Rachel Profiling

Hello, I'm Rachel.

Writer/editor. New Mexican tumbleweed blown east to skyscraper country.

Right now, I am working on a book about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sheilah Graham, and Hollywood in the 1930s. It will also contain a lot of drinking, powder blue suits, dances at the Cocoanut Grove, betrayal, gossip columns, crazy ladies, secret Jews, film lot moguls, and Dorothy Parker quips at funerals. If the world is still around then, it should be out from Random House around 2014. So let's hope the Mayans were wrong.

If you want to say hi please do. Or find me in short form, here.

February 7th 2012

Necessary.

Reblogged from wevegotmail|79 notes

Joe Fox: So what's his handle?
Kathleen Kelly: Uh...
Joe Fox: I'm not going to write him. Is that what you're worried about? You think I'm going to e-mail him?
Kathleen Kelly: [beat] All right, NY152.
Joe Fox: N-Y-one-five-two. One hundred and fifty-two. He's a hundred and fifty-two years old. He's had one hundred and fifty-two moles removed, so now he's got one hundred fifty-two pock marks on his... on his face...
Kathleen Kelly: The number of people who think he looks like Clark Gable.
Joe Fox: One hundred and fifty-two people who think he looks like a Clark *Bar*.
Kathleen Kelly: [laughing] Why did I even tell you about this?
Joe Fox: A hundred and fifty-two stitches from his nose job. The number of his souvenir shot glasses that he's collected in his travels.
Kathleen Kelly: No! The number... the numb... his address? No! No, he would never do anything that prosaic.

Posted at 6:16pm.

February 6th 2012

More Downton Recappery

1 note

Still doing this silly thing. But at least it provided me the chance to coin the term “Debbie Downton,” which I’m sure will be in rotation for at least the next few months.

Posted at 10:39am.

February 4th 2012

Reblogged from lisasimpsonbookclub|573 notes

lisasimpsonbookclub: An oldie, but a goodie

Posted at 2:24pm.

January 29th 2012

9 notes

Judith Thurman, Cleopatra’s Nose

Posted at 12:39pm.

“

There’s some instinctive attraction that draws you, as a writer, to your subject. And the attraction usually has to do with some primal personal thing that, of course, you have no idea about. In the end, the piece always comes down to the one or two sentences you struggle over. The sentences where you try to say explicitly what it is that the two of you, subject and writer, have in common. Those are the sentences that you just bang your head against the wall over until you get them right. It’s very hard to make that distillation but that is actually what your job is. Without trying to pin the person like a butterfly to the wall, to sum it up. If I can do that, then I feel satisfied. To give the subject a reality in the form of a sentence that is like a piece of rock crystal or a prism.

”

January 28th 2012

8 notes

Dream room.

Posted at 10:36pm.

January 26th 2012

Reblogged from whhw|50 notes

I mean.

whhw:

tinyairplanes:

Bethany has a sewing machine. Her name is Sewfia.

poor ol’ gal deserves a whole cheesecake for the things i’ve put her through.

Posted at 5:10pm.

January 26th 2012

I’m in love with these (via New York Public Library)

2 notes

See more at the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

Posted at 2:43pm.

January 22nd 2012

Reblogged from nprradiopictures|123 notes

As a PWHWANPR (person who has worked at NPR), I can testify that this is how people inside the juggernaut sound as well.

nprradiopictures:

It was only a matter of time…

babesofnpr:

Shit Public Radio Listeners Say (by sarahlynnladuke)

These are your people.

Posted at 6:08pm.

January 21st 2012

Obit on Parnassus/F. Scott Fitzgerald/The New Yorker/1937

4 notes

Death before forty’s no bar. Lo!

These had accomplished their feats;

Chatterton, Burns, and Kit Marlowe,

Byron and Shelley and Keats.

Death, the eventual censor,

Lays for the forties, and so

Took off Jane Austen and Spenser,

Stephenson, Hood, and poor Poe.

You’ll leave a better-lined wallet

By reaching the end of your rope

After fifty, like Shakespeare and Smollett

Thackeray, Dickens, and Pope.

Try for the sixties — but say, boy,

That’s when the tombstones were built on

Butler and Sheridan, the play boy,

Arnold and Coleridge and Milton.

Three score and ten — the tides rippling

Over the bar; slip the hawser.

Godspeed to Clemens and Kipling,

Swinburne and Browning and Chaucer.

Some staved the debt off but paid it

At eighty — that’s after the law.

Wordsworth and Tennyson made it,

And Meredith, Hardy, and Shaw.

But, Death, while you make up your quota,

Please note this confession of candor —

That I wouldn’t give an iota

To linger till ninety, like Landor.

Posted at 3:28pm.

January 19th 2012

Reblogged from sylviascarlett|30 notes

sylviascarlett:

Marilyn Monroe and Sheilah Graham at Ciro’s Nightclub

Posted at 1:03pm.