Text Genie

Steak red and raw, that’s the writing of A.A.Gill. Who’s he?

Wow! If good writing is taking what you want to write, and embroidering it in Baroque fashion, but not gilding the lily, so to speak, but somehow combining both florid flourishes and precise description and expression, without going over the edge into inexactitude and fantasy or even downright lying, then A. A. Gill is the man for you.

Never thought we would say it, but this kind of writing knocks the New Yorker into a cocked hat, or whatever the phrase is. Enough of the placid, limpid delineation of reality (supposed reality, actually often involving composite characters and combining conversations held at different times into one, we have been disappointed to learn), this is writing as big as a bleeding brown hunk of Angus beef slapped down on your plate with plenty of mashed potato and spinach on the side, food for the man in us, not the dinky tea party we have been praising up till now.

All Hail A. A. Gill, scribe to the Gods!

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FOOD
May 2013 Vanity Fair
Steak Shows Its Muscle

Again….Wow!

New Yorker Humor Collection is Exemplary, Mostly Hilarious

Proof that Wit Rules, Shallow or Not

The New Yorker still manages to print some of the finest journalism in the English speaking world, distinguished by a deft, elegant literacy where its subjects are treated without sensation, salesmanship, or condescension, but rather, with unflinching, spotlit realism softened with civilized discretion.

The unjustifiably ad-starved (curse those philistine media budget executives who won’t support it nas a priceless cultural treasure chest) magazine’s writers and editors combine the tact of understanding psychiatrists with unremitting respect for the dignity of people as human beings, however quirky in impulse or irrational in self justification they might be, whether they are saints or murderers. Their profiles are rounded sculptures, rather than the two dimensional sketches we find in the rest of the magazine rack.

Along with all this talented sobriety, some of its most accomplished writing is to be found in the humor section, where week after week, the Shouts and Murmurs column is often a brilliant page which nails our culture’s hypocrisy, vanity and other foolishness to the wall with painless accuracy, turning the absurd dross of human posturing into the gold of wit that will never tarnish.

For this reason we were delighted to stumble upon a copy of Fierce Pajamas, the collection of the best New Yorker humor pieces from m year or two ago, as we surveyed our library with a view of weeding out enough books to at least get rid of the stacks on the floor (a vain project, as usual – who can find a book which does not contain invaluable information of one kind or another? Books are now the repository of the best information in this new age of the Internet and Wiki with its supply of incomplete and suspect knowledge).

Given the fast pace of modern life in the biggest of big cities, culturally speaking, in the English speaking world, that is to say New York City with its Niagara of events and publications, where even the Times is to long to skim every day, the number of books one actually reads end to end every year can be counted upon one hand. Yet Fierce Pajamas is one of that privileged category, the book that one scours for pages one hasn’t read or that one wants to read again for lack of any that one skimmed past.

A rich cornucopia of brilliant gems, silver candlesticks and gold coins of humorous essays, this volume should be kept by the bedside for nightly nightcaps of amusement, allaying cares and concerns with its reassuring parade of little satires and other debunking of what we take so seriously – too seriously – throughout the day.

The highest peak of New Yorker satire

Of course, those with long memories will know that the finest compendium of New Yorker pieces is not this excellent collection but the fabled Snooze, which was issued 27 years ago.

The only oddity about this parodic peak when you first come across it is that too many of the choices seem to be by the two editors responsible for this literary celebration of the New Yorker’s genius, Alfred Gingold and John Buskin. These evidently rather egomaniacal likterary enablers have had the effrontery to have reserved space for no fewer than 15 and 1`6 of their own works respectively.

It is only a third of the way through this volume that you realize that the explanation for the favor the editors were showing to their own work had a different explanation. The whole thing – even the cartoons – was in fact not drawn from the pages of the New Yorker at all. It was all a parody – of the New Yorker.

But the work is so expert that any of its selections could be included in a typical New Yorker issue and be essentially undetectable by the unsuspecting naive reader. until he or she is finally alerted by the slight increase in fatuity rendered.

The whole thing is embarrassing – how could we be so undiscerning?! – except for the fact that a parody that is almost indistinguishable from the original in tone and approach is surely the most delicious of all.

Of course the New Yorker has moved on since 1986 when the parody hit the bullseye dead center, but the sheer brilliance of this work shines as brightly now as it did then. Should be among the most treasured items in anyone’s personal library, but most espeically that of any writer.

Alain de Botton Explains Our Emotions About Sex

Proves the Two Are One and the Same

Actually, how to think about real life sex – better than anyone has before

Don’cha love self help books? They always promise the secret of bringing emotional order out of chaos, but somehow the promise is never fulfilled. Instead of seeking and exposing inner truths, all we get are trite homilies, and ways to manipulate ourselves and others. What we need is a philosopher to apply his or her truth seeking to everyday life and tell us the way it is, really. But where is that writer?

It is none other than Alain de Botton, who has guided us so successfully through topics as diverse as Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdus, how to be an atheist and a revised idea of success to How to Travel. Now he has turned his hand to sex, and the result is a triumph of truthseeking. This is odd and unexpected in a way,k since Alain has led a charmed life, himself, born well off and privileged in his education and in his looks, if we are permitted to say so.

We last saw him at his reading in Manhattan at a small bookstore on Lexington in the 70s, as we recall, where we noted that he had a ravishingly beautiful young woman in tow who obviously shared the same fine education as he had himself (or so we imagined). What has this lucky fellow got to teach those of us lesser folk in our wrestling with the eternal challenges and verities of relations between the sexes?

Well, quite a lot, it seems. What we have in hand is a copy of How To Think More About Sex, his contribution to the series he founded, The School of Life. Unlike the other small volumes in this series, it is superbly written – by which we mean, it is written with the unique method which de Botton has patented, which is to apply his fine mind to the truths of daily life and give them words which shine with the light of honest revelation.

How unexpected that de Botton should be able to guide us through our own lives and experience when his own is so privileged. But his success is that of a man who is unafraid to confront his own insecurities and, recognizing that they are universal, explain them perfectly in terms of reality and the emotions we feel – hope, trepidation, yearning, bliss – when we venture into the realm of sex, which involves and engenders emotional intimacy as well as physical, unless we are in the idiot realm of “the hook up”, the latest fashion among young college females in the US and perhaps all over, where for the sake of their “career” sex is undertaken with a determined resistance to any vulnerability of that kind.

If that sounds confused, it is the kind of confusion which de Botton with his mastery of delineating truths by finding precisely the right words for them can be counted on to disentangle in this book, which proves once again that writing well is in fact thinking well, and that the only way to find out what we really think and feel is by writing it down. In the hands of a master, we find out what we really are.

The only reservation we have is that the title is cleverly provocative for sure but still a little misleading. What the book is really about is How to Think Well About Sex. But as a woman commented who saw us reading it in line at a store, it certainly is a very effective way of meeting people!

How to Think More About Sex

by Alain de Botton

Click the tab for the long excerpt

Introduction

It is rare to get through this life without feeling generally with a degree of secret agony, perhaps at the end of a relationship, or as we lie in bed frustrated next to our partner, unable to go to sleep that we are somehow a bit odd about sex. It is an area in which most of us have a painful impression, in our heart of hearts, that we are quite unusual. Despite being one of the most private of activities, sex is nonetheless surrounded by a range of powerful socially sanctioned ideas that codify how normal people are meant to feel about and deal with the matter.

In truth, however, few of us are remotely normal sexually. We are almost all haunted by guilt and neuroses, by phobias and disruptive desires, by indifference and disgust. None of us approaches sex as we are meant to, with the cheerful, sporting, non-obsessive, constant, well-adjusted outlook that we torture ourselves by believing that other people are endowed with. We are universally deviant – but only in relation to some highly distorted ideals of normality.

Given how common it is to be strange, it is regrettable how seldom the realities of sexual life make it into the public realm. Most of what we are sexually remains impossible to communicate with anyone whom we would want to think well of us. Men and women in love will instinctively hold back from sharing more than a fraction of their desires out of a fear, usually accurate, of generating intolerable disgust in their partners. We may find it easier to die without having had certain conversations.

The priority of a philosophical book about sex seems evident: not to teach us how to have more intense or more frequent sex, but rather to suggest how, through a shared language, we might begin to feel a little less painfully strange about the sex we are either longing to have or struggling to avoid.

Whatever discomfort we do feel around sex is commonly aggravated by the idea that we belong to a liberated age – and ought by now, as a result, to be finding sex a straightforward and untroubling matter.

The standard narrative of our release from our shackles goes something like this: for thousands of years across the globe, due to a devilish combination of religious bigotry and pedantic social custom, people were afflicted by a gratuitous sense of confusion and guilt around sex. They thought their hands would fall off if they masturbated. They believed they might be burned in a vat of oil because they had ogled someone’s ankle. They had no clue about erections or clitorises. They were ridiculous.

Then, sometime between the First World War and the launch of Sputnik 1, things changed for the better. Finally, people started wearing bikinis, admitted to masturbating, grew able to mention cunnilingus in social contexts, started to watch porn films and became deeply comfortable with a topic that had, almost unaccountably, been the source of needless neurotic frustration for most of human history. Being able to enter into sexual relations with confidence and joy became as common an expectation for the modern era as feeling trepidation and guilt had been for previous ages. Sex came to be perceived as a useful, refreshing and physically reviving pastime, a little like tennis – something that everyone should have as often as possible in order to relieve the stresses of modern life.

This narrative of enlightenment and progress, however flattering it may be to our powers of reason and our pagan sensibilities, conveniently skirts an unbudging fact: sex is not something that we can ever expect to feel easily liberated from. It was not by mere coincidence that sex so disturbed us for thousands of years: repressive religious dictates and social taboos grew out of aspects of our nature that cannot now just be wished away. We were bothered by sex because it is a fundamentally disruptive, overwhelming and demented force, strongly at odds with the majority of our ambitions and all but incapable of being discreetly integrated within civilized society.

Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be. It is not fundamentally democratic or kind; it is bound up with cruelty, transgression and the desire for subjugation and humiliation. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should. Tame it though we may try, sex has a recurring tendency to wreak havoc across our lives: it leads us to destroy our relationships, threatens our productivity and compels us to stay up too late in nightclubs talking to people whom we don’t like but whose exposed midriffs we nevertheless strongly wish to touch. Sex remains in absurd, and perhaps irreconcilable, conflict with some of our highest commitments and values. Unsurprisingly, we have no option but to repress its demands most of the time. We should accept that sex is inherently rather weird instead of blaming ourselves for not responding in more normal ways to its confusing impulses.

This is not to say that we cannot take steps to grow wiser about sex. We should simply realize that we will never entirely surmount the difficulties it throws our way. Our best hope should be for a respectful accommodation with an anarchic and reckless power.

Meet the Author

Alain de Botton is the bestselling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, as well as numerous other works of fiction and essays. He is well-known for making complex philosophical and artistic subjects accessible for a wider audience. De Botton founded the School of Life, a series of lectures in London that aim to make academic learning applicable to real life. With the success of the school, this concept was adapted into The School of Life book series. De Botton lives and works in London.

See New York Times interview by someone whose name is not attached in the Times Book Review:

The New York Times

January 24, 2013
Alain de Botton: By the Book

The author of “How to Think More About Sex” was impressed as a young man by Kierkegaard’s claim to read only “writings by men who have been executed.”

What book is on your night stand now?

I’m reading “Zona,” the latest book by one of my favorite contemporary writers, Geoff Dyer. The premise of the book sounds immensely boring — an essay on Andrei Tarkovsky’s fim “Stalker” — but fortunately, like most of Dyer’s works, it isn’t about anything other than the author: his obsessions, his fears, his encroaching (and always endearing) feelings of insanity. The book is held together by the sheer quality of the author’s voice, a feat in itself.

What was the last truly great book you read?

I remain predictably in thrall to Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” There is so much in the novel, it’s possible for two committed Proustians to love it for entirely different reasons. Some like the dinner parties, some the art history, some the jealousy, some the young girls in bloom. The Proust I respond to is the psychological essayist who observes the motives and emotions of his characters with some of the forensic acuity (and dry deadly wit) of the great French moralists like Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and Stendhal; the Proust who writes things like: “There is no doubt that a person’s charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: ‘No, this evening I shan’t be free.’”

What is your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

I’m devoted to the essay. This is a much less defined genre than, say, the history book or the novel. The kind of essays I have in mind come down in a line from Montaigne, and tackle large quasi — philosophical themes in a tone that is warm, human, digressive and touching. You feel like you have come to know a friend, not just a theme. I have loved essays by, among others, Emerson, Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Donald Winnicott, Cyril Connolly, Joseph Brodsky, Lawrence Weschler, Milan Kundera, Julian Barnes, Adam Gopnik and Nicholson Baker.

Have you read any good books on philosophy lately?

I have been consoled by Arthur Schopenhauer’s delightfully morbid pessimism in “The Wisdom of Life.” “We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness,” he tells us. “It may be said of it: ‘It is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens.’ ” It’s a mistaken prejudice of our times to think that the only way to cheer someone up is to tell them something cheerful. Exaggerated tragic pronouncements work far better.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? The prime minister?

Your president is a complex case, a man of passion, courage and oratory. And also, a diligent, prickly, practical law professor. I’ve got a weakness for the former side, so would want to put books in front of him that could bolster what I think of as his best impulses. I’d particularly keep him close to Whitman and Thoreau, those great American voices of openhearted humanity, daring and liberty. As for the British prime minister, he urgently needs to read John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, and read up on constitutional matters from a historical perspective.

What were your favorite books as a child? Did you have a favorite character or hero?

I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don’t read. Lego was my thing, as well as practical books like “See Inside a Nuclear Power Station.” It wasn’t till early adolescence that I saw the point of books and then it was the old stalwart, “The Catcher in the Rye,” that got me going. By 16, I was lost — often in the philosophy aisles, in a moody and melodramatic state. I was impressed by Kierkegaard’s claim that he was going to read only “writings by men who have been executed.”

What books had the greatest influence on you when you were a student?

The French essayist Roland Barthes was, and in many ways continues to be, my greatest influence. I responded to his way of approaching very large topics (love, the meaning of literature, photography) in oblique ways, with great formal innovation and originality. His essay on photography, “Camera Lucida,” is a model of what a highly rigorous but personal essay should be like. I couldn’t have written my first book, “On Love,” without reading his “A Lover’s Discourse.” Barthes taught me courage and innovation at the level of form.

What was the last book that made you cry?

I’m always close to tears reading Judith Kerr’s delightful children’s story, “The Tiger Who Came to Tea.” It tells of a tiger who turns up, quite unexpectedly, at teatime at the house of a girl called Sophie and her mother. You’d expect them to panic, but they take the appearance of this visitor entirely in their stride — and their reaction is a subtle invitation for us to approach life’s unexpected challenges with resilience and good humor.

The last book that made you laugh?

I’ve been reading a nonfiction cartoon called “Couch Fiction,” by a British psychoanalyst, Phillippa Perry. The book is simply the best single volume on analysis I’ve ever read, and takes us through one man’s analysis, and his attempts to resolve a range of problem with his mother and his girlfriend. It’s done with images and speech bubbles by Junko Graat; it’s constantly charming and always deeply accurate and thought-provoking.

The last book that made you furious?

I got very angry about the food industry reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s excellent “Eating Animals.” Now, a few years later, I’m bewildered and deeply worried by the way one can be impressed and moved by a book and yet do absolutely nothing about one’s indignation and simply put all the good arguments to one’s side — frightening evidence of the impotence of books in the hands of fickle readers.

What’s the best love story you’ve ever read?

Goethe’s “Sorrows of Young Werther” is like a distillation of all the themes of the Western approach to love. It’s also a study in immaturity. Werther’s love for Charlotte depends on not being reciprocated. Had she said yes, his love might have foundered in the routines of child care. In other words, it’s a love story that subtly points out how much the standard love story doesn’t prepare us for what mature relationships are like. It’s a book that should be given to the young, with warning.

Are there any architects that you think are also particularly good writers? What are your favorite books on architecture?

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way. His books are beautifully laid out with captions and images. I recommend “Towards a New Architecture.” It’s a deep pity that while Le Corbusier’s style has been much copied by architects, very few have drawn the right lessons from him about literature and prose style.

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

I would have liked to meet John Ruskin, who has been a big influence on me, and whose eccentric visions of the ideal society (at the level of architecture and morality) I am constantly inspired by. He felt sad, persecuted, lonely and misunderstood. I would have wanted to try to be his friend.

And if you could meet a character from literature, who would it be?

Proust’s Albertine sounds high maintenance but rewarding — and, in my eyes, a proper woman, a tomboy, rather than a hermaphrodite.

Who are your favorite writers of all time? And among your contemporaries?

My life has been variously overtaken (and ruined by) Montaigne, Stendhal, Freud and W. H. Auden. I think a lot about W. G. Sebald and Ryszard Kapuscinski. A contemporary of sorts, albeit in a different generation, was Norman Mailer. His largely forgotten book, “Of a Fire on the Moon,” fascinates me: a big sprawling essay on technology and America that deserves a wider audience. Among the living, I deeply love: Milan Kundera, Michel Houellebecq, Philip Roth and Nicholson Baker.

And if you had to give a young person a list of books to be read above all others to prepare for adulthood, what would you include?

I’d give them Theodore Zeldin’s “Intimate History of Humanity,” a beautiful attempt to connect up the large themes of history with the needs of the individual soul. I’d point them to Ernst Gombrich’s “Art and Illusion,” which opens up the visual arts and psychology. There’s a lot of despair in adolescence, so I’d recommend comfort from pessimists like Pascal and Cioran. I’d especially give them a sad, poignant, questing little book called “The Unquiet Grave” by Cyril Connolly (written under the alias Palinurus).

What are you planning to read next?

I’d love to read Chris Ware’s new book, “Building Stories,” which was unfortunately out of stock (an extraordinary oversight) and has just become available again. In the meantime, I feel I’m going to have a great time with Douglas Coupland’s new little book about Marshall McLuhan.

Alain de Botton sorts out our fantasies and confusions from ground level, amid the spires and towers that we build to appease them in vain.

Here’s another slice of the Botton cake:

“The psychological aspect of an impression of ‘sexiness’ is also evident in the context of clothing, especially women’s high fashion. Turning once again to the evolutionary–biological point of view, we might draw an easy comparison between couture’s presentation of its product and the mating displays of tropical birds. Just as the quality of the plumage of these birds can indicate the presence or absence of particular blood parasites and thereby swiftly communicate a message about health to a prospective mate, so can fashion seem, at least from a distance, to be narrowly focused on accentuating signs of biological fitness, especially as these are manifest in legs, hips, breasts and shoulders. However, fashion would be a rather one-dimensional business if it spoke to us only of health. There wouldn’t be such intriguing differences between the wares turned out by companies and designers such as Dolce & Gabbana and Donna Karan, or Céline and Marni, or Max Mara and Miu Miu. The foregrounding of health may be one part of the mission of fashion, but on a more ambitious level, this art form also provides women with clothes that support a range of views about what it means to be an interesting and desirable human being. In all their infinite permutations, clothes make statements about values, ethics and psychological dispositions, and we judge them to be either ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ depending on whether we approve or disapprove of the messages they carry. To pronounce a certain outfit ‘sexy’ is not just to remark on the possibility that its wearer might beable to produce thriving children; it is also to acknowledge that we are turned on by the philosophy of existence it represents.

In a given season, we may look at any designer’s collection and consider how we are being invited by it to think of virtue. Dior, for example, may be urging us to remember the importance of such elements as craftsmanship, pre-industrial society and feminine modesty; Donna Karan may be stressing the need for independence, professional competence and the excitements of urban life; and Marni may be making a case for quirkiness, calculated immaturityand left-wing politics. Getting turned on is a process that engages the whole self.Our arousal is an endorsement of a range of surprisingly articulate suggestions as to how we might live.”

Here’s another one, on the temptations of adultery:

The pleasing aspect of de Botton’s career is that he has brought a good mind to bear on issues that concern us all in our lives, yet dealt with them on the basis of how we live and how we might want to live, rather than remain on the academic level far above the supposedly mundane concerns of daily life. Like a good novelist he gives substance and definition to what we are often unconscious of in our social lives, and treats seriously the details of familiar issues as they are lived, rather than set them aside for dealing with later in a church or other abstracted setting. Yet he doesn’t turn to fiction and fantasy to explore everyday reality, but makes explicit the lineaments of desire, ambition, greed and every other force which moves us in our lives.

It is something of a marvel that the highest ivory towers of England have produced such a down to earth philosopher from an academic milieu and a society which is rife with more intellectual and class snobbery than almost any other.

PS: Don’t believe us? Then here are a few confirming opinions from the pinnacles of hackdom:

“Many books of pop psychology or pop philosophy try to contend straightforwardly with what ails our age; Alain de Botton’s wonderful How to Think More About Sex comes to mind, an example of an intelligent person helpfully untying some knots that bind us.”—Sheila Heti, The New York Times Book Review

Dwight Garner’s fine review in the Times is more than a match for Botton’s high level pontificating, both noting its preciousness and admiring its perception. “How to Think More About Sex is a meditation on how comprehensively disruptive our urges can be…an honest book that’s on the prowl for honest insight….Self-Help Books for the Rest of Us.”—The New York Times

“It’s like Cosmo meets Plato—finally!”—Salon

“Even if our sexual partners don’t excite us, this writer’s piquant prose will.”—More

“De Botton is never prescriptive, and the intellectual rigor of his investigation prevents this book from settling into a self-help reference guide.”—Publishers Weekly

“By encouraging readers to understand their desires and manifestations of sexuality in new and more reflective ways, de Botton’s addition to the School of Life series offers a tantalizing discourse on this endlessly fascinating, and eternally misunderstood, subject.”—Booklist

“[de Botton] offers a collection of essays that, taken as a whole, serve to pull sexuality into a philosophical consideration of our drives and desires, to illuminate how we can make sense of the urges that drive us senseless….A well-rounded examination of the ways we can marry intelligent thought and physical pleasure.”—Kirkus Reviews

Author of two classic literary jewels leaves us

But Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge will live forever

Sad news today (Fri Jan 11 2013) that Evan Connell, author of two of the greatest small classics of American literature, has died.

Here is the obituary in today’s Times:

Evan Connell, Novelist of Many Genres, Is Dead at 88
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Evan S. Connell, a versatile writer praised for his spare portrayal of the frost and repression within a fictional upper-class Midwestern family as well as for his account of the very real and bloody battle that was Custer’s Last Stand, was found dead early Thursday in an assisted-living facility in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 88.

Mike Waller, a nephew by marriage, confirmed the death.

Mr. Connell, the only son of a physician, grew up in Kansas City, Mo., and moved West as a young man. His interests also traveled.

His acclaimed and best-selling first novel, “Mrs. Bridge,” published in 1959, captured the emotional remoteness of a Kansas City family that was much like the one in which Mr. Connell had been raised.

The novel tells of a young woman named India — “it seemed to her her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her” — who marries a young lawyer named Walter Bridge, who is “very tall and dignified” and “rather stoop-shouldered so that even when he stood erect his coat hung lower in the front than in the back.”

Not long after their marriage, after they are settled into their routines and he has begun sleeping through the night, she frequently awakes and looks at him and “wonders about the nature of men, doubtful of the future,” until “at last there came a night when she shook her husband awake and spoke of her own desire.”

“Affably he placed one of his long white arms around her waist; she turned to him then, contentedly, expectantly, and secure. However nothing else occurred, and in a few minutes he had gone back to sleep.

“This was the night Mrs. Bridge concluded that while marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was not.”

A decade later Mr. Connell wrote a sequel, “Mr. Bridge,” and the two united many years later in “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” the 1990 Merchant Ivory film starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

By the time his Kansas City made it to the screen, Mr. Connell had long since become a Westerner. He spent many years in the San Francisco area, where he started writing an essay about Gen. George Armstrong Custer and could not stop. Soon he had a book, or what he thought should be one. It was called “Son of the Morning Star,” and initially no publisher would take it. One, North Point Press, which had published “Mrs. Bridge,” eventually did, releasing it in 1984, and the book became a surprise best seller.

ABC made a television movie based on the book in 1991.

In 2010, in a review of another author’s book on Custer’s Last Stand, Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times recalled “Son of the Morning Star” as having “lasting visceral resonance” and described it as a “masterpiece.”

In 1985, as “Son of the Morning Star” was having a long ride on the best-seller list, Mr. Connell told The Times: “‘ There are two explanations for writing the book. Just about all the kids in this country grew up on cowboys and Indians. Maybe now it’s ‘Star Wars,’ but when I grew up in Kansas City, you could send in box tops — from Quaker Oats, I think — and get something like a color picture of Sitting Bull.

“As far as this project goes,” he continued, “a few years ago I was sitting in a saloon wondering what to write next. I didn’t have any ideas for a novel, and for years whenever I couldn’t manufacture something successful, I simply worked on a subject that interested me. And the Old West came to mind.”

The subjects that interested him ranged widely, frequently consumed him and rarely rewarded him financially. Until the success of “Morning Star” when he was 60, he lived modestly, working at whatever job he could find — reading meters, delivering packages, accepting résumés at an unemployment office — so that he could devote himself to writing. He never married and had no children. He spent nearly every day writing or researching his often dense subjects.

He wrote at least 18 books, including collections of poetry and short stories. In “The Patriot,” a novel published in 1960, he wrote about a naval aviation student’s fears of failure — including fear of failing his father. Forty years later, in his novel “Deus Lo Volt!” he wrote about the brutality of the Christian crusades in the Middle East. Four years after that, in 2004, he published a biography of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya.

Some supporters said the diversity of Mr. Connell’s work attested to his skill. Others said his refusal to hew to a few themes or formats — or perhaps master them — suggested an incomplete talent.

Reviewing Mr. Connell’s last book, the story collection “Lost in Uttar Pradesh,” published in 2008, David L. Ulin wrote in The Los Angeles Times that it offered “an unsettled glimpse of its author, with whom we can’t quite come to terms.”

“Brilliant in places, frustrating in others, enigmatic in both content and conception,” he added, “it’s a vivid metaphor for Connell’s career.”

Evan Shelby Connell was born on Aug. 17, 1924, in Kansas City. He graduated from the University of Kansas in 1947. He is survived by a sister, Barbara Zimmerman, two nieces and a nephew.

Asked about his writing in various genres, he told The Kansas City Star in 2010: “If I find a subject that interests me, then I try to decide how best to write about it. Some things seem better suited for nonfiction, and others seem to be fiction in content or nature. A friend of mine once asked me how I could switch from one to another. I don’t regard it as switching; it’s just whatever subject happens to interest me, and then I decide how I can best tell the story.”

Exquisite, loving satire

As you can tell by taste testing the morsels above, Mrs Bridge is a perfect literary production, encapsulating with humorous but poignant irony the limited existence of a good soldier in the female battalions that marched to the drum of conformity in the upper middle class Protestant suburbs of Kansas City in the nineteen thirties.

With his deadpan description of a hidebound, shallow life with all its petty concerns and buried frustrations Connell depicts a human being caught in a snare of unquestioning subscription to superficial social regulation and it is both a comedy of manners and a muted human tragedy, where the daylight of fulfillment peeps only fitfully through cracks in what is essentially a well furnished but windowless room.

Those rays of enlightenment shine briefly courtesy of Mrs Bridge’s children, whose taming Mrs Bridge patiently insists upon even though they tend to escape her wishes as they grow, and even though she dimly senses that perhaps they deserve to live in a world of freedom and fullfilment she barely understands.

Ultimately this is a perfect study of the human condition, which achieves its effect with deadpan mimicry of the mentality it describes, and with small unexpected twists in the fine fabric of the story as it rolls otherwise smoothly from Connell’s expert loom. As he weaves this placid tale of suburban conformity, it is these provocative and telling turns that we savor. He has a superb capacity to make us as content with Mrs Bridge’s life as she is herself, and yet feel his sympathetic love of her as the prisoner of she knows not what.

As the publishers and reviewers of the two books have rushed to quote, it is Schopenhauer who said that the real business of the novelist is to make the small interesting, rather than write up great events. Connell achieves this in a minor miracle of story telling.

Mrs Bridge’s children, of course, are her major worry, given that they don’t seem to have inherited her placid temperament:

She brought up her children very much as she herself had been brought up, and she hoped that when they were spoken of it would be in connection with their nice manners, their pleasant dispositions, and their cleanliness, for these were qualities she valued above all others.

With Ruth and later with Carolyn, because they were girls, she felt sure of her guidance; but with the boy she was at times obliged to guess and to hope, and as it turned out not only with Douglas but with his two sisters what she stressed was not at all what they remembered as they grew older.

What Ruth was to recall most vividly about childhood was
an incident which Mrs. Bridge had virtually forgotten an
hour after it occurred. One summer afternoon the entire
family, with the exception of Mr, Bridge who was working,
had gone to the neighborhood swimming pool; Douglas lay
on a rubber sheet in the shade of an umbrella, kicking his thin bowed legs and gurgling, and Carolyn was splashing around in the wading pool. The day was exceptionally hot. Ruth took off her bathing suit and began walking across the terrace. This much she could hardly remember, but she was never to forget what happened next. Mrs. Bridge, having suddenly discovered Ruth was naked, snatched up the bathing suit and hurried after her. Ruth began to run, and being wet and slippery she squirmed out of the arms that reached for her from every direction. She thought it was a new game. Then she noticed the expression on her mother’s face. Ruth became bewildered and then alarmed, and when she was finally caught she was screaming hysterically.

All in all a perfect comedy of manners, and a comedy of universal human failings (on the middle class level):

Spanish was a subject she had long meant to study, and quite often she remarked to her friends that she wished she had studied it in school. The children had heard her say this, so for her birthday that year they gave her an album of phonograph records consisting of a lethargic dialogue between Senor Carreno of Madrid and an American visitor named Senora Brown. Along with the records came an attractive booklet of instructions and suggestions. Mrs. Bridge was delighted with the gift and made a joke about how she intended to begin her lessons the first thing “manana.”

As it turned out, however, she was busy the following day, and the day after because of a PTA meeting at the school, and the day after. Somehow or other more than a month passed before she found time to begin, but there came a morning when she resolved to get at it, and so, after helping Harriet with the breakfast dishes, she found her reading glasses and sat down in the living room with the instruction booklet. The course did not sound at all difficult, and the more pages she read the more engrossing it became. The instructions were clear enough: she was simply to listen to each line of dialogue and then, in the pause that followed, to repeat the part of Sefiora Brown.

She put the first record on the phonograph, turning it low enough so that the mailman or any delivery boys would not overhear and think she had gone out of her mind. Seated on the sofa directly opposite the machine she waited, holding onto the booklet in case there should be an emergency.

“Buenas dias, Senora Brown,” the record began, appro-
priately enough. “C6mo esta usted?”

“Buenas dias, Senor Carreno/’ Senora Brown answered.
“Muy bien, gracias. Yusted?”

The record waited for Mrs. Bridge who, however, was afraid it would begin before she had a chance to speak, and in consequence only leaned forward with her lips parted. She got up, walked across to the phonograph, and lifted the needle back to the beginning.

“Buenas dias, Senora Brown. Como esti usted?”

“Buenas dias, Senor Carreno/* replied Senora Brown all
over again. “Muy bien, gracias. Yusted?”

“Buenas dias, Senor Carreno,” said Mrs. Bridge with in-
creasing confidence. “Muy bien, gracias. Yusted?”

“Muy bien,’ said Senor Carreno.

Just then Harriet appeared to say that Mrs. Arlen was on the telephone. Mrs. Bridge put the booklet on the sofa and went into the breakfast room, where the telephone was.

‘Hello, Madge. I’ve been meaning to phone you about the
Auxiliary luncheon next Friday. They’ve changed the time
from twelve-thirty to one. Honestly, I wish they’d make up their minds.”

“Charlotte told me yesterday. You knew Grace Barron was
ill with flu, didn’t you?”

“Oh, not really! She has the worst luck.”

“If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. She’s been down since day before yesterday. I’m running by with some lemonade and thought you might like to come along. I can only stay a split second. I’m due at the hairdresser at eleven.’

“Well, I’m in slacks. Are you going right away?”

“The instant the laundress gets here. That girl! She should have been here hours ago. Honestly, I’m at the end of my rope.”

“Don’t tell me you’re having that same trouble! I sometimes think they do it deliberately just to put people out. We’re trying a new one and she does do nice work, but she’s so independent.”

“Oh,” said Madge Arlen, as if her head were turned away
from the phone, “here she comes. Lord, what next?”

“Well, I’ll dash right upstairs and change,” said Mrs.
Bridge. “I suppose the garden can wait till tomorrow.” And after telling Harriet that she would be at Mrs. Barren’s if anyone called, she started toward the stairs.

“Que tal, Senora Brown?” inquired the record.

Mrs. Bridge hurried into the living room, snapped off the
phonograph, and went upstairs.

There are, of course, myriad other social obstacles and dangers Mrs Bridge must negotiate; in fact, the narrative is an obstacle course of barbed wire and landmines in this respect:

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge were giving a party, not because they
wanted to, but because it was time. Like dinner with the Van Metres, once you accepted an invitation you were obligated to reciprocate, or, as Mr. Bridge had once expressed it, retaliate.

Altogether some eighty people showed up in the course of
the evening. They stood around and wandered around, eating, drinking, talking, and smoking. Grace and Virgil Barron were there Grace sunburned, freckled, and petite, and looking rather pensive; the Arlens arrived in a new Chrysler; the Heywood Duncans were there; and Wilhelm and Susan Van Metre, both seeming withered, sober, and at the wrong party; Lois and Stuart Montgomery; Noel Johnson, huge and alone, wearing a paper cap; Mabel Ong trying to begin serious discussions; and, among others, the Beckerle sisters in beaded gowns which must have been twenty years old, both sisters looking as though they had not for an instant forgotten the morning Mrs. Bridge entertained them In anklets. Even Dr. Foster, smiling tolerantly, with a red nose, stopped by for a cigarette and a whisky sour and chided a number of the men about Sunday golf.

There was also an automobile salesman named Beachy
Marsh who had arrived very early in a double-breasted pinstripe business suit, and, being ill at ease, sensing that he did not belong, did everything he could think of to be amusing.

He was not a close friend but It had been necessary to Invite him along with several others,

Mrs. Bridge rustled about her large, elegant, and brilliantly lighted home, checking steadily to see that everything was as it should be. She glanced into the bathrooms every few minutes and found that the guest towels, like pastel handkerchiefs, were still immaculately overlapping one another at evening’s end only two had been disturbed, a fact which would
have given Douglas, had he known, a morose satisfaction
and she entered the kitchen once to recommend that the extra servant girl, hired to assist Harriet, pin shut the gap in the breast of her starched uniform.

Around and around went Mrs. Bridge, graciously smiling,
pausing here and there to chat for a moment, but forever alert, checking the turkey sandwiches, the crackers, the barbecued sausages, quietly opening windows to let out the smoke, discreetly removing wet glasses from mahogany table tops, slip ping away now and then to empty the solid Swedish crystal ashtrays.

And Beachy Marsh got drunk. He slapped people on the
shoulder, told jokes, laughed uproariously, and also went
around emptying the ashtrays of their cherry-colored stubs, all the while attempting to control the tips of his shirt collar, which had become damp from perspiration and were rolling up into the air like horns.

Following Mrs. Bridge halfway up the carpeted stairs he said hopefully, “There was a young maid from Madras, who had a magnificent ass; not rounded and pink, as you probably think it was gray, had long ears, and ate grass.”

“Oh, my word!” replied Mrs. Bridge, looking over her
shoulder with a polite smile but continuing up the stairs, while the auto salesman plucked miserably at his collar.

Such a magnificent limerick may well have been written by Evan Connell himself. If so, we thank him for that too.

The inimitable Simon Rich – son of Frank Rich, no less – pulled off a classic a year ago, which deserves to be memorialized. Yes, talking of great things in terms of the trivialities of daily life – is there a Chinese laundry in Heaven that doesn’t shrink shirts, for example – is an old comedy trick that Woody Allen has polished to perfection, but Rich’s genius is to take it over the top to some celestial sphere where every line becomes a poignant existential truth.

SHOUTS & MURMURS
CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE
BY SIMON RICH
JANUARY 9, 2012

On the first day, God created the heavens and the earth.

“Let there be light,” He said, and there was light. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening—the first night.

On the second day, God separated the oceans from the sky. “Let there be a horizon,” He said. And lo: a horizon appeared and God saw that it was good. And there was evening—the second night.

On the third day, God’s girlfriend came over and said that He’d been acting distant lately.

“I’m sorry,” God said. “Things have been crazy this week at work.”

He smiled at her, but she did not smile back. And God saw that it was not good.

“I never see you,” she said.

“That’s not true,” God said. “We went to the movies just last week.”

And she said, “Lo. That was last month.”

And there was evening—a tense night.

On the fourth day, God created stars, to divide the light from the darkness. He was almost finished when He looked at His cell phone and realized that it was almost nine-thirty.

“Fuck,” He said. “Kate’s going to kill me.”

He finished the star He was working on and cabbed it back to the apartment.

“Sorry I’m late!” He said.

And lo: she did not even respond.

“Are you hungry?” He asked. “Let there be yogurt!” And there was that weird lo-cal yogurt that she liked.

“That’s not going to work this time,” she said.

“Look,” God said, “I know we’re going through a hard time right now. But this job is only temporary. As soon as I pay off my student loans, I’m going to switch to something with better hours.”

And she said unto Him, “I work a full-time job and I still make time for you.”

And He said unto her, “Yeah, but your job’s different.”

And lo: He knew immediately that He had made a terrible mistake.

“You think my job’s less important than yours?” she said.

“No!” God said. “Of course not! I know how difficult it is to work in retail—I’m totally impressed by what you do!”

“Today I had to talk to fourteen buyers, because it’s Fashion Week. And I didn’t even have time to eat lunch.”

“That’s so hard,” God said. “You work so hard.”

“How would you know? You never even ask about my day! You just talk about your work, for hours and hours, like you’re the center of the universe!”

“Let there be a back rub,” God said.

And He started giving her a back rub.

And she said unto Him, “Can you please take the day off tomorrow?”

And He said unto her, “Don’t you have to work tomorrow? I thought it was Fashion Week.”

“I can call in sick.”

And God felt like saying to her, “If your job is so important, how come you can just take days off whenever you feel like it?” But He knew that was a bad idea. So He said unto her, “I’m off Sunday. We can hang out Sunday.”

On the fifth day, God created fish and fowl to swim in the sea and fly through the air, each according to its kind. Then, to score some points, He closed the door to His office and called up Kate.

“I’m so happy to hear your voice,” she said. “I’m having the hardest day.”

“Tell me all about it,” God said.

“Caitlin is throwing this party next week for Jenny, but Jenny is, like, being so weird about it that I’m not even sure that it’s going to happen.”

“That’s crazy,” God said.

And she continued to tell Him about her friends, who had all said hurtful things to one another, each according to her kind. And while she was repeating something that Jenny had said to Caitlin God came up with an idea for creatures that roam the earth. He couldn’t get off the phone, though, because Kate was still talking. So He covered the receiver and whispered, “Let there be elephants.” And there were elephants and God saw that they were good.

But lo: she had heard Him create the elephants.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “You’re not even listening to me.”

“Kate . . .”

“It’s so obvious!” she said. “You care more about your stupid planet thing than you do about me!”

God wanted to correct her. It wasn’t just a planet He was creating; it was an entire universe. He knew, though, that it would be a bad idea to say something like that right now.

He said, “Listen. I’m really sorry, O.K.?”

But lo: she had already hung up on Him.

On the sixth day, God called in sick and surprised Kate at her store in Chelsea. She was in the back, reading a magazine.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I blew off work,” He said. “I want to spend the day with you.”

“Really?” she said.

“Really,” He said.

And she smiled at Him so brightly that He knew He had made the right decision.

ILLUSTRATION: MAXIMILIAN BODE

Why is oily such a favorite characterization for someone speaking that it has such a forest of synonyms?

Moby Thesaurus
oily
Synonyms and related words:
Pecksniffian, adipose, adulatory, bland, blandishing, blarneying, blubbery, buttery, butyraceous, cajoling, canting, chrismal, chrismatory, complimentary, courtierly, courtly, disarming, fair-spoken, fat, fatty, fawning, fine-spoken, flattering, fulsome, glib, goody-goody, greased, greasy, gushing, holier-than-thou, honey-mouthed, honey-tongued, honeyed, hypocritic, hypocritical, ingratiating, insincere, insinuating, lardaceous, lardy, lubric, lubricated, lubricious, mealymouthed, mucoid, obsequious, oiled, oily-tongued, oleaginous, oleic, pharisaic, pharisean, rich, sanctimonious, sebaceous, servile, simon-pure, sleek, slick, sliddery, slimy, slippery, slippy, slithery, slobbery, smarmy, smooth, smooth-spoken, smooth-tongued, smug, soaped, soapy, soft-soaping, soft-spoken, sophisticated, suave, suave-spoken, suety, sycophantic, tallowy, unctuous, unguent, unguentary, unguentous, urbane, wheedling

Presumably this reflects the fact that wheedling or insincere charm is a such a common perception in human transactions, perhaps reflecting the imbalance of power which torments us in so many relationships!

Just reread this jewel, Alexander the Great, Shouts and Murmurs, New Yorker March 12 2012.

Another young genius from Saturday Night Live. How come they are so turgid at SNL, which seems to be nothing but boring satires of TV shows when last we looked??

SHOUTS & MURMURS
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
BY JACK HANDEY
MARCH 12, 2012

Alexander the Great hung his head. He had conquered everything, and there was nothing left to conquer. “What about this area over here?” he said, pointing to an unshaded part of the map.

“You conquered that last week,” his top general said. “We haven’t had time to color it in yet.”

When Alexander started out, the world was fresh and new, begging to be conquered. At the age of ten, he conquered all of Greece, clad only in his underpants. He went on to vanquish the vast empire of Persia while totally nude and drunk. He woke up from sleepwalking one morning to discover that he had conquered Egypt. Once, he laid siege to a fortress all by himself, sneaking from bush to bush and popping up behind each one, pretending to be a different soldier.

There had been difficulties, to be sure. At a raucous victory dinner, a chicken bone became stuck in his throat. As he reached for a glass of water, he touched off a mousetrap, then another, and another. He began to flail about, and his foot got stuck in a bucket. Even like this, he conquered India.

On and on he went, conquering kingdom after kingdom. His generals would plead with him to stop, but he’d say, “Come on, just one more,” and they’d say, “Well, O.K.”

His empire became so large that, even today, if you meet a woman in a bar and invite her up to your apartment to see a map of Alexander’s empire, when she gets there and you show it to her she always says the same thing: “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Alexander smashed every army sent against him, slaughtering thousands. Those who fled the battlefield were hunted down and killed. Women and children were sold into slavery. But the happy times could not last. Eventually, there were no more people left to conquer.

“What about the Assyrians?” Alexander asked his generals.

“We conquered them,” one of them replied.

“O.K., how about the Bactrians?”

“Con-quered,” several generals said, in singsong.

Alexander was getting desperate. “What if we gave countries their freedom, then conquered them again?” The generals looked down at their feet. One coughed.

“Very well, then, I shall conquer the birds of the sky,” he said, but he was reminded that he had already done so, and also that he had been given an eloquent tribute speech by a parrot.

“What about the ants? Can’t we conquer them?” Reluctantly, one general unfurled a tiny document of surrender.

Seeking to console Alexander, the wisest of his counsellors said, “Perhaps, master, what you truly seek is not to conquer but to be conquered.”

Alexander picked up a spear and ran him through.

Rallying his troops, Alexander had them build a primitive rocket ship. He travelled to the moon with thirty hand-chosen men, holding their breath. They utterly surprised the moon men and laid waste to their planet.

In what was perhaps his greatest victory, Alexander conquered half the Kingdom of Heaven. Using sappers to undermine the pearly gates, he and his army poured in, riding captured war elephants, trampling angels and saints. But Heaven, as he realized, “is mostly clouds,” and he wisely withdrew.

Alexander was preparing to journey to another universe, which he hoped to burn down, when he died. At first, his generals didn’t believe it, but then his body was brought out, still clutching his sword and wearing his newly fashioned “space suit.”

They say that he was buried in the Caucasus, among the crocuses, but no one knows for sure. Legend has it that he will return again one day, perhaps in the not too distant future, when the world is once more in need of a good conquering. ♦

Jack Handey, comic genius.

There is much that is highly amusing in the New Yorker, as the volume Fierce Pajamas proves with its selection of humorous pieces that have appeared over the years in America’s finest magazine, which brings a well phrased and well mannered briefing and accompanying cartoons and light entertainment to the educated bourgeoisie of the nation every week with great reliability.

There has never, however, in our experience, anyway, been such a hilarious three pages as the story of Ogg, which appeared earlier this month as a crowning achievement in humor for the year, if not the decade, in fact, if not the entire eighty odd year history of the publication.

Thank you , author of shining brilliance and lovable fun, and David Remnick, hard working and quality ensuring editor, for this wondrous peak of good humor which had us laughing out loud for the first time in our years of reading this well edited rag.

A Christmas present for the spirit, no less.

SHOUTS & MURMURS

I LOVE GIRL
BY SIMON RICH
DECEMBER 17, 2012

I am Oog. I love Girl. Girl loves Boog.

It is bad situation.

Boog and I are very different people. For example, we have different jobs.

My job is Rock Thrower. I will explain what that is. There are many rocks all over the place and people are always tripping on them. So when I became a man, at age eleven, the Old Person said to me, “Get rid of all the rocks.” Since that day, ten years ago, I have worked very hard at this. Whenever it is light outside, I am gathering rocks and throwing them off the cliff.

Boog’s job is Artist. I will explain what that is. When he became a man, the Old Person said to him, “Cut down the trees so we have space to live.” But Boog did not want to do this, so now he smears paint inside caves. He calls his smears “pictures.” Everybody likes to look at them. But the person who likes to look at them most is Girl.

I love Girl. I will explain what that is. When I look at her, I feel sick like I am going to die. I have never had the Great Disease (obviously, because I am still alive). But my uncle described it to me. He said there is a tightness in your chest, you cannot breathe, and you have anger toward the Gods. I was going to ask him to explain more, but then he died. My point is: Girl makes me feel this way, like I am going to die. There are many women in the world. By last count, seven. But she is the only one I ever loved.

Girl lives on Black Mountain. It is called Black Mountain because (1) it is mountain and (2) it is covered in black rocks. Every day, Girl has to climb over the rocks to get to the river. It is too hard. She has small legs and she is often getting stuck. So one day I decided, “I will clear a path from Girl’s cave to the river.”

I have been working on Girl’s path for many years, picking up the black rocks and carrying them away. I never throw her rocks off the cliff like normal rocks. Instead, I put them in a pile next to my cave. I like to look at the pile, because it reminds me of how I am helping Girl. My mother, who I live with, says the pile “has to go.” (I worry that she will move the pile, but it is unlikely. After all, she is an elderly thirty-two-year-old woman.)

I have made good progress on Girl’s path, but there are still many rocks left. The job would go faster, but I am clearing the path in secret by the light of the moon. The reason is—and this is a hard thing to admit—I am afraid to talk to Girl. If she found out it was me clearing all the rocks, I’m sure she would say something to me like “Hello” or “Hi there.” And then I would be in trouble. Because the truth is I am not so good at making words.

Boog is very good at making words. For example, last week he showed off his new picture at the Main Cave. Everyone was expecting it to be a horse or a bear (all his pictures so far have been horses, bears, or a mix of horses and bears). But this picture was not of any animal. It was just a bunch of red streaks. People were angry.

“I wanted animals,” the Old Person said. “Where are the animals?”

It was bad situation. I thought that Boog would lose his job or maybe be killed by stones. But then Boog stood on a rock and spoke.

“My art is smart,” he said. “And anyone who does not get it is stupid.”

Everyone was quiet. We looked at the Old Person to see what he would say.

The Old Person squinted at the red streaks for a while. Then he rubbed his chin and said, “Oh, yes, now I get it. It is smart. People who do not get it are stupid.”

A few seconds later, everyone else got it.

“It is smart,” they said. “It is smart!”

The only person who did not get it was me. My beard began to sweat. I was scared that someone would ask me to make words about the picture. I headed slowly for the exit. I was almost out of the cave when Boog pointed his finger at me.

“Do you like it, Oog?”

Everyone stopped making words and looked at me.

“It is smart,” I said. I meant for my voice to sound big, but it came out small.

Boog smiled.

“Ah,” he said. “Then why don’t you explain it to us?”

I felt a burning on my skin. It was sort of like when you fall into a cooking fire and your body catches on fire. I looked at my feet and people started laughing.

I looked up at Girl to see if she was one of the ones laughing. She was not (thank Gods). But she could hear all the other people laughing and that was just as bad.

“I am tired from talking to people who are less smart,” Boog said. “I am going to mate with Girl now.”

He took Girl’s hand and started to mate with her. Some people stayed to watch, but most took this as their cue to leave.

On my way out, I heard Girl making sounds. They stayed in my head all night, like an echo in an empty cave.

ILLUSTRATION: MIGUEL GALLARDO

The next day, I decided to become an Artist. I told my plan to Oog (there are several of us named Oog—I’m sorry if it is confusing) and he said, “You can’t be an Artist. It is hard.”

Oog agreed with him.

“You’re a Rock Thrower,” he said. “Stick with that.”

I was angry at Oog. Partly because he always takes Oog’s side. But mostly because I did not agree with his words.

Maybe Artist is hard job. It is not for me to say. But I would be surprised if it was as hard a job as Rock Thrower.

Throwing rocks is not so easy. For example, five years ago one of my shoulders detached from my arm when I was throwing a boulder off the cliff. And two years after that the other shoulder detached also. I can still throw rocks off the cliff. But now when I throw them I am screaming. Not just once in a while, but constantly. Every time I throw a rock, I am screaming, loud. I do not even realize I am screaming—it is just part of my life. Another thing is that sometimes I fall off the cliff, which is bad situation.

“I am going to make a picture,” I told the others. “A good one.”

“Who are you going to show it to?” Oog said. “Your mother?”

Everyone laughed: Oog, Oog, Moog, even Oog.

“No,” I said. “I will show it to Girl.”

No one made words after that.

I have never spoken to Girl, but one time she spoke to me. It was a long time ago, when we were still children.

It was the first day of school and we were learning to count. It was confusing. I am very good at some numbers. I understand “one” and “two” very well and I am O.K. with “three.” But when it gets to higher math, like “four” or “five,” I have trouble.

The Old Person had told us each to make a pile of five rocks. I did not know how many that was and it was getting to be my turn. It was bad situation.

The Old Person was about to call on me, when Girl whispered in my ear.

“You have too many rocks,” she said. “You need to take away four.”

I stared at her. I think she could tell from my eyes that I did not have a great grasp of “four.”

“It’s two twos,” she said.

I swallowed. To this day, I do not know what she meant by this.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I will help you.”

The Old Person was about to look at my pile when Girl stood up and pointed into the forest.

“Predator!” she yelled.

By the time we came back from the Hiding Cave, it was night. On the second day of school, we graduated and I got my sheepskin just like everybody else. I wanted to thank Girl, but I did not know which words to make. So I said nothing.

Girl has a small head, so it is very strange how she fits so many things inside of it. She knows all the numbers: “six,” “eight”—you name it. But she also knows other things nobody else knows.

One time, I followed her down to the river. She was hunting fish in the normal way, by jabbing a stick in the water. After a long time, she caught a small flat fish. I assumed she would do the normal thing (rip off the head and eat the body), but instead she did the strangest thing I have ever seen. She put the stick—with the small fish still on it—back into the river. A short time later, she pulled the stick out. A bigger fish was on the stick. I do not understand how Girl did this. But I have thought a lot about what I saw, and I have developed a theory: she is a witch who knows magic.

Even though she is probably a witch, I still love her. My mother says that when you love someone you love them despite their flaws. For example, my father was not so good at hunting after a monster ate his arms. But my mother continued to mate with him, because she loved him.

Girl must really love Boog, because he has many flaws. He never smiles or shares his meat with other people. He is rude to the Old Person and will not rub his feet. And he isn’t very “down to earth.” For example, one day he stood on the big rock and said, “Everyone should worship me, for I am a living God.” Maybe he is right. I do not know how all that works. But he doesn’t have to say it on the rock.

Boog’s worst flaw, though, is that he disrespects Girl. It is subtle, but if you watch him closely you can tell. For example, sometimes he orders her to mate with him in front of crowds. I know this is his right (he is man, she is woman). But it is the way he orders her to mate that I do not like. He makes his voice big and snaps his fingers. It is like he is talking to a dog. If I owned Girl, I would only command her to mate with me in front of crowds if it seemed like she was in the mood to do that.

Boog has a lot going for him. He is very wealthy (three skins). He is maybe a God (unclear). He styles his hair in the new cool way (wet). He invented Art. But I still cannot understand why Girl is with him. As my father used to say, “There must be other monsters in that cave that we don’t know about.”

I decided to make my picture of a horse, because I knew that was a thing. It took a long time, for many reasons: (1) I could only work nights, because of my rock-throwing job; (2) it was my first time making Art; and (another reason) my mother was watching over my shoulder the whole time and making words. “You are bad at this,” she said. “You should stop because you are bad.” I love my mother and will always rub her feet, but sometimes I think she does not know how to help.

Finally, after many days of work, I finished my picture. I was about to add my handprint when I heard a familiar laugh.

I turned around; Boog was there.

“What a smart picture,” he said, clapping his hands. “You are really smart.”

I smiled. It was very nice, I thought, for Boog to say nice things about my picture.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I was being sarcastic.”

A long time passed. I did not know this word, but was afraid to admit it.

“I am glad you like my picture,” I said.

Boog cursed the Gods under his breath. “The picture is bad,” he said. “O.K.? It stinks. I do not like it.”

I sighed. I was beginning to see what he meant.

My plan had been to show my picture to Girl. But I started to worry that she would not like it. The reviews, so far, were not great.

Oog said, “It is the worst picture made yet by a human.”

Moog said, “It is proof that you are a stupid person.”

The Old Person said, “I always knew you were dumb. It is known by everyone. But this picture makes me realize you are even dumber than it was believed.”

One of the main problems, people explained, was that I had not given the horse any legs. Also, I had given it hands, forgetting that a horse has no hands.

I was proud of the picture when I painted it, but people’s words had made me ashamed. I decided it was best to destroy it, before Girl found out about it.

I grabbed some empty bladders and brought up water from the river. I was about to splash the painting when I heard that laugh again.

“Don’t destroy it yet,” Boog said. “There is someone who wants to see it.”

He grabbed Girl by the arm and thrust her in front of my picture. It was bad situation.

“Tell Oog what you think of it,” Boog said.

Girl mumbled something, but it was too soft for me to hear.

“Tell him!” Boog ordered.

“I do not like it,” Girl said. “You are not smart. I love Boog and not you.”

I stood there in silence. Hot water came out of my eyeballs.

Boog grabbed one of my bladders, wet his hand, and slicked back his hair. Then he walked over to my pile of black rocks, picked one up, and hurled it against my picture.

“Let’s go,” he said to Girl.

She started to follow him. As she was leaving, she paused to take a rock from my pile. I was afraid she would throw it at my picture, like Boog had. But instead she held it up to her face and squinted at it.

“Let’s go!” Boog shouted.

She followed him into the woods, still holding the rock in her hand.

My mother woke me in the night.

“A monster is here to murder us,” she said.

I nodded. This is usual occurrence.

“What kind of monster? Wolf?”

She shook her head. “It is a clever monster. Listen.”

We were silent for a while; soon, I heard a strange sound. The monster was throwing rocks against the cave, one after the other.

I took my kill stick and headed outside. I saw a figure in the shadows and was about to charge it when the moon appeared suddenly between the clouds.

“Girl?”

She was standing on the edge of the forest, a black rock in her hand.

“Sorry if I scared you,” she said. “I came to say thank you.”

I was confused. “For what?”

“For clearing me a path.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“I took a rock from your pile and compared it with the ones on my mountain. They’re the same kind.”

I walked cautiously toward her.

“Are you a witch?” I asked.

She laughed.

“I’m not a witch! I just used common sense. I mean, there are thousands of black rocks piled up next to your cave.”

I was still confused. She put her hand on my arm and the hairs on it stood up.

“Thank you for clearing all the rocks,” she said, looking into my eyes. “It is a good path. You are good at clearing the rocks.”

For the second time that night, hot water came out of my eyeballs.

“I’m sorry I said those mean things about your picture,” Girl said. “Boog made me.”

I was shocked; that had not occurred to me. Boog had been clever.

“Does that mean you like my Art?” I asked.

She looked at my horse and hesitated.

“It’s interesting,” she said. “But you know what I really like? Your rock pile.”

She walked over to it. “It’s sort of like a sculpture.”

“What is sculpture?”

“Like a picture in three dimensions.”

Much time passed in silence.

“Can I impregnate you?” I asked.

“What?”

“I know I am not smart like Boog. I do not understand Art and I am bad with the numbers. But I will work hard to clear the rocks for you. And when you have child I will clear the rocks for the child. I will clear all the rocks for you and the child until I am eaten by a monster or die of the Great Disease. I will make you many paths so you can go all the places you want.”

I paused to catch my breath. It was the most words I had ever made at one time.

“What about Boog?” she said.

I thought about it for a moment.

“I will murder him,” I said.

She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. It was like it had been in my dreams.

We made many words that night. Girl explained that she never really loved Boog. He just seemed like her only option. No one else had ever asked to mate with her. The other six men on earth, including me, had been too afraid.

I confessed that I did not understand Boog’s last picture and she laughed.

“No one did,” she said. “Not even Boog.”

The stars were out and Girl counted them out loud until I fell asleep.

The next day, I took a large rock and struck it against Boog’s head so that his skull cracked open and he died. Afterward, Girl and I went swimming.

We have decided to have many children: one, two—maybe even a higher number.

I love Girl. Girl loves me.

It is good situation. ♦

Style and substance achieve peak of accomplishment

Understated comedy more telling than any tragedy

Its famous cartoons aside, there is humor elsewhere in the New Yorker, even in the fiction department, where it can serve to make a point more sharply than any sober prose might do. For example, the Semplica-Girl Diaries by George Saunders in the Oct 15 2012 issue reads at first like another priceless Pooter saga from Diary of a Nobody (one of the highest peaks in English humor), essayed this time by a middle aged suburban father some time in the future.

September 3rd
Having just turned forty, have resolved to embark on grand project of writing every day in this new black book just got at OfficeMax. Exciting to think how in one year, at rate on one page/day, will have written three hundred and sixty-five pages, and what a picture of life and times then available for kids & grandkids,, even greatgrandkids, whoever, all are welcome (!) to see how life really was/is now. Because what do we know of other times really?….

Soon, however, the amusing story reveals a much darker layer, and finally – beware! – turns out to be not at all a lighthearted work of unintended self mockery so much as an alarming satire taking to task the thoughtless American exploitation of the immuigrant underclass, as if we ourselves aren’t in the same boat, struggling to improve our family’s lot by doing undignified and often degrading work.

But there is something about the style in which the story is told – truncated but heartfelt notes on his supposedly humdrum day – which strikes a note of humor throughout, nonetheless. The truth turns out to be that this only conceals the cruelty of which the protagnist is completely unaware. Saunder’s explanation of his writing the story on the New Yorker site has an interesting encapsulation of this tendency of culture to have blind spots of cruelty or stupidity of which anyone immersed in it is completely unaware.

If you have a copy of the Oct 15 2012 issue still around, you are lucky. You can enjoy this remarkable story first, which you will have to do if any of the following is going to make sense:

THIS WEEK IN FICTION: GEORGE SAUNDERS POSTED BY DEBORAH TREISMAN>

“The Semplica-Girl Diaries” deals with a family in a not-too-distant future (or perhaps an alternate present or past?) that is struggling to keep up with the Joneses—which, in this society, means leasing some unusual garden ornaments. How did the idea of the Semplica Girls come to you?

Well, it’s embarrassing. Somewhere around 1998, I had this incredibly vivid dream in which I went (in my underwear) to a (non-existent) window in the bedroom of our house in Syracuse and looked down into our backyard. Balmy summer night, beautiful full moon, etc., etc. I was looking at something, and it wasn’t clear what, but I was getting this incredible feeling of happiness and well-being and deep satisfaction, as in, Wow, I finally was able to really step up for our family. I am such a lucky guy—to have this amazing wife and kids and now, at last, to be able to do justice to them in this super way. Then the yard came into focus, and what was out there was … as I describe in the story. And the weird(er) part was that, even having seen that, the “I” in the dream continued to be happy: “Jeez, just look at that, it’s so beautiful, and I was able to do that—man, I have really arrived.” And so on—this lush feeling of gratitude (which I was actually feeling, those days, in real life) but grafted onto this strange vision.

In thinking about this guy, who was mostly but not entirely me, and trying to understand how “I” might come to not only tolerate but even crave having four SGs in my yard, I thought a good bit about our slavery days here in the U.S., and also about the Holocaust, especially as presented in that amazing book by Victor Klemperer, “I Will Bear Witness.” When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn’t see it. He can’t. He’s average. And is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo. The average person in the U.S., in, say, 1820, assumed white superiority, and, if he happened to be against slavery, was for a gradual solution, which probably involved sending all the slaves back to Africa, notwithstanding the fact that most of them had never been there and were Americans in every respect. And this would be the nice, moderate, urbane, educated person of that time, who fancied himself “progressive.” Likewise, even Klemperer, a Jew who would end up losing everything to the Nazis, didn’t seem to see it coming. He would note things about Hitler and the Nazis very peripherally in his diary, but his main focus was on the minutiae of his life—his wife was being difficult, he’d hit the fence with the car, he was having panic attacks, etc. etc. (Whenever his colleagues or his neighbors took something away from him because he was a Jew, they would always explain it to him à la “Those dopes in Berlin are making us do this,” and he would accept this gracefully—“I know, I know it’s not you, it’s Berlin.”) Also, interestingly, he was a professor who wrote about French literature, often from the perspective of “the French personality.” So even the idea that there was some sort of Jewish personality—i.e., an innate national or ethnic personality—seemed O.K. to him. I’m guessing that when the Nazis started talking about “Jewish tendencies” he objected to the mischaracterization of those “tendencies” but not necessarily to the idea that a “race” had “tendencies.”

A wonderful example of how a fine intelligence can inform not only a perfect story but the comments of the author, which make perfect sense.

1976 novel glitters with his unique genius for loaded remarks

Saying much more with very much less

In Manhattan sometimes it seems the less you pay the more you get. This is certainly often true in books. We paid a dollar (and the book was labeled 50c) for a paperback copy of Frederic Raphael’s masterwork Glittering Prizes in Housing Works, where we went to listen to a panel on privacy and the internet, only to be bored by the trivia from the supposed authorities at the table. We lucked into the perfect antidote riffling through the dollar trolley.

We knew Raphael not only as the American born (1931) author of the TV series made from his book but also as the wit of sociology who scripted (and won an Oscar for) Darling (1965), Julie Christie’s first major film. Playing a lead role opposite Dirk Bogarde and Lawrence Harvey, Christie proved their equal in dominating the screen, but the real star of the movie was the script. Seldom has there been a wittier script than Darling’s. It might almost be viewed as the screen equivalent of The Importance of Being Earnest. Not quite a necklace of verbal diamonds on that celestial level, perhaps, but certainly a string of pearls with shiningly clever lines which delineated the petty decadence and ambitions of swinging sixties London spot on.

The book is a similar tour de force, quite exceptional in showing off Raphael’s ability to signal huge swathes of attitude and even genuine emotion in a remark as short as a couple of words. Even the reviews which uniformly praised it as brilliant at the time failed to realize how unique it was and has been since, as far as I know. Anyone who reads it will find themselves talking in pithier terms and writing more succinctly, too.

(Here you seem to have forgotten to add some examples. – Ed.)

Simply put, in Raphael’s hands, less means more. The less he writes, the more meaning he packs into it. All with a Pinteresque illumination of meaning in its spaces.

So what ever happened to Raphael?

Well, well. Just as we suspected. He won an Oscar for his screenplay for Darling. The bio reveals he was born in 1931 in Chicago but schooled in England at Charterhouse and then St Johns College, Cambridge, and wrote other screenplays including Nothing But The Best, the excellent 1964 film, Far From The Madding Crowd, and Eyes Wide Shut, the last film by the estimable Stanley Kubrick, though reckoned by many the director’s only flop.

The latter resulted in Eyes Wide Open, a memoir of Raphael’s collaboration with Stanley Kubrick (he wrote the first draft of Eyes Wide Shut, apparently, which the director then adapted to his own purpose) which so alienated people concerned with the movie as well as family and friends of Kubrick (Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg among them) that Raphael was not invited to its premiere! Subsequently he wrote the introduction to a new translation, published by Penguin, of Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, the basis for Eyes Wide Shut, and a Wall Street Journal book review in 2011 entitled How Stanley Kubrick Met His Waterloo, a comment on a book which is an archive of Kubrick’s effort to do a film on Napoleon. The review highlights Kubrick’s ignorance of France and history, but still ends by saluting him as a grandmaster of film.

Anyhow, we realize we should give an excerpt from Glittering Prizes to show what we mean, so we are looking for one on the Web to save typing it out. Every remark is a double entendre, a pun of an unexpected sort. As a way of spicing up conversation, it is always fun. But Raphael always makes it mean something more than a joke.

Oddly enough this kind of density of expression can come off as too precious, and certainly listening over again to the panel where Raphael speaks on Glittering Prizes on this podcast: Raphael, Cont, Bryan Cheyette on Fame and Fortune at Jewish Book Week one can form a mild distaste for Raphael’s spontaneous remarks which are as pointed, brief and perfectly phrased as his writing, since one senses that they are indeed supremely self conscious and even defensive in a way that their very quality can get irritating, but this may be because the topic itself is inevitably as tasteless as the cultural prejudice it embodies.

Or it could simply be that if you have lived in America long enough the “you know”s and “I mean”s and “anyway”s fake casualness and preciousness of English literary chat on the Beeb – caught perfectly in style in Darling as Dirk Bogarde listens to a tape of such a program – followed by perfectly formulated comment becomes irritating, since it is unnatural to those who never attended Oxbridge and aims at a false impression of modesty and honest confiding which actually overlays an arrogance and on a deeper hidden level a fear that disturbs one’s focus on what is being said.

Possibly it is a mistake to be too brilliant since it can come off as a defense rather than a natural talent, and distract from what one is trying to get across, at least in person, though on the page it seems more attractive, if only because it saves the reader’s time.

Frederick Raphael on how things have changed

Miranda Seymour in the Guardian on how Raphael’s career rocket sputtered