The New Yorker, BTW, first appeared on February 21, 1925, six years before my birth day.

I remember reading an early anecdote about the then struggling magazine: Harold Ross, the New Yorker editor, ran into Dorothy Parker, an early contributor (second issue) on the street and asked her to drop by and write something for the magazine. Parker replied, “I did, but someone was using the pencil.”

I woke up thinking of Robert Benchley, recalling that lovely line, “Get out of your wet coat and into a dry martini”.

Two more famous lines that have never left me are one each by the rest of the triumvirate:

Woollcott: “All the things I like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening.”

Parker (asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence): “You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.”

Millennials don’t say things like that.

Obviously I am six decades out of sync.