Columns

We’ve all heard about how the newspaper business has changed in the last two decades. There’s the Internet, which dramatically transformed classified advertising. And of course, there’s … the Internet, which allows anyone with a blog or a social media presence to become their own opinion columnist. And … let’s not forget the Internet, which provides instantaneous access to millions of words on any conceivable subject (Some of those words are even accurate).

“Dorothy Parker – What Fresh Hell Is This?” a biography by Marion Meade. 451 pages with index and illustrations. The question is one that Parker often used to answer her telephone. The subject of this biography is often irascible, willful and not easy to like; she became a leading voice in The New Yorker at its inception, followed by several years working in Hollywood, friends with Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the entire world of New York writers who gathered at the round table in the Algonquin Hotel. Her response to meeting Will Rogers was, “I always liked a man I never met.” Meade manages to portray her subject in a sympathetic manner and gives us a portrait full of the life that Parker always exhibited across the years. Check it out.

You can smell it in the air, feel it in your bones, see it in the beginnings of color change — summer is ending and with it the tremendous energy force of Mother Nature’s race to produce food. The food’s consumers are more than just human. They include the animals that share our planet. Hence, the seeds of weeds and trees feed the birds. Melons, winter squash, and tree fruit fill beaks and stomachs of hundreds of creatures hiding in nests, burrows, blackberry brambles.

Marie Butler