The Portable Dorothy Parker

There are 5 posts tagged The Portable Dorothy Parker (this is page 1 of 1).

Silly rabbit, lucky charms are for leprechauns

My high school had our Open House on Thursday. Having gone to a much smaller school than the one where I currently teach, the idea of an Open House seems unusual to me. Apparently students and parents around here get to choose which high school they want to go to? I’ve always been under the impression that, if you lived in a certain area, then you went to a certain school. That was why rich parents would move to a certain neighborhood “for the schools.”

Yesterday, though, I spent an evening explaining (or “upselling”) aspects of the English department to prospective parents and students. Mostly, I did this by giving everyone really hard grammar and punctuation questions and giving them mini Snickers if they got a question right. Good salesmanship is about having snacks. (Prove me wrong.)

I didn’t try very hard, though. English would not be a selling point for nearly any high school — every student has to take four years of English, no matter what, so there isn’t much “selling” to be done. I can understand some students wanting to go to a certain school for the football program, or because they have a good music director, or their theater department was big, but nobody picks their high school based on the English classes.

Essentially, I was like a car salesman pointing out that the vehicle in question had four tires. “These babies sure do spin!” I said, aiming a kick at a tire, missing, and kicking the door frame instead, leaving a large dent.

So, it’s been a busy week. I have made some good progress with The Portable Dorothy Parker (I’m nearly finished), and am thinking about what I want to read next. I’d like to pick something fun, but I also want to keep working with the element of randomness. Maybe I’ll just pick a number and let the Gods of RNG hold my fate in their fat, fumbling fingers.

I mean, I can’t pick out the books that I know I’ll like first. If I do that, pretty soon the list will turn into one big chore. Like a bowl of Lucky Charms with all the marshmallows picked out; it’s milky disappointment. I feel like randomly picking is the only real way to go forward.

At the same time, who cares? This is my project and I can do it however the hell I want.

Maybe I could randomly select three books and choose the one that I like most? That’s an idea! It’s still random, but it’ll keep me from getting hit with The Bible when I don’t feel like reading something so ponderous.

Let’s try it!

Native Son by Richard Wright
In Xanadu by William Dalrymple
the lives and times of archy & mehitabel by Don Marquis

Oooooh what a range. I’ve heard of two of these, and I’m pretty sure I read Native Son in college. Still, if I’m picking between those three, then I suppose my next book is going to be In Xanadu by William Dalrymple, which I’m pretty sure is about a guy traveling down the Silk Road in the 1980s.

Let’s get ready for some lightly racist soul searching!

Buy me some peanuts

I’ve been trying to think of what, exactly, it is about Dorothy Parker’s writing that I like so much. I touched on it briefly yesterday when I wrote about a New Yorker style of writing, but I think there’s more to it. These things can often be indescribable, however, so you’ll have to take this with a grain of salt.

First of all, I think I read from the perspective of a writer. I’m not as interested in character and plot as I am in how the author presents those things. (This is largely why I never mind spoilers — knowing the end makes the journey more satisfying to me.)

One question I always ask myself when I’m reading is this: “If I were writing this same story, is this how I would approach it?” When the answer is “yes,” I feel a quirky sense of camaraderie with the author, as if we’re reaching across great gulfs of time and space to give each other a spectral high-five. “I see what you did there!” I say to them. “You and I are on the same wavelength!”

Dorothy Parker starts stories the way I start stories, she writes dialogue the way I try to, and all of her endings are satisfying. I feel like a baseball enthusiast watching a pitcher completing a perfect game. I know just enough to recognize how cool it is, even if I can’t accomplish the same feat myself.

While I appreciate authors whose sense of style jives with my own (like Parker, pictured above suddenly realizing the photographer was totally nude), it’s not that I can only enjoy authors who write the same way I write, or that I think those are the only good writers out there. Far from it.

To stick with the baseball metaphor, sometimes books can be more like, say, a hockey game. As a baseball enthusiast, I can appreciate the athleticism and the teamwork and the speed of a hockey match. I can even marvel at how violent everything is and how suddenly, as if by magic, teams seem to score. Hockey games can be wonderful to watch and I’m sure I’d have a great time if I went to more of them. But, no matter how good the game is, I’m still a baseball guy.

I enjoy reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, but I would never write the way he does. The same thing goes for Thomas Pynchon and Gene Wolfe — they are fantastic authors that I always return to, but they have vastly different sensibilities than I have.

Dorothy Parker just plays my sport, and she does it awfully well.

(In that same metaphor, reading Salman Rushdie feels like watching a variation of Polo that was only popular in a specific region of Kashmir during the early 1970s, and I’m stuck watching the match while sitting next to a guy intent on elbowing my ribs and explaining why the whole sport is actually about religion.)

I had another observation at school today, which basically means I had an administrator sit in on my class with the sole purpose of giving me an assessment. (Huzzah!) That makes a total of … five times this year that I’ve had some sort of observation. It is unusual to have that many, and I’m not a huge fan, especially considering one of those observations was done by our district superintendent, but it’s not as if there’s a lot that I can do about it.

Some teachers point out that professional development meetings and classroom observations are the means by which administrators justify their jobs. Even though, quite frankly, I don’t know who is arguing that we should have fewer administrators. Schools need more people in nearly every position — you could double the number of admins and it wouldn’t hurt at all, as long as they were doing useful work.

More to the point of today’s evaluation: I don’t like how administrators evaluate teachers like college professors who say, “It’s impossible to get a 100% in this class.” It’s a stupid philosophy that is only ever brought up by people who are experts in their field, but not experts at teaching. (Hear that? It’s the sound of hundreds of engineering department heads mouthing, “Who, me?”)

We’re evaluated in a number of areas on a scale that goes from “Poor” to “Exemplary,” and from my understanding, nobody every gets an “exemplary” on any part of it. What I’ve been told is that “the wording of ‘exemplary’ on the rubric makes it nearly impossible to attain.”

Am I exemplary? I doubt it. But I am “proficient” enough to recognize that you shouldn’t build a rubric with unattainable levels of scoring. Because what is the point of that? It’s like not handing out a gold medal for the long jump because nobody at the Olympics can jump 50 meters.

Is it supposed to make me feel like I have room to improve? I always feel that way. Most teachers do; we don’t need a reminder. We constantly evaluate and improve our plans and strategies. That’s baked in.

Am I supposed to think that administrators are evaluating us based on faulty perceptions of what “good teaching” is because nincompoops at the department of education are forcing them to? Because that is what’s happening, and that doesn’t make anyone look good.

Anywho. I’ll probably have one more observation this year, and I’ve decided that it’s not worth worrying about. (I’ll still worry about it, of course, but I’ll feel silly for doing so. (Put something to that effect on my tombstone.))

Seems like a good spot

The temperatures have gotten so low (around -12º F) that they’ve cancelled in-person school today. It feels like a bit of a … wimpy decision. Where I grew up, they would never cancel school for cold temperatures. Snow? Sure; cancel away! But, as far as my tiny alma mater was concerned, freezing to death in sub-zero temperatures was just fine. Some people would even say it was a right of passage.

Snow days are a thing of the past, though, even in “big city” districts like mine. These days we’ve got to create asynchronous lessons that students can do from home and then have virtual professional development meetings.

So, my students are watching a video about Arthur Miller while I’m having Teams calls about S.M.A.R.T. goals.

(There’s an unspoken understanding that we have so many virtual meetings because teachers in my district got a raise recently. and any time teachers get a raise the “I WIsh I GoT sUmMErs OfF!” crowd demands that some free time be taken away. It’s stupid, but this is Nebraska, and the true litmus test of a piece of Nebraska legislation is “How much can it hurt public employees, minorities, and/or homeless people?”)

The meetings will only take up the morning, however, so I’m not too bent out of shape. It’s not like it hurts anything to set goals for the upcoming months.

I adore Dorothy Parker. I’m working through The Portable Dorothy Parker (it’s technically Penguin’s Dorothy Parker Collected Stories) and just enjoying the hell out of it.

Parker, who was instrumental in the growth of The New Yorker magazine in the 1920s, has become somewhat emblematic of a New Yorker style that I don’t know the actual name of but exists in my mind as its own category. Parker is in there, along with J.D. Salinger, John Updike, and David Sedaris. The relationship between those people may seem tenuous, but I would categorize their prose as tight-knit. An entire story or essay might hang on a single word or phrase, and it follows that every word and phrase needs to be elegant. In the end, what you get is a meticulously crafted insight into some subtle aspect of the human character.

On a sentence-by-sentence basis, their writing is an absolute treat. (As opposed to my recent foray into Salman Rushdie, whose sentences are bloated for the sake of bloating.) They approach their writing with thrift and a great concern for how things sound.

There’s also an element of psychology to their writing that I’ve always enjoyed. The way a character speaks is a little glimpse into what’s going on inside them, what’s “wrong” with them, how they are damaged. There’s a belief in this New Yorker style that we are all a damned mess and only vaguely pretending to be well adjusted for the sake of appearances. Our voices, however, give us away.

It’s all great fun, and it’s honestly hard to believe that some of Dorothy Parker’s stories are 100 years old.

The sun is as high as its going to get, I’m afraid, and it is a balmy 8º F.

Once upon a time, there was a guy in a covered wagon rolling across the great plains with his family, an ox, and a big bag of corn. He stopped (here! of all places), looked around, and thought, “This’ll do.”

It boggles my mind.

Reading the right Dorothy

The Asiago & Spinach Stuffed Chicken turned out great yesterday — it was easily one of the best meals I’ve cooked this year. The hardest part was actually assembling the chicken breasts, which need to be cut into (forgive the terminology) meat pockets so you can stuff in the spinach and sun-dried tomatoes and cheese. Once put together, I seared the chicken breasts in a cast iron skillet and put them in the oven to cook all the way through.

After buying sun-dried tomatoes, though, I started thinking, “I bet I could make those myself,” and, sure enough, it isn’t difficult to do:

It seems like a fun project … if it weren’t the dead of winter. If I try to leave a bunch of tomatoes outside now, they’re just going to freeze and/or get stolen by the gangs of obese city squirrels that roam my neighborhood.

It looks like you can dehydrate them in the oven, but that wouldn’t be “sun-dried,” would it? “Oven-dried tomatoes“ doesn’t have the same flair. Although who wants to wait six months until you can actually try this? Maybe I’ll give the oven-dried ones a shot, then in the warmer months I can … *checks notes* leave fruit unattended outside all day.

Wait, that can’t be right.

Ha — I bought the $0.99 “The Portable Dorothy Parker” off the Kindle store, only to discover that Amazon is selling a mistitled version of a collection of Dorothy L. Sayers’ works. I honestly read a whole chapter thinking, “I didn’t know Parker wrote mysteries. Fun!” before doing a little digging to get to the bottom of things. It looks like Amazon really put the wrong cover on a book and is selling it.

Bearing that in mind … it seems as if I can’t find a digital copy of The Portable Dorothy Parker. I guess there’s not a lot of demand for that one.

A little bit of research tells me that books in The Portable … series were first published by Viking Press in 1944 and were meant to be pocket-sized editions of “selected works” from various authors. (I believe I have The Portable Emerson floating around downstairs somewhere.) So, in keeping with the spirit of this endeavor, I’m just going to read a whole bunch of Dorothy Parker and call it good.

I was able to find a digital version of her Complete Stories, so I’ll check that one out. How different can it possibly be?

She’s a great writer with an interesting history, so I’m sure I can’t go wrong. Assuming I’m reading the right Dorothy this time.

Is goat cheese pretentious

Sarah got me a cookbook for Christmas. Taste of Home: Cooking for Two: 317 Quick & Easy Recipes Perfect for Small Households. I have been trying to branch out into cooking more advanced dishes over the last few years, but my culinary zeal is somewhat tempered by being horribly exhausted all the time. I very rarely want to cook a whole-ass meal when I get home, and when I do cook, I usually make so much that we have leftovers for about two days. Which gets old.

This book, though, has some good options that aren’t time consuming, don’t require a bunch of ingredients, and won’t have us eating chicken curry three days in a row.

This week, I’m going to try the Goat Cheese & Spinach Stuffed Chicken. Except I’m not going to use goat cheese, because WTF. Who uses goat cheese?

“I’m just going to get some … artisanal asiago,” I told Sarah. We were in the cheese section of our local Baker’s, which has a surprisingly large selection, and I picked up a small bag of grated cheese that seemed as if it belonged in Italy. “You don’t think that it will mess with the … integrity of the dish, do you? Not using goat cheese?”

“It’ll be fine,” Sarah said. “I don’t even like goat cheese.”

Right? I don’t think anybody in the world prefers goat cheese, and if they do, they’re probably the sort of people that use a wine decanter because “it needs to breathe.” No it doesn’t. You’re just trying to justify the $300 decanter you bought at Marks & Spencer.

Anywho. The dish is basically a chicken breast stuffed with spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, and cheese. You can’t go wrong no matter what kind of cheese you pick, and I think a nice asiago will do just fine.

I’ll serve it with baked asparagus. (Did someone say bacon-wrapped?)

I didn’t read much Dorothy Parker yesterday. After school, I came right home and did my first week’s homework for this semester’s online class, which is called, “Self-Care for Educators.” A whole class dedicated to tips for fighting burnout! I can dig it.

It’s exciting because I guarantee, at some point this semester, I will be stressed out about an assignment for a class that’s literally teaching me how to be less stressed out.

It’s kind of like having a class called, “How to Get More Sleep” and scheduling it for 5:00 AM.

I’ll be jumping into Dorothy Parker with both feet this morning. This afternoon, too, after I do a bit of cleaning up in our dining room. (It’s been all cluttered since Christmas.)