Parker Tyler Books

Parker Tyler's 1945 epic poem, The Granite Butterfly, was hailed by William Carlos Williams as "the best long poem in English since The Waste Land." This beautiful facsimile edition includes the important reviews (by Williams, Marius Bewley & others) and correspondence concerning the poem (with, for example, Bewley, Williams, Ezra Pound & Kenneth Burke), as well as a charming introduction by Charles Boultenhouse, Tyler's partner, exploring the poem's central theme: his lifelong fetish for the matinee idol Carlyle Blackwell and its grafting on to the poet's Oedipus complex.

One of the finest literary works of the twentieth-century, lovingly reprinted in this edition. An epic about cinema and sexuality and what it is to be human. The accompanying essays are priceless.

One of the finest literary works of the twentieth-century, lovingly reprinted in this edition. An epic about cinema and sexuality and what it is to be human. The accompanying essays are priceless.

The chapters deal with a specific aspect of sex in movies, and the author has dug deep to pull out some great and obscure movies. The book is richly endowed with many black and white pictures of memorable scenes and stars. Material is presented from the first on film kiss up to the free-for-all sex romps of the 70's. Very entertaining and the pictorial content alone is worth it.

It's good to see this fascinating book still in print after all these years. I believe the original 1974 edition went up to 8 or 9 printings. Where Parker Tyler found his material is anyone's guess. Jammed-full of photographs from obscure and well-known films, both Hollywood produced and from foreign countries, this book is casually laid-out which makes it great for thumbing through. Everytime I open the pages I find new and interesting facts I didn't know. Each picture carries a short caption identifying the film and the book is divided into chapters of sexual preference or deviation, like "Bedroom and Bath", "The Bosom and the Bottom" and "The Gay Sexes." (Hollywood didn't miss a thing!) The chapters describe every era of filmmaking and the fight with censors, eventually bringing us to 70's and Black Exploitation Films. Highly Recommended!

I must agree with the previous reviewer who pointed out that the author needlessly bashes the film SEXTETTE and that because of that, its impossible to give this book 5 stars. I did a review of SEXTETTE here on amazon and I pointed out some of the arguements made in this book and my feelings on those points. Aside from that, the book is full of great photos and tons of valuable information on the other films. A must have for any Mae West fan's collection, but see Sextette with an open mind first, and then judge it for yourself. Don't just listen to this author's somewhat cruel appraisal. The woman was, after all, in her mid-80's when SEXTETTE was made, and you know, we all know women 30 years younger than that who don't look as good as Mae does in SEXTETTE. Otherwise a great book.

THE original FILMS OF MAE WEST was one of the best entries in the Citadel film series. Originally published in the early 70's when Mae was still alive and active (one film yet to be made!) it's both admiring and serious, fan-oriented and scholarly. Since Mae only made 11 pictures at that point, each movie gets far more attention that films in other volumes where the star made 60 or more. Tuska clearly admired Mae at the time (he even heaps praise of the widely trashed MYRA BRECKENRIDGE, accurately predicting it would become a cult film!) Alas, he apparently had a falling out with West or something because in his update for the edition after her death he brutally trashes her last film, the genteel rather enjoyable sex comedy SEXTETTE as well as her performance, makes comments about her personal abilities in her final years that are unkind and rude, and tacks on a final essay on her that seems dismissive. I would give the book five stars if not for these "revisions".

I read this along with Senge's The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization and Malone's The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life. The Cowen and Parker book was the most satisfying of the three. For one thing, it summarizes recent economic theorizing about the nature of the firm in a short section. This includes Transaction Cost Analysis, or New Institutional Economics, of which Oliver Williamson's work is the best known. For people interested in it but who don't want to tackle The Economic Institutions of Capitalism, this book is the way to go. They trace the changes in industrial organization from craft production through the Industrial Revolution, Taylorism, and into the modern age. They declare Taylorism to be dead, killed by the intense competition brought by globalism.

The goal of the paper is to introduce the idea that firms are similar to states, Taylorism is analogous to central planning, and modern organizations are starting to look more like a market economy. This was appealing to me in light of something I wrote several months ago. I wrote that Lean production was Hayekian in that it allows people to share information and organizations to learn more quickly. In addition to emphasizing that principle, Cowen and Parker write that firms should try to be more market-like by design by using market-like incentives and clarifying property rights and responsibilities within the firm. They use Koch Industries as an example; Koch actually trademarked the phrase Market-Based Management (R). As the book he co-authored with Norm Bodek seemed especially concerned with the comparative accounting practices of GM (and especially Donaldson Brown) and Toyota, Bill Waddell should be especially interested in one of their closing comments:

"This paper has considered some general principles which are a guide to how market economics can aid management. Future research needs to focus on the internal and institutional impediments to the use of these principles. One particular area that needs exploring is current accounting practices. The development of 'activity-based accounting' appears to be a step in the right direction by allocating joint costs or overheads more effectively so as to identify the true costs of production in carious parts of the firm."

Still, I am dissatisfied with the general sharing of information between management science books like Fifth Discipline and The Future of Work and economic theory. Cowen and Parker mention W. Edwards Deming, but don't elaborate. Markets in the Firm was written in 1997, so they would have had access to many of the Lean canon (they cite The Machine That Changed the World : The Story of Lean Production in the bibliography), but don't explore much of it. If an article mapping Lean methods to transaction cost economics hasn't been written, it needs to be.

I read this book during a binge of early 20th century gay fiction and I wouldn't say it was 'dreadful.' If you're talking esoterics, Ronald Firbanks is the bloke you want! Wyndham Lewis was equally unrewarding. There was at least some humor in The Young and Evil, when the protag pukes on the straight woman! I laughed. The copy they interlibrary loaned me was printed in Paris on handmade paper--you probably won't find anything so opulent on Amazon . . . I digress, I caught more of a Joycean feeling than Stein but I can't stand that woman!

A dreadful novel, pretentious, arty and clearly indebted to Gertrude Stein in its alliterative passages of nonsensical phrases. The characters are cardboard, the plot non-existent and good chunks are completely unintelligible. Saying all that, I found the book fascinating as a historical document of gay life in New York of the early 30's. Village Bohemia, gay bars, the drag balls, cruising on Riverside Drive, gay bashing, rent parties are all here, and written by those who lived it. Those looking for sex scenes will be deeply disappointed because none exist...just the fact that the male characters went to bed or paired off with each other was risqué enough to put terror in the hearts of potential publishers. But as an illustration of George Chauncey's Gay New York none better could be found, an authentic document of the times. Worth every affected paragraph.

By this time, there's a fairly sizeable American sub-genre of "Bohemian" novels that deal with young artists and their sex-drug-and-alcohol-crazed friends. This is the fourth of this sub-genre that I have read. The others are Kerouac's THE SUBTERRANEANS (1950s San Francisco), Viva's SUPERSTAR (the Warhol crowd in the late 60s) and of course, Henry Miller's Parisian classic TROPIC OF CANCER. Several years ago I was showing some visiting German friends around New York and they asked me, "When did Greenwich Village become a gay neighborhood?" After a little thought, I said that I didn't know, but would guess after World War II when the young men came home from the war. Well, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler's THE YOUNG AND EVIL shows that I was wrong. This book was published in 1933 and depicts a Greenwich Village with a well-established gay scene, so the Village must have gone gay decades before then. Like the other books I mentioned, this one is virtually plotless and an obvious roman-a-clef, with false names attached to real people. Like THE SUBTERRANEANS, it is written in the present tense. Unlike any of the others, this one has been influenced by Gertrude Stein, much to the book's detriment. One pretentious sentence treads upon another's heels. Most of the time this oblique way of storytelling just gets in the way. However, there's in an interesting sequence of non-sequiturs jumbled together from about a dozen simultaneous conversations at a drag ball that struck me as rather exhilarating. But most of the time the book is a gay soap opera about the tangled emotional lives of mascara-wearing poet boys and the masculine ethnic youth of the neighborhood. Some of it is quite funny. But toward the end, there's a shocking scene in which the boys are attacked and beaten by sailors. Fortunately they are all arrested and taken to jail before they can be too badly beaten, but the episode does bring home vividly the terrors that could be in store for those whose only crime was being effeminate. Fortunately, the book is brief. As literature, I'd say this book's value is minimal. But as an historical artifact I found it quite worthwhile. I'll give it two and a half stars rounded up to three.

A dreadful novel, pretentious, arty and clearly indebted to Gertrude Stein in its alliterative passages of nonsensical phrases. The characters are cardboard, the plot non-existent and good chunks are completely unintelligible. Saying all that, I found the book fascinating as a historical document of gay life in New York of the early 30's. Village Bohemia, gay bars, the drag balls, cruising on Riverside Drive, gay bashing, rent parties are all here, and written by those who lived it. Those looking for sex scenes will be deeply disappointed because none exist...just the fact that the male characters went to bed or paired off with each other was risqué enough to put terror in the hearts of potential publishers. But as an illustration of George Chauncey's Gay New York none better could be found, an authentic document of the times. Worth every affected paragraph.