Dud Avocados and Podcast Shoes

And other things to get you through June...

I’m definitely not the only one who first read Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avacado when NYRB Classics put it back into circulation a few years back. I remember putting it down and feeling shocked that Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce wasn’t the sort of cultural icon that Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly is, but then I remembered there isn’t a Dud Avacado movie starring Audrey Hepburn casually wearing a black satin Givenchy cocktail gown, which means there aren’t posters of Dundy’s character for a million college freshmen to tack to their dorm walls. The lack of merchandise is part of the reason The Dud Avacado remains a perfect cult novel. 

I’ve been rereading Dundy’s 1958 debut over the last week. Revisiting books and movies is back in style for me since I’m taking my duties as Chief Diaper Changer very seriously. It’s a comfort thing, I suppose. And like the dark days of 2020, if it’s not something I’ve already read or watched, it’s on the lighter side. During that first year of Covid, I binged P.G. Wodehouse and stuck mostly to books written before 1970. My tastes are somewhat similar these days, especially since I’m trying to cut out any social media with Jack Dorsey’s DNA. I realized a few years ago that being cooped up and filling your time with Twitter or Facebook eats away at your brain, so I’m trying to exist mostly in a state of the three Bs: Baby, breathing, and books. I’ve read a few good ones, but the reread of The Dud Avacado has been the highlight.

The first thing you need to know about Dundy’s debut is that it’s actually sort of strange, but charmingly so. Reading it again reminds me of the first time I picked it up and wondered what the book was actually about besides a young American woman recounting her experiences trying to have the best time possible in Paris. It’s not quite madcap, but reading it again, I can see why Groucho Marx was the book’s most famous fan. His fan letter to her is almost always mentioned when The Dud Avacado comes up. He wrote “It made me laugh, scream and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm). If this was actually your life, I don't know how the hell you got through it.” Knowing that line and reading Dundy’s book again, I see a kinship between the two. I also see shades of Marx’s old collaborator and frenemy S.J. Perelman’s travel stories in her writing. But while Perelman was trying to find the sweet spot between Wodehouse, James Joyce, and Yiddish, Dundy was just trying to capture the voice and energy of a young American woman living abroad and trying to soak up every moment of it. Reading it now, I’m even more shocked than ever that we’ve had Emily in Paris, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and multiple seasons, movies, and even a second series of Sex and the City, and there still isn’t a movie or limited series version of The Dud Avacado. The book feels so ahead of its time that I finished it again and had to remind myself it wasn’t from this century. In an odd way, I started thinking about On the Road and how Dundy’s book pushes so hard against many of the boring Eisenhower-era American tropes. And like Jack Kerouac’s much more famous speed-addled musings, it takes traveling to get in a different frame of mind. 

I’m not going to Paris this summer; I’m likely not going anywhere outside of the tri-state area. There’s talk of a little trip to New England after Lulu gets her next round of shots, but other than that, I’m staying put in Brooklyn with weekly visits to my shrink in the city. Giving The Dud Avacado another read has me thinking about how much literature will occupy my time during the next few months when I’m not doing laundry, obsessively watching my baby sleep, or just gazing at her and wondering how the hell 50 percent of me went into making something so beautiful. It also reminded me of how nice mental comfort is. Physical comfort is wonderful, but the last few years have been such a terrible time for all of our brains that I’m finding the act of tuning out and turning off to do some rereading like a long mental spa retreat. I’m not going to call it Dud Avacado Summer, but Dundy’s book sure helped me realize that going back to places I’ve already been might be the ticket I need to get my mind back on track. 

Courtesy of Morjas

Podcast Shoes, so hot right now. Merch might be dead (G-D help me if it is…), but podcast shoes are thriving. What are podcast shoes? I mean…they’re collabs between podcasts and shoemakers. Seems pretty self-explanatory. Did you think I meant shoes you wear while recording a podcast? That sounds bleak. This week saw the two heavyweights of Cool Style Boys (trademark on that term pending) pods, Throwing Fits and How Long Gone, release two very different kinds of footwear. The Fits guys teamed up with Adidas to drop a pair of Gazelles that glow in the dark even when it’s totally light out, while the duo behind How Long Gone came out with a limited edition Morjas boat shoe that has me reconsidering my own personal “No black boat shoes” rule that I have for some reason. Maybe it’s because they look a little more on the moccasin side, but I’m really into them.

Overlooked genius women, also so hot right now. So this week I’ve written about Elaine May and Elaine Dundy. I hate to break up the Elaine party, but I get the sneaking suspicion that they’d be perfectly fine with me including Judith Jones and Sara B. Franklin’s excellent new biography on her, The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America, in the conversation. I’m a big Judith head. Last year, I wrote about the L.L. Bean cookbooks she did in the 1980s, but I’m also always playing a little game trying to wonder just how far her influence reaches. I loved her memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, but Franklin’s wonderful book really takes out the strings and does the work of tying Jones to everybody from Sylvia Plath to John Updike and Julia Child, while also telling a story that feels like it fits squarely between Mad Men and Mary McCarthy’s The Group in terms of period and environment Jones really began to thrive in. She was a trailblazer as much as a culture shifter, and her life deserves the sort of remembrance Franklin has written.

Spade and Ripley, circa 2024. I’m shocked, shocked, to say that first I loved the AMC limited series Monsieur Spade, with Clive Owen as old Sam Spade living in the French countryside, just trying to have some peace and not die of lung cancer, and now I’m telling everybody to watch the Netflix take on Ripley. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, but I think part of the appeal is that American studios have realized that maybe they need to look to the U.K. for adaptation inspiration. The stories are great, but they haven’t traded in the great-looking clothes and wonderful over-acting. Either way, I’m here to say we need more of these new takes on old stories.