Word: gossipist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...service-oriented features -L.A. has steadily tightened its hold on the turf. Under Editor Geoff Miller it has spiced how-where-what consumerism with monthly contributions by such luminaries as Joyce Haber (The Users), who can be a sharp social observer as well as the town's top gossipist, and acerbic Movie Critic John Barbour-along with some of the shrewdest assessments of food, wine and film of any city magazine...
...presence in his own novel. A cinematic kind of novelizing is more fashionable now, in which the page is a movie screen, wondrous but neutral. Jones's writing is less glittery but more personal, very high-level gossip that is fascinating because, like all gossip, it defines the gossipist...
Karmel's Restif, splendid fellow, is not only a gossipist and eavesdropper but an aging whoremonger, moralist, printer and pamphleteer, skeptic, citizen, sentimentalist and night-prowling philosopher. He catches perfectly the queerness of the scene when he does reach the Bastille: "The fortress is being looted. From the high towers precious documents float down into the moat." He records the rainy grayness of Paris and the strange periods of calm when the Revolution catches its breath ("Most people lost interest . . . The price of bread continued to rise"). He sees the city's whores applaud a lynching "with their...