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Alvin Orloff
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in Los Angeles, The United States
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Disasterama!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997
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published
2019
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2 editions
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Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person
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published
2004
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3 editions
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Vulgarian Rhapsody
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The Unsinkable Bambi Lake
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published
1996
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3 editions
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Gutterboys
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published
2004
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2 editions
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I Married An Earthling: A Novel
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published
2000
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2 editions
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Why Aren't You Smiling?
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published
2011
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6 editions
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![[Why Aren't You Smiling?] [...](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/nophoto/book/111x148._SX50_.png)
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[Why Aren't You Smiling?] [By: Orloff, Alvin] [October, 2011]
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I was not prepared for the weirdness!
The English eccentric, Quentin Crisp, once said that, "Only a lie is boring," and I believe that truer words were ne'er spoke. I wanted my memoir, "Disasterama!" to be exciting, so I told the truth about my louche and feckless youth as a club kid, hustler, and somewhat delusional cultural activist. When, after 56 rejections, it was accepted by Three Rooms Press for publication in the fall of '19,
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Alvin’s Recent Updates
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Alvin
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| This mad romp, full of acerbic wit and deliciously odd characters, hinges on the semi-permeable boundary between reality and fiction. | |
"Of the eleven Spark novels that I've read this is, so far, my absolute favorite. It's a masterpiece of literary games, humor, and an exercise in economical brevity. It packs in its meta-narrative, themes of identity, textual identities, cults, and go"
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"A total Lark! This one beguiled an incipient February's depression into thinking snow is wonderful - at least for the kids outside building snowforts...
Sir Quentin's an odd old codger, but his Biographical Society seems quite above board to young Fle" Read more of this review » |
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Alvin
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| Bottum is actually an accomplished prose stylist and his descriptions of San Francisco's long lost underground are evocative, lyrical and to my mind (and I was there - living a few blocks from him, actually) accurate. His stories about growing up gay ...more | |
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Alvin
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| A fun, propulsive, and artfully twisted page-turner that delivers a delicious critique of trauma porn and cultural appropriation. The main characters are two dimensional (which is OK in satire, which this sort of is!) and the story bogs down a little ...more | |
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"”Virginia Woolf would have loved Grindr.”
What a sharp, witty, and scathing commentary on the commodification of ‘sad gay’ stories, & who gets to write and profit from them most of the time. By far one of the more unique books I’ve read in a while, I" Read more of this review » |
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Alvin
rated a book it was amazing
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| Insights, jokes, anecdotes, and gnomic utterances are swirled together into... something. Not every one of these fragments lands - some are simply too vague and/or abstruse - but there are enough gooduns to make for a great read. On a cautionary note ...more | |
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Alvin
rated a book really liked it
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| Reading Smith's essay-lets feel like listening to a smart, trusted friend free associate about her life and the issues of the day - "the day" in this case being that monstrously difficult year, 2020. ...more | |
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Alvin
rated a book liked it
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| Pithy musings on memory and motherhood and time and the writing of diaries. It's a pleasant, even charming read, full of quirky little insights and observations, but nothing she said has stuck with me - and I only finished the book ten minutes ago. ...more | |
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Alvin
rated a book really liked it
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| Neither as immersive nor fun as Miller's novels, Galatea is a quick, easy, and somewhat melancholy read with an easily digestible (but thoroughly right on) feminist moral. ...more | |
“Reagan's going to mess everything up, cutting taxes for the wealthy and getting rid of the safety net and all that. The rich and the poor won't be able to mix socially. The rich will be afraid of getting ripped off or asked for money and the poor won't be able to afford to hang out in the same places anyway. Society's going to be divided by class and instead of expressing themselves, people are going to spend all their time advertising their status. It'll be shallow, like the Eisenhower era. Parties will suck.”
― Gutterboys
― Gutterboys
“Unlike prostitution or promiscuity, stripping was entirely public. One foot on the state would forever mark me as a disreputable character, the sort respectable people called a sleaze. On the other hand ... I didn't know any respectable people and my workday would be a mere thirty minutes long. And, I had to face it, some quirk of my psychic constitution rendered the strictures of ordinary jobs insufferable to me. Restaurant work felt like a cross between the treadmill at the gym and one of those Japanese game shows on which contestants are abused and humiliated in front of a sadistic audience. Office work was even worse, calling to mind those B movies in which some poor soul--bound and gagged, but eyes wide with terror--is slowly walled up brick-by-brick in the dungeon of some damp, rat-infested Transylvanian castle.”
― Disasterama!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997
― Disasterama!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997
“I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.”
― Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt
― Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt
“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
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“As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”
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“As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.
But the frogs die in earnest.”
― The Female Man
But the frogs die in earnest.”
― The Female Man
“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
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Hi Alvin, thanks for the add. I had no idea you wrote "Why Aren't You Smiling?," it's already on my TBR list!
Wow, great to meet you!
Alvin