Linda Rosenkrantz

This 1965 transcription, real and direct from a big ol' reel-to-reel tape recorder hauled around everywhere by the author, is one of the strangest books I've ever encountered. Linda's three friends - Emily, Marsha, and Vincent - white, with the cheap NYC rents of the day allowing for enough disposable income to make for entertaining lives - are all hanging out, hitting 30, and yakking. Their conversations, sometimes trivial and more often casually profound, are about love, sex, painting, show more LSD, literature, marriage, psychiatry, alcoholic friends, clothing, famous people, and their own destinies and lack of ambition, make up the entirety of the book. Born in 1935, they'd be 85 now, and what a gift it would be to meet them again and see how they turned out! 1965 being the midpoint of the upheaval of the '60s, big changes are erupting, and the women, art world hangers-on, still have one foot embedded in their parents' decades. Vincent is gay but not quite convinced that he shouldn’t sleep with Marsha. How did Linda know that these conversations needed to be scooped up for posterity? It's just a honey of a book - hilarious, annoying, cloying - but always fascinating and so singular that there's never been anything else like it.

Quotes: "I want to be rich for one reason only: money."

"We're each too many people for one mate to satisfy."

"Elegance is a certain great sensual respect for the essence of things."

"What's wrong with most adults is that they're judging whether or not their parents have been good to them in the terms of a child."

"I love you because you're so sober when you're drunk"

"I AM very moral. I'm scared to do anything wrong." "That's not moral, that's scared." show less

Elsewhere I described this as my literary summer soundtrack, and I’m not sure I can come up with anything better. Talk, which was originally published in 1968, is the transcript of three friends talking to each other out in the Hamptons during the summer of 1965—originally a number of friends taped by Rosenkrantz, distilled down to two women and their gay male best friend. They’re in their late 20s/early 30s, involved in the 1960s New York art scene—Andy Warhol and Henry Geldzahler show more are name-dropped—and all, as was the fashion, in analysis. The conversations veer from banal to deep, self-important to involved, trite to interesting, and cover a lot of bases where sex, art, food, and relationships are concerned. It’s just delightful, even when the speakers themselves get tiresome—it’s the rhythms of the conversation of friendship that make it work. There’s a kind of music to it, even when the reader thinks—often—that they’re all slightly narcissistic and immature. But aren’t we all sometimes—and even more to the point, don’t we all have those thoughts about our nearest and dearest, even as we still love them? Talk is like that, and it swings along cheerfully even as it takes some dark turns. It’s a fine summer read, and it’s guaranteed to put a little burnish on your own chatter with friends for a while after it ends.

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To me this is performance art, from a period before that term was commonly used. Mediated performance art, even better. Mediated by Rosenkrantz's invisible hands, by the tape recorders as well. The 3 performers perform their hearts out, talking, as the title suggests. And lord do they talk, just exhausting to think about it. Interesting enough though, to get a view from almost 60 years ago, and to see how it differs from today (not so much...). As opposed to non-fiction, there is no way to show more get an update on what happens after. A pity that. Life is longer than 3 months in the hamptons... show less

Quite an interesting and often amusing book. It covers the role of the telegraph (the old timey equivalent of a text message or email) in American history, with over 400 examples of real telegrams sent by various famous people. I had never thought much about the telegraph before, but this book underscores just how significant it was up through the 1960s. I confess I preferred the first half of the book, which had the shorter and funnier telegrams, to the second half, which concerned the show more telegraph's role in war and disasters. Definitely worth a read. show less