Word: mongrelism
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...York attained its now partly lost eminence is the grand theme of Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 606 pages; $25), a detail-crammed psychohistory by Ann Douglas, who teaches English and comparative literature at Columbia University. As she interprets this era, the modern artists who gathered in New York to create a new American culture relied upon "terrible honesty"--a term devised by the crime writer Raymond Chandler--to overthrow the romanticizing, domineering matriarchal ethos of the late Victorian...
Dorothy Parker wanted to call her (unwritten) autobiography Mongrel, presumably reflecting her Wasp-Jewish heritage. Douglas applies the word to the polyglot nature of the new culture, which was profoundly influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. Writers like Langston Hughes who settled in and around Strivers Row in Upper Manhattan gave distinctive voice to the aspirations of American blacks. "Aframerican" musicians like Duke Ellington entertained white audiences at Harlem's Cotton Club with an exotic new idiom, jazz, that became one of America's enduring gifts to the world...
...Brach & Sons, died at the age of 79. They met in Miami in 1950 at a country club where she ran the hat-check concession. She wasn't very social. She was obsessively attached to her pets; she once chartered a plane home from the Bahamas to tend a mongrel with a bad kidney. She favored wigs. Chicago fed off such stuff as the mystery remained unsolved and theories proliferated. One was that the handyman did it and put the corpse through a meat grinder. Another: that she was an amnesiac living in the South Seas. There were sightings...
...face of it, Jennifer Berman's book seeks to collapse the widely accepted pecking order. It is predicated on the assumption that men do not make as satisfying companions for women as Harvey Mansfield would like to believe; the cover concretizes this assumption, featuring a racy-looking mongrel eagerly helping himself to a happy-seeming woman's popcorn as they sit side by side on the sofa, watching television. Inviting. You might cheer the caption that "Dogs aren't threatened by two women with short hair...
...asking, "Where do you come from?" if I'm not the only one who has felt like a mongrel shuttled from place to place? My roommate doesn't think she has a home state, either, having been dragged from Oklahoma to Arizona to Iowa and elsewhere. Now she, like I often do, says she's from Boston, though we're not exactly Bostonians...