INVENTORY

 Remembering Dorothy Parker on the anniversary of her birth.

Click on image for a clearer view.

A checklist for times of COVID

INVENTORY 

Four be the things I am wiser to know:

Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.

Four be the things I’d been better without:

Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.

Three be the things I shall never attain:

Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.

Three be the things I shall have till I die:

Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

- Dorothy Parker

Pictured top: a bookplate made in 1987. Collections: State Library of Victoria, private collections. 

In terms of a physical inventory, the Art Deco clock (presented to my late grandfather, Lee Rogers, by the Port Augusta Swimming Club) and vase (purchased at Portobello Road Market, London in the 1970s) sit on the mantelpiece in the dining room of the Art Deco house we moved into late last year. The cocktail glasses, a gift from the old friend this bookplate was originally made for, are stored in an adjoining glass cabinet.  

Dorothy Parker Comic

This week I’m continuing work on the unique artist books mentioned in my previous post. It’s proving to be a particularly satisfying, but challenging project.

So I have sought occasional light relief by playing with other book forms. Advised and encouraged by iPad artist Deborah McMillion Nering (see Blog Post December 24, 2012) I’ve made my first experiments with comic strips, one of which is reproduced above.

The Dorothy Parker comic was made using Strip Design, Etchings and Halftone iPad apps. The latter app offers an impressively varied selection of picturesquely aged ‘papers’. The comic's title comes from the opening line of Cole Porter’s song lyric Just One of Those Things (1935). The text, of course, is by the inimitable Dorothy Parker.

Click on the comic to enlarge.

Oscar Wilde according to Dorothy Parker

Oscar Wilde Bookplate, 1987,  linocut

Here is one from the vault. Pictured above is of my early bookplates, which incorporates a short verse by the venerable Oscar Wilde. A poet, prose writer and playwright par excellence, he was also a celebrated wit, as was once observed by Dorothy Parker, herself no slouch in that department:

Oscar Wilde

If, with the literate I am

Impelled to write an epigram,

I never seek to take the credit

We all assume that Oscar said it.

From The Portable Dorothy Parker, Penguin Classics, Deluxe Edition (paperback) 2006. Original edition first published in 1944.