Word: autopsists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What vitiates Perelman's wit is over-specialization. He has always been a deftly ironic autopsist of what is dead in language. But he is a coroner more of the written than the spoken cliche, so that The Beauty Part sounds as if it were printed on the stage rather than performed on it. Parody is, at best, a parasitic form, no stronger than the host body it is fastened to, and in this case the host is junky novels, flea-brained Hollywood scenarios, self-help journals, and ad jingles. Pop culture is turned into pop parody...
...along a street, or standing in talk with a friend, or sitting with a magazine. Suddenly a look of surprise and terror wells into his face. He clutches at his heart, droops, collapses, in a few minutes is dead. "Heart failure," announces the ambulance doctor. "Coronary thrombosis," reports the autopsist. "A blood clot clogged one of the principal blood vessels of the heart muscle and caused it to fail," explains the family doctor. Not every victim of a heart attack dies instanter. But doctors almost universally are pessimistic about a heart victim living long thereafter. And the survivors live...
...cardiac end where fresh food comes in to the pyloric end where digested food goes out into the intestines. Pathologists notice that every ulcer or cancer of the stomach always distorts the neat parallelism of the wrinkles. But they notice it only after the patient is dead and the autopsist has done his work. If x-ray pictures had shown the irregular wrinkles, the doctor might have saved the patient before it was too late...
| 1 |