So when pal of the blog, award-winning novelist and host of  History Channel’s Decoded, Brad Meltzer, sent me a link to his new TEDxMIA speech, How To Write Your Own Obituary, I clicked on it immediately.

As with most things Meltzer, it’s worthwhile viewing.

Anyways, you should go read the piece. Consider this excerpt.

But in most other respects Mr. Hitchens is undiminished, preferring to see himself as living with cancer, not dying from it. He still holds forth in dazzlingly clever and erudite paragraphs, pausing only to catch a breath or let a punch line resonate, and though he says his legendary productivity has fallen off a little since his illness, he still writes faster than most people talk. Last week he stayed up until 1 in the morning to finish an article for Vanity Fair, working on a laptop on his bedside table.

Excess for thought

My thanks to longtime friend, Doug Walker, for making me aware of a Slate article by David Friedman, discussing his project SundayMagazine.org, in which he posts “the most interesting articles from the New York Times Sunday Magazine from exactly 100 years ago, with a little bit of commentary or context.”

I would love to know what the fellow mentioned above from 100 years ago would make of the overeating and excess of today.

The Guest List

When you grow up with a sister who successfully conceived and produced a one-woman play about Dorothy Parker, you tend to take notice of new books that partially examine the Algonquin Round Table. So when writer Ethan Mordden recently released his book, The Guest List: How Manhattan Defined American Sophistication—from the Algonquin Round Table to Truman Capote’s Ball, my pop culture radar was alerted. Mordden’s book is summarized (by its publisher, St. Martin’s Press) as: “From the 1920s to the early 1960s, Manhattan was America’s beacon of sophistication. From the theatres of Broadway to the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel to tables at the Stork Club, intelligence and wit were the twinned coins of the realm. Alexander Woolcott, Irving Berlin, Edna Ferber, Arturo Toscanini, Leonard Bernstein, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, the Lunts and Helen Hayes presided over the town. Their books, plays, performances, speeches, dinner parties, masked balls, loves, hates, likes and dislikes became the aspirations of a nation. If you wanted to be sophisticated, you played by Manhattan’s rules. If you didn’t, you simply weren’t on the guest list. The Heartland rebelled against Manhattan’s dictum, but never prevailed. In this lively cultural history, Mordden chronicles the city’s most powerful and influential era.” Mordden was kind enough to do a brief email interview. To get a better idea of the book’s perspective, make sure to read this excerpt provided by the publisher.
Ethan Mo

Tim O’Shea: In book loaded with great anecdotes and details, written by an author like yourself with a wealth of knowledge, how do you decide what great stories to include or exclude?

Ethan Mordden: I like stories that illuminate the subject: enjoyable but telling. For example, almost any Dorothy Parker story, however funny, reveals her despair at being too smart and not pretty enough, a real problem in her day, though much has changed since.

O’Shea: How pleased are you when you read a review like this, that connects with your work, partially due to your one mention of Georgie Price on page 53 “Mr. Mordden, Should you happen to read this please know that as a kid of about ten my father took me to a summer replacement radio show (CBS)in a dusty, mouldy old theater that had once been the Gallo Opera House. The star of the show was Georgie Price. Probably ten or so people, including us, are left who can identify the singer, let alone the theater. I had a wonderful time with this book.”

Mordden: It’s charming. I love Amazon’s customer reviewers. Some of them are amazingly smart about elite fields, like ballet or history. There I am, thinking, These guys are better than the pros.

O’Shea: In terms of this book, how would you define New Yorkism?

Mordden: New Yorkism is an ethnicity formed by its five main ethnicities–Irish, Jewish, Italian, black, gay. A New Yorkist work would be, say, Will & Grace set on Porgy and Bess’s Catfish Row, complete with Debbie
Reynolds’ recurring role as the Jewish mother.

O’Shea: As you note in the introduction to the book “a secondary theme runs through the narrative, treating the development and advance of three minority groups—Italian, Jewish, and black—in an environment that had favored only the Irish” What motivated you to pursue this secondary theme in the book?

Mordden: At a dinner party some time ago, I remarked in passing that New York humor is fundamentally Irish. Someone else thought it was Jewish, and someone else thought it was black. I thought, So what is New York humor? What is New York culture, period?

O’Shea: The length of some of the book’s footnotes are quite impressive. When composing these footnotes did you ever think they might have warranted inclusion in the main text–or was did you feel to do so would derail from the flow of your core analysis?

Mordden: I love footnotes–not academic ones, reading ones, with more information. They’re supplementary, so they can’t intrude on the text. They go at the bottom of the page, in smaller print, which breaks up the page visually and gives the eyes a touch of dazzle. I always think that extra bit of intel, inessential yet relevant–is like the chocolate drop on your hotel pillow.

O’Shea: Have you been surprised at how some some critics have taken issue with your conclusion that the U.S. current cultural capital is partially Los Angeles and is transitioning to Las Vegas?

Mordden: They’re being silly. It’s one sentence out of three hundred pages. And I didn’t say, “Positively.”

O’Shea:I was blown away by the 20 pages detailing Sources and Additional Reading, some of the books you reference seem fairly obscure. How hard were some of them to acquire for your research?

Mordden: If the New York Public Library doesn’t have it, Amazon or eBay do. But the library has pretty much everything. After cocoanut sno-kones, it’s the greatest invention ever.

Bonus detail: TED offers subtitles with these videos, which is always great with TMBG songs. At the nine-minute mark, they do one of my favorite songs (several songs in one song actually), Fingertips.