Word: bellowing
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...supported by his second wife, Alma, who worked as a salesclerk in Manhattan department stores. By the time of his brother's death in 1944, Singer had become a recognized writer-but only to readers of a dying language. One of them was a young novelist named Saul Bellow, who translated Singer's tale, Gimpel the Fool, the story of a village simpleton transfigured by the belief that the next world "will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception." Remembers Singer: "This story brought me so much popularity-somehow I have the strange feeling that...
McCowen's narrative throbs with excitement or drops to an astonished whisper during his recounting of the miracles. He stifles a yelp of laughter at supplicants removing the roof of a house to get at Jesus (one of several surprisingly humorous moments). He rises to a tipsy bellow as Herod offers Salome a reward for her dancing, then sheers off into girlish silliness when Salome, as if for want of anything better, asks for the head of John the Baptist...
These worldly wise immigrants do not necessarily share what Novelist Saul Bellow called the "kiss-the-ground-at-Ellis-Island attitude." Many are the shards and barbs on the road to becoming American. U.S. television is a big turn-off for Europeans. So, at least initially, are permissive child rearing, much so-called gourmet food, gun-toting cops, blah-blah cocktail parties, football and baseball, bubble gum, littered streets, first-naming on first encounter, and such other indue -ers of culture shock as the warning on a hotel dressing table that greeted one European couple on their first night...
...novel Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow described the onset of fame: "I experienced the high voltage of publicity. It was like picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk. It was like the rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation." Some who grasp those charged serpents will themselves incandesce in celebrity for a little while and then wink out (goodbye, Clifford Irving; goodbye, Nina van Pallandt): defunct flashlights, dead fireflies. Thus they will have obeyed Warhol's Law, first propounded by Andy Warhol, the monsignor of transience and junk culture: "In the future, everybody...
...Bellow knew, fame can be a state as complicated as serious religion; at any rate, the vocabularies are sometimes interchanged. Terms like "immortal" get thrown around. The Beatles' boast in 1966 that "we're more popular than Jesus now" was a cheeky little blasphemy accurately located an intersection between Liverpool and Nazareth. In her book Fame, Susan Margolis noticed that "today the gifted as well as the deranged among us are struggling to be famous the way earlier Americans struggled to be saved...